hey, welcome to the sophia series! If you're new here, i can understand not wanting to go back and read the first two works, but i can assure you, i'll leave a summary at the bottom of this chapter that can catch you up completely. this is so you don't have to go back and read sophia's return and sophia's suffering, because it may be time consuming and, to be honest, the writing hasn't always been that good. fear not, however, because i am a much better writer than i used to be, and am dedicated to giving you longer, more worthwhile chapters. so stick around, and for a summary of what's happened in the series up until this point, see the bottom of the chapter. thanks, and i hope y'all enjoy!


two days after grady.

We moved.

It was the first thing we did. With Grady so close, none of us were comfortable being so close to the city. Yes, we wanted to find our group, or at least someone else, but after a long discussion, we came to the mutual agreement that our safety comes first. After all, we couldn't reunite with the rest of the prison if we were dead, or locked up at the hospital.

For the time, it seemed like Jaime and Sylvia's group would be sticking around. They'd helped us, and in times like the ones we lived in, you needed all the allies you could.

As we packed up and prepared to leave, we slowly begun to learn about the rest of the group. There was Jaime and Sylvia, of course, the former being 23, while the latter was 25. Along with them, there was Smith and Alice. The latter was, an older man probably reaching middle age, while the former was a woman in her early thirties at the latest, with cropped brown hair that reminded me of my mother,. Jaime also had a brother who was about a year older than me, who told us he went by Jay, but not what Jay was short for.

There was a kid Luke and Mika's age, too, named Cheyenne. She had been travelling with her uncle, Abbott, who reminded me a little of Daryl, but a little more rude, and somehow even less friendly. He obviously cared deeply about his niece, and seemed to tolerate (like?) the rest of his group. With us, however, he seemed suspicious. I think it helped us that we had Luke and Mika, two kids her age, and a baby who seemed loved and well-cared for. Still, he held us at a distance, but I found it hard to blame him when the first time he met me, my hands were literally covered in a child's blood.

Molly.

Even though we were in a rush, we did take time to bury Molly. For the most part, I dug the grave. Several people offered to lend a hand, but the only one help I accepted was Luke. It was less about needing help, though, and more about the look he gave me. I could tell that he wanted to do it, and maybe he needed it, in the same way I did, so I passed him the extra shovel and we got to work.

It took longer than I thought it would, but between the two of us, we got it done. Together, with the help of Noah and Tyreese, we lowered Molly in the ground. I hadn't been to many funerals, both before and after, but I remembered burying my mom, so I worked off of that..

Each of the kids tossed a handful of dirt into the grave, as did the rest of our group. Tyreese pitched the little makeshift cross he'd nailed together, and Beth read a few lines from a bible she'd found in the home. There wasn't much else for us to say, so for a long while, we stood there in silence, the kids on either side of me. Luke had Judith, arms solid around her and keeping her close to his chest, as if he was trying to keep her safe. At the time, it seemed odd, because he'd asked to hold her. Looking back, I think it made sense. Despite only being eleven, Molly'd cared so deeply for Judy, and maybe having Judith close reminded him of Molly.

We stayed at the house that night, before packing up early in the morning and bolting. Tyreese and I debated whether or not to keep the truck, largely due to the fact that the window was smashed and therefore offered no protection. We decided to keep it, with the reasoning that the truck was so tall, there's no way anything would be reaching in.

Seating became a problem. The night before we left, it occured to me that our big, gray truck only seats six, and if you added Noah and Beth in, that made seven. Someone could hold Judith, but I wasn't quite happy with that.

The other group offered the extra space in their car, and while I was loathe to seperate us, in case something goes wrong, Tyreese and I really couldn't justify getting another car, and therefore having to siphon more gas, when we could just move things around.

In the end, Noah offered to ride with Cheyenne, Abbott, and Alice, and Beth stated that she'd ride with them. It wasn't too horrible of an option, so we went along with it. So, early in the morning, Beth and I managed to properly install Judith's car seat in the back of the truck before we all set out, intent to get out of Atlanta. We didn't want to go too far, not when our group was still out there, but we had to put at least a considerable distance between us and Grady.

Noah mentioned to me the night before we left, when the two of us were keeping watch, that he wanted to go back to his home and check on his family. I was on board, of course, until he mentioned that he was from Richmond, all the way in Virginia. That had thrown me for a loop, considering that it was several states away, until he explained that he and his father'd been looking for his uncle. They hadn't found him in end, and Noah'd gotten quiet after telling me that his father was killed. After a long, pregnant pause, we switched topics and made small talk for another half hour before we woke up Jaime, Tyreese, and Luke to relieve us.

