AN: Here we are, another self-indulgent chapter. It's just that fluffy comes out easier when you're tired, to be honest. And it works as something of a bedtime story for me. LOL

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

111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

"You don't know it, Soph," Daryl mused, "but I'm real bad at all that kinda shit."

"I know!" Sophia said.

Daryl laughed to himself. She repeated the words a few different times, her tone becoming more and more sincere with each repetition. She didn't know what he was talking about, but she knew that the typical response to any such lament was to respond with a sincere and heartfelt "I know."

"Yeah—maybe you do know, Soph," Daryl said. "Hell—I prob'ly done somethin' like that to you at least once. An' if I ain't? Just wait. I'ma get around to it. You just give me time to fuck it up."

"I know, Daddy," Sophia said, still testing out various tones of voice. She sounded almost joyful this time. "I know," she added again, this time dropping her voice to little more than a whisper like she might be trying to soothe Daryl.

Maybe she was actually trying to soothe him. Daryl tried to check his facial expression, not sure how much his daughter might be reading there.

He talked to her about a lot of things that, honestly, he probably had no business discussing with a human as small as she was. The fact of the matter, though, was that he'd always found it easy to talk to Sophia. When she was a baby, he knew that she couldn't understand what he was saying. She always responded to him—enjoying his attention and the words they shared, even if she didn't know what they meant—and he'd appreciated the opportunity to talk about things without feeling even the slightest big judged.

Sophia still couldn't understand much of what he said, but she was starting to pick up on a great deal more.

"I gotta stop tellin' you everything," Daryl admitted.

Sophia's bottom lip rolled out Daryl and she paused in playing with the plastic boats that she was holding in her hand. She stood up in the large metal washtub that served as her bathtub and made her way to the side. She held her arms out to Daryl for a hug and he shook his head at her.

"You wet," he said. "Sit down, Soph. Play with your boats."

She didn't sit, though, and she didn't back down. Instead, she stood there with her arms spread out wide and her bottom lip protruding.

"You win," Daryl said. He leaned forward and accepted Sophia's dramatic and soggy hug. After she felt that she'd comforted him enough that he would stop saying things that she didn't like the sound of, she sat back down in her bath and gathered up her boats once more. Daryl reached over and tousled her hair.

Carol's hair was curly. As it started to grow from the very short cut that she'd favored when he first met her, it erupted into ringlets. Sophia's hair, on the other hand, was straight. It was apparently a trait she'd gotten from her biological father and, right now, it hung in straight clumps and stuck to her face. When Daryl tousled it, Sophia reached up to rake at it with her fingers. Daryl helped her and pushed it out of her face.

"It's just that it was important to her, Soph," Daryl said. "You know? I mean she was lookin' forward to it. She don't look forward to all that much. An' she was. But I just messed it up. I couldn't even let her have it. She wanted to just tell one person about the whole thing an' I just jumped right on in there an' swallowed up all of it. Took it right away. I wrecked the whole damn thing an' I can't take it back. An' now she ain't never gonna get that chance again."

"I wouldn't say never."

Daryl jumped. Carol's voice surprised him to the point that he nearly came out of his skin to run about as a wholly skeletal version of himself. Sophia jerked dramatically, too, to look in the direction from which her mother's voice had come. Peering over her shoulder, Sophia smiled a toothy grin.

"Mama!" She declared.

"Hi, baby!" Carol cooed from behind Daryl.

"How long you been there?" Daryl asked, not looking back at Carol.

"A little while," Carol said.

"I know you weren't there when she hugged me," Daryl said. "Got me all wet. 'Cause she'da called you out."

"I was behind the door frame," Carol said. She walked over and eased herself down to sit on the rug beside Daryl.

He glanced at her, half expecting her to be angry or frowning at him, but she was smiling. Her expression didn't match the way he felt at all. And maybe she could see it—maybe that was why Sophia had been trying to make him feel better—because Carol's expression changed when she looked at him. She reached her hand up and touched his forehead, brushing his bangs back. She clucked her tongue at him and leaned forward, kissing him tenderly on the forehead before she gave him something of a pained smile.

"You need your hair cut tomorrow," Carol said.

"It's fine," Daryl said.

"Sure it is," Carol said. "If I never wanted to see your eyes." She sighed. "You didn't wreck anything, Daryl. In all the time that I've known you—and certainly in all the time that I've loved you—you've never wrecked anything. On the contrary. You've made everything better."

"You wanted to tell Lori an' I just snatched that shit away from you," Daryl said.

"There's always next time," Carol said.

"You act like you know there's such a thing," Daryl said.

Carol laughed to herself.

"I don't," she said. "And there's a good chance that there isn't a next time. But—I didn't think there would be a this time, either, so I'm not willing to say never. Besides—I didn't know how to tell her. I wanted to tell her, but then I just couldn't figure out how. You came along and saved me, more than anything."

"You said you wanted to tell," Daryl said. "I done told her an' Rick both."

"And there's everybody else," Carol offered.

"Like they don't already know," Daryl said. "You know we told 'em to keep it to themselves, but I guarantee you that Lori's done run her mouth, an' once it gets out loud enough for Glenn to hear it then we might as well just stand on the damned table at dinner an' tell everyone."

