Alas, once again my long chapter titles are upsetting this site's character limit, so I'm gonna just put the full titles at the beginning of each chapter for this season's finale stretch.

Last Day on Earth, Part One: The Way It Does.

-Rhys' POV-

We come across a small town.

In the town is a library.

Viskocil public library, to be exact.

I clear it with Carol's tiny, black snub-nosed revolver since I'm pretty sure I lost my gun back at the road.

Carol's barely standing when I get her into the non-fiction section. I help to set her down on an ugly blue sofa by a window. I manage to dress her wound with the supplies I brought for my ear. Now I'm sitting on the window ledge a few feet from her, flipping through the importance of being earnest, amusing myself with the pages. A rifle I found in the children's section is propped against my leg.

Carol's eyes have been watering since we got here. I've been trying to ignore it.

"I don't need you here," she gulps, trying to sit up, only to wince in pain and fall back into the truly hideous sofa.

"Uh-huh," I nod, flicking a page to let her know I'm ignoring her.

"Why are you still here?"

"Because."

"Because?" Carol sniffs, wiping her eyes on her sleeve.

"Because Tara would be pissed if I showed up and told her I left you bleeding out over Pride and Prejudice."

"I'm not bleeding out," she rolls her eyes at me, wiping them on her sleeve again and tossing the book she didn't realise she was lying on to the floor.

"Not since I patched you up you're not."

Carol looks out the window I'm perched beside. She's looking at what I've been trying to ignore. A walker strung up by its neck, hanging from a radio tower in the courtyard outside. He looks like the walker from the farm— recently dead. There are a bunch on the front doorstep, too.

"Can you at least go cut it down?" Carol frowns as the walker rattles noisily in its chains against the tower outside.

"So you can sneak out while I do?" I peer over the book at her and watch her slump back into her cushions, confirming my thought. "I know you."

I know you.

I have to think about that.

I frown at her.

"What?" she asks grimly.

"Back on the road, you said my name is Noah."

"You already asked me this, and I told you," Carol hisses. "I just said it."

"But it is. My name is Noah." I grimace without meaning to. "Why do you remember that?"

Carol looks at me in disbelief. Like it's the dumbest question I could have asked.

"Why does that matter to you?"

"I don't actually know." I shrug. "I just know it does for some reason. It matters that you know that. Why? I mean, other people know it. Michonne, Sasha, Carl, Rick, Maggie, Glenn, Daryl — I told Rosita once, too. Nine people know. Why do I care that you know it?"

Carol leans her head back into the sofa arm. Ignoring my rambling.

I clear my throat. "I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy."

Carol gives me one of her looks.

I hold up the cover of the importance of being earnest. "It's from the book."

"Why here?" she asks.

"Why here what?"

"Why did you pick a library?" Carol asks me. "Out of all the buildings in this town. Why the library?"

"I like libraries," I tell her. "I've learnt people don't loot libraries... although I think people were in this one before us." I look around at the room and its many books. Set up cots have been left cold in a corner. Blankets and empty MREs are on the ground.

Carol stops glaring at me, and I wonder if it's because she's tired after glaring at me for most of the day or if she sees the practicality of what I just said.

"They remind me of Karen, too," I tell her, shutting the importance of being earnest and sitting on it.

"You know, she basically built the one in the prison," Carol tells me. "Yeah, it was bare until she got to it."

I suddenly feel very uncomfortable and angry at everyone in the room. "Yeah," I tell her bluntly. "Yeah, I knew that."

Carol winces again, holding her side. "Sorry," she mutters the word like it doesn't come naturally.

"You ever regret it?" I ask her.

She looks surprised. Thinking. I can tell she doesn't want to answer, but I also know that she knows she doesn't have a choice.

Carol finally bites her lip and says, "I regret most things."

I understand this is the closest she can get to an answer without answering.

"The longer we go," I tell her, watching the hanging walker outside the window, "the longer we live, the more people that die... the more I start to wonder."

Carol's looking at me in a way she does rarely, a way that's saying she cares.

I go on. "Terminus, Wiltshire, Gareth, Pete, Ron... the more chances we give people, the more we seem to lose."

