Reagan leant against the wall of the living room and waited silently for the rest of the group to arrive and settle down, Rick and Lori were the last to come in, Carl right behind them. The boy stalled looking over at everyone before huffing and walking off to join Jimmy and Beth in one of the others rooms.

"So how do we do this? Take a vote?" Glenn queried from his spot in front of the piano after a few heavy moments of silence.

"Does it have to be unanimous?"

"How about majority rules?"

"Well, let's just see where everyone stands then we can talk through the options" Rick stated moving forward with calming hands as if trying to ease the tension in the already tense room, everyone knew things were going to get said but how they would react to them would vary from person to person.

"Well, where I sit there's only one way to move forward" Shane was the first to throw his two cents in.

"Killing him, right?" Dale asked looking around the group. "I mean why even bother to take a vote? It's clear which way the winds blowing"

"Well if people believe we should spare him I want to know"

"I can tell you it's a small group, maybe just me and Glenn" Dale moved his eyes to Glenn who had grown more uncomfortable.

"Look, I think you're pretty much right about everything all the time but this–"

"They've got you scared"

"He's not one of us, and we've– we've lost too many people already"

Dale looked from Glenn to Maggie. "How about you? Do you agree with this?"

She shifted her weight from foot to foot looking over at Rick. "Couldn't we just keep him prisoner?"

Quinn shifted slightly in his spot in the corner and shook his head. "Just another mouth to feed over winter, and lord knows it's gonna be hard enough to feed ourselves over winter and that barn won't stay warm enough for him either"

"He could be an asset, give him a chance to prove himself"

"Put him to work?"

"That means a constant guard, twenty four seven," Reagan finally lent her voice to group's discussion. "And how many of us could honestly say, here and now, they we'd feel safe with him around?" She scanned the group to see most shaking their heads.

"So that's it? We kill him?"

"Look, let's say we let him join us, maybe he's helpful, maybe he's nice," Shane sneered. "We let out guard down and maybe he runs off and brings back his thirty men"

She looked towards Daryl as he shifted growing tense for a moment, his eye met hers briefly, a look of fire in them as Dale disputed Shane's theory.

"If we do this, we're saying there's no hope, rule of law is dead, there is no civilization"

"Oh my god"

She shot a glare across to Shane as he muttered and decided to lend her voice to the argument. "We insist on buryin' our dead instead of burnin' them but here we are willin' to kill a kid, all he's sayin' is that just because the world went to the dogs that it doesn't mean we have to lose our humanity, we lose that and then what are we? We're no better than him and his boys, no better than the shufflers we kill, we end up becomin' nothin' but mindless fuckin' animals," She shook her head lightly. "We go down this road and there's no turnin' back, if we kill him we might as well kill every other survivor that we come across because they pose a potential threat"

"Ray, if he leads his people back here we'd all fuckin' die" She watched as her brother took a step towards her, a bold but aggressive move on his behalf.

"You think I don't fuckin' know that, Quinn," She snarled. "But I can empathise with that poor bastard's position right now, I've been there, or do you not remember that?"

His face fell, all that fire and bravado deflating as he took a step back. "Of course I remember," He muttered quietly. "I nearly fuckin' lost you, how the hell do you expect me to forget that?"

"Look," She turned to Rick. "I agree wholeheartedly that he should die, but only because he stands between me and my children. Just because the world got dragged into darkness doesn't mean we should follow that road with it"

"Why the hell are we even listening to a woman whose never even told us her real name?" Shane interjected and she turned her gaze on him and snorted softly shaking her head.

"That's why you're bein' a wanker? All 'cause you don't know my name?" She started to laugh. "Oh, that's fuckin' rich comin' from a lyin' prick like you"

"What the hell are you talking about?" He pushed himself off the fireplace taking a threatening step towards her.

"You know exactly what I'm talkin' about" She snapped back taking her own aggressive step forward, despite her healing injury she was more than willing to throw down against him again, though this time she would be putting him down instantly instead of just teaching him a lesson.

