Authors Note:
So this is a re-write of my multichap One Bright Moment- now being betaed by Haley Jo, the wonderful first mate of the tumblr USS Caryl!
Go check 'em out- the blog is made of awesome.
Anywho, I just wanted her help cleaning it up, but there's actually a pretty major storyline change now which is cool so yay Haley Jo!
The basics however are still the same- Daryl and Carol have a one night stand pre-ZA that unbeknownst to Daryl brings about Sophia.
I'm generally warning for language, adult situations, violence/gore, abuse, drug/alcohol use, and maybe other things that we'll deal with when we get to 'em. THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH FOR YOUR INTEREST IN THE ORIGINAL AND MY STUFF IN GENERAL AND ALSO FOR JUST CLICKING THIS!
It's AMAZING AND I FREAKING LOVE YOU FOR IT!
Anywho, thanks again and please leave a review, I love and appreciate them :)
Hope you enjoy!
-One Bright Moment-
Chapter One: All I Ask
I don't want your future.
I don't need your past.
One bright moment.
Is all I ask.
Leave My Body- Florence And The Machine
The bar was crowded, typical for a Saturday night- or afternoon for that matter.
Daryl moved quickly through the establishment, slipping through throngs of dancers.
He removed himself from Merle and his crowd, who were far too rowdy for his taste, ducking past the waitress Merle had passed the clap along to, who always felt the need to go into detail about the whole goddamn experience. He knew every corner of the place.
Through his high school years it had been more a home to him than home ever was.
Beyond just knowing the building itself, he knew everyone there, from the broads to Merle's people to guys in suits who called themselves "social drinkers" in an effort to cover up the fact that they were boozers. It sure as hell wasn't the best bar in the world- might have been one of the worst- but it was his bar and he took comfort in the routine of it, in the predictability with which nights spent here rolled on.
He was surprised, confused even, to see a stranger- a slender young woman, dressed in a silky red shirt with lips to match- perched daintily at the end of the bar.
She looked out of place and a little stunned, her deep blue eyes glancing around worriedly.
She was twisting her long, curly blonde hair around a finger nervously, almost flinching every time one the regulars went to approach her. She took short sips from her beer, wrinkling her nose with every one. There was something endearing about her mannerisms, but almost sadly so. She looked more like a frightened pup than a woman out for a drink.
There was some sort of pull about her though, a force that had him walking nervously towards the empty bar stool beside her. Something about how she carried herself seemed to be practically begging to be protected, held tight and defended from the rest of the world. Despite himself, he felt strangely drawn to her, to that unnamable thing that surrounded her, the vague sense of a kindred spirit.
Before he could think the better of it, he downed the whiskey he'd ordered and turned to face her.
"Hey."
Carol jumped slightly when the man spoke to her, a seemingly hesitant half-smile on his lips, his icy blue eyes surveying the bar. He was good looking in a scruffy way. His tattered flannel shirt and the stubble across his jaw gave the impression that he didn't give a damn how he looked.
Luckily for him, he was attractive enough without much in the way of upkeep.
Those startlingly bright eyes of his bore into her shoes while he tore into his thumbnail, waiting awkwardly for her to reply. She looked around the bar instinctively, assuring herself that Ed wasn't there, that it was safe. She took a long drink of her beer, praying that it would give her courage- and maybe some flirting skills.
This is what you came here for, she encouraged herself. Remember? Freedom, rebellion...And here it is, staring at your shoes saying hello.
So talk to him already!
"Hey," she replied in what she hoped was a smooth, seductive voice. "I'm Carol."
He nodded, his lips quirking in what might of been smile, had it not come and gone so quickly. "Daryl. " He gestured to her now empty beer bottle.
"Ya want 'nother one o' those?"
She shrugged. "Why not?"
The palm of his hand slammed onto the bar, catching the attention of the barmaid. "Hey, Carly, 'nother beer fer her an' a shot o' whiskey fer me a'ight?"
"Nawt a prob'em, Daryl," Carly replied, promptly setting the drinks down before them.
Carol smiled at him as the barmaid walked away. "You come here alot?"
"Yeah. Known 'erybody 'round here since I were a kid, I guess. Robbie- guy t'at owns the place- he's a'ight. Lemme an' my brother crash 'ere a couple o' times. Good guy. Done a'ight by me." He quickly drained his shot of whiskey, gesturing to Carly for another. "So wha' brings ya down 'ere an'ways?"
"That obvious I'm not a local?"
"Accent ain't thick enough. Ya sound like ya mighta finished high school," he joked, that little quirk of his lips returning, hair falling in a shaggy brown mess around his face as he leaned back. " 'Sides, I'd 'a known who ya were if ya was from 'round here."
