AN: Here we are, another chapter here!
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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The combination of a sedative, a muscle relaxer, and a day during which things were simply going well, created an atmosphere in which Carol actually became giggly. In Daryl's life, he'd never had too much patience for giggling girls or women—for silly girl-antics or anything of the sort—but he quickly became aware that, perhaps, that was because he'd never cared so much for the girls or women that were giggling.
Seeing Carol happy enough that she seemed incapable of containing her smile, even as she walked with him along the corridors of the ship, was enough to make Daryl feel like his heart might actually explode in his chest.
He knew, without a shadow of a doubt—punching in the code to enter their quarters and leading her inside as she leaned on him for support against her somewhat wobbly legs that were powered by her probably slightly fuzzy mind—that his happiness was directly linked to Carol's. Like some kind of symbiosis, he drew from her happiness, and he naturally felt lighter until he might have been easily convinced that the doctor had given him the same kind of medication that he'd given Carol.
Once they were inside their quarters, and the door was closed, Daryl turned Carol toward him, purposefully pulling her so that she would lose her very carefully maintained balance for a fraction of a second. She gasped, surprised by the motion and the feeling of falling, but immediately laughed when Daryl caught her and she could relax in the confidence that she wasn't going to fall.
He wouldn't let her fall.
She smiled at him, first with the closed mouth smile that came after her surprise, and then with a smile that spread all the way to her eyes. Daryl held her close to him.
"You're fuckin' gorgeous," Daryl said, his face immediately growing warm as the words came out of his mouth. He'd thought them, but he hadn't actually planned to say them so matter-of-factly. Carol laughed to herself.
"Maybe we need to go back to sickbay," she said, "and get the doctor to look at your eyes."
Daryl smiled simply because he couldn't help it. Looking at her, looking at him like she was, made it impossible to keep the expression off his face.
"There's nothin' wrong with my eyes, Carol," Daryl said. "They're brand new, remember? Doctor rejuvenated everything—even our sight."
Carol sighed, but it was clearly a put-on sigh. She ran her fingers around the neck of his shirt, and he shivered when her skin touched his. Her eyes watched what her fingers were doing as though she needed to focus intently on an action that was nothing more than the nervous entertainment of her hands.
"Maybe that's why it took you so long to—notice me," she teased.
Her eyes flicked back up to Daryl's and she didn't even try to hide her teasing smirk.
"Shut up," Daryl said. "You know I noticed your ass a long damn time ago."
"How long?" Carol asked, swallowing back her amusement.
"Like four hundred years ago if you wanna get technical about it," Daryl said, deciding to play along with her.
"It takes you an awful long time to make a move, Pookie," Carol said.
Daryl laughed to himself.
"You can say that again. He leaned forward and kissed her. She kissed him back, and the feeling behind the kiss practically surged through him. He could feel it all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes. He moaned his satisfaction with the kiss, and Carol smiled against his lips as the kiss broke. She licked her lips when Daryl looked at her, and he shivered in response.
"You have some very important work to do," she said. "What do you say—you take me to the bedroom, and we work on ensuring that our family can grow in the future?"
Daryl raised his eyebrows at her.
"You gonna help me with that?" He asked.
"Seems only right, doesn't it?" Carol said. She was already nodding her head at him, half her smile swallowed back in her best attempt to at least appear serious at the moment. Daryl smiled to himself and mirrored the nod like she clearly hoped he would. "Don't you want me to—give you a hand? Or, maybe, even a tongue?"
Daryl laughed low in his throat.
"Might be the only thing that makes this whole process bearable."
"I think we can manage more than bearable, Daryl," Carol assured him.
"I sure bet we can. Come on, woman."
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Normally, Daryl might argue that some kind of combination blow job and hand job wasn't romantic enough to make someone desperate to stick around. He would have probably called someone crazy if they'd told him that something like that would make him want to curl up and spend half the day cuddling with someone.
He was learning, though, that his normal, now, was a great deal different than what he'd ever expected it might be when he'd lived in an old trailer with his brother in Georgia.
