AN: Here we are, another chapter here.

I'm taking poetic license (a great deal of it) with this part of the show, so I'm offering my apologies to the canon purists among us.

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

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Carol was lost.

In the scramble of things, people had gone this way and that—all of them trying to survive.

They'd found each other, trailing into the cellblock, over the course of time that Daryl and Rick were cleaning up the problem in the control room. By the time Rick and Daryl had made it back, there was mostly good news. Nobody had been bitten, even though the yard had been flooded and their day had been disrupted. Nobody had been seriously injured. Lori's labor had started, but they'd managed to get her back into the cellblock. Things were touch and go with her situation, but that was because surgery, performed under anesthesia that might be outdated, without monitoring technology, and with the use of a manual respirator, was never going to be ideal.

Everyone else was fine.

Except, of course, for the fact that two of them hadn't returned.

Carol and Oscar were lost somewhere.

They'd zigged when others had zagged, and they hadn't made it back. Because of any number of reasons—none of which Daryl really heard or cared about—nobody had so much as gone looking for them.

Sophia was safe for the moment, so Daryl went without hesitation and without asking anyone else to sacrifice their safety or comfort. He took nothing more than his own weapons and a flashlight.

In the yard, he put down the remaining Walkers that shuffled toward him. He appreciated the repetitive and familiar sensation of driving his knife into their skulls and ripping it free before he moved on to the next Walker. He shoved them back, threw them down, and drove the knife into their skulls.

And he tried to figure out where Carol and Oscar might have gone.

They had been in the upper part of the prison yard. They'd both been in the same area the last time that Daryl had glanced up in that direction—moments before everything had happened—because he'd seen them talking and admiring Hershel's ability to get around with more confidence and spryness than most of them might have had if they'd suffered a similar amputation.

Daryl checked a guard tower in the area. He opened the door and yelled inside, praying to find that they'd hunkered down in there and were waiting for someone to tell them that the coast was clear. He got no response, though, so he moved on.

There was an exit door to the part of the building that was, in the very back, caved in. It was a part of the prison that was overrun with Walkers. It was the part of the prison that they'd shut off from their area. They'd declared that, eventually, they'd venture in there to try to clean the area, but cleaning that wing would only take place long after they'd put in the effort to clean the wing that attached to the library, recreation room, and cafeteria—all things that would have more to offer them.

The building, according to the sticky maps they'd found, had been solitary confinement. The place where people were sent when they couldn't be housed with everyone else. It was a place of mental torture and, more than likely, anguish for those that were put there. If they hadn't done something terrible to deserve to be locked in tight little closed-up cells, Daryl would feel sorry knowing that human beings were being put there.

It wasn't a building with any appeal for the group, so they simply didn't bother with it.

But it did open into their yard.

And when Daryl got there, he found that the door had not only been recently opened, but it was slightly ajar. Daryl glanced down toward the ground. There was sand and gravel over the roughly paved area. It was impossible to look for any kind of tracks. The door was not normally open, though. Someone had opened it. It hadn't been the man that they'd killed—he'd have no reason to go this way and he hadn't come out into the yard. Nobody inside the prison, now, would have gone this way.

Daryl knew, in his gut, that Oscar and Carol had come this way. More than likely, they'd found themselves trapped in this area. A wall of Walkers would have been coming for them and it would have cut them off from the rest of the prison.

The fear that they would have felt to go into a part of the prison that they knew was likely crawling with Walkers, must have been intense.

The tightness that immediately seized Daryl's chest made it feel like he was being squeezed by some kind of giant, invisible boa constrictor.

He hated to hesitate even a moment in looking for Carol, but he had to. He took a moment—just a moment—to try to breathe. He tried to simply get air into his lungs. It was something that had seemed so easy only that morning, but it was proving to be more and more difficult as the day dragged on.

He wanted to prepare himself for anything that he might see inside—for what the aching in his chest was already trying to tell him to prepare for—but he couldn't. There was no way that he could prepare himself for anything. He put his hand on the metal doorknob. He wrapped it around the metal and flexed his fingers around the handle. The door was ajar. He only needed to pull the heavy metal door open, and he could step into the same hallway that Carol had stepped into less than an hour before—the longest hour he could remember.

