Title: Five Unimportant Things Andrea Takes from the Pharmacy (and One That Will End Up Saving Her Life)

Author: GageWhitney

Rating: T

Pairing: Daryl/Andrea

Disclaimer: Very much not mine.

Summary: They raid the pharmacy once more before leaving Hershel's farm for good.

Note: I've never done one of these "five things" fics, but I thought I'd give it a shot. Hope it works.

Oh, and you all ROCK. I love the Daryl/Andrea fandom! You guys leave the best reviews, and I love it. Thanks. :)

They raid the pharmacy once more before leaving Hershel's farm for good. While the men take guard around the perimeter of the store, the women pilfer whatever items they can from the already picked over store.

Andrea walks the aisles alone, eyes roaming over almost empty shelves in hopes of finding some things they can put to use.

1.

She's browsing the personal care section, looking for any available products to deal with the monthly bill that keeps coming even after the world ends, when she sees them. One last package, left behind by who knows which looter for who knows what reason.

When she takes the box of condoms off the little metal hook, she has no real plans for them. Since certain things had been revealed to the group, there's no way she's getting involved with Shane ever again. There's no telling what the future holds, though, so she glances around to make sure no one's looking and shoves the Trojans deep into the depths of her canvas bag.

A few weeks later, when she kisses Daryl in a tent by the side of the road and he yanks her shirt over her head, she's glad she had the foresight take them.

"Only got the 12, huh?" he muses, after their heart rates have slowed and the sweat has cooled on their skin.

She chuckles and turns her head to look at him, naked and stretched out on the sleeping bag beside her. "We're down to 11, now."

"Yeah. Shit," he says eloquently.

"You know, we can always supplement them with… other things," she says with a grin.

The corners of his lips threaten to twitch upward when he says, "Oh, yeah? Like what?"

She decides to show rather than tell.

2.

The makeup aisle is surprisingly empty. Looters, she suspects, were probably looking to stock up on their favorites back when people still thought the world would go back to normal at some point.

It never did, and cosmetics are fairly useless at this point. Still, she spies a leftover tube of bright red lipstick on a display and, after a brief inspection, stows it in her bag.

It's sexy and daring and bold and she never would've worn that color before, back in the real world. She used to stick to sheer pinks, going for professionalism during the day and playing up her light green eyes with thick mascara at night.

Since the apocalypse began, she hasn't worn any makeup at all, hasn't even thought about it, to be honest. She smiles to herself, though, when she sits in her tent and slicks crimson over her pale lips, making sure to keep the color neat with a little mirror that once occupied her sister's purse.

There's the sound of footsteps approaching, so she quickly caps the tube of lipstick and tosses it and the compact into her bag, then leans back on her sleeping bag to wait for him.

Daryl unzips the flap and pokes his head in. "Hey," he says, before slipping fully into her tent and zipping it back up.

"Hey yourself." She smiles sultrily at him and hopes he notices her lips.

He does, and gives her a low whistle. "Whoa."

"You like?"

He's staring at her lips when he nods his head. "Yeah."

"Good. Come here," she says, crooking her finger.

He kneels in front of her and watches as she moves forward and presses her lips to his. His tongue slides along her lips, and she pulls away, chuckling softly when he groans. His lips are colored red with her lipstick.

She moves onto his jaw, then kisses down his neck as she unbuttons his sleeveless flannel shirt. His breath hitches when she pushes the shirt off his shoulders and kisses down his chest, leaving red smears on his scarred skin.

"Shit," he breathes when she yanks his zipper down.

She smiles up at him, all pale green eyes and bright red lips, and leaves her bright red lipstick somewhere else.

3.

She comes across a thick, shiny coloring book on an endcap, some generic brand filled with pages and pages of bold outlines of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures. There's a 24-count box of Crayola crayons hanging beside it, and she takes the pair to bring back to Carl. Something, she figures, to keep him occupied and acting like a kid, if only for a little while.

When she presents her gift to him, Carl asks her to sit at the RV's little dinette table and join him. He tears out a page. "Here," he says. "Brachiosaurus."

Daryl approaches them later, quirking an eyebrow at the scene before him. Her dinosaur is half colored in, and she's surprisingly relaxed from the simple activity.

"What're you all doing?" he asks, putting his crossbow down near the door.

She shows him her brachiosaurus. "Coloring. Want to join us?"

Carl rips another page out of the book and hands it to Daryl, which he accepts with a shrug, dropping onto the seat next to Andrea.

