Joan doesn't like most of them. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody with half a brain and a quarter of an ability to read people. Joan's never been miss popularity, she only had one friend before the turn, and he's long fucking dead. She killed the man that killed him, and as far as she's concerned, that makes her even with luck and fate. God is another matter, but He's not the concern.
Joan's always had a lot of wordless, voiceless opinions about how power should be used. She could never put to sense what bothered her so much about Woodbury, bad enough to want to escape, risk her life just to wander. And she can't explain the same about why the prison sets her more at ease. Yeah, she's not on friendly terms with any of these fucks, she doesn't go to their parties or listen to them sing around the campfire, but she's the first to do her chores, and she makes it fucking clear she can be relied on. She's got skills. She's a fine mechanic, and not a terrible shot. She clears out the dead around the fences. She keeps Merle company.
Somehow, she ends up thinking about that as one of her chores.
He's like some kind of feral animal, sometimes; he needs to be distracted, or he'll scratch and scratch until the whole place comes down. Loathe as she is to admit it to himself, she likes him better, now. It's not a whole lot. She can still barely stand him. But she knows, now, for sure, that he's not liable to try and rape her. That just isn't in the cards. He might kill her, might leave her on the side of the road if he felt it benefited him, but so far, it hasn't. And so far, she thinks she deserves the company.
And he knows his bible. It's a point in his favor. He's probably seen her crossing herself over her food, praying before bed. Joan is strangely comforted in having finally found the devil that quotes scripture.
(Satan, her father once told her, isn't in hell. He's behind other people's eyes. Watch closely, and you can see Him.)
She sees the devil in Merle's eyes far less than she did in her father's. In a way, she can trust him. He's simple. Don't fuck with his brother-- a quiet man whom Joan gives the widest of berth-- and don't fuck with him, and he doesn't give a shit. Sure, he likes roiling people, but he's not softening you up for something worse. He's just picking at the scab that he sees other people as. Can't leave well enough alone.
It's a peaceful life, one she doesn't deserve. She avoids people, does her chores, hunts, scavenges, goes on runs, fixes cars, and quotes scripture with the worst man in prison. It's... fitting. She's a bad person. She's a sinner. She deserves to be around other sinners, since she can't find it within herself to regret her sins.
It all comes crashing down eventually. It always does. That asshole shows up with a fucking tank, where do you get a fucking tank in the middle of all this shit? But there he is, with his fucking tank, and he chops off Hershel's head-- a good man with the wrong ideas about God, but a good man-- and shoots into the fences. Everything is smoke and panic and death.
One thing in the Prison's favor: they let her carry weapons on her at all times, so long as they're not loaded. Joan keeps an ax at her belt at all times, one of those break in case of emergency deals she found in the bowels of this place. Her gun is kept in the armory, and when she hears the Governor roll up, she grabs it, a shotgun and a revolver. Call her old fashioned, the revolver used to be her dad's. She really ought to get some automatics, but that's a worry for another day. So she has six bullets and a few slugs and an ax, and outside she finds complete chaos, screaming madness, dead and living mingled in a horrible swath.
Instinct takes over. She runs. This place is dead. She was never loyal to one person here, except possibly Merle, out of a strange mix of guilt and self loathing. Everyone else, she was just loyal to the idea of the place, and that idea's dead. It's time to go.
She steals a car, which isn't really even stealing, because she repaired the fucking thing and optimized it for off road driving and all that fancy shit Rick used to smile over. It's her fucking car. She hotwires it (someone else had the keys, and they're probably dead anyway) and tears through the crowd as best she can. Thank Christ it's a fucking Jeep.
She doesn't believe it at first, when she thinks she sees Merle slogging through the death and the chaos. Fuck. Is she really going to- yes. She can already feel herself slowing down.
When he hears the rumbling of an engine he tries to swerve into the trees, but they're too sparse here. Which means-- fuck, what? He can keep running, try to outrun a goddamn car (not likely) or stop and take a stand (which doesn't seem much likelier to help things out, but is definitely more his style.)
