AN: I finally got a moment to type this up today!

There's an AN at the end for anyone who is concerned about my stories (and the status of those stories).

There's a short time jump here. It's all going to come out in the wash, so to speak, but we're moving on in the story. There is still much to come.

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

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"How would you feel if your daughter were taken away?"

The woman asked the question as nonchalantly as she asked any other question. She asked it over and over again. During every visit, Carol was forced to answer the same question. She couldn't be sure, but she felt like there was less emotion behind the question each time it was asked. At this point, Carol couldn't imagine that anyone could even ask her how she liked her eggs with less inflection in their voice.

Carol didn't want to believe that the woman dubbed "Hurricane Maggie" could be so cold by nature, but it was also hard to believe that even working for their government for so long could rob someone of their emotions. Unfortunately, the only other possible explanation wasn't a pleasant one. The only other possible explanation required Carol to believe that enough horrible things had happened to the woman in front of her that they'd finally just stripped away her feelings. Given what Carol knew that she and the other prisoners she'd met had experienced—all of them still being in possession of their compassion—she shuddered to imagine what the horrors might look like that finally took that emotion away.

"I would probably feel the same way I felt the last time she was taken from me," Carol said. She did her best to keep her tone even. She didn't want to give away too much of her emotions. She'd cried for the question a few times. She'd been angry for it once or twice. Now she was practicing pretending that it had no effect on her at all.

It wasn't true.

"And how was that?" Maggie asked, scribbling on her pad. She looked like she was taking notes, but Carol imagined that she was simply doodling in the margins of the paper.

"Heartbroken," Carol said bluntly. She felt Daryl squeeze her hand. These conversations with Maggie were frequent enough these days that she was becoming something of a normal figure in their lives, but that didn't mean that they were ever easy conversations to have.

Daryl usually seemed to handle the meetings even worse than Carol, and he almost always needed time to recover after an "interview," but he was at least doing pretty well at maintaining his composure while they were being observed.

These interviews, they'd been told, were an important part of the project and everyone was subjected to hours and hours spent talking to both Melodye and Maggie. Carol assumed that the two women compared notes somewhere or, at the very least, they both sent their reports to whomever it was that was concerned with their answers to the obnoxiously repeated questions.

When the interviews had started, they made Carol a great deal more nervous than they did now. Now, every now and again, she felt the strange prickle where a question struck a nerve like it had in the beginning, but for the most part she'd started to numb to the repetition. She could almost conduct the interviews alone. It hadn't taken her long to learn the basic questions that were repeated throughout the conversations.

"Is it fair for me to ask you a question?" Daryl asked, shifting around on their couch. There was no malice in his voice and his tone was even. For the moment, the questions weren't even really getting to him.

He still held Carol's hand in his, though. He seldom released it during these conversations.

"I'm not the one being analyzed," Maggie responded. "But if you feel so inclined..."

Daryl seized his opportunity.

"How would you feel takin' our daughter away from us?" Daryl asked.

"I beg your pardon?" Maggie asked.

"You keep askin' us—day after day after day—to imagine how we'd feel if you were to come in here an' snatch Sophia right outta our home. You ask—and I notice you get more and more detailed about when and how it would happen as they're growin' more—you ask how we'd feel if our babies was taken and we never so much as got the chance to see 'em. What I want to know, then, is how the hell you would feel if it was you that was doin' the takin' them away?"

Maggie looked shocked and Carol had to admit that she was surprised as well. Carol squeezed Daryl's hand in hers to ground him. She wanted to remind him that this wasn't Melodye and they had to be careful. Maggie had been assigned Milton-selected-and-approved guards—and therefore the men wouldn't attack them unless they were truly sure there was a threat—but that didn't mean that Maggie wouldn't file some kind of report against them that would land them on a bus that never came back to Woodbury and, more than likely, never made it anywhere else either.

Daryl was frustrated, and perhaps he was even a little heartbroken at the idea of losing any piece of their family, but he hadn't been threatening or violent toward Maggie in the least.

Daryl simply wanted to know something that Carol also wanted to know—something that all of them had discussed from time to time when they were given the freedom and the privacy to do so. They wanted to know what these people felt—if they felt anything at all.

Were they really that different? Were the hypothetical non-Wilds so different that they could rip apart families without so much as another thought? Were they all that way or were there simply some of them that were hired to carry out the dirty work of those who thought of the cruel ways to treat others? Were some of them simply victims of circumstance?

Could Hurricane Maggie, herself, take Carol's children away by force? And, if she did, could she live with herself afterward?

