A/N: So, I've really been trying to avoid rehashing scenes that take place on the show, but it's kind of inevitable for these next couple of chapters. So I'm sorry you already know how a lot of this goes down, but I promise it won't go on past the next chapter! ...And you will be rewarded for your patience. By the way, I'm super glad you guys enjoyed the last one! I really wanted their reactions to come off as realistic, but I love my Rick and promise he won't be a butthead for too long, haha. So try to enjoy this, despite its predictability; I promise I'll update ASAPly! -Ash

5: okay? okay.

"Hey, Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"Can I ask you something?"

Rick and Carl had been walking along the train tracks in silence for a good five minutes, enjoying the light breeze that June had to offer. The moment was too serene, Rick knew it wouldn't be long before his son had something to say. "You can ask me anything, Carl."

"Okay," he sighed lightly, "so… I'm still kind of confused about how you and Michonne are having a baby if you weren't together at the prison."

Rick anticipated this was coming. He had let it all go much too easily when they first spoke about it a couple of days ago. He didn't know when, but he knew at some point he would have to explain himself. "Well… I'll be honest with you. Sometimes people have sex without being in a relationship, son. There are no rules about it, really, so long as it's two consenting adults."

"So you don't have to be in love."

"No, not quite," he sighed uncomfortably. "That's not to say I didn't have feelings for Michonne at the time, but we were still sorting through it all."

Carl's face appeared to be processing the information, but he wasn't sure it made sense to him. What was the point in having sex if you weren't in love? He had to be missing something. "So… why did you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Why did you and Michonne have sex if you didn't know how you felt about each other?"

"Well, because sometimes it's more about physical stimulation than emotional," Rick squinted, hoping that his son would leave it at that. This was quickly becoming the most awkward conversation he'd ever had, which was saying a lot.

"What?"

So much for him leaving it at that. "All right," Rick stopped walking, causing Carl to do the same. "You know how you felt about Beth for a while?"

Carl frowned, unaware that his dad ever had any clue about that. "Yeah…" he returned cautiously.

"Did you wanna kiss her?"

Carl found himself feeling shy all of a sudden. "Dad..."

"You wanted to have this discussion, let's have it," Rick chuckled, seeing the unease take over Carl's face. "Did you?"

"I mean… yeah. I guess so."

"Well, imagine that feeling, multiplied by ten. By twenty, even. And maybe you have a bunch of other feelings swirling around that you can't quite figure out. Sometimes, you act on one and say, 'I'll figure the rest out later.'"

"So that's what you and Michonne did."

"Pretty much," Rick admitted, resuming their walk. "We love each other. And maybe it was always there, but we're both pretty hardheaded, so it took a while for us to realize it."

Carl nodded thoughtfully. "Was it that way with Mom, too?"

"No," Rick exhaled as his thoughts shifted to Lori. "Your mom and I got married pretty young. I wasn't much older than you, honestly, and we thought we were just crazy in love from the very beginning."

"But you weren't?"

"No, we were. For a very long time," he assured him. "But when you start off so young, it's hard to stay that way. You change so much from your twenties to your thirties, it's almost like you end up married to a completely different person."

"That's why you and Mom started fighting all the time."

"Yeah, I suppose that was most of it," Rick recalled regretfully. "We did our best with what we knew, but the truth was… we didn't know anything."

Carl nodded as his blue gaze caught his dad's matching one. "Did you still love each other?"

"We did. Even in that last year together when things got really bad, I always loved your mother. It was just hard to like her after everything…"

"Because of Shane. Right?"

"It was because of me," he countered emphatically. "I had a lot of pent up anger because of what happened with Shane, but I can't blame that on him or your mom. I decided how to react to that."

"Yeah, but… Mom had sex with Shane, right?"

"She did…"

Carl's eyes flitted down as he received confirmation for what he thought was true for so long now. "Did you even know if Judith was your daughter?"

"Technically, no," Rick confessed quietly. He knew once she was born, having seen her big blue eyes, but he had prepared himself to raise Shane's baby. "It didn't matter, though. She was mine, no matter what."

Carl felt satisfied with their conversation. As much as he hated the weirdness surrounding it all, he liked that he was no longer in the dark about so many things. All he ever wanted was for his father to be honest with him, because that's all he ever was with Rick. "Hey, Dad?"

Rick chuckled lightly at how often his son said those two words in that exact intonation. "Yeah?"

"I'm not mad that you guys are having a baby. I'm just… sad."

Rick felt similarly, and understood where his kid was coming from, but wanted to see if Carl could articulate why. "Why's that?"

"I don't know, I just… it feels like you're replacing Judith," he answered softly. "And l know she can't be replaced. In my head, that sounds crazy. But my gut just feels like this is all wrong."

"Carl, I told you that's not possible. Your sister, whether she's alive or… gone, she's always gonna be Judith. We couldn't replace her if we tried. And you do a great disservice to whoever this kid is gonna be, by not acknowledging that he or she is their own person. You don't just replace someone; you make a new space for that person."

"Yeah, but how am I supposed to be happy about a new brother or sister when Judith is still… gone?"

"I don't know, son. I struggle with that myself."

