AN: This prompt was planted there by a reader/reviewer of a story. For the moment, she'll remain anonymous in case she doesn't want to be named. If she wants to be named later, then I'll surely give her credit for coming along and asking me to try my hand at Carick at a moment when it struck me as something I really wanted to do.
I've never written Carick before, so this is entirely new to me. I seldom even write the character of Rick with any detail, so this will be an adventure for me, both in where the story goes and how I decide to actually portray the characters to get it there.
If Carick is not your cup of tea, or this story isn't, then I understand entirely. If you decide to read, though, then I hope that you enjoy. Let me know what you think!
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"The Elders say the men should look at women in a sacred way. The men should never put women down or shame them in any way. When we have problems, we should seek their counsel. We should share with them openly. A woman has intuitive thought. She has access to another system of knowledge that few men develop. She can help us understand. We must treat her in a good way." –Author unknown.
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He'd always heard that people, when they were truly crazy, didn't realize their own madness. It would stand to reason, then, that he wasn't insane, because for the longest time he'd felt like he barely had a grasp on anything.
He could almost imagine his mind being tethered to a string and looped around the finger of some invisible force that was treating it like something of a yo yo.
Rick Grimes couldn't exactly say that he'd ever had anything in mind as the way that life would be at the end of the world, but it was pretty safe to say that this wasn't what he would have envisioned if anyone might have asked him.
Now they were headed toward Virginia as fast as their feet could take them there. They were headed toward some kind of heaven on Earth where they could stop walking. They could stop fighting. They could stop looking over their shoulders and never knowing if they'd find, just behind them, a hoard of hungry Walkers or an evil person whose ill intent was no longer reined in by the law and the government that had, if not kept them entirely under control, at least kept them from showing their full selves.
Of course, in a world that was empty of the more obvious demons and villains, people were left to deal with the scariest ones of all –the ones that lived inside them.
Rick knew that he'd spent a lot of time blaming everyone else.
Each step closer they got to Virginia, it became clearer to him that he'd spent most of his time, at least since the world had turned upside down, blaming everyone else for what was wrong in his life and in the lives of everyone else.
He was supposed to be their leader.
But he didn't feel much like a leader.
And every hit the group took? It was another hit directly to him and to his ego. Each loss that they suffered was a loss that was his in a way that it belonged to no one else.
Everything was just another clear sign that he wasn't made for the position that he was in and that, at best, he was somewhat fooling them into believing that he was stronger and smarter than he was. He felt, though, like some of them already knew that he was barely holding it together. And he feared the rest of them would know before long.
And what was worse? A group looking toward a broken leader or a group with no leader to look to at all?
Of course, there was potential for a new leader. A leader in someone that he might never have believed could have been a leader at all.
Once, though, she wouldn't have believed it of herself either.
He pretended that he wanted to lean on her, just a little. He pretended that he wanted to work with her to make it to Virginia. When he asked her, not sure even how to form the words that still hung in his mind and begged to be said, if he could join her? If they could join her? He pretended that he still had interest in being some kind of leader for this group. He pretended that he thought he still could hold such a position.
What he'd really thought was that he wanted to join her and hand over, without pomp and circumstance, the reins that had been thrust into his hands.
But he hadn't figured out how to say that to her yet because he hadn't worked out how to speak to her—how to really speak to her—when he knew that the last real words he'd said to her burned inside of her as hot as they burned in his own mind.
He'd blamed her too. She'd been just another on a long list of people that he'd blamed.
He'd used them to convince others that he was the good guy. He'd used them to convince himself that he was the good guy.
He'd used them to cover up, at the very least, everything he'd felt about his own potential failure—a failure he felt was upon him now.
Before he'd made it out of Atlanta he'd blamed Merle for the uproar with Walkers and people alike. His first villain and his first victim, handcuffed to a roof. He'd left him there, walking away from his problems, in the care of T-Dog. And T-Dog had dropped the key. It was an accident. It was an unfortunate, life changing accident.
And that was fine, as long as it wasn't Rick's accident.
He'd blamed the group, essentially, for that first breach on the safety of their camp. The one that had cost lives at the rock quarry. They weren't doing things right. They weren't thinking ahead. They weren't living the way that people had to live these days in order to survive.
He was going to be their savior, when really he often felt like he was using them to save himself.
He could blame Otis for ills his son suffered. He could blame Sophia for running into the woods. He could blame Randall for heightening the conflict between himself and his best friend. He could blame Hershel for not being more prepared for the herd that would descend upon them at the farm.
He could blame Shane for Lori and Lori for Shane.
He could blame those prisoners for keeping the prison from being as safe as it should have been and for leading to the death of T-Dog.
And for making him lose Lori—the moment he realized that maybe, just maybe, he'd been blaming her instead of taking even a moment to consider his own position in everything. Maybe he'd failed to realize how he'd changed.
Andrea, Michonne, Merle again, the Governor—the list went on. Every time the road sloped sharply downhill, he had someone to blame. There was always someone he managed to point at and say that, without their involvement, he might have made things work. He might have made things better. It wasn't him. It was never him.
