I have been having so much trouble with my writer's block lately. I was hoping if I pull out and post some old ficlets I never posted here, it might inspire me a bit. Either way, I'll feel less guilty about never posting anymore. (Side note: I'm sad FFnet doesn't let me put images into these. I make headers for all my ficlets, if you check out my AO3 account (burningupasun), you can see them.)
Title: Caught (in a Closet)
Word Count: 1217
Universe: Canon (between Alone/Still).
Rating: General
Brief Summary: Stuck in a house of walkers, Daryl tugs them through the nearest door and into safety... which also happens to be a very small closet that leaves Beth pressed right against him.
Notes: If I remember correctly, I originally intended this to be something more smutty but as always, it ended up being something more emotional.
He has just enough time to hear their shuffle of their feet from the other room, mingling with low grunts and growls. By now he can number them in his head the way he used to be able to pick out how many people were in another room from the sounds of their voices and the heft of footsteps. Five, six, seven walkers maybe more, all headed their way.
Beth's head had just begun to turn and her lips to part when he slides his hand over her mouth and pulls her back against his chest. She freezes like a doe caught in the sights of a hunter's bow but only for a moment. That tension eases away, soothed by her trust in him, allowing him to draw her slowly backwards to the nearest door. He doesn't care what room is behind that damn door as long as it's not more walkers.
At least that's what he thinks until he draws her back through it and shuts the door with the softest 'snick' of the latch only to realize that what they've stepped back into isn't a room at all. It's a closet.
He's stuck with Beth Greene in a space so small that he wonders how it even contains both their heartbeats, if it has enough air to fill their two sets of lungs, let alone if they can even move.
But she tries. Slowly and quietly, because he's trained her well these last few weeks. Her feet don't make a sound as she turns and so the walkers might not hear her through the door but Daryl is acutely aware of every little movement she makes. His nose is full of the scent of cherries, lingering from that half-empty bottle of shampoo she'd found on a run last week. He can feel the slide of her ass and then her hips against him as she turns, the warmth of her hands braced against his chest as she settles and then the hint of her breath across his neck as she tips her head back to look up at him.
He holds a finger to his lips and listens to the sounds beyond as if by focusing on them he can ignore the fact that her slender body is fitted right up against hers as if those soft curves were designed by nature to mold against his. He listens for shuffling feet and low groans and tries to deny that there is a stirring within him, heat licking inside him and curling through his veins until his breath becomes just faintly shorter.
When he hears nothing, Daryl whispers, "Gotta wait. Might move past, give us a chance to make for the door." If this doesn't kill him first. If he doesn't die with the scent of cherries in his nose and the heat of her body enough to make him feel the itch of friction beneath his skin.
She says okay even as her hands slide down his chest and around his back. Her head settles against him, cheek to chest, and he breathes out lowly, "What're you doing, girl?"
"Getting comfortable."
He'd laugh, if he didn't have to be quiet. Cause he's the last thing from comfortable right now. Or maybe he's the most comfortable he's ever been, it's hard to tell. There's fire in his veins like need, urging him to let his hands find the small of her back and pull her closer, coaxing him into dipping his head and brushing lips down her neck to discover if she tasted as sweet as the cherry scent of her hair.
Yet there's a part of him that has never felt better. They've been on the run from the prison for weeks, never stopping more than a few days. They've let behind not only family and friends but walls and beds and the comforts of what had slowly become home and yet... And yet there is a part of him that feels more at ease striding through the woods with her at his side than he ever did back there and he knows that it's not just the woods.
It's her. It's her sweet smile and the way she hums sometimes when she walks. It's the way she settles his bow into her arms like it's an honor just to touch it, but when she fires it she looks like a goddess who strides through the woods as if they are her own.
It's the memory of the crackling flames as they burned the house down together, flames lighting up the old skeletal bones of the home and his past as the girl beside him thrust her middle finger up to the sky.
There is a part of him each day that feels them changing. Not feral, but maybe wild. Like maybe they will stride into the depths of the forest side by side one day and never come out again. And in the woods beneath the canopies of the trees with nothing but their own strengths to sustain them, it will be good. It will be right.
He feels that sense of rightness now as steady as her heart beating against his chest and matching the rhythm of his own. He feels it as his hands slowly lift to find her back and span it, mimicking the splay of white wings across his own back. The closet is dark and she is closer to him than he's ever comfortably been to another person before and yet this, too, feels right.
It feels like home, in a way he never felt in the prison or on the farm and certainly never any time before that. Home isn't a place for him, it never has been. Home now is this. It's the scent of cherries and the rise and fall of her back beneath his hands as she takes in deep breaths. It's the warmth of her body against his own, it's the softness of her curves fitting as perfectly against him as her muscles, harder and firmer now after their time on the run.
Home is her tipping her head back again to look up at him in the darkness. It's the hint of the curve of her jaw etched into the gloom, and the gentle parting of her lips as she breathes out his name like a question, or a request, or maybe even a prayer.
Home is the warmth of her lips against his when he closes the gap between them and leans in to kiss her. It is the taste of her on his tongue and the sigh she breathes between his lips.
And it is the way she smiles and nods when he pulls back and whispers that tomorrow, they'll head back into the woods. They'll go deeper.
Maybe it will feel even more right there in the depths of the forest. The last man standing and the last woman at his side; the hunter and the goddess.
(If she is a goddess, a huntress of the woods, than he has long since been ensnared. He is caught and held, but he has no desire to break free.)
Wherever he goes, it doesn't matter. He will find home with her at his side, because that's what she is.
Home.
Right.
Everything.
