A/N: At the end

Halfway through the afternoon, Sasha swapped out with Abraham on trail. Michonne nodded at Abraham and stretched out her legs to catch up with the rest, just as soon as the big pink guy had turned around and said, "Got it, ladies."

Sasha stuck around for a minute as he reclipped the sling of his rifle so the muzzle of the machine gun hung low. "Go on," he said. "Rick and Maggie are up at point. Why don't you go sit in the easy chair with the rest of the chatterbugs?"

As if she needed his permission. Sasha slung her rifle over her shoulder and slugged Abraham in the arm as she passed. "Holler when you want a break," she said, over her shoulder. "I'll send someone back to keep you company." The rest of the group stretched out ahead of her in a long and ragged, sort-of-line – ranger-file, Abraham called it. Close enough to talk quietly, not really close enough to touch, taking up the whole damned road as if they owned it.

Moving down the unmarked road as if they were ghosts.

The older members of the group – Daryl, Glenn, Rick, Carl, Maggie and Carol - had fallen into the rhythm of the road scary fast. It's what we did, for months, at the beginning, Glenn said.

Yeah, with vehicles, Daryl had snorted. Makes a difference.

It didn't seem to, not really. By the end of the second day on the road, the pattern had been set.

Up and move early in the day, take your time, stop a lot. Stay quiet on the move, stay real quiet on the stop. Always check where you stop. Avoid chokepoints. Drink lots of water – which meant boiling a lot, every night. When you find a likely spot to scavenge, clear the area, then scrounge. Move away to a new spot before you eat. Spend lots of time checking your night spot. Keep the night fire to a tiny bowl of red embers. Always post watch. Always check on each other.

Sasha had recognized the outlines of it – it was how she and Tyreese and the rest of their tiny group had survived for nearly six weeks, after the walkers broke through their wall. Abraham and Rosita were, if anything, better than the old members of the group, and their patterns meshed with the larger group with only a few grindings of gears. Sasha and Tyreese had adapted easily as well. Michonne…half the time, Sasha didn't even remember that Michonne hadn't been with Rick's group since the beginning. It was easy to forget, until the quiet woman stepped on someone's toes and sparked a snarking contest.

As Tara had noted, most of the wobble had worked out pretty fast.

Most of it, anyway. Father Gabriel and Noah were trying, and learning as fast as they could. Both of them were walking sound now, at least at the start of the day, and carrying their weight in supplies. Noah had a long-handled scuffle hoe that was more a walking staff than hacking tool, but the preacher still wasn't carrying a weapon.

Even Eugene…well. He's trying, Sasha told herself. Better than yesterday, lot better than last week.

She stretched her legs, drew even with Eugene and Noah, and then Rosita. "Hey."

Rosita glanced over with a quick grin in greeting, pale hands folded over her snub-nosed machine gun, then turned back to the brush lining the roadside ditch.

"Abraham on trail again?"

"Yeap. You know who's up next?"

Rosita sighed, sent a quick look back over one shoulder. "Ought to be His Uselessness, but he already tried to trip and break his neck this morning." She paused, a frown line popping up between her eyebrows. "Everyone's had a turn, I think. I'll go." She tugged her cap brim down and stepped to the side, waiting for the end of the end of the line to reach her.

Sasha nodded and kept walking. The heat was bearing down, still, in that less-hot-but-still-awful way that it got around five in the afternoon, unless a storm jumped up and buried everything in solidified humidity. Her shirt was soaked, her handkerchief was soaked, and her underwear was a sopping mess, for none of the good reasons.

Ahead of her, Tara and Glenn were walking close, as they tended to do. (It was either that, or deal with the two of them drowning out the frogs in the ditch. Glenn and Tara liked talking.) And, as they tended to do, they were drifting back from the forward end of the line, too busy chattering to keep up the pace.

The road tilted up one hill, slopped down to the next. At the bottom, where leaves and a scattering of twigs had collected, Sasha caught up with Glenn and Tara. "Hey."

