A/N at the end. Part 1/4


Eugene - of all people - found the campsite for them. Which greatly increased Eugene's credibility with the group, likely increased his expected lifespan by several months, and took a great deal of pressure off Carol, who had been, at that point, the last person reliably neutral towards Eugene, and feeling herself slip, hourly, towards the homicidal perspective shared by much of the rest of the group.

They were strung out on the firebreak; Glenn and Michonne on point, Abraham and Sasha taking trail, with Rick and Rosita moving up and down the line and occasionally pushing out on the edges to check over ridgetops. Carol was content enough to take her turn riding in the easy chair, as Abraham put it – hiking in the slightly thicker middle of the group, walking beside Carl and just behind Maggie, Noah limping behind. No snakes, no walkers, just put one foot down in front of the next and wave back at Judith as she gurgled. The sun had long since burnt off the morning chill, leaving everyone grateful for the intermittent shade of a longleaf pine, and struggling through sugar sand wallows in the dips. All of them had switched on and off of traveling watch – even Father Gabe was taking a turn. Rick was never really off watch, and neither was Daryl, except when he was out hunting. But for everyone one else, there was this time to be in the center, relatively protected, when you could let your mind shut down, let the wind and rustle of leaves slip over you, and just walk.

As they had come to learn, though, Eugene never ever stopped thinking. When he stopped walking, Maggie almost walked straight into his backpack.

"Ooof," she said, and then, uncharitably, "What is with you? Move your fat ass, Eugene, quit hogging the road."

And of course Eugene stepped to his right just as Maggie tried to pass him on the same side. She bounced off his backpack again, and this time came right back with a stiff-arm and "Jesus!"

Now half the group had stopped, and Glenn was already turning around, coming back to see to Maggie. Carol sighed, shook her head and pointed at Glenn – no.

Beth had been in the ground for thirteen days. Maggie had spent three of them weeping, two raging at Eugene for drawing them away with lies about DC and a cure, and eight in brittle, seething fury at the entire world.

At some point, Maggie was going to have to stop blaming Eugene for her sister's death. Today wasn't that day, obviously. But that didn't Maggie got leave to call down every walker in the woods on the group.

Before Carol had a chance to step around Carl – or before Eugene managed to knock down Maggie with his backpack as he turned left, then right, then left again – Eugene stopped dead center of the road, knelt and pointed one finger at the woods, and announced, "Am I the only one who noted that structure? Why have we not searched that one?"

"What? Quit making shit up, Eugene," Maggie snapped. "You're not getting another rest break." She stiff-armed him again. "Keep moving." Eugene wavered, one hand sinking in the sand as he struggled to stay upright.

Carol got a hand on Maggie's arm before the younger woman could shove at Eugene again. "Maggie, wait, " Carol said, with more patience than she felt. "Eugene, what structure?"

"That one." Eugene's arm was shaking, but insistent. "With the mailbox, and the fence, and the driveway."

And the damnedest thing was, he was right.

The Onoconee National Forest was a mass of reclaimed marginal farming land, damaged by erosion, bought up by the state, and allowed to return to woodland. In a previous life, when Ed had gotten them far enough ahead on bills that he could consider taking a week's vacation, Carol had carefully gone through all the options for a low cost holiday – she imagined nights around a campfire, cooking smores with Sophia, birdsong at dawn, long afternoon walks under the trees. She'd even planned for sunscreen and tick repellent. There would be other families there – Ed could talk with the husbands, she'd chat with the wives. Under the eyes of strangers, and with limited access to alcohol, Ed would be on his best behavior.

Then the clutch had gone out on the Cherokee, Ed sold his vacation days for cash, and after the vehicle had finally been fixed, he'd taken them to Six Flags as a sort-of-apology. Four hours of screeching music, jostling strangers, Sophia crying because she couldn't go on the wooden rollercoaster, then puking up all the cotton candy she'd eaten, before Ed realized there was not a beer to be had in the entire theme park and forced them to leave.

She'd kept the folder of national parks and lakeside campgrounds in a drawer for years. Somehow, at the end of the world, it had made its way into the Cherokee. That first winter, they'd read the words off every scrap of paper that came to them.

The Onoconee Forest brochure had described the refuge as a patchwork affair, made of whatever land could be bought or begged or foreclosed upon, with bits and drabs of hold-out sections and homesteads and quarter acres dotting the landscape. Even before the end of the world, the miles of public forest had been broken by privately owned fields, farms, and homes. The group had passed a few, on the way north- burnt out hunting camps and vacation homes, empty-eyed houses long since looted of anything useful.

It was a lesson they'd learned the hard way, that first winter – close to the cities and towns, the walkers were thick and dangerous, but the threat had kept away competing scavengers. Further out, other survivors had already stripped the leftovers from any homes so that now they were simply empty buildings – no resources, no walkers, no hope, no threat. The only way to survive was to run along the edges, like the muskrat in the Jungle Book tales.

