What if there was a bit more of a time lapse between Glenn and Maggie getting captured and Carol being rescued from her cell, and Daryl didn't have to rush off right after he'd brought her back?
This story is what may have happened. This is my second fic, so I'm very much a budding writer. Also, English is not my first language and I have been writing this story for so long that I don't even know if it will make sense to anyone but me, but I hope some of you enjoy it. Please leave reviews if you do! Or if you have some feedback for me. The lovely reviews I got for Hold are what drove me to finish this one, so I would dearly love to hear from you, readers!
I do not own the Walking Dead blah blah blah
05/11/2015: Edited a couple of typos
Carol approaches the graves slowly and before she's even halfway down the gentle slope her eyes are already filled with tears. The three fragile unmarked crosses stand precariously in the pale cool dawn of the morning, a grim reminder of how tenuous their life has become nowadays. Her vision blurs as she approaches the mounds and she sinks down to her knees, silently invoking the names of their dead.
Lori. T-Dog.
Two dead, three crosses. The suddenly jarring dis-symmetry of the numbers shatters the prayer that was forming on her lips. Fear of another disaster she has not yet been told of clamps her heart and her mind does a frantic recount of the group. She tries to get a grip on her breathing as she mentally ticks off the remaining members of her family. Daryl. Rick. Glenn and Maggie. Herschel and Beth. Carl. Baby Judith.
No, there hasn't been another death, a stranger must be buried here. She sighs with relief and realises with a twinge of guilt that she doesn't care who it is as long as it is not one of hers. Death, she thinks, they have become so used to it, and yet the loss of their loved ones cuts them so deeply, still.
She turns her thoughts to her dead friends once again and attempts to pick up the strands of her prayer. Visions of T-Dog being ripped apart by walkers have invaded her dreams all night, shattering the sweet relief and joy she had first felt when Daryl brought her back. "This is God's plan," T's last words ring in her ear.
The words slap her in the face, as harsh and stinging as her husband's hand once was.
God. As if He would think Carol Peletier worth saving over T-Dog. Over Lori.
Over Sophia.
She remembers her desperate prayer in that church near Herschel's farm. "Please, do not let this be my punishment", she had begged.
It would seem God is set on punishing her again and again, and will show no mercy. Bile rises in her throat as her gut twists with self-loathing. How many people will have to die, before she does? How many more people will she be unable to help, unable to save?
I'm a burden, answer accusingly the words she has so often used to define herself. She clenches her fists and shakes in angry denial. She has fought all winter to make a lie of these words. God knows she has tried. Learnt to shoot so she could defend herself, defend the group. Soaked up as much as she could of Herschel's medical knowledge so she could help Lori when the time came.
Oh god, Lori.
She stifles a sob at the thought of the ghastly, inhumane fate of her friend. Lately, she had started to feel useful. Needed. Like she belonged here, like she had a place. Lately, she had felt... free. Almost...
"Happy."
She shudders at the suffocating indecency of the word. "Who do you think you are, you worthless cow!" She cowers as the echo of Ed's voice pierces her skull. Ed was anything but a religious man, always quick to dismiss and mock her faith, yet it had always struck her as ironic how when it came to the subject of Carol Peletier and her failings, he unknowingly preached and exacted the word of God as if bestowed with a Holy mission. The crosses in front of her stand as silent witnesses to the truth of his words, a chilling reckoning of her foolish arrogance. The last of her anger deflates, making place to the crushing weight of shame.
He finds her by the graves. A couple of walkers are snarling outside of the perimeter, but all is otherwise quiet. She's kneeling on the dewy grass, in front of the crosses, head down and shoulders hunched. He wonders if she is praying. He can't help but feel a flicker of annoyance that she still looks to that useless God of hers. Like it's ever done her any good.
She looks sad and alone, he thinks. Defeated. It scrapes painfully at his chest to see her like this, she seemed so happy and full of life yesterday after he brought her back to the others. Even the news of Lori's death hadn't snuffed out the shine in her eyes. Her beautiful blue eyes are full of stars nowadays and when she looks at him with that look she has, something twists inside him, something painful and good at the same time, something to hide away and hold onto. It confuses him. Hell, he shrugs, a lot of things about Carol confuse him.
She must have heard his soft footsteps as he approaches but besides glancing over her shoulder briefly, she doesn't acknowledge his presence. Telltale streaks on her cheeks tell him she has been crying. "Hey", he says softly "You all right?".
