#breb23

I need you to stay. Just think about it. Otherwise, I’m gonna have to punch holes in all them boats.

Carol stares at the ceiling above her head while Daryl’s voice keeps echoing in her mind. Fully clothed, but barefoot, she lies down on her bed and stares at the familiar small cracks and dirty spots. Thinks about what he said and twists the friendship bracelet he made her earlier. 

I need you to stay, Daryl had said, his voice weary after they’d spent the entire night fighting walkers and putting out the fire caused by a damn falling Soviet satellite…as if their lives couldn’t get any more ridiculous and the solution to end the madness was to have her with him, by his side.

Sleepless, she thinks about how she knows all the imperfections of that particular ceiling by heart. That first winter, after the Kingdom fell and she moved back to ASZ, Carol dedicated each night to commit them to memory, while avoiding sleep and the consequential nightmares. The thin crack near the window resembled the scar Henry had on his right knee, the result of tearing it open after falling from the roof of the gazebo in the center of the Kingdom. The concentrated cluster of tiny damp spots at the opposite side of the ceiling, close to the door, reminded her of Sophia’s freckles. And right in the center, directly above Carol’s head, a series of thicker cracks around the light fixture looked like cold, mocking rays of sunlight.

  Just think about it. Daryl had added, quite quickly, knowing that he needed to give her the choice because if he just told her to stay, she would run the other way by stubborn principle alone. After all, Carol was a runner, and in the middle of the night, alone, there was no reason to be ashamed to admit it. She felt ashamed, however, that Daryl also knew this about her. He knew her all, by heart, just like she knew that fucking ceiling.

  Carol closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, wishing that the tears welling up in her eyes to not fall (she knows that if she starts crying, she won’t be able to stop and she’s so, so tired of crying).  With her eyes closed, she tries to imagine that she’s lying on the boat again and that there’s no ceiling above her. No cracks or spots, only stars that look just like stars. Just the sea, that went up and down, up and down, in a cadence that helped her forget that she was who she was. A failed mother with all her children dead.

Otherwise, I’m gonna have to punch holes in all them boats. Daryl’s voice cuts through her grief and Carol opens her eyes again. Despite the sorrow and the grief and the loathing in her heart, he gets to her. Pushes, demands, in his own way, for her to stop running. For her to stay.

“I don’t know how.” Carol whispers to the ceiling, her voice faltering, tears running from her eyes to her ears, to pool on her pillow. Henry and Sophia stand on opposite sides of the room, looking at her.

It takes a long time for her tears to dry out, but they do. She finds out that it helps to keep fidgeting with her friendship bracelet. A safeline. Her children vanish as the sun comes up and takes the darkness away. She decides that sunrise is as reasonable a time as any to get up and start another day, but not before fixing her gaze one last time on the cracks above her head. Those that she always thought looked like rays of sunlight. At dawn, with her room bathed in orange light, Carol notices that each one ends in a somewhat triangular point. Like arrows. Wooden arrows carved by Daryl.

While washing her face, Carol thinks that maybe she could stay. At least, she could try. Oceanside needed their boats intact, after all.

____________________________

The infirmary ceiling is white and smooth, without a crack or speck of dirt in sight. Looking at it, her right arm heavy and immobilized at her side, Carol wonders how they manage to keep it so clean. She imagines Siddiq walking around with a broom and mop, dusting and washing the ceiling, wearing a floral cap to protect his hair, and laughs.

“Hey there. You awake or trippin’?” Daryl greets, a light laugh in his tone too. He’s sitting in a chair beside her bed, shoulders sagged with weariness and worry.

“Why would I be tripping?” She answers with another question, trying to sit up but not quite managing it because of grogginess. Daryl quietly helps, bracing her with one hand while rearranging her pillows with the other so she can have some support.

“No sleep. Too much sleep. Pain killers. Plenty of reasons. You choose.” He murmurs and sits back, groaning a bit because of his bad knee. “Are you feeling alright?”

The room she’s in is completely lit by the sun, which means she spent the rest of the night there and a good portion of the morning too, but Carol has no recollection of it. The last thing she remembers is screaming Daryl’s name while hanging upside down in that haunted school, full of zombies, whisperers, and her dead children. Afraid of dying, however surprising that may be to her.

“I’m fine.” Daryl gives her a loaded look and Carol sighs, giving in. “My arm aches.” 

