Lost ; Daryl Dixon

Chapter 8

You were running on autopilot, your brain checked out, switched off, letting your body do what it needed to to survive. For the most part that had meant walking, for miles, unsure where you were going or what you were searching for. You'd left the Sanctuary straight away after taking down the Savior that had killed Daryl. He was a big guy, and you were pretty sure that the one strike against his skull wasn't enough to have killed him, so you took off, running aimlessly into the woods, lost in your grief. You'd been alone for a little while, back at the very beginning, but then you'd found the Dixon brothers, and later on the camp at the quarry. When the prison had fallen, and you'd found yourself separated from the group, you'd motivated yourself with your hope that you'd find them, find the archer, knowing that they must be out there somewhere. But now...

Now it was all gone, as was your drive to keep putting one foot in front of the other. What was the point in any of this when everyone you grew to love inevitably died. How had it come to this? It seemed that almost every other community you came across was twisted and corrupt, their humanity lost somewhere back when the dead started walking. Was there anybody sane left in the world? Was there anybody left at all?

As the days rolled by, regret weighed heavy on your shoulders. You wished you could go back and do everything again, do it differently. The prison was the place you'd been most settled, most comfortable, but you'd wasted a lot of time there unwilling to admit the feelings that you had for Daryl, putting a brave face on it and playing at being his friend. By the time you'd both come clean, it was too late. The prison had been destroyed just a few hours after the first time you'd told him you loved him, and everything since then had felt like a battle. No more lazy evenings together up in the guard tower, no more quiet meals cooked up by Carol in the cell block, no more open fields to wander in. You hadn't fully appreciated what you'd had whilst you'd been there, and then, just like Alexandria, it was gone, all of a sudden.

At least that time you'd found the group, been reunited with them all. You could still see Daryl's face when his eyes had locked on yours for the first time at Terminus, the love and relief. You were like two halves of the same person, not functioning right unless you were together, and that was how you'd made it through everything that had come next: together. You didn't know how to do this without him.

*****

'Hey, ya wanna get out of here?'

You stirred slightly from where you'd been dozing, resting against Daryl's chest as he sat propped up against the end of a pew in the church. You'd ended up there when the group had come to the rescue of a priest that had run into trouble in the woods, and now you were all waiting it out whilst Abraham, one of the trio that Glenn had met out on the road, tried to fix up a bus parked out front. The plan was to head to Washington to deliver the scarily intelligent Eugene who, in theory, could restore the world to its past glory. You weren't sure you bought it. It sounded like a pipe dream, but at that point you were still in the haze of happiness that came from being reunited with your family, willing to go along with whatever Rick, Daryl and the others thought was best.

'C'mon,' Daryl nudged you again, and you felt his lips brush against the bare skin of your shoulder.

'Alright, alright,' you grumbled, easing yourself out from between his legs, and pushing yourself to your feet, not easy when your arm was still caught up in a makeshift sling which hung from your neck. You'd broken your collarbone back before you'd found the group at Terminus, and it was proving to be a pain in the ass. You pouted at him as you watched him lever himself up from the floor, but it quickly became a smile when he raised his eyebrows at you suggestively, before taking your hand and leading you out of the church.