The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater - J. R. R. Tolkien
Beth shakes her head to clear the vision that feels like it's turned her blood to ice. She knows she's frozen, and her grip is painful on Otis's bare forearm where she caught herself to stop falling. The farmhand looks worried.
"You having one of your episodes, Bethie? Do I need to get your daddy?"
She shakes her head urgently. Since Hershel didn't believe her about her mother's illness being dangerous, she isn't inclined to trust him with this. All he does is mourn now, when maybe they could have fixed it. Instead they lost Shawn, too.
At least Beth didn't see that one to play in technicolor in her visions.
"Otis? If someone asks you to fetch medical supplies today, don't go to the field hospital at the high school. Just don't." She puts all the urgency she can into her voice, squeezing his arm.
The big man looks fearful for a moment, but he nods. "I believe you, even if some don't want to right now. Can get supplies at your daddy's office, I bet."
The support in his earnest expression warms her heart. She flings her arms around him in an impulsive hug. "Please stay safe, Otis."
The rest of the vision flickers in her head as the farmhand moves toward the pastures to check on the cattle. The strongest parts are always the person she's touching, but sometimes other related events intermingle. Otis dying on the ground, betrayed by an apologizing man she can't see clearly, doesn't make a lot of sense, but the medical supplies do.
There's a spike in urgency on the first part of the vision. It calls to her, burning through her brain like a migraine. As she hurries toward the house, she sees Maggie's car leaving. Her heart sinks as she sees Paul at the wheel. A supply run, taking her only true ally away, since even if Maggie stayed, she thinks Beth should try to ignore the visions right now for their father's sake.
Pressure builds in her head, and she whimpers in pain. It summons Rocky, who nudges at her hand. She kneels and hugs the dog close, stroking his smooth fur. "We gotta go into the woods, boy."
He understands 'woods' well enough, because he looks out to the treeline as if to say 'what are we waiting for'. With a look toward the house, she abandons the idea of trying to convince her father to believe. Since her mother's death, he sees her ability as a curse.
If he stops her, the vision will build and build until the crescendo is watching a little girl die as if she were right there beside her. After the terror of seeing Annette's last minutes, both before and when they happened, she never wants that to happen again. Unseen by the adults who might stop her, Beth and Rocky make it to the cover of the woods.
She knows these woods like the back of her hand, spending hours exploring with her siblings. More Paul than Maggie or Shawn, with the age gap too great on the older two for the last couple of years. But Paul always had time for her. College didn't turn him into an insufferable adult who didn't have time for her like it did Maggie. She didn't need to be told that Shawn's 'difficulties' were of the kind they ran Just Say No campaigns in school about. She understands what an addict is, after all, even if her family tries to shelter her from it.
As her sneakered feet carry her further into the trees, seeking the sunlit clearing she knows well because of the lightning split oak, the pressure in her head begins to ease. Rocky yips softly, sensing the change.
The red and tan Kelpie is a trained service dog, purchased years ago as a pet when Paul was first adopted, but when the visions started, medical testing ruled them seizures. Rocky's ability to sense them as they started got him the training to be her service dog, accompanying her everywhere, even at school. The visions may not be true seizures, but the dog still alerts to them, even in differing stages like now.
The clear image of the terrified, lost girl who seems to be Beth's age is fading, gaining that translucent edge that means she's close to fixing what's wrong.
Beth feels terror shoot through her when she hears growling and sees the walker menacing the girl of her vision. With a snarl of his own, it's Rocky who saves the girl. He hamstrings the walker, toppling the tall once-man and giving Beth a chance to snatch the girl's arm.
"Run! Run as fast as you can," she urges, dragging the girl with her. Rocky circles around them, growling.
They flee as the vision of the blonde flickers and disintegrates to white noise in her head with the girl's hand clasped firmly in Beth's.
Luna's damaged gift has always bothered her, but never more once the world met with a calamity that overcast anything the Wizarding World ever predicted happening. Now, the bubbles of pressure that build in her mind are harder to deal with, since she never gets the vision that should accompany them. The head injury she suffered the day her mother died, leaving a nine-year-old caught in the backlash of a botched experimental spell, warped her magic in ways that weren't always clear until she was an adult.
