When he decides to move into one of the cells, she is there, waiting for him, a thick blanket over one arm. She stands, a figure in gentle patience with eyes that reflect this even more so, while leaning against the doorway as he unpacks his bag. He slips the poncho over the top bunk, props his crossbow against his bed near the floor, and throws his pillows against the back wall in a way he'll eventually get used to.
Once he's situated, fussing with the point of a bolt and watching her at the corner of his eye, that is when she moves to the foot of his bed. With a few calm gestures of her hands, she begins to spread the blanket out, and that is when he sees its pattern: flowers, small and close together, are all over the cloth, and the material is thicker than the grey blankets of the prison. It's familiar: like the awareness that lifts its head and yawns in his chest when she accidentally brushes her hand at his dirty boot.
"What's that for?" he asks her with a flick of the arrow in his hand, the whisper of its feathers loud to his ears over the sound of his heartbeat.
"It's for you," is her answer, and when he begins to gnaw at his thumbnail, she smiles lightly, eyes squinting. "You get cold at night. I thought you might need it."
He twitches his foot next to her hand, and her head tilts to meet his gaze. "It's your favorite," he reminds her, as if she could forget, and this time she ducks her head; and that is familiar, along with the way her hands begin to wring together, rustling the fabric.
"Because you gave it to me," she says and that yawning thing wrapped around his heart stretches out, leaving a tingle behind in his limbs. "But I have an extra blanket, and you get colder than I do, and I thought — I thought you'd might like to use it. You know," she glances at him, "if you need it."
They stare at each other, and it is a sign of how comfortable he feels with her — and how comfortable she is with him — that neither of them feel the need to look away right at that moment. He sets the arrow down, gently, his arm and hand reaching out to grasp the blanket in a fist. He ruins all of her meticulous work, the insistence of smoothing out the wrinkles in the material, and pulls it closer to him, half in his lap.
Because she is right, and she is...generous, watchful, as always. When she is on watch he wouldn't be surprised if she'd noticed how he'd reacted to the cold out on his previous perch, how the scars at his back would ache with old pains, the memory of bruises that have faded with time, and with the new ones that form every day.
It wouldn't surprise him at all, if she knew all of this, because he'd noticed it in her: the way her joints would sometimes crack the colder she'd get, the way she'd struggle to put some warmth in her thin fingers, rubbing her palms and pushing them under her arms. It was why he gave her the blanket in the first place.
But she knows this, and she was obviously returning the favor.
Daryl meets her eyes; feels his expression soften in reaction to hers. She smiles: small, and with a quiet strength, while the awareness skitters across his skin to bask in the glow that squints her eyes. He can't help but return it, and is rewarded when that smile widens, and the beat in his chest roars in his ears like a drum.
"Thanks," he says, and the rest of the world grows quiet as an entire conversation passes in silence between them.
Based off of a post on Tumblr.