There is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Halfway back to their rooms with the kids, Carol realizes the book she has is the second in a series. While beggars can't be choosers in the world they live in now, there are way too many books in the recreation room for her to bother confusing herself. The CDC is a godsend to all of them after weeks in tents with the constant threat of walkers. Ed being dead? That's even better for Carol and her kids.

With Ed living, remembering life before him was hard, despite thirty years of not having him around versus fifteen with him. He hasn't been dead two full days yet, but already she can feel the old Carol flickering around the edges of who she was. She wonders if Andrea would even believe they weren't so different, once, before Carol fell for a bold smile and sly charisma that hid Ed's narcissistic personality far too well when he wanted to do so.

"Sophia, make sure your brothers get to bed. I'll be there in a minute," she tells her daughter, who nods from where she's walking beside Carl in the hallway. Benjamin and Henry are ahead of the older two kids, already almost to the room they claimed as sleeping quarters for the night.

Her daughter agrees easily, as responsible as she's always been where her younger brothers are concerned, so Carol reverses course back up the hallway. She can hear a raised male voice before she reaches the rec room, and a shiver of concern crawls up her spine. Reminding herself that not every man who gets temperamental is going to follow that up by hitting someone, she heads for the open doorway.

It's Shane and Lori inside, and while Carol can barely hear her, Lori's words are bitter and chastising. Shane is insisting that he didn't lie to Lori, so Carol thinks they must be arguing about Rick's miraculous resurrection. The door slams before she can reach it, which makes her startle and jump. The cowardly part of her considers leaving them to the fight, but she doesn't want to be that woman again, so she steps close to the door and listens.

Shane pleading with Lori in a way that makes Carol's stomach feel sour, grief coloring his voice as he tells Lori he couldn't hear Rick's heartbeat. She's seen the way the once happy couple's behavior has twisted since Rick reappeared in their lives. It makes her heart ache for them both, because Carol's old enough to know just how damn fleeting happiness is, and there's no easy solution to the tangled relationship.

Both of them have been kind to Carol and her kids, but Shane especially so by always inviting Sophia and the twins along with anything he does with Carl under the guise of Carl needing company. Whereas Carol always worried that Ed's temper might turn on her boys, trying to toughen them up in some asshole fashion, she never hesitated to send them anywhere with the former deputy. Benjamin and Henry have thrived under the positive attention, and Sophia's admitted to openly envying Carl for having Shane around.

It's just a matter of time before everything boils over. She doesn't want that to be tonight for either of her friends, so taking a deep breath after she hears a thump on the door, she calls Lori's name.

Both of them go quiet at the sound of Carol's voice, and she breathes a sigh of relief and tries to open the door and can't. Shane must be leaning against the door, which makes sense on how clearly Carol could hear him.

"Lori? Everything okay?"

Movement shuffles behind the door, and Carol hears a different door slam. When she tries again, the door moves and she steps into the room.

To her surprise, it's not Lori who stayed behind in the room, but Shane. A part of her expects him to brush by her, to chase after Lori or at least go lick his wounds in his own room, but he gives her a heartbroken look and collapses on the couch. He doesn't say a word to her, so she crosses to the bookshelf and completes half of her errand by replacing the book.

Glancing at Shane out of the corner of her eye, he's got his head leaned back and one arm thrown across his eyes. He looks lost in a way she never expected to see from the normally confident man, so she ignores the books and goes to sit on the coffee table opposite him.

"It will take her a while to forgive you."

Lowering his arm, Shane stares at her through narrowed eyes. "You seem certain she will."

"She will. Right now she's angry and scared and feeling guilty. She can't show that to Rick or Carl, but you're the easy target, her whipping boy."

It's easy sometimes to see Shane the cop and forget that the man is a decade younger than Carol and only recently took on the responsibility of a family. Lori's mentioned enough of their past lives for Carol to form an image of Shane as a bit of a Peter Pan type, a perpetual bachelor who could never quite settle down. The long friendship between Lori and Shane makes it even easier for Lori to target Shane's vulnerable spots, and as much as Carol likes Lori, the woman is cornered now, and just like animals, cornered humans fight viciously.

At the quarry, whatever Lori said to Shane ignited his temper so much that when the other ladies agitated Ed into striking Carol in public, he nearly beat Ed to death. Maybe Carol doesn't know what was said, and she certainly isn't going to ask Shane, but it flipped the man's mood from the happy noise he was making with Carl to a towering rage that offset Ed being several inches taller and probably fifty pounds heavier.

