Walking Dead fanfic: Passing the Buck
Title: Passing the Buck
Summary: Money doesn’t mean a whole lot after the end of the world. Except when it does.
Author: persnickett
Rating: R
Word Count: ~3500
Chapters: 1/1
Pairing(s): Daryl/Glenn
Spoilers/Warnings: Spoilers for the first two seasons of the TV series
A/N: Crossposted at beware_walkers.
This is my first TWD story and it was written for severina2001 who bid on me in the rainbow_support auction. I offered a 3000 word fic for any pairing and she picked Daryl/Glenn and requested something - anything - with a ‘happy, hopeful’ ending for her guys -- no unrequited, no angst, no longing from afar. She’s both an awesome writer and a great friend, so here’s to being happy and hopeful that this qualifies. ;)
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Passing the Buck
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It feels like it’s about a thousand degrees in the shade - which is where Daryl’s got his kit laid out, on a rickety, splintery old picnic table that’s barely even serviceable as a makeshift workbench. The heat on a day like this one gets into you - the cicadas’ song like the very voice of heat itself; the buzzing of it humming like it’s inside of your head, where the dull, constant ache of fatigue lives, of days gone without a decent meal.
What they all could use, is a hunt.
Daryl cuts a section of cord, puts it to his lips to wet down the frayed edges, and tries to tune out the chatter coming from the sunlit clearing upwind. They got all the time in the world, and no place to go, and the old man and that kid are still bent over with their heads up the nose of that shit-bucket RV.
“Well Glenn, it’s like I was telling Jim,” the old man sighs. “A hundred bucks to the man who can puzzle this one out. See this, right here? The contact is exposed. It’s too close to the side and it just keeps arcing every time it touches the metal. Even if we had the tools, there’s not enough space to re-mount it.”
“Couldn’t we just re-insulate it?”
“With what? There isn’t enough hose left to be cutting into the rubber any further. I’m afraid it’s not safe at all; just a matter of time before it sets the whole darn thing on fire.”
The kid - Glenn - looks perplexedly into the engine again, and then he’s crouching down in the dirt and Daryl wonders if he’s about to try and crawl under the big motorhome for a better look at its guts. He’s watched this kid wriggle his way into tight spaces on their scavenger runs before - neatly hopping fences and shimmying his lithe, narrow form through windows or duct vents. But he’s doing something else. Loose shoelace, looks like.
Daryl blinks, brushes at a trickle of sweat headed for his eyes with the heel of his hand and starts to wind the new sending he’s cut around his bowstring.
“What about something like this?” Glenn is saying, holding out a hand. Turns out he’s pulled a long strip off the peeling rubber soles on one of his beat-up Chuck Taylor sneakers. “If there’s any rubber bands in the RV or anything, that could hold it for a while, maybe.”
“…I’ll be damned.” The old codger doesn’t take the thing though - starts fishing around in his pockets instead, until he comes up with a dilapidated brown leather wallet he’s evidently still carrying around. Old habits n’ all.
Glenn looks confused right up until the moment he pulls an actual hundred dollar bill out and hands it over.
They still got no place in hell to go, and about enough gas to get them just exactly that far.
He’s done here. Daryl turns his eyes away again, starts packing up his shit. Keeps them there, even when he hears Glenn’s surprised huff of laughter.
No need to keep on staring anyhow, like some creep who hangs around playgrounds waitin’ for the schoolbell. He already knows too damn well what there is to see. He’s seen the way the kid’s narrow, almond shaped eyes get wider with delight at the dumbest little things when he smiles, instead of getting narrower still, like a normal person’s would. He’s got the image - welcome or not - burnt like a brand into his brain since they got here, of the way the slow grin splits his face; white and open and big city orthodontist perfect.
And he half suspects the way he can’t stop looking has something to do with the expression his brother gets when he looks at the kid; how Merle’s keen wolf-eyes go sharper, and meaner …a look Daryl learned long ago ain’t to be trusted.
The two of them are still laughing and congratulating themselves on a make-work job well done when Daryl strides past, throwing the strap of his kit over his shoulder.
“Don’t spend it all in one place.”
He doesn’t look back to see that smile melt away from the kid’s face either.
