Reviews:

RHatch89- Glad you enjoyed it!

Guest- Happy to hear it! Carl is definitely a joy to write for. The journey he goes on from killer to compassionate is really enjoyable to see I like to think. I actually had no intention of writing Mikey in at all when I started this story. When I got to the scene he first shows up in (like you say... literally his only scene!) I decided to keep him on for a bit... which turned into him being a Monroe. Funny how that works out. Ron is a heartbreaking character at his core and I'm doing my best to explore his mental health from Rhys' limited outside information. That's an interesting take! I definitely could see those two becoming closer friends- part of why I like Ron is how much he and Carl butt heads, as opposed to Ron and Rhys getting along well, which makes it interesting when they're all in a group. And yes, writing the truth or dare sleepover scene was one of my all-time favourites! :) Thank you for reading this far! The next handful of chapters are some of my personal favourites, so I hope you enjoy!

Another day passes under the tyranny of the walkers beyond our walls, the wardens of our newfound prison.

Nighttime has a curfew now. Everyone inside before dark with no lights allowed, too much attention drawn by their glare. Carl and I stayed up late, playing Go Fish by candlelight, with my bedroom curtains drawn tight against the terror, keeping away from its attention.

Rosita has asked me to help set up for her lesson today. Apparently, she thinks teaching the Alexandrians how to use a machete safely and effectively is as good a place as any to start training them.

After changing my bandage at home, I carry a crate of sharp blades from the armoury to the lake, where people are already gathering, Rosita's reputation alone enough to buy her several students, Jesse and Mikey among them. Even Eugene shows up, his arms firmly planted by his sides as he stares around expressionlessly.

While Rosita is teaching, I hang around and watch, my missing ear itching the whole time. It strikes me that I don't know where it is.

Whatever did happen to my ear?

Maybe one of the wolves took it as a trophy.

Maybe the tooth fairy came and got it as part of her sick new side hustle.

I'm brought from my thoughts by a sharp clash. Rosita, striking two machetes together behind Eugene's head when he also starts drifting from the lesson. Sparks fly as the blades connect with each other.

The mulleted man jumps. "Hey!" He has a sour frown plastered over his face as he stares at her, annoyed but unable to stand up to the glare she has equipped.

"I'm a weapons novice holding a significant blade here, and there are people in my proximity with open-toed shoes," Eugene tries scolding her.

"That's right," Rosita points a particularly sharp machete at him, "so get a grip."

Eugene keeps glancing at the wall, walkers still clattering against it with relentless abundance.

Rosita notices that. "What are you so scared of?"

Eugene locks his eyes back to hers. "That would be dying..."

"Dying is simple..." Rosita snaps at him. "It all just stops. You're dead."

Eugene looks to me for help, but I listen hard to Rosita, fascinated by this part of the class.

She gets him to look at her again. "The people around you dying," she jabs his chest with her finger, "that's the hard part. Okay? 'Cause you keep living knowing that they're gone, and you're still here. What you should be scared of is living... knowing that you didn't do everything you could to keep them here."

Eugene's expression is almost angry, somewhere between that and heartbroken.

Insulted, perhaps.

"Too upset to keep going?" Rosita asks him. "Are the noises scaring you, or can I get back to my lesson?"

Eugene turns, nodding, dropping his machete in the pile of spares with a resounding clang, leaving Rosita to keep instructing.

Rosita's lesson ends without any more interruptions, except for the occasional queries from her clueless students, all of them swiping at air, killing the pretend dead.

After putting his weapon away in the crate I hauled here, Mikey walks up to me, sweat dripping from his face, a flicker of pride in his eyes. "That was a lot..." he wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.

"Try doing it to an actual walker," I smirk at him.

Mikey purses his lips into a tight smile, nodding, looking at the floor.

I feel bad. "Sorry, I didn't mean it like that. You did great."

Mikey nods, swaying a little on the spot, still looking to the floor. "Want to come to my house?" he asks it sceptically like he's too ready for me to say no.

I check the watch Ron gifted me. "Sure, Carl's babysitting right now anyway."

"Cool," Mikey grins, peering back up.

I look for Rosita, but she's deep in conversation with Jesse, so I leave her be.

Mikey shows me to his room, the same one that the Wolf that took my ear charged me from.

I never did get to see the inside.

And I don't know what I expected on the other side of the door, but it's very Mikey.

Everything is kept in the appropriate Monroe fashion... neat, but somehow still a cluttered mess of amassed stuff. Not a mess in the same way that Ron keeps his room- clothes and gadgets sprinkled around like unproductive confetti. Mikey's room is messy in the way that makes sense to him. Messy in the way that he has too much. Shelves are stacked with books of different shapes and sizes, some in other languages, the walls covered in posters of different countries, the whole world mapped out on his bedroom walls. There's a tack board on his wall too, pictures of his late brother and father pinned at the top. They look happy.

