Carol has heard gunshots before. The loud crack is familiar by now, thanks to years of Ed "hunting" - dragging her out to the woods, chugging beers, and firing the occasional (usually missed) shot at some perceived flicker of motion - and, of course, the recent end-of-the-world shots fired at the various corpses rambling around. They'd ceased to phase her by now, and, while she still flinched at the shots she couldn't anticipate (as she did with most sudden noises), even that was superficial, with no real, heart-stopping fear involved.
So, when this shot rang out, when she heard Rick's devastated shouting, when a horrible mix of bone-chilling fear and terrible dread filled her, the feeling was unusual and unexpected. It was a sudden certainty that something had gone horribly wrong. A thousand thoughts ran through her head - Sophia, walker, Sophia, a vicious stranger, Sophia - and she stood frozen, unsure of what to do. Only when the others overcame their own shock and ran out of the farmhouse did Carol come back to her senses. Only then could she pull herself together and start sprinting, joining them in running outside, listening to the conversions they carried on around her. Any other day, Herschel's shout of "What the hell is going on out here?" might have made her flinch, but she barely even registered it, too focused on the scene before her.
The scene that consisted of Rick dragging an unconscious Daryl Dixon. An unconscious Daryl Dixon with blood tracing down from both temples and flowing liberally down his neck. An unconscious Daryl Dixon with yet more blood soaked into his shirt and head bowed over it, suspended between Rick and Shane. The scene that also consisted of a very shocked T-Dog holding a very familiar doll.
Sophia's doll.
For a second, she stopped, her forward momentum ceasing as that familiar object registered as her brain tried to understand whatever it was she was seeing. Everything faded out around her, sound falling to the wayside in favor of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears. Almost immediately, though, she was filled with an overwhelming desire to touch it, to hold it close like it were Sophia herself. She was running again before she realized it, yanking the doll away in a way that she'd never do if she were in her right mind and pulling it closer. She didn't know what to do with it now that she held it, but the need to have it in her hands had simply been too much for her to resist.
Carol hadn't held a stuffed animal for comfort in years, had dismissed it as too weak, even for her, and left that for Sophia, but now? Now, she could understand. As her hands sank into the soft cloth of the doll, tangling in its ragdoll hair to the point that it almost felt real, she was struck by the sense of familiarity, the idea of home inherent in the object cradled in her arms. It hadn't long been Sophia's - Carol had seen Eliza Morales extend it as a shaky gift just before leaving with her family - but Sophia had been so happy to have it, had fallen in love with it so quickly, had carried it around with her so near-constantly, that it felt like, for years and years, it had only ever belonged to Sophia. Carol didn't feel weak as she clenched her hands around it, wringing it in her hands as though trying to pull comfort and answers from it with strength alone. For once, the attempt at comfort came freely and willingly, absent any second-guessing or self-doubt.
Her contemplation of the doll only lasted for a few seconds. The chaos and the confusion around her simply didn't allow anything longer, and she found herself hovering anxiously behind the group. She was torn in too many directions, caught between begging for news of Sophia, asking what she could do to help, leaving to get out of the way, or just waiting in patient silence. Even as she opted for the latter, trailing behind the others as they dragged Daryl into the farmhouse and to the upper bedroom with the doll still in her hands, she felt adrift and useless. Then, Herschel barked out an order to clear the room and the door slammed, sending her even further out to sea with no answers and no job to do but wait.
The door, closed in front of her, became her enemy. The dark painted wood clashed with its frame, white and clean despite the apocalyptic grime coating everything else, mocking her with its unfair cheeriness in such vicious circumstances. Voices - muffled and quiet, sometimes urgent sounding and (in Rick's case) occasionally panicked - floated out, but even strained ears and neck pain from craning it closer did nothing to clarify them. Even the door handle looked unfriendly, its shining bronze glinting too merrily in the light.
Eventually, she gave up on waiting there, unable to bear it. Part of her felt guilty as she walked away - the only person waiting outside was Lori, and it was clear that she was waiting for Rick, not for Daryl - but it couldn't be helped. She simply couldn't bear it; she couldn't handle waiting with nothing to do, standing there in awkward silence with Lori, possibly hearing the sounds of pain and maybe even death from within the room. Besides, the man had been wounded helping look for the daughter she was too weak to protect, much less to find. Who was to say he even would have wanted her there?
