Pairing: rivals to friends with benefits slowburn Joel x F!Reader, Post-Outbreak
Fic Summary: Sleeping with Joel Miller was supposed to be a one time thing. When the older brother of your closest friend showed up in Jackson, you hadn't expected him to stay more than a day. You'd both given into a brief moment of passion before he left, and that was the end of that. It didn't matter, you were never going to see him again. Then Joel returns a few months later, and screws up everything about the comforting life you had established in Jackson.
Fic Tags: One Night Stands, Rivals into Friends with Benefits, Emotional Slow Burn (really slow), Eventual Romance, Mutual Pining Idiots, Angst & Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Found Family (lots of Tommy & Reader and Dina & Reader friendships), Long Chapters
Fic Warnings: Explicit Smut (18+ MDNI), Language, Canon-Typical Violence, Alcohol Use, Age Difference (Reader in her 30s, Joel 56) Themes of Grief/PTSD/Depression with mentions of death (family members, both Reader and Joel) that can be heavy at times, Specific Warnings in each Chapter
Status: Complete
ao3 link
official art by @cynibuns
tribute edit by @dundienominee
moodboard/graphic by @planet-marz1
Reader fanart by @mydzygro-art
masterlist (no longer posting on tumblr, check ao3 for new fics)
chapter 1: I am not the only traveler
chapter 2: the holidays linger like bad perfume
chapter 3: do I wanna know if this feeling flows both ways (18+ Smut)
chapter 4: there it is again, that funny feeling
chapter 5: break the silence; damn the dark, damn the light
chapter 6: and I'll never see you again if I can help it (18+ Smut)
chapter 7: look at us, you and I, back at it again (18+ Smut)
chapter 8: maybe I don't quite know what to say, but I'm here in your doorway
chapter 9: I thought that you’d be here by now (18+ Smut)
chapter 10: can the killer in me tame the fire in you?
chapter 11: this slope is treacherous, this path is reckless (18+ Smut)
chapter 12: you take what you get, and you turn it into honesty
chapter 13: burned out flames should never reignite, but I thought you might take me home (18+ Smut)
chapter 14: he built a fire just to keep me warm
chapter 15: speak to me until your history’s no mystery to me
chapter 16: and it feels good to be known so well (18+ Smut)
chapter 17: baby, it's Halloween, and we can be anything (18+ Smut)
chapter 18: yes, I'll admit that I'm a fool for you (18+ Smut)
chapter 19: either I'm careless or I wanna get caught (18+ Smut)
chapter 20: with your boots beneath my bed; forever is the sweetest con (18+ Smut)
epilogue (18+ Smut)
(listed in order of how they occur after the main fic)
morning after chapter 20
waking up to oral (18+ Smut)
painfully domestic (kisses to get their attention)
lingerie & breeding kink (18+ Smut)
(epilogue takes place here)
half-asleep, half-awake (Joel POV companion piece to main fic)
not much I need (nonsexual intimacy)
kissing scars
easy, plaid-shirt mornings (18+ Smut)
would it be enough if I could never give you peace? (Reader's anxiety)
a feeling so peculiar (seasonal depression)
chapter 13 sneak peek (Jealous!Joel's POV Date Scene)
chapter 13 scene (Jealous!Joel Smut after Date 18+)
chapter 13 cut endings (Angst af)
chapter 14 sneak peek (Reflection Joel's POV)
chapter 15 sneak peek (Totally Casual Drinks Between Friends)
chapter 16 sneak peek (Dina and Ellie Plan)
chapter 17 sneak peek (The Dance)
chapter 18 sneak peek (Joel Pines for You)
chapter 18 secret scene (Tommy finally fucking figures it out)
chapter 19 sneak peek (Tommy and Reader)
fic playlist
MC playlist
Taylor-coded MC playlist (for my fellow Swifties!)
Summary: Every time Joel Miller realizes he loves you. Every time he wants to tell you, and the time he does.
Warnings: Brief smut (unprotected p in v, possessiveness, creampie), brief reference to canon-typical violence, longing, Joel can’t communicate his feelings until he can, lots and lots of love. Multiple specific references to the main series. Joel's POV.
A/N: I’ve gotten asked a few times when Joel realizes he loves Reader in this series, and the inspiration hit me the other day to write out my answer to it. Because it could be one scene, but so many before, and so many after when he wants to say it. I miss these two and I love these two and I hope that this little companion piece to the fic makes somebody as happy as I was to write them again!
