Walking Dead 1. Rain

**Disclaimer: The Walking Dead belong to Robert Kirkman and AMC.**

**Yeah, I should be updating other fics, but this one-shot just happened to write itself. Special shoutout to Peta2 for being my beta, friend, sounding board and cheerleader and pushing me to just put my fingers on the keyboard and write something, anything. Thank you :)**

* * *

><p>"<em>I love you<em>

_because no two snowflakes are alike_

_and it is possible_

_if you stand tippy-toe_

_to walk between the raindrops"  
>― <em>_Nikki Giovanni__, Resignation_

It rains the moment she sees him, it pours.

Beady droplets, chestnut-sized, pelt down hard, splashing in waterlogged puddles, shaking rocks and weeds off their stand, bending the lithe birch branches. A mid-summer tempest, spewing molten fury. How it's possible for thunder claps to echo deafeningly and the soil beneath her to fizzle away like crumbs of stale three-day-old bread when everything is immersed in an outlandishly gloomy hush and stillness beats her.

Water cascades cling to her batting eyelashes, veiling her vision. At first, it's just a glimpse, a fleeting image in the outskirts of her peripheral vision. Reality and illusion sluice in droves, belting through her in equal doses.

What grabs her attention in a chokehold is the sleeveless khaki shirt and the v-shaped shoulder blades as her hand snaps up to shelter her eyes. The second thing that resonates with her is the crossbow, swinging laxly on his back. He's not straight-backed as usually, his gait doesn't resemble the panther-like grace of light-footedness and speed. His hand is pressed on his side and he sways a tad, shoring himself up against the adjacent tree trunk.

But it's him, no doubt.

Her mouth opens, a set of trembling lips form the five-letter name, 'Daryl', and a desperate screech tears through her lungs. Just like that she charges forward, her dog-tired legs bestowed a whole new free will on their own. Because it's Daryl and the rest doesn't matter.

"Daryl!"

She screams again and again and again and she knows she can't be heard, no way, not over that clamorous storm party feasting around. The sensitive sinew of her throat chaffs from the inhumane effort and her heart is grappled beneath the serrated maws of invisible pliers, pumping a scorching pain across her chest. She screams again, her desperation panted out fused with phony hope.

And yet he stills for a vibrating second, his hunched nape perks up. He twirls around, the heels of his roach-stompers dig in the quagmire, and mirrors the exact same gesture she did just a few moments ago, bringing his hands above the sagging bags of his eyes. He blinks then, jaw dropping agape, and Carol laughs. Between tripping over everything that stands in her way, between scrambling up on all fours to dash forward once again, she meets the incredulity glistening in his gaze and chortles out loud.

She can swear that his mouth moves too, shaping into the circle of another five-letter name, 'Carol', and it doesn't take long for him to follow, he's running too. The crossbow band soars in the air and his loyal companion is swiftly tossed away as Carol wrestles with the fastened straps of her backpack until she yanks it off, always running, always sprinting like there's no tomorrow.

Closer and closer they get, pulverizing the distance.

The physical proximity she's been musing ever since her banishment is no longer a pipedream. He's there, close, so close.

Her foggy eyes drop on the garment of his shirt, ruptured and blood-stained, and the primal grin plastered across her features tides away, contorted into a grimace. Oxygen poisons her system like viperous flecks as she skids and tramples on rotten leaves and twigs and her surroundings flash out in a warped specter of mixed colors and shapes, feet plunging ankle deep in the mud.

Close they are now, almost in arm's reach.

The adrenaline-fueled resolution that propelled his limbs thus far lapses gallop after gallop until the frantic brunt of his gait devolves into an angular stumble. His knees buckle and she hears it now, as her arms lock around his waist and his eyes roll in the back of his head, she hears her name wriggling out as a breathless moan.

The momentum of his dead weight drags her down. Carol totters and plumps on the sedge-coated greenness of the drenched woods bed, hands clasped around his slumped torso to keep him atop and minimize the impact of the collision for him. Her entire body howls, crushed between two rocky surfaces as she is, but nothing registers with the escalating horror striking bombs in her bloodstream.

"Daryl…"

It's just a whisper and the distraught mindset wobbling in the confined walls of her skull doesn't allow her a spare glance at his face. She perches him in her lap, propping his back over her arm and then stoops over, teeth and free hand ripping his shirt into shreds. Frantically examining the wound lacerating his side she finds it superficial, the blood clotting around the open gush, already working to heal it.

