Daryl and Olive had been forced to come to terms with those around them, the new group with which they had been recently assimilated. One full night with them was almost too much for Olive to bear, but she ignored her doubts and swallowed her pride, standing beside her man with dignity and a bearing she hadn't had for quite some time.

They had been out in the woods since before the sun rose, and still they were having trouble accumulating the nutrition they required. Daryl had spotted a rabbit around an hour before the current moment, his sights fully set on that small but rambunctious creature, knowing full-well that rabbit was a meat that Olive had enjoyed since she was very young. He wanted to get her some food that would sustain her as well as satisfy her craving for the meat, and he was nowhere near willing to call it quits.

He fired his crossbow at the hare once he had reached the conclusion that his game of waiting would soon be at its end, but, unfortunately, his arrow hit the creature simultaneously as the arrow of Len, a man from this new group.

Daryl was pissed. He wanted that rabbit for Olive, and he'd have it one way or another. "What the hell're you doin'?" he questioned, lowering his bow to physically close the space between himself and Len.

Len shrugged, a sick kind of smirk on his already twisted mouth. "Huntin' me some breakfast," came his cocky answer.

"Game's mine," Daryl corrected. Olive remained tied to his side, ready to defend him if necessary.

"My arrow's the one that hit it first."

"We been out here since before the sun came up."

Len shrugged again, this gesture now pissing Olive off, too. "Rules of the hunt don't matter out here. See, I claimed that rabbit, so it's mine, boy."

Daryl picked the rabbit up, his grip tight around the creature's limp neck and he approached the other man. Olive stood by, still ready.

"Listen," Len began, his beady eyes slimming down even further, "the way I see it, this bitch got you all fucked up in the head, walkin' around here like a dead man."

Daryl glared. "Tryin' to catch breakfast for her don't make me fucked in the head."

Len nodded, his tone still condescending. "More like fucked in the ass."

Daryl started towards him gruffly, but Olive put her hand flat against the middle of her lover's chest, her gaze directed at the asshole Daryl was prepared to fight off. "Rabbit's my favorite out here. He caught it for me."

Len snickered. "See what I mean? Fucked in the ass."

Daryl drew his knife, his demeanor ready to spill blood when Joe, the leader of this new group, approached them and stopped the fight.

"Hey, weapons down, boys," he implored, and the two reluctantly complied. "Let's see if we can settle the real problem here, huh?" Joe turned to face Len. "Did you claim it?"

"Hell yeah," Len said.

Joe turned back towards Daryl and Olive. "There you have it. Looks like that rabbit belongs to Len. Looks like you may be wanting an explanation." Daryl took Olive's hand from his chest and continued to hold it, pulling both of their arms back down to their sides. "Going it alone ain't working nowadays. Still, it is survival of the fittest. That's a paradox right there. So, I laid out some rules of the road to keep things from goin' Darwin every couple hours, keep our merry band together and stress-free. All you gotta do is claim. That's how you mark your territory, your property, your bed at night. One word: claimed."

Daryl half-scoffed, his grip around Olive's hand both possessive and tight. "Aside from Olive, I ain't claimin' nothin'," he stated.

Len looked at Joe, a kind of disappointment on his face. "We're gonna teach 'im, right?" he asked of the leader. "Your rules say we gotta teach 'im."

Joe shook his head. "It wouldn't be fair to punish you for a rule you never knew existed."

"Ain't no rules no more," Daryl said.

"Oh, there are. You know that. That's why I didn't kill you for the crossbow." Joe took the rabbit from Daryl's hand and sliced it in half, tossing the upper end to Len. "Claimed. That's all you gotta say. Hey, an ass-end is still an end." Joe and Len both walked away, leaving the two to their half of a rabbit they had rightfully caught.

"You did what you could," she comforted, knowing that he was undoubtedly feeling guilty.

Daryl gave her a look of regret and shook his head. "I just wanted ya to have a good day...just once."

Olive nudged her knuckle underneath his chin until his head tipped up enough to look at her directly. "Hey...you're here with me. Every day is a good one."

Daryl loved her so much that it was moments like these wherein he felt inadequate to her heart, her passion, and he leaned in closer, giving her lips a tender and well-thought-out kiss.

::::

Later that day, the pair traveled with their new group, hand-in-hand as they trudged through a meadow of wheat, the Georgia heat filtering through them like a well-lit room and a familiar tune.