Carol took a prolonged sip of her beer, putting off answering while she could.
She'd never finished high school. She'd gotten pregnant senior year with Ed Peletier's baby.
A drunken mistake made at a friend's birthday party, a night she couldn't even remember had taken everything from her. She had to fight to keep the tears out of her eyes as she remembered crying over the sink, screaming at those two god awful pink lines that would wipe away her future.
She was going to be a nurse, or maybe a teacher.
Instead she turned out to be the neighborhood scandal- seventeen, unmarried and pregnant.
As far as the people of her quiet little suburb were concerned, she may as well have been selling herself.
Her parents fixed up the unmarried problem soon enough though. They engaged her to Ed, planned the wedding and orchestrated the whole hellish union.
The night after the wedding rehearsal, she had awoken in a panic, with the sheets stained scarlet and blood spilling out of her. She'd miscarried, lost the baby.
She was married to Ed Peletier the next morning.
After he drove her down to their shabby honeymoon suite and locked the door behind them, she told him that the baby was gone. She told him that their entire lives were just sent down the drain for nothing. His lips thinned into a hard line while she spoke, and then he punched her. The blow stole the air from her lungs. He had looked shocked at first, appalled with himself, while he stared at her trembling, doubled-over body. Then he had grinned.
He broke three ribs and her jaw that night.
And every day of her sham of a marriage was just her honeymoon on repeat, a never ending loop of kicks and punches. So tonight, after Ed had passed out on the couch, TV porn blaring at an ungodly volume, she cleaned herself up and headed out. Though it was only one night, it belonged to her, a brief escape from that same broken, goddamn record.
"Just trying to get away for a while I guess," she replied finally, doing her best to keep her tone light.
He nodded. His eyes scanned over every inch of her face.
He carefully read her expression before briefly revealing his own.
Understanding.
They had a couple more drinks after that, and then Daryl asked if she wanted to go outside for a smoke. With a small nod, she followed him out back, watching him drag on the cigarette, looking back and forth from her to the pavement. Her eyes dragged back and forth along the pavement as she waited expectantly for him to finish his smoke.
She wanted him to make a move, to clarify his intentions, but her patience was wearing thin.
As he dropped the cigarette butt onto the concrete, she turned to him, and tilted her head upwards. Both her hands grabbed at his hair and pulled his face down to her level.
She pressed her mouth to his fiercely, tongue demanding entrance.
He granted it almost instantly, letting her dominate the kiss, and giving her a sense of power and control that simply didn't exist with Ed. His arms wrapped carefully around her lower back, to bring her closer as she monopolized the kiss. Her tongue and teeth nipped and sucked while he kissed her slowly, steadily. He was a calm background to her ferocity.
She let out a sigh as he pressed against her, a moan escaping him.
She almost regretfully broke the kiss for air, gasping as she spoke.
"You have a place?"
"Yeah," he replied, short of breath. He motioned down an adjoining street, towards a collection of shoddy, older houses. "C'mon."
The minute or so that it took for Daryl to take his keys from his pocket and unlock the five different locks on his front door- because Merle would be damned if anybody was going to break in and steal his shit- passed with a painful slowness.
As he fiddled with the deadbolt, he was almost afraid that, by the time he got the fucking door opened, she would have come to her senses and changed her mind.
That certainly wasn't the case. When the door did finally open she pushed him against the alcove wall. Her tongue was hot and frantic as she explored his mouth.
The door swung shut behind them. Daryl groaned back into her mouth, tugging the back of her shirt, and throwing her against him. He briefly broke the kiss as he pulled off the offending item, then resumed with just as much intensity. She took her mouth away from his, moving along to the side of his neck, to lick her way up to his jaw.
His mouth found the hollow where her slender shoulders met her neck and when she nibbled on the lobe of his ear, he bit down instinctively to stop a moan.
She gasped loudly, her hips bucking against him. A growl came from the back of his throat at the sensation. Daryl freed one of his arms from her embrace, and felt the wall behind him for his bedroom doorknob. He smirked into her collarbone as his hands clasped against the cool metal and he quickly twisted it, falling into the room.
They landed on the old carpet and Carol straddled him. The door swung closed with a slam.
His hands found her hips, grasping them, and he quickly glanced towards her for confirmation before he unfastened her jeans. She wriggled free of them, kicking the pants and her worn lace panties away in one fluid movement, before working at his belt.
She was coy as she removed his boxers. Confident, she leaned over him and brought her mouth to his one last time before getting down to business. With a low, throaty moan, she slid onto him.
Their hips rocked in time as their breaths grew shorter.
