EPISODE FIFTEEN
"the answer to all my prayers"
SEASON 8
stats: 4 weeks later
GREY KINGSTON
our family, some blood and some friends thought of as our own brothers and sisters, that's what has kept us going these past couple weeks on the road. rick and i, we've been left in the dark not knowing what's happening with our people, the ones in north carolina, the group in ohio and the second group sent after them.
but as we walk along the edge of the trees of alexandria's front road—the road we once followed when our group was whole all those years ago, our distrust a metallic, heady taste in our mouths, the memories of the burning prison fresh in our minds as fresh as the smell of the smoke from terminus in our noses—the road aaron led us down to the community that became our home, it does not look as it did that day.
it doesn't look the way it did the day i left it a little over two months ago. the walls of our community have foreign flags draped over their sides, words and an emblem on it i can barely make out as i squint and my boots slow in the dirt at the person pacing on the other side of the wall atop the watch dock in a white uniform, white helmet, and with a gun.
not our own.
the thought goes through my head at the same time it does rick's. i can only tell because he doesn't waste a second before beginning to run, run toward the sparse lining of trees left to conceal us in the woods beside the road, but he doesn't make it a foot onto the street before i'm raising my bow at the dark figure emerging from our blind sight that has grabbed for rick with a hushed yell.
rick turns on it—on him—his curls swinging, his knife pulled and gripped in his right hand. but rick doesn't spill blood and i don't let go of my arrow as the man takes a step back, a dirty hand raised to his mouth, quieting me and rick. negan.
rick lowers his knife, his ribs expanding suddenly as he takes in a sharp breath, his maroon t-shirt stretching across his broad chest. the stubble on his cheeks is mixed with gray, and i haven't been able to stop looking at him since the day we found each other.
i've been wondering if we would have made it back home to virginia quicker if we had been able to keep our hands off of each other, but, what's a few more days, rick had whispered each time i told him we needed to wake up and go. he won the argument every time and it ended with the horn of the car accidentally going off because two people don't fit in the drivers seat, or we ended up in the backseats again or made due over the hood of the car or against a tree.
"holy shit." negan drawls, grinning at the sight of rick—someone he has not seen in almost four years. "rick grimes, the man that you are. you survive everything that's thrown at ya, don't you?"
rick's eyebrows furrow, his skin, and mine, almost as dirty as negan's, as if negan has also been out in the woods for a very long time.
negan's hazel eyes trail over to me, his gaze softening and grin fading, "hey, grey."
i swallow and find a lump in the center of my throat.
if something were to happen, i'd go down first before i'd let his place fall, negan's words from before i left come back to me. i hear them loud and clear as i behold the look on his face as he stands with a defeated, tired slouch in his posture. you'd be leaving this place in good hands, protected hands.
please, i almost say, almost start begging for my family who i fear are no longer behind the walls of our home a couple hundred feet away.
"they're alive." negan says it before rick or i storm past the steel walls and paint it red. "they're in the commonwealth."
"what the hell is that?" rick takes a step closer to negan, furthering his distance from the trees he almost ran past.
negan glances at me once more before motioning with his head for us to follow. so we do, further east through the woods, deeper and deeper into them and farther from our home occupied by strangers. he leads us to ramshackle cabin i've seen plenty of times on runs before, looted the last of its supplies from years ago.
beside the cabin, a blow of air huffs out of a black horse's muzzle, wiping its hooves against the dead grass like it's restless as a man with blonde hair brushes its back. i know those eyes, those green eyes that raise to look at me as i veer off from walking with rick and negan. and i know that horse.
whiskey.
i turn around, looking back at negan who has stopped walking, he and rick watching me approach the stallion and man.
