Michonne (nomorebullshit) wrote in vascaptiolog, @ 2014-02-04 02:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | joey mccoy, michonne |
Who: Joey McCoy and Michonne
What: Walking and talking.
Where: Walking to the carnival.
When: Late day 85/early day 86.
Rating: Probably high for language and talk of violence.
Status: Complete.
It was late, and Michonne wasn’t really accustomed to being outside this late anymore. She’d gotten so used to the safety of the prison walls in the last few weeks that it seemed smarter to stay inside at night. Walkers were harder to see and deal with at night. And Michonne was smart enough to know that as good as she was at killing walkers, even the best warriors tended to get in trouble when their senses weren’t at over 100%.
She wasn’t used to this place yet. Not really. It didn’t feel like a safe place to be, anymore than back home. But at the very least, there weren’t walkers here in this world. Yet. She wasn’t convinced that the museum would hold up against a horde of walkers. It wasn’t very well fortified. These were the things that kept her awake at night as she put conscious effort into not thinking about what had just happened back home.
Vas had plenty of its own problems in addition to the Management’s mind games. Taking care of Katie for the past week had been both a joy and a curse and nothing short of torturous. She’d known it wouldn’t last. She’d been warned. She didn’t even need to be warned. Good things didn’t last. At the end of the day, Katie wasn’t her child. She wasn’t Lily. She had to do everything she could to keep that in the forefront of her mind. And she had a responsibility here.
Carl wasn’t her son. They weren’t blood-related. But if she was being honest with herself, she cared for him like he was family. She looked out for him, would die protecting him if she had to. And there was no doubt in her mind that he’d do the same for her if it came down to it. Exhaling, she stared up at the sky, trying to gather her thoughts as she waited for Joey to join her. She knew the story, of course, because Carl had filled her in. She’d caught bits and pieces of things through the journal. Enough to paint an image in her mind that made her uneasy.
She heard quiet footfall behind her and she turned to see the young woman there, looking very pale and tired. Like she was just this side of broken. Michonne knew that look. Knew that feeling. She’d been there over and over and she felt for the girl, even though she didn’t want to. She didn’t want to feel anything, because not feeling anything was just easier. But she did feel for Joey, and while she hadn’t had a chance to really talk to her much since she’d first arrive because of Management’s various experiments, she had the time now.
“Ready?” Her voice was quiet.
Joey didn't actually want to go on the walk with Michonne, if only because it was very seldom these days that Joey had any desire whatsoever to even drag herself out of bed, much less socialize. She'd silently endured Scott's invasion of the museum the past week because of the baby he'd been forced to share with Michonne and she'd kept her sobs muffled in a pillow and her tears to herself. She'd kept her mouth shut and stayed locked in her room, leaving only to use the bathroom or shower at the gym. While Joey wasn't angry at Michonne for bringing Scott with her because Carl was in the museum, she was angry at the group in the museum at large, including Michonne, but most especially at Piper, Kaylee, and Carl — people who had called themselves her friends and hadn't even spared a moment to ask how she would feel about one of Tate's murderers living under the same roof. At some point, Joey's opinion had ceased to matter to anyone in that museum, long before she'd even met Tate. It certainly mattered to no one now that he was gone and she'd been largely keeping to herself in an attempt to keep from spewing verbal vitriol at anyone who may or may not have deserved it at any given time.
Scott's generalization about the people in the museum being cool about him staying there had been the straw that broke the camel's back. Kaylee and Piper could be traitors and play his stupid lacrosse if they wanted to; Simon could sit back in silence neither agreeing nor disagreeing to what was going on and Carl could put on blinders to Joey's feelings because it was important to him to have Michonne close by, but Scott's generalization was not going to be left unnoticed and undebated. Joey was tired of having everyone let the werewolves get away with literal murder. She knew that most people, if not everyone in the dome, believed that Tate had tried to kill Stiles; Joey wasn't blind to that. But there had never been any discussion around it. One minute she was kissing him good night and he'd told her that he loved her...and the next minute a complete stranger — someone she'd only seen in passing because he lived in the gym — was telling her that Tate was dead and it was over. Joey didn't understand why everyone was so quiet about it. She didn't know how to wrap her head around the fact that everyone was so sure that a teenage boy most of them had never even met and none of whom had bothered to get to know had nothing to say about his murder. No one was outraged. No one was sad. No one was even questioning it. It felt like she was in a bad dream where suddenly popularity contests became deadly and because the cool kids had killed Tate, no one was going to ask for anyone to take responsibility for that. Joey was tired of enduring her pain alone and with no one on her side. So, she'd finally snapped.
