Disclaimer: I don't own AMC's The Walking Dead or any of its characters, wishful thinking aside.
Author's Note #1: Entry for the USS Caryl's '25 Days of Caryl Challenge' – Day 13 (Sep 29) Fall Colors Challenge, (I ended up using all of them): * orange * red *brown *mottled grey *dark purple.
Warnings: This is actually a unique piece, as it is told from an outside perspective, so stick with me on this one. I think the premise is interesting – if not the atmosphere.
Harvest Moon
Chapter Two
This would be his last visit.
That much he knew for certain.
It wasn't something he'd decided. It wasn't even something he'd learned, the wisdom of his years or some shit. But rather, it was the veiled sort of awareness that comes when you know your gas tank is running on empty. When you look at the fuel gauge and know it's telling you a little white lie, the needle stuck resolutely at half-full as something deep in your gut burbles out a negative.
It was instinctive, he supposed, like dying herd animals driven to return to familiar ground, here he was, circling around the pivotal moments, the moments of his life that for good or ill had shaped him.
He'd learned to listen to the silent cues, to the invisible tells just like his father before him – the man who'd taught him to track and provide – to protect his family. He remembered each and every lesson. Rare moments where it had been just the two of them, surrounded by the forest-dark, the muffled peace that seemed to define the deepest reaches of the Georgian Wilds.
He'd come to cherish those times.
To understand the long silences and camera-quick looks for what they were.
It had taken time, but he'd learned that love was a complex thing to express. And that people expressed that love – like the love a father has for a son – in remarkably different ways.
His mother had loved brightly and without censure, with half-hugs and warm embraces, with open words and encouragement. While his father had loved reservedly, quietly. If love was a volume, he kept his at a perpetual whisper.
He'd never once doubt the strength of it though.
Even when his 'pa hadn't been able to say it, that love had always been there.
You just had to know how to look.
In more ways than one he was his father's son.
What with his long dark hair and predisposition for suspicion.
It was shot through with silver-grey now, just like his father's had before-
It was his eyes that set him apart though - that broke the uncanny likeness.
Glacial steel and sea foam flecks.
His mother's eyes.
He'd inherited her willowy build as well, all long limbs and slight.
He could still eat for days and never gain a pound.
"Born to be a runner," his mama had said, running her hand down his cheek, thumbing the peach-fuzz starting to grow on his upper lip. Fussing over him until he rolled his eyes and wriggled out of her hold. Laughing as Judith – all long dark hair and soulful eyes – beautiful and beyond cool in his teenage eyes, made mocking kissy-faces over her brother's shoulder.
Her first child had been the same, or so his mother had said, her little Sophia.
They always talked about how he'd learned to walk long before he'd said so much as a peep.
Such a quiet child.
He'd even cried softly.
It was like somehow, he just knew.
When he'd been younger, he'd coveted the freedom that came with feeling the sun on his face.
He remembered the way his bare heels had slammed into the hard packed earth.
He remembered laughing, for the sheer joy of it, as Glenn and Maggie had turned his desire to run into a game, trying to catch him and reel him in for tickles as he'd dodged their wriggling fingers and run circles around them. Eventually escaping to hide behind Tyreese, plastering himself to his back, panting and giggling as the man had rumbled with laughter.
He'd loved to run.
And good thing too.
Considering they ended up doing their fair share of it.
His own history was complex, unexpected.
He was a child of the new order.
A son born into a world defined by the colors of crimson and faded, mottled grey.
He'd been conceived at a crossroads on the night of a harvest moon.
On the cusp of the changing of the seasons.
The shortening of the days.
"My miracle child," his mother had called him.
It was his earliest memory.
Her reverent smile, tentative and disbelieving in all the ways he hadn't understood until he'd gotten older. But it was a good one nonetheless. He'd been an accident. But not an unwelcome one.
He'd learned to live with the fact that his father often looked at him like he was liable to disappear at any moment. Like he was something amazing and impossible. Like he wasn't used to having good things.
He didn't know for sure, but sometimes he was almost certain that look wasn't just because of the way the world was now. All he knew was that he regretted not asking when he'd had the chance.
The world he'd been born into had been one of reds, oranges and rusty browns.
It was picture-perfect fall leaves withering.
It was the scent of dying pine.
It was moldering scrolls of birch bark drowning in last season's rot.
It was the early autumn breeze tingling across the senses.
The closest thing to a homecoming he'd ever experienced.
That was how he knew it was time.
He didn't know the exact date of his birth.
Only the season.
His mother and father had argued about it more than once – light hearted at the fire-side as Judith and Carl skinned pheasant and wild turkey, Tyreese and Rick splitting stumps into kindling in the background. They'd spat out dates like spent ammunition - the twenty-fifth of September, October first. Numbers attached to meaningless words, months of the year that none of them needed to keep track of anymore.