**
After that it becomes a sort of a game or somethin’, a wry running gag - passing the old buck around from hand to hand for doing or saying something all nostalgic and cute. You can hear the whole damn group of them sitting around the fire at night, yammerin’ about what a hundred bucks would have bought them back when it meant something, what they’d spend it on now.
It makes Daryl itch.
A whole day of pampering at the luxury spa becomes “just one long, hot shower” for Jacqui - to the sound of whole-hearted agreement from the females in the circle.
“Chocolate,” Amy intones, getting another murmur of approval from the women, and Andrea picks up the notion next, but from the things she says she wants to do with it, she might as well be talking about sex.
A polite adult titter goes around the circle every time someone uses a word like ‘slather’ and at one point Lori even puts her hands - much to his confusion and annoyance - over her boy Carl’s ears.
He can’t decide whether to feel better or worse that he couldn’t join their sorry little game even if he’d wanted. The things Daryl would have spent a chunk of cash like that on, if he could ever get his hands on it, hadn’t changed a lick.
But not one of them says they’d spend it on ammo, clean water, gas for the truck.
“I’d give a hundred for a damn aspirin,” he mutters.
Merle pokes his tongue into the wad of chew tucked into his lower lip and stabs the cut branch in his hand into the embers of their own two-log blaze. He slants Daryl a shrewd, knowing glance, before he turns his head and spits.
“Got somethin’ better in my stash.”
“Nah.” It’s nothing getting away from the faked-up cheer of their fire lit faces won’t fix. Away from the pointless longing for a time that may as well never have existed for all the good it could do them now. One that more or less never did, if you were sitting at this end of camp and your name was Dixon. “…I’m turnin’ in.”
Away from the way Glenn’s laugh carries on the night breeze to come wafting over his shoulder every few minutes, raising his hackles every time, as if the sound were just behind his ear.
**
“Ugh, a hundred bucks to put it out of its misery,” Andrea mutters, taking a step backward and pushing the back of her hand across her brow.
A morning jog gone horribly wrong is left jammed up in the grille of a big black SUV. You can still see the bottle-blonde hair, and some of the fancy yoga gear; all but one of the limbs long gone under the wheels of the suburban monstrosity. A single pristine white jogging shoe kicks ineffectually at the air.
It actually snaps its broken and fleshless one-hinged jaw at him when he steps wordlessly forward. Nobody else moves.
Daryl draws one of the worse-for-wear arrows out of his quiver and shoves it through the damn thing’s eye socket.
**
Glenn’s eyes are like inky, charcoal pools with the pupils gone wide the way they are now, like the sky on a night without stars. His mouth is soft and kiss-swollen, and quiet for once.
His hand drops to cover Daryl’s though, when Daryl slaps a hand down on his chest.
“Hundred bucks,” Glenn’s fingers sit feather-light on his wrist, nimble enough to catch the fraying bill under his palm when he pulls back. “N’you don’t tell nobody what just happened here.” His own fingers feel like lead.
Daryl turns tail and disappears into the underbrush.
**
When he thinks about it, he can’t remember a single thing he loved as a kid, no toy he liked, having anything for his own that Merle didn’t take from him at one time or another. Just showin’ him he could, most likely. Puttin’ little brother in his place.
He’s still got a scar on the back of his left knee from the whuppin’ he took for losing the first thing their old man had ever given him. Nothing but a short little pig-sticker, really, but the old wooden handle fit in his hand like it was made for him, and the grain was worn down ’til it felt like silk against his palm. And their Pa told him, between slugs of Wild Turkey mind you, it had belonged to their granddaddy before he died.
Merle swore it was an accident, dropping the little pocket knife into the drink at the fishing hole after he ‘borrowed’ it - by force, naturally - from Daryl one afternoon on their way home from Sunday school. But the older he got, the less accidental certain accidents started to look.
Jeannie Pearson wasn’t even all that pretty, but she was smartest girl in school and when Daryl asked her for a dance at Peggy Reilly’s Sweet Sixteen birthday party, she said yes. He can still remember the way her hair smelled - just like strawberry ice-cream - and feeling the strange, cold burn of Merle’s eyes on him as he turned her awkwardly around the floor.
Jeannie didn’t come to school for a week after the night Merle took her to the drive-in, and Merle only ever gave him a taunting, sidelong sneer and insisted a ‘gentleman don’t kiss n’ tell’. But that gossipy little bitch Peggy put it around that she saw Jeannie in town at the grocery mart with her mama, wearing a pair of big ol’ sunglasses that weren’t doing much to cover up an obvious blacked eye.
