Work Text:
Smoke curls from the craters in the dirt, fires crackle along the metal carcasses of cars. On both sides of the field men and women hunker behind scarce cover, waiting for their moment to strike, to fire their guns, to send their bullets bursting through their enemies’ flesh.
The moments come in bursts, flashes of noise and showers of sparks and screams and curses and blood, the thunder of boots, the thud of bodies, then another pause before it begins anew.
Rick sees this all through a haze from the sidelines, the energy for anger having left him hours ago, all that remains the ringing in his ears and the two bullets in the chamber of his gun.
He finds it difficult to move, even as he sees another of his allies gunned down, calling out, silenced. He looks down at his fingers, pulls them briefly away from the wound in his abdomen, the brightness of his own blood almost paradoxical on his hands, on his shirt, leaking from his skin and body, another bout of gunfire cracks through the air, another round of bodies hit the dirt.
This isn’t how it should have gone. This isn’t how it should be ending.
The battlefield has gone quiet. Rick looks up, takes in the silence.
The flames reach like ivy, moving slow and languid like kelp in deep water, the smoke hangs, curling.
About a third of his forces are still standing, more than of their enemies, but with significant injuries, lying or crouching unmoving, like the other party too.
Rick frowns, finds his pain has been put on hold, the flow of blood ebbed. With the help of the boulder he sits behind, he manages to stand, shaky and weak, but on his own two feet.
On the battlefield, a shape has appeared. It’s translucent and vague like the smoke, shifting and gliding between human and animal, known and unknown. For a brief moment Rick thinks he sees his mother. Not weak and crumpled as she had been at the end, but young, virile and strong as she had been in his earliest memories, in the days of long heats and running through dry crackling fields until the evening sun set behind burning clouds.
Then the wisps move and bend and his eyes tell him it’s the sturdy brown mare he found during those first few days in Atlanta, the short-haired companion that carried him into the city and lost its life to the hordes.
Then it’s Lori, Dale, the deer in the woods of the Greene farm, the dogs on the road, Shane, Andrea, Beth, a man he shot a few weeks ago out on the road, a saviour separated from his group, old, tired, worn-out. He had raised his gun, and Rick had fired, noticed only after that the man had had no finger left to pull the trigger.
Now all those eyes stare back at him. He stands there and he watches, as the smoke-shape-figures hover over bodies, linger, brush gently, gently over. One after the other.
“Hey.”
The shape stops, vague smoke now more of a dense cloud, as it turns its many heads in one.
“What are you doing?” He asks. His voice feels strange. Delayed, slow, strained. Like trying to push air into a container and finding it full to the brim already.
“Is that the question you want answered?”
The words don’t sound like words, at least not in the way a person would say them, but Rick understands nonetheless. Is it the question he wants answered? No, he supposed it isn’t. “Are you Death?”
The shape – now solid enough to have chosen one head, and settled on a strange mix of them all, ringed atop with antlers larger than any Rick has seen before – nods. “I am.” It steps away from the closest body with the dull sound of hooves on grass and the memory of impending rain. “Are you scared?” Death asks, thunder rolling like distant mountains in the words.
Rick took a moment. “No. No, I… I don’t think so. Should I be?”
“That depends who you ask.”
Rick lets his gaze roam over the frozen battlefield. In the minutes he has been watching and talking, the fires have breathed, the smoke curled, his people barely blinked. “How are you doing this?”
“Should I ask my first question again?”
Rick considers. “Are you doing this?”
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not.”
Death visits another body, brushes over gently, lifts a sigh.
For one heart-stopping moment, a thought enters Rick’s mind. He asks with stuttering breaths, “Are you here for all of them?”
Death turns to look at the terrified, brave, hurt people left standing or kneeling in the grass. “Of course.” His bright, hollow, not-quite-there eyes alight on Rick once more. “Eventually.”
“But not now?”
“No. Not now. Not all of them.”
“Who–” Rick stops himself, breathes, allows himself to be briefly relieved. It isn’t a question he wants to ask. Or, perhaps it isn’t one he wants answered. “I imagined you differently.”
“Did you?”
Rick thinks of all the depictions he has seen of Death; biblical, metaphorical, spiritual. None of them had been his own. “No,” he says. His fingers find the hole in his shirt, in his body. “Will you take me too?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“You don’t know?”
