hello, it's been a while. a little over a year, actually.
i've often pondered how to express the fact that i miss writing, because it's not like i ever stopped. i'm still writing, from errant academic essays to prose and even beyond, just not here.
apparently, the last you heard from me was at the tail-end march last year. that sounds about right. i think of april a year ago and i am haunted by the hurdles that came with it, one after the other until it's april again. actually, april's ending so soon, too.
in writing these silly little fanfictions, i told myself that i'll write something when i'm no longer burdened by a thousand difficulties. i wanted to enjoy it rather than be burdened by it. for a while, i felt undeserving of writing, and perhaps that's why i have drafts festering in the cobwebs of time.
when we are cornered by our lives, suffocated by whatever our human minds think is so vital that we let it cloud the days with doubt, i find that i've tried fighting out of it. everyone loves an underdog, even me. when the odds are stacked against me, i find myself thrashing like a violent dog to find the way out.
i'm not a violent dog. i'm tired of biting.
in the year that it's taken, i found myself growing in ways that i never thought i'd be in. i've come to love new things and let go of others.
i'm a year older today. some birthdays are more peaceful than happy. they are birthdays nonetheless.
two songs that i've been listening on repeat since february this year comes to me now. i'm not a hundred percent better, but i am getting there. i'm not fighting the harshnesses of my vicissitudes, and instead i'm letting time take its course and gravitate to things i've left hanging because i thought i was undeserving of it.
only time will sort it out.
다 괜찮아질 거야.
i won't guarantee a new writing, but i will guarantee that i'll try.
i love you. i'm glad i exist. maybe that's enough for now.
your favorite full-time absentee / part-time writer is here for a quick little rec list in my absence. asterisks indicate media that currently fuel a few wips hidden in my drafts:
heaven by mieko kawakami* (oh to be seen in the violent doggone days of middle school)
isle of dogs dir. by wes anderson
princess mononoke dir. by hayao miyazaki* (the imagery of femininity that spits out blood and bone >>)
lolita by vladimir nabokov (for who am i if not fucked in the head?)
as always, be kind to yourself. and consume the world until you are so full of it. may you never tire of beauty.
tenderness is in the hands
― Carolyn Forché, L’Avventura (1960), Ocean Vuong, The White Ribbon (2009), Hart Crane, Gelatin Silver, Love (2009), Ingeborg Bachmann, Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991), Sylvia Plath, Psycho (1960), Rod McKuen (stills by @forhandsthatsuffer)
summary: you meet joel in the aftermath of a terrible accident. reeling from the aftermath of the event, there is a looming shadow that complicates your relationship with the southern man you just somehow happened to meet
warnings: explicit (but not graphic) content–MINORS DO NOT INTERACT! relatively dark(?)-ish joel miller, allusions to smut (not heavily detailed), graphic depictions of injury, some scenes include hospitalization (not in graphic detail), dubious consent, joel miller radiates mansplain / manipulate / malewife energy, men are trash in general wbk
note: oh. my. god. it has been far too long and i’m so so very sorry for just now coming back! i’ve hit a terrible writer’s block alongside very bad mental health and i’m just now recovering :’D thank you so so so much for 800 followers, it’s going to take a while for me to respond to everyone but i’ll be going through them! i love you very very dearly, mwah!
note 2.0: pls pls lower your expectations, 🫣 i am trying to get back into the groove of things!
You remember the screech of tires on frozen asphalt. A flash of headlights. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Your body ignited in pain. Then… darkness.
Darkness that seemed to spread before you for an eternity. Untethered and stuck in limbo, perhaps in another universe, you would call it the most peaceful slumber of your life. The misfortune comes when you wake. Lightning strikes shake you awake from the darkness of your subconsciousness. Electricity trembling in your chest as it shoots through your beaten frame. A light peers through your closed eyes. Brighter, and brighter… bigger and bigger. A ringing in your ears that almost deafens you.
The world shifts around you, and you wake paralyzed, staring at the ceiling in the warm sun that falls on your body lying there. Everything hurts. There is a humming in your head that you cannot seem to shake out of.
The solitude lasts for a beat. Then another. That’s when you see him.
A sleepless, roughened man looking at you with his warm eyes. Through the bleary vision of your own gaze, a shaky breath escapes him. His crinkled eyes looking over your features with a swift once over.
“Oh, Christ, you’re awake.”
And that’s how you met Joel.
–
In the week that followed your complicated recovery, Joel tells you he saw the crash. Tells you the asshole who ran you over was nowhere to be seen. He says most of it with his eyes averted. Yet you hold your gaze.
You will not be weakened by the shame of your misery.
It is two days later when you confess to him; your throat still rasping as the pain in your head boils and toils beneath your skull. You look at him when he arrives, paint-stained shirt providing evidence of a messy day of working. “I don’t want to think about what happened to me anymore, Joel.”
Your tongue grabs at words the way young children do with sticky fruit in the summer. As if language has become foreign to you.
Joel, keys in hand, meets your gaze with a furrowed brow. “Sure, sugar. Whatever you need.”
Maybe your eyes were tricking you, but you could’ve sworn you saw his shoulders relax from some kind of tension leaving his body.
–
Joel doesn’t know what he had gotten himself into. What he does know is that for some reason, he couldn’t bear the idea of staying away from you. You tell him fragments of what little you remember, your concussed consciousness blindly clawing at every last bit of beaten brain matter for some kind of answer.
You sometimes cry from the effort it takes you to think, but he’s there. The first few times, he held your hand. As the hours bled into days, he held you as you wet his shirt with warm tears. Sometimes, when the nightmares reach him in his own bed a few miles out from the hospital, it feels like you’re bleeding into him.
From the moment he saw you, he had been marked. And no matter how many times he scratched at his own skin, he could never wash away the blood on his hands.