“I bet, you ripped it open somehow with glass. Lost a lot of blood too.” He pauses and then, shily, traces the bandage with one of his fingers, eyes intent on it. “There was a lot of blood. And a lot of walkers. At first, I thought…I thought…Real luck Michonne was there too to think straight.”

Daryl stops talking, because there’s no need for any more words. Carol can hear his fear in the silence, in everything that he doesn’t say.

“I’m sorry.” She quietly says, taking his hand on hers. Her friendship bracelet between their wrists. He instantly brushes his thumb against the back of her hand. 

“Siddiq gave me some pain killers for you to take. Yah need to come back in a few days to check them stitches. Gotta drink a lotta fluids too. Rest. Sleep.” 

“We don’t sleep.” She teases, but it is the wrong move to make because he lets go of her hand and gets up.

“Stop.” Daryl warns her, tired and frightened, and goes to the door. “Gonna tell everyone you’re awake. Lydia’s worried sick. Do yah wanna stay here? Or come home to rest there?”

Carol glances at the immaculate ceiling above them, too clean and perfect for her sorrows. 

“Home. I want to go home with you.” 

“Gotcha.”

____________________________

After freeing Negan and watching him leave Alexandria unnoticed, Carol returns to his cell and lies down for a while on its makeshift bed.

The ceiling there is made of a hard and dark concrete, from the foundation of the townhouse above them. Random stains of dampness and whatever more all over it. She reflects about how heavy it lingers there, sustaining all the weight above; just like the decision she just made weighs heavily on her heart. 

She recalls how Daryl smiled a few hours earlier, when she said they should have gone to New Mexico when they had the chance. How, even amidst the storm their communities were and all the worry and anxiety it was causing him, he could still smile at the thought of running away with her. To a brighter, sunnier place, where people weave bracelets.

Carol stares at the concrete ceiling and toys with her bracelet, trying to mentally prepare herself for the moment when Daryl would learn what she just did. Tries to imagine how disappointed he would feel, when the time came, even though her reasoning was solid and took care of their two major problems. Two birds, one stone kind of deal. How upset he would be that she went behind his back and lied to him about not having anything to do with it - because she knew she would have to lie. Daryl couldn’t know. What Daryl didn’t know, he couldn’t be blamed by proxy.

“It’s my burden to carry, not yours.” Carol says to the Daryl in her mind’s eye, at the foot of the stairs of Michonne’s house, smiling at the thought of going to New Mexico with her. “Only mine.”

____________________________

“You still should have told me.” Daryl tells her, frustrated, angry, but not angry enough. Not as much as she deserves, anyway. Their lives just turned a whole new page in all this shitshow. Lydia, missing. Siddiq, dead. Dante, the Whisperer equivalent of a trojan horse. But that’s what Daryl is mostly upset about: that she went behind his back. Again. Carol knows that he is also afraid that, if she goes with the team that wants to look for the herd, she might do something erratic again. Get herself hurt or others. Get lost. Or worse…Leave him behind.

  “I’ll help you look for her.” Carol replies, avoiding the path he wants to follow with this conversation. Trying to bring his attention back to Lydia. “But..I don’t think she wants to be found.” 

  “Are we talking about her or we talking about you?” He asks and Carol just exits the kitchen without answering. Runs away from their disagreement. From his upset, sad eyes. The truth of his words.

  She finds herself at the balcony at the top of the house, where she and Lydia passed the time and shared their grief together when being around anyone else was too much to handle. Unceremoniously, Carol lies down on the wooden floor and looks up. Staring at the sky usually helps when she is feeling the way she’s feeling right now. Half wanting to throw herself off the balcony, half wanting to go down the stairs, find Daryl and bury herself in his arms. 

  She looks at the passing clouds and tries to soothe the hurt in her heart. Because it hurts how much Daryl keeps trying to reach her, to communicate, to talk some sense into her head. How he just doesn’t give up. 

  In a low voice, she hums a song that always comes to mind when she gazes at the clouds. Something she used to sing to Sophia when she was little. They would lie on their backs in the backyard to pass the time when, for one reason or another, Ed decided that Carol had lost the privilege of taking the girl to the nearby park. They would hunt for clouds shaped like rabbits and dolls and Carol would sing.

