AN: Short chapter, sorry.
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The following two weeks had been difficult for the group. It had taken several days before anyone wanted to leave the community for anything, or wanted to allow anyone they loved to leave for any reason.
Stella had clearly taken the loss of Dominique the hardest, and she wasn't her normal chatty, cheerful self in the slightest. Chelsea had also taken it pretty hard. Though she'd had no intimate relationship with Dominique, she had viewed him as the one that had kept her protected when they were on their own. Michonne could understand both of them having a hard time dealing with the loss, and she wished that she could do something to help them through it, but she couldn't. In fact, she felt that, at times, they looked at her and at Maggie as though they resented them, perhaps because Glenn and Daryl had both returned safely, or maybe it was just something she was imagining.
Michonne was sorry that Dominique hadn't made it, but there was nothing that could be done about it now. She was very glad that it wasn't her that was two weeks into dealing with a loss, she couldn't imagine what that would be like. She felt guilty, sometimes, when she saw Stella, because she knew that deep down she was thankful that if they were returning one person short, that it wasn't Daryl they had lost.
I'm only human, she thought. We're all only human. At the end of the day everyone grieved for the losses of the group, but they grieved more for their own losses, for the losses of those who had the most impact in their lives, and losing Daryl was something she didn't want to imagine.
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After breakfast Michonne joined Carol, balancing Hope on her hip.
"I'm going to look for clothes today," Michonne said, standing over Carol.
"What?" Carol asked, looking up at her and shading her eyes from the sun.
"My clothes really aren't fitting well anymore," Michonne said, "I'm going to search the houses and see what I can find."
"A lot of these houses had babies, I'm sure there are plenty of maternity clothes," Carol said. "Why don't you stay with me, do some easy jobs. I'll send Maggie and some of the others to collect together whatever they can find. You don't need to be lugging things around."
Michonne sighed.
"I think I can handle carrying some clothes, Carol," she said.
"I didn't say you couldn't handle it, I said you didn't need to be doing it," Carol responded, ignoring Michonne's annoyed tone of voice. "I've seen you fight pregnant, but it doesn't mean you need to be putting any strain on yourself if you don't have to. Sit down here and help me finish the dishes. When Maggie passes by I'll send her out to get you clothes. She'll enjoy it anyway, you might as well let her do something to get ready for the baby."
Michonne sighed again. She really didn't like the idea of always sending everyone to do things for her. The past few weeks it seemed that all she'd been allowed to do was laundry, dishes, mend clothes, help with the food, and occasionally, and it was rare, carry something light from one location to the other. She felt like if she continued this way that everyone was going to start thinking that she was helpless, even far less useful than Beth, and the thought of everyone considering her someone who wasn't capable of doing anything was driving her insane.
"Sit down here, Michonne, we need to talk," Carol said.
Michonne looked at Carol and hesitated a moment, the look on Carol's face, however, was one of determination, so MIchonne thought she should at least hear her out for a moment. Michonne handed Hope to Carol, and unbuttoned her pants. Then she sat down beside Carol who was now smirking at her.
"What?" Michonne snapped.
Carol smiled.
"Pants too tight?" She asked.
"Why do you think I want to go looking for clothes?" Michonne asked, taking Hope back. Hope tugged at one of her dreadlocks and she reached up to unwrap the baby's fingers from it.
"Michonne, do you want to tell me why you've got an attitude with me every time I tell you to do something or not to do something?" Carol asked. "We agreed before you ever got pregnant that if I was going to be the one responsible for helping take care of you and helping you deliver this baby that you would do what I thought was best…"
Michonne started to interrupt her, but Carol held up her hand.
"And I remember you agreeing that you wouldn't argue about it, so what's going on now?" Carol finished.
"I just think you're being overprotective," Michonne said. "I'm not helpless, and I don't like looking helpless to the rest of the group."
Carol snickered.
