AN: This is just a short little fic. Just a few chapters, but you know that my science isn't always exact for that. It's just meant to be cute and fluffy and was inspired by an anon request on Tumblr.
I own nothing from the Walking Dead.
I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Daryl couldn't say that he'd ever been an amazing sleeper. As far back as he could remember, actually, he'd always had a hard time falling asleep. Of course, in his younger years he always found something to blame it on. His parents fought a lot. He worried about things that were out of the control of a child. When he got older? He didn't sleep because he partied too hard and denied himself sleep to follow his older brother around with the goal of being cool in his brother's eyes. As he got even older? He swapped out sleep for extra hours of work and more money in his pockets.
All his life, there had always been something to blame for his inability to shut down and sleep when night came.
Except now he was really out of excuses.
He was fifty three years old. He was good with money. He'd more than saved up enough to live comfortably on if he wanted to retire. He didn't retire, of course, because he liked his work—but he no longer had the need to work late if he didn't want to. He didn't have much to worry about in life. He had most everything that he needed. He couldn't blame the threat of problems for his lack of sleep. He lived alone in his home, too. So there was no one there to keep him awake. He couldn't blame Merle for too much noise or something equally inconsiderate.
He'd come to accept that he simply didn't sleep much anymore.
Most nights, Daryl felt the need to simply get out of his home. He usually spent his evenings there, eating a t.v. dinner and watching whatever happened to be on when he turned on his television set, but then when it was time to sleep he felt the need to simply escape his own walls. If he wasn't tired, there was no reason to make himself more miserable by lying in bed and thinking about all the hours of sleep he was missing.
As a result of his nighttime haunting of the little town, he'd discovered the few places where someone could actually go at a late hour to entertain themselves. There weren't many options, though, because the thing about sleepy little towns was that they actually slept—even when Daryl didn't.
The diner in town was the only establishment that was open twenty-four hours. The town was a rural stop on a main highway in Georgia. The diner sat just a few miles off the highway and, as a result, it caught a lot of traffic from people who were just travelling through. From what Daryl saw, it probably did the best business of the day after the residents of the town had gone to bed.
Daryl was a regular there.
Almost every night he sat in the same seat at the same back-corner table. Sometimes he ate, other times he didn't. They didn't bother him, one way or another, because he was such a regular customer that he more than made up the money for the nights when he only wanted something to drink.
Tonight was one of the nights where he wasn't feeling particularly hungry. He put in an order for fries—something to pick at—but mostly he just ate one every now and again when he even remembered they were there. He watched the people as they came in and out—truckers and families with sleeping children were the most common. Some of them stayed long enough to eat. Others got their food to go. Others, still, stopped just for the restroom or to ask directions.
Daryl had seen all kinds.
He noticed the woman when she came into the diner because she seemed a little out of place. She came in, shaking off her umbrella because of the storm that raged on outside, and then she looked around the diner like she'd never been there before. She didn't have the "look," though of someone who'd been travelling. Her clothes weren't right for it. She didn't have the half-asleep or dazed look that was common. Rather than going to the register or the bar and asking for directions—or going straight to the bathroom as was pretty common of travelers—she ran her fingers through her short gray hair, wiped some water off that was beading on her rain jacket, and then she searched out a seat.
She sat at the table almost across from Daryl. He'd chosen the side of his table that faced her. Whether meaning to or not, she'd chosen the side of hers that faced him. When the waitress came, she ordered coffee—nothing else—and she thanked Janet with a smile.
Daryl thanked Janet, too, when she came to refresh his sweet tea, and then he returned to watching the woman.
She looked like she didn't know what to do with herself. She looked around, patted her legs under the table, and picked at the sugar packets. She rearranged the things on her table and she sat straight up and flopped back in her chair. She wasn't half-dead like most of the people that stumbled through there at this hour. If anything, she had too much energy.
Daryl snorted to himself when Janet brought the coffee and put it down in front of the woman. She looked at him. He hadn't actually meant for her to hear his amusement, but he was caught now. He might as well roll with the punches.
"Hope that's decaf," he said, sitting up to lean with his elbows on the table like they might actually have a conversation across the space that divided them.
"It doesn't matter if it is," the woman said. "Won't make a difference."
Fair enough, she knew her caffeine tolerance better than Daryl did.
"Headed somewhere?" Daryl asked.
The woman looked surprised to hear him speak again. She looked at him, pointed to herself, and hummed.
"You're talking to me?" She asked.
Daryl chuckled and gestured toward the empty space in front of him.
"Well, my buddy here ain't good for conversation," he said. "Headed somewhere?"
The woman looked around and then she started to speak to him. She got half a word out and stopped. She sighed and then she got up. She gathered up her things and Daryl assumed that maybe he'd offended her. Some people, after all, were pretty easy to offend. She surprised him, though. Rather than leaving or relocating to the other side of the diner, the woman gathered her stuff up and moved to stand next to Daryl's table.
