AN: Here we go, another little chapter.
Warnings for violence and abuse ahead.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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Alice had been lying awake for what felt like days. The only reason she knew it hadn't been that long was simply because the sun had failed to rise again.
She could drown out Merle's snoring and his occasional curses thrown at no one and everything when he woke. If she could keep him away from the drugs she'd found in the motorcycle and tossed out into the woods when he wasn't looking, he would be detoxed before long. She'd only kept what she knew could be used for medicinal purposes, and those were hidden too.
She could also drown out Daryl's thrashing around and curses spat at her and Merle and maybe at whatever gods he was calling out to because the tent was crowded, uncomfortable, and for whatever reason it smelled.
She could drown out a lot of things, but what she couldn't drown out was what she already knew to be the sounds coming from the tent of Carol and the dirty, sweaty, ass of a man that she was apparently married to.
From what Alice could hear, he was unhappy. She imagined he'd never been happy in his life.
She could hear that in his unhappiness, he was making Carol unhappy too, but each time she dared to make any noise suggesting her displeasure with his asshole nature, his unhappiness grew…and so did hers.
And what further pissed Alice off was that she knew that the girl was in the tent with all of this going on and that was causing her to squirm and itch until she almost felt as miserable with the world as Merle did right now. She'd never been very good at minding her own business and she knew that.
Alice sat up and wormed her way toward the exit of the tent, heaving a sigh as she did. She could hear that Daryl was moving about now.
"The hell is wrong with you?" He asked. "You gotta piss again?"
"No," she hissed back at him. "Can you not hear that? Am I really the only one that can hear what the hell is happening in that damn tent?"
"What?" Daryl asked.
"That asshole is beating his wife," Alice responded.
"What you want me ta do about it?" Daryl asked. "It's better ta mind your own business. You'll just make it worse if you go over there an' start runnin' your mouth."
"Not if I kill him," Alice said, matter of factly.
Daryl laughed. He didn't realize that she was serious.
"I'm serious, Daryl," Alice said. "What are they going to do?"
"Kill you back, I reckon," Daryl commented.
"I have the right to a fair trial," Alice said.
"You lost your damn mind?" Daryl responded.
"I'm working on it," Alice said. "Daryl…that little girl is over there. She's in that tent. That little girl is seeing that man beat her mother…he might hurt her too."
Silence came from her companion and if she hadn't been sure that he was awake she might have thought that he'd gone and fallen asleep again.
"Whatta you want me ta do about it, Al?" The response came back. Daryl's voice sounded a little different than Alice was used to and she couldn't put her finger on what had changed exactly and she certainly didn't know why.
"I want you to stop it," she said.
"I can't do that," Daryl said. "We kill him and they'll kill us."
Alice wasn't going to take that for an answer when she heard another of the pathetic noises coming from the tent. This was a world where people died every day. It was a world where she'd seen good people torn apart by walking corpses. It was a world where she couldn't imagine being put to death for simply getting rid of some asshole who really, really deserved it.
So she crawled out of the tent, dragging her knife behind her.
"Where the hell are you goin'?" Daryl spat at her just as she straightened herself up.
"If you want do it, I will," Alice said.
"Merle…" Daryl called back into the tent. Alice could hear them as she made her way across the dirt of the camp toward the tent where hell was going on to the point that the occupants were unaware of what was happening outside of their space. "Merle…Al's gonna get her ass killed…come on…"
"Don't give a damn," Alice heard Merle respond and she laughed to herself even as she continued her trek, not entirely sure what she was going to do when she got to the tent.
When she did reach the tent, Alice stopped just outside of it, didn't turn back to see if there was a Dixon brother coming to help her out or not, and took a deep breath. She grabbed the tent flap and flung it open, releasing more of the noise into the night than the flap had kept muffled.
She poked her head in but kept her eyes closed for a moment. The tent that this "family" shared was smaller than the one her family shared, but all the occupants of the space were awake and they were clearly surprised by her intrusion.
The man barked out something about why the hell she was there and Alice opened her eyes, scanning first the terrified face of the child and then the face of the woman who looked equally terrified but wore the marks of the noises Alice had been trying to ignore all night.
"I heard you like hitting women," Alice responded, sucking in a breath and hoping that she knew what the hell she was doing, though she doubted it. "Consequently…some women like hitting back."
