Author's Note: I'll be perfectly honest and say that I have no concept of time when it comes to how long the course of season 2 was supposed to have been. I don't know if it was supposed to have been a couple of weeks or a month or more, which is why Jules addressed the issue in Part One. Anyway, the plot bunnies like Jules, so here's another semi-shortie with her in it. Hope you enjoy!
Jules Greene liked to consider herself a normal southern woman. She had the warm, welcoming personality of someone who'd been raised in a small town, she went to church most Sundays, and she rarely used bad language around people older than her. She'd always struggled some with that last one, but she was only human, after all.
She had struggled with it a few days ago, as a matter of fact, as her uncle paced his small office and read her the Riot Act for getting involved with one of the strangers who had tumbled onto the property a while back. From what Maggie'd told her, Hershel wasn't all that keen on people from the Greene household mixing with the others and he'd called Jules into his office to 'discuss' her relationship, such as it was. He'd immediately gone off on a tangent about sin and danger and blah blah blah. Jules stopped listening about forty-five seconds into it.
"Are you even listening to me, Juila Elaine?"
Jules snapped her eyes from the carpet and looked at her uncle, eyebrows raised. "Absolutely." His scowl deepened and he leaned over his desk, bracing his palms on the surface. She took a deep breath. "Okay, no. Not really."
Hershel shook his head. "I know you think I'm just being a ridiculous old man, but those people are dangerous. That friend of yours is probably the most dangerous of the lot. They don't believe the same as us. They've killed people."
"All due respect, Uncle Hersh, they haven't killed anybody who wasn't already dead."
He slammed his hand sharply down onto the desk. "Enough! The dead do not walk, Julia. You know that as well as I do. Those people are sick, and that group out there—"
"I told you what I've seen!" Jules interrupted. "I told you what I saw the day my parents—"
"The fact of the matter is this," Hershel said, cutting her off with a curt wave of his hand. "While you're in my house, you abide my rules. You keep away from that man."
"It's not happening, Hershel." Jules stared at her uncle, chin lifted, jaw set defiantly. "I'm not a little kid you can boss around and I sure as hell ain't your daughter. You wanna follow Beth and Jimmy around all day long trying to make sure she doesn't give up her carnal treasure, that's your prerogative. Even Maggie—she's an adult, but she's yours, so if you want to take on that fight it is within your right. But I'm just barely on the green side of thirty, so I'll be damned if I give up what little bit of normalcy and intimacy I have just to appease you and your prejudices."
"Normalcy? You think that boy is normal?" Hershel demanded. "You think drinking and killing and taking advantage of emotionally vulnerable girls is normal? Lord, Julia, the man is nearly twice your age!"
Jules rolled her eyes and shook her head, waving her hands in front of her. "I'm not talking about this with you anymore. If you want me to, I'll move out to a tent. Otherwise, you might as well put it outta your head. I'm a grown woman, Uncle Hersh," she added, trying to take some of the sting from her voice. "I can make my own choices." She turned and started for the door, stopping when Hershel spoke again.
"You might not be my daughter, girl, but you're my blood. Think about what your daddy'd say about you going around doing all kinds of things with that man."
"His name's Daryl, Hershel." She looked over her shoulder, her eyes cold and her face impassive. "And what my daddy would or wouldn't say is a rather moot point, wouldn't you say?" She left the office and slammed the door behind her.
Jules sighed as she remembered the argument, plunging her hands into the cool water that she was using to wash some t-shirts. Hershel hadn't asked her to move out of the house, thankfully, but it was nice out so she figured she would use it to her advantage and do some laundry.
She'd been with Daryl nearly every night since their talk in the woods, either in her bed or his, but he refused to sleep inside with her and insisted that she not sleep in his crappy tent. She suspected deep down that he was doing it as some sort of unconscious, good ol' boy respect thing. Still, she'd like to wake up next to him in a real bed at least once. She smiled at that notion, knowing that if she ever mentioned it to him that he would get all surly and probably say something assy.
She wrung the water out of the last shirt and flapped it out before hanging it on the line. She gathered her basket and headed for Daryl's tent, which was set a little ways out away from everybody else. She'd given him a few shirts that had practically taken an act of Congress to get him to accept, so she figured the least she could do was try to keep them from smelling like Sasquatch. She'd just tucked a faded t-shirt—amazingly, sleeves intact—into her basket when she heard him approaching. She glanced up and smiled, surprised when he seized her upper arms and gave her a good hard shake, making her drop the laundry basket.
"Did you know? Did you know about it?" he yelled, his fingers digging into her flesh.
She struggled against his grasp, shocked and flustered by his unprovoked attack. She broke his grip and slammed her palms against his chest, shoving him back a step. "What are you talking about?"
Daryl regained his step and crowded in on her, putting his face in hers. "You really gonna stand there and pretend you don't know? Don't you fuckin' lie to me!"
"You best back up off me, Daryl," she said angrily. "Don't you accuse me of lying when I don't even know what the hell you're talking about!"
"I'm talking about the walkers!" he shouted, gesturing wildly. "The fuckin' walkers in the barn! You live here and you expect me to believe you didn't know they were there?"
She stared at him, mouth agape. "What?" Walkers in the barn? She shook her head, and when she spoke, her voice didn't sound like her own. "What do you…th-there's nothin' in the barn except some rusted-out tractor equipment. Hershel locked it up so nobody'd hurt themselves on it." Once she said it aloud, she realized just how flimsy of an excuse it was. Yet she'd never questioned it, not even for a minute. She looked Daryl in the eyes and struggled to breathe. Walkers. On the farm. In the barn. And Hershel had the audacity to say that Daryl was dangerous? She shook her head again and turned away from him without another word, heading to the house in a daze.
Daryl watched her go before he looked down at his shaking hands and clenched his fingers into fists. When would he learn to control his damn temper? He raked a hand through his hair in frustration and sighed. He'd never admit it to anybody—had a hard time admitting it to himself—but he was scared. Knowing that there was a barn full of who knew how many walkers only a few hundred feet away from the house where Jules slept every night…it had terrified the shit out of him. And that had made him angry. Then to think that she might have known about it? He'd lost his head when he'd seen her fiddling around his stuff like everything was normal. But, he realized now, at the time she thought everything was.
She made it to the house. He didn't know what she was going to do when she came across one of the others, but he didn't have time to worry about it. Rick was going to meet with the old man to talk to him about the walkers he was keeping. More talk. Meanwhile, the trail for the little girl, virtually nonexistent to begin with, was getting even colder and he'd just alienated the only person who'd actually given a shit about him since…hell, ever. Daryl ripped his knife from his belt and threw it, burying the blade deep into the trunk of a nearby tree.
Fuck! Could anything else go wrong?