There's such a thing as a good death.
A kiss goodnight. Boarding the last train back home. Tears shed over the lifeless body of a pig delivered into the light of the world by two young hands. Older now. Wiser, maybe, too. Lying old and infirm in the same bed the children were conceived in, stroking their mother's wedding ring til the lights go out for the very last time to the music of a flatline.
Good deaths. The best of them.
But he's been dying long and slow for weeks.
It started in a watchtower with the taste of summer sweat. Kept burning in a bottled jungle, fanned by butterfly wings. This one, good death licked the sky with black smoke spirals from the wildfire lit like a flicked cigarette in a wheat field.
Cement smeared its shape into his knees as he knelt between her legs. He wore her thigh on his shoulder, sewing soft shower kisses into her skin.
He really meant just to kiss her.
To kiss her while her thighs pressed warm against his ears. To feel her toes dig into his back like rain soaked soil. He meant to trap her there between his mouth and the cement wall and drink from her like rainwater off a sweet citrus leaf. Meant to bury his hands in the curves where her thighs melt into hips. Meant to die there between her legs on the hard, rain-beaten ground as warm water poured over the shape of her with a closeness he could only dream of.
And he did.
Did kiss her. Did trap her in that kiss and in his arms. Did die –isdying – desperate and thirsty as the lap of his tongue.
Of all the colors and fabrics, she wore daylight the best. It poured over her chest and half her face in the sharp shape of the window overhead. Her locs spilled down the wall like ivy. Head tipped back so the sun could paint her neck gold. Her voice was a girlish, desperate song that stoked the walls like a plucked steel string.
His fingers sunk into her skin. Muscles yanked and cried against his bones as he pulled her closer to his mouth. He wanted to be soft – to hold her like she ought to be. Like he'd done before. But she rooted her fingers in his hair and pulled. Screamed his name like it'd save her. He felt her ankles cross behind his back and her thighs close in til all he knew was the thin stream of water that spilled down her belly onto his tongue and the way she tasted on it.
So he held her in his hands like she could cure him.
Like she could fix the jagged, awful thing that sat inside him like a broken window, all the death and summer heat spilling in to smother whatever good he had left. Like it would all go away with the scrape of her fingernails at the back of his head or her legs woven between his shoulder blades. Like his name in her voice would wash over him like molten glass and leave him new and clean and undamaged.
He felt the arc of her back in his palms. Felt her toes curl and the way her hips rocked against his face, pinned like a dry winged butterfly between her legs and desperate, grasping fingers. Her voice pitched, a sharp and pretty sound muffled by her thighs against his ears, and he held her.
Held her as she shook. Held her as the water came down. As one wave subsided for the next to send her trembling on his tongue again. As her back met the wall and the sound of their tangled voices gave way to water on cement.
His hands slid from her hips to the tops of her thighs, resting slack, then, over his shoulders. Nose pressed into the soft skin beside his cheek, he kisses away a water drop and looks up into her eyes.
A good death.
The man is a menace.
A problem. He's a solar eclipse, the slice of an alarm clock's cry through a bad dream, a rain cloud in summer, and the hands around her waist. He's the voice in her ear, the kiss between her thighs, and the dragged hand across her iron bars, the soft sound of bone pillowed by flesh as he strikes each and every one on purpose.
Wine, wives, and weddings. Butterflies and waterfalls. Midday showers.
This man will be the death of her.
Noon comes as warmth draped across her back like a sheet. Bright and cozy. Thin enough not to make her sweat. Her toes flex against the mattress. Ankles roll in their sockets as the sun paints her foot soles. She breathes deep from the chest she lays on, a stupid little smile pressed into her mouth from sleep. His fingernails graze her naked back.
"Hey," a man's voice calls down the cell block, "Y'all seen Michonne anywhere?"
Another voice responds. "Not since I left the fences." Carol's. "Why?"
"I need to ask 'er somethin'." Tyreese answers back.
"Well, this morning was 'er shift out front. Dunno what she was onto after that." There's a pause. Then, "Maybe she left early?"
"Nah." Tyreese clicks his tongue. "Y'think she would?"
"Maybe. Been a while since the last time she went out with Daryl." Another pause. "You ask Rick? He'd know."
Oh, good. She means the menace who lies sleeping underneath her.
Michonne presses her hands against his chest and rises, wincing as the mattress sighs under their tangled weight.
He blinks alive. Stretches in the midday sun and drags an idle hand up her spine. Smiling.
A menace.
"Mm. Mornin'." He says as sleep crumbles from the end of his voice like sand.
A hush comes cool between her teeth as her feet meet the sun cooked floor.
He rests his weight on his elbows, watching her pick her clothes from the edge of the bed, the shelf, the ground. Softer now, he murmurs. "Somethin' wrong…?"
"I fell asleep." Her underwear's elastic scrapes up her legs. "I shouldn't have. That's on me."
"S'alright," She can hear the smile on his lips, even with her back turned. "I'on't mind."
"I do."
"Beth," Carol calls down the corridor, her voice like a switchblade against the iron. "You seen Rick?"
"I did. Just before lunch." There's a ripple in the girl's voice as she bounces the baby in her arms. "Said he wasn't feelin' too good. I saw 'is curtain closed."
An uncertain peace lays over the cell block like frost in early morning. Crackling cold bites at her fingers as denim crests her hips, as a single brass button, sunbaked through the thin sheet of daylight in the doorway, snaps into place. The zipper hisses. Too loud. Her bare feet pad dully across his bedroom floor, locs like willow branches in her vision as she searches the ground for what's missing.
"Rick," she whispers. "Where's my-"
She snaps up to meet his gaze as he lays watching her, cheek resting on the back of his hand. He wears an easy little self-satisfied smirk. Summer sky eyes obscured by eyelids half-hooded as he looks at her naked chest. Her fingers bury in the dark blue linen pooled around her feet and she throws his shirt at his head.
