A/N: Poem tidbits in the story is "Lines Written in Early Spring" by William Wordsworth, google for full text if you like.
It's altered for FFN from how it's posted on AO3.
I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined...
Lori scrambles out the window of the rickety old mobile home, letting her weight drop to the ground. The impact makes her heels ache, especially since her shoes are a size too small and held together with more hope than anything else these days, but it's worth it to be outside in the fresh air. With a wary glance back, she picks up the threadbare backpack she tossed out the window and slips through a gap in the rusted chain-link fence that surrounds the trailer park and makes her escape into the woods beyond.
She's not supposed to be out here, but she doesn't give a damn. Even in her mind, the curse word makes her flinch a little, as if it will conjure her mama to flick her ear and threaten to wash her mouth out with soap. Mama doesn't care that much about Lori anymore, but old habits die hard. Sometimes she thinks about just walking until she can't walk anymore, because no one is going to report her missing if she doesn't come home.
Not since Daddy died.
Not since he moved in, stinking up the tiny trailer that is all Mama can afford on the scrap of social security she gets from what Daddy paid into the government by working construction all his aching life. He doesn't want Lori there, sees her as a useless burden, but at least he just ignores her most days. The big problem is that what he does, Mama copies.
Lori's so damn tired of being invisible, although sometimes, being seen? It's too painful to think about.
Out in the woods, she finds the little grove of trees that she's been thinking of as her sanctuary ever since her Mama moved them to this little mountain town three months ago, right after school let out for Christmas. When she first came, things were half green, half brown, plants gone winter dormant entwined and tangled with the evergreens that didn't care that the North Georgia Mountains actually have a winter season.
But it's spring now, and everything is starting to get new and shiny, with bright leaves decorating the trees, and birds gracing the forest with song and flutters of nimble movement among the trees. She wishes she knew the names of everything, but that was always one of those things Daddy was going to teach her one day.
One day, when Lori was big enough to walk around the woods quietly.
One day, when Daddy wasn't working so much.
One day, which will never come now, because Daddy is dead and buried and never, ever going to come home to hug Lori ever, ever again.
Dropping the backpack to the leaf-strewn ground, she tucks herself into the shelter of a half hollow dead oak still stubbornly staying upright. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she suppresses the tears that threaten, because being a crybaby sure won't bring her Daddy back. Maybe, just maybe, if she comes out here enough, she'll figure out all the things he meant for her to learn. Listening to the sounds of the birds singing and the nearby creek, she practices being quiet enough that nothing knows she's here, like Daddy used to say he did.
Lori is so successful in being still, being quiet, being unnoticed… that she falls asleep in the shelter of the once majestic oak.
And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.
Daryl isn't sure why he bothered bringing his crossbow along today. Only thing legally in season is turkey right now, and while he knows the game warden will look the other way if he takes a rabbit or a few squirrels, it always feels like he's tempting fate to trust a man with a badge and a gun. Such people never look kindly on Dixons for long, and his Daddy and Uncle Jess got busted for poaching just over a month ago.
He just can't imagine the game warden thinking letting Daryl keep his belly full is worth it anymore, not after that stupid shit.
But the freezer's empty of the deer he got back before the season ended, as well as everything else he put back. Why the hell Daddy and Uncle Jess went out with their rifles when the dumbasses both know how to use a crossbow, he'll never know. If they had just left the guns at home, putting an arrow in that big buck would have been legal. Archery season's always just a little bit longer than firearms, after all.
He would like to think stupidity isn't hereditary, but the evidence points to the contrary. His brother served his last round of juvie punching a teacher at the high school, after all. Maybe if Merle hadn't done that shit, he wouldn't have enlisted in the Marines just as soon as they let him set foot back in the free world again because he'd turned eighteen. His brother managed to fuck that up, too, and the damn fool's serving time in military prison, for socking his superior officer in the mouth this time. Merle just moved up the ranks of whose teeth he's willing to knock out. If he keeps it up, Daryl thinks he'll be aiming for cops next, just as soon as he gets out of the prison the Marines tossed him in.
With Merle gone, it's just Daryl left at home with Daddy, and that's a sort of hell he'll do anything to avoid.
There's a thicket Daryl's rigged up near the creek that worked real nice as a hunting blind before, and he's hoping it might work for turkey, too. There's a logging road right nearby, and when he's lurked near other hunters, listening and learning to sift the knowledge from the bullshit, he knows they like places like that. He's seen some signs of turkeys dusting themselves on that road, so he knows they're in the area. It's just a matter of watching, waiting, and calling.
If not, the creek has plenty of fish, and as stubbornly Dixon thick-headed as Merle might be, he did teach Daryl what plants and mushrooms he could eat and not accidentally off himself, or worse, spend days shitting his brains out. Folding his bony frame into the tangle of spring awakening muscadine vines, he relaxes like he always does when he's hidden from sight.
Patience pays off, because a fat old gobbler struts into sight just as Daryl's starting to wonder if he needs to figure out how to imitate the hens he can hear somewhere nearby. He's hunted enough spastic, wary critters with his crossbow by now to know to keep it quiet and steady as he raises the weapon. The only warning the big bird gets is the twang-and-pow, and then he's flopping around, body seizing as it gives way to the mortal injury delivered by Daryl's bolt.
