2. Butterflies

She really meant just to kiss him.

Just a kiss, innocent enough. A balm for the aching hole in her chest that grew like a split in the earth after watching love work out for someone else. It always seemed to work so well for someone – anyone – else.

Rick was a good man. Handsome. Kind. Completely insane. Aggravating in all the right ways. It was early on she decided that, if it was going to be anyone, it would be him.

And it was.

What struck her was his gentleness.

She'd watched him before, sweat and blood dripping down his face like rain, as he wielded knives and rifles and grit his teeth against the recoil as he fought to kill, but always to protect. Could never forget the way her skin screamed when he prodded her thigh where the bullet had shorn her. In his violence, he'd shown her what it meant to pose a danger to what was his. And, somehow, she came to stand not on the other side of his rage, but beside him in his fight.

Because there was always another fight.

But, standing there with him in the last slice of sunlight as the day began to die, those same hands she'd seen stab and crush and kill were soft when they touched her. Soft as he cradled the back of her neck. Melted so soft down the shoulder he'd asked to dress til his fingers painted her wrist and made a home in the heat of her palm. He touched her with all the tenderness of dandelion cotton, blown by the wind to land warm and welcome on her skin.

Hesitation, she expected. Total denial followed by angry condemnation and a slow death by withering to their friendship, she had all but prepared for. If it weren't for the wedding and the wine, she might not have done it at all. That his hands would be work worn and rough, she knew just by looking. But that they would be kind when they held her – that was a surprise.

And then it wasn't just a kiss anymore.

Summer sun burns the tarmac. It cooks the roof, crumbling as it is, and the pitch black pathway that winds like a river through bamboo and dogwood. Leaves shaped like spearheads bleach and curl their ends under the sun's eye, and it's all they can do to keep moving; not to burn alongside them.

She leaps over a barricade's edge and, for a moment, her palm shrieks on the hot cement. A walker swats at her ankle with a bony hand, its torso welded to the ground. She caves in its skull with her heel, then crouches over the body to search.

"Daryl and Sasha are on guns," Rick offers his advice, unasked for. "We should keep movin'."

"You never know, Rick." Her lips purse to keep from smiling – because or in spite of him, she doesn't know. "Could be a key or the bullet that saves your life on one of these things."

Coat pockets empty, she moves onto the pants. A martial nightmare of olive drab canvas and rotten flesh fused like cheese to cast iron. She wrinkles her nose, but keeps on.

"Or a whole lotta nothin' but burnt daylight." His shadow lays over her back, a cool reprieve from the heat. She can tell from the shape it makes on the blacktop that his hands are on his hips, one on the grip of his pistol, as always. Impatient. "C'mon. I'on like you bein' out in the open with this much visibility."

"One second…" she says into her bitten lip. The telltale bell of keys clinking together like coins in a jar stokes a triumphant laugh. She tears the keyring through its belt loop perch and wears it on her finger. "Hah. See?"

"Alright," Rick rolls his eyes and turns back up the path, the shadow of a smile at the corner of his mouth. He waits for her to fall in step at his side. "What'cha got?"

She pinches each key between her fingers. "Hm, tiger enclosure, alligator enclosure, cafeteria, concert hall, infirmary – ooh, butterfly sanctuary."

"We should hit the infirmary first, then the cafeteria on our way back to the front. If there's time, we could check the concert hall for clothes n' things to bed down with. Think they used that as a barracks." He catches her expectant look out the corner of his eye. Incredulous and a little playful, he asks, "An' I s'pose you wanna go see the butterflies."

Two crows break from the boughs of a magnolia tree and streak across the sky. Petals rain like crashing paper planes. Sunlight plays on crow feathers like silky rainbow rings on oil. Their flight, intertwined and unrehearsed with fallen flowers in their wake, might be the closest she'll ever get to watching planes take off. A gift and a loss.

She watches just to keep from looking at him. "Only if we have time."

His hand was warm as he let himself be moved. She took him by the wrist, metal watch band cool against her skin. Rough fingertips coasted down the swell of her chest, the valley where her ribs parted, and settled, unsure, just beneath her shirt's hem. She breathed in and felt as it filled his hand. Watched him study her a moment. Maybe two.

"It's okay if I…?" He asked on shaken breath.

