He's petting her hair, her back, anything to remind himself she's real. He doesn't know how to comfort her beyond physical touch. Physical touch, and hard fact. "Rick slit his throat," Daryl says, "in front'a everybody."
The fact that Rick intends to let the fucker live is a discussion for another time. He's not bringing Dana back for a while, in hopes that their new doctor will fuck up and Negan can choke on his own blood.
It occurs to her that she isn't crying, but Daryl is. She's likely in shock; she'll know if she develops physical symptoms beyond the vague sense that none of this is real. That it couldn't be real. Abraham and Glenn and countless others couldn't have died just for this moment, concrete leaching the heat from her legs even as her cheek's warmed by Daryl's chest.
"We have to round up everyone here." It's like being in a dream. She doesn't have any idea how she's going to manage gathering them together, let alone convincing them to go someplace new. Is her heart beating too fast? It seems like it's beating too fast. "We need to burn this place to the ground."
Who the fuck is Daryl to deny her anything? He stands, slowly, helping her up. "Gotta get their supplies, too," he says. "Got enough trucks outside, get it done tonight."
Rick won't like it. Rick will be busy. It'll be what Maggie wants. When did Daryl become so goddamn independent?
"Will they take them?" Hilltop, Alexandria, whoever. Scully wobbles as she stands, thinking, oh, yes, it is shock. I feel cold. "We have to promise them someplace better."
"Maggie still ain't killed our prisoners," he says, leading her carefully down the hallway. He's horrified to realize he still knows the layout of this place. "And these folks... just his slaves."
He can't think of a better word for it. His workers? The people he forced to eke out meager existences on some kind of point system, because they didn't have any skills he considered valuable enough to earn their keep? Daryl's sure Negan thought the point system, the fake money, whatever he called it, kept it from being slavery. Daryl, in this moment of relief and anger, is sure he knows better.
"Maggie'll take the extra hands, if she can feed 'em. We got Gregory all locked up."
"Collaborated," Daryl says, because it's the fancy word Maggie used that made it all make sense, "with the enemy."
They walk up steel steps, and find a room of people pressed to windows, hissing rumors for news. Daryl explains the situation. Help everybody get out of here, and they'll have a place to live where they don't have to worry about Negan's shadow. Stay, and get fucked. By nightfall, he says, the whole place will be up in flames.
A few people, mostly young boys who wished they'd been allowed to join the fighting, stand up to Daryl. You and what army, they say. They're too small to fight, too hungry to think straight, and the ones that don't have parents to pull them back were clearly hoping to get refashioned into soldiers. It's their choice. By that point, people re loading cans and gasoline into trucks and finding all the flammable shit in sight. He leaves them to their devices, but he hopes they come to their senses. The last thing they need is a band of feral teenagers, dying for a chance to prove themselves with blood.
It takes four hours, and through that time, Dana's eyes are distant, haunted. When they're all out of the compound, he hands her a lighter. It's his, a metal piece of work made to last; he refills it with fuel every few months. He found it in the prison, back at the beginning of things, in the Officer's Mess. Someone had carved FUCK onto the side.
Scully worries about the boys. She doesn't know them, and her attempts to connect with them right now go nowhere - but they're not going to be fine on their own, even if they survive. Looking at them, she sees her son, but these kids aren't William, and she can't force them to go.
She tried to talk to them, even tried leaning on the air of expertise she knows she carries. Even here at Sanctuary, where no one's all that important if Negan's in a bad mood, she'd had some cache; everyone might be Negan, but almost no one has any medical training. But she gets nowhere, and eventually, she gives up and helps pack up everything worth keeping. There are supplies they can't afford to lose, possessions people know they want to hold onto.
Daryl finds her when the sun's starting to set, and she's starting to droop. The awful, buzzing sense of shock has left her, and so has the adrenaline of we need to leave, we need to leave now. By the time she takes the lighter from him, all she wants is a shower and a long sleep, and possibly not in that order.
She's got the makings of a Molotov cocktail on her - she might have been collecting the pieces once she saw Daryl was finishing up.
"Everyone's out?" When she gets the affirmative, she flicks the lighter until the rag catches and hurls it into the Sanctuary.
A memory strikes him like an icepick to the back of the head, and suddenly he's bawling. He can't cry out, won't let himself, but tears stream down his face as he watches the fire. His hand finds Dana's shoulder, and he grips it hard. Everyone's out. Everyone important is safe.
