Author's Note: Big special surprise today! the_wd_caryl made a fan video for this fic! The direct link is in my author profile (the site won't let me copy it here) or you can search it on YouTube under "Caryl - But I won't never give up, No..." by The_WD_Caryl

She put together scenes from the show that match the emotional arc of this fic, then edited a bunch of shots from the show together to make entirely new scenes that show the events of the attack in Chapter 14-17. So thanks to her incredible generosity and technical prowess you can sort of watch this fic onscreen with the real actors!

This is my favorite present of all time and I'm so flattered and just...overcome that anyone would like my little story so much to make a whole video for it! And I'm going to try to stop gushing right now or I might cry. Everybody go watch her amazing video.

Chapter 19: The Resilience of Stones

Trees waved in the wind, the few leaves left on them crackling and rattling together. The yard around the big house was lumpy with bodies that they'd left last time they'd been here, when walkers had attacked her down by the pond. Carol crossed her arms and leaned back against the wood siding, not turning her head when she felt the subtle shift in the air. It wasn't that she'd learned to hear Daryl coming, necessarily. Lots of times, she felt his eyes on her before she ever heard a thing.

"I'm glad we came back here," she said. "It must have been a nice place, once."

"We're going in fucking circles." Daryl spit onto the ground. "Already cleaned out this kitchen."

Claustrophobic panic nibbled at her. He was right. They kept hitting roads blocked off with fallen trees or wrecked cars, or clotted with herds of the dead. They'd never made it more than a day's drive from the old quarry camp, and they had fewer and fewer roads left to try. Fewer and fewer cupboards they hadn't already raided. She stared out at the gentle hill behind the house, trying to soothe herself with the open space.

Tonight, she didn't want to think about survival. She wanted to believe there was still more than that left in this world.

" 'S wrong?" Daryl swiped a stick off the ground, breaking little pieces off it as he leaned up against the siding. He was always doing that, fiddling with something when they talked. Usually a weapon, though maybe that was just a coincidence, considering weapons made up the majority of his possessions.

"Nothing." She tore her eyes off his strong fingers. "Why?"

"Quiet today."

She smirked, peeking up through her lashes. "We've been riding a motorcycle all day, Daryl. How would you hear it even if I decided to get chatty?"

The Triumph was ear-shatteringly loud. He'd given her his spare set of earplugs to wear, but the quiet still felt overwhelming at the end of every day when he turned off the engine. She'd been surprised at first that he wore earplugs, but not since he'd shown her how to decipher all the forest sounds. Daryl used his hearing like he used everything else: like a weapon.

He just looked at her, waiting for the real answer.

She exhaled, a little flutter kicking up her heart now that the moment was really here. "Will you come with me somewhere?"

He nodded easily. "Yup." A second later, though, his hands paused on the stick. "Uh, just me?"

Now her whole chest felt like it was fluttering, her head getting light and spinny. "Just you."

He gave her a piercing look, the same expression he got when he heard a sound at night he couldn't decipher. When she didn't take back her invitation, he nodded, more slowly this time. "Where?"

"Not far."

She ducked back into the house to tell Rick where they were going. When she came back out, Daryl's crossbow was riding his back and he matched her pace as they climbed the hill and dropped down to the pond.

His shoulders got stiffer the closer they got to the water, his eyes going straight to the place where he'd kicked a walker off her when she was half-naked and trying to bathe. They'd dragged the bodies off into the trees, but there were still a few rusty brown stains on the rocks. She kept going, walking straight through the dark places.

She stopped when she saw a spot where a stream fed into the pond. There, most of the rocks were tumbled smooth, washed down with years of running water. The sun hung unadorned in the sky today, and though it wasn't exactly hot, Daryl had shrugged out of his coat and just wore his leather vest over one of his shirts with the sleeves ripped off.

The glance she stole at him collided with one of his. They didn't always talk when they were together, but today the silence felt too laden with other meanings. She tried to ignore that, waiting for it to ease into their normal comfort as she picked through the rocks along the edge of the pond, choosing the flattest ones.

She sent one skimming out across the pond, hopping a good five skips before it sunk. Daryl let out a quick breath and she grinned at him. "Impressed?"

