Chapter Text
Daryl didn’t like this. He didn’t like it at all. He couldn’t put his finger on why he didn’t, though. Alexandria was heaven in that deadly world they now lived in. It was safe, it had sturdy walls, food and shelter. Yet Daryl didn’t like it, he couldn’t help but feel on edge, his body urging him to run away from the place.
It was too good. There had to be something hidden, something dangerous in that Alexandria heaven. It wouldn’t be like that Terminus place, maybe the people in there might not try to turn them into food, but it couldn’t be as good as it looked. They couldn’t trust it, no matter the people in there seemed weirdly harmless and even a bit helpless to have survived the harsh world.
Aaron, though, the man who had found them and brought them to Alexandria, and his boyfriend Eric…they didn’t seem that bad, they didn’t make Daryl feel like they were hiding something. But he couldn’t be sure. Their leader, though…Daryl didn’t know what to think. He hadn’t liked that stupid interview he had to do with her, feeling out of place and uncomfortable as shit. He didn’t trust her and yet he couldn’t really say that she was planning something to harm his people in some way.
Daryl knew they needed this, though. They had lost their home and most of their people, because he hadn’t been able to find and stop the Governor. Then he managed to find his family again but lost Beth, let the girl die, broke her sister’s heart again. They had been wandering since then, looking for shelter, another place where they could stay, finding nothing but death until now, until Aaron took them to Alexandria. They were dehydrated, unable to find water anywhere. They were starving as he’d been barely able to find anything to eat.
So, yes, they needed the place, strange or not. They had a baby with them, Judith needed it, the shelter, and the food, and the water, the protection, everything. The kid too, Carl. They deserved it. And so they would stay.
That didn’t mean Daryl liked it.
If he was honest, it wasn’t only him not trusting the place. It had more to do with how everything and everyone looked. Everything was too perfect, untouched by the world outside the walls. Big, expensive-looking houses, perfect green areas…it made him uncomfortable. The same happened with the people. They looked perfectly put together, as if they belonged in those houses, as if they had never stepped foot outside. They looked like the kind of people who’d take a look at Daryl, shake their heads and murmur their bullshit, or who’d laugh at him aloud, the kind of people who’d think him a good for nothing, who’d despise him.
It had been like that his whole life, in his old town, with people looking at him like that and gossiping their bullshit. Then in that quarry where he first met some of the people who were now his family…but he was painfully aware of what they had thought about him at the beginning, he knew the way in which they had looked at him, in a similar way that the people in his town did…these Alexandria people, they kind of looked at him like that too.
Daryl didn’t care. Screw them. He had never cared. Let people talk and gossip all the shit they wanted…Yet he felt self-conscious and uncomfortable, he couldn’t help it, he felt all eyes on him, he could almost hear their thoughts…he felt like crawling out of his skin, like running away…But the baby and the kid needed this, they deserved it, and his family needed it. Rick had decided they’d stay, and so Daryl’d deal with it.
Once all the interviews were finished and Deanna announced she allowed them to stay, she explained they’d be given housing, clothes, and food. But first, they had to give up on their weapons if they wanted to be allowed to stay in there, and so they were lead to a storeroom in which they had to leave their weapons in custody, the woman working there assuring them she’d take care of them and to not worry, Alexandria was safe and they wouldn’t be needing the guns.
Daryl didn’t like it, but as he looked around he realized nobody seemed to be carrying. They must be really sure of their safety, or they must be really stupid. After a bit of Rick and Maggie going back and forth with Deanna, they gave up their firearms but were allowed to keep their knives as long as they didn’t carry them outside the house they were going to be given. Daryl was also allowed to keep his crossbow…he didn’t know how he’d have reacted if they had tried to take it away, but the idea of being in there unarmed made him feel uncomfortable…and like punching someone. He hated it.
They were there, waiting to be lead to their assigned houses, when Daryl heard a voice that made him feel something…something strange. “Okay then, Jessie’s going to bring them clothes and all that, and I’ll put together a box with food for them.” That voice…it was strange, but it made him feel…weird. He thought he’d heard that voice before, somewhere, but he couldn’t really remember, couldn’t place it, it was like chasing the memories of a dream after you wake up…
He turned around followed the voice, finding two women talking, but he instantly focused on just one of them. It…it couldn’t be…he wasn’t sure…there was again, that feeling of chasing images from a dream, of trying to remember something that wasn’t there anymore… Then the woman looked at him and he could see the same feelings in her eyes as she frowned, seeming to study him, slowly walking closer and then blinking at him, seeming confused and surprised.
“Daryl…Daryl Dixon…is you, isn’t it?” She was closer now, next to him, and her voice and face took Daryl seventeen years back or so, to a clear in the woods near his town and a girl sat down next to him singing. “But…it can’t be…how…it’s really you?”
