AN: I wanted to do this for a while and I finally sat down to type it out. It was sparked by the list of prompts and the thought of "meeting in prison," but it took a turn all its own.
I own nothing from the show.
I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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"Inmate 6245?"
Daryl stood up in his place, not that there was very much room for him to do anything else. He was, since terminology wasn't really set in stone these days, in something of a holding cell. That's what he considered it, at least.
The officer that had come for him was a Barney Fife character. He probably weighed, and Daryl was being generous, less than a well-grown thirteen year old boy weighed. He was tall and stringy and almost comical. If Daryl had an inclination to do anything, he could take this officer out before anyone else could stop him—bare handed.
But he didn't have an inclination to do any such thing. He might take Barney out, but there would be others that would get to him before he made any real progress toward freedom, and then the punishment would be long term enough that it would never be worth it just to know he'd taken out the human string bean.
They'd bind him again too, and Daryl most liked to avoid the bindings. He succumbed to them during routine procedures, but for the most part he'd earned a name as being docile. He was allowed to spend his days without the bindings. He could stretch his legs if he pleased—when he wasn't in holding cells or confined to some other small place for one reason or another—and he could do with his hands what he pleased as long as he didn't please putting them on an officer or another inmate in an act of violence.
As "Inmate 6245," or just 6245 when they didn't bother with the formalities, and tagged as "docile," Daryl enjoyed as much freedom as he probably ever would.
Freedom.
Sometimes Daryl thought that freedom was a concept that had been created by society to make people afraid of the opposite.
Capture. Incarceration. Confinement. Control. Prison.
At one time, every inmate had feared those things. Freedom, in itself, was a way of controlling people. Physically they were given, at least for the most part, free reign. They were given at least the illusion of self-governance. Really, though, they were being mentally controlled because their actions were always carefully policed to avoid the dreaded imprisonment.
It was keeping them under lock and key, just the same, except it required fewer people to don uniforms and keep vigilance over everyone else. People policed themselves. All in the name of freedom.
"6245?" Barney Fife asked. Daryl chewed his lip and glanced quickly around him. In the small space there were two other inmates, but neither of them flinched. One wore enough bruises to indicate that he was either a new arrival, still being tamed as such, or he was given to violence and it hadn't been beaten out of him yet. The other simply stared at the floor. There was no reason to believe, though, that either of them might have been 6245.
Daryl hummed and nodded, stifling his humor at the situation.
"6245," he repeated back. "Always been the same. Except—that one time when I was in Sesame Street Lock Up and they called me D-D-O-T. Like damn dot with a stutter."
Barney didn't look amused, but Daryl didn't really care. He wouldn't be punished for a bad sense of humor. That wasn't how it worked.
"You're being moved," Barney said, ignoring Daryl's joke entirely.
"Damn sure hope so," Daryl responded. "I'm ready to get outta this box."
Barney produced the handcuffs that Daryl dreaded. They were temporary, though, and always worn during transfers. Daryl produced his wrists and waited while the cuffs were secured. Barney yanked on the metal harder than he had to.
"Come with me," he said. Daryl nodded his compliance and started to follow the walking stringbean through the dingy halls that he'd come down earlier when he'd been notified he was up for transfer.
Transfer came around. Everyone got transferred, sooner or later. They were shuffled about so often, at least in the early days, that Daryl had lost track of where he was almost entirely. Eventually he'd stopped trying to even keep up with it. It didn't matter. The facilities, though all different, were essentially the same. What concern was it of his what the outside surroundings were like? He'd probably never see them anyway beyond the time he spent in transfer. He would die, like most everyone else that had been brought in, as 6245. When he died? They'd put a bullet through his head—assuming that wasn't the cause of his death—and they'd burn him with the rest of the unfortunates that happened to die that day.
Nobody would remember 6245 and, more than that, nobody would remember Daryl Dixon.
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Daryl tried to play the guessing game out of the bus window while he rode in silence after he woke from the sleep brought on by the rocking of the vehicle travelling down less than perfect roads. He tried to guess, every time he was transferred, where he might end up or even where he was. There was a theory, though he didn't know if it held any more truth than any other theory, that they were all being shuffled to somewhere that was like an inmate gathering place. Stop by stop. Facility by facility. They all got closer to this place. It was somewhere the government was designing for them. It was somewhere where they could be put out of sight and out of mind, no doubt.