His eyes narrowed as he straightened up and tensed, he was beginning to get defensive. "You don't know what the hell you're talking about"

"Are you really sure about that?" She challenged him with a smirk. "But can you honestly say that not knowin' my given name is what's makin' you so stroppy?" She asked coldly. "Or is it 'cause I'm smarter than you in just about every goddamn way?" She seethed taunting him cockily before turning her attention back to Rick. "I don't give a flyin' fuck what you do with this kid but I'll tell you this, keepin' him locked up in that shed is cruel, it's fuckin' torture, so either put the poor bastard out of his misery or do what you were plannin', dump him in some bloody paddock for all I care but if you don't do somethin' about him by tonight, I will" She snapped before turning and heading towards the door, she was utterly through with the conversation that was playing like a broken record. She stalled briefly in the doorway and turned back to Shane staring him direct in the eye as she spoke. "As for my name, it's Reagan, Reagan O'Rourke" With that she left, the front door slamming shut behind her.

Reagan sighed softly looking skyward before she caught sight of the barn that had housed the walkers in her peripheral, she turned towards it and felt a cold sinking feeling in her gut, something wasn't right about it, she felt as if he was calling to her, beckoning her down to it. She glanced back through the mesh of the outer door as she heard the argument inside starting to flare again before heading down towards the barn, the walk down was silent, the entire farm seemed to be blanketed in an eerie silence, a silence that weighed down on her with each step she took towards the barn.

Goosebumps flared across her skin as the chilling feeling seeped through her skin and settled in her muscles, she inhaled and then exhaled slowly as she pushed the gate open and made a beeline for the barn, only one door was open, the stench of the walkers that had been in there had seeped into every crack and crevice making the barn absolutely reek of death and putrefaction.

She stopped cold in the barn's doorway, her lungs constricting and heart almost stopping. The keening screech that came from the woman standing in the barn dropped her to her knees and she placed her hands over her ears digging her nails into her skull as the woman continued to scream out her screeching cry.

Reagan could feel a burn in her chest, the need to take a breath but she couldn't force her lungs to work, all she could do was stare. The woman wasn't pretty, not like her father had told her some of them could be, she wasn't even ugly, all she was, was a woman with greying skin and thick oily black tendrils of hair shadowing her face, her body wrapped in rags and fingers showing bones worn into fine points as sharp as razors, she seemed to just float there in the back of the barn, hands covering her eyes as she screamed, flecks of dried blood across her body with wet blood dripping off the edge of her chin.

Reagan wanted to move, wanted to get away from the woman as she began to move towards her but she couldn't. She stayed stock still and as silent as death as the woman simply floated past her, her keening cry stopping as she drew nearer, one hand moving from her face allowing her to see that the woman had no eyes, just soulless, black, bleeding sockets. A hand moved to trail across the back of her own, the sharp sting of worn bones slicing perfectly through her skin jolted her out of her reverie, her burning lungs finally getting their breath of air, albeit a stale, decaying, breath of air.

She jerked her head around and found nothing behind her. Nothing, she was gone, the woman in rags had simply disappeared, confusion stirred and she began to wonder if it had just been a figment of her imagination but one look at the back of her hand and the thin deep line across the back of it confirmed her suspicions as blood ran hot from the wound, down over her wrist and then down her arm. The chilling feeling that had drawn her to the barn in the first place was still with her but it had now shifted into her bones chilling her right to the very core.

Reagan stared at the blood on the back of her shaking hand; that thing, that woman, that spectre, hadn't just been any sort of spectre, it had been a Banshee, something she'd always thought was just an old myth, a legend. She forced herself to take a few breaths and clenched her shaking hands, in her mind's eye she could see its blurry outline, hear that keening screeching cry from when she'd been shot. She shuddered slowly picking herself up and felt fear settle in her bones, the blood in her veins turned to ice as a realisation hit her, if it had indeed been a Banshee then someone was going to die and very soon. She watched her hands tremble and choked on a breath as panic began to claw at the back of her mind, meeting the Banshee had shaken her, shaken her worse than when she'd been a prisoner.

Reagan sat on the edge of the tiny wooden dock, feet dangling in the water, as she tried to come up with every possible way to refute what she saw, but she had seen the Banshee with her own two eyes, she couldn't refute that, she couldn't reason away what she'd seen. "There you are, been lookin' everywhere for you" She jerked at the sound of Daryl's voice from behind her, she'd been so lost in her own mind she hadn't even heard him approach. "…Reagan?" His footstep's stopped a little way behind her as she remained silent, hands curled tightly around the edge of dock bleaching her knuckles white. "What's wrong?"

She shook her head and moved to stand, she hadn't stopped shaking since her encounter and she didn't want him to see her like this again. She couldn't look at him even when he placed a hand on her shoulder.

