AN: Shorter chapter, I know, but today has been pretty busy and pretty draining. So I've had less energy and less time to write. Still, I figured giving those of you who read regularly a little something was better than giving you nothing at all. If I get a chapter in tomorrow it'll probably be short too, but I'll see if I can't scrape up a little extra time. For everyone still reading, I hope you enjoy.
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"I think you drew blood." Daryl said, still trying to catch his breath.
"I think you gave it as good as you got it." Michonne said.
"I didn't hear you complainin'." Daryl said.
"I wasn't complaining, and I'm not complaining now." She responded. "So do you want to talk about it now?"
It was more than obvious that Daryl had a lot of things on his mind. Daryl was usually very gentle in bed, even more so than Michonne would have preferred at times, but that had not been the case at all tonight.
"Do you think I'm crazy, 'Chonne?" Daryl asked.
"No, Daryl, I don't think you're crazy. Crazy people rarely ask if someone thinks they're crazy." Michonne said.
"I kinda felt crazy when I killed that man today." Daryl said.
"Well, maybe you had a crazy moment. We all have those, but you did what needed to be done. This world's bad enough without people like Earl walking around in it. Because of him it's going to take Carol a while to get over this."
"But she'll be alright?" Daryl asked. He'd been concerned about her. She didn't eat dinner with everyone else. Instead Maggie and Beth had made dinner and Michonne had brought her some back to her room. She didn't come out of her room at all, actually. He had been the one to put Lil' Asskicker down for bed.
"She'll be alright eventually, Daryl. A woman goes through a lot when someone does that to her, and I think Carol's been through a lot more than she lets on sometimes." Michonne said. She had gone in Carol's room and sat with her while she ate. Carol hadn't really wanted conversation, and Michonne had understood. Carol had asked her to stay with her while she fell asleep, and Michonne had tried to be as comforting as she could, silently rubbing her back while she drifted off.
"She had a husband that used to hit on her." Daryl said. "He got killed in an attack on our camp." Daryl was silent for a few minutes, obviously still thinking because he was kind of nervously playing with Michonne's fingers. "I don't understand it, 'Chonne." He said after a minute.
"Understand what?" Michonne asked.
"I mean I ain't never been so horny that I would do that to no one. If I want to have sex with you and you don't want to have sex with me I get a little bummed out, but I figure that you'll wanna do it later, so I just wait." Daryl said. "I don't think I'd like it very much if you wasn't wantin' to be part of it."
"Rape isn't about sex, Daryl." Michonne said. "That's what really makes men like Earl so disgusting. It's about power over someone and about wanting to humiliate them. He wasn't horny, he just wanted to hurt Carol, and it didn't even have to be Carol, I'm guessing. It just so happens that she is the only one of us that very often is alone."
"I hate that we let him stay here. I felt like I shoulda thrown him out the first night, but I didn't. I let Carol down." Daryl said.
"You didn't let Carol down, Daryl. Actually I think you elevated yourself a little more in her eyes as a hero because you killed Earl. Right now I think Carol is really blaming herself more than she's blaming anybody else." Michonne said.
"That don't make sense. It weren't her fault." Daryl said.
"Doesn't have to make sense, Daryl. We all think a lot of things that don't make any sense." Michonne said.
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The next morning Michonne fed Hope and watched Judith, who was sucking on a bottle and toddling around the nursery. She hadn't mastered walking yet, but she was falling less and less. Once she'd gotten the guts to let go of the coffee table downstairs, after circling it about four times holding on, she'd happily discovered that she now had the freedom to follow anyone in the house, unless they shut a door, closed the baby gate, or put her in her crib.
Michonne could tell that Judith was missing Carol. Mostly because she kept cawing at her, which was the sound she always made to call Carol. Carol hadn't been out of her room yet, and Michonne was starting to get concerned.
She got up with Hope and walked to Carol's bedroom door, Judith following behind her. She knocked.
"Carol are you up yet?" She asked. She may not be. Daryl was still snoring in the other room.
