Chapter Text
December 23rd, 2011
Hattiesburg, MS
The thing was, there was history here, deep in the South. It was one of the oldest corners of a toddler nation, and people didn’t know- didn’t want to know- what that meant. This was a land soaked in blood.
Daryl Dixon stabbed his cigarette blindly into the ashtray at his elbow, most of his focus on the television above the bar. It was barely three in the afternoon and there was no one to complain about the lack of a game on, so the bartender hadn’t protested too much when Merle stood on the bar and flipped the TV to a news channel and turned the volume up so they could actually hear it over the shitty Christmas music the bar’s overhead sound system was piping in.
“Well, shit,” Merle said as he sat back down. On the screen, a typically attractive reporter was standing in front of an old church with construction equipment parked around it, a small crowd of people toting homemade signs weaving a wobbly circle through the big machines. The scroll of text at the bottom read Public Outcry Over Relocation of Civil War Graves.
“Disturbin’ old graves,” Daryl said with a tired sigh. “Idiots never learn.” Nothing pissed off peacefully slumbering spirits like fucking around with their graves.
“We’d be out of a job if they did, baby brother,” Merle said with a manic sort of cheer, slapping Daryl’s shoulder hard enough to near knock him off his stool. Daryl eyed him suspiciously- Merle had been clean for going on nine weeks now, but Daryl knew better than to hope it’d last. A hunt had gone bad a couple months ago and Daryl had caught the worst of it, and that was always enough to scare Merle straight for a month or three. However, eventually, inevitably, he would start using again.
“All this media attention’s gonna be a bitch,” he said, then gestured with his beer bottle towards the TV. “Gonna be trippin’ over cameras and protestors.”
“I say we let Casper off a few of ‘em first, make sure there really is gonna be a problem,” Merle said. The bartender, doing aimless busywork at the far end of the bar so as to not be accused of eavesdropping, lowered his head a little and moved further away, not sure what he was overhearing but knowing for a fact he wanted nothing to do with it.
“Fuck you,” Daryl said quietly, taking another sip of his beer. That was, at the heart of it, the main difference between them- forget the drugs, the casual abuse, the arguments, the stealing. Merle hunted because he liked killing shit. Daryl hunted because it was something he could do, something he was good at. It was all he had, in truth, and if he sometimes felt better about himself for knowing he was helping people, saving them- well, that was nobody's business but his.
“Easy there, Darylina,” Merle said. “I’m only kiddin’.” He tossed back the last of his beer and slammed the empty bottle down on the bar, and both Daryl and the bartender jumped a little and glared at him. Merle belched, cracked all his knuckles, and oozed off his stool. Daryl finished off his own beer and tossing a ten on the bar to cover the bill before following him out.
It was nippy outside, so Daryl pulled his jacket in tighter over his shoulders. If he breathed out and watched closely enough he could see his breath almost start to crystallize. In terms of brutal winter conditions, it was like being savaged by a kitten. Anyone hoping for a white Christmas- foolishly hoping, considering the local climate- was gonna be shit outta luck. Not that it mattered to Daryl any; the Dixons had a longstanding tradition of not celebrating any holiday, ever.
“Thinkin’ we’ll head down to New Orleans after this,” Merle said casually, and Daryl lifted his head, feeling the dread trickle through him like ice in his veins.
“Yeah?” he asked warily. He used to like New Orleans- used to love it, actually, loved the good food and the relaxed atmosphere, to say nothing of Louisiana’s ridiculously lax gun laws- until he’d figured out why Merle dragged them down there so often. His crystal meth dealer was in New Orleans. “Got someone you need to see down there?”
Merle stopped and glared at him, but Daryl wasn’t within grabbing distance- he knew better than that. “What I do in that city ain’t none o’ your business, boy,” he said, voice low and gravel-rough like thunder. He sounded, in that moment, exactly like their father.
Daryl scoffed but said nothing. He tucked his hands into his jacket pockets and lowered his head and swayed on the spot, just out of Merle’s reach. Finally his brother snorted.
“Let’s just get this done,” he said as he turned away.
“Oughta wait ‘til tonight,” Daryl warned, once again following after his brother.
“Nah,” Merle said, his mood lightening in the face of Daryl’s unswerving loyalty, fucked up though they both knew it was. “ ‘S just a pissy spirit. It’s amateur hour. We’ll be done by tonight.”
