Chapter 3 Give a guy a Complex

There really wasn't much to do in the car on a run except talk or gaze out the windows. There wasn't anything to see and no cars to pay attention to. Radio stations had been off the air for ages and the only time anyone heard music was if someone decided to sing. Daryl wasn't much of a singer, and he'd never heard Michonne sing. He was driving and kept casting glances in her direction. She was staring out the passenger side window at scenery she must have seen at least a dozen times in the past few days. They'd been on at least that many runs, as had a few others.

The goal was to stock the prison with everything they could possibly need in case it became impossible for them to go later. If the winter was harsh and brought any kind of ice and snow with it, no one wanted to run the risk of running off the road and getting caught by a herd of Walkers.

"Damn, girl, I'm gonna go crazy if you don't say anything." Daryl said after a while. Michonne looked at him.

"Nothing much to say." She said.

"Tell me something, anything. How'd you learn to use a katana?" Daryl asked.

"We have all learned to do a lot of things since this started, out of necessity. I realized that I couldn't carry all the ammunition that I needed, and that I wasn't a very good shot, and I found a katana at one of the stores that I raided." Michonne said. "I just learned to use it by having to use it, I guess." Michonne looked at Daryl who was keeping his eyes on the road as if he had any kind of traffic to worry about. "Did you know how to use a crossbow going into this?" She asked.

"Yeah. I been huntin' since I was at least six. I always liked the bow better than a gun. It just made more sense, you know? It was like I it was more fair or something than the guns. I felt better when I hunted with it." Daryl said. Bingo. He'd found the sweet spot. Ask her about the katana that had essentially become her only friend and she'd open up...at least a little.

"Have you always hunted to eat or did you hunt for sport?" Michonne asked. Daryl seemed like the kind of guy who probably had a living room full of animals that he'd killed and stuffed for no reason. That kind of man never really appealed to her. They were just like the men who sat around bragging about how big their dicks were or how many women they'd slept with.

"Nah, I always ate what I killed. I didn't have the most reliable parents, so if you wanted food you had to get it yourself, ya know? It wasn't like I had no June Cleaver mom who had dinner on the table every night. Her dinner mostly came from a bottle." Daryl said. Michonne didn't respond. He didn't know if she didn't know what to say or if he had made her uncomfortable. "What about you? What did you do before all this shit started happenin'?" He pushed a little further to see how much she would tell him.

"I was a lawyer." She said. Michonne didn't want to talk about that life. The life before all of this was a life that was too full of disappointments and too full of things that weighed her down when she lingered on them. She didn't want to drag that weight back out and carry it around with her, especially not when they were going on a run.

"A lawyer, huh? You musta made a lotta money." Daryl said. He heard Michonne snort and glanced over to her.

"Yeah, I guess so. It's done me a world of good." She said. Daryl laughed.

"Yeah, you notice we don't go touching no cash registers when we go on runs. It ain't good for much these days." He agreed. Money had been the most important thing before. He could remember having spent most of his life worrying about it. How much did he have? How much could he get? What would happen if he didn't get enough? Nowadays there wasn't any use for money. Nobody paid for anything in cash. Anytime a payment was owed to anyone, it was probably owed in blood.

"It's only good if you're out of toilet paper." Michonne said. The thought of what her life was like...the thought of all the money she'd worked to make...it all seem wasted now. Now time was of the essence. Nothing was promised to you now like it had been back then. Back then she thought she was always promised tomorrow and had to prepare for it. The money was great. It would be used to send her daughters to college. College...neither of them would ever go to college, and in this world it wouldn't matter if anyone ever had. Everyone was equal now. It wasn't about what you knew that came out of books; it was what you knew about survival that mattered.

