Note: So chapters 5&6 never showed up? They were showing for me while logged in, and a reviewer says they got the notification (THANKS so much, jessmarkOMGtheydid!), but they weren't actually showing up with the story? So I've re-uploaded those, and hopefully they (and Chapter 7) will work this time. Fingers crossed.

Chapter 7

Daryl came awake all at once, aching all over but more aware than he'd been since he first came to in the infirmary. It was as if just getting away from that place had allowed his brain to reset itself. He knew that jackass had been dosing him more than Carol knew, which meant that the doctor lied to Carol and disregarded what she told him. He filed that away with the other things he wasn't going to think about until he was back to a hundred percent. Instead, he turned his head enough to look at Carol.

She was curled on her side beside him, both hands tucked under her chin, her hair sticking up in tufts around her head. He could see her eyes moving beneath her eyelids, but she didn't seem to be in any kind of distress. He tried to stay as still as possible, not wanting to wake her, but he knew there wasn't much hope for that. The sun sky was starting to lighten outside the window, and he'd never known the woman to not rise with the sun. There was somebody moving about outside the door, too, and that would wake her any second now. It was probably what had woken him.

Whoever it was, if he didn't stop them, they would knock on Carol's door expecting breakfast.

He'd never actually slept in a bed with another person. He'd been on beds with other people, but never what anybody would call in bed with them. Not long enough to go to sleep, anyway. It only made sense, then that he'd never realized how hard it would be to slip out of a bed without waking the other person. Weighing the odds of accidently waking Carol against the certainly of the knock that would be coming any minute now, there just wasn't anything for it. He had to try. In the end, he got lucky. She muttered something, rubbed her cheek into the pillow a few times, then settled back down. Damn if that wasn't cute.

He cracked the door open with a soft click. Rick was walking down the hall, dripping, wearing only a bright pink beach towel with a cartoon cat on it. Rick wasn't too bad. He could deal with Rick. He didn't want to, but it could have been worse.

It could have been Glenn.

"Hey," he whispered.

Rick spun around like he expected to see a Walker behind him. "You're back," he said.

"Yeah. Look, need a favor."

Rick smirked. It was a very specific type of smirk, and it made Daryl want to simultaneously run out of the house as fast as his feet could carry him and punch the other man in the face.

"You want me to make sure nobody disturbs you and Carol today?"

Well, yeah. Not for the reason he probably thought.

Not exactly that reason.

Maybe that reason?

"Yeah. Carol does all the damned cookin' around here. Get somebody else to take a turn. She's wiped out, man."

"Right. Of course. I'll take care of it. You're looking better."

"Found any signs of who shot me yet?" As distractions went, it was a good one. It wiped the smirk off the other man's face, at least.

"Nothing yet," Rick said. "A bunch of us are meeting at Deanna's again tonight. We're trying to convince them to start an armed watch. Sasha's been pushing for it since we got here, though, and we haven't had much luck."

It had been a week, and Daryl was of the opinion that if the incident was a precursor for some kind of trouble for the community, something would have happened by now. He didn't say so for several reasons. First, because there was a chance that it wasn't true, and it was always better to be prepared than to be surprised. Second, there was about as much chance of the people around here taking anything that came out of his mouth into consideration as there was of Glenn ignoring good gossip. The third, and currently most important to Daryl, reason was because it was a topic other than whatever was going on between him and Carol, and he really wanted to people to talk about something other than what was or wasn't going on between him and Carol.

He didn't even want him and Carol to have to talk about what was going between him and Carol. No more than it would take for him to be really, truly, without a doubt, one hundred percent sure that she really meant what she said, that is.

"I'm gonna get Carol to take the bandages off. Gonna be a couple more days at least before I'm good, though." If the ache in his shoulder and chest with the arm immobilized was anything to go by, it might actually be a while before he could use his bow, but he wasn't going to worry about that today.

Today was for Carol getting some sleep and convincing her to take the bandages off. One thing at a time.

Bandages off, build strength back up, kiss Carol, kill Pete Anderson.

It wasn't that long of a to-do list when he thought about it.

Kissing Carol might come a little further up the list.

