wildest dreams ━ rick grimes × male!oc

chapter three:

ƇӇƛƤƬЄƦ ƬӇƦЄЄ: "you were waiting for me all along. well, I missed you"

Rick startles awake in the middle of the night. There's a car alarm beeping somewhere close and his shoulder is throbbing again. Shifting into a sitting position, Rick finds the mattress beside his own empty. Neither Morgan nor Duane are in sight.

He hurries towards the windows and pulls down some of the blinds so he can see out onto the street. It's filled with walkers, the car alarm is steadily bringing them all in closer.

Frowning, Rick hears quiet, muffled sobs and Morgan's soothing whispers coming from upstairs. Deciding to keep out of their business, Rick moves back to his mattress. He fishes some tylenol out of his bag and takes two pills with some water.

He's about to go back to sleep when the sound of shuffling behind the door catches his attention. At once, he's up on his feet and looking through the door hole. Rick finds a woman dressed in a nightgown, eyes wide and hair messy. For a single moment, she looks like a scared and lost human, but then she catches Rick's gaze through the door hole and her eyes don't look right. They're bloodshot and black with yellow dots, it's all sorts of wrong.

Curious, Rick watches as the woman drops her gaze to the door handle and starts twisting it, trying to get inside. When she finds the door locked, she just keeps twisting the handle persistently.

Moving away from the door and back to the mattress, Rick lays on his back and runs a hand down the side of his bandage. The wound underneath it doesn't hurt as much as it did yesterday and it's slowly getting easier to move. Granted, gaining his full strength back is going to take time, but Rick doesn't really have time now, does he?

"Hey," Morgan greets, coming down the stairs quietly. He joins Rick on the mattress, looking tired. He smells salty now, covered in Duane's tears.

"Hey," Rick whispers back. "Your pup upstairs?" He asks.

"Yeah," Morgan says, matching his tone, "He'll come back down when he's ready. He just... well, my wife, she," he pauses, turning on his side to face the door, "she's outside."

"Oh."

"She, um, she died. In the other room. On the bed up there."

Rick closes his eyes and lets Morgan talk.

"Nothin' I could do about it here," Morgan says, "that fever, man, skin gave off heat like a furnace." He's quiet for a long moment and then he starts mumbling, "should have put her down, I should have put her down, but I couldn't. I just don't have it in me. She's the mother of my child."

Rick mulls over Morgan's words. She's the mother of my child.

Does Rick think about Lori like that?

No. She gave him Carl, yes, but she was no mother to him. Not with the way she ignored him and pushed him away whenever he tried to get close to her. Clenching his hands into fists, Rick takes a deep breath to calm himself down.

"Tomorrow," Morgan stares at the door, watches the handle twist and twist but not give, "tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Rick echoes, because he knows what tomorrow entails. Tomorrow means Morgan putting his wife out of her misery.

It's not long before they both fall back asleep. Some time during the night, Duane comes down to join them. They wake up the next day, tired and hungry, but with a mission.

The three of them eat breakfast. They have cold, canned soup and Rick pulls out his stash of granola bars to give them an energy boost for the long day ahead of them.