August 9, 2010

~*~ DD ~*~

Today's run ended up being one where Daryl is completely grateful there's plenty of willing hands to take over and unload both the fish they caught and the fuel and supplies. He's exhausted as he pulls the truck to a halt, and Sophia's been asleep on Zach's shoulder for the past half hour. They were cut off from an easy return by a herd moving northwest, thankfully well out of range of the Homestead, but he made the decision to lead the dead on a chase around to the west side of the damned lake rather than risk they might somehow shift and follow the noise. They weren't in any danger from the shuffling mass, but instead of arriving back just before supper, it was now getting closer to dusk.

His first sign that something's off kilter here is when Patricia is herding the rest of his crew away toward one of the tents for their supper, her expression solemn as she even tugs Sophia away. "Merle needs to talk to you up at the house. Everything's okay, but it's a family matter." She catches his glance toward Sophia. "Adults. You can fill her in later about what you think she needs to know."

Sophia looks worried, so he musses her hair. "Go on, Pipsqueak. If it's not okay, we'll make it so."

She looks uncertain, but follows Patricia obediently as he heads for where his brother is standing on the front porch and waiting.

"What happened, Merle?" This careful shit is worrying him, especially after the extra time on the road today.

Merle clears his throat. "Abby finally talked about her mama dying. It was pretty rough."

"Thought she might eventually talk to Carol if no one else." Carol certainly always managed to make him feel a little pocket of calm safety anytime he was around her.

"It wasn't Carol." Merle glances back toward the house. "Was Lori."

"What's she doing hanging around Abby? She's supposed to be with family if I'm not here." Lori Grimes is too lackluster in looking after her own kid, in his eyes, to be responsible for Daryl's.

"She heard something from Carl when she was playing a game with Jazz and some of the other kids this afternoon. She came upstairs to get a snack and went off to find Lori instead when she realized Lori was working in my office."

He starts to go past his brother to find his daughter, frustrated with the conversation, but finds himself halted by Merle's hand on his bicep. "Daryl, her mama had some sort of miscarriage and it's most likely why she was sick and died like she did. From what Carol and Lori could suss out, she was still first trimester, so Ethan's coworkers didn't know yet, but Abby did, apparently."

"So why all the fuss keeping me out here to tell me?" It's horrific, and despite all the bad blood between him and Carrie, he would never want her to die like that. He can't imagine how much grief Abby's been keeping locked up. She always wanted a sibling, but it never happened in the five years he was married to her mother.

"Because you haven't made your distaste for Lori any secret, baby brother, and your little duckling is imprinted on her right now something fierce because she found out Lori's pregnant. They're sitting inside watching a movie, and if you're gonna be pissed about the fact that I think you need to let her spend time with Lori, neither of them is up to witnessing it."

"What the hell, Merle? The woman can barely keep up with her own kid. I'm not putting mine off on her. And pregnant? That's just another mess at her feet, ain't it?"

"Daryl." It's not often he hears that sort of bite in Merle's tone, not toward him, and he stiffens, still held in place by the hand on his bicep when he starts forward. "Whatever the grudge you're nursing toward the woman, let it go. Can't have family tearing at each other. Not before, not now."

"Lori ain't family."

"Consider her however you like, but her baby will be."

"And Scout's happy about that?" He can still remember when the reality kicked in for Scout of the extent of her injuries and just what was taken from her that wouldn't heal. It was after everyone else had returned back to Georgia, just him and her in San Antonio before she was discharged from the burn unit. He couldn't even hold her through it, the burned skin still too painful.

"Scout's the one that decided that." He finally lets Daryl go, and he moves away, feeling desperate to see with his own eyes that Abby's okay.

She blinks at him sleepily from where she's tucked in between Lori and Jazz on the sectional, watching The Incredibles. He drops down to crouch directly in front of her. "Hey, Sunshine."

"Hi, Daddy." She gives him a hesitant smile. "Did Uncle Merle talk to you?"

