Roby @zomquette - Tumblr Blog

Cuentos De Dixons

Summary: Loving Daryl Dixon came with fine print: Merle. During laundry duty in the prison yard, what starts as casual storytelling turns into a full-blown public humiliation ritual, with Merle airing out exactly how he discovered your secret relationship, Daryl trying not to combust, and half the group learning far too much. Between dirty laundry, thin curtains, old insults, morbid curiosity, brotherly baggage, and one very questionable apology, you’re forced to decide whether Merle is worth tolerating. Unfortunately, because he’s Daryl’s family, he’s yours too.

Warnings: Merle is a pretty huge warning, Discussion of racism and xenophobia Racist language / microaggressions, allusions to racit slurs (i was too uncomfortable to put it in but you get what he means) Sexist comments Crude sexual humour Accidental voyeurism (Merle is a peeping Tom 😃) References to sexual content Implied sexual content Established sexual relationship Alcohol consumption Drunkenness, ngl some cringy parts here and there sue me, some fluff, alot of crack, angst with happy ending, SMUT !!! shower sex, then bedroom sex, merle stole their condoms so do the math 😏, intimate sex, uhh what else oh awful Spanish sorry to spanish speakers, I've been told i get the gender of Sanish wrong o bare that in mind.

Author's note: This is only about 40k words 😃 sorry. this was based off a request i got almost a year ago which ill make a post about but i also combined it with a few other requests for another latina fic (go check out Corazon if you haven't already<3). The tenses' in this fic does get a lil confusing i will say that but hang in there soldier ✊. And i cannot reiterate this enough i am a white woman; i will never undertand what racial discrimination is like firsthand (argue with the wall) so this fic isnt exactly taken from retrospect 💀 this is supposed to be a fun fic however so try and enjoy it to the most if you can get through it 🩷 This wouldnt be a class TWD fic without a bit of angst. My inbox is always open if you wanna share your thoughts on this or comment below :) Anyway without further ado enjoy 🙈 (ill do a moodboard later I'm tired)

Morning at the prison came with heat already rising off the concrete, with the sour-metal stink of the fence, with walkers piling up outside the chain-link like shoppers on Black Friday. Their fingers hooked through the gaps, gray and split and grasping, teeth clacking wetly at anyone who got too close. The fence crew had been at it since dawn—spears punching through skulls, boots scraping gravel, somebody muttering for the love of God every time another one staggered in to replace the last.

Beyond that, life went on with the stubborn, ridiculous insistence it always had.

Carol stood by the grill with her sleeves rolled up, flipping something that was sizzling like a snare. A few people drifted near with tin plates in hand, drawn in by hunger more than smell. Someone had managed coffee, or at least hot brown water with ambitions. Kids moved between the cell block and the courtyard in little clusters, running carelessly again like all kids should be. The prison, for all its concrete and razor wire and blood baked into the cracks, had learned how to pretend at normal.

You came out into it with a laundry basket balanced against your hip, the weight already wearing your arms down.

You had put off washing yours and Daryl’s clothes for far too long. Not because you were lazy, despite what Merle would say if given half a chance, but because laundry for two people somehow multiplied in the dark like rabbits. Daryl alone shed enough grime to qualify as a weather system. There were shirts stiff with sweat, socks you were ninety percent sure had once been white, bandanas, several pairs of jeans that looked like Jackson Pollock paintings, a whole lot of gross underwear, and some of his sleeveless shirts you sneaked into the basket because if he caught you trying to wash his clothes he’d try and steal it back.

The basket was heavy enough that you had to stop near the wash tubs and set it down with a dull, wet thump. “Madre de Dios,” you muttered, flexing your fingers.

“Hi, Mrs. Dixon.”

You froze for half a second. The title snagged somewhere warm and ridiculous under your ribs but you’d deny it had any effect on you all the same. Mrs. Dixon. Huh.

You and Daryl weren’t officially married; it’s not even something you’ve ever discussed. It was as if half the prison collectively decided it was easier to call you his wife than explain whatever you were. You suppose girlfriend sounded pretty tacky and childish, and partner sounded like a business affair, so… you didn’t correct Patrick. You only glanced over your shoulder, caught the shy, earnest look on his face, and let yourself grin down at the laundry for one private second before turning around. “Morning, Patrick. How’s it goin’?”

He stood a few feet away with the stiff posture of a little boy on his first day of kindergarten, all limbs and nerves and too much bravery gathered in one place. You noticed his nervous tick of pushing his glasses up the ridge of his nose, eyes darting past you like whatever he needed was standing behind your shoulder with a knife.

Which, unfortunately, was not far from the truth.

Merle Dixon sat on a bucket, shaded near the wall, with one boot on an overturned crate, chewing jerky like he personally resented the cow it came from. He had a wrench in one hand, turning it idly like he was admiring treasure. A little pile of scavenged odds and ends sat near his boot: screwdrivers, pliers, a socket piece, something that might have once belonged to the generator shed.

Patrick stared at him like he was facing a final boss. You followed his gaze and sighed. "What did he take?" Patrick blinked, startled. "I'm sorry?" "Merle," you said, already tired. "What did he take?" Patrick's ears went pink. "...My wrench." "Your wrench?" "Well, not mine mine," he said quickly, because Patrick had the kind of conscience that try to file paperwork before committing theft. "I mean, I found it. I was keeping it. For later. "For later," you repeated. His whole face lit despite the fear. "Yeah. I mean, if we ever find something with an engine that isn't completely destroyed, I thought maybe I could help fix it up. Like, not a car, probably, because that's a lot, but maybe a bike or a go-kart or something. It was something me and my dad used to do..." He seemed embarrassed from how you were staring at him. "That sounded less stupid in my head" "No," you said, softening despite yourself. "That sounds like it would be put to much better use than whatever Merle was planning to use it for." Your money was on him using it as a new hand and calling himself Mr Gadget. Patrick gave you a hopeful, helpless little smile. Then Merle made a show of flipping the wrench in his hand, and Patrick's smile died instantly. You nudged the basket aside with your foot and tipped your chin toward Merle. "Go ask for it back." Patrick swallowed. "Are you crazy?" "Patrick," you sterned, nodding towards Merle. "Go get it back from him." "Ok," he squeaked but still didn't make any effort to move. You almost laughed. "Don't let him intimidate you. He's mostly hot air and tantrums." From the shade, Merle called without looking over, "Heard that." “You were meant to,” you called back.

Patrick took one step. Then another, until he was stood in front of Merle with his shoulders rounded, wrenchless hands hanging at his sides, chin tucked like he was approaching a dog everyone had specifically told him might bite. Which, to be fair, was not an unfair assessment. "Um," Patrick started, but his mouth was suddenly drier than wine. Merle's eyes slid up, slow and mean with boredom. "You got somethin' stuck in yer throat, kid?" Patrick swallowed so hard you saw it from the wash tubs. "Mr. Dixon?" Merle's mouth curled around the strip of jerky wedged between his teeth. "Mr. Dixon's my daddy," he drawled, picking at a molar with his thumbnail. "You wanna speak to him, you gotta travel a whole lot more south, and I ain't talkin' Texas." Patrick's face did something tragic. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again, like his brain had briefly left his body and was now trying to climb back in through the window. "Pardon me, Merle." "Look at that," Merle said, shifting the wrench from one hand to the other. "Almost said it with yer chest." "I, um.." Patrick's eyes flicked down to the wrench, then back up again, then immediately away because Merle was staring at him like an unpaid debt. "I'd like my wrench back, please." Merle glanced at the wrench as if surprised to discover it there. "This?" "Yes." "This thing here?" He lifted it into the sunlight, turned it once, inspected it with great ceremony. "This your wrench?" Patrick nodded, hope gathering in him with painful innocence. "..That's the one." "Huh." Merle squinted at it. "Don't see your name on it." The hope died. You actually watched it leave Patrick's body. His shoulders drooped first, then his chin, then the rest of him folded inward in slow, awful stages. It was more painful than watching a promposal get turned down in a school cafeteria. He gave one tiny nod, like he had accepted this cruel verdict. and started to turn away. You closed your eyes and asked every saint you could remember for patience you didn't think could be rendered anymore but prayed for anyway. Carol, from the grill, did not even look around. "Don't let him make the boy cry before breakfast." You wiped your wet hands down the front of your jeans and crossed the yard. Patrick saw you coming and froze in a miserable little halfway turn, equal parts grateful and mortified. Merle, on the other hand, looked delighted. Like this was the most exciting thing to happen to him all morning, which was probably true, because his hobbies included theft, harassment, and annoying people. “Well, well,” Merle said, leaning back on his crate. “Here comes la jefa.”

You stopped in front of him and held out your hand. "Give the kid his wrench back." Merle looked at your palm, then up at your face. "He wouldn't know what to do with it." "Doesn't matter. It's his." "Might hurt himself." "He's more likely to hurt himself standing near you." Behind you, Patrick made a tiny sound-half laugh, half panic-like amusement had tried to escape and been tackled by survival instinct. Merle's grin sharpened. "Alright, alright, calm down, lil' sister." He lifted both hands, the wrench still held hostage in one of them, then looked past you toward Carol. "In-laws, am I right?" There it was again - the whole prison had apparently held a wedding while you were busy collecting your dirty clothes. From Merle, it sounded less like a title and more like a charge being read aloud in court. Still, the words kicked softly under your ribs, embarrassing and stupidly nice. You didn't correct him - that would have given him far too much joy. You kept your hand out. "Wrench. Now." Merle looked at your hand. Looked at the wrench. Looked back at you. And still, somehow, made no move to hand it over. So you slapped him upside the back of the head -- a crisp, satisfying little smack except it wasn't little. Merle jerked forward, more offended than hurt. "Ow! Woman, what the hell-" "Wrench," you demanded. "Now. Don't make me hit you again." Carol's shoulders started shaking at the grill. She was trying to keep flipping breakfast like she was above this, but one corner of her mouth had given up entirely.

Merle muttered something gross under his breath and shoved the wrench into your hand. You turned and passed it to Patrick, who accepted it with both hands like you had returned a kidnapped sibling from war. "Thank you," he said, clutching it to his chest. You pointed at Merle. “Say you’re welcome.” Merle's face twisted. "Hold on now-" "Merle, di que eres bienvenido!" Shit — you said it in Spanish. Now he has to say it. He glared at Patrick; " yer welcome," he bit out, each word dragged through broken glass. Patrick nodded quickly. "Thank you. Again." You were about to go back to the wash tubs when Patrick's gaze slid, cautious but newly brave, toward the little pile of tools near Merle's boot."Erm," he said. "Is now a good time to say he also took my pliers?" Merle's head snapped toward him. Patrick flinched but, to his credit, continued. "And the long screwdriver. And the thing with the little twisty end." Merle looked about ready to flip. The thing with the little twisty end? His expression said. Why should this kid have tools he don't even know the name of? You stared at him. Then you realised, with some horror, that you had understood the exact shape of Merle's thought without him speaking it aloud. You were spending way too much time around him. Slowly, you turned your head and raised your eyebrows. Merle lifted both hands in defeat. "Fine. I'm goin' to get 'em." "They are right there," you pointed. "The rest of 'em," he called back. "That's only some of it," Patrick added, voice small. "I think he keeps the other stuff he steals under his bed." Merle stared at him, and Patrick shrank half an inch but did not take it back. Then Merle pushed himself off the crate with a groan worthy of a dying man. "Lord above, shoulda stolen his specs first." "He would still see you stealing his wrench - you're not exactly stealthy." you reminded him. "How was I s'posed to know he'd tell his mama on me?" Oh hell no. You took one step forward and Merle immediately took one step back.Smartest thing he’d done all morning. “Get the rest of his shit,” you said, voice sweet enough to curdle milk. “Now.”

Carol finally laughed out loud, bright and quick over the hiss of the grill. Merle pointed at her as he passed. "You stay outta this, Peletier.” Carol flipped the meat with unnecessary force and did not look remotely threatened. "Return the tools, Merle." He kept walking, shoulders hunched in dramatic martyrdom. "Everybody's on my damn back today." You watched him go until he was out of earshot, then turned back to the wash tubs. The morning had already warmed the water unpleasantly, and the pile of clothes waited like a punishment. You knelt, grabbed one of Daryl's shirts, dunked it, and started wringing it out, cloudy water running over your knuckles. The courtyard went on around you. Somebody laughed near the cell block doors. Metal scraped on concrete. Out by the fence, the spear crew worked in a steady rhythm, push and twist, push and twist, walkers dropping like flies and then more turning up to the party. The prison always had a soundtrack now-groans, crows, boots, pots, children's voices, and somewhere in the middle of it all, people pretending not to listen. And strangely, Patrick still hovered by the wash tubs holding his rescued wrench to his chest, looking torn between getting breakfast and clutching the tool tighter in case Merle appears and takes it by force. You glanced up. "Uh... you good, Patrick? Anything else I can do for ya?" You let the mama joke slide for now but no way were letting it become a thing. He stared at you with open awe. "How did you do that?" "Do what?" "That." He gestured vaguely after Merle, then at the wrench, then at you. "Manage him." The word made you bark a laugh. "Manage Merle?" Patrick nodded earnestly. "Yeah. Like... how?" You looked toward where Merle had vanished, then toward the fence where walkers pressed and groaned, then back down at the shirt in your hands. A grin tugged at your mouth before you could stop it. Carol slid a portion of breakfast onto a tin plate and carried it over with the air of someone who had decided this conversation was more interesting than cooking, handing the food to Patrick. “Well it’s not an easy task,” she said, handing Patrick the plate because apparently fear of Merle burned calories. “But he has come a long way I’ll give him that.”

You snorted. "Still has quite a bit to go, though." Carol smiled, eyes flicking toward you. "Well yeah. But baby steps." Patrick leaned in slightly, hooked despite himself. You twisted Daryl's shirt tighter, water streaming into the tub, and felt the story open up behind your ribs like a door you had been waiting all morning to unlock. "Well," you said, settling back on your heels, "compared to how he used to be, sure. Night and day." Patrick clutched his rescued wrench in one hand and his breakfast in the other. You glanced toward the cell block, half expecting Daryl to appear by instinct just because someone had spoken his brother's name too many times in a row. Then you looked back at Patrick. "If you ask Merle, he'll say he's always been compliant." Carol made a soft, disbelieving noise. "But I'd say we saw some real change in him when the rest of Woodbury moved in. Merle came with them, and every single person in this prison wondered how long it would take before somebody stabbed him." Patrick's eyes widened. "And honestly?" you said, wringing out one of Daryl's shirts until water streamed between your knuckles. "It's still a possibility. Carol leaned her hip against the table nearby, half watching the grill, half watching you with that small, knowing smile she got when she already knew a story but wanted to hear how someone else told it. You dunked the shirt again. "When Merle first came here with the Woodbury people," you said, "he was about as welcome as a suspicious rash." Carol hummed. "That's nice." "It is," you smiled. "I'm editing for Patrick." Patrick blinked. "Oh really you don't have to!"

"Oh, sweetheart," Carol said mildly, "yes, she does." You flashed her a grin, then looked down into the cloudy water. "It was pretty bad then," you admitted, softer this time. "Not just because Merle was Merle, though God knows that would've been enough. It was everything he'd done before he got here. What he did to Glenn. How he was complicit in what the Governor had done. Nobody wanted to give him a second chance, even though he was trying to start over for his brother." Patrick's expression shifted, the hero-worship of the story dulling into something more thoughtful. He was young, but not so young he didn't understand what people did when they were scared Carol's eyes flicked toward the cell block. "Rick let him stay because Daryl vouched for him." "He's probably gonna start regretting that any day now if he hasn't already," you chuckled.

From somewhere behind you came the crunch of jerky. Merle had returned at some point, standing a few feet away with a fistful of Patrick's stolen tools dangling from one hand and his strip of jerky in the other, wearing the offended expression of a man walking in on his own eulogy. "Y'all tellin' lies about me?" he asked. "Totally, we were just saying how sweet you are," you smiled, reaching one wet hand out for the tools. Merle looked at you, then at Carol, then apparently decided to let it go, dropping the tools into your hand. Patrick made a soft, happy sound as you passed them over. "I was plenty welcome" Merle said with a mouthful of jerky "You were nearly impaled almost every day for about a week." "Nearly don't count," Merle spat, lowering himself onto an overturned bucket like a man settling in for a theatre. "Go on then, Mrs. Dixon. Tell it right." You looked at Patrick. "See? This is how it starts. You give him a chair, suddenly he thinks he's part of the narrative." "I am too." "You're a symptom." Patrick choked on a laugh and tried to disguise it by shovelling more food into his mouth, and Merle grinned at him with too many teeth. You wrung the shirt again, and the prison courtyard blurred in your mind—not disappearing exactly, but thinning. The heat, the tubs, the smell of breakfast and old concrete slipped sideways, and you were back there again, in those first days after Woodburywas no more, when the prison felt crowded for a change, and above all fragile, like one wrong word could crack it open.

The Woodbury people had come in with dust on their shoes and fear in their eyes.

They arrived in a big school bus: old people with bags clutched to their chests, mothers shepherding children, people who didn’t know where to put their hands when they weren’t holding guns. They walked through the gates slowly, staring at the prison like it was both salvation and a... well a prison sentence. The cell block swallowed them in echoes. Every cough, every footstep, every low murmur bounced off concrete and came back bigger.

And then there was Merle. He didn’t exactly arrive like a refugee. That mantle never suited him.

He swaggered in with his metal hand catching the light, chin up, mouth already shaped around some comment nobody wanted to hear. He looked around the prison as if judging the accommodations. You remembered the way the air changed when people saw him. Glenn had gone still. Maggie’s hand had found his arm. Rick’s jaw locked. Michonne watched Merle with the quiet, measuring focus of a woman deciding how fast she could turn him into a human kebab.

And then there was Daryl. He stood near the gates with his crossbow in his hand, looking like every muscle in his body had been pulled too tight and tied off. Merle was beside him, alive and louder than ever, taking up space the way Merle always did, and Daryl should have looked relieved. Maybe a small part of him was. Maybe some old, bruised, loyal part of him still couldn’t believe his brother was standing there breathing after all.

But when his eyes found yours across the yard, the relief briefly slipped — just long enough for you to see the thing he was trying not to show: that being near Merle did not make him whole the way people seemed to think it would. It dragged him backwards. It tugged at a version of him he had already outgrown without realising it, and you could see him fighting not to look like he needed you while needing you so badly it sat in his face like hunger.

You hadn’t gone to him right away — that part was harder than you wanted to admit. Every part of you wanted to cross that yard and launch yourself into his arms. But Merle had been his brother before you were anything. So you gave them space. Not because you liked Merle at all. You had eyes, and more importantly, ears.

You gave them space because you trusted Daryl, and because you loved him enough not to tug him back the second someone threatened to take up more of his time than you did.

For a while, you let Merle have him. Or you tried to.

They went toward the woods together that first morning, Merle talking with his whole body like the trees themselves needed to hear him, while Daryl walked beside him in that quiet, head-down way that made your stomach twist. It wasn’t resignation exactly. Habit, maybe. Muscle memory. The way his shoulders rounded like he was making himself smaller without thinking.

You had watched from the yard with a basket of pig feed tucked under one arm, pretending very badly not to watch. Merle kept leaning in, nudging him, running his mouth with that big ugly grin, and Daryl’s mouth twitched once like something almost funny had gotten through.

Your heart pinched before you could stop it. You hated Merle a little for earning even that much from him. Then you hated yourself for hating it, because God, what kind of woman got jealous of a man's brother after he had just come back from the dead? Apparently, you. Carol found you standing there, tossing handfuls of feed over the wrong side of the little pen while the pigs stared at you like you were the slow one. "He'll come back," she had said "I know," you sighed, staring hopelessly. "I just-wait, who?" Carol's mouth curved, small and merciless. She didn't bother pretending she believed you. Most people in the prison had the decency to act like they hadn't noticed you were head over heels for Daryl Dixon; Carol had never wasted decency where accuracy would do. She only nodded toward the woods. "Your pig feed's on the outside." You looked down - half the feed was, in fact, scattered uselessly beyond the fence. "Shit." Carol chuckled and went back to whatever she had been doing, leaving you to feed the pig's. He did come back, of course. Daryl always came back. That was the thing Merle didn't seem to understand. He seemed to think his return would peel everything else away. As if the prison, the group, the watches, the dinners, the quiet conversations over maps and guns had all been temporary scenery. As if Daryl had simply been waiting for his brother to come back so he could climb into the old skin and pretend it still fit. But it didn't fit. Not anymore. You could see Daryl trying. That was the part that hurt. He would stand with Merle because loyalty was carved into him too deep to dig out. He would hunt with him, share a smoke with him, listen when Merle talked too loud and too long about all the things that made him angry. But Daryl's attention would always start drifting sooner or later. His eyes would catch on the cell block doors. On the fence line. On the watch towers. On the places you usually were when you were not beside him. Merle would ask him to hunt the next morning, and Daryl would say he had fence duty. Merle would ask him to check the east perimeter, and Daryl would say Rick already had him on the west. If Merle wanted him on a run, Daryl would tell him Glenn needed backup. If Merle wanted him to sit around drinking and complaining about everyone in earshot, Daryl would mutter that he was tired and busy himself with bolts that had already sharpened twice. Which was funny. because Darvl was alwavs tired. Tiredness had never stopped him before. The truth was simpler. He wanted you.

He wanted you in that stubborn, silent, Daryl way that pretended not to be wanting at all. He wanted you so badly he got irritated by it. You could see it in the way he avoided looking at you when Merle was close, as if not looking somehow made it less obvious, as if the effort did not put every feeling he had right there in the hard line of his jaw. He wanted you in the way he lingered near the gates when he knew you were gone for the day, acting like he was checking the latch twenty times or so. He wanted you in the way he pretended not to hear your voice and still turned toward it every time. He wanted you in the way he got meaner when he had gone too many hours without you, all sharp edges and short answers until you passed close enough for your fingers to brush his and his whole body seemed to remember how to function again.

And because he was Daryl, he acted like none of it mattered. Like you were simply neighbours who occasionally made small talk about the weather. But you knew him by then. You knew the quiet language of him.

If he stopped at your shoulder and said, “You good?” like it was nothing, that was ‘I missed you’. If he glanced at your plate before his own, that was worry .If he stood too close while pretending to look past you, that was the closest thing to a confession he could manage with Merle watching.

And when he did finally get you alone—behind the watchtowers, in the narrow shadow between cell blocks, in the brief, breathless privacy of your curtain pulled shut—he stopped pretending so abruptly it almost hurt.

His hands would find you before his mouth did, rough and careful all at once, fingers at your waist, your wrist, the nape of your neck, like he was checking that you were still there and forgiving him for acting like a stranger for the whole day. He would kiss you like a man starving quietly in public all day, forehead pressed to yours after, breathing through the embarrassment of having wanted anything that much.“Missed me?” you’d tease, soft enough not to wound.

He would scoff, look away and deny it falt out, but his thumb would keep moving over your hip, slow and unconscious, and his body would stay curved around yours like the answer had already betrayed him.

That was the Daryl Merle had come back to. Not soft or weak, more the opposite. Just… loved.

And worse, loving back.

And Merle had noticed. That was the thing about him nobody ever liked giving him credit for. For all the noise he made, for all the crude jokes and handsy gestures and mouth-running that made people want to shove him headfirst into a walker pit, Merle Dixon saw more than he let on. He saw the way Daryl came back from you different - steadier. Which was worse, somehow. Daryl used to come back from a fight buzzing with it, jaw tight, eyes mean, shoulders still squared like he was waiting for the next swing. Merle knew that version of him. Hell, Merle had helped build that version of him piece by piece, ugly brick by ugly brick, because that was how Dixon boys survived. You kept your fists up, kept your head down, and if someone mistook you for an easy target, you made them curse the day they were born. But after you, Daryl came back quieter. And angrier about being quieter. Like peace itself had personally insulted him.

He could still be dragged back into old habits, sure. Merle could still get under his skin if he dug hard enough, could still make that vein in his neck jump, could still pull a snarl out of him with the right words at the right time. But it never lasted the way it used to. Daryl would flare up, all teeth and temper, and then something in him would twitch sideways, like he remembered there was somewhere else he would rather be. Merle saw that too - the way his baby brother kept looking past him across the yard, searching without meaning to. Saw how his eyes snagged on certain corners of the prison, like maybe you might step out from behind them. Saw how Daryl started listening for one voice under all the others. Predictably, Merle initially thought the prison had made him soft. "Told ya," Merle drawled one afternoon, sprawled on the steps like he owned them while Daryl sat a few feet away, sharpening a bolt with slow, mean strokes. "This place done made ya softer than cotton candy in the rain."" Daryl didn't look up. "Don't got a soft bone in me." “Sure, sure.” Merle picked at his teeth with his thumbnail, eyes bright with boredom and malice. “That why you got yourself a chore chart now? Little supper bell? Folks callin’ your name all sweet like they expect you to come skippin’?”

