AN: Here we go, another chapter here.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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"T," Daryl said, his voice barely above a whisper. It wasn't carrying far, but it didn't have far to go. He'd "negotiated" with the person next to his bed to get him to switch with T-Dog. It hadn't been too hard of a negotiation since the man next to him clearly didn't want to be talked to. At the threat that Daryl, apparently something of a chatty person around here, might actually try to engage with him further, the man had quickly given up and even offered to help move T-Dog's few belongings over just a little. T-Dog hadn't seemed to have much of an opinion on the whole thing and Daryl had decided to take that as a sign that he wanted them to be "bunk mates" and he wanted to be closer for conversation—even if it ended up being a good deal one-sided. "T," Daryl repeated into the semi-darkness of their room. Light flooded in from the hallway, where guards were keeping something of an eye on everyone, and kept the room from ever being fully dark.
"What?" T-Dog responded at just the moment that Daryl had decided to accept that he'd fallen asleep.
"Can I ask you somethin'?" Daryl asked.
"You're gonna do it anyway," T-Dog responded. "What the hell you want to know now? And I'm still not telling you shit about Jacqui. You can forget you ever heard her name."
Daryl winced a little at the bite of the comment, but he accepted it. He'd realized, earlier, that people just didn't take well to his questions. He'd managed in running the women off during their puzzle time and at dinner everyone had seemed just a little more distant and quiet than even was usual for them. People around here didn't ask each other questions often. They offered what they wanted, when they wanted, and they accepted what they got. They asked for nothing more.
But Daryl couldn't do that. Maybe once he could have. In fact, he knew that once he would have preferred it that way. But he'd been so long without the interaction of others that now it was almost like a hunger. He'd always had a need to understand what was going on around him, even if he only understood it in so far as it made sense to him, and this was no different. The only way that he had to understand Region Thirty Three was through those that seemed to have naturally come to understand the location and the way that things worked.
And having been so long alone? He had a strange need, too, to understand the people around him. He knew how he got here. He knew what he'd been through. He knew about his life before the turn. He knew about his time as a wild. He knew what had happened since he was captured. He wanted to understand, though, if his experiences had been universal or if, by some chance, there was much that he'd somehow missed.
He wanted to know how it all compared.
And to find that out? He had to keep asking the questions. He had to keep dipping into the pile for more pieces of the puzzle. And he had to accept that sometimes there was going to be biting and growling and gnashing of teeth. Sometimes there was going to be avoidance and raised shackles. But if he kept a hand out to sniff, in a gesture of innocence and good will, eventually they'd come back—and maybe a little closer the next time.
After all, they were all animals.
"I weren't gonna ask you nothing personal," Daryl said. "Nothing about—you know who."
T-Dog rolled around in his bed with some apparent irritation since Daryl could hear the sounds of his sheets and blanket moving.
"What do you want?" He asked.
"Were you here when they was a separation?" Daryl asked. "When it weren't coed because the women was showing up knocked up?"
Silence for a moment, but Daryl was developing infinite patience, so he waited it out while T-Dog decided if he was here or not and exactly how much he wanted to say about the whole thing.
"Yeah," T-Dog said, not offering anything else for at least two beats of time. "Why? You were thinking about getting someone pregnant?"
Daryl laughed quietly to himself. At least T-Dog's humor was still intact sometimes.
"What happened?" Daryl asked. "When the whole thing happened?"
Silence, followed by a hum of consideration.
"What do you mean what happened?" T-Dog asked. "Women got pregnant. They weren't supposed to do that. They launched an investigation and some big wigs come in and they ask a bunch of questions and then—there's a separation and we're all men on one schedule and women on another."
"They figure out who any of the men was? That done it?" Daryl asked.
Silence. Another hum. Then the sharp hiss of sucking teeth.
"Man I don't want to gossip with you about shit that doesn't matter," T-Dog said.
Daryl thought about it. It didn't matter. Not really. It didn't affect him personally. Whether or not anything had happened here prior to his arrival was really irrelevant. However, the response from the women around him, earlier, made it feel like it mattered.
"Did they figure anybody out?" Daryl repeated, deciding to ignore T-Dog's need to snap at him.
"Couple of dudes around here took the fall," T-Dog said, but he didn't sound too convinced.
"What'd they do to them?" Daryl asked.
T-Dog laughed to himself.
"Took 'em out," T-Dog said. "Transferred I guess. Didn't see none of them again."
"But?" Daryl asked.
"But?" T-Dog repeated.
"You don't sound like you believe that," Daryl said. "Sounds to me like you telling me a story that you been told to tell me."
A hum in the negative.
"Not a story I was told to tell," T-Dog said. "Just the story. Some women said it was guards. They never found any guards responsible for it. It was just—the dudes that got transferred somewhere. Somewhere for people like that. Wild thing to do—probably a different facility for them."
