This is inspired by Bones. I love that show. Seven Shots is soooooo close to being done. But then this took over. I almost posted SS yesterday. I meant to. But couldn't... Sorry...

CriminalMindsWhore- I did intend this to be named "Orphan's Prayer". But as you can see, it's changed.

But here's this.

The Day the Tulips Blossom

Roxanne grabs the board and pulls. They're weak after years of holding the door closed. They fall into rotting chunks on the ground and she resorts to clawing them to pieces, getting bits of soft wood beneath her finger nails. She's a tall woman, dark blue eyes, dirty blond hair and a pretty face. She's been working in the clean up for over a year now, using it as practice for her job as an anthropoligist. After so long, most of the corpses found have turned to bone, if not disintegrated farther. Her job has become more difficult, having to find these skeletons and give them genders, faces and more. It's an interesting job, alright.

After being orphaned at a year old, Roxie had been taken care of by her aunt and uncle. Her parents had died in the mess that was the apocolypse. Dubbed as zombies by the media, the undead had taken over the country. Only now, at least twenty years later, has society been rebuilt. Roxie had grown up with her cousins. She remembers a time when she was six when her aunt held her close as they prayed that they were still hidden from the undead creature outside the door. She learned early on that walkers could spell death for her. At the age of eight, Roxanne and her aunt, uncle and a year old baby cousin named after Roxie's mother settled in a growing town. She grew there, getting two more younger cousins. At eighteen she went to the local college to study anthropology. When the clean up started, she was employed to give descriptions of the bones found and try to identify the people.

Roxie manages to clear the last of the boards, and she pushes past the door. On the otherside there's a dark room. It's small and there's a barricade blocking off another door. Lying to the side are two skeletons, untouched by the elements. The bones aren't white, but a dirty light brown/gray. The rotting flesh would've gotten in the porous surface of the bones. Roxie shines her flash light over them and her assistant, Kian, follows after with his clipboard, ready to write down what she says. He's a few inches taller than her with black hair, a stocky figure and green eyes.

She slips gloves on and looks down. The bones are close together, mingling. The ligaments have barely held and the flesh is gone. The back of each skull is in pieces, scattered on the ground. A rusty gun sits near the hand of one. There's a metal case on the ground besides the two remnants.

She snaps a picture of the scene, protocal for each body. She gently touches the pelvis of one. "Female. Caucasion. Approximently thirty to thirty-five and has given birth. Prominent wear on the carpals, metacarpals, tarsals, metatarsals and phalanges. Most likely a job that required a lot of standing and writing." Kian nods. She moves to the other which is half under the first. "Male. Also caucasion. Same age range, though most likely older. Wear on the ends of the radius and ulna. Active job. Evidence of teeth marks on the humerous on the male, tibia on the female. I can safely assume that both commited suicide." She sighs.

"These the last two of the day?" Kian asks quietly.

"Yeah," Roxie answers. They had two other sets of skeletons safely stored on the truck.

"I'll go get a box." The boxes are easily carried alone, exspecially when Kian is a strong built man. They are filled with a protective foam that held the bones in place during the journey. Pressed between two layers of the soft material, bones are rarely harmed in transport. Roxie's imagination always overtakes her with suicide cases. And in this one, she can't help but think that these two had a story. That these two had been something. A brother and sister dying together? Lovers with no other choice? Roxie doesn't know. She reaches over and picks up the metal case. It's rusted shut but easy enough to open. Inside is an old journal, almost perfectly preserved, only slightly musty. She opens it to find a diary entries. The first few are blurred beyond recognition, as though the book had gotten wet. But the rest are easily read on the darkened paper.

"Amy and I were taken in by a man named Dale. He's nice and going to bring us to a camp where some others are set up. I probably won't write that long of an entry today, though."

Kian returns with the box and Roxie closes the book, putting it back in the little container and placing the gun on top. She closes the box and stands. "Let's put these two t' rest..."

