Chapter Text
Heat.
Soft, syrupy-thick warmth was lingering in the air of his room, snaking its way in through the cracked window pane of the shabby cabin, making it uncomfortable to breathe, uncomfortable to think, even.
Daryl knew he had to get up soon, and the mere thought made his eyes want to roll back.
It was excessively warm for September, he'd long since noted. Sweltering enough that even he wanted to complain, despite his local upbringing. He was getting too old for this shit, just toeing the line between thirties and forties. Outside the window swallows were chirping, getting ready for the day amongst the pine.
Daryl supposed he ought to do the same. Kicking the thick, sweaty duvet off, he sat up, running his hands down his face and at once coming upon the realization that he needed to shave.
“A’right, a’right, I got it,” he mumbled, flipping a tired bird to the critters in the trees as their insistent noises grew louder by the second. Christ, he was hungry.
Standing up and slipping into his worn rabbit slippers (say what you want, they were comfortable), he shuffled out the doorway toward the bathroom. After a quick shave, a cold shower and a slice of honey toast, he bustled back into the bedroom, perusing his closet in thought before picking out the same black shirt and suit pants that he somehow always ended up wearing.
Using the blowdryer was tedious, and so, he decided just to let the air deal with it, hoping it’d stay greaseless despite the heat. Keys, wallet, phone and laptop, Daryl was set to leave after the whopping time of thirty minutes.
Stepping out onto the veranda and pushing the door closed softly, he paused when he heard a noise to the left of him. Looking up toward the Ecke property, he was beyond surprised to see a silver Kia rolling into the driveway, clunky body bouncing on the pavement.
Really? Who even drove Kias nowadays? It went without saying that Daryl preferred bikes to any car, but he understood the appeal of not having to sit groin-to-ass if you ever wanted to be more than one person at a time on the road. Therefore, he owned a neat Toyota. Plain, gray and inconspicuous, it suited him perfectly.
Rather than standing around and staring at the new addition to the neighborhood, he stepped down the stairs, careful to avoid eye contact when he heard the slamming of car doors a few meters away. Daryl wasn’t good at social interaction, never had been. Despite him being rather a natural with kids, he could never quite get along with his own generation.
Most people he knew found him hostile, and although he may be headstrong, he didn’t consider himself an angry person. He didn’t want to be perceived as one, but it was better to be hostile than weak, and so he never set the record straight.
His choice of profession was far from random. He’d spent long years pondering what to do with his life, at one point considering simply ending it due to lack of use. When he met Carol Peletier in his senior year, and she asked if he was pursuing his art in some way, the idea first sprung into his mind to be a teacher.
Nowadays, the two were colleagues and good friends, Carol one of the few people to ever look past his prickly exterior. Of course, over the years he’d also had a handful of students who claimed him to be ‘jelly on the inside’, something which he never understood and therefore infuriated him more than anything else.
Hopping into the front seat and pulling out of the driveway, Daryl cruised past what he belatedly realized was his new next-door neighbor. He caught a glimpse of a male profile, but the person's face was obscured by the car door, and so he didn’t get a good look. Dismissing the one-sided interaction, Daryl put a bit more pressure on the pedal, and went on his way.
“Morning, Daryl,” Carol smiled when he ran into her in the staff room.
“Hey,” he replied as sincerely as he could manage, fiddling with the cord to his computer.
“You look refreshed,” she complimented, watching his still slightly damp hair and clean shaven face.
“Ah… Shaved,” he muttered in lieu of a thanks, but Carol understood all the same. Smiling once more, she placed her coffee cup down on the desk beside his and reached for a manila file folder atop the hanging shelf.
Today, she was wearing a lilac long skirt and a light green turtleneck, little gold earrings glinting in the yellow light of the fluorescents. Carol taught home economics to older students, which meant the two didn’t converge very often, but when they did, it was almost always a relief. Carol was a natural little ray of sun shining into his otherwise murky life. Their classmates had found the two to be an unlikely pair, but to Daryl it had always been obvious that Carol was a friend.
“‘M gonna go. Let me know if you need any help durin’ your 11.30 class, I have a free period.”
“Oh no,” Carol declined amicably, “you just rest, you work hard enough. Besides, Martin is helping out.” She looked down at her hands, her expression in that moment warm and contented. Daryl didn’t dare interfere, and so he had simply nodded and breezed past her out the door, cord in hand.
Primrose Hill High School was a large, old building, full of students from every corner of the city. Luckily, they all needed to have a certain level of competence to stay afloat there. There were the troublemakers, of course, but one advantage of his intimidating appearance was the fact that Daryl’s words certainly weren’t overlooked. Most of the trouble therefore took place outside of his classroom.
When he turned the corner to the corridor in which the art room was located, he was for a moment taken aback by the gaggle of students gathered by the door.
“...Morning,” he mumbled once he was close enough, dutifully unlocking the door and letting the group filter in. While everyone went to take their places, Daryl sensed an unusual kind of quiet in the room, one that was strange for the first class of the day. Eventually, once he looked up from where he’d been wrestling with the charging cord once more, he saw the majority of gazes focused on something to the left of him.
Glancing over, Daryl was slightly perturbed at the sight of a young boy.
