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haruhey · 2 years

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Would You Have Me?

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Word count: 6.2k

Angst | Insp: betty by Taylor Swift | photo credit: @theteasetwrites

Daryl comes back, but something about him's changed.

First post-Leah fic?? Let’s see how it goes. Oh, and AU. Kinda. Basically just pushed back the Whisperers introduction for maybe a few weeks?? And I refuse to rewatch Find Me, so if some of his history is messed up, uh… no it isn’t <3

It’s kind of funny - you don’t look any different than he remembers.

Older, sure, but your smile’s the same one that makes his stomach flutter, and your hair’s pulled into that same ponytail he used to tug you free from every night before. Before all this.

Just one glance is enough to make his heart hurt - just one glance is enough to make his chest well up with guilt.

How could he ever think he wouldn’t miss you?

“Oof- Holy sh- hi there, buddy. It’s been a long time since I saw you here. You’ve gotten so big.”

No, you look even more beautiful than he remembers. Both your hands are at either side of Dog’s face, your eyes alight with the same expression of affection that you used to give him on early mornings when he’d pull you into him, refusing to let go, and it feels like he can’t breathe when he remembers those days.

It feels like a lifetime ago.

“Where’s your daddy, huh? Or did you run away and come find me again?”

The gates of Hilltop are just behind him, so is Aaron and Carol and her son, but he can’t see anyone but you. You’re laughing now - a sound he could know even in death - bent down on one knee as Dog attacks you with his kisses, his tail wagging left to right so quickly it looks almost like a blur, and it sounds just as warm as the first time he heard it.

Dog barks then, turning in your loose admiration to look in his direction, and Daryl follows your smile like a moth to a flame. He’s suffocating on the autumn air - suffocating on the way you look at him - but there’s something else in the stutter of his lungs. Something that has nothing to do with how much he wants to reach out and kiss you.

It gnaws at him, searing like salt on a wound.

“Hey there, Dad Dixon.”

You sound the same, too, but what did he expect? Your voice has always sounded like honey to him; like rose and lilac and all the other good in the world trapped in one person, only escaping through your quiet, carefully plucked words. He could spend hours listening to you - has, probably, when he’d lay his head in your lap and let you run your fingers through his freshly showered hair, reading whatever you were reading out to sleep-caught ears - and he wants to smile that huge, lopsided grin you’d called ‘handsome’ before, but he just can’t.

Oddly, it hurts too much to. Just like the pain of a memory he’d long tried desperately to forget. God, he’ll never be able to take that back, will he?

“Hi, sunshine.”

Sunshine.

The word rolls off his tongue without a second thought, each syllable feeling so familiar as he pulls down his bandana, and it surprises him, in a sense - how contrastingly pleasant it feels to be with you again. Even after all that’s happened - all the years that have passed - it scares him, how easy it is to fall back into a routine with you. You’re inescapable, threaded into every fibre of his being, and he thrums alight with the same fire that drew him to you when he’d first met you.

“You staying a while?”

Scratching Dog’s ear one last time, Dog whimpers when you finally stand back up, rubbing against your legs so you continue to shower him with the attention you usually do, and Daryl can’t help but scoff at him. Damn dog is acting like he’s never been pet in his life, but then again, maybe you just do it better than him.

Daryl can’t blame him for preferring you over him, though. He does too.

“Yeah. Seems like it.”

He nods back towards where he remembers Carol being - vaguely, because he’s been so caught up in looking at you that he can’t be sure where her and her son even are - and fights the flush of his body when his eyes finally meet yours. You’re so close, your face an arm’s length away as you walk one step towards him, and when your lips upturn again, it feels like someone’s dancing on his chest, squeezing the words out of him until he asphyxiates.

“Came just in time, huh? It’s been forever since I last checked on you.”

Slowly - as if you’d hurt him, as if you’d expected him to flinch instead of melt against you - you reach out a hand, brushing his bangs aside and ghosting the skin of his brow bone before you’re feather-light against his cheek, and it feels like the phantom touch he’d spent months replaying.

It feels like the one he’d consumed himself desperately trying to replicate, but it’s not the same.

