forthedog | Move dust through the light to find your name

Entry tags:

andrea,
darrow

Move dust through the light to find your name

It's been cool but now it's warming again; the Realm had had its own cycles and so had the Island, and now he's learning this place. He knows summer when he feels it, even without the calendar on his phone, and summer is coming fast.

And somehow he feels like it's going to be a bitch of a one.

He spent the last night in a bar--an honest to God bar with AC/DC blasting from an ancient jukebox in the corner, and at least it wasn't the bar he'd found Sam in--and his opinion of it had improved slightly when some change in his pockets had bought him a couple of Pixies songs. He had taken some shots, lost track of them. Thought in a bored kind of way about seeing if the blonde a few seats down the bar with the extremely low-cut top and the extremely fake tits would take him home.

Realized how easily boredom can blend with anger. Paid his tab and wandered back to the apartment, alone, sometime around three.

Now he's got a hangover--nothing especially bad but just enough to make everything else seem slightly more shitty than usual. And he's in the park, which is probably not the best idea, but at least he's not close to the burn scar of the World Tree and whatever's growing there now. He hasn't been back since the fire. But he thinks he might be edging around it, in his mind and in space, looking for a way to return. He hasn't yet decided to his own satisfaction how much of this is simple masochism.

He's still not sure how much pain is actually necessary for healing.

On the path, no one else in sight, he whirls suddenly and slams his fist into the trunk of the closest tree. Pain daggers up his arm and makes his eyes water, but it's sharper and realer than the ache in his head and the deeper, harder ache in the center of his chest. His knuckles are bleeding in a few places and he stands there, sucking at them, not surprised to find the metal taste of it comforting. Blood. It always comes back to blood.

Neil is in his blood. Like poison. Or like a drug that, once injected, needs to keep flowing through the heart in order to keep the body alive.

Fuck.

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As much as Andrea is pretending to be a lookout up in her tree, she know that isn't the only reason she's in the leaves. There's no sense denying that she's hiding. From the new arrivals in the city, from the fact that she doesn't know where she fits in a place like this. No one down there is looking for a sniper or someone to sit in a bell tower all day, watching for roamers. So instead she finds a tree in the park, settles herself on one of the thicker branches and pretends she's still useful.

As it turns out, it's a relatively good location from which to spy on people as well. This morning she's already been witness to a couple arguing over rent and a small boy chasing a larger boy on a bike, threatening to kick his wheels out. Nothing very exciting, but it seems like that might change. Mike is across the path from where she is, but she still gets a good view of what he's doing and even though she knows she shouldn't be amused, a smile touches the corners of her mouth anyway.

"You know," she calls down, rifle set across her knees, "I feel at least five times more masculine having just witnessed that."

He starts slightly, but he already knows who it is, turning and shaking out his hand, feeling at once both embarrassed and less embarrassed than he thinks he probably should feel.

He looks up at her and laughs, amused and pained both at once. "Well, good," he says. "At least it's working on one of us."

"Masculine by proximity," Andrea says, putting the safety on her rifle before she slides it onto place on her back so she can climb out of the tree. It only takes her a few seconds to get down and she lands lightly on the path, then brushes her hands off on the back of her jeans. Her mouth pulls up into another lopsided grin as she looks at Mike, then looks at his hand. It's bleeding, but it doesn't look too bad and, more importantly, his fingers don't look broken.

"Should I even ask? Or is tree punching one of those things you generally leave alone?" she asks, head tipped slightly to the side. "I was never good at knowing what the social boundaries were for stuff like that."

"For most people? Yeah. For you, there's a Shot At A Bunch Of Freaky Shit With exception." He gives his hand another shake and winces, examining it. Stupid. Incredibly fucking stupid. So at least he's sort of consistent there. If he can't be so anywhere else.

"Not like I even got a good fucking answer, though, so you'd be wasting your time."

Rolling her eyes, Andrea points up toward the tree. "I've spent the last hour sitting up there, pretending there might actually be some kind of reason for me to be here," she says. "In terms of my time being wasted, I think I have it covered."

It's not a particularly happy thought, but she feels like most of her time here is wasted. She misses Atlanta. She misses Alexandria.

"Why'd you punch the tree?" she asks.

He doesn't answer immediately. He stands, his thumb moving absently over the congealing blood at his knuckles, and he's thinking about mistakes and close calls in alleyways, about fighting beside her and feeling simple and unjudged. About how, now, he feels strangely compelled to tell her the truth.

Because she also isn't sure where she fits, it seems.

"I'm in love," he says, "and I'm handling it really fucking badly." I have an addiction and its name is Neil McCormick.

