Almost from the moment she left the sanctuary of Alexandria, Carol knew this was a bad idea. Drowning in her own grief and anguish about the lives she had been forced to take, she took the only path that seemed open to her.

She ran.

Now, alone and faced with the once-familiar patterns of survival in the wilderness, she was beginning to second-guess her choice. Back in town, surrounded by high walls and people, there seemed no escape from her thoughts and the impossible choices that dominated her life there. On her second day on the road, she felt herself once more consumed by emptiness.

She berated herself again and again. Why did she close herself off from the one person who understood her best? Why hadn't she allowed herself to be open with him, the only one who cared enough to reach out to her and try to pull her back from the edge.

She missed Daryl. More than that, she regretted the time she had spent skirting around him. There were so many things she wanted to tell him, things she was frightened to tell him. She could barely get it all straight in her head, let alone explain it to him, but something told her he would have understood nonetheless.

There was nothing she felt that he didn't feel at one time or another. Her fears were his fears – she knew it, yet why did she pull away from him so persistently?

Her tangled thoughts slowly began to unravel, allowing her emotions to bubble to the surface for the first time. The inescapable pain and remorse were uppermost. However, what she could not bear was the loneliness and fear she felt without her best friend. The thought of something happening to him was somehow worse than all the other fears that she had conjured in her mind.

She remembered all the times they'd risked their lives for each other. All those acts of kindness and consideration he had shown her. Those glances that threatened to set her on fire when all she wanted was to be stone – not to feel anything. As she shivered beside a paltry camp fire in a clearing in the woods, all she wanted was to feel that warmth again.

A twig cracking nearby made her hand fly to her knife. Her breaths came quickly as she looked around, alert to any sign of walkers or other predators. She kicked dirt into the fire, cursing her lack of caution.

She peered into the darkness, waiting for a signal to run or fight. Then she heard someone speak.

'Carol?'

The sound of his guttural voice sent a shudder of relief through her body. Irritation quickly took over.

'Daryl?' she replied. 'What the hell are you doing out here? I told you not to come after me.'

He appeared out of the darkness, illuminated only by the soft light of the embers and the merest hint of moonlight peeking through the trees.

'I didn't come after you – I was looking for Dwight.' He saw here meagre camp with the provisions that she had hauled out of Alexandria. 'So you left.'

His voice was flat, but Carol felt a tug at her heart. Daryl had been trying to keep her safe since the beginning. She never asked why and he only gave the barest of explanations. As time went on, she came to know the man and realised that he needed her as a reason to keep going, almost as much as she needed him.

He peered at her for a moment and then jerked his head back in the direction he had come. 'Saw your fire. I found a cabin on the hill. It's secure, got clean water. We can stay there tonight.'

Daryl lit a fire in the stove and heated some water for pine needle tea. It wasn't that appetising but it was better than nothing, and helped to wash down the deer jerky that he had brought.

He had never been so relieved to see anyone in his life.

He wanted to be angry – wanted more than anything to drag Carol back to Alexandria where she was safe, but he knew she had to make that choice herself. He was never much for talking about feelings, but he knew there was so much about her that was locked up inside herself. It saddened him to think that he could not give her a reason to live – she had to find that herself.

He knew she was not ok. Maybe being ok was not enough anymore. Maybe he had to take a leap and say what he was feeling for once. It scared him more than anything – the thought of everything pouring out and seeing Carol sitting there stony-faced and unreceptive, or worse still, rejecting him outright.

Daryl could no longer deny what he knew in himself to be true, that what he felt for Carol went far beyond friendship. He had thought about her, feared for her, stood and fought with her, missed her for so long that he couldn't distinguish his feelings from any other part of himself. Carol was inside his head, she was everywhere. He loved her and he was sick of being without her.

'You know I liked you at the farm right?' he broke the silence. 'Maybe even before then.'

She looked at him with piercing blue eyes that seldom betrayed what she was feeling. 'You liked me?' she replied evenly. 'I always thought you felt sorry for me.'

'No,' he muttered. 'Maybe at first, but then I saw how you dealt with Ed. I knew were a survivor like me.'

She smiled then, and his heart soared. It had been so long since he had got a genuine smile out of her. There was no little reason to smile anymore.

'You could've said.'

He should his head bashfully, feeling his cheeks growing hot. It was like he was a damn teenager again, trying to put the moves on a girl. He was just as awkward now as he had been back then – all those years ago when the world was whole.

'Couldn't. You scared me.'

'Scared you?' Carol replied incredulously. 'Little old me?'

Another precious smile. Daryl felt his heart hammering in his chest and finally summoned the nerve to say what he had been thinking for years.

'Yeah, 'cause I knew that nothing I'd ever done or seen in this whole goddamn world could hurt me as much as you could. I didn't wanna lose you.'

