please don’t lose it again
— joel miller x platonic!f!reader
— summary: the aftermath
— a/n: i’m replaying tlou2 and got to the scene again. this followed. sorry if the flow isn’t great!! im all over the place. please please please heed warnings. love you so much. not the official ending for itdws!
— warnings: major tlou 2 spoilers, major character death, grief, burying a loved one, loss, spoilers for itdws, throwing up / vomiting (referenced, not really explicit), all the stages of grief in like 3 minutes, guilt, blame, being sad, GORE, or descriptions of gore, and dead bodies
— taglist: @rhymingtree @sleepygraves @wnstice (everything) @auggiesolovey @just-kaylaa @evyiione @lemonlaides @faceache111 @randomhoex @canpillowscry @pedropascalsrealgf @star-wars-lover @coolchick333 @soobsdior @rvjaa @sunflowersdrop @definitely-not-a-seagull-i-swear @miss-celestial-being (pedro)
a what if one shot from the if the door wasn’t shut universe!
masterlist (part one , part two , part three , part four , part five )
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The world is full of horrors.
You learned that much a long, long time ago. In your formative years, your youth, when you were actually a child, you had experienced more horrors than you could name. You didn’t have enough hands to count them on. There was loss and there was pain and there was Joel.
There was a brief time, after arriving to Jackson, where you didn’t have Joel. A part of you always knew he would come back. Not for you, that was true, but you had always known that he would be back. That he wasn’t gone in the way so many were. That Tess was. In the very depths of your mind, he lingered. Even if he had left you behind, he was still with you, in the worst of ways.
You have never lived in a world which didn’t have Joel Miller.
He had always seemed untouchable. Unmovable. As if the world could only move around him.
You never thought you would have to live in a world without him.
There was always a certainty that you’d held. Joel would outlive you. He would survive, where you wouldn’t. Despite how you had improved in your skills out in the wild, in the back of your mind, when you saw Joel, you had always believed he would be the one to bury you.
Because even if Joel hadn’t stayed for you, he would surely stay for your death. It was who he was. Always the survivor, always the one to bury the bodies, always the one left.
You had never considered what it would be like to bury Joel.
Even now, as you sit with your hand pressed against the freshly turned earth, frozen at your fingertips, you aren’t sure you really know what it’s like. Because, surely, there’s no way that Joel Miller could be reduced to this. A body in the dirt. A faceless name left upon a headstone, forgotten in a garden of the dead.
He was alive yesterday.
He was alive.
How could they have buried him? You think of the way the dirt has iced over, numbing your fingers. You wonder how much effort had gone into plunging a shovel into the dirt. How much ice had formed on Joel’s skin when they put him in there?
He would be cold, out here. Without the jacket you knew was hung up in his closet. He would be cold.
“C’mon,” Jesse said, faintly. “Put your gloves on.” He tried, crouching beside you, beside Joel, with the very gloves Joel had gotten you held in his hands. Did you thank him, for those? You needed to. You needed to thank him.
You turn your head away from the wooden headstone, the clumsy carving that Joel could’ve done better, the letters spelling his name. If you don’t look, if you turn your face away, or close your eyes, Joel is still out on patrol. He’s wearing his jacket, holding his gun, pressing a warm hand against his hip in his signature pose. He’s not cold.
But when you turn back, it’s still his name. The ground is still frozen, and as much as you press your hand against the dirt, Joel doesn’t reach towards you. Joel doesn’t do anything. Joel stays buried underneath frozen dirt, underneath snow and ice. Joel stays cold.
Jesse’s hand is warm when he grips your own, his stare concerned and helpless. You wonder what would have happened if it had been you on patrol. If you were the one taking Joel and Tommy off duty. You wonder if you could’ve saved him. You pull your hand away.
He follows you when you stand up.
When you look back, Joel’s headstone blends in with the others. There’s nothing remarkable setting it apart, nothing screaming that it was Joel and he had been alive yesterday.
You wonder who the other headstones belong to. You wonder if anybody remembers them. You wonder why nobody is here, visiting. You wonder if Joel’s grave will end up the same way.
Vaguely, you notice that you’re counting. As you walk, you count the crunch of snow beneath your boots. There are thirty-three steps from Joel’s grave to his door. Thirty-three measly steps between his home, and where his body is buried. Did he know, yesterday, when he was drinking his morning coffee — the coffee you had brought him — that he would spend the rest of time buried thirty-three steps away? Did he have any idea that he would never come home? That he would always be thirty-three steps away?