(I was a little leary about having Luke help keep a watch, but he insisted. He wanted to do it, he said, wanted to learn now so he could do it without the others one day. It was fair, and in the end, I didn't have a good enough reason to say no, so he stayed up with the two men.)

Leaving, even though I knew we would be coming back through the city often to look for our group, still made me nervous. I justified it with worrying for our own safety, but it didn't mean I wasn't nervous.

It helped, however, when we passed the Now Leaving Atlanta sign, and I felt the knot of tension in my chest deflate.

We'd decided not to go far, and even though I knew the drive wouldn't be that long, it still seemed unbearably quiet. None of us were in the mood for conversation, which was fair, but after maybe ten minutes, I pulled down the visor above my seat. There was a small piece of faux-leather, with several pockets for CDs. They were mostly hard rock and heavy metal types of music, but among them, I spotted a disc that didn't seem to fit in, and grabbed it.

Elvis: 30 #1 Hits

With a hum, I turned it over in my hands. I wouldn't have said Elvis was my favorite artist before the outbreak, but then again, there wasn't always music going in my house. My dad didn't really care for it, said it drowned out the television. Sometimes, though, when he wasn't home, my mom would pull out her old CD book, the one that with all her albums in it, some of which that held music older than she was. Our stereo wasn't the best, but it played music all the same, and that was good enough for my mom. She'd play all these different artists. I don't remember most of them, but I could remember her favorites. The Oak Ridge Boys, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash. And while Elvis wasn't her favorite (that was saved for The Statler Brothers), she'd liked him well enough, and I'd hear him around the house every once and awhile.

Now, when I slipped it into the disc slot, there was something comforting about hearing a song that was familiar. I didn't know any of the words, granted, but it still felt a little bit like home, in a way. Even though I'd never been the kind of person who listened to a lot of music, hearing Elvis come through the truck speakers made me understand why so many people had cared so much about it.

When the first song had ended, Tyreese glanced over at me. "Not a bad choice," he commented, offering me a small smile that I returned. I shrugged, pushing the visor back up.

In a weather sort of sense, it was a nice day. When we finally pulled away from the old house, it was still a little dark out, but an hour into the drive and the sun was already starting to shine above us. A little ironic, considering the hell I'd been through lately, but it felt a little like a fresh start. Tyreese hummed as he drove, Judith babbled in the backseat, and I even noticed Luke smile in the seat behind me when I glanced in the side mirror.

Our truck led the party of cars. I was fairly sure that Jaime and Smith suggested we go first to give us control over where we were going. Probably because, even though they'd helped us, I couldn't help but be suspicious. They didn't have any more people than we did, if you counted Judith, but we had more kids and were less armed. Just about all of them had guns, compared to the two pistols and one rifle we were carrying.

At some point, Tyreese and I began discussing where to go. There was an aging map of Georgia in the glove compartment of the truck, and although it seemed a little yellowed, it was current. As we took turns, I used a pen from the center console to mark off where we went, so we'd be able to get back to Atlanta easier.

We made it through the Elvis CD a full time, before we decided to start looking for a residential neighborhood. According to the map, we'd reached somewhere between Sne, and considering we were still planning on making frequent trips back to the city, we didn't want to go that far out. True, I knew how to siphon gas, as I'm sure Tyreese and some of the others did, but that doesn't mean I wanted to be doing it every five minutes.

When we started to find the residential areas of town, Tyreese nearly turned into the first neighborhood he saw, but at the last second, I stopped him. He gave me a curious look and I explained.

"Go for one with bigger houses," I instructed.. "Bigger houses means richer families. More bedrooms, better stuff, more space."

He nodded, conceding to the point, and we cruised around for a while before Mika spotted a grouping of houses that looked nicer. Sure enough, when he turned onto the street, we found some houses that were definitely upper-middle class. Even from the outside, I could tell they each had to have several bedrooms, and decent space inside.

For maybe half a minute or so, we drove down the street. I think we were really just waiting for one of the houses to call out to us, but in the end, it was neither Tyreese nor I who picked the house. It was Luke, who jammed his finger against the window.

"That one," he declared, and after a brief moment, Tyreese pulled the truck into the driveway of the home Luke had pointed out. It was red brick, with gray shingles and shutters. Seemed as good as any others along the street, I supposed.

The drive was wide enough for two cars, so Jaime pulled in beside us, and Abbott behind them. Even though it was silly, considering that we were supposed to be trusting them, I couldn't help but be grateful that they hadn't boxed our truck in, in case we needed to make a quick getaway.

I was the first to hop out of the truck, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a walker stumbling up the street. I had my gun on me, but instead, I jumped on the back of the trunk bed and rummaged through a couple things until I found the baseball bat I'd thrown inside. As the kids climbed out, I jogged over to the geek, and made quick work of smashing his head in.

