And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes.
It's weird being free to just go wherever she wants to again, Lori thinks as she slips between the break in the fencing that's only gotten worse over the years. After fourteen months away, it's just damned weird that no one's supervising her anymore. Her mother spun enough of a sob story about being alone while having cancer to make even the staunchest of caseworkers yield.
The woman doesn't need a caretaker anymore than Lori does, and it's fucking thyroid cancer, which is like winning the lottery if you've got to have cancer. Yank the thyroid out and remember to take the meds, problem solved. It's not like her mother is going to have to have chemotherapy like Lori's ninth-grade English teacher needed even after her double mastectomy. Now that's a cancer to be worried about.
The woods haven't changed all that much over the years, but considering the property borders the Chattahoochee National Forest, it's unlikely to ever change drastically. These trees will cycle through their lives, graced by flowers at their bases, for far more years than Lori will ever see on this earth. The clearing she seeks still has primroses like it always has, the pink-and-white blooms a splash of color amid all the greens, browns, and grays of the forest floor.
It's stupid to come here because Daryl won't be waiting for her like he did year after year after they first met when she awoke from her nap to see him with that turkey. He kept his word, unlike most of the people in her life, and taught her everything he knew about life in these woods. She got the better part of the deal, because there was a lot less for her to teach him than the other way around, but once given, Daryl's loyalty never wavers.
His hunting blind is still here, though, and she feels a surge of joy at the discovery. If he'd abandoned their spot, it would be falling into disrepair, not neatly kept. Somehow she's not surprised to find the old military foot locker is still here. Opening the latches, she peeks inside, smiling to see fresh dates on a few random cans of food. He wouldn't need to hide out here for days at a time these days, but apparently, old habits die hard.
Setting aside the spare change of Daryl's clothes, Lori lifts one of the two blankets, and in a fit of nostalgia, sniffs it. It ought to be a bit gross, left out here in the trunk, but instead it smells like laundry after being hung on a line to dry, underwritten by a distinct note of Old Spice. She wishes it was cool enough this afternoon to wrap it around her but reluctantly tucks it back in the footlocker instead.
"Heard you were back."
The drawl from outside the hunting blind makes Lori squeak in a way that ought to be embarrassing, but she's just so damn glad to hear Daryl's voice that she pops out to fling her arms around his waist. He grunts, making a sound of objection that he immediately negates by closing his arms around her.
"Back to stay," she tells him. "Not gonna be that stupid again."
"Shouldn'ta done it in the first place. Drugs never got Merle ahead in anything, now did they?"
It's not a unique lecture, and she doesn't think she'll ever understand how Daryl manages to stay out of the seemingly inevitable slide into drugs, alcohol, and criminal behavior that plagues both their families. His daddy dealing meth and pills was the worst kept secret in a five-county radius, just like her stepdad was the local man for good White Widow or Panama Red instead of nasty ditch weed.
All it had taken was a new sheriff getting elected who had a grudge and a mistaken belief that taking out his known dealers would cleanse the county of any illegal drugs. Lori bets it's probably twice as bad now, just a little harder to find. Both of their father figures are doing long stints in the state pen right now and Merle along with them. The only reason she has her freedom long before the men is the asshole married to her mama had been right about one thing; the law went pretty easy on a sixteen-year-old girl when she got caught with over a pound of marijuana neatly packaged to sell.
Lori finally lets go of Daryl, stepping back to study the changes of the last year. He's clean and in decent enough clothing, although, from the number of grease stains on the jeans, she guesses he's still got a job at the garage the next county over. That half-starved look that persisted throughout his last years of high school is finally gone, replaced with broad shoulders and strong forearms inherent to manual labor. Without his daddy or Merle around to fuck it up for him, of course, he's doing better.
"You're looking good. Betcha gotta beat the ladies off you with a stick," she tells him, grinning impishly when he flushes red to the tips of his ears. He's never going to understand his appeal to the opposite sex, she thinks, because he doesn't have the hulking bulk and brawn of the other Dixon men.
"Why you gotta say shit like that?" he grumbles, tipping his head so that his eyes are nearly hidden behind a fall of sun-bleached hair.
