AN: This is just light and fun and for entertainment value.
I own nothing from the Walking Dead.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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"No...but you can't go...you can't..." the redhead protested, pulling at the blonde's shirt like she might actually pull it off of her body before long. In a moment, the blonde squirmed loose from her friend's grasp and rearranged her clothes. Daryl had already learned, from two people back, that the blonde was named Andrea. He'd learned that not because he had any particular interest in the woman, but rather because the redhead had said her name at least a dozen times since they'd been ushered into the roped off area like cattle.
"Carol, I'll be right back!" Andrea protested. Now Daryl knew who the redhead was. "Just—hold our spots and I'll be right back!"
"Michonne will be fine! She can go through it alone!" Carol protested. Andrea laughed at her friend and bumped into the man that was in front of Daryl—which sent him backing up to step on Daryl's shoes as if the woman had been made of acid.
"Michonne will be terrified," Andrea said. "She barely survived the hayride. Carol—just hold our spots. I'll be right back."
Both of them were terrified and it was clear. They'd wrapped around each other, huddled in the back of the hayride, like they were protecting each other from bombs instead of from the slight shock of seeing someone wearing a mask come streaking out from the woods. During the long process of finding a spot in line, they'd been clinging to each other and shrieking when one of the people wielding bladeless chain saws dipped in near them. The blonde, at one point, had actually threatened one of the people dressed as an axe murderer with a kick to the crotch if he took another step toward her.
But they were troopers, and they were determined to do this, even if it was clear that they were terrified.
"Two minutes...five at most," Andrea said. "I'll be right back. You'll be fine."
Andrea sidestepped again, escaping Carol's grab for her clothing and disturbed the man in front of Daryl to such a great degree that he proved himself not to be much of a man in Daryl's opinion. He shoved the blonde for her transgression hard enough that she hit the guard rope and, finding that it didn't have enough strength to stop her or enough flex to bring her back to her feet, she slid down until she was on her ass on the hard clay ground.
"Man! What the fuck?" Daryl spat at the man in front of him. "Damn woman bumps into your ass and you..."
Daryl stopped himself before he said anymore or did anything else. His instinct was to return "kindness" for "kindness" and lay out the asshole. Instead he stepped around him and offered a hand to the blonde that seemed more stunned than genuinely hurt. She accepted his hand and thanked him for helping her to her feet.
"You alright?" Daryl asked, ignoring entirely that the man who was once in front of him was now behind him and protesting that he'd "cut" the line.
"Thanks," Andrea said, gaining her feet and wiping at herself. "I'm fine."
Daryl started to apologize for the actions of the apparent asshole now located behind him—the man who was going to lose a finger soon if he didn't stop using it to poke Daryl between the shoulder blades in protest of now being one person back in line—but Andrea didn't allow him the chance to do that. She slipped under the rope, where she clearly wasn't allowed, and loudly called to Carol that she'd be right back. And then she darted off, threatening as she went another of the people that jumped out to simultaneously scare her and protest that she should be in line and not running loose in the "scene" area.
Finally tiring of the poking behind him, Daryl turned around to face the man that was doing it.
"Give it a break," he warned. "You lost your damn place 'cause you're an asshole. Be careful you don't lose more. I don't work here."
The man backed up and bumped into the person behind him, but Daryl noticed that man didn't do any shoving. Evidently he'd passed Lining Up 101 in kindergarten.
Daryl smiled, satisfied, and turned back to look in front of him. Carol was standing there, looking around him, trying to find Andrea in the darkness.
"Daryl," he offered, quietly accepting her name in exchange. He didn't hold her lack of polite greeting against her. She was clearly preoccupied. "They ain't gonna let her back in here," Daryl said, somewhat mournfully. "Once they catch her, she's going to the back of the line."
Carol looked at him, big eyed, in the dim light of the floodlights that were keeping the area from being pitch black. Her eyes looked almost wet and Daryl wondered if she'd actually been crying through the whole ordeal. He didn't have to ask if she was, though, because it was clear as soon as another round of "visitors" came to try and rile them up in line. Carol screamed out, her voice already going hoarse for the overuse, and Daryl heard the tears behind it. Instinctively, he put a hand on her shoulder to calm her and shooed away the "goblin" to go somewhere else.
"Hey," he said. "Hey—it's OK. They just people in costumes."
