Fluff | Angst | Thank you @weretheones and @normanplusdaryl for betaing <3
You’re part of Daryl’s past, but you could also be his future.
or
A bad day leads the two of you to each other.
or
Whoever said it’s better to love and lose
Never loved and lost you
Daryl barely made it through sophomore year.
In all honesty, he was impressed he even got to junior year. When Merle left at the tail end of spring, he - in all of his younger brother naïveté - thought he would come back before the semester ended, taking him from the dump they called a house and from that asshole they had the unfortunate pleasure of calling their old man.
But July came and went, then August, and by the time the new school year rolled around, Daryl stopped waiting for him - just shouldered his backpack and went to school because where the fuck else was he supposed to go?
He gave the whole school thing two weeks. It was enough time to mark off attendance - to lay low before he traded his backpack for his crossbow and started hunting for that weird butcher shop three blocks down to make some money - and he had intended on following it.
Intended, being the right word, because the plan went to shit the second Mr. American History started pairing people up for those dumb, mandatory, biweekly collaborative projects.
Intended, because it just had to be you he was paired with, didn't it? His stupid classroom crush he tried so hard to stop thinking about?
He remembers seeing you for the first time in some math class in sophomore year, and he’d, in his hormone-ruled, bored-out-of-his-mind teenage brain, spent the better half of the period just looking at you. He never worked up the courage to say anything about it to anyone, but you were the prettiest thing he’d seen in his 16 years on Earth, and he hated the way you made his hands all clammy.
Even years later, he looks back on the months he spent being your friend, and he still feels that crushingly familiar clench of his chest.
Maybe it wormed its way almost permanently into him those weeks he first sat next to you in American History. It was a compulory course and both you and he hated it. The teacher - Durand, but Daryl took to calling him Dickhead and Deranged just to see which would make you roll your eyes the hardest - was a notorious douchebag, round glasses over a nose that was entirely too big to stay on his face and three strands of gray hair that seemed to be holding onto his head by spite alone.
He never seemed to take Daryl seriously, even though Daryl knew more than double the amount of history you did. You could pick his brain for hours about the pirates and the Sumerians and the Cherokee and their legends, and he’d let you, despite the glare that marked over his face for anyone else.
In exchange, you let him pick your brain, too. Over the piece of apple pie the two of you would share on the rare occasion you’d both scraped together enough to figure it would be worth buying, he asked about your future. He tried picturing himself with you through it all despite knowing there was nothing for him outside of this shithole town, and he listened to you talk.
He could listen to you talk for hours.
You had big dreams, considering you came from the same place he did, but he had faith you could do it. He knew you could, and even looped his pinky with yours, your thumb pressed up against his while he promised to make it to graduation. He had to watch you toss your cap and flip the bird at 4 years of hell, didn’t he?
But then winter came, and with the Christmas break rounding the corner, Merle came back too, peeling into the dirt road in front of the Dixon dump and taking Daryl along with him. You remember coming back when the second semester started, the same room that had once been used for History now a Government class, and you had hoped to suffer through it together.
You made it through one school week until you’d started asking around.
Nobody got themselves involved with the Dixons - with their surly tempers and their permanent scowls, but you’d gotten into the habit of ignoring those words when you were with Daryl - so when no answers turned up, you weren’t really surprised.
You figured he must have finally gotten his out from his old man.
It was only at graduation that you’d found out what happened to him, overhearing one of the principals talking about how both of Will Dixon’s sons had run away from home and how he’d drunkenly bragged about finally beating sense into them, and, though you knew it was selfish, as the ceremony ticked on, you still hoped Daryl would come back in time to watch your cap toss.
He never did.
When he finally did come back to Georgia, it was a little over a full year later. The old lady that ran the diner the two of you hung around after school had told him that you got a scholarship offer in May - some bigshot school out west - and that you’d packed your bags and left in August.
You weren’t set to come back until the year ended in April, and he wasn’t planning on staying.
He wasn’t planning on making staying anywhere a habit, and, in the blink of an eye, twenty years passed.
A second blink and the world fell.
Everything changed so quickly that it truly did feel like an instant as minuscule as a blink - the dinosaurs had the meteor, and life before them had the ice age - and he couldn’t help but wonder if this was just a breath before a new age flooded in.
It seems like everything he thought about was about the future. Some of it he would have considered trivial before - when the next meal would come, when the next time he’s going to fill his canteen is and where the next source of freshwater is - but, in this blip of time, he hesitates to call it that.
Sometimes, when he went out on his bike or shouldered his crossbow and slipped his knives into his holsters, he thought about how Li’l Asskicker and Carl would grow up - how they would never really get to be kids in the same way Rick probably wanted them to be - and almost nothing he did felt trivial anymore.
It scared him, he guesses - how much he cared about those kids and how much everyone else did, too.
He wished someone cared about him like that when he was younger.
It was good, though, this pressure. Daryl was never really one to half-ass anything in the first place, but with the intake of Woodbury and the Council’s decision to start bringing people in, there was a new drive to care. It rippled through the prison, and he liked it, being a part of something bigger than himself.
He felt like someone new.
Someone that mattered - that did good - instead of being some asshole with a bigger asshole for a brother.
At least, he did until he saw you.
Two weeks after taking in the people of Woodbury - with one week spent out recruiting and another spent in the infirmary because they’d met some less than friendly people who definitely did not fit the recruitment criteria - he saw you from around the corner, an all too familiar face helping Carol with meal prep in the courtyard.
He didn’t eat lunch that day, and to say he avoided you was an understatement.
There was something about you that brought back feelings he would have rather left in the past. You reminded him of when he was a teenager, stuck in his shitty hometown with his piece of shit old man and no way out. But at the same time, you reminded him of those nights spent down at the creek, skipping stones and staring at the stars, that comforting lack of second-guessing because he knew he was, for the first time in his life, in the company of someone who actually wanted to spend time with him.
You reminded him of that diner with the warm apple pie, and he never could forget the first time his heart ever beat against his ribs like it was too big for his chest.
But, most of all, you reminded him of first love and his broken promise - of a future he could never have had.
Daryl hated it, being confronted with his past like that.
So yeah, maybe he did revert back to his old ways of hiding and just trying not to think about his problems, and yeah, maybe he did take one too many runs back to back so he wouldn’t have to keep fighting the urge to look for you despite simultaneously being scared shitless at the thought of talking to you, but it was successful in staying away from you, and that’s all he cared about.
Or, well, he thought it was.
Because, though it’s been nearly two decades since you’d thought about high school - with it long since becoming college, and college into adulthood - it’s crossed your mind more than you’d liked to admit lately. It’s an odd feeling, an ill-fitting nostalgia creeping through the holes of your blanket-covered cell bars, but it was oddly comforting. You never thought you’d ever think of that place as comforting, but maybe it wasn’t high school that you found yourself chasing in the dead of night.
It was him.
Daryl never really knew how popular he was - here, and back then, when those minutes before and after gym class divulged into shushed remarks about his looks and half-serious confessions of crushes muttered to the secrecy of the changeroom’s four walls - but you did. You were always on the other side of it, silent in your agreement.
Woodbury - or, well, ex-Woodbury - was no different.
He’s a far cry from that scrawny little kid you split your lunch with all those years ago, but there's still the linger of boyish handsomeness to him that made your cheeks heat when you thought about him too long. There was no mistaking him for anyone else, but that subdued, ultraviolet warmth you’d grown familiar with was gone from his eyes.
He’s not seventeen anymore, flipping his uncut hair from his face as he taught you how to skip stones and catch fireflies, but you wanted to talk to him all the same. There’s not much left from the old world - let alone much that you could have considered good, or wanted to remember - but he’s one of the few things you’d cared enough about to keep safe from the pulling tide that faded your memories.
He made that shitty town more bearable, even if it was for those few months. Gritting your teeth and enduring had become tiring until he’d grimaced at that first History Inquiry project and made you laugh with the annoyed upturn of his lip.
You’d planned on thanking him at graduation, but he’d left months before then.
You’d planned on a lot of things to be frank, but there’s no reason to linger in the past when now is a shell of what then was.
There’s even less of a reason when now feels heavier than then ever was.
Today would have marked ten days without incident, a first foray into the monumental double digits until the sun had set behind the return of the run crew’s RV and Beth was forced to flip the number back to zero.
It’s been four hours since they came back - a quarter of the group gone from the unfriendlies they’d met, another dealing with the aftermaths of the encounter and one more made up from those the crew’s recruited - and it’s the first time in those four hours that you’ve left the dingy wing of the infirmary.
You didn’t hate it in there. Far from it, actually, with Hershel and the others being half-decent company and seeing the work you did benefiting people, but the infirmary, especially on days when the crews rounded back, meant the stinging smell of blood and death lingered no matter how much you scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. It stuck to every crevice on your body, and it permeated. Guilted you for not trying hard enough and not knowing enough.
On days like this, everywhere you went seemed too small and too unforgiving, and you’re not sure if you can stand tossing and turning in your bunk. The night sky is a friendlier sight than your ceiling, and the view from the abandoned watchtower is a hell of a lot better than the tiny, barred-up window at the corner of your cell.
If you’re lucky enough, maybe sleep will steal you for a couple of hours before the sun comes up. At least enough to make it through the next day.
You have faith it will - you can already feel the first wave of exhaustion pull at your bones.
Taking a breath, you press your hands into your pockets after pushing the door to the Prison open and slipping out. Autumn is beginning to seep through the cracks of summer and the nights are starting to get colder, but your jacket should be enough until you climb up and find sanctuary in the sleeping bag you’d left there three days ago.
It doesn’t take long to reach the door - if you jig the knob to the right before twisting and skip the third step from the top, the trek upwards is close to silent - but when you open it, the creak yields, at first, an expletive before the annoyed voice tears through the quiet.
“I already told ya I ain’t talkin’ ‘bout-”
The volume of him makes you take a step back, the sound of a man making your body lock up for just a second before you recognize the mess of hair atop his head and the wings stitched on the back of his vest, and you make quick work getting to him, crossing the platform in a single stride.
“Daryl?”
And he’s quick to realize the person speaking to him isn’t Carol like he’d thought. Though he really really really hopes it’s not you, the familiarity of your voice leaves little room for speculation, even before he turns his head and - for the first time in a long time - really, really looks at you.
“Oh.”
His heart beats in his ears and locks his throat before he can muster up anything else to say, and for a second, you wonder if you should introduce yourself to him.
“Sorry, I, uh, wasn’t expectin’ no one to be here.”
But the knowing upturn of his eyebrows - his apology, and the way he scoots himself over to make room for you the same way he did in those library reading nooks - tells you you don’t need to, and your shoes slide against the concrete as you drop down to a sit.
He remembers you, too, the sweat of his hands too obvious with the fact, even though he wishes he didn’t.
He wishes there wasn’t a familiarity in the way you sidle your body against his, swinging your legs underneath the railing and over the balcony, and he wishes he couldn’t feel the heat coming off of you.
He wishes it didn’t wrap him up like the warm rays of sun, and he fights down a smile at the fact that you always were so bright. He wishes he didn’t remember you like that - glossed over in a blinding, yellow hue.
Daryl wishes he never remembered you like sunshine - he wishes he didn’t still.
Picking up the glass next to him - just to occupy himself and bide the time until his nervousness hopefully washes away into general apathy - he takes a sip before setting it down and taking a pull of the cigarette in his other hand.
The smoke is slow to fill his lungs, but he welcomes it anyways, holding it there as the nicotine-drawn buzz settles in his brain, and then he breathes it out, angling his head up and away from you.
You never liked it, the Malboros he’d swiped from his old man that he’d keep tucked in the smallest pocket of his worn-down backpack, but you’d told him one night, not unlike the one you’re both trying to find solace in right now, that you were scared of what his father might do if he found out.
Then you slipped in the obviousness of his health, just to break the tension of vulnerability, but it hit Daryl like a truck, the fact that he’d never had someone think about him like that before - like they actually cared.
“Heard your brain cells can rot if you do that.”
He raises an eyebrow at you only to be met with a small smile playing at your lips and the slightest bit of a sparkle in your eye, and the taste still lingering on his tongue reminds him of what he’s been doing. The glass is half full with the room-temperature whiskey he’d tried to make himself feel better with after stitching up his own wounds, and there’s ash from his smoking gathered beside one of the railing's poles, and despite the knowing you’re probably right, he sighs, waving your concern away.
“Ain’t worried. Don’t got a lotta them anyways.”
The cigarette between his fingers is lit still, and he takes another drag before the grayed end of it crumbles to the floor, fighting the upward tug of his cheeks at the sound of your amused huff and your quick response.
“That’s why you gotta take care of the ones you still have, Daryl.”
Scoffing, he tilts the edge of the glass towards you, holding it out for you until you take it from him, and he tries not to think about how the tips of his fingers burn when they brush up against yours. It’s not as sweet, the innocence of a teenage crush long since faded into the dull pang of expired love and loss, but it rushes through him all the same.
He would have offered you a cigarette, too, but you’ve never been one to pick up habits that bad.
A comfortable silence falls over the two of you then, the sky offering a serenity the two of you are less than strangers to, and you wince from the liquor when you finally take a sip. It’s nothing like the moonshine he’d smuggled from his dad’s stash - it went down a hell of a lot smoother than you remember that shit going - but your tolerance has taken a nosedive since weekends unwinding and inter-departmental parties had ended.
Besides, the only places you could get alcohol back in Woodbury were way above your paygrade.
Placing the cup back onto the concrete, you steal a glance at Daryl, spending just a second studying the curve of his nose and the jut of his cheekbone. He’s more handsome than he’s ever been, and you can feel the heat rush up your neck before you blink away the thought.
Get a hold of yourself.
But you can’t, not when he’s so close, and you’re not sure if it’s wholly unselfish, what makes you drop your eyes down from his face, but you do, and you realize why he was so on edge when he heard the door open.
He’s fidgeting. Ever since he put out his cigarette, he’s restless and can’t quite figure out what to do with his hands in the same way he was when you’d asked him why he never wanted to go home back in the school library, and it sends you back, too, a familiar pit growing in your stomach. It’s like he’s that kid again, scared of telling you - or, well, people - things that hurt because his stupid brother and dad drilled into him that he’s less of a man for even feeling hurt in the first place, and it’s equal parts infuriating and concerning.
You can tell that the gears are turning in your head as you try to piece him together; a run crew came back just today, and you haven't seen him in a little while. It doesn’t take a genius to make the connection - especially with everyone’s propensity to talk about how Daryl brought them in - and though you might regret it, you decide to pry.
Not pry, just ask.
Conversation used to flow so easily between the two of you. Were you naïve to hope it would again?
“Bad day?”
It’s small, your voice, teetering in the air with its uncertainty, but Daryl doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, he glances down at the space between you, wrapping his fingers around the highball before meeting your gaze, and he bites the inside of his cheek, weighing the option of telling you or not.
“Jus’ tired is all.”
And though he hesitates those first few words, your eyes are so kind - so genuinely caring - that he can’t stop himself from saying more.
That was what he was scared of.
Why hasn’t he let you go?
“Sick’a fuckin’ losin’ people.”
The frustration when he speaks is palpable, and you’re not sure if it’s bravery or stupidity that makes you move - maybe it’s both, culminating in your own desire that someone would finally see through your crippling bravado and offer you a hug or something - but your hand snakes out to grab his before you even think, shaking it slightly in the strength of your squeeze.
Then he freezes, and for a second, you think you must have overstepped - that he’s going to push you away and yell at you and leave - but he doesn’t. He just takes a breath, the heft of it rising his shoulders then dropping it as he squeezes your hand back harder, a silent thank you in the press of his fingers against yours.
But still, he lets go, afraid the warmth in his chest might make him do something he regrets, and you chew at the dried skin of your lip, thinking about the right thing to say.
Fuck, you could never navigate things like this - it got better as you got older, sure, but words always seemed to fall short when it came to you and him - and when you finally settle on something, half of you wonders if it was just because you thought it better than nothing.
“I feel you.”
Because what else are you supposed to say? That it’s going to be alright and that he shouldn’t blame himself because it's so blatant he is? It’s thin ice you’re walking on, the fear of sounding patronizing drowning out the spark of hope you want to light him with, because you remember the man he was. He’s never had anyone fighting in his corner, and you’re not callow enough to think he thinks of you as something - someone - different.
But he does. He does think of you as someone different, and he wants to say more, but he doesn't know where he stands with you, or with himself. If he says what he’s thinking - that he feels like it is his fault and that he’s not sure if he could ever stop feeling like that. That he’s scared shitless and like it’s some big joke that people actually look up to him for things - wouldn’t that make it feel too real?
So he doesn’t. He just tips the lip of the glass against his and takes another sip to make sure his mouth is occupied, staring down at the bottom ridge of it until you speak again, and he’s helpless to do anything but look at you.
“At least it’s beautiful out tonight.”
He’s sent back to twenty years ago then - the scrawny redneck you’d somehow deemed good enough to be your friend forcing his old habits back to the him of the present - and he can’t help the squeaked little noise of a response. Words have always been hard for him, too. They’re hard for him to think of and even harder for him to form, and it’s made worse by the fact it’s almost like he’s back at 16, convinced that you’re too pretty to talk to.
“Yeah.”
And though you hear his hum of agreement, he never looks away from you, admiring the curve of your familiar smile and the rise of your cheekbones.
The lurch of his heart comes back then - the same beat against his ribs that he hated all those decades ago - and it’s stark then, the realization you’ve never really left him.
“Ain’t never seen nothin’ like it.”
Pressing his lip to the edge of the glass once more, he welcomes the burn of whiskey when you smile at the moonlit horizon, and he watches as you lean your chin against your arms.
You’re beautiful - more beautiful than all the colours in the star-speckled sky - and he could stare for hours.
just beta read the reunion fic that @haruhey finished writing... when i tell you that this one is good, i mean that this one is GOOD. i think you'll all really enjoy it :]
– jin steps into the cute bakery kyungmin told him about last night. his nose is invaded by the sweet smell of sweet treats just being out of the oven paired with fresh bread and cinnamon. one minute in here and he can tell the owner is experienced in his business contrary to what his brother had said. jin allows himself to snigger a bit, all too knowing that kyungmin was just bad-mouthing this place as an attempt to support jin’s business. ❛ ah, it must have been hard for him. they even have these chocolate cupcakes he likes so much, ❜ he muses out loud as he crouches down to take a good look of the desserts displayed.
( based on this. ) ☾ ˚⊹ *・゚countless nights were spent like this, the two tangled up in each other. callie knew that it was wrong, that she should quit whatever the two were doing, but she was too head over heels with them. there was so many factors that told her to leave them, to end it once and for all, but callie couldn’t do it. sure, they were dating her best friend, but wasn’t callie with them first ? she saw the good, the bad and the ugly with them so how was it fair that her best friend got the best ? she would never quite figure that out. “ tell me you can stay here all day, ” she whispered, her head upon their chest. ( @haruwrites )
Daryl overhears a conversation he definitely shouldn’t have, but he acts on it anyways.
or
The tip of my tongue is sweet
Whenever I say your name
Typical conversations, the smallest feelings
I keep talking about them
About you
Girl’s talk Girl’s talk
Girl’s talk Girl’s talk about you
“It’s not my fault!”
Daryl’s steps freeze at the sound coming from your makeshift office, your voice slightly muted by the wooden door pulled shut but still seeping through the little space which separates it from the floor.
‘It’s not my fault’?
“But it is, you idiot!”
Raising an eyebrow, he adjusts the crossbow slung over his shoulder, leaning his ear closer and trying to make out the muffled voice responding back to you. It’s wrong, he knows it is - privacy and all that shit - but, God, he wants to know everything about you.
“He gives you ‘fuck me’ eyes all the time! Ask literally anyone around here, dude. He wants to rail you.”
What?
Now that catches his attention, an undeserving flash of jealousy crashing through his body as a lump forms in his throat. His grip tightens on the strap digging into skin as he swallows it down, the thought of you with someone else making him hot with anger even though he knows you’re not his. That gnaw of privacy returns, but he wants to know who has been obvious enough that anyone can see it, and why the fuck he hasn’t noticed.
“No he doesn’t, Rosita.”
He doesn’t blame whoever ‘he’ is - after all, it would be hypocritical of Daryl to, considering he’s been pining after you for damn near a year with little to no progress to show for all the heartache he’s been through - but Jesus, if ‘he’ ends up confessing before he does, you might take ‘him’ up on the offer. You might take ‘him’ up on the offer and all Daryl will be left with would be a broken heart and many, many more cold and lonely nights.
Fuck, who is ‘he’?
“It does look like he wants to rail you.”
Another flash of anger and- wait. Is that-
“Carol-“
It is.
“No, he doesn’t. He just- his eyes are just expressive, and they’re like- they just look like that, okay?”
He promises to himself to pry Carol for answers despite the weighted drop of dread in his stomach. She knows who ‘he’ is, but chooses not to say anything when she catches him staring at you when he knows you’re not looking? God, if she’s not telling him whoever ‘he’ is, she must think he’s not enough competition to even know about ‘him’ in the first place. Did she just let him steep in his wishful thinking as a consolation prize for the fact it’ll always be a fantasy?
“You give him ‘fuck me’ eyes, too, y’know. Daryl’s smart, but he’s an idiot when it comes to you. Trust me.”
Wait.
He’s ‘he’?
“Maggie-“
Holy shit.
“Don’t ‘Maggie’ me. We all know he’d try an’ punch the ground if you fell.”
Daryl reds then, a heat of blush crawling up his chest at the realization of how fucking obvious he’s been and how, yeah, maybe he would actually try and punch the ground if you fell. He’s not moving anymore - just spun away from the door, stuck from his own shock to the floor - but when your voice muffles through the wood next, he turns towards it like a sailor to a damn siren song.
“Remind me why you’re all here again?”
He hears an onslaught of answers then; ‘you’re too hot to be pining after someone. Especially someone who looks like they would jump on you the second they can’, ‘Daryl looks at you like you’re everything, and I’ve never seen him look at anyone quite like that’, ‘Daryl told me he likes you’- thanks, Carol - and his eyes widen at the way the casualness of their words, as if they’ve been said to you a million times before.
Wait… you’re pining after ‘him’? The ‘him’ who happens to actually be him?
Jesus fucking Christ.
“It was- I- look, guys, besties, ladies, it- it doesn’t matter that I have a tiny, little crush on him.”
Now comes a cacophony of scoffs, your groan cutting through them before you speak again, and Daryl thinks something must be wrong with his circulation because his pulse is beating in his ears so hard that he leans almost comically close to the door in order to hear you over it.
But no, there’s nothing wrong with his circulation. If anything, it’s working perfectly well because the rush of blood that accompanies the realization is the only rational result of knowing about your tiny crush.
Your tiny crush.
Your tiny crush on him.
“Okay, fine, yeah, sure, maybe it’s not tiny. Maybe I’ve been in love with him for, like, months now and maybe it’s not going away, but what about it? It’s not like he thinks of me the same way, okay? Just because I want to kiss him and, like, cuddle him and, yeah, maybe get him to rail me doesn’t mean he wants to, okay?“
You.. you think he doesn’t think of you that way? You want to kiss him and cuddle with him and you want him to- you want him to-
Swallowing, Daryl wipes at his red-soaked face, his jeans starting a little too tight at the images rushing through his head like a flood. You want him to-
You want him to-
“We literally just told you he fully wants to rail you, too!”
Yeah, they’re pretty damn right about that.
He pulls from the door then, his brain clouded over in thoughts so debilitating that he thinks if he stays there too long - if he hears more than he already has - he might push all critical thinking to the side and burst through the door with everyone still in there. His hands are sweaty with want as he shifts the placement of his crossbow, and he wipes his palms on his jeans, desperately searching for anything to tie his senses back to reality.
Shit, what the fuck was he even here for?
Does it even matter anymore?
He comes to the conclusion that, no it doesn’t, rather quickly, and he massages his temples as he strides out of the hallway, quick steps covering the distance between your room and the infirmary’s entrance before the realization of his eavesdropping really, really, dawns on him.
You - intelligent, funny, caring, stupidly pretty and perfect and out of his league you - have a crush on him, and when the haze of lust finally clears from his brain, despite being much too old for things like that, his ego swells to the size of Texas and he can feel his heart doing a goddamn victory dance.
Daryl spots Denise in the corner of his eye, her hands a mess of chalk dust and she’s in a hoodie that’s Tara’s. They’ve been together a lot - he’s pretty sure he caught them kissing behind the medicine shelves just a few days ago - and they seem pretty fucking happy, too.
He’s envious of them. Envious of Aaron and Eric with how many times Aaron’s told him he ‘can’t wait to get home to Eric’, and he’s certainly no stranger to the ugly green feeling that rears its head when he thinks of Glenn and Maggie.
God, he wants that. He wants that with you. He’s wanted it with you since the cement walls of the prison, and now that he knows you feel the same, why does he have to wait?
Exactly!, he screams at himself. Why does he have to wait?
No more fucking waiting.
He glances at the window just next to one of the exam tables, and though it’s just late afternoon, Daryl crosses the distance to get to Denise, a determination in his eye that could burn down his path. He’s never been one to push his luck - that’s probably why he’d locked his lips and buried his feelings for you for all those months - but he stands tall in front of her and takes the chance.
“Got a quick question for ya.”
Denise’s eyes flick up from the sheet of paper in her hands and she raises her eyebrows as she notices the puff of his chest, the surety of his gaze making his face look meaner than it usually is.
“You can take her off her shift after your check up, if you want. I’ll just get Rosita to cover it.”
And he’s surprised for a second - half because he’d just remembered that, yeah, there was a reason to come here in the first place, and half because she’d guessed his intentions before he’d even gotten his words out. Though, maybe he shouldn’t be surprised, because if today had taught him anything, it’s that he’s just that fucking oblivious to the fact he’s just that fucking obvious.
No, he’s going to change that.
By the end of today, Daryl will be able to call himself yours, or he’ll spin the Earth around himself for another chance.
Nodding, he turns towards your office and suppresses his giddiness as calls your name, long strides taking him to you so quickly he thinks he might be sprinting, and his heart is speeding up as he formulates a plan.
He needs this to be perfect.
Like you, perfect.
The second he gets to the door, it creaks open - hinges much too old for this house that he hasn’t gotten around to oiling yet, though he’d promised a week ago to do it - and he’s almost trampled by the familiar faces you’re forcing out, each one sharing a knowing glance as they pass him in the hallway.
Carol even gives him a thumbs up, and he wonders if she knows what’s running through his mind. It damn well wouldn’t be the first time.
“Hey, Daryl. Sorry about all that.”
Running his hand through his hair, he sets his crossbow down on your desk as you make your way to the bed, patting it in a much too familiar signal for him to sit.
This is good.
You don’t suspect a thing, and that’s good.
Step one is a success.
“Nah, ‘s fine, don’t worry ‘bout it.”
He eases a chuckle into his voice and waits for you to turn around, watching you close one of the drawers with those lollipops the little ones like, and when you do, you face him with a smile spread so wide across your lips, and it’s like his whole brain goes blank.
You look at him expectantly, a second passing before he remembers his fucking pulled lower back muscle from nearly two weeks ago, and his hands snap to his vest, pulling it off and setting it next to his crossbow. In his defense, it doesn’t even feel like anything’s happened anymore, so it’s not his fault that he’d forgotten about it for the past few days.
Clearing his throat, he shakes his bangs from his face and makes his way to the tiny twin bed he’s seen you passed out sleep-drunk in so many times before. He’s much too busy dwelling over that moment of embarrassment to realize that his shirt is riding up and his belt doesn’t really do shit to keep his pants above the waistband of his boxers, but you notice, and you swallow down the lump in your throat.
No, you have to stay professional. Even if he has the audacity to look like that.
