They leave shortly thereafter. Rick explains to Hershel where they're going. The two men nod and talk quietly enough that the others stutter in the monotony of their morning; curious glances and mumbled questions come from everyone.

"Where are they going?"

"Just the two of them?"

"Is that such a good idea?"

Dale approaches Cal as she waits by the SUV, her stillness infinite even as he draws up beside her. She casts him a glance, but remains unmoving.

"Does Daryl know you're going?"

"No."

Dale's rifle is slung over his shoulder; he fingers the strap uneasily. "Be careful," he whispers, his eyes glued on Rick.

Cal's lips tighten, her eyes falling to the rifle she knows he'll never use in his own defense. "You too," she leaves Dale at the foot of the barn and trails behind Rick.

Dale watches as they drive away.


The community is small and dead. Rows of trailers lead to rows of houses that lead to death. A large patch of the community is charred and burned – only the skeletons of buildings remain, crumbling to ash with every breath of wind.

They find a black crater filled with soot and twisted metal. Rick parks the SUV at the edge of catastrophic ring; the tires sinking into a foot of soggy ash.

"A gas station was supposed to be here," Cal mutters, toeing a charred piece of metal.

"Well, now we know what happened to the rest of the town," Rick eyes the edge of the ring, the force of an explosion having painted the concrete with blackness. "Station exploded. Fire must have jumped from house to house."

Cal follows his line of sight down the row of burned and collapsed buildings.

Everything is dead.


They find the old discount store – Save Lots – or rather, what is left of it.

The front half the building is simply gone, eaten up by the fire. What remains is shadowed and burnt.

Rick parks the SUV beside the only other vehicle in the parking lot – a sedan enrobed in grey.

Cal drags her fingers across the car, grimacing at the thickness of the ash on her fingertips.

"Must have rained," Rick says, watching as Cal wipes the thick paste on her pant leg. She grimaces down at the ground and at the grey paste clinging to her boots.

Rick approaches the store, his feet silent across the ash-mud. He stands at the entrance of the store, looking into the inky blackness with a tense jaw. Cal draws up beside him, her mouth thick with the taste of fire.

She feels awe.

The glass of the front windows had long since shattered, leaving metal framing that grimly resembles the ribcage of a rotting giant. She reaches out, her fingertips coming away covered in black soot.

Something crunches. She reels back, knife already unsheathed.

Rick steps through the window, boots kicking up ash and debris. He looks around, his awe careful, his caution fluctuating. He slowly unsheathes his own knife, casts her one last look, and moves further into the store.

Cal glances over her shoulder at the empty parking lot, at their footprints, at the grisly heart of the burned store. She follows, stepping lightly through the shattered frame of a door, and across the dry ash and crumbling debris scattered across the ground.

They wind their way deeper and deeper into the shop. Their path is labyrinthine – it is determined by where the roof has collapsed or where it has not. There are shelves that have collapsed against one another, and shelves that have not. A mangled pile of black and twisted metal is all that remains of shopping carts.

They almost miss a set of doors - as charred and fire touched as the rest of the building, they blend in with the ash soaked walls and the sooty debris.

They stand in silence and regard the doors with a grim hope.

Together they pull pieces of fallen debris from the door, huffing and heaving and holding their sleeves to their faces as ash and dust spring into the air.

Rick pushes open the door.

It happens quickly. The door suddenly slams back towards them, and something dark and twisted collapses onto the ashy ground between them. It writhes on the ground, sightless eyes staring up at them, and teeth – as white as snow against the charred flesh of its burnt face – click at them in longing. It lets out a breathy wheeze, ash scattering away from the open crater that is its throat.

Rick crushes its skull with his heel. The smell of smoke and cooked meat rises around them.

Cal swallows a sudden thickness in her throat.

"Come on," Rick draws a flashlight from his jacket and clicks it on. Cal follows suit, her penlight much smaller.

She doesn't say anything as she opens the door and slides into the heart of a dark and smokey would-be grave. As the door creaks shut behind them, they are met with a deep and inscrutable depth - the few undefinable shapes that are before them melt away into shadow, lending a vastness to the darkness.

