AN…Quite incredibly, I've bashed out another chapter. I know I'm probably a little bit greedy, but please, if you're enjoying this fic at all, let me know? It isn't getting much love and while I do understand the pairing probably isn't a huge favourite, there's still enough of you out there to let me know you're reading. I truly hate to beg but…I'm begging…on hand and knee…
Part Six
Carol
"What would you be doing right now if the world wasn't shit?" Andrea asks, her voice cracking the calm silence that has settled between them us as they wander through the woods, again aimless.
"Kicking off my heels, pouring a glass of wine and relaxing in my armchair," Michonne says and Carol smiles at the wistful note in her voice that twists within the curl of wind around them.
"That sounds nice." Carol refuses to feel envious. There's no room left in this world for jealousy of the lives these women had experienced in a world before walkers. What would be the point when their lives now were shit? Despite Ed, she can't claim hers was bad before disaster had hit—she'd still had Sophia, after all, and having Sophia was the only blessing her life has ever had.
"I'd have been boinking my boss, probably on his desk," Andrea admits as her boots crunch the twigs and leaves beneath their feet, a smug smile on her face.
Carol laughs. "God, Andrea, what did you do other than screw men?"
Andrea stares at her and for a second Carol feels guilt squash all sign of amusement from her, wondering when she's learned to be so brash, blurting words that pop up in her head before thinking hard about them first.
The blonde blinks, and then shakes her head, the smile turning from smug to vulnerable in the space of three seconds. "You know, I'm not really sure. I've always been in a relationship—or…I guess an affair. I never thought too hard about it."
Michonne stops their trek, the chain in her hand rattling as her pets stop behind them. "There is more to life than men."
Carol darts a quick look at their undead followers, eyes them thoughtfully and without fear. "I would have been gettin' dinner ready and compiling a list in my head of all the ways I could kill Ed and get away with it."
Andrea gasps, stares at her incredulously, then bursts into a spurt of genuine laughter. "I take it you didn't come up with one? There's really not many ways to get away with it, unfortunately. I've seen some creative attempts in my time, though. Much better that you waited for a walker to do it for you."
"I couldn't do it," Carol confides, feeling that overwhelming sense of failure flood through her once again, but new faith in herself forces her to shrug it off immediately. "I had to protect Sophia. God knows what might have happened to her if I'd gone to jail."
There is an awkward silence then, as Carol and Andrea remember exactly what did end up happening to Sophia, even without Carol killing her father.
"I had two daughters."
The soft words that spill from Michonne cracks like gunshot through the air and they both turn to watch her, concerned at how something so personal about herself being suddenly revealed will affect her. She's held back all this time for a reason, Carol knows, and can only hope they've become so close now that the boundaries are starting to crumble finally. The woman stays strong, stoic and her face betrays little of the turmoil she must experience at the loss of her children. No more words are spoken, though, so Carol steps forward, sheathes her knife at her hip, and hugs her.
No one is going to question it further, so they all move forward, thinking about three little girls and the horrible fate that took them away from the mothers that loved them.
"I only lost my sister and I feel like it shattered my soul," Andrea says finally, painfully, splitting the silence with words that do little to heal or bounce it back to levity. "I don't know how you two can put aside the heartache. God, I tried to kill myself after what happened to Amy. Carol, you didn't even attempt it, though it must have been so much worse for you."
Was she wrong to not try to end it all when Sophia stumbled out of that barn, her eyes milky and dead, her skin pale, her mouth stained with blood?
"I might have," she says slowly, thinking back to that horrible day and feeling darkness steal into her heart. "If Daryl hadn't caught me when I ran to her, held me back, I might have given in and let her take me with her." The thoughts hurt, the loss wounds her again and Carol stubbornly blinks back tears. She tries so hard to not think about that day, to not give space in her head for everything she's lost, trying to celebrate instead the strong women she's found and the one she's trying so hard to be. Most days it's a success, but today… "It hurts, you know. Down deep and it never seems to fade away, but most of the time I can lock it away so that I can function, so that I can be what you two need me to be so that the three of us can make it through this and survive. I have the two of you, and you both have me, and while once I might not have thought that was such a gift, now I do. I will do everything in my power to protect you both, and that's my gift to you and to Sophia, too."
Michonne smiles, her eyes brightened with unshed tears, and with the hand that is not holding the chain of walkers, she clasps hold of Carol's and they walk on, fingers threaded together, taking strength from each step. Her secrets are still wound up deep inside her and Carol wonders if Michonne will ever release them. She doesn't believe that they are kept hidden from a lack of trust—she suspects that Michonne keeps her pain tethered tightly away so that it's never given the chance to weaken her, because weakness in the world they now live would spell disaster for all of them. Carol is smart enough to know this—recognised it even before they fled the farm—but it is only since wandering with these two women at her side that she's really learned how to be strong. Or the kind of strong that could save a life. She'd protected Sophia for years, kept her away from the real horror of Ed, but in the end it didn't do her any good. Her little girl had still run into the woods and been taken by walkers. Carol's solemn vow to these women with her now is that it won't happen again. She'll never be that weak again and she'll never surrender against the hardship she faces, no matter what the outcome will be.
The biting wind around them sinks into her bones, and she pulls her coat closer. She's been fighting a cold the last day or two and every time she coughs they all look out to make sure she's not drawn the attention of walkers. The frequency of her coughing seems to be increasing, turning into irregular fits. She can go hours without making a sound and then suddenly a tickle in her throat will persist for minutes as she croaks through the worst of it, feeling drained once it finally stops.