“Tell me if this hurts, okay?“
Your hands are on him in a second, pressing against his once overstrained muscles, and he wonders if anything could ever hurt when you’re touching him.
“You having fun out there with Aaron?”
Letting out a silent groan, he shrugs - or, whatever the equivalent of him turning his head in the other direction against the mattress and looking at you through the overhang of his locks is.
“Nah, ain’t nothin’ really goin’ on out there no more. Don’t really take Aaron much either. Jus’ ridin’ alone. Hopin’ a deer or somethin’ worth grabbin’ passes me.”
You hum in response, satisfied at the state of his muscles and the feeling of them underneath your hands. It’s not necessary, these massages, but you’re pretty sure you read somewhere that it helps the healing, and even if you were lying to yourself, he doesn’t seem to mind, and you sure as hell don’t.
“Then come get me next time, Daryl. I would love to go ‘ridin’’.”
Those words shouldn’t light something in him - shouldn’t conjure up those fantasies of your body that he’s only ever explored alone by himself - because you’re doing that shitty imitation of his voice that usually makes a chuckle want to worm out of his throat, but it does and it makes him burn.
He takes an eyeful of you when you stand and turn towards the medicine cupboards, and he gorges himself on the sight of your thighs as they poke out through your cloth shorts. The leg holes on them are cut so damn big he swears he can see your underwear from where he’s laying, and a rush of saliva forces its way into his mouth, wet hot heat licking through him at his desire to bury his face up against you.
You want him to take you for a ride?
Daryl could do that. He’s got a couple ideas right now about riding that he wouldn’t mind acting out.
“We’re also running low on some antibiotics,”
Turning, he kicks off the bed, letting the mattress squeak and only half listening to you as he tries to hype himself up enough to actually go through with his plan. He’s gotta do this - act now and follow your dreams, or whatever the other bullshit was that he heard when he used to be in school - and he will, but he just needs a second to fucking man up.
“So when you go out with Rick in a few days,”
He takes a step then, fueled on by your wood-muffled confession that’s currently devouring his mess of a brain, and then he takes another and another, not stopping his methodical steps until you’re barely a foot from him.
“Could you keep an eye out for these…“
You spin on your heel then, hands full and halfway outstretched in order to give the pill bottles to him until they hit his chest, the sudden block of him knocking them out of your grip. They fall to the ground with a rattle, and your voice drains from your throat when you look up at him, the looming figure of his broad shoulders stretching out to steal your vision from everything but him, his face lent down just the slightest.
You should want to cower - Daryl’s so fucking big he could box you in and keep you sandwiched between the wooden cabinets and his body with little effort - but you like it. Especially the way he’s looking at you.
“Dar- Daryl, what’re you-“
And he’s so close to you, too. So close that you’re pretty sure he can hear each shaky breath you take, and when your hands go to grip at the ledge for the balance he’s knocked from you, he grabs them instead, warm, work-calloused hands wrapped around your wrist to bring them to his chest and over his heart.
“Ya feel that?”
He leans impossibly closer, taking another step forward until one of his legs is between yours, and your head swims from the thought that he really has sandwiched you in front of him. His heart pounds underneath your palm and it quickens with each passing moment, a limbo of apprehension hanging for a second longer before he bites the bullet, whispering the words to you as if forcing them out is the only way he’ll be able to say the words he’s saying.
“This, it- it beats for you.”
The second he says it, he cringes and drops your wrist - turns his face to the side and shuts his eyes as his face scrunches inwards - but despite it, a sickeningly saccharine feeling wells up in your chest.
“God- shit- sorry, I-“
This is the last time he’ll listen to any of Glenn’s suggestions. Romantic? More like fucking stupid.
Sighing, he turns around, leaving you to stare at his back even more confused at the sudden drop of tension, and you wipe your sweaty hands on your shorts, your knees needing a moment to solidify from the near jelly they’d become at his closeness.
“What was- what're you doing? This isn’t funny.”
You watch as he runs his fingers through his hair, and faces you again, a look of utter embarrassment mixed with disappointment settling in his eyes after he hears you.
“It- it ain’t supposed to be.”
And he sounds so genuine in his response - you know he doesn’t lie to you - but there’s no way he means what he’s saying. Not when he’s so quick to apologize for his confession.
“Daryl, if this is a joke…“
He can’t be serious.
But he is.
If there was one thing in the world that he would ever be serious about, it would be this. He just needs to stop thinking. What’s so hard about this, anyway? He knows you like him, and he knows damn well he likes you, too.
Swallowing, he holds your curious look, eyebrows furrowing with a newly settled determination, and the courage he needs to man the fuck up flares to fruition when he replays your words again.
“I heard ya.”
You bite at your lip then, a singular ‘what?’ falling from them no later, and a rush of something primal works through Daryl’s body at the way it looks so inviting for his own teeth to replace.
“I heard ya. Talkin’ with Rosita n’ Maggie an’ Carol.”
The ice-cold waterfall of your realization makes you freeze, and another stutter of ‘wh- what?’ breaks from your throat.
“I heard ya. Heard everythin’.”
He takes a step then, and your mind is telling you to back up and retreat from this embarrassment, but your body wants nothing more than to stay still. It burns for him, lonely nights and months of pining holding your feet down like an anvil.
“I know ya have a crush on me. That ya wanna kiss me.”
Staring down at the ground, your fists ball up at your sides as you hear him move, and he just keeps coming, pacing with wide strides.
“That ya wanna cuddle.”
Daryl’s voice is low, gravelly, sounding too fucking good for your poor brain to take - and you close your eyes, crushing your eyelids together to brace for when you eventually overheat and crash.
“That… ya want me to…”
Fuck, you know what you said. He doesn’t need to actually finish his sentence for either of you to understand what he means.
He grabs your chin then, two thick fingers and his thumb tilting your head up to him like he was holding a cigarette, and just this proximity makes him think you could overtake him. You could be his new addiction, and he’d be perfectly fine with that.
“Daryl, I-“
The second you open your eyes, his face surges forward, and you close them again, preparing for the messy press of his lips, but it never comes. Instead, he grabs both your hands in his, running his thumb along your knuckles before he overtakes your stutter.
“I wanna give ya all’a that. An’ more, if ya let me.”
His words whisper along your lips, and you nearly crumble with each syllable. He presses up against you in this bubble of intensity, and you think you might be going crazy, but you think he can hear your pulse thrum through your skin.
“So can I kiss ya?”
Nodding, your impatience drives you forward, and in a second, your lips touch his, clumsily bumping noses in your fervour before the kiss gets firmer. He drinks down the sensation like an aged liquor, and his grunt surprises the both of you, as well as the push of his leg between the two of yours.
There are no words being said when he brings your hands to rest at his waist, and he grabs yours, absentminded fingers playing with the laces of your shorts before sliding underneath the hem of your tucked-in shirt. He doesn’t mean to make pictures of him undoing your pants spark in your mind, but he just needs to touch you in whatever form that would be, and, quite honestly, he doesn’t exactly mind that you’re pushing back with so much need as well.
You’d imagined your first kiss with him to be gentle, maybe even a little desperate, but this, this lust devouring both of your brains is so loud that neither of you care about the adrenaline so high in your veins.
“Let’s get outta here.”
Only when you both pull away to breathe does he speak, and only then do you even realize you’re in your office and that the cupboard might make an indent into your skull with how long you’ve been resting your head against it.
“Daryl, I- I can’t. I need to be here for a few more hours. But if I didn’t, I would go with you. I- there’s a lot of things I want to do with you.“
He knows what you want. You’ve been pulling his hips against yours by the leather of his belt, and though he’s made no indication that he knows, he does nothing to stop you.
“You can go. Come with me, I mean. I, uh, I asked Denise. She said it was fine. That- that Rosita’ll cover your shift.”
He mumbles as he presses himself back down, just against your chin. Just until he feels you smile from the tickle of his stubble and he flames alight with the affection steeped intimacy.
“You planned this? Wanna take me home that bad?”
Giggling, you thread your fingers through the mess of his uncut hair, and you catch the way he blushes red despite the fact you’re happy about his… proactivity? He wants you like you want him, and you kiss him again, feather-light to the corner of his lips.
“I ain’t gon’ lie to ya. It’s, uh, it's been- I’ve been thinkin’ ‘bout it since the prison.”
A boyish smile works its way onto Daryl’s face, and you slip from his hold, ducking down and around him when he dips his face down to yours again, crouching down and pulling open a drawer before grabbing a string of condoms and stuffing it into your pockets. It doesn’t take much time for him to turn around and see what you’re doing, but before he reaches you, you’re back on your feet.
“Then c’mon. Take me home.”
He speeds up his steps at your words, and he grabs your hand, pressing a kiss to your knuckles before slinging his crossbow over his shoulder as he cuts his path to the door.
“Ya sure ‘bout this? Hundred percent?“
Just before he crosses the threshold into the hallway, he looks back at you, almost blinding with how radiant you are, and you squeeze his hand, a grin so wide it makes his heart want to explode.
“Let’s get outta here, Daryl.”
That’s all he needs.
Months of loving you in silence makes him delirious with anticipation, and he has half the mind to throw you across his shoulder and carry you back to his house, but he settles for quick strides of his long legs, his hand held firmly in yours.
He doesn’t care that everyone can see. No, maybe he wants them to see, but that doesn’t matter as he occupies himself with how perfect and soft your fingers feel in his. Neither you nor him notice the fact that Rosita and Carol have hung back, or that the former notices the holographic gold peeking out from the pockets of your shorts and slaps the latter’s shoulder with an excitement that could rival yours, because the only thing on his mind is you, the same way he’s on yours.
Your body is practiced to the way he moves - the runs you’ve been on with him and the countless times sneaking around with him makes his steps a familiar rhythm - and you match him until you both get to his house.
Even before Daryl manages to control his nerve-shaking hands and open the door, there’s a tension so thick in the air that it’s threatening to suffocate either of you in it, and when you finally manage to get some privacy as the door finally closes the two of you in, both his hands are on your body. There’s no escape from him as he presses your back against his closed door. Not that you want one. God, you don’t want an escape from him.
“Tell me to stop. Tell me ya think we’re movin’ too fast. Tell me to stop an’ I will.”
No.
Shaking your head, you look back up at him, threading your fingers through his hair and pushing his bangs from his face as he leans on his arm to your right. He’s so handsome like this - looking at you so reverently - and it makes you choke on your own words, stuttered through a consuming wave of pure affection.
“I want you, Daryl. I don’t- don’t you think we’ve waited long enough?”
He lets every damn syllable sounding from your voice sink into his brain, and Jesus Christ can you do things to him. You make him feel in a way he’s never felt before, and he could fucking cry at the way your eyes round in a plead.
“Thought everyone was goin’ fuckin’ crazy thinkin’ you wanted me, too.”
Leaning up, you press a kiss to him, so intoxicating you make him want to chase your lips like a lush, but he pulls away in order to put his crossbow somewhere. He loves it - cherishes it - but right now, it’s just a fucking nuisance.
“I want you. You’re- you’re everything I want.”
Does your voice have to sound so good?
It all happens in such a flurry of need - you’ve both kicked off your shoes, you’ve wrapped your fingers around his wrist and he’s wrapped his around yours, he’s whispered a confession about how long he’s waited to hear you say that, you’ve beamed and kissed him and touched him - and when he finally opens the door to the basement, you’re giggling at how he almost trips the two of you over trying to keep his lips on your neck as you descend the stairs.
“You’re so cute, Daryl. Has anyone ever told you that?”
He has his chest pressed up against your back, arms linked across your waist and at the front of your stomach before you spin around to face him, and he holds you gently by the small of your back, drawing random shapes against the fabric of your shirt.
“I ain’t cute.”
But he can’t deny the pleasant feeling wading through him, nor can he hide the fact the corner of lip pulls upwards just the slightest.
“You are.”
Heated hands grab at you, and he kisses you into his bedroom, your fingers restless at his shirt buttons. Quickly, so damn quickly, each rush of adrenaline driving the both of you towards each other, he finally gets to his mattress, and he crashes down to a sit, bringing your knees to either side of him and pulling you into a straddle as the poor springs threaten to buckle underneath him for a second.
“Still think I’m cute?”
You nod, shakily since your brain is too preoccupied with telling you not to squeal at the sudden movement, but you fail, your thighs closing on either side of his body. Your hips move in a jolt, unintentionally rubbing against him for just a second before his big hands coax more movement out of you by the careful kneading of your ass, and you do it again and again, spurred on by the warmth of his overheated skin as you unbutton his shirt.
“D-Daryl-“
His large hands return to you just after he chucks his shirt in the other direction, and he swears when he feels your thighs start to quiver around him, your pelvis bucking in a desperate rhythm he’s more than happy to be a part of. He’s firm, pressing up against you through his jeans, and you can feel him, especially when he lifts his hips up against yours in reaction and pulls an intoxicating little whine from you.
“Tha’s it. Tha’s it. Feel good, huh?”
You can’t remember what you were going to say - thoughts wiped clean from your head with each roll of him - and you’ve bitten your lip so hard it flashes white indents when your mouth drops open slightly to feed your lungs’ burn for oxygen. Daryl watches each movement of yours in admiration, fascinated and wholly captivated at the fact he can render you into this with a precarious flex of his thigh and the rough of his jeans against your cloth shorts, and his ego grows tenfold.
“Feels good, then?”
He grinds you down on him as you nod, encouragement dripping from his chapped lips that have no right being as soft as they are, and with each movement of him - with each devastating push and pull of his hands, a pressure growing in the base of your stomach that you want to take over your body and you want to dissolve into - you breathe out his name, two simple syllables making him throb under the confines of that stupid zipper keeping him packed down tight.
You’re beautiful, he praises, and your body burns and burns with his words, the gravelly twang setting deep in your body and making heat flush up your face.
“D- Daryl, I think I’m-“
He knows how close you are - he’s close too, a damp mess in his boxers that probably mirrors your own underwear despite the chaffing from the thick layer of denim that covers him from you - and he hitches you over his thigh instead, digging his fingers into the give of flesh and groaning into your ear afterwards.
He’s obsessed, the feeling of your body in his hands, and when you moan out his name, leaning forward and pressing his head into your neck, his heart races from his chest and he wants to put it in your hands. He’s being overwhelmed in the best way - he breathes you in, letting you settle in his lungs while you make those pretty little noises next to his ear that almost make him unravel from them alone - and when you press your chest up to his, dragging yourself along the length of his muscular thigh and whine, the rope of tension tightens and tightens.
“God, you’re fuckin’- fuckin’ beautiful like this.”
You’ve learned rather quickly that, for a man who speaks in grunts and glares, Daryl’s rather talkative when you’re in a selfish search for your own pleasure, and damn it if it doesn’t catapult you to the snap in the base of your stomach. But there are too many layers of clothing separating you from him. It’s muted those sensations - made them plateau to a dull ache - and you think you might cry as you slow down.
“Daryl, I can’t- it’s- it’s not enough.”
He hears the way your voice breaks - watches you tilt your head down as if you’d expected him to scold you like those days back at the Greene farm, when his mouth ran angry more often than not, and he had a heart filled with too much emotion to understand what to do with it - and he lifts his hand until it’s below your chin, gently tilting you to look at him.
“Hey, hey, ‘s okay. If ya don’t wanna do this, then don’t.”
And Daryl’s so fucking tender, big puppy eyes staring up at you like you’d hung the stars into the sky, and your hips stop, instead leaning your face forward until your forehead rests against his. A small smile spreads across your cheeks at the clumsy little knock of his nose against yours, and you press a quick kiss to the corner of his lips.
“No- no. I want to do this. I just- it’s not enough.”
Nodding, he lets you pull your face away before reaching down and taking the knot keeping your shorts up along your waist between his fingers. He raises an eyebrow at you, watching you for any signs of hesitation or discomfort, but when he sees none - when you bite your lip and nod for him - he undoes it, watching you get up and slip your hands underneath the hem.
He’s a little obvious with how excited he is to see you slide them off, but it only feeds your own excitement. It’s endearing, this broad-shoulder hulking man crumbling for you, and when you finally step out of your shorts, your underwear has such a wet spot it could be embarrassing had your mind not been so preoccupied by a desire to please him in any way you can.
“I want this, Daryl. As long as you still want this.”
With each step you take, his throat closes up more and more, and when you grab his hand, placing it against the bottom of your shirt, he pulls it off of you, your eyes brimming with so much warmth he truly thinks this might be heaven on Earth.
“Then would it, uh, would it be alright if… if we, uh, try somethin’ else?”
When your shirt joins your shorts just a few feet away, you nod, stripping your bra from yourself as well before breathing forward a ‘yes’ that makes him want to claw at his jeans. Though, when your hands reach for his belt, he grabs your wrist, stopping you in place, his grip unmoving and firm. Only when your eyes flick up to meet his does he run his thumb across your skin, and you swear you see the corner of his mouth quirk upwards.
“Sit on my face.”
His words are so abrupt that it takes a second for you to register them, and when you do, a giggle bubbles up from your throat, stuttering a ‘what?’ before kneeling between his legs on the mattress. You expect him to join you - to hear that grumbling chuckle before he lays you on your back and pull the leather off - but when he doesn’t and starts slowly moving the two of you up towards his headboard, you realize he’s serious and a pang of arousal shoots through you.
“Daryl, I- I’ve-“
It’s silly, the way you lower your voice to almost a whisper before speaking again, and if you didn’t look so fucking good with each of your movements - all beautiful body and beautiful face - he might have laughed. Just the tiniest bit.
“What if I kill you?”
Oh, no, that makes him chuckle - the sound blossoming through his chest - and he brings your knuckles to his lips, pressing kisses against the skin before looking up at you through his bangs. God, you’re so fucking pretty it hurts.
“Ain’t the worst way to go.”
There’s a boyish smile on his face as he speaks, but you’re still looking at him with those sloped eyebrows that scream concern, and evidently, joking was not the best way to handle this situation.
“Just- I jus’- I wanna taste ya. An’- an’ I’ve been thinkin’ ‘bout this. A lot. Too much.”
He lets go of your hands at that, letting one of his rest at the crook of your neck and the other on the outside of one thigh, and his thumb caresses at your jawbone before he opens his mouth again.
“Wanna do this so fuckin’ bad, but- but ya don’t gotta if ya don’t wanna. There ain’t a lotta things I won’t do with ya. Or- or for ya.”
Daryl’s expression turns bashful at his confession, but he elates when he feels you nod against his palm, spreading your hand over his before pressing a kiss to it. He’s god damn buzzing with excitement when your movements become more sure, leading him up the bed before his back hits the headboard.
“You’ll tell me if it’s too much, right?”
He nods then - maybe does it too quickly, honestly - but he can’t bring himself to care as he feels you press him down against his mattress. His cock is throbbing at the surety of your actions, and he’s in a haze of mind-numbing lust until you’re straddled over his lower stomach, fully naked now if the slick heat of you there means anything.
“How will- how will you let me know? ‘Cause you won’t exactly be able to talk.”
Your thighs rest flush on either side of him and his hands gravitate to them before you can even finish your first sentence. Daryl’s tongue darts out when he sees that patch of wet curls sat below the rise of his ribcage, and, yeah, this is heaven on fucking Earth.
“I’ll tap out right like this. Scout’s honour.”
He taps on the outside of your thighs once, then twice before he spreads his palm across your ass and lifts you towards him. The bed squeaks as you shuffle closer and closer, and he swallows down the rush of saliva racing up his throat, half in anticipation and half in how fucking good you look. He’d stare forever if he could.
“You were never a boy scout.”
Scoffing insincerely, he watches in awe as you rise to a kneel, and his fingers spread you open, nearly groaning himself at the way you moan when he brushes against your entrance. There’s a sneaking suspicion in him that, even if it gets too much for him, maybe he never would tap out. Maybe he’d spend eternity between your thighs and overwhelm himself with you. He’s certainly not opposed to it now that you’re so close.
“Jus’ take what ya need, y’understand? I’m a big boy. I can take it.”
You might still be a little too sensitive from just moments ago, but you push through the slight shake in your thigh as you near his face. Daryl doesn’t seem to be on your side, though, because his tongue darts out between his lips and he stares at all of you - like he wants to fucking devour you, a 12 course meal after months of starvation.
“Dar- Daryl, don’t look at me like that.”
Heat blankets you from neck up and you grip the edge of his headboard to get yourself out of your head, patting yourself on the back for making it just below his chin.
Stop overthinking this. Just stop.
“You’re soakin’. Worked up, ain’t ya? Jesus, you’re so pretty it hurts.”
You wish you could hate him. You wish you could hate the tiny, miniscule lilt of amusement in his voice, but then he drags his pointer and middle fingerpads against your entrance, gathering the evidence of his observation with palms still spread against you, and there’s no way to hate his stupidly handsome upturned lips.
“Shut up.”
His grin only grows at your words, and when one of his eyebrows rises, you’ve played enough children’s games with him to know what he’s going to say.
“Make me.”
And you do.
Sinking down on him, you tighten your hold against his headboard and nearly keel forward when he tightens his hold against you, pulling you down further until you’re sure you must be suffocating him. But when you go to lift off him, he grunts into you, keeping you in place so he can flatten his tongue against you and encouraging you to grind.
It’s a little awkward at first - the bed is squeaking with the uneven rock of your weight-bearing knees and there’s no fucking way he thinks you look good from that angle - but his stubble rubs against you just right, and when he grabs your hand, letting you thread your fingers through his hair so you can angle him and take your pleasure from him, your forehead thumps against the drywall, the thud of it reverberating with your moan.
Your abdomen flexes as you rut into him, your eyes falling closed though his stay open to watch. He’d gone too many nights thinking about this - the sounds you would make, what you would like and how you would like it - and when he moves you just the slightest bit upwards, his nose drags against you and his tongue presses in, lighting your nerves on fire and rubbing against something fucking devasting, you think you might have cried out his name loud enough for the houses across the street to hear.
Or, at the very least, his neighbour, whose name escapes you because the only name you can think of is Daryl, Daryl, Daryl.
His eyebrows are furrowed beneath you, deadset in determination and concentration as his fingers dig into your inner thighs, palms resting at the tops of them to keep you from moving up too much and letting any of you escape him. He’s making as much of a ruckus as you are - less, considering he has you muffling him - but when you moan, he moans, the sound reverberating through you and making the cycle repeat itself.
He’s a quick learner; it didn’t take a genius to know he's observant, or that he’s damn good with his hands, but what you didn’t know was how easily he could pull your noises until your throat felt raw. You’re not sure if the person you’re hearing is even you, but then again, who else would Daryl even let do this to him?
“Daryl- Daryl, oh my god.”
Nor does it take a genius to know how close you are, a precarious lean over a cliff’s edge. Just a breeze could knock you down
He pulls you away then - just a bit, kissing the inside of your thighs after obscenely licking his lips and swallowing - and his words are less coherent sentences than they are half-formed, love-drunk mumblings, but they’re just as sure in his intent.
“C’mon, give it to me. Be a good girl ‘n give it to me. So fuckin’ pretty like this, ya got no idea. Ain’t got no right lookin’ like this.”
His praises are all you need to succumb, another flick of his tongue and grind of your hips making you spasm as he holds you, your legs pressing against him and sandwiching his ears as the tension in your stomach rises and snaps. You didn’t know you could feel like this - that someone could make you feel like this - and you coat him, running down his cheek and his tongue and his stubble as he tries to catch as much of you as he can.
You clench around nothing as he mouths at you, eager and sloppy with his movements, and your hand in his hair keeps him in place. You feel like you might float away from Earth if you weren’t holding onto him, and even as you start to slow down, bangs fallen into your face and sweat stuck to your forehead, he keeps you rocking against him. It’s wholly selfish, he knows it is and he would confess that if you wanted him to, but he wants to see you do it again. He wants to see it so fucking bad.
“Daryl- I- it’s too- it’s too much.”
He lets go of his grip then, pressing kisses down your thigh as you rise up off him, but as he watches you clench, his spit and your own arousal a slick mess against you, his biceps flex to keep you in place again. The dig of his nails makes you mewl, and when your hand unthreads from his hair and goes to grab one of his, he links his fingers with yours, holding you against your own thigh.
“Jus’- jus’ let me look for a second. Jus’ a little longer.”
And when he sounds like that, who are you to say no? Your whole being’s belonged to him for months now.
So you let him stare - even bring your other hand down from the headboard to clear his stray strands from his eyes so he can see you better.
“Was that what you thought it would be like?”
Humming, he kisses your legs once more before letting you go, wiping at his stubble with the back of his hand before sitting up against the headboard. You’re to the side of him, perched on those pretty knees that were around his head just minutes ago, and for a second, he’s stuck replaying, half-lidded cerulean staring back at you.
“Was more’n I could’a thought. Was fuckin’- you were- you were so fuckin’ hot.”
He feels like such an idiot when he says those words, reduced to a hormone riddled teenager because he can - shit - he’s pretty sure he can still taste you, and he brings the back of his hand to his forehead, closing his eyes and pulling breaths from the air. He needs a second to process and pick up the pieces of his lust-crumbled brain, and even though he tries, it slips from his grasp like sand.
You shuffle towards him then, your weight leant on your arms to give him a quick kiss, disarming in its charm, the heat of your fingers beneath his chin still lingering even after you’ve moved. His lips stay puckered for a second longer, and when he feels you grab at his belt, an interested raise of his brows accompany the opening flutter of his eyes.
He watches enamoured as you unclink the buckle, a spectator in your erotic display as you slide the leather from their loops and unzip his too fucking tight jeans, and he audibly groans when you pull them off him, the sway of your chest making too many late night thoughts lurch forward.
“Think you can keep goin’?”
Smiling, you bite the inside of your cheek to keep from making an audible noise when you finally pull his boxers from him. He’s red - so red and angry, jutting against Daryl’s stomach as if screaming at you to look - and just the sight of his cock is enough to have you reaching out to palm at him.
“Yes. Yes. I can keep going. I wanna do everything with you.”
He nearly melts into a puddle from your voice - raw from calling out his name and the haze of desire from feeling him leak viscous against your palm - and in a fluid motion, he has your back pressed against the mattress, only the squeak of it even making you realize he’s moved you. Well, that and the fact he’s propped himself up on both elbows and has your body beneath his.
“Then let’s keep goin’.”
Daryl sinks down then, and when you feel him smile against the skin of your neck, you wonder if, after you’re both sated and heaving breaths to fill your lungs from the exertion, you’ll ever want to be anywhere else but his bed.
Either way, you won’t hear a complaint from him.
»»———— ⊱
comment to be on my taglist! (some of these tags don’t work and i don’t know why???)
Chapter warnings: descriptions of everything that happens at the Negan lineup. If you can stomach that, everything else should be no problem.
The Saviors seize a hostage.
You should have never gotten on the truck.
But what could you have done, really?
“Got a new group out there givin’ us trouble, and I’m in the mood to settle some shit. Wanna come?”
He stood lent against your doorframe just 4 hours ago, the Virginian sun still streaming in from the tiny crack of wall you called a window, and he had that grin twisting his features. You’d been through enough of those looks to understand that, when it morphs his face, he’s not asking, and your skin had risen into those insistent, memory-laden goosebumps that come like Pavlovian instinct, forcing you to leave the scratchy linen of your sheets and pad across the frigid cement of your room.
In 10 minutes flat, you were dressed and loading into the seat you’re in now, and 5 minutes later you were peeling out of that hell-hole, a nonchalant humming coming from the man next to you as he taps his thumbs on the steering wheel, one half of some long forgotten rhythm muffled slightly by the leather of his glove.
You keep your eyes on the flashes of trees as you ride on gravel roads. You don’t want to look at him. Or at the mirror, where you would see Arat and the bat resting next to her. You’re not sure if you can, souvenirs of its violence painting the metal wire. Knowing what will be happening once each checkpoint reports back, you’re not sure you could even handle the look of any of them.