They were bubbling over with questions that never got answered. They were all aching to ask questions that most of them never dared to present to anyone like Maggie. Daryl wasn't threatening the woman at all. He simply wanted to know. He wanted to understand.

"I don't have to answer anything you ask me," Maggie reminded him.

Daryl nodded his understanding.

"You don't have to," Daryl agreed. "But I was hoping you would. I always thought you could understand others better if you knowed how they felt. What was goin' on, ya know? In their heads. It's clear to me that you have to feel the same way. Otherwise, I don't think you'd come in here askin' us questions like you ask and wantin' to have the conversations that we have. But—I believe that understanding—well, it's gotta work both ways. It ought to, at least. So I just wanna know how you might feel if it was you that took our daughter away from us."

Maggie stared at him, let her eyes drift to Carol, and then settled them back on Daryl. She nodded her head and sat forward.

"I—I wouldn't be the one that actually did it," Maggie said. "But I don't think I would feel anything in particular."

"Just doing your job?" Carol asked, her voice catching a little in her throat now that the whole thing seemed a little more real and concrete than it had only moments before.

Maggie nodded her head.

"Just doing what needed to be done," Maggie said. "What was best for the children. Being removed from wild parents would give them the opportunity to be raised as people."

"Raised as people by people like the ones who locked my daughter in a room. Like the ones who returned her as defective to be sent to other people. The development of all the children that we've had returned to us clearly shows that they haven't flourished under the care of their new parents," Carol offered. "They haven't been given what they've needed to thrive. They've barely survived."

"Many of them were born wild," Maggie said. "At the very least, they became wild. Once wild—always wild."

"You believe that," Carol said, swallowing. She wasn't sure, herself, if she meant it as a question or a statement. Maggie half-nodded in response.

"I try not to bring my personal beliefs into it very often," Maggie said. "But—yes. I believe that. The virus doesn't ever go away. It's always there. The physical changes are always there."

"Then why take the kids at all?" Daryl asked. "If it's so damned hopeless and they just end up bein' doomed to be wild forever, why take 'em at all?"

"Nature vs. nurture," Carol supplied. Maggie neither verbally denied nor confirmed what Carol said, but Carol felt that her silence confirmed it. "But you don't believe in that, either."

Maggie cleared her throat.

"My job is to do what's asked of me," Maggie said. "I work for the government. Everyone does. I do my job—whether or not I'm always in agreement with every decision that's made. Woodbury is the first active community geared toward the total rehabilitation of Wilds and their reintroduction into society. It has a secondary focus on repopulation and a tertiary focus on scientific and medical research. I am a doctor, so of course I support the idea of advancement. My personal beliefs and feelings, therefore, aren't important when I come to work. It isn't my job to report on whether or not I believe that you have the potential to be rehabilitated. It's my job to simply report the status of your reactions to your surroundings and the happenings in your life—whatever those may be."

"You don't think your beliefs might influence that?" Daryl asked. "Your reports on what we say an' do? Whether or not you think we're gettin' rehabilitated or whatever?"

Maggie stared at him and a hint of a smile slipped across her lips.

"If my personal beliefs changed my recommendations," Maggie offered, "then I would have recommended the project be shut down months ago and the entire population be sterilized or exterminated—whichever the government preferred. I haven't recommended that, though, and—well, as you can see—I haven't even recorded this conversation. I'm leaving my personal beliefs out of my professional reports."

"But you don't believe in the project?" Carol asked.

Maggie shrugged her shoulders.

"Maybe I'm hoping it will change my mind."

Carol wasn't sure whether or not she sincerely meant what she said. She ventured another question seeking more information.

"But—you don't believe that it will?" Carol pressed.

Maggie visibly swallowed. She nodded her head, but it didn't feel like she was agreeing with Carol. Her eyes had dropped to focus on the coffee table and it looked almost like she was agreeing with some quiet suggestion that the table had made.

"I once believed that anyone could come back. I believed that there was hope for anyone. I believed that—despite this virus? Despite the changes? I believed that people were still who they were. They were who we knew them to be. They retained, deep down inside themselves, some trace of who they were. I even believed that the Dead weren't quite dead. I believed they could be cured. Certainly, back then, I would have believed that the Wilds could be brought back." She laughed to herself, but Carol felt a shiver at the sound. There was no humor behind it. "I believed that we had the power to do that." Maggie shook her head at Carol, then. "Personal belief doesn't mean much. It's really only science that matters in the end."

