AN: This is just a little AU one shot that was inspired by the prompt from therealsonia. She wanted "spring cleaning."
I own nothing from the Walking Dead.
I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Two large hefty bags stuffed nearly to bursting sat against the wall near the front door. Another was halfway full in the extra bedroom. Three cardboard boxes were stacked up on the other side of the front door and Carol had labelled them all with a black marker so that the people taking donations could have some rough idea of what was in each box. Trash and donations out of the way, there were another six boxes that Carol was filling with items that they could sell in a yard sale. The homeless and those in need might have very little need for the items, but the neighbors would almost assuredly take them off their hands for a quarter or two.
And once the boxes and bags were cleared out, Carol was pretty sure she was going to be able to breathe a little better in the small house. For now, though, she'd have to work around them until Daryl got home.
As soon as Carol was confident that the bulk of the de-cluttering was done, she readied herself to clean the house. She filled a bucket with soapy water and, in the cleaning style of her grandmother, she went around wiping everything down that could possibly catch dust. In between every few items, when the rag dried out, she wet it again and wrung out the excess water to start again. Slowly and methodically, she made her way around the house. She wiped down the baseboards and the windowsills. She wiped down the doorframes and the crevices in the door that caught dust she tried not to notice the rest of the year. She wiped off the knick knacks that she hadn't been ready to part with and every piece of furniture those items called home. Every now and again she picked up some object or another that she'd missed in her earlier cleaning and she moved it to the appropriate pile near the door.
Some people hated spring cleaning, but Carol loved it. She looked forward to when she could make time for it from the first moment that she started to feel spring coming.
She had always felt different when spring was coming. There was a different quality to the air. The sun seemed to shine brighter. The rain, when it fell, seemed to feel cleaner. The animals all came out of their winter hiding and everyone she encountered just seemed a little happier. To Carol, the spring made her feel lighter. It made her feel full of hope and expectation.
And spring cleaning made her home feel just as fresh and new as the world outside.
Six years.
Carol and Daryl had been married six years now. They'd moved into their little home almost immediately after their honeymoon. Between them they'd brought little more than two or three boxes and bags each and some hope for their future. Over the course of those six years, they had acquired more possessions than would seem possible on their fairly minimal incomes. Normally Carol would say that they were good with money, but cleaning out the excess junk was making her re-think that entirely. Granted, most of their purchases were made at budget prices, and they picked up a good number of their larger items second-hand, but they could have saved a great deal more money through the years by simply not buying half of what they'd bought.
For six years, it had been accumulating. It had been building up. Stuff—and that's what most of their possessions boiled down to—had been slowly piling up everywhere. And the worst part of it was that they'd been oblivious to it. They'd been ignoring it as it filled the closets until it trickled out of them and then got moved to the extra bedroom. They'd overlooked it when it had crowded the extra bedroom and been moved to the attic. They'd been blissfully unaware of it all when they'd purchased—at a discount price thanks to connections they had with a friend of Daryl's—the small storage barn for the backyard.
Even spring cleaning had failed, for six years running, to purge the house of all the unnecessary stuff that they'd acquired.
It might have gone on, too, until their lives had been completely overrun with useless junk that they simply had to have and had since forgotten about, if Carol hadn't opened the closet in the extra room that morning, gotten attacked by an avalanche of stuff that had shifted on the top shelf, and decided that enough was enough.
The work wasn't done, and there would be much more that would make its way out of the house now that she'd begun the purge, but Carol was already feeling better. The house was feeling less cluttered, and Carol was feeling lighter. Now there was so much more space than she remembered. Their tiny house, as it turned out, didn't feel so tiny at all anymore.
The feeling, as Carol went along, was even better than a normal spring cleaning. It was almost intoxicating. Carol found herself humming happily as she worked, giving the house the most thorough top-to-bottom cleaning that she possibly could, and she wasn't the least bit ashamed of the fact that she could say that today she felt the best that she'd felt in a very long time.
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When Daryl pulled his truck up in the yard and killed the engine, he sat and stared at his front door longer than he normally felt the need to do. On the porch, crowding the door a great deal, was a massive pile of stuff. Bags and boxes were spilling over everywhere.
As the rational man that he prided himself on being, Daryl got out of the truck, lit the cigarette he'd customarily smoke before he went in the house after work, and walked over to the porch to study the stuff from a short distance. It was Carol's day off and it was obvious that she'd chosen to spend it cramming all these bags and boxes full of their belongings. Daryl scanned his memory and tried to recall if there was anything that he'd done, sometime within the past few days, which might have pushed Carol to think that he needed to take half the shit they owned and go with it.
From the looks of it, though, she was trying to give him more than half.
