AN: This is the "back story" to "Daddy," but it's also simply a Caryl story starting in season 1. I asked what everyone wanted and it was pretty much a toss-up between a separate story and flashbacks. I toyed with it a bit and decided to put the chapters as a separate story. In the "Daddy" story, I'll still be alluding to their past as I normally would in a story, but this way the actual detailed backstory is separate. This allows those that are not interested to avoid reading it, and it also allows those interested in this story to not read the other if they don't want to.
If you are interested, however, I'll be exploring their early days throughout the story. This is not going to be some amazingly original story, so if that's what you're looking for then you might want to read something else. If you're looking for a nice story that's a little different than canon and follows our two lovebirds, this might be the story for you. This whole thing is a bit of (I admit) self-indulgent "write what you feel like writing/want to write" fluff and stuff for me, so I'm just going to write where the inspiration is. I hope it may be something that you can enjoy as well.
At any rate, if you do read, I hope that you enjoy! As always, I greatly appreciate when you let me know what you think!
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Daryl's father had tried to impart very little wisdom upon his two sons. Every now and again, though, he'd gone spouting off bullshit that both of them had tried to forget. Some of it stuck there, somewhere between Daryl's ears. The few words that he remembered his father saying rang back to him from time to time. His old man said that a man was just born to be what the hell he was born to be. He'd never be any more than that. Some were born to be something and others were simply born to be nothing. Some men, like Daryl and his brother Merle, were mostly born to be a waste of time and space.
If Daryl was looking to blame someone, he might say that it was his old man's words that had held him and Merle back in life. Maybe, if it hadn't been for everything his old man had said, they both might've done something more with their lives. They might've gotten up in the morning, washed their faces, and become something more than what the hell they'd become. Maybe both of them would've been white-collar businessman making some kind of change in the world. Instead, they'd spent most of their lives doing blue-collar jobs that they abandoned too frequently to ever turn the jobs into something that paid a decent wage or promised some kind of future.
More than anything else, Merle and Daryl didn't finish anything. Maybe that's how they were meant to be.
Between the two of them, they never had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, so to speak, but that's all that people like them were ever meant to have. There was really no need in wanting more when you didn't deserve it, and when you weren't likely to have it. Wanting what the hell you couldn't have would only lead to disappointment.
Daryl knew about wanting when he couldn't have, and maybe Merle, but Merle had a better grasp on hiding shit. He was Daryl's older brother by nearly a decade, and he'd had a lot more time to get used to their lot in life. When Daryl thought about the way the life could be, or maybe the way that it should be, he saw the fairytale story—or, at the very least, some kind of cheap and watered down redneck fairytale. He saw himself with a wife, a couple of kids, and maybe a dog. But that kind of shit wasn't what the hell someone like him got. It wasn't what the hell someone like him deserved.
His old man had made that clear.
Merle and Daryl weren't worth shit, and no self-respecting woman was going to want a man who was made just to ruin her life.
When it came to women, Merle seemed to understand more about what they deserved than Daryl did. He got everything it would seem that their old man thought they deserved. He got a veritable rainbow of venereal diseases, and he got lucky that everything he'd caught so far could be cured with antibiotics. He got women that didn't stick around, and he got women that nobody would have wanted to stick around. Whether or not he was satisfied with what he got, Merle seemed to accept his lot in life.
Daryl went the other way. Since he wasn't good enough to have what he wanted, he figured that he'd just do without. It wasn't worth the effort to end up with something—or someone— that was just a thorn in his side.
Daryl had come to accept that his old man was right and things just were the way they were. Some people got what they wanted, and some people got just what they deserved. Some of them, like Daryl and Merle, ought to be damn happy that they got anything at all since they barely deserved the air that they breathed.
At least when the world went to shit, Daryl and Merle Dixon didn't have much to lose.
Of course Daryl had wondered for some time how it was that certain assholes—of the variety that it struck him to believe didn't deserve to have shit—somehow got lucky enough to get all the things that Daryl, himself, just wasn't good enough to have.