But as Daryl had said more than once, every once in a while, even a blind squirrel could find a nut. Like now.

"Slap me in the face with a donkey's dick and call me weasel, I would never have seen that," Abraham said, staring at the brush-covered fenceline. At his feet, a finger-nail's width of red peeked from a blanket of leaves: the red metal flag of a rural route mailbox, post shattered and laying flat on the ground. The name on the box read Seville in block letters. "Course, I never got a chance to, before the nerd king sang out like a canary."

"Daryl would have seen it," Glenn said, who had missed it, and used appeal to absent authority to salve over his wounded pride. "I hope whatever the hell he's chasing tastes really, really good."

Leaves lay thick over the narrow turn off from the firebreak, obscuring the rain-carved ruts that would have marked the passageway during the summer. The thick water oak standing sentry by the gate had let one long, wisteria-draped arm lay down before the rust-red gate, crushing the mailbox and obscuring the driveway, the gate, and the faded yellow NO TRESSPASSING PRIVATE PROPERTY sign still clinging by a brittle ziptie to a crossbar. Even deep-autumn dry, the wisteria vines were entangled enough that shifting the thick end of the down branch was impossible. (It would not have mattered – the gate was closed at that end with a tumbler lock the size of Carol's fist.) They settled for hacking off some of the smaller branches at the far side while Abraham and Tyreese boosted Glenn and Noah over the fence. Between breaking off branches, prying at the gate hinges, and jerking the gate back and forth until it finally shifted with a long complaining groan, they forced a path around the branch and through the gate.

Three hundred feet up a gentle slope, the path hit another gate, this one secured with a nail-hooked chain. Beyond it, a cedar-sided house sat tucked up tidily – a world away from the towering sprawl of the Greene farm house they had left two years before. A faded blue Suburban sat before a second building – a shed-slash-workshop, two roll-down garage doors completely open and a thick drift of leaves leading inside the dark interior. Beyond the workshop, a rusted metal shed listed under a dry tangle of scarlet-leaved Virginia creeper like a sailor staggering home from the port-side bars.

Rick slowly led the way through the frost-burnt grass, leaves crunching underfoot. Broomsage stood scattered across the yard, with darker ragweed husks and fluff-topped goldenrod here and there, dragged down by bright green catbriar.

Rick signaled two fingers at the outbuildings, pointing Glenn one direction, Abraham the other. "No sneaking, don't get shot by accident," he said quietly. Abraham nodded and jerked his head at Rosita, who fell in beside him as they cautiously trudged around the back.

In front of the house, Rick shifted his rifle so the muzzle pointed down and called out, "Hello the house!" A pair of bobwhites took off from under Glenn's feet, making him jump and curse.

The sound echoed around the yard.

Nothing else moved.

Rick checked left and right again, pulled the rifle into his shoulder and made his way up to the porch, feet carefully under him and Michonne an arm's length away. A wooden sign hung on the door – Born to Hunt, Forced to Work. Rick called out again and then lifted a fist to beat on the door. A dove burst out of a gap beneath the porch roof, startling Michonne into a flurry of profanity.

Out in the yard, Carol kept her head turning left to right and back again, focusing on keeping her muzzle off any of the group and the porch in the corner of her eye.

"Still nothing," Rick said.

In the space where Daryl would have snarled, no shit, Sherlock, silence carried on. Rick reached out, tried the door.

It opened under his hand. "You've got to be shitting me," Michonne breathed. Rick shrugged, let the door go, and then put his shoulder to it, when it stuck after two inches. Carol saw him ease inside, then flicked her eyes back to Noah, nodded the young man back to the left. Noah swallowed, nodded, shifted closer to the porch.

And then shrieked as something shifted and twisted, shattering underfoot with a crunch that carried aross the yard.

He jerked back, falling, scrambling backwards and struggling to bring his borrowed rifle back to bear. Beside him, Tara had her shotgun up and pointing at the grass. Michonne's feet were pounding across the porch, dragging Rick back out the door, as Abraham thundered around the corner with Rosita at his heels.

"Stay!" Maggie snapped, holding a hand to Tyreese and Carl. "Wait!" Tara freed a hand from her weapon and helped Noah get to his feet, pulling him back away from whatever it was. There were five weapons trained on it, and then four, when Michonne whipped around, sword in one hand and the other at the small of Rick's back, shifting together, nearly joined at the hip, Michonne's eyes locked on the still-open door and Rick's rifle aimed at whatever it was in the grass.

Eventually, after a great deal of siding up to it side-ways, and Glenn leaping at the head and beating it in with the butt of his rifle, it turned out to be a cane-bottomed rocking chair and the owner of the homestead – a seventy-year old man, by the Georgia State driver's license in his wallet and known to the world as Antonio Seville.

