Chapter Three:

The Calming

"What do you think she'll be like?" Beth asked Carol as the two women sat on her bunk, her voice quiet as not to disturb her father, who was reading scripture to Axel in the opposite cell.

"Let's find out," Carol replied with a friendly shrug, lifting the rucksack of the girl they'd found into her lap.

"Seems a bit wrong, going through her stuff," Beth winced a little uncomfortably.

"Rick wants it done," Carol replied, unlacing the string. "If it'll give him some peace of mind, it'll be worth it."

There had been concerns after Lori's death, of course, but after last night's outburst there was now tangible proof of their leader's instability. Carol was willing to lessen the pressure on Rick in any way she could.

Carol emptied the contents of the girl's rucksack out onto the bed. Nothing of too much interest; two travel-sized packets of kid's cereal, a half-empty bottle of carbonated energy drink, a screwdriver, a box cutter, two kitchen knives, a dead cell phone and a wallet covered with silver-and-pink studs. Carol opened it up to find that it held forty dollars and eighty-nine cents, not that anyone would be interested in that. As she delve deeper she discovered an expired library card, a handful of receipts, a photograph of a tawny-haired family and the girl's student card.

"Laurel Pearson," she read, turning the card over in her hands. "In her final year of college, apparently. I think that's as much as we're going to learn without talking to her face-to-face."

"Why would she keep her cell phone?" Beth asked, attempting to revive the drained device.

"Hope, I guess," offered Carol, giving an immaterial smile. From the upper bunk, Maggie snorted.

They were all worried about Maggie. She'd become incredibly reclusive since they'd got her back- she wouldn't talk to anyone about Woodbury, not even Glenn. She seemed to resent him for whatever had happened there; but at least she'd stopped crying now.

"Hebrews chapter thirteen, verse five," read Hershel from the opposite cell, fracturing the quiet, "be content with what you have, for he has said, 'I will never leave nor forsake you.'"

Maggie gave a thick, cantankerous laugh and threw her head back.

"Enough, Daddy," the woman drawled, eyes closed and smiling. "The so-called 'good book' can't help us now... where was the Lord when Mama died? When the farm got overrun, when we lost Jimmy and Otis and Patricia? What about Lori and T-Dog and everyone else? Where was God when Glenn and I got took by Daryl's bastard brother-?!"

She stopped mid-sentence with no apparent reason to. All that was alive in her seemed to drift somewhere above her head before drooping back into her body, at which point she was suddenly overcome with exhaustion and lay herself back down on her bed. After a moment, Beth placed the items slowly back into the bag and the ruffle of aged biblical pages resumed tenderly from Hershel's cell.

Carol took her leave of the family almost immediately, made very uncomfortable by the exchange. She went in search of Daryl, and found him perched atop the panopticon tower in the next block, legs folded up in front of him whilst he picked at his finger nails. He hadn't realised she was there yet. Or maybe he was just ignoring her.

"Daryl?"

No reply.

"Daryl," she repeated, a little thicker this time, as though she were rebuking an unruly schoolboy.

"Wha'?"

Carol rolled her eyes to herself; nice to see that he was in such a dark mood that he had lost even the ability to enunciate. "You okay up there? I didn't see you at dinner last night, or at breakfast."

"Hmm."

Carol frowned, decided upon a more direct approach. "I heard from Rick that your brother's asking for you."

Daryl gave a disapproving grunt. "Let him ask."

Carol allowed an expression of annoyance to set into her worn features. Daryl was never exactly a team player, but she hadn't seen him this withdrawn in quite some time... not since they had lost Sophia. It had to have something to do with that crazy brother of his. With Rick like he was and the rest of the group still reeling from Woodbury, now was certainly not the time for one of Daryl's strops.

"I thought you should know that while you were gone, Rick had a funny turn. He started shouting his head off at that group who Carl and Hershel found," she continued, "he pulled a gun out on them and made them leave."

Carol decided not to indulge the story of Rick crying upon Daryl. She wasn't sure that Daryl would appreciate it. She didn't want to make him feel uncomfortable, especially not when he was in a mood like this.

"Glenn's isolating himself," she told him. "I think Merle's got something to do with that, too."

Daryl scowled, hating that Merle had to be his responsibility. "Y'all want him gone, but he's my family. Last I got, I ain't just gonna kick him to the curb."

