Night Shift (oc x Daryl Dixon)

(15) way down we go

Before

"Dale could--" A pause was held. "Could get under your skin." Another break of silence. "He sure got under mine."

Madeline and the group stood before the a now touched spot of dirt, that held another person the group had lost.

"because he wasn't afraid to say exactly what he thought, how he felt." Rick stood out of the line up, instead he stood before them. "That kind of honesty is rare and brave."

This was the first funeral where she didn't wear something black. It was the first where she didn't dress of the color of mourning. Instead she wear the same outfit as had on, the night he took his last breath.

"Whenever I'd make a decision, I'd look at Dale. He'd be looking back at me with that look he had." He always made the right decisions, Madeline thought. "We've all seen it one time or another."

All of the groups head hung low, all of them felt with despair and discomfort of the person they now had to adjust to life without. It didn't seem fair to none of them for this to be reality. "I couldn't always read him, but he could read us. He saw people for who they were. He knew things about us."

Madeline nodded along, "The truth... Who we really are." Something Rick didn't stand for, as well as everyone here. "In the end, he was talking about losing our humanity. He said this group was broken."

Everyone knew it. No one could sit and deny what the group truly was. It was a mess, Madeline felt it. You could feel the tension everyone had the second you reached any of them. She felt like saying that was shifting the blame to everyone else but her. She knew it happened to be her too. She questioned the groups morals, fought against them.

Even if it was for what they thought to be right. Everyone had the wrong way of going about it. "The best way to honor him is to unbreak it."

Dale would want everyone to get along. He's want everyone to do what's right, and not have to think if it was or wasn't. Just plain right and wrong, hoping no one would see the grey.

Madeline wanted it to be unbroken.

But she knew Dale would never apply that about Shane. Who still was hiding what he had done. What her and fake both knew he had done... now just her. "Set aside our differences and pull together, st feeling sorry for ourselves and take control."

Madeline eyes left the dirt, the grave. Shifting up towards Rick as he spoke, "of our lives... Our safety...
...our future. We're not broken."

"We're gonna prove him wrong. From now on... We're gonna do it his way." She now turned to everyone around her, looking for protesting eyes.

But there wasn't any.

"That is how we honor Dale."

And they will.

˚ · • . ° .

Everyone stood huddled around a blue truck. "It'll be tight, 14 people in one house." After Dales death, her dad decided to let everyone move inside for the winter. It was about to get really cold, the nights already unbearable.

Plus the dead which was finding their way onto the land. Every day a group has to go out to kill them before they get to close. How long would that last before one did get to close.