To this day, Daryl can’t be sure what happened to the raggedy-looking black and white puppy he brought home from the county fair the year he turned eleven, either. But he does know that to Merle’s eyes, some gangly little olive-skinned boy with a quick smile and nervous hands trailing around on his heels, likely don’t look a whole lot different.
So it’s pretty damn stupid, what happens next - the sneakin’ around, the hard, stolen kisses ’round back of the RV or one of the tents. The dirty blanket tossed over their laps in the back of the pickup despite the sweltering heat, so Glenn can snake a clever hand into his pants while their rag-tag convoy picks its way through the automotive graveyard that used to be a highway. Daryl keeps his eye on the horizon and bites his lip until the skin breaks.
The cut will still be there the next morning, or even later that same night, whenever the next time is that he lets Glenn find him and corner him. And Daryl will push closer, press harder just for the tang of blood, something like sanity, on his tongue. Anything to chase the flavour of fear out of the things their hands do, make Glenn’s skin taste a little less like sin, and guilt. Less like shame.
**
“He was an ass, was Merle.”
Glenn doesn’t speak - knows Daryl hasn’t come to talk - just keeps watching him, slouched blearily against the doorframe.
“But he was all I had in the world. …Ever.”
When he stumbles across the threshold, Glenn closes the door behind them. He takes Daryl’s weight when he lurches forward; meets his mouth when he comes down, sloppy, and too hard.
And Daryl almost enjoys it, the brutally hungover ass-drag to breakfast; head sore as a whore on Sunday morning, and welcome. He can take the all-over tenderness, the sick throb in his temples under the too-bright fluorescent lights in the CDC hallways, as his penance.
Gladly, so long as he doesn’t have to see the look that hits those pretty, cat-slanted eyes when Glenn wakes up alone and finds the ragged, filthy bill where it’s left next to the bed.
It’s a long time before Daryl figures on seeing that bill again. And he don’t reckon he deserves any different.
Maybe things ought to be different now, and maybe they were. Merle gone, and the shiny steel bars on the doors in this place just maybe enough to keep the freakshow the world outside had become at bay. Maybe, but maybe not.
And the one thing that wasn’t any kind of changed was a shit-for-brains kid from the bayou who couldn’t never take care of anything long enough to call it his own.
**
“A hundred dollars,” Glenn says, all lit up golden and orange by the flicker of the campfire and holding up the neatly folded scrap of old paper, “for your favourite memory of Dale.”
“Hear hear,” Rick says, raising his rare beer bottle into the light of the circle and Glenn reaches over, past Lori, smiling quietly with her arms wrapped tight around Carl’s shoulders, to pass him the bill first.
“We’ll go clockwise,” Rick says, glancing around.
And Glenn looks at Rick the way they all do, with gratitude, respect. Like he was going to save them all.
The way nobody ever did Daryl - before Glenn.
These days, Glenn don’t bother looking his way at all. He keeps his eyes down all through the retelling of Dale’s favourite joke.
He seems nearly fixated on the hands fidgeting in his lap, until Maggie reaches over to take one and squeeze. Glenn smiles a little then, squeezes back.
A preacher, a politician, and a penguin walk into a bar…
Daryl gets to his feet, and volunteers for the next watch. He’s heard this one before.
**
Spring comes, bringing back the birds and new buds to the trees, and with them a glimmer of new hope.
They get the good, cold winter they were prayin’ for, and just like they’d hoped, most of the geeks can’t survive the freeze. It’s just plain sense that not all of them do, either.
Beth nods tearfully at whatever it is Glenn’s telling her, and she throws her arms around his neck when he hands her something - something heavy-looking and made of gold.
Maggie won’t even look at him. Her eyes look red but her chin stays up, stubborn and proud, as she shuts the door of the van they’ve packed with what supplies the group could afford to send them on their way with.
She ain’t wrong, exactly, about heading back. The farm has two wells that should be thawed by now, and if any of the horses survived the winter, they’ll make their way back too.
And nobody’s arguin’ Old Man Greene would’ve wanted to be laid to rest anywhere else.
