Work Text:
"I need to hear you say you've been waitin' all night
There's orange dancin' in your eyes from bulb light
Your voice only trembles when you try to speak
Take me back to us dancin', this wood used to creak"
- Something in the Orange, Zach Bryan
It was an innocent question.
Innocent, but as the space seemed to shrink around them, and the air became thin, Daryl was surprised to find how easy the image of that night painted itself in his mind. He could smell smoke and the pungent scent of moonshine as he took a deep breath and glanced up from his bow to the girl sitting across the kitchen table from him.
Judith was looking at him expectantly, brown crayon in hand, her normally wide brown eyes beginning to narrow as she waited for an answer. If it was anyone else, he wouldn’t even dignify them with a response, but he never was very good at saying no to her. Girl was always way more perceptive than she should be at her age, and he was not prepared for the questions he could see beginning to form.
“Blue,” he said, voice rough, before looking away. Daryl used his finger to dig out a dab of the beeswax from the small tin on the table, pinching the string of the bow between his forefinger and thumb, working the wax in with practiced ease. He felt a wave of frustration with himself for getting worked up.
It was stupid- he never even considered the question before. Growing up, he didn’t have space for trivial things like deciding his “favorite color.”
He guessed he’d had some over the years, though; the color of the trees in the forest around his home. The different shades of green blurring by his vision as his feet pounded the ground below, which meant safety, either from his old man or his own thoughts.
The shade of grey the sky colors itself in the pre-dawn, when the day is just starting to lose the inky darkness of the night. For just a moment, the world is muted and calm.
He couldn’t deny that he preferred the smooth slick of ebony on his bike and matching black of his vest - the one thing from the old world he still held on to.
But when asked directly, he was instantly transported back to that night outside the shack.
Fire burning the old rotten wood brighter and hotter than the anger that had consumed him only a few hours prior. Smoke thick in the air and in his lungs, but the feeling of being able to breathe properly for the first time in his life. It had been her idea-
“We should burn it down.”
Her tinkling voice was as clear in his mind as the day she said it, and he was no stranger to the effect it had on him. Muscles tight, he shifted in his chair and hunched further over his bow, letting his hair fall and obscure his face.
Daryl had looked at her then, really looked at her. Her eyes were bright with the drink, but there was a startling clarity as her gaze bore straight past his flesh and into his soul. His instinct was to dismiss it as just another foolish whim of a young woman away from her family for the first time, but she was stripping him bare from the inside out with just one look. She wasn’t searching for a cheap thrill, she was telling him again to put it away.
If Judith noticed the sudden tension in the air, she didn’t let on. She watched him tend to his bow for a few moments before grabbing another crayon and continuing with her project. Daryl felt guilty for not giving her more, but his throat closed up and he was clenching his teeth so hard they were beginning to hurt. He refused to let the familiar frustration well up and make him show his ass to her.
“You got away from it.”
“I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“Maybe you gotta keep on reminding me sometimes.”
“No. You can’t depend on anybody for anything, right? I’ll be gone someday.”
Daryl propped his bow up against the leg of the table and reached behind him for the quiver of bolts draped over the back of the kitchen chair. Setting the tube on the table between them, he glanced over at Judith once more. She was working diligently, but sensing his eyes on her, she looked up and met his gaze with a smile. Feeling the guilty knot in his gut loosen a little, he handed her a few of the bolts.
“Wanna help check the fletchin’s?” Daryl offered, knowing she enjoyed it anytime he invited her to join him. Her smile grew a mile wide and she eagerly held her hand out for her share.
“Remember,” he said, handing her half of the bolts, “yer lookin’ for any tears or cracks. Any warpin’ in the plastic.”
“And look down the middle to make sure the vanes are evenly placed,” Judith parroted the rest of his instructions with ease, causing Daryl to smirk slightly, even with the turmoil still thundering through him. She reminded him painfully of Carl just then, always eager to assist with the weapon they deemed “cool.”
“Atta girl,” he muttered, mussing the hair on the top of her head as he stood up and strode past her, angling for the hallway. “Gotta take a leak.”
He heard her soft snort behind him but was otherwise locked in on her new task as he headed for the staircase that would take him to the bathroom upstairs. Daryl still had trouble wrapping his head around the fact that the place he laid his head at night had more than one bathroom to choose from, much less more than one floor.
Closing the door behind him, Daryl leaned his back against the grain and let his head thump against the wood, his eyes closed. He took another deep breath to attempt to clear his head of flashes of blonde hair and the surprisingly strong grip of her delicate arms around him as he sobbed his grief for their missing family.