Don't seem like there's much to lose, though. Which means he's about to turn and figure out how much damage he can do before he gets run down when she shouts at him.
"Well, shit."
But he clambers into the car anyway, she doesn't have to invite him twice.
He also does her the courtesy of not telling her to hurry the fuck up and go. She's a pain in the ass but she's not stupid.
If this means she gets to drive, it's a fucking blessing. Especially if he hasn't got a gun pointed at her during it. It's almost refreshing; everything is shit, complete and utter fucking shit, terror and death all around them, but for once? They both have the same goal, and she trusts him to complete it.
At least, until it becomes a choice between him or her, but they aren't there quite yet. She's still got the car.
She nods at the shotgun in the back. "Shoot whatever looks like it's about to shoot us." The Dead aren't her concern; she's mowing them down when the can't swerve and avoid them. It's not good for the car, but she likes being alive more than having an intact undercarriage.
They do at least make a good team. Merle is willing to admit that, possibly because he thinks it'd piss Joan off and he does love getting a rise out of people.
Which is to say he's already cranking the window down when she makes that suggestion, though it's his own gun in his hand. He's a pretty decent shot, even down a hand; the only reason to hold back is-- well-- in all this shit it's hard to say who's who. Not worth wasting bullets on the biters, and for all his talk about not giving a shit-- well, half the prison folk are Woodbury folk, his folk, and as for the rest, friendly fire isn't. Ain't worth risking it, not unless they get close enough to know.
They make a good team, fighting and annoying the piss out of each other. One good turn deserves another, and she cuts through whatever bullshit he's spinning. There's only one person here Merle gives a shit about enough about to actually ask after. She can't even blame him for it. In another world, she'd be the same.
"I'll keep an eye out for Daryl."
There's a rumbling, the car going over a few twitching bumps, more Dead mowed down. Joan swears-- the jeep will make it through this, but who knows how much longer, if they keep running bodies over.
Yeah, she's got his number. He just grunts, firing off a round, and watches the asshole jerk and fall in the mirror. It's not as satisfying as it ought to be. They're still running-- even if they pick off a couple along the way, even if the Governor's rotting somewhere right now, they still lost this fight.
They've got, what, maybe a couple dozen bullets? No food, no plan, not much besides whatever gas is in this thing, whatever shelter it'll provide if they can outrun the guns behind them.
Basically, they're fucked. But at least she's got her priorities straight.
He takes another shot, fails to hit anything but a tree. Swearing, he leans back in his seat. Fuck it, ain't like it's helping anyway. Instead he just glares uselessly out the window, trying to come up with anything-- any kind of plan.
Joan knows what happens when people like Joan and Merle go too long without a solid plan of action. The result is Joan ending up dead on the side of the road. Her ambition is to live as long as possible to spite her brothers and father, be the last Dority standing when the Earth takes its last shuddering breath at the end of days. It's probably why picking up Merle in the first place was a dumb move, but that's life. If you're not making dumb moves, you're probably fucking dead.
More rumbling as she goes over more bodies. They hit the forest, and that shaves off a lot of the dead swarming them; she tries to stay on the roads Rick and the others kept clear in case of having to leave on some kind of convoy. Planned for every possibility, they did. Except fucking tanks.
And she thinks.
"There are supply caches," she says. They're hers, and she hasn't told... anybody about them, because it makes them think you're liable to cut and run. Which, fair. You never fucking know. "We'll hit them, and start looking for Daryl. You're almost as good a tracker as him."
It doesn't surprise him that she'd have shit stashed, just in case. Joan is careful, and she doesn't trust anyone or any damn thing. He likes that about her. She can take care of herself. If she couldn't, he sure as shit wouldn't have dragged her along. Lending a hand (the only one he's got) now and then is one thing. Right now she's going to be the one saving his ass.
And doesn't that fucking needle him, needing someone's charity.
Her grin twists into a crooked thing, clearly enjoying herself spitefully. And, hey, if it gets them off the subject of their dead 'friends' and demolished home, all the better. They drive through the forest, Dead getting fewer and farer between, and she swerves on the road occasionally to avoid boobytraps. They'll be coming up on one of her stashes, soon; it's how she knows.
