Author's Note: Challenge response to the Caryl Bingo challenge at Nine Lives. The elements I chose to include were: 1. Drunk confessions 2. Carol teaches him 3. Daryl's bike 4. A picnic and 5. Constable Cockblock. Daryl and Carol get separated from the group on a mission and hide out in an abandoned apartment.
Spoilers: None. Set during 8-01 but written before it aired.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Apartment 316
"You're not going alone," Morgan declared.
The mission had gone smoothly to this point, but now here they were, waiting in a litter strewn alley for Dwight's promised intel to magically appear. So far, the group, which consisted of Morgan, Tara, Daryl and Carol, had seen nothing but broken bottles, a weathered pizza box and a scrawny cat who scent-marked Daryl's bike. They were leaning against their car engaged in idle chatter when Tara insisted she heard a noise from the next street over and wanted to investigate it.
The trio tried to convince her that it was likely nothing, and that they needed to be present when Dwight made the drop, but she was hell bent on finding the source of the clang. Morgan decided to accompany her for safety's sake. These were dark times, and no one should be out there alone.
With them gone, Daryl and Carol stood in a somewhat backward silence. They'd had no chance to catch up following her return to Alexandria.
"You sure we can trust Dwight?" Carol asked, more to break the stillness than anything else.
"No." He gazed furtively down the alley. "But what choice do we have?"
Another clanging noise rang out to the east of their position. Despite the lingering soreness in his right shoulder, Daryl quickly scaled a fire escape to peer over to the other side.
"Shit."
"Shit what?" Carol queried.
"Shit, we gotta get the hell outta here!" He was already halfway down and reached the ground in an instant.
"What is it?"
"Herd. I dunno, hundreds of 'em. They'll be around that corner in a few seconds."
"Where are Morgan and Tara? "
"I didn't see 'em. Holed up somewhere I hope."
Carol peered into the car window. "Morgan has the keys! Can you Hotwire it?"
"No time for that," he said as he straddled the bike. "Hop on!"
As the herd appeared in the alley and lurched toward them, the motorcycle's engine roared to life. Without further hesitation, she jumped on behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. Ditching the herd was easy enough as they roared off at high speed.
They made it only about a mile through the city before the rear tire became dangerously under inflated.
"Why are we stopping here?" Carol wondered.
"Flat tire."
"Got a spare ?"
"Check the trunk," Daryl muttered.
"Okay, that was a stupid question."
"Looks like apartments down the block there," he pointed ahead. "Can hang there until Tara and Morgan pass by."
She helped him stash the bike behind a dumpster and they headed down the street.
Carol followed a step behind, clearly lost in thought. Daryl glanced over his shoulder then eyed her curiously.
"S'on your mind?" Daryl asked.
"Just remembering the last time we escaped a herd on your bike."
"Different bike."
"True." They walked on. "Did I ever thank you for that?"
"No need to."
"You saved me."
He stopped short. "No. You…and Rick and Carl and Glenn and Maggie…you saved me."
He resumed his trek, and she quickly caught up to him.
"I was done," he lamented. "Weren't nothin' goin' right, then the herd coming to the farm and the fire and all…I thought the group was broken and there weren't no point to any of it. I got away and I just sat there on the bike and watched it burn. Then I heard you yellin' and I snapped out of it and went back. It was kinda like a new beginning."
"We've had a lot of new beginnings." Carol said wistfully.
"Think we get one more?"
"I hope so," she answered truthfully.
They paused at the front of the once upscale but now dilapidated apartment homes. Two sets of eyes scoured the area analyzing the pros and cons of various units. They settled on a third floor unit facing the Main Street. High enough for a good vantage point and difficult for walkers to ascend if they blocked the stairwell securely.
At the top of the stairs, Daryl hoisted Carol up to a window almost too small for even her lithe form. She slipped through and opened the front door for him.
"We're gonna need to leave some kind of sign for Morgan and Tara," Carol said. "So they don't just drive right by us."
Daryl considered her words, remembering Sasha's spray-painted "DIXON" on the door of an office building. It wouldn't do to leave anything that would tip the Saviors off as to their location. He started rummaging through the home.
"Find somethin' we can paint or write with."
Carol held up a box of children's finger paints.
They returned to the street and Daryl hastily scrawled a message.
JONES 3:16
"How's that?" He asked.
"To anyone not named Jones, it would look like misspelled proselytizing."
"Yep. Hopefully Morgan'll know what it means."
Satisfied, they locked themselves inside apartment 316.
"We could be here a while," Carol said as she peeked into the pantry. "You hungry?"