Not being wrong don’t make the hurt any less, Daryl knows. He cuts the kid a wide berth; takes care not to stare when he stands in the road long after the dust has settled behind the van tires, hugging his arms around his skinny chest like the lingering chill in the damp spring air can creep right up inside it to his heart.
**
It’s easy enough keeping busy, what with hibernation season over, and the deer getting bolder too, tempted further and further afield to nibble on the fresh young shoots coming up everywhere after their winter starve.
There’s plenty of work for the rest of them too; supply runs, salvage trips for usable building materials, a ton of odd jobs to fix up the big old abandoned house on the hill into the shape they’ll need it in by the time Old Man Winter comes knockin’ again.
So it’s been weeks, and the heat is starting to come back to the days, when Daryl hears the telltale twig snap. He could keep going, pretend he doesn’t know the kid is tailing him, but if he wants today to be the day he finally nabs that doe he’s been tracking up on the ridge, he can’t afford the company.
Glenn doesn’t stop when Daryl does; keeps right on moving in under the dappled light and shade of the leafy canopy above until he’s standing in front of him, what feels like just a little too close.
“Help you with somethin’?” he asks, like he doesn’t know.
He still feels a little pang of surprise through his gut like adrenaline, though, when gets his confirmation and Glenn doesn’t answer. The dark eyes glitter with familiar mischief and he pulls that beat-up old bill out of his pocket instead, all folded up neat and tight into a narrow little rectangle.
“A hundred bucks if you don’t tell anyone what I’m about to…”
Daryl shakes his head, shifts his weight backward just to put a little space between them.
It was a mistake, last time - swapping that ugly old bill back and forth for every rushed spit-and-fumble. Every session of clutching, hurried rutting with their clothes fully on, panting and sticky and terrified sick that their stifled grunts would be overheard.
And only an idiot makes the same mistake twice.
Daryl raises his bow, to make his point. Glenn’s hands go up in the air, but it’s nothing more than a reflex, it seems, because the look on his face doesn’t falter and neither does the stream of sudden chatter. He never could seem to stop yappin’, once he got started - on about how this is stupid, that they should at least talk, how - with both of them staying in the community for the foreseeable future - they can’t avoid each other forever.
So Daryl takes a step forward, and that seems to do the trick. He takes another, and Glenn takes a silent step back. Then another.
“Okay,” Glenn says finally, sharply. “I get it.”
Daryl’s not so sure. He moves forward again, keeps going until he gets them right out of the bush and back into the open clearing, where Rick’s got Carl and a few of the older kids crowded around learning to split firewood, before he lowers the bow.
Glenn’s eyes are angry now - they’ve already run the gamut through mirth and fear and might be just little shiny with angry tears, the way he tends to get when he’s determined about something and not getting his way. Daryl could swear he’ll never know what he was thinking, carryin’ on all crazy and secret and out of control like that, with a kid who had to have the worst poker face on God’s green earth.
With the weapon down, Glenn doesn’t move now when Daryl steps closer, just lifts his chin and stands his ground, his hands in tight fists at his sides.
So he does it again. And again, and once more, until he’s close enough to get a mittful of Glenn’s soft cotton t-shirt and hold him still.
He doesn’t get much of a response at first, but Daryl chalks it up to surprise and holds the kiss until the rigid tension under his fist goes lax like a popped bowstring; until Glenn gives a little huff against his mouth that could be laughter, or exasperation or a bit of both, and he feels Glenn’s hand come up to curl around the back of his neck, slim, searching fingers tangling and pushing into the hair at his nape; until he hears the sound he’s been waiting for, and a catcall goes up from the little group standing around at the chopping block.
“No deal,” he says, when he’s ready to let Glenn loose again. “Keep it.”
Glenn looks down at his sneakers, actually goddamn blushes before he can look back up to send Rick, standing there grinning wide with a silencing hand on Carl’s shoulder, a shy flash of that perfect, big city grin.
Daryl doesn’t even try and match it, barely manages a short nod in return for their hootin’ and applause. He’s never been so thankful to be a honest-to-God literal redneck before, when he feels heat glowing under the camouflage of sun-baked red on the back of his neck and the tips of his ears. He gives Glenn’s shoulder a squeeze and heads back out into the bush to see about trackin’ down that doe.
Only idiots make the same mistakes twice. The smart guys are the ones that learn from ’em and still have the guts to go ahead and make all new ones.
Finding the right person to go ahead and make ’em with, seems as good a start as any.
