"We ran into his brother. They went off."
Two short sentences, and the world fragmented around her.
Carol heard herself stammering out stupid, pointless questions to which she already knew the answers.
"They left? Daryl left?" How was that even possible? She'd lain sleepless through the night, fearing they'd all fallen to some kind of grief out there, but to know he'd come through it in one piece and then gone off of his own volition, without one word of regret, one last chance for her to look into his face, or hear his voice...
A single word tore from her throat, full of confusion and pain - "Gone?"
She turned and let Rick pull her face into his chest, but the tears dried almost before they hit her skin. She swallowed the bile that swirled in her mouth, hefted her rifle and pointed her face up the hill, headed back home.
"He said you'd understand."
Glenn's voice, thick with sympathy, cut through Carol's misery, and she blinked back her tears as she looked up at him.
"He said that?" At least he'd spared a thought for her, before he'd left. "I guess he was right. I do, that's the worst part of it." Her brittle laugh threatened to turn into a sob. "Doesn't mean I'm not pissed as hell at him for choosing Merle over us, but I understand that he couldn't just leave him again, not after they'd just found each other."
She fought to get her voice under control. "You must see that, too, Glenn, don't you? If you were separated from Maggie for almost a year, and finally got her back, could you walk away from her if the rest of us told you she couldn't stay?"
"Yeah, but I love Maggie," Glenn said, sounding confused.
"Yes, you do. So think how conflicted Daryl must feel, choosing the one person he probably loves and hates in equal measure. I don't envy him his road, though it may take me a long while to forgive him for leaving m-m…" Keep it together, Carol. "For leaving. But I understand why he chose the way he did." And she did, no matter how much it felt like sandpaper against her soul.
When they'd returned from Woodbury and she'd realized Daryl wasn't with them, it had been all she could do to keep her legs under her. The strangest part was that, even for those few seconds before Rick reached her and said, he's alright, he's alive, she hadn't considered the possibility that he was dead. Somehow left behind, or taken prisoner by the maniac whose little fiefdom they'd invaded to take back their own - that made some kind of crazy sense to her - but not dead. And yet he was gone, out of reach of any rescue attempt, back into the brutal embrace of his older brother, whose idea of kindness was to shoot a man once you'd stolen everything that would have made it possible for him to survive. How Daryl had managed to escape that lifelong association with his core sense of decency intact was beyond her imagining.
For Glenn's sake, she put on a bright face of reassurance. "He'll be fine out there. He and Merle together, I think they're practically unstoppable. And we'll figure out how to get along without him." Carol's throat clenched around the lie, but her friend's stricken expression made it impossible for her to say what she really felt. Adrift. Grieving. She patted Glenn on the hand and fled, before the tears that choked her made their way out into the air.
Daryl checked the sight on his crossbow for probably the twentieth time in the previous hour, although the passage of time was almost impossible to gauge, wandering around out there in the woods. He wasn't used to ever thinking about time when he was hunting - things took however long they took, and he resented whatever it was in his head that kept harping at him, you're wasting daylight, like there was some kind of limit to how long he and Merle had to fix on a direction and start moving that way.
Merle wasn't helping matters, either, second-guessing every move he made, questioning his woods-sense. Hell, he'd probably spent way more time out in the forest than Merle over the previous year or so, putting food on the table for his people; meanwhile Merle maybe had got a little soft, living the relative high life afforded to one of the Governor's lieutenants. One of the man's flunkies, the way he saw it, not that he was apt to put it like that to Merle.
He'd tested the waters, dangled a little picture of how things could be at the prison, what they could have there: a roof and solid walls and some kind of a decent life, maybe not as cushy as what Merle'd gotten used to, but somewhere a man could make a place for himself, as he'd done...
Merle wasn't having any of it. He acted like they were right back at the quarry, when all he could see was the sweet pickings the two of them could make of that little encampment of anxious city-dwellers. Even back then Daryl had chafed at the bridle Merle tried to keep on him, and had done his utmost to steer things in a different direction. Everything had changed when Merle had failed to come back from that run into Atlanta, and Daryl had to acknowledge in his secret heart that he'd found it freeing to be out of his brother's poisoned grasp.
He'd found a home for himself, untainted by his name and his history, with people who looked only to how he was now. Like how he was now was admirable or something. And despite that, he'd blindly chosen to put himself right back into Merle's grip, and his insides writhed in protest, trying to break that hold. High in his chest, something pulled, like a tight little knot, like a fishing line hooked under his skin. Dragged on him, making Merle's barbed comments faint in his ears.
As soon as Glenn pulled the truck safely inside the inner gate, and Carl rushed to secure it behind, Carol moved up to the fence and watched as the three men below worked as a team to take down the walkers that swarmed them. Daryl stood just outside the treeline, delivering bolt after bolt into the converging stragglers, while Rick and Merle fought nearly back-to-back with whatever weapons came to hand. In less than a minute, the only figures remaining upright were the three of them, uneasy comrades-at-arms. In near-unison, they moved up to the outer fence and regarded the scatter of walkers that stumbled through the grass, barring their easy entrance to the prison yard.
As Carol watched, Daryl's eyes moved up to where she stood amid the cluster of bodies waiting anxiously inside the gate, Her heart lurched in her chest to see how ragged he looked, like he was on his last reserves. Her shaky hand went out to grip the wire, wishing it was his shirt she clutched, that she could wrap herself around him and reassure herself that he was really there, warm and breathing, in front of her. But instead she went down the fenceline with Maggie and Glenn to draw the walkers' attention away from the men outside, giving them the opportunity to make their way up the drive to safety.
