Joan stays a month, mostly spent making plans. Merle put enough effort into getting her here that it'd be a bad move to just bolt. And this place is a shitshow, all the bad memories of her childhood shoved into a little town high on its own fumes, but the food is free and regular if she pulls her weight. Joan doesn't know how to not pull her weight, Dad saw to that, so she does her part.

That doesn't mean she gets on with the locals. She gets shoved into the building the orphans are stuck with, and while she doesn't have to go to their little 'school', she still has to sleep and wake up there. Even without her shithead brothers looming over her reputation, she gets along with the Woodbury kids just as well as she did the kids in fucking Shivley. She gets into a few fights, spends two weeks with a black eye, and knocks out a kid's teeth. She decides to leave when she narrowly avoids getting her arm broken, and she's genuinely surprised when they just let her walk. She was planning on having to make a break for it. But they let her right out the door, and it doesn't feel earned. Puts her on edge, not feeling like she deserves the victory. Fighting for it's so much more... comfortable.

It's still a surprise when she sees someone in the clearing ahead of her, and if she squints, she can recognize the shape of his thick skull through the trees.

She should run. She doesn't. She should shoot him. She doesn't do that either.

She's a fucking idiot, and a hypocrite too. She's killed people she knew better, cared for more, than fucking Merle Dixon. Still, something stays her hand, and she doesn't examine the impulse, not wanting to find whatever the truth really is.

She does draw her pistol, keeping it up and pointed at him before she enters the clearing. "I'm not going back."