Watching the newest member of their group is like watching a frustrated, confused machine that doesn't quite understand what confusion or frustration is.
To some extent, Michonne understands. There's an adjustment period after having been alone for so long that takes a while to get used to. It happened before the dead rose and she suspects it will happen long after she is gone as well. That awkward, tentative sort of touch and go where one feels out the moods and feeling of their new social circle. The testing jokes with new coworkers, the watchful eyes that see what is acceptable, the carefully listening ears. There's probably a name for it all, but Michonne only ever took Intro to Psyche as an elective in her college days and never went any further than that.
Not that it would matter here and now. Then again, maybe it might.
Because there's the normal getting-to-know-new-people thing, and then there is Maly with her blank face and her blanker eyes. She's nonverbal most the time, slipping around at hours beyond comprehension to most of them. She detaches from the group and drifts, and slowly, ever so slowly, they make their way up the river as the days melt into weeks, chasing resources in the water flow.
(And if you had told Michonne a scant six years ago she would be elbows deep in filth, chasing a turtle through waist-high water, she would have laughed in your face. But then again, she didn't think turtles could be this fast. Obviously, the rabbit and the tortoise story would have gone much differently in an aquatic terrain.
It only rankles a lot when the stupid amphibian -reptile?- takes off to deeper waters, leaving her empty-handed while Maly de-shells her third one in as many days.)
But more to the point, trying to understand what Maly is feeling half the time is a challenge in and of itself. It's something Michonne has to carefully read in the way she goes stiffer than normal. Not the awkwardly-staring-into-the-distance stillness, but the complete does-not-compute-processing-error that locks her in place. It's the flaring of nostrils as she draws a near silent breath, the way Michonne can track her slipping away from voices anytime more than one person starts speaking above a whisper or makes a decibel too much noise in general.
Trying to understand what is happening in Maly's head is near impossible and it doesn't help that Maly doesn't seem to understand either.
There's so much Michonne wants to ask, wants Maly to say, but she doesn't think it's a good idea. The day that Maly covered her ears and just walked away lingers in Michonne's mind alongside the knowledge that the other woman has no qualms about disappearing into the wilderness, leaving the group behind.
And Michonne doesn't like that idea. Not just because the group is learning things or because Maly is somehow useful in some way. But because that's not life. It's not all about scraping by by the skin of one's teeth, just getting by.
It's more. So much more. It's a list that grows in Michonnes' head as the days go by. The weight of Judith growing heavier on Michonne's hip, Carl's mischievous grin. Carol's steadfastness and Rick's strength. Eugene's weirdness, Sasha's passion, Abraham's endless cheer. Glenn and Maggie's union, their love, Rosita's wit, Noah's first bashful grin since he discovered his home was gone.
It's Maly's blank, uncomprehending stare as Michonne silently passes a handful of walnuts -a large portion of what she found for the day- into the slight woman's hand.
It's a pile of leathery shelled turtle eggs -damn near three dozen in number- that Maly casually dumps in her lap later that night.
(And it's definitely, definitely, the smug grin she gets to send Dixon when he asks if she's gonna share.)
"What is it, Tiny?"
In front of them, gazing blankly through the underbrush, Tiny has come to a stop. It ain't strange, not really. Tiny has a habit of pausing every now and then, going stock still and just existing for a hot second.
Abraham ain't no stranger to it. He's seen it before, sported by a dozen different soldiers. Tiny ain't just freezing most the time, she's practicing situational awareness. The little bugger is listening, head cocked like one of the damn dogs milling about, face smooth and impassive and she slides it around to just look at the world around them. She takes note of every little thing, searching for some shit Abraham can't even begin to really fathom.
He's pretty damn sure that he doesn't need to, either. Tiny does a lot of thinking in that head of hers, he bets. Any more and there'd be too much thought, not enough action.
Eventually, at her convenience, she drags her eyes over to him. There's nothing in her face that gives her away, but a muscle in her neck jumps out when they lock eyes. It's jack shit in the span of things, nearly covered by that checkered scarf that brings grainy photos of Viet guerilla's to mind, but it's a reaction. From Tiny, that shit's huge.
He's pretty sure it's a tick that displays annoyance. He can't really be sure, be he knows he wouldn't mind one damn bit if it was.
Tiny's good. It's not just her admittedly admirable skill set, either. That shit is hard, but learnable given time. Between everyone here, they can get by.
What Tiny brings to the table is gumption.
She isn't running from things, isn't held back by the past like a snake with its tail caught under a rock. She isn't worried about what was or whatever happened before they met, could probably give less than half a damn about who they are and what they have done. She just keeps going. Endlessly, relentlessly. She works, she progresses, and there's a solidness there that reminds Abraham of desert mountains jutting proud as all hell against desert winds.
Tiny doesn't talk. Tiny does.
As he watches, her eyes drag back to a single, indistinguishable spot in the underbrush, then darts back to him. Lord knows it ain't clear as the hand signals he used to use with his squad when he was on one of his tours of duty, but fuck if it ain't some sort of signal. There's something there she's alerting him to.