Seventy-two hours later, Merle was cuffed to the railing of his hospital bed by his left hand- his only hand, now- and Daryl, fresh out of police interrogation and not entirely sure he had permission to leave but fuck them all anyways, was halfway through Alabama and still hauling ass.
Fuck the cops, fuck those stupid insane suicidal protestors. Fuck Merle, while he was at it, for telling him to get out of town and never look back- simultaneously the most and least selfish thing Merle had ever done, ordering Daryl to get clear of this shitstorm.
Fuck the job. He was done with that shit.
Done.
-----
May 16th, 2013
Ashlyn, King County, GA
“It’s a lovely house,” the real estate agent had said a week ago, when he’d still been just looking at the place. “Three bedroom, one-and-a-half bath- will your wife be joining you to look around?”
Rick had rubbed his thumb over his wedding band for a moment, a nervous habit, then tugged it off and tucked it into his pocket. “No,” he said simply, and the agent had floundered, not knowing what to say, what was safe to say. Rick could be cold as ice, Lori had told him countless times- when he got mad, he froze, he didn’t burn like most people, and apparently that was something terrifying to behold.
It was a lovely house, Rick eventually allowed himself to notice. It’d been a week since that conversation and he was officially moving in- mostly by keeping out of the way as the movers did all the real work- and he finally took the time to actually look over his newest commitment. The walls were white but not spotless, the floors all wood and nostalgically creaky underfoot, the rooms airy with wide windows accented by gauzy curtains. The place looked lived-in, if strangely bare without any furniture. It reminded him of his childhood home, which was the entire point.
“ ‘Scuse me, sir,” one of the movers said impatiently. He was holding up the front half of a kitchen table, and Rick scrambled out of the kitchen doorway.
“Maybe you wanna wait outside, sir?” the other mover, the one holding the back end of the table, said as he walked past. “One of your neighbors is out. Be neighborly of you to go say hi.”
“Am I in the way?” Rick asked as the movers set the table down. There was the immediate, loud silence of two men trying very hard to not say anything, and Rick nodded once to himself. “I’m in the way,” he said, moving back out into the living room. “I’ll get outta your hair, then.”
The back of the moving van was still open, most of the furniture already out. Up front, next to be moved, was a crib. Rick stopped on the porch and stared at it for a long moment. It’d been his crib when he was a baby, and he’d hoped it would be Carl’s too. Lori had shot that idea down, giving him a long list of reasons that basically amounted to her parents gave them a fancy crib at the baby shower and they were using that because she said so, and Rick had let her, too blindly in love with this woman who was carrying his child to care.
He cared now, fourteen years too late.
He turned away and paced to one end of his porch, studying the house over there. The minivan in the driveway had a handicapped placard dangling from the rearview mirror and a wheelchair lift hooked up in the back. Rick shook his head and turned away, then paused. The house on the other side had a motorcycle in the driveway and a man sitting cross-legged next to it, a toolbox sitting open beside him. He was turned away from Rick, so all Rick saw was the broadness of his shoulders, the curve of his back, the definition of his well-toned biceps made clear by his sleeveless shirt. His right hand was resting on his knee, barely visible from Rick’s angle, and tucked between two fingers was a cigarette burned almost down to the filter.
This was not the sort of man that concerned himself overmuch with being neighborly, Rick thought to himself. He’d been a cop for the better part of sixteen years. He knew trouble when he moved in next door to it.
Rick stepped down off the porch and cut across his yard, heading straight towards his neighbor at a casual stroll. He wasn’t surprised in the least when awareness coiled through the other man’s spine and straightened him up from his careless slouch, some animal instinct warning him of the approach. He didn’t bother to look back, though, just lifted his cigarette to his mouth and blew out a billow of smoke, the wind carrying it over to Rick to sting his nose.
“Afternoon,” he said casually, stopping at the property line, and the other man turned his head just a little bit. His hair shielded his face and curtained his eyes, but Rick could still see something of them, cat-narrow and pale.
“You the new neighbor, then?” he asked, stubbing his cigarette butt out into the ashtray beside the tool box.
“Rick Grimes,” Rick said, his right hand instinctively coming to rest on his belt. For a moment he groped blindly, feeling for a holstered gun, a gold badge clipped over his pocket, before he remembered.
