Michonne found Daryl on the far side of the community, going house to house with Rick, clearing Walkers out of some the final houses. Hope wasn't with her, so Daryl reasoned that she must be with Carol.
"Hey sexy." He called as she approached.
"Hi there, handsome." She called back. Daryl smiled at her. He waited for her to get there, and reaching his arms out to her he pulled her to him, kissing her.
When the broke apart, Michonne smiled and gazed at him for a minute before speaking. "I wondered if a big, strong man such as yourself could help a poor, weak, woman like me out for a little while."
Daryl pinched her and she yelped a little, still smiling at him. "You know you ain't no weak woman." Daryl said.
"OK, you got me there, but I do still need the help if you can pull yourself away from Walkers for a bit." She said.
"Hold on." Daryl said. He went into one of the houses, and finding Rick, informed him that he'd be back later to help him clear bodies out. He trotted back to Michonne and they started in the direction of headquarters. "What's up?" He asked.
"Well, we were picking through houses and we realized just how much stuff we're finding. Some of these people had more money than they knew what to do with, which is good for us, but Carol's got a lot of organizing to do. So she's come up with a storage plan. She's taking over the house across the street from headquarters and she's using it completely for storage. That means that there are two steps involved in her plan, one is to move all the furniture out of that house and put it in the one next door. The other is to bring all the bookshelves from the other houses, which Carl is hunting down now, to that house to give her extra shelves and storage areas. We need your "muscley" arms to help out with that." Michonne said.
"Sure, no problem." Daryl said. "We should have gotten Rick to come along too." Daryl said.
Michonne made a face and Daryl knew what it meant. Rick was getting better. Slowly he seemed to be returning to the Rick that Daryl had known before Lori died, but it was a slow transformation. Daryl thought that perhaps having relieved Rick from much of the stress that Rick had been under had helped him a lot. It was stressful when everyone was looking at you, expecting you to tell them how to live, expecting you to give them some kind of solution to a problem that you really had no idea how to solve. For Daryl, it was stressful at times, but he liked getting everyone's opinions, having everyone involved, and letting them see that he was going to do the best he could by all of them, but that he was essentially in the same shoes as everyone else. He wanted to figure out some magic solution, but that didn't mean that he would, and it certainly didn't mean that he could guarantee the safety of everyone. He couldn't even guarantee the safety of those that he loved more than he even loved himself. He thought that maybe some of Rick's problem had stemmed from not feeling like the others could handle knowing that the person they looked to for answers could admit that he didn't have any answers, he just had, essentially, suggestions that they happened to like. Rick had always seemed to feel, in Daryl's opinion, that he had to handle it alone and that if any of those suggestions failed, for whatever reason, it would have been his fault.
The removal of this stress was allowing Rick to maybe work through some things he hadn't worked through before, and he was getting better, but Michonne was still leery of him, and Daryl knew that. In her opinion it was better to let Rick continue killing Walkers, blowing off steam and spending some alone time inside the houses rather than working with the rest of the group on putting together Carol's vision. Daryl understood, and wasn't going to push it.
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"I swear it looks like I need to be directing traffic or something." Dora said to Carol. She and Carol had been relieved of doing heavy lifting and instead were packing up boxes of the small items that they didn't need from the house to be carried over by the others to the neighboring houses. It was taking a while because this was apparently a household full of people that had loved to collect useless things. Or at least now they seemed useless.
All around them was the constant hustle and bustle of back and forth. People carried things out and encountered people who were carrying shelves in for the already cleaned out rooms. It did seem that they needed some sort of traffic cop.
"It's chaotic, but they're efficient." Carol said, putting things in boxes.
The only people not helping were Rachel, who was on babysitting duty, Frank, who had been excused because of an old back injury, Carl, who was running up and down streets checking cleared houses for shelves that Carol could use, and Rick, who was still finishing up with the great Walker clean out.
It was coming along nicely and Carol was excited about her new storage facility. They were finding so much, which was a great thing, and the added space was much needed if she wanted to be organized enough to make her life easier.
The sequence of fast thuds and the final crash caught everyone's attention that was in the house. Carol looked up from what she was doing, pausing for a minute. Maggie's howls brought her to her feet and followed by Dora she rushed into room where the howls were coming from. Maggie was squirming around a little at the foot of the stairs, lying in a bed of items that had apparently come from the box that she'd been carrying. She was howling in pain.
Michonne and Sasha had been carrying out a piece of furniture together, which they had promptly put down, and now they were trying to figure out what was wrong with her.
"Is anything broken?" Carol asked.
"I don't think so." Michonne answered. "Maggie, does it feel like anything is broken?"
Maggie kind of felt like everything was broken. "I don't know." She said. "My arm is killing me, and my back is too."
"That was a really good tumble she took." Sasha said.
"Well, you're moving around, so I don't think your back is broken. Your arm has a pretty good gash on it. Something stabbed into it." Michonne said.
"If you can get her up, get her next door and I'll clean up the gash." Carol said.
Maggie wasn't in the mood to try to get up just yet. Sasha darted out the door and found Daryl and Tyreese hauling a bookshelf down the street. She stopped them and they put it down, following her back to the house. Tyreese gently picked Maggie up and followed Carol across the street. Dora trailing behind them to see if she could be of any service while the others went back to work.
Once Carol could really check Maggie out, the external damage didn't look too bad. She was probably going to be sore, and there would be bruising, but mostly she had scraped her back somehow in the fall and whatever had stabbed into her arm had left a gash. It really wasn't all that long, but it was deep.
"I can stitch that up." Carol said.
Dora, held Maggie's hand and tried to comfort her a little while Carol went to get what she needed. Glenn came in a moment later, word having finally gotten to him, and he rushed over, taking Dora's seat. He kept brushing the hair out of Maggie's face and comforting her. He looked panic.
