Reviews:

BabySlothXYaoi- Thank you very much for the feedback! Tara gets too excited! And yeah, no idea what the origin of candy floss is. Poor Noah is yet to really adapt in some ways. Carl's good at listening, I think he's also used to Rhys' way of dealing with trauma, Carl's more comfortable with it now, and knows how to be there for him. Happy that you liked it! I really like that way of seeing Michonne's reaction... in my mind, it was more of an annoyance towards Rhys' silence, but the idea that she is annoyed at him not holding family as a priority is very interesting and fits her character perfectly, good catch! That is one of my favourite things about writing this, seeing everyone's different perspectives on what dialogue means. Glad you liked the chapter!

Luna de Octubre- Thank you for letting me know! I'll try my best not to shy away from writing them at these longer lengths!

Big thank you to notmuchmoretosay for proofreading this for me! Go check out their newest walking dead story, No Sanctuary.

I've got you under my skin,

I've got you, deep in the heart of me,

So deep in my heart that you're really a part of me,

I've got you under my skin.

A road is visible through the parting trees ahead. We go to continue, but Rick stops up with a single hand in the air. He speaks to Noah, his voice gruff and low. "They have spotters? Snipers?"

Confusion seems to have become Noah's default expression at this point. "We built a perch on a truck... sometimes it's out front."

Glenn peaks past the forest and onto the road beyond, turning back to us with a frown. "Not today."

We all step from the safety of the tree line with caution. Passing rotten road kill as we travel with our guards raised to the spiked gates of the Shirewilt Estate. As we approach it, we notice how hidden it is, walls spanning into the trees, a community tucked away in the bowels of the forest, one road leading in and out.

Seemingly out of place, a grandfather clock lies on its back across the asphalt, alone outside the short walls of the Estate. A faint ticking still tolls under its wooden shell.

Noah rushes towards the gates, slamming his weight against them before any of us can stop him. The rusted metal clangs noisily as it braces against his force. Noah presses his ear to the steel gates and listens for a response. All of us waiting for it.

From beyond the rusted gates, the sound of distant clattering faintly reaches us on the wind.

"Noah..." I try.

"You hear that?" Noah turns to us, false hope in his eyes.

"Just wait." Glenn holsters his handgun, climbing gracefully up the wall beside the gates, the barrier short enough that he can see over and into the Estate beyond.

We all hold our breaths. Michonne and Tyreese full of antisipation. Rick and I, waiting for the bad news.

Noah's breaths become heavy gasps as he watches Glenn, desperate for good news. Ready for the bad all the same, ready to face it as Tyreese's father would.

Glenn's shoulders fall, and he looks back at us, avoiding Noah's eyes when he shakes his head.

Another dead end. Rick's expression doesn't change. Maybe he's hiding it behind his wild beard, or maybe, he's not hiding anything.

While we're all caught in our own disappointment, Noah is quick to scale the wall, despite having a mangled leg, courtesy of Grady.

We watch him, none of us surprised. Michonne looks disappointed.

Tyreese follows after Noah, with me on his heels.

Once behind the walls, we see why Glenn didn't want to look Noah in the eyes. The houses of what looks like it could have once been a vibrant culdesac are reduced to tarnished shells, holes in their roofs and walls, exposing their blackened innards. Everything looks like how we left the prison, how Terminus probably looks now. The fire and the storm gone, leaving only a bitter reminder of what once was. Shirewilt is gone.

Rick tells Noah to wait up, but he doesn't. We all chase after the limping teenager as he tries to run down the community's street, but he doesn't go far. Realising for himself that there's nowhere to go.

Bodies of people Noah used to call family are lying in the overgrown grassy yards of their missing homes. The corpses burnt to bones, crows feeding on what's left. Tyreese and I try not to look, painful memories trying to surface.

We catch up to Noah at a crossroad, a walker shambling in our direction from the road ahead, drawn by his cries. Noah collapses to the floor, holding his head, as he wails over the dead. I understand this reaction. It's too familiar. I remember when I lost Karen, I remember trying desperately to keep everything out, hoping to keep the good memories in.

"I'm sorry, Noah," Rick crouches beside him, "I truly am." Then Rick stands, a switch flicking in his eyes as he starts announcing that we need to look for supplies before we head back.

"Then what?" Michonne sounds angry at Rick. She swallows her disappointment, instead drawing her blade to the approaching walker.

"I got it," I tell her, taking the broken spear off my shoulder where it hangs, passing her by to dispatch the dead one. Killing it is easier than thinking about what's happening, what's going on.

