AN: Here we go, another chapter here.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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Alice had sent Carol to get Daryl and anyone else that she could grab to help her get Andrea down to the clinic without forcing her to put any pressure on her foot which, as Alice described it, was apparently pretty badly cut and bleeding more than Alice was comfortable with allowing it to do for an extended period of time. Daryl had insisted that they didn't need anyone else and he had been right. He'd simply gone to the house, hoisted Andrea up himself, and carried her the decent distance to the clinic without the help of anyone beyond opening and closing doors for him. He'd also stayed long enough to hold her leg, apologizing to her for any discomfort that he might be causing, so that Alice could put stitches in that would close the wound. He'd left immediately after Alice finished bandaging the wound because he didn't want to be involved in anything else that was taking place. Nobody had pressed him to stay. Carol, though, remained close by in case Alice needed help with anything.

Andrea was clearly in shock. Carol didn't know if it was owing to the cut or if it was owing to the events that had led to the cut, but the shock was obvious even to her. Andrea was shaking almost violently and most of what she was saying wasn't making a world of sense, but she kept saying it anyway. Her favorite lines were stuck on repeat, almost, and Carol's only way to respond to the whole thing was to keep asking Alice to explain to her what had happened, even if she wasn't getting an explanation right away.

"You can't tell them what happened," Andrea insisted. "You can't. You can't tell them what happened. You can't."

The words rolled around and around and Alice had simply ignored them while working on Andrea's foot. Now that it was bandaged, though, and no longer actively bleeding, Alice walked around and caught Andrea's hands in hers.

"Look at me!" Alice yelled in Andrea's face. The loudness of her voice seemed to catch Andrea's attention, even if "can't" kept coming out of her mouth. "You have to breathe with me, OK? Breathe with me and then we'll talk. Breathe. Inhale. Hold it. Exhale. Inhale. Not through your mouth, that just makes you panic. Through your nose. Good. Exhale."

"What happened?" Carol asked for what felt like the twentieth time.

Alice ignored her, though, to keep Andrea focusing on her breathing. She gave her the command to keep going as she was, continuously taking in and releasing oxygen, and Alice gathered a few things to start cleaning the minor scrapes and cuts that both women had sustained on their faces and other body parts. It was only then that she apparently felt she could divide her attention enough to tell Carol what the commotion had been about.

"Margaret Greene happened," Alice said. "Hurricane Maggie. And if anybody says I didn't see this coming then they're a liar. I've been saying this was the kind of thing that was going to happen since I found out they picked her up for the job instead of Melodye—my partner."

"What job?" Michonne asked, breaking her momentary practice of coaching a now calming Andrea.

"She's a therapist," Alice said. "At least theoretically that's what she is. All of you have to be evaluated mentally and several times over. The government demands it even outside the constraints of the project. If you're going to be considered completely tame—truly not Wild—then you're going to have to be evaluated by a professional. That's not the problem, though. It's the professional that they chose that's the problem."

"It sounds like you two have some history," Michonne said.

"I guess you could say that," Alice said. "It boils down to this...once upon a time, those of us who were in safe zones didn't know what the hell to do about the world around us because none of us understood a damn thing. At that time, the Walkers were the greatest threat out there."

"Walkers?" Carol interrupted.

"Dead people walking," Alice said. "So what do we do about them? They ranged from your uncle Steve to that nice lady that sold frozen yogurt down the street. Didn't seem right to kill them, but it seemed like there wasn't much of an option. So how the hell do we handle the threat? I mean—the government was wiping them out, of course, but there was this whole huge debate about it. That's when I met Maggie for the first time. My first job after the turn was working in a lab—it was pretty much the job that all of us had if we had medical degrees of any kind. We determined that the Walkers were, in fact, dead. So—you couldn't really kill them, if you catch my drift, because they were already dead. I rallied for respectful disposal of the bodies, but I was on board with the fact that something had to be done about them. It was the only way. If they weren't put down, more people were going to keep dying."

"I think everyone knew that," Carol pointed out. "I mean, it certainly didn't take us long to figure it out."

"It took some people longer than others," Alice said. "Maggie was an activist for the Rights of the Dead."

"The what?" Carol asked.

Alice ignored her again, though, and went back to Andrea. The woman could switch gears quicker than anyone that Carol had ever met in her life. When she was focused on something, especially something she deemed serious, she was entirely focused on it. Everything else would have to wait.