"that's your horse." negan nods, answering the silent question on my face. "and you know him, too." he talks about the blonde with green eyes. "his friends said his name is reid, but he—"
"doesn't talk." i finish for him.
the group i came across out in the middle of who knows which state i was in at the time. the ones who gave me the directions to the fallen helicopter that i now know belongs to the colony. the group who offered me a peanut butter sandwich because noah's sister believes there's still good in this world.
i gave them directions to alexandria in exchange for their kindness and forgiveness even after the way i attacked their friend—that familiar, deadly distrust in my veins again when that happened. i told them to ask for aaron and spencer when they made it, but aaron and spencer ... they weren't here to let them in and hear their story.
i knew spencer had gone out after our group in ohio at the time i told noah about alexandria, but i figured if they ever decided to come, spencer would've been back by now. i figured that we all would've been back.
negan and rick head inside the cabin, allowing me some time with whiskey and reid. i have a lot i could say, but for some reason, as i pet whiskey's nose and inhale the damp smell of leaves and hay around us, none of the words come out.
the brush in reid's hand works against whiskey's hair coat as i rest my arms on the stallion's back, hugging him and closing my eyes.
"i was looking for him," i say at last, not lifting my head, but i hear reid's movements stall for a moment before slowly starting back up again. "rick, the guy i'm with. i was looking for him when i ran into your group, and the helicopter you pointed me to led me to him."
i lift my head, looking across whiskey's muscular back at reid who is still busy brushing, but peers over at me every now and then.
"i'm sorry alexandria isn't—isn't what i promised. it was when i left, but ..." he reaches his hand across to rest it on my forearm as if to say it's okay. "guess you met negan instead. you been stayin' out here with him this whole time?"
he nods.
"i hope he hasn't been too much of an asshole." i whisper, and reid matches my close-lipped smile with his own.
"are your friends inside?" i look over at the small cabin where smoke from a fireplace is coming out the other side, a shaky gray line steaming up past the roof.
reid nods, tossing the brush into a pan and patting whiskey goodbye before following me toward the cabin.
we take the creaky wooden porch steps that lead up to the front door. inside is warm and smells of fire and old, dusty things. it's small with two even smaller bedrooms, a door i assume that leads to a bathroom, and a sitting area, kitchen and dining space all open to one another. the openness allows the heat from the fireplace to reach us as we sit in the worn chairs around a small table.
"only a few days after you left, grey, another group of ours went out to pennsylvania to follow the first group; the one with your son," negan looks at rick. "eugene, ezekiel, yumiko, and the rest of the kids." he uses the term, kids, lightly when talking about enid, henry, and lydia. "they ended up in the same place, unharmed and in ohio, a place called the commonwealth."
the commonwealth, must be the words on the flags draped over the walls of our home i couldn't make out a mile back.
"eugene came back, a whole bunch of those astronaut suit-wearin' soldiers with him and said the commonwealth isn't anything to be afraid of. he said it's better there, better than he imagined and that we wouldn't have to send our people out anymore lookin' for food. that we could live comfortably again, there. so everybody left with him. daryl took judith, said it'd be better for her to be where carl is. rosita, siddiq and their daughter went. everybody but me and the people up at hilltop. we stayed, and i watched those same soldiers who promised we could come back to alexandria whenever we wanted, seize it like it was their new shiny investment to dig a flag into like the one on the moon."
"alexandria doesn't belong to us anymore." rick concludes, his voice low and rough as he speaks behind the finger he drags along his bottom lip in deep thought. "even if our people get out of the commonwealth, they have nothin' to come back to with alexandria being seized. they'll never let us back in and leave us alone."
"you got that right." negan sits back in his chair. "eugene got us in some deep shit. i left alexandria because i didn't want to have to answer to those pricks, but i stuck around the area, watching it every so often and checking the main street ... like i did just now and ended up spotting you two walkin' up to it like you were gonna head in there, guns a-blazin'." he chuckles.
he meets my blank stare, a muddled mess of pleas in my head, a lack of words on my tongue.
