Reviews:
Janeth Perez- Very happy to hear that! Writing Rhys and Tara is always a blast, they give off so much positive sibling energy! Interesting, very interesting... I can't give anything away, but I can tell you that we'll be learning more about Rhy's family fairly soon! I'm loving the theory, and thank you for reading and reviewing!
BabySlothXYaoi- Poor Rhys, he really tries to be smooth, he really does try! I am in love with the visual of Daryl wearing domestic clothes and helping in the kitchen! I would also 100% be Noah, I wanna see what cool stuff is in the house. I feel like Carl did that unintentionally, aha. Dude, the beardless Rick effect still affects me to this day, wish he kept that glorious monster. I promise you'll get some answers to your questions in this chapter, and I have a feeling you'll like it!
Note- The character Mikey is the youngest son of Deanna and Reg Monroe in this story. If you don't remember Mikey, I'm not surprised... he was in the show for two scenes, then got written out. A massive thank you to notmuchmoretosay for spawning that idea! Once again, their brilliance never ceases to amaze me. Go and check out their Walking Dead pentalogy series, Stale M&M's, and its spinoff, AN: No Sanctuary.
I watch Carl wake up beside me, whispering good morning to me as early light bounces around his face from one of the living room's windows. I whisper it back, using a kiss instead of words. Michonne coughs from behind me, saying, "Mornin.'" Carl glares at her over my shoulder.
"Not saying anything," she whispers.
The house starts to wake up not long after. We all finish off a pot roast that one of the neighbours brought by last night, which still tastes amazing.
When we leave to explore, Carl pushes Judith around the streets in a pram.
"A what?" Carl's laughing at me when I call it that.
"Pram," I tell him.
"Stroller," he corrects me.
"Sure..." I roll my eyes. "How about a pushchair. Is that better?"
"It's better than pram..." he snorts.
We almost make it around the block undisturbed but get called over by an older couple sitting on their wrap-around porch.
We smile through a short greeting.
"Who is this bundle of joy?" The lady who introduces herself as Natalie Miller asks.
"Judith," Carl smiles as Natalie's husband, Bob Miller, shakes Judith's tiny hand.
"And you boys are?" He asks.
"Carl and Rhys," Carl tells them. "We got here yesterday."
"So nice to have some fresh faces!"
Rick suddenly jogs over from down the road, unknowingly saving us from the awkward questions I know are coming.
"Hi there," Rick nods to the elderly couple when they wave sweetly. "Boys, Jessie's son, Ron, wants to meet you. Why don't you head on over to their house? She said it's the one with the, um... Owl sculpture?"
Rick takes Judith from us before the two of us start to walk in the direction he pointed out at the end of the road.
"Maybe I should go find Rosi-"
"Nope," Carl cuts me off, "You're not making me do this alone."
"I just don't think I'll be very-"
"Nor do I!" Carl laughs at me before taking off, rocketing between two houses and disappearing from sight, leaving me in clouds of dust. A burst of energy sends me after him, sprinting as I try to catch him, following as he shoots around an enormous lake flooding the heart of Alexandria, a flock of ducks exploding from the brilliant blue surface, escaping our expedition and sending water flying. I hurtle over snaking wires and cables as we weave between the glass panels of the community's solar farm, spitting us out by the front gate, which we race past. Carl finally collapses behind a freshly painted gazebo, the far side of the lake from where we started. I drop beside him in the grass, our chests rising and falling out of sync as we gasp for air, sprawling on our backs and laughing our asses off.
"Why- why did you do that?" I gasp when my voice finally beats past the burn of air in my throat.
Carl takes my hand, still laughing. "I wanted to see the community!"
"At a hundred miles an hour?"
"You think we were going that fast?" Carl turns his head in the freshly cut grass to look at me, his bright red cheeks conflicting with the green earth.
"Definitely," I grin.
We lie there, staring back up at the fluffy white clouds as they glide across an otherwise unadorned blue sky, merging into shapes when they bump paths, dragons and gods clashing through their moulds.
"Aren't we meant to go meet that lady's son?" I ask when my breathing is normal, and the dragon wins the fight above us.
