(A/N: Thank you so much guys, for your renewed interest. I really appreciate all the alerts and reviews…my work week starts tomorrow morning at QUARTER TO SIX IN THE MORNING so I can't promise when the next revamped chapter will be up but I'm aiming for Thursday, it's clear at the moment getting to the new stuff is going to take a bit longer so hopefully you'll bear with me. Right now, I need to put myself to bed toot sweet :P Hope you all enjoy the re-write!
P.S. If you find anything grammatically wrong or duplicated sentences please let me know, I've read this over twice and I'm so tired I can't really spot if I'm missing anything….i'm in the market for a beta reader too hint hint, nudge nudge*)
Chapter Two: Vatos: Pt. Two
"Son of a bitch!" Daryl seethed, once again muscling through a lapse of stunned silence. "What the hell?"
He shoved his bow towards his attacker and shook her off, sending her stumbling back towards the corner of the stairwell.
"What the hell's your problem?"
"Get away from me." Analeigh spat through clenched teeth, mustering every scrap of nerve she had left to keep her voice from cracking.
"How about you tell me where my brother is first?" Daryl retorted.
"I'm warning you…"
Bat scraping against the ground, she steadied herself and turned just enough to shoot him a glare through a thick swath of disheveled bangs.
As far as fault went, there wasn't any to be had in such an aggressive knee jerk reaction. Everyone had reason for their nerves to stand on end, and by the look of her there was no denying Analeigh had been through the ringer just as badly as anyone else. She was worn and drawn looking, clad in a stained cotton sundress, that had clearly seen better days, bearing an array of small rips and tatters. Tiny, and almost frail looking auburn hair fell in soft messy waves against delicately pale skin, framing mossy green eyes rimmed with dark circles and a heavy bruise just across her cheekbone. Even with her best "game face" painted on and trying like hell to hold her ground and seem everything she was not, it was more than just a little evident Analeigh was but a fraction of a second from breaking. She'd been made to endure the same hell as everyone else had, and now on top of everything, being cornered in a stairwell wasn't exactly conducive to a calm and rational situation.
Even if things had been calm and collected, throwing Daryl in the mix tended to have a habit of blowing things to all hell anyways. On the best of days and under the best of circumstances he hardly reacted to things in a fitting manner. Emotions now running high, and Merle's life quite possibly on the line tossed all common sense and tact to the wayside was no doubt going to make dealing with Analeigh interesting to say the least.
"Where's my brother?"
"How the hell should I know?"
"Found you in the same canteen he busted out of." He moved towards her, not giving so much as an inch in pursuit of his own end. "You wanna call that coincidence?"
"You can call it what you like, I didn't see nothin'…I don't know nothin'. It's a big building…in case you hadn't noticed."
Daryl sidestepped swiftly as she rocked on her heel and made to dart around him and down the remaining steps. Snatching her tightly around the wrist he held fast to her and snuffed out any other projected move for escape.
"Uh-uh." He sneered, quite literally breathing down her neck as he backed into the wall a little further. "You ain't gettin' off so easy, Darin'."
"I ain't your Darlin'." Analeigh grit her teeth and bit back a fresh flood of panic.
"Got that right." Daryl gruffed. "Now, I won't ask you again…where's Merle?"
"What reason have I got to tell you anything?"
"Which one you want?" A sly smirk tugged at his lips. "I got lots."
Always the one to like to feel as though she had a fair amount of grit in most situations, Analeigh's brave face was fading fast and soon there would be no concealing she was doing little more than shaking in her proverbial boots. There would be no more concealing the nervous tremor that coursed through her muscles, no concealing the breath that came in digging gasps, or the apprehension clouding her eyes. To show fear was to show weakness and more than likely, admit defeat. Hard as she may try, she was fighting a losing battle and quite visibly crumbling by the second.
"Let go of me." She half squeaked and tugged against his grip.
It was next to folly to try and swing a baseball bat one handedly to any effect. But in a last attempt at standing her ground, or a threat to do just that anyways, Analeigh tightened her fingers about the base and raised the bat off of the ground.
"You wanna take another swing at me you best go on and do it."
