*Daryl Dixon love story*
In a post-apocalyptic world where the dead come back and eat the living, Maevys Grimes finds herself clinging to the last shred of her humanity as she fights to keep her family alive. The blood, the loss, the gore: these thi...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"Quit bothering me, woman," Daryl huffs, having been on the receiving end of another one of Maevys's snide comments.
She smirks down their hands as the assembled tent poles pass from her fingers to Daryl's.
The first night they'd spent in the woods Maevys had insisted on sleeping in her own tent. But after a close call with a goon, that Daryl had promptly saved her from, it'd been decided they'd be sharing a tent tonight.
"I'm just sayin, Darlin, if you're feeling a little frisky I don't bite," she teases, laughing at his scowl.
Daryl can't help but notice the way her nose crinkles when she laughs, the observation and the feelings it stirs only riling him more.
"I'm never bringing you hunting again," he gripes, and she awards him with a light laugh before laying down the tent pole.
"Ima get some more fire wood," she snickers.
Both Maevys and Daryl were too stubborn to admit it, but they'd actually had a nice time hunting together. Not much had been caught, but it'd been longer than Daryl could remember since he enjoyed someone's company the way he was enjoying hers.
He found her to be incredibly sarcastic, and she certainly loves to tease him, but still Daryl ended up asking the woman about herself. She'd told him a bit about where she came from and her time in the military. And when she questioned Daryl in return, hadn't complained that he was hesitant to oblige. Maevys was rather patient with him, and the stretches of silence between them felt comfortable.
"Hey! Look what I found," she calls to him as she trudges back to their makeshift camp. After dumping the firewood piled in her arms to the ground, she approaches him, opening her fist to reveal small blackberries.
She gave him the entire handful, not bothering to eat any herself. "You don't want one?" He asks, popping a sour berry into his mouth.
"Not unless you wanna feed it to me," she teases over her shoulder as she starts building up the fire.
Daryl rolls his eyes at her, watching her tend the fire for a moment before saying, "do you ever quit jokin?"
She pauses, swinging the piece of wood in her hands back and forth slightly as she chews on his question. She knew the answer, she just didn't know if she wanted to give it to him.
"Honestly?" She asks, casting him a glance. The sudden seriousness catches him by surprise, but he schools his features.
"Sure."
"After I got back from Iraq, everything used to set me off. I had PTSD like a mother fucker. So bad that I started to become a danger to the people around me," she explains.
Daryl watches her silently, hanging on to every word.
"My brother got me some help, and I learned that to cope with it by finding things that keep me grounded," Maevys shrugs then, as if banishing a difficult memory. "For some reason, humor does that for me. Making serious shit into a joke, keeping people around me laughin, it helps me not fall victim to the bad shit in my head. I guess after a while, even after the PTSD stopped putting my life on hold, it became a habit. And with all the shit going on now, humor is all I've got sometimes."