"Yes, baby girl, he did. I'm sorry I wasn't here when you needed to talk finally."

"It's okay. Auntie Carol and Miss Lori took care of me." He glances to where his daughter has firm possession of one of Lori's hands, as if the skinny woman will escape if she doesn't hold on.

"Is that so? I'm glad they did."

She reaches out to pet his cheek and he catches her hand and holds it in contact with him. "I'm gonna be Cricket's helper when she takes care of Miss Lori's baby," she says softly.

It takes every ounce of self-control he has not to react, to stiffen up, because he knows his fragile little daughter is one of the smartest kids he knows. Even without Merle's cautionary order, he knows he can't take this from Abby. It isn't his happiness or comfort that's important here.

"I'm sure you'll be a proper little doctor then. Maybe we'll find you a lab coat and some scrubs so you'll look the part," he offers. She giggles and frees her hands from both adults, pushing around him to pull something off the coffee table behind him. It's a little photo album, a cheap one meant to keep pictures in a purse, and she opens it to show him an ultrasound.

"See, the baby's just right and happy. There's its head and arms and legs. Cricket showed me how to listen to the heartbeat too. It's a special machine and she and Miss Lori say I can keep it so I can do the checkups. I have a stethoscope too, but you can't hear the baby yet with that because it's way too little."

It sounds like a hell of a lot of decisions made before he even has the chance to be involved, but he knows everyone's been worried about Abby. The second they had an inkling of how to help her, the family probably burst into action like a kicked over ant hill to provide fixes to her problem. He's just going to have to roll with it for now, until Abby's had more time to heal.

He kisses her forehead and gives her the best smile he can manage. "It sounds like you have it all planned out. How about I go take a shower so I don't smell like a fish bucket anymore and come back to watch your movie with you?"

She nods, her attention already drifting back to the movie over his shoulder as soon as he mentioned it.

He avoids looking at Lori at all when he stands and walks away.

~*~ SW ~*~

Shane's settled into the spot he and Scout usually use for movies in the Dixon living room when she pauses short of him, handing off their drinks. "I'm gonna go check on Tihu."

She makes her way up the stairs, where Daryl disappeared as soon as Abby decided she was happy enough with Carol overseeing her bath if she got to borrow the big bathtub in the master suite. Everyone else is settling in comfortably while the teenagers bicker over the movie choice. Most here are the residents of the house, but Lori's here tonight, which is new. Rick declined the invitation, but Shane expected that. His best friend assures him he isn't angry about the baby, just adjusting, but it still weighs on him.

From the sound of it, everyone's about to get an earful, because Daryl's very clear "what the fuck do you think's gonna happen?" echoes down the hallway and into the open air of the living room in the weird acoustic trick he's noticed about any of the upstairs rooms if the doors are open. Raised voices carry like an echo chamber. Merle gets to his feet, but Cricket stops him, shaking her head.

"You know something's been festering there, brewing since San Antonio. Best to let it out."

No one looks comfortable at the idea of hearing whatever this is going to be and Cricket just gives a forced smile. "TV downstairs works just as well for movies."

Shane notices Merle's gripped the railing for the spiral stairs, obviously uncertain about Cricket's request he stay out of it. The kids are gone, but not everyone has cleared the room when it's Scout he hears now.

"You say something that stupid again, and I'm going to smack you so hard Abby'll be a grandmother when you wake up."

Daryl's reply isn't loud enough to carry, or he's far enough away from the door to muffle it, so the next thing they hear is Scout again. They're down to Merle, Shane, Lori, and Cricket.

"You can't think Lori's anything like our mother, Daryl. Lilliana wasn't capable of loving anyone, but even a blind person can see Lori loves her kid."

Lori freezes in place, her progress halted by hearing her name, and he thinks she's actually considering leaving entirely by her anxious look toward the door.

Merle looks sucker punched, reliving some past pain maybe, and Cricket steps in to wrap her arms around her father's waist. He folds her in his arms in reflex.