The air around them now is becoming icy and night is falling faster. Michonne spies a house up ahead and runs forward to check it out, handing her chain over to Carol before she leaves. Carol looks at the metal in her hand and squeezes it tight. There's a story in Michonne's confession earlier, and the little snippets she's dropped over the months. With a heaviness that sinks low in her gut, Carol turns and eyes the feral monsters they drag everywhere with them for safety. Michonne lost two daughters and these men were worse than animals. The picture she's imagining turns her stomach, so she yanks hard on the chain and doesn't feel any guilt when they stumble forward.
Even at the end of the world, just three girls travelling and surviving together, Carol is still stuck with doing the laundry. She should be mad as spades, but as she watches Michonne frolic in the stream, she giggles instead.
"What's so funny?" Andrea calls out as she does her pass around them, machete in hand, eyes peeled seriously at the woods surrounding them.
"Was just thinking back to that day at the quarry, when we were all doing laundry while Shane and Carl were trying to catch frogs."
"And your fatass husband sat on his rear end and did absolutely nothing?" Andrea hasn't looked at her, but Carol suspects that is on purpose, as her head ducks almost immediately and she can see the apology forming in Andrea's head before the blonde's lips can even move.
"Yep, that was Ed's favourite activity, after all. Expanding his ass while he smoked all the day long." Carol giggles again at the memory, even though a split lip had been at the end of it. Ed can't hurt her anymore, and while it may have been almost a full year coming, she is gladdened by the fact that she not only accepts it, but is confident that no man will ever hurt her again.
"You know, other than seeing him sit and watch us work, or when he sat on the RV pretending to keep watch while he watched all of us work, or he sat around the fire and watched you work, I don't think I ever saw him do anything else."
Carol raises a brow in consternation. "You're the lucky one then, I guess." She's not intending to make Andrea feel guilty, but the result is the same. She smiles even as Andrea drops her guard and her weapon and rushes toward Carol to apologise silently with a hug.
"That fucker is dead now. Best deal for him, I bet." She kisses Carol's temple and Carol laughs, shoving the other woman gently with her shoulder.
"If it weren't gonna be a walker, it would've been me eventually," Carol says, voice strong, reveling in Andrea's gasp of surprised amusement.
"You're admitting pre-meditated murder in front of two ex-lawyers? Girl, when did you grow balls?" Michonne calls out from the middle of the lake, now fully stripped and her stunning, pert breasts glistening in the sunlight, nipples pebbled hard from the frigid temperature of both the water and the air.
"Watcha gonna do? Report me to the police? Not like you didn't know alredy." Carol shakes her head, a wide grin splitting her face. She rinses out the last shirt she's washed and puts it in the pile as Michonne drags her now clean body from the lake, gratefully accepting the towel Andrea hands her before she heads back to take watch.
"Hell, no. Not sure I'd have done that even before the world became so fucked up. Wife beaters deserve a knife to the groin, no matter which world we live in." Michonne roughly dries herself then pulls on a fresh set of clothes, gathering up her dirty ones to replace Carol as washerwoman. "Your turn. Off you go."
Carol stands and does her own striptease before wading out into the water, her skin immediately covered in goosebumps as she starts to shiver uncontrollably.
"Oh God, how did you stand this?" A cough erupts from her throat and she covers her mouth as another follows it. She shouldn't be in the stream when it's so cold, she knows, but the need to feel clean is urgent after over a week since they'd last been safe enough to take advantage of the water. "You must have a hide as tough as a rhino's to not be shivering your ass off."
Michonne shoots her one of those sparsely shared grins, her teeth white against the darkness of her lips, and Carol thinks she's a little bit in love. "Maybe one day I'll let you touch my ass and you can see for yourself."
Carol laughs hysterically, then coughs again before shaking it off and getting down to the point of this excursion into the water. The soap bar is in her hand and she wrestles with it so it doesn't slip her grasp, almost moaning as she feels more clean with every sweep of it across her flesh. She rushes, feeling the congestion that has been building in her head the last few days become even more dense the longer she stays in the cold. With enormous relief, she runs the soap over her entire body, thankful for the smallest of conveniences from their old world as she starts to feel more like herself again.
She feels the rattling in her chest before another round of coughs chokes at her throat leaving her feeling weaker than she has been even in the past two days since she first became afflicted with this cold. Carol hurries from the water, using the same towel Michonne has discarded to rub the moisture from her body and quickly redresses. Black cargo pants in a heavy drill fabric rubs against the goosebumps and instead of feeling warmer, the shivering increases. She can't help but take in Michonne's concerned gaze as the woman discards her scrubbing and goes to her pack, pulling out the bottle of cough mixture they'd found in a pharmacy somewhere along their travels. They have a small stockpile of medical essentials and Carol is immediately grateful for their forethought as now her chest is starting to hurt.
As Michonne prepares the correct dose, Carol dons her bra and squeezes into the scarlet tank top, then adds another over the top and then her coat and boots, and still she can't stave off the chills that wrack her body and make her teeth chatter. Her vision seems to blur as Michonne places the mixture right in her hand, and as a sudden sweat seems to slide over her skin, she throws it back and shudders mildly at the taste of it.
"We need to get somewhere she can rest," Andrea says and Carol nods, feeling suddenly more tired than she has in her life.
"Hmmmm, feel tired," Carol agrees before she ass plants on the ground, her head pulsing with a new thudding rhythm that gradually gets louder and louder the hotter her body starts to feel. There is rapid activity around her and as she pushes through the haze to think about collecting their washing together, she feels strong arms supporting her and she's dragged up until she's standing slumped between them.
"I'm fine," she tries to tell them, but her tongue has gone numb, and with a sick sense of dread, she just tries to move, putting one foot in front of the other until coherent thought seems to twist into itself before disappearing altogether.