AN: This is a oneshot inspired by a post that psychoanthrowalker made on Tumblr. I'm sure there were other ideas behind the post, but this is what happened when I tried to bring it to life.
I own nothing from the Walking Dead, but I do own my original characters, plot points, etc.
I am not actively watching the show, so much of this is based on my understanding from other people's posts. It's also strongly based on my imagination of how things are going/will go.
I hope you enjoy! Please don't forget to let me know what you think!
111
Daryl stood staring at himself in the mirror. His reflection stared back at him. He frowned, and his reflection frowned back, amplifying his feelings.
He felt the poignant ache of loss. Mourning. Grief.
It was Daryl Dixon, though, that he was mourning, and he had never expected to feel that particular, distinct loss.
Still, as he looked at his reflection in the mirror, and his reflection looked back at him, that's what he felt. He'd lost himself. There had been something of a long-term, chronic, slipping-away that had taken place over the years—piece-by-piece. It had been almost imperceptible and easily-ignored. Now, though, dressed up like some kind of a stupid-ass looking Storm Trooper from an old Star Wars movie, the loss was complete.
"Fucking hell," he muttered to himself. The reflection that he hardly recognized as himself raised a lip in disgust.
Maybe this place was paradise. Maybe this place was the safety that they'd been hoping for since the beginning of all this madness. Maybe this place signified rest, home, and security. Maybe it meant a return to normalcy—a normalcy that they'd been without for so long that, really, it was abnormal in itself. Maybe this place was the closest thing to heaven that any of them would ever know in this plane of existence.
Or, maybe, this place was hell.
Maybe it was a bit of both, depending on perspective. Each person looked at each situation, after all, and decided if it was heaven or hell for themselves.
Daryl walked over to his bedside table and rolled himself a cigarette from the papers and tobacco that waited for him there. He took it over to the mirror again and, flicking the flame on the lighter he'd picked up at the storage area where they could grab whatever they wished, he lit the cigarette. He saw only a faint glimmer of his former self as he inhaled and the smoke filled his lungs—whisps of it trailing around his face.
This was what they'd wanted. This was what they'd been looking for since everything started. This was what they'd hoped for every single day and with every single mile they'd covered.
Daryl had hoped for something at least a little different for a while now—since just about the time shit started to become this—though he'd only really begun to truly understand it, himself, and he hadn't dared to voice it, sincerely, to anyone else.
Like everyone else, he wanted safety and security. He wanted to know that everyone was comfortable, happy, and had what they wanted. He wanted something, though, for himself, too. He wasn't finding it. Not here. Not dressed like a Storm Trooper in this ridiculous-ass armor that was difficult to wear and seemed more for theatrical performance than anything else.
Daryl didn't want to be anyone's Storm Trooper. He didn't want to be anyone's second-in-command. He didn't want to be a sidekick. Hell—he didn't even want to be anyone's leader or their savior.
Daryl just wanted to be Daryl Dixon—and he wasn't sure how much of Daryl Dixon, honestly, was left.
He laughed to himself. His reflection laughed back.
Maybe what the hell was left of him would stay fresh in this stupid Tupperware container they expected him to wear.
Daryl wanted what he'd once heard that everyone else wanted in life, though he hadn't really said it out loud all that much. He wanted love. He wanted companionship. He wanted—if whatever deity was in charge of such things was smiling on him—to have all that, along with the physical relationship that he knew could go with it. He wanted his own security—the feeling that he would spend the rest of his life, preciously-short though it may be—with the woman that he loved. He wanted the sweet feeling of true rest that he imagined must come at finally being able to close his eyes, next to her, and know that this was more than a dream.
He wanted to be with her—loving her for everything she was—and he wanted to know that she loved him just the same.
He wanted to be Daryl Dixon, and he wanted her to love him for that.
The problem, of course, was that, though he loved her that way, he wasn't sure that she could or would love him that way. He wasn't sure of what she wanted—really wanted—and if he could ever be enough for her. He wasn't sure if she'd be willing to leave this place with him and go, like he'd once suggested, where he could be Daryl Dixon, without everyone's expectations of what that meant, and she could be his.
