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She feels like she’s three different people at once, the moment it happens.
The wood creaks underneath her feet, Rebecca screams, and Sarah falls
...
She doesn’t get close with people. It’s something she can admit, not that she’s proud of it. She just… can’t, anymore. She doesn’t get close with people, but she watches Sarah the way she watches Clementine and when the little girl asks her questions or laughs with her or makes comments that don’t properly reflect her age, Christa can’t help but ache.
She does what she can from the sidelines, but Sarah is not her kid. Not even the same way that Clementine is not her kid, because Sarah still has a parent. And then, well, she doesn’t anymore, and her father had not prepared her for the world they were living in now.
She tries not to speak ill of the dead. She’ll say she doesn't agree with his parenting style, and leave it at that.
Sarah clings to Christa, in the moments after her father’s death, despite Christa’s halfhearted objections. She feels prepared and so, so unprepared at the same time, but she’s a little girl who needs help, and Christa has never been able to turn away from that.
It’s not easy- nothing in this world is ever going to be easy, she knows- but she sits Sarah down and they talk. And they talk more, every night before she sleeps, in the morning when she’s so scared she shakes Christa awake and on the long walks between each new place they settle.
Omid was autistic, and it’s not the same of course because Sarah is a child, and Omid was twenty when they met and so Christa can’t say she’s the most experienced person on the planet, but she’s the most experienced person in their group to try and help her adjust.
She prepares her for the world the best she can, the way she had pressured Lee to do with Clementine, the way she had done with Clementine, and then she falls from the patio into a horde of walkers and everything inside Christa screams.
Protect yourself, something in her says.
Protect Rebecca, another part of her.
Save Sarah, says the loudest.
Her thoughts swarm, she looks around frantically- the others are screaming now, along with Sarah’s fearful ones and Rebecca’s labor pains. Her hands are vibrating, her body is leaking out of its container, she can’t handle- she can’t do this all over again- she-
She jumps, right over Jane who’s struggling to pull herself up to the rest of them.
“Sarah, Sarah, it’s okay, stop screaming Sarah please-”
“It hurts!” Her shrieks are blood-curdling. “It hurts it hurts, Christa please -”
She sees the debris from the crumbling building. She sees the metal and the splintered wood. She sees the blood.
She sees Ben.
Her vision swarms, but she keeps moving for Sarah. She keeps moving for Sarah, but she isn’t fast enough, and there’s already a walker biting into her wrist, and there’s a walker behind Christa and she can’t do anything.
Kenny had been brave enough, back then, to save Ben in a different way.
Christa isn’t brave enough.
She feels herself lock up. She can’t do this again, she truly, truly can’t. Sarah’s screams continue until they don’t, but they echo around in her head so loudly she can barely hear the screamed “help her, Jane!” from somewhere above.
There’s a pressure behind her, and then gunshots, and someone’s pulling at her arms and shouting in her ear and she’s being thrown up into Lee’s arms and over into the part of the building that’s left standing.
She doesn’t wait to see if Jane makes it. She crawls, numbly, towards Kenny and Rebecca and sobs.
Please let this baby live, she pleads. Please, if there’s anything good left out there in the world listening, don’t let this baby die.
(He’s a beautiful little thing, and Rebecca graciously let’s her hold him. It’s like he’s the most important thing in the world, the center of the universe, but something in Christa is still sour, and it will probably never change.
Every time she gets something good, something else is taken away.)