"Lose what?"

"The fight. Each other. Our homes. I've been wondering lately... if someone was sick like Karen was... if someone threatened us like Karen did— would I want to give them a chance like I wanted to give her back then? Or would I think like you did?"

Carol doesn't answer.

"I think you would give them a chance," a new voice says from around the corner.

I jump, raising Carol's revolver at the doorway. A stick comes down hard on my hands, making me drop it and shriek in pain. Morgan's standing in front of me, the gun at his feet.

"Fucking ow!" I hiss at him.

He looks apologetic.

"How did you find us?" Carol asks, looking beyond annoyed.

"Bodies outside," Morgan tells us.

"Wasn't us," I hiss at him, snatching up the revolver, my knuckles still stinging.

"I told you not to come," Carol whispers to Morgan, sounding close to tears again. She reaches over and grabs her gun from me.

"I know," Morgan says with a grin. "And I'm gonna start listening to you real soon."

Carol shakes her head, huffing and blowing breath like a hot air balloon that can't take off. For a brief moment, I'm worried she'll have another panic attack.

"We can rest here for the night," Morgan tells us, "head back first light."

"No," Carol tells him, gritting her teeth to look as menacing as she can from her position of bleeding over the monstrous sofa.

"We'll go back," Morgan tells her. "You will."

"You think I'm being dramatic here?" Carol asks him. "Do you really think you could just come here and tell me to come back, and that's how it'll go?"

Morgan glances at me for support, but I shake my head at him.

"Dito," I say.

Morgan gives me this sad look, and I decide I don't want to look at it, so I walk from the room. They're still talking, and I choose to stand outside to listen.

"Those people, your people," Morgan says very slowly as if we just don't get it, "they care about you."

"I know they do," Carol says back with the same tone. "And I care about them. That's why I can't be there."

"That's why you have to be there," Morgan cuts her off with a whisper.

The hanging walker rattles against its tower, clanging and growling at the wind knocking it back and forth. I start to get annoyed by it, too.

"Do you really just not get it?" Carol laughs at Morgan like he's some sort of fool — some poor idiot missing our sad, outcast punchline. "After everything that's happened. If you care about people, there are people to protect— there are people that you will kill for." She takes a shaky breath. "If you don't want to kill— or if you can't? Then you have to get away from them. You do not get both. You— you should know that."

I want to walk away, but their conversation keeps me magnetised outside the door.

Morgan goes on to explain how she's wrong, how people are all that's worth a damn. I realise that he doesn't get it. Morgan has his way — Morgan doesn't kill, and he can't understand the other options. He can't see people like Carol... people that can't help but end up killing. But I can see her. I understand it.

"Out here on your own," Morgan says, "you'll die."

"Then let me die," she says flatly.

"I'm not leaving you."

The floorboards squeak as he must step toward her. I peek my head around the corner to watch them.

"Please just go," Carol whispers. She points her revolver at him, pulling the hammer back with a strained click.

He just stares at her. I can't tell if he feels sorry for her, though. Sorry for the both of us. Carol looks devastated by the world. I see as she realises what she's doing. How she's pointing a gun to escape killing. With shaky hands, she lowers her revolver again.

The floorboards must just be old in this library because they creek under me, too, as I step back into the room with them — that magnet getting stronger. They both glance at me. I say nothing.

"If you care about anyone... there is a price Morgan," Carol tells him. "And you're gonna pay it. I have, and I can't anymore."

"Then why's he here?" Morgan points his finger at me.

Carol and I don't look at each other. We stare at him because only we can know that answer, and if we were to look at each other for even a second right now, it might fill the room until we can't breathe. The sad answer being that we don't care about each other. We can't. When I see her, there's a killer.

And when she sees me?

I offer Morgan half a sandwich from my pack after he checks on my shoddy patch job of Carol's wound. We left her to rest in the other room.

"She needs stitches, antibiotics to make sure she doesn't get an infection," Morgan says, staring at the outstretched sandwich.

"She can make that decision," I say.

"How's the—" Morgan points at my ear.

"Missing," I say.

