Something that hit me after I watched season 2, episode 10. It may not have been what went through Rick's mind but we are noticing a great change shifting. Twas fun writing & exploring it!
Evade the Walkers. Shoot, stab, or smash them in the head. Rinse and repeat.
A run-in with the Walkers was never as blatantly routine, although the patterns remained the same. A survivor was like a magnet to those dead eyes and hungry, gnashing mouths. As much as blood attracted the Walkers, the survivors craved a stable life, but passions inhibited their bodies, followed swiftly by hot words and dangerous hands.
As in the case of two men who once shared much of the same interests and confided their troubles, they stood angrily in front of the other, surrounded by a wasteland of empty cars, buses, and trash at a public works facility, but they didn't care how much noise they caused by screaming at the other. Everything from the core finally came to a giant, ugly head.
During the heightened moment of their strongest emotions, the word "brother" was as distant to them as another group of survivors; a word lost to the void and consumed by the previous months of a new, treacherous world. Bottled within their stained grimy fists, momentum and gravity crippled their skin and fractured their bodies. Rick and Shane were no strangers to bruises and cuts, even broken bones, but attacking each other was unfamiliar territory.
Tired of being second in command, Shane's fists destroyed countless walls of jealousy and regret. His submissive days were over, and he was doing what had to be done, even if it meant clobbering his best friend's face with a rusty pipe wrench. Sacrifice what you need, to save what you love.
Alternatively, Rick sent his gentle touch of handling problems through a bullet and into the head of the two troublesome guys from the bar. He loved Shane, but the haunting revelations were just too much. Earlier, Shane had come clean about what happened with Otis and the medical equipment rescue, and that fact was as thick and strong as molasses. The rest of their evening went downhill from there, with hurtful accusations and threats, and when family is brought into the matter, the hell unleashed.
The pipe wrench missed Rick's head by inches and smashed through a window, spewing a horde of nesting walkers on their turf. As Rick ceased function in a walker's head with a quick stab, he hid under the walker as the horde swarmed after a stumbling, wounded Shane.
In all of the chaos after and witnessing Shane trapped in the school bus with walkers grabbing for his flesh, the temptation to leave festered in his brain and pounded through all of the bruises and warm blood that Shane created. Adrenaline was high, and egos were even higher, even his own. Seeing the two dead cops on the ground changed the game, and when they finally rescued Shane, the first thing Rick wanted to spit in his face was, "how did it feel being left for dead, brother?"
Instead, he played it cool and wondered if the game rattled Shane's good conscience at all. If it didn't, there would be another time, and then game over.