Michonne had taken Joey's written rage with patience and understanding and she'd said that she knew how Joey felt. Joey wasn't sure she believed that, but she wasn't going to count Michonne out without giving her a chance, especially when Joey had no one left to trust. She'd promised Carl to stay with him until the end and that they were in it together and she'd meant it...but she didn't trust him anymore, either; not like she used to.
It had taken an effort to drag herself up out of bed and she dawdled enough to give herself time to stop crying before she finally pulled off her pajamas and replaced them with a pair of jeans and a t-shirt underneath Tate's jacket. She intended to climb that Ferris wheel and she knew she'd need it; it was colder at the top than it was on the ground. Tomorrow, Joey was going to pack her things and vacate the museum. She was no longer welcome and she didn't want to be. There was no more comraderie. People didn't ask her so much as tell her when new people were going to live in the museum for a while...and now, between River and Scott, people had just stopped even letting her in the loop at all. It wasn't a place where she felt comfortable or wanted anymore and she didn't feel safe. Nowhere felt safe, but if she was alone, then when the attacker hiding behind Tate's death came out for another go 'round, maybe they would pinpoint her and at least if she had to die in this horrible place, she'd do it proving that Tate was innocent.
After dressing herself, she checked the safety was on the gun just like Carl had shown her before she pushed its muzzle down into the waistband of her jeans, and then she headed outside where Michonne was waiting.
Her face was drawn and tear stains were written into her cheeks; her hair was greasy and pulled back into a ponytail, though a few stringy pieces had escaped and were framing her face and neck. It had been a couple of days since Joey had showered last. Maybe more. Largely, she couldn't be bothered if she wasn't going to be around anyone to offend with her lack of hygiene anyway. Tomorrow, she'd have to, though, because she was starting to feel the grime at this point. Michonne asked if she was ready and Joey shrugged, her eyes still red-rimmed and watery as though threatening another storm of tears that Joey didn't have the energy or desire to try to hide from anyone any longer. "I guess," she replied non-comittally. "I'm sorry I yelled at you, again," she added quietly.
Michonne watched her for a moment before they begin to walk, pursing her lips at the younger woman’s apology. “It’s fine.” She knew it wasn’t about her; truth be told they’d had very little interaction since Michonne had arrived. She’d had very little interaction with anyone outside of Carl. She struggled with new people, with letting people close enough to actually get to know her or vice versa. But Joey was a child, like Carl -- slightly older, but not by that much, and she was alone in this place and for those reasons, Michonne found herself paying more attention to Joey than the other adults. Kids and apocalypse situations, or torture situations...it was unnerving.
She slid her hands into her jacket pockets even if it wasn’t really cool enough to be wearing a jacket. It was one of the only things she had from home, and as shitty as home was, it was hers. Normally she didn’t leave and go anywhere without her katana either, but right now it was useless, a dull piece of metal. She suspected foul play on Management’s part. She was grateful there weren’t walkers around, that so far she hadn’t actually needed a weapon. But there were other things here, and other people, and Michonne knew better than anyone that the saying a wolf in sheep’s clothing was deadly accurate in a lot of cases. Like the governor.
