Chapter 21: With Conviction

Thunder bellowed on the horizon, echoing in Daryl's ears as he absentmindedly poked holes in the side of his tent. The Hershel house creeped him out and despite the Doc's suggestion that he stay in bed, Daryl was out of there as soon as he could get on his feet. His stitches were delicate and if he stood up or turned around too fast, he got dizzy, so he spent the bulk of his time flat on his back feeling useless.

Andrea stopped by, apologizing for shooting him and giving him a book to read, but she didn't stick around. After she left, Daryl started flipping through the chapters seeing if anything interesting caught his eye when over the edge of the book he saw a flash of honey-blonde hair through the mesh window of his tent. Daryl craned his neck to see who it was but then the flash moved right into view.

"Hi," Marnie said hovering by the tent flap door. A drawing on a piece of lined notebook paper dangled from her fingers.

Daryl narrowed his eyes at the little girl. "What're you hangin' around here for?" He asked impatiently.

"I made this for you," Marnie held out the picture to him. "I made one for Andrea, too, but hers is in red." Marnie had drawn two faces on the paper in blue pen, the smaller face had swirls of curly hair and a big smile. "That's me," she pointed at the smaller face, and then the larger one. "And that's you, see?" Then she tapped her finger to a squiggly mess of lines that looked like a bunch of deformed stars. "And your arrows." Smiling, she held it out again and waited patiently for him to take it. "You won't tell Jordie I came to see you, right?"

"Why not?"

"She said not to bother you 'cause you got hurt, but I wanted to give you your picture." Despite her sister's apparent request, Marnie came fully into the tent and dropped her backpack at her feet. From the front pocket of her bag she pulled a lime green coloured bandaid. "This is the last green one, you can have it." She unpeeled the plastic and knelt down by Daryl's head, sticking the bandaid over the bandage covering the bullet graze on his left temple.

"Marnie?" Lori arrived outside the tent and extended her hand out to Marnie. "Daryl's gotta rest like your sister, honey. Why don't we go feed the chickens?"

Grabbing her backpack, Marnie eagerly took Lori's hand and went with her, yammering about names she wanted to give the farm birds. Daryl tossed his picture aside and went back to scanning through the boring book but then, thinking better of it, he picked up the drawing and folded it and tucked it into the book's front cover.

That afternoon, Daryl was so restless from being on his back all day he got up to count and clean his arrows. He hadn't had a chance to do it since his injury and he enjoyed the monotony of that particular busywork. Using one of Dale's fold out chairs as a table for his arrows, Daryl stayed on his feet to clean each one with the same red rag he always used. He was inspecting each tip to see if any needed to be sharpened when he heard someone calling his name.

"Daryl!" A voice whispered loudly.

Glancing up from his cleaning, Daryl spied Jordyn on the porch gesturing urgently at him. Abandoning his arrows, Daryl trudged towards her. Pain throbbed in his side from his puncture wound with each heavy step he took but he clenched his jaw and walked through it. It'd take more than a bad fall on one of his own arrows to slow him down.

When Daryl got to Jordyn, she was leaning against the porch spinning the walking stick he'd collected for her in her fingers. "Look," she said when Daryl arrived, pointing something out to him with her walking stick. "Weird, right?"

Daryl looked and immediately saw them. Under a tree a few feet from the porch steps were two racoons. One was dead, the other one was chewing at its carcass. Jordyn's eyes were wide and she was smiling again as though holding in a laugh. Curiosity bubbled in Daryl's mind, why was she telling him about this of all people? Did she think they were friends or something? Her smile seemed to say so and suddenly it occurred to Daryl that he noticed her smiling now. He hadn't ever seen her face that calm, or her eyes that bright. He figured she didn't really have reason to smile before. Now she had Marnie back and the shadows that clouded her eyes had lifted. Now, she had reason to smile.

"It's stuff like that that makes me think your chupacabra is real." Jordyn was saying, using her walking stick to balance while she sat up on the porch rail. "Well, the racoons and the dead running around..."

