A/N: If you haven't read Chapter 119 of RBM, you probably should. I will be alternating the final chapters of RBM with a counterpart chapter that reintroduces the POV in ISO. All of the "Calm Before the Storm" chapters should be considered prequels to Chapter One and Negan's capture of our heroine.
May 24, 2017
- Merle -
At fifty-three, Merle realizes what most men who build or purchase large homes realize: they're too damned big once most of your children are grown.
The sense of an increasingly empty nest was offset for a while by hosting other families close, but that frittered away much the same as the house gradually emptied of Merle's own older children. Hershel left to live with Lenore on the Eldridge farm. Beth stayed for a year longer, at least as her official residence, but as soon as her veterinary training ended, she married her young man and took over a house on Tybee to serve as the veterinarian for the coast.
He honestly thought Patricia might permanently live with him and Carol, but as her fosterlings reached sixteen and left for apprenticeships one by one, she surprised most of Homestead by starting to date again. She married Morgan Jones six months later and moved down to the Expansion with little Matty and her new husband, overseeing the cafe style community kitchens originally set up for the Woodbury refugees.
As Carol predicted, Jazz never moved back to Georgia, choosing to serve as the veterinarian at large for the Virginia communities. Surprising exactly no one, Honey lasted less than six months in Georgia after her brother moved north. Sophia and Logan both took their apprenticeships at Hilltop, and whether Logan will return to Homestead when his ends next year is anyone's guess. Sophia didn't make it quite back to Homestead, not with her other half working as the engineer for the Georgia end of the train line to Virginia. Even Jamie relocated, although he, Amy, and the kids only went as far as joining Andrea and Dale at Tybee.
In a five bedroom house, only two are occupied, because his two youngest children insist on sharing a room still. Cricket declares it a Dixon trait, to be overly attached to one's siblings. He just wishes she didn't sound so wistful when she says it.
"Daddy?"
Merle smiles at the interruption to his almost morose thoughts. "Yeah, baby girl?"
"You're gonna burn the bacon, and Nate hates his crispy."
Ava's right, so he rescues breakfast, getting the bacon off the heat and onto the drip racks. "You in the mood for scrambled or fried today?"
She looks at Nathaniel, strapped safely in his booster seat at the table. His youngest son is coloring, paying no attention to their conversation. "Scrambled. Can you add cheese and jalapenos?"
"Sure. Want to help?"
Ava grins, finding her step stool and unfolding it in front of the stove. He cracks the eggs into the pan for her, wanting to skip the frustration that will inevitably erupt if she accidentally lands shell in her pan. She looks so much like Carol it's damned adorable, especially when she concentrates as she wields the spatula while he retrieves the jar of diced jalapenos from the refrigerator.
"How many spoons?"
She observes intently until he's added four fairly heaping spoonfuls to the six eggs in the pan. "Now, Daddy." Her red pigtails bob as she nods to emphasize her words.
"It's a good thing you kids have cast iron stomachs like your old man," he says, putting the lid back on the jar and returning it to the fridge.
"Mama doesn't like the hot food so much."
"Very true, sweetheart, which is why we spoil ourselves when she's off on a trip."
Ava's quiet, watching the eggs slowly morph from liquid to solid as she stirs slowly. "How much longer is she gonna be gone?"
"Remember what I told you last night? When we read her email?" At five, Ava already shows an intelligence level he suspects her teachers are going to scramble to keep up with until she's old enough to formulate her own education.
"Yeah. The train runs on other Saturdays."
"Every other Saturday, yes. So your mama will be home this Saturday, along with Michonne and Cricket and the kids." Ava was actually supposed to go on the two week long trip to Virginia with Carol and Michonne, but a difficult to conquer ear infection kept her home. Only the promise that they would go up to see her northern-based siblings and nephew in Virginia in early July kept her from a full-scale Dixon tantrum.
It's one thing that amuses him. Ava looks like Carol, but inherited Merle's personality on a level that's amusing when her temper isn't ignited. Nathaniel's almost three, so it could change, but so far, he's a miniature Carol in attitude, down to being able to coax Ava out of any doldrums by force of hugging the stuffing out of her. The older he gets, the more he looks like the few childhood pictures Merle has of himself.
He shreds cheese into the pan when the eggs are nearly done, making them nearly as much cheese as eggs, like both kids love. "We need to get to eating. You're due at school in half an hour."
"Mister Rick says we are going on a scavenger hunt today." Ava gives the eggs one last shove around the pan as he cuts the heat.
