Needy husband Daryl needs to sleep touching you at all times! If you move even an inch away from him he will pull you back into his arms and bury his face into your neck or hair.
Needy husband Daryl who always has his hands on you. His favourite places to place his hands are your thighs and your ass.
Needy husband Daryl who can’t help himself but stare at your ass and tits all the time. Once summer started, the prison had been so hot during all times of day and night, so your only dress code was shorts and a small tank top, with no bra. He loved staring at your tits bouncing up and down, nipples staring at him through the tank. Ass looking amazing in those tiny shorts that showed the top of your lacy panties when you bent down.
Needy husband Daryl who pulls you by the belt buckle of your jean shorts. You get hot when he does that.
Needy husband Daryl who stares at your ring finger wearing his ring. He feels possessive towards you.
Needy husband Daryl who has to fuck you before and after his runs. It’s his ritual. Even if he has little time before leaving, he still finds a few minutes for a quick fuck with you.
Needy husband Daryl who loves when you beg him to choke you with his big arms while fucking you from behind. He loves to feel you squeezing him hard, drooling all over his elbow. He knows you get the best orgasms ever from that position, so whenever he can, which is always, he will fuck you in that position.
Needy husband Daryl who begs you to let him eat you out while on a run alone. Imagine him being all needy from seeing you kill walkers, that he needs to beg to eat you out when you arrive to your scavenging destination.
Daryl thinks you're too young for him, despite the fact that he's already half in love with you.
season 10 Daryl (late 40s-early50s), 25 year old reader
The first time Carol noticed it, Daryl was sharpening a knife that didn’t need sharpening.
His eyes kept lifting from the whetstone every few seconds, drifting across the Alexandria courtyard toward you.
You sat on the church steps with Judith tucked against your side, helping her braid wildflowers together while RJ climbed all over your back like you were a human jungle gym. Your laughter carried across the afternoon air—bright, warm, alive in a way that made people stop and smile without realizing it.
Daryl looked away the second Carol smirked at him.
“What?” he muttered.
Carol bit into an apple. “Nothin’.”
“Ain’t nothin’.”
“Mhm.”
He scrubbed harder at the blade.
Carol watched him for another long second before saying casually, “You know everybody already thinks she’s yours.”
That made his hand stop entirely.
His jaw flexed.
“Don’t start.”
“Oh, I absolutely am gonna start.”
Daryl sighed like a man approaching execution.
Because the truth was worse than Carol even knew.
He was already gone for you.
Completely.
Hopelessly.
And it terrified him.
You had arrived at Alexandria a little under a year ago.
Twenty-five years old. Alone. Covered in walker blood and stubbornness.
Daryl remembered opening the gates with Aaron after a run and finding you sitting against the outer wall with a knife buried in a walker skull beside you and a sprained ankle swelling purple beneath torn jeans.
You’d looked exhausted.
Not weak.
Not helpless.
Just tired down to the bone.
Aaron had crouched carefully. “You alone?”
You nodded once.
Daryl remembered how your eyes tracked every movement around you. Smart. Careful. Ready to fight if needed.
Most people were scared when they first saw him.
You weren’t.
You looked at him for a long moment before saying, “You got any clean water in there, crossbow?”
He’d blinked.
Then snorted unexpectedly.
And that had been the beginning.
You fit into Alexandria like you’d always belonged there.
You helped in the infirmary when Siddiq got overwhelmed. Helped repair walls. Went on supply runs. Read stories to the kids. Learned how to fight from Rosita. Learned tracking from Daryl.
That last part had become dangerous for him.
Because you looked at him like he mattered.
Not like a legend.
Not like some hardened survivor everybody whispered about.
Just… Daryl.
You’d sit beside him during watch shifts and ramble softly about old-world things you missed. Bad coffee. Cheap shampoo. Terrible reality TV.
He’d pretend not to care while secretly memorizing every word.
And somewhere along the line, the quiet companionship turned into something sharp and aching.
He started noticing little things.
The way your nose scrunched when you laughed.
How you always touched his arm when passing him something.
How you trusted him without hesitation.
How your face softened every single time you saw him walk back through the gates safely.
It hit him slow.
Then all at once.
He was in love with you.
Which was a damn problem.
Because you were twenty-five.
And he was…
Old enough to know better.
Old enough to remember a world before the one you grew up in.
Old enough that sometimes his shoulders hurt when the weather changed.
You deserved somebody younger. Easier. Somebody who wasn’t carrying decades of scars and grief and blood under his skin.
Not him.
Never him.
So he buried it.
Or tried to.
It would’ve worked better if you weren’t also painfully in love with him.
You tried not to be.
God, you tried.
But Daryl Dixon was impossible.
Impossible in the quietest ways.
He brought you wildflowers without acknowledging he’d done it, leaving them beside your porch like some skittish forest creature.
Three weeks later he came back from a run holding a dusty can of peaches like he’d discovered buried treasure.
“Found these,” he’d grunted.
You’d stared at him.
“Daryl…”
“Wasn’t usin’ ‘em.”
Liar.
Then there was the way he protected you.
Not in a condescending way.
Never because he thought you were weak.
But because the idea of losing you genuinely frightened him.
You saw it every time walkers got too close.
Every time gunfire erupted.
Every time you came back late from a run and he paced Alexandria like an angry caged animal until you returned.
And yet—
He kept distance between you whenever things started feeling too real.
Like he’d catch himself wanting to touch you and force himself to stop.
Like he’d look at your mouth for half a second too long and immediately retreat afterward.
It hurt.
Because you knew.
You knew he felt something.
But every time you got close to crossing that line, he’d pull away like he was scared of himself.
The breaking point came after a supply run gone wrong.
A small herd had separated your group near an abandoned gas station.
It happened fast.
Too fast.
One second you were fighting beside Carol.
The next, a walker grabbed your arm and slammed you hard against concrete.
You stabbed it through the skull immediately, but not before your head cracked sharply against the wall.
By the time Daryl reached you, you were dazed and bleeding from your temple.
And he lost his mind.
“Move!” he barked at the walkers between you.
His knife tore through them brutally.
Desperately.
You barely had time to stand before his hands were on your face, checking your pupils, your shoulders, your neck.
“You hurt?”
“I’m okay—”
“You blacked out?”
“No.”
“Lemme see.”
His voice shook.
Actually shook.
Carol saw it.
So did you.
Daryl pressed his forehead briefly against yours like he couldn’t help it.
Like relief physically weakened him.
Then he realized what he was doing and jerked backward immediately.
His walls slammed back up so fast it almost gave you whiplash.
“I’m fine,” you said quietly.
He wouldn’t look at you.
“Need Siddiq t’check yer head.”
“Daryl—”
“We’re goin’ back.”
The ride home was silent.
Painfully silent.
That night, you cried about him for the first time.
Carol found him outside the next morning.
He sat on the steps behind his house smoking a cigarette like it personally offended him.
“You’re an idiot,” she greeted.
Daryl grunted.
Carol leaned against the railing. “She cried herself to sleep.”
His head snapped toward her instantly.
“What?”
“She cried.”
His face darkened with immediate guilt.
“I didn’t—”
“You did.”
He rubbed a hand over his face.
Carol softened slightly.
“She loves you, you know.”
Daryl looked physically uncomfortable.
“She’s twenty-five.”
“So?”
“So?” he echoed incredulously. “Carol, I’m damn near fifty.”
“You’re forty-something, not dead.”
“Ain’t right.”
Carol stared at him for a long moment.
Then she asked quietly, “You think she’s too young because of her age?”
He frowned.
“Or because you think somebody like you doesn’t deserve to be loved by somebody like her?”
Silence.
There it was.
Carol knew him too well.
Daryl looked away first.
“She deserves better.”
Carol snorted softly.
“That girl looks at you like you hung the moon.”
He swallowed hard.
“And for the record? She’s a grown woman. Stronger than half the people here. Stop acting like she doesn’t get to choose what she wants.”
“She don’t know what she wants.”
Carol’s expression turned flat.
“She crossed a state during the apocalypse alone and stabbed three Whisperers in the throat last month.”
“…Yeah.”
“She knows what she wants.”
Daryl said nothing.
Carol stepped closer.
“You know what I think?”
He sighed heavily.
“I think you’re scared,” she said gently. “Because if you let yourself have her, really have her, then you’ve got something left to lose again.”
That hit too close.
His jaw tightened.
Carol smiled sadly.
“You already love her, Daryl. All you’re doing now is hurting both of you.”
Then she walked away, leaving him sitting there with the truth lodged painfully in his chest.
That evening, there was a knock at your door.
You opened it to find Daryl standing there awkwardly holding a mason jar.
Your brows lifted.
“Is that… moonshine?”
“Might be.”
You laughed softly despite yourself.
“What are you doing here?”
He shifted uncomfortably.
“Can we talk?”
Your heart immediately started racing.
You stepped aside to let him in.
The silence stretched once the door closed behind him.
Daryl looked nervous.
Actually nervous.
You’d seen him face walkers, guns, storms, even Alpha herself with less visible fear than he had standing in your living room.
That alone made your chest ache.
He set the jar down carefully.
Then rubbed the back of his neck.
“Been thinkin’.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
A tiny huff of laughter escaped him.
God.
Even that tiny sound made you melt.
Daryl looked at you for a long moment before speaking.
“When I met ya… thought you were tough as hell.”
You blinked.
“Okay…”
“Still do.”
His eyes held yours now.
Steady.
Raw.
“I tried not t’feel this.”
Your breath caught.
Daryl swallowed visibly.
“Thought I was too old. Thought you deserved somebody better’n me. Somebody younger. Easier.” He shook his head faintly. “But then every damn time somethin’ happens t’you, feels like my heart’s gettin’ ripped outta my chest.”
Tears immediately burned behind your eyes.
“Daryl…”
“And I know it ain’t fair.” His voice roughened. “Know I ain’t exactly—” he gestured vaguely at himself, “—prince charming.”
You laughed wetly through your tears.
He stepped closer.
Tentative.
Like he still expected you to pull away.
“You got a whole life ahead of ya,” he murmured. “Could have anybody.”
“I don’t want anybody.”
His breathing stuttered.
You stepped closer too.
“I want you.”
The words shattered whatever restraint he had left.
His eyes closed briefly like the confession physically hurt him.
When they opened again, every emotion he’d been burying for months sat there naked and terrified.
“You mean that?”
You cupped his face gently.
His scruff scratched your palms.
“You are the kindest man I’ve ever known,” you whispered. “You protect people. You care about people. You make me feel safe. You make me laugh. You make me feel loved even when you’re trying not to.”
Daryl’s eyes went glassy.
“Nobody’s ever looked at me the way you do.”
“Get used to it.”
A broken little laugh escaped him.
Then he kissed you.
Finally.
And it was nothing like you expected.
Not rushed.
Not hungry.
Reverent.
Like he’d spent months denying himself this exact moment and still couldn’t fully believe it was real.
His hands trembled against your waist.
Yours slid into his hair.
He made this soft rough sound against your mouth that nearly ruined you.
When he pulled back, his forehead rested against yours.
“You sure?” he whispered.
You smiled through tears.
“So sure.”
Daryl looked at you for another long moment.
Then he kissed you again harder this time, deep and emotional and full of everything he’d been too afraid to say aloud.
A month later, Alexandria stopped pretending not to notice.
Mostly because Daryl had apparently decided if he was finally allowing himself to love you openly, he was going to do it fully.
The man who once barely touched anybody suddenly couldn’t stop touching you.
A hand on your lower back.
Fingers brushing yours.
Kissing your forehead absentmindedly during conversations.
Pulling you into his lap during evening bonfires while everybody tried very hard not to stare.
You caught Carol grinning at the two of you constantly.
“Don’t,” Daryl warned one afternoon when she smirked knowingly.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yer thinkin’ it loud.”
You laughed into Daryl’s shoulder while he grumbled under his breath.
But he was smiling.
Actually smiling.
And at night, when the world quieted and the walls fell away, he held you like something precious.
Like something he still couldn’t believe belonged to him.
One evening, lying tangled together in bed while rain tapped softly against the windows, you traced the lines of old scars across his chest.
“You know,” you murmured sleepily, “you never answered something.”
“Hm?”
“How old were you when the world ended?”
He groaned immediately.
“Oh, c’mon.”
You giggled.
His arms tightened around you.
“Brat.”
“You love me.”
Daryl pressed a kiss into your hair.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “I really do.”
And this time, there was nothing fearful in the words at all.
the heat from the road rose in shimmering waves, but it was nothing compared to the sweltering, suffocating silence hanging between the two of you on the bike.
the asphalt gave way to cracked dirt and overgrown weeds as the motorcycle tore down the old logging trail. the canopy of oak and pine closed in overhead, blocking out the harsh midday sun and swallowing the both of you in shifting, green-tinted shadows. every bump in the road was a deliberate torment. each time the bike hit a rut, your body was thrown hard against daryl’s back, your breasts flattening against his spine, your thighs tightening around his hips to keep your balance. under your palms, daryl’s stomach muscles were hard as iron, flexing and rippling with every micro-adjustment he made to the handlebars. he wasn't easing up on the throttle. he was riding fast, reckless, driven by a raw kinetic energy that felt less like traveling and more like running away from the edge of a cliff.
you leaned your cheek against his shoulder blade, inhaling deeply. the scent of the lye soap was fading, giving way to the heat of his skin, the familiar musk of stale tobacco, and the hot grease of the engine. he felt immovable beneath you, an unyielding wall of heat that seemed to vibrate in sync with the roaring machine between your legs.
after endless miles, the trees broke. daryl killed the engine, coasting the bike into the dense brush behind a collapsed barn. the sudden silence of the woods was deafening, save for the ticking of the cooling exhaust.
for a long moment, neither of you moved. you were still wrapped around him, your chest rising and falling against his back. daryl sat with his hands still gripping the handlebars, his knuckles white, his head bowed. his breathing was deep, his shoulders rising and falling in uneven cycles.
"get off," he muttered, his voice so thick and gravelly it sounded like it had been dragged through the dirt.
you let your arms drop, sliding off the back of the seat. the moment your boots hit the ground, your knees felt weak, the residual vibration of the bike still humming through your thighs, keeping the deep, throbbing ache between your legs intensely alive.
daryl swung his leg over the bike and stood up, refusing to look at you. he immediately reached for his crossbow, slinging it over his shoulder.
"pharmacy is just through that tree line," he said, his voice tight, his southern drawl cutting sharp through the quiet air. "we do this quick. we do it right. keep your eyes on the tree line while i get the bag. understand?"
"daryl," you said softly, stepping into his space.
"i said, keep watch," he snapped, finally spinning around to face you. his eyes were dark, bloodshot from lack of sleep. the fake composure he’d maintained in front of rick was gone, replaced by a raw, feral frustration. "don't start. not out here. i'm tryin' to keep us alive, and you're—" he choked on his own words, his gaze dropping involuntarily to your lips before snapping back to your eyes. "just do what i tell ya."
you stood your ground for a second, the heat radiating off him nearly enough to push you back, before you finally nodded and turned toward the thick wall of pines. you kept your eyes on the shadows of the tree line, your ears straining for the sound of snapping twigs or the wet, dragging footsteps of the dead. behind you, you heard the rough canvas of his duffel bag rustling, the thud of his boots against the dirt, and the frantic, shallow rhythm of his breathing. he was working too fast, his usual meticulous tracking discipline shot to hell by the sheer proximity of your body.
"alright," he grunted after a few minutes, the leather of his vest creaking as he stepped up behind you. "move out. stay on my heel."
he bypassed the main road entirely, cutting through a rusted section of chain-link fence behind the small-town pharmacy. the glass on the back door was intact but caked in decades of grime, looking dark and ominous. daryl didn't hesitate. he jammed the blade of his hunting knife into the old lock mechanism, giving it a fierce, sharp twist until the ancient brass gave way with a loud, echoing crack that made you both freeze.
he waited, counting the seconds in the dead silence, before pushing the door open and slipping inside.
the air inside the pharmacy was cool, smelling of damp paper, old dust, and stale plastic. it was a small independent clinic, the shelves half-ransacked but mostly intact. daryl moved with his usual lethal efficiency, clearing the two short aisles with his knife drawn, his boots making no sound on the linoleum. once he satisfied himself that the place was empty, he sheathed his knife and ripped the list from his pocket, his eyes scanning the crumpled paper with a fierce, almost frantic focus—anything to keep from looking at you.
"start on that side," he grunted, nodding toward the shelves labeled ailments & pain relief. "look for the amoxicillin. anything in a sealed bottle."
you nodded, stepping into the narrow aisle. the space was incredibly tight. when daryl moved past you to check the back counter, his broad shoulder brushed against yours, a sharp, deliberate friction that sent a spike of heat straight down your spine. you both froze for a fraction of a second, the air between you turning thick and heavy, before he ripped himself away, his boots scuffing hard against the floor.
you tried to focus on the bottles, your fingers trembling slightly as you moved them aside, but your eyes kept tracking him. he was tossing bottles into his duffel bag with too much force, his breathing shallow and loud in the quiet store.
then, you saw him stop dead in front of a small, rotating display right next to the pharmacy register.
through the dusty plastic dividers, the bold lettering of the condom boxes practically screamed in the dim light. daryl stared at them. his entire back went dead silent, his broad shoulders locking up. from behind, you watched the tips of his ears turn a deep, furious crimson.
he stood there for five agonizing seconds, his head bowed, fighting a war with himself. with a sudden, sharp jerk, he reached out, his thick, grease-stained fingers wrapping around a couple of boxes. he didn't look at the labels, didn't check the sizes—he just snatched them off the hooks and shoved them deep into the bottom of his duffel bag, throwing a handful of gauze rolls over them to bury them out of sight.
he let out a sharp, shallow breath, his jaw working as he spun around, finally catching you watching him. his dark eyes flared with a wild, cornered heat, his chest heaving under his vest.
"got what we need," he snapped, his voice dropping into a harsh, warning whisper that cut through the aisle. "let's go. now."
the short ride from the pharmacy to the abandoned house was a blur of raw nerves. by the time you reached the house, the woods had darkened into late evening gold.
daryl was a total mess on the bike. he took the turns too hard, his boots skimming the dirt as he navigated the final stretch of the old trail. his mind was spinning. the memory of what he had done in that dark hallway just twenty-four hours prior—the rough way he had gripped himself, the noises he’d made while panting into the dust—was flashing behind his eyelids in agonizing detail. his skin felt like it was on fire under his leather vest.
more than that, a deep, clawing anxiety was eating at his stomach. what if you hated the house? what if you thought he was crazy for dragging you out here? he was a tracker, a redneck drift-away who slept on dirt and lived off grease; he didn't know anything about romance or what a woman like you wanted. the thought that he might look foolish, or worse, that his clumsy attempt at giving you something nice would make you pull away, had his heart hammering against his ribs.
when the motorcycle finally idled down in the overgrown driveway of the secluded craftsman home, daryl killed the ignition and sat dead still. his hands were shaking so badly he had to keep them balled into fists against the handlebars.
"it's... it's up here," he muttered, his voice a low, strained rasp. he got off the bike, grabbing the duffel bag, keeping his eyes locked on the porch steps, his broad back rigid as he led the way inside.
the front door creaked open, and the preserved silence of the house swallowed you both. the air smelled of decay mixed with old cedar, candle smoke, and a faint hint of mildew. daryl walked down the narrow corridor, his eyes deliberately avoiding the dark hallway where he’d lost his mind the day before, though his neck flushed a deep, telltale red as he passed it. he pushed open the bedroom door and stepped aside, his breath catching in his throat as he waited for your reaction.
you stepped into the room, and the breath left your lungs. the setting sun filtered softly through the delicate, dusty lace curtains draped over the antler mount on the wall. dust motes danced in the shafts of light, disturbed by your movement. the deep mahogany of the bed and dresser set looked rich and dark in the dim light, the faded lace doilies and clusters of burnt candles giving the space a holy, untouched atmosphere. a few faded family photos sat on the mantle, turned face down. it was beautiful. it was safe.
you let out a soft, breathless sound of absolute wonder, walking over to the bed, your hand reaching out to trace the smooth, dark wood of the footboard before you sat down on the edge of the mattress. "it’s... it’s perfect. you found this for me?"
hearing the genuine sweetness in your voice, the sheer relief that washed over daryl was so physical his shoulders dropped. he let out a long, shuddering breath, his head shaking slightly as he tried to process that he hadn’t screwed it up, setting the duffel bag down with a thud.
