Chapter Text
Rick was waiting in the prison courtyard, pacing back and forth with his eyes on the road, on the treeline, into the woods. Michonne had come back earlier, alive and seeming relatively unshaken, not that she ever really did seem affected by little things like fear. She’d said that Daryl was alive when she last saw him, and Rick had to believe that was still true. He had to.
When Daryl appeared on the road, his crossbow dangling from his hand like it was almost too heavy to lift, Rick was hit with a sense of relief that went deeper than bone, deeper than blood, down into the spaces between his nerves, his cells, his synapses, the strands of his DNA. Daryl was back, and Rick felt the world shift back onto its orbit, gravity righting itself so that everything was steady again.
Only Daryl was alone, and Rick knew what that meant.
Rick opened the gates for him, let him through. Daryl walked with uncharacteristically heavy feet, eyes on the ground, and Rick looked for tension in his shoulders but found none. Daryl was relaxed, too relaxed, with the posture of a man who didn’t care enough anymore to waste energy with keeping his muscles tight. Rick was surprised he’d made it back at all, and he reached out to touch Daryl’s shoulder, feeling his brother’s death clinging to him like a film over his skin.
Daryl stopped walking. He didn’t turn, didn’t tense, didn’t shake Rick’s hand off or lean into it. He kept his eyes on the ground, his breathing locked in a perfect military-grade cadence, and Rick wanted to move his hand to the man’s neck and check to see if the pulse there was as maddeningly steady as the rest of him.
Rick said Daryl’s name, feeling it spread over his tongue like he’d been saying it all his life. “I’m sorry,” he said, quietly.
“Don’t need your pity.” Daryl’s voice was low-pitched and rough, even for him.
“It’s not pity,” Rick told him. “It’s…” He trailed off, looking for the words to explain. “I just want you to know I care, is all.”
Daryl nodded slowly, still facing away from Rick. “He was walking when I got there,” he said, barely more than a whisper. “Wasn’t when I left. That’s all that matters.”
Rick thought about how this didn’t even register as unusual anymore, this casual discussion of tragedy, of senseless death, of broken families and white eyes. Which wasn’t to say that it didn’t hurt, especially when it was like this, but it had become a script. Lines they’d said what felt like a million times by now: did he make it and no, he didn’t and did you give him a mercy shot and of course I did.
“Hate you had to do that alone,” Rick said, curling his fingers into Daryl’s shoulder.
Daryl shrugged. “Had to be me.” He paused, let out a silvery sigh into the night. “Glad it was me.”
“I get that,” Rick said. He said Daryl’s name again but wasn’t sure where he was going with it, what he could say, what he even wanted to say. He just wanted him to turn around, to let Rick look into his steel-blue eyes and reassure himself that there was still life there. But Daryl didn’t.
The night-insects buzzed louder and the scene wavers in front of him, and Rick says the man’s name again, one more time, before he wakes up.
//
Rick’s lips are dry and his limbs feel weak, disconnected. He opens his eyes, expecting to see the stained mattress on the top bunk of his cell above him, but instead it’s a smooth white ceiling, the paint pristine in a way that nothing has been pristine since before the world ended. A sharp scent buzzes through his nostrils that he eventually places as antiseptic and industrial-grade cleaning supplies.
He sits up, looking down at the IV in his hand, at the way his skin looks flat and dull, at the clean sheet tucked in around his legs. It’s the archer with the blue-gray eyes he tries to ask for, before anyone else, but he opens his mouth to call his name and finds that he can’t remember it. Rick frowns and presses his palms to his forehead, willing himself to find the name in there somewhere, to yell it, to pull his anchor back to him, but there’s nothing there, only the echo of the man’s gravelly voice and the way his shoulder had felt under Rick’s hand.
A man dressed in hospital scrubs pokes his head into Rick’s room and looks just absolutely stunned. “Mr. Grimes?” he asks.
Rick blinks at him. “Where am I? Where’s…” He tries to force the name out again but can’t grasp hold of it in his brain. He sorts through the names he can remember, dismissing Lori and Shane because they’re dead, and only comes up with one that he thinks is still alive. “Carl. Where’s… Carl?”
“Carl, sir?” The man asks.
“My son,” Rick says. “My boy. Carl. Where is he? Is he at the prison?” Rick looks around. “Is this Woodbury?”
“Um, this is Lakeshore,” the man says. “My name’s Peter. I’m a nurse here.”
“Lakeshore,” Rick repeats. There’s a flutter in the back of his brain, the image of his grandmother sitting in a wheelchair in front of a television that always seemed to be playing Wheel of Fortune. It had been a stretch to call the small body of water outside the place a lake, but Rick had always thought that it looked pretty outside the window in the sunlight anyway.
“Lakeshore Assisted Living,” Peter says. “I know you’re confused, Mr. Grimes. Let me get a doctor in here to talk to you about what’s going on.”
