AN: Here we are, another piece to this one, with a small time jump.
I hope you enjoy! Please don't forget to let me know what you think!
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Daryl woke gently as he felt the movement of Carol in the bed. He didn't know if she was fully awake just yet. She drew backward, wiggling a little as she moved herself, until she had fitted herself entirely against him. Daryl helped her, since he was awake now, to make sure that they touched down the entire length of their bodies.
Carol was warm and weighty in the bed. The mattress marked the presence of her and Daryl's body naturally pulled in toward her. She stopped moving as soon as she was fully against Daryl, and he smiled to himself to think that he'd been what she was seeking—consciously or unconsciously. For a moment, he closed his eyes, and he simply drank in the feeling of her. He inhaled, smelling her—there was a particular scent to her after a night of sleeping that was different, somehow, than the way she smelled at other times. He liked it. It was comforting.
Daryl kissed the back of her neck as gently as he could, barely making contact with his lips on her skin. He didn't want to wake her, if she wasn't awake already. He moved his hand carefully under the cover, and found her hip. He rested it there, over the curve of her hip, for a moment.
Sometimes, Daryl enjoyed taking a moment in the quiet hours to simply think about the fact that Carol was there.
His thoughts weren't particularly profound, or at least he didn't think they were. He was overcome, sometimes, though, by the simple realization that Carol was there. She had once not been there—and he had been quite lonely, at times, and had wondered, sometimes, if he would always be lonely. He had wondered, too, sometimes, if it would always only be him and Merle until, someday, maybe there wasn't even Merle, and he was left to simply be entirely alone.
Daryl didn't care for great crowds of people—that much was certainly true—but he didn't like being entirely alone, either.
He would never be alone again. Carol was here, now. And, not only was she here, but she was making them a family. Sophia was here—even now, the little girl was sleeping in her bed, happily, and soon she would rise and want breakfast, and cuddles, and to go outside with Daryl while he milked the cows and started the earliest of morning chores that happened before breakfast.
Daryl slipped his hand over from where it rested on Carol's hip, and he rested his hand on the spot he almost thought of as sacred in some way—like blessed ground or something much the same. Their baby was sleeping, he imagined, like all the rest of the household except himself. Of course, he had no proof of that. The little one was, after all, still quite little. Carol said she could feel the little thing move from time to time—a faint fluttering, she said, that reminded her of the sound that bumble bees made when they buzzed too close to your face in the summer heat. Daryl wished that he could feel the bumble bee wings, but he was happy to hear about them, even if he couldn't feel them.
The baby was there, whether or not Daryl could feel it beyond simply being able to rest his hand on the small swell of Carol's growing belly. Daryl's family was growing, and he would never be entirely alone.
Daryl jumped gently when he felt Carol's fingers come to rest over his. He smiled and her body shifted gently as she rooted back into him just a touch more.
"Mornin'," he offered. His voice was gravelly.
"How long have you been awake?" Carol asked. She flexed her fingers over his, and he flexed his fingers against the small show of their little one.
"Not long," he said. "Just long enough."
"Long enough to do what?" Carol asked.
"To appreciate you," Daryl offered.
Carol laughed quietly. They both kept their voices low so that they wouldn't wake Sophia before she was naturally ready to get up.
"I've been sleeping, Daryl," Carol said, teasing him. "I haven't done a thing for you to appreciate."
"I been appreciatin' how you weren't here, but now you are," Daryl said.
"Well—that hardly seems like something to appreciate too much," Carol offered. Daryl leaned up enough to kiss the side of her face and she moved to roll back on him. He moved his body backward, giving her room to roll on her back, and he shivered when a gust of coolness came under the blankets. Carol picked up the shiver, and she smiled at him. "Cool is starting to really set in."
Daryl hummed.
"It ain't but barely started," he said. "Gonna get a lot colder than this."
Carol made something of a humming noise in her throat.
"I'm glad I have you to keep me warm all winter, then," she said.
"You got that," Daryl said. "I guess—that's kinda what I was appreciatin'."
"That you don't have to feel cold in the bed in winter?" Carol asked.
"That I don't gotta feel alone," Daryl said. "Not just in winter. Never."
Carol smiled at him.
"You're certainly not alone anymore," Carol said. "In fact, the house'll be so full, before long, that you won't know what to do with yourself, especially if we keep steadily adding a body to it with each year."
"Can't wait," Daryl said, doing his best to brush away any hint of insecurity that might be starting to show itself around the edges.
Carol wasn't given to insecurity in quite the same way that Andrea was. For good measure, Merle was given to reassuring Andrea at least a few times a day that he was happy to have her and that she was doing a damned fine job at being his wife. He liked her cooking better than he liked any food he'd ever eaten, and he did like taking her to bed, better than any whore he'd ever taken to bed before—and it was all made better just because she was his own wife. He handed these reassurances to her throughout the day, usually making sure to leave her with at least one of them after breakfast so she didn't worry Carol too much during the day.
Still, every now and again, Carol did seem to need a little reassurance of her own that she was still pleasing to Daryl. The man she'd married before—Ed—had never found her pleasing, after all, and so she found it hard to believe that Daryl really just didn't find anything about her to be anything really less than pleasing.
"Baby awake yet?" Daryl asked.
"Not that I can tell," Carol said. "But—your daughter's going to be awake soon. She'll be wanting to go with you."
Daryl smiled.
