(As Yet Untitled)

by DomWeasel

Watching the series again back in late 2022, I was reminded how much Sophia's arc in the TV show depressed me. Thought about it for several months and then rewrote season 2 with an original character to have some fun and take a break from another project, and to create a timeline where Sophia may or may not live as long as her comic counterpart. I don't know, I haven't finished yet

9. The Lesson

I had never been a believer. You might have thought that would change with everything I had seen but, no. But the night the farm had fallen had left me with a recurring dream about fire and writhing figures in the flames and that was pretty hellish. It was a bad dream to have. When you had it when the last thing you remembered was barbed wire and blood…

And then I saw an angel and I freaked out.

[][][][][][]

I had been stabbed before and I had had to just deal with it. I had held a towel to it until it had stopped bleeding and then bandaged it. It had been nothing compared to amputating my own fingers. This in turn felt like nothing compared to coming to after being stabbed multiple times. It was a bit like a hangover in that my mouth was dry and my head was pounding but I couldn't move. I couldn't talk either. Just gurgle.

"Daddy!"

Moving my head wasn't an option so my eyes had to do it. There was the angel and there was Santa. My eyes weren't working. I blinked but that didn't fix them. I felt something pushed between my lips and then there was water and that was good. Good enough for sleep.

[][][][][][]

I woke up and felt human. Strange dreams but I was pretty sure they were dreams.

"How are you feeling?"

"Depends. Where am I?" The words scratched my throat.

"Infirmary." Hershel answered. "Cleared it out 'specially for you."

"That's not good." I said for some reason

"You lost a lot of blood. You needed a transfusion but we didn't know your blood type." He explained in his soft voice and I shrugged. "When we start going for regular supply runs, some blood test kits might be a good idea." He mused. "You owe Axel and Oscar your life. They got to you before we did and those few seconds probably made all the difference. Those boys had some unfortunate experience with stabbings."

It came back to me then and I tried to sit up only to fail entirely because I didn't have the strength to lift my head off the pillow, only to painfully jolt my body. "Sophia?!"

"She's fine. She's having nightmares that ain't gonna stop any time soon but she's okay." His eyes took on a sad cast. "Someone else you owe your life too."

"I thought he was dead."

Hershel took a moment and though his beard hid the minutia of his emotions, his eyes betrayed him. "Rick said he chased him into a… Into a dead end. And I mean that literally. There were walkers all around, no way out that he could see. He thought they took care of him. Rick was wrong. He made a mistake. We all know he made a mistake and we all nearly paid dearly for it." He breathed in and then sighed heavily. "Andrew opened up all the gates we secured. He lured in a whole herd of walkers on the other side of the prison. If he had killed you and Sophia, he would have opened the last gate and we would have been overrun. And if that had happened, we could have lost people. We could have all gone down."

"And Sophia stopped him."

"You stopped him."

"No…" I rocked my head on the pillow. "I tried. He killed me."

"You ain't dead, son. And I worked too hard for you to give up now. The first twenty-four hours were touch and go but you're a stubborn son of a bitch." He cursed unexpectedly and held up my left hand. "You came through performing surgery on yourself, remember?"

I reached with my right hand for my neck and found the little bag I kept my missing finger bones in. It was my strange little talisman and though I could feel they had removed my clothes, they hadn't taken that away.

"Your wounds are stitched and cleaned. We've got antibiotics in you. There's no reason you ain't going to get through this. You've come too far to die because of one asshole."

"One asshole." I mused. "What's happening out there?"

"We've had to start all over again. Andrea, Daryl, Rick and T have been doing what they can but he led a small army here. Even with Axel and Oscar helping out, they haven't been able to clear much. Too many of them and no way to contain them like before. It's slow going."

"What was his plan? Let the walkers kill us all and then… Leave? Or try to take the place for himself?"

"I don't think he thought that far ahead." Hershel released my hand. "You've been in and out for five days."

"Feels longer." Talking was exhausting and I felt myself starting to drift off and I couldn't shake the fog. "Feels longer."

[][][][][][]

When I woke up again, Hershel was gone and Beth was sitting nearby. She looked tired.

"You made me think I was dead." I said, startling her.

"Whut?"

"All I saw was white and gold and I really thought you were an angel and I was dead." It was dark now and she definitely looked angelic in the light of a couple of dynamo lanterns. Beth had been pale in the autumn when I had met her but after the winter, she looked like a porcelain doll.

"Thanks? I guess." She was embarrassed and put her hand on my forehead. "How do you feel?"

"I can wriggle my toes." I said. "That's good."

"That's good." She confirmed.

"Can't lift my arms."

"You lost a lot of blood." She reached and lifted my right arm, the one opposite my stab wounds. There was nothing I could do to stop it dropping. "You really had me worried." She said it lightly and then she placed her left wrist next to mine. "You never told me." She murmured.

"You never talked about it." I replied, looking at our similar scars. Mine was old and pale while hers was still red. Nastier too because she had used glass.

Beth touched her scar and then mine. "You have a lot of scars."

And if she had helped her father undress me and taken care of me for the past week then she was intimately acquainted with those scars. "I got past it."

"Did you?"

"All of them are old. That one." I could only look at my left arm as I didn't have the strength to touch it. "Not so old."

"Why?"

"Why did you?" I asked, knowing she knew the answer.

"And you got by?"

"I'm lying in a bed in a prison infirmary. That's still better than where I was…"

Beth looked around and then gazed into the darkness, thinking about her old life. The ruin of that lost life had been what had pushed her to the edge. Even her optimism could not paint this place as good as her former life. So if I thought this was better than my own former life… She hugged me.

"I hate to ruin the moment, but I really need to take a leak."

She giggled into my neck and then released me. "We don't have any secrets anymore." She declared slyly and I winced.

[][][][][][]

For two days, the only people I saw were Dr Hershel and Nurse Beth and as I was as weak as a new-born rat, I could understand what he meant when he said over-exertion would be a bad idea. After a week I was no longer 'exsanguinated' as Hershel called it but I had been stabbed three times in the belly and I was lucky, damn lucky, that Andrew hadn't pierced my intestines or a kidney. Keeping me in bed was to stop me tearing my stitches and while I had no memory of it and found it hard to believe, I had apparently torn them open three times in the five days I had been out. I found wiggling my toes exhausting but I had flexed my abdomen enough to tear stitches and this despite them strapping me down. The dressing meanwhile needed changing daily. I found it interesting that I had recovered my strength if not my vitality from amputating my fingers quicker than I had with this. Although, maybe that experience had weakened me and that was why this had me out.