The motion hadn’t been missed. His neighbor smirked, one corner of his mouth pulling up, and turned away.
“Daryl Dixon,” he said finally, the words carrying a certain expectation, and Rick went very still, like a rabbit spotting a snake in the grass.
He knew about Daryl Dixon; of course he did. Everyone in King County knew about Daryl Dixon. He was a quiet, law-abiding citizen whose brother had pled guilty to double homicide in Mississippi in order to avoid the death penalty, and whose reputation splashed back onto his brother. Daryl was the town’s boogeyman- shadowed and ominous, a silent threat, but ultimately harmless. In Rick’s youth, it had been Old Man Carroway, the widower who lived in the house on the crest of the Maple Avenue hill and who would bang a couple of pots together and scream like an alley cat to scare kids out of his yard.
Rick had formally transferred out of Atlanta PD and into the King County Sheriff’s Department four months ago almost to the day- the very same day Lori had served him with the divorce papers- and not once in those four months had Daryl ever caused even a parking ticket’s worth of trouble. But it still felt wrong to have him here, in this quiet kid-friendly neighborhood, a dark smudge on the bright landscape. He didn’t belong here.
Guess that made two of them, then.
“Reckon you’ve heard by now I’m a cop,” Rick said amiably, and Daryl flicked him another look, unconcerned. “We ain’t gonna have any problems, are we?”
Daryl unfolded his legs and rose to his feet in one smooth move. He was Rick’s height, but he was broader in the shoulders and probably close to thirty pounds of pure muscle heavier. Rick rocked back on his heels, feeling irritatingly small compared to the other man, and wondered what the hell was wrong with him, that he was challenging the guy like this.
“Nah,” Daryl said finally. “Ain’t gonna be a problem, ‘less you got one.” He gave Rick a long searching look, then turned away, gathering up his toolbox and ashtray and heading into his garage.
“Hey,” one of the movers called, and Rick tore himself away from his senseless staring and turned back, lifting his brows in question. “What do you want us to do with these boxes?”
Rick walked back across his yard, sparing a glance over his shoulder every few steps- but Daryl didn’t return, probably went into his house through the garage so he didn’t have to deal with his judgmental, pissy neighbor. They were off to a great start, all sarcasm intended, and it was entirely Rick’s fault.
The very first box he saw had Shane written on the side, Lori’s normally neat writing all blocky and wobbly, like her hand had been shaking. She didn’t want any reminders of Shane and had dumped them all on Rick. He didn’t know yet how he felt about that, what he intended to do with any of it. He stared at his best friend’s name written by his wife’s hand and felt nothing more than very, very tired.
“Put ‘em in the garage,” he said, already moving to go open the garage door. “I’ll sort through ‘em later.”
“You got it,” the mover said, and grabbed the box nearest him- books- and hauled it inside.
Rick slid his hands into his pockets and groaned, allowing himself to slouch. He’d been bracing himself for the next blow for months now, ever since he’d found Lori in the kitchen, sitting on the floor with her back to the refrigerator and her face messy with tear-smeared makeup, the pregnancy test in her hand showing a little blue cross in the readout circle. Such a little thing, to completely destroy three lives and damage countless more.
He looked over at Daryl’s house one more time, then moved over to the stack of boxes. He slid his left hand out of his pocket, rolling the gold band of his wedding ring between his fingers. He’d been keeping it with him, not wearing it, just needing it close. He stared at it for a long moment- then pried up one flap of the box marked Shane and dropped it in and strode quickly away, before he could tackle the box and dig his ring back out.
Some things belonged in the past.
-----
“A cop?” Michonne echoed, like she couldn’t be sure she’d heard it right. She might not have- the connection was staticky and breaking. She was probably out in the woods somewhere, barely on the edge of civilization. She was breaking in a new partner, Daryl knew, some lawyer chick whose sister had been killed by a vampire.
There were only two reasons hunters got into the job. Daryl was lucky enough to have been born to it.
“Atlanta PD, homicide,” he read off from the computer screen. “Got an article here, says his partner got himself last year.”
“And why do I care?” Michonne asked patiently. In the background, a woman yelled for her to hurry up already, and Michonne yelled something back, her voice muffled and indistinct- she’d put her hand over the phone, Daryl guessed.