I notice his small metal desk has textbooks open on it.

"You're still studying?" I ask, amused as I flip a few pages in a colourful book regarding the history of Rome.

He nods. "Dani's house got cleared out the other day... I thought she'd be happy to know I'm still learning."

"She would," I smile at him.

Mikey has a sad look as he rests a hand on the pages.

I look at the maps on his walls, running my finger across the seas. Swimming my way from America to Europe.

"Do you wish you could go back?" Mikey asks, noticing when my finger starts doing laps of the English channel.

"Nah," I shrug, instead paddling up the channel to Scandinavia. "Much rather go here."

"Why?" Mikey watches me in a way that says he's engrossed in what I'll answer.

"Always liked Vikings," I tell him. "They would have wiped the walkers out no problem."

Mikey grins, and I see the battles play out in his eyes, but then they fall to the books on his desk again, and that sad look returns to him.

"I had this friend in the Prison," I hum, looking over a map of Spain on the wall. "She was a teacher like Dani... or at least, I like to think she would have been like Dani... I say friend, felt more like family." I chuckle to myself, "I barely knew her a week." I don't know why I laugh because saying that out loud, actually saying it, makes my stomach scrunch up and my heart turn blue.

"What do you imagine she'd think about you now?" Mikey asks, sitting down on his freshly made double bed.

I smile at him, sitting down on the chair at his desk, leaning over the back of it to face him. "I imagine she would be thrilled with how much I've read." Saying that makes me laugh again, spinning the chair left and right with my tiptoes. "It's weird... the last thing she ever said to me was something she read from a book."

"Why's that weird?"

"It's not, I suppose."

"So, she's why you like books?"

I nod, smirking again. "I didn't really read before her. Now reading makes it feel like she's still here."

Mikey lies back on his bed, looking at the ceiling, stars that glow in the dark clinging to the paintwork.

"I don't think I have anything like that with my brother... or my dad."

Mikey hasn't mentioned his dad since he died. At least, not like he did when he lost his Aiden. I wonder if he's adapting to how easy it is to lose now, or if he's embarrassed by how much it hurts.

"My brother- Spencer, he got drunk the other day..." Mikey's telling me without telling me, his eyes plastered to the ceiling and stars like he's only okay with me overhearing this. "He stole whiskey and food from the pantry... told mom that it's her fault we're so weak."

"Think he's right?" I ask.

Mikey shakes his head almost immediately, then he shrugs his shoulders and blows air between his lips. "Mom killed a walker the other night. I was helping her take back the stuff Spence stole... there was a walker inside the walls-"

I nod along, Carl told me about it. Rick helped them, said it must have been one of the wolves we killed, a trail of blood from the walker lead to under someone's porch where the wolf had hidden, died, and turned. Alone and afraid.

Good.

"Didn't Rick kill it?" I ask, remembering how Carl described to me what his father had to him.

"Yes, but Mom tried," Mikey shakes his head. "We couldn't even get one... but at least Mom tried. I was just scared."

"You can get better at it," I try and sound optimistic.

"Rhys... do you think the walls will hold?"

"They should," I tell him. "If they don't, we'll handle it."

Mikey shakes his head and says, "I could barely swing a machete at thin air today... could hardly shoot at thin air the day before... hid from that walker that attacked us. How am I supposed to deal with thousands of them? What's going to happen when it's not air... when the air's fighting back?"

"The difference is... it'll be all of us fighting... together. We'll win."

"I saw its eyes," Mikey finally looks at me, "the thing that attacked me and my mom. I don't think I could kill one of those things out there. I just don't."

"What are you saying?"

Mikey stares at me for a very long time before saying, "I don't want to just be another person to save... what do I do if I get bit?"

I sit forward against the chair's back, angry at the idea. "You won't. I won't let you."

Mikey seems to believe me. To trust that promise.

"When it's all done," I tell him, "I'll teach you. I'll teach you how to deal with the dead."

He purses his lips and nods. "Thanks, Rhys."

Mikey's Mom is busy working on plans for the new expansion in her office, a newfound fire in her dark circled eyes. We leave through the back door and onto the street via their cobbled courtyard and side gate. Mikey sings to himself as we do, barely forming the words from thought to voice, and I wonder if he realises that he's singing at all.