–
He’s the one to take you home to your quiet little apartment, having grown dust in your absence. You apologize, he waves you off. He watches you as you peer out of the window, comprehending a view that had once been so mundane, transformed into some shred of a miracle for you to still be there, witnessing it all. He’s behind you, ten feet away, tilting his head as your hair catches what little sunlight blessed you the day you left the hospital.
He says your name, and you look back at him with a curious smile. “My God,” he followed. “You look just like starlight.” He steps forward, and that’s when you know everything had fallen into place. Without another moment lapsing, he takes your face into his hands, pulling you into a searing kiss.
You apologize so many times. For the hospital smell on your skin. For your trembling knees. For the dizzying sensation of human contact without the involvement of medical processes. For feeling so unclean.
Meanwhile, he apologizes, too. For kissing you. For pulling you to him. For holding you. For carrying you to the forlorn couch grown cold from the absence of human warmth. So many times that there are times that you don’t know what is there to apologize for. You shake your head each and every time.
The tears roll down your cheek just as he pulls away and his eyes immediately soften. You shake your head, pulling him into another kiss as you whine.
There are many things you want to tell him. But you don’t dare tell him this: Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you have been ruined.
“Tell me to stop, honey, and I will,” he murmurs, holding your cheek as you pause between touches. You shake your head immediately. You want many things. You are hungry and untamed. But you do not want him to stop.
You tell him as much. “Joel, don’t you dare stop.”
And he doesn’t. Not when you’re naked and he sees your bruised skin, purple and yellowed in places. He looks to you just as your body tenses. His demeanor softens, kissing along your jaw and your neck with a shaky breath.
“I won’t hurt ya, darlin’.”
He keeps to that promise. Even when your legs are around his waist and he’s caught in your warmth. He says it again and again as you whine into the cool, quiet solitude of your home.
I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you.
–
Falling in love with Joel was both so complicated and so simple at once. Whenever you wake beside him, you wake up writhing from the pain of your injuries; sometimes crying from the nightmares that followed every waking moment. You felt marred by shame for putting so much of your perceived burden on his shoulders. He never departs from your side, his strong arms placating you while his lips press against your temple.
It’s all so simple, the way he cares about you. And whether or not you admitted it, you like the feeling of being cared for. Of having someone that cares.
Regardless, you cannot escape the fact that someone did this to you. And whenever the pain shocks your body, everything but rabid rage escapes your body. You curse the stranger, whoever they may be, for that cursed night.
Joel sees glimpses of this. He saw it most that one afternoon when the hospital called, saying you had been taken care of. By who, they didn’t say. Only that the stranger apologized for what happened.
You were on the floor, hands trembling in the fists you held them in. The hospital bill crumpled a few inches away. You do not see him. What you see is all red.
A wail escapes your trembling mouth just as your hands claw at anything they can touch. It is an uncontrollable surge of blinding, mouth-foaming, unbridled rage. He’s there, trying to hold you down before you hurt yourself. Each wail pierces another hole into his aching heart. Each struggle followed by his gentle shushing, trying to assuage you in the crest of your emotion.
“Whoever it was,” you told him then as you sobbed. “They ruined my life.”
“Darlin, darlin’...” He breathes in, cupping your face. “Maybe he’s around and he regrets-”
“No!” You claw at him, just as he holds you tighter against his chest. “If he could find me, then he could say it to my face. He wouldn’t be some coward who left me alone like this after he ruined my life!”
It destroys him. And you can see it in his face. All he can do is hold you as you cry against his chest. All he can do is shut his eyes, letting the waves of grief crest over and over your frame. Letting your sobs tear him open and burn him out.
He tells you nothing lasts forever. That he’ll be there for as close to forever as possible. You shake your head because you know better. He says nothing lasts forever. He doesn’t know he’s just afraid your pain can last longer than he is capable of loving you.
–
Perhaps, to the end of his days, Joel will regret that drunken night. He’ll regret following his bleary gaze through the quiet, sleet-slick roads. He’ll regret the fact that he couldn’t have stopped his truck sooner.
When he steps out into the cold just as he smells the acrid scent of burning tires, he sees your bloodied face in your car. So small. So undeserving. He muttered a string of cusses. The sudden shock of adrenaline washing away the last of his drunkenness. He looks back at his truck, horrifically beaten, his gaze doubling from his last bout of drunkenness.
He bargains that night. Calls up someone high up amongst the police rank to bail him out. He negotiated for ten minutes. Then he hides the truck somewhere off the side of the road for him to come back to and dispose of. And then, only then, did he call for help.
Only then did he reach you in the driver’s seat, blood now caked to your skin as he lay you out amongst the concrete.
You make some sound, and he cusses to himself.
His rough palms cup your cheek, trying to get you to look at him then. But you were too far gone.
He spoke, anyway. Just in case you’ll hear it.
“It’s alright, doll. I won’t hurt you.”
Even now, weeks after he stole your life from you, he holds you and tells you the same thing anyway. The same set of words that manage to calm you down.
He does love you. And it breaks him every day to know he was the one to endanger you.
summary: you meet joel in the aftermath of a terrible accident. reeling from the aftermath of the event, there is a looming shadow that complicates your relationship with the southern man you just somehow happened to meet
warnings: explicit (but not graphic) content–MINORS DO NOT INTERACT! relatively dark(?)-ish joel miller, allusions to smut (not heavily detailed), graphic depictions of injury, some scenes include hospitalization (not in graphic detail), dubious consent, joel miller radiates mansplain / manipulate / malewife energy, men are trash in general wbk
note: oh. my. god. it has been far too long and i’m so so very sorry for just now coming back! i’ve hit a terrible writer’s block alongside very bad mental health and i’m just now recovering :’D thank you so so so much for 800 followers, it’s going to take a while for me to respond to everyone but i’ll be going through them! i love you very very dearly, mwah!
note 2.0: pls pls lower your expectations, 🫣 i am trying to get back into the groove of things!
You remember the screech of tires on frozen asphalt. A flash of headlights. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Your body ignited in pain. Then… darkness.
