Part One
He feels like he's had a headache since the day he went to Atlanta with that quarry group. It started when he'd first had to listen to that whiny blonde bitch panic all the way into the city, and at the times when she'd finally taken a breath, the gringo bastard was shooting orders left and right. He'd never been good at following orders—was better at giving them than putting up with assholes that thought they could tell him what to do.
Merle had never intended on playing nice with those people. He'd had one plan and one plan only in going on that trip. He wanted to breathe away from them all and those kidsat the camp, and he'd wanted to find some stuff to round out his stash. That plan had gone all to fuck the second Officer Friendly had crashed into their little party, and brought the butt of Merle's own rifle down on the back of his head. Headache. Exposure, sunstroke, thirst, sawing through flesh, tendons, bone, more headache. And now Woodbury seemed to be the biggest headache of all.
Some days, being an upstanding, solid citizen of Woodbury almost pushes him into considering splitting his own head wide open. It horrifies him the things a man has to be willing to do to save his own neck in this town. Merle has become quite practised at blocking it all out, finding other pleasures in the place to distract him from the shitty life choice that has been forced upon him. Most of the day his strategy works like a charm, but at night…at night he always seems to go to his place alone, unless he's scheduled to be on watch. Some days he makes sure he's on watch, just for the sheer relief to not be left alone with his own thoughts. With his own demons. Demons are no fucking good to him when he has nothing to blot out their roar. The Governor runs a clean ship—and that means no fun for Merle. Nothing to take the edge off, nothing to give him a little of the sweet life he's missed ever since he made the stupid decision to separate from his brother. It's nights like these, when his head is thumping and his body is wired ready to pounce and brutally tear down the first sonovabitch that dares to cross him, that he craves his lost stash with a desperation that makes him quiver.
The throbbing of his brain swelling too big for his skull at least serves the purpose of blinding him to the memories that keep building upon themselves as he stays within the walls of the town. Not all of the fuckers are bad, but even the good ones sometimes hurt too much like a sonovabitch to be welcome. The good ones unleash a longing inside him so deep and painful that he usually has to resort to something fierce to distract him, like a fight—something that rarely goes down well with the Governor—to carry the agony of it away. It shuts out the determination of his brain sometimes to wonder if Daryl had even gone looking for him or if his little brother had felt something like sweet relief to see the back of him. He knew he'd been no prince to be around, but they were blood, and no matter how fucked up Merle always seemed to be, Daryl somehow managed to hold all their shit together. It was a fucking marvel, and one that Merle feels he should acknowledge, but the shooting, splitting pain that brings him back to the here and now without any compassion for what he is leaving behind reminds him how dangerous it is to think too hard about all he's lost.
He is standing on the wall now, peering out at the darkness and trying to convince himself he doesn't feel the pain that starts to clamp around his skull. His day refuses to stop flashing through his head on repeat, stalling at certain moments when all he wants to do is forget it completely. His shift is almost at an end and he can already feel the tension roiling in his gut, his muscles stressed for the inevitable wind-down time that never quite works to his advantage. He is wishing for biters, a herd of the fuckers, just so he has something else to fight, to take his mind on a wander that isn't in his own head.
"Yo, Merle. Get your ass down here. Game's starting in ten." Martinez grins up at him and Merle treats him to a typical Merle-like glare.
"You pricks got anythin' decent you're playin' for? If all's you got is snickerdoodles, then I'm out."
Martinez chuckles, thrusts his hand in his coat pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, shaking it enticingly. Merle can barely even get excited. The buzz he gets from nicotine is so short lived it's hardly worth the waste of his time to clown around for a few hours with these bozos. He finds that kicking his drug habit has strangely encompassed the smokes as well. If he has any it makes the craving for other shit all the more intense.
"Nope. Try again, motherfucker." He turns back to look beyond the wall, sighing in frustration when it remains walker-free.
"How 'bout this?" Martinez holds up what looks like a delicate, gold chain and Merle chokes on the bile that surges in his throat. Last time he's seen that chain it had been adorning the neck of a woman—her terrified, caramel-coloured eyes burning into him as she begged him not to hurt her. Not to hurt her little boy.
"The fuck would I do with that?" The bile is there in his mouth, burning his tongue and his throat and the guilt of it all scratches away at his brain. Trying to distance himself, distract himself, he spits over the wall.
