#a small snippet after snickering at people's comments about joel

[ohraicodoll]

Daisies

Joel Miller x fem!reader The Last of Us (Show/Game) 1.3k Words

Summary: Because the women of Jackson have nothing better to do than set their eyes on Joel Miller. 

She wasn’t intentionally eavesdropping. No, she was minding her own business, grabbing supplies to help Joel fix the slightly broken window in Ellie’s room. The teenage girl kept complaining that it made her side of the house five degrees colder despite the fact it was warming up to Spring finally. 

It wasn’t her fault she was stuck in her ways, used to having to be silent as the dead, walking so quietly people had a habit of not noticing or hearing her. It was a survival skill, but one that didn’t suit settlement life where you were supposed to act normal and friendly and not like a ghost.

“Goddamn, it’s heinous how good the apocalypse looks on that man.”

“Right? The rest of us look like shit meanwhile Joel fucking Miller turned into a fine piece of meat.” Her brow furrowed at the women nearby, hands stilling on the small slivers of wood she’d been grabbing. Out of the corner of her eye, she looked at the small group as they very obviously stared across the Jackson plaza at the very man in question. Joel was talking to Tommy, heavy brown jacket stretched tight across his back as he stood in his usual Joel-stance. Hands on his hips, thumbs tucked into his belt, knee cocked out. He’d gone only a bit more gray, settlement life helping to destress him a bit though Ellie’s constant pestering may have canceled that out. Raising a teenage girl all over again was proving challenging, no matter the setting. But he was getting rest, getting food, and the strain had slowly seeped out of his face over time. They weren’t wrong. He did look good. He always looked good. She just didn’t like that they had noticed it as well. Joel and her weren’t necessarily a thing. Yes, they’d both helped Ellie to get there and yes, they all lived in the same house and yes, she knew exactly what that mouth could do but it wasn’t like they were dating. They only…existed together. Took care of each other, in more than a few ways. They didn’t exactly go holding hands down Main Street though. So no, while he wasn’t taken, wasn’t hers, there was an almost animalistic urge in her to stake a claim. To mark him and bare her teeth to get them to avert their eyes. Promise that they couldn’t handle him with their soft hands and dainty sensibilities they’d kept in their stranglehold even decades after that stopped mattering. Joel had always likened her to a feral animal and maybe he wasn’t far off. But maybe he liked that kind of thing. Like girls in dresses, smelling of daisies, cooking and cleaning and letting him do the hard work. A man’s job, whatever the fuck that was. They never talked about that. It certainly wasn’t her.  Gritting her teeth, she tried to block out their voices and focus on the task. It was dumb. This was dumb. It came from complacency and comfort and having too much time on your hands from not having to survive moment to moment. They should be helping be actually productive and not gawking at Joel Miller, talking about his ass- Their voices lowered and became fervent whispers, causing her to look up again. Joel had finished his conversation with Tommy and was headed directly their way. He wasn’t scowling for once, seemed almost relaxed though that furrow between his brow was almost permanent at this point. It was just…Joel. She ducked her eyes back to the wood pieces and quickly picked out the pieces needed, adding them to her pile next to the small bottle of homemade glue, nails, and rationed tape she’d already gathered. He probably didn’t need it all, but the more she grabbed the more it would seem like she was busy. If he was going to talk to them, it wasn’t her business and she certainly wasn’t going to be caught eavesdropping. While they may not have noticed her, Joel had a sixth sense for when she was around no matter how quiet she was trying to be. A chorus of chirpy, “Good morning, Joel!” went up as he reached the group and her teeth went on edge. She could taste the words like overly sweetened cough syrup. Thick and saccharin. But no reply came, no thick accented greeting, only a grunt of half-acknowledgement and that caused her to look up again. He’d sidestepped them, barely giving them even a glance as if they were in his way and were an obstacle, and was instead heading to her. And if his eyes seemed to brighten, lips seemed to lift up in the barest hint of a smile, she tried not to notice it. “You’re takin’ an awfully long time to pick out a few scraps,” Joel commented as he finally reached her side. Shoving what she had grabbed into the sack on her shoulder, she shrugged, “Wanted to give you time to talk to Tommy. Didn’t want to interrupt.” He smirked as if smelling her bullshit and shook his head, “Wasn’t anything important. He wanted to invite us over for dinner after someone ratted to him and Maria about last night’s dinner catastrophe.” Their multiple cans of different soup mixture. They had only had one of each type and one pot. Mixing it had been to save time, but the taste had been…something. “I think Ellie’s getting tired of our experimenting,” she huffed a small laugh, shuffling the toe of her boot along the dirt, “I guess Maria’s cooking is slightly better than ours.” “Well maybe Ellie can take over dinner duties if she’s gonna snitch,” Joel chuckled, “If she wants home cooked meals so bad, she can figure them out herself. I can barbecue, but that’s about it besides heating up a can.” “Yeah, yeah, so you like to say,” smirking, she began to start walking towards the direction of their house, ignoring the whispers and glances the women were giving the two. She could only imagine what they thought of her, standing at his side. Rough, unkept, throwing on whatever shirt she had grabbed off the floor though at this point she wasn’t sure which were hers and which were his. She definitely didn’t smell like daisies no matter how clean she got. Before she could go down that train of thought though, Joel matched his steps to hers and surprised her. It wasn’t holding hands, wasn’t anything particularly romantic, but as they both passed the group he slipped his hand into her back pocket. The move brought her closer to him, had his arm pressed into her back, but the heat of his hand separated from her skin by only threadbare denim set her on fire. He leaned into her and whispered into her ear, “Next time we go hunting, I’ll show you and wipe that sass right off your face.” His fingers clenched, almost gripping her ass, causing her to bite the inside of her cheek. “Now let’s get home before you rip the throats out of those hens clucking behind us.” She tried not to seem surprised that he’d noticed, had thought she masked her irritation well, but this was Joel. Of course he noticed. “What, you don’t want me to hurt your fan group?” raising a brow at him, she looked up and tried to stay joking, teasing. No, she wasn’t jealous. No, she wasn’t looking for him to voice that this was something beyond mutual satisfaction. But the hand in her pocket was new outside of the confines of the house and it had thrown her for a loop. Joel chuckled, muttering the words fan group and stared at her, eyes darkening and pulling her a little tighter into his side, “Darling, I could care less about them. I don’t need someone who can cook and tell me how good looking I am. In case you haven’t noticed, I prefer someone who I trust to have my back. Who has some teeth.” And that was all that needed to be said. She grinned, showing those very same teeth, and didn’t care if it made her look feral. They walked back to their half-hobbled together house, their kid that wasn’t theirs, and their shit cooking. God help anyone that tried to get in their way.