Chapter Text
It was the blonde hair that Daryl saw first. The girl wheeled around, moving constantly to keep each and every single man in her field of vision, just fast enough that he couldn’t get a good read on her face properly. For an awful moment he thought it was Beth; Beth with her white-blonde hair knotted back into a braid, Beth holding onto a knife so tight it turned her knuckles colourless.
But the girl wasn’t Beth. Daryl felt his stomach sink with disappointment. Just a touch shorter, freckles all up her arms. Not Beth at all. He had lost her in the same way he lost all children; a constant agony that couldn’t be denied. As hard as he fought to do no harm, Daryl couldn't deny his nature. Failure was in his upbringing and it had left a mark on his bones. That's why he was feeling like one of those shitty burned out houses, the kind with so much potential and yet barely still standing, walls gutted up from some previous tragedy. He saw houses like that occasionally from the road and always had to push to keep on walking, unable to stop and wonder what could have been. Everything around them now was in a fine state of decay, going until just the roots were left. A couple more years like this and nothing would be recognizable at all.
Nothing to show that they ever really existed at all.
That girl started to turn around again. Joe had whistled sharply, immediately catching her attention, and she quickly threw him a miserable glance, recognizing him as the leader to whatever this was. Daryl now dropped back a little, circling on the edge of the group.
Watching. Waiting. His moment, he tried to think, could come at any moment. Patience was always his best virtue.
“Well, you’re looking just a tad bit lost, darling. What’d you do? Wander off the beaten path?” Joe gave her a smile, his teeth invisible behind the lips that pressed together tight. Danger partially secreted away. But judging by the set of her shoulders, she was capable of reading it for what it was just fine. “Take a wrong turn once or twice?”
The woods were looking appealing. Best case scenario was right now, using this stranger for a distraction, stealing some distance while they were preoccupied by their sport. The advantage was cruel, but Daryl was limited for options.
“Put your hands up. We’re gonna be here for a spell, might as well keep those hands where can see ‘em.”
A hopeless fight. Joe was always honest. Daryl had figured that out from his own introduction to the men on the road. He looked dangerous and usually something that looked dangerous was deadly enough. Joe didn’t make any effort to hide that quality. His boots inched forward and he loomed over her, close enough that she edged back a little, automatically spacing herself closer to where Len was waiting.
Just like coyotes ripping apart something young and soft, hungry enough to eat the bones and lick all the blood up clean. The air was getting a touch cool and this was the kind of company Daryl had fallen in with, opting to settle in with Joe’s men and tough out the coming change in season. He breathed deeply and tried to push away the knowing, that Len was vibrating with anticipation.
Carol had always gotten a touch short in patience whenever a storm was coming in. Somehow she had a gift for tasting the ozone before the whole thing touched down, knowing just when to push for cover and avoid the worst of the downfall. Daryl could read a different sort of storm. Hunting was fine enough, but he knew most of the men here had been angling for a softer kind of game. Nothing but a few walkers had come up out of the brush in the last few days and now a girl was right in the middle of things.
Once there had been feral cats living around the trailer park and he left them a bowl of food out. They gorged the whole thing down immediately and died from that. Absence of something always made the heart grow fonder and wasn't that true to the appetite of a person?
The girl was muttering something that Daryl couldn't properly make out. He was right on the edge of the group, lingering on the sidelines. For the last two days he had been inching a little more away, settling himself just a tiny bit further from their oily little fires to avoid immediate notice when he finally ducked off on his own. Never tried starting conversation with a single one of them, kept his silence during terse exchanges. They weren't going to offer him anything good and he knew perfectly well that they had nothing worth having.
But those men were perfect trackers and hunters, Joe's band of men, and they were sure to come after him. A whole team capable of seeking prey out in tandem. That's what Daryl had learned when he hung back to observe them, Joe picking up the first set of tracks that vanished somewhere in the underbrush for Billy to figure out the next fragment of, men practically scriptwriters to the backwoods they were in.
Mother Nature thinks she’s smart, but she’s got a code. Just gotta decipher what she’s saying, Merle would always say. That’s all trail reading is. Left is left, right is right. Anything with a pulse is gonna cause a disturbance.
It would be smart to go. And he could. Right now was a chance.
His feet didn’t move. Later, Daryl told himself. The afternoon sky is burning up around them. Logically he didn’t want to take off under the sun. A blind man only had to run just a little faster than his equally blinded-chasers. Later, he told himself, very tired. Refused to acknowledge the sentimentality coursing through his veins, tried very hard to stop thinking about Beth or—
No. Daryl shut his eyes. He didn’t want to be with these people. They weren’t his.
