He's Just a Baby

Alexandria

(BTW, this is the last kind of weird chapter before the story actually starts to sound good lol.)

"M-Merle?"

Daryl took a cautious step towards the last remaining walker that was slumped over a human carcass, eating its guts out.

He had recognized the crafted prosthetic arm weapon on the walker and the sight of it had made him freeze in his tracks.

At first he had thought it was an odd coincidence, that the walker couldn't be Merle, that his brother was still alive somewhere after he had left the group for good. His brother was not one to be easily defeated, after all.

However, when the walker looked up and its dead eyes met Daryl's own, he knew exactly who he was looking at.

Daryl sniffled, taking a shaking step back as he felt his world crash around him. His breathing was already becoming erratic, and his heartbeat began to ring in his ears.

Merle, his big brother...he was gone.

The walker, who now had its full attention on Daryl, stood up on shaky legs and began to stumble closer to him.

Meanwhile, the archer's eyes glossed over with tears as he shakily pulled a knife from his pocket.

"I'm so sorry Merle. I-I'm so sorry," Daryl muttered repeatedly as the walker wandered closer and closer, even though deep inside he knew that Merle had never once said sorry for any of the awful things he had done to him.

Then, when Merle the walker was only about two feet away, Daryl lunged at him and plunged the knife into it's decomposed forehead.

————-

Daryl shot up, eyes instantly flashing open. Instead of finding the broken-in face of his dead brother though, he found himself looking at a wooden house beam.

Right...

Daryl looked around in the darkness that was dimly lit by a small candle laying near him, and found himself sitting on the floor of a house's front porch, his back leaning against the white exterior of it.

All of reality suddenly came crashing back into him when he remembered where he was.

That night...after Daryl had fallen asleep in the prison, barely stable after an awful supply run, everything had went to shit.

Somehow, the big chain that had been holding the main gate to the prison shut had come undone during the night. And due to this, a huge swarm of walkers, who had been waiting outside of the gates, had slipped into the prison.

And the man they had been fighting with, the governor, had set fire to a whole wing of the building as well, dragging the attention of even more walkers, and injuring a couple of the people who had been sleeping peacefully inside.

Daryl didn't remember anything clearly from that moment on, all the way until they had arrived in Alexandria a long while later. It was like he hadn't truly been awake during it all.

He had remembered waking up to screams, and instantly suffocating on the ash that lingered in the air. The fact that he had wet himself had gone completely unnoticed as he had panickily ran out of the cell block and into the fight where Rick and the others were. He remembered the looks of horror on everyone's faces as Hershel dropped dead, his head being chopped off by the enemy. He remembered the feeling of his knees almost giving out during the fight, and the moment where he had forced his headspace so far back in his mind that he felt like he was splitting his skull in half. But that was all he could really gather from that day.