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Chapter Text

The empty walls of the room felt close, the entire space filled up by her presence. Still, Rick had moved even closer to her, followed that magnetic pull, all but begging her to understand. The stolen gun was heavy in his hand as he laid himself bare. Michonne's soft gaze up at him, even more than her words, was a benediction.

"We can find a way," she said, voice gentle but no less full of conviction for it. "And if we don't... I'm still with you." 

The relief was so profound it shook him a little, flooding his body. Rick raised his hand once more, offering the gun to her again. Michonne reached out and closed her small hand over his, hot as a brand, slender fingers curving, and pressed his hand back down by his side. 

It happened in the blink between her moving infinitesimally closer and pulling away. 

Yes, some deep animal part of him confirmed at the contact, yes, this is it.

Rick leaned in, fell forward into her huge, dark eyes, and pressed his lips to hers. 

Michonne's lips were soft. So soft, that he moaned into it, a vibration against her sweet full mouth. He didn't know when he'd closed his eyes, when his left hand had come up to cup the smooth curve of her jaw, when his right fell to the small of her back. It was all at once, everything.

Their lips parted, pulling a tiny sigh from her throat, before meeting again, her plush upper lip between his, his tongue stroking hungrily at it. 

Then, she inhaled sharply and pulled away, taking two swift sharp steps backwards, eyes saucer wide. She licked her lips absently. Bright white teeth pulled at her bottom lip and then released it as she stood framed by the doorway to his bedroom. 

Furious heat curled in Rick's belly. 

"The meeting," she said, voice unsteady. She reached for her jacket where she'd tossed it on his bed and grasped twice before she got a hand on it. It was the most uncoordinated he'd ever seen her. 

"Don't be too long," she called as she fled. 

Rick's hand clenched on the gun he was still holding, trembled with the electric current running beneath his skin. 

"Fuck!" he exclaimed to the empty room. 

Rick knew he had been spiraling. Of course he knew. Since the moment they set foot through those gates. No, before that, even before Aaron showed up at the barn. He'd confessed it himself: since the train car, since Terminus. 

And maybe, he could admit, even before then. 

It had been a long downward journey since they lost the prison, since he'd believed that he and Carl had lost everything and everyone. 

And he'd come back, in tiny bits, pulled himself up over the edge of the cliff—been pulled—but the momentum of the fall had never truly stopped. If he was honest, he already knew one of the the only things he'd been holding onto. 

Michonne. 

When she showed up at the door of the house he and Carl were camped out in. When she, easy as anything, took on a share of responsibility for his son, then seamlessly did the same for Judith when she'd been miraculously returned to them. When she even took up caring for the group as a whole, doggedly shepherding them when the wilderness broke them down. She had saved them all. 

She'd saved him.

Michonne had taken Rick's hand and led him to safety, or something like it. And then he'd pulled away. Scared and surrounded and chasing—being chased by—ghosts. He'd said it to her outright, yet another confession: she had the power to change his mind. She could anchor him when he was inclined to fly off the handle, and he hadn't wanted that. Had been scared of how easy it was becoming; had been so hyper aware of all possible danger that he hadn't wanted the monster to be soothed and calmed by her steady, unflinching presence. 

He hadn't wanted to let go of the fight.

Waking up on that mattress under her burning gaze felt like rising out of a strange dream. It felt like snapping out of a week straight of sleepless wandering through some twisted mirror of his life before. Squinting against the light and head ringing with faint echoes of his old job, his old self, his old wife. 

It had all been a nightmare of mundane tedium and blissful ignorance. He'd stood listening to the monsters beyond the gates, loud as anything, while these people walked around deaf to it, like the world didn't end. Like they weren't all going to die and soon if they didn't learn that they lived in a war zone now and they had to fight, that there was no other option. 

They couldn't just close their eyes and let other people handle it; they couldn't let men like Pete Anderson just be, couldn't have a community where people were allowed to prey on the vulnerable for the sake of convenience, where the vulnerable took no pains to defend themselves. 

That wasn't the world anymore, never should have been in the first place. 

But Michonne was right. Carl was. 

He'd gone about it all the wrong way and now they were backed into a corner because of him. They were going to have to make a decision tonight, and it was going to change everything in this ridiculous little town, one way or another. 

And he had endangered his relationship with the person he trusted the most, the one he needed the most, a few minutes before the shit was set to hit the goddamned fan. 

"Fucking idiot," Rick said again to the empty room. 

Then, through the window, he saw a hunched figure shuffling crookedly down the street. 

Rick's feet dragged as he walked back through his front door that night, then doubled back to check the lock. The novelty of having a front door at all still hadn't worn off. 

And yet there were still two more people dead in this place with front doors and movie nights and dinner parties. The worst part was that Rick still wasn't entirely convinced that they understood. A life was too steep a price to pay to appeal to a bunch of delusional morons who refused to listen. 

Then, there were the other complications. 

It was after midnight, but a lantern was still on for him in the living room. Michonne sat, bathed in its golden glow in a tank top and cotton shorts. Her katana, reclaimed and wiped clean, leaned against the arm of the couch. She was looking down at Judith's baby monitor in her hands. 

"How's Morgan?" she asked before Rick could fully process her presence. 

It was an easy out for the conversation he knew they should be having. He wondered if that was why she'd waited for him. To see what he had to say for himself.

"I don't know." And that was the truth about a lot of things. Morgan included. The other man wasn't like he had been before, back in King County, but Rick didn't know who he was now, couldn't trust who he might've become. Not with everything else going on. 

"He seems better," he admitted, "but I don't know beyond that. He agreed to be locked up at night." 

"About the best you could ask for. Under the circumstances." This statement was accompanied by an elegant shrug of her shoulders, bare and sculpted, as ever as she leaned back against the cushions. Her eyes, rendered golden by the reflected light, met his at last.

"Suppose so." Rick shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, dead tired, and knowing it was his own fault that he wasn't sure whether he should sit down beside her. It was something he wouldn't have given a moment's thought before. 

"How's Deanna?" he asked. 

Michonne had tended to the diminutive leader while Rick took care of debriefing with Daryl, Aaron, and Morgan. 

