AN: Here we are, another chapter here.

I'll be honest, it's something of a transition chapter. Those have to happen sometimes. LOL

Also there's an AN at the end.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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"I thought you weren't coming back," Carol admitted, her voice barely above a whisper so that it wouldn't carry beyond the curtain covered entrance into their cell. "I feel bad even admitting it. I feel bad even—even admitting that I feel relieved when I know what Hershel and Beth—what they must be feeling. What everyone's feeling, really. But—it's different for everyone else."

Daryl sat on the bed and watched Carol. He wasn't saying much, and he looked troubled, but that was only to be expected.

The whole run group had been gone all day. Nobody had started to panic until the sun was setting. Then a sensation of worry had simply descended over every last corner of the prison.

Being out after sunset was particularly dangerous. The Walkers didn't really seem to suffer from any vision difficulty because of the lack of light. They remained able to continue on as they normally would. People, however, needed light to see. The light drew the Walkers. If the people tried to continue on without light, they were much more likely to make stupid mistakes that might get them grabbed by Walkers that they didn't see or hear. Beyond that, it seemed like many Walkers were simply more active at night, even though Carol had no reasonable explanation as to why they might be.

Carol had distracted herself by turning all of her attention to feeding the group, cleaning up after the meal, and making sure that Sophia remained unaware of any potential problem. Her daughter clearly noticed Daryl's absence, but she accepted the happy face that Carol could force herself into wearing, and she accepted Carol's promise that "Daddy" would be there to get Sophia's breakfast ready when she woke up from a good night's sleep. With the promise fresh in her mind, Sophia had allowed Carol to handle her entire bedtime routine, and she'd stayed asleep as Carol had moved her delicately from their cell to the cell that Sophia shared with Rick and Lori's daughter, Judith.

It was only once Sophia was asleep that Carol had allowed herself to start unraveling with concern over the fact that something might have happened. They knew roughly where everyone was supposed to be while gathering supplies, but a lot could happen that could draw a group away from their intended location, and those changes couldn't be communicated back to the group. Going in search of someone was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Still, Carol wanted desperately to go after Daryl.

She might have suggested something the moment that the sun had started to break through the darkness of the night, but she hadn't had to.

Daryl and T-Dog had come back in two vehicles. They'd come back with a large truck that they'd gotten running while they were away, and they'd come back with the car that they'd taken when they left. They came telling stories about finding a great deal of useful stuff on their run, but also finding more Walkers than they'd bargained for. Neither of them had been hurt, but they'd been slowed down considerably when they'd worked to avoid the potential trouble of a herd that had been wandering near them.

They'd never rendezvoused with Maggie and Glenn like they'd planned. The two had never shown up to their designated location and, after escaping the herd that they'd worked to avoid, Daryl and T-Dog had driven in the direction where Maggie and Glenn were supposed to have gone, but they'd seen no sign of them. Since the two of them had no way of knowing exactly where Glenn and Maggie might have been sent, and since they couldn't find any indication of their whereabouts, they'd decided that it was likely that the two had returned to the prison. They'd done the same, positive that they'd all meet up there with stories to tell about the day.

Glenn and Maggie had never returned, though, and now it seemed that the whole prison was waiting out the night in the best way that they knew how. Nobody was quite sure of what the dawn would bring. They would have to figure out a plan, but there was really nothing they could safely do until the world woke up and allowed them to see everything clearly once more.

Carol and Daryl were supposed to be sleeping, but Carol's concern over the possibility that something had happened to Daryl, compounded with her concern over their two lost group members, meant that she wasn't very much in the mood to sleep. Daryl, too, seemed like he was content to simply spend the night keeping each other company in the cell.

"Even now," Carol continued, talking to herself as much as she was talking to Daryl, "I feel—you must think I'm awful to admit it. I hope we find them, but I'm relieved you're back. I kept thinking..." Carol stopped. She felt unable to stop talking entirely, but she also felt unable to put her words together in any clear and decipherable order. She felt unable to stop telling Daryl essentially the same story over and over. It was as though his absence and the fear of losing him had broken something inside her. A thread or something had snapped and there was nothing there to hold back the flood of thoughts and emotions that she could usually keep intact. For as much as she might accuse him of judging her for her words, though, Carol had to admit that Daryl truly looked like he wasn't judging her at all. He never did. "I kept thinking..." she swallowed back against the lump in her throat that found its way back to a position where it had been several times before. Daryl changed his positon so that he could sit beside her. He rubbed his hand over her back and hushed her.

"It's OK," he said. "You ain't gotta say it. You ain't gotta explain it, neither. We all feel what we feel. And every man's a liar that says he don't got selfish thoughts. Woman too, I reckon. We love what we love best. It don't make us bad. Makes us human." Daryl's voice was barely loud enough to reach Carol's ears, but it brought with it strange wave of comfort. "Fuck—if I was bein' honest, I'd sacrifice everybody in this prison two dozen times to save you an' Soph. More'n that if it's what I had to do. Does it make me an animal?"

"Not to me," Carol said. "But to everyone else..."

"An' still I sit here not carin'," Dayrl said, making it so that she didn't have to finish.

She understood exactly what he was saying. He was trying to put her own emotions into words. They cared about the people around them and they were all family, but it had long since been decided that everyone cared for their own more than they cared for the rest. It was only natural, but Rick—their leader—had made it clear that they better give into those feelings. They better not fight them. He was always going to care for his first, and always at the expense of the group. That was accepted, but nobody was going to pretend that they didn't understand his lessons loud and clear. They, too, would have watch their own backs first and everyone else's second.

It was the law of the land, no matter how cruel it might seem. And maybe Daryl was right, maybe they were all simply human.

