this place grows colder
as strong as we are
with every rope swing i struggle for air
i know i'm breathing but is it still there
are you still there
The woods are quiet.
Daryl stands just inside the treeline, staring into the frosted wood. The fog is dense enough that he can hardly see a hundred feet. A walker could be standing there - or a man with a gun.
He bites at the inside of his lip. Useless having someone on watch.
He turns slowly to head back to the house, his hands in his pockets and crossbow tucked into his elbow. He had snared a rabbit earlier, the thing so uselessly thin that he had wondered if it was even worth skinning. It hangs from his hip, bumping against his leg.
He prefers it to the idea of canned mystery meat.
The trees part. The long drive of their home stretches before him. Daryl walks quietly along the road until he's staring up at the house, searching for her face in the attic window.
But she isn't there.
The attic window is empty.
Daryl frowns. A chill curls along his spine and settles in the pit of his gut - a feeling he can't quite place. He stares at the yawning dark of the attic window for a moment longer before he ducks into the house.
He nearly bumps into Dale emerging from the kitchen.
"You seen Cal?"
"Last I saw her she was on watch."
Daryl mulls over his words and nods, sidestepping Dale to move up the stairs.
"Listen, Daryl -" Dale begins, but Daryl is already rounding the corner at the top of the landing, shooting him one last look to butt out.
Daryl heads for the attic first, stepping into the cold room, surrounded by a cloud of his own frosty breath. The attic window is ajar, the small seat they had arranged at its mouth empty.
He frowns and leaves, heading for the small closet he shares with her.
It to, is empty.
That chill quivers through him again, and he has a brief and unsettling thought that she is gone. Gone. He knows she wouldn't just leave, hopes, but he still casts a glance to where she squirrels her stuff away, hating himself for doubting her.
It remains, untouched.
But that feeling in the pit of his stomach remains.
He retreats from the room, winding his way through the house until he stumbles across Rick and Carl where they hover over their latest project - the homemade silencers courtesy of Merle.
"You seen Cal?"
Rick looks up from where he tightens a hose clamp around the end of a bottle. "I spoke with her earlier, she was on watch."
Daryl shakes his head. "She ain't there now."
Rick frowns. "What'd you mean she ain't there? Who is on watch?"
"No one. Attics empty."
"I saw her," Carl pipes up, eyes darting between them.
Both Daryl and Rick turn slowly. Carl hesitates under their scrutiny and fiddles with the pieces of metal in his hands. "I saw her leave with T-Dog."
Daryl offers to take watch. Anything to placate Rick's exasperation with Cal abandoning her post. It earns him a grateful nod and a mumbled thank you.
He sits himself in the window, tucking himself into the blanket on the chair. The drive disappears into the fog. He stares as far down the road as the fog allows. He considers the undefined and blurry shapes of the treeline and outbuildings, the sun as it fades. All things that made leaving the house not exactly a smart choice. The disadvantages were too great.
The feeling in his gut evolves. He feels something prowling there, small and insignificant, nourished further into life as the hours pass. It isn't as the sun starts dipping below the horizon and Cal and T-Dog still aren't back that he realizes what it is.
It's fear.
He knows he shouldn't worry for her, that she can take care of herself. Cal is a lot of things, but she ain't stupid. She'd survived longer than the rest of them - alone, without anyone else. She knows what the new world is like more intimately than they do.
But she'd never take unnecessary risks like marching into a blurry, shapeless world. She'd never go wandering around when there was no advantage to be had. And she'd never be out after dark unless she had run into trouble.
When the sun finally dies and the world goes dark, Daryl leaves his post.
There is blood everywhere.
The smell is thick - thick enough to coat her tongue and wash away the smell of the dead world, the cold of winter, the fog that still presses in around them.
Her foot is heavy on the pedal and she drives fast enough that even T-Dog - in shock and dying - grasps weakly at the dashboard in alarm. But it doesn't matter - his fear is unfounded. The road is open and yielding; no cars to worry about, no walkers to fret over.
The only thing she can think of is the sun falling behind the horizon, made darker by the thickness of the fog encompassing the world. The dark will slow them down - but she can't…
Her jaws tightens, her hands grip the wheel harder. Cal glances at T-Dog, at her shitty jacket soaking through with blood, at Madge's nametag as bland and dirty as the first day she shrugged that damn jacket on. It had bought them time today with how dirty and ruined it was, but he had known. Merle had known she was liar because she didn't have a single scrap of equipment or provisions.
He had attacked because she had made a mistake.
Woodbury.
She remembers finding the photo: Brandon and Jessica, Woodbury.
He was angry when he attacked. Her head pulsing at the thought of where he had caught her with his arm - his metal arm.
Let me ask you one more time, darlin'.
He had been so sure she was lying. He had baited her, waiting to see if she would keep to the lie.
