slowburnsins
Daryl Dixon x OC
Slowburn
TWD
The world died slow, and the people left behind learned to die slower. Averly Jane Sparrow already knows how. She moves through the ruins like bracken, quiet, brittle, easily brushed aside until it cuts you open. Most people do not notice the danger until they are bleeding.
Daryl notices. Not the softness. Not the quiet. He notices the way she never misses a detail, the way her stubbornness keeps her alive when common sense says she should not be here. He notices the steel beneath her skin.
He calls her Sparrow, low and rough, like naming something that should not exist in a place this cruel. Not delicate. Not harmless. Just small enough to slip between the cracks and sharp enough to survive in them.
They do not trust each other at first. She resents his bluntness and his quiet authority. He is impatient with her caution and cleverness. Side by side, they navigate the rot with a fragile, silent understanding. He kills what gets too close. She sees the threats before they move. Hunter and hawk. Bolt and bracken.
The world will chew them up if they are not careful, and the deeper they go into the dark, the harder it becomes to tell who is keeping whom alive.
They clash, they resist, yet fate refuses to let them part. The dead drive them together, the world forces them to lean on each other, and every narrow escape only binds them tighter.