It’s not the same because you’re here. Touching him, smiling at him, studying him with the same dent of concentration on your forehead that he remembers from a lifetime ago, and, fuck, he wishes he could go back.

He can’t imagine a life before you anymore - can’t imagine a life without you. Not when so many memories of you flood his brain and overflow in his blood, and he can’t believe he ever left you.

He can’t believe he ever let himself leave.

“Looks like your scar healed up pretty nicely.”

It takes a second for him to register what you mean - takes a second for him to do something other than stare at you, the sun framing your face like you were meant to be the center of his goddamn universe - and he pulls his lips into a line, fumbling with the strap of his crossbow.

Why do you still have to be this…

Why do you have to make him feel like this? After all these years, can he not escape the iron grip you have around his whole being? It’s like you’re the same person as before. Before Alexandria. Before Negan. Before shit fell apart and he left for the woods. Before he met-

Before he met-

Fuck, why is his throat closing up?

“Y- yeah. S’pose so.”

Blinking, he pulls his head away from you through every part of his weathered body refuses, and he doesn’t miss the way your body stiffens at his rejection. It’s barely a split second, but he’s got every part of you memorized that a split second’s all he needs. His eyes slip down your face, a haphazard study because he already knows what’s wrong, and he can’t even look at you anymore without an avalanche crash of shame.

Turns out Daryl was right, all those years ago.

Back when all he did was stay up at night and stare at the prison ceiling - replaying your smiles, your jokes, your laughter until all he felt were wings beating against his ribs, wondering if you would even consider imagining a life with him - he was right.

He doesn’t deserve you.

He never did and he never will.

“I, uh, I gotta unload my shit.”

Before you can even say anything or meet his ceruleans with a look so apologetic you take his heart into your hands and crush, he shakes his bangs back in front of his eyes and toes the dirt underneath his boot, gaze dropping to kick at a loosened pebble.

“Right, yeah, of course. There’s an empty room in the Barrington house you can stay in.”

He doesn’t have shit - he doesn't really have anything, nothing that matters, anyways - but this, the way you smile at him like you’re happy to see him, this is suffocating. Seeing you like nothing happened, it’s lava hot as it trails down his insides, scorching him like bad moonshine, but, God, he wants it.

He’s caught between the fear of smouldering to ash and the decadent hazy buzz of knowing he could reach out and touch you.

But to even be around you after all these years, Daryl would let himself burn.

So he turns towards his bike and feels the popping of sparks along his skin, drawing his shoulders around first before turning his head slowly and methodically in hopes - in a desperate plead - that you’ll follow, and you do. He can feel you behind him, a happiness so damn addicting and contagious in your familiar footsteps that it makes his heart beat out of his chest, and, fuck, it humiliates him.

He wants to turn around and sneak away to someplace only the two of you know. He wants to press up against you, hold your waist with one hand and trail his fingers down your jaw to your chin. He wants to feel your weightless nod as his palm tilts your face towards his, and more than anything, he wants to feel your lips on his.

He wants to kiss your breath from you - wants you to kiss his from him - but his shame keeps him moving; an incessant, silent blaring.

A twig cracks beneath the drop of his weather-worn boot, his heart pounding against his chest and a red flush over his ears that threatens to colour his cheeks pink, and - Jesus Christ - his knees feel so weak he wonders how he’d managed to stay upright the whole time he’d talked to you.

It’s been so long since he felt like this - an affection that does nothing but wills itself forwards and consumes him - and despite knowing he’s not the same as before and neither are you, he forces himself to speak anyways, a pure push through his teeth.

“You, uh, ya got me a spot up in that mansion?”

He unties his knapsack as he fights through his words, and the pink dusting Daryl’s cheeks darken when he remembers the first time he stuttered in front of you. He’d chastised himself endlessly for it - avoided you for four days afterwards - and despite the years that have passed, and the years that you’ve shared, he wants to retreat back into himself the same way he did back then.

“Mmhmm. You finally get the royal treatment you deserve.”