  “Sure as I’m breathing, sure as I’m sad, I’ll keep this wisdom in my flesh. I leave here believing, more than I had, this love has got no ceiling.”

  A cloud shaped like a Cherokee rose slowly drifts overhead before disappearing from her sight. She hopes Lydia is safe and sound out in the woods. She takes a deep breath and composes herself. It’s time to go find the herd.

____________________________

There’s no ceilings inside the cave to distract Carol from her feelings. No ups, no bottoms. Just endless walls and walls of stone closing in on her. Squeezing her heart, her lungs, her mind. 

  Daryl keeps herself at this side all the time. Don’t bullshit me, he says. You gotta promise, he begs. I gotta know we’re on the same team, he cries. He holds on to her, to their story. We don’t fight for revenge. Shines his light for her. His whole light. Daryl is all but made of light. Her man of honor, her best friend, her ride or die. We fight for our future. 

  And Carol tries, she really, really tries to hold on to him, to his obvious and selfless love for her. She tries to hold on to them.

  But the walls keep closing in and the sound of the walkers are just like the sounds that came out Sophia and Henry’s mouths when they became walkers. She tries to hold on.

  But fails.

____________________________

The wooden ceiling above her head is made of linear planks and rich with maroon, reddish and auburn colors. Pretty, soothing, ancient.

  It reminds her of Daryl’s hair.

  Ezekiel moans beneath her and she is overcome with guilt. Feels like she is betraying him, but files away the little voice inside her head, which sounds like Alpha, that asks her “which one?”.

____________________________

“No matter what you do, you lose people.” Alpha mocks her, as if her subconscious choosing that bitch to be her inner voice isn’t mockery enough. Apparently, Carol really, really hates herself. “Sophia, Lizzie, Mika, Henry, Ezekiel…And if you go back, Daryl could be next.”

  “I could never let that happen.” Carol angrily answers, trying to free herself from under the boat and debris of the shed that are on top of her. The collapsed ceiling above her head is a metaphor for her own broken mind; the slow walker coming at her, happily growling at the easy meal he is about to have.

  “Your track record does not inspire confidence.” Alpha points out, as if Carol didn’t know it already. “You know what you gotta do. I could’ve been anyone, but you chose me because I get the job done.”

  “I don’t want this.” She murmurs and is again surprised by how much she really doesn’t want this. She doesn’t want to die. She just wants the pain to stop. She wants to live painlessly and free of grief and guilt. She wants to remember Sophia and Henry as happy, forever freezed in time children. She wants to be free of her ghosts.

  “Just look at the flowers…” No. “… like you’re supposed to.” No!

  Carol looks once more time at the broken ceiling and focuses all her energy and strength on the blue sky above. Gratefully, it’s the same shade of Daryl’s eyes. She pictures herself back in the dream she had, where Daryl would make them breakfast and she had a different wedding ring on her finger. A simpler life, with him. Intently, Carol manoeuvres her shoulder, the always-so-easy-to-dislocate shoulder, and with a push frees herself. She can still hear the distinctive sizzling of his frying eggs and hear him getting some dollarbills to buy jam while she gets up, stabs the walker and collapses on the ground, utterly spent.

  Alpha looks at her with something akin to pride in her eyes.

  “It’s never too late.” Carol affirms to herself, out of breath, but certain. Alpha vanishes, and takes with her a good part of the weight she has carried since Henry’s death. Finally silenced.

  She was ready to run towards Daryl.

  ____________________________

Epiphany aside, Carol doesn’t know how to express to Daryl that she is here to stay. Even so, she tries.

  She’s helping him set up a trap of nails and cans on the staircase of the abandoned hospital, which is their last stronghold in the Whisperer War. Daryl’s going on and on about how Michonne just felt to help some other people and that he would’ve liked to go with their friend. 

Telling her, without using the actual words, that he no longer believed Carol wouldn’t leave too.

  “I’m still here,” she tells him softly, and he looks at Carol like he really wants to believe her, but words are not enough anymore. He doesn’t believe she means it, even though she does like she never did before. Or maybe, Carol thinks, with a knot in her stomach, Daryl doesn’t want her anymore. Maybe his love for her really did have a ceiling. Maybe it was better for him that it had a ceiling. Daryl deserved better.

  They keep working on the trap, side by side, but in silence.

____________________________

“It’s over, right?” Daryl quietly asks, searching her eyes to get his answer.

