Who We Are
Holding On For Dear Life
So I'd like to preface this by saying that I'm not really a fan of what they're doing with Daryl's character on the show. Like I'm really starting to hate his combative and uncompromising attitude. At least Rosita still has a little resolve and clear thinking left under all of her suicidal bravado. Speaking of Rosita, she and Tara actually interacted and while it was a fight it was still pretty awesome to see. I have a chapter planned to deal with her so keep an eye out for that. As for this, this is the best I could do to rationalize Daryl's attitude to myself. I was listening to The Ghost of You by My Chemical Romance while writing this. I think it fits both Daryl himself and Daryl/Beth pretty well.
Richard's plan had been a solid one, better than the hope for more people to just magically appear out of nowhere and join their cause that Rick was hedging his bets on, Daryl could admit that to himself. If the plan had had nothing to do with Carol and had instead put some random stranger in harm's way he would have sacrificed their life without a second thought. He could even admit to himself that he had probably overreacted at finding out that the plan did in fact involve Carol, he was smart enough to know that threatening potential allies could come back and bite them in the ass at some point. The plan did involve Carol though, would most likely have ended in her death and he wasn't about to let another person he cared about die as long as he was still breathing and capable of stopping it.
He had allowed other people to plan and posture with Beth's life, had allowed himself to be drawn into Tyreese's "safe" plan that ultimately just ended up giving Dawn and her group the ability to draw the situation out into what it became. He wasn't going to let anyone else use the lives of people he cared about as simply bullet points to be acknowledged and used at the discretion of whatever genius was devising each particular plan. He had been unable to protect Sophia, he had been unable to protect Hershel, he had been unable to protect Beth, and he had been unable to protect Glenn and he was dammed if he didn't put all that he had left into protecting Carol.
Morgan had been right about one thing, they were all holding on to something. The thing he was holding on to wasn't the hope that the assholes that roamed every corner of what had become of the world would all of a sudden become better people like he did though, he wasn't that much of an idealist. No, he was holding on to something much more real, he was holding on to Carol and all that she represented. She was the last person besides Rick who actually understood him. If he were to lose her he would be essentially losing the last vestige of something more within himself that had cropped up during their time at the prison. Rick was his brother, they had said that and meant it to each other, but it wasn't the same.
So, he hadn't told her about Glenn and Abraham or what was really going on with their group's relationship with the Saviors. If she ever found out the truth it would break her, just like she said it would, and she would launch a one-woman vendetta against the Saviors and everything they held dear. It would be just like Terminus and there was no guarantee that she would walk out of it on the other side this time. He couldn't lose her that way either. He had let Beth go off on her own back at Grady Memorial when she had been safe and within arm's reach and she hadn't come back.
He was back at the Hilltop now, Maggie's own little fiefdom to do with what she wished. Gregory was a pushover and Daryl sincerely hoped that the specter of death that seemed to constantly follow him around enacted its perverse nature upon him. If he was an unbiased observer he could admit that Maggie had been slightly unhinged since Glenn's death, but he was unhinged himself and couldn't blame her, wouldn't blame her if she wanted to see him dead for his part in the whole thing, so he just let her go on the way she was. As he sat and stared out at the road he hoped that Rick would soon be making his way up that road with a new army and a plan to finally take the fight to the Saviors. Then he could finally get off his ass and do what he did best and not have to think about all that he had lost since the whole shitshow that was the apocalypse began.
He hadn't known Sophia all that well aside from the fact that she was Carol's daughter, but after she went missing he had made it his mission to find her and return her safely to the rest of the group. His efforts had been futile as she had been inside Hershel's barn the entire time already turned. It had been his first failure in protecting someone.
Hershel had been a better father to him than his own deadbeat of a dad could have ever hoped to have been. He saw the good in him when not many other people had. In the end though he had fallen victim to the Governor's madness. His second failure to protect someone.
Beth was something that he hadn't deserved but got anyways. She had seen the good in him despite it all, it must have been a Greene family trait, and trusted him with her life wholly and without much complaint. Together they had formed something that he still wasn't quite able to put into words and those weeks with her were still the best weeks of his life. Failing to protect her had been his most egregious error.
Glenn was a friend, an unexpected friend, but one of the greatest friends he had ever had. He had never deserved his friendship, hadn't particularly wanted it at first, but that had never stopped Glenn. Glenn was a good person, a better person than Daryl could ever hope to be at his best and he certainly wasn't at his best right now, and he hadn't deserved to die like he did. It had been his own bravado and stupidity that got Glenn killed and he would never truly forgive himself for that. Just the most recent in a long list of failures that had been filling up since long before the dead overtook the living.
He wasn't a good person, had gotten better due to the people around him, but he had never been one and wasn't one now. He killed that Fat Joey guy without a second thought when it really wasn't necessary just because of who he'd happened to fall in with. None of them were any better than the Saviors when you really got down to it, especially himself, and him calling them out for being monsters, doing what they did, was nothing more than full-fledged hypocrisy of the highest order. If he happened to catch a bite or a scratch from one of the dead one day or meet the end of Negan's bat there would be those amongst the group that would miss him, maybe even shed tears, but he would deserve none of it. He had failed Sophia, he had failed Hershel, he had failed Beth, he had failed Glenn, and he would probably end up failing Carol too, but he was still holding on for dear life to the possibility that just maybe, this once, he could do what he had failed to do countless times before. Maybe, just this once before he met his inevitable demise, he could finally do something worthy of all the admiration shown to him by the people he had ultimately failed.