AN: This was one that I wanted to do. It's the celebrity/fan prompt.
I own nothing from the show.
I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Book Addict.
Those were two words that most people who knew Daryl Dixon would never associate with him. Most people who met Daryl probably assumed that he couldn't read at all. They probably thought, no matter how wrong and fueled by negative stereotypes, that he'd never cracked any cover beyond that of a school primer.
Part of that view of him was where he came from. Part of that view was because of who he was and how he filled the work hours of his days to make the money that put food on his table and roof over his head. Part of that was because of how he presented himself.
He was well aware of how he presented himself. The presentation, after all, was strategic. Daryl knew about knowing his audience. He worked long hours at a shop with other men that didn't read anything more than what they could cover from the paper while they took a dump—and most of that consisted of the comics that came on the back page. The people that came to the shop to shoot the shit and would bring in a lot of money fixing up cars that had long been put out to pasture were other men that didn't spend much time discussing the books they read—if in fact they ever read any—and they weren't interested in talking about what might be on Daryl's bedside table. They wanted to talk about the women in the tool calendars. They wanted to talk about this broad or that one what come through town. They didn't wanted to assume that the thing that kept Daryl up late at night was not a book.
Even the people who shook hands with Daryl and exchanged paperwork and checks didn't really want to think that he read. Their interest in him didn't extend that far. It didn't go any farther than what he could do to get them back on the road as soon as possible. They thought his smarts started and ended with tools they couldn't even call by name.
Daryl corrected none of them.
The truth was that he hadn't been much of a reader for most of his life. He liked reading magazines, especially ones that might give him ideas for all the dream cars he might build when he came into the money that he always imagined he'd one day make, but he didn't really care for books. They were too long. They didn't have pictures. The stories in them were too far removed from real life—at least from his real life.
He'd never found, in a single page of any book that he'd ever picked up, one single thing that he could relate to. Books had always simply been a waste of time.
That was what he thought, right up until he'd read the first one by her.
Daryl had come across her first book by accident. He'd found it in one of the cars that he'd been cleaning out before it was sold to junk. The book, along with a slew of other items, went into a cardboard box for sorting. Anyone who wanted anything out of the box took it, no questions asked, and the collection of junk replenished itself with every new scrap car that passed through there.
The book remained in the box, though, through at least two or three different loads. Daryl watched it, simply out of curiosity, to see how long it would take before anyone claimed it as their new possession. The book outlasted three broken umbrellas, a travel coffee cup with no lid, at least a hundred ink pens without caps, two tape measures, one package of unusual sized windshield wiper blades, three kids' meal toys, and one shoe whose mate had gone on to a different life with its original owner.
All the junk, it seemed, could find a home—except the book.
One day, in a rushed effort to find some last minute entertainment to fill a few idle minutes on the john, Daryl had snatched the book up. He figured, in the time that he had, he might cover two or three pages—just enough to declare the book good for nothing more than kindling. But what had happened was quite different.
Inside the pages of the book—pages that he read quickly and easily because the person who spoke didn't seem to need to weave the most complicated tale ever told—Daryl found the first person in a book that he could relate to. He found the first person that he felt like he knew.
She was a young girl—and Daryl had never been one of those—but she lived in a town like the town that he grew up in. It was the town that he lived in still. A one stoplight kind of place—though now it had expanded to have quite a few more than the boy from his childhood could recall. The town in the book had one general store—the only kind to have—and it was filled with people.
People that Daryl felt like he knew. He'd met them before. They'd served him coffee, made his sandwiches, and spat tobacco juice on the ground outside the gas station while making small talk with him about the weather and the size of the mosquitos this year.
The girl lived in a house, not entirely unlike the one that Daryl had lived in, so that Daryl could bring up his old home in his memory and walk the halls with her. He could smell the musty smell of old paint, worn carpet, and stale cigarette smoke. He could, with her, remember the buzzing sound of the first window unit that they ever had and he could recall what it felt like to stand close to the grates of the old floor furnace—a pot of water steaming nearby to keep the air damp in the winter—and feel the blast of heat that came out of it like it was the boiling hot gateway to hell that kept them from freezing.
