AN: Hello everyone! As you can tell, I am somewhat new to this site. I have been an avid reader for years, but never really got a chance to write. Inspiration hit me hard when I was reading the book based on the Pearl Harbor movie and I had to just go ahead and try my hand at this. I will be changing a few things here or there in order for it to fit with our characters. I do not own Pearl Harbor by Randall Wallace or The Walking Dead or its characters. Leave me some feedback and let me know if you think I should go ahead and continue with it or not.
Daryl Dixon could still smell the sweet scent of the pine wood where Rick Grimes had bored two holes through the nail keg and run a rope between them, to tie around their waists like a seat belt. The two boys sat on that keg, its top barely bigger than a slop bucket but large enough for the narrow butts of two ten-year-olds living on the farm scraps of America's Great Depression.
But they had their own airplane.
It was a biplane, one of the first crop dusters anywhere in the south. Rick's father had bought it after the spine of its fuselage had cracked and its engine was thought to be too worn to be much use to anybody. He had cannibalized it for spare parts. Now its wings were jagged stumps of splintered wood, ripped fabric, and rusted wire; its propeller was a 2-by-4 Rick found on the farm, and its windshield sheltered a sparrow's nest. But it had once flown in the Georgia air, and now it flew farther and faster than any airship had ever flown, in the minds of two farm boys.
"They're coming in from the left!" Rick screamed, and threw his shoulder against Daryl. Rick had lean ropey arms, a tall frame and the quick eyes of a pilot. Even at the age of ten, Daryl had noticed this quality of his friend's eyes: not nervous, not twitchy, just quick.
"I see 'em!" Daryl called back, above the imaginary roar of their plane's engine, and the buzz Rick was making with his lips as he jerked the broken broomstick that controlled the maneuvers he was making through the sky in his mind.
"Get 'em Daryl!"
"I got 'em, Rick!" And his tongue tickled his teeth, unleashing a thrashing pulse of machine gun fire. Daryl loved it when Rick call him by name, called to him like a brother. Rick was the only one in life who called him Daryl. His mother had called him by it, but she had died when Daryl was four. The best thing his father ever called him was Boy. Daryl's hair was light brown, like his mother's had been, and he had her blue eyes. At least he hoped his eyes had come from her. An image of the softness of her eyes as she once looked at him, gazing at him in quiet love, blazed in his memory whenever he thought of her. But her life seemed so distant now, and he had begun to wonder if his memories were only the projections of his fantasies and he saw her as Rick saw their plane, soaring in the sky.
"He's behind us! Behind us! See him?!"
"I see him, Rick!" Daryl hollered, and twisted in his seat to fire toward the ruptured tail section of their craft. But in the plowed fields beyond, though they glowed for him in the pure joy of togetherness. Rick, he was sure, could see the Red Baron's bi-plane arcing down toward them. Rick could see everything, could really see anything he could imagine. It was the most remarkable thing about being with Rick. With Rick, there was the world everyone else could see, and then there was the world that he could see, a world where old wrecks flew, and boys were pilots, and they were brave.
The only thing Rick couldn't see was how to spell words. On the plank dashboard he'd rigged up for the planes controls, he'd chalked the letters RUDR. Daryl, winner of the King County Elementary School spelling bee the last three years running, had never been able to hear a word spoken without seeing exactly how to spell it in his mind. And Daryl didn't just see words, he heard them sing and play with each other, he heard them rhyme or clash as they bounced around in his head. Still, Daryl would have traded all his visionary gifts for Rick's. In games like dodge ball, Rick saw the ball's flight before anyone else—where it was heading; it was almost as if he could look into the future of the flight of a ricocheting ball. This made Rick the better athlete, when it came to things like batting or catching; and he has speed too, in his legs and hands as well as his eyes. Daryl's big advantage on the playground was that he could fight. When he got punched in the nose, he never cried; he hit back, and always harder than he was hit. It was because of this that their friendship was sealed.
It happened one cold November, when the sky was slate gray and the mood of their teacher was just as dark. She'd given them the assignment of writing a page about the meaning of Thanksgiving, and had then told the students to exchange papers with the classmate sitting next to them. It was a routine of hers: "Check each other's spellin'!" she'd call out, and the pages would rustle across the aisles. Daryl had always sat beside Rick; they would draw pictures of World War I air battles, and whisper, and snicker, and it was that very noise that had gotten them separated. So now it was Shane Walsh sitting beside Rick, and when Daryl saw the papers exchange, he already felt the cold in his stomach.