Daryl's hand dragged the blade down the bolt again. Shhk. "Got that sheriff starin' at ya like you're his favourite huntin' dog." The blade stopped for half a second, but you couldn't miss it. Merle's grin spread slow; "I hit a nerve yet?" Daryl kept his eyes on the bolt. "Ain't in the mood." "You ever are?" "Merle. "What?" Merle lifted his hand, all innocence, which looked especially stupid on him. "I'm just sayin'. You used to have some bite in ya, baby brother. Now look at ya. Eatin' at a full table. Everyone sayin' hi to ya like yer a damn celerity. Letting folks pat ya on the back like you some lap dog." Daryl finally looked up. It wasn't much. Just a lift of his eyes from beneath the curtain of his hair, blue and flat and mean enough to make most men rethink their choice of words. Merle, unfortunately, had never rethought anything in his life. "Keep talkin' and you'll be left with no hands," Daryl said, low. "Have fun wipin' yur ass then." Merle laughed, delighted. That was more like it. That was the brother he knew, the little stray dog with blood in his mouth, the one Merle could poke and prod and rile up until the whole world remembered the Dixons weren't house pets - they were supposed to sleep outside. But the laugh didn't last as long as it should have. Daryl looked away, across the yard, and Merle followed his gaze. Daryl tried not to look - he really did - but it was not use the second Daryl's eyes found you across the yard. You were standing by the tables with Maggie and Beth, sleeves shoved up, hair tied back messily from the heat, sunlight catching on the sweat at your throat and along your collarbones until his own went dry as dust. Death Valley dry. End-of-the-world dry. You were laughing at something Carl said, your whole face breaking open with it, bright and warm and sharp enough to hurt, then you reached out and ruffled the kid's hair just to annoy him, grinning wider when he ducked away and tried to act offended.

And Christ, that was the thing about you—you made everything else disappear. The yard, the fences, the dead groaning beyond them, Merle’s voice scraping at his ear trying to get his attention, the weight of the crossbow against his back, all of it just slipped out of focus until there was only you, shining in the middle of all that grey concrete and rusted metal like you had no damn business existing somewhere so ugly. Daryl’s fingers tightened around the bolt in his hand. His chest felt too tight, like something inside him had finally given up pretending it wasn’t yours. Falling for you sounded too soft for what had happened to him. He hadn’t just fallen. He’d gone face-first into asphalt and stayed there, stunned and bleeding and stupid, watching you smile like it was the only thing keeping him breathing. Then Merle snapped his fingers right in front of his face. “Hellooo, baby brother. You in there?” Daryl jerked back like he’d been caught with his hand somewhere it shouldn’t be, jaw clenching, heat crawling up his neck as he looked down at the bolt again and scraped the blade over it harder than necessary. “Shut up,” he muttered, rough and useless, trying to sit there like his blood wasn’t on fire, like his heart didn’t kick against his ribs every time your laugh carried over the yard, like he wasn’t already ruined beyond fixing.

"Disgustin"" Merle said in the present. "Man looked like somebody hit him between the eyes with a shovel." You wrung out a shirt over the wash tub without looking at him. "That's romantic, Merle. You should write poetry." Patrick, perched nearby with the rapt attention of a child hearing forbidden adult history, looked between you and Merle like he wasn't sure which one of you was more dangerous. Carol, standing near the grill now with a metal spatula in hand, didn't even turn around. "Daryl has never looked romantic in his life." "He did once," Merle said. "Looked constipated after, but the first part was real romantical." You flicked a sharp spray of wash water at him and caught him right across the cheek. Patrick's mouth fell open. Merle wiped his face slowly, eyes narrowing. You smiled sweetly. "Sorry. Hand slipped." "Woman, one of these days-" "You'll what?" His mouth opened - then closed. Before his remarkable character journey he probably would've said something sexist or racist or better yet a combination, but he didn't - people do change. Carol finally glanced over, dry as old leaves. "Smartest thing you've done all morning." You plunged both hands back into the tub, the water cloudy with soap and prison dust, your knuckles bumping against rough fabric beneath the surface. "For the record, Daryl was not a whipped dog" Merle snorted. "Please. Baby brother was totally a whipped dog — floatin' around this yard like somebody gave him a biscuit and scratched behind his ears." "If Daryl's a whipped dog," you said, "then what does that make you hmm? Cujo?" Merle gave you the finger without missing a beat and you blew him a kiss. Carol shook her head, but there was a smile tucked into the corner of her mouth. The thing was, Merle hadn't pinned it on you right away. That was the funny part.

He noticed Daryl was different, yes. He noticed the vanishing. The excuses. The way Daryl started slipping away after dinner instead of letting Merle drag him into some miserable corner of the prison. He noticed how Daryl suddenly cared whether his hands were clean, which frankly alarmed Merle more than any walker herd ever had. He noticed how his brother got twitchy about certain corridors in the cell block, like Merle stepping too close to them might trigger a damn landmine.

He noticed the clothes, too. Daryl had never cared much about his things before. Not beyond knowing what belonged to him and making damn sure took it. But now he was worse. Touch his pack and he snapped. Move his blanket and he got pissy about it. Pick up one of his shirts and he looked ready to bite through bone.

Naturally, Merle assumed possession first. Then early mid-life crisis. Then onset personality disorder. You, somehow, did not make the top three. "He thought Daryl was possessed," you told Patrick. Merle jabbed a finger at you. "I said influenced." "You said possessed" "I was speakin' metaphorical." "You asked Hershel if there were Catholic supplies in the pantry." Patrick's eyes went huge; Carol's spatula paused over the grill. Merle shifted on his bucket. "Well, excuse me for explorin' all avenues." "You asked if we had holy water." "Did we?" "No." "Then see? We gotta be prepared for anything these days." You laughed despite yourself, shaking your head as you dragged another shirt from the water. "Before he figured it out, he accused half the prison." "I did no such thing." "You accused Carol." Carol turned around then, one brow raised. Merle panicked, immediately pointing at you. "Now that right there was a misunderstandin"." But Carol’s expression didn’t move. “Say one more thing and I’ll shove your face onto this grill.” Patrick looked like he was fighting for his life not to laugh. You leaned closer to him, lowering your voice like you were sharing state secrets. "Then he accused Michonne." Patrick's eyes snapped back to Merle. Merle threw his hand up. "He talked to her!" "Daryl talks to people," Carol said. "Barely" Merle shot back. "And not for free." You grinned. "Michonne said maybe three words to him and Merle acted like he'd caught them climbing out of a motel window." "Woman had a sword," Merle said, as if that explained everything. "Daryl's always had poor impulse control." "You are his impulse control problem." Merle pointed the jerky at you again. "Careful, 'mana." The word came out of his mouth with all the grace of a boot through a screen door, mangled and smug and somehow still recognisable. Patrick blinked. "What does that mean?" You glared at Merle for a few more seconds before answering. "It means sister," you said, wringing the shirt tighter than necessary. Patrick brightened. "So he calls you that because of Daryl?" Merle's grin returned, slow and mean and pleased with itself. "Nah. I call her that 'cause it makes her wanna drown me in the laundry." "It does," you said. "She loves it" "Hate it," you corrected.

But back then, before the nickname, before the arguments got familiar enough to stop feeling like threats, before Merle figured out that you were the reason Daryl kept sneaking off, he had gone through suspects like a man with a personal vendetta against logic. He suspected Maggie for ten horrifying minutes. This ended when Glenn happened to pass by and overhear Merle suggest, in terms nobody needed repeated, that Daryl had been “sniffin’ around another man’s woman.” Glenn stopped so abruptly he nearly walked into a wall. So Merle took that as proof of innocence, mostly because Glenn looked too confused to be a cuck.

Then he suspected Beth because she smiled at Daryl once and Daryl didn't immediately flee the area, which, in Merle's mind, counted as a full seduction. "Beth smiles at everybody," Carol said. "Exactly." Merle replied. "Suspicious" You rolled your eyes. "You were really working a case huh? Detective Dixon ready for duty." Merle shrugged. "And yet, who figured it out?" "You did," you admitted, because unfortunately, he had. You pointed one wet finger at him. "By accident." "Still counts." "After accusing everyone in a fifty-foot radius." "Good detectin' requires a wide net." And he took that quite seriously because Merle during one particularly deranged hour, suggested Rick. You hadn't been there for that one, but Daryl later told you with the exhausted expression of a someone who had lived through war and was preparing for a second one because obviously you would never let him hear the end of this. Suffice to say a little pee came out when he told you because of how hard you laughed. Merle, according to Daryl, had leaned in close on the stairs one night and said; "if it's the sheriff, I ain't judgin. I mean, I am, but mostly 'cause he looks like he cries after" Daryl had nearly thrown him over the railing. Carol turned her face toward the grill, shoulders shaking, one hand lifted to her mouth like she was preserving her dignity through force alone. Merle looked insufferably proud of himself. "What? Was 'bout as likely as him datin' the hot Latina chick." Before you could bite back, a shadow moved behind you. You hadn’t heard Daryl come up behind you — one second there was only the slap of wet laundry in the tub; the next, two hands landed at your waist and squeezed. You yelped so hard the shirt in your hands slapped back into the tub and launched a grey sheet of wash water, splashing the both of you. For one beautiful, suspended second, the whole courtyard seemed to notice at once. The hiss of Carol’s grill went loud in the quiet. Somewhere by the fence, a spear punched through a walker skull with a wet crack. Patrick froze with his wrench hugged to his ribs, eyes huge. Glenn near by had stopped chewing whatever second breakfast he sneaked past Carol.

Daryl looked down at the dark splash spreading across the front of his shirt, slow and unimpressed. Then he looked up at you from under the damp pieces of hair falling over his brow, and the flatness of his stare would have been more effective if his hands weren’t still planted warm at your waist. You pressed a hand to your heart, breath caught somewhere between fright and laughter. “¿Qué coño te pasa?” you hissed through your teeth. His mouth twitched but he would probably deny it under oath. One corner betrayed him, small and quick, as his thumbs shifted against your sides through the damp cotton of your shirt. “Yer jumpy this mornin’,” he muttered. “You sneak up on innocent, defenceless women, they are going to jump, genius.” His eyes moved over you once, head to toe, with the dry skepticism of a man who had seen you threaten his brother more times than he could count. “Don’t see none in these parts.” Smartass.

You meant to be offended and elbow him; make a whole production of it because there was an audience and Daryl deserved to suffer for scaring you half out of your skin. But before you could twist away, his arms slid farther around you, forearms settling across your chest, pulling your back into the solid line of him like it was the most natural thing in the world. The moment his chest met your shoulders, the heat of him sun-warmed from fence work and faintly damp with sweat, something in you softened on instinct. You sank back into him with a little sway, your shoulder blades fitting against, his chin hovering near your temple as if he had only come over to annoy you and somehow ended up holding you like you’re about to make a run for it. His arms were firm without trapping you, casual enough to look careless, but you felt the way his hands settled around you, the way his fingers pressed once at your dewy skin like a silent check-in wasn’t ‘casual’.

Now cocooned, you tipped your head back enough to glare at him from under your lashes. “We’re wet now.” “Your fault,” he grumbled right back at you. “See that right there,” Merle announced, pointing his jerky at the two of you, “ is proof that he’s locked down tight.” “It’s not like we’re married,” you said automatically. Glenn looked at the two of you like the answer was obvious, the way Daryl’s showed no sign of letting go, you with your back tucked neatly into his chest. It was so obvious that it seemed like a trick for him to walk right into - so he kept his mouth shut.

You felt Daryl notice all of them staring. His body went a fraction more rigid behind you, embarrassment tightening through his shoulders, but he didn’t let go. And once upon a time, that would’ve made him vanish in a heart beat. Now he only cleared his throat, shifted his grip as if he had been doing something purely practical. He had a coil of rope slung over one shoulder, hair damp at his temples from fence work, dirt smudged along the edge of his jaw where he’d probably swiped his wrist without thinking. He looked like he had come over meaning to drop off supplies and had walked directly into a public hearing about his personal life. His gaze moved across the gathered crowd: Patrick clutching his wrench, Carol at the grill, Merle glowing with terrible purpose, Glenn hovering near the breakfast line with no plate and no excuse because he had already eaten twice, and two people by the beans who were pretending not to listen in.

But you were more focused on the fat streak of dirt on his face. Had this fucker gone face-first into the yard or something? “Ven aquí,” you muttered, already reaching for him. Daryl’s attention snapped to you a half-second too late. “What?” “Aquí, estás sucio.” He barely had time to squint before you licked your thumb and caught his chin between your fingers. His whole body went rigid. “Nah—hey—” “Quiet.” “Don’t start with that.” “Dije que se callara!”

You pulled his face closer, thumb pressing to the smudge with determined, merciless affection. Daryl tried to turn away, but you had his chin trapped, and worse, you had an audience. Merle’s grin spread so wide it threatened to split his face. Glenn had stopped mid-step near the table, eyes flicking between you and Daryl like he had accidentally wandered into something not meant for his eyes. Patrick, poor curious Patrick, looked as if someone had handed him a controversial book and told him every page was about the Dixons. Carol didn’t even bother hiding her smile. And Daryl saw all of them seeing, and that was when the tips of his ears went red. “Woman,” he warned under his breath. “You have half the courtyard on your face.” “Been worse.” “That is not the argument you think it is.” You rubbed harder, licking your thumb again when the dirt refused to surrender. Daryl made a low, humiliated sound in the back of his throat and tried to lean away, but you just followed him without missing a beat, hand firm on his jaw like you were tending to a particularly difficult child. He could have stopped you, everyone knew he could have. That was the funniest part. Daryl Dixon, crossbow on his back and blood under his nails, could drop a walker from fifty yards and skin a squirrel before breakfast without breaking a sweat, but apparently he could not survive his woman cleaning his face in public. Merle slapped his knee. “Oh, this is better than church.” Daryl’s eyes cut toward him. “Get ‘er off me.” “Yur on your own baby brother.” “You’re gonna be eatin’ dirt in a sec.” “With your mama cleanin’ your cheek? Good luck with that one.” You pinched Daryl’s chin a little tighter, turning his face back to you. “ Deja de moverte.” “I ain’t movin’.” “You’re squirming.” “I don’t squirm.” “You’re squirming right now.” Glenn, very unwisely, made a sound that might have been a laugh. Daryl’s glare shifted to him and Glenn immediately looked at the ground. “Nope. Didn’t see anything.” Patrick lifted one tentative hand, his expression bright with doomed honesty. “For what it’s worth, Mr. Dixon, I think it’s very—” Daryl’s glare cut him off and Patrick lowered his hand at once. “Never mind.”

You finally got the last of the dirt off, rubbing your thumb over his cheek once more just to be sure. His skin was scratchy beneath your fingers, rough with stubble, his jaw still clenched like he was trying to preserve the final scraps of his dignity by force. You studied your handiwork seriously, tilting his face left, then right. “There,” you said, satisfied. “Hermoso.” Daryl huffed. “Hands off me, woman.” But before he could pull back, you tugged him in by the chin and kissed him full on the mouth just to embarrass him more. It wasn’t a sweet quick peck either. A proper, loud, shameless kiss, the kind that landed with enough heat and intention to make Glenn choke on air and Merle howl like he had just won money on a dog fight. Daryl froze for one mortified second, caught between wanting to melt into you and wanting to fake his own death to escape the witnesses. Then his hand twitched at your waist, just barely, betraying him before he could stop it. You pulled away first, smug as sin. His mouth stayed parted for half a breath. Then he remembered where he was and the red in his ears spread down his neck. Merle was nearly doubled over on the bucket. “Oh, Lord. Somebody get Hershel. My brother is gonna pass out.” Daryl rubbed the back of his neck but it did absolutely nothing except make him look more flustered. “Ain’t funny,” he glared at a laughing Carol. “It is a little funny,” Glenn said. Daryl pointed at him. “You wanna keep breathin’?” Glenn nodded quickly, backing away even farther from the group. You went back to the wash tub as if nothing had happened, dunking the shirt beneath the cloudy water with both hands. “So,” you said brightly, “you wanna know what you missed?” Daryl stared at you, eyes narrowing with immediate suspicion. “Why?” “We were talking about you,” you sing-songed, “That ain’t good.” Merle wiped at his eyes, still wheezing. “Oh, it’s real good.” Daryl’s gaze moved from Merle, to Carol, to Glenn, to Patrick, then finally back to you. His expression had gone tight with that specific dread that meant he knew he had walked into something but hadn’t found the trap yet. Patrick, sweet doomed Patrick, lifted his hand again. “If I may, Mr. Dixon…” He swallowed when Daryl looked at him, but pushed on bravely, voice small and sincere. “I am enjoying this very much.” Patrick’s hand lowered with the slow caution of a man disarming a bomb. “Respectfully.” Daryl looked to you for an explanation, but you only smiled up at him with all the innocence you had never possessed. His gaze dropped to the shirt in your hands, and his expression changed, a flicker of suspicion followed by something softer. The sort of look he gave ordinary things that had somehow become precious because they now belonged to you too. “That mine?” he asked. You wrung the shirt slowly, water streaming between your fingers back into the tub. “No. This is the shirt of the other hick I sleep with.” Merle thought that was hilarious, head tipping back on his bucket and howled like you’d just handed him Christmas. Patrick was shyly enjoying this as if he was a tourist in your life. “Jesus,” Daryl muttered, dragging a hand down his face. “He comes later in the story,” Glenn said automatically. The silence that followed was exquisite. Glenn looked down at the spoon in his hand — as if the spoon itself had spoken through him. “I… don’t know why I said that.” “You sure you ain’t got somewhere else to be?” Daryl asked. “No,” Glenn admitted, then gestured weakly toward the breakfast table. “I was… getting breakfast.” “You’ve been served twice Glenn,” Carol said. Glenn looked down at his feet. “Right.” Merle grinned at him. “Pull up a bucket. Story’s gettin’ good.”

Daryl made a low noise and dropped the coil of rope near the fence supplies like it had just pissed him off. He even took two steps away, shoulders turning toward the fence, already pretending he had never intended to stay. You reached back without needing to look at him, one wet hand finding his fingers by memory, and tugged. It was such a small movement, barely anything. Your damp fingertips hooked around two of his, a quick little pull like punctuation. Daryl looked down at your joined hands. “Estancia,” you said softly. “You can help me with the laundry.” His jaw worked. You could see the argument assembling itself in his head: fence needed checking, rope needed sorting, Rick probably needed something, literally anything would be better than standing here while Merle collected blackmail material.“My shirts don’t need wahsin’ but fine,” he muttered. “Oh they do,” you said, turning back to the laundry, still holding his fingers. “Baby your clothes were so stinky yesterday I thought a skunk had gotten you.” When Carol made a delighted sound into her cup Daryl knew he should have left just to prove a point.

Instead, after a long second of pretending the matter was still under review, he crouched beside the wash tub and reached into the basket. He grabbed one of his shirts, shook it out with a snap, and plunged it into the soapy water. “You’re doin’ it wrong,” he grumbled. “I am washing clothes, not performing surgery.” “You twist ’em too much, stretches ’em out.” You slowly turned your head. “When have you ever done laundry?” He shot you a look from under his hair. “I know things.” “You know blood trails and squirrel anatomy.” “And laundry.” “You’d wear the same shirt for 2 weeks if wasn’t for me,” you deadpanned. “Maybe I’m breakin’ ‘em in,” Daryl shrugged. Then he wrung the shirt out with unnecessary force, which was somehow more annoying than if he had been bad at it. Water running down over his hands, catching in the small scars across his knuckles. His knee bumped yours once as he shifted closer, and he stayed there, close enough that his shoulder brushed your arm every time he moved. Grumbling. Helping. Pretending the two were not related.

Merle leaned toward Patrick and stage-whispered loudly enough for the fence crew to hear, “See, this is where it all went wrong for him. Used to be a perfectly miserable bastard.” Daryl flicked wash water at him without looking. Merle jerked his boot back. “Hey — you cut that out,” he barked. At this rate he’ll probably be dripping with soapy water by the end of this ‘story-time for degenerates’. So really it was more of a car wash than a story time at all. Merle was about as durable as a four by four so yeah — car wash. Merle watched the two of you sat next to each other with the smug satisfaction — bickering about laundry skills and nudging each other like it could wipe the grin of the other’s face but only proved to make it prominent. But what he was smug about you couldn’t tell. Maybe it was that he was right about the two of you; or maybe it was that he was glad he was wrong about the so-called Dixon curse; because yeah, he was. Dixons could in fact love, and maybe harder than anybody. Daryl was living proof. “So,” you said, clearing your throat like you were having a serious discussion and not elbow-deep in laundry, “where were we? Oh yeah, Merle took ages to figure it out.” Merle scoffed and leaned back on his bucket, jerky caught between his teeth, wearing the expression of a smacked ass. “I was gatherin’ evidence.” “Sure, keep telling yourself that,” you said under your breath and you and Daryl shared a sneaky look.

Around you, the courtyard had settled into that lazy late-morning rhythm where everyone was still working but somehow also listening. The fence crew pushed at the walkers in a steady, distant beat; Glenn had drifted closer, no longer pretending he wasn’t listening in, and Patrick sat near the wash tubs with his wrench across his knees like he had sneaked into the movie theatre without a ticket.

“The point,” you said, reaching into the basket for another shirt, “is that Merle knew Daryl had someone. He just couldn’t make his brain land on the obvious answer.” Patrick looked from you to Daryl to Merle, his brow pinched with the kind of honest confusion only a kid could have when discussing the topic of relationships “Why not?”

For once, Merle did not answer right away. That was what made you look up. Merle Dixon was a man who filled silence like he was afraid of what might crawl out of it. If a room went quiet, he threw something crude into the middle and watched everyone scatter. But now he only chewed slower, eyes sliding away toward the fence like the chain links had suddenly become fascinating. Daryl noticed the strangeness of it too. His hand had gone still beside yours in the water, knuckles half-submerged, sleeves shoved to his elbows. He didn’t look at Merle — instead he stayed looking down at the cloudy surface, jaw working, mouth pressed into that thin, stubborn line he got when he already knew what answer was coming and hated that everyone else was about to hear it.

You glanced between them. “Oh, come on,” you said, trying to keep it light, because that was usually the safest way to touch something testy in front of Merle. “Why didn’t you figure out it was me? I thought Daryl picking up Spanish wouldve given it right away.” Merle shrugged, “thought he was just gettin’ good at guessing.” Carol scoffed so hard she nearly lost her grip on the spatula. “Sure, Daryl knowing Spanish gave it away.” You turned to her. “That wasn’t necessary, but thanks.” “Yeah, him suddenly knowing Spanish and you sporting new hickeys everyday. Very subtle.” Glenn, who had picked the worst possible moment to scoot even closer, stopped dead and became intensely interested in the dirt by his boot. Daryl lowered his head, hair falling forward around his reddening face. He was being accused of something he was absolutely guilty of, so now was the time to pretend everyone wasn’t looking at him. “Why would ya say that?” he huffed, defeated. Carol’s face stayed mild as milk. “I didn’t say where they were.” Merle slapped his knee. “Aw, now this is breakfast.” You covered your face for half a second, not because you were ashamed exactly, but because apparently half the prison had been watching you and Daryl behave like idiots for weeks and had politely let you believe you were masterminds of deception. “Okay,” you said through your fingers. “Some of those were not hickeys.” Daryl’s head snapped toward you. “What?” you said to him, lowering your hands. “Some were bruises.” Daryl’s expression changed in an instant, the embarrassment burning clean off him. His brows pulled together, and he leaned a fraction closer like he could physically put himself between you and the implication you had just accidentally dropped at everyone’s feet. “Don’t say it like that,” he said. “Wait, what? Oh—“ You finally put two and two together, and it was awful. Your mouth opened, then closed. “I didn’t mean—” “I know what ya meant.” His voice was low, but there was a hard edge under it now, enough to make Merle’s grin twitch smaller. Because yes, some of them had been bruises (like twenty five percent), but completely totally innocent. A shoulder knocked against a supply shelf, a hip caught on the bedframe because neither of you had any patience once the cell door shut. Your thigh marked by the corner of a table after Daryl had dragged you toward him with more hunger than coordination. Stupid clumsy bruises, the kind that made you roll your eyes in the morning and were kissed better by Daryl while grumbled about how you needed to be more careful. But said out loud, like that? yikes.

You winced. “Yeah. No. That sounded horrible.” Daryl huffed through his nose, still looking faintly murderous on behalf of a version of himself that didn’t exist and never would. “You could’ve said anything else, and you went with that?” “I was trying to defend you.” “By makin’ me sound like I beat ma woman?” “I panicked!” “You’re terrible under pressure.” “I am fantastic under pressure… Just not this pressure.” Glenn lifted one hand weakly. “For what it’s worth, nobody thought—” Daryl panned to him again. Glenn dropped the hand. “Never mind.” You cleared your throat, heat crawling up your neck now for an entirely different reason. “Okay. We’re gonna drop this before I somehow make this worse.” You grabbed another shirt from the basket and wrung it out. “Seriously — what was it about me that made you cross me off the list?” Merle leaned forward, that guilty grin already trying to sharpen itself back into something useful, but he still was reluctant to answer. That made your stomach pull tight before you could stop it. It was ridiculous, maybe, to care. You knew how solid you and Daryl were, but still, something about Merle’s hesitation caught under your ribs. “Just say it,” Daryl said. The words were quiet. Not angry exactly, but they landed heavier than the banter.

