A/N- No ownership of TWD. This is my second posting in TWD fandom, but it was the first one I wrote. I left it without an ending when another idea hit, and I finished that one and posted it, but got no love at all for it so I never bothered to post this one until I just now came across it again looking for something else. If you like it, please review! If you don't like it, leave a review to tell me why!
It had been almost twenty four hours now since Sophia had gone missing. Daryl was making his way back to the highway to check in, make sure he still needed to be out there and to grab a new water bottle. There was a stash of them in the RV. He would grab one now and later on, after they found the little girl and there was time to spare, they could boil more water and refill them all.
He watched the ground in front of him and knew he was about to step out of the tree line when he heard movement off to his left. That was where the stream cut under the highway and there was a chance that the girl had managed to find it and was following it back. His thirst momentarily forgotten, Daryl left his trail to find the noise. He walked carefully, silently. If it wasn't the girl, it could be dinner. Or a walker.
It was neither.
It was Carol.
She was scrubbing some cloth together in front of herself. Probably clothes, his brain slowly supplied.
She stopped and held up the cloth. A shirt, yellow with some kind of picture on the front, but he couldn't see it through the dark ugly brown stain on the front of it. Blood. She dipped it into the water and began to scrub at it again, so hard that her shoulders were shaking.
They shook some more and Carol made a choked sort of noise and dropped her hands into her lap. Her shoulders were still shaking. She's crying, he belatedly realized. She looked at the shirt again and with a sob flung it aside as she fell back into a sitting position and put her hands on her face.
He had never been good with talking to people at all and the idea of going to comfort a crying woman made him nauseous. Slowly, being even more careful to not make noise, he eased himself back behind the trees a bit so that he could no longer see, or be seen, and he listened as she cried herself out. There were a few moments of silence broken by the water lapping at the edge of the rocks and her hitching breath.
There was an intake of breath and a quiet sigh as she stood up and walked away from the water. A rustle of fabric as she gathered up the laundry, then there was quiet again.
Daryl let his head fall back against the tree behind him and he closed his eyes and sighed. He was tired. He had been combing through the woods since first light and there was no sign of the girl. Her trail had gone cold after only a hundred feet or so from where Rick last saw her and for all the people trampling the area, he couldn't pick it back up. There were footsteps here and there, narrow deer trails where she would probably have walked if she'd run across it, trees that looked easy to climb. Twice, there were dead animals where a walker had fed but neither of the carcasses were recent. He had learned how to tell if an animal had been killed by a walker or by another animal. If it was a walker, and it wandered off before finishing its meal, none of the other animals would touch what was left. Somehow, they knew it was tainted.
Daryl looked at his water bottle. There was one single drink left. He left it in there and put the bottle back in his cargo pocket. That little girl didn't have a fresh water bottle and damn him if he was going to go get a second one before finding her.
He went back to the place where Rick tried to hide her, and began his search again.
What did you think?