Starter for @mercyprevaild

Old folk said things always got worse before they got better. If that was true, then Lucille was certain the world would be a fucking amazing place once this shit was over, because she couldn't imagine how much better than it used to be the world would need to become to balance the fact she'd woken up from surgery to literal corpses that were roaming the streets and eating people.

Days passed in that damn hospital and it became more and more clear an "if things got better" situation than a "when things got better" situation. But at least she wasn't alone.

She'd found him in one of the halls near her own bedroom's, a bed placed in front of his door might have been what kept him from being shot like most everyone else who hadn't run away or hidden when they had the chance to had been. Her fellow apocalypse survivor wasn't much of a conversationalist, considering he was in a coma, but he was a good listener, and Lucille... well, she appreciated the company even if it was just a nameless man on a hospital bed. Keeping him alive gave her something to do other than wandering those halls and making sure doors and windows were closed.

It wasn't a permanent option, she knew that. Most of the dead had been locked in the cafeteria and that was were most of the food was, all that was left around the hospital were snacks from bending machines and those bags of liquid food or whatever they were called for the patients, which she was tired of even before the world went to hell. She'd have to move on eventually. But for now, this worked.

Or at least it did until, one morning, she went to see how her fellow survivor was doing and found the door open and his bed empty. She'd seen a enough people die and get up for her mind's first thought to be the worst case scenario.

It wasn't hard to separate the two halves of the saline bottle hanger and grab the lower one with the base to use as a weapon. Lucille's heart hammered inside her chest, mind racing with the possibilities of where the man might be, if he'd creep up on her, if she'd survived this long only to get eaten by the very person she'd been trying to keep alive's reanimated corpse.

And to add insult to injury, she didn't even know why he was there, didn't even know his fucking name, only that he had a gunshot wound. She might have been keeping a criminal alive.

Plotted starter for @wexarethewalkingxdead

Things at Hilltop tend to be quiet as hell. Lucille would even dare say boring, but she didn't want to jinx it. People here liked it quiet, those who didn't went out and did things– not her, she'd not set foot outside the walls since the day a group of eight left and returned as seven people and a corpse, saying a man called Negan had killed the boy. Since then, she'd been stuck in her own version of house arrest, keeping her head low when those saviors came and took half of what they worked so hard to have, just like everyone else.

But not today, today there was certain air of hopeful recklessness in people, the dangerous kind. A new group came along with Jesus and Carson, at least six armed people who waltzed in with the collected wariness of people who've definitely seen some shit. They were a curious sight, Hilltop didn't receive new people often. Lucille could tell they weren't here to stay when they went into the Barrington house for an excruciatingly long amount of time. When they made it back out, cleaner than when they went in and with that look of annoyance that most people already knew was the effect Gregory tended to have on people, she decided to approach instead of lingering and staring like they were a zoo exhibition.

"I'd like to say Gregory ain't usually like that, but that would be a lie," she said, giving a slight nod in greeting. "The name's Lucille, a quite bored and quite nosey local."

Lucille studied each of them quickly, not wanting to stare at either of them for too long. Two women and four men, armed with different weapons– it didn't take a genius to tell these people weren't to be messed with, it only took a look at the sword and crossbow.

Despite her effort not to stare at any of them, Lucille's gaze ended up settling on one of them. He wasn't as tough looking as the big ginger and the crossbow guy, but the others seemed to kind of surround him.

Plotted starter for @betaofthedead

The world ended and for some strange twist of fate, Lucille was still alive. She wasn't a particularly religious person, but this all just felt like a joke —a very cruel one at that— from some higher power who seemed to get their rocks off by making her deal with bullshit. She survived the cancer, survived the surgery and the lack of proper treatment because of the pandemic that broke of shortly before her surgery, and now the population of the United States —and the world, probably— was about 90% cannibal corpses.

Negan was gone. Lucille wasn't sure if he was dead or he'd left, but when she woke up at the hospital, dehydrated and starving, he just wasn't there, neither were any of the doctors or patients, at least not any that were still alive.

That was months ago. How many, Lucille wasn't sure– as if time at hospitals wasn't already weird enough and made it impossible for her to tell how long she'd been hospitalized, television, radios and cellphones didn't work so there was no way for her to know what day it was exactly. But if she had to guess, Lucille would say it had been about a whole year.

Her first winter had been spent hiding in the hospital, barricaded in the cafeteria that it had taken her days to get the reanimated bodies out of in a non confrontational way, eating the nonperishables. But as soon as summer began, she filled a car with as much water and food as the back and passenger seat could fit and left.

Lucille's breath fogged in front of her face, reminding her than any moment now it would start to snow again and she had yet to find a safe place to hide at. The car wouldn't do, cold autumn nights in that car had been hell and each day it seemed that there were more and more of the undead around, even when she attempted to stay away from big cities. Right now, she stood out of her car at a gas station in a town that though possessing some sizeable buildings, was still quite small, getting some fresh air and stretching her legs after hours of driving.

She was about to get back in the car to not waste what little sunlight she had left when she saw someone small —too small to be an adult— rush across the street, too fast to be one of the dead.

"Hey!" Lucille called out, then her mind caught up to her mouth and she wanted to smack herself. A kid would certainly not be alone, right?

But what if they were?