"Hey," they said back, one after another, both with grins far broader than Rosita's. Sasha braced herself for an interrogation about her last two hours at the end of the line – How was it? Hot. How's the road? Same as up here. Bugs bad back there? Yeap – but instead the two remained uncharacteristically silent as she matched her pace to theirs.

They went up the next hill, and down, without breaking the quiet. Sasha shook off her initial impulse to push forward, catch up with the next people up the line. They don't want to talk to me, they can lump it.

She'd been cold-shouldered before – she didn't have Tyreese's easy way with people, didn't trust the way he did. And there was…baggage. 747's full of baggage. Strewn all over the landscape, like rotten spots in a roof, waiting for someone to step into them and fall through into the inferno below. We all have rotten spots. We all burn each other.

The key was keeping the damaged localized.

But whatever it was that held Glenn and Tara quiet didn't feel hostile. If anything, the looks they were shooting her were conspiratorial, not exclusionary.

Halfway up the hill, Tara let out a little squeak. "Oh!"

Sasha jerked her head up. Tara actually had her fingers pressed over her mouth. On the other side of her, Glenn let his breath out with a gusty sigh.

"What are –" Sasha was cut off by Tara's hand gripping hers.

"Oh my god, look, look!" Tara hissed, waving a hand at the road ahead. "Oh, that's much better, oh, very nice."

Sasha looked up the road, rising gently ahead, and the rest of the group stretched ahead of them. The closest were Carol, trudging steadily along under a backpack that Sasha knew was almost as heavy as her own. The older woman had let the group coddle her for most of five days after Grady Memorial, and then put her foot down. Carol still wasn't up to speed – not that any of them were – but she was pushing herself as much as Daryl Dixon would let her.

Beside Carol, Daryl had slung his crossbow and strode along, easy panther grace belying the clownish aspects of his ragged clothes and sloppily cuffed pants. One of the buttresses of the group, for better or ill – hell, at first, Sasha had thought Daryl one of the more sensible and sane ones. Turns out he's as much a mix as anyone else. Always competent at guard and watch, and generally good for automatically seconding whatever crazy shit Rick thought up. Cranky and vicious if you riled him, and with a way of biting back words that made Sasha itch to get up in his face and snarl, c'mon, cracker, spit it out, I dare you. And now he was drifting back across the pavement to bump shoulders with Carol, as if they were walking down a crowded sidewalk. Might almost be back at the prison, doing an evening check of the fence. Good times, better times…

Except Sasha didn't ever remember Daryl Dixon having the balls to actually link hands with Carol Peletier in broad daylight, or encourage her into what – even from a distance – looked suspiciously like walking bumper cars.

And she never would have thought to see Daryl actually raise their joined hands and brush a kiss along the older woman's knuckles.

"Hooolie shit," Sasha muttered.

"You said it," Glenn said with satisfaction, from the other side of Tara. Jolted back into reality – okay, so this is reality, walking dead things and hiking down an empty road for days and public entertainment is watching anti-social rednecks play at courting grey-haired widows in broad daylight – she looked at Tara and Glenn, who were looking back at her, wearing matching idiot grins.

"What the fuck is that?" she asked, keeping her voice low. And trying to keep a straight face. And the laughter out of her tone. "And don't you two have better things to do with your day, than spending it spying on grown adults doing –" she waved a hand –"whatever that is?"

That looked a lot like Carol grinning a terminally cheeky grin at her rough-edged...whatever…and playing thumbwars as they walked along.

"Making up for lost time," Tara chirped. "You know, like Bob would say about –" She broke off. "Ah. Oops."

Sasha squared her shoulders. "No, it's…it's okay." She let the image of Bob's face come into focus, before her mind's eye, and then fade away again, lingering on his delighted grin. An answering smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, at her heart. This is how I want to remember you, love.

She still had no idea what kind of good was supposed to come from Bob's death, but she'd already ruled out bitterness at other people's joy as an option.

And speaking of other people. "But, really, are they that new? I mean, I thought they were together, back at the Tombs."

"Glenn said," Tara began, before Glenn interrupted, shaking his head.

