the birth of a simple light
He's scared out of his mind, and fuck if that isn't the most unsettling feeling he ever thought his body could process. His hands are shaking and he's sweating like a stinky waterfall, heart pumping so, so hard he's surprised it didn't rip itself out of his chest yet.
He remembers now why he fucking hates the smell of hospitals, its dry, sterilized scent mixed with medicine. The smell of fear that fills its green, almost white hallways. The agonizing slow countdown of death waiting to happen - a rotten smell that he spent half his life with. But he has to keep himself in control and reminds this doesn't happen here, he supposes, even if he's sure everywhere in the hospital smells like… well, hospital. Nah, here the walls are a soft shade of purple and the door is pinned full of doodles. The hall carries a whisper of joy, happy voices. The air is heavy with hope.
He's still scared, though, and every microsecond feels like a decade. But Lori is sweating worse than he is (even if she smells like yellow flowers) and at every seven minutes right on point, she will scream and swear at them.
The nurse doesn't leave the room anymore and the doctor comes from four to four minutes to take a look between Lori's spread legs underneath the sheet.
But his smile is just as large as Rick's, as both of them hold Lori's hands, receiving more curses and a death grip.
Any moment now.
Daryl is six years old the first time his dad beats him. It's because of a stupid thing - some expired canned goods they have to eat and Daryl ends throwing up his dinner not an hour after he eats. His dad is mad because he is wasting food. He has puke on his chin and his ragged shirt. His dad screams, call him ugly names, spits once on the floor and twice at him. He gets a punch in his stomach because he's just being a pussy.
He calls for his brother, but Merle is not here. He can't stay because he'll kill their dad, he says, so spend days and nights at the local bar, picking fights and stealing money. Cheating at cards and cheating life, in general.
It doesn't matter, in the end. A limping leg and a bloodied back somehow cured the bug. Or so he tells his dad, minutes later, when he makes the little boy stand up and look him in the eyes.
(It's a lie, of course. Daryl is back at vomiting a few hours after all that and he hates Merle so much right now, but he still wishes to be wherever hole his brother is, because it means not being here.)
The second time dad beats him, his bruises were black and purple. The sound of cracking ribs is something that will haunt him forever.
The weirdest thing is that he doesn't remember how he met Rick, per say. One moment he's stuck in a terrible, miserable youth and the next he's walking around town with a newly graduated cop, sitting next to him in a police car and not being arrested for just being a Dixon. It's the craziest shit in the world, how he giggles and laughs out loud and eats junk food. They are twenty-three, if he remembers right, and behaving like a couple of teenagers.
His mind is a blank space, jumping to a memory of his bloody nose and his drunk father beating the life out of him, to a sunny Sunday and a stupid barbecue, Lori is there, as beautiful and graceful as ever, Shane too, tall and strong, looking scary but patting Rick's shoulder softly and always calling him brother.
He doesn't know when his life transitioned in such radical way, and it pains him because most times he feels like living in someone else's skin. Borrowing a body and a house; a life. A happy life. But fuck, he doesn't want to turn it back, he doesn't want to wake up in his own broken, shattered sack of skin and bones, lying on a dirty couch in an even dirty trailer. He has a suburban house now, for god sakes, it even has damn unnecessary white picket fences and a massive yard where the neighbor's dog likes to poop. He gets to make grocery lists, listen to Lori complain about mismatched curtains and watch college football games in the stadium nearby, with warm beer and disgusting hot dogs.
He still spends the weekend in the woods and he cleans squirrels and rabbits at his well-kept porch. He works in a garage and ninety percent of the time he's covered in oil, grease and stinking of sweat and wearing a cool leather vest. And he has neighbors that smile at him, toothy and honestly because he is liked around here. Good lord, they take their time to ask how was his day. The little girl front door likes to hug him and the young couple two houses down the street come by for a chat and pizza every couple of days.
But he still Daryl Dixon, and somehow he lost his rough background, but didn't lose himself.
