And Daryl washes, because he learned to take good care of everything in the prison, where it'd be wasteful not to. California sounds like another country after all these years, but maybe he'll ask about that next.
"Merle," he says. "He was with me in the beginning. Few of our people knew him. They won't have nothing nice to say about him... that ain't their fault."
"People don't always enjoy jackasses." They work together, not unlike they had at the clinic, but she's far more aware of the way her arm brushes against his as she moves. "Did you have any other siblings?"
"Well," she says, thinking about it, her attention on her hands. "I spent as much time as I could at the beach. Of course, so did my sister Melissa, but she was mostly interested in the lifeguards. I was there because I loved the ocean. I still do."
It's been so long since Melissa's murder that she can talk about her relatively easily, especially the teenaged Melissa, who'd seemed impossibly pretty and confident to her sister.
"It was always warm, and if you went to a restaurant - not that we got to do that much - everything had avocados on it. To be honest, I don't think I'd ever seen an avocado before we moved." She tries to remember what else was true about the place, how it had felt. "We were in base housing, so it was always cramped. Not as small as this trailer, but Melissa and I shared a room, and so did Bill and Charlie - our brothers. You couldn't take a step without someone else noticing."
"Huh." It sounds cozy, in an approachable way that doesn't make his heart burn jealously. They were comped by the government, and got nice perks, but the space was still small and food was expensive. She speaks fondly, but everything before the end is fond now, fuzzy with memory. He knows very well that throwing your kid in a lake is cheap; he imagines throwing them at the beach is too, and probably safer.
"Catholic family," she says, like that explains everything. The dishes are already done with - without having to cook, there's not much to clean up. But Scully lingers there at the sink all the same, looking up at him. "I'd like to hear about Georgia sometime - but only if you want to talk about it."
From the litany of well-remembered insults Merle would sling, which Daryl used for so long to try and frame the world he didn't know, he remembers a few choice words about Catholics. Nothing worth repeating. Daryl doesn't feel like he really understands religion; he just knows it's not for him. Frankly, that's true for most things.
"I don't know." She's not sure what's going to put him at ease to talk about, and what's going to make him clam up. She's got the feeling no one does, even Daryl. But as she leans against the sink, wiping her hands on her jeans, there's a hint of a smile in her face. "I just like hearing about you."
She's forgotten about crossbow practice for the moment; the only real purpose in the world is standing here together, half a step apart.
She looks up at him like he's got a story worth telling, and in that moment she'll catch a look of clear-eyed confusion before he catches himself. Bowing his head doesn't really hide his face from someone at Dana's height, but it's instinct all the same. It takes him a second to rile himself; sometimes, he has to remind himself, attention can be good.
"This one time," he says, "Merle got locked up-- screwed up his parole or something, I don't remember. I ran outta money, but I had a shack in the woods Except there was this family camping nearby. Squeaky clean yuppies."
He dries off his hands, and finds a place to sit while nursing a plastic cup of lukewarm water. "They think I'm the groundskeeper? Turns out this whole time I was on camping ground, never knew it. Spent the summer helping those goddamn kids find pawpaws and chanterelles, teaching 'em all to fish. Got to the end of it, the dad hands me fifty bucks. I wasn't expecting to get paid, but fifty bucks for three months?"
He takes a long drink from his cup. "So I got drunk and set the shack on fire."
There's a loveseat in there, old and ugly but entirely functional, and when Daryl sits down on it, Scully sits down beside him. She listens, tilting her head toward him, imagining him with a couple of kids trailing behind, asking what's that? what's that? at everything they passed.
"That kind of work should have cost them thousands." He'd essentially been a nanny and a teacher to those children - if their parents had trusted him to take the kids mushroom-hunting, they'd probably been grateful to have some time off from parenting. Especially on and off for an entire summer. Scully could imagine herself in the same place, thinking she was giving an employee with a wage a nice tip. She doesn't say so. "You've always been good with kids, haven't you?"
She's seen him interact with Judith, with the few other children of Alexandria. They'd all come into the clinic as soon as there was a doctor and everyone's chronic issues were taken care of - and by then, Daryl was helping out while his shoulder healed.
He tilts his head, squinting. He'd tried to tell a story that showed the beauty of Georgia and his own hateful stupidity. Instead, Dana's picked out a detail he doesn't know how to respond to. Nobody's ever made him confront it.
"I guess," he says, floundering under the weight of praise. "They're funny. It ain't hard."
"They are," she agrees, and tentatively, she slides an arm around his waist. What she'd like to do, what she's slowly angling towards, is setting her head on his shoulder: feeling this out step by step, trying to decide if she can let herself want this. "It sounds like a nice summer - before they paid you, at least."
