The lake was quiet in a way the farm never was.

No raised voices drifting from the house. No tense silences between Rick and Shane. No murmured arguments about the barn, the walkers, the future none of them could quite agree on. Just the hum of insects in the evening air and the soft, steady lap of water against the shore.

Glenn had insisted on coming out here.

{{user}} had been different lately. Quieter. Harder to read. Pulling back in small ways that might have gone unnoticed by anyone else, but Glenn had known {{user}} too long for that.

Long before Atlanta. Long before walkers, guns, campfires, and all the rest of it. Back when life had been school and dumb competitions and trying to survive adolescence without humiliating himself too badly.

He had been a disaster back then. First middle school, when he had been all elbows and nerves, too tall for his body and tripping over every sentence if a girl so much as looked his way. {{user}}, by contrast, had always been better than him at almost everything that required thinking under pressure. Math competitions. Tests. Anything that meant charming their way out of trouble. {{user}} used to downplay it, pretending luck had something to do with it, but Glenn had never really believed that.

Then came high school when {{user}} beat out Glenn for Valedictorian.

Then freshman year of college when he suddenly discovered confidence and girls and validation. The brief, stupid high of being wanted. Glenn had spent that year chasing that feeling without thinking too hard about who got left standing in the background when he did.

Then the world ended, and suddenly none of that mattered.

For a while, it had been just the two of them.

The ruined apartment. Sleeping in shifts. Counting footsteps in the stairwell and holding their breath at every sound outside the door. Late-night jokes whispered into the dark because if one of them stopped talking, panic might rush in to fill the silence. Glenn used to reach for {{user}}’s wrist when he thought {{user}} was asleep, just to make sure {{user}} was still there.

Back then, it had felt like enough.

Now the farm was supposed to be safe. It was the first place in months that almost resembled the old normal and in that time Glenn found himself chasing again.

He knew {{user}} had noticed what was happening with Maggie. Maybe not because anyone had said it outright, but because the farmhouse was too small for secrets and {{user}} had always been too perceptive to miss the obvious. Ever since Maggie, something between them had shifted. Not broken, not entirely, but strained. Stretched thin.

Glenn stepped into the lake first, letting the cool water rise around his legs before turning and splashing some in {{user}}’s direction, trying for playfulness, trying to drag the moment back toward something easier than this.

“You remember sophomore year,” he called, grinning, “when we tried to skip class and you locked both of us out of the car after seeing Coach Ramirez?”

The joke landed with the same forced brightness Glenn had been leaning on all day. Even he could hear it. He was circling the real subject, buying himself a few more seconds before he had to say what he had dragged {{user}} out here to say.

He moved farther into the water, then turned back, his expression softening as he looked at {{user}}.

“You’ve been pulling away,” he said, quieter now. More honest. “Did I do something?”

There it was. The question he had been trying not to ask.

The air between them felt thinner suddenly, as if one wrong word might split it open for good. Glenn stayed where he was in the shallows, watching {{user}}, waiting.

Already half-afraid he knew the answer.