AN: This is just a little one shot for thaliasandy on Tumblr who wanted a little Cyreese.
For anyone else who reads, though, I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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After a cool bath to wash away the dirt and sweat of the day, having put away the metal tub that they carried in and out the house for bathing, Tyreese made his way to the bedroom, conscious to keep his steps as light as possible to minimize the creaking and squeaking of the boards underfoot. The house was old before the turn. He'd made a good number of repairs on it throughout the years. It was still, though, an old house and he didn't need to wake the living and make them as restless as the dead.
The fake crystal knob turned loosely in his hand and the door creaked open. He expected to find the room dark and quiet—she'd have gone to sleep hours ago while he was still out chopping wood—but instead he found the room illuminated by the dim and slightly flickering light of a lamp that was threatening reaching the end of its wick.
Tyreese stepped forward and turned the wick up enough to stop the flame from dancing and casting shadows around. He slowly peeled himself out of the wet clothes that he'd put on as he bathed, and he took some care to put them neatly to the side so that she wouldn't have to wonder around behind him picking things up.
She was asleep. She was asleep any night that it was a particularly late night for him. They worked together most days, and on most projects. Everything they did was even. It was divided. The work was fifty fifty. Their relationship was "fair" and it was "equal" and that was just the way she liked it. Sometimes? Tyreese might have liked to have the chance to take care of her, following some mentality of the way that things might have once been, but he understood that even the suggestion was something she found distasteful.
Taking care of her could, as she saw it, so quickly hit the slippery slope toward taking control.
He would have never controlled her. He never would have tried, honestly, but he doubted that he would ever be successful if it were something that he even desired.
He picked the lamp up and moved it to his side of the bed. He rested it on his night table so that, once he was in bed and all was good and secure in the house, he could turn the light out and they could both sleep.
The house had been theirs since they had decided to start over. It had been theirs since there was nothing left for them. So far, nobody had come to claim the place and they assumed it was safe to assume that nobody ever would.
Terminus had been what its name had promised. It had been the end of the line. They hadn't needed to fully approach it to know that. On the road they'd run into a man—a man who seemed like he intended to take them into some kind of custody but hadn't figured that Carol might shoot him before he ever got the chance to touch any of the three of them—and he'd confessed that Terminus was a place where people went to die. There wasn't any coming out of there alive.
They'd debated it for some time. Did they go? Did they risk possibly being killed to see if there was a chance that the people they knew were still alive? The man had promised them that they weren't. They were all dead. He was dead too, though he'd been allowed to live long enough to tell his story. Carol had told Tyreese that, if he wanted, she would go with him to try to see if anyone remained alive. She'd warned him, though, that if she lived, she would leave.
Rick had told her that she wasn't welcome. She'd felt that it was the truth. She'd be even less welcome if anyone were to find out what happened with Lizzie. Nobody would ever understand that who hadn't been there to see it for themselves.
Taking the man's word at face value—because men pissing themselves from fear of the gun next to their forehead rarely lie—and knowing that he didn't want to leave Carol to face this world alone, Tyreese had made the decision to go with her. They'd taken Judith, mourned their lost, and turned their steps in another direction entirely. She hadn't wanted him to go with her, but over time? She began to grow accustomed to him.
And he began to grow accustomed to her.
And somewhere along the way? With time and care? The friendship that had grown strong between them had become something more. It had started with the little things.
There was a moment when he caught her eyes—watching him with more intent than was really necessary. And he'd smiled, embarrassed to be studied so hard, and she'd blushed and turned away with her own embarrassment. So he'd let her catch him.
There was the first time that they hugged and, maybe for just a moment, she'd held it a little longer than she had to. She'd held it longer than she had before.
There was the first time that she'd kissed him. He let her. He didn't tell her that he'd been dreaming of the moment that it would happen because that might make her nervous—and he didn't want to make her nervous.
She was the strongest person that he'd ever met, the fact that she was a woman entirely irrelevant to that point. Yet, there was still something soft about her. For a long time, it had been gone entirely. She'd been cold and distant. She'd left him to care for Judith and she'd kept her distance from them both. But when he'd finally told her that he understood? That he forgave her? That he held nothing against her that she could even imagine? Slowly she had started to come out into the world again. She'd started to come out into his world.
On their farm? They were now almost entirely self-sufficient. It had taken them years to get there, but now? It was comfortable. It was almost easy. They could almost forget that, outside the fences that he'd reinforced and checked twice a day, there was a world that was cruel enough that it had tried to break them both.
When they'd first started to explore their feelings? She'd been afraid. She'd made him feel, in many ways, like the most frightening person that she could meet. He was, to her, a bear of a man. In the beginning? When she looked at him, she saw his physical strength. She saw the man that, when she'd twisted her ankle because he'd been clumsy and knocked the ladder out from under her while they were working on the barn, had heaved her up and carried her to the house without losing his breath. She saw strength—and it scared her. So he'd had to teach her that strength and abuse of that strength were not one and the same.