Daryl sat up, one arm around her lower back, the other hand fastened on her hip. He bit his lip, drawing blood as he struggled to keep from coming before she did. The woman was working fucking magic. The least he could do was hold his horses a little while longer.
The pleasure , the heat in his core was building up to an almost unbearable pressure and he wasn't sure he could hold off. He barely registered the pain as his lip split.
His teeth gnawed into the slit in an effort to force himself to hold back, and wait for her.
With a long, drawn out moan and a spasm, she finally came. He let himself go, eyes nearly rolling back into his head as he growled against her. Neither of them said a word, just lay back on the dingy but soft carpet, Carol's eyes fluttering closed.
Despite all his efforts, the exhaustion hit Daryl full force like a sledgehammer and his eyes fell shut almost instantly as his head hit the floor.
It was after ten in the morning when he woke up again. He let out a hung-over groan, relieved that he didn't have to work that morning. Turning groggily to his side, he was surprised at the pang of disappointment he felt when he saw that Carol's sleeping figure wasn't there beside him. It was stupid. He'd known what he was getting himself into.
He knew enough from Merle about what a one night stand entailed.
Wasn't liked he'd fucking proposed or anything. Even as he grumbled to himself about what an idiot he was being, the disappointment was still there.
Better to ignore it, he decided, getting up and on with his life.
It was hot. The Georgian heat was unforgiving, and the quarry was offering no hope of shade. Daryl stood along the edge of the embankment, sun beating mercilessly on his back, while Carl and the little blonde played in the water below, astonished. He was astonished not by the dead rising to consume the living, not by the fucking apocalypse, but by a tiny, meek little twelve year old girl and her docile mother.
Twelve years- he couldn't even begin to wrap his head around it.
He'd been shocked enough when Carol had turned up at the quarry- with her husband and daughter in tow. Her hair had greyed and her face had grown hollow, worn by the events of the passing years. Something fell inside him when he thought of the little girl's eyes- wide, scared, and painfully familiar.
Twelve years.
Yeah, that would line up pretty damn well with his one and only prior interaction with Carol.
Shut up, he reminded himself. They're just eyes. Don't mean shit. Lot of people probably end up with eyes like that. It doesn't mean a thing. It's not proof. She could just as easily be the husbands, he repeated to himself, like a mantra. He still couldn't get the girl's stare, as big and frightened and blue as the water below him, out of his head.
It was fucking disconcerting, the way so simple a thing seemed to have thrown him off his axis, and was gnawing into the pit of his stomach, no matter how hard he tried to shrug it off. It gave him a sense of responsibility and uneasiness that he couldn't quite rid from his thoughts. He caught a glance of Carol's husband towering over her nearby, muttering something low and threatening, Carol flinched before he stalked off towards the tents.
Daryl ground his teeth.
It was the husband that was bothering him, he decided.
Ed, a beast of a man who stunk of crap beer and whose gaze crawled up and down over his own daughter like an insect, slimy and revolting. The man was a piece of shit.
That much had been apparent to Daryl the moment he'd laid eyes on him.
He'd seen how Ed's hands clasped over the girl's shoulder hard enough to make her wince, how Carol made sure not to stare directly at him and kept her head bowed low.
Her voice shook when she spoke now. There was only a slight tremor in her words, almost too insignificant to notice, but it was there nonetheless.
Daryl knew people like Ed. He had grown up with them.
Hell, that son of a bitch could have passed as a convincing double for the sperm donor that had been his father. He knew what it was like, growing up that way.
He understood constantly looking over your shoulder, always listening for those heavy steps behind you. The hairs on the back of his neck still stood up when he recalled the old man standing behind him, how the stink of halitosis always preceded his presence, and how the thud of his boots caused an ill, sinking feeling.
"Daryl?"
He nearly jumped at the sound of Carol's voice. He turned quickly to see her standing behind him, glancing around worriedly as if to make sure she hadn't attracted anyone's attention.
"Wha'?" He asked, his tone coming out with more bite than intended.
"Look, I know it's been a long time..."
His voice softened slightly, though the words still came out more snappishly than he'd intended. "He ain't gon' find out if tha's wha' yer worried 'bout."
She relaxed briefly, before tensing again. Her eyes were still scanning the area.
"I should go before he gets back."
He nodded as she turned to go before speaking suddenly, his mouth moving without his permission. "Yer kid? She got a name?"
A look akin to panic washed over her as she answered. "Sophia. Why are you asking?"
He shrugged. "No reason. Jus' wonderin'."
She nodded, and turned to walk away.
Her arms wrapped around her sides as she left, worry written in her features.
Daryl sat himself against the quarry's edge and busied himself with sharpening his knife.
His gaze lingered on where Sophia played in the water below and he couldn't help but wonder.