Daryl rushes back from the road, moving through the shadowy places of the wood as quickly and quietly as he can. The truck that had roared down the drive had long since gone quiet, and as he nears the house he sees movement through the poorly boarded front windows.

A single glance in the cab paints a horrific tale - one of blood and gore. The jacket - her jacket is bloodied and ruined.

Daryl feels the sudden death of hope, of dreaming, of a future where laughter and safety had been real.

He rushes into the house, a familiar burning building in his gut. It is the first simmering taste of anger, but he knows it will evolve into rage. Rage that someone had hurt her, that someone might have stolen every possibility away from him.

Rage that he hadn't realized that possibility until this very moment.

Rage that he hadn't allowed it to be more than just keeping an eye on you.

When he steps into the living room he feels a moment of that anger flourish - and then die.

It isn't Cal that everyone bends over, but T-Dog. T-Dog is the one on the couch, Hershel bent over him, brow furrowed as he works on a knife wound to his gut and his hand - his hand... He can't tell what is wrong with his hand besides that it iss bound and looks so wrong.

"She's in shock."

Daryl looks at Dale, Dale who stares at him with those wide eyes. I told you so and no need to apologize are in those wide eyes. Daryl doesn't say a word. He just nods and turns.

He finds Lori in the kitchen, searching the cupboards for a chocolate bar or something sugary. She glances at him when he enters and gestures mutely to the corner.

A ghost huddles there.

Cal is grey. Ashen. Covered in blood. And she stares at some immutable truth, eyes wide and unseeing as she tumbles down a well of memories.

He knows - he's seen that look before.

Her hand, he notices, reaches for something - anything.

So he offers himself.

"Ain't gotta say nothing," he murmurs.

And she cries.


Lori leaves the room.

And the house slowly melts away.

He's holding her, hands gripping her as tightly as she grips him.

They spiral together into some weird, shitty despair. He can't stop the grief clutching at his own heart - for her, he realizes. His heart aches and bleeds and despairs for her. That in itself is a startling realization, one that makes him both clutch at her more desperately and hold her more gently.

She had crept into his soul - he can't quite figure out when or how, but she did. It might have been in her own quiet way; or how she had asked him so plainly if he wanted to be alone; or maybe it was just her - all of her.

Daryl stares at the wall as she cries, sobs against him. Even that is quiet - breathy huffs that slide against his neck.

He doesn't know how long they stand there, but Cal eventually stills. She doesn't move away, and so they stand there longer - still holding on to one another.

They stands there for what feels like a breath, but a hand touches his shoulder, jolting them back into reality. Cal has long since stopped crying; Daryl's hands ache from how tightly he had gripped her. Rick stands at his side, staring at them both.

"Hershel patched up T-Dog as best he could."

Cal looks up from where she had buried her face in Daryl's shoulder, her eyes red and swirling with delirium.

"He's lost a lot of blood, but he'll live."

She stares long and hard before a croaked whisper escapes her tear-dried lips. "I want to see him."

Daryl's hands are suddenly filled with cold air and nothingness; his hands are empty as she stumbles from the kitchen, bloodied fingers clutching at the wall and piles of canned foods as if she still needs something to hold onto.

And then she's gone.

Rick and Daryl stand in the quiet Cal leaves behind. Daryl stares at the doorway, uncertain whether she had been there at all - uncertain if he had held her and been held in turn, if he had been needed.

She had needed him.

"She needs you," Rick says.

Daryl blinks and looks at him. At first he sees nothing but the sorrow of whatever happened to T-Dog and Cal, but then he sees the tightness in Rick's jaw, the determination in his eyes that lap at the shores of uncertainty.

Daryl watches as Rick's hands rest on his hips, his fingers moments away from the grip of his Python. In that moment he knows Rick is going to deliver him one hell of a shit sandwich.

"It was Merle."

There is something strange about hearing that name again, and for a moment Daryl can't quite comprehend what exactly Rick is talking about.

"What?"

Rick regards him carefully before replying. "Cal said it was Merle."

Merle.

Merle is alive.

His brother is alive.

He blinks, and turns - stopping only when a hand stays him. He glances down at Rick's hand on his shoulder.

Rick's eyes are imploring. He shoots a cautious look towards the living room, and ducks closer, his shoulder blocking Daryl's as he murmurs quietly. "I don't think it's a good idea to go asking her about it right now."

But Merle.

Daryl nearly brushes past, but Rick steps into his path again.

"Let me talk to her."

"He's my brother," Daryl growls.

"And Cal needs you."

And just like that Daryl focuses, he hesitates. Cal and Merle; Merle and Cal.

"Let me talk to her," Rick repeats. "We'll find out what happened."

There is a part of Daryl that wants to rage and curse and spit. He wants to demand answers and find Merle, his brother, his family. That familiar anger boiling under his skin is there - it is always there -, but it suddenly sputters at Rick's words, at his honesty. It sputters and dies at the thought of Cal. Cal covered in blood, staring into the eyes of some unseen memory, reaching for something - anything.

