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it ain't me, babe by monalisaaa
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
07 Dec 2025
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Summary
Ellie’s eyes lit up. She tightened her palms around the embroidered patches of Mars, Venus, and Earth on the straps of her backpack and then quickened her pace as fast as her little legs could take her. The image of the house grew closer.
It was an old farmhouse. Vines clung to the faded, wooden siding. A porch wrapped around it, the paint chipped. There was a large willow tree in the front yard. A tire swing hung from an especially large branch. Ellie’s thoughts were immediately consumed with how much she wanted to ride it. The night breeze brushed her bare arms, nudging her along.
TLDR// Toddler Ellie comes across a haunted house while running away. In it, she finds a nice, though grumpy, ghost, Joel. For the first time in twenty years, he feels alive, looking after her when no one else ever has, the entire time terrified he'll lose another little girl.
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Inextricable by honeyandraspberrytea
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
05 Oct 2025
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The woman whips around, and yeah, she looks like she could be in her mid thirties, but Ellie is so confused because Joel never would have left her if there was even a chance Sarah were alive, he wouldn’t have abandoned her, and Ellie swings the scope back to Joel to see if she can read his face, but he’s facing the wrong way, and he’s hunched over like he’s physically in pain and—
“Daddy?”
She starts to move, slowly, towards Joel, taking halting steps like she thinks he’ll disappear. He doesn’t move at all.
Distantly, Ellie hears Anna radioing for Tommy.
“Daddy?” she asks again, and Ellie registers her southern drawl, even more pronounced than Joel and Tommy’s. She sounds like Scarlett O’Hara. Tommy made her watch Gone with the Wind last month, after Ellie had missed it on movie night.
Joel still hasn’t moved. Sarah doesn’t step any closer to him.
They just stand there, in a stalemate.
Joel is breaking down.
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Two years to the day of EllieandJoel, JoelandEllie, the prodigal daughter returns.
(Sarah lives, and Ellie learns to live with it)
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 44,475
- Chapters:
- 12/22
- Comments:
- 160
- Kudos:
- 590
- Bookmarks:
- 119
- Hits:
- 16,323
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Bookmark Notes:
AGH this is my favorite fic ever! The miscommunication is killing me, but in a good way.
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Summary
When Javier Peña rides into Jackson, Joel feels something shift in the pit of his stomach.
Takes place after TLOU s1 and long after Narcos s3, with some timeline fudging to make them the same age.
highlights: slutty bi javi. grouchy bi joel (he's sort of comphet coded?). joel pov. jealous-but-in-denial joel. extreme competence. flirting via extreme competence. pedro pascal's voice kink. joel is down baaaad. tension. javi's tight pants. gun use. if smoking bad why hot? joel-typical angst. javi-typical angst. canon-typical violence. eventual smut.
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Summary
“You don’t get to come back here. You don’t get to do this.”
“I needed to see you,”
“You should go.”
Ellie squeezes her eyes shut and swallows the urge to be sick. She pulls her tired backpack across the counter, unzips the front pouch and rummages through loose accoutrements for the bracelet, holding it out to Dina. “Take it.”
Or, the one in which Ellie returns to Jackson.
Series
- Part 1 of in lieu of flowers, send him back
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Somewhere to Land by ThelastofTays
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
09 Nov 2025
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Summary
You come home at 19 because you’ve run out of places to fall.
Back to a father you barely know.
Back to a house that feels too small for your anger, your loneliness, your life.And then there’s Joel Miller, the man next door. Older. Quiet. Steady. The kind of man who shouldn’t look at you the way he does… and the kind of man you shouldn’t want.
But tension like this doesn’t stay harmless. It pulls. It burns. It ruins sleep.What starts as glances through open windows and arguments that leave your pulse racing spirals into something deeper, heavier, impossible to ignore. Something that scares you both in different ways.
This is a story about desire that hits before you’re ready, love that hurts before it heals, and two people who keep finding their way back to each other through every mistake, every distance, every ache.
A slow burn that smolders.
A heartbreak that lingers.