"Forget what I said. It was bullshit. We all thought – we all knew there was a – a something. And they were just, you know, quiet about it." He sighed. "Okay, not all of us. Rick didn't. Or else he wouldn't have…" Glenn trailed off.

"Booted her out for killing people?" Someone had to say it. And Tara had lately developed the signs of a serious hero crush on Carol, so it wasn't going to be the usual suspect.

Now the silence went uncomfortable. Sasha clenched her jaw, hitched her pack further up on her shoulders, and watched Daryl Dixon, terror of the woodways, almost fall over the yellow line in the road because he was looking at Carol and not his own two feet.

They went up another little hill. Across the top, Tara said, "I, uh, I never heard all of that. Was this – was this people who attacked you?"

"No." Glenn said. "No, it was people of our own."

Sasha kept her mouth shut. She wasn't sure what she was going to say. Probably something stupid. It generally was, in situations like this. God, if I could only like people the way Ty does.

And then she was talking anyway. "It was sick people. Right before – right before the Governor attacked. We had a sickness in the Tombs, and, and Carol killed two people who had it. Killed them, stabbed them in the head, and burned them."

Tara stared at her, stumbled, and ducked her head again to stare at her moving feet. "Was this, was this the same sickness that you had, Glenn, when, when we met?"

"Yeap."

Tara said oh in a very small voice.

"Sasha had it,too." Glenn put in. "Came down with it, right after we found Karen and David's bodies."

Tara said oh again.

The three of them went on being quiet for a long while. The shadows of the trees were leaning well into the south-bound side of the road before Tara asked, "Were they – the two people, David and, and –"

"Karen," Glenn said.

"David and Karen – were they, um, related to anyone? Or, um, important, to anyone? Any somethings? That I should know about, I mean?"

And it was such a horrificly awful and completely sane question that Sasha let a bark of laughter escape her chest. Because that was exactly the point – not that a life had been snuffed out, but that Sasha would let her guard down around a stranger, just because she recognized the name. Not that a teenager – a kid – had had her brains splattered all over Grady Memorial's bright clean walls, but that Maggie had broken down, was still shattered, and the rest of the group was still walking around bleeding.

It wasn't important that David and Karen had been alive one day, sick the next, and then burned and buried on the third day. It was important that Ty had sworn to kill the person who had done that.

Emotional compromise. It was exactly the sort of thing that Tara and Glenn would relate to.

Now both Glenn and Tara were giving her odd looks. Or – the typical sort of normal looks one gave odd people. Sasha swallowed down the rest of the laughter. "David's people are dead. Sickness, or after the Fence came down." Tara's face did that thing again – not so much a crumble as a stillness, as if she were locking away something before it hit her skin and the muscles underneath. Sasha took pity on her and smiled, forcing out the next words. "Karen was from Woodbury. We met her there."

Up the road, as if he could feel her thoughts run over him, Tyreese turned around, making Judith's sunshade sheet flutter. He raised a hand and waved; Sasha unclenched one fist from her pack straps and waved back. When he faced around again, it was Judith who was waving.

"Karen and Tyreese were… something. Like, out in the open about it. And when Karen died, Ty went…he got a little crazy. Threatened to kill whoever killed them." She sighed. "And then, well. The Governor showed up."

"How did – how did Rick find out? How'd – who decided to send Carol away?"

"Excellent question," Glenn said.

Sasha snorted. "Didn't come through the council."

"Rick's…not council," Glenn said slowly.

"Truth. Not then, not now."

Glenn sighed unhappily. "He – he did right by us. Mostly. Lori…" Glenn sighed again. "I…would still like to hear how that happened, with Carol." Sasha nodded.

Tara protested. "But…Tyreese, he said, he told everyone that he'd forgiven Carol. So did Rick. That it was all okay." She bumped her elbow against Sasha. "She – she had to have her reasons, right? Good reasons. And now it's all good, right?"

Sasha looked at her, looked at Glenn looking back at the two of them.

And like something out of an afternoon soap opera, a pair of walkers in church lady hats waddled out into the roadway, with a trio of be-suited male walkers staggering behind. Warning whistles sounded up and down the line, the group reacting together, smooth and competent.