Darkness that seemed to spread before you for an eternity. Untethered and stuck in limbo, perhaps in another universe, you would call it the most peaceful slumber of your life. The misfortune comes when you wake. Lightning strikes shake you awake from the darkness of your subconsciousness. Electricity trembling in your chest as it shoots through your beaten frame. A light peers through your closed eyes. Brighter, and brighter… bigger and bigger. A ringing in your ears that almost deafens you.
The world shifts around you, and you wake paralyzed, staring at the ceiling in the warm sun that falls on your body lying there. Everything hurts. There is a humming in your head that you cannot seem to shake out of.
The solitude lasts for a beat. Then another. That’s when you see him.
A sleepless, roughened man looking at you with his warm eyes. Through the bleary vision of your own gaze, a shaky breath escapes him. His crinkled eyes looking over your features with a swift once over.
“Oh, Christ, you’re awake.”
And that’s how you met Joel.
–
In the week that followed your complicated recovery, Joel tells you he saw the crash. Tells you the asshole who ran you over was nowhere to be seen. He says most of it with his eyes averted. Yet you hold your gaze.
You will not be weakened by the shame of your misery.
It is two days later when you confess to him; your throat still rasping as the pain in your head boils and toils beneath your skull. You look at him when he arrives, paint-stained shirt providing evidence of a messy day of working. “I don’t want to think about what happened to me anymore, Joel.”
Your tongue grabs at words the way young children do with sticky fruit in the summer. As if language has become foreign to you.
Joel, keys in hand, meets your gaze with a furrowed brow. “Sure, sugar. Whatever you need.”
Maybe your eyes were tricking you, but you could’ve sworn you saw his shoulders relax from some kind of tension leaving his body.
–
Joel doesn’t know what he had gotten himself into. What he does know is that for some reason, he couldn’t bear the idea of staying away from you. You tell him fragments of what little you remember, your concussed consciousness blindly clawing at every last bit of beaten brain matter for some kind of answer.
You sometimes cry from the effort it takes you to think, but he’s there. The first few times, he held your hand. As the hours bled into days, he held you as you wet his shirt with warm tears. Sometimes, when the nightmares reach him in his own bed a few miles out from the hospital, it feels like you’re bleeding into him.
From the moment he saw you, he had been marked. And no matter how many times he scratched at his own skin, he could never wash away the blood on his hands.
–
He’s the one to take you home to your quiet little apartment, having grown dust in your absence. You apologize, he waves you off. He watches you as you peer out of the window, comprehending a view that had once been so mundane, transformed into some shred of a miracle for you to still be there, witnessing it all. He’s behind you, ten feet away, tilting his head as your hair catches what little sunlight blessed you the day you left the hospital.
He says your name, and you look back at him with a curious smile. “My God,” he followed. “You look just like starlight.” He steps forward, and that’s when you know everything had fallen into place. Without another moment lapsing, he takes your face into his hands, pulling you into a searing kiss.
You apologize so many times. For the hospital smell on your skin. For your trembling knees. For the dizzying sensation of human contact without the involvement of medical processes. For feeling so unclean.
Meanwhile, he apologizes, too. For kissing you. For pulling you to him. For holding you. For carrying you to the forlorn couch grown cold from the absence of human warmth. So many times that there are times that you don’t know what is there to apologize for. You shake your head each and every time.
The tears roll down your cheek just as he pulls away and his eyes immediately soften. You shake your head, pulling him into another kiss as you whine.
There are many things you want to tell him. But you don’t dare tell him this: Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you have been ruined.
“Tell me to stop, honey, and I will,” he murmurs, holding your cheek as you pause between touches. You shake your head immediately. You want many things. You are hungry and untamed. But you do not want him to stop.
You tell him as much. “Joel, don’t you dare stop.”
And he doesn’t. Not when you’re naked and he sees your bruised skin, purple and yellowed in places. He looks to you just as your body tenses. His demeanor softens, kissing along your jaw and your neck with a shaky breath.
“I won’t hurt ya, darlin’.”
He keeps to that promise. Even when your legs are around his waist and he’s caught in your warmth. He says it again and again as you whine into the cool, quiet solitude of your home.
I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you.
–
Falling in love with Joel was both so complicated and so simple at once. Whenever you wake beside him, you wake up writhing from the pain of your injuries; sometimes crying from the nightmares that followed every waking moment. You felt marred by shame for putting so much of your perceived burden on his shoulders. He never departs from your side, his strong arms placating you while his lips press against your temple.
It’s all so simple, the way he cares about you. And whether or not you admitted it, you like the feeling of being cared for. Of having someone that cares.
Regardless, you cannot escape the fact that someone did this to you. And whenever the pain shocks your body, everything but rabid rage escapes your body. You curse the stranger, whoever they may be, for that cursed night.
Joel sees glimpses of this. He saw it most that one afternoon when the hospital called, saying you had been taken care of. By who, they didn’t say. Only that the stranger apologized for what happened.
You were on the floor, hands trembling in the fists you held them in. The hospital bill crumpled a few inches away. You do not see him. What you see is all red.
A wail escapes your trembling mouth just as your hands claw at anything they can touch. It is an uncontrollable surge of blinding, mouth-foaming, unbridled rage. He’s there, trying to hold you down before you hurt yourself. Each wail pierces another hole into his aching heart. Each struggle followed by his gentle shushing, trying to assuage you in the crest of your emotion.
“Whoever it was,” you told him then as you sobbed. “They ruined my life.”
“Darlin, darlin’...” He breathes in, cupping your face. “Maybe he’s around and he regrets-”
“No!” You claw at him, just as he holds you tighter against his chest. “If he could find me, then he could say it to my face. He wouldn’t be some coward who left me alone like this after he ruined my life!”
It destroys him. And you can see it in his face. All he can do is hold you as you cry against his chest. All he can do is shut his eyes, letting the waves of grief crest over and over your frame. Letting your sobs tear him open and burn him out.