Long, brown hair, blush lips and a checkered flannel shirt, at first glance there was nothing unusual about him, except maybe his eerily symmetrical build – but upon squinting, Daryl’s eyes widened slightly at the sight of the boy’s lack thereof.
On the right, where there was supposed to be iris and sclera, there was instead a deep blackness, unlike any prosthetic eye example Daryl had ever seen before. However, not wanting to appear staring, he cleared his throat and nodded.
“Welcome. What’s your name?” he asked, as he did with every new student.
“...Carl Grimes,” the boy answered after a moment of silence, blinking once. Daryl couldn’t help but note that he was missing right eyelid, too. Turning his head, Daryl nodded toward an empty seat at the front of the classroom next to a young, slightly rebellious girl named Enid.
“A’right. Welcome, Carl. I’m Daryl. Daryl Dixon. Go ‘head and have a seat.”
For a moment, Carl’s eye seemed to widen a little in surprise, before he threw his backpack over his shoulder and trudged over to sit down.
“Right, so, I thought we’d pick up where we left off last week. Anyone rem’ber?” Daryl asked, grabbing a piece of chalk from the drawer and approaching the board swiftly. He didn’t like to waste time, and, sensing the new kid’s discomfort, decided to get right to it.
“Like, history,” echoed a voice from behind him, and Daryl breathed a little sigh.
“Tha’s right, Thompson. Hand up next time,” he instructed, pressing the crayon to the board.
Art History.
Getting lost in the description of European master artists, Daryl scribbled on the board for a good twenty minutes, early on instructing the students to take notes.
“Which one of these artists makes ya note somethin’?” he asked.
Enid’s eyes flashed for a moment, before she looked down, but Daryl wasn’t willing to let her off the hook, not when she tended to have such good insights.
“Enid,” he said. “Who’s your favorite?”
“...Monet,” she replied after a moment, staring toward the board.
“A’right. Why?”
Her eyes briefly flashed toward him once more, but he didn’t back down.
“I don’t know,” Enid replied after a moment, averting her eyes. Daryl, unwilling to exert her past her boundaries, looked toward the spread of students for an answer.
“‘Cause Monet actually knew how to use color,” Derek Ely said with a bored tone.
“How so?” Daryl questioned, for once not reprimanding the lack of hand-raising.
“He was a master at what he did, obviously. Not like Van Gogh,” Derek scoffed, as if it were a ridiculous name, “rubbing everyone’s noses in his own shit.”
Daryl couldn’t help but huff a small, incredulous laugh at the sentiment.
“What, it’s draggin’ our noses in his suffering jus’ ‘cause he expressed it? ‘S a call for help, ‘s what it is.”
The boy’s eyes widened a little, clearly having expected a slight.
“...No. No, just because you’re in pain doesn’t mean you have to make it somebody else’s problem. Everyone carries sadness, and it’s each individual’s choice of how to deal with it,” Derek insisted, but before Daryl had a chance to counter him, somebody else did.
“Are you stupid?”
A ripple of little intakes of breath spread through the classroom like wildfire, everyone’s gazes falling upon one Carl Grimes.
“‘Scuse me?” Daryl asked, and the boy met his gaze, all calm anger.
“You’re an idiot,” Carl reiterated, turning toward Derek, “if you think that each measure of pain weighs evenly. What, you didn’t get your allowance last week? You think that’s the kind of stuff Van Gogh painted?”
“What do you know, Stevie Wonder?” Derek shot back angrily, and a little chorus of laughter bounced through the classroom.
“Ely,” Daryl was quick to say, “out.” He pointed toward the door, tired exasperation the only thing his mind could muster.
“No, Mr. Dixon, I didn’t–”
“Nah, get out.”
Sulking, Derek collected his things in the silence of the classroom.
“Anyone got a friendly quip ‘fore we continue?” Daryl asked warningly, glancing around at the bored faces of his students. “No? A’right.”
“I want y’all to write a page or two about your favorite out of the artists I’ve been through today, s’well as picking out a favorite piece by ‘em. At least five-hundred words.”
A collective groan echoed round the classroom, and Daryl shook his head disapprovingly. The remaining twenty-five minutes were spent in silence, only sound in the classroom being the scratch of pencil on paper, and the occasional sniffle or cough.
“Right, get outta here,” Daryl said once the clock reached 8:55, sighing once more when he realized he had to battle the charging cord again. “Enid, will you let Derek know ‘bout the paper?” Daryl asked her on her way out, to which she nodded.
Turning back toward his computer once more, Daryl let out a little sigh, grabbing the cord.
“You have to press down.”
Just barely, Daryl managed to repress a flinch, eyes flickering up to the boy standing beyond the desk in front of him.
“...Whut?” he asked dumbly.
“The cord. You have to press down, there’s a little portion of plastic that you have to push for it to retract smoothly,” the boy said, blinking patiently.
Daryl looked down at once, and there, low and behold, was a little piece of triangular plastic begging to be pushed. So, the teacher did as was recommended, and suddenly, the cord fell right out.
“Huh…”
“Good job, Einstein,” the Grimes boy said, quirking a small smile at Daryl’s expense.
“How’d you know that?” Daryl asked, deflecting.
“My dad has the same one. He’s hopeless, had to help him with the same thing.”
“Right… Thanks,” Daryl replied, surprised to find his own lips curling up at the corners.
It had been a while since he last smiled.