AN: Here we go, another chapter. More to come as soon as I can.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Rick stood for some time in the shed and thought about things, because there was a lot to think about.
Carol wanted an answer from him. She wanted some sort of yes or no, on or off response, and he had failed to give it to her. Instead, what he'd offered her was the explanation that he couldn't be with her—or rather that he couldn't be open about it—because of his children.
And he wasn't even sure if it was true or not.
Judith didn't know Lori. She had never known her from the outside, and she never would. Nothing remained of her mother in this world—Rick wasn't even sure if Carl still had the picture that he'd once been willing to risk life and limb to get from a café.
It wouldn't matter to Judith, and it wasn't a slight to Lori if it didn't matter to her. She'd hear about her mother, and hopefully more of it would be flattering than not, but she would never have the ability to remember her—and therefore couldn't actually miss her. The most she could do, honestly, was miss that she didn't have the chance to have the mother that some children had, a biological mother.
But there was probably not shortage of children in the world without mothers, and there was no shortage of mothers without children. Judith would have a mother.
And it could be Carol.
Judith would be happy with Carol as her mother. Rick sometimes suspected, though he never really said it, that she might believe her to be her mother at any rate.
Even if Rick had tried to take that away from her. Away from both of them.
Carl did remember Lori, and Carl was who Rick was using as his greatest concern in all of this.
But upon further inspection, he had to ask himself if that was really fair either.
Carl remembered Lori, but he was also far past the age of looking, at least exactly, for a surrogate mother. He didn't need the kind of maternal care that he would have if he were younger—Judith's age or younger. He didn't miss Lori for those things because he wouldn't have allowed her to "baby" him at any rate, even if she were still there.
What Carl needed from a mother, perhaps, he was just as likely to find in any woman willing to offer it—and Carol and Michonne both offered it to him.
When Rick actually thought about it with no one around asking him questions—questions for which it was a quick and easy answer or excuse—he realized that it was unreasonable to think that Carl would have a problem with whatever it was that was happening between Rick and Carol. Or with whatever it was that might happen between them if Rick were to come clean and make it something openly discussed and known about.
Carol wasn't going to replace Lori, but she wasn't going to try either, and Carl was old enough to understand that. Carl was, arguably, far more grown than his years indicated.
Rick knew that it was time to stop using his children as excuses.
She'd been right, after all. He'd used them far too many times against her.
But if he wasn't using his children against her, then he had to decide what was really going on. He had to figure out what it was, exactly, that was even making him consider using his children as some kind of excuse to throw up at her that might act as a stop sign.
When he'd asked her to leave, it had been…
It had been…
So many things.
But maybe, more than anything else, it had been his fear.
Right now? He was feeling afraid too, but for entirely different reasons. Right now he didn't fear a virus that might wipe out the people that he'd become responsible for. He didn't fear letting those people down or losing control over a group. He didn't fear Carol and the decisions that she seemed to be able to make—decisions that he wasn't sure he could have ever made.
But he did fear Carol, to some degree in this instance. And he did, to some degree, stand in awe of her ability to take a stand on something that seemed so complicated to him.
And he feared letting her down.
Because if he said that he wanted something more from her than the nighttime meetings that they'd had? Something more than the strictly physical hidden behind closed doors and out of the sight of others?
Then he had a certain responsibility to her, and it was one that he took seriously, even if it was one that he'd never exactly performed to the level that he'd intended to perform with Lori.
He'd let her down.
But, then again, he'd felt like she'd let him down too.
It didn't exactly make them even, if such a school ground mentality could be applied to something like marriage, but it did make it a little easier for him to handle the guilt that, every now and again, threatened to eat him alive.
And maybe, to some degree, he feared letting Carol down like he'd let Lori down. And maybe he feared letting Lori down, in some way, again.
But—if he didn't do anything, and if he didn't say anything? Then he might not be actively making a decision, but a decision was being made.
He was telling her, without telling her, that he didn't want anything with her beyond what they had. And, in essence, that was telling her that he didn't want anything beyond something purely physical.
Even Rick knew that it wasn't a very flattering thought—and he knew that even if she thought she could accept that, he hated to ask her to make that decision knowing what she would basically be deciding: was she OK with continuing to be with him, knowing that he wasn't thinking about her as anything more than a warm body?
And that wasn't the case. So he had to be the one to take it off the table entirely.
He had to actually say something. He had to do something.
Because, even if he didn't say anything, he was saying everything.
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Carol was surprised when there was a knock at the bedroom door of the farmhouse. She was sharing the room with Michonne, everyone basically having to double or triple up because of space, and Michonne glanced over at her from where she was sitting on the bed, reading a book.
"Expecting someone?" Michonne asked.
Carol frowned.
No, she really wasn't expecting anyone. She wasn't sure that it was fair to expect Rick, and there was no one else that she thought might have unfinished business with her tonight. However, she always seemed to be the one that people "needed" for something—can you sew this? Can you fix this? Do you know where this or that is? Do you have this whatever that I need?
