grxgerblack

The house looked promising—quiet, empty, and only slightly less moldier than the last place. It sat back in the trees with its porch listing to one side and its windows filmed over with grime, the whole thing giving off the kind of eerie, abandoned charm that made Rick say, “We clear it quick,” and everyone else say nothing because nobody had the calories left to say anything.

Walking through the front door, you were running on fumes and bad attitude. The whole group was.

Your tongue felt foreign with thirst. Your legs had crossed the line from sore to numb sometime that morning.Your stomach had given up on growling hours ago and now just sat in your middle like a stone. But none of that—not the thirst, not the dirt in your bra, not the raw blister at your heel—was the thing chewing through your nerves. That award goes to Daryl.

Well, it wasn’t Daryl himself. It was that Daryl had not touched you properly in weeks, and apparently your brain had decided to respond to that by turning every harmless interaction into a full-scale hormonal emergency. Every time he leaned too close, every time his hand brushed your back in passing, every time his voice dropped into that low gravelly register right near your ear, your body went holy shit is this finally happening? and then got violently disappointed when the answer was no.

You’d had no privacy since the prison fell. None. No walls. No curtains. No stolen ten minutes. Not even a quick makeout sesh. You hadn’t realised until it was gone just how much of your relationship functioned through touching. Without it, the two of you were like a machine missing one small but extremely important bolt—still technically working, but rattling so hard it was a miracle nobody had kicked you both into a ditch yet.

“Take the back room first,” Daryl muttered, peering down the hall with his crossbow half raised.

You cut him a look. “That was literally where I was headed.”

He grunted. “Just sayin’.”

“You’re always just sayin’.”

“Yeah, well. Somebody’s gotta.”

Tara, slipping past with Glenn in tow, murmured, “Oooh, they’ve started early today.”

“Closet,” Daryl said, pointing with his chin.

“Yes, wow, thank you, I had completely forgotten closets could contain things.”

He glanced at you, tired eyes narrowing just enough to say you are being ridiculous. “Really? Actin’ like a kid.”

You smiled sweetly. “I’m gonna bite you.”

From the front room, Rick sighed. “Can y’all maybe do that after we know there ain’t dead people in here.”

“That ain’t what she meant,” Daryl muttered automatically.

You whipped your head toward him. “How do you know what I meant?”

That actually got a laugh out of Glenn, who immediately looked guilty for doing so. Daryl’s ears went a little pink. “I just—”

“You just what?”

He stared at you for one beat too long, and there it was again: that awful little pause where both your brains remembered your bodies existed.

You remembered the exact shape of him over you, his hand spread on your stomach, the heat of his mouth at your throat, and for half a second, the dim hallway and the walkers and the road all dropped away under the sheer idiocy of how much you missed climbing him like a tree.

Then a floorboard creaked, and the depressing sexless reality came back with all the tenderness of a slap. Daryl cleared his throat and looked away first. “Just clear the damn room.”

“Excellent save,” you said.

“Shut up.”

You pushed open the back bedroom door with your boot and swept inside. Empty, unless one counted a collapsed dresser and what looked like the fossilised remains of a cat as something. You moved toward the wardrobe, and Daryl moved with you.

“Are you following me,” you asked, not even bothering to turn.

“No.”

“You are literally stepping where I step.”

“That’s called watchin’ your back.”

“That’s called breathing on my neck.”

“Wouldn’t have to if you’d quit goin’ towards every dangerous lookin’ thing like a moth to a flame.”

You spun around, and because the room was small and the apocalypse hated you, he was right there.

Not touching. That would’ve been easier.

Just there—close enough to feel his heat, close enough that if either of you leaned an inch you’d be having a very different type of exchange, close enough that the stale air in the room had turned thick and weird around the two of you.

You looked at his mouth.

He looked at yours.

From the hall, Michonne said, with devastating calm, “If I open this door and y’all are licking each other, I’m leaving.”

Both of you jumped apart like you’d been caught stealing from church.“We ain’t—” Daryl started.

“You are so embarrassing,” you hissed at him, which would’ve landed better if you weren’t blushing so hard your face felt hot. “Me?” he shot back, offended. “You the one starin’.”

“Was not.”

“Was too.”

“You were in my personal space!”

“You got a personal space now?”

Tara’s head appeared around the doorframe for all of one second. She took one look at the two of you standing six feet apart like scandalised Victorian lovers, and lit up. “Oh, this is bad,” she said, delighted. “This is way worse than I thought.”

“Get out,” you and Daryl said together.

She vanished, snicking. For one long second, the room held.

Then Daryl scrubbed a hand over his face and muttered, “Need this house cleared before I give up n’ sleep outside.”

You let out a laugh before you could stop it, tired and real and dragged out of you against your will.

His mouth twitched.

That was the worst part, honestly. Not the hunger. Not the road. Not even the fact that your body had apparently decided to become a traitor every time he came within grabbing distance.

It was that you were both still perfectly fine—solid, yours, his—and yet somehow so badly deprived of privacy that you’d started acting like a pair of idiots in front of witnesses. And the whole group absolutely knew it.

--------------------------------------------------------------

By the time the cans were scraped clean and tipped upside down by the fire to cool, the house had settled into that uneasy version of night people on the road called rest. Rick had posted the watch. Abraham and Tara had the first shifts, then Michonne. The rest of you had been granted the luxury of horizontal misery on the warped wood floor of somebody else’s living room, every blanket and old cushion dragged into a lumpy little nest around the cold fireplace.

No one talked much once the food was gone. A few murmured goodnights drifted through the room, then the soft rustle of people turning over, finding hips and shoulders and corners of flooring they could tolerate. The whole place smelled like damp coats and candle soot. Somewhere outside, a night bird made a sound like a hinge.

Daryl dropped beside you with a grunt, back against the wall for a second before he slid down to the floorboards. You followed, settling into the blanket with the boneless heaviness of someone who had been upright for too many hours. For a while, neither of you did anything except breathe and pretend that was enough.

Then his hand found the edge of your blanket and tugged once.

It was such a small thing that nobody watching would’ve thought anything of it, just the absentminded shift of someone making room. But you knew him. You knew that little, silent come here better than your own name. You moved without looking at him, easing into the space he’d made, laying your head carefully against his chest and shoulder while he bent his arm around you like it had been waiting there all day to be useful.

The sound he made was barely there, more breath than noise, but you felt it in your hair. “Ya still grumpy at me?” he murmured.

“That makes me sound like a toddler. I wasn’t grumpy per se,” you whispered back, listening to his heartbeat under your ear. “…maybe a little vexed..”

He snorted softly. “We’ll go with that then.”

The room around you was full of sleeping people, boots lined up by the door, weapons within easy reach, everyone arranged in that strange, intimate geometry of survival, but in the little pocket beneath his arm, it almost felt private. Not fully of course. Still, enough to loosen something.

For a while, you just talked.

Not about anything useful, which was probably why it felt so nice. The house creaked around you, the others settling into uneasy sleep across the floorboards, and the two of you stayed tucked in your little corner with his shoulder under your cheek and his arm loose around your waist, pretending the warmth of him wasn’t the only soft thing you’d had all day.

You talked about the creek you’d passed that afternoon and whether it had been worth the detour. You argued, in whispers, over whether his poncho was a horse blanket he cut a hole in or something badass to wear to keep the heat in, and weaponised the fact that you constantly stole it. You told him that if civilisation ever crawled back into existence, you were never sleeping on another floor again unless there was a paralysing amount of wine involved.

Daryl gave a low snort, barely more than breath against your hair, the sound warm where it rumbled under your cheek. “You gettin’ fancy on me now?”

“I have always been fancy,” you whispered, lifting your head just enough to glare at him through the dark. The room was mostly shadow, the dying fire throwing an orange tremble up the stairwell, but you could still make out the stubborn line of his mouth and the glint of one eye watching you. “I’ve simply been humbled by circumstance.”

“You ate cold pasta with your fingers yesterday.”

“Gracefully.”

“Licked the can.”

“I was conserving resources.”

His mouth twitched, small and traitorous, and you felt absurdly victorious for pulling it out of him. His hand, the one that had been moving in slow, absent circles against your arm like he didn’t even know he was doing it, slid higher to tuck a loose piece of hair behind your ear. The touch was so ordinary it hurt worse than something dramatic would have. There was no urgency in it, no survival reason, no wound to check, no danger to steady you through. Just him touching you because he wanted to, because your hair was in your face and his fingers knew where to go.

For a few breaths, the two of you lay there listening to the house complain around you: the old boards sighing under sleeping bodies, Glenn shifting somewhere near the fireplace, someone coughing once and going quiet again. Daryl’s thumb lingered near your temple, then drifted down the side of your face as if he’d forgotten he was allowed to stop.

“’Member back at the quarry,” he murmured after a while, voice lower now, roughened by exhaustion and the kind of memory that snuck up soft, “when you tried to make coffee in that little dented pot Dale had?”

You blinked, caught off guard by the gentleness in it. “Tried? I made coffee.”

“Ya made dirt water.”

“You drank two cups.”

His eyes flicked away, but not fast enough to hide the soft little crease at the corner of them. “Didn’t wanna hurt your feelings,” he said, almost tentatively, like the admission embarrassed him more than any confession had a right to. Then, quieter, “Probably coulda served me up grass and I woulda ate it.”

You pushed up onto one elbow, chin hovering near his chest, delight spreading through you despite the chill and the hard floor and the hunger that never really left. “Dixon,” you whispered, scandalised, “were you being nice to me?”

His gaze cut hard toward the ceiling. That was answer enough.

“Oh, my God.” Your grin widened until your cheeks hurt - you were so gonna tease him. “You had a crush on me,” you singsonged.

“Shut up.”

“You did.” You poked him in the side through his shirt, delighted when he jerked under you and caught your wrist, not to stop you so much as to pretend he had control over the situation. “You drank my terrible coffee because you were sweet on me.”

“Wasn’t terrible.”

“You just said dirt water.”

He stared at the dark like it might save him. “Flavoured dirt water.”

You had to bite down on your smile so you wouldn’t laugh loud enough to wake half the room. He was still looking away, jaw working, but there was a quiet warmth in his face now, something almost boyish under the grime and the hollows tiredness had carved beneath his eyes. For a second, you could see him back then so clearly it felt like the room around you changed shape: younger, sharper, all shoulders and suspicion, standing at the edge of the quarry camp like he’d been invited to a party by mistake and planned to leave before anyone noticed.

“I remember that,” you whispered, softer now. “You wouldn’t sit with me.”

He frowned faintly. “Sat near ya.”

“You sat on a log ten feet away,” you said, laughing under your breath. “For a while I thought I stank or something.”

His ears, even in the dark, seemed to go a shade warmer. “Didn’t know what to do with ya.”

The joke softened in your mouth before it could become another tease. You settled back against him, cheek to his chest, listening to the steady thump beneath his ribs. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged, but it didn’t work with you lying half on top of him. His shoulder shifted under you, awkward and too honest, and his hand found the edge of your sleeve again like he needed something to do. “I mean…” He cleared his throat, eyes still on the ceiling. “Was terrified of ya.”

You lifted your head. “Of me?”

“Talkin’ to ya,” he muttered. “Felt like I was gonna throw up. Was hopeless.”

A laugh slipped out of you, small and helpless, because the idea of Daryl Dixon—knife on his belt, crossbow on his shoulder, temper always two inches from the surface—feeling physically ill because you smiled at him was too sweet and too ridiculous to survive silently. “No way.”

“Was awful,” he insisted, and the way he said it made your heart fold in on itself. His thumb moved over your sleeve, slow again, grounding himself in the fabric. “You’d come over with that damn coffee, lookin’ like… I dunno. Like I made you up in my head.”

Your smile faded into something softer.

He swallowed, still not quite looking at you. “You’d be talkin’ like ya knew me already. Actin’ like ya gave a damn. Ask me stuff. Didn’t look at me like everybody else did.” His mouth pulled to one side, almost amused now, though there was a tender ache under it. “And you were still the meanest person I ever met. Didn’t take shit from nobody. Couldn’t figure out why the hell you’d give me the time’a day.”

Your chest tightened until it was hard to breathe around it.

The quarry rose up in your mind, bright and dusty and impossible: sun burning over tent canvas, smoke from the fire catching in your throat, Dale’s RV gleaming like an old white beetle in the distance, Andrea laughing at something, Shane shouting as always, little Carl running somewhere he probably wasn’t meant to be so he wouldnt have to get his hair cut my his mom. People alive who were no longer alive. Problems that had felt huge then and almost gentle now. You remembered Daryl, too—quieter in a different way, all sharp edges and defensive eyes, watching everyone from a distance like he expected kindness to bear its teeth if he stood too close.

“I liked you too,” you admitted, soft enough that it felt like a secret all over again. “Even then.”

His arm tightened around you.

“Yeah?”

“Are you kidding?” You let out a quiet laugh and tipped your chin up so you could see him properly. “The way you threw squirrels at people like you were saying hi, mouthing off every chance you got, shoulders all tense and flexed, southern accent, shiny muscles, and you rode a bike?” You shook your head gravely. “I had no chance.”