By the time I take the walker down, another appears. Michonne steps around me, marching forward to deal with it, and I can't help but show my annoyance. Thankfully a third Walker appears, giving me an outlet for said irritation. My spear is propelled forward by emotion. Frustration and fury sending it into the walkers face, splitting its head apart with a firm strike, foul-smelling blood spurts from its exposed brain, giving me a feeling of control over our helpless situation. By the time we return to the others, Glenn agrees with Rick about sweeping for supplies.

"I'll stay with Noah," Tyreese tells us, standing beside him as he whimpers. "Keep us company, little man?" Ty looks at me.

I shake my head a thousand times, "No, I'll help search."

I worry that if I slow down, then everything will hit me. Everything might catch up.

Ty nods, the rest of us leaving to search what remains of the Estate.

Outside a small house with strands of ivy climbing its grey-bricked walls, belongings lie rifled through on a paved driveway. Michonne stamps on a framed baseball shirt, shattering its glass window into sharded mirrors. Rick glares at her, worried. She says that we need the clean shirt, the satisfaction of breaking something, only being a small bonus.

While Rick and Glenn search the junk in the drive, I follow Michonne into the garage of the small ivy-covered home to find bin bags, not finding it amusing when Michonne corrects me- "Garbage bags."

"You pissed off?" Michonne asks me seriously as she rifles through car magazines atop a rusted metal shelf, not finding anything worthwhile.

"Yeah," I tell her.

"Funny. Carl told me you weren't keen on this place."

"I wasn't."

"Then why are you pissed?" She asks, lifting a bicycle from the ground, only to drop it when she sees the flat tires, the bell dinging when it hits the floor.

I look under a wooden table as I speak. "I'm pissed because Carl wanted this. It sucks that he can't have it."

"It does," she nods.

I take a deep breath. "I'm also pissed because no matter how much I kept telling myself this place would be gone or bad. It still hurt when it was."

"Maybe it doesn't have to be," Michonne throws me a baseball. The soft leather feels cool against my palm when I catch it.

"I was thinking about that guy in the storage container, back at Terminus."

Glenn's words get both mine and Michonne's attention. His voice is soft as he speaks to Rick outside. We leave the garage to join them.

"I made us stop," Glenn tells Rick, clearly frustrated. "After the prison, on my trip, I got Maggie back... and things went okay."

Rick watches Glenn, his eye twitching at certain words.

"Losing Washington..." Glenn goes on, all the frustration draining from his expression, a sadness replacing it. "Losing Beth, right after finding out she's alive." Glenn stops talking to pick a baseball bat from the junk at his feet. I know he's thinking about Terminus as he cradles the bat, thinking of those words- Burn, Feed, Wash.

Glenn feels the weight of the bat in his hands as he continues speaking to Rick. Michonne and I, standing to the side as we listen. "I hadn't caught up with you yet. If it were now, I wouldn't make us stop. We'd run right by, and Rhys wouldn't have had to kill that guy because of me."

"Glenn," I get his and Rick's attention. "You're right. We should keep running. But that guy I killed? It's not your fault. That's how it is now. If it hadn't have been him, it would have been someone else."

"We need to stop..." Michonne's voice shakes as she blurts the words out. She takes a breath before continuing, "You can be out here too long." She's staring at me, looking shocked by what I said, like she thinks I'm the same boy that missed my shot at the prison gates.

No one disagrees with her. No one says anything, until Rick does.

"Let's finish searching these houses."

It doesn't take long for the four of us to finish our sweep, everyone now holding bin bags filled with anything of use. I discover a science dog comic beneath a bunk-bed in a teenager's room, stuffing it into my satchel bag, happy with my find.

I see the others on the road outside the house I just searched. Michonne is standing in the driveway as I leave the building, her focus fixated on the garage. A light bulb ignites in her eyes, sending her storming towards the road, full of electricity.

She grabs Rick's arm, getting his attention and pointing to the garage. "We could put some of the garage doors together against the break in the wall. Park a car against them until we can brick it back up."

All she is getting in response is a sigh from Rick and sceptical looks from Glenn. I just watch them all timidly.

"It can work," Michonne insists.

"This place is surrounded by a forest." Rick throws the obvious in her face. "There are no sightlines." He starts walking down the road as he continues, gesturing for us to follow. "Whoever, whatever would be on top of us without us even knowing it. That's probably what happened here."

Glenn gives his bat a few practice swings, saying, "That's what happened to us."

I get an image of the Governor riding his tank through the forest, crushing fences and walls, and it sends a chill up my spine.