A connection that refuses to die.- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 497,708
- Chapters:
- 130/130
- Comments:
- 1,596
- Kudos:
- 586
- Bookmarks:
- 86
- Hits:
- 23,299
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She returned to Jackson not as a protector, but as a ghost—silent, belonging neither to the world of the living nor to the realm of the dead. Her presence is a whisper in the empty alleys, a shadow that follows you even when no one is there. She brought not aid, but a quiet threat, for where Ellie walks, old fears blossom and pains that were better left buried are awakened. Her fight is not with external enemies, but with her own reflection in the eyes of those who once knew her, and every step she takes is a reminder: some wounds never heal; they only lie in wait, ready to be reopened.
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Part man, part beast, Joel Miller lives in solitude a few miles away from Jackson. At fifty-seven years old and without a Soulbond, Joel can't coexist with others— a man without his mate crazed by time and age. Until the day he sees her, the girl with tangerine blossoms in her hair and a laugh that echoes through the trees.
So, he tracks her down. Hunts her through the woods, and brings home a girl that is not the wilting flower he expects. -
Intertwined Fate by orphan_account
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
23 Apr 2023
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Joel & Tess end up in Jackson without ever meeting Ellie. Ellie ends up in Jackson too.
Everyone heals. Family is found.
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You had been soft your whole life, too gentle for a world that demanded brutality. When Tommy found you, half-dead in the snow, he gave you a second chance. Jackson gave you a home. Ellie gave you a friend. And Joel Miller…
Joel gave you nothing.
He barely looked at you. Never spoke your name. He acted like you didn’t exist.
But that didn’t stop you from wanting him. -
In broken mathematics (we estimate our prize) by No_Illusions
Fandom: The Last of Us (TV)
11 Apr 2023
Summary
Surprise! This entire thing is a finale fix-it!
Essentially, I wanted to explore two things re: the finale: 1) What if Joel didn't feel he had to lie to Ellie? and 2) What if Ellie, by episode 9, had the capacity to understand the choice that Joel made in the hospital?
The first fic in this series tries to answer the question of "what would need to be different for that to happen?" The second fic explores the aftermath of ep 9 and how things have changed.
Later fics will include more hurt/comfort and whump in this AU.
Series title butchered from Emily Dickinson's poem "As by the dead we love to sit."
- Words:
- 28,105
- Works:
- 2
- Bookmarks:
- 45
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Keep Going by stainedglasspanel
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
08 May 2023
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Summary
Joel sounds a thousand miles away. “Ellie? Are you listening? I said, don’t you *ever* do that again.”
Well, she thinks deliriously, that won’t be a problem after all.
“Ellie, what—?”
It feels like she has no control over her body anymore, like it’s someone else who is extending her arm, pulling back her sleeve, and exposing a ring of broken skin. She hears Joel stop breathing when he sees it too.
She's been bitten.
________AU where Ellie is already traveling across the country with Joel when she gets bitten.
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 32,553
- Chapters:
- 6/6
- Comments:
- 169
- Kudos:
- 1,578
- Bookmarks:
- 444
- Hits:
- 23,348
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Summary
Joel broaches the topic of Ellie going down to the clinic once and she spends the next two days ignoring him, because going to the clinic wouldn’t just mean telling people, it would mean acknowledge that it had happened at all, and Ellie had decided pretty steadfastly that she wasn’t going to be doing that ever. It had happened, it was over, and now she never had to think about it again.
Her ignoring it forever plan hit a snag in the third week of being back in Jackson, when her UTI that she had named Fred to try and find something amusing about the fact that she was still dealing with that shit almost two months on, decided to extend beyond her nether regions and make her fucking boobs all gross and weird.
***
The aftermath of Silver Lake, in a world just a little worse
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Fear of God by netherfeildren
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
18 May 2023
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Summary
What was monstrousness? What was it, but a certainty that there existed within you multitudes of desires, needs, guilts, impulses – humanity? At the end of the world, when the dust has finally settled, Joel grapples with what it is to take hold of your own monstrosity – your own humanity – and live with it. And what it is to bear that truth in the palm of your hand held towards the person you love, offer it to them, and have it be accepted for what it was. Courage, above all else, it is courage that is necessary to go on.
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Big bad Joel Miller falls in love and doesn't know how to deal with it.
