Titleless

Kill a Dixon

Hi! It's been a while and I had these two requests sitting in my inbox for a really embarrassingly long time. To these two anons, if they're even still around, I apologize...but here it is now.

8. As much as I want you to rest right now, it’s freaking me out that I can hold you down this easily!

Daryl storms through the front door of the house you share with Carol and him, before slamming it shut and heading towards the couch. You can not see him yet, but you recognize the sound of his footsteps and, tonight, they sound angry. 

You wipe your hands off your pant legs and peek your head into the living room, where you now see him sitting, a human mess covered in blood and mud and god knows what else. Your heart does a weird thing in your chest and you skip towards the couch to see if he’s been hurt. It probably isn’t his blood, so calm down and take a deep breath before you make it worse, you tell yourself inside your own head. 

You stop right in front of him, but he does nothing to acknowledge you there, even though he knows. “Daryl? Did somethin’ happen? You hurt?” You are ready to run over to the infirmary and fetch Denise if that’s the case, but the archer looks up at you for just a second before he speaks. 

“Nah, ‘m fine,” he says and goes right back to staring at his own hands while you stand there and stare at him. 

“Are you sure?” 

He never told Beth why he was so silent and so numb after the prison fell, but he also felt he didn’t need to. Beth knew. She’d seen enough of how Daryl lit up at the mere sight of you. She’d watched him become flustered and flushed. Daryl’s protectiveness was obvious by the way he always planted himself right beside you, or stepped slightly forward as if to shield you from anything that didn’t feel 100% right.  So, it made perfect sense that when the prison fell, he became one of the walking dead. He didn’t feel alive anymore. He didn’t feel anything. He just existed, drifting in the turbulent ether, fighting only enough to continue being.  The smell of your hair, the feeling he got when he was near you, the shape of your body, the way you moved your hands when you talked, it all seemed to have gotten inside of him, or into the air all around him. You had become a physical necessity. And then you were stolen, and he didn’t know if you were alive or dead, and he was almost too afraid to find out. All he knew was that he could no longer breathe, could no longer sleep. He could only exist.

Prompt: “The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.” - Oscar Wilde