AN: I don't have much to say for myself. So, I'm just not. LOL

I own nothing from The Walking Dead, but I do own my own original stories, plots, characters, etc.

If you read this, I hope that you enjoy. If you want, please do tell me what you think of it.

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Run, Boy!

The words could echo in Daryl's mind even after he was awake for a while and warming coffee over a fire. The words woke Daryl up out of sleep more times than they didn't.

Some mornings, it seemed that Daryl could still smell the scent of charred flesh when he woke. He wished that it didn't come accompanied with the cold knowledge that it was human flesh he smelled in his nightmares.

Humans were animals. They were the worst kinds of animals. The ambled about on two legs and used their thumbs and fingers to manipulate things that other animals didn't use against each other—weapons that went beyond those that were given by God. Humans were cruel. They were savage and merciless.

Daryl had no use for them as a general species, and he found that there were only a few that he'd encountered in his years that made him alter his opinion on them, as particular examples of the species, at all.

Daryl used the tobacco from his pouch and rolled a cigarette for himself. He poured coffee from his pot into the little tin cup, and he drank it hot enough to scald away any remnants of sleep that might be lingering around the back of his mind and making his brain fuzzy.

He would pack up today. He would move camp. He'd roll up his blanket and tent, gather the rest of his supplies, and pack them up neatly. The weather promised to be good, and Daryl was feeling like stretching his legs a good bit. He could make it a great distance before he felt any real need to stop for something more substantial than a piss. The jerky and biscuits in his pack would eat well enough on the walk.

Besides—Daryl was tired of being here. Things were getting too crowded here. The people were getting too close—too thick. As soon as a town started to really get going somewhere close by—lively as those who lived there called it—then Daryl knew he wouldn't be camping somewhere too much longer. As soon as the camps turned into lively towns, the people took over like fleas. They spread further and further out until they choked out all the people, like Daryl, that preferred to live alone with the land.

Daryl stayed somewhat close to towns, of course. He had to stay close enough to make it in every now and again. He had a taste for tobacco, coffee, flour, and other goods that were hard to come by on his own. He stayed close enough to towns to trade. Pelts, game, and fish bought him damn near anything he wanted. He could parlay, so they called it, a little with some of the various natives in the area—red-men, he'd heard people call them, though he'd never much figured them to be even nearly as red as the white people that stayed too long in the sun and didn't much have the skin or constitution for it. Indians, other people called them. Daryl just tended to call them by their names or, if he didn't know a name, he usually simply signaled to them to let them know that he'd just as soon leave them in peace and be left as such.

As a result of having little damn interest in anybody else, Daryl found himself on the right side of people that seemed to scare the life out of others. They traded with him—fancy goods they got off of wagon trains either legitimately or not—and Daryl gave them shares of the goods he could buy from town without suffering more than a few stares and people crossing the street to avoid contact with the mountain man that scared them because he was unknown to them and, according to them, likely some kind of white-skinned, buckskin-wearing savage.

Daryl was happy to scare them. The more damned people he scared, the more people that kept their distance from him.

He didn't want them in his life, and he surely didn't need them. He hadn't needed anyone…not since…

Run, Boy!

The lingering, frantic sound of his brother's voice echoed in his head even as he packed his gear. He hadn't heard his brother's voice for years—many, many years. When his brother had told him to run, Daryl had been only a child. He had never fully been sure how old he was, but he'd probably been no more than seven or eight. His brother, Merle, had been the last damn thing he'd really had left to call his own in the world.

His brother had saved him from his parents—the first proof, so Merle had said, that people were savages. Only savages, Merle had said, would beat their own children merciless like they did.

The little ass town they'd gotten to was just cropping up when they'd arrived. It was fresh. It had smelled like piss, and shit, and livestock—and not necessarily in that order. Merle had told Daryl that's how they'd know the town was thriving. Thriving, Daryl, had learned early, like lively, meant that there was a lot of people around. People, at that time, had meant potential for money—and money meant goods.

That was before Daryl knew a great deal about trapping and trading. Merle hadn't known so much about neither trapping nor trading, but he'd known a good deal about doing things with cards—things that sometimes got him bloodied up from fights, but often put food in Daryl's belly when the game was scarce. Daryl had worked a job for the doctor in that town. That's what the doctor's wife had called it, at least. He'd gathered eggs for her and tended her chickens. As payment, he got some of those eggs and the coin she put in his palm to take to Merle in their little building out back of the house. She fed Daryl, too, when he couldn't find Merle.

Daryl still cooked eggs when they could be found, and chewed them slowly, with his eyes closed, and thought of the doctor's wife.

She hadn't been the worst kind of animal. She'd been the softest kind of animal. She'd made him eggs and given him biscuits and milk from her cows. She'd smiled at him, and taught him to read some words from a book—he could still remember those words—and she'd taught him about ciphering some numbers that still helped him make fair trades in towns where people refused to deal in anything but gold and the money that they didn't realize was far less real and far less valuable than the game and pelts that Daryl brought them.

