Deanna questions Carol, calls the meeting to order and we hear a lot more from Morgan. Things are about to get a little Zen up in here.

Students of Reality

"Well, you know, that's the world we live in. ...It's about reality. And as a Buddhist, Buddhism does not just favor a nice side of the phenomenal universe. Buddhism says we are all students of reality, whatever it is."- Gary Snyder

"If you could join us as well, Michonne? Morgan?" Deanna asked, pointing to the smaller room off the main space of the living room where other mourners were talking amongst themselves and with Spencer, sharing reminiscences about his father with him.

The newcomer nodded, his Zen face giving little away as to his state of mind. He hadn't said much either, preferring to observe, reserving judgment on the community he had found himself in by virtue of his rescue of Aaron and Daryl. He and Rick had a somewhat stilted reunion of sorts the night he arrived, just in time to witness the man he had once spared and saved take another's life. Even knowing the dire circumstances that had precipitated the act, under his veneer of calm he was uneasy. The recruiters he had saved knew what he was capable of and wanted him on their side and had said as much to Deanna, but Morgan hadn't yet committed to stay.

Michonne and Carl were more wary of the new arrival than the others. The last time they had seen him he had been intent on methodically clearing a small Georgia town of walkers, his mental state best described as broken after the loss of his son to the walker who had been his wife; the one he'd been unable to put down for so long, a decision that had cost him his child. They wanted to believe that he could come back from that loss and be whole again—that all of them could—because they had all lost just as much, but experience had taught them that everyone's breaking point was different. Someone could appear whole and then fall apart before your eyes.

The group Deanna had gathered for the meeting included Aaron, Eric, Maggie, Abe, Olivia, Tobin, Carol, Daryl, Morgan and Michonne. They were waiting on Rick who had wanted to make sure Carl and Judith were settled with Rosita and the others in the Clinic before he arrived.

Deanna came over to Carol who was standing near the window, pulling the curtain back slightly to peer out onto the street.

"Maggie tells me you were on the ruling Council back at the prison compound in Georgia."

Carol glanced over at the only surviving Greene family member who was talking to Eric, her gaze narrowing slightly before she looked back to Deanna with a smile.

"I helped out in the kitchen... the pantry...I guess I was sort of the Olivia of the place." Carol shrugged, minimizing her contributions.

"I'd like to institute something similar here, an advisory board." Deanna explained, "I need someone good at logistics and planning—someone who can cut through the bullshit and see possibilities and implications for the future in current events."

"You've picked a good assistant in Maggie then." Carol nodded, smiling and nodding benignly in the younger woman's direction.

"From what I've been told, you ran the day to day operations at the prison, Carol. Made sure everything that needed to be done, got done." Deanna said somewhat forcefully, watching Carol's reaction carefully.

"I did some of the cooking, took my turn at story time for the kids—" Carol gave the other woman a puzzled little frown. "I'd hardly call that running anything." she demurred. "Just doing my part."

Deanna stared at her, cocking her head slightly to the side.

"And what you did for me...for Reg... last night? You've done that part before?"

"We all have." Carol said softly, sadly. "It's our reality."

"It's what we'll have to become isn't it? Students of reality?" Deanna asked. "These walls have let us hide our faces from it for far too long. We need people who can teach us how to deal with the world the way it is now. Aaron, Daryl, Morgan—all of you who have lived out there—you see what's out there—but we need people in here preparing us. I think you're one of those people, Carol."

Carol was torn. She had been maintaining her casserole baking facade fairly well up until the last few days when circumstances had pushed her back closer to whom she had been outside the walls. She knew Daryl was right when he said their being together would alter people's perceptions of her; she could tell it had already made Deanna look at her in a different light. That coupled with her actions to keep the woman's husband from turning made her realize that she was growing weary of hiding who she was, tired of not trusting.

Deanna was doing her best to right the wrongs her leadership had caused—wasn't that the sign of a good leader? A willingness to learn from one's mistakes? Put other's interests before your own?