She put a pan of water on the stove for a minute, just to take the chill off, and carried it up to her cell, needing desperately to wash away Axel's blood from where it caked on her skin. Before long the water was so bloody that she felt all she was doing was transferring the stains from one place to another, so she set it aside and dug out a clean top to put on.
When she stepped back out into the corridor, Daryl was sitting on the steps below, and she froze, caught between wanting to respect the tension she read in him, and wanting to go to him, to tell him… what? That she had been torn apart by his leaving? That she wasn't sure she could trust that he was back to stay? None of it was anything he needed to hear right now, not from her. And she didn't trust herself to stop once she got started, so she kept her distance and waited to hear what the others had to say about their newest guest.
Nothing got resolved, not that night, not the next morning. Rick was… well, unhinged was probably too strong a word for it, but not by much. Despite his outwardly cocky attitude, all Daryl could think about was that the Governor was out there, arming for retribution, and instead of getting ahead of the situation by making plans of their own they were sitting around arguing about the disposition of one man. They were likely to still be sitting there with their pants down when that one-eyed bastard came back, shooting.
Recriminations had flown back and forth, and Glenn and Maggie weren't looking to budge on the issue of letting Merle stay, so Daryl said his piece and went up to his cell, passing Carol on the way. She barely even acknowledged his presence, and Daryl guessed that was about what he deserved from her.
He was sitting on his bunk, sorting damaged arrows from those that were whole, when she slipped into his cell and leaned back against the little chest where he kept his things.
"Haven't had a chance to say, I'm glad you came back." Her voice was light, like what she said was almost inconsequential. Like she wasn't carrying a mouthful of bitterness on his account.
The light from the corridor gilded her jawline, the angle of her shoulder and the fine bones of her clavicle, making it difficult for him to focus on her words.
"He's not good for you. Don't let him bring you down." She gave him a cheeky little grin, the way she always had, and said, "After all, look how far you've come." Daryl looked around at his few, worn possessions, the stained concrete, and felt a wry, answering smile break over his face, just for a moment; a second when he thought maybe they were going to be alright, after all. Almost as if he hadn't walked off into the woods and left her behind, without a word. It was more grace than he felt entitled to, and wasn't that just like her, in the end. But still her eyes said, you hurt me, and he wished he knew how to make his own say more than I'm sorry.
Some time later she heard his boot scuff outside her door, and looked up to see him standing there in the dim light.
"Knew almost as soon as I left that I'd made the wrong call."
Carol pulled her legs up in front of her and patted the bunk, silently inviting him to sit with her.
He ignored the space, took a step into the cell, his eyes intent on the floor. "Merle, see, he's just the same, and he thought I was too. But I ain't. Didn't know that until it was too late."
"Not too late, Daryl." She kept her voice soft, fearing to shut him down. "You're here now."
He pressed his back against the wall and slid down, folding himself into a bundle on the concrete. "We came on a family. A woman, two men. A baby. They'd got pinned down, fightin' off a bunch of walkers, and I couldn't just watch. Merle kept back, took his sweet time joinin' in, and then he wanted to rifle through their stuff, see what was good to be taken. Nearly had to put a bolt through his head to get him to leave 'em alone."
She heard the doubt in his voice, as if he wondered yet whether he should have taken that shot anyway. His brother, the predator, and perhaps Daryl was thinking a quick death would have served all of them.
"I walked away, didn't look back to see if he was followin' or not. Kept feelin' this pull, right here," and he ground his fist into his breastbone, his knuckles turning white, "tuggin' at me, wouldn't let me go. All I knew was I had to come home." His fingers caught in his hair, digging at his scalp. "For all the good it's gonna do. We're probably dead here, you know that?"
Carol slipped off of the bunk, scooted up to sit next to him, their knees just touching. She tilted her head to look beneath his bangs, up into his face, reading the anger and dread there. "I don't for a second believe that, Daryl, but if this is all that's left to us, I'd still take it. If we're dead tomorrow, at least we'll go out on our own terms."
"It's not the way I'd choose to end it, though. First I'd gut that pirate-patch asshole, give him a little taste of his own medicine. Cut him open and let a walker feed on 'im." Daryl was up on his feet, pacing the width of her cell, two steps away and two steps back, worrying at the ragged skin of his thumb. "Fuck with what's mine, they best be prepared for hell."
He stooped and caught her arm, pulling her up to meet him, his hand sliding down to circle her wrist. "Christ, Carol, I was never so glad to see a face in my life as I was when I saw you up at the gate. Thought the way things always seem to go for us, I'd make it back to you and you'd be gone. I know it don't make sense, but that pullin' on me? that was you. Callin' me home."
She raised her hand and laid it gently against his cheek, feeling him lean into it. "Guess I was hoping louder than I realized."
He sighed. "Don't tell no one, I'll sound like the softest pansy-ass left on the planet."
She stepped up to him and pressed her forehead into his chest, and he rested his hand in the small of her back. The vibrations of his voice carried through her frame as he said, "We live through this, there'll be some changes. Ain't content to stand by and let what's important slip outta my hands."
She nodded against him, breathing him in, feeling the tug on her own heart. "If we live through this…"
"We will." His voice was firm. "Don't know how, but I ain't losin' you again."
A/N: The title comes from Sally Fingerett's song, "Home is Where the Heart Is."