He smirks but stops when I don't smile.

"Does it hurt?" he asks.

"I guess... sometimes." I shrug. "Most of the time, actually."

"You know," Morgan smiles, accepting the sandwich when I don't give up, "I didn't come alone." Morgan's smiles are often too kind for what he's been through. The type of smiles that Alexandria gave us when we first arrived, the kind that tells you the person hasn't been through the worst of this world. But I know Morgan has.

"You look pretty alone," I tell him, biting my half of the sandwich.

"I told em' to turn back," he explains. "That they should be at Alexandria."

I nod, chewing my bite.

"It was Carl and Rick," Morgan finally says when I don't ask. "They came to get you. Sasha and Abraham wanted to, but they needed to stay back and keep Alexandria safe. Rosita, Glenn, a few of the others; they would have too, but they were gone before they even knew about you two."

"Gone where?"

He shrugs. "They'll be back before we are, probably back already."

"Do you think that will make me go back?" I ask, almost amused. "You think that I don't know they care?"

Morgan sets the sandwich aside and rubs his hands together, nodding not at my question before saying, "We'll go back tomorrow. Stay the night here then—"

"I'm not going back yet."

"You need to," Morgan tells me.

"What, you gonna throw me in the car and force me?"

"I didn't bring a car," he tells me.

"You walked?"

"Drove halfway with the others," he says, "walked some," he pauses, "then I found a horse."

"A horse?"

He laughs, nodding. "A horse."

"Still," I shrug, not sure if I believe him about the horse bit, "I'm not going back."

"Can I ask why?"

"Because of how it sees me," I tell Morgan's somehow hearing eyes. "Everyone just feels sorry for me after the slaughterhouse— after Denise. I'm tired of being broken."

"How 'it' sees you?" Morgan's head tilts at me.

"Alexandria — it — the community."

"Where are you going?"

"I said in my letter," I tell him. "I'm gonna find Tara and Heath... they're almost back anyway."

"Why?"

"Tara won't look at me the way 'it' does. Figured if I can spend a little time being treated normal, I might go back to it."

I wait for him to call my idea stupid. To throw me over the horse and take me back kicking and screaming.

"That makes sense," Morgan says, nodding his head.

"Really?"

He nods, again, rubbing his hands together. "But there are better ways to leave."

"Is that my gun?" I change the subject, seeing the weapon on his hip.

Morgan looks down at it like he'd forgotten, the concept of using it apparently foreign to him. He takes it, handing it out to me.

I shake my head. "Keep it."

"But—"

"I'll borrow Carol's," I tell him. "We found that rifle, so we're good."

We hear a crash from the fiction section. Both of us rush in to find Carol up from the unsightly sofa, leaning off a bookshelf, clutching her side in pain.

"Damn it," she hisses.

"What were you—?" Morgan starts.

"The hanging walker's driving me mad," she says.

He chuckles at her, lifting his stick from the wall he'd leant it against. "I'll go get it down," he tells her.

She purses her lips into a smile, and Morgan leaves. The moment we hear the library door open and shut, I ask her a question.

"You knocked that stuff over on purpose, didn't you?"

Carol grabs her bag, the rifle I found, and heads for the door, still holding her side.

"Probably got a five-minute headstart," she tells me.

I run into the other room and grab my bag, meeting her at the back door. Carol waits as I lift the rotting bookshelf that we'd used to secure the door, pushing it aside before we can walk out onto the library's back steps. Three dead bodies lie on the doorstep. It reminds me of a Bob Marley song.

The whole library is fenced in by spiked metal railings, so we make our way around to the front, checking for Morgan at each corner.

There's a horse tied to the railed gate.

"Huh," I pet the horse under its mane. "I really thought Morgan was fucking with me about the horse."

After we're out, I re-wrap the gate chain behind us before we sneak off down the road.

A/N

I honestly didn't love Carol sneaking off in the show, but god damn if I'm not enjoying writing Rhys into it!

Hope everyone had a good week and relished Carol and Rhys being sneaky together!

Next Time: Carl finds himself missing Rhys... and we get a brand new POV.