Author's Note: In my universe, Carol never ate Ezekiel's pomegranate, because she knew that would mean she owed him and she was joining someone else's community.


Chapter 3: The Ashes

The whole ride back, Carol held on tight, and Daryl actually let her. Sometimes, one of his hands would come off the motorcycle's handlebars and he'd touch her hand, clasped across his belly. Like he wasn't quite sure it was really there.

When her directions led them back to the little house outside The Kingdom with its graveyard garden, he looked confused. He looked more confused after they stashed the bike out back and he saw her things stored inside the already-cleared, already-cleaned house.

She explained how she'd come here in sparse, plain words as she heated up food for him. Quick, like ripping off a Band-Aid, back when they still had such things. It was harder these days, with all the adhesive on the medical tape getting old and gummy so it clung too hard around your wounds.

It felt like a fresh betrayal to tell him how she'd left him, knowing now where he'd been while she was off on her own, trying to remember how to heal.

He didn't say a thing, and when she slid the plate in front of him, he didn't eat. His hands just hung in his lap like his arms had been broken and not yet cast. She gave him space, busied herself heating up water for bathing.

But when the water was hot and his food had gone cold, he still hadn't moved.

"Daryl? Do you want something else?"

A muscle in his cheek twitched, winced. He shook his head.

His tangled hair lay over his face and she itched to brush it away so she could see him. But he hadn't reached for her since they got off the motorcycle. After what he'd been through, everything that happened to him needed to be his choice. She wouldn't go against that, even for his own good.

"Why'n't you go clean up?" His voice was scratchy, like he hadn't used it in a long time.

She leaned her forearms on the table across from him, bent down until her face was at his level, even if she couldn't see his eyes. She didn't say a word, because she knew he'd read the concern in her face clearly enough, and she didn't want to push.

"Need a minute, 's all," he said.

"All right." She reached to squeeze his arm, and stopped herself. His choice, not hers. No matter how much she needed the comfort of feeling him whole and alive. She retrieved the bucket of water and heaved it off the stove.

"Carol."

She almost dropped the bucket, she was so surprised at hearing her name off his lips. He so rarely, rarely used it and it sounded different in his gravelly, low-pitched voice. Like an entirely different name than the one everyone else addressed her by. She immediately wanted him to say it again so she could listen, try to hear the differences. To let them slip in between the bruised places in her, because something in that sound…she needed it.

Carol swallowed back the sharpness of her sudden desire and set down the bucket. "Yes?"

"This is where ya live now?"

His head was up, but he still didn't meet her eyes.

"For a while, yes, I have been."

"Are ya…" He struggled to find a word, and eventually the silence became its own kind of question.

She wanted to reassure him that she was okay, but she didn't want to lie. Didn't even want to toss off their old, "Gotta be," even though it would be so nice to have a familiar joke lifting the air between them.

"I do okay here," she said. Because she did. She went through all the motions of taking care of herself, as if her body were a tool whose use she knew she'd need again someday.

He nodded, as if that were what he'd asked.

She picked up the bucket again, even though she'd filled it full enough to wash his bigger body. It was more weight than she risked when she knew she'd be the only one around to lift it. But she clenched her teeth and ignored the burn of her muscles and old injuries, moving quickly down the hall to the bathroom. She set the water down, and as soon as she did, an image of his crossbow flashed into her head.

He'd propped it against the wall, not by his chair like he usually did.

Was it that he felt safe here, that he knew the danger would be coming from without, not within? Or did it not really feel like his, now that the other man had had the weapon so long?

She hadn't given his vest back for the same reason. It didn't feel right, not yet. Suddenly, she wondered if she should have done it anyway.

The floor creaked in the kitchen. It was so quiet she knew she would have heard the scrape of his fork against his plate. Or at least his chewing, loud as it usually was.

Something was wrong.

Carol tried to shake off the feeling, because what wasn't wrong? She'd just killed dozens of men and it was taking everything in her not to focus on that, to think of Daryl instead. He was important, not them. That's why she'd killed them. They'd made that choice when they'd decided to make slaves of other human beings.

That wasn't your decision to make. Rick's voice haunted her, even now.