She hadn’t met any of the wolves that Joey was so angry at, except for Scott. And for the life of her, she didn’t get a bad vibe from the kid. He seemed more like a big puppy than some kind of werewolf. She was still trying to wrap her mind around the idea of werewolves in general, even though Carl had filled her in when she arrived, and she was from a world where the dead came back to life and ate people. She drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around much,” she said, her words quiet as always. “I’m not great with people.” It wasn’t a lie. Even back home with the group, she struggled to integrate herself. Her most solid connection had come from the youngest boy of the group, though she liked all of them well enough. Trusted them as much as she could trust anyone. She’d killed for them, nearly died for them. But she rarely felt like a part of them. It was why she’d kept away for so many months looking for the governor. Being alone was just easier in some ways. But there was no denying she was lonely sometimes, and she suspected the teenage girl beside her was a lot worse off in that department than she was. “It’s not an excuse.” She glanced at Joey sideways. “I shoulda asked sooner.”
"Nobody has," Joey replied softly. She sounded more resigned than upset. "And you didn't know...or maybe you did but you didn't know me, so I didn't really expect you to be," she admitted. Joey wasn't sure why Michonne was apologizing for not having been there for Joey when she owed the younger girl nothing.
Still, she looked up at Michonne briefly before looking ahead of herself again as they walked. Joey couldn't decide whether she wanted to laugh derisively or cry at the fact that the person beside her, a person who barely knew her at all, was the only one apologizing for her lack of support. What this place did to people was sick and Joey decided shortly after Tate's death, that she wanted nothing to do with anyone anymore, unless it was periphery. Carl was the lone exception because he'd been the one to feed her, check on her, guard Tate's cabin for her, and talk her down from the Ferris wheel when she couldn't remember which places to step.
...and yet someone new was reaching out to her, the way she had recently for Rachel. At this point, it had become so foreign a concept to her that she wasn't sure how to wrap her head around it. "Nobody likes me anymore," she blurted out. "Nobody talks to me because I haven't made myself very approachable lately but...some people haven't even tried. I don't know why you are...but thanks."
Joey was right, of course. Michonne didn’t really know her, but she recognized someone who was in obvious pain as well as anyone else. The world had long ago taught her that other people didn’t deal with someone’s personal grief well. Over and over she’d learned that for as much compassion and optimism as some people had, that all tended to go away in the face of death. It made them think of their own mortality, made them uncomfortable at the thought of facing a similar loss.
She considered Joey’s words for a long time before she spoke again. “People are funny when it comes to grief. Even when they care, they feel helpless. If they can’t fix it, they don’t want to be involved. Hurts too damn much,” she murmured. She walked alongside the younger girl, letting Joey set the pace of their walk because this wasn’t about her. It was about the broken young woman next to her.
Joey's eyes welled up and she didn't blink the tears back when they came. She let them fall silently. It felt like she'd cried more in the past few months than she had in the rest of her whole life combined and it seemed like there was no end in sight. "I never knew anybody who died before," she admitted. She felt childish saying it; naive and small. She'd never even lost a grandparent to old age while old enough to process it, so Joey's first experience with death was the brutal murder of the first boy who ever loved her. That, she supposed, was why everything felt doubly hard for her. "He told me he loved me. That's the first time anybody who wasn't my family ever said that to me...that's the last thing I'll ever hear him say and I don't know if that makes it better or worse..."
She sniffed and reached up to wipe her face with one hand. Tate had written to her that he missed her already, before he'd even gotten to the cabin only to meet his demise. The only time Joey ever felt loved like that was around Tate...and now he was gone and nobody cared. Some people even condoned it. Kaylee sprung to mind after she'd said that she wasn't saying what the werewolves had done was either right or wrong. Joey couldn't understand how it was even possible to have a gray area. They'd murdered Tate. How was that in any way "right?"
The two of them walked mostly in silence with their words breaking it between long pauses and Joey kept pushing one foot in front of the other until the carnival was in front of them. She stared up at that top car and her eyes moved up to the stars in the sky from there. I'm tired of letting them forget you and I'm tired of pretending I'm not angry. I'm sorry I'm being so weak...I know you wouldn't have wanted it, she thought, directing those thoughts to Tate, if any part of him lingered to hear them.