“Ain’t my house,” he said once she was back. “Am I gonna have trouble explainin’ this?”
“No,” Michonne said steadily. “The bills are paid, you signed a lease and you cough up rent every month, everything’s solid from a legal standpoint. Are you growing pot in the basement or something?”
Daryl said nothing, his silence more eloquent than words could ever be.
“Then there’s nothing to worry about,” Michonne continued. “Just don’t go pissing him off on purpose.”
The other woman yelled something again, and Michonne yelled back again. This time, Daryl heard snatches of phrases- he’s a friend, was one, and look after each other was another. It set his teeth on edge. It was bad enough accepting charity from Michonne, living in her house for basically nothing. He wasn’t about to let anyone else start pitying him.
“You gotta go,” he said, mostly to remind himself- Michonne was not his. Merle had been, ‘til they’d fucked it all up. Now he was alone, and that was how it would stay.
“Yes, I do,” Michonne said smoothly. “Take care of yourself, Daryl,” she added, soft and sincere and surprising. Then there was dead air, a silence loud and living after the constant chatter of the static-riddled line.
Daryl dropped the phone to the table and sat back in the chair, staring at the computer screen. A radically different Richard H. Grimes than the one he had met today looked back at him. This one was clean-shaven and bright-eyed, looking a decade younger than the scruffy, tousle-haired man from earlier. Why the hell would a big city homicide detective give it all up and move to the boonies?
His phone buzzed, rattling merrily across the table, and Daryl snatched it up. He’d set his work alarm months ago- hard to adjust to set hours, after thirty-six years of going to work whenever the hell he felt like it. But, as Michonne had pointed out, he paid the bills and his mockery of a rent. He could deal with the boredom of a civilian life.
He grabbed his jacket and his helmet and closed the garage door behind him as he headed out, sparing a glance at Rick’s house. The moving van was gone, the house itself closed up and dark. Daryl stared at it a good long moment before starting his bike up. He worked at a bar and kept a bartender’s hours, and if Rick Grimes was a light sleeper, Daryl’s three a.m. homecoming every morning was going to leave an even worse impression on the man than he’d already managed just by being a Dixon.
Right next door to a fucking cop. This was going to suck.
-----
May 20th
Greene family farm, King County
“You need boots.”
“What?” Rick asked, lifting his head. He’d been staring intently at the ground, trying to avoid stepping on anything- well, just anything. Being a deputy in small-town northern Georgia was very different from being a detective in Atlanta, he’d known that when he requested the transfer. He’d just forgotten, was all, what it was like to live out here.
Next to him, Maggie Greene laughed in delight, a pretty sound. A pretty girl, really, with just enough of that Irish spirit in her to make her vivacious and exciting, not enough to be overbearing and obnoxious. Rick’s first thought upon meeting her had been a very fatherly sweet young girl, with all the paternal affection he was capable of, and he knew in that second that he was getting old.
He used to be Maggie’s age, not that long ago, it had felt like. When the hell had this whole getting old thing even happened?
“Boots,” Maggie said again, patiently. “You need a good pair of boots, if you really wanna go native.”
Rick hesitated and looked away, walking through the field in silence. It wasn’t any of Maggie’s business, but-
“I am a native,” he said finally.
“Really?” the girl asked, her pretty smile tugging at her lips again.
“Ashlyn, born ‘n raised,” he said. “Didn’t move to Atlanta ‘til I was twelve.”
He’d met Shane in Atlanta, the first week of school after he moved. The busy middle school in a big city had been overwhelming to a small-town boy, and Shane had somehow found his scared naïvety endearing and took him under his wing, forging a friendship that would last twenty-two years. Lori had been at that school too, although the less said about that, the better.
He turned his thoughts away from those long-dead days and frowned. He could smell it now, death and blood warring for dominance. “Anythin’ like this ever happen before?” he asked as he walked up to the body.
It was- had been- a cow, until someone had slit open its belly and painted the spring-green grass with its guts. Rick had seen worse- done to humans, no less- but something about this seemed especially pointless and cruel.
“Once, last year,” Maggie said, settling easily into a more serious mood. “We get a cow splitting open in the heat sometimes, but the heat doesn’t do this.” She gestures towards the viscera staining the grass.
