AN: This is just something light and for fun. Since I'm working a lot on some darker stuff, I just wanted to do something kind of silly to break things up.
As always, I own nothing from the show.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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He was drunk.
No. He'd left drunk behind at least four beers ago. He was obliterated. He was trashed. He was too drunk to figure out how fucking drunk he was and it was his brother's fault.
No. It was his fault. He couldn't blame this shit on Merle. Merle might've been the one buying the drinks, and he might've been the one suggesting one more round, but Merle was most assuredly not lifting the beers off the table and putting them to Daryl's lips. He'd been too busy practically doing that to the blonde.
As Daryl stopped, leaning against the side of the building for a moment, and stared with blurry eyes at the numbers on the brick, he had a moment of silence for the blonde. Merle was going home with her. She was the one that was coming out of this shit the worst. Daryl had to stumble home, in the dark, with an unfortunate case of blurry double vision, but the blonde was going to take Merle home with her.
There was one born every minute—and if she wasn't careful, there'd be another born nine months from now. Merle wasn't always the most careful about what he did. Especially not when he was in some new place and figured he could get away with it before anyone knew him and knew to put his name to his face.
Daryl closed one eye to study the numbers on the building. He was fairly confident this was his building. There were four of them, all lined up in a row, and he felt like most of them were just one inspection away from being condemned. The numbers on the building, even when he was sober, didn't match the numbers of his address. Too many of them had fallen off or been stolen—though he didn't have a clue what the hell someone might want the fake brass numbers for.
He was a little proud of himself. Drunk as he was, he had made it and he'd only fallen in three ditches during the trip. Rather, he'd only fallen in the same ditch three times.
Now all he had to do was climb the stairs to the second floor, unlock the door to their new palace, and find his room without killing himself by falling over all the shit that they hadn't unpacked and probably wouldn't get around to unpacking. At least they'd gotten most of it out of the way. Now their décor was just boxes, full of shit, stacked up and lining the walls.
That had been their décor when they'd left the last place. Probably the best thing they could've done was just left the shit behind.
The trip up the stairs was long. It was too long. The steps seemed to multiply. Every time Daryl gave himself a pep talk that there were only a few more to go, there were a few more that appeared. Finally, though, he reached the landing and stepped into the hallway.
The place smelled like shit. It smelled like what would happen if Phillip Morris were to flood and then be left to mold and mildew for at least twenty years. He hadn't seen any rats since they'd gotten there, but he was pretty sure that the only reason there weren't any was because they had higher standards for living spaces than this particular building would allow for. He must be in the right place.
Home sweet home.
Through keeping one eye firmly closed, Daryl discovered that he could see much better than he had during most of the trip back to his apartment. Maybe pirates with their eye patches were on to something. Maybe that's why the hell they wore them. They could get piss drunk and still make out which of the assholes in front of them was the real deal.
Right about now, Daryl felt like a pirate. The ground seemed to rock under his feet. He could blame it on faulty construction and say that the building was entirely unsteady, but he was pretty sure that it might have had a thing or two to do with the fact that he'd just come from becoming a VIP at the local bar.
He found the apartment and dug the key out of his pocket. Even the keys to this place were kind of gross. There was a glob of something stuck on the end of his that he couldn't identify.
No. He didn't want to identify it. He suspected it might be something like old gum, but that was an unpleasant thought so he'd decided at the bar that he'd simply pretend it was glue. At least it wasn't hard to find in his pocket.
A few minutes of fighting with the lock and Daryl had the door open. Immediately he was greeted by a smell that he didn't recall. Something clean. Something—maybe floral. He'd bought some cleaning supplies at the dollar store just down the street and he cursed under his breath when he realized that somehow he must have been too rough on the bottles and they'd busted. They were probably leaking out everywhere and he'd probably fall in a puddle of cleaner and crack his skull open. The only consolation was that, if they were leaking out over the floor somewhere, at least he could count on one part of the place being clean.
Daryl stepped into the apartment and pushed the door closed behind him. He didn't bother with the light. There wasn't anything to see and he didn't want to see it anyway. He put the key on the counter, just beside the door, and then he immediately toed off his shoes. If Merle came in, he'd probably fall over them, but that wasn't Daryl's problem.
As he stumbled through the dark, finding it just as easy to navigate his steps without vision as it had been to stumble along with the double vision that had seen him home, he also went working himself out of his clothes. He left everything where it fell. There was no need to worry about being tidy. After all, he was going to be the one to clean this place up anyway. If it got cleaned up at all, that was.
He stubbed his toe on something and cursed to himself. A box that hadn't made it to the wall. Left out in the middle of the floor it was like a booby trap. He'd just missed it. He was lucky that he'd only knocked the hell out of his toe and hadn't broken his neck. He heard something squeak. He froze for a moment, but the one squeak was all it gave. He heard it, and it heard him. So it was freezing.