There’s a humour in your voice that should put him at ease, but as he slings his bag over his shoulder, all he lets out is a dry scoff, brows rising for half a second before he shrugs his crossbow on as well. He turns to you then, one of his rough hands cutting across his forehead to block the sun from his eyes, and a smile worms onto his face without warning.

It’s an uneven thing, wrinkles forming just underneath the apples of his cheeks, but there’s nothing unfamiliar about its boyishness. Nights spent sneaking out of the prison cells - spent lying in Alexandria’s open fields, spent stargazing and talking about nothing and everything at the same time - they’ve ingrained the tight pull of his lips into an ever-present instinct when he’s around you.

“Nah, don’t deserve nothin’.”

Huffing, he makes no move to clear his bangs when they fall into his face, and he kicks his bike’s kickstand, instead blinking hard when your face scrunches inwards, that look you always have whenever he makes a self-deprecating dig dragging up memories he couldn’t bring himself to forget. He remembers the attention-soaked pecks you’d smush into his cheek - can feel it for a fleeting second, warmth scattering across his skin - and he thinks he’s stupid for ever thinking to forget them.

“Nah to yourself, Daryl.”

He watches as you shake your head - as you purse your lips into barely a pout as you imitate his cadence - and it’s making his chest tighten up. It’s infuriating, the hold you have on him, and it dawns on him then, how futile forgetting you is.

When he looks at you, it’s like there’s nothing else in the whole damn universe.

Nothing else that matters to him, anyways.

“C’mon, I’ll take you up.”

And, fuck, it hurts.

Maybe it wouldn’t if the two of you hadn’t just drifted - maybe some of this heartache would stop if he knew there was no way he could ever find his way back into the naive fairytale romance he’d once upon a time even more naively believed he was the one you’d share it with - but to know the possibility looms still and that he’d done something so damn regrettable to fill the you shaped pit in his being, he wishes you’d had spit venom at him and told him you hate him.

He knows he should say no to your offer - knew the second he saw you that he couldn’t just look at you and be okay with going a second more not being yours again, and knew it would be better for the both of you if he just said no and pretended it didn’t hurt him to say that - but he’s a selfish man. A stupid, selfish man who can’t hold on to anything good in his whole life.

So he lets you take him - looks at you with eyes full of the warmth that escapes him so easily when he’s with you as Dog pads barely a step behind you - and fights every urge he has to fall to his knees and apologize.

You wouldn’t even know what he’s apologizing for.

God, you don’t even know about her.

“We’re here. Home sweet home.”

And before he even realizes, you’ve taken him upstairs - steered him past decorative lamps and peeling wallpaper, woven him past lingering people who haven’t seen him in years or even ever - and the way you smile at him while you gesture towards the creaky old mattress Dog’s made his home rattles him back into the past.

It rattles him back into happier moments - the comfort of your gray duvet on his tiny double bed, the knowledge that both of them had been moulded into the shape of the two of you striking him with a heavy hand - and he can taste fresh blood at the tip of his tongue when he bites a piece of dead skin free from his lips.

He shifts his weight from foot to foot, a rapid one-two blink to keep those happy moments away because he knows if he keeps looking at you there would be no way he’d be able to take his eyes off you at all. He’d sink into them, surrender himself to the spell you’ve put over him and refused to lift, and you’d hate him for it.

Because for the first time in over a decade, there’s a crushing secret he’s keeping from you, and he could almost scoff at his choice of words. Crushing. Yeah, damn right it’s crushing. Crushing to his drying mouth and his pounding heart and his whole magma-hot being. You’re woven so deeply into him he can’t bring himself to unthread from you, and it fucking hurts.

“Daryl, is something wrong? Are you okay?”

You watch him from a few steps ahead, one arm extended past the white-wood doorway and gesturing into the room while the other is in the first movements of stretching towards him in a pull from his own head, but heavy steps from down the corridor break the wallow of his regret before you can.

And when he finally snaps out of it, he doesn’t even look at you as he passes you by, a rush of displaced autumn air cooling his already unfamiliar cold-shouldered treatment down further. It’s enough to make you worry - what once would have been a bolt into his arms with your face buried deep against his chest instead hesitating into steps with a foreign air of uncertainty - and he can see it in the way you move to follow him in.