That ridiculous Officer Sunshine who had given Daryl such unfair standards for the company he kept with. That someone decent like Dale or Lori would be recoiling right now, horrified by each one of these men. Or even Hershel, the memory of the man feeling like a stab to the chest, what he might think if he knew that Daryl lost his daughter and ended up settling right in with people like this.
Somehow the world went and ended and he had known better people because of it. Even managed to get a little piece of who he used to be back.
But these dogs...
They weren't his and they didn't measure up to that standard that had already been set. Daryl was still looking backwards to what they had back at the prison, all the work they put into making into some place real. Joe's people would have seen it as a stack of cards to knock down. That's what they did, after all. Took whatever had value, teeth snapping as the insults flew back and forth, half tamed and half wild. They were straining on very short leashes, Joe barely willing enough to hold them back. Daryl had people, a shell of something good, and they would never fit inside that space.
Dan stepping forwards had the girl twisting away. That was a smart move, Daryl considered bleakly, steering clear of that particular man. He was open about his preferences, practically broadcasting the reading material he kept in the bottom of his bag without even the slightest bit of shame. The knowing of it had Daryl blinking away shades of red whenever he saw him thumbing that magazine open.
She looked downwards. That was her best shot of avoiding direct confrontation, but it wasn't going to work. This was an awful game and they would keep going until it wasn't just leftover rainwater pooling on the ground here. He scanned her over quickly, already looking for their best opportunity to stop this, and saw her in bits and pieces; jeans and a shirt, sleeves rolled up, a patch of fabric knotted around her wrist, some pretty scrap of something with a floral pattern on it. Daryl drew a little closer, feet apparently responding now, and the men hardly noticed as he slinked into their numbers, no longer holding separate but with them. Kept looking at the girl and seeing nothing but the blood stains on her jeans, a smattering of freckles—
Freckles like his daughter had on the backs of her hands and across her face. Familiar to him, just like the blonde hair was. There was a photo in his pocket worn from handling and those blue eyes were the same, a perfect match to his brother’s eyes. The girl was standing and breathing in front of him, the girl who should’ve been dead, the girl who was supposed to be dead and gone, a name with no real burial site, something he lost not just once but twice…
“Claimed.”
His voice was a dark, unrecognizable thing. It matched the filthy word. His hands were suddenly shaking. Some of the men swung around to look at him when he stalked through to grab her by the wrist, squeezing his fingers around that bit of fabric. Warm, though. Alive. Daryl had gotten pissed, once, when she took pen and drew lines to connect the freckles on her wrist, talking loud and fast at her while he scrubbed the ink off with a bar of soap. It was hours after Merle showed up drunk and laughing at him for being an asshole that she explained she was just trying to make the lines show up, confused why his arms had tattoos and she didn’t have any. Why had he been so angry over something so stupid? Daryl had forgotten that patch of temper, but looking at the freckles brought it all back at once. “I said she was claimed,” Daryl warned Len immediately, reading that interest flaring up. Best to keep it separate from this. He jerked her back half a step and she tried to hit him, spooked and wild with the tight grip he had on her wrist.
You're gonna break her damn wrist, Merle's voice taunted him. What'll you do then?
Dead. She was supposed to be dead. Everyone was dead and gone. How the hell could she have made it to be standing in the middle of the woods, caught in this trap? Daryl needed to figure some way out.
“Look at that. I told y’all that Dixon here has a thing for the youngens. Little fresh meat for the table, huh?” Len crowed right back at him, smiling from ear to ear. This pleased him, clearly, that they were playing the same sport. He had the same expression that Glenn had whenever Daryl obliged him by playing a round of cards late at night, stuck for options on entertainment.
He split his focus between Joe and the rest. All the men were threats, but he needed to slot each one into their proper categories. “You said all I had to do was say ‘claimed’, right? That’s the bullshit you all keep with?”
Joe considered him lazily, just like the cat that had gotten the satisfaction of everything it ever wanted. “Those the rules out here.”
Daryl hated it. Maybe his people made him weak, Carol stealing his clothes to scrub clean properly or Glenn tossing a bottle of clean drinking water his way for no reason at all, the bits of kindness that kept adding up. They would’ve cut the skins off their own backs to hand over. It wasn’t like this. And now Daryl was speaking Joe’s language, playing their game with their rules, saying whatever it took to get a clean path out.
She stared up at him. Didn’t look any less scared. A sick, horrible thought burst through his mind within a second. Maybe she thought he was just like any of the other men around her. Her face was bloodless. Zero trust. Recognition on her face looked a lot like horror. He brushed off her next attempt at hitting him and couldn't quite bring himself to fault her for it.
The last time she ever saw him properly was when he left that hospital with her waiting for him to come back.
Oh, his heart stung. I made you.
And then, wearily rational: I’m going to have to watch you die.