Daryl could just stare at her, unmoving and silent, until his brain seemed to work again. “Y/N?” But…but she was right…it couldn’t be…it didn’t make sense…
“Yeah…yeah it’s me…and it’s really you…” The woman grinned and the ghost of a feeling he barely remembered anymore went through him at the sight, his mind taking him back again to a girl grinning to him while he told him about some book he’d read. “How?”
Daryl couldn’t say anything, though. Couldn’t do anything that wasn’t looking at her as memories and feelings that he had kept locked somewhere threatened to break free. Y/N. She was…she’d been his friend, when he had no one else. She’d been more than that. She’d been the first woman Daryl had fallen in love with, and the only one.
The one who left, whom he let go, for her own good, even if it meant breaking both their hearts. The one who, after she left, Daryl hadn’t been able to think about without crying as he felt his heart being ripped out of his chest. The one he’d tried so hard to forget, the one he hadn’t allowed himself to think about in years and years…
And there she was now, in the same place than him more than seventeen years later, after the apocalypse, after the dead took over the world. It didn’t make sense. Daryl wondered if he wasn’t asleep and dreaming. Or unconscious. Maybe he’d passed out from lack of food and water and he was hallucinating this whole thing, Alexandria and the girl…
It felt real, though, and there she was, looking at him, her grin gone and a frown on her face now, yet Daryl couldn’t say anything, couldn’t move, couldn’t make sense of what he was feeling, could barely even form a thought.
“I…I guess you need…I mean, you all… need time to…yeah, to adapt to this…to process it all…” Y/N blinked at him but then she looked around at the others, before her eyes focused back on Daryl as if she couldn’t help it. “So…yeah…” She seemed a bit confused and at loss of words too, but Daryl couldn’t do anything. “This is Laura, she…she’ll walk you to your new houses…and…yes…”
Before Daryl could say or do anything, could realize what was happening, they were being walked away and his feet were moving on their own accord to follow his family, though he looked back at the girl…the woman. Y/N. It seemed like she was forcing herself to walk away too, but she was too looking at him. Their eyes met and those ghost feelings came back, those elusive memories getting stronger and stronger. Then someone approached her to speak and he had to keep walking.
He barely heard anything of what the people walking them to the houses told them, barely anything of what Rick said, barely looked at the houses they were given. Y/N…how could it be? How could she be there? It didn’t make any sense. He didn’t know how he felt.
“Daryl?” Rick’s voice got through his dumbfounded state. “Who was that woman before?”
For a few seconds, Daryl couldn’t speak, which made Rick frown, but then he managed to kick himself into action. “She…she was someone I knew from before…from my town…” She was that and so much more.
“Could she be dangerous? A threat?” Rick asked, as if he too were still suspicious of the place and its people. “Anything we have to worry about?”
“What?” Y/N was the furthers thing from that…but that had been more than seventeen years ago after all…still, the words ‘Y/N’, ‘threat’, and ‘dangerous’ didn’t seem to want to mix in his mind, it just didn’t feel right. “No…no, I don’t think so. She was…she was a friend.”
“Yeah?” Rick frowned, seeming confused and surprised, which just made Daryl feel more awkward, rubbing him the wrong way.
“You think I didn’t have friends of what?” He snapped, he couldn’t help it…it wasn’t that far from the truth, he’d always mostly had just his brother…but then…then he’d also had Y/N…more memories and feelings came to him and he wasn’t sure if he welcomed them or not.
“No but…I don’t know man, you didn’t seem happy to see her.” Rick shrugged.
“I wasn’t expecting to see someone seventeen years later in this bullshit of a place,” Daryl snapped, turning to walk away and back to the porch of the house, a house that didn’t look real, as if someone had taken it from a magazine…nothing made sense in that place, and Y/N being there made even less sense.
Rick’s words echoed in his mind…wasn’t he happy to see her again? To find her after the world ended? To find that she was alive, she had made it? He…yeah, sure, he was glad Y/N was alive, of course he was. But he wasn’t sure of what he was feeling. He hadn’t said anything to her…maybe Y/N now thought that he didn’t like to see her again, or that he didn’t care? Even though he couldn’t make sense of his feelings, he knew he didn’t like the idea of her thinking that. Or maybe…maybe it was her who wasn’t happy…who didn’t care… It hurt, even with that mess of feelings going through him, it hurt.
But the girl from Daryl’s memories, she always smiled when she saw him, that grin he had fallen in love with, always seeming so happy to see him…he knew, even seventeen years later, that she had cared for him. Maybe the memories were blurry, some more clear than others, but he did remember that…and how she’d made him feel.