He wasn't sure how much of Daryl Dixon would be left to offer her, if he stayed here too long.
His cigarette done, he disappeared from view again. Like turning his head, he lost sight of the piece of himself he'd caught in his periphery.
"Son of a bitch," he muttered to himself.
Daryl reached around behind himself and grappled for whatever the hell was holding the shell onto his body. When he'd gotten strapped into the armor, there had been a man there that had practically dressed all of them like over-sized dolls. Daryl had meant to pay attention to exactly how all the pieces fastened on, but he'd slipped away, somehow, during the whole process—the numbness he felt had bled over into a certain mental numbness, it seemed.
Now, he didn't feel numb. He felt frustrated and more than a little angry.
He wanted out of the armor, but he didn't know how to get out. His fingertips slid against the slippery surface of the slick shell, missing their hold on anything useful. Anything he did catch to tug didn't seem to do anything. At this rate, it would have been just as effective to have them hold up pieces of fenders and quarter panels while someone circled them with a practically endless loop of tight duct tape.
Suddenly, Daryl wanted desperately out of the armor.
He wanted out of the Commonwealth. He wanted out of—this. All of this. Even though, really, he couldn't quite name what this was.
He wanted only what he'd ever truly wanted—and he suddenly felt sure that he'd never get it, no matter how desperate he felt to have it.
All of that desperation, anger, and frustration seemed to come together in an immediate and overwhelming need to be out of the armor. With the build up of all that, and the inability to catch hold of anything that seemed to make any difference in his current predicament, Daryl felt a rising panic in his chest.
He wasn't claustrophobic. Not really. But she was. He'd seen the panic in her eyes before. He'd heard it in her trembling voice and ragged breaths. He'd understood that, despite the abundance of air around her, her mind had believed she was suffocating. She was losing herself. She was dying.
He felt, all at once and far too realistically, what she'd felt. Suddenly, he couldn't breathe. The armor had become a vice, and his mind told him it was tightening against his chest—choking out his air and everything that was left of him. He was dying. He was disappearing. Unexpected panic took over, and he frantically scrambled to get free of the ridiculous outfit. When he crashed into the wall in his thrashing attempt to find freedom and himself again, he knocked a picture down, and it came crashing to the floor.
Almost immediately, there was a knock at the door.
"Daryl? Are you OK?"
He couldn't answer. He couldn't say that he was OK. He wasn't. There was so much here that wasn't OK—and it was, at this moment, all represented by this armor that was trapping him.
She didn't wait for response, really, nor for invitation. She invited herself into the room quickly, the door closing behind her with a heavy bang that, normally, might invite someone else to come into a room—if it weren't Daryl's room where, really, few people came without explicit invitation.
Her presence there, in his room, worked like an instantly-acting tranquilizer. Daryl stopped frantically clawing in an attempt to fight for his freedom. He stopped feeling like the armor was suffocating him. Suddenly, it was only her presence that was suffocating him—and he never much minded that kind of suffocation.
Her brow was furrowed. She looked concerned. That only served to calm him a bit more. She needed him to be calm for her to be calm—and he'd do whatever he could to make her happy, even if that meant suffocating in the Storm Trooper outfit into which he'd been duct taped.
"Are you OK?" Carol asked.
"I am now," Daryl said.
In its efforts to escape the Commonwealth armor, it seemed that his brain had let down its natural protection a bit. Daryl felt himself grow warm when he realized that he'd admitted that Carol's presence, alone, had helped to begin solving his problems. Something shifted in Carol's expression, but if she realized what he'd said, she didn't call him out for it.
"Can I—help you with something?" She asked, the concern on her features softer but not entirely gone.
Daryl was embarrassed, now, to admit that he'd lost control of himself for a moment and panicked over being trapped in the confining armor. Before he could say anything, she smiled at him—a soft, slightly sympathetic smile. It was the kind of smile that he'd really only tolerate from her. She reached a hand up and, scratching her fingertips against his scalp, she smoothed his hair.
"You're a mess," she said with a soft laugh. "What were you doing? Can I help?"