You looked at Daryl, then back at Merle, who rubbed at his jaw with the back of his hand, the metal one hanging loose over his knee. “Fine,” Merle said at last, voice rougher than usual. “Didn’t see you two bein’ a match, all right?” The answer sat there between you. You had braced for something vulgar. Something about your ass, maybe, or Daryl’s complete lack of game, or some joke about you needing your head checked for choosing the younger Dixon. Something you could roll your eyes at and swat away. But this was blunt, straight to the point, no sugar coating at all. “A match?” you repeated. Merle shifted on the bucket. “Yeah. A match.” You looked down at yourself, then at Daryl, bewildered despite the absurdity of it. “Why?” Daryl’s eyes flicked to you. There it was: the thing he hated. Not Merle’s answer, but your face after hearing it. The little pull around your mouth. The quick blink. The way your shoulders set, like you were trying to turn hurt into attitude, before anyone noticed the difference.

His hand slowly moved under the water, his fingers brushing the side of your wrist, hidden beneath the cloudy soap, as if for half a second it really was only the two of you. “Hey,” he said quietly. When you first looked at him his eyes darted away, then came back, blue and uncertain and gentler than he probably meant them to be in front of everyone. “Ain’t like that,” he muttered. Your brows pulled together. “Like what?” “Like it means somethin’ bad.” He swallowed, thumb dragging once over your wet wrist. “People not seein’ it. Don’t mean they knew nothin’.” That softened something in your chest and annoyed you at the same time, because you didn’t want to be comforted. You wanted to be offended. You wanted to drag the whole yard into court and make them explain, one by one, why exactly they thought the two of you didn’t make sense. Because how could they not see it? How could they look at Daryl and not see what you saw?

The steadiness under the rough edges. The loyalty so deep it scared him. The quiet intelligence in the way he read a room, a trail, a person’s fear. The tenderness he hid like contraband. The way his hands, those same hands everyone knew could kill, could be so careful when they touched you that it sometimes made your throat ache. And how could they look at you and think you didn’t belong beside him? As if love had rules and only applied to certain people. Like you had to match on paper to fit in the places that mattered. Your voice came out smaller than you intended. “I just don’t understand why it was so hard to believe.” Daryl’s face tightened, and he leaned a little closer, enough that his shoulder brushed yours, enough that you were wrapped in the musk of him. Around you, the yard seemed to know better than to make too much noise. Even Merle, miraculously, kept his mouth shut. Daryl worked his jaw once before speaking. “’Cause people are stupid,” he said. He kept going, rougher now, pushing through it because your feelings were on the line and that mattered more than his embarrassment. “They see you and they think… I dunno.” His eyes dropped, then lifted again. “They see bubbly. Pretty. Bossy.” “I am not bossy.” He gave you a look. “Careful,” you said, narrowing your eyes. His mouth twitched despite himself. “See?” You would have splashed him if his thumb hadn’t still been stroking the inside of your wrist. “They see you huggin’ everyone like you’re everyone’s best friend,” he continued, quieter. “Yellin’ in Spanish when somethin’ gets under your skin. Feedin’ people like you want their stomachs to explode. Laughin’ so big ya might pass out. Centre of attention every room you walk into.” Your throat tightened when he looked down at your hands again. “And they see me,” he said, voice scraping lower, “and they think I ain’t built for that.” He shrugged one shoulder, uncomfortable now, but he didn’t pull away. “Maybe on paper we don’t make much sense,” he said. “But I don’t give a shit about paper.” Something in you gave. You leaned your shoulder into his, pressing there until he accepted the weight. “No,” you said, voice still a little wounded but warmer now. “We make sense.” Daryl looked at you then. Really looked. And in that look was the whole secret of him: the man who didn’t know how to say big things without flinching, but still tried when you needed him to. “Yeah,” he said, barely above a rasp. “We do.” For half a breath, the courtyard let the tenderness sit. Patrick, who had probably expected a funny story about managing Merle and the troubles of house-training him, had instead stumbled onto something incredibly soft and tender, sat very still with his wrench in his lap.

Then Merle, because he was Merle and tenderness made him break out in hives, raised his hand. “Now hold on,” he said. “When I said I didn’t see the match, I mostly meant she’s way hotter than you.” Daryl’s head turned slowly, his mouth flattening into a line as he stared at his brother. What the hell was he supposed to say to that? Argue? Thank him? Push him off the bucket? Merle spread both hands, delighted to have found safer territory, which for Merle meant the ground was still actively on fire but at least everyone was laughing. “What? We all thinkin’ it.” “Merle,” Carol warned, though she was smiling into her cup. Patrick looked like he was trying very hard not to agree and also trying very hard not to stay out of harms way. Glenn, unfortunately, made the grave tactical error of nodding before catching himself halfway through. “I mean—objectively— you know what, never mind.” “Wise choice,” Daryl grumbled. You, however, brightened instantly. “Oh.” You sat back on your heels, wringing water from the shirt with renewed dignity. “So this was about looks?” Merle barked a laugh. “Course it was about looks. What’d you think, I was questionin’ your birth signs or somethin’?” Daryl glanced at you from beneath his hair, and there was just enough trouble in his eyes to make you suspicious. “He’s got a point,” he said. “Was just after your looks.” You turned to him slowly, smiling with murder tucked neatly behind your teeth. “Aww, baby. That’s so sweet.” His mouth twitched. “Ain’t sayin’ I’m proud of it.” “You better not be saying anything else if you want to keep that pretty face.” Merle nearly wheezed. “Pretty face? Now I know love done made you blind.”

You looked Daryl over then. Really looked, making a performance of it just because you felt his shoulders tense the second your gaze started moving. Messy hair, sunburnt bridge of his nose, strong line of his shoulders beneath the sleeveless shirt, dirt under his nails, arms built from years of bowstring and hard living. The scowl that had never once scared you the way he clearly wished it would. The mouth currently pressed into a warning line because he knew you too well and could already feel you becoming a problem. “Hmmm,” you said. Daryl’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t.” You smiled slowly. “I don’t know, guys. I think there might be something wrong with your eyes.” Carol turned back toward the grill, already amused. “Here we go.” “I mean, are we seeing the same man?” “You’re on thin ice,” Daryl warned. You ignored him, because ignoring Daryl when he used that voice was one of your most cherished hobbies. “Because I’m looking, and frankly—” Your hand drifted, casual as a saint, toward his backside. Daryl caught your wrist without even looking, and the speed of it was honestly insulting. “Nope.” You gasped. “I wasn’t doing anything.” “Ya were about to.” “You don’t know that.” “I know you.” Merle howled. “Oh, she was goin’ for it!” You tried to tug your wrist free, grinning despite yourself. “I was simply admiring with touch.” Daryl leaned closer, his voice dropping into that stern rasp that never worked on you and absolutely should have. “Quit that. Get back to laundry.” Your mouth fell open. “Excuse me?” He released your wrist, reached past you for a pair of dirty jeans from the basket, and with the same calm audacity of a man who knew exactly what he was doing, gave your backside one firm, discreet pat before dropping the jeans into your lap. “Laundry,” he said. You stared at him, heat rushing up your neck as the entire yard seemed to inhale around you. “You are so dead.” He picked up another shirt and casually dunked it into the tub beside you. “Mm-hm.”

Merle grinned, relieved to be back on familiar, terrible ground. “See, baby brother, I was bein’ realistic. She’s all fire and hips and big hair, and you was skulkin’ around like an ugly girl at prom.” Daryl’s jaw tightened, though the corner of his mouth still wanted to betray him because you were staring at him like he had just won a prize. “Why you still runnin’ your damn mouth?” “You got charm, I’ll give ya that,” Merle added quickly, lifting a hand as if that might save him. “A damp sorta charm. Nowhere near as charming as I am, obviously, but ya made it work.” Daryl looked him up and down, then leaned back over the wash tub with the faintest, meanest little twitch of a smile. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Where’s your girl then?” Glenn made a noise like he had been physically punched by joy, Carol turned away with her shoulders shaking, and Patrick slapped both hands over his mouth. You stared at Daryl, utterly delighted. Merle’s grin died a noble and immediate death. Daryl only wrung out the shirt in his hands, smug bastard that he was, and refused to look at anyone while victory settled over him like sunlight. Daryl barely hid his proud face. You turned to him, eyes bright and ready to annoy him again. “A damp sort of charm.” “Don’t start.” Daryl grabbed the pants from your hands and wrung it out with more force. “Story’s over.” “It is not,” you said, snatching it back. “It is for today.” “No, it is for exactly ten seconds while you recover from being called damp.” You smiled down at the laundry, warm right through despite the grey water, the prison stink, and the walkers groaning against the fence.

That was the thing Merle hadn’t understood at first. He had been looking for a match that made sense from far away. Something easy to categorise. Something obvious enough to fit inside his crude little guesses. But you and Daryl had never been obvious. You had been a thousand small, private things adding up before anyone else learned how to count them. Your touch becoming the only one he allowed. His silence making room for your noise. Your laughter dragging something lighter out of him. His steadiness giving your fire somewhere safe to land. Merle had not seen it because Merle had been looking for the wrong kind of proof. Then again, as he would proudly point out later, you did eventually give him proof. Very loud proof. But that was a different part of the story. “Can i continue?” You said, finally, arms out. “Is that ok with everyone?” Merle waved a hand. If he interrupted you one more time you were gonna get violent. “So,” you said, “Merle knew something was going on with Daryl. And I was trying very hard to stay out of it.” Merle snorted at that. “I was,” you said, pointing a wet finger at him. “You pointed a gun at me on the second day.” You opened your mouth to correct him, but immediately closed it. technically that was true…

You remembered hearing Merle before you saw him—cursing like a sailor, a long-range rifle cradled wrong, and a cleaning rod jammed halfway down the barrel like he had tried to stab the problem into submission. "Piece'a shit won't cycle," he snarled, yanking the charging handle like it insulted his mama. "Goddamn stovepipe-hell with it. Shoulda brought a man's gun." "You did," you had said, strolling past with your canteen. "You just don't know how to run it." His head snapped up."Well now, ain't you sweet,” he grinned. “Go on, mamacita, tell me about guns." You took the rifle out of his hands before he could blink. "Well, to start," you said, fingers already working. "Stop yanking on it. It’s not a slot machine.” He barked a laugh. "You talk pretty. We done?" "Not even started." You tilt the rifle, thumb the mag release so the magazine slaps into your palm, lock the bolt to the rear, sweep the chamber with two quick glances. There it was: a spent casing stovepiped and a live round kissing it like a clingy ex. You hook the brass out with your nail, palm the charging handle, rack it twice, then smack the buttstock against your boot while you pull smoothly, clearing any sticky carbon like magic. You check the extractor claw, flick a flake of carbon off with your thumb, reseat the mag, and slingshot the bolt. The rifle is back together under your hands like it remembers you. Merle's eyebrows climb. "Well butter my ass and call me a biscuit." You shoulder the rifle fluidly and sight down the barrel at him. He freezes dead, uncanny blue eyes going bright and mean. For a heartbeat, nobody breathes. Then you clicked the safety on, spun the rifle butt-first, and shoved it back into his chest. "Relax, Dixon. You'd be a waste of ammo." He exhaled loudly, then grinned slow, delighted. "Marry me." "Nah," you say, stepping around him. "I prefer your brother." He chokes so hard you almost pat his back. "You-what?" “Don’t worry about it!” You shouted back as you headed off to the watch tower, his eyes definitely glued to your ass.

“Ok, in my defence,” Merle said in the present. “I didnt know you were bangin’ ma baby brother.” “Deserved a gun in your face for that,” Daryl said before you had the chance. “Oh, you think so?” Merle sat up, tone all teasing. “I bet your boyfriend, Rick, would say otherwise.” Daryl plunged his hand into the bottom of the wash tub and threw a sopping sock at his head. Merle caught it against his shoulder and recoiled. “Aw, hell, woman, you washin’ these or makin’ soup?” You pointed to the tub. “Shut up or help.” Merle tossed the sock back and leaned away. “Ain’t ma job to do laundry, woman,” he grumbled. Before Daryl could tell Merle to watch himself, your head whipped to him; “¿¡Perdón!?” You’re already making a move to get up. “You wanna say that again, puta?” Daryl didn't even make a move to stop you, but you halted when you saw Merle put his hands up. “Alright, I'm sorry,” he blurted, so quickly it sounded like his mouth was full. You went back to what you were doing and leaned back the tiniest amount and kept your hands busy in the water.

“So,” Patrick said carefully, looking between all three of you, “when did he figure out it was you?” Merle leaned forward on his bucket, delighted. “Now that,” he said, “is a better story. Type of story you’ll be tellin’ ya grandbabies.” “Well,” you breathed. “That took longer than it should have, that’s for sure.” Patrick leaned forward like you had just announced there would be fireworks. Daryl did the opposite. He leaned back, eyes already scanning the yard for an escape route. Unfortunately for him, you knew every version of Daryl trying to flee something, whether vulnerability, intimacy or conversation topics. His hand was still close enough that you caught two fingers in yours and tugged him right back. “Don’t you dare,” you murmured. “Ain’t doin’ nothin’.” “You were about to leave with a lame excuse.” His jaw shifted. “If ya lemme think o’ one it won’t be lame.” Merle barked a laugh from his bucket. “Thinkin’ never was yer strong suit, huh, Darylina?” Daryl shot him a look that had buried men in shallower graves. You dipped your hands back into the tub, laughing despite yourself. The water had gone grey from dust and sweat, and Daryl’s shirt twisted heavy between your fists. The smell of soap, grill smoke, and summer heat mixed with the rot blowing in from the fence. It should not have been the kind of morning that made people want stories. But then again, nothing about the prison made sense when it decided to feel like home. “We had a lot of obstacles,” you began. “Like a lot a lot. So Merle was nothing. That’s probably why it took him so long to figure it out.”

Back then, Daryl still shared a cell with Merle. That was a pretty big obstacle. Not the only problem in your way, obviously. One of many. The prison was full of people with ears, eyes, and absolutely nothing better to do once dinner ended. But the cell was the worst of it. The Dixon brothers had been put together because nobody knew what else to do with them, and maybe because some hopeful, foolish part of Rick thought proximity might make reconciliation easier. It did not. It made sneaking around a tactical operation. Every night, Daryl had to wait for Merle to either fall asleep, wander off, pick a fight, or lose interest in sleeping there altogether. Then he came to you like clockwork, slipping through the curtain with silent boots and a face that only softened once the rest of the world was behind him. He never knocked, just slipped through like a breeze. Sometimes you were already awake, sitting cross-legged on your cot with a book open in your lap and your ears trained on the catwalk. Sometimes you pretended not to have waited, even though you had been staring at the same sentence for twenty minutes. “You awake?” he would whisper, as if your whole body had not turned toward him the second he stepped inside. “No,” you would whisper back. “But now I am.” Those nights were the easiest part of the world. Outside your cell, there was gallons of literal nightmare fuel, fresh graves beyond the yard, whispers about the Governor, arguments over rations, and the constant scrape of survival wearing everyone thin. Inside, there was Daryl sitting on the edge of your cot, tiredly unlacing his boots. There was your hand sliding over his shoulders, feeling the day’s tension gathered there and easing it loose beneath your palms. There was the quiet, stupid relief of him being close enough to touch after a whole day of pretending you were normal about each other. That had not started in the prison, though. On the road, you and Daryl had become something before either of you had the sense or courage to name it. Not because of proximity —everybody was close on the road. Everybody smelled terrible together, starved together, slept in the same dirt, passed around the same mouthfuls of water and the same bruised hope. That kind of closeness made a group.

What happened with Daryl was different. You were two people who probably never would have spoken long enough to matter in the old world. He was all sharp edges and silence, someone who didn’t care much for conversation. You were bubbly and passionate when you felt things, stubborn in three different languages, too quick with your hands, your temper, your mouth. At first, you annoyed the living hell out of him. He annoyed you right back. He would grunt instead of answer. You would answer for him just to watch his jaw tick. He would tell you to quit making so much noise. You would make more noise on principle. It was not like the others. You did not just trust Daryl because he was useful or brave or good with a crossbow. You trusted the specific shape of him beside you in the dark. The way he always noticed when you were limping before you did. The way he handed you the last strip of dried meat without looking at you, like making eye contact might turn kindness into a confession. The way he drifted closer on watch when the night got too wide, pretending it was tactical while his shoulder found yours. The way he listened to your rambling like it irritated him, then remembered every word three days later when it mattered. And Daryl, God help him, got used to your antics. Worse, he started needing them. Your teasing. Your muttered Spanish. Your dramatic threats when a can refused to open. The way you could make him want to roll his eyes and smile at the same time, which frankly felt like witchcraft. You became the voice he listened for when camp went too quiet, the face he looked for in groups, the footsteps he knew without turning, the laugh that cut through all the rot and hunger and made something in his chest ache because the world had no business still making sounds like that. By the time either of you realised what was happening, it was already too late. Being away from him made you restless. Being away from you made him meaner. The group moved around you, bonded by survival, but you and Daryl had become two peas in one very damaged, highly armed pod — always orbiting, always bickering, always pretending the pull between you was loyalty and not the kind of wanting that made every accidental touch feel like a lit match dropped in dry grass. The tension got ridiculous eventually. Painful, even. A brush of his hand at your lower back could ruin your entire afternoon. Your hip bumping his near the fire could make him go so still you’d think he was having an aneurysm. You would catch him watching your mouth and then watch him hate himself for it. He would catch you staring at his hands and assume the drool at your mouth must’ve been the wind. So by the time you reached the prison, with its walls and gates and cot mattresses and the impossible illusion of doors that closed, it finally gave all that wanting somewhere to go. Which was the funny part: the prison didn’t really chill you out at all. After months of muddy roads, cold nights, shared blankets, fleeting glances and watch shifts where wanting sat between you like a loaded gun, the prison should have felt like a blessing. And yeah, in a lot of ways, it was a blessing. Because you were both insatiable, half-mad with horniness, and absolutely terrible at pretending you were not, the prison was a godsend. But it also made a lot of things worse. Because you guys got nothing done. That was a pretty big problem and Merle didn’t even need to be there for that.

Every chance Daryl got he would snatch you away like he was starved, even though he’d already had his fill several times by noon. You were clingy in a way neither of you would have admitted under torture.

Daryl trying to leave your cell was damn near impossible. It was pretty straightforward. Boots on, vest grabbed, retrieve crossbow, one last look back before he slipped out to hunt or take watch or pretend he had not just spent half the morning in bed with you. But then he would make the fatal mistake of looking at you properly: naked under the twisted sheet, skin warm and marked from his hands and mouth, hair an absolute disaster across the pillow, lips swollen, eyes heavy and smug and still asking for him like he had not already given you everything he had because you couldn’t get enough. His own hair would be no better, sticking up in every direction from your fingers, his shirt half-buttoned wrong, his belt still hanging loose because even getting dressed had become a negotiation with himself. He would bend down for the quickest goodbye kiss, just one, barely anything, because he knew if he lingered he was finished, and you would look up at him through your lashes like the devil had personally trained you. Daryl would barely make it outside the curtain before your fingers hooked into the back of his shirt and tugged. For one noble, doomed second, he would try and scrape up any willpower he had left and not melt into your arms. Then he would think,, What am I, stupid? and turn right back around, letting you pull him in until he could get his hands on you, haul you up with a low, wrecked sound, and toss you back onto the cot like there wasn’t a million things to do while the clothes he had just put on hit the floor again.

Daryl acted like he was above the clingyness, obviously, because Daryl had built half his personality out of looking unimpressed, but he was the worst one. He came up with so many excuses why he couldn’t sleep in his own cell just because he didn’t want to admit he hated sleeping without you now. He would find you in the laundry room, in the pantry, by the stairs, anywhere there was half a shadow and enough space to crowd you against a wall. And you loved it so much. Maybe that should have embarrassed you. Maybe in a world full of death and desolation and people turning into monsters, you should have picked something nobler as one of your favourite memories. But there was something about those weeks that still made your stomach flip when you thought about them. The honeymoon phase is no joke people.

And he had the audacity to act like it was your fault; you completely impaired his ability to function like a normal fucking human being. You would be minding your business, barely awake, hair a mess, trying to start the day like a functional adult, and then a hand would hook around your waist from a cell doorway and yank you clean out of the corridor. One second you were thinking about breakfast. The next, your back was against the inside wall of Daryl’s cell, his body crowding yours, his palm over your mouth to catch the startled sound he had caused in the first place. “Morning,” he’d rasp, like he hadn’t just kidnapped you before coffee. You would glare at him over his hand. He would look very pleased with himself for a man pretending not to be. The worst part was that you never even managed to stay mad. Not with his knee sliding between yours just enough to make your thoughts scatter. Not with that stupid, devastating mouth hovering so close while he waited to see if you would shove him away or drag him in. You always dragged him in.

Getting Daryl to shower wasn’t as big as a task as you had expected. Admittedly it took some strategy. Sometimes bribery. Sometimes threatening. Sometimes standing a little too close in the corridor and telling him very seriously he’ll be stuck with his hand unless he washed off the grime that covered him head to toe. He would scowl at you and storm off, then show up ten minutes later with a towel over his shoulder. Because Daryl Dixon was stubborn, not stupid.

The third shower stall became sacred ground. Not because it was romantic, unless you counted mildew as atmosphere. The tiles were cracked, the curtain was questionable, and the whole place smelled permanently of damp concrete, old soap, and whatever industrial cleaner Carol had decided would do the trick. But the pipe behind that stall was ancient and loud, a violent, clanging thing that shrieked through the walls whenever the water pressure kicked too high. Which made it perfect. Perfect for the days you actually managed to get Daryl in there, which, admittedly, required strategy. And once you had him behind that curtain, once the pipe was screaming and the water was coming down hard enough to turn the stall into steam and noise, all his grumbling became somebody else’s problem.

The curtain would screech to a shut on its rusted rings while footsteps could pass outside at literally any second. The pipe was already shrieking when he hiked your leg up. “Fuck,” you breathed, the cold tile biting hard into your back while Daryl’s soaked chest pressed hot and solid against yours. He had one hand locked under your thigh, holding you open against him, the other braced beside your head as he drove into you with the kind of rough, focused urgency that made thinking impossible. The wet slap of skin was barely swallowed by the groaning pipes, but embarrassment was somewhere far behind you, drowned under steam and the drag of his mouth and the way his hips kept knocking the breath out of your lungs. You clung to him like he was the only solid thing in the world, legs wrapped around him making sure he wasn’t going anywhere. His hair dripped into his face, his mouth swollen from yours, his eyes dark under the wet strands every time he pulled back just enough to look at you. You were trying to keep quiet, trying to stay upright, trying not to lose your mind against the tile, but Daryl had a way of making all three feel like unreasonable expectations. “You know someone could walk in,” you squeaked, which would have sounded more convincing if you weren’t already grinding into him, arms locked behind his neck like you had no intention of letting him stop.

Daryl’s eyes cut to yours. “Won’t take long,” he breathed against your mouth. You would have laughed if he hadn’t kissed the sound right out of your mouth. He hitched you higher, palm rough beneath your thigh, pinning you harder until the tile knocked faintly against your spine. The slick drag of his body against yours, the steam gathering on his shoulders, the sharp curse he swallowed when you tightened around him — all of it blurred together until there was only the force of him, the heat of him, the breath-stealing roll of his hips as he found a rhythm and lost the last of whatever restraint he had pretended to bring in with him. Daryl would groan low in his chest like being inside you had ruined him all over again, forehead dropping to yours, breath hot and ragged against your mouth while your nails dug into his shoulders. Your body went taut around him, and his grip turned bruising, desperate, like if he held you tight enough, if he pressed you hard enough into the wall, if he kept you there under the hammering water and the screaming pipe and the thin mercy of that curtain, he could keep the whole world out for just a few more seconds.

