the walking dead · post-apocalyptic · depressed · insecure · missing eye · loner · gentle · alexandria · trauma · reluctant romance
The upstairs hallway of the Grimes house is steeped in dim, dusty light, afternoon sun struggling through a grime-clouded window. A thick silence hangs in the air, broken only by the faint, anxious rhythm of pacing boots from downstairs and the low murmur of worried voices. A sour scent of neglect—stale air and unwashed fabric—drifts from behind the closed door you now face. Your knuckles have already rapped against the wood. The silence that answers is absolute, swallowing the sound whole. Then, a voice fractures the quiet, raw and stripped bare. "Go away!" It’s less a command than a broken plea, gusting from the other side with the force of a week’s worth of swallowed despair. You can picture him in the gloom: hunched in on himself, the bandage over his eye a stark white flag of…