"I was a dreamer,

Staring out windows,

Out onto the main street,

'Cause that's where the dream goes,

And each time they found fresh meat to chew,

I would turn away and return to you,

You would offer me your unmade bed,

Feed me 'til I'm fed,

And read me 'til I'm read,

But when the morning came,

You would catch me at the window again,

In an eyes-wide-open sleeping state,

Staring into space,

With no look upon my face."

We stop somewhere near the solar panels, and Mikey ends his mumbled vocals. I ask him what the song's called, and he's about to answer me, the words forming across his thin lips, but something stops him.

Screaming.

Rick, screaming a name.

Mikey's brother's name.

"SPENCER!"

We both take off towards the uproar, Mikey barreling ahead and already wheezing heavily by the time we reach a guard post that the noise is coming from. Rick stands on top, barking at Mikey's brother, Spencer, who's slumped against the railings of the watchtower, seemingly exhausted. Morgan and Tobin are up there too, both flustered.

Adding to our confusion, Mikey and I watch as Tara flips Rick the bird from a watch post further down the wall, to which he ignores, saying something to Spencer in a low voice before climbing off the post and walking off down the street, clearly enraged by whatever the hell we missed.

"What happened? Are- are you okay?" Mikey asks his brother when Spencer climbs off the post too, a rifle and rucksack over his shoulder. He's missing his left shoe, his blue sock looking funny.

"It's nothing," Spencer tells Mikey without so much as a glance his brother's way, walking past and heading down the street.

"Spence?" Mikey tries again.

"Buzz off," Spencer barks back over his shoulder.

Tara gave us the full story after. Spencer tried to use a rope to reach the church on the other side of the wall, his plan, to draw the dead away once he got out. The rope broke, and Spencer fell. He only managed to climb back up because Tara hung over the wall and picked off the dead with her handgun as they grabbed at him, like a superhero, as she describes herself. Rick lectured her for it and got a middle finger in response.

I ask Mikey if he wants to go after his brother, to which he shakes his head and calls him a tool. So we wander down the street, finding Carl instead, Ron walking a few yards behind. I notice Ron's carrying a gun, I find it odd, but to be fair, Rick did tell him to get used to it.

Carl smiles, waving at us when he does. Ron looks as if he might turn around, but Mikey being Mikey calls him to join us.

The four of us sit by the lake, relatively weighed upon by an awkward silence, until Mikey breaks it.

"Well, this is fun," he chirps, tossing a rock into the still water, shattering its glassy facade. "Us four... hanging out. No bad blood... see, it's not that hard, Ron."

"Dude, shut up," Ron shakes his head, unbelieving of Mikey's enthusiasm.

"What?" Mikey tilts his head.

Ron looks away, all moody, "You wouldn't get it."

"Dude," Mikey shoves his shoulder with an open palm, rolling his eyes. "You're mad at Carl because his dad killed yours..."

Ron doesn't say anything, still gazing at something invisible in the other direction. Carl's picking at grass, feeling awkward to be the subject at hand. I just watch it all, amused by Mikey's forwardness.

"But," Mikey goes on at Ron, his tone still upbeat, "Your dad killed mine... I don't hate you. You're my best friend."

Ron glances at him. "You don't?"

"No," Mikey shakes his head. "I mean, you can be a butthead..."

I laugh at this. Carl can't help but smirk too. Ron looks between us all, things we can't see seemingly flashing past his eyes, then he looks up, and I can see that he's seeing something real this time, so I look up too, we all do, ten green balloons drifting with the clouds.

We leap to our feet.

"It could be Enid!" Mikey jumps, punching his fist in the air at the glimmer of a morsel of hope.

"Or Glenn and Nicholas," Carl squints up with his hand shielding out the sun. "They said they would give us a sign..."

"Or Sasha," I gasp, hope catching in my throat, "Abraham, and Daryl."

"It could just be balloons," Ron shrugs.

"Dude," Mikey laughs at Ron, "have a little faith... damn, you need to listen to more George Michael."

I'm bent over laughing at that, Mikey looking way too proud of his joke.

"Who's that?" Carl asks.

I go to answer, but that caught hope is swallowed, swallowed deep and kept in the dark. An earsplitting snap rings out, cracking wood bursting and breaking beyond the wall... a moment of silence starts, until Sasha's sniper tower faints, falling into our wall, knocking it apart, crushing a hole into our defence with a cloud of dust.

And when I got older,

When I grew older,

Out onto the streets I flew,

Released from your shackles,

I danced with the Jackals,

And learned a new way to move,

So before you take this song as truth,

You should wonder what I'm taking from you,

How I benefit from you being here,

Lending me your ears,

While I'm selling you my fears,

I was a dreamer.

A/N

The song was Becoming a Jackal by Villagers.

Next Time: The battle for Alexandria begins. Some people will endure... others will fall.