“It is.” Carol answers, concealing the fact that she nearly sacrificed herself on top of that cliff, with no desire to die in her heart, only the desire to keep him (and all of them) safe, even if it cost her her life.

“You get what you wanted?” 

“No.” It pains her to admit, the longing in her heart for him when he is right in front of her crushing her. “And I won’t. Not really.”

“Well, you still got me.” Daryl’s voice faltered a little bit.

“Yeah?” Carol didn’t want to cry. She was really so tired of crying. She was tired of seeing him cry too. 

“Yeah”. 

Daryl reaches and hugs her and she does her best to not break. There is so much left unsaid. So much to do to repair their bond, to rebuild the trust she knew she shattered. 

“New Mexico’s still out there.” He slightly jokes, smiles, and warms her heart. Forgiving her of everything, just because she came back to him.

Carol chuckles. “Yeah. Maybe someday.” Impossible man. Not for the first time, she realizes how much she loves him. How lucky she is to have him. And wants to do right by him. “We still have things to do here.”

____________________________

“You never know when to stop.” Daryl bursts, angry, frustrated, fed up. Done. 

Carol doesn’t understand where all this is coming from, but she knows it’s been repressed all day. Months, actually.

“That’s all that matters, yah bein’ right, huh?”

It’s like being stabbed in the back. She knows he’s not trying to hurt her, that he’s suffering and venting his anger because he can no longer contain his feelings. But she can’t shake the feeling that everything Daryl says is like a stab in her skin.

“You wanted to run, so yah ran. You couldn’t deal with the guilt, so you made it my problem.”

For the first time in years, he’s not holding back anything. He is not trying to soothe her. To cuddle or comfort her. It is exactly what she wanted weeks back, for him to give up on her..before she realized that all she actually wanted from life was to be with him.

“Wanna run? Run. I know where I’m supposed to be. I won’t stop yah this time.”

And Carol does exactly that. She runs to the easiest and closest place she can find: the living room of the cabin where he lived a false romance with another woman while she was married to a false king. She leaves him alone, heartbroken, on the dirty porch and sets about fixing the front door so they can take refuge safely that night.

 ____________________________

“Daryl?” Carol calls, in the dead of the night, after staying quiet for a couple of hours, studying the cabin’s roof as it has no ceiling. It’s full of spider webs. A couple of tiles are missing in one of the corners.

“Yeah?” He replies, without any discernible emotion in his voice, somewhere below hers. They had decided to lie down in the living room, near the fireplace, to spend the night, and Daryl silently urged her to take on the dusty sofa. (Leah’s bedroom and bed were obviously out of the question).

Carol takes a deep breath. “What did you mean when you said earlier that..that friends don’t have the same conversation over and over again?”

Daryl doesn’t answer her for a long time. She kids herself that she can hear him thinking even though there’s no noise in the cabin besides their breaths and crackling fire. Fidgets with her bracelet while waiting.

“Yah know what I meant.” He finally whispers, more than says.

Carol fixes her eyes in a particular big spider web near what it used to be the cabin’s kitchen. “Are we not friends anymore?”

She counts twenty fibres of silk before Daryl speaks again. “Don’t think we ever were just friends.”

 ____________________________

They go their separate ways the next morning. As Carol and Dog walk under the treetops, a vast ceiling made of green and brown, She plays with the pocketknife Daryl lent her, repeatedly replaying his words.

 ____________________________

“Sorry about the mess. Dog went crazy trying to catch a mouse and so did I. I forgot that it was like this.” Carol says, watching Daryl tidying his room up from his threshold. She has two bowls of stone soup in a tray, knowing he was probably hungry after spending the night outside the walls. And that he wouldn’t be able to sleep until he cleaned up the mess she left behind.

“That’s okay.” He shrugs and signals for her to put the tray on his desk.

“No, no, it isn’t.” Carol softly tells him. Daryl chews on his mouth before going back to cleaning.

Silently, she helps him. While Daryl puts his books and comics back where they belong, Carol reorganizes the scattered furniture. He puts up a drawing from RJ that had fallen and she gathers up the arrows scattered on the floor. Daryl is folding his colorful blanket when Carol notices that some of his arrows have flown behind his makeshift bed and bends down to pick them up. Surprised, she retrieves with them the double capper she gave him weeks before.

