Epilogue Part II

Daryl smashed his hair down with both hands, water droplets slicking out of the shaggy strands and pattering to the concrete floors. His heart was pounding away like he was doing a hell of a lot more than just walking down a hallway. Maybe just 'cause he was tired.

Hershel'd pulled him aside yesterday and told him he best hurry his ass up on his project because Carol was starting to get suspicious. Fuck, like he didn't know that from the way her eyes narrowed on his stained clothes when he came in from working. Not that she ever asked. He kinda liked that about her, the way she didn't miss much but she didn't jump into people's business with both feet like Maggie. Still, after Hershel's warning, he was up all night finishing. Came back to find a container of food waiting on his pillow, so she hadn't missed that, neither.

But even if she knew exactly what he was doing, he weren't telling her until he was good and ready. First, 'cause he'd really needed a shower first. Second, 'cause she worked too hard as it was and he wasn't about to let her take this on, too. Like Glenn had said, there were some things a man had to do himself.

The babble of voices rose as he passed through the cell block toward the room where they always ate. Axel was telling one of his stories with a lot more volume than truth, and Glenn burst out laughing, which probably meant he'd just fallen for that crap.

Daryl stopped dead, heat flashing through his whole body like he was about to be sick. This was it, really it. What if she didn't like it? He shook his head, scowling at the ground as he blasted toward the common room. He weren't no coward and everybody in the whole damn prison would know if he backed out now. He steamed into the doorway, glimpsed everybody eating, and turned right back around and walked out again.

Fuck.

They were eating lunch. All of them. And they'd gone silent as churchmice, which meant they was listening like churchmice, too. Why hadn't he planned a time when nobody'd be watching 'em? He shoved his hands through his hair, pacing up and down the hallway. He hadn't thought past the shower. His head was fuzzy from lack of sleep and from imagining this moment a thousand different ways over the last two weeks of brutal work. When he swung around for another round of pacing, Carol was standing right there. His heart backflipped and his stomach settled.

"What happened?" she said, very quietly. "Do you want me to get Rick?"

Because of course. Just from that one glimpse of him, she'd known he wasn't there to eat, that he had something on his mind, and that he didn't want to say it in front of the group. His footsteps slowed and he went over to stand with her. That made him feel better about things. Carol was like a soft buffer between him and the sharp edges of the rest of the world. She just…didn't seem to mind him.

Not the way he didn't match up with the rest of the group, or the way his tone usually came out harsher than he meant it to, his words plainer. Some of the things about him that he'd always thought were weird were things she did, too. And no matter how bad he fucked things up sometimes, she stayed calm and gentle, sometimes made a little joke so it didn't seem so awful. When it was just him and her alone, shit was just easier.

He touched her arm. "Wanna show you somethin'."

"All right." Her eyes warmed. "It's a roast pig, right? With barbecue sauce?"

His lips twitched. "Mm-hmm."

She nodded crisply. "I'd expect nothing less."

The corners of his eyes lightened, and he felt like smiling right back at her. Instead, he took her hand. They were in full view of the doorway, and doing it set his guts to twisting and wringing again, but he did it anyway. It always felt like somebody was going to laugh that he'd dare to touch a woman like her, or maybe arrest him or something. Or that as soon as he let himself feel how much he liked it, she'd disappear right out of his hands. Chewed up into blood and mud like Dale had been.

But Daryl also remembered how his neighbor Bobby would play with him at home but looked the other way at school when Daryl rounded the corner with his grass stained pants and thrift store backpack. He never wanted Carol to feel like he only wanted her when no one else was looking.

He squeezed her hand. "You eat already?"

"I'm not very hungry."

He scowled.

She patted his bicep with her free hand. "I'll eat later. When you do." The prod was gentle, but it was there. "Now what did you want to show me?"

He led her into the main cell block, then out the door on the far side. Into a corridor, where he had to let go of her hand to unlock the next portal, then unclip the chain and carabiner that he'd welded into the frame of every door. They had a lot of cleared area now, and only two sets of keys. This way, if walkers broke through again, every door was a point where they could be stopped. Every room a potential sanctuary.

He hadn't welded since high school shop class but it weren't rocket science. Once he'd found the welder in one of the maintenance rooms, he'd figured it out again pretty quick.

Carol touched his back, tension in her slim fingers. "I've only got my knife. Let me get my pistol if we're going into the non-cleared wing."

He ducked a look back at her, trying to hide his excitement. " 'S a'ight."

He tipped his chin toward the hallway and she followed. A little nervous, but trusting him. He clipped the carabiner shut, his shoulders feeling like they'd grown an inch or two beneath the cotton of his clean shirt.

