Unexpected
e·piph·a·ny [ ĭ-pĭf′ə-nē] noun
a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.
It came to him one morning, as he stood in the tower watching the mist swirl over the empty fields beyond the perimeter fence, that he was quite possibly the luckiest son of a bitch alive.
If anyone had said the same to him, in these hard times when no one knew if they'd survive the day, he very likely would have looked at them like they'd lost their mind. But it was true.
Before the world went to hell and the dead walked the earth, he'd been a miserable excuse for a man, shunning most human contact, and what little there'd been had been mostly hostile, sometimes violent, and had only reinforced his life-long belief that mankind was basically shit.
That was back when the only family he had was Merle, and the ghosts of their parents, and none of them had ever done much to reverse his conviction that hell was other people.
It all began to change one summer day outside Atlanta, amid a motley assortment of refugees, scared and hungry and tired and hoping for a savior. He wasn't the man they looked to for reassurance, but he'd found a niche among them, his rough ways schooled through a lifetime of making do on his own giving him an advantage in the chaos. They hadn't relied on him back then, and with good reason, but they'd recognized that here was someone who understood on a bone-deep level what the rest of them needed to learn - how to survive. He'd taught them as well as he could, but kept his walls high and tight.
Along the way there'd been conflict - with Rick, the lawman lacking a stable footing from which to exercise his authority; with Shane, who saw only the cliché from years of domestic violence calls and bar fights and thought he had the whole picture; with all the uptight middle-class suburban expectations the rest of them held about how the world should work, and no longer did. Along the way most of those assumptions got kicked to the curb, as they lost one after another of the group to the predations of the dead. They closed ranks, circled the wagons, and moved on.
Finding a soft, cozy haven on the Greene farm had almost been the death of them all. Running water and home-cooked meals relaxed their guard, made them think somehow a normal life might still be possible. It didn't last. Nothing did, by then. His self-claimed mission to bring Sophia back to her mother had burned like a scrap of paper in that moment the dead girl staggered out of the old barn. Everything else went south within days after that. Dale, gutted by a walker that should never have been allowed to get that close, and finished off by his own merciful bullet. Shane, lying in wait for Rick, ensnared by whatever dark urge overrode the bond between them, and only chance determined which one prevailed. Finally the dead descended on them in an inexorable flood, driving them back out into the wilderness. More tragedies, a few miracles to balance the grief.
They'd wandered, heartsore and weary, through long months of privation, shared desperation forging links of kinship as potent as blood. Perched on the ragged edge of despair, they'd found the prison - grim and forbidding, a wasteland of cold concrete and razor wire, but to their eyes a refuge, a fortress against the outside world.
It hadn't been simple. They'd lost T-Dog, almost lost Carol. Frontier medicine had saved Hershel, but nothing could salvage both Lori and her baby. Losses, gains. That was the measure of nearly everything these days. How many dead, how many saved. Their willingness to foster the lost, the measure of their humanity. Sometimes they failed the test.
Some of the losses were nearly beyond enduring. The last thing that had kept him tied to his old identity, gone when he'd put his buck knife into the skull of the shambling hulk that was once his brother. That last thing that had let him maintain his hard carapace, keeping others at a distance, saying, this is where I come from, who I am, down deep. He could never forget - how could they? Why would they want to? And yet they did, and seemed eager to do it.
His defenses fragmented in the face of their trust. Exposed, he struggled against it, and found it somehow freeing.
But some of the gains were almost worse - the weight of new armor, wrought from the regard of others, their vision of him as provider and protector. He'd never asked for this, never seen himself as part of a larger whole; never learned to carry the weight of their unlooked-for faith.
Her faith in him, disregarding all the ways in which he didn't measure up. While he railed against the demands of so many, she carried him beyond all the doubt and questioning, made him feel he could stand tall and bear the heft of their belief.
He heard her footsteps on the rungs of the ladder now, coming to meet him as she did most mornings when his watch was nearly at an end. Her easy grace, her sparkling smile as she handed him a cup of hot coffee, carefully balanced for the climb and offered like a blessing. It was the one shining moment of his day he could count on, this simple morning ritual, when she emerged into the tower, and she never failed to take his breath away. She was a gift, the reward for surviving, and if he'd learned nothing else since the world changed, it was that you treasured the moments of grace you were given.
He took the cup from her hand and drew her into his arms, ignoring her shocked inhalation. We might not get tomorrow. He'd not wait another day.