not pictured: me, a grown adult college student trying to remember how thirteen year olds think and have crushes.

I cried in my mother's arms until I was out of tears.

They came hot and heavy, soaking her shirt, but they tapered off after a few minutes. She held me the whole time, pressing kisses into the line of my hair and rubbing circles into my back.

Nobody disturbed us; I'm not sure if anybody even spoke. If they did, I couldn't hear them over my mother's gentle voice and the thump of her heartbeat against my ear. Cliche as it was, in the moment, it sounded like music. I didn't feel much like almost-thirteen in her arms, but more like five years old, being held like I was something precious.

When she let me go, she was still wearing a smile that stretched her face. She stood up, leaning down to offer me a hand to help. I took it, climbing to my feet before throwing her into another hug. This one was shorter, but she laughed as she ran her fingers through my hair.

"Welcome home," she said.

Around us, everybody else seemed to be just as excited for us, despite the fact that I didn't know most of them. Maggie and Beth were still wearing huge smiles, the latter reaching up to brush an errant tear from her cheek. Carl lingered in the doorway of Judith's cell, grinning.

I even got a 'welcome back!' hug from Glenn, which, though a little awkward, was warm.

My mom gave me a little tour after that, but there wasn't much to see. The other cell blocks hadn't been cleared all the way, and most of the prison was still a mystery. For now, everybody was set up in Cell Block C. It wasn't much to look at, just two floors of rooms, but she showed me who lived where.

She helped me get set up in my own cell, too. Well, to be fair, it was actually her cell, but the bottom bunk was free. A year ago, I might have protested having to share a room with my mother. Now, I was just grateful to have the chance.

I learned a lot, too. Not just the sad stuff, like I'd asked Daryl to tell me, but the good things. Glenn and Maggie were dating, which seemed really sweet, considering how messed up the world seemed lately. Judith, despite how she'd come into the world, was healthy and progressing on that way.

It wasn't so bad here, even with the near-end of the world going on outside.

I got to meet Hershel, Beth and Maggie's dad. He clasped one of my hands between his two, something warm in his eyes. "It's nice to meet you, Sophia," he said. "I've heard a lot about you."

My mother told me that he was a doctor that saved Carl's life; that's how they met. I didn't ask questions, but I filed that fact away in my brain to ask Carl about later.

Besides Hershel, there were two other guys they'd run into here at the prison, Oscar and Axel. They were both polite, but they didn't say much to me.

We didn't see Rick, but my mom said he'd been disappearing a lot lately. Losing Lori had been hard for him. To be honest, I didn't like thinking much about Lori, either. When we were together, she had been warm and motherly, making sure all the kids at the camp got their homework done. At the time, I'd been a little annoyed that I still had to learn math even though there were dead people milling about. Now, that resentment made me guilty.

My first afternoon went by right before my eyes, and when the sunlight coming through the window faded, one yawn was all it took for my mother to usher me into the cell. I almost wanted to protest, but when the excitement started to wear off, exhaustion took its place. At my mom's insistence, I curled up on the bottom bunk of our room to get some sleep.

The cot wasn't as comfortable as some of the beds Jackie and I had slept on when running from home to home, but it wasn't awful. I could get used to it, considering that only one night before, I had fallen asleep tied onto a tree branch.

A smile on her face, my mother tucked me in and brushed the hair back from my face. After planting a final kiss on my forehead, she left the room. I almost asked her to stay, as if this would be a dream I would wake up from all alone, but I held the fear back before it could slip out.

It didn't matter much, anyways, because I was asleep in minutes.

—

The next few days were, compared to the last several months, almost dull.

I spent a lot of time milling about the prison. My mom hovered a lot, but it didn't bother me. Instead, I made casual friends with Beth, or hung out with Carl. He opened up his small comic book stash to me, so I killed spare time alone by reading them. They made good conversation topics, too, when Carl and I ran out of things about our lives to talk about that weren't depressing. He was a little more guarded, a bit more jaded, than he had been before. I didn't want to bring up anything that might make him close off, so I waited to see if he would bridge the topic first.

