Author's Note: This starts mid-way through the amazing episode, 5x06 Consumed, when Daryl and Carol are in Atlanta to try and rescue Beth from Grady Memorial Hospital. In the process they take a quiet moment to talk about how they've both changed. This is two canon moments stitched together with an expanded, more satisfying conversation, pushing toward a turning point and my take on what was really going on with Daryl suddenly taking up smoking.

We Ain't Ashes

Daryl stood at the window, finished off a bag of chips. Tossed a glance at Carol, but once he wadded up the bag, the whole room was so quiet. He could just about hear her thinking. Across the way, Grady Memorial Hospital was quiet, every bit as closed to him as Carol was.

She kept saying she didn't want to talk about what was on her mind, so he asked what was on his.

"You said I'm different than I was before?"

"Yeah."

"How was I?" He looked back out the window at the barren streets of Atlanta, waiting.

He figured it wouldn't be anything good, but that didn't bother him as much as it used to. Carol always seemed to see him clear. The good and the bad. He knew he wasn't no prize, but he was curious. Especially after Beth said she thought he was different, too. But she also assumed he'd been locked up before. Some kind of fucking criminal. Beth was barely more than a child, and Carol was hell and gone past that, but it tickled something in the back of his mind that they'd said the same thing to him, not too many days apart.

"It's like you were a kid," Carol said. "Now, you're a man."

He just kept staring out at the walkers. Funny, he expected it to be a shock, whatever she had to say. But that just about matched the way he was starting to feel.

He'd have knocked the teeth out of anybody who said he wasn't a man a month ago, year ago. Hell, a decade ago. 'Sides, anybody who said it recently would have been using those teeth to chew up meat that he hunted, so they didn't deserve 'em if they were going to insult him anyway.

But hunting, killing walkers. It wasn't the same thing as being a man. Maybe understanding that was part of the switch.

"What about you?" he asked. The longer they were out alone together, the easier she talked. It had always been that way, but the way the group worked, they weren't alone much. He couldn't tell if it was making her feel any better, this time, but he wanted to hear what she thought anyway.

"Me and Sophia stayed at that shelter for a day and a half before I went running back to Ed. I went home, got beat up, life went on and I just kept praying for something to happen. But I didn't do anything. Not a damn thing."

He didn't like the way she was sitting. A little limp, like her body was just a thing she'd propped up against the wall until she needed it again.

"Who I was with him, she got burned away. And I was happy about that. I mean, not happy, but… At the prison, I got to be who I always thought I should be. And then she got burned away." She hesitated, a long time. "Everything now just…consumes you."

Her confession sank down deep in him, in the place where all the years went. Where the blood went, every time you washed it off your hands. And even though they scraped with honesty, the words felt wrong. She was wrong.

He made a sound, and she looked up.

"We ain't ashes."

"You aren't."

He shook his head, let out a little snort of derision. She didn't bother to argue further, just sort of drifted away mentally like she'd been doing more and more.

After a second he turned, sat back against the edge of the window. There used to be a little bit of something there between them. Like the air was a little bit more alive when she was close by. He'd wonder, sometimes, what would happen if he touched her. For longer than just a squeeze on the arm, softer than a clap on the shoulder. She'd tease him, or look at him with the light of something a little more than laughter in her eyes.

Carol had made him believe in the possibility of more. For him. For them. For this fucked up carcass of a world.

Whatever that spark had been, it was gone now, dead out like a campfire in the rain.

He flipped the machete he'd found, caught it by the handle. "You said I was a boy, before. What's the difference?"

"Difference is you think." Her face turned up, and there was that steel in her eyes still, but it was brittle now, like there was nothing underneath it but open air. "Before, you just acted. Sometimes you did the right thing, sometimes the wrong thing. You went out in the woods to rescue a kid one day, you beat information out of another kid in the barn the next day. You were like this whirlwind." She tilted her head, and for a second there was a hint of that old interest, like it mattered to her what he was. "After a while, you started doing more good than bad, but you were still poised right on some kind of edge. I thought Merle coming back might tip you off, but he didn't."

She rubbed her hand down her pants, brushing the dust of chips off them. Once, she might have said she was proud about that, he was pretty sure. But now she simply said it, all flat. Like she didn't have enough care left in her to spare any for him. He asked. She was answering.

Hell, least she was talking.