She presses a heavily scented handkerchief to her nose, blotting the nosebleed. Whatever she's trying to prevent was easier when she could apparate, but the plague that destroyed the Wizarding World in ways no Dark Lord ever managed sent magic into a tailspin. The only reliable magic Luna can access right now is her innate abilities that muggles would deem psychic powers and anything involving plants. They don't seem to be affected by the magical drain, so she is grateful that herbology and potions were always among her strong points.
Something has the hordes of the dead in Atlanta stirred up. Luna moves from rooftop to rooftop, dropping into alleys and scaling fire escapes and downspouts, letting the pressure in her mind lead her in the right direction. She finally reaches a building near the centerpoint of whatever is agitating the dead. Hearing gunfire from the next building over, she ducks behind one of the big air conditioning units and observes.
The fight on the roof across the street makes her itch to intervene, but when she goes to leave cover, it feels like her head might split open. Relaxing back against the machinery, she pants through the pain and waits out the nosebleed.
Okay. Not time yet.
It is almost physically painful to watch the man's terror as he realizes he's being left behind, abandoned by his fellows in their understandable animalistic urge to save their own skin. As the stranger howls out his rage and fear, she tries moving again. The pressure eases almost entirely, so she knows this is why she's here.
Looking over the edge of the roof, she sighs. "Seriously, this is not the time to be without magic."
If she's really, really fast, she can access that fire escape, but it'll take literally sliding down five stories on a downspout that looks like it's better days were before she was even born. Trusting the 'sheer dumb luck' that seems to cling to her in the apocalypse, Luna grips the downspout and eases her weight over the roof's ledge and prays Harry's idea of guardian angels exist.
Still stirred up by the noise and activity on the other side of the building, the dead are actually distracted enough that they don't notice her in time. She's two meters off the ground and climbing fast by the time they realize they let a meal escape like a squirrel climbing a tree.
"Things really have gone pear shaped on you, haven't they?" Luna says, giggling when the man nearly has a heart attack at her seeming to appear out of nowhere. All his focus was on the door, which seems to be ineptly chained somehow, so she simply walked up beside him.
"I don't know you, girlie, but I won't say no if you can get me out of these cuffs." The way he's blinking, she suspects he isn't entirely sure she's not a hallucination. That's okay by her, because she often sees things no one else does. She would wonder herself, if she were in his predicament.
Since whatever violence fueled him earlier seems to have faded, she kneels on the gritty surface of the roof and takes his wrist gently in both her hands. He's damaged the skin badly yanking on the metal, but she ignores that in favor of studying the lock. "On the telly, they always show hair grips being used to unlock these. Suppose we can give that a try."
The burly man doesn't object when she plucks one out of her hair. She's especially fond of the ones tucked in her braids today, with their sparkly fake gemstones that look like sapphires. The task proves easier than she actually thought, since she expected the stuff from the telly to be crap, actually. "There you go, free as a birdie."
"Hate to tell you, blondie, we ain't birdies to just fly away."
Luna sighs, because she knows that. "It would be rather nice, wouldn't it, if we could just hop off the roof and fly away. If we wait a bit, they'll get bored and wander off. Then we can just scamper down the fire escape I came up and walk away. Those people with you made it rather more complicated than it should be."
"None of them have the patience to wait it out." He rubs at his face, sniffing hard, but he accepts the water bottle she offers him from her backpack. "Just how old are you, girl?"
Aware that most people mistake her for being much, much younger than she actually is, Luna flashes him her most winsome smile. "Over thirty, not that you'll believe me."
He just shakes his head, concentrating on the water. She retrieves a jar of healing ointment from her pack, not bothering with anything to clean his wrist. It won't matter, not like muggle medicine. "Give me your wrist, please?"
Eyeing the jar in her hand, he shrugs and offers it. What she's about to do is a risk. It won't fix him completely, not like it would a wizard or even a squib, but it will help faster than anything he's ever seen. But her gift led her here, to him, so she is going to take the chance. Slathering a good smear of the ointment around his entire wrist, she watches his eyes widen as the torn and bleeding skin knits itself back together. It's a raw, delicate patch of new skin, one he can easily rip right back open over the next day or two until his body fully takes over the healing process.