"May I?" She asked.
He raised his eyebrows at her in surprise and gave her the gesture of "go ahead" for joining him. She sat and spent a moment getting herself comfortable once more.
"Guess that answers that question," Daryl said. "You was headed to my table." Across the table from him, the woman looked at him like he was an idiot. He'd accept it. She was very attractive—and even that expression didn't take away from it. "A joke," Daryl offered.
"I just thought that, if we're going to talk, it would make more sense to talk this way," the woman said. "Unless you mind?"
Daryl shook his head.
"Don't mind," he said. "I don't got any plans."
"Carol McAlister," the woman said, offering her hand to shake across the table.
"Daryl Dixon," Daryl said, shaking her hand in response. He cleared his throat. "So—where you headed?"
"I was headed to the park," Carol said. "Until it started pouring rain."
"So you're from around here?" Daryl asked.
Carol nodded.
"I've lived here for at least—seven years? Eight? I moved here right after I divorced my husband," Carol said.
"Sorry," Daryl offered.
"Don't be," Carol responded. "It was one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. Both getting rid of my husband and moving here. You're from here?"
"Born and raised," Daryl said. "That's a lie. I was born two towns over—hospital's there. But I'm from here. Spent my whole life here. The park? At two in the morning?"
Carol smiled to herself and went about fixing the coffee that she hadn't prepared to her liking yet.
"The one over off Oak? The little one? I like to walk there at night. It's not crowded. There's never anyone there but me. The bugs aren't as bad as you would think they'd be. On nice nights? I like to clear my head out there," Carol said.
"Rain ran you in tonight," Daryl said. Carol nodded.
"Unfortunately," Carol said. She tasted her coffee and must have found it to her liking. She sat back in her chair, visibly relaxed, and continued to drink from the mug in her hand.
"That coffee'll keep you up the rest of the night if it's leaded," Daryl said. "They make it strong here."
"I'm up most of the night anyway," Carol said. "I haven't slept a full night since January. August before that."
"What happened in January? And—August?" Daryl asked, immediately wondering if he was really at liberty to ask such things of the woman. She looked at him and was clearly asking herself, too, if he was at liberty to pose such a question.
"My daughter went back to school," Carol said. "Up-state. I don't sleep well, when she's gone, but I'd never tell her that."
Daryl hummed to himself and nodded at Carol.
"Been longer for me," he admitted. "I can't even tell you the last time that I slept a whole night. I come here a good bit. Always open. Got a couple of other places I hit. Just get out the house."
"Away from the silence," Carol said.
Daryl hummed.
"But you just said you like the park. It's pretty quiet, right? Nobody else but you because everybody else is home asleep?" Daryl asked.
"It's a different kind of quiet," Carol said. "It's a quiet that feels like..." She broke off and shrugged. "It's a quiet that feels like it should be quiet. It feels like the quiet that belongs there. At home—it just feels out of place."
Daryl swallowed.
Sometimes he understood that feeling a little too perfectly. He liked quiet as much as the next person. In fact, too much noise or too many people talking at once and he could feel like he was about to lose his mind. He could feel like he was on the verge of screaming. But there were other times when the quiet just seemed to be too much. It seemed suffocating.
"Quiet can be overrated," Daryl said. "Sometimes."
Carol hummed and nodded her agreement as she drank from her coffee cup again.
And quiet could be overrated. So much so, in fact, that Daryl found that the conversation shared with a virtual stranger, that night, was one of the best things he'd done in a while. He actually had fun simply sitting across a table with her. They chatted about things around town—the construction that was being done outside the courthouse to make the town "prettier," the fact that half the town was up in arms about the fact that another half wanted to paint all the fire hydrants green—and then when they were out of conversation they sat and took turns making up stories about the people that dashed into the diner for one thing or another—always looking completely pissed off about the rain—before they dashed back out again.
By the time that Daryl paid his tab and left a generous tip for Janet on the table, and Carol did the same, they'd put in at least two hours of just not-being-quiet together.
And Daryl, honestly, was sad to see it end.
But sleep or not, they both had lives that continued when the sun came up. They both had jobs. They both had things to do. They both had to get home and do all the domestic things they did to fill the hours that they didn't spend sleeping, and they both had to lie down and hope that maybe, just maybe, there was a short nap that would keep them going when the morning demanded it.
So, in the rain, Daryl walked Carol to her car and she laughed at him for his insistence that he didn't need to share her umbrella because he wasn't going to melt away in the water. And then he went and climbed into his truck to drive himself home in the opposite direction from that which she'd taken.
He didn't ask her if he might expect to see her again at the diner, another night sometime, but he realized that he really hoped he did.