AN: Here we go, the second chapter to this short fic and our first check in with Daryl.
I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Daryl had purposefully left the fat envelope on the table, closed, for at least three days. He knew what it was. Opening it wouldn't bring him any surprises. The only thing it would do would be to solidify things. It would tell him, in black and white and once and for all, that he'd failed at his marriage.
He'd failed at the one thing he'd sworn to himself that he'd do right in this life.
Two double whiskies, alone, on a Friday night and he was finally able to face the envelope and the cold hard truth.
He was Daryl Dixon. He was forty years old and he was divorced. His wife, Carol Ann McAlister Dixon, had now returned to being Carol Ann McAlister. He'd promised her, when he'd married her, that she'd never return to that name again—especially not following any events like the ones that he knew surrounded her first marriage to a no-good son of a bitch that hadn't known how the hell to treat a woman—but he'd lied.
He'd never meant to lie.
He still wasn't really sure exactly where the whole thing went wrong.
Probably it was just the prophecy of his old man coming true. Among so many words that his ears could still hear, he could hear the early declarations of his old man about what he'd become. About what his brother would become.
"You ain't good for shit. You ain't been worth a damn thing since you was borned. Ain't worth what the hell they made us pay to bring your worthless asses home. Woulda done better to leave you there. You ain't gonna amount to shit boy. Come from shit, become shit, stay shit. That's all the hell you gonna be."
Over and over like a litany, the words in a number of variations whirled through Daryl's mind as he turned the envelope over in his hand, the contents of it returned to the white paper for "safe-keeping". Merle had lived up to the prophecy. Every last damn word of it. He lived two counties over in a piece of shit little trailer that was no better than the one that Daryl was in now. He worked a job that was a dead end job bringing in shit money that was little worse than the one that Daryl worked—the one that Carol told him it was fine if he spent the rest of his life working. After all, it was a career and, eventually, he was sure to move up if that's what he wanted. The problem was he didn't know what he wanted, and he wasn't even sure if he cared. And women? Merle had seen more women come through his bedroom than most people who worked at airports had probably seen pass by. He had at least a half a dozen bastard kids spread all over the county, and that was only counting the ones that he knew about. He'd never become anything and, at almost fifty years old, it wasn't likely that he ever would. He'd be buried as another good-for-nothing-nobody that not a damn soul remembered.
And Daryl was following right along in his footsteps.
When he'd met Carol, he'd first thought that she was entirely out of his league. She wasn't the kind of woman that a man like him ended up with. She was smart, funny, and beautiful. She was everything that classified her as being able to have what she wanted. The kind of woman that would end up with Daryl? That was the kind of woman that had to settle for what the hell she got.
But, for whatever reason, Carol had decided to give Daryl a chance. They'd dated for a while before he finally worked up the nerve to ask her to marry him. He knew that she had her reservations about marriage. She'd been married before, when she was young, and the man had turned out to be a beater. He'd turned out to be the kind of man that made her life a nightmare. So Daryl had sworn to himself that he'd make her life a dream. He'd be everything that she needed because, just by merit of being Carol, she was already everything that he needed.
But he'd been prepared for her to tell him to go to hell when he'd popped the question. He'd been prepared for her to turn him down.
She'd surprised him again, though. She hadn't turned him down. She'd cried and she'd kissed him and she'd put the ring on immediately, even though it wasn't very nice, but she hadn't turned him down. She'd given him a chance to marry her. She'd given him a chance to make it into being something. After all, even if he wasn't the best man in the world, he could be the best husband there was. And he could be the best father there was. That, in itself, would be something for a Dixon like him.
It was all so damn perfect too. At least, in the beginning it was. It was absolutely perfect for the two of them. They got a house together, even if it came with a mortgage Daryl wasn't sure he would live to see paid off. He got a better job that paid enough so that, with her salary combined with his, they could live pretty comfortably. They got decent cars that they later upgraded for better cars.
They were building their own American dream.
And then? It got even better. They were becoming parents. They were going to have it all. The perfect life, the perfect marriage, and then the perfect child to raise between them. Daryl was going to be the best old man that there had ever been—baseball games and bikes and everything else, boy or girl was of no matter to him.
And Carol was going to be a wonderful mother.
