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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"Not all of how. Think he's getting blood from the hospital. I'm just..." His mouth twists into a wry smile. "A supplement." He catches the wrinkle of her nose, but he isn't altogether surprised that she's registering no real disgust besides that. Just as well. He's in no mood to defend it and he's not sure how he would even start to do so.

He shrugs again. "And I never did much tree-climbing. Prefer my feet on the ground."

"When he first told me that he was a vampire, I asked him to let me get settled before he told me how he eats," she admits. "Guess I don't have to worry about that anymore." And yet she's still curious, is still bound to ask Spike as many questions as come to mind whenever she gets a chance. He's different from the roamers, very different, and she thinks she can trust him. It makes her wonder what Rick might think.

"So we're stuck, aren't we?" she asks. "Until something else fucked up happens." It's not the best way to live, but she knows she can't go back to how things were before. She doesn't know how to be that woman anymore.

"Dunno if we're stuck," he says, glancing over at her again--funny that he's circling back around in this direction, but really he's not sure where else he's even supposed to go.

"I'm at least gonna make sure I'm ready when it hits."

Andrea's lips purse slightly as she continues to look ahead, thinking about what she thinks Mike is saying. If she's honest, she isn't entirely sure it's a good idea. If he's in love with someone, that's something she wants to stay away from, but maybe the alley was just a fluke. Nothing that will happen again.

"You still think you could teach me something about fighting?" she asks, glancing over at him again.

"If you want," he says, after a moment of silence, looking away again. All at once he's freshly uncomfortable and not even sure why--because he was fucked up then, like he'd said, and everything's better now, isn't it?

Well, isn't it?

"Got some learning to do myself, but... yeah. Sure." He shoots her a wry smile. "Won't even get all fucking weird about it. I promise."

"Neither will I," she answers, satisfied with that answer. Whether she likes to admit it or not, she's not very good at fighting someone in close contact, not unless they're not expecting her to fight and even then she's sure she only put Spencer down because he never would have hit her back. It's one of those things she needs practice with and it will help, having someone like Mike show her how.

"What is it you need to learn?" she asks. She can't imagine there's anything she can help him with, but it can't hurt to ask.

He huffs out a laugh, easing a little. Fuck it, if she's not going to get weird about it there's no reason for him to do so either.

Sure.

"Weapons that don't shoot fucking bullets?" He nods down to his side where it's covered by his jacket; he has his gun, of course, because he doesn't go anywhere without it right now, but keeping it a little under the radar seems prudent. "I got ammo for this to last a while but sooner or later I'll have to pay for more. And hand to hand..." He shrugs again. "I can hold my own. But I could be better."

"Should have stocked up while the timing was still good. I got myself a kick ass bandolier that I'll probably never wear, but it makes me feel tough just to say I have one," she says with a bright grin, thinking of it sitting in the closet in her apartment. When she and Clementine move to one of the houses, she's going to have to make sure she gets a gun cabinet to lock everything up and keep it away from the little girl.

"So if we could both be better at hand to hand, who's going to teach us?" she asks. "Spike?" He's a vampire, after all, he can probably show them both how to be better than they already are.

"He knows his shit," he says, a little moodier than he means to sound. Because what the hell to make of that... he still doesn't know. The fighting. All of it. What it does to him. How it makes him feel.

"He's been showing me a thing or two. Nothing serious. I mean, we could make it more serious." He gives Andrea a sudden grin. "Probably wouldn't even charge you for it like he does me."

"Good, because I'm not..." She trails off and gestures at her throat. And it isn't because she doesn't trust Spike -- she does, weirdly, more than she trusts most people -- but it's a little too much like what was happening back home. He's not a roamer, she knows that, he isn't even close, but she's seen too much biting in the past year and a half. It's definitely not for her.

"I saw a lot of biting. Most of it didn't have a happy ending," she explains. There's a part of her that's still fascinated by it, a part that wonders why Mike does it, but she doesn't expect she'll be trying it any time soon.

He nods, his grin fading. He knows enough about how animated corpses were conceived of in his own world to get a general idea, assuming that Andrea's world operates on anything like the same lines. An ugly idea.

"I guess you know he'd never... do that to you. Not unless you offered." He's not sure why he's so certain--Spike's made no bones about being a monster, after all--and yet he is. "I did. Offered, I mean. 'S weird, but I think if I'd said ow, seriously, get the fuck off at any point, he probably woulda."

Andrea laughs, but she nods along, agreeing with Mike. "Yeah, I know. It's weird, but I trust him. Probably more than most people." It has something to do with the fact that he was on the island, that he remembers her here, that they have that connection. But it's more to do with that night the three of them fought. She has a hard time not trusting people who fight by her side when it matters.

"If he wanted to kill either of us, I'm sure he could've at least a dozen different ways by now, right?" she asks. And she trusts her instincts about people, too. There are plenty of folks back home who'd had a death wish, but Andrea's not one of them. She wants to live a long and healthy life.

"He's had enough chances," he murmurs, and all at once he decides that he's not going to tell her about the first time, about being pinned against the wall and thinking that he might actually be seconds from death and wanting it, hungering for it, because at least then he'd be able to rest and things would be ultimately simple again. He's not going to tell her that. Not now.

Not least because now he's pretty sure death isn't that simple anyway.