Daryl had a desire to slap himself. He wished Merle was there, at that moment, to hit him hard in the back of the head—hard enough to clack his teeth together—so that it might help him to steel his nerves. He let out a few quick breaths, the same way he might if he were preparing to try to pull the door entirely off its hinges instead of to simply open it, and then he finally pulled it open.

Immediately, he flicked on the flashlight and shined it down the corridor.

Like the area where he and Rick had been, the lights would have been flickering in this part of the prison when Carol and Oscar had come through here. Now it was pitch black, and it would remain that way until he turned some corner to escape the narrow access hallway. Somewhere, he was sure, there were some windows in this part of the prison, but he didn't expect there to be too many—this was never meant to be a part of the prison that inspired much happiness or hope.

Daryl could certainly feel the heavy sadness that seemed to just hang in the air—or maybe that was simply the feeling that existed inside of him.

He didn't dare to call out. For the moment, there were no Walkers, but he knew that they were in there.

The access hallway was long and narrow. It was like a closed in cattle chute. Its purpose was only for people to get in and out of the building, though, so it required very little in the way of creature comforts. When Carol and Oscar had passed through here—likely in a quick-paced, panic-induced state, they would have been practically tripping over one another just to make it down the narrow passageway.

At the end of the access corridor, there was a turn off. Daryl flicked the light in one direction and then the next to try to guess where they might have gone or where the different hallways might lead.

He wasn't looking for the easiest passage for himself. He wasn't looking for an escape from Walkers for himself. He was, like some kind of would-be detective, trying to figure out where they might have gone, and he was in over his head.

When he heard the growling of Walkers, though, and none appeared, he decided to follow the sound.

Straight down the little corridor, into the darkness, there branched off another hallway. In this hallway, there was sunlight coming from windows that existed up near the ceiling. The purpose of those windows was only to allow light in for cases like this when there was no power. Those windows, perhaps, had told the officers that were stuck working some kind of punishment shift here that it was day or night outside. They were strategically placed so that even their glow would offer very little comfort to the prisoners that were stuck here. There was rattling, and Daryl realized he was next to a row of solitary confinement cells—if he could even call them that.

The prison was old. It had been built in an era when "prisoners' rights" weren't even the hot-button topic that they'd occasionally been on the news when the world had gone to hell in a handbasket. All over the world, Daryl already knew that prisons were updating and upgrading to make living conditions more amiable for the prisoners. The backwoods prisons of Georgia, though, would be some of the last to be upgraded by the government.

These solitary confinement cells were barely more than metal closets. The only connection they had to the outside world was a small, square, barred window near the top of the door for guards to speak to the prisoner, when they deemed such a thing necessary, and a slot about halfway down, covered with a flap that clasped on the outside, where food would be shoved through at given intervals.

Daryl yanked open the metal door where the clanging was occurring—the lock having been freed probably with the failure of the power—and immediately drove his knife into the skull of the Walker that had been waiting to get out. The bastard had probably thirsted or starved to death in the little metal closet. When the locks had come loose, he'd probably stayed in there to try to hide from whatever was happening outside. Maybe he'd chosen to die instead of face the unknown. It was only in death that he'd probably started rattling the door to his cage. Whatever he'd done in life, especially given the kinds of fairly petty crimes that were handled at a prison like this, he'd probably suffered the most horrific ending that anyone could have wished for him.

Down the line, there was more rattling and rumbling. There were other hallways, too, illuminated by the same tiny little windows, where more of the metal cells would be lined. This whole building was solitary confinement. These sorry bastards were left to die and rot in their tin cans, and most of them had probably stayed, for one reason or another, rather than venture out of the safety of their metal death-closets—all of them given their caskets before their deaths.

The growling Daryl heard, though, wasn't just that contained behind the heavy metal doors.

There were loose Walkers in the corridors. Daryl knew, already, that they were likely guards who had died there for one reason or another, or prisoners who had left their tiny cells only to die as soon as they tasted some kind of relative freedom. Either that, or they were simply stray Walkers that had come in through the damaged part of the prison and somehow meandered blindly to this spot—maybe even smelling the dying prisoners in their cells.

