Truth be told I wasn't sure I was going to finish this given how much has happened on the show lately, so it's a bit AU now. It follows on from my previous one shot, Death In Absentia, so Lori is still alive and pregnant and Andrea was never involved with the Governor. That said I'm considering writing a future fic following the continuity of the show (eg. Judith alive, Lori dead) that would possibly take place after the Alexandria safe zone for those of you familiar with the comic.

ANDREA GET YOUR GUN

In the dream, Andrea was running again.

It was the same one she'd had all winter, ever since she'd almost met her fate in the woods, only this time it was Amy – with her milky white eyes and clumsily grasping fingers – who was trying to tear her apart, and she knew Michonne wasn't coming to save her…

"Knock knock," a voice drawled from somewhere close by, jolting her out of her troubled sleep.

She sat up quickly, narrowly avoiding hitting her head on her friend's bunk. From the looks of things, it was empty; Michonne must have gotten up already.

Turning to face the door, Andrea was surprised to see Rick standing on the other side of the bars. While their talk the night before had gone a long way towards clearing the air between them, she hadn't really expected it to alter their relationship much: even within their limited circle, they rarely had cause to interact with one another.

His sudden intrusion into her private space made her feel self-conscious; shaking off the remnants of her nightmare, she shoved the tangled hair back from her face with both hands in an effort to make herself more presentable.

"Come in," she called, drawing her legs protectively up to her chest and wrapping her arms around her shins as she waited for him to clue her in on the reason for his visit.

At her invitation, he slid the heavy door aside and stepped into the cell.

"Is everything okay?" she couldn't help asking, noting the matching pair of assault rifles he was carrying: one in his hand, the other slung across his back.

"For now," he agreed, "but I was hoping you could help me make things a little safer around here."

"Me?" she repeated, knowing how dubious she must sound. "Shouldn't you be asking Daryl?" Like everyone else in the group, she'd come to view him as Rick's right-hand man.

"You're the best sharpshooter we have – one of the best I've ever seen," Rick explained with an earnestness that made her think that this wasn't just him trying to sweet talk her into forgiving him. "But you're gonna need a lot more than raw talent if we're gonna win against these people. Now I know Shane was training you – if you'll let me, I'd like to finish the job."

"Now?" she asked, eyeing the guns again warily, still not convinced that he was recruiting the right person for this mission. Sure she had taken out more than her fair share of walkers, but she'd never killed a human being before. What if she choked and someone else died because of it?

"You got anything better to do?" he asked with the beginnings of a smirk, casting his eyes around the bare cell to illustrate his point.

"I guess not," she agreed, rising from her bunk. It was that or help with the laundry, and she was tired of being relegated to the role of housemaid while the men were off fighting her battles for her.

Rick checked the safety on the rifle he was holding and tossed it to her. "This is yours now."

Andrea snatched it reflexively out of the air, turning it over in her hands. It was heavy – much heavier than she was used to – with the added weight of a silencer screwed to the barrel. She raised it to her eye, peering at Rick through the viewfinder. With a weapon like that, she could do some serious damage to anyone – or thing – that got in her way. She could be like Michonne: calm and commanding and completely unafraid. But was that really what she wanted? She was a survivor, not a soldier, a warrior, a cold-blooded killer.

She thought of the pistol she'd been using, stashed beneath the corner of her mattress. It had served her just fine all those months on the road with Michonne. "Thanks, but I've already got a gun," she assured him, letting the rifle drop so that it pointed back towards the ground.

She moved to hand it back to Rick but he pushed it away. "Not like this," he insisted. "This is built for precision. I want you to keep it – keep it with you at all times. You won't always be able to get up to the tower and we can't afford for them to catch us off guard."

Andrea stared at the weapon while she considered his proposal. He was offering her a chance to do something meaningful; something besides picking up after everyone. Wasn't that what she'd been pushing for ever since her sister died?

In a moment of decision, she pulled the sling over her shoulder, letting the weight settle comfortably on her back. It felt good: right. Like maybe this was what she was meant to do.

"Thanks, Rick," she told him, flashing him a grateful smile.

"For what?" he asked, looking surprised. "The gun?"

"For taking me seriously," she explained. "For not treating me like a girl." That was what had drawn her to Shane in the beginning: he made her feel strong, powerful, like she could handle anything, and she needed that after she had failed at the only thing she set out to do.

"You and Michonne are more capable than some of the men here," Rick reminded her. He let out a self-deprecating chuckle. "Hell, you're probably a better shot than me. Why not use that to our advantage? We only get one chance at this. It'd be a shame to waste it arguing over gender politics, don't you think?" he finished with a boyish grin that she couldn't help but find charming.

She nodded, cracking a smile in return. It was a mystery to her, how someone as good-natured as he was – when he wasn't totally immersed in holding the group together, that was – could be married to someone as high-strung as Lori. She bet he must haven driven her crazy at times.

Rick was the first to break eye contact. "Come on," he said, jerking his head at the door, all seriousness again. "We've got a lot of ground to cover."

"Damn," Rick said approvingly, shielding his eyes with his hand as he followed the trajectory of Andrea's bullet down the fence line. After just a few hours of practice, she had toppled a crow perched almost twenty yards from the guard tower where they now stood. "You sure you weren't a cop in a past life?"