"Well, that ought to be a lot of fun." The former deputy deciding to drop back to teaching surprised a lot of people, except his ex-wife and childhood best friend. Merle thinks Rick definitely missed his calling when he became a deputy instead of a teacher after college, because he's damn near worshipped by his gaggle of beginner students.
Ava nods. "Me and Meredith are gonna be partners."
"What about Callie and Judith?"
His daughter sighs and actually rolls her pretty little blue eyes at him. "You know that Callie's best friend is Matty, and Judith will always ask Hershey to be her partner. She cried yesterday when Mister Rick asked her to sit with Nico for reading time instead of Hershey."
Merle hides his amusement as he fills plates and cups and sits them in front of both kids. He has to gently coax the coloring book and crayons away from Nathaniel, but Ava's quiet urging of "there's peppers in the eggs" makes it easier. While Carol once predicted a trio of Dixon girls with Callie being the miniature warleader of the male contingent of their birth year, it didn't quite play out like that. These kids have very firm ideas on who their best friends are.
He certainly doesn't object to Ava's best buddy being her weeks-older niece.
Maybe the house is too big for just the four of them left in residence, but with the steady growth of the family and several members not living at Homestead now, he supposes he's glad it is. It certainly makes family gatherings easier when everyone descends on Homestead.
He grins and finishes his breakfast before Ava decides to lecture him about the time.
- Jacqui -
Jacqui leans against the doorframe to the bathroom, watching as Jim trims his beard. He catches her over his shoulder and pauses, smiling. His once dark beard is slowly giving way to silver, showing that he's almost fifty far more than his still dark hair. "Brandy off to terrorize the world already?"
She laughs. "Yeah. She said we were too slow this morning, and she had plans."
Their younger daughter, at fourteen, doesn't lack for keeping busy. Unlike Jocelyn, who enjoyed being in the classroom and honestly seemed sad when she graduated out of the regular schoolroom at thirteen, Brandy nearly threw a party when becoming a teenager meant she got to join the ranks of the teens rotating through various job skills to figure out what they wanted to concentrate on when they apprenticed at sixteen.
It's just Brandy at home now, thanks to that apprenticeship system. Jocelyn's at Hilltop, learning to be a teacher, to no one's surprise. None of the teens apprentice at their home, although some are half-trained by the time they do shift to another community. Jacqui was one of the proponents of the plan when it began three years ago, when she took over Scout Walsh's seat on the Homestead Council. It builds ties between the population that would be harder, without the youthful friendships linking everyone together.
But it doesn't make her miss her oldest daughter any less, and she knows Jim is practically counting the days and hoping that Joss actually comes back to Homestead instead of teaching elsewhere when her apprenticeship ends next spring.
"Think you could take some time off from the garage?" she asks, thinking about the security schedule. They don't run the amount of teams outside the walls they once did, because seven years after the world turned upside down, the well-coordinated teams from the eight Georgia communities have keeping their area clear of dangers down to an art form.
There have been other communities found since the battle with the Governor of Woodbury, but none of them wanted to stay independent. Absorbing their populations into the existing communities keeps all of their populations thriving rather than just surviving. Hell, the tiny twenty-person Savannah Farm community they discovered in the second year of the apocalypse has enough farmland enclosed now to give Homestead a run for their money on food and livestock production, and a population of nearly a hundred people.
Fewer herds doesn't mean no patrols at all, but her set of teams is due to roll to their two weeks off duty in two weeks before going back on for six. Two of those will be completely away from Homestead as part of the ongoing push across the Georgia borders into the neighboring states. Most food supplies are long spoiled, even canned goods, by the cycles of hot summers and cold winters, but they'll always need the manufactured supplies that aren't easily replicated anymore.
Jim returns to his shaving, thinking over her request. "Yeah, Rosita won't mind, especially now that Rachel's more independent and doesn't hate the daycare so much."
"Good. I was thinking of asking Lori to take Brandy off the chore rotation and us take the train up to Hilltop when it goes out next."
While running the steam engine train back and forth between what used to be Gainesville, Georgia and Hilltop is a system that requires a lot of coordination of supplies and fuel, Eugene's pet project remains one of the best ways to shift larger quantities of food, supplies, and people safely between the two halves of the Allied Communities. It even necessitated the development of a forty-person community in former Gainesville to serve and protect the train while it's in Georgia, jokingly named King's Cross when it first started, but the name stuck.
The train spends two weeks near Hilltop and two weeks at King's Cross, so taking the train means spending a fortnight in the opposite location if you rely solely on it for travel. Car travel is possible, but rarely approved by any community for the fuel consumption, and traveling by wagon, horseback, or bicycle is just not worth the time for most travelers between the two states.