"That's true." Daryl said. Michonne had only offered him her job description. He didn't know if he should push it any further. He didn't like to talk much about his own past, but that was mostly because he felt like it wasn't much to be proud of. He'd spent most of his life as a deadbeat working odd jobs and promising himself he'd get his life together "tomorrow". Now the tomorrows were pretty much done, and none of it mattered anyway because he had shucked that life completely. He hadn't had a family, though somewhere in the back of his mind he'd always thought he'd have one someday. "Did you have a family?" He asked timidly.

"Of course I had a family. Everyone had a family at some point." Michonne shot back. Her tone was not the same jovial tone it had been before.

Daryl realized he had hit a soft spot. Maybe her family had been killed when all this happened, or maybe she'd had to see them go one by one. He knew the loss of his brother, though he hadn't been much, had been more than he wanted to admit. He decided not to push the issue and they continued in silence until they got to the town.

"Looks quiet." Daryl said as he pulled up in front of the hardware store. This town had afforded them few Walkers, leaving them to believe that a herd must have passed through and picked up the majority of them.

"Yeah, well looks can be deceiving." Michonne said, getting out of the car. Daryl went first into the store and looked around. Everything seemed completely still and quiet. He could somehow feel Michonne only a few feet behind him, katana in hand and ready to strike. Once they had made a few rounds, looking down the aisles, they started packing bags with tools and supplies they might need for repairing things during the winter.

"I guess the wood and wire is out back." He said as they loaded the bags into the back of the vehicle. A lone Walker approached them and Michonne lopped its head in half without a word. She followed him around back where a few Walkers were roaming around aimlessly. He took out one of them with an arrow and before he could say anything, she hacked the other two to the ground. "You'll give a man a complex." He said, retrieving his arrow from the Walker he had taken down.

"Yeah, well, you've got to be quicker than that." Michonne said.

Daryl wasn't sure, but he thought he may have caught a glimpse of a smile from her. He wondered what she looked like when she smiled. He bet she had a beautiful smile and thought it was a shame that the life they led gave her so little desire to show it off. He always did like the way women looked when they smiled.

"Here's the wood and wire." He said.

"How are we going to take that back?" Michonne asked. The rolls of wire were far larger than she had anticipated and only the two of them were there.

"I'll bring the car around. We'll take a little wood in case we need it. We can use the wire cutters to cut some of the wire and make a smaller roll." Daryl offered.

While he brought the car around back, Michonne wiped out a few more Walkers that tried to saunter onto the scene. Something was different about Daryl Dixon today, but she couldn't put her finger on what exactly that was. Before all of this had happened, she might have thought he was acting differently because he was interested in her, but that couldn't be the case. His awkwardness had to be owing to something else. Maybe it was the slight hangover he'd confessed to having earlier? Daryl was with Carol, and Carol followed him around like a lovesick puppy. Of that Michonne was sure, but something was off. When Daryl got there they loaded up the wood first and then went to work trying to unroll the large rolls of wire to cut off just what they needed.

Daryl was trying as hard as he could to shake the sudden, or not so sudden, interest that he had in Michonne. She didn't look at him that way. She didn't think of him that way. Still, while they were working so hard against the strongly coiled wire to roll out lengths that could be easily put in the back of the vehicle, he couldn't help but notice what she looked like, covered in sweat, almost as wet as he had seen her in his imaginings of her getting out of her bath. He had to keep shaking the image from his head in order to get the work done, and also to keep from showing exactly what he was thinking physically.

Finally enough wire was loaded, with only minor cuts on either side, that they could head back to the prison and confidently repair, for at least a little while, most of the holes that most concerned them in the fence. When they got in the car, both of them were covered in sweat and exhausted.

"What'cha say we fix the fence tomorrow?" Daryl asked, panting from the strain.

"I'm good with that. I think it'll hold through the night." Michonne said. She hated to admit but every muscle in her body ached from doing what had probably taken four men to do for the business between the two of them. She was ready to wash herself off and go to bed, even though it wasn't dark yet.

"I just hope someone else wants to unload tonight." Daryl said. Michonne agreed and they headed back to the prison with their spoils.