Chapter 10: Naked

So much of her life now was defined by loss.

Carol didn't have a name for the hollow, tattered feeling that lived deep in her throat, below her tongue. She didn't have a name for the stillness that came from riding on a truck seat that was too still after the deep, healthy thrum of the motorcycle. She didn't have a name for the weird satisfaction that came from forcing her knife into a walker's skull, all her fingers bruised on the edges from the brass knuckle handle of her new blade. She didn't have a name for the contradiction of feelings that welled up every time Daryl didn't jump between her and a threat.

She was going crazy.

Or maybe, they just needed a whole new language of suffering for a world filled with the insatiable dead. The way Eskimos had a thousand words for snow.

Normally, Daryl's anger burned off quick. Sometimes, if it had been bad enough, he'd work up to apologizing. But maybe nothing in this world could be normal for more than a second. Because after their argument about what he risked to bring home that deer, he didn't forgive her.

She didn't go to the bike the next morning, because his posture was so whip-taut she was afraid to. Instead, she just got in with Glenn and Maggie and every day that went by, Daryl got quieter with her, and louder with everyone else.

His temper had a rhythm to it. He'd say something mean and true, hit something or walk it off, and then she'd push right back into his life. This time, she didn't push, because she needed the space to think. To try and decide if she wanted more with Daryl, the way Rick and Lori seemed to think she did. Did it need to be romantic, between them? What they had wasn't really about sex or kissing, though her body seemed plenty interested in those things when he was around.

When she tried to examine her feelings, the thing that hurt like a wound in the base of her throat was that she wanted to be important to someone. She hadn't ever been important to anyone but Sophia, and what child had a choice but to love her mother?

She wanted to be something. Mean something to someone. But what she already had with Daryl was more than she'd had in so long and he was so broken himself that it was very precarious. One touch, one little moment of eye contact and he'd gone running off in the forest for a day and a half and nearly gotten himself killed.

They were all walking the razor's edge of survival here. Any tiny little imbalance could throw them off. But relationships could steady them, too. Glenn had come into his own after he found Maggie. And after Sophia died, Carol would have given up if she wouldn't have been so worried about Daryl. Them together could be a good thing, if she followed what Rick said and she was very careful and took it slow with him.

If there was one thing she knew about Daryl Dixon, it was that he needed more love in his life.

But she needed to be sure that "more" was something he wanted, and communication wasn't exactly his strong point.

On the third day after the deer, he scouted very far ahead and found them a mansion with a pond out front. A house with water nearby was nearly a holiday. Bathing, laundry, a fire-and-boiling party that always led to wistful s'mores jokes and Carl finding ridiculous things to toss on the fire just to see how they'd burn.

They burned exactly like things on fire. Carol never had the heart to tell him that they were all the same.

But today, a house to camp in before dark and water nearby didn't get the joy tingling in her throat like it did for the others. After they boiled enough water, she followed Lori and Beth down to the pond with a heavy heart and a big sack of dirty clothes that people had shucked off with no trace of modesty.

Carol took off her jacket and shoes and rolled up her pants. She pulled the pistol Daryl had given her out of the back of her pants and laid it on the ground. With the other hand, she rubbed the bruised place it left against her spine, oily grit building up behind it. It would be nice to have a real holster, if they could ever find one that fit.

She checked the forest behind the pond, then waded into the freezing water with the other women. She would kill for a full-body bath, but it was terrifying enough to just take her shoes off these days. If she had to run, she'd be so slow without them.

They started to splash off, washing quickly and shiveringly under and around their clothes.

"I can't take it anymore. I'm going all in." Lori whipped her shirt off and threw it toward the shore. Her bra flew after it.

Beth's eyes widened and she giggled.

Carol eyed the goosebumps already breaking out across her friend's skin. "Better hurry." Her jeans were clinging to her legs with old sweat, and she clenched her teeth, skinning out of her shirt. She dropped it right in the water. It needed a wash as bad as she did. Her feet were already numb but she stayed in the water and scooped water into her armpits, flushed it along her arms. Next to her, Lori squeaked and shivered as she bathed. Carol grinned, her nerve endings tingling with life for the first time this week. With the next splash of frigid water over her short hair, she cried out, her abs clenching.

"Shh!" Beth warned, but she was laughing. "You two are crazy!"

"But we're cleeean," Lori sing songed.

