my tears ricochet

Chapter Seventy Nine

Rick's hands were clenched around the steering wheel. "Carl woke up and started asking for Lori."

The highway unraveled into the distance. A few birds took flight from the thicket of trees off to the side of the car and Daryl tracked them; their sudden lurch against gravity, wings straining until they caught the current. One broke into the lead and the rest followed in a line, fragments of life in an empty sky.

Hershel had made the crosses himself with scrap bits of wood for their first three graves. But two out of three had only been shams; Carol alive and Lori's body consumed in it's entirety.

Daryl tried not to remember the man's hands as he crafted tokens of memory for their people. He tried not to remember the way the graveyard bloomed and flourished. He tried not to remember how easy it had vanished beneath cars and a tank, one army smashing the sacred space of the living and the dead.

"Might've been right back on the farm. I looked around for her like she'd be there, like she'd have stepped away for a second," Rick said. Daryl listened, patient. "I forgot I ever lost her. Everyone... it all hit me at once."

Everyone, everthing. It was the cost of living.

Surviving had demands that took bits and pieces over time.

Daryl dug into his pocket and pulled out the box of cigarettes. It was the one that Abraham had given him on the steps while he waited for Ivy to come through surgery alright, a final cigarette waiting to be burned. He held it between his fingers and looked at it. "How'd you get separated from my kid?"

The hatchet was buried deep in his closet for if the time ever came that Ivy wanted it. She had regarded it similar to a coiled snake waiting to strike, wary and with the lingering haze of trauma catching her up. Daryl didn't mind holding onto that weight until the day came that she grew into the mantle.

Rick kept his gaze on the road. Paint was a faded scar running across the asphalt and they were parked dead centre on it. "We got out of the house. I was worried that our line would break when the door opened, but they came through and we got out," he said quietly. Shame coloured his face and neck. "Gabriel peeled off with Judith, trying to get to his church or somewhere safer."

He imagined it. Rick would have been in the lead and the rest as mere birds chasing after him.

"I knew what Jessie was thinking the minute she froze up. We could've made it, but the dead were in the graveyard and she saw them, she started seeing people. Pete, her kid. Doesn't really matter. She just... locked up. They got her and I had to break the hold she had on Carl before he got pulled down."

Rick would have used his hatchet to break the grip on his son. That hatchet had a legacy of violence that ran straight back to Atlanta, that never fully ended. It didn't matter how well Michonne had cleaned the weapon before giving it over.

Blood still soaked every inch of it.

"Sam saw that. Carol... I had sent her in to get the guns and he'd caught her, you know. So she bribed him with a piece to keep his mouth shut, a little tiny thing that looked more like a toy you'd get in a cereal box. I hurt his mother so he was gonna shoot me, but the shot went wide and Carl took it."

Daryl hummed as he considered the confession. He considered the cigarette in his hand and how easy it would be to light it and burn it down to nothing, a burst of smoke before the wind stole it away.

"Fresh blood, noise. We were standing there in the middle of it," Rick said, knuckles white with tension as he clung to the wheel. "And I don't know. I saw Carl bleeding and I was just moving. I had to hand the hatchet off because someone needed to carry him. Deanna wasn't ready to use it. Michonne was on the other side."