Daryl made his new deskmate's corrections quickly-there was only one mispunctuation, and Daryl picked it up instantly—then looked in sick fear at Rick's face. Rick had no idea what was wrong or right with Shane's paper—but that was not the danger. Shane frowned down at Rick's paper, then smiled, and began drawing circles around words with his red crayon, and then before Daryl or anyone could do anything about it, Shane held the paper up high and laughed and called to the class, "Lookey here at how smart Rick is!" The paper was covered in red—but it was not as red as the humiliation on Rick's face. The teacher had said sharply, "Give that paper back to Rick, Shane!" and she left it at that.
But Daryl hadn't. At recess he raced out of the schoolhouse door, ran like a bullet at Shane, slammed his forehead into Shane's nose, then fell across his chest and punched him until they pulled him off, though Daryl broke away twice to punch and kick him again.
That fight had marked Daryl's public life in a way nothing had before. He and Rick were more than friends; they were brothers.
The boys paused in their game as the sounds of the real plane above them changed, growing louder and higher in pitch as the plane descended over a field lush with young plants. In the cockpit was Rick's father, a Baptist deacon who raised his own crops, fixed anything devised by man, and turned other people's junk into useful machinery.. The plane he was diving earthward in at that very moment was a crop-duster he had assembled from parts culled from a dump outside a nearby military base, combined with those he had stripped from the wreck Rick and Daryl played in. He had painted the plane a ruby red, and its wings and spinning propeller flashed sunlight as it rushed a few feet about the plowed ground, released a trail of crop spray and climbed again, up into a crystalline blue sky.
Daryl watched and thought how beautiful it was. Like Heaven were the words that came into his mind. Then for some reason he did not yet understand, Volunteer State sang after them. It would be years before he would write the line, in describing his home: "…Maybe it's not Heaven; it's just Georgia. But for as long as there's been an America, men have fought and died for this place—as volunteers." Then he would comprehend where the urge to express himself on paper had come from; now he looked at life, and peace, and felt its joy.
Rick pressed beside him on the same nail keg seat, watched the plane dip again, release a blossoming trail of soft spray, then pop higher as his father pushed the foot control and the elevator flaps on the tail section bit the air, and Rick felt it. Rick felt everything. To Rick Grimes, the world was an endless source of living stimulus, and he lived connected to it through the sensations of his heart. Movement, sound, sight, smell, all affected his emotions.
He was not thought of as an emotional boy; feeling early on- -Rick's way of knowing—that most people did not experience life as vividly as he did, he learned to keep his intensity to himself, Most people thought of him as quiet and inward. But to those with whom Rick felt a real kinship—the ones whose spirit had a glow, a scent like fresh bread, a taste like cool spring water—Rick was a volcano of life.
Rick's heart locked onto those people, and stayed.
He knew he and Daryl would be friends for life. Their differences, like Daryl's abilities with words, were not barriers; Rick saw beyond the fact that written words made sense to Daryl and were so confusing to him. And Daryl was always ready to enter the world of imagination that two Georgia boys could find on a spring day.
"Bandits at 2 o'clock!" Rick yelled.
"Power dive!" Daryl responded. And together they buzzed their lips in a flying noise and worked the controls, Rick's bare feet on one pedal, Daryl's on the other. The barn beside them, unpainted except for the hand lettering that said "Grimes Crop dusting," remain firmly in its place, so the boys had to stare at the control cages chalked on their makeshift dashboard to see the world spin and dip around them. In their minds their overalls had become flight jackets, and their bowl cut hair was covered with leather helmets, the very gear for wearing when saving America from the aggression of the German Kaiser. Daryl held his fists in front of his face and spat machine gun sounds, then blew an explosion through his cheeks.
"Good shooting, Daryl!"
"Good flying, Rick!"
"Land of the free…" Rick said, in holy conviction.
"Home of the brave," Daryl returned, as if he said amen.
But before they could turn their dreams to confront another challenge against the safety of democracy, a man's hand closed around the straps of Daryl's overalls and snatched him from the cockpit.