They walked down the hall, through another gate, and into another cell block. Tension radiated from Carol now, but her hand fell from her knife when she glanced into the cells and found them empty. Her eyes narrowed and she strayed a step further from him, studying the floor.

He stopped and let her take her time, his face lifting in spite of himself. Hershel had been right. It had been worth it to take the time to clean after he dragged the bodies out. Safe was one thing but bloodstains just didn't never put a person in the right frame of mind.

"Was this cell block empty?" she finally murmured.

He snorted. "Not hardly." Overrun with jumpsuited prisoners from the far side, in addition to the ones who'd been shot in their cells. But he'd shot the better part of them through the gate, gone in and stabbed the rest, then sealed off the far side. Later, he wished he would have risked luring them out into the yard before he shot them, but the extra labor had been worth not putting the group at risk if one got away from him.

She trailed her fingers over the bars, peeking into the cell. "It's so…clean."

"Better be." That had been an entire week, right there.

She turned around, and awareness was starting to dawn across her face. "Why, Mr. Dixon, no man has given me a whole cell block before…" She was fully grinning now, her hands sliding around his hips in a way that made his skin tingle and his brain go as sluggish as creek mud. "Did you do all of this yourself?"

"Tried."

He hadn't told anybody what he was up to, but then he'd damn near thrown his back out hauling a giant-sized walker. Forgot how big people could grow before the turn, specially on all that chicken fried steak and gravy mix they'd found spoiled in the freezer. Rick had found him trying to rig a pull chain from the truck down two hallways and around a corner. The sheriff had helped him carry out the rest of the bodies after that. Plus, he'd had to ask Lori how to get blood out of concrete when water didn't do the trick. She gave him some cleaning fluid stuff but the next day, he went in and there was Maggie, scrubbing away at the floor. When he told her that no way were her and Glenn using the room at the end, she just shrugged, gave him a funny little smile, and kept cleaning.

The next morning Beth gave him new sheets and his face got all hot and he ended up yelling at her even though he hadn't really meant to.

Carol smirked, fussing with straightening the collar on his shirt even though it was half-ripped off from the teeth of a walker three weeks ago. "I bet. It's hard to keep a secret in this place.

"Goddamn whole place poking their noses into our business," Daryl growled.

She glanced around at the empty cell block and gave a small, happy-sounding sigh. "So are you planning on moving us out of the main block so Judith doesn't wake us up three times a night?"

He frowned, his hands stilling where they'd found their normal place at the upper curve of her waist. He hadn't considered she might want to move.

"Could, I guess," he said. "Plenty of rooms."

"It's okay if you don't want to," she said, responding immediately to his tone.

"Just…close enough to hear if something happened but it'd take us a minute to get down there." He chewed on his lip. "You could move. I could…maybe we could have a watch inside as well as out. I mean, move between the two wings. 'Cept—"

She touched his lips and he was immediately distracted by how soft her fingers were. "It's okay," she whispered. "I kind of like being near enough to know everybody's okay. Plus, with you and me taking turns feeding Judith, Lori gets more sleep."

Daryl lowered his head, pressing a kiss to her forehead and resting his cheek atop her short, silver hair for a second. When Carol took the baby, she used to sit on the stairs to feed it, 'till he grunted at her that she may as well be comfortable, wasn't gonna bother him any. After that, she'd perch on the edge of his mattress, and he'd flip the edge of his blankets over her lap. Sometimes, the humming in the back of her throat would soothe him right back to sleep. But other times, he'd lay still and just watch her with the baby. Her hands were so gentle it did something strange inside him. Lots of nights, he'd wonder what Sophia looked like when she was that little. Wondered if there were pictures left anywhere, if he could go far enough to get them back for Carol.

Sometimes, he thought about what she'd said that night in the daycare center, about wanting babies if they were his. He should have answered her, but his brain had spun immediately away into planning and he'd forgotten to say, "Not yet" until the moment was gone.

They needed to shore up the fences and seal the back edges of the prison. Get the farm established and food stocked back, find a breeding set of pigs, and hopefully chickens. They needed to figure out how to reload bullets and get more medicine. Set up his redirect fences to push the walkers away before they ever got to the prison. Figure out how to raid that overrun Big Spot down the road before all the cans spoiled.

There were a thousand things he had to do first, because he'd rather never have a child of his own than risk Carol having to lose one again.

Daryl cleared his throat and took her hand, leading her to the far end of the cell block and through another barred portal. Here, there were three solid doors with the word SOLITARY stenciled on them in black paint.