His old man was one of those such assholes. He'd been an asshole of the greatest degree—and half the contributor of life to Merle and Daryl—but he'd ended up with a wife that was too damn good for him and two sons. Maybe his wife hadn't been a top-shelf prize, and maybe his sons hadn't turned out to be worth much, but he'd still gotten pretty much everything out of life that a man could really hope for.
And he'd pissed it all away. But he'd still gotten it.
Daryl couldn't quite understand, growing up, exactly how it was that the lots were drawn in life.
And those thoughts continued to baffle him as he aged.
Daryl couldn't stand Ed Peletier's presence for more than five minutes at a stretch. Practically the very sight of the man drove Daryl to fits, and every time he opened his mouth, Daryl felt moved to chew a hole in the side of his face to keep from saying something that would surely piss Ed off.
Daryl didn't really give two shits if he offended Ed Peletier for Ed's sake, but rather that, if he offended him, he knew that Ed would take his frustration out on his wife's face instead of on Daryl's where his frustration should have been directed.
If he'd been the kind that would have thrown a punch at Daryl, Daryl would have insulted him often and early on. Then, when Ed's fist came in his direction, it would have opened up the gates for Daryl to come out swinging. It would have given Daryl the chance to pound on the sorry asshole for a little while without anybody jumping in to scold him for his actions. But Ed Peletier would never throw that punch. Not at Daryl. Because Ed Peletier was the kind of man who punched his wife in the face instead of throwing punches at someone who could whip his ass for him like he deserved.
Ed was an even bigger coward then Daryl's old man, because at least Daryl's old man had been known to go a few rounds with assholes his own size. There was no doubt about it, he'd beaten his wife and his kids, but his anger and his brutality didn't stop there. Ed, however, only doled out punches to the small-framed woman that he called his wife. The woman that, once upon a time, he must have promised to love and cherish. He knew she couldn't physically overpower him, and so he gave her fresh bruises daily to wear on her face and arms.
Yet, somehow, a man like that was the kind of man who had managed to deserve the little petite wife with the pretty face that he fucked up with his fists. He was somehow born to be the kind of man who had a tiny baby girl—born so close to the moment when the world went to shit that Daryl wasn't really sure if she was born into this world of chaos or if she'd been born before, in the world that seemed ever more distant from reality. And, after everything had gone down and the world had sat back to count their losses, a man like Ed Peletier had managed to be born the kind of man who deserved to keep everything. He'd lost nothing.
But people like Daryl—who dreamed of having what Ed seemed content to shit on—seemingly deserved just about as much as Ed had lost.
Daryl watched Ed from a distance, always trying to pretend that he had less interest in the woman that his brother called a mouse than he really did. He didn't want to stir up any kind of jealousy in Ed. Daryl didn't want to stir up any kind of negative feelings in Ed. Anything that got stirred up, he knew, would only be bad for the woman.
Her name was Carol, and she deserved more than that. She deserved more than Ed.
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"I'm sorry you lost your brother."
Daryl couldn't expect her to say that she was sorry that they had lost Merle. Merle hadn't been a very good addition to their group. He'd been drugged out of his damn mind since they'd found the group. He'd been hyped up on some crystal, or some shit that Daryl couldn't name, that he'd found while they been raiding houses in search of anything that could help them survive. Nobody in the group was going to miss Merle, except for Daryl, and maybe Daryl only missed him because he was the only thing that Daryl still had from his old life. He was really the only thing that Daryl had ever had. And now he was gone, but the worst part about it was that he was gone without really being entirely gone. He had disappeared. He had vanished. But Daryl didn't know if he was really gone, or if he was still out there, somewhere, and only gone from Daryl.
He thought about telling Carol that the Merle she knew, hyped up on whatever the hell he'd been taking, was just the Merle that was seeking some kind of comfort for some long-buried pain he had inside him. He just wanted some relief from the ache—and nothing had taken it away yet. Maybe nothing ever would. But he wasn't the Merle that he could be when he was sober and he had a taste of hope for the future. He certainly wasn't the Merle that Daryl believed he could be if the comfort that he sought was made readily available to him in some kind of entirely different and less-destructive form.
