He was willing to do anything.
.
Figures were visible in the early morning light, shuffling over the unkept edges of the prison and drawing in larger groups. Every day brought more of the dead and they drew inwards with feet and hands, trailing along in endless hunger.
The sunlight made the landscape look soft in ambers and pale purples but Ivy saw the teeth all the same. Felt the was the air had turned dead and flat. It was deceptively pretty in the morning light, even if the world was burning up.
Everyone was shuffling belongings around and packing whatever had tentatively been stored around their prison refuge. They were all survivors, used to picking up the pieces to keep living, running fast enough to keep out of reach of the danger coming up at their heels.
Ivy threw her own bag into Carol's car the way she had hundreds of times before, snapping the door shut and spinning around to survey the courtyard. One of Carl's old comics had been abandoned on the pavement and rain had damaged the pages, making ink bleed into warped images.
"I was supposed to serve eighteen months in here," Oscar told her, meeting her in the middle of the cars. "But the world went to shit and I never got to leave."
"Congrats. You're free to go."
The man didn't strike her as violent but Ivy still counted the facts up to reassure herself that he was safe. Oscar liked wearing slippers at night for comfort and would collect magazines and crosswords, usually kept one ear out for any trouble. He was large but never towered. In his grief he had spent an evening baking them a poor man's version of peach cobbler just to bring everyone together into the light of the candles and lanterns, transforming a space of iron bars and concrete into an illusion of warmth.
"Your dad's gonna want you to get in that car."
Daryl would. They would probably argue about it. Their fights usually went in the same direction every time; pulling away to get louder, refusing to give up their own individual histories just to burrow deep in their points. Ivy wanted to fight and Daryl wanted to keep her from a fight.
It was his role of being a parent and Ivy didn't always like accepting it. Rick did similar to Carl and she knew Hershel played the same card with Maggie and Beth. Ivy was still figuring out how to be parented and she wasn't sure if he really knew what he was doing half of the time.
Daryl seemed to keep a running check list with her: keep the kid fed, make sure she sleeps, is she still breathing?
Everything else was a learning curve. They were both adapting to it, learning the balance of coexistence.
"I don't care," she decided. "This isn't his decision."
The corners of Oscar's mouth twitched upwards. "He might think otherwise."
"I'll be safe."
"You ever learn the art of negotiations?"
Ivy blinked, confused. "What?"
"Sometimes you gotta be ready to give something up to get what you want," Oscar advised her, adjusting the strap of a bag hanging over his shoulder. "The Governor is coming and what do you want?"
"To fight," she said, dragging out the word in case Oscar had suddenly turned stupid in the last five minutes. "I want to stay and fight."
He hummed. "You wanna fight. Do you think your dad's gonna let you be standing here waiting to greet him at the gate?"
"No."
"If you can't be there, where's the next best place?" When Ivy failed to come up with a response he gestured to the gun at her belt. "You wanted to use that. So sit somewhere up high away from the real damage and fight."
His words clicked together inside Ivy's mind. It felt cowardly compared to what she had first envisioned, marching in the vague direction of that awful replica of a town, holding her gun up the Governor's face and taking back a piece of herself. But the man was coming here and there was only so much time she could afford fighting with Daryl when he wasn't one that she wanted to fight.
"You want revenge. I knew girls just like you," Oscar said, all traces of a smile vanishing. "Someone hurt them and the world told them to accept it. They made their little system to protect the person who did the hurting. Revenge- you should know it by it's teeth. If you want to go after it, it'll mark you up the same."
"What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean."
He walked away to stash his bag and Ivy saw that it was fragments of Lori's things- her favourite blanket and pillow. Ivy looked up to the catwalk and formulated an argument that sounded less like an argument.
.
Daryl was always surprised when the group didn't reject him. He had never been the kind of man that people naturally followed. The world was merciless even before and he lived beneath the line that could be trusted. It was uncomfortable to step into the role of authority and to see others looking up at him, that he was both seen and heard, trusted even though they knew exactly who he was.
In a different life, he would have robbed them blind and left them for death.
In this life, he was fighting side by side.
Rick sat across from him with Glenn and listened as he spoke. They didn't turn away. Both men held focus and that kept the sharp pain of grief at bay. He had lost a brother but found a family.