Rick nodded, still smirking, and stalked dramatically toward his room. As John Wayne impressions went, it wouldn't have been half bad, except for the towel. Daryl slipped back into Carol's room with a mumbled "Dramatic asshole."

"It was Rick?"

Damn.

"Go back to sleep," he whispered. "You ain't' got anything to do today."

"I promised we would stay in here until the house clears out, but then I have to do laundry and get something together for dinner, at least. I won't go to work if you want company."

"Rick's takin' care of it."

She opened a closet and started rummaging through clothes. "I'm not tired. I had a long nap yesterday, and then we slept again last night. I'm not tired, Daryl. I need to do something."

The way she said "need" instead of "want" hung heavy in the room.

"You are doin' something. You're hanging out with me. Gonna help me take these bandages off today, right?"

She rolled her eyes at him. "The doctor —"

"I can't see his face 'til I get to punch it," Daryl snapped. He shook his head, "Didn't mean to yell."

"Daryl, he's the only doctor that we have."

"And I'm pretty sure he's been dosing me after you told him not to, 'cause I'm not having any trouble having complete thoughts. It's not happening."

"If I look at it and there's anything off or if you get even one degree of a fever, then we call him and you control yourself, so he doesn't know we're on to him until we're both ready to do something. Deal?"

"And you hang out with me today instead of working."

"Are you asking me on a date?"

"Ain't nowhere to go on no date. Besides, married people don't date."

"So if we aren't working, and we aren't dating, what are we going to do all day?"

Daryl blew out a breath and said words he never, in a million lifetimes, would have imagined he would ever say. "Reckon we can, y'know, talk. About stuff."

Carol dropped to the edge of the bed like a puppet whose strings had been cut, clutching the pair of jeans in her hands against her chest. She'd gone pale and wide-eyed, and he almost took it back. Merle always said that women wanted to talk all the time, but the more Daryl was around other people the more he realized that Merle only knew about a very specific subset of people. And also, he was sometimes completely full of shit.

He flashed on their conversations in Atlanta, how she'd talked around the edges of the things it was obvious she really needed to talk about, and how he was just starting to feel like he was getting through to her when she was…he wondered if she knew he sometimes dreamed of that car hitting her. The way she flew into the air, the sound it made. He shook the memory away. He had a good idea what she didn't want to talk about. He was pretty sure that it was the same thing that she needed to talk about, but he wasn't opening up that can of worms today.

"I got a lot of things to say sorry for," he said instead.

She was shaking her head before he finished his sentence. "You don't. You've always done your best, Daryl. You don't have anything to be sorry for."

"Sorry I gave up," he whispered. "Prison was gone, everybody was gone, I lost the kid, and I just gave up. Stuff happened I ain't proud of. And it happened 'cause I gave up. Hell, the kid—if I'd just started looking for you instead of letting myself think you were dead, I probably never would have lost her in the first damned place."

"I thought you said we got to start over," she said.

He nodded. "You forgive me? Really? Not just sayin' it because you think you'd want somebody to forgive you if you done it. You really forgive me for not lookin'? For following Rick again after what he done?"

She nodded, but she wasn't looking at him. He knew what that meant.

"You know how I can earn that?" He asked, swallowing hard. This talking bullshit was hard.

"Daryl—I didn't even know you were carrying that around. Rick and I are okay. It won't ever be like it was before, but we're okay. And you and I are okay, too. I know that things went bad very quickly. I was there, after. I saw the smoke, and…" she was frowning, blinking hard, and she was clutching those damned pants like there were a lifeline.

"But it won't ever be like it was before."

"Nothing can ever be like it was before, but that isn't because of anything you did or didn't do. Even if—even if what happened to both of us while we were separated never happened, we couldn't go back to a time that's over. That's how life works. I'm not the woman I was at the prison. You aren't the man you were there, either."

"You are though. You're her. I can see her. Yeah, sure, stuff has happened, and I ain't sayin' you ain't carrying more than you were before, but you're carrying like, well like you carry things. The person you are, that ain't changed. You're still right here."