"So what's the plan, you two?" Joe questioned, lagging behind enough to talk to them.

"How so?" Daryl asked, feeling Olive pull herself closer to him.

"You're with us now, but you ain't soon?"

Daryl let his shoulders shrug a bit. "We're just lookin' for the right place is all."

Joe laughed kind of, the sort of laugh that makes one rething one's personal foundations and beliefs. "Oh, we ain't good enough for you, huh?"

"Some of you ain't exactly friendly."

"You ain't so friendly yourself. You know you need a group out here."

"Maybe we don't," Olive chimed in, giving Daryl's hand a tender squeeze.

"No, you do. You should be with us. People don't gotta be friendly. We don't have to be nice, we don't have to be brothers in arms. We just gotta follow the rules. You claim. If you steal, you keel. I know it sounds funny, but nobody's laughing when somethin' goes missin'. And you don't lie, 'cause that's a slippery slope indeed."

"What happens if you break 'em?" Olive questioned, knowing that her question was of the inevitable sort.

"You get beaten, depending on the nature of the offense and the general feeling of the day, but that don't happen much, because when men like us follow rules, we stick to 'em."

Soon enough, they crossed under an overpass kind of bridge, their path now following train tracks. Up ahead was an abandoned building, and Joe gestured to it.

"Right here-" The others in the group followed their leader's gesture. "This is our abode for the night."

Daryl stopped walking, halting Olive in her own steps and feeling her limp a bit. Her ankle was still sore, but that didn't matter to either of them. "There ain't no us," Daryl cautioned Joe, watching as he turned to move back to them, the other men heading into the building.

"You leavin' right now?" Joe inquired, a serious expression on his face. "No? Then it sure seems like there's an us." The man paused and Olive took Daryl's arm, the one her hand was entwined in, and gripped it tightly, her arm crossing her torso and her thumb swiping his skin affectionately. "You cat people? I am. Grew up with 'em since I was three years old. Vicious creatures. I'll tell ya...there's nothin' sadder than an outdoor cat who thinks he's an indoor cat." Joe wheeled around the left the two outside to think things over.

"I don't like these guys," Daryl sentimented, his volume low.

"I don't either," Olive agreed, sighing, "but we don't have a choice right now, do we? If we leave, these guys might track us down and kill us for desertion or somethin'."

Daryl scoffed. "They can sure as hell try."

Olive smiled slightly, turning her head to press her underlip to his bare shoulder. "We might as well stay the night. When something better comes along and soon as we've got an out, we're gonna fucking take it."

Daryl nodded in agreement, leading her into the building. Bustled refrains and repetitions of the word "claimed" echoed through between the metal and cement walls. The men in the group had all claimed the cars found within as sleeping places for the night until there were no more cars left.

Olive pulled Daryl down to the cement floor with her, pulling a black tarp off of one of the cars and laying it out for them. This would be their shared bed for the night, the pair remaining absolutely silent and each tightly wound to the other as if their lives depended on it.

Hell, maybe they did.

::::

"Where the hell is it?!"

Daryl and Olive awoke with a start to hear Len's screaming voice and watch as he came towards them with a violent drive. Both quickly rose to the ground, Olive letting her knee go flaccid to keep her heel off of the ground.

"My half was in the bag. Now it's gone."

Daryl raised a hand to prevent Len from coming any closer. "You step back," he warned.

"Now ain't nobody else around here interested in that cottontail except for you!"

"Yer the only one still thinkin' about that shit."

"Empty your bag."

"I said step back."

Joe took a hold of Daryl's bag, and then Olive's, sifting through each of them. "Did you take Len's rabbit, Daryl?" he asked. "Just tell me the truth."

"I didn't take nothin'," Daryl answered.

"What do we got here?" Joe said, shaking the contents of their bags out onto their tarp. In a moment, the rabbit's top half fell out of Daryl's bag.

Daryl started towards Len, his teeth gritted and his demeanor on full-defense. "You put that in there, didn't you? When we went out to take a piss, didn't you?!"

Len sneered. "You lied."

