A/N: So this had been published once but I took it down for reasons no one will probably care about xD But here it is again! Sadly, I lost my reviews but hopefully I'll get some back :)

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Warning: Character death and angst

It's been so long that he no longer remembers.

But that's a lie, even unto himself, because the truth is he remembers everything.

Except…that's not exactly right either.

He doesn't know what's right anymore; he doesn't know what the truth is. That's another thing that's he's forgotten and remembered in conjunction and it used to bother him, keep him up at nights, not let him sleep, but then he just didn't let it because there are many other things that keep him up when the sun goes down and he just doesn't need any more.

It's not exactly new, this paradoxical way of living. It's as old as time and it's also new every sunrise, a familiar fresh hell. Carl has long since passed the point of fighting against it, thrashing against the currents and instead lets it take him, down the stream and towards the horizon and on until forever. Except the world is round, not flat, there's no edge, no ending, and so he always finds himself back where he started, a continuous circle, a never-ending cycle. Round and round and round.

He's often wondered if this is hell. He's often wondered if this is heaven. It's been a long time since he waited for an answer to come.

The dark is absolute as he sits with his back pressed against the bark of a tree, high up off the ground. If he tried, he would probably be able to measure the distance, a rough approximate anyway, but he doesn't even attempt it. What's the point? Things like that don't matter, not anymore. The only things worth measuring are how much food is left and how much water, how long until dark and is everyone accounted for, one head, two, three and ten. Things like time and distance have lost their meaning in all but the most literal sense. There are no longer hours to count; it's just the slots of time known as day and night, the spans of light and dark. There are no longer miles to go or destinations to reach. It's how long they can walk before they can't anymore; how far must they run to live another day.

Carl remembers a time when it wasn't like this. He remembers and yet he doesn't. It's all there in his head, snapshots, memories, snippets of a life once lived but...it's almost like he lacks the knowledge to access them. He can see them, hear them, all right behind his eyes, but it's in the wrong language. He has all of the knowledge and materials without any of the understanding.

It's worse than not knowing anything at all, like how some of the younger ones don't, because you can't miss what you never had right?

But Carl had it, once upon a time. And he remembers.

He remembers what cars looked like not marooned on the side of the road, nothing but dust and dirt, rust and ruin, memorials to long passed ghosts. If he closes his eyes he can see black and smooth road beneath full tires, a humming engine and the sound of bells. Or as it horns? He thinks it's horns. Horns and honks, bells and whistles, they amount to the same now. He knows they were different, once, but the notion is archaic, incomprehensible. There have been no horns or bells for years. Carl doubts there ever will be again.

Which is why the lines are so blurred, so indistinct. Because Carl remembers these things but they no longer exist, only ghosts in his memories. And if they don't exist outside his head…does that mean they are not real? Were they ever? Sometimes, Carl thinks that everything is a lie in his thoughts, imaginings and dreams. That there was never anything more than the life he lives now: walkers and death and the dirt beneath his shoes. Or maybe this is all a dream, a nightmare, and he's asleep in some far off place, trapped in this hell. Carl doesn't have an answer. All he has are these things in his head, the memories of someone else's life in a time and a world far from the one he lives in now.

Absentmindedly, he pulls a strip of dried meat from his pocket, remnants of an uneaten dinner. The piece is small and gamey and tastes like ash on his tongue. Most things taste like ash now; ash and dust and thirst and hunger, all underlain with the faint sickeningly sweet flavor, familiar as the rising sun: the taste of decay and death. Carl chews, his jaw clicking, and tries to recall the taste of other things but, again, he remembers at the same time he doesn't.

He flips through the memories in his head, an old book with worn pages. They are faint and grainy now, like the picture that is covered in plastic and sown into the top of his father's hat, laying in Carl's lap, but they are still there. Like the photo, they have faded with time and trauma; they've lost their color, their vibrancy. Carl remembers in dull black and white now, like the filter in his head has broken. Or maybe it's just tired, tired and weary like the rest of him. He doesn't know. All he knows is that the things in his head are all pale and shadow no matter how hard he tries to paint them. Even his dreams are shades of grey. There was a time that Carl used to dream in color, bright and shiny and new. But he hasn't dreamt in years.

The nightmares are when he's awake and anything good and happy no longer has a place, not even when he sleeps.

