Crestfallen ↬ Carl Grimes (old version)

H A Z E

"Could you be any more cliche, Sheriff?" I laugh, gently tapping his chest before lightly wiggling from his grasp and ruffling his hair, making sure to scrub the water deep into his scalp and whatever grime might be layered in it. "Of course we're okay."

In one swift moment, he grabs my hand with his own, taking that as his moment to tangle our fingers together, shooting a smirk my way. "Only with you."

Only with you.

-

-

Thunder continued to rumble in the air outside the thick wooden walls of the barn, every once in a while lighting up the air with its partner in crime as it flashes for a brief moment between the cracks of the panel. Along with that, the most soothing sound of it all, was the dim crackle of the fire that sat in the corner of the large building, a good twenty feet away from where I lay as I attempt to shush the roaring thoughts of my brain as I tightly shut my eyelids and pray for an ounce of rest tonight.

Usually, whenever there was a storm like this, I never could truly fall asleep, simply because of my irrational fear of thunderstorms. It was not the lightning, nor the thunder that scared me, but rather, the loudness of it. It seemed, to me, that during every storm there seemed to be a war going on. A battle between the dominance of electricity and noise to see which could be the most intricate and complicated. The fear was something based off of how threatening storms seemed, and yet here I was, on occasion, pretending to be a threatening person amongst my peers only to feel as if I had never grown from the child I had used to be.

The only difference between now and then was the fact that, now, as I lay against the bundled fabric with my eyes as wide as saucers, watching the dance between thunder and lightning, I couldn't feel the faintest hint of fear. Instead, I felt jealous of its presence. Jealous of how wild and free it was allowed to be when it came to the sheer force they both made once they combined into one another.

"Milah, are you awake?"

Of course, I was. Anyone could've probably guessed that I was if they walked up to me, and if it were anyone else but Carl, I probably would've feigned being asleep until they had eventually wandered away. But, since it was him, I had zero hesitation before carefully flipping to my other side as a response, lying on my stomach and resting my cheek against my wrist so that my eyes met his bright blue ones, his silhouette flickering every so often due to the dimness of the light that came off of the small campfire.

With a small smile, he scans my face and hums. "I'm sorry if I woke you. I couldn't sleep."

"I wasn't sleeping," I mumble, nuzzling deeper into the fabric and ignoring the weakness of my voice. "How could I?"

Silence answers my words and I take that as my cue to let my eyes flutter to a close, not exactly wishing for sleep anymore but still allowing it to have its chance to take me at whatever moment it would like to. I could still feel the burning sensation of those blue eyes gazing at every detail of my face, but it was something I could grow used to, particularly since it made me feel much safer due to who those particular eyes belonged to. The gentle, lingering gaze of his eyes on my own, before gently shifting to my lips and then to the freckles along my cheeks, and then last but not least the light tangle of my hair as small wisps fluttered in front of my face. Every bit of him was so easy to envision in my brain. It was the kind of vision that broke apart any of those pesky thoughts that liked to linger on my brain like a sort of plague, like sunlight and shadows in the afternoon.