AN: Here we go, another chapter here.
We have about two more to go in this one.
I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Daryl stayed until he couldn't stay any longer. He stayed until his mind was running too fast for him to stand it. He stayed until he thought he might simply fall down on the floor and fail to get up again because he no longer felt in control of his mind or his body. He lied to himself. He told himself it was the heat in the room. He told himself that the warm temperatures of the house—kept that way to try and keep Carol from succumbing again to the illness that she hadn't really gotten over yet—were sucking away all his air and all his strength. He lied to himself, and then he lied to everyone else. Daryl stepped outside to get some air.
That's what he told them. He was going to get some air.
Daryl made it outside the house with a lamp. With shaky hands, he rolled a cigarette. He put it between his lips and lowered himself down to sit in the rocker. When he lifted the flame to light the cigarette, he saw his fingers trembling before his eyes badly enough that he needed his left hand just to steady his right enough to light the cigarette.
Daryl took one draw off the cigarette and quickly another, but the tobacco didn't help to calm him. It didn't soothe his nerves. It didn't make him feel any less like his chest might explode.
He flicked the cigarette over the railing of the porch to burn itself out on the ground and then he reached out and caught the railing his hands – the railing that he'd built with his own two hands. He lowered himself down onto the floor of the porch and rested on his knees. Daryl leaned his head forward, resting his forehead against the wooden spokes of the railing.
He fought back the sensation that made his throat hurt and his chest ache. He fought back the sensation that made his eyes feel a little less securely set in his head than they usually did. It wasn't proper for a man to cry. It wasn't proper for a man to let his fear push him to the point of shedding tears. Those were things that were for women, not for men.
But without shedding tears, and knowing there was nothing more that he could do in the bedroom to be of service to anyone, Daryl felt like he didn't know what to do with himself.
Daryl had never been a godly man. He'd never been a spiritual man or even much of a praying man. Sometimes he sprinkled the meals he ate with blessings that sounded like nursery rhyme versions of the ones that Hershel laid out over his meals. Sometimes he watered his fields with whispered prayers that he was sure God probably laughed at because they weren't done right—and Daryl had so little right to make requests of a God with whom he'd spent so little time.
But tonight was the first time that Daryl sincerely tried to pray, with everything he had in him, so that God would hear him if He were listening.
Daryl didn't know what to say to him, or even how to say it. He didn't know how to go about praying for a life that was more important to him than his own. He wasn't sure how to go about setting up a trade or even if God was interested in bartering. Daryl was sure that there was some order the words were supposed to come in. He was sure that there was some proper way that a man was supposed to address God—some way that would make his words heard and looked upon fondly. Daryl didn't know those details, though, so he simply said what he felt he needed to say, and he asked to be forgiven for his lack of understanding about how such things worked.
Because he didn't know anything about all those kinds of things.
All Daryl knew was that his wife was tired and she was weak. All he knew was that she was giving up the fight to even get the child born and there was still more that she had left to go through. Daryl was a strong man. His back was good. His shoulders and knees were strong. He could work all day, but he couldn't give that strength to Carol—and she needed it more than him. There was nothing that he could do to help her—and she was out of strength to help herself.
Daryl didn't really know how to pray for such things, but he knew he needed all the help he could get. Carol needed all the help that he could get her. It didn't matter where it came from, she just needed it and she needed it soon.
And Daryl wasn't sure if there was such a thing as life, for him, without her—so he needed her to have all the help that she could get.
Daryl rested on his knees, his head against the railing of the porch he built himself, and he muttered his possibly-incorrect prayers for so long that his knees and feet started to go numb. He stayed there long enough that the cold made his face and his hands hurt so bad that he could feel their pain over the pain that he felt drowning him from the inside.
He stayed there until he felt a hand press on his shoulder that startled and surprised him.
Daryl had prayed long and hard enough that he might have believed that some kind of angel was coming to tell him that help was on its way, but when he jerked around he found someone that, if she had been any kind of angel at all, would have been of the fallen variety.
"I'm sorry," Andrea said quietly. "I didn't mean to startle you."
"You didn't," Daryl lied. "I was just...prayin', I reckon."
"You don't know if you were?" Andrea asked.
Daryl laughed to himself, even if he didn't feel the humor, and the movement stirred up the heavy and tight feeling in his chest. He got to his feet, wincing to himself at the pain that he felt in moving his joints for the first time in such a long while. The prickling pain of blood finding its way back into his feet reminded him that he was there. The pain helped to take away a little of the odd numbness that he felt had wrapped around his brain like a spider web might wrap around his body if he walked right through it.
"Don't know if I was doin' it right," Daryl said. "You know how to pray?"
"I pray," Andrea said. "What?" She asked, raising her eyebrows at Daryl. "You don't think I can pray?"
"Just don't seem like the kinda person that would be gettin' messages through," Daryl said.
"If I heard right," Andrea responded, "it weren't just them that don't sin that gets saved. Look here. Look what I got."
She moved her arm, pulling back enough of the blanket that was wrapped around her to let Daryl know that she wasn't just bundled up against the cold in her usual fashion. In her arm, Daryl caught a glimpse of a bundle that he could assume was his child.
"That..." he started, but he couldn't finish it. His words hung in his throat.
Andrea smiled softly, the corners of her mouth barely turning up.
