Gemlo4
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Ellie’s not sleeping much.
Granted, they’ve only been in Jackson three weeks, hardly time to shake the habits of the road like sleeping in shifts for a couple hours at a time. But this is different, Joel can tell. She’s restless, deep shadows under her eyes, and when he wakes in the middle of the night he can usually hear her moving about the house somewhere.
But the house is quiet one night when he pokes his head into her room and finds her bed empty, and his heart damn near screeches to a stop in his chest. It’s almost three in the morning, so why in the hell isn’t she in her bed?
(4 times ellie can't sleep, and 1 time joel can't either)
Bookmarked by Gemlo4
25 Jul 2025
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“It ain’t your fault,” he said gruffly, tying off her bandage. He stayed squatted a moment more, searched her face. Cherubic, in a way. Glossy-soft, like paint. Cracked to a million fuckin’ pieces right in front of him.
Ellie shrugged, scoffed, rolled her eyes. Fourteen, he thought. Her tear ducts welled up, a couple of beads wobbling there. A twinkle in her eye, quivering stars. Too proud, in the midst of it all, to let them tip over. Not again.
A flash, then—her in the bar, scrubbing at her face. The squeeze in his chest. It wasn’t my first time.
The sun beams down on them now. Insects humming, running water somewhere close. Her silence, louder still. Her footsteps his only indication she is there at all.
There’s been an itch, something he’s longed to say, searching for the words. To another person, another child, another life—It’s not on you to save the world.
He aches, words limp in the cage around his heart, draped over ribs. Carcass-like, rotting. That tiny grave.
It’s kind of the whole fuckin’ point.
Bookmarked by Gemlo4
07 Jul 2025
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if you never bleed, you're never gonna grow by BarlowGirl
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
18 Jul 2025
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There’s more blood than she expects, when she’s bit.
Riley tears up one of her spare t-shirts so Ellie can wrap her arm up, but they have to change it twice before it stops soaking through. Weirdly, Riley’s hand doesn’t bleed as much. There’s a bit of blood, because, well, in teeth versus skin, teeth win, but she just dabs it away with a scrap of cloth and some water and it stops pretty quick.
Worried about making it bleed again, Ellie leaves the wrapping on hers for so long that neither of them notice that the whorls of infection on her arm don’t match the infection creeping up Riley’s arm.
Or: The one where Ellie bleeds a lot.
Bookmarked by Gemlo4
05 Jul 2025
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the once and future carpenter by becomethesun for marchflower
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
21 Apr 2025
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Lately, it’s been hard to know what Ellie needs. Some days she’s his little shadow and hardly leaves his side, and other days he gets the cold shoulder and she barely talks to him all day. He’d like to chalk it all up to typical adolescent angst, normal kid stuff, but he knows it runs deeper than that. She’s still adjusting to being part of a family, on top of dealing with all of the shit she went through on their trip here, the fallout of everything that happened at the hospital in particular. Everything he did, not that he regrets any of it. It breaks his heart that she’s hurting so much over it, but even if she decided that she never wanted to speak to him again, he’d take that loss a thousand times over losing her in that hospital.
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Joel and Ellie make their way towards forgiveness and family with the help of Uncle Tommy and Aunt Maria, a few carpentry projects, and a contraband turtle.
Good Things Happen Bingo: Working With Your Hands
Series
- Part 2 of kin (a canon-divergent au)
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 5,668
- Chapters:
- 1/3
- Collections:
- 1
- Comments:
- 18
- Kudos:
- 79
- Bookmarks:
- 17
- Hits:
- 1,198
Bookmarked by Gemlo4
19 Jun 2025
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blueberry alley by marchflower
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
23 Jul 2025
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Summary
Ellie slides into her place and picks up her spoon. “What’s this?”
“Porotos granados,” Tommy replies. He sits beside her, squeezing her shoulder as he passes. “Our mama used to make it. She was from-”
“Santiago,” Ellie volunteers. Tommy chuckles.
“Si, Santiago,” he agrees. He says it with a little lilt that’s so different from his normal drawl that it makes Ellie giggle. It’s still weird to her, how sometimes Tommy and Joel switch so easily from one dialect or language to the next. She doesn’t even mind when they talk Spanish around her to keep her from knowing their business. She likes the rapid fire cadence of their words, the way the vowels sound like sugar melting over hot coals on their tongues, the way Joel sucks his teeth and hisses, how Tommy’s voice goes higher when he’s joking. It’s weird sometimes to look around at all the ways her family doesn’t match each other and yet love each other so much. It shouldn’t make sense - they shouldn’t make sense - and still, they do.
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Ellie's first year in Jackson, told through dinners and lunches and midnight snacks and egg sandwiches.
Or:
Food as a form of love.
Bookmarked by Gemlo4
16 Jun 2025