"Part of me wants to say I'm higher than a damned kite and you're still a hallucination," he mutters, blue eyes narrowing as he looks from his wrist to her. "But I saw my great granny do similar. People called her a witch for it."
Luna smiles sadly. This man's family wouldn't be the first to have magic die out over time. The grandmother could have been a squib, too, since she knows a few who can manage basic potions that rely more on the ingredients' magic than the potioneer's. "She might have been one."
"What do I call you, witch girl?"
That makes her giggle. "Not that. My name is Luna."
"Merle." He surprises her by offering his hand. Good manners didn't strike her as his cup of tea, but she takes it and smiles.
"The blackbird and the moon. Sounds like a children's book," she muses. "Do you want to return to your people?"
Merle blinks a bit at her segway about the meaning of their names, but shakes his head. "Not really my people, but my baby brother is back at camp. Need to go shake him free of them."
"We'll go find him then."
"You got people, Moonchild?"
The question, innocent as it is, causes a wave of grief to crash through her. She doesn't, not really, not anymore. While a small percentage of the muggle world population seems to be immune to the deadly plague, it wiped out the wizarding population so swiftly she imagines there would have been disasters all over if the muggles weren't distracted by their own societies crumbling. When she fled London, Diagon Alley was fully exposed, all protections hiding it gone along with the people they protected from discovery.
She got sick herself, but Harry did something to save her. Luna still isn't sure what it was, but the ritual when magic was failing ended with her being hurled through the aether as bodiless as apparating or using a portkey, to appear in a refugee camp in an American state she never thought to visit again. Only instinct and her gift nearly splitting her head with the urgency led her to snatch the crying toddler from death.
That memory reminds her that she's not alone. "Yeah, but we have a three-year-old with us, so we can't both go out into the city."
"Well, my brother's a grown ass man. He can look after himself while you get back to your people. You don't gotta follow me around."
Luna tests out the idea of separating from the man and feels a headache beckon and fishes out her handkerchief for the resultant specks of blood. "That would be bad. I think we're supposed to stay together for now."
"You sick?" He sounds concerned, not scared, so she shakes her head.
"Fixing your wrist isn't the only thing I can do, but the other is a bit messed up."
"Can't have my savior wandering about having an episode like that to get eaten by dead shitheads. Assholes that left me would take in people with a kid. They're soft hearted like that."
She smiles a little. "Okay. We'll find my friend and her son and then we go. Easier anyway, since we have a car, right?"
Merle's booming laughter stirs up the dead blocked at the stairwell door, but Luna just grins as the pressure pops like a bubble on the wind, goal reached.
Paul frowns as Maggie picks through things in the pharmacy as if it was an everyday shopping trip. "This is stupid," he grumbles, twisting his hair up into a bun and securing it. The pharmacy is sweltering in the summer heat, and frankly, he's damned tired of coming into town every other day or so like the world still has cashiers and cops to patrol what supplies they take.
"Daddy says we can't take it all. What if other survivors need it?"
"Dammit, Maggie, when was the last time we saw someone that wasn't our own people? All this nitpicky rule of Dad's does is put us at risk every time we come out. Don't see him out here seeing what the world is really like."
His sister sighs. "He's grieving, Paul. He lost Mom and Shawn."
"So did we, Maggie! He won't even look at Beth anymore. It's bullshit."
Being adopted by the Greenes when he was nearly too old to consider it was one of the best things that ever happened to Paul after more than a decade in foster care. He wasn't even lucky enough to land in actual homes most of those years, getting regulated to group homes with even less care and attention than a couple paid to look after state wards. A chance encounter with itty bitty Beth Greene and the 'seizure' she had at the Atlanta Zoo changed his entire life. From what he knows of his youngest adopted sister's gift, it didn't just change his life, it saved it.
Watching her fold in on herself the longer their father sticks his head in the sand and insists that Annette and Shawn aren't actually dead is like having his heart carved right out of his chest.
"I know." Maggie still sticks to the strict rules laid down by Hershel, taking only the basics they need, even as Paul guards the door and watches her back. "But he isn't going to listen to us."
"And if those dead things get loose? What if one of them bites Beth? Or Patricia when she's feeding them?"
"I don't know!"
