TWENTY-ONE: (NOW I KNOW) WHAT YOU ARE
FLIPPING THE SWITCH ISN'T HARD, she had done it every time she performed surgery; it's what separated good doctors and extraordinary, life-changing doctors like her. Leaving the nonsense, everything personal and distracting, beyond those doors, labeled O.R., she focused on what she knew she had to do.
Right now is nothing new.
The Governor butchered her father, and now she needs to kill him. God, or whoever controlled the events that just partook, is cruel and she doesn't care if He, or anyone, decides to bring hell upon her—nothing can hurt her any more than the destruction of her entire soul.
The rain never wavers; the light droplets fail to extinguish the fire blazing her soul with every step she takes toward the governor.
He has Rick pinned down on the muddy ground, choking him to death. Not permitting him to kill another person she loves, Josephine quickens her pace. As soon as she nears him, she throws her foot forward and collides the sole of her boot against the side of the governor's face.
Tumbling off, Rick gasps for oxygen. Josephine can't hide her look of disgust down at the Governor as she protectively steps over Rick's heaving body. Phillip attempts to get up, but Josephine kicks him again in the stomach, keeping him down.
"Jo," Rick wheezes, but his calls fall on deaf ears. He tries again, but Josephine ignores him, so he instead limps to find his son.
Josephine occupied with hurting Phillip as much as she wants, grabs him by the collar of his leather jacket and drags him like a rabid dog sentenced to be put down. Gripping with both hands she throws him against the turned-over bus. Not giving him time to regain his balance she takes a fistful of his hair—also hoping to take off his entire scalp with her bare hands—and slams him into the wet metal like he did to her. A smudge of blood is left before the rain washes it down.
While his brain continues to rattle in his skull, Phillip falls back, his body trying to persuade him to give up. Josephine doesn't allow him the courtesy. Spotting his twinkling nickel Barretta a few feet away from them, Josephine adds her entire weight in her foot as she steps on him to grab the gun.
Feeling his entire guts shift under her, Phillip lunges for her foot to pull her down; she is too quick and in one swift motion, she swats him away and kicks him in the face to snap him away from her.
Huffing out a breath of annoyance, she picks up the gun and swivels around to shoot him point blank. At the same time, Phillip jumps on her and locks her arms to the side causing her to pull the trigger into the open plain slowly being filled by walkers.
Falling back, Josephine's L-1 vertebrae lands directly on a sharp rock. Shrieking out from the impact, Phillip uses this to his advantage. Sinking his nails into her wrist and repeatedly hitting it against the slippery Earth, he manages to pry the gun from her hands. Tossing it aside, he decides he wants to feel the life leave her body, staring directly into her eyes and be certain he is the last person she ever sees before she dies.
He, above her, his hands wrapped around her throat, the dark clouds pelting harsh drops obscuring her vision until he leans to tower over her and he can see him as clearly as in her many previous nightmares. His lips lift into a joyful snarl when her pupils dilate.
But not of fear—adrenaline.
Plunging her thumb into his eye, he falters and she wraps her legs around his middle and flips them over so she is now on top of him. Josephine wraps her two hands over his throat and begins squeezing. Blinking back the involuntary tears, Phillip reaches behind and pulls the chain tightly around her throat. The golden cross straightens down to point at him accusingly and in shame.
And as the seconds roll longer and she doesn't seem unfazed. Josephine smirks down at him, her strong lungs capable of holding onto nothing. Phillip's eye widen in shock and opts to shove her off. The hand that isn't choking her, trails up her chin.
"AHH!" Phillip lurches out as Josephine bites down on half of his pointer and middle finger.
He tries pulling his hand out from her mouth, but his fight or flight response forces him to tighten his grip on her gold necklace and throw her off him; with the single motion, he snaps her necklace off and his two fingers leave his hand.
Throwing the last memento Josephine has of her mother behind him, Phillip brings his mutilated hand to his chest. Suppressing his pain, he rolls to his knees ready to kill her once and for all, only to be met with the barrel of his gun and Josephine Steele standing under the harsh rain with a furious frown.