The nature of what he and Carol were doing required him to practically run away from her the moment that she coaxed his body to find its release and they got the lid on the little container the doctor had provided. She wasn't going to take his fleeing from the room personally, though. Instead, she'd sent him off with a kiss as soon as he'd gotten dressed, and he'd stuffed the container that she'd been keeping warm—like a mother hen sitting on her eggs—into his pocket as soon as he was dressed.
Daryl had practically run to sickbay and passed the cup off to Kes with a little less urgency than passing a football for a winning touchdown. He'd gotten back to the room so fast that once, in a corridor where nobody was coming, he'd allowed himself to speed up to the point of proceeding at a quick jog. He was out of his clothes again, stripped down to his underwear, and lazily lounging in the bed with Carol before enough time had passed for his body to lose, entirely, the almost magnetic desire to be as close to her as possible.
Though she didn't really feel like making love, and though he wasn't going to pressure her into anything more than simply lingering beside him, she'd stripped down to absolutely nothing—allowing him full access to her body to touch, taste, and smell as he'd worked toward the orgasm that had filled their little container.
She was still naked as she lied next to him with her leg hooked over him. He ran his fingers gently over her knee as it rested against his stomach.
She was trailing her finger around his body, her head resting against him. Every now and again, she lifted her head to smile at him or to offer him a kiss. If he didn't see her, or turn his head in time, she kissed his jaw or the side of his face before nuzzling back into him.
"What'cha thinking about?" She asked, finally, after they'd spent a long, silent period simply loving on one another.
"You really wanna know?" Daryl asked.
She laughed quietly, the calm having taken away some of her giggly nature, but not having stripped her entirely of the feeling of happiness that practically radiated off of her.
"I wouldn't have asked if I didn't want to know."
"I was thinkin' that—in sickbay…which a year ago, I wouldn't've even known what sickbay was—we got a little cannister. All labelled up with 'Dixon' on it. And in that cannister, we got us a whole big ass family, Carol. Just waitin' to happen."
The sound she made was muffled laughter, but it was absolutely a call back to that earlier giggly feeling. She squirmed against him, drawing herself in closer and tighter to his body—there was no more room, he felt, between them anywhere.
"A year ago—not only would we not have known what a sickbay was," Carol mused, "but we wouldn't have had anything labelled 'Dixon,' and we certainly wouldn't have been thinking about a family."
Daryl trailed his fingers over her skin.
"Speak for yourself," Daryl said. "I think—somewhere? I was maybe thinkin' about all that a long time ago."
Carol sat up and Daryl hated the break in what felt like their head to toe connection, but he was glad to see her face for a moment.
"Really?" She asked, furrowing her brow and propping herself on her elbow. The almost permanent smile played at her lips.
"Really."
"You're just saying that because you're thinking it now."
"I'm not. I mean—I am, but…I know I thought of it at least a little bit, Carol. Back at the farm. I thought about it, at least a little bit, every time I saw you—going after it with someone else." She frowned at him. "I'm not bringin' that up to throw at you. I'm just saying…I thought about it. You and me, and a Dixon family."
Carol smiled to herself. She leaned toward him and he caught the kiss she intended to give him.
"You still gonna marry me? Talk to Kathryn about how we have a wedding on a starship?" Daryl asked.
"Of course," Carol said. "I had to wait to make sure you weren't going to get scared off. Maybe—find yourself a little alien girlfriend or something to avoid our family." She laughed to herself and Daryl caught it. "When do you want to do it?"
"Soon as she can arrange something suits me," Daryl said. "We'll do whatever you want. However, you want. I don't care, one way or another, as long as we come out of it all the way married."
"We're going to start a family, Daryl," Carol mused after a moment. "We're going to be parents."
"We are," Daryl said. "And this beats New Mexico, don't it?"
"This wouldn't have happened if we'd gone to New Mexico," Carol said, shaking her head. "I wouldn't have gotten pregnant. And if I had? I don't even want to think about it, Daryl. Everything that could've gone wrong…"
"Shhh…" Daryl hissed quickly. "Nothing's goin' wrong, Carol."
"I know," she said. It was evident, on her face, that she did know. At least, if she didn't know, she was fairly calmed by her confidence at the moment. They were just talking about hypotheticals. Daryl could handle any discussion as long as she wasn't upset. "I just mean—it would've been very different. And…terrifying."