The pipe screamed. The curtain trembled. Your head fell back against the tile, and Daryl caught the exposed line of your throat with his mouth like he couldn’t help himself, teeth scraping just enough to make your whole body jolt around him.“Shh,” he rasped like a hypocrite, because he was panting like a dog. His cock would be buried deep inside you in a public shower stall and he had the nerve to tell you to be quiet. Yeah fair enough. Your eyes rolled back every time without fail, hair always a miserable mess in the steamy heat. Your breath broke. “Daryl—” His mouth covered yours again, filthy and urgent, swallowing the sound before it could escape into the shower block. He felt your smile against him anyway, wild and breathless and impossible to hide, and that did something to him. You felt the shift in his body before you heard the rough sound it pulled from his throat, felt the way he got hotter, sharper, meaner in the best way, his hand finding its cue to dip down to your cunt and work with purpose while his hips kept their hard, messy pace. He knew you too well. That was the problem. He knew exactly when your body started to betray you. Knew the change in your breathing, the helpless little catch in your throat, the way your thigh trembled in his grip and your nails dragged down his wet back. He knew when to kiss you deeper, when to press harder, when to angle his hips just right and make your whole body seize around him. The only problem here was the finish always came too fast in there. The rush, the steam, the noise, the knowledge that anyone could walk past and see the shadow of him holding you up against the tile while you came apart around him — it made everything sharp, reckless, impossible to stretch out. You turned your face into his shoulder, biting down on the sound that tried to tear out of you, your body clenching hard enough to make Daryl’s rhythm stutter. “Baby,” you gasped against his skin, the Spanish slipping out before you could stop it, soft and ruined and barely louder than the water. “No voy a durar.” He cursed, low. He always acted like he didn’t understand half the things you said when you got like that, but you knew better. The man had picked up a suspicious amount of Spanish from exactly these kinds of situations, which was both embarrassing and deeply unsurprising. He remembered the words that mattered to him. Especially the ones you said when your voice went thin and desperate and your legs were shaking around his waist. “Me neither,” he rasped. Then he drove into you harder, once, twice, his whole body locking tight against yours as he followed you over with a broken grunt muffled against your neck. His hand tightened under your thigh, his forehead pressed to your shoulder, and for a few seconds he just held you there, buried deep, breathing like he had been running for miles.

The water kept hammering down. The pipe kept shrieking.Your heart kept trying to claw its way out of your chest. For a while, neither of you moved. Your back was cold, your legs were starting to ache, and Daryl’s weight had you pinned to the tile in a way that would probably leave marks. But his mouth pressed to your shoulder, and his breathing was warm against your wet skin, and his hands still wouldn’t let go until a noise from outside the washrooms would jolt you out of the haze. Daryl’s head lifted slowly, eyes narrowing toward the curtain like he could threaten the entire hallway into silence by glaring hard enough, telling you to quit laughing at the absurdity of it all. Then he dropped his forehead against yours, exhaling rough and quiet, and for one dangerous second you thought he might start laughing too. Shower sex did not happen often. It was too risky, too cramped, too likely to end with one of you limping back into the cell block with wet hair and a suspicious inability to make eye contact with anyone. But when you did treat yourselves, it was worth every second of sneaking back out like nothing had happened. Worth the bruised spine. Worth Daryl standing beside you afterwards, hair dripping, face blank with the desperate seriousness of a man trying very hard to look innocent while you adjusted your shirt and failed not to smile. And when someone inevitably asked who had used all the hot water, you would only shrug, sweet as anything, and disappear before people started pointing fingers.

Another problem was fence duty — or flirtation with weapons. You would stand on the platform with rifles, pretending to scan the tree line while you slowly edged closer. Daryl would mutter something about keeping your eyes on the field, and you would say your eyes were on the field; technically, he was just unfortunately shaped like a distraction, and a striking reminder of the filth you’d been wrapped up in a few hours ago in your cell. Him being right there - it was hard not to think about it and smirk at the memory. He would scoff and call you a freak - but he wore the same look in his eyes as you, so takes one to know one.

So really you guys weren’t strangers to hurdles in your relationship. The only reason you didn’t let it come between you is because you didn’t care what others thought.

Ok actually, that was a lie. You cared a little. Not because you were ashamed but because you had wanted to love Daryl out loud from the beginning. The sneaking around was fun, sure, but you were made for a loud kind of loving—hands on arms, kisses on cheeks, names softened by warmth, affection given in passing like salt. Back before the world ended, your family had never loved shyly. They had loved across kitchens, over each other’s voices, with food, with arguments, with several people talking at once and someone yelling from another room that dinner was burning. Daryl did not come from that. Daryl came from locked doors and flinching silences, from wanting things so quietly he could almost convince himself he didn’t want them at all. Love, to him, was not something you announced in the middle of a room. It was something he carried close, tucked under his ribs where nobody could get their hands on it. So you hid it because he needed time and you were ok with that. At least, that was what you told yourself. There had been a small, ugly part of you in the beginning that wondered if maybe he wanted to hide you because he was embarrassed. Not of you exactly, not in any way your rational mind believed for more than a few seconds, but insecurity had never needed to be logical. It slipped in during the mornings he left before dawn, during the meals where he barely looked at you, during the moments when his hand would brush yours in passing and then vanish like the touch had burned.

“Wait,” he interrupted in the present, going completely still beside the wash tub. “What?” His brow had pulled together, not angry yet but something close enough to hurt. The shirt in his hands sagged, forgotten, water dripping steadily from the hem into the dirt. “You thought that?” His voice had gone low in a way that made the teasing around you thin out. “That I was embarrassed?” You winced. “Not for long.” Daryl kept looking at you, eyes sharp and searching, like he needed to find the exact place in you where that thought had lived and tear it out by the root. “Ya never told me that.” “Well, because it was stupid.” “Well yeah but ya still shoulda told me.” That shut you up. It was such a Daryl thing to say—rough, blunt, half-mumbled, but so sincere it landed clean. He looked almost offended on your behalf, as if your own insecurity had insulted you in front of him and he was deciding whether it needed its teeth knocked in. You reached for his hand under the rim of the tub, catching his wet fingers with yours. “I know now it wasn’t true.” His eyes did not move from your face. “I do,” you promised, softer. “It was just… hard sometimes. You’d sneak out before anyone woke up, then spend the whole day acting like nothing was happening. And I understood why. But sometimes my brain got stupid about it.” You could almost see what he didn’t say. That in his head, if anyone was going to be ashamed, it would have made more sense for it to be you. You, with your joyous laugh and warm hands and pretty mouth and everyone liking you so easily. You, who could make a room bend toward you just by walking into it. You, choosing him, somehow. Him with his mean-looking crossbbow and bad temper and family baggage that bit people. He didn’t say any of that. He only looked at you like the idea of you ever feeling unwanted by him was preposterous. “That ain’t ever been true,” he said, each word dragged out rough and careful. “You know that, right?”

“Oh, trust me I know.” You squeezed his hand, thumb sliding over the scarred ridge of his knuckle. “I realised pretty quickly you didn’t have it in you to not be obsessed with me.” You leaned your shoulder into his, just enough to make the point without making a scene. He rolled his eyes but corner of his mouth twitched despite himself. Merle made a gagging noise. “Lord, give me strength.”

One of the last times you’d slept in Daryl’s cell before everything came out was about when you realised this man didn’t have it in him to not be enthralled by you. Merle had taken the watch tower shift, which meant the cell was fair game. The night had been too cold, the air crisp and mean behind the hanging sheet, the prison breathing around you in distant clangs and murmurs. Naturally you went to sleep by your favourite radiator. You had fallen asleep tangled in Daryl’s blanket, your cheek pressed to his shoulder, his hand spread low on your back. By dawn, the light had begun to creep pale and grey across the floor. You woke first to the ugly knowledge that Merle’s shift would be ending soon. Daryl was still half-asleep, heavy and warm under you, face buried somewhere in your hair, one arm hooked around your waist with the stubborn finality of a padlock. His hair was a mess against your skin. His breathing was slow, hot, and uneven, and every time you tried to shift away, his arm tightened like his body objected before his mind could wake enough to argue. “Baby,” you whispered, voice ruined by sleep. “I have to go.” He made a muffled sound that might have been English in a previous life. You tried to pry his arm loose. “Daryl.” “No.” “You didn’t even hear what I said.” “Don’t care.” A laugh cracked out of you, quiet and raspy. “If I don’t leave now, Merle’s gonna come in and see me.” His face pressed deeper into you, stubborn as a child and twice as immovable. “Let ’im.” That made you still. Outside the cell, the prison was waking in pieces, and any second now Merle Dixon could come swaggering down the corridor with his big mouth and worse timing. You should have been panicking. And you were a little. But Daryl only hauled you closer, dragging you back into the warm cave of the blanket until your legs tangled again and your hand landed in his hair. “Daryl,” you whispered, half warning, half melting. “I’m serious.” “So’m I.” His voice was thick with sleep, rough enough to scrape something pleasant down your spine. “Ain’t leavin’.” “You’re not the one who has to leave, I am.” “Nope.” “You can’t just say nope me like that decides everything.” He still didn’t move. “Can.” It was so ridiculous, so possessive in the laziest possible way, that affection broke over you like warm water. Your fingers slid into the back of his hair, nails scratching gently at his scalp. He hummed, probably without even knowing, the sound vibrating against your chest. “You really mean that, Dixon?” you murmured. “You don’t care if he finds out?” His arm tightened. “Mhmm,” he grumbled. “Tired of sneakin’.” Your heart did something stupid. No, he wasn’t ashamed of you. Not even close. If anything, he wanted to keep you hidden the way people hid valuables when the world went bad. Not because they were embarrassed by them, but because everybody else had hands.

And Merle, unfortunately, had a hand and a knife. You weren’t being hidden because he was embarrassed. Daryl was hiding you because Merle ruins everything Merle sat up straighter. “I do not.” The yard went quiet in the immediate, communal way people go quiet when someone has told a truly outrageous lie. Everyone deadpanned on him. Merle’s eyes narrowed at the collective doubt now aimed in his direction. “What?” “You would have ruined everything,” you said, plunging both hands back into the grey wash water. Merle scoffed, but there was less force behind it than usual. “I mighta made your lives a little dysfunctional.” “If by that you mean ‘hell’ then yeah — a little dysfunctional,” you said. Carol closed her eyes, lips pressed together in that very specific way that meant she was either praying for strength or trying not to laugh herself into the grill. Merle waved a hand, unconcerned.“Whatever.” Beside you, Daryl made a low sound that was suspiciously close to a laugh. He tried to bury it by wringing out one of his shirts with unnecessary violence, but you caught the way his shoulder loosened by the tiniest amount. Not fully. Daryl never relaxed all at once. He eased into it like a stray dog deciding whether a porch was safe. But he eased all the same. You smiled to yourself and shook water from your fingers before reaching for the next shirt. “Anyway, the point is, while Daryl and I kept sneaking around, Merle kept trying to figure out who his brother was sleeping with.”

Merle’s investigation, if it could be called that without insulting real investigators everywhere, began badly. The first clue was the bra. To this day, you and Daryl disagreed about the exact chain of custody. He insisted you had left it there on accident when you were hurriedly getting dressed to abandon ship. You insisted he had practically ripped it off you the night before and thrown it so haphazardly, as if it had offended him, and you couldn’t find it the next morning. Sure it was still pretty dark but it was either staying to find your bra to have a supported chest or to enjoy more blissful undiscovered relationship with your boyfriend. The truth was probably somewhere in the middle, dirty and wrinkled and absolutely doomed from the moment it crossed the threshold into the Dixon brothers’ cell. It was black, tattered at one strap but still practical. Nothing special. Atleast, nothing that should have inspired a full forensic investigation.

Unfortunately, Merle found it. He had been digging through the cell for something he had definitely misplaced himself and would later blame on an easy target. Daryl came back from a runto find his brother standing in the middle of the room, holding your bra up with the tip of his knife like it might bite his face off. Merle’s grin spread slowly, horribly, like sunrise over a crime scene. “Well now,” he drawled, stretching the words until the moment begged to be put out of its misery. “Either you’ve developed some real interestin’ hobbies, or the wind’s gettin’ mighty personal.” Daryl crossed the cell in three strides and snatched it off the knife. “Laundry got mixed.” Merle’s eyebrows climbed. “Laundry got mixed.” “Uh-huh.” “This yours?” Daryl shoved the bra into his pack so fast he nearly ripped the zipper. “Said laundry.” “Didn’t ask where it came from,” Merle said, leaning against the bunk with awful delight. “Asked who it belongs to.” Daryl’s ears went red. That was the problem with Daryl. His face could stay mean as a thundercloud. His mouth could flatten into a line sharp enough to cut meat. His whole body could go still and dangerous. But his ears had no loyalty. You liked to joke that was the real reason he kept his hair long. Strategic coverage. Merle saw the colour crawl up his brother’s ears and it was practically audible - the rusty gears in his head begin to turn. “Hold on,” he said slowly. “You got a woman?” Daryl really should’ve lied better. “No,” he said, far too fast, and then uselessly busied himself with his crossbow. Merle’s grin went feral. “Oh, you got a woman.” “Shut up.” “A good one too, by the looks of it.” Merle mimed holding the bra against his own chest, which was an image Daryl would later describe to you with the haunted stare of a veteran. “Who is she?” “Ain’t nobody.” “Mm. Nobody with a nice rack.” Daryl threatened him by pointing a bolt at him. And Merle laughed for ten whole minutes. Back in the present, Glenn spoke up, because apparently the morning had not embarrassed him enough, “Was it yours?” Every head turned. Glenn froze. His spoon hovered uselessly in one hand. “I mean, obviously it was, but—” Daryl pointed toward the far side of the yard. “Go help Rick.” Glenn shrunk into himself, voice small like a mouse “But I wanna hear the end” “Go.” You laughed, cheeks warm despite yourself. “Yes, Glenn. Obviously it was mine.” Patrick looked like he deeply regretted choosing this morning to retrieve his wrench and yet could not bring himself to leave. Merle leaned toward him, eyes gleaming. “That ain’t even the good clue.” “Merle,” Daryl warned. You were already grinning. “No, he’s right. The condoms were funnier.” Daryl squeezed his eyes shut, willing this nightmare to be over.

The condoms didn't prove anything on their own. People scavenged all kinds of old-world relics. Batteries that may or may not work. Lighters with one spark left in them. Painkillers two years expired. Cigarettes. Lip balm. Things that had once meant convenience and now meant treasure. But because Merle found them in Daryl’s pack, he immediately became insufferable on a level nobody had previously measured. He had shaken the little box once, right beside his ear, like a child on Christmas morning trying to guess what was inside. “Well, well, well.” Daryl had gone still in the doorway. Merle’s grin turned predatory. “Ain’t we presumptuous.” “Give ’em here.” “Oh, I’m a proud big brother alrigh’.” Merle danced back as Daryl stepped forward, metal hand held high, box caught between two fingers. “Look at you. Plannin’. Dreamin’. Practicin’ optimist over here.” “Merle m’serious—” “Who’s the lucky lady?” His eyes lit. “Or fella. It’s a fella, huh? That why you’re bein’ so shy?” Daryl lunged. Merle ducked sideways, laughing, narrowly avoiding getting slammed into the bunk. “Wait, I got it. You just wear ’em by yourself for fun? That it?” Daryl nearly tackled him into the wall. Later, when Daryl told you, he had tried to keep his face stern and wounded, but you had laughed so hard into your pillow your stomach hurt. He’d threatened to sleep on the floor if you kept going. You had kept going, but of course he was bluffing. In the present, you nudged Daryl’s boot with yours. “You should’ve seen your face when you told me.” “Wasn’t funny.” “It was extremely funny,” Merle said. “Looked just like when I caught him lookin’ at one’a my magazines.” Slowly, with the awful satisfaction of a woman being handed a weapon, you turned to Daryl. “Really?” Daryl stared at Merle with murder in the set of his jaw, not daring to glance at the rest of the group and confirm what he already knew: everyone was listening and everyone was delighted. “Would you shut the fuck up,” Daryl spat, voice rising slightly. Merle just winked at him. Way to poke the bear.

Patrick, who had somehow become braver through sheer exposure, asked very quietly, “…Did Merle ever give them back?” A pause settled over the wash tubs. Not a natural pause — a guilty one. Merle evaded Daryl’s line of sight like it was child support. Daryl’s eyes sharpened. “Merle.” “What?” “You said you lost ’em.” “I did!” he shrieked. You slowly turned toward him. Merle leaned away from you first, then from Daryl, realising too late that the tub was on one side and his own stolen-tool history was on the other. Nowhere good to run. “Merle.” “What? Ain’t like I used ’em.” Daryl stood so abruptly the shirt in his hand slapped back into the tub. Merle pointed at him. “Now hold on.” Carol sighed with the bone-deep exhaustion of a woman who had been forced to supervise grown men since the end of civilization. “Boys.” You lifted a wet shirt from the tub, water streaming down your forearm, and held it between them like a flag of surrender. “I am not washing any more blood out of this laundry.” Daryl stopped, and Merle smirked, because he had survived another day. Barely. The truth, which Merle did not volunteer and Glenn suddenly became very interested in not knowing aloud, was that the condoms had not been lost at all. Merle had traded them to Glenn for a pack of cigarettes he had scavenged. You only found that out much later, when Glenn, wracked by guilt and cornered by Maggie, confessed the whole thing while refusing to make eye contact with anyone. In Glenn’s defence, he had thought they were Merle’s and not trafficked goods. Which somehow made the entire situation worse. In the present, Glenn took one very careful step backward. Unfortunately for Glenn, everyone noticed. Daryl’s head turned slowly. “Glenn.” Glenn pointed toward the breakfast table with his spoon. “I really should see Rick” Merle clapped his hands once, delighted. “There he is. My business partner.” Daryl looked between them. “You traded with him?” Glenn’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “In my defense—” “You got no defense,” Daryl said. “I did not know they were yours.” “That don’t make it better.” “It makes it weird,” Patrick whispered. Everyone turned to him. Patrick looked down at his wrench. “Sorry.” You started laughing first, and once you started, there was no stopping it. Carol followed, shoulders shaking quietly. Merle howled. Glenn looked betrayed by the universe. Even Daryl, after a long, painful battle against joy, let one breath of laughter slip out through his nose. You leaned your shoulder into his leg where he stood beside the tub. “For what it’s worth, I forgive you for losing our apocalypse contraception in a cigarette-based trade scandal.” Daryl looked down at you, then back at Merle. “Ain’t me that needs forgivin’.” Merle lifted a hand. “I accept.” “No one offered,” you and Daryl said together. After a few more minutes of giggling, you wiped the tears from the corner of your eye with the heel of your wrist and reached for another shirt. “Anyway,” you said, still smiling. “After the bra and the condoms, Merle started closing in.”

Patrick watched the two of you with open fascination, as if love was a machine and he had just seen one of the gears move. Patrick frowned. “Wouldn’t rifle thing put you higher up on the suspect list? I would have thought he’d put two and two together—” “You’d think huh,” you said. “But Merle has never been good at making connections. Thinkining isnt his strong suit.” Merle nodded solemnly. “Thinking’s how people get wrinkles.” “Then you must be the exception cuz your face looks like a leather bag,” you chuckled. You thought Merle would’ve stormed you for sure. You looked up and he had his eyes closed, chanting ‘don’t hit a woman, don’t hit a woman’ over and over again, making Daryl’s eyebrows cinch together. Daryl wrung the shirt so hard water splashed Merle’s boot for what was probably the fith time this morning, as if to wake him up from whatever psychosis you had put him in. You laughed and kept the rhythm going, clothes dunked and wrung, dunked and wrung, while the story unwound itself. And because his shoes were likely puddles, he decided he would humiliate you this time. “Tell ‘em about that time in yur cell,” Merle said suddenly. Daryl’s head snapped up so fast you nearly heard something in his neck object. “No.” Merle grinned around his jerky. “Oh, yeah. Tell ’em about that.” You went very still for half a second, one hand sunk wrist-deep in the laundry tub, the other curled around the soaked collar of Daryl’s shirt.

“The cell?” Patrick asked, immediately brightening in the way of someone who had no survival instinct when presented with gossip. Daryl pointed at Merle, “don’t.” Merle held up both hands, delighted by the panic he had caused. “I gotta say somethin’ now, so ya may aswell just tell it. Its defamatory if ya don’t;” “ you don’t even know what that means,” you said. “I know it’s makin’ him sweat like a whole in a church.” Daryl made a move to get up. “I’m leavin’.” You caught his arm without looking, stopping him instantly. You smiled sweetly. “You’re staying.” His jaw worked, clearly weighing his dignity against the fact that you had him physically tethered beside a bucket of wet laundry. “Ain’t doin’ this,” he muttered. “You’re already doing it.” Carol’s mouth twitched. “She has a point.” Merle leaned toward Patrick and stage-whispered, “This right here’s why you never let a pretty woman learn your weaknesses.” “My weakness ain’t her,” Daryl snapped. The silence that followed was delicious. If this scene was being animated by Disney, Daryl’s nose would’ve grown 10 feet long. In this production he simply stared at the laundry tub like he could drown himself in it. You patted his thigh. “Aw, baby. You keep telling yourself.” “Shut up.” Merle made a gagging sound so dramatic it disturbed a crow off the fence. You ignored him and finally let go of Daryl’s arm, though only because he crouched back down beside you with the defeated stiffness of a man accepting his fate. His knee pressed against yours. He grabbed yet another shirt from the basket and started wringing it with far too much aggression as always. “The cell,” you said, clearing your throat with more dignity than you felt, “was when Merle found out.”

Patrick leaned forward so far Carol had to nudge his plate back before it tipped. In your mind, the buzzing courtyard dimmed into the cool gray hush before dawn, into stale prison air and rough blankets and Daryl’s heartbeat under your cheek. “Merle was supposed to be gone overnight,” you began. When Merle was gone, the whole cell block felt different. There was no booming voice from the next bunk, no metal hand scraping against concrete, no crude comment tossed through the curtain just because Merle had sensed happiness nearby and decided it needed pest control.

It had been late when you slipped into Daryl’s cell, and later still when the two of you finally fell asleep. By the time morning began pressing pale and thin against the bars, you were out cold. Not pretty-asleep. Not like the movie-asleep. Proper, bone-deep, apocalypse-exhausted sleep, exertion from work and late night exercise (what type of exercise shall remain nameless but it wasn’t the kind that required clothes). It was the kind of dog tired that dragged you under and kept you there because for once you were perfectly warm — not just too hot or too cold —and Daryl was comfier than an arm rest, and the whole miserable world had narrowed to the slow rise and fall of his chest beneath your cheek.

You were sprawled over him, one arm tucked between your bodies, your face turned into the hollow below his collarbone. Daryl was flat on his back with both arms around you, one hand spread low across your ass (real classy), the other hooked protectively over your waist even in sleep. His chin rested near the crown of your head. Every now and then, his fingers would twitch against your skin like even unconscious, some part of him was checking that you hadn’t moved. It looked familiar. That was the unnerving part. Not scandalous. Just familiar. Lived-in. Like the two of you had done this a thousand times before — because you had. The sheet had been kicked low sometime in the night, shoved down in a losing battle against the sticky prison heat, leaving it tangled uselessly over your legs and not doing much for modesty anywhere else. The air in the cell was warm and close, carrying the faint smell of sweat, soap, old cement, and Daryl’s skin, and you were too deeply asleep to know anything outside the circle of his arms existed. Then Merle came back early. Later, he would swear he had not strutted in but he absolutely had. Tired, yes. Half-dead on his feet, maybe. Running on nothing but muscle memory, spite, and whatever awful thing passed for Merle Dixon’s survival instinct. But still, somehow, with swagger. His boots dragged down the corridor in that uneven rhythm you knew too well, and the curtain twitched aside before either you or Daryl had the chance to hear him. His bag hit the floor with a dull thud. Then— “Oh, shit.” Daryl woke instantly. One second he was dead asleep under you, breath slow, body heavy and loose. The next, he was all motion beneath your cheek, every muscle snapping tight like a wire. His arm locked around your waist. His other hand came up fast, dragging the sheet higher while he twisted, turning you into him completely, your half-awake body barely understood it was being moved. “Get out,” Daryl demanded. His voice was low, but not embarrassed-low. Not sleepy-low either. A dangerous-low. Merle stood just inside the curtain, bag at his feet, eyes wider than saucers. In the dim blue-gray wash of early morning, he looked caught somewhere between exhaustion, horror, and the deeply unfortunate knowledge that his eyes had just gathered information his brain had not consented to store. “Shit my bad,” he blurted, hands lifting. “Didn’t know ya had company—” “Merle.” Daryl’s voice rose, sharp enough to cut through the last threads of sleep. “Get the fuck out. Now.” That was what woke you properly. Not Merle or the thump of his bag. Not even the chill of air against skin where Daryl had moved the sheet too fast. It was Daryl’s voice.

Your eyes cracked open against his chest, confused and heavy, your hands sliding blindly to his waist because your body knew where he was before your mind had caught up. For one blissfully stupid second, you thought maybe there were walkers. Maybe an alarm. Maybe something normal and terrible. Then you lifted your head. And made direct eye contact with Merle Dixon. Holy shit. You had never wanted death so quickly. “Mierda,” you hissed, ducking back behind Daryl so fast you nearly headbutted his shoulder. Daryl’s arm tightened around your waist, hauling you chest-to-chest against him, his body turning broad and solid between you and his brother. It would have been touching if you were not actively praying for the concrete to split open and swallow you whole. There was no point pretending now. It wasn’t like you could say you were checking for fever — would you really have to do that naked in the middle of the night? Trading blankets wouldn’t work either. Laundry got mixed up again? It worked the first time — you were simply checking the labels for the right sheets. No that wouldn’t explain why Daryl was groping your bare ass. Discussing strategy? Sex does make you more productive - wait no that’s what you used on Daryl when you wanted to have a quickie. Any other stupid excuses your panicked brain threw against the was immediately rejected because this was exactly what it looked like. You peeked one eye over Daryl’s shoulder and gave the weakest little wave of your life. “Heyyy, Merle,” you said, voice rough and mortified. “How’s it goin’?”