"No one said anything about making Merle leave," Carol soothed, "it's just- we need you now, Daryl. You can't afford to be like this, not now, not with the Governor on our doorstep threatening to kill us all-"

"Screw the Governor!" Daryl snapped, slamming his hand down sharply. He heard Carol sigh. To hell if he was gonna look at her, either.

"I just think you should talk to Merle," the woman reasoned. "See if you can calm him down, get him to realise that the world isn't against him."

"It ain't the world that's against him," Daryl mumbled, gesturing in the direction of the cell block. "It's them in there. I shoulda just gone off with him, just the two of us, like he said. S' always been just me and him."

"We can... we'll make the others understand that he's valuable."

Daryl grunted. "Only thing valuable about Merle's the silver fillings in his teeth."

"Merle has military training, doesn't he? He's resourceful, and he's smart-"

"Yeah, when he's not busy being stupid."

"He could become a valuable member of the group. You'll talk to him, won't you? For me?"

Daryl only grunted in response.

~oOo~

An hour later the youngest of the two Dixon's was slouching up the corridor of the upper cells.

"Christ, brother, you've got a face on you like an ass slapped raw. You gonna let me out now or what?"

"I need to talk. I ain't here to let you out."

Merle pulled a sour face, lips stretched tight. He looked over to the girl's cell; she was still asleep, and snoring a little. "Well if that's the case you can just go back downstairs and get to sucking the Sheriff's dick or whatever it is you do around here. I'm sick of talk."

"Then shut up," Daryl scolded him. "I've come up here to talk some sense into ya, but we both know that ain't gonna happen so just sit your ass down and at least pretend to listen for once in your life."

Mildly amused by his brothers outburst, Merle gave Daryl the benefit of the doubt and crouched back down on the edge of his bed.

"Alright. Let's hear it, little brother."

"You gotta try and see it from everyone else's perspective. Imagine if you were Rick-"

"I've tried seeing matters from his viewpoint, but I can't get my head that far up my own ass. You think I give a crap about what these people think?"

Daryl let Carol's words fall into his mouth, scraping them off the floor where he's discarded them and reciting, "the world ain't against ya. You gotta show these people that you're valuable, otherwise we're both out on our asses here."

"I. Don't. Want. To. Stay," Merle hissed, up in Daryl's face now as he spat each word, drawing out each syllable.

"You should, cuz like it or not, we're here. Rick ain't gonna just let you walk out of here, maybe back to the Governor to tell him all our plans-"

"I'm done with that prick."

"They don't know that. They don't trust you."

"Trust or no trust that one-eyed prick is comin', and when he does, all these people are dead. You and me, we can survive this. But we gotta get out of here now."

"I ain't leavin' em," Daryl told his brother, shaking his head resiliently.

"Didn't love 'em all so much when we were gonna hang 'em out on their asses and jump camp back in Atlanta," Merle reminded him, "what happened, d'ya balls drop off and you suddenly realised playing happy families with Hickery-Dickery-Doc down there and farm girls was just what you've been searching for? That ain't the Dixon way, boy, you know it ain't."

"...You gotta give this place a chance. For both of us. Until then, you stay in the cell."

Merle growled low in his throat. "Treat a man like an animal and he might just become one, little brother. You remember that."

As Daryl was thinking on his brothers words, a slow yawn stretched over from the opposite cell. He'd forgotten about the girl, that she was being kept up here, too. He could just about see her, sitting up and stretching herself out over the covers. He heard a couple of the bones in her neck click as she rolled her head from side to side.

"Mornin', Sunshine," Merle called, hand resting over one of the horizontal bars. She looked over and gave the two brothers a half-hearted salute, still bleary from sleep.

Merle looked at her dazed face as she swung her head. He hadn't took much notice in the scuffle of yesterday, but she was nice enough to look at. Big brown eyes, all that hair. Big in other places, too, and just the right ones; she seemed to notice his eyes on her chest and reached out for the jacket she had arrived in, slipping it over her shoulders in spite of the warmth.

Laurel found some surprise in his appearance too; he was missing a hand. Holy heck, how had she managed to miss that? Instead he wore a nasty-looking prosthetic with a blade attachment which wobbled a little when he tried for a wave. He was... imposing to say the least, and it was clear by his face, with those cold-drilled icy eyes, that he knew it. He gave her a devilish wink and she cringed inwardly.

"You gonna let the girl out, Darlena?" Merle prompted his brother.

"I don't carry the keys," Daryl mumbled with a shrug, not wanting to admit to Merle that he didn't want to act on anything like that without Rick's approval.

