my tears ricochet

Chapter 108

Rick didn't want to leave but eventually complied with clear resentment. He offered up his pistol but Daryl refused, opting instead for the rifle. It wasn't a fancy one but it felt familiar from a lifetime of hunting. "Get," Daryl warned him. "Before they start sweeping the perimeter again."

"Stay safe," Rick said back, voice equal in warning. "Don't play stupid games."

Ivy looked uncomfortable and watched as the man vanished into the landscape. "I'm sorry if I made you upset."

He wheeled back, looking at her properly. "You think that's the best way to win a fucking fight?"

"Maybe not the best way," Ivy admitted, voice small. "But effective."

Daryl still had so many regrets from their last fight. He knew exactly how to verbally flay Ivy with his words, how to render her down to raw hurt, and to break whatever fragile trust was building itself back up again. His hands framed her face carefully which prevented her from moving. "If I ever see you try and pull that stunt again, you'll be lucky to stand five feet from a weapon. You hearing me right? That was bullshit."

Ivy had the audacity to look surprised. "Okay?"

He still had Gregory's blood beneath his fingernails. The man was alive when Daryl left him, a literal raw mess begging for death, spineless coward skinned and mangled. Jared looked pristine in comparison. His temper felt like a living thing under his skin, a parasite that demanded more to feed his anger. "There won't be a round two of that."

She tried to move away but he didn't let go. "I just wanted you to listen. I only do that when I need someone to listen because sometimes they just don't and I know I can do this, honestly—"

"You've done this shit before?"

Yes. The truth was plain across her face. "Twice," Ivy confessed and his silence provoked more of a confession from her. "Glenn tried to take me back to the prison after Woodbury but I wanted to wait for you to come back, and Sasha and Tyreese were going to make me give up on what I was doing... I knew what I was doing."

Daryl inhaled sharply, considering her. "That's unacceptable."

"I just needed people to stop trying to touch me. I know how to do this," Ivy said, a touch raggedly. "I promise you, dad. There's a way to finish this."

"If I think for one more you've got a death wish, I'm dragging you back to Alexandria. This is the last time you play that game you got me? You listen and when I tell you to walk, you fucking walk."

Daryl remembered lining tin cans up on a fence to teach her how to shoot, vaguely resentful of being roped into the process with a stolen gun, but wasn't entirely sure they ever touched on gun safety and the many cons that came with holding a loaded weapon to oneself's skull.

That was possibly a major oversight.

He waited until her confirmation sounded less resentful, pointedly refusing to stop looming until something was vaguely settled. "Fine. Yeah. But I know— fine."

"I can get you out of here. You don't have to stick to this part."

"No. I need this, dad. I got into this. I don't... Simon needs to die and it needs to happen, and I just want to finish everything. I want to go home. I want to know that it'll be safe to go home."

This was different from her warpath back to Phillip after Woodbury or her personal mission against Negan. Simon was just an obstacle. "This doesn't have to be on us," he told her, because they were together in a battle for the first time properly, both of them looking at a target.