For the first time in however many days or weeks, there is a sense of maybe.

The house has a sense of potential, of permanency. They're far enough back from the road, hidden among the trees that there is a moment of hope that they might have found a home – a real home.

That first night they found places to sleep, claiming small sections for themselves. Mattresses and blankets were rearranged to create livable sleeping quarters to be shared. After her shift on watch – a cold and seemingly useless experience involving sitting on the roof and staring out into an unfathomable darkness – Cal had found the room Daryl had claimed only through luck.

It wasn't a room so much as a closet, tucked off in the back of the house. Where the others had created beds, Daryl had created something more akin to a nest. The space was tight and cramped, but held the heat of their bodies well enough that Cal felt only the faintest threat of winter creeping past the grimy warmth of her socks.

That first night she had crept into the room, a keylight shining from where he had hung it off a nail. In the near dark she had knelt at the door, eyes wide and lips tight. She had watched him as he watched her, both of them considering the other with something.

"C'mon," he had rasped, lifting the blanket in invitation.

Always she wanted an invitation, he realized. Always she needed an invitation.

He still wasn't sure if it was for her benefit or his.

Cal had shrugged off her jacket and tugged off her boots. She had shuffled under the blankets, tucking herself behind him, fingers coiling into the shirt at the small of his back.

They had fallen asleep. Her encompassing him; him encompassed by her.

That first night had been the first time they slept with hope in their hearts, and dreamt of maybes.

And outside, for the first time in years, it began to snow.


"Snow doesn't suit Georgia."

Dale finds her on the porch, staring down at the white blanket draped across the entirety of the world. She stands at the edge of snow that had blown onto the front porch, eyeing everything with distaste.

"It doesn't," Cal agrees.

Dale tugs at the strap of his rifle as he steps past her, into the snow, to stare up at the roof. "We'll need to find a new place to be on watch."

Cal steps into the snow, tracking past Dale. She stands beside the truck and SUV, eyes narrowed as she looks down the drive. She looks down at the snow, sludgy and melting – already succumbing to the mildness of a Georgian winter.

She sucks in a breath of wet air, wincing at the coolness on her teeth.

Hershel steps from the house, one hand pulsing as if to chase away an ache. "We haven't had snow in years."

Dale regards Hershel - how the other man still favours his hand despite the weather's break. Dale's elbow had ached up until the clouds heaved with snow – now it was hardly a twinge.

"I'm going out," Cal decides. The two men start. She glances at them. "I'm going down the road."

Dale thumbs his rifle. "I'll come."

She doesn't disagree.

They walk together down the gravel road, marveling at the quiet the cold has ushered in. The trees bow overhead, creaking with the unfamiliar weight of a snowfall in Georgia. Cal casts cursory glances over their shoulder, eyeing the footprints they leave in their wake.

"It'll be gone before noon," Dale offers.

She nods.

They walk further on until they reach the main road. It is there on the empty road that they encounter a walker.

It stands beside a car, snow clinging to its shoulders and head. It doesn't move, it doesn't even make a sound. It simply stands in quiet, staring sightlessly down the road.

Dale curses softly. Sometimes Cal forgets how much less of the new world Dale has seen next to the others. She glances at him, at the rifle he's already removed from his shoulder, at the trigger he itches to pull.

The walker lets out a breathy sigh. Its body creaks and cracks as it lifts its chin; its eyes, glassed over from the cold, are hungry.

It croaks miserably at them.

"Is it frozen?"

Dale starts at the voice.

Carl peers out from behind a tree.

"Carl," Cal's voice drips with warning.

The boy has the decency to look sheepish.

"Well?" He asks, eyes bright and shiny. He moves to Cal's side, fingers curled around a pistol.

"On its way to," Cal moves towards the walker, her knife already in her hand. She stands a moment out of its reach. The thing lets out a breath, its hand inching up as it snaps and cracks with the strain of the cold.

Carl is at her side in a moment. His eyes gleam with the walker's inability. "Cool."

"Carl," Dale warns. He hasn't moved any closer.

They watch the walker's fingers move, stiff and lethargic, entirely affected by the cold. It can move – but only just.