His breath hitched with a silent laugh, and this time he couldn’t hide the blush. Not completely. His face turned away into the dark, but you caught enough of it to make your whole night.

“Makin’ me sound like some rabid animal,” he muttered.

“No,” you said, pressing a quick kiss to the edge of his jaw because you couldn’t help yourself, his skin hot, rough with stubble, familiar enough to ache. “You just got better at letting me pet you.”

He huffed like he was offended, but his hand came up to the back of your head and held you there for half a second longer than necessary. “Go to sleep.”

“Lemme ask you this.” You poked his chest once because he should have known better than to think you could be redirected that easily. “Who do you think fell first?”

“Me.” He answered so quickly that you stilled.

“Really?” you whispered, craning your neck to look at him. “I thought it would be me for sure. I mean, by the time we reached the farm, I was pretty hooked.”

He stayed quiet, eyes fixed somewhere above you. The silence changed. Not heavy exactly. Just full of something older than the two of you were now, something that had been sitting quietly beneath years of blood and loss and road dust, waiting for a night still enough to be named.

You nudged him gently. “Was it before the farm?”

Still quiet. Your smile faded at the edges, not disappearing, just softening into wonder. “Daryl.”

His throat bobbed.

“C’mon,” you whispered. “Tell me.”

For a long second, the whole house seemed to hold its breath with him. Then, so quiet you almost felt it more than heard it, he said, “Pretty much… first time I saw ya.”

Oh. It landed in you like something delicate being placed carefully in your hands, impossibly soft.

You didn’t know what to do with it at first, and for once, your mouth had no smart thing ready, no joke sharp enough to cover the tremble in your chest. You only looked at him in the dark, at the man who had spent half your lives together pretending not to need anything, and realised he had been carrying that first moment all this time like a match cupped from the wind.

“The first time?” you breathed. He shrugged again, smaller now.

“What was I doing?”

“Yellin’ at Shane.” That startled a laugh out of you, quiet and bright.

His mouth curved faintly, relieved by the sound. “He was runnin’ his mouth about somethin’. You told him if he wanted to act like everybody’s daddy, he could start by washin’ the dishes after supper.”

You pressed your forehead to his shoulder, muffling your laugh into his shirt. “That sounds about.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, and his hand smoothed once over your hair, slow and fond. “Never came across anyone like you.”

“That a good thing or a bad thing?.”

“Thought you were badass,” he corrected, quieter. “Mean, smart. Smokin’ hot.”

You lifted your head again, eyes stinging in a way you refused to acknowledge. “Oh yeah?”

“Don’t make me say it again.”

“Oh, I absolutely will at some point.”

“Course you will.”

You smiled at him, but it wobbled at the edges. “All that time?”

He didn’t answer with words. He didn’t need to. His hand slid from your hair to the side of your face, thumb brushing once beneath your eye with a care that felt almost reverent in the dark.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was full of everything you’d lost between the quarry and here—the farm, the prison, all those people and places and versions of yourselves that existed now only in memory. But it was also full of what had survived. His arm around you. Your cheek against his chest. The ridiculous fact that after everything, after all that distance and fear and hunger and grief, you could still lie here and tease him about dirt-water coffee until he admitted he’d loved you before he knew how.

You smiled into the dark, then lifted yourself just enough to press your mouth to the corner of his. It was quick, almost routine now, the kind of kiss that didn’t ask for anything but still said plenty. Goodnight. I’m here. Don’t go too far, even if you’re only turning over.

“Night,” you whispered.

“Night.”

You turned carefully in the cramped space, settling with your back against him, his arm finding your waist by habit before either of you had to think about it. Behind you, he went still in that wakeful way of his, not quite ready to surrender to sleep.

For a while, Daryl only listened to the house. The floorboards settling. Glenn’s breathing from somewhere near the fireplace. Rick shifting in his sleep. The woods pressing close outside.

And you, warm under his hand.

That was the part that made his chest feel strange. Not sad, exactly. Not the kind of hurt that had teeth. Just a dull, blue ache at the thought of all the roads between that quarry and this floor, all the people missing from the spaces around you, all the walls you’d had and lost, all the times he’d thought he had nothing worth keeping until you proved him wrong by staying.

Back then, he hadn’t known what to do with wanting you.

Now he knew exactly what to do with it, and still couldn’t, not here, not with the whole group asleep around you and the road waiting to swallow everyone again at morning.

His fingers curled lightly in the fabric at your stomach. You sighed in your sleep, or close enough to it, and shifted back into him by instinct. Lowering his face to your hair, he breathed you in once, and closed his eyes with that old quarry memory still flickering behind them: you holding out a tin cup of terrible coffee, smiling like you already knew he was worth the trouble, even if he didn’t think the same.

He shifted a little then, rolling just enough onto his side to face the room, and his back turned toward you beneath the blanket. The movement left you tucked up behind him, your arm draped over his waist. It was an unspoken rule for him to put himself between you and wherever the door was when bunking down. At first you thought it was just a coincidence he did that, but then you realised, he was putting himself in harm's way in case the unthinkable came through the door. That meant you were in your own little pod in the corner with a Daryl-shaped barrier boxing you in like a hug. Without thinking, you lifted your hand and traced a line down the centre of his back through the thin fabric of his shirt

Your fingertip drifted again, lower this time, drawing nonsense shapes between his shoulders, little idle lines that didn’t mean anything and meant everything. His skin moved under the shirt with each breath. You could feel the hard pull of muscle and the familiar shape of him beneath your hand, and it made longing rise in you so fast and sharp it was almost funny.

He was right there.

That was the worst part.

Right there under your fingers, under your breath if you leaned one inch closer. You could smell him. Feel his warmth. Hear the scrape of his swallow when your nail caught lightly at his spine.

And you missed him.

Missed him like he was gone.

It was absurd. Cruel, even. To have him this close and still feel the distance. To know exactly how he sounded when he laughed against your neck, how heavy his body got after, how his hand spread over your hip in sleep like it belonged there, and have none of that now except these careful scraps. It was like being starving and made to sit with your face over the pot.

Your hand kept moving of its own accord, tracing him slowly, and you let your mind slip back to the prison the way a hand slips under a pillow, searching for the cool side. You thought of the cellblock at dusk, all honeyed light through bars and the familiar clatter of people settling in for the night. You thought of your old curtain, half-drawn and crooked because Daryl always tugged it too hard, the whole place smelling faintly of sun-baked concrete, tobacco and sex. You thought of the cot that had complained under both of you, the scratchy blanket you used to pretend to hate, the little stolen privacy of walls and routine and knowing where you’d wake up.

You thought of Daryl there, stretched out in your cell with one boot still on because he’d sworn he wasn’t staying and then stayed anyway. His hair mussed from your fingers. 

Your shirt was somewhere on the floor, and his head was pillowed heavily on your stomach while you drew idle circles over his shoulder, kind of like how you were doing now.He’d be stretched out on his front, one arm thrown across your thighs, the other dangling off the side of the bed, half-dozing after sex with his face turned into your skin like he’d intended to stay there forever. The prison had been loud in the distance—someone shouting in the yard, metal clanging, a laugh from down the cellblock—but your little haven had held - all yours.  

You could see it all, so clearly, it hurt.

“Move,” you’d murmured, half-laughing, because he was crushing your legs. His answer had been a grumble into your stomach and a tighter squeeze with the arm over your thighs. “Nah.”

“You’re heavy.”

When he’d said tough shit, you’d just smiled and gone back to drawing useless little lines over his back, tracing the ridge of his spine, the slope of his shoulders, the ribbons of scars dorned across his back. He’d shivered once under your fingers and turned his head just enough to press a lazy kiss to your hip.

“Should get up,” you’d said eventually, though you’d made no move to actually do it.

“Nuh-huh.”

“We’ve been in here forever.”

“Good.”

There had been no urgency in him. No panic. No rationing of touch. Just that lazy, unreasonable confidence that the hour belonged to you because there would be another after it, and another after that, and the world outside the curtain could wait. You had taken it for granted in the way people only realise too late that they were rich.

You remembered looking down at him then—hair a mess, eyes half-shut, skin warm and loose with sleep and satisfaction—and thinking, with a kind of stupid fondness, we’ll always have this.

You blinked in the dark of the abandoned house and found the prison gone, the bars replaced by wallpaper curling off rotten walls, the mattress by splintered floorboards, that easy golden stillness by the raw thin edge of the road. Daryl was still in your arms, but only barely, and all at once you wanted that old afternoon back so violently it made your chest ache. You wanted it back so bad; the sadness of it rose so suddenly your eyes burned. You don’t realise those are the good old days until they’re gone.’ Fuck whoever said that.

The memory hit so hard now it was almost physical, and the ache of it should have kept you awake.

Instead, it softened you.

Your body loosened by degrees, melting back into his warmth, the present blurring at the edges until the hard floor became a mattress, the draft became summer heat, the dark house became concrete walls holding the day outside. Daryl shifted his sleep and made an unconscious jerk that used to startle you awake but was now so natural to you it was a comfort, and in your half-dreaming mind it was the prison again—his hand on your hip, his mouth near your skin, the curtain keeping the world out.

You followed the memory down.

Down into heat, and quiet, and the old impossible luxury of time...

-------------

The heat in the cell sits on your skin like a second blanket.

Summer in the prison always settles heavy, thick and damp and a little stale, like the concrete itself has started to sweat. The little fan somebody rigged up three doors down is useless here. The curtain is half-drawn, but it does nothing except trap the warmth inside with you. Your back is slick against the mattress. His hair is damp. The sheet twisted around one ankle is soaked through where it’s bunched at the foot of the bed.

And Daryl is between your legs like he’s got nowhere else on earth to be.

Your wrists are cuffed to the iron bars of the headboard, the metal warm from the room and rubbing just enough to keep you aware of it every time you pull. Not enough to hurt, but enough to make you feel how trapped you are; how much you are at his mercy. 

He’s been there forever. That’s what it feels like. Nearing on an hour, maybe more, spread open beneath him in your tiny prison cell while the world beyond the curtain keeps moving on without you, while his mouth and hands and the slow drag of his body keep proving that time is not a real thing in here.

You’re sweating. He’s sweating. It’s almost ridiculous how gross the two of you are in the trapped summer heat, his shoulders shining, your hair damp at the nape, his chain sticking to the hollow of his throat when he lifts his head to look at you. There’s no elegance left in it. No room for elegance. Just heat and skin and the rust-smell of the handcuffs and the little breathless sounds he keeps dragging out of you like he’s collecting them.

“Daryl,” you whisper, which would sound like a plea even if you didn’t mean it that way.

He looks up from where he’s pressing kisses to the inside of your thigh, eyes darker than the dim cell deserves, one hand still spread hard over your hip to keep you from twisting away from the overload. He’s got that look on his face—the one that means he knows exactly what he’s doing and intends to keep doing it.

“What,” he askssays, low and rough, though you both know he heard the tremble in it.

You tug uselessly at the cuffs. The bed rattles, old iron whining in protest. “You know what.”

His mouth twitches.

That smug little almost-smile should not be legal on him.

“I don’t know nothin’,” he lies, and then he kisses your inner thigh again, slower this time, closer, his stubble scraping the sensitive skin there in a way that makes your stomach jump. “Think you oughta explainn it.”

You let out a helpless little sound that only encourages him. He’s cocky today. Worse than usual. Maybe it’s the cuffs. Maybe it’s because you’re completely on display for him. Maybe it’s because you are completely on display for him and at his diposal. Maybe it’s because there’s finally time, because you don’t have to rush, because for once nobody is pounding on the curtain and nobody is calling either of your nameshis name from the yard and nobody needs either of you for the next hour except the two of you. Whatever it is, he’s leaning into it with quiet, infuriating confidence.

You’re squirming so much that the whole bed keeps squeaking; squeaking; shifting in little jerks across the floor. 

His forearm snakes around your stomach,forearm snakes around your stomach pinning you more firmly, rough palm hot and damp. “Hold still.”

“You are a cruel cruel man,’ you gasped.

That earns you a short, wrecked laugh against your skin. “This was your idea.”

“The torturing part was not my idea,” you mutter, then gasp because his fingers drag through the wet mess between your legs like he’s never felt anything he liked better. “The hand cuffs are on me, sure. And I wish i never found them.”

In your defence, you wanted to handcuff him to the bedpost - but he won rock, paper, scissors, you wanted to handcuff him to the bedpost - but he won rock paper scissors so he got his way.

“Guess you shoulda went with paper,” he mumbled against you, sending vibrations through” he muffled against you - causing vibrations against your core. You choke on a laugh that turns into a moan before it’s halfway out. He takes advantage immediately, shifting up over you in one smooth movement until his chest is over yours, one knee forcing your legs wider, his mouth at your throat, then your jaw, then your mouth. Sure, yYou can’t pull him down because your hands are trapped above your head, but you don’t need to. He’s all over you already, the full weight of his attention almost worse than his body.

Your knees are useless. Your wrists are warm and slick inside the cuffs. Every inch of you feels overworked, wrung out, and somehow still starving.

He kisses you the way he does when he knows you’re close again—deep and heavy and a little mean, like he’s trying to swallow the panic before it turns into begging.

It doesn’t work.