Daryl didn't know if they were all going to the same place. He didn't know if the transfers had any sense to them or if he was moving along some kind of path, like a game piece following a board he couldn't see, or if they were all simply being shuffled because space ran out. Resources ran out. Some facilities were better equipped than others.
There was an end to the line. There always had been and there always would be. Daryl wasn't really sure, though, if how you arrived there mattered at all.
The landscape told him relatively nothing about where he might be. Mountains in the distance, at this point, could be any set of mountains. Towns were protected by high walls, mostly topped with barbed wire, and weren't visible to anyone travelling the so-called highways any longer. The walls, these days, were almost entirely unnecessary. They served, now, to keep out the wild ones that hadn't assimilated and hadn't been captured. Once, though, they'd served to keep out the dead when they took to walking about. Now, though? The only time anyone ever saw one of those wandering loose in the wild was, Daryl imagined, if some uncaptured wild-one happened to die and take to ambling about.
One dead man walking was hardly a threat to those that remembered life in the thick of it. One wasn't a threat at all for those who remembered what it was like when this whole thing started.
Daryl remembered it.
He saw the place they were headed at least twenty minutes before they got there. For the mountains in the distance, the land around him was fairly flat. The scorched landscape had either always been desert or, at any rate, it was now. It allowed for pretty decent visibility.
All the better to shoot the wild-ones down, should they escape.
Knowing better than to speak on the bus, Daryl waited until they'd stopped. The doors were opened and they were being waited for by officers that were expecting them. It had been a ride that had taken two full nights to make. They'd gone a decent distance—even if the new fuel didn't move things as fast as they might have once moved across the country.
When everyone filed out, Daryl stopped a moment and leaned toward the driver.
"You know where we are?" He asked.
The old man with tired, bloodshot eyes, looked at him.
"Do it matter?" He asked.
Daryl didn't bother responding. The man was right, really. It didn't matter. Still, Daryl had a curiosity and it wasn't likely to fade without some kind of answer. He followed the other inmates destined for a new home out of the side of the bus and looked around him, squinting at the brightness of the sun. After a moment, he felt the officer he hadn't looked at yet when he put a hand on his shoulder.
"Move it along, inmate," the man said, pushing Daryl slightly in the direction that all the others were going.
"Can you tell me?" Daryl asked quickly. "Where the hell are we?"
"Region Thirty Three," the officer replied.
Daryl took it as the only answer he'd ever get. The name of the facility. But, at least, now he knew the place he'd call home until the next time they pulled him for transfer.
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If there was such a thing as a final destination on the prison circuit, Daryl hoped it might be Region Thirty Three. He'd spent the first while there in a holding cell, alone, but it had been temporary. He'd waited patiently, despite a small bit of claustrophobia at the fact that the room, barely bigger than a broom closet, had no windows, and eventually they'd come for him.
Yes. He was inmate 6245. Formerly D-D-O-T. Formerly 6245. Formerly "Wild Tagged 43." Formerly...Daryl Dixon. Except they didn't say that part. They never did. Who had been, before he'd become wild, didn't matter. As one of the wilds, after all, he probably had no ability to even realize that he'd been anything before.
They didn't know them. Not any of them. But it didn't matter.
His identity established, and his file read, he was being moved to a "bunk" for "dociles". He was given a rucksack that held what were, now, all his belongings, and he was taken to something that reminded him of everything he'd ever thought that dorms at summer camp or college might be like—even if he'd never been to either of those places.
Region Thirty Three was large and it was divided for the "docile" and the "untamed". Daryl assumed, though he didn't ask, that there were probably other spaces of the facility that he didn't want to know about. He knew how to keep his head down. He didn't want to find out about the inner workings of every facility that he passed through. The first had been enough.
When he reached his "bunk," he was surprised to find that all the dociles had a relatively large amount of the captive freedom that they were allowed. Rather than being put, two by two like animals on the Ark, into cells, they shared something of a "common room" with each inmate having a cot to themselves and a small cabinet for their belongings.
He had been given ten minutes to "get comfortable" in his space—had failed to meet even one of his new "bunkmates" and then had been shuffled out, now unbound, to what he was told would be his supper and evening recess.
Entering into mess hall, where the smell of the food was already better than anything he'd eaten while he was wild and had his so-called freedom, Daryl saw the thing that made him most excited about Region Thirty Three.
Region Thirty Three, it seemed, was coed.
Daryl hadn't seen a woman in—it didn't even matter. He was seeing plenty of them now. More than he felt like he'd seen in his life, but then things always looked better when you hadn't seen them in a while.
