AN: This was brought about by an anonymous request on Tumblr that I consider doing something where Ed doesn't die at the rock quarry and we see how things develop with Caryl while Ed is still alive and well. I thought it was an interesting idea to play around with, so here we are. According to the plans that I have for the story, this one will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 chapters and will be a slow-burn Caryl story.
This story comes with some warnings. Because I'm going somewhere that the show didn't go, I won't be following the events on the show exactly. As well, you can expect that the characters might be a little "OOC" from time to time because this is something that we haven't seen develop on the screen.
Also, there will be trigger warnings here for violence and domestic violence—both actual and alluded to—since Ed is alive. There will be the scenario of Carol/other person because she's married to Ed. I don't intend to be terribly graphic with either of these points, but you should be aware of their presence. They should be expected.
If you choose to read, however, in spite of all those things, I hope that you enjoy the story.
I own nothing from the Walking Dead.
I hope that you enjoy the first chapter as we get started here. Let me know what you think!
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Daryl wondered how many miles they'd have to drive before the big black cloud of smoke, billowing up like it came from the pits of Hell, would no longer be visible in his rearview mirror.
The CDC was burning—one of the final places they'd expected to find life and proof that the world was still going on, somewhere, like it had once been going on. It was burning. More than that, it was gone. Like so many other things, it simply ceased to be. It was just gone. What was burning now was the leftover debris that the explosion had left behind and the whole surrounding area that was swallowed up in the wave of fire. The CDC, itself, was simply gone.
Jenner was gone. Jacqui was gone.
Now they were just names to add to the running checklist of people they'd lost. It was a list that grew a little every day. Today it grew by two. Tomorrow it might grow by four or six. The truth of the matter was, Daryl was sure that it would keep growing until there simply weren't any more names to add to it or anybody left to remember the names that were already there.
It made Daryl sick to his stomach. He didn't want the list to keep growing.
He'd always hated losing things.
Even though his old man wasn't worth the six foot plot they threw him in, and even though Daryl had wished him dead a million times, he'd hated losing him. He'd taken with him the last hope that Daryl had of having a normal childhood. He'd taken with him the last hope that he might, somehow, magically turn things around and become the kind of old man that tossed a ball in the yard with his sons and didn't get piss drunk after a day of working the newest job he was simply waiting to get laid off from.
Daryl had hated losing his mother. She'd taken with him the last bit of softness and kindness that he'd known in the world. She'd taken with her the only pair of hands that had ever touched Daryl in true tenderness—filled with a kind of love that he couldn't find anywhere else. She'd left Daryl feeling a kind of vulnerability that nobody knew until their mother was just gone.
Daryl had hated losing the house when he and his brother didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of keeping it. He'd hated moving into the piece of shit that Merle had found them—thanks to a buddy who took pity on the fact that Merle was barely old enough to be his own guardian and was pretending he could be Daryl's. And, even though he'd hated living there, Daryl had hated leaving behind that piece of shit when they'd struck out to try to save themselves in a world they understood even less than they'd understood it before.
It wasn't much, but it was the only damn home they had.
Daryl had hated losing his brother every single time he'd lost him—and those times were numerous—because he'd landed himself in juvie again or he'd run off in search of something better where he promised Daryl would join him if he ever found it. Merle was an asshole and he was a son of a bitch, but he was all that Daryl had left in the world.
And Daryl had really hated losing him when he was the last thing that Daryl had left and Rick had handcuffed him to a roof like a dog to leave him there for dead. He'd hated knowing that he'd never know, not for sure, if his brother was out there somewhere or if he'd succumbed to his self-inflicted wound and died somewhere in Atlanta.
They'd lost enough people out of their group that Daryl couldn't even remember everyone. They'd lost their camp at the rock quarry where they were sure they'd be safe.
And now? They'd lost the CDC—a place that seemed, for just a moment, to be the answer to whatever prayers they were still bothering to offer up into the universe.
They'd lost nearly everything, and yet they held on to some of the damnedest things.
Despite his dislike of losing people, there were people in their group that Daryl wouldn't mind seeing lost. But, like cockroaches, it seemed that those were the hardest assholes to get rid of.
And it seemed that cockroaches had the best luck. It would appear that human cockroaches, by merit of being human beings that actually deserved not a single damn thing in the world, were the people who lost the least. They were the people who held onto everything good in their lives. Everything they never deserved to have in the first damn place.
Daryl reached in his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. There'd been several cartons at the CDC, but he'd only had the one pack on him when he'd left. One cigarette was missing out the pack, and he took the second out now. He lit it, his hands shaking a little from the nerves that had been stirred up by facing death, and he took a draw off it.
