In The Bird Song | TWD

chapter 53 - Not Nothing

Harlow pov

They lock the doors now, at night.

When they think I am sleeping. When they think I can't hear. But I am not sleeping. And I can hear.

I want to shout at them. Scream that I am not an animal, cry that I do not need to be caged. But it would be a lie.

Two weeks have passed since the funeral. One week and three days have passed since I went down stair with bruised knuckles to find the face of Michonne sporting a swollen eye and busted lip.

I remember her smiling like normal, and I remember the trickle of blood as her lip re-split. I remember wanting to die, to bite my own lip until it bled so that we might match. I remember doing neither. I remember sitting Izzy at the table and pretending I had not seen. I remember the shine of the butter knife, and how easy it would have been to run it through my wrists.

I had a dream the night before the funeral. In it a boy, and a baby. Only I know now that it was not a dream, but a mangled perception of a perceived reality. One I know to be true, though it does not feel as such. I wish it were just a nightmare, because that I could wake up from. A nightmare ends. This does not.

I can't remember the night hours well. Perhaps this is a good thing, perhaps not. some days I do not remember them at all. And what I can remember during the day seldom makes sense. I remember holding Annette, and her face looking not as it should. Her hair to dark, her lips to thin, her nose to sharp, her cheeks to full. Outside of the darkest hours, I can understand this baby to be Judith. Not Annette. Not my baby girl. Not the one who is dead. The one who I killed. Or got killed. If there is a difference.

The night of the funeral, I was outside. I must have been. Because upon waking dirt was caked in my nails and grass stained my knees.

Izzy was there. Sat in the corner of our shared room. Her hair tousled. Eyes wide and staring. Watching me. Her bottom lip bitten raw. Her eyes-stained pink.

I did not know what to do then, or what had happened. Something was wrong, I knew that. And yet I still didn't know, not in the way I should have.

"Izzy?' I asked, my voice raw and breath bloody like I had been screaming. Had I been screaming? I can still see her face, and feel the bitter sting of her mistrust. Mistrust in me.

"Why'd you do it?" the accusation in her tone was not lost on me, and I fumbled to try find an answer that wasn't 'I don't know' or 'I'm scared.'

"I-I cant remember. Please love, I'm sorry" even to my own ears my answer sounded empty, manipulative even. I did not deserve her forgiveness. But I needed it, I needed it so badly I would have cut my brain out and given it to her so that she could see how wretchedly sorry I was.

And yet I still didn't understand the extent of my fuck up. Still didn't see the wounds I had left her with. Not until she started screaming. And scream she did. All her defeated apathy boiled into rage; her entire body was alight with it. And I have never, not once, been as scared as I was then. I could do nothing as she hurled the extent of my failure at me, as she spat out her hurt and turned it into mine.

And the thing that hurt the most? The thing that killed me? She did not cry. Not a single tear. She is 6, possibly 7; she should have cried. But she didn't. Her eyes were dry, with nothing for me to wipe away. Children cry. Until they don't. Until they learn not to, that nothing will change if they do. That nobody will help them. But I'm still here, still here but not there. not where she needed me to be. I didn't want Izzy to ever lose her tears, but she did. And she hasn't cried since.