Still…Carl clings to scraps that he barely retains and he knows soon those too will be completely gone. But they aren't gone yet and until then he clings to the memory of chocolate chip cookies. It's a random memory, mundane, but it's one of his favorites, one of the few he has left. He doesn't know what they taste like, that's been lost to him for decades now, and gone too is the scent. He knows they smelt good, heavenly even and isn't that a word lost in translation, but he can't remember the smell. All the knowledge and none of the understanding. But…he can still picture them: small and circular, gray with pockmarks of black dots that were chocolate. He knows the colors are not right, that, after some thinking, they were brown and beige, and he knows those colors, colors of dirt and dust, but he can't seem to put the two together correctly, can't insert tab A into slot B. The memory is lackluster, no colors, no taste, but it's alright because when he replays it in his mind, gingerly, trying not to notice all the things that have faded, one by one, from the decaying clip…he knows he only replays it for them, the parts of them in the old, worn, grainy movie. He sees thin hands and thin arms pull the cookies from a slowly disintegrating oven, round hips swaying to a table that's no longer there because the image has gone past all recollection or remembrance. He sees a hand reach out, calloused palm and thick fingers, and snatch a cookie once they're cool. He sees thin lips scowl and hands on hips; the white flash of a disarming smile and the ghostly echo of rumbling laughter, vibrating through his skull with no sound. He sees his parents and he wishes he could remember the details of this memory, what they were doing, why, even what his kitchen, their house, looked liked but it's lost now, a slowly shrinking world with his parents at the nucleus.

Carl doesn't flinch as the phantom pain pricks in the hollow cavity of his chest. He just tilts his head up and stares at the sky, the cold pinheads of stars cart wheeling overhead. Some nights, he tries to count them. There's a ghost in his head, from years ago, from a stretch of road with angry people, confused and lost, flashing lights and stalled cars, that whispers, "See the stars bud? Count all the ones ya can see and when you're done we'll be back home. Promise." Carl counted them then and he's counted them millions of times since. It doesn't matter. The promise remains broken.

He knows they tried. Tried as hard as they could, just like he tries as hard as he can now, but it wasn't enough. It's never enough. Carl realized that the day he was six feet in the ground and shoveling dirt over his shoulder, just another grave, just another day, but when he was done and hoisted himself out of the hole, it was his father that replaced him, laid to rest in the ratty remains of his sheriff's uniform, dull and dented gold star pinned right above his heart and a tidy, neat hole, right between his eyes. Carl remembers standing on the lip of the grave, his father's hat on his head, still too big, and filling it, shovel by shovel, thinking that nothing would ever be enough again. Enough to make him smile. Enough to make him happy. Enough to keep him sane.

He thought much the same when his mother died, years before, bloody and tired, but with a smile on her face as she handed a squalling babe into his arms, hands falling limp the second her burden, her treasure, was safe in his grasp. He remembers staring at her, her pale drawn face and blank eyes, blood on her still smiling lips as a shout of anguish echoed behind him, rising and rising, reaching a crescendo just as his father walked around the side of the bed and dropped to his knees, eyes trained on his mother's immobile face. His jaw had been clenched tight, lips trembling, eyes leaking, and it had taken Carl a moment to realize…it wasn't his father that had been screaming because the haunting wails were still persisting and his father had his face pressed into blood streaked linens, silent and shaking. They buried his mother that day, at dusk, and it was his father shoveling dirt, muscles bunching, sweat in his eyes, mixing with tears, as Carl stood at the edge, cradling his baby sister in his arms. He remembers thinking that it wouldn't be the same but maybe it would be just enough to survive, his father, his sister, and all that was left of their group.

That was before they woke the next morning and found Shane laid out in the dirt, peaceful looking and silent with his back against Lori's wooden cross, the remnants of a smile on all that was left of his lips, shotgun still propped up in his lap.

Carl blinks, eyes dry, and starts counting the stars again, remembering how his father had counted the freckles on Shane's face, right before they buried him next to Lori.

"See the stars bud? Count all the ones ya can see and when you're done we'll be back home. Promise."

He knows it isn't true, that it's the seasons, the position of the earth beneath him, but Carl feels the count is dropping, has been dropping for years. Like the stars are going out one by one, winking out like they're too tired to keep on, burning hopelessly in a cold universe. Carl likes to think that he's buried a lot of those stars, plucked them from the sky and squirreled them away into the dirt because the world doesn't deserve them, not the beauty and not the light and it feels strangely satisfying to think Carl's deprived the world of something beautiful when all he has left is ugliness and decay. He smirks bitterly at the thought and when he laughs, quietly and whispered, it sounds crazed.