The day he'd found out she was pregnant, his shaky hands trying to steady her shaky hands as she tried to read the pregnancy tests that she'd lined up on their bathroom sink, he'd gone out and bought a crib right away. That little extra room finally had a purpose besides storage. Their kid—their perfect kid—would fit just damn right in that room. And it would be the happiest kid that ever there was.
Daryl had been in a couple of bar fights in his life. Merle had backed his ass into a corner more than once where they were outnumbered and out-muscled. He'd been sucker punched so hard in the gut that he didn't feel like he shit right for days. But nothing had compared with the pain that he'd felt in his gut the moment that the doctor—fake solemn expression on his face—had said the words that Daryl could hear as clearly as he could hear his old man's voice in his head.
"I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do. We can't find a heartbeat."
Daryl had hardly heard a word the doctor had said after that. Snatches of it had come through. Things they wanted to do to Carol—things that needed to be done apparently—and some promises about what else they could expect in the future had filtered through. Daryl had barely heard them, though. The blood had been pounding in his ears so loudly that he'd worried he might just start bleeding right out of them. His chest had closed up tight enough that he'd wondered if he was having a heart attack. But he'd held it all together. He'd swallowed it all down.
He'd learned early on in his life how to keep it all from showing. Carol, too, had learned the trick. So, in silence, they'd both taken it all in.
That silence, it seemed, hadn't ended there.
Daryl didn't know how they were supposed to talk about what had happened or what the hell there was even to say about it. When he got home, he put the crib in the barn out behind their house. Some years later, he dragged the damn thing out, put it in the back of his truck, and drove it down to the Goodwill so someone else might have it. Someone who was getting a kid that they could keep.
Daryl always felt sorry about it. He figured, maybe, it was the prophecy that had something to do with it. Maybe things were going too good for him. Things were going a lot better than they had any business going for a piece of shit Dixon like himself. Something, somewhere, had to go wrong. Maybe he always figured he was the cause for it all. Maybe he was the reason there wasn't ever any more kids.
Maybe Carol knew it, too, even if she forgave him.
He'd have no way of really knowing, though what she did and didn't know. After all, they didn't talk about it.
But nothing was quite the same after that.
They were happy enough. They got along alright. They kissed every morning and every night—and sometimes in between. At least once a week they had sex and, if they were lucky, sometimes they actually got around to making love. They slept pretty well at night and Daryl was never cold with her body up against his with the way she rooted into him when she slept. But nothing was ever quite the same as it had been—especially once they started to realize that they weren't getting any more chances at having a kid of their own.
Daryl kept trying to be a good husband. That never stopped. But now, with a drink in one hand and the envelope in the other, he could only figure that he'd fallen short of the mark. He should've expected it, really, but it didn't mean that it didn't hit him like a ton of bricks. He'd let Carol down. He hadn't been the man that she'd needed him to be. He'd kept his promise to treat her right, and he'd kept his promise never to lay his hands on her in a way she didn't want. He'd even, for the most part, kept his promise not to cuss her and yell at her. But still, somehow, he'd failed to be what she needed him to be.
She'd failed to realize, from the beginning, that he never was what she needed him to be. He wasn't destined for that. He was destined for exactly what he had right now—a great big steaming pile of proof that he wasn't worth a damn thing and wouldn't amount to anything.
If anything, he was sorry he brought her along for the ride. He was sorry he took those years from her—years when she might've found someone who was worth her. Someone who might've been the old man to her kids by now.
He still loved her, though. God how he loved her. Even now, sitting on the ugly orange couch he'd gotten at the Goodwill to give him something to call furniture in his living room, his chest ached just at the thought of how much he loved her. A couple of times, after they'd started the whole thing for the divorce, they'd ended up together for a couple of nights. Being back in her arms, even if it was something temporary and something she'd never meant to happen, had been one of the best damn feelings that there was.
It had been so good that it had taken all that Daryl could do to be a man about things and accept that it was over. It was done.
Carol had finally realized that he wasn't what she needed, and it wasn't fair for him to keep stringing her along. It wasn't fair for him to keep asking her to waste her life on him. Not when he couldn't be what she needed.
Because she deserved more, and he wanted her to have more. It was of no matter what it felt like to him. And it was no matter that, for her to have more, he had to sit there on the couch with a drink in hand, running his fingertips over the undeniable proof that he was never really good enough for Carol in the first place.