This is my first ever writing of anything, certainly my first fanfic! Please be a bit kind :-)
I believe I should say that I don't own the WD characters?
It had been 4 days since Rick and Michonne had left to go back to the feral warehouse group they'd briefly seen Daryl with, and Carol was nearing the edge of her ability to function. She and Tyreese had already overstayed the two days they'd agreed to wait at the small farmstead they'd taken over, and the tension about whether they should leave or not was eating them up. Every word between them was strained and the girls were tetchy and difficult to keep quiet. Judith's milk powder was nearly gone and everyone had been living for days on the small amounts of the canned vegetables and rice they had left.
Rick's group had barely escaped with their lives when the gang had invaded the house they'd been holed up in after the prison escape, and they had encountered the group again days later at a huge old warehouse on the edge of one of the many tiny towns along the edge of the railway tracks. They'd heard them before they saw them - hollering drunk, smashing whisky bottles and shooting junked cars in the parking lot of what looked like some kind of military depot - oblivious to the walkers they were collecting along the heavy reinforced boundary, shooting what seemed to be silenced pistols at any large concentrations of the dead before returning to their drinking. They seemed to be celebrating something, but before he could work out what they were up to or how much of a threat they currently were, Rick had needed to dive into a ditch full of decapitated walker corpses when a second pack of goons roared out of the dark interior on a truck and started patrolling along the road he was on.
But in the few seconds he'd had to scope out the men, he'd recognised the half-strangled guy who'd nearly spotted him under the bed in the house and also, gut-wrenchingly, seen Daryl, sitting with the thugs on a stack of beer crates, looking drawn and haggard but evidently now part of their collective. There was no way Rick could risk any kind of communication in the state of health he was in - not with Carl in close proximity and no base, no ammo and no supplies to call on. They'd agreed to track around the group, find a base and some supplies and head back for Daryl as soon as they could. Two days careful maneuvering through and away from the town had led them straight past the farmstead and literally into Mika who had run onto the strip chasing a chicken just as Carl was checking the road ahead from the edge of the woods a few hundred yards back.
The sweet reunion of Rick, Carl and Michonne with Judith and the rest of them had been overwhelming. Rick and Carol had embraced and he'd cried some of his tears of happiness at finding his daughter onto Carol's shoulder as he apologised for ever making her leave their family. She'd known that he trusted her again when his tiny baby girl had reached for Carol and he'd placed her firmly into her arms, telling her to thank her Aunt Carol for looking after her so well while Daddy was gone. When he'd told her later that night that Daryl was alive and who he was with, he'd had to stop her from running out of the door back to the town and she'd wept again with frustration.
Michonne had been the only voice that managed to get through to Carol, finally making her agree to stay at the farm instead of going on the rescue mission with one simple phrase "If you love him, don't mess up us bringing him back to you." She knew then that she wouldn't be able to think clearly seeing Daryl outnumbered, with his life in danger. That she would be a risk to them all with her extreme emotions. And worse even than that, she wasn't sure he would actually want to come back to them. To her. That he might rather run with the pack of wolves like before, when he lived his life as the Beta to Merle's Alpha Dog.