"i stayed," negan says, looking at me. "because i made you a promise to protect that place. everyone wanted to go though, as far as we knew, the commonwealth wasn't a threat. but i stayed because i felt it was the least i could do. even though they didn't show up at our gates looking for a fight and our people left willingly, i still felt like i failed you the minute i saw them claim the place once it was empty. after watching that, there was no way in hell i was leavin' it wide open for you and rick to walk into once you came back."
i nod from across the table, nothing but the sound of the crackling, shifting logs in the fire.
rick's gone quiet beside me, those dark blue eyes of his have fallen to his lap. as deep and red as that old line runs between him and negan, all that bloodshed between them until they made a truce that one day, negan always believed rick was still out there. he nudged me to stop feeling guilty about wanting to go find him, made a promise to me that he'd look after alexandria and he did.
and—our people, negan just called them.
"is it?" rick lifts his head.
"is what?" negan asks.
"you said as far as we knew, the commonwealth wasn't a threat." rick's teeth grit. "is it? a threat?"
negan takes a deep breath, and i know the answer just from that. "i've been talking to daryl twice a week at night if he can find the time to use a radio. he and rosita work for the commonwealth's military, they thought it'd be the best and fasted way to find out the place's secrets, if any."
"and they did."
a nod, "i guess the commonwealth puts on a pretty smile and woos you with their massive concrete wall surrounding the place, but our people, they aren't good at letting others be in control of their safety. they ask too many questions, can't let others be in charge 'cause they know they'd run the place better, so no, the commonwealth isn't a good place for us; for them. and daryl's been lettin' me know that, giving me steps to a plan on how all of us out here can come together and get them out, and get our home back."
"you said hilltop stayed." rick says, picking up on every piece of information negan is giving us, not letting anything slide past him or get swept under the rug—skills he learned as a cop and still carries with him.
"that's who's gonna help us. hilltop wasn't seized, the commonwealth soldiers don't know about it."
"so if we head out now we'll make it just past nightfall." i speak up, and their heads turn toward me. my chair's legs beneath me scrape and squeak against the floor as i push away from the table and stand up, the creaking floors beneath my shoes as i head to the door.
"yes, ma'am." negan mutters, and i can feel the answering smirk on rick's face as he keeps his head down, fingers drumming against the scratched wooden table.
=
RICK GRIMES
"you up for this?" i tilt my head as i look at grey.
"going to hilltop?"
"going to hilltop and going to ohio." i say. negan and the other guys' conversations are nothing but quiet noise to us as they stand a couple feet away, giving grey and me space to talk around the side of the cabin. "we've been on the road for a while, we'll be on it again if we do this."
"i won't just stay here while you go off if that's what you're saying." there's a small shift in her eyebrows.
"no, i know." i sigh, tucking my hands in the back pockets of my jeans. it's the middle of winter, but it's damp and muggy out today, so i gave grey my jacket to wear since i got too hot with it on. "i know, i just ... don't want anythin' happenin' to you. i just got you back."
"nothing will happen to me." she reaches her hand out to touch me, her fingers starting at my shoulder, then idly falling to my chest. "and that's why we're gonna talk with everyone at hilltop. we'll come up with a plan, and we'll be here the next time daryl radios negan, so we can get him in on it too and he can tell the others. carl's gonna be so happy to hear from you. everyone is."
i take her hands in mine, looking down at them as i think.
"look at everything we've done, what our group is capable of." she says. "ben's offer still stands. if alexandria isn't ours anymore ... we do have a place at the colony if we want."
i take in a deep breath just to release it slowly, "i know." i glance over my shoulder at the four men around grey's age who stand around whiskey and talk with negan. "you trust those guys?"
grey's looking at them too, assessing, "they could've turned around and went back to their camp the minute they saw alexandria the way it is. but they stayed ... to hold out for something better. do you trust negan?" she throws the question at me.
"he stayed, too." i say after some time. "he didn't give up on our home or his promise to you. i kind of feel like i have to thank him."
grey laughs as i scrunch my nose at the thought, "well, you don't have to thank him just yet. come on," she drops her hands from mine to stuff them in the pockets of my coat that's a bit big on her, and i follow her toward where our things lay stacked on the ground ready to be tied over whiskey's back.