She nodded.

And she watched his wrist disappear under the fabric. Felt his fingers push beneath the underwire, shove the cup aside, and engulf her with his touch. Felt the rhythmic knead of his thumb. Felt his breath hitch and stutter in his throat, stifled by their kiss. Felt his absence on her chest and on her lips the moment he pulled away to slide that strap off and leave her nearly naked on the window sill.

"You're beautiful." She heard him say somewhere between his mouth on hers and the fingers chasing her vertebrae up to the clasp of her bra.

Hook and eye parted ways and left her bare before him. His breath spilled warm on her chest. Shoulders pitched beneath his linen shirt, they rose and fell as he watched her. Brow knotted. Scant light skimmed across his wet lower lip, mouth open.

He looked at her like he could die, and kissed her just as desperately.

Then he was on her like shadow. Like the very color of her skin, inseparable from her flesh itself and all the ways it blanketed her body. Like he was born between her cells, filling the gaps she couldn't see. With his hands and with his mouth, he drew a map of her bones, muscle, and skin. Everything the dying light could touch and everything it didn't.

Night air danced in through the bullet holes in the window pane and cooled the sketch his tongue made on her neck from jaw to collarbone. Cast a spell and goosebumps rose under the hay needles of his beard upon her breast. Rough hands squeeze her where she's softest. Fingernail half moons on her chest and beneath her denim jeans.

She took him by the wrist once more to guide him. Down, the flat of his hand ghosted over her ribs, over her belly. Down, his fingertips at the denim seam. Down til they brushed the brass button closure.

And, this time, there were no questions. No twilight in his eyes as he looked up at her to ask permission. He didn't ask.

He didn't need to.

It was his thumb that pushed the button through the eyehole. They were his hands through the belt loops, pulling the last of the clothes from her body. The warmth of his hand glowed on her low belly as he slid beneath thin floral cotton and sighed into her mouth as she drowned his fingers between her legs.

"Fuck," he hissed into her lips and curled against her.

The dead chased them in here.

Writhing masses darken the frosty plexiglass windows like campfire shadows splashed in the dirt. Black silhouetted fingers streak across the canvas, painting red wherever they reach. This strange, forgotten little room with its hand painted mural of azaleas and Cherokee roses and butterfly wings big enough to lose herself in makes as good a screen as any for the shadow play of hungry hands outside the doors.

"You okay?" He asks, sliding a metal pipe between the door handles and testing his weight against it.

"Yeah," she wanders to another set of doors. No windows. No handles. She leans back to inspect the wall. No signage, either. Glancing over her shoulder, she finds him standing close by. She looks him over. "You?"

"My heart'll catch up with me eventually. Matter a' time before Sasha and Daryl start firing shots. Should draw 'em away." He tips his chin toward the doors with a hard stare. "That our way out?"

She shrugs. "Gonna have to be."

"Good call with the keys." Rick drags his hand across her bare shoulder and steps in front of her. His back spreads broad before her, a tapestry of bloodstained denim. She watches her shadow drape across his shoulder blades and tease the fine curls at the nape of his neck. He tightens his fingers round the handle of his hatchet. "Stay close."

He kicks the doors open and the room on the other side makes itself known with a wet and hazy sigh. Water drums a slow song as it spills over a rock into a small pool. Overgrown grasses and ferns cry dew drops into the earth. A tangled mess of lazy vines climb tree trunks big enough to step inside up to a domed glass ceiling. Silvery veins between the window panes cast checkerboard shadow down through the canopy, over ripe fruit and flowers, through the fine, hot mists of a captive rainforest to streak across Rick's shoulders. And on every lush, living part of it – butterflies.

Like wildflowers after rain. Every shape, every color, beating paper wings against the thick, wet air to live and die in a green glass cage, untouched by the dead. One floats in Rick's orbit as he makes his way down what's left of the footpath. Bright blue, like the surface of a still lake in spring. Like his eyes; pale blue with the hope of a new day and the sorrow of the one that came before it.

Part of her – the part that comes alive when they're alone – hopes it'll land on him. That it'll choose him, bloodstains and bruises, dark circles and all. That maybe he would notice it and the river worn lines around his mouth might soften for a little while.