"Is that what you think, Michonne? Do you think everyone looks at you like you're helpless?" Carol asked.
"I know they do," Michonne said. "You won't even let me go for water anymore."
"That's Daryl's call, not mine," Carol said. "Daryl doesn't want you outside the gates at all, and I don't blame him. It's not that we doubt you could take care of yourself, it's that there's no reason for you to be in that situation if you don't have to be. There's a difference. I can guarantee you that no one here thinks that you can't do all of the things that they do, but there's no reason for you to do them when there's someone else that can take care of it. All I'm asking is that you take it easy for a little while, just give yourself a break, and after the baby comes and you've recovered, you can go right back to doing everything, just like before."
Michonne wanted to argue with Carol, but she wasn't really sure what she wanted to say. She was still very irritated with the situation.
"I just feel like I'm not really contributing around here. I'm not doing anything useful or important," Michonne said.
"I see," Carol said. Something in her face changed a little. She didn't say anything, but she did gather up the dishes and get up, heading back to headquarters to put them away until it was time to serve lunch.
Michonne watched her as she walked away. She came back a few minutes later, carrying a bag of something. She grabbed up the pan full of dish water and tipped it over, letting the water run away from her. Then she turned and started toward the backyard, not saying anything to Michonne.
Michonne finally got to her feet and then picked Hope up, following after Carol. Carol was feeding the rabbits and stuffing some of the old clothes they'd used as bedding back into the covered area of the rabbit pen.
"They keep pulling it out?" Michonne asked.
"Mmm hmm," Carol said, not looking up at her.
The rabbits, although wild, were actually quite tame. They allowed you to pet them, and Daryl would pick them up by their ears, examining them to see if they were getting fatter. It was clear that two of their females were expecting babies, and probably any time now. Carol rubbed the head of one of them with the back of her hand and then closed the pen. She got up and dusted her hands on her pants, walking toward the smokehouse to check the fire in there.
Carol's movements were jerky, and Michonne could tell that Carol wasn't speaking to her on purpose.
"Now do you want to tell me what's wrong?" Michonne finally called out to her.
Carol swung open the door to the smokehouse.
"Stay out here, I'll be right back. The smoke's a little heavy," she said, going inside. A few minutes later she emerged and shut the door, wiping her forehead with the back of her arm.
She stood facing Michonne, her hands on her hips.
"Well?" Michonne asked, shifting sides with Hope.
"Well what, Michonne?" Carol asked.
"What's wrong with you now?" Michonne asked.
"Really, Michonne? You can't figure out what's wrong with me? You're an intelligent woman, I'm sure you can muddle through it. You don't really need things explained to you on quite the level that Daryl does, now do you?" Carol said sharply.
Michonne was surprised. She'd never heard Carol take that tone of voice with her before. Carol could throw a sarcastic comment every now and again, and she was even caustic from time to time, but it was clear that there was something different in her voice right now, and her stance was different as well.
"Are you mad at me?" Michonne asked.
"No, Michonne, I'm not mad at you," Carol said. "Go do whatever it is you've got to do," she said, turning around and starting down the street. Michonne tagged behind her for a second. "I've got to do some of the useless things around here so everyone else can have enough time to take care of all the important things," she snapped.
Michonne stopped for a minute, realizing that what she had said had apparently struck Carol as a negation of her importance in the group.
"Carol," she called. "Carol, stop!"
Michonne caught up with Carol and Carol turned around, looking annoyed and a little hurt.
"I didn't mean it like that," Michonne said, "and I think you know that. You know that what you do around here is important and you know that every one of us is thankful for it. I guess that I'm just in a bad mood. My clothes don't fit, and I don't feel like myself. I wasn't ever domestic, so to speak. My house was always a mess. I had someone come in to clean up once a week just because otherwise I never stayed on top of things. I guess that when I'm doing all the things that you have me do, I just don't feel like myself, and I don't feel like I'm doing what I am usually doing to help the group. It's not that I don't see that these things are important, because they are."