Truth was, neither of them rightly remembered.
He'd made the mistake of nodding once, simply accepting it as he did with everything, content that his question had been answered – after a fashion – as he'd let his thoughts reel back to the previous fall, remembering the late Indian Summer and the small house they'd stayed in during the winter. But that had only made it worse.
He'd always found it strange when talk like that made them get all quiet.
Like when Malik and Jada - Bob and Sasha's twins – had asked what Halloween was.
Their reactions always made him feel like he was missing something.
Michonne had tried to explain it to him once. The meaning behind the dates. The tiny black-lined squares that counted down the days to the end of the month. To make him understand the meaning of holidays and weekends. He'd nodded in all the right places, eager to know, but more eager not to disappoint.
It was a personal failing, he supposed.
His tendency to want to please rather than wound.
Truth was, he'd never seen the point.
He didn't need something to keep track of the days.
To let him know when summer was ending.
He knew the way it smelled.
The way it felt on the skin at dusk.
The chill of it in the small hours before dawn.
You didn't need much more than that to know what your bones were already telling you.
He crouched down, joints pop-popping as he examined the tilt of the twin, weather-beaten crosses. It had been close to twenty years since he'd been here last. The ground had been different then, softer, still entrenched – nutrient rich – from all the blood that'd been spilled here.
He rested a hand on the mound to his left, running his hand across the curve as blood-shot eyes traced the hand carved "C" he'd etched into the wood all those years ago. The "D" on the other had come out a bit crooked. He'd been working with a blunt knife and a bandage on his right hand that had hampered his movements.
He felt a smile stretch across his face as he remembered his cursing.
The way he'd vented his frustration and grief through angry tears.
He took a cloth-wrapped bundle out of his pack, handling each item with careful reverence. Feeling the plush of the earth underneath him as he settled himself in the small space that separated them.
He kept her knife wrapped in the dark purple sweater she'd favored.
Just as he'd once carried his father's bow.
They were talismans he'd carried with him.
A quiet, personal sort of remembrance he'd observed throughout the years.
Now it was time to return them.
Where he was going, he wouldn't need them.
He winced, back sore, as he twisted around, prying a small camping shovel free from his pack. It'd be dark soon. Best make use of the light while he still had it.
He stayed there, hands coated earthy-black, until the sun made tracks across the sky, poised in the familiar cradle of the Georgian skyline as dusk settled. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, feeling the individual grains grate across his scars as the loose soil fluttered back to earth.
He felt strangely empty – light in a way he'd never experienced.
He'd done what he'd set out to do.
And now the idea of the future spanned out in front of him like a long, open field.
The kind that made you want to kick off you shoes and give it a run for its money.
His head cocked, marveling as the idea took root.
It had been a long time since he'd wanted to run.
It was only when a distant sound, a low-lying rustle and a rattling moan sounded out that he finally rose. The figure he cut was unsteady but proud as he watched the fading light flicker between the gaps in the wood. A mess of dying colors - hues of orange and copper-beaten gold – one simile short of a metaphor as the shadows of distant trees began to lengthen and warp at his feet.
A smile twitched across his lips as he took them in.
The ground had been unyielding, rocky and hard, but they'd chipped out enough to bury them together. Side by side and facing the dawn.
He remembered pausing long enough to drop down between them, to make a hole in the sheets they'd wrapped around them. Enough to pull their arms out. Enough to curl bloody, stiffening fingers around the palm of the other.
It had seemed important to come back, one last time.
Especially now.
Because he hadn't been facetious when he'd said that things were changing.
He wouldn't live to see it, but things were different now. Evolving.
It was the eve of his life, and just like he figured was proper, everything was coming full circle.
He wasn't the first and he certainly hadn't been the last, but it was his generation that had proved humanity's resilience. That had proved that virus or not, we could still hold our own.
Because in the end, that was the key.
Time.
They hadn't figured it out for sure, if those like him had some sort of natural immunity or if the virus had a best before date – but he had a feeling that someday, in the not so distant future, they would have answer for that too. But for now, all he knew was that he had a scar on his right thigh – a set of teeth marks and the ripping drag of canines - to prove it.
People still died.
People still got bit and turned.
But no longer was turning a given outside of a walker's jaws.
It was the reprieve they'd needed.
What was left of the military and distant governments were starting to make tracks, figuring out how to bring the survivors of the great plague back together.
Humanity had finally found a way to fight back.
Survive.
He was the resistance made flesh.
He was product of the best parts of humanity, a solid mixture of both the old and the new.
And he couldn't have done it without them.
A/N #2: Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed. Please let me know what you think. – This story is now complete.