"Carl?"

The sound of his name wafts up from the ground and it makes him blink up at the darkness, not even twitching towards the empty gun on his hip, his father's gun, or the more useful machete laying across his thighs because the voice is familiar, as familiar as his own. He glances down, expecting to see darkness and shadows, but he's surprised to see a figure standing at the base of the tree, pale and smudged but there nonetheless. Carl lifts his head up to the sky again and sees that the sky isn't as black as he had thought, still dark but there's enough light stretching from the horizon that he can see vague shapes in the bruised light of dawn. Another sleepless night. Another endless day. Round and round and round.

Carl takes a deep breath and squares his jaw, lifting his father's hat and placing it on his head, fingers just brushing the picture sown underneath. It's been years since it slipped past his ears but Carl has never felt that the hat fit him right. It always seems too big, too heavy, like he'll never grow into it. He doesn't think he ever wants to. He spares one last glance at the sky and tries not to wonder if he will be burying any more stars today and something aches hollowly in him at the vastness of the stars because if each one is a loss…he'll be losing forever and ever. There's not enough dirt left in the world to dig that many graves. There's not enough left of Carl's heart.

He shimmies down to the ground, slowly but surely, muscles and joints aching from hours stuck in one position. The ironic part is, Carl's still in what would be considered his prime if the world was still the one he has locked up inside his head. In the world around him, though, he's an old, old man. He certainly feels like it when his feet impact with the earth, dead grass crackling under his weight. Dead grass for a dead world. Something flickers across his thoughts, a flash of green expanses and paved roads with faceless waving people, but it's gone before he can blink and he can't grasp any details to hold on to. Carl feels like his mind is disintegrating, pieces of his brain shutting down, tired and fed up. He thinks he might let it.

When his legs are steady and his back is straight, Carl lifts his head and looks out across the small clearing where the rest of camp is huddled. Camp is a few patched up tents and dented pots, clothes strewn across branches and rocks to dry. There are no cars. Caravan days are another thing that lives only in Carl's mind. There's no more gas, no more oil. In all honesty, there's almost no food left. The human race is not the only thing that's been pushed to the brink of absolute extinction. Carl hasn't seen a deer in years.

Ten people crowd around a meager fire, a young girl turning a spit with a thin squirrel crackling over the flames. The girl is small and slight, no more than fifteen. She knows nothing of the ghosts in Carl's head. Cookies and cars are no more than a fairy tale to her, something as untouchable as the fading stars and the perpetual sun. Sometimes, he'll take to regaling tales of the past, of soaring skyscrapers and so many people they filled the whole world. But those instances are far and few in between. Almost everyone in the group is too young to fully understand his words, what the world was like, before. It's all a story to them. It would feel like a story to Carl too if it weren't for the hollow pulse beneath his ribs and the black and white smiles of ghosts stamped behind his eyes. He tries not to tell them too much because it only hurts them all: a life that Carl has lost and a life the rest of them are never going to have.

If he could, above anything, he wishes he could make them a batch of his mother's cookies. He wishes he could keep them all safe.

Suddenly, a light hand lands on his shoulder, slight fingers curling into his skin. Carl gives half a thought to the phantoms he has chained to him before he turns around and looks into two-tone eyes.

Carl's mind is shrinking, encroaching upon memories and words and pieces of his life that seem no more than some far of dream. But, he thinks, at least he will never forget the colors of his mother's or Shane's eyes. At least he'll always have that. Even though Carl himself has his father's, the blue of ice or the sky, he has trouble finding any resemblance to Rick Grimes when he finds a spare mirror to look in or the placid plane of a puddle. They aren't the same, no matter how much he tries to tell himself they are, no matter how many times he compares them to the picture in his hat. His father's eyes were never that dark, shadowed by decades of guilt and pain; not even at the end.

Julie smiles in the pre-dawn light, small and thin, and Carl remembers her as a baby, crying in his arms and he still can't believe he's been able to keep her this long, still can't believe she's actually had the chance to grow up. He can't decide if it's a blessing or a curse. He settles on both and in his mind repeats a cycle of you're welcome and I am so fucking sorry at his baby sister.

