A/N: Hey ya'll, a multi-chapter Caryl fic. Hopefully you enjoy :). Please lemme know why or why not so I can stellar for ya. Happy reading 3
Begin Again: Chapter One:
Waking up at the crack of dawn had never been her thing, but she wouldn't let him be the only one. Besides, if she didn't feed him, he wouldn't eat. Last thing they needed was the only real hunter in the group to starve to death. They were close enough to that already she knew, not bothering to look at the diminishing pile of food stacked neatly on the kitchen table.
So up she got every morning, usually just in time to rush downstairs and put together something that would travel alright, before he appeared in the kitchen and walked quickly out the door with her parcel.
They were quiet mornings. Usually he nodded, neither feeling particularly inclined to speak the typical pleasantries. Weren't much for them. But he did always pull his brows together, looking at her pyjamas. Daryl always slept with his boots on, knife sheathed at his hips, crossbow within reach. And Carol, well, she could either get changed in the morning or make him food to take on his hunt. She couldn't do both and he wouldn't compromise on when he left, muttering he could take of hisself.
Walking behind him to the front door on that particularly cold morning, she couldn't help but wonder what he thought of his status in the group. She looked out for him not because he needed looking out for, but because that was all he did for everyone else, completely neglecting himself. Not if Carol didn't step in to fix that. He deserved better than he gave himself. She just wanted to him to feel as valuable to himself as he was to the group.
Not that she would ever say that to his face. She bit her bottom lip, trying to keep her smirk to herself, thinking about how that conversation would go.
He caught her smirking out the corner of his eyes, quickly glancing back down to the ground, grabbing his pack. She had that look before, and he remembered what had come of it when he asked. He brushed aside the anger at that memory, disguising the discomfort at being looked after. He nodded to her, barely taking the time to look up before he left the house, wanting to hide the slight flush on his face. 'Cause the problem was he actually liked being looked after a bit. Made him feel like some kept pansy who couldn't take care of themselves though. Made him feel uncomfortable to feel that way about it. Dixons were either pissed off or drunk, Merle would slur to him like an apology after he got beat down by their daddy or Merle himself. Daryl subbed in "hunting" for drunk though. Problem was no one, much less a toothpick of a woman he'd known for some few months had ever looked after Daryl. Merle and his good for horse shit dad didn't count. That life was dead now anyway.
Carol watched him disappear, standing at the door long after his figure fleeted, her smirk and good mood disappearing with him.
He used to take her out at dawn. A while ago, before the weather got too cold and supplies got thin. The less they had the more they had to find creative solutions to make up for it, and that often could take up most of the day. Living a life of survival was exhausting at the best of times.
She spoke words she regretted after the farm was lost. After a few days truly thinking about what it would be like split up, to not have Rick, or Lori, or Maggie, or god forbid Daryl, she understood what their little group meant to her.
She had lost her precious Sophia. She watched her motionless, lying on the ground all those cars away, and couldn't protect her, even if she had wanted too. She just didn't know how.
Now she chose to remember the better times with her little girl, and was determined not to let this group, her family now, be taken away.
So Daryl and her went out, at the crack of dawn, every single morning. First she just wanted to learn to hunt. She wasn't foolish enough to think she could actually defend or protect anyone from Walkers, but she needed to contribute. Needed to help keep this group strong and together. Daryl was surprised, and he had never let anyone go out hunting with him before, but like only Daryl could, he picked up on her intentions right away. His silent consent mean he approved of it.
She wasn't bad. She learned to set a couple traps, how to clean the animals, get them ready to be cooked. But quickly, not even a month in, he scrapped teaching her to hunt animals.
There had been a bad patch for a while. Walkers were migrating south and they kept getting caught in the thick of it. Daryl resisted teaching her at first, and resisted a lot, but Carol was determined. She couldn't let herself be a burden anymore, and at the very least she had to be able to defend herself. He couldn't deny her that, so eventually he angrily gave in and she was taught how to take out Walkers.
