Disclaimer: I don't own The Walking Dead. Everything belongs to whoever owns them, my wishful thinking aside.
Authors Note #1: For imorca because she tagged me on tumblr and literally just said: "Milton x Jesus, tho" and here we are because I am an entire trash can, apparently. Set in an AU where Milton escaped Woodsbury with Andrea in season three instead of staying, but lost Andrea before they could get to the prison and ended up on his own in the wild. Everything basically follows canon, but Milton is on his own until around the time when Team Family discovers Alexandria where in fix his comes across Jesus.
Disclaimer: Grief/loss/healing, depression, adult language, canon appropriate violence, blood and gore, sexual content.
Scintilla
Chapter One
The first life he'd taken had been hers.
There had been a storm.
His glasses had fogged up.
He hadn't seen the walkers until she was shoving him to the side with a strangled sound.
He got the rest in pieces between lightning strikes.
The sheen of bloody, rotting teeth through the bubbles of rain trickling down the lens.
The opaque mist of dead eyes as the horde ripped into her.
Scrambling backwards as his arms sank wrist deep in the running mud.
Falling down the embankment.
Hitting his head on a rotting stump.
Then nothing.
It had been an accident.
But that hadn't made it any less damning.
After that - turned around in the grey, chased by walkers, lost, alone - he'd just wandered.
He avoided them at first, staying on the outskirts of the forest and preserving his ammunition. Moving from house to house when he could. Waiting for the walkers to pass before he moved on. Stopping and stalling as everything came down to those handful of moments where he could move freely.
Most of the houses were stripped bare. No food. No usable supplies. No clothing. Nothing. But he found bits and pieces he could use as the days trickled past. A long black canvas trench coat in the back of a closet with the tags still on. A camping machete underneath the flannel of an abandoned sleeping bag rolled out by a grouping of candles in a sour smelling living room. A half-used roll of duct tape. Rope. Paper.
He killed his first walker without bullets five days after he lost Andrea. Stabbing it awkwardly through the temple as it shambled aimlessly down the hall of the last home for at least ten miles in either direction. Taking it down before it could alert the small group milling outside. The kill itself was messy. Undignified. He misjudged his trajectory and speed so that instead of pinning the walker cleanly to the wall with his weight, they struggled for an ageless second before falling over a side table and across an expensive looking carpet. Spraying his skin with a mist of foul, lukewarm red when he wrenched the knife free just a bit too quickly. Recoiling as every cell in his body curled into itself in disgust.
He was unused to the concept of vomiting quietly, but he adapted.
He found three empty cans of dog food and a dirty spoon on the counter of the breakfast nook in the same house. He tried to think about another explanation – another reason why the spoon was coated in the same air-dried brown as the inside of the kibble cans. But when he looked around at the empty cupboards around him, he knew his first assumption was probably the correct one.
He thought about that for a long time afterwards.
He stopped sleeping for the most part. Other than the constant pit of hunger burrowing a hole in his belly, that was what got to him first. He couldn't. He didn't feel safe. Even indoors, behind a stranger's door and furniture dragged in front of them for good measure, he still felt open - vulnerable.
Even when his eyes were closed, all he was really doing was watching the inside of his lids.
Slowly realizing why Andrea had been so desperate to make Woodsbury work.
Why she'd told him that places like that – even the prison – were something special.
Something worth fighting for.
He spent part of his day observing, scribbling down thoughts and observations when he could in his notebooks. About walkers. About the supplies he needed. About how long he had before winter. Everything. Trying to exorcise the itch twitching out underneath his skin that reminded him it had been almost a month since he'd seen another living person.
He gave into temptation and said his name out loud in front of a small fire in the half-dark of someone's back lawn one night. Heating up some water he'd collected from a nearby creek in a six-pack of empty beer cans as a full moon rose thick and full at his back.
They were the first words he'd said in over two months. But he still cringed when they aired out, over-loud and scratchy with disuse as somewhere in the close distance, a pack of coyotes yipped and howled. It sounded ridiculous, but he wanted to make sure he still remembered how. Irrationally afraid that he was slowly losing parts of himself to the silence.
He used to like the silence.
He used to go out of his way to avoid people.
He used to do a lot of things.