"yeah," he muttered, his voice thick and rough. "thought... thought you'd like it."
to cover the overwhelming wave of vulnerability crashing over him, daryl immediately reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. his hands were still trembling slightly as he struck his plastic lighter, the small flame illuminating the sharp, nervous angles of his face. he took a deep, dragging pull, the blue smoke curling around his messy fringe as he leaned his hip against the heavy mahogany dresser.
before dropping the lighter, he kept the flame sparked. with a tense energy, he moved across the room, using that exact same lighter to bring the room to life. one by one, he touched the flame to the clusters of candles gathered on the dresser, watching the small wicks catch and cast a warm glow, candle wax dripping softly onto the old wood. then he stepped over to the nightstand, leaning down to light the remaining candles there. the small, golden flames flickered into existence, bathing the dark wood in warm light and illuminating the soft curve of your throat. he blew out a stream of smoke, his dark eyes locking onto yours through the haze as he finally snapped the lighter shut and set it down.
as you sat on the edge of the mattress, your eyes drifted to the dresser drawers. poking out from the top seam of the dark wood was a sliver of white fabric. curiosity pulling at you, you stood up and walked over, sliding the drawer open. an old perfume smell, trapped in the drawer for years, wafted out as your fingers pulled out a vintage, white lace nightgown. it was delicate, completely sheer, and beautifully preserved.
you looked up at him, a sudden spark of courage cutting through your nerves. "i'm going to wash up," you murmured, holding the lace against your chest. "and put this on."
daryl choked on his smoke, coughing as his eyes locked onto the fabric in your hands, his face turning an instant, burning crimson again. he couldn't even form a coherent word, merely nodding as he shoved his hands deep into his pockets.
he cleared his throat, looking away. "i’m gon’ clear the rest of the house."
in the small, adjoining bathroom, you used a clean rag and a basin of water to wash the grime of the road from your skin. you could tell daryl had already done the exact same thing before he brought you here. slipping the nightgown over your head, the sheer material fell softly against your skin, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.
the room went humid with tension. you stood in front of the large mirror attached to the mahogany dresser, the candles daryl had just lit casting a warm, golden glow across your skin and illuminating your reflection. the sheer fabric showed every curve of your body, the tight, dark peaks of your nipples clearly visible beneath the lace.
a floorboard creaked behind you. daryl had approached silently, but the sight of you in the mirror made him stop dead. his chest rose and fell in deep, uneven cycles.
he didn't have his cigarette in his mouth anymore; he had set it smoldering on a porcelain dish to keep his face completely free for you. slowly, he closed the distance until he was towering right behind you, his heat enveloping your bare shoulders. he looked at your reflection, his dark eyes wide and consumed. he reached up, his rough hands coming down to rest on your waist. his thumbs dragged against your hip bones, his fingers trembling under the weight of his own conscience. his skin still smelled faintly of gasoline and grease, even after washing.
"ain't right..." he trailed off, his voice dropping into a register so low and gravelly it vibrated straight through your skin. he stared at your reflection, his jaw tight. "wantin ya. shouldn't be thinkin' 'bout you like this."
you turned your head slightly, looking back at him through the glass, a sudden, fierce certainty anchoring your voice. "why? i know what i want."
daryl let out a sharp, ragged hitch of a breath. his large hands instantly gripped tighter on your hips, pulling your lower body back against his denim-clad thighs with possessive suddenness.
"and what i want is you," you added softly, your eyes locked onto his in the mirror.
his grip remained solid, anchoring you to his chest, but the finality of your words seemed to throw him completely off-balance. his breathing was shallow and hot against your neck as he leaned down, his forehead dropping against your bare shoulder blade for a split second.
his jaw flexed, his eyes darting away before he rasped out, "gon’ be clumsy."
his bare lips finally found your skin, beginning to pepper slow, sharp kisses along your jawline.
"it’s okay," you whimpered back, your eyes closing as his lips pressed into your neck.
hearing your shaky, nervous confirmation seemed to snap the last thread of his restraint. daryl let out a low, defeated growl, reaching for his clothes with a frustrated, impatient urgency. first, he yanked his leather vest down with a rough jerk, shrugging it off his shoulders and tossing it to the floorboards. next, he grabbed the hem of his sleeveless shirt, pulling it over his head in one swift, sharp motion, his messy fringe catching briefly on the collar before falling wildly into his eyes. the shifting candlelight caught the pale, heavily scarred skin of his back and the corded muscle of his torso. he was completely shirtless, his chest heaving, but he still had his heavy denim pants and boots on.
he turned you around, his grip moving from your hips to your waist, and effortlessly lifted you onto the high mattress. the old wood groaned and the bedframe tapped softly against the wall under his weight as he climbed up after you, his movements driven by a frantic desperation to touch you everywhere at once.
shifting his weight, daryl pressed his clothed knee right up against your core, the rugged denim of his jeans creating a blunt, grounding pressure against your panties through the sheer fabric of the nightgown. the solid weight of his knee anchored you to the mattress, and he immediately leaned down, burying his face in the crook of your neck. his mouth was wet and completely uncoordinated as he began to leave frantic kisses along your collarbone and up to your jawline, his rough chin scratching your soft skin. at the same time, his thick, grease-stained hands came up to your chest. his thumbs began to lightly circle your nipples over the thin white lace of the nightgown, the friction making the peaks harden instantly beneath his palms.
the pressure of his denim-clad knee against your core was overwhelming. instinctively, your hips tilted upward, and you began grinding against his leg, seeking relief from the agonizing ache building between your thighs.
the moment your body began grinding against his leg, it absolutely killed him. daryl let out a sharp, broken groan, his whole body locked, hips jerking involuntarily. he stopped dead, burying his face hard in your shoulder as he fiercely fought his own anatomy. he was breathing like he’d been hunted, his chest heaving against yours.
he paused, he went rigid for a second. a sudden look of severe self-consciousness flashed across his face, his eyes searching yours with a raw, panicked vulnerability. he misread your breathlessness, assuming he had overstepped or hurt you.
"i... i'm sorry," he choked out, his voice a ruined scrape into your skin as he started to pull back. "pushed too hard. i didn't mean to—"
"daryl, no," you interrupted, reaching up to clasp his face, pulling him back down. "you didn't. don't stop."
relief washed over his features, though his jaw remained tight. "damn it," he gasped, his forehead resting against yours for a brief second. "hold up... just hold up. i ain't..."
knowing he was right on the brink and wanting to make it good for you first, daryl forced himself to shift down. he lowered himself down the mattress, his hands sliding down your thighs to gently pull the sheer lace nightgown up, bunching the white fabric around your waist. he leaned down, pressing a string of kisses down the center of your tummy, his breathing hot and shallow against your skin.
he moved lower until his lips reached the damp cotton of your panties. resting his jaw heavily against your inner thigh, he paused, his dark eyes looking up at you through his messy fringe, wide and completely intense in the candlelight.
"gotta tell me if it's right," he rasped, his voice dropping into a low, rough growl that shook with raw nerves. "if it hurts. any of it. don't go hidin' it from me."
you nodded breathlessly, your fingers clutching the old quilt beneath you.
daryl didn't waste another second. he hooked his thick fingers into the elastic of your panties, sliding them down your legs and tossing them onto the floorboards before parting your knees wide. he slid down between your thighs, his denim pants frictioning against your skin while his boots remained securely on, dangling off the foot of the bed. he buried his face directly between your legs.
"you’re soppin’," he growled, the unfiltered observation slipping out of him before he ate you out with a fierce hunger. his tongue lapped at you with a messy desperation before finding a steady, relentless rhythm against your sweet spot. his hands dug hard into your hips, anchoring your lower body to his mouth as he worked.
he didn't rush it.
"good?" he choked out, the word muffled and breathless against your clit.
"so good," you cried out, your hands shooting directly into his messy hair, holding him close.
he stayed down there for minutes on end, entirely focused on the way your body responded to him. he listened to the gradual shift in your breathing, waiting out the slow, steady build of heat and moisture as your body climbed. he tracked every tiny twitch of your thighs, keeping a constant, wet pressure on your core until the tension in your hips became completely coiled. he didn't stop until your breath caught in a high, sobbing gasp and your body began to shake, your core throwing off a wave of intense heat as you finally broke, finishing completely against his mouth.
daryl drank in your high, shattering release, his jaw slick with you as he finally slid back up your body. his chest was heaving, his dark eyes completely pitch-black as he hovered over your trembling form.
his hands were shaking so badly he could barely control them. he leaned over the edge of the high mattress, practically diving into the canvas duffel bag resting on the floor. his large hands frantically fumbled through the supply of medical gear, knocking pill bottles and gauze rolls aside as he desperately rummaged through the dark bottom of the bag to find the boxes of condoms he had snatched from the pharmacy. he pulled one out, squinting hard at the tiny lettering on the box in the dim, flickering candlelight, his brow furrowing with a severe, almost comical intensity as he tried to figure out what the hell it said.
watching his fiercely focused expression over something so domestic, a soft, involuntary giggle bubbled up from your chest, breaking the heavy tension in the room.
daryl’s head snapped up. a deep flush bloomed across his cheeks and rushed down his neck. a rare, genuinely light smile tugged at the corner of his lips, softening the hard, gritty lines of his face in a way you'd almost never seen.
"quit," he muttered, his voice a quiet, embarrassed huff as he shook his head and looked your way, tossing the box aside into the blanket to grab a loose wrapper instead.
still kneeling over you with his boots dangling off the mattress, he reached down to his waist. he didn't take his jeans off entirely—he just popped the metal button, his belt buckle catching briefly on the quilt with a dull metallic clink as he violently jerked the heavy denim and his underwear down past his hips, keeping them bunched around his upper thighs so he wouldn't have to deal with kicking his heavy boots off. he tore open the foil wrapper with his teeth, his jaw tight and a lingering, fond warmth creeping up his neck as he fumbled to unroll the protection over his length, his breath hitching in a harsh rattle of pure concentration.
when he settled back between your legs, the weight of his heat pressing against your core, he paused one last time.
"get your legs 'round me," he commanded softly, the gravel in his voice dropping into a deep, possessive register. "hold on."
you instinctively brought your knees up, wrapping your thighs tightly around his thick waist. he let out a broken, tortured sound at the contact, his forehead dropping against your neck as he slowly, deliberately pushed himself inside you.
as he drove in deep, his large, heavy palm flattened right back over your lower tummy. he pushed down firmly against your stomach, anchoring your hips to the high mattress with a dominant pressure that forced you to feel the absolute fullness of him inside you. the hard, grounding weight of his hand against your abdomen sent an electric spike of pleasure straight to your core, making you gasp loudly against his shoulder.
the sudden, stretching fullness made your body stiffen under his weight. he forced himself into slower strokes for a minute, jaw tight with concentration, his frame tightened like iron, his hand still pressing firmly against your tummy. "hurt ya?" he choked out.
"no, no," you breathed, your hips making a small, upward adjustment against his palm to welcome him deeper. "don't stop. just stay still for a second."
he listened, suppressing every primal instinct inside him just to give your body time to adjust. only when you began to move against him in a slow, inviting rhythm, did he allow his hips to shift, beginning a deep, agonizingly deliberate pace, his palm keeping a steady pressure on your stomach with every stroke.
the friction built to a shattering crescendo. "fuck... please," you sobbed out, your head rolling back against the pillow as the wave of your release began to crest.
suddenly, a sharp, distinct *creak* echoed from the floorboards directly down the narrow corridor outside the bedroom. it wasn't an aimless scrape. it was a heavy shifting of weight inside the house.
daryl froze instantly, buried deep inside you. the weight of his body turned to solid stone, his chest completely still as he held his breath.
his head snapped toward the open bedroom door. before a panicked gasp could escape your wet lips, his large, rough palm collapsed firmly over your mouth, sealing it completely.
his other arm wrapped like a steel band around your waist, pinning your lower body flush against his hard hips, anchoring you so deeply beneath him that you couldn't move an inch.
"shut up," he breathed against the crown of your head.
the dynamic was instant, unexpected, and entirely intoxicating. the sheer force of his hand pressing you flat into the mattress while he remained buried inside you sent an electric shock straight to your system. blind panic and scorching arousal fused together.
desperate for an anchor, your hand flew upward, your fingers raking blindly against the dark mahogany headboard. your hand vanished against the wood, your fingers clamping tightly around a heavy wooden rosary that had been wrapped around one of the bedposts. you pulled on it with a wild, trembling force.
the old twine snapped.
the silence shattered as dozens of wooden beads spilled free, bouncing and rattling across the hardwood floorboards like a handful of gravel.
daryl’s eyes flared with a wild, dangerous heat. his grip on your mouth tightened, his jaw stone-rigid as he stared out into the pitch-black hallway, his ears straining so hard for any reaction to the noise that the veins on his neck were bulging. he held his lower body completely still inside yours, ensuring the old mattress springs didn't make a single peep.
beneath his heavy palm, your breath hitched sharply. the absolute vulnerability of the moment made your pulse race. your lips parted slightly against the calloused meat of his hand, tasting the faint salt of his skin, your hips hitching up involuntarily against his frozen length in a desperate, silent plea for him to move faster.
he felt the tight, twitching squeeze of your body around him. his eyes cracked down to yours, catching the wide, eager dark of your pupils. a sudden heat flared in his own chest. he didn't pull out; instead, he subtly leaned his hips harder into yours, a silent warning to stay still that only made the ache between your legs flare hotter.
another long silence stretched through the house.
a small, frantic scratching sound echoed from the kitchen down the hall, followed by the tiny thud of a raccoon dropping from a broken window pane.
a long, slow, chest-heaving breath finally escaped his lungs. the rigid, lethal tension in his shoulders eased. slowly, tentatively, his fingers slid away from your mouth. his rough thumb lingered on your lower lip, dragging across the wetness left by your breath, pressing down just hard enough to make you whimper in the quiet room.
his jaw flexed as he looked down at you, the dark heat in his eyes tightening. "told ya to stay quiet."
"no," you gasped out, your voice trembling as you arched up against his leg. "i need it. daryl, please."
his jaw flexed hard. “damn right,” he growled, the praise low, rough, and thick with his heavy accent.
he buried his face in the crook of your neck, his movements becoming rough, hurried, and fueled by a desperation he could no longer contain. he drove into you with a fierce, frantic urgency, his heavy denim bunched around his thighs as he anchored himself to you, his large hand pressing down hard against your tummy to drive himself as deep as possible. he hit your sweet spot again and again, his strokes heavy and relentless until you sobbed aloud against his neck, your body scrambling as the release finally broke over you. seeing the complete surrender in your eyes, he let out a broken, ruined sound as he came, the intense release racking his shoulders, his hips stuttering forward against yours as he spilled himself completely into the protection, holding you so tight against his chest you could barely draw a breath.
the silence of the room returned slowly, filled only by the frantic, synchronized rhythm of your heavy breathing and the quiet ticking of the candles on the nightstand. he didn't roll away immediately. he lay buried in your shoulder, his heart thumping hard against your ribs, his large hands still securely locked around your waist.
after a long, quiet moment, he carefully withdrew and disposed of the protection, finally working his clothes back up over his hips and buttoning them. before settling back down, he stood up on trembling legs, walking quietly to the window to peer through a slit in the lace curtains, scanning the overgrown yard one more time to ensure your safety.
satisfied, he returned to the bed and slid onto his side on the mattress, keeping you pulled securely against his chest. he reached down, pulling the dusty, faded quilt up over both of your flushed bodies, shielding you from the cooling air of the room, and reached out to adjust the pillow beneath your head.
his fingers gently tucked a stray lock of hair behind your ear. his dark eyes, soft now, finally clear of the anxiety that had tortured him all day, searched yours in the fading candlelight. he shifted closer, burying his face in the crook of your neck, his rough, unshaven chin scraping lightly against your skin as he let his whole weight settle into your side. his thumb moved slow against your hip beneath the blanket while the old mattress creaked softly beneath the both of you. outside, the world still groaned and clawed at the fences, but in that small room, with his heartbeat steady against your chest, daryl was at peace.
Summary: losing the prison had been a punch in the tit. No, wait. Losing the farm was a punch in the tit. Losing the prison was a roundhouse kick to both boobs and the crotch, for good measure. You’d gotten comfortable there; privacy was no longer a myth there, and you fought tooth and nail for it — only to end up back on the road again, starving, filthy, exhausted, and sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder with the whole group like a traumatised family. Without privacy, there’s no way to unwind, and since you and Daryl aren’t great with words, all that frustration starts leaking out sideways. When Rick finally steps in to tell you both to sort your shit out for the group’s sake, “reckless and impulsive” barely covers it. So, you and Daryl sort it, just like God intended.
Warnings: Reader is borderline cringe but some parts are funny (to be cringe is to be free). Crack, usual TWD gore and violence, reader is a badass/dumbass (same thing) reader and Glenn are like a sibling duo lol, lil sprinkle of angst (tension between reader and Daryl in their relationship), umm what else oh yeah SMUT SMUT SMUT AND MORE SMUT!!! Smut flashback, touch of bondage, loads of egding, reader has a wet dream hehehe, they fuckin' in the dirt like God intended, they be animals, it’s sex guys you can guess the rest of the warnings cuz i already feel blasphemous for writing this ✌️
Era: this isn't really canon, but it's after the prison falls and they were never seperated so Terminus doesn't happen 😚
Author's note: This is like 6 oneshots wrapped up into one fic lol (it's long). Well, it's more like crack and smut rolled up in a ball and disguised as a fic. Idk if this is my best smut cuz I haven't written smut in sooo long, but I'm getting back into the rhythm of things 🫶. It's mostly proofread 🤷♀️ lemme know what y'all think - enjoy 🙈
The house looked promising—quiet, empty, and only slightly less moldier than the last place. It sat back in the trees with its porch listing to one side and its windows filmed over with grime, the whole thing giving off the kind of eerie, abandoned charm that made Rick say, “We clear it quick,” and everyone else say nothing because nobody had the calories left to say anything.
Walking through the front door, you were running on fumes and bad attitude. The whole group was.
Your tongue felt foreign with thirst. Your legs had crossed the line from sore to numb sometime that morning.Your stomach had given up on growling hours ago and now just sat in your middle like a stone. But none of that—not the thirst, not the dirt in your bra, not the raw blister at your heel—was the thing chewing through your nerves. That award goes to Daryl.
Well, it wasn’t Daryl himself. It was that Daryl had not touched you properly in weeks, and apparently your brain had decided to respond to that by turning every harmless interaction into a full-scale hormonal emergency. Every time he leaned too close, every time his hand brushed your back in passing, every time his voice dropped into that low gravelly register right near your ear, your body went holy shit is this finally happening? and then got violently disappointed when the answer was no.
You’d had no privacy since the prison fell. None. No walls. No curtains. No stolen ten minutes. Not even a quick makeout sesh. You hadn’t realised until it was gone just how much of your relationship functioned through touching. Without it, the two of you were like a machine missing one small but extremely important bolt—still technically working, but rattling so hard it was a miracle nobody had kicked you both into a ditch yet.
“Take the back room first,” Daryl muttered, peering down the hall with his crossbow half raised.
You cut him a look. “That was literally where I was headed.”
He grunted. “Just sayin’.”
“You’re always just sayin’.”
“Yeah, well. Somebody’s gotta.”
Tara, slipping past with Glenn in tow, murmured, “Oooh, they’ve started early today.”
“Closet,” Daryl said, pointing with his chin.
“Yes, wow, thank you, I had completely forgotten closets could contain things.”
He glanced at you, tired eyes narrowing just enough to say you are being ridiculous. “Really? Actin’ like a kid.”
You smiled sweetly. “I’m gonna bite you.”
From the front room, Rick sighed. “Can y’all maybe do that after we know there ain’t dead people in here.”
“That ain’t what she meant,” Daryl muttered automatically.
You whipped your head toward him. “How do you know what I meant?”
That actually got a laugh out of Glenn, who immediately looked guilty for doing so. Daryl’s ears went a little pink. “I just—”
“You just what?”
He stared at you for one beat too long, and there it was again: that awful little pause where both your brains remembered your bodies existed.
You remembered the exact shape of him over you, his hand spread on your stomach, the heat of his mouth at your throat, and for half a second, the dim hallway and the walkers and the road all dropped away under the sheer idiocy of how much you missed climbing him like a tree.
Then a floorboard creaked, and the depressing sexless reality came back with all the tenderness of a slap. Daryl cleared his throat and looked away first. “Just clear the damn room.”
“Excellent save,” you said.
“Shut up.”
You pushed open the back bedroom door with your boot and swept inside. Empty, unless one counted a collapsed dresser and what looked like the fossilised remains of a cat as something. You moved toward the wardrobe, and Daryl moved with you.
“Are you following me,” you asked, not even bothering to turn.
“No.”
“You are literally stepping where I step.”
“That’s called watchin’ your back.”
“That’s called breathing on my neck.”
“Wouldn’t have to if you’d quit goin’ towards every dangerous lookin’ thing like a moth to a flame.”
You spun around, and because the room was small and the apocalypse hated you, he was right there.
Not touching. That would’ve been easier.
Just there—close enough to feel his heat, close enough that if either of you leaned an inch you’d be having a very different type of exchange, close enough that the stale air in the room had turned thick and weird around the two of you.
You looked at his mouth.
He looked at yours.
From the hall, Michonne said, with devastating calm, “If I open this door and y’all are licking each other, I’m leaving.”
