I own nothing Walking Dead related, except for the DVD's and comics. Let me know what you think!

In another life the virus never happened.

People thrown together by horrible circumstances never met, or those that already knew each other never had to make choices they never would have considered before.

Lori never slept with Shane. She spent every extra moment at Rick's side and when he woke up, finally, she was there. They had a daughter a year later, and Rick stood as best man when Shane got married to a pretty lady that worked behind the diner's counter.

On their honeymoon, Shane and his new wife went to visit the Grand Canyon and camped out. They happened to be parked next to an older man named Dale who told them about his wife and their long life and wished them luck in their own lives, hoping they were half as happy as he had been.

A man named Morgan never took his wife and son away from their home, and instead they lived together, happy, occasionally flipping through the photo albums that meant so much to them. He never taught his son to shoot a gun.

A doctor named Jenner loved and admired his wife's genius when it came to pathogens and knew he wouldn't be able to live without her. They worked together at the CDC in Atlanta, happily oblivious to the death that lived in the specimens around them.

Glenn worshiped a sports car from a distance and promised himself that when he got older, and rich, he'd buy ten of them, joyriding them wherever and whenever he wanted. Of course, he'd be married to a supermodel too, so it wasn't looking very likely.

Andrea and her sister went on their road trip, and stopped at a gas station outside of Louisville, Kentucky to eat and take a break. Two men rode up on their motorcycle while they sat there. Andrea scoffed at the Nazi symbols on the bigger man's bike and at the way Amy's eyes trailed over the younger man. So her sister had finally hit the bad boy stage. Right before college. Perfect. The older man was gruff and rude to the Middle Eastern man behind the counter. The younger man, apparently his brother, trailed behind him, saying nothing. He looked up and their eyes met for a brief second before his older brother was harassing him to hurry up. The sisters teased each other for finding the same brother cute, and continued their road trip, never giving the object of their mutual attraction a second thought.

Merle ended up dead in a shootout with police. Those who knew him weren't surprised, and most thought it was lucky that Daryl didn't end up being with him that day. Their life had been awful growing up, but Daryl was okay by himself, and maybe now without that influence everything might work out. A couple of years later Daryl married a girl he'd known his whole life, and while he never really did much, he was a good man.

Carol took her daughter and slipped away in the night after years of abuse. She wasn't sure what had made her do it except that she just woke up one day and knew it was over. It was get out or die. She got out. She and Sophie moved to Atlanta where she went to work for a nursing home and eventually got comfortable enough with herself to tease the janitors she worked with about how gangster they really weren't.

A veterinarian named Herschel ran his practice until the day he died of old age, surrounded by his children in the same farm house he'd once been kicked out of and then repaired and restored. He had no regrets about his relationships with his children and knew they knew they were loved.

These people lived their lives. They never went hungry. They never watched the people they loved die around them. They were as happy as they could be.

That was another life.