Andrea actually laughs, though not cruelly and she shakes her head, looking up at the trees again. "I think that's probably a pretty common thing," she admits, though she herself has always been fairly good at it. Until recently, anyway. She isn't in love with Sam, that much is certain, but she still wishes she could have been around long enough to find out if she could be.

Now she'll never know. And she'll never know with Rick. All she'll have is the memory of Dale.

"How badly is really fucking badly?" she asks, then begins to walk down the path, nodding for Mike to join her.

And this might be where the impulse to be honest hits a fuck of a brick wall. Because the details... She doesn't need to know the fucking details, but even the rough outline of the thing makes him feel dimly sick to his stomach.

He falls into step beside her, thinking that he really likes her and how much of a shame it could be if he completely freaked her out.

"I hurt him," he says finally, staring ahead at bands of green and brown as they slide by. "And... What I think freaks me out the worst is the idea that I could do it again."

And it sounds so simple when he says it like that. Almost rational.

It's almost instinct, talking to Mike like she would Rick and she looks over at him, eyebrows lifted. "So the exact same thing that freaks out every single person who's ever been in love?" she asks, because she knows she's thought of it more than once or twice herself. Sometimes, with Dale, she found herself terrified she'd break his heart unintentionally.

"So he's here, I'm guessing. And you're in love with him and he's in love with you?" she asks. It's not always that simple, but the simple act of being in love can help cure a whole lot of ills and forgiveness, she finds, tends to be easier when love is involved.

He laughs, bitter and stopping just short of nasty. The way she says it, it sounds like a fixable problem, and all it does is highlight just how really unfixable it feels.

"It's not the exact same thing," he says. "It's... I wish to Christ it was that fucking simple." I died. I still feel half dead. I feel like death is running through my blood and I could infect him with it.

He looks over at her, briefly and completely at a loss. "Why are you even fucking talking to me like this?"

"Like what?" she asks, looking back, eyebrow arched. For whatever reason, fighting beside Mike makes it a lot easier for her to ignore what happened between them in the alley. What it comes down to, in the end, is a mistake, not only because he's in love with someone else, but because she's still thinking about someone else, too. If that's what he's referring to, she isn't sure how else she's supposed to talk to him.

"If it's because we kissed, then I wasn't aware that had to change how I talked to a person," she says. "Unless you get weird about it." Then it might change a thing or two, something Spencer could certainly attest to if she were to ever see him again.

"No, that's not fucking why," he says tightly, hands clenching at his sides. None of this makes any sense. None of it has since he got here. "I mean, it's... kinda, but--"

He stops, reaches out, closes a hand on Andrea's arm and pulls her to a halt. "When I say hurt, I don't mean fucking broken hearts and pints of Haagen-Dazs. I mean hurt. I'm fucking dangerous. You saw some of it. And this thing. Being in love." He lets out another harsh laugh and turns away. "It's like a fucking monster. It eats everything."

Andrea lets him stop her and she listens, her eyebrows still lifted at the words he chooses. It's not that she doesn't believe he's capable of the things he says he is, because she has seen it, in the alley, in that fight on the street. If they'd met anywhere on the road, she suspects Rick would have ordered her to kill him based on what she's seen and she would have done it in a second. She would have done anything for Rick.

Gently pulling her arm from his grasp, she says, "I know. I know what it's like to be dangerous. I know what it's like to hurt people, Mike. Really hurt them." The Hunters, the Governor's men, the countless people she's put down like they were nothing more than animals. "And you can call me naive or whatever you want to say, but I think that if someone knows that about you and loves you anyway... I don't know. That's worth something."

"I don't think you're naive," he says, quieter. Something in him is weakening, he can feel it--something in him is going to break. And he doesn't know what's going to happen when it does.

"I mean... you're right. It's worth something. I just got no idea what, yet." He pauses a second or two, engaged in silent debate with himself, then pushes ahead. "Look, I'm. I'm sorry about before. In the alley. Truth is, that was... it was right after. And I was fucked up." He lets out a sigh. "I still am, it was just a lot worse then."

Lifting her hand, Andrea waves it off, because he isn't the only one who needs to apologize for that. "I shouldn't have walked off like I did," she says, then laughs. "You're not the only one who's fucked up."

Even now, with Dale gone for more than half a year, she feels intensely guilty having feelings of any kind for anyone else. The fact that there have been four different men in that time, four men she's felt different things toward, it makes her hate herself a little. Dale never would have moved on from her so quickly. Spencer hardly counts, but she can't forget Rick and she can't forget Sam.

"You would think that the world ending would make dating and love a whole lot easier," she says with bit of a smile. "But it seems like nothing ever does."

