Growing up, her Daddy called her Angel Eyes.
"For the color and the expression," he would say. "That girl sees inside your head."
It was Ed who taught her to bury it. "You're always lookin' at me like you think I'm up to something," he's say. "You ain't got no business watching me like that."
She learned to cock her head, learned to smile. That smile would crinkle up the corners of her eyes, lift her chin, calm Ed's catlike hissing. She learned to hum as she worked and brace her shoulders up high. Carol was only seen when she meant herself to be.
It wasn't any different when Ed died. In truth, her life was only marginally more dangerous with the apocalypse than with him, but she would keep up all her walls if it meant shielding any piece of Sophia. It was the only protection she knew, and she handed it off to her little girl like she had given the lattice of her DNA.
It wasn't enough. Sophia vanished and her mother was faced with herself. A wreck of a woman, battered, then widowed, then alone.
And yet she wasn't alone. And her grief erased her carefully cultivated invisibility. The eyes followed her after Sophia's disappearance, and each pair glanced off her skin with a different mark. Every time Rick looked at her, she saw the flash of responsibility. Lori's glances flickered with fear, her fingers closing tighter on Carl's shoulders. In Shane's eyes she saw shame, and Andrea's held pity lightly glossed with contempt. Glenn and Dale watched her with concern and caution. They all saw her now, but only for a second at a time, their eyes skimming over her like hands on an infected thing.
Carol saw everything, and she felt their eyes like the back of a hand glancing off her cheek.
But not his.
Daryl's presence had been a threat to her from the moment he and his brother had stumbled into camp. He was there to supplant her, to identify her. Another silent one, watching, lurking. Wallflowers can hide from everyone but each other.
So she watched him a little bit closer than anyone else. She saw his boyish posturing, shoulders pinned far back which mimicked confidence, but she recognized the difference between a stance of power and one of readiness. Self-defense. She read the lines in his nervous lips, noticed the way his fingers flickered on his weapons, and caught the way he spoke by punctuating the words with his chin, jutting them forward.
They were expressions she had long traced in her own skin, and were beginning to blossom in Sophia.
He didn't seem to watch her much at first. Not particularly. Ed he looked at, stalking him with his eyes, watching every interaction between the man and his daughter. Not that it mattered to her much.
But then Ed was dead and Sophia was missing and the only gentle eyes that stayed on her were Daryl's.
When he wasn't out scouring the woods, screaming Sophia's name fearlessly into the listening trees, he was back at the farmhouse, watching Carol.
His eyes didn't bear any marks of burden or pity. They just watched, absorbing her the way a painter absorbs his muse.
She squirmed.
It seemed no matter where she went, his eyes could find her. They would trail across her shoulders as she paced the farmhouse, rest on her profile every time she turned her head, stroke smoothly along her hands as she worked, trail her feet as she walked. She felt those glances like the touch of skin and she was stripped bare.
His eyes were off her when she saw Sophia again. His arms and hands took their place, holding her immovable while she screamed. He watched the wreckage of her little girl, and clasped the mother tight.
It felt right. They were words she would come to realize much later, after words started flowing again. Complete thoughts and sentences, fully fledged emotions that were burned out for a while, but they did return. And when they did, she realized that it had been right for him to be there. No one was looking at her, but the hands tightening on her skin knew her already. She had melted into his fingerprints. When his eyes turned down to her again, she had finally lain still under their gaze, weeping unashamed.
It was not vulnerability to be exposed to one who already knew her. She would not have chosen to let him in, yet he was already there, heated and sweat stained and weeping too. They lay wrapped up in each other in the dust and the grief was a maelstrom in her belly, caving her in and ripping her down but something stayed propped up. Hanging on by a sliver remained some fraction of life, a heartbeat so low it was practically in her belly. She was never to know how much of that was due to the arm pinning her shoulders not in violence but in safety.
Carol saw.
She saw Lori and Shane probably even before they did, and witnessed the blood and agony that came from it. Even stacked on top of each other like corpses, she knew the apocalypse was far lonelier than anyone had anticipated. Going to each other's bodies for comfort, like Glenn and Maggie did, made sense. But seeking someone out for anything else, like Glenn and Maggie did a little later on, was a different sort of death sentence. Love is the death that kills the lover and the loved and as she watched the tattered strings of her heart wave in the wind over Sophia's grave, she knew that it was the most dangerous thing in this world.
Those strings wove themselves back together faster than she would have thought. Maybe it was because she assumed she wouldn't be long for the world anyway. At any moment a grid of yellowed teeth would sink into her skin like a line of poisoned syringes and she would just fall asleep. But the months ticked by and she learned to shoot, aiming for the teeth, scattering them into impotence in a lumpy spray of red and yellow.
She didn't know she wanted to live when she and T-Dog got cut off from the others in the prison. She didn't know it when she heard him screaming, pulled apart. She didn't even know it when she sat choking in the dark after the tombs had gone silent. Carol didn't know she wanted to live until she was lying on the floor of the prison, her body stripped of energy, and heard the voices coming to look for her.
