Red ~ TWD (Daryl Dixon)

Run Baby Run

3 Weeks Later...

Losing the farm was a real punch in the tits. Losing our people was like having an organ removed without anesthetic, especially Sophia. I would never forget the sight of her small, battered, dead body shuffling out of the barn, or the sound of Carol's anguished wails of sorrow.

I might not have lived there long, and I hadn't known them well at the time, but even I knew we had something special. The people and the place. In my experience nothing good ever lasted, and unfortunately the same was true for the Greene farm.

We'd been on the move constantly since then, living like nomads as Rick chased the mirage of safety. I wanted to believe there was somewhere out there we could make a life, but as days blurred into weeks I wasn't sure places like that existed anymore.

Surviving like this was less than ideal, but I lived this type of life before in the military, especially during deployments. The others were unaccustomed to the anxiety, fear and exhaustion that stemmed from not knowing where your next meal would come from, or where you would sleep that night. Those feelings spread like a cancer, slowly eating away at your will to continue from the inside out.

Sighing, I looked out the window in the backseat as Glenn drove down the winding back roads of Georgia. I couldn't believe after everything I ended up in this group. Well, if I was being honest I couldn't believe they accepted me. I was woman enough to admit I was a hot mess on my best day and a complete nightmare on my worst, but somehow I found a place here, acceptance. It freaked me out on the daily.

For the first few days after I was officially released from the shed I contemplated leaving, skipping out in the middle of the night without even so much as a goodbye. It wasn't the group, it was me, I knew that. I didn't play well with others, and I'd been alone for so long my ineptitude at human interaction was constantly on display. Lori threatened a swear jar if I didn't find a way to stop cussing around Carl. I made Carol nervous with my blasé attitude towards everything, and T-Dog's taste in superhero's was just plain irrational.

So I went little nuts.

A couple of times.

I ran off in the dead of night only to be tracked down, in a depressing amount of time I might add, by Daryl. I swear the man had taken some kind of blood oath where I was concerned. He always knew where I was, what I was doing, and especially when I was feeling uneasy. It was the only way to explain his odd behavior.

The strangest part was every time he found me he simply scanned me for injuries, sat down beside me and never said a word. He didn't ask questions, never tried to pull the why out of me. I think it was because he already knew. Daryl understood me because he was just like me. He'd been broken, and somehow found a way to put himself back together. This was his way of doing the same for me. I didn't need saving. I just needed to be accepted for exactly who I was, and Daryl could give me that.

Rick didn't understand it.

"I've seen you calm in the most intense situations, but when everything is OK, relatively speaking, you lose it."

All I could do was shrug and go to timeout like a good girl. I never claimed to make sense. I basically ran on denial, sarcasm, and irrational thoughts.

The others took my running personally. It made me sick they felt it had something to do with them when nothing was further from the truth. This group had changed everything. They changed me, and it was terrifying. I hadn't known saving Daryl's life would alter the course of my own so drastically. That one act, saving his life at the expense of my own, was all it took to become one of them. Apparently acting firsts and thinking later was the price of admission for this ride.