She needs you.


From where she sits in the living room she can see T-Dog lying on the couch, sleeping but alive. Hershel sits beside him, watching with a patient, kind expression.

"Cal?"

A hand reaches out, a warm cloth pressing into her palm.

She blinks, at the hand, at the cloth, at Rick who perches on a box in front of her. Behind him Daryl leans against the frame of the living room door, watching, chewing at his thumbnail - something she hasn't seen him do in weeks.

She accepts the cloth. There is a bowl cradled in Rick's hand, the water inside steaming.

She stares at her hands, crusted with dried blood.

I never meant for this to happen.

Words she wants to say, but can't.

She rubs the cloth against the back of her hand, watching silently as nothing happens. Her hands are stained with T-Dog's blood, her friend's blood.

I never meant for this to happen.

"T-Dog'll be alright." Rick watches her, his expression careful.

Her voice is soft, hardly more than a whisper. "What about his hand?"

Rick glances at Hershel, his jaw working as he thinks of what to say.

"He lost his thumb." Hershel offers the words instead.

Cal's knuckles are white with how tightly she clutches the cloth.

Rick leans forward, offering her the bowl of hot water to rinse the cloth. She eyes it warily before accepting; everyone is mesmerized by the scarlet cloud the cloth leaves behind.

"What happened?" Rick asks.

Cal dips her hands into the water, ignoring the dirty water sloshing over the sides and soaking the carpet at their feet. She stares at the water, swirling and red, spilling over the sides as she begins scrubbing her skin clean - raking her nails across the backs of her hands, down her wrists, in the beds of her nails.

No one says anything.

"We went for a walk." T-Dog's voice is a startling, world shattering sound.

Everyone stills.

Where he lies on the couch, nestled beneath a pile of blankets, T-Dog is hardly more than a whisper of a human.

"Merle found us on the road. Came right out of the mist like a ghost."

There is a deep silence that follows.

"He wanted you," T-Dog murmurs to Daryl. "But -"

"Nah," Daryl agrees, casting a glance at Cal. "Probably a good thing you didn't bring him back."

"I didn't want him to find you - any of you." Cal's voice is quieter even than T-Dog's. She doesn't looks up from her hands, her skin raw and patchy with blood. "He was looking for Daryl. And you -" she finally looks at Rick. "He wanted to find you."

He wanted to kill you. Words she doesn't have to say.

She looks down at her hands again, rubbing her thumb along her stained knuckles, and tells them in hushed whispers of the journey to the farm, the decision to fight, Merle catching her in her lie, and the inevitable struggle that saw T-Dog stabbed.

"How'd you get away?" Rick asks.

Cal still doesn't look up. "I shot him - and I left him there."

Daryl moves from the door, shoulders hunched as he stares down at Cal. "You shot-"

"Daryl -" Rick warns.

Cal lifts her gaze to look Daryl in the eye.

She had fled the house earlier because she had felt an inkling of anger. Anger at his connection to a man who had nearly beat her to death. She had fled because she knew it was unfair to judge him and to be angry with him for a connection he had no control over.

Cal realizes now that her anger has melted away. Instead, fear flounders in her heart. Fear that he will make a choice - one that doesn't involve her. Fear that he will destroy her more soundly than his brother ever could.

Do you want to be alone? The very question he'd asked her so long ago, right after she had shared her intention to leave..

She had replied once: I don't know.

She knows what her answer would be now.

"I need to know if my brother is still alive," Daryl rasps, desperation in his eyes.

He can't see it, she thinks. He can't see that she needs him.

"He's alive."

Daryl breathes a sigh of relief, his hands coasting down his face.

"He'll kill you," she breathes to Rick.

"Cal -"

"It was him," she murmurs, staring down at her hands. "He's the man from town. He's the one that left me for dead... When you first found me…"

A silence follows her admission - deep and stretching as it encompasses the room. Rick stares at Cal; Cal looks up, slowly, to Daryl; Daryl can't look away.

"I found him on the side of the road. Arm cooked off. He was dying."

"I cuffed him to a roof in Atlanta," Rick admits.

"And I lost the keys." T-Dog coughs.

Daryl.

Daryl starts to pace.

"He told me as much," Cal's voice is quiet. "Never your names. Just that it happened. We helped each other. We survived - and then we fought over supplies -" she looks away from them all, remembering vividly how desperately they had grappled for the pack.

She had fought a titan.

"I lost."

And he left me for dead, she doesn't say.

"I didn't know… I didn't know he was your brother until today."

They are silent at that. Rick staring and Daryl pacing, and fuming, and wrestling with that anger she knows he wants to retreat to.

"I didn't want him to find you," Cal repeats. She glances at Daryl - Daryl who refuses to meet her eye. "I didn't want him to find any of you. I'm sorry."

