my tears ricochet

Chapter Eighty Seven

Daryl was gone.

Negan had left afterwards with his men and Ivy blistered from how he had kicked her down, driving her straight into the ground while laughing. Casual violence was extraordinarily simple compared the how he had battered Abraham into nothing.

Light was cresting the sky as morning thawed out around them and they were silent like pillars of salt around their fallen friend. Seconds slid by like grains of sand. They were all stuck going forward with the current of time and no one could turn it around.

Ivy would never be able to wash the blood away from her memories.

She would never be able to move on from this one moment. No matter how far she managed to go, a part of Ivy would still linger in the clearing, rotting.

Hot sunlight stretched over the ground and Ivy wanted to wake up young again, to surrender this life to the dead ones walking. She wanted the ignorance that came with childhood.

Rosita struggled to get upright. "Hey," Sasha called with a hoarse voice, stretching out one hand. But the woman only yanked back on instinct as she forced herself to her feet. Rosita made an awful noise and moved like the weight of the sky rested across her shoulders like a burden that would never yield. "You need to sit down."

"No." She walked stiffly. Her fingers were trembling until Rosita forced both hands into tight fists, suppressing the weakness where she could. "No."

"We need to get you to the Hilltop," Rick cut in. He rose in a jerky motion to meet her and Rosita moved in the other direction on reflex.

Long black hair fell across her face. "You need to go get ready."

"For what?"

"To fight them."

Maggie looked up from the empty space beside her. She had tried fighting to get to Glenn and taken a solid punch to the face that left her cheek darkening like a reflection of Ivy's. "Someone needs to get back. Start getting the grounds ready for what's coming."

"They have Daryl," Rick said and Ivy flinched from the ground. "They have Glenn. They have an army."

Rosita struggled to clear to short distance to Abraham before she let herself fall to the ground. Her hands caught at the one pressed flat to the dirt. She laced her fingers through his stiff ones and tried to hold it.

"We would die— all of us."

"Go home," she bit out, breaking. "Take everybody with you. I can get there by myself. I don't need you here."

"Can you even walk?"

"I need this," Rosita said. It was like watching her spit out of a mouthful of broken glass. "You need to go to Alexandria. You— he was out here because of me. I don't have my family anymore. Everything I had? It's this. It's gone. So stop telling me what I need, because this is it. I'm alone now."

Rick shook his head and it looked like he was trembling. Blood made his jacket look darker. "We're still your family."

"I can make it. Stop wasting time you don't have and get moving."

"We can't leave you behind," Aaron managed to say. The night had left an awful impression across his face; eyes glassy from shock, dried blood marking his fingers.

"You have to," Rosita told him as she looked at the pieces left on the ground. "Because I can't leave him."

The body on the ground was barely recognizable. Ivy could see Abraham's jacket and his boots. And she knew that if she dug into his right pocket she would find a literal nest of hair elastics because Rosita often snapped so many and he was always prepared to hand a fresh one over.