Cal slips her knife into its temple a moment later, letting the stiff body reel back. It hits the snowy concrete like a piece of frozen meat.

Clunk.

"I don't think I've ever looked forward to winter," Dale murmurs, eyes wide as if they've discovered something positively wondrous – and perhaps they have.


It doesn't snow again.

Those first few days are punctuated by deeply cold nights, and days that warm enough to produce a walker here or there that shamble uselessly through the woods, lethargic from the chill still in their bones. They push against the barb wire fence surrounding the house, their moans rousing someone from some chore or other to slip a knife in their brain.

Days turns to weeks. The weeks bleed together until they judge not by the nights that have passed, but by the length of Carl's hair and the soft growing roundness of Lori's stomach.

Eventually the moderately cool days become colder, and the nights colder still. Their breath hangs in the air for a moment longer; their fingers and toes chilling more quickly on watch.

One night Daryl wakes to find Cal shivering against his back, her cool feet eagerly burrowing into the crook of his knees.

She doesn't say anything, only breathes a laugh of embarrassment. It drifts across his skin like fire, and he feels some strange pull in his heart.


Everyone cycles through watch.

Even Carol has stuttering moment of abject terror, clinging to the roof with desperate hands. Daryl is on the roof with her, a knowing comment from Rick – and a knowing stare from Cal – had seen that he wouldn't leave her alone.

Eventually she concedes defeat, slipping off the roof through the uppermost window of the attic, sniffing loudly, murmuring a quick maybe next time.

Cal meets her on the landing of the attic's ladder.

Carol's hair, she notes, has a sort of look to it – like a cat after a particularly indignant encounter with the vet. Her lips are tight with fear.

"How'd it go?"

Carol offers her a timid, embarrassed smile. "Maybe next time," she whispers, and disappears into the house.

Cal stares after her, impressed that she had tried at all.

She ascends the ladder of the attic, shutting the hatch carefully behind her. She can feel the last dregs of warmth sucked from her, the open window of the attic breathing softly of the cool winter's day. Daryl regards her, eyes hooded and jaw set with tension. An aftermath, she thinks, of Carol's uncertainty.

"At least she tried?" Cal offers, gritting her teeth against the shiver racing along her spine.

Daryl makes a sound at the back of his throat.

They stand in silence, Daryl still in the cold, and Cal shivering against it.

His eyes have turned back to the grayness of the world around them. A fog had rolled in a few days previous, consuming everything less than a quarter mile away.

"Bein' on watch with this fog is useless," Daryl mumbles, biting at his lip.

"I don't mind," Cal replies.

Daryl glances at her, at the quake of her shoulders and the way she tucks her chin into the collar of her jacket against the cold – everything she does says otherwise, but he doesn't say anything about it. He tugs off a pair of gloves he'd freed from a moth ridden closet, tucking them against her chilled palm.

She stares at the gloves in surprise. "Daryl-"

He shrugs, "I expect them back tonight. I'll be waitin' up."

She takes them, turning them over in her hands as he watches in that inscrutable way of his.

"Thanks."

He nods.


She doesn't know how long she sits in the cold, staring uselessly into the mist.

Eventually Rick joins her, crawling through the window of the attic to perch beside her on the roof.

"Where'd you get those?"

Cal follows his eyes to the too-big gloves. "Daryl."

Rick nods, as if everything makes sense in the world.

Cal narrows her eyes at him, "what?"

He leans forward, draping his arms across his knees, hands loose. He considers her for a long moment, eyes light. Cal stiffens, uncomfortable with his appraisal.

He holds out a peculiar looking device, and she forgets the knowing look in his eye – the subtle tug of his lip as if he's holding back a smile.

Cal reaches out, fingers brushing the suppressor reverently. It is different, she thinks, completely and utterly diferent from the one Carl had found earlier that week. Silver and scratched – a dash of paint on the edge as if it had been something else before all this.

She glances up at Rick, eyes wide with surprise.

"But how?"

He produces a handgun from his jacket, and screws the suppressor to the muzzle.

"Daryl."

She blinks down at the gun tucked into her hand, at the red and pink scars lacing Rick's knuckles.

"Daryl?"

"His brother acutally – which is unsurprising considering what Merle was like..."