The doctor comes in within a few seconds, clutching a clipboard and looking at Rick like she almost doesn’t believe what she’s seeing. “Mr. Grimes,” she says. “It’s good to see you awake.”
“Where am I?” Rick asks again. He struggles to sit up in the bed, fighting against limbs that feel weak, sluggish. “Where’s Carl?”
“We’ve called your wife. She’s on her way, with your son,” the doctor says. “I’m Dr. Brennan. You’re under my care here at Lakeshore. Do you remember what happened to you?”
Rick shakes his head, more to clear it than as an answer to the question. “I… I was at the prison and I… he was there. He’d just killed his brother and I was trying to figure out what to say to make that better for him.”
Dr. Brennan and Peter exchange a quick look, then the doctor takes a step forward. “You were shot, Mr. Grimes. Do you remember that?”
“Shot?” Rick asks, wrinkling his forehead and sifting through his memories. He’d been injured plenty of times during the fights with Walkers, during the months of slogging through each day with just survival on his mind. But he hadn’t been shot, not since…
He blinks and looks around. Electricity. Computers. A TV monitor playing some daytime soap opera on mute, hanging in the corner of the room. He looks at the doctor, her hair clean and tied back, wearing light makeup and a white lab coat that just couldn’t have stayed that white being washed in creek water. “Shit,” he whispers, and he draws his knees up to his chest and hugs them, feeling the pit of his stomach fill with bile and something cold.
“You were shot in the line of duty,” the doctor tells him. “Four months ago. The doctors at the hospital put you in a medically induced coma. You were supposed to wake up after a few days, but you didn’t.”
“No,” Rick says. He shakes his head again, in denial this time. “No, that ain’t what happened. I got to get back to them. To the prison.”
“Your wife--”
“My wife is dead,” Rick snaps, his voice loud and echoing off of the sterile tile floor.
“No,” Dr. Brennan says patiently, putting a hand on Rick’s shoulder that he immediately shrugs off. “She’s on her way to see you now. She’s picking your son up from school. And your partner is on his way too.”
“Shane,” Rick says, images of blood and death and white eyes filling his mind. “He’s dead too. I killed him.”
“You haven’t killed anyone,” Dr. Brennan says. “And you haven’t been to a prison recently. You’ve been here since June, when they moved you to Lakeshore to free up a bed at the hospital.”
Rick presses the heels of his hands into his forehead. “June,” he repeats. “It was… I got shot in May. So four months. That means it’s…" He pauses, counts months in his head. "September?”
Dr. Brennan nods. “You’ve been in a coma since May. Whatever you’re remembering about prisons and people dying… it must have been a dream. Everything is okay. Your wife is alive. So is your partner. They come by at least once a week to visit you, with your son. And they’re going to be so happy to see you.”
Rick swallows hard, feeling the dryness in his throat. “And the Walkers?”
The doctor frowns, clearly confused. “We can get you a walker if you need one,” she says. “But I think your legs should be strong enough still to stand up. You may need some physical therapy depending on the severity of the muscle atrophy, but we’ll have to see how you feel once you’ve tried walking around a little.”
Rick stretches his legs back out and lies back on the inclined slope of the bed, staring at the ceiling. “So there aren’t Walkers. Zombies. The world… hasn’t ended.”
“No, of course not,” the doctor says, smiling. “That was all a dream. Welcome back to the world, Mr. Grimes.”
Rick closes his eyes and allows the doctor to check his vital signs, his reflexes, his muscle strength, and after a few minutes they leave him alone in the room, promising to check back in after his visitors have had a chance to get there and talk to him. Rick nods and leaves his eyes closed, concentrating on his breathing, on the scent of hospitals and clean things, on the hum of the fluorescent lights above him, an alien sound to him now.
Lori is alive. Shane is alive. There aren’t any Walkers anymore. There never were.
He should be happy. He is happy. It’s a new start, a chance to fix everything. The world is still turning like it has for so many centuries and when he walks out of this place, he won’t need a gun at his side and a knife in his boot anymore. Carl is still a child, still innocent, hasn’t pointed a gun at anyone, will never have to stand in a barn door telling Rick to shoot an unarmed kid. Lori is still his wife, and when he sees her she won’t look at him with the same kind of contempt in her eyes that she had when he’d told her that he’d had to kill Shane. He doesn’t want to go back to the life he’d thought he was living while he slept. He wants to live in a world where the smell of death is something that bothers him instead of something he doesn’t even notice anymore. This is better. Rick can’t bring himself to wish for anything else.
But he thinks about the baby, his daughter, who doesn’t exist anymore, and he thinks about all the people he thought he knew, that he thought he loved. The family he’d grown from a group of strangers. All the people whose names he can’t remember--the farmer and his daughters, the Korean kid with the solemn eyes, the short-haired woman who’d come so far from where she’d been at the beginning. The quiet man with the crossbow, the one he’d trusted with all their lives, the one whose steady presence is what’s missing from this sterile room. He thinks about all of them, remembering their faces in his mind, and something a lot like grief soaks into his skin to settle around his veins.
