Carl wakes me up by hitting me on the head with wolverine rolled into a tube, leaving a mark on my forehead.

"Ow!" I sit up, rubbing my head with my right hand while trying to swing for Carl's legs with the left.

"What was that for dickhead?!"

"You told me to wake you up!" Carl can barely speak through his laughter. He clearly finds himself much funnier than I do.

"Yeah, not with a rolled-up comic book to the face!"

"Well, next time, be more specific," Carl tells me from a safe difference.

"Anyway," he goes on, "My Dad and Carol are out on a run for meds. So I'm gonna work on the gardens again. Maggie's in charge."

"Tyreese isn't back yet?"

"No, sorry, man."

"He will be."

Carl leaves me to get dressed before I have a chance to hit him back.

I put on the same clothes from yesterday, slinging Sasha's Rifle over my shoulder and holstering my pistol. The clips full in both. Hopefully, they can stay that way.

I grab my spear and head to A block. Once again, taking the weight on entry.

Sasha is already waiting for me at the visiting glass. She looks awful.

"Look at you," she coughs. "Armed to the teeth."

I can see myself in the reflection of the glass.

"I don't know if I like it," I tell Sasha honestly.

"You don't need to like it, just get used to it. You've stepped up, Rhys. Everyone sees that, everyone that matters anyway. Once this over, I'll remember what you did."

"Sasha, you need to rest."

"I'll rest when the meds get here."

"Tyreese isn't back yet. Rick and Carol have gone to look for medication as well," I fill her in.

Sasha gives a weak nod, gesturing to the clock. "Who's on the fence."

"Maggie, I'm meant to join her in about an hour."

"Better get going then."

With an hour to spare, I find Carl working his garden plot, doing something beyond my level of comprehension with a giant fork looking thing.

"When's your break?" I ask him.

He sticks the fork into the earth, wiping sweat from his brow. "Whenever I want."

"Do you wanna go for a walk?"

"Sure."

I take his hand, helping him to his feet. Though the field is empty, so we don't let go. But it would be fine if someone saw since it's just a friend thing.

"You know," Carl starts as we walk through the fields desolate areas. "You talk to yourself when no one's around."

"Do I?" I hum.

"I met another guy who talked to himself once," Carl ignores my question, "He was crazy."

"Think I'm crazy?" I ask him, not entirely sure if I'm offended yet.

"No." Carl answers quickly, "I think you're great."

I smile, "good save."

We walk along the fence, neither of us mentioning how we're still holding hands. It's something we've been doing more since that first day in the office. Holding hands while we walk to chores, holding hand when we walked back, all just friend things. Things that friends do.

We stop walking when we're back in the same long grass from the other day. Carl sits down, disappearing beneath the grass, only the gold of his stetson still visible.

I join him, sitting shoulder to shoulder again, under the dried sanctuary.

He pulls back, looking at me funny.

"What does twat mean?" he asks.

"Excuse me?"

"You said it on your first day here. What does it mean?"

"You don't need to know, man."

"I do."

"You're too young," I tease him.

He looks frustrated at this, shoving my arm, "Asshole, I'm like four months younger than you!"

I shove him back harder.

Carl takes this as a challenge and lunges at me.

Now in competition, we roll around in the grass, pinning each other for moments, before the other gains the upper hand and wrestles back control. We laugh and shout at each other as the rest of the world falls away, leaving us behind.

Carl finally manages to get on top of me, sitting on my stomach and pinning my wrists with his hands. Completely out of breath, he tells me, "I win," bolstering a tremendous grin on his face.

I struggle under Carl's hold but to no avail. I grin back at him.

Blue meets Green.

And then the whole world stops turning. The walkers stop walking, and my heart stops beating because Carl is kissing me. Kissing me like something from one of Karen's books. A storybook, where nothing is real, and everything is us.

It lasts forever, as a good book can. But like all good books, the kiss ends. Carl pulls away and looks at me, staring into me. Searching.