=
i was told carol stayed behind to watch hershel when maggie went off in the second group to ohio, and they're the first to greet us as we walk toward the lantern-lit porch of hilltop's manor. carol hands me the son of my friend i miss everyday, and i take the young boy in my arms. she tells me he'll be four in just a few months. my heart squeezes in on itself as i whisper hi and plenty of other things to maggie and glenn's son.
grey stops short in the manor's front entrance. her father stands inside the house, frozen in his own tracks at the sight of his daughter he bid farewell to a few months ago when he gave his blessing to come and look for me. she told me all about that blessing while on the road, that even though it was unwanted, deep down, she really did need to hear it as her last push to leave.
i softly sway and bounce hershel in my arms, my attention darting between him and carol and grey and elijah as she approaches him. the two of them walk off somewhere in the foyer to talk, and i catch up with carol a bit longer before a familiar face catches my eye.
the lights inside the house cast a yellow warmth throughout. the rich, cherry wood of the railing on the sprawling staircase looms ahead past the foyer i meet andrea in. i stand with my scuffed, dirty cowboy boots grey gifted back to me on the road since we left the colony on the red, cream, and blue ornate rug.
with hershel propped on my left hip, i reach for andrea's forearm, not staring too long at the empty sleeve where her left hand was lost due to her accident.
"it's good to see your face again." she smiles, a bit of youth still in her eyes, her golden hair longer than the short chop it was the last time we were reunited—it now brushes her shoulders.
"yours too. things have been okay here?"
andrea watches as i hand hershel back to carol so she can put him to bed. "we've made do. what happened at alexandria, it seemed like a good idea at first and i believe eugene thought it was too, but negan's been keeping us in the loop up here with what daryl tells him about the place."
"yeah," i drawl, peering down the long foyer to where grey and her father talk on the other end. "that's why we're here. we're gonna figure it out, and ... and we could really use your help."
andrea smiles, placing her right hand on my shoulder and nods, "you're family. we all are, ever since you and negan ended the war. we all owe it to you, being able to live as one. we'll get you back to your kids, rick. you deserve to live happily, after everything you've been through."
"thank you. so do you, andrea."
the floorboards creak once with the shift in weight under elijah and grey's boots. elijah kingston never liked me. back in king county, before the fall, elijah ended up down at the sheriffs department more nights than i could count—drunk and disorderly, speeding, affray—and the list goes on. and me, being a cop, and him, being who he was, we did not like each other.
but things are different now. time has passed, and maybe he's still a bit of a shit-head even in this world, but we can work together. we can put it all behind us and do what we need to do. do it for the one person who stands between us, her brown eyes and dark hair the opposite to his.
for grey, for his daughter, he extends his hand to me. and for the woman i love who i now call my wife, i take elijah kingston's hand and shake it.
for the sheriff i was in the past and the obtrusive man elijah used to be in our old town. for the man who used to be my best friend who watched out for grey and her mother and was there the night elijah was arrested and taken away to the prison i ended up at four years later with the dead roaming around. i looked at it like it was the answer to all my prayers the morning we found it. maybe it was.
for the full circle of glenn saving me that one day, which led me to finding my family, which overall led me here, to my family again and to holding glenn's son who will grow into a good man, taking after his father. for hershel, who saved my own son when he was hurt, and for hershel's daughter who needs to be brought back to her boy.
for our family. as i did with negan, not a foe, a friend, i now do with elijah.
grey watches our hands even as they fall back to our sides. she told me what elijah said to her before she left, how he wanted her to go and look for me because he could tell what it was doing to her with one look at her face, just sitting behind alexandria's walls and falling into that pit of darkness that followed her around. he saw the same thing happen to her mother the longer she stayed and loved a man like him who should've been the one to walk away instead of promising to change and just hurting them more.
elijah wants things to be different for grey than how they were for his wife. he wants his daughter to try and be happy in this world because that's a lot nowadays, being able to be happy, to still have those we love with us.
it's less of a surprise of why we're here at hilltop unannounced after dusk than it is that i survived an explosion and being gone for almost four years. but the stories in between the lost time can wait.