"My daddy taught me to survive," she says, without any evident regret. "I was better at it. Teaching don't mean shit."
She likes, too, that Merle knows that Joan killed Paul Dority, even if he was never told all the details. It's something she didn't tell anyone else in the prison, for obvious reasons, but it's something she feels something like pride over. She ended that son of a bitch. She fixed it. One of the best things she ever did, even if she did it too late.
Not that he'll argue in her case. It doesn't bother him that she killed her father-- doesn't really register that maybe it ought to. He figures it's the kind of thing that happens now and doesn't mean much. Shit, he came close enough to murdering his own before things got bad.
But he's a better tracker than Daryl, still. He'll have to be if they're going to find his brother, and if there's one thing the Dixons still share it's that they're both stubborn assholes. He's not accepting defeat on this one.
"Where the fuck do you get a fuckin' tank," he growls after a while, not really at her but she's got the good fortune to be the only one there.
The prison was a shithole, but it was their shithole. Halfway livable even.
Joan gives a one-shouldered shrug. Sure, whatever. She'll take it, because her father was an idiot, and it's part of why she killed him. They drive, and he murmurs to himself, and she knows he doesn't exactly want an answer. They argue and bitch sometimes, but she knows what it sounds like.
His words, more than anything, sound like sorrow. She can't help that, and she doesn't want to deal with it. God's got ways, but so does the Devil. She doesn't want to say it, because she knows he'll whirl on her, call her some stupid church bitch. She's not, she knows what God's like, but she's not going to argue it with him of all people. IF anything, they ought to agree.
She eventually stops the car near a tree, and if you look closely among the branches and ivy, you can see someone's nailed a plank to it. It's a signal from the past to the future. She knew she'd need to leave eventually. She opens the car door, and looks straight at Merle.
"I get the stuff, you shoot anything comes near. You leave, you ain't get none of it, or any of the others. Just a car with a half tank of gas that needs work done on it you can't do."
There's nothing to gain from trying to talk, not really. He's in too bad a mood to fight. And besides, what matters is the fact that they're fucked. It's too late to cry over spilled milk or flattened fences, they just gotta keep going.
Maybe find somewhere safe and get good and drunk, if they're lucky. They're not gonna be lucky, though.
Sucking his teeth, he fixes her with a mock-innocent stare that falls way heavier on the mocking side.
"Sure, I'll keep an eye out while you go shoppin'."
Where the hell's he gonna go, anyway? He opens his own door and unfolds out of the car, stretching his legs, glances around. Quiet enough but they made a racket getting here; it's just a matter of time.
Joan is already half way up the tree. The less time she spends staring at that look he shot her, the less she wants to punch him, the better off they all are.
She won't punch him. But she knows she needs to prove her usefulness, or she'll wake up and he'll be gone.
"Jerky," she says with a grunt, shimmying up another branch. "Ammo. Duct tape. Shit they wouldn't notice I was keeping back."
If she took a swing at him he might feel better. It's best that she not, though. Probably he'd end up hitting her right back and he has the feeling they wouldn't get along so well after that. She takes his shit better than just about anyone who ain't family ever has, but everyone's got limits.
"Busy little ant," he marvels, with a low whistle. He's not even watching her at this point. There's gotta be something around here, right? One of the biters, or two or five of them. He's not gonna get a moment's peace to get drunk but maybe beating the shit out of something will do just as well.
When there's finally a rustle in the distance, he's halfway thrilled to go after it.
"Fuck off," Joan says from her tree. As nicknames go, it's not horrible, but she makes a point of hating all of them. Maybe they'll replace some of the worse ones.
Not that it really fucking matters with Merle.
She hears something rustling in the woods, something coming; it's a noise she would have ignored, years back, but now she's always primed for this kind of shit. That's the new human race, listening for snapping twigs like deer in the forest. Not that Merle would ever let himself be seen as a prey animal. No, she can see him now, ready to kill whatever came across them.