It was true. Her skin felt like her skin again, without layers of dirt and sweat and blood clinging to her and weighing her down. Carol glanced once at the stiffness of her graying, bloodstained bra, and then she reached behind her back and popped the clasp, the bumps of her spine scraping her fingers.

Even with the deer, they hadn't had much food lately.

She dipped the bra into the lake, squeezing water through it with numb hands. It was disgusting, really, but she didn't have a backup. And who would see it anyway? There was no one to care what she wore under her clothes.

Her hands locked hard on the ball of sodden fabric, sadness dragging at her again until she couldn't even think about wading out of the pond, much less getting up tomorrow morning. "Lori?"

"Uh-uh-huh?" the other woman chattered, wringing out her bra and dashing for shore. She threw on her husband's dirty shirt out of the laundry pile, rubbing her arms for warmth.

"What you said the other day? About…" She trailed off without saying his name. "About how you didn't know what we were, but we were something."

Beth shot a covert peek at her as she waded out of the lake, her whole slim teenaged body trembling with the cold. Carol splashed after the younger girl, her feet numb and her torso headed for the same result. Usually, she didn't care to bathe in front of the others but today she already felt so raw and naked that being without her shirt hardly even registered.

Lori sent her a quick, sharp look. "Of course I remember."

"Why'd you say it?" Carol asked. "I mean, how could you know that he—"

There was no sound after she broke off. Not splashing, not even birds. Seemed like the whole forest behind the pond had gone silent.

"Because I was thinking I might— But I don't want to— Especially not if—" Carol coughed, all the vocabulary she'd learned in her whole life suddenly getting caught up in her throat. She didn't want to say any of it in front of Beth, and more than that, she didn't want to think it. It felt like too much hanging out in the open; vulnerable in this world of intense cruelty, this world that delighted in taking everything away.

Lori looked at her. "You really don't know?"

A creaking moan came out of the forest.

She looked that way, and the walker came reeling out of the trees surprisingly fast. It was the closest to her, and Beth and Lori were both between her and her gun. If she went after the weapon, the walker would grab them first.

She leapt forward, her cold-numbed fingers tangling in the snap that would release her knife from its sheath. It came free just as the walker grabbed her, its skeletal hands digging with heedless strength into her thin arms. It didn't care what part of her it held, just wanted to haul her in toward its teeth, but now she couldn't get her knife high enough to reach its head. She stabbed at anything she could reach and the walker didn't even flinch. It had a hole in its cheek, its tongue caught through that instead of coming out through its mouth and even as she kept struggling, Carol couldn't stop staring at the wrongness of it.

Next to her, Lori screamed, and walkers piled out of the forest. Beth went down under one of them, sending up a spray of water. Terror bolted through Carol as, in an instant, the odds went from manageable to certain death.

"Daryl!" she screamed, the word tearing at her throat with its sheer volume.

Then, she made herself go limp. It was a ploy from early in her marriage, to trick Ed into dropping her so she could run. That was before she realized that running just meant he'd beat her twice as hard and she learned to endure instead.

The walker didn't drop her, though, just toppled dumbly when their combined weight hit a tipping point. Its chin cracked her in the eye when they fell. She grazed her own arm with her knife, stabbing blindly because she couldn't wait for her vision to clear. Not with diseased teeth that close. Wetness splattered her face, freezing rocks ground into her bare back, but the growls and snarls of the walker just got louder so she must not have struck home. She tried to blink burning blood out of her eyes, and suddenly her knife arm was free. She drew it back and then the walker's weight lifted off her.

The walker went flying, hitting the ground a few feet away and sliding. Daryl hurtled over her without finishing it off, and sent a crossbow bolt into the brain of the walker wrestling with Beth. He threw his crossbow over his shoulder and ripped his knife from his belt. He grabbed the last walker by the hair, jerking its head back from where its teeth had been about to close on Lori's cheek. He rammed the long knife in through its temple.

Carol tore her gaze from him and hauled her bruised body up, meeting the walker with the ruined cheek as it came crawling back toward her. She kicked it onto its back, stabbed neatly through its eye socket, then looked for more.

One smaller one, a child. Her stomach twisted, but it was heading for Beth where she lay in the shallow water, still struggling to get out from under the body of the walker Daryl had killed.

Carol re-gripped her knife and told herself it was no different. It wasn't a child, any more than the taller ones were people. It was just death, staggering on two dead feet. She had to do this.

A bolt pierced the tiny walker through the back of the head.

She let out a little breath of relief when it fell, her knees going weak.