On the third day though, the third day of bottles and bedpans and staring at the empty sky through the infirmary window; I wanted out. As it happened though, lying in bed distorted just how much pain I was experiencing. When they sat me up fully, I discovered new pains I didn't know I had had. This alarmed me and I wondered how things seemed to hurt more these days than they had when I was younger. Maybe it was just the winter and I would toughen up again once I healed from this and ate regular meals once more.

"Take your time." Hershel advised and I had to bite back the blasphemous curses I would have used to express my feelings. Rediscovering my legs took a few minutes and frustrating as it was having the Greenes clinging to my forearms, I couldn't get annoyed with them. I did manage to shrug them off when I was able to stand under my own power though I felt them hovering behind me as I took my tentative steps out of the infirmary.

The prison was full of walkers. Before it had been convicts and guards but now they seemed to be ordinary people wearing filthy but regular clothes. The courtyards were full of them and I could see open doors. I had been out a week so if they hadn't been able to remove or contain them then things were even worse than they appeared to be. Not that I could be any help. Walking tugged at my groin which pulled my midriff and my stitches. Walking did not feel good and I could tell that one sharp and unexpected movement and I would split myself open.

"Back to square one." I remarked.

"Could be worse." Hershel gave them an unimpressed look. "They're shut off from us. They may have the other half of the prison but our two cell blocks are secure. They're not getting in again."

"Again?"

"They were in Cell Block A and C but they couldn't reach where we sleep. It was hard but they took them back. Had to clear them all over."

"More fires." I mused.

"More fires." He confirmed. "But if we're going to set the world right, burning walkers will be a regular part of our lives."

He made it sound righteous and with Sophia's beliefs, it felt like the beginning of a crusade. A necessary crusade. Although, surviving was more important right now.

The others were down in the field and I did not feel like limping down there. Too much. I had been fed up lying in the infirmary but the exertion of leaving it meant that suddenly my foam pads beckoned and so I went into the cell block. It was not like I remembered it.

"She's been busy." I said.

The small common area with its grey metal fixtures and grey walls was no longer quite so grey. Sophia had been working here and the walls had murals as high as she could reach while standing on a box and I looked at Beth and Hershel who shrugged because they must have gotten over any negative feelings about it days ago while I was left thinking that Sophia's rendering of the Greene farm was really quite beautiful. It was just as it had been when we had first gotten there; the farmhouse, the barn and even Dale's RV parked by the trees. A thirteen year old had done this.

They must have gone out and found her more art supplies because she had painted the railings of the walkways and stairs along with the mesh of the cages blue. The cell doors were green. The edge of the upper walkway was one long length of green holly with red berries to make you think incongruously of Christmas. Combined with her first mural beneath the windows, it was hard to believe this place had been strewn with trash and bodies and completely lifelessly grey. Like a fresh walker.

"Very busy."

"Kept her mind off things." Beth said and she didn't need to explain what that meant.

None of the cells below had been painted beyond their doors. Mine meanwhile was filled with a spectacular sunset over the ocean, or with an odd sense of humour, an ocean with a sink set in it which the sun was descending into. The wall opposite the bunkbed meanwhile was a meadow like the mural downstairs and I saw what she had done. The ocean and the meadow were wide open spaces a far cry from this small cell or the claustrophobic woods we had been lost in. She knew I disliked the prison for being a prison and she was transforming it.

"This was the first thing she did." Beth said.

"Big improvement." I sat on my bunk and noted the sheets were clean and my recently acquired pillows were fresh too. Carol. "Looks like a whole new world."

"Axel and Oscar couldn't believe it."

"Where are they now?"

"The other side." Hershel put in. "They ain't under house arrest no more but they have to stay in their cell block. At least for now. But we've shared a few meals over here."

"So something good came out of this."

"Don't say that to Rick." Hershel advised, meaning that people had already muttered that stopping me from bleeding to death shouldn't have been what it took for the two convicts to earn a little trust.

"So half the prison's overrun with walkers, but walkers are the only problem now."

"For now." Hershel said and I didn't know what he meant and I was honestly too tired to ask.

[][][][][][]

When I woke up again it was to a pair of big sad eyes peering at me. The moment she saw I was awake she didn't bother with words, she clung to me and I thought about the first time she had done this which was also when she had thought I might die. It was decidedly less awkward, even if she had kissed me, because I knew her now. She wasn't a strange child. She was a friend. A friend who withdrew and sat on the stool and she looked very small and skinny. She wore a pink T-shirt that hung loosely and did nothing to brighten her up.

What to say though… What could you say? "How are you?" I asked and she could only shrug. "That bad…" She nodded mutely. "You saved my life."

"So we're even." She said and that was difficult to fathom. People our age shouldn't have been trading life debts. She gazed steadily at me and that hazel-eyed gaze had changed. Forever changed. I picked myself up to look at her and for just a moment I winced as I pulled on my stitches and it was enough to start her shaking.

I immediately took her wrists and I wished my own hands weren't so skinny. "I'm sorry. You should never… I should…" Babbling like a lunatic. How did you tell a kid you were sorry they had shot a man in the head? She had been upset for two weeks after shooting her first walker. Carol had said she didn't have a mean bone in her body and I had never seen anything to disprove that. And she had killed someone because they were killing me.

All I could do was kneel and then hold her and let her cry.

[][][][][][]

"What the hell are you doing?"

"I'm trying to remember when I stopped being horrified by these things." The walkers were gnawing on the mesh trying to get at me and they were inches from me but they didn't bother me. They were on the other side of the fence. "If they were on the other side of the fence, I'd be scared for my life but… They're walking corpses. That doesn't bother me."

Andrea had a simple philosophy; stay alive, don't get bit. After the CDC she had been messed up for a while but then after the farm she had become brutally pragmatic toward walkers and only a little less toward people. I had worried about Shane's influence on her but his plot to kill Rick by killing Randall as well as knowing he had killed Otis had eliminated any of that in her. She approved of me and Beth doing our best to take responsibility for Carl and Sophia and freeing up the adults for other things. She approved of my approach to walkers; eliminating the ones I could and making sure they were down. She didn't spend any time any more asking why things were the way they were.

But everyone had the nagging voice at the back of their head telling them that it was unnatural.

"Just put them down." She said.

I shrugged, and then drove the chisel of my crowbar through the fence. I was meant to be resting and instead I had gotten up before anyone else, dragged my sore body out to the gates and now I put down a quartet of walkers and then sat on the gravel of what Rick said was called 'the Sterile Zone'. It was a good name because it served the purpose of keeping the field and exterior separate from the gore from walkers. What I had just done was obviously stupid because it felt like I had been punched in the gut.

