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angel from montgomery by monalisaaa
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
20 Sep 2025
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Summary
“Hey.”
The girl’s eyes snapped up, panicked. She spared a second to glance down at the man in front of her, her eyes racing up and then looked at Joel with the exact same type of terror, before emerging with something in her hands.
Joel watched, immediately suspecting a gun. “Whoa, now-”
The girl lifted her hands up, revealing an old knife. She smeared the tears on her cheeks away, trying to seem bigger than she was, but it didn’t work.
She was a terrified kid.
The urgency in Joel’s expression blinked. “Hey,” He repeated, his voice painted soft, though he didn’t let himself hear it. The girl just stared up at him with her knife, not realizing the tremble of her own grip or the violent shakes that tore through her entire, bare body. He just realized that now. Only her knees were covering her, along with the clearly torn pair of underclothes on her lower half. She cringed under his eyes. “It’s okay,” He tried. “I’m not gon’ hurt you.”
The girl didn’t even blink. She just stared up through her tears, terrified of him.
Fuck.
TLDR: Joel finds a traumatized Ellie on the side of the road. He's immediately soft. Meanwhile, she has to learn how to trust him.
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 94,840
- Chapters:
- 14/14
- Comments:
- 175
- Kudos:
- 542
- Bookmarks:
- 128
- Hits:
- 18,404
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
16 Aug 2025
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Disconnected by finding_the_sun
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
10 Aug 2025
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Summary
Ellie gets an injury while out on patrol and hides it from everyone, worrying that Joel will take it as a sign she's not ready to go out there. A few days later, she starts getting sick, and only gets sicker as time goes on.
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
10 Aug 2025
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You Need Me, Let Me Know by finding_the_sun
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
12 Jul 2025
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Summary
Ellie's chemical burn & all the angst that goes along with it. Plenty of comfort too ;)
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
12 Jul 2025
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used to wish i was anything to anywhere (to anyone) by cardigains for marchflower
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
15 Feb 2024
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Summary
“Thank you, baby girl.” Metal hits the ceramic edge of a plate. There’s the squelch of doused french toast being lifted out of a river of syrup, the muffled sounds of chewing. “Been a long time since someone…” Joel clears his throat for like the third time in two minutes. “Imma keep this someplace safe.”
“Whatever, man,” Ellie manages to find her way back to flippant, feeling the twisting, twining thing within her stomach finally beginning to settle, finding that the sugary sweetness is bright and tacky on her tongue. “It’s just some blueprints.”
Joel chews like he’s thinking. Somewhere along the way, Ellie’s learned what it looks like when he’s thinking.
Eventually, he says, “No, it ain’t.”
//
or: A little peek into the journey of settling in and becoming a family that's not afraid of titles and the certainty they hold.
Series
- Part 2 of Next Door Neighbors
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
12 Jul 2025
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the consequence of living by two_birds_alone_together
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
11 Jul 2025
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Summary
Ellie takes a few hesitant steps toward the door before Joel notices it: blood, soaking down her side.
Fuck. Fuck.
He yanks her back, frantic as he pulls up the hem of her shirt. Dark red seeps through the fabric as he searches for the source. “Jesus,” he breathes, spotting the wound. “Okay, you’re okay. Keep goin’.”
She stares at him in confusion, still trying to catch her breath from the terror of being attacked. “What?”
“Just keep movin’.” With his hand on her back, Joel forces her forward until bodies no longer surround them. He needs space to work, needs to get her away from the carnage before shock sets in. With one movement, he sweeps the cans off the large crate, then focuses on Ellie. “Up,” he says, voice low as he boosts her to sit.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. He can hear the fear creeping into her tone.
“I think you were shot.”
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(wherein henry's bullet doesn't just kill sam)
Series
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 13,900
- Chapters:
- 3/3
- Collections:
- 1
- Comments:
- 26
- Kudos:
- 198
- Bookmarks:
- 37
- Hits:
- 4,272
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
06 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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Summary
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 TwoStepsForward
05 Jul 2025
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Nothing's Alright But That's Okay by The_Golden_Sun
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games), tlou - Fandom, The Last of Us
22 Jun 2025
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Summary
"Her first night in the Millers' home, the start of her new life, begins with a kiss on the forehead from Joel and a night of half-sleep, waking every couple of hours to follow the doctors’ instructions exactly."