Those people could have been forced into it, the way Dwight had been. The way Rick and her entire family had been. Who did Negan hold hostage to control each of those men? Who would search through the ashes of the building she'd burned, looking for their bodies?

Carol blinked. She needed to clean up, not dwell on decisions made, sins already committed. That weight was on her now, wrong or right.

But then, that was the thing about life. You didn't get to know if your choices were right when you made them. You only found out afterward, when the test was already turned in, your answers scrawled in ink.

She used to think you could know, but she'd been much younger then. If there was a hell, she'd long since earned her place there. Right alongside Lizzie, who thought she was killing for the right reasons, too. Alongside Negan and the Governor and Shane, who'd thought the same.

She closed her eyes, her body quaking as tears rose to her eyes.

A creak sounded, only a couple of rooms away.

Walkers. In the house.

Her hand jolted toward her knife before she remembered. Daryl was here with her.

The doorknob squeaked from the kitchen.

She dashed across the house, running before a single thought could form in her head, and she burst into the kitchen in such a flurry that his eyes actually connected to hers for a second in surprise.

Beth's knife lay on the table, neatly in its sheath. His crossbow was abandoned by the wall, but he'd hung a water bottle from his belt and he still had a hunting knife, so maybe it hadn't been a suicide mission after all, even though he had one foot over the threshold. His hand hung on the knob of the door he'd been about to close between them.

"At least I left a note," she said.

His gaze dropped. "Can't stay. Not after what I did, what I been. Thought I could, if it were just you, not everybody." His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. "Worse."

She let her gaze fall, landing on the same patch of floor between them. Carol knew what it did inside your mind, to not be able to control what was done to you. She remembered the shame of knowing someone else had witnessed your humiliation.

"You saw me, too," she said. "When Ed had beaten me down."

Daryl went very, very still.

"You respected me." It was surprisingly hard to say the words out loud. "Even after that, you came to respect me." She swallowed, and focused back on him because that was easier. "What makes you think I can't do the same? You never even gave in, not like I did."

He looked away, toward the forest.

Carol snapped. She crossed the kitchen and yanked him back inside, slammed the door closed. She knew it was wrong to take that choice from him and she was too scared to do anything else.

"No," she said, something quavering rising up in her throat like a scream and she wasn't calm, wasn't resolved, wasn't anything she'd been since leaving Alexandria. "You can't leave. I know you. If you're alone, you'll just…fade away."

His eyes flickered around the kitchen. There were no decorations there, nothing that spoke of her personality. Just tools.

"No," she said. "I'm not any better. I'm…" She drew a shaky breath. "All this time, I've been trying to tell you. I can't anymore. I left because I didn't want whatever was wrong with me to hurt you, too. But now, we're just…"

She looked at him, and her mouth twisted involuntarily, a sob clawing to get out of her. She'd blocked the sounds when they were happening, focused all on him and his cell and his needs. But she could hear the screams from that burning warehouse. Oh could she hear them. From the look on his face, he was hearing something, too, and she had no idea what.

He reached for her, so fast she knew he hadn't thought first about what he was doing. And he stopped just as fast, shaking his head. "Carol..." This time her name was an apology, seared from his battered throat.

"No," she said. She didn't even know where the word came from. From the same place, maybe, that made her get up after she was stabbed, after she was shot. The thing that kept dragging her back to her feet when all she wanted to do was curl into her own grave and pull the earth down on top of her. "No!" She shouted it that time.

Daryl's eyes were so wide she could see the flash of blue even through the shield of his hair. Her voice rattled against the kitchen windows, like the shriek of a crazy person.

She wasn't entirely sane, she knew that. But neither was he, and she wasn't capable of letting him go. Not for his good or her own, and maybe her last shred of sanity had finally fled because it felt good to shout.

The way it felt good to slam that pickaxe deep into Ed's brain. Into the seat of his sickness, of everything that was wrong in him that made him do those things to her. It felt good to ruin him, the way she had thought he'd ruined her.

She'd lived so many lives since then. She hadn't known how to start another one, but now that Daryl was here, too, she had to figure it out.

