Welcome To Evangrove - A Walking Dead ff

Chapter 1 - Just a Kid

Foot prints in the snow, easily trackable, lead to two Dixons, hell bent on hunting in the winter.

"Long way from home, huh, lil' brother?" Merle's voice came smooth and soft, carried by the gentle winter breeze that chilled the brothers to the bone. The mere sound of his voice causes Daryl to cant his head to the side and murmur a growl - a warning, Dixon for 'Shut up, we're hunting." Merle rolls his eyes in response, but accepts the command, and resumes his slow pace behind his younger. They're silent predators, in this white landscape, as Daryl's trained eyes scan the snow for what he had seen just moments before. There - his hand raises and he points to their gift; a doe, leading her fawn to a tree. Merle frowns.

He takes no time in killing the mother, sending the lanky child scattering into the woods. A grunt signals his brother to take the kill before anything else does, but Merle hesitates, passing Daryl just moments later with a hurt look in his pearlescent blue eyes, though he does nothing to the kill.

"What? S' born too early. Thing was gonna die anyhow." Daryl says flippantly, taking it upon himself to quickly claim the mother’s dead corpse. The shot was clean, right below the shoulder blade, meaning the meat wouldn’t be tainted. He lets a proud smirk flicker across his face as he goes about his duties, removing his bolt and gutting the poor thing. Crimson blood splatters against the white snow as Merle watches from the other side of the doe’s corpse. He looks briefly for her child, but it’s gone too far. “Merle, s’ dead. Stop lookin’ for it.”

“Take that stick out ‘yer ass ‘fore you speak to me, boy.” Merle warns, eyes reluctantly relinquishing their search, drifting back to the awkwardly sprawled out game before him. Daryl knows this tone all too well, and his place, and so he bows his head and continues with his work. Eventually, he has what he needs, and puts what he can salvage into the sack he had slung around his shoulder. The blood had now created a sizable puddle, pooling around Daryl’s knees, creating quite the shocking contrast of colors. Merle feels a brief pain in his side, an old scar he had gotten long ago, but he brushes it aside.

Had to let it go already. Five years was too long to carry regret.

“M’ sorry.” His brother’s voice drifts up towards him, almost dreamily taking him away from his thought. A glance at Daryl reveals sad eyes of his own, an apologetic expression gracing his surprisingly young looking face.

“Nah, you were right. Just a kid anyway.”

The words come as an unsettling reminder to both, and it causes momentary unrest. Merle is quick to turn away and steal a few steps in the opposite direction, praying that Daryl will realize his mistake and not press any further. Daryl takes the cue, though he wishes silently that they’d just acknowledge it - acknowledge what her death did to him.

“We should get goin’. S’ cold, need t’ set up somewhere.” Merle says, clearly uncomfortable. Daryl is too. Hell, for the past five years they’ve both been. Couldn’t fill the space that little girl left in him, and that made Daryl feel miserable. At one point he was all Merle needed, and then he wasn’t. That alone kept him from a sound sleep, but that wasn’t the kicker. It would release so much tension if they would just talk about it. About her. About Quinn.

“How long s’ it been since you said her name?”

Merle sucks in his breath, closes his eyes, and releases the tension in his shoulders. “We ain’t havin’ this talk now. Not now. Les’ jus’ g-”

“Why not? Merle, how long we gonna hafta’ wait? Huh? Five more years? Ten? You can’t just pretend she didn’t exist!”

He’s never been the type to shut his mouth, to bide his temper. No, Merle was the man to let that anger out in the ugliest of ways, and Daryl knew that. The fights those two have had left both bruised and bloody, their voices like thunder, each strike a crippling blow. To Daryl, however, this was a long time coming, so he chose his words carefully, not because they would hurt his brother, but because he knew they would. Instinctively, the smaller man tenses up, moving one arm in front of his chest so that when the fight began, he’d have the advantage.

