AN: Here we go, another chapter here.
If any of you are any good at making covers and want to make something for this one, let me know. If not, I'll try to make something generic soon, but I'm not great at it.
I hope you enjoy the chapter! Let me know what you think!
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Two days they were kept on something like lockdown for a squabble that lasted less than ten minutes and in which, as far as Daryl had been able to see, nobody so much as got injured. Their meals, though communal, were surrounded by enforced silence. Nobody was allowed to speak. They were only able to sit and eat in silence, staring at each other every now and again in an uncomfortable manner.
The officers that walked the halls and checked in on the bunks were enforcing quiet, too, in those spaces. They were allowed to speak, but not much above a whisper or they drew the attention of those very same officers.
Daryl entertained himself by reading a book that he'd picked up—some novel about aliens that was as realistic to him as any book about "regular" life was now—that was missing several pages and the front cover. T-Dog was near him, on his bunk, for most of the two days, but he didn't much want to talk to Daryl. He didn't seem to want to talk about life before the turn, because it was done he said, and he didn't want to talk about when he was wild, so there wasn't much to say.
And talking about this place? Apparently short of asking basic questions like where something was or what time something started, it was all forbidden. Any time Daryl tried to ask a question about how things worked here? People clammed up and looked away. It was the moment when all of them suddenly worried about their feet or the furniture.
Daryl decided that the first rule of Region Thirty Three, like Fight Club in a movie he'd seen once, was that nobody talked about what went on at Region Thirty Three.
Nobody except Carol, apparently, and the women with which she passed her time.
In the two days they were on lockdown, Daryl saw Carol while they ate. He saw all the women. Because of the enforced silence, though, he wasn't able to say much to them. They communicated a little with their eyes, but anything that couldn't be conveyed with a glance was off limits. He couldn't learn more about her. He couldn't learn more about any of them. He was stuck with the limited information that he had, more than one burning curiosity in his gut, and the hope that soon the people who ran this place would lift the silence that they were pressing down on everyone now.
He didn't realize, before, how much he liked communication.
And on the third day? His wish was granted. He didn't know the silence had been listed until he was lined up and marching with his fellow bunkmates toward breakfast. As they reached the door of the mess hall, the rumbling din of people speaking all at once drifted out to greet them and no one was blowing whistles or yelling at them to stop their barking. They were free to speak again.
Daryl got his tray, as he did every morning now that his life here was becoming habit, and he made his way to the table where he found Carol, Andrea, Lisette, and Dori sitting. He took his seat with them and he grunted a hello all around that they barely acknowledged with sound. They were sticking to the silent nods of the days behind them. They were still adjusting to the lifted ban on thought and word.
His first instinct was to start a conversation, but starting one was difficult. To ask what they'd been doing seemed redundant. Trapped, like him, they'd probably done very little. Stripped of recess and everything else besides the required activities for life, they'd probably been reading or maybe sharing some hushed chat about whatever they filled their days with. Recounting it wouldn't make for much interest for anyone.
And starting anything deeper?
Maybe the silence was enforced, from time to time, for more reason than simply a scuffle that might break out. The fight, perhaps, was just a cover for what would happen at any rate.
When everyone was seated and eating, Daryl watched as the guards brought in those set apart—the bound prisoners coming from taming. Whether they were new or had flagged out, he wasn't certain since they were all strangers to him. They lined them up near the tray area, but instead of leading them down to the three special tables that were "reserved" for them, they stopped them and began to release their wrists. When they were free, declared silently tame and docile, they were left to get trays and join the group again. Daryl watched them as they went in search of seats, most choosing to return to the comfort of the reserved seats for the moment. All of them kept their heads down, but the evidence of what they'd just endured was clear to anyone.
One of the women came directly toward them. She stopped just at their table and stood there, holding her tray until Daryl grew uncomfortable with the proximity and the feeling that he was expected to do something, but he had no idea what that something was.
Carol got up, without a word, and she returned a moment later with a chair that she put at the other end of the table. The woman sat at it without speaking.
Apparently she knew them.
Her familiarity with them became even more apparent when Andrea, the sulky blonde, leaned and quickly put an arm around the other woman's shoulders, leaning her face into the woman's arm.
The moment, even as Daryl was just taking it in, was interrupted by a loud bark coming from the guard that was overlooking their table.
"LC456F, you've got two flags," he warned.
Andrea straightened up, but not without glaring at the guard first.
Daryl cleared his throat, unsure of what was happening around him, and leaned around Andrea enough to see the new arrival at their table. She was a black woman and she wore the signs and marks of taming, but she didn't keep her eyes cast down. She kept them dancing, instead, so that they never landed on anyone but weren't simply brought to the table or the floor.
"I'm Daryl," Daryl offered quietly.
"LC457F," she said, her voice low and hoarse.
Daryl furrowed his brow, but he didn't say anything. He looked at Carol who was glancing back and forth between him, the guard, and the new arrival at the table. She sighed and leaned forward, bringing herself closer to Daryl by lessening the distance that the table caused between them.
"She's Michonne," Carol said. "People fresh out of taming—don't always want to make small talk."
Daryl ignored the slightly scolding tone to Carol's voice. The information that she offered was just that, information. It automatically came across as being corrected. These days? Daryl didn't find that nearly as crushing as he once might have. Everything about their lives, these days, was about correction.