To be honest, I'd had a little crush on Carl back at the camp in Atlanta. He had been cute, with his big blue eyes and dimples. As I was learning rather quickly, nine months did not make that go away,

Annoying.

I saw his dad, eventually. Apparently, he'd taken to clearing out the empty tunnels as a way to pass his days after Lori's death, only coming up for air in sporadic bursts.

We were sitting in the side room with the tables, eating dinner, when the door to the tombs swung open and Rick Grimes stepped in.

Right away, I could tell something was different about him. Not just the extra inches on the back of his hair, or the beard he had started to grow, but something in his face was missing. He walked like he still had sea legs from getting off a boat, and his eyes seemed distracted. When they swept the room, it was like he was seeing straight through us all.

"Everybody doing okay?" He asked.

"We're doing fine," Hershel replied. "Found an old friend."

He nodded in my direction, and Rick scanned the room before he noticed me. I watched as he blinked several times, as if he didn't recognize me, before it sunk in.

"Sophia," he said, a small smile curling the edge of his lips. "It's been a long time. How'd you get here?"

"I found the prison and I saw people outside," I told him.

"By yourself?"

I shrugged. "Followed the sound of a car."

"Smart," he remarked.

When I didn't reply, he reached out to place a hand on my shoulder, squeezing once before pulling away. "Glad to have you back."

I grinned, although it felt awkward on my lips. "I'm really glad to be back," I replied.

He looked at me for another second before he turned to Carl.

"You doing okay?"

Carl nodded. "I'm okay," he replied. "And Judith is doing really well, she's eating and she's healthy—"

Much like he had with me, Rick gave his son a squeeze on the arm, cutting Carl off in the middle of his sentence. "I'm glad things are okay," he said.

Something in Carl's face fell at the interruption, but his father either didn't notice or ignored it, bidding quick goodbyes before disappearing back from where he'd come. Once the door closed behind him, Carl's lips twisted into a frown.

"He doesn't even care about her," he muttered.

"He just needs time," Hershel assured, reaching out to pat Carl's hand. "It'll get better."

"That's the most grounded I've seen him yet," Glenn chimed in, though he balked a little when Maggie shot him a look out of the corner of her eye.

After Rick's visit, lunch was a quiet and almost stiff affair. I finished my meal as quickly as I could without being obvious before disappearing back into my cell to read through another comic Carl had loaned me.

It was a good way to pass an hour, but when I finished, I glanced down at the floor beside my bed to realize that I had already read through everything I'd borrowed from him already.

It took me a second of debate before I decided what to do. Climbing off my bed, I scooped up the pile of comic books off the floor and went off in search of Carl, hoping that the tense air around him from earlier had faded.

He wasn't hard to find, considering he was sitting in his own cell, Judith in his lap. I lingered in the doorway, watching him make faces at the baby before he glanced up and took note of my presence.

When he saw me, I held up the load I was carrying. "I finished them," I said. "Thanks for letting me borrow them."

"Already?" He replied, raising an eyebrow. "Wow. You can just set them with the others, I guess."

I nodded, crossing the room to place the comic books beside the others underneath his bed. When I stood back up, my mom's words from earlier about Carl getting shot shimmied back to the front of my mind. I hesitated for a moment, wondering if it was a sensitive subject, but my curiosity got the better of me.

"What happened?"

Carl's face twisted in confusion at my outburst. "Huh?"

"When you got hurt," I clarified, sheepish. "My mom said you guys met Hershel when he treated you."

"Oh," he said, nodding in understanding. "I got shot,"

"You got shot?"

It came out of my mouth louder than I meant it to, but he only laughed. Shifting Judith over to one side, he used his free hand to lift his shirt. Sure enough, there was a dark mark on the skin beneath his ribs, like a patched up little hole. The scar seemed pretty healed, with no redness left to speak of, but the sight of it still gave me pause.

"It was an accident," he explained. "My and my dad and— and Shane were out looking for you when we saw a deer. I tried to get closer to it, but there was this guy, Hershel's friend. He was out hunting, but he didn't see me. When he shot the deer, it went through her and into me."

I stalled, trying to process the information I'd just been given. "Wait," I said. "You got shot looking for me?"