"Yeah..." Carl shrugs, staring up and seeing his own battles. "Jus' thought we'd take the scenic route."
"Has your Dad talked to you about us? Since the warehouse, I mean."
"No. I think he's too embarrassed," Carl shrugs.
"Are you?"
"I don't think so," he says, "Jus' don't want to talk about it with him."
"Are you worried about what he'll think?"
"No," Carl answers sternly, giving me a quiet smile.
The sun jumps behind a cloud, light dancing through breaks in its rounded shape until the star bursts out the other side, blinding me.
"We should probably go," I tell Carl, feeling bad because I know he's enjoying the clouds, that he's the type of boy that watches them pass.
"Probably," he grumbles, climbing to his feet and helping me up, knowing that I'm the type of boy that prefers to run.
We knock on a perfectly white door. Stuck in the door's lawn is a letterbox reading 'Anderson's,' every letter a different colour of the rainbow, except for the last two, written in red and orange again. On the other side of the letterbox, four names have been scratched onto the metal. 'Jesse' Is written in a neat cursive above the name 'Sam,' which is signed more messily. The last two names on the metal, Ron and Pete, look as if they were put by the same person, their handwriting scruffy like mine.
A pretty woman with a kind smile opens the door after we knock.
She has dripping blonde hair, pulled back into a loose ponytail, a strand of it escaping to the front of her fair face. Blue paint stains the front of her brown jumper. She's holding a paintbrush in one hand and a water pistol in the other.
"You must be Carl and Rhys?" She says to us, breathless for some reason.
We both nod at her.
"Sorry, come in, please. My youngest, Sam, decided that now was a good time to shoot me with his squirt gun, despite me painting the hallway," she waves the paintbrush around in gesture, a speck flying off and landing on Carl's cheek in a splodge of green.
"Sorry!" she laughs. "Come in..."
We smile graciously and follow her inside the house. The hallway is part blue and half green. Something tells me she changes the colours around a lot.
"Sorry, I'm Jessie." She shakes both our hands, then shouts up the stairs. "Ron! Can you come down, sweetie?"
We hear stomping over our heads before a boy, with somewhere between red and brown hair, trots down the stairs. He looks to be the same age as us, if not a year older. He's wearing a brown shirt over a grey button up.
"Hey," he points at us with one hand, the other buried in his pocket. "Carl and Riley, right?"
"Rhys," Carl corrects him. "I'm Carl."
"Cool, come on up."
We follow him up as he climbs the steps, toys and paint cans littering each one.
"Behave yourself," Jessie calls after her son, which Ron ignores.
"We're almost always here after school," Ron tells us, his voice breaking on a few of his word, "so you can come by anytime."
"You go to school?" Carl and I ask at the same time.
"He speaks!" Ron says to me, and I give him my most uncomfortable laugh.
Ron doesn't seem to notice the awkwardness and goes on, "Yeah, Dani runs it in her garage. Little kids go in the morning, and then it's us in the afternoon."
I notice that Ron's walking with a slight limp.
Ron looks back. "You'll probably come too, right?"
"Probably." - "No."
Carl and I speak at the same time again, saying different things on this occasion. Carl gives me a funny look. "Probably," he repeats himself.
"Cool," Ron nods again, not seeming to notice an awkward air suffocating us.
We reach Ron's room, and he introduces Carl and me to two other teenagers sitting inside.
"Guys, this is Carl. That's Rhys."
The room is packed full with things a normal kid would keep, posters of bands that I recognise and sports teams that I don't. Colourful robots are printed along his bed covers, and a trail of worn clothes leads to an ensuite. The room smells of teenagers, something my Mum would always say when Sean stayed around my house.
"You two, this is Mikey," Ron points to a boy with a square haircut and curved black eyebrows. "He's Deanna's son, so he's practically in charge," he snorts.
"Sure I am," Mikey laughs at him, standing up and shaking our hands. He looks like he's probably closer to Carl's age.
"And this is Enid," Ron gestures to a girl sitting on his robot bed with long brown hair. Ron puts a hand on her shoulder.
I guess they're together.
