mks 12 98 I wish I'd saved Mika. I really do. Every time I re-edit the last chapter I'm like, "Gah! I could've saved her!"

Guest Thank you. But I assure you it is far from the best story on this site! Thanks though. Yeah, the deer's kinda an important symbol in this show.

ApocalypticFanfiction Wow! I converted you into a Carl lover! Wow! Well, fuck, my job here is done. Jesus. Might as well pack up my things and be on my way. Hahaha, only kidding. THANK YOU! SO MUCH! Hahaa, means so much you like my story.

PrettyPrincess45 Haha, thanks! Oliver appreciates it!


Finally, the last chapter at the grove.


Serpents in my mind
Looking for your crime.
When everything changes
There's no more time

You've got a knife, well I've got a gun

I was lost in the world
You wanted me to run and I'd climb instead
Searching for the answers I will never find
But that's okay, I know what I'm doing this time

Serpents in my mind
Trying to find your crimes
Everything changes in time...

In the bathroom, Carol helps me clean up.

"Look up at me, please."

I don't. Instead, gently, she lifts my chin. I shut my eyes while she wipes blood away.

"Hands, please?" She sounds old. She pulls my hands from the sink herself. The barb cuts sting when she cleans them. I wince. She apologises. Then apologizes again. "I'm so sorry."

I don't know how to look at her face.

Tyreese comes into the bathroom, looking tired and holding Judith. "I gotta talk to you."

"Where's Lizzie?" Carol asks.

"In her bedroom. Took away her weapons." It's clear by the way he looks between us that he wants to be alone with Carol to speak, so I leave the bathroom.

Lizzie is where Ty said she was, sitting cross-legged on our bed with the empty shoebox rested on her lap. The blood has been cleaned off her hands and face, but it still stains the hems of her sleeves.

I sit next to her carefully.

"Think Mika must've set them free, before..."

I don't say anything, just stare at the box.

"I was gonna give them all to her, when she wakes up. She'll go hungry otherwise." "She looks at me. "Ty says we'll find something else."

I overhear Carol and Tyreese talking, catching sentences like, "We can't sleep with her and Judith under the same roof," and "she can't be around other people," and, "this is how she is... it was already there."

Lizzie doesn't seem to hear them. She's looking at me.

"I never had a friend other than Mika," she says. "I know how they feel. I can understand them." Something must happen in my face when she says this, because Lizzie starts to cry. "I don't want you to be mad at me. Oliver, please don't be mad at me?"

I don't know what to say. There's something inside of me, like a hurricane, and I start to cry, too. And then I pull her to me and hold her.

We stay like this for a long time. It seems to make her feel better, but I am sinking, down down down through the bed and floor-boards and foundations, until finallytoosoon, someone knocks on the door.

"Oliver," Carol says, and I have this terrible feeling in my stomach.

"Is she awake yet?" Lizzie asks.

"Not yet." Carol clears her throat. "But, I was thinkin' you and me can pick some flowers for her."

Lizzie nods. She gets up and Carol tucks her under her arm, and the three of us leave the bedroom. Tyreese catches my arm as I'm about to follow them out of the house. He looks at me very seriously. I look at the floor.

"Oliver..."

I glance at him. He lets go of me and watches Carol and Lizzie go. I go to the window and watch them talk together among the wildflowers. Judith starts crying and Tyreese goes to coo to her. Lizzie's crying.

"What's going on?" I ask.

Tyreese doesn't answer me, so I look out the window. Carol's holding a gun to Lizzie's head. I feel my gut drop and I'm rushing for the door, but Tyreese is there to stop me.

"No, Oliver."

"Let me through, man! Let me through!"

He doesn't and I scream at him. I hit him. He just stands there and takes it. I beg. I collapse at his feet and plead for him to let me out, to stop her, and then silence takes me over, hanging in the air like poison. I refuse to breath it. Even Judith is silent now. Beth used to say she could sense people's moods. I close my eyes. Have to. Can't stand it.