She shrugged. "Well, that woman is going to have a look at your bullet wound, and then we'll go see what kind of food they left us."

Daryl winced. "Hope Rick didn't try to cook it himself."

"If he did, that's on you."

Carol didn't know exactly what Daryl had said to Rick when they had their visit in the infirmary, but she knew the vague outline of it. Between what Daryl said about Rick getting the idea that everything the Alexandrians thought was true, and the way Rick had taken to avoiding her eyes, she had assumed that it had all been about events on a highway nearly three years ago.

Had it really only been three years?

Lori had already been pregnant with Judith, and Judith couldn't even walk unassisted yet.

Carol felt like she'd lived three lifetimes in the time since Sophia was lost.

If there had been any doubt at all that more than those events had factored into that conversation, she could figure out part of the rest of it from a combination of Daryl wanting to talk about her exile, and the spread of food left on the table. It wasn't wasteful, unless you factored in the possibility that Rick had cooked it without help, but it was more than she'd expected. Cooked apples, powdered eggs, walnuts, and a kettle of water still hot on the stove that she hadn't even heard whistle that she quickly set about turning into tea.

This wasn't about her, she knew that. This was all about Daryl. This wasn't Rick saying he was sorry for anything that happened between him and her, this was Rick trying to make it up to Daryl. It wasn't a big deal, really. Rick had always been better at hiding it than Lori had, but he'd always had ideas about male and female roles. It had mostly shown early on, before Carl learned to edit himself and what he had been taught would just come spilling out of his mouth. Rick wasn't obnoxious about it, but it was there, nonetheless. Now that, in his mind, Carol actually belonged to someone, her ranking had changed dramatically.

They ate in silence. One thing that hadn't changed since nearly the beginning was the comfort in their silences. There was no need to fill the air with needless chatter. It was peaceful, and heaven knew peace was a valuable commodity these days. When they'd finished, they cleared the table but left the dishes in the sink at Daryl's muttered, "day off".

The problem with a day off was that, once she was slept out, there was nothing to do. None of the books in the house warranted a second read. The only board game to be found was Candy Land, and Carol would rather fight a herd of Walkers with only a fork than play another round Candyland in her lifetime. She said as much to Daryl.

"The hell's Candy Land?"

"It's a board game for toddlers. God, it's awful. It's like Chinese water torture. Sophia loved it. I played that game every day, sometimes five or six times a day, for a solid year. Never again."

"That bad, huh?"

"Well, not if you're two, I guess. I am not two."

"So ain't nobody taught Jude, yet?"

"Daryl Dixon, if you do that, then you're the one playing. Hide that box."

"Yes ma'am."

A few minutes later she heard a triumphant whoop from the home office that Daryl slept in when he was inside the walls. That Daryl used to sleep in. Whatever.

"What did you find?"

He trotted down the hall at a speed that she had thought still beyond him, holding his prize in his hand. "Playin' cards."

"Well, that's better than nothing," she said, smiling more at his excitement than at the idea of losing at poker for a couple hours.

"Can't play Rook with two people. Could play Rummy, though. Or poker."

"You found them, you pick."

He shrugged, winced, and chewed on the side of the side of his thumb. Then Daryl Dixon winked, and said, "Wanna play strip poker?"

For a second she thought she had to have heard him wrong, but the intent way he was watching for her reaction suggested otherwise. "People could come back any time."

"Could play in our room." He added waggling eyebrows. He was being playful, only half serious, but it surprised her, anyway.

"Ask me again when your stitches are out," she said, throwing in a wink for good measure. She couldn't have him thinking he had flustered her.

She was absolutely flustered.

There was a time she flirted to watch him squirm, and the role reversal completely threw her off. She wouldn't ever have imagined Daryl capable.

"Ain't got no stitches in my eyes," he mumbled. "But if you don't think you can control yourself…"

The front door creaked open and Rick came through. "Sorry, won't be long. Didn't take enough supplies. Just here for diapers."

Red blossomed at the base of Daryl's neck, spreading up toward his face quickly. He stepped between Carol and Rick said in a tone she hadn't heard in a very long time, "You've got to be fuckin' kidding me!"