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By the time that Daryl covered the ground, which was really not very long at all, between the two tents, hell had already broken loose. They were starting to draw something of an audience too, though people were just hissing back and forth in the darkness, none of them wanting to come out for this anymore than they'd wanted to come out for the noises beforehand.
Daryl reached the tent in time to see one part of it crashing down from the chaos of all the bodies inside. He made his way into it far enough to find the little girl in the chaos, not even knowing what her name was, and very nearly jerk her out of it. He somewhat flung her into the darkness and out of the direct line of fighting that was taking place, assuring himself that she wouldn't get trampled in what looked to be some kind of confused lock up where the man throwing punches didn't likely know where they were going.
Daryl knew he didn't know where they coming from either, but as soon as he really opened his ears and let himself hear the screams, now coming from two women though they were of a different nature, he couldn't help but react.
It brought back too many memories. It brought back too many bad memories. And what fueled his anger even more than knowing that the man didn't care about what he was doing to his wife was the threats that he was throwing at her combined with the ones he was throwing at Alice.
And to make it worse, there was the sound of her apologies. Her apologies and her begging thundered in Daryl's ears.
The begging was not to hurt him. The begging was not to make it worse, no matter what words she used, because every bruise on his body the abuser would take out on his victim tenfold. The begging was for him not to be angry at her for something she had as little control over as how many times the Earth spun around.
And the apologies were all the same, no matter the scenario. The apologies were the sound of the abused begging telling their monster that they were sorry…sorry for so many things…sorry for living…sorry for making them act like a brute and an animal.
The sounds burned deep in Daryl's gut until he felt the animal in himself surge out and he reached into the tent again, yanking out the woman that he could get his hands on and slinging her into the darkness with her child and away from the fight at hand. He expected her to leave his grasp as freely as the girl did, but when he felt her body stop abruptly he turned quickly enough to notice that his brother was there, silent but likely burning with the same fire of memory that Daryl was burning with, and that he'd stopped her body to move her more smoothly toward the cowering girl.
All the other assholes were staying stuck in their tents as though they were stone cold deaf to everything that was happening. All the other assholes were playing well the role of the neighbors that saw but never did anything more than offer sympathetic and sometimes judgmental looks. They were playing the roles of the neighbors that whispered to each other but never called the police.
And even the policeman there was playing well his role of sticking his head in the ground and turning a blind eye to this in favor of spending more quality time grunting around in his tent like a pig with the bird woman.
The fire burned in Daryl to the point that when he went in the third time into the tent he connected with the man before he even got Alice out of the way. He hoped she had enough sense of self-preservation to get herself out of the way and out of the tent that was trying desperately to be torn down around them once he locked up with the man whose name he didn't even know and used his energy to take out all the aggression he'd never taken out on others before on the single person available to him now.
Somewhere in the confusion, the tent either came down or they made their way out of it because Daryl became aware of the fact that he could feel the breeze blowing around him even as he was unaware of even the details of how the fight in the darkness was progressing.
Around him were sounds…all of them muffled now by the pounding in his ears and his strange sense of pride that the asshole had landed only two or so punches for as long as they'd been fighting, which felt like an eternity. The man wasn't much of a fighter if his victims knew how to hold their own in a brawl.
It was Merle that finally got them apart, and it was Merle who delivered the final blow that rendered the man unconscious. It was Merle that pulled Daryl to his feet and spoke words to him that he wasn't even ready to focus on enough to understand at the moment.
His head pounding, Daryl became aware of the fact that they'd destroyed the tent for all intents and purposes and that the man he'd been fighting was either unconscious or dead on the ground.
Alice had found her way out of the space as he'd hoped she would and she was clinging to the woman and the girl, all three wrapped up together, while the woman cried and said words that Daryl doubted anyone could understand and the girl tried desperately to hold onto her mother and soothe her for the trauma she'd endured.
And slowly the others were coming out of their tents and into the darkness, their lamps swinging like fireflies swarming toward him.
"Tie the fucker up," Merle growled. "Deal with his sorry ass come fuckin' daylight."
And Daryl wondered if Alice had been right about the chance at a fair trial for any of them in the world that they found themselves in now, because if she hadn't, the lynching mob was coming for them…and he was probably the guiltiest of them all at this point.