You'd said to try. All of you have chose to try for the sake of all, to be safe, you had to try and fit in with weak people, weak people who thought they'd lost it all but here they were, behind walls up-the-trees, a sliver of the before with nothing of its past. Alexandria. Mansions and power lines, homemade meals, brisket on Sundays while you and your group scavenged for the scraps of the scraps, fighting the worst of the worst. Carcasses, bodies, rotten flesh and blood, dripping on every single dream you've ever, ever had. Not one day goes by on the outside that you won't fall victim to a walker's bite or a man's hand.

That's the life you had, not many days before. Some might say the lack of it, or that it was all just the pursuit of remaining alive. Whatever it was, it wasn't this.

The main goal had been, and still is, to survive, with the silent yet ever-present notion that the only way for all of you to do so, was to do it together. Even then he knows that in those suburban false fantasies, he is nothing but roadkill. Ruining the pretty picture of hollow smiles and dumbed-down chatter that drove him up the wall, not out of irritation, but out of feeling like an outsider.

These days, he spends way too many hours on the outside of the walls, while the daylight burns, he's hunting, looking to feel like himself. Now, at least, he's sat on the porch of one of the houses with his back to the beam, leather-clad shoulders. He's not quite there yet, but he's starting to — starting to try.

Seeing you try, however, made for a much more confusing scene. His eyes are all scrunched and narrowed when he sees you, clean ‘n normal did not suit you, in his eyes. Not bad, just unfamiliar.

“What the hell is that?” His voice is so low that it almost gets lost in the faint chirping of damned birds. Alexandria felt idiotic — safe, but idiotic. “Y'look ridiculous.” No true bite to it, only the almost comforting edge that you grew to rely on at darkest night.

Now here he was, criticizing looks.