"We have to tell everyone." Michonne whispered.
"Yeah." Daryl said. He was kneading her shoulders. Even though it was the middle of the day, the two had been in bed for at least an hour. After his watch, Daryl had come down to find Michonne in the cell, just sitting on the bed with the trash can between her knees.
Michonne couldn't help that she was tense, and the massage was keeping the nausea at bay. She was grateful that she hadn't had to ask Daryl to do it; he had just started doing it while she told him about talking to Hershel. Michonne knew that Hershel and Carol would keep it to themselves until they told everyone, but she also knew that Carol was busting to talk about it and the gossip chain in the prison was relatively short.
Daryl had spent the entire watch daydreaming. In his daydreams, anything was possible. He tried to ground them in the day to day reality in which he lived to make them more plausible scenarios, but so much snuck in from what he used to know that it didn't always work out that way. The biggest problem was that in all of his daydreams the kid, who was sometimes a boy and sometimes a girl, was already at least four years old and walking and talking. It held his hand a lot and kissed him on the cheek. His reality right now was much different. Instead what he had was Michonne, sitting in front of him, with her face in a trash can.
Daryl didn't know much about pregnant women. He'd been around Lori some, but not enough to really pay attention. What he did know was that they got big bellies that everyone touched. He also knew they were moody and ate weird things. So far he couldn't say any of those things fit Michonne. She didn't look pregnant, and around here there wasn't much variety in the food, not that Daryl had seen her eat much of anything in the past few days. He couldn't say she was moody, either, because Michonne was always moody.
Daryl stopped massaging Michonne's shoulders. She put the trash can on the floor, feeling better now that she was totally relaxed. He slipped around her and sat beside her, taking one of her hands and nervously running his finger up and down each of her fingers.
"You said Hershel could feel the baby." Daryl said.
"Yeah." Michonne said.
"Could I?" Daryl asked. Michonne thought about it for a minute.
"I don't know what he was doing, Daryl. I couldn't tell you if you'd found the baby or just some random internal organ." She said. Daryl looked disappointed, but he did kind of snicker at her. "Besides, if you go poking around, I might get sick again."
"When ya gonna get big?" Daryl asked. He tried to picture what Michonne would look like pregnant. He was having a hard time picturing it, but he thought he'd like it when he saw it.
"I don't know." Michonne said. She remembered that she had been big with both of her daughters. They had been large, healthy girls. She also remembered feeling like she ballooned up over night. It seemed almost like one night she went to bed not feeling pregnant at all and the next day she woke up feeling like she had eaten a whole cantaloupe. She was sure it had actually been a slower progression, but that's how it had felt to her. She didn't like how much this was making her remember…how much it was making her feel.
Daryl could see on Michonne's face that she didn't want to talk about it anymore, and even though he really wanted to talk about it, he decided not to push her. Instead he just pulled her to him and she rested her head on his chest.
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
They could hear Maggie coming long before she got to the cell. Being cramped up in the prison, forced to spend most of their free time inside because of the cold, had given people a little more energy than they knew what to do with and Maggie released hers in spurts of wild silliness. She was apparently running, from the sound of her feet pounding on the floor, and dragging something across the bars. Daryl could hear her getting closer, like a train coming down a track.
"Chow time!" Maggie said, suddenly appearing outside their cell. She pressed her face between two of the bars and hung there oddly for a moment. Daryl snickered at her. He couldn't decide if she looked insane or looked like she was about to break out in a dance.
"I heard ya." He said. "We're comin'."
"Better get it while it's hot. Carol made a feast." Maggie said, lingering at the bars a second longer before trotting off, dragging what Daryl now knew was a wrench down the other bars.
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
Everyone at the table was in good spirits. Daryl hadn't seen plates piled this high with food in a while. Something about the quiet of the past few months, coupled with the bounty of food before them, made everyone seem so much lighter tonight. Carol was even busy passing around some of the beer that they still had stored up.
Rick and Rachel were the last two to join them at the table. Two of the new people, who Daryl now knew were named Josh and Brenda, had just taken over watch, having eaten early.
"What's the special occasion?" Rick asked, sitting at the table and accepting a plate from Carol who had been listening to a funny story that Glenn was telling about his life before. She didn't respond to Rick. Instead she turned her attention back to Glenn and laughed at the end of his story, continuing to pass out plates and offer seconds to anyone who had gobbled through a portion of anything.
"I don't know." Carol finally said to Rick. "I guess you can call it Christmas." She paused for a minute, smiling at everyone. "We haven't had a Christmas in a long time."
