A/N: This is just a little drabble I wrote for the Nine Lives rewrite season six challenge. I hope you will all let me know what you think :)

Daryl couldn't believe his eyes as he walked down the street on that quiet night. It was late and he couldn't sleep. He hadn't intended to be going where he was going now. He was going, in a hurry too.

It was the last place he wanted to go.

But he was out on the porch of the house smoking a cigarette, listening to the crickets and cicadas making their night music. It was always so quiet at night since the turn and it made him calm. It reminded him of peaceful times in the woods when he was a kid. Good times.

He had been thinking about that and about Merle, and it was then that he noticed, Carol's boots were gone.

Oh hell no.

Raw panic shot through his veins, as he stared at the boot rack, where they all kept their boots. Where could she have gone?

She wouldn't run away tonight, not when they had to go take care of the Negan guy. She wouldn't leave them all to do it alone, that much he knew.

Because he knew her.

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They were sitting on his porch and she was smiling at him. It was a tired smile and very unlike the smile she had reserved for him, the one Daryl always got, the one that went right up to her eyes. This was a smile that held sadness behind it, if you looked hard enough and Daryl always looked.

But it was a smile just the same, open to interpretation if you didn't know the woman behind it and he knew her. He had to put a stop to something that was swirling in the air, because he also knew deep down it wasn't what she wanted.

Daryl had been dragging his feet over this for too long, his fear keeping him from getting closer to her, and if he didn't get there quick it might be too late, forever.

He loved her, he had always loved her.

He had never brought a woman a flower before in his whole damn life, he knew even then, back on the farm. Daryl loved her completely from that day on.

Daryl felt now, like he had on the farm, a compulsion to do something that he didn't understand. This was like the flower, he had picked it and put it in the beer bottle and he didn't know why.

All he did know at that time was that he wanted to do it for her, but why, he didn't know.

Now felt something but he couldn't name it, it was like his blood was boiling and he was enraged. Daryl didn't usually get this way, and he was almost always able to keep his emotions in check.

A lifetime of hiding from his father and running just made him closed off and empty inside. Until he saw what he just saw. Suddenly it was all different and he couldn't stop his feet from going where they wanted to go.

Carol was sitting on Tobin's porch and the way they sat there, so close together. It was so intimate and she never sat that close to Tobin before.

She looked up when she heard him coming, still holding the cigarette in her hand and she smiled. Daryl noticed a dark look come over Tobin's face when he saw him approach.

But Carol was smiling.

The smile that was only for him, the one she had given Daryl so many times over the months they had been together, and she stood up and walked towards him.