Daryl Dixon

When you, Maggie, and Glenn came back from Woodbury after Merle forced you there, something was different. Glenn was beat to hell, Maggie was angry, and you… you were skittish. Quiet.

Glenn has barely spoken to Daryl, Merle having driven a wedge between them right when it was starting to feel like Daryl was finally fitting in. You were a close friend. Rick trusted him with Little Asskicker and important situations around the prison. He was actually listened to and his opinion valued… until he brought Merle back with him.

Most if not all of the progress made between the youngest Dixon and everyone else was out the window, but nothing bothered him more than the way you suddenly avoided him like the plague. Skittering away any time he got even close or called your name. All of the men, actually.

If one of the men enters a room you’re in, you find the quickest reason to leave. You won’t eat meals with the whole group, either eating in your cell or secluding yourself away in a corner, back to a wall and eyes on an exit strategy.

Contrary to recently renewed belief, Daryl Dixon is anything but stupid. He recognizes these patterns and between you and Maggie… he doesn’t like the picture being painted.

So he takes the Daryl way of handling things and comes to your cell when the fewest people are in the prison, sleeping in their cells or on guard or doing god-knows-what elsewhere. He convinces himself that his heart doesn’t ache when he watches you startle, scared by the male silhouette in your doorway. You don’t relax when you meet his eyes and that is nearly as devastating as the change to your cell.

Gone are your belongings spread across the cell in a cheery attempt to make it look more as a bedroom. Your mattress has been dragged from your bed, shoved into the small nook between the wall and the head of the bunks. Your backpack, your boots, and your other belongings form a wall around the foot of the mattress, effectively blocking you in.

It’s not a bedroom anymore, it’s the equivalent of an animal trying to protect themselves in their den and he tries to ignore the faint crack of his heart breaking.

“What are y’doin’ in there?” His voice comes out gruff but attempting to be… what, conversational? He knows what he’s here to ask and it’s not about the weather outside. “Mattress goes on the bed.”

Normally that would’ve earned him a huff and a sarcastic comment dripping with easy wit, but all he gets is those scared eyes looking at him like he’s the big bad wolf. Like he’ll eat you whole.

“Just me,” Daryl softens his voice as much as he can and steps into the cell, slowly and making minimal noise. He ignores the way you flinch, stopping outside of arm’s reach, a trick he learned as a kid, and eases to sit in a mimic of your own posture. “Ain’t gonna hurt ya.”

The way you look at him screams that no, you don’t know that, so Daryl does something very rare and completely disarms himself. Not a knife, not a bolt, nothing on him other than his clothes, and he passes the weapons over to you. “Body’s tellin’ you I’m a threat. I ain’t a threat to you an’ you know it.”

A small sniffle as you grab his weapons and pull them into your makeshift nest, mumbling that everyone feels like a threat. He takes a moment to think about that before shaking his head. “Nah. Not everyone.” You know what he’s getting at and he knows you know, but you seem determined to be stubborn. That’s okay- he’s even more stubborn and a bastard to boot. “Y’get raped?”