Michonne grabs me by the arm, stopping everyone as she speaks. "We could start taking down the trees, use them to build the walls up." She still only gets the same looks from the other two.

"Look." Frustrated, Michonne drags me to one of the downed walls, somehow using me to enforce her point. Glenn and Rick following with their scepticism.

But as we step beyond the downed wall, past crumbled cinderblocks and cast-iron railings, we discover that it's somehow worse out here than inside. Bodies lie mutilated, ripped open, and quartered like game. They don't look like they were walkers.

Tire marks lead from the woods into the community. The walls had fallen in their wake.

"Doesn't matter," Glenn tells her.

Michonne ignores him, wandering along the outside perimeter with a look plastered on her face. A look that says we aren't seeing what she is.

"We can make it work," She pleads for Rick to see her reasons, turning to me when he falls short. "Rhys, you said you wanted this place for Carl. It can still be that."

I realise she wasn't using me to enforce her point. She was trying to convince me. I see the desperation in her wild eyes as they bounce between mine, searching for hope.

"It could..." I finally agree after a long silence, my gut twisting painfully at my choice to be optimistic. "The prison went wrong because of people. Terminus and Grady, the people were the problem there too... there aren't people here... so, maybe this place could work."

Michonne lets a smile form across her intense face. I love her smiles. You know something's wrong if she isn't using every tooth in her mouth.

"People did something to this place," Rick tells us, waving his revolver at the corpses, making an example of the mutilated.

"This could be somewhere safe. It's a possibility. It's a chance." Michonne starts shouting when Rick shakes his head, exploding with belief. "Instead of just being out here. Instead of just making it. Because right now, this is what making it looks like!" She copies Rick in making an example from the dead in the grass. "Don't you want one more day with a chance?"

Rick's stern expression falters for a second, "We-" he begins, only to be cut off by distant screams.

"Help! Rick! Glenn! Rhys! Michonne!"

The shouts from Noah send us all into a frenzy of looks and dropping faces before it sends us running back into the community.

Homing in on the cries for help, we're lead to a back garden. Wicker chairs and dangling windchimes decorate the overgrown cobbled courtyard of a whitewashed house.

Noah's on the house's back porch, hiding behind a flimsy wooden screen with two walkers pushing against it, forcing him to the floor as he cries out.

Glenn decorates the white house with a coat of crimson, smashing a walker's head into it using his baseball bat. Rick takes the other down by planting his Machete into its rotten cranium.

Michonne tries to decapitate a walker approaching from the flower beds, only for her blade to bounce off his neck with a terrifying clang, made less frightening when we see the rebar stuck into the dead man's shoulder, protecting its neck from her katana. The walker manages to grab Michonne in her confusion, but the rebar does nothing to protect its eye as I stick my broken spear through it, sending the walker to the flower bed with an explosion of dirt and dead petals.

Noah is helped to his feet by Glenn, left breathless from the attack.

"T- Tyreese," he chokes out between gasps of air.

"Where!?" Rick barks.

"My house. He's been bit."

The information doesn't sink in... not when Noah tells us.

Not when Glenn is dragging me by the arm at a run towards Noah's old house.

Not even when we burst through the front door, waiting for a limping Noah to show us the way.

Only when I see Tyreese, sat with his back pressed against the wall of a child's bedroom, do I understand what Noah said.

Blood oozes from deep teeth marks on Ty's arm. He's trying to hold it in, but blood seeps through his fingers, flooding a broken picture frame that sits beside him, pools of dark red meeting on its glass. Sweat runs down his face, tears too, then he sees me, his vacant look becoming a weak smile.

I try to reach him, but Michonne pushes me back. "We need to cut it!"

"Cut- cut what?" I can't breathe, each word choking me.

Noah's holding me back when Michonne tells him to. I'm kicking and yelling, not understanding what's going on.

"They did this at Grady!" Noah shouts at me, his arms wrapped around me as I struggle to reach Tyreese. "It's the only way to stop the infection spreading!"

Rick grabs hold of Ty's bitten arm, pulling the bloody limb tight. Glenn holds Tryeese to the wall while Michonne lines up her swing. Everyone is shouting. Tyreese is just staring at me, smiling.

"Hold him!"

"Go, go!"

"One hit, clean, go!"

My feet feel numb as I watch Michonne cleave Tyreese's arm from his body at the elbow. I'm forced to listen as Tyreese screams in pain. I scream too. Screaming at her to stop, to leave him be, not to hurt him anymore. But it's over already. Tyreese's arm is limp and on the floor, looking sad.

"Is he okay?"