It’s been months since you’d been forced into those 4 suffocating walls you’d refused to call home, and though you’ve lost a lot of yourself, your fear of Negan lingered no matter how much you’d wanted it to evaporate and disappear like the parts of you before it. It’s been months since he held that goddamn bat against you, but it doesn’t matter. That fear ignites at the worst times, knotting up your stomach.
You loathe it, but you’re powerless against it.
Maybe you hate that fact more.
There seems to always be an ever-present smirk on his face whenever it comes to ‘settling shit’, the promise of making a show of his unwavering power dangling in front of him and ramping up his excitement with each passing moment. You can’t remember how many times you’ve sat in this seat - the last group was a while ago, you think, the place with the huge house at the top of that hill - but as Negan’s hum changes into a whistle, that stupid overwhelming fear shoots through you, taking over your body for a second and banging your knees against the door when you flinch away from him.
The knock reverberates through the truck, the enclosed space doing you no favours when you take a sharp inhale at the pain, but the whistling stops, the crush of asphalt and the squeak of his leather jacket taking over as he turns to look at you.
“Oh, c’mon. Loosen up, princess. It’s not like this is your first time.”
You bite the inside of your lip to keep from responding to his poorly hidden double entendre and that stupid nickname which has wormed into his vocabulary. It was a joke - at least it was when it was a throwaway comment from Sherry after she had one too many sips of cheap vodka - but Negan seems especially inept when it comes to how close he thinks he is to you. He had pinpointed it and insisted upon it being some playful replacement of your actual name, and every fucking time he said it, you feel your blood start to simmer.
But you know what happens when you upset him.
He makes a show of it in front of the furnace, and you remember the pain which tears through you, but in private - a handful of Saviors for insurance and away from prying eyes, in front of his own stovetop and his squeaky cupboards and his hidden drawers - that’s what terrifies you.
Actually, no. What scares you is the fact he can do all that and then act like it never happened.
He’d greet you in the morning like he was greeting an old friend, and just go on with his day.
“Keep your eyes on the road, Negan.”
Arat scoff does little to hide her smile - neither does he, an upwards curl of his lips before he turns away to do just that - and you let out a breath, shifting in your seat in an attempt to regain your bearings. It’s like walking on eggshells, each time you talk to him.
He’s volatile.
One day he’d brush it off with a laugh, but some days he would pin you into place with a look, and you’d go to bed with one more bandage than you’d had the night before. But he’s mellowed out since you’d first met him; either old age is taking its toll or he’s become comfortable in the status quo he’d hammered in with swings of Lucille and burnt faces by the iron.
“Well, shit, who pissed in your cereal this morning?”
You let the question linger, and Negan peels into the gravel-faced clearing before you can let silence fully steal the space between the three of you. He slams the brakes as he turns into his spot, and it sends your body forward. You barely have time to lift your hands to brace for the stop, but you manage enough, your forearms pressing against the dashboard.
“Whoops,”
He pulls the keys from the ignition then, pulling a laugh from his chest before you hear a click from between the two of you, and he gets out, resting his arms against the top edge of the truck before leaning in with a wide smirk.
“Guess you should’a worn your seatbelt.”
Asshole.
You’re not sure at what point your abrasion had distorted in his head into banter, but, frankly, it pisses you off. It pisses you off because he couldn’t be more obvious with the fact he doesn’t think of you as a threat. As far as he’s concerned, you’re some angry chihuahua he’s ultimately got control over. Angry as all hell, but harmless at the end of the day. The more you think about it, the more it pisses you off, and though your mouth opens in the beginning of a retort, Simon’s static voice breaks through before you can form anything further.
The group reached checkpoint C first.
“Pass me that, won’t you?”
Grabbing the walkie-talkie from the cupholder, you chuck it at him without another thought, turning to open your side’s door as it hits his chest with a thump, and he even laughs at that, not missing a beat before the push-to-talk is engaged and his voice rumbles into the microphone.
They reach a second checkpoint not much longer, the chained-up rotted soon after that, and radio silence follows after they reach the wall of burning trees. It must have freaked them out - it was Simon, after all, whose voice was the first and last they’d heard. They would have had to have known something was coming at this point, even if his presence at the flames was purely by chance.
Sooner or later, they were gonna get sloppy. They were gonna get nervous - get desperate, and slip up - and they have no fucking clue what’s in store for them.
As the sun inches under the horizon, you sip nervously from your water bottle, the carabiner attached to its lid tinking against metal as your hand shakes. The Saviors had started getting into position just after sunset - an order that was barked by Negan echoed by Laura when she’d decided they were moving out a little too slow - but you’re stuck in place, your heart pounding in your chest and a lump in your throat that you can’t get down no matter how hard you try.
You’re leant behind a car, Arat sat in the driver's seat as she absentmindedly toys with the safety on her pistol, and you’re thankful for the Virginian night. It hides the shaky breaths visible from the chill after an unfamiliar RV pulls into the clearing, and it hides the flash of panic that crosses your face when Simon pulls out someone you can’t quite make out in the dark.
It’s starting.
You don’t know how many people are in the group. You’re sure Negan has told you - that big mouth of his never quite shuts up between the orders he gives you and the monologues he considers ‘conversation’ - but you never listen.
It can’t just be him, though, you’re sure of it. One man can’t have caused him to go all on the offensive like this.
Negan’s sat in that red-lined RV now, a short conversation with Simon wrapping up with a wolfish grin shot in your direction before slinging Lucille over his shoulder and waltzing into the open door, and you clip your water bottle back onto your belt, rubbing your temples to try and forget it.
It feels so pointless, every time you’re dragged to one of these stupid confrontations. You don’t even do anything here. You don’t grab automatics to ‘get shit done’ - you don’t douse cut-down trees in lighter fluid or tie up the infected for some sick psychological torture - you’re just some spectator in all this.
Every time Negan looks at you like that, that expression wiping across his face like that night you’d first met him, it’s like a taunt. It’s like he knows, even without making you kneel next to the squelch and crush of a head, that he can make you break out in a cold sweat and make you remember the fear that coursed through your veins when you had been.
You hate that he’s right.
When you hear the first few whistles, your hair stands at the back of your neck, and you try to blink away the first few tears threatening your vision. The Saviors are close - they have to be, even grouped up, whistles can’t get that loud - and as the two tones get even closer, you close your eyes and lean forward, putting your head between your knees as you prop yourself up against the trunk of the sedan.
It was only a matter of time before they were caught.
In the position you’re in, you urge your bloodflow to your brain in hopes that maybe - just maybe - it’ll work well enough that it won’t make you think of the first time you’d heard those sounds. You hope that it’ll melt the ice lining your muscles, but you don’t have to hope any longer when the lights of the parked cars turn on, breaking you out of your spiral with the momentary flash of white as you squint your eyes to adjust to the brightness.
Despite the pain at your temples when you stare into the lit clearing, you’re thankful for it. It reminds you you’re here, not in a long-buried memory, and though you hate being here, you hate being there even more.
But you know this weirdly settled thankfulness won’t last long. As you watch them get onto their knees, whatever’s left of your morals are screaming at you to do something try to stop the way Negan swings open the door and waves Lucille like he’s at some pissing contest, but you know it won’t do anything. You know you can’t do anything.
You’re not sure if savior complex is the right word for what you’re feeling, but it feels funny when you’re in this type of situation.
There’s always an illusion of help - that maybe if you screamed loud enough or just spoke some stubbornly-ignored reason, you could be able to stop him - but you know you can’t. As the first bash of Lucille breaks skull, you know there’s no way to stop him. He swings and swings and swings, and it’s so silent save for the group’s sobbing and the constant thunk of his strikes.
You’re not close to them at all - the length of a car and several people separate you from the group - but you can see them well enough when you turn your head, your heart hammering against your ribs when you recognize that one of them is a kid and one of them looks so pale that she might pass out at any given second. The headlights illuminate them like some sort of demented spotlight, Negan’s shadow distorting across their bodies and their bloodshot eyes as he lingers the bat in front of one of them for too long.
You know what he’s getting at - he’s testing their fear, he’s testing how much more he needs to push before they crack and run back to their community with their tails between their legs - and you remember when you were there, a different type of acquiescing running through your mind. You knew you couldn’t do anything when you were the one knelt on hard ground. You knew that there were too many guns pointed at you and there was too much violence in Negan’s eyes.
The only people who would act on that impulse would be the stupidest people in the-
Holy shit.
The only people who would act on that impulse are here. Or, at least one of them was.
He swung at Negan - that man who had blood running down his chest and blood covering his hands - made hard contact with the corner of one of Negan’s cheeks, and though he’s subdued in almost an instant, you can’t look away. An odd sense of fascination keeps your eyes glued to the scene in front of you.
You don’t remember the last time anyone’s swung at Negan - let alone at a lineup - and you can’t help the spark of a long-forgotten hope that sparks within you.
He’s brave, that much is obvious.
But still, he’s stupid as all hell, held down to the ground as Dwight points a crossbow at him, staring straight at the barrel of it like a trapped animal, and you watch them drag him back into place, a sick feeling crawling into when Negan rises back to his feet.
You know what’s coming. You were on the receiving end of this once, too.
You know defiance gets you nothing except another grave to dig.
And though you’re expecting it, your hands balled into fists at your sides as if to somehow cushion the consequences of not looking away, you still recoil when Negan brings Lucille down on a different man.
It’s different, this time. This man doesn’t use his last bit of consciousness for a well-deserved ‘fuck you’ to Negan. He uses it to tell someone that he’ll ‘find her’ - holds on to his coherence and fights the rushing blood and pain to try and get out more - but he can’t, Negan’s voice filling the space with a mock of sympathy.
Then he swings again, and your stomach feels like it’s folding in on itself, rushing up your throat and through your lips. You turn back away from the scene, hoping that it’ll erase you from whatever the hell is going on, but it doesn’t and in a split second, you’re throwing up. Everything you’ve just seen finally catches up with you and you’re really throwing up, but nothing is coming out except pieces of a granola bar and the ocean of water you’d tried to calm yourself with.
It hits the line between the gravel and the sparse grass, and you take a step back to avoid it, but nausea hits you like a wave and makes you stumble. The trunk of the sedan stops you from moving any further, and you place a hand on it to steady yourself before taking a step to the side and then another, leant forward with your arm in front of you until you can brace on a tree.
Jesus Christ, did you really manage to forget the reality of this? Did you really manage to forget how the air smells when it’s tinged with this much fresh blood? Or how fucking haunting the sound of so many people crying is?
It seems you have - at least, you forgot how overwhelming it was - and you’re not sure if you’re furious or happy that you have.
But now you remember. You remember kneeling and your ribs stinging with each breath you took. You remember the smell of your friend’s blood coming from right next to you. You remember the way your eyes burnt from all your crying and the way your chest hurt with each sob that ripped through you. You remember it all, down to each blade of grass.
Stop overreacting.
There’s always that voice in you that berates when moments like these happen. It curls its lips up in disgust at the fact you’ve let yourself become so terrified, and you loathe yourself for it, a reminder of how it had all gone wrong that day and how you’d let it. It speaks tenfold, the image of that man even just trying to swing at Negan sharpening its words to a point and cutting you with its disappointment.
Even though you try to convince yourself you’re not there anymore, it all feels so real that you can’t help but spiral.
God, you’re such a fucking-
“Hey! Hey, y’alright?”
You’re not sure how long you’d spent lent on that poor tree, the intensity pulling you from reality, but it doesn’t matter because, when Arat places her hand on your shoulder, you flinch away, stumbling on your shaky legs. It feels like it’s been ages - your mouth is cotton and your ears are ringing - but it can’t have been long, the sun barely starting to rise.
“Yeah, fine. Great. I’m great.”
Wiping your mouth with your sleeve, you ease yourself back into a stand, blinking hard before looking around and ignoring the suspecting squint of Arat’s eyes. You’re pretty far out, a couple meters past the closest vehicle, and when you spot the pistol strapped to her thigh, you can’t help but wonder if you could just go.
If you just reached down and took it - if you just concentrated enough pressure to one spot at the side of her head - would she be knocked unconscious, giving you the opening to run?
But you know you can’t. Well-aimed pistol whips barely knock people out as it is, and you haven’t eaten anything substantial since the day started. There was no way you’d be able to do it. The second you bolt, Arat would tackle you. Even if you knocked her out, you wouldn’t make it far, your legs would give up as if they knew he would end up finding you.
He always does.
“Here, eat this.”
A tiny plastic packet is pressed into your palm before she steps back, grabbing your arm and dragging you back towards the clearing. With the darkness ebbing away, the headlights have been turned off, and you can see everything without its blaring harshness.
The scene looks even sadder in natural lighting - tracks of dried tears and slumped shoulders lined up one by one - and all of them refuse to move their heads from where they’re frozen.
But one of them is missing.
Leaning against the sedan, you rip open the packet with your teeth, your fingers still lacking feeling from what Arat had caught you in just moments ago, and you try not to look at the center of the clearing as you force down the crackers.
It’s then when you notice the RV is gone, and it’s then when you realize Negan’s gone too.
It doesn’t take long to connect the dots, and when you finally glance back over to them, you finally figure out who’s missing.
He’s the leader, then - curly hair and fur-lined jacket.
Break him, and everyone falls in line.
The sun comes up soon, lighting the clearing through the gaps between heavy-set trees, and the RV peels in not long after. You watch with the same pit in your stomach when Negan pulls him out by the back of his collar, and as he yells his demand of him to chop off his son’s arm off - as he stops him before he really does it - everyone knows that, whatever Negan had set out to do, he must have done it.
Dwight loads the man who punched Negan into the van he’d come out of - and he shifts his weight when he gets in, swaying like an animal trying to escape - and you find yourself curious about him. You watch as Negan leans in just a foot away to talk to their leader before rising back onto his feet, and you learn that the man’s name is Daryl.
And as much as you hate agreeing with Negan, he really does look like a Daryl.
“We'll be back for our first offering in one week. Until then, ta-ta.”
He throws their axe over his shoulder, a nonchalance in his gait, and he’s quick to hop back into the truck he drove over, letting out a theatrical sigh as if to say ‘all in a day's work’ without actually saying something. Though, knowing him, he’d probably love it if his voice carried for a moment more.
You contemplate where to go as you watch everyone start to disperse - if you’d asked, would Dwight be willing to let you sit shotgun in the car he’s keeping Daryl? Or should you follow to wherever Arat is going and try to figure out a way to thank her for the saltines that have settled your stomach for the time being? - but you don’t have time to move your feet before you hear a familiar voice calling your name and banging against the car roof.
“Get on in, princess.”
Negan sticks his head through the driver’s seat window, and you pull your lips into a line before taking a deep breath and turning your feet in his direction. He’s looking at you with an easy smile, but you keep your eyes on the ground instead, walking behind the wall of cars to mitigate some of the embarrassment you feel at any type of association with Negan.
You look over at the group before pulling at the passenger side handle, and some of them are looking back at you. The woman who had spoken up is studying you, so is their leader and the kid and two of the other women, and you feel shame course through you at their glares. You tear your eyes away from them and blink harshly before hitting the seat, and you slam the door shut, taking a deep breath as you refuse to look at Negan as he barks orders through the open window.
You watch them as all of the Saviors loads back up, and you can’t stop yourself from wondering if this was what you looked like on that night, too. Was this what you would have looked like on that soccer field if he hadn’t taken you before the sun rose?
You can’t blame them for it, though.
Because it’s your fault for letting him push you around like this, isn’t it?
Because you’re so scared of being out there alone, you’d do anything to survive, wouldn’t you?
Because he’s scarred you enough times for you to think like that, hasn’t he?
Swallowing hard, you try to stop that stupid voice from running by pulling your legs up to your chest and tapping a lazy rhythm onto your shin. It’s comforting. It reminds you of the world before - when you’d slaved over schoolwork to it playing mindlessly out of your old cassette player - but also of how things were before you met Negan, its tune playing through that rusty old vinyl player you’d dug up.
You hadn’t heard it since.
“Hey, your little… blegh, during the shit that went down, you alright?”
Your eyebrows meet in the middle of your forehead as you turn to look at him, trying to figure out if there was some hidden motive behind what he’d just said only to conclude that there doesn’t seem to be.
“Yeah, fine. Doing great. Don’t worry about it.”
Your face relaxes as you speak, and you shake your head to try and convince him to drop it. Turning back towards the window, you study the trees as they pass by once again, and it feels like you’re back in yesterday, blurs of green the same way they’d been when he’d driven you to the clearing. There’s some peace to be found in the colour, but he breaks it before it settles.
“Go see the doc when we get back.”
It turns out that your response just wasn’t convincing enough for him, so he tells you what to do, and you think about how this is always how it is with him. You think about how it’s never a suggestion - how you never get a say - and how it’s always an order you’re just expected to follow.
Guess you’re clocking into your shift earlier than expected.
“You got some boyfriend I don’t fucking know about or something?”
Scrunching your nose at his digging, you give him a curt response - ‘I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you’re implying’ - and when he speaks again, you can hear the way a corner of his lips turns up.
“You haven’t been screwing around?”
You don’t dignify him with an answer.
Instead, you let an emptiness linger as you chew at the inside of your cheek, wondering if you really should say what’s hanging on the tip of your tongue. It could get you in trouble - no, it could get you in a shit ton of trouble - but you do it anyways, some feeling gnawing at you to take a hint from that Daryl guy and just be brave for once.
“You didn’t have to kill the Asian guy.”
The silence that follows is deafening.
“I let you get away with a lot of shit, y’know that?”
Then panic comes - it drips slowly, down from your hairline and stings from your forehead down to your chin - but you stave it off before it can shake your voice.
“I’m just saying that you-“
He interrupts with a raise of his gloved hand, the pieces of dried blood on it cracking with the open and close of his first, and for that second where you think he might hit you, you flinch away by instinct, pinching your eyes closed to brace for it.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’s done it, but the impact never comes.
“If you were one of the limp-dicks out there, I would’ve thrown you in a cell for questionin’ my goddamn authority.”
Instead, he places his hand back on the steering wheel with a small smile, his words making you let out a breath, and you find yourself listening more intently than you care to admit.
“But that’s why I like you, isn’t it, princess?”
Your jaw strains at the stupid nickname, but the playfulness that’s wormed into his words makes your tensed shoulders relax just the slightest.
“Pullin’ me back and really putting shit into perspective when that shit needs it. I like that, keeps me in line. It shows you’re really lookin’ out for the future of this place.”
It takes all the strength in you not to scoff, but some of it slips out, a tiny huff followed by a twist of your lips, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that it’s definitely not a smile. There’s no doubt in your mind that he knows you’re not looking out for the Sanctuary or the Saviors when you find the courage to mouth back at him. Why else would he keep dragging you out to shit like this?
It’s to keep you in line, you’re sure of it. It’s to keep you in line as if reminding you of that night would keep you locked in your room and stuck where he wanted you. He’d dragged you back to the Sanctuary one too many times for him to just not care about you anymore.
“It was just- it was just unnecessary, Negan. If you liked the balls on the guy who punched you, you could’ve just taken him and left and ended everything there. You didn’t have to kill the Asian guy or do any of the stuff you did afterwards, either.”
The breath that escapes his mouth as a barely-audible whistle, his frown oddly approving before he questions you. His voice isn’t condescending or accusatory, you don’t think, but there’s a dangerous edge to it, like something could go wrong if you answered it wrong.
“You know what they did, right?”
But you don’t have the right answer, so you just don’t say anything.
“They ambushed the whole fucking satellite station! Killed every one of them! The blood’s on their hands, so I would say it was pretty fuckin’ courteous of me not to cut off their dicks and kill every last one of ‘em, wouldn’t you?”
You can’t find the words to refute that - not when his voice rises enough for the vibrations to run through the car and work their way into your bones, or when he gestures with that same gloved hand that’s done more than its fair share of things to hurt you - but even if you did, he gives you no time to respond, anyways.
“So you still wanna debate morals, princess? ‘Cause I don’t think you understand the whole damn scope of what they did.”
His voice drops down, but it doesn’t hide his irritation, and you swallow down the spit that’s made home in your throat. Nobody told you what that group did, but you think you know why, biting down the smile pulling at your cheeks.
They’re the only ones to have tried it and done it successfully.
Rosita embarks on mission impossible, and it results in Daryl almost getting into a fistfight at a bonfire.
or
Jealous Daryl. Protective Daryl. Lowkey possessive Daryl (my toxic trait is that I love this trope). What more could you want?
He wonders, for a second, if you forgot about him.
Though, Daryl hasn’t put himself in a position to be noticed by you quite yet. He’s standing by the doorway as he watches you take care of your day-to-day monotonies; admiring you, that’s what Rick would call it - makin’ eyes if Merle was here - and maybe they’re right, but he can’t tear his gaze away.
Pen between fingers, your tongue flicks out to wet your lips, eyebrows attempting to meet as you scrunch them confused. You’re not writing anything, he notices, and your non-dominant hand rises from the edge of the textbook to trace along the sentence you’re seemingly trying to comprehend. It’s simple, the movements are nothing groundbreaking - nothing particularly eye-catching - but it’s moments like these when Daryl feels a particular dull gnaw of longing.
He can’t call it a longing of his old life - not when all he remembers is drifting, an asshole redneck with an even bigger asshole for a brother - but of the old world, he guesses. One of them, at least. A kinder one to both you and him.
One where he met you and wooed you through Black Sabbath concerts. Or one where you’re both younger - where he’d try and help you through your exams even though he’s about as dumb as a bag of rocks if you’d showed him just a page of whatever you were studying. Just… one where Daryl didn’t have to visit you every few days about some stitches threatening to pop off his skin or about how a fractured rib is healing up.
Shaking the thoughts away, he runs a hand through his hair and takes a step forward. Then another and another, clunky boots not making a single noise as he closes the gap between your doorway and your desk. He raises an eyebrow when you don’t seem to acknowledge him though he’s standing just a few inches from you, and he bites the inside of his bottom lip when he hears you sigh.
“Everythin’ okay?”
His voice breaks your concentration and your head lifts rather abruptly to him, the usual blankness of his expression morphing into an upwards tug of his lips when yours breaks out into a smile. Ever since Carol told him that you only smile like that when you see him, Daryl can’t stop wondering if she’s right. It makes his heart scramble for balance, but he never finds it - can never find it when he’s around you - and he doesn’t even really know if he wants to.
“Every word in here’s like fifteen letters long.”
Putting down your pen, you lean back and rub at your eyes, the action much too cute for his poor heart to take, and he thinks he may crumble into the ground if he keeps looking. Though, his eyes stick onto you, months of stolen glances forming a habit he can’t quite break yet. When he knows you can’t see him - when he knows you’re not going to catch him staring - he can’t help but to.
Daryl swallows as he watches you move, the shirt you have tucked into those shorts he’d scavenged for you pulling taut over the swell of your chest as you bring your arms up straight over your head and lean back. Your swivel chair squeaks underneath the new movement, and he’s thankful for the cricks and cracks of your joints since they cover the slight choke on his spit - the one that he tries to hide with a clearing of his throat.
Only when you turn yourself to face him does he finally speak, broken out of his admiration by the curious slope of your brows. He doesn’t show up without a reason - even if that reason ends up simply being just a desire to ‘keep ya company’ - and you wait for him to say something, only for your patience to be rewarded by an upturn of his lips.
“Almost like they’re doctors or somethin’.”
Scoffing at his poor attempt at a joke, you uncross your legs, hands falling between your thighs to grip at the slight cushion of your chair and scoot yourself back. The action is so innocent - just a readjustment after struggling to understand that slightly ripped textbook - but he can’t help the way his jaw tenses, teeth grinding into each other so hard he thinks he might bite through his own skull.
The action is innocent, but the feelings stirring in him are anything but.
There aren’t many times where he feels younger than he actually is - not when his back hurts every time he comes back from recruitments and he’s picking up on the grays sprouting from his beard - but Jesus fucking Christ does he feel like a teenager around you. His body’s reacting like he’d never seen skin before, and he loathes the lack of control.
Never in his life had he met someone who keeps him up at night with a racing heart, but then again, he’d never met anyone like you until the dead started rising. Daryl’s got a long list of regrets behind him, but meeting you has never been one of them - not ever.
“Is the only reason you came here to remind me that I do not, in fact, have a medical license?”
Biting his bottom lip, he fights down his excitement as he tries to properly phrase the slight pain he feels each time he inhales. He hasn’t seen you as a patient in just under a week - more importantly, hasn’t felt you touch all over his damn his chest in just under a week - and he’d be hard-pressed to admit he missed the care of your steady hands even though his skin rises in goosebumps every time he thinks about it.
“Forgettin’ that damn linebacker from a few days ago?”
Daryl speaks then, a piss poor attempt at pretending he wasn’t being distracted by his brain’s insistence to relive old memories, and he’s not sure if you catch it - it’s hard for him to slip anything by you, - though, your expression doesn’t expose anything besides the rise of your brows, widening the whites of your eyes as a look of realization washes over you.
Shit, you did forget.
And by the looks of it, you felt bad.
“Crap- yeah, sorry, I didn’t mean to. Just give me a second.”
Lopsided, an apologetic smile worms way onto your face as you rise to a stand, tucking stray strands of hair behind your ears as you beeline towards the bed in your office. You should be honoured, you’d said to him after Rosita exposed the fact you’d only let him sleep on it when he needed to stay overnight in the infirmary. Since then, there’s always an odd sense of joy that takes over his body when he lets himself dwell on that fact.
Just for him.
The bed that smells like you - whose blankets wrap him up in a warmth that feels like your sunshine and rainbows - is just for him.
“Nah, there’s a lot’a people to look after, I get it. Don’t gotta go apologizin’ for nothin’.”
Daryl’s voice carries through the room as he watches you pull the sheets flat for him to sit, and he gets to work unbuttoning his shirt. It’s nearly routine by now, but God knows it hasn't always been. Weeks - months, maybe - of meeting you in that tiny cell block had passed before he finally worked up the courage to show you every mile of scarred tissue and all the memories he’d like to erase. He’d never trusted anyone like that before.
Hershel had been necessity - damn arrow through his side and a tumble down that cliff nearly making him bleed out - but you were different.
You, well, you were choice.
And it’s only been you, Daryl supposes, who he’d let himself be bare with. All that uncertainty - the doubt of how you would view him afterwards - had shattered useless when he heard your soft ‘I’m sorry someone did this to you’. It rushed warmth through him, the overflow of what felt like genuine care coating every crevice of his body and making him buzz alight.
He’d never been cared for.
At least, not in the way you seemed to.
It was such a foreign feeling, but he’d basked in it like a plant beneath sunlight. In that moment, it was like Daryl could feel his defenses break - like he could hear pieces of his meticulously built walls chip off and fall to the ground when he was with you. No sooner had his protection of mortar and brick morphed into a sandcastle, and no sooner had a tidal wave of you knocked him over.
Sudden - the realization of what he had been feeling hit him all at once.
He’d never been in love before, but no matter how much he tried to deny it - no matter how many times he tried to ignore the flutter in his stomach each time he saw you, or suppress the smile that always seemed to want to make an appearance when he heard your voice - Daryl could never distract himself from how nice you made him feel.
He’d given his heart to you a long time ago, and he can’t blame anyone but himself for the fact you don’t know it yet.
“Is there something on my face?”
Wiping at the corners of your mouth, your tongue peeks out to catch at whatever he’s been staring at. Daryl’s gaze pushes you to the border of self-consciousness though you know a couple of crumbs lining your lips or an angry pimple is barely the worst situation he’d ever seen you in. It doesn’t hold a candle to when walker blood covered every inch of you as you’d fought the breached hoard, and it certainly doesn’t come near the time you were so damn exhausted and sore that he had to hold your hair back as you threw up into a stack of burnt walkers since you couldn’t keep your arms up for more than 10 seconds.
