AN: I'm so happy that you seem to be enjoying this! I'm loving all your reactions!
I'm back to work and regular life tomorrow, but I'll update when I can.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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"Two bedrooms," Daryl said. "I'll keep watch. You can each take a bedroom."
"You didn't sleep last night," Carol said. "You have to sleep. I'll take watch."
"I can relieve Carol when she's ready," T-Dog said.
They all sat in a circle on the floor in the living room. The house had a small fireplace, but it also had an axe and a stone for sharpening the axe—both items that Daryl intended to pack into their trucks—so he'd cut some wood that was small enough to fit into the small fireplace and provide them with both light and warmth. Searching the house and yard, Carol had also found some pots that she wanted to lay claim to, a grate off an old grill, and some utensils. T-Dog had found two cement blocks outside for Carol's makeshift cooking surface, so they were practically as prepared at one stop as they had been at the house where they'd slept the night before.
Not to mention, they had full intentions to raid the closest and clear the beds of blankets.
At least they were already living up to Daryl's expectations that they could do as well as they had been doing.
They'd brought the full pot in where Carol had cooked the meal. She'd made good use of the rabbit that Daryl had managed to snag, the three squirrels he'd brought in for good measure, and some assorted noodles and vegetables they gleaned from the pantry. The recipe had likely never graced the pages of any pre-turn cookbook, but it was about the best meal that Daryl could remember having in a while.
The best part, perhaps, was that there was nobody standing around them as they ate to practically count the spoonfuls that they took in. Daryl reached for the ladle that was floating in the pot and fished around. He caught several hunks of meat and some of the vegetables before he drained out a little of the juice. Putting his bowl down on the floor, he reached his other had out toward Carol and waved his fingers at her when she didn't immediately hand him the bowl.
"I have plenty," Carol offered.
Daryl waved his fingers at her again.
"Lil' more ain't gonna hurt'cha," he offered.
She sighed, but she did hand him the bowl. He smiled to himself. He liked being able to win arguments when they mattered to him. He filled her bowl and passed it back to him. He dropped the ladle back in the pot.
T-Dog laughed.
"You ain't gonna fill my bowl for me?" T-Dog asked.
Daryl nodded toward the pot.
"There's plenty there," he said, starting to eat from his own bowl again. "Get what'cha want. Ain't got nobody's name on it."
"But you're serving Carol," T-Dog said. There was nothing really accusatory in his tone. In fact, there was something of a smirk on his lips and some amusement to his tone. Daryl wasn't sure how to answer T-Dog, though, so he simply looked at Carol and then shrugged his shoulders before returning to his own food.
Carol sighed. Her spoon clanked on the side of her bowl as she leaned forward just enough to put the bowl down.
"It's getting warm in here," Carol said.
"That's kind of the idea of the fire," T-Dog said with a laugh. "Feels good. I don't have to wear that itchy ass sweater I found. That thing's starting to stink."
"Maybe we could stay an extra day," Carol said. "If it seems safe. We could go through the clothes. I could wash some things and let them dry?"
One of the greatest things the little house had to offer was an almost secret treasure that Daryl had uncovered on his way back to the house from the wooded area. He'd run some traps and he'd decided to place a few in an overgrown part of the yard where it was likely that rabbits or squirrels might play. While he'd been burrowing around in the weeds and shrubbery, he'd found that the house had a little hand pump that was, apparently, connected to one of the many underground wells or springs that were prevalent in the area. He'd primed it with a little of the bottled water and it worked.
Given that the house had been well stocked with bottled water, Daryl assumed that perhaps the pump water wasn't the best for drinking—though he didn't know why it wouldn't be—but whoever had lived there had clearly considered it fine for the plants and other outdoor activities. The water could be boiled to guarantee it was at least as purified as some of the practical swampwater that they'd drank when practically stagnated puddles had been all they could find. It could also be used for baths or, as Carol had suggested, washing some of the clothing that was long in need of being cleaned.
"Long as it's safe," Daryl said, "nothing happens? I don't see why we can't put in a couple nights here."
"I need to start warming up some water for baths," Carol said. "I think we can get a pot—sort of on that fire."