Daryl normally did what he could to care for the group, but once Carol had seen him live up to the promise that he would take care of his first. At the time, though, Carol hadn't even realized that Daryl considered her and Sophia to be anything more to him than group-related family.

They had been on a farm. They'd ended up there fleeing Atlanta when the CDC had exploded and forced them on the road again. They'd encountered a traffic snare on the highway that would take them days to clear. A herd had come through that was one of the largest they'd ever seen. There had been Walkers everywhere and they'd all had to fight with everything they had to survive the passing herd. It was clear that they weren't going to survive if they had to sleep on the highway. Several of them had gone in search of shelter. They'd branched off in different directions. Nobody had ever expected Rick's son, Carl, to be shot, but it had happened and it was an accident. The man who had shot the boy took them to the farm. The whole group had come following after.

Hershel was family to them now, and Carol cared for the old man dearly, but in the beginning he had not been warm or welcoming. He'd banished them all to sleep outside and the fever had washed over all of them. Whether the fever was the result of some changing weather or whether it was something floating in the atmosphere after the turn or the explosion of the CDC, Carol had no way of knowing. All she'd known was that her daughter had fallen ill. Her baby girl had struggled to hold onto life and Carol had known true fear—a kind of fear that had far outweighed any fear she'd felt until that point.

She'd truly believed she might hold her child while she breathed her last breath.

There had been some antibiotics, but all of them had gone to Carl. There had been none left for Sophia and Carol had been truly helpless. Tylenol and nothing else that she could scrounge up or beg from the others did anything for Sophia.

And then Daryl came back. He came back from a run that he'd taken by himself. It was a run that he'd announced to nobody. He came back from a run that he'd taken on a stolen horse. He came back bleeding and injured, but he came back just the same. Ad he came back with antibiotics that he delivered directly to the hands of the old man and demanded that he use them to find a way to cure Sophia.

Carol remembered how angry Daryl had been when Rick had requested some of the antibiotics for Carl who had already taken everything they'd found. She remembered how angry Daryl had been when other sick members of the group had come begging for some relief.

Bloody, exhausted, and weakened, Daryl had stood ready to fight them—one at a time and with nothing more than his hands—on the porch of the farmhouse. Carol remembered that others had backed away from him, some of them whispering suggestions of rabies or calling him feral.

She had never felt more drawn to him, though, than she had that night. It was the first indication that he might consider her and Sophia to be more than simple travelling companions thrust upon him by the luck of the draw.

She'd given him a kiss that night. The first of many. And he had acted like it did as much as to heal his soul as the antibiotics did to heal Sophia's illness-wracked body.

That was also the night that it had become clear in the group that they were all family—but there was an animal law in place that simply stated that we take care of our own first.

Carol leaned herself against Daryl.

"You're a good man," she said. It was something she often told him. She reminded him of it often, in case he might forget. She never wanted him to forget that.

"We'll look for 'em tomorrow," Daryl said. "They prob'ly just got caught up somewhere. It was gettin' dark an' they decided to stay the night. It was safer there than it was tryin' to get back here. We'll go out tomorrow an' we'll find 'em after breakfast."

"I promised Sophia you'd be there to wake her up," Carol said. "That you'd get her breakfast. I didn't—I didn't know what else to tell her when you hadn't come back. I didn't want her to worry, and it was the only way she was going to bed without you."

"You done good," Daryl informed her, rubbing her back. He sighed. Carol could tell that something was bothering him, and she had the feeling that it wasn't Sophia. Maybe it wasn't even Glenn and Maggie.

Carol sat up and furrowed her brow at him. He mirrored her expression. He nipped at the side of his thumb with his teeth and Carol reached and took his hand in hers so that his nervous habit wouldn't cause him to injure himself. Even though a torn cuticle was hardly life-threatening, it was unnecessary if Carol could stop it.

"You don't sound too worried about Glenn and Maggie," Carol said.

"I think they just holed up somewhere," Daryl said.

Carol nodded her head. She was worried, but the explanation was a good one. Glenn and Maggie were practically run professionals. They were good at what they did and they seldom had trouble. It was perfectly reasonable to believe that they'd seen a reason to change their plans and that's what they'd done. It was entirely likely that they'd be back at the gates before anyone had eaten breakfast and planned what to do about trying to find them.

"Are you worried about Sophia?" Carol asked. "She's fine. I told her that you got held up. I told her that you had a lot to do and it was making you late, but that you were coming back. I told her you'd see her in the morning."

Daryl shook his head.

"Then what are you worried about?" Carol asked. "Can I help you?"

Daryl chewed his lip, then, and his eyes darted away from Carol. She fought the urge to reach for his face and draw his eyes back to her. Instead, she gave him a moment to sit with his thoughts and she took comfort in the feeling of him working her hand in his.

"It ain't nothin' except—I was worried about you. I didn't like leavin' you. I don't—never like leavin' you. Maybe—I like leavin' you even less now."

Carol smiled to herself. She squeezed his hand in hers.

"I'm here," she said. "And you're here—and it'll all work out."

Daryl leaned and requested a kiss which Carol very gladly granted.

"Let's stop worryin' for the night an' just let's deal with all in the morning? Let me just be happy that'cha...that'cha here? With me? Go to bed with me, Smooshy?" Daryl asked, smiling to himself at the strange new pet name that he seemed to have latched onto. Carol let him have it.

She swallowed down some laughter and nodded her head.

"Your children are wearing me out," Carol said. "Both of them. I thought you'd never ask, Pookie."

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AN: Someone mentioned the back story of this particular "Caryl" couple. They wanted something that would address how they got together, how Daryl became Sophia's Daddy, etc. Would you be interested in that?

If so, would you be interested in it in something like flashback chapters that I put here, or would you be interested in a separate sort of fluffy/self-indulgent collection of goop like this one?