#joeltess

[comfortblr]

[userblorbo]

 Anyway, it doesn't matter. I need you to take a breath. What? Joel…

[dr-cassie-mckay]

@pscentral​ anniversary event: take four (dynamics + love)

↳ joel & tess + peace by taylor swift

[socialambivalences]

Well, Tess sometimes likes to stare

[barlowstreet]

Stop making these? Me? Never.

the last of us text posts - part twenty-two

(part twenty-one) (onion post) (part twenty) (part nineteen) (part eighteen) (part seventeen) (part sixteen) (part fifteen) (part fourteen) (part thirteen) (part twelve) (part eleven) (part ten) (part nine) (part eight) (part seven) (part six and a half) (part six) (part five) (part four) (part three) (part two) (part one)

[seethesunny]

Joel and Tess were not a couple in the game

I'm sorry anon what lmao

So you come to my house, tessjoel Central, disguised as a stranger, and you tell me this. Why come to the tessjoel headquarters blog and even bother?????

I normally wouldn't even entertain asks like this but I must carry their legacy and clear the searches.

Here, from that conference in Toronto in the year 2013!!! and despite me not really vibing with Neil and his retcons, Tess and Joel's relationship isn't one of those.

It isn't a retcon because even if it wasn't planned from the get go (as we all know the tlou we got is way different from the original idea), it's something that was brought up and discussed while the game was being made and it is imbued in the subtext of the game, and sure you can argue that it makes Tess and Joel being a "couple" semi-canon at best, but if you're trying to look at it with the lenses of how a regular couple should act and behave then you'll miss the clues and what it's being implied.

From the director's commentary released in 2022, both Troy and Neil discuss again the nature of their relationship (something that they have done before in the past, too) and you can have your own interpretation, but this is a topic that has been discussed and breached openly from people that were involved in the process of creating the game.

And lastly, the most recent interview about these two from 2023 before the show dropped, again it's not a retcon if even in the OG Tess and Joel had their own sort of romantic relationship. I think for you to truly accept it and embrace it you must remember how these characters behave and the world that shapes them, they won't go around kissing and holding hands but that doesn't make them less true.

So yep, you're entitled to make your own conclusions and have your own opinions but I'm gonna leave the facts here and go

[alwaysbethewest]

TLOU fic: Knot Your Fingers Through Mine

Title: Knot Your Fingers Through Mine Pairing: Joel/Tess Rating: Explicit Word count: 900 Content/warnings: Pre-series/early Boston, probably not canon compliant, references to violence, slightly rough sex, fisting, mild angst because that's who they are 😔 Unbetaed and I'm trying this thing where I just post it instead of fussing with it for days (but let me know if you spot any typos). Title from a Snow Patrol lyric.

They were slow to open up to each other in the beginning. What someone else knew about you could kill you or it could save you, and there was no knowing which it would be until it happened.

The information was spare to start with. She knew he was Tommy’s brother. That they came from Texas. That he was hard of hearing on the right. And skilled with a knife.

She couldn’t sleep the night after they’d held an ambush. Sometimes she’d find him outside, awake under the guise of keeping watch, even though they’d set a perimeter alarm that could wake the dead.

She ran her thumb over the edge of his nail. There was a thin line of rusty brown there, a trace of another man’s blood he hadn’t yet been able to scrub away.

She pressed a kiss to his raw knuckles and he watched his own hand as she lowered it back to rest on his thigh between them. Wondering over that tender spot.

“I used to build things,” he told her finally.

“Tell me,” she asked.

They lied to themselves, pretending that in this new world every act of violence was carried out in self defense. She and Joel were the only members of their group who hadn’t been military before. Tommy and his friends were better at compartmentalizing, focusing on the mission—survival—without questioning how it was justified.

The first time they fucked it was fast and punishing and he apologized to her after. His hands, tight around her wrists as he ground into her, were trembling now.

“Sorry,” he whispered. He buried his face under her arm, unwilling to meet her eyes, body still plastered to hers because he couldn’t bear to draw away.

“It’s okay,” she assured him. She picked up his hand, running her small fingers over his, and set it down at the base of her neck. Trusting. She felt his breath hot against her skin, thick in the dark space of her armpit, and then he dragged his arm down so his hand was resting over her heart, and they lay like that for a long time before he lifted his face and then shuffled down her body to eat her out, penitent.

In Boston Tommy told Joel he was getting an apartment with a friend from their crew, leaving him and Tess to live together on their own. She could see that Joel hated the news, hated letting his brother out of his sight. It felt unnatural to him, grated at his sense of right.

She could have lived with Tommy but she liked the privacy. The apartment was dingy but it came furnished with a couch and a bed and a tub. She straddled him on the sofa, grinding against him through their clothes, riding the seam of her jeans and the line of him hardening under her, and she watched his eyes go unfocused and his mouth slack for a long, precious minute before he came back to himself and took hold of her hips with intent. She loved his face like that.

Their energy was rationed and the building had hot water two days a week, which would have been unthinkable to her younger self but felt like nothing less than a luxury after the year they’d had of campfires and freezing streams. She sat in the bathtub soaking up to her neck and he pretended to climb in, crowding over her, surprising a laugh out of her that felt rusty, unpracticed. It was addictive, the giddy feeling of it, and that made her laugh harder, till she had tears in her eyes, and he looked at her in wonder and he laughed too.

“I want to grow something,” she told him, when she could feel spring approaching. “I used to—have I told you this? I used to have a garden. Back home.”

“What’ll you grow?”

He asked it indulgently, as if there was a nursery in town where she could take her pick of the seeds. Like they had a plot of land. Like it was more than just a fantasy.

“Anything,” she said. She just wanted something that felt like hope.

In the end, they found a patch of mint and she brought home a cutting and put it in a little pot on the windowsill to soak in the sun and grow. He’d pinch off a leaf to chew on and she liked how it made him smell, all fresh and cool and green.

He put his whole hand inside her, one finger and then another as she asked for more, until the width of his knuckles stretched her as far as she could go and she felt like she was floating and sinking at the same time, like she’d taken a drug that turned her upside down. Her mouth was open, throat working over a scream that came out a cracking, high-pitched whimper. He drew his fingers out gradually, as slowly as he’d worked them in, turning his wrist to make her body shudder.

“I wish I could keep you inside of me,” she whispered. She wished the world could be just this, the two of them and nothing to fight.

He trembled. She looked at his open face and could see he was scared of it, being so entangled with her.

She felt the ache he left in her for days.

[brittaswinger]

Tessjoel my butchfemme ship