“More,” you breathe against his mouth anyway, already embarrassed by how desperate you sound and too far gone to care. “Please—”

His hand slides between you, lining himself up, the blunt heat of him dragging through your slick with a maddening patience that makes you arch hard enough to rattle the headboard. There smile is in his voice when he says, “Ya really want it huh?”

“Yes,” you say immediately, because there is no dignity left in this cell, and both of you buried it a long time ago. “Daryl—”

“Shh.” He kisses the corner of your mouth, then your cheek, then the shell of your ear, his voice dropping rough and low where it goes straight through you. “Gotcha.”

And then he pushes in.

Slow - so slow you could scream.

You feel every inch of him, every unbearable second of it, your body trying to climb away from the sensation and chase it deeper at the same time. You’re so oversensitive it borders on agony, his pace deliberate enough to make the whole thing feel impossible. Your eyes squeeze shut. Your breath catches. You hear yourself making broken little sounds into his shoulder, and his hand leaves your thigh just long enough to grip your jaw and turn your face back to him. 

“Look at me.”

You try. Fail. Try again.

His forehead presses to yours as he sinks deeper, deeper, until your whole body goes tight and startled around him. You genuinely don’t know where all of him is supposed to fit. He’s talking now, half under his breath, half into your mouth, and the words are pure Daryl—gravelly, blunt, unfairly filthy in how matter-of-fact he makes them. “That’s it,” he says. “Take it. C’mon. Easy. Yeou’re alright.”

You are not alright. You are dying. You are transcending. You are very possibly seeing God. “Oh my god—”

“I know.”

“No, it’s, I—” Your voice breaks clean in half when he finally bottoms out, hips flush to yours, and stays there for one devastating second like he wants you to understand exactly what he’s doing to you. “Daryl.”

His mouth brushes yours, softer now. “Yeah? That good huh?”

Does he even have to ask? You’re shaking. Fully shaking. Your legs are spread useless and numb beneath him, your wrists straining in the cuffs every time your body jerks on instinct. He reaches up,, hips not faltering for one second,  fingers wrapping around the chain between the cuffs, and tugs—not hard, just enough to remind you that there’s nowhere to goo. The sound that falls out of you at that is humiliating.

His eyes darken further.

“You really — fffuck - like seeing m-me tied up huh?” You manage to get out on the third try.

“Not the worst sight,” he murmurs, glancing up at your hands, then back down at your face so he could see the whole array of precious expressions on your face.

He gives it to you in slow, deep strokes that drag all the way out and then back in with enough force to make the bed frame protest against the wall. Every thrust lands in the same devastating place, e. Every one leavinges you more gone than the last. He’s manhandling you without rushing it, one hand on your hip, the other around your back, using his weight and the angle and the cuffs and your own helpless body against you until your brain is nothing but white heat and his name.

“So much,” you hear yourself say, though your hips lift to meet him anyway, chasing more. “S’too much, I can’t—”

“Yeah, you can.”

There’s that quiet cockiness again, that infuriating certainty in his voice like he knows your body better than your mind does. Right now he probably does.

Your orgasm is coming way too fast. You can feel it, huge and bright and terrifying, climbing through you in violent little pulses. It doesn’t even feel good anymore, not in a simple way. It feels like standing too close to the edge of something enormous. 

“Baby I’m not gonna last,” you squeaak, and this time there’s real panic in it.

He hears the difference immediately. His mouth finds yours, steadier now, his hand sliding down between your bodies to hold you through the rising shock of it. “Hey,” he murmurs, rough and low and all Daryl. “Just stay with me. C’mon. Breathe.”

Your wrists pull against the cuffs. Your thighs shake around him. His pace doesn’t break, doesn’t hurry, doesn’t falter. He’s all over you, exactly where you need him, too much and perfect and impossible, and your whole body goes tight under the pressure of it.

“C’mon,” he murmurs, mouth hot at your cheek, his voice roughened into something that feels like a hand inside your chest. “Wake up.”

Huh?

You blink at him, breathless, disoriented. The prison cell swims around the edges. The bars are hazy. The curtain stirs in a heat that suddenly doesn’t feel right. “Daryl—”

“Wake up.”

His hand leaves the chain between the cuffs and rises to your face, thumb brushing your cheek. No, not brushing - patting. Coaxing you awake...

You jerk awake all at once to cold dawn and damp earth and the awful, immediate absence of him.

For one second, you just lie there staring into the washed-out grey of morning, your body still trying to catch up with a world that has changed under it. Then the disappointment hits so hard and stupid it actually makes you angry. You roll over with a wounded groan and shove your face into your rucksack, which has all the comfort and softness of a sack of rocks.

Behind you, Daryl huffs a laugh.

“Rise n shineRise and shine,” he mutters, voice thick with sleep and far too amused for someone who has just ruined your entire life. A hand lands between your shoulder blades, then slides up into your hair, fingers working slow through the mess of it in that absent way he gets when he’s trying to wake you without admitting he’s being gentle. “Was startin’ to think ya died.”

You make a muffled, miserable noise into the rucksack that roughly translates to Iaei wishI wish..

“Mm.” His hand keeps moving, untangling a knot, scratching lightly at your scalp. “That bad, huh.”

You push yourself up on your elbows with all the enthusiasm of the freshly exhumed. The group is just beginning to stir around you—blankets rolling, someone coughing, low voices by the dead fire where breakfast is apparently the next tragedy on the schedule. Daryl is crouched beside your bedroll, forearms on his knees, watching you with that half-annoying, half-soft expression he always gets first thing in the morning.

“C’mon,” he says. “Needta find somethin’ to eat.”

You sit up fully—and freeze.

There’s a warm, slick heaviness between your thighs, enough to make your whole body go hot again for a completely different reason.

You suck in a breath.

Daryl’s eyebrows pull together instantly. “What.”

For one sharp, horrifying second you think, oh my god, my period, because of course that would be the final humiliation after waking up from the hottest dream of your miserable little road-life. You glance down, hand already moving under the blanket—

—and then stop.

Oh, no.

It takes exactly one second for your traitorous body to explain itself.

False alarm, no blood; just the aftermath of your own brain deciding to stage an unauthorised prison reunion with your boyfriend while you slept three feet away from the group like a complete degenerate.

Your face goes so hot it feels like you need a doctor to check you're not dying. Daryl leans in a little, suspicion deepening. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” you say way too fast; his expression says he believes exactly none of that.

You try to stand with dignity, which is impossible when your knees still feel vaguely dream-boneless and your entire lower half has decided now is a great time to remember every second of that fake prison bed. You end up half-crouching instead, clutching the blanket around your lap like a Victorian woman posing for a photo.

Daryl squints at you. “You good?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“You’re bein’ weird.”

“I’m always weird.”

“Not like this.”

You glare at him with all the fury of a woman whose subconscious should be hosed down. 

“Morning,” Rick says, already halfway by, then slows just enough to take in your expression, your death-grip on the blanket, Daryl crouched there with his hand still in your hair like he forgot to remove it, and the general atmosphere of something is wrong here and I would prefer not to know what. His face does a very subtle, very tired thing. “Y’all good?”

“Uh-huh,” you say, voice embarrassingly high.

Rick’s eyes flick to Daryl.

Daryl meets them with the flattest do not poke the bear look a man can physically produce before coffee.

Rick, to his credit, reads it immediately. “Right,” he says, the word stretching thin with self-preservation. “Well. Don’t take too long.”

He keeps walking, visibly deciding he does not get paid enough for whatever this is.

Daryl waits until Rick’s out of earshot before looking back at you, the amusement still there but softened now with actual concern. His hand slides from your hair to the back of your neck, thumb rubbing once at the base of your skull.

“You gonna tell me what’s goin’ on,” he says quietly, “or am I just s’posed to accept that ya woke up possessed.”

You close your eyes. There are no good answers. There are only bad ones and catastrophic ones. “Please stop being nice to me,” you mutter. “It is not helping.”

That pulls a real chuckle out of him, low and warm and sleepy enough to make your stomach dip.  He studies you for a second, the puzzle pieces clearly clicking into place one by one. Not all of them, but enough to know this is not an injury, not an illness, not anything he can fix with a canteen and a pat on the shoulder. His head tilts - and then, very slowly, his eyebrow rises. Oh, absolutely not.

“No,” you say immediately.

He smiles wider, all smug corners and dangerous understanding. “Didn’t say nothin’.”

“You were about to.”

“Ain’t gotta.”

You hide your face in your hands like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. His palm smooths down your hair once more, kinder now that he’s enjoying your suffering. “C’mon,” he murmurs. “Get up. You can be mad at me while we look for breakfast.”

You look up at him through your fingers, mortified beyond words. “I am not mad at you.”

“Nah,” he says, standing and offering you a hand. “Whatever this is its way wayworse.”

He hauls you gently to your feet, steadies you when your blanket tangles around your legs, and for one tiny, awful second your eyes meet and you know—just know—that if he presses even a little, if he asks the right question in that low morning voice, you are going to have to fling yourself into a lake.

Instead, he only squeezes your fingers once before letting go.

“Go wash your face,” he says, maddeningly calm. “Cool down before it gets any redder.”

You stare at him, mouth agape.

He tilts his head. “What.”

And because apparently humiliation has finally curdled into meanness, you mumble, “Nothing. Just thinking maybe I liked dream-you better.”

His grin goes crooked. “Well,” he says, stepping back, “dream-me ain’t gettin’ ya breakfast.”

Then he turns and walks off toward the fire, far too pleased with himself, leaving you standing there in the miserable dawn with damp thighs, a wrecked conscience, and the certain knowledge that this day is going to be absolutely intolerable. 

--------

The warehouse sat at the edge of town like a stranded ship, square and windowless except for the high slats near the roofline, its broad metal sides painted with half-peeled community signs that had somehow survived the years better than the people who’d once followed them.

FOOD BANK SATURDAY

FREE WINTER COAT DRIVE

SPRING MARKET — LOCAL VENDORS WELCOME

The banners flapped in shreds against the chain-link fence as the four of you picked your way through waist-high weeds and old flyers melted into the mud.

Glenn squinted up at the building. “Well,” he said, trying for optimistic and landing somewhere around doomed, “it still looks… upright.”

“Mm,” Rick muttered. “That’s one word for it.”

The front entrances had been chained from the outside—heavy loops of rusted iron snared through the handles, reinforced with bent lengths of rebar someone had shoved through the links as a final, panicked stay in there. Daryl crouched, fingers brushing one of the chains, eyes narrowing at the old scrape marks on the metal doors.

“They weren’t keepin’ people out,” he said.

No one answered that, because there wasn’t much to say.

You tipped your head back and looked up at the roof. The warehouse was only one story, but it had been built high and ugly, one of those broad utility buildings with exposed support beams on the outside and enough ledges and seams to turn climbing it into a bad idea rather than an impossible one.

So, naturally, that was what you did.

By the time you hauled yourself onto the roof, your palms were black with grit and the backs of your thighs were already damp with sweat. The metal panels groaned under your weight in a way that made every muscle in your body tighten. “Jesus,” you hissed, flattening instinctively when one of the roof sheets gave a sudden little slide beneath your boot.

“Careful,” Rick said immediately from a few feet behind you, too late to be useful and exactly on time to be annoying.

“I am being careful.”

Daryl came up last and threw you a look that suggested he begged to differ. He dropped to a crouch beside a jagged break in the roofing and peered down through it.

The reaction was instant. He went still. Not tense. Not startled. Just utterly motionless in that way he had when his whole body locked.

You moved before you thought about it, dropping beside him and bracing one hand on the hot metal lip to look through the opening.

The warehouse floor below was carpeted in bodies. At first glance, Glenn made the same mistake anyone would. “Oh,” he said, relief rising too fast. “No, wait, those are just corpses—”

“No,” Daryl cut in quietly.

It wasnt just the number of them, though there were plenty—dozens scattered in collapsed rows between shelving units and overturned pallet stacks, slumped against support poles, tangled near the chained doors. It was the details. The way some of the skulls were caved in, yes, but plenty weren’t. The way some bodies looked shriveled almost to leather, clothes hanging off them in strips, while others still wore the dull slackness of a more ordinary death. One sat upright against a pillar with an empty bottle clenched in its hand and a dark stain dried down the front of its shirt. Two more were collapsed together near the back wall in a knot of limbs and torn fabric that suggested things had gotten ugly long before they got quiet. “Oh,” Glenn said again, much more softly this time.

Rick crouched beside the opening and stared down into the dim, stale dark of the warehouse. “Looks like this place fell at the start.”

“Military,” you murmured, eyes catching the old emergency signage, the barricaded exits, the awful logic of it. “Must’ve shoved people in here and locked it down.”

Daryl’s mouth flattened. “Then left ’em.”

The shelves themselves rose in long warehouse rows, most of them still standing. That was the part that made the whole thing almost unbearable. All that food still sitting there—boxes of jars, canned goods, dry goods in split sacks, packets, bottled water in shrink-wrapped towers near the middle—untouched except where some displays had toppled. It was obscene, really. All that supply left to rot while the people below it rotted first.

You scanned the floor again and felt the old cold dread of the prison halls crawl up your back.“Remember those walkers in the yard at the prison,” Rick said quietly. “Half of ’em were like mummies till they heard us. Then suddenly they were the hungriest things in the world.”