She hopes it's not someone who doesn't deserve it, but honestly, she's not interested in stopping him. It wouldn't be a good bet.
Joan climbs back down the tree and worms her way back into the car as quickly and efficiently as she can. She's got tree sap and pine needles on her shirt, but it's covering some of the blood and ash, so she'll take it. She throws the supplies-- jerky, tape, ammo, like she said-- in the back, and picks up her gun. She doesn't lean out of the car-- what a great way to get bit, wow-- but she does watch his back. Hopefully he'll be quick with it.
By now, Joan's probably as much an expert on him as anyone is, which means she probably knows that Merle Dixon deals with negative feelings in extremely healthy and productive ways.
The first walker takes him by surprise, stumbling into view even as he goes looking for it; it's enough that he retreats a few paces with a grunt, but he turns the distance into a lunge, spearing the thing through an eye socket and drawing back before it drops like a sack of cement.
With an all-too-cheerful whoop, he crashes into the brush in search of more. The action, the distraction, it's just as necessary as the food she's getting.
She follows him slowly, eventually stopping the car near the point in the line of trees where he went off road. She can't stop him from whatever masculine ritual he feels like he's completing, and she'd rather not even if she could. This is his gross bullshit, his stupid baggage. If he gets himself killed, it's one less mouth to feed.
And then, you know, it won't be her. Sometimes she wonders if it'll be her. He's the kind of person she'd end up killing, if patterns repeat themselves.
Whatever. She climbs out the jeep's sun roof, sitting on the top with her rifle in her lap, and she waits. He'll come back or he won't. She'll give him an hour.
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what_wings_dare2014-10-20 06:48 pm
no subject
Joan's always had a lot of wordless, voiceless opinions about how power should be used. She could never put to sense what bothered her so much about Woodbury, bad enough to want to escape, risk her life just to wander. And she can't explain the same about why the prison sets her more at ease. Yeah, she's not on friendly terms with any of these fucks, she doesn't go to their parties or listen to them sing around the campfire, but she's the first to do her chores, and she makes it fucking clear she can be relied on. She's got skills. She's a fine mechanic, and not a terrible shot. She clears out the dead around the fences. She keeps Merle company.
Somehow, she ends up thinking about that as one of her chores.
He's like some kind of feral animal, sometimes; he needs to be distracted, or he'll scratch and scratch until the whole place comes down. Loathe as she is to admit it to himself, she likes him better, now. It's not a whole lot. She can still barely stand him. But she knows, now, for sure, that he's not liable to try and rape her. That just isn't in the cards. He might kill her, might leave her on the side of the road if he felt it benefited him, but so far, it hasn't. And so far, she thinks she deserves the company.
And he knows his bible. It's a point in his favor. He's probably seen her crossing herself over her food, praying before bed. Joan is strangely comforted in having finally found the devil that quotes scripture.
(Satan, her father once told her, isn't in hell. He's behind other people's eyes. Watch closely, and you can see Him.)
She sees the devil in Merle's eyes far less than she did in her father's. In a way, she can trust him. He's simple. Don't fuck with his brother-- a quiet man whom Joan gives the widest of berth-- and don't fuck with him, and he doesn't give a shit. Sure, he likes roiling people, but he's not softening you up for something worse. He's just picking at the scab that he sees other people as. Can't leave well enough alone.
It's a peaceful life, one she doesn't deserve. She avoids people, does her chores, hunts, scavenges, goes on runs, fixes cars, and quotes scripture with the worst man in prison. It's... fitting. She's a bad person. She's a sinner. She deserves to be around other sinners, since she can't find it within herself to regret her sins.
It all comes crashing down eventually. It always does. That asshole shows up with a fucking tank, where do you get a fucking tank in the middle of all this shit? But there he is, with his fucking tank, and he chops off Hershel's head-- a good man with the wrong ideas about God, but a good man-- and shoots into the fences. Everything is smoke and panic and death.