"Glenn wants to talk to you," she says quietly, as if someone was still sleeping and she is loath to wake them. She's a soft-spoken woman and Carl would think her innocent but for the shadow behind her eyes and the scar that runs the length of her cheek, old and white against her tanned skin. The site of it is a constant reminder that walkers are not the only dangers and Carl has to be ready at all times because he won't lose Julie too. The thought is impractical, he'll eventually lose everyone because Carl is cursed to roam this dead earth until decay and old age take him, but he thinks it nonetheless, clings to it and lets it drag him forward from day to night and day again. An endless repetition. His responsibility. He remembers.

Carl nods and clears his throat. "Tell him I'll be right there." Julie smiles again in response and Carl's throat clenches, as it always does, because it's his mother's mouth, thin lips, a rosy bow, but it's Shane's smile, wide and lazy and easy. He used to be angry at his mother, at Shane, for what they had done to his father but he's reviewed his memories enough, played them over and over in the dark of night, that he knows that they loved each other, all of them: his mother, his father and Shane. He hopes, wherever they are, that they are finally happy. He hopes that he was wrong about what he had said to Carol Peletier ten lifetimes ago, sitting on his first grave, his first loss, her daughter rotting beneath them. He hopes that maybe, after all that he's endured, he might see them again. But he doesn't think about that now. He has things to do and miles to go and people to look after.

He watches Julie as she walks back to the group, trailing her fingers across arms and shoulders in good morning, ruffling the hair of the kids of the group. Carl hadn't wanted kids in their group, all he could remember was pale hair and a pale face and shadows of freckles, no color but the visage of Sophia nonetheless, but Julie had just stared at him, her features set, and Carl had caved. How could he not with his mother's light hazel eye staring into his soul on the right and Shane's earthy brown orb pinning him to the ground on the left and, damn it all, if Rick's determination wasn't set in there somewhere too. Julie was the combination of three people and Carl couldn't say no to a single one of them.

Across camp, Julie reaches a smaller tent, set towards the back, and knocks on the wooden pole in the center of the doorway. A moment later, Glenn steps out, slowly, gingerly, and they share words. Carl isn't too concerned as to what they are. He'll hear them in a minute. For now, he just stares at his sister and at Glenn, the only vestiges of his family that he has left, the only broken pieces left of that first group that had bound together right outside Atlanta. Glenn's older now, grey in his once black hair, wrinkles on previously smooth skin, but he's still alive, miraculously, and Carl repeats the same thing at him, rebounding in his skull.

You're welcome. I am so fucking sorry.

He's sorry that Glenn has out survived the rest of their former group: Maggie, who made the decision to join her father and sister, when old age took the first and disease took the second; Andrea, who disappeared the day they found Shane on Lori's grave; Carol, who slipped away one fall morning, Julie young and wide-eyed and just starting to call her mama to the heartbreak of Rick; T-Dog who got bit before Julie was even born, brought down by a well placed arrow, right in the temple; Daryl himself who lived long enough to not only help Carl bury his father, but long enough to teach him how to hunt and track and survive; long enough to hum Julie to sleep, though he would never admit it, so many times that Julie still remembers the tune, the words, and sings them to the children that they now have in their charge, right before he begged Glenn to put a bullet between his eyes because, for all his bravado, the man was as scared as the rest of them and needed twice the amount of love.

Above all Carl's sorry that he isn't sorry because if Glenn's still here, he isn't in this alone. Not yet. That day is coming; Carl knows it. But, until then, he has days to endure and nights to think and wonder and count the stars.

Carl trails his fingers across the hostler of his father's gun, a thing that hasn't been fired since it was used to put down its first owner. Carl knows he shouldn't carry the thing, there are no more bullets left and the old metal is heavy on his hip. But he cleans it every so often regardless and he tries to remember the sound it made when bullets left the chamber and what it felt like when he was young and oh so sure his father could protect him from everything.

There's a hand on his shoulder again but Carl knows that this time, there's no one behind him. "You take care of these people son. I am so proud of you. I know you'll be a better man than I ever was. And please, Carl, remember…remember that I love you."

Carl takes a deep breath and curbs the urge to turn around and cast his eyes about. Instead, he lifts his chin and walks forward, towards camp and the people he's in charge of, the people he had promised to protect. The memories in his head cycle round and round, black and white and grey, frozen smiles and decaying things, dying stars, and he realizes something.

It's not that he no longer remembers.

It's that he remembers just enough to make him wish he could only forget.

Short. Sweet. To the point. Whatever that is xD

So what did you think? :) Please let me know below!

Until next time!

~Shadows