"Hey, hey," Alice said to Andrea, squeezing her hands. "Welcome back. Your hands aren't shaking as bad anymore. How are you feeling?"

"You can't tell them about this," Andrea said. Alice laughed quietly, but she didn't let go of Andrea's hands.

"So you've been telling me," Alice said. "Milton has to know what happened, OK? He's got to know that you were attacked, in his home, and you were brutalized. It's important that he know about what you experienced. What you both experienced. And besides, the injuries are going to give it away."

"You can't," Andrea repeated.

"Then tell me why I can't," Alice said. "Go ahead. Convince me that this is a bad idea."

"If they think I had a weapon," Andrea explained, "then they'll think I'm violent. You said yourself that violence is going to make them take the baby. You can't tell them because—they can't think I was being violent."

Alice laughed again and shook her head.

"I saw that house. They're cleaning it right now. There aren't any weapons in that house. You didn't have any weapons. They don't even let you have steak knives for longer than it takes you to eat a meal and then they count them when they take them back. You had a large glass bottle of fruit juice. If it was a weapon, it wasn't a very good one. You're the only one it hurt. So—and I want you to listen to me—they aren't going to take your baby for this. You are the victim."

Carol spoke up then because she thought that she could answer for the somewhat unsure expression on Andrea's face. She understood it.

"We haven't been victims for a long time," Carol said. "No matter what, it's always been our fault. Everything that's happened to us. Everything in prison that happened. It was always our fault. If a guard—had a bad day and slammed you into a wall? If your nose got broken in the process? You got a flag for it or went to taming because you shouldn't have pushed the guard to that point by simply walking by him to go to the bathroom."

"That's the problem," Alice said. "You've always been the victims. Since this whole damn war against the Wilds started, you've been the victims. And you've been played as the bad guys. It stops here. It stops with Wave Thirty Three." She directed her words at Andrea then. "You were in your home and you were having the breakfast that I told you to have before your appointment. A scared little woman with some gun shy guards broke in on you and attacked you because of their fear. A fear that's just as irrational as a fear of the damn dark when there's nothing hiding in the shadows. You two were the third and fourth people those same guards attacked today. You don't have to pay for this. You're already paying for it as much as you're going to. And I'm going to take care of your foot and we're going to check on the baby, OK? You—and Michonne? You're not the bad guys. And you're not getting painted that way. Can we look at the baby?"

Andrea seemed a little calmer and she nodded her acceptance of Alice's words and her suggestion to check on the baby. Carol moved over near Michonne, curious to see the ultrasound for herself, and waited while Alice walked Andrea through her examination of her—constantly assuring her that everything was just as wonderful as it could be—that she had to succumb to before she got the prize of laying her eyes on the baby for the first time.

Carol had ultrasounds while she was pregnant with Sophia and she remembered them well. They had been wonderful to her—moments when she felt she could connect with the baby that sometimes felt foreign to her even though they inhabited the same body—and she was eagerly waiting for when it would be time to see the baby that she was carrying. Watching Andrea experience it, for the first time, brought a lump to Carol's throat and she was glad that Alice didn't rush her. She was glad that Alice took the time, even as she jotted down information for herself, to make it a real experience for Andrea. For the moment, the accident of the morning almost didn't matter and Michonne and Carol could have disappeared out of the room entirely.

Carol listened to Alice's running narrative while Andrea simply watched, staring at the screen like she was afraid to blink.

"OK, so there's baby. See that? There's an arm and...wait, this angle is better. There's two arms. And down here? Those are two legs. Right there's one and there's the other. So we got four limbs and that's the head. There's the heart. It's beating, so we like that. And—I'm just going to take it away for a minute and get a few measurements. That's your—there's your cervix. So this is you right now. That's your cervix and it measures...that's perfect. One ovary. Looks like it should. There's the other. See that? That spot? Tells me that's where the egg came from. This ovary won. Now—back to the little one. Did you see the movement? Wait—that's you. Relax. That's you causing that movement. There we go. There's the baby. See it wiggling around? Active."

"Is he OK?" Michonne asked. "I mean—he didn't get hurt?"

"He looks fine," Alice assured her. "I mean—I'm not sure he's a "he," but it's as good a guess as any right now. Nothing looks troubling. I'm still going to prescribe a little rest and down time for Mama, but that's as much for that cut to close up well as it is for anything else. It can't hurt to take a little down time."

"But he's OK?" Andrea asked.

