AN: This is just a little one shot from a Tumblr prompt.
I own nothing from The Walking Dead.
I hope you enjoy! Please let me know if you do!
111
In life, there were always moments that were bigger than themselves—much, much bigger.
There were lessons that went far beyond the simple, newly-acquired skill.
"The most important ingredient is love," Carol had assured Daryl as she'd talked him gently through careful measuring, and mixing—not too much—and pouring and, finally, baking.
Daryl made her coffee, just the way she liked it, and passed it to her. She thanked him with a kiss. He pulled her close to him, silently requesting that the kiss linger longer than it absolutely had to. Carol wasn't going to complain. The cake had about an hour to go before it was ready to come out of the oven, and she couldn't think of any better way to spend that hour than wrapped in Daryl's arms, sharing sweet, slightly-coffee-flavored kisses.
When the kiss broke, for good measure, Daryl planted a series of quick little kisses right back where that one had been. Carol broke the stream of affection with laughter that she couldn't hold back, and Daryl echoed the laughter.
The feeling of being able to laugh—just to laugh—with Daryl was amazing to Carol. If anyone had asked her what her favorite things about Daryl were, at the top of the list would be the fact that she could laugh with him. She could relax around him enough to do that, and not feel that she might face backlash because she accidentally laughed at something that she had no way of knowing was "off limits."
And Daryl laughed, too. He laughed with her when she made mistakes. He laughed when he made mistakes—at least some of the time, and once she'd made him comfortable enough to trust that a mistake wasn't a reason for her to ask him to leave her life.
Daryl laughed with Carol, instead of laughing at her with the venom and vitriol that Ed had used to mock Carol, hurting her however he could, even when he didn't feel like putting energy into using his hands.
Daryl never hurt Carol—at least not on purpose—and she would have rather put her hand in a running blender than to hurt him for the sport of it.
"That why your cakes are so good?" Daryl asked. "You put a lot of love in 'em?"
Carol smiled at him and hummed. Daryl loved her food. Anything she cooked, he praised profusely. He ate like a starving man at nearly every meal, and she found the way that he delighted in every mouthful to be quite the aphrodisiac for her.
Of course, that could also be tied to the fact that she'd already learned that his eating with gusto didn't exactly begin and end at the little table in their kitchen nook.
"I try," she said. "When I make something, I like to think about who I'm making it for. I like to feel my love for them, and I like to let that flow into whatever I'm making for them."
"Me?" He asked.
"Most of the time," Carol said. "You're my favorite person to bake for. You know that."
"I like your cakes," Daryl assured her. "Like everything you give me…"
It was a simple statement, but it was sincere, and it made Carol's chest and throat ache. No amount of flowery poetry and over-the-top declarations of love could ever amount to anything as moving as Daryl's simple and sincere statements of love. The flowery poetry, after all, was nothing more than fancy words meant to convince someone that what was being said was true because it was beautiful.
Daryl's words were beautiful because they were true.
"And that only makes me want to give you everything," Carol breathed out, reassuring him, as he often needed from her, that she loved him and wanted him to be happy. She thought he deserved the world, even though the world had, at times, made him believe that he deserved nothing at all.
All he wanted was her, though, and the life that they planned together. The world had taught her, too, that wasn't very much at all. She might have argued that his bar was set pretty low, and he was settling for very little, but he wouldn't have heard it. Daryl made her feel like she was worth the whole world, and she wanted to return the favor ten-fold, because she believed it about him, as well, even when he found it hard to believe about himself.
"I can taste the love in your cakes," Daryl offered. He smirked and raised an eyebrow. His tongue darted across his bottom lip before he troubled his lip with is top teeth. Carol didn't try to tear her eyes away from the movement that he made, very likely, without even realizing he did it. The simple gesture tugged at something inside of her. Her body responded, briefly offering her some reminder of what else she'd love to give him—what she'd already given him once that morning, and what he would surely have before the lazy afternoon they were spending together was done. He must have had the same thing on his mind. "I can taste the love in everything you give me, Woman."
She smiled and her body flushed with warmth.
"Let's have a little cake," she said, "and then…maybe I can give you something else?"
"My favorite damn dessert," Daryl teased.
This would hardly be dessert—unless, of course, their first round of the morning counted as breakfast.
This was Daryl's first cake. He wanted to learn to bake simply because he'd never learned before. Nobody had ever taken the time with him to teach him how to bake. He and his brother, Merle, had learned to cook a few things out of necessity and for survival, but they'd never learned to bake.
For Daryl, this baking lesson represented something that was much more profound than simply combining the ingredients necessary to make a pound cake that they could enjoy, with coffee, in between bouts of lovemaking. For Daryl, learning to bake with Carol was gaining a new skill—one that he did, very much, relate to love and affection—and it was being able to offer her something from which he derived a great deal of comfort and reassurance in the love that lie between them.
The baking lesson was also something of a quid-pro-quo. Daryl was teaching Carol how to shoot the little handgun that he'd bought her. The choice to do so wasn't because he expected her to be a master marksman. It was simply because he wanted her to be safe, even when he couldn't be with her, and he felt the gun would help guarantee that she could protect herself. With the gun, and the ability to use it correctly, she wouldn't be hurt by the likes of Ed Peletier again.
The gun, and the shooting lessons, strange as it may seem to someone who didn't speak Dixon quite as fluently as Carol had learned to speak it, was a very clear declaration of love from Daryl.
Taking the time with Daryl to teach him how to do something he wanted—like bake a cake—was Carol's declaration of love to him. Of course, she also recognized that his desire to bake the cake was also a show of his love for her.
And she practiced, perhaps, more than most women would with the gun, because she saw the pride he had when he told people how good she was with the weapon, already—and she wanted him to have a partner of which he could be proud and about which he could brag, at least a little.
When Daryl's cake was ready, Carol held her breath as she helped him get it out of the pan and onto the serving dish. She praised him on how it looked and the fact that it had come, intact, from the pan. She commented on how wonderful it smelled, and she distracted him from the cooling cake with a few more kisses and the shared effort of making a fresh pot of coffee.
When the cake was finally cool enough to eat, she watched him carefully slice it and transfer pieces to plates. Together, they sat at their little table and finally tasted the cake.
Carol noticed that Daryl didn't dare to taste his, watching her intently instead.
She smiled.
"It's wonderful!" She said.
"Don't'cha lie to me!" Daryl said, his brows furrowing slightly.
Carol laughed quietly at his immediate need to deny his beginner's skill.
"Look at me," she said. "This cake is wonderful, Daryl. You did…excellent. Really. I admit, I was a little worried. Not because I doubted you, but because…well…pound cake is one of those cakes that, if it goes bad, it goes really, really bad. But this? Daryl…this is good."
"Yeah?" He asked, still clearly afraid to taste it and risk breaking the magic of the moment.
"You could be a baker," Carol said. "In fact, I might just let you start being the one that does the baking around here."
"OK—now you're just bein' an asshole," Daryl said with a laugh. "Blowin' smoke up my ass."
"Taste it, if you don't believe me," Carol coaxed.
Daryl did fork up a bit of the cake and shove it into his mouth, almost reluctantly. He chewed, and slowly his features softened. He hummed and nodded, accepting that the cake was everything that Carol said it was. She smiled.
"See?" She asked.
"Ain't too bad," Daryl said.
"I'm proud of you, Pookie," Carol said. "And—I love that you wanted to bake me a cake."
He smiled and his cheeks blushed pink.
"Love you, Woman," he said.
"I know you do," Carol said. "I can taste it." She winked in him. "That's the most important ingredient…and you added just the right amount."