She had been right that evening, but she had also been wrong. She would be gone one day in the near future, ripped from him a second and permanent time, her blood the last part of her he would ever feel on his skin. But she was also never completely out of frame in his mind, her presence always in his peripheral. She was still reminding him, every day.
“You gotta stay who you are, not who you were.”
Maybe she haunted him, or maybe he was just crazy. Either way, he didn’t really give a fuck if it meant he was able pretend, even for just a moment, that when he opened his eyes she would be there. That she would be standing with her middle finger up to their mistakes, their fears, their doubt, their past. If the mere thought of her would let him see her smile, to feel her touch against his stomach in joining her as they let all the bullshit go up in smoke.
He could accept hallucinations or fucking brain cancer if it meant that when he was asked by a child what his favorite color was, he could see orange and red firelight dancing in her blue eyes with stunning clarity, as if sparks had fallen into a quiet ocean.
Beth, he finally allows himself to say her name in his mind. Years later, standing with his back to a door and hiding in a bathroom, Daryl can finally admit to himself that he loved her even then. Something he didn’t believe himself to even be capable of at that time, something pure.
Something that, as he opens his eyes and uncurls his fists, seeing nothing but the white walls enclosing him in a too small, too clean space, he knows he will never have again.
“You’re gonna be the last man standing.”
Daryl doesn’t even spare himself a glance in the mirror before turning around and ripping the door open, all but falling into the hallway in search of the oxygen that had suddenly been sucked from the bathroom. He grants himself only another minute in his head before he has to get his shit together.
With that minute, he stares down the empty hall and allows himself something he never has: what if?
What if they had a chance to finish their conversation in the funeral home, where he was once again lost in a flame’s golden hues flickering in a sea of blue as she stared back at him with such openness? What if he had never let her walk back towards that bitch in the hospital? What if he had never been stupid enough to open that door in the first place? What if he had a chance to tell her that he didn’t want to be the last man standing if she wasn’t there with him?
What if, even if she didn’t feel about him the way he did her, she was downstairs with Judith twisting her hair to have a small matching braid to the one in her own hair?
The sound of a chair scraping back down in the kitchen broke him out of his spiral, and he started mentally shoving his overflowing thoughts back into their respective graves. Daryl rubbed his hands up and down his face harshly, willing his composure back. His senses returned to the present as well, the taste of moonshine on his tongue giving way to the sweetness of the beeswax he unceremoniously sucked off his fingers, the smell of smoke morphing into the venison that had been cooked for breakfast that morning.
Deciding he was as pulled together as he was going to get, Daryl started back down the stairs and into the kitchen where Judith had laid out the bolts he had given her to examine neatly on the table, along with the picture she had been coloring when she asked him his favorite color.
He sat down alone, thankful that Judith had run off and given him a few extra minutes to find his footing again. Leaning forward, he grabbed the paper she had left for him and sat back against the straight-back, turning the paper to fully see the colorful drawing.
Daryl's tentative grasp of his control slipped once again as his eyes landed on a simple campfire scene drawn neatly on the bottom of the page. Great care was given to draw the logs in the way he showed her how to stack them, flames burning bright above stacked wood, the chaotic strokes of the crayon showing the difficulty of trying to capture the movement. The forest around the campfire stood tall and proud, secluding the area with a thick green canopy of branches and leaves.
The star of the show however, was the explosion of color that was the sky. Various shades of blue blended together with care, much too beautiful to be accidental. Streaks of orange and red cut across the oceanic color of the sky like flame colored ribbon, their bright contrast ushering in the sunset.
Her eyes flashed through his mind once more, this time softer without the moonshine, but still illuminated by the soft glow of the candlelight over a dinner table. Everything Daryl didn’t understand and was too scared to put into words clogging his throat, setting aflame the same fight-or-flight response in him that he felt now. He could admit that now- the reason he got up from the table that night to try for the dog. He wasn’t scared of nothin’, but he was terrified of her and her cool blue eyes fractured with the colors of warmth.
Daryl was pulled from his thoughts by the sound of Judith’s footsteps coming back down the hallway. With a harsh bite of cheek to fully ground himself back in the present, he quickly folded the paper into a square to place in the inside pocket of his vest. He grabbed his half of the bolts just to have something in his hands, something to distract from the fact that he couldn’t escape her ghost today.
If Daryl was honest with himself though, he could admit that as painful as it was, he didn’t want to escape her. He could also admit that she was right, and it burned him from the inside out.
“You’re gonna miss me so bad when I’m gone, Daryl Dixon.”