Instead, she retreated to the kitchen, falling into her normal tasks. She had expected it to calm her down, to relax the tension still lurking in her spine, but it didn't. Instead, she had to continue without her usual enthusiasm. For once, she actually viewed the tasks as drudgery rather than an escape or a contribution. She wasn't able to focus on the chores she had to complete without her thoughts floating to the room upstairs. Instead of planning the menu for the Greene family thank-you dinner, she plotted about how she'd get Daryl to stop his ridiculously self-sacrificing ways - she had seen him regularly giving away food he really couldn't spare, and he was infuriatingly stubborn at the best of times, much less when cooped up - and to take some of it. She didn't consider how she should thank Herschel or his family; she paid attention to how to thank Daryl for searching for her baby girl. And she didn't worry about when she next had to do laundry, either; she was too busy remembering blood drying on skin and clothing.
Eventually, Lori rejoined her in the kitchen. Carol looked up from her work, distantly aware that the motion was too quick, too immediate to be casual, but she didn't care after awaiting an update - any update - with a confusing mixture of fear, guilt, and anticipation for so long.
Lori nodded, once - brisk and perfunctory - as she entered, disinterested as she said, "He's fine."
Carol sagged in relief, the tension leaving her body all at once, but her relaxation didn't last long; it was mere seconds before she was sitting up again and asking, "And Sophia?"
Lori smiled - slight sadness imbued in her face - and walked forward, passing her hands up and down Carol's arms in what was meant as a comforting gesture, but came across patronizing and uncomfortable. "He found her doll… They've got a sense of where she is, so they can search the area. They'll find her, Carol. Rick will find her." Then, she was gone, stepping away and moving over to the counter.
Carol returned to work a little more diligently after that, slightly more energetic. Every fiber of her being wanted to sprint - to Rick, to Shane, to Daryl, to anybody - to get answers on where her little girl was, but she focused on taking Lori's words to heart; they had the search well-in-hand and, even if she was skeptical about Rick finding Sophia, Daryl's discovery of Sophia's doll had restored her faith to some degree. She managed to focus on her tasks, thoughts more absorbed by the chopping of food than in the room upstairs or the darkness of the forest in which her baby was trapped.
Her peace didn't last long. Her thoughts were once more interrupted as voices floated in through the window nearest the porch, Andrea's familiar, strident mingling with Dale's calming tone. Carol didn't try to listen, couldn't hear what they said that drew her attention, but she somehow heard Andrea's guilty "I shot Daryl" and Dale's response of "Don't be too hard on yourself… We've all wanted to shoot Daryl," and she found herself suddenly burning with a rage that surprised even her.
Carol had always been a peacemaker, the kind of person to calm situations down, to ensure that people were happy, but, in this instant, she found herself positively furious. First and foremost, Andrea didn't deserve Dale's reassurance. Her mistake was a stupid, irresponsible one that nearly got one of their own killed, and she should feel guilty about it. Carol herself had never really handled a gun, and even she knew better than to, as a novice, fire a weapon, against orders, at a target within reach of her own people, on which she didn't have a clear sightline.
Still, it wasn't even Andrea's earlier idiocy with the sniper rifle that inflamed her so. Rather, it was Dale's attempt at mollification, his attempt at humor, that set her off. Those words, uttered so carelessly, felt like a grave injustice. She knew why he said it, why it was meant to be funny… but the humor itself was lost on her.
When Merle and Daryl had first shown up at camp, she'd watched from the sidelines, listening in on the camp business from her place plastered at Ed's side. She'd long been used to reading the room, to getting a sense of who she could trust and who was dangerous, and she'd known immediately that Merle Dixon was dangerous. He was loud, brash, and abrasive, rude in his language and in his tone, violent in sentiment and manner. She'd needed none of Ed's "guidance" to want to avoid him; indeed, Merle had reminded her too much of Ed, so that had come naturally.
Daryl, however, had caught her attention more out of curiosity than of fear. Sure, he was rough around the edges, clearly uncoordinated in interpersonal relations, and standoffish to the extreme, but he hadn't been loud and violent like his brother. Most of the time she had seen him, he'd been somewhere on the edges, whittling sticks into crossbow bolts at the brothers' campsite or off hunting for the group while Merle stayed at camp and drank lazily. He wasn't aggressive, for the most part, acting like his brother's shadow when he was in camp, silent and quiet and nearly intangible. She'd even swear she'd seen him flinch from time to time, jerking violently at the same loud voices or unexpected contact that she'd jumped at for years, but she'd never really worked up the courage to talk to him, to ask about it. Besides, she doubted he'd appreciate it; the man avoided individual conversations just as much as he shirked - or tried (and, usually, failed thanks to his hunting contributions) to shirk - the public eye, avoiding any kind of spotlight like it was dangerous.
