Rick, Deanna and the others were still talking out in front of the medical center. Rowan listened long enough to make sure that Deanna was not just going to let Carol march in there and shoot Daniel. They she headed for her trailer. Morgan couldn't take her downstairs to see the man he had captive until that group of people was gone from the street in front of the infirmary building.
For now, that was fine with Rowan. She needed to check on her animals. And she needed to wash the blood off. Everytime she looked at the dark sticky fuild that was dried on her clothes and body, the sight of it made her want to start screaming. She wanted to scream and just keep screaming until everything around her went black again. But instead she forced herself to look ahead at where she was walking instead of down at the blood that was crusted all over her.
Enid was sitting near the firepit. She had already taken care of the animals while Rowan was in the infirmary, and Rowan gave her a grateful smile. Then she headed straight for the water barrel and started stripping off her bloody clothes, feeling the tears well up in her eyes. Enid appeared next to her with a bowl and two washrags. She handed one to Rowan and kept the other one in her own hand.
"Dunk your head in first," Enid suggested, "Its in your hair too." Rowan did as she was told, feeling more like she was the child and Enid was the mother. Once her hair was wet, Enid helped her wash it, and she helped Rowan get the blood off her face and back, where she couldn't see herself to know if she got it all. Once she was clean, Rowan felt cold and shivery, but so much better. She finally felt like she was able to breathe again without wanting to scream.
Shoving most of the water off her body with her hands, she wrung her hair out by twisting it into a long rope and squeezing it. Her hair would still stay wet for most of the day, but at least that got enough water out that it would not be dripping everywhere. In her trailer, she pulled on a pair of underpants and wrapped her fringed buckskin skirt around her waist. It was the warmest looking thing she could find. She put on a black tank top and then threw the buckskin vest on top of that to hide her nipples, which were hard and poking through the thin fabric of the tank top. Her crystal necklace was still around her neck. She didn't take it off to bathe.
The corner of Daryl's handkercheif was peeking out from under her pillow and Rowan snatched it up. Eager to feel the comfort of being close to him, she planned tie it loosely around her neck like a scarf. But once she had it in her hands, she had a sudden flash. Her wrists were bound tightly and she could feel the hard bark of a tree behind her back. As quickly as it had come, the feeling was gone. But it scared Rowan and made her really start worrying about Daryl. Rick already said if he wasn't back in the morning, they would go look for him. But to Rowan that seemed like a thousand years away from now. As she tied the hanky around her neck, she was thinking she might take the dogs out and look for the man herself.
Morgan had not been able to tell her who he had locked up, but he had described the man's injury. Rowan took what she needed from her trailer. Clean rags for bandages. Herbs for washing the wound out and packing it. Plus what she neeed to make a tea that would help with the pain and swelling. She also grabbed some dried travelling food. Whoever he was, there was no doubt he would be hungry.
Morgan was sitting on the steps of the infirmary, looking intentionally casual. He was waiting for Rowan, and making sure no one got any funny ideas about going in and killing the man with the broken ankle. When he saw Rowan, he got to his feet and walked quickly towards the locked door that led down into the small basement apartment where no one ever went. He looked around to be sure that no one was watching them, and then he opened the door and ushered her and the dogs inside before locking it behind them.
Rowan gripped her messanger bag. She could see a pair of long legs stretched out on the narrow mattress in the next room. But nothing could have prepared her for who those legs belonged to. As soon as Rowan entered the room, she dropped her bag, sending it to the floor with a thump. Then she started backing away, slamming into Morgan, who put his arm around her shoulders to steady her.
"I can't do this," she told him, her eyes opening wide with her fear and panic. Tank issued a low growl in his throat. The big dog was becoming less and less impressed with Morgan. The man had grabbed Rowan in the infirmary, and now he was scaring her.
"Why, who is that?," Morgan asked her. He had not seen Rowan react this way to any of the other former member of her group. Why was this man different? Rowan did not answer him, she just kept looking back and forth between him and the man on the mattress with a frightened look on her face. "It's alright," Morgan told her, trying to calm her down, "I won't allow him to hurt you. Just treat his wound and you can go."
