AN: Here we are, another chapter here.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Rick went directly to sit on the foot of the bed, the whole frame of the old bed letting out a creak when he rested his weight there. Carol considered joining him after she closed the bedroom door, but she stopped and stood in front of him, a few feet between them, with her arms crossed across her chest.
"I didn't—uh—I didn't really expect you to come so soon," Carol said.
Rick looked at her, nodded once, and then looked back at the floor where he was, apparently, studying the woodgrain since there was nothing more there for him to examine with such careful intent.
"So soon?" He asked without looking at her for the moment. "It felt like I was out there for a while."
"Big decisions take time," Carol said. "If you're going to make the right decision. For the right reason. Are you sure you're—that you're making the right decision? For the right reason?"
Rick looked at her then.
The problem with Rick, and Carol had often thought this, was that he was a man who was capable of simultaneously being a person who overthought things far too much and of being a person who made rash decisions.
Which he was depended on something unknown to her—maybe the pull of the moon or maybe something in the water—but he could easily go either way. There seemed, often, to be no middle ground. He either seemed to be eternally unsure of how he should react to a given situation, or he reacted quickly and brashly and did the very first thing that came to his mind—only stopping later to think of the consequences.
She'd seen both sides of him at work, and at this moment, she wasn't sure which was in control.
He tipped his head to the side, nodded to himself again, and then he finally spoke, his voice giving away that maybe he was still thinking this one through.
"What's the right reason?" He asked.
Carol shook her head.
"I don't know," she admitted. "I don't. But I know that the wrong reason—or, at least, the wrong reason in my opinion, would be that you're bothered that I left you in the shed. I don't want you to be here because—you're frustrated and you're—making the first decision that you can make to…"
She stopped and shook her head at him. She didn't want to put to words what she was thinking. She didn't want to say out loud that she didn't want Rick making a fast decision just because she'd turned him down for sex when that's clearly what he'd come to the shed looking for. She didn't want that to be the reason that he made any decision because it wasn't a very good reason for saying that he wanted something more meaningful between them and that he wanted everyone in the group to know about it.
Rick sighed and shook his head.
"It's not that," he said. "I know it's not that. But—I know that this world, it's not like the world that we used to live in. It hasn't been for—anybody. We're losing people. It feels like, all the time, we're just constantly—losing people. And we find something good…We found the prison. We took that prison. We shed blood, we lost lives, and we took that prison. And we had something—for a while—we had something. And then we lost it. We lose everything—especially if it's good…"
Carol felt a catch in her throat, as though she'd tried to swallow something barbed. She swallowed against it.
She knew as well as any of them—maybe even more if than some if they were going to compare their scars—what it was to lose in this world.
"You—uh…" Carol stopped and cleared her throat, unhappy with the way that her voice came out. "You're afraid—you think that—if we do this? If we put a name to it, and it's something good. That—that we're going to lose it?"
He looked at her and, at that moment, his expression said it all.
Carol shook her head gently at him. She shook her head because she didn't know what to say. At that moment her mind was offering her a million different things to say and her mouth was refusing to say any of them at all. All she could do, it seemed, was to shake her head.
Because she understood the fear of losing something good. She understood, too, the feeling of not even knowing if you wanted something good—because if you had it, then you'd feel the loss…a loss that almost seemed sure to come.
But at the same time, if there was anything left that was good at all in this world? It seemed hard to pass that up when it was being practically handed to you.
Carol sucked in a breath, all at once, that was so deep and so violent that it almost surprised her.
She had to tell him. She had to come clean to him. She had to confess. Her confession was something that she knew might very well change Rick's mind about her entirely—it might very well drive him to send her away again.
It wasn't something that she could hold onto any longer, not if she was expecting him to make some kind of decision about what they were doing.
And suddenly there was something of a cold fear in her chest, because she didn't know how he might react. She would take it, though. She would accept whatever reaction he had. And, she decided in an instant, she would do her best to keep Tyreese from being involved.
If Rick kicked her out of this group, she would survive—or she wouldn't. Either way, she was planning on leaving anyway. And even though she'd started to put those thoughts out of her mind and had started, in her own little way, to replace them with the idea that there might be something there—something to look forward to—she knew well enough how to shut those thoughts down and go if she had to go. Tyreese, though? He needed this. She wasn't going to take that from him.
She sucked in another breath, already feeling her chest tightening at the thought of admitting what had happened to him, and she turned and walked back to where she'd been sitting before to sit once more. Her knees felt shaky and she was more than certain that they weren't going to hold out for this—but she wasn't going to fall to them, not in front of him, not if he was going to tell her that she had to leave.