Series
- Part 1 of Birdie’s House
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 54,914
- Chapters:
- 10/10
- Comments:
- 331
- Kudos:
- 1,164
- Bookmarks:
- 381
- Hits:
- 55,670
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When Joel Met You by pandapetals
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV), When Harry Met Sally (1989)
07 Dec 2025
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Summary
You never expected to cross paths with Joel Miller again after college. He’d always been sharp-tongued, guarded, and impossible to figure out — your roommate’s boyfriend, and nothing more. Yet, life in Texas has a way of circling back, especially when you keep running into Joel.
*Or a slow burn inspired by When Harry Met Sally.
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Bookmark Notes:
17
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Bookmark Notes:
wip for me to come back to
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Summary
“Do you want to put away Ellie’s things?" Tommy asks. "We can put them in the attic for now.”
“The hell would we do that for?” Joel lifts up his dead little girl’s shirt, rolls his eyes at the dirt stains that didn’t come out, and folds it neatly.
Tommy swallows. “Cause she died, Joel. And maybe it’s too hard right now to…” he cuts himself off. Joel isn’t listening anymore. He unfolds and refolds the same shirt, his eyes glassy. “Joel—”
“—You got the roster out for next month yet? Was hoping to get Ellie’s birthday week off, I’ve got plans.” He shakes his head. “16, jesus.”
Tommy drops it. Ellie keeps living.
Ellie is presumed dead. Joel doesn't react the way Tommy thought he would.
Written for Whumpter Day 16: Repressed Trauma
Series
- Part 3 of Whumptober 2025
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Bookmark Notes:
Poor hurt joel, traumatized joel, protective as fuck Tommy, we love Tommy, meh Maria, ellie comes back in end even though it's already angsty
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hell hath no fury like my father by flannelfeelings
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
23 Aug 2023
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Summary
Joel knows FEDRA used corporal punishment, Ellie’s flinched away from enough outstretched hands for him to put that together.
He knows that when they first met, she’d watch him out of the corner of her eye every time he took his belt off before bed. He’d assumed with a small sadness that she was worried for her safety in a different way, more similar to the way she gets nervous around teachers after Silver Lake.
He hadn’t realized that the faded white scars on her back he sometimes sees peeking out of her tank top are from being hit with a belt.
(joel finds out more about ellie’s past once they’re settled in Jackson- and vows to stop at nothing to protect her from it ever happening again)
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Where the Pines Don’t Speak by ClareDeVee
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
30 Oct 2025
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Summary
Years after the world fell, Eira has survived everything except grief.
Raised on a remote farm after the outbreak, she's spent most of her life behind fences—with no friends her age, no place to belong, and no room for softness. After a brutal encounter leaves her scarred and isolated, a final tragedy pushes her to Jackson, Wyoming, where safety is offered—but healing isn’t.
Joel Miller knows better than to get involved. Especially not with someone more than half his age, someone already carrying more pain than most. But when Eira starts asking for things—small things like batteries, and bigger things like open gates. Joel finds himself saying yes more than he means to.
Two people, both weathered by loss, both afraid to name what they need.
This is not a love story.
But it might become one.-
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smoke, ash, and strays by ketchupchipsaregross
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
23 Jun 2024
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Summary
Joel opened the door onto the street and let it swing shut behind him, annoyed when the kid managed to duck around it before it could slow her down.
“I’m not a toddler, dude, I can walk by myself,” The kid said.
“I got my orders,” He ignored the eye roll the kid threw at him, “And quit calling me dude.”
“Whatever you say,” She gave him a sly smile, “Bro.”
(or joel just wants to do his job and go home smelling like a campfire, it'd be great if the raccoon child from the alley would let him do that in peace)
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the shirt off his back by BarlowGirl
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
16 May 2025
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Summary
“Your clothes,” she says. “I don’t mind them.”
“Well, they’re all yours,” he says. “Whenever you want.”
In the moment, he’d carve out his actual heart and give it to her if it made her feel better. His clothes are nothing compared to that.
Or: 5 times someone stole Joel's shirt + 1 time they didn't
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don't you call her baby (we're not talking lately) by spritejac
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
02 Nov 2025
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Summary
“Sure thing, kiddo.”
The words freeze Ellie in place, hand suspended where it was reaching for her fork as time seems to stop around her.Kiddo.
Since when the fuck is Dina “kiddo”?
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Ellie not knowing how to confront Joel about Salt Lake and learning that maybe she is, in fact, replaceable.
Or:
Jealous Ellie and Joel who takes in every teenage girl.
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