"Put it straight in there," Daryl said. "It won't hurt it. But the water can wait until—'til after we eat. It ain't like we got a set bedtime around here."
Carol picked up her bowl and returned to eating. Daryl watched her, curious to see if she'd eat a decent amount or if she'd be so trained to stop eating that she simply would—whether or not she had food available to her. She ate well enough, though, Daryl supposed, for someone her size.
T-Dog and Daryl both finished off two helpings of the dinner, and they both praised her cooking skills—something that brought a genuine smile to her face.
T-Dog didn't ask Daryl anything else about why he'd put the food in Carol's bowl, and Daryl didn't offer any information, but he knew that eventually they'd have to tell T-Dog about Carol's little secret. Carol knew it, too. That was probably one of the main reasons that she looked so uncomfortable.
When dinner was done, Daryl carried the pot into the kitchen. They could eat on the stew through the night and the next day. Carol collected up the bowls and utensils and she washed them in a bucket and dumped the dirty water out the door.
Daryl and T-Dog had already filled a few of the plastic gardening buckets they'd found in the shed out back with water and they'd brought it up to the house for bathing. It wouldn't be a luxurious bath for any of them, but a good rag-and-bucket bath was better than no bath at all. Daryl fed their little fire and worked on the best way to warm the water while Carol finished straightening up their living area.
T-Dog found himself a spot in one of the chairs and flipped through a magazine like he might actually read it. Daryl sat down on the floor by the fireplace to keep watch over the hot water and to remove it with a fire poker as soon as he was certain it was hot enough to mix with some of the other water for baths.
When Carol was done touching everything in the living room that she seemed to need to touch, she walked to the center of the room, bent for a moment like she was studying the fire, and then she straightened up. Daryl could practically feel the nervous energy radiating off of her as she turned to face T-Dog.
"It's really getting warm in here," she said.
T-Dog laughed to himself and looked up from his magazine.
"You do have like—sixty layers of clothes on, Carol," he pointed out.
"I do," Carol said. "Maybe I'll just—take something off."
Daryl swallowed down a faint bit of amusement that he felt growing inside him. So this was how she was going to do it. She was going to see if T-Dog might just notice what she was hiding once it was pretty much laid out there in the open for him to see.
Piece by piece, Carol worked her way out of the cumbersome layers of clothing that she was wearing. It seemed like she untied, unwound, and undid thirty articles of clothing as she shucked them off and tossed them across the arm of a wooden chair that looked uncomfortable and hardly good for anything beyond holding her discarded clothes. When she had worked her way down to the bottom layer of clothing—the thin long sleeved shirt and stretch pants that she favored as long underwear and pajamas, she straightened herself up and declared, happily, that she felt much better—and it wasn't nearly as stifling.
The belly that Daryl almost worried he'd imagined for how well she hid it was even more pronounced when Carol was close to him and he felt like he didn't have to try to hide the fact that he was looking at her. More than anything, he was sincerely surprised that she managed to hide it so well with nothing more than a ridiculous amount of clothing to use as camouflage. He supposed, though, that she'd probably spent a decent amount of her life trying to make herself somewhat invisible.
Daryl glanced at T-Dog, who was still at least pretending to read his magazine, and he announced that the water would be ready soon, so T-Dog might want to get a bucket for himself so that he could mix the boiling water with his well water to take off to the bathroom that the house boasted.
T-Dog sprang into action when he was called upon to actually do something and he abandoned his magazine. He got to his feet, poured some water from one of the full buckets into one that had already been emptied, and then straightened up to bring his bucket with him for Daryl to help him pour some of the boiling water into it.
Daryl saw the exact moment when he realized that something about Carol was at least a little different than he'd simply come to expect was true.
"Ummm—Carol?" T-Dog asked.
Carol stood straight, turned to face T-Dog, and offered him a smile. Her expression very nearly made Daryl laugh, so he bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself under control.
"Yes, T-Dog?" Carol asked.
"When did you..." T-Dog started.
"Get that?" Daryl broke in. "Because that's what the hell I asked her last night."
Carol laughed to herself. Daryl could see her shoulders sag forward a little. She was relaxing. T-Dog hadn't fully come to terms with everything, and that much was clear, but at least he hadn't acted negatively.