"Where's my bra?" The words cut between her teeth as she fights a smile.
A sound, then, like an engine come to life. Smooth and oil slick with a single key turn in the ignition, it rumbles low as Rick rises on the mattress. Linen falls to one shoulder like water over rock. His feet slip from the thin, mussed bedsheet to the ground, and he looks at her, smiling still. If it weren't for the rainstorm heartbeat in her ears or the thud of footsteps down the hall, she might've stood stupid and useless just to watch him wake up. Happy and naked, red in the chest in a splash of daylight.
She shouldn't be here. Shouldn't have to fight the pull of her lips or the invisible current that tows her toward the bed. Toward him. She won't put her hands on his shoulders. She won't bow to him like a swan's neck to taste him on her tongue one last time. She won't stand there before him, feel his calluses on her waist, or lose any more of herself to the pull of his river.
A hand thuds thick against the cement wall outside Rick's cell. A short shadow burns its shape into the square of afternoon stretched long across the floor.
"Rick, you in there?" Carol asks, and strikes the wall again with the heel of her hand. "We can't find Michonne and Tyreese needs 'er for somethin'."
Panic's not the right ,then, as Michonne crosses an arm over her chest and searches Rick's eyes for an answer.
"Gimme a minute," he calls to the doorway and stands. He tugs the sleeves up his arms and steps into the heap of denim at the foot of the bed. His belt chimes metallic as he fastens it in place. Leaning back for the bed, he scrapes her tank top between two fingers and tosses it into her hands.
"That's it?" There's more shape to the words than sound.
"S'all I got," He shrugs, pushing buttons through eyeholes with infuriatingly steady fingers. "Just…lemme handle this."
"What?" Carol asks, voice pitched.
"Where'd y'see 'er last?" Rick steps into the boots propped up against the metal bedpost and slips past the sheet into the hallway, gesturing behind him with his hand for her to move. To make her escape, somehow. "Usually takes lunch by the bus out front. You try there?"
So she does.
She's doing a lot of what he asks these days.
He squints against spattered sunlight as the bedsheet partition passes over shoulder. A broken piece of sun hangs from the window's corner and the sky colors at its edges like paper over a lit candle. Must've slept a while.
Calluses scrape his neck as he sets his collar. Strums another button through an eyehole and savors the smell of her as it sprouts through his shirt's fibers to tease the air.
"Rick?" Says a voice, cottony and far away.
Michonne doesn't use the knife cut curls of bar soap like the rest of them. Not since the first time he walked her to the showers, alone on a soundless blue night. All those runs of hers and Daryl's, she must keep some aside just for her. Something floral. Something tangy with a rich, punchy color. Kind of soap that crumbles, handmade, when she holds it. The kind with flower petals crushed into the lye, that leaves its smell like a stain on the skin, and anyplace else it touches.
Afternoon air in his lungs, he buries his nose into his collar to be with her just a little while longer.
"Rick."
There it is again. Another noise he's learned to live with behind six inches of cold cement. More scrap to the burn pile of cooked and settling iron, rat feet like fingernails on limestone, and a hundred tiny protests in a precious, baby voice.
Carol's now, too. "Did y'hear me?"
"Yeah." He didn't.
"So you'll think about it, then." And she nods with that crosshair stare of hers, like she's saying yes for him.
"I didn'tsaythat," he replies, maybe sharper than he ought to. His collar slips past his fingers to settle around his neck.
"Youshould."
"Doctor's orders, Carol. Y'know the rules." Beth hums as she rounds the top of the stairs to present him with a happy, red-cheeked baby. Soft, chubby arms pass from her hands to father's, and she slingshots Carol a warning glance. "Rick ain't on the council, so we don't talk to 'im 'bout council stuff." Then, she looks to him. "Iddin' that right?"
Judith weighs as much in his hands as a cloud on a summer day. Fat, clumsy fingers reach for his beard with the shaky determination of a calf putting hooves to the ground for the very first time. He holds her to his chest. Wrinkles his nose as her hand closes around it. Feels a smile pull at the corners of his eyes. Intense focus – triumph, even – on that round, pink face.
"Hey, baby girl." And his voice goes tender for her, like linen on a clothesline. Windswept and clean. "Where-"
"Where've you been?" Tyreese's voice carries upstairs like a beaten drum. "I must'a pissed off everyone from here to the fences lookin' for you."
"Me, huh?" Michonne gives a breathy nothing of a laugh. Caught in the middle of her exit. "What'd you need?"
The voices swell like lakewater. Carol bubbles over his left ear, Beth at his right. Sweetest sound there ever was, Judith chirps up at him from his arms. Little socked feet prod and kick at his midsection as he sinks down the stairs.
"You should at least think about it." Carol tells him.
"I know it's short notice, but I was wonderin'..." Then Beth. "Since y'got your check-up today, maybe…"
The water rises.
Boots meet cement at the bottom of the stairs. Steps like hooves clang and clatter down the metal behind him like an ugly song. Braided voices. Wilting daylight. A sweaty little hand in his beard, grasping like a snap pea for something to hold onto.
Tyreese's shoulder's pressed into the wall in front of her, standing close. So close he can hear his teeth scrape like rock on asphalt inside his cheek. The other man's body pours over her so she can stand in his shade. Shoulders hunched. Head tipped down, reading her like a new chapter. He stands so close, he can only see half of her behind him.
"I was actually hopin' to talk to you," Tyreese says. He looks over his shoulder a spell, then back to her. "Alone."
He's already walking toward them. Baby tugs his beard like a weed. The footsteps keep falling. Keep following behind his back like the coming night. Like a thunderstorm at blue sky's edge. Like a wave through a dam breach.