Eyes locked with Daryl's, Analeigh grit her teeth and willed herself to do just that only to be met with little result. He took another step towards her and she pulled back instead of attacking. Another step, and her shoulder blades grazed against the cool concrete of the wall behind her. Cornered in the corridor, there was nothing now that Analeigh could do, no recourse whatsoever she could think of let alone muster herself to enact. Little mistakes had brought her to this and little mistakes were the ones he seemed to make time and time again. "I didn't think so." Daryl smirked, so close to her now the term 'breathing down your neck' took on the most literal meaning possible.
"That's what I thought." Daryl grabbed the bat out of her hands and tossed it to the side with a clatter, drawing a sharp whimper and a reactive flinch from Analeigh just as Rick appeared at the foot of the stairs.
"Daryl, get the hell off of her!" Rick barked, forcing his way between the pair, shoving Daryl half against the wall himself. "That is not the way we handle this."
"Yeah? Says who?"
"Says me." Rick ducked and forcibly caught Daryl's line of vision. "You muscle her around like you do 'bout everyone else and there will be a problem, you got that?"
"What, you think you're gonna get anywhere with a good ol' heart to heart?"
"Man, why don't you ease up a little?" Glenn added breathlessly, joining he fray. "Can't you see you're scaring her half to death?"
"Don't think this concerns any of ya'll." Daryl grumbled.
"Maybe not." Rick replied exasperatedly. "But I'm not about to let you browbeat her into telling you what you wanna hear."
Analeigh eyed the men, not fully understanding why she didn't use the moment of distraction to make a get away. Maybe she was too tired or even just a little too rattled to go for it. Maybe she had decided from there on out she just didn't care or maybe, if nothing else, Analeigh wanted to figure out just what the hell was going on.
"I already told him I don't know nothin'."
"Why'd you run then?" Daryl peered around Rick. "You got something you ain't telling me? You got something to hide maybe?"
"You ain't ever been scared enough to run away from somethin'?" Analeigh shot back.
"There's a difference between bein' scared and bein' a coward." He replied. "I don't run from nothin'."
"Just like there's a difference between bein' brave and bein' stupid. That too hard for you to understand?"
"Just you keep talkin' sweetheart."
"You wanna try and shut me up?" She shot back, finding a little more courage at the hand of third party interference.
Rick stepped in again, making another attempt at disarming the escalating back and forth. He knew there would be nothing remotely close to good end if the progression continued and spending all day arguing in a stairwell was not their purpose for such a risky mission away from camp.
Analeigh flinched slightly, protectively curing in on herself as he extended a hand towards her. Uniform or not there wasn't anyone she was going to just up and trust at the drop of a hat and distance was not in her favor.
"You don't know nothin', and that's fine." Rick assured her quietly, trying to calm her nerves and convince her he meant her no harm. "Why don't we start with what you do know?"
"What I do know?" Analeigh parroted. "Like how all I was doin' was trying to sniff out something to drink and wound up being chased down half a dozen flights of stairs and badgered by ya'll instead? That what you mean by 'What I do know'?'"
"I guess that could work." He shrugged, and flashed her a half smile. "But I was really thinking more along the lines of your name…maybe how you come to find yourself here."
"How I come to find myself here." She scoffed and rolled her eyes at how simple the statement made things sound.
"You don't know anything else, then I will be good with that." Rick encouraged. "The sooner I figure out what's goin' on here, the sooner we will be on our way if that's what you want.
Eying him wearily, Analeigh remained tight lipped and silent as the grave as she weighed the pros and cons of telling anyone one scrap of anything about her.
"I promise…just your name if that's all you want to part with."
"We getting' somewhere with this or can we about get to lookin' for Merle?" Daryl griped. "Goddamn waste of time is all this is."
Gnawing her lower lip thoughtfully, she flipped her eyes between the pair of men. To his credit at least, Rick seemed like less of a pain in the ass than Daryl apparently was. And while it wasn't ideal to say much at all the faster she could get them out of her hair the happier, it seemed, everyone would be.
"Analeigh…" She winced slightly as she gripped the handrail and shifted her stance against the wall. "My name, that is."
"Just Analeigh?" Rick arched a brow.