"I guess," Daryl mumbled, clearly uncomfortable again. He pulled all the blinds down before lighting the candles in the table.
"We're pretty safe here," she offered. "No walkers are getting in, and we haven't seen a Savior all day."
"Ain't safe nowhere!" He snapped back, a little more forcefully than he'd intended. "Ain't no such thing as safe anymore, just varyin' degrees of fucked."
"I feel safe when I'm with you."
"You know Denise thought that, too, right? And Glenn and Abe and Beth and Hershel…I was there for all of 'em. All died in front of me and I couldn't do a damn thing about it."
"Sometimes there's nothing anyone can do. I have better odds by your side than I do anywhere else."
"You were safest at your little house by the Kingdom. Shoulda stayed there."
"Well, I didn't. I came back to where I belong. To fight beside the people I love." She poked a finger in his chest in a way that managed to convey both firmness and affection. "Deal with it, Pookie."
Point made, she returned to her self-assigned task of meal preparation. There was really no heat source, no means of cooking anything, so she would have to be creative.
Daryl busied himself with ransacking the closets throughout the apartment. Some clothing in good shape. They would take those. A safe, which he quickly pushed aside. What good would cash or jewelry do anyone these days? A stack of board games. No, they had plenty at Alexandria. A few more candles. Excellent. Two unopened packages of AA batteries. That might be useful, if they were still any good. Carol called him back to the kitchen.
"It looks like we have all the makings of a good old-fashioned picnic here," she informed him. "Nothing fresh, but we do have sandwiches and fruit…and wine. Lots of wine."
"How the hell you make a sandwich without bread?"
"Crackers."
"Meat?"
"Spam."
"We're gonna need that wine," he groused.
"What we need is a blanket."
"For what?"
"For the floor. We're having a picnic. Keep up," she teased.
With a sigh of resignation, he disappeared for a moment and returned with a red and white checkered tablecloth.
"This is better," he said as he moved the coffee table and spread the cloth on the floor. "More picnicky."
"That's the spirit."
Carol was pleasantly surprised when Daryl removed the candles from the table and arranged them, along with the newly discovered ones, around the picnic area. She rewarded him with a warm smile.
"Here are the sandwiches," she laid a plate in the center, "and the fruit."
"That canned?"
"Would you eat fruit that's been here for three years that wasn't?"
"Good point." He picked up a peach quarter and placed in his mouth. "Not bad. Ima try one of these sandwiches."
Soon he was reaching for another bite. "Only you could make Spam on a cracker tasty."
She popped the cork on the wine bottle. "Something from the cabinet above leaked all over the glasses," she said. "There's no way to clean them."
"Don't need none." He put the bottle to his lips, took a long swig, and offered it to his companion. She followed his lead.
"Find anything good in your exploration of the place?"
As they ate, he relayed his findings to her, even admitting to being a little curious as to the contents of the safe. It was the board games, however, that caught her attention.
"What games?"
"Checkers, Aggravation, Monopoly….stuff like that."
Carol's gaze focused on his features, softened in the candlelit glow. Until very recently, Daryl had always looked much younger than he actually was, despite smoking and a lifetime of exposure to the elements. He seemed to have aged fifteen years in the two weeks she'd been away. Whether it was fatigue, injury, stress or all of the above, it was clear that life had come at him hard recently. He was relaxing a bit now, enjoying a brief respite in the form of a picnic by candlelight, and the years just dropped away. Still, though, his aura showed that he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Daryl could object all he wanted, but they were safe for the moment. She determined not to pass up the opportunity to lighten his load. No one could predict what the next days or weeks would bring, but here and now they were together. They simply had to make the most of it.
The first bottle of wine was empty, so Carol retrieved a second and gave it to Daryl to open. She was just beginning to feel tipsy and she wasn't ready to let it go.
"Where are the games?"
"Master bedroom," he gestured to his left. "How long You expectin' to be here?"
"I figure we'll give them until morning. If they're not here by then, we'll find a car and head home. Fair enough?"
"I guess."
"How about Life?" She called out from the bedroom.
"Naw," he waved dismissively. "I had enough of life lately."
"Monopoly it is, then."
"I ain't never played that."
"No problem," she said confidently as she placed the game on the picnic area and moved the empty plate aside. "I'll teach you."
Daryl eyes her curiously as she set up the game and gave him a rudimentary rundown of the rules. The level of liquid in the wine bottle became lower and lower.
"…but if you roll doubles three consecutive times, you go to jail," Carol continued.
"Yeah, yeah, got it. Roll the dice. Let's get on with this," Daryl interjected.