"About how you'd expect," Michonne said with a sigh. 

The unspoken implication rang loudly through the air. 

He, of course, remembered how he'd been after Lori died, and Deanna and Reg frankly seemed to have a substantially better marriage than he and Lori had ever had. 

Exhaustion pushed Rick to bite the bullet. He sat down on the couch what he hoped was a respectful distance from Michonne, but without seeming like he was trying to avoid being too close to her. An awkward algebra that he hated the idea of having to learn.

She shifted as he settled. Just a bit, not really moving closer or further away—a nervous shuffle that made Rick's heart sink into his stomach. She fiddled the baby monitor in her hands before leaning forward to set it on the coffee table in front of him. 

"She went down easy a while ago," Michonne, announced, deceptively casual. "I have suspicions that Carl is still reading in his room, though." 

Rick nodded slowly as she stood, grabbing her sword—he doubted she'd ever let it out of her sight again after today. She'd wanted, he knew, so badly to put it away. He'd wanted that for her, even if he couldn't believe it was possible. But he couldn't help but think that it was better off in her hands than anywhere else. Maybe she thought so now too. He wished it felt like he could still ask her about things like that—ask her about what she was thinking and how she was feeling without tripping directly over the mess he'd made.

When she moved, he could smell the sweet scent of the cocoa butter lotion she'd been so happy to find in the pantry. The low glow of the lantern reflected off of her toned thighs as she passed in front of him. His hand, he knew now, could fit perfectly into the curving dip at her lower back, could span a large portion of her tiny waist. 

He wanted to unknow it, but not nearly as much as he wanted to find out more. Not even half as much as he wanted to measure every plane and curve of her body with only his palms and fingers and mouth. It thrummed in him at her nearness now, that wanting. Like a dog pulling at its leash, sure that freedom was closer than ever before.

"Michonne," he called out as she headed towards the stairs, his voice breaking. She paused, stiffened, just the barest hint of tension through those shoulders. 

"Good night," Rick made himself say. 

"Good night," Michonne replied without turning around. 

When her footsteps had receded up the stairs, he let his head fall onto the back of the sofa and sighed heavily as he stared up at the ceiling. 

It wasn't that he'd never thought of it. There'd been a time, back at the prison, after tentative understanding had first transformed into friendship, when it hovered constantly under the surface of his thoughts. A nascent longing; a half-formed desire. A schoolboy crush, if he was being honest. He'd never been particularly inclined towards those, even before he married his first real girlfriend at 22. It seemed a strange thing to finally pick up while pushing 40 after the end of the world. Which was one of the reasons, alongside those blaring sirens of "too much, too much, too soon, too soon", that kept it exiled to the back of his mind.

Then the prison fell and she found them and didn't hesitate when he invited her, directly, into his family. The thought didn't live in exile anymore as they traveled, as they reunited with the rest of their family. It was just there, indelible, but unspoken. 

It was a knowing. It was the understanding that she had become necessary, to him and to his children. But the constant urgency of their lives smothered any opportunity to consider further and that knowing also came with the knowledge of everything that was at stake.

He hadn't been waiting, not really. There was no plan of action, no goal, no direction. There was only the implicit awareness of what lie between them and what that could become, what they could be to each other. There was possibility, circumstances allowing. And he knew it. He'd just never known if she knew it.

It was hard to tell, when it burned so bright for him. Was there really a matching fire he could see in her eyes sometimes, or was it just a reflection? She'd never been easy to read, no matter how much time—too much time maybe—he spent staring.

She certainly knew now that he'd pressed the point. And she certainly hadn't been unresponsive in the moment. Of course, neither that or her studied silence let him know how she actually felt about it.

"You've been avoiding me."

It wasn't accusatory which, all told, probably just made Rick feel worse. 

It was a simple statement of fact and one that he couldn't deny without being a liar. So he stood up from the box he'd been searching, applesauce for Judith's breakfast tomorrow in hand, and nodded at Jessie where she stood at the pantry door. 

"Thought it would be best if I kept my distance, considering," he said. Still a half-truth. 

In the daze of the last week, the insanity of coming to Alexandria, he'd looked at Jessie and seen Lori. Lori come again in the world come again in a place like they'd always wanted to be the kind of family to belong in. 

There was a wound there, the guilt settling heavy on him in a way it hadn't since those first days after her death. Then, Jessie had needed help, and in those moments, he would've said anything, done anything, to keep her alive—to stop history from repeating itself. 

But once he'd woken up, once Pete was dead, it'd felt like an ending. And he had never once in the past week considered what came after. Now he was terrified to look at Jessie, free from the shadow of ghosts, and see expectation. 

So yes, he'd avoided her. As surely as for the last two days Michonne had found reason to be up and out of the house before he even made it out of his room, despite the fact that he'd always been the earlier riser between them. Maybe it was karma of a sort. 

"That's fair," Jessie said quietly. 

"I was gonna check in, in the next few days. She how y'all were getting on," Rick offered under the weight of her gaze. 

"It's probably for the best that you didn't come by the house," she allowed, looking away, as if embarrassed. "The boys are- struggling." 

"I'm sorry," he said, earnestly. He wasn't sorry for what he'd done. He wasn't sorry that Pete was dead. But that they had to go through that, yeah, he'd always be sorry about that. 

Jessie, nodded, sniffled a bit, her arms wrapped around herself as she moved closer to him where he stood, half hidden among the laden shelves, her voice lowering. 

"They know how Pete was, what he was but..." 

"He was still their father," Rick said, nodding. 

"I want them to understand." Her eyes had grown big, glistening with unshed tears. "You helped me. No one else cared and-" 

"That's not true," he felt compelled to point out. "Carol cared. She understood," he said meaningfully. It wasn't his story to tell, but Jessie should know she wasn't alone. "She's the one who saw it, the one who told me." 

Jessie's brow wrinkled, just slightly, as she stared up into his eyes. Then the door to the pantry opened again. 

There, the midday sunshine making her a graceful silhouette, stood Michonne. Brown eyes landed on Rick, widened almost imperceptibly in surprise, then darted between him and Jessie. 

"I just came to get some apple-" she began.

