AN: Here we are, another chapter here.
I'm excited that it seems a few people have found this one now. I do hope you enjoy it!
Please don't forget to let me know what you think!
111
Daryl knew that, in town, there were often people that would scratch off your beard for money. Every now and again—and usually at the start of summer—he'd known a few of Jim's acquaintances that would wander down and get their beard scratched off. Jim, himself, had done it once or twice, and Daryl remembered watching it take place. He had always thought it looked dangerous to trust someone to put a blade so close to your throat just for scratching off your beard. Besides, many of the men that Daryl had seen were odd looking when they came out of there—including Jim—with their skin all different colors.
It just seemed like a dangerous business altogether for Daryl, and he'd never really wanted any part of it.
Wrapped in a piece of cloth, Daryl still carried a bit of glass that he got from Jim's belongings—all of them, naturally, became Daryl's belongings after he had laid Jim low in a grave that he dug for him and had covered him over well with rocks so that the animals didn't get at him like they would.
The bit of glass reflected back whatever it was aimed at, and it also seemed to help start fires sometimes with a little concentration and careful angling. Jim used it, at times, to see himself while he worked to scratch his own beard off with a sharp blade. He'd tried to do it to Daryl, but Daryl had fought him enough that Jim had given him a good smack in the mouth for squalling like he had, and then he'd given him the little pair of scissors that Daryl still kept.
It was good for trading, Jim said, to cut his hair and beard from time to time. It helped the town people to want to talk to him, and throwing his hair out helped the birds, squirrels, and other nest-building animals. Daryl would do the cutting for the animals more than he would for the town people—and maybe Jim had known that.
Daryl hadn't cut his hair and beard for some time with the little scissors, but as soon as he returned to his camp with the pretty woman and situated her on his blanket until her body relaxed enough to allow her to wake, he'd gone through his pack for his bit of glass and scissors. He wasn't much good at making himself look like anything in particular, but he could cut away at the hair until it was better and more appropriate for town people. Maybe, then, she wouldn't be so afraid of him when she woke.
Daryl wasn't honestly sure if he made things better or worse, but he abandoned his hacking when the woman started to stir. He gathered up what he could of the hair, tossed it outside of the little sheltering cave, and returned to where the pretty woman was resting on his blanket.
Kneeling close to her, he put his hands up to show her they were empty even as she started to come around.
"Easy. Please don't yell," Daryl said.
Daryl's request wasn't heard, obviously, because the very first thing that the woman did, upon waking, was to yell. Her yell echoed around the small cave that Daryl was using as a shelter. He winced and waved his hands at her.
"Stop yellin'! Would'ja stop? Stop yellin'! That don't do nobody no good!"
His own sounds mixed with hers. She stopped yelling, at least, though her final sounds echoed a second longer after she stopped producing them.
Where her first reaction to Daryl had been to slip out of consciousness and, thus, to render herself unable to really experience whatever she feared might be about to happen to her, her second reaction was to try to flee. She scrambled backward, in a very ineffective effort to escape Daryl, who wasn't actually advancing on her in any way.
Daryl dropped down to a squat, hoping that putting himself more at her level might help to calm her. Some animals, he knew, responded poorly to something that towered over them. It was a threat, even when a threat wasn't meant. Daryl didn't have much experience with women—he'd only barely known his mama, and he'd been pretty young when the doctor's wife had died. Since then, his only interactions with women were the few he saw in town—most of which did a great deal to avoid him unless, like the painted women, they wanted his attention for what they saw him put in his pockets.
"It don't do no good to go that way," Daryl said. "That part back there's blocked off. Just rock. You gotta go that way if you goin' outside."
He gestured back over his shoulder.
The woman, wide-eyed, not-screaming, and still evidently terrified, switched tactics once more. Scrambling backward, she clawed at the ground and, too late, Daryl realized what she intended to do. She flung the handful of dirt and pebbles just as he turned his face, and some of it managed to catch in his eye with a biting sting.
"Why the hell would you do that?!" Daryl yelled. His voice echoed, now, as he wiped at his eye with his sleeve. "I didn't hurt you! I let you lay on my blanket! You wanna run that damn bad—I don't care! I didn't build this, and the truth is that you're goin' the wrong damn way! It weren't no cause for you to throw shit at me!"