You’d expected him to give you shit for it, honestly, but all he does when you bring it up is laugh.
Who said the apocalypse couldn’t be fun?
There’s an image in your head that pops up whenever you picture him then - so vivid and unlike any other memory catalogued between the folds of your brain. Daryl’s sitting just next to you on the log of a thick fallen tree a few miles out from the walls, vest worn open against dark blue flannel, and his head is thrown back, the mop of hickory falling against his grin-risen cheekbones from the angle.
An insufferable, deep and lovely chuckle breaks forth from his chest, blossoming into a full-body laughter which shakes his shoulders with the force. You bite down your own smile as you smack him lightly against the bicep, the dull impact against his muscle only making his amusement double.
In that memory, he’s so carefree.
You barely ever get to see him like that, and fuck does it makes your heart murmur in want, but that’s Daryl Dixon you’re thinking of. Swallowing down the lump in your throat, you let the familiar feeling of want settle in your chest, a stark and physical reminder that it’s Daryl Dixon you want.
Always aiming for the unattainable - especially when the unattainable is a selfless, loyal, and really goddamn cute man with broad shoulders and blue eyes that make you feel safe.
“Jus’ thinkin’.”
He pulls his shirt off just after he speaks, dropping the fabric onto the chair you’d set out for his crossbow and exposing the blue and brown splotches covering his thick torso. The slightest pang of pain strikes when his arms stretch over his head and he lets out a small grunt beneath his breath. You hear it though he probably tried to suppress the sound, and you pull your lips into a line with the desire to comfort him.
You know he’s capable - he’d told you through gritted teeth about how he’d gotten that asshole into a headlock before Rick told the guy to scram with a point of his Colt Python - but you can’t help the want you feel to wrap him in a tight hug like you did when he first came back all battered and exhausted.
“I didn’t know you were so open to trying new things.”
Scoffing, Daryl sends you a glare, insincerity lining his features before the corner of his lip twitches upwards, registering the small grin on your face. Four long strides take him to the other side of the bed, and he sits down, legs swung over the edge of the mattress and turned away from you to you and the door. It’s not huge, the smattering of bruises, but it lines in a concentric spot along his spine.
Your hand reaches out almost immediately, searching for the broken skin you’d slathered in ointment just a few days ago and prodding at the skin. They didn’t need them - they were nowhere near the normal amount of blood you’re so used to seeing on him after an unsuccessful run, if you remembered correctly - but you’d done it anyway. It meant less pain and faster healing for him, but you know he’d call it a waste of resources if he knew.
So it’ll just be your little secret for the time being.
“I’m real adventurous.”
Daryl’s mouth moves before his brain can filter it out, years being in his brother’s company doing nothing for the lewd undertone of his words, but your steady hands don’t still. There’s no light smack to his shoulder like he’s so used to receiving when he teases you, and he realizes you didn’t catch it.
It always surprises him how naive you are sometimes despite being one of the smartest people he knows. Months of watching you interact with the Woodbury people and even a few days with the slime that was Merle around girls had shown him how many jokes went over your head. Just a simple smile and nod from you was all they got. Hell, sometimes you wouldn’t even smile. And if it landed? They’d be lucky to receive anything less than a glare from him and a disgusted grimace from you.
A few more prods on his skin earn a couple mumbled complaints, but you keep your steady hand until you’re satisfied. Daryl wouldn’t mind, though, if you kept touching him, the skate of your dull fingernails on his back lending another thought for him to mull over. He’s not easily flustered - you couldn’t be when you had a brother like the one he had - but you've no sooner moved around the bed to face his front, and he’s no sooner wishing he didn’t wear such light coloured jeans.
“Does it still hurt?”
A smile threatens to creep forth, and you bite the inside of your lip to keep it down after you speak, a rush of familiar accomplishment brought forth by how much the swelling has gone down, and he imitates your action to stop himself from dwelling on how nice you look and how nice you sound and how nice you smell. Fuck, he shouldn’t be letting himself think these things - should wait until he’s alone so he’s not steadily boiling over, at least - but the sun shines into the room just right and it’s making you glow.
It’s just about making him lose his goddamn mind, too, because you really do you look like an angel, and he’s starting to wonder if God has outlined you himself with his steady hand. Sure, he’s not religious - couldn’t call himself that even on a good day - but he wouldn’t be surprised if you’d sprouted white wings and a damn halo across your head.
Stop, Daryl tells himself, and starts thinking of walkers instead just to stop himself from wanting to rest his hand on your neck and pull you down to kiss him. He’s down bad - real fucking bad - and his resolve only crumbles when your eyes drag up his body, his tongue fumbling to respond when he meets your gaze. Shit, were your eyes always this pretty?
“N-nah - feels fine. Can barely tell you’ve been a bullshittin’ doctor this whole time.”
Though it’s barely a moment’s hesitation, Daryl can hear himself stutter and he swallows hard - the sound of his distraction imperceptible to everyone in the room but him, ringing stark like black paint on a canvas. Well, imperceptible to ‘everyone’ as in imperceptible to you.
And thank God it’s just the two of you, both for the fact that if it was Rick or Carol they definitely would have clocked the messy look in his eye or the rose blush rising across his cheeks, and for the selfish fact that only he can see the smile that curves at your lips.
“I have a long list of satisfied patients. One where you appear many, many times.”
Scoffing, he stretches out his back and arches forwards, his lips forming a response as the ribs he’d fractured - at least, Daryl’s pretty sure he heard you say they’re fractured, but then again, he’d been so distracted by your fingertips along his skin that it made your voice sound underwater - result in a nearly inconsequential throb of pain. They don’t hurt as much as they did before, and it’s a surprise to him that that linebacker didn’t shatter all his damn bones.
Wins are few and far between for him, so he should probably count that as a win, shouldn’t he? Optimism, and all that.
Before he can even open his mouth in response, the doorknob jangles open and he feels the warmth of your two palms on his shoulders pushing him down onto the mattress beneath him, the air knocked out of his chest after he takes a second to process what just happened. He can’t, though. Daryl’s mouth hangs open the second he sees you between his legs, bent over him and holding him down to the bed like a manifestation of one of his tucked away fantasies.
Fuck, fuck, what the fuck?
“Hey, I brought over the...”
The snap of your neck upwards to the voice looks almost painful with your speed, but he only recognizes an apology and a rush of panic in your eyes when he hears Rosita from the doorway just behind him. He doesn’t move - doesn’t want to move because the slope of your jaw and curve of your neck is making him lose his goddamn mind - but neither do you, and a heat builds in his stomach, replacing the initial shock with swirls of red-hot feeling.
Rosita’s words die on her tongue as she takes in the scene in front of her. Daryl’s shirtless - obviously shirtless - and it looks like she caught you in the middle of doing something particularly enjoyable, only catching the urgency in your look.
You and Daryl are together? It might have flown under the radar - with how personal and private the two of you are, it’s more than possible nobody’s picked up on it - and all she can think about is how she’s going to tell Abraham, then Carol, then Maggie, then Michonne, then Glenn, then Rick. She’ll even tell Carl if he wants to know.
Fucking finally.
“... okay then.”
Smirking, she balls up the fabric in her hand and throws it towards you, watching it land in a clump next to Daryl’s torso and turns, shutting the door behind her so loud the sound reverberates through your bones.
A moment passes.
Then another.
Then your eyes meet his and you hop back from him like he’d burnt you, scrambling for a response as he stays on the bed, reeling from the last few seconds of what he could only consider was God smiling down at him or something.
“Sorry, I- I didn’t know she would come in. I didn't mean to- I didn’t want her to see your back ‘cause I didn’t know if you were okay with her seeing it and- “
Kicking up back into his sit, Daryl runs his fingers through his hair before waving your apology off, the corner of his mouth pulled up as if he was going to laugh even though he knows full well that his mind is still fuzzy from being underneath you. It was unexpected, sure, but unwelcome? He could call it that only because Rosita had walked in.
“Ya gotta stop apologizin’ for somethin’ that ain’t your fault.”
He watches as you bite your bottom-lip - watches as it curls into half a smile when you recognize his sincerity - and he hears your voice soon after, your figure nearing him with the few steps needed to close the distance as you tuck a loose strand of hair behind your ear.
“Just… I thought she would at least knock.”
Sighing, you take the black clump into your hands and turn away from him, walking around the mattress to get to that half-broken stool that can really only hold his crossbow. It’s ugly - a muddy, muddy orange that makes Daryl want to throw it out whenever he sees it - but you defend it like it’s your favourite thing in the world and it’s oddly endearing. Even if he searches for spray paint each time he leaves the walls.
“Must’a been important.”
You scoff and the sound intrigues him, one of his eyebrows quirking up like the lift of one of his knees. The bed squeaks underneath his attempt to face you, and you turn back to him before tossing him his shirt, nearly hitting him in his face. Daryl catches it, though, and pushes his head through the hole, punching his arms out on either side and glaring at you when he hears a small huff of laughter escape you.
Still, it’s nice to hear that sound. Even if it’s directed at his odd way of putting on a shirt.
“It’s, uh, it’s not really that important. Kinda stupid, honestly.”
Unfolding the fabric in front of you, you shake it once then twice to straighten it out, and he can’t keep that look of insincere annoyance on his face because that dress - if he can even call it that - makes his throat dry.
Holy shit.
It’s barely anything and he hates the fact his brain immediately starts forming images of you in it - hates the fact he knows you’d look so fucking good in it and the fact he knows he’s going to be in for even longer nights.
“She’s been trying to get me to wear this ever since she found it in her closet, but this is… God, could you even imagine me in it?”
He can.
He is.
But you don’t need to know that.
Clearing his throat, Daryl works to shake the thoughts from his head. From the sound of your voice, it’s not lost on him that he’s probably never going to see you wear it, and he’s fighting his own brain real damn hard to give you the respect you deserve, but he knows they’re not going to disappear. They’re just going to be tucked away like money in a piggy bank. At least until he smashes the pink porcelain to pieces, seeking selfish indulgence before the familiar sense of shame settles in his bones again. He can’t keep doing that to you, but he can’t stop.
“Thought you were gonna wear the one that makes ya look like a pilgrim tonight.”
He mentally pats himself on the back when he manages to string together a cohesive sentence, and he watches as you make your way to your desk. Holding out the dress, you study it as if considering putting it on, and he finds himself stuttering his breath for your answer as you pull your legs up into that stupid position he’d begged you to stop calling ‘criss-cross-applesauce’.
“Hopefully, I’m not gonna wear either of them if I can convince Rick I’m not really important to meet.”
Humming, Daryl turns away from you and drops his foot back to the ground before bending down, undoing his laces with quick tugs. He knows he should probably get going - let you slave over whatever the hell he’d walked in on you slaving over - but the bed is so comfy, and maybe he just wants to talk to you a little longer.
“Can’t be that bad.”
His phrasing catches your attention, and you look over at him, sitting against the headboard with his legs kicked up onto the ratty blanket you’d laid out if he didn’t kick his dirt-covered shoes off.
‘Can’t be that bad’?
Did Daryl Dixon say a social gathering can’t be that bad?
“You gonna go?”
You can’t help but study him as you wait for him to answer you. Can’t help but look for something - anything - to figure out whether or not he’s bullshitting you.
But it never comes.
“Sure as hell considerin’ it.”
It’s genuine. Everything he’s saying is genuine, and you’re glued to every little movement of his being like you’re looking for signs that some alien has started to live in his body and taken him over inside-out. Who is this man, and what the hell has he done with the Daryl you know?
A smirk blooms across his lips then, and he folds his arms behind his head, closing his eyes before he peeks one open with a lazy roll of his neck towards you. It makes your heart stutter, how handsome he looks, and your focus is stolen to just watching his mouth form each word that tumbles out.
“‘Cause Carol’s gon’ cook somethin’ worth talkin’ ‘bout, y’know. And I don’t wanna miss whatever she’s gon’ do wit’ that deer I damn near broke my spine carryin’ back.”
Oh.
There he is.
That sounds like him, and the words are so familiar that you’re sure they’re regurgitations of how you’d convinced him to go to those welcome parties at the prison. Standards for meals in the apocalypse are low - half the shit in the pantry is expired and, God forbid, someone uses something other than salt for seasoning - but Carol must be a fucking magician with what she can cook with a can of lentils and apparently sheer force of will.
No wonder he’s considering it.
“‘Sides, it could be fun.”
Raising an eyebrow, your grin lifts to one side and you crumple the dress against your chest, spreading your legs to slide down the back of the chair until it hits comfort. You’d had plans - get deeper into the meat of the textbook and hopefully read more than two pages a day - but now that Daryl’s here, it would just be plain stupid to ask him to leave. Plus, he looks kind of cute when he’s fidgeting with his fingers.
“That linebacker hit your head too, or something? When have you ever thought anything with people could even be remotely fun?”
He hums then, lip pulling into a line as he contemplates his answer. It's not a lie, the fact he’s set his sights on eating that deer, but it’s not necessarily the whole truth. Daryl knows full well he could just leave his house for a few minutes and ask Carol for a slice, but Jesus fucking Christ has he found himself determined to see how you’d look in that dress.
Who knows how long it might take before there’ll even be a chance like this again? He’s always been an opportunist, and if there was a time to change his tune, it sure as hell can’t be now.
“Won’t be bad if ya come with me.”
Shit, that was not subtle at all and he knows it, biting the inside of his cheek as he waits for you to respond. He’s expecting a flat-out ‘no’, honestly, but when it never comes, he finds himself holding his breath as your grip tightens around the garment. Contemplating. You’re contemplating an answer and blood nearly rushes into his mouth with how hard his teeth dig into his own flesh.
You could go. Honestly, you probably should go to help support whatever community bullshit Rick and Maggie are trying to make happen, but…
But what?
There’s nothing holding you back from going. There’s no reason not to, and you already know at least six people - no, seven now, if you tack on what you can only assume is Daryl joking around with you - that will already be there. Plus, when was the last time you’d been to a gathering? It might be nice.
It might be fun.
“I’ll be off in an hour.”
The second he hears your words - phrased more like a suggestion to him than anything - he feels a tingle of anticipation race through him. Holy shit, greenlight. Clearing his throat, he stretches out the cricks in his neck and kicks off the bed, toeing on his shoes before leaning down and tying them.
He’d only intended to see you for a little bit - plans of hanging out at his place during the bonfire now replaced by hopefully seeing you in that dress at the bonfire - and he would stay if he could, but there are traps that need to be checked. It’s a shitty excuse he’s concocted to get the hell out of the infirmary, sure, but Daryl has to figure out a reason to leave other than trying to keep his thoughts from how you’d look in that dress and how you’d looked bent over him. They’ll loom over him the whole damn day if he doesn’t do anything about it.
“I’ll drop by an’ pick y’up, if ya want. Y’gon’ be here?”
He speaks as he walks over to that rickety old stool, listening to your chair squeaking as you turn to follow his movement. You’d mentioned the fact you needed to oil it for a few days now, but you’d never got around to it. ‘Life gets busy’, you’d said to him, and he gets it. Maybe he should drop by with some of the oil he keeps for his motorcycle sometime soon and get rid of that god awful squeak himself.
“Nah, my house. I'm gonna have to change into something nice.”
Daryl bites back his smile, swinging his crossbow over his shoulder before turning his head and taking you in for one last look. You’ve straightened up from your slouch, sat cross-legged on the armless swivel chair and dress in a pile just on your desk, knuckles pressed underneath your cheekbone as you lean your weight on your arm. The squish of your cheeks makes his lips pull into a line to keep his expression schooled, and he gives you a small wave before he leaves.
“Wear somethin’ fun.”
He hears you scoff before he turns the doorknob, an ‘I’ll try’ coming from you, and he can’t help but pray to God you would think of wearing that dress as he walks through the infirmary. But then again, if you did wear it, he’d have a hard time thinking of anything except you. Not that he hasn’t been struggling with that since he’d realized how he felt months ago in the damn prison.
Rosita gives him a smirk when he makes eye-contact with her as she reorganizes the medicine shelf, but he shrugs her look off, fighting the blush threatening to spread from his cheeks. She didn’t knock, and Daryl knows he should be at least a little angry at her for making you think you’d been responsible for putting him in an uncomfortable position, but he can’t help but be a little thankful of what happened.
You bent over him, the curve of your jaw, the rise of your collarbones, the drop of your neckline - it’s seared into his brain, and he swears as he fumbles the front doorknob, suddenly remembering the imaginations of you wearing that skimpy thing. Maybe he’s stupid, but up until a couple minutes ago, he’d forgotten shit like that even still existed.
Now he has an hour to think about it, and he keeps his eyes on the ground as he beelines to his house.
An hour.
He just hopes you never find out what he’ll be doing for that hour.
- - -
“You going to the bonfire tonight?”
Scrunching your nose, a contemplating hum escapes from you before you swivel around, the sight of Rosita leaning against the doorframe and a smirk plastered on her face greeting you. She likes to say that she's been waiting ages to talk you into going, if you remember correctly - it's really only been a couple days, but in the current world, that does feel like ages - and part of you wonders if she might be annoyed that all her efforts pale in comparison to some light teasing remarks from Daryl.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe you are weak for him.
And maybe you can’t find it in yourself to feel anything but pleasant at the thought.
“I wish I had more of a choice.”
Her expression doesn't change - your face betrays the annoyance and dejection in your voice, and it's written so obvious across your features that she's surprised anyone can believe you when you're lying. The only person she knows that manages to be blind and deaf and completely clueless when it comes to you is the last person she’d expected. Glenn, sure. Maybe even Maggie or Rick, but Daryl? He's the most observant man she's ever met, and he can read almost anything like a book.
Except, apparently, you.
The only thing he couldn't seem to read was that infuriatingly sweet expression of yearning on your face when he was around. Everyone else could see it - even Carl could - so why the fuck couldn't he? Well, actually, based on what she'd seen a few minutes ago, that wasn’t the case anymore. Unless you’d somehow mustered enough courage to put on your big boy pants and confessed to him.
“But Daryl just wants to go for the food, so that’s all I’m staying for, too.”
Rosita’s far too familiar with the small smile you get when you say his name, and the almost triumphant memory of getting that visual confirmation of your relationship with him jumps forward in her brain.
Finally.
“You’re going with him?”
She’s been on the brink of shoving your heads together so you two would stop the stupid pining shit she’s had to witness for weeks now, and catching you in that less than innocent position with him gave her all she needs to rub it in Abe’s face that one of you finally mustered enough courage to confess. She'll get the specifics soon enough, but right now, she can't help but pry, asking another question right after your nod. God, she can't wait to tell Carol - can't wait to tell everyone that the resident lovesick puppies have finally gotten together.
“Leaving with him?”
Again, you nod, and her smile only widens.
“Will you guys need some condoms?”
The drop of your jaw is almost comical and your eyebrows slant to meet, a sputter of air escaping you at how off-guard her comment catches you.
“Rosita! Shut up!”
She laughs and you’re pretty sure your face is starting to burn into that same overheat that stubbornly shows up when she talks about Daryl like this. He’s such a private person - so much so that you’re not even sure he’s into doing that - and the way she's speaking is so loud and brash and heavy-handed you can only be glad he’s nowhere near the infirmary to hear her.
“Is that a ‘we’ll get them ourselves’ shut up or a ‘he pulls out, so we use the protection of God’ shut up?”
You’re not a prude - at least you don’t think you are - but your thoughts get the better of you at her suggestion. Your mind whirls into overdrive as the images start coming, and you swear Rosita is getting some sick pleasure from how your throat moves to swallow the spit gathering in your mouth. The only thing you can do is scream at yourself to stop.
Stop thinking of the condom in use.
Stop thinking of the condom in use with Daryl.
“Ros- I am going to commit so many acts of violence against you.”
Groaning, you sink into your chair before you speak again, legs spread and the back of your hand against your forehead, sneaking a glance at her from underneath your thumb. You recognize the look immediately, and God do you wish you’d never told her about your crush on Daryl. Then again, it was your own damn fault for overestimating how much liquor you could hold. Especially after not touching a drop for months. Rookie mistake.
“It’s a ‘Daryl doesn’t like me like that so please shut up’ shut up.”
Her smile doesn’t drop, and you close your eyes just so you don’t need to see her anymore.
“You guys don’t have sex?”
You not giving an answer isn’t out of the realm of possibilities, when she thinks about it more. Daryl’s never really dropped any hints that he wants to do anything except make those stupid heart-eyes that make her want to throw up - and considering how private you are, you’d probably never let anything like that slide. You’re pretty tight-lipped when you want to be. At least, when she thinks of all the times Glenn and Tara, and even Rick sometimes spill like overfilled bowls, you’re tight-lipped.
She reminds herself to invite you over for whisky sometime soon. She’s gotta get the details somehow.
“Well, no. You kinda have to be in a relationship with someone for that.”
An odd silence falls after you speak, and you peek an eye open, watching one of her brows rise up to wrinkle her forehead. A beat, then another, and then her face scrunches inwards in a squint.
“No fucking way.”
The sound that escapes you is what you can only consider a scoff, and what the hell can you even say to that? Instead, your hands fall back onto your lap and you stare dead into her eyes, waiting for her to give you something other than the feeling of being studied.
“Holy shit, you’re serious.”
She looks at you with a contort of incredulity, and before you can even open your mouth - seriously, what the hell can you even say to her? - her hands shoot up into the air from the crossing at her chest and her voice’s pitch nearly matches the height of her hands.
“Months! How much longer can you possibly go? Getting either of you to confess is like Mission fucking Impossible, oh my God.”
Your mouth rounds in the beginning of a sentence, finally catching a window where your brain can form some kind of response, but it doesn’t seem to matter because she cuts you off. From what you can see on her face, a genuine curiosity overtakes her exasperation, and you readjust your seating, pulling down the legs of your shorts from where they’re ridden up and preparing to finally answer something she’s asked.
“What did I walk into, then?”
Hm.
Shrugging, you pull your lips into a line while you take barely a second to contemplate your answer. It’s not like you need the time, though. You’re not about to spill all the scars on his back and all the shitty stories about his childhood his voice would carry through reminiscing night shifts and spontaneous stargazings. He trusts you with the past he so desperately wants to forget, and if Daryl wants anyone to know about it other than you, it wouldn’t be right for the words to come from anyone but him.
You’ve shed a lot to cope with the world, but holding on to some shred of human decency is a lot easier than people make it out to be.
“He just doesn’t like it when people see him without a shirt on.”
It’s that fine balance between flippancy and assertion that makes her take the answer at face value. She doesn’t care, honestly - maybe just a little curious since the whole ‘Daryl only ever lets you check on him’ isn’t just his pure adoration for you that she and Denise had chalked it up to - but she doesn’t push it anymore. Besides, it doesn’t seem like either of you have any particular problem with whatever system you two have agreed on.
“I bet you love seeing him like that.”
Sighing, you scrunch your eyes closed and send a sharp, insincere glare that immediately clears the space separating the two of you. All she does is smile and tilt her head as if awaiting a resounding ‘yes’ that she unsurprisingly never ends up getting. You and Rosita click - have clicked since saving her ass from one of the rifled-up Terminus people, and you cherish her as maybe one of your closest friends - but when it comes to the romance department, she might as well be a magnet pointing the same direction as you.
“I have an idea.”
Oh?
Hearing four words is enough to have you raising an eyebrow as you look over at her. You’re no stranger to her ‘ideas’ - especially when Daryl’s been involved in the conversation - and you can only be thankful that Maggie or Carol aren’t here to egg her on. Rosita’s so fucking bold sometimes it both scares you and impresses you, and she looks back at you expectantly. Watching you shrug as she waits for you to say anything in response.
“You're gonna tell me it anyways.”
She hums in agreement and takes a step towards you, catching her lip in what you can only assume is pure excitement before she takes another, and then another. Her straight trajectory deviating slightly to pick up the garment lying on your desk just to the right, but she returns headfirst to you no sooner, that same triumphant smile on her face that you remember from the first time she’d brought it to you.
“Wear the dress.”
Scoffing, you reach out to grab it out of her hands only for her to lift it past your fingertips and let it hang downwards, showing you the laces that are supposed to crisscross and frame your shoulder blades. Tara has mentioned how it was ‘an underratedly sexy part of the body’, but Rosita was too busy sticking her beer-coated tongue down Abe’s throat for you to think she’d remember.
“Rosita, I-”
You make out a couple of syllables before she’s holding up the garment to you as if you’d never seen it before - maybe the only reason you’d even gotten to speak is because she’d had to turn it around in her hands and slip her fingers between the layers of fabric to readjust the bra padding - but you can’t bring yourself to be mad at her because she’s so enthusiastically trying to make you feel better about your stupid little crush that it’s honestly kind of funny.
“Dude, I’m serious! He’ll love it!”
After finishing her readjustment, she lifts the dress back up and holds it out in front of you, tilting her head to the side and squinting as if truly studying the way you’d look in it. Honestly, the dress isn’t hideous - you’d seen people wear stuff like that in the clubs you’d celebrated your 21st and all your friends’ 21sts in, or when Halloween rolled around and sorority girls would wear it with red horns to call themselves demons - but it’s just not for you. Or maybe you’d just never let it be.
“I don’t know…”
You’re not the greatest liar - the world had gone to shit, and you can really only do it decently enough to have stayed alive from unfriendly run-ins - so it doesn’t take a genius to catch the margin of consideration that you’re taking. Your eyes are along the hems now, along the cut-outs and the thin little pieces of string that are supposed to frame your back, and she’s not even sure whether or not you’re even trying to hide it at this point.
“He’s gonna feel the same way looking at you that you feel looking at him. Think about it.”
Rosita can’t be too sure, though, tapping her pointer finger on her temple as if her suggestion might be the pinnacle of human invention. The last time she’d trusted you to put on your big boy pants, she nearly smacked you when you’d told her about the - platonic - date she’d spent so long more or less planning for the two of you. If Carol was telling the truth, apparently Daryl spent the next few hours walking around with a stupid little love-drunk smile on his face.
A smile. Rosita’s never seen him smile before.
And sure, maybe she’s naïve in thinking it’s only a matter of time until one of you confesses, but she’s damn well going to try her best to expedite the process.
“Daryl won't even know what hit him when you show up in this thing. Then maybe you'll need the protection of God to keep him away from you.”
Taking a breath, a noise sputters out of you at how off-guard the latter half of her monologue takes you, a suggestivity so stark it might as well be painted in red in the air. There’s a part of you that blooms in butterflies at the thought - at the thought that Daryl might be looking at you and wanting you - and he did say something about wearing something fun.
This could be fun.
“Fine.”
You’re sure someone would think you’d given Rosita the last hot shower with how she celebrates, clenching her fists and shaking them in victory, smiling wide at the prospect of one of her plans finally getting to see the light of day. You can’t blame her, though, most of her ideas land her a smack on the shoulder and not even a second of consideration. It’s not her fault you’ve been saying no to anything remotely suggesting you confess your stupid little crush.
Not even a second passes before she’s throwing the dress into your lap and yelling out to Denise that you ‘said yes!’, her grip at your wrist pulling you up before your survival instinct kicks in, your feet planting themselves into the ground beneath you. Rosita glances over at you, tugging you once more with a tilt of her head before she speaks, dragging you with steps on combat boots not too dissimilar from yours.
“We need to make you hot, dude. Every second counts.”
She yells a goodbye to Denise who waves back over a student copy of some pediatrics textbook, and you let Rosita drag you out of the infirmary, holding the flimsy piece of fabric against your chest as she beelines towards your house.
“You’re acting as if we don’t have a job to do.”
