Michonne pawed at the dirt trying to get at the thing before it slipped away.

They were slippery little buggers on their home turf.

She hadn't accounted for that in her rationing. For every three or four she assumed she'd find, she only actually caught one.

The odds would have been in her favor if it had rained recently, driving them all to the surface but there hadn't been a lick of precipitation in at least a week- which was another issue all together.

"Ha!" She actually said out loud to herself as she wrangled a long fat one out of the top soil and popped it into her mouth.

It was undeniably disgusting. She knew this as she ate but honestly it was not all that much worse than the stale gummy worms that she'd found a few days ago in an abandoned knapsack at the side of the road. In fact, the real worms were decidedly chewier and not the same sickly sweet.

But she was in it for the protein anyway not the taste. Daryl had sworn to her these suckers were rich in protein.

Still, if you had told her a month ago that she'd be on her hands and knees digging earthworms out of the dirt she'd have laughed in your face. At the Prison, food hadn't been precisely abundant but there'd been enough to go around and once the gardens were really bearing their bounty there promised to be more.

It was hard to believe that had been only three weeks ago.

It was already starting to feel like a lifetime to Michonne. Much in the same way that Mike and Andre had been so far gone as to seem like they were the recollections of another person or characters from a book she'd once read. Not really connected to her, not connected to now. They had become hazy. The loss still burned bright but everything else about them had grown soft around the edges. The Prison was starting to feel like that now too.

She sat back on her haunches and sighed. She was thinking about them again.

Her boyfriend and son. Not only them either, now there were others as well: Daryl, Carol, Maggie, Glenn…the roll call grew longer all the time. This is exactly why she had always chosen to travel light. Travel alone. Attaching her life to nothing and no one for so long. Then she'd found Andrea alone in the woods, and suddenly her life cracked open again.

…dammit.

Michonne shook her head, wiping away unbidden tears.

You gotta stop. She could almost hear Daryl's voice telling her.

She had to stop recalling people and places and things now lost to her forever. All alone, she was already spinning out. The crying was a sign of that. Even when that bastard Merle shot her, she hadn't cried. Crying –when she needed to retain all the hydration she could manage—it was stupid.

"Stop it!" She chided herself again, coaxing another of those slimy devils from their home.

So quickly, she had already been reduced to scavenging worms and grubs the way Daryl had taught her. She was lucky she'd half-listened when he told her how. Back when she'd been on her own before, she had lived on any junk she could find: stale candy, crazy cheese, cupcake snacks that supposedly could survive a nuclear winter, potato chips, really anything she could find that purported to be edible. But that wouldn't do this time around. Her food had to be more nutritious. And she had to be more conscientious about what she consumed…which was a huge joke, considering the circumstances.

There was almost nothing left anywhere to find that wasn't growing directly out of the soil. That was, of course, because the Prison group had already rather thoroughly cleaned out all the surrounding homes and businesses within at least twenty-five miles in every direction long before she'd even arrived there. It was ridiculous of her to think nearly a year later that there would have been anything by way of food to find nearby. Yet she knew she didn't dare go too far afield.

Not for a while at least.

"You sure you're okay with this?"

"I've lost my leg, Michonne, not my sense of decorum. How would it look if I stood here and watched you work?" Hershel asked good-naturedly as Michonne dragged more bodies off the truck and onto the pile.

"I'm more concerned about how it'll look to Maggie and Beth that I have their father beyond the fences doing hard labor." Michonne said straightening up briefly to look at the older man and wipe the gleaming perspiration from her brow.

She smiled at him.

Life still, after all this time, had an incredible sense of irony. She would not have expected to fall into such immediate kinship with this silver-haired older man and his gentle, lilting voice. Particularly given how they'd met—with her deliberately withholding the missing puzzle-piece in his daughter and son-in-law's abduction. It was a minor miracle that they now spoke to each other at all. Although to be fair to herself, no one had been on their best behavior that day.

"Remember, I was a farmer first." Hershel added. "Hard-labor is all in a day's work for me since childhood."

Michonne nodded, granting him that. "Well, I'm almost done anyway. You can help me light 'em up."

"Sure thing." He said, moving away from the flatbed of the truck he'd been leaning against. He shuffled a little on his prosthetic leg. "But I suspect it's not in that capacity that you asked me out here anyway. Am I right?"

The smile fell from Michonne's lips and lines worried her forehead. She nodded reluctantly. She should have known he would see right through her request for help. She rarely solicited help from anyone, ever.

