A/N: I took down the original version of this story so I could put up this edited version. I've tightened it up a little bit and also added a little more Caryl, as the original version really didn't have much. So if you didn't see it the first time around, please give it a read, or feel free to read it again. This is more of a character-driven than a plot-driven piece.

[*]

"Books are uniquely portable magic."

- Stephen King, On Writing

No matter how hard he worked, Daryl still felt the weight of the empty hours between those gray stone walls. Maybe that was why he ended up, in the prison library, running his fingertip over the dusty spines of books. His father had called him "too big for his goddamn britches," "uppity little shit," and "lazy ass" every time he caught him reading a book. So Daryl had learned to hide his reading. When Andrea had tossed him that book on Hershel's farm, he'd said, "What, no pictures?" But when she was gone, he'd read it cover to cover, because with books, Daryl could be alone without ever having to be alone.

Daryl got his love of reading from his mother, who had been taught to hide her intelligence by her own mother. That must have been quite the challenge, married to Will Dixon, but eventually, she drowned her smarts in cheap box wine. Before she had, though, she used to sneak into her boys' bedrooms at night and read to them from books she'd bought for ten cents apiece at the Salvation Army.

The first one Daryl could remember, and still remembered, was Harold and the Purple Crayon. He must have been two when she first read it to him, but the dream of drawing himself a path right out of the Dixon cabin and into some other, better world lingered with him for years to come.

When Daryl's mother read to him, she'd point at every word as she said it, and he'd follow the chipped, cheap red polish of her nail across each line. By the time he started Kindergarten, he was reading on a second grade level, and he was so bored by school and the books they read that they thought he was an idiot. So in first grade, they put him in the "slow readers" group. It wasn't until Daryl's fourth grade year that a teacher discovered Daryl could read and read quite well.

Miss O'Henry wasn't his teacher, but she was in charge of clearing the playground after recess, and she found him hiding in one of the tire tunnels, reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. She had him moved out the slow readers group and into her own class the second quarter, and that was the best year Daryl ever had in school. That was also the first, and only time in his youth, that Daryl Dixon ever fell in love.

Miss O'Henry was like an angel from on high, with her flowing red hair and bright emerald eyes and her subtle encouragements. He only got sent to the principal's office once those last three quarters, and though he hadn't cared a wit what the principal thought of his f-bomb, he'd been heartbroken to think he'd disappointed her.

But the next year Miss O'Henry married and moved, and his fifth grade teacher loathed him. That was also the year his mother passed out while smoking and burned the cabin to the ground. Merle was away at juvie, and it was just him and his father after that.

For the next two years, Daryl wouldn't touch a book.

But these days, in the eerie peace that had descended in the midst of a monstrous world, he needed to distract his mind. Not that long ago, he'd repeatedly driven a knife into his own brother, or, at least, into the thing that had once been his brother. Those glassy eyes that stared up at him while he thrust the blade through flesh and brain were like a one-way mirror - no one seeing out. Daryl needed to drive that image from his mind.

He seized a book and drew it out: A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis. That was the man who wrote all those Narnia books he'd read in fourth grade. Miss O'Henry had given him the entire box set to take home. In return, he'd brought her his most prized Eastern Cherokee arrowhead. He lay it shyly on her desk the next morning, muttering, "It brings good luck."

The Chronicles of Narnia he'd hidden in his foot locker at home, under two old blankets and his B.B. gun, and drawn them out to read, by flashlight, late at night, one ear turned toward the door, in case he should be caught. He used to daydream of escaping to Narnia, of entering a world where no one knew him as the worthless piece of shit his father always said he was.

He now took A Grief Observed to the window sill, which was wide enough to make a seat. Sunlight filtered in through the barred window above, and the wood was hard and warm beneath his legs, which he stretched out until the heels of his boots were flat against the wall on the other side of the pane. Daryl leaned back against the wall and opened the book. He thought of his brother.

Carol had once told him that Merle wasn't good for him. And maybe she was right. Merle sure as hell had never made Daryl feel good about himself, the way Carol did, or the way she at least tried to do. But Merle had been there. At least some of the time. And he was the only one who had. He'd taught Daryl to hunt well, and if not for that, Daryl wouldn't be alive today. When Daryl was young, and their father was in a drunken rage, Merle would hide Daryl under his bed, leave him there, shut the bedroom door, and go out to deal with their father alone. Daryl heard the yelling and the things breaking, but he'd never known quite what happened to Merle until Merle was gone away to juvie and it started happening to him.

When Daryl left home for good at seventeen, Merle was just getting out of the army. He let Daryl roam with him and found him work. He made sure there was always food to eat, cigarettes to smoke, and a roof over their heads during cold or rainy weather (sometimes it was a friend's place, sometimes a cheap motel, in a pinch - Merle's pick-up truck). So Merle had been there, at least some of the time. In the end, Daryl's brother had gone out fighting, like he'd always wanted to. And he'd gone out fighting for them.

Daryl turned a page. He loved the rasping sound the paper made, almost as much as he loved the smell of books. It was a soothing sound, like the song of spring crickets or the hooting of the winter owl. His body grew warm from the sun as he read, and he shed his leather jacket, letting it fall to the library floor, so that now one bare shoulder pressed against the wall beneath the bar-lined window.