"Come in." Carol said. Michonne came in. Carol was dressed and sitting on her bed. Judith came in behind Michonne, and seeing Carol she smiled and called to her, walking over. Michonne sat on the bed and Carol picked Judith up.
"I didn't know if you were awake yet." Michonne said.
"I heard Hope wake up." Carol said.
"Do you want to go get some breakfast?" Michonne nudged.
"Not really." Carol said.
"You need to eat." Michonne said. "If it were me, you wouldn't let me just not eat."
"It wouldn't have been you, Michonne." Carol said. "Something like this wouldn't happen to you. Something like this would happen to me because I wasn't strong enough to fight him. I wasn't even fast enough to get to my knife." She was choking up again and Michonne reached over and rubbed her back a minute.
"Carol, what if I told you that it has happened to me." Michonne ventured.
Carol looked at her, but she didn't say anything.
"It happened to me in college." Michonne said. "I remember it very clearly. I'd been at a party and I'd had a little too much to drink and there was this guy at the party that was paying attention to me all night, and I was flirting with him, but not much. I had told my friend that was with me not to let me do anything stupid, but I guess she wasn't paying me too much attention because she let me leave with him. He was going to take me back to my dorm. I guess he thought that meant that he deserved some form of payment for it, whether or not I wanted to give him anything." Michonne remembered fighting him, but he'd ultimately won the fight. She remembered afterwards, feeling so ashamed and so dirty. She could relate to Carol who had been scrubbing herself vigorously with the washcloth. Michonne hadn't told anyone because she'd felt so ashamed and so guilty. Unfortunately for Carol, she couldn't hide from hers.
"I'm sorry." Carol said.
"I guess I am just trying to say that it can happen to anyone, and you will overcome it." Michonne said.
"You would have never thought that after all this time, that would be something that would happen to you. I've thought about being killed by Walkers, and I have thought about being killed by the Governor, but I never thought about the fact that this would have happened." Carol said.
"We got a little too comfortable because we haven't encountered a lot of people." Michonne said. "No one in our group would do anything like that, and we've forgotten that the Governor probably wasn't the only bad person to make it this long. We forgot that there are more threats out there than just Walkers or starvation."
Carol just nodded her head.
Michonne got up. "Come on, let's go get breakfast." She said. Carol got up and followed her. Daryl, still looking very sleepy, was coming out of their bedroom. He smiled at Carol.
"Good mornin'. Feelin' better?" He asked. Carol's face made it clear that she obviously wasn't feeling any better, but Daryl didn't really know just what to say. She half nodded, and he followed her and Michonne down the stairs.
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Dora wondered if everyone in this group was always this quiet or if they were quiet because they were there. Hardly anyone spoke when they were around. She knew it was probably a cloud hanging around because of Earl. She had spoken to Maggie when they'd first entered the gates, and Maggie had seemed like a cheerful girl, though their friendliness hadn't lasted long because Earl had started with the black woman with the sword.
They still hadn't had formal introductions. She'd been introduced to Maggie and Beth when they first entered and learned that they were sisters. Maggie was married to the Asian boy, but Dora didn't know his name. She could tell from the way that they acted and the fact that Maggie wore a ring that they were married. She also knew that they lived in a house with Beth.
Dora had also learned Daryl's name and Carol's name. Carol's name she knew because of the incident, and Daryl was the one that had done most of the talking around them. He was the one that asked most of the questions and gave the decree that, at first, they would have to leave, and then that they would be allowed to stay, but they were on trial to make sure that they all behaved the way they should. Dora was sure they wouldn't disappoint. She and Frank were just retirees that had been on vacation. The two boys, Jimmy and Junior, were good boys.
Dora was trying to figure the rest of the group out. Daryl was apparently the leader of the group, which she had heard him refer to as his family, though she doubted they'd begun this as a family. If it was a family, however, he was the patriarch of it, despite the presence of other men. Carol had seemed like the matriarch figure of the family, perhaps. She apparently did the cooking, and Dora was unsure of her other roles.
