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She stands by her window, arms circled around her chest, holding herself together. Her features look so delicate and fragile, a whisper of freckled porcelain threatening to fall apart.
You comin'? The gruff sound of his voice does not shake her. Instead, she remains frozen, a statue against the flood of sunlight. Gonna talk to the guy. Taking a brave step into her room, Daryl finds his fingers nervously folding themselves into fists against his thighs.
The memory of her warm breath on his lips and her blue eyes curious and soft, so close that he could see the moonlight reflected in them, is too vivid, increasing the rhythm of his heart and slowing his steps.
No, Carol replies in quiet determination. The word feels like a rejection, and Daryl freezes on the spot. Outside, the sky is spread out in smooth blue. Inside, the clouds gather.
Y' alright?
She does not turn to look at him, and her lack of faith in him stings sharply. His eyes roam the gray of her sweater, spots the tension in her shoulders that appears to have claimed her permanently.
Gotta be. Once, those words had been spoken with a fleeting but genuine smirk that lit up her face. Now, they are a mere shadow of those times, a ghost of days gone by, and maybe lost forever.
He has no clue what to say to her. In this moment, she is a stranger to him once more, out of reach, lost in the world of misery she has resigned herself to. He lacks the tools to drag her out of there. Last night, however, he had seen a glimpse of the real her. The mask broke the night the walls came down, but for a reason he can not fathom, she is still hiding behind the shards.
He has never been particularly skilled with speeches or finding the right words at the right time. But even he finds himself suffocating when there seems nothing left to say. Without another word, he turns and steps out into the hallway again. His finger hesitate, hovering above the door handle.
Questions tickle the tip of his tongue, and in his mind he can hear himself voicing them. Asking her once more to come down and join them, because amongst them is where she belongs. Plead with her not to shut him out, because everything that eats her up silently from the inside and vanquishes the light in her eyes is becoming too much, and she will break. No matter how strong she is, woven from iron and steel. Inquire what last night meant, if what did not happen has any impact, if it even matters but a little to her.
The door falls shut behind him with a thud, and he makes his way down the stairs with all those words left unspoken.
You ever think about it? Settling down? It is not a question he expected, and a topic he wants to discuss even less than whatever is going on between Rick and Michonne these days. That is none of his damn business, anyway.
For a splint second, he wants to brush off the question, grunt and walk away. But then it settles uncomfortably in his mind. Does he want to settle down?
He has never really considered what that concept even means to him. A wife? Children of his own? A house with a fence and a dog? He has never had any of that, not even the slightest chance to ever even come close. In his life, not a single person had come his way to settle down with, to arouse his need to stay put in one place and call it, and the people there, home.
Faintly, he remembers something Merle once said, or rather, what his own mind protected onto Merle's lips. Ain't nobody ever gonna care about you except me, little brother. All his life, Daryl has lived by that notion. Nobody was ever going to burst into his life and switch on the light.
There was never a person in this world who understood him, quietly and without force, blindly yet with piecing clarity. Not the way Carol does.
The world that once harbored dreamlike ideals like settling down is gone, torn apart in strips of flesh and ashen rain. There, buried in the debris, he found the person he never thought he'd find, and never thought he'd want to find.
He can imagine it now in all its fuzzy details, all the while knowing they will never come true. A house that will never be his. Carol touching him and allowing him to touch her in ways she never will. Children that will never be born to them. A quietness settling around them that will always only be smashed by snarls and gunshots and the sound of broken bones.
Settling down. It has, quietly and without signs, become a possibility he might consider. And in the same time span, it has manifested itself as even more impossible than it already had been.
You think she'd settle? When the defeated words pass his lips as a rhetorical question, Daryl is not sure who he is even talking about anymore. Michonne? Carol? Whoever the hell Abraham has his mind set on these days? What does it matter, anyway?
He walks away before Abraham can pester him with another question that adds nothing but salt to his wounds, fidgeting with his hands, fighting to wipe away faceless children and Carol's sun-kissed smile.
It's blurry, and he has no idea what exactly he is looking at. But this is Maggie and Glenn's baby, and despite looking like nothing more than a moldy pea, it is good. A smile tugs briefly at his lips, but he bites it away before it is fully grown.
When the bitter-sweetness of the moment overwhelms him, it hurts to smile.
He is happy for them. They deserve this, the chance to build something, to build a family when their own have been erased from this world. Also, it is proof of what they all have achieved, of what they have built from all the blood they had to pay. Living proof that they are beyond surviving. That they are not dead.
It is not envy that dampens his mood. He has never wanted children, and to know now that he truly never will, that is a truth he can easily live with. Still, the picture in his hands embodies everything that Glenn and Maggie have, everything that this world still has to offer.
In swirls of black and white, Daryl sees everything he has never had, has never been, will never call his own and will never grow to be.