"Applesauce for Judith," Rick finished for her, holding up the jar. He eyed her steadily, holding her gaze. "You left early this morning, or I would've told you I was gonna pick it up." 

"Well, worked out either way," she replied, not rising to his bait. 

"Michonne, right?" Jessie said, both breaking through the tension and reasserting her presence in the room. She turned towards Michonne with a friendly smile. "I'm Jessie. I don't think we've ever officially met." 

Michonne only nodded placidly. "Well, since the shopping's done, I'm gonna go." 

"Michonne," Rick called as she disappeared back out the door, his feet already moving to follow.  "Sorry, there's something I need to," Rick called over his shoulder towards Jessie. "I have to- Sorry." 

Michonne was halfway down the street by the time he made it out into the brisk afternoon air and Rick followed behind her as she headed down the line of picturesque houses towards their home. Carl was in class and Judith was with Carol, so it was an empty house he charged into after her. 

She'd made it into the kitchen and was putting out the ingredients for sandwiches. Carl was  growing like a weed and could always be counted on to be starving when he got back.

"Michonne," Rick said firmly, trying and failing to keep the plea from it. 

"That was Pete's wife, wasn't it?" Michonne asked, calmly digging a butter knife into a jar of peanut butter. "Was that what it was about? Why you didn't tell me what was happening even though we were supposed to be constables—partners?" 

Rick paled. "No. No, of course not."

He moved closer, as much as he dared, pressing his hands against the other side of the kitchen island, directly across from where Michonne had begun slathering peanut butter onto only slightly stale bread. 

"He was hitting her. Hitting her boys," he reminded her. "He was gonna kill her and no one was doing anything about it." 

"I know," she sighed, finishing a sandwich and starting on another. "I know. And it's none of my business anyway. Forget it."

"Of course it's your business," he responded immediately. For a scant second, she met his eyes, then turned her attention back to the sandwiches, silent.

"Michonne," Rick urged. "We need to talk about what happened." 

She snorted indignantly, just short of a laugh. "A lot of shit has happened, Rick." 

"Don't do that. You know what I mean." He shifted his weight from one leg to the other, hands on his hips.

"Fine. Let's talk." The knife clacked loudly as she dropped it into the peanut butter jar. Hands flat on the countertop, she leaned forward.

"You kissed me, Rick," she said with the tone of an accusation. "And I don't know what the hell that's supposed to mean." 

"Well, you kissed me back," he pointed out. "So maybe start there." 

She looked at him incredulously, one eyebrow arching. 

"It was a good kiss," she offered with a shrug.

He'd needed to be drunk and half-insane to even work up the gumption to peck a woman on the cheek. In the last two years, he'd definitely never even thought about kissing anyone the way he'd kissed Michonne. And the things he'd been thinking about her since, hell, it'd been even longer since that kind of desire had been on his radar.

Clearly, things were different for her. 

"So, am I supposed to assume you just go around reciprocating with everyone who lays one on you then?" he asked, only half joking.

"And who exactly do you think has been kissing up on me that you wouldn't know about?" she responded, an edge of real humor briefly creeping into her expression. "We've been living in each other's pockets for the last year and we haven't exactly had a lot to choose from." She leaned back, sliding her hands back from the counter, and crossed her arms.  Her gaze was inscrutable. "Until recently, I guess."

"There's nothing going on between me and Jessie," he blurted. 

Arms still folded beneath her breasts, she shifted her shoulders as she leveled him with a look. He took a deep breath and tried again. 

"I did, I did see something in her," he admitted. "As sure as I saw things back at the prison, but it wasn't-" He grappled for the words, for the truth. "I just didn't want her to die like- I didn't want anyone else to die if they didn't have to." 

Michonne's nod was a concession, right before she dug in more. "Does she know that?" 

"I don't know," Rick admitted. "That's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about us." 

"Is there an us, Rick?" she asked, searching. 

"You tell me." 

"No." She shook her head emphatically, her locs brushing back and forth against her shoulders. One caught on the strap of her bright yellow tank top. His fingers itched to touch it. "You can't put this on me. You started it." 

"Is that where we're at?" he asked, blindsided by the childish declaration.

"That's where we're at," she said firmly. Arms still crossed, she waited, implacable.

His mouth opened, then closed again as he searched for words—tried to figure out if there were words to encompass everything he was feeling.

"I kissed you because there's something between us," he settled on. "There has been for a while. And it caught up with me." 

"Rick," she sighed and he thought she seemed suddenly very tired, "you've been...struggling since we got here. Unsettled. Making mistakes." Her arms dropped, her posture opening as she gestured to him. "I know that you're trying. Especially after everything with Reg, but this is- You haven't been thinking about the consequences. Of anything." 

He'd considered, of course, during that longstanding awareness, Carl and his relationship with Michonne. How he might react, what it could mean to him. But this, what she was saying seemed like more than that. 

"What exactly do you think is gonna happen?" he asked.

"What always happens," Michonne said sharply, and she blinked away an emotion so quickly that he couldn't even get a read on it. 

"There's too much at stake for us to bullshit around with something like this," she started again, though she didn't meet his eyes. "There's Carl and Judith. The rest of our family. They need us. This place needs us. Here, present. Not distracted because we haven't gotten laid in a while." 

She could've run her sword through his chest and done less damage. 

"Right," he managed to croak out. 

He'd wondered. He'd always wondered if she knew too, if she felt it too. And now he had his answer. No. Not the way he did, at least.

"You and me, we have to be good, Rick," she said desperately, once again granting him the full force of her gaze, eyes huge and shining. 

He'd rarely heard her plead with him that way. There was nothing else he could say. Nothing he could deny her, as usual.

"We're good," he assured her over the painful pounding in his chest. "Always."

He put away the applesauce before finding an immediate excuse to flee the house. He was already walking down the street with no concept of where he was going when a voice called out to him.

"Take care of your something you had to do?" Jessie asked. She was seated on her front porch, smoking. Rick blinked away the deja vu.

"Sorry for running off like that," he said, approaching the foot of the front steps. 

"I'm sorry too," she replied before taking a long drag. "I didn't realize. About you and Michonne."

It was the last thing he expected her to say and he found himself grasping for a response.