"That sounds like a pretty good plan. Sure you're not just anxious to get a good look at whether or not she's dating, mama bear?" He grins, rinsing his razor and then his face. "While Honey might keep a teen romance secret if she had no concerns, you know Jazz would sing like a canary if you seemed worried."
"Not if it's Logan."
"Ah." Jim leans on the sink with one hip, beckoning her forward into a warm hug. "You know there's not a single apprentice up at Hilltop that we wouldn't be absolutely happy for Joss to fall in love with."
"It's not the apprentices that bug me." Well, maybe other than Logan, because the odds of that particular Dixon moving back to Georgia are pretty slim. "What if she decides to follow her heart like Jazz did and stay up there?"
Jacqui knows it's silly to fret so much about her daughter, an adult by all the communities' current laws at seventeen, but both girls were already half-grown when she and Jim got them. They didn't get to spoil them long enough.
"Well, if that does happen, darlin', then maybe we try out a different community ourselves for a few years once Brandy leaves for an apprenticeship. Nothing says we have to live at Homestead forever."
He's right with that. Even her Council seat doesn't mean she has to always live here. Just as Scout resigned, she could too, and give her seat up for fresh ideas. Mechanics of Jim's skill are welcomed everywhere, and Rosita's phenomenally good with anything mechanical, so Homestead wouldn't be left in the lurch.
"I guess that gives us two years to see where Brandy's interests finally end up, eh?"
Jim just laughs and kisses her gently. "You and I both know that girl's a mechanic down to her bones, even if she does wander off for a while to see what else she might like."
"I love you," she says against his shoulder, hugging him tight. She knows the worry over the girls comes from losing one brother too young and never knowing the fate of the other after the world ended. Jim lost more, horrifically, so he understands her need not to be permanently far away from their daughters.
"Love you, too. Now, are we going to breakfast or were you eyeing me from the doorway like that for an entirely different reason and announcing the place was childfree?"
Jacqui can certainly take a hint to return to her initial reason for admiring her husband's still trim form. He takes her slow smile as an answer and leads her toward bed, not breakfast.
- Hershel -
Hershel runs the ultrasound wand across the patient Jersey cow, studying the screen intently. "What do you see, Lindsay?" he asks.
The girl leans in, squinting, before retrieving her glasses from their protective pouch. "Twins. Ugh. Gonna suck waiting to find out their genders."
He smiles at her grumpy reply. She's his last apprentice he'll train, and he thinks she's the most likely to stay at Homestead. Titus is a good man with the animals, and no one would ever guess the man started his career in the prison system, but the sheer number of herds here need more than one skilled veterinarian. Perhaps Beth or Jazz will return one day, or even young Logan, but if he were a betting man, his bet would be on Lenore's youngest.
"At least we don't have to turn a profit like the old world cattle or dairy farmers did," he reminds her. Losing a potential breeding heifer and future milker as a freemartin isn't a financial issue here. If these calves are a mixed gender set of twins, the female will simply be treated as any surplus male would. A good life of sunshine and plentiful food before going where so many animals before have - the community freezers.
"I will keep my fingers crossed for two heifer calves. We could always use more milk cows. Lori says she'll teach me how to make cheese the next time she runs a batch."
"That'll be a good lesson for sure. You're working over there on Friday, right?"
With Jazz gone, somehow the dairy operation landed in Lori Dixon's lap, and she's taken to the job with an enthusiasm Hershel certainly wouldn't have predicted when he met the woman back in that quarry outside of Atlanta. The tiny creamery Jazz began with is a project for the schoolchildren, with just enough sheep kept to keep it interesting as an agriculture and science lesson. Lori's new domain is on the property they still call the Horse Farm after all these years, despite the only horses being ones ridden over by workers for the creamery or herds.
"Yeah. The Savannah farm is delivering a lot of water buffalo milk that she thinks she will split into mozzarella and domiati, so some fresh and some cured."
"Just don't try to eat half your lesson in mozzarella," he teases.
She grins, petting the pregnant cow before leading her back to the field to turn her loose with her fellow expecting cows. "That's all the Jerseys today. Do we want to start on the Swiss?"
"We've still got about two hours until supper, so we might as well."
