I wanted you to read this ...

He hoped that everyone ... Carol ... was asleep by now. It was certainly late enough. On the way up to the prison when he'd returned with Michonne, after he'd spotted the bathtub that she did the laundry in, he'd asked her if she'd made breakfast for everyone and she'd confirmed it. He'd seen the laundry tub with his own eyes, and knowing her, she'd helped with dinner and dishes as well. She should be passed out in her cell by now.

As he'd had a very bad night and a taxing day, plus emotional upheaval after their return to the prison, followed by a long hunt to calm his nerves, he himself was past exhausted as well. It was all he could do not to stomp up the stairs to his perch, and he cringed inwardly at his own echoing footfalls. Surely he could do better than wake half the prison in the middle of the night?

Tired beyond anything he'd known before, he stumbled over the second to last step and barely managed to catch himself with one hand on the railing, but his right shin came down hard on the edge of the last step with a loud, clanging sound and he hissed in pain. This was just what he needed, after spraining his right ankle on a protruding root in the pitch black forest on his way back just now. Cursing softly, he made it the rest of the way up to his perch. Carefully leaning his empty crossbow against the wall at what would amount to the head of his bed in a minute - he didn't keep the weapon loaded while asleep, in case Carl or one of the other kids got their hands on it - he grabbed his bedding and unrolled it. Still favoring his right leg, he sat down, took off his dirty boots and socks and rolled up his pants leg to inspect the damage.

The stairs inside and out were all made of steel, and the tear in his pants, with the edge already feeling wet to his touch in the intermittent darkness, didn't bode well. He waited for the moon to break through the clouds still racing across the sky before actually looking at his leg. There was a nasty gash halfway up his lower leg, bleeding badly. Cursing again, he blindly reached for the first aid pack he kept on hand next to his book stack, took out a bandage roll and ripped open the plastic packaging.

Right at that moment he heard a soft creak on the walkway along the cells behind him, next to his perch – a cell door opening or closing. Before he was even aware of it, his hands were loading his crossbow as he turned around to face whoever was coming at him in the total darkness that had fallen over the prison again as the cloud cover once more completely occluded the moon, still almost full. Inwardly ranting at himself for fucking up his ankle and shin, he hoped it wasn't really someone hostile approaching him who had somehow managed to sneak into the prison – though he wouldn't completely put it beyond that Blake asshole to have come back himself or sent one of his cronies left alive after his batshit crazy attack on them. How ironic it would be for them to have gone out looking for him, burning time and fuel and risking their necks, if he were truly to come crawling back after licking his wounds, find a way to make it in and hide inside like vermin to take them out one by one. By the time his weapon was loaded and he silently rose to his naked feet he was almost hoping it was Blake and he'd get to put that bolt into his remaining eye – but not after giving him some of his own medicine for what he'd done to Merle.

He almost shouted out in surprise when the next shaft of moonlight revealed not Blake but Carol standing right in the sights of his weapon, next to the cell he used as storage for some of his stuff so as not to clutter the perch. Embarrassingly, he could feel heat rising to his neck, face and ears almost instantly, and he lowered his crossbow with a mumbled apology. It wasn't just his overreaction at her approach that made him blush, but he guessed that she wouldn't be aware of that. He remembered their earlier exchange in this very spot in painful detail and hoped it wasn't what she'd come about. Maybe she was bringing him food, the way she always did when he'd missed a meal. His eyes went down to her hands, all but expecting them to hold a bowl.

Apparently, however, his day was going to get worse. She was clutching not a bowl of stew but a very familiar folded piece of paper. He could have kicked himself. Of course she would have read it and come to talk about it. His heartbeat and blood pressure went off the scale, his blood roaring in his ears so loudly that he didn't understand what she'd said the first time around. Mortified, he raised his eyes from his bare feet and bleeding leg to look at her. "Hm?" he asked.

"It's a bad time for this – you're hurt", she repeated, also looking down at his leg now and putting the letter into the pocket of her sweatpants. The first drops of blood were just reaching his ankle which had also started hurting like a bitch now, with the adrenaline wearing off, after climbing the stairs, catching his fall and trying to come up on Carol like a fucking ninja, all while attempting to suppress a limp.

"'s nothin'", he deflected, the way he always did when someone wanted to take care of him. "'m fine." He limped back to his makeshift bed, removing the bolt from his bow, and set his weapon against the wall once more. Sitting down, he folded his legs with the injured one resting on his left knee, carefully took his right foot in his left hand and gently moved it, testing what hurt and what didn't. He didn't think it was sprained badly – he'd gotten hurt while out hunting often enough to have become somewhat of an expert on ankle and knee injuries. This one would hurt for a few days, people were probably going to notice that something was wrong – which he hated, because some of the bolder ones might try to actually talk to him about it - , but he wouldn't need Hershel and it would be as good as new again in a few days' time. Satisfied that he would be okay, he pulled his red rag from his back pocket and was starting to wipe the blood off his leg when she interfered.

"You can't use that to clean it!" He was pretty certain that she hadn't meant to shout, not with everyone who wasn't on watch sleeping all around them.

"Sure can. 's just a cut", he mumbled, folding away one blood-soaked corner of his rag to get to a clean area again. He'd done this a million times. He was a big boy, he didn't need her to mother him, and he'd made enough of a fool of himself in front of her today to last him a lifetime.

