A/N: This is an experiment. If you enjoy it, I may post more scenarios where Daryl and Carol meet sometimes in the ZA or without the ZA. Disclaimed: None of this is mine, I own nothing.

Daryl hated hospitals, and would have killed Merle if he was around, for having tossed him out of a car some time before (days?), after Daryl had been stabbed in the stomach in a fight. Of course, big brother was nowhere to be seen, and Daryl was playing the sleeping game in order to not have to answer the cops' questions. Who had stabbed him? Why?

He had gotten stabbed because he had been slow and had been entirely too trusting that Merle had his back. When the fight had broken out, over cards, Daryl not being part of the game, as he hated gambling, for some reason, one of the assholes Merle had been playing with had decided that Daryl must have been sending his brothers clues about the others' game.

Merle would have needed to pay him a fuckload of money, all cash and with non-sequential serial numbers before Daryl would have helped him. Gambling was for the weak, and cheating on top of it made you a sore and stupid loser. Their father had been one of those.

The cops were still around, he could feel them staring. He needed them gone. He needed to see what could be done, and how he was. All he knew right now was that he his stomach hurt like a bitch, and his nose was itching. The latter of those consideration was the worst to bear with.

Finally, he heard some noise he was familiar with, cops got a call from dispatch, and made sure with a nurse that they would be called when John Doe would wake up.

Forcing his features to remain as still as possible, he tried not to chuckle at the fact that he was a John Doe once again. Every time he got in trouble, he ended up a John Doe at the hospital, because his brother dearest always made sure he would drop him without identification papers, so that when Daryl would slip out of the hospital, they wouldn't have medical bills to pay. It meant changing hospitals and dispensaries each time, in order to not get recognized after a while, and when they had been driving here, it had felt like the longest drive ever, the pain too strong, and Daryl thought he had asked his brother to drop him somewhere closer and risk being recognized, because there was too much pain. Lord knew, or the Devil knew, that Daryl knew pain.

He had vague memories of getting tossed on the curb, his brother honking over and over again until the doctors had rushed out and gotten a hold of him. The memories got very blurry after the clear sound of the horn, and he had tidbits of recollections, involving more pains, people saying he was bleeding too much (duh) and someone jabbing a syringe in his arm. If it hadn't been filled with painkillers and hadn't sent him to La-La-Land, he would have punched the jabber. What was the doctors' creed again, do no harm? The jabbing had been painful enough to warrant a punch in the face.

Daryl wasn't sure how much time had elapsed since he had been tossed there. He knew he had been awake for half a day, but he couldn't say if he had just woken up after being stitched up or if he had spent a few days in a coma. It had happened in the past, and Daryl had discovered that there was nothing resting about being in a coma. You came out as drowsy and tired as you went in. Not a good deal.

"The cops are gone, Mr. Doe, I believe you can open your eyes and let me assess your injuries," he heard and he nearly jumped out of his skin.

The pain kept him in bed.

He slowly opened his eyes, and was met with a female doctor, who was sporting a sly smile, and who for some reason, he wanted to kiss senseless.

She had grey hair, but didn't look a day over 40. Then again, what did he know? He was hitting the big 4-0 later this year and he didn't know how people would describe him. What took his breath away were her eyes. She had warrior eyes, like his. She looked like she had seen too much and had to live with it every day. He knew the feeling. Oh, and her eyes were so clear you needed a moment to realize they were blue and not grey. Maybe they were grey? Nay. He may have a shitload of painkiller in his body, he still could tell colors apart.

She moved closer and came to sit next to him.

"So, Sleeping Beauty, want to tell me why I had to bring you back twice after I opened you up?"

He had been struck dumb, there were no other explanations. Or maybe there was something wrong with his brain. Had they done a neuro exam? Dixon brains were notoriously untrustworthy.

"I... died?" He asked finally, and fuck, his throat was sore.

She got up and went somewhere in the room. He wanted to ask her to come back and sit, his throat could wait, but she was back in an instant, with ice. She offered him a couple of pieces, slowly, and the contact of her warm hands against his face made him feel very grateful he didn't blush.

"Careful. We had to put you on respirator during the procedure, and we removed the tube when we had patched you up and you could breathe on your own. I'm guessing your throat must be sore. It will pass. It will be nasty in the meantime, but it will pass after a while."

"Who?"

Wow. He had never been a man of words, but he felt like he was bordering on brain injury territory. Except his brain seemed to work fine. It was the doctor who was stealing his words and left him clinging to her voice.

"My name is Doctor Peletier, trauma surgeon at Emory's hospital."

The fuck? Daryl thought, looking at her. No wonder it had felt so long getting there, his brainless brother had decided to drive him in A-fucking-Tlanta. It hadn't been like Daryl had been bleeding like a gutted pig...

"Do I keep on calling you John Doe?" She asked.

"What about Sleeping Beauty?" He sassed, and though it was a stupid comeback, he was glad his brain was back with the program.

"If you insist, I'll call you Sleeping Beauty. Though you should know, I don't think Sleeping Beauty snored as loud as you did," she said mischievously.

"I do not snore!" He exclaimed, outraged.

He saw the spark in her eyes, and he realized she had played him into revealing just how awake and functioning he was.

"Ha ha. Call me Daryl." He said, annoyed at his behavior.

"Daryl. Nice to meet you. Now that we've chit-chat, do you mind if I check your wounds?"

"Dying to get me naked, aren't you?" He said, while trying to help her remove the cover so that she could check.