"You could get yourself a woman," Martinez suggests lewdly, his hips gyrating in a way that Merle would once have said was a rip off of his own crude moves. Tonight, it just pisses him off to see someone else act so tough and badass when he isn't feeling it himself.
"Havin' a woman's nothin' but a pain in the ass," he declares, and feels uncharacteristic exhaustion settle over him all of a sudden. "Hell, just go. Think I'm comin' down with somethin' anyways. Gonna hit the sack and see if I can shake it off."
Martinez laughs as if Merle has just said the funniest thing he's ever heard. "Maybe you gonna shake somethin' else off, man?"
It's a good thing the asshole doesn't hang around for a reply, Merle thinks, as the pounding in his head gets worse. He thinks he's slipping. Not so long ago having a warm woman to pound into would have set his world to rights, as long as he also had his bike, his buddies and his pile of coke, he'd have been a pretty happy and satisfied man. This zombie apocalypse has fucked up all sorts of things, not just his creature comforts. No, it's fucking with his head, in the way that thinks about things, in the way he is comfortable with life.
He jumps down from the wall as soon as the change of shift arrives, nodding unseeing at the few figures still wandering the streets as curfew kicks in. He should have agreed to the card game, should have agreed to kill a few more hours of his night with meaningless shit, but already he knows it wouldn't have helped. He is about to be bombarded with visions of red—death, greed, depravity—and seeing it reflected as barter or winnings for a good hand of cards would engrave the wound even deeper on his soul.
His room is in a building directly opposite from the Governor's. At first Merle figured it had been the first spare room available, but since then he's come to realise that the Governor likes to watch his minions at every opportunity. Merle has always hated being watched, hated being observed, and it rubs him wrong something awful to know the Governor's beady eyes can track his every move from his own fucking home just by staring out his window while pretending to keep an official eye on the town.
His space is sparse—kitchenette and table with two chairs, a bed barely walled off from a small living room and his own bathroom. It was a palace compared to the tent he'd shared with Daryl at the quarry, but it's lonely, too. He hates being alone. His skin prickles with it, knowing exactly the kind of fucked up shit he has a reputation for sinking into when he's alone. Hell, he knows the kind of fucked up shit he gets up to when he's surrounded by people so when he's alone the stakes are merely raised to higher levels of total shit.
The Governor at least allows them alcohol to let their hair down, and Merle's impressive stash of bottles are emptier than most as he struggles nightly with the ghosts that like to haunt him. He could have won some tonight, if he'd gone to the game, and faced with a depleted supply of courage, he moans at what he will now have to face head on and completely sober.
The chair squawks as he twists and straddles it, his face buried in his arms as his knife attachment skims the table top. And then it plays out, the review of his day like the movies he has no chance of ever seeing again, though this one is horrifically vivid and not some made up story with a sappy ending. This one is a horror story that makes his own blood run cold, and he's played a leading role in it.
His first run after his arm had healed and he'd regained his strength and vigour, Merle had been shocked that the man behind the face of the town's leadership would be so hands on. Not only was it surprising that he would be right in the middle of possible walker herds, Merle was almost knocked over backwards when the man suddenly attacked the living, ruthlessly killing in order to take supplies, claiming their own need to be far stronger than the few scattered but surviving elderly, or those too weak to protect themselves, or those too strong to be anything but a threat. But the first time Merle sees Phillip Blake as the monster that he is, is when he put a gun against a child's head and didn't even blink when he pulled the trigger. His grin had been cruel as he then turned the gun to the screaming mother and repeated it like it was some kind of game. Merle had almost lost it then and there, but years of self-preservation had taught him how to make his heart slow against threats, how to harden his face so no one could see how he thought or felt.
The movie reel is moving faster, merging and fading before surging again in his mind's eye in liquid colour, bleeding into his brain. His body shudders with revulsion, seeing again the woman today, crying hard and hopeless as she held her little boy tight to her chest, her head shaking frantically no as the Governor and his boys beat the shit out of her husband and brother. Merle was left the task to take out the woman and her child but thankfully the noise from the others had attracted walkers and he left the store where this poor, doomed group had held up in before they'd come across them. The Governor could have offered them sanctuary—could have taken the half-starved group to Woodbury, fed them up and given them shelter and safety. Taken their loyalty. They had no food, but they'd had guns. Lots of them. Lots of ammunition as well, and so with greed thrumming through his blood, the Governor did what the Governor always does. He took, wreaking vengeance on those that had the misfortune of possessing what he wanted until he's wiped out the light from another human being.