we want to find our people, go to ohio, get them back, and rebuild ourselves a home. that's what's important right now. it won't be easy, with the people who run the commonwealth turning their survivors into their property, doing whatever they want with them if they show any sign of the rose-colored glasses coming off—all this information thanks to daryl risking unauthorized radio-use to fill negan in.
but we've worked with a place like this before, with a man who wanted power over anything else and didn't care if lives were lost ... as long as they got out of his way and of what he wanted. we were going to take the governor's people in, fight for them like they'd been with us from the start. we were about to have it all, a good plan to find a safer, bigger place for us all to live together, and he took it away with one swing of a katana.
never again. we know what to do this time should the commonwealth turn out like the man who left the place lori died in and judith was born in, the place where grey entered our group like she was always apart of it, in flames.
every chair is filled at the long, oval-shaped dining table we sit around. candles are lit in the center to light the empty plates we ate off of. "we'll get our people back, we'll get back our home ..." i glance down at my right hand resting on the table, grey's on top of it. her hand is smaller than mine, soft in some places, calloused in others.
i flip her hand over, her palm facing up and i intertwine my fingers with hers.
"two friends of grey's are in the top ranks at the colony, the place we were at in new jersey, meaning they can call a lot of the shots should they want to, and they offered us a deal." the dining room is silent as everyone listens. candlelight flickers, shadows dancing across their faces. "they said once we get back to our people, we can call for them and they'll fly out and bring us all back to the colony to live there. if we need the help ... if we need more people, more weapons to get our group out of ohio, i'm sure they'd come."
because if the commonwealth is the governor, and we're his people stuck without a home, then the colony is what we were in the original narrative—the prison. the sanctuary.
"sounds like a war you're planning for." carol says from across the table.
"if it comes down to it. we've gotta be prepared, gotta be ready to do whatever we can to get our people back and get somewhere safe. because i'm tired of being separated from my family, my friends, again and again, and i know you all are too."
i meet the eyes of the four guys who have been with negan since they came to alexandria, talking about a girl named grey who told them to ask for aaron and spencer, that she promised them a walled, safe community to bring their sisters and mothers to once they saw it for themselves.
jacob, seb, reid, and noah. they trusted grey and she trusted them, enough to go looking for the remnants of a helicopter i was once in the day it crashed beside that body of water.
"grey told me you have a group back where you came from." i address the four of them. "when we have a safe place to call our own, whether it's alexandria or the colony, they're comin' with us. you're helping us now, you're good people ... we'll help you out however we can."
i know there's a reason we're all here. a reason we all made it and met each other along the way. that even through our losses and darkest days, it shaped us into who were are, made us strong enough to fight for those good days again, like when we walked up the road to alexandria for the first time, and the morning we conquered the prison and felt the freedom of having land to ourselves.
even though i've been clenching my hands to stop them from shaking every time i think of my son and daughter being somewhere i'm not, in a place that doesn't have their best interests in mind, i have to hold it together until i see their faces—see carl alive and get to hold him and his sister like that day i found him at the start of all this, when he ran to me the second he saw me alive.
grey gives my hand a light squeeze as if while she's been listening to all of us talk, she's quietly been thinking in her own head why all of this is worth it, putting our lives on the line one last time for the people we love.
and i know what she's saying to me without even looking at me, without even opening her mouth to say the words we've said to each other since her first night in that cold prison with our small group from the beginning,
you won't have to do it alone.
=
a/n
the only excuse i have for it being 4 weeks since my last update on this book is that i wanted y'all to experience in real time the time jump from last ch. to this ch. (4 weeks)
— i'm kidding, i've been super busy w/ school, but thank you so so much for reading!
if you wanttt, leave ur thoughts / predictions for how the final chapters of youngblood will go in the comments :)
— we'll get a rick/carl/judith reunion; daryl/rick/grey reunion and .... other things ;) ty so much for all the love on the last chapter!
❁ fun fact no one asked for: the first time grey and rick told each other they wouldn't have to do something scary alone was in chapter 3 :') okay goodbye love u