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The truth is that Daryl doesn’t much care for wine.
The other truth is that he’s polished off almost two thirds of a bottle of it almost totally on his own.
He was worried about it at first. Worried - actually gave a shit, actually cared, because yet another truth is that he’s never been to dinner with someone like this in his entire life, never been invited to sit down with someone at a table with the person they love and no one else and drink wine and eat pretty goddamn good spaghetti, serious spaghetti, and drink fucking wine out of a fucking glass and just… share the space.
No judgment. He knows he didn’t fit there. He was perfectly aware. Aware that he was getting shit wrong, had no goddamn table manners, he never has, and he caught them smiling at each other, but while it made him a little self-conscious, sure… They weren’t judging him. He could tell.
They were smiling, but it wasn’t mean, and they weren’t judging him.
There’s no angle that he can see. They genuinely seem to like him.
He can’t figure it out.
And a final truth is that he’s pretty sure he likes them.
So he was a little concerned about the wine. Eric begged off not too long after Aaron took him to the garage and showed him the bike, said he was wounded and anyway - with a slightly crooked, self-deprecating little smile - that someone as devastatingly handsome as he was needed all the sleep that was supposedly good for that.
And it wasn’t fake, at all, and again Daryl thought What the fuck, I like these people.
These aren’t the kind of people he ever thought he would find himself liking.
So, to Aaron, actually asking: should he let up on the wine or something? And Aaron laughed and said more than one house actually had full cellars, and then he went and got another bottle, and that’s how it got to be two in the morning and they’re down to less than a third of a bottle between them, sprawled in the living room, just…
Just talking.
And he’s not saying a whole lot, of course, but that’s fine, because he actually doesn’t feel like he needs to. Aaron seems to get it. He’s not pushing. He’s talking - about his life before the Turn, about places around the world he’s been and shit he’s seen, some of it pretty wild, pretty hairy - but he’s not exactly chatty either, and he’s falling quiet now and then and letting the silences play themselves out. Comfortable. Like they don’t have to be filled.
And Daryl is feeling warm and a little sleepy - not the kind of lurching, violent drunk he’s used to. He still thinks he’s kind of drunk, but it’s gentle. It, like everything else, is comfortable. Everything is also just a bit muted, the edges smoothed out, and he’s self-aware enough to know that he needed that.
He’s all edges. All sharp. He’s been cutting himself. He’s been cutting himself for weeks. He’s been an open wound. It’s still there, under everything… But it doesn’t hurt quite as much.
He’s never going to be normal. He’s never going to be okay. He never was anyway. But for a while, with her, it seemed almost within reach. It isn’t within reach now, but he’s thinking back and remembering how it was with her, that last night when he saw something and allowed himself to think he deserved it, allowed himself to grab for it and try to hold on, and thinking about it isn’t agony. He thinks about it and it hurts, but it’s not florid rage and it’s not grief so immense that it crushes him, knots everything in his chest up into a bloody fist until he can’t feel anything at all.
He thinks about it and he just misses her.
He misses her so much.
She would have liked this. She would have liked them. She would have liked that he’s doing this now. She would have liked that he tried, even if he didn’t go to the party, and maybe she would even have said this was better than a group of people he doesn’t know and another group of people he thought he knew and is now, deep under everything, beginning to wonder about.
She might have been proud of him.
He blinks, hard.
He’s not going to do this now.
It’s one of those long stretches of quiet, and when Aaron breaks it he sounds thoughtful. Thoughtful, and there’s something in his voice that aches.
"The thing about a place like this… You forget how to lose people." He pauses, glances up at Daryl, shakes his head and laughs softly. "I mean… I know. I know what you see, a lot of this. A lot of us. You look at it and you think a place like this makes you soft. We already talked about that, didn’t we? But it’s not just about survival."
He trails off and looks down at his wine glass. It’s mostly empty, and Daryl thinks about offering him a refill, and then doesn’t.
"I’ve lost people. I have. I know what it’s like. I know how much it hurts. I know how it… It cuts the legs out from under you. You can’t walk anymore. You just drag yourself along." He nods up at the ceiling; Eric in bed, and for a violent, almost hateful moment Daryl imagines how, when he finally leaves, Aaron will go up to bed and curl himself around someone he loves, someone he wants to share his life with and who wants to share the same with him, and he’ll sleep.
He gets to have that.
And he’s talking about dragging.
Carrying.
"Yeah," he mutters, and drains half his glass at one go, and he feels Aaron’s gaze on him and tries not to resent it and basically fails.
"I was so scared of losing him because I knew how much it would hurt. Because I remember. How you lose someone - or how you don’t, how you do it right - is you’re terrified of it. All the time. You hang onto them like your life depends on it, because it does. The people here…"
He looks toward the window, the quiet street outside. Daryl wonders if the party has wrapped up. If all those comfortable people are in their comfortable beds. If, when he wanders back to the house he’s sleeping in - a place he can’t even vaguely imagine calling a home - he’ll be the only one awake.
Smoking on the porch and thinking too much and trying - because when he’s alone it gets hard again - to not use his own fucking skin as an ashtray.
He hasn’t, since the once. But he’s wanted to. As it turns out, it’s a fight. He’s not sure how much longer he can win.
He looks up. Aaron’s expression is distant. Sort of speculative. A little hard to read with any reliable depth. “What about the people here?”