"Reagan, what happened?" Worry laced his tone as his grip tightened on her trembling shoulder. "You're shakin' like you just met death or some shit"

"…I did"

He snorted softly. "What?"

She finally looked up and pointed towards the barn in the distance. "In the barn, I– I met a Banshee"

"Banshee? What?"

"She's part of the Fae, an omen of death" Her gaze dropped to the wound across her hand and she rubbed at it ignoring the pain that flared through her arm from it.

He took her hand and looked at the wound. "What the hell'd you do?"

"I didn't do it, she did" She shivered, the chilling feeling was still present in her bones.

"She ain't real, just a myth, like all that other Fae shit your brother told me about"

She yanked her hand out of his grip, the words burned, as if they'd been acid. "You saw a Chupacabra, did you? And they're supposedly mythical creatures," She snapped at him, she didn't believe in much and deemed herself a believer of science but sometimes there were just some things that science couldn't explain away; this was one of them. "How the hell else do you explain this?" She motioned to the back of her hand. "I sure as shit didn't do it to myself, why the bloody hell would I? I…" She shook her head lightly. "Someone is goin' to die tonight"

"Ain't no one dyin', Reagan" His arms circled around her shoulders tugging her into his warmth and she shifted curling her arms around his waist underneath his leather vest and slow inhaled his scent before coming to a decision on the exhale.

"Love, I need to tell you somethin'" She felt him tense at the words.

"What is it?"

She pulled back to look at him, she wanted him to understand one thing before she told him. "I want you to understand one thing, I don't want you to feel cornered, like you have to say somethin' in return for what I'm about to tell you, I just want you to belt up and listen," The trembling in her hands had returned as her heart began to race in her chest. "And I don't know any other way to say this other than to just come right out and tell you, since dancin' 'round people has never been one of my strong points…" She tried to quell the nervousness that had rooted itself in her as she looked him in the eye. "I love you, Daryl"

Silence enveloped them as she pressed a gentle kiss to his lips; a part of her knew he wouldn't respond, another part hoped he would, but either way he knew where she stood now and what he did with it was now up to him. She didn't known if she needed him to say it back, but she did know that she needed him to keep being there for her, to keep having her back when she needed it the most, and to give her the strength and support she needed to get through each hellish day and night until her luck finally ran out.

Authors Note

Dear lordie its been a long time, I don't really have an excuse other than I've been a lazy fuck and life's been getting in the way again, I'm lucky enough that I can do bits of writing at work but it's still not enough sometimes. I've been favouring other stories over this one, I've got some new ones in the works including a Dragon Age Inquisition one for Solas that I've been working on since long before the Trespasser DLC came out, one for Chicago PD for Hank Voight, and one for The Witcher for Geralt. I've been trying to kick my own ass into gear by doing one shots for all my OC's (I didn't realise how many I actually had until I wrote them all out on paper, about 35+). I'll try posting those to my tumblr, maybe on here as well, the link for my tumblr is in my profile.

Hopefully everyone is keeping safe with this virus currently ravaging the world, I'm lucky enough to live in a country that's far enough away from everyone else that we're not as bad off as others yet.

Reply Time!

Mitsuki. Smith: I've missed everyone as well. More is on the way. Although there's only about 5 more chapters until the end of this one, hence why I'm trying to get the next one almost completed.

celia azul: Thank you dear, its nice to hear I'm appreciated, I love writing and adding to an already expanding universe. I could never stand with Dale and his wanting to save Randall either, it just seemed like such a stupid decision and then trying to drag everyone else into it as well.

lilwicca1989: You're welcome doll, another is on the way.

KEZZ 1: Thank you doll, I'm currently writing more, I have plans mapped out right up until the end of season 9, I still haven't started watching season 10 yet, been busy with catching up on all my other shows.

nessiesmith2012: You have to remember that she's still not part of the group at that point and they could have very easily turned on her, she's the new comer and, depending on how much of what went down Shane actually saw, she could have wound up with his shotgun to her head since they already had bad blood starting between them, plus she's someone that's always going to take a hit for someone weaker than her.

FireGodsKittenLove: Are they though? I mean, we still have a long way to go before we get to them, plus we're going to meet someone else first before we meet them, if you can guess who I'll give you a virtual high five. I'm glad to be back as well, it's taking me a while but I'm getting back to normal slowly.

Haley tuttle: New Chapter is finally here.

Romantific: New Chapter is finally here.