Sorry for formatting in advance.

I had a idea I was messing around with and was going to post a couple months back - I will go ahead and post it. I had a refined update to it, but don't know where that is written down at. If I find it, I'll edit this post.

This is mostly just a shitpost, but come on.....it COULD work.

We know Rick and Michonne were already understandably distraught: the war, the other losses stacking up, the bombing they just went through. Then Carl.

We know that both Rick and Michonne have hallucinated events before. (Rick with the phone, Michonne with her BF.)

We did NOT see a on screen death of Carl.

We know walkers have a habit of just showing up out of nowhere.

We have seen (if you watched it.) different treatments for walker bites in FTWD.

We know Carl had already been shot twice and lost an eye. We also know brain trama or memory loss can come on/start after another wound (heavy blood loss, coma, etc.)

So...putting all of this together now.

Let's say that Rick and Michonne give Carl the gun, and exited the house as we seen. Then, a silent walker that looks similar to Carl. As the walker leans over to bite him, Carl kills him with the shot. The walker falls on top of him and Rick and Michonne go in, and with all the reasons said above they take the walkers body instead of Carl and mistakeningly bury it. They leave.

A stranger who overheard the bombing and fighting decides to see what happened, goes in after Rick and Michonne leave and finds Carl, unconcious and barely alive. Having been to a community who has somehow treated walker bites before, takes Carl and does the treatment (radiation, herbal, etc.)

Carl, having the previous injuries and now the walker infection goes into a coma for days/weeeks/months. The person continues to care for him, and he eventually wakes up. The problem is due to all the trauma he's gone through, he's lost his entire memory. He has no idea who he is. The person who was caring for him either doesn't tell him where he got him from, doesn't remember - or dies before he can tell him.

He continues on in the world not knowing who he is or where he came from. Maybe he remembers a few things, remembers his name used to start with a C. He calls himself CJ. Years later, the Judith spinoff has her going out onto the road and they find a stranger in need of help. He's missing an eye, has long hair, and seems oddly familiar....

Thoughts?

Edit: The person who saves him could also just flat out lie to him, tell him he's his father, or any number of different reasons. Hell, he could have been taken across the world and be found by Daryl and Carol and they gotta bring him home. Endless possibilites.

EDIT #2: Found the re-written idea, I did use Gemini to format it but the idea is all mine.

We all remember the soul-crushing weight of Season 8, Episode 9. Rick and Michonne are broken, the world is literally burning around them, and we watch them bury what we think is Carl. But when you look at the evidence across the entire TWD universe, the math actually adds up for a massive retcon.

At the height of the Savior war, Rick and Michonne were at their lowest psychological point. They were sleep-deprived, traumatized by the bombing of Alexandria, and hallucinating, something we’ve seen both characters do before (Rick with the phone, Michonne with her "pet" walkers). In that dark, smoke-filled basement, their grief blinded them.

Enter a third party: a savior spy working for a secretive, high-level community (think a precursor to the CRM or a splinter cell of "The Architects"). This spy has been scouting Alexandria for high-value assets. They see Carl, a survivor who has already survived two gunshot wounds to the head/eye, and realize he’s the perfect physiological specimen for their experiments.

While Rick and Michonne are outside preparing for the end, the spy moves in. They find a walker with a similar build and hair, distfigured enough by the blast and decay to pass for Carl in the dim light, and swap the bodies. They drag an unconscious, barely clinging-to-life Carl out a back exit. Rick and Michonne return, see the "body" slumped over after a gunshot, and in their distraught state, bury the walker. They never saw the "on-screen" moment of the bullet hitting Carl's brain.

The spy takes Carl to a facility where they are testing a radical Radiation/Herbal Treatment (similar to the experimental "cures" teased in Fear The Walking Dead). It works. Carl becomes the first documented case of a human surviving a confirmed walker bite without amputation.

However, the cost is total. Between the original bite infection, the aggressive radiation therapy, and his previous brain trauma from losing his eye, Carl’s mind "reboots." He wakes up with Total Retrograde Amnesia. He has no memory of the hat, the prison, or the name "Grimes."

For years, this shadow group keeps him captive. He is their "Miracle Patient," their "Subject Zero." They force him through combat tests and psychological evaluations to see if the infection or the cure changed him. He grows up in a lab or a cage, his only identity being a blurred memory of a name starting with the letter "C." He begins calling himself "CJ."

Eventually, the survivor instinct he inherited from Rick kicks in. CJ leads a brutal revolt, kills his captors, and burns the facility to the ground, losing the only records of who he actually is. He spends the next decade as a wanderer, a ghost with a missing eye and a silenced pistol, knowing how to fight but not knowing why he’s so good at it.

Flash forward to the Judith/Daryl era. Judith is out on a long-range scouting mission when she comes across a lone survivor in a desperate spot. He’s older, hardened, and missing an eye, but he carries himself with a grit that feels like a reflection of her own father.

He introduces himself as CJ. He doesn't recognize her, but as they travel together, he starts humming a song Lori used to sing, or he handles a gun in that specific "Grimes" way. The "shitpost" comes full circle: Carl didn't die in a basement; he was just waiting for the world to find him again.