A/N: Thank you all for your kind reviews and I hope you continue to enjoy!

Disclaimer: The Walking Dead does not belong to me - I'm just playing around with these poor characters for awhile.

Ch. 4

There was nothing to the east. Each town they came to was dead or over-run, so eventually they pilfered a GPS unit from the dash of another vehicle and avoided the towns all together. Ironically, with everything that had gone to shit, the GPS still worked, that metallic, computerized voice telling them to turn left in a quarter mile. She would probably be broadcasting out into space long after the last of the human race died out.

They rarely used the camping gear that had been stashed in the roof box of the small SUV, choosing instead to sleep in the car, ready to flee at a moment's notice. Meals were hasty things, cooked low over a banked fire when they were cooked at all. Foraging trips were even more pathetic, quick and harried and efficient. They didn't need so much now, not with only the two of them. Their biggest concern was gas, but even on the back roads they ran into plenty of abandoned vehicles. The sheer number of road blocks made for slow going, and they were often forced to find a different way when they ran into road jams so bad there was no navigating through them.

What should have taken them under a day instead took four, between the backtracking and constant caution and the first two failed attempts at searching the small towns dotting the highway, which had forced them to flee aimlessly down unknown back roads. Rick's grief was still a physical lump in his throat, and Daryl had never been sociable at the best of times, so the mood in the car grew more and more tense as they traveled. Rick fully expected Daryl to kick him out and take off on his own, almost wished for it in fact, but the other man didn't. Even as Daryl's temper grew shorter and his words more biting, even when Daryl gave into temptation and slugged Rick across the jaw after one intensely heated argument, he never told Rick to go. In fact, he said the opposite. "You better fuckin' be here when I get back," he'd told Rick, before heading off into yet another maze of cars with an empty gas canister. Rick just rubbed at the slowly forming bruise on his jaw and waited.

Once they'd gotten used to each others constant presence, they talked a bit in the car. Made a plan. Daryl asked what they would do if they got to the coast and there wasn't anything there for them. Rick thought long and hard on it, watching the woods surrounding the backwater highway they were traveling speed by through his reflection in the window.

"Suppose we could find a boat, head up the coast, anchor off shore and see what we can find," he said at last. It seemed as good a plan as any.

"Boats take gas," Daryl pointed out.

"So we find a sailboat," Rick answered.

"You ever sailed before? 'Cause I ain't even been on the ocean before." And Rick had to admit that Daryl had a point. They were as likely to flip as to actually get anywhere.

Still… "It's better than nothing," Rick shrugged, and that was that.

The coast turned out to be a nightmare. Or rather, the approach to the coast, since they never even managed to make their way close to it. Apparently others had thought the same thing, and even the back roads leading down to the coast were clogged with abandoned cars and the dead. A large hoard greeted them just outside Brunswick, and yet another on the only bridge heading north. They backtracked then, leaving the paved back highways for a series of forest roads that Daryl said looked like they might take them all the way to the coast. The satellite image that downloaded in the GPS looked like a bunch of scribbled green lines to Rick, so he gave Daryl the benefit of the doubt and turned when Daryl and the machine said they should turn. It ended with their car nearly stranded in a swamp, with Rick cursing Daryl and Daryl cursing the fucking machine that couldn't tell a seasonal road from a year-round one. They managed to push the car out with the help of a few boards pilfered from an abandoned house not far off the road, and sat fuming in silence as they poured over the maps, the paper ones this time, their confidence in the electronic one shot to hell and back.

"Where to now?" Rick asked finally, sighing wearily. Daryl shot him a concerned glance, and Rick was pretty sure he could understand why. Daryl's face was drawn and pale under his tan, with dark circles under eyes that were puffy from lack of sleep. Despite the fact that they no longer needed to ration food, he could see Daryl had lost weight, his jeans hanging loosely from his hips. Rick had no doubt he looked much the same.

Daryl shook his head, spitting in the dirt at his feet. "Fuck, man, we need a break. We need to sleep, a good night's sleep for once. Or we'll be dead before the month's up."

Rick nodded, glancing around them. They were in the coastal swamps, and the land lay flat and wet around them. It was monotonous in its homogeneity, stretching out for as far as the eye could see. "We'll find something," Rick promised. "There's someplace out there that's safe. There has to be." As if saying it enough times could make it true.

It did seem to calm the wildness in Daryl's eyes. "Okay," Daryl said, opening the driver's side door. "Okay, we can do this. Let's go."

