AN: Here we go, another chapter here. This is something of a transition chapter.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Daryl was practically holding his breath and waiting for either he or Andrea to fall ill with what plagued Carol. When it happened, which he feared it would, Daryl really had no idea what he'd do. He was as busy as he ever was trying to keep the farm running—adding in Carol's usual tasks with his own of tending the animals that typically fell into her care—and Andrea was busy taking care of Carol and filling in for the daily tasks inside the home that she managed well enough like preparing meals, cleaning up the messes that they somehow seemed to make day after day, and keeping the fires going in the fireplaces so that nobody caught a chill from the cold that just kept coming on stronger with each passing night.
Daryl waited for the sickness to hit one or both of them, but it never came. And, slowly, it started to leave Carol. After a few nights of fighting fevers that kept her breaking into soaking sweats and shivering like she was half-frozen, no matter what they did to keep her warm, Carol's symptoms started to lessen. Slowly her eyes got a little clearer—a little more familiar to Daryl—and her breathing started to sound a little less raspy and a little less labored.
Slowly she started to come back to herself, though she didn't come back as quickly as Daryl might have liked. Still, Andrea tended to her with all the care that Daryl could have asked of the woman, so it wasn't for lack of trying. The illness had simply taken its toll on Carol and, as Andrea had explained it to Daryl, she was taking her time recovering because her body was busy splitting up its efforts between healing Carol and taking care of the new life that she was trying to prepare for the world. There was a lot for her body to do an only so much energy that it could devote to each task.
One night, finding himself unable to breathe with the heat that hung heavy in the house, Daryl went out to sit on the porch in one of the rocking chairs that was finally finished and ready for such sitting. He rolled himself something to smoke and he rocked himself while he enjoyed the normally biting chill of the wind that came through in gusts that felt like they blew straight off of ice.
He glanced back only a moment when he heard Andrea open the door to the cabin and step out onto the porch. She was wrapped in a blanket like it was clothing and she smiled at him when he looked at her.
"Look like a squaw," Daryl said. "Bundled up like that."
"Don't suppose I've ever seen one up close and personal," Andrea mused. "That other chair took?" She asked.
"Open if you want it," Daryl said. "You look like you freezin' though."
"I knew it'd be cold out here," Andrea said. "But nobody can freeze in there. Can't hardly breathe."
Daryl laughed to himself.
"I told you to keep the house warm," Daryl said. "Can't nobody say you don't follow orders."
Andrea hummed at him as she settled into the other rocker.
"Part of the job, really," Andrea said. "I been followin' men's orders all my life."
Daryl hummed at her in kind.
"How long you been...well, how long you been doin' the..." Daryl paused. He wasn't sure exactly how one politely asked someone how long they'd been dedicating their life to whoring. Usually he figured it wasn't his business. Carol didn't like talking much about it and Daryl didn't like talking about it too much with Carol, either. Andrea, however, was a lot more open about how she spent her life and how she earned her money. She didn't seem to have quite the same shame surrounding it that Carol suffered from. Either that, or she'd simply come to terms with it.
"You askin' how long I been a whore?" Andrea asked.
Daryl laughed to himself.
"I guess it ain't right to ask," Daryl mused.
"I guess it don't matter," Andrea responded. "The askin', I mean. The whorin' either, really. I can't say. I don't even remember how old I am now. Thirty? I don't know, really. It don't matter. At the time I got my start? I was—thirteen? My moons had just come on me for the first time. Worked first at a saloon outside Cheyenne. The Crystal Palace. It weren't no palace, and there weren't no crystal. Didn't care for the way the place was run. Decided when I ran my own place? Things'd be different."
"Are they?" Daryl asked. "Different?"
"You really wanna ask that question?" Andrea asked. "You want me to answer it?"
Daryl shrugged his shoulders.
"Wouldn'ta asked it if I didn't," he said. "But you don't gotta answer it if you don't got a mind to."