She had some time to think, while they screamed her name endlessly into the tunnels. He was here to pull her out of the dark, again, and this time she ached to be out. She wanted to stand up in the sun. She wanted – she wanted those small things, every one of them lining up in her mind like dominos as she lay still and thought so calmly and sleepily of water – Georgia-warm and stagnant in her mouth. She wanted Carl's short laugh and Maggie's slow smile and the way Lori put her hands on her back to balance her swollen body.
Carol smiled, cracking her dry lips. She blinked sticky eyes into the darkness and for a time it wasn't easy to know what was real.
A low thumping woke her. Everything in her vision was blurred and trembling and she couldn't identify the sound. Then she heard a low sobbing. There weren't enough people left alive to make recognition difficult, and the heat of his scent and scratch of his breathing were flooding her numbed senses.
Daryl.
So close. Her body twitched spasmodically. He was so close. In a flash, in a staggering second, Daryl became everything she had been reaching for. Sunlight and water and smiles and warmth. Daryl was not the only good thing in her very small world, but he had become the center of every good thing.
She tried to cry out, but she couldn't. Her fingers seemed to reach out of their own accord, reaching for the door she'd collapsed behind so many hours – or days – ago. She pushed, too groggy to move more than her fingers, but it made a noise. The same noise she'd been making for hours, but this time she heard him go silent in a listening response. She heard his feet scratch as he pulled himself, cat-like, to his feet and approached her door.
Hunter mode. She thought, with a delirious smile. Her hunter.
- 0 -
Daryl's eyes had always found the beautiful.
Growing up, there wasn't much of it. Poverty and neglect stained his world into neutral browns and greys, but his family would find him squatting in a diaper in the dirt, cooing over the unblemished gloss of a snowy flower. He would collect shiny and colorful bits – both nature and trash – and stash them in his mattress to gaze at before falling asleep. Baby Daryl lived with selective vision, his bright little eyes would skip over all the filth and misery to light on a flickering red of a cardinal, the distant dance of church bells.
His mother sighed over it, pushing back those stubborn bangs and gazing into his clear eyes. "That boy has x-ray vision," she'd say, before the drink sponged the words from her lips. "All he sees in this world is the good. It's gonna break him, one of these days."
It was Merle who taught him to bury it. In a rare act of gentleness the older boy helped patch up his brother's wounds one day soon after their mother burned herself alive. "These kids would hold back from you some if you'd just quit being such a homo," Merle explained, pouring water into the gashes in his little brother's face. "Come down to earth a little, brother. All this shiny shit ain't the real world."
He learned to smother himself. He grew silent and withdrawn, trudging in his brother's footsteps. He learned to fight back, swift and deadly. Hit them once, don't let them hit again. He learned to drink until he could deaden the part of himself that always jumped to defend the beautiful, learned to avert his eyes from the healthy girls Merle took to his room night after night from the bars.
Then he would wake early and slink away to hunt. In the woods, life was still beautiful. There was color and life and all that "Disney shit" his brother warned him about. Daryl would survive and he would adapt, but he was hangdog stubborn and his love of beauty he refuse to repress. But he would never speak of it, or reach out his hand to touch it anymore.
When the world fell, the rich folks lost their beauty. They lost all the pretty new things they draped around their lives, and they lost their long cultivated image of humans as inherently good. But Daryl was long used to the brutality born from the need to survive. His hunt for beauty never faltered in the face of the walking dead.
Then he and his brother stumbled into that little camp outside of Atlanta. Any other night they would've robbed it and run, but Daryl was choking on dehydration and Merle was nursing a gaping head wound. As the people fluttered about, Daryl stood swaying by the fire, listening to his brother bitch as the blonde lady pressed something to his bloody head. Some other folks were scrambling to pull the children into an old brown RV, or arguing in various corners. Daryl's breathing quieted someone as he ascertained that no one had even hardly noticed him in the darkness. He stood hunched and silent, his hunter's eyes shifting. Then he heard a little voice, quieter than birdsong at his elbow.
"Here," she said shortly, pushing a plastic cup into his hand.
He looked down at her cropped head and the familiarity of her dirt grey clothes, and didn't move.
She pushed the cup towards him again, glancing nervously towards an ugly rat of a man across the fire. That glance was as familiar to Daryl as the color of her clothes.
The woman pushed the cup at his hand again with a tired sigh. "Will you just drink it, asshole?" And her eyes flickered up to him, eyes almost buried in weariness and misery and pain. A soft, pinched expression wrinkled in the dirty skin of her face, but Daryl didn't see that. His eyes skimmed over the trembling hand and skinny arms, the dirt and bruises around her neck and collarbone, the cautious and fearful expression. He saw the eyes. Sharp and watchful and kind.
"Fine," he mumbled, taking the cup and slurping it down in one go.
She watched him drink and the corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. "I'll get you another," she said, and disappeared before he could protest.
Daryl grunted in a belated response and his eyes dropped to the fire again.
That night, wrapped in a filthy sleeping bag beside the embers of the dead fire, he took out that mental Polaroid of that woman's eyes and turned it over and over again in his mind.
Daryl Dixon had learned to hold his hand back from beautiful things. But nothing had ever stopped him from looking. His beauty-parched eyes drank in every little loveliness.
And now he had found his most beautiful thing.