The same strength she feared, instead of hurting her, could be used to simply liven up their love life—once they had one—because she didn't need to fear that she hurt him. She didn't need to ask him, if he picked her up and changed their arrangement, if he could handle it. She didn't need to insist that it was too much when, in a moment of the closest they ever came to whimsy, he picked her up and carried her to the bedroom that they came to share with each other.
Slowly? He'd come to love her. He'd come to love her in a way that he'd never loved anyone before. And she had come to love him.
He'd told her about his wife. He'd told her about his daughter. He'd told her about the guilt that he felt when he thought about Terminus and feared that he may have left his sister behind—that she may have been alive and needed him. She'd told him about her husband. She'd told him about her daughter. She'd told him about the guilt that she felt, every day, about the things that she'd done because she believed they needed to be done.
They'd forgiven each other their sins. There was never true peace to be had, but what there was? They found in each other.
When Judith had been somewhere on the cusp between her third and fourth year, and Tyreese had gone on a run to try to get some supplies they needed to keep improving their home, he'd walked right into a bad scene. A small group had passed through a town and there had been an accident. He'd been expected at home before dark, but he was late because he couldn't leave the woman to die alone. She didn't want to finish it for herself, and he wasn't strong enough to finish it for her. She'd wanted her time, and he'd wanted her to have it.
Carol had been terrified. She'd met him at the fences, in the dark, where she'd been pacing since she'd put Judith to bed and pretended that all was well. She'd leapt into his arms at first and then she'd yelled at him and swatted at him in false anger before she finally collapsed against him in frustrated tears. It was only then that she'd noticed the sleeping baby—not fully a year old—whose mother had died saving him when her group had abandoned them both because his crying drew Walkers.
Together? They became parents again. Quietly, they both hoped that Samuel would be like Judith—and they would never have to face, again, what they no longer talked about.
Now Samuel was nearly three. And Judith was nearly seven. At least, as far as they could tell. And they were both beautiful, wonderful children, who understood this world to be the only world there was. They understood, ironic as it may be, the old world to be the stuff of fairy tales and make believe.
And Tyreese and Carol? They belonged to both worlds, though Tyreese felt that with each passing year they belonged more to this one than they ever had to the last. Life now? It was different. In the past? They'd lived with the knowledge that they could die and every day could be their last. Now? They believed it. It changed, in many ways, the way they lived.
They worked now only for themselves and for each other. They were happy in their work because they saw the payoff from it. They raised their children with all the lessons they wanted them to learn about how to treat each other—and how to treat others if they were ever to meet them. They enjoyed things like fires and good food and warm baths.
They loved each other like there was no one else—and it was only partially because it was true.
They belonged to both worlds, but in the middle of the crazy chaos of the new world? They'd found where they wanted to be. Though they sometimes brought it up? They mostly let the past go with the world to which they'd bid farewell.
Tyreese groaned at the soft feeling of the bed and the smell of the clean sheets. He'd dedicated himself today, on one of the few days that they spent working apart, to cutting and stacking wood for the winter and preparing for repairs that would need to be done. Carol had dedicated her day to cleaning the house, airing it out before it was too cold to do so, and to washing the sheets and leaving them to dry, clean and crisp, in the sunlight.
At his groan, he heard her move and he glanced in her direction. He was about to apologize for waking her when she sat up on her elbows and he realized that she'd never been asleep. She'd been fooling him. Her face wore no trace of just having been woken.
"You love clean sheets," she said softly.
Tyreese chuckled to himself.
"You should've been sleeping," Tyreese said, pretending to scold her. She smiled. She knew it was only playful banter.
"Sam didn't want to go to bed," Carol said. "And by the time I got him down? I was wide awake. I thought I'd wait for you."
Tyreese sucked in his bottom lip quickly and released it. It was the quickest way to erase the smile from his face so that the concerned look—complete with furrowed brow—that he was going for would be complete.
"You didn't know how late I'd be," he challenged.
Carol shrugged gently.
"It didn't matter," she said. "I'm still wide awake."
Tyreese nodded his head gently.
"Can't sleep?" He asked.
She shook her head in response.
"Not at all," she said.
"Want to—come over here and see if we can do something about that?" Tyreese asked. He chuckled to himself. "Sometimes—they do call me the sandman."
Carol raised her eyebrows in false surprise.
"Why would they call you that?" She asked.
"I have my ways," Tyreese teased. "Of bringing sweet dreams."
Carol narrowed her eyes at him, but she'd already begun to move to come closer to him.
"Who calls you that?" She asked, the fake challenge having almost slipped entirely from her voice. She brought her lips to his, her body resting half on top of his, before he could even respond.
"Only the most beautiful woman I know," he said.
Carol hummed at him.
"She must be pretty special," Carol teased.
Tyreese hummed in the affirmative.
"That she is," he said. "That she is."
Carol smiled at him then, a genuine smile that brought her out of the game.
"And lucky, too," she said.
Tyreese didn't know about that, but he didn't protest. He was too busy because, with the words, she kissed him again. This time with more purpose behind it than before.
He couldn't speak for her, but he felt pretty lucky.