"There's this boy movin' into D Block n' he asked for my help, but with Judith…" Beth toes the question like a shoreline.
"S'fine," he tells her. "I got 'er."
Carol keeps baiting a dead hook. "There's big choices bein' made, Rick, an' I think you should-"
"Sounds like somethin' y'should talk to the other council members about."
"But-"
"I ain't in charge no more. Y'should go find someone who is."
Enough.
Heart in his ears, he charges for the corner of the cell block where they stand and cast a blended shadow. Her body and someone else's. The shape of her splashed against that wall like a reflection in the water, warped and rippled by some other man standing too close. Jaw set firm like chains on a sealed door, he storms. Weren't for his daughter in his hands, he'd be wielding a fist.
He's standing too close.
"Think you can swing it?" The other man asks her in a low voice.
And she smiles. Smiles as her eyes settle soft to the ground. Tips her head to one side then the other, trying to make up her mind before-
"Rick." Hershel. A wall with sad old eyes and a clean button down stands between them. He glances down and smiles. Lines rise on his cheeks and forehead like split silt in a dry creek bed. "Judith joinin' us for your check-up today?"
"Guess she is." Rick tilts his head to see over the old man's shoulder, eyes narrowed. She's saying something back to him now. Arms crossed. Still smiling. "Listen. Can we do this another time?"
"S'what you said last week." A tight lipped smile. Kind he recognizes from a thousand childhood questions on porches and kitchen linoleum. "Now son, y'know a man's only as good as 'is word."
"S'pose we're doin' this now, then." Rick shakes his head. Squints someplace past him, watching Michonne disappear beyond the cell block door with another man beside her.
Tyreese places his hand, soft as chicken feathers over straw, on the small of her back and guides her over the threshold into the distant someplace else. Someplace the sun can't reach. Someplace inside these concrete walls where stone and rusted metal soak up their voices like broth into bread. To someplace he can't see her. Someplace he can't follow.
"That's right," Hershel says.
And the floodwater swallows him whole.
The hallways come alive at noontime. Hard walls carry the sound of boots on the ground in the balmy darkness underneath a cement roof. So many faces pass that she doesn't know. Voices of strangers curl the air like talk on the radio. Children roll by, chirping and laughing and tangled like tumbleweeds, and she feels herself sink into the dark.
"Y'like kids?" Tyreese asks her.
Michonne turns to look at him as the question stings her cheek. Face hot, breathing lead, she says, "They're alright."
"I seen you with Carl." He ponders, "You're real good with 'im. Ever have kids a' y-"
She nods as much to kill the conversation as to soothe the bleeding notch in her throat. "What was it you wanted to ask me?"
His smile feels familiar. Like the grin of a man on an advertisement, nice and hand painted on the page of some catalog printed long before she was born. She doesn't know him – knows of him. But the kindness seems real enough.
Head on a swivel, he keeps looking down the hall. The peaceable line of his mouth doesn't break, doesn't wilt, despite the unrest in his eyes. She half expects a cry; a curse through the teeth and the sound of thirty dragged, dead feet behind them.
It doesn't come and he says, "I was actually hopin' to ask once we make it outside, if that's alright by you."
"Why's that?"
"'Cause people talk." He raises a brow. Grins at her like a friend. "N' y'never know who's listenin'."
Eyes ahead, she chuckles. More air than sound. "I'm not gonna regret this, am I?"
"Not if I say it right." He returns the gesture. The sound. "It's just, after D Block, with everything Glenn was sayin' about you helpin' 'im n' his wife, I figured you might help me, too."
"Glenn's a friend."
"A good friend."
She rolls her eyes and fights the pull at her mouth. "I didn't say that."
"Or whatever counts as a good friend, now." He adds, pushing waffle knit sleeves up his arms. "He is. Right? That's why you helped 'im?"
"...Sure."
"I ain't so dumb as to call m'self a friend just yet," he says as they round the corner. Daylight cuts a bright square into the concrete.
"But you are dumb enough to ask." She glances at him from the corners of her eyes.
Laughter, then. Rough and real like stale bread in a closed fist. He steps into the doorframe and holds the metal grate open with an outstretched arm to let her pass him by.
"That's right." He says with a confidence unearned.
And she walks into the day, warmth on her skin like callused hands.
Sunlight's dull underwater.
Matter of fact, everything is duller underwater. No sheen in hair, no brightness in the skin, no shimmer in the eyes. Everything lives blunted, weakened by the weight and thickness of the flood.
"Blood pressure's higher than last time. Heart's gallopin'." Every voice sounds far away, words hollered into a pillow through a cinder block to fall like warbled nothing on his ears. "Rick, how y'been the last few weeks?"
"Fine," he chases time, syllable by blurry syllable.
"Any episodes?"
A pause like a fingernail caught in the cord of a sweater. Then, "Y'mean like…seein' things?"
"If that's what it looks like for you," Hershel says in that wary, halfway to hand-wringing way of his. Bony cheeks under red skin. Eyes yellowed and focused and wet as they watch him. "Seen or talked to your wife lately?"
"No," is the easiest answer.
It's simpler than saying he's starting to forget what her voice sounded like – unangry, unbitter. That he's starting to lose the needle of that scratched record and the way it accused him in the dark and in the day. Easier than admitting that her face is bleeding at the edges of his memory like a ring of wine on linen. Fading from purple red to almost nothing at all.
That when he thinks of tender eyes, they're big and brown and he's got to brush the locs aside to get a better look. A no is so much easier than grieving and catastrophizing about what it means, exactly, that he dreams of someone else while what's left of Lori bakes into the concrete. That the only woman he sees and talks to these days lives just downstairs. And that she smells like springtime and smiles in her sleep and lives in his head when she's away, as deep and inerasable as the wrinkles in his brain.
No is all he can say.