This proximity to her, the tender look on her face, the amusement in her tone of voice—all of it thrilled Daryl in a way that was, probably, entirely nonsensical. As she pulled her hand back, she cleared her throat, and there was a light blush of pink on her cheeks. Daryl saw her throat move as she swallowed. Daryl's chest tightened, again, but this time it was for a different reason entirely.
"Can you help me get off?" He asked. Immediately, his stomach crashed down inside of him the same way that the picture had crashed down to floor earlier. His whole body ran ice cold and then hot again. As much as part of him wanted to lose consciousness after the words left his mouth, he felt another part of him—bold as the little asshole was—wake up at the very suggestion. He stammered out a correction, but the damage was done. "Shit—can you—help me get this off? Can you—help me get this off? The damn…armor?"
There was no wondering if Carol hadn't heard it. She smirked at him, and the pink on her cheeks darkened. Daryl's pulse picked up, and it was harder to breathe normally than it had been at the exact moment that he'd feared that he might actually suffocate to death.
"I can help you," Carol said, tilting her head to the side and only halfway muffling her teasing. Her nostrils flared with the amusement she was swallowing back. Daryl shouldn't have found that attractive, really, but he was immediately aware the that the damned Tupperware armor left nowhere for an erection to go—and he was used to needing a little space for such things in Carol's presence.
"Shit's killin' me," Daryl said. He realized how strained the words sounded, and he immediately felt a rush of hot embarrassment again.
Carol snorted.
"The armor," he added, though he felt like there was really no helping things now.
"We'll have to—do something about it," Carol said. There was a distinct sound of something in her tone that Daryl had never been able to label well. It sounded like pout, but it was teasing. "Come here, we'll get you some relief, Pookie."
Carol winked at him and her smile curled upward as she stepped behind Daryl. Immediately, she went to work pulling and releasing things that held Daryl captive in the Commonwealth get-up. Piece-by-piece, she stripped away the armor and let it drop to the floor. Daryl tried to catch none of it. He let it fall away, happy to be freed from it and not wanting to gather it back it up—not caring what became of it, really.
"There," Carol said, circling around Daryl. He recognized the softness in her voice. It always made his pulse speed up. He wasn't accustomed to people speaking to him so softly and affectionately. It was mostly her that had ever spoken to him in such a way and, really, it was only her that had ever made him feel the way she did. She smiled at him when she was in front of him again. That soft smile, again. "Now…" she said, drawing it out and then pursing her lips at him with a touch of a smirk on her features. "What about…that other request?"
Daryl's heart slammed to an abrupt stop in his chest before beginning to dance wildly.
"Other…request?" He stammered out.
"Unless—you really didn't mean it," Carol challenged. She held his eyes a moment and then flicked hers downward. He didn't have to look down to know what she was looking at. He could feel it. After being freed from the confines of the armor, he knew exactly what she was looking at. She brought her eyes back to his. "If you didn't mean it…" She hesitated a moment. Her mouth was just barely open in a little "o" shape of relaxed curiosity as she studied his face.
For a moment, Daryl couldn't speak. He felt like he couldn't move. He was held captive, again, but this time by the overwhelming sensation that this moment—this very moment in front of him—defined every moment to come.
With the shedding of the Commonwealth armor, perhaps he'd shed a little armor of his own. Maybe, invisible, it lay among the pile of other pieces on the floor.
Maybe she'd done the same.
"If you didn't…I understand," Carol said, her eyes never leaving his. "If you did…I can help."
If Daryl had ever imagined that, in a moment like this where Carol was open and available to what he wanted—and all that he might want to say to her—he would have had something wonderful and eloquent to say to declare his feelings, he let himself down entirely. Instead of telling her everything, he simply found himself nodding in response to her offer of help.
She smiled, though, seemingly unoffended by his lack of romantic speech. Her smile grew a touch devilish.
"It's…so romantic," she teased. "So—you do wanna screw around, after all?"
Everything inside Daryl reacted. It was a memory—a moment trapped in time—that he'd replayed in his head a thousand times. More than that. He'd replayed it so many times that he was incapable of keeping count. He'd imagined every possible scenario of how it might have gone differently—how it should have gone differently. And now, just as he'd been then, he was too unnerved by Carol to even respond in all the ways that he'd dreamed up as perfect.
