Somewhere in the darkness came the sense of snapping teeth and clawing fingers, the sound of a crossbow bolt whizzing through the air. A voice, shouting, too indistinct to register the words but the tone urgent, hasty. Chain link rattling against metal support posts. The hum of a vehicle's engine as tires sped across hot pavement. And then a sensation of relief, of sanctuary, and the flash of something that wasn't white, wasn't black, and wasn't grey - a color that Rick couldn't quite identify - before it all slipped away.

– – –

Somewhere in the darkness - a different darkness, though: lighter somehow, less like the interminably deep black of wherever he'd been and more like the inscrutable closed-eyelid sensation of colors just outside the visible spectrum - Rick started to wake up.

Somewhere in the darkness, too, he felt the pinch of bungee cords wrapped around his wrists, both arms held immobile just out to the sides of his head. He kept his eyes closed, hand moving quickly, quietly, trying to figure out where he was and what he was lashed to; in the end, his hand wrapped around the smooth wood of a banister on either side at about the same time as he registered the give of something soft beneath him.

A bed, then. He was tied to a bed.

And, judging by the rustling of movement somewhere in the room, someone else was in the room.

It was instinct to open his eyes, but he rebelled, staying in the not-so comforting darkness in a spur-of-the-moment attempt at espionage. Hands-that-weren't-his fiddled with the bandage around his waist, followed by the sound of scissors rasping as they snipped through gauze, and it was only then that he realized the bandage had changed; the long, narrow belt of bandage around his waist had been replaced by the catch of tape sticking to his skin.

His hospital gown was still present, as were the papery hospital shorts, which Rick only noticed as the hands withdrew again, and for which he was very, very grateful. Footsteps strode heavily across the floor, and the sparkling patter of water splashing against itself filled the air. "I know you're awake." His voice was deep, about as heavily Southern as anyone's around there, and utterly unsurprised. "Got that bandage changed. It was pretty rank. What was it? The wound?"

Rick let his eyes flick open, relishing in his newfound situational awareness even as he regretted that the stranger had known he'd been awake; clearly, Rick would not have made as good a spy as he'd fancied in all of his James-Bond-Jason-Bourne fantasies. "Gunshot. Who the h-"

The stranger - and really, what was it that kept getting Rick stuck around people he didn't know, people he didn't trust? - didn't let him finish. "Gunshot? What else? Anything?" He stood to one side of the bed, eying Rick warily but with an air of patient evaluation that made Rick, oddly, less worried about the guy who'd kinda, sorta kidnapped him at shovel's edge. It helped that he stayed unmoving, quiet and still aside from passing a towel around his dripping hands.

Maybe it was stupid - okay, it was definitely stupid, since he was still tied to the man's bed, and a relatively easy target on top of that - but the man's interruptions and cryptic non-answers were frustrating, and waking up bound into place when he had no sense of what was going on was hardly a way to make him especially friendly. "Gunshot ain't enough?"

He kind of regretted the snark as the man walked closer, hovering over the bed and pointing. It wasn't innately threatening, but Rick couldn't move and he was injured and he had to get out, to get to LoriCarl, LoriCarl, LoriCarl before (if the craziness of his vision had been seen properly) Daryl got back and Merle lost any reason to not rob the place, so it was bad enough that Rick very much didn't like it. "Look, I ask and you answer. It's common courtesy, right?" Grudgingly, Rick nodded slight acceptance, but the man leaned down further. "Did. You get. Bit?"

Rick blinked, and flashes of memory or vision or something flitted through his head. Teeth snapping in the darkness. Disease in a hospital courtyard. That nurse inside, torn apart, almost as if they'd… as if they'd been eaten. "Bit." If he didn't know what he thought he knew, it might have been a question; as it was, it was too flat to be one, too quiet. "Is that… is that how it's spread? Bites? The… the disease, or whatever is going on?"

The man narrowed his eyes at him, but nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, if you were bit, or chewed. Hell, maybe even scratched; no one knows." A pause, then, "So, I'm gonna ask again, and you better have an answer for me; you been bit?"

He'd answered Rick's question, so Rick went ahead and answered his: "No. I got shot." Another squint of the man's eyes, like someone who absolutely shouldn't get tested, not on that, and Rick elaborated. "Just shot. Far as I know."

He found himself flinching backwards before he - at least on an intellectual level - registered the man's hand reaching out towards him. He looked oddly patient at that, though, simply pulling back his hand slightly and saying, "Hey, just let me. Ain't gonna hurt you; just gotta check for a fever." Another moment of tense hovering and he added, "Just gotta check, that's it."

