"Oh my God..."
The words rippled through the camp. Someone said it first, then others picked it up, the realization spreading as people checked and double-checked and couldn't believe what they were seeing.
The cheers erupted all at once. People were laughing and crying at the same time, hugging whoever was closest, not caring about the blood and gore coating everyone's clothes.
Morales leaned against the side of a pickup truck, using his sleeve to wipe the walker blood and sweat from his face. His hands were still shaking from adrenaline, but he was grinning like an idiot.
He scanned the crowd gathered around the campfire. People were supporting each other, checking wounds, pressing makeshift bandages against cuts that would scar but wouldn't kill. Miranda was fussing over a gash on her husband's arm.
His eyes landed on Lucien.
The kid stood slightly apart from the main group, near the RV, looking oddly clean compared to everyone else. While the rest of them were covered in blood and dirt and worse, Lucien's clothes were barely mussed. His blond hair caught the firelight. That calm, composed expression on kid's face was striking in a way that made Morales' grin widen.
"Hey," he called out, his voice carrying over the noise. "I'm just saying... did we seriously get ourselves a wizard or something?"
The words were meant as a joke.
Confusion flickered across Lucien's face, his eyes going wide.
Shit. Does he know?
But Morales' gaze slid past him, landing on Jim, who was sitting on the ground nearby, still looking dazed.
"Jim! You actually got it right!"
Morales laughed and crossed over to clap Jim hard on the shoulder. "Rick brought hope back with him, just like you said!"
That got everyone's attention.
The others began to murmur as they remembered Jim's breakdown earlier that afternoon. They recalled the way he had clawed at the dirt like a man possessed, muttering about death and graves, and about Rick bringing hope.
At the time, they had assumed he was losing his grip. They thought the stress had finally broken him, or that the heat had gotten to him, or that the sheer weight of living in this nightmare of a world had pushed him too far.
But now...
Jim blinked slowly, like he was surfacing from deep water. He wiped at the dried blood on his face with the back of his hand, smearing it more than cleaning it, and looked at Morales as if he were not quite sure what language he was speaking.
"Hope."
His eyes moved across the camp, taking in the scattered walker corpses and the survivors standing where they should have been dead. Then his gaze settled on Lucien, and something clicked into place.
"I remember now." His voice was quiet but clear. "The dream I had. That's why I was digging."
Everyone had gone quiet. Even the people still wrapping wounds or reloading weapons stopped to listen.
"I dreamed that tonight, a lot of people died. There were bodies everywhere, and there was nowhere to bury them. I kept digging graves, one after another, but there were never enough. Then Rick came back. And after that, something shifted. The people who came back with him altered everything. The graves I dug were no longer needed."
Silence.
Rick, who'd been checking Shane's arm for injuries, straightened up slowly. "What exactly are you saying?"
Jim shook his head, still looking dazed. "I don't know. The dream changed. It wasn't like before, and it wasn't clear. There was just death, and then hope. Rick brought the hope back."
Morales was grinning again, but there was something uncertain in his eyes now. "You're telling me you dreamed the future? Like some kind of prophet?"
"I don't know what I'm telling you," Jim said honestly. "I just know what I saw."
And almost as one, everyone's eyes shifted to Lucien.
He felt their stares.
Bloody hell. This was not good.
On the outside, he looked confused, maybe a little uncomfortable with the attention, but nothing more. Inside, his thoughts were racing through possibilities at lightning speed.
Had he been exposed? Did they know? How much had they figured out?
No. Morales had looked straight past him. The "wizard" comment had been aimed at Jim and at his prophetic dream. They were connecting dots, but they were not the right ones.
Still. This was dangerous territory.
"Lucien!"
Duane came running over. The kid grabbed Lucien's arm and started talking so fast the words tumbled over each other.
"Did you hear? Jim dreamed about tonight! He knew the walkers were coming, and he knew Rick would bring hope, and that's you! You warned everyone, so we all survived!"
The boy turned to the adults, his face flushed with the kind of conviction only children could manage. "See? I told you! He's our hope!"
Rick looked uncomfortable with that assessment. "Duane, that's not—"
"It's true though!" The kid was insistent. "Nobody died! Jim said you would bring hope, and you brought Lucien, and now everyone's okay!"
More murmurs from the crowd. Some people were nodding. Others looked skeptical, but even the skeptics were eyeing Lucien with something that looked uncomfortably like awe.
