Summary: In the wake of D block being overrun, the prison gets a harsh reality check. Carl tries to console Oliver after the death of his brother and their best friend.

~ Carl ~

Maggie and I get Michonne back into the prison, but she falls and hurts her ankle. I have to shoot a walker to save her. I know I shouldn't have used the rifle at the gate but I had to. And I feel sick. I feel like this is only the first bad thing that's going to happen in a long line of bad things to come.

This is the start, isn't it?

The start of how things go wrong.

Dad comes hurrying around the corner. His face is splattered in red and he looks pale. I rush over to him.

"You might wanna stay back, Carl."

I crash into his arms and he holds me tight.

"Dad," I sob. "I'm sorry. I didn't see you come out."

"It's okay, I'm here." He rocks me in his arms. "I'm fine. Now back away."

I do, swallowing. "I had to use one of the guns by the gate — I swear, I didn't want to..." and I brace for the scolding, watch it bubble up from his gut to his throat, anger in his face, but he's interrupted.

"I was coming back," Michonne says. "I fell. They came out and helped me."

Dad collects his temper, and asks her, "Y'alright?"

Michonne nods.

"What happened in there?" Maggie asks.

A woman, Kimberly, leaves D block, holding her dead son in a blanket. I look back to Dad. He looks devastated.

"Patrick got sick last night," he says. "Some kind of flu, it moves fast. We think he died and attacked the cell block."

All at once, the energy in my body bleeds out through my knees.

"Where— Where's Oliver?" His name is difficult on my throat. "Where— Where is he?"

"C block," Dad tells me, and I drown in relief. "He's alright, but… Carl, he's mourning." Dad sighs. "Look, I know Patrick was your friend, and I'm sorry. He was a good kid. We lost a lot of good people."

I nod. It's hard to think.

"Glenn and your Dad are okay," Dad tells Maggie. "But they— they were in D block, like Oliver, like me. You shouldn't get too close to anyone that mighta been exposed. Take showers. Oliver — he's washing right now, too. Carl, we all gotta keep Judith away, to be safe, at least for a little while."

I nod miserably, and return to Michonne.

Together, Maggie and I take her to C block.

Inside, Beth is tending to Michonne's sprained ankle upstairs. Judith's up there, too. The first thing I do is wash my hands and change my clothes in my cell. I can hear noise in the shower room so I wait in the common room for Oliver to come out, and when the shower noises stop, I lean into the room. The shower room has several hand-rigged tarp curtains for cubicles, so I can't see him.

"Oliver?"

I hear him sniff.

"It's just me," I say, and he says my name in this small, sad voice, so I go to his cubicle. There's a towel and a clean set of my clothes folded up on the shelf opposite, with a messy heap of his dirty clothes dumped outside the cubicle. I hand him a towel through the curtain when he asks me to, then I hand him various items of clothing when he holds his hand out through the curtain for them — boxers, a t-shirt, shorts, socks, shoes. When there's no more to hand over, I hear him sit on the floor. For a few minutes he's quiet, and eventually I ask if I can come in and he says yes so I pull back the curtain.

The first thing I notice is his bruised knees. He's crying into his hands. Slowly, I sit down next to him under the shower, the wet floor soaking damply through the towel under us. Oliver twists and puts his arms around me. He sobs something into my t-shirt and everything is wet and dripping and uncomfortable but I don't say so. I just put my arm around him and keep my eyes up towards the ceiling.

I don't know how to deal with crying people. He's curled up like a fist, all slow and soggy. It's sad seeing him without his beanie.

"Sorry," he mutters finally.

"It's okay," I say. I try to do what my dad did to me and rock him in my arms, hoping it makes him feel better the same way it did me. "It's all shit…"

It's the first time I've cussed in my life, and it must help because Oliver chuckles, once, wetly, and then puts his head on my shoulder and sighs.

"It was the pig," he whispers. "It was me."

"What?" I ask, fear rising.

"We should never have gone to the pigs." Oliver sniffs. "We had the sickness on us. I should have gone after him when he left our cell last night. He was already choking, and I didn't do anything."

I feel winded.

Oliver is clutching around his middle, all crumpled up and shaking. He cries and cries and I hold him again and tell him we didn't know, we didn't know, we didn't know, until finally he nods and sniffs and wipes his face. He lets me kiss his forehead. It's warm and his hair is damp, and his crying doesn't go away.

"We shouldn't do that," he whispers.