Both of you jumped apart like you’d been caught stealing from church.“We ain’t—” Daryl started.
“You are so embarrassing,” you hissed at him, which would’ve landed better if you weren’t blushing so hard your face felt hot. “Me?” he shot back, offended. “You the one starin’.”
“Was not.”
“Was too.”
“You were in my personal space!”
“You got a personal space now?”
Tara’s head appeared around the doorframe for all of one second. She took one look at the two of you standing six feet apart like scandalised Victorian lovers, and lit up. “Oh, this is bad,” she said, delighted. “This is way worse than I thought.”
“Get out,” you and Daryl said together.
She vanished, snicking. For one long second, the room held.
Then Daryl scrubbed a hand over his face and muttered, “Need this house cleared before I give up n’ sleep outside.”
You let out a laugh before you could stop it, tired and real and dragged out of you against your will.
His mouth twitched.
That was the worst part, honestly. Not the hunger. Not the road. Not even the fact that your body had apparently decided to become a traitor every time he came within grabbing distance.
It was that you were both still perfectly fine—solid, yours, his—and yet somehow so badly deprived of privacy that you’d started acting like a pair of idiots in front of witnesses. And the whole group absolutely knew it.
By the time the cans were scraped clean and tipped upside down by the fire to cool, the house had settled into that uneasy version of night people on the road called rest. Rick had posted the watch. Abraham and Tara had the first shifts, then Michonne. The rest of you had been granted the luxury of horizontal misery on the warped wood floor of somebody else’s living room, every blanket and old cushion dragged into a lumpy little nest around the cold fireplace.
No one talked much once the food was gone. A few murmured goodnights drifted through the room, then the soft rustle of people turning over, finding hips and shoulders and corners of flooring they could tolerate. The whole place smelled like damp coats and candle soot. Somewhere outside, a night bird made a sound like a hinge.
Daryl dropped beside you with a grunt, back against the wall for a second before he slid down to the floorboards. You followed, settling into the blanket with the boneless heaviness of someone who had been upright for too many hours. For a while, neither of you did anything except breathe and pretend that was enough.
Then his hand found the edge of your blanket and tugged once.
It was such a small thing that nobody watching would’ve thought anything of it, just the absentminded shift of someone making room. But you knew him. You knew that little, silent come here better than your own name. You moved without looking at him, easing into the space he’d made, laying your head carefully against his chest and shoulder while he bent his arm around you like it had been waiting there all day to be useful.
The sound he made was barely there, more breath than noise, but you felt it in your hair. “Ya still grumpy at me?” he murmured.
“That makes me sound like a toddler. I wasn’t grumpy per se,” you whispered back, listening to his heartbeat under your ear. “…maybe a little vexed..”
He snorted softly. “We’ll go with that then.”
The room around you was full of sleeping people, boots lined up by the door, weapons within easy reach, everyone arranged in that strange, intimate geometry of survival, but in the little pocket beneath his arm, it almost felt private. Not fully of course. Still, enough to loosen something.
For a while, you just talked.
Not about anything useful, which was probably why it felt so nice. The house creaked around you, the others settling into uneasy sleep across the floorboards, and the two of you stayed tucked in your little corner with his shoulder under your cheek and his arm loose around your waist, pretending the warmth of him wasn’t the only soft thing you’d had all day.
You talked about the creek you’d passed that afternoon and whether it had been worth the detour. You argued, in whispers, over whether his poncho was a horse blanket he cut a hole in or something badass to wear to keep the heat in, and weaponised the fact that you constantly stole it. You told him that if civilisation ever crawled back into existence, you were never sleeping on another floor again unless there was a paralysing amount of wine involved.
Daryl gave a low snort, barely more than breath against your hair, the sound warm where it rumbled under your cheek. “You gettin’ fancy on me now?”
“I have always been fancy,” you whispered, lifting your head just enough to glare at him through the dark. The room was mostly shadow, the dying fire throwing an orange tremble up the stairwell, but you could still make out the stubborn line of his mouth and the glint of one eye watching you. “I’ve simply been humbled by circumstance.”
“You ate cold pasta with your fingers yesterday.”
“Gracefully.”
“Licked the can.”
“I was conserving resources.”
His mouth twitched, small and traitorous, and you felt absurdly victorious for pulling it out of him. His hand, the one that had been moving in slow, absent circles against your arm like he didn’t even know he was doing it, slid higher to tuck a loose piece of hair behind your ear. The touch was so ordinary it hurt worse than something dramatic would have. There was no urgency in it, no survival reason, no wound to check, no danger to steady you through. Just him touching you because he wanted to, because your hair was in your face and his fingers knew where to go.
For a few breaths, the two of you lay there listening to the house complain around you: the old boards sighing under sleeping bodies, Glenn shifting somewhere near the fireplace, someone coughing once and going quiet again. Daryl’s thumb lingered near your temple, then drifted down the side of your face as if he’d forgotten he was allowed to stop.
“’Member back at the quarry,” he murmured after a while, voice lower now, roughened by exhaustion and the kind of memory that snuck up soft, “when you tried to make coffee in that little dented pot Dale had?”
You blinked, caught off guard by the gentleness in it. “Tried? I made coffee.”
“Ya made dirt water.”
“You drank two cups.”
His eyes flicked away, but not fast enough to hide the soft little crease at the corner of them. “Didn’t wanna hurt your feelings,” he said, almost tentatively, like the admission embarrassed him more than any confession had a right to. Then, quieter, “Probably coulda served me up grass and I woulda ate it.”
You pushed up onto one elbow, chin hovering near his chest, delight spreading through you despite the chill and the hard floor and the hunger that never really left. “Dixon,” you whispered, scandalised, “were you being nice to me?”
His gaze cut hard toward the ceiling. That was answer enough.
“Oh, my God.” Your grin widened until your cheeks hurt - you were so gonna tease him. “You had a crush on me,” you singsonged.
“Shut up.”
“You did.” You poked him in the side through his shirt, delighted when he jerked under you and caught your wrist, not to stop you so much as to pretend he had control over the situation. “You drank my terrible coffee because you were sweet on me.”
“Wasn’t terrible.”
“You just said dirt water.”
He stared at the dark like it might save him. “Flavoured dirt water.”
You had to bite down on your smile so you wouldn’t laugh loud enough to wake half the room. He was still looking away, jaw working, but there was a quiet warmth in his face now, something almost boyish under the grime and the hollows tiredness had carved beneath his eyes. For a second, you could see him back then so clearly it felt like the room around you changed shape: younger, sharper, all shoulders and suspicion, standing at the edge of the quarry camp like he’d been invited to a party by mistake and planned to leave before anyone noticed.
“I remember that,” you whispered, softer now. “You wouldn’t sit with me.”
He frowned faintly. “Sat near ya.”
“You sat on a log ten feet away,” you said, laughing under your breath. “For a while I thought I stank or something.”
His ears, even in the dark, seemed to go a shade warmer. “Didn’t know what to do with ya.”
The joke softened in your mouth before it could become another tease. You settled back against him, cheek to his chest, listening to the steady thump beneath his ribs. “What do you mean?”
He shrugged, but it didn’t work with you lying half on top of him. His shoulder shifted under you, awkward and too honest, and his hand found the edge of your sleeve again like he needed something to do. “I mean…” He cleared his throat, eyes still on the ceiling. “Was terrified of ya.”
You lifted your head. “Of me?”
“Talkin’ to ya,” he muttered. “Felt like I was gonna throw up. Was hopeless.”
A laugh slipped out of you, small and helpless, because the idea of Daryl Dixon—knife on his belt, crossbow on his shoulder, temper always two inches from the surface—feeling physically ill because you smiled at him was too sweet and too ridiculous to survive silently. “No way.”
“Was awful,” he insisted, and the way he said it made your heart fold in on itself. His thumb moved over your sleeve, slow again, grounding himself in the fabric. “You’d come over with that damn coffee, lookin’ like… I dunno. Like I made you up in my head.”
Your smile faded into something softer.
He swallowed, still not quite looking at you. “You’d be talkin’ like ya knew me already. Actin’ like ya gave a damn. Ask me stuff. Didn’t look at me like everybody else did.” His mouth pulled to one side, almost amused now, though there was a tender ache under it. “And you were still the meanest person I ever met. Didn’t take shit from nobody. Couldn’t figure out why the hell you’d give me the time’a day.”
Your chest tightened until it was hard to breathe around it.
The quarry rose up in your mind, bright and dusty and impossible: sun burning over tent canvas, smoke from the fire catching in your throat, Dale’s RV gleaming like an old white beetle in the distance, Andrea laughing at something, Shane shouting as always, little Carl running somewhere he probably wasn’t meant to be so he wouldnt have to get his hair cut my his mom. People alive who were no longer alive. Problems that had felt huge then and almost gentle now. You remembered Daryl, too—quieter in a different way, all sharp edges and defensive eyes, watching everyone from a distance like he expected kindness to bear its teeth if he stood too close.
“I liked you too,” you admitted, soft enough that it felt like a secret all over again. “Even then.”
His arm tightened around you.
“Yeah?”
“Are you kidding?” You let out a quiet laugh and tipped your chin up so you could see him properly. “The way you threw squirrels at people like you were saying hi, mouthing off every chance you got, shoulders all tense and flexed, southern accent, shiny muscles, and you rode a bike?” You shook your head gravely. “I had no chance.”
His breath hitched with a silent laugh, and this time he couldn’t hide the blush. Not completely. His face turned away into the dark, but you caught enough of it to make your whole night.
“Makin’ me sound like some rabid animal,” he muttered.
“No,” you said, pressing a quick kiss to the edge of his jaw because you couldn’t help yourself, his skin hot, rough with stubble, familiar enough to ache. “You just got better at letting me pet you.”
He huffed like he was offended, but his hand came up to the back of your head and held you there for half a second longer than necessary. “Go to sleep.”
“Lemme ask you this.” You poked his chest once because he should have known better than to think you could be redirected that easily. “Who do you think fell first?”
“Me.” He answered so quickly that you stilled.
“Really?” you whispered, craning your neck to look at him. “I thought it would be me for sure. I mean, by the time we reached the farm, I was pretty hooked.”
He stayed quiet, eyes fixed somewhere above you. The silence changed. Not heavy exactly. Just full of something older than the two of you were now, something that had been sitting quietly beneath years of blood and loss and road dust, waiting for a night still enough to be named.
You nudged him gently. “Was it before the farm?”
Still quiet. Your smile faded at the edges, not disappearing, just softening into wonder. “Daryl.”
His throat bobbed.
“C’mon,” you whispered. “Tell me.”
For a long second, the whole house seemed to hold its breath with him. Then, so quiet you almost felt it more than heard it, he said, “Pretty much… first time I saw ya.”
Oh. It landed in you like something delicate being placed carefully in your hands, impossibly soft.
You didn’t know what to do with it at first, and for once, your mouth had no smart thing ready, no joke sharp enough to cover the tremble in your chest. You only looked at him in the dark, at the man who had spent half your lives together pretending not to need anything, and realised he had been carrying that first moment all this time like a match cupped from the wind.
“The first time?” you breathed. He shrugged again, smaller now.
“What was I doing?”
“Yellin’ at Shane.” That startled a laugh out of you, quiet and bright.
His mouth curved faintly, relieved by the sound. “He was runnin’ his mouth about somethin’. You told him if he wanted to act like everybody’s daddy, he could start by washin’ the dishes after supper.”
You pressed your forehead to his shoulder, muffling your laugh into his shirt. “That sounds about.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, and his hand smoothed once over your hair, slow and fond. “Never came across anyone like you.”
“That a good thing or a bad thing?.”
“Thought you were badass,” he corrected, quieter. “Mean, smart. Smokin’ hot.”
You lifted your head again, eyes stinging in a way you refused to acknowledge. “Oh yeah?”
“Don’t make me say it again.”
“Oh, I absolutely will at some point.”
“Course you will.”
You smiled at him, but it wobbled at the edges. “All that time?”
He didn’t answer with words. He didn’t need to. His hand slid from your hair to the side of your face, thumb brushing once beneath your eye with a care that felt almost reverent in the dark.
The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was full of everything you’d lost between the quarry and here—the farm, the prison, all those people and places and versions of yourselves that existed now only in memory. But it was also full of what had survived. His arm around you. Your cheek against his chest. The ridiculous fact that after everything, after all that distance and fear and hunger and grief, you could still lie here and tease him about dirt-water coffee until he admitted he’d loved you before he knew how.
You smiled into the dark, then lifted yourself just enough to press your mouth to the corner of his. It was quick, almost routine now, the kind of kiss that didn’t ask for anything but still said plenty. Goodnight. I’m here. Don’t go too far, even if you’re only turning over.
“Night,” you whispered.
“Night.”
You turned carefully in the cramped space, settling with your back against him, his arm finding your waist by habit before either of you had to think about it. Behind you, he went still in that wakeful way of his, not quite ready to surrender to sleep.
For a while, Daryl only listened to the house. The floorboards settling. Glenn’s breathing from somewhere near the fireplace. Rick shifting in his sleep. The woods pressing close outside.
And you, warm under his hand.
That was the part that made his chest feel strange. Not sad, exactly. Not the kind of hurt that had teeth. Just a dull, blue ache at the thought of all the roads between that quarry and this floor, all the people missing from the spaces around you, all the walls you’d had and lost, all the times he’d thought he had nothing worth keeping until you proved him wrong by staying.
Back then, he hadn’t known what to do with wanting you.
Now he knew exactly what to do with it, and still couldn’t, not here, not with the whole group asleep around you and the road waiting to swallow everyone again at morning.
His fingers curled lightly in the fabric at your stomach. You sighed in your sleep, or close enough to it, and shifted back into him by instinct. Lowering his face to your hair, he breathed you in once, and closed his eyes with that old quarry memory still flickering behind them: you holding out a tin cup of terrible coffee, smiling like you already knew he was worth the trouble, even if he didn’t think the same.
He shifted a little then, rolling just enough onto his side to face the room, and his back turned toward you beneath the blanket. The movement left you tucked up behind him, your arm draped over his waist. It was an unspoken rule for him to put himself between you and wherever the door was when bunking down. At first you thought it was just a coincidence he did that, but then you realised, he was putting himself in harm's way in case the unthinkable came through the door. That meant you were in your own little pod in the corner with a Daryl-shaped barrier boxing you in like a hug. Without thinking, you lifted your hand and traced a line down the centre of his back through the thin fabric of his shirt
Your fingertip drifted again, lower this time, drawing nonsense shapes between his shoulders, little idle lines that didn’t mean anything and meant everything. His skin moved under the shirt with each breath. You could feel the hard pull of muscle and the familiar shape of him beneath your hand, and it made longing rise in you so fast and sharp it was almost funny.
He was right there.
That was the worst part.
Right there under your fingers, under your breath if you leaned one inch closer. You could smell him. Feel his warmth. Hear the scrape of his swallow when your nail caught lightly at his spine.
And you missed him.
Missed him like he was gone.
It was absurd. Cruel, even. To have him this close and still feel the distance. To know exactly how he sounded when he laughed against your neck, how heavy his body got after, how his hand spread over your hip in sleep like it belonged there, and have none of that now except these careful scraps. It was like being starving and made to sit with your face over the pot.
Your hand kept moving of its own accord, tracing him slowly, and you let your mind slip back to the prison the way a hand slips under a pillow, searching for the cool side. You thought of the cellblock at dusk, all honeyed light through bars and the familiar clatter of people settling in for the night. You thought of your old curtain, half-drawn and crooked because Daryl always tugged it too hard, the whole place smelling faintly of sun-baked concrete, tobacco and sex. You thought of the cot that had complained under both of you, the scratchy blanket you used to pretend to hate, the little stolen privacy of walls and routine and knowing where you’d wake up.
You thought of Daryl there, stretched out in your cell with one boot still on because he’d sworn he wasn’t staying and then stayed anyway. His hair mussed from your fingers.
Your shirt was somewhere on the floor, and his head was pillowed heavily on your stomach while you drew idle circles over his shoulder, kind of like how you were doing now.He’d be stretched out on his front, one arm thrown across your thighs, the other dangling off the side of the bed, half-dozing after sex with his face turned into your skin like he’d intended to stay there forever. The prison had been loud in the distance—someone shouting in the yard, metal clanging, a laugh from down the cellblock—but your little haven had held - all yours.
You could see it all, so clearly, it hurt.
“Move,” you’d murmured, half-laughing, because he was crushing your legs. His answer had been a grumble into your stomach and a tighter squeeze with the arm over your thighs. “Nah.”
“You’re heavy.”
When he’d said tough shit, you’d just smiled and gone back to drawing useless little lines over his back, tracing the ridge of his spine, the slope of his shoulders, the ribbons of scars dorned across his back. He’d shivered once under your fingers and turned his head just enough to press a lazy kiss to your hip.
“Should get up,” you’d said eventually, though you’d made no move to actually do it.
“Nuh-huh.”
“We’ve been in here forever.”
“Good.”
There had been no urgency in him. No panic. No rationing of touch. Just that lazy, unreasonable confidence that the hour belonged to you because there would be another after it, and another after that, and the world outside the curtain could wait. You had taken it for granted in the way people only realise too late that they were rich.
You remembered looking down at him then—hair a mess, eyes half-shut, skin warm and loose with sleep and satisfaction—and thinking, with a kind of stupid fondness, we’ll always have this.
You blinked in the dark of the abandoned house and found the prison gone, the bars replaced by wallpaper curling off rotten walls, the mattress by splintered floorboards, that easy golden stillness by the raw thin edge of the road. Daryl was still in your arms, but only barely, and all at once you wanted that old afternoon back so violently it made your chest ache. You wanted it back so bad; the sadness of it rose so suddenly your eyes burned. You don’t realise those are the good old days until they’re gone.’ Fuck whoever said that.
The memory hit so hard now it was almost physical, and the ache of it should have kept you awake.
Instead, it softened you.
Your body loosened by degrees, melting back into his warmth, the present blurring at the edges until the hard floor became a mattress, the draft became summer heat, the dark house became concrete walls holding the day outside. Daryl shifted his sleep and made an unconscious jerk that used to startle you awake but was now so natural to you it was a comfort, and in your half-dreaming mind it was the prison again—his hand on your hip, his mouth near your skin, the curtain keeping the world out.
You followed the memory down.
Down into heat, and quiet, and the old impossible luxury of time...
-------------
The heat in the cell sits on your skin like a second blanket.
Summer in the prison always settles heavy, thick and damp and a little stale, like the concrete itself has started to sweat. The little fan somebody rigged up three doors down is useless here. The curtain is half-drawn, but it does nothing except trap the warmth inside with you. Your back is slick against the mattress. His hair is damp. The sheet twisted around one ankle is soaked through where it’s bunched at the foot of the bed.
And Daryl is between your legs like he’s got nowhere else on earth to be.
Your wrists are cuffed to the iron bars of the headboard, the metal warm from the room and rubbing just enough to keep you aware of it every time you pull. Not enough to hurt, but enough to make you feel how trapped you are; how much you are at his mercy.
He’s been there forever. That’s what it feels like. Nearing on an hour, maybe more, spread open beneath him in your tiny prison cell while the world beyond the curtain keeps moving on without you, while his mouth and hands and the slow drag of his body keep proving that time is not a real thing in here.
You’re sweating. He’s sweating. It’s almost ridiculous how gross the two of you are in the trapped summer heat, his shoulders shining, your hair damp at the nape, his chain sticking to the hollow of his throat when he lifts his head to look at you. There’s no elegance left in it. No room for elegance. Just heat and skin and the rust-smell of the handcuffs and the little breathless sounds he keeps dragging out of you like he’s collecting them.
“Daryl,” you whisper, which would sound like a plea even if you didn’t mean it that way.
He looks up from where he’s pressing kisses to the inside of your thigh, eyes darker than the dim cell deserves, one hand still spread hard over your hip to keep you from twisting away from the overload. He’s got that look on his face—the one that means he knows exactly what he’s doing and intends to keep doing it.
“What,” he askssays, low and rough, though you both know he heard the tremble in it.
You tug uselessly at the cuffs. The bed rattles, old iron whining in protest. “You know what.”
His mouth twitches.
That smug little almost-smile should not be legal on him.
“I don’t know nothin’,” he lies, and then he kisses your inner thigh again, slower this time, closer, his stubble scraping the sensitive skin there in a way that makes your stomach jump. “Think you oughta explainn it.”
You let out a helpless little sound that only encourages him. He’s cocky today. Worse than usual. Maybe it’s the cuffs. Maybe it’s because you’re completely on display for him. Maybe it’s because you are completely on display for him and at his diposal. Maybe it’s because there’s finally time, because you don’t have to rush, because for once nobody is pounding on the curtain and nobody is calling either of your nameshis name from the yard and nobody needs either of you for the next hour except the two of you. Whatever it is, he’s leaning into it with quiet, infuriating confidence.
You’re squirming so much that the whole bed keeps squeaking; squeaking; shifting in little jerks across the floor.
