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she also lives!
she also lives!
wanted interactions (and open to ship with)
wanted interactions (and open to ship with)
Wanted interactions: TLOU characters, Telltale TWD, Fallout Prime, 3, 4, and others you may see in this sort of apocalyptic scenarios.
Open to ship with: Joel but it's not 'expected' of anyone (however, I kinda don't want an official pre-existing relationship, just flirting and them basically being a couple. I want to see it happen in threads). Also maybe other men? Maybe.
fc: Linda Hamilton. She's 35 in the Terminator but the vibes are perfect (and I may find older Linda icons later) so Tess looks ten years younger than she is when she's not roughed up (I adore her canon faceclaim but she was there five minutes).
Potential triggers: just regular TLOU/"it's the zombie apocalypse" ones
I'm keeping the show writers' idea that she had a husband and a kid who got infected:
I'm keeping the show writers' idea that she had a husband and a kid who got infected:
1978 - born in Pennsylvania.
1996 - gets pregnant while dating her high-school sweetheart Kevin, turns 18, their son Theo is born.
1998 to early 2000 - Tess joins the army at 20 years old because money is tight. Deployed to Kosovo, great strategist, saves fellow soldiers, gets promoted to Specialist, goes home.
2003 - the infection starts. Tess, now 25, kills Kevin but finds herself unable to shoot their son Theo. She locks him in the basement after he turns, he's still there.
2023 - Tess is 45 at the beginning of the game.
She hasn't told Joel about her family yet. Hurts too much and she never let herself deal with it, too ashamed of letting her son become an Infected. Now, after Joel chooses Ellie over a cure, Tess may feel they are on more even ground and that she could share. She wouldn't have lied about it before, but I assume nobody specifically asked. Having to immediately end her family facilitates her turn for immediate savagery afterwards.
Also I don't think she ever shared much in general except that she served in the Army, and Joel doesn't seem the type to prod. In the game she asks "what do you know about us? about me?" and I'm running with it. She's slightly more openly caring and prod-y.
ship:
ship:
-I don't want her to have hooked up with Joel yet. I want her to have flirted, sure, but I prefer to let things develop "on screen" for the fun of it, so I feel like it's more of a ' neither of us has made that move despite us basically being a couple and sleeping in the same bed' situation. Joel rpers don't have to ship btw. I'm fine with the one-sided, but she will be in love with Joel.
Plus "Yes you are! Look, there's enough here that you have to feel some sort of obligation to me. So you get her to Tommy's.” feels like a non-spoken, non-sexually-acted-on romance line to me. This is also because it's much more entertaining for me if they are BOTH unable to say things than for Tess to be the usual female character that waits for whatever crumbles the emotionally-distant can give her.
How is she alive?
How is she alive?
She breaks a leg when they are fighting infected instead of being bitten, and is dead weight. She's carried to the Capitol building, but once they are under attack being slowed down will result in all of them dying; she'll get killed either way she'll convince Joel to go on.
If it's Infected that are coming she hides for a while, then tries to make her way outside and gets captured by soldiers that were nearby (or she'd have died alone), or if we go by the game it was soldiers all along and they choose to capture her after an initial shooting.
Either way, she's brought back to the QZ for interrogation and execution and the Fireflies save her.
But she has to heal before going after Joel, so she reaches them in Jackson after they are back from Salt Lake (brought in by Maria much like Joel and Ellie were).
If you rp Joel and you want to write it, she'll question Joel about what happened to the cure.
Life in Jackson:
Life in Jackson:
In general, to allow interactions with him and everybody else, I'll assume by default that she was told the truth, and she didn't know how to take it, so it's been tense-confusing between her and Joel for a long time. Because she gets it but it's also so frustrating, and Jackson offers a 'normal domestic life' she's not used to, so she needs some time to adjust to everything.
She'll finally stay in one place despite Joel teasing her about the fact that normally he wants to take a break and she never does, and she'll take up the job to train everybody who wants her to.
Eventually, if you are not a Joel rper (because I think her relationship with Joel should be decided between us) I also default to her going back to their comfortable domesticity by season 2, in a shippy way.
I'M HERE FOR AUS WHERE JOEL LIVES. If he does get tortured and survives, and you are going with basically my Ellie's AU where she still goes on a rampage not just to avenge him because trauma, but because they could come back, Tess went with her right away. They are both human disasters. IF JOEL DIES she'll be exactly like Tommy in the game, bloodthirsty and completely broken. She might find some peace later in being there for Ellie the way Joel should have been. She can't interact with Abby in this case, she'd have had no mercy.
If you want to write in this universe but not in Jackson or if you want to interact in a different zombie setting (like the Walking Dead):
If you want to write in this universe but not in Jackson or if you want to interact in a different zombie setting (like the Walking Dead):
she couldn't get used to life in Jackson for several reasons and had to leave on her own, again. Naturally you can also request an AU from before it's been 20 years and she's chilling without Joel.
Backstory for fallout (Prime, 3, 4)
Backstory for fallout (Prime, 3, 4)
She was once a guard in a gigantic system of 4 vaults united together for a series of experiments; had a child when very young, much like her TLOU counterpart, and left for 2 years to train as if she were a soldier, as part of the experiment, to then go fight the mutated Infected (similar to zombies that came from the third Vault and were trying to breatk into the forth.
She then came home and her life kept going forward, almost idliac, when the experiment goes south: she's 25 by the time the Infected break through the Vaults and start Infecting or eating everyone. Her husband Kevin is bitten, and she kills him soon after (incubation period can go from a few hours to days, she thought she had longer), but she doesn't get to him before he bites their 7 years old, Theo. She can't find in herself to kill him, something she regrets to this day, and instead seals him into their home.
Then she takes a group of other fighters and they shoot their way out to the surface.
There, she becomes a raider, a smuggler, a mercenary, whatever she needs to be to survive, no pity, no mercy. Dog eats dog world. She's paired with her close friends - almost partner - Joel, and the two wreck havoc together for 20 years before they are forced apart by destiny: he has to take a girl away from there, because she needs to be studied (something about her blood maybe being the key to cure Infected, just in case the disease escapes their 4 Vaults and reaches the surface), and Tess breaks a leg and would be dead weight.
She forces him to leave, so that they won't have to die with her since she can't be saved, but she ends up making it out of her tough spot, and now she's alone, wandering around the Wasteland with no more goals except survival. If we want to 'complete' her and Joel's story, we can also say that before or at some point during the thread they are reunited, but Joel is now living a pretty domestic, happy life with the girl as a daughter-figure, and Tess isn't ready for that.
Added: May 22nd 2025
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