AN: I used to be apologetic about things like accidental new stories. I'm just not anymore. Instead, I'm simply leaving this here as what it is. I can't let go what I can't let go, and that's just the way I'm wired. Anyone reading this probably knows that by now.
Something was somewhat brought to my attention, though, and I felt I should address it. This is a Caryl story, as far as the romantic relationships go. I am not an author that tries to trick my readers with surprise anti-ship relationships. I am open about what I'm writing, and I try to let you know about anything that you might find triggering. That being said, Carol and Ezekiel start out married here. It is a performance marriage. Ezekiel is not a villain, and he will not be written as one. I'm also not writing them as passionately in love. They are friends, and he does support Carol. I hope all of that will be made clear.
That being said, I apologize if anyone feels that I cannot be trusted to write Caryl when I say that this is a Caryl story or if anyone feels triggered by my inclusion of the Carol/Ezekiel marriage without some explicit mention that would be part of the start of this. You're not going to be blindsided with that relationship as anything more than a friendship where they have mutual respect for each other, but I apologize to anyone who may have been bothered by that or surprised by it. I promise that I will try to handle things delicately, and that this is, in fact, a Caryl story. If it weren't, I would make sure it was labelled and treated as such.
If you are able to read, I do hope you enjoy the chapter. I thank you for your support, even as I have these accidental interests in exploring some new things. Please don't forget to let me know what you think of the chapter!
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Daryl wanted to know everything. He wanted to ask Sophia how she'd gotten here, what her life had been like, and if she was alone. All of that was pushed from his mind immediately, though, when she dissolved. At just the mention of her mama, the young woman in front of him turned, once again, into a scared little girl who had been chased by Walkers, had gotten lost and, maybe for all these years, had simply wanted her mama—maybe almost as badly as her mama had wanted her.
Daryl wasn't usually the biggest hugger in the world—at least when the person he was hugging wasn't Carol—but he took Sophia into his arms without thinking about it. She hugged him back like he wasn't a stranger at all, and like she didn't only remember him from what was probably a terrifying time in her life. As he felt the young woman in his arms squeeze him very tightly—a young woman who was long and lanky and someone he was still somewhat determined to think of as a child—he slowly, truly, realized that she was real. She was flesh and bone. This wasn't some hallucination from choosing the wrong kind of mushrooms, and it wasn't some continued dream from dozing off, accidentally, when he shouldn't have.
Daryl couldn't find the words to ask the questions that he wanted to ask, but he doubted that Sophia had the words to answer them. The only thing that mattered to either one of them was clear.
"Let's go get your mama," Daryl said when he pulled out of the hug.
Sophia nodded at him, red-eyed, and returned to the copse of trees where he'd found her only long enough to re-emerge with a hiking backpack. Daryl tried to take it from her, but it was already placed on her back, and she was buckling the front supports. She clearly had no intention of handing it over for him to carry, and he had no intention of pushing the issue.
On the way to the Kingdom, Daryl's mind ran a thousand miles a minute, but none of the thoughts that he had seemed capable of finding their way out of his mouth. Beside him, brow-furrowed almost to the point of looking angry with the world, he wondered if Sophia felt the same.
There was so much to say, but saying everything was hard, especially when there was no way of knowing exactly where to begin.
"Where are we going?" Sophia asked finally. Daryl was thankful that she broke the silence that seemed to grow more tense with each passing second, but also seemed harder to break the longer they maintained it.
"Place called the Kingdom," Daryl said. "It's just a community, really."
"You live there?"
"Not exactly," Daryl said. "Stay there sometimes. For a night or two. I live wherever the hell I am. Mostly in the woods. Got a camp. You livin' somewhere?"
"I move around," Sophia said.
Daryl wanted to ask if she'd been moving around since they'd lost her. He wanted to ask her what happened and how she'd gotten here. There was time for that, though, and the words stuck in his throat.
"You alone?" He asked.
"Now I am," Sophia said. She made no offer to add to that, and Daryl got the gut feeling that she was content if he left it that way. She wasn't leaving things to lead him to asking her for more information. She wasn't seeking sympathy or interaction. She was simply answering him in a cut and dry manner.
Sophia was not a child anymore, and that was going to take as much adjustment as realizing that she was still very much alive—and very much real.
"Mama lives at this Kingdom place?" Sophia asked.
Daryl's heart lodged firmly in his throat and his stomach turned inside out—or at least it felt that way.
"Yeah," he said. "She does. I visit her there. She visits me, sometimes, at my camp."
He wasn't sure if he should tell the young woman that, in the long time since they'd last seen her, her mother had adopted a child who, at this point, was almost grown, and was in something of a farcical marriage that she'd accepted, as Daryl could best reason it, to have some sort of companionship where he had fallen short of the mark.
