Sweet Tooth (Twd x Male Oc)

Chapter 64: Season 6 ~ The Next World

FIVE MONTHS LATER
October 2012

Standing under the gazebo on a mild autumn morning, I peer up at Enid. She lies stretched across the roof, reaching down to me. I grab her hand. She counts to three and pulls. My feet scuff against the pillars and bench-back — I'm grunting — I'm slipping.

"Hold on!"

I can't.

I fall.

As I hit the ground, a dirt cloud bursts up around me. Bean fusses over me. Enid sighs and frowns down at me disappointedly. I groan in pain and shrug the dog off, cursing in Italian as I get up and brush dust off my clothes.

"Try again," Enid says.

"No." I put my arm in my hoodie pocket even though Denise tells me I should try not to hide it anymore. "This is useless. I barely make it climbing over the wall."

Enid tuts, turning over onto her back to look at the sky. Her hair falls over the roof edge, billowing in the slow, petrichor breeze.

"He's gonna make us go out there again, you know."

I shrug. "I can talk to him for you?"

I can almost hear her roll her eyes.

"No," she says. "You like going out there. I don't. Not anymore. This is my problem. I'll talk to him myself."

A lot has changed since the herd came all those months ago. Carl survived the gunshot — the bullet went in his right eye and out his temple and messed up the small part in his brain that processes thoughts into words. He couldn't speak at all for weeks, and only in the last few months he's been managing simple sentences again.

As well as that, it's now harder for him to concentrate on things for more than a few minutes at a time, and sometimes when he's hurt himself he won't notice until somebody points out that he's bleeding. His depth perception is all messed up, without his right eye.

It's been hard for him to recover.

Nothing has really been the same. Not even Carl and I. We're more like friends now than anything else. I don't know why. I guess I was just so afraid I would lose him after he was shot, and I knew that I was causing issues between us even since I lost my hand, that I just realised after it all —after what we'd already lost— it was better for us to focus on mending ourselves before we got caught up trying to mend each other.

We don't really talk about it.

In the meantime, we try to be normal kids again. We read comics and listen to music. Carl and I do PT and sometimes I go to therapy sessions with Denise. We go outside the walls together —Carl, Enid, and I— into the woods. We'll spend whole days there sometimes by our hollow tree and we've even renovated the area a little — pulled some more logs over for furniture and we even brought a locker out to keep our stuff in.

The woods became our safe-place.

Or I thought it had.

"Sorry you don't like it out there anymore," I say.

Enid turns to look at me from the gazebo roof. "I'm not."

She climbs down and we sit together on the bench.

"I'm done running away," Enid tells me. "You still lose people even after they're gone. I didn't know what that meant before, but Glenn told me. He said, 'The people you love. They made you who you are. They're still a part of you. And, if you stop being you, that last bit of them that's still around inside of who you are... it'll be gone.'."

"Faith without works is dead," I say.

"Is that... from the bible?"

I shrug. "Saw it on a wall in Father Gabriel's old church."