"I don't-"

"Rick. Come on," she cut him off. She leaned back, staring up at the roof of her porch. "I feel so stupid." The laugh that followed was humorless. "It's so fucking obvious. She lives with you and your children. I figured you were all just close after being out there. Of course, I was in the middle of something. Idiot. I thought there was a...vibe or you liked me or-"

"No, Jessie," he attempted, "it wasn't- it wasn't about you, I-"

"Wow," she breathed and grinned sharply. "Thanks."

"No. I don't mean-"

"Yeah. You do."

"There was," Rick said firmly. "There was a...vibe. You didn't imagine it."

She looked at him then, breathed out smoke through her mouth, eyebrows slightly raised. 

"My wife, she died, having Judith," he continued, it all spilling out like drainage from a wound. "It was...bad between us for a long time before that. I was still supposed to protect her. But I didn't. Something like this is what she wanted for us. Even before. It reminded me of her. You reminded me of her. I'm sorry. You deserved better than that," he finished.

The silence stretched as she looked down at him before taking another drag of her cigarette and shrugging.

"Well, it ended up saving me from my living hell so. How much can I really complain?"

He nodded, ran a thumb across his eyebrow as he rested one foot on the bottom step, weighing whether to continue.

"I wasn't trying to put you in the middle of anything..." She tilted her head curiously during his pause. "Michonne and I we- we aren't...together."

"But you want to be." It wasn't a question.

"We've been through a lot. She's not like anyone I've ever met," he mused. "It's like- It's like living in the shadow of something, something massive, bigger than you can imagine. You sort of forget about it," he explained. "You know it, but you don't focus on it."

"Well, you both seemed to be focusing on it in the panty," Jessie said evenly.

Rick shook his head, took a step back from the porch. "I shouldn't be talking to you about this."

"No, go ahead," Jessie said, voice pitching up a little. "My shithead husband is dead, one of my sons won't come downstairs, the other one hates the sight of me, and I have to figure out how to keep us all alive in this nightmare of a world. So, why not listen to the guy I thought might eventually- why not listen to him tell me about the beautiful warrior woman he actually has feelings for."

She made no attempt to mask the bitterness and Rick took it in stride.

"Yeah. Guess I deserve that."

"Little bit," she agreed, but as quickly as it came on her it seemed to pass and her next question carried that polite, curious tone she'd spoken to him with since the moment they met. "So what's the hang-up?"

"She doesn't feel...like I do."

"She say that?"

"Not in so many words," Rick allowed. He already felt cut open about it. He didn't particularly relish ripping his own guts out to be examined.

"Good, because it's bullshit," Jessie said confidently. When he looked at her curiously, she shrugged again.

"Once I saw it, it was impossible not to see. And it definitely wasn't one-sided."

It was a good kiss, he thought, unbidden and said, "It doesn't have to be one-sided to be...unequal."

"That's what you want? Perfect equilibrium?"

It was what he'd always wanted even before he'd known he did. It was what they'd had until he fucked it up.

He looked back down the street towards his house, where Michonne was still inside making lunch for his son, where she would put his daughter down for a nap if he didn't come back before Carol dropped her off. Where she would come down to dinner and smile and joke with him and Carl over whatever he'd heated up for the night.

"I want it to mean something," he said.

A quiet, secret part of him felt almost relieved when they discovered the herd. 

It was a problem that Rick hadn't caused and that felt, in some ways, far simpler to fix.

Chapter Text

The screeching of the distant horn made Michonne's teeth itch as she followed behind Rick's purposeful stride. As they passed deeper into the forest, further away from the road, the sway of his hips—the bowing of his legs—took up more mental space than it should have. Her concentration was, humiliatingly, shot as he dashed off instructions to her and Glenn. Until there it was again, pulling her focus back. Us and Them. 

She understood, she did, but the Alexandrians were who they had now; they lived behind the same walls and they all had to learn to deal with that.

"Rick," she chided.

Rick's gaze bored into hers as he responded to her objection. All of her thoughts laid bare in the single sharp syllable of his name.

"You try to save em, you try," he said. "But if they can't keep up, you keep going. You make sure you get back."

Beside her, Glenn thrummed with anxiousness, but nodded nevertheless. He turned quickly to rejoin their charges, and Michonne was left alone with Rick's piercing stare. He was waiting, she knew, for her own agreement.

"Michonne," he rumbled, when she remained silent. 

She felt, for a petrifying moment, as if he was going to lean in like he did before. There was a stretch of rapid heartbeats where everything else went away and it was all she could think about.

Instead, he reiterated, "You have to get back."

It was a plea dressed up like a command, with so many more words wrapped up in it than articulated. Just like the way she said his name. 

That, at least, was the same between them. She'd always known what he wasn't saying.

He wasn't saying, I need you. He wasn't saying, I can't do this without you. He wasn't saying, Please, please, please, don't leave me alone. But Michonne heard it all anyway.

And just like his kiss—sweet and sensual and electrifying—it was terrifying to be wanted with such naked desperation.

Mostly because she knew now, for sure, that a matching feeling would well up in her breast, consume her from the inside out, if she was foolish enough to let it.

Michonne had never been a fool.

"I'll get back," she promised anyway.

David felt like a message. 

Not the man himself. Michonne was no narcissist. A person's life and experience hadn't existed just to prove some cosmic point to her.

But meeting him, hearing his story, that felt so clearly like whatever might be left out there laughing in her face.

After I thought I was dead and gone, he said, as if he was plucking words right from her thoughts.

She wanted to ask him so many questions, questions that she shouldn't ask a dying man. How could he let himself do it all again? Hadn't he known it would end this way? 

Was it worth it?

Maybe she didn't ask because she knew what he would say. (Finding her in all this? That was everything.)

The same thing some part of her had been saying for days. The same thing all of her had been ignoring for who knew how long.

Michonne wasn't blind. Of course, she knew that Rick was attractive. He was downright sexy when he wanted to be. (Though that was a bit of a misnomer. Michonne doubted Rick Grimes had ever intended to be sexy in his life. Maybe prom night. Or his wedding night. Some other special occasion where he felt the need to impress, the particular expectation to perform- She cut that thought off at the knees, veering away from a dangerous road.) And she couldn't pretend she had never felt that thrill between them. He stared at her too much for that. And it wasn't even like other men stared at her, both before and after the turn. There was some of that, yes, but it was also something else. Something unique to Rick and the intensity of his regard. 

