records

always calls me home

A/N: part 3 in my nashville!AU. follows inside your head [part 1] and alone in our own world [part 2]. i'd recommend reading them first. there's a time jump, more children than music, and my attempt to write a song fit for The Brothers Dixon. title taken from 'a life that's good', which is an actual song from the show Nashville.
this is what happens when i watch Nashville and The Walking Dead right after one another. enjoy.

—

She has a miscarriage on the eve of the start of her national tour.

The tour doctor confirms it with a sad sigh. Did you know you were....

No. she had no idea.

She is in New York, in a hotel, alone, her children, her husband back home and in that moment, she feels eighteen again, afraid and isolated and so terrified of the future. she blames the strenuous rehearsals, the long hours of promotion. She blames herself and she wonders if he will too.

So she makes the decision not to tell him.

They don't keep secrets. Save this one.

—

Daryl Dixon takes to fatherhood like a duck takes to water and all those terrible clichés his mother-in-law tends to use.

Mother-in-law. Fatherhood. If he had thrown around those words ten years ago, he might have thought he were in the midst of a fever dream. Or jacked up on Merle's pills.

But this is no dream, no high. Okay, maybe a high of a different kind. But right now the reality is his stubborn and wilful seven-year-old daughter refusing to take off a black-fringed shawl because while it's all well and good to play 'Stevie Nicks' at home, you can't wear that get-up to school.

"Daddy!" she pouts, "Mama lets me!"

This isn't Daryl's first rodeo, however. Fixing her with a child-appropriate glare (that she won't fear anyway, that girl has him wrapped around her little finger), she shakes his head.

"Your Mama let's you wear the hat, Lila," he says sternly, "don't play me for some fool, girl."

With a huff and a sigh, she stomps back to her room. He spares a glance at the kitchen clock, the morning already feeling longer than it should.

"What are we going to do with your sister, Jack?"

From his seat at the kitchen table, his four-year-old son simply laughs.

—

"I miss you," she breathes down the line. This is their routine. She calls before the children go to bed, he calls after and even eight years later it is breathy sighs and whispered promises and the timber of his voice making her feel like she's coming undone.

"Fuck, baby," he sighs, sounding exhausted, "I have no idea how you do this everyday."

She giggles, because yeah, it's easy when it's both of them, working as a team. Easy when she can fight with her wild, opinionated, free-spirited daughter and he can goof off with their son. And when he was in Europe, there was her Mama and Maggie helping out so she never felt out of her element, never felt like she was drowning without him.

"You can call my Mama, you know," she says softly, "fly the kids to the farm for the weekend, her and Daddy would love that."

"Yeah," he says, trying to brush her off. She knows him by now, knows that even though her folks love him, he doesn't like them to think he can't handle things, like he can't be a good father, a good husband.