Not Today

Chapter Five

ROSEMARY III

Emotions were messy things.

That was one of the first life lessons Rose Dixon had learned.

Some, like anger, caused people to erupt in shouting and cursing while their faces turned an unsightly shade of red, while others made people curl up in a ball and do nothing but cry for days on end. 

Emotions had such a tight hold on people, a strange concept for Rose who'd learned from an early age that nothing good rarely ever came from them. Emotions were fickle and easily swayed by careless words that Rose found were rarely ever meant by the people that said them. To be controlled by ones emotions was a weakness, and so Rose kept hers on a very tight leash. 

Anger, bitterness, jealously, and confidence were all things that Rose felt, but only barely. She kept them carefully tucked away,  behind layer after layer of logical thinking and rational thought processes.  There was beauty to her process. You had to first identify the source of the emotion. Then and only then could you lock it away in a safe, buried behind the more important thoughts. It used to take her ages to sort through her feelings, to bury them so deeply, but now it took a mere minute.

In hindsight, it was the best gift her mother had ever given her, because at seventeen years old, Rose had found two people who so perfectly demonstrated why she never acted on emotion.  

Sure, when she saw her father and uncle tense up in anger, or Hailey and Glenn laugh to each other, Rose felt something. But it didn't hold a candle to the amusement she felt when she saw former police officers, Shane Walsh and Rick Grimes, two police officers who had their emotions written across their foreheads. The slight wrinkle of Rick's forehead when he rose his eyebrows in curiosity, the furrow of Shane eyebrow and the purse of his lips. The watering of Rick's eyes and the clenched fist that Shane tried to hide.

It was clear to her that they didn't know just how much of themselves they gave away, the weaknesses they left open for the exploitation of a person crueller then she was. Rose may be observant and cynical in nature, but she certainly wasn't malicious. 

The awkward forms of the two police officers that stood in front of her entertained Rose more then she let on, and she was more then content to stand back against her tent as the two men attempted to explain the disappearance of Merle Dixon. 

So far, she'd gathered that his violent and foul tempered actions had gotten him left behind on the roof of the very building the group had fought to escape. 

T-Dog stepped into her view, his bruised and cut up face even more gruesome in the daylight. "I dropped the key." He said, holding her gaze with anxious eyes. His fear of her was funny to Rose, mainly due to the fact that despite her time spent in the camp she'd never actually held a conversation with the man. 

She wondered if he knew that these were his first words to her. The Dixon supposed it didn't really matter if he did, the situation didn't really bother her no matter who dropped the bloody key. 

Her Uncle Merle had had been many unpleasant things, but he had given her the most perfect of weapons, in the form of a bow and quiver of arrows. He'd advised her, and tutored her in killing a walker, despite his patience thinning by the third arrow. It had taken three shots for her to hit the walkers head, and with each arrow she loosed Rose had learned something new. One, Merle Dixon was a terrible but a very well informed teacher. Two, he was terribly impatient. Three, he not only liked but actively encouraged violence . 

It was this third reason, which allowed Rose to firmly close the lid on her emotions when it came to his disappearance. The teenager was well aware that she was detached, her brain missing some vital component that everyone around her had. Despite this, the girl had never liked violence, and Merle's enjoyment of it told Rose that if she needed an archery teacher then her father was definitely the way to go.