Now, Daryl smiled. As much of one as he could muster, which really wasn't much of anything. It didn't matter; Jordyn didn't see, she was still looking at the raccoons. All those weeks ago when Daryl had told the camp about what he'd seen, which he was still positive was a chupacabra, no one had believed him. Not even Merle, he'd just and lit a cigarette and chucked his brother a warm beer. But apparently Jordyn believed him, she must have if she knew about it.

Thinking back, Daryl couldn't even place Jordyn at the camp that night he'd brought up the chupacabra. But there had been more of them at first, the survivors. And from what Daryl could recall, back then Jordyn didn't speak. Not at first. He remembered that clearly, because up until the moment she'd first spoken to him, almost a week after he told his chupacabra story, he had thought she was crazy.

Cursing, Daryl slammed the door of Merle's truck and went in search of his brother. Of all the things to lose, he lost an arrow. His supply of them was limited as it was, and one was missing. He'd counted them before he and Merle went hunting - he'd had twelve. He counted again when they were loading up the truck to come back to camp and he still had twelve. That was less than two hours ago, and in that time he'd lost one.

Still spitting curses under his breath, Daryl approached the main campfire where the handful of kids in their group were playing a game with their mothers' nearby. Merle wasn't sitting by the fire, which was normally where Daryl found him in the evening. Instead he saw one of the mothers, the brunette with the little boy, and beside her a girl he didn't know anything about. "Merle?" He called out, checking the boxes of canned food near the fire. "If you stole from me, bro, I'll kill you."

"What are you looking for?" The brunette mother asked. Lori, that was her name.

"An arrow, I-" Daryl said, but before he could finish, Lori was up on her feet.

"Carl!" She snapped. "Don't go into the forest!" Lori stalked over to the children to scold her son who was looking at his feet as he wandered back into the camp away from the tree line.

Kicking a rock aside, Daryl figured he'd rip the seat out of Merle's truck if he had to. He couldn't afford to get lazy with his arrows. Every single one was valuable, too valuable to have simply misplaced. "Goddamn it..."

"It's there." The voice came from the girl by the fire. She wasn't looking at him, but she was pointing to a pile of bags, underneath which was his missing arrow.

Daryl kept glancing at her as he shifted the bags. His arrow was tangled in the strap of the duffle that Merle carried food in when they went hunting. After checking twice that the arrow was still usable, Daryl took another look at the girl. Up until now he had been sure she was retarded in some way. He'd never heard her speak. He'd never seen her angry, or sad, or delirious which seemed to be the choice of states that the other survivors were in, but this girl was like a shadow. Silent and unassuming.

Sitting before him he noticed she held a black rifle in her lap and she was etching something in the handle with a penknife. Daryl hadn't seen her shoot, he hadn't seen her cook, he hadn't heard her complain. He wasn't even sure of her name. The most he knew about her was that she spent most of her time stuck to Lori's side.

"Where'd you get that?" He nodded at the rifle.

Her pale face turned to him, the corners of her lips dipped down. Her eyes were dull and bloodshot and she blinked too slowly as though she hadn't had enough sleep. Without answering him, she looked from his crossbow to his eyes, and then back to her rifle.

"Hey, I'm talking to you." Aggravation boiled through Daryl's veins, she could clearly hear him.

"Please go away, Daryl." The intensity of her voice didn't show on her face, which remained still and lifeless, but her request was cold as ice.

Sneering, Daryl got to his feet and stormed back to his truck. Spitting some grit from his mouth, he stole another quick look at her over his shoulder. It was as though their interaction had never happened, she showed no sign that anything had disrupted her day. He wondered how she knew his name when he had no idea of hers; he wondered how she got the rifle and if she could shoot it, but mostly he wondered what the hell was wrong with her.

On the porch; Jordyn was still talking, which struck Daryl as so strange when he thought about how quiet she had been when their group first formed. He realized that he liked hearing her speak, and he knew why. Her smile came through in her voice, he could hear her happiness. Or maybe he was just hearing what wasn't there anymore, that monotonous voice she'd had when they'd been driving on their search for Marnie when Jordyn was staring off into the distance. It was like she would revert back to that strange, silent girl by the fire all over again.

