WHO:Michonne & Lina WHEN: Early May WHERE: Bar WHAT: Michonne runs into a semi-familiar face WARNINGS: Mild; drinking & language STATUS: Complete
Knowing that the dreams happened and having them happen to you were vastly different things. Michonne could understand the theory in it, but she hadn’t really wanted the practical experience. Dreaming of Mike, of Andre, it was enough to have her waking in a cold sweat, tears streaming her face.
And so began the day with a bottle of rum from her half-unpacked kitchen and white noise on the television. By the time that ran out and she discovered that no, she couldn’t just drink gin on it’s own, Michonne was thrown together haphazardly and in search of a moderate to decent enough bar to continue drowning her sorrows, rather literally in this case.
If she could get drunk enough to stop remembering that bright cheerful face, then she’d call it a good day. She was probably half-way through her own bottle of scotch at the bar when she spotted the redhead, that odd little niggling at the back of her head that told her she knew the woman from somewhere, if not personally then at least in passing.
It just wasn’t coming to her through the current fuzz of awareness.
If Lina Inverse had a penny for every single name and face she remembered shooting at her for having such a hefty price tag on her head (again, she didn’t do most of what she was accused of, and it was her ex-employer’s way of trying to get back at her for practically bombing his headquarters), she’d have a damn good savings she’d be sitting on. Most of the time they were all blurs, but every now and again there’d be someone that stuck out like a sore thumb - and that was Michonne.
Probably because she’d been one of the few women to have ever tailed her.
Funny how this place brought old acquaintances together, like they were all connected in some twisted web of fate that’d bring them all here - it drew all of them in like moths to a flame.
“I’m not really surprised to see you in a place like this,” voiced the redhead, not as scraggly or scrawny like she’d been on the run. Lina had always been one to look like she drank from the fountain of youth but she at least looked older (maternal, even), dressed in leggings and a tunic shirt, a black belt pinching her waist. She had the clarity of sobriety and cheerfully took a seat next to Michonne, beaming with a smile. “Hey there, pretty lady. Come here often?”
The voice was familiar too, but Michonne knew it wasn’t an old friend. She made a point in knowing where most of them were, the odd occasional person she didn’t feel the need to keep tabs on, people she could trust not to screw her over. They were people she didn’t need to keep a constant tab on.
The redhead was familiar for something else.
“No one should be surprised around here.” Dive bars weren’t that bad, and this place was fine, Michonne just needed something to kill her memories anyway, nothing fancy. It was probably the smile, the sass, maybe a little of the sarcasm that had Michonne trying to put her finger on where she knew the redhead from -wasn’t a one night stand, unless the girl hadn’t been a redhead at the time. “No,” she answered the question honestly anyway, “First time, new to the area.”
It would come to her, it always did, Michonne just needed to pay attention. “One of your haunts?”
Michonne had especially been on her radar considering she’d been an old buddy of Pete’s - her husband dabbled in contracts still now and again (they had to unleash their penchant for violence somehow, and hers was always doing the modern version of bandit hunting), but it was no surprise they crossed paths before.
Just so happens they had a mutual acquaintance of sorts.
“Used to be,” Lina answered, glancing around the place in what was almost admiration before waving the bartender over for a beer. Blue Moon, please. “Mostly if I ever needed the scoop on something or what was the latest trashy rumor when it came to people of interest.” Her survival during the darker times of her life were attributed to three things: luck, skill, and the interference from a half-demonic ex. “Especially with those that had a price tag on their heads. I used to be one.”
That was when it clicked for Michonne. It’d been a few years, and it had been a wild chase, and she knew she hadn’t been the only one on that chase either. People had told her not to bother, it was impossible, even if she’d caught Lina, she’d lose her not long after.
“I… I think I shot at you once.” Missed, which was unfortunate, Michonne tried not to miss as often as possible, but running and shooting at the same time rarely went well. It had Michonne raising an eyebrow at the redhead, because shouldn’t she be avoiding Michonne? Or angry?
“This place is full of weirdos.” Which was putting it lightly, as Michonne finished her drink and waved for another one.
There she goes! Ding ding! Lina’s tongue clicked, and she offered the woman a playful wink. “That’s about right,” she confirmed, taking the orange wedge that’d been propped atop the hole of her beer to peel and bite into. Mmmm. “Turns out you’re also buddies with my husband so, wow, talk about a small world, huh?”
Michonne probably shot at a lot of people so the fact that she even was a blip in her memories was surprising. Much like Lina had a lot of people shoot at her, and she hardly ever remembered who they were unless there was something particularly distinguishing about them. “Any particular reason you’re getting sloshed tonight, or did the dream bug bite you excruciatingly hard?”
