Daryl was given a blanket and pillow to sleep on the couch in the study, which apparently doubled as Tex and Tammy's bedroom. The couple spread out a sleeping bag flat on the floor and made a nest of pillows and blankets. They were the leaders of this ranch, and yet they hadn't claimed the master bedroom or any of the servant's houses. They slept on the floor in the study. Daryl couldn't help but contrast their surroundings with Negan's private, luxury crib.
Exhausted, Daryl fell asleep almost immediately, and with no "Easy Street" to wake him up every fifteen minutes, he slept soundly for a good four hours. He awoke, however, to the sound of Tammy crying and Tex whispering, "Shhh...shhh...darlin', it's a'right."
"I miss him so much," she murmured.
"I know," Tex soothed her. "So do I. We're gonna end this though. We will."
She didn't stop crying.
Daryl rolled over and turned his face to the back of the couch. He hated the sound of a woman crying. It reminded him of his mother, crying all those nights Daddy didn't come home because he was with some other woman. It reminded him also of Carol, crying in that RV, weeping over her missing daughter. Daryl had wanted to smash something, to do anything to distract himself from the painful sound of Carol's tears. He'd wanted to thrust a stopper in her aching, but the only thing he could do was leave and walk the road, hoping for any sign of Sophia.
He had to leave now, too.
Daryl rolled off the couch. "Cain't sleep. Goin' to help yer men stand watch."
[*]
As Daryl passed a pick-up parked at the side of the main dirt path leading from the ranch house to the gate, he thought of the possibility of just sneaking off. Going home. But Tex was right. There was nothing he could do for his people, certainly not with a single rifle and a handgun. The best he could do for them was to stay here and fight their enemy. Rick was protecting them, keeping them alive, even if through submission. This ranch, like a magnet, could draw the Savior's wrath from Alexandria.
A free-ranging cow, which sat in the grass, lifted its head and rustled the long, green blades as Daryl passed by. Fireflies floated listlessly in the Virginia night air, flashing on and off in a call to love. The scene was strangely beautiful. However sick and fallen and twisted this world became, nature pressed on just the same, the one thing that hadn't changed.
Nature was cruel, too, of course - as cruel as it was beautiful. Of a hundred seeds, only one might grow. Fathers ate their rival young. Animals hunted one another, just as humans were doing now. Storms destroyed entire towns. None of that bothered Daryl, however. Nature didn't have a conscience. But men ought to. Men ought to defend the weak, not extort them. It was one thing to kill the people who were trying to subjugate you, but it was another to be the one who was doing the subjugating.
Daryl had to remind himself of that, because he knew some of those Saviors were just trying to survive. He knew he would be killing broken people tomorrow, people who were mere shells of their former, better selves. He couldn't blame them for wanting to find a way to live, but there were lines that should not be crossed, even for survival. Daryl would have chosen death rather than brutally extort the innocent for Negan.
Daryl made his gradual way to the leftmost watchtower, where Issac now stood, rifle in hand, eyes in all directions. He chose this tower because Malik was in the other one, and something about the man's coolness disturbed him. Of course, it wasn't as if Daryl hadn't once beaten information out of a man himself, back on Hershel's farm, but he hadn't been nearly as comfortable doing it. Well...maybe he had been, until Carol had asked him if it made him feel like more of a man, if he had hit that boy because he couldn't hit her back in the barn.
That boy, he thought, had needed hitting. His people were killers and rapists, and they would have ravished the women on that farm. But Carol was right about one thing. He was angry enough to hit her back in that barn, if he had been the kind of man to hit a woman. He was angry that she'd asked him to give up the hunt for Sophia. No one had hunted for him all those days he was lost in the woods as a boy, but Carol had been desperate to find her daughter. Desperate. And Carol had possessed faith in Daryl, too, had told him he was every bit as good as Rick. She'd believed Daryl had the skill and the determination to find Sophia. She'd believed in him, and then, suddenly...she hadn't. She'd told him, We don't even know if she's still alive.
Of course, she'd also told him, I can't lose you, too. Daryl hadn't processed those words back then. He was too angry. Only later did he realize that she might care for him. But that was a long time ago. He'd never had the courage to act, and she'd move on to Tobin.
Daryl made his quick way up the rickety ladder at the side of the watchtower. Isaac turned and nodded when he walked onto the platform. "Can relieve ya if ya want," Daryl said. "I ain't sleepin'."
"I'd have to run that by Tex, and I don't want to disturb him."
What Daryl heard was - I don't trust you to keep watch. He wasn't offended. He wouldn't have given the duty over to a stranger himself.
"But you can join me," Isaac added. "A second set of eyes never hurts."
Daryl nodded and moved to the opposite corner of the tower from Isaac. "Ya don't happen to have a smoke, do ya?" Daryl hadn't had a cigarette since he'd been taken captive. One would think the torture would eclipse the withdraw, but he'd found the lack of smokes to be worse than the dog food.
"Tex doesn't allow tobacco products of any kind on the ranch."
"What?"
Isaac's straight, white teeth flashed in the moonlight. He had a single missing tooth on the far, top left, which Daryl hadn't noticed until he smiled. He must have lost it after the turn, or else the space would have likely been filled in by some cosmetic substitute. "Just kidding." He fished in the pocket of his army fatigues, pulled out a pack, and extended it.
Daryl took it with a hearty thanks. "Got a light?"
