Instincts (Daryl Dixon FF)

t w e n t y t w o

[Season 4, Inmates]

No P.o.V

Anger made her feel alive. So alive her little toes would curl in their socks and her teeth would crush together if not for herself forcefully keeping them apart. It made every hair on her skin stand and every cell in her body throb. Anger is great, sometimes, because it can awake forces you didn't expect yourself to have, it can make you ten times stronger and ten times faster. It can, unleash things hidden deep inside the core of yourself. Some patients though may experience unpleasant side effects, such as loss of rationality, sudden physical convulsions or falling into a state of regret after the condition subsides. As for Margo she mostly experienced these 'physical convulsions', although they tend to be quite calculated and quite harsh. Let's say the term convulsions may be a little debatable in her case and the term punch a lot more fitting. The way she just moments ago bitchslapped Daryl in the face didn't really seem like a convulsion-slap more like a slap-slap. After Beth stood still, dumbstruck and with tears burning in her soft eyes, Margo had failed to hold herself back once more. The shirt she was wiping her already clean knife with slid of her fingers, the knife itself got stuck back into the shed on her hip and her feet started walking towards him. She was quick to raise her hand and maybe Daryl could've stopped her if he'd wanted to but he didn't. Maybe he had chosen not to or regret had already settled in immediately after that sentence had left his mouth, either way her slap hit his face full on. She had stomped towards him aggressively, stared dead into his eyes for a few seconds and then slapped him.

Her body was radiating energy and Daryl realised that he'll probably never understand where she takes it from. It's attractive, not in a sense of beauty but in the sense of actual attraction. She draws him in. She pulls at him. The way she stole the keys off him, the way she threw her knife into his walkers head, the way she just slapped him like she would've any other person. She's so abnormal and she's intelligent in ways he does not dare to try and grasp. Daryl's staring at her right now and he knows. It's because he wants her to talk and he's been waiting ages for her to talk but she's just staring back. She's staring back at him with her endlessly cold blue eyes and doesn't talk because all Margo ever seems to do is answer.

When she walks away the heat goes with. She leaves them in the cold and him in the freezing feeling of guilt. It's not her fault though, it's his and the way Beth's looking at him is too. Her gaze is full of disappointment and hurt and her posture slumps as she walks over to a bush to pick some dark red berries. It's his turn to talk, to apologize to be exact but somehow he remains silent. He can't open his lips and no words are leaving his mouth, he's stuck in a loop of what might be right to say but can't figure out where to stop. He starts tugging at his black biker scarf, which was once stuffed into the back pocket of his pants. Her small hands had started overflowing with berries and he tabs her back with the scarf, he does it twice actually. Daryl needs her to have it and to use it as well. It's the reason he's being so peristent with it, so demanding, and fortunately she takes it after the second tap. A gentle smile adorns her face as she grabs the cloth out of his hand and carefully empties hers into it. She folds it together and twists its ends to close it. The case is closed, sort of, for now.

They started walking again, picking up the pace, following the tracks and the path through the dark green woods. It didn't take long until they came upon something new. A new clue, she decided. Margo didn't know at which point this had turned into a kids detective mystery but she went with it, her anger had subsided and boredom was filling her brain with emptiness and stupid ideas. Behind a fallen tree stem, two killed walkers were laying on the ground, dipped in a pool of blood and guts. The smell was horrendous but Margo wrinkled up her pointy nose anyways and sniffled the air intensely like an animal.

"That ain't walker blood", Daryl said from behind her, softly grazing his thumb overneath some dried traces of blood on a leaf he'd found. Beth was quick to come along, peeking over his broad shoulder to take a look at the leaf herself. She seemed so pure, almost child-like as she stared at Daryls hand with her wide eyes and a soft smile on her lips. She bit them in excitement, just a little bit, with her front teeth and then expectantly looked at Margo. Margo, who didn't know what to tell Beth rather than the bitter truth that things weren't the way they seemed and Margo who was relieved that talking wasn't known as a thing she did, because Beth easily accepted her silence once she didn't. Instead, Beth took matters into her own hands, gave herself a little push off Daryl and walked towards her. She hopped over the stem clumsily to take a look at the corpses.

"The trail keeps going", "they fought them off!", she happily exclaimed, waddling along the tracks which were leading away from the scene and upwards to a little glade.

"No", Daryl mumbled back, voice hoarse and hopped over the tree stem as well to follow Beth, "Got walker tracks all up and down here. At least a dozen of them." He absently slid his shoe over the ground, pushing some of the golden autumn leaves aside, revealing more and more imprints underneath. Beth only half-heartedly glanced at the tracks and didn't seem to give his words much consideration nor value. She was purposely being ignorant towards the truth, although not aggressively like the night before but rather to shelter herself. She didn't need the truth right now. She just needed something to keep going and maybe someone to hold on.

Margo was just about to lift her foot to step over the trunk, ready to join them on the other side, when a sound caught her attention. Something rustled, which wasn't crazily alarming in the middle of the woods but should be quite catching in combination with a zombie apocalypse. Zombie apocalypses make zombies walking around a lot more likely and that's a fact. So she softly lowered her foot back down and simultaneously slid her hands towards her tender hips, aiming for the two knives there. Her eyes slowly and intensely glanced across the trees but there was nothing to be seen, not yet.

"What is it?", Beth asked. She had turned around to urge them to move on but rephrased her words once she saw the look on Margos face. Beth had learned to hate that look quickly. When her bright blue eyes glimmered sharply and her nostrils flared, it was the look of trouble.

"Walker", Margo whispered back and firmed the grip around her knives, pulling them out of their sheds.

"But I don't see-", "it's the smell", she interrupted.

" 's probably the corpses", Daryl objected. He had taken the crossbow off his shoulder but only held it loosely with his right hand.

The rustling got louder quickly and maybe Daryl and Beth couldn't distinguish the smell of different decomposing stages like Margo but they could definitely hear them by now. Daryl propped up his crossbow, joining the staring into the woods club. Walkers can be hard to see in this kind of undergrowth. Their dead skin gets so rotten and old that it takes on the greenish colour of doom and they start blending in with all the browns, greys and greens a forest contains, like camouflage.

Beth had long realized that a group of walkers was slowly inching towards them somewhere but seemed to be paralyzed into her position. Her breaths were quick and short, her hands emptily wandered along her body, searching desperately for the one single knife she had. It's kind of her own fault, she heavily denied having more than one knife let alone a gun in her waistband and as a consequence, she didn't. When Beth finally did find her one knife but then had issues pulling it out the shed due to her panic, Margo decided to step in and help.

She, much more gracefully than the other two, took and elegant gazelle-like step over the wood and quickly scurried to where Beth was still frozen to her spot.

"Get behind", she mumbled under her breath, already using her hand to softly push against Beth's chest in an attempt to get her sheltered.