Glenn swallowed. “So we assume they’re all live.”

“We assume the ones that ain’t obviously dead enough can still get up,” Daryl said.

Below, somewhere in the belly of the building, something shifted. It was small. Maybe just settling metal. Maybe not.

You eased back from the opening, sat on your heels, and wiped your dusty palms on your jeans. “Okay,” you said. “So. We need the food. We do not need to become the food. Ideas.”

“Open the doors,” Glenn said first, because of course he did. “Make noise, flush them out, then circle back in and grab what we can.”

You stared at him. “That is a terrible idea.”

His head came up. “It’s not terrible.”

“It is if ‘flushed out’ turns into ‘wandering herd directly back to the group.”

“It wouldn’t come back to the group if we led it away.”

“Oh, amazing, great, so all we need is one neat, cooperative line of walkers who respect traffic signals.”

Glenn frowned. “That’s not what I said.”

Rick rubbed the back of his neck and kept staring down into the hole. “Could try pulling things up. Rope around a few boxes. Fish ’em out from up here.”

You looked at the gap, then at the angle, then at the rows below. “What are you gonna do cowboy, lasso a can of peaches from 20 feet up?”

Rick gave you a deeply unimpressed dad look. “You got a better idea?”

As a matter of fact, you did.

The support beams were eyeing you up like Daryl’s ass in jeans.

The roof had old metal trusses spanning the entire width of the building, thick enough to hold the weight of the panels, running wall to wall over the shelving rows below. Narrow, yes. Rusted in places, yes. Trustworthy, probably not. 

You pointed. “We use those.”

Three heads turned to look at you.

You stood a little taller despite the grime and sweat itching down your spine. “They run the whole length. If someone gets down from here, climbs onto the truss, and moves across the beams, they can reach the top shelves without touching the floor. Lower a rope, tie off boxes, haul them up. It’s quieter, it doesn’t open the doors, and it doesn’t send an army of starving corpses wandering after us.”

Glenn looked back through the gap. “That’s… actually not bad.”

Rick nodded slowly. “Would work.”

Duh, of course it would, it’s your plan. Daryl, however, did not nod. His eyes had already moved on to the second part of your idea, because he knew you too well. “No.”

You blinked. “I haven’t even volunteered yet.”

“You was about to.”

“Maybe I was gathering dramatic tension.”

“You ain’t doin’ it. That’s final.”

You put your hands on your hips. “But it was my idea!”

“And it’s a bad one.”

“It was a good one two seconds ago.”

“It was good till you started thinkin’ you were the one goin’ across.”

You laughed once, short and offended. “Who else is gonna do it?”

“I will.”

You looked at him, then very deliberately looked him up and down, from the crossbow to the shoulders to the boots planted on the roof panel that had already shifted under your far lesser weight. “Baby don’t make me say it.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Say what?”

“You are built like a grudging ox.”

Glenn made a strangled sound and looked away. Rick’s mouth twitched dangerously.

Daryl stared at you in flat betrayal. “A what.”

“You heard me. Those beams are old. They’re not gonna love a full-grown angry man stomping around up there.”

“Yer talkin out yer ass.”

“There’s more of you to love, hozney.”

He leaned closer without seeming to move much at all, voice dropping. “You wanna say that one more time.”

Your pulse made an extremely unhelpful leap.

This was the problem. This exact thing. The way every stupid argument kept tipping halfway into something else before either of you could stop it. The way he got close and your brain forgot the topic. The way his attention felt like being gripped around the waist.

So naturally, you doubled down.

“You stomp like Bigfoot,” you said, slower this time, because apparently you wanted to die. “And I’m lighter, better balanced, and less likely to bring the whole roof down.”

“Your balance sucks.”

You gasped. “Fuck you, no, it doesn't!”

“Ya get dizzy when ya turn around too fast.”

“One time I slipped in mud.”

“You slipped in mud, gravel, wet grass, dry grass—”

“That was a streak of bad luck.”

“—and a flat kitchen floor.”

“What’s your point?”

Rick cleared his throat into his fist, shoulders twitching now.

Glenn gave up trying not to laugh. “She’s got a point about the weight thing.”

Daryl turned on him so fast Glenn actually put both hands up. “Don’t encourage her.”

“She always has a point,” you said, already warming to your own brilliance now that there was resistance. “I go across. You three stay up here and work the rope. If I slip, you haul me up. Safety buffer.”

Daryl made a face like the phrase offended him on principle. “Safety buffer.”

“Yes. Very technical.”

“No.”

You threw both hands up. “You always say no to my ideas!”

“Cuz ya act like ya got nine lives.”

“That is not a tactical concern.”

“It is to me.”

That actually got Rick laughing, low and tired and unable to help it.

The roof shifted softly under somebody’s boot and all four of you went still, eyes cutting back to the hole, the rows of bodies below, the heavy silence waiting under the metal. Then Rick exhaled and rubbed a hand down his beard. “It’s the best idea we’ve got.”

Daryl looked at him like he’d been personally stabbed.

“The beams probably won’t hold much extra weight,” Rick went on, practical as ever, which was how he got away with these betrayals. “She’s the lightest. We tie her off. Keep tension on the rope the whole time. Glenn hauls. You anchor. I spot.”

Daryl’s jaw worked hard enough to crack teeth.

You smiled, bright and insufferable. “Glad I got the Rick seal of approval.”

Daryl cut you a look so full of irritated, helpless heat it should’ve melted the roof clean off. “If you fall in there—”

“I won’t.”

“—I am not explainin’ to the group that we lost you because you wanted to play acrobat.”

Your grin widened. “See? You do listen to my ideas.”

He made a low sound in his throat, half threat, half something else, and turned away before it could become either. Glenn leaned over to you while Rick started sorting rope. “You know he’s gonna be unbearable about this.”

You watched Daryl yank the line harder than necessary through his hands, all bristling protectiveness and silent panic in a dirty vest, and felt something hot and stupid unfurl in your chest despite the hunger and the horror and the walkers waiting below. “Oh,” you said, sweet as poison. “I’m counting on it.”

Next thing you know, Daryl is lowering you down like he’s trying to negotiate with gravity.

The rope burns warm and rough through his palms as he feeds it out inch by inch, jaw set so hard it looks painful, eyes never leaving you as your boots search the air for the first beam. The whole roof creaks around you, old metal shifting and sighing under the weight of three men and one questionable plan, and below the hole, the warehouse waits in its awful, patient silence, a sea of dropped shoulders and slack heads and still hands that may or may not stay that way.

“Little left,” Rick mutters from the edge, one hand anchoring the rope, the other braced on the roof panel.

“I know my left,” you whisper back.

“Sure you do,” Daryl said sarcastically.

“Could we keep the chatter down to a minimum, please? I’m trying to focus.”

Your boots finally tap metal.

The beam is narrower than it looked from above, just a rusted strip of steel stretched wall to wall with twelve feet of nightmare yawning underneath it. For one incredibly stupid second, your arms pinwheel out from your sides, balancing wildly, and Daryl’s entire body jerks forward so hard the rope goes taut enough to sing.

You correct yourself with a hop and a wobble, then grin up through the hole. “Wow,” you whisper, breathless and obnoxious. “Thought I had it there.”

Rick drags a hand down his face, and Daryl looks like he may genuinely pass out. “That ain’t funny,” he hisses, voice low enough not to carry and intense enough to strip paint.

You beam up at him, all teeth. “Little funny.”

“No it wasn’t.”

“It was a kinda,” Glenn says, hanging over the edge with both elbows planted on the roof, “it was the exact amount of funny that becomes deeply unfunny if you do it again.”

“Copy that,” you say, already inching forward because if you let yourself think too hard about the drop, or the bodies, or the fact that one wrong move could turn you into a screaming can opener for the dead, you were going to freeze and embarrass yourself in front of everyone.

So you pretend.

You pretend you are not twenty feet above a warehouse floor covered in starving corpses.

You pretend this is easy.

You pretend you are traipsing across the rafters of a church play, balancing for applause, when really your throat is dry and your heart is in your throat.

“Keep your knees bent,” Rick says quietly.

“Weight over the balls of your feet,” Daryl adds at once.

“Yep,” you mutter. “Love being coached through my own stupidity.”

The first shelf is close enough that you can crouch, reach, and hook a box toward you with the length of broomstick Glenn found on the roof for exactly this purpose. It scrapes softly across the top shelf, dust puffing up into your face. You ease it to the beam, pry it open, and find—

“Canned Brussels sprouts,” you breathe. “What kind of sick bastard donates this.”

“Food is food,” Rick whispers.

“Barely.”

You toss the can up.

Glenn leans further into the hole, one arm and half his torso dangling through like a badly secured chandelier, and catches it with both hands before it can bounce off the roof and ring through the warehouse like a dinner bell. “Got it,” he mouths.

The rhythm comes after that, slow and strange and somehow almost manageable once your body stops trying to convince you that you are about to die.

Crouch. Reach. Hook. Lift. Toss.

If anything is too heavy or you don’t have enough arms to carry the load, you stuff everything into your rucksack and hurl it up to Glenn. Daryl then empties the goods and throws the empty bag back down to you. It’s like a cheap version of a dumb waiter, but way less convenient.

Glenn hangs lower and lower through the roof to catch whatever you send up—cans, pasta boxes, a dented multipack of instant noodles, some pathetic but still exciting ramen bricks that make you feel, absurdly, like a kid sneaking through the kitchen at midnight on your tiptoes for cookies when your parents told you explicitly not to. Except the kitchen is a warehouse full of sleeping dead, the cookies are your dinner for the next two weeks, and your parents are flesh-eating mummies in donated church clothes.

The beam complains under every careful step with little rusty chirps and flexes that make Daryl visibly reel from above. Every time it gives even the tiniest creak, his hands clamp harder on the rope like he could wrestle the entire building into obedience if he squeezed hard enough.

“You’re white as a sheet,” you whisper up after you just chucked the rucksack up to Glenn and caught Daryl’s line of sight. He looked like he was going into shock. “Shut up and keep movin’.”

You make it further across the room than any sane person would. The hauls get better too—good, solid stuff that feels like winning. Pasta. Canned fruit. Vacuum-packed noodles. A couple jars of sauce that make Glenn nearly weep. 

Eventually, you gather enough loot for Rick to say, “That’s enough. Come on back up.”

And that should have been that.

But then something catches your eye.

A half-collapsed cardboard box on the floor near the far aisle. Not on a shelf. Not conveniently positioned. Just sitting there in a shaft of gray light, label half-torn, one corner buckled in—but unmistakable.

Beans — loads of them.

You go completely still. Above you, Daryl’s expression changes before you even point. He knows you too well. One look at your face and he’s already shaking his head. “Don’t even think about it.”

Glenn blinks. “Huh?”

“It’s beans,” you whisper, like this explains everything.

Rick’s own gaze tracks, lands on the box, and then closes in brief, pained understanding. “No.”

You glance up. “I’ll be super quick.”

Daryl actually makes a strangled sound. “Why ya always gotta make things so hard.”

“You wanna win big, you gotta risk big.” You raise your arms, shrugging. That’s why poker was always your game.

He yanks on the safety rope once, sharp and warning. “No way.”

You look down at the line tied around your waist. And then, because apparently every decent thought has left your skull to make room for legumes, you realise the problem.

You can’t get low enough with the rope on.

Even Rick, patron saint of exhausted pragmatism, is already shaking his head. “No. We’ve got enough. We head back.”

You look at the beans.

The beans look at you.

You haven’t had enough to eat in so long that your body treats the sight of them like a religious vision.

“Stop it, let’s go, cmon,” Daryl says, reading your face with horrifying accuracy.

“Would you still love me if I was beanless,” you whisper to yourself.

“What?” Daryl called back, a little too loud for comfort. The acoustics carried his voice around the warehouse, and for one terrible second, you all held your breaths to see if that had done the trick. It was pure dumb luck that it didn’t stir the walkers awake.

“Focus,” Rick hisses after a few awful seconds. “Keep your voices down. Now cmon, we’ll pull you up—“

You weren’t even listening anymore; when you set your mind on something, all bets were off. “Fuck it,” you mutter, and untie the rope around your waist.

The reaction above you is immediate, silent, and catastrophic. Daryl’s face goes blank in that way it does when he is too furious to form words. Rick hisses something that is probably a curse.

Glenn just says, very quietly, “Oh, no.”

Then you move.

You step off the beam onto the top of a shelving unit, crouch to balance, then lower yourself with every ounce of care you possess to the warehouse floor between the sleeping walkers. The landing is soft enough that only dust puffs around your boots. For one second you stand there with your heart trying to punch out through your ribs, surrounded by bodies that are way too close for comfort.

Above you, Daryl makes a sound like every vessel in his head is preparing to burst. “Glenn,” Rick snaps. “Get to the door. If this goes bad, we open it and run them out.”

Glenn is already sliding back from the hole in the roof, shoes scraping over the metal panels as he hurries for the chained entrance.

Daryl moves like he means to jump straight down after you but Rick catches him by the vest. “No. You go in there now, you get both of you killed.”

“Let go.”

“Think Daryl.”

