smallgingeritis
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mellow is the man who knows what he's been missing by flannelfeelings
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
30 Apr 2024
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Summary
“We’re having a baby. Jesse’s the father.” The words come out of her mouth so quickly she nearly stumbles over them.
Joel freezes.
In that moment, he feels everything and nothing simultaneously. Looking up at this girl, just 20 years old, wide-eyed and freckled, clearly terrified of what he’s going to say, he feels utterly unraveled.
And suddenly he’s in the Boston QZ, with this little pony-tailed brat nagging him about Before, asking too many questions, clinging to Tess like she’s never had an adult be nice to her in her life. He’s walking along cracked pavement, listening to shitty puns and trying to suppress his laughter. He’s looking up at a petrified little face through blurry vision, listening to her tell him it’s all gonna be okay, feeling the stab of a needle through his wounded stomach. He’s holding her bloody cheeks in his palms, cradling her face like she’ll disintegrate at the slightest touch. He’s carrying her limp body from a hospital hallway with lights blaring and gunshots echoing.
Having a baby?
(the everyone lives AU where baby JJ gets to be born into a big ole happy family)
Bookmarked by smallgingeritis
08 Jan 2026
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his strength is making me stronger by buggieb
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
16 Jun 2025
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Sunday dinners just sort of happen to Ellie without her even noticing the pattern. It starts their first Sunday in Jackson, just one week in, and by the time the weather warms up, a month has gone by and Ellie’s eaten at Tommy and Maria’s house every week. Maria is about ready to pop and Tommy keeps badgering her to sit down while he finishes cooking. They’re bickering with two big dumb grins on their faces when Ellie turns to Joel and asks, “Why do you guys do this every week? Don’t you get tired of it?”
Joel pauses. “It’s a family tradition,” he says, musing, like he’s never considered it before. “Growin’ up, Tom and I ate every damn meal together. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Our mama would cook, so we’d do the dishes and set the table and all. So, food is - it’s real important to the family. You sit together for meals ‘cause some days it’d be the only time you made time for each other. When things get busy, you forget what’s important. You eat together, because you love each other.”
or: 4 things Joel teaches Ellie about food & family, and 1 thing Ellie learns.
Series
- Part 3 of my love is mine, all mine
Bookmarked by smallgingeritis
27 Dec 2025
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blackbird, blackbird, what do you see? by marchflower for historian_in_pearls
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
22 May 2025
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“I think I - fucked up my ankle.” She points to her left foot. “When I fell.”
Her remorse lies thick and rank between them. Joel imagines he can see it rotting there, in between shafts of honeyed sunlight. Shame, he thinks, fits her so poorly. He’s reminded of Kansas City, of her sitting her with her back to the newspaper lined window, chin on her knees, a single tear on her cheek as she tells him:
It wasn’t my first time.
Little girls, he thinks, have no business carrying that sort of regret. He has no business reading into it this way - thinking about all the tender spots Ellie’s got lying in ruin inside of her, all of the ways this world has failed her. All of the ways he’s failed her, all of the ways he might still. She’s only a job, he tells himself sternly. She’s cargo.
*
Joel patches Ellie up again, and again, and again.
Bookmarked by smallgingeritis
18 Dec 2025
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they say killing time ain't a homicide (just a prayer for a leap year) by cardigains for captainredspade (CodenameArtemis)
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
30 Dec 2024
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She doesn’t want to be read for the truth of what she is, what she’s become. Lonely, isolated, a girl who watches TV with the old dude who dragged her ass across the country and then doubled back when there wasn’t anything left for them to find. She’s not meant to be here. Not in Jackson, not in this house, not beside this version of Joel.
She’s a fucking orphan from Boston who’s got the weight of humanity slipped beneath the skin of her forearm, a couple calluses on the tips of her fingers, and a brain that still goes fuzzy at the slightest prodding of any of the pieces of her past that have delivered her to where she is today.
Joel’s shoulder is not for her to lean against. Those kids in her classroom are not for her to bond with. This is a fake life that she’s begun to settle around herself and the only thing that’s less real are the movies that play out on the screen in front of her, filled with animatronic dinosaurs and intricately painted backgrounds of spaceships.
or: Ellie doesn't quite know how to settle into Jackson, friendships, or a family.
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- 2/2
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Bookmarked by smallgingeritis
12 Nov 2025
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your words mean nothing so take 'em back (i don't wanna be carrying this weight on my shoulders) by cardigains
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV)
14 Apr 2023
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Summary
And then soft, so soft Ellie barely hears from all the way over on her staircase, ear angled down towards the slats in the railing, breath held while awaiting a reply. She needs the truth, too. She deserves the truth. After all of this. The blood on her hands, on her face, on her memories. She gets to know why. Why after all this shit, none of it was even worth it.
What Ellie once believed to be heavy, uneven breathing, she comes to realize, is quiet, fractured sobbing. “I can’t lose her,” he confesses, an omission to what Ellie already knew from the second she woke up in the back of that car, woozy and light and empty. Bare legs, cold and exposed in a hospital gown. The whole car reeked of human blood and sweat, while her skin was the cleanest, the purest, it had been in months.
“I couldn’t let ‘em take her, Tommy.”
It’s all the answer she needs.
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Through the seasons of Joel and Ellie's first year in Jackson. How the anger she feels at his betrayal wedges its way between them and how they find their way back together regardless.
Bookmarked by smallgingeritis
10 Nov 2025