"Damn mouse," he muttered to himself. "Damn rat."
He'd gotten a little too excited about their seeming absence from the building. The little fuckers were probably running all around him and celebrating over the presence of the cleaning products that were running all over the floor.
He touched his hand to the bedroom door frame, stopped a moment to steady himself, and leaned his head against the door frame to further the effect.
And that was the moment that he very nearly pissed himself.
There was something that was almost sobering about something cold and metal and foreign scratching against you in the darkness. It took away the ability to swallow. It took away the ability to think.
"What the hell do you want?" A woman's voice said. "I'll call the cops."
Daryl remained frozen because he feared what the cold metal might be. His mind was trying to spin as quickly as it could, but he'd been the dumb asshole that had jammed up its gears. Cleaning supplies they'd left in their apartment. A few rats and mice, they probably had those too.
Daryl was about two hundred percent certain, though, that they'd left no woman there. And the blonde, if she'd even had a mind to, couldn't have beaten Daryl back to the place.
"Should be me calls the cops," Daryl offered, his voice coming out hoarsely. "I don't know what the hell you're doing in my damn apartment, lady, but—this ain't no place for you."
The woman who owned the voice that had sounded in Daryl's ears earlier was quiet for a moment. Now, slightly sobered, Daryl could recognize her breathing in the darkness. His eyes, adjusting some, could barely make out a silhouette.
And then he was blinded by the light that one of her hands turned on in a quick slap to the wall.
She screamed. Daryl cussed the blinding light and the fact that the knife she was holding—good for gutting but bad for him—scratched its way across his chest in her movements to jump away from him. And, somewhere, another voice screamed and called for her mother.
"It's OK," the woman in front of Daryl called. "It's OK. Just—stay there."
"What the fuck?" Daryl asked. The woman in front of him was wearing a t-shirt and cotton shorts. She'd been sleeping. It was all over her face. But what was she doing sleeping in his apartment?
Daryl looked around. It appeared that before she'd started sleeping in his apartment, she'd also cleaned it and moved all of her shit into it so that it looked nothing like it had. It looked nothing like his apartment. It wasn't his apartment.
"What the hell?" Daryl asked again, more to himself than anyone else.
Now the woman didn't look like she knew what to do. She was standing there with the hunting knife in her hand, pointed at Daryl, but she didn't look like she was going to filet him anymore. Now she just looked baffled. He couldn't even think about the trickle of blood that was running down his chest—running all the way down.
Daryl looked down and immediately remembered that, on his way to his bed, he'd lost all of his clothes. All of them.
"Holy shit!" He spat, turning quickly to head back where he'd come from. Too quickly. His head spun and he went down. It all went black.
When he woke up? He was a little less fuzzy minded—one blow after another sobering him—and he was on the floor and covered with a blanket. The woman who had sliced him with the knife was tending to the wound now, perched on her knees beside him. Daryl hissed at the burn of whatever she was putting on it and she looked at him.
"Don't get any ideas," she warned. "I've still got the knife."
"What the hell you got a knife like that for?" Daryl asked. "What the hell you afraid of?"
She raised her eyebrows at him.
"What are you doing in my apartment?" She asked. "Why'd you break in?"
Daryl furrowed his brow at her.
"Didn't break the fuck in," he said. "Got a damn key. Walked right in the front door. Who are you?"
"Carol," she said. "You're Daryl. I checked your wallet."
Daryl started to sit up a little, but she pushed him back down and finished her work on the wound.
"It's your ass I should be worried about—gonna rob me?" Daryl asked.
"Not hardly," Carol said. "You don't have anything to rob."
Daryl was struck for a moment. He should have money. But then, all of a sudden, it hit him why his dear brother was perhaps feeling so generous with the money that he was doling out for drinks all night long.
"Fuckin' Merle," Daryl muttered.
"Excuse me?" Carol asked.
He looked at her and shook his head.
"Don't worry about it," he said. When she finished with the wound, he thanked her quietly for the assistance. "Guess that's that," he said, starting to sit up but being careful to keep the blanket he was covered with in place.
"Not exactly," Carol said. "I hope you've enjoyed our middle of the night meeting. I know I have. But there's still the one little problem of who the hell you are and what you're doing in my apartment."
Daryl had almost forgotten about that. Almost.
"I'm in sixteen," he said.
"And I'm in fourteen," Carol said.
Daryl sucked his teeth and groaned against the feeling in his head. Part of it was from hitting it when he fell, no doubt, but part of it was certainly from the drinks that he'd had.
"I come in the wrong door," he said. "Shit—I'm sorry."
"With a key?" Carol asked.
