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How is it that after finally getting what he’s been after for so long, all Kieren wants to do is go back home?

Then again, a lot of that panic is due to the fact that one minute, Kieren had been in the washroom trying to give himself his injection using the mirror and the next, he’s in the middle of a crowded train station, as if suddenly his old wishes are coming true and he’s managed to escape Roarton and find his way into a whole new whirlwind. The trouble, of course, being that he’s got no cover up, no contacts, and is currently wielding his injector.

“Excuse me,” he says, as politely as he can despite his rising panic, jamming his way out of the station with his head down and trying not to make any eye contact. He feels like he can’t breathe and given that he doesn’t breathe, that’s a bit much. It feels like too much. Between losing Amy and his forced encounter with Blue Oblivion, suddenly having a mad episode and thinking you’re in a crowded city must mean something. The trouble is, he isn’t sure what.

It’s not really a side effect that they put in the pamphlets, is it?

Kieren doesn’t find any respite on the street either. There’s just more and more people, like they’re coming from every direction. His panic drives him into an alleyway just for a breather, clasping onto his injection. He reaches back for the hole in his neck, grimacing as he tries to align it. He hadn’t managed to finish giving himself the daily dose before he’d been interrupted.

And now he’s in an alleyway in some strange city, looking like he’s shooting up.

Strangely, it brings Simon to mind and Kieren almost laughs at the absurdity of the situation, only he has to be careful because if he moves, this is going to hurt more than it usually does (and it usually hurts a lot). It’s in the middle of this completely absurd and ridiculous piece of mad theatre that he hears footfalls at the head of the alley, because of course he’d be caught out like this.

Mindful of what he looks like right now and knowing he needs to finish this injection, Kieren keeps his head just slightly tilted so the shadows hide his skin and his eyes.

“It’s not what you think,” he protests immediately. “Really. I swear, it’s medicinal.”

Because that would be the perfect cap on a mad day – being carted off to the hospital or the loony bin for giving himself required drugs in some strange new alley. So here he is, in the hands of a stranger, and Kieren just has to hope that after all the really terrible experiences he’s had lately, this is going to make up for it all.

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It's been a hard few weeks, first losing Michonne, then thinking Kili's brother might be gone, then finding out Rick, Carl and Judith were all gone, too. But that's been undone, at least a little, though she doesn't know what's going on really or how to work things out. It had taken a few days, but on a whim Beth had called Carl's cell again and it hadn't given her that automated disconnect message. It had rung and rung and then it had gone to his voicemail, but what that means is that he's still here.

If he's still here, maybe Judith is still here, too.

That doesn't take away the losses she's feeling and she doesn't know where Carl is or how to find him, but at least it's something. It's been sort of a rollercoaster, though, and when she stumbles across some guy doing God only knows what in an alley, she's tired. It's been a long day and all she wants is to head home so she and Daryl can try and figure out what to do next in looking for Carl and Judith, but suddenly he's there and he's talking to her.

"Medicine for what?" she asks. On another day maybe she'd be more polite about it, tell him not to worry about a thing, but things have been real trying lately and she's not feeling her best. "I mean, it's fine, you can do what you like, I don't own the alley or nothin'. Just... maybe don't let the police see you."

Kieren nearly fumbles the injector, not sure he really wants to ask a stranger for help, but his hands have been unreliably shaky lately and he really needs his dose and he needs help. He hates to say it, but he needs the help. "I've got a condition," Kieren manages, grimacing as he turns, just enough that some of the light catches his pale cheek.

"I don't suppose you've got steady hands? I could use a bit of help. The way I'm shaking, I'm more likely to dribble it everywhere."

He's very pale, which she guesses fits in with him saying he's got a condition, and there's a part of Beth that really just wants to keep going and get home to Daryl, but she can't. No matter how tired and heartsick she is, she can't just ignore someone who needs her help and so she relaxes a little bit and nods.

"Yeah, alright," she says, taking a step forward. "Just... tell me what to do? I've never done nothin' like this before."