“You kept it.” She says, on her knees, unable to contain the warmth that shines through in her voice.

“Sure I did.” Daryl simply retorts and, instead of sitting on the bed, kneels beside her. He takes it from her hands and toys with it for a second. “Dunno if it has any more luck left tho.”

Hearing her own words coming back at her hurts. 

“I don’t think they work like that. I don’t think they ever run out of luck if we do our part to believe in it.” Carol tells him, placing one of her hands on top of his. “Have faith, you know?”

“And not run when shit gets bad?” Daryl asks, intertwining his fingers with hers, the double capper safe between their palms.

“Yeah. That too.” She agrees. 

They look at each other. There’s a strategic ray of sunlight coming through one of his bedroom windows and illuminating Daryl’s face. He is beautiful. 

“I’m sorry.” Carol whispers. “For everything.”

“I know. ’m sorry too.” Daryl caresses her in the cheek with his free hand, brushing away a tear. “You’re not going anywhere.” He confirms, needing to be reassured.

“I’m not going anywhere. Unless… unless it is with you. I know too where I’m supposed to be.” 

“Huh.” Daryl just grumbles. He lets her hand and the double capper go, and adjusts himself. Takes her face with his both hands and stares intently at her. Grounding her, him, them both in the moment. “Yah kept the bracelet.”

Carol sniffs and smiles. “My best friend made it for me.”

“Best friend? What are you, ten?” Daryl parrots, but it lacks humour. His voice is dead serious. His eyes keep going from her own eyes and her lips. 

She marvels at his courage for doing that – for asking her what she knows he’s asking, right there, in broad daylight, shining like the sun itself; while she could only speak freely in the silence of the night, staring at a ceiling infested with spiders. 

“No.” Carol answers, closing the distance between them. Touches her forehead with his and closes her eyes, expectantly. Their lips brush against each other. “I haven’t been ten for a while.”

 ____________________________

They stay down there, on the floor, between scattered arrows and a growing pile of dirt pieces of clothing.

Daryl slides his calloused hands under her shirt, gently caressing her skin, ribs, spine, until the edge of her pants. Drags his teeth, tongue and whiskers all over her neck, kisses softly her breasts. 

Carol touches him back; strong muscles contracting and relaxing under her fingertips. Maps all his scars, old and new, loving them with strength. Pushes his pants down and immediately pumps his erection, knowing and appreciating he’d go commando. 

Silently, reverently, they intertwined their bodies in one swift motion, knowing exactly how to fit together, as if they had done it a million times before. Certain that they would do it a million times again later.

They knew where they belonged.

 ____________________________

Daryl’s bedroom ceiling is higher than any other in the house and is crudely painted white. Rustic. As insane as it sounds, Carol thinks it feels like him. She says so, a little groggy from sleep, relaxed from more than one orgasm, and Daryl just chuckles at her absurdity.

Later that day, they lay naked in her bed, comfortable in this new, yet familiar way; and Daryl says the cracks around the light fixture looks like her hair. She corrects him and tells him no, that they looked like his wood carven arrows. Daryl rolls, getting off the embrace they are on. Sits on top of her, his strong thighs on both sides of her hips. He arranges her hair around her head, like a halo, before looking up at the ceiling and back to her.

“Nah, definitely looks like yah.” Daryl points a finger at her and then, at the ceiling, like she could see herself through his eyes. “Just like the sun.”

Carol tries to argue, calling him ridiculous, while feeling her cheeks burn with shyness and the force of his love. Daryl shuts her up by kissing her. And kissing and kissing her,

It had been a week since she’d left that morning to check the traps they’d set.

A week.

For something that would have taken her one and a half days, at most, even if she had reset them immediately instead of bringing them in.

Even with the storm.

.-.

The storm had set in mere hours after she’d left the compound that they had fortified for the winter after realizing that they would not reach their destination before the end of fall. Since they’d understood that, this far up north, winter might last until March or even well into April, they had not just seen to the windows and doors of each house and provided for lots of firewood but also built a solid wooden wall around those houses they were going to live in.

It hadn’t looked so bad at first. A light drizzle of fluffy white flakes, wondrous to look at as they slowly started to cover the ground instead of melting into slush. As the light started to seep out of that first day of her absence, he’d noticed that the thin snow cover briefly kept the darkness at bay by reflecting what little light there was.