It struck Daryl when she said it and he looked around, trying to figure out where he was and where he'd left the key. While he was still muddling through it all, Carol managed to find her feet. She got up and he remembered where he'd left the key.
"I put the key on the counter—soon as I come in," Daryl said.
Without saying anything, Carol found the key and picked it up. She opened the apartment door and stepped outside, leaving the door open, and a moment later she returned, clacking the key down more loudly on the counter than Daryl had when he'd come in.
"They're the same key!" She said. "Our apartments have the same key!"
Daryl considered it a moment. Then he laughed to himself.
"Cheap as the damn person that built this building was," he said. "Probably bought all the damn locks at some kind of bargain price. Every damn body in this building's probably got the same damn lock."
Carol's whole countenance changed. A woman that should've been freaking out because Daryl was in her apartment, naked under her blanket no less, suddenly looked more concerned than she had the first moment she'd turned on the light and cut Daryl with her ridiculous knife. She ran her fingers in her hair, tugging at it, and waved the other hand around. It rested on her hip, dropped, returned to her hip, and dropped again.
Daryl in her apartment wasn't worrying her too badly, but the thought that others might come in was getting to her.
"Tomorrow," Daryl said, wishing he could fix it because her anxiety was making him anxious, "just go down to the store and get a new lock. Hell I'ma get one too. Pick you one up. I can—I could change that shit in half an hour."
She stopped the pacing and looked at him. She furrowed her brow.
"You'd do that?" She asked.
Daryl thought about it. He'd do that. He'd certainly do that. It wasn't that much to ask. He'd do it for his own place anyway, and once he was going it wasn't any sweat to just do another door. He nodded.
"Yeah," he said. "I'd do that."
She looked relieved. A smile came across her lips as her shoulders sagged under the new emotion. Then she tensed up again, though.
"My daughter," she said, shaking her head. "What am I going to do about tonight?"
Daryl didn't think it was a good time to point out that if he was the first person to break into her apartment—with a key to it—there was a good chance that nobody else had figured out the locks matched and therefore they weren't likely to come in tonight. He didn't think it would be a very good idea to voice it to her in such a way.
But he didn't know really what else he could offer. He swallowed.
"If you want," he said. "I could—spend the night? Sleep on the couch?"
"I don't know you," Carol said.
Daryl chuckled.
"If I was gonna do something, don't you think I'da done it by now?" He asked.
She looked uncomfortable and he picked up the knife she'd left on the floor. She was comfortable enough, naturally, with him to have left it there. It struck him—and that in itself, the fact that he'd never hurt her being beside the point—was enough to guarantee that he'd never have done anything to the woman. He moved just enough to extend his arm and offer it to her.
"Here," he said. "Sleep with your daughter or whatever makes you feel better. Keep that damn knife close by and I can promise you that I ain't coming nowhere near you. Somebody come in—by chance? Get past me? Just gut their ass."
She looked almost amused before she pushed the emotion away. She took the knife and offered him a soft thanks that was almost like the one he'd given her for dressing the wound that she'd inflicted and apologized for only by cleaning it. Of course, maybe he deserved the wound for not being more careful about his surroundings.
"I'm sorry I..." she said, coming to take the knife. She gestured to the cut. Daryl smiled to himself, the uncanny feeling washing over him that this woman could read his mind.
He shook his head.
"Ok," he said. "Sobered me up some. I needed that."
"Are you sure you want to sleep on the couch?" Carol asked. "You don't know me either. And it isn't very comfortable."
"Better'n my bed, probably," Daryl said. "Besides—just like me. If you was gonna kill me? You'da done it by now."
They exchanged a few pleasantries and Daryl promised, still from his spot on the floor, that he would change the lock in the morning. Carol offered him water and food and whatever he wanted out of the fridge. Then she bid him goodnight and headed toward the room where her daughter was supposed to be sleeping. More than likely the girl was probably wondering what the hell was going on.
Daryl got up, once her back was to him, and took the blanket with him to gather his clothes together and start getting ready to sleep. Merle was never going to believe this shit. Daryl wasn't certain he even believed it. He half expected to wake up at any minute and find that he'd simply passed out drunk in the ditch he kept falling into and had a vivid nightmare.
He smiled to himself when, as he was getting some water, he heard Carol speak softly to him from the doorway of the second bedroom.
"Put your clothes on, Daryl," Carol said. He turned to find her smirking and leaning against the doorframe. She dropped her voice just a bit. "You've got a nice ass, but my daughter doesn't need to see it."
Daryl blushed, realizing his blanket wasn't well arranged, and hummed out the only sound that he could make before Carol laughed to herself, made her own humming noise of disbelief at the night, and retired to the bedroom.
Nobody was going to believe this shit.