Chapter Text
The last thing that Mika remembers before the big black hole in her memory is Judith screaming.
She remembers sitting on a picnic blanket, picking dandelions out of the grass while Judith crawled around in a sloppy circle. She remembers the sun on her face, and the sound of birds and the color green. Vibrant, beautiful green. It was pure summer, before any of the edges of it could start to brown.
And then Judith started screaming.
What happened next, Mika can only remember in flashes. The glint of a knife and a pair of worn-in cowgirl boots. Judith’s pink onesie and the blanket with stripes. The thing Lizzie said—it’s okay, you can change. And she was headed for…
Flashes. Tackling Lizzie. Slamming face-first into the ground and choking on dirt. The mingling tastes of earth and copper. Her own voice—Lizzie stop, Lizzie don’t, Lizzie Lizzie.
She remembers a searing burst of pain, remembers ribbons of red cutting all through the green. Her thoughts went rapid and desperate—Mommy help me, Daddy I need you, it hurts it hurts please… She remembers seeing flowers in the grass. And then just black.
And screaming screaming screaming screaming.
——
Judith is still screaming when Mika wakes up. She is in a bed, wrapped in a faded old quilt and there’s light streaming in through the windows. It takes her eyes a moment to adjust, to see Tyreese is sitting in a rocking chair with Judith in his arms. She is screaming, screaming screaming… and then Mika stirs, and Judith immediately quiets.
Mika hurts everywhere. Her head is heavy and her throat is scratchy and her stomach. Her stomach feels even worse than it did that time in second grade when her appendix burst. Mika knows that she is not supposed to use this word, but she feels like shit.
It’s hard to speak but she gets out a whisper. “What’s going on?”
Tyreese yelps and calls for Carol, who rushes into the room gasping, breathless.
“Mika?” Carol exclaims. “Mika, oh god, you’re awake, thank god.”
Mika can’t quite put the pieces together. They are in the cottage. And Mika had been outside with Judith and they’d been in danger? Mika had needed to save her from… From what? She’d jumped in the way of, of… And then she’d gotten stabbed in the stomach?
Mika looks over at the baby, who is clean and rosy and quiet now. Whatever danger they were in, now it’s gone. Now they’re safe. Safe and sound and okay, except…
“Where’s Lizzie?”
The noise that Carol makes does not sound like crying. It’s more like when the walker’s heads come off, when their bodies fall to pieces. It seems like the longer they walk around, the more they turn from flesh and blood and bone to dirt and mud and mossy green. Decaying, Mika thinks it’s called.
Tyreese speaks slow and even. “Mika, sweetie, Lizzie... Lizzie tried to kill you and Judith. We had to stop her. She’s gone.”
Gone. For one quick, awful, horrible, blissful moment, Mika feels relieved. Finally, she thinks. Finally.
And then something else seizes control of her body, some unbearable pain that she does not have a name for. The noise that she makes is not like crying. It’s not like crying at all.
——
When Mika was five, she asked for a baby for Christmas. She wanted to be a big sister.
Her mom had laughed. “I don’t think Santa’s elves can gift-wrap babies,” she said.
Mika got a baby doll instead. She named her Charlotte and carried her everywhere. She did everything you’d do with a real baby— dressed her, rocked her, sat her in a highchair at the breakfast table and held spoonfuls of cereal up to her mouth.
Lizzie played rough with her toys— not mean, just rough. She’d swing stuffed animals around by their ears and tangle her Barbies’ hair into knots. So when Mika found her in the playroom one day, holding Charlotte upside-down by the foot of her onesie and “feeding” her from a bottle full of sticky red juice, Mika freaked.
“Stop!” she shouted. “You’ll choke her!”
Lizzie blinked, confused. “I was just feeding her,” she says. “She was hungry. And anyway you can’t choke a doll.”
Mika didn’t care what Lizzie’s excuse was. “Just give her back.” Lizzie rolled her eyes.
“Fine, jeez.”
She sort of shoved the baby doll back into Mika’s arms and stormed off. Mika fixed Charlotte’s onesie and held her close.
“I won’t ever let her hurt you again,” she declared.
Mika was eight when the dead started walking-- still a little girl, still young enough to play with dolls. Charlotte was the one she took with her when they left their apartment. Charlotte made it seven months into the apocalypse, past the bombs dropping on all the big cities, past trying to find Aunt Lisa in Tampa, past Kissimmee and Orlando. Past Mommy dying. Then one night they had to flee their car so quickly that all their things got left behind.