People back home, in large, probably didn’t think that Michonne felt pain in the same way they did. She wasn’t exactly known for displays of any kind of emotion other than well-kept anger. She hadn’t known Tate at all, hadn’t been there for any of the madness that had gone down. She knew from Carl that he hadn’t trusted Tate, that he believed Tate to be the person who’d tried to murder Stiles, but that Joey had seen another side of the guy. She trusted Carl’s instincts for the most part, but usually werewolves weren’t involved and she hadn’t yet decided how much that difference that made in everything that had gone down. She did wonder if the werewolves had been human, if they would have made the same choice in their actions, but she supposed they’d never know the answer to that.
Michonne wasn’t entirely surprised that this was Joey’s first taste of death, because she was so young, and she wasn’t from where she and Carl were from. Where people they cared about died every day. Sometimes from walkers, sometimes from disease, sometimes from other humans. The world was a terrible, violent place, and this one seemed to be much the same way in that aspect.
She was quiet again as she, too, looked up at the ferris wheel where Joey was looking, wondering what its significance was to the young woman. It obviously held something for her that Michonne couldn’t see. “Carl tell you much about our world?”
It took Joey a little longer to process Michonne’s question than it probably should have. Mostly, because Joey was in her own head, just then. Tate was gone, most of his things were gone, his cabin had been taken over, no one was talking about it...it was like he’d been erased. But the Ferris wheel still loomed overhead and she was willing to bet that if she went up there, the clothes he’d laid out for them to sit on would still be in that top car. That car in the Ferris wheel was hers and nobody was going to take that away from her. Not even, apparently, the Management.
“A little,” she said. “He doesn’t talk about it much. Daryl never liked to talk about it much, either,” she replied softly, taking a few steps more toward the base of the Ferris wheel. She almost told Michonne that she was going up just a second before actually starting to scale the thing, but the woman’s question about Carl had been unrelated in context, so Joey waited, wondering if there was a reason in particular that she’d brought it up.
She wasn’t surprised by either of those revelations. If anything, Daryl was as reserved as Michonne herself was. She didn’t like talking about it either, but sometimes life necessitated one be more forthcoming in order to help someone. “He tell you the dead where we are reanimate? We call ‘em walkers. Doesn’t matter if you’re bitten or not. Anyone who dies, comes back as one.” She had no idea if Carl had told Joey even that much, and if not that was probably going to be a rather surprising reveal, so she watched the younger woman closely for her reaction.
Joey looked over at Michonne again, finally. “I knew they were called walkers...and I knew they were pretty much zombies…” she admitted, lifting her eyebrows a little. She hadn’t known anything else about it. Carl hadn’t said. Daryl said even less. “No matter what…?” she asked and she willfully squashed down the tiny part of her that thought fleetingly that if Tate was like that, she could’ve at least said goodbye. She knew better, of course, because Carl had at least let her in on the fact that walkers weren’t really people anymore. Her stomach turned at the very fact that she’d let the thought cross her mind at all. She’d keep that to herself...forever.
“No matter what,” Michonne confirmed, voice quiet as she looked up at the ferris wheel. When it came down to it, she hated talking about herself. Hated revealing things that made her vulnerable. In fact, she rarely made the effort with people on that level, but there was something about Joey that made her feel like the younger girl was some kind of kindred spirit because of their intimate knowledge and understanding of pain and loss. She turned so she was looking at Joey once more, expression reflecting more sadness than she’d ever allowed even Andrea to see.
“First one I had to kill was my boyfriend,” she admitted. “Then his best friend. After that…” She was silent for a moment. “I know that pain, is all. It feels like you’re alone, but right now you’re not.” She reached out hesitantly, squeezing Joey’s arm for a brief moment and letting go.
Joey’s stomach twisted uncomfortably as Michonne spoke. She couldn’t imagine if something like that had happened to Tate instead; she didn’t think she could have killed him. Even if she knew she was supposed to to stay alive, Joey didn’t think she could. It made her heart ache just as much for Michonne as it already did for Tate. “I’m sorry…” she whispered, because there was nothing else, really, to say. Michonne hadn’t had to share that with Joey, but she had. Joey wished Michonne didn’t know how it felt; that sort of pain, but she did.