He'd missed the first garbage day of the week and they'd had an extra bag of garbage hanging around the house for two days, but that wasn't worthy of ending their marriage—if it were, Carol would have packed his shit up years ago. The knob on the counter-top toaster oven had stopped working quite like it was supposed to and, upon trying to fix it, Daryl had been forced to call time of death on the appliance. But Carol wouldn't have packed up his possessions for that—he'd broken his fair share of things before and she wasn't even all that attached to the toaster oven.
When his cigarette was done and disposed of properly, so as not to add insult to injury if Carol was unhappy about something, Daryl mounted the porch steps and poked through one of the boxes. He hardly recognized the stuff that was in the box, but he could vaguely remember that it was his.
But Carol hadn't seemed at all pissed off that morning when he'd left—so something had happened in the meantime.
He screwed up his courage and stepped inside, trying to figure out if his best approach was to pretend he hadn't seen the stuff on the porch at all or to try to smooth things over right off the bat. He found Carol, in their bedroom, humming to herself while she put clean sheets on their bed. She looked up and smiled at him when he tapped on the doorframe with his knuckles.
He was even more confused now.
"Good day?" He asked.
Carol nodded.
"You?" She asked.
As he would normally do, Daryl came into the room and started to empty his pockets—loose change, a pocket knife, and everything he'd acquired during the day—onto the dresser.
"Not too bad," he mused while he piled up everything he'd scrape off the dresser and return to his pockets the following morning. "Busy all day. Hardly stopped since I started."
"Me too," Carol agreed. "I was hoping—you wouldn't mind if we got dinner? I didn't really have time to cook and I hated to mess up the kitchen as soon as it was clean."
Daryl hummed at her. Testing the waters was proving that everything was fine. Everything was normal. But it didn't explain why so much of his shit was piled up on the porch like it was a "welcome basket" and a "get the fuck out basket" all at the same time.
Daryl cleared his throat.
"We can get dinner," Daryl said. "Ain't no problem. You—wanted to go out or...stay in?" Pockets empty, Daryl wiped his hands on his pants for all the good it would do if there was anything from work still on there and he moved to help Carol finish making the bed. She shrugged at him about the dinner question to say that it didn't matter to her. It never mattered to her. She'd been deferring choices about food to him since the very first date they'd ever been on and, contrary to what other men said about their wives, she'd never complained whether he'd taken her somewhere nice or simply chosen a burger. "You been busy," Daryl said. He didn't dare to ask what she'd been doing. He'd learned his lesson about that. That, he knew, was one question that could get a rise out of Carol quicker than anything else. If she said she'd been busy, she'd been busy. It wasn't her fault that Daryl wasn't so great at figuring out what she might have been doing. "But you—had a good day, though?"
A smile spread across Carol's face that almost went from ear to ear. He didn't need a verbal response to the question. The expression said it all.
"A wonderful day," Carol said. "I cleaned everything. You could do the white glove test in this house and I promise you that you won't find a speck of dust anywhere."
Daryl laughed to himself about her enthusiasm. He liked a clean house, it was true, but it didn't matter nearly as much to him as it did to Carol. To Daryl, a clean house mostly meant that he could find most everything he needed. To Carol, there was a sense of accomplishment there.
But it still didn't make things any clearer for him.
"Gotta ask you something," Daryl said. He got a hum from his wife—a declaration that he should proceed even if it was with some caution. "Why—uh—why you got all my shit on the porch?" Carol looked at him, putting the decorative pillows into place that they'd just pull back off the bed in a few hours, and furrowed her brow. "My shit," Daryl said. "It's all on the porch. I do something that I don't remember?"
She opened her mouth in a silent "Oh." Her eyes went wide like she'd just remembered something, but then the expression faded off her features entirely.
"I cleaned," Carol said.
"I...see that," Daryl said. "But—you clean every week and I don't come home to everything in the yard."
"It was spring cleaning," Carol said. "I washed the baseboards. I don't wash the baseboards and the...and the ceiling fans...every week."
"And my stuff was in the way?" Daryl asked.
The bed between them was like their own personal conference table at the moment. They looked at each other over it and it was clear that neither of them felt they were being understood.
"I cleaned out the closets," Carol said. "I cleaned out the extra bedroom. That stuff? It's our stuff. But it's our stuff that we haven't even touched in years. Donations for charity. Garbage for the stuff that just isn't good anymore. Yard sale stuff that I thought we could put in the barn for right now and sell next weekend."
Daryl understood now. She wasn't getting rid of him, she was just getting rid of over half of the items that they had in the house—half of what they'd accumulated since they got married. She was cleaning up all day, but she was also cleaning out.
"So I go to work all day and you decide what of my shit I'm willing to part with in my absence?" Daryl asked. "I just don't get no say in the matter?"
"Daryl, you didn't even know we had most of that," Carol said. "I didn't even know we did. I promise you that there's nothing in any of that stuff that you're going to miss."
"Point is," Daryl said, "that I didn't get no say in it."
