Pairing: Jackson!Joel Miller x esoteric!Reader
Summary: You're the preacher's daughter. Joel's the man with too much past and no patience for softness. He never meant to notice you. But you're light. And he's been in the dark too long.
Warnings/tags: hints at grief and/or ptsd. Reader is a little bit crazy
A/N: guys I know it’s been like almost 2 months since I published the first chapter but I promise this is still in my head all the time. AND chapter three is in the works (and will hopefully be out before October) this is briefly edited (Also I’m having so much fun writing this OC so you better like her.)
You always woke before the sun.
Not from discipline, but because the dreams couldn’t hold you. They were loud and strange, sticky with images you didn’t understand. Your father said dreams were warnings, meant to be feared — and you never told him yours.
You slipped from the mattress and stood barefoot on the wooden floor, cold through the threadbare rug. Your cotton nightgown clung to your skin with sleep-sweat.
You didn’t progress right away.
Instead, you went to the mirror — the small, warped one nailed to the back of the wardrobe — and pulled the nightgown down from one shoulder, then the other. Let it fall.
The glass was old and imperfect. It made your edges ripple, your stomach long, your eyes distant. You studied yourself like you might study a creek’s surface: curious, cautious, unsure what lived underneath.
You touched the scar on your side from when you fell from Atticus, the mark just beneath your collarbone from a childhood fever. Your fingers brushed over your ribs. Your hips. Your chest.
Not with vanity. Not with shame, exactly.
Just… like you were trying to understand what you were made of.
You thought of the lamb born last spring — slick and new and trembling, barely standing. How its eyes looked, unblinking. You remembered thinking it had known something then. Before the world taught it otherwise.
You pulled on your dress and tied your hair back with the faded ribbon from under the floorboard.
You didn’t look in the mirror again. There was no point.
Downstairs, the house creaked like it, too, was waking with reluctance. You stirred the fire to life, cracked two eggs, and set the leftover cornbread on the skillet to warm. The smell filled the small kitchen — but not enough to soften the silence.
Your father came in just after six.
He was always clean. That was the first thing. Pressed collar. Sleeves buttoned. Belt cinched. Bible in hand. His beard had started going gray in streaks that made him look severe, like he’d been carved from something older than wood.
When you served him, he spoke “Bless the hands that prepared this.”
You didn’t say thank you, because that wasn’t what he meant.
You ate in silence, forks scraping, the clock ticking like a soft rebuke.
He didn’t look up from his plate when he spoke next.
“You’ll tend the fence line today. The east side. Patching needs done.”
You nodded, already finishing your last bite.
“Yes, Papa.”
“And I’ll expect a full report before supper.”
You rose and cleared the plates. You took the dishes to the sink. The water was cold. The sponge had gone stiff overnight, and the grease clung to the plates like it wanted to stay. Still, you scrubbed harder than you needed to.
Outside, in the window above the sink, the light had shifted. Pale and warm now, as the sun had fully risen.
Through the window, dirt stained and smeared with white light
Not directly. Not really.
But there was something in the glass. In the way the sun struck it.
The permanent wrinkle between his brow from decades of refusing weakness like it was sin.
The way his flickering, blurred eyes looked back at you through the warped glass stirred something you weren’t ready to understand. A knot of wonder and aching tangled tight in your chest — tethering itself to your lungs, suffocating you. You fought it, at the time, unsure what it was. You only knew the feeling was something you’d carry with you.
The sun was beaming when you crossed the field. The grass was high in places, and the thistle scratched your calves. You didn’t mind, just prayed it wouldn’t leave a mark.
The east fence ran long and crooked. Birds nested in its weak spots. There was a hole where a raccoon had clawed through the wire last week. You crouched and began the slow work of tightening, patching, hammering.
The rhythm helped. It made you feel real. Not just a vessel for someone else’s will. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
You stood, one hand on the top rail, and there he was— Across the field, just on the other side. Walking slow, boots scuffing the dry earth. The same man from before. The one whose face you started seeing in the water, the glass, the sky.
You didn’t move. Just let the wind play with the hem of your dress.
He tried not to look. You saw it — how his head dipped, how his eyes slid away like he was just passing through. But his pace faltered. And again, he peeked.
You tilted your head, curious.
“Are you a messenger,” you called out, voice steady but strange,
Turned toward you fully, frowning like he wasn’t sure he’d heard you right.
You leaned a little on the fence, squinting your eyes to see him through the sun.
You watched as he took a slow step closer, boots crunching the dry earth.
“Your hands,” he said, voice low. “You fix fences with those?”
You looked down at them — the rough skin, the small cuts from thorns and wire. You didn’t know if he meant it as a question or something else.
“I fix what needs fixing,” you said, your voice steady, but you could feel your heart quicken.
