Author's Note: This one shot takes place during 4x02 Infected, when everyone in the prison was starting to get sick. Stick around, folks, I've got a great big announcement at the end!
"You okay?"
"Gotta be."
Later that day…
Feet clanged against metal, water splashed, hushed voices murmured in the open, echoing cell block.
Carol sat on the sheet-less mattress and felt guilty.
It was self-indulgent, waiting here when there were a thousand things to do. Rooms to sterilize, food to cook, patients to care for. Lizzy and Mika to check on. This time of day, she was probably the only one sitting still.
But this was the only place she was sure Daryl would be.
Once he dug the last grave, he'd shower. Most of the things he did for the group were dirty work, and half the time he didn't see a reason to waste water when the next task on his list would always leave him sweaty or dirty or bloody again. But after graves, he always showered. Before that, he'd need a change of clothes out of this room.
He said he couldn't sleep in a cage, so he stashed only his belongings in here away from prying eyes. Himself he stored out in the vulnerable open of the stair landing. She planned to ask him to move into a cell, at least right now while anyone could get sick and turn in the night.
It was a perfectly good reason to be waiting for him in this cell. Daryl wasn't great at self-preservation at the best of times. If she asked him when anybody else was listening, he'd probably need to play it off all tough, like he didn't need bars to keep him safe. As light as he slept, maybe he didn't. And she knew he'd want to be in a central location, ready to respond to a single moan before a walker could stumble out of one cell and make their way to find a victim in another.
But why risk him? Why risk Daryl of everyone in this overcrowded prison of people she didn't want to lose?
She wrung her hands as she waited, her fingertips lingering on all her own imperfections: the ugly bulbousness of her joints, that persistent dry place on the back of her knuckles. She had the hands of an old woman, especially after washing so much laundry by hand since the turn. Stuffing her hands under her legs, she threw a glance at the privacy sheet covering the door.
If anyone caught her waiting here for him, that's what she'd say. She was going to ask him to sleep safely in a cell.
That was the only reason she needed to talk to him alone.
Carol squeezed her eyes shut, the lie feeling squirmy in her belly before she ever said it out loud.
She just needed to see him, that was all. Without his face slammed shut to everyone else watching. She needed to see if he was okay, because when she asked earlier, he lied to her.
Was the lie to about not being sick? Or that he wasn't upset?
She needed a minute, just one minute with them alone and safe in a room together. Then she could go out and face all of this. All the invisible germs trying to kill them, and them trying to kill each other once the germs had won out. The moans of all the things trying to kill them from outside the fence while she washed the germs out of everyone's clothes.
The bars rattled open and curtain swung aside. Carol came halfway to her feet with nerves, then forced her bottom back to the mattress when she caught sight of a familiar grass-stained pair of boots. A wad of dirty clothes hit the wall and rebounded into a pile on the floor as Daryl ducked inside, tossing a wet towel on top of the clothes a second later.
He only made it one step further before his boots stuttered and his knife swished out of its sheath so fast it barely made a sound.
"It's me!" Carol held up her hands. "I'm me." She blinked, feeling fumbly for having said it that way. But after last night, a familiar face was no longer a guarantee of safety around here. No one would be feeling that more acutely than Daryl, who had had to sink that same knife into his own brother not too long ago.
"Shit." He hissed out the word, seething back and forth across the cell like his weight wasn't quite ready to settle back into his heels yet. He stuffed the knife away. "Sorry. Didn't mean ta."
"I know." She stood up. "I shouldn't have startled you. Especially not today. I should have called out. I just didn't want anybody hearing me in here."
He jerked to a halt, his eyes flicking back and forth between hers. "Why? Somethin' happen? 's going on?"
"Nothing, nothing." She was making a mess of this. Whatever "this" was supposed to be. "You shouldn't sleep out on the perch it's not safe!" She flung the words out at once like an accusation, not even pausing as she made for the door.