Olive was done playing the niceties, her blood beginning to boil up underneath her skin. No matter how weak her ankle still was, she set her foot down onto the ground and got right up into Len's face, her eyes wide and unblinking. "He couldn't have!" she shouted, Len proving to be a bit startled by her loud volume. "He was with me the whole night! We ain't been nowhere." Daryl tried to take her back from Len's face, but she was not ready to be moved quite yet. "Daryl's a man of honor, a man of his word. If he says he didn't take it, he ain't lyin'."

Len pushed his own face nearer to Olive's, his nose brushing up against the tip of hers. "You lied," he accused, a bit surprised when she didn't back down. "You stole. We gonna teach these fools or what, Joe?"

Joe put his hands up and pushed Olive and Len apart. Daryl wrapped his arms around his woman, pulling her firmly back against his chest. "Now, wait a second here," he said. "Both Daryl and Olive say that he didn't take your half of the rabbit, so we've got a little conundrum here. Either they're lyin', which is an actionable offense, or..." Joe turned to Len now, his eyes solely on the man. "You didn't put it in his bag like some pussy, punk-ass, cheating, coward cop did you?" He paused a bit. "'Cause while that wouldn't be specifically breakin' the rules, it'd be disappointing."

Len hesitated. "It would?"

Joe nodded slowly. "Mmhmm."

"I didn't."

Joe shrugged loosely. "Okay, well..." He right-hooked Len as hard as he could across the jaw until he hit the ground ass-first quite hard. "Teach him a lesson, boys. Teach him all the way." The others in the group began kicking and stomping Len as hard as they possibly could, their group's way of 'teaching' a member who has broken the rules. "He's a lyin' sack of shit and I'm sick of it." Joe shook his head sadly, turning to face Daryl and Olive, both of whom were a bit startled at the turn of events. "I saw him do it."

"Why didn't you stop 'im?" Daryl questioned, thoroughly confused.

"He wanted to play that out. I let him. You both told the truth. You understand the rules. He doesn't. Looks like you get the head, too." Joe tossed the head to Daryl who caught it as he watched the leader join his men in kicking the daylights out of Len.

::::

Now at-peace, Daryl and Olive took the silence as an opportunity to take a nap, seeing as they hadn't slept very well the night before.

Some hours later, however, both were roused by the scent of something terrible, something akin to death. Packing quickly, they knew this drill better than any other and readied to leave.

"Daryl," Olive said, pointing to blood stains on the pavement, all leading a trail out of the building. Once they had packed entirely, Daryl and Olive headed outside to find one of Len's arrows in his own head, his body laying quite dead - and heavily burnt from having been set aflame - in a heaping pile of singed fabrics and charred flesh.

The group soon left, the tracks still providing their only map. Once again, Joe lagged behind enough to talk to the outcasts of the group, handing them a flask.

"It's White Lightning," he explained.

Daryl took a swig before passing it to Olive. "I ain't been lit at dawn since before everything fell apart," he commented.

"Fell apart?" Joe repeated, taking his flask back once they had finished with it. "I've never looked at it like that. For me, it seems like everything's finally falling together for guys like us, living like this, surviving. We've been doin' this from the start, right?"

Daryl did not answer him, instead focusing on Olive, whose ankle was doing much better today than it had been for some time.

Ahead they could see a map stake, one with a Georgia map marked with the word TERMINUS in huge letters by a star that indicated the location of such a place.

"Getting closer," Joe said assuredly.

"You seen this before?" Daryl asked.

"I'll tell you what it is - it's a lie. Ain't no 'sanctuary for all.' Ain't gonna welcome guys like you and me and your girl here with open arms."

"So that's where we're headin'?" Olive inquired.

"We were holed up in this home and this walking piece of fecal matter was hiding in the home. Strangled our colleague Lou and left him to turn. Lou came at all of us. He lit out. We tracked him to these tracks, one of those signs, and thus we've got a destination in mind."

"You see his face?" Daryl questioned, steadying Olive as she tripped over a board on the tracks and nearly fell.

"Only Tony," Joe answered her, gesturing to the man with a bandanna. "That's enough for a reckoning."

Daryl chewed on his lip as he pondered this, his eyes wandering off of the tracks for a moment. "Claimed," he said, letting Olive be for a moment as he gathered a group of wild strawberries into his pockets and went back to Olive, sharing a smile with her as well as the newfound fruit.

They could have gotten used to this group, and would have, for sure, if it wasn't for what happened the next night.