Before, she'd been prodding him to ask her for a confession, hinting at what happened to those two little girls. But Daryl figured the reason she wanted to say it out loud was so his shock would affirm to her how bad it was, whatever she'd done.

He didn't want her to say it because it didn't matter how shocked he was—and honestly, he probably would have been. If it was bad enough to eat her up like this, it would be as bad as things got. But he could shock her, too, if he wanted. With a whole life of stupid shit he'd done. And if he could come through the other side as something decent, she could, too.

"I don't even know when it happened," Carol said absently, looking out the window at the walkers in the street. "Either I didn't notice, or I was already gone when you changed, but somewhere in there, you started thinking." She looked at him, sad. Tired. "You started deciding. And you chose the way I always thought you would."

Her face was utterly uninflected, and then she huffed a little laugh and looked down to pick at her jeans.

"Knocking that gun out of my hand." When she looked up again, her head lolled against the window frame. "You started deciding to be better and somehow, I drifted into something worse."

He shook his head, the little twist of irritation in his gut firing up into something bigger. Second time in his fucking life he earned the respect of somebody he actually cared to impress, and both times it was too late. Rick, sitting there with bombed out eyes and bits of guts in his beard, calling Daryl his brother. It was true. Had been true for a long time. Yet he hadn't said it until he was sitting there with his tail between his legs, both them ashamed of choices they'd made.

He threw a glance over. He thought, one time, that if any woman in the world was ever going to reach for him, he'd want it to be her. And now she was telling him she was proud of who he'd become after she wasn't whole enough for it to matter anymore.

A noise scraped from somewhere close and he was on his feet, grabbing his gear before she even turned her head. Finally, a threat he actually knew how to deal with.

Around the corner, they found a walker, pinned to the wall through the throat with one of Daryl's arrows that that kid had stolen earlier along with his crossbow and Carol's rifle. He ripped the arrow out, slashed the walker through the head. Carol went up ahead and then she ricocheted back, falling to the ground with a walker on top of her. Daryl kept going, his eye on the kid who had stolen their weapons who was escaping down the hall. But there was no thunk and suck of her stabbing out the walker. Instead, she cried out in pain and he jumped to her side, quickly swinging the machete to take out the walker for her.

Fear echoed in the back of his head like she was Beth or Judith. He forgot she used to need him like that, for protection. Her arm must be a lot more hurt than he thought it was.

He shoved the walker off, pulled her back to her feet.

"I'm good, I'm good," she gasped. "Go!"

He took off ahead, going after that fuck who had his crossbow and an assault rifle that Daryl really wanted back. The moron was trying to move a giant bookcase. Daryl dropped his shit, ran in, and pile-drove his elbow into the kid's back, unbalancing the case. The guy fell back on him and Daryl rolled out of the way as the book case fell, pinning the idiot.

He snatched up the weapons, handed the gun back to Carol, and debated for a bare second. He could kill the guy and be done, or leave him crippled but with a knife to fight the walkers the way he had to them. Or he could call it bygones and let him go. He knew what Rick would do, what Beth would do. He was already bending down to move the bookcase when he saw Carol looking down at the kid, and changed his mind.

Instead he snatched up a carton of cigarettes like that was what he was going for all along, and ripped the top off a soft pack. Shit, it'd been forever since he'd had a smoke. Much running as he did these days, it was probably for the best. But he needed something to do with his hands and Carol was already looking at him all wide eyed like she was the surgeon general or something. Used to be, she could read him like a language he was only half-literate in. He couldn't have that, not if this play was going to work.

The kid started begging and Daryl popped the cigarette in his mouth. "Nah. I already helped you once. It ain't happening again." It was close enough to the way he used to operate that Carol would buy it.

He pulled out a Zippo and lit the cigarette as Carol watched him. And he couldn't risk a full look, but it seemed to him that she already looked more like she used to—like she cared enough to be disappointed if he was an asshole. He blew out his smoke screen and stalked back toward the hallway.

Behind him, the kid's voice rose, pleading frantically. Good. Wouldn't hurt the idiot to throw in a few tears, look a little younger. Carol had a soft spot for kids, even now when she seemed hollow of most everything.

"Daryl!" Carol called, looking down now at the bookcase she had no chance of moving, even with two good arms.

He didn't want her to do this on a whim, dammit. He wanted her to think, to feel something.

He whirled around, glaring. "You almost died because of him!"