"I don't want it to jus' be a friend thing," he whispers, breathless.

My breath is gone too, and I can't get anymore. I swallowed it, all the air in the world stollen inside of me, all the butterflies along with it, flooding my insides, tickling my gut with collywobbles.

"Me neither," I force out, butterflies escaping with my words.

His grin is uncontrollable. Yet he looks awkward.

"Can I- can I do it again?"

I nod too much.

"Maybe get off me first?"

He does, and we kiss again.

Everything is long and overthought, but our time is short and indefinite. We smile at each other as Carl's hat tumbles to the ground.

We lie in our hiding place, side by side on the last page of our book.

He pulls away from me and sits up, his expression offbeat.

I sit up with him pulling my knees up to my chest. Suddenly feeling self-conscious, I hum to myself.

"I'm hungry," Carl tells me, dusting off his hat and getting to his feet in a hurry.

"You're going?" I squint up at him, blocking the sun with my hand, "Don't you wanna stay here for a bit?"

"I can't," He looks different suddenly like someone had told him something terrible. "I mean- I gotta go check on Beth and Judy."

"Okay. Do you want me to come with you?"

"No." His answer is blunt and hurts. "I'll see you around."

"Okay."

Heading to the fence to start my shift, I see Maggie, already working on a giant cluster. Plunging a sharpened metal pole into a sea of walkers pushing against the fence.

I run over to help. Since I left my spear on the bus, I grab a bloodstained crowbar hanging on the chainlink and start stabbing.

There must be near to a hundred of them, snapping at us behind the fence as they push each other into it, desperate to tear us apart. I watch as the head of one splits open from the weight forcing it through the fence like a pasta maker, sending chunks of brain and skull towards me.

It feels like hours pass as we work at the fence, their numbers never seeming to thin.

We take a break, Maggie handing me a quarter-full bottle of water, which I take gladly.

"I am sorry about Karen," Maggie tells me, whipping her brow with her red sweater.

I don't answer her. I just wonder why people always apologise for things they're not guilty of.

She doesn't stop there, like she's thought about what she is going to say since last time.

"Ain't nothin' harder than losing someone you love, what you gotta do is rely on the people you have left. Tyreese has you and Sasha. You have Tyreese and Carl. Guess we don't get to ask for more than that."

I smile at her. Not the normal fake smile I give to everyone else that apologises for what they haven't done. But a real smile, grateful for her words. She takes this to mean she made sense and smiles back.

"You and Carl are real sweet together, you know."

I freeze like a deer in headlights- big fucking headlights. Why did she have to keep talking? She'd nailed it, stuck the landing, and won the award for the best pep talk.

She takes advantage of my silence and goes on, "I ain't sayin' anything," she grins at me, knowing she's right when my face starts burning.

Why won't she shut up?

"Glenn was actually the one to notice."

I want to die.

"It makes sense."

Fuck it.

"He kissed me." I blurt out.

Maggie looks unfazed by this. "Well, it's about damn time."

"W-what?"

"When you boys ain't playin' footsie under the table or holding hands when you think no one's lookin', you're glued together at the shoulder."

I must look horrified because she backs it up with, "Don't worry, I'm pretty sure Glenn and I are the only ones who notice. I mean, that was us not long ago."

"Really?" I ask her. I always assumed Glenn and Maggie were together since before the world ended.

"Oh yeah," she goes on, looking out past the walkers, hiding a sad look in her eyes. "We were passin' notes under the table and sneaking out at night."

She turns back to me, that sad look gone, like she'd thrown it over the fence. "Then he went and proposed, makin' everything much more boring."

"I don't think he likes me."

"Glenn?" Maggie tilts her head at me.

"Carl."

"He's sure got a funny way of showin' it." Maggie chuckles.

"Felt like he was angry at me, then made an excuse to leave. He couldn't look at me."

Maggie nodded at this like she understood completely. "When Glenn and I first started, he pissed me off. I refused to talk to him."