How was it, Andrea wondered, that in all the time they'd known each other, the subject of what she had done for a living had never come up?

"I was a lawyer," she told him, lowering her rifle so that she could join him in admiring her shot. As her gaze landed on the bird – now prone in the grass – she contemplated the delicious irony of bringing it back for Lori to serve for dinner.

"Ahhh," Rick agreed with a knowing smile, drawing her out of her petty thoughts. "Close enough."

"Not really," she argued, shifting the viewfinder aimlessly in search of a new target. They might have both worked to uphold the law, but they had very different priorities. "You guys would arrest some poor kid just because he happened to be black or Hispanic and then it would be my job to keep him from going to prison." She settled on a bird circling overhead.

"Funny how prison used to seem like such a bad thing," Rick mused out loud, and Andrea let her finger slip from the trigger, allowing the bird to get away as she turned to regard him with interest. It wasn't often that she got to see this side of him: Rick the man, not Rick the leader.

"A lot of things from the old world don't seem so bad now," she agreed with a pensive smile. "What I wouldn't give to pay taxes or wait in line at the grocery store. Or sit through another crappy reality show."

To Andrea's disgust, Amy had seized control of the remote in the various hotel rooms they'd stayed at while they were on the road, forcing her to endure hours of odious people bickering and complaining to the camera. If she had known that would be the last time she would ever do something as mundane as lounge around drinking and eating take out in front of the TV with her sister, she would have tried to enjoy it more.

"You okay?" Rick asked her, seeming to sense the sombre turn her mood had taken.

Andrea forced herself to shake off the sadness she felt whenever she thought of her sister. The last thing she wanted to do was to cry in front of him when she was supposed to be showing him what a valuable asset she could be. "I just miss her sometimes," she admitted with a discomfited shrug. "I guess it kind of snuck up on me."

"Grief'll do that to you," he agreed sympathetically, and she wondered who he was thinking of. Did Shane count when he had killed him with his own two hands?

"Sometimes I wonder if that's all there is anymore," she confessed quietly. Grief and pain, and of course, death. "It feels like all we do is brace ourselves for the next big loss."

First it was her parents, then Amy, and finally, Dale. It was almost a relief to her that most of the people she loved were dead because it meant the worst was over. With the exception of maybe Michonne – who had become like a second older and more belligerent sister to her – she had no one left to lose.

"Is that why you tried to kill yourself?" Rick asked her. There was no judgement in his tone, just curiosity.

"I didn't try to kill myself," Andrea corrected him. She had never set out to deliberately harm herself. "I just didn't try not to." It wasn't that she had ever actually wanted to die: she just hadn't been sure she wanted to live anymore. Some days she still wasn't, but that hellish night at the farm, she had made the choice to survive and she was determined to honour that for as long as she could.

To his credit, Rick didn't try to accuse her of splitting hairs. "See that geek over there?" he said, pointing to a lone straggler about halfway between the fence and the tree line. "I want you to hit it right between the eyes."

It was a bigger target than the crow, but it was twice as far away. "I can't," she insisted. "Not from here." She had always been better at putting down walkers at close range.

"How far away was Daryl when you shot him?" Rick teased her.

Andrea looked away, feeling her face heat up with embarrassment. "In case you've forgotten, I missed," she reminded him. "And it was a good thing I did."

"Only by a few inches," he argued, "and you've gotten a lot better since then."

"Okay," she agreed with a resolute nod. "I can do this," she added, half to Rick and half to herself. She braced her gun against the railing to keep it steady and hunched over it, lining up the shot.

When she was satisfied, she released the trigger…

…and missed.

But rather than skim harmlessly over the walker's temple as it had with Daryl, the bullet penetrated the side of its skull, and lurching forward one final step, it went down.

Andrea turned to beam at Rick. "Did you see that?"

"That was pretty good," he allowed.

Her eyebrows shot up in incredulity. "Pretty good?" she repeated. Her accuracy wasn't at one hundred per cent yet, but she had made the kill, and surely that was what counted? "You're kidding, right?"

Rick shrugged. "You got lucky this time," he told her, his eyes dancing with mischief.

"Lucky my ass," she complained. She gestured with her gun at a young female walker that had meandered into the vicinity of her previous victim. "Fifty bucks says you can't make that shot from here."

Rick laughed as though she'd just told a great joke. "What would I do with fifty bucks?"

"Don't tell me you're scared of a friendly bet?" she goaded him.

"No, I was just thinking you're gonna have to do a lot better than that to make it worth my while," he told her seriously.

She had to admit, he did make a good point. In the new world, money was no longer the most valuable commodity. "Fine," she agreed. "Then how about this? If you win, you can have my share of whatever culinary delight Carol is cooking up for dinner tonight."

"And if you win?"

"You have to give me yours."

Rick grinned. "You've got yourself a deal," he agreed, holding out his hand so that they could shake on it.

He made a show of setting up his own gun. "Here goes nothing."

The bullet lodged in the walker's shoulder. It took note of the injury but kept coming. "Shit," he muttered. He glanced over at Andrea with a hopeful smile. "I hit it. I don't suppose that counts?"

"Nice try," she said, rolling her eyes and bending back over her own gun.

She fired once and to Rick's surprise and her delight the walker fell to the ground with a hole in the centre of its forehead. "Looks like you owe me dinner," she told him smugly. "But don't worry, I'm willing to share."