——— 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧.
pairing — joel miller x ( black!fem! ) reader scenario
y/n was born into the chaos. thirty years after the start of the outbreak, y/n has discovered herself ripped from her safe home in a compound and auctioned off in a post-apocalyptic s.x traff.cking ring. a strange, significantly older man wins your bid. you could have never expected he would be your savior.
word count — 2.3k warnings — dead dove, do not eat. s-xual sl-very and human auctioning. trauma and recovery. extreme age gap relationship. murder, violence, gore, horror. you get the gist. eventual gentle / emotional sex, virginity loss, and ddlg themes.
𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐀 𝐑𝐄𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓? 𝐒𝐔𝐁𝐌𝐈𝐓 𝐈𝐓 𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄. 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓. 𝐀𝐎𝟑.
𝐈. 𝐌𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐎𝐖𝐒
You never had a chance. Not really.
From the day you were born, your existence served only as proof of the human condition to perpetuate its kind, no matter the situation or circumstance. The same condition that affected all creatures. The need to continue. The need for furtherance.
You thought it cruel. Your parents told you stories when you were a girl, about big buildings full of blinding bright lights and music that came from the ceilings, where food was endless and all you had to do to get it was hand over a few pieces of paper. The concept of money was strange to you, and for awhile, when you were a girl, it kept you up at night. It plagued you with your very first come to reality—the reality that humans, even when given the entire world on a silver platter, always had to make hierarchy.
It was mammalian, wasn’t it?
You thought the concept of money was utterly ridiculous. Some made-up, imaginary means of dictating who could have what resource. In your world, only the hands of cunning and fate could decide who had what.
You learned that the day it happened.
You learned that the hard way.
You learned of this human condition on one tame, breezy afternoon.
The kind of afternoon that felt… tangible. Real and raw and like, if you spend enough solitude in the meadow, you could feel your own existence, humming beneath your skin. You could feel your own electricity—your living-ness—as the tepid air lifted in and out of your lungs like nourishment.
You didn’t know just how vile the world could be.
How moments of peace, like that one, were to be considered sacred, and not taken for granted.
He sold you out.
He sold you out, one day after telling you he’d marry you.
Now it all made sense.
Why he’d been so adamant, almost pleading with you to leave the compound with him. You have no ties here, he’d tried to negotiate. Just me. Just me, y/n. We could leave, and find something better—.
But you’d stopped him. Told him to stop trying to get you to leave everything you held near. After so many years of living outside the walls with your parents, in a constant run for your life. You’d watched them be murdered, and by the hands of cunning and luck, found yourself standing in front of that compound’s front walls.
It was like you’d finally found Heaven, after braving Hell for so long.
But you forgot that the infected weren’t the only monsters lurking behind those walls. You forgot that man could be just as evil as nature. Man could be predator to its own kind.
He sold you out.
He sold the entire compound out.
And you still weren’t entirely sure what for.
But the day they burnt it down, rounded up all the women and children, and shot the men, those demons told you a name.
He was laying face down in the dirt, blood pooling out of his skull, after he failed to “pay up”, as they said. His collateral? All the men slaughtered to reduce competition. All the women and children rounded for the human condition. Perpetuation. Furtherance.
They drugged any girl who looked old enough.
Forcibly inspected them.
Separated the hymenally intact from the not, citing some tale from the old world about it signifying virginity.
Yours had been intact. You remembered how, the night before, when your boyfriend was telling you he’d marry you, he begged you to let him fuck you. To let him at least finger you. You didn’t understand then. You didn’t understand his insistence. You thought he was being disgusting and disrespectful. You weren’t ready, you both had been seeing each other for less than six months. He was trying to save you from this.
His one last hoorah.
Maybe just to absolve himself of remorse. You’d never know, because he was dead now for not “paying up”. Currency. Money.
You became currency.
The acts of man would one day split the earth in two.
You watched, numb with horror, as every other girl was sold off at auction to the highest bidder.