Charlotte’s probably still there. Somewhere on the I-75, between Ocala and Gainsville. Locked in a car all alone. Mika thinks about it sometimes, and it feels like reaching into a little kid’s jewelry box, digging through all the clunky plastic pieces of her past.
So maybe that’s where Lizzie goes, when the leave her at the cottage. When Mika pushes her out of the corners of her mind and tries desperately to lock her away.
——
It turns out Mika had been unconscious for almost two days.
They stay at the cottage one more night, until Mika feels well enough to walk. And they move on. Mika has a bandage over the wound on her stomach, and they need to check it for infection sometimes and it hurts. But besides that she’s okay. They follow the train tracks. They find an old car seat in an abandoned van and take turns carrying Judith.
Judith is not the same as a baby doll, Mika knows, she looking after her still comes easily. She needs to be fed and changed and rocked to sleep. She needs to be handled with care.
At night when they set up camp, Mika huddles under Tyreese’s arm and tries to sleep. When she can’t, she gets up and goes to sit by the baby. Judith makes lots of noises, awake or asleep, just cute little gurgles bubbling from her mouth. Sometimes it almost seems like she’s trying to say something. Mika wonders how long it’ll be before she starts to speak.
“Did you like being a big brother?” she asks Tyreese one morning, when it’s her turn to carry the car seat. Judith is awake and happy and chewing her own foot.
“Most of the time,” Tyreese says, with a smile. Mika likes it when Ty smiles. His smile is soft and warm and fuzzy from his beard. “When Sasha wasn’t being bossy.”
Lizzie was bossy too, Mika thinks. Lizzie screamed and cried and broke things when she didn’t get her way. But she doesn’t say that out loud.
“Sasha’s still bossy,” she says instead. “But I like her anyway.”
——
They are deep in the woods when they hear something explode. The walkers hear it too, making a big clump as they lurch toward the sound. They find a cabin and a stranger setting off fireworks, and the next thing Mika knows Tyreese is holding a gun to the man’s head and Carol is covered in walker guts and promising to kill people.
Mika huddles in the corner of the cabin, Judith’s car seat in her arms. She wants desperately for the stranger to not see her, but he does.
“You got a name, kid?” he asks.
“Mika.”
“How about her?”
The wound in Mika’s side aches, and when she swallows there are knives in her throat. “Judith.”
He looks at Tyreese. “They your daughters or something?”
Tyreese, somehow, seems both larger and smaller than ever before, all at once. “They’re friends.”
“I don’t have any friends,” says the stranger. “Just the assholes that I stay alive with.”
The man says mean things, lots of mean things. He talks about saving children like it’s something awful and wrong. He tells Tyreese that they should run, they should kill him. He looks at Mika and smiles in a way that she does not like. Like his teeth are in his eyes.
“What do you think?” he asks. “He should kill me, right?” And Mika wants to scream but she can’t.
Outside the walkers are closing in, rattling and moaning and shaking the door. Tyreese gets up to check the lock and the stranger pounces, knocking Judith to the floor and grabbing Mika by the ribs. He claps his hands around her neck and Mika still can’t scream.
“Just one twist, man,” he says. “Don’t make me.”
He makes Tyreese leave the cabin, makes him go outside, where the walkers are. Judith is crying now, and the stranger drops Mika, goes to loom over the baby. He is panting and out of breath and there is a knife on the table and he picks it up—
and Mika sees red, sees green, sees her mother father MommyDaddyLizzie—
She screams and then she tackles him straight to ground.
Tyreese bursts through the door moments later, grabs the stranger out from under Mika’s fists and into his own. He hits and punches until the stranger stops struggling.
Tyreese throws the body outside and then Mika crawls into his arms and cries.
——
So Terminus was not a sanctuary.
Mika's a little unclear on the details, but somehow a whole bunch of people from the prison wound up at Terminus, and then they were in danger and then Carol went and set the place on fire. They all got out-- Rick and Carl and Michonne, Daryl, Sasha, Bob, Maggie and Glenn and some new people Mika doesn't know. They found Mika and Judith and Ty at the cabin, and now they're all travelling as one big group.
Daryl is the only one who will tell her what actually happened. That’s what’s great about Daryl— everyone else gives her excuses and kid-friendly-make-believe, but Daryl never sugar coats a thing.