"And I'll be happy to take her with me," Daryl said. "Been thinkin' we oughta move her bed in here with it gettin' cold. It'll fit right over there, and it'll keep her closer to the fire when we keep one goin' at night. That way she don't get too cold."
Carol smiled at him.
"And the baby in here, too?" Carol asked.
"Baby oughta come when it's on the tail end of the cold—warmin' up, even. Still, all the babies to come we oughta move in here, come the winter."
"What about the fireplaces you put in those rooms?" Carol asked. "There's no need for you to have gone through the trouble of putting a chimney in the back of the house if it won't never be used."
"Sophia gets a bit bigger, she can have her own fire," Daryl said. "Same with the other little ones. But—she's still awful curious about the fire when one's burning. You leave her in there with one, and she'll climb right outta bed and get burned. At least—that's what I worry will happen, so I don't want her in there with a fire until she gets on big enough to understand it better."
Carol smiled at him.
"You do love her, don't you, Daryl?" She said. Daryl didn't think it really sounded like a question at all. It sounded a whole lot more like she was just thinking about it in the same way he'd been thinking about how nice it was to have her in the bed with him, so that they could be together, instead of having to worry about being alone.
"Yeah," Daryl said. "I do. I love you, too, Carol…with the biggest kind of love I can."
Carol's smile renewed itself.
Every time Daryl said words out loud about his love to Carol, his heart beat fast—not because he didn't mean them, but because he did, and every time he said them, he felt like he meant them a little more. They were fairly new words between Daryl and Carol. The words were new, perhaps, but Daryl felt like the meaning behind them had been there since Carol had first left that train platform with Daryl—maybe they'd even been there before that.
Daryl could have sworn he wrote those words into the letter he sent to get Carol and the life she brought to him. He certainly wrote the intention of those words into that letter, if nothing else.
Maybe, even, it was his love that had found Carol and brought her all the way here to him. Maybe it was his love that had led some kind of destiny to make it so that her ex-husband left the world to make her open to be his and to bring his family so that they could be together forever.
Of course, Daryl didn't always tell Carol all the things that he thought.
Sometimes, though, when something crossed his mind and he was chewing on it a bit too much, Merle would get to noticing it, and he would damn near pen Daryl up and force it out of him—he always had, ever since Daryl could remember—just to make sure that he didn't think it was something he needed to help Daryl work out. Daryl told Merle some of the things that he thought about how his love for Carol might've been good enough and big enough to make all that had happened happen.
Maybe it wasn't like the preacher in town said at all. Maybe marriages like theirs weren't wrong marriages—not real at all, he said in the street, even, now that there were a few other such marriages happening in the town and around it, with wives having come in on trains for other men who were feeling lonely. Maybe the preacher was wrong and theirs were marriages that were very, very right. Maybe God so much approved of them, in fact, that he made them happen against odds and across distances.
Maybe they thought it was Mrs. Baker that had picked them their wives, but maybe it wasn't her at all. Maybe there was a much bigger hand at work in selecting just the right, most-perfect woman just for each of them.
Merle had mused over Daryl's thoughts with a cigarette and a cool drink of water more than once, but he'd been mostly noncommittal about it. He figured that he wasn't an authority on things about the Good Book, and so he didn't know if it was Mrs. Baker or God that picked out wives for holy matrimony, but he did know that he had a piece of paper that said he was married, and Hershel was able to marry them legal and holy and everything else, and Merle did somewhat suspect that Andrea, though not all angel, was at least a little bit angel—at least so much as it mattered to him—so he was willing to not dismiss Daryl's notion entirely.
Carol pulled Daryl's face down to her, and she kissed him. Her kiss said as much as any words he had for her, and she smiled at him when it broke.
"I love you bigger'n the whole world," she offered. "Bigger'n anything beyond it, too, Daryl."
He laughed.
"You don't even know what all's beyond the world, Carol," Daryl offered.
"Doesn't matter," Carol said, half-shrugging her shoulders. "I probably won't never know, either. Not all of it. But whatever it is, I'm still going to love you bigger." She raised her eyebrows at him. "What if—you were to get some fire going, and I was to get us some coffee before Sophia wakes up? And—what if…I was to sit on your knee while you had coffee, and you can tell me about all you want us to do for Christmas, Daryl?"
Daryl smiled at her.
"Christmas is a ways off," he offered.
"But you've never had a real one," Carol said. "And neither have I. Not within memory, at least. And this'll be Sophia's first Christmas, too, because Ed didn't never do nothing for her, and I couldn't do much more than sneak her something that she didn't understand. It's gonna be a big Christmas for all of us here on the farm, Daryl. It doesn't hurt to start thinking about it. If we talk about it, it'll be like it lasts longer."
Daryl smiled and kissed her again, softly.
"I'ma get you your fire going," he said. "We'll talk Christmas over coffee—and then I'll take Sophia out with me to start the chores while you and Andrea's makin' us a breakfast fit for some kings, like you do ever' morning."
"Maybe we figure our husbands deserve a breakfast fit for kings," Carol offered.
"That's fine, then," Daryl said with a laugh. He pushed up, accepted the cold of the morning—a chill that would drive him to work a little faster to get the fire going each morning. He got out of bed, relinquishing the warm comfort of Carol's arms for at least a little while. "Long as you livin' like queens."
"I certainly can't complain," Carol offered, following him out of bed to make good on readying everything for their personal time before Sophia rose.