my tears ricochet

Chapter Eighty Five

"Better to live like rats," Merle drawled. Both hands were clutching the steering wheel tight. "That's what you're doing, right?"

"What?"

They were in Carol's old Cherokee with a pair of fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror. Ivy looked around and realized they were driving along vaguely familiar farmland, clouds of monarchs passing overhead. Their wings beat in a single motion, a heartbeat in the sky itself. That meant there would be a storm somewhere else, she thought idly, peering up at the shades of red and gold tangled together. Their wings that were a soft blur of movement could cause a hurricane thousands of miles away.

She was sitting in the front seat this time with Lori's old blanket tossed over her lap. She played with the soft fringe of it and tried to keep from looking at the burned out barns and houses.

"You settling down roots, kid?"

"Should I?"

"You tell me."

No. Yes. Ivy still wasn't sure. It would be nice to know if what she was doing was right, settling herself into a bed of domestic comforts, allowing the rest of the world to fall away instead of slipping right back into the wildness. "I'm trying, I think."

One of the butterflies crawled over her knee. It seemed content to rest for a while as they continued driving along the countryside. Bright wings quivered slightly.

"You know, I tried that once or twice. Never worked out in the end."

The fuzzy dice were blank. They swayed back and forth as Merle guided the car around a tight curve in the road, gaze focused to the hard line of asphalt. Ivy looked at the road so she didn't see the people in the distance, swarming the fields, dusty faces turning in their direction as they kept going. "I want to be safe again. I want this to work out if that meant that everything is going to be okay."

Ivy wanted white smoke to fill the sky. Hope was an uncomfortable pressure to live beneath and she wanted to know if it would be worth enduring.

"I would've gone back in the end, if I had enough pieces left," Merle smirked. "That prick sure kept that from happening. Took everything and just kept on going, huh?"

"Would've, could've, should've." Ivy teased the words out. He didn't sound angry. When he laughed, it was with her; with teeth that didn't flash around like a shark's mouth. "What'd you end up doing when you left?"

Merle looked at her. His grey skin looked suddenly serious, gaze almost flat. The butterfly crawled across her knee to her wrist and flapped it's wings twice. "You know exactly what I went and did."

Daryl had told her bits and pieces but Ivy tried to think, considering the man next to her. "I think you tried taking out the Governor." Because why else would he have kept on going that day, with that gun and knife? Merle was a bullet and a blade. Nothing less. "And I think you managed to take out some of his people either."

"Everyone gets one lucky shot, kid. You gotta sit yourself somewhere up real high and wait for the hunt to follow your trail."

"Oscar said that, once. Said it was safer to get away from the damage and fight that way."

"It's all about guns and numbers. It's always been like that. That's why you sometimes gotta die first in order to take a few out."

"It was kind of you, doing that." Ivy said. A white farmhouse blinked along in the distance and it hurt to recognize the outline of it; the familiar barn, the fields and the tree line. It vanished quickly beneath a passage of monarchs sailing low to the ground, vanishing it beneath colour and movement. "I wanted to like you better."