He tells you nothing lasts forever. That he’ll be there for as close to forever as possible. You shake your head because you know better. He says nothing lasts forever. He doesn’t know he’s just afraid your pain can last longer than he is capable of loving you.
–
Perhaps, to the end of his days, Joel will regret that drunken night. He’ll regret following his bleary gaze through the quiet, sleet-slick roads. He’ll regret the fact that he couldn’t have stopped his truck sooner.
When he steps out into the cold just as he smells the acrid scent of burning tires, he sees your bloodied face in your car. So small. So undeserving. He muttered a string of cusses. The sudden shock of adrenaline washing away the last of his drunkenness. He looks back at his truck, horrifically beaten, his gaze doubling from his last bout of drunkenness.
He bargains that night. Calls up someone high up amongst the police rank to bail him out. He negotiated for ten minutes. Then he hides the truck somewhere off the side of the road for him to come back to and dispose of. And then, only then, did he call for help.
Only then did he reach you in the driver’s seat, blood now caked to your skin as he lay you out amongst the concrete.
You make some sound, and he cusses to himself.
His rough palms cup your cheek, trying to get you to look at him then. But you were too far gone.
He spoke, anyway. Just in case you’ll hear it.
“It’s alright, doll. I won’t hurt you.”
Even now, weeks after he stole your life from you, he holds you and tells you the same thing anyway. The same set of words that manage to calm you down.
He does love you. And it breaks him every day to know he was the one to endanger you.
summary: you meet joel in the aftermath of a terrible accident. reeling from the aftermath of the event, there is a looming shadow that complicates your relationship with the southern man you just somehow happened to meet
warnings: explicit (but not graphic) content–MINORS DO NOT INTERACT! relatively dark(?)-ish joel miller, allusions to smut (not heavily detailed), graphic depictions of injury, some scenes include hospitalization (not in graphic detail), dubious consent, joel miller radiates mansplain / manipulate / malewife energy, men are trash in general wbk
note: oh. my. god. it has been far too long and i’m so so very sorry for just now coming back! i’ve hit a terrible writer’s block alongside very bad mental health and i’m just now recovering :’D thank you so so so much for 800 followers, it’s going to take a while for me to respond to everyone but i’ll be going through them! i love you very very dearly, mwah!
note 2.0: pls pls lower your expectations, 🫣 i am trying to get back into the groove of things!
You remember the screech of tires on frozen asphalt. A flash of headlights. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Your body ignited in pain. Then… darkness.
Darkness that seemed to spread before you for an eternity. Untethered and stuck in limbo, perhaps in another universe, you would call it the most peaceful slumber of your life. The misfortune comes when you wake. Lightning strikes shake you awake from the darkness of your subconsciousness. Electricity trembling in your chest as it shoots through your beaten frame. A light peers through your closed eyes. Brighter, and brighter… bigger and bigger. A ringing in your ears that almost deafens you.
The world shifts around you, and you wake paralyzed, staring at the ceiling in the warm sun that falls on your body lying there. Everything hurts. There is a humming in your head that you cannot seem to shake out of.
The solitude lasts for a beat. Then another. That’s when you see him.
A sleepless, roughened man looking at you with his warm eyes. Through the bleary vision of your own gaze, a shaky breath escapes him. His crinkled eyes looking over your features with a swift once over.
“Oh, Christ, you’re awake.”
And that’s how you met Joel.
–
In the week that followed your complicated recovery, Joel tells you he saw the crash. Tells you the asshole who ran you over was nowhere to be seen. He says most of it with his eyes averted. Yet you hold your gaze.
You will not be weakened by the shame of your misery.
It is two days later when you confess to him; your throat still rasping as the pain in your head boils and toils beneath your skull. You look at him when he arrives, paint-stained shirt providing evidence of a messy day of working. “I don’t want to think about what happened to me anymore, Joel.”
Your tongue grabs at words the way young children do with sticky fruit in the summer. As if language has become foreign to you.
Joel, keys in hand, meets your gaze with a furrowed brow. “Sure, sugar. Whatever you need.”
Maybe your eyes were tricking you, but you could’ve sworn you saw his shoulders relax from some kind of tension leaving his body.
–
Joel doesn’t know what he had gotten himself into. What he does know is that for some reason, he couldn’t bear the idea of staying away from you. You tell him fragments of what little you remember, your concussed consciousness blindly clawing at every last bit of beaten brain matter for some kind of answer.
You sometimes cry from the effort it takes you to think, but he’s there. The first few times, he held your hand. As the hours bled into days, he held you as you wet his shirt with warm tears. Sometimes, when the nightmares reach him in his own bed a few miles out from the hospital, it feels like you’re bleeding into him.
From the moment he saw you, he had been marked. And no matter how many times he scratched at his own skin, he could never wash away the blood on his hands.
–
He’s the one to take you home to your quiet little apartment, having grown dust in your absence. You apologize, he waves you off. He watches you as you peer out of the window, comprehending a view that had once been so mundane, transformed into some shred of a miracle for you to still be there, witnessing it all. He’s behind you, ten feet away, tilting his head as your hair catches what little sunlight blessed you the day you left the hospital.
He says your name, and you look back at him with a curious smile. “My God,” he followed. “You look just like starlight.” He steps forward, and that’s when you know everything had fallen into place. Without another moment lapsing, he takes your face into his hands, pulling you into a searing kiss.
You apologize so many times. For the hospital smell on your skin. For your trembling knees. For the dizzying sensation of human contact without the involvement of medical processes. For feeling so unclean.
Meanwhile, he apologizes, too. For kissing you. For pulling you to him. For holding you. For carrying you to the forlorn couch grown cold from the absence of human warmth. So many times that there are times that you don’t know what is there to apologize for. You shake your head each and every time.
The tears roll down your cheek just as he pulls away and his eyes immediately soften. You shake your head, pulling him into another kiss as you whine.
There are many things you want to tell him. But you don’t dare tell him this: Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you have been ruined.