And maybe she shouldn't be doing it now, but she can't just ignore someone who needs her help.

"You sort of hold the injector bit and you'll have to aim it up with ..." He trails off uncomfortably, because even his Mum and close friends have trouble giving him his daily injections and this is a stranger that he doesn't really know at all. So Kieren just turns, a touch, a little half shuffle and bows his head down to gesture to the hole at the back of his neck.

"Just one press of the injector in there," he indicates. "It'll hurt me, but don't mind the wincing. I'm a bit of a wuss, yet."

Taking a step forward, Beth looks at the hole at the back of his neck curiously, but she takes the injector and does what he says. It's probably not a very smart thing, not at all, she's probably helping him just shoot himself full of some awful drug, that seems like the most obvious answer, but at the same time she just doesn't believe it to be the truth.

There's something about him that seems sincere enough and Beth thinks she's a pretty good judge of character.

"There," she says, taking a step back, still holding the injector before she offers it back to him. "Um... here? This is the weirdest way I've ever met someone."

Kieren winces at the injection as he's always prone to do. No matter how many times he's received this shot, it always stings, but he also looks forward to it because it's about the only thing he really does feel. He takes the injector back, offering a tremulous and grateful smile. "Thanks," he says, a touch uncertain about being in public (even in this reduced capacity) looking as he does.

"What is this place?" he has to ask. "I've never seen this many people in one place in me whole life," he admits.

He's still not really looking at her, even though she can tell he's smiling and Beth takes another step away, trying to get a better look at him. "Are you new?" she asks. "To Darrow?"

He has to be. He's asking what this place is, his accent means he's not one of the people who's naturally from Darrow, and her frown deepens a little as she thinks what it must be like to arrive here and just be sick. "If you're new, we should probably go sit down somewhere. I'll have to tell a whole lot of stuff and if you're sick..." She takes a step closer to him again, trying to see his face better. "My name's Beth."

"I didn't really know I was going to be new to anywhere," Kieren has to admit, because this whole thing is about as easy to understand as waking up in your grave, trying to shovel your way out. Seeing as he's still got no explanation for that, he thinks shovelling another inexplicable something on top of that might be pushing it.

He gives her a smile and though it's got warmth, he's a touch tense. "Kieren," he says, not extending his hand, but nodding. People don't really love the cold hands thing. He wants to protest that he's not sick, but he's got a disease, hasn't he? And that means he's got a condition. "Where do you suggest we go?"

Something about him doesn't look right. Beth's trying not to judge, because he's said he's sick, he's got a disease, and that's not something he can help, but he just doesn't look right and she can't help but worry. That's just in her nature.

"Maybe the park," she says. "But ultimately the train station. You've kinda been... kidnapped, I guess. Taken from home and dropped here in Darrow and I know it's real weird, but... but that's how it is. Are you sure you're okay? You're awful pale."

He feels a bitter twinge of mild resentment as her question, unprompted, brings to mind the roleplaying sessions they'd been made to do with Dean. He knows she doesn't have any idea and that she means well (it seems she does, anyway), but Kieren can't help get a bit touchy about it. And still, he also knows that she's willing to explain some oddness to him, so he ought to be good in turn.

"Sorry, there's usually a whole speech," he says wryly. "I'm not very good at it, though. I'm Kieren Walker," he says, like he's at an Al-Anon meeting. "And I suffer from Partially Deceased Syndrome. I'm fully compliant," he says, the wryness dripping from his words. "It doesn't exactly go away, the pale skin," he admits.

What he's saying doesn't make any sense until it suddenly does and Beth takes two quick steps away, her hand going for the knife at her waist. He's a walker.

It still doesn't really make sense, not when he can speak to her, not when he's functioning, and Beth just stares at him, her lips parted without any sound coming out. She hasn't taken the knife out, it's still in its sheath, but she hasn't let go of it either and all she can do is stare at him.

He's just said he's dead. But he's speaking. Walkers don't speak.