His forearm snakes around your stomach,forearm snakes around your stomach pinning you more firmly, rough palm hot and damp. “Hold still.”
“You are a cruel cruel man,’ you gasped.
That earns you a short, wrecked laugh against your skin. “This was your idea.”
“The torturing part was not my idea,” you mutter, then gasp because his fingers drag through the wet mess between your legs like he’s never felt anything he liked better. “The hand cuffs are on me, sure. And I wish i never found them.”
In your defence, you wanted to handcuff him to the bedpost - but he won rock, paper, scissors, you wanted to handcuff him to the bedpost - but he won rock paper scissors so he got his way.
“Guess you shoulda went with paper,” he mumbled against you, sending vibrations through” he muffled against you - causing vibrations against your core. You choke on a laugh that turns into a moan before it’s halfway out. He takes advantage immediately, shifting up over you in one smooth movement until his chest is over yours, one knee forcing your legs wider, his mouth at your throat, then your jaw, then your mouth. Sure, yYou can’t pull him down because your hands are trapped above your head, but you don’t need to. He’s all over you already, the full weight of his attention almost worse than his body.
Your knees are useless. Your wrists are warm and slick inside the cuffs. Every inch of you feels overworked, wrung out, and somehow still starving.
He kisses you the way he does when he knows you’re close again—deep and heavy and a little mean, like he’s trying to swallow the panic before it turns into begging.
It doesn’t work.
“More,” you breathe against his mouth anyway, already embarrassed by how desperate you sound and too far gone to care. “Please—”
His hand slides between you, lining himself up, the blunt heat of him dragging through your slick with a maddening patience that makes you arch hard enough to rattle the headboard. There smile is in his voice when he says, “Ya really want it huh?”
“Yes,” you say immediately, because there is no dignity left in this cell, and both of you buried it a long time ago. “Daryl—”
“Shh.” He kisses the corner of your mouth, then your cheek, then the shell of your ear, his voice dropping rough and low where it goes straight through you. “Gotcha.”
And then he pushes in.
Slow - so slow you could scream.
You feel every inch of him, every unbearable second of it, your body trying to climb away from the sensation and chase it deeper at the same time. You’re so oversensitive it borders on agony, his pace deliberate enough to make the whole thing feel impossible. Your eyes squeeze shut. Your breath catches. You hear yourself making broken little sounds into his shoulder, and his hand leaves your thigh just long enough to grip your jaw and turn your face back to him.
“Look at me.”
You try. Fail. Try again.
His forehead presses to yours as he sinks deeper, deeper, until your whole body goes tight and startled around him. You genuinely don’t know where all of him is supposed to fit. He’s talking now, half under his breath, half into your mouth, and the words are pure Daryl—gravelly, blunt, unfairly filthy in how matter-of-fact he makes them. “That’s it,” he says. “Take it. C’mon. Easy. Yeou’re alright.”
You are not alright. You are dying. You are transcending. You are very possibly seeing God. “Oh my god—”
“I know.”
“No, it’s, I—” Your voice breaks clean in half when he finally bottoms out, hips flush to yours, and stays there for one devastating second like he wants you to understand exactly what he’s doing to you. “Daryl.”
His mouth brushes yours, softer now. “Yeah? That good huh?”
Does he even have to ask? You’re shaking. Fully shaking. Your legs are spread useless and numb beneath him, your wrists straining in the cuffs every time your body jerks on instinct. He reaches up,, hips not faltering for one second, fingers wrapping around the chain between the cuffs, and tugs—not hard, just enough to remind you that there’s nowhere to goo. The sound that falls out of you at that is humiliating.
His eyes darken further.
“You really — fffuck - like seeing m-me tied up huh?” You manage to get out on the third try.
“Not the worst sight,” he murmurs, glancing up at your hands, then back down at your face so he could see the whole array of precious expressions on your face.
He gives it to you in slow, deep strokes that drag all the way out and then back in with enough force to make the bed frame protest against the wall. Every thrust lands in the same devastating place, e. Every one leavinges you more gone than the last. He’s manhandling you without rushing it, one hand on your hip, the other around your back, using his weight and the angle and the cuffs and your own helpless body against you until your brain is nothing but white heat and his name.
“So much,” you hear yourself say, though your hips lift to meet him anyway, chasing more. “S’too much, I can’t—”
“Yeah, you can.”
There’s that quiet cockiness again, that infuriating certainty in his voice like he knows your body better than your mind does. Right now he probably does.
Your orgasm is coming way too fast. You can feel it, huge and bright and terrifying, climbing through you in violent little pulses. It doesn’t even feel good anymore, not in a simple way. It feels like standing too close to the edge of something enormous.
“Baby I’m not gonna last,” you squeaak, and this time there’s real panic in it.
He hears the difference immediately. His mouth finds yours, steadier now, his hand sliding down between your bodies to hold you through the rising shock of it. “Hey,” he murmurs, rough and low and all Daryl. “Just stay with me. C’mon. Breathe.”
Your wrists pull against the cuffs. Your thighs shake around him. His pace doesn’t break, doesn’t hurry, doesn’t falter. He’s all over you, exactly where you need him, too much and perfect and impossible, and your whole body goes tight under the pressure of it.
“C’mon,” he murmurs, mouth hot at your cheek, his voice roughened into something that feels like a hand inside your chest. “Wake up.”
Huh?
You blink at him, breathless, disoriented. The prison cell swims around the edges. The bars are hazy. The curtain stirs in a heat that suddenly doesn’t feel right. “Daryl—”
“Wake up.”
His hand leaves the chain between the cuffs and rises to your face, thumb brushing your cheek. No, not brushing - patting. Coaxing you awake...
You jerk awake all at once to cold dawn and damp earth and the awful, immediate absence of him.
For one second, you just lie there staring into the washed-out grey of morning, your body still trying to catch up with a world that has changed under it. Then the disappointment hits so hard and stupid it actually makes you angry. You roll over with a wounded groan and shove your face into your rucksack, which has all the comfort and softness of a sack of rocks.
Behind you, Daryl huffs a laugh.
“Rise n shineRise and shine,” he mutters, voice thick with sleep and far too amused for someone who has just ruined your entire life. A hand lands between your shoulder blades, then slides up into your hair, fingers working slow through the mess of it in that absent way he gets when he’s trying to wake you without admitting he’s being gentle. “Was startin’ to think ya died.”
You make a muffled, miserable noise into the rucksack that roughly translates to Iaei wishI wish..
“Mm.” His hand keeps moving, untangling a knot, scratching lightly at your scalp. “That bad, huh.”
You push yourself up on your elbows with all the enthusiasm of the freshly exhumed. The group is just beginning to stir around you—blankets rolling, someone coughing, low voices by the dead fire where breakfast is apparently the next tragedy on the schedule. Daryl is crouched beside your bedroll, forearms on his knees, watching you with that half-annoying, half-soft expression he always gets first thing in the morning.
“C’mon,” he says. “Needta find somethin’ to eat.”
You sit up fully—and freeze.
There’s a warm, slick heaviness between your thighs, enough to make your whole body go hot again for a completely different reason.
You suck in a breath.
Daryl’s eyebrows pull together instantly. “What.”
For one sharp, horrifying second you think, oh my god, my period, because of course that would be the final humiliation after waking up from the hottest dream of your miserable little road-life. You glance down, hand already moving under the blanket—
—and then stop.
Oh, no.
It takes exactly one second for your traitorous body to explain itself.
False alarm, no blood; just the aftermath of your own brain deciding to stage an unauthorised prison reunion with your boyfriend while you slept three feet away from the group like a complete degenerate.
Your face goes so hot it feels like you need a doctor to check you're not dying. Daryl leans in a little, suspicion deepening. “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” you say way too fast; his expression says he believes exactly none of that.
You try to stand with dignity, which is impossible when your knees still feel vaguely dream-boneless and your entire lower half has decided now is a great time to remember every second of that fake prison bed. You end up half-crouching instead, clutching the blanket around your lap like a Victorian woman posing for a photo.
Daryl squints at you. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“You’re bein’ weird.”
“I’m always weird.”
“Not like this.”
You glare at him with all the fury of a woman whose subconscious should be hosed down.
“Morning,” Rick says, already halfway by, then slows just enough to take in your expression, your death-grip on the blanket, Daryl crouched there with his hand still in your hair like he forgot to remove it, and the general atmosphere of something is wrong here and I would prefer not to know what. His face does a very subtle, very tired thing. “Y’all good?”
“Uh-huh,” you say, voice embarrassingly high.
Rick’s eyes flick to Daryl.
Daryl meets them with the flattest do not poke the bear look a man can physically produce before coffee.
Rick, to his credit, reads it immediately. “Right,” he says, the word stretching thin with self-preservation. “Well. Don’t take too long.”
He keeps walking, visibly deciding he does not get paid enough for whatever this is.
Daryl waits until Rick’s out of earshot before looking back at you, the amusement still there but softened now with actual concern. His hand slides from your hair to the back of your neck, thumb rubbing once at the base of your skull.
“You gonna tell me what’s goin’ on,” he says quietly, “or am I just s’posed to accept that ya woke up possessed.”
You close your eyes. There are no good answers. There are only bad ones and catastrophic ones. “Please stop being nice to me,” you mutter. “It is not helping.”
That pulls a real chuckle out of him, low and warm and sleepy enough to make your stomach dip. He studies you for a second, the puzzle pieces clearly clicking into place one by one. Not all of them, but enough to know this is not an injury, not an illness, not anything he can fix with a canteen and a pat on the shoulder. His head tilts - and then, very slowly, his eyebrow rises. Oh, absolutely not.
“No,” you say immediately.
He smiles wider, all smug corners and dangerous understanding. “Didn’t say nothin’.”
“You were about to.”
“Ain’t gotta.”
You hide your face in your hands like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. His palm smooths down your hair once more, kinder now that he’s enjoying your suffering. “C’mon,” he murmurs. “Get up. You can be mad at me while we look for breakfast.”
You look up at him through your fingers, mortified beyond words. “I am not mad at you.”
“Nah,” he says, standing and offering you a hand. “Whatever this is its way wayworse.”
He hauls you gently to your feet, steadies you when your blanket tangles around your legs, and for one tiny, awful second your eyes meet and you know—just know—that if he presses even a little, if he asks the right question in that low morning voice, you are going to have to fling yourself into a lake.
Instead, he only squeezes your fingers once before letting go.
“Go wash your face,” he says, maddeningly calm. “Cool down before it gets any redder.”
You stare at him, mouth agape.
He tilts his head. “What.”
And because apparently humiliation has finally curdled into meanness, you mumble, “Nothing. Just thinking maybe I liked dream-you better.”
His grin goes crooked. “Well,” he says, stepping back, “dream-me ain’t gettin’ ya breakfast.”
Then he turns and walks off toward the fire, far too pleased with himself, leaving you standing there in the miserable dawn with damp thighs, a wrecked conscience, and the certain knowledge that this day is going to be absolutely intolerable.
--------
The warehouse sat at the edge of town like a stranded ship, square and windowless except for the high slats near the roofline, its broad metal sides painted with half-peeled community signs that had somehow survived the years better than the people who’d once followed them.
FOOD BANK SATURDAY
FREE WINTER COAT DRIVE
SPRING MARKET — LOCAL VENDORS WELCOME
The banners flapped in shreds against the chain-link fence as the four of you picked your way through waist-high weeds and old flyers melted into the mud.
Glenn squinted up at the building. “Well,” he said, trying for optimistic and landing somewhere around doomed, “it still looks… upright.”
“Mm,” Rick muttered. “That’s one word for it.”
The front entrances had been chained from the outside—heavy loops of rusted iron snared through the handles, reinforced with bent lengths of rebar someone had shoved through the links as a final, panicked stay in there. Daryl crouched, fingers brushing one of the chains, eyes narrowing at the old scrape marks on the metal doors.
“They weren’t keepin’ people out,” he said.
No one answered that, because there wasn’t much to say.
You tipped your head back and looked up at the roof. The warehouse was only one story, but it had been built high and ugly, one of those broad utility buildings with exposed support beams on the outside and enough ledges and seams to turn climbing it into a bad idea rather than an impossible one.
So, naturally, that was what you did.
By the time you hauled yourself onto the roof, your palms were black with grit and the backs of your thighs were already damp with sweat. The metal panels groaned under your weight in a way that made every muscle in your body tighten. “Jesus,” you hissed, flattening instinctively when one of the roof sheets gave a sudden little slide beneath your boot.
“Careful,” Rick said immediately from a few feet behind you, too late to be useful and exactly on time to be annoying.
“I am being careful.”
Daryl came up last and threw you a look that suggested he begged to differ. He dropped to a crouch beside a jagged break in the roofing and peered down through it.
The reaction was instant. He went still. Not tense. Not startled. Just utterly motionless in that way he had when his whole body locked.
You moved before you thought about it, dropping beside him and bracing one hand on the hot metal lip to look through the opening.
The warehouse floor below was carpeted in bodies. At first glance, Glenn made the same mistake anyone would. “Oh,” he said, relief rising too fast. “No, wait, those are just corpses—”
“No,” Daryl cut in quietly.
It wasnt just the number of them, though there were plenty—dozens scattered in collapsed rows between shelving units and overturned pallet stacks, slumped against support poles, tangled near the chained doors. It was the details. The way some of the skulls were caved in, yes, but plenty weren’t. The way some bodies looked shriveled almost to leather, clothes hanging off them in strips, while others still wore the dull slackness of a more ordinary death. One sat upright against a pillar with an empty bottle clenched in its hand and a dark stain dried down the front of its shirt. Two more were collapsed together near the back wall in a knot of limbs and torn fabric that suggested things had gotten ugly long before they got quiet. “Oh,” Glenn said again, much more softly this time.
Rick crouched beside the opening and stared down into the dim, stale dark of the warehouse. “Looks like this place fell at the start.”
“Military,” you murmured, eyes catching the old emergency signage, the barricaded exits, the awful logic of it. “Must’ve shoved people in here and locked it down.”
Daryl’s mouth flattened. “Then left ’em.”
The shelves themselves rose in long warehouse rows, most of them still standing. That was the part that made the whole thing almost unbearable. All that food still sitting there—boxes of jars, canned goods, dry goods in split sacks, packets, bottled water in shrink-wrapped towers near the middle—untouched except where some displays had toppled. It was obscene, really. All that supply left to rot while the people below it rotted first.
You scanned the floor again and felt the old cold dread of the prison halls crawl up your back.“Remember those walkers in the yard at the prison,” Rick said quietly. “Half of ’em were like mummies till they heard us. Then suddenly they were the hungriest things in the world.”
Glenn swallowed. “So we assume they’re all live.”
“We assume the ones that ain’t obviously dead enough can still get up,” Daryl said.
Below, somewhere in the belly of the building, something shifted. It was small. Maybe just settling metal. Maybe not.
You eased back from the opening, sat on your heels, and wiped your dusty palms on your jeans. “Okay,” you said. “So. We need the food. We do not need to become the food. Ideas.”
“Open the doors,” Glenn said first, because of course he did. “Make noise, flush them out, then circle back in and grab what we can.”
You stared at him. “That is a terrible idea.”
His head came up. “It’s not terrible.”
“It is if ‘flushed out’ turns into ‘wandering herd directly back to the group.”
“It wouldn’t come back to the group if we led it away.”
“Oh, amazing, great, so all we need is one neat, cooperative line of walkers who respect traffic signals.”
Glenn frowned. “That’s not what I said.”
Rick rubbed the back of his neck and kept staring down into the hole. “Could try pulling things up. Rope around a few boxes. Fish ’em out from up here.”
You looked at the gap, then at the angle, then at the rows below. “What are you gonna do cowboy, lasso a can of peaches from 20 feet up?”
Rick gave you a deeply unimpressed dad look. “You got a better idea?”
As a matter of fact, you did.
The support beams were eyeing you up like Daryl’s ass in jeans.
The roof had old metal trusses spanning the entire width of the building, thick enough to hold the weight of the panels, running wall to wall over the shelving rows below. Narrow, yes. Rusted in places, yes. Trustworthy, probably not.
You pointed. “We use those.”
Three heads turned to look at you.
You stood a little taller despite the grime and sweat itching down your spine. “They run the whole length. If someone gets down from here, climbs onto the truss, and moves across the beams, they can reach the top shelves without touching the floor. Lower a rope, tie off boxes, haul them up. It’s quieter, it doesn’t open the doors, and it doesn’t send an army of starving corpses wandering after us.”
Glenn looked back through the gap. “That’s… actually not bad.”
Rick nodded slowly. “Would work.”
Duh, of course it would, it’s your plan. Daryl, however, did not nod. His eyes had already moved on to the second part of your idea, because he knew you too well. “No.”
You blinked. “I haven’t even volunteered yet.”
“You was about to.”
“Maybe I was gathering dramatic tension.”
“You ain’t doin’ it. That’s final.”
You put your hands on your hips. “But it was my idea!”
“And it’s a bad one.”
“It was a good one two seconds ago.”
“It was good till you started thinkin’ you were the one goin’ across.”
You laughed once, short and offended. “Who else is gonna do it?”
“I will.”
You looked at him, then very deliberately looked him up and down, from the crossbow to the shoulders to the boots planted on the roof panel that had already shifted under your far lesser weight. “Baby don’t make me say it.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Say what?”
“You are built like a grudging ox.”
Glenn made a strangled sound and looked away. Rick’s mouth twitched dangerously.
Daryl stared at you in flat betrayal. “A what.”
“You heard me. Those beams are old. They’re not gonna love a full-grown angry man stomping around up there.”
“Yer talkin out yer ass.”
“There’s more of you to love, hozney.”
He leaned closer without seeming to move much at all, voice dropping. “You wanna say that one more time.”
Your pulse made an extremely unhelpful leap.
This was the problem. This exact thing. The way every stupid argument kept tipping halfway into something else before either of you could stop it. The way he got close and your brain forgot the topic. The way his attention felt like being gripped around the waist.
So naturally, you doubled down.
“You stomp like Bigfoot,” you said, slower this time, because apparently you wanted to die. “And I’m lighter, better balanced, and less likely to bring the whole roof down.”
“Your balance sucks.”
You gasped. “Fuck you, no, it doesn't!”
“Ya get dizzy when ya turn around too fast.”
“One time I slipped in mud.”
“You slipped in mud, gravel, wet grass, dry grass—”
“That was a streak of bad luck.”
“—and a flat kitchen floor.”
“What’s your point?”
Rick cleared his throat into his fist, shoulders twitching now.
Glenn gave up trying not to laugh. “She’s got a point about the weight thing.”
Daryl turned on him so fast Glenn actually put both hands up. “Don’t encourage her.”
“She always has a point,” you said, already warming to your own brilliance now that there was resistance. “I go across. You three stay up here and work the rope. If I slip, you haul me up. Safety buffer.”
Daryl made a face like the phrase offended him on principle. “Safety buffer.”
“Yes. Very technical.”
“No.”
You threw both hands up. “You always say no to my ideas!”
“Cuz ya act like ya got nine lives.”
“That is not a tactical concern.”
“It is to me.”
That actually got Rick laughing, low and tired and unable to help it.
The roof shifted softly under somebody’s boot and all four of you went still, eyes cutting back to the hole, the rows of bodies below, the heavy silence waiting under the metal. Then Rick exhaled and rubbed a hand down his beard. “It’s the best idea we’ve got.”
Daryl looked at him like he’d been personally stabbed.
“The beams probably won’t hold much extra weight,” Rick went on, practical as ever, which was how he got away with these betrayals. “She’s the lightest. We tie her off. Keep tension on the rope the whole time. Glenn hauls. You anchor. I spot.”
Daryl’s jaw worked hard enough to crack teeth.
You smiled, bright and insufferable. “Glad I got the Rick seal of approval.”
Daryl cut you a look so full of irritated, helpless heat it should’ve melted the roof clean off. “If you fall in there—”
“I won’t.”
“—I am not explainin’ to the group that we lost you because you wanted to play acrobat.”
Your grin widened. “See? You do listen to my ideas.”
He made a low sound in his throat, half threat, half something else, and turned away before it could become either. Glenn leaned over to you while Rick started sorting rope. “You know he’s gonna be unbearable about this.”
You watched Daryl yank the line harder than necessary through his hands, all bristling protectiveness and silent panic in a dirty vest, and felt something hot and stupid unfurl in your chest despite the hunger and the horror and the walkers waiting below. “Oh,” you said, sweet as poison. “I’m counting on it.”
Next thing you know, Daryl is lowering you down like he’s trying to negotiate with gravity.
The rope burns warm and rough through his palms as he feeds it out inch by inch, jaw set so hard it looks painful, eyes never leaving you as your boots search the air for the first beam. The whole roof creaks around you, old metal shifting and sighing under the weight of three men and one questionable plan, and below the hole, the warehouse waits in its awful, patient silence, a sea of dropped shoulders and slack heads and still hands that may or may not stay that way.
