if you love me, don't let go

Things Don't Always Work Out The Way You Want

A/N:

Anyway, this is the chapter that kept kicking my ass in terms of tenses. You would not believe how many times I rewrote it in past tense or perfect past tense and in the end it still didn't turn out quite correct, but it's better then where it began.

I did find it more difficult to get into Yumko's headspace, I think mostly because we know even less about her life than we do Magna's so it was really just taking cues from her personality and starting mostly from scratch. Surprisingly, 10x14 actually gelled really well with the backstory I'd already written out for Yumiko's character so that was nice. What was NOT nice was watching her and Magna part ways - and without even a goodbye hug. I can't BELIEVE we've never seen these guys hug, when they've hugged so many other characters, even my mum pointed out how weird that was and how they're treated so obviously different compared to the straight relationships on the show. It's pretty disappointing.

I could relate to Miko as being someone who had had so many plans for her life and the future but then, well, life blows them to smithereens so that aspect was easier to write.

Next chapter is the last one from Miko's POV (the final chapter will be Magna's again) and we get a flashback for their third year into the apocalypse.

"You don't know what lies ahead for us. No one does. I had all these plans for my life, and I clung to them so hard. And for what?"

- Yumiko, The Walking Dead, 10.14

. . .

After her parents split when she was thirteen, her mother had moved to America for a job - and taken Yumiko with her. Long-distance back and forth over the years to stay with her father during the holidays had been rough, but she'd also secretly been glad that she no longer had to listen to the sound of her parents fighting through her bedroom door almost every night - even if the price was leaving behind all her friends, her home and the man she loved more than any other in the universe.

She'd learned how to live with distance, to make a life out of partly granted wishes and find happiness in the glass half full approach. Her childhood and youth hadn't turned out the way she'd wanted but she could adjust to that - and had done so rather well.

So long as she focused on the positives. So long as she filled her life to the brim with hobbies and studies and little side projects to keep her mind busy, always busy.

So long as she never let herself be still.

She'd done amazing in school as a result, beyond her own expectations even. But it also hadn't been in any way surprising. For the most part, Yumiko had made school her life - at least, the educational aspect. She made friends easily, formed connections without thought with almost everyone, but at the same time there was a sizable distance between her and whoever she allowed into her orbit. It wasn't intentional. She liked people, liked interacting with them, she just . . . couldn't seem to get close to anyone. Didn't much see the point.

She preferred spending time on her studies and after-school activities rather than hanging out at the mall or going to parties. She was an only child, so she was used to her own company - and more than comfortable with it.

She had her pets - between the two houses there was a total of five dogs, two cats, a tortoise called Pistachio who traveled with her, and a horse that resided in her uncle's stable in Kent - and she had her parents. She and her father conversed every day and it was he who Yumiko shared her thoughts with, her passions. Her relationship with her mother was a little more caustic, the older woman never quite getting over the needling anxiousness a gamut of childhood illnessess had provoked in her; and sometimes that overprotectiveness could be suffocating. They also disagreed quite turbulently over the direction Yumiko's life should take. Her mother had leapt at the obvious smarts her daughter possessed and taken it to mean that, of course Yumiko would one day become a doctor like her, a surgeon if all went well.