The stressed shout is clamped down by Maggie slapping a hand over her own mouth. She tears up and he feels like an asshole for making his sister cry. With a glance at the empty street, he leaves the door and goes to hug her tightly. "I'm sorry, Mags."
Maggie nods against his shoulder, and he tries to remember that she lost her best friend when Shawn died keeping Annette from devouring her own family. He and Beth hadn't been at the house when it happened, since he took his sister on a hunt with Rocky, trying to get her away from the oppressive atmosphere of the house. Hershel refused to believe Beth's vision predicted their mother's death, stubbornly arguing that the cannibalism on the news was drug related.
Even as Shawn fought to keep Annette away from Patricia and eventually got her in the barn, Maggie witnessed it, while Paul knelt in the woods beside a sobbing Beth. When he carried the exhausted girl back to the farm, he knew when he saw Otis sitting on the steps crying softly exactly what Beth saw and couldn't tell him for the tears. Shawn died, burning up with fever, seventeen hours after his mother.
Paul placed his brother's still human body in the barn at Hershel's orders, but he's regretted it ever since.
"We'll figure something out. Maybe Patricia won't tattle if I just take care of them? Lay them to rest?"
When Maggie moves away and wipes at her face, he knows she's considering it. "Do you think you could do it quietly and safely?"
"Yeah. I've been thinking on it for weeks now. Frog gig from the loft will work. I can reach their heads and never be in reach."
"Okay. When we get back, I'll suss out Patricia and make sure she'll keep quiet. We can set Bethie on Otis, because you know he'd set the damn barn on fire, Daddy's good opinion be damned, if she asked him to. He can just tell Daddy he isn't finding any new ones in the woods like you do."
Paul smiles sheepishly. "Realized I've been putting them down when he sends me hunting?"
"Yeah. So would Daddy if he got his head out of his ass, but we won't make it obvious." Maggie glares at the pharmacy shelf. "Is there still a display for those reusable shopping bags? I say we clear out everything we might need into those, and keep my bag for Daddy's shopping list only. We can hide it in the trunk."
Finally freed of his sister's insistence they follow Hershel's orders to the letter in town, he grins as he does as instructed. As he promised Beth, once they swayed Maggie to the right side of things, their lives will get better.
A/N: You may get double notices on this story if you have a subscription to my stories. FFnet went through a nasty glitch and wasn't letting the story exist... so I deleted it to see if it'll show up without being listed as a crossover.
Greene Farm AU (requested by Director Danvers):
Primary POVs: Beth, Paul, and Luna
Main Pairings: Beth/Carl, Paul/Glenn, Shane/Luna
Background Pairings: Daryl/Maggie, Morgan/Michonne
Background & Requests: Beth is the adopted daughter of Hershel and Annette Greene, placed with them by her birth mother, Luna Lovegood, and hidden by a spell that even prevents Luna from finding her easily because her life is in danger if she stays in the Wizarding World. Her magic manifests as psychic visions as a small girl, activated by touch if someone is facing deadly peril within a factor of three (3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months). One of her visions saves a teenage Paul Rovia, leading to his adoption by the Greene family. Meanwhile, with the Wizarding World dead, Luna is propelled by Harry's last desperate ritual to find their daughter, a sacrifice eerily similar to Lily Potter's.
Consider Luna's spell a variant of the Fidelius Charm in HP. Hershel knows Beth is adopted, because he's the Secret Keeper, but Luna and Harry only have the bare minimum of it - that their daughter is alive and safe somewhere. Magic is wonky and nearly gone, with only inborn talents like those of a Seer still usable (Note: avoiding the overpowered fix-it issues of Magic in the ZA) and plant based magics. Luna will be the only HP character.
Beth & Sophia try to find the highway, but it's the wrong one. They find Morgan and Duane instead. Luna, Merle, Michonne, & Andre follow Luna's malfunctioning Seer power to converge on Rick, Shane, and Randall when Shane is trapped in the bus. No CDC. Amy, Jacqui, and Jim survive the quarry attack because Rick's group doesn't encounter the Vatos and is back in time. Beth, Sophia, Carl, and Duane are all 14-15. Luna is 31, Maggie 29, and Paul 22. Carl still gets shot. No Shane/Lori affair. Lori pregnant with Judith pre-ZA.