A/n: This will have slash, and will only follow The Walking Dead canon episodes until I feel like screwing with stuff. Fyi, I'm so nervous posting this like wtf.

Warnings: Mentions of mpreg, ooc-ness in characters.

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or The Walking Dead.

.

.

.

"Don't Open. Dead Inside"

-Person who wrote that inspiring warning.

.

.

.

Chapter One

Rick stared at the dead flowers on his bedside table in fascination and slight horror. Shock was mingled in with the other two emotions as he rubbed his fingers over the dry petals. What in the seven hells was going on? His blue eyes shifted to the plain clock that was hung up upon the wall of his room noting that it had stopped probably due to dead batteries.

"Shane?... Lori?" his voice was rough and gravelly and his throat hurt something fierce and awful.

Rick coughed, his eyes closing as pain ran through his chest from every expelled breath. He looked down at the white bandages that crossed his chest and remembered that he was shot on the job by one of the criminals. Shane had been repeating a mantra of "Shh" and "You're gonna be okay" but that was…

How long ago was it?

The next memory that he had was of Shane once again when he had brought him the flowers which now sat on the table beside his hospital bed. Shane was rambling on about the guys at the station pitching in to buy him them and the fancy girly vase and something about a woman picking it out-

"Ugh…" he groaned.

The officer grunted as he tried to get on his side. Something wasn't right. The hospital was quiet. Too quiet for a hospital anyway. It seemed almost dead. Empty.

A hospital that was the only hospital in the county wasn't devoid of life nor was it simply going to shut down. The silence bothered him greatly having being surrounded by some form of noise in his whole thirty something years of life either by guns at the training academy, the cars motors when chasing criminals or his sons-

"Carl!" Rick bolted upright only to gasp, his arms quickly circling around his middle and shoulder when a static shock of pain raced through his body, worse than the cough escapade. Rick took deep breathes ignoring how much it hurt to do so until the intense pain dissolved into slight and ignorable pangs.

The deputy stumbled to his feet and immediately grabbed onto the side table as the world shifted and twisted on its axis. He swallowed down bile that threatened to rise up from his empty stomach and took several more deep breaths to steady himself and his beating heart as well as his churning belly.

"Fuck" he muttered to himself, his rough hands pulling the sticky things from his chest making the heart monitor machine let out a piercing incessant beep.

The other sticky attachments came off soon after the first and then the IV needle next. Rick winced and clenched his jaw when the small puncture wound began to bleed. Why they needed to place that thing in him he didn't know nor cared because it was never going in again he swore as it was dropped to the tiled floor with a small 'plink'.

The first thing that he would do after he got out of the hospital was to find his son and Lori and hopefully Shane. He limped over to the door and pushed it, the door opening slowly with a slight creak.

"Wha…" his blue eyes took in the train wreck that was a hospital, empty bed, papers and wheel-chairs were scattered about the deserted hallway, the ceiling lights were dim or not on at all casting the hallway in a gloom.

"Hello?" he called out stumbling over a book.

What was going on? Where was everyone? Ricked peaked into the waiting area of section two and nearly gagged. The lights were on in that area, though he wished they weren't as they showed him the disemboweled body of what was Nurse Amber. She was the one who more often than not took Carl to see his family doctor when he came for check-ups. It looked as if something had eaten through her flesh and bones seeing as how only her head remained untouched it was a slow and painful death. He stared into her dead grey eyes unable to turn away from the young woman who was always so cheerful in such a place where death was the norm.

He jumped when he heard familiar sound of rattling chains caught his attention. In block letters painted in black were the words 'DON'T OPEN. DEAD INSIDE' Rick stumbled towards the door and reached out to it only to pull his hand back when a white as chalk hand pushed it way through the tiny space of the door. Fingernails that obviously belonged to a woman felt the sides of the door that was locked with two heavy chains and a piece of wood. He glanced back at the sign and then at the hands, wondering if this some sort of sick joke.