Roxanne and Kian return to the city. They carry in their load and Roxie sets to work. She has to draw the faces of these people in order to more easily identify them. The first two they found are men, an african american and an asian. She then reaches the suicide cases. She takes out the skull of the man first, mentally adding in flesh markers. A face begins to form on the sketchbook page before her. He was probably considered handsome in his prime. He squints slightly and has a non-comforting look of disdain. She looks at the man's face and back at the skull, noticing a remodeled scar right above where his ear would've been. She adds it to the picture. Finished with the man's portrait, she takes out the woman's skull. Picturing the flesh markers, she can immediately tell this woman was pretty. An angular face and slightly prominent cheek bones. She sets the woman's portrait besides the man's and looks at both. She can tell they aren't related. There are little to no similarities in. The male has a sternal foramen(1) when the female does not.

'They must've been more,' she thinks.

Kian comes into the room. "Are you done with those facial reconstructions?"

She nods. "Yeah..."

He pauses. "Is something wrong?"

She shakes her head. "No. I'm fine."

"You work with death all day, Ro. It's okay if you're feeling blue."

"I said I'm fine."

He shrugs. "I'll run these through the system. See if we can't find out who they are. I've already got their dentals in." He picks up her sketches and brings them into the next room to scan them on. Roxie starts picking up, fully ready to go home once Kian checks for names. She places the bones back in their respective boxes to wait until their names were found. Worst case scenario, they would end up in one of the nameless graves. If that happened, Roxie would be sure to keep them besides each other.

And then she sees the metal case. She reaches for it and sits behind her transparent glass desk. She removes the gun first, setting it gently on the table. Next comes the little black journal. She opens it and continues to read from where she had been earlier.

"We're with a bigger group now. Our 'leader' is some guy named Shane. There's more than twenty of us. Amy's made friends with a guy around her age. He's nice. I've been talking to some people. There's one person I have to avoid. His name is Merle. He's a sexist, shovenist pig. His brother is fine, but he's... Disgusting."

Roxie reads on, not realizing she recognizes many of these names. It's almost an hour later when Kian sticks his head back into her office. "You know they won't be finished until tomorrow night at the earliest, right?"

"What?" She looks up from the journal. "Oh, yeah. I got caught up in this."

"Well, I'm going home. I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"

She nods and he leaves. Eventually, she gets up and goes home, bringing the metal case home with her, gun, journal and all.

Immersed in the journal, Roxie reads. She's finally recognizing the names, though she wonders if it's just coincedence.

"We left the CDC. I wanted to stay there. I wanted to blow up with Jaqui and Jenner. I don't like this pain. This hole Amy left. I want to die. If Dale hadn't stayed there, I would be dead. I'd prefer to be. Not dying slowly as we try to find a place. And now we're stopped on a highway with the skeletons of cars surrounding us. I hate this.

Dale took my gun away. My gun. The one my father gave me. Just because I want/wanted to die doesn't mean I'll just pop a cap into myself. I hate this so much.

Sophia is gone. Oh, that poor little girl! She's lost in the woods somewhere, alone. Why is life like this now? She doesn't deserve to be afraid. She should be in seventh grade, playing with friends, just starting to date. Not in the woods, alone.

Daryl and I just went into the woods to look for Sophia. I can't say how much I respect that man. When we were out there, we found a hanging walker. And he asked me if I wanted to live. I'm pretty sure that it is just a habit. But I'm also fairly sure that if he hadn't asked today, I would've killed myself tomorrow. So now he's saved my life for the umpteenth time."

Roxie got lost in the story. But it wasn't really a story. It was someone's account of their last years. It was all that was left of a woman of the Last Generation, the name for those who came before the walkers.

Eventually, she falls asleep reading.

The next morning, she heads into work, metal case in hand. She doesn't get a chance to read. There's more bones to examine, as well as paper work on each. She feels lucky when a corpse comes in with a form of ID. Dogtags, license, anything. It makes it all easier.

