Hell, madam, is to love no longer. –G. Bernanos

Michonne looked for the Governor the moment she freed herself of her bindings. She should have known it would end this way. Now her friend was dead and others would die before the day was over. Her katana was lying where he had dropped it, next to Hershel's body. No time to think about the horror of that, only to take revenge. The pounding in her ear was her own heartbeat, and the grip of her blade the only sure thing.

Impaling the man was surprisingly anticlimactic. Michonne felt no triumph, only a dull sense of relief. He deserved worse. She could only leave him to turn, as he'd done so cruelly for Andrea. She thought of her friend's tears, her brave grey eyes dulling and closing. A rush of madness swept her from head to toe. He wasn't dead yet. She'd see how long he, with all his monstrous strength, could live without an arm, or a leg, or his ears or his nose –

Gunfire roared throughout the compound. Her instincts took over after that. It only took her a moment to see that Rick was okay. Blood ran in alarming rivulets down his face, but he was alive, and most importantly, he could walk. Somewhere, children were screaming.

How easily she could shift from killing walkers to killing people. It was easier, in fact; people often hesitated at the sight of her, and their fear made them stupider and slower and easier to read. She felt nothing when she killed them. These people had ruined her home, and they were hurting her people, scattering them to the wind after all the blood spilled and soul sacrificed trying to make something out of this wretched wilderness. The unfairness of it pounded in her veins, crushing her lungs in all the same ways that her son's death had. The utter unjustness – that meaningless, chaotic violence could prevail so easily, that life was so fragile. It was almost a relief to feel nothing but rage.

Rick's eyes are bloodshot, the skin around them still bruised from his fistfight with the Governor. His whole face is bruised, in fact. He looks like hell. This doesn't stop him from grinning with all his might at the sight of her, and she can't help the smile plastered to her own face. Carl wraps her in a bone-crushing hug that leaves her breathless. Her heart races with the most happiness she's felt in a long time.

"Hey, you," says Rick hoarsely. His hands twitch, as if to hug her too, but the moment passes. The three of them beam at each other.

"Am I glad to see your beautiful faces," she laughs, even though she can't help but notice how thin and anaemic they both look, like they've been on the run for a lot longer than a day. Carl needs a haircut, badly.

"How did you find us?" asks Rick, at the same time that she says, "Where's Judith?"

Carl's face falls. Rick looks blank. "Her baby carrier was empty when we got to it," he says, at last. She knows he is doing his best not to think about it. It's just easier not to.

"Everyone in that compound was looking out for your baby girl. Someone would have grabbed her before they ran."

No one says anything.

"We'll find her," she says. She can only update them on how many of their own she found dead or dying as she walked through the ruins of the prison, and they fill her in on how they ran from the madness and kept walking until they got here. She tells how she followed their tracks, and leaves it at that. No point going into boring details about herself.

"What next?" she thinks aloud. It helps to strategize and plan; the sombre mood does not completely lift but at least there is something to do that will take their minds off the image of a bloody baby carrier. They decide to reinforce the barriers in the house and stay in the house for the night, at least. The neighbourhood is pretty empty, Carl informs her with some pride, and that, along with the shoe he's conspicuously missing, tells her he's gone exploring.

Rick, being himself, insists she take the bed upstairs, despite the fact that he is on the verge of collapse and most certainly should not be sleeping on a cramped and saggy sofa, not when there's a perfectly proper bed with an actual spring mattress. In the end she wins, and Carl helps his father upstairs as Michonne pokes around the house.

Dusk is falling outside, but it's warm and bright enough inside. This home is inexplicably well preserved, besides the broken lock – a residence of some means, from the looks of the plush carpeting and tasteful furniture. Not a single blood stain or desiccated corpse to be found. The normalcy and cleanliness of it is what makes it feel so odd. She reminds Carl to go brush his teeth and feels like she is a TV mom, walking through a prop set. Any second now, something horrific is going to happen. Except it doesn't. She gets to the master bedroom and watches from the doorway as Rick lowers himself slowly into bed.

"There's a couple of clean lady's shirts in the other room," he says when he notices her, and straightens up, like he wasn't just in serious pain. "Pants, too, if you're looking."

She glances down at herself. Her vest is alright, just a little blood-spattered, but her tunic… well, it might just be time to let go.

"Thanks," she says. "Maybe I'll scrounge up something for you too. That shirt you're wearing used to be white, right?"

He laughs in a sharp exhalation of breath, like a man who has forgotten how to do it. It turns into wheezing. Michonne hopes the internal injuries he's got are few and minor. What doctoring she knows is limited to chicken soup and Tylenol.

"I'll leave you be," she says, turning to go. "Let me know if you need anything."

"Hey, Michonne." Rick gives her a smile that's pained and a little sad. She notes the bruise marks still wrapped around his neck. "I never got to say thanks. For backing me up when… things got hairy. I don't know if I'd be here without you. Hell, I'm not sure what Carl and I would have done if you hadn't shown up today."