Michonne stood over the skin-bound skeletal remains of the body, poking at it with the end of her sword. "He just died. Didn't turn, wasn't eaten, just fell off the porch and died."

"Christ save me," Abraham said, "from a world where a seventy-"

"Sixty-eight," said Rosita, because her mission in life was to take no shit from Abraham, and give him grief at every opening.

"Whatever – where an old man can drop dead of a heart attack, or whatever, and this be a complete and utter fucking mystery to whoever should come across him." He looked at the keys in his hand, tossed them up and caught them. "Sucks for him. Might be the break we need." He tilted his head towards Rick. "What you think there, officer?"

Rick looked around, looked at the angle of the sun, and then back at Carol. She shrugged. Rick looked at Michonne – a fast, eye-blink-and-it-was-gone-nod – and then at Glenn. "Check the place out. See what we can salvage. Find me a reason to not spend the night. Check the fence. Check the tanks, see if there's water. If the fence is good, and the water's good, we'll spend the night, at least."

Michonne straightened, sheathed her sword. "And Daryl?" she said, looking at Carol, not Rick, and now the tension that had set its teeth all along Carol's spine had a voice.

Abraham snorted. "If that man can't sort out the mess we left down on the firebreak and make his own way up here, I'll eat Father Gabe's hat without ketchup."

Rick ducked his head and laughed. "Sasha, why don't you go down the hill a bit, keep a look-out for our lost lamb?" He looked at the sky again. "The rest of you, you know what needs doing."

It was only in Rick's mind, of course, that things sortied themselves out so tidy.

Sasha went back down the trail, of course, but she had to get her whistle back from Tyreese first, and collect a full water bottle, and another handful of toilet paper, and an extra blanket, because the wind was picking up.

The perimeter needed to be checked, the yard had to be investigated more closely, all the buildings at least cursorily surveyed, and a fire built so that water could be boiled to fill the empty canteens – all more or less at once. Carol divided tasks as fast as she got volunteers, had Carl put Judith down on the porch in a patch of sunshine, and then sent the boy as runner from one group to the next.

"You," Rick said, coming back out of the house after he and Michonne cleared both floors to find Carol standing with her arms folded, watching the group enthusiastically jump at the work before them. "You are a marvel."

"You don't see the lists in my head. I'm tempted to back out and say get back on the road, where at least we know the routine. This is too much like work."

"I thought you liked space." Rick picked up Judith. "Or is that just limited to particular space, these days? Shared with a particular person?" She gave him a look. Rick bounced Judith on his hip and grinned. "I know what it is – you want everyone out of your hair so you can do laundry."

Carol sighed, "Fat chance of that happening." Slough-rinsed underwear had been the standard, that first winter, and now it looked like they would be back to the same options.

Then Noah came bouncing over, saying that three of the four thousand-liter water tanks were completely full, but more importantly would someone help him with the big door in the ground he'd just found, it was a root cellar, it had to be, Michonne called from inside the house for someone to check the chimney for bird nests or other issues, Abraham announced that the Suburban appeared to be full of shelf-stable food, Tyreese came from the shed-slash-workshop with a hefty mattock over his shoulder, and Glenn reported that he had found a roll of barbed wire next to the metal shed and three places where deadfalls were leaning against the yard fence – oh, and there was another gate in the back, that led to a road that led God-knew-where.

Rick sighed and passed Judith back to Carol. "I'll get the fence. And check beyond the gate."

He stepped off the porch into the grass, leaving Carol to holler after him, "Take Michonne!"

"What?" Michonne stuck her head out of the door, frowning after Rick as he trotted across the yard after Glenn. In the driveway, Abraham was pacing around the Suburban, frowning at the tires as Rosita pulled boxes out of the cargo area in the back. Michonne leaned further out. "Where's he off to now?"

"Fenceline. Will you go with him? I think Abraham is about to dive under that car and not come out until dark."

"On it." Michonne leaned back inside to snatch up her sword and followed Rick. "Someone else needs to manage food."

Maggie came around the corner, a box of canned goods in her arms. "I'm on food. Carol, Tara said she found some things in the shed, wants you to take a look."

Carol leaned back her head to judge the angle of the sun. Noon, or a little after. Daryl had split off midway through the morning, gone hunting. Be safe, she thought after him. I want to show you all these things.


A/N: Daryl/Carol, with some Rick/Michonne, Glenn/Maggie. Team Group. Set after S508, on the road. From a prompt by TheReader'sMuse on tumblr: All that raspy, stubble-strewn skin all under Carol's little hands as the blade shivers down the span of his throat. The smell of lathering soap and something that was distinctly her, rising as he tightens in his jeans. Holding back an aroused little shiver as she leans down to get to that…hard to reach little curve… - so this is entirely Not My Fault. Thanks to FS for beta.