purplemechanics
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Westward bound, and your steps are uncertain. Your hands shake, and it's hard to keep the food down. Joel thinks he might know why.
(or, how accidents sometimes lead us to our fates.)
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Logically, Jude knows what has happened. She knows mortal words like “panic attack,” like “trauma,” like “Jude was kidnapped and tortured and used and saw her worst fear come to fruition as a powerless prisoner of the Undersea,” but they have never crossed her mind like they do now while her husband stares at the sheet she has ripped in her frenzy to get away from him, perhaps the person who loves her most.
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to die upon a kiss by purplemechanics
Fandoms: Game of Thrones (TV), A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
22 Jan 2020
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“But is it really worth it, the work you do? Doesn’t it - Can’t you get - How could you possibly enjoy it?” Her words fall weak to her own ears, and suddenly, she’s embarrassed. The boys always laugh at her when they talk about sex and her shoulders stiffen and her ears get red. The women do not laugh at her like the boys do.
“Oh, shekra,” Hela murmurs in her glistening Braavosi tongue. “Of course it can - and should - be enjoyable. Has no one ever told you this?”
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“No.” Her response is so fierce and quick that he starts, turning to look at her. She, who only moments before had trembled at the thought of the life growing inside her, levels him with a gaze born of fire and storm and a northern affinity for pack. “What’s done is done. This is ours, and I won’t fuck it up.” She says it like she believes herself. He knows she doesn’t. But he knows she won’t fuck it up.
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When the storm clouds are riding through a winter sky, sail away;
or
She goes to see him before she leaves.
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Yearling by JustAGalWhoWrites
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
20 Jul 2024
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Yearling: noun
- A young horse, older than a foal but not yet two years old.
- A still wild thing that is too new to tameAfter years of surviving in the wilds of Wyoming after the cordyceps outbreak, you find yourself in Jackson. It's a town filled with friendly faces and the kind of world you hardly remember, let alone can connect with or understand. But one man - Joel Miller, another loner, like you - makes you think that trying to find your place in society again might be worth it.
Series
- Part 1 of Yearling
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it's a long way back (but a short road home) by cardigains
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
18 Aug 2025
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“It’s okay. I know a guy.” Ellie likes talking about Joel like he’s her mob lackey or something. Makes everything feel a little less looming and leering and lethal. She called Joel "a guy" when it came to getting an extra slice of pie or getting outside of Jackson's walls when she needed a day off of school, when she couldn’t fucking stomach it anymore. He told her to cut it out whenever she called him that. It was a bit. She liked all of their bits these days. “He’ll get you out too.”
“I’m Ellie," she volunteers though she doesn't want to. This woman isn’t an enemy. She’s as caged in as Ellie, worn down to the point that she barely had her wits left about her. There was a look in people’s eyes when they got that way, when they’d started giving up hope. Ellie would fucking know.
The woman shakes something loose from her bones, digs her teeth against her lip before she answers, “I’m Sarah.”
Ellie snorts. “Yeah,” she says with only the edges of humor clinging on. “He’ll definitely fucking save you.”
or: On Outbreak Night Joel and Tommy are separated from Sarah. They spend the next twenty-one years assuming each other is dead. Until Ellie and Sarah find each other in the same awful circumstances.
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your words mean nothing so take 'em back (i don't wanna be carrying this weight on my shoulders) by cardigains
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV)
14 Apr 2023
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And then soft, so soft Ellie barely hears from all the way over on her staircase, ear angled down towards the slats in the railing, breath held while awaiting a reply. She needs the truth, too. She deserves the truth. After all of this. The blood on her hands, on her face, on her memories. She gets to know why. Why after all this shit, none of it was even worth it.
What Ellie once believed to be heavy, uneven breathing, she comes to realize, is quiet, fractured sobbing. “I can’t lose her,” he confesses, an omission to what Ellie already knew from the second she woke up in the back of that car, woozy and light and empty. Bare legs, cold and exposed in a hospital gown. The whole car reeked of human blood and sweat, while her skin was the cleanest, the purest, it had been in months.
“I couldn’t let ‘em take her, Tommy.”
It’s all the answer she needs.
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Through the seasons of Joel and Ellie's first year in Jackson. How the anger she feels at his betrayal wedges its way between them and how they find their way back together regardless.
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all i needed was someone (when the whole wide world felt young) by cardigains for eedsknees
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
20 Dec 2023
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Much like the other day, Ellie ends up sitting on the porch steps. Joel’s back even quicker this time. Almost like he’d left his first aid supplies sitting out and ready to attend as needed.
More cleaning, this one hurts less. More gel liquid, this time rubbed in a bit better. And more bandaids, these ones something other than plain, boring beige. Not princesses either, usually the first thing adults reached for when they mixed the two factors of Little Girl and Injured together.
Nope. This guy has dinosaur bandaids.
“Dude, I fucking love dinos!”
Joel’s head swivels up, eyes going from her carefully patched up elbow to meet Ellie’s gaze. She wants to ask him how he knew. She wants to ask to see the rest of the designs in the box. She wants to tell him all of the other things she loves.
“S’pose I picked right then,” he says, almost like he’d been standing in the aisle, contemplating what exactly that might be.
“You did,” is how Ellie answers him, not bothering with a thank you.
//
or: Ellie is Joel's next door neighbor who's hellbent on learning to ride a bike to get where she needs to go. Little does she know that place is right across the street.
Series
- Part 1 of Next Door Neighbors
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Summary
Joel Miller has mastered the art of self-control in all areas except one: not fucking his friend’s daughter.
Series
- Part 2 of Waiting Game