He smiles as she treks into the field, going to find their next patient. Hearing about the planned delivery from the Savannah farm makes him hopeful. Beth usually tags along with the supply exchanges between Homestead and the Savannah communities, bringing Elijah to spend a day playing with his cousins and her stepbrother Taylor to visit with his mother and one sister remaining at Homestead. She hasn't seen Maggie's youngest child yet, with Annika only nine days old, so he's fairly sure she'll come.
It'll be a treat to see two-year-old Elijah, so he thinks he'll plan to spend the day surrounded by his grandchildren instead of working, since Lindsay's already scheduled to be working with Lori that day anyway. Hershey won't mind missing a day of school in favor of a day with Grandpa, even if he has to share the attention between his cousin and two younger siblings.
Being Grandpa is one of the best roles he's had in his sixty-seven years.
- Jesus -
Paul chases his completely nude toddler through the cottage, torn between being vexed and amused at his son's antics. If MJ had his way, he would never wear a stitch of clothing whatsoever. On one hand, his nudist preferences meant potty training was so easy everyone thinks Paul and Jazz are pulling their legs when they say MJ trained himself. On the other hand, he and Jazz get called to convince their little streaker to at least don a pair of shorts by various babysitters on enough occasions to make it a running joke at Hilltop.
"MJ, munchkin, you don't make your Tåta chase you with clothes like this."
Well, Tåta is at least a magic word to halt their little speed demon. It also means he goes ass over teakettle across the living room rug for stopping too fast with toddler coordination. "Tåta? Tåta gone."
Paul uses the tumble as a distraction to scoop MJ up and shuck him into the teeny tiny boxers Carol made him to try to tempt him to at least wear one article of clothing. Convincing him to wear clothing is much easier if MJ knows his beloved Nana made the item. "You're right, buddy. Tåta is making sure all the new baby sheep arrived okay."
The peak of a lambing cycle rarely changes from Jazz literally sleeping down at the paddocks until the lambs are all safe and sound. Before MJ was born, Paul usually joined him, but the toddler's too excitable and convinced of his own indestructibility to spend much time at the paddocks when the ewes are wound up and anxious.
"Baby sheep here?"
"I don't know yet. If you leave your clothes on, you can go play with Amelia so I can go see Tåta and find out if any of the baby sheep need to come live with us a while."
It's a regular enough occurrence for a stray sheep, or goat, or any other baby animal needing round-the-clock attention to come live with them for weeks or months that MJ pretty much expects a new pet anytime he hears the word baby in connection to Jazz. If they ever have another child, he wonders if their son will expect the baby to be returned elsewhere after a period of time.
"Melia!" MJ chants with a grin, thrusting an arm out so Paul can get the little tank top on.
"Yep. You and Amelia are buddies for the morning with Aunt Olivia."
Paul doesn't travel as much as he used to, not overnights, especially. It was part of the deal he made with Jazz before MJ was even conceived. He doesn't miss being outside the walls like he once thought he would. Maybe the wanderlust would have faded without becoming a father, with just getting older and being married settling him down, but he's glad it did. They used to travel together, even with baby MJ, for Jazz's occasional rounds of the Virginia communities as one of only two fully trained vets in Virginia.
That came to a halt two months ago, when Ezekiel at the Kingdom took in a group of refugees fleeing a well-organized bandit group out of the New York area. The tales of the atrocities the women and few surviving young boys reported has all four Virginia communities keeping travel to a minimum. The trips that do have to be made are accompanied by at least two security teams. They sent the women and children further south, making sure there was an impossible level of geography between them and any pursuit, but so far, they've seen no signs of strangers in Virginia.
The promise of spending time with Amelia and Olivia even gets shorts and sandals on MJ. He pats Paul on the head, blue eyes sparkling with mischief under his mop of black curls. "Up, Daddy."
He swings his son up on his shoulders as requested. Even without Jazz walking beside them, MJ still likes being carried in the way that makes him near eye level with his Tåta when his fathers are walking somewhere together.
MJ and Jazz are the center of his world, and Paul will never give MJ cause to question whether or not he's the most important part of his life.
A/N: PDFs are uploaded at my site (darktidings. atwebpages. com) for the character lists. I've sorted them a couple of ways, but because they're PDFs, your browser/computer/phone may require downloading rather than viewing online.
These PDFs do contain a fairly decent amount of spoilers for the opening chapters of ISO, but I figure anyone who wants to peek right away doesn't mind the spoiler potential. They are not a complete listing of the entire population (even I'm not that detail oriented), but a starting point of where the story is outlined to go at this point in time. Consider some information subject to change.
"Careers" are a bit of a loosely labeled thing in this sequel, but should give you a general idea of what the person does as their primary work as the story opens.