AN: So this is the first chapter to a nine chapter short-story. It's ultimately a Caryl story, but probably not as traditional as some. Other elements will be present as we go through the different lives of Carol. There's a little bit more information at the end. That's an AN that everyone needs to read if you're deciding whether or not you want to read this story (because I know some people are more sensitive than others about appearances/discussions of other ships).
I own nothing from the Walking Dead.
This chapter gets a warning for the presence of Ed (though nothing abusive/graphic here) for anyone who might want it.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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The lavender Easter dress had been her favorite one out of any that she could recall. It was, perhaps, a little over the top in comparison to the other dresses around, but she favored the flowing skirt and the tight bodice. It made her feel feminine and light and beautiful. It didn't matter if her father had jokingly teased that she looked like an Easter egg in person or that her mother had suggested that she might have chosen her shoes a little more carefully to have matched better with the fabric.
None of that mattered to Carol. What mattered to her wasn't really how she looked, it was how she felt.
She'd missed the big Easter picnic for the past three years. She'd been away at college on a scholarship and she'd found it too difficult to make it back home. Even though Spring Break should have allowed her such a freedom, it usually ended up that the week was one she used to work more. It was the perfect time for getting a good head start on all the papers that the end of the semester—approaching so quickly that she could hear it coming—would demand from her. The library, after all, was absolutely abandoned.
But this was her last year. It was the year of her student teaching and her break had allowed her to come home—the prodigal child of the whole town since there weren't too many people from Stone Ridge that even went to college. She would be there for the picnic and she would go wearing the dress that she'd picked out and bought herself, without any input from her mother, to flaunt a little her own pride in her accomplishments.
When they got to the picnic, though, Carol quickly realized that things in town hadn't changed just because she'd gone to college. She wasn't returning as some kind of hero or inspiration for those around her. She was still the same person she'd always been, Carol Ann McAlister—the girl who didn't quite fit in.
And even the power of the lavender dress wasn't enough to make her feel less than invisible in the crowd.
Carol fixed her plate and wandered around, while her parents talked with people they knew from church, to look for some of her old classmates—people who really hadn't had much of an interest in her while she'd lived there and gone to school with them—but she soon found them to be fairly unreceptive. If they hadn't felt any real affection for her when they were all going to the same high school, they certainly didn't feel it now that she'd stepped away from her life there for a few years. While she'd been away trying to get a degree, most of them had gone on with their lives and, more than likely, spent their leisure time together reliving the glory days of high school.
Those days, honestly, hadn't really been glory days for Carol, so she had nothing to relive with them. She had no stories to share and she wasn't part of their stories. She was the girl on the outside of all their stories, in fact.
And she was the girl on the outside of their group gathering.
Knowing and accepting when she wasn't welcome—when she simply didn't fit in—was something Carol was good at. It was a skill all its own. She took her plate and, instead of interrupting anyone else's meal, she made her way across the grassy area of the park and chose a seat for herself in the shade of a tree. She sought out the cleanest looking spot, where grass was likely all she'd come into contact with to soil her dress at all, and she sat. With her plate in her lap, she picked at her food and watched everyone else from a distance.
She didn't fit in there. She never had.
Once it had bothered her. Once it had been the only thing she wanted. She wanted to be popular and well-liked. She wanted to be part of the groups of friends around her. She wanted to be part of something instead of feeling like she was always just inserting herself into something to which she didn't really belong.
She fit in even less now, though, than she ever had.
And she realized that it didn't bother her as much as it once had. She was growing accustomed to it. She was accepting it.
She belonged to a different world than they did. She belonged, perhaps, to a world all her own. And, maybe, one day she'd find a place where she really felt like she fit. Maybe, one day, she'd find her own friends. Her own people.
A tribe, of sorts, that would accept her for exactly what she was.
Even if what she was just an over-freckled, red-head with frizzy hair that was eating alone in a purple dress that, more than likely, made her look like an Easter egg.
Maybe, one day, she'd find someone with whom to share her world.
"Carol Ann—always eating alone," Carol heard. She raised her face and shielded her eyes from the sun to see who had snuck up on her, coming from behind the tree. She smiled.
"Ed?" She asked.
"Been gone so long you don't remember me?" Ed asked. "Got that many boyfriends away at your fancy ass University?"
Carol's heart pounded in her chest. Ed Peletier had been the closest that Carol had ever come to having a high school sweetheart. They had eaten lunch together a few times. They'd gone out to eat once. They'd seen a movie together and Ed had put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her in the dark during the closing credits. She couldn't remember the movie, but she could remember the strange flutter in her stomach over that kiss.
But it had all ended rather abruptly when she'd told him that she'd been accepted to go to school and she was going. That wasn't really what Ed had in mind. Apparently he didn't think that he needed college and he certainly didn't think that she did. He wanted to get married, just like most of them did, and he wanted to raise a family. He didn't see any reason in delaying that, especially not since Carol wouldn't need education to have three or four kids. That was, if he was to choose to marry her.
He'd been mad—hot headed enough he'd punched a wall and stormed away from her—when she'd told him that she was leaving. He'd written her a letter, during her second semester, telling her that he was sorry for how he'd acted and that he wanted to see her again, but nothing more had come of it than that.
Carol still had the letter.