"Oh, we should've brought Carl," A smile twirls her words like curls around around an idle finger. "He would've loved this."

"Would he?"

"Yeah," She looks at him over her shoulder. Curious. "He told me he's really into the concept of life and death right now – how old things have to end so new things can begin." Watching Rick's face decay from intrigue to disgust, she laughs. "Not in those words."

"Yeah, well, that interest a' his is one of the reasons he ain't comin'," his mouth is a tight line pulling at the hollows of his cheeks. "I'on't want 'im goin' on runs anymore."

"So he's grounded?"

Rick walks past her. The rough fabric of his button down brushes her naked shoulder. She cooks in the heat he leaves behind.

"Yeah," he says, raising the hatchet to the air as he checks around the bend.

"How long?"

"Til I say he ain't."

"Indefinitely?"

He nods. "S'what I said."

At some point, her boots met the concrete and slept there underneath her jeans until she came back to them and realty.

He held her in his arms with her back pressed into the window pane, her chest to his. She felt the muscles pull at his forearm beneath his naked skin. The fine hair on his outer arm tickled her thigh as he molded his hand to the shape of her. The thick part at the base of his thumb rocked against her as his fingers drummed from the inside.

It had been years since she heard her voice fill a room, tangled with the moans and heavy breathing of a man who dismantled her. Felt almost as strange as it felt good. His heart thundered percussive against her cheek. That big, destructive hand found its place at the back of her neck and held her to his chest like she was his. Tendons strained against his wrist. Fingers curled. She crossed her ankles behind his back and tilted her hips up into his hand.

Part of her wanted him to hold her. Wanted to be his. Wanted to forget there was ever a time before the dust dark glass at her back and the heart that beat through bone and flesh and linen just to touch her cheek. That part of her wanted to take his jaw in her hands and hold it like a broken winged bird – to bring his panting lips to hers and heal them both like it was all so easy. Like, then, it'd all be over. To lose their losses in each other.

But the other part of her knew how thin that line was. How steep the fall. How permanent, the damage. How she could never come back if she were to look in those eyes and kiss that mouth as the moon rose over the treeline to paint sharp and pretty shapes on his face as he looked at her, wounded and wanting, like she was a dream.

So, with shaking hands, she unbuttoned his shirt and spread her fingers across his naked chest. Felt the tension that lived there as he worked between her legs. Felt his heart in her hand as the world caved in.

She smothered a scream in his chest. Wrapped her legs around his waist and held him close. She grasped at his back with blind and dying fingers and raked them down. Towed her fingernails til she could feel his skin curl underneath them like strips of birch bark.

And while the world may have ended, he showed her, on the ends of his fingertips, that she hadn't.

"So how long are you gon' make me wait before we talk about this?"

Her face feels like static on an old tv. The feeling creeps down her arms and fills her fingertips, poison in her blood that sinks a little deeper with every heartbeat.

"Michonne."

She turns to look at him. The hilt of her sword sears its shape into her hand, fingers bound to it like roots.

The hollows of his eyes are blue-violet, life's pinkish reds worn away by time and sleeplessness like a sandstone cliff beaten back by the sea. His fingers bind into fists then release at his sides. Tension with no place else to go, so it lives in his hands. His eyes are two cloudless days, powerless but to watch her beneath a wrinkled brow. He's beautiful and menacing, standing there in the shaft of light spilling in through a roof made of glass.

"We been playin' business as usual all day," he tells her, "I don't want to, no more."

"Why?"

"'Why'?" His face fractures like a mirror under a crowbar's teeth. He steals closer. "'Cause last night, you an' I, we changed things between us. I feel it. N' you're pretendin' now, but I know you feel it too."

"Is that a problem for you?" She watches sunlight play in the sheen of sweat on his forehead, so confounded by what she has to say and what she doesn't. "That things changed?"

"What? I- no. My problem is tryna act like they didn't."

"Oh, I see. This is because we didn't-"

"You're not hearin' me."

"I'm not pregnant, Rick."

"That's a whole other thing, Michonne."

"Even if I was, I wouldn't know for sure until a week or two-"

"It ain't about that."

"What's it about, then?" She glares up at him. "That we had sex? We were drinking. Feeling sad – I'm sorry, I was sad." She raises her open hand toward him, fingernails obscuring the folds of his shirt. "You were fine, right? That's what you said."