She presses herself against the door at her back and waits. There is no sound but their quiet and short breaths. She reaches for the penlight tucked into her jacket, and quickly sweeps the room, revealing a small ash-covered albeit relatively unscathed warehouse.

Rick sweeps his flashlight across the floor, along the walls. He edges forward with careful steps, light sweeping the warehouse for any sign of movement. Cal follows until they near the loading bay door, a couple of cling-wrapped pallets squatting forlornly under a blanket of ash. Rick reaches out and rubs a handful of the grey soot away.

"Cal."

"Is that...?"

"Yeah."

Rick drags his knife down the face of the cling-wrap, grimacing as clouds of ashy billow into the air. They pull and grab and grasp at the wrap, ignoring the painful squeal of it as they rip it off the pallet of goods.

Cal holds her sleeve to her nose as Rick rips open one of the boxes, marveling at the can.

Mystery Meat. Chilli. Beans.


She uses her fingers, not particularly caring to stick her knife in her mouth – not after where its been. She glances at Rick as he picks at his own can, one hand on the wheel and one shoving fingerfuls of something into his mouth.

She glances in the rear-view mirror, watching as the skeleton of the Save-lots and the burnt out community disappears around a bend.

Rick tosses his can out his window and sucks his fingers clean.

"Now we just need a home," he says.

Cal glances at him, noting the hope in his eyes.

"It's a big world," she says around a mouthful of squishy faux-meat.

"Yeah. There's got to be a place left for us in it."

Rick glances at the rear-view mirror, his expression turning thoughtful."We'll head back tomorrow, bring back more. We're going to need it for the winter."

She makes a sound at the back of her throat: her agreement.

They descend into quiet.


The twine is fine in his hands. He folds it over in his fingers, tucking it into itself. The loop is visible and conspicuous, made of the bright orange twine used to bale hay, but he doesn't care – he has nothing else to use.

Daryl gives an experimental tug on the loop – it slides closed around his fingers. He chews as he resets it, tying the loose end to a nearby sapling that groans miserably as it bends. He tucks the loop across the small game-trail, using the dead, thick grasses to keep it upright.

He leaves.

There was little else to do but wait. He had set a series of snares along several game-trails, and there was nothing he could do to rush their purpose. The small, sparsely wooded area that backed the farm had yielded nothing but cold game trails.

Even the trees had been silent – not a squirrel or bird in sight.

He breaks the treeline, eyeing the hay barn squatting across the field. They had hidden the vehicles on the far side of the barn, tucked between machinery, out of sight of the road. He can see that the SUV is gone.

He chews at his lip.

When he draws up to the barn T-Dog greets him from under an eave, bat in one hand and a handgun in the other.

Daryl glances at the empty spot where the SUV had been. T-Dog follows his gaze.

"Rick and Cal," he explains. "They went off to some discount store or somethin'."

"Jus' the two of 'em?" Daryl asks.

T-Dog nods.

Daryl frowns.

Maggie and Glenn leave the barn.

"We're going to the house," Glenn nods across the fields towards a small house tucked down near the road.

He enters the barn through the small side door, ducking past Hershel and a glowering Lori. Her hands, he notes, are twitching and tugging and pulling at her sleeves – he briefly considers the fact she might want to strangle someone.

He heads towards the small hay fort he had shared with Cal. Even in the dim light of the fort he can make out the lumpy shape of the blanket. He pauses and bites at the inside of his lip, considering it.

"Cal went with Rick," Dale appears out of nowhere, a greasy rag in one hand and a piece of an engine in the other. He wipes the grime from it, and watches Daryl with careful eyes.

Daryl looks away from the blanket to glare at the old man in his stupid bucket hat. "Any idea when they gonna be back?"

"I don't know."

The two men stand there - Dale prying as he was want to do, and Daryl staring at him, waiting for him to leave. He'd been under Dale's scrutiny on occasion, but there is something unsettling about the older man's sudden intensity. He feels like he's about to be grandfather'd - something he has absolutely zero interest in.

Daryl skirts around Dale, but the older man stops him with a greasy hand.

"You and Cal are close."

Daryl blinks at him, his hackles rise. What was the old man playing at?