And she'd already forgiven him for getting mad. After all, she understood it. He'd only gotten mad because he'd felt threatened. He'd only gotten mad because he thought that, after going to college, it might bother her that he had chosen to go to work for his father instead. He'd only gotten mad because he'd thought it might mean that she didn't look at him the same way—that she looked down on him. And no man wanted to feel like a woman, especially not his sweetheart, was looking down on him.
Carol wasn't looking down on him at all. In fact, it was him that was looking down on her, literally, at the moment.
"Of course I remember you," Carol said. "It's been years, Ed."
"Too many," Ed said. "You're—you're lookin' good for yourself."
Carol smiled.
"You like my dress?" She asked. He hummed at her—grunted really—but nodded.
"Pretty," he said. It was the best kind of compliment she was going to get from Ed Peletier about a dress, but she'd accept it since it was the first compliment she'd gotten about it at all. Carol patted the ground beside her.
"You could sit with me," she said. "Then—I wouldn't have to eat alone."
Ed looked around, like he might be expecting someone to say something about it, and then he did settle down beside her. Ed was more popular than Carol was, and maybe that was owing to who his father was, but for some reason he'd taken a shine to her. He had other girlfriends, and Carol knew that, but he'd always told her that she was special. She was something different than them.
And Carol had to believe him because she'd always felt different, at least in some way.
Ed sat for a moment and produced a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He lit one and offered the pack to Carol. She shook her head.
"You quit smoking?" Ed asked.
The truth was that Carol had never smoked. At least, she'd never smoked enough to really consider it a habit of hers. She'd done it, more than once, to try to fit in with everyone else, but it wasn't something she really enjoyed. In fact, every time she did it, she'd look at the others who were really enjoying it and feel a little bit more out of place.
It was just another reminder that she wasn't like them.
Ed didn't need to know all that, though. A simple white lie could handle this.
"Yeah," she confirmed. "Didn't like it. Makes my breath smell bad and—and I heard you can get wrinkles that way."
Ed laughed to himself and studied the cigarette.
"Better you don't smoke then," Ed said. "Don't want to mess up your face. But—all the same, I don't intend to stop."
Carol shook her head at him.
"You don't have to," Carol said. "I just—don't want to."
She put her plate to the side, an offering to the ants that would soon find it, and then she shifted around in the grass. Ed slid closer to her and dropped an arm over her shoulder just like he had in the movie theater. She held her breath for a moment, almost afraid that any sudden movement on her part or drawing attention to it might make him move.
"You got you a boyfriend?" Ed asked. "Someone you're dating up there?"
Carol swallowed.
Her life at college was as solitary as her life in Stone Ridge had ever been. She had her books to keep her company. There, like in high school, she really had no real enemies, but she couldn't say that she had too many real friends either. She simply existed—even if she felt that hardly anyone ever noticed her existence.
"No," she said. "Not one."
Ed smirked at her and when he spoke there was a touch more gruffness in his voice. He moved his arm, moving her whole body with it, and shook her playfully from side to side.
"You messin' with me, Carol Ann?" He asked. Carol smiled at the teasing. She shook her head at him. He only seemed more pleased. "Been waiting on me all this time?"
She hadn't exactly been waiting, there just hadn't really been any other opportunities. But Carol knew that men could be fragile and she didn't want to hurt Ed's feelings. She simply confirmed for him that she'd been waiting on him with a nod of her head and she sucked in her breath to keep from appearing too excited by his seeming interest in her.
"Have you been waiting on me?" She asked, curling her lip at him and arching her eyebrow. She knew that he hadn't. More than likely he'd had ten or fifteen girlfriends in her absence—and that was on top of the ones that he'd had while she was in town.
"Matter of fact? I have," Ed said. "Just how much longer you gotta be at that place anyway?"
Carol's heart thundered now in her chest. If he'd said anything else, she might not have heard it over the sound of her own rushing blood in her ears. She was almost dizzied by everything about Ed—by the thrill of finding out that, after all these years, he still cared what she was doing.
And he still cared when she was coming back.
"Just a couple of months," Carol said. "Just—finishing up student teaching. But—then I'll be done."
"A free woman?" Ed asked. Carol smiled and nodded. "Comin' back to Stone Ridge?" Carol hesitated to respond. She didn't want to say that there was really nothing in Stone Ridge for her—that she'd always felt really out of place there even if she had nowhere that she really felt right—but she didn't have to say it because Ed seemed to read her mind. "Comin' back if—you had something to come back for? Someone? Say—a man that was asking for just a little bit of that freedom?"
Carol smiled at him and nodded again, barely able to breathe for just a moment over everything she dared to think that he was insinuating. She continued to nod until he laughed at her.
"Damn it, Carol Ann, you look like a dashboard dog," Ed commented. Carol laughed, but he soon stopped her laughter by covering her lips and kissing her. And even though they weren't hidden by the darkness of the movie theater this time, Carol wrapped her arms around him and kissed him back.
She'd be free but, hopefully, not for long.
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AN: So each chapter of this story will be a "life" of Carol. There are nine chapters because we know, as she tells Daryl, she has nine lives. This is the first chapter (complete). Given that there will be a number of her experiences (and lives) that will be explored, it should be expected that other relationships will appear here. Ultimately it's a Caryl story, but that's not the only thing that's going to be discussed. If you know me at all, however, you know that I don't do much smut. I don't foresee anything like that with any other character, though there may be mentions of sexual relationships, but I will put a "warning" at the beginning of chapters for anyone who may need it.