She doesn't hear anything after that except the whistling in her ears. The only thing that crosses her mind is the coppery wash in her mouth. Her tongue, she thinks, tastes like cotton or blood or both. Maybe like concrete.

"Merle?"

She hears his reply, though it sounds disjointed and garbled. Like he's is speaking, but someone is plucking random words from his mouth to create a sentence that almost doesn't make sense.

"Asshole – rooftop – his arm – cauterized on a stove – stole our van – never found him."

She doesn't say anything. She stares ahead into the fog, seeing instead the rolling and feverish eyes of a man that had tried to kill her for her backpack. She can remember how tight his grip had been when he slammed her head into the road. She can feel the slick of his knife as it danced off her rib, slicing open her side.

He'd left her for dead, to be eaten alive – an unforgivable violence in her opinion.

"Daryl has changed a lot since his brother disappeared."

She blinks, reeling back into reality at the sound of Daryl's name.

And then she realizes she's alone, Rick long having ducked back into the house to leave her to her sightless watch.

She blinks, the weight of the gun in her hand both frightening and comforting in light of Rick's recent revelation. The homemade suppressor makes her think of Merle, no matter how hard she tries to push him from her thoughts. Of how he had so casually left her to die, to be consumed by whatever monsters their fight had attracted.

The suppressor is Merle's last testament.

Or maybe, she thinks, a sign of things to come.

"Well... Fuck," she hisses.


She recognizes shock for what it is – a disconnect from the world that leaves everything muted. The motions of checking the safety and stowing the gun are almost mechanical; her descent from the roof is in a daze. She passes by a smiling Maggie, unable to see the smile falter and fade and the worry take her eyes.

Maggie watches her go, but she doesn't say anything.

"Cal, you good?"

The voice is far away, strange. She blinks and looks at T-Dog, from where he sits on a couch, huddling beneath a blanket, a mug of shitty coffee in hand.

Cal stares at him for a long moment, eyes almost unseeing.

And then she starts for the door, spilling from the house and darting across the lawn with silent steps.

He's up and following her before she makes it past the treeline.

"Cal," he hisses, following her deeper into the misty wood. "Cal!"

But she doesn't slow down, her pace taking her further and further from their home – further and further into the mist. She doesn't know how long she runs, but maybe it is forever.

When the shock fades, she feels the fear – the deep and unrelenting fear that she'll never escape from him. That Merle will exist in every waking moment of her life. That she will relive his attempted murder, and her own attempt on his life, forever. And Daryl - she can't even think of Daryl without her heart screaming in her chest. He is Merle's brother. He is the brother of a man who had left her to die.

She slows long enough to duck under a barb wire fence, her feet taking her down a soft ditch and onto an old road. The sound of her own footsteps slapping against concrete make her hesitate and stop.

The sound of T-Dog crashing through the woods draws her attention, and she turns to watch him nearly tumble down the gentle incline of the roadside. Her heart freezes and her body tightens with fear – the shock is gone, replaced by the instict to flee.

"Shit," he hisses, drawing up beside her, panting and leaning over to draw in ragged breaths. "What. The. Hell?"

"Merle."

T-Dog blinks, as if he can't quite comprehend what she's saying.

"Yeah," he pants out. "Daryl's asshole brother."

She can't look at him. "No one ever said his name. Not even Daryl."

"Cal," he stands up. "What about Merle?"

She doesn't look at him when she says it. Words spill out of her mouth and she shrugs and tugs at her jacket as if uncomfortable in her own skin.

"I know him."

T-Dog shrugs, "so then you know he's an asshole."

Cal finally looks at him. She stares long and hard. "We fought," she whispers.

T-Dog stares at her, turning her words over and over. She watches the realization settle over him, dawning in his eyes like a flare.

"Oh. Oh."

"Yeah," she offers. "I didn't know he was Daryl's brother." It's never come up, are words she doesn't need to say. The truth of Daryl and Cal and their quiet is the only thing about them that is certain.

"He tried to take my pack," Cal's voice is soft, honest. She stares down at the concrete. "I stabbed him."

"He deserved it."

Her lips pull into a thin line. Her eyes are dark with mirth.

"I like to tell myself that," she says.