That wasn't who she was anymore.
"Carol? What's wrong?" Rick asked.
Carol covered her mouth, taking a moment to compose herself, and shook her head at him.
"I have to tell you something," she said. "I have to tell you—what happened. Before you say anything else. Before you even—before you think anything else. I have to tell you."
He looked afraid, and rightly should he be, Carol thought to herself.
"When—after you left," Carol said, focusing her attention on the arm of the chair she was sitting in so that she didn't have to see his face while she spoke, "I went back to the prison. I tried to leave. But—I couldn't just leave and I didn't think—and I still don't—that you had the right to do what you did."
He started to interrupt her and she held up her hand. She looked at him and shook her head.
"Please, don't interrupt me," she said. "You can say whatever you want to say when I'm done. You can say—whatever it is. But—just let me finish. Because, if you interrupt me, I won't finish."
Rick simply nodded his understanding.
"I didn't think that you had the right to do what you did. I wasn't going to just—leave—when I knew that people were sick. I knew that they were coming back with medication. They would need all the hands that they could get," Carol said. "The worst you could have done was kill me and, honestly, I felt like you were determined to do that anyway. So—I was going to go back and confess to everyone. Let them all decide."
She paused a moment and looked at him, but he was staring off at the wall behind her, his eyes unfocused. He was going to give her the chance to say what she had to say, just like she'd requested. She felt sorry for him, though, because he looked bothered by just what she'd already said and he had no idea that it was absolutely nothing in comparison to what was to come.
"When I got back, the prison was already burning," Carol said. "By the time I made the decision to come back—there was nothing to come back too. I saw—Tyreese leaving. I saw he had the girls with him. So—I followed them. Finally? I caught up with them. We—travelled for a bit. We saw the signs for Terminus. We were going there. We—stopped—in a farmhouse. A little house—in a little grove. A pecan grove. And—it was really nice, actually, so—we were going to stay. Not—maybe not forever—but we were going to stay for a little while. Except…"
She paused. There was just no easy way to say it. There was no way to paint a picture of what had happened—of the absolute horror of the situation—and make it come out as anything picturesque or lovely. It was absolutely the stuff of horror movies, and there was no way to soften it. She couldn't soften it for herself, and she couldn't soften it for Rick really. It was something that would haunt her for the rest of her life, and very likely in the hereafter if such a place existed, and she didn't know how to make it sound "nicer".
She just had to say it.
"Rick, Lizzie was never—Lizzie had a lot of problems. And she never really understood the Walkers. She never knew what they were. She thought…" Carol had to stop more than she wanted as she spoke. She had to focus on swallowing back her emotions and keeping them in check. She didn't want to break down and be reduced to a blubbering person who couldn't be understood. But it still made her want to break down. "She thought that the Walkers were another stage of life. We die, we become them, we live forever as Walkers. She didn't want to kill them—but even that wasn't the problem."
Carol shook her head, feeling frustrated with herself. It just wouldn't come out the way she wanted it to come. It kept getting stuck in her throat. Finally she sucked in a breath and spit out the rest of the story as quickly as she could, very nearly feeling like she was vomiting it out at him.
"She killed Mikka," Carol said. "One day, when we went to get water, we came back and she'd killed Mikka. She wanted—she was going to kill Judith too—maybe all of us. She wanted to let her come back as a Walker. She thought she'd still be herself—she wanted me to see that she'd still be Mikka. She didn't know…"
Another pause, another breath, and Carol was sure she couldn't look at Rick.
"She might have killed all of us, but she planned to kill Judith," Carol said. "I knew that she couldn't go on like that. I knew it wasn't safe for Judith. It wasn't safe for anyone. It wasn't even safe for Lizzie. Sooner or later? She'd have killed herself to—to join everyone else."
Carol looked at him then, but she didn't really let her eyes see him. She merely directed them in his direction.
"I killed her. I…shot her. Before we left for Terminus," Carol said. "It was me. It—wasn't Tyreese. It was me."
Carol looked at Rick then, actually allowed her eyes to focus on him. He was looking back at her. He was staring at her. Now he wasn't focused on the wall behind her or a curtain or whatever it had been that he'd been looking at in the faint illumination provided by the two lanterns burning in the room.
He was looking at her.
And she felt a catch because he didn't look like she'd expected him to look after such a confession.
"Rick?" She asked. "Say something?"