"It's my choice, dammit! Mine! If I get hurt, that's my choice too." Shane understands Merle's wish to intervene. Scout's distress, the words obviously do to with him and Lori and probably the baby, makes him feel sick to his stomach. Earlier, everyone seemed to take the news in stride about the pregnancy, bustling around as if it were all planned to happen exactly so. He still remembers the thrill of hearing the baby's heartbeat with the little Doppler Cricket brought to test out and then demonstrated to Abby once they knew for sure it would work so early along. The little girl's joy was infectious.

Daryl's moved back in range to be heard again. "And when she finds her someone new and decides sharing the baby's a bad idea, how're you gonna live with that?"

"She's not Carrie either." The rest of what Scout says isn't audible.

"Rather be alone by my choice. Everybody leaves. Even you did. Needed my sister and you weren't here!"

Their voices both drop again, almost muffled. He hopes it's because they're trying to comfort each other.

Cricket curses against her father's chest. "Stupid fucking therapist. Never should have listened to her saying we had to acknowledge Daryl wasn't actually our brother."

It's not the first time Shane's heard Daryl or Scout slip out from uncle/niece to siblings terminology. Daryl does it more than Scout does, using that Chamorro term for sibling like an affectionate nickname. He can only imagine how complicated it is, with Merle raising Daryl right alongside his own children, to sort out the relationship to fit society's expectations.

Merle smooths his daughter's hair. He speaks softly, explaining for Shane and Lori, since the upstairs argument seems to have subsided. "Daryl didn't know he was my brother until he was twelve. I got our father's rights terminated when I was stationed in California and adopted him. Thought him thinking I was a dumb sixteen-year-old father was better than telling him our father beat our mama to death and left him abandoned with her body. If I'd never come back to Georgia and put him in range of the old man again, maybe I would have never had to tell him."

Lori's got her mouth covered with one hand in a way Shane knows means she's trying not to cry.

Cricket lets Merle go and goes to wrap Lori in her arms. "This isn't on you, Lori. Daryl's been hurting a long time and just when we thought he was getting over losing Abby, Scout got hurt. I don't even think Daddy was as terrified as Daryl when we saw what she survived. The scars are so bad, but the burns... I was afraid then, if we lost Scout, we were gonna lose Daryl too."

"They're close, but that close?" Shane says. Thinking Rick was dead gutted him, but he grabbed his lifeline by focusing on Lori and Carl.

"She nearly died to protect him once, Shane. I don't think he'll ever see that as repaid. And that thing she does, where she touches along a pulse point when she's being affectionate? She thought he was dead and was too young to know how to check. It's been a nervous habit of hers about people she loves ever since."

Merle sighs. "Spent enough on that expert therapist to put her kid through college. All she could do was keep repeating to set boundaries and acknowledge the past. They got worse, not better. Took all the kids to Guam for a year and stayed with their extended family. Nobody there knew what happened, and the culture there is changing and Westernizing, but they still value the relationship between siblings, especially a brother and sister. Might have been best to stay on the island, but I got a job offer back home and was still naive enough then to think their mother might wake up one day and want her kids again. There was no way she was ever going back to Guam once she left it."

Scout appears in the open part of the hallway. She looks haunted and lost and doesn't acknowledge anyone before escaping down the stairs out the front door.

Shane follows.

~*~ CP ~*~

Carol shuts off the bathroom light and crosses to the bed. Merle's already lying down, sheet pulled to his waist and one arm behind his head. He's so lost in his thoughts he doesn't acknowledge her right away and actually seems startled when she brushes against him by accident.

She gives him a soft smile. "Penny for your thoughts?"

His eyes slide closed for a minute, and she aches for him after the upheaval of earlier. She missed what actually happened, being in the bathroom with Abby, who at ten was too old to need supervision but still too rattled by her losses to want to be left alone in any room. They returned to the living room to find everyone scattered and Merle looking like the walking wounded. She accepted his request to wait to explain, but she's not sure he can yet.