“Tell me to stop, honey, and I will,” he murmurs, holding your cheek as you pause between touches. You shake your head immediately. You want many things. You are hungry and untamed. But you do not want him to stop.
You tell him as much. “Joel, don’t you dare stop.”
And he doesn’t. Not when you’re naked and he sees your bruised skin, purple and yellowed in places. He looks to you just as your body tenses. His demeanor softens, kissing along your jaw and your neck with a shaky breath.
“I won’t hurt ya, darlin’.”
He keeps to that promise. Even when your legs are around his waist and he’s caught in your warmth. He says it again and again as you whine into the cool, quiet solitude of your home.
I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you.
–
Falling in love with Joel was both so complicated and so simple at once. Whenever you wake beside him, you wake up writhing from the pain of your injuries; sometimes crying from the nightmares that followed every waking moment. You felt marred by shame for putting so much of your perceived burden on his shoulders. He never departs from your side, his strong arms placating you while his lips press against your temple.
It’s all so simple, the way he cares about you. And whether or not you admitted it, you like the feeling of being cared for. Of having someone that cares.
Regardless, you cannot escape the fact that someone did this to you. And whenever the pain shocks your body, everything but rabid rage escapes your body. You curse the stranger, whoever they may be, for that cursed night.
Joel sees glimpses of this. He saw it most that one afternoon when the hospital called, saying you had been taken care of. By who, they didn’t say. Only that the stranger apologized for what happened.
You were on the floor, hands trembling in the fists you held them in. The hospital bill crumpled a few inches away. You do not see him. What you see is all red.
A wail escapes your trembling mouth just as your hands claw at anything they can touch. It is an uncontrollable surge of blinding, mouth-foaming, unbridled rage. He’s there, trying to hold you down before you hurt yourself. Each wail pierces another hole into his aching heart. Each struggle followed by his gentle shushing, trying to assuage you in the crest of your emotion.
“Whoever it was,” you told him then as you sobbed. “They ruined my life.”
“Darlin, darlin’...” He breathes in, cupping your face. “Maybe he’s around and he regrets-”
“No!” You claw at him, just as he holds you tighter against his chest. “If he could find me, then he could say it to my face. He wouldn’t be some coward who left me alone like this after he ruined my life!”
It destroys him. And you can see it in his face. All he can do is hold you as you cry against his chest. All he can do is shut his eyes, letting the waves of grief crest over and over your frame. Letting your sobs tear him open and burn him out.
He tells you nothing lasts forever. That he’ll be there for as close to forever as possible. You shake your head because you know better. He says nothing lasts forever. He doesn’t know he’s just afraid your pain can last longer than he is capable of loving you.
–
Perhaps, to the end of his days, Joel will regret that drunken night. He’ll regret following his bleary gaze through the quiet, sleet-slick roads. He’ll regret the fact that he couldn’t have stopped his truck sooner.
When he steps out into the cold just as he smells the acrid scent of burning tires, he sees your bloodied face in your car. So small. So undeserving. He muttered a string of cusses. The sudden shock of adrenaline washing away the last of his drunkenness. He looks back at his truck, horrifically beaten, his gaze doubling from his last bout of drunkenness.
He bargains that night. Calls up someone high up amongst the police rank to bail him out. He negotiated for ten minutes. Then he hides the truck somewhere off the side of the road for him to come back to and dispose of. And then, only then, did he call for help.
Only then did he reach you in the driver’s seat, blood now caked to your skin as he lay you out amongst the concrete.
You make some sound, and he cusses to himself.
His rough palms cup your cheek, trying to get you to look at him then. But you were too far gone.
He spoke, anyway. Just in case you’ll hear it.
“It’s alright, doll. I won’t hurt you.”
Even now, weeks after he stole your life from you, he holds you and tells you the same thing anyway. The same set of words that manage to calm you down.
He does love you. And it breaks him every day to know he was the one to endanger you.
summary: you meet joel in the aftermath of a terrible accident. reeling from the aftermath of the event, there is a looming shadow that complicates your relationship with the southern man you just somehow happened to meet
warnings: explicit (but not graphic) content–MINORS DO NOT INTERACT! relatively dark(?)-ish joel miller, allusions to smut (not heavily detailed), graphic depictions of injury, some scenes include hospitalization (not in graphic detail), dubious consent, joel miller radiates mansplain / manipulate / malewife energy, men are trash in general wbk
note: oh. my. god. it has been far too long and i’m so so very sorry for just now coming back! i’ve hit a terrible writer’s block alongside very bad mental health and i’m just now recovering :’D thank you so so so much for 800 followers, it’s going to take a while for me to respond to everyone but i’ll be going through them! i love you very very dearly, mwah!
note 2.0: pls pls lower your expectations, 🫣 i am trying to get back into the groove of things!
You remember the screech of tires on frozen asphalt. A flash of headlights. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Your body ignited in pain. Then… darkness.
Darkness that seemed to spread before you for an eternity. Untethered and stuck in limbo, perhaps in another universe, you would call it the most peaceful slumber of your life. The misfortune comes when you wake. Lightning strikes shake you awake from the darkness of your subconsciousness. Electricity trembling in your chest as it shoots through your beaten frame. A light peers through your closed eyes. Brighter, and brighter… bigger and bigger. A ringing in your ears that almost deafens you.
The world shifts around you, and you wake paralyzed, staring at the ceiling in the warm sun that falls on your body lying there. Everything hurts. There is a humming in your head that you cannot seem to shake out of.
The solitude lasts for a beat. Then another. That’s when you see him.
A sleepless, roughened man looking at you with his warm eyes. Through the bleary vision of your own gaze, a shaky breath escapes him. His crinkled eyes looking over your features with a swift once over.
“Oh, Christ, you’re awake.”
And that’s how you met Joel.
–
In the week that followed your complicated recovery, Joel tells you he saw the crash. Tells you the asshole who ran you over was nowhere to be seen. He says most of it with his eyes averted. Yet you hold your gaze.
