my tears ricochet

Part 109

It felt like the ground was moving beneath her feet.

Shadows of daylight cut overhead but Ivy was lost amongst the swirling dead, bodies moving through the hills and plains, her feet barely managing a path straight through the mess. Rot ruined the air. It settled in her lungs, touched her skin. She was Ivy, barely, beneath the mask and hours of marching left her numb. Where did the dead girl end and where could Ivy begin?

Her footsteps on the ground were soundless. Her hands brushed the hands of dead things, their faces wheeling around with the frantic energy of many things moving at once, thousands of bodies turning into one shape.

She blinked and saw the porch on the farm house. She blinked and saw a face with the skin peeled back to show the white bone beneath. She blinked and saw the trees outside of the prison. She blinked and saw filmy eyes looking back.

Her entire life was due to the fact that she had run as fast as possible, refusing to falter and die locked in place. She had abandoned her first home, she had abandoned the prison, she had abandoned the bridge, she had abandoned her own self when necessary; surviving with the taste of her own fury bitter in her mouth like blood.

Steering the walkers meant driving them deeper towards where the sun rose from. Ivy had seen darkness melt from orange light, the horizon softened during the gradual rise of it all. Simon liked the rockier hills. They camped up high and it made it impossible to skirt beyond the edges of the watch, impossible to find familiar faces amongst the wilderness.

But she was alive. She was alive and that was what mattered. The scars on her arms and wrists meant so little. Woodbury left a mark on her and she had outlasted that hell. Simon had forced handcuffs onto her that she shredded her skin against, dragged by a dead thing into a pit of death, but she survived that as well.

There was enough of herself left. Ivy thought it was all gone once but somehow the ragged pieces had come back together to be sewn, a patchwork quilt of a girl who belonged nowhere and to so few, tentative piece by tentative piece.

A woman's body jerked as it fell into step beside her. Her ragged boots flapped as she walked. Ivy forced her gaze to look beyond the body, to avoid eye contact. She had to be both soft and hard, a living girl nestled beneath the skin of a dead girl. Long brown hair swept back from the wind and it was Lori's hair, her own mother's hair—

A hand gently came down on her shoulder and squeezed.

Ivy didn't let herself turn back. They were in the thick of the herd, surrounded by walkers with teeth liable to bite and the first drop of blood meant to inevitable slaughter. Daryl's hand didn't yield but softly pressed courage back into her bones, a reassurance of something good in her shadow.

She once brought death with her. If Ivy closed her eyes she could see that old history spill out; men and women dead, her stomach pressed flat to a rooftop while she popped off shot after shot, a knife in her hand aimed to cut deep to scrape against bones, pink switchblade to a plain black knife, interchangeable the more she grew up, death and dead, living because of it.

I'm here, she didn't say. I'm still going forward.

Daryl once said that sometimes the dead could hear her voice. She hoped Abraham was leaning forward, watching from wherever he was sitting. She hoped Oscar knew she was fixing what retribution had failed to provide. She hoped that everyone knew that she was on the right side of the chain, that she was miles and lifetimes away from the place she first started from.

I'm here, she didn't have to say.

.

"I had a couple kids," Simon said into the fire, leaning to provoke the flame into consuming the wood. It billowed smoke, soft with rot and dampness, fighting the efforts to give warmth. "Three of them."