Daryl didn't tell Carol anything about Merle, because he found that he really couldn't find the words to say anything that meant anything at all. Instead, he simply offered her a half-grumbled thanks for the small act of kindness she'd done him by acknowledging his loss.
It was more than anyone else had done.
"Do you want to come and have some fish?" She asked.
As much as he might like to pretend that he was contemplating some kind of starvation because of the sadness he felt over the loss of his brother, he was hungry, and he knew that food was scarce. When they had it, they had to eat it. Daryl got up from his spot, and started to follow Carol back toward the camp where everyone was gathered to enjoy what was a feast to all of them after some pretty meagre days.
Carol's sleeping daughter was strapped close to her body in the carrier that the roughly six month old baby had probably spent most of her life in. The bruises on Carol's face were fresh, as was the busted lip. It had all happened earlier that day. And it all happened while they were gone looking for Merle. This time, it all happened right out there in the open instead of behind the cover of their tent. With it all out in the open, Shane had felt like he could take advantage of the opportunity to relieve some frustration on Ed's face. Shane's frustration wasn't actually with Ed, but he'd used Ed just the same. Daryl appreciated that Shane's target had been that asshole. Daryl thought that if he'd been at the camp, he might have accepted Ed's public display of beating his wife as an invitation to finally do what he'd been thinking about doing since the first time he'd overheard the unmistakable sounds coming from their tent and seen Carol wearing purple marks on her skin over breakfast. Daryl might have given into his desires, and he might have done even more damage to Ed Peletier than Shane had. Shane, for his part, had made it so that Ed's face looked like it had had an unfortunate encounter with a meat grinder.
And still it didn't seem to be quite enough to Daryl, but there was nothing else to be done for the time being.
They would have to watch him. Whenever he came back into himself, he would beat Carol within an inch of her life. Maybe he'd actually kill her. And if the baby were around...
Daryl had heard him say it more than once. The baby, Sophia, was just another mouth to feed. Maybe the asshole didn't realize that voices drifted through cloth tent sides. Maybe he didn't realize that they carried out there where there was nothing to be heard at night beyond the hoot of the occasional owl or the song of some bullfrogs serenading each other. Ed said that the baby would get them all killed with her crying.
Sophia, for her part, cried a great deal less than Daryl had actually imagined a baby would cry—not that he'd ever spent a great deal of time in the company of infants.
Ed said that her crying would get them all killed because the monsters would hear her and come looking for them.
He wasn't the only one to grumble about that. Daryl had heard several members of the group complain about the baby. This wasn't the world for babies, they said, as though her mother had had the opportunity to time things just right, and as though she'd had some advanced knowledge about the impending doom that the world was facing. They acted as though she'd had the child just to spite all of them.
Daryl hated to tell them all that they were a bunch of fucking idiots and that, if they got killed, it would most likely be because most of them didn't know to watch their own ass with a mirror in their hands.
Daryl wouldn't be surprised, when Ed's face healed up a bit, if he was feeling angry and ready to hurt someone. Daryl wouldn't be surprised if, finding himself too chickenshit to hurt Shane like he would want to, Ed went after Carol to hurt her instead. He wouldn't be surprised if the asshole, seeking to hurt her in the greatest way possible, went after that little baby.
Daryl decided right then and there, following Carol toward the fire to eat fish, that he'd watch Ed Peletier like a hawk. If he so much as made a questionable move, he would find that Daryl was waiting for him.
Daryl had a lot of his own anger to relieve, after all, at the injustices of this world. He'd been born, according to his old man from whom he must have inherited something, to be the kind of asshole that relieved anger with his fists. He might as well let Ed Peletier be on the receiving end of that anger—especially if Ed needed somebody to fight so badly that he was willing to go after his wife and daughter.
Daryl would give him someone to fight if he needed it. Someone who had been born for little else.
He couldn't fight nature, after all.
He was just a man—and a man was born to be just what the hell he was and not a damn thing more.