Below, you don’t give yourself time to think at all. You step over a body with your breath locked in your throat, then another, careful not to brush torn sleeves or brittle fingers. The smell is death in itself—old poison, old rot, old clothes. The beans sit there like a miracle with terrible timing.

You reach them, and as you grip the box, you realise it’s heavier than you expected, dense with cans, the cardboard softened at the corners but still holding. Of course it is. Of course, the thing you would risk your stupid life for would also weigh as much as an anvil.

You heft it onto the top shelf with a soft grunt, wincing when the metal creaks under the shifting load.

You hear the faint, unsettling rattling from across as Glenn struggles to free the chains. At this rate, your dumb bean mission isn't what will wake up the walkers; it's Glenn’s shaking of the doors. It’s pretty ironic that he’s trying to open the doors in case you fuck up, but right now, he is about to wake them up for you before you even get the chance. Whatever happens your not gonna stay down here. So you climb.

The shelf sways under your weight, just a little, but enough to make every nerve in your body flash white. You freeze, knuckles digging into the metal, and wait.

When it finally settles, slowly but surely, you empty the cans from the box into your rucksack, each one placed and shifted to balance the weight. The bag grows heavier and heavier until it drags at your shoulder and tugs your centre of gravity meanly off true.

The chains at the entrance rattle louder now. Glenn planning for your downfall.

You straighten on the shelf top and hold the rucksack up toward the roof opening like a trophy, every inch of you smug despite the death pit all around you. “Tell Glenn not to bother,” you say up towards them. “Mama’s bringing home the goods.”

“Quit messin’ around and move!” Rick hisses.

“Buzzkills,” you mutter.

You bend your knees and jump for the beam the way you’ve done half a dozen times already.

Only this time the shelf gives first.

The metal beneath your feet folds with a horrible, rusted crunch and the whole unit collapses into itself. For one terrible second, all Daryl and Rick see is a bursting cloud of dust and a violent shudder through the racks below.

And then the warehouse wakes up.

Not all at once. That would have been kinder.

A hand twitches.

A head jerks.

A rasp drags up from the floor like somebody striking a match.

You hit the ground hard and rolling, the breath punched out of you. The rucksack slams your shoulder. Somewhere, metal crashes. Somewhere something moans, then something else answers, and suddenly the whole room is filling with the insidious, dreadful sound of sleepers pulling themselves back into hunger.

It’s Daryl’s voice yelling your name which forces you upright.

No checking bruises. No checking the damage. You scramble for the nearest standing shelf and scale it with all the grace of a panicked cat, boots slipping on dusty metal, hands burning. It’s taller than you’d like and farther from the beam than it looked from above, and when you stand on top of it and finally look down—

Stupid idea.

A sea of walkers churns beneath you, arms lifting, jaws working, all those dead faces rolling upward like a starved village. How thoughtful. They want to catch you.

“Now!” Daryl roars.

You jump before you can talk yourself out of it.

Your fingers catch the beam with a jolt that nearly peels your shoulders from their sockets, and your whole body swings out hard—ninety degrees of empty air and screaming muscles before your momentum dies. You hang there for one awful second, staring at the ground, staring at all those outstretched hands waiting politely for you to drop.

Then survival kicks you in the spine, and you must muster everything in you to haul yourself up.

Above, Rick and Daryl are shouting, Glenn is somewhere at the doors, and below the walkers are fully awake now, groans rising loud enough to rattle your teeth. Slow and steady is dead. You go fast, feet clanging over the beam, each step a bargain with physics.

Don’t look down.

Don’t look down.

Don’t look down.

The beam screams under your boots. Something metallic falls away behind you with a crash but you don’t let yourself turn to see. Your rucksack thumps against your back, heavy with the canned beans and poor life decisions.

You make it under the hole at last and thrust the bag upward with both hands.

Daryl looks personally offended by it.

“Take the damn bag,” you hiss.

He glares like you just suggested he rescue the groceries first and your stupid life second. “Get that shit away from me,” he yells.

Rick, who still possesses enough sanity for all three of you, snatches the rucksack out of your hands. “I got it.”

The second the weight is gone from your back, you jump.

Daryl catches you.

Not with any grace either. He catches you like a man grabbing the one thing in the world that matters before it can fall out of reach, hands under your arms, hauling with everything he’s got while Rick grabs your vest and Glenn—somehow back at the roof now because apparently he can teleport when panic is involved—helps drag you up the last ugly, scraping foot.

You collapse half on top of Daryl, half on the roof, both of you breathing like you’ve been gutted.

For a few seconds nobody says anything at all.

Then Glenn lies back flat on the roof beside you and wheezes, “I hope those canned beans are worth it.”

Daryl’s hand comes up hard to the back of your head, not rough, just urgent, pressing you in against his shoulder for one fierce second before he shoves you back enough to look at you. His face is a storm. His eyes are wild. His voice, when it comes, is low and vicious enough to mean more than the words themselves. “You are the dumbest, bravest, most annoying person I ever met.”

To anybody else, it would sound mean.

To you, translated from Daryl, it means: thank God you’re alive, you absolute dumbass.

You grin, still gulping air. “You forgot ‘reckless and impulsive.’”

He closes his eyes like he is asking the universe for strength.

Rick, still kneeling with one hand on the salvaged rucksack, exhales through his nose and says, “Next time, we leave the beans.”

Daryl just kept you there, breathing heavy, arms wrapping around you to keep you there longer before you try to test your luck again.

---------------------

It seems the group got over your reckless borderline suicidal stunt pretty quickly, no matter how eccentric Glenn or Rick told the story. After they were warmed and fed, the group were left stunned in a way of people who have gone too long on empty and suddenly find themselves content and blinking at one another like they’re waiting to wake up.

The beans are in one pot, the pasta in another, the salvaged jars worked into something Carol insists on calling stew and everyone else is too grateful to argue with. The smell alone is enough to make the whole house feel less haunted.

Full bellies change people.

It happens slowly at first—shoulders coming down, voices climbing, somebody laughing too loud at something that isn’t all that funny and nobody minding because laughter itself had started to feel rare enough to hoard. Glenn is nearly glowing from the praise, taking credit for the rope work with just enough modesty to make it irritating, while Tara keeps calling you “Bean Queen” with increasing reverence and zero shame. Even Rick’s face has lost some of that hard, hunted look, though the lines don’t leave him entirely.

You’re tucked into the corner of the room against Daryl, his legs spread out in front of him and your back settled against his chest like that’s where it belongs. His arm is around your middle, hand planted on your hip with the kind of absent firmness that says he’s still making sure you’re here. Every now and then his thumb drags once over the seam of your shirt, checking, counting, reassuring himself in some wordless way he’d deny under oath.

He’s been impossible ever since the warehouse. Not in a mean way — more in a Daryl way. Which is often worse.

“Coulda died over beans,” he mutters now into your hair while Glenns tells Sasha how he nearly dislocated his own shoulder trying to lean through the roof like a chandelier. “That’s a new low.”

You tip your head back just enough to look at him. “They were good beans.”

“They were beans.”

“They were many beans.”

He gives a disbelieving little huff. “You got a death wish.”

Across the room, Glenn lifts his spoon in your direction. “To be fair, it was a pretty heroic amount of beans.”

“Thank you,” you say, pointing at him. “Finally, someone with vision.”

Daryl’s hold tightens fractionally around your waist. “Maybe I oughta put you outta my misery myself.”

You gasp theatrically and grab at his forearm where it lies across you, making a strangled little performance of it. “He’s threatening me,” you croak to the room. “In front of witnesses.”

He doesn’t even try to stop the ghost of the smile that pulls at his mouth. He bends his head and grumbles near your ear, “Wouldn’t have to threaten ya if you’d quit tryin’ to swan-dive into walker pits.”

You go limp in his arms in exaggerated tragedy, one hand flopped over your chest. “Tell. my. story.”

“‘She was stupid,’” Daryl says immediately.

“‘But awsome’” Glenn adds.

“‘Led with her stomach, not her brain,’” Tara says solemnly.

That gets a genuine laugh out of the room, bigger than the joke deserves, the kind that comes from hunger easing its boot off your throat for one blessed hour. You laugh too, because how can you not, even as Daryl shakes his head against your hair and pretends not to enjoy the fact that you fit there so naturally.

Then Carol, practical saint of the damned, appears by the pot with her spoon in hand.“There’s seconds,” she announces. You’re on your feet before the sentence finishes.

Daryl catches your belt loop too late to stop you. “Of course there is,” he mutters, watching you go with the kind of tired affection he only shows when he thinks no one’s paying attention.

You drift toward the pot, bowl in hand, and nearly collide with Rick doing the exact same thing. He steps aside enough to let you in, then doesn’t move far after you’ve both filled your bowls again. The room behind you hums with easy noise. Firelight jumps warm along the walls. For once, no one is listening too hard. Rick leans one shoulder against the mantle and eyes your second helping. “You earned that.”

You grin. “Damn right.”

He nods once, but his expression doesn’t soften as much as the room has. “Today was a Hail Mary.”

The words are quiet, but they land heavier than the bowls in your hands. Your smile slips, just a little. “We made it.”

“You did,” he says. “By the skin o’ your teeth.”

You glance past him toward the others. Daryl is still where you left him, one knee up now, spoon resting in his hand, eyes on you without trying to hide it. He doesn’t know this conversation is about him too, but something in your face must’ve given it away because he sits a little straighter.

Rick sees you look, his tone staying low. “Whatever’s goin’ on, it needs sortin’.”

Your brows pull together. “What’s going on is we’re all exhausted and one bad week from losing our minds.”

“That’s true,” he says. “And still not all of it.”

You open your mouth to deny it and hate that you already know how weak the denial will sound, but Rick lifts a hand before you can try. “I’m not askin’ for details.”

“Great.”

“I’m serious.” He glances toward the room, toward your people, toward the makeshift little camp that has somehow made itself a family twice over and keeps surviving mostly on stubbornness. “I don’t care if it’s grief from the prison, or stress, or just the road gettin’ to everybody. But you’re actin’ reckless. More than usual - which says a lot.”

You shift your bowl from one hand to the other, suddenly unable to get comfortable in your own skin.

“Same goes for Daryl,” Rick continues. “He’s distracted. You’re distracted. And when the two of you start in on each other, it spreads.”

You give a short, incredulous laugh. “Me and Daryl are fine.”

Rick’s face changes in the smallest, most devastating way. It was that deeply tired deadpan of a man who didn’t actually say a name but didn’t need you to say one for him. “…I didn’t say it was about Daryl,” he says.

You close your eyes for one full second. “Great.”

“That’s on you.” He takes a bite of his food with the maddening calm of someone who has already won this exchange, chews, swallows, then says, “I don’t care how you sort it out. Talk. Fight. Go walk a perimeter and scream at each other. Just sort it out. The group needs both of you with your heads screwed on right.”

You look down into your bowl because it’s easier than looking over at Daryl and wondering just how obvious the two of you have become. Your voice comes out quieter than you want. “You really think it’s that bad?”

Rick’s expression softens then, but only by a fraction. “I think you nearly got yourself killed over a box of beans.”

Yikes - the man has a point.

“I think Daryl was ready to jump into a warehouse full of walkers after you, and the only reason he didn’t is because I grabbed him first.” He pauses, then adds in that dry, almost kindly way of his, “And I think if the two of you keep actin’ like whatever this is ain’t affectin’ you, it’s gonna get one of you hurt in a way beans can’t fix.”

The room behind you laughs at something Michonne says. Somebody bumps a chair. Daryl is still watching, and now there’s a question in his face too, because he can tell Rick’s talking to you in that leader-voice of his, the one people only get when they’re either in trouble or about to be assigned something. You swallow, nod once, and Rick seems to take that as enough. “Good.”

He pushes off the mantle, shifts past you, then pauses just long enough at your shoulder to add, “And for what it’s worth… if I had found beans like that, I’d have pulled the same thing.”

You look up so fast you nearly slosh your dinner. His mouth twitches. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.” Then he’s gone, crossing back into the warm noise of the room, leaving you standing there with your second helping and a heart that suddenly feels too big and too visible.

When you turn around, Daryl is still looking at you — the second your eyes meet, one of his brows lifts just a little, asking without words. You stare back for a beat, then start toward him.

He shifts, making room before you even reach him, one hand already reaching for your bowl so you can climb back into the shelter of his body without spilling anything. His arm comes around you the moment you settle, hand warm at your waist, and he bends his head just enough for his mouth to brush your temple.“What’d he want,” he murmurs.

You take a bite first, because apparently you need courage and beans to survive this conversation. Then you mutter into your spoon, “Apparently we’re a public safety hazard.”

Against your hair, he lets out one low, deeply offended huff of laughter. “Well,” he says, voice rough with tired amusement, “he ain’t wrong.”

That should not make your face go hot. It absolutely does.

The room feels too warm suddenly, too full, too close. Full bellies may have made everyone giddy, but they’ve also made it impossible to hide behind misery anymore. Now there’s food in your stomach, a roof over your head, and Rick Grimes has all but told you to go deal with your boyfriend before your unresolved nonsense gets somebody bitten.

You lean back a little further into Daryl’s chest and stare into your bowl like there might be instructions hidden in the beans.