She seemed entirely unbothered. In fact, she wiggled a little, from side-to-side, in something like a quick dance, and she smiled warmly and sincerely.
"I think you promised me something, once, about going down first. If you don't want to, though…we can work around that. I'll take an IOU." She laughed quietly. "After all, Pookie, I waited this long."
It took her touching him—her hands touching him gently on either side of his face—and her face moving toward his for a kiss, for Daryl's stupid-ass brain to wake up out of the damned, silly stupor that had engulfed it. He felt her lips against his. Suddenly, he was hungry. He was starving. The kiss he'd wanted for so long was within reach and he was suddenly like a dying man reaching water in the dessert.
He grabbed her face. He held her roughly—so much more roughly than he intended, but he was unable to stop himself—and he kissed her. He searched for every bit of satisfaction that he'd wanted for so long. She finally squirmed and pulled away from him. He realized, immediately, that she wasn't denying him the kiss, but she was suffocating. He wasn't allowing her to breathe in his frantic need for more.
"Shit, I need you," he said.
He said it before he realized it. He said it before he thought about it. Apparently, his mind, saturated as it was with everything that he'd been thinking since they'd reached the Commonwealth, was tired of letting him have control. It had broken free, and it was on a mission—a mission to have what the hell he'd wanted and denied himself for all this time.
Carol's mouth opened in a stunned expression. Her eyes—shit, her eyes were so damn beautiful and she looked at him desperately—locked on him. He held them as he backed her toward the little double bed in his attic room. She stepped perfectly with him, though her steps were backwards, and she didn't protest with more than a little squeak of surprise when, hitting the mattress, she toppled back onto the bed without any other option.
Daryl unfastened the belt that was practically the only thing holding up the slightly over-sized and well-worn jeans.
"You can change your mind," he said. He meant it, but he prayed she wouldn't take him up on that offer.
Her response, it seemed, was simply to unbutton her own pants and wiggle her way out of them. She wanted to send a message to him, and he got it—loud and clear. Panties, jeans, and all went to the floor as she used her feet to shove off shoes and anything left on her legs.
"Holy shit…" Daryl stammered out. He'd imagined her naked before. He'd imagined touching her, tasting her, smelling her—he'd imagined what she would feel like as he thrust into her. Merle had always told him that his first taste of pussy would drive him wild—that a man never forgot his first pussy, and that was damn near magic to him in his memory. The truth of it was, that Daryl's first piece of pussy hadn't been all that impressive to him and, really, the best thing about it had been that he could close his eyes and imagine what it would be like if it were her.
He thought that maybe he would tell her that, someday, but it wouldn't be today.
Somehow, he lost his pants and his own boots. Somehow, she lost her shirt. Somehow, he lost his, too. Things seemed to be happening—moving along as nature intended—without Daryl's full mental participation. Maybe, he thought, it was because he was pretty sure that all of the blood in his brain had gone south to feed the throbbing erection that was nearly making him grit his teeth.
He was soothed, suddenly, when she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him again, pulling him down against her.
"Come on," she whispered, her breath blowing warm against his ear and making him shiver. "Let me help you get off."
He nearly came then and there. Maybe she knew that. For all the romance that he might have dreamed up in a million different daydreams, none of it was happening now. She was guiding him to her. She was helping him find his way into her body. In the same fog of disbelief and sweet appreciation, Daryl felt the warm wetness of her wrap around him. She squeezed him as soon as he was inside her. He had no idea how she could make her body do that, but she did it again. She let out a sound—half what he might have considered a protest of discomfort and half a sigh of sweet relief. The sound rippled all the way down Daryl's spine. He dipped a head. He tasted her nipple against his tongue. He felt it as he sucked it and it rubbed against his tongue. He slid his hands down her arms, squeezed her forearms, and pinned her arms to the bed. He heard her noise of appreciation, followed by a grunt, and he opened his eyes to her.
Her mouth was open. Her eyes seemed clouded with feelings he couldn't quite place, but he recognized them on some kind of animal level.
