AN: Here we go, another chapter here.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Carol stayed in her seat for the moment. She didn't trust her legs enough to try to get up. She already knew, and knew well, that in times like this her knees could betray her and deem her bodyweight to be just too much to support.
Rick was simply staring at her, almost blankly, and it took him long enough to respond that Carol was starting to grow as uncomfortable with his silence as she might have been with any possible reaction or response he might hurl in her direction.
When he finally did speak, though, his voice was low—he almost sounded defeated with the volume of it—and his words weren't any that she'd expected.
"You would do anything for this group," he said.
He lowered his face to the floor a moment and Carol didn't speak. She waited on him. She waited for him to take in all that she'd said. She waited for him to think about a response. This wasn't something that she felt anyone would know how to address immediately. She knew that she wouldn't be able to, not if she were sitting in his place.
"You would do anything for this group," he repeated, still not looking at her.
Carol didn't feel she needed to respond. She'd responded to that statement, or question, whichever it was meant to be, once before and she didn't feel the need to repeat herself. She felt that he should know the answer to that.
"You would…" He started, as though he were just going to repeat the same phrase once more and then he stopped. He looked at her. "You would do anything for Judith, too."
Carol nodded her head just enough to register that she was even still there and following along with him as he went through things himself.
"I thought I couldn't…that's not true," he said, disputing with himself suddenly. "I said that I couldn't trust you with her. But—you're the person she'd be the safest with. You're the person she is the safest with."
Carol hummed negation of that and shook her head at him.
"She's safe with you, Rick," Carol said. "She's safe with Tyreese. With Daryl. With Michonne. Carl would keep her safe."
"What happened out there," Rick said. "With—Karen and David? Carol—you're right. I had…I had no right to do that. It isn't an excuse, but I was trying to do…"
He stopped speaking again and shook his head. He laughed to himself ironically.
"I'm tired of hearing my own excuses," he commented, more to himself than to her. "I'm tired of saying…I did what I thought was best. This group…it needs a leader. These people…they need someone to follow. But I'm not that leader. I want to be. I was—as a cop—I was trained to be a leader. In case of emergency, follow the police officer. But I'm not a leader. I'm not anymore prepared for this than anyone else."
Carol sat back in her chair. She almost felt disarmed at the moment. She wasn't expecting his words to unfold into what they were becoming. She expected him to be angry with her. She expected him to respond to what she'd just told him. But, instead, he was responding something else entirely, even if they were related.
Still, Carol sat still and quiet and waited for him to have the moment that he seemed to need to have.
"I made that decision because…I was overwhelmed. I didn't know what decision to make. The virus was taking over the prison. It was threatening the lives of everyone that I was working for—everyone I needed to keep safe. And then—someone was killing people? Someone was killing people and burning bodies and—Tyreese was going to expect an explanation. Everyone was going to expect me to do something about it. They were going to expect me to handle it."
"You made the decision because you were scared," Carol offered, keeping her voice as low and even as she could. She could recognize, almost immediately, that Rick was going through—in just that very instant—a range of emotions that were coming back from just thinking about the situation.
She'd seen Ed go through his own chains of emotions, and though they weren't the same exactly, she knew that things could go in a number of directions depending on which one of Rick's emotions won out at the moment. "Rick, it's OK to be scared. We're all scared. Everyday. Every…hour. We're all scared. Even—even those who don't show it? Who can't show it? They're all scared."
He fell silent a moment before he continued.
"It was going to be run with a panel. Nobody in charge. The group made the decisions—the panel made the decisions for the group," Rick said. "And when it's all running smoothly? That works. It works fine. But in the end? Things go badly? People need someone to look to. They want someone to fix things. Even the panel. They want someone to say this is the way things are. They need someone to make the hard decisions. The decisions they don't want to make. Everyone wants equality, but in the end? They just want that one person to blame because they don't want to share that."
Carol felt a catch in her chest.
It was true. It was a universal truth. When it came down to it, human nature was that everyone wanted someone else to make the hard decisions. She certainly did.
In fact, she could remember a time when she really wasn't sure she was capable of making a decision at all. She wasn't sure she wanted to make decisions, and especially not if they were difficult ones. She didn't want to be blamed for them. She didn't want to be held accountable for them.
Of course, once upon a time, hard decisions in her life had been the equivalent of what she should and shouldn't make for dinner—and a wrong decision? Depending on Ed's mood, a wrong decision could lead to a night of hell that she had to try to hide from Sophia.
She wasn't afraid anymore to make the decisions that had to be made.
Now she realized that someone had to make them. Someone had to be the one to say this is the way things go and this is what we're going to do. In her opinion, the important thing was to try to make the best decision—for everyone involved—and to follow through with it.
"I forgive you," Carol said. "I honestly, truly, forgive you for what you did, Rick. You wanted to make the best decision. You made the best one you could. You asked me to leave."
He looked at her, furrowed his brow, and shook his head.
"No," he said. "No—I didn't make the best decision. It wasn't—that wasn't my decision to make. I wasn't asked to make that decision. If anything? It belonged to everyone. It belonged to Tyreese…it belonged to everyone who was affected by it."
"Tyreese forgives me," Carol said.
Rick nodded his head, but he didn't offer more words at the moment and he didn't offer any more explanation of where his mind was for the time being.
So Carol did the only thing she knew to do and remained where she was, sitting and waiting him out.
"You made the decision about Lizzie?" He asked.
Carol stared at him.