Even their noobs were doing what they'd been told – Eugene trotting up to join them, with the trail guard right on his heels. Up ahead, Father Gabe made a tight knot around Tyreese with Carl and Maggie, while Rick and Michonne hot-footed it back to the middle. One of the walkers was already down with a bolt through its head and Daryl was working on a better angle for the next shot, Carol sidestepping behind him to keep Daryl from being blind-sided.

"I got Eugene," Tara said, her knife out and up on the balls of her feet. "Go git'em."

With a sense of relief, Sasha tugged her trench knife loose and stepped into the fray at Glenn's side.

Just like fires, she thought, later, when the adrenaline had worn off and they were back on the road. Waiting was bad, but not as bad as that first moment, when you didn't know if it was going to be bad or just routine. That was the worst part.

Fighting – fighting was good, but it never lasted. It was…unsavorable. You couldn't draw it out, make it last, not like a warm chocolate cookie or a cold beer, not like a lazy morning sleep-in or a good lay, holding there on the edge of finishing for as long as you could. Fighting fires, fighting walkers – you jumped at opportunities to strike, you knocked it down as fast as you could, you scrambled like hell to just get it over.

The after? When everyone was alive and unscratched and unscorched and the smoke dying down and all the walkers flat on the ground, when all that was left was rehydration and cleaning equipment and finding lost helmets and beating the weeds for Daryl's last green-feathered bolt?

That was worth living for. Worth fighting for. Worth dying for? In the immediate aftermath, she could not rightly say no. Ask again, Sasha told the magic eight-ball in her head, tonight, after my shoulder stiffens up. Carl called out, Yes! Sasha looked up to find the young man waving the crossbow bolt over his head. She waved back, grinning, and started back for the road. On the road, the guards and nappers were rising, pulling on packs and stomping back into their boots. Ready for the next thing. Glenn slapped her hand, and so did Daryl. Then they were moving again, loose, easy, and faster than the early afternoon.

The euphoria lasted until the next break. A looted Chevy pickup, flat on all four tires, sat under an overpass more than half an hour past the last Yateston 3 Miles sign. Michonne and Abraham dumped their packs and strode off, scouting for the edge of town. The rest of them sat down in the shade of the overpass and waited. Maggie called dibs on Judith, even for the diaper change, so Sasha finished her bottle of water and went with Tara to pee. When she came back, Tyreese was sitting alone, up the edge of the embankment. Sasha pulled another water bottle out of her pack and made her way up to her brother.

"Hey," she said, as she settled in beside him. "You got something against sitting in the shade?"

Tyreese gestured at the bush behind him. "Got shade." He didn't look at her, just kept tugging at the grass in front of him.

"Gonna get sunstroke." When he ignored her, Sasha sighed, laid back with her elbow over her eyes, and surrendered to the heat, the weight off her feet and the aftermath of the earlier alarm.

When she woke, the scanty shadow of Ty's pathetic little bush had shifted all off her body, and her face was wet with sweat from the inside of her elbow. Tyreese had pulled off his knit cap and sat staring down the slope. Sasha sat up beside him, trying to hold on to the nap and blink herself back into usefulness at the same time, and failing at both.

Off to the west, a line of thunderheads were forming up, flat underbellies already dark with rain.

"Hey." There was a whole pile of crumbled leaves in front of Ty.

"Yeah?" She rubbed her face. Downslope, Daryl sat propped against the front end of the truck, staring back the way they had come. Carol half-sat, half-leaned against Daryl, apparently dead to the world and the way the man's hand played with her hair. Sasha wondered if Glenn or Tara could see the two, and if not, if she wanted to describe later. Maybe they'd trade a night watch for it. Or chocolate.

Hell of a thing, to turn paparazzi at the end of the world, on your friends.

Ty's voice broke into her thoughts, drew her back to the now.

"Wanted to tell you. Make sure you heard me." He hesitated, tore up more of the leaves.

She passed another hand over her face and shifted to look at him. "Okay. Hit me."