Without explicit permission from his brain, Daryl's hips moved. He sought out release to go with the comfort that he found simply feeling the sweaty warmth of Carol's body next to his. She responded to him. Her heels encouraged him—practically the same, he imagined, as if she'd been wearing spurs to suggest that he go faster and harder toward what they both seemed to need. He ignored the fact that the loud bedsprings cried out loudly enough to drown out most of their sounds and, realistically, to alert what was most of the surrounding area to what they were doing in the little bedroom.
Daryl didn't care. He would have, at that moment, opened the window and yelled out at anyone passing by that he was, finally, making love to Carol—having her entirely, in every way possible, just as he'd dreamed of having her—and she was, beyond what he might have imagined, clearly enjoying it as much as he was.
He felt her reach the peak that he'd been afraid he'd never have the time or ability to get her to, and she squeezed him tightly—with every part of her body, it seemed—and she whispered encouragement to him that came out in sounds like some foreign language that her mouth could speak directly to his body.
Daryl came hard, thanking her for everything—thanking her for being her, and for being there and, presumptuously, for being his.
For a very long moment, they lie together in a sweaty, twisted tangle of arms and legs. They wrapped around each other, both of them panting, until their breathing evened out together. Daryl's pulse slowed as he sensed hers slowing.
He had never felt so comfortable in his life. He had never felt so right. So complete.
He felt like Daryl Dixon, again, and he felt like the most complete version of himself, with Carol in his arms.
The first words after making love, and he believed that had to be what they'd done because he felt it to simply be so, and he felt like she felt it to be so, should probably be romantic, and beautiful, and they should probably sound like sweet poetry.
Daryl had never been much of a poet—not in his whole nor his fractured form.
"Go with me," he said, his voice barely over a whisper. He touched her face tenderly. He brushed her hair back where it got stuck in the sweat on her skin. "Go with me and…and stay with me."
"Where?" Carol asked.
"Not here," Daryl said. He held Carol's eyes and she nodded.
"OK," she said.
Daryl felt relief wash over him. He practically felt tears prickle at his eyes.
"You'll go with me?" He asked.
"If you're going," Carol said.
"And you'll stay?" He asked.
She smiled softly. She leaned up and kissed him gently before she rested her head against the bed again. He was pinning her down. She should have complained of claustrophobia and suffocation. His naked body was pressed against her naked body. She didn't complain, though. She showed no signs of finding it difficult to breathe. Instead, she seemed like she felt comfort and relaxation under the weight of Daryl's body.
"You're sure it's me you want to run away with?" She challenged.
"Never been nobody different. Never—felt like this about nobody else," Daryl answered without letting even a second pass between them. "You gonna stay?" He asked again. "Forever?"
Her smile renewed.
"Forever's a long time, Pookie," she teased. "Are you sure…you want me that long?"
"Not long enough," Daryl said. "But—it'll do."
"Then, I guess I'll just…have to stay forever," Carol said. "Where?"
"With me. I don't give a damn where," Daryl admitted. "New Mexico's still out there."
"If…we're going to New Mexico, or wherever," Carol said, "and…if we're going to stay forever. Does that mean…I get to say I love you without you running away?"
The sound of it made Daryl's chest squeeze with happiness. His pulse quickened. He wanted that. He'd always wanted that, even when it scared him. He'd wanted it since this whole thing started—since he'd first realized that Carol may very well be the woman that he could actually love and, beyond that, since he'd first realized she was, in fact, the woman he loved.
"Love you, too, woman," he said.
She smiled sincerely and kissed him again. He let it linger. They teased each other in their kissing. He let her breathe, this time, before she had to pull away. He still hadn't brought himself to move off of her entirely, though. He savored the feeling of her for a little longer. He would feel her again, in his arms, many times—forever, hadn't she said? But he would never, again, feel her in his arms for the first time.
There was no need to rush.
"There's—just one thing, Pookie," Carol said, teasing him again. There was no effort to move on her part.
"What's that?" Daryl asked.
"Leave the armor when we go?" Carol asked. She laughed quietly when Daryl laughed in response.
"Sure," Daryl said. "Long as you leave yours, too."