Daryl's eye wasn't hurt too badly. It was scratched, and it blurred as it produced water to try to wash itself clean, but he wasn't blinded, and it would heal quickly. Still, even if he wasn't in any truly devastating physical pain—he hurt. His chest ached. His face burned. His eyes prickled with more than a reaction to the dirt that had been flung at him—but at least he could hide behind the dirt.
His reaction—one he'd been given to having to things since he was a boy—made him angry.
He rose up, left the pretty woman half in the dirt and half on his blanket, and walked over to the opening of the little cave that he was using as a shelter. He dropped down, finding a seat with his back against the rock. He had nothing to keep his hands busy, and he desperately needed something at the moment, so he simply reached for a nearby stick and stabbed it at the ground. With the unoccupied hand, he pawed at his eye.
Out of his somewhat burry peripheral vision, he could watch the woman.
She stopped scrambling and scratching. Slowly, she stopped doing anything at all except for staring at Daryl. Maybe, even, she didn't look as terrified as she had.
Daryl's whole body felt hot, but his face felt especially warm. His eyes were still running water, and his throat ached. He looked in her direction, now, and she jumped—visibly shaken.
Daryl knew that people tended to run away from him. They'd run from Jim, too. They ran from what they didn't know and what they didn't understand. There were people who sold these little books that told stories about people—real or not, Daryl wasn't sure—and sometimes they wrote about trappers like Daryl and Jim. Daryl knew they did because he'd been approached before by someone wanting something they called a quoda, or something like that, and Daryl had told him to go piss on a rattlesnake. Rather than being offended, the skinny ass man had looked pleased and run off—presumably to piss on a snake somewhere.
Daryl had never really thought, before, though about how people would really look at him. He'd always sort of appreciated that something about him made them want to leave him alone—except when he was trading with them—because he knew that most people were the worst kinds of animals and it was better to keep his distance.
Something about the way the pretty woman looked at him, though, made Daryl's throat ache.
"You gonna be so damn skittish," Daryl said, recognizing that what he was feeling was coming out as anger, even if he wasn't sure that it was real anger, "then you can just go on and get on outta here. Go on! There ain't no damn door! I ain't tryin' to keep you here. Go on!"
She didn't go anywhere. She sat there, half on Daryl's blanket, and stared at him with her purple and green face. Suddenly, she didn't look scared. She looked something else entirely. Daryl wasn't sure he liked that look any more than he'd liked the scared look.
He pointed his finger at her.
"Told you to get on outta here if you gonna look at me like that!" Daryl said. "You—you ain't my problem. I don't need you here. I only brought you here to get your ass away from him, but if you wanna go runnin' on back there, then why don't you just go? Let him mark your face up all like it is, if you like that." He wiped at his still running eye, and the pretty woman stayed where she was. "Just go," Daryl muttered again, not really feeling his own words enough to put the emphasis and bark behind them that he thought they merited. "Go on…I don't need you…I was just doin' this for you."
The pretty woman got up. She was leaving. She was going to go running off. She'd either go running back to her old mate, or she'd be off to find another, but Daryl wasn't going to take her down to the town and turn her loose among the new homesteads like he'd thought about doing. And he wasn't going to go back to the shanty to see if she went back there.
He didn't want to—and he couldn't swallow when he thought about her going and, maybe worse, how she'd looked at him. She'd looked at him like he might tear her throat out. He wouldn't have ever torn her throat out. He wouldn't have even put the awful marks on her throat that he knew her mate had put there—purple and hateful like the ones that his daddy had left on him and his brother…marks Daryl still had.
He would have never done to her what her own mate had done, but she'd looked at him like she feared him most of all.
Daryl turned away from her. He didn't want to watch her go. Instead, he used his stick to scratch at the rock. There was a vein of the yellow going through it that drove the people mad around these parts. It wouldn't be too long before someone saw that yellow in Daryl's rock. When they saw it, they wouldn't leave the rock to be a nice little shelter like it was—they'd break it down. They'd destroy it for the gold that wasn't even as valuable as the shelter was, really.