He'd rescued the book from the box and he'd taken it home with him. He'd read it three times over before he wanted more. He wanted more of the feeling that the book gave him—a memory, but a better memory than he'd ever had on his own, of life.
He'd ventured to the book store in town. Immediately he'd been helped, even if the young man was looking at him like he doubted Daryl could read, and he'd soon found out that there were more books. There were four more books. All by her. All portraits of life like he wanted them to be. All waiting for him.
He'd bought them all at once and certainly spent the largest sum of money that he'd ever doled out for books. And he'd read them all. Two, three, even four times for the ones that were his favorites.
But soon? They weren't enough. They just weren't enough. There were things that needed to be told. There were stories to hear. He could imagine them, just barely, when he worked. He could almost hear the voice in his mind reading them out loud to him. There were things that absolutely needed to be said and he wanted to hear all of them read clearly by that voice—her voice inside his head. He could think them, but she could tell him how to think about them better. She could tell him how to think about them in ways that he'd simply never imagined thinking about them before.
So he'd returned to the same bookstore and he'd found the same guy working there. This time, for whatever reason? The guy had remembered him. He'd welcomed Daryl back. He'd asked him how he liked the books. He'd wanted to talk to them, but all Daryl could really think about was finding out where the rest of them were.
The feeling that he'd felt, when the guy told him that there were no more, was something new to him. He'd been disappointed in his life before. Really, most of his life had been one disappointment after another, but this was a different kind of disappointment.
He'd found something he liked. He'd found something that made him happy and warm in an odd sort of way, and now he was finding out that it was simply gone. There wasn't any more. He'd have to be happy with what he had because there was nothing more to give him.
He hadn't wanted to hear about other books. He didn't want to know that there was this author or that author that sounded a lot like her. He didn't want to know that this person or that person put out books that were similar stories. He didn't want to hear any of it. None of the books he was going to be offered were going to be her books. None of them were going to have her voice. None of them would sound just the same in his head.
The only thing that he'd gotten, as something of a condolence prize from that trip to the bookstore, was the information that she had an upcoming book. It was at some kind of printer place or something and they would release it like they did the movies. Daryl knew people that liked to wait outside the movie theaters for some film or another. He never cared enough about any of them to wait outside—especially if there was more than one or two other people waiting—but he knew that people did. And her new book? When it came out, it would come out the same kind of way. One day it wouldn't be there, and the next they'd open up all the boxes and they'd fill the special shelf with them for anyone who wanted it—or anyone who didn't know her voice yet and maybe wanted to hear it for the first time.
The more that Daryl thought about it, after leaving that day, the more that he'd worried about it. The bookstore in town was small. Any of the books they had on the shelves were in small, tight little bunches. One copy was stacked in front of another, face up, until the thickest of the stacks were four books high.
Four books. Four copies. That was it. If there were none in the back? There were only four chances to get the book before it was gone and there was no telling how long it might be before there were more of them.
So he'd gotten the phone book and he'd called a bookstore at the main city an hour away. He usually only went there for things that couldn't be bought in town—like when he needed a good pair of pants because someone died and he should pay his respects or when his work boots wore out and he needed another pair to last as many years—so he was sure that they would have more than four of the books.
They promised him that they would have far more than four of them. They would have, as they described it, even more than four boxes of them. They were having a very special event. The woman that wrote the stories, it turned out, was a local woman of sorts. She'd been born and raised not two small towns from Daryl. She was going to be there that day, signing the books that people bought, and spending a few minutes chatting with each of them. It didn't cost a thing, from what Daryl understood, to do all that—just the cost of the book. And certainly, if he paid the money and did all the rest, he got the book. There weren't any tricks and there weren't any strings.