He’d kept looking out the window, watching the flurry of frozen water out there in childlike wonder, until the day’s work finally overwhelmed him and he fell asleep on the chair, leaning against the curtain.

Waking up wasn’t quite as peaceful, unfortunately.

He was ripped from a dreamless, exhausted sleep by a shriek just beyond the window that had his heart hammering and sent him surging to his feet the very second he was waking up. Expecting either a walker or a raving lunatic to be coming at him, he stared about himself wildly, his knife in his hand, and it took him nearly a minute to understand that what was coming for them wasn’t human, nor had it ever been.

The languid dance of the flakes outside had turned into something quite different, he saw as he turned toward the window to check if he could find the source of the shriek out there, in the cold darkness.

The wind, soft and slow when he had tentatively rested his hand on her shoulder in a wordless gesture of good bye, had turned into a furious monster, whipping the snow around the house and toward the window in gray sheets that looked unending.

And the snow …

The snow wasn’t just a light cover on the ground any longer, either.

The snow had to be at least a foot high, rounding the shapes of the abandoned tools and toys that had welcomed them when they had first entered the village. The snow had rounded the sharpened ends of the logs they had used for their fence, hiding the deadly tips.

The snow had completely hidden the street leading toward the gate, obscuring the edges of the sidewalks and intersections.

The snow had changed what the darkness disclosed of the landscape into something new and unrecognizable.

A shiver ran down his spine.

.-.

Daylight - or what they got of it - revealed just how complete that change was in the morning, after a sleepless night haunted by the shrieking of the wind and the rattling of the house in which they gathered over the course of the night, one by one, in pairs, in groups of three, four, five. Nobody wanted to remain alone in these conditions, isolated in their chosen „home.“

The village, or what was visible within the perimeter of their wall, had turned into what, before the apocalypse, would have been considered a „winter wonderland“, the snow piling in drifts everywhere, with ice flowers on the windows.

Now, with no emergency services, no power, no central heating, these conditions were deadly. The storm’s fury hadn’t abated. The wind was still howling and shrieking around the corners of every house, through the naked trees, through the lamp and power poles barely visible through the white veils it was whipping through the air.

As the hours dragged on, the sky got minimally brighter before turning dark again long before what should have been sunset, with no sign of the blizzard calming down - and, after two days, no sign of Carol.

.-.

„No, you’re not going.“

Rick was adamant, and everyone he turned to for help supported their leader’s decision.

The storm was still howling, the snow was three feet high by now, temperatures were still well below freezing, and Carol had taken their best equipment for the night she’d been expected to camp in the open. 

Second best was second best, but, after all, only second best, Rick argued. Additionally, Daryl had no way of knowing where Carol would have started checking their traps, and no way of deducting where he might find her now. In the snow, he’d be unable to find either his traps or her trail.

If worst came to worst, the group would lose not just Carol, but both of them, and there was no way Rick could allow that. Even years into the apocalypse, Daryl was still the group’s most proficient hunter - he’d had plenty of practise when the world had still been civilized, after all. Those were years that were serving them well, but also years that were hard to catch up on for the people he was training.

„You’re not the boss o’ me!“ Daryl snarled in response to Rick’s verdict, taking a menacing step toward the former sheriff, until Sasha and Michonne, within moments of each other, each placed a hand carefully on either of his shoulders to stop him. They all knew, of course, that neither of the women had any chance of actually stopping him if he didn’t choose to let them, short of them resorting to physical violence - but Daryl knew that they would never do that.

They were at an impasse.

„I can’t risk losing both of you. Losing Carol would be hard enough on its own - and I don’t think we will lose her. She’s a survivor. She’ll be back.“

For a moment, Daryl’s burning eyes met Rick’s, and each man knew what specifically made Daryl so angry about this statement. Rick knew, deep inside, that Daryl would never truly forgive him for exiling Carol from the prison before the Governor’s attack, that Rick endangering Carol in this way was always going to stand between them despite Daryl’s unfailing loyalty.

Carol was a survivor not just in her own right, but because Rick had forced her to be one, in a way Daryl would never forget.