A breeze of air around his dick made him realize that he was naked beneath the gown. Blood rushed through his veins, and he forced himself to look away. If she needed to open the gown, she would expose him, and while he might be a cocky little thing (nicest compliment his brother had ever paid him), he just didn't want to be looking at her with his junk out in the open. Hell, he was pretty sure he was stupid enough to get a boner, and he found himself hoping that there was not enough blood in him, and that nothing would happen when he would feel her hands on him.

If they had been anywhere else, and she had been about to check his junk, he would have hoped for a more ... romantic setting. The word had almost burnt his brain as he had allowed himself to think it. Romantic. Ugh. It reminded him of when he was eight and Merle had made him believe that girls didn't have cooties, but that they had this special power that made your dick fall off the moment they touched you. He had avoided girls' touch for a couple of years, and when one teacher of the female gender had touched him, he had jumped away and ran to the bathroom, making sure his dick was still on. That had been a bitch to explain to the teacher who thought she had hurt him. Thanks Merle.

He turned his head around slowly, when he realized his dick was not in the open, and Dr. Blue Eyes was examining her work. He saw that she had managed to push his gown in such a way that a piece of it was covering his cock.

She looked at him and saw that he was watching what she had done.

"Yeah, I thought this was more second-date discovery," she said jokingly. "You know, keep the mystery for a while longer."

She seemed to blush as if she regretted her quip.

"Chicks usually fight each other in order to be the one meeting... that part of me," he said, feeling extremely shy, which was not like him, or maybe it was him.

He was a chick's magnet, he knew it, it was the lone wolf thing, but he didn't care for them. He fucked them when he had an itch, but that was it. Dr. Blue Eyes was something else, she was a whole new world, in which he had no place. He silently thanked the asshole who had stabbed him. Sure, he had almost died from what he could tell, but if it meant meeting his Doctor, he would die and be resuscitated again.

"Shush," She said, but her smile didn't match the chastising words.

She had put gloves on, and checked the stitches. It didn't hurt, she was careful and her touch was light, yet he knew she knew what she was doing and what she was looking for.

She put his gown back in place and put back the cover in place.

"You want to know what we did?" She asked.

"I want your name."

"Peletier. Do I need to check you head?"

"Your first name," he groaned, and she seemed to think it through before saying:

"Carol. So you really don't care about what went down in the O.R?"

"Tell me Carol then."

She explained that he had been brought with three stab wounds, and that his bowel had been hit. In the O.R, she had fixed it, but he had lost so much blood that his body had given up twice, and she hadn't let him have his way and had brought him back. It did explain why he felt like shit.

"I waited until the cops were called away before I came to examine you," she said.

"You knew...?"

"That you were awake?"

She laughed and that was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

"In my experience, people who are really under and still recovering from the procedure do not discreetly use their morphine pump when nobody is watching."

"Hey, don't put it in my hand if you don't want me to use it!" He said, feeling like she had caught him with the hand in the proverbial cooking jar.

"I put it in your hand precisely because I thought you may want to use it. I had an inkling you were faking sleep, and I had one of the nurses put the button in your hand and speak out loud about it, to test my theory."

"Why didn't you just tell the cops on me?"

She looked thoughtful and he could tell she was carefully crafting whatever she would say next.

"One of the nurses... She's close to retiring. She told me that she was almost certain you were a patient she had seen when he was younger, after he had been beaten, and for whom life hadn't been kind. I checked you over when they brought you in, your back and..."

"You can always me check me out," he said, half-jokingly, nit sure he wanted to hear where this was going, as this was hitting way too close to home.

Who wanted to meet a woman, the first woman ever, and have them know right away that they had not been worthy of their parents' love?

"Anyway, I just thought that you had your reasons for pretending to be asleep, that we would discuss it once we were rid of the policemen."

He looked at her, at her profile, and he had this feeling in his chest that she was not saying many things, but that she could relate to some of the things she had noticed on him or about him. It made him mad, not because she knew about him, but because she seemed to know from experience what the things she had seen meant.

"I know what it's like to not want to talk to the cops," she said.

"You saw my back," he said, "how 'bout tit for tat?" He said.

He wasn't sure if he expected her to go along, but at least it made him feel like he was gaining back control.

"Tit for tat. Tit for tat," she repeated, looking over his head at the wall.

He didn't want to make her uneasy and was looking for something to change the subject.

"I became a trauma surgeon because I was a patient for a couple of them when I was 19 and married an asshole. Asshole died, and I went to med school. Is that tit enough for tat?"

He didn't know what to say, since she had been so candid, almost too candid for him to handle.

He saw that she was still waiting for him to react. He nodded.

She got up, and he couldn't help but drink in her silhouette. She looked so frail, but a trauma surgeon...

"You should see me crack open chests with my bare hands," She joked, and he wondered if she could read his mind.

She pretended to crack open an invisible chest with her hands like she was the Hulk, and he laughed.

He stopped right away and used the morphine pump like a mad man. It hurt like a bitch.

"Sorry," she apologized.

"No need."

"Well, I've got other patients to see," she said.

"Liar."

He had no idea why he had said it, but he knew she had been lying. She just wanted to give him some space, and maybe get some for herself.

"Will you come back?" He asked.

"Yes. Will you still be pretending to be asleep?" She asked.

He sighed. If she was coming back, he wouldn't be able to play dead, now, would he?

"Damn you Carol," He said.

She smiled and winked at him.

She left.

Damn her. It looked like he would be paying medical bills in the future. He would worry about that later, and he went to sleep, dreaming of blue eyes, and smile that made him feel like he had won the lottery.