There was something in her eyes that he didn't recognise. He was afraid he'd blown it. Stupid, stupid of him to say all those things when she was still hurting over everything had had happened to her and Maggie. Fool. He should have sat there and provided a shoulder if she'd needed one. Instead, he'd probably gone and ruined everything.

'How could you lose me, Daryl? You never had me.'

He felt his stomach drop in his chest – he had been imagining it. All this time loving her from a distance and he never thought that maybe it was just him after all.

'Sorry…' he began to mumble some pathetic apology.

'You should correct that.'

That look was back but now he understood it. It was calling him forward and not holding him back. He knew now that she wanted him too and that maybe now was the right time for them – the only time.

Daryl crawled forward on the bare floorboards to where she was sitting. She had her legs pulled tight in front of her, shoulders tensed – afraid of what she had just asked. He was there now and nothing in the world was going to stop him.

He reached forward and touched her chin gently. Her eyes met his and signalled yes. Neither one was sure who moved first but somehow they met in the middle, their lips questing yet still unsure.

It took a moment for her to relax into the kiss but when she did, she wrapped both arms around his neck and pulled herself against him.

Daryl could barely believe this was real. A moment ago they had been sitting in silence like so often before, and now he was touching her as he had longed to do for years. His large hands travelled down to her waist, trying to bring her even closer.

Unskilled and inexperienced in what she wanted from him, all he could do was move to her neck and kiss her softly with lips and tongue. A satisfying moan escaped her lips and he dared to reach under her shirt and touch the sensitive skin and the base of her spine.

'Daryl,' she whispered. 'Hang on a second.'

His heart sank again, wondering if he'd made some fool error, but he quickly realised what she was doing. She unrolled a blanket from her back pack and laid it on the floor, then made a makeshift pillow from their jackets.

Smiling at him, she lay down and pulled him on top of her, where they spent long minutes indulging in kisses and exploring each other. Daryl could tell that nobody had touched her like this for a very long time, and he could say no more for himself. He was nervous and shaking with need, yet overjoyed and incredulous that he was here with the woman he loved. At the same time, he was still terrified of screwing this up.

He moved his hand over her belly, enjoying the softness of her skin and how the planes of her body softly curved. He began to lift her shirt up, feeling a momentum growing that could not be stopped.

'Hey, it's ok,' she muttered, kissing his neck. 'You don't have to.'

'Whadda you mean?' He was barely coherent, so excited by the prospect of being with her at last.

'Come on, you don't want to see me with my clothes off, do you?' Her tone was light, but something snapped in Daryl.

'What?' He looked at her, not understanding.

She avoided his eyes. 'Ed used to say I looked like a plucked chicken,' she laughed humourlessly. 'We used to do it in the dark.'

He felt an old anger rising up in him at the man who had abused Carol for all those years. He couldn't believe that after all this time he was still in her head.

'Listen to me,' his tone was firm. 'I don't give a shit about what Ed used to say. I wanna see you.'

He gazed at her, hoping she understood that he really wanted her, no matter what she had done, or what had been done to her.

Slowly, she peeled off her shirt and threw it on the ground. Reaching behind her, she unfastened her bra and tossed it down beside her abandoned shirt. She stared back at him as if daring him to change his mind.

His breath ragged, he reached out and touched her skin, running his calloused fingers up over her ribcage and under the swell of her breasts.

'Fuck Ed,' he said under his breath. 'Christ, Carol, you're beautiful.'

She grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him into a deep kiss, pressing her tongue against his. He moaned uncontrollably, feeling her hands pulling at his shirt. He sat up quickly and pulled it off and discarded it before returning to his beloved.

Daryl silently promised to do everything he could to make her forget her pain, if only for this one night. He moved down, laying kisses on her breasts and stomach, enjoying the breathless sounds she was making. He clumsily tried to undo the top button of her pants and felt her stiffen.

'What is it?' He lifted his head and looked at her.

'You don't have to,' she protested half-heartedly.

'I want to,' he practically growled. 'I don't wanna hear that shit, Carol. I wanna go down on you – do you have a problem with that?'

Daryl wasn't sure who moved quicker as they made short work of her pants.

They breathed together in the afterglow. Carol felt as if her heart were whole again, not the shattered, fearful thing that kept her half-alive since Sophia's death. She knew that the weight of her sins would soon return to haunt her again, but for now, she was content to remain in this strange bubble of contentment in the middle of the wilderness.

'You ok?' Daryl asked.

'Mmm,' she replied. 'It's just… nobody's ever done that before for me before.'

His eyes snapped over in her direction. 'You're kidding.'

'No.' She bit her tongue before admitting that Ed didn't like it – she knew it would spoil the mood.

'Jesus, Carol. All you had to do was ask – I'da been on you like a shot.'

A joyful laugh erupted from her – the first in a long time. 'Come here,' she whispered lovingly. 'Time I paid you back.'

In the dull morning light, there was no sound in the forest other than the contented sighs of two lovers who had found each other at the end of the world.