Work Text:
Carol’s sitting on those little stairs outside the church, the ones that wobble too much, and she listens to the crickets. She wonders what secrets they keep.
Daryl comes to sit beside her, and he’s just fucking sitting there, as if he doesn’t want to know what happened. As if he doesn’t want her to let him in.
But he gives her these little glances. Won’t take his eyes away from her for more than a second. He looks pleading and helpless, but only because he can’t help her. They both know that. And it’s too much. It’s too much and he hasn’t even said anything.
She realizes by the aching in her bones, the subtle crack in her heart, that she has lost the war - the only one that she wants to lose. It comes out all wrong, with no preamble, and she is not looking at him.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she says, and she doesn’t know how else to start. It always comes back to that feeling. She could have done something to save those lives. “Lizzie didn’t understand. What she had done... she didn’t understand. There wasn’t another way. Couldn’t save them.”
Somehow, she is not crying. Her voice is not cracking. She feels calm, not panicked or terrified. Not like on those sleepless nights under a tree or on rocks, when she and Tyreese were trying their best to protect Judith because they didn’t have a damn thing else they could protect.
She remembers those dreams the most. Waking up in a cold sweat. But when she thinks about it, the dreams themselves never stuck - it was her own voice that she remembers. In the dream and echoed in her mind from memory. “Look at the flowers.”
And now she looks at Daryl, because she feels as if there is nothing else to do.
He has not moved his body nor his eyes from her face. And she regrets every word she spoke, wishes she had kept her mouth shut and taken her sins to her grave, because it is not terror or sadness that she sees in his eyes, but understanding, perhaps even something loving. And she has found that there is a certain kind of love that she can connect with Daryl Dixon and no one else. She doesn’t understand it, but she understands him, and sometimes that feels like enough to get her through.
But it is worse, that look. It is worse because she needs someone to hate her as goddamn much as she hates herself, needs someone to say that she is a monster. Needs someone to tell her that not only was she unable to save her daughter, she was unable to save two other young lives. She is as useless as Ed always said she was.
She is crying now, and the sobs are heavy and loud. Her tears are rolling down her cheeks in streams, but she hardly feels them tickle. He stands up, and she knows by the thud of his feet as he walks down the steps.
He’s standing in front of her and she knows that he wants her to look at him, but he won’t say it and she can’t.
She puts her head in her hands to stifle her sobbing, but it doesn’t matter because Daryl has pulled her up to his chest and her tears are falling on his vest instead. He grips her back tightly with his hands and everything about him feels strong - because he is, and she has always known his strength.
Her face is pressed into his chest and her hands place themselves on his back, too, because she knows that she won’t pull away and she doesn’t want to. She finds herself saying “I couldn’t save them,” and it is muffled but she knows that he hears it.
She can feel him shaking his head. “You saved us all.”
She cries harder, but he says nothing and she thinks of what a blessing that is. She doesn’t know how long they’ve been standing there, how long he’s held her and rocked her back and forth, how long since she’s stopped crying and simply stayed in his warmth.
She doesn’t know why she told him then. Why she told him there, on those rickety old steps, with the crickets loud and the night black. She finds that she doesn’t give a damn - she’s only glad that she did.