Carol nodded her head.
"It's OK, I know you didn't mean it like it came off," she said finally. "I'm not really mad. I guess you have kind of been forced out of your role."
"What are you going to do now?" Michonne asked.
"Ration boxes," Carol said.
"Let me see if Beth will keep Hope while she's watching Judith, and I'll help you," Michonne said.
"I thought you were going looking for clothes," Carol said.
"We'll send Maggie and whoever she wants to take with her. They can surprise me," Michonne responded.
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"How's he doin'?" Daryl asked, finding Rick watching Beau and Carl work with Carl's new bow on one of the streets.
"I don't think he's hit a single one of the targets yet, but Beau's got a lot of patience with him," Rick said quietly.
"It ain't gonna come over night," Daryl said. "It's a lot different than aimin' a gun. I've used a regular bow before, it's a different kinda skill set."
Daryl stood quietly for a minute watching the two boys. Each time Carl would load the bow, Beau would stand beside him or behind him, directing him on how to hold it, how to move one arm or the other, which way to aim. It would take a while, but Daryl felt like Beau would be a good teacher for Carl. He didn't seem to ever get frustrated, really not at anything, and that infinite patience would pay off. Daryl wondered about the boy sometimes. Beau would tell you anything you wanted to know about him, but Daryl hadn't asked him too many questions besides the practical ones.
Beau had seemed bothered by Dominique's death. Daryl hadn't talked to him about it directly, but he knew from Michonne that Beau had talked about it some with Carol. Apparently the whole situation had hit close to home for him, reminding him of losing his brothers in Walker attacks.
Daryl wondered if Beau felt responsible. He knew it was easy in those situations for people to blame themselves when they'd made it out and others hadn't. Shane was the only person that he'd known that had willingly sacrificed anyone else to escape a crowd, the entire community fully aware by now of what had happened to Otis. Everyone else still tried to fight until the end to save themselves, and to save each other, so each loss could strike you as a failure on your part. It was a moment when you let someone down. Daryl could imagine that Beau probably felt the same. He'd decided to deal with it by throwing himself into making sure that Carl acquired a new skill, perhaps even a skill that could save him, in some way, some day.
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Maggie, Rachel, and Sasha had gone collecting clothes for Michonne. Now Hope was crawling around the bedroom floor while Michonne sat among several boxes and bags that were overflowing with every kind of maternity clothes imaginable.
Most of them didn't seem right to Michonne as she was sorting them into piles, wondering what would fit now and what would fit later. They all seemed so clean, so fresh. A lot still had tags on them and had never been worn.
Michonne thought that she would have loved many of the clothes before, they were brightly colored, light clothes for the most part. The person that she'd been before all of this would have liked all the colors, all the prints, but now they just didn't fit. They were too happy, too something. It was hard to imagine wearing anything like this in a world where you might have to bash in the head of a Walker at a moment's notice.
Still, she wasn't exactly on Walker duty these days, and this was what she had to wear.
The clothes seemed a little cheerful when she considered that all the members of the group were, to some degree, in mourning, and a few were still deeply in mourning.
How quickly it all passes, these days. She thought. When she was a little girl, and her grandfather had died, she remembered her grandmother talking about mourning. In her grandmother's opinion, the proper mourning time was no less than a year. Her grandmother had lamented that people didn't respectfully mourn any longer, recalling to Michonne that they had gone an entire year after a loved one's death wearing black and restricting their activities. A full year. Now her grandmother would really be shocked at the way that people mourned. Death had become so commonplace that official mourning was sometimes limited to only a few minutes, perhaps a day or two if everything was in your favor. The rest of the grief that you had would have to be worked out here and there, when you had the time, and chances were you'd have another death to grieve before you'd worked through the entire process with the last loss you suffered.