Carol laughed to herself.

"But whether they know or not, they'll pretend that they don't," Carol said. "And we'll still get to tell them. And that'll be all that really matters."

Carol crawled sideways on her knees, closing the short distance between Daryl and herself. She got as close to where he was sitting on his knees as was possible, and then she leaned her head over on his shoulder.

"I'm not mad at you," she said. "But—I am upset that someone is messing with my Pookie's feelings."

Daryl's gut twisted just before it relaxed with the chuckle that he tried to swallow back.

"What the hell I tell you about callin' me that?" Daryl asked.

Carol laughed to herself.

"You don't want to be my Pookie?" She asked.

"It's a stupid ass name," Daryl said.

Carol frowned at him. At that moment, Daryl was reminded how much Sophia and Carol looked alike. He was also reminded that he was completely and utterly fucked since both of them had the ability to manipulate him with little more than an expression.

"You didn't like Baby," Carol said, her voice soft and scratchy. She swallowed and shook her head. "You didn't like—Honey, Snookums, Darling, Dear, Love."

She broke off and Daryl remembered a scene he was pretty sure he'd seen in a horror movie once. Someone reached into another person's gut, snatched out their entrails, and probably tore them out or twisted them around something. Whatever the situation had been in the movie, Daryl felt like that was what was happening to him at that moment.

Carol's eyes were suddenly damp and her frown was very sincere. She finished her commentary on the stupid pet name by shrugging her shoulders.

"I just meant—Pookie's just—you could just call me Daryl," Daryl stammered. "You're Carol and I'm Daryl. You call me Daddy, sometimes, and I call you Mama."

"That's for Sophia," Carol said, her voice barely more than air. "And—I guess—for the baby. I just wanted something—for me. Something cute. But...you don't like it..."

Whatever had reached into Daryl's gut gave a hard twist to his entrails.

"It's fine," Daryl said.

"You don't like it," Carol said.

"It's growin' on me," Daryl said. "Pookie—I mean—it's growin' on me. But—maybe you could just—call me Dixon like you do sometimes when people's around an' then, ya know, Pookie...it could be for you. Like just for you. Not for nobody else."

Carol offered him a partial smile. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek.

"Thanks, Pookie," she said, nuzzling the side of his face with her nose.

"We got an audience," Daryl said. When he rolled his eyes back toward Sophia, she had stopped playing with her boats. She was watching both of them, mouth slightly open, like they were the most mesmerizing thing that she'd ever seen. When Daryl mentioned her eavesdropping, she smiled at them and offered the both of them a perfect view of every one of her teeth—teeth that had kept them up for what seemed like an eternity's worth of nights as they slowly made their way through her gums.

"Hi Daddy," Sophia offered.

Daryl laughed to himself.

"Hi, Soph," he responded. "You are a peepin' Tom."

"To be fair," Carol said, "we are right by her bath. Besides—she likes seeing us loving on one another and, to be honest, I like her seeing it. There are worse things that she might have seen."

"Shhh..." Daryl hissed quickly to keep Carol from slipping down any long and winding road into her past. He hated even remembering where she'd been in the past. Just thinking about it was enough to bring back the excruciating gut-wrenching feeling that he'd rather do without.

"You know I don't like when you talk about shit like that," Daryl said. "Makes you sad."

"It's just the same as me not liking that you're listening to him again," Carol said. "He's wrong. He's always been wrong, and he'll always be wrong. You don't fuck things up, Daryl. You never have. And—I don't like him hanging around any more than you like you-know-who hanging around in my head."

"But you know as good as I do that they in there," Daryl said. "An' they loud."

"We just have to be louder," Carol said. "Listen, Daryl, I wanted to tell Lori, but I couldn't get it out. You helped me. And—later? After dinner maybe? We'll tell the others. Together. That way it doesn't have to be a you thing and a me thing. It can just be an us thing."

Daryl smiled at her. He nodded his head.

"If that's what you want," he said.

"That's what I want," Carol assured him. "And—I want a kiss."

"I reckon I could scrounge one up," he said.

He leaned over and kissed her. She teased him with her tongue, and Daryl growled at the jolt of electricity that her silent suggestion sent through his body.

"Gonna be a long time 'fore she goes to bed," Daryl said. "Dinner an' all first. An' you kissin' me like that."

Carol smiled at him. She winked at him.

"It'll give you something to look forward to, Pookie," she said. She put her hand on Daryl's shoulder and used him to help get herself off the floor. He offered a hand out to help steady her, but she got up relatively easy. Her knees didn't give her half the trouble that his did sometimes. "I have to go and get to work on that dinner," Carol added once she was on her feet. "Can you handle getting Princess Sophia in her jammies so she can have something to eat?"

"As good as on it," Daryl said. "Don't'cha worry, we'll be there when the dinner bell rings. Soph—tell ya Ma that we got it."

"We got it!" Sophia declared, repeating the line that Daryl had taught her with a pretty decent amount of repetition over her short life. It was the perfect way to respond to much of what Carol had to say to them. Carol laughed to herself.

"I know you do," she said as she walked out the room and left them to their task.