Hershel brought the red gas canisters with him handing her one as he took the other to the pile of walkers. For better or for worse, he was about to be the first person she told. She needed to figure out where she was planning to start and why suddenly Hershel felt less like her friend and more like her confessor?

"Don't worry, kid. You can start whenever you're ready." He said presciently. "It's just you and me out here."

Michonne nearly chuckled now. Nearly.

How had it been possible to be so fabulously wrong at that precise moment?

They had most definitely not been alone out there that day, as they'd soon both find out. In the forty or so-odd days since Michonne wondered.

How could she have been so stupid? So complacent?

She'd let the illness that burned its way through the Prison's population convince her that her time was better spent at home. She let fear and concern for her friends outweigh the importance of looking for The Governor. So then, of course he'd come looking for her. Looking for them all, really.

He'd been out there. Right out there, on their doorstep...waiting.

Sometimes, she still had nightmares about it. In them, again she was turning, only minutes later to find herself face to face with The Governor's gun butt. And again and again waking, who knows how long after that, to find herself bound in the back of his RV with Hershel trussed up beside her.

You led my Daddy outside the gates to his death. Maggie's ghost accused her in the worst moments.

Nowadays, all Michonne's dreams were nightmares but this one was still the most often recurring one.

She trudged along trying to shake the guilt of those thoughts loose without actually shaking her head. Right now, she couldn't make any sudden movements. She had fallen in with a small herd and she didn't need to call attention to herself. She'd seamlessly blended in as they made their way through a small town, so that she could scope it out unmolested. She was tugging Spot and Fido along with her —that's what she called her pets, the ones that she'd taken to help camouflage herself.

It had been her plan that "Spot" should be The Governor.

She'd looped a special hogtie especially for him, fantasizing about how good it would feel to cut off his limbs and jaw, maybe poke his other eye out. She'd very nearly cried later when she discovered someone had come behind her to put a bullet in his skull, allowing him to rest in peace. His subjugation, even in death, was to have been her prize, the one single reward she could wrest from all the subsequent agony.

And someone robbed you of it. Glenn commiserated in her head. Michonne knew he had wanted to kill The Governor too, once upon a time.

She couldn't help feeling cheated. In the end, she'd had to settle for that asshole in the tank after she found him wandering around with a gaping hole in his sternum. She remembered him too, with his shit-eating grin, waiting as Rick nearly broke under the weight of The Governor's ultimatum. She remembered him, as she remembered all the faces of The Governor's people. People who had just stood idly by as he nearly took Hershel's head off his shoulders right beside her.

Those faces she still recalled clearly even days later, when she made her way back to the Prison. At the time, the air was still thick with smoke though it had already burned for nearly four days. But she'd returned when she thought it was safe enough, hoping against hope to find survivors or supplies or both.

Michonne hadn't been foolish enough to go back into the structure itself, which by then had been overrun for days and was clearly a deathtrap. But she had skirted the perimeter a number of times until the herds cleared sufficiently to enter onto the grounds. There she did what she could, putting down any unfortunate Woodbury refugees she encountered and gathering what items she could find.

That's where she'd found Hershel's reanimated head… and The Governor's lifeless body. The injustice of that dichotomy gnawed at her still. As did Judith's bloodied infant carrier—the image of which still had the power to stagger her even all these weeks later.

…and it did.

Michonne missed a step stumbling forward, as if over the unwanted memory. Fido and Spot looked on placidly as she righted herself but unfortunately she'd done enough to alert Roberta, Carlos and Regina—she'd taken to naming her walker companions—of her presence among them. With a heavy sigh, Michonne kicked the walker nearest to her down and calmly pulled her katana out of its sheath on her shoulder. In one fluid arcing motion, she dispatched Regina and Carlos, then she stabbed Roberta straight through the eye socket. Pirouetting to her left, she took off Ted's neck and shoulder, then Francis' skull came clean off his body. This herd was only about twelve or so deep. So she could have killed them all with her eyes closed.

And she very nearly did. She wasn't sure where this new self-destructive impulse was coming from. The recklessness. She just knew the loneliness was wearing on her in a way it never had before.

Why was she even continuing to bother? She wondered more and more often. Looking at the felled bodies and various body parts strewn about her feet, she despaired. What was the point, if she was destined to be alone?

But before that thought was even fully formed in her mind, she knew the answer.

…Because you're not alone, not really. That's why. Rick's voice whispered her.