Everything is so much faster now. Michonne thought. She looked at the relationships she'd formed with the group. Her love of Daryl was deeper than she imagined it ever could be, and now she realized how fast everything between them had really taken place. Her relationship with Carol was like the best friends that she'd read books about and seen movies about, but never really had growing up. They all became close quickly, and they lost each other just as quickly. Sometimes it felt that you barely had time to come to know someone before they were just someone whose name you could barely remember and whose face was even less strongly imprinted on your memory.
The only things that seemed to take the same amount of time as they always had were the children. Hope and Judith grew like weeds, but they grew no faster than any other baby had grown. Carl was sprouting into a young man, and the "kids" that they'd taken in were slowly maturing into the men and women that they would be. And this one, Michonne though, thinking about the baby she was carrying, the one that was forcing her to sift through bags and boxes of unknown women's forgotten maternity clothes, this one is growing at exactly the same pace as all the others. This one would take as long as it was going to take. It had no concept of the rapidness with which life outside its warm bed passed.
Michonne assumed she was somewhere around twelve weeks pregnant, remembering back to when she'd been pregnant with Hope, but there was no way of telling. She and Carol were crossing their fingers that she was about twelve weeks now, and using that as a reference point, in hopes to have even the foggiest idea when it came time to determining when they should be preparing for the baby's arrival.
"Michonne, you better come on, it's time to eat," Carol called up the stairs, snapping Michonne out of her thoughts.
Michonne hurried and dressed.
She didn't feel quite right dressed in the olive green khaki pants and the lavender top that she chose, again thinking that it felt to bright for their situation, but it fit, and it was comfortable. She slipped into a pair of shoes that she'd found in the closet, thankful that the woman who had lived there had possessed both good taste and feet that were a little larger than her own. The extra room was nice in contrast to some of her shoes.
"Does mommy look silly?" She asked Hope.
Hope didn't respond to her, except to coo at her and stretch her arms toward her. Michonne sighed and scooped her up, heading to dinner.
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When Michonne walked into the room, coming toward him to pass him Hope, Daryl stopped for a minute. She looked vastly different to him. Michonne looked softer, more like the Michonne that lived in the photo album that she'd let him lay claim to, since he was the one that most often looked at it.
Daryl could hardly take his eyes off of her, not sure if it was the clothes, or the fact that she had her dreads tied back from her face, but struck by her, almost as though he were seeing her for the first time. He didn't miss, either, the fact that a few of the others were looking at her too.
After dinner Michonne excused herself and went back to the house early, claiming that she was tired, and still had a few things to do. She'd left Hope with Daryl, and hadn't expected him to follow immediately after her.
Daryl followed Michonne to the bedroom and sat on the foot of the bed with Hope while Michonne sorted through piles of clothes. It was obvious she was in a bit of a bad mood.
"What you goin' through, 'Chonne?" Daryl asked.
"It's just these clothes," Michonne said. "They're all wrong. They don't look like me. You had to notice everyone staring at me at dinner, or were you too busy staring to notice? I know they look weird on me, but it's what was available. They didn't exactly make maternity wear practical for the end of the world."
Daryl snickered at her. "'Chonne, I was staring at you 'cause I thought you looked pretty," he said.
Michonne stopped what she was doing.
"What?" She asked.
"I thought you looked pretty, like you do in my picture book," he said. "I like them soft colors on you."
Michonne smiled at him, but she didn't say anything.
"I bet that's why everyone else was lookin' at you too, 'Chonne, it weren't 'cause you looked bad, it was 'cause you looked real pretty and we ain't been used to many of us bein' all that pretty these days," Daryl said.
Michonne didn't really know if what Daryl was saying was true at all, but it made her feel a lot better, for the moment at least.
"You really think I look pretty in this?" Michonne asked.
"You look prettier than I've seen ya before, and I always think you look pretty," Daryl said.
Michonne smiled at him, wholly pleased by the compliment.
Daryl smiled back at her.
"And you look even prettier wearin' my smile, 'Chonne."