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When he was seven, Carl got his arm stuck between the fridge and the kitchen counter.
Too proud to call for help, he sat and sulked and let the feeling disappear from his fingers until Dad came in looking for a beer. He laughed a little and then knelt down to get a closer look at his son. “How’d you get yourself into this predicament, Carl?”
And Carl screwed up his face and tried one more fruitless attempt to yank his arm out of the crevice. “My Bumblebee transformer went under the fridge,” he admitted finally. “I was trying to get it.”
“Hm,” Rick says. “Hm hm hm.” He looks at Carl’s arm, looks under the fridge, looks back at his son. “Carl, we’re gonna have to cut it off.”
“Dad!”
“Oh, calm down, I’m kidding,” he says, and stands up. “Alright, here’s what we’re gonna do. I’m gonna pull the refrigerator to the side and you’re gonna pull your arm outta there. Got it?”
“Got it.”
It works. Carl gets free. Rick pulls the Transformer out from under the fridge using a backscratcher. They don’t tell Lori.
Carl’s not thinking about that right now.
He’s thinking no no no and oh God, oh God and Michonne, please don’t talk, please, he’ll kill you. He’s thinking that he would kill Negan if he could, he’s thinking that he never could. He’s trying not to think about the black marker line on his left arm.
Carl keeps waiting for the blow that doesn’t come. For a second, he wonders if Rick already did it and what he feels is a phantom limb, phantom fingers and phantom wrist and phantom arm. But no, there it is, intact, and there’s the hatchet on the ground, and there’s Dad, frozen, pleading.
Carl would do it himself. For Michonne, for Maggie, for Sasha, Eugene, Aaron, Daryl, Rosita… for the baby. Carl would do it himself. If he could. If that was part of Negan’s game.
Rick keeps saying please, please, like Negan cares. He screams and Carl thinks about the fact that it’s going to draw in walkers before he processes the fact that Dad is screaming, tormented, tortured. He can’t let that keep happening. He can’t. He can’t.
“Dad,” he whispers finally, trying to think of Mom and Michonne and Judith and Enid and anything he can picture to make him less afraid, “Just do it. Just do it.”
Rick doesn’t do it. Negan stops him. It’s not mercy; Carl knows that. It’s just that Negan wants to jerk him around like a dog on a leash. Give him treats. Watch him jump for them.
The nightmare finally ends, or at least pauses. Maggie and Sasha take the RV and the rest of them pile into the truck and head back to Alexandria. Carl sits sandwiched between Dad and Michonne and tries not to think, or talk, or anything.
When they pull into Alexandria, it’s a unique feeling. They’ve walked through ghost towns before. This is like being ghosts inside a living, breathing town. Nothing around them has changed, but they’ve been irrevocably altered.
Enid’s there as soon as he climbs out of the truck. “You shouldn’t have made me stay,” she says, storming up to him, already ready to resume their argument. “Damn it, Carl, I should’ve gone with…” And then she sees them, really sees them. Sees Eugene’s black eye, sees the blood splattered across Rick and Rosita’s faces. Sees those most notable for their absence. “Carl…”
“Later,” he says, his throat dry. “I’ll tell you everything. Later.”
Somehow, Michonne and Rick and Carl all make it inside their house. No conversations, no explaining, no stopping. Rosita goes with Eugene to the infirmary and Aaron goes to tell Spencer what’s happened.
Rick takes Judith out of her playpen and goes to sit with her on the couch and holds her and he doesn’t say anything for a long time. Michonne, meanwhile, goes to Carl and wraps her arms tight around him, her chin pressed against his shoulder. “I’m okay,” he promises. “I’m okay.”
“I’m not,” she says, and keeps hugging him.
Upstairs, Carl moves mechanically. Hat off, change his shirt, change his bandage, hat back on. He changes his jeans, too, when he notices the grass and dirt stains right at the knees of the ones he’s wearing. He’s clean, he’s ready, he’s okay, he’s okay, he’s okay.
His bedroom looks the same. Like nothing happened. And Carl thinks about the things he owns, the things that belong to him. A photograph of Michonne and Judith. A small pile of comic books. A blanket. A few changes of clothes. A paperback copy of The Grapes of Wrath. His hat.
It isn’t his. It isn’t his. Everything belongs to Negan now. He shuts his eyes and tries not to throw up, and then he goes back downstairs.
Dimly, he can hear Michonne talking with Gabriel out on the porch. His dad’s still on the couch with Judith, but he glances up when Carl walks into the room.
His eyes find the marker line on Carl’s arm. It might as well be a scar. “Hey,” Rick says, hoarse. “Wash that off.”
Carl looks down at his arm, and then shrugs. “It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”
“Wash it off,” Rick says, and he shifts Judith in his arms, brings a hand to his mouth. His eyes don’t meet his son’s. “Please. Just… please. I can’t.”
Carl looks at the line on his arm again and back at his dad. And he remembers the screaming, the sobbing. And he shrugs again, and he goes outside.
Gabriel’s gone; Michonne’s alone on the porch, watching dusk roll in. Stars pop out. Carl finds the North Star and he feels more lost than ever. They stand there in silence, soaking in it until they can’t anymore.
“I…” Carl starts, and the hours spent on his knees on the ground weigh on him like decades. “I think there’s something wrong. With me.”
Michonne turns to him, and he can see the response she must be thinking, There’s something wrong with all of us, and hell, maybe that’s true. Maybe you don’t get to live this long in this world without becoming somehow wrong.
But he knows what he means. He feels different. He doesn’t think he feels the way Michonne and Dad do, the way everyone does. “Everything he did,” Carl elaborates. “To us. To Glenn and Abra… to everyone. To me. Everything… it felt… I mean, it didn’t feel good,” he explains, and he feels like a monster. He feels like a fucking monster. “It just felt right. Like… like we had it so easy for so long and now we’re back to the way it’s supposed to be.” A shudder runs through him, fills him with ice. “I’m just like him, aren’t I?”
“No, no, no,” Michonne says, putting a hand on each of his shoulders, looking square into his face, her eyes wide and honest. “Carl, you are nothing like him. Okay? Okay, you are good and brave and… and I, I am an excellent judge of character. Right?” She tries to smile and it feels like trying to crack stone. The fissures in her face won’t bend the right way; she can’t do it. “Just…” She pulls Carl in again, her arms around him, and this time he hugs her back. “You’re alright and I’m alright and your dad and Judith are all alright. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Right?”
“Right,” he says, muffled against her.
“Alright,” Michonne says, and she thinks about the boy who once told her he was just another monster. She thinks about the boy who refused to let himself be scared in front of Negan. “It’s okay to be scared,” she promises. “It’s okay to be sad. I’m scared and I’m sad and it’s okay if you are, too.” He shakes just a little, a tree in a storm, and then he finally, finally starts to cry.
They stand like that for a long time, leaning against each other, saying nothing much at all. And later, Carl goes inside and washes off the line on his arm.