"I thought Andrea was LC45 whatever F?" Daryl asked, keeping his voice low and directing his question toward Carol since Michonne didn't want to talk and Andrea didn't seem too keen on it either.
Carol glanced back at them and then back toward Daryl. She shook her head slightly, but then her words didn't match the gesture entirely.
"Andrea is LC456F," Carol said. "Michonne is LC457F."
Daryl glanced back at the women. Michonne was dancing her eyes around, but she had her face turned away from him to a degree that made it clear that she was, at the moment, not receptive to anything about their new acquaintance. Andrea was half slumping over her tray, eating, and might as well have been pretending that nobody there so much as existed.
Daryl directed his concerns back to Carol.
"Same capture facility?" Daryl asked.
A quick nod.
Of course they were likely from the same capture facility. They had odd numbers, at least for the ones that Daryl had heard, and it was probable that it was part of the labelling system of their facility and not something universal—even if Daryl didn't know why they felt the need to give their captures veritable license plates for identification.
He furrowed his brows again, formulating his next question, but he didn't even need to answer it. Carol seemed more than capable of reading his mind at the moment. She answered it without hearing it.
"Same capture," she said. "Close together."
"Not close," Andrea said, breaking her carefully guarded silence. "One right after the other."
Daryl looked at her then, convinced that if she was speaking she might as well finish telling her own story instead of making Carol give him her version of things.
Andrea looked at him, held his eyes for a moment, and then dropped hers back to her tray.
"She turned herself in," she mumbled, but she made it clear that's all she was going to say.
And Daryl made up his mind that he wasn't going to ask for more. Not from her, and not right now.
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Allowed to recess for the first time in several days, Daryl was happy just being able to stretch his legs and feel the warmth of the sun on his face. He stretched more than was necessary and kept close to Carol whether or not she wanted him to.
She seemed to want to be quiet, so he guarded the silence for some time. He followed her to an area that was somewhat shaded by one of the walls and he watched as she sat with her back against the wall. Daryl joined her, sitting on the ground beside her. He reclined against the wall and watched, just as she did, the others who were spending their times in the ways that they chose as best.
Not twenty feet from where they sat, Daryl saw Andrea standing near Michonne. They kept a half foot of space between them, but every now and again Daryl saw the blonde dip in. She'd touch a hand to Michonne's hand. A hand to her arm.
"What's up with them?" Daryl asked, finally breaking the silence between him and Carol. "Andrea and Michonne?"
She looked in that direction and shook her head at Daryl.
"They've been together since the beginning," Carol said.
"Since the beginning of what?" Daryl asked. "Lot of beginnings these days."
"Since the turn?" Carol offered.
"Wild together and they let 'em stay together?" Daryl asked.
Carol hummed.
"Same capture facility," she said. "They haven't always been together though. There was a time when they weren't."
"What happened?" Daryl asked.
Carol hummed and shook her head.
"It isn't my story to tell," she said.
"Can't get it from them," Daryl said. "Don't neither of 'em say nothing."
"They will," Carol said. "Just—give it time. Michonne's just out of taming. Andrea's..."
She never did finish telling him what Andrea was. She fell into silence and sighed rather deeply.
"Just give it time," Carol said.
"Got plenty of that," Daryl said.
He sat for a moment and leaned his head back against the wall. He looked at the sky above him. It never changed. Sure, sometimes it was sunny, and sometimes it was cloudy and overcast, but the sky itself never changed. He could still see in it the same things he'd seen all along. It showed, unlike the land that was marked now, that some things had never really been affected by the hell on Earth that they'd all been through.
"Were you alone?" Daryl asked. "Out there? Were you—wild alone or...did they split you too?"
Carol didn't say anything and Daryl looked at her to see if she'd heard his question. She was sitting, now, with her elbows on her knees in front of her. She was studying the ground between her legs.
Suddenly, she pushed herself up and took to her feet with the swift movement.
"It's too hot out here," she said, even though it wasn't that hot at all. "I've got a few things to do."
Daryl, realizing that he'd overstepped some kind of boundary for the moment, got to his feet as quickly as he could. She was already starting to walk away from him, no more of a goodbye offered, and he reached a hand out and caught her shoulder.
He snatched it back when he heard a guard near him call out that there was no touching.
Carol turned back to look at him, though, her face showing her frustration at the moment.
"I'm sorry," Daryl said. "Didn't mean to ask you somethin' that was gonna upset you. I'm still—it's been a long time since I talked to people. I weren't never good at it. I guess—I'm worse at it now. I just wanted to know...something else about you."
She stared at him, her face not changing its expression, and he wished he hadn't asked anything at all.
"I'm sorry," he repeated.
Carol nodded.
"It's fine," she said. "Just—it's fine. I have to go."
Daryl let her go, but he couldn't resist asking one last question and hoping he got the response from her that he wanted, though he would have understood if he hadn't.
"Can I still—eat lunch with you?" He asked.
She stopped walking again and turned back. Her expression was different now. It was softer. It softened even more in the short interval that she spent looking at him.
"You better," she said, the corners of her mouth curling up just slightly and causing Daryl to mimic the expression before she turned to continue on in the direction that she'd started, heading back toward the buildings with the same determined steps she seemed to use to get anywhere that she had to go.