"You have a daughter," Andrea said. "Come inside. Hold her."
Daryl's head swam and he shook it gently, hoping to settle down his brain a little.
"Carol?" He asked.
Andrea licked her lips and looked away from him. When she looked back at him, she'd renewed the somewhat stressed smile that she'd been wearing before—a smile that he might have believed if he hadn't come to know the woman as well as he had since she'd practically moved into his home.
"Doc's with her," Andrea said. "He's lookin' her over. Spendin'—spendin' a lil' time just seein'...he's just seein'..."
The stammered mess of words that were leaking out of Andrea's mouth told Daryl far more than the words themselves. Andrea wasn't one who spent a great deal of time searching for her words. She didn't usually taste all of them before she let them out of her mouth. Her hesitation was her trying to find the right ones—and that meant that there were some words that she thought Daryl wasn't ready for. Or, perhaps, there were some words that she wasn't ready to say.
Daryl gestured back toward the door to tell Andrea to go inside. He picked up the lamp and he followed behind her, giving her some distance because he didn't fully trust his half-dead feet not to send him toppling to the floor.
As soon as they were inside, Daryl put the lamp down on the table and sat down in one of the chairs. Andrea hovered over him and shed her blanket to reveal to him the baby that she'd wrapped tightly in a much smaller blanket.
"You wanna hold her?" Andrea asked. "I washed her up. Cleaned her up good. Doc looked her over. Says she looks good, Daryl. Breathin' good. She's healthy. Cried a bit, but mostly she's set on sleeping now."
Daryl nodded his head at Andrea, not trusting his voice to come out the way it ought to come out. She passed him the baby and helped him settle the tiny infant in the crook of his arm.
Daryl stared at the sleeping baby with red skin and a slightly swollen appearance to her face. He couldn't say that she looked like him and he couldn't say that she looked like Carol. Right now, the tiny dusting of light colored hair that she had could be blonde or it could be red. The lamplight couldn't be trusted. And since Carol was redheaded and Daryl himself had been born with hair the color of cornhusk, he couldn't say even where she might have gotten that from.
But she was his daughter.
And suddenly Daryl felt overwhelmed and terrified because he was holding a daughter and he didn't know a thing about women beyond what he'd learned from his wife and her whore best friend.
Daryl looked back at Andrea had who had quietly taken a seat in one of the other chairs.
"Carol?" He asked again. He shook his head at her when Andrea glanced off to the side and opened her mouth to start another of the too-well-thought-out speeches that wouldn't tell him a single damn thing. "Don't lie to me," Daryl said. "An' don't try to paint it up like one a' your damn girls. You can't turn shit into gold, Andrea. Just—tell me the truth."
Andrea shook her head. She looked like she was moments away from tears. Daryl could see them pooling just behind her eyes, but she was fighting them back with everything she had. Maybe it wasn't any more proper for Miss-Madams to cry than it was for men.
"It don't look good, Daryl," Andrea said. "She don't look good. She don't look strong. And they was a lotta blood and I don't know but, maybe it was more'n she had to spare right now."
Daryl's heart pounded as hard as it could in his chest. He was sure there wasn't much room for it to move around, though, because his chest was squeezing it as tightly as it could.
"I got blood," Daryl said. "You got blood. Between the two of us...don't we got enough to give her what she needs? Can't she take what we got?"
"I don't know if it works like that," Andrea said. "But Doc's with her an' he's gonna do all that he can do."
"Then—go in there an' ask him if it works like that," Daryl said. "Or you hold the baby an' I'll do it myself." Daryl found that suddenly he was angry. He was furious at the woman sitting just near him and he knew that, honestly, he had no reason to be angry with her at all. But he needed to be angry with someone, and she was the closest person that it seemed reasonable to be angry with. "You heard me!" Daryl shouted, startling the infant in his arms. "Get up an' go in there an' find out how the hell it works!"
Andrea held back her tears as much as she could, but some of them leaked out of her eyes. She hit her feet and nodded her head at him, not bothering to brush the water from her cheeks.
"The baby," Andrea said. "You gotta—be soft around her. Gentle. She don't like the yelling." She picked up the blanket she'd been wearing around her when she'd stepped outside and draped it over Daryl's shoulders like a shawl. "Pull it around you. Around her. Keep her warm, Daryl. She's little an' you don't want her catching cold."
Daryl patted the infant in his arms, tugging a little at the blanket without quite getting it around him, entirely unsure what to do with the child and growing more terrified by that fact every second.
"Go," Daryl barked at Andrea when she stepped in front of him again to try to help with the baby.
Andrea nodded her head.
"Be gentle with the baby," Andrea said. "I'll call you...to come an' see Carol when Doc says it's OK to...to call you."
It was clear she hadn't prepared the end of her words any better than she'd prepared what she'd tried to say to Daryl outside. She walked directly toward the bedroom and left Daryl where he sat at the kitchen table, trying to calm his daughter while he fought the urge to cry right along with her because he'd already upset her in the first few moments of her life, and he didn't know if he was prepared for what the rest of her life might hold.
Daryl tugged the blanket around, wrapping it over him and the baby both, hoping to soothe the little one back to sleep and keep her warm against the cold that had already threatened to take so much more from the both of them than the child could even imagine.