He resists the still-unusual-to-him urge to look back, to see if she's still gazing after him, to raise his hand in farewell. He is still unused to having a champion. He is still unused to being a champion.
He thinks about those hazy days right after the fire. Sitting on a hard plastic chair in a hallway that smelt of stale bagged lunches and industrial cleaner, watching his ratty sneakers bounce up and off the chair's metal legs, as he kicked, and kicked. Someone had given him a bag of Fritos to quell his grumbling stomach, and his 8-year-old self gobbled them as if they were his last meal, greasing up his fingertips and lips. To this day, he can't stand the smell of them.
From the open office doorway, the low, insistent voice of his "caseworker" and her boss, a fat man with a weather-reddened face, discuss him. What to do with him. Now that Momma's gone. She always said Virgina Slims would be the death of her. She was right. Momma with her beautiful eyes and crooked teeth. As apt to smack you upside the head as she was to give you a nicotine-infused kiss. It had just been the two of them those last eight months, with Merle in juvie.
With both Daddy and Merle gone, it had been…easier. Not what you'd call terrific, but easier. The neighborhood kids, they'd started letting him stand around and watch what they were playing. Without Merle to menace them, they even let him fetch stuff ("Hey, Daryl! Can you get us that ball there, in the shitpile?"), occasionally letting him join in.
Now, sitting in this grey-painted hallway, he strains to hear his future. "Not sure…17-year-old brother in the system...fostering might be difficult…attachment issues…" the young, sing-songy voice of the caseworker drifts out to him. Attachment issues.
And now he understands, he thinks. What binds us to others? Everything he had been attached to burned to a crisp, gone in an instant, that spring day. Momma gone, completely. He had told Carl they had said it was better that way. Nothing left. Ashes.
The foster homes, he'd just floated through and been shifted in and out of for three years, until, one day, a 20-year-old stranger that sorta reminded him of his brother showed up and said he was takin' what belonged to him.
"Hey, baby brother!" Merle had cackled, slapping the legs of his dirty jeans. As if Daryl was a source of amusement. And without a thought, he followed him out the door and into the same life he had left in the ashes. Except Merle never kissed him, like Momma had. And he smoked Marlboros.
Attachment issues. Because now he understands. As he hurries after Rick and the others, part of him stays behind. He can feel it spinning out behind him, a long, silvery-grey (like her eyes) thread, back to where Carol is standing, urging him to turn around.
"Nine lives, remember?" She had half-smiled up at him, stroking a silky strand of hair off Li'l Asskicker's face. And part of him had wished for the excuse to do the same to her, but with her bare, shorn head the opportunity didn't present itself readily.
He wasn't sure how this woman had slipped into his clumsy heart. If he had thought about it at all, he would have said that all that was left of his heart was ashes, and the stale smell of Fritos. But it seems as if he was very wrong about that. And his clumsy heart is glad.