"Does everyone else live there?" Sophia asked.
Daryl scanned back through his memory—a slideshow of who Sophia would have known flashed through his brain. His already aching stomach hurt a little worse as he saw faces that, now, lived only in the memory of very few people. It felt a little too hard to tell Sophia that most of the people she'd known back then were dead.
"No," Daryl said. "Just your Ma."
Sophia looked at him. For a moment, his eyes fully connected with hers. She had brown eyes—probably a genetic gift from a grandparent—but the soul that he saw in them still reminded him of Carol's clear, blue eyes.
Sophia saw more than he wanted her to see. He was sure of that, but she didn't say anything. She simply nodded and kept walking.
"How far is it?" She asked after a moment.
"Not too far," Daryl said. He laughed quietly. "Especially not at this pace. You got some damn long legs—you know that?"
Sophia laughed.
"Yeah," she said. "I do."
111
As the gates of the Kingdom came into view, Daryl felt like his organs were out of control. He couldn't begin to imagine how Carol would feel. He couldn't begin to imagine how Sophia would feel.
If he were to tell the truth, which he probably never would, he was feeling overwhelmed by his own sense of "rightness." There was an odd feeling in his gut that everything that he'd ever done wrong was, somehow, about to be put right. He was about to do the one thing that was the greatest thing that he could ever do. It was a moment he'd been dreaming of, it seemed, for years.
He really hadn't done anything, but he'd never get his stomach or heart to believe that.
Still, as they neared the gates, another feeling battled with his feeling of absolute and utter excitement. He stopped his forward progress and, matching him each step of the way, Sophia stopped hers. She looked at him with an expression that asked everything her mouth didn't bother to ask.
Shit. She looked so much like her mother. Carol was the only person in the world who could absolutely unnerve Daryl just by looking at him. Now, it seemed, she was one of two.
"I know you don't wanna hear it," Daryl said, accepting that some of what he thought had to come out, "but—we thought you were gone all this time."
"I know that," Sophia said. Daryl must have made a face at her, because she smiled softly and shrugged her shoulders. "I was gone," she said, by way of an explanation, "and I knew you had to believe that I was dead, or you would have found me. Mama would have found me."
"Jesus," Daryl said, feeling like he was choking on it. "She wanted to. We tried. I tried, Sophia. I looked for you…she left supplies for you. Went back just to see if you found the spot. Couldn't really give up until the fire."
"I don't know about a fire," Sophia said. "I wasn't there."
"Where the hell were you?" Daryl asked. "I mean—I know you probably don't wanna talk about it and you don't owe my ass any explanation, but…"
Sophia shrugged. Daryl watched her eyes dart to the side. He remembered something he'd read, once, that said that people's eyes went in one direction when they were about to lie—creating something from scratch in their brain—and to another direction when they were remembering. He didn't have to know the direction to know that Sophia was remembering.
"I was going to stay where Rick told me to," Sophia said. "But there were more Walkers. I got scared. I ran. I did try to go in the direction that he told me to, but…there were more in that direction. I thought I'd find my way back. I thought Mama would find me. Someone would find me. But—before I had run too far, I ran into someone else. I felt lost. I was scared. At first, they said they would help me find you. They said they knew exactly where the highway was—exactly where the spot I was talking about was. By the time I realized that they weren't going to take me back, it was too late. They weren't bad to me. There was one woman who called herself my mom. She would only call me Layla. She died. I've travelled with a few people since then. But she wasn't a horrible person. She just—missed Layla. Nobody's called me Sophia until today."
"Shit," Daryl said. "You got fuckin' snatched. Like shit weren't bad enough, there was people snatchin' other people's kids…"
"They weren't bad to me," Sophia reiterated. Daryl's stomach tightened. He realized that, even though it might have been a traumatic event for her—likely the whole damn thing had been—she clearly would have held some affection for the only people that she'd had during the whole thing. Daryl accepted that with a nod and dropped it.
"I was gonna say that your mama…didn't know you were alive," Daryl said. "And—you walkin' in there right now and just surprisin' her might be a whole lot for her all at once. Might be a shock. And there's no way around that, and it's gonna be the best shock of her life, but…"
"Maybe you ought to prepare her," Sophia said.
"Just to help ease the shock a little," Daryl agreed. "I don't wanna just—leave you out here, though."
Sophia smiled at him. She laughed to herself. She held up her hand. The "big knife" she'd threatened him with earlier was, actually, a machete. It hung just loosely enough in her grip that it made it perfectly clear that it was a weapon with which she was intimately familiar. It was like an appendage to her.