A long moment stretches between them all. Rick reaches out, his hand coiling over her's. It is unspoken, but the meaning of his grip rings true: thank you.

"Daryl-" T-Dog's words fail on his lips, and both Rick and Cal turn to see Daryl shrug his crossbow over his shoulder.

"You say he's at the farm?" He asks with a nod towards Cal.

"It's almost fifty miles away -"

Rick stands, jaw tight as he realizes just what Daryl plans. "You can't bring him back here," he hisses, eyes flaring. "We've got people we need to protect."

Daryl stares long and hard, his eyes never wavering from Rick - even as Cal stands, hands clutching at herself, eyes wild in turn.

"He's my brother -"

"He tried to kill our people -" Rick steps into his space, ducking his chin so he has Daryl's eye. "Our people, Daryl."

Daryl holds his eye for a long, stretching moment, jaw working as he considers Rick's plea.

"I gotta go," Daryl breathes. "I ain't gonna leave him out there."

He leaves.

The resounding silence left in his wake is tangible. It sucks the very air out of their lungs. They stare in disbelief.

A bitter tang rises in her throat. She can feel something pinching her throat, her tongue. She is exhausted as her heart lurches in her chest, crying out for what is and what could be.

Cal struggles out of her seat, her legs shaking as the shock of the day falls to exhaustion. She shuffles across the room, out of the house, and into the cold night, the fog pressing around her. Daryl is a shade stalking through the dark, and she moves to follow him.

His name is a croaked prayer on her lips. "Daryl."

He doesn't hear her.

She repeats his name, louder.

He stills, shoulders stiff.

"Please…" She whispers.

"He's my brother. I ain't gonna leave him out there."

He turns, and she sees it in his eyes. A plea.

Don't. It says. Don't ask me to stay. Don't ask me to choose.

She trembles. She can feel her fear snaking about her chest, entwining itself about her heart and squeezing. To be alone…

She can see him begging, silently pleading. Don't ask me to choose.

Cal can feel it - her heart splintering.

In that moment she makes a choice. A choice to be better than the fear coiling about her insides; a choice to be better than the very man Daryl looks to run after.

It nearly kills her to speak.

"I'm not saying that." She wishes she was. She wishes she was begging him to leave Merle behind. But she can't. She can't force him to, and she certainly can't ask him to turn away from blood - even if it's Merle - even if she desperately wants to. To force him would be to ruin him, and an ultimatum would only drive him further from the quiet place they had found for themselves. No, she can't force him - and she can't ask that of him, because it's Daryl. It's Daryl. It's Daryl.

She knows Merle's claws dig deep, she can see their relation so clearly now; his influence visible in the pacing anger, the quick temper, the rough edges that make up Daryl Dixon. But where Merle was angry because that was exactly who Merle was, Daryl was angry because he'd been dragged through the mud by his brother and told that it was the only way to survive.

She can't ask him to turn his back on the man that taught him that - the man that had taught him to grasp and grapple and fight for more time.

But...

But she can stand aside and let him choose between surviving and living. Even if his final decision breaks that quiet, soft thing that had flourished in the gentle places of her heart.

"I'm not saying that," Cal repeats.

He falters at first - and then squints in anger, looking for some manipulation, some tactic. His anger and caution are his only defense, she thinks. It is the only thing he's ever been allowed to know.

"Your brother scares the shit out of me," she whispers. She steps closer and reaches out, her fingers coiling around his wrist. His arm tenses under her touch. "But you don't. You aren't him, Daryl. You aren't Merle."

In a whisper she asks, "do you want to be alone?"

It isn't a threat. It isn't a question meant to guilt or manipulate. It is a path - a choice he can make and that she would yield to.

Daryl stares at her long and hard. His eyes flicker with understanding as his anger suddenly dissipates. "He's my brother," he rasps one last time, as if that alone explains everything there is to understand.

Cal stares at him. "I know."

Her hand falls to her side, releasing him.

And then he leaves, and she watches him go.


She stands outside for a long time after that, looking as far into the night as the fog allows. It is only when Rick drapes a blanket around her shoulders and murmurs for her to come in that she retreats.

The house is still around them.

Rick regards her carefully. "What Merle did - Daryl… He ain't like that."

Cal glances at Rick, her eyes shadowed and heavy with exhaustion. "I know," she murmurs, and slowly moves to ascend the stairs to her room.

She shrugs out of her dirtied clothes and crawls under the tousled blankets. Her eyes flutter shut, and despite her exhaustion sleep eludes her.

In the quiet dark she reflects on the splintering pieces of her heart.


AN: First, a huge thanks to all the people that are supporting this story. Your reviews, favourites, follows, and private messages truly give me life. I didn't have time to reply to the reviews of the last chapter, and there were some people who reviewed as guests, but I still want you all to know that I am grateful for the time you take to leave me words of encouragement.

If there is anything that looks like garbage, please tell me. I am drunk (lol i am not kidding)