It wasn't true that the road to hell was paved with good intentions.
So he'd blamed her too.
When the virus hit and they were fighting something entirely out of their control? He'd felt helpless. He'd felt like it was all crumbling. He knew now that he was hiding then. He was hiding behind the "council" and hiding behind his "temporary retirement" of sorts. He was hiding from responsibility.
But he had never really wanted to give it up.
Because as much as he hated being a leader? As much as it kept him awake at night and he doubted that he truly had the ability to do what he claimed he could do?
He hated the idea of truly handing it over to another soul.
She'd killed them. She'd claimed that she was putting them down. She was putting them out of their misery. She was ending it before they had to simply suffer through the agony of drowning in their own blood the way that many of the others that succumbed to the virus on their own had done.
But in that moment?
Rick had been absolutely terrified. He was terrified because he realized that something like that? It was a hard call to make. It was a horrifying call to make.
And it was one that he probably never would have been able to make and go through with—because he would have had no one to pass it to. The weight would be entirely his to carry. He wouldn't have wanted to shoulder such a load alone.
But she'd done it.
And then she'd been terrifying to him.
Because this was not the woman that he thought he knew.
Or, rather, she was and she wasn't.
The moment that he'd even had the slightest idea that it was her, he'd immediately been positive that it was her. She wanted, and he knew it, to keep the virus from spreading. She wanted to save as many lives as possible, even if that meant docking a few minutes from someone here or there whose continued existence might cause more problems.
We bury the ones we love.
But she'd burned their bodies black. All on her own. At first glance? It appeared she'd tried to burn away the evidence. She'd really tried to burn away the infection.
Burying them would have been planting the disease to fester in the soil. Burying them would have been begging for polluted water and food supplies. He'd held the burning against her almost as much as the murder itself—and then Hershel had suggested doing the very same thing with the bodies that they removed after she was gone.
She'd been gone because of him.
He had tried to give himself a clear conscience about the whole thing, but there wasn't anything that could truly wipe his mind clean.
He'd given her some food, weapons, and a car—nevermind she'd be lucky to make it ten miles in the vehicle. His conscience was clean. He'd done everything he could do for her. She was dangerous and she was unpredictable and he had to look out for the good of the group. He was doing it, truthfully, for her own good, because if he found out? Tyreese would kill her. If they found out? Daryl, Maggie, Glenn? Any of them? They would want her dead for it. If they banished her? They'd do far worse. He was doing her a favor when he left her behind because they wouldn't want her there.
And he'd told her that. It didn't matter if they did, either, because he wouldn't want her there. He would never trust her around his children.
He'd never trust her around the boy that she'd treated as her own son every chance that she was given, even though she could have had every reason in the world to avoid him because he reminded her of her own loss.
He'd never trust her around his daughter that knew her as much as a mother as she really knew anyone else—his own daughter that she'd helped care for even before she'd come into the world.
He didn't want her there.
That was on him.
It was, maybe, one of the first times that he'd ever taken the full weight of any of his decisions on himself. And even then? When he'd returned to the prison? When he'd heard what Hershel had to say and he'd seen the anger and hurt in Daryl's eyes?
Even then he'd been sure to stress that he'd done the right thing, even if they might not realize it. She was a danger to them all. If she'd stayed? She would have eventually killed them all.
She was too far gone.
Yet she had saved them from certain death at Terminus. She'd saved his life, his son's life, and the life of every other person who had ended up trapped in those train cars. She'd done it, just like she'd done everything else, with little thought about herself.
That was, perhaps, where they differed the most.
Rick felt, especially these days when he was left chewing over everything that had happened to them, that he'd barely stopped thinking about himself. He wondered if she'd ever started.
She had delivered then, even after everything that he'd said to her, safe and sound, his daughter into his arms.
She had returned to him what he'd failed to return to her. She'd returned to him the very same child that he'd said she couldn't be trusted with.
Lately? He felt he couldn't trust himself entirely. He'd put that on her.
Since they'd left Grady Memorial Hospital, Rick had barely found it in himself to speak to her at all. The broken pieces of the story that he'd gotten from Daryl said that they'd followed the car in search of Beth—who they'd lost—because they'd seen it while near the edge of the road that night.
While near the edge of the road beside a car with a charged battery. While Carol had just so happened to have the few things she owned on her person.
Rick knew that she'd been planning to run. She'd been planning to leave. And what reason would she have to stay? He'd told her that no one wanted her there. He'd told her that they would hate her and they would turn on her. He'd told her that she wasn't welcome with the group and that no one wanted her there.
What reason would she ever have to stay?
He'd never found the way to tell her that he'd been wrong. He'd never found the way to tell her that he was sorry. He'd never told her that he'd been as afraid of himself as he was of anything else that they'd seen or done along the way. He'd never really apologized for sinking the blade in the most tender parts of herself that she'd left vulnerable and exposed to him.
He'd never told her that, even if he could speak for no one else, he never wanted her to leave. He only wanted her to stay.