He tenses for half a second before he realizes what she's doing. So they can touch each other? They're that close? The idea is an enormous boon to his ego, much less his fragile sense of belonging. He relaxes into it, letting is eyes flutter briefly closed. No one's ever held him like this before. No one's ever wanted to.
He comes back to himself on the end of an exhaled breath. "Yeah, before I set shit on fire."
A pause-- he vividly imagines holding her closer, putting his face in her hair. He chickens out, and relaxes in the knowledge that he doesn't have to do anything but stay still and enjoy the contact. Nobody expects guys to get cuddly.
But his hand finds hers, settling over it on his hip, running his thumb over the delicate line of her fingers.
"Don't drink much no more. Still find pawpaws-- Carl liked 'em. They don't grow up north."
That moment of tension's why she's moving slowly - the other times she's reached to touch him, he's responded like a startled animal. It's a trauma reaction, she suspects, and given the scars he carries on his back, it's a well-earned one. But he lets her touch him, so she leans into his side, and eventually her cheek's resting against his shoulder.
"I've never had a pawpaw," she admits. He smells like cigarette smoke and sweat, and that grounds this deliberately in a new place, one that has nothing to do with Mulder. "What do they taste like?"
She puts her head on his shoulder, and all the tension goes out of him. He can't resist nuzzling into her, his chin against her scalp. She's so delicate and beautiful and she's holding him. He'll remember this until he dies.
"Kinda like banana bread," he says. "I'll try'n figure out where they grow. Get you some when we leave."
"I'd like that." And she likes this, sitting here with her feet tucked under her and his jaw bumping against her head. It doesn't ask too much of either of them. They could change their minds - she could change her mind - and they could still sit like this, because it's as appropriate for friends as anything else.
She falls quiet, thinking of things she can't say, like we could cut south for a while when we go to Wyoming. But that'd be a waste of time on a trip that won't happen - or, at least, won't happen any time soon - and Scully doesn't want to talk about how it won't. "And you can teach me to find chanterelles."
He wants, suddenly, to kiss her. Daryl has tried to avoid thinking of anything more than holding and touching, because it feels like a kind of betrayal, but the need rises up in him anyway. She is so beautiful; she deserves to be kissed.
He doesn't move, for fear of making his want obvious. It feels like it's written all over his face. He thinks on chanterelles and the loamy scent of deep forest, the way Dana's milk-white hands contrast against dark grass and bark. "It's easy," he says, after a few moments too long. "Bright yellow. Truffles're harder."
He's quiet long enough that she looks up at him, her head barely shifting. Just enough that her eyes can catch the details of his face - more and she thinks she'll startle him, without actually thinking about it consciously. And he's looking at her.
Scully thinks she recognizes that expression, if not from seeing it here. But with Daryl, nothing's certain. He's a dog hiding in the pelt of a wolf, companionable and kind behind the suggestion of sharp teeth. She sees the kind of affection she thinks she'd like to see, but she's not ready to trust that her read of him is any more accurate than everyone who looks at him and sees danger.
Instead, she says, "I hear mushrooms are easy to get wrong. I'll need some formal training before I start picking dinner off trees."
He steels himself with smaller victories. Careful, careful, he reaches up to pet the hair pooling at her shoulder. It catches on rough calluses, but it doesn't snag; her hair is so soft to the touch, it slips through his fingers like sand.
"I'll show you," he says. Making plans for after only feels like a little bit of a betrayal when she asked first. "Don't touch anything that's red."
She mostly feels his touch where his hand brushes against her shoulder, and it's not at all unpleasant. This, like everything else, is both nice and probably best left uncommented on.
"The red ones with the white spots?" It's unsurprising to hear that they're dangerous; nature gives bright colours to poisonous animals for a reason. (What that means for a redhead, she chooses not to think about.) There's a smile in her voice as she adds, "What a pity. They always looked nice in illustrations."
The quintessential mushroom is the one that can't be eaten. It's too bad.
Daryl settles, letting himself relax in the warmth of Dana's body. He could get used to this. Nothing has to change, but maybe he gets to hold her. And if things do change, well, he'll figure it out then. He lets his eyes drift closed, luxuriating.
"Yeah. Those'll make you howl at the moon. Knew a guy that tried to take 'em and he damn near ran into traffic. Gold caps're safer if you wanna go on a vision quest."
"Gold caps? Yeah." He reaches back to scratch the nape of his neck, his habitual and unconscious tell. Has she already figured this out? It's not like he was hiding it. "Used to take a lotta shit, in the old days."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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"Merle," he says. "He was with me in the beginning. Few of our people knew him. They won't have nothing nice to say about him... that ain't their fault."