The red orange of the fire catches into the setting sun, and for a moment, the whole world looks like a bruise. He swallows hot air, and keeps himself from breaking. There's blood and sweat and dirt smeared all over him; if they notice him crying, nobody says shit.
He gets into his stolen truck, and leads a caravan of fools back to Hilltop.
"You sleep, alright?" He's sure Dana will want to do some doctoring when they get back, but it's at least a half hour's drive. "Some real rest."
Scully glances up at him. In the firelight, tears are pouring down his face - and though she doesn't know exactly why, she can think of plenty of possibilities. Why doesn't matter, only the ease with which she can lean in against his side and wrap an arm around him.
She doesn't bring it up then, or later in the car, though she does give him a bemused glance. The roads in Virginia were never fantastic, and years of neglect have done them no favors. "I don't think I'll get much sleep in here. How is everyone?"
He wipes at his face with the back of his wrist, and tries not to think about how wet it is. Everything comes away dirty, anyway. His hands are smeared with ash and filth. "Hilltop's been getting by. Maggie ain't had anymore pains. Been some scrapes, but nothing too bad."
There have been gun wounds. He just doesn't want to worry her, and is that fair? A long sigh escapes him.
"We pulled out some bullets. Reckon you'll wanna look and see how we done."
"Good." She's tried not to think of Maggie, all this time, and she's felt terrible about it. There was nothing she could do from afar, she'd told herself.
Her feet are curled up under her, her arms wrapped around herself. "Unless someone needs emergency care, I might want to wait until tomorrow."
"Nobody'll mind," he says, because if they do, they'll have him to deal with. In all the fuss of having to explain the new refugees, the supplies, the fire, Dana can slip easily past notice. And if she doesn't, he'll handle it.
"I gotta... I gotta talk to Maggie. Explain all this. You ought'a get some rest. Kept your place same as it was."
When there was nothing else to do, in utter despair, he tried to clean it. If it's nicer when she came back, it'd mean she'd come back.
Scully's quiet for a long minute as they bump over the rough roads, turning the thought of it over in her mind. More than anything, she wants to ask him not to. Come back to the trailer, lie in bed with her for the next three days. All they'll do is sleep and talk and sleep some more.
They can't do that, though. Even if the war's over, the world goes on.
"I'll come with you," she says, glancing over at him. "This was my idea."
He doesn't want her to have to see what Hilltop's become, how threadbare. He doesn't want her to know Negan might still be alive. He doesn't want any of that to cross her mind, and it isn't quite fair of him.
"If you like," he says, clearly unhappy with it, but not quite unhappy enough to be upset. He'll support her no matter what she does, even if she sidesteps his suggestions. Perhaps especially.
"Carl's dead." How else to say it? "His last wish... guess he wanted Negan left alive. So he might still be sucking breath, somewhere in Alexandria." A long, guilty pause. "Reckon you should stay at Hilltop awhile. Know I am."
She goes cold at the thought. Carl was a good kid - quiet, observant, kind. With more time, peaceful time, he would have grown into a good man.
"I'll stay there until Maggie has her baby." If Gregory's out of power, there's only one person who could step into the void. That means Hilltop is Scully's home for the foreseeable. "When she doesn't need constant care anymore, I'll leave."
For Wyoming, she doesn't say.
"How is Rick?" Having lost a son still hasn't given her a sense of just what he might be feeling: the finality, the totality of knowing there'll never be hope of seeing him again.
Daryl wants to say he's fine but the words don't come. In place of them, the truth. "He ain't the same," Daryl says. "When- when Lori died, he was a little like this, but it's different. Carl was... I mean, you know."
He's tearing up again. He's always cried too damn easy.
"Yeah," she says softly, reaching over to set her hand on Daryl's leg. "I know."
The world is full of good, kind, killable little boys, and they die too young. If Scully thinks about it any longer, she'll be doing more than sniffling back tears. She can't let herself. "And everyone else?"
A long sigh, inhale, exhale, and he's fine. He's fine, or he will be. "Rosita got scarred up, but it's healing. Jesus, too. Eric-" His voice hits a hitch- "Eric's dead. Aaron adopted a baby. Reckon it was the only way he could keep going."
"Oh." Her chest aches. It's the return of that dizzy buzz of energy, a kind of shock that feels entirely foreign. (Why now? Why this? After everything she's survived, why is this where she falters?)
