Daryl's Lullaby ~ Daryl Dixon x Reader

Ch.46 ~ A Confusing Day

Y/n' POV

I stood in the field from last night, staring down at a patch of grass drenched in a dark red substance. Tears pooling at my eyes as I tried to stop them from straying down my S/T cheeks.

The tracks I had found and followed lead me here. The same walker Carl most likely had seen was the one to kill Dale. Though Carl's hadn't been the one to lead the walker to this location. Their tracks married eachothers for a few feet past the stream before Carl's broke off in a different direction to the walkers.

I travelled through the trees eastwards for almost an hour before I stumbled out of the tree line and into the field. Dread engulfed my being as I sprinted across the field to where I now knelt on the ground in the same place I had been sat the night prior crying.

There was no changing the event that occurred last night and yet a mix of sadness and guilt flooded my veins as I thought over the outcome which could have been different had Carl mentioned the walker... It's not Carl's fault but he still should have mentioned something to someone.

'Maybe then Dale would still be...' I shook my head. Last night it was inevitable, something was bound to happen soon enough and judging by the way the small boy has been behaving it was obvious to anyone who chose to look at the picture with open eyes that the boy was beating himself up.

Heaving a sigh and wiping under my eyes, I stood up and began to trail my way back into the forest to finish my lookout. I still had a job to do despite the dread which rippled through my body in tidal waves. Knowing how the walker stumbled onto the farm offered no closure to the matter.

This world had broken my tough act I had spent so many years perfecting. The death of a friend finally taking its toll on my being. I was exhausted, mentally exhausted from not caring for so long that experiencing these feelings all at once caused me to physically lack the strength to hide behind my facade.

But I was experiencing more emotions than grief over the loss of a companion, other emotions boiled in the pits of my being. The bottle's metal cage that locked my emotions in, unlocked and now all that remained was a fragile glass bottle which struggled to contain the emotions I probably feared most to experience.

Emotions I had locked away when I became a cadet due to simply having no interest in pursuing them. But now that I was showing that I was more than a hollow shell, now that I showed I was capable at caring, these locked away emotions were beginning to build pressure and slowly fizzle, causing the glass bottle to shake from the pressure inside.

Consumed by my thoughts as I walked through the forest my senses dulled and my guard dropped allowing a wandering walker to tackle me to the ground. A wake up call to reality from my self wallowing as I held the creature arms length away while it straddled my waist and attempted to reach its clawing hands out to scratch away at the exposed skin on my chest.

Today I had decided to ditch the military jacket and walk around in my black vest and camouflage cargo trousers... An obvious mistake on my part.

The exposed skin on my back, my shoulder blades, loitered in dirt and scratches from unidentified sharp objects sticking into my back as my body wiggled about in its struggle to keep the walker at bay. The position caused a flashback from last night, when I caught a glimpse of Dale in the same one, before Skylla had tackled the walker off him. My arms faltered while in my daze allowing the creature to clasp onto the strap of my vest as it tried to claw at the skin below.

As quick as the memory flashed before my eyes it was gone and a new emotion boiled from within the pits of my subconscious. Anger roared through me unlike anything I had experienced before. With a new found strength I brought one hand from the walker's shoulder to its jaw and began to push the thing back.