"We need to teach you to shoot."

It was a rebuke. One that made me suck my teeth and stand up. Andrea was five foot six but she wore good boots and had excellent posture so she seemed taller but when I stood up, it was clear that she held no advantage even over a skinny kid like me. "Say it."

She didn't like me squaring up but she didn't back down. "If you had had a gun, a little girl wouldn't have needed to do the shooting."

"If I had a gun, we would have used bullets teaching me that we needed during the winter and we wouldn't be here."

Andrea conceded this point. "But you don't need training to shoot a psycho at three feet."

"Yeah." I smiled at her which unnerved her just a little. "And that's going to haunt me for the rest of my life." More walkers were approaching along the fence to where I had put the others down. "However long that is." I decided to deal with them.

"You can't talk like that." She said behind me and I put the crowbar through the fence again.

"It's a cruel world. Always has been." I spiked another skull. "But I wouldn't wish what I've been through on anyone. Is that weird? I don't resent people who've had it easier than me."

"Sophia never had it easy."

"That's why we get along."

"A little too well."

"Don't go there."

"If I had concerns, you'd know it." She said and it was the first time anyone had said anything serious about it. Obviously, there had been bigger issues in the meantime.

"But?"

"We spent four months together, usually half a dozen people to a room huddling for warmth… We're all a little too well-acquainted." Andrea mused. "And that little girl had two choices; you or Carl. I don't like it but I understand it. And now… You're in deep. But your personal life isn't my problem. My problem is you can't shoot. As soon as we have the ammunition, you and I are taking a ride."

"Yes, ma'am."

Andrea gave me a look, unsure if I was mocking her, and then looked back out. It was still now. No more walkers. They were all around the other side of the prison.

"We've been here three weeks now?" I mused aloud. "Are we better off now?"

"We have beds to sleep on behind steel doors that lock. And all this to stretch our legs in." She indicated the lower yard. "It's not as pretty as the farm but it is secure. Doubly secure." She meant the two fences. "We're better off. We just need to put some more work in."

"What is the plan?"

"No idea." She said in that pissed manner of hers. "We've been on damage control since you got stabbed. Everyone's just been holding their breath. No offence."

"None taken." It was even flattering and I didn't know how to take that. "What would you do?"

"Fix the water situation." She said. "So we don't have go outside for the basics. If a herd showed up today, our best bet would be to hide inside and wait for them to leave. But that could take days or weeks. And we'd have to live on bottled water. But if we got that hose we talked about through the fence, then we could get what we need at night."

"But it hasn't been done."

"We were prioritising keeping the dead out." She said and then sighed. "We make all these plans and the walkers stop us."

"We're still here." After a winter of hiding in dark places and running the rest of the time, the three weeks we had spent here was the longest the majority of the group had spent in one place since the camp at the quarry outside Atlanta. "They can't get us in here. Not unless a horde shows up or some other asshole opens all the gates."

There was a commotion up at the cell block and I saw Sophia rush up to the locked gate and gaze down at me.

"Someday you may have to marry that girl." Andrea remarked without a hint of humour.

"Be nice."

"I am. She's woken me every night for nearly two weeks. I know what she's going through."

She meant waking from a recurring nightmare again and again. For Andrea, it was seeing her sister bitten and bleeding out. For Sophia… Blowing a chunk out of a man's skull the way she had been trained; just not for live men. Everyone had those nightmares but not every night and Sophia couldn't help but cry out and wake herself and everyone else.

"I should go up there." I said.

"I would." Now there was humour in her tone.

It had been awkward the previous night eating the meal. I was not close to any of the adults and I had spent most of my time with Beth, Carl and Sophia. Beth and I had talked. Carl was only interested in comparing scars which had upset his mom although I had found it hilarious that he wanted to compare his shooting scar to my stab wounds. Meanwhile everyone knew I had spent the better part of the afternoon holding a weeping Sophia and they had every reason to be uncomfortable with that. I was uncomfortable with it. How did you set boundaries with a thirteen year old who had kissed you when she had also saved your life and needed comforting for killing someone in the process? I didn't have the answer. No one did.

Breakfast was no less awkward that I hadn't thought that Sophia would be triggered by me being missing from my cell and the block, just like the day of my stabbing.

Rick decided to put a positive spin on the site being overrun. "Anyone who sees the place from the front will see the fence down, the burnt ruins and the place infested. They won't see an opportunity."

"And if they come from the back?" Andrea asked, because she had to.

"They'll see us." Rick replied. "And if they're people like us, we won't have a problem."

"And if they ain't?"

"When was the last time we saw anybody?" Rick asked and he had a point. Raiders were a threat but not an immediate one. Everyone knew that. "We'll take down the signs that point the way here. Then anyone who ain't a local won't even know we're here. In the meantime, we need water. We discussed it. We know what we need to do so we'll get on with it. We'll make rain collectors too. We'll make sure water ain't an issue. Then we can start talking about crops."

"We should start with some planters." Hershel said. "Up in the yard. That way we can make a start before we move onto the real hard work. Get a feel for it."

"Practice?" Theodore asked.

"You ever farm before?

"I ain't never had a houseplant." Theodore confessed. "So what do we need?"

They discussed logistics. They needed the equipment for the water pump, they needed timber, farming tools, tools in general, whatever gardening materials could be found in the area and so on. Maybe even scavenging a local farm.

None of this mattered to me. I couldn't walk without hurting, let alone run, so I wasn't going beyond the fences.

Rick took Daryl and Oscar to take down the signs. Oscar wanted to see the outside world and just seeing the roads would be a good start; not enough to overwhelm him. Glenn, Maggie, Andrea and Theodore went to take another look at the town; to see what could be found in garages and sheds. It was bitter to me that the prison had a workshop full of tools and now thanks to Andrew, we were cut off from it. There must have been enough timber and nails in there to build a house.

Axel had tied his jumpsuit off around the waist and found a black jacket to wear over his prison shirt. It wasn't much but it allowed him to recover a little of himself. It was a mark of trust that Axel was left with just Dale and Hershel to watch him. Two old men and two teenagers. He continued to stand in that manner of hugging himself, like he had when Tomas was around. I found him standing up by the gate looking down on the field. The gate was closed and he was gazing through the mesh at the footbridge over the creek.

"It's not a good view." I remarked, startling him. It was not good that he hadn't heard me approach.

"It's different when you can look at it any time you want. When there ain't someone telling you where you're meant to be." He shook his head. "Ever since you let us out of that cafeteria, I ain't been able to sit still knowing I'm not where I was s'posed to be. You follow me?"

"Not really. Until all this I didn't have anyone telling me what to do since I was… A kid."