"Cos you're so pretty when you blush."
Teasing him is something she missed desperately while she was away, and she's overcome with an intense sense of lost time. Letting the humor fade, she hugs him again, wishing she were short and petite like her mother. Being tall and gangly means she can't rest her head on his chest like she did when she was younger and hugged him. He hugs her back, one big hand smoothing along her spine so gently she wonders if he thinks she'll somehow disappear.
"How's your mama?" Daryl asks gruffly when he finally moves away, picking up the crossbow he must have sat down to greet her.
"Drunk by ten a.m. most days." Lori shrugs it off, no longer able to summon much emotion about her mother's ability to subsist on cigarettes, box wine, and cheap vodka. It's not like he'll judge her for it, considering his own mama's final years. "You hunting today?"
"Maybe. You got a license still, or you get too citified living in Atlanta to hunt anymore?" Daryl flashes her that quirky half-smile of his.
"Jesus, Daryl, it was a foster home, not a penthouse or some shit." Although to be honest, she had enjoyed living in the Atlanta suburb in the highly-monitored group home she was assigned to for eight months after her six months in juvenile lockup were complete. Staying there until she aged out of foster care might not have been the worst-case scenario, but like most government programs, they liked to blather on about 'reintegration of the family unit' even when it wasn't the best option for the kid.
He just laughs and jerks his head for her to follow him. "Need to swing by the house to pick up your bow. Kept it in working shape for you."
The quiet faith that she would eventually return makes a warm feeling overlay all the anxiety that returning home brings back. Falling in step beside him, she walks through the woods as quietly as he taught her. The spring sunshine is dappled across her skin, and something settles in her restless spirit that had never felt at home in the city. Her hand brushes his, and she twines their fingers together.
The battered old trailer a mile away isn't home any more than blood makes her mama actually family in the years since her daddy died. She knows his own equally squalid trailer isn't a place he feels at ease in either, even with the more volatile Dixons locked away long enough for him to have some peace in the place. The memories in those two places have too many layers of hurt and desperation to ever be anything as cozy as 'home'.
But here? Beneath the towering old trees clinging to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, with spring wildflowers gracing each clearing with enough sun for them to strive toward, and hearing the soft exhales of her best friend's breath and feeling calloused skin against her own?
This is home.
The birds around me hopped and played, Their thoughts I cannot measure...
Daryl flings the birdseed out into the sparse grass of the backyard, watching as the tufted titmice, finches, and dark-eyed juncos hop up fearlessly to snatch tasty bits. They've grown half-tame and spoiled to him feeding them, and he hates that he had to take down the bird feeders that have graced the backyard. The juncos are ground feeders anyway, but it's just a matter of days before they migrate north.
Slim arms slide around his waist, a slide of skin on skin as her arms slip beneath his worn t-shirt that never fails to make him shiver. "You know it's possible Merle might not bitch about the feeders."
Setting the nearly empty bucket of birdseed down at their feet, he twists in Lori's embrace to kiss her gently before he replies. "Don't see the need in taking any chances on him using them or the birds for target practice."
With his brother, it could happen, at least with how Merle was behaving before he was busted last. Serving twenty-five months out of a twenty-eight-month sentence hasn't seemed to improve the older man's disposition much when Daryl's ventured over to visit. Daryl is just damned lucky that his father got shipped far enough south that even Will Dixon didn't expect Daryl to pay his respects. Although in his darker moments, he knows the real luck is that his father copped twice the sentence Merle did, and that no parole board in their right mind will believe the man's at low risk of reoffending enough to parole him earlier than ninety percent served.
"You think he's gonna be pissed that I'm living here?" Lori asks as she steals his birdseed bucket and tosses a few handfuls out to the waiting birds. She's wearing some sort of gauzy sundress that hides little of her lean curves from him, and the rich blue of the fabric makes him glad he doesn't have to go into work today. As much as she likes to admire how he's grown up, she really doesn't understand just how much she's changed, too.