"To you." She nodded. "For now."
It was funny the way such an insignificant scrap of information seemed to fixate everyone's direct attention. If Analeigh didn't know any better she'd have thought they were all fixed to the spot waiting on her complete life story to come barreling forth in fantastic detail to regale them. A sign of the times really, the need to humanize anything or anyone that didn't want to tear a person's face out and gnaw on their insides while they were still alive was probably more to be expected than not. A life story, however, was not exactly something she was willing to just up and dish out. Maybe in another life, but those days had long since passed, or at least so it felt.
"And you just happen to be here, in the right place at the right time?" Daryl spurred her on spitefully
"That what you call it? Right place, right time?" Analeigh scoffed. "This is an ideal place to you to hole up for days, and days only to run into something like this."
"You're living here?" T-Dog finally spoke up.
She nodded. "If you wanna call it that."
"Alone?"
Another nod.
She shifted uncomfortably and dug her fingernails forcibly into the palm of her hand to still a yelp. With the situation calming, even just slightly, the adrenaline rush was beginning to wear off and the effects of her tumble down the stairs, if not everything else she had suffered through, were kicking in with a vengeance.
"Just there on the floor below." Carrying on with a heavy sigh, she clutched at her ribs and stifled another whimper. "It's the only place I could find where the doors would shut enough to chain. Aside from food and water, I stay in a lot. So like I said, I ain't seen your friend's brother, or anyone else for that matter. You can take it for truth or not, I don't much care."
"Satisfied?" Rick sighed and shot Daryl a pointed glance.
He nodded, crestfallen and all the more frustrated. It was only ever a fifty-fifty chance Analeigh would have something useful to tell them, but it would have been everything in the world if the outcome was reversed and she had. The blood trail, now that Merle's stump had been somewhat tended to, had run it's course and Atlanta was a big city in which too be looking for one man. Knowing Merle would be doing no different than they were, ducking around corners and keeping out of plain sight as much as possible, made the prospect of searching all the more daunting at that. Daryl would come back every day to carry out the search if that's what it took, he could track just about anything right up there with the best of them after all. But the longer Merle was missing the less likely it was going to be to hunt him down, and that was if there was a clear trail to follow at all. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but once again perhaps when Daryl needed his brother the most, he had all but dropped off the face of the earth and this time it didn't look like he'd be coming back to make amends.
Daryl was the first to notice something wasn't quite right with Analeigh, not by half. She'd put on a decent show, pretending like everything was fine and she was only just a little rattled. But like a red flag blowing in the wind, her growing discomfort fixed his attention to whatever it was she sought to cover up. Giving her a subtle once over his eyes lingered on her lower half a moment before flicking back to hers, seriousness of a different note drawn across his face.
"You're bleedin'." He gave a little nod towards her leg, drawing focus of the rest of the group towards it.
Blanching slightly, Analeigh stifled a gasp and strained to tug at the hem of her dress. "It's nothing."
"Is that so?"
"Jesus…" Glenn half whispered. "Look at that."
Two thick dark streams of blood trickled down from the outside of her thigh, winding down past her knee before crossing paths and pooling in a sizable rivulet just above her ankle. Deep blue and purple bruises splotched across the majority of her lower leg, her ankle was clearly inflamed and bearing a deep gash that had mostly healed over but looked irritated and sore none the less. How any of them had missed the fact that she was blatantly pretty injured was anyone's guess, but as much as Analeigh would have played it off to get the group on their way as quickly as possible, that sort of bleeding and the looks of her leg wasn't something that could so easily be ignored. At the very least it went directly against Rick's conscience to just leave her there, shaky and possibly bleeding just as badly as Merle had been (or maybe still was) just by her word alone.
"Doesn't look like nothin' to me." Rick grimaced, flicking his eyes back up to meet hers. "Are you sure you're gonna be alright?"
Analeigh pulled back from the others again, jarring loose a fresh wave of pain to be bitten back. "Not that it's any concern of ya'll…"
"You get bit?" Daryl interrupted.
A hint of sadness flicked across her features as she turned her gaze towards him. "You'd best believe me when I tell you I wish I had been."