“Little left,” Rick mutters from the edge, one hand anchoring the rope, the other braced on the roof panel.
“I know my left,” you whisper back.
“Sure you do,” Daryl said sarcastically.
“Could we keep the chatter down to a minimum, please? I’m trying to focus.”
Your boots finally tap metal.
The beam is narrower than it looked from above, just a rusted strip of steel stretched wall to wall with twelve feet of nightmare yawning underneath it. For one incredibly stupid second, your arms pinwheel out from your sides, balancing wildly, and Daryl’s entire body jerks forward so hard the rope goes taut enough to sing.
You correct yourself with a hop and a wobble, then grin up through the hole. “Wow,” you whisper, breathless and obnoxious. “Thought I had it there.”
Rick drags a hand down his face, and Daryl looks like he may genuinely pass out. “That ain’t funny,” he hisses, voice low enough not to carry and intense enough to strip paint.
You beam up at him, all teeth. “Little funny.”
“No it wasn’t.”
“It was a kinda,” Glenn says, hanging over the edge with both elbows planted on the roof, “it was the exact amount of funny that becomes deeply unfunny if you do it again.”
“Copy that,” you say, already inching forward because if you let yourself think too hard about the drop, or the bodies, or the fact that one wrong move could turn you into a screaming can opener for the dead, you were going to freeze and embarrass yourself in front of everyone.
So you pretend.
You pretend you are not twenty feet above a warehouse floor covered in starving corpses.
You pretend this is easy.
You pretend you are traipsing across the rafters of a church play, balancing for applause, when really your throat is dry and your heart is in your throat.
“Keep your knees bent,” Rick says quietly.
“Weight over the balls of your feet,” Daryl adds at once.
“Yep,” you mutter. “Love being coached through my own stupidity.”
The first shelf is close enough that you can crouch, reach, and hook a box toward you with the length of broomstick Glenn found on the roof for exactly this purpose. It scrapes softly across the top shelf, dust puffing up into your face. You ease it to the beam, pry it open, and find—
“Canned Brussels sprouts,” you breathe. “What kind of sick bastard donates this.”
“Food is food,” Rick whispers.
“Barely.”
You toss the can up.
Glenn leans further into the hole, one arm and half his torso dangling through like a badly secured chandelier, and catches it with both hands before it can bounce off the roof and ring through the warehouse like a dinner bell. “Got it,” he mouths.
The rhythm comes after that, slow and strange and somehow almost manageable once your body stops trying to convince you that you are about to die.
Crouch. Reach. Hook. Lift. Toss.
If anything is too heavy or you don’t have enough arms to carry the load, you stuff everything into your rucksack and hurl it up to Glenn. Daryl then empties the goods and throws the empty bag back down to you. It’s like a cheap version of a dumb waiter, but way less convenient.
Glenn hangs lower and lower through the roof to catch whatever you send up—cans, pasta boxes, a dented multipack of instant noodles, some pathetic but still exciting ramen bricks that make you feel, absurdly, like a kid sneaking through the kitchen at midnight on your tiptoes for cookies when your parents told you explicitly not to. Except the kitchen is a warehouse full of sleeping dead, the cookies are your dinner for the next two weeks, and your parents are flesh-eating mummies in donated church clothes.
The beam complains under every careful step with little rusty chirps and flexes that make Daryl visibly reel from above. Every time it gives even the tiniest creak, his hands clamp harder on the rope like he could wrestle the entire building into obedience if he squeezed hard enough.
“You’re white as a sheet,” you whisper up after you just chucked the rucksack up to Glenn and caught Daryl’s line of sight. He looked like he was going into shock. “Shut up and keep movin’.”
You make it further across the room than any sane person would. The hauls get better too—good, solid stuff that feels like winning. Pasta. Canned fruit. Vacuum-packed noodles. A couple jars of sauce that make Glenn nearly weep.
Eventually, you gather enough loot for Rick to say, “That’s enough. Come on back up.”
And that should have been that.
But then something catches your eye.
A half-collapsed cardboard box on the floor near the far aisle. Not on a shelf. Not conveniently positioned. Just sitting there in a shaft of gray light, label half-torn, one corner buckled in—but unmistakable.
Beans — loads of them.
You go completely still. Above you, Daryl’s expression changes before you even point. He knows you too well. One look at your face and he’s already shaking his head. “Don’t even think about it.”
Glenn blinks. “Huh?”
“It’s beans,” you whisper, like this explains everything.
Rick’s own gaze tracks, lands on the box, and then closes in brief, pained understanding. “No.”
You glance up. “I’ll be super quick.”
Daryl actually makes a strangled sound. “Why ya always gotta make things so hard.”
“You wanna win big, you gotta risk big.” You raise your arms, shrugging. That’s why poker was always your game.
He yanks on the safety rope once, sharp and warning. “No way.”
You look down at the line tied around your waist. And then, because apparently every decent thought has left your skull to make room for legumes, you realise the problem.
You can’t get low enough with the rope on.
Even Rick, patron saint of exhausted pragmatism, is already shaking his head. “No. We’ve got enough. We head back.”
You look at the beans.
The beans look at you.
You haven’t had enough to eat in so long that your body treats the sight of them like a religious vision.
“Stop it, let’s go, cmon,” Daryl says, reading your face with horrifying accuracy.
“Would you still love me if I was beanless,” you whisper to yourself.
“What?” Daryl called back, a little too loud for comfort. The acoustics carried his voice around the warehouse, and for one terrible second, you all held your breaths to see if that had done the trick. It was pure dumb luck that it didn’t stir the walkers awake.
“Focus,” Rick hisses after a few awful seconds. “Keep your voices down. Now cmon, we’ll pull you up—“
You weren’t even listening anymore; when you set your mind on something, all bets were off. “Fuck it,” you mutter, and untie the rope around your waist.
The reaction above you is immediate, silent, and catastrophic. Daryl’s face goes blank in that way it does when he is too furious to form words. Rick hisses something that is probably a curse.
Glenn just says, very quietly, “Oh, no.”
Then you move.
You step off the beam onto the top of a shelving unit, crouch to balance, then lower yourself with every ounce of care you possess to the warehouse floor between the sleeping walkers. The landing is soft enough that only dust puffs around your boots. For one second you stand there with your heart trying to punch out through your ribs, surrounded by bodies that are way too close for comfort.
Above you, Daryl makes a sound like every vessel in his head is preparing to burst. “Glenn,” Rick snaps. “Get to the door. If this goes bad, we open it and run them out.”
Glenn is already sliding back from the hole in the roof, shoes scraping over the metal panels as he hurries for the chained entrance.
Daryl moves like he means to jump straight down after you but Rick catches him by the vest. “No. You go in there now, you get both of you killed.”
“Let go.”
“Think Daryl.”
Below, you don’t give yourself time to think at all. You step over a body with your breath locked in your throat, then another, careful not to brush torn sleeves or brittle fingers. The smell is death in itself—old poison, old rot, old clothes. The beans sit there like a miracle with terrible timing.
You reach them, and as you grip the box, you realise it’s heavier than you expected, dense with cans, the cardboard softened at the corners but still holding. Of course it is. Of course, the thing you would risk your stupid life for would also weigh as much as an anvil.
You heft it onto the top shelf with a soft grunt, wincing when the metal creaks under the shifting load.
You hear the faint, unsettling rattling from across as Glenn struggles to free the chains. At this rate, your dumb bean mission isn't what will wake up the walkers; it's Glenn’s shaking of the doors. It’s pretty ironic that he’s trying to open the doors in case you fuck up, but right now, he is about to wake them up for you before you even get the chance. Whatever happens your not gonna stay down here. So you climb.
The shelf sways under your weight, just a little, but enough to make every nerve in your body flash white. You freeze, knuckles digging into the metal, and wait.
When it finally settles, slowly but surely, you empty the cans from the box into your rucksack, each one placed and shifted to balance the weight. The bag grows heavier and heavier until it drags at your shoulder and tugs your centre of gravity meanly off true.
The chains at the entrance rattle louder now. Glenn planning for your downfall.
You straighten on the shelf top and hold the rucksack up toward the roof opening like a trophy, every inch of you smug despite the death pit all around you. “Tell Glenn not to bother,” you say up towards them. “Mama’s bringing home the goods.”
“Quit messin’ around and move!” Rick hisses.
“Buzzkills,” you mutter.
You bend your knees and jump for the beam the way you’ve done half a dozen times already.
Only this time the shelf gives first.
The metal beneath your feet folds with a horrible, rusted crunch and the whole unit collapses into itself. For one terrible second, all Daryl and Rick see is a bursting cloud of dust and a violent shudder through the racks below.
And then the warehouse wakes up.
Not all at once. That would have been kinder.
A hand twitches.
A head jerks.
A rasp drags up from the floor like somebody striking a match.
You hit the ground hard and rolling, the breath punched out of you. The rucksack slams your shoulder. Somewhere, metal crashes. Somewhere something moans, then something else answers, and suddenly the whole room is filling with the insidious, dreadful sound of sleepers pulling themselves back into hunger.
It’s Daryl’s voice yelling your name which forces you upright.
No checking bruises. No checking the damage. You scramble for the nearest standing shelf and scale it with all the grace of a panicked cat, boots slipping on dusty metal, hands burning. It’s taller than you’d like and farther from the beam than it looked from above, and when you stand on top of it and finally look down—
Stupid idea.
A sea of walkers churns beneath you, arms lifting, jaws working, all those dead faces rolling upward like a starved village. How thoughtful. They want to catch you.
“Now!” Daryl roars.
You jump before you can talk yourself out of it.
Your fingers catch the beam with a jolt that nearly peels your shoulders from their sockets, and your whole body swings out hard—ninety degrees of empty air and screaming muscles before your momentum dies. You hang there for one awful second, staring at the ground, staring at all those outstretched hands waiting politely for you to drop.
Then survival kicks you in the spine, and you must muster everything in you to haul yourself up.
Above, Rick and Daryl are shouting, Glenn is somewhere at the doors, and below the walkers are fully awake now, groans rising loud enough to rattle your teeth. Slow and steady is dead. You go fast, feet clanging over the beam, each step a bargain with physics.
Don’t look down.
Don’t look down.
Don’t look down.
The beam screams under your boots. Something metallic falls away behind you with a crash but you don’t let yourself turn to see. Your rucksack thumps against your back, heavy with the canned beans and poor life decisions.
You make it under the hole at last and thrust the bag upward with both hands.
Daryl looks personally offended by it.
“Take the damn bag,” you hiss.
He glares like you just suggested he rescue the groceries first and your stupid life second. “Get that shit away from me,” he yells.
Rick, who still possesses enough sanity for all three of you, snatches the rucksack out of your hands. “I got it.”
The second the weight is gone from your back, you jump.
Daryl catches you.
Not with any grace either. He catches you like a man grabbing the one thing in the world that matters before it can fall out of reach, hands under your arms, hauling with everything he’s got while Rick grabs your vest and Glenn—somehow back at the roof now because apparently he can teleport when panic is involved—helps drag you up the last ugly, scraping foot.
You collapse half on top of Daryl, half on the roof, both of you breathing like you’ve been gutted.
For a few seconds nobody says anything at all.
Then Glenn lies back flat on the roof beside you and wheezes, “I hope those canned beans are worth it.”
Daryl’s hand comes up hard to the back of your head, not rough, just urgent, pressing you in against his shoulder for one fierce second before he shoves you back enough to look at you. His face is a storm. His eyes are wild. His voice, when it comes, is low and vicious enough to mean more than the words themselves. “You are the dumbest, bravest, most annoying person I ever met.”
To anybody else, it would sound mean.
To you, translated from Daryl, it means: thank God you’re alive, you absolute dumbass.
You grin, still gulping air. “You forgot ‘reckless and impulsive.’”
He closes his eyes like he is asking the universe for strength.
Rick, still kneeling with one hand on the salvaged rucksack, exhales through his nose and says, “Next time, we leave the beans.”
Daryl just kept you there, breathing heavy, arms wrapping around you to keep you there longer before you try to test your luck again.
---------------------
It seems the group got over your reckless borderline suicidal stunt pretty quickly, no matter how eccentric Glenn or Rick told the story. After they were warmed and fed, the group were left stunned in a way of people who have gone too long on empty and suddenly find themselves content and blinking at one another like they’re waiting to wake up.
The beans are in one pot, the pasta in another, the salvaged jars worked into something Carol insists on calling stew and everyone else is too grateful to argue with. The smell alone is enough to make the whole house feel less haunted.
Full bellies change people.
It happens slowly at first—shoulders coming down, voices climbing, somebody laughing too loud at something that isn’t all that funny and nobody minding because laughter itself had started to feel rare enough to hoard. Glenn is nearly glowing from the praise, taking credit for the rope work with just enough modesty to make it irritating, while Tara keeps calling you “Bean Queen” with increasing reverence and zero shame. Even Rick’s face has lost some of that hard, hunted look, though the lines don’t leave him entirely.
You’re tucked into the corner of the room against Daryl, his legs spread out in front of him and your back settled against his chest like that’s where it belongs. His arm is around your middle, hand planted on your hip with the kind of absent firmness that says he’s still making sure you’re here. Every now and then his thumb drags once over the seam of your shirt, checking, counting, reassuring himself in some wordless way he’d deny under oath.
He’s been impossible ever since the warehouse. Not in a mean way — more in a Daryl way. Which is often worse.
“Coulda died over beans,” he mutters now into your hair while Glenns tells Sasha how he nearly dislocated his own shoulder trying to lean through the roof like a chandelier. “That’s a new low.”
You tip your head back just enough to look at him. “They were good beans.”
“They were beans.”
“They were many beans.”
He gives a disbelieving little huff. “You got a death wish.”
Across the room, Glenn lifts his spoon in your direction. “To be fair, it was a pretty heroic amount of beans.”
“Thank you,” you say, pointing at him. “Finally, someone with vision.”
Daryl’s hold tightens fractionally around your waist. “Maybe I oughta put you outta my misery myself.”
You gasp theatrically and grab at his forearm where it lies across you, making a strangled little performance of it. “He’s threatening me,” you croak to the room. “In front of witnesses.”
He doesn’t even try to stop the ghost of the smile that pulls at his mouth. He bends his head and grumbles near your ear, “Wouldn’t have to threaten ya if you’d quit tryin’ to swan-dive into walker pits.”
You go limp in his arms in exaggerated tragedy, one hand flopped over your chest. “Tell. my. story.”
“‘She was stupid,’” Daryl says immediately.
“‘But awsome’” Glenn adds.
“‘Led with her stomach, not her brain,’” Tara says solemnly.
That gets a genuine laugh out of the room, bigger than the joke deserves, the kind that comes from hunger easing its boot off your throat for one blessed hour. You laugh too, because how can you not, even as Daryl shakes his head against your hair and pretends not to enjoy the fact that you fit there so naturally.
Then Carol, practical saint of the damned, appears by the pot with her spoon in hand.“There’s seconds,” she announces. You’re on your feet before the sentence finishes.
Daryl catches your belt loop too late to stop you. “Of course there is,” he mutters, watching you go with the kind of tired affection he only shows when he thinks no one’s paying attention.
You drift toward the pot, bowl in hand, and nearly collide with Rick doing the exact same thing. He steps aside enough to let you in, then doesn’t move far after you’ve both filled your bowls again. The room behind you hums with easy noise. Firelight jumps warm along the walls. For once, no one is listening too hard. Rick leans one shoulder against the mantle and eyes your second helping. “You earned that.”
You grin. “Damn right.”
He nods once, but his expression doesn’t soften as much as the room has. “Today was a Hail Mary.”
The words are quiet, but they land heavier than the bowls in your hands. Your smile slips, just a little. “We made it.”
“You did,” he says. “By the skin o’ your teeth.”
You glance past him toward the others. Daryl is still where you left him, one knee up now, spoon resting in his hand, eyes on you without trying to hide it. He doesn’t know this conversation is about him too, but something in your face must’ve given it away because he sits a little straighter.
Rick sees you look, his tone staying low. “Whatever’s goin’ on, it needs sortin’.”
Your brows pull together. “What’s going on is we’re all exhausted and one bad week from losing our minds.”
“That’s true,” he says. “And still not all of it.”
You open your mouth to deny it and hate that you already know how weak the denial will sound, but Rick lifts a hand before you can try. “I’m not askin’ for details.”
“Great.”
“I’m serious.” He glances toward the room, toward your people, toward the makeshift little camp that has somehow made itself a family twice over and keeps surviving mostly on stubbornness. “I don’t care if it’s grief from the prison, or stress, or just the road gettin’ to everybody. But you’re actin’ reckless. More than usual - which says a lot.”
You shift your bowl from one hand to the other, suddenly unable to get comfortable in your own skin.
“Same goes for Daryl,” Rick continues. “He’s distracted. You’re distracted. And when the two of you start in on each other, it spreads.”
You give a short, incredulous laugh. “Me and Daryl are fine.”
Rick’s face changes in the smallest, most devastating way. It was that deeply tired deadpan of a man who didn’t actually say a name but didn’t need you to say one for him. “…I didn’t say it was about Daryl,” he says.
You close your eyes for one full second. “Great.”
“That’s on you.” He takes a bite of his food with the maddening calm of someone who has already won this exchange, chews, swallows, then says, “I don’t care how you sort it out. Talk. Fight. Go walk a perimeter and scream at each other. Just sort it out. The group needs both of you with your heads screwed on right.”
You look down into your bowl because it’s easier than looking over at Daryl and wondering just how obvious the two of you have become. Your voice comes out quieter than you want. “You really think it’s that bad?”
Rick’s expression softens then, but only by a fraction. “I think you nearly got yourself killed over a box of beans.”
Yikes - the man has a point.
“I think Daryl was ready to jump into a warehouse full of walkers after you, and the only reason he didn’t is because I grabbed him first.” He pauses, then adds in that dry, almost kindly way of his, “And I think if the two of you keep actin’ like whatever this is ain’t affectin’ you, it’s gonna get one of you hurt in a way beans can’t fix.”
The room behind you laughs at something Michonne says. Somebody bumps a chair. Daryl is still watching, and now there’s a question in his face too, because he can tell Rick’s talking to you in that leader-voice of his, the one people only get when they’re either in trouble or about to be assigned something. You swallow, nod once, and Rick seems to take that as enough. “Good.”
He pushes off the mantle, shifts past you, then pauses just long enough at your shoulder to add, “And for what it’s worth… if I had found beans like that, I’d have pulled the same thing.”
You look up so fast you nearly slosh your dinner. His mouth twitches. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.” Then he’s gone, crossing back into the warm noise of the room, leaving you standing there with your second helping and a heart that suddenly feels too big and too visible.
When you turn around, Daryl is still looking at you — the second your eyes meet, one of his brows lifts just a little, asking without words. You stare back for a beat, then start toward him.
He shifts, making room before you even reach him, one hand already reaching for your bowl so you can climb back into the shelter of his body without spilling anything. His arm comes around you the moment you settle, hand warm at your waist, and he bends his head just enough for his mouth to brush your temple.“What’d he want,” he murmurs.
You take a bite first, because apparently you need courage and beans to survive this conversation. Then you mutter into your spoon, “Apparently we’re a public safety hazard.”
Against your hair, he lets out one low, deeply offended huff of laughter. “Well,” he says, voice rough with tired amusement, “he ain’t wrong.”
That should not make your face go hot. It absolutely does.
The room feels too warm suddenly, too full, too close. Full bellies may have made everyone giddy, but they’ve also made it impossible to hide behind misery anymore. Now there’s food in your stomach, a roof over your head, and Rick Grimes has all but told you to go deal with your boyfriend before your unresolved nonsense gets somebody bitten.
You lean back a little further into Daryl’s chest and stare into your bowl like there might be instructions hidden in the beans.
His mouth brushes your ear. “Public safety hazard,” he repeats, almost pleased. “S’got a ring to it.”
You elbow him lightly in the ribs.
He grunts, then kisses your hair.
And because the universe has a sick sense of humor, that tiny, stupid bit of tenderness feels more dangerous than the warehouse ever did.
⸻
Rick’s advice sits between the two of you for maybe fifteen minutes before it becomes impossible to ignore.
Not because either of you particularly wants to acknowledge that Rick Grimes has somehow become the unwilling manager of your sex life, but because now that the words are out there—sort your shit out—the tension feels louder somehow, like naming it gave it teeth.
The house settles around you in soft groans and old wood sighs. The others are still eating and talking in that warm, relieved post-meal haze that only comes after a genuinely good scavenging run. It should feel safe and easy but instead, every time Daryl’s hand drifts over your hip or his mouth brushes your ear a little to closely, it feels like a lit match dropped into dry leaves.
You last maybe five more minutes curled against him before you turn your head and murmur, very quietly, “Come upstairs with me.”
He goes still at once.
Not because he doesn’t want to. That part is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing. It lives in the way his arm tightens around your waist, the way his chest expands under your shoulder, the way his hand stops moving for one single second like his whole body is listening too hard. He tips his head just enough that his mouth is near your ear. “Don’t play with me.”