Axel frowned because in his eyes I was a kid. Even if I had threatened him with a shotgun. "I liked it." He said. "You knew where you stood. You didn't have any doubts. Any worries. You did what you were told. Slept, pissed, ate, showered when you were told to. I can leave now. 'cept if I do, I'll get torn to pieces. But that's not why I don't want to leave."

"You're nuts." I said. "I spent my whole life trying to avoid coming here."

"I heard."

"How do I thank someone for not letting me bleed to death?"

"…I don't know, man." He wouldn't look at me. "When someone got stabbed inside, you had to step back so the guards wouldn't think it was you. And if you tried to help, the dudes doing it would think you were… 'filiated. You follow me? But the guards always did the same thing; apply pressure. That's all we did."

"Hershel said it made all the difference."

"Maybe." He was embarrassed and so put it into terms he could deal with. "Least we can stay now. Come outside when we want." He gripped the wire. "You were good to us. We returned the favour."

If he wanted to put it that way, that was fine by me. Saved me another awkward conversation.

"What's the deal with them kids, anyhow? Carrying guns like that?"

"A walker comes for me, I can take it down with this." I patted the crowbar at my belt. "A walker goes for the kids, they're not big or tall enough to fight like that. But guns?"

"So they done some shooting before then?"

"They're monsters. It's easy to shoot monsters. …Well, not so easy for her. She was never comfortable with that. They never had to shoot at people and the people in this group who had to shoot at people; they didn't like that."

"Really?" Now he looked at me and I knew he was back in that laundry room with Rick's gun at his head and thinking about that dripping machete.

"Trust me, he'll do anything to protect his family. And not just his wife and son."

Axel looked back, over at Dale up in the guard tower by the gate. "How 'bout the rest of y'all?"

"We've all gotten our hands dirty. I'm the only one who can't shoot though."

"Why?"

"I never liked guns." I said shortly.

"Me neither."

"Can't stay that way though."

"You think your man's gonna give us guns?"

"Give it a while. He may hate it, but he needs you. He needs bodies. You two give him nine." Andrea, Axel, Carol, Daryl, Glenn, Maggie, Oscar, Theodore and Rick himself. All able adults who could do whatever labour was required to make this place habitable and with the exception of Carol, eight who could fight hand to hand. "I'll make ten when I'm healed up."

"What about the blonde girl?"

"Beth? He ain't gonna work her like a mule. Her daddy might…" While Beth was obviously no stranger to work as a farm girl, Rick had always looked at her first and foremost as a skinny teen, like me. "How's your cell block?"

"Not as cosy as yours. I thought it was bad before. At lights out it was always bad but when the lights are always out… When the lights are on there ain't a single shadow in a prison. Nowhere for you to be out of sight; you follow me? Now it's all shadows."

"And you want to stay."

"And y'all want to live here. And if y'all want to live here, how bad is it out there?"

"One giant graveyard." I said.

We ate outside. It wasn't a particularly warm day in the end of March but being outside in the grass was nice. I didn't think so much about what I was eating because I was simply grateful to be eating. Even now I couldn't get used to the regular meals after the long grim winter.

Sophia sat with me on her left and her mom on her right. She leaned on her mother, reminding me of earlier days and making recent events difficult. Carl sat with his mother who in the week I hadn't seen her was visibly more pregnant. That was understandably hard for Axel not to stare at, although he tried. Beth and Hershel sat together and looked so much at home in the long grass.

"Can you really grow crops in this?" I asked, tearing up some of it.

"The soil is good. And if you're willing to put in the effort, the work that's necessary; you can make anything grow where you want it." Somehow he made everything into a question of faith and not Christian faith; just belief.

"I've never grown anything. Food for me came from a store, not a field."

"You'll learn." Hershel said. "We'll have you picking beans instead of pockets."

This made Beth and Carl giggle and it also intrigued Axel. He had said he had heard about my criminality but obviously not any details.

"I was a housebreaker." I explained for him. "I could have been one bad day from being in here with you."

"You don't look the part." Axel was reassessing me.

"He can pick any lock." Beth said. She sounded oddly proud.

"Near enough." I shrugged. "When I was young, I just looked for opportunities. …Windows left open, that sort thing of thing. When I wasn't stealing leftovers from tables outside restaurants…" I looked at my bowl. "That's why I can never get used to this. Real food…"

They stared at me, except Sophia. She was the only one I had ever given any real details about my old life to. Besides my introduction during that meal in the farmhouse, they had never asked, just as no one asked about Daryl's old life. They just knew I was a thief and I had been homeless as a child.

"Better grub than we used to get served." Axel mused. "Only had three guys in the kitchen who cooked before. Rest of 'em just threw stuff in a pot and told us to pray."

Rick, Daryl and Oscar returned first. They had brought the road signs back for no real reason I could see except maybe the thin pieces of metal might serve some use. Rick had an odd energy that I realised was impatience; he wanted to make things happen and that wasn't happening fast enough. Oscar looked drained and I tried to imagine things from his point of view. In many ways, he had the same experience as Rick except he had been conscious through it all. Oscar had left a locked room to encounter the walking dead and then to see a dead world. It had been explained to him but now he had seen it. He knew that the chances of his family being alive were next to nothing. It was a lot to process. We all knew how that felt.

The others returned and they had tools of all kinds. We could start our own logging company if we wished and they had gathered a couple of rain barrels. The cell blocks had downpipes from the gutters and it was easy for them to be sawn off at the bottom and then the barrels were slotted into place. It was good timing as it was clearly going to rain. I guessed it had rained a bit while I had been out but this looked like it would be heavy. It had been a dry month.

[][][][][][] March 29th

I listened to the sound of falling rain with only a vague ability to see it on the frosted glass. It was dark in the cells in the morning and evening normally and the rain meant it felt like it was still dawn. I heard no one moving around. No one felt like getting up when they didn't have to. No one was hungry enough to get up and start the day yet. What was crazy about that was that it meant there was no urgency. We had spent the whole winter on edge, either holed up waiting for the dead to pass by or making every second we had count. Now we could afford to waste time. There was nothing productive that could be done indoors now so even Rick was still.

Fourteen people living in a cell block. Thirteen of them occupied the cells while Daryl still slept on the landing. I thought my bed with two foam pads was uncomfortable while he was sleeping on one on a metal floor. The man either was tough as nails, or just insane. Or maybe he didn't want to get soft and didn't trust this new haven to last.