He colors in a velociraptor using purple and blue crayons. She watches with amused affection when he and Carl start arguing about what color dinosaurs really were.

4.

There's an old copy of Cosmopolitan left near the registers, the date on the cover marking the time since things were normal like some perverse version of a time capsule. She snags it, if only because she's sick of reading bad novels all the time.

Back in the real world, she'd read her share of issues. Not that she had a subscription or anything, but waiting for her toenails to dry at the salon or sitting on a sandy beach, she'd flipped through the glossy pages and taken the stupid quizzes and made mental notes of sex tips that weren't totally ridiculous.

One day, she catches Daryl leafing through it.

"A hundred and one ways to please your man, huh?" he teases. He clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "Looks like we only got through about 16 of them so far."

She chuckles, and puts her chin on his shoulder to look at the open page. "What do you say we give number 48 a try later?"

He reads number 48, and his eyebrows jump to his hairline. "Uh, yeah," he gulps. "Yeah, we can do that."

Numbers 48 and 73 can be crossed off the list that night.

5.

The supply of notebooks is still readily available in the stationery section. Since balled-up wads of paper aren't exactly effective weapons against walkers, she supposes they're not exactly an item in great demand. Still, Andrea selects a small three-subject notebook with an orange plastic cover and shoves it into her bag. She doesn't know what she's going to do with it, really, but it feels right to have it.

Mostly, at the beginning, she uses it to write down events she wants to remember, stories from another life, memories that she's afraid will turn gossamer and slip away from her one day.

She doodles, sometimes, flowers and hearts and transparent cubes, filling a page as they drive in silence down a long stretch of road or waiting nervously for Daryl to return from a hunting excursion. Oddly, she finds she's missed drawing in the margins of newspaper articles and yellow legal pads.

Eventually, she uses it to make a list of potential baby names, creasing a page lengthwise, titling one half "boys" and the other "girls." Baby name books are a thing of the past, so she lists names she can remembering liking, old friends and relatives and characters from movies. She writes down the names "Amy" and "Sophia" and almost crosses them off twice.

He takes the list from her hands at one point and stares at it for a few moments before holding his hand out for her pen. He immediately starts scratching names off with messy, crooked lines, biting at his lips as he concentrates.

"I think it's okay if we use their names," he says quietly, handing the list back.

"Yeah?" she asks, eyes teary. She rubs the bump on her stomach. "You don't think it's too sad?"

He shrugs. "Only sad if we make it sad."

They end up with a little girl named Amy Sophia Dixon.

1.

In the back of the pharmacy, Andrea finds what used to be the employee break room, including a row of lockers. The open ones have been mostly cleaned out, and she uses a hammer she'd picked up to bust the locks on the ones remaining.

There's not much inside, mostly photos of people she doesn't know tacked up on the doors and old pay stubs littering the bottoms. There's a camouflage fleece sweatshirt tossed haphazardly into one of the lockers, and it's too big, but she slips her arms into it and zips it up anyway.

Buried underneath the sweatshirt, she finds a plastic bag from a sporting goods store. She peeks inside and can't believe the unbelievably stupid, dumb, fantastic luck she has sometimes.

Crossbow bolts. A whole bagful of snub-nosed, aluminum bolts with brightly colored feathers on the end.

She's suddenly incredibly grateful for whatever part-time hunter, part-time pharmacy employee once worked there. She hopes that, wherever he is, he made it out of town alive and intact.

When their caravan is ready to leave, Andrea climbs into the passenger seat of Daryl's pickup with her canvas bag and the plastic sporting goods bag.

"Riding with me?" he asks.

"Yeah." She dumps the plastic bag unceremoniously in his lap.

"What's this?" he grunts.

Barely concealing her smile, she says, "Open it."

He looks inside and, when he sees the treasure she's found, it's one of the few times she sees a genuine smile grace Daryl Dixon's features. It's a nice smile, she thinks, with straight white teeth and crinkling eyes. He's especially handsome when he smiles, and she thinks she'd like to see it happen more often.

"You found this in the pharmacy?" he asks incredulously.

"Employee break room," she explains. "Had to bust open a locker to find it."

He gestures at her. "Same guy who owned that sweatshirt?"

"Yeah," she says, glancing down at herself. She's swimming in the shirt.

He nods his head. "Thank God for rednecks, huh?"

The truck engine turns over, and Daryl pulls out of the little store parking lot, gesturing out the window for the others to follow him.

"Yeah," she says quietly. "Thank God for rednecks."