"Dating," he says, laughing again--less pained now. The word is so ridiculous. The idea is ridiculous. It defangs everything else, at least for a few moments.

He tilts his head slightly to one side, looking at her, returning the smile in a fainter version. "You don't seem fucked up. You seem like you got your shit pretty much together. Not that I'm the best judge."

For a second she debates agreeing with him, brushing it off as just trying to relate, but there's no sense in that. Mike's been at least partly honest with her and if there's anything Andrea appreciates, it's honesty. She owes him a little bit of the same in return.

"The love of my life was a man twice my age," she says. "In the time we were together, he was bitten by roamers twice, lost one leg to infection, lost the other to a bunch of cannibals I then helped torture to death and then I had to shoot him in the head to keep him from coming back." She looks at Mike, her smile a little pained. "Fucked up."

"And you seemed like such a nice girl," he murmurs, and for the first time in days he actually feels a little better. Because she gets it, he can see now, looking at her. Maybe it's just because the world she's from seems every bit as fucked as the Realm was. Maybe not. Who can say.

"I'm sorry," he adds. "I never had to kill anyone I loved. But I always figured I might someday. Guess I got lucky." And the last word is biting, bitter, but he's also starting to see how in some ways, it's true.

Neil's here. Tom isn't, but it's something.

"You did," Andrea says. "In that way, at least, you did. Because it's awful. I had to shoot my sister, too." She isn't sure why she's told him that. Plenty of people know that Amy is dead, but besides those who were there to witness it -- which was limited to Rick and Glenn back home -- no one knows that Andrea had to pull the trigger.

"Killing people gets a lot easier with time," she says. "It did for me, anyway. I know how that sounds, but I'm okay with that. When it came down to the people I loved or some guy we didn't know, I was okay making that choice. But killing someone you love sucks every fucking time."

Sister. Jesus. Suddenly he's unbelievably angry at wherever she's from. At all of it. Things he doesn't even know.

"Yeah, I know how it sounds," he says, turning away, starting to walk again. So much for feeling better. Even though he still does. A little. "I lost count a long time ago. It does get easier. You're in the shit, you got choices to make, you do what you have to do."

He looks back at her again, his smile a twisted knife-edged thing. "And then part of you starts to fucking enjoy it. Not so okay with that part."

A ghost of a smile flits across Andrea's features and she looks over at Mike, meeting his gaze. That much is certainly true, even if she has a hard time admitting it. None of them ever talked about it, not the way they were with the Hunters that night, even though Andrea knows they all enjoyed it a little bit.

"No, that part is... harder to deal with," she agrees. And yet she doesn't regret it. She doesn't regret what they did to those men, not even a little bit and she's sure none of the others do either. They hurt Dale and that's all the reason Andrea needed for the things she did.

You think you know? I woulda filled graveyards if they left any fucking bodies, he thinks, but he doesn't say it, because he doesn't want to play this game today. He's played it enough with Sam, all clenched fists and jaws and You think you fucking know me?

Shit is just shit, and if you're quibbling over the size of the pile, he thinks, you've sort of missed the fucking point.

"So the fuck're you doing here, anyway?" he asks, and shoots her a lopsided smile. "In general. Besides hiding in trees."

"Not much," she admits with a laugh, looking up at the trees again briefly. It's nice to be able to walk in the park, sunlight filtered through leaves, but it turns out it's not the normality she misses. There was no sense of purpose in being a legal assistant and when there'd been nothing else, it was easy enough to ignore. Now that she's had something, a reason to exist, it's a lot more difficult to get back to normal.

"Mostly keeping out of the way," she says. "Watching out for Clementine. She's eight, showed up not long after I did and I couldn't..." Trailing off, Andrea shrugs. She's sure Mike knows what she means, what she couldn't do. She hasn't told anyone about Ben and Billy, probably never will, but she knows she's at least partly watching out for Clementine in order to make up for not being able to protect the two of them.

"Right, she's from the same place you came from, isn't she?" Because of course, when shit hits the fan the children aren't spared.

And again he's glad the girls aren't here, and not just because he doesn't want them to see him this way.

"'S good she's got you." His mouth twists. "Shouldn't be any kids at all here. Somehow I don't think darkness and monsters is the worst shit this place can toss at us."

"You're probably right about that," Andrea agrees, though she doesn't know quite what to expect either. That in itself isn't so bad -- she's good at dealing with the unexpected -- but she hates the idea of any children being caught in the crossfire, much like Clementine was that night.

"So what about you?" she asks, looking over at Mike again. "What are you doing, in general, besides punching trees?" There are certain people in this city who are going to adapt well to the changes, she thinks. She's just not sure she's one of them. She's not sure Mike is either.

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