Narrowly missing an ill-placed mailbox, Rosita lets go of your hand and waves off your concern before twisting your doorknob open and ushering you in. Half of her urgency is in the fact she’d caught glimpse of Daryl helping out the people hoisting up that new piece of the wall - if you had seen him, she would have had to talk you into ignoring the desire to break off from her to talk to him - and half her urgency is in the fact she’s got no clue how to tie the thin laces to make him finally want to do something. If she has to spend another week watching the way he looks at you, she’s gonna lock you guys in a room and not let you out until you kiss.
“Denise said it was fine! Besides, your shift ended like, half an hour ago.”
Scoffing, you pull out your hair from your ponytail as you kick off your shoes, turning your head to tell her that she ‘got on half an hour ago’ as she locks your front door. The second you turn back towards the staircase, you hear her scoff a ’so?’ and you shake your head. You can’t really blame her for jumping ship, though. Unlike an actual hospital, there’s no steady stream of patients, and you’ve skipped your shift to hunt with Daryl more often than you would like to admit.
Rounding the corner, you push into your room and throw the dress onto your bed, pulling open your underwear drawer and balling a pair of underwear in your fist before Rosita can make the last step of the stairs. You stuff the cotton into your pocket just as she clears the doorway and she picks up the pile of arrows stacked meticulously on your stool, moving it painstakingly slowly onto the desk in front of it before sitting down.
“Don’t go through my stuff.”
She just nods as she fiddles with the broken handle of one of your storage shelves. It’s not that you have anything you particularly valuable - well, you do have that polaroid Carl took of you and Daryl back at the prison when he thought you two were ‘k-i-s-s-i-n-g’ tucked between the pages of the novel you were more-or-less ambling your way through, and you’re pretty sure Daryl would kill you if anyone other than the three of you involved knew about it - but it’s more of a general human decency thing than anything else.
10 minutes is usually the longest you shower, but today you might have pushed it to 15 since the water pressure felt fucking good on the knots in your back and shoulders. You step out of the shower and wipe your body dry before slipping on a henley you’re pretty sure you stole from Tara - then again, it could be Denise’s, but that’s besides the point since neither of them have asked for it back. Your hair is your next victim, threading your fingers through some of the stubborn knots as you dry it haphazardly on your way to your room.
You can still remember the first shower you took after the prison fell, and it feels so long ago even though it’s only been a few weeks. It all felt weird, you guess - the hot water, the air conditioning, and even just the abundance of suburbia was too odd to just settle into.
It’s still weird, in a way, and maybe that’s why you and Daryl take almost every opportunity to just avoid it. The… stability of it all. You’re thankful to live here, that’s for damn sure - you could’ve become religious the second you saw the walls and the showers - but that pervasive little part of you that thinks Alexandria is too good to be true just keeps growing.
There were lots of things like that were too good to be true. And you’d gotten hurt in your own stupid naïveté holding out for hope.
Jesus, way to bum yourself out.
“So… project makeover?”
Pressing your lips together, you mentally shake the thoughts from your head and nod, walking over to your closet. There’s not much in there - everything you wear is piled up on just one shelf, the other ones taken up by miscellaneous knick-knacks you’ve swiped from runs - but you manage to find a nice looking bra hidden between the layers of turtlenecks you’ve hoarded for the colder seasons.
It’s not a surprise to you it’s unfamiliar - there are a lot of things you’ve never worn before because it’s just not practical when you have to hunt in the mornings and pick pebbles off the knees of clumsy children in the afternoon - but what better day to try out the adventure than now? Before you can grab the dress from your bed, though, Rosita taps at your arm and holds out her hand as if waiting for you to drop something onto her palm.
You’ve got nothing in your hands - nothing of particular interest at least - and you just look back at her, tilting your head to the side in a prompt before you turn back around to pull open your sock drawer, hearing her explanation from behind you. Wow, all you have left are the long socks you wear underneath your sweatpants. Maybe you’ll just have to wear the ones you’d taken off to shower.
“It’s a padded backless dress.”
You have no trouble catching the subtext - ’you won’t need a bra, so don’t bother’ - and you raise one of your eyebrows, biting the inside of your lip as you think about your options.
According to her, there’s no need since it’s padded.
According to her, the hooks will just get in the way of the dress’ aesthetic appeal. Plus, the dress looks tight, so all the band’s going to do is lump up the fabric.
Y'know what? Sure.
Scrunching your nose, you loop the straps to hang on her outstretched fingers, and finally turn away into your bathroom again. You hear the jangling of your drawers being pulled open, and you bite down a smile when she responds with ‘why do you have, like, no socks’ at your joking warning of ‘I said ‘no going through my stuff.’’
The dress is hard to put on. Plain and simple. Well, no, that phrasing is wrong because you wish it was plain and simple. Instead, the straps that aren’t undone - they’re for your arms, you think? - are convoluted as all hell, and you think you might have broken a seam or two trying to push your hand through one of the holes.
But you manage.
Eventually.
Henley in your grip, you make your way back to your bedroom, the skirt of the dress fluttering behind you with each step. From what you caught of your reflection - to be fair, though, most of the time you were too busy trying to figure out how to keep the dress against your chest - Rosita was right in saying the padding would do just fine without that extra layer, and even though it’s pretty form fitting, there’s not a panty line in sight. Even the cut-outs look like they belong, and honestly? You don’t even really mind that the dress itself is a little on the shorter side.
“Wow, okay, who knew you looked like that underneath all the stuff you usually wear.”
Her words make you nerves act up despite yourself. It’s just a compliment on your looks, but those have been so far and in between you’d forgotten how stuff like that sounded.
“Oh, um, thanks. Yeah. I, uh- you probably have to fix the knots in my dress, though.”
The apocalypse makes you stop sweating stuff that doesn’t equate directly to the base level of survival, and you haven’t thought about the way you look in months, so why does this whole thing - this whole ‘looking good’ thing - start feeling so important so suddenly?
You look fine.
You look good.
Will Daryl think that, too?
Fuck. That’s why.
“Hell yeah let’s get into it then.”
You’re not sure how long she’s tugging the strings loose and tightening them again, much less the time she’s spent undoing them and doing them again. They’ll probably look better than what you can do, but then again, that’s a low bar to surpass since all the knots you know have been learned second-hand from her and Daryl. She’s probably putting them in the convoluted bows she’d learned from some dude named Tad, but if she wants to dress you like a pretty little present, you’ll let her.
And honestly, it feels kind of nice to be doted on.
Biting the inside of your cheek, you reach for the comb lying just a few inches from and work out the tangles in your hair as you try not to think too hard about how Daryl might react to this you. He’s seen you in dresses before, sure, but they’re winter jackets compared to this one. Especially the one stuffed into your closet on that first day you’d all made your ways through its walls.
Yeah, he’s in for a surprise.
It’s odd, the mixture of excitement and dread that settles into you on the realization that you're actually wearing this. God, the excitement feels almost like a kid getting a new toy and waiting for school to show everyone. But the dread? The dread is equally juvenile.
Nobody cares what you look like - much less Daryl, who’s probably seen you at the worst - and maybe that’s the problem.
Daryl doesn’t care what you look like, but you want him to. You want him to blush when he sees you - you want him to get so flustered that he stumbles over his words - and you want him to look at you and realize that all he wants to do is hold your hand and cup your cheek and kiss you.
“Right?”
You hum in agreement, not having listened to anything Rosita has said in the past couple of minutes, and you’re not sure she notices until she lets out a small huff of… semi-annoyance, maybe?
Turns out it’s a sound of accomplishment because then you feel her take a step back - can hear the squeak of your mattress as she takes a seat on you bed - and you turn your head around just enough to see a satisfied smile on her face, even though you would have heard it in the lilt of her words.
“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?”
Oh-
“No, I’m just thinking. Like, regular thinking. Not about him.”
After letting out a noise of disbelief, Rosita lies down, the bottom half of her body hanging off the bed and she stares at the little star stickers on your ceiling. She’ll never understand why you’d chosen to stay in the only room that screamed it was for kids - especially when Rick’s house had an extra room and Judith’s been falling asleep in your arms a lot more often in the past few days - but it wasn’t the first time you’d taken something solely because nobody else wanted it.
After all, how else did you end up becoming the closest thing Alexandria’s had to a paediatrician? You couldn’t pay Denise enough for her to agree on digging pebbles from the skin of those little demons even though she’d told them last visit to ‘be more careful’.
“You gonna piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining, too?
You put your comb down, a light scoff taking up the momentary silence, and pull out a drawer, the tiny trinkets of cat figurines and little houses tinking against each other as you dig through to find a hair tie.
Shit, where the fuck did you put your stash?
“Look, you look great, okay? Your boobs look great.”
Her phrasing makes you chuckle, and you roll your eyes, about to say something before a familiar one-two-three pattern raps at the door. That saccharine mixture of excitement and dread flares up again, and your body turns almost comically, pushing up and off the stool to grab a pair of clean socks without thinking twice.
Racing down the stairs, you try not to slip on the nearly frictionless contact of cotton and furnished hardwood on your way to the door. Daryl’s here - he’s here - and you can’t help the anticipation rising as you twist open the doorknob.
“Hey, sorry for bein’ early. I jus’ thought…”
But his words die in the middle of his throat when he trails his eyes up your body. It takes a second for him to recuperate - to remember what he wanted to say and that checking you out should be reserved to when he knows you’re not staring right at him - and he pulls together all the willpower he has to rip his attention from you and finish his sentence.
“There’d, uh, be less people. An’ we could, uh, bail earlier since Carol’s usin’ the grill now.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck he’s a mess, and he turns his head away from you so his hair covers the majority of his face. He doesn’t need you seeing how hard he’s clenching his jaw to make the blush on his cheeks disappear, nor does he need the sight of those cut-outs to burn themselves into his memory. They do it on their own accord, he swears.
But then you bend over, pulling on those combat boots he thinks look too damn good on you for no reason, and his eyes get drawn back by the movement of your loose hair. He’s never really seen your shoulders before - never seen those thin black knotted straps against you or how your shoulder blades flutter up beneath your skin as you tie the laces - and it’s driving him crazy like he’s a teenager who’s never touched a girl before.
“Hell yeah, let’s go!”
Clearing his throat, he follows you when you skip past him, pulling the door shut after you’d left it just a little open, a small smile threatening to form on his lips when he sees the grin on yours. He’s spent the last hour thinking about how you’d look in this dress, and it’s even more obvious to him than before that he’s really in it deep when not even his own imagination - it’s a runner when he lets it be - can’t hold a candle to what he’s seeing.
Just… God, you’re pretty.
“Oh, uh, thank you, Daryl. You’re pretty too.”
Shit, shit, shit did he say that out loud?
“Fuck, I- fuck- I’m sorry.”
Swallowing, he averts his eyes as you turn around to face him, sensing that infuriatingly cute rise of your brow and playful smile playing at your lips which makes him redden twofold. He wants to shrink into himself and disappear, but his stupid tongue keeps forming words and he can hear himself speak before he can even think twice about what’s escaping him.
“I mean, ya do look nice - like, pretty, I mean - but I just- I ain’t thinkin’ of ya like that.”
Though you’re blushing too, he doesn’t register that as he keeps his vision to the ground, too scared of what might greet him if he gives into the urge to look at you. There’s an amusement to you that he can sense - maybe even a satisfaction - and there’s an odd pleasure mixed in with the humiliation he’s feeling.
He knows you like teasing him - hell, Daryl likes teasing you more than he’d care to admit - but he can’t help but think you might be doing it for other reasons. Maybe you want to see him blush because you think it’s cute or because you have that little voice in you, too, that entertains the thought that he’s blushing because he thinks you’re serious - that he’s entertaining that same thought like you do.
“Like what?”
Like how he wants to take your hand in his and press kisses against each round of your knuckles. Or how he wants to wrap his hands around your waist and pull you sweet into a kiss that makes you forget your own name. Or how he wants to slip a hand into that stupidly distracting backless and grab a palmful of your ass and press up against you while wrapped up in your arms. Or how he wants you to let him bury his head in your chest and between your thighs and to let him draw splotches down your neck with his lips.
Fuck, stop thinking about all that shit.
“Like nothin’. Shut up.”
He hears you laugh and it’s like all his thoughts are wiped from him - at least, they’re all wiped for now, no doubt waiting for another late night to flare up again - and Daryl finally regains enough courage to look you in the eye. The second he does, a grin spreads across your cheeks and he wants to cry with how happy you look.
You don’t just look pretty, you look beautiful.
His heart pounds at the thought, and he misses the sound of Carol yelling for him. You catch it, though, and stare back at him. It’s not like him - he could pick up on the sound of a walker at double the distance she’s at right now - but nobody but him knows he’s too busy feeding his addiction to you to notice anyone else.
So you wait for him to react - to turn towards her and wave or nod or something - but it doesn’t come on the next step, or the next, or the next.
Then something washes over you - a confidence you’ve never felt before, brought on by the happy buzz of his attention - and you grab his hand, the juvenile rush of adrenaline shooting through you. For a second, he stutters, the warmth and feel of your hands making Daryl’s whole body short-circuit, but it’s just the shock he needs to get out of his haze.
He matches your steps soon enough, catching up to you even though he’d put on his unbroken nice jeans under Carol’s suggestion. God, he should’ve never told her about the fact he was going with you - well, he never told her specifically, but she’s a damn witch when it comes to reading people - because she’d dressed him up like she’d been waiting her whole life to.
“Hey there, lovebirds.”
Rolling his eyes at Carol, he lets go of your hand immediately, shoving his into his pockets and toeing at the dirt beneath his boots. He doesn’t look at you - the implication of the word lovebirds playing tricks on both his and your mind, conjuring up thoughts he’d already had too many fucking times today and making the two of you just flustered enough - but he wants to. You look too good not to want to.
“Wha’d'ya want?”
He prepares for another teasing remark - prepares to scoff at the smile that widens her lips and maybe even grab your hand to find a spot underneath a tree just to get away from her desire to embarrass him - but Rick calls your name before Carol can even say anything.
“Sorry, I didn’t think he’d… Just, uh, find a seat and I’ll meet you after I’m done, okay?”
Your touch at his shoulder as you speak makes him warm from the inside, and honestly, you could say anything and he’d nod along like a damn lovesick puppy. This instance is no exception, and for the first time since you’d held his hand, his eyes meet yours as he pulls his lips into a tight line.
A smile.
At least, the most he could muster up with all the people beginning to take up the field around him.
You’ve got too much power over him - then again, he’s known that since that first night you’d both spent stargazing in the prison field - and as you walk away, he’s stuck staring. The backless cut-out of your dress, the sway of your hips, the amount of leg he can see and how those damn socks cut mid-calf; he can’t do anything but stare.
Yeah, you’re fucking beautiful.
Scoffing, Carol reaches her tongs over to flip the slab of meat cooking on the grill, and she bites down a chuckle. How much longer did she have to wait until he picks up the courage to confess? The more time drags on, the more possible it is that Carl might get a girlfriend before him.
“Y’know what phrase pops into my mind when you have that look on your face? ‘Hate to see her go, but love to watch her leave.’”
Daryl’s whole being goes rigid at that, quick glares being thrown in every direction in case he needs to shut up any poor soul who had caught him. Thank God your back is to him - well, of course it is since that’s what he’s been fucking staring at - because shit, was he really that obvious? Or was Carol just being Carol and tapping into that scarily observant side of herself?
“I’m gon’ tell all them Alexandrians ya pissed in the stew.”
A little tilt of her head accompanies the chuckle bubbling up from her throat, and Carol reaches for the bowls next to her, ladling out two portions of said stew and throwing in your favourite spoon that Daryl had made a point to tell her about. It’s an ugly thing - probably made for a child with the airplane wings that sprout from the otherwise inconspicuous stainless steel - but he’d beamed with pride when he’d brought it back from a run. If you were anyone else, he probably wouldn’t have made the effort to care, much less remember, but he’d lamented over the loss when the prison fell.
You don’t hide your childish enjoyments, and at first he’d hated it - why the fuck did he have to ‘stop and smell the roses’ when you’d accompany him on hunts? Why did you lose your absolute shit over some dinosaur shaped handheld fan and beam so bright the whole day when you showed it to everyone? - but you were so warm and your smile was so breathtaking that the excitement painted on your face melted away his annoyance like ice cream in a Georgian summer. He’d do anything if it meant seeing that look on your face.
Raising an eyebrow, he takes the bowls from her hands and peers into them, jokingly studying the steaming liquid as if she really had let loose in it. Another spoon - one that’s ‘considerably less cool’, you’d probably say - gets dropped in the other when Carol manages to calm the fire burning high underneath a slab of meat.
“This a threat?”
Only then does she notice the false distrust slathered over his expression, and she rolls her eyes, plating two huge slices of venison.
“Might be if you don’t tell her how nice she looks today.”
Memories of just moments ago flare up like an unwanted rash, and he has to suppress a groan, staring off into the distance and onto you at her suggestion. You do look fucking nice, and he wished he’d told tell you when his mind wasn’t drunk off devouring the way you looked and embarrassed himself.
“Would do it if I didn’t already.”
Oh, that takes Carol by surprise and she can’t help but grin at that. It’s a step - a tiny step, sure - for Daryl’s courage when it comes to you, but it’s gotten to a point where she’d rather pat him on the back for even doing something than push him towards discomfort.
“Wow, you’re manning up, huh?”
Daryl bumps her shoulder with his and scoffs, eyes off you and taking a deep pull of the stew in order to cover up how flustered he’s getting thinking about how exactly the compliment tumbled out of his mouth.
A line for food starts forming after a few more exchanges - ‘called her pretty’, ‘‘pretty’, and not ‘nice’?’, ‘kinda jus’ slipped out’, cue a wide grin from Carol - and the real implications of going to a social gathering start settling in him. Jesus Christ, there’s people now. So many people. It makes him want to fold into himself.
Glancing over, he’s surprised to see you looking at him from so far away, and he bites down a wave of satisfaction when a disappointed expression rides over the guy you're talking to’s face. You’ve said something - Daryl watches your lips move, and even though he tries his damndest, he can’t read them - but it doesn’t matter in the end because you’re gone from that guy before Daryl can even think about finding a spot to sit down.
It mustn’t have been a thrilling conversation considering how readily you get the fuck out of there, and a dull throb of jealousy threatens to take over when he catches the guy’s stare trail up your legs. He has no authority to feel like this - you’re not his, and he’d rather jump into a pit of walkers than tell you what you should be doing - but God fucking damn it is that feeling persistent.
It’s persistent enough that he nearly drops the carefully stacked bowls, recovering only a second later after half-stumbling over some stupid rock that has no business sticking out so much. Some stew spills out onto the grass, some onto the skin exposed from his unbuttoned sleeves, and he has to hold himself back from shaking his arm to rid the quick flash liquid heat. It’s not particularly hot, it's just the surprise that gets him.
He swears beneath his breath as the temperature settles, and he shakes the bangs from his face before he turns in your direction. Looking for you in a crowd - the action is so familiar to him that he seeks it out without a second thought.
“Nice recovery. D’you use to be a busboy or something?”
Your voice shocks him, and he nearly recoils from the weight of your words, an embarrassment so heavy ripping down his throat when he realizes how stupid he must have looked stumbling over his feet. Jesus Christ, when the fuck did you get so close? And how the fuck did he miss you?
Swallowing, he holds out your bowl, nudging it into your hands before turning around and slumping into a sit against a tree. Your skirt sways in the Virginian breeze, and you press your free hand down to keep the fabric against your thighs before you let out a dejected huff and decide to take a seat next to him, resting your head against the bark and nearly lolled over onto his shoulder as you carefully cross your legs.
“A place’d have to be real desperate to hire someone wit’ a mug like mine.”
Daryl’s fingers play at the corner of his bowl, his right hand coming up to wipe at his chin in a nervous tick he’s never quite grown out of when he notices how close your face is to him. Your lip quirks up at his words, and you pull away, turning to look at him and pretending to study each curve and slope of his face before a smile breaks.
“Weren’t you blonde as a kid? Girls like that. Plus you give off bad boy vibes. I think a place would be smart to hire you.”
There’s a dry chuckle that wants to worm its way out from Daryl’s throat, and he’s helpless to it, feeling it rock his shoulders against the bark behind him. Shaking his head, he looks over at you, raising an eyebrow, attempting to decipher that look on your face - attempting to figure out whether or not you’re joking about him being attractive because there’s no way in hell someone like you would think he could be - but your smile is so genuine it makes him want to melt.
It’s moments like these when he wants to just fucking tell you how much you mean to him - where he wants to pull you into his lap and push his chin up against that curve of your neck and press a kiss against your cheek - but the feeling always ends in a scorching disappointment, and it settles in now. It makes him angry at himself because God fucking damn it why can’t he just confess?
Pulling his foot closer, he rests the hand holding his bowl on his bent knee and runs his free fingers through his hair, scoffing back a response that has more amusement lacing it than he’d expected.
“Bad boy? ‘Cause I ride a motorcycle? You’re ridiculous.”
Daryl hears you laugh lightly from next to him, and he shakes his swept back bangs back into his face to stop the smile from its stubborn battle onto it. There are so many people around. There are many people staring at him - or you, or the tree, or not even because maybe his nerves are making him irrational - and he clenches his jaw. When are people going to stop looking at him like some animal? Just because he’s never really shown up to anything like this and never really talked to them doesn’t mean he’s some alien.
Noticing the tensing of his shoulders, you nudge him, the sharp part of your elbow digging into his ribs, and he’s broken out of that cloud of gray you can feel looming over him. You used to think he was the hardest person to read - with him responding to your questions in grunts most of the time, and the fact he’d had a permanent scowl on his face for the first two weeks of talking to each other, how could you not? - but now, you’d have to be blind to think he’s anything but an open book. Or, a slightly ajar book.
“They’re always starin’ like I pissed in their cereal or somethin’.”
You pull your eyes off Daryl long enough to take a quick scan of the open field - there are families sat on blankets taking the opportunity to imitate picnics from before the world fell, women and men seated on huge wooden patio benches swapping stories over bottles of beer, children playing tag as they all run across the slightly uneven ground - but you catch a couple of people looking over to where the both of you are sitting.
There’s only about 3 or 4 people standing there, but staring is staring, and staring is uncomfortable no matter how many people are doing it.
“They’ve probably never seen you cleaned up so nicely before.”
But you can’t blame them because Daryl looks fucking good and you would be staring too if he wasn’t sitting so close to you that it would make you feel weird above all else. Stupid tight jeans. Stupid freshly showered hair that falls onto his face just right. Stupid unbuttoned flannel sleeves showing his biceps that he just can’t button because he’s really that muscular.
Pressing your thighs together, you tear your eyes from him, refusing to let your mind wander. Don’t think about how nice his hair would feel between your fingers, or how nice his body would feel on top of yours - or under it. Just stop.
God, when will the suffering end?
“Carol pointed a hose at me when I left ya. Wasn’t gon’ let her spray me down in the yard like no damn mutt.”
You remind yourself to try and find another one of those chocolate bars Carol likes when you realize it’s her handiwork that makes you want to push yourself onto his lap. Of course it was Carol. When you had zoned out and stared at Daryl when he first wore that dark blue flannel, it was on that one morning watch with her.
You fiddle with the spoon sitting in the bowl on your lap, and your eyes meet the group of women chatting behind decorative glasses that remind you of family gatherings. They’re looking in your direction, taking only a second of glance at you before you realize their attention isn’t surprise at Daryl, but desire for him. There’s that look in their eyes - that unmistakable glint you’d held your drunk friends back from acting on at bars and nightclubs - and you shift in your seat, scooting closer to him. Reaching out, you pull his attention using one of his undone flannel sleeves, and open your mouth to speak.
“There’re some girls looking at you.”
Turning to face you, he follows your line of sight and sees the group you’re talking about. The second his eyes connect with one of theirs, they avert their glances, and he watches your head turn from looking at them, back to him, then back to them.
“I think they were checking you out, Daryl.”
A noise breaks from his throat and he catches himself wanting to laugh. He nearly does, honestly, when he sees that you’re serious. Averting his eyes, he shoves a spoon-torn piece of venison into his mouth, and misses the fact one of the women searches him out. You catch her, though - especially the way that looks sparks back up like flint - and you gnaw at your lip, her look dissipating the second she realizes it’s just you.
Then something settles in you, twisting in your chest and wringing out a tightening in your jaw, rearing its green head from behind your usual indifference. Fuck, what the hell is going on? You grip harsher at the edge of your bowl, staring down at the black fabric hugging your thighs, and the thought that you’d been stupid to wear this - that the compliment he’d given you was just courtesy - rips through your mind.
They’re beautiful, those women.
How could you compare to them?
Daryl looks over at you after wiping his mouth, expecting to see you already dug into the stew as well, but instead you’re just staring into it, that frustratingly cute look of concentration and thinking that you usually have when you’re trying to figure something out. He highly doubts you have much interest in what’s in the stew - you’re not touching your precious novelty spoon, after all - and though almost every inch of your face is familiar to him, there’s something off that he can’t quite pinpoint.
“Somethin’ wrong?”
Humming, you look over at him and shake your head as a quiet ‘nothing’s wrong’ is breathed out of you. Taking your spoon between your fingers, you fidget with it, nails dragging across the wings protruding from the spoon, and Daryl notices the unsurety like a moth to a flame. It’s almost like you don’t even want to say what you’re planning to, but before he can say anything, you beat him to it.
“They’re pretty aren’t they?”
He furrows his eyebrows at that, his eyes flicking over to the women you’re talking about and he shrugs. He doesn’t care, really. He’s never cared about the way someone looked if they weren’t you, but for the first time in months, you misread his actions. Jealousy blinds you for a second - the flare of it foreign as it makes you misinterpret his shrug of indifference for a mask of his interest - and you tilt your head in their direction, trying to ease an encouraging smile onto your face no matter how fake it may be.
“Why don’t you go talk to them?”
If his brows could furrow any more, his face would crumple inwards on himself. Why doesn’t he-?
Because they’re not you, that’s why. But he guesses he hasn’t been obvious enough about that.
“I ain’t interested in ‘em. You know that.”
Daryl doesn’t lie to you. He never does, and your blind faith - your blind hope - binds you to your belief in him. It’s like a weight is lifted from your chest, and you let out a small relieved exhale, biting the inside of your cheek to suppress it as much as you can. You realize he’s studying you when his eyes don’t leave your face, and in an effort to deflect his attention, you bump his shoulder with yours, a lopsided smile spreading on your features that knocks his breath out cold.
A pleasant wave of wordlessness washes over the two of you for a while, only the sounds of your airplane spoon scraping dull against the dark wood of your bowl and plate along with the mingling people taking up what could’ve been silence. It’s more peaceful than anything - sitting out in the setting sun with Daryl? There aren’t many opportunities for that anymore - and when you glance over at him, his eyes are closed, lips pouted as he tries his hardest to doze off, and God, he’s so pretty.
You tear yourself from him to keep from staring, chewing almost mechanically on the venison in your mouth, and you catch the group of women looking back at Daryl. The slight jealousy returns, sure, but it seems slightly quelled - calmed by the replaying reassurance in his voice. To the left of them is the new group of people that had joined under a week ago, though, it feels odd to call them ‘new’ considering they’d just gotten back from a run for Alexandria. If Rick keeps throwing newcomers into the ring so quickly, he might have to have more of these bonfires to keep them from revolting.
One of them nods towards you, tipping his beer in your direction, and it takes a second for you to register the fact it’s even for you. Common courtesy drives you to wave back in acknowledgment, and after another second of looking at him, you realize it’s that completely boring some-type of engineer Rick had introduced you to earlier. No, wait, he wasn’t an engineer, was he? Jesus, you can’t even remember his name let alone his previous career field, only that you had jumped at the first opportunity to leave that God-forsaken droll he’d considered a conversation.