"But it's got to be true science," Daryl offered. "Tested. A lot. Not just one opinion based on one subject. It's gotta be true and based on fact if you're gonna call it science."

"And for that, we have experiments," Maggie said. "Projects. Whatever name suits your tastes."

Carol squeezed Daryl's hand in hers and he returned the gesture as he nodded at Maggie. She sat back in her chair, crossed her leg over the other once more, and picked up her pencil to, theoretically, doodle in the corner of her pad. Her face lost any of the expression that it had taken on while they'd been talking.

"How would you feel if your daughter were taken away?" Maggie asked.

"Devastated," Daryl said. "Like somebody was tearin' pieces off of me. Offa both of us. Angry—because I'd know there wasn't nothin' I could do about it. Nothin' y'all would let me do about it."

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AN: I received a guest review about this story and I wanted to address it for that person and anyone else who is concerned about the status of this story (or any other that I have). I appreciate their reminding me that I hadn't had the chance to update everyone here and I thank them for getting me thinking about a few things that I wanted to say.

This one is a little long, but you should expect that from me by now. LOL

I have not stopped writing the story and I have not disappeared. I promise. In the past three or so months, I've had a great deal going on in my real life. I am in the process of changing jobs which meant a great deal had to be finished with my last job and prepared for my new one (still in process). I've had training to do and more to accomplish. I've moved twice (once across the country). I have a family as well, and sometimes I have responsibilities with them. During most of the past three months, I've had no more internet than that which is on my phone. I write whenever I can, but I simply cannot write as much as I would like. It's also very difficult to mass update everyone when I have nothing to offer as far as a chapter goes.

I am very sorry for making everyone wait. I appreciate those of you who read and I appreciate that you're willing to be patient with me. Without readers, I wouldn't bother putting anything out there, so you mean so very much to me!

Sometimes, though, I do get stuck (like most writers) and this made me want to address that. There are a lot of stories that never get finished (as the review suggested). This is absolutely the truth. The number one reason that I've seen writers mention as the reason that they don't finish is that they feel like people don't care. They feel like the story doesn't matter, so why keep writing? We all know the "write for yourself" thing, and most of us do write for ourselves. The "write for yourself" thing is also the reason that I have about six large folders and three 3-inch binders full of writing that will likely never see the light of day. We share what we share to connect with others.

I say this to simply say that if you love a story, please do try to let the author know. Let them know that you're reading. If they publish chapters in a long fic, they need to be reminded (often) that you're there. If they know you read the first chapter, but never heard from you again, it's easy to believe that you didn't like anything after that and their story took a horrible turn somewhere. It's easy to believe that nobody likes the story. And if nobody likes it...you get the idea. If you like something and you want to see more of it, let the author know. I'm not just saying this for me. I'm saying it for every fanfic author that you read. Just a quick comment saying "reading" or "thanks" will do, but the more you say, the more they'll probably feel motivated to write. It likely takes them hours (this chapter, already knowing what I would write, took me about five hours to complete) to produce content. The only payment they get comes in the reviews and comments of readers. A nice review can make my day, get me out of a rut, etc. Don't underestimate the power of kindness and a few minutes of your time.

If you love a story and it's been stuck for a while, drop the author a note. Remind them that you like the story. Maybe ask if it's stuck. Most of us love interacting with other people and we don't mind that kind of thing. Very often it's been a kind nudge that's got me going. If you really love the story, offer to be a sounding board so they can bounce ideas off of you. Maybe you'll get a stuck story moving again and you'll get back something you liked just by chatting about it. (I've got a few of mine stuck. It happens. If you think you can help, I'd certainly appreciate the help and I am sure other authors would love that as well. Talking about it really does help sometimes. (Hit me up if you want to get "In A Good Way," "The Little Things," or even "Grass Roots" back on the rails and moving again, LOL.)

I truly appreciate hearing from all of you. And I appreciate the guest reviewer for reminding me that I hadn't updated everyone on this story as to my current life status. And I don't mean to be too long winded (and bore you all to tears), but I'm saying all this for any author out there, especially in a time when the show isn't offering too much inspiration to anyone. If you love (or like, or even want to read more) of a story, please take time to let the author know if it's at all possible. If you feel like something is stuck, reach out. You may not always get the response you want (that's true for anything), but you might do something really kind for someone else and, in the process, get something that you'd like too.

At any rate, I thank you for reading this and all my stories. Without you, I really wouldn't have any reason to be here. Your comments mean the world to me and I greatly appreciate your patience as I struggle with making my life somewhat predictable again. I hope I'll be back soon with much more of this story (because it is one of my favorites).