Dale just considers him quietly before he casts a quick glance at the fort and the discarded blanket. He shrugs, and looks down at the piece of machinery. He thumbs it, thoughtful. "Sometimes when you're close with someone... they might feel differently about you than you might feel about them."

Daryl considers the possibility that Dale might not be talking about him and Cal at all.

"Cal and I are just friends."

"How does she feel?"

Daryl growls, "I wouldn't know."

"Pushing people away isn't how we're going to survive this."

Daryl flashes his teeth at Dale. "I ain't pushing her anywhere."

Dale's eyebrows droop, his face the portrait of pleading. "Daryl..."

Daryl glowers, his eyes darkening. "Mind your own damn business." He moves to brush past the old man, but it stilled by a hand on his shoulder.

Dale doesn't meet his eye. He stares forlornly into the grey light of the barn, eyes lost in a sea of memories and would-be futures. He whispers, his voice filled with remorse. "This is about seeing something worthwhile and taking it before its too late."

He feels a moment's hesitation - and then a stubborn bitterness rises in his chest. What right did Dale have trying to interfere in his life?

"I ain't listening to this shit," Daryl grouses, shrugs off Dale's hand, and shoulders his way out of the barn.


Daryl isn't there. Maggie and Glenn are gone.

Rick and Cal move the boxes of food into the barn. They work around the others and their stunned joy.

Hershel grips Rick by the shoulder, hope gleaming in his eyes.

"Thank you," he says.

"Now we just need a home," Rick murmurs.

Hershel nods. "It'll come in due time."


She finds him in the fields, walking through the tall grasses towards a treeline in the distance. She jogs after him, her footsteps swallowed by the wind that has started whistling in from the east. As she draws near she notes the tension lining his shoulders – sharp, immovable lines.

Daryl is the quiet of a storm roiling in the distance. A swathe of grey clouds tumbling over and over again as a viciousness builds in its belly.

He doesn't acknowledge her as she draws up beside him; she doesn't say anything by way of greeting. Cal tucks her hands into the pockets of her coat, and stares ahead at the treeline looming in the distance.

They walk across the field in silence, the wind buffeting against their backs.

Daryl leads her into the treeline, through the dead and crumbling underbrush. His footsteps are careful, soundless even among the ashy remains of deadfall and leaves. He searches the grey woods until his eyes alight upon a rabbit hanging dead from a string.

A snare, she realizes.

Daryl stoops down to release the dead animal and tie it to his belt. He resets the snare with practiced hands, his intensity stilling Cal's concern.

Without a glance he stands and moves further along the game trail. Cal follows in silence.

He leads her to another snare, and then another. Each one yields a scrawny rabbit, eyes wide and vapid; he ties them to his hip, his hands unshy and even brusque in the handling of the bodies.

He stands stiffly and moves off down the trail. She follows.

They are passing through a narrow section of trees when he turns on her, his eyes narrowed and jaw tight.

"Why're you followin' me?" he growls.

She stares back in silence, her eyes narrowing steadily. She has seen him upset with the others, but he has never turned his true ire on her. She steels herself against him, reminding herself that she had known he was stormy weather when she initially followed him. She could have left him to be, but she hadn't.

She had dared the storm, and it was the storm who she now endured.

Cal watches him carefully, the tension roiling off of him reminiscent of Merle. The rational part of her understands that Daryl wouldn't hurt her, but the instinctual side – the side that had felt gun barrels pressed to her temple, or a knife digging into her side, or a man smashing her head against concrete for more time – coils and prepares to flee.

She takes a breath to stop the stiffness from setting into her bones. She wills away the moment of irrational fear. This is Daryl, she reminds herself.

"Just keeping an eye on you."

The tension suddenly rolls off of him. It falls away. It dies. The tempest flatlines.

Daryl visibly deflates, and the fight that was in him becomes nothing more than a half hearted word stumbling through his lips. "I don't need you to keep an eye on me," he grunts.

Cal tucks her hands into her pockets and watches him. Her passivity had disturbed him – he had sought a fight, readied himself for conflict, and found her wanting – which wasn't necessarily a bad thing. There are moments from her past that remind her that sometimes – sometimes - anger is best met with kindness and not aggression.