He shakes his head then, shrugging off his crossbow and bag before dropping them both rather unceremoniously on the bed, and forces courage to line his veins. He’s done it before, mustering all that his regret-numb body can in order to steady himself and say something to you, but the way you’re looking at him makes his voice waver.

“I, uh, I wanted to talk to ya if-“

Your eyes sink into his back, anchoring his feet to the ground with a weight that matches the pressure in his chest, and he curses fate when those forgotten steps from down the hall call your name, just as he manages to control his betraying body’s stubbornness and turn around to finally face you.

Quite honestly, the concept of fate has never rattled in Daryl’s brain much, but it’s an odd yet conscious idea that maybe fate purposely keeps the two of you apart that overwhelms his thoughts. You’d wondered to him about it before - told him of the stupidity of Romeo and Juliet’s violent romance, yet stroked his hair and whispered love to him when he’d called you his sun - and, if he really, really thinks about it, maybe he does put some faith in fate.

Actually, no.

Fuck fate.

If it keeps you and him apart, Daryl would look God dead in the eye and move mountains to change it.

“Gotta go?”

But still, he’s just a man, and the tight close of his throat reminds him of that. His body betrays any image of nonchalance as his words break off, but you’ve turned around already, looking backwards for whoever called for you, and you don’t see him cringe at himself, nor does he think you notice the disappointed tension in his voice as you respond, one of your feet already turned away from him and down the decorated corridor.

Maybe he should be happy about that. Maybe he should thank whoever it is that’s pulling you away from him and helping him save face from what would have definitely been nervous blubbering, but every synapse in his brain is drilling the selfish desire for you to ignore them and come to him instead into his bones, and annoyance flairs instead.

“Yeah, but we’ll catch up after dinner?”

Nodding, he echoes you - ‘after dinner’ in a gravel-toned promise - and just stands as you leave, watching your figure get smaller and smaller until you turn the corner and disappear, and for the first time since he’d stepped off his motorcycle Hiltop’s walls, he can breathe. It’s cold, the air that washes his burning lungs, despite the seasons turning leaves red, but that’s how it’s supposed to be, he guesses.

It’s longing, heartache and regret that he breathes in, and he holds it like smoke from those crushed-up Marlboros you’d tried to get him to quit.

He deserves this.

He drags his feet then, closing the door with shaking fingers, and turns back towards the bed, walking sluggish before his body goes lax and collapses onto the mattress. Dog’s bark matches the beat of the bedframe’s squeak, and he nudges Daryl’s head with his snout until Daryl sighs and turns onto his back, grunting and pressing the palms of his hands against his eyes to block out all the sun seeping in through the pulled-open blinds.

“Get off’a here. You’re gon’ make the bed all dirty.”

There’s no scold in Daryl’s voice despite the words - more tired than anything - and Dog recognizes it, whining before curling up against his ribs. Sighing, Daryl sits up, his legs hanging off the edge with his feet still in dirt-covered work boots and cards his bangs back before stretching out an arm towards Dog, catching his ear in a scratch. His eyes don’t leave the door and neither do Dog’s, and Daryl’s dejection almost makes him laugh when he notices.

“Miss her, huh?”

Yeah, me too.

Nuzzling deeper into his side, Dog whines again and there’s nothing in these four dreary, stupidly old-fashioned wallpapered walls to distract him from his own thoughts. There aren’t traps to check or lakes to scan to distract him from the fact that yeah, he misses you - and neither are there miles to cross to justify not seeing you and facing the searing tear in his chest.

It’s been there for a while - deepening with the passage of time, but hurting just the same - and Daryl remembers the lengths he went to to get rid of it. He knew why he was hurting, and he knew what he had to do to get rid of it.

He remembers trying to fall out of love with you - remembers trying to fall into love with someone who wasn’t you - and he remembers how miserable he had been when he did.

Daryl tried. God, he’d tried. Months of convincing himself he didn’t need you turned into years, and somewhere in those years, he’d convinced himself you were better without him. You had stability at Alexandria - at Hilltop. You had food, water, a bed to sleep in at night; everything he didn’t have in the unpromising wilderness because he just couldn’t go back to it all.