It took them a surprisingly short amount of time to find a temporary shelter, and Rick found himself thanking God for that before he remembered he didn't believe in the Almighty anymore, or at least they weren't on speaking terms and hadn't been for quite awhile.

Their shelter was in the form of a water tower, surrounded by a strong fence topped in barb wire and accessible only by ladder. During the day, they worked on securing the area, first building an overhang and walls out of wood scavenged from nearby sheds around the railing of the water tower, both to keep the rain off and hide the small fires they built at night to keep warm. It wasn't much, but it kept them dry and it kept them comfortable, and after days of living in fear and numerous sleepless nights, that was enough. In the days that followed, they drug more wood and bricks from the nearby houses, and worked on fortifying the chain link fence that surrounded the water tower.

At night they huddled under the small overhang they had built, warming their hands over the small fire before dousing it and crawling into their sleeping bags. The metal grating was hard underneath their sleeping pads, but at least they were safe there, and Rick watched as the shadows disappeared from beneath Daryl's eyes and he began to put on weight again. Rick also felt stronger than he had before, in the weeks after Lori and Carl's death when every waking moment was one of fear and anxiety, and he found as time went on that he could move back to the normal holes on his belt rather than the few he'd cut with Daryl's knife.

Some days they ventured out, trying to scavenge what they could or patrolling the area around their shelter to make sure no walkers trespassed there. "Last thing we need is to get trapped up here," Daryl had said, and Rick agreed. As safe as their new home was, it could just as easily turn into a death trap, and they made sure to keep the fire low and their conversations quiet.

Days and then weeks passed there, as the nights grew colder and their companionship easier. Rick found that Daryl lost his temper less often these days, although the other man would still sometimes remove himself from their small shelter in a huff, sitting alone and staring out at the forest around them for hours at a time. Rick learned not to bother him when he was in those moods after the first time, when Daryl threw a punch that almost knocked Rick over the railing. Daryl had been quick to grab him and steady him, and gave a half-hearted apology, instantly followed by a muttered "Just leave me the fuck alone," which Rick willingly obliged.

As the weeks passed, Rick felt his grief grow more distant, more controllable, if not any less fierce, and found that in the quiet moments he could think about Lori and Carl and Shane, and even the rest of their group, and focus on the good times they'd had and the memories that they'd made rather than the black hole in his chest that was their absence. It almost felt like a betrayal at first, but he realized he was healing, as much as anyone could heal from such a loss, and it was good to be able to think of them fondly again.

Still, sometimes at night, Rick would dream about Lori, and cry himself awake only to find Daryl pressed up against his side, watching him. "Dreaming again," Daryl would mutter, looking away. "You good?" Rick always said yes, whether he actually was or not, and Daryl would move back to his own sleeping pad. Rick wondered what Daryl would do if he said no, he wasn't okay. He fingered the cooling sleeping bag, and missed having someone to sleep next to.

Sometimes the dreams were not nearly so innocent or sad, and Rick would wake up with the memory of Lori's lips on his, of her tracing the contours of his ribs with her mouth and moving down lower, the feeling of his hands and mouth running over her smooth skin on a lazy Sunday morning. Rick didn't know if Daryl woke up when he dreamed those dreams like he did for Rick's nightmares, but the other man was never beside him when he woke with a start from Lori's ghost haunting his thoughts. Those times, Rick would wait, listening in the dark for Daryl's breathing, before taking himself in his own hands and finishing what the Lori of his dreams had started.

He couldn't say when it was that the two types of dreams started to meld together, when Daryl pressed up against his side when he awoke from nightmares turned into Daryl moving over him in his dreams. Sometimes it was even both of them in his dreams, and that was the most confusing of all because Lori would never have been okay with that, and the real Daryl seemed to have the sex drive of a wet sock, and Rick wondered when the world had changed so much that he could think about Daryl and sex in the same sentence.

He ignored those dreams, and never mentioned them to Daryl, though he found himself watching Daryl as time passed, noticing the grace with which Daryl moved through the woods, crossbow held ready in case of attack, the way he rubbed his face when he was nervous or uncomfortable, the way he never seemed able to sit still for long, even when they were rained in and there was nothing to do but hang out around the fire in their sleeping bags and keep watch. You're just lonely, he told himself, trying to clamp down on his growing interest. Daryl would never forgive you if you said anything. Hell, you'd be lucky if he didn't shoot you with his crossbow. So time went on, and they hunted and patrolled and ate and slept and lived in each others' shadows, and Rick kept his thoughts to himself and reminded himself of Lori and Carl and how much he loved them, and most of the time it was enough.