One thing in the Prison's favor: they let her carry weapons on her at all times, so long as they're not loaded. Joan keeps an ax at her belt at all times, one of those break in case of emergency deals she found in the bowels of this place. Her gun is kept in the armory, and when she hears the Governor roll up, she grabs it, a shotgun and a revolver. Call her old fashioned, the revolver used to be her dad's. She really ought to get some automatics, but that's a worry for another day. So she has six bullets and a few slugs and an ax, and outside she finds complete chaos, screaming madness, dead and living mingled in a horrible swath.
Instinct takes over. She runs. This place is dead. She was never loyal to one person here, except possibly Merle, out of a strange mix of guilt and self loathing. Everyone else, she was just loyal to the idea of the place, and that idea's dead. It's time to go.
She steals a car, which isn't really even stealing, because she repaired the fucking thing and optimized it for off road driving and all that fancy shit Rick used to smile over. It's her fucking car. She hotwires it (someone else had the keys, and they're probably dead anyway) and tears through the crowd as best she can. Thank Christ it's a fucking Jeep.
She doesn't believe it at first, when she thinks she sees Merle slogging through the death and the chaos. Fuck. Is she really going to- yes. She can already feel herself slowing down.
Idiot.
"Get the fuck in!"
no subject
Don't seem like there's much to lose, though. Which means he's about to turn and figure out how much damage he can do before he gets run down when she shouts at him.
"Well, shit."
But he clambers into the car anyway, she doesn't have to invite him twice.
He also does her the courtesy of not telling her to hurry the fuck up and go. She's a pain in the ass but she's not stupid.
no subject
At least, until it becomes a choice between him or her, but they aren't there quite yet. She's still got the car.
She nods at the shotgun in the back. "Shoot whatever looks like it's about to shoot us." The Dead aren't her concern; she's mowing them down when the can't swerve and avoid them. It's not good for the car, but she likes being alive more than having an intact undercarriage.
Merle is right; as soon as he's in, she guns it.
no subject
Which is to say he's already cranking the window down when she makes that suggestion, though it's his own gun in his hand. He's a pretty decent shot, even down a hand; the only reason to hold back is-- well-- in all this shit it's hard to say who's who. Not worth wasting bullets on the biters, and for all his talk about not giving a shit-- well, half the prison folk are Woodbury folk, his folk, and as for the rest, friendly fire isn't. Ain't worth risking it, not unless they get close enough to know.
"You seen anyone else?"
no subject
"I'll keep an eye out for Daryl."
There's a rumbling, the car going over a few twitching bumps, more Dead mowed down. Joan swears-- the jeep will make it through this, but who knows how much longer, if they keep running bodies over.
no subject
They've got, what, maybe a couple dozen bullets? No food, no plan, not much besides whatever gas is in this thing, whatever shelter it'll provide if they can outrun the guns behind them.
Basically, they're fucked. But at least she's got her priorities straight.
He takes another shot, fails to hit anything but a tree. Swearing, he leans back in his seat. Fuck it, ain't like it's helping anyway. Instead he just glares uselessly out the window, trying to come up with anything-- any kind of plan.
no subject
More rumbling as she goes over more bodies. They hit the forest, and that shaves off a lot of the dead swarming them; she tries to stay on the roads Rick and the others kept clear in case of having to leave on some kind of convoy. Planned for every possibility, they did. Except fucking tanks.
And she thinks.
"There are supply caches," she says. They're hers, and she hasn't told... anybody about them, because it makes them think you're liable to cut and run. Which, fair. You never fucking know. "We'll hit them, and start looking for Daryl. You're almost as good a tracker as him."
no subject
And doesn't that fucking needle him, needing someone's charity.
He glares daggers at her for that, lip twisting.
"Who the hell d'you think taught him?"
Of course, she must know that.
no subject
"My daddy taught me to survive," she says, without any evident regret. "I was better at it. Teaching don't mean shit."