His voice is husky, low-pitched with emotion when he does speak, eyes still closed. "Every time I think they've healed past Lil's neglect, I find out something's just ripped right past the scars and wounded them again."

"Scout and Daryl?" Cricket seemed distressed, but more of a reaction to Merle's emotions than anything of her own. But then, the bits she's pieced together of the checkered history show the younger three kids led relatively normal, stable lives.

"I never realized he was angry at her. He always seemed so proud of what she was doing, serving her country." He opens his eyes, rolling to face her. "We were all terrified when we went to San Antonio. The odds were so low on survival at first. I even called her mother. Lil lives two hours from the burn center and wouldn't come even when I told her our girl might be dying. That's who I married, and it took me years to realize the damage she was doing to them. I sometimes wonder if I ever would have woken up if my father hadn't got out of prison and forced me to learn exactly what went on in my own home when I wasn't there."

Carol feels sick. With Ed, as terrifying as it was, there was never a time when she didn't know every interaction he had with Sophia. She reaches out in comfort, cupping his face between her hands and resting her forehead against his.

"Assholes always want to act like beating on a kid is the only way to damage one, and Lil put up one hell of a front when I was there. Daryl was her precious boy, always praised for how sweet he was to his sisters. Didn't have the first clue she started leaving Daryl to watch the girls as young as seven, best he can remember, anytime I wasn't home. Did the bare minimum to keep CPS out of the picture when I was deployed. I left them alone with her for fucking months at a time when I was in the Marines."

There's nothing really to say to that, so she just caresses his hair, letting him vent.

"I was out of town for work when the police tracked me down. Daryl was critical, Scout not a lot better, but she was alert at least. Will Dixon dead in my own kitchen floor. Lil was in goddamned Savannah, hours away. Left a twelve-year-old alone with an infant and two little girls. She almost did time for it too, but her public defender managed a post-partum depression defense. I caved to it long as she gave up her rights."

"Do you think it really was post-partum?" She's horrified for poor, young Daryl. No wonder he's hardwired as a protector of children.

"I don't think Lil is capable of loving anyone, despite years of convincing myself otherwise."

"I'm sorry." She kisses him gently and he allows it, drawing her in close. She's avoided asking in the past, since they both share the barest minimum of their particular demons in regards to their exes, but he's already hurting. "How did Jazz happen?"

"Jazz is an undeserved blessing for me being too stupid acknowledge that Lil was lying the one time she sought contact with the kids again when we came back from Guam. She did the whole song and dance. She had therapy. She was willing to have supervised visitation. All the right words, even the right actions. Only smart thing I did was not let her see the kids right away. She just found life on her own too hard. Thank God she never could handle her alcohol and didn't realize I'd grown up past the idiot eighteen-year-old kid she married. Maybe I'm a good father now, Carol, but it took me years to get here."

"She was older than you?"

"Six years older, yeah. She was a waitress at one of the cafes popular for the servicemen on the island. Exotic as hell for a Georgia boy looking to forget where he came from. Only half Chamorro. Her mama was half-Chinese, half-Chamorro and her daddy's father was an American. When the state of Georgia wouldn't give custody of Daryl to me as a single man, she offered to marry me as the solution. She wanted off the island."

Carol strokes his shoulders and kisses him again, letting it linger. "I guess I know why you've stayed unmarried so long then."

His smile is slow in coming, and bittersweet, but it's there. "I did get a really good payoff for the wait. Don't look so worried for me, Mouse. I survived it, just like you survived yours. Matching pair."

She can't help a small laugh at the image of them as a matched pair, but at the same time it's true.

Tonight's emotions are just one little bump in the road to fitting all the Dixon pieces back together properly.

~*~ LG ~*~

"Quit acting like I'm going to bite you, woman." Daryl huffs as he finishes putting bedding on the futon in Jazz's room.

Lori's still baffled by the fact that she's let herself be convinced to stay with Abby, after the little girl panicked when she realized Lori was leaving the house to sleep 'outside'. But it seems that Daryl cracking enough to ask her to stay in the house is as far as he can manage to go tonight. Leaving her alone in the room with Abby isn't on the agenda.

