Things were coming along well, in Daryl's opinion. The past couple of weeks had been full of their share of breakdowns and coming around, but work was getting done and everyone was starting to settle down. The "kids", as he referred to the younger generation of members, were slowly becoming acclimated to the group.

Glenn had been through a bit of a rocky spot after he and Maggie had killed the drifters that they encountered. Daryl had to have a few conversations with him, convincing him that he wasn't becoming some kind of monster, that they had been the monsters. He would have thought that Maggie would have had a hard time with it, but surprisingly she seemed to feel no remorse whatsoever over ridding them of their lives.

The news of another settlement in the area had also been a topic of some interest to Daryl. He wondered how many there were and where exactly they were located. He wondered if they'd ever appear at the gates, or if on some kind of run they might stumble upon them. Daryl didn't know how he felt about the possibility of encountering another group, especially another large one. On the one had the fear of another Governor was a very real fear for everyone. If the other settlement wasn't a peaceful one, then they could have problems. If they were peaceful, then they might want to join up with them. Though numbers could be seen as a good thing, they could also be a bad thing. Numbers meant more hands and they meant more work could be done, but they also meant a drain on supplies, which could shorten how long they could sustain a larger group.

Daryl worried about the other groups out there a good bit. He worried about them probably more than he worried about the Walkers they encountered. Walkers were predictable to some degree. In small numbers you knew you could deal with them. In herds there was more of a risk, but at least you knew what they were after, and you knew what they were doing. They were just stupid hunks of rotting flesh that wanted to eat you. People were far less predictable.

Their demolition was coming along better than they'd planned. The one house was almost completely down and they'd begun on another. The biggest worry that they had was now that they were tearing the houses down, the stuff had to go somewhere. Glenn had taken to driving cars outside the gates, just far enough that he didn't have too far to walk to get back, and then Maggie would stand watch over him while he siphoned the remaining fuel out of the tanks for their own use. The pavement they tore up, the useless hunks of cement and other debris that came from the deconstruction of the house was slowly being cleaned up and wheel barrowed outside of the community. This was somewhat worrisome because it meant increased time with the gates open, and it meant people spending more time outside the gates than they were always comfortable with.

Still, the work had to be done and the space that they were clearing, although it was only slowly being cleared, was important to all of them. The promise of spring coming kept them spurred on, dreaming about how much fresh food they'd be able to grow.

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Daryl worried a lot, but today it was difficult to be worried. It was a lazy, rainy day and his house was filled with entertainment.

Tyreese and Carol were sitting in the floor playing with a bunch of toys they'd found for the girls. Michonne was sitting on the couch with Stella sitting on the floor between her legs, and she was doing her hair. Dominique sat on the other end of the couch, and was telling them all kinds of funny stories about college, about all the things they'd done before the Walkers had come. The days when worry for them was more about passing biology and less about living through the night.

Daryl liked listening to everyone talk and laugh. It relieved a lot of his concerns, at least temporarily.

Daryl called to Hope and she turned, grinning at him. She had four teeth. It seemed to him that they'd showed up almost overnight, but he thought they were the cutest things he'd ever seen, and she didn't mind showing them off. She seemed to be constantly grinning. Hope was beating two wooden blocks together, and Daryl could see that she had Judith's attention. The two had developed a sort of sibling rivalry at times. Judith was now becoming pretty well known for the habit she'd developed of not having any interest in an item until Hope had possession of it. Then it was the one thing that Judith simply must have, and she would frequently take things away from her, earning herself a scolding from Carol.

As Daryl suspected, Judith went in for the attack and snatched away one of the blocks that she was now coveting before Carol could notice what she was doing. Hope looked surprised, and then she got upset.

"Judith!" Carol scolded. Judith looked at her but didn't say anything. "Give that back, right now, you have plenty of stuff to play with."

"Mine," Judith responded.

"No, not yours. Give that back to Hope right now," Carol said.

Daryl laughed. Judith reluctantly returned the toy, but the look that she shot Carol was her best angry face.

"Come here, look what I've got," Tyreese said, showing Judith a Jack in the Box that he'd produced from the box of toys they were going through. She walked over to him and he helped her to sit on his lap. He put it in front of her and wound the crank. Hope too, looked at it, interested in the music it produced. Both girls were enthralled for a second, until Jack made his appearance. Then they both wailed. Tyreese comforted Judith, and Hope abandoned her blocks and crawled toward Michonne.

"Come here, Hope," Daryl said. She crawled over to him and he scooped her up, comforting her. "They don't like that one."

"Yeah, apparently it's not the hit of the party," Tyreese said.

"I never liked those things anyway," Stella said. "They always scared me."

"You know what always scared me?" Michonne asked. "Toast popping out of the toaster."

Everyone laughed.

"I'm serious, I mean I knew it was coming, but it never ceased to make me jump," She said.

"It used to be toast popping up, and now it's Walkers popping up," Carol said. "I think I prefer the toast."

"At least the toast wasn't trying to eat you when it popped up," Dominique added.

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The next day, Michonne opted out of demolition work for the day, switching off with Beth to help Carol with the laundry and the girls.

"So thanks for last night, by the way," Michonne said while they were scrubbing.

"For what?" Carol asked.

"For, you know, letting us get started first before you and Tyreese did anything. If Daryl's already in the mood he can overlook it, but when y'all are doing something first it pretty much shuts down anything that I was trying to get started," Michonne said.