Michonne doesn't answer me, dragging me by the collar, following Noah as we leave the room.

Tyreese has to be fine now because his arm was bitten, and now it's gone.

Rick and Glenn cover Ty's missing arm with a dusty blanket before they haul him to his unsteady feet, dragging him from the room with us, the dusty blanket already soaked with blood.

The bite doesn't matter now because his arm is gone.

We make it to the main gates, Tyreese stumbling every step down the streets of Shirewilt.

He's fine though because he's not bitten anymore. I try to tell Michonne that he's fine, but no one hears me. Maybe I didn't speak. Maybe my voice is too small and child-like.

We all reach the exit. Walkers are banging on the locked gate from the far side.

Someone's shouting.

"Get the chain!"

Panic sinks its teeth into my gut.

Michonne spins me to face her, "Help Noah hold Tyreese."

I nod at her words.

Nodding as Michonne leaves to help kill the dead.

I do what I'm told, frantically nodding the whole time.

I force myself under Tyreese's other arm, but we can't support his weight. We can't stop Tyreese from crashing to the road, the blanket covering his stump slips off, and I realise just how not okay Tyreese is. I try covering the stump with my hands as it squirts blood across the road, apologising incoherently when Tyreese screams in pain. There's so much blood, and I can't stop it as it covers my hands and my flannel sleeves, my poncho soaking it up as his blood coats me in its inkiness.

A walker slips past the others, nearly reaching us, teeth snapping, refusing to give us time. Rick manages to blow its head apart with his walker kryptonite. The blood from the walker's missing head sprays onto Tyreese's exposed stump, I try desperately to wipe it away, but I lose it in all the other blood. Unable to tell them apart.

"Nonono."

Michonne puls me to my feet. "Rhys, come on!"

"No, the blood it's not- it shouldn't-"

Michonne's not listening to me, grabbing me again, not understanding that his blood's not okay.

Why doesn't she understand?

We keep running. Not the good running that lets you escape from everything, no, this running is terrible, we're chasing everything, but we can't stop. We're in the woods, and we can't stop running. We get to the wire web, Tyreese barely making it through. Michonne's foot crushes the skull of that skeleton we saw on the way in. We're back at the minivan, and I'm being thrown inside by someone. Tyreese is slung across me, his head against the window. I'm trying so hard to hold onto him, but he won't stop bleeding.

The drive is so long. So much longer. Ty is whispering to me.

"Turn it off."

I'm crying now.

His head is on my lap, looking up at me with the same smile from that bedroom.

"Don't- try not to- speak-" I hiccup, my tears are so loud, my crying violent as I stare at him, helpless.

"It's okay."

"No."

"It's okay," he repeats.

"I can't lose you..."

"There were so many ghosts in that room," he whispers. "I saw all those people I let down."

"Please..."

"I was scared Karen wasn't there. But she's here," his voice is so calm, soft as it fades between the words.

My crying is hysterical, desperate sobs as I drown in his blood.

"I always found it funny," he tries to chuckle, but more blood comes out.

"W-what?" I'm trying so hard to be strong for him, trying to face it.

"You look like her. Like Karen."

My tears are falling onto his face. I try to wipe them away, only to smear blood onto his cheek. It looks like he's crying blood.

I'm shaking my head, but he's nodding.

"You do," he insists, his eyes like a short dancing flame, clinging to life, flickering in and out of existence.

"Not just the way you look," Ty whispers. "The way you are. She was so kind. And she loved so... so hard. I know you find it harder now, but when you smile, sometimes I swear I see Karen. That gift of hers."

I feel like my tears are running out as I look down at him. We hit a bump in the road, and he winces, his flame wavering.

"I've got something for you," I choke out.

"For me?" he asks like a child getting a gift.

I struggle, reaching over him to take Karen's bracelet off my other wrist. I show it to him, pushing it into his open hand, putting mine over his, helping him as he squeezes the metal weakly.

"You told me you didn't know if you were ready to hold on," I tell him. "You need to now."

He gives a faint smile up at me. I smile back, holding him as tight as I can.

He studies my smile gently with his glassy eyes. "There it is."

Tyreese goes limp, the bracelet falling to the floor.

The minivan stops.

Don't you know, little fool,

You never can win,

Use your mentality,

Wake up to reality,

But each time that I do just the thought of you,

Makes me stop before I begin,

'Cause I've got you under my skin.

A/N

The song was I've got you under my skin by Frank Sinatra. It was the song that Ty sang to Karen in 4x2, the episode this story started on.

Funeral tomorrow.