Wordcount: 1.8k
gorgeous dividers by @saradika
Important: Please read this post and how to help Palestine.
The first time Joel feels it—really feels it, settled into his bones with an undeniable weight, tugging at his heart with an unimaginable lightness—is the night of his 57th birthday.
Months of staying out of his bedroom, of keeping you off his bed, dissolve into a forgotten time the moment you tug the glass of whiskey from his hand.
Move over, you’d said, making room for yourself amongst the place where he laid his head every night. You finish off the drink, take the rest of the poison he’d been diluting his veins with to drown out the pain of all he’d lost, and settle next to him.
He thinks he wants to see you there every night.
You ask him things like his favorite fucking color, things that don’t matter. Not to him, not to you—but you ask anyway. You meet his eyes readily, open and honest and searching his soul for the same old breaks in your own, and he feels it.
You hold his hand, and it fits there. You would fit into his side too, he muses, if he pulled you in.
He wants to pull you in. He wants you in ways nobody’s ever had you—he knows they haven’t, can feel the trepidation in your soul when he looks at you for too long, or lets his touches linger.
You’ll fuck him like there’s no tomorrow, because maybe there isn’t, but you won’t let him hold you tender. Not that he’s tried, but he knows you. Not everything about you, but enough.
And that night, there’s more. More to you, wounds open and pain spilling out, and it looks like his own. It is his own.
I should probably go, you say when it’s become too much, and he feels the urge to ask you to stay.
Joel asks if you want a drink instead, because he’s an idiot, and you say he’s had too much, because you’re right.
He watches from his window as you walk home under the streetlights for once instead of sticking to the darkness, and though he won’t call it what it is, he knows it’s love.
Joel’s loved you longer than that, though. Somehow he knows it, but he can’t place when.
In front of his fireplace, maybe. You’re shivering from god knows how long you had spent in the rain, in the graveyard, in your own mourning. Broken, and he wants to find each piece of you that you’ve lost and put you back together.
Or at least hold you tight enough that you feel okay again. He just knows that he misses your damn smirk, your fucking laugh, and maybe that was love too.
Or maybe it’s when he wants you to be his, his, his only. When he wants to erase the image of that man’s hand on your back with his own on your skin, fingertips digging into your hips and pulling them back to slap against his.
Maybe it’s the skirt of a temptress bunched up around your waist, each desperate thrust of his cock into your needy cunt, dripping and squeezing as you say, moan, scream his name, his, his.
Maybe it’s when you’re half-naked after, admitting you don’t know what the fuck this is, don’t understand what it’s become, and he doesn’t know either. But it’s something delicate. Maybe it’s love then.
Maybe it’s love on the bathroom floor when he realizes you’re the first friend he’s made in years.
Maybe it’s love when he wants to kill every single bastard raider who took you from him, wants to tear them apart with his bare hands and make them bleed and bleed for how much blood they’d taken from you. Precious blood, blood that kept you alive, kept you snarky and angry and wrapped around him each time he took as much pleasure from you as he gave back.
Or it’s Halloween, the bright lights, loud music, and clothes of a bygone era. None of it real until Maria shoves the truth of the matter into his face. She tells him he’s an idiot and just what it all means, what you mean to everyone, and to him, and he finally accepts it.
That’s the first night he has you in his bed. The first night he sees all of you, feels all of you, skin against skin, and you come again, and again, and again. It’s not enough, he needs to keep feeling it, needs you to fall apart in his hands so he can put you back together. A single thread he weaves through you and tugs with each ripple of pleasure, pulling you apart again with each clench of your cunt around his cock, until you pull it from him too.
You fall asleep in a matter of minutes after. Lips parted, and he wished he could watch them swell after a kiss, but you were still holding back.
So he settles for his palm on your cheek, stroking the scar that he still doesn’t know how you got, and feels so much longing, so much love when you sink into his sheets, wrapped up in his favorite color that you knew because you cared to ask. Settled by just the touch of him.
Joel thinks you tried to say something that night, but he’ll never know what. He does know what he wants to say, but he holds back. He’d wait for you, even if you never wanted this too. He’d be whatever you did want him to be.
Time passes in a blur after that, as you tangle yourselves together in ways he never would’ve once thought possible. He doesn’t move, and you lean into him. He doesn’t move, just lets you come to him, too scared you’ll run away again if he holds you too tight, or at all.
Then that night. A meal shared with the family you’d found. He tries to go home alone after, and you chase after him, hold him tight, and he knows. He knows what he feels, and he knows you feel it too.
