Work Text:
Daryl is not sad to leave the Kingdom. It was never his home. Never his place no matter what the King offered before. It was easier to keep a distance from the fairytale where he had no role to play, and where he didn’t have to see Carol hand in hand with Ezekiel every day. He didn’t begrudge her happiness, but it was too hard to be around to see it. When the Kingdom fell by degrees the days of pageantry and sunshine were impossible to get back. Everyone felt it seep from the place slowly and steadily like a fatal wound until it was time to go.
Arriving in Alexandria presented its own challenges. Lydia was not warmly welcome anywhere by anyone. He knows all too well what that feels like, the suspicious glances, the low conversations just out of your hearing and the loud ones you’re meant to. It’s strange how fiercely he wants to protect her, and the way his stomach lurches when he feels he’s failed.
The winter means that everyone has had to find a place, but space is limited with all the extra people from the Kingdom. Michonne swallows her reservations and gives them all a place to stay, but not without making it clear that they’ll have to leave if it causes a problem for her kids. For the first month Carol and Lydia barely leave their respective rooms. He thought that when Carol told him she wanted to come with him that it might have meant something more, but it’s clear her grief is too fresh to press her. He’s waited to share space with her for years - it’s enough that he knows where she is and that she’s eating.
In the second month he’s sure Michonne is going to kick them to the curb. Lydia doesn’t sleep well, and she knows almost nothing about how to share space with others. She walks in on people in the bathroom, scares the shit out of Daryl when she decides to sleep in the garage one night, rifles through draws, and rips the pages from one of Judith’s books to start a fire. Nothing has ever belonged to her, so she behaves like everything does. Broaching these issues with her is so awkward Daryl avoids it until Michonne presses. It’s a toss up whether she’ll overreact or shut down completely.
Daryl doesn’t have a hot clue about raising kids. He’s seen Michonne with Jude and RJ, even Aaron with Gracie, but Lydia isn’t really a kid, she’s seventeen, and he sure as shit knows nothing about being a dad to a teenage girl. He’s had to dig deep for patience he never knew himself capable of.
In the evenings when the kids are in bed he sits in the kitchen with Michonne who, more often than not, shrugs at his questions and leaves him to mull things over. Carol is always conspicuously absent during these conversations. The hardest part is that he wants to talk to her about what to do. Desperately. She’s polite to Lydia, but still keeps a noticeable distance. He never thought he’d be loyal to someone the way he’s been loyal to Carol, but Lydia’s presence in his life makes him feel torn in a way he hasn’t felt since Merle was alive. He wants to somehow heal them both, but doesn’t know how.
They fight sometimes, or rather Lydia yells at him and storms off when he tries to calmly enforce some rules to keep her safe, and to keep the rest of his hair from turning grey overnight. He does his best not to yell back, but when the odd curt tone emerges from his throat, a tone that he’d shame himself for using later, she juts her chin out in defiance. It makes him want to hit the roof and hug her at the same time. She’s a wild thing, and Daryl’s always appreciated and respected wild things.
Sometimes things are good. She sits beside him on the couch when Michonne reads to the kids before bedtime, occasionally falling asleep slumped against his shoulder. She brings him a sandwich when he’s working on his bike, or a thermos of hot coffee from Carol when he’s out with a crew collecting firewood. Her teacher tells him she’s picking up reading quickly and he feels something like pride. Somewhere along the way he accepts that this dance between good times and bad is just part of being a parent.
In March she locks herself in the bathroom in the middle of the night and won’t come out. He knows it’s her in there because he stopped by her room to check on her when he couldn’t sleep and her door was left open. It’s become his habit to walk the house and make sure everyone is safe and accounted for. He feels he owes that much to Rick, but really it’s because the tangle of feelings he has for these women and children makes him need the constant reassurance that everyone is okay.
He panics for a second before he sees the band of light on the floor in front of the bathroom door, but then the panic returns when he hears her retching.
“Lydia, you okay?”
He hears a muffled sob through the door that makes his heart drop.
“Daryl?”
She sounds like she’s in pain. He tries the doorknob figuring he’ll deal with her anger if it means making sure she’s safe, but it’s locked.
Breathing deep to calm his pulse he leans closer and says, “Open the door.”
“Go away!”
It feels like a slap and if he wasn’t already awake, he’s certainly awake now. He scrubs his face with his hands.
“Open the door.”
He keeps his voice down, but the tone is such that it’s clear he’ll break it down if he has to. She sobs again, but rebukes him - loudly.
“I said GO AWAY! Leave me alone!”
Just as he’s searching his pockets for something to pick the lock with, he feels a familiar hand of gentle restraint on his shoulder. It’s Carol, her silver hair curly and loose around her shoulders, an angel bundled up in a housecoat. He gives her a pleading look, and she gives him a tired smile in return and pats his arm.
