"Hey, hey. Focus on me, alright?" She positioned herself between her and the window, blocking out the view through the dirty glass, and used both hands to rip through the worn fabric of his pants. Silent tears rolled down his face as he sobbed, her fingers pressing around the gash on his thigh where the bone showed through, and she shushed him again. "It's gonna be alright. We've gotten this far, right?" She turned to look through the first aid kit she'd found wedged into the back of a bathroom cabinet, but there was nothing in it that she could use, and she ran her hands through her hair. "We've gotta go, okay? I'll carry you, don't worry." She shoved everything of use she could find into their bags and put one over each shoulder, handing him the gun and the few bullets they had left before she slid her arms under his back and legs and hauled him up. "Ready?" She kicked the door open, uncaring of the noise and what it might attract, and set off walking in the direction she remembered the road being. Her arms and shoulders shook with the strain of all the weight, but she ignored it as best she could and kept walking. There wasn't time to rest, not until they found somewhere else safe, and she kept up a string of meaningless conversation as they went. She could've cried in relief as she emerged from the treeline and saw the road, and the people walking along it who looked at her in surprise and disbelief.
"Oh, thank god." She fell, her knees no longer holding her up after however long she'd walked, and she only just managed to stop herself from collapsing on him and jarring his leg more than the fall already had. "See, what'd I say?" The boy looked up at her, his eyes half closed from pain and fatigue, but his mouth was quirked up into a smile. "We made it." The rest felt like heaven to her aching muscles, but she grit her teeth and stood up to meet the people walking towards her, moving to stand in front of him so he was out of their reach. She wasn't taking anymore chances, not after the claimers. The weapons made her nervous, too many ways that this could go wrong, but she couldn't walk away without trying. Her mouth was dry, she couldn't remember the last time she'd had any of the water in her bag because she'd been saving it all for James, so her voice came out cracked and broken when she started to talk. "I don't want anything, I just need to know if there's any houses around here." She knew that she looked bad, even for the end of the world, with her clothes covered in mud, sweat, and blood that probably wasn't hers but at this point she didn't even know. "Where did you come from?" She pointed behind her, still trying to calm her breathing, "There's a house that way, maybe twenty miles or so. That's where we-" James' scream cuts her off and she whirls around just in time to see him being dragged backwards off the edge of the steep bank, skidding across the dirt to grab him by the hand with one arm and to reach past him with the other. The position means that his face is smashed somewhere into her stomach, but she ignores his teeth biting into her skin from the pain as she jams her knife into the head of the walker that's got him by the leg. Hands reach past her, grabbing James, and she looks up into the face of the man that looks like their leader. "Come with us, we'll get his leg looked at." She wants to refuse, but the bleeding has soaked through his makeshift bandage by now, so she accepts the hand offered to her and pulls herself up off the ground. "What's your name, kid?"
"Billie. He's James."
"He your brother?" She looks across the railway to the man standing at the edge, a crossbow dangling from one hand, and shakes her head. "No." She can see his brain working, trying to rationalise that with the way that both of them look so young, and the woman with them seems to have the same thought. "How old are you two, anyway?" She looks down at James, at the way his face scrunches in pain when he tries to stand up, and remembers the day that she found him. "He's six."
She's resilient in a way that most of the other kids aren't, stubborn and determined and wild in a way that most of the people at the prison stopped being after a taste of safety and a place to rest. "You can relax, kid." She's whipcord tense beside him, the two of them sitting on the edge of the watchtower roof, and he stifles a smirk when she shoots him an unimpressed look. "It's strange, not to have to worry about when I'm going to eat next." She talks like this isn't a new thing, the not eating, like she's been living her whole life that way and it makes something heavy settle into his stomach. He remembers watching them at dinner and seeing the way she deposited most of her food onto the kid's plate, taking the small portion for herself and barely finishing that even though it couldn't have been more than a dozen or so forkfuls. "I mean, it's good. But it won't last forever and then we're back to being screwed again."
"Nothing lasts forever, kid." He doesn't say that he knows she could survive it, even though he wants to. Ever since he'd seen her carrying the kid, emerging from the trees with him in her arms and both full-to-bursting bags on her back, he knew she was a survivor, the kind of person that could take the punches without ever laying down and giving up. What he does say is "Nah, you got this." and nudges her with his elbow. The smile she sends him is small, barely there, but he sees it. He's not surprised to find out she's a hard worker, or that her hands are constantly moving. For a few days, he watches in the distance at the other kids try and get her to join her in whatever they were doing that, but she refuses their advances every time and spends most of her time out in the sun. Somehow, he becomes the one that everyone else appoints as her mentor, he guesses, and he spends a lot of time those first few weeks taping up her hands after she's worked her fingers down to blisters and blood in the gardens, or cutting and hammering scrap pieces of wood together for whatever project Hershel's thought up this time. It's also not surprising that the old man approves of her, not with the way she finishes one task with efficiency and comes back to him to get her next job. "Got any idea what happened to your parents?" He asks it while he's working side by side with her as they use the old rusty saw to cut lengths of repurposed logs to reinforce the fence, and very carefully doesn't look up as his arm works back and forth through the tough wood. "Last I saw, my mother was one of them." She takes the log when the saw breaks through the other side and adds it to the pile they've already got stacked up on the grass, grabbing the next one and taking the saw when he offers it. She's not wearing gloves again, her bare fingers curling around the rough bark to keep the log in place, and her muscles tense and release as she saws. She doesn't say anything else about it, doesn't mention her father, and he doesn't ask again.