1 - 20 of 62 Works in Codependent Ellie and Joel (The Last of Us)
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i open the window by shinestarhwa
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
27 Sep 2025
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Joel said, and she quotes, “You need to make friends, Ellie-girl.”
Friends. She has friends. She has Joel. Maybe he wasn't technically a friend, but he counts.
“I meant friends your age, Ellie.”
He insisted upon it. Arms crossed, looking at her with a look that toe between concern and determination. And how the hell was she supposed to say no when she was already enrolled?
_____
Ellie's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad first day at school in Jackson.
(+ 2nd chapter where Ellie suffers through a presentation and gets adopted by a friend group. It goes horribly.)
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I’d do it again, for you by 4everand4ever
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
26 Aug 2025
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Relentless, unwavering, and bound by something neither can name, but both understand with absolute certainty.
Both would tear down the world for the other.
Or;
In the aftermath of Silver Lake, Joel and Ellie fight for each other in a world that’s taken too much.
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I don't care if it rains or freezes long as I got my wooden Jesus sittin' on the dashboard of my horse by StrawberrySh0rtcake
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV)
24 Aug 2025
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"I know Jesus says we're supposed to be more into giving than receiving or whatever, but I gotta say, I'm pretty into getting shit."
"Where the hell did you hear that?" he asks, bewildered. Ellie of all people, little heathen that she is, is the last person he would suspect of being religious.
As usual though, the little shit surprises him. "From the Bible," she says primly. "Acts 20:35 mother fucker."
Well he'll be damned.
———
Or: Ellie and Joel and their respective relationships with God, religion, and Tia Blake.
OR: I project my own feelings about religion onto Ellie and Joel (but mostly Ellie).
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be still my foolish heart (don't ruin this on me) by captainredspade (CodenameArtemis)
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
18 Aug 2025
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“Her name is Ellie,” she says, eyes still on the sweet, slumbering child. “Take care of her. Don’t fuck this up, Joel.”
He doesn’t respond, just watches until Marlene is gone and moves to lock the door once more, knowing it’s probably about to be a long night with very little sleep.
Glancing down at the baby – Ellie – Joel releases a slow breath. “Looks like it’s just you and me, kid.”
Fucking hell, he’s got his work cut out for him.
or
(Joel raises Ellie. Some things change while others stay the same. A journey from Boston to Wyoming.)
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Ellie wakes in a world that shouldn’t exist. She’s twenty, bruised by Seattle and everything after. Joel is thirty-two, faster on his feet, untouched by her name, and still whole in all the ways that mattered.
He doesn’t know her. But she remembers everything.
In a makeshift camp that could vanish by morning, she follows him like muscle memory, grieving the version of him who died for her... and mourning the one who hasn’t yet lived through it.
In this fractured mirror of what was, can a post-Seattle Ellie and a pre-Ellie Joel find each other all over again or will time tear them apart before it ever lets them begin?
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Honey, you’re familiar (like my mirror years ago) by Springs_a_changing_me
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV)
25 Jul 2025
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A pitiful whimpering pierces through the thin walls and his heart like an electrical current.
His instincts kick into high gear, something animalistic from the early days of Sarah’s life forcing him up. Where is that coming from? He sneaks down the hallway, passing by Ellie’s room along the way. The door’s open just a bit, light streaming in through the crack.
He peers in, expecting to see all five feet of his kid splayed across the bed, brown wavy hair poking up from under the covers.
He searches the room for Ellie, stepping in without hesitation and blinking hard, making sure he didn’t miss anything.
“Ellie?”
Another little coo comes from her bed, a mixture of babbling and a frustrated cry. He stops dead in his tracks and turns around.
A baby is sitting in Ellie’s bed.
A baby. In Ellie’s bed.
“The fuck?”
Or: Joel has Feelings™. Particularly about not having gotten to see Ellie grow up. Ellie magically turns into a baby. Don’t ask how. Nobody knows and I especially don’t. Angst with hella feels and Joel and Ellie being The Father Daughter Duo Ever.
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I Got No Roots (My Home was Never on the Ground) by Dove_Works
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
09 Jul 2025
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Ellie and Joel and have made their choices. They choose each other, no matter what the rest of the world tries to say - but the Fireflies were only the beginning. With Salt Lake City behind them and their future ahead, it's time for them to figure out what exactly it means to be together.
