Family Aint Just Those You're Born With

by TheSleepyIntrovert

When all hope seems lost and blood families are torn apart, a crossbow weilding redneck, his songbird farmgirl and a scared orphan will come to realise that family is just as much made up of the people you choose as those you were born into. Eventual Bethyl (Slow Burn)

Prologue:

He had been walking for hours. Walking for hours in the same direction, his trusty crossbow slung over his right shoulder as he trudged through the dense undergrowth of the Georgian woodlands. This is his comfort zone, this is where he excels. Tracking and hunting in the backwoods, that is his genius.

He had come across the trail by accident after he fled the over emotional scenes at the Greene family farm. They had slaughtered the walkers that Hershel had been keeping in the barn in his hope for a cure. They had slaughtered Hershel's people, Hershel's family. And although there was no doubt in his mind that it had to be done, seeing the youngest Greene hunched on her knees over her mother's limp body, suffocating on the painful sobs being wrenched from her chest, he knew he needed to leave. He needed to get away from the strange, unfamiliar feeling in his gut.

So he took off to the place he knew best, the backwoods of the Georgian countryside. He may have never been in the area before but all woodlands are the same to those who know what they're doing. The same trees, the same birds, the same animal tracks. Except for the tracks he was following, they weren't animal tracks at all, not even walker tracks. No, these were from a person, a living human being. A very small human being judging by the size of the footprints in the slightly dew dampened earth.

And hopefully they were the footprints of the very small human he was looking for.