AN: Someone anonymous left me a prompt for this, and I just couldn't not write it. There may be more to come to this one. I just couldn't ignore it entirely, because I found it very inspirational. If it doesn't continue beyond this, I hope you enjoy it as a oneshot/episode/experience.

This is somewhat AU and doesn't follow canon exactly.

I own nothing from the Walking Dead.

I hope you enjoy! Please don't forget to let me know what you think!

111

Daryl smoked a cigarette and rifled through the contents of the backpack he'd picked off the Walker he'd just put down. The asshole hadn't really been dead long—a fact which was evidenced by the still-dry cigarettes that weren't even the ones from the two packs he'd had wrapped in a plastic bag to try to save them against the elements while he hiked or camped. There was jerky and a couple of old chocolate bars in the bag, as well. Daryl put the chocolate aside. He liked chocolate, but he didn't like it as much as some people did. Whenever he came across it, he always tucked it away to give to Carol when she came to visit him.

Daryl had been saving chocolate for Carol since Georgia. They'd found a chocolate bar in a gas station after leaving the farm—one that had been dropped by someone raiding the place before they'd arrived, obviously, and had been left behind because they'd clearly been raiding the station back when they were too good to eat something that had been partially stepped on.

Daryl had noticed that Carol, picking it up out of the dirt and examining it to see if the part that was still wrapped—and mostly undamaged by the foot that had stepped on it—was still good, looked at it like she'd just unearthed the world's greatest treasure. Lori, pregnant at the time and already on Daryl's last nerve at least twice a day, had seen the chocolate bar and made a big deal about it, so Carol had handed it over with insistence that Lori enjoy it and the best smile she could give.

Daryl had sensed the reluctance behind the smile, even if Lori hadn't, and he'd recognized the look of someone who was used to giving up things she wanted for the happiness of other people.

From that day forward, every bit of chocolate that Daryl had ever found went straight to Carol.

Sometimes, that wasn't always to Carol's benefit, honestly. Daryl laughed to himself, remembering the time that he'd accidentally given her a chocolate flavored laxative. He'd found it, wrapped in foil and little else, and he hadn't tasted it or questioned it. He'd given it to her as a treat, and she'd chewed through a large bite in hurried anticipation and swallowed it with a look of rapture on her face just before that expression had given way to confusion and slow realization.

He had apologized to her profusely. In a world where "enough" was sometimes hard to come by, self-induced diarrhea was the last thing they wanted. Still, she'd forgiven him and thanked him for the water and Pedialyte that he'd scrounged for her as an attempt to show that he was truly sorry for the mistake.

This chocolate wasn't a laxative, and she would be happy to see it when he showed it to her. He tucked it safely into the plastic bag in his own backpack that kept his greatest treasures dry.

Daryl continued rifling through the contents of the backpack. He sorted items he desired to keep from those that he didn't really need. He didn't feel guilty for taking anything. The Walker, after all, had no need for what he'd been carrying.

There was a wallet in the bag. Daryl felt a sort of ironic amusement bubble up in his chest when he opened it. There was no need for the contents of the wallet any longer. Everything there was a relic of a world that no longer existed. Still, this person had continued to carry it like it might come in handy someday. Out of morbid curiosity, Daryl read the information on the slightly damaged Social Security card and pulled the driver's license free from its plastic pocket.

This was the fourth Walker in probably two months that he'd found carrying some form of identification. All of them had been fairly freshly dead. Of course, the Walker population was heavy in the area, and that meant it was easy for people to get killed if they weren't on guard. These poor assholes, it seemed, hadn't been watching over their shoulders quite enough.

It wasn't that, though, that struck Daryl as interesting. Daryl saw Walkers in all states of decay, so nothing like that really even phased him anymore. Rather, with these Walkers, what he found curious was the fact that they all carried I.D. – like they thought someone might ask for it at some point, and they wanted to be ready to present it—and they'd all come from the same place.

It was a place that, once upon a time, Daryl and anyone he felt particularly close to knew well.

Georgia.

It was proof that there was something of a migration, perhaps, taking place. Maybe many people were headed, like they had once been, for D.C. with some crazy notion that they'd held onto—maybe to keep them going through everything else—that there must be something, somewhere, that would offer safety, stability, and the promise of a past that some weren't ready to accept was simply lost.

Daryl told himself that he had learned to accept loss, but that wasn't entirely true.

"Sorry, asshole," Daryl muttered to the body as he dropped the items he didn't want, returned to the backpack, and the wallet next to the Walker that he'd downed when it had taken a grab for him.

He gathered up his own bag and started walking.