And loves it. Every single moment of his boring, common, normal life.
He stops going to school when he's sixteen. Maybe less. He doesn't give two shits, really. For a good amount of time school was a place that meant no dad, then it started feeling too much like the trailer. Things are shouted to him in the corridor, teachers shook their heads and never look him in the eye, even if they call his name too many times in short fifty-minutes class. He's supposed to study for chemistry and philosophy. Read Shakespeare and Jack London. He has to sit in Math and look at lines and numbers that don't make sense in his mind. The Cartesian plane, what for? How many stanzas is a poem made of, what for?
He uses the time to sleep. The hard surface of the table and the bright light coming through the window isn't ideal, but it's better than home, where he couldn't sleep at all because his dad (or his brother) were fucking some unfortunate chick or talking alone so high on meth, that Daryl didn't understand how they never OD'ed.
When he doesn't sleep, he lists in some piece of paper the places around town where someone is crazy enough to hire him. Any damn place, doing whatever the shit. He just needs some money and fake doses of hope.
He receives twelve nos during the course of three months.
It's the seventh day of April and an old man named Dale let him scramble around his repair shop.
Maybe that's where everything starts.
Rick surely has the most disgusting taste in food in the whole damn world, and he lives with Daryl, so… He often catches himself staring with furrowed brows, mouth half open in horror. It's terrible, really, because Daryl likes the taste of worms when mixed with earth. But Rick, oh man, Rick is something else; Daryl just wishes so hard to the point of almost praying that their son doesn't have this fucking habit.
Because, yeah, they are going to have a son. Can you fucking believe it?
Dad catches him looking (seriously, he's just looking) at an open magazine, page set in a male's underwear propaganda. The dude is black skinned, shining with so much body oil that his skin looks like made of gold. He's in a probably uncomfortable position, hips pushed front, arms held behind his head. His torso made of hard muscles.
Daryl is fourteen, he's sure because it's his birthday and his dad took him to buy new boots - out of necessity, not celebration. In the last months, his bones decided to act in a puberty rebellion and now half his stuff doesn't fit him anymore. He's all out of balance in his own body, always feeling like he's going to stumble over his big foot and hit the floor face first.
The magazine is on a little table in front of him, they're waiting for the attendant to come back with the cheapest pair of boots they got. For a tiny second, Daryl finds himself thinking the man is kind of beautiful; light and pose and a good photographer making him look like a Greek god. He reaches his hand to grab it, to look closer and then maybe flips through the pages, - but his dad is a racist and homophobic, everyone knows that, and he sure as hell will not have a fag for a son, especially one that stares at naked niggers to get his dick wet.
It's disturbing because his brain isn't catching up with his surroundings, the calling names, and punches. And he really, really doesn't know what's happening, and it's so fucking weird, and in an almost an out-body experience, Daryl comes back to the trailer park without his new boots, but with a mouth tasting like blood. And dad isn't with him because he left the store in the back seat of a cop car. His brother is the one there instead, looking relieved that, at least for a week, they will be left alone. Merle doesn't ask what happened, - Daryl himself still doesn't know. But he doesn't wish him a happy birthday either.
It takes six hours between Lori's banshee screams and the loud, high-pitched cries of a newborn baby.
Carl has ten tiny fingers and toes, a mop of dark hair, and a damn healthy lung. He's eighteen point five inches, eight thirty-seven pounds.
He's the most stunning human being Daryl was ever graced to see.
And Carl is his.
His ma dies when he's five, and she takes down the entire house with her in the process. He remembers feeling numb, kneeling there in the street while people stare at him, while water is gushing at the burning wood and brick. The smell is strong, kind of cruel to his nose, to his eyes - they are full of tears, and he's ashamed to say it's because the melting flesh he knows it's in the contained hell in from of him, even if he tries to convince himself it's the smoke.
Merle, when he finds out, looks just as numb.