So Daryl—uncomfortable with a crowd this big, even if it was only twenty people—had taken a personal day and had cleaned himself up. He didn't know what he was supposed to look like to get the new book and get a signature sprawled on it by her, but he wanted her to have a decent first impression. After all, he'd been hearing her voice in his head for some time now, he might as well look decent in her eyes. He'd gotten to the bookstore at the time that the man on the phone had told him that things started and he'd stood, his money ready in his pocket in case there was some kind of rush or some kind of race and competition, in line with the other twenty or so people.
They were let in the door and some of them went in different directions. Daryl, however, didn't lose track of why he was there. There was a large wooden table, set up just to the side at the front of the bookstore, and the brand new book—with enough copies for all of them—were displayed. At the table, smiling, was a woman.
It was her.
Daryl had never seen her before. There weren't any pictures of her. The backs of her books told the story that she lived a quiet life, alone with her pets, and it suggested that she didn't do much else than write the books that he read and live a life that would fill up more books. There weren't any pictures, though, on any of the books. He'd had no real expectation of what she might look like, but still he hadn't expected her to look like she did.
She just looked normal. She didn't look like he guessed someone who wrote books that he liked so much would look like. She didn't look special and she wasn't wearing anything particularly refined. Honestly, Daryl was as well-dressed for the occasion as she was. She was pretty and smiling and she laughed when the few people in front of Daryl shook her hand, but there was nothing about her that made her the woman that he might have imagined she would be—she wasn't a super hero and she didn't look much like a celebrity. She simply looked—nice and normal.
The normality of her, though, didn't stop Daryl from being nervous when he got to the table. He had no idea what to say and anything he might have thought about saying on the way to the store had left him. He was caught up in the anxiety of meeting her, whose voice had lived in his head for so long, and in the anticipation of getting his hands on the book that he'd been waiting for since he'd gone searching it out months before.
When he stepped up to the table, he reached for one of the copies just as she reached for another copy. He started to hand her the one that he'd picked up, but then he was embarrassed at his delayed notice that she seemed to have her own supply and the one that he'd taken was just for them to look at.
He stammered out an apology, attempted to put the back on the display where he'd picked it up from, and only succeeded in tumbling a few of the copies to the floor. Mortified, for a moment he could only look at them, lying there on the floor, and think that he'd made the worst mistake of his life coming here to get the book—he'd have done much better to simply slip the guy back home a five dollar bill and ask him to hide a copy behind one of the dictionaries or some other book that nobody would ever read.
"It's OK," she said. "There are tons more. They're everywhere. What's your name?"
Daryl looked at her then. It was the first time that he actually heard the voice that had been the one inside his head. Outside of his mind, it was very different. Outside of his mind, it was soft and sweet and had a somewhat musical tone to it.
She smiled at him when he looked at her, and he realized that she wasn't very normal at all. She was beautiful. She was beautiful—and he already felt like he knew her. He already felt like she knew him.
He smiled at her as best he could around his embarrassment. He glanced, out of the corner of his eye, as someone came to pick up the books he'd tumbled to the floor so that they could be well-arranged again.
"Daryl," he said. "Daryl Dixon..."
Her smile renewed and she started to write in the book that she was holding pinned to the table. She scrawled his name out there and then looked back at him.
"Have you...is this the first one you've read?" She asked, furrowing her brow like she was trying to read something more about him. Daryl hadn't prepared, really, to talk about himself. He didn't have much to say to someone like her—someone who already knew how to say anything he might want to say except that it would come out better.
He cleared his throat and shook his head.
"Read all of 'em," he said. "Some two or three times. There's one? The—uh—the one where there's the real long part about the church picnic? Read that one four times."
She raised her eyebrows and then she smiled, her cheeks tinging slightly pink.
"Wow! Four times?" She asked.
Daryl felt a little embarrassed again, but he nodded.
"What's this one about?" He asked, furrowing his brows back at her. "Because—I don't know if you was thinking about it, but I don't think you was really done with that one—because it coulda gone on and you didn't even say nothing about the whole thing when Jenny got married. You just said she got married and that's—I mean I liked it but that ain't really no kinda way to end no story."
