AN: Here we go, another chapter and the last chapter in this short fic.

I hope that you've enjoyed. And to the person who requested this, I hope I've done your prompt justice!

Enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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Daryl stared at the piece of paper with Carol's curling handwriting on it. He knew her penmanship well. He could identify it anywhere without any need for a signature. He'd spent years seeing it on any number of things. He'd almost memorized it the first time he'd seen it. It had been her name and phone number on a napkin with the words "call me" underneath. Then he'd seen it on cards and little notes—little scraps of paper that reminded him that she loved him. Scraps of paper that told him to have a good day of work. Scraps of paper that, sometimes, seemed so out of place in his life because they were words that he wasn't used to at all, and he certainly wasn't used to the idea that someone would put feelings for him into writing.

Over time her handwriting had become something he was more accustomed to seeing on little notes that reminded him of things that needed to be done around the house. It was something that he saw on checks—checks that had both their names on them—and that he'd seen on grocery lists that she left stuck to the refrigerator for him to add to if she didn't think of everything.

Once he'd even seen it, one anniversary, scrawled across their bathroom mirror in lipstick. She'd told him she loved him with a heart to shorten the message and she'd told him she was "waiting for him".

This was the first time, though, that seeing her curling letters actually made Daryl feel sick to his stomach. He read the letter, sent to him because, as she'd written, she wasn't sure that she could talk to him at the moment, a few times over. Pieces of the letter stuck in Daryl's mind, and in his throat, like sand spurs.

We'll make it as fair as we can.

She needs to know you.

I want you to spend time with her.

Whatever you want. Whatever you're comfortable with.

She's your daughter too. If you want her.

Daryl felt like he was drowning when there wasn't even water in sight. No matter how many times he reread the words, it didn't get any easier. They didn't change at all.

If you want her. If.

Of course Daryl wanted her. He wasn't entirely sure that he deserved a daughter, but he wanted her if he was able to have one. He'd wanted her since before he knew about her. He'd wanted her since the very first time that he and Carol had even discussed the possibility of having a child. Even back then, even when the thought of it turned his stomach with the tight clench of nerves and self-doubt, he knew that he wanted her. The only if, in his world, was that which surrounded whether or not she would ever actually come to be.

Somewhere things had gone wrong and Daryl hadn't even realized it, not entirely, until the letter had come in the mail and he'd read the words that Carol had written—words that she felt compelled to write because she wasn't sure that she could say them.

It had hit him, then, like a ton of bricks.

There were too many words that they didn't say. There were too many that she couldn't say. There were too many that he didn't think that he could say.

Carol asked him what he wanted and he never told her. He never put into words that he, even if he didn't say it, had wants and desires just the same as everyone else. He never told her that he simply preferred her to have what she wanted and, more often than not, he wasn't even sure that he could have what he wanted. Or that he even should have it.

But her letter, in his opinion, made it very clear that she interpreted his silence on the matter differently. By not expressing his desires, she'd read it as proof that, maybe, he simply didn't want what he had. Maybe he just didn't want anything at all.

Maybe he didn't want her. Maybe he didn't want their daughter.

And nothing could be farther from the truth. Or, really, closer to it in some ways. Because Carol was right if she thought that Daryl didn't want what he had. At the moment, the one thing he didn't want was what he had.

He didn't want the divorce. He didn't want to live in the little piece of shit mobile home with the second-hand furniture. He didn't want to know that his wife was living miles from him and that, if she needed him, he might not even know it until it was too late. He didn't want to lay awake at night and wish that he could fall asleep, knowing he'd sleep soundly if she were only there, her back to him as she often slept, already sleeping.

Daryl didn't want what he had now. He wanted what he'd lost—for his own inability to say it—and he wanted what he hoped to have in the future.

He didn't want to spend weekends with his daughter. He wanted to spend every day with his daughter.

And he didn't want Carol to be his ex-wife. He never had. He'd never wanted the divorce in the first place.