//
Shane comes in the room first, bursting through the door like a rush of water through a dam, and Rick fucking loses it the second he sees him, hot tears pouring out of eyes that he refuses to close. Shane leans over the hospital bed, pressing his lips to Rick’s forehead, and he gathers Rick up and murmurs brother, brother into his hair, and Rick has missed the guy so much he can’t even hold it back anymore and he clings to him, fisting his hands in Shane’s shirt and not giving even the slightest shit how this looks to anyone passing by, because Shane knows what he means and what he doesn’t mean and what it is and what it isn’t, and there’s none of the bullshit there anymore. No anger, no judgment, no jealousy, just the pure joy of knowing that they’re both alive and they both still have each other. They’re still best friends. They’re still brothers.
Rick puts his lips next to Shane’s ear and pours it all out there, telling him he’s sorry and that he loves him and that he never wants to fight again, that they can be brothers and they can get past everything and he loves him he loves him he loves him.
“I love you, too, man,” Shane says, and he sniffs once and pulls back away from Rick. He sits on the edge of the bed and brushes Rick’s hair back from his forehead. “Thought I lost you.”
Rick has tears on his cheeks and he’s pretty sure they’re still actively flowing, but he doesn’t have the emotional strength to care about that right now. “I was dreaming while I was asleep,” he says, locking eyes with Shane. “I was dreaming, man, and you were dead. I had to kill you. I didn’t want to but I had to. You understand, right? I had to do it.”
“Rick, man, it’s okay,” Shane tells him. He reaches for Rick’s hand and squeezes it briefly before letting it go again. “It was a dream. I’m alive. Nobody killed anybody. Everything’s cool.”
Rick lifts his hands to his face and rubs the tears from his own cheeks. He looks at Shane’s chest, remembers all too vividly what it felt like to put a knife there. It hadn’t slid in easy, not like he’d thought it would, not like a bullet would have. Shane’s ribs fought him, his heart tried to refuse the blade, his muscles clinging around the metal and trying to hold it back. Rick had to push, to shove, to force the knife in. He had to have momentum. He had to mean it.
His hand is on Shane’s chest, just below his heart, before he can stop himself. “I fucking stabbed you, brother,” he whispers. “I hated it. I hated that I had to.”
Shane puts his own hand over Rick’s on his chest. “Hey, buddy, it was just a dream. I’m here.” He gives Rick that 120-watt smile, the one that Rick had kept seeing in the back of his mind when Shane was on it. I killed my best friend for you people, he thinks, only he didn’t. Only Shane is here. The old Shane, the real Shane, the one that Rick loves like a literal brother. Not the twisted version that he’d had to take out to save the others.
“We’re good? You and me?” Rick asks. He knows that they are, or at least that they are as much as they were when Rick got shot, but he needs to hear it, needs to know that even though he’s lost so many people in the last hour he hasn’t lost this one.
“We’re good,” Shane agrees. He smiles at Rick and stands up, then looks at his shoes with his thumbs hooked into his pockets. “Lori’s on her way. She stopped by to get Carl out of school but they’ll be here any second.”
And as soon as Shane says it, Rick hears Carl’s voice from down the long hallway. His footsteps speed up until he’s running, yelling for his dad, and Rick hears Lori’s voice telling Carl to slow down, and it’s almost too much. Carl skids into the room and flings himself onto the bed and into Rick’s arms, and Rick crushes him in as strong of a hug as his atrophied muscles can possibly produce.
Lori comes into the room while Rick is hugging Carl. She smiles at him, her big brown eyes sparkling, and he notes how beautiful she looks--soft skin, shining hair, the right amount of weight on her body. She’d always been slender, of course, but in the months of the dream she’d started looking a little gaunt--they all had. It’s nice to see her looking healthy again.
Rick is so caught up in holding his son and listening to the nonstop play-by-play of the last four months of the boy’s life that he almost misses the glance that passes between Shane and Lori. He remembers that look. He saw it while he was sitting around a campfire with all those people--names, what are their names?--and again, over and over, for weeks before either of them finally came clean about it. It’s the same look, and there’s no doubt in Rick’s mind that it means the same thing it did before.
He waits for the rage to fill him like it had at the campfire, but he looks at Shane and remembers the way it felt to watch him die, looks at Lori and remembers seeing the farmer’s girl walk out of the prison with a baby and no Lori, looks at Carl and remembers how the poor boy had to shoot both of these people in the head, and he just can’t bring himself to be angry with any of them. So they found each other. So they love each other. None of it matters, because he has his family back. If they want to be together, he’ll let them.
Rick sees narrow blue eyes in the back of his mind. He’s lost too much anyway, even having Shane and Lori back. He won’t lose them again. Not like before. So he hugs his son and he smiles at his wife and his best friend and he tells himself that this will be enough for him.