Series
- Part 2 of The Choices We Make
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Through the Valley by lillyfields
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
17 Jun 2025
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There's no words to describe how Ellie's head feels right now except for being hit repeatedly with a motherfucking sledgehammer. She briefly registers cold concrete beneath her before peeling her eyes open. Glancing around with a bleary gaze, she slowly lifts her head. She’s pretty sure she has permanent brain damage. Being able to lean back on her elbows, a fuzzy view of – bars? – is suddenly in front of her. This has her scrambling back until she hits a wall, chest starting to heave. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. She barely has time to think before a door on the far side of the room is opening, a familiar face strolling through.
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Sharing is Caring by Chaska_Kao
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
09 Jun 2025
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After Silver Lake, Ellie can't eat.
Joel does what he does best: he fixes it the best he can.
While their system works on the road, in Jackson it becomes a problem.
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Doctors come in and out. There isn't much more they can do. She's yelled and screamed and cursed about it. Didn't change anything. They did what they could. All she can do is wait. Fucking useless.
He's lost so much blood. She wanted to give him some, but they're not the same blood type. Of course they're not. Maybe they would be if she were his daughter, but she's not. She's not.
He's lost so much blood. So much blood running through her fingers. Ellie wipes her hands on her jeans. It doesn't help.
He's stilI. Too still. But his chest lifts and falls, and that has to be enough.
~oOo~
Or, the one where Ellie saves Joel from Abby, and they get to try and mend what has been broken between them for so long.
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Concern by ChildOfTheBarricade
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
21 May 2025
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As hard as Maria fought to see the best in people, if the world both Before and After had taught her anything, it was that some people were not inherently good. Some people were just predators, and as devastated as she was that she hadn’t caught it earlier, that she’d have to tell Tommy, Maria couldn’t find it within herself to be surprised. She shivered as she remembered, just the night before, Joel holding Benji as he slept. Maria tucked her arm a little tighter around the baby on her lap, looking back up at the schoolteacher.
Maria doesn't have the whole picture and takes things into her own hands.
CW for discussion of sexual assault of a child (The Silver Lake Incident) - not graphic but Ellie describes what happened.
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In Between Days by Capricordinary
Fandoms: The Last of Us (TV), The Last of Us (Video Games)
19 May 2025
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Turns out there's more like Ellie. People that are immune.
The difference between them and her?
She has Joel and a future with him waiting for her.
***
Ellie turns out not to be the only one the Fireflies are experimenting on. A fellow test subject befriends her. But he's just as indoctrinated as Riley was and willing to give up anything and everything in the name of a cure - his health, his life. And Ellie's.
Slowly, it becomes apparent that no one else at this hospital is expecting her to have an After.
Nobody but Joel. And god help the motherfuckers who are standing in the way of it.
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12-year-old Ellie by avabava07
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
17 May 2025
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"It’s not my life I’m worried about,” the gun man snapped, his voice cracking under the pressure.
Joel stiffened. He recognized that tone: desperation. Then the man stopped. Joel saw his head tilt. The gunman was looking down.
The gunmans arm raised slowly, revolver in hand. Toward Ellie.
Joel didn’t think. Didn’t weigh the odds. He moved. Joel surged forward, every inch of him committed, and brought the bat down with both hands. It connected with the back of the man’s skull with a sickening crack: the kind of sound that sticks with you.
And that sound did stick with the blonde girl with a dutch braid, sitting curled up against the passenger door.
TLDR: Joel defends Ellie but at what cost?
(Could be read alone but would make more sense if you read the original story.)
Series
- Part 5 of Shoeless Child on a Swing
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“You’re alive,” Tommy breathes, repeating it twice.
Each one hits like a blow.
“She’s dead,” he counters, voice flat in counterpoint to the way it writhes in him like a snake, a painful, thrashing thing. It’s the first time he’s said it out loud.
He can’t bear to repeat it.
“No, no,” Tommy says in a rush, pulling back. “No, Joel. She’s here. She’s in Jackson.”
Joel could almost laugh at the lie, well-intentioned but misplaced, which is his brother’s particular specialty. Tommy must have already read it on him, what Joel knows he’s going to do next. He’d sworn once to his brother that he would never do it again, never leave him behind.
But a man can only break so much before he can’t withstand it anymore.
(what if joel was just a few minutes too late to find ellie in silver lake?)
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With a house so big, it seems like a waste to not use all of it.