His mouth brushes your ear. “Public safety hazard,” he repeats, almost pleased. “S’got a ring to it.”

You elbow him lightly in the ribs.

He grunts, then kisses your hair.

And because the universe has a sick sense of humor, that tiny, stupid bit of tenderness feels more dangerous than the warehouse ever did.

⸻

Rick’s advice sits between the two of you for maybe fifteen minutes before it becomes impossible to ignore.

Not because either of you particularly wants to acknowledge that Rick Grimes has somehow become the unwilling manager of your sex life, but because now that the words are out there—sort your shit out—the tension feels louder somehow, like naming it gave it teeth.

The house settles around you in soft groans and old wood sighs. The others are still eating and talking in that warm, relieved post-meal haze that only comes after a genuinely good scavenging run. It should feel safe and easy but instead, every time Daryl’s hand drifts over your hip or his mouth brushes your ear a little to closely, it feels like a lit match dropped into dry leaves.

You last maybe five more minutes curled against him before you turn your head and murmur, very quietly, “Come upstairs with me.”

He goes still at once.

Not because he doesn’t want to. That part is so obvious it’s almost embarrassing. It lives in the way his arm tightens around your waist, the way his chest expands under your shoulder, the way his hand stops moving for one single second like his whole body is listening too hard. He tips his head just enough that his mouth is near your ear. “Don’t play with me.”

You blink, caught off guard. “I’m serious”

He sighs through his nose, rough and low and very much not immune. “We ain’t rubbin’ one out in a sleepin’ bag again.”

That drags a laugh out of you before you can stop it, all soft and scandalised. “It wasn’t that bad. And I wasn’t suggesting—”

“Were with your eyes.”

“I can’t control my eyes,” you said - squeezin your eyes shut o he couldn’t see your tell.

He scoffs which in Daryl tongue translates to bullshit, but there’s heat all through it now. He wants this. God, he wants this. He just also wants the version of it where he can actually put his hands on you properly without someoene accidentally becoming part of the experience.

You shift in his lap anyway, because your restraint has been on life support for days and you are no longer prepared to pretend otherwise. “We don’t have to go all the way.” You slide your hand up over his chest, tracing the edge of his vest, and feel the way his breathing changes under your palm. “Just… upstairs.”

The hesitation is still there, but it’s losing ground.

Because he knows you. Knows exactly what your voice sounds like when you’ve hit the end of your rope. Knows what his own body has been doing every time you get too close and then move away. Knows the road has stripped you both down to nerves and instinct and want. He mutters something low and filthy under his breath, then pushes to his feet so suddenly you almost laugh again. “Ladies first,” he says.

The room you duck into on the second floor is barely a room at all anymore—just a narrow little bedroom with peeling wallpaper, one broken chair, and a window clouded over with age. The bed frame is long gone, just a rectangle of paler dust on the floor where something once lived, the air smelling like old wood and summer rot.

You barely make it two steps.

His hands are on you so fast, not rough exactly, but urgent in a way that makes your knees soften even before he spins you around and crashes his lips to yours. You back into the wall and he follows, hands braced on either side of your head for a heartbeat before they start moving—your waist, your ribs, your throat, your hips—like he’s been starved off touch so long he no longer knows how to do it sparingly.

This is why the sleeping bag idea was doomed. Daryl doesn’t do anything halfway once he gives himself permission.

His mouth is everywhere at once — your jaw, your neck, the slope of your shoulder. He kisses like he’s making up for lost time, open-mouthed and relentless, and whatever hesitation he brought upstairs evaporates the second your fingers get in his hair and you pull him back down to you harder.

Your shirt goes first, dragged over your head in a clumsy, breathless tangle that leaves you laughing once into his mouth before he kisses the sound away. Then your bra, and the moment your chest is bare to the cool, stale air his whole expression changes.

He looks wrecked — actually wrecked. Like the sight of you has punched every coherent thought clean out of his head. “Jesus,” he mutters, and then he bends and proves that there is, in fact, no spot on your skin he intends to leave untouched.

You’re the one who shoves him back toward the floor first, guided more by desperation than grace, and he goes with you, landing hard on the old boards with a grunt while you climb over him in one smooth, greedy motion. Your thighs bracket his hips, your hands fisted in his vest, your hair a curtain around both your faces.

For one second he just stares up at you. His hands land on your waist and stay there, thumbs digging in like he’s keeping you from floating away.

The dry humping starts almost by accident. One roll of your hips just to feel him.

One rough exhale from him that says exactly how bad an idea that was.

Then another because it felt so good the first drag.

And another because it was too good to stop.

And suddenly your whole body is lit up, the friction making your thoughts come apart like torched paper. Even through too many layers, it feels devastating—his jeans, your cargos, the heavy shape of him pressing right where you need something and not enough and oh, god.

You drop your forehead to his shoulder and groan. He laughs once, wrecked and breathless, and tips his hips up to meet you.

There it is. That’s enough to make you lose all pride.

“Yeah,” he mutters against your throat, one hand spreading up your back, the other dragging you down harder against him. “That’s it.”

Your lungs abruptly stop working.

Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the lack of food over a long period of time. Maybe it’s the weeks of wanting finally finding somewhere to go. Whatever it is, you’re dizzy with it in seconds, all the blood in your body rerouted south, burning between your legs so hard it feels cruel.

Daryl’s mouth is at your collarbone now, then lower, then back up, leaving your skin wet and hot and bitten in half a dozen places. You are absolutely going to have hickeys. He seems determined on that point. His mouth keeps finding the same tender places with the concentration of a man signing paperwork.

“You wanna leave marks huh,” you gasp, though it comes out more like an accusation wrapped in a moan.

“Mm,” he says against your breast, entirely unrepentant. “Maybe.”

“You are such a freak.”

“Look who’s talkin’.”

You shove your hand down the front of his jeans and grin at the noise he makes. Not quite a moan — more like someone hit him in the chest with a bat.

There is no dignity left between either of you now. You’ve become a pair of starving animals, and Daryl—who had been trying to pretend he was somehow the composed one—immediately loses that illusion the second your fingers manage to wrap around him.

His head drops back against the floorboards. “Oh, fuck.” He grabs the back of your neck and kisses you so hard your thoughts scatter like birds.

The rhythm gets rougher after that. Needier. And somehow he starts winning, if this is a competition, because his hands are everywhere and yours can’t decide what they want more—his hair, his throat, what’s inside his jeans, under his shirt, all of it at once. You rock down against him again and he actually curses into your mouth, one of his hands gripping your hip so hard it almost hurts.

The room is too hot. Your skin feels feverish. Your breasts are aching from the scrape of his stubble and the drag of his mouth and the way he keeps licking over the marks he leaves like he’s proud of them. You’re so turned on you could combust, one long unbearable pull low in your body, and the friction is so good you can barely think around it.

Which is probably why neither of you hears Maggie the first time.

The second time, what you do hear is her voice drifting up from downstairs, faint through the floorboards. Calling your fucking name.

Your whole body locks. Daryl’s hand stills on your thigh.

You both listen.

Then, louder, Maggie calls your name again: “It’s your watch.”

You close your eyes.

From somewhere below, Rick’s voice cuts in, valiantly trying to save your lives. “Uh—don’t know where she is, I’ll just—”

And then Carl, traitor to the nation, says with perfect sincerity, “I swear I saw her and Daryl go upstairs.”

Your head falls back in pure, cosmic despair.

There is a long silence in which you can actually hear the universe laughing. Then you bury your face in your hands and groan. “Why does God punish me specifically.”

Daryl, who is still painfully, visibly hard under you, drags both hands down his face like he’s trying to peel the frustration off. “You gotta be kiddin’ me.”

The worst part is that Maggie, bless her, has the decency not to yell again right away. Which somehow makes it worse. Now everyone downstairs is just… aware.

You stay where you are for one extra second out of spite. Then another because your body is refusing to accept the ruling. Daryl’s hand comes up and smooths through your hair, his touch suddenly frustratingly gentle now that the moment’s dead. “You’ll live,” he grumbles.

You lift your head and glare at him. “I don’t think I will. Seriously. This is literally killing me.”

“Walk it off.”

“But I don't want to,” you pout.

He strokes your hair again, because apparently he’s decided if he can’t have you he’ll at least pet you through the disappointment. “We’ll get em’ next time.”

“Yeah, right, I have a better chance of becoming a nun… wait, technically I am a nun now, right? Because I ain't getting any?” That's the only noteworthy part of nunhood anyway.

That gets a real huff of laughter from him, but he’s just as wrecked. “That ain’t how it works.”

His jeans are doing absolutely nothing to hide the huge problem, and the second you notice him trying—badly—to angle himself into something resembling dignity, the giggle escapes you before you can stop it. “Shuddup,” he mutters.

You sit back on his thighs enough to appreciate the full extent of his misery and have to bite your lip not to laugh again.

Downstairs, Maggie calls one more time, now definitely amused. “You comin?”

“Yup!” you yell back, then mutter under your breath, “I fucking wish.”Daryl scoffs, but he definitely agrees with you in spirit.

You reach for your shirt and drag it back on, wrinkled and useless, not even bothering with the bra because what exactly had it done for you besides get removed. You grab your rifle, sling it over one shoulder, then look back at him still sprawled on the floorboards, one hand braced over his eyes, the other very obviously trying to hide the state of him.

It is almost enough to make you stay.

Almost.

You step back over him, lean down and cup his jaw with one hand. He looks up instantly. “I’ll be back later,” you say, because hope is all you’ve got left.

“You better.”

You lean down until your mouths are barely apart. “Kiss me like you’ll miss me, Dixon.”

And boy does he.

His hand comes up behind your head at once, fingers threading into your hair, holding you there while he kisses you slow and filthy enough to make your knees threaten mutiny all over again. It’s not rushed. Not sweet either. Just a deep, furious promise pressed mouth to mouth.

You pull away before you can change your mind and throw your watch shift straight into hell. Then you stand, turn, and stomp downstairs with the exact energy of a child summoned to dinner only to discover it’s mostly green vegetables.

The second you hit the ground floor, every pair of eyes pretends very hard not to be looking at you. That alone tells you everything.

Maggie takes one glance at your flushed face, your slightly wrecked shirt, the absence of Daryl, and has the nerve to look innocent.

You stop dead in front of her and flip her off.

She bites back a smirk.

“Cockblocker,” you mutter.

From across the room, Rick puts both hands over his face.

And somewhere upstairs, floorboards creak under the weight of one very frustrated man reconsidering every choice that brought him here.

—

...You last about thirty minutes.

Thirty heroic, miserable, entirely uneventful minutes of watch, sitting by the front window with your rifle across your lap and your nerves lit up like somebody had shoved a live wire under your skin. Outside, the woods are black and still, the moon caught in the high branches, the road beyond the trees pale as bone. Nothing moves. Nothing groans. Nothing snaps a twig or drags a foot or gives you a single useful excuse to focus on anything other than the fact that Daryl was probably just as frustrated, unfinished, and probably still lying there on that dusty floor with his jeans half-fastened and murder in his heart.

You try to be noble about it. You try to be a helpful asset to the group.

You try very hard not to think about his mouth on your skin, his hand in your hair, the way his eyes had gone all dark and helpless right before Maggie ruined your life.

At minute twenty-eight, you decide that being helpful is overrated.

At minute thirty, you abandon your post like a woman with a mission from God.

Glenn is asleep beside Maggie near the fireplace, his blanket pulled up to his chin, one arm tucked awkwardly under his head. Maggie is curled toward him, dead to the world, and you crouch beside him with the stealth of someone about to commit a felony for the greater good.

“Glenn,” you whisper, barely louder than breath.

Nothing. You poke his shoulder with two fingers.

“Glenn.”

He jerks awake so violently his hand shoots toward his knife, eyes wide and terrified, mouth opening around a strangled noise you smother by clapping your palm in the air like no, no, no, shut up, shut up.

“It’s me,” you hiss. “It’s me. Relax.”

He blinks at you, disoriented, hair smashed on one side and sticking straight up on the other. “What—what happened?”

“I need you to take watch.”

His face slowly empties of panic and refills with suspicion. “Why?”

“…I’m tired,” you croaked. You hadn’t really thought of the reason you were gonna tell him to switch with you. “I’m basically falling asleep over here. You really wanna put the lives of those dearest to you with someone as incompetent as me keeping watch?”

Even in the dark, even half-asleep, even with the world ending around you, Glenn manages to look offended by the quality of your lie. “You woke me up,” he whispers, “to tell me you’re tired?”

“…Yes.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You didn’t.”

“Why are you arguing with me when you could be getting up?”

His eyes narrow. Then something terrible happens: he wakes up the rest of the way. His gaze flicks over you—your flushed face, your hair still a little wild from Daryl’s hands upstairs, the way you keep glancing towards where Daryl was tossing and turning in the corner —and realization crawls over his expression with dawning horror. “Oh.”

You point at him. “Don’t.”

“Oh,” he says again, quieter, worse.

“Glenn.”

“You want me to take your watch so you can—”

“If you finish that sentence, I will wake up Maggie right now and tell her about the time i walked in on you with a porno magazine-”

“ok ok, stop!” he cuts you off. “You barely said you were coming in, and that was before I even met Maggie!”