Michonne knew what Carol was doing, and she was a little thankful. There was nothing like a full stomach to make everything seem better, and the announcement they were going to have to make had the potential of either being taken as good news or bad. Still, Michonne was nervous about telling them all. This would mean another mouth to feed, another person to protect, and it would mean, at least for a while, that she wasn't going to be the fighter that they had relied on her to be. So far that had been her place in the group. Now she didn't know where she would fit or if they would be able to accept her new role.
Carol put a bowl down beside Michonne's plate. It was the rest of the peaches she'd been eating that morning. Glenn's eyes got big and he immediately reached across the table and took a slice out of the bowl, cramming the entire thing in his mouth. Carol reached over Michonne and gently slapped him on the head.
"No snatching food." She said in the same tone she would have used to scold Sophia for such behavior.
Glenn, who was still chewing, was smiling through his chewing. He swallowed the peach.
"Hey, I didn't get any and I was the one that was up on the roof the whole day fixing Beth's stupid hole." He protested, still smiling.
"The hole wasn't my fault." Beth said. She'd heard enough complaining from Glenn about that hole that she was sick of it. She hadn't asked him to fix it, either. Everyone knew it was Rick that assigned jobs, and Glenn had been the one that he decided was best at patching up roofs. "I didn't get any fruit either." She added after a moment.
Michonne silently slid the bowl of fruit toward Beth. There was more than enough food at the table, and she knew that favoritism by Carol wouldn't buy her any popularity.
Carol sat down at the table finally and took a beer from the ones she had put in the middle. She was dying for Michonne to make the announcement, but it didn't look like Michonne was going to do it. She was just staring at her food, taking bites every now and again. From the look on Daryl's face she could tell that there was no problem there. He looked just as happy as everyone else at the table. Carol ate a little of her dinner, listening to the rambling conversation that was going on. Finally she couldn't stand it anymore.
"Um, don't we have something we need to talk about?" Carol finally said, looking at Daryl and Michonne.
Herschel cleared his throat and everyone at the table got quiet, waiting patiently to hear whatever it was they needed to hear.
Daryl looked at Michonne. She looked like a deer in headlights. He realized she wasn't going to be able to make this announcement. Now everyone was staring at them, and that didn't seem like it was going to make her more comfortable. Daryl decided he would handle the announcement for her.
"Guys…" Daryl said, unable to keep himself from grinning, "we're gonna have a baby."
The reaction at the table was silence at first. No one moved. Daryl stared at them, and they stared back at him. Everyone had even quit chewing, and Maggie was stopped with a forkful of green beans partway to her mouth. The only one in the room who was moving at all was Judith, wiggling on Hershel's lap and sucking on a bottle.
"Well, I for one am excited for you two." Carol said, breaking the silence and returning everyone back to their animated state. One by one the congratulations trickled out of the group. Many of them were half hearted, but at least they were offered.
Michonne wasn't offended that people weren't exactly overjoyed about the announcement. They knew it was a mistake…no one would purposefully plan to have a baby right now…so how much congratulations could you really offer someone for a mistake that had just sort of happened to them? They were all looking at her a little oddly now. Michonne had long since figured out that no one in the group really knew what to do with her. It was obvious that they didn't really view her as a woman, at least not the kind of woman that Carol or Maggie or Beth was. They saw her as something a little less woman than that, and yet here she was, currently in the most womanly condition that she could be in.
Still, everyone looked like they were going to accept it, they just needed to process it, and Michonne couldn't blame them for that. It still hadn't sunk in entirely to her, and she was pretty sure Daryl that it hadn't sunk in entirely to Daryl either. Carol seemed like the only that had accepted it completely.
Michonne's main concern was Rick. Michonne knew that Rick didn't really like her. He tolerated her at best. She couldn't read his facial expression well right now, but she didn't miss the crease between his eyebrows, and she wondered what was going on his mind.
Glenn was in shock. He and Maggie had been very careful to avoid her getting pregnant, but they had talked about what would happen if she did get pregnant. It was something they didn't want, though; because Glenn had admitted to himself that he didn't think he'd be able to handle the strain. He would want to take care of her, above everything else, and these days taking care of somebody didn't always work out the way they wanted. If everything were normal, he would have loved the idea of having children with Maggie, but everything wasn't normal and he knew that if she were pregnant she'd be at risk. All kinds of things could happen, and he would go crazy knowing that he couldn't control all of the risks. No one wanted their loved ones threatened in any way.
Glenn reached across the table and slid the bowl of peaches back toward Michonne, smiling a little nervously. Michonne smiled at the gesture.
"Thanks Glenn, but really I'm full." She said.