He remembered too now, painfully well, the last time he had seen her. Her eyes full of tears as she begged him to ask her to stay with him, she saying goodbye before disappearing from his life on a bus when he didn’t say anything… He hadn’t thought about that, hadn’t allowed himself to do so, in years and years, but as he did now, pain shot through his heart as if it had been the week before. The night before that…that night when she kissed him and they slept together…he didn’t want to think about that. Had tried to erase it from his mind because no matter it was one of his best memories, it was too one of the worst…it hurt too much…and it came back now…
Daryl felt a lump in his throat, felt dangerously close to tears. He felt like a weak idiot. He didn’t want to think about it, he didn’t want to remember it, he had managed to push it back and forget for years…but now she was there, miraculously so, and it didn’t make sense, and Daryl didn’t know how he felt, didn’t know what to do, but he was overwhelmed by feelings he couldn’t even place or understand…
“Hey…” Carol’s soft voice took him back from that spiral of troubled, confusing feelings. “Don’t want to come in with everyone?” Daryl shook his head, he didn’t like the house, he didn’t like the place, he didn’t like how he felt. “Okay.” Carol sat down next to him on the stairs. “That woman…so, she was just a friend?”
“What you mean?” He snapped.
“Nothing… just…nothing.” Carol gave him a soft smile. “You don’t want to go talk with her, then?” Daryl shrugged, he didn’t know. “It’s okay, I’m sure it must be a shock. Give yourself time.” Carol squeezed his hand and got up, and Daryl looked at her.
“I just…I…” Daryl tried, but he couldn’t find words. “I don’t know.”
“It’s okay.” She gave him a smile again. “Take your time. But maybe talk to her when you are feeling better.”
Daryl was still sat down on the stairs when Y/N approached the house carrying a box. She spotted him on the stairs and looked at him in wonder, as if she too couldn’t believe this was real, but a smile tugged at the corner of her lips. Daryl, though, could barely look at her, he didn’t know why.
“You still got it…” She murmured, looking at his crossbow with the ghost of a smile on her face, and Daryl didn’t know what to say, so he just looked down. “I…I bring you all some food, I’ll show you the storeroom when you’re ready, but this should last you for some days…”
“I can hunt my food.” Daryl didn’t know why he was snapping all the time, but he couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t like the place, their houses, their clothes, and their food, he didn’t trust it or understand it, he couldn’t help it…and the way in which seeing Y/N made him feel, those turbulent feelings that shook him…he felt like running away, he didn’t know what to do.
“Yeah…yeah I know…” Another smile tugged at the corner of Y/N’s mouth as she nodded, looking at his crossbow again, her eyes soft bus sad, and he wondered if she remembered how just the day after they met for the first time, she had gone with him while he hunted…she’d been upset when he killed a rabbit, he remembered it now. “But it’s good to have food supplies too, so…yeah…”Y/N chewed on her lower lip, seeming a bit unsure of herself, before the door opened and Daryl heard Carol’s voice.
“Hello?”
“Hi there…I’m Y/N, I’m bringing you a box with some food and supplies, but feel free to go see hour storerooms and pantry, and I’ll tell you about our system and all that.”
“Thank you, Y/N, I’m Carol, it’s good to meet you.”
“It’s good to meet you too…” Y/N sounded nervous, though, Daryl could hear it in her voice. He wondered if that Alexandria place took in many people or if this was an exception…It would explain why people kept looking at them like that… But at him, though, he knew why they looked at him in a certain way, they had done it in the world before too. Y/N, though…she never did it, she used to look at him in a way that Daryl had never seen before, in a way that…that he didn’t know if he wanted to remember.
“Daryl told us you are an old friend?”
“Yeah…but we hadn’t seen each other in…I don’t know, seventeen years? Maybe more…it’s unbelievable…”
“It’s incredible, yes, but wonderful, isn’t it? I’m sure you two have a lot to catch up.”
“Yeah…” Y/N sounded unsure, though, and Daryl wondered if maybe she didn’t want to…he didn’t like how that made him feel, even though he wasn’t sure if he wanted it or not. “Daryl?” She called for him and Daryl looked at her, but couldn’t say anything. “Could we…would you mind…can we speak?”
Daryl opened his mouth but nothing came out of it, he just stared at her in dumbfounded, confused silence, and so Carol spoke for him. “Please, do so! I’ll leave you two alone to speak, I still have a lot to sort inside!” Daryl could hear in Carol’s voice that she was being overfriendly and over-cheerful, he felt she’d been like that since arriving at Alexandria, as if she was playing pretend, he didn’t know why. But he too knew that Carol cared for him and probably she genuinely wanted him to speak with an old friend…he didn’t know if thank her or not, still feeling like running away.
Carol closed the door, disappearing inside, leaving them both alone.