Pairing: Daryl and Carol
AU ZA: Character ages will not all be the same. The walker virus is different. Not everyone in the story that either lived or died on the television show/comics will live/die in the same way.
Premise: A Bewitched witch gets reincarnated as Carol Peltier. The year is December 2000, and the height of the end of the world is 2010. Just a drop in the ocean causes ripples of change.
AN: I do not own the Walking Dead, Bewitched, or any magical phrases or spells that you may read within this story. All I own is the premise, my original characters and how this all plays out.
Prologue
Radiant pin pricks of light winked and twinkled, interspersed in an ebony sky.
A solar flare licked at the Earth's slowly deteriorating ozone making the air taste like brimstone. Freezing winds whipped against the crumbling ruins of a once beautiful city.
Eleanor's chest ached as the air burned her lungs with every shaking breath. The air felt too thin now. It didn't look like there would be much time left for her now.
She morosely recalled how in her youth, the air had felt sweeter, cooler, fuller, and crisper. How life used to thrive on this stupid rock, once upon a time.
She weakly wheezed in another ashy breath. Her mind desperately tried to block out the frigid temperature. She furiously ignored the blue tinge her hands had taken, her burning throat, and her gnawing gut. There wasn't much else she could do right now.
She reminisced about her life, and the path that led her here. To this tiny dingy bed. In this decrepit, crumbling, and abandoned nursing home. One of the many ruins she'd stumbled into for some scrap of sanctuary.
A bitter sweet smile tugged at her dry lopsided mouth. Reminiscing about the past always made the unbearable pressure against her chest abate, for a moment at least. It made her forget the shadow of death that clung to her like a second skin.
Eleanor used to be magic. She used to have power. Power that could've saved them. Alas, hindsight was bitch.
She had handed over her reality bending powers to the Witches council for mortality. To live, love, and die with her family. She didn't think that she would be the last one to die. And certainly not like this...
Eleanor had hoped that while her family grew around her, in her declining age, that she would die peacefully in her sleep alongside her husband. Ideally, they would've also been surrounded by their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Alas, life was never that kind to her.
After she had been granted her "mortality", her husband suffered a heart attack. It was just a day or so before they could celebrate two decades of being married to one another. It was a shitty anniversary, to say the least.
Another shuddering cough overtook her. Pain shot through her chest like roots darting in the ground. Eleanor's squinty blue eyes prickled with thin tears as she thought about her lost loved ones.
She wiped away the blood that had splattered out of her mouth against her almost skeletal forearm.
There was no food or water in this abandoned relic of a place either. The looters and raiders had probably taken everything that had been worth taking. She'd been too late. Again. She'd felt like she'd always been too late nowadays.
Pain and nausea pierced through her making her feel numb. Nothing was left in her, but the images of her loved ones kept coming. Broken bodies. A fire that ate away at everything. Monstrous faces and dirty hands tearing at people she couldn't protect, and blood... Too much blood. So much pain. With each child, family member, and friend that she had to bury, her heart broke bit by bit, piece by piece.
Now at a creaking one hundred and five, she was the last of her line. Her mortality felt like a bad joke that left a sour taste in her mouth.
She hoped with all her heart that she would find her family in the next life. If there was such a thing. All the things that she had experienced in this life time, made her spine tingle in distress.
Was there even a God? And if so, why leave everyone in this hellhole? Why? Why did her family have to ripped apart? Why her babies? Why did they-? She slammed her eyes closed as a strangled cry slipped past her lips. She forced her mind to freeze. It wasn't time for that. Not now. Not yet. Despair could wait.
She idly spun her well-worn wedding ring around her wrinkly skeletal finger. Wheezing, she brokenly hummed a long forgotten love song to comfort the ongoing burning that tore at her back of her throat. Her somber melody echoed against the crumbling walls around her as her eyes fluttered shut. Darkness consumed her as her heart spluttered its last beats.
A dazzling comet shrieked across the curtain of darkness as Eleanor's life seeped away. As it darted past her cooling corpse, it flashed a brilliant azure then gold. It blinked out of this universe and into another, leaving none the wiser.
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Carol Mason blinked away the tears that gathered in the corners of her eyes, as she brushed back her short thick red hair.
Ed gave her a disgusted sneer as he drunkenly ambled back through their living room towards the front door. There was not even an ounce of regret on his face. He didn't think that he was in was wrong, even though he had just beat his fiancée into a bloody pulp on their kitchen floor.
Sophia's cries echoed out of her nursery, unknowingly aggravating her already temperamental father into slamming the door behind him.
Carol blinked away the onslaught of new tears, and winced as she gently touched her head. Blearily, she noted that blood was splattered on her hand when she brought it to her face. With the sight of blood smeared on her hand, combined with her daughter's anguished cries, Carol faded away into the darkness that edged her vision with a loud thump.
Her heart slowly puttered to a stop. Breaths stolen, by the pain that shot through her. The hidden aneurysm lodged in her brain loosened, it was probably because she had to endure another violent beating.
Her last thoughts were of her daughter's cries, and how once upon a time she had imagined a story where she wasn't the damsel, the victim. She was brave once. She didn't feel brave anymore. Her soul's final yearnings called out to the universe as it faded away, and this time the universe answered.
A familiar comet screamed through the sky appearing out of a small tear; one that closed up as soon as it had opened, in this universe and with it an unlikely passenger before dissipating into the atmosphere.
Eleanor's errant soul was unceremoniously dumped into Carol's still warm body with all the grace of a stumbling calf.
Carol's eyes ripped open. Her blue eyes dilated before sharply focusing. She bolted upright as her heart galloped again at the sudden impact of a new soul and magic merging with this new mortal body.
Her suddenly unbound magic went to work on her concussion, aneurysm, and the other wounds she had sustained. It twisted and surged through her veins and arteries, pulsing under her skin.
She tilted her head as she heard the pitiful cries of a baby nearby and wearily got up off the ground. The height difference was new, as was the sudden overall change, but Carol didn't really notice that at the moment. At the current moment, her bleary thoughts were focused on the cries of that child. She hobbled up the slightly familiar stairs and winced from the pain that seemed to radiate from her ribs.
What happened to me again? Her magic was quickly trying to heal what it could in this new vessel, but it certainly wasn't instantaneous. It left Carol feeling like she'd been hit by a train.
As the whimpers and quiet cries of a child got louder she knew that she was getting closer to the source of the noise. Opening up a door with a glaringly pink name, Sophia it had said, she paused. Didn't I have a daughter named Sophia once? She shook her head and pushed the door open. In the middle of a threadbare brown crib, sat a little eight-month old baby with tear streaks a mile long.
Carol swept into the room, as a sudden familiarity hit her, and scooped up the little girl, who she assumed was her child. She cooed sweet comforting words into her still developing head. Sophia looked at her mother and calmed down into hiccups, clinging onto her with her tiny baby hands in a vice grip.
Carol's mind finally cleared. And as she looked around her, while she bounced on her heels calming Sophia into a quiet lull, she noticed everything was wrong. This doesn't look like the nursing home I had fallen asleep in.
She turned and found her reflection. A young non-malnourished injured redheaded woman looked back at her. Blinking in confusion, she yelped, "THE FUCK!?"
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