AN: Here we go, another little chapter here.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Daryl walked down to the cell where his brother was supposed to be occupying the time of the frightened, and surely traumatized, little girl. When he got there, though, he found that neither of them were occupying the other. Sophia was curled up, asleep, on the bottom bunk and Merle was passed out on the top bunk and snoring in short, loud bursts that echoed around the small space. The girl, clearly, was exhausted or she'd have never slept through the freight train rumbling above her.
It was for the best anyway. She probably needed to sleep and anything she found in whatever world lie behind her eyelids had to be a hell of a lot better than what there was to see here.
"Good damn thing Rick's puttin' our dangerous asses away from the rest of the group," Daryl commented to himself as he rummaged around in the cell looking for anything that might be of use there for caring for the woman.
Daryl wasn't even sure what he was there after or what he might need. He didn't know how to make the woman any better than she was…but no one else was really doing much of anything.
Hershel had come back, Merle had temporarily come down and picked the locked handcuffs with their broken chains off her wrists and had left in brooding silence to return to the company of a child. Hershel had set what was likely a broken wrist with the only wood that he could find, since no one was willing to help with even that, and it was little more than broken pieces of what appeared to have once been part of a chair that he bound with torn sheets. If she moved wrong, she might further injure herself with just the ends of the pieces themselves. He'd put a shoulder back into place, declared there might be injuries he didn't even know about, and left it at that.
There was nothing more that he could do.
Here's some soup, here's some broth…good damn luck to you. They didn't even have pain meds that he could give her until she was able to swallow something solid without choking.
All in all, maybe, the thought was simply that this woman…Carol…was beyond saving. Surely that's what it said, right? The fact that he'd brought a fresh pair of cuffs…either Rick's or some that Rick took off his best buddy's dead body after he killed him…and cuffed the least injured of the woman's arms to the bed so that, if she turned in the middle of the night, she could be put down without causing too much harm. That said that she probably wasn't going to make it.
And Daryl didn't have the slightest clue why he cared.
He had no reason to really care about this woman. He didn't know her. She didn't mean anything to him. She wasn't his blood. The kid…if the woman died, what happened to the kid? She wasn't his either. He didn't owe her a thing more than he'd already given them both, and that was a ride out of the crazy assholes town and right on over to the next place he'd probably visit, looking for some revenge.
But, for some reason, Daryl did care.
Coming up with all the rags that he could find in the cell, Daryl left the space and went back down to the cell he was currently occupying with the woman. He'd stripped her clothes, the ones he'd put on her earlier in the day, half off of her.
He wasn't an idiot. Anyone in her condition was going to soil themselves. He might as well make it as simple to clean up as he could.
So he folded the rags to put under her, something easier to change out when the time came, and tried to remind himself that what he was doing had no real meaning to him at all.
He was taking care of the woman because the kid wasn't his. He was taking care of her because if the kid was going to grow up in this world she needed some damn body to call her own and she seemed particularly fond of her mother.
He was taking care of the woman because every kid should keep a mother that they were fond of…for as long as they possibly could.
He was taking care of the woman because nobody gave a damn about her.
He was taking care of the woman because nobody gave a damn.
And Daryl knew what the hell it was like to be on the receiving end of not a single fuck that anyone had to give.
So he was taking care of the woman.
But it didn't mean a thing to him.
If she lived, that was great. Good for the kid. Good for her. If she died, it was no skin off his teeth.
It didn't matter a damn bit to him, he was just taking care of her.
And he was probably only doing that until she died because Hershel seemed to think that, having gone through the day with little change, she was destined to do just that. She was fighting, but she just wasn't strong enough to fight her way back from wherever she was.
But Daryl thought, and maybe it was that he was tired and the flickering light of the emergency lamp played tricks on his eyes, that there might be a little change. He thought that he might see, just maybe, a little color in her face. He thought that her breathing might have changed a little and that it was a little more profound now than it had been when he'd started giving her the water and the broth with the abandoned medicine dropper from a kid's bottle of some nasty medicine or another.
But, change or not, it didn't matter to him anyway.
Daryl sat down on the edge of the bed, ignored the probable hour that had everyone asleep in the prison but him, and sucked up another dropper full of the broth from the second bowl that had appeared outside the cell without explanation. Daryl had never heard the approach of the person who left it there with fresh water and food for himself, Merle, and the girl. It was left, it seemed, by some kind of food-fairy that must haunt the prison.
He lifted the woman's head in his hand, much like he'd been doing earlier, and dribbled the contents of the dropper into her mouth. If his angle was right, she swallowed it without prompting. If it wasn't, he'd fill the back of her throat until he rubbed her throat with his fingers and coaxed her to swallow it.
He hadn't let the girl see her.
