Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace.
-Oscar Wilde
-Rhys-
There's not much left, really.
Gabriel's church is charred from its columns to the canopy. The pale white shutters covering the windows are scuffed and dented as they cling to shattered glass.
It looks wrong in a way I don't recognise. Wrong in the way Noah must have seen Wiltshire, which made him want to make the walls here stronger. It's wrong in that particular way that things get when the fires are out, and the smoke is dispersed, and the world's stopped watching; stopped caring about what comes next because it knows nothing will. It's quiet.
Rick and Michonne help me check every house for Mikey. Every door a chance to find him alive, clinging to the world with stubborn hands. But each door just leads to disappointment until there aren't any left. The watch tower he had stood on is now nothing more than a heap of smouldering timber at the base of a scorched wall. Burnt corpses of walkers litter the streets. Some of the houses have collapsed; I try to check them too, but Rick pulls me away from the wrecks of glowing red and black wood, and he tells me he's sorry.
I help Michonne close the rear gate that was rammed open. A walker's cheek gets caught on the latch before we can shut it, half its face tearing away as its skull gnashes its teeth at us. I stab it in the face, and Michonne does the same to a dozen more bunched up behind it, building a wall of corpses in the gap between the gate and the wall.
We head back to Morgan street, where Rick pulls a walkie-talkie off a dead Savior. He clips it to his belt before walking up the steps of a completely untouched 101 and going inside. He's parked the run truck up onto the curb, and its backdoors are open, the rear loaded with a few bags of supplies.
Michonne follows him up onto the porch but stops when she notices the blue-painted handprints Carl and Judith left in the corner by the bench swing. She kneels down to touch them, and I hear as she starts to softly cry.
I forget that she was the first of us that wanted to fight for this place. Before we even saw it, she was fighting. Now it's gone, and everything we lost here seems meaningless. Everyone.
My guitar is still leaning against the porch where I left it only a few hours ago.
A walker stumbles over a piece of the wall that was blown apart behind the houses across the street. By the time it reaches our street, I'm angry enough that I'm picking my guitar up by the neck and marching down the porch steps and cracking the walker across the head with the stringed instrument with a loud twanging sound. The walker hits the hard road with a pathetic thud, leaving a crack in the guitar, and I feel a streak of blood hit me across my face. I hit it again, screaming at it this time. Again and again, until the walker's head is a bubbling puddle of red viscera, and my voice breaks and turns sore, and the guitar is shattered into a million pieces of string and wood.
Michonne's grabbing me from behind, and we're both crying, and she leans into me and holds me so tightly as I scream at the walker and let the splintered neck of the guitar slip and clatter to the floor from between my bruised fingers.
When I finally go still, Michonne turns me around to look at her. She holds my face and wipes at the smear of blood that I can feel on my forehead.
"Noah got you that," she whispers.
I nod, rubbing my stinging eyes.
Michonne's face is sunken, and she has dark circles around her eyes that make her look as sad and tired as she must actually be.
"C'mon," she says, pulling me towards 101 when walkers start moving towards the commotion.
In the kitchen, Rick is filling Carl's orange duffle with food, and when Michonne says it's time to go, he slings it over his shoulder, grabbing a framed photo of Carl and Judith off a side table before we all head out.
We make it to the truck, and my throat gets tight when I look past it to see the gazebo by the lake in flames.
Michonne touches my elbow as Rick puts the last few bags in the truck.
"We used to sit in there, and..." I shake my head. "It doesn't matter."
But Michonne suddenly grabs pair of fire extinguishers from the truck and shoves one against my chest before sprinting at the gazebo. I follow. Rick calls out, but we're spraying the flames with foam, and I'm coughing my lungs up from the endless and sickening smoke too much to hear him. Then Rick joins us, and we douse the fire until the walkers swarm us, and we have to beat them back with the extinguishers, but even then, the fire eats on, hungry and greedy as the gazebo is engulfed. Rick pulls me away, and Michonne carves our path back to the truck, and I watch the gazebo crumble apart as we drive away from this place.
I can't help but look out the back as we drive over the fallen gate.
No mercy for the lost, no vengeance for our plunderers.
We drive for a little while before Rick says something.
"Carl wants us to stop. He said it the other day on the road."
Michonne looks at him.
"How can we just stop?" Rick asks, his eyes flickering to the rearview mirror. "After this, how can we?"
"You can ask him when we get to Hilltop," Michonne says quietly.
I sink into my seat in the back, swaddled amongst the luggage.
"I need to talk to Jadis," Rick says then.
"What?" Michonne whispers, frowning at him.
"They have weapons... people. We can't just give that up."
"Why now?"
