Our Extinction Event {Daryl Dixon}

No Need For Apologies

They found an abandoned barn in the woods, and when he saw it, Daryl sat down against a tree and pulled out a handful of crushed cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket. Parker leaned down and placed a kiss on the top of Daryl's head, brushing the hair out of his face. 

"I'm gonna go check out the barn. Besides, pretty sure being around smoke is bad for the baby."

"Be careful," Daryl advised, watching her leave. As she walked away, Parker heard Daryl crying behind her and as much as she wanted to go back and comfort him, this was something he needed to do alone. He had to process what happened before he allowed anyone else inside the mental walls he had barricaded himself behind. Parker knew it, and as she walked away, she felt tears of her own well up in her eyes. She carefully circled the barn, securing the perimeter before heading back to the doors. She knocked a few times, but when she was met with nothing but silence, she carefully opened the doors. 

Inside was a lone walker whose head turned as Parker entered. She pulled her knife out and slowly walked up to the walker, and once she was close enough, she plunged the knife into the walker's head, again and again, and again before she finally stumbled back and choked on a sob. She covered her mouth to stifle her cries, it had all become too much for her. She cried for Beth, for Daryl, for Rick, Carl, Judith, and everyone who was with them, and those who weren't. Talking about Dale again after trying to put him out of her mind was hard because she had yet to fully forgive herself for what had happened to him. Their faces flashed through her mind, everyone from Jim and Amy in Atlanta to Lori, T, and Hershel at the prison to Beth and Tyreese just a few weeks ago. 

Everyone she had lost over time came back to haunt her, their faces dancing in the back of her eyelids. Parker dropped to her knees and knelt there for a few minutes, crying to herself, wishing things had gone differently. Then she stopped to ask herself if she had really wanted things to be different. If things weren't the way they were now, and the virus never happened, would she have met the people she was with now? Her heart would never have been touched by so many special people she was proud to call her family. A family that was forced together due to circumstance rather than choice, but a family nevertheless. Parker's mind drifted back as she thought about all the ones she had lost, and then she thought about all the people they'd met along the way and were still here. 

The original Atlanta group had dissipated, leaving behind only a few, but they had rebuilt themselves and opened their group up to unfamiliar faces. Parker couldn't disappoint the people she was with now, no matter how dysfunctional they were, because without them she would have given up weeks ago. Crying helped because it eased the weight of the emotions that piled up even if that relief was short. She wiped her tears off with her sleeve, sniffling as she started to collect herself, she was grateful that no one was around to see her cry. This was something she needed to do alone, she needed time to process everything alone, the same way Daryl did. 

With a slow, shaky breath, she pulled her knife out of the walker's head, wiping it off on its torn and tattered dress. She slowly rose to her feet, grabbed the rotting corpse by the ankles, and started dragging it out of the barn, hiding it in the bushes where no one would find it. She quickly made her way back to the barn doing one last sweep of the place before some shuffling caught her attention. On the other side of a large pile of hay bales, Parker found another walker, one that was too weak to move. The sight of it almost made her feel sorry, but then she reminded herself that the thing she felt sorry for only had one thought in its mind and that was to eat her. She sunk her knife into the walker's temple and dragged it out, adding it to her newly started walker pile, kicking some leaves around to hide the trail the body's left when she dragged them. When she got back to where Daryl was sitting, she forced a smile and tried to pretend that she hadn't been crying a few minutes earlier.