"If anything happens to me, I want you to look out for her." He jerked his chin, pointing down slope. "For Carol."

Sasha felt her face wrinkling up in confusion. "You mean, like…"

Tyreese looked up from the leaves for the first time in nearly an hour. His eyes met Sasha's. "Listen to me. Look out for her."

"Ty, I –" And then there was quiet whistle from up the road. Sasha looked up to see Michonne and Abraham walking back with self-satisfied expressions. Down below, the rest of the group was rolling to its feet, Daryl giving Carol a hand upright.

"Come on, people," Rick said. "Let's see if we can beat the rain."

The scouts had found a mini-industrial area, fence still mostly secure, with a barely-touched residential area on the other side. They beat the rain by a good twenty minutes, and it was only the food scrounging party that got at all wet.

But as the scroungers got first call on chocolate and canned fruit, Sasha didn't mind at all the last mad dash through icy downdrafts and the first lashings of hail. Then they were back under the overhang, and the camp was nearly complete, with the windows blocked with tar paper, a fire where the smoke could vent, two walkers firmly put down behind the line of sheds, and a stack of greasy blankets making the evening look positively cozy.

Ty was in a pallet-breaking contest with Abraham and didn't even look up until Sasha called him over to supper.

She didn't get him alone again until late in the evening. When the fire was all but out, and everyone settled down, Sasha rolled back out of her bedding and cautiously pulled on her boots.

Tyreese sat by the back door, looking out at the loading dock. She tugged her jacket closer and hunkered down next to him. He leaned into her one-armed hug, but didn't say anything.

Eventually, she caved, like she always did. Chatterbox.

"You want to expand on what you were talking about, earlier?"

Ty shrugged. "What I said. You need to watch out for Carol."

"Look just because you spent–" four really fucking intense days on the road with her…She let that fall away. Bob had been no one to her, twenty days ago. Just another guy around the Yard.

She sighed, tried again. "Look, I know you like the white girls, have I ever given you shit about that? No, hear me out. I'm not about to start. But Carol's with Daryl, or next thing to. Don't put this on me." She doesn't need me looking after her. It was clear enough to Sasha.

"I know that."

"Then act like it, for pete's sake. All your mooning over her is going to do is piss off that guy - who's already an idiot around black folks, don't you try to tell me different - and give yourself a belly ache. And embarrass me, when I have to step in and save your ass."

"Don't." Tyreese wiped his face. "I'm serious. Don't do that." He wouldn't look at her, just kept staring off across the darkness and the silver mesh of the fence.

"So am I. And don't tell me what to do. She doesn't need you, and I don't need to be wasting time fighting over an old woman who doesn't even love you."

"You're not listening."

"Don't tell me –"

"Sasha. Shut up." When he had her attention, he went on. "I'm not just saying look out for her. I'm saying, look out, around her. Don't drop your guard."

She stopped, then. Shook her head, trying to make the words fall back into place. "What are you saying? Carol? Dangerous? To the group?"

"She killed David and Karen."

"I-I thought – you said she had her reasons. You were over that." Would I care so much less for Bob, in another ten days? Could I forgive the bastards at Terminus, in another week? She gripped her hair in both fists. No. She was not her gentle bear of a brother, who took to babies like ducks to water, who could look his lover's murderer in the eye and forgive her–

Who was still sitting there, like a bump on a log, waiting for his quick-witted little sister to catch up.

"Sasha. I forgave her. I did, and I do. She did what she thought was right, and without a scrap of evil intent in her heart. I know that. I believe that."

"Then what…"

"If Karen'd been well, she would have held her off. David – Carol would never have had a chance. She killed them when they were sick and helpless. Pro'bly when they were sleeping." He took another breath. "Lizzie – Lizzie went bad. Killed her little sister, was going to kill Judith. She was crazy, couldn't tell the difference between being alive and being walkers. She wanted all of us to be walkers." His eyes came up to meet Sasha's again. "I'll do anything to keep Judith safe. Anything. So I let Carol take Lizzie. And they went for a walk, and Carol shot that little girl in the back of the head."