Michonne felt sometimes that he understood her better than anyone she'd ever met. Yet he looked at her like she was the greatest mystery he'd encountered; like she was a puzzle he was determined to solve. A puzzle that he was set on taking each piece of and examining from every angle, to know as thoroughly as he could. And not just for the sake of knowing, but because he couldn't not know. Rick looked at her as if he needed the intimacy of that knowing like he needed to breathe.

He looked at her like that. Kissed her like that. And then had to nerve to pin her with those eyes and ask for more. 

So much more that it would be a lot to ask in any world. In this one? It was unthinkable. 

That was a place Michonne had already been—a place she had never for a second considered going back to. 

She still wasn't entirely sure how she survived the first trip.

It was a long way back, longer than the few miles they'd traveled, and Michonne felt like she'd lost things along the way. 

Not Glenn. She wouldn't think of him as lost. She couldn't. Certainly not in front of Maggie.

But Rick had been right, in his way. In the end, They didn't all make it, no matter how hard she and Glenn had tried.

She was explaining to Maggie about Glenn's plan to send a signal, when her attention was drawn away. Somehow, it seemed, Michonne was the first to hear him, even though she wasn't closest to the gate. It felt surreal, like an out of body experience, as if she was everywhere and nowhere all at once. As if she could feel the thud of his boots as he ran, hear the desperate panting of his breath even before he called out.

Michonne was already sliding the fence back as Rick's yell of, "Open the gate!" rang through the air. She unlatched the metal fixture and hauled it out of the way just as Rick stumbled and slid through, a cresting wave of walkers seconds behind him.

Gate secured, Michonne turned to face him where he knelt panting on the ground. All thought of the new awkwardness that had sprung up between them melted away as her feet carried her forward to check on him.

He met her eyes as she approached, his gaze ocean-deep, and before Michonne could open her mouth to ask him anything, Rick surged to his feet and wrapped her in his arms.

"You're okay," he gasped into her neck, his breath raising goosebumps on her skin. "Carl and Judith are okay."

He stated it like fact, her presence alone somehow confirming that for him. It made her stomach flip uncomfortably.

"Yeah," Michonne managed, trying and failing not to be overwhelmed by his nearness, the unrestrained press of his body to hers. "There was an attack, but they're okay. We're okay."

His arms were wound tight about her shoulders and waist. She could feel the rapid tattoo of his heart as if it beat against her own ribcage. She realized, too late, that her hands were stroking soothing circles on the broad expanse of his back. Rick murmured something else, something she didn't want to hear, into her shoulder. Then pressed his forehead there, marked her with the sweat of his brow.

He hadn't let go and she couldn't. It was too much. It was everything, and that was too, too much. Michonne felt it, the same way she felt the press of his thigh against hers, his heaving chest against her breasts. She wanted to melt there, let it all flow from her, all the things she'd been holding back; the dam wasn't cracking, it was disintegrating in the urgency of his embrace.

"What happened," someone asked. A crowd had gathered, their expectant murmurings granting Michonne a reprieve.

At last, Rick released her.

But Michonne still felt him.

Michonne checked on Carl and Judith, showered, changed, and avoided meeting Rick's eyes as they traded stories about what happened after they separated.

It took all of ninety minutes, and then she had no choice but to head for David and Betsy's house.

She watched the crowd that had already gathered, watched as Jessie Anderson repeated back Rick's admonition about survival before putting down Betsy's walker with its long ugly gashes along its wrists. Then, Michonne turned and walked away.

Obviously, Betsy had already known. 

Michonne supposed there hadn't been much to say in any case. 

The breeze would have been pleasant some other day, when it didn't carry the stench of hundreds of walkers pressed against their walls. As it was, it just made a fitting duet with the constant low rumble of moaning.

"Let's just keep it to our people for now," Rick said as they leaned against the bannister on their front porch.

Michonne sighed heavily. Tired of the argument. Tired of being the one who had to make it when she wasn't sure how much she believed it herself anymore. Tired of his arm resting a polite distance away from hers.

"If we had time to bring them along, it'd be different," he continued. "But we haven't had a chance to catch our breath."

"Rick, we're in here together. We're catching our breath right now. Anything else is excuses." 

Michonne let herself look at him: the tired cast of his face and the persistent worry caught in the crease of his brow. He'd stayed on watch at the wall from sunset into the wee hours the night before. She knew because she'd been at the watch point just down from him. They'd trudged home together eventually, weary from the weight of their anxieties.

The entire way she'd felt the heat of his stare—searching, deciding. Inside their house, they'd said barely a word to each other before parting in the upstairs hallway and disappearing into their rooms. In the morning, they and Carol sat at the table across from Morgan, an impromptu interrogation. Rick gestured at his old friend, and Michonne's mind went briefly blank when her eyes caught on his hands.

"They're trying," Michonne continued as the shadows grew long around them. She surveyed the mostly deserted streets. "We have to try too."

One hip against the porch railing now, Rick studied her, eyes flickering down and back up to meet hers. He ran a hand across the stubble darkening his jaw. The tan line on his third left finger was blindingly stark.

"No holding back, huh?" he asked her, challenging.

Pinned by his stare, bright blue eyes made brighter by the contrast with his crisp white t-shirt, Michonne wondered if she was, quite literally, the world's biggest hypocrite.

"There you are!" came Deanna's voice as she hurried towards and then up the steps. 

The interruption would've been a relief, if not for the shrewd way Deanna had looked at Rick and Michonne since the moment they stepped through the gates. It had taken Michonne a while to realize what the older woman saw, but now she felt uncomfortably exposed whenever she thought about it.

"Glad I caught both of you," Deanna continued, excited, reinforcing the truth of Michonne's thoughts. Still, it was good to see her bright and animated. No longer drawn and hollow as she had been in the days since she'd lost both a son and a husband in quick order.

