The situation, such as it was, left only two real choices: to talk or not to talk. Neither seemed particularly appealing.
On the one hand, trying to hide things never went well for anyone, and this was far too delicate a situation for that kind of cat-and-mouse. Pretending that all was fine and dandy, dealing with the situation in a complete vacuum, trying not to make things worse but without any idea of how to make things better… None of that sounded ideal.
On the other hand, sitting down the two people in question to have a damn intervention didn't seem particularly ideal either, and especially not when said intervention consisted of saying hey, so, I know you killed a guy, and I know I'm a cop but I'm thinking of just ignoring that, trust me, please? and hoping it would work. Trust was one thing, but that would be asking a lot.
And yet what other choice did he have? Even if, by some miracle - or, rather, their good planning and experience with ditching post-hunting-trip bodies - there was no evidence on the body itself, that still left countless possible loopholes, whether from alibi mismatches or motives or murder weapons or any of the countless other tiny, inconsequential details that could make or break a case. He had no hope of compensating for all of them, no way to make sure his meddling didn't inadvertently worsen the situation for everyone involved. He really didn't have another choice, and he knew it, even if he didn't want to accept it.
Which was why, with they just found a body ringing through his ears, he knocked on the door to the Dixon-Peletier house, just as he had so many weeks ago.
Daryl answered it, just as he had the last time. Somewhere behind him, Rick could make out Carol and Sophia having a muffled conversation, and he caught just enough to know they were discussing grades before his attention snapped back to the reason he was there in the first place. He'd rather focus on discussing schoolwork - Sophia was so smart, just like Carl - than murder; he just also didn't have much of a choice.
Daryl knew it, too, Rick could just tell. Maybe it was some microexpression that flitted across his face, there and back again. Maybe it was whatever silent communication let them work together so well. Maybe it was just intuition. But he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Daryl could tell why he was there. "C'mon," he said, and Daryl might generally sound serious, but there was a solemnity to that phrase that felt in a world of its own. "I'll get Carol."
– – –
Rick sat down before really registering where he was, the world too busy spinning for him to focus on anything as trivial as where he was. It was only when Daryl re-entered the room, Carol close behind and Sophia somewhere far, far on the other end of the house, that Rick noticed: he was sitting in the same place he had that Tuesday, when he finally processed that he'd found his people. Fitting, he supposed, that life would come full circle like that.
"What's this about, Rick?" Carol's voice was wary, buried beneath her innocent charm, in a way it hadn't been for at least a month. The masks were firmly up, like always, but, unlike recently, he was back on the receiving end. Daryl didn't speak, just leant against the countertop like he so often did, arms crossed in front of him. Another mask.
Rick swallowed, pretended it was suave and smooth and subtle in a way he knew it wasn't. He could feel it, jerking his way through the motions as awkwardly as he was trying to navigate a too-complex situation. "I-" A moment, to breathe. "I'm not really sure how to go about this."
Carol smiled. It was a false smile. Too bright. "Just say it, Rick." The name felt like a challenge, even though the word itself was unimpeachably neutral.
"The– A body was found. Recently."
No reaction.
"It has been positively identified as Ed Peletier."
A twitch of Carol's mouth, unidentifiable as happy or sad, relieved or confused, devastated or neutral. "Oh, my god." The words were definitely more blank than they should have been. "What happened?"
"Looks like foul play." Rick attempted a balance between watching for a reaction and not eyeing them too closely. Knowing his mental state, he probably failed. "Knife."
Carol's expression didn't change. "I see." A moment, and then, as if on cue, her face crumpled. If Rick weren't absolutely, positively, 100% certain she were lying, he'd almost believe her. "I don't know what to say."
Daryl still hadn't spoken, hadn't moved. Rick knew that look; that was the look of him knowing something and not wanting to say it. Of him looking at a pair of squirrel tracks and waiting, waiting, waiting for Rick to make that guess. Of a man who knew what was approaching on the horizon but didn't want to do anything until it finally arrived.
There was no point in drawing out the purpose. Rick shifted in his seat, ignoring the rasp of cloth against wood in favour of listening to the room's silence. Tactful, he was sure, wasn't the way to go. "I know you killed him. Known it for a while now. And I'm pretty sure you knew that for a while now, too." There's a moment of pause, of silence. A moment of him looking at them and them looking at him. They've always been a bit cyclic - talking slightly disingenuous circles around each other, knowing full well that it was happening and yet never calling the others out on it - but it was out in the open now, all implications cast aside for blatant confrontation. "So…" His hands, clasped in front of him, fell to his sides, as open and (ideally) unthreatening as he was being. "How can I help?"
– – –
Carol had known, of course, that the likelihood of Ed staying vanished was remarkably unlikely. (If nothing else, he was just too much of a pain in the ass to stay gone and, the second he found out it was best for everyone if he didn't make a reappearance, he'd have found a way to do it anyway, just out of spite.) That fact had resided at the back of her mind since that night, since they'd dumped him somewhere as far off the beaten track as possible and then left as silently as they could. She'd even, in some ways, planned for this. Planned the perfect frown for when the cops reappeared, the perfect teary expression to evoke conflicted grief and guilty relief, the perfect tremor in her voice as she'd say, "Are… Are you sure? It's really him?" and the perfect stunned nod when whatever deputy or sheriff or marshal gave her the good ol', "I'm sorry, ma'am, but it's definitely him."
