Never Had Wings | Walking Dead Fanfic | Sequel to AWAS

-PROLOGUE-

"Stacie," I addressed her without slowing down nor a turn of my head. I had grown weary and annoyed at her attempts to get me to open up about everything. "I do not want to talk about Rick. I do not want to talk about Andrea. I do not want to talk about Thea." I told her. "And I sure as hell do not want to talk about my brother." I added on at the end, this bit coming out much faster and much quicker and much more painfully than I had expected. Just by the mention of his name, I felt the wound reopening again along with my tear ducts.

"Elec-"

"Can we just, like, skip the whole concept of conversation?" I queried whilst cutting her off, keeping my eyes glued to the woodland before me. "I, for one, am not in the mood, Stacie." I revealed, not that it was much of a surprise. "Today had been a no good, very bad day." I muttered underneath my breath, wanting to rip the world in two with my mind or burn the whole forest down to ash.

Crunch.

"Stacie?"

Slowly, I pivoted myself around to see that Stacie had been the cause of the crunching sound. She had fallen on a clump of dead, dry golden leaves on the forest floor. Her face was deathly pale, the colour of sheets or snow....the colour of a drained person.

"Stacie." I exclaimed, rushing over to the girl. "Stacie? Stacie? Can you hear me? Stay with me, sweetie, stay with me." I urged her, positioning the girl so that she was leant up against a big willow tree. "Stacie? Stace? Anastacia? Sweetie, please."

Slowly, Stacie's eyes began to slicker open ever so slightly. 'Oh, thank the Lord.' I thought to myself as her deep blue eyes connected with my own. 'She can focus, okay, that's good.' I took a mental note before wondering about her temperature. Automatically, I placed my palm on the girl's sweaty forehead.

"Oh, my God." I panicked, drawing my palm away from the boiling forehead. "You're burning up," I informed her. "You-you must have what I had before...erm....." I hypothesized. "Heat Exhaustion, yes that must be it." I put forward after searching for the name. "Here, let me get you some water." I proposed, unzipping my backpack and retrieving a bottle of water before attempting to unscrew the cap.

Weakly, Stacie began to roll up her sleeve of her pink blood stained cardigan that she had been wearing for the last few days. 'Better get that off of her, she's already burning up.' I thought, in the middle of unscrewing the cap off of my water bottle. In the corner of my eyes, I caught sight of the wound on her wrist that was still oozing with blood that she had revealed by pulling her sleeve up.

A bite wound.

"No." I gasped, accidently dropping the water bottle to the floor at the sight of it. "No." I denied before taking Stacie's skinny arm in my hands, gripping it loosely in order to inspect it. "Oh God, no." I shook my head, vigorously shooting up to my feet. "No. No. No. No." I raged, I would have broken everything in sight but seeing as I was in the forest all I had to let out my anger on were the trees. "No! No! No!" I screamed kicking one tree, punching the next in fury.

"I'm going to die... aren't I?" Stacie questioned me but I could barely hear her over the blood pulsing around my brain whilst I paced back and forth with my hands knotted into my short waves hair. "Like Jim? Like Sophia?" Stacie questioned causing me to cringe and turn to look at her with a pained expression. "It's alright, I already know the answer," she 'reassured' me.

"Stacie......" I glanced down at her being with a sigh. Biting my lip, I slowly crouched down in front of the girl to get on eye level with her like I did usually. But this time, I had failed. Stacie would usually tip toe whenever I did that to reach my eyes but now, she didn't have the energy to even stand. "Why didn't you tell me?" I asked, pulling my hand painfully from within my hair.