Tommy is stood in the house when you walk in. His head is bruised, blood still crusted on his skin, and you wonder what happened. You wonder how this could have happened. He doesn’t look like the same man who had once walked on a patrol with you, gun raised, vigilant in every movement. If they let Tommy live, if they let Ellie live, why did they kill Joel? Why did they stop him from coming home?
It’s not long until you realise that you have nobody to ask about Tess. Tommy had long ago told you everything he could remember, most of which was corrected by Joel. Is there anybody left in the world who knew her? Anybody left who would ask about her?
Will it just be you, until your death, who remembers Tess? Who remembers Joel? After you, Tommy and Ellie are gone, who will know him? Who will remember him? Who will put flowers on the grave in which they buried him?
You wonder how long it will be until people wonder about his grave, as you had with the others. How long it will be until he’s forgotten.
What’s going to happen to his pictures? The photographs of Joel and Sarah? Of him and Ellie? Of you and him? Who is going to understand each of these pictures? Who is going to know what was happening in each? How many memories are gone, now that Joel is dead?
“Kid, I…” Tommy trails off, eyebrows furrowed.
Joel is dead.
He’ll never finish the supply of coffee you gave to him. He’ll never complete the guitar he was making for you. He’ll never finish reading your favourite book. He’ll never receive the new mug you’d made for him. He’ll never do anything. Because Joel Miller is dead, and he’s buried thirty-three steps away.
How do you fix that?
How do you tell Joel that you’ll forgive him for ever leaving, that you’ll forgive him for everything, if he just comes back? If this time, he comes back to you. How will he know that things could go back to normal? That you’d— you would do anything. You would bring him all the coffee you found. You would watch every shitty movie he wanted. You would make him every damn mug he asked for. You would forget about him ever leaving at all. You would go back to normal. To before he left, but better.
All he had to do was come back again. That was it.
He just had to prove that it wasn’t him they buried. That the disfigured body they’d brought back to Jackson wasn’t him. That he wasn’t the one who’d had his head caved apart. Joel had proved things that had been far crazier. Surely, for you, he’d be able to prove this.
He would come through the door, all amused grins and warm jacket, and he would walk the thirty-three steps to his grave and tear the headstone with his name on from the ground. He would make fun of Tommy for ever believing it to be him, and he’d make a better gravestone, the name — which wasn’t Joel Miller — carved on neatly, more clearly.
Joel Miller was a survivor. He had to survive.
You aren’t quite sure what you’ll do if he doesn’t.
“I’m sorry.” Tommy says eventually, finally finding his words, and the look on his face reduces your denial to ash. You look at him, trying to find the similarities between him and the mess of the body that had truly been Joel. You find nothing. No resemblance between the body and Tommy. It makes it all the more difficult to believe that he’s dead. You’re not quite sure what Tommy is apologising for. Was it his fault? Did he goad that—that girl into cracking Joel’s skull? Into spilling his blood out of his veins? Into leaving him there like that? Like a body, not a human being?
Jesse says your name, gently, as if your skull would cave if he spoke it any louder. You realise that you’re standing here, in Joel’s house, in the very place that you had drank tea and coffee and whiskey with him, and you have no reason to be here. There’s no Joel to make you a terrible cup of tea, or to play his guitar while you carve at his workshop desk. There’s no Joel, and all of Tommy’s apologies won’t change that.
“I didn’t—” You cut yourself off, finding that you can’t speak any further, lest your throat go dry and your eyes get wet. And really, the words you had gotten out are enough. You didn’t.
You didn’t save him. You didn’t give him that god forsaken mug. You didn’t take him dinner. You didn’t tell him how much you appreciated him. You didn’t tell him that you loved him. You didn’t tell him that he was your dad when nobody else was. You didn’t forgive him.
“It’s okay.” Jesse tells you, and he believes it, obvious in his arms as they wrap firmly around you. Obvious in the way he holds your head, in the way he breathes. But it’s not. It’s not okay.
How could it be okay? You want to yell at him. You want to scream at him that Joel is dead, that it’ll never be okay. You want to do something, anything, but there’s nothing you can do. It wouldn’t matter. Joel would still be dead, and still, nothing would be okay. But you can’t do anything. You can’t vocalise a thing, except for what becomes a choked sob as it leaves your throat.
This is the first time that you cry.
And even though Jesse squeezes you tighter, as if he could possibly put your pieces back together, you fall apart. Once it starts, it doesn’t seem to stop.