That was several months ago.
She smiled, thinking about the groups reaction on her first run into town. Daryl had been teaching her for a couple months, and frankly she was really good. Once she go over the emotions of it and built up her strength a bit, she started becoming just as good as any of them. Carol was always petit and light on her feet, and Daryl taught her how to use that to her advantage. She wasn't powerful enough or had enough brute strength to take down Walkers like most of them did, but her way was quieter and stealthier. A real advantage when herds were roaming through what felt like every part of country.
But she knew if asked a year ago what would be more shocking: Walkers wiping out half the population, or Carol Peletier taking them out like she was made for it... Well she figured it would be the latter.
She snapped from her daze down memory lane- she blamed the unholy hour of the morning it was- eyes focusing back to what she was looking at. She saw movement. Her muscles immediately tighten and mind flicked to full awake, turning from tired and lagging to alert and ready.
One Walker, dim and distant in the woods as the sun shone only a sliver yet in the hazy cold morning. Grabbing her coat from the hook without taking her eyes off of thing staggering in her direction, she zipped it up quickly, grabbing the belt that had been hooked underneath of it and put it on tightly. The familiar weight grounded her a bit, with the feel of the knife on one side and gun strapped to the other a comfort.
Her head snapped to the right, another appearing, a distance away from the first, both travelling in the same direction, both thankfully coming from the opposite way Daryl left. If they hadn't, she would have been out the door in a heartbeat looking for him. But as much comforted her, she realized he wouldn't be there to protect her either.
More came.
They were a distance away, but she counted at least eight. All spread out, all walking without real purpose. They didn't know about the house, packed with people, was so close to them. As always a slew of feelings rushed through her, her heart unable to decide on one.
She walked silently and quickly from the front door to the living room, where Rick, Lori and Carl were. Their room opened up to the dining room, where Glenn and Maggie were. Carol peered through the window facing east, looking out the direction they came. It didn't look like a herd. There might be some stragglers hanging back, but herds were many and never left the amount of distance they did. She found it a grim comfort that after being around the Walker so much this winter, they were starting to understand their habits.
"Carol... What is it?" Rick said, rubbing his face, eyes wide as he woke himself up quickly.
This time there just wasn't time for those typical morning pleasantries. "Walkers. I think nine. Not a herd as far as I can tell. Gotta stay quiet." She whispered, turning in her crouched position for a moment before shifting back.
"I'll get T-Dog, Glenn and Maggie." He said, waking up and on full alert instantly.
Carol shook her head. If she was wrong and it was a herd, or with one not far behind, the whole group would be too loud and they would never get out.
"I can do this, quietly. There's so much distance between them I can take them out one by one. You know I'm quick and silent."
"We ain't having you do this alone. No one goes out alone. I know you're good but we get everyone suited up, and we all take them down."
"And if this is a herd?" she whispered fast, hearing movement in the other room and upstairs. Lori was up, and Carl was gone, telling the others already. They were too practiced in this. "I know, fight or flight, but we aren't gonna have time to get away if everyone is off scattered or gets cut off."
It happened not all that long ago, and she could see the memory burning painfully behind Rick's eyes. They had all managed to get out but both T-Dogg, Maggie and Hershel almost didn't make it back. It was too loud, too scattered, too chaotic. Just too many Walkers. The memory of the almost losing so many, watching and wondering and stitching and all that blood burned in Carol's heart. They were her family. She had to protect them better. And she knew she could do this.
Rick wavered, torn and weary. He was tired. Everyone was. He was their leader and it burdened him heavily, but Carol knew she was right about this and needed him to see that. He was looking at things less and less emotionally, unable to carrying the emotional baggage of caring for everyone above the safety of everyone. And the potential of losing one person over the potential of losing several grimly won him over.