“You know what a cannibal is, kid?” he says, when she sits down next to him at their campfire that night. The group has decided to stay for a bit at a church in the woods, the best shelter any of the them have in a while. There is water and food and a kind-of-nice priest, and they are feasting on Daryl-caught squirrels and canned vegetables.
Mika shakes her head. “Mm-mm.”
“S’a’person who eats people.”
“Eats people?”
“Yup,” Daryl says. “They were cannibals. Tried to eat us.”
“Eww!”
“Yup.” Daryl feeds a few leaves into the fire, takes a bite of his squirrel. “Hey, y’ever hear the story ‘bout Detective Clarice?”
“No.”
Daryl nods at the church door. “Why’n’tcha get ready for bed and I’ll tell it to ya?”
“Bed” is a sleeping bag and a couple throw pillows, fluffed up haphazardly on one of the pews. Mika brushes her teeth and curls up on the pew, and Daryl tells her the story of Clarice Starling, the brave lady detective who defends the world from the evil cannibal Dr. Lecter. Mika is riveted. She hangs on his every word until she falls asleep.
Or almost falls asleep, at least. Because when everything else has gone quiet, Mika is awake enough to hear Daryl and Carol whispering.
“You told her The Silence of the Lambs as a bedtime story?”
“Yeah, so? The kid likes stories, thought everybody knew that. An’ I didn’t tell it too dark, gave it a happy endin’ and shit.”
“Yes, but—“
Mika can’t hear what Carol says next, but she can hear Daryl kick the pew in front of him.
“Oh, shit. Carol, I’m sorry, I didn’t—“
“It’s okay, you didn’t know.”
“And Judith too?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus, fuck... How old is she again?”
“Ten.”
“Fuckin’ a, ten years old, shouldn’t be seeing that shit.”
Mika can’t sleep, so she tries counting sheep but the sheep are all screaming.
——
The cannibals find them, and there is a bloody, awful showdown, and Mika tries not to watch, she really does. She takes Judith and hides in the tiniest corner she can find, tries to block the whole thing out for both of them. But she still sees. She sees Rick and Sasha and Michonne cutting bodies into pieces and she knows the cannibals are the bad guys, but it still makes her wants to cry. Bob dies in Father Gabriel’s bed, and Tyreese digs one-too-many-graves.
Carol is not here. She and Daryl have just up and disappeared, and it is making Mika angry. Isn’t Carol supposed to be the one looking after her? That’s what Daddy wanted, anyway.
Mika sits on the front steps of the church, trying to silently fume the way teenagers do on tv. She wants to be tough and cool, one of those girls who wears black nail polish and watches scary movies without flinching. She wants to be Detective Clarice Starling.
But Tyreese sits down next to her, smiling in that soft gentle way of his and holding a stack of books. “Found these in the church library,” he says. “You said you liked science class, so I thought they might be up your alley.”
He holds out the top book on the pile— a DK Eyewitness book about weather. Mika actually gasps.
“Science books!” she exclaims. She throws her arms around him. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
“No problem, kiddo,” he says. “Y’know, I don’t know too much about science. Think you could teach me?”
So Mika opens up the book and tells him everything she knows about the weather, and then all about butterflies and killer whales and how plants grow.
“And did you know that mushrooms aren’t really vegetables?” she asks.
Tyreese’s eyebrows scrunch up. “They’re not?”
“Mm-mm. They’re funguses.”
Maggie is sitting few feet away, listening in with a quiet smile. “Fungi,” she corrects. She winks, and Mika isn’t angry anymore.
——
When Daryl shows up again, he is with a teenage boy named Noah— and Noah knows where Beth and Carol are. They are trapped in Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, and as soon as Noah finishes his story the group begins to make a rescue plan.
Tyreese, Rick, Sasha and Daryl accompany Noah back into the city. Mika stays behind, with Carl and Judith and Michonne. The church was damaged when the cannibals came, so they work on fixing it.
But their bad luck hasn’t run out yet. Just a few hours after their friends leave, the church is swarmed by a horde of walkers. It’s too many to fight off, so they escape through a tunnel Father Gabriel had dug, and trap the walkers inside of the building. No one’s hurt, but now they’ve got no place to stay.
What they do have is a fire truck. And Abraham, one of the new people, who is very good at driving it. So they pile in and head for Atlanta.