There's still a part of him that feels like a pervert for sleeping with her, even if she laughs that four years age difference is nothing even though she was seventeen the first time he'd seen her naked in all her long-limbed glory back in the clearing they still call theirs after all these years. She left to serve her time in juvie, still awkward and coltish, looking like she was thirteen and not sixteen, but when she came home?
He'd just about swallowed his tongue when she ducked out of his hunting blind and into the sunlight a year ago. Every gawky, half-grown feature had settled into a young woman so beautiful he might not have recognized her anywhere else, if not for those gorgeous, deep brown eyes of hers that were just as capable of looking right inside his soul now as they'd been at twelve. Her putting her mind to seducing him a month after she came home is still the single most astounding event of his twenty-two years on earth, and he hadn't put up much resistance at all.
"Nah. Merle likes you just fine, and you know he'd put the fear of God into your stepdaddy if he showed his face over here."
Asshole his brother may be, but Daryl knows Merle would have beaten Lori's stepfather to a fucking bloody pulp without care for the consequences the day she showed up barefoot and bruised at Daryl's door three days after her stepfather made parole in October. She hadn't been eighteen yet, and technically, moving in with him violated her probation, but like most things in their neck of the woods, no one seemed bothered when Lori started getting on the school bus somewhere other than the place legally listed as her home. All her useless bitch of a mother did was leave a trash bag of Lori's clothes on the front porch while Daryl was at work and Lori at school.
"It was a bit different before. Merle liked me when I was the smart assed kid that he thought it was funny to teach Marine weapons drills to. Now? I'm sleeping with his baby brother."
Lori sounds actually worried about his brother's reaction, so Daryl plucks the now-empty bucket from her and chucks it toward the corner of the rickety back porch. Tugging her into his arms, he kisses her again, but this one lacks any of the lazy innocence of the earlier kiss. Once she's suitably distracted, he smirks at her.
"Just fix him some of that chicken fried steak thing you made last Sunday, and the man will propose to you, dammit." Daryl still isn't sure what all went into the food, but whatever she'd done, that venison backstrap had tasted like the best damn steak he ever had in town.
"Eww. I do not want to marry Merle." Her wrinkled nose emphasizes her distaste, but she doesn't look worried anymore, at least. "I've got some venison left, so maybe I will fix him up a good meal to come home to. If what he's been eating is like what I got at the detention center, he'd probably eat just about anything after that slop."
Daryl can see the ideas starting to spin in her head and knows Merle is likely to have a spread like their old kitchen has never seen by the time Daryl gets him home. "He's fond of corn fritters and mashed potatoes, especially if you're making that mushroom gravy, too."
He's pretty damn fond of that gravy himself. It's just two birds with one stone to make sure she puts it on the menu, and there's plenty of mushrooms that they foraged out of the woods to go in it. They certainly eat a hell of a lot better on Daryl's pay from the garage than either of them ever did as kids dependent on self-absorbed parents incapable of providing for their offspring.
"I think I can manage a decent pan of gravy. You sure he'd want fritters and not biscuits? Or I could just make both." Lori laughs, the sound light and cheery, when Daryl can't hide his enthusiasm for that idea. She glances at him and sighs, plucking at the hem of his worn-out shirt. "You need to get dressed if you're gonna be on time to pick him up."
As tempted as Daryl is to show up in his white t-shirt and sweatpants so old and faded that their original black is now a murky gray, he knows Lori is right. Padding back into the dim light of the old trailer, he glances around the tidy space and sighs. Having the place to himself for so long meant it was tidy and clean when Lori moved in, but she's even more of a neat freak than he is. They could probably eat off the kitchen floor now.
Merle being home is likely to change that, but maybe it won't. He realizes that he has never actually known how his brother might behave without their father's influence, and for once, he's going to have a few years to find out. A clean house, Lori's soothing influence, and a job waiting for him at the garage, all of those might finally make a difference.
Still, when Daryl climbs in his old Ford pickup and heads down the packed dirt driveway to bring Merle home, he can't help but watch the birds fluttering in the April sunshine along the way. His life has always been both stagnant and ever-changing, just like the birds that wing their way in and out of the woods he calls home. Change is inevitable, and for once in his life, he hopes it's for the good.