He snorted, grabbed up a rock of his own and hurled it. It smacked the surface of the water with a loud plunk and sank. "Too round," he muttered. She tossed him one of her flatter ones and he sent that one out, too, getting barely two skips before it sunk.

They took turns, the competition growing more earnest with every rock.

Six skips.

Zero.

Five skips.

Two.

Eight skips.

Three.

Nine skips.

Zero.

On the last one, Carol burst out laughing. "You're terrible at this!"

He ducked his head. "Rocks're too damn fat, 's all."

"I can't believe I've found the one outdoorsy thing Daryl Dixon can't do." The tips of his ears grew red and she tossed a pebble at him, bouncing it off the round muscle of his shoulder. "What'll you give me not to tell everyone else?"

He snorts. "That I ain't no good at throwing rocks? The hell do I care? Rocks sink. Don't make no difference if they do it sooner or later."

She wound up, letting her hips swing with the throw and this time her rock skimmed so fast across the surface she couldn't even count the skips. Her shoulders dropped under a huge sigh. "I used to do this when I was a kid. Back when my dad was still alive, before my mom remarried. Could do it for hours and I wouldn't think about a thing. I can't imagine doing that now. Whole hours without a single thought in my head."

"Try this'n." Daryl passed her a rock, a good smooth one. "When'd your dad die?"

"When I was eleven."

"Young."

"Not as young as you lost your mom."

He shrugged.

Carol gazed out at the pond. After her dad died, her mother hadn't ever been the same. Mom had been so starved for attention she married the first man she'd dated: her boss. That had been when Carol was thirteen, just starting to sprout the tiniest swell of breasts. Her throat suddenly felt tight, and the rock Daryl chose for her sank on its first skip.

Daryl had given up entirely on skipping rocks now, and he'd dropped to one knee as he sifted through the stones. The smooth ones he passed up to her, but the most vividly colored ones he set in a row in front of him. They looked like something, like he was sorting them by type, maybe.

"Ain't never skipped rocks as a kid. We only had the little crick out back o' the house. Nothing even big enough to get a decent swim near there."

His lines of colored rocks were growing, and she waited for him to find one he liked well enough to keep.

"Used to love rocks," he muttered. "When I's a kid."

"Yeah?" She sent another one skimming along the mirrored surface of the pond. "What about them?"

"Can't break 'em." His hands kept returning to a few of the brightest ones, picking them up, smoothing them with his thumb, putting them back down. "Toys al'ays got broke, somehow."

"Merle?" She frowned out at the lake. Even as a grown man, he mostly seemed to go after things once he realized someone else wanted them.

"My old man, mosta the time." Daryl flicked a lumpy gray stone into the water. "Get all drunk and start screamin' that life takes everything away from ya, best get used to it." He threw another rock into the pond. "Even 'fore my mom burned up, he was like that. When he sobered up, he'd bring home more toys, from the dollar store or whatever, but…" Daryl shrugged. "Didn't want to play with 'em. Knew they'd just get broke."

"Ed was like that." She sat down, her arms resting loosely on top of her knees. "He was always sorry, after. In the early days, he'd cry all over me, promise he'd change. Later on, he'd just bring me these flowers." She looked over at Daryl with a smile that was only a little sour, because it was almost funny, now. "Not even real roses. These fabric ones."

Daryl's eyebrows rose. "The ones they's always selling in gas stations? Them dusty ones?"

"Yup." She did laugh now. "They were probably dusty because nobody else's husband was lazy enough to buy flowers at a gas station. I knew he only thought of them because they were right there when he stopped to buy cigarettes and a 40-ouncer on the way home. But I felt bad not liking them because, you know, at least he thought of me."

Stones crunched as Daryl's foot started jittering up and down. "I used ta feel bad, too. When my old man'd come home with a new toy after he broke my old ones. Say, 'Son, I bought something for ya!'" He made a sharp noise, shook his head.

Carol gritted her teeth until her jaw ached, but it wouldn't help for her to curse at his father for being a bastard, even though he had been. Instead she shot Daryl a sideways look and a little smile. "At least they weren't 'genuine rose scented.'"