He woke up one night to the chill of a knife pressed against his throat and the weight of a filthy hand – tangy with disturbed earth and fire-ash - against his mouth. He struggled into the sting of smoke from his extinguished fire, catching three, maybe four shadowy shapes moving around the small clearing he'd settled in for the night before a boot slammed into his ribs so hard he felt the bones creak.
Every bit of air exploded out of him in a rush as he gagged and flailed. Jamming the sharp of his elbows into the person's chest again and again until they fell away and all the pressure on his skin disappeared. By the time he had picked himself up and blew on the coals enough to bath the pre-dawn in an orangey-red glow, they'd taken everything he had.
Everything except his heartbeat.
The next day, he was digging through a pile of trash when the sound of gunshots pealed out into the foggy afternoon air. There was a moment of hesitation before he started moving – a moment to question if he wanted to try. Weighing the pros and the cons until the flashing neon of his own morality overrode logic and made the rest easy.
He fashioned a crude spear with a fire-blackened tip out of a fallen branch and followed them. But he wasn't kidding himself. It was desperation and a complete lack of options that was making him brave. It was all about averages. If he didn't get his supplies back, he was going to die before he reached the next town. Going after them was the only choice he had left.
It was the screams that helped him pinpoint the location. High on an unfamiliar building sort of rage that almost extinguished itself when he pushed hap-hazard through the trees and almost right into a trio of walkers clustered around the owner of said screams.
He picked up his machete from where it'd been left abandoned on the ground slowly. Careful not to make a sound as he repatriated the weapon and hefted its weight like the return of an old friend. He wanted to leave the same way – undetected – taking in the situation pragmatically as he crouched down, spear-butt braced on the ground beside him so he could lever himself up at a moment's notice. Concentrating on inching his stolen bedroll fractionally closer as the walkers continued their meal.
But what he wasn't counting on was whoever it was seeing him from inside that tangle of boney limbs and thick, coating blood.
"Please..." she begged, heavy on the consonants. A stressed note. Fractured and almost childishly high. Reaching out to him from between rotten flesh and worn fabric as her broken nails caught on the wisps and tore into hang-nail shreds.
She'd been part of the group who had stolen from him. Young. Brunette. Mid-range height and weight with deep dimples and blood-shot eyes. She was even wearing one his shirts. He had her red-handed, settled in the debris of an overnight camp that was littered with the fruits of his labor. His fire starter leaning against a rock beside the empty fire pit. The cans of food he'd been painstakingly rationing were empty and charred in the ashes. Everything he'd built up for months, gone.
He got his feet back underneath him slowly. Scaring himself motionless when a part of him actually considered the thought of just walking away. Eyes feeling far too wide for his face when he realized how easy it would be. How no one would blame him. How no one would know. How she deserved it. How he was so hungry he could-
He caught the first walker through the back of its head with his spear. Grunting through the brute force of it as his muscles responded in kind. Learned behavior. Muscle memory. The moments still weren't fluid – natural - but they came easier now. He let the body fall backwards, its dead weight snapping the branch firmly in half as the others turned, snarling. Letting pieces of her drop from their hands as they turned, reaching for him.
This time he didn't flinch when blood splattered across his face. Letting it whip out in uneven flings of arterial splatter as the skull of the second concaved under the edge of his blade. Whirling out, half-panicked as he caught the shadows in the corner of his eye, beheading the last one with a painful wrench of his back.
The sudden silence was uncanny. Leaving him stunned and unsteady on his feet as the woman writhed in the absence of stimuli – both good and bad – blood welling up in the hollow of her ruined chest.
He swallowed the tang of frustrated anger. So tired and hungry he could have killed for it as he forced himself to fold down beside her. Dutifully penitent to a sin he'd only really thought about committing as the tips of her fingers ghosted across the knob of his knee.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, shuddering. A well of red pooling in the cavity where skin was supposed to be, upsetting itself every other breath to stream thin down her sides. "I'm so sorry. I was just so hungry and-"
A muscle in his cheek twitched, trying to avoid eye-contact as every cell of skin she touched made him burn hot on the inside. Fighting with the churn in his stomach that reminded him how easy it would be to become the type of person who would have just walked away.
It wasn't who he was.
But it could be.
If he let it.
"Stop."