She let Daryl and Merle sleep in the little building out back of their house that her husband called a cabin, and she forgot to take the pay for their keep that he claimed they owed.

Daryl still remembered the smell of burning flesh and the sickening realization that had come when he'd seen their house on fire thanks to the savage thieves that meant only to rob people of the money that wasn't real anyway—and to kill just to get it and to get away without finding themselves on the business end of a hangman's noose.

Run, Boy!

Daryl's last sight of Merle had been one that he'd been trying to block out of his memory since that night. As soon as he'd realized what they were doing—as soon as he'd woken to the smells and the sounds that still haunted Daryl—he'd practically attacked those animals just to keep them occupied and away from his little brother.

Just to give Daryl time to run.

Daryl had been taught early never to question Merle, and he never did. He didn't question him that night. He ran as hard as he could to the place where they most often went for hunting—where the game was good—where he could still see the burning town below as the fire spread faster than anyone could do anything about it. He waited there, balled up as small as he could make himself, wedged between a rock and the trunk of a scrubby ass tree.

Daryl waited for Merle until the sun was almost up. He'd wandered back to the town, scared to get too close, and had seen the milling about of people in the ash, and mud, and mess. He'd heard the sounds of fighting, sobbing, and the gnashing of teeth—of people behaving like animals and turning on one another in their grief and anger.

He hadn't seen Merle.

He'd never seen Merle again.

So, he'd listened to Merle's last words to him the best he could, and he'd run. He'd run as far away from that God-forsaken town as he could get on his damned nubby-ass little legs.

The man that had finally found him, doing his best to stab a fish through with a stick he'd sharpened to a point on a rock, had been a man who went by the name of Jim, though Daryl had never known any other part of his name, and he'd taken pity enough on Daryl to feed him and, then, to teach him how to feed his own damn self. He'd helped him get outfitted well enough, shown him the ways of a trapper who wanted little to nothing to do with what Jim had called polite society, and then Jim had gone to sleep one night and left Daryl to figure the rest of it out on his own.

Daryl had done alright.

He might hear names thrown around about him when he slinked into some town or another to swap his offerings for the goods he wanted—he might even be comfortable these days being called everything from a mountain man to a savage, depending on how kind the poor-whispering townspeople felt like being—but at least he kept decent company when he came across others in the wilderness, and his overall constitution seemed to do a decent job of keeping those Daryl truly considered to be savages at bay.

Even the kind of men that burned people in their homes and killed them for their goods believed all the legends, after all, of savage mountain men that knew no limits and respected no laws beyond those that Mother Nature, herself, wrote.

Daryl set his camp, satisfied with the new area, after he brought down a deer that would suit him for a while. He was some distance from the nearest town—a brand new one just getting started that was barely more than one half-cleared road and some shanties pretending to be storefronts—and that was how he liked it. The people would come soon, looking for places to settle and ways to make their livings, but the place wasn't overrun just yet with bodies. He was close to water and some natural structures that offered good cover from the elements.

Daryl built a decent fire and set to work preparing his kill—bones for tools and weapons, hide for trade in town, meat separated into what was best for trade and what he would keep for himself. There was fresh for now and some to make into tough jerky to store and chew on later. Nothing, or hardly nothing, went to waste—just as he'd always been taught by Merle and by Jim.

When his camp was as set as it was going to be, Daryl slipped away from the little covered area that he'd call home for a while and went for a walk to familiarize himself with the area and check the nearby water for signs of beaver. A good offering of beaver was a trapper's dream—and it could guarantee Daryl all the goods he'd need for a long while, plus plenty to trade for peace with any of the natives that might come wanting their friendship bought.

The water was icy cold no matter the time of year. Daryl remembered Jim saying that a trapper could hope for little more than dying somewhere warm instead of knee deep in icy water. Daryl figured that, at least, Jim had gotten that much. He'd been warm under his stinking ass bear skin when he'd gone.

The signs for beaver were better than Daryl had hoped, and he felt a little lightness in his step as he wandered along and surveyed his new home. He stopped long enough to roll himself a cigarette while sitting with his back against a tree, and he smoked it a moment before going on with his exploration. That was when he'd heard the sounds that made his skin prickle and his hair stand up.

Movement from someone not trying to be quiet and the sounds of animals—the domesticated sort.

He was certain he was still a decent distance from the town that they were scrambling to set up—a town that still would be nothing to speak of for some time.

Daryl eased himself up from where he'd stopped to smoke and followed the sounds, sure that he would see whoever was making the noises long before they saw or heard him.

He was right.

When the hastily built shanty came into view, Daryl knew he was still well-covered. He crouched down, hiding himself behind bushes, but he wouldn't have been noticed at this distance if he'd been standing at his full height.