Dad is a nutcase. He breaks both his hands from punching everything that gets in from of him - including both his sons. He tears his skin open and he cries loudly, uglily. Sobs so desperately he looks like drowning in thin air. He calls his ma names, and all they receive as an answer is the whispers of curious neighbors.
Daryl never felt alive before, but a rotten thing installs inside him and it promises that he never will actually feel that way. Doesn't matter what, doesn't matter how. His ma dies, but manages to take away something she didn't have the right to have, in the first place.
Dixons do have a heart, after all. Or so it feels like.
And it's poisoned now.
It's a hard decision, and they spend almost a year discussing it. Filling notebooks with plans and counts, numbers and lists. Writings places all over the city and scratching possibilities of a bigger house, it has to be something that just by looking at its foundations, both of them would immediately call home.
Amazingly, Lori is the easiest part of all that crazy shit they want to do with their lives. She talks to her husband, Rick childhood best friend and work partner, and he just claps their shoulder and says that if they need anything, besides his wife's belly to carry their offspring, that is. Rick's eyes are wet and Daryl lets him kiss his mouth in front of other people for the first time ever.
They are together for seven years. (Three months and twenty days because Daryl keeps track of important things.)
They also have a fight over who is going to donate, and Daryl is angry at Rick for even considering the idea of him passing his cursed DNA to their child. Besides, after Daryl discovered Rick and Lori brief past, he kept wondering how they would make the apple pie life, perfect kid.
He's not proven wrong.
Rick has the guts to ask about the surname, too, because he's just plain dumbass sometimes. Or he pretends to be crazy like that. Pfft, the fucking prick. Daryl holds a pinky faced Carl so close to his chest as if trying to get his kid inside his frenetic heart, listen carefully to the calm breathing and soft whimpers coming out his baby pouty mouth.
He stares at Rick as intense, hard and angry he can manage. Rick stares right back for such long time, because he's also stubborn as a mule, that a nurse has to come in and sneak a bottle at Daryl's hand, to feed a hungry Carl.
After what seems like an hour, Rick snorts and says alright, alright. Grimes it is.
Carl Grimes.
Daryl thinks it's damn fitting.
Their kid is going to beat this world.
Merle is going to spend the rest of his life in jail, and Daryl doesn't even know why. He's eighteen when he gets a call from his brother talking a mile about how he did what needed to be done.
Daryl doesn't understand once more because of their dad still alive.
Rick is a dirty, dirty fucker when it comes to sex. It's with him that Daryl learns what kink really means. He has a mouth on him that Daryl would never, ever expect, and the first time he heard some words being said in Rick's voice, he felt real off footing. He calls Daryl shit like whore and sugar, sweetheart and then slaps him in a matter of thirty seconds.
They have a kink drawer in the closet and a big box under their bed.
They are still young, horny as fuck, and for the first year and half of their relationship, they fuck every day. Worse than damn rabbits, the couple of them.
But after that, they settle into something "normal". Rick still a case of wonder, with you ask Daryl. Most of the time he doesn't know what happened in his own mind when they have sex. Daryl just rolls with it. It feels good and it's never boring, but he wonders sometimes, creates a theory and asks if Rick learn that stuff from porn sites.
Rick just smiles wolfishly at him.
But other times they make love. And that unsettles Daryl every single time, no matter how often they do it like that.
Rick will kiss every little inch of his skin, trace lightly his scars and fucking recite poems about stuff Daryl never heard of. He will whisper, then lick and sob. Sob against his torn up flesh. He even cried once or twice, proclaiming he loves Daryl so damn much it feels like his body isn't able to fit it all in.
He will arrange Daryl in the center of the bed, put pillows under his neck and under his hips, kiss him open and then, so darn slow, fill him up. And they will stay joined like that for hours, actual long hours. Rick will move his hips just barely, hold his hand, fingers intertwined so tightly both their knuckles turn white. Rick kisses him and they whisper sweet nothings to each other, breathing calm and steady.
Daryl like those nights the best because he cries too when he finally reaches his climax. Not because of the orgasm, but because he also loves Rick so much that his shell of a body will never be able to contain a quarter of his feelings.
