For most of Esme's childhood, things went fairly well.

Her parents stayed married, she had a baby sister, Victoria, half her age, and the family dog, Brute, was her best friend. Growing up in Germany, she often saw the glamorous lives of wealthy Americans being flaunted on TV. To Esme, America seemed like the place to be. She was captivated by the freedom, the things they had, the way they lived. From a young age, she had always dreamed of going.

On her tenth birthday, her dream came true—she received tickets to America. One month abroad with her family. Even Brute! Esme couldn't have been happier.

In the month leading up to their trip, Esme dedicated herself to learning English. Her parents were already semi-fluent, so she picked up most of what she knew from them. By the time the trip came around, she was more than ready.

They rented a fancy hotel in Georgia, and everything went according to plan for nearly two weeks. Then, the first announcements of the outbreak began. At first, Esme and her family decided to stay inside, assuming it would all pass.

But it never did.

The news was a non-stop barrage of horrifying images. Monsters stumbling through the streets, their clothing tattered and bloody, as though they had all been in a massive collective car crash, and were looking for help. 

It wasn't help they were after, though. The footage of the attacks had been blurred at the worst moments, but the horror was clear enough. Indeed, to a child cursed with Esme's imagination, the blurring only managed to bring the atrocities into sharper relief.

As their month-long stay ended, the hotel stopped charging fees, there were no more visits to their room, and services ceased. Meanwhile, the number of deaths was rising rapidly. Before the connections went out, the news stopped bothering to blur at all. Suddenly, there was unedited footage of crowded streets overrun with monsters. The newscasters' faces remained placid, almost bored, as they spoke over pictures of mass graves. The experts smoking cigarettes in the studio as they described people being—and here, Esme's imagination went into overdrive—eaten. 

The roads were no longer safe—nowhere was.

Esme's father was a weak man. After nearly a year of being holed up, looking out the window became scary, and the sound of groans and cries of the dead constantly filled the silence. The dead would bang on the doors, scratch at the glass, begging to be let in. He couldn't take it anymore. He took a pistol to his mouth, and cut ties with the world.

Esme was the first to find him. She'd been in the living room, awake far past her bedtime when the gunshot rang out. It had come from her bedroom, so she snuck in, only to be met with the sight of her father's brains painted on her walls. Her shriek alerted her mother and younger sister to the scene.

After that, things were quieter. Her mother became distant and cold, while Victoria remained the oblivious six-year-old she was. It was just them for a while.

That was until, long after the world had long since officially ended, Victoria snuck out. Somehow, the little girl had undone the locks and gotten outside, where she was met with the open jaws of death. And yet again, Esme discovered it. Later, when recalling the scene, she found she could remember it only in fragments. Snapshots like crime scene photos. A bit of bloody fern here. A tattered fray of pink nightgown there...

That was the breaking point for her mother. Consumed by grief and madness, she turned on Esme with a knife. Carving her childhood away bit by bloody bit. And then, she followed her husband's final act—using the same gun to end her own life.

By any other means, Esme would've been dead if it weren't for being discovered shortly after. Daryl and Maggie found the limp pre-teen in the confines of an old hotel they had expected to clean out for baby supplies.

There's a black hole in Esme's memory, a gap she cannot bridge. One moment, she was fighting for her life at the hands of her mother, while the next, she was waking up, safe and sound, bandaged and stitched, lying within the soft sheets of a prison bed with strangers by her side.

It was there that she spent another two years with those strangers. She learned to love them after time, just as they loved her. They cared for her, taught her to walk again, taught her to fight, and taught her survival. Her bonds ran deeper with some than others, including Daryl, Maggie, Beth, Tyrese, Sasha, and her closest friend, Carl.

When the time came that she lost some of her closest companions, Esme felt such true heartbreak, a feeling that nearly shut her out from the rest of the world. 

However, when the prison fell after the attack of The Governor, the entire group was split, and Esme was left to fend for herself, along with Carl. Though it drew them closer in the long run, the two children weren't well off by themselves. They found trouble.

They were lucky to be rescued by Rick, Michonne, and Daryl, but it wasn't something that left them unscathed. Life went on painfully slow from then, living on the road for a while, finding Terminus, the barn, and eventually, Aaron.

Esme was weary of the stranger when he showed up at their doorstep, promising a life of riches and safety. But, with so little to lose, the group decided to take the chance that was Alexandria.

9/27/24
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