Merle stared at you. Then at Daryl’s murderous side glare. “Hey there, Amiga,” he said, awkward in a way you had not known Merle was capable of being. He bent slowly, blindly feeling for his bag without taking his eyes off a completely uninteresting patch of wall. “No hard feelin’s or nothin’. Didn’t know y’all were in here—“ “Why are you still here?”daryl snapped. “What’d ya want me to do?” he added, because apparently even embarrassment could not fully overpower Merle’s need to complain. “This is my cell too.” “I don’t care,” Daryl grunted, pointing at the doorway. “Out.” Merle lifted the bag like a shield. In the dimness, his face flickered through too many expressions to name cleanly: embarrassment, exhaustion, shock, and beneath all of that, something quieter. Something almost amused. Almost tender, though if anyone had accused him of that he would have chosen violence. Maybe, for one strange second, he saw it. Not the obvious part. Not the bodies, not the sheet, not the scandal he would absolutely use against Daryl later.The real part. You half-asleep and instinctively reaching for his brother. Daryl half-feral from sleep, shielding you before he had even fully opened his eyes. The two of you tangled together with the easy comfort of people who had stopped pretending long before anyone else had permission to know. Maybe Merle saw that and understood more than either of you wanted him to. But then was not the time. Merle nodded once, backing out like there might be a T. rex in the cell and sudden movement would make things worse. “Right. I guess I’ll just go… elsewhere.” He fumbled the curtain halfway across, then corrected it when Daryl glared. “All the way,” Daryl bit out. “I’m doin’ it alright.” The curtain finally slid shut.

The cell was painfully quiet except for your breathing and Daryl’s heart hammering under your palm. You were still pressed against him, skin hot with embarrassment, face buried near his shoulder as if hiding after the fact could somehow undo what Merle had seen. Then, from the other side of the curtain, Merle’s boots retreated down the corridor with unusual speed. You let out a long, strangled breath. “Well I guess that’s it,” you whispered into his skin. “He knows now.” Daryl stared up at the underside of the bunk above him like it had personally disappointed him. “Yeah,” he muttered. “He knows.” Something had flared in your chest then but you hadn’t the balls to name it. Now you realise - it was relief. Cat was finally out the bag.

Patrick looked as though his soul had left his body ten minutes ago and had not yet decided whether to return. “That wasn’t what I was talkin’ about,” Merle said, ripping you o ur if the memory. You froze. Daryl turned his head slowly. “What?” you both said. “That wasn’t when I found out, I mean,” he corrected. Merle leaned back on his bucket, grin spreading lazy and wicked across his face, and tapped ash that was not there from the end of his jerky like it was a cigar. “Oh, y’all thought that was the grand reveal?” He snorted. “Nah. I knew days before that.” You both stared at him. Even Carol looked surprised. Merle’s grin softened just slightly around the edges, though he hid it quickly behind a chew of jerky. “I just let y’all keep playin’ secret lovers. Like Romeo and Juliet.” Carol’s eyes narrowed. “They died.” “How was I supposed to know that,” he shrugged. Jesus Christ the school system failed him. Patrick whispered, horrified and delighted, “He already knew?” “Kid,” he said, tapping the side of his nose like he was about to reveal state secrets, “I’d known.” “You’re bluffing,” you squinted at him. Merle leaned back on his bucket, one arm hooked over his knee, enjoying every ounce of attention now that he had successfully dragged the whole courtyard into the palm of his hand. “Fraid not, ‘mana.” Daryl’s jaw tightened. “How?” Merle’s grin shifted. Not gone, exactly, because Merle would probably keep grinning through his own funeral just to annoy whoever cried first. But something in it changed. The sharpness dulled around the edges, and for half a breath he looked somewhere past the wash tubs, past the fence, past the prison yard baking in the Georgia heat, like the memory had reached up and hooked him under the ribs before he could make it into a joke. “Well,” he said, dragging the word out, “funny story.” Daryl’s eyes narrowed. “Ain’t gonna be funny.” “Oh, it’s funny.” Merle eyes averted to you. “Just not for y’all.”

You pressed your lips together, already dreading what this could be. Merle shifted on his bucket, and the courtyard seemed to lean in around him without meaning to. Carol turned down the meat on the grill so it wouldn’t burn. Glenn, who had been trying to look casual and failing spectacularly, gave up completely and stood still with his spoon in his hand. Patrick sat with his wrench across his knees and the haunted expression of a boy who, mind you, had only asked for one tool back and somehow ended up in the middle of Dixon family lore. Merle chewed once, swallowed, and then, with the smug solemnity of a man digging his own grave with both hands, began. “Was middle of the night,” he said. “I woke up needin’ to take a leak.” Carol closed her eyes. “Beautiful opening.” “Thank you, Peletier.” You felt Daryl shift beside you, already bracing. Merle ignored him. “I hop down, and first thing I notice is baby brother’s bed’s empty.” Daryl’s hand went still in the tub. He stared very hard at the gray water, which told you immediately that he knew exactly where this was going and wished, with every surviving piece of himself, for a walker breach. Unfortunately, Merle kept talking. “At first, I figured he was on watch, or broodin’ somewhere. Y’know how he gets.” Daryl muttered, “Shut up.” “He does brood,” Carol said mildly. “Thank you.” “I didn’t say continue.” Merle continued anyway, because of course he did. Patrick leaned forward, eyes bright with interest. Carol saw that and pointed the spatula at him. “Yknow what you — don’t need to hear this..” His face fell. “What?” “Go show Carl the new comics you found.” “But—” “Patrick.” The boy looked between her, you, Merle, and Daryl, clearly devastated to be banished from what was shaping up to be the most educational conversation of his young life. You gave him a sympathetic wince. Daryl looked relieved for exactly half a second. Carol tilted her head toward the cell block. “Run along now.” Patrick opened his mouth, reconsidered after seeing Daryl’s face, then stood. “Yes, ma’am.” Merle watched him go. “Shame. Kid was gonna learn a valuable lesson.” “I’m sure he has already had the birds and the bees talk,” Glenn chuckled.. “Rhee shut your damn mouth,” you pointed at him.

You turned back to Merle who was wearing his sickening grin again. Back then, Merle had been half-asleep when he climbed down from his bunk, boots shoved on wrong and shirt hanging open, moving on nothing but bladder pressure, bad temper, and the kind of dead-eyed exhaustion that came from trying to sleep in a place where the dead moaned outside the fences all fucking night. The cell block had been washed in that strange blue-gray dark that came right before dawn, when the world outside couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be night or morning yet. The air was cool for once, slipping through the broken seams of the prison with a damp little bite, and the sheets hung across cell doors stirred gently in the breeze, lifting and falling like pale sails in the half-light. Merle glanced toward Daryl’s bunk out of habit. Empty. Blanket kicked crooked. Pillow flattened. No brother. Merle squinted at it. “Huh,” he muttered. Not out of any concern. Daryl wandered, took extra watches he hadn’t been asked to take, disappeared into corners basically on the daily. For all Merle knew, he was perched somewhere with that crossbow, glaring at the sunrise. So Merle dragged himself along the catwalk, one hand rubbing sleep from his eyes, the other skimming the rail. He passed one cell, then another, hearing the normal prison-night sounds: somebody coughing in their sleep, a low snore, a boot scuffing below, the distant rattle of chain link, the faint restless groan of walkers beyond the fence like the world’s ugliest lullaby. Then he heard a woman’s voice. It wasn’t clear at first. Just a soft, breathless little sound from behind one of the sheets, muffled by fabric and shadow and the low sigh of the breeze moving through the block. Merle stopped dead. One hand still on the rail. One boot half-lifted. Brow furrowed as his tired brain tried to catch up with what his ears had already understood.

There were plenty of things Merle expected to hear in the middle of the night at the prison. Nightmares. Whispered arguments. Crying, if people thought they were quiet enough. Somebody swearing because they had stubbed a toe on a bucket. Glenn probably tripping over something. All reasonable. What he did not expect was a woman — moaning a name. His brother’s name. Soft and wrecked and unmistakable. Merle’s eyes widened. Even without hindsight he knows he should have kept walking. That was what decent people did, probably. They heard something private and moved on. They let curtains mean curtains. They took their piss, minded their business, and did not invite lifelong mental scarring into their skull. Merle Dixon, however, had never been accused of decency for longer than three consecutive seconds.

So when the breeze curled through the block and lifted the edge of the sheet across your cell, he couldn’t help but look. Only for a second, he would later claim. A second with terrible stamina. The sheet fluttered back like it had conspired with him, and through the thin slice of moonlight and shadow, Merle saw enough to understand everything at once. It was you. You were on Daryl’s cot, though barely anymore, the narrow mattress shoved crooked beneath the force of what the two of you had been doing long before Merle stumbled into view. You must have started properly on the bed, tucked away behind the curtain like civilized people, but somewhere along the way Daryl’s eagerness had dragged you lower and lower until your shoulders were near the edge, your head tipped back over the side, hair spilling toward the floor in a dark loose fall that caught the moonlight like water. Your face was turned up into the pale blue glow, throat exposed, lips parted, eyes squeezed shut as pleasure twisted your expression into something so raw and open that Merle felt his own spine lock against the sight. Your legs were in the air like you just don’t care around Daryl’s hips. One of his hands gripped the underside of your thigh, holding you open for him, while the other moved over you with a boldness Merle had never once associated with his skittish, snarling little brother. Daryl was touching you like he knew you. Like he had the right to. Like every inch beneath his palms had already become familiar territory, mapped in secret and revisited often, his fingers digging into your hip, sliding to your ass, dragging up your side as if he couldn’t decide where he wanted to hold you because he wanted all of it at once. And Daryl— Christ.

Merle had seen Daryl angry. He had seen him feral. He had seen him half-starved, bloodied, stubborn, mean with fear, half a second from throwing himself at danger because somebody told him not to. He thought he had seen every version of his little brother. Ohhh how wrong he was. He had never seen him like that — so undone. It was written all over the clench of his jaw, the way his mouth kept pressing to your shoulder to muffle the sounds dragging out of him, the way his breath punched rough and ragged into your skin every time he rocked into you and your body took him deeper. You whispered his name like a prayer, hands indecisive on where to go, one moment buried in his hair, the next gripping his back, then sliding shamelessly lower to his ass to pull him in harder, greedier, encouraging every deep thrust like you were both too far gone to care what the prison might hear. Daryl moved like a man who had lost the argument with himself hours ago. His hips drove into yours in a hard, steady rhythm that made the cot complain beneath you, the frame tapping faintly against the concrete wall in a way that should have been funny to Merle but currently he lacked a sense of humour. Your body rocked with every thrust, head tipping farther back, hair brushing the floor, breasts rising with each broken breath as Daryl leaned over you, mouth hot against your jaw, his wet, desperate whispers caught between English and pure wreckage. “Look at me,” Daryl rasped, hand coming behind your lolling head and threading in your hair, bearing the weight as if it were imperative he sees your face. That was the thing that hit Merle hardest. Not the bare skin. Not the heat. Not the obscene slap of bodies barely hidden under the restless sheets. It was your eyes opening when Daryl told you to look. It was the way your gaze found his immediately, glassy and dazed and full of so much trust that Merle’s stomach gave a strange, foreign twist. You looked at Daryl like there was no prison, no walkers, no one else in the world, and certainly no Merle standing outside your damn cell being the worst human being alive. You looked at him like he was the only thing anchoring you to the earth while he fucked you halfway off the mattress. And Daryl looked right back. Not cocky. Not smug. Not like Merle would have expected a man to look with a woman like you falling apart underneath him. He looked ruined. Completely, helplessly ruined. His forehead dropped close to yours, his hair hanging around both your faces, and for a few seconds the two of you just breathed into the same little space while his body kept moving and yours kept meeting him, familiar and frantic all at once. There was nothing new about it. That was the confronting part. Nothing about the way you touched each other felt like discovery. It felt like returning. Like the two of you had been in that position enough times to know exactly where to put your hands, where to press your mouths, how to read the hitch in each other’s breath before the other could even ask.

You murmured something in Spanish, soft and filthy and helpless, the words spilling out of you like you didn’t even know you were saying them. Daryl’s whole body reacted. Merle didn’t understand the words, but he understood the effect. Daryl’s hips stuttered, his grip tightened on your thigh, and he cursed into the side of your neck with a low, broken sound that made Merle’s eyebrows shoot up so high they nearly left his face. “Well, damn,” Merle muttered under his breath. He stood frozen in the dark, caught between horror, fascination, and the growing certainty that if either of you noticed him, Daryl would throw him clean over the railing without stopping to put pants on. He was going to leave, turn around and forget the whole thing. Then Daryl said something that was so unlike the brother Merle thought he knew that, for one second, he wondered if he had imagined it. “I love you.” The words barely survived beyond the bed. They weren’t polished. Not pretty but nothing Daryl ever said came out pretty. They sounded dragged from him, rough and breathless, like they had clawed through every locked door inside his chest before finally finding somewhere safe to land. His pace had turned deeper, more deliberate, his face pressed close to yours as if the words belonged against your mouth and nowhere else. You answered immediately. Not surprised — not like it was the first time. Like hearing Daryl say he loved you while buried inside you was something your heart had already learned how to hold. “Te amo,” you whispered, hands sliding up to cradle his face. “Te amo.” And then you kissed him. You kissed him like the words had lit you up from the inside, mouth open, desperate, your body arching hard beneath his as the rhythm between you broke messy again. Daryl groaned into you, the sound swallowed by your mouth, and one of your hands slid down his back, urging him on, pulling him deeper as your Spanish dissolved into a breathless string of half-formed pleas that made no sense to Merle and clearly made perfect sense to Daryl. Because Daryl answered you.

That was another thing Merle would never recover from. His baby brother, who barely spoke in full sentences when the sun was up, who had once responded to “are you okay?” by disappearing into the woods for six hours, was murmuring against your mouth like there was no part of himself he could keep locked away from you anymore. “I got ya,” Daryl breathed. “I got ya, baby. That’s it. Ain’t lettin’ go.” Baby? How was that even in his vocabulary? He had not survived the world ending just to hear his brother say baby while fucking his girlfriend into a frenzy. Your body had started to tighten around Daryl. Even Merle could tell. He wished he couldn’t, but some things announced themselves. The way your legs clamped higher around his waist. The way your fingers twisted in his hair. The way your mouth broke from his because you could not keep kissing and breathing at the same time. The way Daryl’s pace turned less controlled, his shoulders trembling beneath your hands as he tried to hold himself together long enough to get you there first. Daryl’s hand slipped between your bodies, and Merle unfortunately caught just enough through the shifting gap in the sheet to understand exactly what he was doing. The press of your hips had gone messy and greedy, bodies moving together in that slick, desperate rhythm, and then Daryl’s fingers found your clit with the kind of filthy, practised confidence that made Merle’s soul try to leave his body on the spot. Your reaction was instant. Your mouth fell open around a sound you barely managed to catch, your spine bowing, one hand flying to his wrist — not to stop him, but to hold him there, to keep that rough, knowing pressure exactly where it was while he kept fucking into you. Daryl didn’t even look down. He watched your face the whole time, eyes dark and fixed, like every twist of pleasure across your expression was something he wanted burned into him. Like he knew precisely what he was doing to you and still couldn’t get enough of seeing it happen. He must have felt it coming before you did, because his hand tightened under your thigh, his fingers between your bodies working with vicious little purpose while his hips kept that deep, grinding rhythm that had already dragged you halfway off the cot. You tried to say his name, tried to warn him, tried to form anything that sounded even remotely human, but Daryl kissed you through it, swallowing the sound as your body went tight beneath him. Your whole body snapped taut around him, spine arching so hard your chest pressed into his, your mouth open against his as the pleasure tore through you in a wave violent enough to make the cot jerk beneath you. Your thighs clamped around his waist, your fingers digging into his wrist where he touched you, forcing him to feel exactly what he had done as you came all over him. Merle saw Daryl’s rhythm stutter. Saw his shoulders jolt. Saw the sheet beneath you darken where your body gave out around him, wetness spilling between your thighs and over his hand, sudden and obscene and so intimate Merle’s brain nearly shorted out on the spot. “Oh, hell no,” Merle whispered to the wall, horrified. But inside the cell, Daryl looked like the sight had damn near killed him. His mouth broke from yours just enough for a rough, helpless sound to tear out of him, his eyes fixed on your face as you shook under him, as your body clenched and pulsed around him, as you made those little ruined sounds he kept trying to catch with his lips before they could escape into the cell block. He watched you like he couldn’t look away if the prison burned down around him, like seeing you fall apart beneath him had reached into some dark, starving place in his chest and put a hand around his heart.

“That’s it,” he breathed, voice wrecked against your mouth. “Perfect.” You made a small, broken sound at the word, your hands going from frantic to desperate-soft, one sliding into Daryl’s hair, the other dragging down his back as if you needed to keep him close through the last trembling shocks of it. Your lips brushed his, barely a kiss anymore, more breath than anything, and the Spanish slipped out of you in pieces, dazed and filthy and tender all at once. “No pares,” you breathed. “No te retires. Lo quiero dentro, por favor.” Daryl’s jaw clenched so hard Merle saw it jump. “Yeah?” he rasped, and the word sounded like a warning and a confession at the same time. “Want it that bad huh?.” You pulled him down into another kiss and that was his answer. You were still trembling around him, still whispering against his lips, still pleading in Spanish. “Lléname,” you gasped. “Por favor, baby. No te atrevas a salirte.” Daryl’s whole body shuddered. That was probably another clue that Merle missed - Daryl now understood Spanish perfectly well. But Merle had just assumed it was a lucky guess when he responded naturally when Spanish was directed at him. Little did he know he had a very dedicated Spanish tutor. Maybe he didn’t understand every word when you were yelling too fast in the yard, maybe not every insult you threw at Merle with your hands flying and your eyes on fire, but this? These words? This voice? Daryl knew exactly what you were begging for. He wouldn’t admit it in daylight but alot of the Spanish he picked up on was during sex. He had collected it in moments like this, filthy little lessons pressed into his skin until your wanting had become its own language between you. He couldn’t say them back to you properly if someone put a gun to his head, but he knew what you wanted. And how could he deny you?

His head dropped, hair curtaining both your faces, and his mouth found yours hard enough to cut off whatever else you might have said. For one second there was only the wet, desperate sound of the kiss, your bodies moving together, his hips driving deeper, rougher, like the words had snapped the last thread of his restraint clean in two. “As if ya had to ask,” Daryl ground out. Daryl drove into you once more, hard enough that your breath punched out against his mouth, and then again, deeper, rougher, like he was trying to bury himself in the very place your voice had begged him to stay. Your legs locked around his waist with a desperate little jerk, heels digging into him, holding him there, keeping him close, and the sound that tore out of him was so wrecked and helpless that Merle would’ve made fun of him if he could. Daryl’s forehead pressed to yours, his breath spilling hot and broken over your lips as his hips ground flush against you, giving you every inch, giving you exactly what you had pleaded for in that ruined, breathless Spanish that seemed to carve the last of his restraint clean out of him. He finished deep, hips pressed tight to yours, his whole body locking over you as the first hot pulse of him spilled into you and made your eyes flutter, your mouth falling open against his with a soft, stunned sound. You felt him fill you, felt the warmth of it spread through the aching, tender place where your bodies were joined, and the intimacy of it hit harder than everything. It was filthy, yes, obscene enough that the ruined sheets beneath you and the scrape of the cot against concrete would haunt Merle’s nightmares forever, but it was more than that too. It was Daryl giving you what you asked for because you trusted him enough to ask, because the warmth spreading through you was just another way of saying what neither of you ever seemed able to say plainly in daylight. That you were his. That he was yours. It was your body taking him like it knew him, like it wanted every last part of him, like there was no distance left between you worth keeping.

You held him through it while his shoulders shook beneath your hands, fingers buried in his hair, lips brushing over his temple, his cheek, anywhere you could reach as he shuddered into you again, and again, each pulse dragging a low, broken sound from the back of his throat. His face was tucked close to yours, eyes squeezed shut, mouth parted like even breathing had become too much to manage, and you could feel how completely undone he was, how fully he had given himself over to you in that narrow, moonlit cell. Daryl stayed with his forehead pressed to yours, chest heaving against yours, hand sliding up to cup the side of your face with a gentleness so at odds with the last five minutes that Merle almost felt dizzy from it. Your bodies were still tangled together, too close, too familiar, too full of trust for him to dress it up later as just sex and laugh it off over breakfast. That wasn’t just fucking - that was making love in its truest form. To merle those words were fiction, a fairytale. But he just saw it with his own eyes. You were both quiet for a moment except for the uneven drag of your breathing, your body still twitching faintly around him as you came down. Daryl was looking at you, no, into you, hair falling around his face, eyes dark and soft in a way Merle had never seen on him before. And he probably should have taken the mercy and escaped before his eyes, ears, and remaining sanity suffered any further damage.

But then Daryl spoke - so softly it was worse than anything that had come before. “Hey,” he murmured. “Look at me.” You made some little boneless sound that might have been protest and might have been your soul reentering your body. Daryl huffed, almost a laugh, but his voice stayed low and gentle. “C’mon. Come back to me.” Merle’s mouth parted. Come back to me? Who the hell was this man, and what had he done with Daryl? Inside the cell, the cot shifted. Daryl must have eased you back up from where your head had been hanging over the edge, because Merle heard the soft drag of the sheet, the little scrape of the mattress springs, your breath catching like even being moved felt like too much after what his brother had just done to you. There was a low murmur Merle couldn’t make out, Daryl’s voice tucked down close to your skin, followed by the gentlest rustle of fabric as he pulled the sheet higher over you. Then he kissed you. Once on the mouth. Again on your cheek. Then your temple. Then lower, somewhere near your jaw, slow and aimless, not hungry anymore, not trying to start anything back up, just lingering there like he had forgotten the part where people were supposed to separate after. Like he had no idea what to do with all the love still moving through him except keep putting his mouth on you in every place he could reach. “You with me?” Daryl asked, voice rough and quiet. You made a weak little sound, half laugh, half sigh, still wrecked around the edges. “Barely.” “Mm.” There was a smile in his voice now, small and private and so unlike him in daylight that Merle’s stomach twisted again. “Good enough.” You laughed, loose and drunken with it, and then your breath hitched into something softer when Daryl kissed down the side of your throat, just because he could. Because you were his. Because apparently Daryl was the polar opposite of his brother; he actually stuck around after sex to nuzzle like some lovesick idiot instead of rolling over, passing out, or, in Merle’s preferred tradition, getting dressed and fleeing the scene. Daryl kissed your shoulder. Your collarbone. The corner of your mouth again when you turned your head toward him Then you made a small surprised squeak when he nosed your ticklish s nbpot and shoved weakly at him. “No, no—Daryl, not there.” He huffed, amused. “What?” “You know what. You do that on purpose.” “Dunno what you mean.” He kissed the ticklish spot again. You giggled. Actually giggled, breathless and boneless beneath him, and Merle pressed his head back against the wall with a silent expression of profound suffering. Because this was somehow worse than the sex. The sex had been bad enough. Horrifying. Educational in ways he had not consented to. A full visual assault he would be invoicing the universe for at a later date. But this topped that. This was doting. That was the only word Merle had for it, and he hated it. His brother was doting on you like a damn wimp, still tangled up in your warmth, still clinging like he hadn’t had enough even after having all of you. Daryl had one arm braced around you, keeping you tucked beneath him, while the other kept fussing in small, almost unconscious ways: smoothing your hair from your damp face, dragging the sheet over your bare hip, thumb brushing your cheek like he needed proof you were still there. He moved slow, too slow, like he didn’t know how to stop loving you once he’d started. Like twenty-four hours in a day still wasn’t enough time near you. Like even after all that, even after being inside you, finishing inside you, hearing you say those filthy, sweet things in his ear, he still wanted another minute.

Your hands were in his hair now, lazy and trembling, fingers scratching softly at his scalp while you smiled up at him like you were drunk on the shape of his face. Merle could hear it in your voice when you teased him, low and warm and utterly ruined. “I love it when you get like this,” you whispered. Daryl’s answer was muffled against your skin. “ Like what.” “All clingy and sleepy. Like a Sloth.” “Ain’t clingy,” he huffed, nestling into you further. You made another soft sound, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, and Daryl kissed it quiet before it could become anything else. Merle stared at the opposite wall like it had personally betrayed him. Because he could make jokes about fucking. He could make jokes about sneaking around. He could even,make jokes about his brother apparently understanding Spanish when properly motivated. But he had no joke for this. Daryl checking your face like you were something precious. Daryl coaxing you back down from whatever cloud he had sent you to, murmuring to you as if he knew exactly how far he had pushed you and exactly how carefully he had to bring you back. Daryl, who could barely accept tenderness without acting like it burned, giving it to you like it belonged in his hands. Your voice came again, quieter now, rough around the edges and sweet with exhaustion. “Te amo,” you whispered, stroking his face. There was nothing but silence for a beat. Then Daryl, so low Merle felt like a criminal for hearing it, answered, “Love ya too.” Merle pressed both palms to the wall and seriously considered walking beyond the prison fences unarmed, because being eaten alive by walkers was preferable to this. Ok thats a bit dramatic but point is he’s going to have to wash his eyes with soap. Merle couldn’t stomach seeing anymore but he could hear things, like the springs complaining again when the two of you shift. When there’s a longs pause he almost looks in tong delighted. “Stay a minute,” you whispered. “Yeah,” Daryl answered in a hush. “Ok.” Merle flattened himself against the wall, eyes wide, apparently just realising now that he had seen something he had no business seeing and couldn’t unsee. Daryl was supposed to be a useful stray the group had kept around because he could hunt and kill and take a punch, not someone who was in love with some random Latina.