Dark eyes study her as Shane sits up straight. What he's looking for, she isn't entirely certain, but then his mouth twists in what she thinks is an attempt at a smile. "Don't think she could hurt me enough for you to have to worry, Carol."

Twisting her hands in the fabric of her robe, she sighs. "Worst part of me and Ed was never when he beat the shit out of me, you know. He did that a lot less than everyone seemed to think. It was the way he spoke to me, like I was less than human, and that? He did that all the time."

Shane is too smart not to assemble the pieces of his own disintegrating relationship with Lori in the manner Carol meant for him to consider. She waits patiently, just watching him think it over. When he sighs, it's a deep, shuddering movement that wracks his torso.

"I feel like I'm losing everything. My whole family. When Rick finds out…"

Carol can't help the disbelieving noise she makes at the idea that anything between Rick's best friend and wife is hidden from the one person who knows them both best in the entire world. Years of being wary of the man in charge of her and her children means she's paid far more attention to Rick and the changes he heralds than most people would.

"Rick knows. He's just pretending he doesn't so that maybe it'll just go away. If he shows that he's angry at you, it means he's ungrateful that you saved them. If he's angry at her, he could force her to make a choice he isn't ready for her to make yet."

The Grimes' marriage had been so far on the rocks when Rick was shot that Carol's impressed they hadn't separated. There's a lot to be said for the social pressures of small towns and family expectations, she supposes. Lori hadn't tried to hide it, not in the few quiet conversations she'd had with Carol and Miranda when the single ladies were busy elsewhere. Even as content as Miranda was in her marriage, they'd both understood Lori's dilemma.

"She won't even let me spend time with Carl."

Shane's voice breaks on that statement, and Carol can't blame him. Her kids have envied the loving bond between Shane and Carl from the day they met, but it was amplified when they found out Shane wasn't actually Carl's father. Maybe because it was socially acceptable to show his affection for Carl and not Lori, Shane's love for the boy could have been seen from the damn moon, she thinks.

"Maybe you should stop chasing her. If she thinks you've let her return to the illusion that she's got a happy marriage with Rick, she's going to stop feeling like she needs to be on red alert to keep you from being the one that deals it a death blow."

"I love her, and you tell me I should just let her walk away?"

Carol shrugs, trying for a gentle smile in the face of Shane's intense stare. "She's not a possession, Shane. You aren't Ed."

Horror rolls across his features at the comparison. She wonders just how tangled his emotions got tonight trying to find a way to convince Lori that they're still compatible as a couple. As hard as he hit the bottle tonight, she suspects she doesn't want the answer to how dark that path was getting.

When he doesn't speak, she sighs. "Are you in love with her or the idea of finally having a family of your own? That's the thing you need to figure out, and maybe best considered when you aren't drunk as a skunk."

When the quarry was attacked, Carol hasn't forgotten that Shane gathered her and Sophia protectively behind him, just like Lori and Carl. They may have been his first concern, as they rightfully should have been, but his mind had gone to the other vulnerable members of his group, too. He kept calling for Benjamin and Henry, too, and helped Carol check them over once Rick was in camp to assume the spot of protector for Lori and Carl. Repaying his ongoing kindness towards her children is the least Carol can do for Shane tonight when he seems so close to losing his grasp of who he is.

Standing up, she wraps her robe closer around her thin frame and drifts back to the bookshelves, leaving him to think.

If it had been anyone other than Carol coming into the room after overhearing him with Lori, Shane would have fled as fast as Lori did. Out of the two not caught in the strangely powerful web of charisma Rick has always been able to generate, Carol is the one he can handle. The serenity she's always carried with her, even while under Ed's hulking, violent shadow is appealing, too, while his emotions are ripped and raw.

Her coming to sit and talk isn't surprising. Compassion seems to be her defining trait, although it's a bit eerie just how fast she dug into the depths of what he's wrestling with. He'd been so close to snapping tonight, desperate to get Lori to listen to him, to remember how good things had been between them. If Carol hadn't interrupted when she did, what would he have done?

The stern reprimand Carol delivered sits like an elephant in the room. Shane supposes years of Ed have taught her to recognize a man on the cusp of doing something abhorrent. The cowardly part of him wants to blame the alcohol he's had far too much of. The part of him that wants to be a good man can't stop feeling her intent gaze when she stated Lori wasn't something to be owned knows it's an excuse he can't afford.

"I don't like who I am becoming."

