Disclaimer: I own nothing of The Walking Dead.
A.N.: For those of you who have read from the beginning, you're awesome. For those of you who have not read from the beginning but are reading now, you are also awesome. Thank you guys so much. Enjoy!
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Prologue
My dad's gone again. Rick's gone again. Glenn, Bob. I got them all back, and now they're gone. Again. That part, the again part, makes it all so much worse, pisses me off so much more.
We thought they would open the main door when they came for us. But they didn't. They opened a door on top of this boxcar, this cage, and dropped in a smoke bomb. Or something. Whatever it was, exactly, that poured from the little gray canister, it burned my eyes, my throat, made us all cough. There was shouting . . . Then the smoke faded and my dad and the others were gone. It was like a magic show I went to once, with my Mom's boyfriend Tommy, where a magician made his assistant disappear. But then the assistant stepped out of a big blue wardrobe and everyone cheered, because she was fine, and happy, even.
That's not going to happen here.
Terminus. Sanctuary for all. Community for all.
Damn Terminus. Damn its sanctuary, damn its community, damn its arriving and surviving and its lies and its bullshit and mostly, mostly its people.
All the signs, all the – hope. We thought it was possible. We should have known.
But I can't worry. Worrying would just get in the way. Instead, I'll expect my dad to be okay. I'll expect Rick and Glenn and Bob to be okay. Somehow. Because that way, I can focus. I can be brave.
And I can't tell anyone about how I feel the blood pumping all around the gash the bullet left in my side. How it hurts, how it's bleeding again. I can't tell anyone how a chill is rushing from my head to my toes, even as I'm dripping sweat. Because if I did tell them, they would worry, and they can't worry. At least not about me. They only need to worry about us. About us against them.
Because we have to win. I don't know what kind of fight we're talking about here, but we have to win it. Something's in my bones – this desperation, a fierceness. I feel it when Carl's fingers tangle with mine, when I catch Maggie playing with the pocket watch Glenn got from Hershel, when Owen shares a cigarette with the army man Abraham. When LC steps towards me and then stops.
I feel it. We have to win.
We're going to.
A.N.: So, my new beta convinced me that there was more of a time jump during the second half of the last season of TWD than I wrote into my story, so I wrote a new chapter and made some adjustments to later ones that hopefully make up for it. I think I like it better now. The new chapter is called "In the Fog." Enjoy.