Daryl jumped. Lost in his contemplation of the yellow vein running through the rock, and pawing at his weeping eye, he had done what he'd set out to do—he'd put the pretty woman out of his mind long enough for her to make her escape.
She hadn't made an escape, though, and she didn't go running through the brushy forest around them.
Daryl jumped when he felt the pressure of her touching him.
He was not accustomed to being touched often, and certainly not by pretty women. Daryl glanced at her and then tried to turn away. She was close to him—very close. It suddenly made it difficult to breathe.
Her brow was furrowed, and she didn't look frightened anymore.
"Is your eye OK?" She asked.
"Whatta you care?" Daryl growled.
"Here," she said. She touched his face. Her fingers pressed into his skin and she turned his face. "Let me see."
Daryl stared at her through is blurry eye and his clear eye. She was very, very close to him. His heart beat fast in his chest. It was difficult to breathe.
When she wasn't yelling, her voice was soft like he thought it might be.
"I don't think you'll go blind," she said.
"Of course, I ain't fuckin' blind," Daryl growled.
"But…it could stand to be washed out. Do you have any water? Something—clean?" Daryl opened his mouth to respond to her, and she half-smiled at him and shook her head. "Water," she said. "That's all I need."
Daryl gestured over to the area of his camp where he kept his water. His camp was neat and organized. It was always neat. Jim had taught him about keeping his camp neat because a man ought to care about the things that are important to him. If he didn't care about the things that were important to him, and he didn't take care of them, he might find himself without them—like Daryl had helped the pretty woman's savage mate to find himself without his pretty mate.
The woman got up and walked over to retrieve one of the water bottles. Daryl watched her. She brought it back and, opening it, she gathered up part of her skirt and poured the water directly onto her skirt. Daryl started to move away when she moved to swipe at him with it, but she pinned him between the rock and herself.
"Easy," she said, with the same kind of tone that Daryl might have used to calm an animal. The water was cool and, though she wiped with determination at his eye while pouring more water against his face, she was gentle. "There," she said after a moment. "It looks better already. I'm—I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you."
Daryl laughed quietly.
"You did so," he said. "Nobody slings dirt in somebody's eye that don't mean to do it."
She laughed.
She laughed at what Daryl had said. She laughed, and his heart beat a thousand times faster than it had before. The beat was irregular, and uncomfortable, and…for just a moment? The beat was terrifying. She laughed at Daryl, and the smile from that laughter lingered on her lips. And she sat back on her bottom, close to Daryl, and she didn't look terrified.
She smiled.
And Daryl could barely breathe and he could hardly swallow.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I—was scared. I thought—you were going to hurt me."
"No," Daryl said, shaking his head. "But—I'm sorry you got scared. That—well, it weren't what I meant at all."
"Do you—have a name?" She asked.
"Course I got a name," Daryl said.
She raised her eyebrows at him.
"Are you going to tell me your name?" She asked.
Daryl laughed.
"I guess I'm not one for—bein' town social or whatever," Daryl said. "I'm Daryl—for anybody who's ever bothered to call me anything."
The smile returned to her lips.
"Carol," she said.
"No—Daryl," Daryl said.
She laughed again. Her laughter was prettier than the sound of any bird that Daryl had ever heard—and he was pretty partial to birds. There were a good many of them that he loved to hear sing enough that he'd learned to whistle to them so that they would call back to him sometimes.
"Carol," she said. "My name's Carol. You're Daryl, and I'm Carol."
Carol. Her name was almost as pretty as she was. Daryl wasn't sure, though, if that was the kind of thing he ought to tell her.
"Carol," he said, simply repeating it back. She nodded.
"I don't think…you want to hurt me," Carol said.
"No," Daryl said, shaking his head.
"And you said…you didn't mean to scare me," Carol said.
"No," Daryl said, shaking his head again.
"Then—what did you mean to do?" Carol asked.
Daryl's stomach twisted. His heart drummed hard in his chest. He hadn't let go of his stick just yet, and he squeezed it, feeling it give way in his palm.
He half-shrugged his shoulders.
"I guess I meant to—help."