Daryl had a rocky relationship with loss and acceptance.

When his mother had died, burned away to nothing, the loss had been definite, undeniable, and absolute. Still, he hadn't accepted it for years because there had been no body, and he'd been too young to see the charred remains that Merle had later told him they'd carried out of the ashes and rubble of the house in what was, essentially, an over-sized Ziploc bag of what had once been their mama. At the time, Daryl had believed, somehow, that she'd come back. Maybe the whole world would rewind and he'd get a second chance. Maybe she'd come back, clean, and they could be happy because the old man was gone, having left almost as soon as she'd died.

When his old man had skipped out on them for the last time, Daryl hadn't really realized there was a loss there. There was hardly anything to miss, and the old man left often, but he came back again—like Merle. Years passed before Daryl accepted that he was just fucking gone like he'd never been there in the first place.

And Merle? He left, but he always came back. One constant thing in their relationship had been that Merle would leave, but he would come back. The last time Daryl had seen him, he'd come back for the last time. The hardest thing about putting him down was accepting that he was never fucking coming back. Not again. No way, and no how.

In some ways, it had been the same with Andrea, Daryl recalled—she'd been gone, and then she'd come back again. Rolling her body in the tarp to bring her back to the prison had nearly killed Daryl because it was the acceptance that, with the bullet through her brain, she wasn't coming back. Not ever, and not even after her reappearance had done something to renew his belief that not all losses were permanent.

It was easier to accept loss—no matter how close he was to the person—if he could believe that they'd come back.

The losses that he'd seen where someone absolutely wasn't coming back were always the hardest. And, unlike when his mother had died, he'd always been faced with a body to prove that the loss was absolute – Dale, Glenn, Hershel…and Merle and Andrea when there had been a finality to the whole thing.

What Daryl wanted most in life, if he were being honest, was to stop losing. He wanted to keep what he found that was good. He wanted to hold onto it.

He wanted to hold onto her, really. He'd relinquish the world, if he could hold onto her.

He hadn't exactly ever made that abundantly clear, he figured. He'd never been very good at saying it, even though he'd come close to saying it a time or two, writing it down once or twice, and even screaming it when the mood had struck him. Somehow, he'd always chickened out, though.

Ever since he'd seen her suffer her greatest loss—the loss of her daughter—he'd wanted to hold onto her forever. He'd seen her strength. She'd been able to accept the single greatest loss that she could probably ever feel, and that was a strength beyond any that Daryl could imagine.

They'd never found Sophia. They'd never found her body. But the fire that forced them all away from the farm as they ran for their lives had burned away a multitude of possibilities when it came to finding the girl. Even if they'd gone back to comb through the charred remains of miles of woods that had burned, it was unlikely that any of the burned corpses they would have found would have been immediately identifiable to them as Carol's daughter.

In the aftermath of that, Carol's strength had only grown. She'd been determined never to lose again—not if she could help it.

She had lost, though. Two more girls. She'd adopted them, and she'd lost them.

Daryl had hardly been able to focus on the story of loss that she'd told him, as she'd recounted what had happened during that time—a time of separation for the two of them—because he'd been so focused on the fact that he had her back. He'd thought she was lost to him, and he'd gotten her back. Like every time he'd feared he lost her before, she'd come back to him.

Carol always came back to him. And if he had any damn sense at all, he'd find the words to tell her what he felt—he wanted her never to leave him at all. Not even for a night. Not even for a moment.

But he was a chicken shit, and he'd never told her that. He'd watched her go looking for comfort and stability in the arms of other men, and he'd let her go and even wished her the best of luck, without ever telling her that what he really wished was that she would find all her comfort in his arms.

He let her have this ridiculous-ass marriage she'd accepted because he didn't have the balls to tell her how he really felt—so maybe she was better off, anyway, even though he just couldn't believe she was ever truly more than lukewarm toward His Majesty. Daryl couldn't believe that Carol's love toward Ezekiel was any more real than her Betty Crocker front had been when they'd first found Alexandria.

But he wanted her to be happy, and if playing pretend made her happy, he wanted her to have that—especially since he'd failed at offering her anything better.

If he ever told her the truth, he'd have to admit that's why the hell he was out here all the time anyway.

She'd called him on it once, too. He'd met her there, by the creek, where he often met her to trade supplies—whatever he'd found for what she brought to keep him going. He met her in the spot where he often met her if he was cutting her off from reaching his camp—unable to handle seeing her there and knowing she'd be leaving it again as soon as she was done "checking on him"—and she'd told him, flat out, that it was time to stop roaming the woods. She'd asked him to come back with her. It could have been the perfect moment for him to tell her what he felt, and what he wanted. But he'd chickened out, yet again.

