Life forms
(There never was a honeymoon)
…
This isn't the story of the beginning. Nor of the end. Rather, the in between. The parts unheard.
i.
Merle greets Michone's scars with silence.
They're tangled together on a battered cot with someone's initials carved into the one leg. They stretch a tarp over the bar wall, creating a dark room where they tumble against each other without thinking twice.
He can feel the scars twist over her spine. Engraved into dark skin. He feels the places where his own scars fit perfectly. Clashing violently like life forms.
He asks her the three days later, when she's hunched over as she sharpens her sword and he's swinging back. Bristling she turns away and he can feel the shame blossoming on the back of her neck. He can see the anxiety stretching through her veins.
He says nothing the next time. He just runs his fingertips over them as they lie together in silence just a little softer than before.
When they have sex, they just collide.
Their scars begin to stretch to intertwine the two.
ii.
He gets mad.
He gets mad that he can't reach out and grab her with both hands. That he has to wrestle her helplessly to keep her by his side. That he can't hold on and keep her forever in his arms.
He roars with anger and pictures to damn cop dead. He tries to find her voice when she clams up. He tries to spark her, like dynamite.
She doesn't get mad.
She just deals with the turmoil of emotions until they have become numb once again.
She paces the cell. She punches the walls until her fists are swollen and bloody, and even then she sets off with her sword, swinging at the dead until she can't fight anymore. She strikes back when he can't strike first.
He fights until he is trapped like he was on a roof back in Atlanta all alone. She fights for him to keep him. She can't live anymore, wandering lost.
She weaves her fingers into his hand when no one looks. She finds the pieces that are lost, and replaces them.
He howls and she fights. Primal, but in the only way they know how.
iii.
They talk about maybe leaving.
They would find somewhere small. Open.
They would live somewhere big. Closed.
The group fears Michone. The group hates Merle.
Michone has Andrea's last breath and all her mistakes rubbing against her shoulders every time she tries to stand with her spine straight. Merle can only fold against the expectations, and try and hide against the world.
Carol whispers to Rick one night, when Merle stalks past, Michone gliding before him. 'They're like puzzle pieces.'
They are. In a sense.
Pieces that do not belong together, worn away from the force. Like cars colliding that catch death with their fear.
Merle talks about leaving, and how it would be grand.
Michone smirks and talks about slipping away in the night like a thief.
iv.
When they first met, she was fierce.
When they first met, he was livid with betrayal.
Andrea is hunched beneath him, where he thought she should have been before. She's alive. He remembers the way the cuffs felt that time.
The way the sun turned those into a wicked torture devise. Merle heard the way the key seemed to ring as it fell down the pipe, and the fierce beating of cowardice as the fool ran away. Hands laced in sin fumbling to lock to door weakly. Corruption filling his lungs, as he hears the heavy engine gunning away.
All she can feel is her daughter's last breath pressed against her shoulder.
Somehow, they fit.
They sooth each other's jagged edges, and scorch away the snarls that warp their minds.
v.
He doesn't really believe in God. Not in any of the bullshit his mother used the spout before Daryl was born.
After Daryl was born, she became like a ghost. Watching damned little soaps and worshiping other people's lives. His dad worshiped three things, really. Drugs, his fists, and 'Candy-with-an-I'.
It's just when she's sprawled over top of his body, his hands locked around her waist-
He thinks he can believe in something.
vi.
One night she panics.
He's deep in sleep, his hand tight around her wrist when he's startled awake. She manages to claw at his face and he slaps her square across the face.
Daryl would panic sometimes, when they were younger. Before Merle faced juvie for setting some girl's hair on fire. He would fling himself out of his cot, and scramble like mad to the door, his hands snatching at the door handle. He would plead for the phantom to stay away, begging that he was sorry.
Merle would try and coax Daryl out of it, trying to restrain his trembling hands.
Now, Merle's grown up. Daryl isn't his to calm.
Michone is, so he forces her against his chest. He forces her to catch her breath, and when she claws against his back, he bites her shoulder. He doesn't waste words on her.
He holds her tight. His hands leave bruises on her arms. Her nails stretch ribbons down his flesh.
He holds her until she calms down.
When she calms down, he keeps holding her.
vii.
When they started to fuck in the beginning, she resisted.
When they started to love in the end, he resisted.
viii.
They leave.
He looks back. She looks forward.
ix.
They hotwired six cars, and hiked along the expanse of one long highway until they find a hotel tucked away from the roads a way back. It's not much, a mere step up from a single level motel. Only six walking corpses haunt the inside, and they're child's play to take care of.
There are eleven bedrooms, with exactly twenty new surfaces to have sex on.
The real topping on the cake is the pantry stocked to the brim with canned goods. Merle smirks, because he thinks about how thin his girl has gotten, and how much worry it has begun to cause. She had been dead set on rationing, tucking away more and more. It makes him want to shake her hard, and force her to just stop thinking about the future-their future. Just to take and take and take what should be her own too have.
They cook three cans of corn, and dish out cheap apple sauce. They drink from a bottle of wine stashed away in the cellar, and for the first time in a long time-they've become full.
Michone laughs deep, tumbling forward onto the bed. Merle locks the door behind them, checking beneath the bed and in the closets. She scouts the bathroom until every inch of the room has become cleared from a threat. She sets her sword on the floor beside the bed, and Merle leaves a gun fully loaded with the safety off on the table.
They sleep for a long time after that.
Michone doesn't panic; Merle doesn't bother to think about the bad.
They just sleep.
x.
She doesn't die slowly.
She dies screaming in Merle's arms, chin tilted up and eyes wide. Her hands claw into his shoulders.
Her neck is ripped open, and all that remains is loneliness and panic. Anxiety rims his eyes, and dullness clings to her own.
Bodies are scattered. Her sword is lost. Somewhere he has a gun lost in the ruins strewn about.
He's tumbling over her, clutching tightly to her. His one hand is flat to her savaged back, and a question is still nagging deep within his mind-'who gave here these scars? who hurt her then?'
He presses his dry lips against her brow, trying to find the space in between them that had been so damn infinite hours before.
He's begging her not to go. She's begging him to shoot her.
He waits.
xi.
It's lonely.