She's still staring stumped at the throbbing flesh as if suspicious of this unforeseen blast of serendipity but calloused fingers paw her chin, tilting it up until she's forced to gaze straight inside the azure haven seeking her eyes. A move so compatible with Daryl's demeanor; crude and unrefined at first impression, teeming with such an opulence of affection and delicacy upon careful inspection that her airway clogs up.

"I was lookin' for you."

The masculine scent beneath her filters through her nostrils. It's earth, sweat, dirt and dried blood. It's safety, protection, selflessness and sacrifice. It's Daryl and no one else.

"It's nothing," she gasps the alleviation oozing off her every cell like steam and shunts greasy strands of hair away from his face. "Just a scratch. I'll have you-"

"Everythin' s gone," he rasps barely audibly as somnolence takes over, prevailing stealthily but steadily.

"Sshh… Don't talk now."

He derives mettle and fleeting consciousness from the happiness squirting out of her in grooves and grits his teeth, that vaguely simian mouth, underbite pushing the bottom lip forward, resting under droopy eyes.

"Listen to me…" Daryl heaves. "The prison… Gone… Hershel… Dead… Everythin' s gone."

The new info kicks in violently, twisting her gut and tart bile bubbles up her stomach but after a while of unswerving eye contact Carol nods and lets everything other than his presence ebb at the back burner of her senses, postponed for later.

When her lips fully blanket his, she feels him responding with everything he has. His mouth flexes, parts open just a slit and a weird sound, a half-sigh half-whimper escapes; his hand cups one side of her head, demanding that she slouches lower, closer. She nibbles his bottom lip and it goes pliant, but only for a second. Daryl groans his frustration for the loss and slicks his tongue in Carol's mouth, swirling it lazily in sync with hers. He conforms without protest to the pace she dictates and the kiss builds up, from explorative and tentative to heated and passionate. The monotonous uproar encompassing them in a soaked embrace rattles on and on and water pools around the tangled bodies. It's still raining.

"It's ok now. I got you now," she hums between kisses. "You're ok."

"Carol…"

She blames the whipping rain for the sting of bee bites in her eyes and blinks in a frenzy to rid the mist.

"What, Pookie?"

"Everythin's gone," he murmurs again but something quirks the corner of his lips upwards until that outrageously charming lopsided smirk –the one no person should ever be gifted with- brightens up his features to gainsay the sorrow-ridden gruff of his voice. "'xcept you."

The hand on her cheek glides but she snatches it before heating the ground; their fingers, laced now, rest on his chest. Peppering his face with tender, triumphant pecks, he's still smiling under her mouth as his lids shut and he goes limp in her arms.

She doesn't mind. She can take care of him. She can take care of them both. They are Daryl and Carol after all, freaks and survivors. She snuggles him against her as if the well-toned, dauntless hunter is the finest of porcelains, a cargo simply too fragile and precious to be exposed out in the wilderness for any longer. Keeping his face buried in the crook of her neck to shield him from the storm, she takes in their bearings, gauging their next decision.

That's the thing about rain. Rain means catharsis. It purifies them both, bathes them in holy water, scouring away sins, guilt, repentance, past mistakes never to be replicated.

Somewhere in the distance, impervious to the heartfelt scene or inspired of it, a deeply-rooted flower guzzles the water greedily, almost with gluttony, until the budded petals crack open to reveal pinkish spider webs adorning the chalky paleness of the supple surface. It's the Georgian state flower, a Cherokee rose blossoming against all odds.

* * *

><p><strong>And that's what I want to see on the show! This may stay a one-shot or be explored a bit more with a couple of chapters. Let me know what you think! A kind word always brightens up a cloudy day :)<br>**

**Caryl on!**


	2. Hail

**Ok, I've decided to write three chapters for that. What can I say? I saw more story in this little piece.**

**Thank you all for your kind words for the previous chapter. My sincerest apologies for not responding to the great reviews you guys sent me. I've been having some health issues lately and real life is a bit wild. But I truly do appreciate and love each one of them and I'm insanely grateful to you all :)**

**This chapter changed the rating of this fic from T to M, which means there's smut ahead.**

* * *

><p><em>I love you…<em>

_because only my love for you  
>despite the charms or gravity<br>keeps me from falling off this Earth  
>into another dimension<em>

_I love you_  
><em>because it is the natural order of things<em>

_― Nikki Giovanni, Resignation_

A thousand buckle belts strike hard, everywhere around and above him. His daddy. Or maybe the blows aren't buckles. Maybe they're grits. Merle and some stupid prank.

He hears them, just that. Back to back, no beginnings, no endings, just there, everywhere.