Surprised as Daryl was, he knew it before he saw: it was his father's hand, strong, battered, dirty, the way the hand of a man with but a single arm so quickly becomes. Will Dixon, Daryl's daddy, was a veteran of World War I, and had left one of his arms in the Argonne Forest and had brought back lungs scorched with mustard gas, so he was not a man inclined to be sensitive to the concerns of those whose bodies were whole. He dropped Daryl onto his feet, and let him go, just long enough to snatch him by the front of his shirt, lifting him half off his feet again, and shaking him. "You no count, boy! Horvath come lookin', said he'd pay a dime for you to shovel his pig shed, and I can't find you no place. I done told you, you spend time with this stupid boy can't even read, you ain't never gonna amount to nothin'!"
With all the shame and fear that burned in Daryl at the moment, what came from his mouth was, "He's not stupid, Da—"
Before he could finish the word Daddy, his father had slapped him off his feet.
Rick, who had been smacked on the bottom by his father's hand and had even been switched once for having let his father hear him swear, but had never seen a grown man slap a child in the face, much less hit him so hard as to knock him to the ground, was so horrified he couldn't get a sound out. Daryl was not even surprised. But when his father snatched him up again, twisting the overall straps so tight they choked him, Daryl struggled. It did no good; his father began marching across the plowed field, dragging Daryl as he went.
"Da—" Daryl gasped. "Daddy—"
But Will Dixon's fury made him blind to what he was doing—until something hard cracked across his back with such force that his arm went limp and he fell with his face between the furrows. He'd been hit at the top of the spine, where the neck and shoulders meet in the back, and the impact had caused his mind to flash white for a moment, and then go black. The world swayed like a porch swing, and then Dixon pitched over, turning belly up, and his eyes found what had hit him. The 2-by-4 propeller, in the hands of Rick Grimes.
Rick held the board like a baseball bat, cocked, ready to swing again. "Let him alone!" Rick shouted.
Dixon's eyes bulged in rage; he staggered to his feet. And Daryl was screaming, "Rick… Daddy… No!"
Daryl's father had not shaved since the last time Daryl had seen him, which was three days before. There were scratches on his face, the blood dried over, like he'd stumbled into a barbed wire fence sometime during his absence. His eyes were bloodshot, he stank of vomit, and he looked murderous. None of that scared Rick, if he really saw it at all. All Rick really seemed aware of at the moment was Daryl's vulnerability, and the plank in his own hand. Rick drew the plank back further and hissed, like an oath, "I'll bust you open, you… German!"
The words rang something deep in Will Dixon's broken brain. He froze. He blinked like a calf. And then he began to cough, in sick ugly convulsions, an old soldier broken by trench warfare, stress, cigarettes, and booze—ruined lungs and a ruined life. He finally gasped enough breath to choke out, "I fought the Germans."
His eyes found his son, and it registered in them what he had just done. His mouth moved a moment, then formed words. "Daryl, I…"
The words ran out on him. He turned and staggered away. Daryl looked at Rick with a communication deeper than blood, then ran off after his father. "Daddy! Daddy! Wait."
Daryl caught up with him, took his father's hand, and walked away with him, gripping his fingers in forgiveness. Behind Rick, Tommy Grimes rolled his plane to a stop and shut down the engine. Rick heard the silence more than he had heard the motor's sound, and only then glanced back, to see his father frowning at Daryl and Will Dixon, receding across his field. "What's goin' on, son?" Rick's dad asked.
"Nothing," Rick answered. "Daryl's dad just come to get him." Rick turned his back to the ramshackle plane and replaced the 2x4 propeller. But his daddy was still looking toward Daryl and his father, walking away. After a moment, Tommy spoke. "Hey boy," he said, "you wanna go up?"
Rick's eyes lightened in delight, and he ran to the place, hopping up on the wing and scrambling into his father's lap. "Hey Daddy," he said, as his father reclipped the seatbelt around them both, "will you take Daryl up sometime?"
"Sure will, son."
As his father restarted the hot engine and pressed it forward in a rolling turn, Rick looked out toward Daryl's back as he walked away, and Rick understood with absolute clarity that for as long as Rick lived, nothing would ever hurt Daryl Dixon unless it went through Rick first.