For Those I Left Behind
(The Walking Dead, T, Jim centric)
Jim watches Lori with Carl and sees the way Carol holds her daughter close. The Morales children play tag, kicking up dust, and their games make their parents smile. He grips the shovel, pushes the spade into the hard earth and allows the heat and sweat to wash away the jealousy.
He hasn't slept for days because visions of his family haunt his dreams.
He no longer closes his eyes against the glare of the sun because the dull red behind his eyelids looks too much like their blood.
He grew up in a small town on the outskirts of Atlanta. Fell in love with his wife while they were still at high school. She was a cheerleader, with perfect teeth and wicked sense of humour. He was an outcast, socially awkward and only confident when under the hood of car. He helped her out one day, the last year of school, when he found her stranded on the roadside, the bonnet of her car smoking. The next day she had asked him if he wanted to see a movie together. Their relationship had fueled the rumour mill for weeks.
They got married on a beach. She refused to wear white and he said, "well there ain't no way I'm wearing a suit". Their families had kicked up a fuss, but he didn't care. He was comfortable in jeans and her smile, as she stood before him, barefoot in the sand, was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
She got pregnant sooner than she wanted to, worried about their future, about her career. He got down on his knees, held both her hands and said, "whatever you want" and meant every word.
They called their first child William and the second Jacob. Both boys had his eyes and her smile. When they moved into an apartment in Atlanta, so she could be closer to her job, they joked they were moving to the big city. He set up his own business so he could work hours around their boys and she got a promotion.
The years had changed them. She'd put on a few pounds and he'd lost a few. There were new lines on their faces ("not lines, wrinkles," she'd said, horrified when she noticed for the first time). He picked up dirty socks and she came home bone tired. But her smile, when she held their boys and saw that dinner was ready on the table, was still the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
They talked less but touched more. "I don't remember this scar," she'd say, a blatant lie, but he'd hold her close, whisper the memory into her skin even though he'd told it a hundred times before. He didn't need others to tell him how lucky he was. Whenever he looked at his family over the breakfast table, at how his boys laughed as they fought over pancakes and the way his wife ruffled their hair as she passed and kissed him on the cheek, he knew.
She called him from work at the beginning of the end. "Turn on the news," she said, sounding scared and for a moment he thought it was about the boys and he couldn't breathe. It was almost relief when he saw reports of a new disease. "It'll be fine," he told his wife, "we'll be safe here." It's the same lie the mayor told them a week later: The city is safe, they're working on a cure, a refugee camp has been set up and everyone is going to be fine.
They don't realise it's a lie until it's too late. "Something's wrong," she whispered the day the military bombed the city, "we need to leave". He told her that they would, tomorrow. "No," she said, gripping his arm tight enough to bruise. "Please, Jimmy. Now. We have to leave now." He'd pulled her close, told her, "whatever you want," and meant every word.
They took only the essentials: food, clothes, water (and a photo album, "fine, but just one Jimmy, they're too heavy"). The boys had backpacks. Their faces had been pale in the afternoon light and William had held his hand, knuckles white. "We're gonna be ok, right Dad?" Jim had just nodded, throat too sore to swallow. The streets were quiet, no sounds of traffic or life, just the moaning and shuffling of the dead.
Jim doesn't remember exactly what happened after that. He thinks that they made it to the outskirts before the dead overwhelmed them. The rest is fragmented. The sound of his wife screaming, Jacob's face, skin peeled back from the bone. The feel of William's hand as it was torn from his grip.
He woke up in the dark, tears on his face, unable to believe he was alive. Unable to believe he had left his family behind, that he had kept running rather than choosing to fall with them. He had beat his head and fists on the ground till they were red and bleeding. Screamed into the darkness for walkers to come and take him. But they didn't.
That night he cried himself hoarse and saw as the city, and everyone he had ever loved, went up in flames.
Shane tears the shovel from his hands and ties him to a tree. Jim plays nice. Watches Sophia and Carl and tells Lori to be careful. When they leave him he tips back his head and waits.
But he doesn't sleep and he doesn't close his eyes.