He sighs, knowing nothing else to do, and buries his knees deeper into the moist floor. The pattering of the rain flutters his eye to a close, almost in defeat. At the exact moment he opens his eye, Josephine swings the metal harshly and knocks him to his side.
Phillip clutches his hand into himself, and just as Josephine aligns her aim with his cowering head, a walker sneers at her from behind. Grabbing the walker by the shoulder, Jo wastes a bullet in ending it; then another from the wandering group of the woods.
"Ha," From his laid-back position on the wet grass, Phillip chuckles with his cracked ribs poking his lung. He doesn't have to see to know they're about to get overrun by rotten teeth.
Josephine scopes the area, walkers in a manageable distance, before walking towards the governor. The heels of her boots dig into the mud with every heavy step to find what is so funny to him. What is this murderer of little girls laughing at?
Towering over him, Josephine brings her boot and presses it to his throat. He doesn't bother pushing her away. Instead, looking up at the dark shadow she is above him, he continues to grin.
"You. . . You," he barely huffs out, Josephine restraining herself to hear his final words. "You kill me, you'll die, too."
Her once bright, doe eyes are now dull and narrow. Her flaring nostrils still, and her snarling lips lay flat. Staring down at him reminds her of when he had her in this position: in Woodbury, weak, and begging for mercy.
So she shows him the same compassion he gave her once.
Lowering herself to one knee, her hand strikes down fast to catch his throat; sinking her nails into his flesh, she manages to lift his lolling head closer to her own. Phillip can feel the wrath against her cold skin, her eyes glimmering with venom.
"I'm already dead," Josephine hisses.
Angling his head closer, she leans into him and brings the pistol to shoot him through the back of his skull. She stays still for a few seconds, feeling the warmth of his blood trail down her forehead into her eyelash and past the scar on her lips.
Once the taste enters her mouth, she retracts her nails from him and pushes the corpse away from her like a bag of trash he is. Josephine feels no remorse, no relief. Nothing. His life was meaningless, and killing him changed nothing about her. Her father is still dead, the cinder block walls behind her are ruined, and her sisters are wandering this cruel world on their own.
And Rick and the rest of her family?
Josephine doesn't dare to look back at the devastation. Instead, she ventures away from the rumbling skies and into the woods in front of her, leaving her home to crumble.
The weight of her Barretta is light, she has no more than four bullets in the magazine. Not bothering to waste any bullets on the sea of walkers, she trudges through; swerving and shoving past them, Josephine doesn't stop walking.
She focuses on what she can physically see and feel: grass, trees, rain, mud, blood, blood and water soaking through her shirt, the squelching of the puddles in her boots, the aching in her heart only felt when you have seen a love so beautiful die so brutally in front of you.
Alone in the world, she has two choices: grieve and die or survive. And like before, she treks onward.
By sunset, she reaches an abandoned cabin. The rain has slowed to a drizzle, keeping her wet from head to toe and at risk of getting a cold. Beside the cabin, there is an abandoned blue, pickup truck. Pushing down the memory of Otis, Josephine takes her pistol and smashes the driver's side window, and unlocks the vehicle. Finding no keys, or anything useful, she slumps in the seat. After staying long enough to leave a wet imprint on the seat, Josephine decides on entering the moderately large cabin.
Keeping the wicked metal aiming in front of her, she slowly creeps through the back door; scanning the first room swiftly, checking through every nook and cranny of the kitchen. Empty cupboards, above and below, and old, dry, opened cans clink against one another as she double-checks. Sliding a hand behind the small stove, she pulls back a hand of cobwebs and disappointment.
Passing by the window, she backtracks. Hovering over the deep sink, her heart accelerates, the grip on the handle of her gun tightens and the other hand dips down and picks up the two matches from the drain.
The black tips are still warm. As she rubs the tips to ash, a sudden release of the safety of a gun clicks behind her. Her eyes snap up to the window in front of her in hopes to see a reflection of the perpetrator.
"Drop the gun, and leave." A deep voice of a man warns her frozen body. The aim of his gun burns through her back with every second she doesn't do as he says.
Then with the last of her bullets, she quickly whips around as she ducks down and shoots into his abdomen before he even has a chance to move his finger on the trigger.
