Cover image fanart by andytweed, better resolution found on Tumblr.

This is no longer the easy part.

In the aftermath of Reg's murder and Pete's execution while I recover from my amputation and we all try to go back to some semblance of normality again, I find myself in 101 on a normal, lazy, spring morning curled up on the armchair in the living-room.

After some advice from Denise about my recovery I am writing facts about myself into one of Carol's flip-books:

'Name: Oliver Fabiano de Luca
Date of birth: September 30th 1996
Age: 15
Fact #1. I had a brother, Patrick.
Fact #2. I got bit a few weeks ago, and I lost my right hand.'

"PT?" Carl asks, crossing the room with two steaming bowls in hand. He sets them on the table and I get up and sit on a dining room chair, nodding thanks and set the flip-book aside. He cranes his neck to read. "You could pass for a total left-hander now."

Filling my mouth with porridge, I shape-shift into a human shrug.

Swapping my spoon for my pen, I write:

'Fact #3. My left handwriting is better.
Fact #4. I play guitar and I want to learn piano.
Fact #5. My favourite book is Butterfly Lion.'

Carl grins like I've just created a new colour or something.

I keep writing:

'Fact #6. I am growing out my jewfro.
Fact #7. I am an orphan.
Fact #8. I have never killed a person, but I have caused people to die.'

Very quietly, Carl says, "You don't need to write that last part."

Keeping my eyes on the book, I say, "I do."

"You do?"

"Yeah, so I don't forget."

I think about what to write. My mom was Italian but she didn't like pizza? My dad was Jewish but I never had a bar mitzvah? I could write a list of everything that I'm afraid of, or why zebras are great, but instead I just write:

'Fact #9. I am a beanie kind of guy.
Fact #10. I am in love with my best friend.'

Carl huffs and shakes his head. "Dork."

I shut the flip-book and go on with eating breakfast. Outside through the window I see Carol crossing the street. She stops at the foot of the porch to look at something.

"Sam..."

I stretch up and see him sitting on the step.

"Your dad used to hit you and then he got himself killed," she tells him. "It happened. Now it's done. You live with it or it eats you up. Go home."

She walks inside carrying a green bag full of pantry ingredients. She peers out the window and watches Sam outside and he must leave eventually because she heads into the kitchen.

"Mrs. Neudermyer broke her pasta maker," she says.

"She found one?" Carl asks.

"Where do you think Oliver and I have been getting all our fresh pasta from?" she asks, unpacking noodle and celery soup cans. She sighs. "She only had it for a couple weeks..."

She looks at me like she's expecting me to talk about it, too, but I don't want to talk about pasta-makers. I want to talk about things that matter, like why she won't invite Sam inside anymore, but possum Carol is still playing dead so I don't say anything at all.

Carol moves on, occupying herself with a baking dish and a nut cracker. She shoos Bean away when he sniffs at her ankles. Nell and Noah are upstairs. After Carl and I are done with breakfast we and Bean go upstairs into my room. Noah and Nell are sitting at the window ledge talking. My holster is laying next to my bed ever since the no-guns-inside-the-walls rule was lifted. Mine and Noah's stereo is playing some moody, slow album — one of Aiden's old mixes. I re-read Tokyo Ghoul. Carl sits at my feet on my bed. At some point he says something to me.

"Did you hear me?"

I look at him, guilty.

"I said Michonne never put her katana back, after that night," he tells me. "It's like she never even put it up there in the first place."

It's on your back, Abraham had said once, even when it's off your back.

Pete wasn't buried within the walls. Rick decided that Alexandria doesn't bury killers — at least not the killers who aren't on his side.

"You're doing that thing when you don't talk."

"My voice still hurts."

"No, it doesn't," Carl says.

I sigh.

He sighs. "Are you mad?"

"I'm worried," I say. "It's a big herd they're dealing with out there. Bigger than I've ever heard of."

Rick and Glenn were burying Pete when they found this herd trapped at the bottom of a quarry out west. Thousands of them. That's why Alexandria's still standing. The walkers were busy growling down there instead of eating over here like our own booby trap only it won't hold them forever.

"They're sorting it," Nell says to us. "Finishing the diversion wall, out there at Marshal and Redding."

"I know," I say, wanting to change subject.

Carl thinks of something first: "Gabriel wants me to start teaching him to defend himself now. Asked today while I was walking Judith."

"Will you?" Noah asks.

"Yeah," Carl says, "later."

I look up at him from Tokyo Ghoul. "Can I join?"

Carl looks at me, my amputation, then me again.

He nods. "Of course, man."

We're quiet for a minute. Noah and Nell go back to chatting. Carl leans back into my knees and I continue reading.

I'm not the protagonist of a novel or anything...
But...
If, for argument's sake, you were to write a story with me in the lead role...
It would certainly be...
A tragedy.

Then someone screams from outside.

Notes

Welcome back. Enjoy!

As always,
Happy reading.