"That mean you ain't scared no more?"
"Not as much," she said, seeming to have just discovered that truth for herself. "And—certainly not in the way that I would've been in New Mexico. Even if I'd had a baby, Daryl, and even if…it had been OK? We'd've had to worry about Walkers."
"We don't gotta worry about Walkers now," Daryl said. He sighed. "Now we just gotta worry about…Kazons, and Klingons, and fuck knows what else is flyin' around out here."
Carol laughed to herself.
"But look at the family we've got here," Carol said. "Look what we did to those Kazons."
"Look what you did, mostly," Daryl mused.
"I wasn't alone," Carol said.
"I like when you ain't scared," Daryl said.
"I'm still scared," Carol said. "I am. Deep down and…of different things. Maybe I don't ever get to see that go away entirely, but…I'm not scared the same way that I was. And if the Kazons come back, Daryl, I won't be scared of them. Not now. They're not getting our alien."
Daryl brushed his finger across her cheek. He saw the spark in her eye. It was fear. It was that deep-down fear that she'd alluded to feeling. Sadly, Daryl knew that it would never go away. Not entirely. He raised his eyebrows at her and offered her a reassuring smile, hoping to draw her back into her happiness and farther away from the edge of dark and frightening memories and thoughts.
"They don't get our alien, Carol," Daryl assured her. "Or—none of our others, if this ain't the only one we mix up together."
Carol smiled to herself.
"Do you want more than one?"
"Ain't that what we did this for?"
"We did it as an insurance policy. In case we wanted more than one. But—do you want more than one? Do you know?"
"A whole damn ship full of Dixons," Daryl said. "That's what I want."
He grinned at her, waiting for her reaction. She playfully swatted him, and his heart pumped harder in his chest, pleased to see that he'd pulled her away from her darkness and back into the happy light of the day.
"You looked like you'd seen a ghost when the doctor said fifteen," Carol said. "Don't pretend now that you want a whole ship full of Dixons."
Daryl laughed to himself.
"I tell you what," he said. "And I mean this. If you wanna have fifteen? I'ma let'cha do it. Hell—I'ma support it. Hold your hand and all when they're born. And—I'll love every one of 'em.'
"No," Carol said, drawing the word out, clearly amused. "No."
"I knew you ain't wanted fifteen, neither," Daryl said.
"How many do you want? No jokes."
"Two or three?"
"Is that a question or an answer?"
"Both," Daryl said. "At the end of the day, it's you that's gonna be doin' the real hard work of havin' 'em. I'm just getting the fun of takin' care of 'em and—playin' with 'em. Teachin' 'em things."
"And staying up all hours of the night," Carol said.
"Used to that," Daryl said. "At least it's stayin' up for them and not to keep an eye out for Walkers."
"And changing dirty diapers," Carol teased.
"You think anything a baby can do can be nastier'n some of the shit we've had to cover ourselves with? Or got covered with? A little baby shit don't scare me."
"You'll be a wonderful Daddy," Carol said.
Daryl couldn't help but smile to himself at the high praise.
"Hell if I won't try," he mused.
"You will be," Carol said. "To all—fifteen of our little Dixon aliens."
She snorted.
"All right," Daryl said, reaching around and playfully swatting her ass. She frowned at him, pretending that it hurt and rubbed at the spot where he'd popped her. On second thought, his hand stung, and he realized he might have underestimated his own strength. "You OK? I was just playin'. I think that was harder than I meant for it to be."
"It's OK. I'm fine," she assured him.
"You keep messin' around, joking like that? And we gonna end up with fifteen. You heard the doctor. They don't all gotta come outta that cannister and you're gonna catch us in somethin'. Some kinda—karma or something. And when that happens 'cause you joked around about it so much, you just remember, you ain't got nobody but yourself to blame."
"Mmmm…I don't want fifteen," Carol said, shaking her head. "But—I do want this, Daryl. All of this. You and me, and…this little alien. And—if one or two more is in the cards, that's fine. I'll want them, too. But—I do want this. So much."
"You got all this," Daryl assured her, pulling her close to him. "All of it that you want. Now come here—close your eyes and get a nap, while you're supposed to be resting and we still got permission to be nothin' but lazy."