The shanty was some distance from town—a little further away than most of the earliest settlers of a town usually preferred. People liked to stay close to other people—at least the town-dwelling kind of people did. Being this far out made them nervous because of the risks they believed lurked in the savage, unsettled lands far away from their precious towns—even though Daryl knew that towns could be filled with the most savage animals of all.

The shanty stuck so far from town didn't tell Daryl that a trapper lived there—most of them preferred to live without a structure such as that until they were ready to settle down with a mate or were too old to winter hard anymore—and something about the shanty's location made him uncomfortable. He had nothing to fear from whoever lived there—that wasn't quite it—but he sensed there was a reason for its remote location. There was, after all, a reason for every choice that animals made, even the human kind.

While Daryl was looking the place over—taking in the small, rough-looking wagon that looked like it couldn't have possibly made it any great distance and the somewhat sickly-looking livestock—Daryl saw something that got his attention more than anything else. He saw something that held his attention.

And he lowered himself to one knee so he could comfortably stay and watch for a moment.

She was the prettiest thing that Daryl had ever seen—and he'd seen some pretty things in his life. He'd seen views that few other men ever got to see. He'd seen pretty beads and offerings that had taken the breath away of those that bartered for such shiny things—and he'd easily handed them off because he couldn't be overwhelmed by beauty. It simply wasn't in his nature.

At least, not until now.

Immediately, he knew that he would have traded anything for something that beautiful. He would have bartered anything he could get his hands on—and he would have traded for more if he couldn't come by the payment on his own. To hold something that beautiful, Daryl couldn't imagine what he might give.

She wasn't like the painted women in the towns that batted eyes at him when they saw him trade for the money they valued and fill his pockets to buy goods that mattered to him. She wasn't like those women at all. She wasn't all painted up. She didn't need to be.

She looked like she was thinking deeply as she went about her work, doing something like washing up. She looked like she was contemplating big thoughts—the kind that sometimes Daryl had heard shared over campfires when he stumbled across the kinds of men he trusted, men like Jim, and shared a meal and a smoke with them.

Daryl wanted to hear her big thoughts. He wanted to stay and hear her voice. He imagined it would be soft and musical. He imagined it would sound a lot like the doctor's wife when she'd spoken all pleasant like and told Daryl what a smart boy he was when he'd been doing so well learning the words from her book and doing the ciphering she scratched on a slate.

Except this woman didn't look anything like the doctor's wife, and Daryl felt something stirring down inside of him that he hadn't had much cause to pay attention to before. Sure—he woke up some mornings with the uncomfortable need, that desperate yearning. He understood the need, though. Jim had explained it to him. It was nothing more than the natural need to rut—to mate—to proliferate, Jim had said. All animals felt it, Jim said, even the human kind.

It was only the savage ones, Jim said, that didn't know how to ignore it and control it when there wasn't a suitable mate willing and available for rutting.

It wasn't dangerous at all. It could be ignored. And Daryl did usually do just that. Right this moment, though, when the thought to rut came upon him, he found it harder to ignore than usual, and he half thought of showing himself to the woman with the hopes that—what?

The best he could probably hope for was that she didn't take off screaming that a dirty, savage mountain man was after her. She'd take one look at Daryl's dirty buckskins and run.

Still, he stayed, and he watched her, unable to tear himself away from looking at her.

Jim had an old Bible, and he sometimes read from it and taught Daryl a few words from it—words he'd been taught here or there, since he could scratch words out, too, when the need called for such a thing—and he'd told Daryl about coveting, among other things. It wasn't good, Jim said, but people still did do it because it was nature, and nature couldn't be done away with, even if it could be ignored. Coveting, he'd told Daryl, was the wanting of something desperate-bad until your mind didn't hardly want nothing else. It was the wanting of that thing, even though you couldn't have it and knew perfectly well you couldn't.

Daryl had never coveted before, but he coveted now. He coveted hard. He was sure that he coveted more than anyone had ever coveted before—because she surely was pretty, and he did want to stay there looking at her, even though he'd never be able to hold something so pretty himself.

He stayed until he heard the horse. He stayed until he saw it. A skinny swayback sorrel carrying a man who probably weighed too much for the poorly fed mount. He stayed until he saw the man demand the woman come inside with him—loudly—because she ought to know better than to be out when it was going to get dark and there were savages about.

Daryl stayed long enough to see the woman look around her, slowly and somewhat hesitantly following the man who was surely her mate, like she didn't so much mind staying out with the savages half as much as she minded going in with him.

Something didn't sit quite right in Daryl's belly—something he couldn't quite put his finger on. But it was no never-mind of his, and the dark was starting to settle around him. Almost as reluctant as the woman had seemed to go in the house, Daryl had left the little spot where he'd found cover to watch the shanty.

He meant not to come back, of course, and to leave people to do what the hell it was that people did—but that didn't stop him from breaking a branch or two on the way back to his camp, just in case he might need to follow exactly the same trail back again…for whatever reason.