"We can't meet them with the equal kind of fire that they're bringing. They'll be expecting it. That's why they've made this whole thing a show," Daryl said, remembering the spectacle of wasted gun fire just to break down the gate to their yard and flood the space with walkers. Axel had been a casualty that they hadn't even cared for. It was a point of sparking fear and showing teeth. "But they'll be slower, dragging man power and weapons."
"They've been watching us for days. They'll have seen our work at building defences," Rick agreed, waiting for Daryl's point.
"We need to step back. Let them take a few inches. It'll stretch them out some."
Arrogance was a luxury that Daryl wanted to strip Phillip from.
"Bring them into the tunnels," Glenn realized, eyes widening. "Let them walk right in."
"It's dangerous down there for everyone."
"We know the danger. We know what to expect," Daryl pointed out. "Stay up here? Easy targets. Dead before we even know it."
"Send the others out and make them think that we left," Glenn fumbled for the strings of a plan, tapping his fingers on the table. "Clear the whole space out but make them check the tunnels. It's dark and flooded with walkers. We've still got flash grenades left over we could throw."
Lori, he remembered. T-Dog. "We know how the alarms work now."
Axel had shown them the ropes before he died. They all knew how easy it was to create chaos from nothing. "We'll need shooters up top," Rick pointed. "If we get them to clear out, we'll need someone to take them down."
"Me and Maggie," Glenn said. "Give us some body armour and we could sit up there."
"And me," Ivy said, coming up behind Daryl. "I want to be there."
"No," he said on reflex. "You'll go with Hershel and Beth."
Somewhere safe. If the plan went to hell, they could at least make a run for it. Hopefully Merle had damaged enough of the Governor's people that their were fewer lookouts in the woods. Hershel could still drive and Beth had gotten her license before the world went to flames. If they drove fast enough -and Daryl knew exactly how fast Beth could drive- they could make to the other side and keep going.
"I don't want to go into the tunnels. Let me sit somewhere up high."
"No."
Rick awkwardly stood up. "We could use the extra manpower. She's old enough."
Daryl resisted the urge to bite back. Carl was being sent away. Ivy might have been old enough for the Governor to assault but he wanted to protect her from this. If he could give her one thing, it would be to escape the violence, to have nothing to do with the damage that came afterwards. Daryl couldn't shield her from the horrors of a violent childhood or whatever the man had done to her, but he knew she had gotten comfortable with the concept of it.
"It isn't safe."
"Neither was that road. Neither was your brother. Neither is this whole fucking world."
"You wanna watch that tone, sunshine?" he warned him, feeling his pulse race. Merle's body was rotting in a shed. Ivy could have died out in the woods from blood lose. The world wasn't safe but he wanted her to get someplace where she wasn't reaching for her knife first. "I need you out of here."
"He's got my blood on his hands," Ivy said. Her voice came out scorching with honesty but she didn't yell, just kept dragging out awful truths to hand over to him. "He laughed when I was begging him to get off of me. After, when I thought it was over, he cut my wrist. Just so I couldn't feel safe."
Glenn looked sick listening to it. Daryl wondered what it had been like for the boy to find the remains of the violence. His brother had left him a mess of bruises and blood but he had given Ivy his shirt to cover her. He knew, instinctively, that Ivy had won a pawn in this debate.
She was exhausted from hurting and now she was angry.
Merle had tried protecting him. Daryl had still ended up with bruised knuckles anyways.
A person couldn't find peace in a graveyard. But sometimes, in order to walk away, they had to see the dead.
"Please let me do this."
He had taught her how to shoot in front of a fence lined with glass bottles and tin cans. Inanimate objects weren't the same as the living, but Ivy had taken her shots in Woodbury. She had held the gun the way he had shown her in the woods, forcing Merle back. She would know the difference by now.
"You might not be able to run, if this goes bad."
"I'll save a bullet," she said seriously with the same edge he had felt when he promised to kill her before letting the Governor take her.
"Maggie and I'll be there. We're the last line," Glenn said. "I'll make sure she has a chance to run."
Ivy didn't look scared. It would have been easier to argue if she had been demanding to stick to the real action. Maybe it was selfish trying to keep her back.
The worst part, he knew, was there wasn't much of a plan B. Some of their people would get free. If they lost the prison, it would be a sacrifice for the others to start running. Daryl would be just another name added to a list of the dead, side by side with Rick and Oscar and Glenn. At least at the farm he had been able to give her some illusion of hope. 'If something happens, you run to the highway. I'll get to you.'