He nodded like he understood something you didn’t say. “That wire’s not gonna hold much longer.”
You wiped your forehead with the back of your hand, smearing dirt over your skin. “It only needs to last the winter.”
He hesitated, then offered, “I can help.”
You shook your head gently, pulling your hands back from the fencepost. “It’s my fence, I’ll fix it.”
He studied you a moment, eyes narrowing like he might fight.
“Alright,” he said finally.
You watched him now, really watched — how the green flannel hung loose over the faded white shirt, sleeves rolled up just past the elbows. The jeans, worn and dusty, tucked into boots that had seen miles of dirt and gravel.
In his hand, he held a long wooden pole, its hooked end worn smooth from use, resting lightly against his shoulder. The bottom was hidden in the tall grass, like a silent promise of readiness.
“Why are you here?” you asked, voice steady but with a thread of something sharper beneath.
He shifted, eyes steady under a crease of sun-darkened skin. “‘S just a routine, checkin’ the perimeter.”
You blinked, registered the weapon hanging over his shoulder, and remembered the stories Papa told you.
“Do you… you think it’s safe out here?” The words came out quieter than you meant, like admitting a secret. Vulnerability cracked through your armor.
He looked at you then, not with impatience or dismissal, but something strange — almost confusion. “Safe’s a word I don’t use much anymore.” He spoke, frowning to himself.
You swallowed hard, feeling the weight of it press against your ribs.
“But we do what we can. We watch, and hold what’s ours.”
For a moment, the sun caught the glint in his eyes — tired, steady, and strong.
You didn’t know this man. Only that his name was Joel and that he carried something heavier than you imagined.
Your father was stone — unmoved, unyielding. His silence was sharp and intentional.
Joel was quiet in a different way. Not empty, but full — of things he didn’t say, things he’d seen and things he still carried.
He watched. He noticed, and he cared.
He didn’t speak like someone who needed to be obeyed.
And so, you found yourself believing him.
Joel looked at you for a moment longer, the wind catching the collar of his shirt, lifting the dust in slow, lazy spirals between you.
Then — not like he’d planned it, but like the question just rose up from his throat:
It wasn’t gentle. But it wasn’t unkind. Just flat, like gravel or bone right before it breaks.
You told him. Quietly. The name you were given. The one he’d soon know the whole of.
He nodded once, like he was tucking it into his coat pocket to keep warm. He looked away again. And once more, then he turned and left.
No goodbye. Just a soft grunt and the sound of boots meeting earth. Like walking away was something he’d done so many times it no longer needed explanation.
You watched his back until it disappeared behind the cottonwoods, the flannel turning small, then smaller, then nothing at all.
And then the world resumed.
A crow cawed overhead, tearing the silence with its sharp black beak. The light slanted deeper now, burnished and gold, heavy with evening.
Worked your way along the fence line like a girl enchanted. Slow, methodical. Pulling wire tight. Wrapping it round the nails. Beating it into the posts until your arms shook with the effort.
Somewhere a bee droned in the milkweed. A hawk circled high above, lazy and wide-winged.
The day stretched long, then longer. Shadows peeled off the barn and crawled across the field. Your hands went raw. Dirt worked its way beneath your nails. A blister popped at the base of your thumb, but you didn’t stop.
You passed the hollow where the coyote had been last winter, the soft depression in the grass where the snow used to drift deepest. You passed the gate that always stuck, the rock shaped like a heart you’d once tried to give to God.
And then — without meaning to — you found yourself by the stables. By Dolly and the hay, and the slanted wooden fence that leaned more than it stood.
You dropped to your knees beside the hay pile, the fabric of your dress catching on a splintered beam. You didn’t notice. The sweat on your back had gone cold.
There was hay scattered everywhere — windblown and half-matted, golden in the low light. Your fingers drifted through it, slow as thought. You pinched one strand, then another. Began arranging them.
One crooked letter at a time.
You leaned back on your heels, lashes trembling in the light.
You tilted your head, studying the shape. Then the last one.
His name. In straw. Unspoken.
A horsefly buzzed past your cheek and disappeared into the rafters. Something rustled in the tall grass behind the stable, but you didn’t look.
You lay down, cheek against the warm, dirty earth. Your hair spilled out over the straw like it was trying to reach something. The hay stuck to your skin.
Above, the sky stretched wide and blue-gray, like it had forgotten how to be day. You counted a single bird in it. Then another. Then none.
The name sat beside you like a sin, spelling something you prayed you’d get to call to one day. A small secret. A softness made from splinters.
And all around you, the world kept on — insects humming their lonely prayers, horses shifting on tired legs, the sun dragging her skirts across the last edge of the sky.
Secondary A/N: these are some more pictures I wanted to use in the mood board but they didn’t fit 😿
Dividers by: @uzmachhiato