Michonne watched the brief, failed effort Rick put into not rolling his eyes as Deanna explained the papers she'd pressed into Michonne's hands. He thought her naive, foolish, and Michonne understood why. But all she could feel as she unrolled the plans was awe at the woman's resilience—at the sturdiness of her belief.

Judith's body was a small pocket of warmth pressed against Michonne's thigh. The little girl was curled up on a blanket, napping on the couch between her brother and Michonne. Absent much else to do before the plan to lure the walkers at the wall went into action the next morning, Michonne and Carl had settled on a puzzle. The pieces were spread haphazard across the coffee table, illuminated by the afternoon sun shining through the large paned windows.

"Are you mad at my dad?" Carl asked as he separated out various pieces of the same cloudy white. His tone was casual, as if he hadn't broken a ten minute silence to spring that question on her out of the blue.

"What? No," Michonne said automatically. "Why would you think that?" 

Carl shrugged his noodley shoulders, noncommittal. It both amused and amazed her to see him lately, so firmly stuck in that pubescent no man's land where he was growing faster than he could put on weight to fill himself out. 

"You've just been weird lately," he observed. "Both of you. Like you're nervous or something. I don't know." 

"Have you looked outside?" Michonne asked, hoping her smile would mask the deflection.

No such luck. Carl rolled his eyes. 

"It was before that," he clarified sternly.

Carl had always been perceptive; not too much so for his own good, but definitely, she knew from experience, for the good of the adults in his life. Michonne weighed attempting to lie, but she had never lied to him, and she had no real desire to start.

"Your dad and I have just been figuring some things out," Michonne settled on. "And we're still adjusting." 

She didn't dare think it would be that easy and she was right not to.

"Figuring things out? Like what?" Carl pressed. 

"If I say adult things will you leave me alone?" she asked, with little hope.

He seemed to consider this, albeit briefly, sinking back a bit into the couch cushions as his hair flopped over his eyes.

"Nope," came the firm reply. 

Michonne concentrated on the puzzle pieces beneath her fingers, snapping together the corner of a cabin situated on the snowy mountain that made up the majority of the vista. She let the words fall from her mouth before she could think about them too much. 

She'd been thinking so much about everything lately.

"Things about us. Our relationship, I guess." 

Carl shot back up instantly, his undisguised glee knocking Michonne for a loop.

"You mean like, he finally told you he likes you?" Carl asked, loud enough that Judith stirred, rubbing her face against the blanket and beginning to lift her head.

"What- Finally?" Michonne stammered out.

She rubbed Judith's back as the baby continued towards wakefulness—in part just to avoid Carl's expectant gaze. The question of why exactly a 14-year-old seemed so sure about something that had turned her entire world upside down a few days ago was a challenging one to say the least. Grimeses seemed to have a particular talent for catching her off guard.

"Come on." Carl was incredulous. "I may be a kid but I'm not stupid. I pretty much figured that out back at the prison." 

"Oh, did you?" Michonne asked, accepting that this conversation was going to keep barreling ahead for the time being. 

"My dad was the only one as excited as me whenever you came back from a run," Carl offered as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. 

Maybe it had been. Perhaps her own relief every time she passed back through the gates to find Rick and Carl waiting for her had chased everything else from her mind. Or she'd been so busy trying not to get comfortable with that feeling of belonging, of home, that she couldn't, wouldn't, spare a thought for what anyone else was feeling.

Judith was sitting up now, pacifier still in place, looking curiously from Michonne to Carl as they spoke. Michonne smoothed her soft curls as she considered her response, and the baby began making an attempt to pull herself to her feet.

"You and I are friends," she pointed out to Carl as she offered Judith a hand to steady herself on her chubby little legs. "Your dad and I are friends. How do you figure it wasn't the same?" 

"Because he's a grown man and I don't stare at your..." As Carl trailed off, his face grew red right through the band of freckles across his nose. He averted his eyes from her, concentration returning at last to the puzzle as he fiddled with a corner piece. "At, uhm, you the way he always does." 

Michonne couldn't hold back her fond grin. "Well, don't you have everything figured out?" 

Carl grinned back before ruthlessly knocking her off her feet again. 

"I'm cool with it, by the way," he declared. "Judy is too." 

Michonne tried, with great effort, to ignore the swell of emotion that followed that declaration. It seemed as though that was all she did anymore. Feel things and try to ignore that she was. 

"Oh, you asked her about it?" she said instead, voice light as she could make it. 

"Did you start talking when I wasn't looking, Judybug?" Michonne booped the little girl's nose gently as she leaned against Michonne for balance, eliciting a wide gummy grin.

"I can just tell," Carl said seriously, ignoring their antics. "I think...I think she already thinks you're her mom." Judith's fist had closed around one of her locs, as if on cue, and the baby wobbled there, still grinning. Michonne didn't think it was fair that they were ganging up on her. "I like that. I'd like it if she got to have a mom as cool as you since she'll never get to know our other mom. So yeah we're both cool with it, if that matters." 

His smile was small, but warm, cheeks still a bit pink. That same earnest sweetness had been present in Carl since she met him. It was disarming then, when she was trying to claw her way back to the land of the living without being entirely sure she even wanted to. It was devastating now.

"Thank you," Michonne said thickly, all attempt at levity falling away. "Of course it matters. It means everything."

"Not that I'm saying that...question is what's going on with me and your dad," she continued, clearing her throat. "We have our relationship, just like you and I do, just like me and Judith. And I will always be here for you two. No matter what."

Regardless of all of the uncertainty of the past few days, all the things she'd grappled with, Michonne knew that to be true. She'd meant it when she'd told Rick she was done taking breaks. He asked, and she knew what he was asking; she said yes, and she had no intention of ever taking it back.

It had made it all worse somehow. After the kiss, when the world came rushing back. She loved Carl and Judith. She knew that already. It was chief amongst the things she had never imagined, after, but it was already too late by the time she realized it.

It only made it seem even more unthinkable to bare yet more of her soul to the ravages of the world.

Carl's voice was unsure for the first time as he darted a glance at her and then away. 

"Do you...not like him back?" he asked. "Is that what's wrong?" 

"Carl," Michonne sighed. 

"Sorry," he amended, looking abashed. "You don't have to tell me if it's too private or whatever." 