He wanted to prepare himself for what he might see when he came face-to-face with whatever Walkers still hadn't managed to find their way out of this area of the prison since the chaos had calmed—most of them scurrying around in the hallways like rats in the walls, but having moved on with nothing to hold them here—but nothing could prepare him. Nothing could ever prepare him. Not for what he most feared seeing.

Daryl had only to step a little further—just where the corridor turned to a small outcropping of other cells in the dark maze—to find the free-range Walkers. They weren't coming for him. They were bunched together. They seemed practically content to fight each other like blinded rats squabbling over something they could only touch.

Daryl put down four of them before the remaining two even noticed his presence.

The remaining two that turned to face him were just as unknown to him as the ones he'd already put down, and he breathed a sigh of relief as he dropped them to the ground. That sigh of relief, however, was dreadfully short-lived as he realized what had been holding their attention.

There was so little of Oscar left that Daryl wouldn't have been able to identify him confidently if he hadn't been wearing the coveralls with his name on them that the prison had issued him. From the neckline of his shirt, where very little of his chest was left without bite marks present, Daryl could make out a piece of his tattoo.

Daryl's insides quivered oddly—like Jello shaking when the bowl was moved around rapidly. He ignored the sensation and drove his knife into the halfway picked-clean skull of the man so that he couldn't reanimate, if there was even enough left of him for reanimation, and walked a few steps further into the darkness. The light fell on something, and he stooped to pick it up. It was a scarf. Daryl held it up to the light that streamed in from one of the windows—the color of the light, itself, reminding him that day was rapidly passing.

The scarf was dirty, but Daryl recognized it. It was a motley of colors, but it was mostly pink. He'd told Carol, that morning, that she'd looked ridiculous when she'd tied it on her head. She'd declared it was to keep her head from getting sunburned if she was going to stand out there in the sun all day and wash clothes and catch up on chores that had been somewhat neglected in the time she'd spent caring for Hershel.

Daryl had finally admitted that she looked pretty in the "girly" colors, and she'd repaid him for the compliment by wearing it while she'd ridden him through the fastest quickie they could manage.

He stuffed it in his back pocket, his hands shaking, and continued on.

He could barely breathe. He wasn't even sure, honestly, if he was actually breathing, at times.

His knees shook as he walked and, twice, he had to stop and steady himself. Maybe the oxygen was, somehow, depleted in this part of the prison. Maybe it was making him weak. Dizzy. His chest was heaving.

He was barely able to raise his knife to the next Walkers that he saw—four of the many "rats within the walls" that turned to try to catch Daryl as a snack. They had gotten stuck, it seemed, and were bumping around, unable to find their way out of the corridor. Daryl found the strength, somehow, to raise his hands and drop them—one by one—as they came near him. As each face was revealed to him, he was pleased to know that none of them were known to him.

But the final Walker, as it hit the ground, took Daryl down with it.

Not because he got bitten—the Walker never got near him—but because he reached to pull the second knife out of the Walker's shoulder. It was a knife that had apparently gotten stuck there—clearly thrust in a frenzy and not in a careful stab that would have gone through its skull and killed it. It was a knife that, left behind, meant that its owner had gone on, with the halls and the proverbial walls full of Walkers, completely unarmed. It was a knife that, left behind, likely meant that the owner of the knife had gone on without need of a weapon—and the only way that was possible, was if that owner were shuffling along with the Walker crowd.

Overcome, for a moment, with icy cold realization in his gut, Daryl stopped fighting himself. He stopped fighting his feelings. Eventually, he would get up. He would drag Oscar's corpse from the building to bury it properly. He would tell the others what had happened. He would tell Sophia—even though she wouldn't understand—what had happened.

He would face the rest of this day, and the days to come.

But for now, he had to deal with the fact that, somewhere, walking the darkened halls of the prison—blind, alone, and lost in every possibly way—was the love of his life. The only woman he had ever loved in such a way.

And he couldn't even say goodbye.

Beside the corpse that had, more than likely, been the one to steal her knife and her life, Daryl hit his knees, folded into himself, and wept to the floor because there was nothing, and no one, around but the dead to hear him.