"Hi," the girl says without looking up from her comic book. I crane my neck to read the title but stop when she decides to glare at me for it. I get the impression from her penetrating blue eyes that she doesn't trust us.
"Enid is from outside, too. She just got here eight months ago," Ron tells us.
Carl reaches into his back pocket, pulling out the comic from last night, "Is this yours?"
Ron smirks, "Sorry, yeah. We didn't know you guys got that house."
"We mostly just hang out there and listen to music," the boy with square hair pipes up, his name already escaping me. "That's Enid's."
The girl, Enid, leans forward and snatches the comic from Carl's hands, throwing it on the bed beside her without speaking.
The room goes painfully silent as Carl gawks at Enid. I nudge him the ribs and whisper, "You're staring, man."
"Wanna play some video games?" Ron brings us both back to the group, walking across the long room to his TV. "Or 105, the house across from you guys, has a pool table. Mikey can get us the keys from his Mom's office since no one's living there at the moment."
"Uhhh," Carl mumbles, looking at me for help, but I'm just as lost.
"Sorry... guess we come on kinda strong, huh? We can just hang out," Ron puts both his hands up in his apology. I start to wonder if he's needed to do that at gunpoint like we have.
"You guys don't even have to talk if you don't wanna," Mikey holds up the controller to the PlayStation. "We can just play games... although keep in mind Ron can be a fudging cheat."
Carl is still just staring at Ron, and I'm staring at him. I can tell he's not dealing with normality as well as he thought he might, biting at his bottom lip when it shakes.
"Pull it together, sport," Enid tells him, flipping the page of her comic.
I get annoyed by this, like she thinks it's supposed to be easy. Like they all think we're the strange ones, strange because we don't spend all our time reading comics and playing fallout.
I think hard when Carl starts mumbling, unable to pull it back. I think about what Karen taught me, 'Pretend you're normal until you are.'
"Video games sound cool," I nod at Ron, "What've you got?"
And like magic, from my attempt to seem normal, everything is suddenly just that. Ron grins and starts reading game titles from a bookcase, Mikey pushes a controller into my hand, and Enid smirks, "Good save."
The afternoon rolls around with the sound of kids playing on the streets outside and Jesse building something in the garage downstairs. Ron wanted us to play a game where you hit people with your car and then shoot them, but Carl and I opted for the sims, which Mikey announces that he prefers.
Once Carl is comfortable enough to talk, I pass him the controller so he and Mikey can continue the game together, giving me the chance to stop being one-hundred-percent normal for a minute.
I look around the room. Enid and Ron are curled up on the bed together, talking in hushed whispers that I struggle to hear. I see beside them a skateboard and baseball bat, pushed neglectfully in the corner of the room. I think about Glenn's baseball bat, the one from Wiltshire. I don't remember when he lost it. Ron sees me staring at the bat.
"Did you play?" Ron asks.
"Huh?" I turn, genuinely not understanding his question.
He smirks, "Baseball... did you play?"
I blink at him, realising I'd forgotten that bats had a purpose before they could pulverise heads.
"They don't play baseball in Britain, dummy," Mikey tells Ron over his shoulder.
I switch the normal back on.
"I didn't," I tell Ron. "But we did play it back home, especially in Wales, where my Mum's family came from." I turn to Mikey, "We just didn't do it as fanatically as you guys."
Ron and Mikey both laugh at this.
"Oh bollocks!"
Everyone stares at me for swearing. Ron springs from the bed and peaks his head out his door before promptly closing it, clearly frightened of his mother hearing.
"What is it?" Carl asks, his expression more worried than the rest.
"I have to go see Deanna... I forgot."
Mikey raises one of those curved eyebrows at me, clearly curious at the mention of his mother.
"Did she tell you when?" Carl asks me.
"No, she just said today."
Carl frown at my answer.
"How long have we been here?" I ask Ron, who checks his elegant looking wristwatch.
"'Bout an hour," he answers.
"If my Mom didn't give you a time, then you can't be late," Mikey points out.
I stare at Carl, who looks back with concern in his expression, a look that says he doesn't want me to leave.
"I can stay-" I start.