Merle had bought them some hope but it would only be so much. If Daryl died, he couldn't do much more.
"Need your hair out of your face if you're shooting," he frowned, trying to keep his heart from splitting open. "Glenn'll get you some armour."
Glenn obediently set off and Ivy sat down, holding out a hair elastic with a firm expression. "You do it better."
He snorted, jerking his head slightly to signal her to turn around. She had taken a brush to her hair dry and while it had cleared out the tangles some, it left her hair a frizzing sheet of blonde. It was easier to section, he realized, as if she had brushed it for this very reason.
Nobody had cut her hair since Lori, when she first arrived at the farm. It had grown some, like a measurement of time.
He wished Lori was still here to look over his shoulder and judge his attempts. Daryl had gotten better at managing the hair but it would be almost nice to hear the woman chirping critiques in his ear while he fumbled with hair, both offering care to the girl who hadn't know it before.
"You're going to be fine," he said quietly and Ivy didn't respond, sitting still where shoulders pulled back, spine straight like a line.
.
Daryl's trap had been set carefully. He had heard the destruction from outside the prison and assumed it was a violent show of power. If they had stationed Glenn and Maggie in those watch towers like they originally planned, both might have died before the fight even got started.
He had the flash grenade in his fist and Oscar was over his shoulder, making sure nothing crept up on his back.
Muffled sounds of bullets firing wrenched through the tunnels of the prison and he felt out the silence that came after, the space where the Governor would start pushing in cautiously, moving his people into the cellblock where they left signs of their lives behind.
They had taken care in staging the line directing the Governor. If it wasn't clear enough, they might start wandering in other directions. Glenn and the others were tucked away up high as the final push but if they stumbled their way first, they wouldn't make it.
But it also had to be subtle.
Carol was tucked away closer with a tin can, ready to duck back into a closet with a lock. She was the lure to lead them into the darkness, bait for the arrogance.
He heard the rattle of noise rolling across the floor and flinched, shifting his feet and trying to centre his nerves. Footsteps followed at a quiet clip and he recognized it as the living and not the awkward shuffle of the dead.
They couldn't risk light in the tunnel. The entire plan was formulated on suspense and unease. Oscar nudged his arm slightly and he felt the presence of the man, his eyes barely focusing on his outline. If he died, he wouldn't be alone. It was the only consolation of the plan.
He wouldn't be like Merle, alone in the massacre. Daryl had Oscar and Ivy had Glenn and Maggie. Little comforts.
Daryl tried fooling himself that it was just like sitting in a tree stand waiting for game to follow the path. But the prison was a labyrinth and he was sitting in the belly of it, a trap with teeth and a desire to hurt, to steal back their refuge that they had fought for.
Lights flashed around the corner and it burned his eyes slightly. The air was tense and Daryl was a coiled spring, tossing the flash grenade before lurching backwards, Oscar grabbing him by the collar and steering him towards the wall.
He threw a second before he was temporarily blinded by the white bursts of light, allowing the other man to cover him as the world went into madness. The alarm was kicked off and it overwhelmed the tight tunnels.
Their own loss had taught them the best way to use the prison as a weapon.
Daryl heard people screaming and ducking for cover. The Governor had walked in with the advantage and now his numbers scattered instinctively, each racing to find a way out of the passageway.
Walkers were moving towards the noise and light and Oscar took one out with the short swing of his hatchet.
Everything always happened quickly when everything went to hell.
.
"Get the hell out of here!" Glenn yelled, whipping around the edge of the guarding to fire bullets. Maggie and Ivy joined him in their own fire, clearing the rush of people fleeing their cell block.
Ivy felt strangely distant from the action of shooting, barely recognizing her own hands that were moving, locking on a target and pulling the trigger back. Two men went down and she could barely separate them from the walkers. Clean headshots, exactly as she had practised over and over again.
She was on her feet and she was fighting. Ivy wasn't the girl pinned down like a butterfly in a box. No one was holding her arms. No one was taking anything from her.
'Do you think you own me?' She thought wildly, shooting down a third body. It was a woman this time with long brown hair, a bit like her own mother's hair.
The Governor ran across the courtyard and Ivy froze. There was a sharp, painful ringing in her ears that made her hands lock up. "Get down," Glenn grunted, forcing her back behind the pallets propped up. Maggie tried taking a shot at him but he was firing up, letting a stream of his people through the yard and beyond where they could shoot.