Once it was done, I heard Mika calling my name. Even though her voice was calm, I still spun on my heels, hands tightening on the bat.

"Everything okay?" I asked, heading back towards the truck.

"I can't unbuckle Judith's seatbelt thing," she replied. "The pushy part won't go in."

"I've got it," Beth cut in, sounding amused, before she leaned into the cab where Judy was. By the time I'd made my way over, Beth was pulling her free of the car seat.

"You guys might want to stay in the car," Tyreese suggested. "Or at least outside, while we clear the house to make sure it's empty."

"I can help," Luke offered, and I nearly blanched at the thought. Still, I was quick to recover, and I placed a hand on his shoulder.

"Maybe next time," I told him, and when his face fell, I continued. "At least let me teach you how to shoot first, and then we'll see, okay?"

He sighed, but conceded. "Okay."

Jaime came around to us, everyone else behind him. "What's the plan?" He asked. "Who's going in?"

"I'm in," both Jay and I said, at the same time. Apparently, Sylvia found that funny, because she'd laughed, but said nothing.

In the end, we agreed that Tyreese, Noah, and I would go in with Jay, Jaime, Sylvia, and Smith. Tyreese and I had been completely ready to force the door open, but Sylvia had raised an eyebrow at us all before pulling something out of her back pocket and crouching down by the door. It took me a second, but when I leaned in, I could see she was wedging a credit card into the space between the frame and the lock. After a moment or two of effort, the door clicked, and she pushed it open with ease.

"You gotta teach me that," Noah commented, and Sylvia grinned before stepping inside. We all filed in after her, and fanned out. I started in the kitchen, grabbing a steak knife to use seeing as I had left the baseball bat out in the truck. As I went to move into the living room, there were footsteps behind me, and I whirled around, raising the blade, to see it was only Jay behind me, not a walker.

"Were you about to stab me?" He asked.

"Well, I was when I thought you were a walker," I replied. He chuckled, following me out into the hallway as I moved on.

"You call them walkers?"

I shrugged. "I mean, yeah," I said. "What do you call them?"

"Rotters, or biters," he answered. "But Abbott calls them shamblers. He calls them dickheads, too, but only when Cheyenne isn't listening."

I gave a small laugh at that, as we cleared the living room and started up the stairs. "A guy in my group used to call them geeks," I mentioned, without thinking. After a moment, I hummed, realizing how causally I'd mentioned Glenn, as if he were only a passing thought, and how I'd automatically referred to him in past tense.

Calls them geeks, I corrected, in my head. He calls them geeks.

Jay and I made small talk as we cleared the rest of the house. Mercifully, there were no walkers in the entire house. There was still a car in the garage around the back of the house, and everything looked mostly undisturbed. It was clear that, whoever was living here, they were far out somewhere else. They hadn't packed up their house and left, there were no bodies somewhere else. Maybe they died at work, at school, I don't know, but dwelling on it for too long made me uncomfortable, so instead I pushed it out of my mind.

"It's a nice house," Smith commented, when all seven of us had met back up at the entrance. "Two living rooms, and I counted six bedrooms. Well, five bedrooms, and one that was full of boxes and all. Storage, likely."

"Did anyone clear the basement?" Jaime asked.

"Tyreese and I did," Noah answered.

"Awesome," Jaime replied. "Let's bring everyone else in."

Over the next two weeks, we settled in. The lot of us looted all the houses nearby, gather all the water and salvageable food left behind, as well as anything else worth grabbing. Most of the time, I ended up looking around with Alice or Jaime, who both turned out to be a little more observant than I did. It was Alice who found a shoebox in the master closet of the house across the street, and when she opened it, she found a pistol and a few 9mm rounds inside. In another house, Jaime found an axe in the garage that I'd looked right over and hadn't noticed.

When I scavenged the house three down from the one we're staying in with Jay, however, the two of us found an entire gun safe inside. It was one of the tall ones, the kind people get when they've got more than one gun. Together, Jay and I tore the entire house apart looking for any possible combination of four digits that might work, and when that didn't pan out, we started trying random codes.

After maybe an hour of effort put into opening the safe without any results to speak of, Jay suggested we move on, but I was too stubborn. Instead, we got Jaime and Smith to help us carry it back into the house we were living in, and we set it up in the living room.

"This may be a little much," Jay told me, but I shrugged.

"There's only so many possible combinations, and if we keep trying, we can unlock it," I assured him. "Here, I've got an idea."

Together, we created an order for trying to crack the code. We started with 0000 and went upwards. 0001, 0002, 0003, and so on. After that, we would go 0010, and started back over with the last digit, like we were trying to count higher and higher with each one. Every once and awhile, once of us would wander in and try codes for a while, whether it was for a few seconds or for almost an hour. We tapped a piece of paper to the top of the safe, and would write down whatever the code we'd left off on. It was kind of silly, but at the time, I'd been happy to have something to put my energy into.