He tilts his wrist and watches the formula dip lower down the bottle. Pink baby hands grab at his watch. Little feet kick at the air like she's swimming, and he smiles.
"This next part you're not gon' like, I know," Hershel sighs and hikes up his pants as he paces his cell. "But in the interest a' fairness, I gotta ask."
"We almost done here?" Rick asks, watching Judith's wispy eyebrows sit lower over her intense stare. "'Cause I needta find-"
"Mind you, everything you say in here's 'tween you n' me." Hershel rests a weary hand on the shelf.
"Michonne n' ask-"
"Are you sexually active?"
"What the hell Tyreese was on about this afternoo-"
"Rick, y'hear me?"
"Huh?" He spares a glance. "Yeah."
"'Yeah' you hear me or…?"
Rick tightens his brow at the old man from his seat on the cell bed.
"Oh. Uh, alright then." He clears his throat. "S'my professional opinion that you stay put. Let the others handle the runs, the clearin' for a spell. Rest when y'can. Work the fields when you can't. Be with your boy. With her." Brows like windswept clouds rouse the creases on Hershel's forehead as he glances down at Judith. Then he fishes around the upper shelf. Plastic against plastic. Light plays on silver packaging as the old man extends an open hand. "N' take these with you."
Rick sinks into his collar. "...Condoms?"
"Nothin' to gawk at, son. S'my responsibility to keep y'all right as rain. This is just me doin' my part." His gaze is pinned to the floor. "Y'need more, gimme a holler n' I'll put it on the list for Michonne."
Sun cooked death smells sweeter than expected.
It's easy to ignore in the open. For the breeze to wash the air as clean as it might ever be while the dead drag their heels through dirt and broken sidewalk. Time softens the stench of decay like it does everything, but time works weak and slow at the fence's edge.
And the dead don't rest.
Rancid fistful of nickels and dimes as Michonne plunges an ice pick into the gaps in the chain link. Black blood, more gel than water, bursts from the hole she's ripped and the body slides away like a receding wave. More press in to take its place. Half jaws. Busted teeth. Nailless, sundried fingers poke through the fences like a thousand fork tines, scraping metal and summer heat for something warm and bleeding to hold.
Tyreese pulled her to what he called the quiet side of the perimeter. There are less living than dead on this balding patch of grass, but it damn well isn't quiet. The shriek of metal on metal and the last, guttural scrapes of dead throats gnash together like an ocean of teeth. Not even the shade can stand it.
So they stand in death's breath, side by side, beating them back with crude edges and sweat.
"Ever been in love before?" She thinks she hears him ask.
"What?"
Again. Louder, this time, "I asked if you ever been in love before."
He's standing too close.
She steals away as many steps as it takes for her stomach to stop turning. Locs cut the air as she turns her head. Jealous, then, of the modest crowd of strangers gathered in the shade on the far side of the field. Not talking.
"I don't mean nothin' by it," Tyreese says, hammer claw singing off the chain link. "Not like that."
Someone once said silence is always viable.
So she wears hers like armor.
"I was. Before all this." She feels his attention like the hair strand legs of an insect on her cheek. "Few times."
How many broken skulls to kill whatever this is? Rusted metal into an eye socket, the rotten hole where a nose used to be. Limp body over limp body, she stabs at an answer and comes up empty.
"Didn't think I'd ever be again, after." He hems and haws in her peripheral, large hand on his waist. "But even a no-good world can still surprise you."
Her brows sink. She wrinkles her nose, half against the smell of a gaping head wound, and half against the memory of a sun warm afternoon spent sleeping on Rick's chest. Of work worn fingers on her skin. Of delirious, asking, midday eyes looking up at her from between her thighs.
Another kill, because she needs it.
"Y'know?" Tyreese prods, gentle as he is persistent.
She could've admired that about him if her heart wasn't throbbing in her teeth.
"You probably don't remember 'er," he softly says, "Y'all found 'er when you went after the Governor the last time. She survived the shootin' out on th-"
"I remember," she says.
And his whole body eases for the thin affirmation.
"Karen," he speaks her name like a blessing. Breathes easier, it looks like, just because she's real. Because someone else remembered. "I, uh – she's special." He clears his throat, lifts his head into the sunlight, and says, "What I wanted to ask you before. It's for her."
Her shoulders drop. She pulls the ice pick from an oozing skull to turn and face him. Her silence like scattered sunlight through trees, she opens her mouth to ask and hear more about her – his last surprise in this no-good world.
But then comes the screaming.
He tried everything. Looked everywhere. The kitchen was hollow for the lack of her. The hallways, all dark. The library let its books rot in silence. Empty cells and no one on the catwalk to feel the wind cool as the sun hung low. The thought of finding her standing with some other man in the showers turned his stomach, but he slid a sweaty palm cross the cement around that black mold bend anyway. Called something into the quiet and listened as his own voice bounced back. The air was dry. The room, blue and empty. Purposeless without her.
He left the showers still drowning, but not dead.
D Block sat bare boned and grey, still splashed with faded wine stains where the bodies fell, like an animal carcass on the roadside. There was just one gap of sunlight – the sound of hushed laughter – but it wasn't hers. He blackened that doorway like a nightmare, sweat bleeding down his brow as he spoke in search of her. Beth took the baby and gave his madness direction.
So he tore through the metal doors into the last sliver of day, burning weakly red orange as the purple of night crept in over the treeline. Snuffed fire kicked up its charcoal, carbon smell. Must've clashed shoulders with ten people to get to the middle of it all. Empty fields. Folks packing it in from the fences under the dying day. Talk. Smiles, even.
But the sky and ashes and sweet grass and people don't mean a thing in her absence. Nothing does.