The first time she'd seen Daryl yell from anger had been when Rick had arrived with the news that Merle was gone, abandoned on a rooftop in the middle of a city with flesh-eating monsters running about. She had known the conversation wouldn't go well - everything had convinced her of that, from the way everyone clustered around him immediately after he returned from his hunt, leering at him as he got the news, to the tension in his shoulders as he recognized that he was surrounded, to the blunt, cruel manner in which Rick and Shane actually told him about Merle - and she had heard the pain underlying the anger in his voice when he finally heard what Rick and Shane had to say.
Even as she harbored a secret relief that Merle was gone, happy that at least one dangerous, volatile man was gone from the camp, she understood. She wasn't frightened when Daryl lashed out because she expected it, anticipated that his immediate response would be to fight, to defend himself with the desperation of a man whose world was just turned upside down. Nor was she surprised when, mere moments later, he was demanding knowledge of his brother's location in a voice choked by tears he tried to hide, insisting that he was going on a rescue mission.
She had understood him even more mere days later, when Ed died, when Daryl had given her the pickaxe and she'd driven it, over and over again, into the skull of the corpse on the ground, furious tears - angry at the world, at herself, at Ed - pouring down her face with each squelch of blood and bone. She understood, then, why Daryl had been about to cry that day, why Merle's departure had weighed so heavily on him, why even now she caught him with flashes of guilt in his eyes at the mention of his brother. She could understand him more than she understood anyone else in camp, even without ever having more than a five minute conversation with the man, so he didn't scare her nearly as much as the others did.
Perhaps that was why, as she heard Dale's callous reassurance, she felt suddenly and completely consumed by moral outrage. Was Daryl slightly abrasive, withdrawn, sometimes quick to anger? Sure. But that didn't negate the fact that he was one of the most productive, selfless members of the group. He'd lost his brother because of "the group" and yet still stuck around, still hunted for them, still risked his life for them repeatedly, still nearly died trying to save a girl he barely even knew, and then nearly been shot by one of them in a fit of stupid arrogance, and Dale's response was to belittle the man to whom they owed so much? To argue that his life meant nothing because he wasn't as smooth and polished and normal as the rest of them? To reassure his almost-killer for the guilt that should have taught her never to do it again?
Carol kept chopping the food, the monotony of the task broken up as she realized that this wasn't the only time she'd registered such heartless disinterest. No one had bothered to apologize to Daryl, to sympathize with him for the loss of his brother; instead, it was "Why would you risk your life for a douchebag like Merle Dixon?" and "Merle Dixon? He's not worth one of your lives, even with guns thrown in." spoken harshly right in front of him. Even more recently, only Rick and Shane waited for him to get out of their post-end-of-the-world surgery, and even they were simply awaiting a briefing on Sophia's whereabouts. To hear that, in addition to the low-grade level of disinterest, distrust, and even active dislike directed at the man, Dale could dismiss Daryl as merely an annoyance, one from which "they've all" already sought an escape, was enough to set Carol seething, and, when she snapped back to the present with the rare burn of anger coursing through her, she realized her knuckles were white around the handle of her blade.
She dropped it hastily, distantly hearing it clatter against the cutting board, She never got this angry, tending towards fear over fury most of the time. A few deep breaths later and she was back to her normal self - she could feel her quiet, shy nature slipping back into place with each intake of air - if slightly puzzled at the chink in what, she could readily admit, was a rather mousy personality. She brushed it off, though, and returned to the meal preparation, thoughts still bouncing around from Sophia, to Daryl, to the conversation she overheard and back.
By the time she had finally finished her work - cooked, cleaned, set the table, dished out the food - Carol had made up her mind to bring him a plate of it. It wasn't much, comprising little more than some meat and vegetables, and she couldn't help the familiar flare of embarrassment and shame at the paltry offerings even as she realized that it was all they had, but she loaded it on a tray anyway and hoped he'd find it tolerable.
Carol walked quickly as she took the stairs, hurrying to be sure that she wouldn't end up psyching herself out. It didn't quite work; repeatedly, she turned to head back down - surely Lori could handle going up a flight of stairs and dropping off a plate? - but turned back shortly thereafter. An image of a rose, its five petals white around a center of yellow, floated forward in her memory, and she steeled herself to keep walking; Daryl had left his own comfort zone and told her that story to bolster her, to give her strength and hope, just before heading out and putting himself in danger - a danger that had come to pass on the attempt just after - to find her Sophia. If he could do all that, she could handle climbing a few stairs and handing him a plate.
Still, she was nervous as her hand touched the door, the wood somehow less unfriendly now that it didn't render her useless, her hand slowly closing around that merry bronze handle before pushing the whole thing open. The tray in her hands wobbled precariously, a combination of the force required to move the heavy door and the slight shaking of her fingers setting it off-kilter, but she managed to stabilize it before returning her focus to inside the room.