.
Summary: Money doesn’t mean a whole lot after the end of the world. Except when it does.
Author: persnickett
Rating: R
Word Count: ~3500
Chapters: 1/1
Pairing(s): Daryl/Glenn
Spoilers/Warnings: Spoilers for the first two seasons of the TV series
A/N: Crossposted at beware_walkers.
This is my first TWD story and it was written for severina2001 who bid on me in the rainbow_support auction. I offered a 3000 word fic for any pairing and she picked Daryl/Glenn and requested something - anything - with a ‘happy, hopeful’ ending for her guys -- no unrequited, no angst, no longing from afar. She’s both an awesome writer and a great friend, so here’s to being happy and hopeful that this qualifies. ;)
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Passing the Buck
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It feels like it’s about a thousand degrees in the shade - which is where Daryl’s got his kit laid out, on a rickety, splintery old picnic table that’s barely even serviceable as a makeshift workbench. The heat on a day like this one gets into you - the cicadas’ song like the very voice of heat itself; the buzzing of it humming like it’s inside of your head, where the dull, constant ache of fatigue lives, of days gone without a decent meal.
What they all could use, is a hunt.
Daryl cuts a section of cord, puts it to his lips to wet down the frayed edges, and tries to tune out the chatter coming from the sunlit clearing upwind. They got all the time in the world, and no place to go, and the old man and that kid are still bent over with their heads up the nose of that shit-bucket RV.
“Well Glenn, it’s like I was telling Jim,” the old man sighs. “A hundred bucks to the man who can puzzle this one out. See this, right here? The contact is exposed. It’s too close to the side and it just keeps arcing every time it touches the metal. Even if we had the tools, there’s not enough space to re-mount it.”
“Couldn’t we just re-insulate it?”
“With what? There isn’t enough hose left to be cutting into the rubber any further. I’m afraid it’s not safe at all; just a matter of time before it sets the whole darn thing on fire.”
The kid - Glenn - looks perplexedly into the engine again, and then he’s crouching down in the dirt and Daryl wonders if he’s about to try and crawl under the big motorhome for a better look at its guts. He’s watched this kid wriggle his way into tight spaces on their scavenger runs before - neatly hopping fences and shimmying his lithe, narrow form through windows or duct vents. But he’s doing something else. Loose shoelace, looks like.
Daryl blinks, brushes at a trickle of sweat headed for his eyes with the heel of his hand and starts to wind the new sending he’s cut around his bowstring.
“What about something like this?” Glenn is saying, holding out a hand. Turns out he’s pulled a long strip off the peeling rubber soles on one of his beat-up Chuck Taylor sneakers. “If there’s any rubber bands in the RV or anything, that could hold it for a while, maybe.”
“…I’ll be damned.” The old codger doesn’t take the thing though - starts fishing around in his pockets instead, until he comes up with a dilapidated brown leather wallet he’s evidently still carrying around. Old habits n’ all.
Glenn looks confused right up until the moment he pulls an actual hundred dollar bill out and hands it over.
They still got no place in hell to go, and about enough gas to get them just exactly that far.
He’s done here. Daryl turns his eyes away again, starts packing up his shit. Keeps them there, even when he hears Glenn’s surprised huff of laughter.
No need to keep on staring anyhow, like some creep who hangs around playgrounds waitin’ for the schoolbell. He already knows too damn well what there is to see. He’s seen the way the kid’s narrow, almond shaped eyes get wider with delight at the dumbest little things when he smiles, instead of getting narrower still, like a normal person’s would. He’s got the image - welcome or not - burnt like a brand into his brain since they got here, of the way the slow grin splits his face; white and open and big city orthodontist perfect.
And he half suspects the way he can’t stop looking has something to do with the expression his brother gets when he looks at the kid; how Merle’s keen wolf-eyes go sharper, and meaner …a look Daryl learned long ago ain’t to be trusted.
The two of them are still laughing and congratulating themselves on a make-work job well done when Daryl strides past, throwing the strap of his kit over his shoulder.
“Don’t spend it all in one place.”
He doesn’t look back to see that smile melt away from the kid’s face either.
**
After that it becomes a sort of a game or somethin’, a wry running gag - passing the old buck around from hand to hand for doing or saying something all nostalgic and cute. You can hear the whole damn group of them sitting around the fire at night, yammerin’ about what a hundred bucks would have bought them back when it meant something, what they’d spend it on now.