"Go make yourself useful somewhere else then," Merle scalded him, "the kitchen, maybe. I'm starvin' up here."

Daryl scoffed in annoyance, but went all the same.

Merle sat back with a yawn on the end of his bed, drinking the girl in. She seemed very absorbed in detangling the knots in her hair, not looking up at him for a second.

"How old are you, anyway, kid?"

"Twenty-five," she said, the nervousness evident in her voice, "twenty-six in a couple of months, I guess."

"Hmm. And those people you were living with before you ended up here. Were they good people?"

"Yeah... the best kind. They were all good guys."

"Just guys?"

"No, five of us were women. Tough cookies, some of them. Tougher than any man here, I bet."

Merle believed it. He had known some hard women in his time, women with the strength to hold back the wrath of God or unleash it upon the world.

"You said you were holed up at a factory, right?" Merle inquired, thinking of the abandoned supplies which would be left over now that the Biter's had torn the place through. "How many were there?"

"Fourteen of us," she answered. "We were like a family by the end."

"I meant the Biters, when you got overrun."

She froze for a long while.

"It wasn't the dead."

Merle looked blankly at her, cold eyes just watching as the light shrunk from her face before she continued.

"It was a group. They'd come savaging for supplies, we heard them break in through the back of the steel mill. They sounded pretty riled, not at all friendly. Most of us agreed we should just wait it out in the back, let them take what they wanted and not even know we were there, but Brent was adamant that we had to fight for what was ours. He marched out to confront them with a couple of the other guys and quick as a shot it got out of hand. People died. My people, not theirs; they only ten or so guys, but they had firearms. It got to the point where there were only three of us left; there was no point in fighting back, in dying for nothing. They decided to keep me alive."

Her voice vanished, a wisp on the thin air. She stared ahead blankly, like the words meant nothing to her anymore.

"I was the only woman still breathing. They were part of a larger group and thought I'd make a nice gift for their boss."

"How did you get away?"

"Oddly enough, I just told them no. They said I'd made a stupid choice, but it was one I was allowed to make. They let me go."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

Merle wondered if she was lying. It didn't sound like the sort of thing people did anymore. He knew some of the stuff that had gone on in the Woodbury raids. Nothing living or dead had managed to break him yet, but some of the things he'd seen out there... it just wasn't right, even he knew that. Women had a habit of disappearing after an attack, especially ones who looked like this girl. Many times he and the others had pretended not to notice as a women were pulled away screaming into empty houses and patches of the woods by men who would turn up alone again once all the supplies had been collected with red faces and one less bullet in their gun. No one ever said anything or did anything about it. It was a sick world this mess had created... the sick getting sicker.

He thought of the Asian kid's girl. He hadn't touched a hair on her pretty little head, not in that way, not that anyone bar Daryl seemed to believe him. Heck, he wasn't sure the girl knew herself that he hadn't tried anything the way she'd acted.

He felt guilty about giving her over to the Governor, that much he would admit to. He didn't know if that son of a bitch had actually done anything her or not, but then again, a woman and a man's perception of 'doing something' would probably be very different when the something was like that. All the same, he'd admitted to himself that he regretted it. But then again, if he hadn't taken them to Woodbury, he'd probably never have found his baby brother again, and for that he'd trek to hell and back twice- heck, thrice- over.

A long time had passed between the two. Merle glanced over to the girl, who was staring head-on into the cold light. She looked, he thought, like she'd seen too much bad shit for someone so fresh-faced. Then again, who hadn't? He thought of the Sheriff's hard-faced kid, who had come up to stare at him last night. The sick getting sicker, Merle reaffirmed.

Laurel cleared her throat awkwardly. "I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm telling you all this. I... I don't even know you."

"You know me better than anyone else round here, cell buddy," Merle smiled to her, trying to diffuse the uncomfortable mist that had blurred its way between the two cells.

She couldn't help a smirk. "Yeah, I guess I do. So, uh... how many people are here in your group?"

"Kid, this ain't 'my group.' Why'd you think they've got me locked up here with you?"

"...Oh. So you were with another group? Or out on your own?"

Merle frowned. "One of the two. For a long time, 'fore I met up with my brother again."

"You said your brother's name was Daryl, right? He's a little weird. But he seems nice."

"He's a Dixon," Merle rebuked almost automatically, reeling off yet another of his Pops' old sayings. "Dixons ain't 'nice'."

Laurel smiled at him, eyes brighter than they had been before.

"Well, you don't seem all that bad to me."