' why would i send you away? '
“why th’ hell wouldn’t you?”
she scoffs that line first, abrasive and biting, like her teeth couldn’t grit hard enough to hold it back. what he’s doing, it’s a kindness. she isn’t used to that. kindness is strange, foreign, unfamiliar. she doesn’t know how to trust it, because every time someone’s ever shown her a shred of it they’ve taken it away just as fast. ripped out the rug from under her feet. heart bruised until she’d learned to shield it, defend it from behind the bulwark of her ribs and the miles and miles of armor built with her bare hands. armor made of dirt and rock and steel, leaving her knuckles scabbed and her fingernails torn bloody. his sincerity threatens to crack through all of that — only two other people, her whole life, have ever managed to break their way in.
all that labor, gone to shit like everything else.
she doesn’t mean to be cold. she doesn’t remember how to be warm. there’s a faint memory of that, itching under her clothes like the grime of filth and sweat, but it’s distant. out of reach. she thinks it has something to do with her mama. her mouth presses into a line, lower lip pulled between her teeth to bite at chapped skin.
they’re a whole group out of atlanta. women, kids. one of them’s his, rick’s; a boy she’d peg at maybe ten years old, give or take. they don’t have any more of a plan than she does, but the difference is that it’s they. that they’re in it together. she’s never had that. even before the dead started getting back up to eat the living, she never had that. and here’s this former deputy, who might’ve once seen fit to arrest her for possession with intent, holding out a metaphorical hand and that simple, baffling kindness: stay.
“… we don’t even know each other. ain’t but strangers whose paths just happened t’ cross — you don’t owe me anything, ‘n i don’t make a habit outta bein’ in somebody’s debt. shit, for all you know, i could be waitin’ for cover’a darkness t’ make off with your supplies.” fleetingly, she glances over at him. “kiddin’. but y’ gotta admit i had you goin’ for a second there.”
the breeze, hot as the air from a blast furnace, gives no relief. but at least the sun is starting to set; it’s crowning the horizon, streaking cornflower blue with washes of peach and lavender. maybe she’s tired of walking. maybe she’s tired of looking for the closest people she has to a family and coming up with nothing, coming up emptier than before, coming up scared and hopeless and completely, utterly, bottomlessly alone.
palms land flat above the bend of each knee so that she can leverage herself into a stand, sweeping unkempt hair back from her face. she’s tired. that’s all this is.
she levels a steady look at rick, one that stays this time.
“— put me up for tonight ‘n i’ll help you clear out that traffic jam ahead. whatever we find, i get a third. then we’re square.”
the war that saved my life / @honestsurvival.