The stars came like light through holes in a bedsheet cross a dull and darkening sky. He skipped stones from one to the next til the guard tower stood, an obstacle in his vision, and the water rose like bile. Boots to asphalt, then metal. Blunt, heavy thuds til the tower door sat still in front of him.
"Michonne." He beat the door with the heel of his hand. Three pops like gunfire. "Come on out. Let's talk."
Silence sat like a knife at his neck. His heart beat under cold, killing metal as the water swelled just beneath his eyelids. Everything duller underwater, he beat the door again.
Whispers skittered through the cracks in the door frame like dead leaves on cobblestone. Crisp enough to carry sound – a woman and a man – but too weak to hold their texture.
He ground his teeth. The door shook under his fist. "Y'don't open up this door, I'm comin' in."
The shadow of what he used to be hung from his shoulders like an anchor. Pounding on a strange door, announcing himself like there was still a badge on his chest to bend the light. An ugliness inside him, like nausea, that he knew well from nights around a campfire, watching Shane watch her with that fucking look on his face. Greed and rage and wanting crushed like cornmeal smeared across a crooked half smile. Like he knew something he didn't.
Took two kicks to cave the door in.
Then comes the screaming.
"Rick, what the fuck?" Glenn shields Maggie with his body, arms thrown frantic to the air. The sheets they lay on pull strange over bent knees, his waist.
"Oh shi-" His shoulders slam against the outer wall and he tills his hair back with his fingers. Bores holes into the metal catwalk with unfocused eyes. "S…sorry, y'all. I, uh-" He fights the rising tide for just one breath. "Y'seen Michonne?"
"She's on fences, man! All day." Glenn calls through the broken doorway.
The sinking sun paints tall grass like fire around the guard tower's outer edge. It sways and burns against evening air. Laps bright and weightless against her hips. She wears the last light of day on her skin and wades back home through the reeds. Smiling. He can tell from the halfmoons her eyes make.
Tyreese trails close behind her, like a column of smoke from a house fire.
Rick tears back down the tower steps.
They knock shoulders in the hallway like teenagers between classes. It's easy – too easy – to smile when she can feel his warmth through his shirt against her skin. When their feet hit the floor in effortless harmony. Two steps, one sound.
"Hey," she greets him. It's too easy to smile when he's looking at her.
"'Hey'?" The word sits heavy between them.
Strange.
"You ever find that thing I was looking for?" Brow furrowed, she watches the backs of the people further ahead recede into the darkness of the cell block.
"Oh, that?" A chuckle. She can feel it through his arm on hers, shuddering quiet and soft. He squints up at the line where the wall and ceiling meet, thumbs hooked in his belt loops. "Nah."
She could trip him. Should trip him. "You had it last."
The self-satisfied smirk he wears bends his words like a finger pressed string on a fretboard. "Yeah, well, you had it first." He finds her eyes in the dark. Softer this time, he says, "When I find it, I'll get it to you."
"What the hell was that over by tower two?" She asks, leaning into him like the ring of light around a candle. "You okay? I saw you-"
"'Chonne!"
Rick's expression snaps like fiddle strings under a carving knife.
Tyreese comes beating up the hall behind her, boots on concrete like falling rocks in a landslide. His large hand smooths over her shoulder as he falls in step beside her. "Got a minute? I thought a' somethin' else I'm gon' need." He gives a thoughtful tick tock of his head. A sweet smile. "...Maybe a couple somethin's."
Michonne searches Rick's eyes, one then the other, and finds in them a bitter tundral distance and a focus, cold and precise. He isn't looking at her, but past her, to the man whose hand shares its warmth with her, however brief. There's tension in the blue, like a thread in two fists.
She shrugs it away. The hand falls back to Tyreese's side, and leaves her shoulder to shine in the half-light like broken glass.
"Yeah, I got time." She turns her head and manages a smile or something like it. Watches Tyreese peer behind them down the hall at the sound of women's chirping. "Should we maybe…?"
"You're right." He claps his hand on her skin again and nods, relief – or near enough – in his eyes. "Let's talk at the table. C'mon."
And he leads her through the cell block's open door.
Part of her would snap her own neck if it meant looking back at Rick again. To hold him in her gaze and be held – in his eyes, if not by his hands. For soundless words to pass between them along a spider silk thread, her to him and back again, across any distance, every darkness. Strong like braided wire, despite the hand on her shoulder and the hurt in his eyes.
But the other part would rather die than be swept away.
So she crosses the threshold, digging her fingernails into her palms.
After dark, this place is just an echo chamber. Where drapes lift their skirts to let the sun paint concrete, night pours out cross the floor like lakewater on the bottom of a boat through a cracked hull. A puncture. A wound bleeding dark water til the whole room sinks.
Metal scrapes metal scrapes paper scrapes teeth. Salt burns his gums. His knuckles pull tight around a mug of twice boiled rainwater. Carl's voice is a flat little melody to dinner's crashed car, sinking ship song. Forks under teeth. Cup rings on steel tables bolted to the floor.
"Dad," his son mutters. Leans in. "Why's she over there?"
The empty seat beside him is a vortex with its own, aching gravity. Cold metal to bite his skin through his clothes as he watches the table at the back of the block like he'd watch a car skid over a ledge. Too close, his shoulder on hers. Too focused, her big brown eyes and the scrawl of her brow as she nods along to whatever he spits at her ear over untouched food.
"Michonne can sit where she wants." Rick slashes his fork cross his plate just to close something in his fist.
"But she always sits with us." Those cold eyes razor his cheek. Then, the boy's head reels. His voice pours caustic like black from a smokestack, "Shit."
"Carl."
Chiding doesn't do anything but cut air between his teeth. Doesn't relieve the feeling in his gut, peeled back like the hammer of a gun. But it's something. Better than sitting there, watching her and biting his own teeth to sand as he drowns over dinner.
"What did you do?" comes Carl's accusation. Dagger in a dart board.
