It was the blonde hair that Daryl saw first. The girl wheeled around, trying to keep each of the men in her field of vision, moving fast enough he couldn't see her face properly. For an awful moment he thought it was Beth; Beth with her white-blonde hair knotted back in a neglected braid, small hands clutching a knife so tight her knuckles were pale.
But it wasn't Beth. Daryl had lost Beth the way he lost children; a constant agony that couldn't be denied.
"Well, you're looking just a tad bit lost, darling. What'd you do? Wander off the beaten path?" Joe smiled at the girl, his teeth invisible behind his lips that pressed together, danger secreted away. "Take a wrong turn once or twice?"
The thing about Joe, Daryl had realized, was that the man was unflinchingly honest. He looked dangerous. He didn't make an effort to hide that truth. He practically loomed over the girl, making her take one step backwards and pushing her closer to where Len was gleefully standing.
The girl muttered something that Daryl couldn't hear from where he was positioned on the edge of the men. For two days he had been inching away from the group, settling himself just a little bit further to avoid notice for when he finally ducked off on his own. Joe's band of men were fair trackers and having a group of them meant multiple sets of eyes seeking out prey. He had watched then observe the land, Joe picking up tracks that vanished amongst the brush only for Billy to figure out the next fragment of trail, men practically wolves hunting down a deer.
He didn't want to be with these people. Officer Sunshine had given Daryl unfair standards for the company that he kept. The truth of the matter set his teeth on edge but he couldn't help but think about Dale or Lori, if they knew who he had fallen in with. Or Hershel, he thought with an unfair wrench to his heart, if he was aware that Daryl had lost his daughter and settled in with bad apples.
The world had ended and he had known better people because of it. And these dogs didn't measure up to that bar. They were relentless as they combed through the woods for anything of value. Their teeth snapped and they spat half muted insults back and forth, half tamed and half wild, Joe's feral men all wound up on a short leash.
The girl twisted when Dan inched closer and that was a smart move, Daryl thought, pushing distance between her and that particular man. Dan had a preference for the younger game, magazines stuffed to the bottom of his bag featuring children splayed out, a grizzly appetite that Daryl blinking away shades of red.
He drew closer despite himself. The loose knot of men barely noticed as he slinked in with their numbers, entirely focused on the girl herself, dried blood on the sleeves of her sweater that was rolled up to show wrists and the smattering of freckles—
Freckles like he daughter had across her forearms. Familiar, like the blonde hair, light like his own had been once when he was younger, a perfect match to Merle's bright blue eyes on the girl, the girl who was standing and breathing, the girl who should've been dead, who was supposed to be dead and gone, a name without a burial site—
"Claimed," Daryl spat the word out like it was a foul thing, cutting through the audience to grab her by the wrist. He felt her pulse racing beneath his clenched grip, proof of life he could barely stand to believe in. He had been angry, once, when she took a pen and drew lines connecting the freckles, talking loud and fast while he scrubbed the ink off in the kitchen sink with a bar of soap. It was hours after Merle had laughed at him for being an idiot that his daughter confessed that she was trying to make the lines show up that he had, colourful catches of ink laced through the skin, permanence that she was copying. "I said she was claimed," he warned Len because he saw the look glimmering in his gaze, interest flaring up like a wildfire begging to consume.
Dead. She was supposed to be dead. Everyone was dead and gone and how could she have made it to be standing in the middle of the woods, caught in the trap that would be their undoing if Daryl didn't navigate it properly?
"Dixon has a thing for the young'ens," Len smiled wide. His voice dripped with condescension.
The girl pulled against his grip and Daryl scowled, yanking her firmly into his side. His focus split between Joe and the rest. All of the men were threats but he tried to manoeuvre himself so he was between the most dangerous. "You said all I had to do was say 'claimed', right?"
Joe frowned with vague approval. "Those the rules."
It was the only rule that mattered. His daughter was rebelling, struggling to liberate herself, clearly putting him with the rest of the men in the same category. It was her face looking up at him with sick horror reflected back, the same face peering at him from the window of the trailer whenever he left for work, the face waiting for him to pick her up from outside the school at the end of the day, the same face watching him leave out the hospital room with her arm trussed up in a pink plaster cast—
Oh, his heart felt with a pang. 'I made you.' And his mind, ruthlessly rational, 'I'm going to watch you die'.
"Get off of me," she hissed, yanking without success. Daryl's hand simply held a little tighter. "You can have everything that's in my bag, I'll let you have it for nothing—"
"Oh, darlin'. That's not how this works," Joe said pleasantly. "We found you. Aren't you just so lucky?"
Claimed, Daryl's heart pounded wildly inside his chest. Claimed, his heart split into two fragments. Claimed, claimed, claimed, claimed—
YOU ARE READING
broken claims
Fanfiction'ᴄᴀᴜꜱᴇ ɪɴ ᴍʏ ʜᴇᴀᴅ ɪɴ ᴍʏ ʜᴇᴀᴅ, ɪ ᴅᴏ ᴇᴠᴇʀʏᴛʜɪɴɢ ʀɪɢʜᴛ Daryl lost everyone after the fall of the prison. Falling in with Joe's men had left him hollowed out like a ghost trying to separate himself from his losses until their path merged with another. ...
