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As You Were (Chapter 1)

Fandom: The Last of Us | Pairing: Joel x OC | Content: Fix-it | Rating: Mature

AO3

When Joel and Ellie take a wrong turn on their journey from Pittsburgh to Wyoming, they find themselves lost in a beautiful place with a dark and dangerous secret. While there, they meet a mother and son who, after a recent, tragic event on their family farm, are fighting tirelessly for survival. In an effort to find hope for the future, the two groups set out west together, growing closer over time, making choices and altering paths that will change the course of their lives forever.

This is an AU, starting after the events of the Summer chapter in the first game, and extending into the timeline of the second. Joel lives.

Chapter 1: A Prologue

“I don’t know what happened,” said Joel. He had been polishing the neck of the guitar. Just south of the second fret there was stamped, or maybe painted, the image of a moth. He had found the part in the wreckage of a community theater in the Bighorn Basin, in a town called Cody some weeks before. “Wasn't no plan.”

“These other people,” said Tommy. They were sitting in a safe house in an old tract community near Jackson. They had a low fire going in the fireplace, for cooking. Outside, it was a summer thunderstorm, and they would have to wait it out till morning for the next patrol. “We never really got to talk about them, when y'all came through in the Fall. Where the hell’d you pick them up?”

“Wisconsin,” said Joel. “We’d gotten lost, needed fuel. We came to this driveway in the middle of goddam Amish country. The middle of nowhere. And there they were. When we met them, they were in a bad spot. They were surviving, but the circumstances where they were living at the time were real...trying. Real bad. They needed to leave, and we gave them the excuse. Almost like it was happenstance.”

“They don’t seem Amish.”

“They ain’t,” said Joel. “I just said it was Amish country. All farming, rural communities and such. You think of where we grew up in Texas and then you expand that by a whole degree. These people had nothing but their land.”

“Well, they’re doing a good job,” said Tommy. He had slouched into his chair, hung his head off the back and looked up at the ceiling as if pondering something profound. “Noah’s as capable as they come.”

“I know,” said Joel.

“And Cici, well. She’s teaching the patrols how to make goddam IEDs? Hell of a woman. Maria speaks of her as if we’ve struck gold.”

“They’re good people,” said Joel. “They’ve had to make do, make hard choices. But don’t make no mistake.”

“That, I surmise,” said Tommy. He puffed up and looked Joel in the eye. The rain was pounding down on the roof overhead. “What happened,” he said. "With the Fireflies. You ever find them?"

Thunder rumbled in the distance. Joel scrubbed at his newly-trimmed beard, and it made a sand paper noise that he wasn’t used to. “Yeah, we found them.”

“We got all night,” said Tommy. “Don’t be shy.” He took a tin of tobacco out of his pocket then, like a surprise. He had some rolling papers, too. "You should just start at the beginning."

Joel placed the guitar aside and leaned over the display. He said, “Y'all growing tobacco?”

“Some,” said Tommy. “The weather ain’t perfect for it, but we got greenhouses.”

“No shit,” said Joel.

Tommy was hunched over the table now, sprinkling a little bit of the dried tobacco into one of the paper squares. He rolled it up tightly, sealed it with his tongue. Then he slid it across the table to Joel and proceeded to roll another. “I swipe some, every so often, from the pantry stash,” he said. “Don’t tell Maria.”

Joel picked up the cigarette and looked at it, ran it under his nose. Tommy had a book of matches which he left on the table between them. Joel took one, lit the cigarette, and then he shook out the match and flicked it to the floorboards.

“Goddam.” It was a relic from another life. The nicotine made him dizzy. He closed his eyes.

“When’s the last time you had one of these?” said Tommy, smoking.

“Some time,” said Joel. "Not that long."

He said no more on the matter, but he remembered, exactly, the last time he’d had one. It had been late summer, the year before, on top of the roof of the Old Main building, on the Augustana College Campus in Moline, IL. It was with her, Cici. They were overlooking the Mississippi, could see all the way to Iowa. It had been raining that day, and the air smelled good now, for once. It had been a hell of a day. Nothing good right up until the very end. Noah and Ellie had foraged an entire carton of unopened Parliaments from a corner store in the town, along with a bunch of other stuff. Cici had her hair down that night. They were just talking, wearing new clothes and it felt like any other day. The cigarettes were stale, but it was worth it. They had whiskey, too, which they drank out of paper cups. Joel remembered now, how it had all made him think of Texas, at the time.

He took a deep breath and looked out the window. Then, he looked at Tommy, who was smiling through the smoke between them as if he had a secret.

“What’s going on with you?” said Joel.

“Nothing,” said Tommy, smoking. “What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing.”

“You and Cici,” said Tommy, as if a mindreader. “That anything special? I saw the two of you the other day, walking together by the river.”

“Well, if you saw us walking together by the river, then I guess there ain’t no more to say.”

Tommy laughed. Outside, the lightning was supernatural and lit up the terrain, turning it all white, just for an instant. “You still got that terrible sense of humor. When the four of you showed back up here a couple of weeks ago, I didn't know what I was in for. But you haven’t changed one bit.”

Joel smoked his cigarette, and as he did, he set about rolling another. Wasn’t nothing to it, but he thought about Ellie and whether she’d smell it on his clothes. He didn’t really want that. So he took off his jacket. “I’ll make you a deal, little brother,” said Joel, tossing the jacket to the couch on the opposite side of the fireplace. “You quit asking questions about my personal life, and I’ll tell you my goddam story.”

“The whole story?” said Tommy.

“The whole story,” said Joel.

Tommy had some liquor locked up in a safe in the garage. He went to get it. While he was gone, Joel picked up the guitar. It didn’t have its strings yet, was just a piece of wood. Still, he rested it in his lap, as it was something to hold on to. When Tommy got back, he had a glass mason jar full of moonshine. He unscrewed the top and measured two fingers for each of them into ceramic coffee cups.

Joel took a sip. It was disgusting. “Who made this?” he said, and he coughed, once.

“Eugene,” said Tommy. "You met him last week, at the softball game."

“Tastes like goddam rocket fuel.”

“Can’t guarantee it ain’t,” said Tommy. “Now, start from the beginning. I'm bored as hell."

Joel sighed, looked down at the clear liquor in his cup. The moonshine and the cigarettes with Tommy in the abandoned tract home in the middle of a summer storm was enough to make him feel like a teenager again.

That sort of thing had been happening to him a lot lately. He took a drink. "Well," he said. "It's like I said, we was leaving Chicago, and we got lost."

"How lost?"

"Real lost."

...

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