Anything of resource was fair game.
Pretty young things were hard to come by in a world ravaged by the undead.
You were a pile of gold. Top dollar. The prettiest of the bunch, your captors laughed, sneering and mocking you as they forced you to model some skimpy, see-through dress.
It was about power and control, at the end of it all. They loved seeing you weep. They loved seeing you beg. You were carted around as the most expensive slave for auction. Some woman—you still couldn’t understand it, why she helped them—dolled you up, straightened and curled your hair before every show.
You stood beside some twenty odd other girls, new captives, watched them be sold off day in and day out.
You were priced too high for the common man. Worth at least thirty vials of insulin, a truck of food, and a secluded shelter with already hooked-up off-grid utilities. The leader of your captors told this to you one day, while staring you down as you ate your measly rations. They liked to keep you skinny. Said you weren’t worth feeding more, but you were worth the aforementioned loot. I’m not giving you up until I get everything we want and then some. I don’t care if we have to wait until you’re twenty. He spit it at you, like your youth was a commodity.
Top dollar.
Pretty, young thing.
Laws don’t matter out here no more, dollface.
They would have sold you off even higher if you happened to be younger. That didn’t quell the gleam in their eyes when you shakenly admitted to having just had your eighteenth birthday a few days prior to the slaughtering.
Their eyes lit up. You were looked at like a piece of meat.
You should have cherished that meadow that you used to sneak off to. The dead never found you there. Neither did any of the community. It had been your little slice of Heaven, and it was all ripped away in the blink of an eye.
And then, one day, that fateful line rang out above everyone’s heads.
“Sold! To the gentleman in the back.”
He was older than you anticipated.
You were dolled up like some Christmas present.
Your eyes big and lined with wispy, dark lashes. Your lips stained deep red. Your skin covered in goosebumps from the cold, even with that trash bin fire going in the corner of the church’s stage floor. Your nipples puckered up hard against it. Everyone could see them right through the thin, barely pink teddy they forced you to wear. Just that, a thong, and high heels.
Always terribly exposed.
You wanted to fall to your knees and sob right then and there.
Your luck had run out. No more cunning to call on.
“What’s your name, Casanova?” your handler had chuckled at your buyer, as he approached. He’d offered an unimaginable loot. More than any of the guys could have dreamed of.
An unaffected island off the coast. Filled with supplies gathered over the past twenty years. Older than you. They believed him, because he looked like the kind of guy who would kill someone for looking at him wrong.
“Joel,” he rasped out, some deep drawl still smoothing out his syllables. An accent from a time when communities lasted long enough to develop their own sound. “Joel Miller.”
Your handler wrote down his name on a piece of paper, along with the details of his loot. Mr. Miller was staring at you the entire time. His dark eyes worn not only by the lines etched into his skin beside them, but by something deeper. Past his steady pupils. Unreadable.
“Alright, then, Mr. Joel Miller,” your handler exclaimed, beaming and hardly able to contain his excitement. “Jack’ll pat you down for weapons one more time and then we can take off. You can show us this little slice of Heaven you got.”
The men exchanged a firm handshake. Joel was patted down for weapons, and when Jack was certain enough that he had none, four other men joined your handler, armed to the teeth. Joel would be stupid to try anything. Joel would get himself killed if he did. Joel was your new owner, and your handler’s torch had been passed off to him.
“Gotta get to the dock. It’s about twenty miles from here,” Joel had explained in that deep Texan drawl, his poker face unwavering. The hurdle was accepted easily by the group.
They rallied together a van.
You were shoved in the back with three of them, who taunted you as your handler drove, with Joel in the passenger seat. One guy decided at the last minute to sit it out, citing he’d promised his wife he’d be back at their compound for dinner.
The promise of getting to live like kings clouded your traffickers’ judgement. They weren’t thinking clearly. They didn’t think to check the van for weapons before they left, or even an alternate means of verifying that the island existed.
