Author's Notes at the End
The second time Daryl came back from a supply run with two adults sitting pillion behind him on the Triumph and a pre-teen on his lap clinging to his neck like a baby raccoon, he stopped taking the bike when he went on his own.
In some ways that made it worse, because at least when the lost stragglers were perched behind him on the Triumph's seat and squeaking in terror every time he hit a bump in the road –
- wasn't like he'd ever spilled a bike that he hadn't put down on purpose, it was insulting, was what it was –
-when they were shaking like leaves fit to bounce off the bike, at least they kept their traps shut.
In the car, they liked to talk. Wanted to tell him their whole life story. Where they came from, where they were going. How grateful they were. And especially the way that they ended up in whatever fix they needed rescuing from.
It was fucking depressing how many of them had a story of being abandoned by someone else.
Even applying the metric Merle had taught him – everyone wants something from you, and half of them will lie to you just because they're too chickenshit to look you in the eye and tell you the truth – and figuring half of the stories were bullshit, it seemed a good third of the refugees got dumped by family or "good friends" – people who were so close to them that at the first sight of walkers, they had cut and run.
It always started him down the road of thinking about T-Dog and Glenn and Rick leaving Merle on that Atlanta rooftop, and then his gut started rolling, what with remembering his white-hot rage at their fucking cowardly flight, all at odds with the current warm confidence Daryl had in them all – even T-Dog, who had fucking died, trying to keep walkers off Carol, which kept Daryl's memory of the big black man tinged with a weird sort of golden regret, no matter how many times he had been tempted to leave the clumsy-footed fool behind over that first winter – all that, mixed with the tension of having strangers in the car, leave alone bringing strangers back to the prison where Rick and Glenn and Herschel and Little-Ass-Kicker and Carol and the rest were waiting –
Any road, he hated having them in the car with him. Far better to talk Glenn or one of the others into driving a car while he used the Triumph for scouting. It just didn't work out every time that someone else was available when Daryl was itching for a run.
The latest ones were a group of five – four seemed to be the minimum it took to survive for any length of time. It had been a month since he'd picked up that Stookey guy with Glenn, and not a singleton for weeks before that. This lot was two guys, a gal, a tweeny that was so starving skinny that Daryl couldn't tell if Pat was a girl or boy, and an equally genderless toddler that they called Kaylee.
The gal and one of the guys were family, siblings; likewise the other guy and the tweeny. The baby they'd picked up along the way, abandoned by the same group that had left them. The gal's husband had cut and run with the larger group, leaving the baby behind, the brother barefoot and the gal with only a stick to fight off walkers.
Now, three days after they'd been left and half an hour after the five of them stumbled out of the woods and into the road right in front of the bait shop that Daryl had been combing through, the whole group was still shuddering in shock. The gal – squeezed between her brother and the tweeny in the back seat - broke down sobbing every five minutes. The tweeny had been crying when Daryl had bundled them into the car and hadn't stopped since. Between them, they finished off half of the case of water bottles and all of Daryl's jerky stash.
Around mouthfuls of greasy slimjims, the woman kept mumbling. "He left us. Danny – he just left us. I called after him, and called, but he just left. Never looked back."
Forty miles of backroads and switchbacks of that and Daryl couldn't get them out of the Dodge and over to Mz McLeod and Doc S in D Block for processing fast enough.
After that, he threw the keys to Beth's boy Zack and went for a walk around the fence, head-popping walkers through the chainlink until his arms ached.
Carol found him at dusk, just sitting on the catwalk over the yard, watching the sky change color.
She didn't say anything, just folded herself down on the next pallet over and waited with him as the shadows crept up from the pale gravel ribbon between the fences and slowly swallowed up the pig pen, the stable, and Rick's mad farmer plot. The sky shifted, light clinging to the clouds long after the earth had gone dark.
"Red sky at night…No rain tomorrow, then," Carol said, finally.
Daryl shrugged and nodded, before remembering that Carol couldn't see his face. "Nah. Soon, though."
"Rick will be glad. He's hoping to pick beans next week."
He hadn't realized it had been so long. The tall trellises of beans still had purple-white flowers dotted across the drooping vines – Daryl had assumed that food was still a long time coming, despite all the work that Hershel and Rick and Carl had put into the plot. "Those radish things were okay." It made a break from wild onions and dandelions, for sure.