And now.
Now T-Dog was bleeding out.
Her fault, she thinks. Her fault for staying. For getting close. For not wanting to be alone - not really.
She had fled the house because she let someone get close. T-Dog followed her because he was her friend.
He was hurt, maybe even dying, because he was her friend.
"Cal," T-Dog's voice breaks her from her revery, and she blinks stupidly as she realizes the light has almost completely died. She switches the headlights on, wincing at how bright they are.
A beacon.
We're right here - come and get us.
"Cal."
She glances at T-Dog, at his pale and sweating face. He leans back against the headrest, staring at her from the corner of his eye.
"You shot that mother fucker in the foot."
Cal nearly laughs - she would have if she wasn't so scared.
"Yeah."
T-Dog frowns. "I would'a shot him in the head," he slurs.
She smiles, strained.
"Maybe I should have." She concedes.
T-Dog makes a sound, a snort.
Then there is quiet.
She glances at him.
His eyes are heavy, but he's still with her. She has no idea how much blood he's lost, remembering someone, long ago, splashing a litre of red paint on the ground and telling her to not be afraid. It always looks worse than it is. It always looks like so much more than there is.
But he's pale and sweating.
"You think it'll be easy?"
She blinks, uncertain. "What?"
He swallows. "Explaining to Daryl that you didn't shoot his brother in the head?"
Cal doesn't reply.
The sun is gone now. The light is sucked from the world. It's too dark to go as fast as she can, too dangerous. She eases off the gas pedal, wincing as the mileage drops, drops, drops.
There are tracks leading past the treeline at the edge of the drive. Daryl follows them.
The wood greets him, the quiet of it winding about him - as she had taken to doing in the night. Even in a world gone to hell, the quiet encompassing him is comforting.
In one hand he carries his crossbow, and in the other a flashlight, sweeping low across the ground as he follows the tracks through the dark wood.
The tracks tell him something that Carl couldn't - they tell him how she had left the house. She had fled. She had run, darting through the trees with a desperate gait that spoke of fear or anger or something.
T-Dog's tracks followed at a more sedate pace; T-Dog's tracks were not nearly as desperate.
Daryl frowns when he comes across the barb wire fence, stepping under it with a grimace and continuing on. The tracks lead him to the road.
He checks the other side of the road and finds nothing - no tracks or any indication that they had simply crossed and continued on.
He stands in the middle of the road for a long moment, staring down the road towards town. If he hadn't found her jagged tracks he might assume she was on a supply run and head towards town.
Daryl turns back to regard the road stretching towards home.
He begins the long walk, knowing without a doubt he chose the right direction when he stumbles across the first dead walker, and then the next.
And then he finds the dead man.
At some point she realizes that he's from Woodbury - he's got to be. It happens somewhere between remembering pulling the trigger and shooting Merle in the foot, and berating herself for T-Dog bleeding out in the seat next to her.
Woodbury. He'd been so sure.
So sure she was lying.
Let me ask you one more time, darlin'.
She's so lost in the name of a faceless town, of a man she should have killed, of her dying friend that she nearly hits a walker standing idle in the middle of the road.
She hisses, swerving the truck. Another walker appears in her headlights, and the truck roars over it - a hard thunk and then the jolting of tires. She can't see it in the rearview mirror, the fog and dark are so thick.
She slows enough to right the vehicle back into the center of the road, frustrated with herself and everything about this fucked up situation. T-Dog is quiet beside her, watching as she grits her teeth and digs her fingers into the wheel and drives.
At some point the silence is unbearable enough that T-Dog lets out a gasp. "CD?"
Cal darts a glance at the play button on the CD player. She pushes it.
"Come on baby, don't fear the reaper. Baby take my hand, don't fear the reaper. We'll be able to fly."
T-Dog lets out a wheezing laugh.
Daryl stares at the body of a man only recently dead.
A man, not a walker.
Gunshot to the head.
He swallows thickly and checks the sides of the road for tracks. There is nothing.
He continues down the road, the fear spiking when he notices the blood on the ground, frozen in the coolness of winter, dark against the concrete. There is a gun on the road, abandoned. The suppressor on it is one of the first few they had made.
He feels fear spike in his chest, a pit that yawns open and begs him to leap.
He checks the sides of the road again.
It is in the frost-flattened grasses that he finds her knife, discarded. The only consolation is that it had not been ripped or cut off of her, but unbuckled and thrown aside.
Not lightly would she part with her knife, and in that familiarity he comes to understand the truth: Cal has been taken.
They take a wrong turn, ending up in the small town with the burnt out Save Lots.
Cal swallows thickly as she reverses, driving the truck down the road she's familiar with - the same road she had driven with Rick.
She chokes back a sob when she spots the turn off to the farm. She roars down the drive, uncaring whether the sound of the engine will attract walkers or people.