She could've left it there. Part of her wanted to. But Michonne looked into his big blue eyes, just like his father's, and she couldn't not confess. To him and to herself.

"I do like him," Michonne breathed. "Maybe more than I've ever liked anyone. So much that it's—" She swallowed. "Your dad is strong and good and brave and very handsome." 

"Okay, gross," Carl muttered, wrenching another smile from Michonne against her will.

"Of course I like him. I more than like him," she said, letting the words hang there, letting the world continue spinning regardless. "But that doesn't make it a good idea," she finished. 

Carl seemed to consider this seriously, that somber thoughtfulness also just like his father. Then, he nodded sharply, his decision made.

"I think it has to be," Carl declared. "You and my dad. The both of you and me and Judith. Glenn and Maggie. Daryl and Carol. The rest of our family. Everybody. We all have to love each other, however we do, no matter what. What's the point otherwise?" 

"I don't know, kid," she admitted. 

Carl had opened his mouth to reply when, through the open windows, they heard a deafening crash.

Michonne was very used, this far in, to things not going to plan. She was used to a lot: blood and dismemberment and death, fences going down, walls falling, people being lost. It became familiar, if not easy exactly. But she was still so tired of expecting the worst. Of wanting more, hoping for it so hard she could taste it, needing to believe, but knowing the odds nevertheless.

So, when Deanna—face pale, blood loss and the fever already raging—took Michonne's hand and asked her what she wanted for her life, Michonne was silent.

Her eyes roamed the room, taking in the nondescript suburban interior and seeing nothing. The moaning and crashing from downstairs was only getting louder as the dead mindlessly destroyed this bland altar to life before. It was a strange place to become a tomb. But that's what most of the world was now, she supposed: a strange, endless graveyard.

"Figure it out," Deanna instructed, undeterred, and grasped Michonne's hand harder.

Michonne's next breath came out like a sob. 

"What if that's done?" she asked, desperate for an answer. "Wanting things for me. What if I can't do that anymore?"

"You said you want this place to work," Deanna reminded her. "That's part of it. It doesn't otherwise. Wanting things, that's living."

Michonne swallowed thickly. Her voice was a rasp. "And when it goes bad? When there's nothing left but the pain?"

Deanna gestured expansively. To herself, lying on her death bed. The town, overrun. Her own losses, unfathomable—though not to Michonne. And she smiled.

"It's never all that's left," she said, and cupped Michonne's cheek. "And it's still worth it."

It should have felt like a violation, or eavesdropping at least. Standing there as Rick poured out his grief and hope to Carl's unconscious form, so small and pale in his bed. But there was nowhere else Michonne could imagine being.

Judith had fallen asleep in her arms not long after Michonne retrieved her from the church. She could have put her down. But that too felt like an impossibility. So she stood and watched and, eventually, Carl's hand moved. Even in the flurry of activity that followed, Michonne didn't go far.

By the time Carl opened his eye, Michonne had taken up a chair on the opposite side of his bed from Rick. Judith was snuggled in the playpen someone had dragged in when Michonne wasn't paying attention. Her eyes were locked on Rick and Carl, on her family. Rick's joy was incandescent, and Carl took it in stride, asking questions about the herd, the people, the town, as if he wasn't lying there with a catastrophic injury.

"You don't need to worry about all that right now," Rick instructed gently, Carl's smaller hand still clutched in his own.

Carl nodded, then winced at the movement, and for whatever reason, that cut the last string. It all crashed down on Michonne, the way she refused to allow it to during their long, bloody night and the long vigil that followed.

"Don't cry," Carl said softly, his voice croaking. It was only then that Michonne felt the tears that were trailing down her cheeks. She turned in her seat, wiping furiously at her face as father and son both regarded her with concern.

"Today's been a lot, okay," she replied, voice watery.

"You're telling me," Carl quipped, getting a weary chuckle out of Rick and Michonne both.

Rick smoothed Carl's overlong hair and leaned in to kiss his forehead.

"Well, day's almost over," he said. She could see the smile lines at his eyes crinkle even in the scant light. "Tomorrow's gonna be better."

Carl didn't stay awake for long, which Denise assured them was perfectly normal. He would need a lot of bed rest and then a lot of physical therapy. It was going to be a long road. 

But he was still there.

He was still alive, and it felt like a miracle. Almost obscene in its unlikelihood. Michonne shook with it, with their luck in this, and with all the times they hadn't been lucky.

She and Rick were summarily shooed away to get some food at the very least, if they couldn't be convinced to actually go rest. (And they couldn't.)

They settled on eating their peanut butter sandwiches in the hallway slash waiting room so as not to disturb Carl or wake Judith (who would, in turn, disturb Carl).

They ate in a silence that was more comfortable than had been between them for a while. That was what made her say it. The knowledge that they could come through something like all of this—that they could come back from anything—loosened the last few latches of the lockbox around her heart.

"I had a son. Before," Michonne admitted into the silence.

"I know," Rick said, pausing as her head snapped towards him. 

"I suspected, back at the prison," he explained. "The way you were with Carl. The way you looked at Judith. Then I heard you talking to Carl. Outside of Terminus."

Michonne closed her eyes, all remnants of surprise immediately falling away. Of course he knew. There was, all said, very little of import that Rick didn't seem to know about her. Whether he realized it or not.

"I thought I would never, ever feel that way again, open myself up to that kind of pain again," she confessed. "Then I met him." She balled up the paper napkin that'd held her sandwich, eyes fixed on the door to Carl's sick room. Eyes fixed through it, to the little boy turned young man who had changed so much for her. "And he just...burrowed on in there. And Judith. And you."

Rick moved with deliberate slowness, as though he was giving her a chance to bolt, when he reached his hand out to touch hers. Their eyes met and held before he carefully plucked the napkin from her and tossed it. Then, he gripped her hand in his, palms pressed against each other.

"I'm sorry," he said, a fierce whisper. "I'm so sorry, Michonne. I can't even say how much."

She felt the tears again, burning behind her eyes. When they fell, Rick was there still, to catch them, to smooth them away with the brush of his fingertips. He traced her cheekbone, the tender hollow beneath her eyelid, the curve of her jaw, as if committing them to memory, before he withdrew. His other hand still held hers.