Mika doesn’t want to admit it, but she is a little shaken from the walker attack. It just seems like it never stops. First the prison, then the cottage, now this. They might never have a place to call home again. She climbs into the truck and slumps down on a seat. She manages to keep herself from crying, but not from sniffling a bit too loud.
It makes Abraham turn to look at her. “You alright there?”
“Yeah,” Mika says. “I’m okay.” But Abraham sees right through her.
“The walkers scare you?” he asks. Mika shrugs.
“Maybe a little. But I’m trying to start being brave.”
“Start?” Abraham raises one thick red eyebrow. “What do you mean start? I saw you keepin’ that baby safe from those Terminus bastards. I think you’re plenty brave.”
She was cowering in fear in the corner. Mika’s not sure that anyone else would count that as brave. But it’s nice of him to try and make her feel better. She shrugs again. “Thanks.”
Abraham gestures towards the seat next to him. “Wanna come sit up here in front? The view’s better.”
“I’m ten, isn’t it against the law?” Mika says.
Abraham smiles—his smile is warm and fuzzy through his mustache. It's a good smile. “The law?” he says. “Didn’t you hear? The world ended, there’s no laws anymore.”
And so Mika climbs into the front seat, and watches out the window all the way to Atlanta. He’s right—the view is better up here.
——
They make it to the city, and reunite with the rest of their group. Carol and Beth are both a little worse for wear— Carol got hit by a car, and Beth took a bullet graze to the side of her head—but they’ll be alright. Maggie hugs Beth for what seems like hours, and Mika feels a pang where her appendix should be.
Noah has a bit of good news—he’s from a community in Richmond, Virginia, and he’s pretty sure it’ll be safe there. So they load up their van and drive north.
Mika is overjoyed to see Beth again. They were good friends back at the prison—Mika loved helping with Judith—and Beth’s the one who taught her how to do a mini-braid in her hair. Mika’s pretty sure that Beth’s actually a princess in disguise, because she is kind and fair and patient and when she sings it sounds like Cinderella. She hopes she’ll be even half-as-cool as Beth is when she grows up.
As for the new people: Rosita is pretty but scary, and Noah’s a little quiet but really nice. Eugene is kind of weird— like, talks in math problems and doesn’t really smile. But he knows everything about chemistry and doesn’t get impatient when Mika wants to ask a bunch of questions, so he’s okay in her book.
Tara is great. She is funny and cheerful and she makes up games whenever things get boring, like at summer camp. She used to have a little niece named Meghan, she says, and Meghan was so good at games that Tara always had to find ways to make them harder. And Mika knows that “used to have” means that Meghan is dead, but Tara never says anything about what happened to her.
And then there’s Abraham. Abraham, Mika has decided, is the absolute coolest person in the whole entire world. He is amazing. He’s a million feet tall, he has no inside voice, he knows how to blow stuff up and he cusses more than anyone Mika’s ever met. He gives Mika piggyback rides and lets her sit in the front seat whenever he drives. Mika likes everything about him.
Including his relationship with Rosita. Rosita might be kind of scary, but she and Abraham are always making each other smile. Mika loves seeing people in love— she and her mom used to be die-hard Bachelorette fans.
“When you get married,” Mika starts, early one morning as she helps Rosita gather firewood. That’s the other thing about Rosita— she never gives Mika little kid versions of jobs, she just asks her to help out and trusts that she can do it. “Can I be your flower girl?”
Rosita’s mouth drops open, half-shocked and half-smiling. “Married? Who said anything about me getting married?”
Mika shrugs. “You and Abraham are in love and when people are in love they get married. And I’ve never been a flower girl before.”
Rosita laughs, covering her mouth with her hand as a light pink flush spreads on her face. Mika think she’s never looked prettier.
“Chiquita,” she says, “you can absolutely be my flower girl. Whenever it is that I get married”
The trip north takes a few weeks, as they move by foot and by car, across highways and train tracks, through untamed woods. They camp outside or find shelter where they can, eating canned beans and whatever it is Daryl manages to catch. They take turns carrying Judith. It’s hard, they’re all tired and hungry and cold at night. But they’re all together, and that makes it okay.
And then they make it to Virginia, and it isn’t what they’d expected. Noah’s town is abandoned and broken, windows shattered on all of the houses, trash and branches and body parts littering the streets. There are walkers— there’s a walker, and Tyreese doesn’t have enough time to run.