It doesn’t, though. Merle just let’s out that breath of air, akin to a chuckle, and turns to face his younger brother. It’s an odd, almost unreadable expression on his face, and that unnerves Daryl more than the looming fear of a physical altercation.

“It’s fuckin’ cold, so if ‘ya don’t mind, les’ get goin’.”

Daryl hates to admit defeat just as much as the next guy, but there’s no use. Merle’s as stubborn as his head is thick, so with a soft grumble of defeat, he stands up, attempts to wipe the blood off of his knees, and follows Merle into the endless white before them. Eventually the pair came across a string of apartments, quaint little houses, snow covered cars that hadn’t been touched in years, and decided that one of these dusty little homes would serve as their place for the night. It was close to the road and seemed untouched by looters, which was a rare occurrence nowadays. Nearly everything had been raided and tampered.

“How far y’think we are?” Daryl asks, listlessly tossing his bag on the nearest couch. It’s atrocious floral covering makes him think it’s older than him, and as his eyes relax and acclimate to the surroundings of the dusty old building, he realises it’s interior is just as ancient. Merle shuffles inside the home, tracking snow across the dark carpet. “If this place s’ even real, I mean.”

“Rick said it was near a lake - you kin’ smell the water. We’re close, real close. Less than a stone’s throw away.” Merle affirms, plopping down onto the sofa his brother had been looking at moments ago. A loud sigh announces his contentment in the home, and Daryl can’t help but crack a small smile. “We don’t got enough t’ eat though, do we?” A unanimous glance at the bag’o food reveals the obvious answer. “No - so, we’ll stay ‘ere for a while an’ go back out in th’ morning, when everythin's out an' awake. Don't want us starvin’.”

“Shitty way to die.”

“You said it.”

It was nowhere near Dusk when the boys had settled in, and so for a while, their stay in the home consisted of awkward silence, or Merle’s audible commentary on the atrocious choice of curtains and carpets. Occasionally would the boys converse with each other, but neither one had enough to talk about, and so once more they weren’t their separate ways; Merle to the upstairs, Daryl to the living room and kitchen. It was only after the senior Dixon had entered the master bedroom did he call upon his brother with something substantial to talk about.

What waited for Daryl in the room was a grim reminder not everyone was born with the will to survive. In the bed were corpses they had surely been there for many a year, perhaps since the beginning, with their hands intertwined. It was hard to tell from their miserable state of decay, but the appeared to be a younh couple. That was not all, however - when the two explored the other rooms and attic, there was a dead body for each one. What stood out the most was what looked like a child’s room, a young girl's, and inside it held a man’s corpse hung by a noose. It was macabre at the least, and even Merle was taken back by the surreal amount of death one home held. The only comfort lay in the fact they never found a child’s body, but even that served as an ill comfort, that though it wasn’t dead in here, it might’ve been outside wandering the world in search of food.

Eventually, Daryl ushered Merle back downstairs, because it was clear the little girl’s room was getting to him, and volunteered to clear out the dead bodies himself. Though this emasculated him, he agreed, and soon fell asleep on the downstairs couch.

Neither Dixon could bring themselves to sleep on a dead man’s bed.

With a soft hum keeping him occupied, Daryl continued his scope over the house. It bothered him; not the death, but his brother’s character change. Merle was the rock, the tough one, the man you’d go to - or at least he could - when you were in trouble. Now, however, something so little as a young girl’s bedroom could unsettle him, make his knees weak, his face contort in sadness and revive memories of a child he had protected such a long time ago. Daryl lost people himself, but he never let it bother him like Merle did. That worried him, if only for the selfish thought “Would he mourn me like he mourns her?”

Sooner, rather than later, he finished his run through of the home and tottered downstairs to find the light from the winter’s afternoon had faded curtly into a peculiar shade of darkness. His brother slept soundly, and he joined him on the opposite couch - content that the candles they had lit earlier would serve as sufficient light in case either one woke in the night.