𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐃 𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐄 | CARL GRIMES [TWD]

4 | sacrificial lamb

— CHAPTER FOUR —
sacrificial lamb
[ 4111 words ]

The vestry reeks of damp and stinkweed. At any moment it feels like the walls could shrink to cage them in even more. It's too small. This, and Bob's every wheeze, grinds at Sylvie's patience. He won't turn — they won't let him — but anything is enough to irritate her now. Judith babbling, Tyreese and Rosita mumbling sweetly to her, Eugene blubbering, Gabriel whimpering and Carl tapping a methodical melody against his revolver. Every noise is a pinch between her lungs.

To relieve it she traces the thin slate of light which columns beneath the door, smoothing down jutting splinters of wood as she goes. The mindless monotony lets her forget herself, until Carl makes her remember.

"My dad will kill them." Carl slides down onto the ground beside her and backs against the door, an obstacle in the path of her callused finger. He tilts his hat up; the shade it casts across his freckled skin is blued by the night. "Don't worry."

She has no doubts about that. Rick Grimes is a capable man, a man who's earned the right of a last name in all of this. With everyone else at his side — Maggie, Michonne, the rest of them — they're an immovable force. A bullet with a fixed trajectory. "That's not what I'm worried about."

"What is it?"

This room, its darkness, its almost-silence. It's too much like where he had found her. She doesn't like to think about Terminus, but it's not optional. Those two weeks linger on the periphery of her mind: a bruise that won't fade, a darkness that won't yield to day, a ghost that just keeps haunting. In that train car, the grimmest of her thoughts would materialise and don the mask of darkness. At times she would forget where her nightmares ended and reality began.

When she was alone afterwards, it felt both like paradise and purgatory. Sometimes she thought she had never escaped at all: she had gone mad enough to weave her own dream reality and will it into believable existence, a fabricated world only for her and rabbits and squirrels and skin eaters. But then Gabriel had whined, Carl persuaded her here, and everything concretised. There are lapses, small, swift moments when fear seeds in the pit of her gut. With the sun gliding across her skin, daylight a reassurance, she can dismiss this for what it is. Paranoia. But in this boxy room with darkness staticking around them, everything feels less real than ever.

She knows that isn't the answer he's looking for, and if it were she wouldn't hand it to him anyway. She couldn't. There's no real way to say any of it. Or maybe there is, but that would mean he'd have to parse it, and — unless he has shadows to shoulder — she doesn't think he'd be able to.

So she studies the grime speckled in the valleys of his knuckles and opts for something a normal person might say. "Nothing. I'm just worried," she whispers, like it's a secret. It may as well be; it's still an admission of weakness.