Title: Protective
Fandom: The Walking Dead (tv)
Rating: G
Length: ~1300
Characters: Carol Pelletier, Daryl Dixon
Content notes: Second half of season 5, NO spoilers for the season finale. 
Notes:  I find this fifth season I'm having to do more 'work' as a fan to connect the dots of character development. So here's an attempt.
Summary: Carol is making one of Ed's favorite breakfasts.

 

Carol almost put the paring knife back for being ‘too small’.  Of course it was small. It was a paring knife. Maybe not the best pick against walkers, but she was peeling apples.  Had to keep up appearances, after all.  A woman who knew her way around the kitchen and not much else.  

Appearances. All the way down, and she wasn’t surprised she hadn’t lost the trick of it. Used to covering bruises with concealer or long, filmy sleeves when Ed had had a bad day and took it out on her (better her than Sophia); used to pretending everything was just peachy sweet when...it was anything but.  Used to it so much that her face didn’t even shift, not even a jot, as she tied on the yellow and blue flowered apron over her slacks and sensible Peter-Pan collar blouse.  

“Now, what else?” she said, out loud, testing her voice, to make sure that didn’t shift, either. It didn’t, the persona as solidly in place as when she’d played it up in front of Deanna.  She’d gotten the spatula, the measuring cups, all lined up along the counter, like little soldiers, precise and tidy, the apples lined up, dewed with water, on a folded towel next to the bowl, and behind her the oven chirped that it was already preheated.  

The door from the porch swung open on oiled hinges, barely a squeak.

“The hell is this? You Betty Crocker now, too?” Daryl dropped onto the kitchen stool, letting his pack thud on the floor, deliberately slovenly, streaked with dirt and grime like a statement in the immaculate kitchen. He didn’t belong. He didn’t want to belong.

She didn’t either, not if it meant going backwards.  This was just protective camouflage, her own way to survive.  “Didn’t seem to mind before.”

“That was before,” Daryl said, as though that meant something.  And it did.  Before, cooking, even with cans, even over a green wood smoky fire, was the nail of comfort on which they hung the idea that they were more than just animals, more than surviving. It was their luxury, their treat, the thing and the time that kept them together. Mealtime, breakfast, dinner. Time for confabs, working things out. Time to show they cared about each other.

Now, though, they didn’t need the reminder, didn’t need the comfort of it. Too much comfort all around, even for Carol’s standards.

They didn’t need the comfort anymore.  Alexandria did, though. A town full of children playing grown up, like that reality show she’d seen an ad for on TV before. “And this is now.” She slapped his hand away as it reached for an apple. “Those are for later.”

“Maybe I’m just tryin’ to help.” He feigned rubbing his hand, a bear comforting a stung paw.  

“You want to help?  Make me some soured milk for this.”  

Daryl reached for the knife. “I can do the apples.”

“So can I.”  The knife cut through the white flesh of the apple with a solid schunk.  “Besides, your hands are filthy.”  She jerked her head toward the refrigerator. “It’s reconstituted milk, but close enough.” Close enough for people who hadn’t tasted milk in...how long now?  

“Close enough. You think everything’s close enough,” Daryl said, but he slid off the stool toward the fridge. “It ain’t like it was.”

“Thank God for that,” she said, a little too sharply.  She scowled at the half-apple in her hand. “This was Ed’s favorite recipe. I used to make it for him, well...a lot.” How she knew it so well that she could still remember it: quarter cup brown sugar, quarter cup white sugar, two eggs…. Maybe that’s why she was making it: feeling, and resisting, falling into that role again--the meek housewife, the one who apologized for existing, for daring to express a thought Ed might not like.  Maybe it was an exorcism as much as a defensive ploy.

“How much.”

“Huh?”

“How much of the milk?” He shook the plastic jug over the measuring cup.

“Oh. Oh. A cup.”  Keep up appearances, Carol, she chided herself. “And a tablespoon of vinegar to sour it.”

“Where’s that?”

She blinked, focusing on the apple parting itself into neat white wedges under the knife. Ed had liked the apples thin, almost melt-in-the-mouth, newspaper-reading thin, he called them.  And it was hard to shake that away. “Check under the sink.” If there was a Southern woman who didn’t keep a gallon of cider vinegar under the sink, Carol had never met her.

“Why’s it gotta be sour, anyway?” She could see only a glimpse of him, the light glazing over his shoulder as he squatted by the sink.  So out of place here.  

They all were, but at least he looked it. Maybe he was more honest for it.  And it was a comfort to her to have him here, have him talking, ruffling her up.  

“The acid in the sour milk reacts with the baking soda to make carbon dioxide bubbles. Makes things fluffy,” she added, with a shrug, at the look on Daryl’s face.  

“You some kinda scientist?”

She slid the tablespoon over to him as a hint.  “Learned it in home ec.  We had to take it back when I was in school.”  And she’d taught it to Sophia, so many times, from her high chair to the last time she’d made it, explaining the caramelization of the apples in the butterfat, all of it.  She’d had such big plans for Sophia, things she’d learned from Pinterest and food blogs, plans that kept her away from men like Ed, men like Pete, even, who was Ed, just with more education and a pinky ring. The walkers were out there, but that didn’t make this place ‘safe’ and all the casseroles didn’t make a place civilized.   “Didn’t you have to take it?”

A laugh as sour as the milk. “Didn’t have to take nothin’. No one cared if I even went to school.”  A beat, as he put the vinegar away. “And don’t you even say nothin’ about me maybe going to school here.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Daryl was...Daryl, a precarious balance between child and man.  She didn’t want to do anything to tilt it one way or the other. She spread sugar and cinnamon on the apples, and turned to open the oven, tipping the bowl into the cast iron skillet heating in there, sizzling with butter. Sophia had always loved this part, the way the spice and sugar and apples sent a wave of scent through the kitchen, an illusion of comfort and home.  

Something Daryl had never had, she thought, from what she could piece together. Not even the tattered illusion Sophia had had, where she had clean clothes and hot meals and someone to check her homework every night.  And she could see it on his face, when the smell it, warm and fresh and sweet and tart.  No memory, no bad history, just pure experience of something new and wonderful.  And she remembered another fact, one she thought she’d probably picked up from some commercial or something, that smell was the sense most tied to memory--a strange chemistry of outer and inner world.  

“It’ll be done in half an hour,” she said, quietly, “If you want some.”  

His face registered about five different emotions, from surprise to confusion, his hands, more than capable of handling walkers, twisted helplessly. “Figured it was for, you know, special people.”

“It is,” she countered, and the moment had its own chemistry, its own fragile balance between too little to make a change, and too much that ruins the whole thing. She could feel it frothing between them like the buttermilk she stirred into the Bisquick. “But only if you wash your hands first.”