"Hey." He didn't touch her, but he ducked over towards the door, his presence holding her back more surely than any grip could have.
He moved so fast, Daryl did. Always slipping sideways, moving through the world more like an animal than a person. Now, he dipped his chin, catching her eyes as his still-damp hair dripped water onto his forehead.
She'd been wrong. He'd already gotten his change of clothes and headed for the shower before she'd ever snuck into his cell. She might have missed him altogether. Her throat went tight and tears hit her eyes and dammit, she was being perfectly irrational about all of this.
She turned away, catching her breath before it could betray her into any kind of sound, swiping at her annoyingly damp eyes as she paced back across the cell.
"Somethin' happened." He didn't even have to try to pitch his voice low, the deep growl of it not carrying beyond the thin sheet shielding his cell door. "Didn't it. You can tell me. Ain't gotta tell Hershel. Rick. Not if you don't wanna."
She shook her head, the gray wall of his cell stopping her pacing even though she wasn't ready to turn around yet.
But he was worried enough to crowd her more than he ever did, crossing the cell to murmur, "You sick?"
"No. No, I'm so scared I keep imagining my throat's a little scratchy, but I'm fine. Truly." She looked at him, every cell in her heart going ice blue in an instant. "You? Not—"
He was already shaking his head. "Not sick. But 's gonna get worse."
He hadn't said it in the meeting with all the others, but he said it now. To her.
"I know," she whispered.
She wanted, so badly, to grab his shirt in both her fists and pull him close. But she couldn't.
She hated herself, in that instant, for not being the kind of woman who could do that sort of thing. And she hated him for not being the kind of man who could put his arms around her and ease this moment for both of them.
Maybe she was just angry, but it gave her the courage to look up, and his eyes were so unguarded, looking straight into hers without skittering away.
He didn't ask again, why she'd come. Maybe he knew, even if she didn't. Or maybe he could just feel all the terrible possibilities around them, beginning to rattle the bars that until last night, had felt so safe.
"It feels like the farm." She could barely breathe the words. "Like those walkers coming in the distance, when we realized there were too many of them. When we knew we couldn't hold it."
She didn't think she'd moved, and she would have sworn he didn't—wouldn't—but suddenly her hands were touching his shirt and all that solid muscle beneath threadbare fabric. It was almost like she was falling toward him, not reaching. And still her fingers stuttered, not grasping or caressing but just pressing against him.
Like a touch that had lost track of what it meant to say. Or never had the courage to say it in the first place.
"Ain't the farm."
"It was supposed to be better." She said it to his chest, the part of his body she'd thought so much about that she tried never to look at it. Any other day, she looked at his face, which seemed far too dangerous, and too dear, to focus on right now. "We have fences, walls, cells." But nothing to protect them from each other.
Even less to protect them from disease, which had nearly wiped the earth clean of humans a hundred times before the first walker had ever crawled from its grave.
Her fingers curled closed, holding his shirt as if you could ever really hold onto anything in this merciless world.
And she looked up, because God help her, she wanted to see his eyes while they were still his.
"It just feels like it's all about to end, you know?" she said. "Like a dream that's a little too good."
She knew he hated the prison. He'd told her so many times. Called it a cage, a tomb, a grave. He prowled the yard at night, liked to climb up high so he could see past the fences and the walkers to the forest beyond.
But today, he didn't argue.
Instead she felt the lightest touch; just a little brush against her wrist. She looked down and it was his hand. Fingers curled almost fearfully, his nails bitten off so the ends of his fingers were unguarded, just smooth round callous as his hand trembled, poised in the air and not really touching her. But not really not touching her.
"Ain't gonna let it," he rasped. "There's medicine left. Somewhere. Gotta go to Canada, I'll get it. Them little kids is gonna be fine."
Her chest squeezed all over again. It was just like Daryl. He avoided the kids like they might give him fleas, but he watched over them three times as carefully as anyone else, his bow always at the ready if they got too close to the fingers reaching through the fence. Or maybe it was just because he knew that it was the loss of the children, the little sunny-haired girls, who would cut her the deepest.