"H-Hello?" he reached for the hand and suddenly found himself being pulled backwards. Rick yelped when he fell back onto a body that was smaller than his. With a sudden lurch he jumped from the warm body and regretted it the next instance when a hot flare of pain ran through his body. Cold sweat gathered on his brow and his hands twitched at the sudden pain. His breaths came out in pants and his lungs stubbornly refused to take in the offered oxygen properly. His toes curled in pain and he gripped at his chest. He was not having a heart attack he reassured himself. During his slight panic attack he failed to notice the cause of his attack kneeling besides him.

"Hey are you okay? God I'm sorry about scaring you like that it's just that if you placed your hand in there you wouldn't get it back" Rick looked up at the only person he had contact with since he woke up. The man was a brunet with black hair that came down to his neck, small build, and only a few inches or so shorter than Rick himself. Slightly tanned skin was smudged with dirt and dots of blood and the black shirt as torn in several places; a barely noticeable accent was under the Southern drawl.

"Who are you?" he voice was rough and his cracked lips stung.

The younger man blinked the green emeralds at the question before a small smile curved at chapped lips.

"Harry… Harry Black. The doctor that was in charge of your health and the only living soul besides yourself in this Hospital" Harry declared to the shocked man.

"The- the only… What are you talking about?!" Ricked demanded and leaped back on shaky limbs from the now grim man. Harry shook his head and pointed at the chained door behind him, his hands, smaller than Rick's own shouldered off a backpack and the Deputy went on his guard despite not having anything to defend himself with in-case the stranger pulled out a weapon. Harry raised an eyebrow at him and shook his head mumbling something about him being harmless. A flashlight was waved at Rick's face and the bright light was spotted into the space between the locked doors.

"Watch" Rick stepped to the side and indeed watched, keeping an eye on the other male. The moment the light was potted between the slight crack of the open the Rick stared in horror at the pale and twisted forms that were shown by the ring of light. Blood dribbled from their lips and the skin was tightly clinging to their emaciated bodies. Anguished noises came from the other side of the door and Rick once again felt sick.

"You see, what would've happened if you had placed your hand in there?" Harry asked and pointed at the door that was pressing against the chains as whatever it was that was inside banged against it causing them to creak. Rick leaned on the wall, his blue eyes wide and pupils blown.

What was going on?

"Apocalypse" apparently he had voiced his thoughts.

Harry had the heart to look sympathetic, knowing that while the man was in the coma he didn't know jack about what was happening in the outside world.

"Zombie Apocalypse" he stated again and waited for the man to respond. Rick stared at Harry, his eyes even wider and his chest barely moving as he breathed.

"You're…you're fucking with me right?" Rick's voice wavered and he rubbed at his eyes feeling the wetness beneath his fingers. If what Harry had said was true was his little boy still… was Carl still…

Was Carl still alive?

"Common. Up you go"

Rick looked at Harry, his eyes dazed as he stared up at the younger man. Rick found himself being pulled up from the cold tiles of the hospital floor gently not even knowing that he had been sitting there in the first place. Harry wrapped his arms around the sheriffs' waist and tugged him up into a standing position. He idly noticed himself moving along with the stranger who grabbed his bag from the floor and began the slow and slightly painful trek down the ruined hospital hall. Broken bodies were scattered along the hallway and every three doors or so he would see chains and board along the doors accompanied by the horrible groans and moans of the walking dead.

"Take one step at a time okay? The last thing you want is an open wound in this sorta atmosphere"

Rick managed a dry chuckle that sounded more of a cough than anything else. His eyes looked down on the blood splattered steps, each and every-one from the top of the staircase to the bottom at the back exit of the hospital with littered with it in either drops or small pools.

"You may want to prepare yourself for the world now officer, it ain't what it used to be" Harry warned.

Harry pushed and the metal door opened with a loud creak. Rick could only stare at the devastation that surrounded him. In the car park that was devoid of cars laid possibly close to a hundred bodies wrapped in sheets. The sheets were soaked in places with red and Rick knew it was blood. The air was foul and stale and the once beautiful town now seemed so…dead.

"It's horrible ain't it? Two hundred and twenty-seven bodies of children, women and men. Not enough manpower to bury them and not enough time to do even if you did."

"You counted them…" Rick already knew the answer.