He remembers trudging forward, no matter how much he wanted to go back to you.

And it was selfish, why he did it.

After all, he failed you, didn’t he? He failed everyone living in the communities he once called home when he couldn’t find Rick, and he just couldn’t face it.

It was better that way, staying out. He didn’t have to face you or Michonne, and you could live untouched by his failure, well-fed, well-rested and better than you would have if you weren’t. He tried to convince himself you were happier without him because, if he couldn’t change himself, he would tell himself you’d changed.

But when he finally leaves his room after hours of staring up at the ceiling, realizing the promise of ‘after dinner’ entails having dinner first, he recognizes that you haven’t changed.

You’re sat on the floor of the huge dining room, brighter still than the fire crackling to your side as you laugh at something Carol says, and a familiar kaleidoscope of butterflies overtakes his growling stomach, making him stop at the doorway just to admire. His body goes dumb, one arm stuttered in the halfway motion of bringing a piece of asparagus towards his mouth before it falls back down onto his pile of food, and his plate feels impossibly heavy.

God, what did he do to ever deserve you?

Why did he ever think he could just forget?

Someone bumps into him then - some teenager he doesn’t recognize, half because they run off too fast out to the field for him to get a good look at them and half because he just can’t take his eyes off you - and his fork clatters onto the ground, too loud and too jarring from the surrounding blurred chatter for you not to turn your head towards him, he knows it.

Heat rushes his cheeks the moment metal meets hardwood, and he picks up the fork in half a second, pivoting before bolting towards his room, covering the length of the staircase two steps at a time. He’s not sure you see him - he’s not sure if he even wants to know, if he’s being honest - but one thing he’s sure of is how stupid he’s being. He’s spent maybe a whole 20 minutes with you since he crossed Hilltop’s walls, and he runs like some kid with a schoolyard crush at the prospect of anything embarrassing happening.

Or, like back when his heart first lingered a little too long on the thought of you.

He hasn’t changed either, but Daryl’s known that a long time already. He’d chased the glimpses of you in her though he berated himself guilty every time he did it, and it happened over and over despite telling himself it was the last time.

The food barely tastes like anything as he chews then swallows, robotic movements carried out underneath a smothering roof and behind a closed door before he pushes his dish away, his fork clattering against the plate as he lets out a huff. It’s been three days since he last had something more than an unfortunate squirrel and a bird’s wing, but he just isn’t hungry.

Leaning back in his chair, he tilts his head up, reaching into his vest pocket on instinct alone, but he feels nothing, the box of crumpled cigarettes long gone. It’s been ages since he’s had the urge to smoke - it’s been longer since he’d even found any anywhere - but today… today’s been a rough day, and he knows this feeling isn’t going to go away, crutching himself on the very thing you used to take from his fingertips and replace with the press of your lips.

There’s blood on his tongue when he bites dead skin from his mouth, but a familiar one-two knock makes him bolt to his feet - makes his heart rate pick up tenfold - and he runs a hand through his hair, pulling at his shirt and vest so they lie right over his shoulders as he tries to calm his nerve-shaking hands.

Deep breath.

You’re the same as when you would call yourself his - there’s no reason to be tense, he tells himself. The problem is, Daryl knows there is.

But still, when he opens the door, that grin of yours that he’d seared into his brain beaming back at him instead of simmering in a memory, all his thoughts stop.

“Hey, I missed you.”

Your voice is so warm as you speak, enveloping him in a familiar tingling rush of pleasant that he knows he’s not worth being in, and he fumbles with his own words as he looks into your eyes, his brain busy stuttering his body’s urge to rush forward and wrap his arms around you - to press his face into the crook of your neck and close his eyes and breathe you in like you were all he ever needed.

“I- I…I missed ya too.”

You look down at the ground at that, and he watches as you bite down your smile from widening, barely hearing himself speak with the beat of his pulse which overtakes his ears.

“Uh, come in.”