Which is why she starts deliberately making an effort to spend time in the parts of it she and Joel don’t use often. The linen closet, the dining room, the two spare bedrooms, what Joel says used to be an office, even the attic, nothing gets untouched on her quest to make sure no inch of the house goes unappreciated. She always does it when Joel is out of the house, knowing that it’s a little strange, but she gets a thrill from it, the ability to think something like, “I’m in the spare bedroom of my house right now” and know that it’s not just a fantasy anymore.
And if it would likely set her up to have Joel call her a weird kid again, this new little hobby of hers, well.
What Joel doesn’t know won’t get her roasted.
(ellie settles into having a house) (and then into having a home)
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“It doesn’t feel real,” Ellie says that night, when his patience with the Fireflies has broken, and he’s enforced a bedtime for their labrat that involved bodily shoving medical staff out of the room and slamming the door in their faces.
From his place on a cot right in front of the door to make sure no one gets ideas about coming in without warning, he looks over to her, but she’s only looking at the ceiling, looking far too small in the hospital bed she’s been settled on. They’d had her hooked up to machines at first, but she’d been unable to settle with them on her, so he’d made the executive decision to unhook her from everything, pushing buttons at random until all of the noises stopped.
He’d gotten dirty looks through the little window into the room until he’d shut the blinds.
(how the cure gets found) (featuring AGGRESSIVE patient advocate joel)
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“You wanna move out?” Joel asks, and Ellie bites the side of her cheek briefly. Joel’s face conveys more than his tone, sometimes, but she can’t let herself look at him. It’ll make it too hard to say what she knows she needs to.
“Yeah,” she says, studying a chip in the paint on the railing with way more focus than it needs. “Probably a good idea, you and me having our own space.” She isn’t brave enough to bring up what people are saying about them not having their own space. She can’t do it. Either he’s not aware of it yet, or he is, but reminding him about it might mean him wanting her even farther away before her existence even in the backyard has other people making his life harder. If the closest she can get is being in the garage, she doesn’t want to risk fucking up even that.
“Alright,” he says after a long, long moment. She grits her teeth against the toneless quality of his voice. That’s the tone he uses when he doesn’t want someone to know what he’s actually feeling.
Like he would if he didn’t want a pathetic QZ kid to know how relieved he is that he’ll finally be done dealing with her shit.
(after realizing that she's making joel's life harder, ellie decides to move out to the garage)
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"I'm sorry I lied to you", he says, and he actually means it, too. "But I know I can't protect you. No one can protect anyone, not here. Twenty years I survived in this place, and I was never scared of dying. I am now."
He looks at her, into those wide eyes, it's impossible now to remember how he'd seen her as nothing but cargo once. It was all to protect himself, really. It hadn't worked for shit.
"I'm scared all the fucking time now", Joel says, rubs his hands over his face, his tired eyes. "I wasn't scared like this since-"
Since her, he doesn't say. Doesn't need to.
It's so much better- so much worse, when you find something to live for. When you got something to lose.
~oOo~
Or, the one where Ellie confronts Joel about the Lie, and he ends up revealing more than he meant to, but maybe that's just what they both needed.
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Shoeless child on a swing (reminds you of your own again). by avabava07
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
27 Dec 2024
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He knew what it meant, even if he didn’t want to admit it. Anna was slipping. Again. And Ellie was bearing the brunt of it.
Joel watched her go, his chest tight. As she rounded the corner, he made a silent promise to himself: if Anna didn’t pull it together soon, he’d step in. Scared or not. Because Ellie deserved better, and Joel couldn’t keep pretending he didn’t care.
OR: Modern setting, abusive Anna, eight-year-old Ellie, and neighbor Joel, who will do anything for Ellie. Even if he doesn't want to admit it.
Series
- Part 1 of Shoeless Child on a Swing
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Please, this is just too good to be gone by VilleDesEtoiles
Fandoms: The Last of Us (Video Games), The Last of Us (TV)
01 Nov 2024
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“Don’t laugh at me, okay?” He said, and arched his brow.
Ellie smiled a little. “I’ll try,” she promised.
Joel’s fingers rested on the chords, and then began to move, and his voice shook.
“So persistent in my ways, hey angel, I am here to stay. No resistance, no alarms. Please, this is just too good to be gone.” Joel strummed the strings, and his voice ached. The rough tenor of his voice hung in the air. The lamplight swelled. Ellie looked at him, lips pressed together, waiting. Her eyelashes were spiked with wetness.
OR
Canon, but told through Joel's eyes, through Future Days.