But we had been here for three weeks. Sure, half the prison was filled with walkers thanks to an asshole who had planned to kill me and Sophia with an axe and we had a laughable amount of ammunition left. But this cell block was completely secure. The locked doors made it impervious to walkers and we could sleep safely at night. And we had food. Lots of food. The supplies from the cafeterias would expire before sixteen people could eat it all.

Sixteen… Axel and Oscar were still in their cell block. I didn't see that changing any time soon and it didn't bother me. They had their space. We had ours. I hadn't spoken to Oscar yet but Axel was tame enough. Maybe a little twitchy and a little too prone to eyeing Andrea and Carol, but then he had spent half a year locked in a small space with four guys and even longer in this prison before. I couldn't hold it against him just for looking.

My side ached and that set off my fingers. I could reach for the little bag around my neck and actually hold the remains of my two missing digits but my brain was convinced that the lower portion was still there. The stumps I actually had were not the stumps it felt like I had. My brain was certain I had only lost the bits that had been bitten off and not the pieces I had hacked off. At least eventually I would only have a few scars from being stabbed.

Bitten, amputated, stabbed… Besides Dale getting cut up escaping through his RV window and then getting sick during the winter, no one else seemed to be taking as much punishment as me. How many lives did I have left? I had nearly been taken out in the camp outside Atlanta, so did that near miss count as another life lost? The camp, the bite, the stabbing… If I was a cat; that was six out of nine… Unless you looked at my childhood…

It was a deranged line of thought and I pushed it away. How did people survive in these cells when they were actually locked and all they had were thoughts like this? I needed to heal up and I needed to stay busy.

I looked up at the sunset on the back wall. A reminder that things could get better.

[][][][][][]

For three weeks I spent agonisingly boring hours keeping watch. As the view down the road from the guard tower was limited by the woods either side, this meant that there was nothing to see. Only the treeline between the fences and woods offered any kind of entertainment and that was walkers emerging to join those at the fence. They came steadily enough. Some days after the fence had been cleared, it remained so all day but inevitably a loner or group would come along to continue rattling the wire. They rarely noticed me in the tower but they saw the movement in the field or the yard and that kept their attention long after that movement ceased.

I thought of the upper section as the Yard now while down below was just the Field. They had extensive plans for crops, even livestock, but for the moment those ambitions were tempered by the reality that you didn't just find huge amounts of seed. Not until they were willing to risk driving out and finding a farm and looking for it. That was a future expedition. In the meantime, they had been stocking up on gas for the vehicles and expanding our meagre armoury. The local town yielded some ammunition and firearms but nothing like what they hoped for. They were getting more ambitious with the supply runs though and sooner or later they would head for some military checkpoint to see what goodies were available.

Maybe they couldn't start planting an actual field. But they could use planters as Hershel had suggested. Stuff taken from people's backyards that were meant for growing flowers and instead now had beans and tomatoes in them. Like Sophia had talked about. The sight of these planters, both plastic and timber, outside the cell block did a huge amount to cheer up the grim structures.

They hadn't figured out yet how to put together a pump to get water out of the creek beyond the fences and that frustrated Rick. The rain barrels filled from the prison gutters were a stop-gap but the man wanted a constant flow of water into the prison.

I thought that as Lori swelled, Rick tried to distract himself more and more from her. They seemed less tense than before, the result of living in relative comfort here, but it was still not a happy marriage. Carl seemed mostly oblivious about this, or at least of his mother's discomfort, and enthusiastically helped out wherever his dad let him. What he wanted to do was deal with walkers at the fences but guns were strictly forbidden; suppressed or otherwise. He was too short to stab a walker through the chain and so that meant he had to help in other ways. Like clearing up the mess in the yard and separating the trash from what was useable. He had hated cleaning the cell block and yet sorting through debris from a riot was exciting to him for some reason. He wore a pair of well-boiled riot-gloves to protect him from splinters and broken glass and made piles out of the different materials. To his credit, he did a good job.

Sophia joined the farmers. While Glenn and Maggie were out on runs, that left Beth and Hershel to work on the garden-farm in the Yard. Sophia liked being a part of that as well and I thought it made Hershel look like Santa with two little elf helpers.

Axel learned to clear walkers at the fences. They still made him nervous but every day made it less of an ordeal and more of a chore. Oscar was rather more brutal and it was an Andrea kind of energy. He would not talk about his family but he was obviously venting on the walkers the way she had. That was no problem when he was part of a group cutting a path to the creek or the trees. He always had people to watch his back and so far as I could tell, he wasn't about to break ranks and get himself or anyone else killed.

Theodore seemed to get through to him the most. After six months with, barring Glenn, a bunch of very white folks, it was a relief to him to have another black person to speak to. Just to have around even. I knew Oscar was discomforted by the very white crowd he was now a part of.

Dale tinkered with the vehicles or kept me company on watch. We didn't talk much although that was on me. Dale told stories and he had a very compelling voice that meant I made a poor watchman when he was around. It didn't seem possible that a man could makes stories about being salesman interesting or even funny and yet somehow he could. When I said I was bored, he asked me to imagine spending years trying to invest the same level of enthusiasm into selling the same product over and over and wondering how everyone else did it, and wondering if they were thinking the same thing about him. If that was the kind of life I had avoided being a thief and by the end of the world…

I wasn't sure of the days but I knew once we passed the halfway point of April that I was eighteen. I kept that to myself. Birthdays had never been a celebration for me and I wasn't sure I could even handle hearing the words 'Happy Birthday', let alone an attempt at a celebration. Sophia's birthday had been awkward enough but Carol hadn't wanted to ignore it. Christmas we had ignored. I guessed we had ignored a few birthdays these past six months.

Once upon a time, being eighteen had meant being a man. I didn't know what that meant. I didn't feel any different. I didn't look different. How did I qualify as a man? Cracking the skulls of walking corpses didn't mean anything. I had no religious rites to perform and if I was cracking human skulls then going out with Daryl to kill some animal wouldn't make me a man either.

But it bothered me I had reached this arbitrary age of adulthood with my only romantic experience being that I had been kissed by a child. And having to consider it a romantic experience made my skin crawl. Crawl so much I had to scrub at it. The one upside to being stabbed was that Glenn and Maggie didn't joke about it anymore. No one referenced it. Only Andrea had brought it up. Rick apparently had left it all up to Carol.

Sophia treated me the way she had before. I was her friend. I was someone she chatted to, someone she could show off her artwork to or even teach thanks to having years of schooling that I did not. I played games with her, Carl and Beth. It was so much like before that there were times when it felt like I had dreamed that kiss and the idea I had imagined such a thing rather than it had actually happened made me feel even more gross. I knew it had happened though because I saw Carol keeping a close eye on Sophia. Not on me, but on her daughter. After what had happened with Andrew, I suspected she was worried that Sophia might try to distract herself by pursuing me. The alternative was that she was keeping an eye on me and I hadn't noticed and that brick to the head while I slept was still coming. During the day I tried to avoid being anywhere unobserved and while it might have seemed to the others like paranoia because of Andrew, it was actually paranoia about being alone and unchaperoned with Sophia again.