She's starting to regret not taking this time to rest - the alternative she's chosen is exhausting her - but she's started asking the questions. She has to finish. "What about you?"
Daryl doesn't know how to answer, hasn't got the words. There's a feeling, though, like a stone in his gut, and he knows what's what Dana's looking for. He unearths it with a story; that's easier.
"Carl died 'cause he was out doing kid things. Not the war. He saw somebody out in the woods, and tried to help 'em. Got bit." A long, thin sigh, and he continues. "Guy he saved turned out to be a doctor. Everybody got real excited, but I-... I knew you were alive."
It occurs to her that she has no idea what 'kid things' Carl would have been doing. There were plenty of options, of course - she could easily have imagined a dozen possibilities, but she doesn't. The weight of just how little she knew him, and the fact that she'll never get to know him better, weighs on her.
(It's about William. It's always about William. But it's about Carl, too. She would have liked to see him grow up.)
She gives Daryl's thigh a squeeze. He'd wanted to believe, however much a long shot it might be. "You were right."
"He-" Daryl pauses, and they turn the corner on the road, and there's a stretch of time where he doesn't say anything at all. "He didn't put you in a box? Didn't make you do nothing?"
"No." Some part of her hates having to admit it: that Negan had looked at her and seen someone to treat with at least some human dignity. That she hadn't been tortured as Daryl had, or as that room full of wives had. Widows, all of them, Scully thinks, and thank God for that. She looks out into the night, where the hi-beams illuminate the cracked asphalt. "He...treated me well, inasmuch as he treated anyone well. I was busy, though."
You like busy. He doesn't say it; he knows it'd be no comfort. He keeps driving, and tries not to think.
"Up all night thinking what he could be doing to you." That stretch of time, but especially the nights and early mornings, were the most useless Daryl had felt in his entire life. "I- I can't tell you how glad..."
He looks at her, briefly, before he goes back to the road. He's too emotional for this. The tears and grease must be making his face shine. He breathes in and out again, in and out. "Glad you're back. Ought'a rest as long as you like."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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The fact that Rick intends to let the fucker live is a discussion for another time. He's not bringing Dana back for a while, in hopes that their new doctor will fuck up and Negan can choke on his own blood.
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It occurs to her that she isn't crying, but Daryl is. She's likely in shock; she'll know if she develops physical symptoms beyond the vague sense that none of this is real. That it couldn't be real. Abraham and Glenn and countless others couldn't have died just for this moment, concrete leaching the heat from her legs even as her cheek's warmed by Daryl's chest.
"We have to round up everyone here." It's like being in a dream. She doesn't have any idea how she's going to manage gathering them together, let alone convincing them to go someplace new. Is her heart beating too fast? It seems like it's beating too fast.
"We need to burn this place to the ground."
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Rick won't like it. Rick will be busy. It'll be what Maggie wants. When did Daryl become so goddamn independent?
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He can't think of a better word for it. His workers? The people he forced to eke out meager existences on some kind of point system, because they didn't have any skills he considered valuable enough to earn their keep? Daryl's sure Negan thought the point system, the fake money, whatever he called it, kept it from being slavery. Daryl, in this moment of relief and anger, is sure he knows better.
"Maggie'll take the extra hands, if she can feed 'em. We got Gregory all locked up."
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They were waiting for him to make a mistake, after all. She can't decide if she's surprised it took this long, or that it didn't take longer.
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They walk up steel steps, and find a room of people pressed to windows, hissing rumors for news. Daryl explains the situation. Help everybody get out of here, and they'll have a place to live where they don't have to worry about Negan's shadow. Stay, and get fucked. By nightfall, he says, the whole place will be up in flames.
A few people, mostly young boys who wished they'd been allowed to join the fighting, stand up to Daryl. You and what army, they say. They're too small to fight, too hungry to think straight, and the ones that don't have parents to pull them back were clearly hoping to get refashioned into soldiers. It's their choice. By that point, people re loading cans and gasoline into trucks and finding all the flammable shit in sight. He leaves them to their devices, but he hopes they come to their senses. The last thing they need is a band of feral teenagers, dying for a chance to prove themselves with blood.
It takes four hours, and through that time, Dana's eyes are distant, haunted. When they're all out of the compound, he hands her a lighter. It's his, a metal piece of work made to last; he refills it with fuel every few months. He found it in the prison, back at the beginning of things, in the Officer's Mess. Someone had carved FUCK onto the side.