Maybe he should've said something about that too.

It took him two beers, the second luke warm by the time he'd finished it, and a good six laps around the living room before he'd finally picked up the phone, dialed it, and held his breath to wait for their lines to connect and for her to answer him. He feared, by the third or fourth ring, that she wasn't going to answer.

But she did.

"Hello?" She asked, almost like she didn't have the ability to know, already, that it was Daryl on the other end of the line.

He was almost frozen. He almost couldn't find his tongue in his mouth. But he found it. He knew, in his gut, that he had to find it. This might be his last chance.

"Are you OK?" He asked.

"I'm fine," Carol said, a little hesitation there. "Are you OK?"

"No," Daryl replied, his stomach flipping with the admission.

"What's wrong?" Carol asked. The concern was there. It was real and it was there. In his mind's eye, Daryl could see the little crease between her brows that he knew, even without seeing her, was there. He could hear it in her voice. He swallowed.

"This whole thing," he said. "It's all wrong. Every damn bit of it."

Silence. She wasn't speaking. She was going to make him speak.

"I never wanted the whole divorce," Daryl said. "I didn't want—to leave. I didn't want you to leave. I didn't know—I still don't know why the hell we couldn't work this shit out together. Why the hell we had to go and get lawyers and judges and every damn body else in the whole county to stick their nose in our lives and tell us what the hell we were doing wrong. I still don't know. I weren't good enough for you?"

"It was never about not being good enough," Carol said, the first words that let Daryl know that she was even still on the line.

"What the hell is it about, then?" Daryl asked. "Because I've thought it was about a couple things and it's turned out that—it weren't about none of that."

There was silence on the phone, but it was nothing new and it was nothing that Daryl couldn't simply wait out. He was already feeling better than he had when he'd picked up the phone. Just knowing that Carol was there, on the other end, was enough to calm his nerves some. He sat down on the second-hand couch to wait her out.

"What do you want?" Carol asked. "That's what it's about. Maybe—Daryl? Maybe that's what it's always been about? But—the baby's coming in ten weeks. And we can't wait any longer to figure it out—whatever it might be."

Daryl swallowed.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah," he repeated, more to himself than to the woman listening on the other end of the line. "I know. I read the letter."

"I thought it might be fair," Carol said. She sounded deflated again. It sounded like she was tired. She was tired of the conversation. Maybe she was tired of him. Probably, she was tired of the whole damn situation, just like Daryl.

"It ain't fair," Daryl said. "None of it is."

He cut her off before she could finish what was surely going to be something along the lines of "we'll work something else out". He only let her get in two words. That was all that he needed to hear. If she needed to hear him talk, then that's what she was going to do. She was going to listen to him.

"It can't be fair if you're there and I'm here," Daryl said. "I don't know how we'll work it out. I still don't know if either one of us knows exactly what we're working out, but we'll figure it out. Except it ain't gonna work like this. It can't be fair if I'm here and you're there and she's—she's just stuck somewhere in the middle. That weren't what we wanted. Not ever. Not before when we thought we were gonna have a kid. We weren't gonna have that kid running back and forth between two houses, not having both of us right there..."

"That baby is gone, Daryl," Carol said, her voice breaking slightly.

"But this one ain't," Daryl responded, his voice coming out louder than he expected. The words hurt more than he expected, too. He was almost stunned by it. And on the other end of the line, he could hear some soft sounds that told him that Carol wasn't necessarily handling it the best either. "I'm sorry," Daryl said, and he meant it.

"It wasn't your fault," Carol offered quietly. Daryl swallowed against the way that her voice made him feel. He shook his head to himself. He hadn't always believed it wasn't his fault. More often than not, actually, he'd believed he'd at least had something to do with it, even if it was indirectly. But right now, with the way that she said the words, Daryl believed her. Because Carol believed what she'd said.

"Yours neither," Daryl responded. "But it still makes me—it still makes me awful sorry."

