Voices
There were voices in his head.
It would be really simple to say that they weren't real. That they were figments of his imagination. Hallucinations, even, brought on by the changing of the world. How convenient would that be, to blame it all on the end of everything? The only problem with that plan was that it just wasn't true. Daryl's voices were real. Snippets of memory, as clear as the moment any of them were uttered. They were beaten into his soul, cut deep into his very skin in case he ever tried to forget.
Don't be such a pussy.
Grow some balls.
You ain't nothin' but a freak to them.
White trash.
Stupid inbred hillbilly.
Ain't nobody ever gonna care 'bout you 'cept me.
They's laughin' at you behind your back.
Gonna scrape you off they boot like dog shit.
Woman like that ain't ever gonna lower herself, be with somethin' like you.
If she was alive out there and saw you coming, she'd run in the other direction.
They came at him out of the dark places in his mind, the voices, at the worst times. They were playing now, like an old record, skipping and the same lines repeating, a soundtrack while he paced, never taking his eyes off the guy that had tried to jump Glenn from behind. Rick pulled him off the asshole, but the skinny jackass stills want to jump. Still got fight in him. Daryl should have choked him till he blacked out.
And that damned politician acted like giving those boys a scoldin' was gonna change things. It never would. But Daryl figured she has Rick's number. He could tell. She asked him to be a cop again, right there in front of half the hoity toity little community, and Rick just soaked it all up. Rick Grimes wanted to be a cop again. Still saw himself as that, somewhere underneath everything. Daryl's voices told him this was the kind of place Rick belonged in.
They belonged in, all of the others, the family he found after the world went more to shit.
He told himself it didn't matter. It was just an act, a way of getting on the inside, that's all. They'd been through too much for any of them to go back to before.
Like Carol and her ridiculous clothes. It was only a costume. She'd changed, like him. She'd gotten stronger. She didn't need to fit in, she couldn't fit in here anymore than he could. It was all an act. She wasn't slipping away from him.
Daryl couldn't stop pacing. He stared at the jackass, waited for him to make a move, but too much of his attention was on the speechifying that was going on and the way Rick and Michonne reacted to it.
Deanna said, "That's what you were. That's what you are."
Rick, the man who called him brother, nodded at her like she knew what the hell she was talking about.
Daryl had to get out of there. Out of the crowd, away from the people. He felt hemmed in and on display and wrong, like he was a little kid again, standing in the hallway at school in his too small dirty clothes while all the other kids pointed and stared. Or like he walked into a store to buy some socks and all their security people started hovering around him. Like when he fell off a ladder and the doc in the ER looked at him like he was just trying to score some oxy 'til the scans came back and showed the break in his arm.
In his head, he just called it 'Before', and the he hated it. Before was cold and dark and need. Hunger and desperation. He had more now than he ever had then. Some bunch of delusional suburban assholes wasn't going to be able to take it all away.
But they would fit here. His family. The others. A little time to polish back up, and this place was who they were.
Not him. Never him.
He shook his head and told himself it didn't matter what these people thought of him.
He didn't care. He'd never cared.
The people inside the walls stared, judged, feared. Assumed.
That's what you were. That's what you are. The words echoed. Resonated. Cut into him and left another mark.
She didn't say anything his voices didn't already know.
He was goin' crazy in this damned place. So he just kept moving. Not toward the gate. Not toward outside. Not this time. They weren't getting rid of him so easy. His family was here.
Instead, he made his way back to the house, the kind of house he never thought he would see the inside of, and found her there. He didn't know he was looking for her until he saw her. The muscles in his chest and shoulders started to loosen when she gave him a crooked smile. They didn't say anything, but they seldom needed to. They know each other in ways the others can't possibly understand. Beside her was the most comfortable place he knew, and he had to believe that they had both changed enough that there was no going back. He couldn't lose this.
He sat near her in the quiet and let her voice drown out the others.
You're every bit as good as them. Every bit.