Alice was not worried of the unknown. She was worried of what she already knew. She was worried of the promises that the new people were making to her-the ones bringing the people of a fallen Woodbury into their own settlement. The girl felt sorry t...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
└───────────────────┘
C A R L
CARL GRIMES KNEW BETTER than to have let Alice push him away, out on those church steps. He couldn't stop his body as he shamefully approached the door, placing a hand on its rusty handle.
The boy hesitated before entering, not knowing what he could say that wouldn't get completely washed out within the magnitude of their conversation. Alice now knew the truth about her father, and Carl wanted nothing except for her to yell at him. But instead, the girl gently rejected his presence within all of her angry gracefulness. Her patience made him feel that much more guilty about it all.
"I—I'm sorry." He muttered.
Going against every voice in his head telling him to stay—telling him to fight for her—Carl opened the church door, turning his back to the mourning girl. His boots sounded as loud as ever as they stepped back onto the creaky wood floor, preceding the sound of the heavy door closing behind him. He stood there, in silence, having no goal of going to sleep like the rest of the group.
Carl stayed planted against the church doors, physically unable to part from them. His chest slightly heaved up and down, intaking breaths from between his parted, kissed lips.
The boy's lips were still numb, tingling from the contact that they made with Alice's. It was his first kiss, and he didn't even have time to process the moment before the ugliness of the world around him crept its way back in.
It didn't help that Alice was already bombarded with details about Elliot's death. The added betrayal of the truth being within arm's reach for so long was something that Carl never even considered.
His main focus was protecting her—which came to feel like he'd just been protecting himself. Carl Grimes was now completely selfish within the parameters of his own mind. He was so focused on sheltering the girl because her pain made him hurt. In a way, the boy equated his pure motives into that of an evil, narcissistic monster. Carl was only looking out for himself. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt her, but he became the thing that he wanted so badly to prevent.
And after dropping the emotional napalm on the girl who continued to pile on her losses, he left her alone out there. The boy had compromised her headspace, as well as her safety. Surely she could've handled herself if her weapons weren't left back at Terminus—the place where it all went wrong.
Carl thought that he was respecting Alice's wishes by retreating back into the church, but wasn't he just doing more damage? Wasn't he hanging her emotions out to dry? Was Carl Grimes taking the easy way out?