„I can find her. I will find her. You know I can.“ There was no plea in Daryl’s voice, only rage at being denied a chance to save the woman he -

„I don’t doubt that, but I can’t let you go out in these conditions. You’d freeze to death with what we could give you for your search. What do I tell Carol when she comes back and you’re gone?“

„It’s been almost three days!“ Daryl’s burning eyes searched for support among the circle of survivors gathered around himself and Rick. „What if she’s hurt?“

„And how would you be able to help her if she is?“ Rick’s eyes remained hard, hiding his compassion behind a steel façade. „I’m sorry, I really am. But you can’t go.“

.-.

The snow was piling up against their wall, the wind whipping it into abstract shapes that froze into sharp edges. Daryl set up camp in the gatehouse and didn’t budge when the others tried to persuade him to at least come in for the night, arguing that it was especially vital for someone to be waiting for her if she returned at night.

Temperatures continued dropping, the wind kept howling, the snow kept falling. At this point, even if Rick had allowed Daryl to leave and search for Carol, conditions would no longer have allowed it. The snow was over four feet high and it would have obliterated any signs of her ever having been in the area by now.

And was it possible to survive in this cold with the provisions she’d taken, with the haphazard camping gear she’d selected?

He tried to bring himself to think, „She must have frozen to death by now,“ but found he couldn’t do it.

So many times he’d thought he’d lost her. So many times he’d grappled with the idea of her no longer being in his life, and the very idea still had his chest constrict as if by steel bands tightening around it.

She couldn’t be gone, it wasn’t possible. He couldn’t conceive of the idea, so it couldn’t be.

.-.

They brought hot food out to him twice a day as he continued his vigil by the gate. They brought him blankets, and wood for the small stove.

They watched his eyes turn into empty hollows as the wind kept whittling away at his hope that she would return any moment, that he’d see her emerging from the swirling white hell out there, alive and well, bundled up in every shred of fabric she’d taken with her.

.-.

Day six, and the storm was finally relenting. For the first time since it had started, Daryl saw a milky disk in the sky where the sun was hidden behind the clouds.

A freezing fog was hiding everything further from him than ten feet. He couldn’t take his wool mittens off even in the gate house with the fire on.

How could she have survived in this?

.-.

Her eyes were burning with tears and frost. She almost didn’t feel her feet any longer as she stumbled toward the dark shape outlined in the fog in front of her. Since today was the first time in days that she could even guess the sun’s position, there was no way to be sure she was even in the same general area as their winter hideout, nor could she be sure that whoever might live here would not be hostile, the way so many groups had been hostile toward them - trying to kill or eat them, to enslave them, to take what they owned and leave them to die.

She had survived this long, and she had to take this risk or the next night might kill her - or a turned ankle, a snapped wrist.

It was this or nothing.

She limped toward the dark shapes in the frozen fog and hoped for the best.

.-.

It all ended in a very unspectacular way.

He had climed the ladder to the crown of the wall and carefully raised his head above it, hoping to see more than ten feet through the fog. A lone figure was weaving toward the wall, reminding him of that space movie that Merle had gone to see with him a lifetime ago in which some space jockey had lost his mount on some ice planet and had woven through the snow just like that before collapsing.

The figure collapsed.

Hardly feeling his freezing feet, Daryl half climbed, half fell back down the ladder, wrestled the beam out of the way that barred the gate, and flung the gate open to get to the figure lying there in the snow. Scrambling toward it through drifts of snow reaching up to his thighs, he fought for every foot of ground until he reached the bundle that was lying there so still, as if there was no life left in it.

The clothes of the figure were so covered in frozen snow that he couldn’t make out any other colors but white. Half submerged in the snow, he couldn’t guess at the person’s size or sex. He just knew he needed to get there, and look at their face.

Falling to his knees, he reached out with stiff hands to turn the figure on its back.

Patches of gray skin. Sunken eyes with dark circles under them.

The tips of graying hair peering out from under a woolen cap and a fur lined hood.

He didn’t see a pulse at the neck, and his hands were too stiff and frozen to feel for her heartbeat. He couldn’t tell if the person was alive or not.

Her gray-blue eyes opened.

.-.

She felt the whisper of a touch on her shoulder, her cheek, her arm.

She felt a breath on her face where the cold hadn’t damaged her skin.

She heard a whisper, just one word, and her heart sang, even though she couldn’t yet speak, or open her eyes, or return the touch.

This, she thought, must surely be the greatest miracle she would receive in this life.

Against the forces of nature, against all odds, he had found her way home.