"I think things are different," Andrea said. "If you're gonna work for me? You're gonna turn a profit. I can't keep you fed, keep Doc in service, and keep a roof over your head if you don't. But—my girls...I demand they get a lot more respect than some do. We're offerin' a service. You wouldn't slug the shopkeep if he didn't have the goods you wanted. You don't slug one of my girls just because you picked poorly at the door."
"It true you got the sheriff in your pocket?" Daryl asked.
"It's true I got whoever I want," Andrea said with a laugh. "But bein' discreet is how I keep my business runnin' like it does. Man or woman. Respected, longstanding citizen or bullwhacker. What happens in my house don't get out on the street and ever'body comes through the door is treated with the same damn respect and attention as the next."
"You never married?" Daryl asked.
"No," Andrea said. She didn't offer any other information than that. She'd never been married. That was all there was to say on the matter.
"You gonna marry Merle?" Daryl asked.
"He ain't never asked," Andrea responded.
"If he does?" Daryl shot back quickly.
"Then I reckon it'll be Merle I'll be talkin' to about it," Andrea said, laughing quietly in her throat.
Daryl accepted her response. He didn't know if his brother would ask her or if he wouldn't. Merle hadn't said anything about it one way or another. He didn't even know, from words that had come out of his brother's own mouth, how he felt about Andrea. Merle wasn't one for talking about feelings. He never really had been. Daryl could barely recall him even saying too much about losing their Ma. Feelings weren't something that Merle gave voice to. The only way that Daryl had to know what his brother was thinking was by watching what he'd done. Just like he'd known it was Merle's idea that they needed to move on—step away from the life and the name that their father had given them—because he'd gotten them on a wagon heading west, Daryl only knew that Merle cared for Andrea because he came, as sure as the night did, to Daryl's cabin every night to walk Andrea to the little house that she was calling home temporarily.
And the only way that Daryl had to guess at how Andrea might feel was seeing that she went with him every night. Shacking up, in the way that they were, wasn't proper—but Daryl figured a whore who had settled into her role as well as Andrea did had little worry about what other people saw as proper.
Before Daryl could think of anything else to say—and before Andrea could fill the silence with anything either—Merle came as surely as he always did. On foot, because he had no mount of his own to speak of and he wasn't going to borrow one of the Greene's horses to do something they more than likely didn't approve of him doing, Merle came from the direction of the farm where he took his meals and made his living.
"It's a clear night," he called as a way of greeting them.
"Won't snow just yet," Daryl responded.
"It's comin'," Merle said. "Don't you worry about that. Reckon they ain't no pup yet?"
"It's at least a week off from coming," Daryl said. "She ain't even showing no signs of it yet."
Merle laughed.
"What you know of signs no way?" Merle responded.
Daryl laughed to himself.
"Can't be too much difference between a woman what's gonna calf an' a heifer that is," Daryl said. "Sure the signs is there just the same. And nothin' looks to be movin'. Ain't even restless yet."
"Too tired to be restless," Andrea said. "Too weak. But still, the baby's not coming for at least a week. Things are moving, though. Starting to."
"Ain't comin' tonight, then it's time for beddin' down," Merle mused, stopping at the porch steps. At his command—and that was more or less what his words were meant to be—Andrea stood up and wrapped her blanket a little tighter around her shoulders.
"Where's your boots?" Daryl asked, glancing at Andrea's bare feet.
"Hurt too damn bad to wear," Andrea said.
"Damn feet'll freeze off," Daryl said. "You ain't got no damn sense comin' out the house without 'em."
"Never been accused of having too much of it," Andrea said. "But it isn't the first time I been outside without boots in the winter. Probably won't be the last, either."
"Come on," Merle commanded. "I got'cha."