There’s an acceptance here. Tears wash away any hint of denial, and you’re left with a reality you can’t help but accept. A reality where Joel Miller is dead, and you will never see him again. The arms around you will never be Joel’s. He’ll never teach you to play a new song on the guitar he was making you. He can’t hear the way you cry, even if you scream and yell and call out for him.
For once, you can’t feel him lingering in the back of your head. As if his absence has removed him from you. It feels like losing him all over again.
You didn’t see Tess’s dead body. Now, you’re glad. If there had been anything left of her to see, anyway. But you had seen bodies before. Mostly of Infected. Or of raiders and hunters who were often shot and killed, sometimes when you were the one shooting. Either way, you’re not used to remembering them as being so… still.
When you close your eyes, forcing the tears to fall, you see him. You see the flashes of skull and soggy brain tissue and smears of blood. And he’s still. You think that you’re so used to seeing Infected people that this just… wasn’t natural.
And to think of that body as Joel? It was even more unnatural.
“C’mon,” Jesse urged once more, voice a murmur in your ear as he tightened his arms around you. “Let’s get you home.” He said, moving to leave.
It was wrong. You didn’t want to leave. It was making you feel all wrong, like there was a constant chill sending shivers down your spine. How could he ask you to leave? How could he ask you to leave when Joel had never come home? Who was going to wash Joel’s mug — the one you had made, that he had stolen — of coffee that he’d left on the side? Who was going to make his bed? Who was going to clean the dirty dishes Joel inevitably would’ve left on his dining table?
Joel wasn’t coming home. So who would do it? How could you leave it like this?
“Kiddo,” Tommy sighed, stepping towards you and taking hold of your hands as Jesse dutifully stepped back, expression creased. He looked tired, more than anything. He looked his age. Tommy blinked, looking up towards the ceiling as if holding back tears, and squeezed your hands in his. “Please, don’t… Go home, okay? I’ll send Maria by. And we’ll—we’ll talk later. Alright?”
It was hard to face the fact that Tommy didn’t want you here. It was incomprehensible. How could you be anywhere else but here? How could he want you anywhere else but here?
How could he expect you to go home? To go back and see that stupid mug you’d almost finished? That Joel would never see? All because you had insisted upon it being a surprise. Insisted that he couldn’t see it until you were done. And now he would never see the mug that matched his own, a slightly better looking owl painted upon its side? The size of it just a smidge smaller than Joel’s own?
He had been complaining that you always had to use the shitty old mug with a football logo on the front. You wanted to surprise him with a mug which matched his own. A sign of your bond. A symbol of your trust, your forgiveness.
Things hadn’t been the same since he left you, all that time ago. Both of you had known it. It was almost tangible, every time you saw one another. But you were getting better. You were seeing him at least once every week, which was improvement from the sporadic visits that’d been occurring last year.
You were all he’d had, after he and Ellie had fallen out.
You, perhaps better than anybody, knew that isolation. You knew how cold it could get. You wonder whether or not he would have even been on that patrol, had you not declined his offer of dinner, in favour of working on the mug.
It was a bitter feeling that bloomed as you pulled away from Tommy. An ugly, rearing feeling that was biting at your throat, and the only thing that stopped you from falling to your knees was Jesse. You wanted to be angry at Joel. You wanted to be able to scream and cry at him, to scold him for leaving you once more, even after he had promised he would never do it again.
And you know it wasn’t his fault. You know that he wouldn’t have chosen this. You do know that. But who else can you blame? Tommy, who is grieving the same as you? Jesse, who had done nothing but support you since you had known him? Ellie, who had no choice but to helplessly witness his death? And there was the girl, of course, Abby, Tommy had said to Jesse. But she seemed… inconceivable. A figment of imagination. After all, Joel was the strongest person you knew. What could have taken that away? Who?
It’s not fair. None of it is fair.
Abby had taken so much from you, and you know from the state of his body, that she hadn’t done it quickly. You feel sick.
Jesse is rubbing your back as you kneel on the snow, the shock of the cold seeping through your trousers bringing you to reality. You hadn’t even noticed leaving Joel’s house.
In the corner of your eye, you can see all of the flowers that people left for Joel. It doesn’t help. These flowers, too, will be cold. They’ll be cold and they will die and then Joel’s porch and garden will be covered in flowers just as dead as he is.
And all of the notes will be left unread, because Joel Miller is dead, and he is not coming home.
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