What Dora couldn't figure out was their arrangement. Carol had a baby. The black woman with a sword had a baby. She had gathered that her child was clearly his child, because he doted on it, and she hadn't known too many men that would wear their children around like he had been doing the first night they arrived. His affections for the black woman were fairly obvious as well, but she couldn't figure out about Carol. She'd decided that either Carol's husband had unfortunately died before the baby was born, or maybe they lived in some kind of polygamous relationship and he just favored the black woman. One day Dora hoped to be able to figure it out.
As far as the other households, she knew that there was one couple that had a teenage son. There was another black couple, with a man that was obviously a type of consultant to Daryl because Daryl was always talking to him about them. There was also another young couple that she only saw at meal times.
She didn't know any of their names and she didn't really know if she should ask them anything. Daryl had said they agreed that they could stay, but no one seemed really interested in getting to know them. She decided she'd stay quiet for a while, waiting for everyone to cool down about Earl.
I wish I had never seen Earl. I wish he wouldn't have gotten split up with us. I wish he'd died in the attack.
They had been with three other college kids. Two other boys and one girl. They were all good kids. They were all scared and had been part of Jimmy and Junior's original group. She'd hated seeing all of them get torn apart. They were just kids. Seeing them get torn apart made her lose a little bit of hope of finding her own kids and her grandson. Her grandson had been about the size of Carol's daughter. She wondered what he looked like now, not allowing herself to think that it was possible that something had happened to him.
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"Daryl, I think you did the right thing." Tyreese said. They were finishing up the fence, but it was obvious that Daryl was distracted because he wasn't talking, and Tyreese had grown fond of the chats he had with Daryl while working. He liked talking to him. Daryl was easy to talk to. Tyreese was certain his silence came from thinking about killing Earl. "Hell man, I thought about doing it. I didn't like the way he looked at Tasha, and if I'd been in your shoes and he'd put his filthy hands on my baby sister, I'd have fucking killed him too."
"I feel like I did the right thing." Daryl said. "I just don't like the thought of it, you know? I mean killin' Walkers is one thing, but I ain't killed a lot of living people. You know I killed people during that whole mess with the Governor, but that was different. That was war, you know what I'm sayin'? Now we just gotta go 'round bein' ready to kill anyone we meet 'cause they might turn out to be assholes?"
"There isn't any police or anything anymore to find out if they're bad or not, so yeah we have to look out for them now." Tyreese said.
"You think we're gonna run up with a lot more people?" Daryl asked.
"I don't know but just from what Frank said about how many groups they've met wandering, I suppose we will. It seems like there are quite a few more in the area. You know that's how the Governor built Woodbury, collecting a bunch of small groups into a town." Tyreese said.
"Well, if we gon build us a town like that, we're not gonna have any Earls in it." Daryl said definitively. "I ain't havin' people wonderin' if they gon get hurt goin' to eat breakfast."
"Well, I'm behind you on that. We have to go back to the old West laws of policing, I guess. You commit the crime, we shoot you." Tyreese said.
"Yeah 'cept now it's you look like you might commit the crime and you can either leave or we shoot you." Daryl said.
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"What are you doing?" Michonne walked up to Daryl who was in the yard outside headquarters jabbing wire down into the dirt.
"Buildin' a pen for Lil' Asskicker." Daryl said. "Carol said she needed somewhere safe to put her while she was doin' stuff 'cause the kid wanders around. You think this is gon be big enough?"
The "pen" that Daryl was building was almost the size of the entire yard.
"It's definitely a vast improvement on size from the playpens we used to have." Michonne said.
"Here." Daryl said, stopping what he was doing and reaching in his boot. He produced Carol's knife and handed it to Michonne. "I found this in the grass. Figured she might want it back."
"She might, but she probably won't right now." Michonne said. She decided she'd keep it for a little while and give it back to Carol later, when the storm of emotions had passed. These days your weapon was your friend, an extension of you. It offered you protection. Having it made you feel safe, and she was sure that right now Carol would feel that her knife, thought it had saved her in quite a few Walker battles, had let her down. She needed a little time before she was ready to face it again. For now she was unarmed, but she made sure that she was never alone, staying always in the company of someone from their group, and almost avoiding the other group entirely.