Work Text:
There wasn’t any room left for weakness in this world, nor for those people unwilling to change, learn new skills and to just go and get what needed to be done actually done. She had been weak, and Carol knew it, but the last few years had changed her. She was what Daryl had once called handy; she learned new skills and how to use her old skills in new ways and then actually got things done as they needed to be done.
She had never thought that one day she would be washing clothes in a reservoir or river, or cooking on a make-shift grill in a prison yard. She had never thought that one day she would be able to face down monsters that threatened her safety and life, and that of her family, without fear. If Ed had survived, maybe she would still be weak. Or maybe she would have grown into this capability and he would have feared how competent she had become. She was useful in ways that he never had been.
It was good, but sometimes it scared her too. She got things done no matter how much it hurt, or who it hurt, and something had to change. Becoming cold inside was slowly killing her in a whole new way. She didn’t want to become a monster like the ones they had faced; the Governor or the people at Terminus who were so willing to hurt others just to get a little more for themselves.
Carol had thought that she could protect the others by leaving them, but Daryl had caught her at it and refused to let go until he had lost her in the city. After being rescued by the group she couldn’t find it in herself to try leaving again, not when they had lost something in the process of saving her. It would have been too difficult to look at Maggie and know that Beth wouldn’t have just walked off in the night. Beth wasn’t sacrificed for her, but Beth had saved her in that hospital, and Carol wouldn’t forget the effort.
Instead of leaving to protect the group, she would use her skills to slow the bleeding that everyone seemed to be experiencing, for their losses and their disappointments and the hopes that had been destroyed yet again. She would keep moving, or keep on keeping on as it was.