Alice smiled at her and nodded her head.

"He's OK," she said. "He's dancing. See? Moving around. You'll feel that soon. He got a good dose of adrenaline, probably, but he's fine. And in a second? When he stops wiggling quite so much, I'm going to get you a picture of him. This angle is good? Where you can see—there's the little arms and legs. They're cute, right?"

Andrea nodded at her and Carol could understand why she was avoiding speaking too much at the moment.

"Can I hear...?" Andrea asked.

"We're listening to the heartbeat," Alice said. "Just—let me get this picture. And that'll print in a minute. And now—there you go. That's the heartbeat."

Carol listened to it and the sound took her back to when she'd heard Sophia's for the first time. Even seeing the images that didn't really look like she'd expected hadn't connected her to her daughter quite the way hearing her little heart beat for the first time had. She'd worried that it was too fast, but she'd been assured that it was just the right speed. Alice, too, assured Andrea that the heartbeat was perfectly in the range that she was hoping for.

"We'll let your picture finish printing," Alice said, when it was all said and done, "and then I'll go get Daryl to help you back to the house. OK? You can get dressed—at least in what you have with you."

Andrea hadn't ever had the chance to change out of the nightgown that she'd been wearing. It was barely more than an oversized shirt, something similar had been issued to all of them, and putting it back on and working her way back into her underwear with Michonne's assistance was about the best that she could do.

"If this Maggie woman was—an activist for Dead rights," Andrea said, "then why would she attack us like that? Or ask her guards to attack?"

Alice groaned.

"She was an activist for the Dead until it bit her in the ass," Alice said. "She was a home-grown country girl. She and her family lived out on this farm and they didn't even leave it to go to the safe zones. They showed up, reported in so they weren't tagged as Wild, but they didn't ever leave the farm. Once it was issued that the Dead needed to all be put down and disposed of, she started rallying for rights. She believed they were still people, essentially, and that they wouldn't be animated otherwise. They were just changed. They needed some kind of medical help. She was all over the news and everything else. Someone got the story that she had a whole barn full of Walkers on her property and, well, everything just sort of blew up. The government sent some officials out there and served her a notice. She didn't comply with it and they came back to inspect the barn. When they broke into the barn, the Walkers got out. They started to put them all down and Maggie and her family tried to stop them. During the whole—thing—that happened next, one of the Walkers killed Maggie's little sister. Her mother, to be more specific, killed her little sister. Maggie snapped after that. She changed entirely. She rallied, then, for the eradication of the Dead."

"And the living too, apparently," Michonne pointed out.

Alice somewhat shook her head, but she wasn't committed to the action.

"I lost touch with Maggie," she said. "I never was close to her, but we knew each other. We had a few disagreements following her change. I may not have agreed with what she stood for, but I liked how she stood for what she believed in. When the studies started coming out about—about the Wilds? I got involved in some sectors. Maggie did too. Our beliefs didn't line up and we didn't—we really didn't have anything to say to one another. She's government employed, and she got the job with the project, but I can't support her presence here. This is supposed to be a place that's safe for you. It's supposed to be geared toward getting you full rights. I don't know—because I didn't keep up with her—what turned her against Wilds, but I know that she's gun shy around them. I know that she's firmly a believer in the once wild, always wild camp. I just don't know if that's the kind of person that we need working on this project."

"Why let her stay, then?" Carol asked.

"It's her job," Alice responded. "But—I'm hoping that Milton is as mad about this as I think he's going to be. If he is? There's a good chance she gets fired. If not fired, she'll at least get reprimanded strongly enough that she's going to have to do some changing again. One way or another, her guards are going to be different. They're going to be reassigned and she's going to get some that are sympathetic to the project. I promise you that."

Carol glanced at Andrea and Michonne. Both of them had similar expressions of concern on their faces. Carol felt that concern too. If they had to be evaluated, and they had to pass some kind of psychiatric test, it wasn't going to be pleasant if the person evaluating them had already decided that they were going to fail.

Alice must have been able to read her thoughts, too, because she shook her head at her and pointed at all of them, gliding her finger through the air.

"That's not for you to worry about," Alice said. "None of it is. You just keep doing what you're doing. The project is still young and we're still working out the kinks. Maggie's nothing more than a kink. You've got your jobs. You know what you've got to do. Let the rest of us worry about the other stuff. Stress isn't good for mothers or babies—and right now that's your main concern. Hurricane Maggie is off your radar right now."