Isaac reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a silver lighter engraved with a gold Marine logo and the name John Hanson on it. Daryl leaned over it to light the cigarette and didn't ask who John Hanson was. A fallen brother, most likely, but not fallen in the desert sands where they'd once fought a foreign enemy together. John Hanson had probably survived all that warfare only to be devoured by walkers on his home turf. Or so Daryl imagined.
Daryl took a long, slow draw and blew the smoke out with a satisfied sigh. Then he said, "Ya remind me of someone I used to know." Isaac looked so much like T-Dog, though he was taller.
"Do I? Or do all black people just look alike to you?"
"Nah. You don't remind me nothin' of Bob. Scrawny little guy. Or Father Gabriel. Creepy little fucker."
Isaac chuckled. He picked up a pair of night vision binoculars and scanned the horizon. After he put them down, he asked, "Has your group lost a lot of people?"
"Yeah," Daryl answered quietly. "Too many."
"Mine too, before we made it here. We had fifteen. When we found Green Acres, we only had four. Me, a teenage boy, a ten-year-old girl, and their mother. She used to claim to love me, but once we were safely in Green Acres, and there were other men..." Isaac shrugged. "She wouldn't give me the time of day. I guess what she loved was the protection I provided."
"Mhm," Daryl murmured. "Guess that part of the world ain't changed none. Still cain't count on a woman to be anythin' but fickle." He knew that wasn't true, even as he said it. Maggie had been loyal to Glenn until the end. Rosita had been loyal to Abraham until he'd dumped her. Even after he had, Rosita's heart was still with him.
But Carol...Carol had started sharing a bed with Tobin, even when Daryl was right there in the next house. Of course, it wasn't as though Carol had betrayed him. They weren't a couple, not that way, not like Glenn and Maggie. And yet...he felt betrayed. She hadn't even talked to him about it. She hadn't given him a chance to make some kind of counter offer. She'd just walked up that man's porch stairs and into his bed.
Or maybe Carol wasn't in Tobin's bed. After all, she and Daryl had been in the same prison cell several times and never once shared a bed. He'd slept on the bunk below hers, to keep her company on difficult nights, when thoughts of Sophia haunted her dreams. He wondered now if they would have ended up sharing a bed if just once he'd taken one of her sexual jokes as something other than a joke. But he'd been too afraid of her rejection.
"Sounds like you've been put through the wringer, too."
"Nah," Daryl said. "Ain't no one ever claimed to love me and then took it back." Carol had never claimed to love him. She'd claimed to know him.
"Where are you from?" Isaac asked. "Originally? Alabama?"
"Georgia."
"That's where my brother Theodore lived. Outside of Atlanta. We're from North Carolina, originally, but he moved there fifteen years ago to be the Outreach Minister for some church. He was always a bit of a religious nut. Good guy, though. I guess he's dead now."
"Theodore...Douglas?"
"Yeeeaah," Isaac said, elongating the word with surprise.
"T-Dog?"
"Some people called him that, yeah. How in the hell do you know - "
"- He was with our group. That's who ya reminded me of! See! Ain't that I think all black folk look alike. Just saw the family resemblance is all."
"Was with your group?" Isaac asked, coldly, his tone masking the emotion that was clearer in his eyes. "So he is dead then?"
In his excitement over discovering the connection, Daryl hadn't thought about the fact that Isaac might have maintained a distant hope that his brother was still alive somewhere. He nodded. "Gave his life to rescue a woman in our group." Daryl had been grateful to T-Dog for that. Finding Carol behind that door, finding out that she wasn't dead after all, had been one of the happiest moments of his life.
"And was it worth it?" Isaac asked, his voice a little sad and a little resigned. "Is she even still alive?"
"Far as I know." Daryl certainly hoped Carol was, but why hadn't she been in Alexandria when Negan had taken him to collect? "And T-Dog savin' her life? That kept her alive to save a bunch more of us later on." Terminus seemed a lifetime ago now. "She saved me, and I'm still standin'. So's Rick. Sasha. Eugene. Rosita. Tara." Not Glenn, though. Not Abraham. Not Bob. And not even Maggie. Sometime after Daryl had been taken, she'd been buried in the Alexandrian earth. "Your brother saved seven lives, in a way."
Isaac nodded solemnly. "Theodore always was a sacrificial sort. Sometimes it annoyed the shit out of me, his damn goodness. Made me feel inadequate."
"I know the feelin'. He made me feel like that to. My brother treated him like shit, but when Merle got left behind. T-Dog went back with me to find 'em. He was a good man."
Isaac sniffled, once, and then picked up the binoculars abruptly. He covered his eyes with the lenses, looked out at the distance, and didn't say anything else for the next hour, when someone else came to relieve him. It was a woman, and Daryl didn't want to hang out alone in the watchtower with a woman. She might be intimidated by him, or, still worse, he might be intimidated by her. So he returned to the study.
Very cautiously and quietly, Daryl opened the study door, ready to backtrack if Tammy was still crying in there. She wasn't. In fact, she and Tex were fucking. Maybe "making love" would have been a better term for it, but that wasn't in Daryl's everyday vocabulary. Tammy moaned softly as she straddled her husband and moved in rhythm with him. Daryl backtracked immediately, before either could notice him, and cursed himself for not knocking. He hadn't wanted to wake them if they were asleep. He made his way to one of the barns, where he dozed off in the loft, in a pile of hay, wondering what it must be like to have a lover who could do that - who could fuck your tears away.