"We did it!" Maggie shouted when the people cleared out, kicking up a cloud of dust from their tires as they went.
"We did," Glenn responded, hoarse. The Governor had gotten away. He was still living and breathing and he had people still.
Ivy felt the weight of those three people she had killed. Those had been small little victories but his numbers were still greater.
They had to keep going.
They met their people in the courtyard, bunching in tight to survey the yard. All of the walkers had been massacred with bullets when the Governor had come in and the emptiness was staggering. Ivy could remember how wide and safe the land had looked before, how easy it had been to lie flat on her back and look up at the stars with Beth.
"We did it. We drove them out," Rick panted. The group that had been in the tunnels were still high on adrenaline, Ivy noticed, bodies amped up for a fight. It had been easier shooting up high where there was less risk of close confrontation.
Michonne's sword had a spray of red blood smeared across it. Her face was grave as she counted the bodies left behind.
"We should finish it," Daryl agreed.
"It is finished. Didn't you see them hightail it out of here?"
Michonne looked at Maggie carefully. "They could regroup. We can't take the chance of a second fight."
That sobered Maggie's delight. Carol and Glenn looked ready to keep pushing and Ivy's ears were still ringing, even in the silence of the alarms. "We can't keep living like this."
"We barely made it back last time," Maggie warned. "Woodbury could be a trap just like this one."
"I don't care," Daryl said. "I'm going."
Ivy still felt frozen from the sight of the Governor in the honest daylight. He had been a monster that lived in the darkness of that room, barely visible in the gloom. A small part had never expected him to look like a man in the light.
She should have taken that shot. She could have, if her hands hadn't seized up like they were being held again.
Everyone kept talking in circles about holding firm or pushing forwards. It was like something had taken the air from her lungs. She should have been the one asking to come. She should have already been moving the car. But Ivy said nothing and could barely react when Daryl placed a hand on the back of her neck to keep her steady, talking to her but she wasn't listening.
The Governor had looked up at her before Glenn pulled her down. He had seen her. He had recognized her.
Ivy had done nothing.
One of the bodies in the yard was twitching. Her leg extended and one hand grasped soil before she pulled herself up. Carol clipped the walker with a bullet and Ivy blinked, seeing the body fall backwards again, face turned upwards to the sky. 'There isn't any stars for you to look at,' she thought distantly, wrist aching.
Ivy was still bleeding. She had never stopped bleeding, not even when she was a child.
She was still bleeding in that awful little house and in that closet in the woods; she was bleeding all over the parking lot outside the store where she dropped her knife; she was still bleeding in that room with hands holding her down; she was bleeding all over this prison and she would never stop bleeding.
Daryl tugged her back into the prison and pushed her gun in her hand. "Keep this, yeah? I'll be back."
His voice echoed and she was a thousand miles away. Her hands still managed to hold onto the gun anyways. It was heavy and she felt the coldness of it. Ivy closed her eyes when his lips brushed over her forehead, his hands lightly touching her shoulders without holding her.
The Governor had seen her. She had seen him. He was the same person from before but she was different. 'I hope you remember me. You should. You're the one who changed me.'
Beth settled in at her side patiently and Daryl left, retreating into nothing and she let him, lost in the fog of alarms and bullets. When Beth spoke she had to focus on the words but couldn't manage to respond. The world was spinning, weakly, still breathing.
.
They stopped at the carnage by the side of the road, bodies spilled open with blood soaking the dirt, walkers ripping flesh from bones in greedy mouthfuls. Michonne swung her sword and lopped the head off of one and Daryl followed with a crossbow bolt through the second one.
The walkers were glutted off of easy meat. The bodies that hadn't gotten up were an open feast. Fresh crimson was smeared across the chins of the ones that had reanimated and they were slowed, half unbothered as they drew closer.
Rick took down one man that Daryl recognized vaguely and something jumped behind him, making him whirl around for cover. A woman was sitting above them in the truck with her hands on the glass, face pale.
"Watch," Rick warned, pulling out his gun while Daryl got the door of the truck. She slid down easily and Darly checked the space behind her for anyone else.
"He killed them," she cried, hands still upright. "We were done. We are done. But he just started shooting and he wouldn't stop and they're all dead."
Michonne's face twitched, looking over at the bodies. "He didn't like people who ran."