“I'm sure she would be very interested to know what magazine you were looking at”, you said slyly. For one glorious second, you have him. His eyes widen in betrayal.  “You’re bluffing.”

“Please,” you chuckle. “I have done far worse for less.” 

He looks genuinely wounded now. “You’re a monster.”

“I am a woman in need of assistance.”

“You are extorting me.”

“Oh cmon -- I am negotiating.” 

He drags both hands down his face, careful not to wake Maggie, and breathes out through his fingers. 

You reach into your pocket with the grave solemnity of a person cutting off their own arm and pull out your final bargaining chip: three condoms, slightly battered, wrapped in hope and lint.

Glenn’s eyes go to them.

Then to you.

Then back to them.

Your voice drops. “I am willing to sweeten the pot.”

His face does an entire emotional journey in silence: shock, temptation, guilt, temptation again, then the realisation that Maggie would absolutely kill him if he passed up apocalypse contraception out of prudishness. “You’re giving me those?”

“Don’t make me say it twice. It hurts.”

He takes them like you’ve handed him state secrets. Then he immediately looks miserable about the entire arrangement. “Fine. But you owe me.”

“I am literally paying you.”

“You owe me time. Next time Maggie and I need—” He cuts himself off with a pained grimace, like the sentence has teeth. “You know.”

You raise both eyebrows. “Need what?”

His jaw clenches. “…Time alone.”

“Say it properly.”

“No.”

“Glenn.”

“I’m not saying it when you know what I’m asking.”

“If you can’t talk about it, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

He gives you the flattest look he has ever managed. “You talk about it constantly.”

“Exactly,” you whisper, delighted. “Which means I should be doing it constantly. I’m working on that tonight.”

He squeezes his eyes shut. “I hate this conversation.”

“You’re welcome for the sexual maturity seminar.”

He opens one eye. “Go. Before I change my mind.”

You grab his face and press a fat kiss to his cheek with a dramatic mwah sound as he squirms in your iron grip. “You were always my favourite Rhee.”

“Favourite what? Person to swap shifts with?”

“Love ya!”

You leave him there to gather his boots and whatever remains of his dignity, moving through the room on bare, careful feet, stepping over packs and blankets and sleeping bodies. The house has gone quiet in that deep-road way, full of heavy breaths and shifting floorboards, the kind of sleep that isn’t peaceful so much as involuntary.

Daryl is in the corner that the two of you had claimed, half-turned toward the wall, his blanket shoved down around his waist. He looks like he tried to sleep and failed out of spite. His mouth is set even unconscious, brows faintly pinched, one arm folded beneath his head.

You crouch beside him and lay your hand on his shoulder.

He comes awake like a trap snapping shut.

One second still, the next upright, hand already going for his knife, every line of him hard and ready—until his eyes find you. The fight drains out in a single breath, replaced by confusion, then heat, then the memory of you and how you left him. “Wha—”

You press a finger to your lips and nod toward the back door.

His eyes narrow.

You nod again.

And he follows after you - of course he does.

He doesn’t ask questions while you lead him through the sleeping house and out into the summer night. He doesn’t ask when he catches sight of Glenn settling miserably near the front window with your rifle across his knees. He does, however, make a face—a slow, suspicious scrunch of nose and brow that says he is beginning to understand there has been some sort of interaction between you.

You keep walking.

Around the side of the house, past the sagging porch, into the darker line of trees where the moonlight breaks into strips, and the air smells like leaves, dirt, and cooling sweat. It’s not warm exactly, not after midnight, but the chill doesn’t reach you properly. You’re too keyed up. Too alive in your skin. Too full of unfinished business.

When you’re far enough that the house is just a dim block behind the trees, you turn around.

Daryl stops a few paces away.

You kick off one boot. Then the other.

His face goes blank.

Your socks follow. Then your shirt, dragged over your head and dropped without ceremony into the grass. “Swapped shifts with Glenn,” you say, already working at your pants. “Cost me my last condoms and my dignity, but those were on the way out anyway.”

Daryl just stares.

You shove your pants down your legs, step out, and straighten in front of him wearing nothing but the silvered brush of moonlight and the goosebumps rising over your bare skin. The air pebbles your nipples instantly; you resist the instinct to cover yourself because the look on his face is worth the cold. “So,” you continue, as if you’re explaining a perfectly reasonable plan, “we are going to fuck in the dirt like God intended.”

His mouth parts. Nothing comes out. It is possible his braiun shortcircuited. 

You tilt your head. “You just gonna stand there like a loser, or are you gonna take your pants off?”

That gets him moving, though he does it like the act pains him. His hands go to his belt, fingers rougher than they need to be, breath already uneven. You cross the space before he’s even got the buckle open, toes sinking into the cool dirt, and catch his mouth in something slow.

At first it’s you setting the pace—soft pressure, tongue teasing, palms sliding up the front of his vest as if you’ve got all night. Then his hand cups the back of your neck and the whole thing changes. He kisses you with a sureness that makes your knees weak, deep and controlled and hungry enough to put an end to every illusion of leadership you were carrying. His other hand slides over your waist, down your hip, shameless and familiar, then between your legs, fingers finding you already slick enough to make his breath hitch against your mouth.

You smile into the kiss, because you feel it. That little stumble in him. “There,” you whisper, lips brushing his. “Knew you’d give in eventually.”

He answers by dragging his fingers through you again, slower this time, watching your face like he wants every twitch.

Your words catch, but they don’t stop. They never do when you’re like this. “God I missed your hands,” you murmur, one hand fisting in the front of his vest. “Missed you touching me like you already know what I’m gonna do before I do it.”

His eyes flick up to yours, dark and sharp.

“You do,” you whisper, and the honesty comes out filthy somehow, soft and wrecked. “You know me way too well. You know exactly where to touch, exactly how to make me stupid. Been thinking about it for days - all week, weeks maybe. God, I don’t even know anymore.”

His jaw tightens. His fingers press just right, and you gasp, hips bucking into his hand before you can stop yourself. “That,” you breathe, smiling because he felt it too. “That’s what I mean.”

“Keep talkin’,” he mutters, rough enough to barely be words.

You laugh under your breath. “really does it for you huh?”

His forehead dips to yours. “You’ve no idea.”

That should not hit you as hard as it does. You cup his jaw, kiss him once, then keep going because the way he reacts to your voice is becoming its own kind of intoxication.

“You want me to tell you how bad I’ve needed you?” you whisper. “How many times I almost grabbed you by that damn vest and dragged you behind the nearest tree? How I’ve been lying next to you every night trying not to climb on top of you in front of the whole damn group like some kind of desperate woman with no home training?”

A sound breaks out of him—half laugh, half groan—and then his hands are under your thighs.

He lifts you, your legs wrapping around his waist on instinct, and he carries you a few steps deeper into the trees, mouth returning to yours with enough force to swallow your next breath. Then he lowers you to the ground slowly, one arm behind your back, one hand at your hip, careful even now, even when his whole body is shaking with restraint. The grass is cool under your spine. Dirt presses against your bare shoulder blades, leaves scratching gently at your skin.

He breaks the kiss and starts moving south - and you know exactly where he’s going. “Daryl—”

He ignores the warning in your voice because his mouth is already pressing at your stomach, then your hip, then lower, dragging heat across your skin with each open-mouthed kiss. By the time he settles between your thighs, the last of your patience dies. He latches onto you like he’s doing it for himself, not for you, like this is something he’s been denied and intends to take back with interest.

The gasp that leaves you is so sudden and sharp you don’t know if it came from you or some other equally doomed woman in the woods.

It’s obscene how ready you are for him. How wet. How your body gives him everything immediately, no pride left, no delay. His mouth works you like he’s starving, and the slick sound of it in the quiet dark makes heat rush up your chest and throat. You slap a hand over your own mouth for half a second, then drag it into his hair instead because that feels more useful.

He looks up when you tap his shoulder, eyes heavy and wild, face wet, expression so open it nearly breaks something in you.

“What,” he rasps, and you swore he sounded upset.

“We don’t have time,” you whisper, breathless, already pulling at him. “And honestly, I feel like I’ve been in foreplay for weeks, so it’s not exactly a tragedy if we skip a chapter.”

His mouth twitches, a grin ghosting his face.

You grab his face and pull him up to yours, kissing him hard, tasting yourself on him, using the distraction to work him free from his pants. He lets you, though the sound he makes when your hand closes around him is enough to make your whole body clench.

You guide him between to your cunt, slicking him through the mess he’s made of you, and for one strange, suspended second, your brain expects cruelty.

This is where the dream would cut off. This is where you’d wake gasping and humiliated with nothing but cold ground and frustration.

But you don’t wake. Daryl is still over you. Real. Heavy. Breathing hard. His eyes search your face, one last check, one last silent question. You answer by wrapping your legs tighter around him and pulling him closer.

He pushes in slowly.

The stretch is a sharp, bright thing at first, a scratch of too much after too long without, but underneath it is relief so profound it almost makes your eyes sting. You cling to his huge shoulders, fingers bunching in the worn fabric of his vest, and your whole body seems to open around him in increments, remembering, accepting, aching for the rest.

He stops halfway with a ruined grunt against your neck. You can feel him holding himself back. Feel the tremor in his arms. Feel the breath trapped in his chest because he’s trying to give you time to adjust, because he knows it’s been a while, because no matter how desperate he is, he still knows how to be careful with you.

You cup his face and force him up enough to see you. “Move baby,” you whisper.

His eyes darken, but he still hesitates.

“Please,” you add, softer, but no less wrecked, hand going to his lower neck to urge him forward.  “I need you to move. We both need you to move.”

The breath leaves him all at once and his hips rock.

Slow at first. Deep enough to pull a sound from you that barely qualifies as human. It is absurd, the whole scene—your bare body spread out in the dirt beneath a man still sorta-dressed, your ass probably covered in dirt, your hair full of grass, the two of you finally losing your minds in the woods at some ungodly hour because the apocalypse gave you no better bedroom. It should be funny.

It is kinda funny.

It is also the best thing you’ve felt in weeks.

You laugh once, bright and breathless, and it snaps into a squeal when he fills you again, even deeper this time. “Fuck,” you whisper, delighted, overwhelmed. “Oh my god, Daryl. That’s—yes.  Jesus it’s so so much better than I remembered.”

You keep talking because you can’t help it, because the words are as much release as the movement. “Godd don’t stop, please don’t stop - just like that,” you whine.

His head drops, mouth finding your shoulder.

“There you are,” you breathe, stroking the back of his head the way you know undoes him, fingers slipping through sweaty hair. “That’s what I missed. You feeling this good. You getting all quiet n shy and serious — like you’re doing important work.”

A rough laugh shakes out of him. “Don’ worry - ain’t stoppin’ for nobody.” He huffs against your skin, but his hips aim up in answer, and the new angle steals your breath clean out of your chest. “Oh—shit—yes, that. Baby, that’s it.”

He changes pace — the hand under your head slides higher, cupping your skull, lifting you so he can watch your face. It’s devastatingly intimate in the middle of all this dirt and desperation, his thumb brushing once over your cheekbone while the rest of him drives into you with a focus that borders on feral. Your own hand drops from his hair to the back of his neck, holding him there, keeping his eyes on yours even when yours start to blur.

The tease you’ve been living in for weeks has been all sharp edges and unmet need, a painful little ache with nowhere to go. This is different. This is warm. Heavy. Eye-watering. A relief so deep it feels almost serene under the fever of it, like your body has finally stopped bracing against absence and remembered how to soften around him.

You try to press your lips together to stay quiet, and he sees it. Sees your eyes roll back, sees your face go slack with pleasure you can’t hide, and something in him visibly snaps. “Missed that,” he breathes, so low you almost don’t catch it. “Missed seein’ you like this.”

Your legs are useless around him now, loose and shaking, swaying with every powerful thrust. His grip on your hips and ass is bruising, pulling you down to meet him, making sure nothing between you is wasted. The pressure is building fast—his body grinding just right, cock bullying the same bright place over and over until your fingers claw at his vest and your breath turns ragged.

You get maybe five seconds of warning. “Darylll,” you gasp. “I think I’m—”

He hears it and groans like it hurts. “Yeah?”

“I’m—fuck, m'cumming—”

It washes over you so hard your body bows under him. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and you were no exception - fuck, you missed Daryl-induced orgasms. Your whole body lights up into fireworks like it's the Fourth of July. You swear you died and went to fucking heaven because all you remember is your vision turning to spots and hearing a muffled sound similar to your own, but also not far from a dying animal being smothered.  You manage to muffle most of the sound against his mouth, but not all of it, and he swallows what he can while your whole body goes taut, then liquid, then shaking in waves. It is messy and intense and impossible to hide from, literally - it's like a waterpark between your legs and Daryl is front seat in the splash zone. 

Thank god you warned him because he doesn’t last much longer after that, not with how long it’s been. Not with your legs locked around his waist and your hips still chasing him through the aftershocks like your body hasn’t had enough sense to stop. He swears he hears you whisper inside, but he can't be sure if that's you or the twisted voice in his head.

