Disclaimer: I don't own AMC's The Walking Dead or any of its characters, wishful thinking aside.
Author's Note #1:Entry for the USS Caryl's '25 Days of Caryl Challenge' – Day 13 (Sep 29) Fall Colors Challenge, (I ended up using all of them): * orange * red *brown *mottled grey *dark purple.
Warnings: This is actually a unique piece, as it is told from an outside perspective, so stick with me on this one. I think the premise is interesting – if not the atmosphere.
Harvest Moon
Chapter One
The boy who was now a man picked his way carefully through the green, side-stepping the dull, ivory-hewn husks, half-buried and hopelessly tangled in the long grass. He shaded a weathered hand – crisscrossed with bow-string scars and early-onset arthritis. There were close to two dozen of them, glinting porcelain mounds that rose and fell throughout the clearing – made almost indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape by the passing of the years.
But he knew.
He'd been there after all.
The day three had become one.
It was his bullets that'd helped bring them down.
His blood who'd fallen here.
It wasn't until he spotted them – front and center underneath that droopy old willow tree that he allowed himself to continue forward. He ignored the twang in his hip as his heel skirted dangerously close to a fox hole. His age belayed by the careful way he put boot to ground.
He shook his head, more grateful than ever that he'd decided to make this journey alone. His granddaughter, Lori-Anne, had been adamant that he at least take one of the boys with him. That he'd need help carrying the packs and what not – that he could do with the company. But he knew the truth of it, they treated him with kid-gloves these days. Ever since the sickness he'd come down with the winter past. It'd taken him months to recover, and in truth he could still feel it – lurking in his lungs – silent yet aggressive, waiting for a moment of weakness - for the right moment to strike.
But he was a stubborn sonofabitch.
He had a feeling his mother would have said it was a trait that ran in the family.
He sighed, resigned to a sedate canter as the backwash of memories long buried rippled across the surface of his mind. To anyone else, his expression would have looked conflicted, a shifting turnaround of thin lips and fond eyes as he started forward. But he barely noticed.
He looked around – squinting - silently cataloging the shift.
Connecting what the years had changed and what it'd kept the same.
It really had been a long time.
From a distance he could be mistaken for a man half his age. But in truth, he was a man grown. His children would carry on his name. It would be them who would remember the names of the fallen. It was a growing list, a bedtime mantra he'd taught them all from infancy. A tradition to be passed on from one generation to the next.
He'd buried most of them himself. His parents, friends, honorary aunts and uncles. Pseudo older siblings, lovers, the mother of his first and second child, friends - family. One by one their names had all made it there.
If life was a cycle, he swore that sometimes, Mother Nature hit fast-forward.
People died.
Some of them he knew.
Some of them he didn't.
Either way, death was always a given.
His father once said that good or bad, it was important to remember where you came from.
This was his way of honoring that – honoring them.
And while this place was a boneyard of remembrance, a physical marker to what had once been, what he had created back home had the possibility to span far beyond that of mere flesh and bone.
It was an oral history.
Their history.
Names worth remembering.
He sighed into the gathering dark, sparing a look at the truck and the small little camper trailer he'd parked on the side of the back-country road. His eldest had driven a hard bargain when it came to his leaving.
She was a good girl, his Connie.
A leader now in her own right.
Everyone looked to her these days.
It'd made passing down the mantle of leadership easy.
Old Rick had said the same before he finally passed. Telling him he'd made a good choice letting her take over. That she was fit for it. Taking to it like a retriever to water, reveling in it in a way neither of them ever had.
He'd never much liked the limelight.
"Too much like your father," the old man had teased, surprising them both with a rare moment of lucidity before he eventually nodded off, lost in memory and time as sad blue eyes flick-flicked underneath ancient lids, so wrinkled that they were in danger of disappearing completely.
He'd decided a long time ago that he wouldn't go out like that.
That if it was up to him, he'd never let it get to that point.
Old Rick had outlived every single of one them, his best friend, Lori, his boy, Michonne, Judith, all of them.
He couldn't imagine anything worse than that.
Aging gracefully only got you so far.
After that, it was a crapshoot.
A/N #2: Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed. Please let me know what you think. – There will be one more chapter and this story will be complete.