Small world was one way to put it, and Michonne needed to cycle through her known contacts in her head before, “Wisdom? You’re the--” Okay, if she were being honest was she really surprised that Pete Wisdom married a former fugitive? “You know, him settling down makes way more sense now.” Marginally, but… Well fine, good for them. “Congrats?”
Her fresh drink was dropped off, added to the tab she’d already given earlier, Michonne gave Lina a small salute of her drink before going back to it. “Isn’t that the main reason to drink around here? Functional alcoholism, right?” She smirked a little, because it was fairly close to home all in all, but Michonne was comfortable enough to let herself just drown it out with a steady alcohol flow.
“This dream bug bullshit is ridiculous.”
What a romance, right? Bounty hunter wooing a bounty - but it’s not like they met in a rough rumble n’ tumble of violence, though, and her now-hubby played an important part in making sure the price stayed off her. Pete was a total keeper. “Yep, I’m the wife,” Lina smirked. “But thanks, and welcome to the crazy train. Membership requires you to leave your sanity at the door, or at least redefine the word.”
Nothing really shocked her anymore, and she’d been really surprised that the zombie apocalypse had yet to happen. Or that sharks weren’t falling from the sky like in some shit-rated movie. Either way, something happened? The redhead was always more than prepared to blast it to Kingdom Come.
“What cards were you dealt with?” she asked, nursing her crisp and citrus-flavored ale. “Vampire? Mutant? Wizard? Disney character?” That was just scratching the surface.
Leaving behind the sanity, checking what you thought was possible and impossible, that seemed to be exactly how people managed to reason out living here, how they could possibly settle and just accept it all. Either because they were clinically insane or because the impossible was just normal for them. Neither seemed overly exciting for Michonne.
The list that Lina rolled through just had Michonne’s eyebrow climbing with each suggestion, and was it bad that she shuddered a little at the idea of Disney? She’d never really prescribed to the Disney nonsense, not even when she had Andre. They didn’t watch Disney. Children’s shows yes, but not Disney.
Just her own train of thought had Michonne slugging more of her drink. “Zombies.” She wished these things needed a little more explanation, but they sort of didn’t. “Although we call them walkers.”
Zombies. Walking, deteriorating corpses. Lina’s nose scrunched. They existed in her dreams, too, but more so in the form of necromancy - they didn’t just crawl out of their graves because they realized they forgot to turn the stove off before they died. “Is it a virus sort of thing? Something in the water that turned them, or are we talking a little more supernatural?”
Hey, she had seen games like Resident Evil be played out. All the movies with a Dystopian future where everything laid in ruin too. The ones that ran were the worst. But from the looks of it, whatever came to Michonne the moment her eyes closed and she was lulled into that deep slumber that made them all extra vulnerable...
It definitely wasn’t anything good.
The nose scrunching was just about how Michonne had felt at first, before things got violent and destructive and similar. The walkers were enough to have her hating the zombie genre, she guessed it happened across the board, they started to take a dislike for what they dreamt. “It’s a… I think it’s a virus, not a pathogen or magical anything, there was a CDC warning and then it all just went to shit.”
Maybe that made it worse, how it came on, one day being fine, the next the news breaking and things going wrong all over the place. It would be nice to know how it happened, but Michonne was sort of dreading finding that out too.
“It’s definitely not ideal for getting rest, that’s for sure.”
That’s a kind of survival dream Lina sure as fuck didn’t envy. Most dreams were about surviving something regardless, weren’t they - but there was something about the concept of zombies that came with a classic horror. The sort that caused goosebumps to rise, and the small hairs on the back of your neck to stand erect.
What does someone say, anyway? ‘Hope you don’t get your face eaten off’?
“If this is the beginning for you then I hate to see what else is in store,” she snorted, and she’d argue that her words were doused in realism instead of cynicism. It was just the way things went. Most of the time it started alright and then, like all stories, shit hit the fan. A beginning, middle and end. “Might as well abandon the idea of rest for awhile. They usually don’t hit you back-to-back. Anyone broke the news of injuries crossing over?”
While it was true that Michonne wasn’t constantly having images of another life in a post-apocalyptic world play over and over every night, her own constant state of alertness waiting for it was problematic. She didn’t want to turn to medication, because really, it would cause problems during her waking hours, and because she felt it too final.
Too much like acceptance.
She just needed to work out how to manage it all. And until then, the alcohol was working well. “Yeah, so now I have to see if there’s something I can work into my medical file. Instead of a DNR order, a ‘shoot or stab in brain stem’ order. I think I’d rather be dead-dead than come back like that.” No thank you, if it meant death or living like that, Michonne would definitely choose death.
“But yes, Cindy mentioned things passing over, like death.” Or bites, she supposed her biggest worry should be bites. “What about you? Dream of some horror plot cliche? Or are you a poor Disney sod?”