You blink, caught off guard. “I’m serious”
He sighs through his nose, rough and low and very much not immune. “We ain’t rubbin’ one out in a sleepin’ bag again.”
That drags a laugh out of you before you can stop it, all soft and scandalised. “It wasn’t that bad. And I wasn’t suggesting—”
“Were with your eyes.”
“I can’t control my eyes,” you said - squeezin your eyes shut o he couldn’t see your tell.
He scoffs which in Daryl tongue translates to bullshit, but there’s heat all through it now. He wants this. God, he wants this. He just also wants the version of it where he can actually put his hands on you properly without someoene accidentally becoming part of the experience.
You shift in his lap anyway, because your restraint has been on life support for days and you are no longer prepared to pretend otherwise. “We don’t have to go all the way.” You slide your hand up over his chest, tracing the edge of his vest, and feel the way his breathing changes under your palm. “Just… upstairs.”
The hesitation is still there, but it’s losing ground.
Because he knows you. Knows exactly what your voice sounds like when you’ve hit the end of your rope. Knows what his own body has been doing every time you get too close and then move away. Knows the road has stripped you both down to nerves and instinct and want. He mutters something low and filthy under his breath, then pushes to his feet so suddenly you almost laugh again. “Ladies first,” he says.
The room you duck into on the second floor is barely a room at all anymore—just a narrow little bedroom with peeling wallpaper, one broken chair, and a window clouded over with age. The bed frame is long gone, just a rectangle of paler dust on the floor where something once lived, the air smelling like old wood and summer rot.
You barely make it two steps.
His hands are on you so fast, not rough exactly, but urgent in a way that makes your knees soften even before he spins you around and crashes his lips to yours. You back into the wall and he follows, hands braced on either side of your head for a heartbeat before they start moving—your waist, your ribs, your throat, your hips—like he’s been starved off touch so long he no longer knows how to do it sparingly.
This is why the sleeping bag idea was doomed. Daryl doesn’t do anything halfway once he gives himself permission.
His mouth is everywhere at once — your jaw, your neck, the slope of your shoulder. He kisses like he’s making up for lost time, open-mouthed and relentless, and whatever hesitation he brought upstairs evaporates the second your fingers get in his hair and you pull him back down to you harder.
Your shirt goes first, dragged over your head in a clumsy, breathless tangle that leaves you laughing once into his mouth before he kisses the sound away. Then your bra, and the moment your chest is bare to the cool, stale air his whole expression changes.
He looks wrecked — actually wrecked. Like the sight of you has punched every coherent thought clean out of his head. “Jesus,” he mutters, and then he bends and proves that there is, in fact, no spot on your skin he intends to leave untouched.
You’re the one who shoves him back toward the floor first, guided more by desperation than grace, and he goes with you, landing hard on the old boards with a grunt while you climb over him in one smooth, greedy motion. Your thighs bracket his hips, your hands fisted in his vest, your hair a curtain around both your faces.
For one second he just stares up at you. His hands land on your waist and stay there, thumbs digging in like he’s keeping you from floating away.
The dry humping starts almost by accident. One roll of your hips just to feel him.
One rough exhale from him that says exactly how bad an idea that was.
Then another because it felt so good the first drag.
And another because it was too good to stop.
And suddenly your whole body is lit up, the friction making your thoughts come apart like torched paper. Even through too many layers, it feels devastating—his jeans, your cargos, the heavy shape of him pressing right where you need something and not enough and oh, god.
You drop your forehead to his shoulder and groan. He laughs once, wrecked and breathless, and tips his hips up to meet you.
There it is. That’s enough to make you lose all pride.
“Yeah,” he mutters against your throat, one hand spreading up your back, the other dragging you down harder against him. “That’s it.”
Your lungs abruptly stop working.
Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the lack of food over a long period of time. Maybe it’s the weeks of wanting finally finding somewhere to go. Whatever it is, you’re dizzy with it in seconds, all the blood in your body rerouted south, burning between your legs so hard it feels cruel.
Daryl’s mouth is at your collarbone now, then lower, then back up, leaving your skin wet and hot and bitten in half a dozen places. You are absolutely going to have hickeys. He seems determined on that point. His mouth keeps finding the same tender places with the concentration of a man signing paperwork.
“You wanna leave marks huh,” you gasp, though it comes out more like an accusation wrapped in a moan.
“Mm,” he says against your breast, entirely unrepentant. “Maybe.”
“You are such a freak.”
“Look who’s talkin’.”
You shove your hand down the front of his jeans and grin at the noise he makes. Not quite a moan — more like someone hit him in the chest with a bat.
There is no dignity left between either of you now. You’ve become a pair of starving animals, and Daryl—who had been trying to pretend he was somehow the composed one—immediately loses that illusion the second your fingers manage to wrap around him.
His head drops back against the floorboards. “Oh, fuck.” He grabs the back of your neck and kisses you so hard your thoughts scatter like birds.
The rhythm gets rougher after that. Needier. And somehow he starts winning, if this is a competition, because his hands are everywhere and yours can’t decide what they want more—his hair, his throat, what’s inside his jeans, under his shirt, all of it at once. You rock down against him again and he actually curses into your mouth, one of his hands gripping your hip so hard it almost hurts.
The room is too hot. Your skin feels feverish. Your breasts are aching from the scrape of his stubble and the drag of his mouth and the way he keeps licking over the marks he leaves like he’s proud of them. You’re so turned on you could combust, one long unbearable pull low in your body, and the friction is so good you can barely think around it.
Which is probably why neither of you hears Maggie the first time.
The second time, what you do hear is her voice drifting up from downstairs, faint through the floorboards. Calling your fucking name.
Your whole body locks. Daryl’s hand stills on your thigh.
You both listen.
Then, louder, Maggie calls your name again: “It’s your watch.”
You close your eyes.
From somewhere below, Rick’s voice cuts in, valiantly trying to save your lives. “Uh—don’t know where she is, I’ll just—”
And then Carl, traitor to the nation, says with perfect sincerity, “I swear I saw her and Daryl go upstairs.”
Your head falls back in pure, cosmic despair.
There is a long silence in which you can actually hear the universe laughing. Then you bury your face in your hands and groan. “Why does God punish me specifically.”
Daryl, who is still painfully, visibly hard under you, drags both hands down his face like he’s trying to peel the frustration off. “You gotta be kiddin’ me.”
The worst part is that Maggie, bless her, has the decency not to yell again right away. Which somehow makes it worse. Now everyone downstairs is just… aware.
You stay where you are for one extra second out of spite. Then another because your body is refusing to accept the ruling. Daryl’s hand comes up and smooths through your hair, his touch suddenly frustratingly gentle now that the moment’s dead. “You’ll live,” he grumbles.
You lift your head and glare at him. “I don’t think I will. Seriously. This is literally killing me.”
“Walk it off.”
“But I don't want to,” you pout.
He strokes your hair again, because apparently he’s decided if he can’t have you he’ll at least pet you through the disappointment. “We’ll get em’ next time.”
“Yeah, right, I have a better chance of becoming a nun… wait, technically I am a nun now, right? Because I ain't getting any?” That's the only noteworthy part of nunhood anyway.
That gets a real huff of laughter from him, but he’s just as wrecked. “That ain’t how it works.”
His jeans are doing absolutely nothing to hide the huge problem, and the second you notice him trying—badly—to angle himself into something resembling dignity, the giggle escapes you before you can stop it. “Shuddup,” he mutters.
You sit back on his thighs enough to appreciate the full extent of his misery and have to bite your lip not to laugh again.
Downstairs, Maggie calls one more time, now definitely amused. “You comin?”
“Yup!” you yell back, then mutter under your breath, “I fucking wish.”Daryl scoffs, but he definitely agrees with you in spirit.
You reach for your shirt and drag it back on, wrinkled and useless, not even bothering with the bra because what exactly had it done for you besides get removed. You grab your rifle, sling it over one shoulder, then look back at him still sprawled on the floorboards, one hand braced over his eyes, the other very obviously trying to hide the state of him.
It is almost enough to make you stay.
Almost.
You step back over him, lean down and cup his jaw with one hand. He looks up instantly. “I’ll be back later,” you say, because hope is all you’ve got left.
“You better.”
You lean down until your mouths are barely apart. “Kiss me like you’ll miss me, Dixon.”
And boy does he.
His hand comes up behind your head at once, fingers threading into your hair, holding you there while he kisses you slow and filthy enough to make your knees threaten mutiny all over again. It’s not rushed. Not sweet either. Just a deep, furious promise pressed mouth to mouth.
You pull away before you can change your mind and throw your watch shift straight into hell. Then you stand, turn, and stomp downstairs with the exact energy of a child summoned to dinner only to discover it’s mostly green vegetables.
The second you hit the ground floor, every pair of eyes pretends very hard not to be looking at you. That alone tells you everything.
Maggie takes one glance at your flushed face, your slightly wrecked shirt, the absence of Daryl, and has the nerve to look innocent.
You stop dead in front of her and flip her off.
She bites back a smirk.
“Cockblocker,” you mutter.
From across the room, Rick puts both hands over his face.
And somewhere upstairs, floorboards creak under the weight of one very frustrated man reconsidering every choice that brought him here.
—
...You last about thirty minutes.
Thirty heroic, miserable, entirely uneventful minutes of watch, sitting by the front window with your rifle across your lap and your nerves lit up like somebody had shoved a live wire under your skin. Outside, the woods are black and still, the moon caught in the high branches, the road beyond the trees pale as bone. Nothing moves. Nothing groans. Nothing snaps a twig or drags a foot or gives you a single useful excuse to focus on anything other than the fact that Daryl was probably just as frustrated, unfinished, and probably still lying there on that dusty floor with his jeans half-fastened and murder in his heart.
You try to be noble about it. You try to be a helpful asset to the group.
You try very hard not to think about his mouth on your skin, his hand in your hair, the way his eyes had gone all dark and helpless right before Maggie ruined your life.
At minute twenty-eight, you decide that being helpful is overrated.
At minute thirty, you abandon your post like a woman with a mission from God.
Glenn is asleep beside Maggie near the fireplace, his blanket pulled up to his chin, one arm tucked awkwardly under his head. Maggie is curled toward him, dead to the world, and you crouch beside him with the stealth of someone about to commit a felony for the greater good.
“Glenn,” you whisper, barely louder than breath.
Nothing. You poke his shoulder with two fingers.
“Glenn.”
He jerks awake so violently his hand shoots toward his knife, eyes wide and terrified, mouth opening around a strangled noise you smother by clapping your palm in the air like no, no, no, shut up, shut up.
“It’s me,” you hiss. “It’s me. Relax.”
He blinks at you, disoriented, hair smashed on one side and sticking straight up on the other. “What—what happened?”
“I need you to take watch.”
His face slowly empties of panic and refills with suspicion. “Why?”
“…I’m tired,” you croaked. You hadn’t really thought of the reason you were gonna tell him to switch with you. “I’m basically falling asleep over here. You really wanna put the lives of those dearest to you with someone as incompetent as me keeping watch?”
Even in the dark, even half-asleep, even with the world ending around you, Glenn manages to look offended by the quality of your lie. “You woke me up,” he whispers, “to tell me you’re tired?”
“…Yes.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You didn’t.”
“Why are you arguing with me when you could be getting up?”
His eyes narrow. Then something terrible happens: he wakes up the rest of the way. His gaze flicks over you—your flushed face, your hair still a little wild from Daryl’s hands upstairs, the way you keep glancing towards where Daryl was tossing and turning in the corner —and realization crawls over his expression with dawning horror. “Oh.”
You point at him. “Don’t.”
“Oh,” he says again, quieter, worse.
“Glenn.”
“You want me to take your watch so you can—”
“If you finish that sentence, I will wake up Maggie right now and tell her about the time i walked in on you with a porno magazine-”
“ok ok, stop!” he cuts you off. “You barely said you were coming in, and that was before I even met Maggie!”
“I'm sure she would be very interested to know what magazine you were looking at”, you said slyly. For one glorious second, you have him. His eyes widen in betrayal. “You’re bluffing.”
“Please,” you chuckle. “I have done far worse for less.”
He looks genuinely wounded now. “You’re a monster.”
“I am a woman in need of assistance.”
“You are extorting me.”
“Oh cmon -- I am negotiating.”
He drags both hands down his face, careful not to wake Maggie, and breathes out through his fingers.
You reach into your pocket with the grave solemnity of a person cutting off their own arm and pull out your final bargaining chip: three condoms, slightly battered, wrapped in hope and lint.
Glenn’s eyes go to them.
Then to you.
Then back to them.
Your voice drops. “I am willing to sweeten the pot.”
His face does an entire emotional journey in silence: shock, temptation, guilt, temptation again, then the realisation that Maggie would absolutely kill him if he passed up apocalypse contraception out of prudishness. “You’re giving me those?”
“Don’t make me say it twice. It hurts.”
He takes them like you’ve handed him state secrets. Then he immediately looks miserable about the entire arrangement. “Fine. But you owe me.”
“I am literally paying you.”
“You owe me time. Next time Maggie and I need—” He cuts himself off with a pained grimace, like the sentence has teeth. “You know.”
You raise both eyebrows. “Need what?”
His jaw clenches. “…Time alone.”
“Say it properly.”
“No.”
“Glenn.”
“I’m not saying it when you know what I’m asking.”
“If you can’t talk about it, you shouldn’t be doing it.”
He gives you the flattest look he has ever managed. “You talk about it constantly.”
“Exactly,” you whisper, delighted. “Which means I should be doing it constantly. I’m working on that tonight.”
He squeezes his eyes shut. “I hate this conversation.”
“You’re welcome for the sexual maturity seminar.”
He opens one eye. “Go. Before I change my mind.”
You grab his face and press a fat kiss to his cheek with a dramatic mwah sound as he squirms in your iron grip. “You were always my favourite Rhee.”
“Favourite what? Person to swap shifts with?”
“Love ya!”
You leave him there to gather his boots and whatever remains of his dignity, moving through the room on bare, careful feet, stepping over packs and blankets and sleeping bodies. The house has gone quiet in that deep-road way, full of heavy breaths and shifting floorboards, the kind of sleep that isn’t peaceful so much as involuntary.
Daryl is in the corner that the two of you had claimed, half-turned toward the wall, his blanket shoved down around his waist. He looks like he tried to sleep and failed out of spite. His mouth is set even unconscious, brows faintly pinched, one arm folded beneath his head.
You crouch beside him and lay your hand on his shoulder.
He comes awake like a trap snapping shut.
One second still, the next upright, hand already going for his knife, every line of him hard and ready—until his eyes find you. The fight drains out in a single breath, replaced by confusion, then heat, then the memory of you and how you left him. “Wha—”
You press a finger to your lips and nod toward the back door.
His eyes narrow.
You nod again.
And he follows after you - of course he does.
He doesn’t ask questions while you lead him through the sleeping house and out into the summer night. He doesn’t ask when he catches sight of Glenn settling miserably near the front window with your rifle across his knees. He does, however, make a face—a slow, suspicious scrunch of nose and brow that says he is beginning to understand there has been some sort of interaction between you.
You keep walking.
Around the side of the house, past the sagging porch, into the darker line of trees where the moonlight breaks into strips, and the air smells like leaves, dirt, and cooling sweat. It’s not warm exactly, not after midnight, but the chill doesn’t reach you properly. You’re too keyed up. Too alive in your skin. Too full of unfinished business.
When you’re far enough that the house is just a dim block behind the trees, you turn around.
Daryl stops a few paces away.
You kick off one boot. Then the other.
His face goes blank.
Your socks follow. Then your shirt, dragged over your head and dropped without ceremony into the grass. “Swapped shifts with Glenn,” you say, already working at your pants. “Cost me my last condoms and my dignity, but those were on the way out anyway.”
Daryl just stares.
You shove your pants down your legs, step out, and straighten in front of him wearing nothing but the silvered brush of moonlight and the goosebumps rising over your bare skin. The air pebbles your nipples instantly; you resist the instinct to cover yourself because the look on his face is worth the cold. “So,” you continue, as if you’re explaining a perfectly reasonable plan, “we are going to fuck in the dirt like God intended.”
His mouth parts. Nothing comes out. It is possible his braiun shortcircuited.
You tilt your head. “You just gonna stand there like a loser, or are you gonna take your pants off?”
That gets him moving, though he does it like the act pains him. His hands go to his belt, fingers rougher than they need to be, breath already uneven. You cross the space before he’s even got the buckle open, toes sinking into the cool dirt, and catch his mouth in something slow.
At first it’s you setting the pace—soft pressure, tongue teasing, palms sliding up the front of his vest as if you’ve got all night. Then his hand cups the back of your neck and the whole thing changes. He kisses you with a sureness that makes your knees weak, deep and controlled and hungry enough to put an end to every illusion of leadership you were carrying. His other hand slides over your waist, down your hip, shameless and familiar, then between your legs, fingers finding you already slick enough to make his breath hitch against your mouth.
You smile into the kiss, because you feel it. That little stumble in him. “There,” you whisper, lips brushing his. “Knew you’d give in eventually.”
He answers by dragging his fingers through you again, slower this time, watching your face like he wants every twitch.
Your words catch, but they don’t stop. They never do when you’re like this. “God I missed your hands,” you murmur, one hand fisting in the front of his vest. “Missed you touching me like you already know what I’m gonna do before I do it.”
His eyes flick up to yours, dark and sharp.
“You do,” you whisper, and the honesty comes out filthy somehow, soft and wrecked. “You know me way too well. You know exactly where to touch, exactly how to make me stupid. Been thinking about it for days - all week, weeks maybe. God, I don’t even know anymore.”
His jaw tightens. His fingers press just right, and you gasp, hips bucking into his hand before you can stop yourself. “That,” you breathe, smiling because he felt it too. “That’s what I mean.”
“Keep talkin’,” he mutters, rough enough to barely be words.
You laugh under your breath. “really does it for you huh?”
His forehead dips to yours. “You’ve no idea.”
That should not hit you as hard as it does. You cup his jaw, kiss him once, then keep going because the way he reacts to your voice is becoming its own kind of intoxication.
“You want me to tell you how bad I’ve needed you?” you whisper. “How many times I almost grabbed you by that damn vest and dragged you behind the nearest tree? How I’ve been lying next to you every night trying not to climb on top of you in front of the whole damn group like some kind of desperate woman with no home training?”
A sound breaks out of him—half laugh, half groan—and then his hands are under your thighs.
He lifts you, your legs wrapping around his waist on instinct, and he carries you a few steps deeper into the trees, mouth returning to yours with enough force to swallow your next breath. Then he lowers you to the ground slowly, one arm behind your back, one hand at your hip, careful even now, even when his whole body is shaking with restraint. The grass is cool under your spine. Dirt presses against your bare shoulder blades, leaves scratching gently at your skin.
He breaks the kiss and starts moving south - and you know exactly where he’s going. “Daryl—”
He ignores the warning in your voice because his mouth is already pressing at your stomach, then your hip, then lower, dragging heat across your skin with each open-mouthed kiss. By the time he settles between your thighs, the last of your patience dies. He latches onto you like he’s doing it for himself, not for you, like this is something he’s been denied and intends to take back with interest.
The gasp that leaves you is so sudden and sharp you don’t know if it came from you or some other equally doomed woman in the woods.
It’s obscene how ready you are for him. How wet. How your body gives him everything immediately, no pride left, no delay. His mouth works you like he’s starving, and the slick sound of it in the quiet dark makes heat rush up your chest and throat. You slap a hand over your own mouth for half a second, then drag it into his hair instead because that feels more useful.
He looks up when you tap his shoulder, eyes heavy and wild, face wet, expression so open it nearly breaks something in you.
“What,” he rasps, and you swore he sounded upset.
“We don’t have time,” you whisper, breathless, already pulling at him. “And honestly, I feel like I’ve been in foreplay for weeks, so it’s not exactly a tragedy if we skip a chapter.”
His mouth twitches, a grin ghosting his face.
You grab his face and pull him up to yours, kissing him hard, tasting yourself on him, using the distraction to work him free from his pants. He lets you, though the sound he makes when your hand closes around him is enough to make your whole body clench.
You guide him between to your cunt, slicking him through the mess he’s made of you, and for one strange, suspended second, your brain expects cruelty.
This is where the dream would cut off. This is where you’d wake gasping and humiliated with nothing but cold ground and frustration.
But you don’t wake. Daryl is still over you. Real. Heavy. Breathing hard. His eyes search your face, one last check, one last silent question. You answer by wrapping your legs tighter around him and pulling him closer.
He pushes in slowly.
The stretch is a sharp, bright thing at first, a scratch of too much after too long without, but underneath it is relief so profound it almost makes your eyes sting. You cling to his huge shoulders, fingers bunching in the worn fabric of his vest, and your whole body seems to open around him in increments, remembering, accepting, aching for the rest.