He wondered what would change in him if Merle came back, or rather what was missing without his brother being there. Jordyn had called him better. Better than Rick or Shane for what he'd done for her and he hadn't been sure what that was. And then he understood that what he had done for her wasn't something she could describe, but it was something Daryl could see.

"Thank you again for my stick," Jordyn said. "Marnie scribbled my name on it." She showed him the side of her stick with her name spelled out in wonky letters with black marker.

"You got a weird name." Daryl stated, it was a thought he'd had a few times.

"It was my father's name." Jordyn offered. "He died when I was a baby."

"How?"

Jordyn opened her mouth to answer him, but then smirked and shook her head. "You'll laugh." She twirled the stick between her fingers.

Daryl didn't answer her, because he was quite sure he wouldn't laugh. Nothing really made him laugh. Killing Walkers came close...

"He overdosed." Jordyn muttered under her breath, watching as the raccoon that had been feasting on its friend finished up and scampered into a tree.

Shifting from one foot to the other, uncomfortable with her admission, Daryl didn't say anything. He understood why she was uneasy about admitting that to him. Her mother and step-father had done the same thing and so had Jordyn after she'd found her parents dead. Was it a family trait, suicide? Certainly was passed down to Jordyn. Again, he had no idea why she was telling him this. Purely because he asked? One thing he knew about her was that she was not free and loose with personal information, most of the stuff Daryl knew about her he had found out himself.

"It was different with my father." Even Jordyn seemed to think that was a lame excuse and rolled her eyes at her own words. "They were teenagers when they had me and my father was just a kid. Sixteen, I think. Took too much speed and never woke up." Sighing, she manoeuvred herself off the railing and back onto her feet. "Kinda fits with the world now, doesn't it?" Jordyn sighed. "Dark, random ugliness..."

Her walking was better, Daryl noticed she didn't rely on her walking stick as much as he had when he'd first given it to her, but she was still slow to move. He didn't help her, though, she wouldn't get better if people kept babying her.

"Hey, Daryl?" Jordyn turned to face him, looking uneasy. "Don't tell anyone I told you about my father, okay?" Her eyes seemed desperate. "I'd rather people not know..."

He figured he knew why, who wanted a bunch of strangers to know that your whole family had offed themselves? Nodding as a reply, he saw some of the worry leave Jordyn's eyes.

"Thanks." With that she turned and limped back into the farm house.

Daryl abruptly cleared off the porch and went back to his arrows, curious as to why she was being nice to him. She had her sister and she was still alive, so what did she want?

"Shit, shit, shit," Jordyn drew back when she pulled the trigger, and again the arrow fell at her feet. "This sucks, and I hate it."

"You keep moving," Daryl loaded another arrow into his crossbow and handed his weapon back to her. "You flinch and you'll miss every time."

Making a frustrated noise in her throat, Jordyn realigned the crossbow on the fence post it was resting on. The target Daryl had set up was about fifteen feet in front of her: a barrel sitting on a bale of hay. In the past hour, she hadn't hit it once. "I hate this," she repeated. "And no, I don't think this is easier than riding a horse."

When Hershel had checked over Jordyn's healing rib that afternoon, he'd overheard her reminding Daryl that he was going to teach her to ride a horse and Hershel immediately put a stop to it. The doctor told her that aside from the fact that her arm was not yet strong enough to hang onto the reigns should the animal break into a gallop, if she fell she would definitely break her rib again. So, as a compromise, Daryl agreed to teach her to shoot his crossbow which he claimed would be much simpler.

It turned out to be as frustrating for Jordyn to learn as it was for Daryl to teach. Apparently she had taken to her rifle quite easily, but with a whole new weapon she wasn't confident. She could get it in position with the target lined up through the sight and steady hands, but when it came to shooting she lost it all. The only arrow that had actually fired landed directly beside her feet when she'd had the crossbow at her side and accidentally pulled back on the trigger. The arrow had shot straight into the dirt.

"Try it again," Daryl stood back from her. "And don't flinch." Taking a deep breath, Jordyn rolled back her shoulders and shook her hair over her back.