Slowly he left, because apparently his legs had decided to process the trauma separately from the rest of him, then faster once he realised he was still standing within hearing distance like some kind of pervert with a death wish. He made it halfway down the catwalk before remembering he had originally been on his way to piss. He stopped. Considered it. Then kept walking because apparently his bladder had retreated out of respect for the situation. He made it back to his cell, climbed into his bunk, and lay flat on his back staring at the ceiling like the cracked concrete might split open and swallow him out of pure pity. It did not. Instead, his brain — traitorous, diseased organ that it was — kept replaying every goddamn thing he had seen in bright, unforgivable detail: your legs hooked high around his baby brother like you were trying to keep him there permanently, Daryl’s hand groping your breasts and disappearing between your thighs with the confidence of a man who very clearly knew what he was doing, the sick slap and slick grind of his hips, the cot knocking and his cock rocking into you, your head hanging off the mattress while you moaned Daryl’s name like the bastard had personally invented heaven. Merle squeezed his eyes shut, which somehow made it worse, because now there was nothing to look at except the memory of Daryl’s ass moving with purpose and your hands grabbing at it like you were giving tactical encouragement. “Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered, pressing the heel of his palm into his eye socket hard enough to see stars. He had seen a lot of shit. He had seen walkers eating people alive. He had seen men lose limbs, screaming bloody murder. None of that had prepared him for discovering, against his will and through a fluttering sheet, that his skittish little brother fucked like a man possessed and that the loud-mouthed Latina who called Merle a pendejo ten times a day was the reason Daryl kept sneaking back into bed looking half-dead and happier than a pig in mud. A long time later, near dawn, he heard the curtain down the corridor shift. Merle stilled, listening to the careful placement of boots, the pause at the entrance, the slow, controlled breath that meant Daryl was checking whether his brother was passed out. Then Daryl slipped inside, crossed to his bed, and eased down with the caution of someone who had done this many times before. Merle kept still, his eyes shut, until he thought: should I say something? It would have been easy. One crude comment, one mention of your name in that tone he knew made Daryl see red, and the whole secret would have blown wide open. He could have ruined it right there,and ruining things was one of the few talents Merle had practiced enough to call a craft. But he didn’t; he held his tongue. Because, lying there in the grey dark with his brother settling into the bed, probably still smelling like you, Merle understood one simple, terrible thing. You made Daryl happy. Hell, he saw it plain as day. Daryl is the happiest merle has ever seen him, and that was because of you. So for once in his miserable life, Merle Dixon shut the hell up and went to sleep.

In the courtyard, silence held for a beat after Merle finished. Not the ordinary kind of silence that came when people were trying to decide whether they were allowed to laugh yet.. The kind that sat on your chest and shoulders. It settled over the yard in a way that made even the walkers at the fence sound farther away for a second, their groans dulled beneath the soft drip of laundry water falling back into the tub and the low hiss of Carol’s grill behind you. You had stopped moving entirely, both hands sunk beneath the cloudy surface, fingers curled around nothing. Your heart was beating harder than it should have been. Not just from embarrassment, although God knew there was plenty of that. Your face felt hot enough to steam. Your stomach had folded itself into a tight, mortified little knot, and every person standing within earshot might as well have been staring directly at you in your birthday suit. But it was not only embarrassment but the strangeness of it too. The tenderness Merle had smuggled into the story despite himself. The thought of him hearing Daryl say he loved you before anyone else even knew Daryl had that kind of softness in him. The thought of that secret, that fragile, moonlit thing that had belonged only to the two of you, having existed somewhere outside your cell without being immediately squashed. Everything just felt unervingly exposed. Daryl, though— Daryl had gone still beside you in a way that made the back of your neck prickle. At first, it looked like embarrassment. The red at the tips of his ears. The tight set of his mouth. The way his gaze had dropped to the water as if he could drown the entire conversation in the wash tub by glaring hard enough. Then the stillness changed. It sharpened. The blush drained out of him piece by piece, leaving something colder behind. His shoulders had squared without him seeming to notice. His jaw had locked so tight you could see the muscle jumping beneath the stubble. His hands were still in the tub, but they were no longer washing anything. They were clenched around the shirt beneath the water, twisting it slowly, steadily, until the fabric creaked under the pressure. Patrick, sweet, doomed Patrick, spoke from somewhere behind Carol. “So…” he said carefully, voice small with the awful curiosity of someone who knew he should stop asking questions and had no ability to save himself. “You knew because you heard them?” Carol closed her eyes. “I told you to go.” “I did,” Patrick said. “Briefly.” “Go again.” But it was too late. Because before Merle could turn Patrick’s question into something even worse, Daryl cut through the air like a blade. “You were spyin’ like a damn perv” The words came out flat. No embarrassed mutter. No rough little shut up tossed across the yard to cover the fact that he was flustered.. This was stripped down to the bone, cold and quiet and dangerous enough that Glenn straightened where he stood, and Carol’s attention snapped from Patrick to Daryl’s face. Merle heard the danger. And because Merle Dixon had never once seen a burning house without wondering how it would feel to pour whiskey on it, he leaned right into it. “I was walkin’.” Daryl lifted his eyes. “You looked”, Daryl barked. “Curtain moved.” “You kept lookin’!” Merle spread one hand, all false innocence and rotten timing. “Hell, I thought somebody was in distress. Had to make sure.” You closed your eyes and dragged one wet hand down your face. “Merle.” “What?” he said, grin curling through his voice. “Ain’t my fault Darylina picked a room without soundproofin’.” Daryl’s hand tightened under the water. The shirt gave a faint, strained squeak. Your stomach dropped.

You knew Daryl angry. You knew the flare of him, the snap, the way his temper could bark out quick and ugly when somebody startled him or pushed too close to a bruise. You knew his embarrassment too, the way it made him mean for half a second because softness felt too much like standing naked in a doorway.

This was neither. Merle had not only embarrassed him. He had trespassed. That was the only word for it. Trespassed over something Daryl had guarded with his whole body. Something private. Something holy in the ruined little religion the two of you had built out of stolen time, closed curtains, and hands learning how to love without flinching. Merle had seen you. Not just your body, though that was bad enough. Bad enough to make Daryl’s skin crawl, to make his blood boil in his veins, because the thought of Merle having any image of you like that branded behind his eyes made Daryl want to claw it out of him by force. But worse than that, Merle had seen the way Daryl got to have you. The way you trusted him. The way you opened for him. The way you looked at him when there was no one else in the world. And now he was sitting there with jerky in his hand, turning it into a show. Merle saw the shift in Daryl and smiled anyway. That was the awful thing about him. He knew exactly where the line was. He could see it painted bright red across the ground. He could hear everyone around him silently begging him not to step over it. Then he would look Daryl dead in the eye, grin like the devil had personally sponsored him, and put both boots across. “Besides,” Merle went on, jerky caught between his fingers, “hard not to look. Y’all were makin’ enough noise to scare the dead off the fence.” Patrick’s eyes went round. Glenn made a strangled sound. Carol said, sharp as a slap, “Merle.” Your face burned so hot it almost hurt. You could feel every drop of blood under your skin, could feel the wet cuff of your sleeve sticking to your wrist, could feel the whole courtyard holding its breath around you. Fofew seconds you wanted to dunk your head into the wash tub and vanish beneath the cloudy water like a very undignified baptism. Daryl threw the shirt aside, hitting the dirt with a wet slap. You looked at him. “Daryl,” you warned. But he didn’t look at you, which frightened you more than if he had. His eyes were locked on Merle, and there was nothing brotherly in them anymore. His whole body seemed to have gone narrow with purpose, like every bit of him had been pulled into one hard line aimed directly at the jerk sitting on the bucket. Merle’s grin twitched wider, but there was a flicker in his eyes now. Almost wary. Like he had gotten what he wanted and was starting to realise he might have pulled too hard. “Aw, c’mon,” Merle said, still pushing because apparently self-preservation had been cut out of him at birth. “Don’t get sore. I’m complimentin’ ya. Didn’t know you had it in ya, little brother.” Daryl sprung up and stormed across the space towards his brother, water dripping from his fingers, shoulders squared, head dipped just enough that his hair cast his eyes into shadow. Merle pushed up from the bucket, not fully standing at first, just lifting his weight enough to show he was not scared, or maybe enough to convince himself of it.“What?” Merle said. “She weren’t exactly complainin’.” Daryl moved so fast the bucket skidded backward before Merle was fully on his feet. One second there was space between them, the next Daryl had a fist twisted in the front of Merle’s shirt and had driven him back against the nearest post hard enough to make the metal rattle. The sound cracked across the courtyard, sharp and ugly, and everything else seemed to drop away: the walkers, the grill, the wet laundry, Patrick’s startled breath, Glenn’s muttered curse. Your heart punched into your throat. “Daryl!” His face was inches from Merle’s, his knuckles white in the fabric, wound so tight it looked painful. Merle’s grin had vanished now, replaced by the bright-eyed tension of a man who knew very well that he was no longer only playing. “Don’t,” Daryl said. One word. Barely more than a rasp. Merle swallowed. You saw it. The tiny movement of his throat. The first honest crack in the performance. Daryl shoved him harder into the post. “How many times I gotta tell you to mind ya damn business.”

Merle’s eyes flicked toward you. Wrong move. Daryl jerked him forward and slammed him back again, harder this time and much more deliberate, his voice dropping into something so low and venomous it made your stomach twist. “Don’t even look at her.” That hit the yard like a warning shot. Because there it was. The thing beneath all of it. Not embarrassment. Not being teased. Not even Merle making jokes at his expense. It was you. It was Merle’s eyes on you in that memory. Merle’s mouth wrapped around it now. Merle dragging one of the most private things Daryl had ever had into the dirt for everyone to laugh at. It was the idea that someone like Merle had seen your face tipped back in moonlight, had heard your voice break, had witnessed Daryl loving you in the only space where he had ever been brave enough to do it without armour. Daryl looked sick with rage. “You had no damn right,” he said, each word scraped raw. “Knew I shoulda never let you back in.” For once, Merle did not answer immediately. His chest rose and fell against Daryl’s fist. His eyes searched his brother’s face, maybe for the old pattern, maybe for the game, maybe for the part where this was still just two Dixons circling each other with teeth bared because that was easier than saying anything true. But Daryl was not playing around. And maybe before Merle would’ve gone off about family, how he’s all he’s got, that he is the one who’s been there for him through thick and thin, but that wasn't true anymore. He has a family. He has you. Merle’s jaw worked. “…Didn’t mean nothin’ by it.” “Bullshit,” Daryl spat. “Daryl,” you said again, stepping closer now, careful with your voice, because you could feel the violence coiled in him and knew that if you grabbed at him too fast he might mistake touch for restraint and snap harder.

His shoulders twitched but not enough to turn. You took another step. “Look at me.” Merle, because he was Merle and apparently had a talent for choosing death twice in one conversation, muttered, “Should’ve known it was her from the noise alone. Ain’t that what they say about Latinas?” his eyes slid to yours, head tilting. “All mouth till you get ’em on their back?” Daryl’s fist reared back. Glenn surged forward. “Whoa—” Carol snapped, “Daryl!” And then Rick’s voice cut across the yard,“Daryl!” Rick’s voice boomed, carrying that clean, sheriff-weight authority that made half the courtyard freeze on instinct. Daryl’s fist stayed suspended for one terrible second, Merle’s eyes locked on it. Rick crossed the yard fast, boots crunching over gravel, one hand lifted but not touching yet. He knew better than to grab Daryl from behind. His gaze flicked from Merle pinned against the post, to Daryl’s white-knuckled grip, to you standing in the spill of laundry water with your face hotter than the sun. “What happened?” Rick asked. Nobody answered. Merle opened his mouth. Daryl shoved him once more into the post, and Rick stepped in closer. “Daryl,” he said again, lower now. “Let him go.” Daryl’s breathing was rough through his nose. His eyes were still on Merle, burning so hard you almost wished Merle would look away for his own sake. You reached him then, touching his wrist where his fist was tangled in Merle’s shirt. “Hey,” you whispered. “Mírame.” His jaw flexed. “Please,” you said, softer. That did the trick. Daryl’s eyes flicked toward you for half a second. The rage didn’t leave his face, but something inside it cracked open, and the sight of you — embarrassed, shaken, still choosing to come close to him instead of backing away — pulled him back from whatever edge Merle had shoved him toward. Slowly, Daryl let go. Merle’s shirt fell wrinkled against his chest.

Then Daryl stepped back, but only far enough to put himself between you and Merle. His wet hand found yours without looking, fingers closing around you with a grip that wasn’t soft but desperate in its restraint. Like if he could hold onto you, he might keep from putting his fist through his brother’s face after all. Merle rubbed at his chest, breathing hard, the grin gone. Rick’s eyes stayed on Daryl, whose stare didn’t leave Merle. You squeezed Daryl’s hand and he finally looked down at you, really looked, and whatever he saw on your face made his anger twist into something more painful. His mouth parted like he wanted to say something, maybe apologize, maybe ask if you were okay, maybe promise to keep Merle on a tighter leash, as if you hadn’t heard that one before.

Rick exhaled through his nose, shifting on his feet.“We really don’t need a repeat of last month.” Patrick, who had apparently still not learned that curiosity killed the cat, looked between all of you. “What happened last month?” Carol’s mouth flattened. “Merle was a shocking human being” There was really no defending himself, so Merle actually stayed quiet. Rick looked tired already, like the memory itself had given him a headache. “It was an afternoon in the yard,” he said. “Quiet day, mostly. I was workin the field…” Merle scoffed. “Oh, here we go.” Rick ignored him. Which was usually the safest way to begin any story involving Merle Dixon. It had been one of those lazy prison afternoons; the yard shimmered under the sun, pale concrete pale as a sheet, the air thick enough that breathing felt like pulling cloth through your lungs. The kids had been let out for a while because keeping them cooped up in the cell block only turned them feral, and they were scattered near the tables with whatever scraps of childhood could still be scraped together: a half-flat ball, some chalk, a few sticks being used as swords by children who had seen enough real violence to make pretend violence seem like a simple game to pass the time. Daryl had been nearby, crouched beside his bike with a rag in one hand and a tool in the other, pretending with the dedication of a liar that he was not glancing at you every few minutes. Apart from being a decent human being, Merle had no reason to watch his mouth around you for Daryl’s sake because he was oblivious about the two of you. And apparently kids were no exception to his crudeness. Elena had been playing with the younger kids. She was about seven or eight years old, small for her age, with long dark hair that never stayed tied back and big solemn eyes that had seen too much before she ever reached the prison gates. She had come from Woodbury with no family left, folded into the crowd by people kind enough to keep her fed but not always able to understand her. Her English came in pieces, every sentence a little bridge she had to build before she could cross it. Spanish was easier. It was home. So naturally, she found you. Or maybe you found each other.

It had started with you translating what she wanted but couldn’t say. You asking if she wanted water. You crouching beside her at the dinner telling her it was ok for her to grab as much food as she wanted when she looked too nervous to take a decent portion size. Then one day she had come to you with a small beaded bracelet that she had spent all afternoon making for you, and after that, it was over. Elena attached herself to you with the quiet desperation of a child who had finally found their family again. That afternoon, she was running after the ball when she tripped. One second she was laughing, hair flying behind her, and the next she hit the dirt hard, knees first, palms scraping over gravel. For half a breath there was stunned silence. Then her face crumpled. The cry came out high and frightened. “Me duele,” she sobbed, clutching her knee. “Me duele mucho.” Carl, standing nearby with the ball tucked under one arm, shifted awkwardly. He had been younger than he acted and older than he should have been, which made him terrible at deciding what to do with other children’s pain. “It’s just a scrape,” he said, not cruelly, but too blunt. “You gotta toughen up. Stop being a baby” “Carl,” you said, walking over. He looked over, defensive already. You weren’t angry with him. That was the thing. Carl had been through so much, forced to turn tough in places children were supposed to stay soft, and sometimes he forgot that not everybody had been sharpened the same way. “Not everyone is tough as nails like you are,” you told him, gentler now. “Let her cry.” Carl looked down at the dirt , then back up at you. “You’re tough,” he said, eyes squinting at you in the sun. “When did you stop crying?” “Huh,” you pondered. “Well I still cry so I must not be so tough then.” You squeezed his shoulder as you passed. “Tough people cry too mijo. Remember that.”

You dropped to your knees beside Elena. “Ay, mi vida,” you murmured, reaching for her carefully. “Ven aquí. Déjame ver.” Elena launched herself into you before you could inspect anything, little arms wrapping around your neck, face pressing into your shoulder as she cried. You gathered her close without hesitation, one hand cupping the back of her head, the other smoothing over her hair while she sobbed into your shirt. “Me duele,” she whimpered. “Lo sé, lo sé.” Your voice softened until it was barely more than a hum beneath the afternoon noise.“Respira conmigo, ¿sí? Inhala… eso es. Exhala. Muy bien, mi niña valiente.” Daryl looked up from the bike when he heard your voice changed when you spoke to Elena. The Spanish he knew from you usually came sharp or laughing, thrown over your shoulder at Merle, muttered under your breath when a door stuck, whispered against Daryl’s mouth in moments he tried not to think about in broad daylight. This was different. This was warm and low and almost whimsical, the words wrapping around the crying child like a blanket. Something tightened behind his ribs. He watched you wipe Elena’s tears with your thumbs, watched you inspect her scraped knee, watched the girl’s breathing slow because you were there, because you understood her, because for one small moment in a prison full of strangers she had someone who sounded like family. Daryl swallowed. He didn’t have a name for the feeling and that was probably for the best. Then Merle walked by and decided to be a piece of shit. “The hell’s all that?” Merle said. You glanced up, still crouched beside Elena. “Comforting a child. Try not to be frightened.” Merle’s lip curled. “Comfort her in English.” For a second, you genuinely thought you had misheard him. Not because Merle saying something ignorant was shocking. Merle said ignorant things more often than not. But interrupting a crying child to complain about what language she was being comforted in took a special kind of commitment to being a dick. You blinked at him. “She understands me in Spanish.” “Ain’t the point.” “It is literally the entire point.” Elena sniffled against you, looking between your face and Merle’s with nervous confusion. She didn’t understand all the words, but she understood tone.

Your jaw tightened. You could take Merle’s bullshit. You had dealt with versions of it your whole life from people (mostly men) who thought their ignorance was a personality, from people who heard Spanish and immediately assumed everything they needed to know about you without even asking. You knew the look. The assumption sitting under every word that he was more valid here than you, more entitled to the space, more reasonable, more deserving, more worth listening to because he had been born into a language he had never bothered learning properly himself. You could take it, but not in front of Elena. You turned back to her and softened your voice on purpose. “Ve con Carol, mi amor. Dile que necesitas agua y algo para limpiar la rodilla, ¿sí?” Elena hesitated, eyes flicking to Merle. “¿Está enojado conmigo?” she whispered. Your heart twisted. “No, chiquita.” You brushed her hair back from her wet cheek and smiled. “Está enojado porque no sabe cerrar la boca.” Elena stared at you for half a second. Then she giggled. Daryl’s mouth twitched despite the warning already crawling up his spine. Merle narrowed his eyes. “You talkin’ shit?” You looked up at him sweetly. “Always.” Elena limped toward Carol, who had already started moving in her direction. Only once Elena was out of reach did you stand. Merle folded his arms. “I said speak English.” “And I ignored you.” You dusted off your knees. “Look at us. Growing as people.” “Smart mouth.” “You keep saying that like it’s a discovery.” “You people always this difficult?” The yard seemed to still by a degree. Daryl’s hand froze on the wrench. Your expression didn’t change, but something in your eyes sharpened. “You people,” you repeated. Merle shrugged, already doubling down because that was what people like him did when they felt the floor tilt under them. “Yeah. You people.” “Define that.” “You know what I mean.” “I want to hear you say it.” His grin flickered, irritated now. “Don’t get all fiery on me.” “Oh, fiery,” you said, nodding slowly. “See? That. That right there.” He pointed at you like you had proved something. “Always gotta turn everything into a whole thing.” He titled his head, an ugly grin forming on his face. “You just wantin’ Merle’s attention huh mamacita?” Yikes. “I was comforting a child,” you said flatly. “You were jabberin’.” “I was speaking Spanish.” “Same difference when nobody knows what the hell you’re sayin’.” You stepped closer. Enough to make Daryl’s whole body go full alert beside the bike. “Don’t call my language jabbering when English is no better.” Merle’s eyes dragged over you with the ugly confidence of. someone who thought the world had given him permission to take up as much space as he wanted. “What, you gonna teach me a lesson?” “I could,,” you shrugged. “Someone has to. He barked a laugh. “That right? You Mexicans always this dramatic?” “Why do you assume every Spanish-speaking person is Mexican?” “What else is there?” “Wow you are just a dumb redneck huh?” His face changed as if you had just slapped him. Taste of his own medicine tasted like shit apparently. The look of Merle’s expression was so appalled and angry it made Daryl abandon his tools and stand — not fully forward yet, but up, wrench hanging at his side, gaze fixed on his brother. You didn’t look at Daryl; if you did, he would move, and you wanted to handle this yourself for as long as Merle kept it aimed at you. “Are you allergic to thinking?” You asked genuinely. Merle’s grin twisted. “Aw, c’mon. Don’t be so sensitive. Maybe you’re just grumpy ’cause you ain’t had your tacos yet.” You laughed once, no humor in it at all. Well maybe a little because it was a shit dig. Tacos. Really??

“Oooooh, burn. That’s a good one,” you said. “Okay, hick. Why don’t you go make love to your truck and cry into a can of warm beer because your daddy didn’t hug you enough?” Carol looked down at Elena’s knee and very deliberately did not smile. Merle’s face darkened. If that was merle’s reaction you just prayed Daryl didn’t hear that.. “You think you’re real cute.” “I know I am.” Then he said the inevitable. “You got a lotta mouth for a little bean.” That one stung a little, but you didn’t let it show. Why it shocked you he would stoop to that level you weren't sure - but one thing was for ure, you weren't just gonna roll over and take it. “You’ve got a lot of nerve for a man with a toothpick for a hand.” Daryl coughed once. It might have been a laugh strangled to death. Merle’s eyes snapped toward Daryl, then back to you, and something meaner moved across his face because now he was not only angry, he was embarrassed. In front of you. In front of Daryl. In front of Carol, Glenn, the kids, half the yard. “Careful,” Merle said, stepping closer. “You ain’t as scary as you think you are.” You held your ground. “Neither are you.” “Maybe somebody oughta remind you where you are.” “Prison yard. End of the world. Surrounded by people who are somehow still less exhausting than you.” What could’ve happened next was anyone’s guess, but Daryl wasn’t taking any chances. Daryl started moving,,slowly at first. Merle either didn’t notice or pretended not to. “This is America,” Merle snapped, voice rising. “Or it was, last I checked. We speak English here.” You tilted your head. “Last I checked, the dead are walking and the government is gone, so I think America has bigger problems than how I communicate.” “Maybe teach the little orphan English,” he shot back, “instead of keepin’ her scared and clingy with that foreign crap.” When he brought Elena up that final time - that was the line.

Little elena who finally had a voice in the chaos thanks to you . And he called her a little orphan like her loss was ironic. Because he took the one thing that she still had, that soothed her through it all and spat on it like it was dirty. Your hand twitched at your side. Daryl reached him before you could. One second Merle was standing in front of you. The next, Daryl was between you, shoving his brother hard enough in the chest that Merle stumbled back two full steps. “Back off.” Merle caught himself, eyes flashing. “Hell, you Mexican too now brother?” Daryl shoved him again, harder this time. Merle’s back hit one of the yard posts with a dull metallic clang.“I said back off.” Merle’s face twisted, pride smarting more than his body. “Oh I see. You tryna impress you’re lil Spanish friend so she’ll do ya, is that it?” Daryl’s fist drew back. Rick caught his arm before it landed, barely. “Daryl.” Daryls eyes stayed trained on Merle, flat and furious, his chest moving hard with each breath. “You hearin’ this shit?.” “I heard him,” Rick said, voice low. “Then do somethin’.” For a second, nobody spoke. The yard had gone silent except for Elena’s quiet sniffles near Carol and the distant dead at the fence. Merle’s eyes flicked around, looking for a joke, an exit, a way to make himself the victim in a fight he had built. Rick stepped fully between them. Then he looked at Merle. Not with irritation but disgust. “You don’t speak to our people like that,” Rick said. “You keep this up I’ll handcuff you to another roof. See how you do with no hands.” Merle opened his mouth. Rick stepped closer. “Try me.” Merle shut it. Daryl’s arm was still tense in Rick’s grip, but his eyes shifted toward you for the first time since he had moved. The fury in him changed when he saw your face. You hated that. You hated that Merle could make you feel exposed with a handful of lazy words. You hated that Daryl had heard them. You hated the heat in your throat, the humiliation sitting under your tongue, the fact that Elena had almost heard enough to understand she was being talked about like a burden. “I had it handled,” you said eventually, Daryl’s mouth tightened. “Know that.” “You didn’t have to—” “Know that too.” His voice was rough, but not defensive. More like he was trying to speak without letting the anger spill out between his teeth. Rick released his arm slowly. Daryl didn’t move toward Merle again, but he did angle himself in front of you. Just a little. Carol guided Elena away, one hand on the girl’s shoulder, but not before Elena looked back at you with wide, worried eyes. You forced yourself to smile. “Estoy bien,” you called softly. “Ve con Carol.” Elena hesitated. Then she nodded. Merle watched her go, jaw working, and for one fleeting second something almost like shame passed across his face. Then it was gone.