Lucien wanted to disappear.
This was exactly the kind of attention he'd been trying to avoid. Being seen as "special" was dangerous. It invited questions he couldn't answer, and scrutiny he couldn't afford.
He gave a little shrug and a self-deprecating smile. "I just got lucky spotting them early. Anyone would've done the same."
The prophecy was actually workable. Vague enough to mean anything. Jim's dream had apparently changed when the timeline changed, which was mental, but it gave Lucien cover. If people thought Jim was the magical element here, the one with prophetic powers, that took suspicion off Lucien himself.
He could work with that.
The trick was to deflect credit and make sure nobody looked too closely at exactly how he'd managed to be in the right place at the right time all night long.
That was the play here.
"It was a team effort. Dale and Glenn on the RV, Rick and Shane coordinating everyone, Daryl with his crossbow, we all did our part."
It was the right thing to say. People started nodding as they remembered their own contributions to the fight.
Then Jim spoke again.
"The dream changed. It was not supposed to go like this."
Everyone looked at him.
"In the original dream, the first one I had, we all died. Or most of us did. Then something changed, and the dream changed with it." His eyes were distant, as if he were trying to recall something just beyond his reach. "Rick came back. He brought someone with him. Someone who changed everything."
The attention shifted to Lucien like a spotlight.
Sod it all.
Lucien kept his expression carefully neutral, even as his mind screamed.
This bloke was turning into a real problem. In the original timeline, the show he had watched back in his previous life, Jim had shown limited precognitive ability. He dreamed about deaths before they happened.
This, however, was different. The man's dreams seemed to be adapting in real time to changes in the timeline.
That meant Jim might be sensitive to his interference. He might notice when events failed to line up with how they were supposed to unfold.
That was concerning.
He would need to be careful around Jim from now on. He might need to find a way to muddy the waters and keep his prophetic dreams too vague to act on.
For now, though, he needed to defuse the situation before it spiraled any further.
"I think," he said, "that Jim might be the special one here. I have never dreamed of the future, but he has. Maybe that is the real miracle. He was able to warn us that something bad was coming, even if he did not know the details."
Some people nodded. That made sense to them, Jim as the warning system, Lucien as just the kid who happened to be in the right place.
But not everyone was convinced.
Before anyone could push further, a voice called out, "What a load of horseshit."
Everyone turned.
Ed was leaning against the driver's side door of a pickup truck. He'd been absent during the fight, Lucien vaguely remembered seeing him duck into the RV the moment the walkers appeared, and now he looked disheveled and drunk, his shirt stained with what was probably whiskey.
"Hope?" His laugh was ugly. "I'll tell you what that kid is. He's a goddamn jinx."
The temperature of the conversation dropped about twenty degrees. Carol, who'd been sitting quietly near the fire with Sophia, went still.
Ed pushed off from the truck and swayed slightly as he walked forward. Definitely drunk. His eyes were bloodshot, his movements loose and aggressive.
"Think about it!" He pointed a finger at Lucien. "We were doing just fine here. No problems. Then this little shit shows up, and suddenly everything goes to hell!"
"Ed—"
"Don't 'Ed' me! It's the truth!" He was getting louder now, feeding off his own anger. "Merle gets left behind in the city, that was after the kid showed up! Rick nearly dies in a walker horde, after the kid showed up! And tonight? Tonight we get attacked by more walkers than we've ever seen—"
"After the kid showed up," Morales finished with a flat voice. "Yeah, we get it, Ed. You've made your point."
"Have I?" Ed rounded on him. "Because you're all standing here treating him like some kind of lucky charm, when it's obvious he's the opposite! He's bad luck! A walking disaster!"
He spun back to face Lucien, and there was hatred in his eyes now. "Everything bad that's happened, it all traces back to you!"
Lucien stood where he was, keeping his face calm. He had dealt with worse than drunk arseholes in his previous life. The trick was to avoid engaging and to give them no ammunition.
But Ed wasn't done.
"And you!" He whirled on Sophia, who shrank back against her mother. "What did you say before? That he was a lucky charm? How stupid can you be?!"
"Ed, leave her alone," Carol said quietly.
"Shut up!" Ed snapped. "This is your fault too, filling her head with that garbage! Teaching her to worship some random kid like he's special!"
He turned his venom back on Lucien. "You want to know what I think? I think you brought this down on us."