She likes, too, that Merle knows that Joan killed Paul Dority, even if he was never told all the details. It's something she didn't tell anyone else in the prison, for obvious reasons, but it's something she feels something like pride over. She ended that son of a bitch. She fixed it. One of the best things she ever did, even if she did it too late.
no subject
Not that he'll argue in her case. It doesn't bother him that she killed her father-- doesn't really register that maybe it ought to. He figures it's the kind of thing that happens now and doesn't mean much. Shit, he came close enough to murdering his own before things got bad.
But he's a better tracker than Daryl, still. He'll have to be if they're going to find his brother, and if there's one thing the Dixons still share it's that they're both stubborn assholes. He's not accepting defeat on this one.
"Where the fuck do you get a fuckin' tank," he growls after a while, not really at her but she's got the good fortune to be the only one there.
The prison was a shithole, but it was their shithole. Halfway livable even.
no subject
His words, more than anything, sound like sorrow. She can't help that, and she doesn't want to deal with it. God's got ways, but so does the Devil. She doesn't want to say it, because she knows he'll whirl on her, call her some stupid church bitch. She's not, she knows what God's like, but she's not going to argue it with him of all people. IF anything, they ought to agree.
She eventually stops the car near a tree, and if you look closely among the branches and ivy, you can see someone's nailed a plank to it. It's a signal from the past to the future. She knew she'd need to leave eventually. She opens the car door, and looks straight at Merle.
"I get the stuff, you shoot anything comes near. You leave, you ain't get none of it, or any of the others. Just a car with a half tank of gas that needs work done on it you can't do."
Just making that clear.
no subject
Maybe find somewhere safe and get good and drunk, if they're lucky. They're not gonna be lucky, though.
Sucking his teeth, he fixes her with a mock-innocent stare that falls way heavier on the mocking side.
"Sure, I'll keep an eye out while you go shoppin'."
Where the hell's he gonna go, anyway? He opens his own door and unfolds out of the car, stretching his legs, glances around. Quiet enough but they made a racket getting here; it's just a matter of time.
"How much you got out here?"
no subject
She won't punch him. But she knows she needs to prove her usefulness, or she'll wake up and he'll be gone.
"Jerky," she says with a grunt, shimmying up another branch. "Ammo. Duct tape. Shit they wouldn't notice I was keeping back."
no subject
"Busy little ant," he marvels, with a low whistle. He's not even watching her at this point. There's gotta be something around here, right? One of the biters, or two or five of them. He's not gonna get a moment's peace to get drunk but maybe beating the shit out of something will do just as well.
When there's finally a rustle in the distance, he's halfway thrilled to go after it.
no subject
Not that it really fucking matters with Merle.
She hears something rustling in the woods, something coming; it's a noise she would have ignored, years back, but now she's always primed for this kind of shit. That's the new human race, listening for snapping twigs like deer in the forest. Not that Merle would ever let himself be seen as a prey animal. No, she can see him now, ready to kill whatever came across them.
She hopes it's not someone who doesn't deserve it, but honestly, she's not interested in stopping him. It wouldn't be a good bet.
Joan climbs back down the tree and worms her way back into the car as quickly and efficiently as she can. She's got tree sap and pine needles on her shirt, but it's covering some of the blood and ash, so she'll take it. She throws the supplies-- jerky, tape, ammo, like she said-- in the back, and picks up her gun. She doesn't lean out of the car-- what a great way to get bit, wow-- but she does watch his back. Hopefully he'll be quick with it.
Like anything's ever that easy.
no subject
The first walker takes him by surprise, stumbling into view even as he goes looking for it; it's enough that he retreats a few paces with a grunt, but he turns the distance into a lunge, spearing the thing through an eye socket and drawing back before it drops like a sack of cement.
With an all-too-cheerful whoop, he crashes into the brush in search of more. The action, the distraction, it's just as necessary as the food she's getting.
no subject
And then, you know, it won't be her. Sometimes she wonders if it'll be her. He's the kind of person she'd end up killing, if patterns repeat themselves.
Whatever. She climbs out the jeep's sun roof, sitting on the top with her rifle in her lap, and she waits. He'll come back or he won't. She'll give him an hour.