The group, they really don't know a thing about him.
The nice thing about Merle- besides the fact that they were brothers and blood-kin to each other- was that he understood; he knew him in and out, knew what he had lost and the kind of man he used to be before he was this man on a motorcycle they all called Daryl Dixon, compound bow slung across his back.
Merle knew that he used to be a man named James Daryl Dixon, but that everyone at the shop called him Jimmy. So did his wife, and his baby girl- not even in school yet- well, she just called him Daddy.
He knows that Merle was really Michael Merle Dixon, and he used to bring his beast, the very same one he now rides, into the garage and his kid brother would change the oil and spark plugs, tinker and add chrome whenever a paycheck was stretched a little less than usual. For after all, Merle had his own two kids and an ex-wife to support.
Merle had been over to dinner at Jimmy and Michelle- his wife's name was Michelle- more times than anyone could count and always ate all the mac and cheese which made Hazel sad. But then Uncle Merle would let her ride on his shoulders and she'd giggle and Jimmy would take a long hard drag off his beer and kiss the worry off Michelle's face.
Sometimes they'd both drink too much and Mike would end up sleeping on their pull-out couch in their little old living room in the house they rented. It wasn't anything fancy, but it had a garage out back where Jimmy kept his projects, the pieces of dirtbikes and his collection of bows. (Michelle made him get rid of the guns when Hazel was old enough to walk and banished his weapons to the garage. He hadn't really resented it since he preferred the arrows anyway.)
That was Before, when the only things he killed were deer and when he taught Hazel how to feed a squirrel peanuts out of her bare hand. Before they chattered and fled at the sound of his footfalls, before his skills with the bow meant the survival of so many.
Jimmy and Michelle had just tucked Hazel into bed the night it all started, when the news reports came on and the neighborhood went so unnaturally quiet. He went to work the next day, concerned but confident, as they all were, that this was just some terrorist thing, or some bird flu situation where a vaccine would come out and everyone would be okay.
He came home to the block in flames.
In the time he was gone, someone had started a fire- maybe a walker knocked over a barbeque, no way of knowing now- and the flames had caught the dried out summer grass and spread across the yards, licking across the old wooden siding like it was kindling.
They made it out of the house, at least. Michelle was curled in the bushes, her skin and clothes blackened, ashey; Hazel was tightly grasped to her chest. They were burned, so burned; he didn't know how she managed to stagger out. But they died out there, maybe from the smoke, maybe from the burns; they died and he was not there to save them or at least to die with them.
In a way he was lucky, he knew how they died, that they weren't still wandering, waiting for his arrow to end them.
Mike showed up at the house later, covered in blood. Or at least what was left of the house. Jimmy had called on his phone, everyone he could; fire, EMS, police, anyone and no one had answered, no one had came. The garage was about to burn when he pulled his bow and arrows out and scavenged quickly whatever he thought might he helpful; a pistol from a coffee can on a top shelf, sealed with duct tape (a graduation gift from their grandfather he couldn't bear to pawn.)
"I don't know what the fuck is going on," he'd said, without any preamble. Jimmy had pointed wordlessly to the tarp that he'd used to cover what had once been his wife and child.
Then his friendly neighbor Jason, the one who always won the pinfish tourney every spring, had come at him straggering, an arm and leg broken and one eye hanging clear out of his skull, his throat torn out but still alive and bent on bringing death on them both. Merle shot him in the face with his twelve gauge. There wasn't much left of him after that, and they took off for Atlanta after that.
When they pulled over for a piss, Merle went to call him Jimmy and he just shook his head. "Naw, man," he replied. "I'm Daryl now."
"Well then I'm Merle," he answered. They'd called each other by their middle names as kids, their proper sons of the Confederacy names given to them by a righteous (and drunk) father who believed quite ardently that the south would rise again.
And it had. The problem was that the dead had risen with her.
No, these people didn't know a damn thing about Daryl Dixon, and he had no intention of them ever knowing who he'd once been.