Daryl moves through the trees, heading towards the house with a single intention: to ask for Rick's help.
It drives him on, focuses him. His need to find her swallowing up the fear coiling in his gut and heart and soul.
As he nears the house the quiet of the wood is shattered, the darkness pushed back by two spectral lights gleaming through the fog.
Headlights, he realizes. And a truck barreling down the main drive, heading straight for the house.
There are a thousand thoughts going through his mind; of ransom; of a party of men like Randall's shitbag friends coming to steal their shit and kill them all; of Cal.
Daryl races through the wood, not knowing whether this is war.
No one sees the truck come rumbling down the drive.
But they hear it.
They go quiet, listening as the sound of wheels skid on gravel, headlights pouring in the front windows. The car door opens and there is the sound of someone running, running, running across gravel, up the steps.
Everyone is on their feet, weapons in hand, as the door bursts open. Cal, wide eyed and bloodied and stumbling, stares at them all. She gasps, her eyes sweeping the room for someone that isn't there, before landing on Hershel and Rick.
"T-Dog needs help."
It's enough to spur them on. Rick and Glenn pushing around her, Dale and Hershel and Maggie stumbling behind. Cal follows the flood of bodies, racing faster than any of them as she reaches the passenger door of the truck and rips it open.
"We need to move him - now." Hershel demands, and Glenn and Rick step in to pull their friend from the belly of the cab.
"What happened?" Rick demands as they half-carry, half-drag T-Dog towards the house.
Cal follows, hands and face and torso covered in blood.
"Merle."
The group nearly stutters at his name, but Hershel keeps them moving, pressing them into the living room where Lori drags a wide eyed Carl to the corner. Carol freezes until Hershel asks for water, cloth, anything that can help. She moves, suddenly clear eyed and ready with purpose.
They move him to the couch, settling him down. Hershel props his legs up, murmuring that it might not help with the amount of blood loss, but at this point it doesn't hurt to try.
The room is a hurricane, a tornado, a thunderstorm. Hershel and T-Dog at the eye of it.
She stares, the reality of the day finally pushing past every wall she has in place, demanding to be heard, to be felt. It floods over her, down her throat, drowning her.
She disconnects.
And falls away.
She remembers a tune. A sweet tune whistled into the evening sunset. It eases her into the dark, and she remembers a man with a kindness to his face, who had handed her the keys to his car and walked away. He hadn't had any time left. He had been on his last hour.
She had thought he was the last kindness she had seen.
She had thought he was the last true goodness in the world.
But T-Dog.
T-Dog had saved her.
He had followed her into hell.
And these people - the panic on their faces is real as they scramble to save him. As they work as a unit - no, she corrects herself, a family.
She stumbles forward as if to help.
But Lori is suddenly there, grabbing her arms and leading her away. Murmuring quietly about chocolate and a blanket and sitting down somewhere warm.
Cal stares at her, blinking from T-Dog to Lori to a man whistling a tune to a woman and her child begging, pleading, gasping for a second chance.
She nods, suddenly mute. Her hands, she realizes are shaking. And then she realizes that she's cold.
She's in shock again.
Forget what you have to lose, and fight like hell.
Cal pushes against it, trying to rationalize her way through the labyrinth of fucked up shit she remembers. She tries to push past the cop and his lovely, kind face. She tries to push past the woman and her child screaming for help. She tries to push past Merle leaving her for dead.
She tries to push past T-Dog dying.
She grasps for something, anything.
And suddenly - he's there.
His hand slips into her own. Calloused and rough fingertips gliding gently across her pulse, coiling and encompassing her.
She stares at it, at the way it is as familiar to her as her own heart. Home is no tangible place, she thinks, but the soft place in your heart where the things you love find shelter.
She looks up at him, at the careful and quiet stare, the dirt across his cheeks, the leaves in his hair. She doesn't think when she reaches up to wipe a smudge of dirt from his cheek. Her fingers are crusted with blood, but she still tries.
He watches her, but doesn't shy away.
"Daryl."
His hand is still in hers as if he knows he is her tether to the present, the now. He lifts their entwined hands to his chest, his heart a steady tattoo under her touch. And then he pulls her against him, offering her his touch.
She accepts it. She wants it. She needs it.
"Daryl." She repeats.
He tucks her crown under his chin. "Ain't gotta say nothing."
She hasn't cried since this whole thing started; she hasn't let herself stop and think and really consider what she has seen or done. She had always been decent at compartmentalizing, but now - with someone she considers a friend hurt because of her, and Daryl holding her as she imagines no one has ever held him.
She finally cries.
A/N: Anyone else do that? Hold everything in until it bursts like a dam and swallows you whole? I think our pal Cal might need to sit down and deal with some shit she's been carrying with her, but IDK.
Song: Decorate my Bones by Snow Ghosts