"Lizzie –Lizzie killed her sister?" Sasha shut her eyes against the image. "She was just a little kid, how could –"

"I couldn't. Carol did it. Carol killed Lizzie." Ty let out a long ragged breath. "Carol's killed a lot of weak things."

"Carol? No, not-" Carol who had come staggering out of that hospital, weeping with the rest of them. Carol who was flirting with Daryl every waking moment. Carol, the sane, sensible, practical woman who had sat across from Sasha for three months of Council meetings. No. "I can't – I don't believe – Ty, you're describing someone else, someone cruel –"

"No. Not cruel. Not bad. Just…" He sighed, soft and miserable. "I got watch. Go back to bed."

And that was all that he would say. Sasha sat with him for another hour, waiting out the shift of moonlight on the water still pooled on the asphalt and a trio of baby raccoons toddling out after their mother along the fence line, before giving up and going back to bed.

She did not sleep easy. She woke again at the small hours, as most of them did, anymore, and listened as the watch shift changed out in low voices and yawns. Ty settled down with a sigh in his blankets next to Sasha and was snoring away before Rosita and Abraham finished their usual bout of sex. Sasha tucked her right arm under her head and stared across the room to the doubled blankets that Daryl and Carol were sharing. Thought about Bob, and wondered how it would have felt, to fall asleep listening to his heartbeat, every night for the rest of her life, instead of just for the rest of his.

Halfway through second watch, she gave up and pulled on her boots, dressing quietly before going to find Noah and ruthlessly bullying the young man into giving up his watch.

The raccoons came back, eventually.

The group was…they were small, now, much smaller than the prison. And living in each other's pockets, like it had been at first, under Jerry's shed. And no fences. It was far riskier now, no matter how well they were falling into the rhythm of the road. No matter how fast they could kill walkers, there were only so many people, and not all of them could pull their weight.

Watch out for her.

What, like she's dangerous?

We're all a little dangerous, now.

There was a – a tension in the group. Not a fracture, not a division. But Daryl wasn't backing every one of Rick's plays – not since he'd run to snatch up Carol outside of Terminus. Abraham and Rosita were with the rest because…because they hadn't thought of someplace else to be. Even Glenn – quiet Glenn, soft-spoken Glenn with the laughs and the jokes – he had stood up to Rick in Gab's church, forced a compromise with Abraham that Rick hadn't wanted to make.

And Carol had killed people.

Haven't we all? The butchers of Terminus, kneeling in the church, and the clotted blood and brains that stained the floor, after she and Abraham and Rick had finished. Was that any different?

And from a long way back, she could hear the echo of the answer, in the memory of the anger and grief she'd held, facing the men who had maimed Bob.

Yes.

It was one thing to take a vote in the council about the shower rotation, to ask for a show of hands as to who wanted pizza and who wanted to order BBQ for the night shift. But when the alarm went off and the trucks rolled, it wasn't a majority decision any more. The on-scene commander had to be one person, and that person had to make it stick. Or else more people died.

There was tension there – a tight wire, humming under the strain. It might hold, it might not.

When it broke…

She'd responded to a call, once, on a feed mill accident. Four days of rain, the last of Hurricane Eskine, had cut a washout under a railline access, where the railcars came up to dump grain into the silos. A fully loaded graincar had hit the weak spot, tipped over, shoved a silo over off its foundations. The tie down cables for the elevator hadn't held. Two young men had been standing off from the base of the silo, waiting on receipts for last week's deliveries.

Two hundred feet of cable had parted, fifty foot from the ground. The long end had whipped around and snatched one man from the ground, throwing him across the drive and slicing his belly open to the backbone.

He'd died before his buddy had crossed the roadway. They'd found him there, twenty minutes later, still holding his friend's body, kneeling in two gallons of blood and shit.

The eviscerated man had been the only one hurt. Half a million dollars damage to the silo, including the corn ruined in that afternoon's rain, and a rail line that was down for six months. And one young man who had come along on a ride for a lark.

The family had settled with the railline out-of-court. She'd have never hear of that, if she hadn't overheard someone talking about it, talking about malpractice suits and how the rail company had gotten off light, because the family hadn't thought there was any malice involved. Just one of those things. Just an accident.