Merle had taken out eight walkers in the street, purging their new world of the perceived undead threat while feeling sick at being under the thumb of the threat that was real, and dangerous, and sick as a motherfucker. He'd wanted to vomit the second the two quick shots rang out, the acid burning him from the inside, but before he could turn the corner, the Governor, Martinez and the others were out of the store, their haul carried immediately to their truck. The Governor looked at the sprawl of dead biters on the sidewalk and nodded, grinning his thanks to Merle for keeping them safe and the only thing Merle really wanted to do was bury his knife in the asshole's eye until it speared through his brain.
Instead, he acknowledged the silent approval with a jerk of his head and returned to the truck, his face solemn and stern, doing nothing to give away how sick he felt about what these people do, knowing that anyone that took the time or effort to realise what was going on around them would quickly consider him a part of it. And he wouldn't be able to blame them.
He can handle taking a life if it's needed. But women and kids…it's wrong. He knows it and can't justify it, no matter how hard he tries.
He raises his head from his arms and stares across the room into the darkened space of his kitchen, his eyes blurred from tears he refuses to acknowledge. He could leave this place, but then what? Where would he go? The only place he wants to be is with his brother, and he's got shit all chance of finding Daryl now. The Governor won't let him scout outside of the regular runs, won't let him go out on his own and so far Merle has found no sign of his little brother or any of the others from the Atlanta group. For the fuckers that left him up there to die it's a good thing, he wants to kill every last one of them. They left him to this, this half-life filled with poison and indifference and evil. They took away his brother, his miserable fucked up existence, the one where no one got hurt but himself. In this place, everyone gets hurt—even if they don't know it—and he hates every twisted minute of it.
The knock at the door is quiet, hesitant, and Merle jerks himself upright away from the chair, an angry hand swiping away all evidence of his distress before he stomps to the door and flings it open. She's standing there, again, like some kind of stalker that just won't get a clue.
"Thought you might like some supper after your watch. Martinez said you thought you were comin' down with somethin'."
She's pretty, he'll give her that, and he has no clue why she seems to be interested in him. Another day he might have invited her in, might have had a real good time trying to convince her to let him fuck her, but today isn't that day, not when he has another woman's death on his conscience, and that of her little boy.
"The hell you doin' wanderin' around after curfew?" Merle reaches forward, snatching the plate she's got covered with foil with only a grudging 'thanks' slipping past his frowning lips.
"The Governor said it would be okay, just this once." She smiles sweetly at him and Merle wishes he could smile back, wishes he could just take what she plainly wants to offer him, but tonight his soul is too sick for their usual flirting.
"Thanks for the food, but you should get your ass back home."
Her smile slips and he thinks, 'good', like he wants to hurt her even though she's never done anything but try to make him feel like he's more than he is. He knows the pickings are slim in this small world they've been left in, but he's still not the kind of man she should be aiming her shining eyes at. Especially when he's not even interested in anything that would be more than a one time deal.
"I thought maybe we could…"
"What?" His tone is harsh, impatient and she takes a step back, one hand at her throat while the other attempts to smooth over her blonde, curly locks.
"Talk. We could talk, or…or…"
"Or?" Merle's control is snapping, synapses sparking in his brain so violently it's making his head spin. "Darlin', you stay here one minute longer an' I'm gonna fuck you against this wall then throw you out on your pretty little ass. That's the only 'or' I got in me right now, so you best be on your way before I show you how much I really am that man you keep insistin' I'm not."
She squeaks, horror making her back away quickly before turning on her heel to flee.
"Oh, an' Eva?"
She turns back hesitantly, and Merle takes sadistic pleasure in the fact that he's made her afraid of him at last. "Don' come round here again after curfew, even if the Governor says it's okay."
He steps back into the room and slams the door, collapsing against it, warm plate still clutched in his hand. Four strides across the room he throws it onto the counter and heads for bed. That woman cooks food for the soul. Tonight, his soul isn't hungry.
AN…I've gone back through and edited, added bits, changed bits on this chapter so many times I don't know if I'm coming or going. My experiment in the last fic with my writing style seems to have really screwed with my head, so if you pick up any major issues with this, please let me know. In the meantime, I'm seriously keen for feedback ;)