five months after grady.

After our expedition, time starts to blur together.

Not to say it goes faster, because it doesn't. But the days start to bleed into each other and turn to weeks, as we spend most of our days falling into a routine. Some days, it's going on runs, and others, we went back to the Atlanta area to try and find the rest of our group.

The time I spent at the house, though, I did my best to make the most of it. I taught Luke, Molly, and sometimes Cheyenne how to fire and reload both rifles and handguns, as well as the best ways to use knives and such. They all wanted to learn, especially Luke, but I knew I was doing it mostly for my own sanity.

As time went on, I started to get… well, not bored, but comfortable. Most of my days started in the same way, and most of them ended in the same way. It reminded me a little bit of the prison, waking up and spending the day with Carl, farming and reading and just living. Now, however, life was reading picture books to Judith, trying to crack the code to the gun safe with Jay, eating dinner with Beth and Mika.

For the most part, the routine was easy to swallow, and most of us took to it well. The only person who didn't, really, was Noah.

For his part, I couldn't fault him. For all he knew, his group was slowly dissolving in Richmond, and we were all hanging out here in Georgia. As time went on, his nerves seemed to grow, and I couldn't help but feel for him.

"What do you think about Noah?" Luke asked me one day, while we were sat on the floor by the gun safe, trying to crack it open.

"Huh?" I repeated.

"Like, he seems tense lately," he continued, plugging another set of numbers into the pad on the safe. "Like, what do you think?"

"I don't know," I replied, brow furrowing. "I mean, he wants to find his family. And really, that's just what we're trying to do now, except he knows where to go and we don't."

Luke is silent for a minute.

"There's also a lot more of us," he adds, after a while, but his voice is quiet when he says it.

"There is," I agreed, and we lapsed into silence, pressing buttons instead of speaking. Eventually, though, he turned back to me.

"We're still going to be okay, right?" He asked. "You know, if we don't find the rest of the group."

I stopped, pausing to think about that. I'd spent the past month or so putting not only my energy into looking for the others, but Tyreese's, and Beth's, and the kids. I'd stressed that we needed to find them, that it was our top priority. And yes, maybe it was, but with the way Luke was looking up at me, I wondered if maybe I needed to pull back a little bit.

"We'll still be okay," I assured him. "We're going to be okay. Our own safety matters first. We're trying to find them, and we're going to keep looking, but if we don't, or if it takes us a long time, we will still be okay."

Luke nodded, seeming to take a moment to digest that, before shrugging and going back to punching numbers into the gun safe. I had a feeling that he was more so thinking that over than anything else, but I let him have the quiet to process it instead.

For the next two weeks the days continued to go by faster than they really should of. Maybe, as I've gotten older, they've just seemed to blend together due to how inconsequential they all ended up to be, but I digress.

Two months or so after our escape from Grady, we made our first sort of progress on finding the rest of our group, but it wasn't really very uplifting.

We'd been driving down the road, Smith driving while Beth rode shotgun and told him which turns to take, Alice and I sitting in the back. We were doing circles in the area around the prison, trying to pick up a trail, when Beth suddenly shouted "stop!", causing us all to perk up, alert.

Smith pulled the car to a stop, and Beth jumped out. I scrambled to unbuckle my seatbelt before hopping out after her, but when I saw what she noticed, I stopped in my tracks.

In front of us sat the bus, but it wasn't moving. It was still, the doors were cracked, and flowing out of the back doors was a pile of bodies, stacked over each other.

"Oh my god," I breathed, and the sound of my voice seemed to snap Beth out of her head, because she began jogging towards the vehicle, and the corpses around them, so I raced after her. I managed to catch up with her as she reached the bus, and together, we stood side by side and looked at the damages.

From here, we could see the bullet holes, one in each body. Looking at it, we could tell that they'd turned before they'd been shot, due to some of the greying of the skin. That could have also been from long they'd been lying out here, but we couldn't tell just by looking.

Beth seemed more frantic than I did, and she quickly began scanning to see who any of the bodies were. Most of them I recognized as older people from the prison, men and women who I hadn't known very well, but had still been nice to me. They weren't necessarily the ones I'd been most concerned with after the prison's collapse, but seeing them here was still disheartening.

Some of them were lying face down, and we began to flip them onto their backs to see who they were. They, like the others, I didn't know very well, but there was one corpse that both Beth and I hovered over. The back of his head was covered in dark hair, and he built lean, likely young. We hesitated, holding our breath, before Beth reached down and turned him over.

It wasn't Glenn.

Upon seeing this, we both let out twin sighs of relief. Beth bent forward at the waist, half-doubled over, and I placed a hand on her shoulder, feeling myself deflate. Even though we didn't say it, we both knew we were checking to make sure he wasn't Glenn.