"I'm fine," she whispers back but they both know it's a lie. He feels a sudden urge to hold her and tell her everything will be ok. "Pussy", snickers Merle in the back of his head and Daryl stays silent. He looks at the graves instead, remembering the last time he was here. When he thought she was dead. The stones that were marking the graves have been scattered, he notices. A possum, by the looks of the faint marks on the ground. Probably attracted by the smell, he guesses, must have had a scratch at the graves hoping for an easy meal. His eyes search for the flower he left there, and finally find a glimpse of white, half buried under the disturbed earth. He chews at his thumbnail and shifts uncomfortably, wondering if she's seen it too.
Her next words are so low he almost misses them.
"If Maggie had gone with him, instead of me, he'd still be alive."
She still won't meet his eyes. He frowns at her, confused, waiting for her to explain.
"T-Dog. I shouldn't have turned my back on him, Maggie wouldn't have," she adds. "If it wasn't for me, he'd still be alive."
Damn woman isn't making much sense, but he's heard enough to understand she blames herself for the man's death. He's been in enough battles to understand the futility of hindsight. He narrows his eyes at her and gives a slight shake of his head. "You don't know that. Ain't no point beating yourself over it. T's death ain't on you, it's on the sonovabitch who let them walkers in." But it doesn't work. He can see in the flatness of her eyes that his words have failed to reach her.
"I'm a..." She stops the word from escaping her lips, but she's said it often enough that he knows what she's thinking.
Burden. Even unspoken, the word resonates loudly in the quiet between them. He doesn't like it when she says that, he never knows what to say. Ain't even true, not any more anyway. Not that it matters what he thinks or says, some things you can tell people a thousand times and it ain't gonna make a dime of difference, only talk they'll listen to is the one that goes on inside their heads. He wants to shake her and tell her to snap out of it, but his anger dissolves before it's even had time to rise up. After coming so close to losing her, he finds he doesn't have it in him any more to be angry with her. The unfamiliar absence of anger leaves him disorientated, without a compass. He curses silently at himself. The others would know what to say, how to comfort her. He doesn't have that way with words. He only knows words that hurt. Angry words, biting words, that he fires like wounding arrows. Not words that heal. Soothe. Comfort. Carol's words.
Not wanting her to misunderstand his silence for assent, he grasps wildly for something to say. Her shoulders seem to droop more with each passing second as he stands frozen and helpless, unable to find the words. In the back of his head, Merle is positively cackling himself now, jeering at him, scrambling his thoughts. He screws up his eyes, trying to regain his focus.
He wants to tell her she's wrong.
He wants to tell her how strong she's become, how the woman he first met at the camp would not have fought her way into that cell, would not have hang on to life long enough for him to find her.
He wants to tell her that he needs her.
He wants to tell her every time she looks at him, her eyes laughing and trusting, for a moment he almost believes he could be redeemed.
That maybe he is worth something more than the white trash no-good asshole he's always been destined to be. Merle has stopped laughing now, roaring at him instead. "Who the hell d'you think you are, think you're better than me? You wanna elevate yourself baby brother, do ya?"
"Shut the fuck up!", he rages silently towards Merle. He thinks about the dark hollowness he felt when he thought she was gone. When he thought she was dead. He feels his face grow hot as his own shame rises.
"I shoulda looked for you." He blurts out. She raises her eyes at him, searching his face, the lift in her eyebrows asking him to keep talking.
"When I saw your scarf next to T-Dog's", he carries on, "I thought you were dead. Didn't even look for you, not even one minute. Hell, we buried you." She follows his gaze to the grave next to her and he sees her eyes widen with sudden comprehension. Shit. It dawns on him only now that no one has told her about her grave. He sees the shock on her face. The disappointment. He curses at himself, in disbelief that out of all the things he could have said, that's all he fucking came up with. "Real smooth dummy, real smooth", choruses Merle. He wonders if he has just lost her again. If he's screwed everything up. His stomach constricts in a hard ball of rage, burning, all consuming. He paces, then his anger spilling over, he takes a flying kick at the wretched cross, then another, hitting it over and over until the joined wooden palings are lying flat on the ground, dismembered.
Carol watches him kick again and again at the makeshift cross, until all that remains are dust and bits of broken wood. She stares at her torn down grave, oddly fascinated by the surrealism of the sight. They buried her. They did not look for her.
He did not look for her.
