Stale M&M's (recently plagiarized as "Sweet Tooth") The Walking Dead Fanfiction

16. Season 4 ~ Claimed

Summary: Carl and Michonne play a game. Meanwhile, Oliver and Rick try to avoid being found inside the house.

Chapter Warning: Non consent and sexual/physical violence near the end towards a minor. It isn't written graphically or explicitly but the implications are there all the same. It lasts for 3 chapters, so please skip ahead to the chapter titled "Season 4 ~ Black Smoke" if you wish not to read this arc.

~

Carl closed another front door behind himself, extra bags hanging off his and Michonne's shoulders and backs as they made their way across a front lawn, a parked camper van, and on towards the next house.

"Find anything good?" Michonne asked. "Candy bars? Comic books? Crazy Cheese?"

He gave her an odd look. "Huh?"

"Bam!" With a dramatic flare, she presented a colourful canister from her loot bag and grinned at him. "Crazy Cheese. Found it still sealed and everything. Now, I'll be nice and let you have the first pull."

"No, thanks."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm fine."

She frowned. "You don't seem fine."

She was right. Carl wasn't fine. His mind was elsewhere.

"I'm just tired," he lied. "Okay?"

Michonne sighed, following after him a beat. He turned to look at her when he heard a shallow hiss — she was filling her mouth with the crazy cheese until it overflowed and spilled down her cheeks.

Carl grimaced and kept walking.

"I'm sorry," Michonne said, meeting him at the next door. "I'm not very good at making boys your age laugh." She wrapped her knuckles on the front door, squinting through the little window.

"I was laughing," Carl told her. "Inside."

Michonne rolled her eyes. "Toddlers find me funny. Two, three-year-olds."

She knocked again on the door, waiting for any shambling responses. There were none.

Carl frowned. "What do you mean toddlers?"

"I had a three-year-old son and he happened to find me extremely funny." She led the way inside the house, drawing her katana. "We need food, batteries, water, in that order."

Dumping his bags and shutting the front door, Carl hurried across the room to where Michonne was rooting through the living room cabinet. He shook his head, aware that she was avoiding looking at him.

"Why didn't you ever tell me you had a kid?" he asked.

Still with her back turned, she just shrugged.

"What was his name?" Carl insisted. "Did you have any others? Were you married?"

"Okay." Michonne turned to him stiffly, shuffling past with a pointed finger. "I'll answer one question at a time, one room at a time, and only after we've cleared it..." As she backed away, Carl saw the forcedness in her smile, and then how relieved she looked when he finally nodded in agreement. She left quickly through an open set of glass doors into a dining area.

Carl looked around, checking drawers and under the couch and inside the TV stand, finding a few batteries in a remote controller. When he found Michonne, she was looking at a painting hung beside the table, depicting two dancing rabbits.

"What was your son's name?"

"I said after."

"Well, these are actually two separate rooms and we already cleared that one, so..."