It was a rare occasion that Daryl saw her hair out of the tight braid or secure ponytail she normally wore. He'd always thought her hair was black, but in the afternoon sunlight he could see that it was a deep coffee-colour. He wondered why she didn't wear it down more.

Jordyn took another breath, pressed her eye to the sight and made sure the barrel was lined up. Then, she fired. And the arrow actually flew. It didn't reach the target, but it did stick into the ground like a tiny javelin. Still, Jordyn wasn't happy. "Oh, come on!" She groaned. "It's not that far away, I could spit and hit it."

The amusing thought made him smirk, as did her next attempt at firing which was as successful as all her others. Her main problem was securing the arrow in the right position to be able to pull back and get enough force behind it to send out a fatal shot, but she also couldn't seem to stop flinching at the last second. Daryl figured they were rookie mistakes; of all weapons a crossbow was definitely one of the easier ones to operate.

"I've seen you shoot a Walker through the head without even looking," Jordyn said as she delicately reloaded the crossbow. "How long 'til I can do that?"

"Don't hold your breath." Daryl replied, noticing the rapidly setting sun. "Be outta light soon," he reached for his weapon. "And you won't shoot any better in the dark."

"One more," Jordyn was already hunching down over the crossbow to peer through the sight. "Come on," She mumbled under her breath. Then she exhaled and pulled on the trigger. Again, the arrow flew. And this time it did hit the target. It bounced right off it and fell into the grass, but Jordyn was thrilled that she'd actually made the distance. "Yes, I got one!"

Daryl looked from the bad shot back to Jordyn. "It should have stayed stuck." He pointed out as he went to retrieve the arrow.

Jordyn looked annoyed. "Shut up, I got one." She beamed and grabbed her walking stick from where it was leaning up against the fence post. "I'd give you a hug but I sense you don't want me to do that again."

Gathering up his arrows, Daryl glanced up at her without a clue how to reply, or how to say she could hug him again and he wouldn't mind. But it didn't seem like she wanted to anyway, she wasn't even looking at him anymore. Their last hug had been under an immensely different circumstance. The discovery of her parents' bodies had sent her to overdose on Merle's pills and before she'd done that, she'd requested one thing from Daryl: a hug. Back then he'd thought it was so strange, but then he had also thought she was so strange.

As they gathered all their stuff and turned to head back to camp, Daryl thought that he liked her being strange. Strange was interesting, and definitely fitting of the "new" world.

"Ow," Jordyn suddenly froze mid-step and grabbed Daryl's shoulder. "Cramp."

Stopping on the spot, Daryl just let her hang on to him until the pain passed. While she breathed through the spasm and massaged her calf, she slightly stooped over and leant against Daryl. And for some reason, he thought of their hug again. It had been awkward and strange and came out of the blue, just like now. But, of course it wasn't a hug.

Flicking her hair over her shoulder, Jordyn tilted her head to the side so she could make eye contact with him. "Why do I get cramps and a walking stick and you get to wander around like you didn't fall on your own arrow?"

"Luck?" Daryl shrugged. He hadn't intended it to be remotely funny, but Jordyn smiled anyway.

"Your hair's getting darker," She moved her hand up from his shoulder to just behind his ear and tugged at some of his hair. "I thought being out in the sun so much would make it lighter, but yours is darker..."

Again, Daryl was at a loss of what to say. Her fingers grazed the side of his neck as she pulled her hand away, and her touch gave him an unexpected jolt of energy through his veins. And as she tested her leg and realized she could continue walking unaided, Daryl found himself wishing she could have taken just a little more time to rest. A little more time to stand there with him.

The random reaction Daryl had to Jordyn faded as the night closed in, however they did eat together. Marnie had helped Carol and Lori cook and was thrilled to be able to serve her food around the survivors and she'd joined Daryl and Jordyn with her bowl of soup while they were discussing how to get Jordyn's accuracy better, or at least present, when it came to shooting arrows.

But their calm, fun night was ruined by Glenn, who rose nervously to his feet after dinner and announced with great worry that there were Walkers in the barn.