I tell her that he's not refusing to speak to me. Maggie tells me not to interrupt. I apologise, looking at my trainers.

"Thing is, I wasn't even angry at him. I was just angry that he was right, so I acted childishly."

I kick a rock at the fence, still not seeing the point. She could sense this.

"Point is," she sighs, "I only realized how I was actin' when he told me how I was actin'."

"How'd he do that?"

Now she was the one looking at her feet, grinning, "He told me how he felt. Straight up. No bullshit," she brings her eyes back to me, "When he did that, I realized I was being stupid and kissed him."

Finally getting the point, I understand what she was trying to say.

I thank her. Telling her that I'll do just that, a smile comes to her lips as she fiddles with her wedding ring.

We both hear something from beyond the fence, an engine approaching fast. Dust flying up behind the walkers.

The car belonged to Rick and Carol. Only I don't see Carol, just Rick behind the wheel. Maggie rushes to get the gate for him, leaving me at the fence.

Stepping from the Car, Rick talks to Maggie while I keep working on the cluster. I can't hear their words but their faces tell me everything I need to know.

Carol isn't here. We are.

Maggie tells me to go and get something to eat.

I don't ask after Carol.

I know that there's no answer to that question which ends with a smile.

The air is sharp as I head towards admin, Maggie's advice playing on repeat in my head.

I pass Rick as he leaves admin. We exchange nods, the only form of communication people seem to use anymore since it was an easy way of saying everything you need to know- "Hello... I'm fine... Are you?... No?... Me neither."

I find Carl in our office, rationing out a bunch of fruit that Rick must have brought back.

He throws me an apricot when I ask.

I finish it greedily on the couch as I watch Carl dividing up fruit into fair piles for the others.

"We need to talk about it," I tell him softly.

"I know."

He sounds frustrated. At what- I can't tell.

"Was it something I did?" I ask him quietly, scared of his answer. "Is it me?"

"No," he tells me sharply.

I let him think. He forces himself to face me, trying to hide his puffy eyes by looking at my feet.

"You're too good for me."

I almost laugh at this, only to stop myself when I realise he's not joking. It sounded cliché. But not to him.

I bite my tongue.

"You're always smiling and talking to people like it's easy," he shifts his weight, leaning against the desk with a creak, "the way you see the world, it's so..." he searches for the word, "beguiling."

I raise my eyebrows, surprised that he knows the definition.

He waits for me to say something, desperate for me to stop him. When I don't, he sighs.

"When my Mom died," he goes on, "she told me to always do the right thing. She made me promise not to let the world spoil me," he took a breath to steady his voice before continuing, "I didn't think that was even possible. I thought she was talking about some fantasy."

Blue on Green.

"And then you turn up. And you're so good, and you're strong. Everything she described. Everything I'm not."

"Carl... I," lost for words, "you're not a bad person, Carl."

"I killed someone," he says with soundless tears streaming down his face. "A boy. Not any older than us now. He attacked the prison with the governor, and he ran away. Ran right into us. Judith, Hershel, Beth, and me. I caught him off guard. He was handing over his weapon. Surrendering... and I shot him." Carl finally exhaled, like he was releasing a weight from himself, letting it float up to the office ceiling like a balloon, where it hovered over him.

"I've met different types of people on the road," I begin, not knowing what I'm going to say, letting my voice take over.

"Kind people that lived for just a few days, trying to hold on to what they were before, some remnant of humanity."

I get up, walking over to face him.

"And I've met crazy people, the shoots first asks after kind. Do you know what they've taught me?"

He shakes his head, listening to every word with care.

"They taught me that there's no such thing as good people or bad people anymore. They all died. And the rest of us? We're all just somewhere in between. The survivors."

I still don't know if I'm saying anything that makes sense. But my head tells me to keep going. So do Carl's eyes.

"But you, Carl Grimes. You don't enjoy killing people. I can see that. And you also know that sometimes we have to make hard choices to protect the people we love. We may all be somewhere in between, but I believe that you're closer to the former than the latter."

