Switchboard

One thing she had a lot of now was time. At first, she held it close around her, letting it warm her and protect her from everything that had happened, was happening. But she noticed as the days became weeks, it weighed heavily on her, pushing her down.

And now, she was…restless.

She roamed the woods, scavenging and hunting for food. She prowled the wooden box of the cabin, rummaging into every cranny and crevice until she knew her little home as well as she knew her own body. She began reading the terrible romance novels stocked on the small shelves, happy to realize that whole large chunks of time had fallen away whilst lost in the smutty pages.

She had meant what she had written in her note to Tobin, her convenient lover.

She had meant what she told Morgan, her unlikely ally.

She had meant what she said to Ezekiel, with his exotic fairytale Kingdom and pet tiger and striking eyes.

Hadn't she?

Why, then, despite her best intentions, did her stomach leap when she heard someone approaching the cabin? Even when it was some unknown lackey of the King's? Why did she care? What was it to her? She was like the cabin: isolated, forgotten, simplified and husked out.

Except she wasn't. And like the cabin, she held secrets, like the enticingly erotic pages of a trashy romance novel. Unlike the cabin, which didn't have electricity, Carol's lights were flicking themselves back on, one by one. She seemed unable to stop it, her internal switchboard.

Two of the switches had been destroyed: her marriage with Ed, and the woman she had been because of him, and herself. She had ripped those circuits out of her internal wall, smashing them the way she had pummeled Ed's lifeless skull, pieces flying in every direction. The other was Sophia, faded and gone, preserved only in her mother's heart. No matter what she did or didn't do, that switch was never lighting up again.

And if you had said to her even five years ago, that she HAD any other lights, she would have scoffed. She would have said any internal illumination came from her marriage and her daughter. There WAS no light of her own.

And she had been wrong about that. Hadn't she?

There were switches and wires inside of her she didn't even know existed. Some shone brighter than others. Her friendships with Rick, Maggie, Glenn, Michonne. Flick, flick, flick, flick. Her latent intelligence, waiting all of those years, dormant and muffled, when Ed reigned supreme. Flash. Her ability to not just survive, but thrive, in this supposedly dying world. Twinkle. Even sexual desire, awoken by someone else, fulfilled, briefly, by Tobin's warm body next to her, on top of her. Luster. And him. The man whose own light seemed to flicker and blaze with the same rhythm as hers, shining with a complicated yet utterly familiar luminescence, because it was her own: Daryl. BOOM.

She was awash with light she hadn't realized existed. And every time she destroyed another living person, she felt the whole works flicker inside of her, ready to short circuit. She had never, truly, been this alive except, perhaps, in an almost-forgotten childhood. Grass was so green. The sky was so blue. And the blood, ah so much of it, was so very red.

It was terrifying and exhilarating all at once. She should have known she couldn't hack it for long with all of her lights blazing. After Denise's death, she slowly started shutting the whole thing down. Taking an internal hand and moving everything from "on" to "off".

And it was working, right? I mean…it HAD worked, right? Turning everything off yourself was better than some monster, living or dead, coming in and smashing the shit out of it, leaving you in the dark.

Right?

She had made the best decision, really. It was difficult, but she had to hold steady. She turned a page in her book and sighed. This was better, in the end. A life in the simple dimness of the cabin, in the simple dimness of her soul.

And then: a knock on the door.

Lights on.