"What's wrong with her?" Glenn asked. "What happened?"
"I was at the top of the stairs, carrying a box of stuff and when I tried to go down, I don't know what happened. I guess I missed a step or I stepped wrong. I don't know." Maggie said. "I just felt like I knew I was going to fall, and then I did. The rest I don't really know about."
"She's going to be fine, Glenn." Carol said, sitting back in her place. "She just needs a couple of stitches and she'll be fine."
Carol stitched up Maggie's arm while Glenn tried to distract her. Dora just watched them all. When Carol was done, she bandaged the wound.
"Glenn, give Maggie some pain medicine and take her back to the house. She's off duty for the day. Maggie, get some rest, but try to keep moving around every now and again so you don't get too stiff." Carol said.
Maggie and Glenn both thanked her before they left. Carol sat there for a minute and Dora joined her shortly.
"So what don't you do around here?" Dora asked. "It seems like you do so much."
"I try to keep busy." Carol said. "I try to pull my weight. I do the laundry, I get the food on the table, I take care of babies, offer comfort when I can, I administer birth control, offer therapy if needed, and try to fix whatever boo boos they bring to me…oh, and I helped deliver a baby."
Dora snickered. "Wow, they're lucky you know how to handle those things. What did you do before all this? Where you a nurse or doctor or something?"
Now it was Carol's turn to snicker. "I was just a housewife…and a mother."
"How do you handle the medical things?" Dora asked.
"I learned to do stitches because Hershel taught me. I just helped him deliver Hope because he wanted me there. I'm somewhat certain I could probably remove a bullet from a minor bullet wound, but other than that I have no idea what I'm doing. They just think I do, so I do what I hope is right and hope for the best." Carol said.
"Who was Hershel?" Dora asked. Maybe Hershel had been Carol's husband's name.
Carol smiled a little to herself, remembering that Dora didn't know Hershel. For a moment she felt a twinge of pain, missing him. She smiled again, remembering Hershel. "He was a very good friend." Carol said. "He was a vet, and he got us out of a few sticky situations, but most of all, he was a very good friend."
Dora felt sorry for a minute, realizing that they had obviously lost Hershel, whomever he was, along the way. It was never easy to lose people, and it never had been, but it seemed especially hard to lose them now. Once upon a time Dora had always asked everyone "how did they die" when she'd heard about a death. You could get a wide variety of stories, some of them tragic, but many just owing to the tricks that time played on us. Nowadays it wasn't so much like that. You didn't ask how people died because you didn't want to know how they died. You didn't want to hear about it because it was most likely not anything less than horrifying. You also didn't ask because it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair to rip open someone's feelings, especially when you didn't know how deep the scar ran or how close it was to healing.
"I'm sorry." Dora said.
Carol smiled at her, and put her hand and top of Dora's. "Don't be sorry. Hershel's gone, but he was a good man and he lived a good life. No one should be sorry to talk about him."
Dora noticed a crack in Carol's voice and thought she saw a tear brimming in her eye.
"Should we get back to work?" Dora asked. Carol nodded and they went back across the street to help the others.
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"I mean I don't got nothing against the boy, don't get me wrong, but I want to know if he's the right kind of man for Sasha." Tyreese said. He was helping Daryl carry a bookshelf toward headquarters and they had quite the distance to go still.
"He's 'bout the only man for Sasha." Daryl said. "So if you ain't got nothin' 'gainst him then I'd say he's probably just right."
"I'm just saying that as Sasha's big brother I feel responsible for checking him out and I don't even know what to ask him. I mean I can't really ask him about his family, because no matter what they were like I guess it doesn't matter anymore. I can't ask him how he's doing in school. I know he doesn't have a car. His job title is whatever the fuck we're doing that day. I know where he lives. I just don't even know what I'm supposed to ask him." Tyreese said.
Daryl didn't have a sister. He'd never had a sister, and he certainly didn't have a baby sister. Out of the two new boys, Beth and Sasha had settled on their prey. Daryl didn't exactly see any romances flaming out of control between them. Mostly they shared idle chit chat and some flirty looks at meals, but as far as he knew there hadn't even been any first kisses yet. He didn't know what he could tell Tyreese to ask. Tyreese, though, had taken over a kind of fatherly role for his little sister, and Daryl could kind of understand what he was going through when he thought ahead to the future. If Hope grew up and was big as Sasha and was wanting to talk to some boy, he'd probably want to know more about the boy, but he wasn't sure if he knew exactly what he wanted to know.
"Well, ask him if he hits on women." Daryl said.
"What?" Tyreese asked.
"Ask him if he hits on women. Ask him how he likes Sasha." Daryl said. "If he likes Sasha and he don't hit on women, then I guess it's 'bout as good as it can get. We know he can take care of her, he made it this far and they just been wanderin' around for a while."
"He could lie about whether or not he thinks it's OK to hit women." Tyreese said. "And he could lie about how he feels about Sasha, if he feels anything yet."
"It ain't like he's got a whole buncha options, no offense meant to Sasha nor nothin' I mean she's a cute girl. If'n he don't feel nothin' yet, he will." Daryl said. "And if he decides he likes to go hittin' on women, shoot him." Daryl said.
Tyreese laughed. That's why you went to Daryl with problems like this. In these times, those uncomplicated answers were the most useful. Trust Jimmy if you think he's worthy of trust, give him some time to feel his way out, and if he turns out not to be worthy of your trust, then you simply shoot him. That's all. If he didn't treat Sasha the way she deserved to be treated, the new sheriff in town had already declared his sentence. Either you act decent, or you will be eliminated.