"What?" she manages finally. "You're a... but..." But they destroyed her world. They killed her family. She finds she's blinking back tears and she swipes angrily at her eyes with her free hand.

The dismay and crushing defeat show on Kieren's face quickly as she steps back in fear. He's used to that reaction, it's only that after she'd helped him, maybe he'd thought...except, no. Simon's been right all this time, no matter how Kieren doesn't want to listen. They're different and they're feared.

All he can think of, right now, is Lisa Lancaster and her parents, so utterly hopeful that his bite had turned her; only, it's not like that, not at all. "Where I come from, people who died three years ago, we all rose," he says, confusion echoing in his words. "And, yes, we were rabid and dangerous, but they found a cure and they brought us all back. I don't want to cause any more harm," he protests earnestly. "I'm tired of seeing people getting hurt. I'm so ready to move past that," he says, thinking of Rick and of the tram and the Ravenshead Massacre and just all of it.

"H-how... how can you talk?" She hears what he's saying and she understands them to be words and somewhere in her brain she even processes what he's telling her, but the fact that he's speaking at all has thrown her off so completely that she doesn't know what to do. He's a walker, but he's speaking and she'd been right up close to him and he hadn't tried to hurt her and for just a second Beth feels like she might faint.

Wouldn't that just be the most horrible way to go? Finally face a walker in Darrow and faint right in front of him.

She can see it in his expression that her reaction has hurt him and that makes her head spin, too. "I need to sit down," she says, then laughs a little hysterically. "I'm sorry." She's apologizing to a walker, but he's been speaking to her and he's new and she doesn't think he's at all like the walkers from home.

Kieren searches around them and finds a bench. She probably doesn't want him touching her, so he just gestures to it instead, knowing he should still explain things and besides that, he still feels like he needs plenty of explanation himself to understand what's happening. "Where I come from, there's this company that developed a medicine." Kieren holds up his injector, shrugging as he does. "So long as we take it daily, right in that hole, it keeps the pathways to our brains open and working."

He's not about to say that his hands had been shaky, because his hands aren't supposed to be shaky and that's a whole different kind of frightening that he can't explain. "I couldn't talk before," he admits. "Not when I'm rabid." Self-consciously, he tugs on the edges of his sleeves to pull them lower over his wrists, a defense-mechanism that's grown since his death.

"Jesus Christ," she says and she doesn't often take His name in vain, Hershel would've given her a nudge to hear her say it now, but it seems like the most apt reaction to what she's just been told. There was a cure. Someone out there was developing a cure and they'd just cut them all down. They'd murdered all these people who might eventually been cured and they'd done it without a second thought.

Her brother. Her mother. Lori and Andrea and her father.

"There's a medicine," she says as she sinks onto the bench and puts her head in her hands. "There's... oh my God. Oh my God. But so many people died. My... my mom."

She knows there are different worlds and maybe none of this is true of her world, but she can't help but make the connection. Kieran is telling her there's a medicine for the walkers, there's a way to cure them, and all she knows is that Rick and the others shot half her family because they were so sure there wasn't.

Kieren lingers, just a little closer, and gives her a sympathetic look. He knows so many other of the risen that had hurt their families and how close he'd come to doing the same to his father, but he'd fought so, so hard and he'd come out of the rabid state. He's not sure how to comfort her, but all he's got is his own stories.

Besides, he thinks he's not getting much more information until they've talked this through. "Where I come from, after the Rising, there was a bunch of people who joined the Human Volunteer Force. Zombie hunters," he says, quietly and trying not to let images of Gaz and Bill Macy fill his brain, because of all of them, they're the worst of the lot. "My sister was one. She came across me feeding," he manages, choking out the word, "and she didn't kill me. But I still hurt people," he explains. "And if she had pulled that trigger on me, it would've been right. I was meant to be dead," he says. "I'm happy, now, for the second chance, but ... I was meant to be dead and not hurting people."

None of this makes any sense, but at the same time Beth realizes that he's new to Darrow. He's still a person who needs her help and while she can't quite wrap her head around that idea, as someone else who's been tossed into this confusing situation, she knows she'd want to be helped. Even if meant someone was afraid of her, even if they were confused by her appearance.