"I guess—I got this," she said, putting emphasis on the words she borrowed from Daryl, "back in Atlanta. I'm not sure exactly when."
"That's a baby," T-Dog said.
"Good job, man," Daryl said, unable to help himself. "Now—tell me what that is?" He pointed to the pot.
"Asshole," T-Dog said. "I don't understand..."
"Someone was just gonna wait until the damn thing was borned," Daryl said. "Just sorta see if anybody noticed it."
"I wasn't," Carol said.
"What were you gonna do? You sure didn't say nothin' about it."
"What was there to say?" Carol asked. "What good would it have done?"
"It woulda put you on the priority list," T-Dog said.
Daryl felt a little pleased. At least it seemed that T-Dog was concerned about this for the right reasons so far.
"It wouldn'ta, though," Daryl said. "She's right, really. It prob'ly wouldn'ta changed a whole lot. Some way they'da found a way of—of raisin' Lori above Carol. Sayin' Carl was more important, too, because—he was already here. Lori was more important because..."
"Because she was Rick's wife," Carol said. "And I'm not Rick's wife. I'm nobody's wife. And this baby is—well, nobody's mourning its father. Myself included. So I didn't say anything because it didn't matter. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen."
"But we can help things out a little bit," Daryl said. "So—that's why we left this mornin'. I wanted Carol to get what the hell she needs. Somethin' good to eat. Enough to help—to help it grow. That's why I spent the night huntin' down that raccoon. Gettin' it ready for breakfast."
T-Dog laughed to himself.
"That was why you went all gangster and pulled a knife on Rick," T-Dog said. "I have to admit, that kind of made my morning. He'd just come around to collect meat from Glenn and I."
"Like alms from the damn poor," Daryl said.
"I was pissed," T-Dog said. "I would've eaten faster if I'd have known they were just about to wake up."
"So now you see why we had to high tail it outta there," Daryl said. "Shit's been comin' a long time, but this was it. The final straw."
"Yeah—yeah," T-Dog said. He seemed to muse over everything for a long moment. Then he hummed and nodded his head. "I get it," he said.
"I understand if—you don't want to stay with us," Carol said. "I know you're tired of dealing with Lori and—and pregnant women in general. You didn't want to run away to deal with another one."
T-Dog laughed to himself.
"One that I didn't even know was pregnant for—damn—it's been a while that you been hidin' that," T-Dog commented.
"Point is that we ain't gonna make you stay," Daryl said. "You wanna go—you free to go at any time. This ain't some kinda Hotel California shit where you can't never leave."
"But if you want to stay," Carol said, "we'd like to have you. And I promise that I'll do my best not to be a burden on you—or Daryl."
T-Dog looked at Daryl. Daryl couldn't read what was behind the man's expression. T-Dog finally nodded his head.
"That was the best meal I had in a while," T-Dog said. "And I didn't have to fight for a chance at one of the beds. I don't care if you're pregnant. I don't care—I don't care about whatever's going on. It's all cool with me. As long as we keep to what we agreed to. We all put in, we all take out. And we all help each other whenever, you know, whenever any of us needs help. With—anything. Whatever that might end up being."
"Sounds fair to me," Daryl said. "That sound alright to you, Carol?"
She was smiling to herself. Daryl wasn't sure if there might be at least a little dampness in her eyes that was making them sparkle in the firelight the way that they were. She nodded her head.
"It sounds wonderful to me," she said. "T—I checked. There's soap and towels in the bathroom."
T-Dog accepted her response and brought his bucket to Daryl for Daryl to make the transfer of some of the boiling water before he poured more water in the pot to warm for whoever was second to bathe.
Carol walked over to the door and looked out of it. She surveyed the yard, probably looking for Walkers. She leaned back against the door, arms folded across her chest and just above the innocent bump that she could leave open to view for once.
She looked lighter now that T-Dog knew her secret, too. She looked happier as she looked out into the darkness and searched for any signs of movement.
And she looked every bit as beautiful, in the flickering light from the fireplace, as she ever had. But Daryl wouldn't tell her that.
They all had secrets, after all.