"They went with me to the Sanctuary. The Saviors saw us there. They're gonna be a target, too."
Rick looks between Michonne and me, both of us giving him the same doubtful and empty-eyed stare, one that I think means we can't think about much right now.
"We still need them," he sighs. "They're ours, not theirs."
It's still early, the sun barely in the sky. The junkyard is still a few hours out, and Rick pulls over at an abandoned gas station when the run truck's tank starts getting low. Their a cars all the way down the road, so it'll probably take a little bit to check them all.
Rick tells me to stay in the van. He hands me the radio he took from the Savior and says to listen in.
They're gone for a while. My heart's thumping and my eyes still sting, and my clothes reek of smoke and sewage.
I listen for a while, hearing the occasional Savior chatter. Then it's Negan's voice.
"Hilltop is covered— the roads and then some. They are out there somewhere, so let's get balls deep in every nook and cranny they might hole up in. Nooks, crannies, and holes, people! All that shit outside the box."
I don't hear anything from the radio for a while after that. A long while. So I hold down the button.
It hisses as I bring it to my mouth.
"Negan?" I ask, my voice a whisper.
"Who the hell's askin'?" an unfamiliar voice answers.
"Rhys," I croak.
"Who?" the Savior chuckles.
I grimace before holding the button down again.
"The kid that killed Paula."
The radio is silent then. Silent for so long that I start to worry they can somehow trace our location. We parked a little ways from the junkyard, on a quiet road surrounded by trees. They billow and sway in the wind, but that's all.
Then I hear a voice I recognise.
"Rhysie! What the hell are you doin' calling me up? You know, I think I played it pretty cool back at Alexandria... but I was impressed as shit with your speech. Simon's still talkin' about it! And introducing yourself like a badass too?! I can't wait to—"
"Mikey's dead..."
That seems to shut him up for a moment.
"Excuse me?"
My jaw tenses and I lean back in my seat, rolling the radio between my hands.
"Shit, kid, and whose fault would that be?"
"Yours," I hiss at the receiver, tears welling in my eyes.
"Kid—"
"He wanted to stop it!" I bark. "Mikey wanted to find a way to end this. Just like Carl does. And you killed him."
"And what do you want, Rhys?"
I don't answer, my finger hovering over the talk button, twitching.
"You want peace?"
I hold down the button, but all I do is shake my head even though he can't see it.
"You want us to pick tomatoes together and make trade like a bunch of hillbilly farmers?"
I hold down the button. "No..."
"Ha... ha... ha... I had a feelin' you didn't want that."
"You're gonna die."
"Jesus, you sound like Rick. See, me, Carl, and Mikey... we looked to the future. We know what matters. You put the kid up on that tower... he was bound to get burnt a little. Just 'cause he bit the bullet doesn't mean there still can't be a future for you people."
"The only future is one where you're dead."
I gasp after letting go of the button, breathless and unsteady in my seat.
"What about poor Mikey?" Negan croaks. "You just gonna piss on his memory like that?"
I know Negan's trying to rile me up — I know he is. But I think something inside me is getting something from it. Some kind of twisted release for all this pain.
"He knew you needed to die," I whisper into the radio. "Mikey died giving you a chance. And your chance died with him. I don't care what Carl wants. I don't care what Mikey wanted. You killed him. You killed Glenn. Abraham. You tried to kill Sasha in front of me..." I trail off.
"Fuck... you really know how to send a fuckin' chill down my spine! I swear it, kid! I have goddamn goosebumps under this leather." Negan whistles that stupid fucking tune into the radio, and the notes echo around the van. "But you've lost. Lost your friends, your home. You've all lost the shit that you gave a shit about. But it's not enough. No, sir. See, we save people. We're gonna save you. But first, I'm gonna take it all."
I throw the radio at the wall where it explodes into a million pieces.
I had always wondered if death could be peaceful behind Alexandria's walls — If the world could remember how to let someone slip away with all the silence of a summer sky. It could have been beautiful in its own way. It wasn't like that for Mikey. It wasn't calm like the grass or sky. It was angry like the raging heat of a flaming furnace. But as I sit with my head in my hands, I manage to take a breath and calm myself. I realise that when Tyreese went, there was no one to blame. No radio to break. There was no chance at peace because there was no conclusion to be had, besides a few shovelfuls of dirt into an open grave. That's how I take a calm breath. Saviors killed Mikey. Negan did. Hope of a conclusion lifts the weight settled in my gut.
A/N
I try my best to point out references to older chapters when they happened a while ago, but didn't want to ruin the pace of the last few with an AN section. What Mikey asked Carl to tell Rhys in CH-129, was in reference to dialogue back in CH-80 if anyone wanted to get context for that.