Rick's arrival cut short any response Carol would have made to Deanna's request for the moment. His handsome face was still marred by the cuts and bandages to them that a headlong plunge through plate glass had given him. Despite those wounds he looked unbowed, resilient and defiant in his upright stance; his constable's uniform laundered and pressed, his big Colt Python in a holster at his side.

"If everyone would please be seated?" Deanna asked, but she remained standing at the front of the room, the big blank black of the wall mounted flat screen her backdrop. Conversations ceased and those gathered moved to the couches and chairs around the room. Eric and Aaron sat together on the couch, joined by Carol with Daryl perched on the arm of it next to her. Maggie and Abe sat on a smaller sofa, Olivia and Tobin in individual chairs while Michonne, her katana visible in the sheath on her back and Morgan, leaning on his staff stayed standing, flanking Rick at the back of the room.

"To say our community is at a crossroads would be an understatement," Deanna began. "In practical terms, we have lost our engineer and our surgeon. In human terms..." she paused, looking down and swallowing, her eyes wet but voice still controlled when she looked back up, "...we have all lost someone we loved—every single one of us...but that doesn't mean we get to quit."

"Reality sends things to do, and someone has to do them." Morgan said in a calm clear voice from the back of the room, surprising everyone, "Reality keeps coming. You can't hamper it or block its way altogether; it just flows around you. So you ride the stream. What's flowed past...is past. Even walking in running water is moving forward."

Daryl and Aaron exchanged a look—they'd heard his Zen Master stylings before.

"Moving forward," Deanna nodded in agreement, "That's what I'd like this group to help me do. There are things we simply are not ready for in this new reality. I've heard the report from our recruiters and new arrival, Morgan; I've heard what Rick and his people have been trying to tell us since the day they got here. If I'd have done something about it before now..." she paused again, clearly struggling to stay in control, everyone knowing that she might not have lost her son and husband if she'd have listened to the warnings.

"But we can't just give in to vigilantism." Tobin protested. "I'm sorry as hell about Reg, Deanna—but what you did? What you let Rick do? That was—" he looked around the room for support. "It was an accident; Pete didn't mean to kill him."

"No, he meant to kill Rick." Michonne said coldly. "For stopping him for beating his wife and kids."

"You think we should've waited? Put him on trial?" Rick asked. "Or kept him locked up, plotting, causing dissension? Exile him so he can go out and find enough other assholes to come back and attack us? It's not like it was before. You have to mete out justice as it comes."

Daryl felt Carol stiffen involuntarily at the last. She and Rick may be on better terms now, united in their desire to protect the group, but what he had done to her would always be like a sore tooth you had to avoid biting down upon if you wanted to keep on eating.

"And you get to pick up the pieces." Tobin said, his voice laced with sarcasm. Rick's attentiveness to Jessie wasn't just something that those close to him had noticed.

"What's done is done, Tobin." Deanna said sternly, shutting him down. "I'm damned if I do; damned if I don't. Sometimes all our possible choices all point toward undesirable outcomes. In the heat of the moment...in my grief I made a choice. Was it the only choice? No. Was it the best choice? I don't know. Probably not...but it led us here—to what needs to happen next."

"What are you getting' at, Deanna?" Abraham asked.

"There are more threats to this community than we are yet prepared to deal with." Deanna told them. "I need all of you. I want to institute a Council—like the one I'm told you had at the prison—to help me run this place. You people will be the core of it."

She paused, waiting for that to sink in.

"We still need people willing to go outside—to recruit, but also to scout for signs of this group Aaron and Daryl have encountered, the ones who call themselves Wolves. We also need to continue to build up our defenses—add additional fortifications and traps. Abraham, I'd like you to suspend work on expanding the walls for now and work with Morgan on that. From what I understand he had a whole city block's worth of ideas on walker and raider proofing."

All eyes turned to the man with the staff who locked eyes with Abe and slowly nodded.