"Me too," Carol said.

Daryl nodded his head at her words, wishing that she could see him through the phone. More than that, he wished there wasn't a phone between them. Ten years and they'd never even said the words to each other that they'd just said. Ten years and they'd never cleared each other from guilt. Not explicitly. It felt like there shouldn't be a phone between them. It felt like they should be together.

Daryl felt like she should be in his arms. But she wasn't. And the state of Georgia had declared that she shouldn't be ever again, and maybe that she shouldn't have ever been there to begin with.

"I know what I want," Daryl said.

"What?" Carol asked, clearly seeking clarification or repetition. She'd been working on her own feelings. She hadn't caught his words.

"I know what I want," Daryl said. "You want me to know what I want? Well, I know what I want."

"What do you want?" Carol asked.

"I want—to be there," Daryl said. "With you right now. I want—to be there when she's born. I wanna—be there when we bring her home and I don't wanna leave again because I gotta sleep somewhere else and gotta miss her first night...or her second one. I want—to hit whatever buttons we gotta hit to back this whole damn thing up. You can have your divorce back or whatever. I don't want it. I—hell, Carol. I didn't want that shit in the first place."

"Then why didn't you say something?" Carol asked, her voice more urgent than before but no less full of the shaky sound of tears.

Daryl was quiet for a moment because he didn't have an answer to that. At least, he didn't have an answer that seemed very good to him at the moment.

"I wanna work on that too," he said finally. "But I'm—it's still me, Carol, and I don't got all the answers. You don't neither. But..."

"But?" Carol prompted when Daryl's words fell off again.

"But I wanna find those too," Daryl said. "Maybe...we could do it together?"

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. Judging by the words in her letter, though, Carol had sat through more than her share of those. Daryl could sit through as many as she needed him to sit through now.

"To be married? We'd have to get married again," Carol said. "And—I'm not sure I want to do that. Not until...not..."

She stammered out the last part. It sounded pretty clear to Daryl that she wasn't sure how to say what she wanted to say, but Daryl felt pretty confident that he could figure it out. She didn't want to marry him again until she figured out that Georgia wasn't right. She didn't want to marry him again if it was only going to end up going right where it had gone before.

Daryl couldn't promise her that it wouldn't go there, but he could promise her that he was going to try to make things better. Trying, after all, was really all he had to offer.

"I ain't asking you to marry me," Daryl said. "Not right now. That don't come until later. Until you're sure that's what you want. We can live in sin or whatever you want to call it. Shack up. I don't care about what the paper says. That ain't what I want out of this."

Carol hummed on the other end, it was the sound of her gathering up her emotions and getting them back wherever they belonged when she wasn't letting them out to play.

"I love you," Carol said. "You know that, right? I love you. I never, never stopped."

Daryl swallowed and hummed.

"Same," he said. Immediately his own word bit into him and he winced at it. "I love you too," he corrected, not entirely sure the last time he'd really said the words that directly.

"I know," Carol said, almost softly enough that he didn't hear her.

"We got us—we got us a second chance," Daryl said. He stopped and cleared his throat. "We got us another chance on this baby. On having a kid. How about on us? You gonna give me another chance?"

"I don't know how many chances I have in me," Carol said, her tone of voice turning ever so slightly toward teasing.

"Then I better make it count, right?" Daryl said, almost laughing. She hummed at him. His chest tightened again. "What do you say?" He asked. "Gimme another chance? To—give you what'cha want?"

Carol hummed again, her emotions clearly still not entirely under lock and key. Daryl heard the sighing sound of her sucking in a breath and letting it out to calm herself.

"You've given me—more than you know already," Carol said. "I guess we'll figure the rest out? I—want you to—come home. Daryl?"

Daryl smiled to himself. He wiped at his eyes with his knuckles and, for just a second, he was glad that there was a phone between them. He nodded at her, even though she couldn't see him.

"I'm on my way," he responded.