When The World Ends

Silence.

The kind that presses in on you, heavy and choking, not from peace, but from the weight of everything that happened the night before. Not one of us knew what the hell we were supposed to say, or if words would even do anything. So we didn't bother. We just... existed in it. The aftermath. The blood drying on the pavement. The bodies cooling in the night.

It was an unspoken agreement to leave each other the hell alone.

Carl had crawled out of the truck sometime after it all went down. I felt the shift in the air before I even registered him beside me. He just... lay down, curling up with his head resting in my lap like when he was little. Back before all this. Before survival felt like a sin.

I didn't move. Couldn't. I just sat there, back against the side of the truck, staring out into the dark while my fingers absentmindedly combed through his hair. If it brought him any comfort, I couldn't tell. But I think I needed it just as bad as he did.

Michonne stayed inside the cab, silent as a shadow. Daryl and Rick were on the other side of the truck, low voices carrying through the thin, aching quiet.

I wasn't trying to eavesdrop. But when you're sitting in the middle of nowhere, the world dead quiet, there's nothing else to do but listen.

"I was with Beth," Daryl said, his voice rough like gravel in a tin can. "We were doin' alright for a while. Then someone... someone took her."

Took her. Just like that.

I felt my stomach knot up tight. Daryl losing Beth... God. He must've been eating himself alive over it.

"And those guys?" Rick asked, his voice low but clear. "They found you after?"

"Yeah. Didn't know they were huntin' you. Or her." There was a pause. A long one. "Woulda left 'em in the dust if I did."

I tilted my head back against the truck, eyes fluttering shut. A part of me wanted to believe him. The same part that's wanted to believe in Daryl since Atlanta. But there's this other part—this tired, bitter part—that remembers all the times he wasn't there. When I needed him the most, when the world felt like it was caving in, and he was nowhere to be found.

And in those moments, Rick was.

Now Daryl was back, and all the feelings I thought I buried deep in the dirt with the rest of the world were clawing their way out again. Did he still see me the same? Did I?

But what about Rick?

And Carl... Carl.

How the hell would Carl feel if he knew I slept with his dad? How would Daryl feel? And more importantly... what did I feel?

Safe? Guilty? Both?

I could feel the weight of Carl's head on my thigh. He trusted me, leaned on me. And here I was, spiraling over the man sitting twenty feet away from us and the man sleeping with my kid's father.

It's like I never left high school, except now there's murder and apocalypse trauma.

Then Rick's voice broke through the static in my head.

"You bein' back with us... now... It's everything." I heard him pause, like the words tasted strange on his tongue. "You're my brother."

Something about that hit me harder than I expected. Rick didn't hand out words like that. Not anymore. And Daryl... Daryl probably hadn't heard something like that in his whole damn life.

I heard Daryl mutter something back, too low to make out, and then there was just the shuffle of boots and gravel as they moved around the truck.

By the time Rick came into view, his face was cleaned of the blood. Hair damp from wiping himself down, jaw tight, but his eyes landed on Carl and me—softening, if only just a fraction.