1: best laid plans

They'd lost so much since they found the prison. Lori. T-Dog. Andrea. Merle. Oscar. Axel… Hershel's leg… Rick's sanity… Carl's humanity. The group was hanging on by a thread. It was a wonder they hadn't all cracked. But there was a bright side to all the madness they'd endured – they'd found a home. They'd found a place they could fortify and make safe and build a life. Rick recognized that the second they stumbled upon the prison, and he had no intentions of letting it go. A bunch of undead corpses and a psychopath with an eye-patch were not going to change that. No, he was going to make this work.

"Carl." Rick had just come in from his perimeter check to find his son tucked away in his cell, absolutely knocked out. He stirred at the sound of his father's voice. "Carl, get up. Get dressed."

In recent weeks, Carl had been insolent with his father, to say the least, but in his tiredness, he failed to muster an attitude when he softly asked, "What for?"

"We're going out."

Carl rubbed his sleepy blue eyes, identical to his dad's, and squinted at the darkness. "We are?"

"On a run, yes," Rick supplied. "Do you need a full itinerary, or can you do what I asked?"

"Just you and me?"

Rick couldn't tell whether the idea excited or dismayed him, so he carefully replied, "I asked Michonne to come, too."

Carl tried to contain a smile. "Are we going back home again?" He recalled the last time the three of them went on a run together, still contented by the results of that trip. He liked Michonne. A lot more than he liked his dad at the moment.

"No," Rick smirked, having similar feelings about that trip. But he hated that his son still referred to King County as their home. Those days wee long gone, the dark, gray prison being all they had left. "Stop playing detective and get ready to go."

Carl did as told, disappearing to the showers while Rick returned to his own quarters. "That was easier than I thought it would be." He countered his statement with a sigh of exasperation and sat down on his bed, across from his cell guest. "Thank you for coming, by the way."

Michonne offered him a small smile – a tiny hint of the one that lit up her whole face and made his heart skip a beat. "Whatever you need, Rick."

He appreciated those words, but that was the thing – he didn't know what he needed. With the many, many events that had recently transpired, he felt like he'd been dropped into the middle of a maze. He was finally learning how to navigate this whole apocalypse thing, finally figuring out the keys to mere survival, but the universe kept throwing curveballs his way. His wife, then The fucking Governor, now a whole cell block full of new people to protect. He couldn't react quick enough to it all. He eventually nodded at Michonne's words, absentmindedly gazing at the feet of the chair she'd been sitting in.

"You see something?" she wondered, studying his lost expression. Whenever Rick focused on anything too long, she couldn't help but worry a bit, having been down that dark and twisty road herself.

Shaken from his trance, his eyes finally landed back on her chocolate profile. "No, just thinkin'." He searched her face, as he often did, trying to get a read of her getting a read of him. "It's been a while, actually. Since I've seen her…" he trailed off. "Feels like she might be gone."

While he never explicitly spoke of who or what he saw in his visions, Michonne had gathered that it was his recently deceased wife, for the most part. She would've hated it for him if he'd been haunted by all the ones they must have lost, and was relieved when he gave his hallucinations a pronoun. "I talked to my boyfriend for months," she announced, reminding him of the last time they spoke of this, back in his hometown. "I'm not sure if it ever goes away, or if you just learn to push it down." She frowned at the thought as she waited for Rick's reply.

"Did he die before? Or after?" he inquired cautiously, unsure if he'd stepped over a boundary. He saw her eyes dart downward and appended, "Please don't feel like you have to answer that."

"It was after."

He nodded thoughtfully.

"There's something about it that makes you feel like a failure, isn't there? Even though these shitty circumstances are uncontrollable, even though they're adults that are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, you still feel like you're the one…"

"…that failed to be there," he lamented, finishing her sentence for her. He had no idea if that's what she was going do say, but that's what he felt, through and through. He'd failed to be there. He failed Lori because he wasn't there. This was why her ghost plagued him, and he knew it.

"I wasn't there," Michonne echoed with similar regret to her tone. With a sigh, she blinked back tears and hopped up from her seat. She wasn't a particularly open person, so she wasn't sure how she ended up in Rick Grimes' cell, somewhere near dawn, discussing feelings that she had long since learned to ignore. These were just things she didn't do. She kept that part of her to herself for a reason. Feelings were messy, and messy was a luxury she could no longer afford. It could be the difference between life and death. "You made sure the car is packed and ready to go, I presume?"

He nodded, the view he had of her face now replaced by her torso. "Just waitin' on Carl."

"I'll wait outside," she finished before making her swift exit.

She hoped that didn't seem rude, but that cell had begun to suffocate her. She had been sitting in there voluntarily, awaiting Rick's return, but she wasn't sure why. Some part of her liked his presence, she supposed. Even more, though, she liked that he didn't mind hers anymore. Even more confusing was she was glad when Rick decided to bring back that bus full of survivors from Woodbury. That many people being in the prison provided the illusion that she didn't have to be alone. Ever since Andrea died a couple of weeks prior, she found herself wanting to be around other people more often than not. This proved tricky, however, because becoming close to them was never in her plans.

But as she knew all too well, plans tended to change.