Carol
Patient as always, even though her back and shoulders were screaming after three hours of carrying an annoyingly fussy Judith who started mewling and then crying whenever she tried to hand her to Tyreese, Carol waited as he made sure the safety was on before putting down first his gun and then the two packs he had been carrying in addition to his backpack.
"Thank you, Tyreese. I'll take her back in a little while, I just need to rest my shoulders and arms a bit", she said, handing the sleeping child to the taller man as he reached out to take her.
Tyreese looked all around to make sure there were no walkers anywhere in sight and then suggested, "We could sit down and both get some real rest. Sound good?"
"Sounds like heaven", she sighed, rolling her shoulders and turning her head left, right and left again to loosen the knotted muscles in her shoulders and back. Her arms felt as if they were filled with lead. Her feet felt worse after what, judging by the mellow, tangible light and the position of the sun, had been more than half a day of trudging through the woods carrying either her backpack plus the two additional supply bags or her backpack and Judith.
They both sat down and she slipped out of the straps of her backpack, setting it on the ground. Groaning with pleasure, she helped Tyreese unload his backpack as well, then at once opened it and started rummaging through its contents. "Is the formula down at the bottom or in the front compartment?" she asked, only to add, "Found it!" at once.
Taking out the bottle with the whitish powdered milk already measured into it, she pulled the water bottle from its compartment on the side of her backpack. Unscrewing both bottles, she added water to the powder and started out gently swirling the liquid to dissolve the powder before screwing the top back on and shaking it vigorously. When she was done she capped the milk bottle and placed it in the empty bottle holder on the other side of her backpack to allow the liquid to settle.
She turned toward Tyreese and held the water bottle out to him. He gestured for her to drink first. "I'm sorry, but we can't rest long", he said. "There's not many hours of daylight left and we have yet to find a safe place to stay."
A tired nod was all the answer she could muster. As always since they had left the pecan grove and its dreadful, nightmarish memories behind, they had risen at the first hint of dawn, never daring to stay in one place too long lest either the herd that Tyreese had encountered during the meds run with Daryl or any scouts sent out by the crazed Philip Blake catch up with them. Between fleeing from these dangers, constantly looking out for walkers, and taking care of Judith when she woke up during the night, neither of them had slept more than six hours per night despite their exhausting days.
What sleep they did catch was not restful. They both suffered from nightmares that had them waking up in a cold sweat and with screams of anguish dying on their lips.
Tyreese dreamed of the vanguard of the herd closing in on him as the other members of the meds team were escaping into the woods, of sinking to his knees, sobbing, between what was left of the bodies of Karen and David, and of watching helplessly as the Governor destroyed their prison home with his tank.
Carol dreamed of running through a dense forest, the sounds of walkers always close behind, whisper-shouting Sophia's name as she searched for her lost daughter, of a bleeding, unconscious Daryl being half-dragged, half-carried toward Hershel's farm with a bolt hole in his side and a bullet graze on his temple, of Sophia stumbling out of the barn, her skin a mottled gray, her eyes milky and dead, a huge, festering bite wound at the base of her neck, and Rick stepping out, looking back at her coldly, whispering, "Why do you never mention her name?" before raising his ridiculously huge gun to shoot her sweet baby in the head.
They both dreamed about what had happened back at the pecan grove, of the two fresh little graves they had left behind there, next to the one that they had found next to the old house.
Of course each of them knew why the other kept jerking awake after half an hour's worth of fitful sleep at best whenever they found the time and a place to bed down, but neither of them asked and neither told. Everybody had their own nightmares these days, and plenty of them. There was no need to add more.
Judith's crooning noises as she got hungry after her nap woke them both from a light doze. Carol gave the milk bottle to Rick's daughter whom he had wanted to keep safely away from her, softly whispering the introduction of Little Red Riding Hood to the little girl to keep her quiet as she looked up at her with huge eyes, greedily drinking her cold milk.
Tyreese looked on in silence for a few minutes, then said softly: "I'm ever so grateful I found you ... or rather, you found us ... I wouldn't have known what to do with those girls for much longer. Mika was such a sweet darling, but Lizzie ... There was something unsettling about the way she shot that woman before we made it out of the prison."
Carol abruptly raised her head to stare at him. "She shot somebody?" she asked incredulously, her voice getting louder. Judith produced a dissatisfied-sounding noise, but Carol was too shocked to notice. "You never told me!"
"I didn't think you needed to know, and there were so many other things we had to take care of. Also, the woman she shot was a member of the Governor's army, she was armed and aiming at me, ready to pull the trigger. Lizzie saved my life."
Carol looked heartbroken. "How are we to save our children feom becoming so callous? In a world where you cannot trust anyone you meet, how can we keep them from turning into monsters worse than walkers?"