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After the basement, the pain, and David, Ellie returns to a place she barely dares to call home. Between medication, nightmares, and hands that now heal instead of hurt, she begins to learn that not all affection is conditional. Joel calls her "kiddo," Sarah offers her bed, and Ellie, for the first time in a long while, allows herself to want to stay.
Series
- Part 5 of We, the Millers
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
23 Jun 2025
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Summary
When Joel lost his daughter to an ill-timed leg cramp at Craynold’s Road Lake, he fell apart. 20 years later, he's still in pieces when he saves a rough and tumble foster kid from drowning in a pool on his construction site. In the end, they end up saving each other from much more.
Updates Wednesdays.
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
19 Jun 2025
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Summary
“You’re a kid,” the stranger interrupts. His voice carries a gruff, uncaring tone, even though his eyes are considering.
Ellie pulls up her boot to rest by her hand, wrapping her arms around her knees. In the secret space of her heel, she thumbs the hilt of a pocketknife.
“Doesn’t mean I can’t blast your fucking head off,” she threatens.
The stranger’s brows raise as if her threat is empty. “If that’s what you were tryin’ to do, you did an awful shitty job of it.”
“Fuck you,” she snaps, and her cheeks burn. She hasn’t felt uncomfortable like this since David, since I like the fight—
Ellie is not doing that shit again.
Before the stranger can retort, she wields her pocketknife and lunges from her curled-up position to slash at his face.//
Ellie first meets Joel in the aftermath of Silver Lake.
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
19 Jun 2025
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Summary
Ellie contemplates staying on the floor for the rest of the night, but remembers she's got school in the morning. She didn't want to be sick and tired at school. Even though she was sick and tired of school in general. Pun intended.
(or: ellie williams and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day)
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
17 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.
*
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 TwoStepsForward
17 Jun 2025
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Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
16 Jun 2025
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it's a long way back (but a short road home) by cardigains
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
18 Aug 2025
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Summary
“It’s okay. I know a guy.” Ellie likes talking about Joel like he’s her mob lackey or something. Makes everything feel a little less looming and leering and lethal. She called Joel "a guy" when it came to getting an extra slice of pie or getting outside of Jackson's walls when she needed a day off of school, when she couldn’t fucking stomach it anymore. He told her to cut it out whenever she called him that. It was a bit. She liked all of their bits these days. “He’ll get you out too.”
“I’m Ellie," she volunteers though she doesn't want to. This woman isn’t an enemy. She’s as caged in as Ellie, worn down to the point that she barely had her wits left about her. There was a look in people’s eyes when they got that way, when they’d started giving up hope. Ellie would fucking know.
The woman shakes something loose from her bones, digs her teeth against her lip before she answers, “I’m Sarah.”
Ellie snorts. “Yeah,” she says with only the edges of humor clinging on. “He’ll definitely fucking save you.”
or: On Outbreak Night Joel and Tommy are separated from Sarah. They spend the next twenty-one years assuming each other is dead. Until Ellie and Sarah find each other in the same awful circumstances.
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 152,584
- Chapters:
- 17/20
- Comments:
- 835
- Kudos:
- 1,220
- Bookmarks:
- 276
- Hits:
- 30,053
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
15 Jun 2025
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Next of Kin by ketchupchipsaregross
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
07 Jun 2025
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Summary
“Wow,” Ellie breathed, her face turned up to the triceratops skeleton, “It’s super big.”
“His name is Cliff,” Tess read off from the plaque, “He’s 65 million years old.”
“That’s not as old as sharks,” She said.
“Not quite,” She agreed, “But it’s still cool.”
Ellie nodded, still transfixed, “Super mega cool.”
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(gender equality dictates that sometimes Tess has to be the semi-unwilling foster parent)Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
01 Jun 2025
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and when i call, you come home by spiritually
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
13 Mar 2023
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Summary
“Are you hungry?”
She glanced up at the clock on the wall. “It’s late.”
“Last I checked, you don’t magically stop being hungry after midnight. How about a cup of cocoa and a few sweets.”