Michonne nods in acknowledgement, waiting. She's definitely sensed the tension between father and son. But as usual, Rick underestimates how much his boy needs him. He rubs his bottom lip absentmindedly with his thumb. He likes to talk, sometimes, especially when something is weighing on his mind, and she's always been a good sounding board.

"It all went down so fast – I really thought I could take him. The Governor, I mean. I thought, maybe if he's out, if I could just shut him up, the rest of them would stop and listen. And we'd be able to salvage something."

Yeah, maybe with a sane man, she thinks. But there's no reasoning with batshit crazy. The others didn't see the Governor's daughter, rotting and writhing in her pretty dress, or those heads snapping in their aquariums. "After what he did to Hershel – I don't see it ending differently. You did your best."

He thinks about that. She can see he doesn't quite believe it. Rick looks beaten down, in more than body. Losing Judith and the prison have shaken him. He eyes the katana at her side. "I'm glad you got your man, in the end."

"I should have driven my sword through his heart when I had the chance."

Rick's never liked the idea of her need to find the Governor and how far it took her from the camp, and he's never been good at hiding it. I know about retribution, and hate, and how it pulls you in, he once told her, when it was just the two of them on a run. It destroyed my marriage, and that was of my own doing. He'd never talked about his wife before then. Though it had been Rick's roundabout way of telling her to give up the chase, the things he told her that day had explained more than a few things. But maybe he'd been wrong, and so had she, to forgo her instincts and let her guard down. If she had just found the bastard before…

He's shaking his head. "Nah, it wasn't anything on you. The man was driven by pure hatred." Rick doesn't have to say it, because they both know: survival is a lot easier that way, when there's nothing left to lose and nobody to be accountable for.

He is already passed out by the time Carl is ready for bed. The two of them check the house twice before he bids her goodnight. Halfway up the stairs, he turns back.

"Michonne? That was nice of you, what you did back there for my dad."

"It's nothing. Your dad needs a good night's sleep more than I do."

"No, I mean, what you said about Judith. He listens to you. I think he wanted to hear someone say there was still hope."

"Hey. We will find her."

"Yeah," he says, his face unreadable. How like his father he is at that moment, she thinks. "Well, anyway. I'm glad you're here."

"Me too," she says, and almost calls him honey. Just a slip of the tongue – her mother used to call everyone sugar – but that was back then. Here, when every day and every wasted breath counts, Michonne is used to holding her words close to her.

She takes the couch, and the first watch. This day has felt like a week, but her mind is whirring away. Despite everything that's happened, there is nowhere else she'd rather be than here, in this stranger's house, with the two Grimes boys snoring away upstairs.

Dinner was one can of baked beans and an armful of peaches, shared amongst the three of them. The sweet taste of the fresh fruit lingers in her mouth. There have been slim pickings along this train track they've decided to follow, but the overgrown peach orchard they found seemed like a little gift from God himself. She'd dispatched the lone walker they'd found shambling through the rows of trees and they'd spent a pleasant afternoon picking and eating.

Their lodgings for the night are a dilapidated shack, probably once used for hunting. It's small and suspiciously smelly but at least there are four walls around them instead of open woods. Carl's asleep on the couch, the only soft surface in the shack. The door's lock was hanging by a screw, so they shoved a musty old dresser in front of it. She and Rick are sitting beneath the one window in companionable silence, the cool breeze relieving some of the humid heat.

"I'll keep watch," Rick says. He looks stronger tonight. There's a gleam in his eye that was missing the last time they talked. "You go ahead and get some rest."

She shakes her head, and when he raises his eyebrows, she says: "I don't want to accidentally inhale a centipede."

He eyes her, and smiles that slow smile of his. "That's what you're afraid of?"

"I've already seen two of them zipping around in here. Nothing needs that many legs."

Rick ducks his head to hide his grin, a boyish gesture that's oddly endearing. She knows he doesn't mind the company. The full moon overhead lights up his face as he watches his son sleep.

"How's your eye?" she asks after a while.

He grimaces. "You tell me. Think I have a shot at getting back my depth perception?"

Michonne peers at him. "It looks like it's still swollen… almost like there's blood beneath the skin."

"A blow to the back of the head will do that." He pauses. "I saw it once in a DV case – the woman had black rings around her eyes, like a racoon."

"Jesus. What happened to her?"

"Her husband was a mean drunk. He kept saying she'd tripped down the stairs, even after we arrested him. But she put up bail the moment she left the hospital." He frowns, enmeshed in memory. "It's never simple, is it?" Rick looks away, into the dark. Thinking about before. How often do they get to do that, now, without pain?

"You were a sheriff's deputy, right?"

"Sure. Badge and partner and everything," he says, his drawl shining through. "Saw a lot of shit, but not much that might have prepared me for this world."

"I don't know," says Michonne. "I think you're doing alright. We learn fast. I was a lawyer – guess how much four years of law school and four more of practice are worth now?"

Rick looks at her, and she knows he wonders about her – what she was like before all this, the people she's lost. And though he seldom asks, he always listens when she does tell him.

"Maybe you're right. Never met a lawyer that could handle a blade like that. That thing's a work of art."