He used his keys to lock the last set of bars, then opened the first solid door for Carol, and stepped back so she could look. Even without bars, the walls in this place closed in on him until he'd come back and drilled out the locking mechanism. Now, it couldn't accidentally latch behind them, no matter what.

"Anybody needs us," he explained, "they can come through the cell block, shout from the bars. But can't come this far, so we don't need ta lock t'door. N' this block don't lead to nowhere so they can't walk in by accident."

She didn't answer, just looking in at the room he'd prepared for them.

Lori had brought clean white prison sheets to hang over the walls, which was probably best since they had initials and dicks scratched in all over them. Glenn had given him condoms, which he thought was pretty fucking generous of the little Korean considering how often he had Maggie up in that guard tower. Glenn'd also brought a stack of small towels and a trash can for the cell, and clapped Daryl on the back when he left.

Daryl had pretended he'd known what that meant.

Carol wasn't looking at the sheet-hung walls, though, or the trash can, or the little table with a beer bottle and a sprig of wildflowers stuck in the top—not a Cherokee rose, because he hadn't wanted her to think of Sophia and be sad. Just a purple flower that had a happier story he figured he could tell her sometime when she was in the mood for stories.

Carol wasn't looking at the flower, either. She was looking at the bed, which he suddenly realized took up a lot of the tiny room.

"Ain't what you think."

She didn't answer.

"We ain't gotta." He coughed against the tickle in his throat. "Just…everything belongs to the group. Wanted a spot for us that didn't."

He touched her waist, his thumb brushing against the small of her back, because he thought she might be chewing over some dark kinda thoughts. He used to be more nervous about touching her, but once he'd started to sort out what she did and didn't like, he felt a lot easier about giving in to the part of him that wanted to have her close to him all the time.

He couldn't catch her arm; didn't matter how gentle he did it, or even if it was to yank her away from a walker. It always made her head tuck down and her shoulders suck in small. So he didn't, less'n he had to. And he couldn't hug her from behind if she was doing the dishes.

All the rest of the time, she'd relax back into his chest, her short hair tickling softly against his neck. But if she was standing at a sink washing up, she'd go stiff like she was bracing and even after she realized it was him, sometimes she'd act a little off for a minute or two. Besides those two exceptions, she seemed to like most anything he did, so he touched her all the time when they were alone.

Now, she looked back at him with a smile and that mischievous glint in her eye. "Daryl, I've been trying to seduce you for weeks. We're edging a lot closer to 'gotta' than 'want to' these days. I was just trying to figure out where you found a queen-sized bed in a prison."

"Ain't. Just two little 'uns pushed together. They ain't got blood on 'em," he hurried to reassure her. It'd been hard as hell to find completely clean mattresses, and finally, he'd had to trade T-dog one with just a light blood spatter on one corner for T's unmarked one. Somehow, he thought that might be important to Carol. "Beth found the bigger set of sheets." He didn't know where. They clearly weren't prison-issue with their little flower print, but they were washed, so he hadn't asked.

She turned and wrapped her arms around his waist. "You wanted a place for us. I understand." She kissed him. "I did, too."

His arms tightened. "I know it ain't much. I could try to find a house nearby, with a porch maybe. Work up some fences to redirect walkers away from it, fix it up. Thing is, I don't like being so far from the prison. Can't help thinking, if somebody attacked when we wasn't there to help…" He broke off. "Been lookin' for some radios so we could call—"

"Stop. This is perfect."

His stomach sank as he glanced around. He'd tried like hell, but somehow, seeing it with her here made it impossible to overlook that it was just a box with some sheets tacked up to hide the graffiti. "It's a cell."

"In the old world this was a cell. In the new, this is a penthouse. Walls, safety, privacy, mattresses. Clean sheets." She whooped, and he jumped as it rebounded off the walls. "Wait, listen. Nobody came running." She grinned. "I can make noise without anything trying to eat me, and it never rains in here." She winked. "Looks like I landed me a rich man."

He snorted at that. Hell, nobody was rich any more. Wasn't no money.

Carol's eyes widened and her eyes lit up. "Oh my God, do you want to take a nap? Right in the middle of the day. Everybody'll assume I'm having my way with you, they won't bother us for an hour at least, maybe two. We could actually sleep, without Hershel's snoring and Judith's crying…" She let out a breathy sigh, walking backwards into the solitary confinement cell and pulling him along with her.

"Nap?" he echoed dubiously.

She hooked a finger in his shirt collar. "Unless you wanna do something else."

His face grew hot, his muscles twitchy. "No, nap's good. Ain't slept a full night in…" He tried to think, but couldn't remember. "Since the turn, probly."