You will not be weakened by the shame of your misery.
It is two days later when you confess to him; your throat still rasping as the pain in your head boils and toils beneath your skull. You look at him when he arrives, paint-stained shirt providing evidence of a messy day of working. “I don’t want to think about what happened to me anymore, Joel.”
Your tongue grabs at words the way young children do with sticky fruit in the summer. As if language has become foreign to you.
Joel, keys in hand, meets your gaze with a furrowed brow. “Sure, sugar. Whatever you need.”
Maybe your eyes were tricking you, but you could’ve sworn you saw his shoulders relax from some kind of tension leaving his body.
–
Joel doesn’t know what he had gotten himself into. What he does know is that for some reason, he couldn’t bear the idea of staying away from you. You tell him fragments of what little you remember, your concussed consciousness blindly clawing at every last bit of beaten brain matter for some kind of answer.
You sometimes cry from the effort it takes you to think, but he’s there. The first few times, he held your hand. As the hours bled into days, he held you as you wet his shirt with warm tears. Sometimes, when the nightmares reach him in his own bed a few miles out from the hospital, it feels like you’re bleeding into him.
From the moment he saw you, he had been marked. And no matter how many times he scratched at his own skin, he could never wash away the blood on his hands.
–
He’s the one to take you home to your quiet little apartment, having grown dust in your absence. You apologize, he waves you off. He watches you as you peer out of the window, comprehending a view that had once been so mundane, transformed into some shred of a miracle for you to still be there, witnessing it all. He’s behind you, ten feet away, tilting his head as your hair catches what little sunlight blessed you the day you left the hospital.
He says your name, and you look back at him with a curious smile. “My God,” he followed. “You look just like starlight.” He steps forward, and that’s when you know everything had fallen into place. Without another moment lapsing, he takes your face into his hands, pulling you into a searing kiss.
You apologize so many times. For the hospital smell on your skin. For your trembling knees. For the dizzying sensation of human contact without the involvement of medical processes. For feeling so unclean.
Meanwhile, he apologizes, too. For kissing you. For pulling you to him. For holding you. For carrying you to the forlorn couch grown cold from the absence of human warmth. So many times that there are times that you don’t know what is there to apologize for. You shake your head each and every time.
The tears roll down your cheek just as he pulls away and his eyes immediately soften. You shake your head, pulling him into another kiss as you whine.
There are many things you want to tell him. But you don’t dare tell him this: Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you have been ruined.
“Tell me to stop, honey, and I will,” he murmurs, holding your cheek as you pause between touches. You shake your head immediately. You want many things. You are hungry and untamed. But you do not want him to stop.
You tell him as much. “Joel, don’t you dare stop.”
And he doesn’t. Not when you’re naked and he sees your bruised skin, purple and yellowed in places. He looks to you just as your body tenses. His demeanor softens, kissing along your jaw and your neck with a shaky breath.
“I won’t hurt ya, darlin’.”
He keeps to that promise. Even when your legs are around his waist and he’s caught in your warmth. He says it again and again as you whine into the cool, quiet solitude of your home.
I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you.
–
Falling in love with Joel was both so complicated and so simple at once. Whenever you wake beside him, you wake up writhing from the pain of your injuries; sometimes crying from the nightmares that followed every waking moment. You felt marred by shame for putting so much of your perceived burden on his shoulders. He never departs from your side, his strong arms placating you while his lips press against your temple.
It’s all so simple, the way he cares about you. And whether or not you admitted it, you like the feeling of being cared for. Of having someone that cares.
Regardless, you cannot escape the fact that someone did this to you. And whenever the pain shocks your body, everything but rabid rage escapes your body. You curse the stranger, whoever they may be, for that cursed night.
Joel sees glimpses of this. He saw it most that one afternoon when the hospital called, saying you had been taken care of. By who, they didn’t say. Only that the stranger apologized for what happened.
You were on the floor, hands trembling in the fists you held them in. The hospital bill crumpled a few inches away. You do not see him. What you see is all red.
A wail escapes your trembling mouth just as your hands claw at anything they can touch. It is an uncontrollable surge of blinding, mouth-foaming, unbridled rage. He’s there, trying to hold you down before you hurt yourself. Each wail pierces another hole into his aching heart. Each struggle followed by his gentle shushing, trying to assuage you in the crest of your emotion.
“Whoever it was,” you told him then as you sobbed. “They ruined my life.”
“Darlin, darlin’...” He breathes in, cupping your face. “Maybe he’s around and he regrets-”
“No!” You claw at him, just as he holds you tighter against his chest. “If he could find me, then he could say it to my face. He wouldn’t be some coward who left me alone like this after he ruined my life!”
It destroys him. And you can see it in his face. All he can do is hold you as you cry against his chest. All he can do is shut his eyes, letting the waves of grief crest over and over your frame. Letting your sobs tear him open and burn him out.
He tells you nothing lasts forever. That he’ll be there for as close to forever as possible. You shake your head because you know better. He says nothing lasts forever. He doesn’t know he’s just afraid your pain can last longer than he is capable of loving you.
–
Perhaps, to the end of his days, Joel will regret that drunken night. He’ll regret following his bleary gaze through the quiet, sleet-slick roads. He’ll regret the fact that he couldn’t have stopped his truck sooner.
When he steps out into the cold just as he smells the acrid scent of burning tires, he sees your bloodied face in your car. So small. So undeserving. He muttered a string of cusses. The sudden shock of adrenaline washing away the last of his drunkenness. He looks back at his truck, horrifically beaten, his gaze doubling from his last bout of drunkenness.
He bargains that night. Calls up someone high up amongst the police rank to bail him out. He negotiated for ten minutes. Then he hides the truck somewhere off the side of the road for him to come back to and dispose of. And then, only then, did he call for help.
Only then did he reach you in the driver’s seat, blood now caked to your skin as he lay you out amongst the concrete.