He's paralyzed and numb, can neither move nor feel the pain, and this scares him breathless. To acknowledge their existence, the menace panting in the back of his neck, the torment approaching, zeroing in around him, and yet being unable to react as if doomed to look on his life from the outside –that's panic. If he can't feel the pain, he can't escape it. An incapacitated Dixon ain't no Dixon at all.

And the blows are there, no doubt. Suddenly too conscious of the burden curled around his right side, he knows who it belongs to and the panic for his weakness to protect the owner peaks up like a foreboding crescendo. He has to do something, move somehow, because-

It's Carol.

"Daryl!"

Blurry images of a half-perceived, stumbling trek in the woods flash across his mind, broken and scattered like photo negatives smudge. Rain was berating upon them both. Time and time again the world blackened, his knees gave away and the soggy forest bed hauled up to crush on his face. Time and time again the clinch around his waist steeled and thwarted the free fall or just got in the way to absorb the impact. A power was pushing him forward, a velvety voice willing him not to give up. That voice, ubiquitous and humming, delicate like silk and sturdy like a diamond forcing him out of the darkness.

It was Carol. It's always been Carol.

The irony behind it bites hard, cackles. He was supposed to save _her_, yet she was the one to save _him_. Always the same with her. From the outside, he's the knight in shining armor, galloping on a horseback to save the damsel in distress. Only in their version of the corny fairytale, the damsel wields a knuckle buster and slays the dragon first.

"Daryl!"

An explosion. Deafening and devastating. He knows the sound, the tank bombarding them, razing every stronghold and sanctuary from the face of earth. The Governor is there, with an army on his tail and he's immobilized and useless. He needs to move, will his limbs to charge forward. His mind howls for him to claw back to consciousness, to protect her, protect Carol.

Her weight shifts more and he screams when she's ripped away from him. Adrenaline chaffs the back of his throat but no sound comes out.

"You're having a nightmare."

With a desperate gasp for air, his eyes shoot open and he sits up. The sharp pain across his patched ribs barely registers as one hand gropes the air next to him for the crossbow and the other shoves Carol behind him, muscles flexing in full attack mode.

There's no threat, though. No belts, no grits, no bombs. No daddy, no Merle, no Governor.

It's just the slatted walls of a cabin immersed in the dim light of the lantern flickering across the tiny room and the night encompassing them.

"It's hailing." Carol's voice kindles his shoulder, soothing, wobbling with emotion. "Just hail is all."

His eyes, still bewildered, keep scanning their bearings and he swallows hard.

Just hailstones ricocheting off the roof. No explosions, just thunder claps echoing from the outer darkness. Just a mid-summer tempest drowning the heat and arid earth in cascades of water and ice. And nothing threatens her, Carol stoops over him warily.

"Relax," she whispers, running her fingers across the gruff stubble of his chin and cheeks, and the taut nerves heed to that gentle command in reflex.

Her hands push him back on the pillow and he obeys blindly as she lowers the quilt to examine the damage he did to her handwork. She moves deftly, readjusting the dislodged bandages, while he heaves a few stabilizing breaths, taking in the frugal interior as if he still anticipates the door to bang open and a demon to barge in.

Their clothes hang off-handedly from a nail behind the door and water pools on the floor. On the flimsy table, a red mug, lacking its handle, harbors a bouquet of Cherokee roses wilting fast. More petals are strewn around the surface than attached to the stems. He doesn't like that image of dying hope and, on instinct, his gaze seeks for Carol's who is pulling the quilt back up to his chest, offering a tight-lipped smile and shunting away from his eyes some unruly wisps of hair.

He's lying naked, carefully covered and tucked under the quilt, and it doesn't even bug him. But he's not just that, naked. Clean, for the first time since what seems like eternity in retrospect; dry, in a way that felt unattainable when the relentless downpour soaked him deep to the marrow of his bones; calm, refamiliarizing himself with how to breathe normally again after weeks of groaning and panting like a caged lion, after weeks of looking for her. And yet none of these suffice to decipher that inconspicuous sentiment that belts through him at full pelt.

It's something altogether new and unbeknownst, the wholeness that eases in an existence crippled till hours ago, his heart not missing its most vital part. Without Carol, it beat and he survived. With Carol, it purrs, it's warm and fluffy, a kitten nestled deep in his chest, and he lives. Embarrassing as it may be, a disdain in the Dixon nefarious reputation, it's also true. The difference between living and surviving is the precious presence breathing next to him amidst a storm's berserk spree, he gets it now. To have something to die for instead of just dying. He knows she has known this much for a while.