It was in one night like this that he said yes to a question Rick didn't even asked yet, but was on the tip of his tongue for so long that Daryl tasted it when they kissed.
The world was a brighter palette of colors after that.
His dad shots himself in the head when Daryl is twenty years old, he left a messy note that Daryl didn't bother to read, he just burned it with his cigarette.
He never understood the shit his dad did during all his life. He was miserable, he gets that, and after ma died he never became the same. But he wasn't a shining example of a good father before their home turned to dust either.
Daryl is kind relieved when he ditches the body in one unmarked grave, but he wished his old man wasn't such a coward and made that decision a little sooner. Or.. He doesn't know, his life would still be shit, he figures. Doesn't change a thing that now he is the last Dixon standing, and he will make sure it keeps this way.
He leaves their backwoods trailer behind when he's twenty-one. Dale passed away because of a heart attack, and the damn fool left everything he had to Daryl, in his own hometown. Kings County is tiny and big at the same time, calm, but somewhere that life actually happens.
He gets Dale garage running in no time, and he makes good profit whit it. He thanks the man every once in a while, brings flowers to his well-kept grave and calls the wind fool just to make sure the man knows, wherever the good place he is now.
After a few months he met a man that goes by Jesus, he's Daryl's age and they become friends, somehow. He takes Daryl to a bar called Hilltop. He gets drunk out of his ass at his second time there and throws punches with a man wearing an eye patch. They are separated not long after, and Daryl has a shitty memory for things that are not important, but he hears shouts for a brother and then he is outside, being told to calm down.
(He feels like an idiot, thinking about it right now, as Lori smiles at him and places a kiss on the head the little boy he's still holding. Christ, he was held down in a choke hold, and it was a fucking important moment that night, when a clean out man kneeled in front of him, face so close to his. He'll blame it on the fact the that was the first and last time he was taken to a police station.)
He makes the demon tattoo after Merle dies, getting caught in the middle of a breakout in prison. Merle was a piece of shit and a bad brother. He cries.
Getting the tattoo done is almost magical, the sensation of something being carved into his skin because he wanted to, and not because it was inflated to him. And Rick is sitting beside him, with his dumb smile fixed on his beautiful face, talking the tattoo artist's ears off.
He never stops getting inked after the first one. He found his drug, just like a Dixon is supposed to do. At least this will not damage anyone else's life.
Carl's nursery is stuff out of magazine pages, man. All fluffy shit and soft colors, teddy bears, tiny pieces of clothes - all organized in piles and in its right place. It's the cleanest room in the house, with a big window for sunlight and the best backyard view.
Rick is the one holding their kid now, one big hand over the baby's chest, eyes closed as he memorizes the rhythm of their son's beating heart. It's a beautiful sight, Daryl decides, one that never crossed his mind that he would see someday, but one he will make carefully sure to remember forever.
Rick is always the first one to get up when Carl wakes up crying, normally spending the rest of the night in the nursery but today is different, because he walks in with the kid a moment after leaving the room, and he carefully sets a tiny, gorgeous Carl in the middle of their bed, between them. They don't sleep for an obvious reason, too engrossed watching the life they created, fingertips poking Carl's soft skin because he's too perfect and they have to be sure he's even real.
He never talks about his life before the bar to Rick or any of his friends, even if Rick is a nosy shit that traces his scars softly every night and asks about it every once in always. Daryl used to get angry at first, now the just looks at Rick and promises he's nothing like his brother. Like his dad.
And it's enough to his husband, apparently, because Rick just smiles wild and carefree, takes Daryl's hand and kiss his palm, then places it over Carl's body.
Maybe Daryl's chest will finally explode with how much emotion he carries these days. His breath catches one, two, three times and then he promises again, to himself more than anyone else.
Everything, he decides, everything from now on, - No, scratch that, everything until that moment in the bar will be just bad history, forgettable past, even if in the end his life paid very well for a Dixon. And he's fucking happy with that.