They are talking about brothers. Well, he is talking about brothers – he and his own. She is listening idly, enjoying the attention this man has been giving her all day. It is…refreshing to feel wanted, desired. Even cavalierly, casually. She is also thinking about brothers as he prattled on, wondering. Wondering where they were. Where he was.

Her broken relief at knowing he was still alive is replaced by something she hadn't expected from herself: understanding. She understood why Daryl had left them. Had left this echoing, barren home their group had created. The others – Glenn, Maggie, Beth – didn't appreciate the hold Merle had over Daryl.

"He said you'd understand," Maggie shook her head, refusing to believe it. She had waited; waiting for Carol to scream, to throw something, to feel as betrayed and frustrated as the rest of them are. To punish the memory of Daryl, for abandoning his real family for his blood brother.

But Carol confronts those lonely little spaces she finds over the next few days, those little missing pieces of herself created by Daryl's absence and fills them with the strength she's finally realized she has. She means what she tells Beth. She knows she would turn her back, forever, on Ed, were he still alive. Turn her back and scorn him, and the version of herself that had been Ed's. She misses Daryl, but never blames him.

And now, standing in the prison yard. She and Axel: this odd, funny man with the old-fashioned waxed moustache who really didn't strike Carol as particularly dangerous. Who had thought she was gay because of her shorn hair. A con who is so unworldly and harmless he didn't understand that keeping your hair short might give you those few extra inches you needed to avoid having your head bashed into the wall by a rage-filled husband. Oh yes, Ed had been a hundred times more menacing than this earnest, bumbling convicted felon.

She is not the woman she was a year earlier. She is enjoying the attention from this man, his desire to hold her with his story, to coax a smile onto her face. He nudges her a little, grinning.

"Don't you miss your brother?" Brothers. The word echoes in her mind, and then the shots echo in the yard, and she is sprayed with the warm, living blood of the sweet, bumbling harmless con at her side. The force of the bullet embedded in his skull pushes him towards her, his heavier body dragging her to the dusty ground.

Carol wants to live. Without thought, with nothing but the sound of her own blood rushing in her ears and the sound Axel's blood spattering on her face and into the arid ground, she crouches behind the corpse of the man that had been flirting with her thirty seconds ago.

And for a seemingly endless stretch of time, she and the others, her family, are scuttling like bugs stuck on a specimen plate, dodging bullets and the dead, of which there seems to be a never-ending supply. She crouches, clutching her gun, firing, a dead man's blood pouring down her face, mixing with sweat, dripping into her eyes. It adds a rosy sheen to the madness surrounding her.

When it finally ends, as suddenly as it began, they all rise from their spots across the shattered yard. All but one. Axel, lifeless, on the ground. Five minutes dead.

The living coalesce towards each other. Carol sees Maggie's face, hears Beth's intake of breath. She can feel the sticky, hardening gore on the left side of her face and down her neck.

"I'm okay," she rasps. "It's not mine, it's Axel's." She sees her hand is shaking, just a little. She grips her rifle more tightly, refuses to turn around, look at the man's prone form.

"Holy shit," Glenn exclaims, and everyone instinctively raises their guns. But then, Carol sees. They all see. Rick, fraying and wild-eyed. And behind him. Heading towards the group. Daryl and Merle.

Brothers, Carol thinks, ruefully.