Why does he look so wounded? Standing there, sweat slick curls clinging to his forehead like seaweed on limestone. Ocean blue eyes, wild and wet and unrested as they watch her. He swallows. Throat bobs beneath the graying bristles of his beard.

If he had anything to say, he just drowned it.

Her shoulders fall. "Look. It doesn't have to mean anything." She shakes her head and paces to purge some of the awful energy building up in her chest. "It was one night. I'm not your wife; I'm not your girlfriend. You're not obligated to-"

"You think I feel obligated?" There's hurt in those eyes as he takes a step toward her. "You think I'm talkin' to you 'cause I feel like I have to? That's what you think?"

Her silence, his answer.

Another step closer just to tell her, "I did what I did 'cause I wanted to." He holds her gaze and shakes his head. "Not because of the weddin'. Not the wine. No obligations. I was with you 'cause I wanted to be." His draws his hand over his lips and tears his attention from her to somewhere, anywhere, else. "I still..."

Tin cans and pill bottles crash against one another, muffled by the thickness of standard issue military canvas as her duffel bag hits the flagstone. The sound and its suddenness pulls Rick's attention to her feet. Her sword slides into its sheath to join it. She fingers the hem of her tank top, tugs it overhead, and lets it fall. The little brass button on her jeans presses its shape into her thumb. Her boots slide off one after the other.

She can feel him watching her. Even as she turns her back to him in favor of the water, she can feel the intensity of those eyes. She peels the denim down her hips to feel the sun on her bare skin just like she feels his gaze run like wet paint down her back. She steps her naked feet out of the pool of clothes and into the grass. Flexes her toes against the soft, dark soil, and breathes that heavy, humid air.

"What are you doin'?" He asks in a voice like sandpaper. Coarse and dry.

Her locs spill over her shoulder as she looks back at him. "You were saying you still wanted to." Hands behind her back, reaching blind for the clasp of her bra. "Right?"

He swallows. His fingers flex at the lip of his holster's belt. "...Right."

"So…?" She tips her head toward the cool, black water. "Come here."

And his hands eclipse hers between her shoulder blades.

Part of her wants this time to be different. Wants him not to look at her the way he does – like she's the sun and he's just a tree. Like all he knows how to do – all he can do – is bend and bend and bend to her.

But he does.

He takes what's left of the clothes on her body and lets them fall to the earth. Struggles blind with his holster as he walks with her to the water's edge, caught in a kiss he won't be the one to break. His belt buckle gives. Brass button free. Then the zipper.

It's her hands chasing buttons down his shirt. Her eager, shaking fingers that push the denim over his shoulders and smooth over his shoulders, his biceps, his forearms to give the last of his clothes to the ground so she can have him the way she wants to. Those are her fingernails scraping criss-crosses in his chest hair as they step into the water, entangled once again. The downpour of cool water warps their image, but those are her hands tangled in his hair. Her hands that come together under falling water to cradle his jaw and deliver him back into her kiss.

He reaches down between them and sighs into her mouth. His fingers implore, soft and needy between her legs. Her answer, to warm his waist with a raised thigh. His other hand goes to hold her there, water chasing itself over the hills, cliffs, and valleys of their braided bodies.

And just like he did as night fell on the watchtower, he takes her in his arms and brings her to her end. The sound of his breath, desperate and heady, the underscore to the piercing cry she screams into his neck. He paints her thighs with the mess she made of his fingers and takes hold, raising her from the water, the earth, the air, and into his hands.

The tip of his nose scrapes her cheek, his brow to hers. Every breath, a half whispered prayer into her lips. His fingers press sand dollar shadows into her hips, trembling as they hold her suspended above his hips.

"Y…you," he breathes, "You want me to-"

"Don't stop," she answers.

And, like the water spilling through the gaps in the rock overhead, like her naked hips in his hands in the light of the moon as he held her above him, sitting on an old metal folding chair in a prison watchtower, wine long forgotten, he digs into her with his fingernails, closes her lip between his teeth, and drives her down onto him.

She is full. Chest full, just one breath shared between them. Mouth full with his kiss, with his voice. Hands full with his face, his beard scraping her palms and inner wrists. Her body, full with as much of him as he's willing to give.