“Predators, maybe?” Rick offered, crouching down to study the cut better. “Coyotes or foxes?” They were in northern Georgia after all, close to the mountains. He could safely rule out bears and wolves, but there were other, smaller predators, wilier and more adaptable than their larger brethren.
“My dad called and asked for you in specific,” Maggie said. “He wanted someone to take this seriously, to not just shrug it off like it’s nothing.”
The Sheriff’s Department serves all of King County, not just Ashlyn, Hershel Greene had said, when Rick had first met him, several weeks ago by now. He was a tall, stern man, not unkind, just uncompromising. There was steel in him, tested and tempered, and Rick had found himself respecting the older man within minutes of meeting him. You’ll do well to remember that.
“I do take it seriously,” Rick said, standing up straight again, brushing his hands off on his uniform pants. Diane from dispatch had scolded him for the state of his uniform- washed but not ironed, top three shirt buttons undone- and Rick had ignored her. Lori was a perfectionist and a little bit vain; Rick was neither, and was having fun indulging his inner slob a little now that he didn’t have anyone to impress anymore.
“I was in college last time,” Maggie told him, and for a moment her expression turned distant, sad. Rick had been around town long enough to know the story- Hershel’s wife, Maggie’s stepmother, had passed away a few months back, and Maggie had put her college career on hold in order to help out at home and make sure her recovered alcoholic father didn’t slip into a tailspin. “I can’t tell you much about it, ‘cept the deputy decided it was just some kids pulling a mean prank.” She looked down at the dead cow and said nothing else, but Rick knew what she was thinking: this was not the work of kids, this was the work of a monster.
“Can you think of anyone would do this? Anyone have any problems with your father?” Rick asked.
“No,” Maggie said. “God, no. No one we know would-” She stopped herself, her hand covering her mouth as if to hold the words in.
“A’right,” Rick said soothingly, moving a step or two away from the body. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do now- there was hardly room in the department’s budget for spending any real amount of resources, even just Rick’s time, on cow poaching, or whatever this was called. But he’d meant it when he said he took this seriously. It didn’t feel right, that someone could do this and walk away safe, knowing no one would ever look into it. He just didn’t know where to begin.
He didn’t need this, not now- not ever, if he were being honest, but especially not now. He’d convinced Lori only yesterday to let the kids spend the summer out here in Ashlyn with him, the only time he’d get to see them anymore outside of holidays. His own damn fault for moving out of the city, over an hour’s drive away, making the standard post-divorce custody settlements impossible. He just couldn’t stay in the city anymore- he was a small-town boy, born and bred, and Atlanta had used him up and tossed him aside and he’d had to leave.
“Your dad’s the local vet, right?” he asked, and Maggie nodded. “You think he’d mind…?” He didn’t have words for it, so he just gestured to the cow.
“You want him to do an autopsy?” Maggie asked, her tone one part amused and one part disgusted.
“Whoever did this would’ve had blood up to their shoulders.” Rick said, gesturing towards the cow. “It just seems like an awful lotta trouble to go to for a prank, is all.”
Understanding lit up Maggie’s features and she looked again at the hollowed-out belly of the cow, at the guts and ropes of intestine dragged over the grass. “You think they took something?” she asked, and the disgust was definitely pulling ahead now.
Rick looked helplessly at the mess at his feet. “Will he be able to tell?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Maggie said. “Might take him a few days to get back to you, the Nortons have a sickly calf he’s been sittin’ with.”
Rick nodded and turned away, heading back towards the farmhouse. Halfway there, his heel sunk into something suspiciously soft and he kicked it away in irritation. Boots, he thought to himself- and dead cows, and Lori’s condescending tone on the phone yesterday, Daryl Dixon who drove the world’s loudest motorcycle and had woken Rick up every morning for four days straight. Small town problems.
He left his number with Maggie at the house, secured her promise that her dad would call as soon as he had anything, and drove back into town, the windows of his cruiser all rolled down and his hat tucked safely under one arm. Spring was in high form, the sky a scrubbed-clean porcelain blue, the grass still green and shiny and not yet withering under summer’s baking heat. He loved this time of year. With the wind in his hair and the sky opening big and blue before him, he could almost forget all his troubles and pretend he was a teenager again.
Then the 7-11 at the edge of town blew past and Ashlyn started to sprout up around him, and he focused on the road again, all flights of fancy forgotten.