Daryl caught her as she reeled. She flinched in surprise and left-over adrenaline and they both stumbled, going to their knees in the rocks. He dropped the crossbow, rubbing blood frantically off her arms so he could check for wounds beneath. She jerked as his hand shoved blood off her breast, grazing her cold-hardened nipple.

"You bit? You hurt?" He yanked her in, but it wasn't a hug. Instead, he peered over her back, his fingers too urgent to be gentle as he scoured her skin for scratches. She could feel the change in him the second he realized she was unmarred, and then a sound came out of him. She couldn't have named it. It was the kind of rough, thoughtless noise you made when you were injured or asleep. A visceral expellation of relief. He gripped her elbows, much too hard like he'd forgotten his own strength, and his eyes met hers.

"It's okay," she whispered. Three days had never felt so long, now that he was looking at her again.

He blinked, then paled as his eyes flicked down. "Jesus. Get dressed." He grabbed for the bag of clothes and shoved something at her, his gaze firmly on the ground now. The thing he'd handed her wasn't a shirt—it was a pair of Carl's food-stained pants. She held them up over her breasts anyway, shame sinking its claws into her.

She thought she might have had a good body, once, back in high school when the boys seemed interested. But now, her ribs stuck out like ugly stripes, her skin grayish with cold and slashed with scars. Her breasts small and not as perky as they'd been before Sophia. And Daryl had just seen all of that.

He reached for his crossbow, then seemed to change his mind and shucked his jacket and vest instead, dropping them in her lap. "Dry clothes," he said to Beth as she waded out of the pond. " 'Fore the shock wears off and you get cold." He threw a questioning look at Lori, and when she nodded that she was okay, he swept up his weapons and went off.

They were all quiet for a minute, shaky from adrenaline and cold.

"Should we go back to the house?" Beth asked in a small voice.

Carol stood up, pulling on Daryl's jacket and vest over her bare breasts. "These clothes aren't going to wash themselves, and it's not like we'll get a better place than this." She grabbed the child walker by its ankles and hauled it out of the water. "Help me with this one?" she said to Lori. The other woman stared at her for a minute before grabbing one leg of the larger walker and helping her clear the water.

Carol shoved the pistol into the back of her pants. It would gouge her back when she bent over to do the washing, but she had learned her lesson about keeping it close. Three steps might as well be the full width of North America away, once walkers attacked.

"Go on and change into your dry clothes," Carol said to Beth.

The blonde pointed out into the woods with one bluish-tinged, shaking hand. "Can't. Daryl's still there."

Carol looked and saw the dark back of his shirt through the trees. He was walking even faster than normal. A good ways off but paralleling them, not moving further away. As she watched, he turned and paced back the other way. Always keeping turned away from the pond, but there. Within shouting distance.

"He's watching out for us," she told the younger girl without looking away from him. She hugged his coat a little closer around herself.

"Go ahead and change," Lori said. "If he accidentally catches a glimpse, he'll be more embarrassed than you will be." And then, to Carol's surprise, she laughed. "I thought he was going to puke out of pure nerves when he saw you were topless."

Carol's stomach curdled and she turned away, busying herself with wringing out her dropped shirt and bra, then locating the dry clothes she'd brought down to put on. She took off Daryl's jacket, keeping her back to the forest as her shoulders curled inward and she hurried to cover herself. It felt sluttish to go without a bra, but hers was wet. And what did it matter? It's not like Daryl would be looking, not now that he knew what she really looked like.

Ed had always told her how skinny and bland her body was. How ridiculous it looked when she tried to wear push up bras or flattering shirts. Like putting lipstick on a pig, he'd said. Just another reason nobody'd ever want her but him.

He may have been an asshole, but he'd been right about that. In the movies, when men saw girls they liked bathing, their eyes would get wide and hazy with desire. All Daryl had done was shove her away and tell her to get dressed.

She folded his jacket away and put on her own.

Thank goodness this happened before she could make some kind of move on him. He did care about her. That was obvious since he'd been utterly frantic when he thought she'd been bitten, even though both Lori and Beth had closer calls than her. She'd just let her own fantasies cloud her judgment so that she thought his caring was about more than friendship.

She bit the inside of her lip, her back hunching more as she chose the most soiled pieces of laundry to wash, and tossed the lighter stuff to Beth and Lori. She felt filthier than the clothes when she thought of how she'd almost forced herself on Daryl. He was so sweet, so innocent in so many ways. And she'd nearly put him in the position of having to tell her that he didn't want her to touch him like that. He'd made it clear that he was uncomfortable with physical contact and she'd done it anyway, like she knew better than he did what he wanted.