"No one ever told me," he read, "that grief felt so much like fear." For the past few weeks, he'd felt ready for a fight, felt as if something might jump out at him any moment. He'd assumed it was because he was living in a world of the undead, but the feeling was stronger than usual. It was strange in its sheer intensity. Was that feeling grief?

The book was short, a diary of sorts, written by a man who had lost his wife. Daryl finished it quickly and then flipped back and forth among the pages, reading some of the words again. "The death of a beloved is an amputation." Hershel sometimes felt phantom pain in his missing limb. Was that like when Daryl found himself thinking, "Need to tell Merle" again and again, about some hunting or tracking discovery, only to remember there was no Merle to tell?

Carol must still feel that phantom pain, too. Some nights, he heard her quiet crying drifting from her cell up to the platform where he slept, and he lay awake listening to it, growing angry and annoyed and wishing he could silence it. But he couldn't help to silence it by going to hunt for Sophia anymore. He couldn't do a damn thing. Sometimes, he knew there was some other feeling alongside his anger, an almost irresistible urge to go down to her and take her in his arms. But he didn't, because he couldn't believe anyone could be comforted by his embrace.

Most nights, Carol didn't cry anymore. But some nights, she did. Maybe that was because, like the book he was reading said, "In grief nothing stays put. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats."

The sound of a throat clearing startled Daryl. Instinctively, he closed the book and shoved it between his hip and the wall before turning his head to see Carol approaching. She came to a stop a foot from the window sill. "What were you hiding so fast?" A teasing smile spread across her face. "The prison library doesn't have porn, does it?"

"Nah," he mumbled, his ears reddening beneath his disorderly hair. He hadn't needed to hide it. Carol made fun of him, from time to time, but never in a way that pointed out his shortcomings or differences. Her ribbing was always affectionate. She wasn't going to ridicule him for reading. "It…uh…" He pried the book back out and then swung so that his legs were draping over the window seat and he was facing her. "It's a book. Ya might like it. I mean, ya won't like it, but…uh…ya might could get somethin' out of it." He handed it to her.

Carol turned the book over and read the blurb on the back. "Thank you," she said quietly. She looked up at him, searching his eyes in that way that always made him feel naked.

He turned his eyes down.

"How are you doing?" she asked softly. "You haven't been at dinner with us for a few days. Are you eating?"

He nodded. "Enough."

She smiled sadly. "We're having dinner now. You want to come join us?"

He didn't. But he didn't want to upset her by refusing either. She'd asked so damn nicely, in that quiet, caring way of hers. "Mhmhm."

He slid off the window seat and followed her. She held the book in her left hand as they strolled almost shoulder to shoulder from the library. Her lithe presence reassured him. She paused at a bookcase near the door, which contained graphic novels and comic books, and laughed. He loved the sound of her laugh. It always came like an unexpected burst of sunlight on an overcast day. "I can't believe they have these in a prison library!"

"What?" Daryl asked.

She pulled out Garfield At Large and turned the horizontal, red cover toward him. "Can you imagine a murderer reading one of these?"

Daryl snorted.

"I bought this at the book fair in 5th grade," she told him.

Daryl never bought books at his school's book fair. His parents never gave him any money for anything. What little money he had in elementary school, he made by collecting the beer and soda cans and bottles littered near the creek and turning them into the recycling center at the grocery store. The spare change was never enough for more than a candy bar. He always got the Baby Ruth.

Carol's face contorted, the way it did when she was fighting back sudden tears, and he didn't know where the pain had come from. He wanted to ask if she was all right, but words like that were hard for him, so he just cast her a worried look, until she spoke. "Sophia loved Garfield, too. We even considered naming the dog Pooky, but she settled on Butterscotch instead. He was kind of that color."

"Pooky?" Daryl asked.

"It's what Garfield called his beloved teddy bear."

"Mhmhm." His eyes flitted shyly over her face. He was trying to gauge how upset she was, and wondering what he could possibly do about it. She noticed him observing her and gave him a bitter-sweet smile before walking on.

They were at the door of the library when it occurred to him to ask, "Hey, how'd ya know I'd be in here?"

She smiled, not a sad smile this time but the teasing one that was becoming so familiar to him, and said, "I know you better than you think I do, Pooky." She bumped his shoulder playfully with hers.

His lips jerked into a quick smile. "Stop."

[*]

That night, when Daryl heard Carol crying, he did come down from the landing. She was on the top bunk in her cell, facing the wall. He stood with one shoulder against the open, iron bars of the door and said to her back, "Sorry, should of never given ya that book."

She rolled over to face him and wiped her eyes roughly with the back of her hand. "No, it was cathartic. I was glad I read it."

He swallowed. It took a lot of effort to ask the question, but he made himself. "Anythin' I can do?"

She breathed out and then sniffled in. "Could you maybe sleep here tonight? I don't want to be alone."

"Mhmhm. Go get my pillow and blanket."

When he returned, he crawled onto the mattress on the bottom bunk and looked up at the black wire coils above. She wasn't crying anymore. "This mattress is more comfortable than the cement," he said. "Guess maybe I could stand bein' in a cage, if the door's always open."

Her head appeared over the top of the bunk. In the darkness, her eyes shined with the last remnant of her tears. "Maybe you should claim a cell of your own tomorrow. Maybe it's time for you to come down from your perch and join the commoners."

He smiled. Her head disappeared. The bed creaked above as she rolled onto her side. Daryl stared at the black coils for a long time, until they blurred together and he faded into sleep.