"What?" I ask, winded.

"You said it. We'll get into trouble."

I frown, watching him, thinking back to what I said in the garden this morning. "No… no, I… I — That wasn't the point. I never… I didn't mean we shouldn't, I just meant that... we did anyway."

Oliver looks confused and frustrated and I don't understand anything.

He sniffs, then shakes his head.

Through a small sob, he says, "I don't know what I'm going to do without him."

I don't say anything because I don't have an answer to say.

After a long time I ask, "Does it hurt as bad as the first time?"

"What?"

"The first time you lost someone?"

Oliver thinks for several moments.

"My parents were the first," he tells me. "Pat and I... we didn't put them down. They're still in their bedroom. We were so scared and sad. We didn't know what else to do except try to get used to it, but… we never really did."

I think about this.

I say, "I think it sticks. How bad it hurts. Even if you learn to ignore it. People even tell you to, but they're wrong." Oliver's watching me now, tears on his face. I say to him, "You can't forget that feeling. It's too easy to lose."

More tears runs down his cheeks and I wipe them for him. He frowns at me — frowns and frowns and frowns. Sometimes Oliver frowns so much it's hard to tell what his frowns mean. This frown doesn't seem angry. Not at me at least. This frown is something else. I can't tell what he's thinking but I know what I'm thinking. I'm thinking this is the moment I should tell him about my mom, and about Dale, and about what I did to that boy with the beanie in the woods.

Honestly, against all that, telling him about him isn't even the hardest thing. Everyone has secrets. I know this. But it doesn't make sharing them any easier.

And suddenly, somewhere in the middle of me thinking all this, Oliver puts his hands on each side of my face, his fingers just brushing my earlobes, and pulls me to him. And he decides to kiss me. And it doesn't feel much different to our other kisses before except for the placing.

He's never kissed me on the mouth before.

And as he lets go of me, and we pull away from each other, I wonder if this is like that time he told me about, when he kissed his friend before he died. He said it didn't mean anything but it seems like something like that should mean something — it seems like it should mean everything — but maybe that's just me, and maybe I'm weird for thinking that. Maybe it really doesn't count, like he said… like this.

He tells me he's sorry.

I stand up, stuffing my pockets.

I'm shaking.

"You must be tired," I tell him. "Come on, you can sleep in my cell."

Oliver rests for a couple hours. I stay in the common room to avoid waking him — and maybe to avoid how difficult it is to look him in the eye it suddenly feels. To keep myself busy, I collect a few planks of wood and a toolbox and get started on building a cross for Patrick's grave.

Carol comes by just as I finish.

I hold up the cross. "D'you know if Patrick was a Catholic?"

She leans against the bench and tells me, "He said he was a practising atheist."

I sigh, figuring I should have known that. Using a hammer, I snap the cross apart and start putting the pieces in a pile to get rid of.

"Did you tell your dad what you saw in the library yesterday?"

"Nope."

"Will you tell him?"

I don't answer — don't even look at her.

"I have to keep teaching them to survive. You know that."

I do, but I don't tell her that. "Did you tell their parents?"

"No."

I look at her. "Are you gonna tell'm?"

The pause is thin and stale.

"If I do," Carol says, "maybe after this they'll understand, but maybe they won't. But I don't wanna take that risk."

"Then that's between you and them." I gather up the tools, still not looking at her. Carol doesn't go away. She sits down at the bench and leans forward to get my attention.

"No," she says. "It's between you and me." She waits for me to look at her before she keeps talking. "If you tell your Dad, he'll tell them, and like I said, maybe they'll understand, maybe they won't."

"I don't wanna lie to him," Carl says.

"I'm not asking you to lie," she answers. "I'm asking you not to say anything."

I look at her, thinking she told this to Oliver once, and Patrick, and I think that of all the secrets I have to keep already, this isn't going to be one of them. I won't do it. I can't stand it anymore.

Beth starts singing softly from upstairs.

Carol glances glumly at the floor, and without another word, she stands up, brushes herself off, and leaves the cell block. I wait a few minutes, thinking about my dad, until I carry the wood and tools back out to the courtyard.

Glenn catches me before I go back inside.

"Hey, could you give these to Oliver for me? I don't wanna go in there, in case I expose anyone."

He hands over a cloth. I unwrap it. Patrick's glasses. I wrap it up again and nod.

"They're clean. Hershel boiled them in water. I just... thought he'd want them back."

"Thanks," I say.