She knows what he's trying to do when he tells her this, she knows he's just trying to make things easier, assure her she only ever did what she had to do, but she isn't sure it helps.

"I'm sorry," she says again. "It's just... I don't know, I don't think there's anything that'll make any of this make sense. Not for either of us, I bet, but you're... you're new to Darrow and there's a lot I should tell you."

"I've never been outside Roarton," Kieren says, a bit overwhelmed by all the noise and the clatter and the people. "There's more people inside that train station than I've ever seen in one place in me whole life," Kieren says, hand starting to shake again in that strange inexplicable way it had been doing earlier.

He jams it into his pocket, because he doesn't exactly want to talk about things happening to him that he can't explain. "I'm in America, then?"

"We don't really know," Beth says. "It's a city that kinda seems to exist all on its own. No one controls when they show up here and no one... no one can leave."

Her explanation isn't the best, she knows that. It's stilted and a little rough, but she's still trying to understand what he's told her at the same time as she explains Darrow to him. It's more than just weird, it's completely unbelievable, but she has to believe it.

"It happens to most of us," she tells him. "We all get pulled here like you did."

"I couldn't leave my last town, either," Kieren says, glad that he's not in his Give Back bib, because the orange of that would've been entirely too demeaning and demoralizing to really bear with a new person here with him. "That was on account of hateful politicians, though," he says.

"This place seems a touch more mad science," he says, even if panic is rising. "What about supplies? Can you get things from home?"

"No," Beth says, her gaze flicking toward him. "No, we've got shops and stuff like that, but nothin' from home." And that isn't entirely true, but she doesn't think she can get into the explanation about how some things from home do show up, but they're usually not very nice. She doesn't know if he'd want to hear about her father's head and how it had been on that bench, dead and sightless, trying everything it could just to get to her, just to bite her.

But he asks that, if he can get supplies from home, and she's thinking about whatever it is she's just injected into him. It's something he needs, something that isn't here.

Beth doesn't want to think too long on what that might mean.

Kieren's jaw tenses as he hears that, glancing to the limited supply of NTP in the injector. He knows that there are ways to manufacture it, but he'd never really engaged Simon on how he did it so much as he'd seen it and wondered how it came to be. He misses Simon acutely, then, for more reasons than the ones that come attached with how much he enjoys his company.

"What about medical facilities?" he asks, trying not to feel too doomed. "How are the doctors here?"

"I've never really had to go to them, but it's like any regular city," Beth tells him, then pauses for a long moment. "There are other people here, though. Really, really, really smart people who can probably... they might be able to reverse engineer somethin' for you."

Because she knows why he's asking. He'd looked down at the injector and it's exactly what Beth had thought and she knows she should be glad he's at least worried about it, but she's still so thrown off by everything.

"I know this guy named Newt, he's a genius," she says. "And he works with a bunch of other geniuses, I bet they could help you."

"My friend at home had a natural version, but I was always so put off by his cult that I deliberately tried to never learn about any of it," he says, kicking himself, because if he'd only paid attention to Amy and to Simon more than he had, he might not be in this situation. "You're very nice," he says. "Especially if you've had contact with people like me before. I know this isn't easy. I'm sort of used to seeing the fear and hate in people's eyes. Even when they're being nice."

"I appreciate it, I really do," Kieren insists.

She doesn't feel at all like she's being nice to him. She feels like she's been terrible and cruel and not like herself at all, but she's been so thrown by everything that's happened over the past several minutes that she isn't sure what else could have been expected of her.

"You're new here," she says. "I can't just leave you to figure it all out by yourself. Speaking of which, we should probably get you your package. Everyone gets one when they arrive here and it'll have a bunch of stuff for you. Including an apartment key and the number of the place you'll be living."

Kieren awkwardly rubs a hand up and down the side of his suit, realising belatedly that he's still in funeral wear. "What about clothes? And money? And ... work?" he asks tentatively, not wanting to get right back to Give Back, but if there's an arrest coming, he wants to avoid that as best as he can.