Andrea stepped down the porch steps and Merle hoisted her up like she weighed nothing. She laughed at the movement and wrapped herself into him to make carrying her easier. Daryl laughed to himself at the sight of his brother—no goodnight offered to him by either of the two—working his way across the yard toward the little cabin with the whore in his arms wrapped up in her blanket like a bundle.
Deciding he'd seen enough for one night, and knowing the morning would come soon enough with plenty to do, Daryl got up and walked down to the barn with Toby and Shadow trotting along at his feet. They slept out on warm nights, but on the cold ones Daryl put them in the barn. They let him know, without him even asking them, that they thought tonight was cold because they ran into the barn as soon as he opened the door to offer them the chance.
Daryl checked the horses and locked the barn before he returned to the house and locked himself inside. He drank down a little of the remaining milk that they'd brought in for the evening and then he made his way to the bedroom. In the light of the fire from the fireplace, he could easily make out the bed and the lump under the covers that was his wife.
Daryl eased into bed beside her and put a hand on her neck. She was cool to the touch. There wasn't any fever. It seemed they'd seen the last of it, and Daryl hoped he was right. He eased his hand down to her belly—so swollen now that it seemed to have taken on a life of its own-and felt for movement. There were a few twitches, but nothing like the movement that had been happening before. The baby was settled down for the time being.
Carol woke while Daryl was making his explorations and shifted a little. She stretched her body gently as she came out of sleep and Daryl shushed her, sorry for having disturbed her.
"Daryl?" She asked.
"Go back to sleep," Daryl said. "That's what time it is. Time for sleepin' just as you were doin'. It ain't time for doin' nothin' else."
"You're sleeping?" Carol asked.
Daryl laughed to himself.
"Not yet," he said. "But I come in here for that. Just—checkin' on you."
"I'm well, Daryl," Carol said. It was her answer any time he asked her how she was. Even at her sickest, she'd sworn to Daryl that she was well. Even when she'd been hallucinating that Andrea was her own Ma in the deepest of her fevers, she'd kept enough sense about her to know when she should lie to Daryl to try to comfort him. Everything was fine with her. She could handle anything if Daryl was listening.
"Not just yet you ain't," Daryl said. "But you gettin' there. Sleep on a lil' longer and tomorrow's gonna be a good day."
"It's hot in here, Daryl," Carol said.
Daryl laughed to himself.
"See, I know you doin' better 'cause that's the first damn time in nearly a week that you ain't said it was cold. It's hot as hell in here, but it ain't nothin' new."
"Open a window?" Carol asked, pushing back the blankets.
"Not an' risk you catchin' cold again," Daryl said. "But I'll pull the blankets back if you want that."
"I can do it," Carol protested. Daryl didn't allow her to prove her wide range of abilities, though. He quickly moved to fold the blankets back. The sheets were soaked despite the fact that Andrea had changed them out earlier that day while Carol had been eating the lunch that she'd put out for her. They'd have to be changed again. They'd have to be washed again before the sweat soured. It was just another of the jobs that had become nearly a daily occurrence. Daryl touched Carol's face and she smiled at him in the dim light that the flickering fire cast across her face. She turned her face and kissed his hand before she renewed the smile.
Daryl smiled back because it was the first sincere smile that Carol had given him in days.
"You ain't well yet," Daryl said. "But you gettin' there. You keep on studyin' on it, too. There's a lot that's gotta be done around here. We're just waitin' on you."
"I love you," Carol said softly, her only response to Daryl's assertion that there was much coming in their near future.
"Love ya too," Daryl said.
"I have to go to the bathroom again," Carol said, starting to sit up. Daryl laughed to himself. These were jobs that were usually reserved for Andrea, but Daryl actually enjoyed the chance to take care of them himself when he got the opportunity. It made him feel like he was helping in some way rather than simply passing everything off to Carol's almost full-time caretaker.
"I'll get the pot," Daryl said, starting back out of the bed. "And then you gotta get more sleep. I'll be right here if you should find you needin' somethin'."