AN: Here we go, another chapter here.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

It was torture, plain and simple. It was always the same. Every time Daryl had experienced it, and every time he'd heard about it, it was torture. They could call it taming if they wanted to. They could say that it reminded them all of their humanity—something they seemed to so easily forget—but brought to the light? It would be called torture.

It wasn't taming. It was breaking. It was breaking through any means necessary. All's fair in love and war—and in re-humanizing the population.

The building they were in was dark. Daryl hadn't paid enough attention to it outside to know if it had windows or not. He tried, a few times and to distract himself, to bring the image of it to his mind as he'd walked closer to it so that he could recall if there were windows, but he'd never been able to focus on it. The only place his mind had voluntarily gone, when he'd struggled so hard to take it back to those moments, was to the sight of Carol's footprints in the dirt just ahead of him.

She was in here, somewhere, and they were doing to her what they were doing to him—just a little differently, he supposed.

It didn't matter. If there were windows, or if there ever had been, they'd been boarded up now to make it dark. It wasn't for the ambience of the place. It was only to make it neither night nor day. Nobody knew how long they'd been in the building. Nobody knew how long they'd stay. They had no choice but to believe the authority figures that told them that they'd stay here forever—if that was what it took.

Daryl sat in a hard plastic chair, alone, in the room where they'd left him and stared at nothing. Even the ground between his feet wasn't clear to his vision.

By now? He was pretty sure that both his eyes might very well be blacked. At least the right one was. He could feel it swelling. Swallowing wasn't as easy as it had been when he'd come through the doors.

Around him? Distant either because of actual distance or because of the fuzziness of his mind, he could hear the noises of others. The other wilds, or semi-wilds, or dociles come undone, or whatever they wanted to call them, were screaming. Some were crying. Some of the sounds were, ironically, anything but human.

They were humans. Carol had said so herself and, the more he thought about it, the more Daryl believed it to be true. But humans were animals too. Hurt, tortured, and suffering just as much from their thoughts as they were their physical injuries, they cried out like animals.

The place smelled horrible. It smelled of piss and shit. Daryl was only giving partial credit for that to the fact that there was a "waste bucket" in the corner of the room that he was in earlier—which meant there had to be more—and the fact that there wasn't one in here. Just like an animal, just like they expected, Daryl had pissed in the corner. He couldn't be the only one that had relieved himself to keep his bladder from exploding or causing him more injury. It smelled of sweat and had the musky smell of too many people giving in, over and over, to their feelings of fight or flight. It smelled of vomit—but of course all the other smells gave over to that sometimes. And then, faintly, it had the somewhat metallic smell of fresh blood and the odd and occasional whiff of some kind of cleaning product that was failing at its job to wipe away all the other smells.

Daryl laughed to himself, alone in the room, when he thought about the fact that, maybe, they should retame the cleaning supplies because it clearly wasn't doing its job. It was clearly not performing in the way that was necessary for it to be the best product that it could be for the new power.

It was falling short of expectations. And the benevolent power? Whoever he was? He cared nothing about the absurdity of expectations. All he cared about was compliance.

Daryl had to force his mind to go to things like thinking about the ways in which one might torture a bottle of bleach until, broken and crying on the floor—its plastic cracked and its thick cleaning liquid leaking out—it might promise to do better and it might confess its sins of having been less than. He had to think about these things because they were the only relief from the other thoughts that he'd been reminded of—thoughts that were meant to keep him awake and keep him writhing in his disappointment with himself.

At Region Thirty Three, they knew everything that he'd ever confessed. They wanted more from him, but there wasn't more to give. They repeated back to him his sins—nearly every one that he'd ever committed—and they wanted more, but they didn't realize that they'd drained him dry. It was as if they thought, no matter how many horrible things they ticked off, there were other things that they could expect. He was a monster, like maybe so many other people, but he wasn't the monster that seemed to haunt their nightmares. He wasn't a monster with a never ending list of horrors. They knew them all. And Daryl had heard them all ticked off to him like numbers from the LottoBall drawing.