Carol smiled. "You know, I kind of had a suspicion it might. It doesn't bother me or Tyreese, so I usually try to hold off until I know if you two are going to do anything. It would be easier if you let me know ahead of time, so I'd know if we needed to wait or not."

"Oh, wouldn't that be great?" Michonne said, snickering. "We just develop our own little system and I let you know when I'm in the mood to initiate something or to allow it to continue if Daryl initiates it?"

Carol shrugged. "I mean, why not? It's not like there are any big secrets in that house anyway. That way your plans wouldn't get interrupted and we wouldn't be waiting around, listening at the walls to see if anything was going on."

"You listen?" Michonne asked.

Carol was quiet for a minute, and then she giggled. "Yeah, I actually do, now that I've had to think about whether or not we make Daryl nervous. I mean I stop listening once something starts up, because then we've got the green light if we want it, but I do kind of listen to see if you're working up to something."

Michonne clucked at Carol as though she disapproved, but Carol could tell that she really didn't care and was just teasing her. She doubted, at this point, that Michonne would be deterred if they were all in the same room together.

Once upon a time it would have bothered Carol, but she realized more and more that the concept of privacy they'd once had just didn't seem to exist anymore. There wasn't room for that in this life now. Privacy, modesty, secrets, those things just didn't exist. Now everything and everyone was bared for everyone else to see, and it really didn't matter. Carol was slowly realizing that it didn't even make her uncomfortable anymore, and she wondered if eventually it wouldn't make Daryl uncomfortable anymore.

"Daryl asked me if I thought you might move in with Tyreese," Michonne said after a minute.

"And what did you tell him?" Carol asked.

"Honestly I told him that I didn't know," Michonne said.

Carol thought about it for a minute.

"If it's alright with y'all, I'd think for now I'd rather stay in the house," Carol said.

"It's fine with us," Michonne said. She had suspected as much, and she could admit to herself that she was pleased with Carol's answer. She didn't mind that Tyreese stayed over some nights, and she really wouldn't have minded if he'd wanted to move in there, but she couldn't imagine living in the house and knowing that Carol wasn't across the hall or that Judith wasn't sharing the nursery with Hope. It was almost a source of comfort knowing that in the morning she would see Carol getting Judith ready, and at night they would say goodnight before heading off to their respective rooms.

"Michonne," Carol started after a few minutes, "are you and Daryl still thinking about having another baby?"

"We haven't really talked about it much." Michonne said.

"Well, you don't have too much longer before you need to make a decision," Carol said, "you might want to talk about it so you can let me know."

"I'll talk to him," Michonne said.

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"We're going to have to find more gas cans," Glenn said, walking back toward the community with Maggie, carrying the latest one that he'd filled. "Either that or use some."

"I'm sure we'll be making some runs soon. We could offer to start looking into some of the other towns," Maggie said. "Then we could refuel."

"As much of a shortage as we've had," Glenn responded, "it's strange to think that now we've got more gas than we've got places to put it."

"It's kind of exciting," Maggie said. "Carol's wanting us to start cleaning out another house for storage so we can go on runs and get whatever we can before anyone else gets to it. I'm anxious to get as much as possible. Every time I go in the storage house I get excited."

"Why? It's just a house packed full of stuff," Glenn said.

"It's not the stuff as much as what the stuff means," Maggie offered. "It means we're staying. It means we don't have as much to worry about. I guess I just feel safe whenever I go in there."

"I do like the idea of staying," Glenn said.

Glenn had never liked the drifting part of their lifestyle. Drifting was dangerous, it was so unpredictable. Their lives now could be unpredictable, but it wasn't like when you had to sleep with one eye open to make sure you weren't surprised in the middle of the night.

"Maggie, do you ever think about those men?" Glenn asked.

"What men?" Maggie asked.

"The drifters, the ones we killed," Glenn responded.

"Not really," Maggie said.

"Do you think they were bad guys before all of this happened, or do you think it's the lifestyle? Would the lifestyle do the same to us?" Glenn questioned.

"What do you mean would it do the same to us?" Maggie asked.

"I mean, do you think that us living the way we live makes us act and think a certain way, but if we were just constantly drifting we'd be different?" Glenn said.

Maggie thought about it a while. The lifestyle they led did have a lot of effects on them. She'd only experienced the strain and stress of "moving on" twice since this whole thing happened, but she knew that when they were moving, she was tense and more on guard. Everything seemed so much more fragile then, so much more like something could happen or even that it would happen. It felt like she was holding her breath almost the entire time. Living on the farm, living in the prison, and living in the community, there had been plenty of times when she wasn't holding her breath, at least not as much as when they were on the move.

"I think the lifestyle does affect you, and it does change you a little bit, but those men didn't become that way just because of the lifestyle," she said finally.

"So you don't think we'd be different if we stayed on the move?" Glenn asked.

"We'd be different, I'm sure, but we wouldn't be like them. I don't think we could help being different, but I don't think it would turn us into rapists and murderers," Maggie said.

Glenn thought about it.

"Maggie," he said softly, "we are murderers."

"We only kill bad people," Maggie countered.

Glenn didn't know if that justified it or not, he wasn't sure how he felt about it. "Does that make it any different?" He asked.

"I think it does," Maggie said. "I guess we're sort of the Robin Hoods of murderers. The only people we've killed wouldn't have done anything but bring harm to others, so we were just taking out the trash."

Glenn thought about it a minute. "I guess maybe you're right."