Last One Standing ~ TWD Daryl Dixon

30

Daryl

After Zack's memorial I left to go hunting. I didn't make it back until the next day. It was a little after dawn when I came through the gates. I had a bunch of fresh meat in the back of the truck. I nodded to Rick and Carl as I drove passed them and parked up in the courtyard. I was exhausted and my eyes felt gritty, but our meat supplies were running low. Once I got in a nap this morning I was going to head back out again. I climbed out of the truck.

"Daryl!" I whirled around to see Jo practically run up to me.

I frowned.

There was a broad grin stretching across her face. "You have to come!" she enthused. She latched onto my forearm and hauled me after her. "It worked!"

She pulled me down a long hallway into the tombs. I don't know if she realized it but it was the very room I had last seen Merle. It looked nothing like it had when Merle had been here. The whole counter was covered in intricate tubing, various filters and piles of mason jars and old brewery jugs. She dropped my hand and rushed over to the counter. I frowned after her. I don't think I had ever seen Jo this excited about anything, she was normally more reserved.

"What, are ya making hooch?" I asked confused. Jo hadn't struck me as the type to want a drink in the middle of all this.

She shook her head, her eyes beaming. "Better!" She exclaimed.

She turned back to her work bench and grabbed one of the many large mason jars. She shook it up, gazing at it thoughtfully then, standing on her tip toes she poured some of it's contents into a funnel that looked to be filtering through a rag. Thick, dark liquid flowed out. Seeming satisfied she grabbed one of the dark brewery jugs from the other side of the counter and poured a small amount into a tin cup.

"Here!" she said thrusting it towards me.

I frowned down at the dark liquid not certain what it was. I swirled it a little and slowly lifted it to sniff. I pulled back in surprise and looked up to see Jo standing only a foot away, her face lit up entirely in excitement. I couldn't remember ever seeing her like this. She was so carefree and joyous.

"Go ahead," she said motioning to the cup.

I lifted it to my lips and felt my eyes widen as the first sip touched my lip. "It's-" I started to say but she cut me off.

"Coffee!" she enthused.

I chuckled. "Exactly how much have ya had?"

She waved me off. "Not that much." And she practically skipped back to her set up. She pulled the filtered coffee out of the bottom and poured it through a second filter system. Then she poured more into the first.

"Is this what you've been working on?" I asked.

She nodded. "You and I hit that health food store a month ago and it got me to thinking about hipsters and cold brew coffee and how it was made and how people were still able to drink tea even though we didn't have any modern appliances and how people kept talking about how they missed their coffee and I found coffee at The Big Spot and it took some experimenting and the first few batches were bloody terrible, but with a little bit of work-"

She continued to rambled at about a mile a minute and all I could do was stare at her. Her green eyes were glowing in happiness and her hair was brushed back from her face making her look younger.

Jo had been a lot of things before this all happened. She had been a wife and a mother and a student and so many other things that I didn't know about, not really. This right here was the reason we fought so hard to keep our home safe. Seeing Jo like this instead of killing made something in my chest tight. Becoming a proficient killer was something that was done to her, before The Governor Jo had been a Protector of those she loved.