"We'll need a lot more, though, if we keep bringing in people at this rate. We're up to fifty-seven, now, with those you brought in today."
He grunted. "Seems like all they are is more work, some days."
Carol hummed, neither agreement nor quarrel. After a moment, Daryl went on. "This lot gonna make it?" Because they didn't, more often than he liked to think about.
At least with all the firearms floating around, the suicides didn't generally turn. A vision floated up out of memory – one of the first refugees, a pretty little gal who had come in with a baby on her hip. Two days later, the baby had died. Crib death, Mz McLeod had said.
The woman had hung herself in the showers, and turned there. She'd still had her baby in her arms, still chewing on her arm, as the walker that had been its mother jerked to and fro at the end of its shoelace tether.
Carol's voice broke over his thoughts and Daryl clung to that, breathing through the memory. "I think so. They're upset, more than some, but they've got each other."
"That's somethin'." It wasn't much, but it beat nothing. Even when Merle had been a sonabitch, it was better with him than without.
Carol shifted on the pallet, drawing her legs up, folding her arms over them, wrapping up some feeling close to her heart.
The world had gone entirely dark, the first of the stars bright and fierce overhead. Their light was pitiful, was beautiful, was something alien and unknowable, and it caught the edges of Carol's face and silvered the depths of her eyes. Her breath caught, almost imperceptibly. Daryl blinked and ran the sound through his head again, before asking, with that queer certainty that was coming more and more often, now, around Carol, "What?"
For a long moment, he thought she would not answer.
"Just," she swallowed, "Just remembering Before. When it all turned bad. Ed…" she trailed off, and Daryl clenched his jaw around a curse. Because he wasn't the only one with ghosts breathing slow and quiet over his shoulder in the depths of the night.
She went on. "When it went down, at first, Ed told me to stop being stupid, to quit panicking like a stupid sheep. That was the first few days. Then – the National Guard was on the TV, all these trucks and jeeps on the street. Ed took off in the car." Another deep breath, more ragged. "Our only car. I sat at home with Sophia, all through the afternoon, watching the tv and getting more and more scared. I just sat there." A hand moved in the starlight, brushing at her eyes.
"Sophia went to sleep next to me on the couch, and I dozed off, too. It was after midnight before Ed came back.
"He had gone to one of his friends, and the car was full of all this stuff – sleeping bags, MREs, this camping gear. Old canvas that smelled – you know. You couldn't even see out the back. Sophia had to ride up front, between us. He kept – his hand kept – anyway."
Daryl growled, swallowed down another curse. If he'd known then…
It wouldn't have mattered. He'd have done nothing. None of them at the quarry had been family to him, a year ago. They hadn't mattered.
"He was yelling at us to hurry up, to get in the car, and then he was driving like crazy, heading to the refugee centers in Atlanta. Yelling at us for being slow, for making him so late that he got caught in the traffic jam on the highway."
She stopped there, as if she'd run out of words, had used all the sounds that were left, anywhere, and now there was only the chirp of crickets, tucked in their hiding places along the edges of the world.
"He could have left us. I don't think – it was pride, as much as anything. He wouldn't be known as a man who couldn't protect his family. But he could have left us. And he didn't."
In the starlight, her eyes were very far away, looking at a little car on a long highway, hemmed in by strangers, with a little man and a little woman and a little girl, huddled together against the darkness.
Daryl ducked his head, bowed his forehead against his forearms. Do you miss him rose up in his throat, and died there, because he could not bear to hear her say, yes, yes I do.
Down in the yard, fireflies were dancing, flicking. Above, the Milky Way shone glorious, shimmering, more beautiful than anything he'd ever seen, growing up.
He shoved himself up, finally, biting his lip against the stiffness in his arms. The crossbow slung over one shoulder, he held out the other hand to Carol.
"You're here, now," he said. And again, "That's something."
Her smile was darker than starlight, brighter than the darkness at the edge of his vision. She took his hand, let him help her up.
It was something.
Author's Notes: Carol/Daryl, still dancing around each other. Mentions of horrible things that ordinary people do to each other in the zombie apopocalypse. Inspired by some talk going around about unredeemable characters. Thanks to Flora for beta.