By the time she looked up, Daryl was already moving, hurriedly pulling the sheet up around him and shuffling to be at least partially sitting up. His head was bound tightly with a bandage, a stark, clinical white against the mix of blood and dirt on his skin, and she winced in sympathy, but it didn't seem to faze him; the only sign that it bothered him was the rigid control in his breathing, the in-and-out motion that was far too uniform to be natural.
If anything he seemed more uncomfortable by her presence than anything else, moving in jerky, aborted movements until he was completely shrouded by the white sheet, curled away from her as she set the tray on the table by his bed. He avoided eye contact in favor of looking towards one of the room's corners, clearly perfectly content to let the encounter pass in silence, to let her walk out without any conversation, but Dale's comment floated through her head again and she couldn't bring herself to leave. Instead, she fumbled for a response, eventually settling on a generic, "How are you feeling?"
He kept shifting, clutching at the sheets like they were a shield against her. "Bout as good as I look." The words were quiet, awkward, and just final enough that Carol could tell they were meant as an end.
Still, she didn't quite feel like she could leave, so she continued anyway. "Brought you some dinner. You must be starving."
He turned to face her, then, eyes narrowed instantly as he made direct eye contact for the first time since she arrived. He held the gaze for a few seconds that felt like an eternity, looking at her with a blend of surprise and distrust before twisting to glance over at the bedside table. He looked at it like he expected to see nothing on it, and something akin to confusion flickered there when he did actually find a tray there, though it quickly faded away. Something about that sight - the way he had expected so little from the members of the group that was supposed to be supporting him just as much as he supported them - made a decision for her that she hadn't even known she'd been making.
Without letting herself think about it anymore - and, probably, talk herself out of it - she leaned over to press a kiss to his forehead. She doubted herself as she was doing it, and she quite nearly pulled back as she noticed him flinch, her heart aching slightly as she saw his hands fly up to cover his head, his entire body tensing before he forced it to relax. She might have withdrawn right then were it not for the fact that, once more, she understood, more than she ever wanted to understand anything. She had been there, had suddenly expected Ed's fists to crash down rather than whatever innocuous gesture was actually being made, had felt the mix of guilt, sadness, and loneliness as the other person pulled back in response, and she simply couldn't do that herself, so she paused, hovering there for a few seconds.
Eventually, she closed the gap, allowing her lips to brush his forehead. She winced when she finally made contact and she could feel heat coming off of his skin, a light fever that couldn't be healthy, especially not now that modern medicine had temporarily forsaken them. Sweat covered his forehead - the kind of sweat that stems from pain and fever combining in a dangerous combination - soaking into his hair and the bandages. For a second, she was split between two realities and was caught in the past, remembering the way she'd done the same for a sick Sophia over the years, her memories coming back in a deluge that she somehow both wanted to see and wanted to avoid.
She eventually snapped herself out of it, pulling back. She could see that he was confused from her vantage point, even as he once more avoided eye contact. He was still turned away, but he managed to look even more out of place as he mumbled, "Watch it, I've got stitches."
Part of her - probably the part still listening to Ed's ghost, still believing that what he said was true - felt like she was pushing her luck, like staying any longer or saying what she wanted to say was bound to annoy him, but she steeled herself to say it anyway. "You need to know something…" He twitched slightly, half turning to look at her without actually needing to make eye contact with her, but remained mostly still. "You did more for my little girl today than her own daddy ever did in his whole life."
He didn't completely look away - his eyes were still mostly fixed on that same corner of the room, but he did look back at her a few times, eyes darting back and forth without fixing anywhere for long - but he turned away again, shrugging slightly. "Didn't do nothin' Rick or Shane wouldn'ta done."
Carol had long known that getting Daryl to accept a compliment was going to be a losing battle, that automatically rejecting anything positive addressed towards him was his natural response, so she was surprised she'd gotten as far into the conversation as she had, and she had half a mind to quit while she was ahead. That voice telling her to leave it, to run away, to go back to what she was good at got louder and more insistent... but she still couldn't leave. She couldn't end the conversation with a conclusion so devoid of self-worth. If nothing else, he deserved better after exhausting so much time and effort in trying to find her daughter.
In the end, she settled on saying, "I know. You're every bit as good as them." He tensed again, ready to reject the words, but she didn't let him. Instead she reiterated once - "Every bit." - before walking out of the room, not giving him a chance to argue back before she left him alone, curled around his injured side as (she hoped) he drifted off to sleep.