"No," Carl cuts me off, "Go see her. I'll stay."
You sure?"
"I am."
I get up, thanking Carl with a kiss on the forehead, getting side glances from Ron and Mikey in return. I race from the room, leaving them to their normality, going through the front door to face actuality.
Deanna's living room is just as cluttered as yesterday. One of her other sons, Spencer, tells me to wait here for his mother, so I do. Spencer looks nothing like his brother Mikey, more like his mother, his hair the same colour brown, only short and curled on his head.
I take a closer look at Deanna's bookshelves, disappointed to find only books on law and order.
"You're Rhys..."
I jump, spinning around with my hand on Tyreese's hammer to see a man standing in the hallway, peering at me through the living room archway.
"Hi," I say back quietly, slowly taking my hand off the hammer tucked behind my belt.
The man has greying hair slicked back, with thick black glasses perched on his short nose. If I had to guess, I'd say he seems to be in his mid-fifties or so.
He steps into the living room, extending a hand that I shake, his grip gentle. "My name's Reg. I'm Deanna's husband." His voice is soft and knowing, matching his wife's.
I remember Abraham mentioned meeting him after being assigned to the construction crew. This is the man that built the walls.
I just nod at him since he already knows my name.
"What have you been up to on your first day?"
"Carl and I visited Ron's house..." I answer ineptly, shuffling my feet against the carpet.
"I'm guessing you met Mikey then?" Reg smiles, "Our son spends more time over there than at home."
"I did."
"It's good for him to have a best friend like Ron," Reg explains, "hard to find that in this world."
I just smile politely at him.
"I watched your tape," Reg goes on, a glass of water in one hand, the other buried in his pocket, a trend I'm noticing here. "Can you guess what I was before all this?"
"An architect," I answer, "Abraham told me."
Reg gives a short laugh, "So you can read people, and you're honest."
I'm starting to get sick of the compliments that shoot out of this family.
"You seem to have an interest in staying in the walls," Reg tells me. "And you want to keep everyone safe."
I nod slowly.
Reg looks like he's going to say more, but Deanna appears from the kitchen with a grin on her face.
"Ah, Rhys, come on through." she holds out her arm towards the kitchen.
I walk in after nodding goodbye to Reg, who wanders back into the hallway and up the stairs without finishing his thought. The kitchen has the same aesthetic as the living room, messy but practical. All the kitchen utensils seem out and ready for use, rolled up building plans sit in a corner next to a sketching desk. The only neat part of the room is a small square table made of marble, a metal jug and two glasses in the centre. Deanna sits on a wooden stool behind it, facing me with a hand pointed to an empty stool on the far side.
I sit.
"How was your first night in Alexandria?" Deanna leans across the marble, seeming genuinely curious.
"Cramped," I answer, making her laugh. I don't feel too proud over it, considering I wasn't trying to be funny.
"Well, you guys sure know how to keep safe, don't you?"
I don't respond, and Deanna doesn't seem to mind.
"I've given thought to those jobs," Deanna tells me.
"Yeah?"
"Yes, Mr Dixon is going to have to wait to find his out."
"Why's that?"
She smiles, "You must keep it secret, but Aaron wants to turn him into one of our recruiters."
"Makes sense."
She purses her lips, nodding firmly. "I'm glad you agree."
"I thought maybe you could help me," Deanna informs me, "on thinking of a job for Sasha."
"For Sasha?"
"Yes, what do you think Sasha could do here? She didn't give me much to work with, doesn't like talking about herself that one."
I think on this, "She's our best shot. She could be helpful on the walls."
"We don't put guards on the walls here," Deanna waves her hand at me dismissively.
"Oh..."
How are these people alive?
"I don't know then," I tell her, which only seems to make Deanna frustrated with herself as she leans back in her stool.
I shrug. "Sasha's strong. She helps people. She was a firefighter before everything."
Deanna keeps herself leant back, obviously deep in thought.
"What about me?" I ask finally, tired of not knowing.
"Well, that is just the question, isn't it?" Deanna chuckles, pouring out some water from the metal pitcher into the two glasses on the table, pushing one towards me.