He blanched. "It's not a big deal," he assured me. "Really, I'm fine. I just— I really wanted to find you."

Something like heat rose into my cheeks, and I realized that I was blushing. Hopefully not enough for him to notice, but the thought was embarrassing all the same.

"I'm sorry you got hurt looking for me," I said.

"It's really not a big deal," he repeated. "Besides, if it hadn't happened, we might not have met Hershel and his family."

I wanted to ask if it hurt, but I figured the answer was pretty obvious. Instead, I sat down beside him on the bed, offering Judith a smile when she looked at me, before I turned back to him.

"Daryl told me what happened to everybody else," I said. "I'm sorry about your mom and Shane."

He shrugged. "Neither of them were your fault," he replied. "We knew that there was a chance something could go wrong when my mom found out she was pregnant. And Shane was crazy."

"Crazy?" I repeated. He looked at me, confused.

"I thought you said Daryl told you what happened to everybody?"

"He told me Shane died," I said. "That he died when the farm got attacked."

Carl glanced away, first at the wall, then at his sister. "He did, sort of," he explained. "That's the night he died. But it wasn't the walkers."

"It wasn't?"

"No," he said. "It was my dad."

I paused. It took me several long moments to absorb what I'd heard. The Rick Grimes I remembered, while clearly less haunted than the one today, had been fair and moral. The idea that he killed the man who had been his best friend, who had saved his wife and son, made me stomach twist into knots.

"Your dad killed Shane?"

Carl nodded, face drawn. "He had to. Shane was going to kill him."

"I thought they were friends."

"So did I. But Shane loved my mom. He wanted to raise Judith. And he wanted to raise me. So he lied to everybody, and he tricked my dad into getting him alone so he could kill him. My dad got him first."

"Oh," I breathed, unsure of what else to say. I'd known Shane longer than Rick, ever since we met on the highway into Atlanta. He had always been so protective of Carl, like a father. I had thought it was because he was his best friend's son, because he cared about Rick.

Maybe it hadn't been like that.

Carl had been muted, almost withdrawn, since we'd stumbled into the topic of Shane's madness. When he spoke again, though, his voice was quiet, almost sad.

"And when he came back as a walker, I had to shoot him."

My brows furrowed. "Came back? I thought he wasn't bit."

Realization crossed his face. "You don't know."

"Don't know what?"

"Everybody comes back as a walker," he explained. "Whatever it is, it's already inside people, and when they die, they come back, unless you destroy their brain so that they can't."

When he finished, the two of us lapsed into silence. The amount I had learned in the past few minutes, both about Shane and the walkers themselves, stunned me to the point that I couldn't speak. I was too taken aback to come up with anything to say, anyways.

Carl seemed to understand this, or was taking his own moment to reflect, because he didn't push. Instead, he turned his attention to Judith, bouncing her a few times in his arms.

Eventually, though, he broke the quiet.

"It was a pretty good shot, though," he said, one of the corners of his lip tugging up. "Guess I've got good aim."

When he looked back at me, the somewhat haunted look in his eyes had disappeared, replaced with something almost proud and playful. While him opening up hadn't upset me, it was nice to see him look happier than he had a few moments ago.

"How far?" I asked.

"Like, maybe ten yards," he said. "I mean, I guess it's not that far, but I did it with my dad in the way."

"That's impressive," I replied. "I'm not actually that good with them."

"Oh," he said. "You don't have a gun?"

"I have a gun," I corrected. "I'm just not a really good shot."

"You haven't practiced?"

I shook my head. "Before the day I got here, I hadn't fired it at all."

Carl stood, moving to place Judith back in her box before offering me his hand. I blinked, and when I didn't take the outstretched limb, he waved it.

"Come on," he said.

"Come where?" I asked, and he grinned.

"I'm gonna teach you how to shoot a gun."

raphaelthecowboy: yeah! i was definitely in that early group who grew up with the walking dead. it was definitely a family show; we'd all get together every sunday night to watch the walking dead live. the first episode i actually ever saw was the season 2 premeire. wanting to know whether or not sophia made her way back to the group was the reason i started watching the show.