You make some sound, and he cusses to himself.
His rough palms cup your cheek, trying to get you to look at him then. But you were too far gone.
He spoke, anyway. Just in case you’ll hear it.
“It’s alright, doll. I won’t hurt you.”
Even now, weeks after he stole your life from you, he holds you and tells you the same thing anyway. The same set of words that manage to calm you down.
He does love you. And it breaks him every day to know he was the one to endanger you.
summary: you meet joel in the aftermath of a terrible accident. reeling from the aftermath of the event, there is a looming shadow that complicates your relationship with the southern man you just somehow happened to meet
warnings: explicit (but not graphic) content–MINORS DO NOT INTERACT! relatively dark(?)-ish joel miller, allusions to smut (not heavily detailed), graphic depictions of injury, some scenes include hospitalization (not in graphic detail), dubious consent, joel miller radiates mansplain / manipulate / malewife energy, men are trash in general wbk
note: oh. my. god. it has been far too long and i’m so so very sorry for just now coming back! i’ve hit a terrible writer’s block alongside very bad mental health and i’m just now recovering :’D thank you so so so much for 800 followers, it’s going to take a while for me to respond to everyone but i’ll be going through them! i love you very very dearly, mwah!
note 2.0: pls pls lower your expectations, 🫣 i am trying to get back into the groove of things!
You remember the screech of tires on frozen asphalt. A flash of headlights. Spinning, spinning, spinning. Your body ignited in pain. Then… darkness.
Darkness that seemed to spread before you for an eternity. Untethered and stuck in limbo, perhaps in another universe, you would call it the most peaceful slumber of your life. The misfortune comes when you wake. Lightning strikes shake you awake from the darkness of your subconsciousness. Electricity trembling in your chest as it shoots through your beaten frame. A light peers through your closed eyes. Brighter, and brighter… bigger and bigger. A ringing in your ears that almost deafens you.
The world shifts around you, and you wake paralyzed, staring at the ceiling in the warm sun that falls on your body lying there. Everything hurts. There is a humming in your head that you cannot seem to shake out of.
The solitude lasts for a beat. Then another. That’s when you see him.
A sleepless, roughened man looking at you with his warm eyes. Through the bleary vision of your own gaze, a shaky breath escapes him. His crinkled eyes looking over your features with a swift once over.
“Oh, Christ, you’re awake.”
And that’s how you met Joel.
–
In the week that followed your complicated recovery, Joel tells you he saw the crash. Tells you the asshole who ran you over was nowhere to be seen. He says most of it with his eyes averted. Yet you hold your gaze.
You will not be weakened by the shame of your misery.
It is two days later when you confess to him; your throat still rasping as the pain in your head boils and toils beneath your skull. You look at him when he arrives, paint-stained shirt providing evidence of a messy day of working. “I don’t want to think about what happened to me anymore, Joel.”
Your tongue grabs at words the way young children do with sticky fruit in the summer. As if language has become foreign to you.
Joel, keys in hand, meets your gaze with a furrowed brow. “Sure, sugar. Whatever you need.”
Maybe your eyes were tricking you, but you could’ve sworn you saw his shoulders relax from some kind of tension leaving his body.
–
Joel doesn’t know what he had gotten himself into. What he does know is that for some reason, he couldn’t bear the idea of staying away from you. You tell him fragments of what little you remember, your concussed consciousness blindly clawing at every last bit of beaten brain matter for some kind of answer.
You sometimes cry from the effort it takes you to think, but he’s there. The first few times, he held your hand. As the hours bled into days, he held you as you wet his shirt with warm tears. Sometimes, when the nightmares reach him in his own bed a few miles out from the hospital, it feels like you’re bleeding into him.
From the moment he saw you, he had been marked. And no matter how many times he scratched at his own skin, he could never wash away the blood on his hands.
–
He’s the one to take you home to your quiet little apartment, having grown dust in your absence. You apologize, he waves you off. He watches you as you peer out of the window, comprehending a view that had once been so mundane, transformed into some shred of a miracle for you to still be there, witnessing it all. He’s behind you, ten feet away, tilting his head as your hair catches what little sunlight blessed you the day you left the hospital.
He says your name, and you look back at him with a curious smile. “My God,” he followed. “You look just like starlight.” He steps forward, and that’s when you know everything had fallen into place. Without another moment lapsing, he takes your face into his hands, pulling you into a searing kiss.
You apologize so many times. For the hospital smell on your skin. For your trembling knees. For the dizzying sensation of human contact without the involvement of medical processes. For feeling so unclean.
Meanwhile, he apologizes, too. For kissing you. For pulling you to him. For holding you. For carrying you to the forlorn couch grown cold from the absence of human warmth. So many times that there are times that you don’t know what is there to apologize for. You shake your head each and every time.
The tears roll down your cheek just as he pulls away and his eyes immediately soften. You shake your head, pulling him into another kiss as you whine.
There are many things you want to tell him. But you don’t dare tell him this: Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you have been ruined.
“Tell me to stop, honey, and I will,” he murmurs, holding your cheek as you pause between touches. You shake your head immediately. You want many things. You are hungry and untamed. But you do not want him to stop.
You tell him as much. “Joel, don’t you dare stop.”
And he doesn’t. Not when you’re naked and he sees your bruised skin, purple and yellowed in places. He looks to you just as your body tenses. His demeanor softens, kissing along your jaw and your neck with a shaky breath.
“I won’t hurt ya, darlin’.”
He keeps to that promise. Even when your legs are around his waist and he’s caught in your warmth. He says it again and again as you whine into the cool, quiet solitude of your home.
I won’t hurt you, I won’t hurt you.
–
Falling in love with Joel was both so complicated and so simple at once. Whenever you wake beside him, you wake up writhing from the pain of your injuries; sometimes crying from the nightmares that followed every waking moment. You felt marred by shame for putting so much of your perceived burden on his shoulders. He never departs from your side, his strong arms placating you while his lips press against your temple.