"You do?"

"I do," he locked eyes with his son, their apprehensive stares almost identical. "I'm also scared of what'll happen when Michonne goes into labor. If it goes…" Rick couldn't even finish his sentence.

"I don't wanna be there," Carl supplied quietly. "I can't."

Rick rested a comforting hand on the kid's shoulder, letting him know that he understood. He wouldn't make Carl go through that again, not if he could help it. They continued their walk, their footsteps the only sound in the air.

They eventually made their way back to their camp, where Michonne had just finished folding their sleeping bags and hoped they found something the three of them could eat for breakfast. They'd been on the road almost a week now, and food was scarce. Rick always made sure she ate, but the further she was getting into this pregnancy, the hungrier she became.

"Anything?" she greeted them. They looked more tired than they did when they left, she noticed, but didn't have any noticeable haul to show for it.

Rick handed her a dirty, but unopened bag of barbecue potato chips. "Literally the only thing we could find. No houses in this area either."

She happily accepted the bag and pulled it open. The thought of fake barbecue powder was enough to make her throw up in her condition, but she was too hungry to care. "Y'all want some?"

"I already had some crackers for breakfast," Carl declined with a small smile.

Rick declined as well, knowing it was most important that she had something on her stomach. "I'm gonna set up a snare, maybe we'll get lucky and catch a rabbit for dinner."

She caught his eye and smiled warmly at him. "That would be divine."

"That was one small rabbit," Rick declared, finishing what was left of his dinner and throwing its bones into the fire. He and Michonne sat quietly on a couple of logs, while Carl rested in a nearby car so he could take watch later in the night.

"It was something," Michonne smirked. "Gotta hand it to the thing, it traveled well."

He smiled. "Have you noticed… that's all we talk about anymore. Food. Forgot what this feels like." Indeed, food was no longer an issue for them back at the prison. Now, it was their biggest.

"Me too," she admitted. "I hope we're able to forget again soon.

"We're close," Rick nodded. "Just gotta make it through another day." He began to put out their fire with his boot so they could prepare for bed themselves. "If folks there are taking people in, they have to be strong. They have to have a system."

Michonne still wasn't so sure about this place. The closer the got, the more she was questioning their decision. "I wonder if the whole thing's legit."

There was a sound in the woods that caused both of them to pause. Rick stood up, surveying the scene for walkers, or worse, but heard nothing else, so he sat back down. "We let people in," he continued their conversation.

"We did," she agreed, catching his eye. "So did The Governor."

"Yeah," he nodded again, having thought the same thing himself. "That's always the thing isn't it. We don't get to know until we know. Maybe this place isn't even there anymore."

Before he could even finish his thought, Rick felt the cold barrel of a gun against his temple and an unfamiliar man's voice in his ear. He froze in place. Michonne attempted to grab her katana, but another man had approached and kicked it out of the way before she could catch it. Several other men followed, surrounding the two of them with their guns drawn. They were trapped.

"You screwed up, asshole." The one with his gun on Rick seemed to be the leader of this whole operation. He seemed almost jovial at the fact that he'd caught his man. "Today is the day or reckoning, sir. Restitution. A balancing of the whole damn universe."

Rick glanced around the small group, trying to figure out what the reckoning was for. He kept his eyes on the man closest to Carl, but he realized that he recognized the guy with his gun on Michonne. These were the assholes from the house he'd been trapped in the other day. They were obviously there to get revenge for the one Rick had killed in the bathroom.

"Shit, and I was thinking of turning in for the night on New Year's Eve," the leader joked with a laugh. "Now who's gonna count down the ball dropper with me, huh?" He paused for a moment before he actually began to count. "Ten Mississippi. Nine Mississippi. Eight Mississippi-."

"Joe." Another voice came out of the woods, soon followed by the sight of Daryl and his crossbow. Rick and Michonne looked up, shocked, while Daryl looked on in terror, coming to the realization that just as he found his best friends alive, they were about to be killed. "Hold up," he pleaded.

"You're stopping me on eight, Daryl."

"Just hold up." He needed time. He needed a plan. He needed a way to get them out of this.

"This is the guy that killed Lou, so we got nothin' to talk about," one of the others piped up.

But Joe thought himself a reasonable man, he recognized that Daryl knew these people, so he let him speak. "The thing about nowadays is we got nothin' but time. Say your piece, Daryl."

He tried to talk them out of it by explaining to Joe that his people were good people. He even sacrificed himself to save them. But Joe was having none of it. If he wanted to align himself with Rick, he was going to pay the same price.

All hell broke loose after they began to beat Daryl up. One of them had pulled Carl out of the car and Rick knew then that they were all gonna have to die. And maybe that included him too, but nothing was going to happen to Carl or Michonne if he had anything to do with it.

While Joe went on in his ear, laughing about how he was going to torture him, Rick took that opportunity to headbutt the man, completely disorienting both of them. The gun Joe had been holding went off in his ear, completely setting off another side of Rick Grimes. He had spent an entire year tempering his rage, but it was about to come out in full force.

He got up as best he could, ready to fight Joe, but his bearings were so far gone that he couldn't keep up. All he wanted was to get to the motherfucker trying to rape his son, but Joe had him in a bearhug, not allowing him to move an inch.