She doesn't think she's ever seen a man so brittle or wary of another human being who hasn't actually harmed them. His daughter is curled at her back, contentedly asleep, but she's not sure sleep's on the agenda tonight for her despite knowing she needs it.

She shouldn't start any serious discussion with the girl asleep in the room, but then again, maybe it's the best time to address what she overheard. "I'm not going to hurt Scout."

He drops his pillow with a thump and turns to face her. She thought she's seen him angry at the quarry, when everything in the world seemed to irritate him except the four children, but it's nothing to now. He's so tense she thinks he'd break a bone if someone pushed right now. "Ain't like you'll plan it, but you will. Won't just be Scout who'll get hurt. You don't have the ability to be alone. You ever even been?"

She has to shake her head in order to be honest. "Rick and I grew up together, dated in high school, got married when he graduated college."

"And just as soon as you though he was gone, you couldn't stay alone then either."

"It wasn't like that. Haven't you ever just needed to let someone make you feel something other than grief?"

It's like she flicked a switch. The angry stance disappears and he closes off so fast there's no emotion at all she can determine. She doesn't think he's stopped being angry at her very existence on the planet, but she's still not sure what she's said to cause the change. He's about the same age she is and was married for a number of years too. Surely, he understands.

"No."

He turns away, lowering himself onto the futon with his back turned toward her.

She tries again. thinking about what he said about not just Scout getting hurt. "Daryl, I won't hurt her. Not Scout, and certainly not Abby."

Just when she thinks he's going to ignore her entirely, he speaks. "We'll see."

Deciding she's gotten as far as she can, she settles in herself, trying to will herself to this being no worse than sharing quarters on the road.

It still takes her hours to fall asleep, and she's fairly certain Daryl's awake just as long.

~*~ SW ~*~

"Scout?" Shane calls out softly when he wakes up alone in the bed. She's hard to spot in the darkened cabin at first, she's curled up in such a tight little ball.

When he first got to the cabin, she hadn't wanted to talk at all. She turned the maelstrom of emotion into intense sex that would leave them both carrying marks of fingers grasping a little too hard and his back scored with nail marks. But it seemed to work to bring her out of the state she worked into due to the old memories. It took her two hours to stumble through what she needed to say about her mother. They'd fallen asleep with him wrapped around her for once.

She doesn't answer right away and he leaves the bed to go to her. She's trembling, skin clammy, and it takes him a few seconds to realize her lack of response isn't intentional.

"Scout. It's Shane. I'm going to pick you up." He reaches for the fleece blanket on the back of the couch and wraps her in it, hauling her into his arms, trying to remember all she told him to do if she dissociated. He wishes he knew where her mind is, the flashback more real right now than he is.

Keep her warm and talk. She likes touch. He can do that. He tells her all about his Grandma Jean, about the time he stole the principal's car, about the time he and Rick got busted with a purloined six pack by Lori's uncle the cop when they were thirteen. It feels like hours, but he thinks it's really only about fifteen minutes when she finally makes a small movement and turns her face toward him.

"Shane?" Her voice is slurred, as if her tongue can't quite manage the single syllable of his name.

"Yeah, baby, I'm right here. I gotcha."

"Okay." She lets him carry her to the bed and he puts her down gently. "Don't leave," she mumbles.

"I'm not. Not ever." He gets them both prone in the bed, not sure how she'll want to lay, but she actually manages to solve that for him by curling against his chest, her face pressed against his throat.

"I'm afraid I'll be like my mother."

Fuck. He just can't imagine Scout ever being so disconnected from any child she couldn't stand to look at them. "You won't be. You're Merle's daughter. You won't know how to do anything but love that baby."

She's quiet, but awake, her breath against his throat even and steady but too heavy for sleep.

"I love you."

"I love you too. Try to sleep, please?"

He's not sure how much time passes but she eventually sleeps. He stays awake, standing guard in case any more demons visit her nightmares tonight.