"He was a good kid." Glenn clears his throat, checking his silver pocket watch. "Look, it's getting late. We'll finish gathering all the bodies tonight, then bury them in the morning. Let him know? In case he wants to bury his brother?"

I nod.

"Oh — almost forgot. We were making sure all the cell blocks were clear earlier," Glenn adds, "to make sure nothing was still lurking around. Well, on our way out, I found a bunch of books in the boiler room. Did you put them there?"

"No," I say.

Glenn nods. "Well, could you take them back to the library at some point? I don't wanna risk touching them, in case—"

"I got it."

"Thanks," Glenn says, and while he leaves I see my dad in the field, deconstructing the pig pen. The piglets are gone, as well as the walkers at the fence — I put two and two together and realise they were all slaughtered and left outside the fences to draw the clusters away. I have enough time to stop moping about it before I get to the pen, ready to offer a hand.

"Not this time," Dad says, so I stand back and watch. He still has blood on his shirt. There are gas containers next to a pile of wood from the pig pen. He's going to burn it all.

"The pigs really made them sick?" I ask.

"Or we made the pigs sick," he says.

I dip my head and think about what Oliver said.

Was it our fault this spread?

Why hasn't it gotten us yet?

"I think we should stay away from Judy," Dad adds.

"Okay." My voice cracks.

"I don't like it, but—"

"We have to protect her."

"Yes, we do."

He puts another plank onto the pile.

"Hey, Dad?"

He looks at me, squinting curiously.

"Carol's been... teaching the kids... how to use weapons. How to kill. Their parents don't know and... she doesn't want you to know."

I realise that even though I've said it all I don't feel any better. I still have too many secrets — too many things I desperately want to tell him but can't.

"I think you should let her," I tell him. "I know you're going to say it's not up to you, but it can be."

He doesn't say anything. He grabs a container and pours gas onto the pile, filling the air with its smell.

"Dad—"

"Thank you for telling me."

He sets the gas container far away.

Sighing, I say, "Yeah..."

We stand in front of the pile.

"I won't stop her," Dad tells me, fiddling with a box of matches. He lights one. "I won't say anything."

He drops the match.

We watch the fire catch.

Finally, Dad steps over to a blue toolbox, opens it, and passes me my gun. I hold it in my hands. I watch him fasten his own holster around his waist. He steps over to me and strokes my hair behind my ears and squeezes my shoulder.

"Give Oliver his machete, too, okay? It's in the armoury."

"Okay."

While he burns his shirt, I walk back inside.

By nightfall, Karen and David fall ill, too.

Sitting at the end of my bed, waiting for more news, I catch myself falling asleep and jolt. Oliver wakes up, too. I'd apologise, but he looks like he might pass out again so I wait. He looks at me, groggily.

His voice is very quiet as he says, "Hey, man."

"Hey."

We don't say anything for a minute. Oliver sits up, rubbing his eyes.

"Dad's going to let Carol keep teaching you," I say, figuring I should get this over with.

"You told him?"

I nod stiffly, knowing it won't change anything if I told him I'd said I thought Carol should teach them, and expecting him to be mad, but he just inhales.

"People keep apologising to me," he mumbles finally. "I only went to sleep because they kept saying it when they passed by."

"What else do you want them to say?" I ask.

"Nothing — I don't know..." His face is all folded up while he shuffles over, giving me room to lie next to him. He curls up to my chest, and listening to him fall asleep again is like finishing a drawing — you're never quite sure, just a little more, until then, all of a sudden, it's that last bit of shading and you just know.

I breathe into the top of his head, smelling his smell, and then I can hear someone coming and I push back and sit up. It's Dad. I can tell by his footsteps. He pulls the curtain back to see us.

"You two okay?"

I nod, sitting beside Oliver casually.

Dad's hand is bleeding.

"What happened?" I whisper.

Dad tries to flex his fingers, but it must hurt too much because he stops. "I'll get Hershel to look at it. Listen..." He sighs. "Karen. David. They were killed today, while they were in quarantine. I just found out. Tyreese, he found them in the courtyard..." He looks at his hand and sighs again. "All the cell blocks are going on lockdown for the night. I need you to get some rest. We have things to do tomorrow."

"Dad..."

"Go to sleep now, Carl."

Then Dad's gone and I'm staring at his empty space.

Notes

Carl's "it's too easy to lose" speech was taken directly out of the comic.

As always,
Happy reading.