Alas, the last of the intruders don't stop. The first man falls back into the pool of his blood and soon the rest of his group appears.
Returning a rain of metal, Josephine rolls behind the wooden island and makes herself smaller to avoid the grazing bullets. They pause, and the creaking of the floorboards alerts her of their approach.
Shifting to her toes, she waits for the right moment. One person reaches her first on her left, so she punches him in the crotch with her gun. He cowers forward and she hits him again with the handle of her gun.
Josephine swerves around with a grunt to swing at the woman, but the redhead catches her and twists her arm painfully back. The redhead slams Josephine on the wooden counter and swipes her across to throw her over the counter, cleaning the table of all its contents.
Taking one sharp tin lid on either hand, Josephine springs back up and charges at the redhead. The woman holds her hands to catch Jo, yet only grabs onto sharp metal. She shouts in piercing agony but Josephine digs the lids deeper so they pop out on the other side of her palm.
The redhead doesn't surrender, headbutts Jo, and slams her head down into the stovetop. Falling from the dizziness, allows the woman to remove the shards from her hands as the second man regains consciousness.
Josephine kicks his face back, then opens the oven and grabs a glass, rectangular baking dish to use as a cover over her head as the redhead attempts to drive a knife down Jo's skull.
The redhead tries again, but Josephine slams the glass dish on the woman's foot and quickly drives it up to slam it up against her chin, crashing her teeth harshly together. And with one final swing, Jo twists around and drops the dish on the weak man's head, knocking him out again.
Dropping the glass from her hand, Josephine is left with a final shard in her right. The redhead is on the floor scrambling for a weapon, and just as her torn palm reaches for her knife, Josephine's foot smashes down her fingers. The woman on the floor grunts and writhes on the floor, fighting till the end.
Josephine uses her other foot to step on the woman's back and steals the knife from under her. Throwing the glass in another direction, Josephine doesn't have time to doubt her actions before tugging the redhead up by the root of her hair and plunges the knife up to the base of the skull, making one final twist to assure she has no chance of staying alive.
Dropping her, the dead woman thuds on the ground. Before Josephine can inhale a calm breath, someone else yanks her backward with a cold shotgun on her throat.
The abrupt pressure on her trachea catches her by surprise. Josephine tries to push away the metal, but the assailant from behind doesn't allow for even a fingernail to help her escape.
Josephine reaches instead for the woman's hair. Grabbing a handful of light stands, the other woman grunts out and spins around with Josephine locked between her and the shotgun. Slamming her against the fridge, the woman knocks the last of Josephine's air out of her lungs.
The woman takes the gun away just to slam Josephine's face into the fridge door. Jo catches herself on the sides, and at the same time she turns to face the unknown, Jo surprises the woman by catching the barrel and knocking her back with the butt of the gun instead.
The blonde's head rebounds, but she never lets go of the gun. Both she and Josephine battle for the weapon pointing away from them; they shuffle in the same spot which is stained with the redhead's ever-flowing blood.
Switching positions, Josephine now has the blonde's back pinned against the fridge. She looks up at her with narrowed eyes and begins pressing the gun deeper into the woman's throat.
Concentrating on stealing the woman's last breath, Josephine doesn't notice the man crawling behind her until after he stabs her in the leg.
"Ah," Josephine hisses out as her right leg buckles to the ground.
The blonde rips the shotgun from Josephine, who clutches her thigh and gazes down to see a handmade wooden arrow sticking through her limb. Wasting no time in any more of a painful reaction, Josephine rips the arrow through with a loud squelch and throws herself on top of the man.
He catches her by the shoulders and rolls them across the room; the woman with the shotgun can't shoot for fear of harming her companion. And in her second of hesitance, Josephine manages to snap the wooden arrow in two to stab him at a 45-degree angle up his throat. Digging the sticks deeper into his flesh, Josephine twists it around and then abruptly rips it out, shredding his vocal cords.
Groaning with her mouth shut, Josephine throws the gurgling man to the side. Anticipating the final woman's shot, Jo grabs the nearest Teflon saucepan.