Perhaps though she had dropped that. She no longer woke the cell block every night with her nightmares but instead every couple of days or so. She wouldn't go near that part of the yard and from time to time I saw her pause when she was doing something. She would actually freeze, and then after a few seconds she would shake herself out of it and carry on with determination. I knew she was thinking about it. One thing I did know for sure was that she was more disturbed blowing Andrew's brains out than the sight of me bleeding on the asphalt. I was after all still alive and walking around so she could get over that. She couldn't get over being a killer. A murderer.

Rick had killed at least four men. Daryl, Glenn, Hershel and Theodore had blood on their hands from that shootout in the town by the Greene farm but they didn't seem sure of any kills. Theodore believed he had put a man down but he had been shooting self-defence and the walkers had finished the job. That meant the only two people in the group with confirmed kills was the leader and the second youngest. That bothered a lot of people. Andrea had told me so and the rest had to feel the same way. Hershel had inferred that Rick had gotten the blame for not confirming Andrew was dead but I still had responsibility.

Although if I had beaten or stabbed Andrew to death with a crowbar, Sophia would be having nightmares about that instead…

At least now I had healed sufficiently to be useful rather than just standing around brooding. Although 'useful' was a relative term. Hershel wanted me to take things easy while Rick seemed to consider me best used for freeing up the adults for other tasks. He could leave me behind with the old men, the kids and the mothers while the others took care of business on the outside. He could leave me to keep an eye on Axel. It wasn't that Rick didn't trust Axel, but he wasn't going to leave him in charge while he was gone. Dale and Hershel naturally took the leadership role but I was the closest they had to an able-bodied young man to do what they needed.

It was a relief then when Andrea informed me that she and Rick were going to teach me to shoot properly so that I didn't just have a vague knowledge. After being cooped up for so long, seeing the prison gates vanish behind me was a relief.

"Are you seriously happy to be outside?"

"Why do you think prison is a punishment? You keep anyone in one place for too long and they'll start climbing the walls."

"Even when something nasty is trying to climb the other side of the wall?"

"Stay behind for a few weeks. See how you feel."

I saw Andrea roll her eyes in the rear-view mirror. I was sat in the back while Rick drove and Andrea sat up front made it feel like a family expedition. He had an odd contemplative look to him and I didn't know what to make of it.

"Am I shooting cans off a fence like in the movies?" I asked.

"That's how I learned." Andrea answered. "Or maybe we should find a pack of walkers. See how you handle that."

"They'd turn into an army." I could just picture it. They would have me shooting at one or two and suddenly hundreds would come crawling out of every crook and nanny.

"It's been awhile." Andrea mused. "Besides the ones all over the other side, we haven't had a large group show up at the fences."

"Don't jinx it." Rick said under his breath.

"I told you, we need to reinforce the fences."

"They're strong enough for now."

"Yeah, against a few dozen. If we had a few hundred out there-"

"We've had other things to do."

"And bracing the fences should be one of those things."

It was obviously not a new argument because Rick didn't reply and Andrea didn't have the energy to pursue it. I didn't say anything. She was right that the fences would struggle against a herd and would be ploughed under by a horde. Rick was right that there had been other things to do. So much to do. He obviously considered this a poor use of time.

I used what Rick called a Smith & Wesson Model 64 which I could tell had been a cop gun in the past. I used it because .38 was the one kind of ammunition they could spare, as the others used 9mm automatics. It made me think of Tomas with his snub. The anticipation of firing made me tense up but once I squeezed the trigger, it proved to be much quieter than I had expected. Not much of a kick either. But I still needed a moment.

"What's wrong?" Andrea asked, looking confused.

"His cannon." I pointed at Rick with my left hand. "Made me think it would be louder." I chuckled to myself. "Last gun I heard sounded louder." I sensed them exchange a look. "Okay…"

I emptied it twice before I actually hit anything. The fifteenth shot.

"Am I better or worse than the kids?"

"About even." Andrea answered and slipped my crowbar from me. I watched her use it to down a walker drawn by the noise.

"Ain't everyone a prodigy." Rick remarked dryly.

"You mean her, or Carl?" I asked, and missed with the sixteenth shot.

"Carl's a fair shot." He was deliberately impassive. Carl wasting ammunition would have been a bigger issue if he hadn't been a steady shooter. He may have used the rounds needlessly but at least those spent rounds always put a walker down.

"I found the knack." Andrea swung the weapon back and forth to clear the gunk off of it.

"Not me." My seventeenth and eighteenth shots proved that. "Good at reloading." I could tell they were uncomfortable watching me hold it with my claw and using my right to insert the loose cartridges. "I never liked guns."

"Why?"

"I knew someone who liked them." Another unpleasant childhood memory. "I'll get over it." Only an idiot would have an aversion to firearms now.

I guessed that it would take a lot of practice to turn me into a marksman. By the end of the training session I could take down a stationary bottle or can at ten yards. I didn't think I found the knack as Andrea called it but rather, I knew what mistakes not to make and the gun did all the actual work of putting a round into a target. I didn't think I would be nailing bottles at fifty yards any time soon. In fact, I didn't know if that was even possible with this gun and I didn't want to look like an idiot by asking. None of us bothered to say that a moving head was an entirely different target to a still bottle. The point was that I had some experience of shooting now and knew more than just basic gun safety. It would make everyone more comfortable.

"So what now?"

"Now we talk." Rick said and I didn't like that tone. Andrea conspicuously stepped away and I felt oddly naked without the crowbar despite having a gun. "You got anything you want to get off your chest?"

Maybe he wasn't a cop anymore but he still sounded like one. It was a simple way to trip someone up, make them sweat and confess to something minor while pressing for something bigger. I couldn't be bothered with the drama though and so I simply lifted my shirt to get straight to the point. He got that look; that squinty Clint Eastwood glare. Usually Lori was on the receiving end these days, or Dale or Theodore.

"So what? You blame me for that?"

"Didn't say that. But I want to know if you thought about what might have happened if he hadn't attacked me. Because I thought about it. He was going to kill me and Sophia and then open the gate. To use our bodies as bait. But even if he had let us go, then opened the gate, what then? We'd have been trapped in the cell block. Then what? Or what if people had been caught outside when that happened? You thought about that?"

"Yeah, I thought about it."