Of all the things she had not planned for, Rick Grimes was chief among them.
Not his appearance, since that was more or less expected: the sporadic appearance of cops looking for Ed had been a particularly nerve-wracking regularity since he'd first "gone missing" and she and Daryl had long gotten used to it by the time Rick had shown up. Rather, it was the fact that, somehow, like it or not, he'd seemed to know what they'd done from the very beginning. The fact that he'd seen through the façade that was the newly minted Ms. Carol Peletier without a second glance and sat down to order coffee anyway. The fact that he'd stayed.
She probably should have done her best to get him to leave long, long ago. Should have tried to usher him out the door as subtly as possible after that first morning he'd spent in the diner, and then never thought about him again. (In some ways, she'd tried. Had tried to shut the door on his curiosity as early as possible. It kinda seemed like he'd seen through that, too.) But there was something broken about him too, and it stayed her hand. He wasn't broken like her, like Daryl - cobbled-together pottery, silver duct-tape keeping together uneven edges in some hasty, self-applied, stop-gap parody of kintsugi - but he was still damaged. Still fragmented. She'd looked at him and seen another wounded soul, and even that wouldn't have been enough to stop her from driving him off if she had a good reason.
But it wasn't just that.
Carol had wondered, sometimes, late at night when she couldn't sleep, the crickets droning in the background and the squelch of brain matter meeting her blade kept ringing in her ears, if she were a monster. If she were cruel, and vicious, and evil in a way she'd never really thought herself to be but could always be, deep down in the marrow beneath skin and blood and bone. Perhaps that would explain why she didn't feel bad, or guilty. Why she felt happier after killing a man than she ever had before. Maybe she was. Maybe she wasn't.
But whatever she was, Rick was just like her. Oh, sure, he hid it deeper - hid it under a neatly pressed uniform, a shiny, shiny sheriff's star clipped onto a carefully weathered belt, that hat he tipped like some gentleman in an old-timey cowboy flick - but there was a hint of darkness about him. A fellow monster if that's what she was, something else if not, and all of it buried deep, deep down where she wasn't sure anyone else would notice.
She'd never asked Daryl about any of it. Sure, they talked about Rick - about how far to let this fragile friendship develop, about how much to trust a stranger, and a cop on top of that - but never deeper than the practicalities. Wasn't sure Daryl would get it - could get it - because they were similar but they weren't the same, weren't identical. He wasn't like her, or like Rick (if she were right about him). Daryl had his flaws, sure, and he certainly wasn't polished or politic like most people would've wanted, but he was good in a way he'd never admit, in a way she would never be.
She felt bad about bringing him into the whole mess, even though she knew, intellectually speaking, that she couldn't have done it without him. (It was the same as she felt bad for Sophia, for Ezekiel, for Henry: the innocents she'd dragged into something they knew nothing about and yet could rewrite far too much of their lives if anything, anything went wrong. Sure, Sophia was blissfully innocent of the whole thing, and sure, she made sure that Zeke and Henry stayed far enough away that the damage was relatively minimal, but she was the reason they were involved, and she knew that the situation was tenuous.) Daryl was the odd one out of their little trio - the good one, much as he'd claim otherwise - while she and Rick danced around the darkness lurking in them both.
Perhaps that was why she wasn't particularly concerned when he brought up Ed, when he said that he knew. She didn't stiffen at those words - Daryl did, but only with a subtle, nearly-nonexistent tensing that she only noticed because she was pressed against him, shoulder to shoulder as she leaned against the counter - and she didn't panic either. She simply waited, watched.
And then, when the offer to help came spilling out, she grinned.
– – –
Daryl knew, just by looking at her, that Carol wasn't worried. He knew Carol worried and this… this wasn't it. But that didn't do much to explain why she wasn't worried. Why she was listening with the beginnings of a smile lurking at the corners of her mouth, why it turned into an outright grin at the end of Rick's admittedly nervous-sounding, somewhat endearing spiel and at his even more awkward offer of help.
Yeah, Daryl wanted to trust Rick. But that didn't mean it was the smart thing to do.
They'd become something almost like friends over the months, somewhere between the Georgia sky and the footprints of prey carved into the dirt. Maybe it was fitting, given the conversation he'd just started, that their friendship was rooted in the deep, dark woods, in the drip-drip-drip of blood falling to the dirt and soaking in. Maybe there was some kind of metaphor there, one that might have brought him comfort if he believed in any higher power, if he believed that life did the things it did for a reason rather than just because.
But he didn't.
That didn't change the fact that, once again: he wanted to trust Rick. Wanted to believe the tempting probably-lies spilling from his mouth, the promises of trust and help and so forth. None of them made sense - nothing made sense about a lifelong, by-the-book cop suddenly changing his mind about the whole justice thing, about Rick turning his back on the sheriff's shield he was so proud of - but that changed nothing about how appealing the idea was.
The one thing holding back his distrust - the one thing that had him actively considering, instead of giving in to the knee-jerk instinct to get the hell out (of the room, of the conversation, of the situation) - was the fact that Carol seemed to trust Rick too. Daryl didn't exactly trust easy, but she was more guarded even than him, so to see her… almost relaxed? Not quite open, but closer than he'd ever seen her outside of interactions with him or Sophia? It was a damn rare sight.
So he stayed. He waited. And, like he always did, he listened.