It irritated him, and he could see that Carol was dealing with her own irritation at the moment. Secure in the fact that he wasn't going out with the boxes and bags, though, Daryl didn't mind if she got her feathers ruffled a little. That was what made the world go around, in his opinion, and it was certainly nothing that either of them were strangers to.
"You're a pack rat, Daryl," Carol said. "Look at the dresser! Every day you come in here you bring something with you. Every time you go anywhere, you come home dragging something else that's got to go somewhere. Some project that never gets done. Some thing that gets shoved into a closet and never seen again unless I'm stubbing my toe on it or it's falling on my head from a shelf. The house was filling up! We were going to drown in stuff, Daryl, and I did something about it!"
"By getting rid of my stuff," Daryl pointed out.
"My stuff is in there too!" Carol protested.
Daryl laughed quietly to himself.
"But not nearly as much as mine," he said.
"It just so happens that when I get things," Carol said, "they're things for both of us. They're things for—our home! When you bring in things? They're—things you don't even need."
Daryl pointed at her.
"Most of what I bring in here I don't even pay for, you know that," Daryl said. "You spend more of the money around here than I do. My stuff don't hardly cost us nothing."
"So we keep it just because it was free?" Carol asked. "We never use it and we never look at it—and you don't even remember that it was there and we keep it because it was free? Daryl—when I cleaned out that extra bedroom, there were ten broken radios. Ten. And none of them worked."
"I was gonna strip 'em for parts," Daryl said. "Put all the good parts together and we'd have had a pretty nice stereo."
"And they've been collecting dust for two or three years," Carol said. "Still not working, either, I might add. That bedroom was nothing but junk. We don't even have a bed in there, but we had ten radios that didn't work."
"Point is, I was gone to work and you decided what I was willing to part with," Daryl said.
Carol growled at him and Daryl got the immediate gut feeling that he was fighting a fight that he really didn't care that much about. He realized that it wasn't really that important to him—and she was right and he probably never was going to do anything with those radios—but he wasn't sure how to get out of it now. He wasn't sure if, now, it was simply a matter of pride to keep fighting the stupid fight.
"Fine!" Carol said. "Fine! If it means that much to you? Then you go out there and you go through the boxes. And you get—whatever you can't live without back out of them and move it back inside and clutter the house back up for me to pack it up again when you haven't touched it in a year and it's still in the same damn pile in the corner of the room."
Carol walked around the bed, made a wide circle around Daryl like she wanted to keep as much distance between them as possible, and then walked heavily through the house. Daryl waited in the bedroom until he heard the door of the extra bedroom—far on the other side of the house—slam shut. Finally, he left the bedroom and went out on the porch to nose through the boxes and bags.
Five minutes into his search and Daryl realized that he had fallen into the fight without meaning it at all. Carol was right. Having already dug through a couple of boxes, Daryl didn't see a thing that he couldn't do without. In fact, he didn't see anything that he could even remember having actually ever wanted in the first place.
At the moment, all that he really wanted was to rewind the clock. He wanted to go back in, empty his pockets, help Carol make up the bed, and then decide what they were having for dinner. He wanted to go back in and see her smile over the cleanliness of the house—and he wanted the kiss she would've offered him as soon as the pillows were piled ridiculously high on the bed that had just been made up with clean sheets.
He wanted to know that they had a chance of messing those clean sheets up later, instead of sleeping in the bed like the continental divide ran right down the middle of it.
Daryl smoked another cigarette while he sat on the porch steps and then he got up and gathered up the black bags that were headed for the dump. It would be open in the morning and he could drop those off on his way to work. He put them in the back of his truck before he returned for the donation boxes—all labelled with their approximate contents and marked "Donate"—and he put those in the back of the truck behind the black bags. Once that was done, he gathered up the final boxes, one at a time, and carried them around to the barn. Inside, he flicked on the light and looked around. If he was honest, ninety percent of the accumulated stuff out there was just as unnecessary as everything else that had been loaded up already. Carol hadn't made it out there, and she probably hadn't cleaned the attic, but there was plenty more that they could clear out if that's what they were doing.
When the porch was free of its clutter and everything was sorted to be done away with, Daryl went back inside. Carol was still missing from the main part of the house, still closed into the extra bedroom, so Daryl picked the phone up off the base and carried it with him. He tapped at the door to the bedroom and leaned his head against it to wait for any sort of response from within.
"What do you want?" Was the response that came.
"Can I come in?" Daryl asked. There was no answer. "I—loaded everything up. I can run them donations by on my lunch break. Take the garbage to the dump in the morning." There was still no response. If he wasn't as reasonable as he was, and he didn't know Carol as well as he did, Daryl might imagine she'd gone out the window. "I'm sorry," Daryl offered. "You was right—there weren't nothing out there I needed. Hell—weren't nothing that I wanted. I'm sorry. You gonna open the door?"