One minute you're alive and the whole world is ahead of you and the next you're dead. It happens. The way of the world – like rip tides and wet roads and falling trees and lightning and flash floods and a walker that wasn't supposed to be there.

Just one of those things.

She went on staring at the asphalt, and the pool of water, which had somehow shrunk even as she was staring at it, until the sky grew light and people began stirring inside.

The door creaked open and Daryl stuck his head out, shirt half buttoned and his boots unlaced. "Hey."

"Hey," she replied. Someone said something behind Daryl and he shifted aside, holding the door open for Carl to shove out past Daryl, barefoot and gripping his crotch with one hand. At the end of the dock, the boy faced away from Sasha and pissed a long arc down to the puddle against the dock wall. Daryl met Sasha's eyes and snorted at her eyeroll.

"Man's gotta do what a man's gotta do," he said, leaning his crossbow against the wall beside the door.

"We set up a place for that," Sasha said, resolutely staring at the pale mist under the trees across the fence as Daryl went to join Carl. "In case you boys forgot."

"Yeah, and the girls always bitch when we gotta piss while they're taking a dump. This makes everyone happier." Daryl bounced on his toes, shaking it off, before tucking everything away and turning back to collect his crossbow.

"Barbarian."

"Spear-chucker." He bent to tie his boots. "Gonna be a few before they get breakfast shared out. I can watch, if you want to go nap."

"No, I'm good."

Daryl shrugged, dropped down to sit beside her on the dock, legs dangling.

Sasha tilted her head to look at him. Yeap. Happy, content, well-rested redneck. She narrowed her eyes, staring at his neck. Damn, and they were quiet, too.

"What?"

Sasha had her mouth open to say, your merry little widow left a hickey on your collarbone, when the door opened again and Carol came out onto the dock.

The jibe died in Sasha's throat. Look out for her. Watch her.

Because if you don't…

Carol's face was marked with sleep folds. Her clothes hung on her, as road-crusted as the rest of them. Her hair stuck out in every direction, like a nappy-haired baby, only silvered like an old crone. She had shrugged on an extra shirt against the morning chill, tucking her arms up close against her torso.

She looked like someone Sasha could break over her knee, one handed.

Daryl had twisted about to see who had come out, his mouth opening in an honest smile. Carol gave him an answering one and dropped one arm to meet the hand that Daryl raised.

All they did was look at each other, fingers barely clasping, but Sasha turned away, staring at the water at the bottom of the dock, and in its dark surface saw her own face reflected, and that of the two figures beside her. The image caught Carol's face as she bent forward over Daryl's shoulder, her eyes in shadow and the skull standing out from her pale skin. A death's head.

Sasha blinked, looked up to find Carol's eyes on her. She swallowed, managed a slight smile. Carol nodded, smiling back openly, warmly, before patting Daryl's shoulder and turning away for the inside of the building. Daryl stuck it out for thirty seconds before scrambling to his feet and following Carol.

Sasha sat, waiting on sunrise, wondering if the prickling on her arms was just the chill, or the pressure dropping before a storm.

No, Tyreese had it right. Not cruel. Not a bit of malice.

Just like the hurricane.

end

A/N: M for language and some violent/graphic imagry. Team Group, Caryl, mentions of Beth, Bob, and other deceased characters. Some graphic violence imagry. Smutless. Sugar-rush warning for the Shipping Crew, in all other aspects, not really a happy fic.

Not my characters or my setting. The incident with the cable at the silo is from another person's memory - as far as I know, it did happen, just not in Georgia.

Based on a prompt from Pia-Alexandra, 'I just don't see Carol as malevolent." As it turned out, I could not actually disagree with Pia-lexanda – I don't think that it's possible to accurately describe Carol as malevolent – although I could see some of David's friends holding that opinion. I'm not so sure I agree with Sasha's interpretation…and then I remember Carol's discussions with Andrea (re: the Governor) and Merle (that deleted scene).

Then I think, Sasha, honey, you don't know the half of it.