He'd told Sophia that she could see her in the morning. Maybe he figured the morning was going to be magical, even as it quickly approached, and she might be awake…good as new. Maybe he figured that it would be easier on the girl to see things one way or another. Alive or dead, but not teetering somewhere in the darkness between the two, threatening to slip over an edge.
Daryl didn't know what he thought the morning would hold. And he reminded himself that he didn't care.
"You gonna have to give me some kinda damn sign," he said to the woman that hadn't so much as moved on her own. There weren't even any muscle spasms. She was as still as any possum he'd ever seen. The only movement he got out of her at all was the swallowing and, when Hershel had set her wrist and put the shoulder back, the rapid movement of eyes behind lids…eyes that didn't move when they searched for movement.
She was in there. She was hiding, but she was in there.
And it wasn't hard to imagine why the hell she was hiding. Daryl winced at the injuries on her body. Anyone would hide from them.
He had yet to ask Merle how damn long she'd been missing, but it looked to him, too, that she'd been sustaining these injuries for a long damn time. They were in various states of healing, and some of them looked to have been there for ages.
Scars. He knew a thing or two about them. Merle did too. Everyone would someday.
"Not askin' for a whole damn lot," Daryl said. "Somethin'. Tell me I ain't wastin' my damn time. Tell me I didn't waste my damn breathe draggin' your ass all the way here. You supposed to be some kinda good damn Ma? Give me some damn sign you comin' back for ya kid. Ain't leavin' her damn ass…bailin' out on her. Disappearin'."
He muttered to himself to keep himself company. He didn't genuinely expect the woman to respond, but there was no one else to talk to and no one that would have listened to him, or anyone else he was now apparently affiliated with, with any more interest than the unconscious woman.
Because around here? Around here they thought they knew him. They thought they knew him and they thought they knew Merle.
And before Merle had showed back up in his life some odd number of hours ago? He was good around here. He was good because they could get him to do what the hell they wanted him to do. He was good because he could do the heavy lifting. He was good to do their dirty work.
He was good enough to do for them.
But he wasn't good enough for them.
And even less so now.
The more that Daryl thought about it, forcing droppers of water and broth alternatively down the woman's throat, the angrier he got at the whole damn situation.
He didn't have shit when the world went to hell. He had his brother, a rusted out piece of shit truck, his brother's motorcycle, the weapons that they had in their tin can shithole, and a ridiculous stash of drugs that made Merle so damn unbearable that Daryl sometimes preferred the company of the Walkers over him when he was strung out.
And this group?
Rick?
He'd managed to take part of that away.
And he wanted to be best friends with Daryl. He wanted to call him brother. He wanted to use him for his dirty work and he wanted Daryl to carry around his weight while he was mourning the wife he'd treated like shit for half the time that Daryl had known him…whether or not she'd been someone that Daryl would have never wanted as a wife himself.
But Rick showed him that he killed best friends over wives he treated like shit. He treated wives like shit over best friends he killed. He had so much respect for "brothers" that he thought nothing of handcuffing one to a roof and leaving him there for dead.
When you weren't any good anymore? You were disposable. He didn't give a damn, and maybe they hadn't realized it, but Daryl had. He didn't give a damn. Nobody gave a damn.
And they didn't give a damn about this woman or her kid either.
"Wake up!" Daryl yelled, putting his lips close enough to the woman's ear that if she wasn't completely deaf she had to hear it…no matter where she was. He didn't even care that the burst of sound echoed through the prison or that he thought he heard Rick's kid cry down the way where they were all sleeping…safe from the four of them by nothing more than distance and their ignorance that if they gave a damn about them enough to do anything, he and Merle would have likely killed the whole damn lot of them by now.
Daryl shook the woman slightly and then realized what he was doing. He realized that he couldn't take his rage out on her. He wouldn't take his rage out on her.
That had been the promise that he and Merle had both made to their mother, even if she'd never heard it. They wouldn't take their anger out on a woman. They wouldn't treat a woman worse than an animal, just because they could.
If either of them ever lived to see the day that they had a "wife" to call their own? They wouldn't treat her like they'd seen him treat their mother.
Daryl took his hands off the woman in front of him. Rested her back on the bed, her belly fuller of the liquids now than it had been before, and got up to pace the small space in the cell. He lit a cigarette for himself and smoked it as he paced, not giving a damn where the ashes fell.
He wanted to be angry at her because she wasn't fighting. He wanted to tell her that weakness gets you no damn where and if you want to survive anything you have to man the fuck up and fight…fight back.
But he knew she was fighting. He knew she wasn't weak. If she was, she wouldn't be breathing right now.
And she was still breathing. She was still fighting. Even as the day wore on and the morning crawled closer, she was still alive.
Whether or not he cared.