He has no zero chance of pulling out - your legs are locked and sealed around him, and from the way his breath breaks, he knows it. And secretly, he is grateful because he isn’t sure he is strong enough to leave your warmth

Brother just accepts his fate, buries his face in your neck, and lets go with a low, strangled sound that vibrates through your skin. His hips stutter once, twice, and he finally cums with balls flushed to your ass, and the next thing you feel is warmth flooding your insides. You hold him through it, grinning like an idiot, your hands gentler now, one in his hair and one between his shoulder blades, feeling the tremors move through him until his weight slumps over you. 

For a while, neither of you moves.

The woods breathe around you. Bugs hum. The dirt is cool under your back. His chest is warm and solid against yours, his breath damp against your throat. Your heart slows in pieces. Your brain, which has been unavailable for several minutes, returns just enough to observe that you are naked in the grass, sticky, dirty, probably bitten by several insects (including Daryl), and happier than you have been in weeks.

Daryl shifts enough to keep from crushing you but does not pull away. One hand smooths over your hair, picking out a leaf with grave concentration. “Still mad atcha,” he mutters eventually.

You laugh weakly. “Funny way of showing it.”

He lifts his head just enough to glare at you. It is much less effective with his hair in his eyes and his body still softening inside you.

“You pull that shit again for a can of beans, I ain't gonna come getcha.” Ohh he’s so full of shit.

“The beans fed us.”

“You almost fed them.”

You smile and stroke his cheek with the backs of your fingers. “But I didn’t.”

His look says he has aged six years since sundown. “Gonna be the death’a me.”

“You keep saying that,” you murmur. “And yet, here you are. Very alive. Very accomplished.” He drops his forehead to yours and huffs a laugh despite himself.

Then a voice drifts from the direction of the house, careful and carrying through the trees with the exact tone of a man doing his absolute best not to picture anything. “Hey, guys?”

You and Daryl freeze.

Glenn clears his throat from somewhere mercifully far away. “Not looking. Not looking ok! Just, uh… just warning you, Carl’s switching over soon, and I really don’t want him to be scarred.”

You close your eyes.

Daryl groans into your shoulder like a wounded animal.

There’s a pause.

Then Glenn adds, faintly shell-shocked, “Also… wow, you guys really make alot of noise”

“Glenn!” you hiss. Daryl straightened up so he could conceal your body mody more with his. “No one asked ya ta listen man.”

“Hey Daryl — and I wasnt,” he calls back immediately. “Believe me i wish i could unhear it,”

Daryl lifts his head just enough to mutter, “I’m gonna kill him.”

“You cannot kill him, he’s keeping watch,” you whisper. “We owe him condoms.”

Daryl stills, and very slowly, he looks at you. “You owe him what.”

You smile with all the innocence left in your body, which is none. “Negotiations were fierce.”

He stares at you for one beat, two, then drops his face into your neck and starts laughing so quietly his shoulders shake. And for the first time in weeks, really and fully, you feel the road loosen its teeth.

——

Morning comes softer than it has any right to. The house still looks half-haunted in daylight, all peeling wallpaper and warped floorboards and dust lifting lazily through the beams of sun, but it smells like breakfast now, which makes even the rot in the corners feel less committed to the bit. Someone has coaxed a thin pot of oats into existence with water, a handful of salvaged raisins, and the kind of optimism only starvation can produce. It is not good, exactly, but it is hot, and hot counts for a lot.

The group moves in that sluggish, post-sleep shuffle of people who know they have to pack up but are trying to pretend the road doesn’t exist yet. Bedrolls get shaken out. Weapons are checked. Canteens are passed around and refilled from the precious little water you have left. Glenn is at the window, very determinedly looking anywhere except directly at you, which is unfortunate for him because his ears go pink every time he accidentally catches your eye.

Daryl, on the other hand, has apparently woken up possessed.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a throw you over his shoulder and announce ownership to the room way, but still. For Daryl, this is practically a parade.

He is everywhere.

Leaning into your space while you sit against the wall. Passing you a cup of water and letting his fingers linger a second too long around yours. Brushing past your shoulder even though there is plenty of room. Standing behind you with one hand braced on the wall above your head while he pretends to listen to Rick discuss the route. It’s not showy, not enough for anyone to call him on it without sounding nosy, but you feel every inch of it. The quiet gravity of him. The warmth at your back. The way his hand lands at your hip and slides just a little lower than it usually would in front of everybody before he seems to remember himself and stills there, stubbornly refusing to move it back up.

“You’re being sweet this morning,” you smile at him, voice syrupy. He tells you to shut up - true love everybody. And then ruins the denial by brushing his thumb over your lower back as he turns away.

Across the room, Carol’s mouth twitches into a smile she hides behind her cup.

Maggie drops down beside you a few minutes later with her own bowl balanced between her knees and the kind of look that says she has decided to make your morning worse. She glances over you once—your rumpled shirt, your hair still not quite free of leaves, the dirt smudged behind your knee despite your best attempt at washing up in the cold—then raises her eyebrows. “You’re a little dirtier than your usual filth.”

You nearly choke on your oats. “Good morning to you too.”

“It is.” Her eyes flick to your neck. “For some more than others, looks like.”

You slap a hand over the spot too late.

Daryl, from beside you, pretends that it’s none of his business.

Maggie bites down on a smile. “Relax. Most of us are pretending not to notice.”

“Most of you?”

She tips her head toward Glenn, who immediately busies himself with a strap on his pack as if it has become the most fascinating object in the known universe.

You narrow your eyes. “Your husband has keen ears, I’ll give him that.”

“Its a gift and a curse,” Maggie says, voice dropping into a whisper that turns wicked around the edges. “And thanks, by the way.”

Your eyes widen, and she takes a calm bite of breakfast.

You stare at her. “Did he—”

“No details,” she says at once, holding up a hand. “I accepted the goods. I did not ask about what he did to get them.”

“yeah well not that you desrve it,” you say, covering your face with one hand. “You’re still a traitor for ratting me out yesterday”

Maggie pats your knee with deep, sisterly cruelty. “You look happier.”

You peek at her through your fingers. “Do I?”

“Oh yeah. You’re practically glowing and I think I know why,” she said, looking over to Daryl who was scoffing over his porridge.

You try to glare, but it dissolves almost instantly, because she’s right and you both know it. The awful tightness that had been sitting under your ribs for weeks is gone, or at least loosened. The world is still ruined. You are still hungry. Your feet still hurt. You still have no idea what the next road will do to you.

But your skin feels like yours again.

Your breathing feels easier.

And when Daryl settles behind you, one knee bracketing your side, and silently takes your bowl from your hand to scrape another spoonful of oats into it, your chest does something painfully soft.

Maggie watches this with shining eyes and the tiniest possible smirk.

You point your spoon at her. “Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking too loud.”

Daryl hands the bowl back to you, fuller than before, then stays close enough that his thigh presses against your shoulder. His fingers brush your hair once, picking out a tiny piece of grass with grave concentration.

Tara, who has clearly been waiting for an opening from the other side of the room, leans over her pack with a grin. “So, since we’re all alive and emotionally renewed this morning—hypothetically—if there was a gallon of water at the bottom of a ravine, would you jump for it?”

You pause with the spoon halfway to your mouth.

“Sorry,” Tara corrects herself. “What I meant was how long would it take you to jump for it?” A couple of people in the group chuckle - we’ve got ourselves a comedian over here.

Then you squint at her as the suggestion has personally offended your new, evolved spirit.

“The fuck would i do that for?” you ask. “That sounds insane.”

The room goes quiet for one delicate second, as if the group needed time to process that it was actually you who saud that and not some clone.

"Holy shit," Tara points at you with both hands. “She’s cured.”

“I am indeed a changed woman,” you say solemnly, sitting a little straighter. “A woman of wisdom. A woman of restraint. A woman who would maybe send someone else after the water first… like Glenn.”

Glenn puts his arms out, as if saying the hell did I do?

Daryl scoffs, still fiddling with the back of your hair, which seems to have replaced his nail biting.

“Progress,” Michonne says, dry as dust, though there’s the barest curve at the corner of her mouth.

“Temporary,” Rick mutters, but there’s warmth in it now, faint and reluctant, as his gaze drifts from you to Daryl and back again.

You see the exact moment the pieces start arranging themselves behind his eyes. The second helping Daryl has silently bullied into your bowl. The way he’s settled behind you, legs bracketing your sides, one arm slung low around your waist like he’s pretending to be casual and failing with his entire body. The way you, for the first time in days, are not vibrating like a bowstring pulled too tight.

Rick’s expression goes carefully, dangerously blank.

Then, very slowly, he looks away.

Heat creeps up your neck.

Daryl catches the change in you instantly and lifts his head. “What?”

“Nothing,” Rick says, too quickly.

Daryl narrows his eyes. “Don’t sound like nothin’.”

“I said nothing.”

Without looking up from your bowl, you point your spoon at Daryl. “Leave Rick alone. He’s respecting boundaries.”

Rick gives you the flattest look a man can give while holding porridge.

You smile sweetly back at him. “See? Growth all around. We’re sorting out a lot of things today.”

Behind you, Daryl goes very still for half a second. Then his mouth dips close to your ear, his voice low enough that it brushes right under your skin. “M’down to sort it out again.”

You elbow him lightly in the ribs, but you’re smiling too hard for it to land with any real force. “Shut up.”

“What?” His hand tightens briefly at your hip, smugness bleeding into his whisper. “Rick said we had to sort it out.”

“Pretty sure he didn’t mean traumatize Glenn.”

From across the room, Glenn says, without turning around, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Daryl calls back, deadpan.

Glenn drops his head into his hands. Maggie laughs so hard she has to set her bowl down before she spills it, and even Rick’s stern-leader face cracks around the edges.

That is, of course, the exact moment Carl wanders back in from outside, rubbing sleep from one eye, hair smashed on one side. The whole room goes abruptly, suspiciously normal in a way that is not normal at all.

Carl stops in the doorway and looks around. “Why’s everyone weird?”

“No reason,” six people say at once.

He stares at all of you for a few seconds, deeply unimpressed and far too young to be trusted with silence. Then his gaze lands on you and Daryl, still tucked together in your corner, and his brow furrows with sudden, earnest concern.

“Is it because you and Daryl went hunting in the middle of the night and didn’t get anything?”

Glenn makes a strangled noise into his sleeve.

Carl looks around, bewildered by the reaction. “There’s plenty of porridge,” he continues, like he’s trying to comfort two grieving providers. “You guys bring enough food in as it is. It’s not fair that people are upset just because you couldn’t find anything this one time.”

You stare at him. Then, very slowly, you put a hand over your heart.

“Thank you, Carl,” you say, voice trembling with false emotion. “That means more than you know.”

Daryl’s knee shifts under your hand; you can feel him trying not to laugh, which only makes you worse.

“We work night and day,” you continue, your hand sliding dramatically onto Daryl’s knee, “not afraid to get our hands dirty, not afraid to brave the woods alone, all to provide for this family. And yes, maybe in some ways last night was… fruitless.”

Glenn scoffs at that, clearly disagreeing with that statement, while Maggie buries her face in her hands. You keep going, because now that you’ve started, dignity is dead, and you are dancing on its grave. “But we gave it everything we had. Didn’t we, Daryl?”

Daryl has both hands over his face now, shoulders shaking. Whether from laughter, embarrassment, or the profound desire to sink through the floor, it’s hard to tell. You stroke his back with solemn tenderness. “Look at him. He can’t even speak, he's so broken up about it.”

“Stop,” Glenn wheezes.

“I only hope,” you say, lifting your spoon like a preacher before a ruined congregation, “that someday you can all find it in your hearts to forgive us.”

Rick finally loses the battle. A laugh slips out before he can stop it, rough and tired and real. He points his spoon at you, trying and failing to look stern. “Shut up and finish your breakfast,” he says, still laughing under his breath. “We leave in half an hour.”

The room breaks open around that—not too loud, not reckless, but real. A laugh here, a groan there, Tara clapping Glenn on the shoulder, Rick pretending not to smile and failing by a mile. It’s stupid and mortifying and warm in a way you’d forgotten mornings could be. Even the road waiting outside feels less like a punishment and more like something you might survive because you are not walking into it hollow anymore.

When breakfast is done, and the packing finally becomes unavoidable, you stand and brush dust from your jeans, only for your knees to give the tiniest, traitorous wobble. It is barely anything. Practically imaginary. Unfortunately, Daryl notices because Daryl notices everything about you when it is inconvenient. You lean close enough to murmur, "You may have slowed me down today, but honestly, I’m not even mad.”

His ears go red so fast you feel victorious for the next ten minutes.

Outside, the day waits bright and mean, the road stretching beyond the trees like it always has, indifferent and hungry. Packs go on. Weapons settle into familiar places. Rick checks the map one last time. The group begins to move in that tired, practiced formation that has kept you alive this long.

You think about the warehouse, the beans, the roof, the hunger. You think about the prison, the dream, the grass under your back, Glenn’s traumatised little voice from the dark. You think about the full bellies, softer shoulders, Daryl’s mouth at your ear, laughing against your skin, and what's to come next.

You slide your hand into his for exactly three steps, where no one can really see. His thumb strokes once over your knuckles before he lets go, because public affection still has its limits and Daryl Dixon is still Daryl Dixon, even freshly sorted out.