Disclaimer: Don't own
Warning: Spoilers for 2.07
Shane took a breath and all he smelled was blood and rot and walkers. He couldn't smell the grass any longer, the earth or the grain.
"Sophia," Carol said, voice cracking, and Daryl helped her up, let her go. "Sophia no." She brought her hands, shaking, grief-wrung hands, curled almost like arthritic knuckles, haunted and devastated, to cup Sophia's face. A bit of Sophia's skin came away, slopped wet into the dirt.
He swallowed.
Opening the barn had been necessary. Come what may. At least now they knew and he could find a kind of sad conviction in it, knowing that he'd been right. He'd told them all, a hundred times it seemed, maybe they'd start to listen. One little girl could change their fate. Eat or be eaten. Kill or take their place among the dead.
"Don't look," he heard Lori whispering, Carl's face pressed into her chest, held there so tight he thought she might smother him, choke him with concern and love. "Baby don't look." Shane had known how important it was to Carl to find Sophia. He'd change it if he could, just to keep Carl happy, to keep him a little young.
"We should get to dealing with the bodies," he said, gun warming in his hands, a bead of sweat dripping down the grip, another sliding down the nose of the barrel. "We gotta get them out of the sun."
Andrea nodded, wiped away her tears. He was proud of her for knowing how to step up and do what was right.
"Burn or bury them?" She turned to him, needed to know if she should start a bonfire or bust out the shovels.
"Bury them."
He felt compelled to show he had some humanity left.
"How's Carl doing?" He asked, crouched low as he prodded the fire. The meat cooking sizzled, almost overpowered the scent of decay in the air.
"He's devastated, thanks to you. He lost his only friend." Lori snatched a shirt off the clothesline, folded it in half, then to quarters, over and over until it was a neat, tiny square.
"The barn was a liability. I had to keep him and you safe." And the baby. The one Lori was afraid to say was his.
"You could have waited. Rick said he would handle everything."
Rick wasn't handling shit. Rick was tiptoeing around the issues, dancing like a windup toy to keep Hershel happy, clapping cymbals together with monkey paws. There came a point when you had to put your people and their needs first.
"You already know my thoughts on that." Rick was too good and too wholesome. This life would break him or it would kill him, and if the former happened, then they'd all wish Rick was dead. Lori didn't know her husband near as well as she liked to think. She hadn't been on the job with Rick, hadn't been there for the tough choices, to shoot an eleven year old gangbanger to save an innocent woman's life. Rick had shot the little boy through the shoulder, tried to aim for something nonlethal, but the kid had bled out on the way to the hospital, and that night Rick wouldn't talk or eat, had sat on Shane's couch, blanket around his shoulders, leaned his head on Shane until dawn's first light. Then he'd gotten up and buried it somewhere, moved on best he could.
"You trusted him before. Maybe you're the one who needs to have some faith."
We're different people; he wanted to tell her, here in the land of the bones and the dead.
Lori snapped her head away from him, basket of laundry on her hip. And he'd have it, eventually. All that was rightfully his. Shane deserved more than he'd been given. His was the unfulfilled lot in life.
He hitched his belt a little higher, buckled another notch. He kept step with Rick.
"What you did," Rick said, face full of disapproval and dark. "It was reckless." Goddamn, Shane thought, and the laughter burned in his chest like whiskey, like something heated enough to melt.
"No." Breath whistling through his teeth, fingers flexed to fists. He never knew where the anger came from. Let in fade in and out as it pleased. He wondered if somewhere deep inside, he'd always wanted to break free of Rick. Be his own man. Only took the apocalypse for it to happen. Only took the death of the Shane everyone knew. "It was smart. You can't keep things like that around and be safe."
"You broke Hershel's heart," Rick said, quietly, eyes shadowed beneath the brim of his hat. Shane wanted to ask why Carl wasn't wearing it.
"He can survive that." Sounded cruel, he knew, to someone like Rick. But there was only life and death and sentimentality got in the way, made things harder. You loved who you loved and once they were dead, once they were those drooling, hungry things made of rotten flesh, you had to give them up. Give them up or give yourself up. Hershel was holding onto hope that, like a helium balloon, needed to be let loose to drift away.
"Sometimes I don't recognize you." Rick put a hand on his shoulder. He was holding onto something too. Rick was still clinging to the old Rick and Shane, the Rick and Shane that were sixteen years old, young and in sync. Rick kept looking for the Shane that followed his orders. He wanted the Shane that had measured his life in terms of Rick.
"Me neither." He could admit that much. There were moments he felt like a whole new person, like all he shared with who he used to be was his skin. The potential had been there always. The new world has just given it room to grow, to spread vines and thorns to the sky.
Rick's hand slid upwards, along shoulder to the junction where it met his throat, around to the back of his neck. His fingers spread there, fanned out, palm over the knob at the start of his spine.
Shane knew what was coming before Rick leaned it. Rick misunderstood what Shane had said. He took it as a heartfelt confession, something wrenching and deep. Shane was just stating a fact. The admission didn't feel like anything vulnerable, anything too sore to touch. Rick was going to have to face it sooner or later. No one living how they did could stay the same.
Rick put his other arm around Shane, hand in the middle of his back. He'd thought they were past the hugging stage of their friendship. Past all the parts where they got along. Past the parts where Shane put Rick above himself. Shane had liked those days, once.
He was too angry to let it happen, to let them fall into that again, a hum and roar inside his head, and he pushed Rick away.