Averting your eyes, you take another sip of your stew before you hear Daryl shift slightly next to you. You look over, fully expecting him to question you about that man - it’s only fair after what you’d asked him with the whole thing about his interest in those women - but he’s still on his stubborn quest of taking just one damn nap.
His mouth parts only slightly to breathe, and you watch his chest rise and fall. Three buttons at the top are unbuttoned, giving you a full view of the stretch of his collarbones and that little bit of the slight inwards dent of his pecs, and you bite the inside of your lip when he shifts again, the fabric of the flannel moving downwards in accordance. It doesn’t help that his arms are folded over, either. Daryl’s already large biceps are straining against the inside of his sleeves and displaying to you - almost tempting you with - each curve of him.
He’d make you feel so damn safe in his arms, you just know it.
As if he can sense you, he stirs awake - he wasn’t ever sleeping, to be fair, so maybe it’s more of a ‘stops trying to take a nap’ - and a grunt drags your stare up to his face, the cerulean of him meeting you head-on.
“Need somethin’?”
Eyes widening, you shake your head, still-damp hair thankfully falling into your face to cool the heat of your rising blush. Jesus, you’ve never been so distracted by him before, and it’s not like anything about him’s changed. It’s just him that’s distracting.
“No, uh, you just have something on your face.”
It’s not a lie - he does have a small speck of potato underneath his stupidly attractive cheekbone from how voraciously he eats - but you’re nervous deep down that he’ll realize it wasn’t that you were staring at.
Though, you start to regret telling him because he darts his tongue out, licking determinedly at the corner of his mouth, and it makes you think of other uses for that pink muscle. A lump forms in your throat, and when you catch those women watching him so intently, your body moves on its own accord to free you from your own thoughts. Reaching over, you thumb at the piece of potato, wiping it off his face and onto the red rag lying across his upper thigh, stuffed in his pockets.
To say Daryl freezes would be an understatement. No, he doesn’t just freeze, he feels like his whole body’s dipped into absolute zero, but his mind is hazy and short-circuiting almost pathetically from your actions. He can still feel the slight warmth of your hand on his face and on his thighs, and he has to clench his jaw to keep it from falling open. Did you just-
What the hell just happened?
He blinks once, then twice, then three times in rapid succession to have his brain boot back into working order, and he swallows the spit trapped in his throat. It was so simple, your touch, and it lasted less than a few seconds, but damn it he wishes you would have touched him for longer.
You hear him gulp - it’s almost comical how loud it is - but you’re still reeling from that you just did, too. Has jealousy made you bold? You keep yourself from looking at him, and a tenseness settles in the air around the two of you. He shifts against the tree, you shove a piece of venison in your mouth, and before Daryl can open his mouth to break the tension of silence, you can hear both your names being called by Maggie and Glenn.
Framed by the sunset, they close the distance between the four of you, Maggie waving and you waving back. It’s only then when he finally builds enough courage to glance over at you, the smile on your face so warm it melts him from his sub-zero freeze.
Daryl’s not good at emotion, but he knows he shouldn’t mind that the couple - who are his friends - are here talking to you. Well, and him, but all Glenn is getting about the run in a few days is a couple of grunts of agreement as he only vaguely hears what Glenn’s saying. His brain is much too focused on the still lingering buzz he feels from you.
God, he’s pathetic, isn’t he? With him biting his lip to stop that pleasant buzz from the memory, and the fact his brain is running a mile a minute creating reasons why you’d want to touch him like that - maybe even why you’d want to do it again.
No, he needs to stop thinking about it. You just care about him, that’s all. That’s it.
Before Daryl realizes, Glenn has stopped trying to talk to him, and instead chimes into whatever conversation you’re having with Maggie. He envies Glenn to a degree, he supposes. What, with Glenn’s stupid ability to hold the woman he loves in his arms and the fact he can go back to her after a long day instead of just imagining or wishing he could.
Grunting, Daryl shifts in his seat and your head whips around to him, an ingrained habit from being his choice run partner, and he sputters when your hair hits him in his face. Eyes widening slightly, you pull your hair to one side, interrupting Carl’s entrance into the four - three, actually, since Daryl isn’t contributing much, or at all - person conversation with an apology.
“Tryna kill me?”
Daryl’s under-the-breath barely reaches your ears - with the two of you sitting on the ground, too, there’s even less of a chance that the other three can hear him - and you bite back a smile at the ease that settles in his voice.
“I’d miss you too much to.”
Scoffing, he can’t help the warmth flooding his chest with how genuine you sound. The off-handed, sickeningly sweet of your remark mixed with the image of you threading your fingers through your hair when you turn back away from him makes him remember something, and he reaches into his jean’s pocket then, fishing out an old - well-loved, your voice in his head states - scrunchie.
You’d left it at his house just a few days ago when you’d stayed the night - ‘I only got one bed, an’ it ain’t right for me to let ya sleep on the couch’ to which you’d argued, but crashed the second your head hit his pillow - and he’d meant to give it back when he found it, but he’d left it on his workbench. Just to look at that little token of you.
Tapping your shoulder, he holds it out, nudging the light blue imitation satin to you when Carl gets into a debate with Glenn over some history of a character in the comic books they both read until the spines want to crumple. You take it from him, your fingertips brushing against his for just a second, and he watches as you tie your hair up, a sarcastic remark about how nerdy they both are escaping your lips and he can’t help the clench of his heart at how beautiful you look in the setting sun.
Half an hour passes with easy conversation - even Daryl’s pitching in an amusing remark or two every now and then - and Carol brings more food for the few of you. Between your stupid tangents of long-forgotten movies, you’re laughing so hard your stomach hurts, and your cheeks threaten to split from how wide you’re smiling. Jesus, this is nice. So fucking nice.
Though, Maggie’s bladder pulls her attention, and you accompany her when she leaves to use the bathroom, your house being the closest to the tree you and Daryl have now staked claim over. Your throat dries up at the thought of the water it knows is just in the canteen in your kitchen, and you can only imagine how thirsty Daryl might be after scarfing down almost all his food in the matter of a few minutes. He still has to work on the huge chunk of bread Carol gave him, too.
You’re almost at your door when an unfamiliar voice calls your names, and by habit alone, you turn your head to face the sound, head reels back when they touch the bare skin of your shoulder. Does personal space not mean any-
Oh, it’s him - boring engineer dude with a penchant for talking your ear off about modifications to the filtration system that you and Eugene have already made.
Eyes flicking from the hand on your shoulder to the hand holding a cup of what looks like liquor, you take a step back from him, shaking his unwelcome touch from your body. Men you don’t know put you on edge - especially in this world - and men with alcohol? There’s no way in hell you’re letting your guard down.
Maggie looks back at you when she realizes you’re not right behind her, and pauses in the middle of turning your doorknob. Raising a brow, she questions you without words, and you recognize the concern immediately. She’s offering an out - a ‘just give me a sign and I’m making it an emergency’ - but you wave her off, letting her enter your house while you choose the diplomacy of entertaining his slightly tipsy rambling. The conversation seems innocent enough, save for the obvious show that he’s trying to impress you with his apparent ‘love for nature’, and you wait patiently for a lull to make your escape.
It should come soon.
Please come soon.
Just a few yards away, Daryl’s about to break his goddamn metal spoon in half, already having bent it slightly as it acquiesces to his tight grip and overheated skin, and he tears chunks off the bread in his hands. Shifting in his seat, he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, clearing his throat and nearly choking on whatever the hell Carol had put in this stew that tastes like nothing but his own bitter jealousy at this point.
You’re talking to someone - that same fucking someone who had checked you out when you’d walked away from your conversation with him - and that prick is laughing. His body is bent backwards with the force of it, his arms crossed over one another with a quarter-filled cup of liquor in his hands, and Daryl can’t help but notice the way he leans forwards to flash that stupid, polished smile at you. He remembers meeting people like that in the old world, and he remembers the way they treated him, too.
What a fucking asshole.
Popping the last piece of venison into his mouth, he pulls his rag out of his pocket, the memory of your thumb against his cheek surging forward to replace his seething thought with something much more pleasant. He bites the inside of his lips - pulls his legs to his chest - and just glares in the direction of the guy talking to you.
‘You’re doing that thing you always do’, you’d probably tell him, and, shit, what was that thing again?
Oh right, brooding.
He’d told you it’s just the face he was born with, but there was something so nice about knowing you’d paid enough attention to him to find patterns.
At least, he broods until you make a motion to leave, watching the small wave you give to that prick - a small wave that’s so different than the huge waves you’d made for him after leaving his house - and Daryl clenches his jaw, an odd sense of pride making him push himself up from the tree trunk and away from whatever the hell Abraham and Rosita had entered the conversation to talk about so he can get to you.
A turn of your body makes your skirt flutter around your thighs, and as much as Daryl wishes he could say his eyes get drawn to your ass by the movement only, he knows he’d be lying to himself. But then something happens - an unfamiliar hand stretches into the frame of his pinpointed focus - and a flash of anger rockets through him.
Did someone just-
Turning his attention, he follows the length of the arm, that flash rising to an incessant burning throb when he realizes the hand belongs to that fucking asshole making a move to grab you. To make things worse, judging by the way he turns to shamelessly talk to the other men standing around him after doing it, he doesn’t seem to think anything about that is wrong.
Daryl can feel his blood pressure skyrocketing as his steps gain traction, the stupid jeans he’s wearing digging into his calves, and Jesus fucking Christ is he overheating.
“Hey! Did you jus’ try an’ touch ‘er?”
The douchebag’s arms are folded over his chest like he has no care in the world - the sight causing so many of those patient warnings about anger control you’d spoken to him over stitches to spiral in Daryl’s head - but as he smiles and looks in the direction of your house, the tightening of Daryl’s sleeves around his built biceps pale in comparison to the fact he almost rips the skin in his palms from how hard he’s clenching his fists at his sides.
“Hell yeah I did. You see her? Got her ass hanging out of that dress and bruises all over her knees.”
That first sentence already stings - the casualness of it makes Daryl think he could bite through his own bottom jaw then still have the strength to lunge at the drunk, sorry excuse of a man after it - and all he can think about is how that fucking asshole has some fucking nerve speaking those words about you with a tone like that. He was right - what a fucking jerk.
“You think a woman like that does shit outside these walls? Those bruises are from something else, trust me. And showing them off like that?”
Daryl hears him scoff - watches him rub his free hand through his beard and throw his head back - and the anger trapped in his veins boils and boils and boils at the insinuations of those words and the laughter from the limp-dick posse behind him. The goddamn fucking audacity of this prick to even think that you-
“She’s just begging for it, don’t you think?”
Oh.
Oh.
A long time ago, you were nothing to Daryl - just a pretty girl with a voice that made him act like a mutt to a dog-whistle - but now you’re nearly everything to him. Every smile makes his heart hurt, every laugh makes his chest well up with something warm and pleasant, and hearing someone talk about you like the way he’s hearing now makes him want to commit acts of incredible violence on whoever’s mouth is moving.
Daryl’s never liked locker room bullshit - not about anyone - and you’re no exception.
No, not about you.
Especially not about you.
Fuck anger control. Fuck diplomacy. Fuck everything but giving this bastard what he deserves.
“The only thing ya know is how to be a goddamn asshole. Best learn how to shut the hell up and keep your hands to your damn self if ya know what’s good for ya.”
It’s more mumbled out than anything, Daryl’s own sheer willpower keeping his hands from making contact with the asshole’s jaw, and he surprises himself with the fact he doesn’t jump straight into something like he would before the world fell.
“Fuck’s your problem, man? It’s not like I’m looking for a wife or anything. You can have a turn after I’m done with her.”
You can have a turn after I’m done with her?
Does this bastard not have an ounce of regret? Of shame? Of decency? To say that about you as if you’re just some- some-
You’re too good for the beer-breathed man in front of him - for everyone in this hellhole - and the day he lets someone run their mouth about you is a day where Daryl has already died. Not about you.
“Don’t talk about ‘er like that, you fuckin’ asshole! She ain’t never gon’ fall into bed with ya. Y’ain’t worth a second’a her goddamn time.”
The aggression in Daryl’s voice is too obvious to miss, and as he shifts his weight from one tattered work boot to the other, he doesn’t even notice that his words surprise the man in front of him or that there’s a small crowd watching behind their decorative glass cups. Daryl doesn’t notice because he’s already counting the steps it’ll take to close the distance. It’s only three - two if he lunges on the last step - and that fact gets more and more persistent when that prick speaks again.
“Yeah? Well it doesn’t look like you’re worth it either. Girls like that need a man to fuck ‘em right. Not some pussy-whipped little boy who wants to kiss the ground they wal-”
Turns out Daryl could make it with one good lunge.
His fist collides with the asshole’s jaw in milliseconds, the pivot of his torso making his button-up shirt tighten around his ribs when he takes the fucker down in a tackle, but he can’t register anything except the anger thrumming through every inch of his skin. A bar fight - that’s the closest thing Daryl can relate this to as his veins purely burst through his skin from boiling over - and he’s got a number of them under his belt.
“Don’t,”
A warm rush of blood covers Daryl’s knuckles when he happily takes a swing at the aquiline nose, but he doesn’t mind. No, he likes it - it makes him feel satisfied - and maybe he should be scared that he does. But still, he takes another.
“Ever,”
Unsurprisingly, there’s a commotion now - doors are being flung open as people race to catch a look or to get away and a crowd much bigger than the one before surrounding him - but he’s seeing so much red you’d think he’s the one taking a beating. Fisting the collar of the man underneath him, Daryl pulls him close, real close so the asshole can really, really take in his next few words, and he’s deaf to the sound of your door squeaking open.
“Talk about no one like that again, y’hear?”
You round the corner then, canteen slung over your chest and sprinting towards the mass of people and eyes absent of the horror and fear on everyone else’s since you don’t know what's going on. All you know is this - this drunken, macho-man cheering frat boy bullshit - reminds you of those fights Daryl used to get into when you were all still at the prison. Keyword, ‘used to’ because he’s better than that.
Weaving through the crowd, you finally make it to the center at the same time Abraham does, and your face falls when you recognize the shag of brown hair and the undone sleeves of that dark flannel.
Damn it. Scratch off ‘used to’.
Nobody wants to get involved - Daryl’s always been scary to them, even more so now that the muscles of his biceps almost tear through the poor seams of fabric lining his arms - and their fear of him grows.
He could be half-God - he’s built more like it than anyone else you’ve seen - and the sight shines like a vision from the coliseums.
You run forward without a second thought, the skirt of your dress flitting in the breeze generated from your sprint, and you hook your arm underneath Daryl’s elbow when he raises it for another strike. He turns his head then, a sharp twist of his neck bearing the weight of a glare that makes everybody stutter their breath, but his actions stop the second his eyes land on you.
And on your face? You should be pissed - it should be written all over you - but instead there’s nothing. Not a wrinkle of anger on your forehead, and it shocks him still.
The fucker gets a good punch in then - a sharp crack across his jaw sends Daryl almost flying out of your hold - but you pull him away before he can retaliate, the lull of action causing the man underneath him to pause, too. You can feel the heat radiating off Daryl as he gets up, fire threatening to burn everyone in his pure emotion, and though both he and you both know he could easily break free from you, he steadies himself, gathering the blood rushing to his mouth before turning away from you and spitting onto the ground.
His head lifts after that, eyes meeting yours from beneath the shaggy bangs fallen against his face, and he sheds his vest. Holding it, his hand juts out for you to take it, and you just look at him, trying to gauge what the hell you’d just walked - ran - into as everyone just stares back and forth between the man on the ground and the two of you. It can’t have been for no reason. Daryl’s stopped doing shit for no reason a long time ago.
“Put this on.”
Scrunching your brows, you bite back your questioning as you take the leather from him, following his quick steps as he shoves his way through the crowd. It’s not like it takes much work, anyways. They part for him like the sea did for Moses, just less reverential in sight.
“Daryl- are- are you okay?”
“Doin’ Georgia fuckin’ peachy.”
But there’s blood on his knuckles - there’s blood on his cheek from where he’d wiped it away when it had rushed from his nose - and you reach out for him, a tightening in your chest rising from your need to make sure he’s okay.
“Let me look at-“
Before you can finish your sentence, he stops and grabs you instead, his warm grasp loose around your wrist before he lets go. There’s a seriousness in his eyes - a determination but in a way that’s much more different than the one laced with violence you’d seen just moments ago - and when he speaks, that rough Southern drawl imitates the look.
“Punch me. Right arm.”
What?
When you don’t swing immediately, he squares himself straight at you, nodding at his arms which are lifted into those cupped palms you used to strike when you’d first asked him to teach you to fight.
“C’mon, right arm.”
It only takes a second for you to react - only takes a second for you to put one foot behind the other, to pivot your torso in that familiar 90° torsion and then to strike - and damn it, it feels weird. It feels stupid because Daryl’s never second-guessed your competence even though you had so many times before.
“Now left.”
Again?
He doesn’t move - shoulders wide and square - and you’re vaguely aware of the commotion going on behind you. It’s odd, though. Daryl’s looking in their direction as he watches you, but it’s almost like he’s purposely unaware of it.
And maybe he is. Maybe he doesn’t want to see it. Not when it makes his blood boil. He doesn’t want to see anyone - anything - that isn’t you.
“I said left.”
Jesus fucking-
You can’t help the rush of impatience washing through you, but you swing at him anyways. The quickest option to getting that goddamn blood off his hands and checking if he’s torn open any of his skin is if you entertain whatever this is, and God, what is this?
Nodding to himself, he takes a step towards you, wrapping your wrists in his hands and he pulls you closer, leaning in so his face is just inches from yours.
“Don’t let anyone disrespect ya, y’understand?”
Why is he looking at you like that? Like you’re the only thing that matters to him? Your heart rate picks up, the cerulean of him stealing your breath as it holds your gaze, and your impatience melts away with the concern painted in them.
“D-Daryl-“
His grip only tightens, and a heat begins coating your cheeks - begins clouding your brain and making you forget about everything except how nice he smells and how nice he looks - and you stare back, wide-eyed.
“An’ if they keep botherin’ ya - keep- keep callin’ ya names an’ sayin’ shit to ya - come get me so I can knock their teeth into their throats. It don’t matter where I am, alright? Come and get me an’- an’ I’ll make sure they get what they deserve.”
He doesn’t seem to notice your fluster - he never does when he’s the reason why - and you’re so caught up in digesting his words all you do is blink. One, two, then three, but Daryl’s urgency is cutting his patience short.
“D’y’understand?”
Nodding, you urge yourself to speak - the first syllable of his name forming on your tongue - but a nod doesn’t satisfy him. Not when the bastard who’d tried to lay a hand on you is going to be around. Maybe not around you, but he’ll still be around, and that sets Daryl on edge.
“Do you understand?”
Only when he actually hears you does he let go, and it shocks you, how quickly he drops your hands. A moment passes - your mouth hung open like one of those terrifying angler fish because what the actual fuck is going on with Daryl? - before you realize he’s turned away from you, grumbling a swear and using his long legs to cut the distance to his house.
His strides are your light jog, and a million questions run through your head as you try to catch up to him. You still haven’t figured out why he’d thrown those punches - why he made sure you still could - or why he’d made such a big deal about being the one you come to when someone disrespects you.
God, you really can’t have a peaceful dinner, can you?
Daryl pulls his front door open just as you catch up to him, and you follow him down the basement stairs by habit alone. He’s silent the whole way down - honestly, from the second you’d shucked off your shoes at the doorway, you hadn’t expected anything different - but what you didn’t expect was to see him pacing in front of his couch, the slightly-cleaner-of-blood heels of his palms pressed against his forehead.
He’s never been this angry before - this furious before - in the whole time you’ve known him. Even when that mousey-faced asshole swung at Glenn, you’ve never seen him boiled over in so much red it could be narrowly mistaken for bloodlust.
“What the hell is going on with you, Daryl?”
Your voice shocks him out of a spiral, and even though he tries, he can’t even string together an answer. He can’t string together an answer because what’s he supposed to say?
“I- fuck- I-“
‘I saw somebody tryna slap your ass and heard him talkin’ ‘bout you like you were just some thing to fuck an’ it made me see red ‘cause I love you so fuckin’ much I can’t think properly sometimes.’? No, that won’t work, he knows that, so he stands there, clenching his eyes in frustration, and seethes at his fumbling tongue and trembling hands.
You close the distance then, gliding your socked feet along his furnished wood floor instead of lifting them to take steps, and you reach for his shoulder. Daryl stiffens when he feels you, not from the tension already in his body, but from how gently you touch him, and when he opens his eyes, his chest clenches in a way that’s all too familiar to him.
“Let me look at you.”
Jesus, you’re too good for him - what, with the small smile on your face and the care in your eyes and your goddamn patience that makes him want to throw up because damn it you’re too good for everyone - and he lets you do just that. He can never deny you. Not when you’re looking at him like that, or when you sound like that.
So he follows as you guide him into his bedroom. He follows when you ask for him to sit down on the stool at his workbench, and he watches you as you manoeuvre your way through his house as if it were your own. It could be, he supposes. There’s nothing he has that isn’t yours. At least, there’s nothing he has that he wouldn’t give you in a heartbeat.
There’s still a simmer of anger in him, he can’t deny that, but as you hold his hand in yours, his body between your legs as you sit between a bowl of warm water and a couple of spare motorcycle parts on his workbench, it shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until he can’t think of anything but the way you hadn’t left him.
You weren’t scared of him now, even though every goddamn person there had avoided him like he was the walker virus personified. You weren’t scared of him then, either - even though he’d pushed you away, grumbling and swearing and hating that you were every single thing he wanted - and it feels much too familiar to be in this situation.
But it’s been so long. It’s been so damn long since he’d seen red like that. Daryl was better than that - was better than those fucking anger issues that ran so boldly in the Dixon genes - or, at least he tried to be.
You definitely thought he was. But when he notices your wrists are red - that he can’t even really remember grabbing your arm and leaving that asshole’s blood on your skin - it settles in him that maybe he isn’t. That maybe he’ll never be, and that maybe he’ll never be what you deserve.
“Son’uv’a bitch.”
You retract the towel from him thinking you’d hurt him, draping it across the lip of the bowl of hot water, and you pull his hand close to your face, examining it and trying to figure out where the broken skin is. You can only assume it’s pure luck that he hasn’t sprained anything with the force of which he was swinging at the dude’s face, but it looks like none of the blood on Daryl’s knuckles are his own.
“Sorry. Jus’- jus’- sorry.”
Nodding, you bite the inside of your cheek and finish in silence, only stopping when his familiar work-calloused hands are in yours. You should pull away - should let go of him - but instead, you hold him like he had you, running your thumbs into his palms.
“Are you gonna tell me what happened, Daryl?”
Why… why are you looking at him like that?
You’re making it hard for him to think when you do that.
You make it hard for him to think when you’re just you.
Shifting, he swallows hard, clenching his jaw as that anger rears its head again. Is he seething? He could be from just the memory of that prick and he hates it. He hates that he wants to tell you everything.
“That- that- that asshole was talkin’ like- like you- like-“
Daryl pulls himself off his seat, the warmth of his hands escaping yours so they can return to those spots on his forehead he might be indenting with how hard his frustration is making him press into his own skull, and when he doesn’t speak again, you urge him on with your own words.
“Like what?”
Looking over, he sees you there, sitting so pretty on his workbench, your palms pressing the fabric of your dress down between your thighs to cover yourself, and it makes the rush of that asshole’s words twist his stomach until he feels sick.
Yeah, he’s seething.
“Like you were some piece’a meat, d’ya get it? Like you were beggin’ for it! He- he said you got them bruises in your knees from suckin’ dick and- fuck.”
The truth rushes out without much thought - a boiling over that just drowns his desire to do anything but tell you everything - and his paces get faster, so does the blood rushing through his veins, and his breathing? It’s hard to miss when his chest expands and heaves every time.
And yeah, the words hurt - they do more than sting like they did when you’d first heard them come from college boys and disrespectful coworkers - but it doesn’t matter when Daryl looks like he might pop a vein or two or seven. You can handle yourself, and you can handle that asshole when you see him again. He doesn’t need to be fighting your fights for you, and he sure as hell doesn’t need to be this angry for you.
But in an odd way, you like his attention - like the fact he’d be so furious at someone for saying stuff like that to you - even though you tell him to ‘calm down’. Even though you’re sure he’d do this for anyone he considered a friend.
“Calm down? Ya want me to ‘calm down’?”
You’re not sure what you’d expected - Daryl’s never exactly been the type to just drop something - but there’s still that edge in his voice and it catches you off guard. Usually, he’s more level-headed than this. Usually, he doesn’t run shit into the ground.
“Y’ain’t hearin’ me or nothin’? That asshole was talkin’ ‘bout fuckin’ ya like you were some toy that he’d pass around to whatever other prick wanted ya!”
Usually, he doesn’t explode at you.
At least, not when you don’t deserve it, and right now? You know you don’t.
Swallowing, you swing your legs, contemplating whether or not you should hop off and approach him. His voice is loud and gravelly and when he looks at you, you can understand why those Alexandrians had stayed stuck in their shoes when the fight broke out. Maybe once upon a time you’d cower like them until the aggression in his expression shrank away, but you’re much different than the person you were even a month ago, let alone the person you were when you’d first met him.
“Look, I appreciate you defending me,“
So you hop off, sliding off slowly as you speak, your voice coming out steady. There’s no condescension in it - no superiority, and certainly none of whatever you’d used with misbehaving children that he’d heard one too many times when you were talking to Carl as the kid begged you not to tell Rick about something he did - and it doesn’t shatter when he mumbles a ‘well it sure don’t sound like it’ underneath his breath. He knows you hear it from the way one of your eyebrows quirks upwards, but you keep talking as you take a step towards him.
“I appreciate you defending me, but I don’t need you getting into these pointless fights.”
Pointless?
Pointless?
He could make a list of things in this world that are pointless, and this wouldn’t even show up.
“It wasn’t fuckin’ pointless!”
You bite your lip at that, watching him as he runs his fingers through his hair and you close the distance between the two of you. When you reach out to him - when one of your hands touches his shoulder and he realizes he’s been standing still the whole time as if waiting for your touch - he hates that he thinks of how good you are. It’s not the point, he knows, but God fucking damn it, everyone he’s ever blown up in front of before had never been this patient.
Merle would give it right back to him - would probably throw a punch or two while he’s at it, and so would his old man - but you, why are you so patient? Why aren’t you yelling at him? Why haven’t you called him a barbarian like he’d overheard one of the older women call him just under half an hour ago? And why is that just making him angrier?
You should be fuming. If not at him, then at that bastard.
“Y’just gon’ let some asshole say all that shit? You expect me to let ‘im?”
His words are gritted out as he turns away, and you pray for his poor TMJ with how hard he’s still clenching his jaw as your hand drops from his shoulders. He barely registers it - not when he’s running so hot the addition of your heat feels like nothing - but you do. Taking a deep breath, you step around to face him, crossing your arms against your chest and planting your feet firmly against his floor.
“I expect you to know when and when not to trade haymakers with somebody. And one of those when not to’s is when it’s about me.”
Even though he’s looking for it, Daryl can’t hear the little tingle of frustration escaping in your voice, and his mouth opens before he can even think again. It’s so fucking stupid, his anger, and he knows you don’t know what you mean to him - you don’t know he’s consumed by you, that he would do anything for you - so why isn’t his anger dissipating?
“And I’m tellin’ ya I don’t fuckin’ care. He deserved it, an’ if he puts a finger on ya, I’m cuttin’ it off.”
There’s more poison in his words - more intention than you could ever imagine barreling through the empty air to get to your ears - and he pinches at the bridge of his nose, clenching his eyes so tight he starts seeing static.
“Are you hearing anything I’m saying to you?”