"Alright," he said, crouching down and looking at her intensely. "I'm going to be at the front door, watching you like a hawk, weapon ready. If anything, and I mean anything happens- a Walker gets to close to you, there are just too many- I'm callin' you back or the cavalry is comin' out, you hear me?"
She nodded, practically running to the front door, pulling on gloves from her coat pocket as she did so. Taking a moment she looked out as she slipped on and laced up her boots, counting and watching. They were getting closer, coming from the east and heading south west. They would cut right across the tip of the yard if she didn't get them in time.
Rick grabbed the door, opening it up for her. He gave her a nod before she clicked open the screen door and walked silently out.
She stayed quiet and low, moving swiftly into the woods. She couldn't be sure none of them heard, but the sound of the Walkers footfalls came at that unpredictable but oddly consistent pace. None of them, at least to her ear at this distance were speeding up.
The first one went down easy. She slipped up beside it, choosing the one that was farthest north from the house but was the front of the pack. She slipped her knife deep and fast into its eye socket, using momentum rather than pure strength to take it down. She used her other hand, holding it by the neck and easing it down to the forest floor as fast and as silent as she could. Definitely not soundless, but it was the best she could do.
The next three went down the same. These Walkers had clearly been turned a long time ago and had yet to find a good human meal for a while. Their bones were brittle, figures gaunt, skin decaying and skulls letting her knife slip in easily, making a sticky and stomach turning sound as she pulled it out.
She moved to the back of this roaming group, seeing the ones out in front were too close together. They would be easy for the group at the house to take down if it came to that anyways.
She moved carefully, barely touching her feet to the ground as she walked it felt like. But she stopped short before reach her next target.
This Walker was probably twice her height and in full rotting football gear, helmet and all. Carol pulled a face, before trying her best to back away silently, hoping the helmet would help muffle any sounds. You don't turn your back on them, and you don't leave them alive (or walking, whatever term you wanted to use for the undead). She couldn't take him down, not without causing a lot of noise, but she couldn't turn her back to him either. Daryl would be cursing up something foul if he knew she was doing this, especially if she told him about this guy. He made her repeat those rules a lot in the beginning, when she had gotten too emotional, taking an knife to the head of a Walker, a mere boy no more than fifteen, and when she had gotten careless, turning around in circle overwhelmed with the Walkers coming for them.
She definitely wasn't going to tell him about this guy. Maybe bribe the others with something, doing extra chores or cooking their favourite meal, so they wouldn't tell him about this whole thing at all.
There were two close calls, her foot slipping the mud as the dead Walkers threw their weight at her as they collapsed, but none of the others were the wiser about it.
The last one, the football player, number twenty two she saw, had started veering north, farther away from the house than she knew the others could see.
Carol stood, her posture crouching with bloody knife in her equally drenched glove. She shifted forward, and for a terrifying second she thought a Walker had hold of her. She spun her head around only to see her wool coat latched deeply into the thorny bush beside her. It was either test to see how much noise that helmet really blocked by rustling out of the bush, or leave the coat all together. She opted to leave it and get this hell of a morning over with.
She swallowed, looking down at her practically bare legs, knowing how much she'd get chewed out by Daryl for wearing her stupid pyjamas. He gave her a look every morning, literally every single morning, about her wearing nothing but peach striped cotton shorts and a brown tank top. She was a sight to see, dressed like that in big black boots and bloody gloves, taking out Walkers in the woods.
As she approached the last Walker slowly, Carol saw him slow down a bit, wavering from his pace for a few moments, though she couldn't see cause for it.
It all went downhill before she did, hearing a muffled but audible exclamation a distance away, back towards the house. The helmet wasn't completely sound proof after all.
The Walker turned and immediately lunched at her, forcing her violently back, barely able to keep her footing. Ducking fast and deftly under his clawing hands and decaying mouth, Carol moved behind him, hoping to stab him in the neck while he stumbled to turn around.
But she was the one who stumbled, figuring out why the Walker had paused and shuffled around on the spot for a minute.