"I'll get it," Carol said, the only response she gave, as more of a courtesy than anything else. Michonne was making no move to answer the door.
Carol got up from where she'd been looking at a book of her own choosing out of the bedroom's scanty library, and went, turning the cold glass knob of the old door.
Rick was standing there, his head hung slightly, his hands on hips. When she opened the door, he barely lifted his face and rolled his eyes up to look at her.
"Can we talk?" He asked.
Carol glanced slightly in Michonne's direction, but Michonne was already moving around and gathering up her things.
"I'll just…" Michonne started, clearly not having worked out where she was going or what she was going to say was her urgent calling when she was already out of her "day wear" entirely.
Rick held a hand up in her direction, so Michonne stopped, a somewhat confused look on her face.
"I'm going to ask you," Rick said, "for privacy. I'd appreciate it if you'd give us some privacy."
She started to say something, most likely along the lines of the fact that she was trying to do just that, and Rick shook his head.
"But I don't want you to pretend that you don't know what's going on here or that you didn't see or hear anything," Rick said.
He looked at Carol then and then back at Michonne, keeping his vision somewhat skipping between them when he spoke.
"I haven't talked to Carl yet—and I would like to talk to him in person—but I can do that first thing in the morning. So I'd rather you…and nobody else…say anything until I've had the chance to talk to him, and I'll do it before breakfast…but…" Rick paused, apparently trying to arrange the words he was going to say next, his vision still going between them. "But," he said when he was ready to start again, "I hope that I'm not overstepping my boundaries when I say that Carol and I have…"
And there was another pause.
Carol didn't want to put words in his mouth, and so she wouldn't offer her thoughts out loud, but she wondered if maybe his sudden hesitation to finish what she was pretty sure she could finish for him was because he didn't know what to call it.
What in the world would she even call it?
It seemed entirely ludicrous to say they were "dating". Even "seeing each other" sounded out of place in the world that they called home right now.
And some of the others, who had relationships here and there, stuck to the "old world's terminology," but it still seemed a little out of place.
"We've been…seeing each other," Rick said, finally choosing one of the terms that Carol had just run through her mind as being somewhat unusual for their circumstances.
But, arguably, it sounded better than "we've been fucking each other without any idea what's going on or if there would be more to it".
"Oh," Michonne said. Carol noticed, though, that her voice didn't carry even a fraction of the "surprise" that such an exclamation was supposed to carry. In fact, she didn't sound surprised at all. And she'd sounded somewhat amused when there was a knock at the door.
If they'd thought this was a secret at all, and Carol wasn't sure that she had ever actually believed it was a secret or could remain that way, Michonne was more or less proving to them that everybody already knew what was going on—whether or not they were using Rick's chosen vocabulary to describe it.
It wasn't just Daryl who knew, it was everyone. They might not be saying anything about it, but they knew.
The look on Rick's face said he might just be figuring that out for himself—or maybe he was wondering if Carl already knew what he expected to tell him the next morning.
But then Rick looked at Michonne, nodded his head slightly, and cleared his throat.
"Judith and I were rooming with Tyreese," Rick said.
"And I don't mind rooming with Tyreese," Michonne said. "And—I don't think he minds rooming with me for the night. So—I'm going to switch out with you, OK?"
Rick nodded his head again, his way of saying thank you to the woman for giving up her spot to allow him to legitimately spend the night in the room with Carol—the first night where he clearly intended not to go back to another room when things were done.
Carol felt an odd sort of twisting in her stomach at the thought of it. There were most assuredly butterflies of some sort.
She thanked Michonne quickly and quietly when the woman gathered up the things that she was taking with her, including several of the books off the shelf whose titles she likely hadn't even perused, and made her way out the room, bidding them a quiet goodnight.
Rick stepped out of the way to let Michonne pass, and his eyes followed after a moment as she went, but he didn't come into the room. He stood there in the hallway and waited, bringing his eyes back to Carol after a moment.
"Did I step out of line?" He asked.
Carol swallowed.
He was asking if he stepped out of line by saying they were "seeing each other," whatever that meant in this world—something that they'd have to work out for themselves now—and if he'd stepped out of line by assuming that's what she wanted and that they were both on board with the idea.
He was asking her if he had the right, at least in that instance because not all situations were created equal in her mind, to speak for her—if he had the right to give a name to what was happening between them or what might happen.
Nobody had ever asked her if they had the right to speak to her. They'd simply assumed they did and they'd done it. But, neither before nor after, never had they asked her if they had the right to speak for her.
Carol sucked in a breath, surprised to find that she might need to screw some of her courage into the sticking place for the encounter that she was sure was to come next, and she stepped back a little from her position in front of the door to the bedroom.
"No," she said. "You didn't step out of line—not then. I think—what you said? I think it was fair. Do you?"
Rick tipped his head slightly and then nodded.
"Yeah," he said. He chuckled to himself. "That's why I said it. Can—can I come in?"
Carol nodded and moved to allow him easy passage through the doorway of the old house.
"Please," she said, not sure what else to say and not sure that anything else was necessary—at least not at the moment.