That little tingle rises into a flare as you speak, and even though you know you’re wrong in thinking it - there’s so much more evidence to show you you’re wrong - you can’t help but think that maybe he hasn’t changed from that angry man you’d had to deal with months ago. You can’t help but think that maybe all you’ve been doing is trying to speak reason to a wall.
“‘Course I am. I jus’ ain’t gon’ listen.”
It’s the way he says it that gets you - the way he shrugs your hand off when you reach for him and the way he turns to look towards the door as if to really, truly show you his disregard - and it seems like the end for the patience that has overstayed and persisted much longer than you could have imagined.
“Jesus, Daryl, you’re so f-“
In this moment, despite your friendship - of watching him bite his tongue at meetings and parties and when the kids at the prison got brave enough to overload him with questions - you can’t help but think you’re right.
So you reach out again, pulling focus from the way he’s glaring at the doorframe to make his exit, and this time your movement is so quick you don’t realize you’ve done it until his collar is between your fingers and one of his undone buttons is pressing up against your palm. It shocks him still - the scratch of your nails against the bare skin of his chest sends a jolt through him that makes him freeze - and there seems to be a lot of unpredictable shit happening today because the next thing he sees is how fucking close you’ve pulled his face down to yours and how much indignation is in your voice.
“You’re so stubborn. Do I need to spell it out for you? I’m not your responsibility. I’m not your girlfriend, Daryl, and I’m not yours to wrap up in your stupid vest and keep safe from every man out there looking to get their dick wet!”
His mouth opens, then it closes, then it really fucking opens. Secrets don’t exist between the two of you - they haven’t for quite some time - and those months of admiring you in silence - of loving every damn inch of you even though you don’t look at him twice - takes its toll and he’s speaking before he even has the chance to consider what he’s saying.
You’re too close to him. You’re too close to him and you’re wearing that dress and his vest and fuck it’s making it hard for him to think.
“Well- well, maybe I want ya to be!”
It takes a second - a single second, maybe even half - for his words to worm their way into your brain, and you loosen your grip on his collar, your throat closing as you stare at him, wide-eyed. At the loss of you, he grunts and inches back up to his full height only for the realization of his words to dawn on him, washing away the anger of just a few moments ago in an absolute zero freeze.
A confession.
Wait, a confession?
Oh fuck. Oh no.
Scratch hard. You make it impossible.
“Shit- fuck- I- nevermind. Jus’- jus’ forget about it.”
Grabbing your wrists, he pulls you off him and without thinking - he’s starting to believe that he doesn’t do much of that anymore - he makes a break towards the door.
He’s not sure what he’ll do if he gets out - he still needs to scale the stairs, and, shit, did he lock the door? - but he feels like he might suffocate if he stays in the four walls of his bedroom. God, there’s no fucking air in here and he’s so damn hot with embarrassment he must be sweating and his fucking pants have been cutting off his circulation for the last hour.
But you’re faster - you always have been, swift like a goddamn rabbit, he swears - and the door slams shut with an audible boom when you slide between him and it.
“What did you say?”
Daryl doesn’t lie to you.
He never lies to you.
So he says nothing.
It’s a damn better option than digging a bigger hole for himself.
“What did you say?”
You approach him then, one step turning into two then into three, a demand in your voice that makes his stomach drop and chokes thorns around his throat. It’s a flurry of emotions that settles in his body as he backs up to keep the distance between you and him constant. Embarrassment, curiosity, and anticipation mixes together in him like a haphazard bartender mixing a cocktail, and Daryl swallows hard - hard enough that you can hear the bob of his Adam’s apple before he speaks.
“I- uh, really think I should get goin’.”
Clearing his throat, he tries to sidestep around you only for you to sidestep as well. No, actually, you don’t just sidestep. You reach your hand out against his collar, too, but this is different. It’s not a tight grip. Instead, you let your fingers hang loose at the first done button at the top, and this time, it doesn’t make him freeze.
It does the opposite.
It feeds a fire in him - not the red, though, but something just as wholly consuming - because you’re not leaving him. You’re not leaving him like he’d been so sure you would. You hadn’t laughed off his confession like he’s sure you’d laughed off ones from others, and his body’s reacting like you’re already his.
Fuck, fuck, you’re not.
But… but maybe you could be.
The single thought makes his head swim.
“This is your house, Daryl.”
He can’t even remember what he said to even get that as a response from you, and when his back hits the wall behind him, he realizes there’s no way to get out of whatever this is. Not when you’re looking up at him - something he can’t recognize in your eyes and your skin against his - and when he looks down back at you, he can see the low dip of your dress’ neckline.
There’s really nothing else to do, is there?
“Ya heard what I said.”
So he braves it, doubling down on his statement as he pulls at the hem of his shirt because damn it he wants to grab your waist to bring you closer in this tension. He's tired of hiding his feelings. He’s tired of pretending he doesn’t want to hold your hand and kiss you and sleep next to you and fucking cuddle you and shit every time he sees you.
Daryl’s tired of pretending he doesn’t want you to be - how did you phrase it? - his to wrap up in his stupid vest and keep safe from every man out there looking to get their dick wet.
“I did.”
Nodding, a small smile spreads across your face and it feels like the breath is knocked out of his lungs as he tries to force a response out.
“So why’re you…”
His voice trails off when you let go of his shirt only to grab at the spot he’s been fiddling with this whole time. Looking down at his hands, you bite your lip before you speak, holding the fabric as you rock back onto your heels. It’s like whiplash, how damn cute you are with your face barely a foot away from him, and he’s not sure if it was even your intention to have his body overload the way that it did.
“I wanna hear you say it again.”
The grin that spreads on your face makes him want to cry with how genuine it is. There's no more anger lining his insides - how could there be when you’re staring up at him like that? - and in you, the frustration has long since subsided with the knowledge of why he’d been acting the way he had been.
Daryl Dixon likes you - Daryl Dixon wants you to be his - and the guy was an asshole, anyways, wasn’t he?
Taking his hands in yours, you can see the pink coat his cheeks when you slot your fingers between his. You watch his Adam’s apple bob - you feel his work-calloused fingers stiffen before they hesitantly find their home with you and wrap around yours - and you bring them underneath his vest. Without hesitation, he lets them rest at your hips, and it’s almost alarming how right it feels to the both of you to have him there.
“‘Cause I wanna be yours, too, Daryl.”
God, those four words. Those four words come out of you so simply - ‘I wanna be yours,’ so matter-of-fact - that he nearly melts into the wall behind him, probably only tethered to Earth by how you worm two of your fidgeting fingers into his empty belt loops. You watch the tension sag from his shoulders, and his eyes are starting to form those puppy eyes that shouldn’t look so good on his rough, sculpted face.
“Don’t- don’t say that.”
But despite what he’s saying, his hands don’t drop from you. No, they grip you tighter, as if you’d really go if he let go.
“Why not?”
He doesn’t give you an answer - only hangs his head down as if he’s trying to search for a proper answer - but his reason why clicks in your head just a second after.
“You think I don’t mean it?”
Daryl doesn’t look up when you say it, either, but you can tell by the way he winces at your words that you’re right.
A giggle threatens to bubble up from your chest when you think about how ridiculous this must be. You’re both adults - both much too old to be ambling your ways through crushes - but you’re both standing in front of each other painted over in flustered heat as if everything you’d needed to say hasn’t already been said.
You fight it down, though, and you hook a finger underneath his chin. When his eyes finally meet yours, you take a deep breath to steady a rush of tears threatening to make it past your eyelids. His blues are so warm. They’re so welcoming for you - they feel so safe - and suddenly, they feel so much like home it chokes you up.
“I mean it, Daryl. I mean it, and you’re all I’ve ever wanted since that first night we snuck out of our cells together and went stargazing in the prison’s field.”
That was months ago.
That was too many fucking months ago, and it dawns on him then, how long you’ve spent doing the same things he had. Had you lost sleep thinking about him, too? Does he live so deep in your heart that you hurt when he’s away from you, too? Does he worm his way into your thoughts without your intention, too? And do those thoughts of him… do those thoughts of him keep you company on lonely nights, too? God, it makes something spark in the base of his chest - a desire, a hunger, a gnawing need.
“So please, say it again. I- I want to hear you say it again.”
Your voice - shit, your voice that’s always so comforting and nice and kind - morphs into kindling that feeds his spark until it roars alive. It consumes him, and Daryl’s helpless to it.
“I want ya to be mine, alright? Not that bastard’s - not nobody else’s. I want ya to be mine.”
Throwing all caution to the wind, he bunches the fabric in his hand to avoid bruising your hips when he pulls you flush against him, and he surges his neck towards you to press a kiss onto you. It’s so feverish - it’s chapped lips against chapped lips, his tongue against yours - and he feels the vibrations of your surprised squeal travel all the way down to the base of his neck before he pulls away almost as quickly as he’d pushed forward.
“Sorry- shit- sorry- I- this- this wasn’t how I pictured kissin’ ya for the first time.”
And It really wasn't. He’d run through so many scenarios in his head on how to have it perfect, yet none of them ended up like this. What happened to the flowers he was going to get you? The meal he was going to cook? The lake he was going to bring you to?
What happened to soft? To sweet?
Daryl’s grip loosens and he tilts his head back, a dull thump against the wall behind him sounding across the room as he clenches his eyes shut to suppress a small groan from escaping. That might not have been what he’d intended to have happen, but it felt fucking good and he can’t help but imagine doing it more.
Staring up at him, it takes a second for you to even process everything that’s happened, taking a deep breath to soothe the pressure at your lungs. Your whole body is tingling from him - you can feel it from the apples of your cheeks down all the way to the slight shake in your leg - and you want more. You’ve spent so long daydreaming about how he would feel against you, but it’s nothing compared to reality.
Your hands move on their own accord as he looks back down at you. They trail up his chest until they rest at his neck that’s stretched so fucking perfectly you find yourself wanting to press your lips onto him, and you bite the inside of your cheek before speaking.
“You can try again, I- I don’t mind.”
It’s dangerous to say something like that to him because even though the first half had rushed out - even though you’d tripped over the second - his hands are trembling. Maybe from the anticipation in your words - the intention in them words is making him rush - but maybe it’s from the remnants of his anger. Either way, they both manifest in the same effect.
“Are you- are ya sure?”
Nodding, you shift your weight, rising onto the tips of your toes as if to offer yourself to him, and God does it work.
“I’m sure, Daryl. Kiss me again.”
So he does.
He’s pretty sure he’d be the biggest damn idiot to turn you down.
This time, though, he’s gentler than you expect, the warmth of one of his work-calloused palms covering the whole of one of your cheeks as his chest wells up in so much affection he might crumble to his knees. He watches you close your eyes as you melt into his touch, and slowly, as if to give you enough time to leave if you’d wanted to, he leans in, pressing a kiss much more befitting against your lips.
“How was that?”
He speaks after pulling away, interrupting your pleasant buzz of him with a voice that runs rough along the grooves of your brain, and you hum happily, playing with the hair at the base of his neck before pressing forward and catching his lips in another. This feels nice. This feels good. So fucking good.
The next time you pull away, there’s a smile on Daryl’s face that makes it feel like his cheeks might split open with the effort of keeping his face in one piece, and it only widens when you dig your face into the slope of his neck. He’s hugged you before, yeah, but emotions had been so high then - the relief of seeing each other alive fueling the action - that he’d never really, truly gotten to enjoy the feeling of you pressed up against him. You’re so warm on this summer day, but he fits you like he was made for you, and it couldn’t be more perfect.
“Hey Daryl?”
From between you and the wall, just above your right ear, you hear him hum in response and you worm your hands back to wrap at his waist, fiddling with the hem once more as you look up at him.
“You said you wanted me to be yours, right?”
He hums again. Truly, he only does it because he’s not sure if he can trust his voice not to shake or break from the thoughts starting to run their way through his head, and waits for you to finish. You’re leading into something - he knows because you have that lilt to your voice that always comes before you ask him to do something you’re not sure he’ll want to do - but there hasn’t been a time where he hadn’t done what you’d asked of him.
“Show me, then.”
And this time’s no different.
Daryl swallows down the rush of saliva, your voice making his knees weaken like the first time his butterflies flew south, and he can’t believe what the hell is going on. Today had been a flurry - your body over his in that damn infirmary bed, your body in that dress, that fucking asshole making moves on you, then his confession, now this? - and it feels like he’s been floating since his back first touched the wall.
“Are- are ya sure?”
Your nod is immediate - maybe too quick as you press a chaste kiss onto his jawbone - but it fuels him, any modicum of uncertainty that he could even sense from you melting away when you speak again.
“Make me yours.”
Your voice is smoke and honey - everything he wants to suffocate in - and he reacts in a millisecond too, making the speed at which you’d nodded look as if it was a snail’s pace. Grabbing your waist, he spins the two of you around, pushing your back up to the dull eggshell of his wall in a smooth motion, and you can barely catch your breath before he locks his mouth over yours. He steals your ability to think with every movement of him, and when he slides his tongue over the seam of your lips, you’re helpless to do anything but open for him.
Make me yours, your words seem to echo forever in his head, and those three words pull him into a feeling he’s never had before. You’re - God - you’re like the damn nicotine you get on his ass for, and he seeks more of you like the way his brother might have sought another high from the scrawny tweaker that dealt to him.
His hands are getting even more eager - even more feverish - when he presses a leg between yours and you part your thighs for him, and even though his kneecap is bruised from that goddamn run he was on three days ago, he puts even more weight onto it because that’s the only way he can dip his neck down closer to you. You match him, movement after movement, your fists bunched into his shirt, and a confidence so foreign to you runs through your veins.
In a second, he can feel you fighting the plastic holding the cotton together, and he groans into you, your nails scratching against his chest and making wet hot heat wash over him. Daryl pulls his hands off you then, helping your shaking fingers take off those stubborn buttons attempting to keep him from you. There’s no time for him to be insecure - there’s no need to be when he already knows you don’t care about the scarred tissue littering his back or the ones littering his chest - and he’s determined not to waste time when he’s been dreaming about this day since the goddamn prison and you’d begged him to make you his.
When the plaid spreads open to expose his thick torso, he all but shucks it off, and you can’t help but think about how good his skin feels underneath your hands. It’s not like the touches you’d share on the green leather of medical desks or the one inch thick mattresses in the cells back at the prison. No, it’s different. It’s an intensity matched only by the way he looks at you before he leans down again, missing your lips and instead lavishing your jaw and neck with his attention.
“You hundred percent sure ya still want this, sunshine? Tell me to stop and I will. Promise.”
He’s mumbling into your neck, but that’s all he’s doing. There’s no more pressure between your legs from him, and his hands are no longer holding you down onto him though you’re sure you need it from the way you weaken at his endearment. He wants you to be sure - he’s always cared for you more than he’s ever thought to care for himself - but you almost hurt thinking about stopping now.
It’s almost comical, how fast the mood has shifted from when you’d both burst into his house, Daryl fuming with anger, and maybe you should have taken each step slower - if it was anyone else, maybe you would have - but months and months of pining after him in the solitude of your own mind is so close to coming to an end and you’re desperate for it to. To know that he does too, it’s intoxicating and only feeds that desperation.
“No. Don’t stop. I don’t want you to stop.”
You need him - crave him like nothing you’ve ever craved before - and that need is something you can’t properly articulate. If you felt less for him, maybe you could, but you’ve long since stepped over that threshold. Even if it had hurt to watch him, day after day and month after month, looking at you with those blue eyes that never seemed to waver from just friendship, you’d never once wanted to go back.
But now, you don’t even need to think about it. Now, you know you mean something to him that nobody’s ever meant before. Now, you’ve offered your heart to him, and in exchange, he’s given you his.
“I love you, Daryl.”
Your voice shocks you with how broken it sounds, and you feel him still. His whole body goes rigid for a second before he all but explodes into a quick succession of actions, set off by a groan that pulls at a feeling buried deeply in you.
“Say it again.”
He’s tearing at his vest now - his precious, precious vest that had survived everything the two of you had gone through and then some - and he presses his leg up to you so determinedly he rubs against something devastating.
The dress is short enough that you’d hadn’t had a chance to wear any safety underneath it, and when a sound escapes you - a sound that makes Daryl do a fucking double-take and makes his heart palpitate - he realizes just how little fabric is separating the two of you. The realization is sending him in a spiral, and he throws in a grind to his leg-shaking press, the whole bottom half of him suffocating the second he hears you say it again with that breathy mewl you’d let out.
You’re going to be the damn death of him, but he doesn’t care. Not in this fervour.
“God, don’t even know how long I spent lovin’ ya too.”
You pull the vest off then, your body reacting to the swell of your heart from his words, and you launch it somewhere to the right, Daryl immediately turning on your dress. It’s pretty - so fucking pretty he’d sat for an hour just thinking about it and maybe doing something else you don’t have to know about - but it’s in the way. It’s in the way and he wants to be patient, but the two of you are burning on a short wick and he wants to feel you as long as he can.
It’s in the way, but he can’t get it off.
“Shit, who did this damn dress?”
Tugging at the knots, his voice gets further from your ear as he tries in vain to get his adrenaline-trembling fingers to overpower the stupid string, but it’s not working and all he can hear is your laugh. It almost feels misplaced with the burning fervour rising heavy in the air - all the other times he’d heard it, he’d get that insistent warm of his cheeks and that sense of juvenile satisfaction if he was the cause of it - and it definitely makes a surge of affection launch forward.
Even if your lips are kiss swollen and your neck is starting to brandish him, Daryl can’t help but let himself sink into the familiar saccharine of how fucking cute you are. You’re everything wrapped up in one person, and he’s still in limbo with the knowledge you’d want to be his.
There’s a nudge at his chest, his body only moving because he’d been so caught up thinking about you to do anything else but obey the movement of yours, and soon, he’s crossed the length of his bedroom. The back of his legs hit his mattress, and he lets out a small grunt when he lands. It’s quickly morphed into a small chuckle when you mask him with a surprised yelp, the noise brought forth as his hands wrap around your waist and he brings you down in his fall with him.
It’s not much dissimilar to the fiasco just this morning - the view is the same, and it makes those same butterflies swarm through him - except this time, he’s not blushing from embarassment underneath you and yelling at himself to keep his hands to himself and his mind to himself. Instead, Daryl’s hands rest at your hips until you pull off him, one of your palms lying flush against his bare chest as you take just a few steps away from the bed.
There’s palpable anticipation hanging in the air around the two of you, and he wants to get up and chase your body heat again, but that hold you’d had on him - that hold that had kept his back flush against the mattress just a few seconds ago - it’s enough to have him biting his bottom lip until his flesh goes white. That hold meant business, and he sits up on jittering nerves, waiting to see what you’re going to do next.
You flash him a smile then, mischievous and playful like the ones the two of you would share when you’d sneak out together or cheat to get out of a game night - it had only happened a handful of times, though, and nobody had caught either of you yet, so neither of you really felt that bad - and his jeans feel a little too tight when you turn around after that, pulling your hair out from your scrunchie and placing it onto his workbench. The expanse of your skin exposed through thin pieces of black cotton make him fucking heat, and he admires each slope and curve of you.
“Just watch me. Look at me.”
Your fingers tug the first loop free, and you can feel his stare on you, white-hot heat lashing through your skin as he burns holes through you. It weighs heavy like the anchor of an old-timey merchant ship, and you’re thankful you can’t see him because you’re sure if you turned around, his intensity would pull you under - would drown you.
Look at you? Jesus fucking Christ you’re making it hard to do anything but look at you.
It’s so quiet you can hear him breathing as your hands travel further and further down, the upper half of your back exposed to the silent room, and if the heaviness of his breaths is even the slightest bit helpful in judging his state of self-control, you’re happy that you’d spent enough time with Rosita to be able to undo her go-to knots since Daryl might have pulled the straps so hard they’d have torn. It would be a shame, really, to say goodbye to this dress, which is a far cry from the way you’d felt about it just this morning.
It would be a shame to lose this dress because the way he’d reacted to it - is reacting to it, since you can hear the clinking of his belt and the clinking of his jean’s zipper - is making you feel so wanted that all you can think about is Daryl, Daryl, Daryl.
When the last knot is undone, you hold the front of the dress up to your chest with your left arm and turn back around to face him, the black straps falling down from the sides of your dress like they were limp angel wings or something. You could be - with how much he wants to get on his knees in front of you and worship you like you were some holy creature, you damn well could be - but his feelings that come from you consume him, and there’s nowhere left in him for anything holy. Not when you’re in his bedroom with him.
Daryl’s staring up at you now, belt and zipper undone since he’d been straining hard against jeans that were already a size too small that he’d felt like he might actually suffocate if he didn’t do anything to help himself, and his skin is flushed pink. You were right not to look back at him, because his eyes - his eyes that are the perfect shade of blue and always make you feel safe even though you never really are - can’t seem to hide his anticipation, and stare right back into yours, blown black with libertine desire.
For a moment, you’re lost from your sense of reality - lost in his eyes like the first time he’d tried to teach you how to shoot his crossbow - but when you regain it, the sweetest little boyish smile spreads on his face. If you take away the fact he’s shirtless and the fact you’re just about to be, the scene could almost be considered adorable with the genuine joy that’s painted across both your faces just seconds after another pang of want had shot through you both.
“C’mere.”
His voice is lower than it usually is when he tilts his head as a request, gravelled through but somehow so fucking smooth and you drink him down like a glass of expensive champagne, taking step after step as you make sure to sway your hips a little more than usual until you’re standing between his legs and his neck is craned up to look at you. You swipe back his bangs with your right hand, and your heart swells ten times with the look of adoration in his eyes, leaning down to press a kiss onto him because holy shit you can do that now.
When you drag yourself away from him, barely a second’s contact between your chapped lips and his, you feel Daryl’s hand grasp at the back of your neck, goosebumps rushing down your spine when he pulls you back down for another. It’s intoxicating, and your mouth moves with his until neither of you can breathe anymore.
“Hate this dress, y’know that?”
There’s no seriousness in his voice and you hum lightly as you look down at him, admiring every inch of his face from his rounded nose to the cut of his cheekbones to the stubble he must have trimmed recently. He seems to be doing the same to you because one of his hands swipes an unruly piece of your fallen bangs behind your ears, and one hand is half playing with the hem of said dress and half just touching your bare thigh because your skin feels perfect against his.
“Ya look too damn good in it.”
That same small smile spreads across his face, but the innocent affection in it morphs into almost lascivious when he speaks again. his fingers travelling from your ear down to the arm holding your dress in place.
“Would look better on the floor, though, don’t ya think?”
Daryl quirks an eyebrow up when your hand slides out from underneath his and he realizes you’ve let him hold it against you. You’ve let him decide what he wants to do with it. Well, you give him the illusion that he’s deciding what to do with the piece of fabric because just by doing that, he knows you want it gone just as much as he does. But still, you give him that teasing permission, leaning down so he can feel your breath against his cheek.
“I don’t know… why don’t you find out?”
His body reacts immediately, dropping one of his hands from your chest and letting your dress submit to gravity as it rubs up against him with the close proximity. The hand playing at your hem slides up to dip underneath the little skirt part that covers your ass, and he slides the dress off as you press kisses to his neck. He gorges himself on the feeling of you, taking in each and every swell of flesh with the intention of memorizing every curve of your body with touch alone. You’re pressed up flush against him, and even though he’d spoken about wanting to see you, the heat of his body never once leaves you.
Stepping out of your garment, he takes the opportunity to hook an arm beneath one of your thighs, pulling it across and over his lap so your shin rests against his mattress, and the repetition of those movements are so fluid and comfortable that being sat across his lap couldn’t have felt more right. It’s so intense - everything from his bare chest against yours, to the way he’s holding you so close to him as if he can’t stand being more than a few inches away from you, to the fact you can feel him pressing up heavy against you. It’s so intense that your body seeks a relief to the tension he’s responsible for in the only way it knows how.
Grinding down on him, your hands drop to the sides of his waist, your fingernails digging into the flesh in a dull pain that makes his cock throb against you. He groans, his swear mixing with the purely devastating way you sigh his name, and his hands travel up from your legs, skating over your underwear to grab at your hips. It’s almost possessive, the way he spreads his fingers - one of his large hands could cover your whole back if he wanted it to - and it does things to the both of you when he does.
You indulge in it, satiating your gnaw of lust with the warm flush of his palm, and you watch his face twist with harsh pleasure as you pull away. Not far - just enough to let him really, really see you - and he swallows down the rush of saliva.
“You’re gon’ kill me.”
There’s so much of you he hasn’t seen before - so much of you he’s never felt before - and slowly, it’s becoming familiar territory. That thought alone makes him shiver. He takes in the sight of your chest, the swells of your flesh down to the black cotton that cuts across your hip, separating you from him. Your skin isn’t as smooth as it once probably was, scarred tissue marking gunshots and all the other different wounds that this shitty world had marred you in, but you’re beautiful all the same.
What did he do to deserve you?
“You’re gonna kill me, too.”
Smiling, you bite your bottom lip as you speak, and you can hear a small 'shut up’ rumble through him, only making your expression widen. He’s too bashful for his own good - compliments stay in his system for weeks, especially if they were from you - and he wraps his hands around your waist, lifting his hips up before he twists his body in one quick, fluid motion in order to keep you from noticing the pink on his cheek, hoping your back hitting his mattress is a sufficient distraction.
“You’re so handsome.”
Again?
His face is beet red now, and he buries his nose into your neck, feeling your chest rise and fall when you laugh and he realizes that there’s no way you don’t know how hard he’s blushing. Pressing a kiss against your skin, he pulls away finally, meeting your eyes head-on, and his heart wells up in affection when he sees the adoration in your eyes. You mean it - you think he’s handsome - and damn it, it makes him feel on top of the world. Your words echo through his head and he can’t help the two words that rush from him.
“You’re perfect.”
Daryl says it like a fact - like it’s his own scripture, reverent in holy belief - and he looks at you the same way, too. It makes your body burn for him, and you slide up and up along his bedsheets until you’re fully on his mattress, eyes on his as an invitation for him to follow. And he does, spurred on by how fucking good you look on the dull gray he barely gets any sleep in, and he scales the length that separates you from him, walking on his knees so he can keep his hands on you.
Then he’s almost frenetic in his movement, quick tugs unrolling your ankle socks, and his palm sliding against your shin. His hands inch towards your underwear, and his pulse is quickening a mile a minute, but he pauses and you watch him swallow, eyes flicking between his hands and your eyes.
“Can- can I?”
Daryl’s voice is breaking through him with his sheer force of will, a vicious want for you choking him out, and it only grows when you nod, giving him a breathy ‘yes’ as you lift your hips up to him. He wastes no time in hooking his fingers at your waistband, and he pulls your underwear off as if it had done something horrible to him, flinging it off somewhere to join his vest.
You’re bare for him now, the sight of your whole body lighting something magnificently devastating in him, and when you sit up to paw at his waistband, the heat of your fingers making his cock throb as you brush up against it. The touch is so fleeting, but it’s enough for him to groan and for the hands at your thighs to tighten - for the sound to fill your ears and for the sound to spur you onto your knees in front of him - and you indulge in it, pressing your palm against his open fly and biting your bottom lip.
You’d only intended to touch him like this until you got all the way around his hips - only intended to palm at him over his clothes for a little while longer - but when you slide your hand across his jeans, the sharp edge of something cuts up against you, dulled down by the denim covering it. It’s not the red bandana rag thing because that’s in his other pocket, and it’s certainly not his lighter because that’s stuffed into the vest which was haphazardly thrown across his room. Curiosity overtakes you then, and you reach in, amusement lining your features when you realize what it is.
“Did you plan on getting lucky today, Daryl?”
He’s much too lost in his pleasure to realize what you’re doing until you speak, and his eyes - which were screwed shut to try and shut up the choked moan trying to fight its way through his throat - pop open in panic when the haze in his brain clears up enough to register your words.