The door opened a moment later and Carol stood there, blocking the entrance into the room.
"The door was unlocked," Carol said. "I never locked it."
"I weren't gonna try the lock," Daryl said. "Closed door said just about what it needed to say. You didn't want me coming in."
Carol frowned at him.
"I'm sorry I packed things up without asking you," Carol said. "I was cleaning and—it felt so cluttered. I knew things needed to go and—you were at work. And if I didn't do it today then..."
"It don't matter," Daryl said. He held up the phone. "You want pizza?"
Carol nodded, still looking no less morose than before.
"Pepperoni?" Daryl asked.
"That's fine," Carol said.
"You want something else..." Daryl offered.
"Pepperoni's fine," Carol said, cutting him off.
He looked around her into the extra bedroom that had been an oversized storage closet since they'd moved in. She'd very nearly cleaned it out entirely except for a dresser they'd bought for the room a long time ago, a small table that Daryl had refinished after they'd found it at a garage sale that had a picture frame and a small jewelry box sitting on it, and an empty bookshelf. Maybe he'd been responsible for a good deal of the mess in there after all.
"House looks good," Daryl offered, not changing his position any more than Carol. "Room looks good. Don't think—I've seen it that empty in a long time." Carol hummed at him, still sulking, and Daryl laughed quietly to himself. He moved his hand and touched her cheek, brushing his fingers there. When she didn't pull away from him or dart off in any direction, he slipped his hand under her chin and lifted her face to look at him. She made eye contact with him, but her lingering frustration was evident in her eyes. He smiled at her, hoping he might be able to tease her out of the mood that he'd caused. "Guess this means we'll just have to work double time to fill it back up again."
She furrowed her eyebrows at him.
"That was kind of the point," she said.
"Filling it back up again?" Daryl asked, raising his own eyebrows at her in amusement. She nodded her head and he laughed to himself. It didn't make any sense to him—cleaning out a room to fill it back up again—but he knew better than to say that. Not right now. "My stuff or your stuff?" Daryl asked.
"Neither," Carol said.
"We got guests coming that I don't know about?" Daryl asked.
She left the doorway then and crossed the bedroom. From the small table, she took the picture frame and looked at it for a moment before she walked back and offered it to Daryl.
Daryl looked at the picture frame. Inside of it, rather than being a picture of anything, was simply a notecard that was framed. Written on the card, in black marker and in Carol's curly handwriting, just the same as the boxes, was a message. Clearly, it was a message for Daryl.
"Mommy's making room for me.
Now the house is ready too.
We'll be extra thankful this November.
See you soon, Daddy!"
"It was supposed to be a surprise," Carol said.
Daryl stared at the frame in his hand. He realized his hands were shaking and it was beyond his control.
Six years.
For six years they'd been hoping for this. They'd bought this house, just before they got married, and they'd planned all along for the extra bedroom to be a nursery. They'd never bought the furniture because they were waiting. They'd never turned it into a guest room because they were waiting. Giving up on the nursery would have meant giving up on what they wanted.
Daryl swallowed, continuing to stare at the words. He ignored the fact that they had the strange ability to become blurry, clear up again, and blur once more while he looked at them.
Maybe they'd been filling the room up because they couldn't stand to know it was still empty. Maybe he'd been filling it up with junk and projects that he'd never do because he couldn't stand the feeling of it being empty. Now, knowing it was empty but would soon be filling back up again—this time with the stuff they'd always intended to buy and move in there—there wasn't much in the house that Daryl wouldn't have traded to make more room for their unexpected expected guest and all the stuff that they might need.
"Are you gonna order that pizza?" Carol asked quietly, reminding him that she was still there—and that neither of them had eaten. Daryl looked at her. Her expression was caught somewhere between the sullen look of earlier and a soft smile. She raised her eyebrows at him. "Surprise?" She offered.
Daryl was pretty sure that, at the moment, he couldn't actually respond to her. So, instead, he pulled her to him in a hug, and glanced once more at the frame over her shoulder to assure himself that it was real. When he pulled out of the hug, he caught her lips in a kiss and shivered at the feeling of her fingertips rubbing the hair on the back of his neck.
He smiled at her when they pulled apart and she reached a hand up, tracing her thumb under his eye without saying anything about what she more than likely found there.
"Happy?" She asked. He nodded. "Me too," she offered. Daryl swallowed a couple of times in rapid succession, forcing down the lump that was hanging in his throat like a baseball. "I'm going to the bathroom," Carol offered. "Order the pizza and meet me at the table. We'll start—we'll start making a list. We're going to need a lot of stuff." She laughed at herself and left him standing there. Daryl walked into the room, replaced the frame where it had been, and looked around.
The room looked good. Better than it ever had. It was empty, that was true, but Daryl couldn't wait to see it full.