“Put a sticky note on the back of your license, maybe,” Lina mused, and she meant to be playful but - well, it was probably distasteful as fuck to make quips about someone potentially turning into a moaning, groaning undead being with an appetite for innards. Then again? Sometimes you just had to laugh, bitterly, about some of the shit this place pulled.
It was another way to cope. Among the violence and functional alcoholism, anyway.
Her thumb dragged down through the condensation of the bottle. “No Disney. Some horror every now and again, depending - but mine’s a medieval landscape. Demons, dark lords, dragon gods. Treasure, magic, kingdom politics. It’s a little Dungeons and Dragon-y sometimes, but I can’t say the perks are bad.”
The sorceress tightened her fingers around the glass, and then there was frost - an icy layer crawling up from the base to the neck. It was subtle enough to not catch any unwanted attention.
It wasn’t too bad an idea, potential disclaimer and the vague ‘for religious reasons’ excuse. Maybe she’d just make sure certain contacts knew what to do in the event of her death.
At Lina’s description of her own dream-scape, the Dungeons and Dragons feel to it, the notion that she was basically out of some nerds fantasy world, Michonne snorted into her glass. At least until she turned her drink into a snow-cone and then Michonne was just disgruntled.
“Are you shitting me? You turn into Frosty the Snowcone and I get decomposing nuisances?” What a fucking world. “I call karmic bullshit on that one.” She was irritatingly impressed with it too.
“Ho ho, wait until you see what Pete can do,” Lina giggled a little, pleased that her beer was at least ice cold again - though maybe a little too cold, with the crystals that were now in it. Damn. “His isn’t magic. It’s genetics, a mutation of some kind.” Mutant was the technical term but lordy, that term was too harsh and it made it sound like he had a tentacle for a dick or whatever. “It’s not karmic bullshit, though, it’s just -”
Hmmmm. The redhead bit the inside of her cheek, mulling it over. “It’s a huge, cosmic joke that we’re in the middle of. That’s the way I see it. Life’s funny. Sometimes what we go through here in our regular lives parallel what we go through in some other, and those can be a bitch and a half. But hey, you’ll survive. We all somehow do.”
She was possibly going to need to bring that up with Pete then, some other time maybe. When she was dealing better with this bullshit. “Magic and genetics and super powers, any I might turn into a flesh eating corpse?” She was definitely calling it karmic bullshit, cosmic joke or not.
She didn’t really want to consider all those implications of the parallels she’d already seen play out, and if it was possible that they’d somehow carry on mirroring her life. Walkers would be a harsh spread, regardless of powers that people had.
“The somehow part of that doesn’t really inspire confidence in the situation if I’m honest.”
Lina visibly grimaced. “Don’t know,” was her honest answer. “I can’t promise you that you will or won’t - all depends on what road it all takes you.” Though that sure as hell didn’t sound comforting, did it. No one wanted to hear that they could die, less that they could becoming the walking dead if it happened. “But you’ve go a whole well of weird resources here with the skills people have inherited. Most of us have been bent over a table and royally screwed by this place, though it’s never been anything we can’t come back from. I’ve known people that died and then gave death the middle finger and are happily grounded here with a white-picket fence.”
Neal came to mind. The dreams had killed him and literally tried to do it here, but he lived - so did the pirate, so did Cindy, so did she. “Until then, all you can do is live life. Drink a little. Shoot or stab things when things pop up that need to be shot or stab. It’s really therapeutic.”
Living life was something Michonne had almost been doing for a while now, almost. And maybe she needed to stop almost and just go all in, let the past stay where it was and try to live for now. Even if there were dreams that would eventually kill her, it wasn’t like she was going to live forever anyway, so…
“Point,” she could work with this surely, and there wasn’t a guarantee on anything. “Besides, maybe I’m the most awesome bitch at straight up slaying these fucks.” She’d gotten by so far, and that was pretty impressive considering she’d been a lawyer. She’d managed the career change here, she could probably hold her own in the dreams.
“And I do like that kind of therapy.” There really wasn’t anything left to do but accept it and make it work. So she’d do just that. “Thanks.” Although advice from a former fugitive wasn’t what she’d have expected.
Hah. Lina’s mouth widened into a grin - because maybe she was the one to slay them all, why the hell not? Considering what she had seen of Michonne, anyway. “That’s the spirit, and no prob. I’m gonna assume we’re good though, right? I’m too cute to cuff, and my record’s clean, soooo…”
Her bottle was raised. Peace offering? Maybe? Pretty please?
Michonne’s lips quirked up, her own glass raised to meet Lina’s bottle, “Hey, if your sheet is clean, I’m not making money bringing in an old collar.” There was no point in holding past chases, and Michonne didn’t really feel the need to hold a grudge on someone who eluded her.
“We’re good.” It probably wouldn’t do too well to haul in a friend’s wife either.