There was a helpless look on her face. “I don’t have money.”
“Store’s closed, Ellie. Can’t sell anything.”
OR
Joel Miller, owner of local coffee shop "Cup of Joel" is pretty determined to live the rest of his life alone, and he's okay with that. After all, anyone he's allowed himself to get close to has been lost in one way or another. But loneliness is hard to achieve when there's a 14 year old who won't leave you alone.
OR
basically the last of us without the infected but still all of the found family of joel and ellie. and still the trauma. in a coffee shop!
NOT A SHIP FIC
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 25,143
- Chapters:
- 1/1
- Collections:
- 1
- Comments:
- 55
- Kudos:
- 875
- Bookmarks:
- 187
- Hits:
- 9,308
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
26 May 2025
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These Things Eat at Your Bones by MessyDepressy95
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
29 Jul 2025
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Summary
“Tommy.” It’s a stuttered plea slipping free from the confines of his shredded mouth, a beg that he ain’t ashamed of as he writhes in his brother's unrelenting grasp, the sores lining his cheeks and rubbing against his teeth alight with fire.
He’s asking to be let go, to be able to go to his child because she needs him.
Because he had promised that he wouldn’t let her do this alone.
The people in that room don’t count.
They don’t know that her favorite color is forest green even though she’s never been in the woods, that her shoulder aches if she falls asleep on her right side because her foster father fractured it when she was eight and it healed wrong.
They don’t know that it’s her greatest fear - what’s happening inside that sterile room with grey walls, white bedding and too little warmth.
To let her die alone would be his failure, his broken promise, and he’s watching it happen. Her heart no longer beating and her chest failing to rise.
*
Even when he’s fighting cancer, Joel can’t help but be dad as fuck, especially when Ellie’s fighting it right beside him.Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
25 May 2025
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Summary
Just a regular day, but they were the days Ellie liked the most.
Then Tommy came over.
That, in itself, wasn’t the problem. The problem was the fact that he had interrupted their breakfast by pounding on the door like someone was dying. Ellie flashed a look to Joel, but he was already standing, looking slightly worried as he walked toward the front door just beyond the kitchen. Tommy beat him to it, opening their front door just as Joel reached it.
“Joel.”
The word was spoken with such soft desperation that Ellie was on her feet in an instant. Something was wrong, something was happening, and whatever it was had Tommy shaken enough to say Joel’s name like that.
“Joel. There’s a woman at the gate.”
(Or Sarah lives! somehow! And Ellie is forced to realize her place besides Joel now that his REAL daughter is home)
Series
- Part 1 of Placeholder Verse
- Language:
- English
- Words:
- 26,556
- Chapters:
- 10/10
- Comments:
- 229
- Kudos:
- 1,068
- Bookmarks:
- 199
- Hits:
- 20,049
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
24 May 2025
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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)
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
22 May 2025
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spare the rod by PenAndInkPrincess
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
05 May 2023
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Summary
“I was just…I was wondering what you do. You know. For like…punishment.” She interrupts him. She needs to get the answer already, needs to know what to expect before she drives herself crazy with anticipation.
“Well I was more into grounding than goddamn child abuse.”
“Grounding like…” Her face scrunches in confusion as she dares to look at him. The word is foreign and the best guess she has doesn’t seem right, but she also doesn’t know what else it could be. “Like being…in the ground?”
Joel stares at her for a long, long moment before he speaks.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
(after they settle into jackson, ellie realizes she doesn't know how joel will punish her if she messes up) (it quickly becomes a problem she needs to solve)
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
22 May 2025
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Mary Poppins ain't got nothing on me by BarlowGirl
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
12 Apr 2024
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Summary
It scares him, though, the idea of something happening to Joel. It’s been one of his worst fears for years, ever since a missed bullet, ever since a fight, ever since Joel dropped off the radar and he felt almost a guilty sense of relief at not having to face his own failure. It’s been worse since he met Ellie and he saw his brother come back to life, because that little girl needs his brother like she needs air.
Or: Tommy POV again! This time, he's watching Ellie while Joel has surgery. Ellie is not fond of this plan.
Bookmarked by TwoStepsForward
21 May 2025