He bites his inner lip bloody.
"Dad, what'd you do?"
Tyreese's hand disappears beneath the tabletop.
Bursts of color pop behind his eyes like he's been beaten. Heartbeat in his teeth. Pocket change taste in his mouth that can't be washed back.
That hand resurfaces to slide a folded note cross the metal. She peels it open in her fingers, gives a crescent moon smile, then folds it again and slips it under her shirt's collar to live safe between fabric and her skin. Against her heart.
He'd kill and die to be paper.
"I'on't know what happened." Fork meets tabletop with a bang and he plants his boots on concrete. "But I'm 'on find out."
His fingers drag against her soft inner arm as he storms the hard ground behind her. He doesn't say a thing – couldn't if he wanted to, because there'd be no coming back from what he'd do if that man met his eyes, pressing shoulders with her like he needed her to stay warm. There's quiet in the fistful of moments before her boots hit the floor in his wake.
Darkness and silence slant down cement walls as they pass empty cells, cobwebs, and cracks like wounds in rock. He tears open the library door and calls into its stillness before he steps aside to let her pass.
The door roars shut behind them.
"S'a two day run you're goin' on?"
Millions of pages line the walls from their bindings and shelves and carry his voice to her ear on the beds of their hands. Stories stacked from filthy floor to ceiling, silent in reverence of the sound of him. She realizes she's never been here before. But some of the spines feel familiar. Some of the finger shaped smudges in dust bear his shape – remnants of the books he'd passed her between bars in the night.
Now they stand together in the source.
She nods, brows knit. "Two days, yeah."
He drags his hand over his mouth, rubbing at the hollows of his cheeks before returning it to his hip. He sniffs. "Who's comin' with you?"
"No one."
Teeth grit under a clenched jaw, he asks again, "Y'sure?"
"Am I sure I'm going on the run by myself?" Her smile doesn't reach her eyes.
The man nods, shoulders poured over like a wave under moon. So grave, so severe. Dark library shadow pools under his brows, cabled tight like the jagged edge of a sea battered cliff. It tips over his cheekbones to run like blood in the hollows around his frown. Shadow sits like gouges between beard bristles. Jaw set.
Whatever this is, he means it.
"Yes, Rick, I am."
"No one else?"
The sadness in his eyes is swallowed now by something spinier. Something cutting and desperate that deepens the dark rings and sits sick on its heels like a lion in wait behind the curls that fall into his face. His boot scuffs the floor. Fingers flick against his belt. He bites and releases and bites and releases his lower lip. Can't stand still.
She chuckles. Rolls her eyes before sucking in a long and tired breath. "Is there something you wanna say to me?"
"Y'sure there ain't somethin' you wanna say to me?"
"Other than 'why are you acting like this?'"
Hands on his hips, he hangs his head to stare bullets into the ground. His weight shifts from one foot to the other. Nerves bundle between his shoulders, bunched and rising beneath his shirt. Fingers drum belt leather. Energy wells from his bootsoles to the cords in his neck, tugging as he squares his jaw.
His head rises. He stares across the bitter distance, and finally asks, "What's goin' on with Tyreese, Michonne?"
Truth – or something like it – peels off him like steam.
"Tyreese?" Brow furrowed, she rolls her weight onto one hip. "He's a friend."
"Your friend." He says sharply back.
"A good friend, yeah." Her shoulders hike. "What's-"
"A good friend." Rick's gaze reels toward the ceiling as he gnaws the inside of his lip, jaw thick with tension. He meets her eyes once more. "Y'all good friends like me n' you are good friends?"
"Oh my god, you think I'm sleeping with him." The sound that leaves her is less a laugh and more a joyless exhale. Weighted yet weightless, like air bubble breaths into water, not knowing when next she'd fill her lungs. Arms folded like a border fence, she raises a brow. "That's what this is?"
"I seen you talkin' to 'im. Smilin'. Whisperin'."
"And you think that's 'cause I want to fuck him?"
"Do you?"
She closes her eyes for a beat. Pinches her brows between her fingers under the dim half-light. She hears him part his lips to speak her name, but by the time the taste of it can sit sweet on his tongue, she's got more to say.
It's biting barbed wire, holding his stare like the sharp end of a knife. "You've made it very clear there's a right and wrong answer here."
Then there's that wounded dog look again. Those wet ocean eyes with their storm dark circles looming in the undertow. The twitch of his brow under the lines in his forehead. Awful pinch of hurt and of wanting that cuts too easy through flesh and bone into her chest.
She sighs. "No, Rick, I am not having sex with Tyreese." And before the inevitable, she adds, "And I don't want to, either."
It's getting harder these days to leave him in the lurch.
Danger has blue eyes and dark curls and never knows what to do with his hands.
"But he does?" He steals a step closer, "He asked?"
A smile then, weary and aimless, as she streaks her hand across her brow. "Exactly the opposite." She looks at him, hooking her fingers into the lip of her jeans. A crescent moon of bare skin shines in the gap between her tank top and her hand, pillowed against her thumb. It pulls his eye and she has to stomp her smile dead. "He's working on a list of things for me to get Karen so that her room is perfect when she moves into D Block. Apparently she likes daisies. He wanted me to know that."
"I saw y'all at the fence."
"Saw what? Him hanging up an ice pick? He had me work with him on his shift so we could talk."
"N' the note?" He nods expectant, eyes slanting down to her chest then back again. "At dinner?"
"You mean the shopping list?" She reaches into the scoop of her shirt to retrieve the paper square and throws it at him, still warm from her breast. "Here. Take it. 'Pillows, blankets, slippers, a vase, fresh daisies –white, not purple'. That's what you were so worried about, right? Why you thought I was having sex with him?"