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It's been so long since Melissa's murder that she can talk about her relatively easily, especially the teenaged Melissa, who'd seemed impossibly pretty and confident to her sister.
"It was always warm, and if you went to a restaurant - not that we got to do that much - everything had avocados on it. To be honest, I don't think I'd ever seen an avocado before we moved." She tries to remember what else was true about the place, how it had felt. "We were in base housing, so it was always cramped. Not as small as this trailer, but Melissa and I shared a room, and so did Bill and Charlie - our brothers. You couldn't take a step without someone else noticing."
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So, "sounds nice," and? "One of four, huh?"
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"What d'you wanna know?"
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She's forgotten about crossbow practice for the moment; the only real purpose in the world is standing here together, half a step apart.
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"This one time," he says, "Merle got locked up-- screwed up his parole or something, I don't remember. I ran outta money, but I had a shack in the woods Except there was this family camping nearby. Squeaky clean yuppies."
He dries off his hands, and finds a place to sit while nursing a plastic cup of lukewarm water. "They think I'm the groundskeeper? Turns out this whole time I was on camping ground, never knew it. Spent the summer helping those goddamn kids find pawpaws and chanterelles, teaching 'em all to fish. Got to the end of it, the dad hands me fifty bucks. I wasn't expecting to get paid, but fifty bucks for three months?"
He takes a long drink from his cup. "So I got drunk and set the shack on fire."
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"That kind of work should have cost them thousands." He'd essentially been a nanny and a teacher to those children - if their parents had trusted him to take the kids mushroom-hunting, they'd probably been grateful to have some time off from parenting. Especially on and off for an entire summer. Scully could imagine herself in the same place, thinking she was giving an employee with a wage a nice tip. She doesn't say so. "You've always been good with kids, haven't you?"
She's seen him interact with Judith, with the few other children of Alexandria. They'd all come into the clinic as soon as there was a doctor and everyone's chronic issues were taken care of - and by then, Daryl was helping out while his shoulder healed.
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"I guess," he says, floundering under the weight of praise. "They're funny. It ain't hard."
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He comes back to himself on the end of an exhaled breath. "Yeah, before I set shit on fire."
A pause-- he vividly imagines holding her closer, putting his face in her hair. He chickens out, and relaxes in the knowledge that he doesn't have to do anything but stay still and enjoy the contact. Nobody expects guys to get cuddly.
But his hand finds hers, settling over it on his hip, running his thumb over the delicate line of her fingers.
"Don't drink much no more. Still find pawpaws-- Carl liked 'em. They don't grow up north."
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"I've never had a pawpaw," she admits. He smells like cigarette smoke and sweat, and that grounds this deliberately in a new place, one that has nothing to do with Mulder. "What do they taste like?"
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"Kinda like banana bread," he says. "I'll try'n figure out where they grow. Get you some when we leave."
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She falls quiet, thinking of things she can't say, like we could cut south for a while when we go to Wyoming. But that'd be a waste of time on a trip that won't happen - or, at least, won't happen any time soon - and Scully doesn't want to talk about how it won't. "And you can teach me to find chanterelles."
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He doesn't move, for fear of making his want obvious. It feels like it's written all over his face. He thinks on chanterelles and the loamy scent of deep forest, the way Dana's milk-white hands contrast against dark grass and bark. "It's easy," he says, after a few moments too long. "Bright yellow. Truffles're harder."
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Scully thinks she recognizes that expression, if not from seeing it here. But with Daryl, nothing's certain. He's a dog hiding in the pelt of a wolf, companionable and kind behind the suggestion of sharp teeth. She sees the kind of affection she thinks she'd like to see, but she's not ready to trust that her read of him is any more accurate than everyone who looks at him and sees danger.
Instead, she says, "I hear mushrooms are easy to get wrong. I'll need some formal training before I start picking dinner off trees."
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"I'll show you," he says. Making plans for after only feels like a little bit of a betrayal when she asked first. "Don't touch anything that's red."
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"The red ones with the white spots?" It's unsurprising to hear that they're dangerous; nature gives bright colours to poisonous animals for a reason. (What that means for a redhead, she chooses not to think about.) There's a smile in her voice as she adds, "What a pity. They always looked nice in illustrations."
The quintessential mushroom is the one that can't be eaten. It's too bad.
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"Yeah. Those'll make you howl at the moon. Knew a guy that tried to take 'em and he damn near ran into traffic. Gold caps're safer if you wanna go on a vision quest."
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