He doesn’t have to say it, but he wants to. Night after night he wants to, the more that you settle and the more that you’re his. The more that he is yours.
You kiss him, finally—or he kisses you, he can’t remember which. And it says it all.
Still, the words are trapped in his throat as his home truly becomes yours.
His body had already been your home for a year.
His heart, for longer than he would ever know.
But his house. Four walls that didn’t mean anything, not really, not until you lived within them and your sister’s art was on the mantle, your photograph of your parents was in your room that was his room, all your mugs in the kitchen and his coffee was your coffee—he needs to tell you.
He tries to every morning, in his kitchen with your cups of coffee—or tea, with complaints falling from both his mouth and yours if you were out of your preferred beverage. He doesn’t, but he knows you can taste it in the drink he brews for you, perfected to your liking.
He tries to before every patrol, in case somebody takes you from him again. He doesn’t, but he knows you can see it when his eyes seek yours, when he gives you a nod and a lingering gaze before you’re out of the gates and on your way. He knows you can feel it when you both get home, his arms wrapped around you tight and the tension seeping from his body when you’re pressed to him.
He tries to every night, but it’s lost on his tongue every time it slides into your mouth. He knows you know with every kiss, every thrust of his hips from where he’d found a home nestled between your thighs, spilling himself into you as you welcomed him in and made the most beautiful music every time.
You’re comfortable in bed months after the holidays, after that first kiss. Winter is warming into spring, the air feels like starting again, and he tries to tell you.
You’d been reading when he crawled into bed behind you after a shower. His face buried into your neck, each drop of water onto your skin so cold it makes you shiver. But your nails dig into his forearm when it wraps around your waist, the book tumbling from your fingers as you grasp at the nightstand with each drag of his pulsing cock inside your tight heat.
The lamp on the nightstand rattles with each thrust, sending waves of warm light flashing across the room. He’s mesmerized each time it washes across your face, pinched in the familiar climb for pleasure you trusted him to guide you through. He mouths at the scar on your cheek, caressing with lips and tongue as you gasp his name.
You’re so beautiful. His moon, his heart, his home, his everything.
Joel wants to tell you when you come, your eyes fluttering open and seeking his. Seeking that connection between you, as hungry as you are reverent, and he doesn’t deserve it, that undying loyalty. But you think the same for yourself, so what did either of you know, besides what this was.
Love, and he wants to say it. Wants to say he loves you when each flutter of your pussy around him sends him spiraling into an orgasm, a blissful moment of release he now only ever associated with you.
Half asleep after, you’re content, the warm light of the steadied lamp caressing your skin as he cleans it. You know what he wants to say, he thinks. Your eyes are heavy and lazily watching as he kisses the inside of your thigh, peppers his love up your body to your lips.
Half awake, Joel watches you reach for him, pulling him down into a soft caress of your lips against his, with more tenderness either of you ever thought you were capable of.
He won’t say it. You know he won’t.
But you know he will. Someday.
And that one morning amongst many that belong to just you and him, when you ask about other lives, when he realizes you’d want him in more than just this one—in every one—he says it.
You say it back, and everything is right.
When you ask him when he first felt it, he tells you the truth; that he hadn’t felt it just yet on that snowy street a year ago, but a part of him always knew he would love you.
18+, minors please do not interact, warnings/tags included for each chapter
Paring: Joel x F!Reader, pre-outbreak and post outbreak (no Y/N)
AU (I kept was the outbreak and common characters. Joel's backstory is different, and the way he finds Jackson is different. No Ellie... yet.)
Fic Summary: You worked for Joel and Tommy a few months before the outbreak. When the outbreak happens, you and Joel get stuck traveling the country and keeping each other safe. Neither of you spoke about the feelings you had for one another pre-outbreak, and in a post-apocalyptic world, it seems like survival should be your only focus. But feelings can't be ignored forever.
Fic tags: Explicit Smut (18+ MDNI), Smut, unprotected sex, creampie, oral sex (m and f), fingering, masturbation (m and f), Language, Themes of death/depression that can be graphic at times, Canon-Typical Violence, Alcohol Use, Age Difference (Reader is 10 years younger than Joel), slow burn, mutual pining, angst, trauma, SA referencing later but I will put a big warning on those chapters
Status: complete
Look What We've Become - sequel
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Eighteen - Extra Scene
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
I think most of these could be read stand alone, I tried to add a brief backstory to these if it was necessary
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romaincrisis
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