Nodding, you step past him and take the seat previously occupied by him, not minding the mess of half-eaten food on the porcelain shoved across the table, and when he turns around after closing the door, the sight of you so domestic and so reminiscent of the life he’d shared with you in Alexandria makes him shuffle onto his bed in case his legs give out.

A beat of silence passes then - drowning him, deafening him - and neither of you move. It’s a limbo you’re caught in, neither of you quite sure of how to ‘catch up’, yet still wanting to be here with the other, and it’s so still in this room, both of you seeking refuge in the peeling wallpaper before you gather up the courage to speak. The simple ‘how was life out there?’ makes his stomach knot up and makes him want to distract and forget and tell you ‘it was fine’ in hopes it would somehow fast-track you falling back into the him you remember, but Daryl knows he has to tell you.

He wants a future with you - he’s always known it would be with you - and, after all, what kind of future begins with lies?

So he unwinds and unfurls his history like a spool of yarn, and you chase it, filling in spots between your visits down by the forested lakes, then to when your pattern became sparser and sparser, down to when you just had no more time to spare.

He tells you about Leah - the woman in the woods, Dog’s old owner, the 10 months he spent with her, how she just disappeared - and it hurts to even talk about her in front of you, but, damn it, he knows he has to. He never lies to you - has never lied to you - and he’s not going to start now. Not when you’re in front of him again and not just a phantom touch he’d tried to chase with someone else.

And in an odd way, he wants you to know.

No secrets. He’d promised you that a long time ago.

But for once in his godforsaken life, a tiny, selfish part of him wished he did.

“You slept with her.”

Because when you speak, your words are so blunt - not accusation, not baseless claim - just a statement of fact, and Daryl can feel pieces of himself begin to crumble. His chest is burning, his mind is hazed over in a heavy cloud of regret, and he can barely form a response when you look at him with heartbreak in your eyes.

“I-“

He grasps for air then. He grasps for air to fill his lungs with something other than the suffocation of guilt, and tightens his grip on the edge of the mattress. What does he say? God, what can he say to make it all okay again? To make you want him again?

“I was- I was thinkin’ ‘bout you the whole time.”

He never lies.

He never lies - not to you, you know that - so why does it hurt so much?

“Daryl, that’s- that’s- why-“

That’s bullshit, you want to say.

Why didn’t you just come back to me?

But those words never make it past your lips - you swallow them down with the tears stinging pinpricks into your eyes - and you can feel the base of your throat tighten up. It’s overwhelming, this monsoon of feeling, and your tongue feels too heavy to form words.

“You knew where I was.”

He did.

“So why- why didn’t you come find me? I would have-“

He knows you would.

When he was in that cabin out there with her. passing time and spending every godforsaken hour wondering if he should stop trying to forget you and just go back to you, there wasn’t a moment of doubt that, if he had, a shitty bouquet in his hands and a broken-voiced apologetic beg for you to come with him, your hand would warm his and the two of you would be out in the forest in a heartbeat.

“I- I couldn’t, sunshine.”

You wish you could flare up in anger when he interrupts you - you wish you could yell at him to not call you ‘sunshine’ like he did when he’d first kissed you, then the next morning and the next and the next - but you can’t. Not when your heart lodges right between your collarbones and your chest feels like it might collapse in on itself

“You would’a left everythin’. Everythin’ you and Rick and Michonne and everyone else worked so hard to get. Ev-everythin’ you deserve.”

He bares his soul for you as he speaks, barely able to look at your shrinking form as you fold yourself away from him for comfort, a far cry from how you used to turn to him for it, and your silence bruises him - almost as much as the line you’ve drawn your lips into and the tremble of your bottom one does.

“I- I couldn’t let ya do that. Couldn’t let ya go back to livin’ in the woods - couldn’t let ya freeze out there wit’ me or starve out there knowin’ ya had a life here. You shouldn’t have t’a do that. Not for anyone. Sure as hell not for me.”

God, he’s so stupid, your breath coming into you as a shaky inhale through gritted teeth. and you can’t stop thinking about how goddamn stupid he is.

“I would have left all if it meant being with you, Daryl.”