For a long moment, Joey said nothing, standing still and silent at the base of the Ferris wheel, looking up at it again. “Tate took me to the top a few times,” she said quietly. “The first time, I was terrified. He promised he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me, so I went...and when I got to the top, I’d never felt more accomplished in my life.” She paused. “It’s not the same up there, now, but it’s something…” she finished in a low voice, still staring up at that top car. It was Joey’s way of explaining to Michonne why they were here rather than literally anywhere else in the dome.
Michonne felt instinctively, that Joey would keep her revelation to herself. There wasn’t a reason to tell anyone, of course, and the young woman didn’t strike her as the type to run her mouth without a good reason. She liked that about her. And like Joey wished Michonne didn’t know that pain, Michonne wished the same thing for Joey. But they lived in a world that had failed them both in similar but still different ways.
She looked upwards when Joey began to speak again. The ferris wheel seemed surprisingly sturdy and now she understood why Joey had wanted to come here. She needed to be in the place where she remembered him the best way she could. Whether Tate was really a killer or an attempted killer didn’t matter at this point. What was done was done, and Joey was the one who was suffering.
A faint, sad smile touched her mouth and she nodded slightly. “Care if I come there with you?”
Joey almost said no. Michonne going up there with her would mean filling the void where Tate used to sit. She wouldn’t be able to talk to him up there, even if he couldn’t hear her anyway, if Michonne was with her. But then she thought about why Tate had taken her up there in the first place. He’d said that the town looked beautiful up there, so much that he’d had to share it with someone. Now, Joey could pay that forward.
Instead of saying yes in that simple word, Joey moved forward and started to scale it. “It’s all about where you step. There’s good places to step that make it easy,” she explained, moving up the Ferris wheel enough to give Michonne room to follow. “Don’t let go with your hands until you’re positive the foothold is good. That way, if you slip, you still won’t fall,” she said.
She followed her to the wheel and although she had little doubt she could have made it up to the top without any instruction, she sensed that Joey needed to give the instructions. Because Tate had done that for her, and she was passing that knowledge along to Michonne. There was something very touching about that and Michonne found herself listening intently. Within moments they’d made it up to the top and she watched as Joey slid into the seat. She made note of the clothes that were there, carefully pulling herself up beside the young woman and looking around.
It was surprisingly peaceful there, and she could understand the appeal to Joey, and even to Tate. Obviously neither had much issue with the safety issue, and Michonne certainly didn’t. It was probably the least frightening unsafe thing she’d done in the last several months.
When she got to the top, Joey slid into Tate’s side of the car; she didn’t want Michonne to sit there. She looked out over the town now and remembered the last time she’d been up here had been the morning after Tate’s death and she’d gotten stuck. Without Tate to guide her, she hadn’t remembered how to get down. Eventually, she’d done it, but not without unintentionally giving Carl a handful of heart attacks every time she slipped along the way. The town still didn’t carry the hidden beauty now that it had when he’d brought her up here. Her face was drawn with a maudlin expression.
“It’s uglier up here, now. Now that I know what kind of people are down there,” she said mostly to herself, partially to Michonne, and partially for Tate. She knew it was probably weird that sometimes she still talked to him, even though he wasn’t there. She seldom spoke aloud her sentiments, but she thought them often in his direction. Sometimes, when she felt especially low, she could hear him responding in her head and even though it was fabricated and she’d been the one talking to herself all along, it still made her feel connected with him in a way she couldn’t feel anymore, now that he was gone.
Michonne had spent enough time talking to her dead boyfriend to know when someone else was doing the same thing. Pursing her lips, she hesitated for a moment, then reached out, wrapping an arm around Joey’s shoulders silently and looking out over the scenery once more. It wasn’t ugly to her, yet, but she was sure that eventually she would hate this place as much as everyone else did. Whether she’d hate it more or less than she hated home was anyone’s guess. All she knew for certain was that for as long as she was there, she was going to do her best to look after Carl and Joey, as well. And she hoped that it was going to be enough to get all of them through this.