Shoot anything that looks hungry.

"You can't be beating yourself up over Merle. He's a waste of skin. Grade-A asshole."

Cal shakes her head again. "I'm not worried about that."

"Then what?"

"Daryl."

She stiffens, hands curling into fists in the gloves he had left her. She hates it – the fact that she's nervous about this entire thing, guilty even, because of him. Because she owes him the truth and she's afraid.

Afraid of everything and anything involving him – the inevitable hurt beyond hearing Merle named as his brother, at the looming prospect of Daryl's own hurt from the truth. At the fact that Merle will forever be there between them; a shadow in the quiet peace they had found.

And she's afraid of the anger – not of Daryl's, but her own.


They make their way back toward the farm along the road, stopping once or twice to do away with the near-frozen walkers in their cold-induced catatonia. They check the random cars parked along the way, unsurprised to find them already picked over by one of the others.

"How the hell did we get so far from home?" T-Dog grouses.

Cal smirks at him. "Don't look at me."

"Oh yeah, sure, Miss Havin-your-mid-life-crisis-in-the-middle-of-the-apocalypse."

She shrugs.

T-Dog takes a step in front of her, eyes imploring. "You know I'm here for you, ya crazy."

Cal looks at him, at the loose threads of his coat, at the baseball bat he favours. "I know," she says. "It means a lot, T-Dog."

He grins at her, easy and relaxed and loose.

"Did Rick show you the guns?"

He shakes his head.

"Here."

Cal pulls the gun from under her jacket, and offers it to T-Dog. He turns it over in his hands, thumbing the suppressor carefully.

"Who figured this out?"

"Daryl learned it from Merle."

"Of course he did," T-Dog shakes his head.

When he hands it back to her she shies, holding up her hands. "You keep it."

"You sure?"

"I like my knife."

T-Dog laughs and Cal smiles, and together they start the long walk back toward the farm.

It isn't long before they pass a few cars, and a truck.

"This truck wasn't here last time," T-Dog says, fingers tightening on his bat. He squats and looks under the vehicle. "Body on the backside, not moving."

Cal tries the door, wincing as it opens with a creak. No alarms sound, nothing. She pokes her head in the truck, realizing that the rear bench is covered in boxes. Her heart skips. She checks the car for keys, but finds nothing.

"Find any keys on that body?" She asks over her shoulder.

"Nah."

She sighs and shuts the truck, joining him at the tailgate where he stands over the body of a young man. There is a perfect hole in his forehead.

"Looks like he was bit," T-Dog announces.

Cal glances at the gun in the dead man's hand. She empties it of shells, tucking them away in her pockets.

"We'll come back for the rest," T-Dog reassures her. "Ain't no way we're leavin' this much shit."

Around the tailgate is the body of a young man, blood staining his arm, a perfect hole in his skull.

She nods in agreement.

Reluctantly they leave the truck and its unfortunate driver behind.

They walk a bit further before the silhouette of a walker appears. It moves slowly towards them. She tugs her knife free from the sheath, and takes a step forward.

"Allow me," T-Dog says at her side, tugging the suppressed gun free from his belt.

She smiles at his enthusiasm, and tucks her knife away. Crossing her arms, she gestures to the shape moving closer, "all yours."

T-Dog flicks off the safety and holds it up, aiming down the sights carefully.

A long moment, a held breath.

His finger moves towards the trigger, ready.

"This is the only shot you'll get, nigger. Best take it."

Cal remembers the shock from earlier – coiling across her world and casting her into something akin to nothingness. And then there is the shock that she feels now – a fear so present and real that her muscles seize and all she knows is a primeval terror.

She can't escape him.

"How you doin' there, doc?"

He steps forward from the mists, lips cut into a biting smile that promises violence. His eyes, she realizes, are glued so carefully on her face that she can already feel the once-bite of his knife in her side.

T-Dog makes a strangled noise beside her. She doesn't look away from Merle, but Merle looks away from her.

"Oh, ain't this somethin' special," he hisses.

And she realizes that he's got a gun in his hand and she remembers him hissing something about a lawman and his pet nigger.

He'd lost his hand because of them.


Sorry for the cliffhanger but I mean... how could I not? As always, please review!