"I thought long and hard," Deanna sips her water between sentences, "I think that you could help Carol."
I almost eject my water into the woman's face.
Deanna goes on, "You two seem very alike, kind and loving, but strong. Always there to look after people. I've put Carol on cooking duty, making food for the elderly and those with full time parenting jobs. I thought you could assist her with that."
I shake my head at first, but it turns into a nod, then back to a head shake. Both Deanna and I are confused.
"It's that or nothing, I'm afraid," Deanna looks genuinely disappointed, "I can't place you anywhere else."
The idea of doing nothing scares me much more than working with a killer, so I start nodding again.
"That sounds great."
Deanna grins, patting the table like a judge with a gavel, sentencing me to life in prison. But there's no gavel, and the sentence is life with Carol.
"Perfect. Is there anything else?"
"No," I stand up.
"See you soon, Rhys."
When I get back to 101, I find Daryl still on the porch floor, stabbing his knife into its planks.
"Carl back?" I ask.
Daryl shakes his head.
"Aaron is going to ask you to be a recruiter-" I tell Daryl simply.
He looks up at me, leaving his knife sticking out of the deck.
"-Try and act surprised when he asks," I finish.
"What about you?" Daryl puts his hand over his squint to block the sun as he looks up at me.
"Cooking for people," I tell him. "With Carol."
"That okay?" Daryl squints up from the floor.
"No," I tell him, happy to finally report the truth today. "But It's that or nothing."
Daryl grunts in understanding and I go into the house without anything else said.
I head upstairs, realising that I haven't explored this house yet.
There are multiple bedrooms, most with dirt tracked through them from our people searching the house. I open the last door on the landing, surprised to find Carl inside, deep in thought.
I look around the fairly empty bedroom. Carl is sat on a blue single bed, a matching yellow one beside it. I sit on the blue with him, perching myself on the end of the bed. Carl puts his legs onto my lap.
"Daryl said you weren't back," I tell him.
"Came in through the window," Carl answers, pointing in the direction of the back of the house.
I realise he's still wearing odd shoes as I cradle his leg.
"You need new shoes."
"You're one to talk," Carl chuckles.
I look down at my bloody trainers, wiggling my toes.
"How was Ron's house?" I ask.
He shrugs, "Dumb."
I realise neither of us wants to talk about our day, so I push his feet off me, shuffling up the bed and putting my head across his chest. Carl grabs a gentle fistful of my hair.
I notice that Carl's torn all the posters down. All except one, a poster showing an animal skull with the words, 'Rubish Junkie' written above. Carl notices me staring at it from his chest.
"You said you like that band... back on the road when Abraham let you pick the music."
I smile up at him, "Thank you."
The door opens, and Rick walks in without knocking. I sit up, and Carl releases my hair a little late, making me yip. Rick just opts to look at the ceiling until we stop moving.
"Hey," Rick says, quiet as a mouse. "How was Ron's house?"
I realise this is how I sounded asking stupid questions. I clamber over Carl and sit on the other bed when Rick sits beside his son.
"What do you think of this place?" Carl ignores his father's question.
Rick pats his son's leg, looking around the room. "Well, I think it seems... nice."
Rick's painfully long pause says everything that he doesn't.
Carl nods from his comfy bed, "Yeah," clearly he sees through his Dad as well. "I like it here. I like the people. But they're weak. I don't want us to get weak, too."
Rick hmm's at Carl. I notice he's already grown back some stubble. I feel my face, nothing growing from it yet. I look to Carl, who even has the smallest amount of peach fuzz appearing on his chin. I find this annoying, cursing my face silently.
"We're eating soon. One of the neighbours made us some lasagne," Rick tells us, standing up and heading for the door, not saying anything else as he leaves.
Carl's staring at the ceiling. I'm staring at Carl.
I ask him, "Are you going to speak to your dad about it?"
"It?"
"Us."
"I don't know," Carl shakes his head on the plumped pillows, "Why should I?"
I don't answer because I don't know how to.
"I love you," I tell him finally.
Carl looks at me and smiles, "Same here."
A/N
I really like the parents in the Monroe family.