He grins, but Tiny has already blocked him out. That single-minded determination shows through as she shifts in the new direction and parts the brush.
Abraham laughs at the sight.
It's a road, the first honest sign of civilization since they left that ruined settlement. The asphalt is cracked and worn by erosion, and the forest has grown up right to the very edge of it, but it's unmistakable a little country two-lane. If he stares down to his right, he can see it stretch beyond yonder yet, a sprinkling of cars somewhere along the way.
"It's about time we got done playing Moses and the Israelites," Abraham states cheerfully, stalking out onto the pavement. Something flashes in his memory as his joints adjust to the harder terrain, less giving than the forest floor. A long forgotten memory of his first leave after active duty, boots on the tarmac after being away for so long.
His grin grows. At least this time he ain't gotta shave his beard, and the lack of wind chapped everything is a bonus.
"Too loud," Tiny states eventually, the muscle in her neck jumping again. She stares at him when she says it, and he doesn't think Tiny gets that it's weird as all hell to look at someone like that. Like you can see straight into their damn soul.
"In my experience, communication is key to a successful mission."
She stares some more, focus unwavering even as the others come through around then. Heads swivel and twist as they orient themselves to their new surroundings. His group, it seems, shares the same sort of relief that he had at seeing signs of humanity after fucking weeks -months?- in the wild. Among them, scattered dogs weave around, closer now but still so wary.
A mutt brushes by her leg on its way past, the merle coated one that seems to stick around more than any others.
Her impassive face turns away, and Maly begins to walk in the direction of the cars in the distance as a familiar presence saddles beside him.
"Have a nice little chit-chat?" she asks, and there's no heat. No tension. It's just a passing question.
Abraham turns his smile toward her.
"Yah. Something like that."
Because Tiny doesn't talk. Tiny does. And that behavior right there was practically a whole conversations worth of 'Fuck right off.'
There's a walker in the trunk Maggie Greene opens, and its hair is the color of sun-bleached summer straw.
It's a sluggish beast, its movements slow and drained as it struggles to sit up towards her, dessicated muscle skirting under the too-dry skin. Its hand and feet are bound by rags, mouth gagged by a torn strip of cloth, and Maggie knows that all these little clues tell a story about how the living became the dead.
But the story of this woman's fall doesn't really mean much to Maggie. The walker shouldn't mean anything at all, if she tells it true, but it has sun-bleached straw hair and cheekbones high on its face that must have been cherubic once. Its eyes are filmed over in the same murky grey that the walkers all share, bloodshot and hemorrhaged around irises, but they must have shined a shade close to her own green at some point. It could have smelled of honeysuckles and dust, once, instead of acrid metallic rot.
Her sister used to smell like that.
She used to hide in the honeysuckle bushes that lined their home and the only way Maggie could find Beth was by the shine of her pale hair. It would be wild and tangled by the time she worked her out of them, and Beth, oh, she used to smile like the sun, her breath made sweet by the nectar of the blossoms, cheeks flushed red and eyes sparkling like stars. The smell would cling to her like a second skin, just as much a part of their home as the walls or floor. Their Pa would ask if he had fathered a blossom instead of a girl.
The grief and homesickness washes over Maggie, through her, flooding her bones and swirling under her skin until they fill her lungs and steal her breath away. It's too slow to be a danger, and without the threat, she can't bring herself to do much more than stare, just for second remember how things were -
A leather-jacket clad figure leans over the side of the trunk, arm outstretched, and casually slumps over on top of the walker. The creature hisses behind its gag before its face - and all subsequent noise - is obscured by the thick coat. A half a heartbeat more and the whole walker stills.
Maggie stares, not registering.
Slowly, ever so slowly, she starts to figure it out as Maly's boots scrabble for traction on the side of the car. She's too short to bend over and reach in, and the walker is obviously dead now, but the two aren't adding together.
Uncomprehendingly and with growing alarm, Maggie watches Maly's emaciated form squirm around the trunk. With a guttural grunt, the smaller woman finally wedges the better part of her weight out again and tilts so her body can slide out of the vehicle. Vaguely, it registers that there is a penknife deep in the walker's eye, driven in by...by…
...by the weight of a body slumping on top of it.
Maggie stares at Maly, who notices her almost not at all. There's tiny fast-food salt and pepper packets bitten between her teeth, side by side with a fat, black pouch of take-out soy sauce. Her frame wouldn't support a good, strong blow from the edge of the trunk so Maly just….threw herself in.
"Maggie, Maly?" Glenn calls softly, just enough to be heard and no more. "What is it?"
Maggie has no earthly idea.
The more she looks at Maly, the less she understands. There's a bungee cord hung around her neck, bouncing around as she moves, and a bunch of zip-lock bags half crammed in one of her pockets. There's a bundle of tampons in their wrapper that damn near fall out of her pocket as she rifles around the body, inspecting it.
Scavenging it, Maggie finally grasps.