He stops halfway with a ruined grunt against your neck. You can feel him holding himself back. Feel the tremor in his arms. Feel the breath trapped in his chest because he’s trying to give you time to adjust, because he knows it’s been a while, because no matter how desperate he is, he still knows how to be careful with you.
You cup his face and force him up enough to see you. “Move baby,” you whisper.
His eyes darken, but he still hesitates.
“Please,” you add, softer, but no less wrecked, hand going to his lower neck to urge him forward. “I need you to move. We both need you to move.”
The breath leaves him all at once and his hips rock.
Slow at first. Deep enough to pull a sound from you that barely qualifies as human. It is absurd, the whole scene—your bare body spread out in the dirt beneath a man still sorta-dressed, your ass probably covered in dirt, your hair full of grass, the two of you finally losing your minds in the woods at some ungodly hour because the apocalypse gave you no better bedroom. It should be funny.
It is kinda funny.
It is also the best thing you’ve felt in weeks.
You laugh once, bright and breathless, and it snaps into a squeal when he fills you again, even deeper this time. “Fuck,” you whisper, delighted, overwhelmed. “Oh my god, Daryl. That’s—yes. Jesus it’s so so much better than I remembered.”
You keep talking because you can’t help it, because the words are as much release as the movement. “Godd don’t stop, please don’t stop - just like that,” you whine.
His head drops, mouth finding your shoulder.
“There you are,” you breathe, stroking the back of his head the way you know undoes him, fingers slipping through sweaty hair. “That’s what I missed. You feeling this good. You getting all quiet n shy and serious — like you’re doing important work.”
A rough laugh shakes out of him. “Don’ worry - ain’t stoppin’ for nobody.” He huffs against your skin, but his hips aim up in answer, and the new angle steals your breath clean out of your chest. “Oh—shit—yes, that. Baby, that’s it.”
He changes pace — the hand under your head slides higher, cupping your skull, lifting you so he can watch your face. It’s devastatingly intimate in the middle of all this dirt and desperation, his thumb brushing once over your cheekbone while the rest of him drives into you with a focus that borders on feral. Your own hand drops from his hair to the back of his neck, holding him there, keeping his eyes on yours even when yours start to blur.
The tease you’ve been living in for weeks has been all sharp edges and unmet need, a painful little ache with nowhere to go. This is different. This is warm. Heavy. Eye-watering. A relief so deep it feels almost serene under the fever of it, like your body has finally stopped bracing against absence and remembered how to soften around him.
You try to press your lips together to stay quiet, and he sees it. Sees your eyes roll back, sees your face go slack with pleasure you can’t hide, and something in him visibly snaps. “Missed that,” he breathes, so low you almost don’t catch it. “Missed seein’ you like this.”
Your legs are useless around him now, loose and shaking, swaying with every powerful thrust. His grip on your hips and ass is bruising, pulling you down to meet him, making sure nothing between you is wasted. The pressure is building fast—his body grinding just right, cock bullying the same bright place over and over until your fingers claw at his vest and your breath turns ragged.
You get maybe five seconds of warning. “Darylll,” you gasp. “I think I’m—”
He hears it and groans like it hurts. “Yeah?”
“I’m—fuck, m'cumming—”
It washes over you so hard your body bows under him. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and you were no exception - fuck, you missed Daryl-induced orgasms. Your whole body lights up into fireworks like it's the Fourth of July. You swear you died and went to fucking heaven because all you remember is your vision turning to spots and hearing a muffled sound similar to your own, but also not far from a dying animal being smothered. You manage to muffle most of the sound against his mouth, but not all of it, and he swallows what he can while your whole body goes taut, then liquid, then shaking in waves. It is messy and intense and impossible to hide from, literally - it's like a waterpark between your legs and Daryl is front seat in the splash zone.
Thank god you warned him because he doesn’t last much longer after that, not with how long it’s been. Not with your legs locked around his waist and your hips still chasing him through the aftershocks like your body hasn’t had enough sense to stop. He swears he hears you whisper inside, but he can't be sure if that's you or the twisted voice in his head.
He has no zero chance of pulling out - your legs are locked and sealed around him, and from the way his breath breaks, he knows it. And secretly, he is grateful because he isn’t sure he is strong enough to leave your warmth
Brother just accepts his fate, buries his face in your neck, and lets go with a low, strangled sound that vibrates through your skin. His hips stutter once, twice, and he finally cums with balls flushed to your ass, and the next thing you feel is warmth flooding your insides. You hold him through it, grinning like an idiot, your hands gentler now, one in his hair and one between his shoulder blades, feeling the tremors move through him until his weight slumps over you.
For a while, neither of you moves.
The woods breathe around you. Bugs hum. The dirt is cool under your back. His chest is warm and solid against yours, his breath damp against your throat. Your heart slows in pieces. Your brain, which has been unavailable for several minutes, returns just enough to observe that you are naked in the grass, sticky, dirty, probably bitten by several insects (including Daryl), and happier than you have been in weeks.
Daryl shifts enough to keep from crushing you but does not pull away. One hand smooths over your hair, picking out a leaf with grave concentration. “Still mad atcha,” he mutters eventually.
You laugh weakly. “Funny way of showing it.”
He lifts his head just enough to glare at you. It is much less effective with his hair in his eyes and his body still softening inside you.
“You pull that shit again for a can of beans, I ain't gonna come getcha.” Ohh he’s so full of shit.
“The beans fed us.”
“You almost fed them.”
You smile and stroke his cheek with the backs of your fingers. “But I didn’t.”
His look says he has aged six years since sundown. “Gonna be the death’a me.”
“You keep saying that,” you murmur. “And yet, here you are. Very alive. Very accomplished.” He drops his forehead to yours and huffs a laugh despite himself.
Then a voice drifts from the direction of the house, careful and carrying through the trees with the exact tone of a man doing his absolute best not to picture anything. “Hey, guys?”
You and Daryl freeze.
Glenn clears his throat from somewhere mercifully far away. “Not looking. Not looking ok! Just, uh… just warning you, Carl’s switching over soon, and I really don’t want him to be scarred.”
You close your eyes.
Daryl groans into your shoulder like a wounded animal.
There’s a pause.
Then Glenn adds, faintly shell-shocked, “Also… wow, you guys really make alot of noise”
“Glenn!” you hiss. Daryl straightened up so he could conceal your body mody more with his. “No one asked ya ta listen man.”
“Hey Daryl — and I wasnt,” he calls back immediately. “Believe me i wish i could unhear it,”
Daryl lifts his head just enough to mutter, “I’m gonna kill him.”
“You cannot kill him, he’s keeping watch,” you whisper. “We owe him condoms.”
Daryl stills, and very slowly, he looks at you. “You owe him what.”
You smile with all the innocence left in your body, which is none. “Negotiations were fierce.”
He stares at you for one beat, two, then drops his face into your neck and starts laughing so quietly his shoulders shake. And for the first time in weeks, really and fully, you feel the road loosen its teeth.
——
Morning comes softer than it has any right to. The house still looks half-haunted in daylight, all peeling wallpaper and warped floorboards and dust lifting lazily through the beams of sun, but it smells like breakfast now, which makes even the rot in the corners feel less committed to the bit. Someone has coaxed a thin pot of oats into existence with water, a handful of salvaged raisins, and the kind of optimism only starvation can produce. It is not good, exactly, but it is hot, and hot counts for a lot.
The group moves in that sluggish, post-sleep shuffle of people who know they have to pack up but are trying to pretend the road doesn’t exist yet. Bedrolls get shaken out. Weapons are checked. Canteens are passed around and refilled from the precious little water you have left. Glenn is at the window, very determinedly looking anywhere except directly at you, which is unfortunate for him because his ears go pink every time he accidentally catches your eye.
Daryl, on the other hand, has apparently woken up possessed.
Not in a dramatic way. Not in a throw you over his shoulder and announce ownership to the room way, but still. For Daryl, this is practically a parade.
He is everywhere.
Leaning into your space while you sit against the wall. Passing you a cup of water and letting his fingers linger a second too long around yours. Brushing past your shoulder even though there is plenty of room. Standing behind you with one hand braced on the wall above your head while he pretends to listen to Rick discuss the route. It’s not showy, not enough for anyone to call him on it without sounding nosy, but you feel every inch of it. The quiet gravity of him. The warmth at your back. The way his hand lands at your hip and slides just a little lower than it usually would in front of everybody before he seems to remember himself and stills there, stubbornly refusing to move it back up.
“You’re being sweet this morning,” you smile at him, voice syrupy. He tells you to shut up - true love everybody. And then ruins the denial by brushing his thumb over your lower back as he turns away.
Across the room, Carol’s mouth twitches into a smile she hides behind her cup.
Maggie drops down beside you a few minutes later with her own bowl balanced between her knees and the kind of look that says she has decided to make your morning worse. She glances over you once—your rumpled shirt, your hair still not quite free of leaves, the dirt smudged behind your knee despite your best attempt at washing up in the cold—then raises her eyebrows. “You’re a little dirtier than your usual filth.”
You nearly choke on your oats. “Good morning to you too.”
“It is.” Her eyes flick to your neck. “For some more than others, looks like.”
You slap a hand over the spot too late.
Daryl, from beside you, pretends that it’s none of his business.
Maggie bites down on a smile. “Relax. Most of us are pretending not to notice.”
“Most of you?”
She tips her head toward Glenn, who immediately busies himself with a strap on his pack as if it has become the most fascinating object in the known universe.
You narrow your eyes. “Your husband has keen ears, I’ll give him that.”
“Its a gift and a curse,” Maggie says, voice dropping into a whisper that turns wicked around the edges. “And thanks, by the way.”
Your eyes widen, and she takes a calm bite of breakfast.
You stare at her. “Did he—”
“No details,” she says at once, holding up a hand. “I accepted the goods. I did not ask about what he did to get them.”
“yeah well not that you desrve it,” you say, covering your face with one hand. “You’re still a traitor for ratting me out yesterday”
Maggie pats your knee with deep, sisterly cruelty. “You look happier.”
You peek at her through your fingers. “Do I?”
“Oh yeah. You’re practically glowing and I think I know why,” she said, looking over to Daryl who was scoffing over his porridge.
You try to glare, but it dissolves almost instantly, because she’s right and you both know it. The awful tightness that had been sitting under your ribs for weeks is gone, or at least loosened. The world is still ruined. You are still hungry. Your feet still hurt. You still have no idea what the next road will do to you.
But your skin feels like yours again.
Your breathing feels easier.
And when Daryl settles behind you, one knee bracketing your side, and silently takes your bowl from your hand to scrape another spoonful of oats into it, your chest does something painfully soft.
Maggie watches this with shining eyes and the tiniest possible smirk.
You point your spoon at her. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re thinking too loud.”
Daryl hands the bowl back to you, fuller than before, then stays close enough that his thigh presses against your shoulder. His fingers brush your hair once, picking out a tiny piece of grass with grave concentration.
Tara, who has clearly been waiting for an opening from the other side of the room, leans over her pack with a grin. “So, since we’re all alive and emotionally renewed this morning—hypothetically—if there was a gallon of water at the bottom of a ravine, would you jump for it?”
You pause with the spoon halfway to your mouth.
“Sorry,” Tara corrects herself. “What I meant was how long would it take you to jump for it?” A couple of people in the group chuckle - we’ve got ourselves a comedian over here.
Then you squint at her as the suggestion has personally offended your new, evolved spirit.
“The fuck would i do that for?” you ask. “That sounds insane.”
The room goes quiet for one delicate second, as if the group needed time to process that it was actually you who saud that and not some clone.
"Holy shit," Tara points at you with both hands. “She’s cured.”
“I am indeed a changed woman,” you say solemnly, sitting a little straighter. “A woman of wisdom. A woman of restraint. A woman who would maybe send someone else after the water first… like Glenn.”
Glenn puts his arms out, as if saying the hell did I do?
Daryl scoffs, still fiddling with the back of your hair, which seems to have replaced his nail biting.
“Progress,” Michonne says, dry as dust, though there’s the barest curve at the corner of her mouth.
“Temporary,” Rick mutters, but there’s warmth in it now, faint and reluctant, as his gaze drifts from you to Daryl and back again.
You see the exact moment the pieces start arranging themselves behind his eyes. The second helping Daryl has silently bullied into your bowl. The way he’s settled behind you, legs bracketing your sides, one arm slung low around your waist like he’s pretending to be casual and failing with his entire body. The way you, for the first time in days, are not vibrating like a bowstring pulled too tight.
Daryl catches the change in you instantly and lifts his head. “What?”
“Nothing,” Rick says, too quickly.
Daryl narrows his eyes. “Don’t sound like nothin’.”
“I said nothing.”
Without looking up from your bowl, you point your spoon at Daryl. “Leave Rick alone. He’s respecting boundaries.”
Rick gives you the flattest look a man can give while holding porridge.
You smile sweetly back at him. “See? Growth all around. We’re sorting out a lot of things today.”
Behind you, Daryl goes very still for half a second. Then his mouth dips close to your ear, his voice low enough that it brushes right under your skin. “M’down to sort it out again.”
You elbow him lightly in the ribs, but you’re smiling too hard for it to land with any real force. “Shut up.”
“What?” His hand tightens briefly at your hip, smugness bleeding into his whisper. “Rick said we had to sort it out.”
“Pretty sure he didn’t mean traumatize Glenn.”
From across the room, Glenn says, without turning around, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Daryl calls back, deadpan.
Glenn drops his head into his hands. Maggie laughs so hard she has to set her bowl down before she spills it, and even Rick’s stern-leader face cracks around the edges.
That is, of course, the exact moment Carl wanders back in from outside, rubbing sleep from one eye, hair smashed on one side. The whole room goes abruptly, suspiciously normal in a way that is not normal at all.
Carl stops in the doorway and looks around. “Why’s everyone weird?”
“No reason,” six people say at once.
He stares at all of you for a few seconds, deeply unimpressed and far too young to be trusted with silence. Then his gaze lands on you and Daryl, still tucked together in your corner, and his brow furrows with sudden, earnest concern.
“Is it because you and Daryl went hunting in the middle of the night and didn’t get anything?”
Glenn makes a strangled noise into his sleeve.
Carl looks around, bewildered by the reaction. “There’s plenty of porridge,” he continues, like he’s trying to comfort two grieving providers. “You guys bring enough food in as it is. It’s not fair that people are upset just because you couldn’t find anything this one time.”
You stare at him. Then, very slowly, you put a hand over your heart.
“Thank you, Carl,” you say, voice trembling with false emotion. “That means more than you know.”
Daryl’s knee shifts under your hand; you can feel him trying not to laugh, which only makes you worse.
“We work night and day,” you continue, your hand sliding dramatically onto Daryl’s knee, “not afraid to get our hands dirty, not afraid to brave the woods alone, all to provide for this family. And yes, maybe in some ways last night was… fruitless.”
Glenn scoffs at that, clearly disagreeing with that statement, while Maggie buries her face in her hands. You keep going, because now that you’ve started, dignity is dead, and you are dancing on its grave. “But we gave it everything we had. Didn’t we, Daryl?”
Daryl has both hands over his face now, shoulders shaking. Whether from laughter, embarrassment, or the profound desire to sink through the floor, it’s hard to tell. You stroke his back with solemn tenderness. “Look at him. He can’t even speak, he's so broken up about it.”
“Stop,” Glenn wheezes.
“I only hope,” you say, lifting your spoon like a preacher before a ruined congregation, “that someday you can all find it in your hearts to forgive us.”
Rick finally loses the battle. A laugh slips out before he can stop it, rough and tired and real. He points his spoon at you, trying and failing to look stern. “Shut up and finish your breakfast,” he says, still laughing under his breath. “We leave in half an hour.”
The room breaks open around that—not too loud, not reckless, but real. A laugh here, a groan there, Tara clapping Glenn on the shoulder, Rick pretending not to smile and failing by a mile. It’s stupid and mortifying and warm in a way you’d forgotten mornings could be. Even the road waiting outside feels less like a punishment and more like something you might survive because you are not walking into it hollow anymore.
When breakfast is done, and the packing finally becomes unavoidable, you stand and brush dust from your jeans, only for your knees to give the tiniest, traitorous wobble. It is barely anything. Practically imaginary. Unfortunately, Daryl notices because Daryl notices everything about you when it is inconvenient. You lean close enough to murmur, "You may have slowed me down today, but honestly, I’m not even mad.”
His ears go red so fast you feel victorious for the next ten minutes.
Outside, the day waits bright and mean, the road stretching beyond the trees like it always has, indifferent and hungry. Packs go on. Weapons settle into familiar places. Rick checks the map one last time. The group begins to move in that tired, practiced formation that has kept you alive this long.
You think about the warehouse, the beans, the roof, the hunger. You think about the prison, the dream, the grass under your back, Glenn’s traumatised little voice from the dark. You think about the full bellies, softer shoulders, Daryl’s mouth at your ear, laughing against your skin, and what's to come next.
You slide your hand into his for exactly three steps, where no one can really see. His thumb strokes once over your knuckles before he lets go, because public affection still has its limits and Daryl Dixon is still Daryl Dixon, even freshly sorted out.
Whatever there is next waiting around the corner on the road, you know you'll sort that out too - one way or another.
Summary: With Merle in the slammer and Daryl left to fend for himself in his father’s house, old promises resurface as he heads down a dangerous path.
|| smut MDNI 18+, angst, hurt / comfort, DDDNE only because of dark themes! Bad things don’t happen but please heed tags if you’re uncomfortable with any of these do not read!!! Blood, Drug use, mentions of heavy drugs (implied), unsafe alcohol consumption, abusive households, conversations about death, death pact, references to suicide, childhood friends, trailerpark!daryl, young!daryl, artist!reader, pinv, one moment of painful sex, rough oral, f!receiving oral, rough!daryl, inexperienced!daryl, praise, riding, car sex ||
a/n: *taps mic* is this thing on? are my daryl girls still in the building? Hope the Norman girls enjoy a cameo by another cutie in this
“You gotta say it three times for it to be real,” he told you, voice low. The fringe of his dirty blond hair clung to his brow, damp where the heat of the night had glued it down. You could smell the summer on him, all sweat and dry grass and the faint tang of gasoline clinging to his skin. The smell of his brother’s stolen axe deodorant was pungent and his sneakers were falling apart at the toes, black canvas fraying to white threads, one lace knotted where it had snapped weeks ago.
You nodded, holding up your palm. In the center, the thin meat of your skin, blood beaded thick and syrup dark in the low light, clinging to the crease of your hand before slipping slow toward your wrist.
“If I go—” he began.
“—I go,” you said, the words steady even as your heart thudded sharply in your chest.
He pressed his hand to yours. The first touch was a slide, a wet shift of skin against skin, and then the grip tightened, sealing the mess between you. There was a strange hum in the air as the cicadas, the crickets all quieted, as if your pulse had braided itself with his.
“If I go—” you said this time, voice quiet.
“I go,” he answered, and now there was something alight in his eyes, a small and fierce brightness that caught and held you.
His fingers slipped into the spaces between yours, forcing your palms tighter. The blood trapped there had gone tacky, but still slick in places, and you could feel the slide when either of you moved. It stung where the cuts met, sharp enough to draw breath through your teeth.
“Don’t be a baby,” he muttered, impatient.
“I’m not,” you whispered back petulantly, molars grinding in your mouth, “Jus–just say it.”
“If I go—”
“Then I go.”
Ten Years Later
The trailer was quiet except for the hum of the box fan in the window, its steady spin ruffling the papers spread out on your desk in your small, albeit comfortable bedroom. A chipped ceramic mug sat half full of lukewarm coffee beside you, the ring it left on the wood overlapping three others. You were bent over a sheet of sketch paper, the sound of pencil filling your ears like white noise. Time often blurred in the hours bent over a drawing, shading until the lines began to form shape and your hand cramped. The air smelled faintly of pencil lead and the cheap Bath and Body Works candle you’d been burning down to the wick. Outside, cicadas buzzed in the hot afternoon, their chorus rising and falling in the pauses between your pencil strokes.
Your phone buzzed on the desk, skittering with vibration, and you frowned at the name flashing on the screen.
You hesitated, dropping your pencil and letting your finger hover over the screen before you finally swiped to answer and held the phone to your ear.
“Josh?”
“Hey, beautiful, sorry to bug ya,” came the reply, his voice carrying a lazy ease you could picture across his face, “An’ can ya quit callin’ me by the government name? Gives me the heebie jeebies.”
“Sorry, Scud.” You switched the phone to your other ear with a small smile, grabbing your pencil to erase out a stray line, the side of your hand brushing the rubber remnants away before turning the pencil back and sketching the curve again. “What’s up?”
“I just got done hookin’ Dixon up with some goods and, uh… well…” He trailed off, sucking air through his teeth.
Your pencil stilled in your hand. “What? What is it?”
“I dunno. He—he was askin’ for the hard stuff. Said his brother got booked and…” Scud let out a breath. “Well, I don’t carry that kinda shit, you know that. Ain’t healthy. I’m all herbal, baby, ya know?”