All your movements have stopped, a playful little smirk on that pretty face of yours only making him feel more embarrassed when you hold up that piece of holographic gold plastic he’d intended to put back in the infirmary hours ago. He stutters through an answer - ‘it ain’t what it- I swear I didn’t-‘ rushing out of him - and the warmth of his rough hands leave your body to fist at the sheets underneath you because damn it he might break you if he gripped you that hard.
“This- it was already in my pants when I got ‘em an’ I thought we could’a stopped at the infirmary before leavin’ the party, an’ I was gon’ tell ya, but then I saw ya wearin’ that damn dress an’ I couldn’t think an’ then you were talkin’ to me an’ shit and then that asshole-“
Biting your lip, your teeth hide a quickly widening smile and your hands swipe his bangs from his face once you put the condom just beside the pillow you’re lying on. Daryl’s so damn cute when he rambles like this, and he cuts himself off when he feels your fingers through his hair, relief washing through him when he realizes you don’t think he’s using you just to use what’s in your hand. Realistically, he’s not sure if you’ve ever thought of him as someone who’d just chase something physical, but you’ve met his brother, and he’s told you stories of his old man, so it really isn’t a huge stretch.
“Wish I had the balls to plan for somethin’ like this. Then I wouldn’t’a spent months tellin’ myself Hell'd freeze over ‘fore you’d ever think ‘bout me like I wanted ya to.”
He’s staring down at you now, one corner of his lips pulled up to one side, and you run your thumb along his cheekbone, tugging him down to press a kiss onto that infuriatingly attractive expression. The strength of you surprises him, and he braces himself on either side of you with his large biceps, feeling the shift in the mattress beneath him as you pull your knees out from under you and rest yourself back onto your back.
This whole situation could be funny, maybe, and it shouldn’t be doing things to you - certainly not his flushed face or the humiliation beginning to ebb away from his eyes - but it is, and it only serves as a reminder of what you want to be doing when his body is over yours.
“I think about you a lot, Daryl. Especially like this.”
He’s so large as he frames your sight, and when you think of man, you think just of him. When you think of man, it’s his broad shoulders and thick muscles that swell through your thoughts - his violence-born scars and painful tattoos and his eyes that burn and burn and burn - and the near whimper as he hears your words surprises you. Daryl Dixon, a man that scares and intimidates, has whimpered for you. It makes a wet hot heat lick through you.
You never knew it could sound so good.
“Christ, you’re really gon’ kill me, huh?”
Chuckling, your hands finally return to the waistband of his jeans, and he lifts off the bed, stepping out of the strangling denim in a second. He groans then, half from the way his cock only has to fight his boxers now and half from the way lower half can fucking breathe, and you can see him now, a bulge in the fitted dark gray fabric. It’s like a double-formed attack - the sight and the sound of him - and you press your thighs together to keep yourself together and to get some pressure where you need it.
He notices - God, does he notice - and he can’t stop his hands coming down onto your knees, pulling your legs apart and burning you in his stare as you fall open for him. Anticipation makes you clench around nothing, and he’s biting the inside of his bottom lip so hard it might bleed. You’re staring at him, your heart pumping and pumping and pumping, and when his tongue darts out and he’s staring apex of your thighs, it’s over for you.
“Daryl- Daryl, please.”
Your voice is a goddamn drug to him, and his body springs into action like all the other times you’d called for him. He knows what you’re pleading for - he’s begging for it too, in his own way - and he descends, lips searing onto the bruises as if they were a balm to heal your skin back into that shade he knows as you.
“Been imaginin’ this. Been thinkin’ ‘bout this”
He speaks between his kisses, and you’re fisting at his bedsheets already, trying to keep yourself from begging. Hands on your thighs, the weight of him gets heavier as he presses down on them, holding you open as his mouth trails up and up and up. Sure, he’s never really done this before, and his hands are shaking slightly from the nerves, but damn it, he wants to be good for you. More than anything.
So he just fucking goes for it. It’s his lips first, what Daryl spoils you with, quick kisses inching closer to your wet warmth before he spreads you with his thumbs and presses one right up against you. It catches you off guard, a shock of pleasure sent from the way his tongue applies sloppy pressure before his lips close in a suck, and you shut your eyes, barely registering the noise that escapes you.
It’s a throaty thing, smoothing out into a soft little moan that makes him rut into the mattress, and God, it sounds good to him. He tightens his fingers around your thighs then, an approving groan of his own running more than auditorily through your body, and your hips buck up to him, almost making his mouth slip from you. But he’s determined, getting your hips back down in a second by sliding his hands up until his thumbs are snug in the dip of your pelvis, and even the pressure he applies there makes your head swim.
You’ve never been this sensitive before - his teeth graze against you, and you’re fighting your body’s desire to cry out his name - but it escapes, and you can feel a wash of embarrassment cleanse through your wanton desire. It paints you in a heat that’s almost burning, and your eyes snap open, searching for his in hopes that maybe they’ll tell you he hadn’t heard it. They don’t, though. In fact, they do the opposite, and his stare lights up, throwing kindling into the fire that’s already burning you.
He’s heard you - it doesn’t take a genius to realize that when you can feel a small smirk form on his face - and he flattens his tongue once more just to feel you clench around nothing. It’s feeding his ego, knowing he’s responsible for your sounds, and you don’t realize how much he’s enjoying it until you press the back of your hand against your mouth to stop another pathetic moan from escaping you.
Dissatisfied, Daryl furrows his brows and pulls off you, a line of his spit still connecting him to you, and he slides a hand up, trailing wet kisses up to just below your ribs and cupping at your chest before pulling your hand away from your mouth with a sort tug to your elbow. Why would you hide your sounds from him? Why would you ever think he doesn’t want to hear those noises when he vibrates for them? He rests all his weight on a bent arm next to you as he climbs up, and he revels in the press of his chest against your lower stomach.
“Wanna hear ya, sunshine. Wanna hear ya, y’understand?”
You look down at him then, your blood buzzing in your ears as you nod, but he doesn’t move back down to your trembling thighs, not even when you look at him and his eyes are wide with a hunger as he stares up at the spread of your hair against his pillow.
“D’ya understand?”
It looks like he wants to descend on you then - old fantasies and mirages making him want to devour you and consume you from the inside out - and you bite your lip so hard you might bleed when you see an intensity in him that you’ve only ever seen him fight with.
“Mmhmm, yeah- yes.”
Daryl just watches you - just nips underneath the swell of your flesh until you mumble through your answer - and he slides his hands up your neck until he can pull your lip free himself. He’s sloppy with it, running on the adrenaline pumping through his veins, and his finger slips past your lips, barely even realizing it before your tongue swipes along his thumb. Then your mouth closes around him, your cheeks hollowing as you suck and he grinds into your thigh, unable to keep himself from imagining how you might feel if you got on your knees for him.
“Fu- fuck- holy shit.”
He pulls his thumb from you then, eyes blown wide with surprise, but instead of shying away from him, you give him a fucking look through your hooded eyes that makes his brain short-circuit. How the fuck can someone look so good? God, you’re making him feel so much - you’re making him feel things he never thought he could in this short amount of time - and he can still taste you when he swallows his rush of saliva.
“Want- want your fingers. Please, Daryl.”
Who the fuck is he to say no?
“Are ya sure?”
Nodding, you tell him you want it - that you’ve been wanting it - and he nods back. It’s like a promise, and he sharpens his expression again, almost like the one he has when he’s tracking game. The determination burns in him, and he slides down your body, relieving the throb of his cock by pressing into the bedsheets again. He can’t keep doing that, he knows that, but all he can think about is how close you are and how good you feel and how good you smell.
You feel his tongue drag across your pelvis, and your thighs part for his broad shoulder when he hooks them up and over onto either side of his neck. They’re soft, so goddamn perfect that he can’t help but brush his lips up against them, but he’s almost jittering with excitement and he’s on a fucking mission so he needs to stop getting distracted. His eyes look back up to yours at that moment, one last search for your permission as if you weren’t begging for him just seconds ago, and he can see your chest rise and fall with deep breaths of anticipation.
There’s no more reason to drag this out. Not when the condom Carol stuck in his pockets is almost mocking him from where it lies wrapped just by his pillow.
Carefully, almost as if he would hurt you if he moved too fast, he presses the pad of his finger between your legs, just below where his tongue is lapping at you, and he takes the slight rut upwards fo your hips as a sign of enjoyment. It makes him smile - that’s your enjoyment. Your enjoyment that only he can see and taste and enjoy in the privacy of his room - and he groans, drawing a moan from you as he dips into you slowly.
Daryl’s so scared of hurting you, and part of you hates it, while part of you melts for him.
You can tell his fear by the way his movements lag from the fervour of his mouth, and you pull your leg from his shoulder, spreading yourself a little wider so you can reach down and grab his hand. It’s been so long since someone’s touched you like this - you can’t think of anyone you’d wanted to touch you like this if it wasn’t him - and the ache of desire makes you desperate.
He grunts, following your movements when you grip his wrist, and he pulls his face away in order to watch the way you push his fingers into yourself. God, you’re such a sight that he wants to burn you into his memory forever, but the fucking moan you let out when he fills you is stealing his attention.
“That feel good, sunshine?”
He curls himself then, inching in another, and his fingers are so much thicker than yours it’s making you thrum with the stretch. Your body responds before your mouth even moves, and he can feel the rush of slick heat coat him as you dig your nails into your own thigh, your other hand almost ripping the sheets with how it seems like he suddenly doesn’t even need to fucking breathe. All he needs to keep hearing you say his name the way you do, and he’d happily suffocate between your legs. He can’t think of a better way to go.
So you moan his name - you tell him it feels good and that he’s so fucking good, the words forcing themselves through because it’s the truth - and you’re everywhere in his senses that he pulls the hand at his bedsheet into his hair. Daryl can’t fight himself about this anymore. He can’t fight the fact he wants to feel you when he overwhelms you in his sensations, and when your fingers run through his hair, your nails digging into his scalp with a decadent sear, his cock leaks for your attention almost pathetically.
But his determination is paying off. Each of his grunts vibrate through you and his desire to please makes you climb towards your climax. Not slowly - you’re barrelling to it, rollerblades down a hill, goosebumps across your skin and a haze of pleasure over your thoughts of Daryl, Daryl, Daryl - but it’s definitely surely.
He can’t stop his head from spinning either, warm muffs on either side of his ears from where your trembling thighs fight to keep themselves open for him, because God, you're such a good girl for him it makes his heart sputter. This is what he’s dreamed of when those unrelenting fantasies of you kept him company on nights when he couldn’t stop his mind from running, and to feel you clench around his fingers - to feel you tug at his hair and gush you across his tongue like you’re the sweetest fruit he’s ever put his lips on - he thinks he falls in love even more.
It’s so sinful - so lust-driven and debaucherous - but his feelings for you still bloom in affection and adoration.
“Daryl, I’m- I’m so close-“
Your hands are tugging lightly at his scalp, telling him he can pull off if he wants, but he stays flush against you, mouth and fingers both. He wants this - wants to feel you when your climax hits as close as he possibly can - and he lets you know that with a single fueled look.
His eyes are wide - puppy dogged and begging which have no right in looking as good as it does coming from between your legs - and it catapults you down the hill with triple gravity’s acceleration. Running a thumb across his forehead, you swipe his bangs from his face and angle him until he’s flattening his tongue against you so perfectly over and over again that your hips act by themselves. You’re rutting up into him and he takes it. Daryl takes the chase of your pleasure happily and watches your nose scrunch up as a drowning pleasure washes over you.
The way you moan his name will linger in his mind for the days to come, and almost selfishly, he twists his fingers and grazes you with his teeth just to hear you break it off with a high whine. He’s so hard it’s almost painful, and the only thing that’s keeping him from losing his self-control is the fact he’d already found release to you just hours ago.
“Can ya gimme another?”
Daryl’s voice is slightly muffled from being pressed up against you, and he only slows enough for you to regain your erratic breathing and ride through the tingle splintering across your whole body. He’ll do it for you - if you want his tongue or his fingers again, he’ll gladly spend hours between your thighs until his jaw aches and falls off his skull - but you shake your head. He might completely unravel you if he keeps going, and all you can think about is how he’ll feel when his hips finally meet yours
“Next time then, sunshine?”
He slows after he speaks, a small smile on his face as he pulls from you and you clench around nothing at the way his voice scratches and gravels. Oddly, it sounds so sweet despite the lewd promise in his words, and the feel of him gathering your slick with his fingers makes your hips buck up to him, a small breathless whine erupting from you.
“Next time, Daryl.”
And his whole body lights up at the agreement. Next time. Next time is a reality - a reality he knows to be true because you’ve echoed him - and he can’t help the way his cock throbs knowing you’re a reality for him now. No more wishing you were his. No more mornings feeling guilty when he sees you knowing he’s spent the night before thinking about you. No, you’re really his now, and he might be the luckiest man alive because he has you.
Reaching over, you grab the condom with one hand and swipe the hair out of his face with your other, watching his thick fingers press past his lips as he sucks you off himself and his eyes are so fucking pretty blown black with a consuming, almost possessive need to taste you again. He’s so perfect and you sit up, sliding your palms down his body until they snap to his boxer’s waistband.
There’s a wet spot where he’d leaked for you, and you swallow a surge of saliva as you bite down at the corner of the plastic wrapping, holding it in your mouth so you can use both hands to grab at either side of his underwear and God, you’re both so impatient that he’s getting off the bed the second you’ve touched him. It’s not that he doesn’t want to feel your skin on his, it’s just that it feels like he might die - okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but honestly, it feels like he really might - if he doesn’t rid himself of that last piece of clothing. When he does, the groan he lets out when his cock juts out against his stomach is so carnal that you want to pounce on him right then and there.
And you do. You ignore your trembling thighs and move across the bed until you can touch him, and you rip the wrapper between your teeth open with one hand, biting your lip as he closes his wrist around your other when you take him into your fist. He’s warm - running hotter than the Georgian summer you’d met him in - and his jaw is clenched so tight you’re surprised a blood vessel hasn’t popped yet.
You run him in a stroke and watch the way he lets out a pant, his hips bucking into your touch, and you spit out the plastic from your mouth onto the floor, taking the condom out and rolling it onto him as he tries to keep himself still for you. It takes a second for him to notice the position you’re in - your knees are under you and you’re bent forward, your hands on his cock - and when you look up at him Jesus fucking Christ does it make his mind run. You’d look good like that doing something else.
Next time.
Next time.
A lot can happen next time.
He’s stuck staring for a second - the overrun of his mind taking up all his logical thinking - and that’s all you need to push back along the length of his sheets, propping yourself up on your elbows and spreading your legs with such an inviting look on your pretty little face that makes him want to all but press himself into you.
“Come here and make me yours, Daryl.”
He doesn’t need to be told twice.
Fueled by a frantic need to get to you, he’s on the bed in a second, the springs dipping in accordance with his weight and bouncing you from the way his knees dig down into the mattress. You’re running through his veins, and you’re so slick when he presses his hips against yours that maybe he could slide right in, but he holds himself still, looking down at you with so much adoration it makes you want to cry.
Wrapping your legs around him, you push him closer to you, making a home for him to rest on his knees while you snake a hand between your bodies, grabbing him and biting your lip as you guide him in. Daryl follows your pace - his throat closing up with how warm you are and his mouth sneaking down to your neck to steal kisses from your jaw all the way down to the hollow of your collarbone - and when you’ve taken all of him in a wet buried swallow and his pelvis pressed flush to yours, you fist his sheets, gulping down a whimper.
He notices - can feel your throat move from how his cheek is pressed up against it - and he leans all his weight on one arm, sliding the other down your body to meet his cock and gathering your arousal before pressing down and rubbing a circle into you.
That pulls a noise from you. That pulls a nearly broken choked sob of his name that has him shoving his hips against yours before he can even stop himself. The movement makes you jerk up to him - makes you press your chest up to his - and the contact makes you clench around his cock, pulling him deeper into you. He can hear your pulse from the heat of your skin, and he nips at it lightly, flattening his tongue over his gentle bite as if reminding you of what he could do with it
Pulling his face away, his hips follow too, a slow rock that makes his mouth fall slightly agape, and he watches you look down at where he meets you. It’s almost too much to see - how far your own body has taken him - and you claw at his hips, your dull nails digging marks into his skin and he groans, watching the same image you are. It’s burning you, the sight of his sweat-covered skin and his thigh muscles flexing for each roll, and the way he’s staring at the spot where he connects to you is so fucking intense it sends shockwaves through your whole body.
You can hear his rumbling - can feel the saliva he’s left on your skin to mark you as his - and before you know it, you can feel a wetness slide from your eyes down your face. A whine follows not long after when he curves into you just right and he looks up, biting his lip and expecting a look that matches your debauched whine only to see tears stained on your cheek and tiny darkened spots on his pillow.
“What- what’s wrong? Why’re ya cryin’? Shit, did I do somethin’ wrong? Fuck- ’m sorry I-“
He stills then, his hand resting instead at your hip and the empty air taking up the space against your body that used to be taken up by the heat of his skin, and an expression of panic and guilt projects stark across his features. Fuck, what did he do? Maybe he was moving too fast - maybe the angle was off? - he doesn’t know. All he knows is that you’re crying and nothing makes him hurt more than seeing you cry. Daryl had spent months trying his damndest to keep you from it, but now he’s the reason why.
God, he’s such a fucking-
“I love you, Daryl. I love you so so so much and I-”
Wiping your eyes, you huff out a laugh at how absurd the whole situation is. He feels so good moving in you - each pump of him pulling you down further into the depths of something you don’t want to escape - and to have him stop is like torture.
“I just can’t believe you love me too.”
Despite how innocent your words are, you writhe beneath him, swallowing more of him in a desperate search to release that tension coiling between your thighs. His thumb is perfectly rough with the hold at your ass, and a swivel of your hips makes his grip tighten just enough to have your sentence break at the end.
Looking down at you, he swallows as he watches you work yourself against him. Jesus fucking Christ you’re a sight, sweat between your brows, and there’s a sick part of him that flares alive with the way those tears slip past your pretty little eyes, but as much as he wants to slide back into you, he knows he would never - that he could never - forgive himself if he hurt you. So he stays rigid even though you’re clenching around him and making his own resolve crumble by the second.
“It don’t- it don’t hurt?”
It must have been sheer determination that has him managing to string together a coherent sentence, and you shake your head, wrapping his waist with your calves and pulling him into you. God, you love the delicious fullness you feel when his cock pushes into you, and your mind is beginning to swim. Daryl’s making it swim. His scent, his skin, his sounds. His everything.
“N- no. You feel good. So fu- sorry- sorry I killed the mood.”
A dry chuckle pushes past his lips, and he presses himself down enough to kiss your forehead, taking one of your hands into his, slipping his fingers between yours. He holds it like it’s his lifeline, all his affection fuelling the way he caresses your knuckle as he sandwiches you against the bedsheets.
You wrench your eyes shut, taking in the way his hips have sped up with sounds that are pushed from your chest, and your skin is tingling from your gut all the way up to your scalp. You’re saying his name like a prayer - begging him for everything he has to give you - and he takes your other hand, sick of not feeling it on him and you immediately react when he brings it to his back.
He’s thankful for the way you don’t care about his scars - for the way you don’t hesitate to give him what he wants and you dig your nails into him - because all he wants in the morning is to see you on his body. Daryl’s shameless enough not to deny that he’s left splotches all over your neck to let every bastard out there know you’re his, and damn it, it does things to him to know that when he wakes up tomorrow with you in his bed, he’ll know just what’s underneath his shirt and vest.
Cover him in you - paint him your colour, put your name all over him - and he’ll die happy.
Dipping even further down, he presses a sloppy kiss onto your mouth, his lips sliding across yours and his tongue slipping against yours, and when he pulls away his lungs are burning so much that there was no other choice but to. His whole body is thrumming alive for you, and inside, he’s smiling. It’s not as foreign to him as it once was - you had made it grow almost familiar over the months of knowing you - and he can’t even get it to go away even when he buries his nose into the crook of your neck and inhales you.
You whine then, feeling his tongue trail languid down to your chest, and you’re so fucking close to your climax that you’re nearly gone when he closes his mouth over you, a light nibble that has you arching your back into him. God, you’re clenching around him - your thighs are shaking - and he knows you’re close when you let out that little moan of his name that has Daryl’s hips stuttering. Only then does he pull his face away and when he sees the way your skin reacts immediately, spit slick and brandishing his attention, it sends him head-first towards his own finish.
“Op-open your eyes. Wanna - fuck - wanna see ya.”
God, does he have to sound like that?
You’re helpless to it, fighting your lust-hooded lids, and you look so wrecked it’s driving him crazy. Another whimper escapes from you, falling free from between kiss-swollen lips and you can do nothing but let it - the look of possession and enamour written stark across his face pulling you to the depths of your own pleasure. Shit, he looks perfect. Better than you’d ever imagined.
“Love- love ya, sunshine. More’n anythin’”
Another noise rumbles from your chest, and when his hand presses you further into the mattress - when the other one escapes from your pelvis and circles your nerves again - you want nothing more than to submit to the free fall of pleasure.
“Tha’s- tha’s’it. God, you’re so fuckin’- you’re such a good girl.”
Choking out Daryl’s name, wave after wave after wave of pleasure drown you, and your hips spasm against his. You’re pulsing around him - clenching around him so erratically that he nearly slips from you at the force - and you’re so wet he can hear it from each rut of your hips. He doesn’t hold your body down as you face the shatter head-on, he just helps you ride it out as he praises you with how pretty you look and how good you feel soaking him and fuck is he’s close, the noises you’re making in response to him making his insides twist.
You. Him.
Where do you end, and where does he begin?
“Daryl, please. I- I want it. Want you.”
Christ, he can’t think. You’re such a fucking rush - of pleasure, of affection, of a sweetness that never fades - and it’s nearly overwhelming, drawing him to decadent release with each push of his body into yours. His pace stutters, and after half a dozen sloppy thrusts, he groans your name, stuttering through the first syllable before swearing so filthily you’re surprised it came from his mouth.
You’re both panting when he stills, erratic breathing slowly becoming more and more regular, and he lets go of your hand, both of his arms framing you on either side of your face and pressing his forehead against yours. For a second, you’re both breathing the same air and God it just feels good like this - it feels good to be so close to him. Smiling, you rest your hands at the back of his neck, playing with his hair before tilting his head down and pressing a kiss against his lips. You can feel him smile against you, and your heart wells up in something so saccharine you never want to let go of him.
But both of you need oxygen, and he pecks you one last time before he slips from you. He gets up on still slightly shaking limbs and pulls off his condom, tying it off only to remember the fact he’d moved his trashcan out just this morning. Looking over at you, he memorizes the image of you melting into his bed like a cat underneath the warm sun, and he makes his way into the bathroom, his heart swelled up a hundred times from the satisfied look on your face.
You were already perfect to him, but to see you nested among all his things, it just - how would you say it? - hits different.
When the familiar cold tiles of his bathroom hit his bare feet, he drops the condom into the metal bin and turns back to return to you, but he pauses when he catches sight of a towel hanging on that little rung thing built into the wall that he never uses. He grabs it without a second thought - you’re sweaty like he is, and he knows it’s uncomfortable to be that against his cotton sheets - and he turns on the tap, praying that the water won’t come out freezing.
It comes out cool, and if Daryl’s bones weren’t jelly, he’d do one of those happy dances that he’s caught you doing one too many times, but he can recognize the happiness in his features when he catches sight of himself in the mirror. He scoffs at himself, but a small grin peeks through his teeth anyways.
Turning off the sink, he races back to you, thankful for the short distance between the doorway and his bed, and he calls your name softly. Your eyes are closed and you’ve covered yourself with his sheets, but when you see him with the towel you’d told him felt so soft and fluffy, you pull them off, letting him take in your bare body. His spent cock twitches with interest, but Jesus fucking Christ he’s yelling at it to calm down.
“Know how much ya hate to sweat.”
There’s a boyish almost bashful smile on his face, and he stands at the doorway until you open your arms for him to enter his own room. He takes the invitation without hesitation, sitting next to you on his bed just wanting to take care of you, and runs the towel up from your leg to your torso so earnestly you want to pull him close and whisper declarations of love into his ear.
“If I’m sweating from you, I guess it’s okay.”
His smile widens, and he presses a kiss onto your shoulder after he wipes it clean.
“That’s good. We’re gon’ be doin’ that a lot.”
A slight chuckle escapes you and your expression mirrors his. Threading your fingers through his hair, you lean in and peck the corner of his mouth when he looks up at you, whispering a ‘promise?’ against his lips that he nods in response to.
Cooled off, you thank Daryl and watch him get up, admiring the image of his toned back and his demon tattoos as he walks to the bathroom to no doubt do the same to himself, and when he gets back, he all but collapses into the sheets next to you, content with just feeling you next to his.
A silence lulls over the two of you before you turn to face him, grabbing the hand resting between your body and slipping your fingers between his.
“I don’t really think your vest is stupid, Daryl.”
All that you hear after you speak is a sputtering laugh, and it’s full-bodied, rising from his chest all the way up to his shoulders.
“Nah, I deserved it.”
He turns to face you then, biting his lip even though it does nothing to mask the outwards amusement he’s feeling from your words. Squeezing your hand, he pulls it up to his face and presses a kiss against the curve of your knuckles before he speaks again.
“I’m sorry, y’know that?”
Before you can even say anything back, his free hand joins his other, and he’s still apologizing as he fidgets with your fingers.
“I blew up at ya even though it ain’t your fault that- that asshole-“
Then he squeezes, the memory of that bastard making his blood start to simmer, but when he realizes what he’s doing, Daryl drops your hand and shifts back onto his back, popping his knuckles as he keeps them on his chest.
“Sorry. I just- fuck- he jus’ makes me angry.”
He hears shuffling from you, and before he knows it, you’ve pressed yourself up against him and dig your face into his neck and he can feel your feather-light kitten kisses against his skin.
“Hey, dude, calm down.”
Only you would call him ‘dude’ while you’re both still hazy over doing that, and you can hear the rumble of near-silent laugher coming from his body. It’s oddly endearing, your casualness. At least endearing enough to make some of his anger melt away.
“He’s not worth thinking about. Guys like that probably think they deserve to be sucked off for doing the dishes.”
He turns back to you then, the remaining spark in his blood blown out by the way you’re looking at him, and when you cuddle up against his chest, how the fuck was Daryl supposed to do anything but melt for you?
“Besides, there’s only one guy I would do that with, and he’s right here.”
Running his hand up your waist, he lets out a small huff you take as a laugh and presses you up closer, digging his face into your hair and inhaling the scent of you. It’s dark now, the sun has set into what he can only assume is the deep purple you love to stare at, and he can’t think of another place he’d rather be than right here with you.
“Gonna have to take y’up on that offer sometime then, sunshine.”
He can hear you laugh and when you respond, it’s similarly muffled by his chest.
“Would be my pleasure, Daryl.”
Humming, he holds you like you’re the last thing on Earth - like you’re the last thing that matters - and to him, you are. Something settles in him then. Like a stone dropped into a lake, it rests heavily when he really lets himself think about the fact that the only person you’ve ever wanted to be with like this is him.
You want him - him, who’s ‘a pussy whipped little boy who wants to kiss the ground you walk on’, apparently - but he’s not mad about it. While he’s got you in his bed, he can’t be because he knows when you go in for your shift tomorrow, that asshole will have to see the marks on your neck. Maybe the bastard will even see Daryl if you let him drop you off. He needs to make sure that limp-dick prick knows you’re his.
After all, that would just be the cherry on top needed after getting the shit beaten out of him and having to spend a night all alone in the infirmary, wouldn’t it?