"They’re not scared anymore," Aaron says, almost inaudible. "That’s dangerous." He turns his head then, suddenly, so suddenly Daryl almost jumps. He’s a gentle man, and his face is gentle, and Daryl has never - in the admittedly short time they’ve known each other - seen any indication that there’s any real sharpness in him. But now Aaron’s gaze is piercing, and it comes back to him what he said about knowing the difference between a good person and a bad person, and how it comes down to being perceptive, reading people, and that’s when he realizes that for this entire time Aaron has probably been reading him like a fucking book.
Well. He’s never been great at hiding things.
"What?" He can be sharp too. And he doesn’t think he appreciates this so much, being looked at like that.
"You lost someone."
Daryl stares at him.
There are a number of things he could do. He could flatly deny it. He could ask Aaron who the fuck he thinks he is. He could throw the glass across the room. He could throw the glass at Aaron. He could storm out. He could leave, not violent but sudden and sullen, and he’s well aware of how much he comes off like a surly teenager when he does that, not that it ever helps him not do it.
He could be honest.
But he just stares.
"Look, you…" Another one of those soft little laughs. "You don’t have to talk about it. I’m not trying to get something out of you. I’m just saying, I think you lost someone and I get the sense it was bad, and I think that means… You’re still scared. In a good way. You know what being out there can cost you. You know the things that can make all the difference, and you know it in a way hardly anyone in here does anymore." He gives Daryl the tiniest smile. "That’s another reason I picked you out for this."
Daryl is still just staring. Sorting through his options. He doesn’t want to storm out. He doesn’t want to throw anything. And he’s pretty sure denying it is just going to make him look stupid.
And he likes Aaron. He does.
And maybe Aaron is right.
So he ducks his head, says nothing for a moment, and then - and it’s a little bit of a struggle, but goddammit, he tries - he nods.
"It was bad," he says, very quiet, because it was. This many glasses of wine into the evening, honesty is perhaps easier than once it would have been. He knows all about honesty that comes out of a bottle.
Or a jar.
"Someone you cared about."
Not a question. Aaron is just saying. But again, Daryl nods.
It feels sort of good. Doing that. Hurts, a lot, but it also… It doesn’t feel bad. He doesn’t hate it. And it’s better, somehow, than it would be with anyone in the group. At least right now.
"Family?"
He almost nods again. Then he doesn’t. Because it was true, it would be fair to say yes to that, but it also wasn’t anywhere near that simple, and if he’s going to talk about this, even the smallest bit, he’s damned if he’s going to misrepresent it.
But Aaron doesn’t say anything else, and after a few minutes Daryl realizes that if anyone is going to talk now, it’s going to be him. Aaron isn’t waiting for him to talk. Isn’t trying to pry it out of him. There’s no manipulation here.
If Daryl wants to talk, here’s the space in which to talk.
So he looks into the red depths of what’s left of his wine, and entirely against his will his brain slingshots him back to blood on the floor, blood on her hands, in her hair, blood on his mouth, blood everywhere, a world full of blood, and his throat closes up and his hands start to shake and he whispers, “There was a girl.”
There was a girl and she was…
She was.
He could describe her any number of ways. Say any number of things. Talk about what they did together, what they went through, what happened. Tell all the stories that make up the aggregate fucking tragicomedy that was them. Put any number of words to her and try to connect those words to the things he feels, try to string them all together and arrange them like some kind of ridiculous craft project, art installation, attach pictures and colors and video and sound…
He could do all of those things and they would all fall short, because the most important verb in the entire fucking English language is to be, and she was.
She isn’t anymore.
And Aaron says, very soft now, almost too soft to be heard, “You loved her.”
It’s like being smacked in the face. The gentlest smack in the face in the entire world.
He sits in silence for a long time. He doesn’t have to answer, he knows; Aaron isn’t expecting an answer, sure as hell isn’t demanding one. Aaron just said it, threw it out there between them, and Daryl can leave it where it is or he can pick it up and do something with it, and there’s no wrong choice here.
Except there is. She would say there was. There are things here he’s pretty sure she would expect from him.
She never let him off the hook. Not when it mattered.
It’s not even a stretch. It’s not something he has to grope for. It’s right there. It always has been. He’s always known it. He doesn’t even know how long it was true. Such a long time. So deep, so hard, and yes, he’s terrified of losing people, but - and maybe it’s horrible to admit this - he’s been through the worst now. He can’t imagine anything else ever hurting like this.
He used to think of the idea of someone having their heart ripped out of their chest as a stupid cliche. Yet here he is. Chest cracked.
You loved her.
He doesn’t say anything else. Aaron doesn’t say anything else. They sit without speaking, and between them they polish off the rest of the remaining bottle. And after a little while longer Daryl gets up, murmurs thanks, wanders - a bit unsteady - out into the street and slowly toward…
Not home. It won’t be home. It won’t ever be home, and maybe Aaron is right, maybe he doesn’t belong out there, but he sure as hell doesn’t belong in here, and he doesn’t think he wants to.
He could have. There might have been a chance, once. It’s gone now. She would want him to try, and the truth - the big, nasty, horrible truth - is that he wants to try, and he knows without even having to test out the theory that he won’t be able to make it work. No matter how hard he tries. Rick said he lost something, and Rick probably knows what Aaron picked out tonight, but Daryl also seriously doubts that Rick actually has any fucking idea.
Rick lost Lori. But that was…
That was so different. Rick had a chance. Even now, Rick has a chance.
Daryl?
Daryl has a job. That’s something. Until everything goes to shit again, that’s something.
A job, and - maybe, just maybe, after everything that’s been ripped away from him and everything he’ll never get back no matter how hard he tries, and it’s like it’s a joke except he thinks it’s also, in so many ways, deadly serious…
Maybe he has a friend.