Quietly rounding the corner of the island, Josephine jumps out from her spot and smacks the woman's hands hard enough she drops the shotgun. Jo swings two more times: slapping the woman in the face with the pan and hitting her in the middle of the spine so she falls to her knees.
However, while on the ground, the woman whips out her hunting knife and swipes at Jo's ankles. Jumping back, the woman catches Josephine's injured leg and applies cruel pressure on her wound, making the surgeon fall back on the ground.
The blonde mother kicks the black-haired murderer in the face and hops on top of her to keep her down. They allowed her to leave and live, but this raven omen decided on killing her entire family in minutes, and now she must die to keep what she still has safe. So, with all her grieving strength permits, the mother tries to connect the sharp blade to this bitch's head.
Shaky strength gripping the woman's hands in the air is all that is keeping Josephine Steele alive. As every panting breath passes by, the narrow tip approaches her eye. Jo doesn't dare blink for fear of the end. Death aches in her bones and in every bruise. Death Himself has been teasing Josephine all her life, and now it was a done deal.
But Death isn't her enemy—this woman holding a knife above her, this woman trying to kill her and keeping her from ever reuniting with her family—this woman is the enemy.
With that, it's easy for Josephine to understand she can't be killed.
The gentle waves in her eyes crash down hard and her care for the rest of humankind dies now. Josephine takes hold of the woman's hands and drives the knife down to stab herself in the safest part of her shoulder.
The blonde is too confused as to why she would purposely hurt herself, and believing Josephine crazy the woman loosens her grip on the knife. This gives Jo just enough time to drag the woman to the side and pull the knife from her shoulder and stab her in the side of her head.
A look of shock is stuck in the woman's features as the light of life leaves her body. But Josephine doesn't stop, she flips to sit up and continues to stab the woman in the face until her face is red and torn beyond recognition.
Finally, Josephine can breathe. Slumping her shoulders, she counts the unmoving bodies scattered in the kitchen. Butchered bodies, all by her. Maggie and Beth don't need to know, they just need to return to her protective arms.
Struggling to stand, she uses the shotgun for leverage. As soon as she begins searching for supplies in the dead, a slow, almost inaudible, creaking sounds behind her.
With her back to the other, Josephine leans on her left leg and grips the shotgun to the ready. The short steps stop a few feet directly behind and then a click of a cocking gun holds the silence.
Neither one of the two breathe to interrupt the suspense.
Then: Josephine spins around, aims, and shoots at where an average adult's chest would be, at the same time the trembling little girl on the other side of the room pulls the trigger and grazes Josephine's eye. Together, Josephine falls on her back, and bits and pieces of the little girl's head fly behind before the rest of her body drops.
Josephine barely has any time to realize what she has done before the immense blur overtakes her brain and the intense exhaust forces her to shut down.
-ˏˋ✩ˊˎ-
"I WON'T SEE you anymore," Six-year-old Maggie pouts up at her big sister as they lay on their backs in the middle of the field. The last of summer winds pass by the Greene sisters before the elder has to leave for College.
Jo allows a cow to moo before she responds, "I'll come visit, chunky."
"But it won't be the same." If possible Maggie pouts even harder and soon the tears she had been holding back fall down her eyes. "It just won't."
Seventeen-year-old Josephine's heart breaks at the sight of her sad sister and immediately scoots closer to bring Maggie into her arms. Maggie wraps her tiny arms around her, wishing to never be apart from her sister and bestest friend.
"I love you, Madge," Jo whispers into the small girl's hair. "From here to forever."
This sparks Maggie's worries and lifts her head to look into Jo's eyes. "You're not gonna be gone forever, right?"
Josephine laughs at such an impossibility, "No, of course not."
"Please don't leave me here with them," The six-year-old pleads. Josephine calls her by her full name in warning, but she continues. "Daddy is always with the baby and Annette, and if you leave, I'll be all alone. I don't want to be alone, please."
Maggie muffles her cries into Josephine's chest, and the older Greene rubs a comforting hand up and down her back.
"You'll never be alone." Gently pulling Maggie away so she can see the honesty in her features, Jo wipes away a sad tear from the corner of her sister's eye. "I'll be with you always."