The skeletons she found the day prior are constantly on her mind. She wants the computer to find out who they are. She wants to know if what she suspects is true. She needs to know.

She enters the examination room to a smaller skeleton. It had been brought in earlier by another few people from the cleanup crew. It's left ulna is missing as well as most of the phalanges. There's a clipboard and a recorder besides it. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and slips gloves on her hands. With one hand, she hits play on the recorder and picks up the pencil attatched to the clipboard besides the figure. The other hand gentley turns the bones. "Male," she mumbles to herself, clear enough for the recorder. "African-American. Nine to twelve years old..." She takes another deep breath and continues on, writing what she's saying. She examines the right scapula. There's a bullet imbeded in it. There's a mark that shows where another bullet passed through on the fourth rib down, just skimming it. "... Murdered. Cause of death: One bullet residing in the right scapula. No remodeling. Evidence of another on the fourth rib on the left side." She hits stop on the recorder and leans her elbows on the table, letting her head hang.

"Ro?" It's Kian. He's standing just at the door.

She looks up. "Yeah?"

"You need to see this." She sets down her pencil and takes off her gloves.

"What is it?"

He shakes his head, unable to explain. "Just... Come with me to the scan room." He's been her best friend for as long as she remembers and she trusts him. He's always there for her, no matter what. So she nods and follows him there. On the large projector screen two faces are displayed. They're the same faces she had drawn the night before. Profiles for each are displayed besides them.

Roxie freezes when she reads the names. The man's is Daryl. The woman's is Andrea. "Are they...?" Kian asks.

Roxie nods, tears starting in her eyes. "Yeah. They are." She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. She then has one of her rare moments when she lets her guard down. She pulls him against her in a tight hug. He immediatley wraps his arms around her thin frame, comforting her. She pulls away and speaks. "I've got to go find my uncle." He nods and she's suddenly gone and his arms are empty. He stares after her with a sad sort of longing before returning to the computer.

Roxanne drives as fast as she can to her uncle's house. In the front seat of her car is the metal case, inside rests the gun on the journal. Besides the case is the sketches she made. She pulls into the driveway and gets out with the case and drawings in hand.

Inside, she finds the eldest of her younger cousins seated at the counter in the kitchen. She's named after Roxie's mother. She's pretty. Long, silky black hair. Her eyes have a slight slant to them, showing her Korean decent. She's thin and of an average height.

"Hey, Andrea," Roxie greats. "Where's your dad?"

"In the den. Why? And whats in the box?"

"Nothing. I have to ask him something." Roxie runs down the hall to the den. The door is open and she can see her uncle sitting in his chair with a book in his hands. "Uncle Glenn!" she says, out of breath with tears threatening to return.

"Roxie? What's the rush?" the man asks. She opens the the case and pulls out the gun, tossing it on his lap. He jumps but takes it up in his hands. "Where'd you...?" He slowly turns it over, rubbing his fingers along the edges. "The last time I saw this was when your mother was telling me to run, that it was too late for her..."

"Look at these," she orders, holding out the sketches. "That's my mom, right? And my dad?" She takes a shakey breath and sits in the armchair opposite her uncle.

He nods. "Yes. These are their pictures. Does that mean...?"

She nods this time. "Yeah. I found them. What's left, anyway... Kian, he helped."

Glenn holds the gun tightly in his grip, closing his eyes. "Your mother let me borrow this once. Made me, really... Rick and I had to cover ourselves in guts to smell dead. She gave it to me to make sure nothing happened."

Roxie pulled her legs up onto the seat, hugging them. "They committed suicide. They were bitten and committed suicide," she tells him. He nods.

"I remember seeing her bit. And your father. I felt like the world had ended. Your parents were the toughest people I've ever met. And I got to meet Chuck Norris once."

Roxie rolls her eyes. "I don't recognize old people lingo. Use someone from my generation." Glenn smiles at his neice. There's a span of silence where they only think. She thinks of the parents she can barely remember. He thinks of the friends he lost living through the apocolypse over twenty years prior.