The ground right behind the Walker, the one Carol was fast losing her footing on, was the edge of a very steep slope, falling sharply down into the forest. Trees and bushes lined the way down and she knew that it would feel none too comfortable if she fell down.
She instinctively reached out to the Walker, looking to grab onto something: his jersey, anything. But he turned around faster than she thought for someone so dead and so large, forcing her back further and making her lose her footing altogether.
Impact on the brambled and hard forest floor knocked the wind right out her, along with the knife out of her hand. Tumbling down hard, she barely had time to feel her skin be ripped up by the branches and thorns before she flipped over again and again, the feeling of her skin shredding happening again and again too.
Hitting the bottom hard, Carol laid tangled, head still spinning and slipping so much she wondered if she still was careening down that damned slope.
Thousand of points of pain suddenly engulfed her, like little specks of acid had been sprayed on every inch of her. She could feel the bruising well up all over her body, the blood ad heat from thousands of cuts and scrapes begin to bleed in earnest, and her head unable to focus on anything but sheer pain.
She didn't notice the Walker til it was almost too late. To her spinning mind he came out of nowhere, that red number twenty two doubling and fuzzy to her eyes. He was coming from behind her and she lay there, not knowing where the hell she was. Unable to move her legs, Carol reach around, groping the forest floor for something, hoping that for once in this gone to hell world she would find a bit of luck and her knife would just be there.
Instead she reached for a broken branch, forcing it into the Walkers head and he threw himself down onto her, right above her face. She didn't have the strength to force that piece of wood into him hard enough to put him down. If he had been at her feet, she wouldn't have had his momentum. She would have died. Slowly.
Laying there for several moments, ignoring the sticky oozing that came from his head right beside her own, Carol just breathed. It was done. She hoped to high heaven that it was done. No herds passing through, no miscounting, just have it be done. She doubted she was none too quiet slamming and somersaulting down the hill, and she knew if she didn't move and soon she would be too stiff to do so.
Untangling took a long time. Walking through the bushes to find an easy enough part of the slope of the valley she was in to get out took longer. And getting up wasn't exactly an easy stroll either.
But up and out, Carol walked, arms tight across her chest and breathing deeply. She felt her chest tighten and eyes begin to burn as they watered.
Why after all that fighting, falling down, the pain she was in, was she only thinking of Daryl out there alone and maybe walking right into a herd? Why was she tearing up for that, and not herself for one small, tiny moment?
Why couldn't she just have a selfish moment where she thought about only herself, the pain, everything, and not the fact that Daryl should be here, pissed like thunder and calling her out on her stupid plan. She wished for that rather than this silence as she steadily and stiffly walked back.
These Walkers could have broken off from a larger group, and maybe he had run into it on his way hunting. What if he was hurt, lying in a ditch of brambles, hurt and bleeding, while Walkers lurched forward for him...
"Stop," she whispered harshly to herself. "Look at what you did, and stop it."
Daryl had taught her. He had made her capable of doing this. He could face and fight and beat so much more than she could. It was stupid of her to think he couldn't. Stupid to think he wasn't coming back. But she worried all the same.
Shock and horror would be two very actuate words to describe the looks on everyone's faces as she hobbled back to the house. It wasn't all too big a place for a group their size: three bedrooms up top and than the main floor space, with nothing worth speaking about. It was another house, just like the many they had taken refuge in before.
But the living quarters seemed too small for the rest of them, because as she approached she saw the entire group, minus Daryl, were all outside.
Carol sighed inwardly at their looks and exclamations. She hated that kind of thing. With her head down and her voice repeating "I'm alright, I'm fine, it's just some scrapes, I'm fine" to every single person as she forced her way through the crowd to get inside. An easy lie she had repeated countless times in her old life.
Words came at her from all sides as she sat at the kitchen table. Questions and explanations (and even a congratulations from Carl about her "standing up to those assholes") assaulted her from all sides.