The other part of her knows it can't be anything else. Knows that the cliff is far behind her already as she speaks his name like a mantra into his open mouth, as she rocks her hips into him from the beds of his hands, as he holds her so softly and kisses her lips, chin, cheeks, her nose, her forehead, her collar bone – anywhere she is, his lips will be. How silly of her to try. To believe it could ever just be a kiss.

He's pressing down on her low back with the flat of one hand. Just like he did at the watchtower. She pulls back to look at him – to see the roses on his cheeks and the twisted knot in his brow and watch his eyes come alive to look back at her. Sweat bleeds from his temple down his cheek into her fingers. There's that same look in his eyes. Something at the intersection of joy and pain and having been lost, of being found. He parts his lips to say her name, and it's all she can do just to kiss him. He's close.

Those big, killing hands carry her to the water's edge and lay her down on the grass. He climbs on top of her. Rests as her thighs fall apart. He brushes the locs from her face with his fingers, loses himself in her lips, and sinks, deep and slow between her legs.

Her hips rise to meet him as the sun burns the water from her skin. Some of it falls to her cheeks from the ends of his water dark curls. He shrouds her in his arms, fingers buried in the rich red earth at her back. She whimpers, bathed in his shadow. Unable, unwilling, to look away as his eyelids fall closed. His chest rises and rises and rises til it meets her. His breath comes strangled and desperate and he throws his head back, anchors his hands on her bare skin, and moans his relief as he leaves her empty, spilling out on her thighs.

"Thank you," he says in that low, coffee grounds voice he has after using it to shake the walls. Softened by fresh water, he runs his hands over her thighs to wash them.

"You said that last time."

The sky rises under his eyelashes for him to meet her gaze. "Meant it then, too."

"I get something out of it, too." Hand curled under her chin, she watches him. Water spills through his cupped hands and weeps down her skin. "You don't have to thank me."

He shakes his head with a smile. "Believe me, I do."

His gaze travels from her rippled reflection in the water up her ankle, cresting her bent knee down to the valley of her hips, over the swell of her chest and her lips to rest softly, finally, at her eyes. Wet curls cling to his forehead, obscuring the creases that live there as he considers her. She reaches out to push them aside, and he leans into her hand.

"What time is it?" He gently asks.

It's a moment before she can tear herself away from his eyes. She pulls aside his clothes to see herself in the face of his watch. Kissed and sun dappled and naked. Happier, maybe, than she's ever seen herself before. She blinks past her reflection and calls back to him. "Quarter to three."

"Shit," he sighs, fingers sinking into her thighs. "We gotta get back."

Big hands drag across her skin and take their warmth with them. He steps into the heap of clothes and tugs his boxers up with the hands that touched and took and held her. He tosses her her tank top.

Thick black denim hides his naked body from her, inch by inch. First the knotted muscle of his calves, then his thighs. His hips, gone with the snap of a button. She follows the climbing ivy of thin, dark hair curling up from the lip of his jeans over his navel, up his stomach and blossoming on his chest. Still red from her attention.

He catches her looking.

"Listen, Michonne. I-" His chest rises with caution. Harsh strings of shadow pull at his neck. He swallows. Eyes soft in the asking, "How do we do this again?"

She rises from the waterbank to stand at his side, turned naked toward the sun. Where she goes, his eyes follow. Dew drops of perspiration gather on his brow, bleeding sweetly down the hollow of his cheek to deep into his beard. The bridge of his nose – its sharp angles – cast dramatic shadows on the cheek the sun doesn't touch. A grave line to frame his frown in all its uncertainty. A slice of shadow where chin becomes jaw, drenching the clenched muscle there in the darkness of a jungle trapped in a bell jar.

The sun doesn't touch him there, but she does.

Her hand cradles his jaw. Her thumb rests so easy on his cheek. His breathing slows – something like peace in the palm of her hand. And she realizes he's handing her something.

The glossy strap clings like twine around his finger, held wordlessly out to hers, idle at her waist. It slips from his fingertip to hers. Dark red cotton and elastic crushed between her fingers.

She watches him watching her. Watches him trace her shape with wanting, asking eyes. And when those eyes rise once more to see into her own, she tells him, "Just say so."