Lovely Bones

kissed chin

11. kissed chin

She was lost.

The trees around her looked identical to each other.

The branches and broken twigs that were buried beneath the leaves scrunched under her shoes. Each step she took had been identical to the other, causing her path to twist into a blur. Confusion and terror had crept up her spine, leaving the young girl to loose all sight of where she had been trying to go.

The only thing that had shifted in the air, besides her frail body moving forward in attempt to find her way back, was the dead one that had been chasing her like a game of cat and mouse. The walker was hidden within the depths of the trees but she knew that it could see her perfectly. As it followed, its eyes stayed searching for the blonde set of hair that was impossible to miss. The dead's growls had bounced off of each tree, confusing her on where its location had been. The woods around her had blended together, trapping her in like a sink hole with no possible escape.

The walker's moans were threatening and low, almost as if it had been teasing her intentionally. It's sounds made the baby hairs on the back of her neck stand up.

Teddy didn't mean to get lost.

The blonde didn't have any ill intent when she had left the church. When she slipped through the large doors without being caught, she had entered the woods with a mischievous grin and a cheer of victory, patting herself on the back for successfully sneaking out. Within the mix of excitement, she had accidentally took a wrong turn, leaving her to skip count of where she was going or where she had come from. A single step in the wrong direction had caused her to loose her way almost immediately and when she had realized it, it had already been far too late to retrace.

She was left to use her youthful memory to try and find her way back but the task had proven to be more difficult than she imagined, especially since her fear had erased every thought she had.

If asked for the reason to why she disappeared and went on her own adventure, Teddy would explain that she was trying to leave before her sister could. The blonde tried to fall asleep, she really did, but there was an everlasting twist of anxiety in her gut that had grown too big to push away. As she sat in the church with her eyelashes fluttering in exhaustion, she had somehow convinced herself that once she allowed herself to sleep, Prim would make her escape and leave after Daryl. To stop those events from happening, Teddy decided to leave first so that when Prim did sneak out, she would already be with Daryl and Carol, meaning the sisters would be together again.

Of course, she didn't think about how Prim would react when she were to wake up to an empty booth where Teddy had previously laid. If she had thought that far, Teddy wouldn't have left but it had already been too late by the time the blonde had put that together.

Her intentions were as innocent as they could be. Teddy just wanted to be with Prim. She absolutely hated it when the brunette would leave her behind, even if it was for a quick supply run. In the past, everywhere Prim went, Teddy had been at her side. When she went to scavenge, Teddy would be following her quietly through the aisles, listening to her orders perfectly. They had a routine and Teddy didn't like it very much when Prim would break it. It scared her deeply when the two were separated.

Turns out, her decisions to prevent that had caused the exactly opposite.

An hour ago Teddy had been peacefully lying within the saftey of the church with her sister at her side. Thirty minutes ago she had snuck out the front doors with not a single eye watching, or so she thought at least. Twenty minutes ago she had realized that she was indeed lost. And within the last ten minutes - she lost track of time, - she had been followed by a single walker that had stumbled across her path at the wrong time.