Welcome To Evangrove - A Walking Dead ff

Chapter 7 - A Different Man

If Evangrove was anything like Woodbury, Merle and Daryl couldn’t find it. The people were kind and polite, and far away from their concrete protection it looked like a normal town, the ones they saw on the television when they were younger. Picture perfect. Daryl, however, could not permit himself to relax here. Whether it was his suspicion, or bitter envy of Merle’s love for some brat, he would often sit on the roof and simply look out, waiting for something to happen.

Nothing ever did.

No, the days went by and things were peaceful and simple and calm. He wished cell phones were still in use, so that they weren’t forced to spend more time here and simply tell Rick they found the fabled town many a traveler with radio had heard, but the harsh winter and outright lack of transportation would spell certain death if they attempted to return immediately. Wouldn’t matter much anyhow, they were supposed to return mid spring. Daryl just hated it here with a passion. Or was it the girl? He faced them both with animosity, from glares to scoffs to completely ignoring them, and stole away in his room that he shared with his brother. They took the upstairs to an old apartment she began using as her own, while she slept in the living room. Even the inside of that place looked nothing like the houses outside the wall, it was clean, bright, not a corpse in sight. It was almost upsetting how some had to live by the skin of their teeth and others in the comfort of a protected fantasy.

Speaking of fantasy, his own that perhaps she’d fallen of a cliff and this nightmare could’ve ended was disturbed when she opens the door and catches him squinting out the window.

“Don’tchu knock?” He hisses, shuffling back onto his bed and reclining backwards, legs thrown over the end. He stares at her with that cruel, aimless expression, and the only way it could be clearer he hates her is if he said it.

“This is my house.” Quinn crosses her arms against her chest, her own face mild and unreadable. “What’re you doing?”

“Nothin’.”

She rolls her eyes. “Why are you always so rude?”

‘I ain’t.” He lies, amused he’s finally getting to her. “This s’ how I always am. M’ brother’s the one who dotes on you hand n’ foot, not me.”

“Is that why you’re throwing this perpetual tantrum? You’re jealous?” She moves out of the doorway and to the desk that sat in the corner, a good distance but directly across from the bed. They watch each other carefully, only breaking eye contact to sit down and let her arm rest on the dusty, unused keyboard.

“I ain’t jealous’a nothing.” He lies again. “Specially not you.”

“Really? Because you’re acting like an little girl who didn’t get the dolly she wanted, and you have been since we first met.”

Daryl simply scrunches his nose in response. He’s not going to rebuke those statements, they were completely true, he just wouldn’t verbally confirm it. His shoulders shrug limply.

“Listen, Dixon.” Her tone takes on a sudden ominous sound; a warning. “You’re in my town now. My house. You will respect me -” She’s suddenly out of the chair and in front of his bed, grabbing his shirt by the collar. Her strength surprises him when she yanks him forward, their faces separated by mere inches. “Or so help me God, I will make you wish I had died.”

The abuse he had witnessed his mother go through forebodes him from hitting her, but he thinks about it for as long as they stare down one another. A loud crack of thunder from outside breaks the sight between them, and allows for a moment of peace in the otherwise tense room. However, they turn to each other once more, and Daryl pushes himself away from her and slams back into his previous spot on the bed, adjusting his collar so that it rested against his chest once more. He was wearing not his usual vest attire but a flannel shirt, red, that he had ripped the sleeves off of. Quinn said it didn’t matter at the time of the cloth’s destruction, but he did it nonetheless hoping it’d spite her.