Daryl liked to pretend he was numb. It was a game he had come up with when he was a kid, lyin' in bed on his stomach picking the fletching off old arrows. It wasn't like his dad laid into him like that everyday, but the days that he did, Daryl pretended he could just pop that sore, torn up body off and use a different one. Like the Lego people he had found discarded on the playground. He'd think about the way it felt when he fell asleep on his arm and try to make the rest of himself feel like a snowy television screen. It got easier and easier to rely on that as he got older. Just pretend to be numb, pretend like his brain couldn't process the words thrown at him, pretend his nerves were all dead, and nothing could hurt anymore.

Carol was the first one, the first person to ever really call him out on it. He hated that she could see it. That sameness that they shared, she knew what it was. She knew how he turned himself off from feeling, or at least liked to think he did. He never had to tell her anything about the way he had grown up, how he had lived before. She could see, she could understand.

Beth saw it too. She saw that way he would go numb, trying to make himself feel nothing but pins and needles, stare off into the fire and imagine it was a snowy, buzzing TV. She saw it and she didn't understand. She called him out. She saw the way he opted out, she saw it for exactly what it was and she called him out. She made it impossible for him to go there, that numb, unfeeling place.

Daryl sat there, in that crossroad, and tried. He tried harder than he ever had to go numb. To lose the tightness in his chest, the panic in his gut, the pounding guilt, the absolute agony that she was right. He could feel it all, and for the first time in years he couldn't do it. He couldn't turn it off, he couldn't go numb.