He'd said he was looking for Rick's body. He'd framed it with what she already knew about him—he had a hard time accepting loss, especially when he'd seen no concrete and irrefutable evidence that the loss was absolute. He'd told her that he felt like he had to keep looking, and that he was sure that he'd find Rick eventually.

She'd asked him if he was sure that he was looking, or was he simply hiding?

He was doing both, but he wasn't doing what he'd told her he was doing. He was, as his late brother might have said, looking for his balls. It had been a long and not very fruitful search. He still hadn't found them. If he had, he wouldn't be walking around with wet socks because he'd stupidly stepped in a puddle that was too fucking deep. He wouldn't be feeling pangs of loneliness and mourning a loss that wasn't even a true loss, because he'd never lost her entirely, at least not beyond the loss of a chance to be where the hell he ought to be. If he'd found his balls, he'd be warm right now, and not damp from the somewhat permanent fucking mist hanging in the air with the heavy fog that had settled around him. He'd be warm and dry. He'd be in a nice little house somewhere with a fire burning. She'd be sleeping, probably, next to him with her head leaned on his shoulder the way he liked her to do, or maybe she'd be cooking something warm and good for the both of them to eat.

He was looking for his balls while he hid from the fact that he couldn't bear to see that, though he hadn't lost her entirely, he'd lost part of her to the charade she was playing because she couldn't be expected to give up life entirely to sit in the damp woods and wait for him to come to his senses.

Daryl made his way back toward his camp, smoking a cigarette as he went. One thing that all this time in the woods had done for him was to sharpen his skills and his senses. Any dulling they'd suffered during any time he'd even halfway put down roots was now long gone. He hardly missed anything.

He heard, then, the movement in the layer of dead and damp leaves that coated the floor of the woods. With a sigh, he pulled his knife and steered his steps in the direction of what he'd heard. He was ready to drop the Walker that, without a doubt, would come stumbling out. It may even be another Walker from the group—he assumed it had been one group, though that may have been wrong—that he'd been putting down for a while now.

The movement stopped.

Immediately, Daryl knew—he felt it—that the being he'd heard moving around had heard him, too. And it wasn't a Walker. Daryl finished his cigarette and dropped it directly down between his feet. He snubbed it out with his shoe, determined not to start a fire in the woods that he called home, and he eased quietly and closer toward the area of the woods where he'd heard the now-still movement.

He raised his knife, prepared to use it if he had to, but really wishing that he didn't have to use it.

"I don't wanna hurt you," he said. "But—I ain't about to let your ass hurt me."

He sensed the presence of the person as he moved closer. In a thick copse of trees, a person was hiding. They were almost camouflaged, but not entirely.

"Come on out," Daryl said. "And I won't hurt you unless you try something."

"You think I haven't heard that before, asshole?" The voice growled back at him.

It was a woman's voice. From the pitch, Daryl assumed she wasn't a very old woman, but she was a woman.

"You got my word," Daryl said. "And I got shit else if I don't have that these days."

"I've got a big knife," the voice warned.

Daryl laughed to himself.

"And you got my invitation to use it, if you need it," he offered.

When the woman stepped clear from the trees, Daryl took in her height and overall appearance quickly. She was tall and thin with long red hair and brown eyes. She was young—not a child, but barely a woman—and her appearance was striking.

It was even more striking because something familiar in it made Daryl's stomach tighten into a hard knot, and his heart drummed in his chest. Something in her brown eyes softened even as her brow furrowed.

"Sophia?" He asked, almost choking on it. It had been a long time since he'd said that name out loud in more than a memory. It had been a long time since he'd yelled it—in woods not entirely unlike these—desperately. He'd wanted nothing more—not a single damn thing more—than for her to answer him so that he could take her back to her mother. He'd wanted nothing more than to give Carol back what she'd lost. Back then, he hadn't wanted to admit to himself it was because, deep down, he'd wondered if that would make Carol hold him and stay with him. He hadn't wanted to admit that he'd felt the loss of her little girl so profoundly because he'd felt that he'd failed her, and it had been a feeling that he'd never fully overcome. It had been the one way he'd truly failed her, and he could never make it right.

Like a strange sort of ghost, he saw the matured features of the child that had haunted his dreams for over a decade.

"Sophia…" he repeated.

Her features softened, too, though she kept the furrow between her brow.

"Daryl?" She answered back.

Daryl's heart beat faster than it had before, and he choked out an unexpected burst of nervous laughter.

"Holy shit," he said. "Your Mama's gonna lose her fuckin' mind!"