"You see those two stars, below the North Star," Josephine continues once Maggie's crying has calmed. She points up at the midnight sky, keeping Maggie cradled at her side. "They're sisters."
Maggie snaps her head to Jo, in awe of the reflection of them in the sky.
"They were created for one another, and nothing can ever separate them."
"Nothing, nothing?" Maggie asks hopefully.
"Nothing, nothing," Jo confirms. "They will always be together. At night, shining so bright and beautiful. And in the day, even when you can't see them, they're still together."
"Together, forever?" Maggie raises her pinky in the sky, right below the two sister stars.
Josephine smiles at her younger sister and wraps her pinky around hers. "Together, forever."
Thirty-six-year-old Josephine wishes to go back to that night, but the sound of chewing and gnawing brings her back to the present.
Carefully, she maneuvers to sit up; her heartbeat pulsates in her head and her leg burns in the dirty air. Through the pitch blackness, she can see the scene in front of her.
The second man she repeatedly stabbed in the throat is a walker and is eating the remains of the little girl she killed. He has scrapped what was left of her brain and has moved down to tear open her entire abdomen to feast on her warm organs.
Josephine scoots away as sneaky as she can, but the walker notices the fresh meal immediately. He shuffles towards her, and Jo drags herself to grab the knife in the woman's skull. The walker lurches forward just in time Josephine twists around with the knife so he can impale himself. His body goes limp on top of her, so she tosses him aside, leaving the knife inside of him.
Releasing a painful breath, it turns into a sob, and then into a panic gasp.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Josephine quietly cries into her wedding rings. "Oh, I'm so sorry, daddy."
Squeezing her eyes shut, she apologizes again to her father. He never should have died like that. It isn't fair. His daughters should have never seen that—it simply shouldn't have happened. And, now, she's here, alone.
Enough, Josephine scolds herself and wipes her runny nose with the back of her hand. She doesn't have time to move around like an idiot, she needs to find her family.
First, she attends to her wounds: a light splash of water on the open flesh of her leg and shoulder and a knotted sleeve of a shirt to keep it from getting an infection, and a simple wipe of her face. Second, she steals this group's supplies: their guns, bullets, knives, food, clothes, medicine, etc.
Taking the woman's double-breasted gun holster, she keeps the silver beretta on her left and a black pistol on her right, she also strips the woman of her brown jacket.
With that, she ventures out into the night, hoping to find them. It's pretty stupid, but she can't waste time. She limps through the woods until she finally touches rough asphalt. Taking a fifty-city chance, she decides on the left.
Encountering a handful of walkers, she struggles to stab each one in the head, but she eventually makes it to the bus. The stars offer very little light, so she clicks on her flashlight and checks every single body. Her heart chips away when she recognizes them, but breathes a sigh of relief to not find Maggie or Beth as corpses.
"They're alive," Josephine smiles up at the sky, speaking to her father. "Can you please take care of them? Please."
But she needed to take care of herself first, and standing in the middle of the road isn't helpful. Having no other choice, she struggles to hop on top of the roof of the bus for safety. Looking into the bag she stole, Jo does her best to treat the hole in her leg. Dripping the rubbing alcohol directly into the wound, she swallows her scream and does her best to sew it closed with a safety pin and a loose thread of her jacket. Once finished, she covers it with gauze.
A pause. The night critters sing in between the silence. Josephine remembers the last time she was left to her devices, the weeks that followed her husband's death. She had found her family, and she didn't think she would be in this position again.
Closing her eyes, she begs her brain to let her have some peace and take her out of the world for a few hours. Failing to fall to sleep as quickly as she hoped, her mind drifts off to the many ways her sisters could have died. She thinks of different, scary scenarios in forty seconds, but she snaps her thoughts to someone else.
Rick. Did he find his children? Is he okay? Is he safe? Is he alive? The last time she saw him, he was busted up badly. What if she never finds him, any of them?
Surviving the rest of her days not knowing what happened to him would be more painful than death.
Yet, it's all she has now. Her sickly mind fills in the blanks. She doesn't know whether to cry or become a ball of anger.
