for the valentine's asks may i please ask for promise ring + joel?
thank miss freya
ooooh baby I see angst with this one. WALK WITH ME!
I'm imagining... jackson. a joel lives!universe because joel miller always lives and I won't hear otherwise. I'm picturing... you and him in this almost-but-not-quite sort of cycle, where you're not together but you ought to be, where one of you is always too gun-shy to blurt out what is obvious to anyone else. you have each other, but not all the way. when you stay the night as his, you leave first thing in the morning even though every cowardly cell in joel's body wants to ask you to stay.
then you get hurt on patrol. pack of clickers or raiders - pick your poison - but your partner rides back with you in their arms, bleeding and unconscious, yelling for a doctor. there's no bite. you ain't in infected. but for a long time you lie in jackson's little clinic while the docs do what they can. when you haven't roused in two days, the pit in joel's stomach yawns into an echoing chasm.
what if you hit your head too hard. what if you aren't waking up. what if this whole goddamn time he's been in love with you and never told you, and he'll never get the chance to now.
he spends a lot of time at the clinic. sometimes at your bedside, sometimes out in the hall. he has a difficult time being any further away than that, and often has to be escorted out at night and ordered to go home and sleep.
by the third day, with no sign of improvement except for your stitches holding, joel returns to the clinic with something in his pocket - something he's had for a while now but been too much of a chicken shit to give you. maybe once it could've been the moment he made everything right, but now it's a bargaining chip. now he's just sorry. and so fucking desperate.
in the tiny clinic room you're still out cold. the dressings on your wounds have been changed since yesterday, and someone's brushed your hair away from your face. joel pulls up his usual chair and sinks into it with croaking joints, clearing his throat softly, eyes flitting to the door in case anyone suddenly bursts in. what he's gonna say is only for him and you.
he stumbles through it. mumbling his weakening pleas, begging you to come back to him. telling you you can do it, that you're gonna pull through - not really because he believes it, but because he needs you to. then the mumbling goes on, and the whole room goes wobbly. the hand in his jacket pocket that's been thumbing the ring finally pulls it out. this whole time he's been too scared to touch you, unsure if he's earned the right to hold your hand, but he gently turns it so your palm lies facing up.
it's a little thing. just a band he found out on some supply run months ago that he found himself pocketing before he could think much of it. it isn't for marriage - he ain't proposing - but he'd intended it for you nonetheless as a kind of promise. a promise that he was done running, done hiding. done doing this halfway.
he sets the band in the center of your palm as one wet tear jumps down his cheek. blinking fast, he sniffs and scrubs it away.
"you wake up," he says quietly, the words brittle enough to break. "and tell me to go t'hell for waitin' so long, you hear? just---"
he stops at the first crack in his voice, swallowing dry around nothing.
"just wake up, baby. y'can hate me, but I need ya t'be here."
valentines day asks (with the boys) (now closed)