"We can put them to rest." Glenn looks at Roxie. She nods. "I'll pay for the plots. And-"

"I want to," she says. "I want to pay. For the coffins, for the plot. Everything. And when I die, I'll be buried alongside them."

Glenn's eyebrows raise. "Hopefully that'll be a long time from now." He hands the gun back to her. "Well, let me help you pay, then."

"Uncle G, I get paid plenty for my job. I'll be able to pay for their burials."

He nods. "Okay. Are you going to have a funeral?"

"Should I?"

He shrugs. "I'd go. You're Aunt Maggie would go. And Beth. I'm sure Carl would too. And your Uncle T-Dog would. Your cousins would probably even go. Andrea and Daryl- your parents, Roxie, were part of our family. I can't count how many times they've saved my life."

"I guess I have to have one, then." Roxanne turns the gun over, tracing along it's outer edges. "And I'll get this restored."

"She'd want you to have it."

Later that night, Roxie finds herself curled on her couch alone. She usually spends her nights reading or writing. She rarely goes out to eat or drink. She prefers being alone.

The journal is in her lap as she reads to learn more about her mother. She's over halfway through it. She had heard stories about her parents as a child. Had been told of her Aunt Amy's death, the CDC, the Greene farm. Everything up to their death. But she had never had such depth into either side until now. She knows now that the first time her parents actually talked was late at night in the CDC. That their first kiss occured in the woods when he was teaching her to track. She gets to see the hidden talent her mother had for drawing. Pictures litter the margins. Some entire pages are taken by a sketch.

Roxie only just reaches the part where she's first mentioned around six o'clock.

"I'm pregnant. I'm pregnant. I haven't told Daryl yet. Not after Lori and her baby's death so fresh in our minds. What if something happens? What if this child doesn't make it? What if the little girl or boy growing inside me dies? Or worse... What if Daryl doesn't want it?

I told him today. It's been... A week, I think, since I found out. I wish I could've taken a picture of how he lit up. I did my best to draw it on the next page. But I'm so happy. The man I love and I are going to have a baby. I'm three, maybe four months along. So, in five more, there'll be a mini combination of Daryl and I running around. I'm going to stay up and wait for him to get off gaurd duty. He deserves a surprise tonight.

These cravings are getting insane. I really want some ice cream right now. Cookie dough ice cream. With sprinkles. And french fries. French fries would be really, really good right now. I should stop thinking about it. Why couldn't this baby go easy on me and make me crave, I don't know, squirrel? We have plenty of that. Hell, even craving venison would be better. We even have some of that. Fresh out of cookie dough anything, much less ice cream. Maybe we can find that Desserts gum tomorrow. I really hope so. Or some kind of candy. What is up with this baby? I don't usually like sugary foods. But my mom said she only craved sweet foods when she was pregnant with me. Maybe that's why?"

Roxie laughs lightly. She didn't like sweets much either. She seemed to have gotten her fill while still in the womb, the same as her mother had.

"I already love this baby so much, and I haven't even met it yet. I hope that he or she won't have twelve years between themself and their younger sibling(s?). Because I want more than one. I don't want my baby growing up alone. I don't want her or him to ever have to be alone. I want someone to be there for her or him every second of the day. No one should have to be alone."

Roxie reads the line slowly. Her mother had never meant for her to be alone this way. But here she is, sitting alone in the dark, only enough light to illuminate the page before her. She pulls her cell phone out and calls the only one she knows has always been there for her, even if she doesn't always realize it. He answers. "Kian? Would you mind coming over? ... I, I need someone."

He shows up at her house ten minutes later. She opens the door and pulls him inside, hugging him. "What's wrong?" he asks, placing a hand on the side of her face. She puts a hand over his and closes her eyes.

"I'm reading my mother's journal and... I don't want to be alone anymore."