Apparently a few stragglers came by just south of the house and they dealt with them. She silently thought to herself, remembering someone shouting something that caused the football Walker to turn and spot her. That this was why she wanted things quiet as possible.
But Glenn hurt his arm real bad, something about how the Walker knocked him down and he landed on the blade (Carol mostly pieced that together above all the talking and noise everyone was making). T-Dog had gone out in a pickup to check the east of their house for more Walkers and had gotten back just before she did. She didn't think it had really taken her that long to get back to the house, but apparently it did for him to be gone and back already.
In the commotion and chaos (which was what she wanted to avoid in the first place), they thought she had taken the Walkers out, not able to see the one that headed too far north, and that she had swung back around to help them with the others. Beth had a similar coat and such a slight frame that a few thought it was Carol when she went to help Maggie bring an injured Glenn back to the house.
Carol silently sipped her water through all of this, trying not to look too uncomfortable. It wasn't just the pain that burnt every inch of her skin, but the more people talked, the more she knew the amount of practical but time consuming work they would have to do. Everyone was hungry, having no time for breakfast before this all started, with clothes ripped from the morning's activities and bodies dirty and wracked. This was going to be a long day yet. Half the battle was getting through the hardships, the other half recovering from them. And with the pace they were burning through houses and through towns, Carol knew there would be little rest today. They couldn't be leisurely about their pace. Things had to be done right away.
Lori was the first to remember that Carol, injured and exhausted, needed to be looked after. "Hershel, get your kit and some antibiotics. Beth, you grab some water and a cloth." She sat down beside Carol, and immediately everyone scattered around the small house to do the long list of things that needed to get done. Lori gingerly tried to peel off Carol's glove, her face growing paler and paler.
"'S okay, Lori, I'll do it." Carol said looking at the very pregnant and very nauseated woman beside her. She tried to smile as sweetly as her pain would let her. "It's just some cuts and bruises and I have looked after plenty of those in my time."
Lori wanted to protest, Carol could see that much in her eyes, but with a hand on her mouth she just nodded, walking fast to the toilet. The pungent stench of the dead on her thickly covered gloves was more than most could stand. Carol wondered how the poor mom-to-be-again stood being in the same room for so long.
Hershel passed by Lori on the way out, kit in hand just as Beth set down the bowl of water and cloth on the table in front of her.
"Hershel, you have a seriously injured man," Carol began, giving him a pleading look. Not only did he have to deal with an injured Glenn, but Carol also knew from past experience that that meant a worried sick Maggie. She gave the same speech to him as she did to Lori: "I can clean myself up just fine. I've done it enough times throughout my life. I should be able to handle it by now."
Beth took the job of helping Carol out of her gloves, pulling a face Carol would have made if she had the energy. Beth had them both off and in a plastic bag on the counter (couldn't waste them; they would have to be washed) by the time Hershel agreed, walking off to the dining room was where she saw a bandaged Glenn lying on the table as the door swung opened and shut.
"Beth, honey, we have to feed these people before we all fall over." She said standing up. Beth opened her mouth, but they both paused and looked to the door as Lori walked in, shaking her head before rushing back out.
"Even if we air this room out now, she won't be able to come in here for a couple days," Carol stated, trying not to sound discouraged about more work it put on her. "If we rustle up something quick, I'll get to cleaning myself up in no time."
The young girl's face was drawn and a little too hollow for Carol's liking. She needed to eat. Everyone did. Carol wasn't dying or bleeding out, and with T-Dog, Rick and Carl on Walker duty, Lori on Lori duty, Hershel and Maggie on Glenn duty, she knew this wasn't the time to rest just yet.
Both Carol and Beth tried to keep things light as they worked, washing last night's plates and trying to pull together a decent and hopefully large enough meal for the group.
But all Carol could do was think about Daryl and try to keep the tears back.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Kudos if you got the Shane reference Four points for you!