Back in the present, Rick finished with a tired look at Patrick. “That is what happened last month,” he said, “Like Déjà vu.” The courtyard had gone quiet again, but not the kind that came after Merle said something crude and everyone waited for the punchline. This one sat heavy over the wash tub, over the grill, over Daryl’s hand resting too still beside yours. Patrick looked horrified. “He said that to a kid?” “Near a kid,” Merle muttered. You looked at him. He stared at the dirt. Carol’s voice came dry and sharp from the grill. “That distinction is not helping you.” Glenn shifted uncomfortably. “It really isn’t.” Merle scratched at his jaw, trying for a scoff and not quite finding one. “Everybody was sensitive that day,” he tried again. “No,” you said. Your voice was calm enough that everyone looked at you. “That’s enough.” Rick’s eyes stayed on Merle. “You were warned then.” Carol looked over. “He’s not getting much better,” she said like he wasn’t there. Funny how this all started with talking about how Merle was managed; well it looks like the jury is still out on that one. You felt Daryl practically vibrating beside you, anger banked under his skin, not as wild as it had been a month ago but still there, ready, carrying every version of Merle’s mouth like it was something Daryl had personally failed to keep away from you.

And suddenly you were tired. So tired it hollowed you out. The joke had gone out of the morning. The story had too. The laundry water was cold around your wrists, your knees ached from crouching, and the courtyard felt too crowded with everyone’s eyes, everyone’s judgment, everyone waiting to see whether your patience would finally give out and let Merle have it. You pulled your hands from the tub. “I don’t feel well,” you said. Daryl turned instantly. “You sick?” “No.” You wiped your wet hands down your thighs and stood. “Just tired.” His face changed in that small, painful way it did when he understood there was something wrong he could not shoot, track, fix, or carry for you. You touched his shoulder lightly before he could stand. “I’m just gonna lie down for a bit.” He looked like he hated the idea. But he nodded. You walked away from the wash tub without looking back at Merle. The courtyard stayed silent behind you.

The morning had already broken apart. Patrick, pale with the terrible privilege of having learned too much about your lives had taken over scraping down the grill with the desperate focus of someone trying to become useful enough to avoid further conversing. Glenn lingered near the table only long enough to mutter something about checking inventory for the run, then wisely made himself scarce. Carol watched you disappear through the cell block doors, her mouth pressed into a thin line, and then she looked back at Merle with the kind of quiet disappointment that somehow felt sharper than any knife. “I’m going to check on the kids,” she said. Merle tried for a scoff. “What, got your own storytime to host?” Carol didn’t smile. “Something like that.” Then she left too.

That thinned the yard down to Rick standing with his arms folded, Daryl still squared up in front of Merle with his clothes still sodden, and Merle standing uncomfortably against the pillar, suddenly very interested in the dirt by his boots. Daryl didn’t move for a long second. When he did it wasn’t with the explosive anger from before. That might have been easier. That might have given Merle something to push back against, some familiar Dixon shape to twist into a fight. But Daryl turned slowly, shoulders tight, jaw working like he was chewing through every word before trusting himself to let it out. Merle looked up. “What?” “You know what,” Daryl bit out, voice deep and gravely. “Fraid ur gonna have to tell me,” Merle said slowly,as if wringing out the last of his brother’s patience. Daryl’s mouth tightened. “Don’t play dumb.” Rick shifted slightly, but he didn’t step in yet. Daryl took half a step closer, water dripping from his fingers into the dust. “You know what she means to me.” Merle’s face twitched.. “You know,” Daryl repeated, voice rougher now, quieter too, like every word had to scrape its way out of him. “Ain’t some damn joke. Ain’t just you runnin’ your mouth. You know how much —” He stopped, swallowed hard, eyes flicking away for half a breath before coming back colder. “You know.” Merle’s jaw shifted. “I didn’t mean—” “Yeah, ya did.” The words landed flat. Merle shut his mouth. Because yeah, he did. Daryl looked toward the cell block doors where you had vanished, and something painful moved across his face before he hid it. “She keeps tryin’ with you.” Merle huffed, but there was no strength in it. “She gives as good as she gets.” “That ain’t the point.” “She don’t need you fightin’ her battles.” “I know she don’t.” Daryl’s head snapped back to him, voice sharpening. “That ain’t what this is. She don’t need me to. But I ain’t gonna stand there while you keep cuttin’ at her.” Merle looked away. Daryl stepped closer. “You think ’cause she can take it, that means you get to keep doin’ it.” His voice dropped again, rough with restraint. “She only puts up with your shit cuz o’ me. Lord knows I wish she wouldn’t.” Merle’s eyes flicked back. There was no joke ready this time. Daryl’s expression twisted, anger and guilt tangled so tightly together they looked like the same wound. “You know how that feels? Watchin’ her swallow your shit because of me?” Merle’s face hardened out of habit, but it didn’t hold right.

Daryl stared at him for another long second, then shook his head once, small and bitter. “You keep this up, somethin’s gonna give.” Merle looked up. “That a threat?” Daryl’s eyes did not move. “It’s the way it is.” The yard seemed to still around it. “Something changes,” Daryl said. “I don’t care what. You learn when to shut your damn mouth. You get along with her or stay away I don’t care. Or you take your shit somewhere else. Either way somethin’ changes.” Merle swallowed, throat bobbing under the shadow of his jaw. “You really picking a girl over your brother?” “I picked you once,” he said, voice low. “Look how that turned out.” Daryl leaned in slightly, not enough to crowd him, but enough that Merle could not mistake the weight of it. “’I choose her.” Rick finally moved then, stepping into the edge of the space between them, not blocking Daryl, just adding the quiet force of his presence. “He’s right,” Rick said. Merle’s mouth twisted. “Course he is.” “No.” Rick’s voice hardened. “Listen to me. This isn’t about choosing sides in some family feud. You keep doing this, you become a problem for the whole group.” Merle scoffed weakly. “Because I hurt some feelings?” “Because you make people unsafe.” Rick’s gaze didn’t waver. “It’s a habit of yours. You start shit, and then you act surprised when people don’t like you for it.” Merle’s shoulders sank by a fraction, almost too small to notice. Rick continued, quieter now. “You want to stay here, make yourself useful. Be better. But don’t mistake people tolerating you for permission to keep being an asshole.” Merle stared at the dirt again, the bucket suddenly looking less like a throne and more like exactly what it was: a stupid place for a grown man to sit after driving away one of the few people who still bothered speaking to him. Daryl wiped his wet hands down the front of his pants. “I’m goin’ to check on her,” he said. No one stopped him. Merle’s eyes lifted once, quick and uncertain. “Oh cmon Daryl,” he drawled, feigning casualness. Daryl paused. For a second, the old rhythm waited there. Merle could have made it worse. Could have tossed out one more joke , one more jab to prove he was still untouchable, one more ugly little thing dressed up as humor because he didn’t care about these people. He should say something now just to prove so. But he didn’t. Daryl looked at him, and whatever he saw there did not soften him exactly, but it made the disgust in his face ache with something older. “Figure it out,” Daryl said. Then he turned and walked toward the cell block after you, his steps quickening the closer he got to the doors, as if he was worried the longer he didnt say anything the more you would question which side he was on. Rick stayed a moment longer. Merle didn’t dare look at him. The walkers groaned faintly at the fence. Somewhere inside, Carol’s voice rose in that calm, steady way she used with children. Patrick scraped at the grill with unnecessary intensity. The yard moved on around Merle, but not toward him. For once, nobody filled the silence for him. And Merle Dixon was left alone again from chasing everyone away, with the taste of guilt sitting sour behind his teeth. How the fuck wa he gonna fix this one?

Daryl found you in the cell the two of you had stopped pretending wasn’t shared.

He stood in the doorway for a few seconds before he stepped in, one hand curled loosely around the edge of the curtain, his eyes adjusting to the dimmer light inside. The cell was a mess in a specific, intimate way that only two people could create. His vest was slung over the back of a chair. A few of your shirts had somehow ended up half under the cot, a sleeve reaching out like it was trying to escape. There were socks on the floor that belonged to both of you, a pile of clothes gathered at the foot of the bed, a knife belt hanging from the corner post, one of Daryl’s spare bolts tucked on the little crate you used as a table, and your boots kicked crooked beneath it. Neither of you really cared until you needed one very specific piece of clothing and suddenly the whole place became a crime scene.

You were lying on your side with your back half turned to the door, curled loosely on top of the blanket, one arm tucked under your head and your hair falling over part of your face. You hadn’t drawn the curtain fully shut after coming in. Maybe because you hadn’t the energy. Maybe because some part of you knew he would follow.

Daryl let the curtain drop behind him. You knew it was him - you didn’t need to turn around to know that.

He crossed the cell quietly, boots careful over the cluttered floor, then crouched down beside the cot until his face was level with yours. For a moment, he only looked at you. The tiredness was there, yes, but not the kind that came from bad sleep or too much work or a day spent sweating under the prison sun. This was the kind of tired that sat behind your eyes and made your mouth hold itself still because if it moved too much, something honest might slip out.

His hand lifted slowly, fingers brushing the hair back from your face. They were still damp at the edges from the wash tub, but careful when they tucked the loose strands behind your ear. He didn’t say your name loud. Didn’t fill the cell with concern where anyone passing might hear it and turn it into a whole other fanfare like this morning.

“You okay?” he asked, soft enough that it belonged only to you. You gave him a thin little smile, not bothering to try be convincing because you didn’t think it was worth expending the energy when he saw right through you.

“Yeah,” you said, sighing through your nose. “Just tired.” You shifted on the cot, looking away. “Didn’t sleep much last night.”

That was such obvious bullshit that even the mattress seemed to judge you. You were out like a damn log. There was literally nothing that could wake you. During the night he had tried to move once and you had made some furious little noise in your sleep, tightened around him like a vine, and mumbled something that sounded enough like a threat for him to stay exactly where he was until morning. He had basically had to drag you out of bed earlier because that is how comatose you were. He stared at you. “Right,” he said.

You closed your eyes. “Don’t start.” His mouth twitched despite himself, but the amusement did not last. His thumb brushed once along your cheekbone, barely there, and the softness of it made your throat close in the most inconvenient way.

You hated that Merle had gotten to you.

You hated that something so stupid had gotten a rise out of you. You hated that you had walked out of the yard first, as if retreating made him right, as if leaving meant he had won something. You hated that Daryl had seen it. That was the worst part, maybe. Not Merle’s mouth, not the embarrassment, not even the tedious prejudices.

It was Daryl looking at you afterward like your hurt had entered his body and set up camp there.

You could handle Merle. You could handle ignorance. You could handle men who thought saying “you people” was clever because nobody had ever told them otherwise. But Daryl blaming himself for it? As if he was the one who had said it? That made you feel a whole new level of shitty, and you had no idea what to do with it.

So you smiled thinly again and pretended. Then he stood, motioned with his chin. “Scooch.”

You huffed, caught and annoyed about it, but still sat up enough to let him sit where your head had been. He settled against the wall with one knee bent, the other foot planted on the floor, body angled toward you in that unthinking way he always had now.

You lay back without asking, his arm coming down across your torso, loose and warm, and your head found his lap like the shape had been made there. The whole thing happened so naturally neither of you even paused over it, as if the two of you had forgotten to fumble or be self conscious about how you relaxed into it. It was just Daryl sitting and you curling back into him, your cheek against his thigh, your body stretched out along the cot while his hand settled in your hair. You sighed into it, now a little less alone inside your own skin.

Daryl’s fingers began to move through your hair, slow and idle, separating the strands near your temple, smoothing them back, then starting again. He did it like he was thinking with his hands, like it soothed the edges of his thoughts.

For a few minutes, neither of you said anything. Outside the cell, the prison carried on in low fragments. A bucket dragged somewhere down the row. Someone laughed faintly from the yard, then quieted. There was a car humming in the distance, and if you weren’t mistaken, the faint sound of hooves. The world went on being ugly and loud beyond the curtain, but inside the cell there was only Daryl’s hand in your hair, the warmth of his thigh under your cheek, and the slow, careful easing of your breathing. Then you ruined it.

“Ugh,” you said, staring at the metal slats of the bunk above. “Tomorrow’s run with Merle is gonna suck.” Daryl’s hand stopped so abruptly he may as well have announced it aloud.

In all the mess of the morning — Merle’s story, the humiliation, the tedious argument, you walking away, the guilt thart pressed on his throat — he had completely forgotten that you and Merle were both on the run list for the next day. But that was not the part that hit him hardest — it was how casually you said it.

Like it was inconvenient. Like bad weather. Like a blister. Like Merle being Merle was something you could complain about and then shoulder anyway, because that was what people did. You had walked out of the yard not ten minutes ago with your face set like stone, and now you were lying in his lap talking about going beyond the fence with the same man who’s favourite way to pass the time was to test your patience. And you were just going to carry on and… trust him with your life. You felt the change and glanced up at him. “What?”

He looked down at you like you had just said something in a language even his hard-earned Spanish could not help him with. “You’re goin’ with him tomorrow?” You blinked. “Yeah.” His frown deepened. “With my btother?” “Yes. Your brother, Merle.” “After today?”

You shifted a little, getting more comfortable against his lap, which seemed to offend him further because you had not even bothered to sit up for the conversation. “Why are you acting like this isn’t just another Tuesday,” you said. He still looked at you like you had grown two heads.

“Where the hell have you been the last few months,” you chuckled. “We go in circles. It just the routine we have going on.”

His fingers resumed moving through your hair, but slower now, more distracted. “Ain’t a routine,” he murmured, chewing his lip slightly. “It kind of is.” “No.” His voice roughened. “No, he don’t get to run his mouth, make you storm out, then wake up tomorrow and act like he ain’t done nothin’. Ain’t how this goes.” You sighed. “You can’t keep a kangaroo from hopping.” Daryl stared. “That ain’t a sayin’.” “Ok well now it is.” “Ya can’t just make up a sayin’.” “Fine.” You waved one hand lazily over your stomach. “What is it you rednecks say? That dog won’t hunt?” His brows cinched together. “That don’t seem right.” “Well that’s why i went with kangaroo.” “Christ fine go with kangaroos.”

You smiled a little, but he didn’t follow you into it. His hand kept combing through your hair, thumb grazing your scalp, fingers catching once in a knot and gently working it free. The small care of it made the silence heavier somehow. He was trying to understand. That was the problem. Daryl could handle rage, could handle threats, could handle his brother. What he struggled to handle was you lying there, calm and resigned and still willing to continue as if nothing had happened. That was not like you at all. You held grudges beautifully. Artistically, even. You remembered insults by date, time, and weather. You once refused to speak to Glenn for half a day because he had implied your hair was frizzy. If someone borrowed your things without asking, you’d take their shit right back. If a man looked at you wrong, you could peel him open with three sentences and leave his entire family embarrassed.

So why Merle? Why did Merle get chances he had not earned? Daryl looked at your face, at the tired slope of your mouth, at the way you were trying so hard to act like this was nothing. “I don’t get it,” he said finally. You looked up again. “What?” “Why you put up with it.” The words came out blunt because he didn't know how else to shape them. Your expression softened, and that somehow made him feel worse. “With Merle?” “Yeah, with Merle.” His jaw worked. “He treats you like shit. Keeps doin’ it. You got every reason to knock his teeth out and ya don’t.” “I do fantasise about that,”you said but Daryl didnt react. “I’m serious,” he said quietly, his other hand rubbing your abdomen as if trying to coax you into behave.

For a moment, you watched the light shift along the wall of the cell, thin and grey through the bars, catching dust in the air. Daryl’s fingers moved through your hair again, slower now, more pensive. He didn’t seem to realise he was doing it. Or maybe he did and simply couldn’t stop. “Well,” you said eventually, “he’s your family.” Daryl’s face tightened immediately. “So?” You tilted your head in his lap so you could see him better. “So? That’s everything.”“Yeah but that doesn’t…” He trailed off, trying to find the right words. “Family ain’t just blood.”

You smiled then, not teasing this time; genuine, soft enough that it stole a little of his anger before he could stop it. “Of course it isn’t,” you said, like it was a fact of life. Something flickered behind his eyes, confused and raw, because he expected to explain it. Fight against the old idea that blood excused everything, that blood meant loyalty even when loyalty came with hurt. But you were looking at him like he had never needed to convince you.

You shrugged one shoulder, still lying across his lap as if you had not just reached into his chest and touched something bare. “But he’s your family. So… I guess that makes him mine too.”

Daryl went still. The words landed in him with a force you hadn’t expected. You saw it happen — the small catch in his breathing, the way his eyes fixed on yours, the way his mouth parted slightly but nothing came out.

“Family is everything,” you continued, speaking toward the wall because it was easier than speaking directly into the look he was giving you. “And I don’t mean that in the superficial way people say it on cards before they stop talking to their cousin over a casserole recipe. I mean…” You searched for the words, fingers going to draw any patterns along his arm as you try to explain. “For me, where I come from, family is not just who lives in your house. It is the house. The street. The auntie who is not really your auntie but would still smack you with a sandal if you acted stupid. The neighbour who feeds you because you look too skinny. The cousin who drives you crazy but still gets a plate. The whole village, sometimes. Everybody in everybody’s business, everybody yelling, everybody loving in their own chaotic but beautiful way.”

Daryl’s hand started moving again, slow strokes through your hair. You could feel him listening with his whole body.

“Family is… sacred,” you continued. “Not perfect. God, no. Sometimes family is the reason you need to go scream into a pillow. Sometimes they hurt you because they know how to do that. Sometimes you need distance. Sometimes you need boundaries. Sometimes you need to tell them, very clearly, that if they speak again you will rearrange their face. But the point is…” You swallowed, trying to explain the shape of something too big for one language. “We don’t always choose family, and we don’t always get to choose who we love. And sometimes family just comes attached to the people we love. And I guess we can decide what to do with them. How much room they get. What lines they don’t cross. Whether they are allowed to stay at the table or maybe eat in their room.”

His fingers paused at the end of a strand, then slipped back to your scalp. “Merle pokes fun at it because he doesn’t understand it,” you said. “Or maybe because he does and it scares him. I don’t know. But he is your brother. He is a disaster, and a bigot, and a full-time pain in the ass, and I may still poison him one day if he keeps calling me by ‘you people’ again.” “Wouldn’t blame ya.” “But he is your brother,” you said again. “And you love him.” Daryl stared down at you. “And I love you,” you said softly. “So I’ll try to love him.”

The cell seemed very quiet after you finished speaking. You could hear the distant yard beyond the walls, the murmur of people moving through the prison, the faint clank of someone working near the gate. But inside, Daryl was looking at you like you had just done something impossible. Like all the air had been taken out of him and replaced with something profound.

He had spent so much of his life bracing for people to leave. For people to decide the Dixon family was too much trouble. For people to look at Merle and see Daryl standing right behind him, guilty by blood, guilty by history, guilty by proximity. He had expected anger from you. He had expected disgust. Maybe even distance, though the thought had been sitting in his stomach like a stone since the courtyard.

He had not expected you to fold Merle into the complicated map of what you called family because Daryl was already there. Yeah. He was downright stumped what to do with that.

So he continued touching your hair, his fingers sliding through the strands again and again, gentle and reverent without him making it dramatic. He smoothed the pieces away from your forehead, tucked one behind your ear, traced the line of your part with a careful concentration . The whole time, his mind was moving too fast beneath the silence. How the hell were you real? How did you get more stubborn, more loyal, more impossible every time he thought he had found the summit? You were probably the only person in the world capable of looking at Merle Dixon and deciding, with full awareness of all available evidence, that he might be extended family by unfortunate technicality. Daryl didn't know whether to laugh, kiss you, or apologize until his voice gave out. He settled for brushing his thumb over your temple. “You ain’t gotta do that,” he said. “I know.” “I mean it.” “I know.” “I’ll talk to him.” “You’ve been talking to him your whole life.” His mouth twisted. “Yeah. Might try hittin’ next.” You gave him a look. “You are not fixing your brother through blunt force trauma.” “Would be faster.” That got a quiet breath out of him, almost a laugh, and the sound loosened something in the room. You huffed, putting your hand over his on your stomach. “I’m not saying let him get away with it,” you said. “I’m not some saint who will turn the other cheek forever, because I am not that big of a person.” “Yeah,” Daryl muttered. “You ain’t.” You smiled faintly. “I am saying… I‘m still gonna try. Because you’re worth it.” When you looked p at him then, seeing he was starind down at you, he looked younger. Only for a second. Not boyish exactly, because Daryl had probably stopped being a boy long before he should have, but in the way it healed the aged part of them that the hurt had tarnished “You make it sound easy,” he said quietly. “It’s not.” You squeezed his wrist. “That’s just how much I love ya,” you beamed up at him. You meant it to be casual but it still lit his chest up like a fireplace.

For a long moment after you said it, Daryl just looked at you, softer around the edges in a way that made him look almost shy, like you had said something too big for the little cell to hold and now he had no idea where to put his hands, his eyes, his heart. His fingers slowed into this distracted little motion, twirling one strand around his knuckle, letting it slip free, then catching it again like your hair had become the only thing keeping him from floating clean out of his own body. You watched him for a few seconds, your head still resting in his lap, your body stretched comfortably across the cot, and then a smile started pulling at your mouth before you could stop it. “Daryl.” “Mm?” “Stop looking at me like I hung the damn moon.”

His eyes dropped at once.

“Oh my God,” you said, delight blooming through the tired ache still sitting under your ribs. “Are you getting all shy on me?” “Shuddup.”

But he was smiling. Just a little twitch at the corner of his mouth, hidden badly behind the fall of his hair and the stubborn angle of his jaw. You pushed yourself up on one elbow, grinning now. “Aww. You are. You’re going all bashful because I said your white trash brother is worth putting up with because I love you.”

His hand flattened over your forehead and gently pushed you back down. “Lay down.” “You’re deflecting.” “Yep.” “Holy shit, this is worse than when I first told you I loved you and you avoided me like I had the plague.” Daryl physically cringed, face scrunching at the memory. It was small, but you caught it instantly. “Oh, don’t make that face,” you said. “You know it’s true.” “I said it back,” Daryl mumbled. “Uh-huh. Within two to three business days.” His eyes narrowed. “Wasn’t that long.” “Baby you went full woodland creature. I said I loved you and you looked like I had fired a gun next to your head.” “I ain’t good with that stuff.” “You vanished.” “Needed air.” “You needed a witness protection program.”

He gave you a flat look, but it had no teeth in it. The memory asn't exactly fun to relive, you could tell, not because he hated being reminded you had said it first, not even because he didn't feel the same way then because that was a fat lie, but because he knew, deep down, how close he had came to fumbling something so incredible out of pure dumb panic. Daryl had fight in him for almost everything. He could stare down walkers, guns, hunger, blood, winter, Merle on his worst day. But love confessions? Love confessions had sent him straight into flight mode like a spooked animal. You softened only a little. “Thank God you came to your senses eventually.”

His thumb brushed along your temple. “Yeah.”

The quiet way he said it made your chest warm, so naturally you had to ruin it before the feeling got too large and swallowed you whole. “Uh oh,” you said, narrowing your eyes at him. “Are you going to pull that move again?” “What move?”

“Should I communicate with you via messenger pigeon for the next seventy-two hours? Give you time to process?” “That was then.” “Oh, that was then,” you repeated, deeply solemn. “So you’re evolved now?” He huffed. “Ain’t gonna freak out.” “You’re not?” “Nope.” “Not even a little?” “Nuh-uh.”

You sat up more fully now, delighted by the challenge. His arm stayed loose over your middle, but you could feel his fingers flex against your side as if he already regretted giving you room to perform. “So,” you said, placing one hand dramatically over your heart, “if I said something truly devastating, like, ‘Mr Dixon, your love is the shelter beneath which my weary soul has chosen to rest,’ you would be completely normal about that?”

His face went blank. You gasped. “You’re doing it now!” “That’s cuz you sounded stupid.”