It’s all so simple, the way he cares about you. And whether or not you admitted it, you like the feeling of being cared for. Of having someone that cares.
Regardless, you cannot escape the fact that someone did this to you. And whenever the pain shocks your body, everything but rabid rage escapes your body. You curse the stranger, whoever they may be, for that cursed night.
Joel sees glimpses of this. He saw it most that one afternoon when the hospital called, saying you had been taken care of. By who, they didn’t say. Only that the stranger apologized for what happened.
You were on the floor, hands trembling in the fists you held them in. The hospital bill crumpled a few inches away. You do not see him. What you see is all red.
A wail escapes your trembling mouth just as your hands claw at anything they can touch. It is an uncontrollable surge of blinding, mouth-foaming, unbridled rage. He’s there, trying to hold you down before you hurt yourself. Each wail pierces another hole into his aching heart. Each struggle followed by his gentle shushing, trying to assuage you in the crest of your emotion.
“Whoever it was,” you told him then as you sobbed. “They ruined my life.”
“Darlin, darlin’...” He breathes in, cupping your face. “Maybe he’s around and he regrets-”
“No!” You claw at him, just as he holds you tighter against his chest. “If he could find me, then he could say it to my face. He wouldn’t be some coward who left me alone like this after he ruined my life!”
It destroys him. And you can see it in his face. All he can do is hold you as you cry against his chest. All he can do is shut his eyes, letting the waves of grief crest over and over your frame. Letting your sobs tear him open and burn him out.
He tells you nothing lasts forever. That he’ll be there for as close to forever as possible. You shake your head because you know better. He says nothing lasts forever. He doesn’t know he’s just afraid your pain can last longer than he is capable of loving you.
–
Perhaps, to the end of his days, Joel will regret that drunken night. He’ll regret following his bleary gaze through the quiet, sleet-slick roads. He’ll regret the fact that he couldn’t have stopped his truck sooner.
When he steps out into the cold just as he smells the acrid scent of burning tires, he sees your bloodied face in your car. So small. So undeserving. He muttered a string of cusses. The sudden shock of adrenaline washing away the last of his drunkenness. He looks back at his truck, horrifically beaten, his gaze doubling from his last bout of drunkenness.
He bargains that night. Calls up someone high up amongst the police rank to bail him out. He negotiated for ten minutes. Then he hides the truck somewhere off the side of the road for him to come back to and dispose of. And then, only then, did he call for help.
Only then did he reach you in the driver’s seat, blood now caked to your skin as he lay you out amongst the concrete.
You make some sound, and he cusses to himself.
His rough palms cup your cheek, trying to get you to look at him then. But you were too far gone.
He spoke, anyway. Just in case you’ll hear it.
“It’s alright, doll. I won’t hurt you.”
Even now, weeks after he stole your life from you, he holds you and tells you the same thing anyway. The same set of words that manage to calm you down.
He does love you. And it breaks him every day to know he was the one to endanger you.
*clears throat* *taps mic* hi, hi, hello! :'D it's been quite a long time and i'm so sorry for just now coming back here. i have something under way, and i just wanted to check in before i published it, because it didn't feel reasonable for me to just post a fic without a word of warning.
i hope time has been kind to each and everyone of you who have eyes on this little corner of the internet. i love you, and i hope you have warm blankets and hugs whenever it is wherever you are.
I just realised something from the TLOU gameplay that made me so depressed that I needed to share with you all.
Rewind back to the prologue where Sarah is dying, and we see Joel look away from her a total of two times before she dies: the first time is at the same moment the camera pans to solely Tommy, of whom Joel is looking at (first image). Before he is out of shot, Joel can just be seen looking to Sarah again, until the camera turns back to him where he looks away a second time towards Tommy again (second image).
Now, if you go and listen to the audio of the actual scene itself, you'll notice that the second time he looks away is when Sarah draws her last breath and passes away. She's already dead now.
And Joel missed it by looking away for only a second.
The second time he looks away and then looks back at Sarah, she is already gone. He couldn't do anything. He couldn't look into her eyes, still filled with life (albeit hanging on a thread) anymore before becoming absolutely soulless because he missed it. He didn't see the light leave her, he didn’t see her succumb to the bullet wound where she would move on to no longer feel anymore pain in death. He missed it almost instantly. His last good look of her is after the second time he looked away, when she's already passed on.
But then we fast-forward to the very near end of the game where Joel is trying to perform CPR on Ellie after she almost drowned. He's becoming mentally and emotionally frantic because he cannot lose another one and projects this by trying to resuscitate her. He is back to where he was twenty years prior trying to save Sarah. And then the Fireflies appear.
Joel looks away from Ellie one time. He probably doesn’t even realise that these are Fireflies (they could have been Hunters or even FEDRA for all he cared). The look on his face in the second image is heart-breaking, but it only lasts for a second before he immediately looks down to Ellie.
He only looks up at them once. He doesn’t look up a second time.
Again, if you watch the original scene with audio enabled, you can hear the shakiness in Joel's voice, almost tearfully and very much coming from a place of fear. He's literally pleading for Ellie to wake up, all the while keeping his eyes on her - not looking up again - not even with one of the Firefly soldiers approaching him with an armed weapon.
He can't look away a second time because the last time he did, he lost Sarah immediately. He fears that will happen again, but he cannot let that occur. He won't. Not with Ellie: his second chance, his new reason to live, his new love. Joel refuses to tear his eyes away from her, even for another second, if it risks her life suddenly slipping away before he could even realise it.
He cannot afford to have another daughter lay lifeless in his arms and have her drift off to a place where he cannot follow and protect her anymore, even if it means placing his own life on the line.
I was reading your Joel X siren!reader fic for the thousandth time... Would you ever write a second part?
Love you xoxo
hello darling, thank you so much for this ask! and in response, i always say nothing is impossible! i feel like i ended the fic with the possibility of continuing. i'm just waiting for the right moment to let the fates decide :>
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