"Okay then." I let my shirt drop.

"That it?"

"You thought the walkers got him. You were wrong. If you know you made a mistake…" I heard my voice as I said this and it sounded very childish. But I wanted it to. To see how he reacted.

"I did." He said. "I won't make it again."

"Next time you'll just shoot them?"

"Yeah. I'll just shoot'em. You got a problem with that?"

"Tomas tried to kill you. I didn't have a problem with that. …It made me sick to my stomach but I didn't have a problem with it. I had a problem with you threatening to kill Axel and Oscar."

"They were a threat."

"Were they? Axel looked like he was about to piss himself before Tomas turned Big Tiny into pulp." I couldn't suppress a shudder. "You said Randall was a threat that had to be eliminated. And Shane eliminated him so he could eliminate you. And you eliminated Shane." Rick took a step toward me. "You stabbed one man, chopped another and then left another to get eaten, which got me stabbed. So a thirteen year old had to shoot a live man." I swallowed. "I can get over the rest of it but not that part."

"So this is about Sophia?"

"Kill as many people as you have to. I will, so she never has to do that again… I see it in her every day now!" Now I took a step toward him. "I saw that look you got every time Carl shot a walker when someone else could have got it. That look… Like your boy was gone… She's never coming back from this. She had already been through enough and now this?! Do you have any idea what it's like to be a kid like her?!"

"Calm down."

It took every ounce of my self-control not to take a swing at him. Self-control and a lifetime of avoiding fights I would inevitably lose. I hadn't even realised just how much anger had been bubbling away in me until now. I pressed on my stumps which served to pacify me enough not to do anything stupid. "I get it. She had to toughen up. She had to do things you'd never ask a kid to do to survive this world but she didn't have to kill a man. That's on you. And that's on you because you decided to leave a man to die a horrible death. I don't know why you did that… I'd do it now, after he tried to kill Sophia. It'd be justified now. But why did you do it?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"You think I like it?" He asked. "You think I like having to kill people to protect this group? You think I don't spend every single day thinking about the people I've killed?"

"Do you?"

"What do you want from me?"

"What you just told me. That you give a shit about what you've done. Because you and Daryl were ready to straight up murder Axel and Oscar and why the hell should I be scared of them if that's who you are? What's the difference?" The question was not new to him and he had an answer.

"They ain't us."

I remembered the conversation I had had with Dale that day on the farm, when he had been trying to rally support to not execute Randall. I had talked about how Randall had told me and Daryl about seeing girls raped, and not doing anything. Accepting it. Going along with it. Because those guys protected him. Now I was doing the same thing. Except it was the threat of murder rather than rape. Dale's gripe had been how everyone else had been happy for Rick and Shane to get their hands dirty and look the other way. Now I was everyone else. "So that's how it really is? Us and them? And everyone else is 'them' unless they save our lives?"

"Well if we meet someone nice maybe we'll roll out the welcome wagon for them. But we ain't met anyone nice in a long time."

"Yeah, and they only let you in because you had a dying kid in your arms." I pointed out.

"Exactly."

He had me there. Hershel had only let us on his farm because Otis had shot Carl, and choosing to help Carl had got Otis killed by Shane. You could argue that it had gotten Jimmy and Patricia killed too as it was our activity that had drawn that horde of walkers to the farm. But if it hadn't been that horde, it would have been another that overran the farm. Hershel had acted no different to us than how we did now. Except so far as I knew, he hadn't pointed a gun at anyone.

"This is the way things are now." Rick said. "Our people come first and everything else? You have to make your peace with it. Now I screwed up with Andrew and that's gonna haunt me every time I look at both of you. But everything else? I did what I had to do and we're all still here because of it. You know how that feels." He looked at my chest and I closed my hand around the bag that contained my finger bones without thinking. "You make your peace with it. I've already got Dale and Hershel to worry about without some smartass kid giving me dirty looks."

Training me was necessary but Rick hadn't planned on wasting fuel just on me. The rule now was to never return emptyhanded so that meant we drove on to town simply to pick up a few more things to make living in prison cells just a bit more comfortable. I didn't get to use the weapon I was actually familiar with now because we kept it quiet. Very quiet. We had nothing left to say to each other.

[][][][][][]

Dale normally kept watch because it was the best use of his time during the time. At night, it varied between the adults. Having spent the past few weeks having the odd conversation with him while I kept watch meant I felt comfortable climbing the guard tower to talk about my trip out.

The man was a good listener. He let me say my piece in its entirety without interruption. Not even a grunt. But I knew he was taking in every word.

"He's right." He said when I was finally done. "Hershel and I have been giving him grief. For different reasons… Hershel's a good man but he's content for Rick to have total power. I'm not. Hershel wanted to make sure he knew how badly he messed up assuming that man was dead." Meaning Andrew. "I wanted him to know how much I was disgusted he'd leave a man to die that way. We don't even know what he did to get sent here or what he was prepared to do to us. How do we know that what we did wasn't what made him a man who'd take an axe to kids? We only know that Rick was fine with letting him get torn apart." Dale looked into space the way he did when he was angry with the universe. "That was too cold for me. Too much like… Shane." Even though the man was dead, Dale wasn't letting go of his enmity. "But Rick does feel remorse. He told us. He told you. I guess we should have told you."

"I needed to hear it from him." I said. "After everything that happened in that laundry room…" I sighed. "And then afterwards. The way he treated them…"

"He wanted them shut away in their cell block. Locked away in the dark… To force them to leave. But how was that any different to what you agreed with, sending that crippled kid out on the road to take his chances? This is nothing new. You and Daryl tortured that kid… Rick pointed a gun at their heads."

I had compared myself to Randall going along with wicked deeds so long as it kept him safe. I hadn't thought about my own deeds. "Great. So I'm just a hypocrite."

"'fraid so." He nodded gravely. "Get used to it, kid. It'll happen to you a lot as you grow up."

"I must have gone soft living in that apartment." I mused. "A few years before this… I wouldn't care."

"You were trying to live a better life."

"By being a better criminal?" I had to laugh. "I've actually got more options now. Think about that. When they plant things down there." I waved at the field. "I'll be helping out with that 'honest labour'. Honest work. Or whatever else I do that ends up benefiting everyone. That's more than I could have ever hoped for in the old world."

"Maybe keep that to yourself."

"I do. I know that no one wants to hear I'm better off with this world. Even though it's not that different. I'm still seeing dead people, people fighting over scraps… I grew up with that. I don't want more of that. I don't want more piled on top of what I've already got to live with."