He had killed his father before all this even began. He hadn't killed him with his hands, of course, but he'd killed him with his mind. He'd spent hours imagining the ways that the old man might die—ways he'd hoped he'd died—and then one night? Daryl had finally won. The old man never came back.

He had killed his mother before all this even began. He'd never put his hands on her in an unkind way, but he'd needed too much from her. He'd wanted too much from her. She had nothing to give him. She certainly had nothing more. All of it? Her husband, her boys? All of it had eventually become too much for her. She'd drank to find solace and it was the drinking that had killed her.

He had killed so many after the turn that he couldn't count them. He'd killed so many that he'd stopped seeing their faces in his mind, like he once had, because there were too many for his brain to hold. He'd killed them out of fear. He'd killed them for food. He'd killed them on the chance that they might try to kill him. As the whole thing had gone on? As he'd spent more and more time out there—wild—he'd killed so much and so often that it had become second nature to him. He had killed men, and a few women, with the same passing nonchalance as he'd once killed bugs that had the nerve to bite him. That wasn't even counting the scores upon scores of animated corpses that he'd dropped to the ground for their final rest.

He'd killed his brother. Though he never saw him die, just the same as his old man, Daryl knew that he killed him. He'd at least left him for dead, and that was basically the same thing in the wild. He'd seen them coming. That morning he was just supposed to be hunting. They were holed up. The place they were staying, a house they'd busted into but nobody was using anyway, was nicer than anything they'd stayed in before the turn. Daryl had gone out hunting just to get something for breakfast—something to end the same old dull routine of eating from the shit ton of baked beans they'd gotten out of the store room of an old and half-fallen in general store—and he'd seen them. He knew they were going to capture him. He knew that he had nothing to do but fight, but he wouldn't win that fight. He didn't have enough ammunition to win it, he certainly didn't have enough arrows, and they'd shoot him before he could stab even two of them. So he'd taken their promises that he wouldn't be hurt—that he'd be taken care of and everything would be fine—and he'd gone with them.

But he hadn't given Merle up. He knew he was supposed to trust them, but he didn't. Not really. So he'd never given Merle up. In his taming, though, the first time around—when a day felt like a month—they'd told him that they'd found Merle. They'd told him that Merle wasn't a smart enough man not to put up a fight. They'd told him that Merle was too wild. In fact, he was so wild that he'd killed officers—and he'd gone out in a blaze of glory, so to speak—when they'd finally killed him defending his own little, pathetic Alamo.

He might have gone peacefully with Daryl and he might still be alive today. But he hadn't, because he hadn't known what had become of Daryl, and so he'd died for Daryl's silence. Daryl had killed him by leaving him behind.

If he would kill everyone who ever meant anything to him, and if he could kill people who didn't mean a thing to him without batting an eye, he truly was the monster that they believed him to be and there truly was a long road back—if he could ever make the trip—to taming him into behaving as a proper human, one who served the benevolent power, should.

"6245?" A voice said, snapping Daryl out of his contemplation. He looked around, but he didn't focus on anything—not even on the man standing in the doorway. Daryl hummed. It was the only sound that his parched throat seemed able to produce at the moment.

The man stepped forward and offered Daryl a cup. Daryl took it, but it felt like his muscles were screaming at the amount of energy needed to do even do that much. He looked at it and smelled it. It was water. He drank it down, greedily. It may come with a price, but right now it was a price that he was willing to pay. He almost wanted to cry—even though he hadn't cried about single thing yet—when the cup was dry.

"Get to your feet, inmate," the officer said, though with a little softer tone than anyone else had used through the day. When Daryl didn't get to his feet immediately, not sure even that he could, the officer spoke again. "6245—on your feet."

Daryl looked at him.

"You got a name?" Daryl asked.

"What?" The officer asked.

"A name?" Daryl repeated. "You got a name?"

"Of course I have a name, inmate," the officer said.

Daryl chuckled to himself.

"Me too," Daryl said. "I got a name. It ain't a real great one or nothing—but it's mine. My mama gave it to me—long ass time ago. It's Daryl."

"I'm not interested in your name," the officer said. "To. Your. Feet."