He huffed out a sound, the corner of his mouth kicking up. "Those thangs smelt like shit. Bought one for a girl once. Sneezed like thirty times after I tried ta smell it."

Carol burst out laughing and smacked him lightly in the arm. "You didn't! You bought a girl one of those awful things?"

"Never gave it to her." He shot her a sheepish little glance and when she kept laughing, he tossed a pebble at her shoe. "Shut up."

She shook her head, smiling down at the ground. It was all too easy to picture a young Daryl saving up his coins to buy one of those ninety-nine cent flowers, then being too uncertain to actually present it to the girl he admired.

The whole time they'd been by the pond, she'd been watching him lean a little closer to her, then jerk back away, mirroring the same little advance and retreat his eyes always did when she was around. He could look at Maggie straight on, or Andrea, but never her. If he had that fabric flower today, she imagined the petals would go dusty and rot away before he ever gave it to her. Not because he lacked the courage, but because he didn't want to give the world something else of his to break.

It hadn't escaped her that he still hadn't put any of the stones in his pockets.

Carol picked up a deep red one with sharp edges. "Do you know what this one is?"

He took it, flipping it in his agile fingers. "Type o' slate." He pointed to one of the greens, nudging it closer to her. "This one's jasper. Don't find much o' that round here."

"How'd you know that?" She hugged her knees, watching him. "I mean, you don't learn the names of rocks just from playing with them."

"Library. Sometimes I'd hang out there after school 'til they closed, 'specially if Merle was off in juvy, or when my friends was riding bikes, 'cause I didn't have one, couldn't keep up." He flipped over one of the rocks, wet it to bring out the colors, and offered it to her to look at. "They had books with pictures of plants, rocks. Animals and trees. I figured out all their names. Woods was better after that. Made more sense." He squinted over at her.

"Like a party. Seems more friendly when you know everyone's name." She smiled, playing with the stone he'd handed her. "I felt a little bit like that after you helped me figure out the forest sounds the other night."

He looked pleased, his forehead smoothing. "Some o' them books had stories in them, not just names and pictures. 'Specially plants. They got lots of different names, stories to go with 'em."

"Like the Cherokee Rose."

"Sure, that's one of the best ones, but there's others." He plucked out another rock for her, scrubbed a bit of dirt off one side, passed it over. He'd relaxed from a kneeling position down to sitting with one knee cocked up, his crossbow resting comfortably against his back. "Never wanted to take them books home 'cause my old man'd mess 'em up, but I read 'em enough times that I 'membered pretty much all of 'em. Even now."

She bit the inside of her lip, something dark gathering in her chest at the idea that he couldn't even trust a geology book to be safe at his house, but he spent his entire childhood there. All those years when he was too small to defend himself. She couldn't quite picture that in her mind, and it still made her want to reach for her knife to think about it. But it made sense. He still hadn't put any of the rocks in his pocket, because he never brought home anything that meant anything to him.

"Is that why you never brought me home?" she said softly.

"What?" He looked up, confused.

"Nothing." She laid her head on her knee, sideways so she could still watch him picking through the rocks.

Not that they had a home to go to, now. But it wouldn't make a difference if they did, because he wouldn't claim her as his. No matter how often his eyes sought her out, how they softened sometimes when he first saw her waiting after he got back from a hunt or a run or clearing a house.

She wasn't a weapon, or a mode of transportation. She wasn't anything to keep the group safe or warm or to prove his worth to their friends. With the world the way it was now, he might never feel safe enough to admit to wanting something that wasn't strictly for survival.

Would it be wrong if she admitted that she did? To push him in that way?

Birds called back and forth in the trees, the wind shhhing across the water and kicking up little droplets to splatter on her stained shoes.

" 'S quiet," Daryl said, and something about the way he said it made it clear that this time, he was talking about the area, not her. It was funny, how she could pluck out the meanings from in between his words now. "Hasn't been any walkers in an hour. Keeps up like this, might get to stay two nights."

"That would be nice."

He glanced at her, tossed a stone out to sink into the pond. "Hey."

"Hey, yourself."

"Why'd you want me to come with ya?" He pulled his upper lip in between his teeth, bit at it twitchily as he waited for her answer.