Admitting it hurts like hell, but tonight with Lori isn't the first time he's slipped. While he genuinely didn't realize it was Rick at first in the woods, he held that shotgun on his best friend for too many heartbeats after recognition did dawn to not admit to himself what he considered at that moment. Just like tonight, someone interrupted him in time. One day, there might not be an interruption, and he'll become the monster that is lurking in the back of his mind.

Carol stops browsing the books and comes back over, sitting on the couch beside him this time instead of perching on the edge of the coffee table. "Then change it."

The way she states it feels like it's the simplest solution in the world. His initial reaction is to deny it's possible, but sitting there with her watching him as calmly as if they're discussing a haircut or new outfit, something shifts in his mind. She's right. How many times in his life has he put his innate stubbornness to becoming something other than what he was expected to be, something better?

This is just yet another of those challenges. Lori expects him to fail, to be the monster under the bed that destroys her house of cards out of spite. Spiraling out of control is only proving her angry insults to be correct, and it certainly won't get him more time with Carl. How many times has he arrested men for acting out violently because they didn't get to see their kids on whatever timeline they felt they were entitled to.

Jesus Christ, he doesn't want to become something like Ed. He can still feel the ache in his right hand from where he pulverized the bastard for slapping Carol, and his only regret is that he didn't do it the first time he realized that Ed was a wife-beating bastard.

He isn't sure how to express it, because he doesn't want to bring up his mental comparison to her unlamented husband, so what comes out is, "God, I need to sober up."

"What? You don't want to find another bottle?" Carol teases.

The unexpected humor and her mischievous expression do more for his sobriety than anything else, because he laughs, genuinely laughs, for the first time since Rick returns. Her little half-smile broadens into a full-scale Cheshire cat grin before she pats him lightly on the knee.

"C'mon. I know coffee won't actually sober you up, but I'm sure I can scrounge something up. Maybe put a bit more food in you to offset all that liquor, too, so you aren't starving for calories tomorrow."

Something about being touched gently and casually works like a balm on his wounded psyche, so he gets up and follows her to the darkened kitchen, taking a seat at the table while she bustles around the kitchen. When she plops a pitcher of water and a cup in front of him, he fills the cup and drinks obediently, not a stranger to how much dehydration will kick his ass come morning if he doesn't. At least he had eaten with the first round of drinking because the volume he's taken in might have killed him after weeks of iffy nutrition.

She returns to the table with two plates and a bowl of fruit salad and sets one plate in front of him before sitting down herself. He peeks at the sandwich, which is neatly cut in half diagonally, and laughs again. "Peanut butter and jelly?"

"Protein, starch, and sugar, all in one. It'd be better as peanut butter and bananas, but I think our days of fresh bananas are long gone." Smiling, Carol takes a bite of her own sandwich half, arching a brow when he doesn't reach for his.

He's always lived by the greasy foods while drinking motto, but what the hell, he hasn't had a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich in years. After the scraped together meals of the quarry, the simple childhood favorite tastes like heaven, even with the slightly stale taste of previously frozen bread. It's gone before he realizes, while the second half of Carol's sandwich is slipped onto his plate. She's plucking pieces of pineapple out of the bowl of fruit, so he accepts the extra without protest.

It ought to be uncomfortable, sitting at the table quietly and eating, but maybe Carol's natural serenity is contagious. Shane is used to longer periods of quiet with Rick in the patrol car, and even in the solitude of his old house, but sitting with a woman who isn't his grandmother and just being content is almost a foreign experience since Jean passed away. His brain is still sluggish from the influence of alcohol, but slowly, he's starting to see a future for himself beyond the one so recently snatched away. With Rick gone, he'd focused so hard on Lori and Carl to get past the overwhelming sense of loss that he developed tunnel vision and lost a good part of his sense of self.

The quiet lasts until he's eaten the lion's share of the fruit, too, taking note that Carol left him all the guava and papaya, favoring the pineapple. She's tidying away their dishes, as consumed by the need to be busy and tidy here as in the quarry. Watching her efficient movements, he remembers the horde of walkers flooding into their camp and how it wasn't just Lori and Carl he had to protect that night.

Carol and Sophia had been sheltering behind him, and Shane is almost certain Carol doesn't have any of Lori's skills with a gun or self-defense. He can still hear the echoes of Carol crying, trying to figure out where her boys were in the chaos while comforting Sophia. It had been a damned miracle afterward, seeing the two nine-year-olds huddled with Miranda Morales and her kids. Even if Ed hadn't been sulking and injured, he doubts the man would have bothered to defend his own kids, even the matched pair of sons he liked to brag about like Sophia didn't exist.