With a soft huff through her nose, Maly reaches leans forward and tips over again, making her way toward the pant pockets of the corpse. Her own skeletal fingers probe inside, and after a moment, pull out a tiny packet from within that crinkles in the hot afternoon air. She brings it forward to her face, squinting against the light as she reads the print on the front.
Advil Cold and Flu Tablets, from what Maggie can see.
"Maggie?" Glenn calls again, but closer this time.
Maggie tears her gaze away from the sight before her, focusing on Glenn. His brows don't furrow, not like Pa's used to, but rather his eyes are wide and searching her own. He's concerned, bless his heart, and he reaches for her without thinking about it.
"What?" she asks, forgetting the question in the first place. Her mind is still stuck on Maly, condiments in her mouth as she loots a corpse.
"You had this look on your face," Glenn says. "What was in the trunk?"
Maggie stares into his eyes, so earnest and caring, and feels a rush of love run through her. She loves him so, so much.
"Just a body." she replies. "It'll be alright."
It will be.
How Maly acts doesn't always readily make sense.
What she scavenges, how she moves, the way gives and tells that she has; not many of them seem reasonable or justified. Even when he was a sheriff and the world was a civilized place, Rick thinks that reading her would have been hard. There's something in her that's just so slightly off from the norm, a path gone a bit to the left instead of trodding along a familiar way. It could be isolation that made it that way, could be trauma, but Rick is starting to think that it's just kinda always been like that for her.
"And the pepper packets?" Carol grills Maly, who edges slightly further away. It's almost unnoticeable, but Maly is even more uncomfortable around Carol than any other person. With Michonne she is what could be almost considered polite, Abraham she's damn near dismissive with, but Carol? Carol she's aware of. Knows where the other woman is anytime she's within shouting distance.
Maybe it's because when he said don't ask, just do, Carol took that to mean don't ask for permission, which is about right. But then the matron took to gleaming every ounce of available information she could from Maly at every opportunity.
Never let it be said that Carol lets any sort of resource go to waste, Rick thinks.
"Digestive aid," Maly pushes out, slowly and enunciated so each syllable comes out its own phrase. 'Di-ges-tive ai-d' instead of one smooth word like anyone else makes.
"Anti-inflammatory," she adds clunkily after an awkward pause, far too harsh on the 't' sound.
"The soy sauce?" Carol asks, moving onward in what Rick can only assume is a mental checklist of almost every item Maly has gathered.
He waits for the answer, used to the long pauses by now. They aren't following the road, per-say, but they are walking adjacent to it. He can glimpse it, sometimes, weaving in and out of sight on one side, the sounds of the river they followed up occasionally doing the same at a much, much rarer interval. At this point, the river is more of a creek anyway.
The seconds tick on to minutes, and usually, even at her pace, Maly would have spoken by now. But her voice remains silent, and when he glances at the two of them, the shorter is looking off into the distance without word.
Which isn't unusual, but it makes no sense why she would do it now.
"Maly? Why the soy sauce?" Carol asks again, her tone switched into something far less demanding and almost coddling.
Maly flicks her eyes to her, aware, as always, exactly what spot she's standing in, but she doesn't say a word more She just turns her gaze forward and picks speed, outpacing them in a quiet series of elongated strides.
Carol's face tightens as she watches the figure go, lips pursed in that way she gets.
"I guess she filled out her quota of words for the day," she states after a moment, glancing back at Rick.
For his part, Rick gazes levely back at her, eyebrow quirked.
"You do tend to demand quite a few from her."
"I want answers," Carol says simply. "Besides, if I asked a hundred questions each day, she'd find a way to answer them all with one or two words each, and a hundred words isn't much at all."
"Maybe not."
"What? You think I'm pushing too hard?" Carol asks in a voice that seems to suggest that the idea is a bit ridiculous.
A bit of dust from his beard tickles his nostril, and Rick sniffs to dislodge it, taking the moment to think. If he's honest, he doesn't think it matters much.
"Ain't for me to say."
"Well, she's not saying much, so someone should probably try."
"She said some. And you picked up what she was saying. In my opinion, that works."
For a long moment, Carol just stares at him.
"Rick," she states, the tone completely changed. "Did you set it up so we're socializing her?"
"That's sorta a side effect," he answers honestly. He honestly thought what Eugene said had merit. They were starving, desperate, and Maly knew how not to be. Forcing it out wouldn't work, and would take too much energy. If the group could learn by watching, if they could learn to get by in the way Maly did, they could survive.
Maybe they're still tired. Everyone is exhausted, and the heat is oppressive and damn near painful. They still need shelter, need more than this, but they have water. They have food. They can keep going for a long while yet.
And Rick isn't sure they would have had that without Maly.
"Pretty convenient side effect, Rick," Carol tells him.
He sniffs again, this time raising his hand to swipe at his nose. Damn beard.
"Yah, well, she's a pretty convenient person," Rick answers.
He doesn't look at Judith. Or Carl. Both fed two full meals today.
He doesn't have to, not when the group around them can see the dogs and the woman walking with them for themselves.