As she knelt down beside him, gently taking the rag from his suddenly unfeeling hand, his blood once again roaring in his ears and his heart beating its way out of his chest for sure by now, he realized that any and all decisions about what he might or might not need had been taken out of his hands for the time being. She found his first aid pack, still open on his sleeping bag beside him, and her slender fingers deftly pecked something out from inside it. It was a small, square white package that resembled the foil packs with lemon water tissues that you got in fancy restaurants with certain foods for cleaning your hands after polishing off your plate. Feeling stupid, he realized it was a disinfectant tissue for the exact purpose for which he'd just misemployed his rag.

Watching her competent hands wipe his leg and then gently clean and disinfect the wound itself after she'd produced a penlight from one of her pockets was almost hypnotic. As her touch didn't hurt at all, he assumed that she was either exceedingly good at what she was doing or he was in shock now with his body blocking the pain signals to his brain. Once the wound was clean she found a dressing in his first aid pack, carefully placed it on the jagged cut and picked up the bandage roll that he himself had taken out before noticing her.

"Need ta start at the foot", he muttered, blushing again for being so useless.

Her eyebrows rose in a wordless question.

"Turned my ankle on a root, might 've sprained it. Wanted to wrap that as well", he explained, his eyes firmly on the gleaming white dressing on his leg, unable to look at her.

"And here I was so happy that you weren't even bruised when you came back today", she whispered as she started wrapping the bandage around his ankle. He did feel the pain then, but not in his leg.

"'m sorry. 'm a jackass. Know you hate it when I don't look out."

She paused, trying to catch his eyes, but he kept looking down. He'd started picking on the skin of his left thumb, which was ragged already. "You should know by now that I don't 'hate' anything about you, Daryl", she scolded him softly. "It makes me sad when you're hurt and in pain, is all."

"Yeah, whatever. It's me who did that. Ya don't need more shit in your life."

Smiling, she continued bandaging his leg. "I'm pretty certain you don't get hurt on purpose", she joked. "That damages the fierce impression that you like to make on everybody. People might notice you're not made of stone and start to care."

"People can go ta hell for all I care. Might be we ARE in hell right now", he groused.

"Of course I don't know about you", she began carefully, "but I haven't felt this good in years, personally. For me, hell was before all this. Of course, bad things are still happening everywhere, but the worst has already happened to me - there's only one thing I've left to lose by now, and I've only just learned that it is actually mine to lose."

He couldn't help himself. He had to look at her face after this - to find her looking right back, even though she was still wrapping his leg. Suddenly put out by this, he took the bandage out of her hands and continued the wrapping himself. Her allusion to Sophia's death, however vague, had him drowning in guilt again, and feeling utterly unworthy of her care.

"'m pretty certain ya haven't come out in the middle of the night just to patch me up again", he tried to lure her out. "Gotta be dead on yer feet, probably been up workin' yer ass off for all those ungrateful bitches all day long. What kept you up?"

Taking the folded paper out of her pocket again, she held it out for him to see, but he would have known anyway. It was his letter. He had carried it around for so long before finally giving it to her that he would probably have recognized the sound of it getting unfolded. As he looked at it, shining brightly in the beam of her penlight, he could all but feel the soft, worn edges against his fingers. He could only imagine what she was thinking of him now. "'m sorry. Shouldn'ta done that", he mumbled, tucking the end of the bandage in to fix it. He always got annoyed of them pretty quickly and wouldn't be wearing it for much longer than a day anyway. Messy would do him just fine.

Shaking her head, she put the letter back into her pocket with great care, which surprised him. He had half expected her to throw it in his face. "Do it properly, or it'll just fall of", she scolded him, plucking on the bandage to fix it. He moved to pull his leg out of her reach, but, surprisingly enough, she held it in place, her slender, graceful fingers competent and gentle as before. "Why shouldn't you? It ..." Her emotions overwhelmed her and her voice failed. She was well aware that this letter probably represented the very first time he'd ever revealed his feelings to anyone at all - and it was full of his love for her. Never in her life would she have dared hope for him to love her - yet he did, and he had told her so.

Before she found words again, he started talking in a low, gravelly voice, clearly struggling with his overwhelming feelings. "Hadn't meant for ya ta read it with me still here", he mumbled, once again unable to look at her. "Didn't want ya mad at me."

"Why would I be mad at you for something so beautiful? This is the most perfect love letter I've ever received!" she exclaimed.

With a pointed look around at the cells full of sleeping people he murmured: "Maybe if ya stopped shouting we'd get some privacy here. Have an audience here soon, 'f we keep going like this."

"You still need to eat, anyway - let's go sit in the kitchen, I've saved some rabbit and squirrel stew for you", she suggested.

He groaned in protest, rolling his eyes, but put on his boots, grabbed his crossbow and quiver and got up compliantly enough as he really didn't dig Carl eavesdropping on them. She felt bad when she saw how badly he was limping by now, but knew there would be no stopping him. An audience was the last thing either of them wanted, Daryl more so than her, and she wouldn't convince him to continue the conversation either on his perch or in her cell - they were just too exposed there.

She followed him down the stairs in her stocking feet, the moonlight glinting off the metal of his bow in fits and starts.