"How are you holdin' up?"

"Fine."

Carol averts her gaze and his pulse picks up. Without her eyes, his balance quivers and his center slopes, he has no clue where he stands or where he's going to land next. Pawing her chin, he tilts it up until she has nowhere else to look but straight back into him.

"Lonely," she admits and her lips twitch indistinctly. "I missed you."

"I didn't know if you were dead or alive," he says huskily, wondering if she understands the full magnitude of this ordeal, of what it meant and what it cost.

The shadow clouding her expression tells him that she does, she's experienced it herself. "I'm sorry."

Of all the things they have to be sorry, he's not sure what she's apologizing for. Nor does he care. All is forgiven, if for him, then for her too. He doesn't have absolution to offer, just unconditional acceptance like the one he receives from her. Part of him wants to weep tears of relief for the mere fact that she's there, pressed against his good side, but another part, the more powerful one, the one that prevails, urges him to validate how much alive and together they are.

With a fluid motion, he rolls over and buries his face in the crook of her neck, nibbling it tenderly and then treading a moist path across her jaw line. One arm locks around her torso and his free hand glides inside her tank top, kneading her breasts. She moans softly but shudders violently, flailing like hay in a gale, and he feels the awakening, the blood surge and boil and flesh coming to life underneath his mouth and hands. He's not gentle. He's not smooth. He's not much of a lover.

He doesn't know how to be.

He knows sex, a quick fuck on filthy sheets or against the toilet wall of some shady bar. Making love is uncharted territory, alien and terrifying.

But he's there, craving to become everything his nature and upbringing fight to repress for her, and that's the most he has to offer. Having stripped his heart completely, he now stares doe-eyed and awaits for an answer, reassurances, permission, some hint for him to continue and not back off, hoping that she won't toss his crude love away, that she'll be fool enough to take him, inexperience and awful timing and ill temper, quirks and all.

The futility of words for messages to be conveyed between them is prominent, the trademark of the bond they share. She responds immediately by cupping his face and seeking his lips and in a matter of seconds he whips off her tank top, she shimmies out of her pants and she's naked too, wrapped all around him.

They fucking fit, perfectly, hand and glove, pieces of the same jigsaw. That wholeness he feels since he woke up expands, trespassing every boundary, visible or latent. It's physical as much as it's emotional and the grandeur of this absolute convergence blows his mind away.

He attacks her mouth, his tongue swirls with her, teeth scraping the sensitive skin beneath her ear lobe. Fistfuls of hair are clutched between her fingers and she cranes her neck while his hands roam over every part of her body, exploring her depths, her every mound and cavity. They move slowly from her thighs to her knees and ankles and then back up, lifting her off the bed. A squeal slips through her lips but it comes out muzzled, blotting out in his mouth that shushes her with a light chuckle. She grins and nods as he perches her on his lap and they are both sitting on the narrow mattress, entwined, their bodies pressed against each other.

Her scent filters through his lungs, it engulfs him, conquers him from the inside. She smells like Carol and he whiffs her skin like a hound, breathing her in greedily, jealous of the air around him that might get some of this scent away from him, that might claim part of the woman writhing in his embrace for itself. She's his and he's selfish about it, possessive. Carol and her scent, he's not sharing, not with God himself, not with the world. Her scent moves him to the core, makes him want to cry from happiness and unleashes his inner beast at the same time, a scent he has no memory and no parallel to relate it with, a scent he cannot describe. How does belonging smell?

Her palm vaults at the brunt of his hammering heartbeat and she gasps because she realizes what he already knows hovering over the spot of her pulse –that two hearts thud in sync, like one. His thumbs toy with her nipples, progressively hardening under his palpation and soon she's striving to keep up with his frantic tempo, but he knows, he feels she's there, heart and soul, right in the kernel of their pairing, reciprocating his zest, equally lustful.

"You found me," Carol pants in his ear and her nails hook on the flexing muscles of his back.

He opens his eyes and meets hers, heavy-lidded and dark, full of desire and love. "Always."

He descends again, tongue flicks out to twirl around her nipples, hurling waves of ecstatic joy all over her body as she flaps like a spineless heap of sinews, flush against him. She melts into him, sharp teeth dig absently in her lower lip to stifle whatever high-pitched timbres are mauling up her throat and she winces in pain as the metallic pang of blood floods her mouth. Daryl's lips cover hers, his tongue dawdling there to lick the rupture, sucking it until the sting subsides.

