Based on a dream I had sometime ago. I hate these long waits between seasons...
Even the yellow ribbons from the sun filling the empty cabin didn't make him move a muscle. He enjoyed the mornings, the warmness on his shoulders and sprinkles of dew running down his arms, the cries of wildlife, and a break from the madness out of the world's dry, crumbling hands.
It was a right damn miracle the World still spins, he reckoned.
All he ever wanted was silence, and now it was all that surrounded him. No one else left; just him and the annoying birds outside, and a hunger and ache so deep in his stomach, he forgot what was it like to be human.
In the moment his wide breath escaped, the cabin door creaked. He didn't look up to see if it was anything, or anyone, he recognized. The faces from his past were a blur and water-marked with a pain too awful to revisit.
"Am I too early?" A delicate voice brushed through his own heavy breathing. Time felt glued inside his hands. It stopped a long time ago.
"Daryl?"
One of his fingers slid free. He knew his own stupid name, but the person's voice lifted his eyes open after they had long closed through the morning.
"Mind if I sit with you?"
He grumbled a half-hearted, "Ain't claimed," before following the footsteps of his visitor to a rotten table; a visitor wearing red high heels, a long silky red dress with a split on its right side, and once he stared at its face, his chin quivered from some unspeakable emotion.
"Hey.." Carol's genuine smile met his gaze. She folded her hands and cocked her head to the side. "Did you think I wouldn't find you at the end of the world?"