In his rearview mirror, he could still see the smoke billowing up from the CDC's explosion and the burning that it caused in the surrounding area. He could still smell it. Not even the smell of rotting flesh which seemed to permeate everything could cover it over. The smell of the cigarette smoke that was so close to his face that it burned his eyes couldn't cover over the smell of the explosion.
In his rearview he could also see the bike in the back of his truck—the last thing he had of his brother. It was fitting, Daryl decided, that the bike was in his rearview along with the smoke. It marked everything he'd had to leave behind. It stood for everything that had been lost.
In front of him, like some circus caravan, stretched the vehicles that made up what he could only see fit to call his "new family". Like a family, there were some in the caravan he liked more than others. There were some he could barely even stand to be around. But they were together and, as far as they knew, they were the last remaining living humans on the face of the Earth.
And they would all be lost if they didn't find something or somewhere where they could get a decent enough toe hold to use to crawl out of the hole they were in and survive.
A few days in the CDC, at least, had given them a chance to rest. It had given them a chance to think that there might be a future for all of them. It had given them some food and drink to build their strength up a little, and it had provided medicine for anyone who needed it—though there was really only one of them that had demanded such care.
He was driving the Cherokee right in front of Daryl. The fat asshole had been well enough to run from the building before the blast and save his sorry ass skin—not caring enough to really make sure his wife and kid made it out. He'd left his wife to usher their daughter forward and had only seemed concerned about her whereabouts when he'd reached the car and feared that she might get into a vehicle with someone else who would treat her decent for however long they drove. The asshole was well enough to drive his car away from the fire that might have swallowed them all up, but he hadn't been "able" to do a single damn thing since Shane had kicked his ass at the rock quarry. He'd been milking the injuries he'd earned for everything they were worth since he'd gained them.
And before that? Before that, Merle and Daryl had figured the fucker's hands were put on backwards—good for nothing more than beating the wife he had that doted on him and served him like he was a king and for threatening the kid that looked at him like he was a bomb always set to explode.
He must be doing something right, though, because he'd managed to get everything he had and he'd managed to hold onto it while everyone else around him was losing left and right.
Ahead of Ed Peletier and his wagon of horrors was the RV where the old man sat with Andrea among the company of those that had piled into the vehicle. Daryl could only imagine the conversation that was taking place in there—if anyone was actually daring to say a single damn thing—because Andrea had been willing to give up her life, and the old man had been willing to go with her, because she'd lost every damn thing and figured that a life, once everything else was gone, really wasn't worth holding onto any longer.
She'd lost something that, maybe, Daryl hadn't lost just yet. She'd lost the hope that it could get better. That was all that had dragged Daryl's ass up and out of bed for most of his life, and he could imagine it was what was keeping at least some of them going, so he figured that losing it might really be the very end of hanging on.
But he was glad he wasn't in her presence right now because he didn't know what he'd say to her, but he knew he'd feel driven to say something.
Just ahead of the RV was the Jeep. In the Jeep, Shane drove alone.
Shane had lost it all, just like most of them, but he'd done it in a different way. He could pretend that nobody knew what happened—that they were all blind, deaf, and stupid—but they all knew. He'd been one of the only ones of them that had gained something out of the world's plummet into shit. He'd gained a ready-made family—wife and kid—at the end of it all. But then he'd lost it when Rick had returned.
And now, stewing in his semi-loss, Shane had gained a chip on his shoulder that was the size of Texas.
Just ahead of that was Rick. He was the man that, supposedly, was going to lead them all to some sort of salvation. He was, perhaps, the only one of them that had done things entirely backwards. He'd lost, just like the rest of them, but his loss was temporary. Just like playing some country song backward on the radio, he'd gained back everything he'd lost. His friend—though he came with his Texas-sized supposedly-secret chip—his wife, his son, and his position of power over everyone who looked up to him as some kind of person who would look out for him like the good cop that he was, had all come back to him.
The good cop that had left Merle handcuffed to the roof like a dog.
Daryl had no doubt that Rick was probably a good man, but they were different. They'd come from different places. They'd experienced different things. They could work together, now that they belonged to this makeshift family that was the only thing that Daryl had left, but they would always be different.
Rick, too, would always know that Daryl was different.
His experiences with the law, after all, had always been different than Rick's or even Shane's.
Daryl would always be somewhat on the outside.
He would always be a little different than everyone else—a forced loner—who'd started this whole thing with very little left to lose and had still managed to lose it all.
The only thing he had left, in fact, was the hope that it actually could get better and the determination that—if it were up to him—the losing would stop. If it were up to him? They'd somehow manage to get through this without losing another damn thing that they wanted and needed to hold onto.
Even if the only thing they all held onto was the thin thread of hope that was keeping them all tethered to the Earth that was determined, it seemed, to give up on herself.