Rick's mouth felt dry. Maybe it was because he hadn't had anything to drink in the last two days or so but he knew that it was so because of his fear for his little boy. Yes he cared about Lori too but Carl was his world. His everything. If he died…he didn't know how he would live in this sudden and literally bleak world.

Rick stumbled and was only held up by Harry's comforting hand, a hand that he now noticed had a gold band around the ring finger. It looked a bit battered by time, enough so that it seemed as if the man had been married a good handful of years already.

"You're married" it wasn't a question and Harry smiled at him, indulging him a bit by nodding.

"Yepp, for about eight years now" he grinned a bit sheepish as they continued to trek along the abandoned streets of a deserted neighborhood. Rick nodded and it was only then that he realized where he was being taken. If this was a normal apocalypse free-day, he would've admired the house, would've thought about how much Lori would have gushed about the paint job and the spacious front garden. About the interior and the kitchen. But at the moment all Rick noticed about the place was that he had walls, doors, sealed windows and a huge bed on the bottom floor with working bathroom.

"I'm married as well, over about fifteen years or so and I have a son. His name is Carl, he's about eleven… maybe twelve now…"

That was where he stayed with Harry for over two months as he tried to recover from his stint in the coma. It allowed his wound to heal fully and for him to gain back all the proper motor skills he had been lacking when he awoke in the hospital bed and tripped over his own two feet every minute and a half. Harry took care of him, saying that while he was no longer getting paid for it, it was the least he could do to make sure another human was alive since they were so outnumbered already by the dead.

Rick discovered in his albeit short amount of time with the man that while Harry by all rights and reason could have left him for dead the moment he found him awake and kicking was that the man naturally craved human contact. Not in such a way that it would be weird, but gestures and pats on the shoulder seemed to make the man almost vibrate with energy. He didn't find it so surprising though, in a world where the only human contact anyone would receive outside of the shelter would be a dead person making a full course meal out of their bodies.

So Rick gave as good as he got, appreciation that the man hadn't left him to heal on his own in a shady place with shoddy bandages and medicine. Instead he had been catered to until he could sit up without grimacing in pain, could move without holding onto walls for supports and could eat solids without throwing everything up.

He also learned that Harry was a chatter-box, though he was a bit subdued at certain times. That he hated ranch dressing and preferred to eat any salad he consumed dry or with just a 'itty bitty' bit of vinaigrette. That he was obsessed with the television show Supernatural before the world went to shit and how he was convinced that Dean or Castiel were made for each other. How he found larger dogs ideal compared those 'tiny furry demons' and how much he loved a certain Daryl and that the world could suck it. How he loved cheesecake and eggnog to the point of orgasm and how he used to ship so many fandoms from tv shows like Teen Wolf or The Hobbit. Hell apparently he even at some point shipped Harry Potter and Naruto… Rick still didn't really get the concept of anime or of witches and wizard and freaking werewolves, but he figured Carl knew a lot more about it that he ever would.

In all, he came to the quick realization that Harry had moments where he was an overgrown kid hyper off of oxygen and stale soda and others where he put on his adult face and did adult shit. Harry's words, not his own.

In that month of recovery Harry had told him as much as he knew about the zombie infestation. Apparently rumors were that it begun at a CDC, the virus was supposed to be a typical weapon against other countries. Like Ebola or Influenza. It was supposed to be easy to maintain, contain and control but unlike other devastating viruses and diseases that were created the Z-virus, as Harry had taken to calling it, wasn't as docile as the scientists had thought. The test patients had gone rabid and taken it upon themselves to bite and eat said scientists. It was a bit too late before anyone outside of the CDC building realised what was happening. By then the small problem that had been contained inside of a test tube previously made it's way into human host one by one.

"Or at least that's what I've heard anyway. Before the doctors abandoned ship back at the hospital and the virus made its way over here to Cynthiana, Kentucky there was a doc here, a nice lady who knew what she was doing and she had connections with the heads of the board who told her some stuff that they shouldn't have."

Rick had just nodded numbly.