Suddenly Daryl felt his face burn hot because he realized the woman in front of him, every bit as grown as he was, was fully aware that they were people in costumes. They were still getting the best of her, though, rationality gone out the window.
"I know that!" She protested loudly. "I hate it!"
Fearing she might break down at the knowledge that the blonde absolutely was not going to come darting back out of the darkness to protect her and scream with her, Daryl squeezed the shoulder he had his hand resting on.
"If you hate it so much, why are you here?" He asked.
"Because we all hate it," Carol said. "Because it was Michonne's idea. Start conquering our fears. Start—working on facing what scares us. We do it with all the big things, the little things should be easy. But I hate this—I hate it so much!"
Daryl looked around him. He waved at one of the men carrying a chainsaw and waved him over. The man misunderstood his need for assistance as an act of enthusiasm and ran at them, revving the motor on the chain saw and swinging it for added effect. Carol nearly died on the spot and Daryl wrapped his arm around her this time for protection, all the while yelling at the man to stop.
When he finally did stop revving the engine, Daryl yelled at him to cut the machine off for a moment, this was an emergency. Trained for such a thing, the man did what he was asked and lifted the mask to reveal that he wasn't an axe murder. He was a pimply college kid who was trying to earn a few extra bucks and raise some adrenaline.
"She's scared, gotta get outta here," Daryl said.
"Lines about to start moving," the teenager said. "Nothing going down the hill for another half hour."
"Gotta get her out," Daryl repeated.
"No!" Carol protested. "No! No...I have to do this! I have to—go through this. If I can do everything else? I can do this. I have to do this. I just—don't like them—jumping and touching."
The kid looked at Carol and then back at Daryl. Whatever it was that had brought Carol out here to do this, despite the fact that she hated being lunged at by people who were being paid to lunge at her, it was important to her. Daryl sighed and waved the teenager away, thanking him for his time even as he put his mask back in place and walked off to crank the chainsaw again.
"You sure you wanna do this?" Daryl asked Carol.
"I have to," she repeated.
Daryl sighed.
"Then stick close to me," he said. "If you need—hell—whatever it is you need? Just—lemme know."
Carol looked at him, big eyed again, but a little differently than before. She smiled and Daryl felt his stomach flutter when she thanked him. He felt his face burn hot.
"It ain't nothin' but a thing," he said, protesting her thanks, but still he felt somewhat proud that she would think that something as simple as offering to "protect" her from people that weren't really going to hurt her was such a big thing.
When the line did start to move, Daryl rested his hands on Carol's shoulders. He'd never taken that kind of liberty with a woman—not outside of helping a drunk one get somewhere or getting someone up that had fallen down—but he noticed that Carol didn't protest it at all.
They started inside, the first dark twists and turns, and Carol seemed to be doing fine. The first three or four ghouls and ghosts that jumped at her did nothing to unravel her. She was doing fine and Daryl kept his hands on her shoulders. The next room in and they were in the middle of a skeleton rock concert where he could hear nothing more than earsplitting noise and screams. The flashing strobe lights in the darkness blinded him and he ran head on into someone who had dropped down from somewhere to scare the crowd from above. He yelled an apology to the injured skeleton but kept his hands firmly on Carol's shoulders.
She did fine through the next room, and even the next. But when they reached a room that was lined with coffins, every now and again one of them popping up to scare someone like a jack in the box, Carol came undone when she saw one of the "undead" grabbing at someone ahead of her in line.
Without warning and like a flash, she turned her whole body and curled into herself as she simultaneously curled into Daryl. Without thinking, Daryl wrapped his arms around her and then navigated slowly down the walkway with her. He took one of his arms from around her body, her face buried in his chest, and he used the hand he had to clear something of a path for them, banging on the coffin lids like he was playing an oversized game of whack a mole.
Carol relaxed some as they moved, realizing she was coming to no real harm and really didn't even have to see anything with her face in his chest and him guiding her. She relaxed enough to wrap her arms around him a hug and Daryl stopped his steps for a moment in surprise.