The uproar of the hailstorm raving in the woods startles him with the acute contrast of the interior. Outside the nature's rage is violent, destructive, sending everything to hell, whereas inside the effluence of affection teeming from his every gesture genuinely takes him aback. Till seconds ago, he had no idea he was capable of such tenderness.

Snuggling her closer and closer, she mewls her frustration to further lessen the inexistent distance, as if the ultimate physical proximity is nowhere near satisfactory for the level of intimacy she yearns for.

He's aroused; aroused beyond comprehension, his erection throbs, gliding down her clit in the wet threshold of her private parts. The quake of her lower belly and the heat radiating off her every pore throw him over the edge, the bulge between his legs vibrates, aflame and hard.

Lowering her down, he positions himself above her and she arches in a proper angle, legs stretching to provide him unobstructed access. He wants her, he wants every cell of that body to surrender and belong to him, once and for all. The first attempt to slide inside her is painful for both of them, her tightness pungent, shutting him out. He pauses and inspects her expression, concerned and remorseful for the inadvertent pain he inflicts, and then moves to get out but her legs clamp and she's clinging onto him like a spider web.

"No! No, Daryl. Don't stop."

Conforming, he tries again and the next thrust is fiercer as he propels forward, worming a lane right to the hilt of his crotch. Her breath hitches and, despite her honest efforts to plaster on a pokerface, he sees the serene countenance contorting into distress and stills for a second until she looks more at ease with their posture.

"I got you," he croons between bouts of air squirming out of him in heaves. "I got you."

She lugs her weight off the mattress then until she's floating and there's nothing but the unyielding prop of his palm to cant her upwards, nails chafing a catwalk on his back. New scars, transient and welcome. The sighing and moaning of his name fills the space around them, he convulses again and again and she bucks back, messing with his sanity. Her walls squeeze him and she nearly kills him with the way she's thrashing against his hip bones.

He comes and Carol's name slurs out in a throaty sound. Still trembling with the aftershocks of his climax, he sags atop her and they're panting in unison while he struggles to brace himself on a set of quivery elbows and permit her chest to billow. Two slender veins tingle across his temples and salty droplets spring down his entire body, drenched strands of hair spraying wetness on the shining sheen of sweat already blanketing her skin.

"You ok?"

She nods fast, a tad too fast, fast enough for him to know she's lying and then looks away.

"Carol…"

"When are you going to leave?"

He only gets a glimpse of her misty gaze but catches the fear. He hates that fear looming inside almost as much as he loves her. He hates it, because out of the thousand things she can rightfully cower away from in the walker-ridden world they live in, this particular fear is irrational, founded on nothing. But she's already been left behind once, banished by the very person she probably trusted the most after him, the man he used to call brother, the same man that knifed him in the back when he wasn't there to defend what was his. She's already been left behind once and the fear of reliving it with him this time cuts deep. So he approaches her the same way she always approached him, like a wounded animal. His lips caress her eyes with a feather touch, kissing the stray tears away.

"Never."

The quiet promise is raspy, sandpaper scrubbing on marble, loaded with emotions too profound to be trapped in words. He even doubts that the proper diction to capture the vehemence of what he feels for her has been invented in the first place. Her bleary gaze snaps up, accompanied with an ear to ear smile and now she's crying and laughing in sync like the crazy person she is.

He flops over on his back and hugs her tightly. Hailstones pelt on and on, uncompromising, unrelenting. But they don't pound anymore, not as the laced bodies ease in the blissful togetherness and the woman in his arms drifts peacefully, dragging him with her. For Carol, hailstones don't hurt, they are not nightmare material. On the contrary, they lull, and he wishes that she'll bother to teach him how she does that. He's hopeful that she will, she's gone to great lengths to teach him much more challenging stuff. Loving the hail is going to be a piece of cake for her.

The last thought that tickles his sleepy brain is that Carol's broken mug needs some fresh Cherokee roses. If anything survives the hail. Unlikely, flowers never do. Nothing fragile ever does. But she has, repeatedly. He wonders if another miracle lurks around the corner and the question remains unanswered as Morpheus embraces him.

* * *

><p><strong>Yes, Daryl had to say 'always' and 'never' in the same chapter. Just for reasons… Also, maybe this fic is terribly clichéd and mushy, but it makes me happy to write it while fighting my fears for the second half of the season, so I'll recover the soap opera label. And I wish I didn't completely suck at smut and could do a better job, but I hope that you found the result decent. Hey, I tried :) Let me know if I managed to convey some happy Caryl feels!<strong>


End file.

Walking Dead, Hurt-Comfort, Romance