He looks over at her again, head slightly tilted, curious. "Do you trust me?"

"I do."

The answer comes simply, which doesn't really surprise Andrea. Ever since the dead began to walk, she's gotten good at picking and choosing, deciding who to trust quickly. She hasn't been wrong, not since Thomas and even he wasn't necessarily a person she trusted. He was just someone she didn't think to be wary of.

"Something about fighting side by side with a person that does it," she says, although she remembers Dexter, too. The way he turned on Rick. Mike isn't like Dexter, he isn't like Thomas, she trusts her own instincts on that one.

"Doesn't always," he says. He doesn't know how long it had taken him to really trust Hobbes, doesn't know exactly when it happened--not that it had been about fear of being turned on so much as fear that he might get both their asses killed. "But it helps."

He sighs. "You probably shouldn't. But thanks anyway." And that had been why he had kissed her, he realizes, or at least some of why. Some of it had been the craziness of the moment, the proximity of her, the shine of her hair and the strange fascination of the scar down her cheek.

But some of it had been the way she'd been kind to him when she'd had no reason to be so, when almost everyone else hadn't been.

"You're welcome," she says, rather than comment on the rest of what he's said. Maybe she shouldn't, but she does all the same and unless he decides to go the same route as Thomas and try to cut her face open, she isn't too worried. There are plenty of ways for people to break trust and most of them aren't going to end with her dead.

"What about you?" she asks, looking over at him. "Do you trust me?" It's not a question she asks often, but now that they're talking about it, she's curious.

"Yeah," he says--no hesitation, no time to think about it. He doesn't need any. Trust has never come easy to him, and that hasn't changed even with the memories, but some people, he just knows about.

And even when he hadn't necessarily trusted Hobbes to save his life, he had always trusted him to try so hard.

"You were... good to me," he says, looking down at the path ahead and feeling unaccountably awkward. "When you had no fucking reason to be. That's not all of why, but it's part of it."

When he says it like that, Andrea has to stop and think about it. About herself, about how she reacts to people regularly and she decides the way she treated Mike isn't unusual for her. Traveling with Rick and the others made it hard to trust people, but with the exception of Abraham, she's always been right about those she chooses to pull her gun on.

Most people don't deserve it. Most people, even back there, are generally good, just trying to get on.

"So if I'd pulled my gun on you the first time we met, this would be a bit different now?" she asks, but she's smiling when she says it, teasing. She's glad, then, that she didn't.

"Maybe," he says, returning a smaller version of the smile. "Maybe fucking not. I dunno. But it helped."

He shrugs again, looking back ahead of them. That blackened hill is still somewhere close by, but now he can feel it receding, and the knot between his shoulderblades is easing as it does. "Sounds like you been through some unbelievable shit. But you still act like a human being, treat people the same. That's not nothing."

It reminds her of something she said to Rick once, the words uttered with complete sincerity. All I have left is you... all of you. You're the only things left to remind me of what I can be. "People matter," she says, one shoulder lifting in a shrug. "I mean, what the hell was I fighting for, living for if not for people? I'm more careful than I used to be, but... my friend Rick... he went through the worst of it, I think, after the dead started to walk. He lost his wife and his new born baby, he just... he said once that we were the walking dead."

Andrea shakes her head. "I didn't want to be that. I never want to be that and the only way to keep myself from that is to remind myself that people matter."

If it were Hobbes saying this--if it were Tom saying it--or any number of other people, he might roll his eyes at this, huff out a laugh. Okay, sure. People matter. I'm sure telling yourself that makes all the fucking difference.

And yet when she says it like that, given what he knows now--and that's not all of why.

"You really remind me of someone sometimes," he says, not quite smiling. Feeling an ache working its way through his chest. "She never fucking talked, but... yeah."

Glancing over at Mike, she only studies him for a moment, wondering who she was to him. The person she reminds him of sometimes. It's strange to think, especially with how much he reminds her of Rick sometimes, but she smiles eventually.

"I hope she was a kickass woman who didn't take shit from anyone." she says, because that's the type of woman she'd like to be. It's the kind of woman who was able to keep people alive, she thinks, and that's important to her, even now.

He laughs, briefly unguarded, and it feels good. It feels better than anything has in a while. And for a moment--just the barest fraction of a moment but it's definitely there--it's almost like he can feel Florence's hands on him again.

Not healing. Just there.

"That's exactly what she was. Is." He pauses, and his smile turns distant and fond. "She's this... human in a world full of fucking monsters. And somehow she always loved 'em all." Even the ones they had killed.

Maybe especially them.

"Then I'll take that as a compliment," Andrea says, because she sounds like the kind of woman she'd like. Something that she strives to be, more often than not, although she knows she definitely falls short when it comes to loving everyone. There are plenty of people she can't love, plenty of people she still wishes pain upon, but she tries. Most of the time, she tries.

"How do you know her?" she asks curiously. His world sounds about as bad as hers does. A world full of monsters. It's something she's definitely familiar with.

"She saved me," he says simply. There are all kinds of details that could illuminate it, lend it nuance, but that's really at the core of it. That's ultimately all that matters.

He lowers his head--not ashamed, but suddenly feeling naked. Exposed. Raw. "I was gonna have her killed and she saved me. Everything changed after that."

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