The knowledge surprises her, a painful kind of surprise. She wonders if she imagined the bond that she thought had grown between them over winter. Somehow she'd imagined his search for her would have been relentless, as his search for Sophia had been. She cringes at her presumptuousness. She wonders how she could have been so wrong. So deluded. She feels empty. Cold. Disembodied.
Maybe it is really her buried under that mound, after all, and all that remains of her now here at the surface is an empty shell. She feels as broken as the cross in front of her.
She can feel Daryl standing a few steps behind her, breathing hard. Silence stretches between them once more but now it is him who is waiting for absolution. She senses something akin to despair in his mute and ragged wait and she knows she should say something to him. How she forgives him for not looking. How she understands. How it is enough that he found her. She wants to say it but the words do not come, caught in the bitter taste of her disillusions.
"Get a grip," she admonishes herself, loathing the self pity she is spiralling down into. It reminds her of her old self, the skin she thought she had finally shed. The skin of the woman who let herself be controlled by an abusive asshole. Who let herself believe she didn't deserve anything else. After Sophia, after the farm, she had wanted to become someone else. Someone worthy.
Worthy of him.
She stares at her broken grave, as she struggles desperately to collect the pieces of herself and put them back together again.
"Carol." He whispers her name almost pleadingly and she finally looks up at him. His face twitches and for the briefest of moments the inner fight taking place is etched on his face. His lips move but no word passes his mouth. He breaks away from her gaze and his eyes settle on a spot on the ground in front of her. She follows his eyes and notices the flash of white for the first time, sticking out from under one of the palings.
The world spins and rearranges itself once again as she recognises the familiar shape. She scratches carefully at the dirt and picks up the flower, cradling it as if nursing a fragile flame. The delicate white hearts tremble slightly, whether from the shakiness of her own hand or the slight breeze blowing, she doesn't know. She holds it as feeling and hope and life seep back into her body.
The flower whispers of the gift of its twin, picked to give hope and comfort to a frantic mother.
Of being preciously tucked away, as weeks turned into months.
Of mourning and of grief.
It is all Carol needs to remember the way he constantly watches out for her. The way he is never far from her. The way he lets her closer in that he ever lets anybody else. The way he looks at her, the softness in his eyes making a lie of the harshness of his face.
The flower is proof it is not all in her head, and her strength returning, she brandishes it fiercely at Ed, at God, at all the doubting inner voices that have tried to convince her that whatever-it-is-they-have-going-on was an illusion. That she deserves nothing else other than pain and suffering.
The flower is proof.
She looks up at him. Through the hunch of his shoulders and the tightness of his face, she sees his pain, his shame. They all have their own crosses to bear, she figures, and she thinks of Rick and his immense regrets over Lori. Yes, they all have their burden, which they can choose to bear, carrying it around with them like a heavy bag, or to discard like the cross Daryl just kicked down.
To bear, or to bury.
If any part of her was really buried here, she decides, returning her gaze to the grave, it was the part of her that yielded to Ed, not the part of her that she wills to Daryl.
He looks away as she looks up at him, feeling awkward and embarrassed now. He wishes he'd had the time to knock down the stupid cross before she'd come here, and at the same time he can't help feeling relieved the flower is here to speak for him when he himself cannot.
He chances another furtive glance at her and she holds up the flower towards him, as in acknowledgement. Her eyes are shining again, he notices. His gut untwists with relief, but only for a moment, his heartbeat quickening once more as she stands up and moves slowly towards him, closing the space between them. He stands frozen, arms limp by his side as she slips her small hands on his shoulders, lifting her face towards him. Her soft lips touch his cheek for a second, dangerously close to his own, and then they are gone, and her face is pressed onto his chest.
"Thank you for the flower", she whispers softly into his shirt. He can feel his heart beat against her ear, but she does not release her hold.
"Thank you for finding me."
He waits awkwardly for her embrace to finish, but it lingers, and he watches his own hands creep to the small of her back, then his arms wrapping themselves around her until he is holding her tight. As if they'd been waiting to hold her again ever since he'd carried her out of that cell yesterday, ever since he watched her hug everyone afterwards and he'd had to cross them so they wouldn't open and reveal his want. He knows that later he'll worry about what the hell this means but right now, he buries his face into her shoulder and it is enough just to breathe her in, thinking of nothing but how good, how right this feels. Even Merle is silent now, drowned out by the softness and warmth of her body.
They stay like this a long time, intertwined, at peace, their bodies speaking for them while they silently relish the rare hush of their minds.