LOOK AT ME WRITING ANOTHER M-FIC WHAT IS HAPPENING CALL 911
Seriously though: Bsparrow and Gone Random prompted this little thingy, so...prep for some serious dramangst!sex ;)
I own nothing, of course, and hope ya'll enjoy!
He would probably remember it all better in the morning.
But with the fight with Woodbury literally on the horizon, he certainly wouldn't have time to regret it.
He couldn't remember when he decided he needed her.
But he knew-as the night grew later and the prison darker, colder-that he didn't want to sleep. He didn't want to fiddle with his bow and he didn't want to take watch.
Just like he didn't want to feel Rick's hand on his shoulder, or hear any of Hershel's biblical wisdom.
He didn't even want the smile that holding Little Asskicker always brought to his face.
So he ignored it all.
Ignored Michonne's sympathetic gaze on his back, ignored Glenn's half-hearted attempt to look like he fucking gave a single shit and ignored Beth's worried youthful eyes as they followed him about the bay.
He brushed the lot of them off; they didn't need him until the morning, and he didn't need them.
Not tonight.
Tonight, he needed—
She was absent from the bay and the moment he realized it the burning, coiling tension in his muscles got about fifty times worse.
He found her in the medical supply room. Dimly lit with a barely-burning oil lamp, Carol was ripping open boxes and dumping them on the floor, rummaging through what little bandaging, tape and alcohol swabs the prison had left to offer.
Daryl watched her head jerk up at him from her place on the floor; he pulled the door closed behind him, and in the silence between them the click seemed to echo.
His head was swimming, and he felt restless.
Exhausted, drained, worthless as shit…
And restless.
So goddamn restless.
His fingers twitched. He fought to focus on her face as she peered up at him, eyebrows pressing together. She was worried.
Not scared.
Not suspicious.
Worried.
About him.
His jaw clenched and his teeth started to grind together. His fingers curled into fists and he wanted to whip around and punch the wall behind him. He wanted to scream in anger-not at her, but at himself. At life.
Daryl leaned back against the door and closed his eyes.
Blood seemed to pool behind his lids, black and clotting and dead.
Merle's blood. On his hands. Slipping from the tip of his knife.
The dead, puke-yellow eyes of his brother staring lifelessly up at him flashed in the red-black pool and turned his gut upside down, forced him to snap his eyes back open.
They targeted her instantly, and just as quickly, the urge to vomit faded.
Carol moved to her knees, pushing against the torn plastic around her ankles to lift herself from the floor—
"Don't."
He growled, guttural, angry still.
She froze. Turned her head to side and shot him that calming, longing gaze that he saw from her too often of late.
"Daryl…"
"Whatever yer about to say, save it. I don't need it right now."
And he didn't. He knew she wanted to offer him soft words of comfort and understanding, and he knew it was because she did understand.
More than anyone else in the prison, in the group, in their close but fucked little family, she understood.
But he didn't need her to say it.
She sat back on her ass and pulled her knees up slightly, resting her arms on them. Quiet and calm, she waited.
Waited for him.
He grimaced.
It was fucking insane sometimes how she read him, how she knew exactly what he was feeling and exactly what he was thinking.
And exactly what he needed.
His hands loosened, flattened against the door behind him. The muscles in his arms tensed, twitched, and his nerves, long shot, were sending tremors through his body.
His legs trembled, weak and aching.
The small room blurred and swirled around him, and he looked away from the shelves and supplies and lamp and focused on her face. He wanted to sink to the floor and pass the fuck out, and he wanted to sleep for a week right there, with only Carol to keep him company.
But more than that, he wanted to move.
He wanted to—
He was two steps forward and falling to his knees in front of her faster than he could even follow, bending down, pushing forward, sinking his head into the skin of her throat and sliding a hand around her waist to press into her back. His free hand shot out to the wall behind her, holding himself up, keeping him in control of just how close he was to her.
He heaved for breath. His heart pounded in his ears, in his chest, in his fucking wrists and he realized, with a muffled growl into her soft, warm skin, that he wanted to cry.
Carol was wrapping her arms around his neck, fingers threading into his hair and staying very quiet, very still.
He didn't shed a tear. Instead he focused on the steady thump of her pulse against his lips, how it was half-a-beat away from being in rhythm with his own. He listened to her breathe, slow, lulling.
Crying in Carol's arms wasn't what he searched her out to do, and he knew it.
And so did she.
He sucked in a breath, deep, nerve-steeling, and ignored the lingering thread of panic in his thoughts as he pressed his lips stiffly into the beating artery beneath them.
Carol's soothing ministrations stopped suddenly, the fingers in his hair clenching and he felt the slight tug against his scalp and heard the small, needy gasp she released just beside his ear.
The smallest whine followed when he lowered the arm at her back to her waist and pulled it tight, trapping her against him.
The pounding in his ears got louder. Under his mouth Carol's pulse quickened and he could no longer follow it enough to try and match it to his own. It didn't matter. She was breathing steady but hard, head turned just enough to look at the side of his face as he lifted it from her throat.
He looked at her.
The lamp light was for shit, but he swore those shining blue eyes were dilated.
Even still, she seemed much calmer than he felt.
She smiled at him. His eyes narrowed to her mouth and he stopped, breathing into her face and fighting the building burn in his gut, the spring-like coil of his legs as they ached to launch him that extra inch forward—
Carol did it for him.