It isn't fair; to have them in her life, simply for them to one day not be with her again. It isn't fair; to become so attached to a man only to lose him to the dead world. It isn't fair that it is happening again. It's cruel: this life, this world, are her last thoughts before her tiredness takes over and she finally sleeps.
Waking up a few hours before the sun rises, not because of her body, but because of a bird pecking at her leg and causing the wound to bleed again. She catches him by surprise and snaps his neck. Breakfast.
Dropping down, she thinks about what her sisters would have done and begins following the road through the woods, but a horde of a dozen walkers forces her to take a detour around them. Two hours later, she returns to the road and after walking too far, she arrives at two complimentary houses sitting together. Both are two-story houses, mirroring one another in more ways than Josephine will ever know.
Trying the first door, it was locked; she tried knocking the door back, but something heavy is keeping it shut. Jo sheaths the knife to unholster her pistol. She rounds the perimeter for an entrance but everything is sealed tight.
This heightens her nerves, and every second she stays outside she glances over her shoulder in case the owner returns. She is about to leave, backtracking from the building through the backyard, but trips over a chain.
Landing on her hurt leg, she slowly stands back up. Pulling it towards her, causing the chain to be revealed under a veil of dry leaves. Tugging it to the end, a wooden, two-door cellar is covered under the same erosion.
Dusting away the leaves, Josephine is met with a giant lock on both handles. Swiftly, she dismembers her flashlight, stuffs it with a rag, screws it onto the barrel of her pistol, and shoots one quiet bullet through the keyhole.
Carefully, she opens the doors and enters with her gun first. Using the Sun's light, she does her best to examine the basement. Nothing out of the ordinary, a bunch of craftsman's tools, boxes of moth-eaten clothes, and other abandoned miscellaneous supplies. Carefully, she closes the doors behind her and ventures further.
The only other set of stairs leads inside. However, unknown to her, as soon as she pushed that door open, the thin wire on the other side attached to every doorknob of the house snapped, switching the carefully crafted locks to unlock. The inhabitants of the house patiently wait to follow the slightest noise which is Josephine.
Quietly she passes through the kitchen and finds every window leading to the front is modified to be kept bolted shut, exactly like the front door. To keep people out, or people in, either way, it feels like a trap.
Before she can explore further, she stops at the foyer and finds a rosary in the bowl of keys and spare change. Slowly, she lifts it in front of her face. Closing her eyes, she rolls it over her fingers like the many times she had prayed.
She prays one last time: please keep them safe.
But He failed to do so with her father. And lashing out her anger at Him, she grabs the entire bowl and throws it across into a window. The glass cracks, the bowl bounces onto the ground, the coin chitter on the floor, and before she can cry again, a rumbling from the stairs snaps her into a steel frame of mind to kill.
Gripping her gun in front of her, she starts picking off walkers one by one, but soon they come crowding through from down the hall and become a horde that has eaten all her lead. Quickly scanning the room for anything to aid her, she pulls out her knife and goes head to head with every approaching dead one, then throws them into the crowd to push them back.
Grabbing the house decorations, she uses the picture frames, the coat racks, and the lamps, as her weapon until they break into nothing. The last dozen of walkers head down the stairs towards her and she physically uses her hands: smashing them against one another, against the walls, against the window. Throwing a walker onto the table, the furniture sinks, and the legs snap off, allowing for two sharp sticks to kill the final walkers.
She used to feel sorry for them, the walkers, for not surviving; now, she feels nothing for them and sees them as nothing but obstacles.
Huffing out the rest of her anger, she doesn't bother searching the entire house. Instead, she unfolds a chair from the basement and places it front and center, facing up at the cellar door. And, then, she waits.
The Barretta in both hands, between her legs, keeps staring at the wooden doors, hoping for the owner to return. Someone with the intellect of this mouse trap must have supplies, or at least return with as much. What they have, she needs, so she waits.
Her body still, and her bones and muscles not exerting energy, she ultimately falls asleep. It gives her wounds to heal in somewhat less dirty air and helps her escape the nightmare of reality.