"You want the honors?"
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She tried to talk to them, even tried leaning on the air of expertise she knows she carries. Even here at Sanctuary, where no one's all that important if Negan's in a bad mood, she'd had some cache; everyone might be Negan, but almost no one has any medical training. But she gets nowhere, and eventually, she gives up and helps pack up everything worth keeping. There are supplies they can't afford to lose, possessions people know they want to hold onto.
Daryl finds her when the sun's starting to set, and she's starting to droop. The awful, buzzing sense of shock has left her, and so has the adrenaline of we need to leave, we need to leave now. By the time she takes the lighter from him, all she wants is a shower and a long sleep, and possibly not in that order.
She's got the makings of a Molotov cocktail on her - she might have been collecting the pieces once she saw Daryl was finishing up.
"Everyone's out?" When she gets the affirmative, she flicks the lighter until the rag catches and hurls it into the Sanctuary.
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The red orange of the fire catches into the setting sun, and for a moment, the whole world looks like a bruise. He swallows hot air, and keeps himself from breaking. There's blood and sweat and dirt smeared all over him; if they notice him crying, nobody says shit.
He gets into his stolen truck, and leads a caravan of fools back to Hilltop.
"You sleep, alright?" He's sure Dana will want to do some doctoring when they get back, but it's at least a half hour's drive. "Some real rest."
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She doesn't bring it up then, or later in the car, though she does give him a bemused glance. The roads in Virginia were never fantastic, and years of neglect have done them no favors. "I don't think I'll get much sleep in here. How is everyone?"
Both in terms of doctoring and in general.
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There have been gun wounds. He just doesn't want to worry her, and is that fair? A long sigh escapes him.
"We pulled out some bullets. Reckon you'll wanna look and see how we done."
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Her feet are curled up under her, her arms wrapped around herself. "Unless someone needs emergency care, I might want to wait until tomorrow."
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"I gotta... I gotta talk to Maggie. Explain all this. You ought'a get some rest. Kept your place same as it was."
When there was nothing else to do, in utter despair, he tried to clean it. If it's nicer when she came back, it'd mean she'd come back.
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They can't do that, though. Even if the war's over, the world goes on.
"I'll come with you," she says, glancing over at him. "This was my idea."
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"If you like," he says, clearly unhappy with it, but not quite unhappy enough to be upset. He'll support her no matter what she does, even if she sidesteps his suggestions. Perhaps especially.
"Carl's dead." How else to say it? "His last wish... guess he wanted Negan left alive. So he might still be sucking breath, somewhere in Alexandria." A long, guilty pause. "Reckon you should stay at Hilltop awhile. Know I am."
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"I'll stay there until Maggie has her baby." If Gregory's out of power, there's only one person who could step into the void. That means Hilltop is Scully's home for the foreseeable. "When she doesn't need constant care anymore, I'll leave."
For Wyoming, she doesn't say.
"How is Rick?" Having lost a son still hasn't given her a sense of just what he might be feeling: the finality, the totality of knowing there'll never be hope of seeing him again.
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He's tearing up again. He's always cried too damn easy.
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The world is full of good, kind, killable little boys, and they die too young. If Scully thinks about it any longer, she'll be doing more than sniffling back tears. She can't let herself. "And everyone else?"
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She's starting to regret not taking this time to rest - the alternative she's chosen is exhausting her - but she's started asking the questions. She has to finish. "What about you?"
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"Carl died 'cause he was out doing kid things. Not the war. He saw somebody out in the woods, and tried to help 'em. Got bit." A long, thin sigh, and he continues. "Guy he saved turned out to be a doctor. Everybody got real excited, but I-... I knew you were alive."
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(It's about William. It's always about William. But it's about Carl, too. She would have liked to see him grow up.)
She gives Daryl's thigh a squeeze. He'd wanted to believe, however much a long shot it might be. "You were right."
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"Up all night thinking what he could be doing to you." That stretch of time, but especially the nights and early mornings, were the most useless Daryl had felt in his entire life. "I- I can't tell you how glad..."
He looks at her, briefly, before he goes back to the road. He's too emotional for this. The tears and grease must be making his face shine. He breathes in and out again, in and out. "Glad you're back. Ought'a rest as long as you like."
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