She didn't want to lie, but she also didn't want to throw Tyreese under the proverbial bus. She reasoned to herself that she could say that she made the decision. Even though she'd discussed it with Tyreese, and even though he was reluctantly in agreement with her, he'd been the one to ask her to make the final decision—and he hadn't stopped her when she'd taken the gun from him and told her that she would do it.
After all, Lizzie was her daughter. She'd promised to care for her as though she were her own. She was her responsibility in this world.
It wasn't Tyreese's burden to carry, not any more than he already was.
Carol nodded.
Yes, she'd been the one to make the decision. It had been her, ultimately, that was responsible for the act. She would carry full responsibility for it, and she'd accept fully whatever punishment might be due to her.
"Tyreese knew about it?" Rick asked.
Carol nodded again.
"He knew," she said. "But—he didn't do it, Rick. It wasn't Tyreese. I made the decision. I pulled the trigger."
"But—he didn't try to stop you?" Rick asked.
Carol swallowed and gave herself a moment that she needed, just like the ones she'd gladly given to Rick, to get herself under control. She was choking, still, on her feelings over the whole thing. Any time they were brought to the forefront of her mind, she got the same feeling of drowning.
When she'd finally choked it back, she shook her head.
"There wasn't any reason to stop me," she said confidently. "It was the only thing to do. It was—the most humane thing to do."
He stared at her and then he nodded once more, apparently physically responding to some internal dialogue that he wasn't allowing her access to at the moment.
"Like killing Karen and David?" He asked.
Carol felt the feeling of the phantom strike against her rib cage that came any time Rick spoke about them. Just their names on his lips reminded her of the moment that he'd left her out there. She forgave him, she meant that, but it didn't mean that she forgot or that it hadn't happened.
She nodded again.
"Yes," she said. "It was the only thing that I could do. It was the most humane thing that I could do."
She hesitated a moment before she spoke again.
"It's what I would want," she said. "If it were me."
He nodded at her again.
"This group—they need a leader," Rick said. "They need someone to follow. Someone who can make decisions. Hard decisions. That they don't want to make. I'm not that leader."
"You're a good leader, Rick," Carol said.
He seemed amused by the statement.
He took to his feet for the first time, standing up from the creaking bed.
"I'm not that leader," Rick said. "But you? Carol—you could be that leader. You could—you'll make those decisions."
Carol sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, contemplating those words—contemplating the stark and unexpected change to the conversation that she'd thought they would have.
"They're not looking for a leader that would kill three people," Carol said. She shook her head at him. "You said it yourself. I killed our own. Nobody wants that as a leader."
"They would want a leader that they knew…that they knew would do the best thing," Rick said. "The humane thing. Even if it wasn't the easiest thing? You killed our own because you thought it was humane."
He paused.
"You killed your own because you thought it was humane," Rick said. "You did it—because you thought it was the best thing to do for someone else. Not for you. You said Tyreese knows about it? He forgave you. He wouldn't have let you do it if…"
"I'm not a leader," Carol declared.
The atmosphere in the room had changed until Carol no longer felt nervous about Rick's demeanor. He wasn't, perhaps, entirely stable, but she didn't feel he was a threat anymore—at least not to her. And her knees, now, could be trusted. She took to her feet.
"I'm not a leader, Rick," Carol said. "You're a leader. You want to be a leader, and that's the first thing that a leader needs to be. I don't want to be a leader."
"You can make the hard decisions," Rick repeated. "You can do what needs to be done."
"I do what needs to be done," Carol said. "But that's because it needs to be done, and nobody else can or will do it. Not because I want to do it."
"That's what a leader does," Rick said. "Or, it should be. But—maybe I haven't…I know I haven't. Carol, I haven't always made decisions for the right reasons."
Carol crossed her arms across her chest. It wasn't something she could dispute. She knew that Rick didn't always make decisions for the right reasons. She was pretty sure that anyone who spent enough time around him—who really watched him and talked to him—knew that he didn't always make decisions for the best reasons.
But maybe nobody did.
"Rick—you're just human," Carol said. "And—you've been a leader when this group needed you to be. Maybe you haven't always done everything right—but you've done what was asked of you, what was expected of you. That's—it's what a leader does."
For a moment longer, it was anyone's guess what might be going on behind his eyes as he fixed them on her.
"Carol?" Rick asked. She hummed, just enough to let him know that she was listening and that he should finish speaking. "I want you to be—my…helper in this…my partner. I want you to be…beside me. With me."
Carol swallowed.
"You're not angry at all?" She asked, almost in disbelief that he wasn't going to rail against her at all for what she'd done.
He shook his head slightly, but verbally he ignored the question for the time being.
"Will you…be my…partner? My helpmate?" Rick asked. "In leading this group?"
Carol sighed.
It wasn't really a job that she was sure that she wanted, but it was preferable to being the leader herself. And, she could testify, more than anyone else perhaps, that Rick clearly needed someone—even if it was someone who might act as nothing more than an ear and an extra voice of reason.
She nodded.
"I'll help you," she said. "I'll help you in—doing what we have to do to get the group somewhere…safe."
He nodded and voiced, in almost a whisper, his thanks.
He shifted his weight, clearly chewing on his thoughts for a second before he finally took a few steps, coming closer to Carol and reaching out, squeezing the top of her arm in his hand. It was the first touch that he'd offered her since they'd started speaking. It was strong, but it was gentle too.
He touched her face, then, with his other hand, and moved it so that he could hold her eyes entirely with his own. It was a look that was intense enough that, for a moment, it was almost unsettling.
"And…in this…this life?" He asked. "Will you—be beside me in that, too?"