She looked a little taken aback for a moment and Daryl saw her look around him. He followed her eyes and looked at the people behind him. There were five or so people standing there with their arms crossed across their chests. Daryl mumbled out an apology to them, just in an attempt at being polite, but he really wasn't sorry. He'd was going to pay his money, just the same as they were, and he was going to read the book.
He'd probably read it more than them. He'd probably enjoy it more than them. He was almost certain he'd anticipated it more than them.
He was going to have his minutes.
He turned back to look at her. She was sitting there, pen suspended over the book, and she smiled at him again when she noticed him looking at her.
"I might write a sequel," she said. "That was...In the Deepest Winter? I might write a sequel to that one. Another book?"
"Rest of the story?" Daryl asked.
She nodded.
He hummed and nodded his satisfaction at the plan.
She cleared her throat and started to write in the book. She stalled over the words enough that he was beginning to realize why it took her so long to get the new book out when he wanted it. Apparently it didn't come too fast to say the things that he wanted her to say.
He reached in his pocket and pulled out the piece of paper that he'd brought with him. He'd scratched it out at the kitchen table, and it wasn't much to compare to what she wrote in the books, but it was something he'd jotted down for her. He stuck the paper between her face and the book, pinched between his fingers, and he waved it back and forth to get her attention with it.
She stopped the labored writing, looked at him with question, and he wagged the paper back and forth again.
"What's this?" She asked, renewing the smile that kept changing its qualities and accepting the folded scrap.
"Nothin' much," Daryl said. "Just—some things I was thinking you might want to write in there somewhere. I didn't say them very good—but-you know. Just—if you was looking for something else that you mighta forgot to say. I just—sorry. I just jotted 'em down. Just—things I'd thought you might could say."
She unfolded the paper, looked at it a moment, refolded it in his creases, and put it on the table next to her. She smiled at him again, offered him a soft thanks, and then returned to scrawling in the book. Whatever he'd said must have worked the way that he wanted it to, because she wrote quickly this time. When she was done, she held the book up, read back what she'd written in her own head, and then she pursed her lips and blew on the pages.
Daryl caught himself watching that closely enough that he shifted with his own discomfort in the moment.
Satisfied the ink was dry, the woman passed him the book.
"Thank you, Daryl," she said.
He looked at the cover, but he didn't crack it open.
"Thank you, Ms. McAlister," Daryl said.
She extended a hand to him and he took it and shook it. Later he would think that he should've shaken a soft hand like that more delicately—not like he was sealing a deal.
"Carol," she said, before she offered him one last smile and turned to the person that was waiting behind him.
Daryl smiled at her, not sure that she'd even seen it, and mumbled his goodbye. He took the book to the counter, paid for it like he would any other, and then he walked toward the coffee shop inside the store. He had a day to kill, he'd skipped his morning coffee, and the smell of it was drawing him in. He might as well drink a cup and start the book. It might even be better if he read it with her sitting a few feet away, catching snatches of her voice every now and again, while he could still remember what she should sound like with her words rolling around inside of his mind.
When his coffee was paid for and a seat was selected—private enough he wouldn't be bothered by anyone else, but close enough to the interior of the bookstore that he could still see the side of her if he looked in that direction, Daryl cracked open the book and focused on reading what she'd scribbled on the inside of the cover—his very own, special message just from her.
Daryl Dixon,
I'd love to hear more of what you have to say. Though it's easy to see that you don't give yourself credit, I think you've probably got quite a bit that the world would like to hear. If not the world, I certainly would. The table closes at two if you're free for lunch. I think your suggestions might be easier to follow in person. If you're not there, I'll read your list alone—three or four times.
Carol
Daryl glanced back toward the table, but she was occupied. He smiled to himself, struck to a point that he almost couldn't fully swallow or take in the air that he was breathing fine before.
He glanced at his watch, reread the words in the cover at least two more times—just as he did with anything that she wrote, and he turned the pages to find the first chapter. He had a few hours to kill. He could at least get through a few chapters before two.