The tipping point came the day that Daryl almost died. They were out scouting for supplies, looking for more gas so they could get wherever they needed to go once their most recent safe house proved to be anything but, and for iodine and vitamin C to treat the water they were running dangerously low on. They were finally running short on food, the relative safety of the past few months and the cold weather increasing their appetites, and they'd been taking down an increasing number of walkers on their patrols around the water tower. It didn't take long for them to reach a silent agreement that it would be time to move on soon, before they found themselves surrounded and stranded up in their little shelter, and had decided to go searching for supplies before they had to leave. They'd taken the car a little ways up the road, to what had once been a tiny one street town, figuring that the chances of a hoard of walkers was less there than anywhere else. Daryl had been walking in the lead, crossbow out in front, when Rick heard the tell-tale thump of the weapon releasing and Daryl's startled grunt of surprise from around the corner.

Rick sped up, turning the corner to find himself facing four walkers, another two behind them. Daryl was holding off yet another walker, pinned down on the ground by the body of an eighth one that had a bolt through its forehead. The four walkers turned their attention to Rick when they saw him, and he brought his weapon up and fired four shots in rapid succession. The walkers dropped lifelessly to the ground.

Rick could hear Daryl cursing in the background, but the other two walkers were bearing down on them so Rick aimed and took fire at those. Once they had fallen, he turned his attention to the struggle going on just in front of him. His gun was out of bullets, so he drew his knife and stabbed the walker trying to get at Daryl. The thing slumped down on top of the walker already lying on top of Daryl, and Rick threw both of them off of the other man with a grunt.

"You okay? They get you? You bit?" Rick frantically checked Daryl for blood or bites, hands patting at his arms and chest as his heart raced in his chest.

"'M fine," Daryl wheezed after a moment. "Just knocked the wind out of me."

The weight that had settled in Rick's chest lifted and before he knew it he'd pulled Daryl to him, forehead to forehead, and gave him a quick peck on the lips. "Thank god," he murmured, just breathing and letting the relief wash over him. It wasn't until he noticed how tense Daryl was against him that he realized what he'd done.

He shoved himself away from Daryl with a curse, feeling like a complete asshole and a fool all at once as Daryl sat there, stunned and trembling. What the hell were you thinking? he scolded himself. He knew how skittish Daryl could be, had talked with Andrea and Shane about it when he'd first gotten to camp, before he'd gotten to know the man himself. He'd be lucky if Daryl didn't up and leave him then and there, and as much as Rick hated to admit it, he didn't think he'd last long on his own, not anymore, not without the thought of Lori and Carl out there to keep him going. Daryl's quiet company was all that had kept Rick moving for the last months, and without it Rick knew he was walker bait sooner rather than later. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but realized there was really nothing he could say that would make it okay.

Instead he stood, wiping some of the walker's blood that splattered his hand on his jeans. "Hopefully that's all of them," he said, holding out a hand to help Daryl up. To see if Daryl would let Rick help him up. It was as much of a truce as he could offer. "We should get moving, get what we can and get out of here before nightfall. If there's this many moving around in the day, I don't want to be here at night."

To his surprise, it was enough. Daryl grabbed Rick's hand and levered himself to his feet, dusting himself off as he pulled the bolt out of the dead walker's forehead and reloaded his crossbow. "Don't hear anything else," he muttered, not looking Rick in the eye. "But we should be careful anyway. Don't know how many might be inside these buildings and they're gonna be moving after that racket you made."

"That racket saved your life," Rick reminded him, grinning, grateful that Daryl was willing to forgive and forget, that he hadn't driven away the only person left in his life, the only thing left to care about. Daryl shrugged and gave a sort of half grin in return, though he was focused once again on the town around them, crossbow up and ready for danger.

When Rick took the lead, Daryl followed, maybe further behind and more quietly than he would have the day before, but he still followed. And Rick led them into the abandoned grocery store to search through what was left of the food on the shelves for anything they could use, and pointedly didn't talk about what had just happened, because it was all he knew how to do.

End Notes: There was supposed to be much more Rick/Daryl in this chapter, but stubborn, emotionally stunted men are being stubborn and emotionally stunted… oh well, it will happen eventually (no really, it will)! Also, there may be a bit more of a gap between this update and the next than usual – unfortunately real life is very busy right now and I'm not sure how much time I'll have for writing until mid to late May. Thank you all again for reading and for your lovely reviews!