"What the hell you gonna do now, sport?" he chided him.

Little did he know, he had awoken the bear. You can't mess with a man's son and expect him to just take it. Rick didn't even have to think about it. He sunk his teeth into Joe's throat and pulled out a chunk of his neck, spitting it out callously as the man sunk to the ground.

Everyone stopped in their tracks, stunned at the scene before them. Michonne and Daryl sprung into action, killing everyone that was left, while the man that had attempted to rape Carl was now scared shitless.

"I'll kill him," he threatened, holding a knife to Carl's neck.

Michonne was terrified herself. If anything happened to Carl, she wasn't sure what she would do. She kept her gun pointed on the man, but she wasn't sure she could hit him without hitting the kid. "Let the boy go," she demanded.

Rick was officially out of fucks to give. He had just killed a man with his teeth, and was literally covered in his blood, so one more fat bastard didn't mean anything to him. After he finished stabbing Joe in the head, he turned towards the son of a bitch that had come for his son. "He's mine," he announced coldly to the heat of the night.

Petrified of Rick headed in his direction, he let Carl go and began to plead for mercy. "Stay back. Please."

Rick wasn't hearing it. He gutted the man like a fish, pulling his knife from the man's abdomen, up to his throat, looking him in the eye the entire time. Then, for good measure, he stabbed him incessantly while the other three watched in a mixture of horror and relief.

A few hours later, after they cleared the bodies and the adrenaline from their systems, Michonne and Daryl sat outside their stationary SUV while Rick and Carl spoke privately inside. In all the excitement of the evening, she hadn't had a chance to process what it meant that Daryl was back with them. How much hope she had for the idea that the rest of them were out there somewhere.

"It's good to see you in once piece," she joked with him, remembering he would always say that when she returned from a run.

"After tonight, it's good to be in one piece," he returned, looking out into the forest. His body ached from the beating he took, but he was so damn glad to be alive, he didn't care.

She wondered of his whereabouts since leaving the prison. How he could've survived with such awful men. "You been with them the whole time?"

He shook his head slightly. "Nah, I was with Beth. We had a camp for a while, then we found this house… some kinda trap, it seemed like, in retrospect. But somebody took her. I tried to find her, but they had a car and I was on foot. I couldn't… I lost her."

Michonne looked down at the floor, unsure of what that could mean. Beth had always been very sweet to her, she hated to think of her in grave danger.

"Y'all look like you been doin' all right," Daryl noted. "All things considered, I mean."

"Just been goin' from house to house until we could reach Terminus," she shrugged. She considered telling him she was pregnant, but wasn't sure if Rick would want him to know yet, so she focused on their mission. "That where you were headed?"

"I didn't think it was real," he admitted quietly. "Still don't, really, but I guess it can't hurt to see."

"Let's hope not, anyway."

Silence fell over the two of them as they halfway listened to the sound of Rick's voice speaking to Carl. Daryl felt relieved to have some semblance of his family back, and was glad that the three of them had been together all this time, but he couldn't help but notice someone was missing. "No Judith, huh," he whispered.

Michonne shook her head sadly. "All they found was her car seat when they were trying to get out."

"That's a good sign…"

"It was bloody," she appended softly, her eyes closing at the very thought.

Daryl couldn't say anything in reply to that. The idea of Lil' Asskicker being eaten was too much to bear.

"But I still have hope that someone got her first. I don't know why, but… it's better than believing in nothin', I guess."

He nodded. "It's good y'all got out together."

"Why do you say that?" she glanced up at him.

"He needs you," he offered softly, unsure of how she would take that information. "He probably don't even know it, but he does."

She smiled at his words. He obviously wasn't aware of all the developments in their relationship since they'd left the prison, but she enjoyed that he recognized their bond regardless. "He does know it," she assured him. "And I need him, too."

Daryl caught her eye, trying to figure out if she was saying what he thought she was saying. "Yeah?"

She nodded. "Yeah."

The next morning, the four of them were back on the road in the final stretch toward Terminus. They were following the last bit of train tracks before they would head through the woods and keep an eye on the place for a while.

Rick and Michonne were at the front, while Daryl and then Carl brought up the rear. She watched Rick closely as they trudged through the forest, moved by how calm he had been about the entire ordeal. She always had her faith in him, but she'd seen his confidence transform literally overnight, and she knew that he finally understood that he could take care of them. She would've taken his hand in that moment if he hadn't had it in his pocket.

He noticed her watching him and looked back at her. "You okay?"

She nodded reassuringly. "Yeah." She was more than okay, really.

"I'm okay," he promised, knowing that she tended to worry about him. And after everything that went down the night before, he wouldn't have blamed her. But he really was fine with what he'd done.

"I know."

It baffled him how she was so sure of things before he even had the chance to think about them. "How?"

She looked him in the eye, wanting him to know that she appreciated everything he'd done. That this was the reason she trusted him with her life. Once again, they were alive and the other guys were dead. She didn't have to question the future, because he always came up with an answer. He would do literally anything to protect them. "Because I'm okay, too."