I flinch at the shot.

It was hidden in plain sight, this whole time, just like the ukulele in the house, and Venus the pin prick planet, and Lizzie... I should have noticed.


I dream I'm in a forest, with Carl, except he's a buck, with big black eyes and antlers so large they brush treetops. There's a river, and an island, and swimming butterflies. Under the water, the world is up-side down, and Carl isn't here anymore. I'd left him behind. I try to go back to the surface. I swim and I swim, but I run out of air, and I drown.

When I wake up, I hear digging outside. I sit up and put my feet on the floor, feeling weak and ill. I go out onto the decking, lean over the banister, picking at the white paint peeling off and watch it fall down to the dead flower bed.

Carol and Tyreese are digging graves. Lizzie and Mika are wrapped in two, blood-stained, white sheets. I sit on the porch steps and watch them, and soon, they're in the ground and buried. The grove is quiet. Carol lays wild flowers down on their graves and Tyreese puts away the shovels. None of us say anything. We just look at the graves and the flowers until we each decide to leave. Tyreese goes in first, then Carol after a while longer. I remain sitting cross-legged between the two small mounds of earth. I think about when my grandmother died of cancer. I was seven. In the years after, when we'd visit Italy, we would take flowers to her grave. My mom would kiss her fingers and then she would press them against the dirt.

I do the same thing.

First Mika's grave, then Lizzie's.


Nobody's sleeping tonight. Carol and Tyreese sit at the table with the unfinished jigsaw puzzle sprawled between them. I sit on the couch, staring at Grazelda Gunderson and the unlit fire. We don't talk or move for hours, until, at some point in the silence, Carol pushes her gun across the table.

"I killed Karen and David," she says. "I had to stop the illness from breaking out. I had to stop other people from dying. It wasn't Lizzie. It wasn't a stranger... Tyreese, it was me." She says all this in a tight, high voice.

I watch her, and Tyreese. He shifts in his seat, like he'll throw the table across the room.

"Do what you have to do," Carol says.

"Guys?" I whisper, panicking.

"Oliver," Tyreese cuts me off. "Go to your room."

"What — no."

"Take Judith," he growls.

I can't see her face but Carol is shaking.

I say again, "No!"

Tyreese shuts his eyes.

Very slowly, he asks, "Did she know what was happening? Was she scared?"

Carol shakes her head.

"It was quick?" Tyreese adds, tears falling.

"Yes."

He looks down at his hands and wrings them out.

"Do what you have to do," Carol says.

He just stares at her, sweating. And then he tells her, "I forgive you."

Carol inhales, like it's the first time she ever has.

"I'm never gonna forget," he says, voice low and raspy. "It happened. You did it. You feel it, I know you do. It's a part of you now. Me too. But... I forgive you."

"Thank you."

Tyreese tuns stiffly to talk to both of us. "We don't need to stay here," he says. "We can't stay here."


We leave at first light. I carry Judith on my back in her travel sack and Carol and Tyreese carry the bags between them, and as we stand by the door, Carol passes me Lizzie's knife.

"I don't want it."

"You need it," she says. "Take it." She clips it by its sheath onto my belt, opposite my gun. "C'mon... Let's go."

I was looking at Grazelda Gunderson, still left by the inglenook. And then we leave. Some burnt corpses still litter the ground by the fence. As we pass, we don't look back, just leave the grove and all its ghosts behind.

Lizzie said we all change, and it's true, but what do you do when you don't like what you can feel changing inside of you? Carl used to tell me that he was a monster. Am I? Can I be a monster who makes good decisions? Can I be both? I told him he could be two things at once. I told him that. So, maybe, I can, too. Maybe I can be a monster but I can be me, too — doing what I have to do, with Carol, and Tyreese, and Judith. Maybe I can stay me.


Notes

Kinda hate dream sequences.

The song playing throughout was Serpents by Sharon Van Etten.

Happy reading.