“You know, I can’t help but notice you seem a little at war with yourself here.” ( from merle dixon ! )
Something about that skinny blonde girl gave him pause. She was a sweet enough kid, played well with the little boy and the other girl, polite to the adults, nice to her Momma, and avoided him and Merle entirely - likely at the instruction of her Momma, not that Daryl blamed her. But he’d seen something that morning that made him uncomfortable.
She’d been playing with the other kids after breakfast, giggling and laughing and being all around too energetic for seven in the morning, when her father had snapped at her to ‘shut the hell up’. A rude thing to say to a kid sure, but that really hadn’t been what bothered him. It had been the little girls reaction. She’d gone completely stiff and dropped the bright pink plastic pony into the dirt, nodding and apologizing in a voice that was so starkly different to the one she’d just been using that by all accounts it could’ve been a completely different child.
He knew that reaction. He’d been that skinny little girl in a life that felt so far away but so frighteningly close.
Daryl knew it was none of his business what went on behind closed doors. That wasn’t his kid. It wasn’t his marriage. It wasn’t his father.
Daryl also knew what happened when no one got involved. People got hurt. People died.
He was weighing these options and watching the little blonde girl and her mother folding laundry when Merle speaks. He pulls his gaze away from the two of them and looks over at his older brother. Merle would probably tell him it wasn’t any of his business and to just keep his head down and shut up.
“He hits ‘em.” Daryl mutters, nodding towards where the father - a fat lazy Man who in the two weeks they’d been here Daryl had never seen do a single thing for the rest of the group - sits in the shade. “The little girl, an’ her Momma. He hit’s ‘em.”