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Where the dead rise to walk the earth and the living get that haunted look in their eyes like they want to lie down in their graves instead, Daryl supposes there is no such thing as absolution. There will be no maker to meet when it’s all over. No god to beg for forgiveness for the things he has done, for the lives he has taken. No one to close the book he can’t stop himself from opening in the quiet hours of the night to stare at the names of those he has failed.
Sophia.
Dale.
Merle.
They say they’re not on him, they say those deaths just happened. To him, it’s like their blood still clings to his skin like a stigma. No, if you ask him, he has debts to pay and Judgement Day has come, but there is no forgiveness to be found in the vast land of icy horrors.
With his heart frozen in pain, he stops in his tracks to watch the walker before him struggle. Its undead body is frozen to the ground where it must have fallen a while ago, covered in a thin layer of snow and its intestines sticking to the ground all around it. Georgia, land of the mild winters, has come to bite them all in their asses this year. Daryl snorts at himself and the utter clusterfuck this world has become, swings his crossbow around and puts the walker down with a bolt to the brain.
Winter has never failed to make him melancholy. All the dead plants, trees void of lush green and dormant until spring. Not much game around to feed to the group, either. And now he’s out here in the biting cold and thinking about his sins when really, his life has improved a lot since the apocalypse. Every dog will have his day, after all.
They say that no man is an island. And good things come to those who wait. It’s true, he supposes. He has unknowingly waited his whole life to find his true calling, all his potential dormant, unused. Now he has friends, a family that loves him as unconditionally as he has always loved Merle. The difference being that Merle had never been there for Daryl when he had needed him. But his new family, they would give their lives for him in an instant, just as he would do for them.
If he has found his place in life now, then why does his heart still hurt so much? It’s like the spirits have intoxicated him, like they infiltrated his soul and now they whisper in his ear, tell him it’s too late for him. It’s like they’re right and he can barely stop himself from believing them. He has stayed up many nights, facing his ghosts, because he knows with no illusions that out of this stalemate he has locked himself in with them, only one can come out victorious.
Daryl has lost his faith in the world and the goodness of nature long ago. It was shot dead with a .45 bullet from a Colt Python, a crack shot straight between the eyes and had collapsed in a heap of two dozen other corpses.
Daryl has shot his humanity when he took the very same Colt Python in his own hands and aimed it in Dale’s face. He shot his humanity in an attempt to save it, to take Dale’s suffering.
Daryl has stabbed his own heart with his buck knife when he sank the blade into his brother’s skull seven times.
He knows it’s not because the world has changed that he has become this. Because in essence, the world is the same as it has always been. Just like Daryl knows it’s not his fault that he or his family have turned out this way.
His thoughts drift to the most prominent example of what life is doing to them every single day: Rick. It’s not Rick’s fault for losing his best friend, his wife, his sanity, his humanity. Rick has lost as much as Daryl has and it has broken him just as much. And that’s not on either of them, not on the dead and not on the living.
No, he blames this world for making a good man evil. It’s this world that can drive a good man mad. And at the same time, it’s this world that turns a killer into a hero, because that’s what the world really needs these days. It needs people like Rick who can make the choices no one wants to make and people like Daryl who will carry them out without remorse. The really heavy shit, though, is that this world can make a good man bad. But that is no different from what the world was before.
What’s new to Daryl is this feeling that he has broken hearts and taken lives; even if it’s his own heart and he hasn’t always put an end to those lives himself. He knows it was necessary and he has no qualms about the acts themselves. But that doesn’t stop the memories from keeping him awake at night.
He never used to be a religious man and he doesn’t believe now, either. But for some reason, he can’t help but wonder whether god would turn and walk away if he sent a prayer to heaven now and signed it “From a sinner with no name”. From what he has heard of Christian believers around him, he wouldn’t get into heaven now, if the devil had his way. Would that make him live forever, because his soul’s too late to save? Not in hell, because he imagines life here is as close to that as it can get. And what does that say about him, who has never lived better than he does now?
Secretly, he smiles to himself. It probably says that heaven and hell have become the same now: Irrelevant. So they’re all gonna live forever, tell their maker he could wait! They are all riding south of heaven nowadays and Daryl has no illusions about that being just geographical.
Looking around himself, he huffs a laugh at the inappropriateness of that. South, my ass!, he thinks to himself, kicking at a small snowdrift. He watches the white, powdery masses scatter and decides to go head home and check his snares along the way. There is nothing for him out here in this snowy desert, anyway.
---***---
He walks through the gate with a dozen rodents slung over his shoulder, which he drops off in the kitchen. Carol greets him with a smile and Beth walks towards him to pass him Judith for a moment. The others are milling about as well, chatting and doing various tasks, but Daryl’s eyes look for Rick. He finds him staring out a window at the end of the cell block.
“Hey.” Rick greets softly as Daryl comes to stand next to him, his eyes never leaving the snowy landscape, but his hand reaches out to fall lightly on Daryl’s shoulder.
“Hey.” Daryl mutters back while he shifts Judith in his arms, waving a spoon of baby food in front of her face, teasing a laugh out of her. They stay like that, feeding Lil’ Asskicker until Beth comes to collect her. Finally, Daryl addresses Rick’s pensive mood with a quiet “S’up, man?”.
“Just thinking. Old times, new times. Snow makes me melancholy.” Rick admits, rubbing a hand over his beard. Eventually, he drags his eyes away from the prison yard to roam over Daryl’s face instead. “I can see you’ve been doing the same.” Leave it to Rick to know what Daryl was thinking about.
“Jus’ some old ghosts.” Daryl nudges Rick’s foot with his lightly and watches a fond smile curl Rick’s lips upwards.
I swear I'm gonna live forever
Heading back to Santa Fe
Got debts to pay in Santa Fe
It's judgment day in Santa Fe