"We're always doing something." She waved a hand out at the pond. "Whenever we're together, you're teaching me something or I'm fixing or washing something for you. I wanted to just…hang out." It sounded ridiculous when she explained it out loud. Like something a teenager would say.

A slow smirk took his mouth. "Ya wanted ta 'hang out'?"

She tossed a pebble, let it bounce off his knee. "Don't ruin it."

"I'm not," he said with a laugh behind his voice.

"You're going to spoil it, aren't you?"

He rolled to his feet, pulling her up to hers by the arm when she didn't follow fast enough. "Why don't you show me how to throw them rocks, since you're gonna get all snooty about it?"

"I'm not snooty. You're just throwing them too hard. You have to sort of flick them." She took a step away and bent over to get a couple of good ones. When she stood up, she caught Daryl looking quickly in the other direction. She glanced out, checking for walkers, but when she didn't see one, she dismissed it and handed him one of the stones. "You're holding it wrong." She turned the rock in his hand so the flat side mirrored that of the water. "You have to get the angle and timing just right, so they're already going the same way as the water; parallel. So when they finally do touch, it's just a little kiss. Not enough pressure to break anything, just enough to bounce the rock back up into the air."

He was watching her, his eyes almost pretty in the full sunlight. "Rocks that float, huh?"

"Sure." Goosebumps rippled beneath her coat. Something about the way he was looking at her…but she kept her tone light.

She couldn't kiss him. Not yet. She'd meant to, planned to do it today. But it was too precarious. She couldn't risk him. In a hundred different ways, she couldn't risk him.

His lips moved, just a little. Softened into his subtle version of a smile. "Guess if anybody could make a rock float, it'd be you."

Her brow wrinkled, trying to decide if he was making a joke at her expense, but she couldn't quite grasp it. "What? Why?"

"Ya make crappy stuff better. Like that old RV on the highway ya fixed up for Sophia. Made it look like a real home." He tossed the rock she'd given him in the air, caught it. "Made a decrepit old possum taste like prime rib, th' other night."

"That's just spices and knowing how to use tinfoil to its best advantage."

He tossed the rock in the air, caught it again, looked at her. And somehow it was like he'd said something that took away all her defenses to his compliment, without saying anything at all.

She swallowed against a dry mouth. "On three?"

He nodded, and their hands both shot out on three. Not the count after, like so many people she'd been out of synch with in her life. Their rocks crossed in midair and so when they went skimming across the water she couldn't be sure which belonged to whom. But they skipped so long they almost did seem to float. When they finally sank, all the places they touched the water made little circles, expanding out into each other. The sun glinted off the converging trails.

Daryl's shoulder brushed hers. Slowly, so she knew it had been deliberate this time.

She caught her breath, her knees freezing into place. Maybe she'd been wrong. Was he wanting it, too? Was it not too fast? What if he was just waiting for her to make a move?

"Oughta get back," he said, rocks crunching as he shifted his weight back and forth. "Help Rick."

Carol let out all her breath in a single flood. "Right. Of course. We've been gone for a while."

She sent a glance at the lines of pretty rocks he'd collected, then ducked and snatched one up, narrowing her eyes at him as if daring him to protest. He cocked his head. But he didn't argue.

They walked back from the pond slowly, like neither one of them wanted it to end. It was a warmer afternoon, the sun shining bright enough that Carol could let her hands swing free out of her pockets without her fingers aching from the cold. She walked a little closer to Daryl, glancing at his hand where it hung at his side. After the other day, could she just reach out and take his hand, or would he get all stiff and awkward and ruin the ease they'd built from their quiet moment on the pond? With Daryl, it was so hard to gauge when she needed to give him time and when he needed her to push him.

Lost in thought, Carol had veered close enough that his knuckles brushed hers. He took a step away, automatically giving her more space, then stole a glance at her.

The sound reached them at the same time: shouting, from back at the house where they'd left the group.

Author's Note: I'm just plain old excited to see the reaction to the next chapter. It was one of those ideas my muse threw me out of left field, and I really would have loved to see it on the show. Reedus would have absolutely KILLED this scene.