One short hands-off and common space speech later and Daryl was free to roam among the other inmates. He didn't mind, much, the rules of being "hands-off" because he'd never really been "hands-on". A look but don't touch philosophy was perfect for someone like him.
He soon realized how perfect.
Daryl sat alone, at one of the fold out tables in the mess hall, and ate the food that he'd been given. He looked around him, taking in every sight available to him, but he spoke to no one. Ever since the first place he'd always had a hard time getting to know anybody. In fact, it was nothing new. He'd never been that great at just walking up and introducing himself to someone. He had no real trouble, once the ice was broken and the introductions were out of the way, maintaining something of a civil relationship with others—but he just wasn't that great at being the one to approach.
Now maybe, having been wild and all, it was even more difficult.
So, feeling unable to talk to anyone else, Daryl sat and ate with his head down most of the time. He lifted it only long enough to look around, take in a few more sights, and then he lowered it when he was dizzy with the overwhelming feeling of being surrounded by too many new people at once. His meal done, he passed in his tray and followed some of the other inmates out to the common area for "recess".
Longingly, he watched as some of the inmates—ones who had been there long enough to establish some kind of mercantile connection—smoked cigarettes that the officers lit for them. Others walked around and chatted among themselves.
But Daryl held up a wall and watched. It was what he was best at doing.
He'd just begun to move from a feeling of contentment over Region Thirty Three to an all too familiar bitterness when he was startled half out of his skin.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to scare you. I just—well—you're new here?"
Daryl looked at the woman. She was fully expecting an answer. She was pretty. Her hair was short cropped—by choice or by some other circumstance, he wasn't sure—and silver, but she didn't look old enough that he would've pegged her for "some old lady". Actually, he wouldn't have pegged her even for being as old as he was pretty sure that he was—if anyone was keeping count these days of the years.
She continued to stare, crossing her arms across her chest and shifting her weight with some impatience. Daryl realized that he'd failed to respond to her. It had been a long time since he'd been this close to a woman.
"Yeah," he said, surprised at how hoarse his own voice sounded to his ears.
"I was too, once," the woman said. She looked around like she was checking for an officer. They were allowed to talk, though, so more than likely she was either looking for someone else or was simply breaking the awkwardness between them that was probably born from Daryl's newfound inability not to stare at her. She brought her eyes back to him and gave him a quick once over. He didn't miss the head to toe "check". "You ate alone," she said. "If you don't like that? Breakfast? Look for me. You can eat with us."
"Us?" Daryl asked.
She raised her eyebrows at him.
"I have friends," she said. "I'm not—alone here. Not anymore."
Daryl started to stammer, seeking an excuse not to eat with her. It came from habit, maybe, that he'd buried deep down. He really had no reason not to eat with her. Honestly? He would like it. But the habit was there—maybe it was worse now because he'd once been wild.
But then, so had she or she wouldn't be here.
"You don't have to," she said quickly. She shrugged. "I just offered."
She turned, finding that the end of the conversation, and started to walk off. Daryl barked out a "Hey" at her. It was all that he could say. He didn't know her name and he didn't know her number. She stopped, stood still with her back to him for a moment, and then she swung around and came back to him. She tipped her head slightly to the side and returned her arms back to their position, hugging herself.
"Yeah," Daryl said. "Thanks. But—who are you?"
The woman made a humming noise.
"8294F," she said.
Daryl furrowed his brows at her.
"No," he said. "What's your name? The one you had—before you was wild?"
She looked around.
"Carol," she said.
Daryl chuckled to himself and quickly tried to correct himself when she looked a little miffed by his finding humor at his name. He shook his head.
"Funny 'cause it rhymes," he said. "I'm Daryl."
She nodded her head, the only response she gave, and then she offered him only a slight hint of a smile.
"Fine," she said. "Daryl. If you want to eat with us, just look for me."
"Yeah," Daryl said again, wishing he could find better words to string together and pass as conversation. "Yeah," he repeated, unable to stop himself. "Thanks..." he finally choked out.
"I was new once too," Carol said, offering him the small hint of a smile once more. "We all were," she added, before she turned and walked quickly away toward a large bunch of women that were being herded, Daryl assumed, toward their bunks.
He stood up from the wall, smiled to himself, and searched out his own officer in hopes that he might get a shower before he turned in tonight. He was already feeling pretty good about time to be served at Region Thirty Three.
Breakfast, it seemed, might really be the most important meal of the day.