“Lydia, can you unlock the door?”
“Carol?”
To Daryl’s amazement, he hears a shuffling before the lock clicks open, and Carol slips inside. He sees a glimpse of Lydia on the floor, pale with sweaty strands of hair stuck to her face and neck, and his stomach does that lurching thing again.
It seems to him that Carol stays in the bathroom for hours, but it’s probably only fifteen minutes. He paces the hallway, waving Michonne back to bed when she too pokes her head out to see what’s going on. When Carol emerges from the bathroom she’s alone.
“She okay?” he asks.
“She will be,” she whispers, calming him with her voice alone. “Do me a favour and put the kettle on, and go pick up some pain killers from the infirmary.”
“She got the flu? Something worse? She didn’t eat much today, so it’s probably not food poisoning. Should I go get the doc?”
Carol actually chuckles before shaking her head. It’s the first time he’s heard anything approaching a laugh from her in months. “No, nothing like that. She has bad cramps.”
She can see he still doesn’t get it, so she continues. “Her period, Daryl.”
“Fuck,” he mutters, but that doesn’t come close to expressing what he’s thinking.
He is completely inadequate as a father figure. They’d never talked about the fact that of course she’d have her period. Did she have what she needed for that? Had Michonne and Carol worked it out with her? For fuck’s sake, what did she do about periods out there before?
He berates himself all the way to and from the infirmary with a bottle of T3s in his front pocket. She must have been in pain like this before back at the Kingdom and never told him. Come to think of it there had been other moments where she isolated herself for days at a time, but he chalked it up to her own way of recovering from all that had happened to her. The thought that she’d actually been hiding this from him hurt more than he’d like to admit.
When he makes it to the door of Lydia’s room with a glass of water and a few pills he stops short. The soft lamp beside the bed reveals Lydia curled up on her side around a hot water bottle. Behind her Carol is carefully kneading her lower back, speaking to the girl in hushed tones. She must have braided Lydia’s hair because it’s neatly pulled back from her face.
Lydia cracks her eyes open when he hands her the drugs and helps her take a sip to wash them down. “I’m sorry for causing trouble,” she says, her brown eyes filling with embarrassed tears. She looks scared too, like he’s going to kick her out of the house or something. Another punch to the gut. He perches himself carefully on the bed, unsure of how jostling her might hurt her, and can’t stop the urge to touch her so he reaches out to brush the wetness from her cheek with the back of his fingers.
“s’okay,” he soothes. She nods and closes her eyes in exhaustion. He notices she hasn’t complained about his touch and shoved him away, so he takes another risk and carefully brushes her bangs from her face before squeezing her hand.
He turns to Carol, meaning to thank her and send her back to bed, but when he meets her eyes he can’t speak for the look she’s fixing him with. It’s the same one he saw the day he took care of the walkers for her at the shelter in Atlanta; touched, surprised, but there’s something else there too that warms him from the inside out. Something a little bit scary.
And he’s struck all at once by feelings of his own he can’t name yet - by a clear realization that he wants to protect them and keep them, not for their own sake but for his. He wants Carol and Lydia, and a life with the three of them, and Dog, helping each other through the hard shit. Not a fairytale because he’s the farthest thing from a king, but an ordinary life of moments like these strung together.
They stare at each other in charged silence until Carol looks away quickly, taking in a sharp breath, and it’s like being doused with cold water. He remembers that she’s already had her fill of men who wanted to keep her, and look how that turned out. Why would she want anything like that again?
She pats Lydia on the hip, and says goodnight, but the girl is already passed out. He’s not ready for Carol to slip away again, so he turns off the lamp and follows her out to the hallway.
He touches her elbow with two tentative fingers to stop her from leaving. She turns to him, her voice on the verge of reproach.
“Daryl-”
It turns out he’s not done being selfish tonight, because he needs to touch her too. And before he can stop himself he’s pressing in close to her warmth, holding her like a wounded bird, fearful that she’ll struggle away at any moment. But she doesn’t, and he can’t help himself.
His lips find her cheeks, salty with tears, and then their mouths meet silently in the dark. He kisses her with all the tenderness he feels for her. She is soft and yielding, but virtually still, allowing herself to press back for a brief thrilling second before she pulls away abruptly. The only thing he hears is the kiss breaking, and his heart along with it.
The next morning when he stops by her room with a hot cup of coffee and a jumbled speech in his head she’s gone. It’s hard enough for him to reconcile, but Lydia thinks Carol’s absence is somehow her fault.
“We’ll be okay,” he assures her, trying to convince himself too. “We got each other.”