Daryl swallowed and looked mournfully inside the empty cup. He wished, more than he wished a great deal of things right now, that the cup might magically refill itself. He wished for more water more than he wished for fresh air to breathe that didn't smell like piss and shit and sweat and fear and blood.

"You should be," Daryl said.

"6245..." the officer started, but Daryl cut him off.

"That ain't it, you're gettin' it wrong again," Daryl said, chuckling afterwards. "It's Daryl—it ain't so hard. Just one syllable—or it might be two—hell...I don't know..."

The officer stepped forward then, reaching out hands, and Daryl pushed his body to his feet to keep the man from retaliating against him for his insolence.

"Do I have to bind you?" The man asked.

"I ain't sure you gotta do nothing that you do," Daryl said. "But—I ain't going nowhere. You'd just—shoot me in the back if I run."

Daryl laughed again when the officer didn't respond, but he did walk in the direction that he was gestured to go.

"That why the hell they shot Andrea? At capture? She run? Tried to save her own damn life got shot in the damn back for it? Or you shoot out a knee? How you decide?" Daryl asked.

He felt the hand of the officer on his back as he shoved him forward.

"I can see you need another day in here," the officer commented, this time almost in a conversational tone.

"Or a month," Daryl said. "A year. I was thinkin'—it's so nice here. Might look at buyin' me a plot here."

"Word to the wise, inmate," the officer said, pushing Daryl along as he led him down dark corridors through oddly constructed spaces created for nothing more than this house of horrors, "you might want to consider checking your smart mouth. It won't get you nowhere here—except in deeper shit than you're already in."

"Aye aye," Daryl mumbled. He had a good deal more to say at the moment, but he understood that the officer was truly trying to be kind to him. At least, he was trying to be as kind as his job allowed.

The officer stopped at a place that was lines with true "cells". It was probably constructed with Frankenstein parts of old prison set ups, but it did the trick. True, bar lined cells were lined up in the semi-darkness of the space. In the cells, in clumps like the animals they were supposed to be, Daryl could make out the humps and bumps of bodies—one for each small cell that was barely large enough to lie in—on the floor as others were attempting to sleep. The officer opened one of the cells and pushed Daryl inside.

"Goodnight, 6245," the officer said. "Pass a good night and you get breakfast in the morning."

"Home sweet home," Daryl said dryly as the man closed the cell and walked onward down the corridor to disappear somewhere, the sound of his boots being the last evidence that he had actually existed and wasn't some sadistic ghost of Christmas Past.

Daryl made his way to the wall of his cell and slid down it, using the wall to brace himself against his aching muscles. He leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes, wishing everything he'd thought before would simply leave now.

"Daryl?" He heard, scratchy but soft. Barely a whisper.

He hummed.

"Daryl?" The voice repeated, just slightly braver. "It's me—to your right." The voice trembled a little.

Daryl looked to his right. Face pressed against the bars that divided them, but barely visible to his less than nocturnal eyes, was Carol.

Daryl scrambled, ignoring his body's protests entirely, toward her. She reached a hand through the bars, surprising him, as she ghosted her fingers across his cheek, just below where he knew his eye was swelling. She made a noise—not entirely human—like a soft mewling.

And then? She cried, the sound barely even carrying over the few inches that the bars put between them.

Daryl caught her hand, not knowing what else to do, and he held it tightly in his. He didn't ask her what was wrong—he didn't have to.

"Go to sleep," he said. "It's what I'ma do. Go to sleep."

She started to make a noise again—not even words—and he responded with his own noise to tell her not to bother. He moved his hand, hers clasped in it so that it felt, at once, completely strange and wholly familiar.

"I got'cha," he said, laughing a little in his throat at the irony of the statement. They were both in the same position. He was no better off than she was. He had no more power than she did. "I got'cha," he repeated, hoping she didn't realize the absurdity of the statement.

And she must not have, because she leaned herself against the bars and, before too long, her hand went completely loose in Daryl's. He didn't let go of it, though—and he wouldn't until he knew that he had to. Instead, he simply leaned his head against the bars, their faces almost touching between them, and he closed his own eyes.

For a moment, all that he'd seen inside his mind that day was simply quiet.