They wanted to see their prize with their own eyes.
“Joel, you dog,” your handler chuckled loudly at some point up front. “I promise you won’t regret this. We’ve been saving her since we got her. Pussy hole’s not even open yet. You’ll see!” You heard him promise with glee. The kind of glee that made you sick. Delighted in how your suffering would benefit him.
Every bump in the road was used to count down the minutes until your unraveling. Until life really showed you just how horrible it could get.
You tried to imagine it ahead of time. To prepare yourself. Staring numbly, with your wrists locked behind your back, and your calves tucked halfway beneath you on the cold van floor. The gloss in your eyes told the entire story. You couldn’t even hear your traffickers’ jeers anymore.
How could you fight him off?
He was easily twice your size. And the muscularity he bore was that of decades of testosterone and fighting. He was graying, in his facial hair, in his hairline. He had to have been at least forty, maybe fifty or sixty. You wouldn’t win.
You knew that.
You knew that in the pith of your gut.
“I’ve got a boat up there off that shore.”
“Where at?”
“Right up there. Here, pull over. You won’t get this thing through the sand.”
“Alright.”
The van came to a sudden halt after a screeching swerve. Force of habit to move out of the roadway. Not like many cars went for scenic drives anymore. Hell, calling that overgrown path a roadway was already pushing it.
“Alright, boys. Leave the girl in the back. We’ve got a paradise to go find,” your handler announced, before the driver’s side door was slammed shut. They all filed out, slammed the back two doors shut, and a second later you heard them all lock.
With all your might, you managed to crawl out from the back and witness the five of them trekking down the shore to a single boat, anchored at a single dock. Panning out against the ocean’s horizon, you couldn’t see even the silhouette of another piece of land.
With a deep inhale, you let your shoulders relax, and you fell back, pressing into the back of the driver seat and curling your knees up to your chest. You were barefoot now. Cold, because they hadn’t let you change.
You’d learned your lesson about the meadow.
This moment of peace and solitude and privacy was not to be taken for granted.
Pressing your lips into your bare, blushed kneecap, you let your hair fall down in a curtain around your shoulders and legs, and relished in the tiny amount of warmth it brought.
You would cherish this.
You would cherish this before it was ripped out from under you.
—-
You didn’t remember falling asleep.
But when you awoke, it was not to the sound of your traffickers’ jeers and triumph.
It was to the sound of heavy breathing, and an engine turning over in a roar.
You were just beginning to blink open your eyes with a soft groan when the van suddenly lurched, throwing you against the other side of the confined space.
In one moment, you went from confused, to terrified.
The tires screeched as it pulled out violently. Then the gear was shifted into drive, and you were thrown forward, into the back of the passenger seat.
Only then could you piece together what was happening.
A broken watch sat snug around a thickened wrist; his knuckles were white from how hard he was gripping the steering wheel. From them streamed an unmistakable mahogany. Blood.
He was covered in it.
Your pupils widened into saucers, and then, as if you might be able to hide your way out of existence, you sunk back into the corner where the driver’s seat met its adjacent wall, and made yourself as small as possible.
Up front, you could hear his breathing slowing.
Then he cleared his throat, sniffed, and a second later, you heard some old music flooding forward from the center console.
“You like Jazz?” he asked after awhile.
You didn’t answer.
There was silence for another beat.
“I’m turnin’ the heat up now. Tell me if you’re still cold back there. I got a jacket you can wear. It’s just…” he paused, sniffed again. “Got some blood on it.”
Outside of the front windows, you could see the moon, round and mighty in the night sky.
“Are you going to kill me?” you whispered, your shoulders hunched in around your knees.
You listened to his breaths. Counted them. One, two, three, four—
“No. I killed them, ‘cause they deserved it.” He swallowed. You stared, wide eyed, trembling, at the closed back doors. “I’m takin’ you home.”
Somehow, that news made you even more nauseous than the last.