"First you have to pick a token. What'll it be?"
"Hmm…" he considered thoughtfully, "I'll take the boot. There's lotsa people that need their asses kicked."
"Ok," she responded, "should I be the iron? I did come here to iron out a few problems. Or maybe the car, because I won't hesitate to run down anyone who hurts my family."
"You best get that hat, cause you gonna need magic to pull off all that shit."
"Maybe I just need the thimble, to help us sew up old wounds. " She picked up the race car.
"I'll stick with the boot, since there ain't no rocket launcher. Sure as hell ain't gonna be the dog. We've both been kicked around enough already."
He took another long swig of the wine and settled himself into a comfortable position on the floor with crossed legs outstretched beside the game board and his back against the sofa.
The game progressed with Daryl having a fair bit of beginner's luck, amassing a large amount of property while Carol frequently landed on non-property spaces.
"Second place in a beauty contest. Fifteen bucks", she said wryly as she placed the card back down.
Like every other time she'd thought she had Daryl completely figured out, he surprised with something that floored her with its genuine sweetness.
"Winner musta been sleepin' with the judge," he said casually. "Only way you're comin' in second."
One more time around the board and Carol was desperately low on cash. She breathed a sigh of relief when she landed on Kentucky, which she owned.
"I'll just take the penthouse suite," she joked.
"Why you wanna stay in that dump when you could be in Hotel Dixon here on Park Place? That flop house there gets crappy reviews. Bedbugs, thin walls, bran flakes for breakfast…over we got a heated pool and Froot Loops—the real deal, not that generic crap." He peered into the empty bottle. "How many more of these we got?"
"One more." She stood. "I'll get it."
Daryl rolled the dice and moved eight spaces to Community Chest as Carol went for the wine. His voice followed her through the small apartment.
"Assessed for street repairs?! Son of a bitch—wouldn't it be cheaper to pay off my congressman or somethin'? Maybe I should just burn the motherfuckers to the ground for the insurance money."
Carol laughed aloud. She sat back down, opened the bottle and took a drink before passing it to him. A roll of dice put her car on Marvin Gardens and she dutifully placed the rent money in Daryl's outstretched hand. Doubles. Roll again. Oh crap…Park Place.
"Looks like you're in over your head," he observed playfully.
She counted her money and calculated the mortgage value of her properties.
"I'll settle for all your cash and them three railroads," he offered.
Perhaps it was the wine talking, or maybe the ambience, or maybe the company, Carol couldn't be certain, but suddenly the time felt right. She felt emboldened to lower her voice and say suggestively, "Maybe I could trade services for it."
"Hey, what kinda business you think I'm runnin' here, lady?" Daryl replied with mock indignation. "We don't rent rooms by the hour."
Oh, the wine was definitely at work. Oh well, she figured, in vino, veritas. "I'm good with all night."
Daryl leaned closer to her and dropped his own voice a few octaves, making it even huskies than usual. "One of these times," he told her, "I'm gonna call your bluff. Whatcha gonna do then?"
She moved in closer as well, until their mouths were mere inches apart. "I'm gonna have the best night of my life. 'Cause Sunshine, I ain't bluffin'."
Daryl abruptly dropped the playfulness and became very serious. "You know your my favorite person in the world, right? The one I'd choose to go the end with."
She nodded slightly as she blinked back the tears. This was the emotional release that they needed, and all it had taken was three bottles of wine.
He captured her mouth with his own, easing her back until she was lying on her back, his body completely covering hers as he kissed her.
The sudden pounding at the front door may as well have been a bomb. Daryl jumped up for his weapon as Carol went and peeked through the peephole.
"Who is it?" Daryl asked with his finger on the trigger.
Carol sighed, recognizing the face on the other side. "Constable Cockblock," she muttered.
Daryl briefly looked at her quizzically, then broke into a grin. "What was that?"
"You heard me," she suppressed a snicker as she opened that door.
"Yeah, I did," he chortled.
"What's so funny?" Rick asked as he entered.
"Nothing," Carol shrugged. "Where's Morgan and Tara?"
"They got back about an hour ago. We've been looking for you two, saw your message. You guys all right?"
"We were better thirty seconds ago," she mumbled, nearly inaudibly.
Rick's expression was one of confusion as he turned to Daryl.
"I'd give you some wine, but, uh…" Daryl looked at the nearly empty third bottle.
"I can see that," Rick laughed, catching on. "Glad you guys found a way to relax."
"We'll be doing some more relaxing when we get home," Carol informed him.
Home. All of the sudden she really liked that way that sounded.
END