Paper strikes him in the chest and falls silently to the ground and she watches the fight leave him. Watches his shoulders slake, his fingers still, his shadow ease its anxious movement. Scant light settles on a softening brow, tilted skyward now as the coldness in his eyes melts away. Storm black circles fade to sleepless purple blue. He tilts his head, not to fight –that sheds itself like sandstone chunks into an ebbing sea – but just to look at her.
Another step closer, he tells her, "I'on't want nobody else."
But it's not that easy. She can't let it be.
"And what the hell do you think I've been saying? Huh?" She searches his eyes. "I'm not sleeping with anyone else 'cause I don't want anyone else, Rick."
"Good."
"'Good'?" An ocean spray sting at her cheek. "That's it? You chase me all day and pull me away from dinner acting crazy-" She prods his chest with her finger. "You have any idea how many people – some I don't even know– came up to me today? Saying 'Rick's looking for you,' 'You should really talk to Rick'. I woke up today in your bed." Another prod, like iron into hot coals. "You are the only man whose hands have been on me since my boyfriend died." And another, as the flames come alive. "I don't have sex on all my runs, Rick. Just with you. You'd know that if you asked."
"You're the only one." He rasps, eyes fallen to her lips. "For me, too. You're it. N' I'on't wanna see you talkin' to nobody else. I'on't want you touchin' nobody, either." He teases the boundary with a warm, open hand on her waist, thumb brushing at her naked low belly under the fold of her shirt. "So if you're waitin' on a 'sorry', it ain't comin'."
Her breath comes quick and shallow. She looks away as she takes a step closer, despite herself. Despite everything. And she asks him in a voice soft as fog in the early morning, "You don't trust me?"
"I'on't trust him." He sets his jaw. "I'on't trust nobody 'round you."
He's standing so close.
"S'okay if I…?" She feels him more than she hears him as his beard scrapes the untouched skin just beneath her earlobe.
The heat from his palm blossoms over her belly like a midmorning rose. His breath pours hot down her neck like vapor from a kettle. Idle kisses ripple behind her ear. Soft and persistent like a dragonfly's feet on still water. His fingers unfurl under marigold cotton, tenting thin shadows where his knuckles knot. Teasing just beneath her bare breast with pink fingertips.
She shivers. Spirals her hand up his forearm, beneath her shirt, and pushes him to touch her, skin to naked skin. Her chest rises. Back arcs to meet his touch. Her breast fills his warm and eager hand, and he sinks his teeth into her neck in the cinderblock silence of an empty library.
Wristwatch metal nips cool at her hip as he peels the shirt from her body with one hand. It falls weightless like tissue paper, floats down her calf, and gathers near her ankle. He runs that hand up her waist like a sculptor, hugging and tracing the very shape of her with his palm. He thumbs the thin shadows under each of her ribs until he crests her chest, kneading heady, hungry circles into her skin as he licks the shadow from the hollow of her collar bone. Tongue tip, soft lips, on warm, dark skin.
Seems like fate decided a part of her will always have a home between his lips. Her mouth, her chest, an errant finger as he looks down into her eyes as his rhythm rocks them both. One ship over crashing, desperate water.
That gentle, killing hand flowers behind her back, cupping her to his lips like fresh water. He eases down her belly with the flat of his other hand, a denim lip playing at his fingernails as the breath catches in his throat, cool against her breast. Beard bristles on her naked chest, he tips his head toward the sky and asks.
"Can I?"
"Anything you want." She answers.
She's doing a lot of what he asks these days.
But it's so easy. So easy to bend like a palm under summer sun. Easy to let him run his fingers through her hair and touch her sweetly in all the places the shadows rush to . Too easy to tilt her head back and let her eyes find a gentle close as he strips her clothes away. An easy goodbye to armor, to shields, as he kneels to kiss her naked knees and takes her boots in his hands. Just a nudge from his jaw, and her legs part his welcome. Toes in the fabric of the shirt on his back, her fingers in his curls, his breath between her legs.
It's all so easy.
They lay like tangled roots, their clothes piled high beneath them like autumn leaves. Sweat slicked skin. Breathless grins. Eyes only for the other as the world reintroduces itself, moment by moment.
This one is theirs.
"God, you were so jealous." She laughs, dragging her fingers through his chest hair.
"You could'a said somethin'."
"I didn't think there was anything to say." She shakes her head into his shoulder. Silent laughter simmers in her chest. "Tyreese? Please."
He chuckles. Runs a hand up her thigh. "Oh I, uh, forgot to tell you. Hershel gave me somethin' today."
"Okay…?"
"Guess." He says, narrowing his eyes as the hint of a smile pulls at his lips.
And for a moment, she can see the man in her arms as he once was. Puckish and thoughtful. Maybe even happy behind those squinted evening sky eyes, the greying beard like a field starved of water, and the pleased, bowed mouth it shelters.
She kisses him, then, like sunlight kisses blades of grass or the leaves on trees or wildflower petals, paper thin. Kisses him because there's no alternative. She is alive, and so she must breathe. Her eyes are tired in this dark evening hour, and so she must blink. It's as natural as it is terrifying, how easily her eyes close and their lips meet, and how much more of herself seeps from her fingers into his skin.
"Hmm…" A grin grows on her face as his taste soaks into her lips. "Was it a hat?" She plays along because she wants to. Because it feels good, even when it hurts. Even with that volcanic glass part of her crying out to cut this –all of this – away. "Since you're outside all day?"
"That…actually ain't that far off. But no." The sound of his laugh feels, to her, like parting clouds and sun on her skin.
"Hair clippers?"
He laughs, shaking his head. "Colder."
"...Not a pair of suspenders, right? I know he likes those, but Rick-"
"No, he didn't get me suspenders." He buries his face in her hair, shoulders quaking with silent laughter. "Was a bunch a' condoms," he says through a bitten smirk.