"I've been alone before, Daryl," Sophia said. She shook her head. "I'm not a little girl lost in the woods anymore."
"You sure ain't that," Daryl agreed.
"But…I've been dreaming of seeing my mommy again for…" Sophia stopped and shrugged. Daryl could see emotion cross her features, though she pushed the emotion away quickly. For a split second, it had looked like she might cry, but she stopped it before it started. "Forever, it feels like. I can still smell her. Even though—I know that doesn't make any sense, does it? And it can't be true."
"It can be true," Daryl assured her.
"The last thing I want is for her to be overwhelmed," Sophia said.
"Oh—she's gonna be overwhelmed. There ain't no fuckin' way around that," Daryl said.
"I mean—I don't want to hurt her. To make her…too shocked."
"I hear ya," Daryl said. His stomach tightened again. "Just to be fair to you, and all—and so you don't get some kinda nasty shock, yourself, I oughta tell you a couple things. She can tell you the rest—fill in the details, but…"
Sophia tensed visibly.
"Is she OK?"
"She's fine," Daryl said. "She's—she's good. She's about to be fuckin' incredible when she sees you. It's just…she's married to this guy. Calls himself the King. Ezekiel. She don't really love him, but…that shit ain't my business…"
Daryl stopped. He stopped cold. He had always kept his mouth shut as tightly as he could when he had a lot on his mind because, ever since he was a child, Merle had teased him about having what he called verbal diarrhea. If he held back everything, then he simply did just that—he held it back. He kept it to himself. It ran around his mind, thoughts bumping wildly into each other, but it never got out. It never made him feel embarrassed. It never left him overthinking what he'd said and wishing he'd never said half the shit that came out of his mouth.
But if he ever got started? It was all the hell he could do to get it stopped up again.
That was one of the reasons that he didn't drink to excess with any regularity. It was harder to keep the stopper firmly in place when his inhibitions were lowered, and he started to let more out.
It was especially hard when he'd had something boiling inside him long enough that it felt at risk of boiling over as it was—and he was feeling very much at a boiling point.
Sophia didn't need to hear all of it. It wasn't hers, anyway, to carry.
She looked a little concerned, but Daryl accepted that her concern might be more about his stopping short rather than what he'd said. He thought he might have stopped before he'd said too much.
"He doesn't hurt her…"
"No," Daryl said quickly, his poor, tortured stomach practically spasming. "No. Hell no. I wouldn't let that happen. I mean—she wouldn't let it happen, but…he don't hurt her. He cares about her. Cares for her. They're friends. He takes care of her. Makes sure she's got all the hell she needs, it's just…forget I fuckin' said anything, OK? It's just—I thought you'd wanna know that…you'd just wanna know."
Sophia stared at him, hard, for a moment. Then, she nodded.
"Yeah," she said. "Thanks."
"And that ain't all," Daryl said. "She adopted a kid. Henry. He was orphaned a long time ago, and she's raised him up."
Sophia smiled softly.
"So—I have a brother?"
"Don't piss you off?"
"Why would it piss me off?" Sophia asked. "I always wanted a little brother. I asked for one for Christmas like…every year, I think."
Daryl laughed at her story.
"He ain't so little," Daryl said. "But—I don't want you to think that meant that…she didn't love you or something."
He had no idea why he'd felt the need to add the last part. He felt just as much like kicking himself as he had when he'd very nearly took the lid off everything he'd been boiling in his brain for a long damn while.
Sophia simply smiled at him.
She looked so fucking much like her mother. It made Daryl's chest tighten to the point that breathing was difficult for a second.
"Thanks," Sophia said simply.
"Well—you're welcome," Daryl responded, not sure how else to reply.
"Daryl—can…you go get my mommy now?" Sophia asked, her eyes pleading with him. All at once, in place of the young woman, he saw the little girl again—big-eyed and sweet against the background of a life that could have never been as nice as she probably deserved.
"I'ma go talk to her," Daryl said. "You just—wait out here. Over there's good. Yell if you need help. We're close enough the Kingdom guards'll hear you an' come on out."
Sophia nodded her agreement and casually walked toward a shady area to wait. Daryl glanced back at her once more before picking up his steps and heading toward the gates of the Kingdom—trying to figure out exactly how he would tell Carol who was waiting outside to see her—who he'd brought home to her, finally, even if it was a decade later than he'd meant for it to be.
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AN: In addition to my explanation about the Carol/Ezekiel relationship, I feel I always have to add the disclaimer that I write the characters as I think they should/would be. This doesn't always match with what's on the screen or in everyone's imagination. We're all different. I'm sorry if my versions don't work for you. (Daryl speaks in my world, though, so just keep that in mind.)
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the chapter!