As we were standing there, catching our breath, Smith and Alice came up behind us. "Are you guys alright?" Smith asked, seemingly hesitating on his words, but I nodded.

"We're- we're okay," I said, even as the reality of what we saw hit me. I felt my throat tighten a bit, and I had to swallow hard to keep my voice level.

"Is this- I mean did you know any of these people?" Alice questioned.

"We knew them, but not very well," I explained. "Still- they were from the prison. We knew them."

"I'm sorry," she apologized, and Beth let out a soft, defeated noise. We all stood there in silence for a long moment.

"Maybe we should call it a day," Smith suggested, and after a moment of hesitation, I nodded. We'd been out for a good while, and even though we'd usually go for a few more hours, I was willing to give in. Right about then, I just wanted to head back to the house and go to bed, which is exactly what I did when we got back.

We didn't find anymore people over the next two more months or so, but something exciting did happen. Maybe seven weeks after the bus incident, I was moving things around the kitchen, trying to unpack some of the food I'd found on a run the day before, when I heard my name being shouted.

"Sophia!"

When I heard it, my head shot up, and I jumped to my feet. I didn't waste any time in following the voice, but I was caught off guard when, instead of seeing someone in danger, I just found Jay crouched on the floor by the gun safe.

"What?" I demanded, unable to keep some of my irritation out of my voice, but it melted away when Jay gave me a broad grin as he swung open the door to the safe.

"Ta-da!"

I gasped, scrambling to his side to peek at what we'd just discovered. True, I knew we were pretty well armed after clearing out the prison armory, but this was more about the sense of accomplishment that came with finally opening this thing up.

The interior of the safe seemed a lot smaller than the outside, but that might have been because of how thick the shell was. Inside though, there were three guns. One was a handgun, placed on the highest shelf with several 10mm rounds. Below it, there were two rifles, nearly identical in every way, balanced in a way that had them standing up, and on the floor of the safe, there was ammunition for said rifles.

"Oh my god," I breathed. "It's open."

"It's open," he echoed, and even though he was smiling, he seemed a little awed. To be fair, I felt a bit stunned as well. We'd been trying to get this open for a good long while now, and at this point, I was beginning to think we never would. And yet, here we were.

Jay seemed to recover himself, and he reached out for one of the rifles. "Dibs," he said, as his fingers curled around the barrel.

"Fine by me," I replied, grabbing the other and inspecting it. The metal of the muzzle was sleek, and as I brushed off some of the dust, I could see that it was well-kept. The stock and forestock were made of deep, dark reddish wood. It looked like it wasn't necessarily used often, and had instead been kept like a trophy or a possession instead of a weapon. Still, as I looked it over, it was clear that it was a good rifle, and had been taken care of well.

"Do you know what model these are?" Jay asked, and I shrugged.

"No idea."

After looking them over for another minute or two, we went off to show the others. Save for Abbott, Tyreese, Sylvia, and Smith, everyone had stayed in the house today, and when we walked into the second den, we found Jaime and Alice sitting there and talking.

"We got the safe open," Jay announced, holding up his rifle. Jaime looked up, and Alice's eyebrows raised.

"Nice job," she complimented.

"Nice guns," Jaime added, glancing at the matching weapons we were holding. Showing off, Jay turned a little to the side to give his brother a full view of the rifle.

"Aren't they?" He said, puffing his chest out. I rolled my eyes, adjusting my grip on mine so that the barrel was resting upside down on my shoulder.

"I mean, we didn't really need them since we cleaned out the prison," I admitted, shrugging a little bit. "But still, cool that we managed to get that safe open."

"The ammunition, at least, was worth it," Jay tacked on. "Plus, these guns are great. Well-kept, look nice, the whole nine."

"You guys did good," Jaime congratulated. We talked a little bit more, before Jay and I made for the room where we'd been storing non-food supplies. There were backpacks, tents, and sleeping bags lining the walls, as well as other sorts of camping gear. Across the back of the room, there was several melee weapons, and two dressers that we'd filled up with all sorts of guns and ammunition. A little reluctantly, Jay placed his gun inside of one, and I placed mine in beside it before sliding the the drawer closed.

"You'll see it again," I assured him, when I noticed him pouting. "But in the meantime, do you want to round up the kids and play a board game or something?"

"Only if it's Clue," he replied, but he seemed to brighten, setting up the game while I managed to rope not only Luke, Mika, and Cheyenne into playing with us, but Noah and Beth as well. This made seven of us in total, while there was only six game pieces, so after a short deliberation, Mika and Cheyenne decided to team up.

We spent the rest of the night playing games. Noah beat us in two of the three rounds of Clue, but Beth managed to pull a win for game number three. After that, we moved onto monopoly, which ended up being a long game that ended with Jay nudging me into bankruptcy while Luke cheered him on. By the time we were done, Tyreese and rest of the run group were back, and we all settled in to eat a quick dinner before splitting up for the rest of the night.

