i.
"We're gonna locate that little girl and she's gonna be just fine. Am I the only one Zen around here? Good Lord."
Daryl Dixon is not an optimist; mainly because he does not need the frivolity of hope. He knows, just as he knows the marrow of his bones, that the world is good. Even after the dead have risen up and torn the world away from the living, he knows that the world is not that bad, in the end. This is just evolution, trimming the population with a plague—he went to enough to school to figure that pattern out, at least. And if it is that bad—hell, if it is, then he'll probably be dead by time he figures it out, and then it won't matter anyway.
Hope and prayers are for the ones who believe the world is bad; they are the egg-shell armor against the monsters that prowl in the dark. For people who rely on hopes and prayers, the monsters and the dark are shadowy insubstantial things that survive as murky reflections and bright shiny teeth. But Daryl Dixon knows that there are monsters and he can see them: see them for what they are and what they are not and what it will take to kill them. He sees the dark for what it is, the same way that he sees everything else.
"This ain't the mountains of Tibet. It's Georgia."
He knows that the core of the world is good—not for hopes or prayers or miracles, but because it is. He knows that somewhere deep near the marrows of his bones, he is good. Because he knows it, he doesn't dwell on it, or try to prove it to anyone; maybe that's why it comes as a surprise to the others when he does do something good. It doesn't matter that they don't know what he is; what matters is that he knows. Maybe one day they'll figure him out—maybe not. The looks on their faces are endlessly amusing, whenever he shares his drugs or saves a life or reminds everyone that he knows unswervingly that a lost little girl is alive and well.
What Daryl Dixon does not know is how to articulate this; he feels it, he knows it, but he can't think or speak it as eloquently as he feels it in his heart or the marrow of his bones. But he manages, sort of, in his own off-beat way, to impart what he knows to the others; or he tries to.
"People get lost. They survive."
He finds the words—for the most part—when he tells Carol the story about the Cherokee Rose. Maybe it's the words that find themselves—hell if he knows. It's enough that it kind of almost makes her feel better, if only for a second. The world is good, at its core, even if it is so easy to forget it.
A/N: So yes. Like everyone else, I have a certain fondness for Daryl Dixon. Further drabble/vignette things may range from gen to Daryl/Andrea or Daryl/Glenn.