“He doesn’t know,” Death says, nodding one and many heads in the direction of Rick’s people, one of which has his eyes locked on the bloody mark of where Rick had just been sitting collapsed against the boulder, his hands clasped around rolls of bandage and a knife. Daryl. “And you don’t know. I don’t decide. I just collect.”
Rick waits, watches for a long moment, or perhaps a collection of many short moments, how Daryl’s spring-loaded form moves the span of half an inch, the dirt digging up from his boots hovering lazily in the air as it’s kicked up in slow motion. “I don’t know? Does that mean I can decide?”
Death shrugs, a ripple of convoluted motions echoing through its being. “Your mind isn’t the only part of you deciding.”
Rick looks down at himself. How much blood has he lost already? How many organs has the bullet punctured? “What if–” Rick looks to his people, hurting, suffering, sees how Death glides closer and his heart aches. “What if I went with you? Would you take me instead of them?”
The antlers on Death’s head bow, a swooshing sound of wind rushing through as he shakes his head. “As much as many hope, a deal with Death is not possible. I am sorry, child. I am here for those who come to me, whether you join them now or later.” A smoky hand ghosts over the pale face of a savior, her last exhale one of release.
“Where do you take them?” Rick asks, chest tight, terrified Death will once more venture to their own lines, claim another from their ranks.
A rustle of leaves twenty years ago echoes in his ears as Death smiles. “Wherever they want to go.”
“So, I could…” Rick forces himself to look over Daryl, Rosita, Carol and the others. “If I wanted to see my family… I could do that?”
“Yes,” Death answers. He follows Rick’s gaze. “But it would seem you would do that either way, no? Stay or go, either way someone is waiting for you. Which will you choose?”
Rick feels his energies waning, steps back to lean against the rock again. He doesn’t have much more time to decide, he can feel it. And he wants to see Carl again, Lori, everyone else he’s lost, even Shane. His heart is crushing him with want, with longing. But to see them now he would need to leave everyone else. Not just Michonne, Daryl, Carol and those he’s spent the last years with, but Judith too and the people who count on him at home, at hilltop, the Kingdom.
Whether he likes it or not, people rely on him, his leadership, strategy, whatever he has levied against Negan. He would leave them all. Abandon them. But he could see his son again, hold him again, tell him how sorry he is about what happened, what he let happen.
He has a choice. Or as much of a choice as one can have in this situation, he supposes. He can’t leave now, can he? Leave them? After everything, before the end? Or maybe this is the end. He’s tired. So tired…
So is Maggie, he reminds himself. And Rosita, Abraham, plenty of others. They don’t give in, how can he? They have people waiting for them too.
He looks back to Daryl, still sprinting in slow-motion towards him, rigid determination on his grim expression, unyielding perseverance in every fiber of his body, despite the litany of scars and wounds and he looks to the saviors, fighting not only for a madman but for their own survival, for the prosperity of their own families. There has to be a better way, there has to be. There will be, he decides.
Death looks down upon him as sound and light and smells begin to slowly encroach on Rick again, as he slides back down to the ground where he had sat, as the blood begins to trickle once more and the pain returns. “I will see you again, Rick Grimes of Alexandria. Someday. The others will wait until then. Good luck.”
“Can you tell them something from me?” Rick asks, beginning to have trouble now seeing the apparition.
“What would you like them to know?”
“Just that I love them and I miss them.”
“They know,” Death smiles. His form dispels and his dark antlers turn to smoke and his voice becomes the crackle of flames and gunfire.
-
“Wait, wait!”
Daryl hurries to fish the bandages out of his pocket, bullets dinging off the metal sheets and blasting apart the concrete barriers they were hiding behind, dirt and debris raining down around them as he waits for Rosita to give him the go-ahead.
“Now!” She shouts, sticking the machine gun over the barrier and firing half-blindly into the midst of their enemies as Daryl runs, scrambling over boot churned ground towards a boulder in the grass, kicking up dirt behind him, focused only on one thing: getting to Rick.
He hadn’t even seen him get hit, had only heard the cry of pain and seen him crumple to the ground behind cover.
Now as he slides to the ground in front of him, he’s terrified he’s too late. He sees deathly pale skin, blood-drenched clothes and an unmoving chest and he wants to scream.
Then Rick’s eyes fly open and he gasps, coughing wetly, a hand shooting up to grab his arm. “They know,” he rasps. His grin is bloody red and only partly there. “They know.”
“What? Who knows?”
Rick looks about, seeming to notice where he is and grimacing as he tries to move, grasping his bleeding abdomen. “We need to get out of here. We’re not dying here.”