After we'd cleaned the neighborhood out of food and other essentials, we started moving mattresses over. The first few nights, we'd been sharing beds and sleeping on blankets on the floor, as well as on the couches in the living room and the den.

Slowly, we started to get comfortable, both around at house and around each other. It was odd, to settle into a routine so easily after everything we'd been through as of late. Our home falling apart, Molly being taken, and everything that happened at Grady.

I missed the prison, though. Missed waking and wandering outside to find Carl helping his father in the garden, missed watching Michonne gallop back into camp on horseback. I missed Maggie's gentle, unoppressive affection, Glenn telling jokes to make me laugh, and Daryl bringing me candy bars when he found them on runs. And I especially missed watching the kids run around in the grass, laughing easy and happy because they were safe. I missed all of it.

There was stuff still at the prison, too. All my clothes, more baby formula and purees. Polaroid pictures of me and Carl that Mika had taken, taped on our walls, my stash of books in the bottom of my nightstand. It was all still there, abandoned in place.

With that, a thought occurred to me. It was all still there. And so was our weapons stash, and there was clean water, and food, and everything. And sure, maybe without the walls and the gates, it wasn't so livable anymore, but… with the group we had, the guns we had, what was stopping us from going back and taking the rest of our things.

While I had been lost in thought thinking about that idea, Tyreese had wandered into the kitchen and noticed the expression on my face. "Sophia? Is everything okay?"

I looked up at him, and as if I couldn't help it, a small smile curled on my face. "Tyreese," I said. "I've got an idea."


alright, so a quick summary

sophia's return [follows the plot of season 3]

-sophia, instead of dying in season 2, got lost and wandered around the woods trying to survive on her own for ~9 months. somewhere around the first few episodes of season three, sophia stumbles on the prison, and is welcomed back into the prison (& the group) with open arms.

-carl and sophia spend a lot of time together, he teaches her how to shoot a gun, as she's been spending the last nine months running and using knives. (if i go back and do any rewriting, i'm definitely changing this.)

-carl tells sophia that he likes her, and they start dating. carol gets bitten and she dies. afterwards, sophia argues with carl and tries to run away, but he catches her and they stop fighting.

-the governor attacks, carl shoots jody, and sophia is mad about it, but they make up.

sophia's suffering [follows the plot of season 4]

-we follow the time skip between seasons 3 and seasons 4. chapter one of sophia's suffering picks up with the first episode of the season. carl chews lizzie and all the kids out for naming walkers, patrick gets sick, and he turns

-carl and sophia move into the guard's offices with the kids when the illness gets bad. they argue about this, but they make up.

-on april 27th, carl gives sophia a gift for their anniversary. on the same day, the governor rides up to the prison and attacks them, killing hershel. when the shootout starts, carl and sophia separate so he can find his father and she can find judith. sophia finds judith, molly, and luke, and the four of them escape together.

-they spend a week or so on their own before they run into tyreese and mika. the six of them team up, but not too long after, sophia is trying to teach molly and mika to shoot when a van pulls up, starts firing at them, and kidnaps molly.

-sophia manages to fatally wound one of the people who took molly, and they leave the woman behind. sophia presses her for answers and finds that they're taking molly to grady memorial hospital, so sophia chases after her and gets herself kidnapped in the process.

-sophia spends a few days in a coma at grady memorial. during this, beth tells her she has to pretend like she doesn't remember any of what happened, including molly being taken, so sophia lies to the officers when she wakes up and says that she doesn't remember anything past the attack on the prison.

-later, sophia tries to escape grady with noah, beth, and molly. there's a stand off outside the hospital between them and dawn & officer gorman. during this, gorman accidentally kills molly before he's eaten by a walker. sophia convinces dawn to go back inside and let them go, and when dawn turns her back, sophia shoots her in the head.

-they try to walk all the way back to the house where the kids and tyreese are from the hospital. it is far, and they are carrying molly without any food or water. during this, jaime and sylvia pull up beside them, and offer them a ride. sophia hesitates, before accepting, and they make their way back to the house. this is where the sophia's suffering ends and this story picks up

alright! so now you're all caught up. stay tuned, i'll be doing updates as frequently as i can manage. and yes, i know you're all still waiting for me to bring carl back. i can't even pretend to be sneaky about it anymore. yes, carl is still alive, and yes, we will see him come back. i miss him too, guys, but i want sophia to have her own arc outside of just being carl's girlfriend.

and yes, carl/sophia is the endgame. they will be ending up together, however long it takes.