"But I didn't!" she said, her voice soft and broken, like she might be about to start begging, too.

The cigarette sagged in his mouth and for a second, he wasn't sure he could keep this going. But then he drew deep on the cigarette, letting all her attention go to that instead of his eyes. "Nah," he growled. "Let him be."

That's what she said she wanted. To be away from it all. To not have to care who else lived or died. So he gave it to her, and he walked away.

"Daryl!" she called, and it was her old voice. Sweet and concerned. His heart leapt, and then there was a thump as the walker made it through the door and fell onto the bookcase.

She had the gun. She had all the whole damn deck of morality cards in front of her. She could walk away. She could shoot the walker and let the kid squirm out from under that case in his own good time. Or she could ride in on a white horse and save everything, like she was pretending she didn't want to do anymore.

She made one more desperate sound and he knew she was looking at his back. He turned in time to see her drop her bag and go for the bookshelf, but she wasn't going to make it. The walker's teeth were within drooling distance of the kid's throat.

Daryl shot it.

Carol's head snapped up. Fuck. He'd given in too soon. She'd been almost over the edge but now, she thought he had passed the test and she failed it.

He stalked back into the room, ignoring the kid crying under the bookshelf as the walker's body dripped blood down onto his face. He didn't stop until he was damn near standing on Carol's toes. She wasn't going to get it. He could see that. She was already fading back into her little world of gray again.

"Listen up. When you finally decide what you want to do? When you find another car and disappear?" He pointed back up the hall where the first walker he'd killed for her still lay. "That's the end of you. One hurt arm and you're toast because you ain't got nobody to buy you time to heal." He slammed his fist into his chest. "You ain't got me to care when you go down."

The hit was hard enough to bruise his own ribs and he hoped it did, because this all already hurt like hell. She ought to know better. She saw his face outside Terminus when he saw that she was still alive. She held him while he cried over her, for hell's sake. She knew she wasn't nothin'.

"This ain't the first time you felt like it wasn't worth it," he reminded her. "After Sophia. So did I, hell. I strung me up a necklace of ears and you wandered around like you was a corpse. And yet, on the other side of that, you got to be the person you always wanted to be." He stopped, staring at her, breathing hard. "I ain't never been a person I wasn't shamed to be, but I'm trying. And you know who got me thinking? Beth."

Carol's eyelashes flinched a little, and he wondered if he hurt her, if she'd wanted it to be her. Well good, let her hurt. Let her remember she wanted to matter to somebody.

"And whatever they did to Beth in there," Daryl vowed, "I'm gonna get her back and I'm going to buy her enough time to heal. 'Cause she will." He kept pushing into her space and she kept taking shaky little steps backwards. Finally he stopped, because there was something trembling in her face again, and that's all he wanted. He wanted her to be something again.

"I'd do it for you, too, Carol." His voice went low, growling with how hard he meant it. "You stick around and I'll fight off whatever I have to for you. I'll buy you time to heal. 'Cause you will."

And just like that, the hope faded from her eyes and they started to drop.

He hurled the cigarette onto the floor and her attention snapped back to him. "You think I don't know you, but it's you that don't know you. Stop reacting. Start decidin'. Be a man."

He stood there, his breath heaving out of his bruised chest, the cigarette smoke starting to scorch up out of the carpet.

Carol stepped on the cigarette. He meant to stand his ground and make her shove him back if she wanted to move. But the quiet dignity in her—the quality he'd been drawn to the whole time at the prison—it just emanated from her so he stepped back to let her pass before he realized what he was doing.

She hauled the walker off the bookcase with her good arm, before he could even jump in to help. The corner of his mouth twitched in almost a smile and then she looked at him. Big blue eyes, expectant and a little pleading. He jumped to the end of the bookcase, putting his back and all his weight into it to lift it off the little punk underneath. Kid rolled out, limping over toward the window and Daryl dropped the bookcase and looked at Carol.

"You okay?"

"I'm still here," she said. And she was. He could feel her presence again, like it had come back into her body. Something in him settled, too.

She reached out and brushed his right arm, wincing. "Rugburned yourself pretty good when you rolled." Her touch lingered, and that old spark lit up the air between them. Like hope. Like longing. Like possibility.

Nothing like ashes.

Author's Note: If you liked this, I have one more one-shot posted from this episode, an expanded moment from when they're lying on the bed in the domestic violence shelter. It's called, "Shelter."