It was warm and nice and he realized, suddenly, that maybe he was enjoying it a little more than he should when his job here was just to get the redhead through the maze so that she could say that, with a little help from a new friend, she'd conquered a fear. His heart was pounding in his chest from the proximity of her, but the only outward response he gave was to tighten his hold on her and to continue pushing her carefully through the maze while he waved away anyone that threatened to come near them and pushed at them if they didn't see his first polite request that they make no more attempts to terrify the already thoroughly scared woman.
They finished the whole thing like that and Daryl realized that he'd gotten nothing, really, of the haunted house experience—not as it was supposed to be—but he'd gotten something entirely different from it. As the cool air of the night hit his face when they emerged from the other side, Daryl was reluctant to let Carol go. She pulled gently away from him, when he'd led her to an open spot to breathe and wait for the hayride back, and she blinked at him and looked around.
"We're out?" She asked.
"We're out," Daryl confirmed. "And you made it. Done good."
"I didn't do anything," Carol said. "You did the whole thing. I wouldn't have gotten through it if you hadn't—without you..."
She seemed a little flustered and Daryl couldn't imagine it was for the same reasons that he felt flustered. Likely she was only disappointed that she'd needed to lean on him to get through the maze of artificial horror.
"Hey—no shame in taking help when it's offered," Daryl said, even if he rarely took his own advice.
Carol smiled at him.
"Thank you," she said softly.
Daryl swallowed. Suddenly the idea of saying goodbye to her sucked the breath out of him. Suddenly it seemed like the scariest thing that might come out of this night. He shook his head at her.
"Nothing but a thing," he said. "Any time," he added, his stomach flipping at the fact that his mouth had been so bold.
Carol smiled softly again.
"You were scared too," she said.
Daryl was a little surprised. He hadn't been scared at all. He hadn't had time to be scared or the presence of mind to be scared. He'd been too busy worrying about her fear level.
"What?" He asked.
"You were scared too," Carol insisted. "I know."
Daryl scoffed at her, dismissing the comment with a puff of air, but then he figured that maybe fear worked like drunkenness. Drunk people always needed to believe that everyone around them was drunk. Maybe afraid people were the same.
"Whatever," Daryl said.
"You were," Carol insisted. "I could hear your heart pounding."
Daryl felt shocked then. His heart was pounding, even still, but it had nothing to do with fear—at least not fear of ghouls and goblins and the undead. Those weren't the kinds of things he feared. Truth be told, the woman in front of him could unnerve him a thousand times more than any flesh eating creature from a nightmarish imagination.
"It's OK," Carol said quickly and sharply, shaking her head. She'd taken his shock as being related to her figuring out that he was afraid. "It's OK. I think it was—brave. You helped me, even though you were scared."
Daryl laughed ironically to himself, his face growing warm again despite the chill of the night.
"Nothing but a thing," he repeated, but this time he wasn't even sure if he said it loudly enough for her to hear him. He cleared his throat. "Your friends probably didn't make it this round. Probably—coming through the next one. Hayride will be here soon. Best place to meet them is at the drop point at the bottom of the hill."
Carol looked concerned.
"You think that's best?" Carol asked, looking around. Everyone who'd gone through was hanging about, waiting to be taken back down, and the blonde was nowhere to be seen. Daryl nodded at her and she screwed up her face in dislike of the situation.
"Of course," Daryl offered quickly, "you can ride down with me on the ride—after all, gets damn chilly on the back of that thing."
Carol looked at him, nodded her head, and then a smile that hadn't been on her face before crawled across it. She smirked at him.
"I'd like that," she said. "But—I think you'd like it too. Not because you're cold—but...because you don't like it either."
Daryl smiled at her, chuckled ironically again, and then shook his head.
"Whatever," he repeated from before. "Let's go get in line. Get toward the back of the trailer."
He reached a hand up and put it on her shoulder, guiding her in the direction that he wanted to go. She walked as naturally along with him as if that's where she'd always been. While they walked, she put her hand over her chest.
"It really gets your heart pounding," she mused. "The fear—mine feels like it's about to explode."
Daryl hummed at her and kept walking with her, bypassing the groups of people who were stopping to chat.
"Yeah, fear gets it going," he agreed. "Or somethin' else," he added quietly, sure she hadn't heard it in the din around them. He helped her up onto the trailer and followed her to the back to share a hay bale—and hopefully in the time it took them to get down the hill, he'd figure out how to ask for her number. Even if the thought of it, naturally, made his heart race more than anything else had at Haunted Acres.