That was all he said. All he could say as he knelt there, a mess of clenched teeth and chewing on the inside of his cheek as he wrestled with the unfamiliar burn of misplaced aggression. Coming down in cycles as he shifted in discomfort. Wanting to move - to leave - but her eyes had him captive. Because she didn't stop talking and for some reason he forgot about the line in the sand he was trying to draw between them.
She couldn't have been older than twenty years old.
"The others, they have your pack, your gun," she panted, filthy hands spidering out, skimming through the dew-slick grass as the outside of her teeth stained red with welling blood.
"We could have shared," he started, wanting to be harsh the same time as his mind raced. Having to stop himself from reaching out half a dozen times in under a minute to try and help. To smooth the scraps of his stolen shirt down over the hole in her belly. To cover the underwire of her bra that was peeking through like something wrong and forbidden. The sweat-yellow material almost overshadowed by the disconcerting flirtation of her ribs as they emerged – porcelain-sheened - out of the mess of blood and bone every time she inhaled.
She shook her head.
"Don't be stupid."
There was no heat to the words.
She was past that.
But he got the message all the same.
You didn't trust.
You couldn't afford to.
Not anymore.
"You haven't be out here long have you?" she rasped after a moment, brown curls limp-wild and unwashed as they flared out in a messy halo around her head. "You had somewhere, didn't you? I can tell. You're still shiny. Whole. Not like us."
"I saw you practicing with that machete. Before it got dark. You're putting too much weight into the thrust. Unless the blade isn't sharp you don't need to. Let it- let it do the work. All it needs is gravity. My dad taught me that before, before-"
He made a mental note to locate a blade sharpener. Reminding himself that pragmatism was essential to any and all survival situations as his fingers itched for the phantom curl of his pen between his fingers. They'd even taken his notebooks. All his observations. His records.
"Want some advice?" she murmured, struggling now as her hand ranged back to clutch at the curve of his knee. Wincing internally as hurt reflected in her eyes when he recoiled. Feeling responsible for that expression in a way he didn't quite understand as he bit down on an apology by the skin of his teeth. Knowing at its heart it would be disingenuous.
He didn't want her advice.
He didn't-
"Don't be out here too long," she wheezed throatily. Crimson bubbles trickle-trailing from the corner of her lips as her chest convulsed. Shuddering. "Being out here? It strips you. You don't think it will. You tell yourself you won't let it, but- eventually-"
He opened his mouth to say something, but she was still talking.
Using that last bit of life in her to-
"There are worse things than th-them. I learned that the hard way and that's why I'm here," she rasped, tears trickling down familiar salt-lined tracks as his hands clenched into fists at his sides. "Memories have teeth."
The woman's eyes were still human and pleading when he ended it.
Two days after that he found a walker wearing his coat and pack.
From there on the rest was easy.
He counted the shell casings back to his abandoned gun. Loading it with the last two bullets he'd kept in his pocket as spares and slipped it back in his holster. He stripped the walker's corpse of his things and slipped them back on. Internally marveling on how mute that little voice in the back of his head had become as he took a moment to slice the walker's jeans from its hips. Cutting the thick denim into strips for later as he entertained the idea of spending the night curled over his coat with a needle and thread. Sewing the jean-denim to the most vulnerable areas and layering the rest with the last of the duck-tape.
It wasn't much, but it was enough to start over.
Maybe.
He forgot how to sleep for a while afterwards when he sat down to record what had happened in his notebook and realized he hadn't even asked the woman's name.
The days passed slower after that.
But also faster.
He lost track of what month it was.
How long he'd been out here.
He forgot how to care.
He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror sometime later.
Shattering it reflexively with his fist before he realized what he was looking at.
Who.
It wasn't another person.
It wasn't a walker.
It was him.
He picked up one of the shards, heart racing. Trying to find himself in the wild tangle of shaggy hair, straw-brown stubble, dried blood and dirt. He stared at his reflection for a long time. Taking in the hollows punched deep under tired eyes and the dark, shadowing sort of gauntness that comes part and parcel when a person used to plenty is forced to survive on less – much less. But even then, he still couldn't recognize himself.
He was careful not to look at his reflection much after that.
A/N: Thank you for reading, please let me know what you think. – There will be more to come, so stay tuned.
Reference:
- The title, "scintilla" is a rare word meaning: "a minute particle; spark; or trace."