She rocks on her feet, and shrugs. "I'm not leaving."

He stares at her, working the inside of his lip between his teeth as he often did. A habit she had quickly come to associate with his moments of consideration and contemplation.

He seems to make up his mind – he grunts and turns away from her with a growl. "Fine."

As they start the walk back to the barn he glances at her out of the corner of his eye. His eyes are dark but he is without tension or aggravation. His is a forced disquiet; more show than genuine discomfort.

Cal cants a sly look at him.

"Damn tick," Daryl growls.

Cal lets him see the faintest smile.


Daryl takes up watch on their arrival home, and leaves with his handle of rabbits to clean and cook them behind the barn. She doesn't ask if she might sit with him - she has a feeling he wants to be alone.

Dinner is a quiet affair. The group hovering over cans of chili and mystery meats and watery fruits. Cal sits at the small fire, staring contentedly into the dimness of the barn, reminiscing on a warmth as familiar as the one in her belly. She can't remember the last time her stomach was full enough to lull her into dreams. Despite only knowing the people around her for a few short weeks, she feels safe and warm.

"This is the life," T-Dog croons from where he stretches out beside the fire.

"What is?" Dale asks. "Eating mystery meat?"

"Eating."

"We weren't exactly starving before all this."

T-Dog shoots Dale a look. "We almost were. Two meals a day ain't cuttin' it for me, man."

"What will you do when we run out of food?" Dale asks.

"I don't know. How fast can you run?"

Dale nearly chokes.

"Yeah, you're right. You might be a bit gamey."

Dale scowls. "Now listen here -"

"I just wish we had some nice spices," Carol mutters, choosing to ignore the two men quietly arguing about cannibalism.

"I'll keep an eye out," Cal offers, earning herself a quiet smile.

The warmth of the fire washes over them, and one by one the others drift away. Cal is left alone the fire, watching the last remnants of a log burn itself into smoldering embers. Rick drifts past, a grim shape moving at the edge of the fire, to take up watch. Cal turns back to the fire, to the abandoned spots of the others, to the fort sitting quietly in the shadows of the barn - she can feel the fort beckoning to her, but another part of her begs her to wait for Daryl and see if he still desires her company.

As if her very thoughts summoned him, Daryl materializes across the fire. He squats and tugs at a rabbit bone sticking out from between his teeth.

"How was the rabbit?" She asks.

He shrugs, "skinny."

She glances at the fort they had shared the night before, and back to Daryl. His surliness from earlier in the day no longer looms over him like a rain cloud, replaced instead by a quiet that she is familiar with. Despite wanting to know the root of his mood she hadn't pushed him on their way home, knowing he would be non-receptive to her prying.

Cal looks down at where he holds her wrist and back again. "You okay?"

Daryl shrugs. "Yeah."

"You know you can talk to me right?"

He makes a sound at the back of his throat, and flicks the rabbit bone into the fire. "Ain't nothing to talk about."

She studies him, brow knitting in concern.

He huffs softly, sounding more defeated than antagonized. "I don't like it when people pry into my business."

"I'm not here to pry."

"Ain't about you," he mutters. "Dale don't know when to quit."

Cal looks across the fire to where Dale had retreated to his sleeping bag. The old man's hat is propped over his eyes, but she has a sense he isn't asleep. He hasn't slept well since the farmhouse. There was something the older man had lost back there, but she wasn't about to go poking and prodding in his affairs as he often did in others'.

They sit quietly, watching one another from across the fire. Daryl chews on the inside of his lip as he considers her. A moment passes in which he seemingly makes up his mind about something. He stands and approaches her, extending his hand for her to take – when she does he lifts her to her feet.

His fingers are warm on her hand. He doesn't let go. Her arm erupts in goose flesh, an electric chill trailing from his hand in her own, along her arm to her spine. Despite the heat of the fire, she shivers.

Daryl's fingers tighten.

"You cold?" He asks, bemused as he casts a glance at her arm and the fire sitting only feet away.

Cal stares at him. She can't look away. "I guess so," she whispers.

He jerks his head towards the fort. "C'mon. I'm tired."

He doesn't say anything after that. Neither does she.


Sorry for any mistakes.
Let me know what you think!