Survival 101: With Vivian Bell

Chapter 15: A Painful Reminder

Love, I have wounds,

Only you can mend,

You can mend.

I guess that's love,

I can't pretend,

I can't pretend.

-Tom Odell, I Can't Pretend

Daryl crept through the forest, his heavy boots crunching over dried leaves. He was trying to focus but it was steadily difficult.

The youngest Dixon always saw hunting as a way of distancing himself from the real world. Where most people spent money on expensive aroma therapy and sat down in silence in an act called "meditation". Daryl enjoyed the outdoors, focusing on something other than his usual shit course of day, hunting made life a little saner.

But today was not one of those days.

It's been four days since the incident at the store. He still had trouble grasping what had exactly happened; it was disappointing considering the precautions they had taken to make it a smooth Run.

Though it wasn't the incident itself that bothered him—Vivian Bell.

He wondered if he was the only one who could tell that she hadn't been the same since the Run. It wasn't the same Vivian he had come to know, something in her had snapped.

His feelings for her had completely dawned on to him that day, when he ran out of the store with Sasha and Tyreese at his heels. The way she was sprawled face down on the floor, blood splattered across her clothes and arms terrified him to his core. Before an abrupt rage and urge to protect her flooded through his system, he had killed all the zombies that had dared to try and approach her form.

Sasha and Tyreese had covered for him when he picked her frail body in his arms, to his relief she was still alive but as white as chalk and her lips were alarmingly pale with perspiration building heavily on her forehead.

He remembered the moment she had woken up that very day, a few hours after they had arrived back at the prison. Hershel had asked for her to be laid out on a lone bed in the medical room. Daryl stood at a distance, watching Carol scurry about for supplies and Hershel checked her pulse and mumbled something about it being weak. Rick had arrived moments later, concern clear in his sad blue eyes.

Rick had asked Daryl about what happened but Sasha had cut in and explained the incident to Rick. Daryl was glad she intervened. He was too busy nervously biting at the skin corners of his nails to respond.

When Vivian stirred awake, silence fell over them and all eyes focused on her. Hershel and Carol leaned over her body, waiting for her to open her eyes and the moment she did—Daryl knew he would never forget that moment.

Vivian had screamed bloody murder, the cry the left her lips echoed through the walls and made the hairs on his body stand on end.

Hershel and Carol were too shocked to do anything at first, but then when they tried to restrain her she had put a hell of a struggle. She had clocked Hershel in the nose in a frenzied need to escape. It took Sasha, Carol and Daryl to stop her from struggling.

He knew it was his voice that had calmed her down; he remembered the crazy look in her eyes. Like everything and everyone around her were demons and his voice was the only one she recognized.

After she had calmed down she still stared at them in a way he had never seen before, so much mistrust. He saw the way her attention was darting from his face to the exit. That same suffocating, under duress expression he had seen from her that time with Little Ass-kicker.