He gives me a sad smile, his bottom jaw shaking.

"I'm only strong because you help me. Karen broke me. I wanted to leave. You helped me."

I hold him as he cries, and he holds me back. We hold each other until he stops crying and tells me we need to hand out the fruit, and I tell him okay.

Hours pass and darkness falls outside the office's curtainless window. Carl and I are in the middle of a game of scrabble. Only we don't have a board or any pieces, so in reality, we're trying to convince each other that obviously fake words we make up on the spot aren't fake.

"Dude," I barely manage to choke out as I snort with laughter, "Ratoon is not a word!"

"It is!" Carl insists, holding back childish snickers. "Hershal used it when teaching Dad to be a farmer. Somethin' about plants growing."

"This sounds like 'B-A-C-E' all over again!"

"I still think that's a word," Carl grumbles to himself.

I rolled onto my back, dust flying from the carpet as I explode with laughter. Carl couldn't help but follow suit. We lay there surrounded by dust and mold, laughing our asses off.

"Carl!" We both hear it. Sitting up, suppressing our laughter.

"Carl?" We get up this time running to the door. To the sound of Rick's voice. We find him in the corridor, shrouded by shadows.

Carl asks him what's wrong.

What more.

"I need your help. Both of you, now!" His words snap through the dark at us.

Without a word, we follow him out of Admin and into the night.

We reach the fences, understanding why Rick needed our help. They are starting to cave under the weight of a horde. Too many to count.

We get to work.

Rick and Carl lift the supports into place as I bang them into the ground, securing them under gravel and dirt.

We manage to get four beams in place before we hear the first buckling under the weight of walkers.

The three of us run to hold the fence in place as teeth and nails desperately reach for us from beyond the thin mesh.

Two more supports snap, and Carl manages to pull his Father and me back before we get crushed beneath the dead and metal.

With only one exit clear and the fences down, we sprint for the tower door, slamming it behind us.

Time's up.

The fences are down, and the dead swarm inside. I hold my spear pathetically as I watch the walkers forcing their way past the tower and over the second fence. I kick myself for leaving Sasha's rifle in the office.

Rick and Carl spring into action, discussing what to do. Rick says he could use the bus to block the fence, Carl looking at him skeptically.

I am abruptly grabbed by the collar and dragged as we retreat from the secondary fence.

Rick stops us at one of the gun bins along the fence, handing us rifle clip after rifle clip to stuff in our pockets. He then hands each of us an accompanying rifle. I awkwardly juggle this and my spear before dropping the spear to the floor with a clatter. We head back to defend the fence.

"All right, listen to me." I've never listened harder in my life.

"Magazine goes in here." Magazine, not clip.

"Release is here." I fumble, trying to keep up with them.

"Make sure to latch it." Latch it? What the hell does that mean? Unsure, I just copy Carl.

"Pull back the operating rod. The rounds feed up." I copy Carl again, feeling like I'm back in school.

"Keep squeezing the trigger for rapid-fire, okay?" Finally, something I understand.

I don't do that step yet.

Rick turns to us both, "Boys, you shoot, or you run. Don't let them get close," we both nod, taking aim when Rick does.

The second fence falls.

I squeeze for rapid-fire.

Walkers drop left and right. Most of them thanks to Carl and Rick. My shoulder burns from the kickback, but I keep shooting. Trying to control the bursts of bullets like the others do.

My magazine runs out, and Carl has to help me reload. He also throws a spare magazine to his Dad when he needs it. I've never seen him like this. So sure of himself.

Rick knocks a walker down when it gets too close, and Carl finishes it with a round in the head. He gives Carl a look, somewhere between pride and concern.

Time passes, our ammo dwindles, and the walkers fall. It's not long before I switch the terrifying gun for my familiar spear, and we get to work putting down any stragglers.

We look out over our work and to the main gate, where a car is pulling up. Carl takes the words right from my brain.

"Everything's gonna be ok."