"Oh, we could've used one five minutes ago." She scrapes her bottom lip with her teeth. Smears her thighs together under his hand. "Probably shouldn't get too comfortable with that, right? That's twice today."
"I mean, I don't mind."
"Yeah, you wouldn't." She shoots him a look.
"Speakin' a' babies," his fingers coast from her hips to her waist, and he leans in to kiss her at her hairline. "We should probably get back to mine." Bristles at her forehead, his lips against her skin, he murmurs, "Carl was upset you didn't sit with us at dinner."
"Carl was, was he?"
His laugh's a low rumble. Like being rocked in the bed of his bare chest. "He was. Think you're gon' have to make it up to 'im."
She's first to rise, pressing her palms into his chest and peeling herself free to sift through their clothes for something of hers. He follows after her, sewing a kiss into her naked shoulder before she pulls the shirt down over her chest.
She turns her cheek, a handless embrace, and asks, "...How's a hat like a condom?"
He tugs his jeans up his legs and pushes the button into place. "Y'know. They both go on your he-"
"Ugh." She rolls her eyes with a smirk. "Forget I asked."
There hasn't been a single silent morning at the prison since the day she closed that chain link in her fist and met his eyes. Today's no different. A newborn sun paints cotton candy skies over the dark and pointed tree line. It splashes pink the shambling heads and shoulders of the moldering horde outside the fences as the birds sing, unseen.
Rick's kneeling in the fields, yellowed shirtsleeves bunched up at the shoulders as he leans over a mound of dirt. She approaches him from behind, nudging one of those squared shoulders soft with her hip.
"Hey," she says in an early morning rasp.
"Hey," he grins back as she finds a place beside him, crouched under dawn.
He sweeps wet curls back with his inner arm. Chunks of soil fall from his cupped hands back to earth as daylight teases the mark she left on his neck from this morning's shower.
She forces herself to look somewhere, anywhere, else, and finds a home in his eyes. "What're you doing?"
Loose, black soil tumbles from his hands into a heap beside the farm bed. His fingers weave gentle through a tangle of delicate leaves, little cloudlike poms flicking against the morning as he returns them to the earth, cradled in his palms. He spares her a look, lingering and soft, despite the labor.
"I got the idea to move some'a the clover from outside the fence in here." He mops his forehead with his sleeve. "Pretty sure Hershel thinks I'm crazy, but that ain't nothin' new."
"Why clover?"
"S'rabbits' favorite." He says, scooping another handful of scalloped leaves and blossoms into his hands. "I figure if we get enough goin' inside the fence, then we pull the rabbits from the other crops and we make it a' helluva lot easier to line up a shot. That way you n' Carl ain't eatin' spam every damn day."
She smiles at the windblown soil, then reaches over Rick to fill her hands with flowers. "I like spam."
There's a moment where just birdsong and the moaning horde color the air as he watches her lay roots in the bed he dug. His smile unravels like a loose thread around her finger, tugged free from the binding of a worn old shirt.
And she meets those early morning eyes. "What? You don't want any help?"
"N…no, I-" He swallows. Joy comes back to him, first at the corner of his lips, sheltered under the coarseness of his beard, then in the thin lines that shine around his eyes like sun rays. "I just think y'got real bad taste. That's all."
Their shoulders knock as she turns a laugh out to the wind like a handful of sand. "Yeah, okay, asshole."
And they lay roots together as the sun crests the treeline.
"Just have him shovel shit or something when he gets back." She nudges his shoulder, smiling. "Come on."
He rolls his eyes and dams the dirt with his hand. "I want Carl to like farmin'."
"Bet he'll like it more after two days on the road." She raises her brows at him with a playful little smirk, but wilts a little at his soft, stubborn stare. Locs drape her shoulders as she tilts her head. "You could come, too."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." The brush stroke bend of her lips thins. A tangle of clover and scallop greens fill the scrape he made in the dirt, and both their hands come to seal it. "It'll be like before."
"Before?"
Her eyes are so rich and dark, the whole world lives inside them. He watches the clouds flower cross a deep brown sky. Watches spears of sunlight glitter back at him. Watches windblown grass churn like the ocean, halved by her smiling eyelids. Everything right and good in those big, brown eyes.
Even him, when she's looking.
"Remember? We made the drive out to your hometown. Met your best friend…" She bites at her laughter as Rick turns his shaking head.
"Yeah, yeah. I remember."
"He gave you that parting gift, too."
That pulls his attention. "A stab wound?"
"I know; so thoughtful." She laughs at the growing, silent slash of his teeth as he shakes his head and the earth rests easy between their threaded fingers.
"S'a two day run?"
She nods, smiling softer now. "Two days."
"Be safe," the words leave him like a prayer.
He leans into her shoulder, not pulled into her current but eased, two feet on piled stones as her attention overtakes him. Sunlight like veins passes overhead and he drowns so sweetly, there, next to her. Sunwarm waters pour over as her bare arm meets his, skin to naked skin. He flexes just one finger to touch the back of her hand.
Breathes deep.
And if the world were kind, the sun would rise a little slower today. Moments would melt by like molasses and let him live there beside her, shoulder to shoulder with their hands in the dirt, just a few minutes more.
Author's Note: I'm late updating but, in fairness, this chapter is more than half the length of this entire fic so far.
In this chapter Rick:
- ate Michonne within an inch of her life (twice)
- watched Michonne get dressed after waking up in his bed for the first time
- went completely fucking insane because a man stood too close to Michonne
- pissed off literally every council member with how crazy he is about Michonne
- received condoms (who knows if he'll use them lmao)
Next chapter is called Megazord. (I promise it makes sense in context).
Thank you for your patience and for reading! I look forward to discussing with y'all in the comments!
Also if you like my written work, check out my artwork as well! Socials linked in my profile.