Not Dead [Daryl Dixon x Male OC]

1 - Rooftops & Gunshots

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Nick walked like his limbs didn't belong to him, each step a negotiation rather than an order. Everything hurt. Every damn thing.

The ache was a dull one, as if some lazy torturer was standing behind Nick, only applying enough pressure to be an annoyance. It sat there, never leaving - taunting him as his legs almost buckled with every step he forced himself to take. He guessed this was just the consequences of not eating for five days, or maybe it was the withdrawals hitting him again out of spite - just to make his life that little bit worse while it still can.

The brunette clamped his hand down on his backpack's strap, readjusting it before it could hit a roamer as he passed amongst the dead - smearing even more blood on it in the process (if that was even possible at this point). The smell was... intense, to say the very least. Every step he took into the city full of the walking corpses only made the stench worsen - rotten flesh.

His nostrils flared, he didn't think anything would ever make him get used to the smell that seemed to follow him no matter where he went in the new world.

White shirt now stained a discoloured shade of red and brown, an unpleasant mixture of dried blood and 'fresh' blood - well, as fresh as roamer blood could get. However, Nick was used to the colour, all too familiar with it. He figured out in the early days that the dead didn't go for anything that smelt dead, it was simple logic in hindsight, even if he did make the discovery accidentally. If smearing a dead man's guts and viscera on his face and clothes was what he needed to do to survive now, then so be it. Better than being bit. Better than being gorged alive.

Atlanta was swarmed, roamers hobbled past Nick as they groaned and gurgled on their own blood and spit. A chuckle escaped his lips.

I'm probably walkin' just like 'em.

The hunger and exhaustion blended together sadistically to break down his body slowly. Going into the city wasn't the ideal situation, but he needed food and he needed it bad - Atlanta was his last hope, he was fresh out of options.

The situation, from an outside perspective, seemed horrifying. Alone, coated in a thick layer of blood from head to toe and surrounded by the lingering roamers that fell behind the herd up ahead. But Nick couldn't help but find himself disagreeing, he had never felt more free in his life.

The starvation ate away at him at an excruciating pace, but being surrounded by the stumbling dead placed a sense of comfort within him, the blood staining his skin beginning to feel like home. He would never utter the words aloud, would never tell a soul. There was no rhyme or reason to it, at least, there was none that Nick could pinpoint. He didn't like to think too deep into it, too worried to find something he won't be able to bury within himself again. Why poke the sleeping bear when you can just walk right past it?