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

21. Season 4 ~ The Grove

Summary: A tragedy befalls the grove.

CW: Gore and body horror involving minors.

~

Serpents in my mind
Looking for your crime
When everything changes
There's no more time

You've got a knife, well I've got a gun...

~

The next morning, they all sat around the table picking at pecans for breakfast and working their way through the almost-finished jigsaw puzzle. Lizzie was still very quiet. Oliver felt guilty for not telling Carol what he saw her doing on the tracks, but he didn't want to snitch on her, especially since Mika hadn't either. In any case, Carol of all people would understand why it was important to keep some secrets, right? Oliver thought of Mika and her plenaria worms and wondered if maybe the walkers were just Lizzie's type of worm, and figured she'd likely learned yesterday that it wasn't okay to play with them. He would tell Carol only if Lizzie did something like it again, but otherwise, it was between him and the girls.

Lizzie must've sensed them all thinking of her, because eventually, she said, "I had to help stop them."

"Do you understand what they are now?" Carol asked.

"I know. I know what I have to do now. I know."

"It's ugly," Carol said, "and it's scary. And it does change you. That's how we get to be here. That's... the cost. That's growing up now."

"I don't wanna hurt anyone," Mika said, Griselda Gunderson in her lap. "I don't wanna be mean."

"You have to be sometimes," Lizzie told her, "but just sometimes."

Carol gave Judith to Oliver. Holding her was something that he was finding pretty easy now, after enough practice. Carol smiled at him and went to the kitchen.

"You know," she said, "we still have a lot of pecans here."

"Tonne," Lizzie said.

"You getting sick of them yet?"

Mika grinned. "Nope!"

"C'mon, I got an idea," Carol said, and a few minutes later they were all —Oliver included— cracking open as many pecans as they could fit onto a baking tray. Lizzie found the nut-cracker difficult and kept rocketing pecan shell shards across the room. It made them all laugh, even Judith.

"I used to make this with my grandma when I was little," Carol told them while they searched for any edible parts of another exploded pecan and put them on the tray with sugar and cinnamon.

"They smell good," Mika said.

Carol sprinkled more cinnamon over the tray, laying them even. "There you go. All right. I think you guys are ready to start doin' the cooking around here." She took the tray to the oven. "Who wants to put them in?"

Oliver sat smirking as the girls leaped from their stools.

"I do!"

"Me!"

~

While the pecans baked, the grown-ups left to fill all their buckets and bottles with water at the pump, and after, they were going to start packing and preparing to leave for Terminus tomorrow.

Oliver was outside by the barn, sitting on the old tractor, keeping an eye on the girls who were playing together on a blanket. Tyreese must've removed the walkers from yesterday's breach because they were gone, and the smell of burned rot only lingered slightly in the air.