She sat down on the mattresses. They were right on the floor, since all the bed frames in the prison were singles. Since there weren't any windows, he took out his lighter and lit the big scented jar candle. They'd scored a whole shelf of those at some Hallmark store in town, scouting past where all the cards lay crumpled and stained brown from a steady leak in the roof.

This candle was red and said Home Sweet Home on the front. Wasn't anything like what any of his homes had smelled like, but mosta the other candles smelled like plastic cupcakes and he knew Carol liked red. He closed the door behind them and sat down beside her, the warring scents tickling inside his nostrils as they worked off their boots and he unwound the tick garters from the legs of his pants.

"Sorry them sheets smell like bushes. Beth said she rolled 'em in something to make 'em smell nice but she couldn't find whatever plant she really wanted."

"It's nice." Carol put her boots aside, under the side table. "Outdoorsy. Almost like sage or rosemary, but not quite."

"Yeah, 'cause it ain't rosemary, it's bush."

She snorted out laughter. "I was trying to be nice."

He hauled her into his lap and hugged her tight. "Ain't gotta be nice," he growled. "Don't care about them sheets. You like this place okay?"

"I like it the second best of everything in the whole world."

His face fell and his arms loosened around her. Maybe he should have tried to fix up one of the guard towers. They had a better view, more light, but you could hear the walkers moaning from in there and everybody saw you going in, plus they'd get hot as a fishbowl in hell in the summertime.

Carol turned on his lap, grasping his shirt and shaking him a little bit. "Stop, I can hear you thinking in there. I meant after you. You're my first favorite thing in the world." She leaned back, giving him a teasing grin. "I would like you in a house, I would like you with a mouse, I would like you here or there, I would like you anywhere." She finished with a kiss to his cheek.

He blinked, happy that she was happy but not entirely sure how to play along with her in such a lighthearted mood. "You're good at rhyming stuff," he finally mumbled.

"It's Dr. Seuss! Your mom never—anyway, he writes kid's books." She waved her hand. "Doesn't matter." She wriggled off his lap and pulled back the sheets and the single blanket.

He shrugged off his vest and tossed it on top of his boots, lay down next to her. She snuggled up right onto his chest, her short hair tickling his chin, and he let out a deep breath without thinking. "Wasn't just for us," he said. "If you need quiet, you can come here. All ya gotta say is you wanna be alone."

"It's something we both need more than the others, I think," she murmured. "Quiet."

She snuggled her head further into his shoulder. Daryl tried to relax but every time she breathed out, the air stroked the curve of his neck. His skin got all prickly, then tingly, then he started to get hard. He shifted his legs, but that just brought his attention to an odd tension in his thigh muscles. He squirmed again and Carol lay a hand over his stomach. He went still. Her littlest finger had fallen into the gap between his shirt and his pants and he couldn't think about anything else. His dick was lengthening, and if it got any harder, it would nudge the edge of her hand.

He breathed out, trying to remember something else he could think about. Something other than her hand.

Carol started rubbing soft, slow circles over his belly. Ah, fuck.

The weight of her head lifted off his shoulder and her soft lips pressed against the already-sensitized skin of his neck. He made a sound, then froze. He hadn't been paying attention and what the hell had just come out of him? Was it a grunt? A whimper? Had Carol heard it? Did he sound like a pussy?

He tried to hold out, but had to jerk a fast adjustment to the leg of his pants. It wasn't exactly where he was needing more space but it was as close as he was going to touch with Carol's quick eyes in the same room. The woman missed nothing.

Her fingers smoothed inside the collar of his shirt. His pulse blasted up through his veins and he reminded himself she was just cuddling. The way she sometimes did before she went to sleep. It was affectionate, that's all. It was more than he'd had in his whole sorry life and if he weren't a filthy-minded sumbitch, he wouldn't be thinking more about it than that. She certainly wasn't.

His elbows pressed into the thin mattress as he clamped his arms to his sides.

The circle she was rubbing on his belly dipped just below the button of his pants. Then lower. His vision was starting to wobble black with lack of oxygen but maybe if he held his breath, the air would starve off his cock and it wouldn't grow any bigger, because if Carol—

Her third circle dipped dangerously low and something clicked in his mind. His head bolted off the pillow and he stared down at her slim, beautiful face. "You didn't want a nap at all, didja?"

"Had to get you into bed somehow, didn't I?"

Her hand was caught between his waistband and his naked skin, the head of his erection prodding it, and he was scowling before he could think better of it.

You just ain't got a way with the ladies, do you, little brother?

Merle's voice drifted through his mind and he tried to shove it aside, tried to think past the thundering of his heartbeat.

Carol smiled, unabashed. "You were all blushing and shy. I didn't think the head massage trick would work twice."