Rowan's hand came up, grasping at the crystal that was hanging on her necklace. She took a few deep breaths. She could do this. She had to do this. Morgan thought she was afraid of Derek hurting her. And she was. But that was not the entire reason. Derek was very persuasive. And at once time she had loved him deeply. She knew he was going to try and talk her into going back and she didn't want to have to tell him no. That's why she had left the way she did, sneaking off silently without even a goodbye.
Reaching down, Rowan picked her bag back up. She told Morgan to get her some hot water going in the kitchen. There was a locked door between them and the kitchen, but he could get to it without going outside and risking being seen. Morgan nodded and left the room. Rowan knelt down next to the man, trying not to look at his face. Trying not to look at the aura around his head that was the same colors it had been the last time she saw him. The colors of the sunset, a little dimmer not that he was tired and hurt, but still the same blushing rainbow Rowan remembered.
She had forgotten how handsome Derek was. Maybe she had forced herself to forget. He had the type of skin that got nut brown in the summer, unlike hers that tended towards red under her freckles and peeling with sunburn. His facial features were strong and manly, high wide cheek bones and and prominent chin. The thin pointed nose that marked him clearly as being of native descent. His eyes were closed, but she knew when he opened them, they would be so dark they were almost black. Only the roughly carved W in the middle of his forehead served to mar his good looks.
The man had on a loose fitting green shirt, the belt Rowan knew he usually wore over his shirts to hold his weapons was gone. She wasn't sure if Morgan had taken it, or if Derek had to stop wearing it because of the injury on his side. The neckline of his shirt hung open, revealing his strong chest and the crystal he still had hanging around his neck. A gift Rowan had given him.
She pulled up the side of his shirt, sucking in her breath when she saw the filthy cloth, dark with dried blood and held into place with duct tape. Pulling as gently as she could, Rowan removed the tape and the crusty rag so she could get a look at the wound underneath. It was not a bite, as she feared it might be. Bites did not always turn her people, they seemed to have some natural immunities to whatever sickness caused the plague. But they could still fester and give the person a nasty infection if they were not cleaned out properly right away.
The wound was a cut, long and deep. She guessed the man had been cut with a knife or fallen against something sharp. It was red and the skin was warm to the touch around the edges, so Rowan knew she would have to draw the infection out first, before the wound could be stiched and left to heal. She put a handful of marigold petals and a few cloves of dried garlic in a bowl to wait for the hot water Morgan was bringing. That would be used to rinse out the wound. She would then pack it with more healing herbs to draw out the infection and give him some tea to drink to help with the pain and swelling. She got the items to make the tea out and put them in a different bowl.
Derek started to wake up. He let out a soft moan, rolling on to his injured side before Rowan could stop him, and then yelpling in pain. He rolled back onto his back and his eyes blinked open. Unlike the other men from her old group, that had been afraid of her at first, Derek only smiled when he saw Rowan. He reached for her face, realized his hands were still tied together and put them back down.
"My side hurts too bad for me to be dead," he said. His voice was deep and soft when he spoke to her, it was his bedroom voice. The one he only used when he spoke to her, and only when they were alone together. "So you must really be here." Rowan sat back on her heels, saying nothing to him. She had so many thoughts floating around in her mind, but could not put together a full sentence if her life depended on it.
"Hekaza," he said, his voice so soft it was almost pleading now.
"I don't go by that name anymore," she said, finally finding her voice.
"That's fine," he said, "I will call you anything you like. Rowan. Nizhoni..." Hekaza was Rowan's Indian name. It meant little deer. People, especially her father, liked to call her that because of her freckles. He thought they looked like the spots on the back flanks of a baby deer. Plus her big eyes and the way she ran away at the first sign of trouble, all added to the notion that she was deer-like. But Derek didn't call her that, he called her Nizhoni, or Honi for short. It meant beautiful in Sioux.
"Rowan is fine," she said, not wanting to be drawn down the path he was trying to take her. She could feel her hands shaking and she lifted them up, nervously tucking the loose strands of hair behind her ears. The tears were there, threatening to spill over and wet her cheeks. Blinking most of them back, she wiped the ones that slipped out with the back of her hand.