She took his hand, linked it with hers. "We need to get cleaned up." It was the first, smallest of steps but it was something. She led him past the plate of food he hadn't touched, and thought of pomegranates. She still had no idea how they tasted.

You could move the whole world with a lever big enough. Some philosopher had said that once. And love was the biggest lever there was. Negan had known it. She thought of that woman, alone in her bedroom in Negan's compound. Dwight, dead in the yard.

The people who'd attacked her family had found that out when she lit them on fire. At Terminus. On the killing floor. Again, in Negan's warehouse. She'd been right to be afraid of what she could do, when she loved someone enough. She glanced at Daryl's hollow face. Then again, maybe it hurt just as much when you didn't do all you could, and you failed to save them.

She tugged him into the bathroom and they both sat down, beside the bucket of water and the clean towels she'd brought out for him. At first, she'd intended to leave him the privacy to do this on his own. But she knew he'd just end up the way she had: staring sightlessly at the water while the stain of everything he'd done sank ever deeper into his skin.

He wasn't starving. She could tell that just by looking at his still-healthy face. So whatever disgusting slop Negan had given him, he'd eaten it all up, even while he refused to touch the fresh food she'd served him. Because he thought that's all he deserved.

Carol took a breath. If he wouldn't take care of himself, she'd do it. But she knew how nervous it would make him to take his shirt off, so she took hers off first.

He sucked in a sharp breath when he saw what she was doing, but she kept her hands moving, down the buttons of Michonne's vest and Carl's shirt beneath, then to his buttons.

It felt wrong, undressing in front of him. Undressing him, when he hated so much to have that part of him seen. But they needed to be seen, both of them. They needed to know that someone else could bear the sight.

She left her bra on, in a nod to his modesty, and tried not to stare, even though his bare torso broke her heart. Red scrapes raking across deep purple bruises, layered over the ridges of old scars.

She dipped the cloth into the water, wrung it out, then picked up his hand and started to wash him clean. She kept her touch soft, laying his hand on her knee when she needed to re-dip the cloth to keep it warm.

"Every time Ed did what he did, to me..." She took a breath. "I'd shower afterward, and scrub and scrub. I want to do it right now." His muscles were tense, so she knew he was hearing her, however far away he was in his head. "I did it after I killed those women, those Saviors. You remember? You sat outside the bathroom door for hours."

She brushed his hair aside—no idea how she was going to wash it, with him in the state he was—and ran the cloth over the back of his neck.

"Why is it that we feel dirtied by other people's sins?" she murmured, not sure if she was asking him or herself. "When they hurt us."

She sat back on her heels, forgetting what she was doing for a moment.

Daryl turned and his hand closed over hers. Carol smiled sadly, wishing she knew how to help him. But she couldn't even help herself. That's how she'd gotten here in the first place.

He pulled her into his arms, and it was awkward because she was sitting the wrong way and the rag got dropped somewhere between them, leaving a spreading spot of dampness. But somehow he managed to muscle her into his lap, his head resting on her shoulder and his one clean and one dirty arm warming her all the way around.

"Ya came after me." He didn't seem to believe it, even after the words were said.

"It's what we do," she whispered.

"But what do we do…now?" His tortured murmur barely made a sound against her neck.

She didn't know the answer, so she just slid out of his lap and picked up the rag. Dipped it into clear water and smoothed it across his battered body.

It was such a little thing, but seeing his skin emerge from beneath the grime calmed her somewhat. Maybe this is what she should have done the day they dug Denise's grave. Should have drug him back to that too shiny house that didn't belong to either of them and washed him clean no matter how hard he fought her.

Her hands faltered as something clicked into place for her.

They needed a place, her and Daryl. Where they could be quiet or loud, away from everyone else. They needed a place of their own. They weren't like everyone else in Alexandria. No one was like them. It was why they'd never relaxed behind those walls. Even after Daryl refused to take a gun, he didn't choose a room there. Just slept wherever he found himself, the way he did on the road.

"I don't know," she said. "But whatever it is, we do it together."

She didn't know if that was the answer. If it would heal them or break them for good. All she knew was it felt right to say it, like with everything that stretched behind them, this was what came next.

And when he took the rag from her and started to clean her hands, she thought he knew it, too.