Future Ghosts • TWD

128. Bullshit.

After noticing Daryl walk off with an angry expression on his face in the middle of Jesus's burial, Rosie decided to follow him. He would never tell her how he was feeling when it came to death or loss. He'd just get angry or he'd go off to deal with it on his own. Rosie didn't want him to do either of those things. She just wanted him to do the same thing that he always told her to do: to talk about it. He almost always made her feel better, but he never let her even try to do the same. Maybe she was a hypocrite, though, because she had all of these things that she wasn't telling him, too.

Rosie didn't initially see where he had disappeared to, but as she walked past the entrance to the cellar, she heard his voice. He was shouting at someone. "Get up! How many?!" he was yelling. She could hear a girl- the girl- crying and shrieking in fear and it made that weakness come back. She opened up the door to the cellar and hurried down the steps. When she got to the bottom, her stomach churned- not with anxiety, but with something else. She peeked around the corner, just barely out of sight from the two in the cell. Daryl was holding the girl up to the bars of the cell, his hand around her throat. "Why'd your people kill our people?" Daryl asked, his voice low and threatening. The girl was frozen with fear. Daryl pulled his knife out of its sheath and held it up in front of the girl's face. "Tell me!"

"We were always gonna kill you, ok?!" the girl admitted, her eyes wide and terrified as she stared at the tip of Daryl's knife. She was just a kid. She couldn't have been much older than Rosie, if that. "It's just what people do now. Everybody still alive's a threat. It's us or them," the girl explained, almost completely unable to keep herself together with how fear-stricken she was.

The knife remained pointed at the girl, but Rosie could see Daryl's hand shaking. Did he feel bad for doing this? Did he see what he was doing? How terrified the girl was? "How many people in your group?" he asked. She took a deep breath, but didn't say anything. "The truth!"

"It is the truth!" the girl shrieked.

Daryl pushed the knife closer to her. "Don't lie to me!" he shouted. He always hated when Rosie would lie to him.

"My mom!" the girl shouted, her eyes squeezed shut. "It's just my mom. She's a good person. Please don't go looking for her. Please. She's just one woman, out there alone."

"You said your people were never alone," Daryl reminded her.

"She- she was at the cemetery," the girl said, opening her eyes again. Rosie took a deep, shaky breath that matched the girl's. "She got separated, but just her."

For a moment- just a moment- Rosie thought that, since the girl was telling him what he wanted, Daryl would back off. But he didn't. He pulled his knife away and pulled the girl away from the bars. "Liar!" he shouted. He always hated when Rosie would lie to him, and she had been lying to him so much lately. She knew Daryl would never do to her what he was doing to this girl, but it still made her think about how angry Daryl would be if- or when, rather- he found out she had been lying.

"Please, I'm telling the truth!" the girl pleaded. Daryl grabbed her by the arm and began dragging her toward the door of the cell. The girl dropped to the ground and tried to pull away, but Daryl was strong- much stronger than her. "No! No, I told you the truth!" the girl cried.

"I told you what was gonna happen!" Daryl shouted. Rosie didn't understand. What was gonna happen? What was he going to do?

"Daryl!" Henry shouted from his and Ian's shared cell. The closer Daryl got to the door of the cell, the further Rosie backed away, trying to remain out of sight.

"Shut up!" Daryl shouted.

"That was everything! Please! Please! Let go of me!" the girl cried, gripping the bars of the cell like her life depended on it. Maybe it did. Rosie didn't know. All Rosie knew was that the girl's incessant begging of, Please! Please! Please! only reminded her of herself, when she was eleven years old, trapped in a cell at the Sanctuary. Of course, she hadn't been begging for her life then; she'd been begging for something else. She didn't really know what. All she knew was that she was terrified, and she knew how terrified the girl was feeling.