You want it. Don't you go squirming like a virgin, pretending like you don't.

Ed's remembered voice was so loud in her head she almost didn't hear Lori, asking if she was okay.

Carol looked up. "I'm fine." She forced a smile.

The other woman reached over and gently brushed a tear off Carol's face. "It was scary," Lori said. "None of the men are around, so don't feel like you have to pretend it's just another day at the races. Just because you did the right thing and fought back doesn't mean it wasn't scary."

Carol nodded, the tears falling unchecked now. Shame streaked muddily over her every thought and she didn't dare to check behind her to see if Daryl still paced the woods, protecting her despite his discomfort at having been forced to see her without clothes.

"Some things never change," she whispered. "You learn to fight, and you feel different, but…some things just stay the same."

#

The mansion had a garden before the turn, and the cellar had enough Mason-jarred peaches, string beans and pickles for two whole days of meals, for everyone. They made a strange feast, all together, but nobody wanted to pass up a single novel flavor.

Carol took a little bit of all of them, for the nutrition, but she didn't taste a bite.

Fortunately, the dining room table was full, so nobody commented when she perched on the bottom of the stairs to the second floor instead. Her back and knees ached from bending over the pond, her joints sore from so much cold water. And the twisting in her stomach had nothing to do with any of that.

Daryl came into the living room, gobbling pickles straight from the jar. When he saw her, his steps hitched and then he turned and hustled back into the loud, boisterous dining room.

She struggled to swallow her bite and finally gave up, spitting a slimy chunk of peach back into the bowl.

A minute later, Daryl came back out of the kitchen, striding as fast and purposeful as if he were headed to kill a walker. He had the pickles clutched in one hand, but he wasn't eating anymore. He sat down next to her, making the step jump beneath both of them. She cringed away from the tension radiating off him.

They both stared at the far wall.

"I wasn't watchin'," he said abruptly. "I know when ya go down to do laundry, you take a bath, usually. So I wasn't watchin'. I was just in the yard, so I heard when ya yelled and I ran. That's why I got there so fast."

"Trust me," Carol muttered. "I didn't think you were."

"Oh." His fingers tapped against the jar of pickles as he seemed to consider her words. Then he sat back, took out a pickle and took a big chomp.

She stared down at her bowl, the food still not looking edible even now that Daryl had relaxed some. "Sorry I had to call for you. I was going to take care of it, it just caught my by the arms and I couldn't get my knife up high enough."

"Saw that." He sucked pickle juice off his fingers. "I can show you how to twist your arms away, when they get ya like that. Used to do it to my daddy when I's small, so I could run off. He was big but dumb, like the walkers. C'mon." He set down his pickles and nodded toward the empty living room. "May as well show ya now."

He'd have to touch her in order to show her how to break a grip. Her shoulders curled in, her chest hollow and brittle. She could feel her soiled bra like a spotlight burning beneath her shirt, as it cupped her sagging breasts.

"No, you don't have to. You've had to do enough for me today." If she practiced with him, she'd have to look at him, and she was afraid she'd see in his face the disgust of knowing what her naked body was like. It was bad enough he was being nice to her, so innocently being a good friend like he had no idea she had been half-planning to try to push him into being more.

" 'S no trouble," he protested. "I don't mind."

When she didn't respond, he bumped her with his shoulder. Very soft, in his own little Daryl hug.

Tears hit the back of her eyes and she snapped to standing, all the things she could never have suddenly flooding up her throat like she was drowning on a sea of her own stupid desires.

"I'm tired," she managed to get out. "Thank you, for what you did. I'll see you in the morning."

She fled up the stairs without looking back.

Author's Note: Ack! That was sad! So many obstacles to love for these two damaged people. In happier news, I finally found a place in a later chapter to write a scene explaining the origin of the poncho! Now that I've gone to all that trouble, someone's going to tell me that the poncho was seen in Season 2 and I'm going to cry.

And while we're on show trivia, does anybody out there know the answer to this? In Season 2, after they find Sophia's walker corpse and Daryl's yelling at Carol and she flinches…is it because he stepped in quick or did he actually raise his hand to her? I really can't tell from clips and I don't know if they ever clarified in interviews, but I'm kind of curious because I reference that moment a lot in my fics. Plus, you guys are such an amazing, knowledgeable group of fans I just can't help but mine you for your collective wisdom.