Daryl heard, loud and clear, what wasn't being said. He understood, too, that maybe it simply couldn't be said. After all, criticism wasn't allowed. And even though they couldn't see the guard that was keeping watch over them for the night, that didn't mean that he wasn't in the hallway and it didn't mean that he couldn't overhear anything and everything that they were talking about. It would be difficult, no doubt, to make out their low voices in the large room, but that didn't mean that T-Dog was willing to be reckless and it didn't mean that Daryl should take his chances.
He rolled over on his side and adjusted his position.
"What happened to the women?" He asked.
"What?" T-Dog asked.
"What happened to the women?" Daryl asked. "Men got transferred out. What happened to the women?"
"Had babies," T-Dog said. "What you think happens when they get pregnant."
Daryl didn't mean to make the sound that he made, but it slipped out before he could control himself. It was an exasperated sigh followed by a little of a growl.
"Could some damn body just tell me something without me having to ask ten thousand questions?" Daryl growled at T-Dog. "You already said it don't matter. It don't mean a damn thing. Why don't you just tell me what the hell happened and then I don't gotta keep bugging you with questions?"
T-Dog was quiet, but then he laughed ironically about the situation. There was a hiss somewhere around them, suggesting that they be quiet, and T-Dog responded to that by suggesting that whoever it was shut and go to sleep because they weren't being bothered. Then he decided to respond to Daryl.
"Listen," he said, "I don't know what you want me to tell you. They got knocked up. It was a big deal. That kinda thing weren't supposed to happen around here. Wilds ain't fit to have kids and even if we're docile—we're in prison. We're locked up for our own safety. People gonna be having and raising kids, it's people out there—people that don't run the chance of going wild again. They asked everybody questions and focused on the ones that were suspected to be involved. Cleared out the men that were found guilty of the whole thing and they separated everybody out so that we could see that being coed—being social even? That's a privilege. It ain't a right. The women—they were in trouble. They might've gotten pregnant, but they were just as guilty as the men transferred out were. The women got flags for their conduct and they got flags for if they didn't tell what was found to be the truth about the situation."
"So they tamed them again?" Daryl asked.
A hum in the affirmative.
"Even though they were knocked up?" Daryl asked.
"Held the flags over," T-Dog said. "Added them up. Counted them up. It didn't matter anyway."
"What you mean it didn't matter?" Daryl asked. "Taming some damn body always matters—if they don't have some special way of doing it here."
"Didn't matter because the women went wild again anyway," T-Dog said, his voice carrying the weight of his emotions now that he was tiring with telling this story. "They moved them, too. Took them to the other part of the prison I guess?"
"Went full wild?" Daryl asked. "All the way undone?"
They slipped. They all slipped. Every now and again the wild animal inside of them came out. They couldn't help it. They couldn't fully control it. The animal within them that had been their constant companion when they were out there? It just came back to the surface. The instinct that had led them to kill. To hunt. To do—things that some of them never wanted to talk about again. That instinct was there. They were all wild, deep inside. Once they'd made the change? Maybe the government was right. It could never be undone. They could never be truly tame. They could be docile. They could be as close as possible to it, but they needed to be watched. They needed to be protected from themselves and from each other. They needed to be retamed, every now and again, to keep the beast at bay.
But to go full wild again? Daryl had never known it to happen to anyone once they'd been declared docile. Not if they weren't just pretending in the first place. And if they were just pretending? It usually didn't take too long to figure out it was an act.
T-Dog sat up in his bed and shifted around. Daryl sat up on his elbow to try to observe what was happening. T-Dog leaned as close to Daryl as he could and dropped his voice again.
"They took the babies away," he said. "As soon as they were born. People all over this place heard it every time it happened. You ever seen a woman trying to get to her kid?"
Daryl hummed in the negative. He hadn't. Even out there, even in the turn? The women he'd seen with children were usually already mourning them. Everyone he came across, even if she was losing her mind, was already either clutching the lifeless body of her child or was trying to negotiate with whatever god she prayed to that the animated dead she clutched would somehow come back to its senses.
He'd seen what happened to women when they lost their children—but not when they were taken away alive.
"They're the wildest animals you've ever seen," T-Dog said. "I don't know if they took them to training or what they did with them, but most of them? I believe they'd have had to beat them half to death to calm them down."
"So they took all of them outta here?" Daryl asked.
"At least—most," T-Dog said. He shifted around again, this time moving to sit with his back against the wall that lined one side of their beds and petitioned off the large space. "I guess a couple held onto their senses, but most didn't."
"What'd they do with the kids?" Daryl asked.
"Who knows," T-Dog said. "Nobody knows. They don't tell you that. Take them wherever they took the wild kids that were captured? Take them outta here and give them to some parents that could raise them as people? Good people? Tame people? They don't tell you that. Don't tell anybody that."
"They took captured kids too?" Daryl asked.
"What'd you think happened to them?" T-Dog asked. "They didn't leave them in the wild. And you don't see any of them here. Some of them had to survive."