Perhaps it was the man's patient, more-paternal-than-didactic-but-close attitude. Maybe it was the fact that he hadn't had to bring Rick inside, hadn't had to tell him anything, hadn't had to rebandage his wound and fix him up. Maybe it was the fact that he didn't have to pause and wait for Rick's consent to have his temperature checked since he was basically immobilized there, a butterfly pinned to a piece of cardboard in a display case.

Whatever it was, Rick did end up allowing the motion, the stranger's cool hand settling against Rick's forehead the way Lori had so often done with Carl's. He wondered if the man were a father, recognizing the familiar positioning of the hand, like something that had been done so many times it was simply second nature. Either way, the man simply nodded once, eyes somewhere in a corner that Rick couldn't see. "Feels cooler. Fever woulda killed you by now."

There was something haunted in his eyes when he said it, but Rick couldn't figure out why, not with how little he knew. Instead, he simply shook his head once, perfunctorily. "I don't think I have one."

The stranger shifted backwards. "Be hard to miss." Another glance into that corner and then he was reaching to his waste, pulling something from his waist in a glint of light on metal. It opened with a click, and Rick was pushing away from it and back into the bed as soon as he registered it. A swift jerk at the bungees yielded no results, but he did it anyway, ignoring the dull ache it started in his wrist, trying to avoid the weapon hovering in front of his face with too-sharp edge. And that was the point, apparently. "Take a moment. Look how sharp that is." The knife brought closer again, Rick's motion backwards being even less effective as the thing sat, suspended, over one eye. "Try anything… I will kill you with it, and don't you think I won't."

Rick couldn't help half-wondering whether the stranger were going to kill him anyway. The knife continued to hover over his face, after all, pivoted back and forth with gentle rotations of the man's wrist, and its glistening danger sent light playing out onto his face… but, instead, the blade was simply pressed flat against the skin of his arm and twisted, a sharp snap accompanying the bungee flying free. (Waste of a bungee, he couldn't help but think.) The same motion repeated a couple feet over and both hands fell, flopping against the pillow. Another shift, another snap, and the legs that he hadn't quite processed were tied down suddenly… weren't.

He made it halfway through rubbing the feeling back into pinched wrists before processing that he'd just ended up trusting who was simultaneously a stranger and also, in essence, his kidnapper, without introduction and, even, without figuring out what the hell was so important about that one, mysterious corner. By the time he finally looked back, the stranger was already standing there, halfway through walking out through the door.

Any chance that Rick might have ignored the knife-conveyed threat and tried something anyway vanished out the window when he registered the boy standing in the corner.

The kid shared enough of a familial resemblance to the man at his side that Rick was reasonably certain they were related; a thought back to the way the stranger had checked his temperature, to the way Rick had wondered if he were a father, and he found himself reasonably certain that his newfound hosts - whether voluntarily or compulsorily had yet to be determined - were father and son.

And yet, trusting someone enough to not attack them even after they'd stepped into the role of kidnapper was one thing; trusting them completely, implicitly, and without fail despite not yet getting even a name from them was something else entirely. He shifted, trying and failing to prop himself up. "Who are you?"

A squint from the father, a nervous glance from the son, and then the former was asking, "What's it to you?"

Rick tried to raise his eyebrows in challenge, but suspected it fell a bit flat. Hell, he fell a bit flat, since his arm shot through with pins and needles enough that he let himself sink back into the pillows again. "Just tryin' to become acquainted with the owner of that shovel." He tried to smile, too, but it didn't work either. "Don't mean anything by it." A pause, with still no answer. "Doesn't seem like a name's gonna do too much, not these days."

The kid looked a little abashed at that, and Rick couldn't tell if it were because of Rick's statement or because of the look his father was giving him. Either way, he spoke before his dad could. "Sorry, mister."

His father nodded. "He gets a little excited…" He paused, eyes narrowed towards Rick in what could only be assessment, then nodded once and finished the sentence. "...at times, Duane does."

"I imagine that's a good thing, these days." Rick managed to strengthen his smile a touch, directing it at the kid. "Don't worry about it, kid. Er, sorry: Duane." A few more twists of his hand around his wrist and the dull ache started to fade; he even managed to sit upright, then, and to hold out one hand despite it shaking lightly. "Rick. Grimes."

Another minute of calculation, then: "Morgan Jones." Then, he was shuffling Duane out the door with a casual "Come out when you're able." tossed over his shoulder.