"It's important that we be as self-sufficient inside the walls as possible—a siege could seriously deplete our resources if we can't get out for resupplying. Tobin, we need to plant, cultivate and can or dry the produce we grow. We need people to hunt and also find easy to care for animals that can be re-domesticated. Rabbits perhaps and chickens... Olivia and Carol, we must have a better system for storage and rationing what we do have and what comes in. Maggie, when Glenn is ready, I need him and his crew out scavenging and gleaning anything that he can find for as long as we can. You and Eric are my logistics and manpower organizers. We need to have the whole community involved."

"What about weapons training?" Michonne asked. "Everyone should be able to take out walkers and defend themselves." She looked pointedly at Olivia, who had mostly just sat through the meeting looking alternately distressed and horrified.

"You and Rick can take that on." Deanna nodded. "I could use some myself—I used to trap shoot and go duck hunting with my constituents, but I may be a bit rusty."

"Carl learned to shoot and use a knife when he was 12—what about the rest of the kids?" Rick asked.

Carol looked down at her hands, her breath catching at the irony that she had to hide that very activity from Rick with "Story time." That it had been because of Sophia that she'd done it...and at the double irony that Lizzie had saved Tyreese when the prison fell because she knew how to shoot...and had killed her own sister with the knife Carol had given to her to protect herself...

"You okay?" Daryl whispered, leaning close, putting a comforting hand on her back.

"Carol?" Deanna asked, concerned.

Rick made a sound of distress, knowing she was thinking of Sophia, who had died at 12, without the training.

"It's a good idea." Carol said without elaboration, looking up the ASZ leader and giving a tiny positive shake of her head.

"We'll add it to the school curriculum—weapons handling, safety and marksmanship." Deanna pronounced.

"Can I learn how to handle that?" Olivia blurted, pointing at Daryl's crossbow propped up by the door.

"Long as that's the only thing a Daryl's ya got a mind to handle." Abe drawled, tipping back in his chair to look at Daryl and Carol with a shit eating grin, making Olivia blush beet red and everyone else break into chuckles.

Daryl had stopped at Aaron and Eric's on his way home to search for some motorcycle part he swore he had seen in their garage; Rick had gone after the kids with Michonne along to insure he wouldn't make any "unauthorized" stops and everyone else had gone back to their respective homes or to visit others and so Carol and Morgan were left alone to walk back to the house. They stood on the porch, keeping watch for the others, both full of thoughts and plans from the meeting.

"Rick and Michonne say you're different, changed from how you were before." Carol said, wondering how his losses had transformed him from the broken man she'd heard about, into the calm powerful force he seemed to be now.

"Took a long time." Morgan smiled benignly, giving nothing away, "Lots of water under the bridge."

"Even walking in running water is moving forward?" she quoted back at him a bit archly, wary of would be prophets.

"I found this in a house in that town—Rick's hometown, where I saw him and the woman and his boy last." Morgan told her. He opened his back pack and pulled out a rag tag looking small square thick booklet and showed it to Carol.

She looked at the front of it, which was green and had an image of a golden Buddha and the title, "Everyday Zen."

"I open this every day—doesn't have to be the day it is—most of the time I wasn't really even sure what month it was, let alone day—but wherever it opened to, it seemed to mean something to me—some lesson I needed to learn. Got the thing practically memorized." He shrugged, his way of explaining the Zen koan-like phrases sprinkled in his speech.

"Here, try it." Morgan offered the little book to her.

Humoring him, she accepted it.

"Should I do today?" Carol asked.

"Doesn't matter—just open it or pick a special day." Morgan said, pursing his lips, "Up to you."

Carol hesitated and then used her thumbs to open it randomly.

Nov. 3

Sometimes doing what's right will lead to punishment. Whatever outcome you foresee, go straight ahead with what needs doing. Whatever does in fact occur, will bring with it what you need to do next.

Carol's hands shook, staring down at the words.

"Carol?" Morgan asked. When she didn't respond he gently pried the book out of her fingers and read the page she had found. He looked back up at her just in time to see the shutters fall, her mask back in place. But now he had seen, if only a glimpse, how troubled she was.

"Interesting little book." Carol said too brightly.

Morgan closed the book and held it in his left hand; with his right he grasped her forearm to keep her from turning away.