She laughs quietly, so as not to wake Carl. "I got it off the neighbours in the early days, before we had to leave our condo. They had a teenage son who collected katanas. Mike called me the Last Samurai..." She stops. It's been a while – a long while, since she could think about him without anger. Without all-consuming regret.

Rick is smiling, too. "Mike?"

"My boyfriend," she says, more shortly than she intends to. "Ancient history."

Rick nods. He will store away the name and the story for later, because he is not the type to push. And because this is how things are between them. Small kindnesses, small gifts, over time. He shifts a little, wincing too suddenly.

"Let's see that leg," she says.

Rick pulls up his right pants leg, the one he's been limping on all day. There's a crude dressing pasted on mid-shin from who knows how long ago, crusted through with blackened blood. He peels back the stiffened rag he'd tied around it. Torn flesh is nothing new, but knowing that he's been walking for an entire day on an injury like this makes her cringe. "Doesn't look infected," he murmurs.

"You're lucky," she agrees.

"I got this –" he protests when she fetches a rag and a bottle of water.

"Your depth perception's off, remember?"

She gets the feeling he's used to patching himself up in the field. The fearless leader doesn't need others to tend to a paltry bullet wound. But he has got other people now; he's got her, here, to help in this small way. Maybe he realizes this, because he doesn't say anything when she pushes his hand away, gentle and firm. The muscles of his leg shiver when she rinses the wound, but otherwise he stays still. Michonne's got a steady hand and a lot of patience. She surprised herself with how well she tended to Andrea.

"Don't you wish I'd gone to med school instead of law school," she comments idly. She'd considered both, after college was over. Medicine was stable and prestigious, as her parents liked to remind her. A year of backpacking in Europe showed her she wanted more than stability, and besides, Mike was applying for law, too. She'd been crazy in love with him, then. Her train of thought stops when she looks up and sees that Rick has nodded off. In the soft light of the night his features are softer, less taut. Here, in the planes of his skin and the lines of his lips, is a shadow of the simple sheriff he once was.

"Rick," she says, softly. When he opens his eyes, the nakedness in his gaze makes her freeze.

Rick's eyes are as blue and as deep as running water. Michonne's seen them narrowed, thin and hard with rage, or wide and still, black pupils dilating until only a thin strip of colour remained. Wrath and terror – that was the man she'd met, and it had taken a while for her to see beyond that. There was a hearty layer of crazy there, too, but that was reasonable enough; anyone who maintained great mental health in these times was suspect, in her opinion.

Above everything else, Rick is a survivor. She doesn't hold it against him when she catches him watching her. To be fair, he watches everyone. Rick's always looking for the newest threat to come shambling over the horizon. It's part of what makes him such a good leader. Michonne wonders if he knows how exactly he plays into the stereotype of the small town sheriff when he furrows his brows and fixes his determined, no-nonsense gaze on whatever's troubling him. He's even got a lingering hint of a cop swagger, straight out of a cheesy Western. Except that Rick's wily. And perceptive. And smart. He can turn from docile to lethal on a dime, grimly mowing through a line of human beings with the unceremonious precision of an expert marksman. She's seen him stab a living man a dozen times, hatred transforming his features.

So of course Michonne's kept an eye on him too. Especially back then, when the mutual distrust between them was piled thick and high, and she kept waiting for him to snap and betray her, too. She'd taken care of herself all this time; she could take whatever he was slinging too, if it came to that. He got the message, but he'd never quite gotten around to letting her down.

After Woodbury lay gutted, the people at the prison had begun to draw her in. Little things like Hershel bringing her a bowl of porridge on a bad day and somehow getting her to talk about it without actually asking, like Carol passing by her cell in the mornings before a supply run, a smile and a cup of coffee in her hands. Like Carl remembering her affinity for Georgian blueberries and marking off a little square for them in the garden. Or Rick finding her one day and the afternoon they'd spent talking about Andrea. And even though Michonne was rusty when it came to other people, word by smile by gesture, she'd kind of, sort of, started liking these folks. Caring for them. They were good people, trying their best.

She'd come to respect Rick by then. Everyone – even her – looked to him when push came to shove, even though he never tired of saying he wasn't the boss anymore. He was – is – a good man, a fair leader, and a loving father. Little by little, she's learned this. She's caught him playing peek-a-boo with Judith when no one else is around, both of them hilariously into it, and she's seen him just watching Carl when the boy's asleep, the tenderness on his face enough to make her feel like she's intruding. She appreciates his ruthlessness, now. She would have done the same for her boy.

The two of them had gone through a bad time together and come out a little friendlier and a lot more trusting. She remembers wading with him through a field of walkers that had piled up at one slice of the fence, slicing and dicing, and getting three in one long, hard stroke. That had never happened before – actually, it was kind of awesome – and when she looked at Rick, he was watching her with a grin.

"You could do this all afternoon, couldn't you?" he called, casually incapacitating what had once been an older man in stained overalls.

"Beats the gym," she said, smiling back. The joke was bad, but the point was, she'd realized later that night as she lay in bed – the point was: they were friends.