It makes Daryl itch.
A whole day of pampering at the luxury spa becomes “just one long, hot shower” for Jacqui - to the sound of whole-hearted agreement from the females in the circle.
“Chocolate,” Amy intones, getting another murmur of approval from the women, and Andrea picks up the notion next, but from the things she says she wants to do with it, she might as well be talking about sex.
A polite adult titter goes around the circle every time someone uses a word like ‘slather’ and at one point Lori even puts her hands - much to his confusion and annoyance - over her boy Carl’s ears.
He can’t decide whether to feel better or worse that he couldn’t join their sorry little game even if he’d wanted. The things Daryl would have spent a chunk of cash like that on, if he could ever get his hands on it, hadn’t changed a lick.
But not one of them says they’d spend it on ammo, clean water, gas for the truck.
“I’d give a hundred for a damn aspirin,” he mutters.
Merle pokes his tongue into the wad of chew tucked into his lower lip and stabs the cut branch in his hand into the embers of their own two-log blaze. He slants Daryl a shrewd, knowing glance, before he turns his head and spits.
“Got somethin’ better in my stash.”
“Nah.” It’s nothing getting away from the faked-up cheer of their fire lit faces won’t fix. Away from the pointless longing for a time that may as well never have existed for all the good it could do them now. One that more or less never did, if you were sitting at this end of camp and your name was Dixon. “…I’m turnin’ in.”
Away from the way Glenn’s laugh carries on the night breeze to come wafting over his shoulder every few minutes, raising his hackles every time, as if the sound were just behind his ear.
**
“Ugh, a hundred bucks to put it out of its misery,” Andrea mutters, taking a step backward and pushing the back of her hand across her brow.
A morning jog gone horribly wrong is left jammed up in the grille of a big black SUV. You can still see the bottle-blonde hair, and some of the fancy yoga gear; all but one of the limbs long gone under the wheels of the suburban monstrosity. A single pristine white jogging shoe kicks ineffectually at the air.
It actually snaps its broken and fleshless one-hinged jaw at him when he steps wordlessly forward. Nobody else moves.
Daryl draws one of the worse-for-wear arrows out of his quiver and shoves it through the damn thing’s eye socket.
**
Glenn’s eyes are like inky, charcoal pools with the pupils gone wide the way they are now, like the sky on a night without stars. His mouth is soft and kiss-swollen, and quiet for once.
His hand drops to cover Daryl’s though, when Daryl slaps a hand down on his chest.
“Hundred bucks,” Glenn’s fingers sit feather-light on his wrist, nimble enough to catch the fraying bill under his palm when he pulls back. “N’you don’t tell nobody what just happened here.” His own fingers feel like lead.
Daryl turns tail and disappears into the underbrush.
**
When he thinks about it, he can’t remember a single thing he loved as a kid, no toy he liked, having anything for his own that Merle didn’t take from him at one time or another. Just showin’ him he could, most likely. Puttin’ little brother in his place.
He’s still got a scar on the back of his left knee from the whuppin’ he took for losing the first thing their old man had ever given him. Nothing but a short little pig-sticker, really, but the old wooden handle fit in his hand like it was made for him, and the grain was worn down ’til it felt like silk against his palm. And their Pa told him, between slugs of Wild Turkey mind you, it had belonged to their granddaddy before he died.
Merle swore it was an accident, dropping the little pocket knife into the drink at the fishing hole after he ‘borrowed’ it - by force, naturally - from Daryl one afternoon on their way home from Sunday school. But the older he got, the less accidental certain accidents started to look.
Jeannie Pearson wasn’t even all that pretty, but she was smartest girl in school and when Daryl asked her for a dance at Peggy Reilly’s Sweet Sixteen birthday party, she said yes. He can still remember the way her hair smelled - just like strawberry ice-cream - and feeling the strange, cold burn of Merle’s eyes on him as he turned her awkwardly around the floor.
Jeannie didn’t come to school for a week after the night Merle took her to the drive-in, and Merle only ever gave him a taunting, sidelong sneer and insisted a ‘gentleman don’t kiss n’ tell’. But that gossipy little bitch Peggy put it around that she saw Jeannie in town at the grocery mart with her mama, wearing a pair of big ol’ sunglasses that weren’t doing much to cover up an obvious blacked eye.