She could still remember the sound of him fidgeting with a shotgun, both them alone in Dale's old RV, no words left to say while her daughter's body was being consigned to the earth outside.
"It isn't the kids I can't bear to lose." It wasn't until she said it out loud that she knew it was true.
She'd already lost the person who would hurt her the most in the entire world. After Sophia, the most important person to her was the man whose arms had steadied her through that loss. Holding too hard because he knew how to restrain, but hadn't learned yet how to hug.
His eyelashes flickered with confusion, and his hand fell away, all the way back to his side. " 'sit that guy? Ryan?"
She nearly choked on the laugh that she hadn't known was coming. Daryl's brow furrowed further. She smoothed his wrinkled shirt, because he hadn't pulled away yet, or even flinched. With a layer of fabric between them, it seemed okay to stroke his chest. It was almost funny; that the moment when she realized how terribly much he meant to her, that he'd assume just the opposite.
The murmur of voices from the cell block got more flustered, and she thought she heard her name. Daryl's eyes cut toward the door for just a second, so maybe she had.
He smelled of soap and rainwater and she couldn't stop remembering that he'd just been standing in a grave.
He'd dug her grave once. If she had her way, he'd never have to do that again.
Carol let her hand move up. Past his collarbone. Past the wide line of his shoulders that took up too much of every backseat they'd ever been crammed in together. That blocked so much of the wind when she rode on his motorcycle.
This touch seemed to re-write everything: the cinderblock in the walls, the finger-smudged glass of the windows. It threw the gates open and ground the locks underneath a careless heel. There was no going back from her palm settling over the frantically beating pulse in his throat, and she didn't care. For all her fond talk of the farm, she didn't miss it. Not the way he growled and barked at her and could only show his feelings for her by roaming far away in the dark forest. Not the open air and idealism of their tiny wire fences.
She wanted the prison with its secure walls and thick roof and perfect little courtyards. She wanted to be locked inside with him and never have to come back out.
Carol slipped her hand around to the back of his neck and pulled, as confident as the woman she'd always wanted to be. And then more than their hands touched, her hips colliding with his, his belt buckle biting into her stomach. His palm fluttered against the curve of her waist and then held on. Gripping too hard because he still hadn't learned to hug.
And goddamn it, if they were out of time, this was all she'd get.
Out of sheer frustration, she kissed him.
Nothing lined up right at first and he was slow to respond so if she hadn't been so fucking mad, she might have pulled away and fled out of sheer, terrified rejection.
But this was it. Their people were sick and they might never get a second chance. It might turn into a bloodbath as all the people they'd tried to save ate them alive.
So she gulped down a breath and kissed him again, his chapped lips scraping against hers so that when they finally started to move, she felt it.
Acutely.
When his other hand found her back, she felt it. When his arms stopped hesitating and surrounded her, she felt that, too.
And for a minute, just for one minute, the warmth and the comfort and the giddy gift of it all made her forget everything that waited outside.
When their lips parted, he made a sound that might have nearly been a gruff laugh and he kissed her again; a little off center so he caught her lips and her cheek as if he couldn't decide between the two.
Carol smiled and snuggled into him, putting her head under his chin and her body inside his arms so he didn't have a choice except to know how to hug.
She wouldn't let him scavenge all the way to Canada for medicine, and she wouldn't let him get sick. She wouldn't let God take the prison from them and kill all her people again, no matter who He was punishing this time.
This sickness had to end before it took away her home, and she would do anything to stop it.
Anything.
THE END
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Big news, guys, huge. And if you're one of my hardcores that's been following my fanfic since 2012 you know exactly how big this is for me. Deep breath.
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If you can't get to the Big O, can you get to the happily ever after?
Jera McKnight loves music, swoons for hot guys, but sucks at sex. Jacob Tate is her perfect storm: a pun-loving nude model with a heart as big as his record collection.
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