When he shifted closer, beside her, Michonne let herself lean into his arm.

They sat that way into another silence.

"He's gonna be okay," Michonne said, at last, because she needed to say it. "He will. I believe that."

"He will," Rick agreed with just as much conviction. "And we're gonna make this place something. All of us. Home. I believe that."

It was so simple, but it had taken so much to get there. She'd pushed him so hard towards that end goal, that Michonne had barely noticed herself falling behind.

"So do I," she said, and it was true. But it wasn't all that was true.

Rick tilted his head, leaning in more, listening. Waiting.

"But I- I'm scared, Rick." The words came out in a rushed exhalation, like she'd been holding her breath. And she had, trying for so long not to drown. "I stopped feeling it for a long time. But now, I'm so scared all the time. Of having something else to lose."

He nodded knowingly, the gentle affection, the devotion, in his gaze unwavering as he squeezed her hand.

"Not something to lose," he corrected. "Something to protect."

Maybe she was wrong about the luck. Maybe it hadn't just been this night. Maybe it had started a year ago, when she set off on her own and ended up making her way to this man's door. 

"And I am always gonna do that," he continued, burning with the ferocity that she so admired, that she so loved. That had helped bring them through impossible odds and an endless night. He shifted and folded her hand in both of his, clasped as if in prayer.

"Thank you for doing it with me."

"You don't have to thank me," Michonne said. She'd stood at his back, at his side, and she always would. That ferocity had a twin in her.

"I know." He grinned crookedly. "But I'm not gonna stop."

Michonne's own smile still felt fragile, but no less joyous for it.

Life returned to normal. Or a new normal. They'd had a lot of those since the turn. This one seemed better than most.

Denise let Carl go home after a few days. Michonne imagined it was an allowance made largely just to avoid Rick, Michonne, and Judith essentially moving into her house.

Days were busy, between looking after Carl and putting the community back together, but a good busy. Not dire, just important. Meaningful. Also not so busy that Michonne didn't have ample time to think over the last little, huge bit of unresolved business.

The awkward discomfort hadn't returned between her and Rick, but she could still feel the tension thrumming between them, the things still left unsaid. She knew the why and she knew what was needed to solve it. But how to go about it was a delicate matter. She supposed it didn't have to be. Rick had certainly just dived in head first at the beginning of it all. She'd always been more cautious than him.

Perhaps too cautious, in some respects. In this one most of all.

Lunch was done, Judith was napping, and they'd just been chased off from keeping a cranky Carl company. Rick gently touched Michonne's arm to get her attention.

"There's something I need to talk to you about," he said, haltingly. Michonne hesitated in the hallway where they stood, calming the last few flutters of doubt, before gesturing towards her open bedroom door.

He followed her, silently, and she let him pass her into the room. When she turned from closing the door behind them he'd already taken to pacing back and forth like a caged tiger. Michonne waited, and when he still didn't speak, she decided to take the opportunity to shoot her own shot. But when she took a step towards Rick, gathering her thoughts, the words began, at last, to tumble from him.

"It wasn't a mistake," he declared. Michonne remembered every second of their conversation from two weeks ago too well to need clarification.

"Not for me," he continued. "It wasn't. It wasn't just struggling. You said you've been scared and I could see it. I understand. I was willing to wait. But I can't stand thinking that any part of that is you not being sure I know what I want. I wanted you—not as a distraction, for real. I meant it."

He'd stopped pacing, but he still shifted weight from one foot to the other. Waved one hand to emphasize his point. He didn't move closer, though his eyes were beseeching across the distance between them.

"If that's too much," he continued, though she could see that the thought pained him. "If you don't want that with me...now or even ever. That's how it is. I'll handle it. " He nodded once, sharply, punctuating his acceptance. 

"We'll still be us. We'll still be what we need to be for our family, for our community," he assured her. "But I need you to know that for me it was real. I meant it. I did."

"Rick," Michonne sighed, voice thick with affection. "I always knew you meant it."

His eyes widened, a mixture of surprise and the faint stirrings of hope, but that worried wrinkle between his brows didn't go away. So Michonne stepped forward, placed her hands on either side of his face to still him and brought her mouth to his.

Rick's lips parted in a gasp and Michonne took the opportunity to deepen the kiss, sucking on his plump lower lip before giving the upper one a nibble. Rick's shock didn't last long and he responded in full force as a groan slipped from his throat. His hands cast up and down her body as he pulled her flush against him, finally settling with one on the small of her back and the other firmly planted on the curve of her ass. Michonne tangled her own fingers into the nest of soft curls at his nape, clutching and tugging as he thoroughly explored her mouth with his tongue.

It was better than she remembered, which was no small feat. The first time had ignited a fire she'd all but forgotten existed, consumed her thoughts for days afterwards. This time felt like molten lava running through her veins, like there was nothing after and she didn't want there to be. She could pass the rest of time wrapped around him and be happy.

Maybe she would.

She backed them up slowly, in stuttering steps, until the backs of her knees hit her bed. Rick grunted into her mouth as she toppled them both over onto the cool sheets. Knees bent, she capture his slim hips between her thighs as Rick trailed kisses along her jaw, down her neck. He nosed the strap of her tank top out of the way to taste the skin of her shoulder, to nip at her collarbone. At the sweep of his hot tongue in the valley between her breasts, Michonne balled a fist in his t-shirt, determined that it should get out of her way, and soon. But Rick ignored her efforts, propping himself up on one elbow as his thumb stroked just under the hem of her top.

He grinned down at her, beatific, heavy and warm above her, and Michonne thought her face might crack from the joy of it. His thumb continued its path up, and he leaned close to kiss her lips softly, once, then again.

"So we can agree this time you definitely weren't just reciprocating, right?" Rick breathed into her mouth as their chests heaved in sync.

Michonne gave his curls a sharp pull and watched with satisfaction as his eyelids fluttered and his Adam's apple bobbed.

"Shut up," she commanded sweetly, as she continued tugging his shirt up around his ears.

He did. Though not for long, but by then they were both making more noise than they should have been and Michonne was no longer of a mind to object.