⤐ 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞𝐤𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐨 𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐬𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝.
"I need you to listen to me. When we're out there together, if I say run, run. If I tell you to leave me, then damn it, you le...
'I fear not the fire that will consume me, I only the fear the scars it will leave behind.'
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⤐
After the death of Daryl's mom, he went out into the woods and got lost for nine days. He was too young still to have a bow just yet, but he got lucky enough to survive off of berries for a while. Though the empty pit in his stomach never subsided, and his body grew weaker by the day. The quiet was comforting at first and so was the space from his father, but by the time two days had passed, the deep dark of the forest had started to play tricks on his mind.
On the sixth night he started having dreams, then those dreams had started to trickle into his consciousness, blurring the lines of his own reality.
He saw animals that disappeared and left no tracks, heard whispers behind the trees with nobody there. On the seventh night he collapsed against an oak, the hunger and cold twisting his body into itself, and in the distance, he saw a glowing figure seemingly floating towards him.
She was in a long, white silk dress that glowed against her skin. Her face was soft and happy, a look he had only seen in faint memories of his mother from when he was very small.
The whiskey wrinkles and nicotine stained fingertips had faded away, the hard line of her mouth was full and grinning again. Her hair fell in golden ringlets down her shoulders, flowing to a point at the small of her back. She took steps towards him but they seemed to hover above the ground, floating to him as she reached out a hand.
His rational brain knew that she wasn't real, knew he was faltering into a shocked state. But seeing her there in the woods gave him the strength to stand up, shake off the icy chill in his bones and finally make his way back home. When he returned, his father never even noticed he was missing. He marched straight to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich, and never thought of his hallucination again.
Then there was the incident with the gorge.
Searching for Sophia for days, unable to find any appetite out of pure disgust for the fact that his group was able to lose a child and still carry on with their pathetic lives, desperately searching for some semblance of normal when normal didn't even exist anymore. He was exhausted and weak, and that was before tumbling down the deep gorge and shooting himself with his own arrow on the way down.
He floated in and out of consciousness for a while, snapping to attention when a walker came for his leg. He managed to tie his wound around the arrow sticking out of him, wincing as each tug of the torn cloth pushed the bolt deeper into his flesh. He struggled to climb the steep ravine and lost his footing, tumbling back to the rocky river bed. Delusional and losing blood fast, he started to hear the whispers again. It was Merle's voice this time, the gruff growls that he had heard so many times before.
