Notes

The dark has fully enveloped them before he breaks the quiet, his voice low in deference to the people sleeping around them.

"Is Target Practice your real name?" he murmurs.

She snorts quietly. "Of course it isn't," she says. "What kind of mother would call her kid Target Practice? No, that's a name they gave me." She shrugs. "It stuck."

"Why'd they call you that?"

She's quiet for so long he begins to feel embarrassed, wondering if he's prying into things that aren't his business, but eventually she says, "That was my first job after I came here. I helped Strike train the young hunters."

"You set up targets?" he guesses.

"Not exactly," she says. "I held up the target and ran around while they tried to shoot it. Was supposed to teach them how to hit moving things. Zombies aren't just going to sit still and give you a clear shot, are they? They'd shout target practice when they wanted me to come to the field. Eventually, they just started referring to me as Target."

His mouth opens, but for a moment he's too stunned to speak. "That's despicable!" he says. "How could they do that to you?"

"I hadn't learned to be useful yet," she says, a little defensively. "It was something I could do. I needed to give them a reason to keep me."

"You shouldn't have to earn your right to survive," he says hotly, furious on her behalf.

"Oh, yes you do," she replies, irritated. "I don't know if you've noticed, but the world has gone to shit. When I came here I was half-dead, too weak to fight and not smart enough to help with anything else. Only reason they didn't tell me to walk on is that Ellie said I remind her of her dead daughter." She shrugs again, a little calmer now. "Eventually I learned other ways to help. Gardening and cooking and cleaning. I'm a decent shot, too, and I help teach the kids at the school."

"That's despicable," he says again, sounding like he's on the verge of tears, and abruptly her temper flares.

"Yeah? Well the world is a despicable place. You wanna blame somebody, blame the first half-rotted infected motherfucker who crawled out of his grave and decided his daughter looked like a decent midnight snack," she snaps, and turns onto her side so she doesn't have to look at him.

Long moments pass in a silence only broken by his hitched breathing and occasional sniffles. After a while, he asks, quietly, "What did your mother name you?"

This catches her off guard. She frowns and turns to face him. "It's been a long time since somebody asked me that," she murmurs. "She named me Sage, because she always thought sage was a quiet, pretty plant, and I was a quiet, pretty baby." And then, because she feels bad for having made him cry, she adds with wry humor, "God knows what happened." She smiles when she is rewarded with a quiet laugh. "It's alright, you know," she says, quietly. "I'm okay, and I don't blame them for what they did. And you've got me to look out for you, so you don't have to worry about going through what I did."

"I'm not worried," he says, his voice still thick with the remnants of tears. "I trust you. I'm just sad that you didn't have anyone to care about you."

She sighs through her nose. For the first time in years, she feels sad for herself, too. No, not for herself---for the shy, hurt, lonely kid she used to be. "You're a good person, you know," she says, reaching out to cup his cheek. "Too good for this world. Too good for this hodgepodge group of bastards."

"Not too good for you," he insists before she can get there. "You're so much better than I am."

She huffs out a laugh. "I know that's not true. But," she muses, "I want to be better for you."

He reaches up to grip her wrist. "And I want to be good for you," he says quietly.