Finally, she rests the entire night; her body aches with the pain of having lost the keepers of her heart. Come morning, after not encouraging no one, she decides not to waste time on side quests and focuses on trying to find her family.
Passing a few farmhouses, she finds a few stashes of canned corn and peas. No traces of anyone, so she makes camp in an isolated shed for the night.
The hoots of owls and snaps of branches intense the paranoia she hasn't felt in months. First, it was walkers, then people, now walkers and people.
Her mind and body are nothing but anxieties. What if her sisters are dying at this very moment? What if they're being eaten alive? Or worse, captured by some sick bastards who enjoy killing little girls? And she can't do anything. Her eyes well up at the thought. Her only job—the very reason she was born—is to protect them. She's sitting in a shit shed not doing anything, not trying to find them and they could be suffering. She's a failure; she's not a sister, she's a big mistake not capable of keeping alive her two girls.
She could keep going, but a large table of firewood clattered outside the shed. Wiping the tears, she stands with her giant knife. A shadow passes by the bottom of the crooked planks. Josephine sidesteps to hide behind the door.
Holding her breath, the stranger creaks the door open. They pause in the doorway, examining the room. Before they could find her, Josephine slams the door against the person and jumps out to wrap her hands around the woman's throat. With her other hand, she attempts to stab backward into the woman's face, but she catches her forearm and pushes her away.
They struggle with the knife until Jo swipes at the stranger's feet and she rolls to land on her back on the threshold of the shed. Josephine drops down to straddle the woman, knife above.
Michonne recognizes her first and catches her wrist and breathes out, "Jo, it's me. It's me."
Josephine's paranoia and fears cloud her mind and it takes her a few seconds longer to truly see how she is about to hurt her friend.
"Michonne?" She breathes out like a miracle sent from Christ. Josephine quickly gets off her and lays the knife down.
Helping her up, Josephine sits facing Michonne in awe and wonder. Jo is the first to move. Her trembling hands reach for Michonne's face and still once they touch her warm skin. Now knowing she's real, Josephine breathes out with certainty and brings her in for a hug which Michonne immediately reciprocates.
Together, both women can feel safe in each other's arms. Finding one another is like placing one small jigsaw piece on their scattered, broken hearts.
After they separate, they bask in the comfort of finding one another. Taking each other's appearance, they don't need explanations, the evident dangers of the world are answer enough. Sitting side by side, against the wall furthest from the door, they share two thin blankets. The last can of food is devoured by them.
"It feels like when we used to go on runs and had to stay out a couple nights." Josephine reminisces. "I knew then where we were going back to, but now I don't know."
Michonne soaks in her words. "I don't know either."
Perhaps what she said last night was a lie. Retracing her steps to the footprints now layered with deer tracks, Michonne leads her and Josephine through the woods and then the highway until they find more clues.
"Stay here," Michonne gently sets Josephine on the first staircase of the house. Jo doesn't argue, she can feel her heartbeat pulsating in her leg. She is about to take a peek at her wound, but Michonne returns, her face less hardened. "C'mon, c'mon."
Josephine follows her lead. Standing in front of the door, Michonne knocks.
Confused, Jo reaches across her chest for her gun, but Michonne gently places her hand atop hers. The safe smile present on the taller woman's face tells her she doesn't need it.
Trusting her, Jo drops her hand and faces the inviting entrance waiting for the door to open.
-ˏˋ✩ˊˎ-
SO MANY THINGS TO TALK ABOUT !!
1) Josephine taking the Governor's gun and keeping it as her own?? Yesss I couldn't wait to write that since the beginning.
2). And when jo tells the Governor "I'm already dead." This goes hand in hand to when she refers to him as a murderer of little girls. She feels like a little girl upon the final moments of being with Hershel. In other words,, killing Hershel killed jo and she felt like a little girl then. It's also a double-edged sword since she now killed a little girl and Josephine now falls under the category of murderer of little girls.
3.). Josephine losing jewelry is also pretty symbolic. First her golden cross necklace,, which is her faith and the physical connection she has to the past. Now ripped away by the Governor, literally, it has taken something fundamental to her being. Every loss of jewelry will enter a new phase of Josephine. YOU'LL SEE YEEHAWW