He sits with her as she reads. She's thankful for it. She reads some entries out loud. She shows him the page filled with baby girl names, her own having been circled multiple times. There's another page with boy names. She discovers that, had she been born a boy, her name would have been James. At the top of another page is a small, hand written birth certificate reading 'Roxanne Amy Dixon, born the day the tulips blossom, daughter of Daryl Dixon and Andrea Dixon'.

She reaches the last few pages. The last entry has a finality to it. She reads it aloud.

"I write this as I slowly change into one of the undead. I... I can feel it happening. Daryl's here beside me, watching as I write. Both of us were bitten. Once I finish writing, we're going to take our own lives. I've got two bullets left. But Glenn, he got away. He's going to take care of Daryl's and my baby. My little girl. She'll be a great woman someday. Help fix the world. She'll have a family, be happy, be loved. I know Glenn will take care of her. He and Maggie will protect her.

If this ever reaches her hands, or anyone who knows her, give her this." The next few lines are at the bottom of the page. She stops reading aloud.

"Dear Roxie, Your father and I love you. We're sorry we've left you. But we know you'll be fine. I've got faith that the world won't always be in ruins. When it's not, I want you to be the best person you can. Help others. Protect your own. Find someone you love and who loves you and make a family together. I know you'll have a good life.

Always remember you're loved.

Andrea & Daryl Dixon"

Roxie slowly closes the book. She sighs and sets it on the table. Kian takes her hand and holds it in his own two. "Are you okay?" he asks softly. She nods.

"Fine..."

"You're not though. I know you, Ro."

She sighs and leans against him. "My mom left me a message on the last page, and I just... I'm scared."

"Of what?"

"Not being able to do what she asks."

"Well, what does she want you to do?"

She hides her face in her hands. "More than I think I can do..." she whispers. He picks up the journal, carefully moving to the last page, the part she didn't read out loud. He sets the book down after a few moments.

"That doesn't seem too hard."

"I can help others, I can protect others, but the last part... What man would want me? I'm completely invested in my work and depressed half the time because of it." She drags her hands down her face. He laughs then and she glares at him. "That's not nice."

He shakes his head with a smile. "I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at the fact you think no man would want you." He pulls her against his chest, hugging her. "I want you."

Her eyes widen and she looks at him in disbeleif. "Wha-... what?"

"I want you, Ro," he spoke.

She stares at him with confusion swimming in her eyes. She's never even thought she had any possible chance to date him. In fact, she had thought that she annoyed him more often than not. "I've known you since middle school, though. Why haven't you-"

"Said anything? I felt lucky enough being your best friend. I told you now because, well, I guess I just felt I should."

She buries her face against his chest. "I wish you had told me ealier than this." He's about to say something about how it's better that he tells her now. But instead, he puts a hand under her chin and tilts her face towards him. He lips are soft against hers but also clumsy. She lets herself be drawn in by him, unable to escape her own feelings crashing into his.

A week later, Roxie falls into bed having just arrived home after work. Kian is already there, asleep. She lies on her back for a few minutes thinking. Her parents, Andrea and Daryl Dixon, are at peace now. Their bones lay side by side at the local cemetery. She had beautiful marble headstones made for each.

Eventually, she feels herself start to drift into the verge inbetween sleep and the world of the awake.

Someone leans over her and kisses her forehead. "G'night, baby girl." It's a southern voice, a little gravely, but pleasant.

Another voice, a woman's this time, speaks. "Sleep well, sweetheart. We're always here for you."

Roxie's eyes snap open and she looks around. No one. But she smiles. "Night, Mom and Dad."

(1). Sternal foramen: a round or ovoid congenital bony defect that results from incomplete fusion of the sternal ossification centres. The estimated prevalence is 4.5%. It is typically asymptomatic and of no clinical significance, except in the setting of sternal acupuncture due to the risk of pericardial puncture and tamponade. There have been two such reported cases in the literature, one of them fatal.

I'm not an orphan, but I do feel as though I have no real parents. So I based Roxie a little bit off me -cough--cough-.

Well? I hope you enjoyed it. Reveiws are greatly appreciated.