"Jeez, I'm sorry," Beth says, shaking her head. "I'm doin' a terrible job tellin' you about this place."

She takes a moment for herself, draws in a deep breath and then lets it out, then stands and gives Kieren a smile. "So you've found yourself in the city of Darrow. You can't get home, but they kinda prepare for you to get here, whoever they are. No one really knows. There's gonna be a package waiting for you at the train station. It'll have money and a key for an apartment and a bank card. Money gets put in there every month, so you don't have to get a job, but a lot of people do anyway."

He doesn't have to work. And, even though she seems a bit fearful and distrustful of him, she doesn't seem to want to put him into slave-labour, so really, this place is already a step above Roarton. "Are there any other people like me here?" he broaches tentatively. "PDS?"

"No," she says, shaking her head. "No, there's no one else like you."

Right now she isn't sure if she's grateful for that or not. Maybe if other dead people were here, this wouldn't be so horrifying for her, maybe if someone else like him existed, she'd be able to bring him to them and just ask them for their help and then leave the entire situation behind. Maybe she wouldn't be so upset and bothered by the entire thing. She feels guilty for her own fear and has no idea how to make it stop.

He's alone. He wants to ask about his family because they're not like him, but he doesn't know if he could stand his Mum and Dad not being here, no Jem either. He misses his sister more than anyone right now, because she'd take this place by storm and he could hide behind his big-little-sister.

"I suppose I should go and collect my things," he says awkwardly, clutching his injector to his chest as the precious thing it is. "I feel like I owe you something. I don't think it's really been easy for you to talk to me. Has it?"

"No, it hasn't been," she admits with a sound that's almost a laugh. She doesn't quite feel ready to really laugh about the situation, but it's close. This is the strangest thing she's ever done and Beth has seen and done an awful lot of strange things, but he's being nice enough and she doesn't feel threatened in any way.

After so long, she thinks she knows what it feels like to be in danger.

"I can show you where you'll find your stuff," she tells him. "I don't mind."

"I'd appreciate it," Kieren says. "It's been sort of a rough day," he admits, rubbing a hand up and down his arm. "Even before I got here. This is sort of just really bad icing on a rotting cake, so to speak." Because now he hasn't got anyone and the last time he'd felt this isolated had been at the treatment centre and those aren't memories he likes to relive.

"Of course," she says as she pushes to her feet and takes a deep breath and then smiles. "It's usually waitin' for people at the train station. There's this info booth and there's an envelope that'll be waitin' for you. It'll have some ID and a phone and a key for an apartment. They're really not that bad. Kinda lonely at first and the furniture's not the best, but you can make it your own."

She wonders how walkers would even decorate, then immediately feels guilty for the thought. He's not like most walkers, she knows that by now.

He thinks of the art that decorates his room at home and how he'll probably have to fill the space with his family and friends however he can. Nodding, he shoves his hands in his pockets and ambles after her once he's collected himself and his thoughts, trying to get himself used to this place being his home, now. "Haven't had me own phone, not ever. The town was never big enough to need it."

"You'll need it here," she says. "There's a lot of people, it's a pretty big city. A lot bigger than where I grew up." Maybe not bigger than Atlanta, but they'd only ever gone into Atlanta for special occasions. Most of her life had been spent in that small, quiet town on their small, quiet farm and she'd liked it that way.

But so much had changed and she'd changed with it.

"I don't know the exact population, but it's in the thousands for sure. There's people everywhere. Not much here is quiet except the forest and the cemetery, I guess. Maybe the suburbs."

He used to spend all his time in the town's good cemetary (not good, but untainted, maybe), with Rick. And now Rick's not even here to talk to and Amy's not here and his family isn't here, but at least he's alive. And if there's one thing he's learned, it's not to let himself get so depressed that he gives up. He crosses his arms over his chest and wanders after Beth.

"That'll take some getting used to. Roarton was miniscule, compared to this."

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