To this day, Daryl can’t be sure what happened to the raggedy-looking black and white puppy he brought home from the county fair the year he turned eleven, either. But he does know that to Merle’s eyes, some gangly little olive-skinned boy with a quick smile and nervous hands trailing around on his heels, likely don’t look a whole lot different.
So it’s pretty damn stupid, what happens next - the sneakin’ around, the hard, stolen kisses ’round back of the RV or one of the tents. The dirty blanket tossed over their laps in the back of the pickup despite the sweltering heat, so Glenn can snake a clever hand into his pants while their rag-tag convoy picks its way through the automotive graveyard that used to be a highway. Daryl keeps his eye on the horizon and bites his lip until the skin breaks.
The cut will still be there the next morning, or even later that same night, whenever the next time is that he lets Glenn find him and corner him. And Daryl will push closer, press harder just for the tang of blood, something like sanity, on his tongue. Anything to chase the flavour of fear out of the things their hands do, make Glenn’s skin taste a little less like sin, and guilt. Less like shame.
**
“He was an ass, was Merle.”
Glenn doesn’t speak - knows Daryl hasn’t come to talk - just keeps watching him, slouched blearily against the doorframe.
“But he was all I had in the world. …Ever.”
When he stumbles across the threshold, Glenn closes the door behind them. He takes Daryl’s weight when he lurches forward; meets his mouth when he comes down, sloppy, and too hard.
And Daryl almost enjoys it, the brutally hungover ass-drag to breakfast; head sore as a whore on Sunday morning, and welcome. He can take the all-over tenderness, the sick throb in his temples under the too-bright fluorescent lights in the CDC hallways, as his penance.
Gladly, so long as he doesn’t have to see the look that hits those pretty, cat-slanted eyes when Glenn wakes up alone and finds the ragged, filthy bill where it’s left next to the bed.
It’s a long time before Daryl figures on seeing that bill again. And he don’t reckon he deserves any different.
Maybe things ought to be different now, and maybe they were. Merle gone, and the shiny steel bars on the doors in this place just maybe enough to keep the freakshow the world outside had become at bay. Maybe, but maybe not.
And the one thing that wasn’t any kind of changed was a shit-for-brains kid from the bayou who couldn’t never take care of anything long enough to call it his own.
**
“A hundred dollars,” Glenn says, all lit up golden and orange by the flicker of the campfire and holding up the neatly folded scrap of old paper, “for your favourite memory of Dale.”
“Hear hear,” Rick says, raising his rare beer bottle into the light of the circle and Glenn reaches over, past Lori, smiling quietly with her arms wrapped tight around Carl’s shoulders, to pass him the bill first.
“We’ll go clockwise,” Rick says, glancing around.
And Glenn looks at Rick the way they all do, with gratitude, respect. Like he was going to save them all.
The way nobody ever did Daryl - before Glenn.
These days, Glenn don’t bother looking his way at all. He keeps his eyes down all through the retelling of Dale’s favourite joke.
He seems nearly fixated on the hands fidgeting in his lap, until Maggie reaches over to take one and squeeze. Glenn smiles a little then, squeezes back.
A preacher, a politician, and a penguin walk into a bar…
Daryl gets to his feet, and volunteers for the next watch. He’s heard this one before.
**
Spring comes, bringing back the birds and new buds to the trees, and with them a glimmer of new hope.
They get the good, cold winter they were prayin’ for, and just like they’d hoped, most of the geeks can’t survive the freeze. It’s just plain sense that not all of them do, either.
Beth nods tearfully at whatever it is Glenn’s telling her, and she throws her arms around his neck when he hands her something - something heavy-looking and made of gold.
Maggie won’t even look at him. Her eyes look red but her chin stays up, stubborn and proud, as she shuts the door of the van they’ve packed with what supplies the group could afford to send them on their way with.
She ain’t wrong, exactly, about heading back. The farm has two wells that should be thawed by now, and if any of the horses survived the winter, they’ll make their way back too.
And nobody’s arguin’ Old Man Greene would’ve wanted to be laid to rest anywhere else.
Not being wrong don’t make the hurt any less, Daryl knows. He cuts the kid a wide berth; takes care not to stare when he stands in the road long after the dust has settled behind the van tires, hugging his arms around his skinny chest like the lingering chill in the damp spring air can creep right up inside it to his heart.