“Fuck,” you muttered, already pushing back from the table. Your drawing slid to the side as you started gathering your things. You slammed your notebook closed, stacked your supplies in a haphazard pile and grabbed your sweatshirt and keys on the way to the door. “I’m heading to him now. Was he at his place?”
“Nah. Quarry.”
Double fuck. You stopped in the doorway, your graphite stained palm pressing to your forehead while you thought through your next move. “Okay, I’ll call you later,” you said into the phone. “And Scud?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you,” you sighed, “For callin’ me.”
“No prob, sweets,” he said easily. “Hope he’s okay.”
“Yeah,” you sighed, hanging up and muttering, “Me too.”
The gravel rattled beneath your truck tires, the sound dragging through the valley as you pushed it up the dirt track. Heat poured through the windshield, the air shimmering above the hood. By the time you jerked the gear into park, you were already swinging your door open, canvas shoes hitting dirt before the engine even coughed quiet.
There was a clattering of glass, a grunt of something, and you saw him up ahead.
“Daryl,” you exhaled to yourself, more relief than greeting.
He was down by the lip of the quarry, his faded tank falling across his chest, the red plaid shirt around his waist twisting with the motion as he stalked back and forth. There was a mess of busted bottles scattered around his feet, his backpack ripped wide, guts of it spilled in the dirt. And as he moved about kicking up dust, his arms jerked loose like he could shake something off, a half-drained bottle of Tito’s dangling from his hand.
“What are you doin’?” you asked as you approached, voice sharper now.
He flinched at the sound of your voice and took in the sight of you, but covered it quickly, a dismissive snort cutting out of him as he pitched a rock into the water, “Who told ya?” His words were already coiled, defensive, like barbed wire.
“Does it matter?” you shot back, closing the distance. “Dare, what the hell are you doin’?”
“Go home,” he said flatly, voice scraped raw like the gravel under your tires.
You planted yourself in place, arms crossed. “How drunk are you?”
“Not even tipsy.” A lie and you knew it. “Get the hell outta here.” he added.
“No.”
He spun on you then, wild-eyed, hair clinging damp to his forehead as his lip curled into a snarl. “I don’t want you here!”
The heat pressed down heavy for a long pause, the stink of vodka sharp in the air. You could taste the anger between you, bitter and old. He was nasty with his temper, always knew how to poke your deepest wounds. An animal backed into a corner, lashing out at anything that came too close.
“Daryl, you’re acting like an idiot,” you snapped, unable to contain your own snippy tone. “What happened?”
He barked a laugh that wasn’t a laugh at all. “What happened? Fuckin’ Merle happened. Ain’t nothin’ new. Got himself locked up and now—and now I’m—goddammit—” His words cracked apart as he swore and threw the bottle back, head tipping, throat working hard.
Something in you snapped. Rage and hurt swelled hot in your chest and you lunged, yanking the bottle from his hand. Before he could grab it back you threw it to your mouth, drinking deep. The burn was immediate, brutal, spilling down your chin, soaking into your shirt.
“Would you quit it?” Daryl barked, rolling his eyes like you were just a nuisance. But when you didn’t stop, when you tipped the bottle further and choked another mouthful down, he lunged, snatching at your wrist. “I said quit it!”
You stumbled back, jerking it out of reach. “If you’re gonna be this fucking stupid, I might as well be too.”
He stood, frozen in place as his chest heaved with breath.
“You go, I go.” you spat, eyes stinging now as you heaved in sharp lungfuls, the awful taste on your tongue strong enough to make your stomach churn and threaten, “Remember? That’s what we swore. So if you’re dead set on shooting up and drinking yourself into the grave, I’ll meet you there!”
You watched as his face broke in stages—anger, disbelief, something desperate beneath it.
“Stop,” he said again, but it was different this time. Low and serious, a warning and a plea tangled together as his eyes burned a hole through yours.
Your hand dropped, the bottle swinging loose from your fingertips. The alcohol scalded in your throat, your stomach roiled, and for a second you thought you might collapse with it.
“Just talk to me,” you begged in a whisper.
He looked out at the water, its shimmering stillness reflecting the blue of the sky, then back at you, his eyes the same shade, his chest rising too fast.
Finally, he marched off a few paces and dropped onto a dirt mound under the cool shade of the lone tree.
You followed slowly, your converse crunching glass, but before you sat he muttered—Wait—and he tugged his plaid shirt from around his waist, shook it out, and laid it on the ground. You whispered back your thanks and sank down beside him, exhaling the breath you’d been holding in your lungs the whole drive over.
The world went quiet around you. Other than your shared breath, there was only the low rush of the quarry, a bird somewhere calling out. Cars passed far off in the valley across the water.
“I hate him.” His voice was small, broken open.
No you don’t. “I know.”
Daryl’s face twisted, and he looked away, his arms stretched long over his knees, back curling as he slumped over them, “How could—how…?” His words tangled, then cut off in a choked sound. He sniffled, quick and sharp, and before you could think better of it, you reached, your hand settling against the other side of his head, fingers in his dirty blonde hair, coaxing him down against you until his temple rested against your chest.
He didn’t cry, but he clung. One arm locked around your back, the other heavy across your legs.
“He left me with ‘em,” he whispered finally, voice muffled into your skin, the skin of his thumb between his teeth.
“I know.” You pressed your lips to his hair, closing your eyes, thinking of Daryl being alone in his house with his angry father. “We’ll get through it, Dare. We always do. You always do. And then…” you looked out at the water, its surface flashing orange in the lowering sun, “...then we’ll get away from here. Find some house out in the middle of nowhere. Live off the land, hunt, fish, do whatever the hell we want.”
“Yeah?” he asked, turning over in your lap now, eyes up to you, head still resting in your lap, but facing you now. Your hand dropped from his head to lay across his chest, the other arm now cradling the back of his head in the crook of your elbow.
“Yeah.” you echoed with a small smile.
He smiled back, just a little, as he said: “I want a dog.”
“We can totally get a dog.” you said with a quiet laugh, looking down at him. He was so damn pretty, even now, the sharpness in him carved by years that had hardened what once was soft. But beneath it, you could still see the boy you’d made that deal with. The one with holes in his sneakers, sun-bleached hair hanging in his eyes, a boy who’d never really gone away.
Daryl’s face went very serious for a moment, and brought his hand up to push your hair back, "I'm only goin if you are.”
You caught his hand, pressed your lips to the scar etched across his palm. “You go, I go.”
He stared at where your mouth met his skin for a long beat, and you felt the air shift, only slightly, like the ground beneath you had tilted. You set his hand down carefully, your stomach buzzing with vodka and nerves both.
“Scud said you got somethin’ today?” you asked, avoiding whatever was stirring between the two of you, “Still got it?”
“Oh, so he’s the snitch,” Daryl muttered, rolling his eyes.
“Hey, he’s a good guy,” you said, swatting gently at him. “He was worried about you.”
His eye-roll deepened, but he was already fishing into his back pocket. He pulled out a little white paper joint, flicking it between his fingers, one brow cocked at you.
You grinned, tugging your lighter free from your own pocket. He leaned in close enough that you could smell the mix of motor oil and sweat on him, the sharp tang of vodka still clinging to his breath. You cupped your hand around the flame against the hot evening wind, and he dipped the tip into it, lips around the paper. The burn flared, orange against his face, and he inhaled slowly, letting the embers pull.
When he exhaled, taking it from his mouth, he sat up so his palm pressed into the dirt just beside your thigh, his body still leaning across your legs. The joint dangled from his fingers before he brought it back to his lips, then passed it to you.
You took it from him and inhaled the sweet stick, the smell making your brain a little fuzzy and light. You handed it back to Daryl, and he inhaled deep, then tilted his head toward you as he held his breath. You leaned in, a familiar ease to this part, the closest either of you ever let yourselves get, and let the smoke roll into your mouth, hot and sweet and dizzying.
Your eyes fluttered shut as you caught the smoke, lips parted. His face was right there, the heat of him brushing your skin, his hair falling forward. When you closed your mouth around his exhale, your lips grazed his—barely, the lightest brush, but enough to stop your heart cold.
Daryl jerked back like he’d touched fire. His cheeks flushed pink as he forced his eyes away. He acted like nothing had happened, and he was good at it too—always had been. He’d grown up learning how to bury every flicker of feeling, how to swallow weakness before it showed. That was survival in the Dixon house: hide it, choke it down, or take the beating that came with letting anything that resembled feelings show.
He passed the joint back to you with a hand that wasn’t entirely steady. You took it, holding his gaze this time, your lips closing slowly around the paper. Smoke curled in your lungs, and when you exhaled, you tilted toward him, giving it back. He leaned in, cautious at first, his mouth opening to catch the haze. His lashes lowered, long and dark against his skin as he watched you, so close his breath mixed with yours.
But you didn’t stop there. You have to be brave now. You told yourself. So you closed the gap, pressing your lips to his as the last of the smoke slipped away.
Daryl froze. For a second he was a statue, every muscle locked, as though the earth itself had gone silent beneath him. But then something broke loose as his hand came up, cupping your cheek, and he kissed you back. Everything happened quickly from there, clumsy at first, then rougher, mouth parting against yours. The taste of smoke and vodka and his own dry, cotton tongued breath filled you.
His tongue slid against yours, new and wet, and you opened for him. Your teeth clicked once in the rush of it, and you both let out these little desperate noises—his low in his chest, yours muffled into his mouth. The kiss wasn’t neat or careful. Spit slicked your bottom lip, his tongue sweeping messily until you couldn’t tell which breath was his and which was yours.
One of his hands was still planted in the dirt by your thigh, and you brought yours up, throwing the joint somewhere into the dirt as you kissed him harder. He groaned into your mouth at that, the sound vibrating straight through you.
Your noses bumped, your lips slipped wetly apart only to find each other again, the noises coming from you louder now—little gasps and grunts, the sloppy noises of spit-slick mouths trying to take in too much at once. When his tongue slid deeper, clashing against yours, you moaned right into him, and his answering breath caught like it had shocked him to hear it.
“Car,” he breathed against your mouth.
“Car,” you echoed, scrambling to get up. He smiled as you stood looking at each other, the world glittering and waving behind him, the cotton feeling of your brain making you smile wider as you took his hand.
You swung the truck door open and climbed onto the bench seat, but before you could slide all the way in, his hands were on your hips, rough and insistent. He dragged you forward until your legs hooked around his waist, his body crowding into the cradle of your thighs. His mouth found yours again, harder this time, a hungry clash of lips and tongue, kissing you like he couldn’t get enough.
The air was thick with a buzzing in your ears, the scrape of denim, the wet smack of mouths. You shoved at his shirt until it came free, pulling it over his head, and his hands fumbled with yours, tugging clumsily at your clothes like he couldn’t work fast enough. His lips trailed sloppily across your skin, hot and wet against the corner of your mouth, your chin, your throat. You felt him at your pulse, mouthing, sucking, nipping, his breath ragged as your hands slid over his back.
“You feel so–” he murmured between kisses, “so good, so warm,”
“So do you,” you sighed, kissing his bare shoulder, and as your hands traveled down his spine, you felt the old scars, marred where a belt had slashed his back, his father’s ire always present, no matter if you were nearly naked in each other arms, miles from home.
You stilled, your heart breaking even as your body ached for more.
Daryl froze too, lifting his head, eyes dark and uncertain.
“It’s okay,” you whispered, your palms cupping his face, stroking over the sharp line of his cheekbone with your thumb. “It’s okay.”
He searched you for something, and you weren’t sure what it was—doubt? pity?—but when he didn’t find it, he kissed you again, rougher, needier, until your breath was stolen in his mouth. His hesitation gave way to frenzy, and in the next second he was pushing your back down onto the bench seat, denim scraping against your skin as he tugged at your shorts, greedy hands yanking them down with no patience.
“Dare—take it easy, Jesus—” you gasped, bum slipping on the sticky leather as he wrestled you free of the fabric. His hands were everywhere at once, fevered, desperate, like if he didn’t get closer he might burn up from the inside out.
His mouth was back on yours, teeth knocking, spit stringing between you when he finally tore away to drop down your body. His hands tugged your thighs open, greedy, almost rough, the seat pulling against your skin until he had you bared on the cracked leather bench.
“Daryl—” you started, but then his mouth was on you.
It wasn’t careful. His tongue was hot and messy, just like his kiss, dragging where it wanted, his lips sucking at your sensitive center too hard, his teeth grazing the softest parts until you gasped at the sharp edge of it. He was clumsy, unpracticed, but relentless. Every lick, every nip came with this raw desperation, like he was trying to prove something—trying to devour all the doubt that had ever been beaten into him.
Your fingers found his hair, tugging, guiding, but he was greedy, shaking his head like he couldn’t get enough. The scrape of his stubble, the wet sounds he was making—it was too much and not enough all at once. Pain and pleasure tangled tight in your belly, winding you up until your thighs trembled against his ears.
You came hard, sudden, the world going white as your voice cracked out of you, and still he didn’t stop. His mouth kept working, tongue pushing, lips dragging, like he was determined to wring every last drop from you.
“Daryl—ah, fuck, stop, stop—” you gasped, shoving at his hair, your hips jerking from the overstimulation. Your whole body was twitching, too raw, too much. “Stop!”
He lifted his head finally, mouth slick, eyes wild and almost panicked, like he thought he’d broken something, ruined something.
You cupped his face at once, thumbs brushing the damp heat of his cheeks. “Hey, hey,” you soothed, voice steady where his wasn’t. His chest heaved, frantic, but you stroked him calm, sitting up to kiss his lips. He tasted like you, heady and honey and salt. “Take this slow, okay? You don’t have to prove a damn thing to me. You know that.”
He blinked at you, shoulders drawn tight as a bowstring, his breath catching in his throat.
“I already want you,” you whispered, leaning close so he couldn’t mistake it, couldn’t mistake you. “Always have. That’s never been the question.”
Something in him faltered then, the fight bleeding out of his body, leaving him raw and uncertain beneath your hands. You guided him up with you, coaxing him back into the truck, settling him on the bench. He let you, like a colt finally brought to halter, restless but yielding to your touch.
You tugged at his jeans, pushing them down as you climbed over him, straddling his lap. He was thick and throbbing for contact, but he shivered when you kissed him again—slower this time, steady, your lips working against his until his rough breaths eased into yours. His hands hovered at your hips before finally settling there, not pulling or grasping, just holding.
“It’s alright,” you murmured against his mouth, your tongue brushing his top lip where they parted. “I’m going to show you…how good it is. How good you are. Nothing to prove to me. Okay?”
“Yeah—” his voice cracked like he was young again, just that kid in the field and blood tacky between each other’s palms, and he swallowed before trying again, “yeah, alright.”
Your gaze dropped, fingers trailing delicately down his stomach until you traced the flushed head of him. He twitched beneath your touch, a hiss escaping his teeth as he watched your hand close around him.
“You’re so big, Dare. Fuck,” you breathed, stroking him slow, savoring the weight of him in your palm.
Color rushed high across his cheekbones, his hands gripping tighter at your hips, his fingers denting into your flesh. “Please,” he rasped, near begging, “please, do somethin’, yer killin’ me.”
“Alright, alright,” you teased softly, leaning in to brush your nose against his, “patience. I’m just admirin’.”
He let out a shaky laugh, huffing it against your mouth, and when you sat back to look at him, you thought your heart might give out. His eyes were wide and open in a way you’d never seen, full of softness and trust and something that might have been love.
You kissed him again, deep and sure, as you shifted your hips and lined him up with your slick entrance.
His head fell back against the headrest the moment you pressed down, the tip of him nudging inside. You pressed open, wet kisses to the scruff at his jaw, both of you moaning loud, ragged sounds that tangled together as you sank slow, inch by inch. The stretch burned, pleasure and sting all wound tight, your body clenching around the thick intrusion. You fisted his hair, grounding yourself, while his cock throbbed and pulsed inside you until your hips were flush against his, the sensitive flesh of his balls snug against the curve of your ass.
You sat there, still, the weight of him filling you to the hilt. He was trembling under you, his chest heaving, his fingers kneading into your hips.
“Holy fuckin’—” his voice broke into a strangled groan. “Fuck.”
“I know,” you whispered, kissing his jaw again, up to his ear, soothing, steadying. “I know.”
You felt yourself twitching, pulsing around him, your body adjusting to the fullness, while his cock beat inside you with every frantic rush of his blood.
You stayed seated on him, your breath stuttering out in little gasps as your body tried to adjust, the stretch of him so deep you could feel every hard twitch of him inside you. His hands gripped your hips so tightly they shook, thumbs pressing hard into the soft flesh.
“Jesus Christ,” he groaned, head tipping back, throat working as he swallowed.
“Yer—fuck—you’re squeezin’ me so tight.”
You bent to kiss his mouth again, swallowing the curse off his lips. “That’s ‘cause you’re huge, Dare,” you whispered in praise, dragging your tongue into his mouth, tasting him. His moan shuddered right into you, vibrating through your chest.
When you rocked forward the first time, it was almost too much—you felt the thick ridge of him drag against your walls, every vein catching, and you gasped right into his open mouth. His hands scrambled higher, up your waist, his breath breaking into a ragged growl.
“Goddamn, I can’t—” he hissed, “feels too—”
The truck creaked beneath you as you started to move, small rolls of your hips at first, then a slow lift before you sank back down on him. The squelch of your arousal meeting his length filled the cab, obscene and wet, and the sound alone had him biting down on a groan, his teeth sinking into his bottom lip until it went white.
You found his hair again, curling your fingers into it, tugging his head back enough to kiss him hard. The kiss was sloppy, spit slick and desperate all over again, teeth and tongues and moans as your body took him deeper, grinding yourself down until you were stuffed full to the hilt.
He tried to buck up into you, clumsy, too hard too fast, and you gasped at the sudden sharp sting of him bottoming out. “Oh my god,” you breathed against his mouth.
His chest heaved, nostrils flaring as he tried to match your rhythm. “S’okay,” he said, “Y’can take it, take me.”
The sounds coming from him were raw—half-choked moans, breathy curses, little guttural noises that slipped free every time you sank down on him. Both of your thighs trembled, too intense of being stuffed full. His fingers flexed and kneaded at your hips, needy and suddenly pulling and pushing, but he stayed with you, following your lead.
“Fuck, you’re…you’re takin’ me so good,” he gasped, lips curling back in a little snarl. Different now, more intense, not angry. His words came out broken, like he was shocked by them, like he hadn’t meant to say it.
“And you’re so deep,” you sighed, your own voice shaking now. He filled you so completely it was dizzying, stretching you in a way no one ever had.
You rocked harder then, chasing the drag of him, the wet slap of skin on skin getting louder, filthier in the small space of the truck cab. Every sound felt amplified, the creak of leather under your knees, the wet squelch every time you slid down on him, the hungry tangle of your mouths when you couldn’t stop kissing him.
He broke then, thrusting up into you, messy and frantic, his breath ragged against your cheek. You held his face in your hands, murmuring, “It’s okay, Dare, just feel me—just be with me,” even as you gasped at the way he filled you, thick and heavy and hitting places you hadn’t known existed.
The pleasure rolled through you sharp and fast, a hot rush building low in your belly, and your moans turned high, needy, as you clung to him, grinding down harder, desperate for that sweet spot. He felt it too, his body tensing, the muscles in his stomach seizing as his moans grew louder, rougher.
When you came apart around him, it was sudden and earth shattering. You clenched down on him so hard he shouted, a deep, broken sound that filled the truck. You buried your face against his neck, gasping his name, while he held you tight, still fucking up into you like he couldn’t stop.
The world outside the truck might as well have burned down to nothing; all that existed was the slap of your bodies, the wet drag of his cock inside you, the heat and noise of two friends turned lovers, finally giving in.
And when the tremors ran out of you and his hips slowed, the silence rushed in like a wave. His chest heaved against yours, damp with sweat, the cab fogged with the smell of sex and smoke. He swallowed hard, throat working as though he wanted to speak but didn’t trust himself with words.
You lifted your head, still breathless, your hair sticking to your damp face. A giggle breathed out of you softly, startling in its relief, “God, Dare,” you managed between little bubbles of laughter, “that was… insane.”
He blinked at you, droopy eyed, then huffed something like a laugh of his own as his eyes fluttered open, his blue eyes shining in the lowering sun. “Reckon I didn’t…fuck…reckon I didn’t do too bad, huh?” His voice was rough, cracking on the words, but there was a boyishness to it that made you laugh harder, pressing your forehead to his.
“You were perfect,” you whispered, thumb smoothing over the heat of his cheek.
His grin spread slow, uneven, and you both dissolved into quiet laughter, the sound shaky and warm as it filled the small cab. It felt ridiculous and perfect. Just two people in love, tangled up in sweat and slick and something so much bigger than either of you wanted to name yet.
And when his laughter finally died down, he kissed you again, quick and crooked, as though he couldn’t help himself.