“My love,” you continued, pressing the back of your hand to your forehead, “light of my life, fire of my loins, i cannot bear a day apart from thy—” His hand clamped over your mouth. You made a muffled noise of outrage against his palm. “That’s enough o’ that,” he said. You tried to speak anyway and it came out as pure nonsense.

His eyes narrowed with amusement, and then, because he was apparently choosing cruelty, his other hand found your side and dug in where he knew you were ticklish. You shrieked behind his palm; a strangled, undignified sound that probably frightened a bird off the roof somewhere. Daryl’s shoulders shook as he tried not to laugh. “Jesus.”

You thrashed, grabbing at his wrist, but he only leaned over you, one arm pinning you loosely in place while his fingers attacked the vulnerable spot beneath your ribs. You twisted away, laughing so hard your stomach hurt, and that was somehow worse because the second your neck turned toward him, Daryl pressed his face into the curve beneath your jaw, right against the ticklish spot he knew far too well. “No, no, no—Daryl!”

He made a low, pleased sound against your skin and wrapped an arm around your waist to keep you from wriggling off the cot entirely. You were laughing so hard now that your eyes watered, your hands pushing uselessly at his shoulders while his mouth brushed your throat in deliberately terrible little almost-kisses. “I’m gonna pee,” you gasped. “Better not.” “Then stop!” He finally relented, but only enough to bury his face against your neck and hold you there while you shook with leftover laughter. His hair tickled your cheek, arm heavy and warm across your middle. His breathing was uneven from trying not to laugh too loudly, and yours was a complete disaster, half hiccuping giggles, half breathless gasps.

It hit you, somewhere in the middle of it, how strange that was. You had come in here hollowed out and heavy, laying your head down thinking you wanted to be alone, wanted some quiet. Just a time out from everything. And now you were smiling so hard your face hurt.

Daryl lifted his head just enough to look at you. The shyness was still there, tucked under the softness, but so was something steadier. Something like relief to see you smile again. You touched his cheek. “Ahi estas.” "'M here," he said with a smile, barely above a whiper. “Where’d I go?” “Inside your head,” you said simply. “I like you out here.”He snorted, then dipped down and kissed the corner of your mouth, quick and rough and sweet enough to make you chase him for a second one.

That was when someone knocked on the wall outside. “Y’all decent?” Merle. Your laughter died down into a wheeze. Daryl’s whole body went still over yours. You stared at the curtain for any sudden movements. Then, in a whisper, you said, “Maybe if we don’t say anything, he’ll go away.” “I know y’all are in there,” Merle called. “Heard y’all makin’ a racket.” Daryl dropped his forehead against your shoulder and closed his eyes in defeat. “Final warnin’,” Merle barked. The curtain jerked aside anyway. Merle stepped in with the confidence of someone who had never respected a boundary in his entire life, then stopped just inside the cell when he found the two of you tangled on the cot, Daryl half over you, your hair a mess, both of you flushed and breathless for reasons that were mostly innocent this time but absolutely did not look it. “You lose your hearin’ or somethin’?” Merle asked. You propped yourself up on your elbows and gave him a look. “You lose your sense of direction or something?” His mouth twitched despite himself, like he had expected that and was almost relieved to get it. Daryl sat back slowly, dragging one hand down his face. “What?” Merle didn’t answer right away. Instead, he looked around the cell. His eyes moved over the clothes on the floor, the pile at the foot of the bed, the boots kicked crooked, the crate-table covered in bolts, hair ties, a knife, and one lonely sock that had been missing for three days. He took two slow steps farther in, inspecting the chaos like some kind of deeply unqualified health official. “Well, damn,” he said. “Thought shackin’ up with this one woulda straightened the room up for ya, Darylina.” Daryl nodded toward the mess without hesitation. “This is all her.” Wow way to throw a girl under a bus. “… it’s an organised mess,” you defended. Merle had nothing to say this time, scratching at his jaw, suddenly less amused than he had been when he walked in. The air shifted just enough to take the silly edge off the room. You pulled the blanket over your lap, not because you were exposed, but because his awkwardness made you want something to do with your hands. “Did you really come in here to tell us our room is messy?” Merle looked toward the curtain, then back at you. “Nah,” he said, clearing his throat. “Just, uh… wanted to see if you were doin’ okay.” That was so deeply unnatural that even Daryl frowned. You stared at him. “What?” Merle’s shoulders stiffened. “You said out there you weren’t feelin’ well.” “I said I was tired.” “Same neighborhood.” You and Daryl both looked at each other and wore the same expression; the silent, alarmed communication of two people witnessing an event that was statistically impossible but here we are. Daryl cleared his throat. “She’s fine.” Merle’s gaze flicked to him, then back to you, then down to where Daryl’s hand rested casually over your stomach. Merle’s eyes narrowed. Then widened. “You pregnant?” “What? No,” you snapped, sitting up straighter. “Why would you think that?” Merle lifted both hands. “I dunno. You said you weren’t feelin’ well, he’s touchin’ your belly—” “That doesn’t mean I’m pregnant.” “Well, you know,” Merle said, already digging before his brain had located a shovel, “all you gotta do is look at a Latina funny and poof—” He looked to Daryl, like an idiot expecting backup from the one man in the room least likely to provide it.

Daryl didn’t blink. He looked, very briefly, like he was doing math in his head. You smacked his arm. He snapped back to life. “Ow.” “Are you counting in your head?” “I wasn’t!” He defended, arm raised in surrender. “Hold up— what day is it?” Merle’s eyebrows lifted. “So there’s a chance?” Woah he really wanted to be an uncle. “No,” you said. “There is not a chance. Merle, I am really not in the mood for your shit.” “Whoa, hold on now.” He shifted, the defensiveness coming up fast, but not as sharp as usual. “I ain’t here to start nothin’.” “That would be a first.” He grimaced. “I came in here to, uh…” The word died in his throat. You both waited, wary now, Daryl's body angled toward you out of habit. Merle looked like a man trying to swallow a live insect. “To apologize,” he finally muttered. Silence. You both turned your heads slowly towards one another and held each other’s gaze for a long, confirming second. Then you looked back at Merle. “I’m sorry,” you said. “Could you repeat that? I think my ears must be waterlogged or something.” Merle pointed at you. “Don’t make me say it again.” “You came here to apologize?” “I said don’t make me say it again.” Daryl leaned back against the wall, eyes narrowed, but not with anger now. More like he was watching a very unstable animal approach an open flame. “Then apoligize proper.” Merle shot him a look. “I know how to apologise.” “Do you?” “You ain’t the one I’m apologising to damnit.” You folded your arms. “I’m listening.” Merle rubbed the back of his neck, looking everywhere except your face. “Look, I was outta line.” You lifted your brows. He huffed. “Fine. More than usual.” “Warmer.” His eyes snapped to yours. “You want the apology or not?” “I want to see if you can pull it off.” Merle glared at both of you, then looked down at the floor. “I shouldn’ta said what I said,” he muttered. “Wasn’t right. I was bein’ an asshole.” You said nothing because if you did he would probably give up with apoligies altogether. “And I know that ain’t news to nobody, but… yeah. I know.” He glanced up at you, then away again. “I’m gon try harder. Cause ya mean the world to 'im,” he nodded to Daryl. “If you’ll give me the chance.” Daryl’s expression changed slightly. You saw it, because you were always looking for him even when you pretended not to be. Some of the hard suspicion in his face loosened, replaced by something cautious and almost sad. Merle sucked his teeth, clearly reaching the outer limits of emotional exposure. “There. That’s what I came to say.” You studied him for a moment. “Okay,” you said quietly. He blinked, like he had expected more fight. “Okay?” “Okay.” “You ain’t gonna tell me to go to hell?” “I can, if you want.” “Nope.” You smiled faintly, and for once he did not immediately ruin it. Instead, he shifted his weight and reached behind his back, pulling something from where it had been tucked beneath his vest. A bottle. Your eyes dropped to the label. Then back to his face. “Tequila?”

“Peace offering.” Merle’s mouth twitched, finally finding ground he understood. “Found it a few weeks back. Was savin’ it for the right occasion.” “Aqua bendita,” you laughed before you could stop yourself. “Honestly, I’m impressed you didn’t drink it already.” He looked offended. “I got some will power.” Daryl snorted. You reached for the bottle when Merle held it out, turning it in your hands with a grin tugging at your mouth despite everything. “You know what? I’m not pregnant. That is worth celebrating.” Daryl’s eyes flicked to you, warm now in spite of himself. “Go ahead,” he said. You looked at him. “What?” He nodded toward the door. “I’ll get the laundry.” Your smile softened. “You sure?” “Yeah.” You leaned in and kissed him quickly. Barely more than a press of your mouth to his, but Daryl’s hand came up to your waist anyway, catching you for the half second it lasted. Merle made a sharp sound of protest. “Aw, hell, c’mon. I don’t wanna see that.” You pulled back, grinning. “You did when you were peeping on us.” Game, set match. Merle scoffed, but he backed toward the curtain, clearly relieved that nobody was crying, yelling, or trying to punch him for the moment. Then he paused. “Hey,” he said, nodding toward the yard. “You wanna come see this engine I found? Sounds like a wet fart trapped in a coffee can’.” You stood, bottle in hand, and stretched lazily. “A wet fart in a coffee can, you say?” “Real musical.” “Well, how can a girl resist?” Daryl watched you move toward the doorway, the tiredness still there around your eyes but lighter now, softened by the strange miracle of Merle Dixon attempting accountability without bursting into flames.

Daryl stayed where he was for a second longer, listening to your voice fade down the cell block with Merle’s rougher one trailing beside it. The room was still a mess. The laundry still needed doing. His brother was still his brother, which meant peace would probably last about seven minutes if everyone was lucky. But you had smiled. And merle was trying. He stood, grabbed the abandoned basket by the door, and shook his head to himself. “Wet fart in a coffee can,” he muttered. Then he went to finish the laundry

It was evening when Daryl was finished with the laundry; it established a new appreciation for you, well for your willingness to do laundry. Laundry should not have ranked so high on the list of things capable of irritating him, but there was something uniquely insulting about scrubbing dirt out of clothes that were going to be filthy again within twelve hours. Why would people bother? But he did it anyway because h knew it would make you happy. So, by the time he hauled the finished basket back toward the cell block, his mood was already somewhere between tired and grouchy.

The yard had settled into that softer evening rhythm the prison sometimes got, when the sun started sinking low enough to take the worst of the heat with it and everybody moved like they were slowly remembering they had bodies. Smoke from the grill hung in the air. Someone laughed near the tables. The dead still groaned at the fences, because of course they did, but even that sounded farther away than usual, buried under the scrape of plates and the clatter of people getting ready to eat. Daryl shifted the basket and looked toward the grill first, expecting to find you there but was disappointed. He glanced toward the tables — not there either. That made his brows draw together, because the last he had seen of you, you had been leaving the cell with Merle and a bottle of tequila, which had seemed like a bad idea at the time and had only grown worse in his mind the longer he was left alone Then he heard you your laughter, loose and bright and entirely too uncontrolled to belong to a sober woman. Daryl stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Halfway up the metal steps, sprawled like a couple of menaces were you and Merle, both of you drunk off your faces.

The laundry basket slipped from Daryl’s hand and hit the floor with a heavy, damp thud. You looked down at the sound, blinked slowly as if the stairs had rotated beneath you, and then your whole face lit up with the kind of delight that made Daryl’s stomach do something stupid before his brain could remind it that you were absolutely plastered. “Daryl,” you announced, drawing out his name like you had just discovered it for the first time and found it hilarious. You leaned over to Merle, whispering, “omg my boyfriends here.” “M’right here,” Daryl said, unimpressed. Merle swung around too fast, had to grab the railing to keep himself upright, and then pointed at Daryl, “oh shit, you kissed all the fun Darylin!” Daryl’s eyes narrowed. “Y’all been drinkin’ all afternoon?” “Not all afternoon,” you said, then leaned slightly toward Merle again. “Was it all afternoon?” Merle squinted at the bottle in his hand, which was mostly empty and catching the last of the evening light in one sad golden strip. “Depends when afternoon started.” “That is not how time works,” you told him, with great authority and absolutely no balance. Merle nodded like you had made a profound point. “She’s smart.” Daryl rubbed a hand over his face. “Jesus Christ.” “Hey,” Merle said, lifting the bottle in accusation. “You wanted us to get along.” Daryl dropped his hand and stared at him. “Didn’t want this.” “Well, tough shit,” Merle declared, throwing an arm out toward you so enthusiastically that you nearly ducked out of instinct. “Me and yiir little girlfriend? Thick as thieves.” “I am not little,” you fumed, shoving him. “You’re tiny.” “I could kill you.” “See?” Merle looked down at Daryl.“Best buddies.” You lifted your hand toward Merle. “High five.” Merle, smiling like an raging idiot, lifted his metal arm up high, the knife glinting awfully in light. “Woah!” Daryl exclaimed. He moved up two steps and caught Merle’s wrist before that disaster could complete itself. “That’s the wrong hand, you idiot.” You looked at Merle’s raised knife-hand, looked at Daryl’s stressed face, and then burst into such helpless laughter that you folded forward with one hand on the step and the other pressed to your stomach. Merle stared for half a second. Then he started laughing too, loud and ugly and delighted, the sound bouncing around the stairwell until someone down by the grill shouted for him to shut up. Daryl still had Merle’s wrist in his grip. “Ain’t funny.” “It is,” you gasped. “He almost cut you up like a pig,” Daryl sterned. “That’s what makes it funny.” Merle wiped at one eye with the heel of his flesh hand. “Lord, she gets it.” Daryl released him with visible regret. “How much did she have?” Merle held up the bottle. Daryl looked at it. Then at you. Then back at the bottle. “Merle.” “What?” “That was full.” “Woman can really drink I’ll give her that.” You pointed at him, swaying slightly. “Never doubt me again.” Merle leaned closer to Daryl, voice dropping into the least subtle whisper ever performed. “She beat me at every damn game.” “You were cheating,” you said. “And I still beat you.” “Was not!.” “Half the deck was in your pocket because you kept stashing them!”

Daryl looked between the two of you and felt, with grim clarity, that he might have preferred when you hated each other. At least then he knew where to stand.

This, whatever this was, had the unstable energy of dry grass and open flame. You, giggly and loose-limbed, cheeks warm from tequila and eyes shining with mischief. Merle, louder than usual, which Daryl would not have thought possible, his normal cruelty sanded down into something giddy and affectionate and somehow more alarming. Together, you looked like the beginning of a problem Rick would eventually assign Daryl to fix. “You’re pretty,” you said suddenly. Daryl blinked. Merle pointed at him. “She means you.” “I know who she means,” Daryl muttered. You leaned your chin into your palm, elbow braced on the step above your knee, smiling down at him with a sleepy, shameless sweetness that made his irritation stumble into something warmer. “You’re like all… firm ‘n… tough.” Merle made a choking sound. “That don’t make no sense.” “It makes perfect sense,” you said.

Daryl stared up at you from the bottom of the stairs, trying very hard not to smile and failing at the edges. It was there despite him, tucked into the corner of his mouth, softened by the sight of you leaning against the railing with your cheeks warm from tequila and your eyes bright with trouble.“You’re so drunk.” “Only a lil,” you said, pinching your fingers together to demonstrate a measurement that your swaying immediately contradicted. “You’re slurrin’.” “You’re just jealous,” you told him, pointing down at him with all the grand authority of a woman who had absolutely lost control of her own index finger, “because me and Merle hung out without you.”

Merle, sitting a couple steps below you with the bottle balanced against his knee, nodded solemnly. “Exclusive gatherin’.” You leaned forward, lowering your voice like you were about to reassure Daryl of something very serious. “If you’re worried about me switching favourite Dixon, don’t. You’ll always be number one.” Then you winked. It wasn’t a clean wink either, involving half your face, but Daryl’s mouth twitched anyway. “I wasn’t worried,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose like that might physically hold back the smile. “But thanks.” You beamed, “you’re welcome, baby.” Merle made a strangled noise. “Lord, she’s gone syrupy.” “You’re one to talk,” Daryl muttered, then motioned up at you with two fingers. “Alright. Up.” Your face fell at once. “No.” “Bed. Now.” “No.” “You can barely sit on stairs.” “I am still sitting nonetheless,” you said, with offended dignity. “You’re leanin’ sideways.” Your mouth dropped open, scandalised. “I am never good enough for you, huh?” Daryl blinked, immediately wrong-footed. “What? No—” You broke first, giggles spilling out of you before he could finish panicking, your shoulders shaking against the railing while he stared at you with flat betrayal. “That ain’t funny.” “It was a little funny,” Merle slurred. “You ain’t helping.” Merle lifted both hands in surrender, then remembered one of them was still the wrong hand and lowered the metal one with surprising care. “I am supportin’ my sister-in-law.”

The words hung there for a second but were loosened by tequila and the evening air. Regardless it still landed somewhere real. You looked at Merle, your grin turning warm around the edges. “Aww,” you said. “You do love me.” Merle’s face twisted instantly. “Don’t make it weird.” “You made it weird first.” “I was bein’ generous.” “You basically called me family.” Merle pointed at you with the bottle, squinting as if that might make his argument stronger. “That is a dangerous accusation.” Daryl looked between you both, the smile finally escaping despite every effort he made to kill it. “Jesus,” he muttered, starting up the stairs toward you. “I liked it better when y’all were fightin’.” He concluded then that this was only going to get worse if he did not physically remove you from the stairs. “Up,” he said again, climbing closer and reaching for you. You sighed with the tremendous suffering.“Fine.” You pushed yourself upright. For one glorious second, you looked steady. Then the stairs moved. At least, judging by your expression, that was what it felt like. Your eyes widened, one hand shot out for the railing, and you made a tiny betrayed sound as your balance tipped forward. Merle, who had started climbing behind you, carelessly swaying his knife-arm as he did so, looked up at exactly the wrong moment. Daryl caught you around the waist before you could fall back onto Merle. “Whoa,” he snapped, hauling you back against his chest. You clung to his arms, blinking hard. “The stairs are doing something.” “They ain’t doin’ nothin’.” “They are. It’s like an escalator going fifty miles an hour.” “There aren’t any escalators.” “I know that’s what makes it so alarming. Yeah — the joke can stay, but it needs to feel less “random horny line” and more like drunk-you being reckless, Daryl knowing exactly where it’s going, and shutting it down before Merle can make it everybody’s problem. Merle, still a few steps below you and moving with the careful arrogance of a drunk man who absolutely should not have been trusted near stairs, squinted up at you. “You fall, you’re impalin’ yourself on me.”

You looked back over your shoulder, eyes dropping to the knife fixed at the end of his metal arm, and your face twisted with immediate, theatrical horror. “Oh, no.” Daryl’s arm tightened around your waist before you could wobble any farther. “Watch your step.”

“The only thing I’m getting impaled on,” you began, lifting one finger with all the dignity of a woman about to make a deeply inappropriate point, “is Daryl’s massive co—” Daryl moved before the rest of the sentence could escape and ruin all three of your lives. He bent, caught you around the thighs, and hauled you over his shoulder in one smooth, practiced motion, like he had been waiting for an excuse to remove you from the conversation entirely. You yelped, the sound tipping straight into laughter as the stairs swung out of view and Daryl’s back filled your world instead. Merle cheered from below. “Smart man.” “Daryl,” you protested, though it came out weak and breathless because you were already laughing too hard to sound properly offended.

He adjusted his grip, one arm locked behind your knees and the other braced across the backs of your thighs, steadying you with infuriating ease. Then, because he was apparently determined to make the situation worse and somehow still blame you for it, he gave your backside one firm, casual pat. You gasped loud enough for half the cell block to hear. Merle stopped climbing for the sole purpose of cackling. “Do it again. She made a funny noise.”

Daryl did not even turn around. “Merle.” “Yeah, okay,” Merle muttered, though he was still laughing as he dragged himself up the railing behind you. You lifted your head enough to look at the catwalk upside down as Daryl carried you along it. The world swung gently with each step, metal railing, grey walls, dim candle ight, Daryl’s back, Merle’s delighted face bobbing behind you like a curse that had learned to laugh. “Weeeee,” you whispered at first. Daryl ignored you. So you did it louder. “Weeeeeee.” Merle lost it all over again, laughing like a hyena in a vest, and Daryl shook his head as if the universe had personally assigned him two drunk idiots and no instruction manual. By the time he got you into the cell, your laughter had gone soft and breathless, the sleepy part of drunk beginning to catch up with the giddy part. Daryl lowered you onto the cot with more care than his expression suggested, grumbling under his breath as if tenderness was something he could disguise through irritation.

He helped you sit up enough to tug at the buttons of your shirt because you were doing a terrible job of it, fingers slipping over the wrong button twice before you gave up and let him take over. His hands were careful, his brow furrowed with concentration, and even drunk you had enough awareness left to smile at him like he was being unbearably sweet. “You’re taking my clothes off,” you said, voice gone syrupy with tequila and smugness as he worked the stubborn button loose. “Am I getting lucky tonight?” You raised your eyebrows at him twice, slowly and with absolutely none of the seduction you clearly thought you were delivering. Daryl scoffed under his breath, though his mouth twitched as he eased the shirt off your shoulders. “Not tonight, killer.” Your face folded into a dramatic frown, and you stuck your tongue out at him like a wounded child being denied dessert. “Still counts as getting some action.” “Don’t start.” “You love when I start.” “Not when ya stink of tequila” You laughed softly, leaning into him while he eased the button-up off your shoulders and tossed it away. He pulled the blanket back, guided you down, and tucked it loosely over your legs before you could decide the floor looked more interesting.

Behind him, there was a heavy thump. Merle had entered the cell at some point, apparently decided the floor was both available and welcoming, and was now lying flat on his back beside the cot with one arm flung over his eyes, the nearly empty tequila bottle hugged against his chest like a beloved infant. Daryl stared at him. “Hell no.” Merle did not move. “This ain’t your room.” No answer. “Merle,” he said again, kicking him in the side this time. still nothing. Merle smade a sound that might have been a snore and might have been a curse in the same nature. But there was no walking him up. You lifted your head off the pillow, saw him on the floor, and started giggling again, though sleep had made it weak and soft around the edges. “He looks peaceful.” Daryl stood there for a long second, clearly calculating whether he could be bothered to drag Merle back to his own cell. The answer arrived quickly. He did not. “Fine,” Daryl muttered, stepping over Merle. “Sleep on the damn floor.” Merle snored louder, possibly out of spite. Daryl looked back at you. “Tomorrow’s run’s gonna be real fun with you two hungover.” You made a vague humming sound from the pillow. “Gonna be throwin’ up in the bushes before we even hit the road.” No answer. “No way Merle is takin the bike.” Still no answer. Daryl turned more fully, expecting some smart comment about how you would never waste an opportunity to throw up on Merle, or how Merle was definitely going to take the bike because Daryl said otherwise, or how he should stop worrying because you were no stranger to tequila.

Instead, you were asleep. Completely gone. Your face had relaxed against the pillow, lips parted slightly, one hand curled near your cheek, hair spread wild over the blanket like you had fought sleep and lost instantly. The teasing smile still lingered faintly at the corner of your mouth, as if some part of you was still laughing on the way down. Daryl stood there looking at you for a second. Then his whole face softened. “Lightweight,” he murmured, though the empty bottle and Merle’s corpse-like sprawl on the floor suggested otherwise. He stepped over Merle again, towing his shoes and shrugging his shirt off before easing onto the cot beside you with the practiced care of a man trying not to wake the drunk woman who had somehow made peace with his brother and stolen half his sanity in one afternoon. The mattress dipped under his weight. You stirred immediately, nose wrinkling, hand searching blindly across the blanket until it found him. Even asleep, you moved toward him. He stretched out on his side and pulled you in, one arm sliding beneath your shoulders, the other wrapping across your waist until you were tucked firmly against him. You made a small satisfied sound and nuzzled into his chest like you had been aiming for him even in your dreams. Your breathing had evened out already, warm against his throat, your body heavy and trusting in his arms in a way that still did something to him if he let himself think about it too long. The cell was a mess, and probably always would be: clothes half-folded, boots kicked wrong, blankets twisted, the laundry basket abandoned somewhere downstairs because he had been too busy carrying you to remember anything else. On the floor, Merle was past out, clutching the empty tequila bottle tucked against his chest like the world’s saddest teddy bear, snoring like he was trying to scare off walkers by sound alone. Tomorrow would be hell. There would be headaches, groaning, complaints about sunlight, and probably some fresh disaster Merle managed to wander into ass-first because using his head had never once occurred to him. You would wake up swearing you were never drinking again, then blame Daryl for letting you do it, and Merle would claim he had been perfectly composed despite all available evidence lying on the floor. But tonight, you were smiling in your sleep. Tonight, Merle had tried. And tonight, somehow, the three of you were in the same small room after the drama that was today and no one was bleeding, shouting, or walking away. Daryl looked from you to his brother and back again, his arm tightening around your waist as you nuzzled closer without waking. The whole thing was stupid, fragile, inconvenient as hell, and nothing like the Dixon family he had grown up knowing. Maybe that was why he held on so tight.

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