**
It’s easy enough keeping busy, what with hibernation season over, and the deer getting bolder too, tempted further and further afield to nibble on the fresh young shoots coming up everywhere after their winter starve.
There’s plenty of work for the rest of them too; supply runs, salvage trips for usable building materials, a ton of odd jobs to fix up the big old abandoned house on the hill into the shape they’ll need it in by the time Old Man Winter comes knockin’ again.
So it’s been weeks, and the heat is starting to come back to the days, when Daryl hears the telltale twig snap. He could keep going, pretend he doesn’t know the kid is tailing him, but if he wants today to be the day he finally nabs that doe he’s been tracking up on the ridge, he can’t afford the company.
Glenn doesn’t stop when Daryl does; keeps right on moving in under the dappled light and shade of the leafy canopy above until he’s standing in front of him, what feels like just a little too close.
“Help you with somethin’?” he asks, like he doesn’t know.
He still feels a little pang of surprise through his gut like adrenaline, though, when gets his confirmation and Glenn doesn’t answer. The dark eyes glitter with familiar mischief and he pulls that beat-up old bill out of his pocket instead, all folded up neat and tight into a narrow little rectangle.
“A hundred bucks if you don’t tell anyone what I’m about to…”
Daryl shakes his head, shifts his weight backward just to put a little space between them.
It was a mistake, last time - swapping that ugly old bill back and forth for every rushed spit-and-fumble. Every session of clutching, hurried rutting with their clothes fully on, panting and sticky and terrified sick that their stifled grunts would be overheard.
And only an idiot makes the same mistake twice.
Daryl raises his bow, to make his point. Glenn’s hands go up in the air, but it’s nothing more than a reflex, it seems, because the look on his face doesn’t falter and neither does the stream of sudden chatter. He never could seem to stop yappin’, once he got started - on about how this is stupid, that they should at least talk, how - with both of them staying in the community for the foreseeable future - they can’t avoid each other forever.
So Daryl takes a step forward, and that seems to do the trick. He takes another, and Glenn takes a silent step back. Then another.
“Okay,” Glenn says finally, sharply. “I get it.”
Daryl’s not so sure. He moves forward again, keeps going until he gets them right out of the bush and back into the open clearing, where Rick’s got Carl and a few of the older kids crowded around learning to split firewood, before he lowers the bow.
Glenn’s eyes are angry now - they’ve already run the gamut through mirth and fear and might be just little shiny with angry tears, the way he tends to get when he’s determined about something and not getting his way. Daryl could swear he’ll never know what he was thinking, carryin’ on all crazy and secret and out of control like that, with a kid who had to have the worst poker face on God’s green earth.
With the weapon down, Glenn doesn’t move now when Daryl steps closer, just lifts his chin and stands his ground, his hands in tight fists at his sides.
So he does it again. And again, and once more, until he’s close enough to get a mittful of Glenn’s soft cotton t-shirt and hold him still.
He doesn’t get much of a response at first, but Daryl chalks it up to surprise and holds the kiss until the rigid tension under his fist goes lax like a popped bowstring; until Glenn gives a little huff against his mouth that could be laughter, or exasperation or a bit of both, and he feels Glenn’s hand come up to curl around the back of his neck, slim, searching fingers tangling and pushing into the hair at his nape; until he hears the sound he’s been waiting for, and a catcall goes up from the little group standing around at the chopping block.
“No deal,” he says, when he’s ready to let Glenn loose again. “Keep it.”
Glenn looks down at his sneakers, actually goddamn blushes before he can look back up to send Rick, standing there grinning wide with a silencing hand on Carl’s shoulder, a shy flash of that perfect, big city grin.
Daryl doesn’t even try and match it, barely manages a short nod in return for their hootin’ and applause. He’s never been so thankful to be a honest-to-God literal redneck before, when he feels heat glowing under the camouflage of sun-baked red on the back of his neck and the tips of his ears. He gives Glenn’s shoulder a squeeze and heads back out into the bush to see about trackin’ down that doe.
Only idiots make the same mistakes twice. The smart guys are the ones that learn from ’em and still have the guts to go ahead and make all new ones.
Finding the right person to go ahead and make ’em with, seems as good a start as any.
.