Miracles only happen so many times.

"Carol? If I offered to teach you and the kids, would you want to learn how to shoot and defend yourselves?" It's an impulsive offer, entwined with the memory of the terrified children in the quarry and Carol's kindness to him tonight.

Her expression is so openly hopeful that he feels ashamed he didn't think of it sooner. Maybe Ed would have kept him from anything at the quarry, but the thought that their group now contained a widow and three orphans hadn't really registered with him before tonight. He had lost sight of the people he was responsible for in his obsession with losing Lori and Carl. No wonder everyone is flocking to Rick, since they can probably sense it and Dale's outright witnessed it.

"I'd like that. This place may seem safe enough, but every bit of knowledge is helpful, right?"

"Yeah. I'll ask Jenner in the morning what might be around. I'm betting there's a gym somewhere, something with soft mats. And we don't have to fire guns for you and the kids to learn." Dry firing might not be the best option, but if cops used live rounds for all their practice, the cost would be prohibited to the amount of practice needed.

"I'll gather the kids after breakfast." Carol looks worried for a minute. "I know it feels like a safe haven here, but something's wrong with Jenner."

Shane feels a sense of relief that he's not the only one who thinks the scientist is missing more than half his marbles. "We'll keep an eye on him. Maybe it's a good idea to stay prepared to leave in a hurry if we need to."

"Jenner doesn't need all these supplies, you know."

Carol's matter-of-fact statement makes Shane consider her more seriously than he ever has before. There's a pragmatic streak to the woman in front of him, and he finds he's curious how it will play out as she finds her footing without Ed haunting her life.

"You just might be right about that. Could pack up some of the dried stuff in a couple of bags. Stash them in the stairwell, maybe. Grab 'em if we have to leave in a hurry." He thinks about the extras a place like this might have, and how Jenner gave them mostly free reign. "Bet there's some good stuff that's not food, too."

How bad his hangover might have been by morning if he'd gone back to his room and drank himself unconscious, Shane will never know. Instead, he ends up as Carol's pack mule as she efficiently selects from the supplies of a place meant to house hundreds more than it has, offering input on the things that aren't food. By three in the morning, there are seven neatly packed duffels tucked just out of the way on the main staircase up, close enough to both stairs and elevator for an easy exit.

"We ought to get a little sleep," he suggests, looking at the bounty. "Kids don't need to wake up with you gone, either, I bet."

The concern earns him another of those graceful smiles. "With all the drinking, at least it won't be odd if we sleep in, right?"

Shane snorts, remembering just how plastered some of the others was, and how much he would be if Carol hadn't distracted him. "Breakfast should be entertaining, right?"

Walking her back to her room ought to feel strange, but somehow, their shared meal and pilfering has settled something between them that feels like friendship. She surprises him at her door when she turns and presses a feather-light kiss to his cheek.

"What's that for?" he asks gruffly, uncertain about the kindness in the gesture.

"For remembering you're a good man, even when the world is making you think otherwise." Carol slips into her room, shutting the door behind her, not giving him time to reply.

Shane touches his cheek, and all he can think is that the wrong person is being thanked, because Carol is the one who reminded him of who he used to be and who he wants to be. He doesn't know how he can do that, not yet, but he'll figure it out. They have the time and safety here to do so here, after all.

A/N: Should be around 25 chapters, 60k-100k words.

Grady AU
Primary POVs: Shane, Carol
Primary Pairing: Shane/Carol
Background Pairing(s): future sequels for Rick/Amanda and Lori/Daryl
Background AU: Carol and Ed have three children: Sophia (13) and twins Benjamin & Henry (9). Ed still dies at the quarry after the beating from Shane. Shane, Carol, and her kids are cut off from the rest of the group after the CDC. The Greene Farm falls sooner, and Beth is separated from her family and ends up with Shane & Carol as an adopted daughter and big sister to the younger three kids. Groups reunite at Grady prior to Judith's birth.

Character Note: My stories have been targeted by a fan or fans who is part of an irrational hatred of one of my favorite characters (Beth). Leaving reviews on my stories with no actual content about the story only to slander a character I enjoy? All that's going to get you is MORE Beth. Spite is my Muse's nectar of the gods. For those of you who leave genuine reviews and/or don't read stories when you don't like a character... thank you for being mature folks and I wish you dozens of your favorites in stories in your future. As for the Beth Hater... bless your heart, honey, but I ain't your writing drone, but thanks for the inspiration for even more Beth fic.