THINK ABOUT LIVING | Daryl Dixon

010 | In The Name of Hope, We Rot

━━━━━━ CHAPTER TEN ━━━━━━
In The Name of Hope, We Rot
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          IT TURNED THEIR WHOLE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN when they needed their stability the most, so of course they didn't believe Mallory Cohen was immune. She wouldn't have believed herself either, had she gone through this infected world, unrecognizable from what it used to be but a year ago, in the same way they had. Simply expecting to wind up held in a cell however did not change the fact that she was having a hard time maintaining her sanity with the way history dared repeat itself mercilessly upon her.

Had Daryl not been there to hold her hand through the bars, Mallory feared she would have done plentiful of unreasonable and dangerous things that would most likely have her in even more pain than before, requiring more bandages than just the one on her forearm.

The fever came and it passed, like all fevers did before this virus surfaced and changed the world perspective on this symptom, but they still were monitoring her as one would a bomb without a timer that could at any point go off.

"You should get some sleep," Daryl sighed, disheartened to find Mallory in the same spot he had left her that day, leaning the side of her head against the bars of the cell and keeping her knees up, hugged to her chest with only one arm. He's been pulling his weight around, helping in the efforts of securing the prison, hoping that should he play his cards right, they'd let Mallory go without much of a fight. With days passing and not yet a single sign of her turning in sight, everyone was uncomfortably coming to terms with the fact that immunity was possible and unachievable; in a world filled with bad fortune, people who knew the taste of luck were never gonna swallow the bitter pill that they were now deemed and doomed to an unlucky tag as the likes of Daryl had been for most of their life.

They had no reason to keep her there, but that bitterness stuck in their throat, calling out the names of all the people they wouldn't have lost along the way should "immunity" have been a thing for them too. Such things compelled them to keep the keys far and away from Daryl.

He sat down in a mirror of her position, slithering his hand in her cell and finding her own to hold again.

For a while, they both allowed the silence to linger, Daryl calming his breath to a more temperate pace and falling back down in the habit of focusing his inability to find stillness in only drawing circular patterns on the back of Mallory's hand.

"We need to leave now," she eventually murmured and it has been long enough that they were blocked by bars for Daryl only to sigh, and not also dare to disagree with her. Though he hated admitting it, he was seeing it with his own eyes, feeling it in his friends' reluctance to let her go as soon as hours turned to days and that bite mark only healed further towards a gentle scar. Their denial was making him grow wary.

"I understand if you don't want to leave with me anymore," Mallory's voice cracked, ignoring the way Daryl promptly turned around to look at her, ready to dismantle that thought of hers for how wrong it truly was. "If you can't bring yourself to anymore. With Rick on a warpath, with your brother here too, I get why you wouldn't. But I need to go, Daryl. I've spend too much time as a prisoner. I can't do this anymore. I can't do it again, standing by and watching hope maim good people." With silent tears in her eyes she looked at him, "They are good people. But I have seen good people turn into monsters and I am not talking Walkers here. I don't want to give them the chance to lose their humanity over a cure that doesn't exist."

"How certain are you that it doesn't exist?" Hershel inquired before Daryl had the chance to reply, his presence there startling them enough to let go of each other's hand instantly. As Mallory hesitated in responding, Hershel sighed and nodded towards Daryl, "Rick needs to have a word with you. He's outside, by the fences, on perimeter watch."