"Whatever it is—if you need to talk—I'm a good listener." He said softly, his brown eyes kind, his hand warm on her skin, gentle fingers completely encircling the small bones of her delicate wrist.

The fake smile left Carol's face, blanking as he stared at her so intently, and then a small frown line appeared between her brows.

"I don't know you." Carol said quietly, her eyes narrowing, "And you don't know me."

"Sometimes that's a good thing." Morgan said with a hint of an intrigued smile. "Someone knows you too well; you lose the mystery...I like mysteries...and you lady? You're just about the biggest mystery around this place."

"No way in hell I'ma give that woman archery lessons!" Daryl's loud growling protest rose from down the block as he, Aaron and Eric made their way towards the house.

Carol pulled her wrist free from Morgan's grasp with a sharp tug, throwing them both off balance.

Morgan dropped the book and started to bend to retrieve it, while Carol simultaneously took a few quick steps back; teetering on the top step.

The sudden movement caught the other three men's attention and Daryl lengthened his stride and then broke into a run to get to the porch more quickly, catching Carol before she could tumble down the stairs.

Morgan was still reaching for her, a look of shock on his face for causing her unintended almost-fall, when Daryl scooped her up into his arms, carrying her up onto the porch.

"Y'all right?" Daryl asked, setting her down on the porch swing and kneeling in front of her, checking her over.

"I'm fine—just clumsy—wasn't watching what I was doing." Carol told him, but her pink cheeks, shaking hands and refusal to meet his eyes told Daryl that something else had happened and he glared up at Morgan, cutting off the words of apology the other man had just started to utter.

"Everything okay, Carol?" Eric asked with concern as he and Aaron reached the porch, taking in the tense scene.

"Morgan was just lending me his Zen book. Looks like I could use it." Carol said, taking a deep breath and pulling herself back together, recognizing that she'd been rattled at the combination of the eerily close to home koan and what...what? Another man's touch? His interest?

She reached up and placed her hand on Daryl's cheek, drawing his troubled gaze to her.

"I'm fine, Daryl. Everything's fine." Carol soothed. "I'm just tired. It's just been a rough couple of days."

"For all of us." Aaron agreed. "You ready to head out then, Obi Wan? Got the guest room all set up for you."

Morgan had slept on the couch in the living room of Rick and company's house his first night there, easier to be with the few people he already knew, but had accepted the offered space with the couple four houses down when they'd offered earlier in the long day.

"I'll be on my way, then." Morgan said, favoring them all with a small pleasant smile. On his way past the porch swing he placed the small book face down, open, on the seat next to Carol.

Daryl and Carol said their good nights to the three men and then went inside.

Much later, after they had made love, Carol left Daryl asleep in their bed and returned to the porch, to the book that Morgan had left for her, open to a certain page. She sat on the porch swing seat, pulling her sweater tighter around her, chilled against the autumn air, only her night gown on underneath, her hair still slightly damp at her nape and forehead from the intensity of their joining. Lifting the book she saw it was open to today's date.

Oct. 11.

"There are four kinds of people in the world: Those who build walls, those who protect walls, those who breach walls. And those who tear down walls. Much of life is discovering who you are. When you find out, you also realize there are places you can no longer go, things you can no longer do, words you can no longer say. That is the true reality."

Zen Buddhism has a reputation for being inscrutable, and much of that reputation comes from koans. Koans (pronounced KO-ahns) are questions asked by Zen teachers that defy rational answers. Teachers often present koans in formal talks, or students may be challenged to "resolve" them in their meditation practice. "Koans are a direct pointing to reality, an invitation for us to taste water and to know for ourselves whether it is cool or warm." from Buddhism dot about dot com

The first Zen book entry that Carol reads is a reference to Nov. 3, 2013: the date that the TWD episode "Indifference," the one in which Rick exiled Carol, aired.

The second Zen book entry for Oct. 11 is an adaptation of a quotation from P.S. Baber's work, Cassie Draws the Universe, slightly altered to fit what I needed it to do in this chapter.

Thanks to all readers, favorites and reviewers! I love to hear your thoughts on the chapter if you have time.