Just as he's got the turkey by its feet and tugging his bolt out, he hears a muffled sound behind him. Turning, he scans the treeline, knowing he's not alone out here, but not spotting the intruder just yet. When he does, he's both a little pissed and a little impressed.
She's a little scrap of a girl, dressed as poorly as he is in threadbare, secondhand clothes. Her brown hair is twisted into haphazard pigtails, as if she did the job herself, and she's got the biggest eyes he thinks he's ever seen on a living person before. The sound was her holding her own hands over her mouth to soften whatever protest she was making about seeing him with the bird.
"What's your problem, girl?" Daryl sneers, shifting anxiously. The kid can't be more than eight or nine, he thinks, but then he remembers he's seen her on the school bus. She gets off at the middle school, so she's got to be at least eleven, maybe as old as thirteen. "You don't like people hunting?"
Talking to her breaks whatever spell was holding her so still, because she ventures away from the old dead oak tree and comes close enough that he realizes she might actually be skinnier than he is. She doesn't look grossed out by the dead turkey, or the blood from when it flopped around in its death throes, just curious. When she shifts her head to look at the bird closer, he spies a bruise along her jawbone and a mostly healed spot where her lip's been busted recently, and unease curls in his gut.
"Hunting is just fine," she ventures, voice raspy as if she doesn't use it much. "I just don't know how."
Huh. That wasn't really what he expected her to say. "Don't you got someone to teach you?"
The girl looks at him like he's dumber than Merle when he's gotten ahold of some good weed and sighs. "If I did, I would know how. I'm not stupid."
"Didn't say you were," Daryl grumbles, wondering why the hell he's talking to her. He's got his turkey, and he needs to get it home and figure out how to clean the damn thing.
She studies him critically for a minute but must decide he's telling the truth, because she shrugs. "I'm Lori."
He hadn't meant to get so far as introductions, but for some reason, he replies in kind. "Daryl. Daryl Dixon."
Unlike most people, she doesn't flinch away when he adds his surname. Thinking back, he realizes she didn't start riding his bus until after Christmas, so she must have moved here and hasn't been told the Dixons are the worst sort of white trash yet. He's even lower down than the people that live in that trailer park she comes from.
"Well, Daryl, do you know how to pluck a turkey? Because I know how to do that." She smiles slyly, and it makes her narrow little face light up. He shakes his head, reluctant to admit he doesn't know for sure, and her smile widens. "I can show you how. My Daddy did teach me that much before he got killed."
The way she says it makes him shiver a bit. Not 'he died', like it was natural causes or something expected, but 'he got killed', which means something awful happened to the man, something she is still angry or hurt about happening. He hopes it wasn't something like his own mama, because he doesn't even want a strange little girl he barely knows to have her daddy burn to death.
Unexpected sympathy leads him to seriously think about her offer. His daddy isn't home, which is part of why Daryl's in the woods looking for something to eat. Will Dixon is serving a thirty-day sentence at county for failure to appear on some traffic ticket, which he compounded by telling the judge to go fuck himself when he did finally get hauled into court. It's just Daryl at home for at least the next twelve days, and no one gives a shit anymore if he's home alone or not, even if he's only fifteen.
"Alright. You show me how to clean the turkey, and I'll teach you something in trade. That fair?" He stands stiffly after he makes the offer, expecting her to sneer and reject it, saying she was messing with him about offering to show him how.
Instead, she bounces a little, sly smile becoming a bright, happy grin. "Could you teach me to hunt? Would that be legal?"
Daryl hesitates, scanning her fragile form and still unable to guess her age. "Depends. You at least twelve?"
"Yeah. I turned twelve in December."
Worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, Daryl tries to remember the class he had to take to hunt with Merle. "I can teach you stuff, but you gotta take that hunter's education class to get your certificate before you can actually hunt something. I'm not eighteen yet. Can't supervise you until then. They offer it at the community center sometimes. But the only thing in season right now is turkeys."
That makes her bright expression fade, and it surprises him that it makes him wish it would come back. "Well, it's not like I can just start shooting things on my first day learning, right? There's other stuff to learn."
"Yeah. Like what tracks are what animal, and what they eat, and how to not to scare everything away." Daryl hefts the crossbow onto his back after putting the bolt back in its slot and grabs the turkey. "You gonna come show me how to get the feathers off this thing or what?"
Lori pauses only to retrieve a backpack from the little nest she's made for herself at the dead oak tree. Settling the nearly worn-out straps across her thin shoulders, she falls into step beside him, moving remarkably quiet through the fallen leaves. Teaching her might not be such a chore after all, and if she's out here in the woods, with bruises on her like he would have on him if his daddy was out of jail?
Maybe he can be a better help to her than Merle managed to be for him.
A/N: While I've seen a few Caryl stories where they met as children/teens and were separated by circumstances or choice, this idea has been plaguing me to the point nothing else was going to be written. It's mostly complete, three chapters only, and will be about 10k in length.
This is part of a series I'm creating that will feature unrelated short fics for the Daryl/Lori pairing, both ZA and non-ZA, following a list of prompts I found and enjoyed the idea of. There will be 30 prompts total. The series name is inspired by a rude reviewer here at , who divebombed a fic of mine to say "Daryl and Olive Oyl coupled up ugh no thanks;)". Thanks for inspiring this series, dear anonymous reader!