You’re his, doesn’t he know that? He’d stamped his name onto your heart the moment you first saw him really, really smile underneath that canopy of Georgian cedar and pine, so why couldn’t he, for once in his life, just have been selfish?

“That was the problem, sunshine. I knew you would’a.”

Time has long since faded his memory of her, but you, he’s never forgotten all the little things you do. Not even when he was chasing your shadow in someone else. No, he was - is - stupid and selfish and every other shitty adjective he can muster up in his knowledge of the English language.

“But I was never- I- I never loved her. Not like I loved- not like I love you.”

Your silence is burning, firecrackers sparking across his skin and threatening him into ash the longer you don’t react, and he scrambles for words to fill the quiet, three chimes of the grandfather clock downstairs reminding him of the miserable passage of time.

“It- it was just- it was just a thing.”

You consider his wording - ‘just a thing’ - and you scoff, pressing your feet against the ground before pushing off the chair and standing up, turning to him as you wipe your nose with the back of your sleeve.

When did you become so easily replaced?

“Was I just a thing, too, Daryl?”

Your words hurt and you know they do, but anger comes now and it powers you. No, maybe anger is the wrong word. It’s too tender to be anger, this feeling, but it’s violent in your chest - volatile.

“No. N- no- I- you-“

It didn’t matter what he’d experienced before the apocalypse took hold of humanity, he still considered you his first everything. Everything that was good - that could still be good - they always came from you, and it hurts, even more, to know he was yours, too.

The first time you smiled at him was the first time he felt his heart race so fast he thought he could outrun his motorcycle. That little black polaroid camera he’d used up taking photos of you was his first meaningful, genuine gift. The stargazing was his first date - if you could even call it that - and so was the clumsy lakeside kiss you shared beneath the moonlight.

And that night between his sheets - that night he’d memorized and stretched thin to a million moments - was the first time he’d ever felt wholly consuming, wave after crashing wave of love and want and trust in a flurry of your blinding touches.

“You’re- you were everythin’ to me. Ya- ya still are. So I’m beggin’ ya, please don’t think that.“

You bite your lip at that, the suppression of an unamused mock tightening at the base of your throat. Everything to him, huh? He sure has a funny way of showing it.

“I can’t-“

I can’t believe you.

Your voice breaks as you speak, and he doesn’t know what to do except yell at himself, eyes glued to the ground because just looking at you would threaten the tears to jump from him. Was it worth it, you idiot? Was it worth it, giving himself to another for just a glimpse of how it used to be with you?

“I waited for you, Daryl. I waited and I waited and I waited ‘cause I thought-“

What did you think?

No, were you even thinking at all?

“I- I thought you would do the same.”

He doesn’t speak even as you swallow down your emotions. What is he even supposed to say? It’s not lost on him that your voice is straining - that your eyes are welling up and your tears are threatening to escape. If he speaks, would that make them shine underneath the dim light of your lantern? Make them roll down the rise of your cheekbones, replacing the spots he used to leave love-drunk kisses on with his betrayal?

There’s a bitter taste in his mouth and he knows what it is.

Resentment.

Regret.

Shame.

“I’m sorry.”

It’s croaked out, his voice breaking just after the first syllable, and even though you know it’s genuine - he always was and always is. After all, that was one of the reasons you fell in love with him in the first place - you turn away.

You can’t be here.

Not with him.

“Yeah, me too.”

A step. That’s all you make - that’s all you need - to get to the door, but the squeak of his bed from behind you makes you stutter. It’s just a second’s worth, but Daryl closes the distance.

“Wait-“

He reaches for you then, his fingers wrapping loose around your wrist, and the familiar contact bursts reds, oranges and golds from his hand, but when you look back with tear-stained cheeks, there’s a deafening stillness that overtakes. It hits him like a truck, the shake of your head, bleary eyes connecting with his and making him feel like he’s drowning.

No.

He should beg you to stay.

Don't go.

He wants to. He wants to get on his knees and beg for your forgiveness. He wants to grovel and let his tears fall and never leave your side ever again if you’d just say you’ll stay.

Please.

But then you tug free from his grip, walking away and he just watches. He just watches as he tears apart inside, and in the end, the only person he can blame is himself.

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