"We didn't want the prison," she bit out, eyes red from crying. "But he said it was dangerous, that you were all dangerous people and we had to move first before you came back."
"You psycho leader went after us first," Daryl said, looking at the blood splattered over her hands and shoulders. If the man had shot down all of his people, she had gotten lucky by hiding beneath a body. That might have been a friend's blood on her. "Didn't seem that he wanted to stop."
She frowned, brow furrowing. "You attacked us that night."
"He took our people hostage. Nearly killed one of them," Rick cut in, looking over his shoulder. "If he fired on your people here, what's he gonna do back at Woodbury?"
.
Sunlight came slowly and his mind was thick with grief. He hadn't realized how much it would hurt when Andrea died. The gunshot echoed in his mind and she was sitting beside Amy in the diner, elbows pressed so tight together they made a single form at the counter.
He had felt numb while Rick shuffled orders together, drawing people into organized sections and extending an offer of support. No one can make it alone anymore, Andrea had said in the darkness, bloody in the way her sister had been.
They were saving their enemies.
The Governor was gone and Daryl was lost, going through the motions of starting the motorcycle up, feeling it roar beneath his hands the way Merle had once coaxed it to life, starting the long line of survivors to their home.
Maggie and Glenn held the gate open in silence as the convoy slid past, cars and buses shuttling on through. Yesterday, they would have opened fire on every single person. Now they stood by, watching. Their small group peered outside first before shuffling over, wary as they acknowledged their new audience.
Ivy came out last, face haunted by a sleepless night.
"What is this?" Carl asked, bristling with anger.
"They're gonna join us." Rick said, hand resting on his gun but letting rest at his side. He looked up at one of the cat walks above and fell into silence, eyes full of sky and sun, breathing in the peace. For a long moment they each stood their and felt the empty spaces where someone once had stood. Daryl breathed in and felt a ghost of his brother's old cigarette smoke, a familiar bite to his lungs that filled him with a new wave of loss.
"We're going to open up our home to these people," Rick finally said. "This fight is finished."
The Governor was still somewhere and Daryl had a debt to collect. They were standing in the aftermath but it wasn't over. Nothing was truly finished. There was still blood on their doorstep and the side of the road, one more grave that needed to be dug.
They would bury Andrea with their people. He still held a grudge against her but he let it ease some, choking back the bitterness for a woman who had tried making it right one last time.
.
Everyone was talking and Ivy felt the sharp sting of betrayal. The newcomers had followed the Governor. They had each seen parts of violence that had been left visible. They were all complicit in it. It wasn't fair that they got to scrub their hands clean of the dirt and she was still marked by blackness.
She didn't get to start over again.
The strangers gathered in a loose crowd, craning back their heads to take in what her group had fought for. Ever since the very first night, Ivy had lost pieces of herself to the prison. Safety, security. Her trust. Now she couldn't sleep without seeing that butterfly spin circles above the table, hands coming down on her as she screamed.
Ivy had become a shadow of the Governor.
The sun was cyanide and she was the poison. She looked around at the crowd and one of the men looked back at her for a moment before turning away. Her heart turned to stone in her chest as she saw the spiderwebs on his hands. As she saw the butterfly tangling in the webbing, doomed to die in slow agony.
Carlos was standing in front of her and he didn't even recognize her.
Ivy shifted sideways and began working her way around the new group of people, unable to tear her eyes away from her target. She watched as he turned to whisper into the ear of a woman next to him and Ivy wanted to know who she was. If she was a wife or a sister. If she knew the kinds of things that he did so freely.
Everyone was oblivious as she moved deeper, shifting through people like they were waves in an ocean. A hay field bending to the wind.
She pulled her gun out.
Carlos had caught her by her throat like she was easy prey. "Fucking feral bitch," he had snapped because Ivy was fighting, she was fighting the way Daryl would have wanted her to. Maybe he thought she died somewhere between then and now or that she wouldn't remember his face and he was safe.
Or maybe he wasn't thinking about her at all.
But Ivy had that list of names written out. Names she couldn't forget. Could never purge from her memory.
Carlos stood under honest sunlight like it couldn't burn him.
Ivy stood under honest sunlight knowing that she was still bleeding. Something dark had been lodged in her chest where her heart was supposed to be. You helped him take that, she thought with rage. You held me down and made me the shape of rage.
Ivy sunk herself deep into the shallow grave she had never asked for and pulled the trigger.
.
She was willing to do anything.