"And Sophia?" He asked. "I know you. You know criminals and cops. You definitely aren't soft. Maybe you didn't like seeing it up close and personal but it was nothing new to you. You could get over it, understand it; forgive it. If you had killed Andrew, you would even have forgiven Rick for that. But not this." He looked at me and I was eying him hard. "What it is with you and that girl?"

"Your dad ever hit you?"

"It was a different time. Everyone hit their children then." He reminded me.

"Why did he hit you though? As punishment?"

"That was the reason."

"He hit me because I was there and it amused him. Made him feel good. Same with her. And their friends. You never had a cigarette stubbed out on you." Beth and Hershel were probably familiar with that mark. "When it was just me and her, she had that look. Look I had when I was younger than her, before the streets… Scared. Resigned… She just took it. She expected misery. She blamed herself for it. That's what they do, you know? They make you think you deserve the punishment. From them. From the universe. All of it. You deserve to suffer." I shook my head. "But you know what else? She was still a good person. After everything her dad put her through, she felt bad that she was happy he was gone. She couldn't even get satisfaction out of it… And she trusted me. She trusts people. Me... Daryl… Look at us! We're the last people a kid should trust and she does! And when I got bit… She was scared out of her mind in those woods and then I got bit. She saw me cut off my fingers… I know what she's going through and seeing her have to deal with more of it… Fuck… She's been through enough." Dale was listening silently and intently and it pushed me to a confession. "That kid and her mother are the first people to ever be happy I exist. And I can't get used to that. I mean, she gets a crush on me? Me? And Carol, her daughter kisses me and she's still comfortable with me being around her? Around either of them? And because of what? Because I'm a 'good person'? I'm a two-bit thief from a town that wanted to flush people like me into the rivers so more tourists would visit. If I was a good person, she wouldn't have had to shoot someone."

"You can't blame yourself for that. He tried to kill both of you."

"The hell I can't. A girl who's done nothing but suffer all her life has to carry that instead of me."

"And you think you haven't suffered enough?"

"I can take it! Everything I went through before, everything I saw on the way to Atlanta… It should be on me; not her!"

"It shouldn't be on either of you. But this world… This goddamn world!" He looked out on the string of walkers along the fence. "I had a conversation with Shane once. The day you came back to us… Hershel didn't want us armed on the farm so Rick had us gather up all our guns and when Shane found out about the walkers in the barn, he wanted everyone to have those guns again. And I knew, I knew if he got a hold of those guns, he'd whip up a frenzy and… Well, you saw. So I tried to hide them, and he found me. He told me the only way I could stop him was to shoot him."

I had never asked about that day. I hadn't been in a good way and after everything that had happened, knowing why it had happened hadn't seemed important.

"I tried." Dale said. "I really tried to shoot him. He even put his chest right against the barrel. And despite everything he had done, everything I knew he would do… I couldn't do it. I couldn't kill a man, no matter how dangerous he was, not like that. If a man was shooting at me, maybe I could shoot back but gunning a man down, in the woods, like a mad dog? That's not me." He shook his head and then laughed bitterly. "I said to him that I might not have what it takes to last for long, and I'm still here. And he isn't. And that would be true if I had shot him, but then I wouldn't here either. Not really. But then Rick wouldn't have killed him and if Rick hadn't killed him, maybe then we would have come here and Rick would have treated those men differently… And maybe then we would be dead and they wouldn't."

"What's your point?"

"We never know what the true cost of our decisions will be. Not until after we've made them and enough time has passed that we can see the results. Now you chose to go after Sophia. Did you ever ask yourself why? I don't think I ever heard a word leave your mouth between the time the quarry was attacked and we found you lying in the dirt at the farm. That girl wasn't your responsibility but you still did it. You risked your life just because you knew it was the right thing to do. A man like Shane… Well, he wrote you off after that first night. A few days later he was screaming his head off to Carol that her daughter was 'gone'. That was the level he was at after a few days. And now here we are six months later, we've done some damn unpleasant things but we have the decency to care that they were damn unpleasant things. That girl knows she did something good; she saved your life. And she knows she did a terrible thing; she killed a man. Rick made a bad decision when he decided to let walkers kill Andrew for him. You made a bad decision when you decided to get up early and walked around alone. But Rick didn't know he would escape. You didn't know a morning walk would get you stabbed."

"So what?" I asked. "I shouldn't worry about anything I do because anything could happen?"

"If you want. You can't control the world. You never know what might happen. But for everything bad that has happened, consider the fact that you're alive. She's alive. She's still got the chance to have a happy life."

I couldn't help but turn and look at the prison. "A happy life?"

"You've seen her. You've seen her art. You've seen her helping Hershel. It seems to me that she's healing faster than you."

"She had to save me. She shouldn't have."

"You can't change what happened. You just have to live with it."

"We both have too much to live with already." Maybe he was right and I just had to accept it. Move on. But I was the only one who had seen her face after she had shot Andrew in the head. It was the same as when Rick had told us that we were all doomed to come back as walkers if we died. It was the terror of becoming a monster. "This goddamn world…" I echoed him. "She kissed me because we were talking about this place. How much better things were overall. Safe places to sleep. Plenty of food. She was happy. Making the best of everything…" I did not like reliving the moment. "That was how much of a better place she was in. And then two days later, she shot a man…"

"Life isn't fair. You know that."

"I know that. But it doesn't have to be so cruel." I had told Andrea it was a cruel world.

"But it is, son." Dale assured me. "It is."

Author's Notes:
Morality is the bedrock of the Walking Dead. What people do to survive and whether they're still good people afterwards. It leads to a great deal of hypocrisy which is usually not addressed or it's dismissed with 'I did what I had to do.' When the protagonists do what they had to do, they're still the good guys. When others do it; they're bad people. So this chapter addresses Rick's hypocrisy in seeing himself as good people when he was perfectly happy to let Andrew suffer a horrible death and Bas' hypocrisy of judging Rick's treatment of Axel and Oscar when his own view and treatment of Randall was no different.

It's good for a protagonist to be called out. To learn something about themselves.

The other foundation of the Walking Dead is the protagonists suffering. 'Made to Suffer' as Volume 8 is titled and the mid-season finale of season 3. So I've written a fic where TV Sophia doesn't die, but she still suffers as much as any other TWD character. Living has a price.

I'm British, as my language choices have likely revealed. I'll be the first to admit my knowledge of guns comes from the book 'Guns Recognition Guide', Wikipedia and Youtube videos. If I make any mistakes when describing them, feel free to point it out and I'll correct it. This is why up to this point Bas has never used a gun. Obviously, that can't continue in the TWD universe. He's not going to become an expert marksman after one brief lesson so don't worry about that.