Slanting her head she leaned in to kiss him, catching his breath and the frustrated, desperate groan that escaped with it.
And God, he felt so much better.
The burn was still there; the tension in his entire body still remained, and he knew that at some point between nuzzling her neck and kissing it he'd gotten fucking hard as a rock, but he still felt better.
Something left his thoughts, drifted away, the weight of it dropping from his shoulders like a fucking boulder and he could only see and smell and feel the woman that pressed her lips against his and nibbled, silently asking for a response.
He pushed back, hard, awkwardly fumbling through what should have been a hot, wild tongue-fight but ended up something else entirely. He tried to push his tongue through her teeth just as she tried to bite a bit at his lower lip, and the slight twinge of pain saw him jerking back with a half-mumbled curse, glaring at her as if she'd done it on purpose.
She quirked an eyebrow, bit sheepishly at her own lips and grinned.
"Sorry."
The half-hearted apology rolled off his shoulders as he shrugged away the unfair surge of blame and returned to her space, lowering his hand from the wall to grasp at her shoulders, pulling her back against him.
He didn't care that his experience with women was shit, that he could barely pull off a decent kiss or that he had no idea how to be gentle or romantic or smooth. Two days ago he would have cared. Fuck, that morning he would have cared.
As he pushed Carol as carefully as possible onto the dirty, messy floor of the storage room, he simply didn't give a shit anymore.
And as he came to loom over her, felt her hands balling fistfuls of his shirt and saw her wide, glazed eyes staring up at him expectantly, he knew she didn't much care either. Her lips parted as she ran her tongue over them, coming to press them tight together and she seemed to fight another small smile as she waited for him to move again.
Daryl hovered over her, a shadow blotting out what little light was to be had for them.
They breathed together, hard, heavy, and the burning coil built again as he watched her study his face and pant.
She reached down to slide a finger along the skin between his shirt and jeans, and he hissed, shuddered.
And the spiraling world outside the room died, and the darkening light of the lamp blurred away, and all he saw was red, and white, and the blue blue blue of her eyes and he started moving, pulling at clothes, snapping buttons, teeth grinding and a low growl just on the edge of his throat.
And he kept those blue eyes in his field of view as he pulled her panties down and pushed her tank top up, exposing her belly and sending shivers through them both.
He puffed hot breath into her face, and he couldn't read anything in her eyes aside from the want, the wide, black pupils silently asking him to fucking jump inside them and swim, and pressed his forehead against hers, stared into the blue, the black, slid a hand down to grip the hot skin of her waist and he bucked into her, wordless and desperate.
Her neck flew back, exposed, and he heard the dull thump of her skull hitting the floor as she arched.
Daryl barely felt her fingers tugging at his hair, and he barely heard the low mewls coming from the woman under him. Once he pushed into her he started moving, fast, relentless, and he couldn't stop.
If he stopped he would remember.
If he stopped he would regret.
His free hand reached around to the back of her neck to support it, and as Carol's eyes flashed to his again he groaned at the glazed, heady look she set on him. He swore those blue eyes were darker, as if the black was leaking out and taking over.
Her lips were cracked open and soft whines were slipping into his ears like music, and he pushed harder, growled into her face, pulled out, slammed in.
She closed her eyes tight and gasped, loud, legs wrapping tight around his waist and clenching.
"Carol—"
He almost sounded angry, and he almost sounded afraid. She opened her eyes and looked at him. Slipping his hand flat under her lower back he lifted her small frame up from the floor, tightened his arm around her and drove down, and felt a smile curl onto his lips when her mouth fell open wide.
She stared at him, shocked and soaring, and he never looked away from the blue of her eyes.
She bucked up against him, murmuring something he couldn't hear, and he felt the searing heat shoot down into the space that joined them, and he nearly slammed his eyes shut as he hissed,
"Godammit!"
He ducked his head into her chest and fell forward and surged into her as he came, white spots flashing and the world and his life blurring away and becoming something good, something that felt un-fucking-believable and nothing else existed for those few seconds as he helplessly ground into the slick, welcoming warmth that was Carol Peletier.
He saw black.
He'd closed his eyes.
Breathing against the sweaty, bunched-up cloth that was her tank, he felt like he was falling into nothing. Her chest heaved under his head. He could her heart beating faster than he could count.
And then, as he turned his head to the side and cracked his eyes open to look at the room they lay in, everything stilled and solidified and became real again.
He gripped her to him still, arm like a vice and he lowered her and laid her flat, coming to prop himself up over her with both arms.
His muscles twitched. He trembled.
Soft fingers left his hair to slide across his shoulders, warm and soothing.
Daryl felt his teeth clench together. He wanted to cuss again.
He wanted to hit the wall again.
He wanted to cry again.
"Daryl."
He looked at her.
Carol lifted herself into his space and kissed him, and he fucked it up by forgetting to kiss back until she was already pulling away, and she smiled when he sighed.
Her voice whispered in the dim light around them,
"We'd better get back before they start looking for us."
He huffed.
Settled down against her and slid them onto their sides, finding her eyes in the near-black.
He stared for a moment before ducking his head and shutting his own, remembering, trying not to regret.
"Just a minute."
Lips ghosted over his forehead and he cringed, shuddered, and tucked his head into her neck again. Her breath puffed against his ear and he could feel her pulse, time it perfectly with his own.
"Okay."