As he had no answer to that, Tyreese just closed his eyes and lowered his head. Rick had been attempting to deal with these issues with regard to Carl when the super flu had hit the prison and the situation with the Governor had escalated. He had taken Carl off any and all duties directly involving walkers or defense. Unfortunately, things had gone south too fast to be able to determine if that course might be a viable solution.
Lifting his head again he looked at Judith in Carol's lap, still sucking contentedly. "He doesn't even know she's alive", he sighed. "And if we never meet up with him or Carl again he will never even know that she survived the attack. He could die thinking his daughter was already dead."
While Carol realized that Tyreese was unaware that she had had a daughter herself, and had no way of knowing anything about the circumstances of Sophia's death, his words still made her cringe from the anguish knifing through her. Even out of those members of their group who had still known Sophia and not just known of her, Daryl of all people had been the only one who seemed to have any grasp of what losing her daughter had done to her. All the others, Rick and Lori included, who had had the incredible good fortune of having their son survive a gunshot injury without "proper" care by a surgeon in a hospital, had more or less ignored her plight once they had moved off the farm.
Seeing Lizzie and Mika among the Woodbury survivors had painfully reminded Carol of her loss, and she had seen an echo of her pain in Daryl's eyes as they stood side by side, watching as the girls and their father got off the old school bus that had brought those who had been unfit to serve in the Governor's army to the prison after the defenses of their town had been razed.
Daryl had surprised her then by mumbling, "We'll take good care a' them girls", kicking the ground with the tip of his right boot and stealing a sideways glance at her before lowering his head to look at the dust he'd kicked up. "'m goin' out, gonna hunt some dinner for all these folks", he added quickly, the tips of his ears turning bright red. Lifting his crossbow up from where it sat on the ground, leaning against his calf, he'd slung it over his shoulder and stalked off.
She had to stop thinking of him. Tyreese had told her that he hadn't seen anybody else make it out of the prison alive. For all she knew, Daryl was dead, or he had been taken prisoner again by survivors of that crazed idiot's gang of murderers, to be tortured to death either right there or at whatever lair they had been holing up in.
She would never see him again. Like her daughter, he was lost to her forever, and losing him hurt almost as badly as losing Sophia had. Daryl had been the one good thing in her life after she'd lost everything else. Oh, Ed she could easily do without, but her little baby girl and any sense of safety had been lost to her with the loss of the farm.
As the barn that had been holding Sophia's walker had burned to the ground, she had wondered if she should even do anything at all to get away from the approaching herd. Of course there would most certainly be pain while she allowed the walkers to get her, but it would pass. They'd all seen clearly that walkers did not experience physical pain and were devoid of emotion. Maybe this would be a better way out than running and hiding all the time, afraid, exposed, malnourished, alone even among a group of people?
He had given her hope that there might be a life worth living beyond that barn, that farm, that herd. Even when she had failed to acknowledge his awkward attempt at consoling her as she had sat in the RV, ignoring him, he had persevered, and when the barn had burned and he'd heard her frightened scream, he had come for her. He had not deserted her like everybody else. He had cared.
And now he was gone. Daryl Dixon, who had survived his father, his own crossbow, two falls down a ravine and a fight to the death in the Woodbury arena, was dead. She felt her throat constricting and angrily wiped her free hand over her eyes, catching the two teardrops making tracks through the dust and sweat caking her face.
Tyreese cleared his throat. "Move on?" he suggested gently.
Looking down at Judith, she saw that the little one had drained her milk bottle. "I'll just change her before we get going again", she said, her hand dipping into the open backpack once more to hunt for a diaper. The big, quiet, kind man beside her nodded and dug out their blanket to spread it on the ground for her.
As she was changing the baby, she looked back and forth between Judith's exposed bottom, the full diaper and their water bottle, almost empty now. "We need to find water", she sighed. "This is our last. If I use this up now to clean her we won't have anything left to drink either for ourselves or for her. If I don't, she ll be sore in no time. What do we do?"
Her pleading look and her tired voice cut him like a knife. Looking around them, he said: "Wait a moment. The ground is sloping that way. Maybe we'll get lucky just this once and it bottoms out nearby. We should find water there."
She gave him a grateful look as he rose, picking up his gun again. "Thank you, Tyreese", she said, smiling up at him. "You're a good man. What would the world come to without men like you?"
Knowing full well that it wasn't just him she was talking about - everybody at the prison had seen how those two had followed each other with their eyes, and how she had dropped everything and gone down to the gate to wordlessly welcome him back and make sure he was okay whenever he came back in from a run, and how it was always her and never Hershel who patched him up when he got hurt - he smiled back at her before silently moving away, following the slope down.