"I'm sorry," Derek told her then, his voice as shaky as she felt, "I just thought once you had my baby growing inside you, that you would forget about what happened and love me again." Taking that baby Rowan found from her and getting rid of it had been a terrible mistake. Her father told him to do it, and everyone was afraid of what would happen if they went against Grey Wolf. Especially Derek, who was scared the man would take Rowan away from him. In the end it had been listening to the man that caused Derek to lose the woman he loved, not disobeying him. After that day with the baby, things had never been the same between them.
"I did have your baby inside me," Rowan said, unable to stop the words that were spilling out of her, "that's why I left." The pain spread across his face like a cancer.
"Was it a boy, a girl, can I see it?," he pleaded, trying to get into a sitting position depsite his injury and the fact that his hands were bound. Rowan shook her head, placing one hand on his chest and pushing him back down against the mattress. The way he was moving about was not helping the weeping wound on his side.
"I lost it out on the road." That was the only explanation she offered. As angry as she still was with Derek, she could not bring herself to tell him that she made herself a strong tea and drank it to kill the life he had started growing inside her. She had been so full of anger and hate at the time, thinking of how he had forced himself on her. And she had also been afraid. Afraid of being pregnant and alone out there in the beyond. Afraid of having to watch her baby be devoured by the dead. Afraid of so many terrible things that she couldn't even begin to describe them even now.
"What's going on with the mark on your head?," Rowan asked. She had seen the same letter carved into the men's heads. Those had not been there the last time she saw them.
"Grey Wolf did it," Derek told her. Calling the man by that name meant Derek was speaking of him as the leader of the pack, not as Rowan's father. "After you left. Said he was marking us as part of the pack."
"...but really he was trying to make sure if people left they would have a harder time finding another group to take them in," Rowan said. Derek narrowed his eyes at her. What she said was true, but he was not yet ready to hear it. He looked at Rowan's father with something close to godlike worship. Derek never knew his father, and Grey Wolf had given him the love and sense of belonging that he had never had as a child. That's why he had refused to leave the group with Rowan when she asked him. That had been back before things went sour and ugly between them. And then it had been too late.
Thankfully, Morgan chose that moment to come back into the room with the kettle of boiling water. Rowan busied herself making the wash for Derek's wound and making the tea for his pain, her hands moving so quickly they looked like they were dancing. He was putting on a brave face, but she knew him well enough to know he was in a lot of pain. Morgan watched them both. The man had been making a lot of violent threats when Morgan spoke to him before. This was the first time he had seen any real emotion on the man's face and it gave him hope that maybe the man could come back from wherever this world had taken him.
"You two were part of the same group?," Morgan asked the man, hoping to open up some constructive dialogue.
"She's my wife," the man informed him, giving Morgan the same threatening look he had been giving him before. If Derek found out any of these fucking Wasichu had laid a hand on Rowan, that man would be losing that hand.
"Was," Rowan added, "I was his wife." She said the words with conviction and a new strength that Derek did not recognize from the time he knew her before.
"You still are," Derek insisted. Rowan running away didn't change the fact that they were married. Her father had performed the ceremony himself. And she had said yes. She wasn't allowed to just change her mind.
"Do you want your cut cleaned out or not?," Rowan asked the man. She was quickly remembering the reasons why she had wanted to get away from him. And she was not having this stupid argument. If you could get married in the woods, then you could get divorced there too. And like that stupid song that Enid liked to listen to said, they were never ever getting back together.
Derek lay back. He was not enthused with the way Rowan was talking to him, but he did want the horribly painful cut on his side taken care of. When he was feeling better, and he and Rowan were well away from this place, then he would have a little chat with her about her newfound smart mouth attitude.
** I know the Taylor Swift song came out after the timeline for the apoclypse started on the show, but I used it anyway. After all the literature quotes and greek myths, I thought it would be fun to throw in a little pop culture reference. Thanks to anyone that took the time to leave a review and welcome to my new followers on this story. If anyone wants a visual on what Derek looks like I was looking at pictures of the actor that played Uncas in Last of the Mohicans, he was the brother to the main character in the movie. **