He rolled on top of her.

Hellfire, he'd been fantasizing about this moment for longer than he'd ever admit to her. There was something really screwed up about scrubbing brains out of rough concrete prison floors while thinking about the smooth curve of your woman's breasts, but when faced with the reality of her here in bed with him, he couldn't seem to feel too bad about it.

"Ain't shy," he growled.

He flicked open the button on her pants on his first try, shifted off her so he could strip them down. Her panties were peach colored. Cotton, and nice, and he grabbed them, too, determined to prove that he wasn't no amateur. But then her breath jagged and he paused and stole a glance at her face. Not like he wasn't sure this was what she wanted. But just to check.

Her face was pale, her cheekbones flushed, and he knew what that meant. He swept her panties off. Her toes wriggled madly when he passed them, and that made him smile. But then when he rose back up, his eyes caught on her long, bare, beautiful legs and he remembered.

No girl he'd ever fucked had wanted to do it twice.

For the last few weeks, he'd been trying to figure out how to get better before Carol found out. He finally found the Joy of Oral Sex in a rotting library, the mold of wet books heavy in the air that clung to his teeth where they were clamped on the metal of the flashlight. But then walkers had come and it was hard to fight and hold the book, too. It had gotten brains all over it and he'd had to run and somehow it got left behind along with any chance he had at doing a better job with Carol.

He dropped his head to her collarbone, fighting back the panic that urged him to make excuses, say he had stuff to do out in the yard. His hand clenched against her warm hip.

Her fingers cupped the back of his neck, combing through his hair softly. "You know, if you're not any good in bed, I'll just go find myself another boyfriend."

His head jerked up.

She shrugged. "Plenty of good men these days. I'll just pick one out."

He snorted.

She rolled her eyes at him. "Well? I wasn't the one being ridiculous."

" 'M sorry." He bent and leaned his forehead to hers.

"You should be," she whispered, squirming a little under his palm. "You take a girl's pants off and then put your hand three inches too far to the left…you're just a tease, Daryl Dixon." Even from this close, he saw her eyes flash with amusement. "Or an exhibitionist. Do you need me to start a campfire and call the group in here? Because I know darn well you know exactly what to do with that hand when you have a mind to."

He kissed her. Partially so she'd stop teasing him, because it was a whole lot different to hear her talk about doing that stuff than it had been to simply do it.

After the blizzard that snowed them into that house for two days, they'd started sharing their blankets every night, whether they were camped out or squatting in a house. He hadn't meant it to go farther than sleeping, but they'd both been just half-out-of-their-minds horny. One night his hand had slipped a little lower than her belly and she'd held it there when he started to take it away. It had gone from there.

Pretty soon every night, his hand would slip down her pants as soon as everybody else was asleep. She was shockingly good at staying quiet and motionless when he was doing things to her. Even controlled her breathing so it sounded normal. But where nobody could see, she'd soak his fingers, squeeze them tight inside of her. It drove him half out of his mind wondering how many nights this winter she'd taken care of herself under that blanket, laying only an arm's length away from him but not making a sound to give away what she was doing under there.

Couple times, he'd had to walk out in the woods afterward. He was good at being quiet, too.

He'd been a little hesitant about exactly how to do it at first, but since she couldn't make a sound, she held onto his forearm, and he could tell by her grip when he was doing the right thing.

Course, that had led to a whole other to-do, after a walker attack one day when his sleeve had gotten torn and Rick had seen the scratch marks on his forearm. Man had gone half-nuts and wouldn't believe Daryl when he said they weren't walker scratches. He'd been damn near to flattening Rick's nose—the fuck did he think? That Daryl wouldn't finish the job himself if the fever came for him? That he'd fucking lie about it?—when Carol had shut everyone up by saying she'd left the scratches.

He shook his head at the memory, moving his hand off her hip and a little closer in. "Ya want me to do that now?" He tried to sound like he had any idea how this was supposed to go, now that they had the privacy to do more than fumble around under a pile of blankets. Truth was, he was used to a couple of sloppy, whiskey-flavored kisses and then spitting on his hand, rubbing that on his dick to smooth his way for a quick rut up against a wall or on a scratchy couch while Merle and his girl for the night took the bedroom.

"Either that or take off your pants," she said matter-of-factly, teasing but not teasing in that way she had that he kind of liked. It was nice, because it meant he could act like she was joking if it was something he didn't want to do, and she'd just let him pretend. But if he didn't want it to be a joke, then it wasn't.

And now that he finally had her alone and safe, joking was the last thing on his mind.

Author's Note: Sorry this took a little longer, guys! My to-do list (and a certain Arabian horse) have been trying to kill me.