Crossbows, Choice and Cherokee Roses
A/N ~ I was toying with this angsty headcanon for a while. And then the feels struck and I NEEDED TO GET THE IDEA OUT OF MY SYSTEM BECAUSE yes I fangirl over my own thoughts. This is just angsty fluff tbh. I don't know at what length a drabble becomes a one-shot but I may have walked the line. A oabble. A drabot.
Outlines Fading
[ Daryl looks for her when she's gone. Nobody knows. He knows that it's not going to amount to anything. But he'd feel useless if he didn't. Traitorous. Spoilers for season 4.]
He could hear the prison falling asleep, to the sound of the prison falling asleep.
His crossbow's ready, alert against his bed, his jacket and boots already on, with his live stare stubbornly fixated on the ceiling in the dark. There was never a decision to do this. No revelation, no choice. It just happened. The first night, he couldn't sleep. He'd only meant to go out into the yard, or shoot some walkers by the fence. Somehow it had just turned into this. He knew he wouldn't find her. But he couldn't just sit around, waiting for her ghost-like outline to materialize, or fade away. He couldn't be that powerless. He couldn't betray her like that.
He'd slipped silently into a kind of rhythm, an involuntary routine. A muscle memory wristwatch; he could tell when most of them were asleep. And it wasn't a chore, nor a desperation, although a hint of the latter settled like dust on him when he wasn't careful enough to focus on other things. It was something he had to do. Clockwork.
Slinging his crossbow over his shoulder, a knife and a last-resort gun into his belt, Daryl left his cell and his cell block quietly. He never used the main gate, too much fuss. Under the cover of a smothering midnight, too black beneath the fainting constellations, Daryl ducked through one of the wire-wound holes in the fence, closing it up agin behind him, skewering a lonely curious biter in the skull with his knife.
He followed the road into town, a muffled disturbance in the uncanny desolation of a deserted world. It was almost peaceful, going like this, except for the twisting truth of uncertainty, uncomfortable in his gut, chest. That he didn't know where she was, what she was doing. If she was safe, if she'd found new people who would never really know her. Whether she was thinking about him, too.
There were houses lining the street now, and he checked every one of them. Every one. Sometimes he found emptiness, bloodstained photographs curling at the edges, and sometimes he found walkers, but he left them alone. He killed when he was angry, the nights he hated Rick and he hated everyone else who let it happen and he hated the world and he fucking hated himself for not being there, not being able to find her. It wasn't one of those nights. Tonight, he was just... Alone.
It had felt that way, since she'd been gone. It wasn't like he didn't have friends. Rick was his brother, and Beth was sweet and Glenn could always talk. It was more that he didn't have her. Someone who got it like she did. Someone so perfectly in tune with the rhythm of him, that he didn't even have to try, although she made him want to. Someone he could talk to so easily, who had blue eyes and a quiet kind of storm, someone with more steel in her than anyone he'd ever met, with a pretty smile. Fuck.
He levelled his crossbow at the distance in the road and watched the bolt smash into the walkers' skull. When he yanked it out, the sluggish blood spattered. It always seemed like shorter than it was, him out, looking. He always headed back with a reluctant lead heart as the first fingers of dawn began to spray through the cracks of a ruined skyline, and the birds began to call. He never wanted to.
He was back at the prison before anybody was up, as usual. As usual, that razored thread tugged at him, skin and soul, when he passed her cell, and it seemed to him that the dust was moving in too quickly. Unlike usual, he couldn't force himself to pass it. He only stepped inside for a minute, breathing more cacophonous than his heartbeat, because any longer would have been too hard. Her prescence still lingered there. He wished it would stop pestering him as much as he wanted never to stop feeling the ache of her abscence - never to forget the impact of her not being there. The pillow still smelled of her, faintly. One day soon, that would disappear.
The day stretched out across the survivors' sanctuary, and Daryl Dixon washed the blood off his knife, splashed his face awake and prepared himself for a new, offbeat existence that did not contain Carol Peletier.
He tried to not think about her during the day.
The night was the playground of his memories.