He had learned that the most effective ways to kill the 'walkers' were to either shoot them in the head or stick something nice and pointy through the skulls and damage the brain, and while he favored his gun, Harry always gave him the stick eye when he pulled it out.

Despite wanting to find his son so badly that it was a pulsing ache in his chest at times, Rick understood why Harry was a bit reluctant to venture beyond where they had been staying. The neighborhood alone had it's fair of walkers, from men to children. If they went to the city then only God himself knew how many dead there would be. So he gave Harry another few weeks to pull himself together, he owed the man that much for staying with him during the time he was unconscious at the hospital and then during his recovery.

While 'zombies' weren't the first unusual and downright weirdly terrifying thing that had happened before he didn't want to compare the Z-virus to what had happened several years ago, almost two decades previous if he had to be exact. Rick himself had only been about nineteen or so when the US government released a formal announcement that in the last few decades there have been incidents where men had been discovered to be able to carry, and that the genes, the genetic code had no discriminations of colour and race, that every born male child could have the potential to carry if the gene was awakened.

He had remembered seeing images on the tv of boys his age with protruding bellies with a bit of happy trail still going down under their navels, their breast area filled out just a bit that it was noticeable and their bodies under strain. The government had not said what happened to those boys and men but Rick wasn't stupid then and he sure as hell was foolish now. He knew exactly what happened to those males who turned up pregnant. They went missing and then dead, because honestly what did anyone expect from a society that was based on death and blood and fear of ignorance? If back then the very thought of sitting next to a black person had people screaming with hate, imagine what would happened to a man who had sex with another man and suddenly had a bun in the oven. If blacks were lynched because of their colour, and gays were persecuted and made freaks by their friends and families, then pregnant men surely suffered a fate double and magnified. Rick knew without a doubt that all of the info the government had on the men was due to observation, which led to and came from experimentation.

The only reason the government had deemed it necessary for the people to know was because one of the men who had escaped the holding cells had his baby under the radar and raised it without anyone knowing. The kid, then grown found his father's journal, confessions of the horrible things done to him and other men, sometimes boys no older than twelve. Of how it was all covered up and the address of where it all happened.

The outrage of the discovery of such a place, mostly from the parents and family from the missing men and boys and human rights activists caused the government to make the announcement and place a bill in place that the men and boys who became pregnant or were discovered to have the gene were protected by the law. Added to the fact that the government was sued by the families whose members names were written down in the journal. Rick remembered his father dragging him outside to the back of the house and holding a gun to his head, threatening him that if he ever became a fag, then he would put him down before he produced an abomination. So from then on, he had made it his mission to date as many girls as he could in plain view, letting his old man catch him in the act a couple of times and want not. As a man almost well into his forties now Rick had never liked another man beyond brotherly affection. Never thought of doing the act or touch of a man beyond bromance, but he didn't discriminate either.

That was how he came to the conclusion that Harry is savior was indeed one of those men who were horrible nicknamed 'bitch-boys', when he found the man throwing up for what seemed like the millionth time in however many weeks.

It was either that or the way he rubbing at tell-tale curve of his once flat stomach.

"Uhhh… " Rick could only stare in shock but when Harry flushed the toilet and struggled to get up he snapped out of it.

"You're still the same Harry who cracks dirty and corny jokes and who took care of me when I needed help. I'm not an asshole who discriminates against others just for the fucking jollies"

It was Harry's turn to stare at him in shock as Rick led him to the bedroom they shared with separate beds. He deposited Harry on his own mattress and went off to get the younger man a glass of water and dry crackers. He played in this rodeo before with Lori, nothing was different, only in gender. When he came back up to the bedroom he found his friend, because yes, they were friends now, - propped up against a small mountain of pillows and his eyes closed.

His hand was rubbing at the bump again and when Rick stepped inside he opened the green hues again, a sheepish smile playing on his lips.

"Y'know I'm really glad you aren't an asshole because then I would've had to give you the whole Maury Talk and convince you that no you are not the father"

Rick tried to contain his laughter but failed when Harry nudged him with his foot, because honestly, pregnant or not the man before him was a complete and utter nut.

A/n: So what do you guys think?