AN: This is in a series of "shorts" that I'm doing for entertainment value as I rewatch some episodes. Some of them are interpretations/rewrites of scenes that are in each episode. Some are scenes that never happened but could have in "imagination land". They aren't meant to be taken seriously and they aren't meant to be mind-blowing fic. They're just for entertainment value and allowing me to stretch my proverbial writing muscles. If you find any enjoyment in them at all, then I'm glad. If you don't, I apologize for wasting your time. They're "shorts" or "drabbles" or whatever you want to call them so I'm not worrying with how long they are. Some will be shorter, some will be longer.

I own nothing from the Walking Dead.

I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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"Hey, JC! You takin' requests?"

When his heart bottomed out into his stomach to find that it wasn't Sophia that had rang the church bells, Daryl knew that he was going to have to be honest with himself about how deep he felt like he was letting himself sink down into this. And, eventually, about why.

He'd known, the very moment that he pulled the flap back on that tent in the woods and saw the already stilled—or never moving—corpse sitting there, that it wasn't Sophia. He knew, immediately, that Sophia had never been there. He had no reason to go into the tent. His instincts were better than that he trusted them more than that. But he'd gone in anyway and he'd looked around.

Because part of him needed to find Sophia in that tent, cowering in the corner and waiting for rescue. Part of him needed to find some evidence, at the very least, that she'd been there and he was on the right track and couldn't be far behind her.

When he heard Carol calling out to him, repeating his name, wanting confirmation that Sophia was close by or, at the very least, wasn't in there dead, part of Daryl needed to be able to give her that.

He needed to have some hope to give her. Something concrete. Because, if nothing else, she deserved that.

There were enough good-for-nothing parents in the world that didn't even care about their kids that Daryl figured that one who did at least deserved to know that her kid was still alive and she'd be recovered. She at least deserved some kind of hope that the girl was going to get found. She was going to be all right.

But the only hope that Daryl had to give her was meagre at best.

"Ain't her."

It wasn't Sophia. She wasn't dead and in some state of decay in the tent. He saw Carol, when he came out of the tent, sink with the news. With each passing moment she seemed to drop a little lower. She seemed a little surer that this would only end badly. What reason did she have, really, to believe otherwise?

And Daryl couldn't promise her that it wouldn't. But he could hold out hope as long as possible. It seemed he might be the only one around there with much of it left to spare. Everyone else seemed to be running pretty low on hope for anything.

At the church, though, he had to admit that some of his own hope and optimism had drained a little. His spirits had taken a hit. He'd let himself get a little too sure that it was Sophia ringing the bells and calling them all to her rescue. So when it wasn't? When all they found were more of the corpses that they seemed to find at every turn? Daryl's stomach had simply bottomed out into his gut.

She had no business even being out there.

Daryl had gotten there in time to see that Lori was practically holding Carol back. Daryl doubted, if Carol had gone after the girl—unarmed and unprepared in every way possible—she'd have survived. Neither one of them would've survive. But Carol would have gone after her. Her instinct would have driven her to do it, even if she knew she was running directly toward certain death. And it was pretty clear, to Daryl, that she'd have at least given it everything she had to try to save the girl. Unprepared as she might be for this world, she wasn't unprepared to be a mother. Lori had held her back for her own safety—she'd trusted Rick to do the job.

Maybe that's where they went wrong.

No, the girl had no business even being out there. And if anybody up there was taking requests? Well, Daryl had one. He knew he wasn't the only one asking it, but he figured his might get through. After all, he didn't tend to make a whole lot of requests, so he figured that he was owed one at least.

Daryl never meant to hear a single word that any of the rest of them had to say in the church. Their business was their business, just as his business was his own. He wasn't exactly eavesdropping, but that didn't mean that he didn't just happen to overhear. He'd certainly never meant to listen to what Carol had to say when she got to her knees to have a word with the big man she hoped would deliver her daughter back to her where humans had failed her so far. But Daryl had heard everything she had to say because he wasn't deaf and he couldn't exactly turn his hearing off just because it suited him not to listen to other people's words.

She thought this was punishment. She thought it was her payment for wanting a life where her asshole husband didn't use her as a punching bag. A life where he didn't threaten the kid they made together and where he paid for what he'd done because they sure as shit lived in a society—before the world went belly up—where the asshole wasn't likely to pay for a damned thing.

She wanted to be treated like a human being by the man that she'd married and she figured that losing her kid was punishment for wanting those things because, maybe, she went about wanting them in the wrong way. Yet she still stayed on her knees and trusted a God that she thought could possibly even do something like that to her—to the girl. She could still ask that God for mercy. She could ask him to reconsider. She could ask him to punish her—and only her—for what she'd done and to spare the girl.

Her life for her daughter's.

The least Daryl could do was spare a request that he hoped he was owed and ask for mercy for the both of them. Because, at this point, that was really what he was praying for.