When the time for heading to bed rolled around, Beth headed off to the bathroom to try and give herself a makeshift shower with a package of baby wipes, leaving Mika and I alone in the room all three of us shared with Judith.

We were settling into bed when Mika spoke, her voice soft. "I miss Lizzie sometimes," she admitted. "Is that wrong?"

The question caught me off guard, and I blinked, trying to think over an answer. Lizzie was a tricky subject, and we didn't really talk about. The last time we'd ever really spoken about it was the night Tyreese had confessed to me what happened, long after the kids had gone to bed.

"The girls were outside, and I heard a scream. So I ran outside, expecting there to be a walker. Instead, I found Lizzie, trying to attack Mika with a knife. I panicked, pulled my gun and started yelling for them to stop, and when they broke apart, I asked Lizzie, you know, what the hell was going on? And she told me that she wanted to prove that the walkers, they were people, too, so she was going to kill Mika and let her turn. It… it turned into this whole argument. Next thing I know, Lizzie takes off towards the fence, and there's… there's this walker there, and she just- just shoves her arm and shoulder into it's mouth before I can even shoot it. And it just bites her.

I wanted- I wanted to try and cut her arm off, to do something, but the bite was too high. She kept telling me it was okay, that she was still going to be fine, just now she was going to be a little different. Up until the end, she was sure everything was going to be fine."

"And then?"

"And then, when she died, I… made sure she wouldn't turn."

I thought back on what Tyreese said before speaking. "I don't think it's wrong," I told her. "It's okay to miss your sister, Mika."

"She tried to kill me," Mika whispered, and the heartbreak in her voice was haunting. "I know she didn't think it counted, I know she wasn't- that her head was sick, like Tyreese said, but… she still tried to kill me. And then she died."

Her voice broke on the last word, and she started to cry. In the dim light coming through the window, I could see her on the other side of the king bed, curling her knees into her chest, so I sat up and scooted over, wrapping an arm around her shoulder. She leaned into me, and I could feel her body shaking.

"She just died," she sobbed. "She left me all alone."

"I know," I murmured, rubbing her shoulder. "I know, it's hard, and it hurts, and it's hard to understand. But even though it's confusing, and painful, you don't have to feel bad for missing her. She was your sister before she tried to hurt you, and you loved her."

She nodded, and I continued. "And you are not alone," I added. "You have me, and Beth, and Tyreese and Luke and Judy and everyone else. You're one of us, and we all care about you. And I know that, as long as you need us, we'll do our best to be there for you, okay?"

"Okay," she whispered, and I let her calm down for a moment, before she pulled away and began to crawl under the covers. I curled up beneath my own blanket.

In the darkness, I turned towards her. "No matter what, you've got me," I assured her. "And I've got you. Capiche?"

"Capiche," She echoed, and that was the last thing she said before she started to snore ten minutes later.

As I fell asleep, I thought of family, of my mom and Judith, and Carl, of Maggie and Sasha, and I realized that we needed to hurry up and find a time to go check for Noah's family, but that turned out to be for naught.

The next morning, I woke up to find one of Mika's legs sprawled over my chest, and both Beth and

Judith were gone, likely downstairs already. Yawning, I managed to slip out from under Mika's limbs without waking her, and padded down to the kitchen.

When I got there, I found several adults, along with Beth, standing around and seeming grim. Instantly, the looks on all of their faces alerted me to the fact that something was wrong, and without speaking, Jaime passed me a ripped piece of paper covered in scrawl. Right away, I began to read it.

Everyone-

I know you said we would be trying to find my family soon, but it's been a long time. I know you all have family to find to, and I get that, but I can't stand here while I don't have any idea of what's happened to my own, either.

I didn't take much with me. Just some of the food, some water, and a weapon or two. I took a car from one of the nearby houses so I didn't steal any of yours. I hope this isn't the last you hear from me, but right now, I need to look for my family. Once I find them, I'll figure out what to do. Maybe we can all move there, once you've found more of your people. Maybe it'll be more safer for all us then.

I hope this isn't the last time we see each other.

-Noah

Once I finished, I set the paper down and took a heavy sigh. "Do we go after him?" I asked.

"No," Sylvia replied. "He's made it clear what he wants, and we can't go against that. We just have to hope that he gets there safe."

As I dropped my head, I only had one real thought.

This sucked.

sorry for the crazy delay, I've been trying to prewrite for a lot of the chapters and, well, some changes were made. BUT all good things, all good things. the same five people are still surviving, btw, so if you wanna guess, go ahead. nobody has guessed it correctly yet, but someone got really close.