Walking Dead Grave Digger

_**Hello again ladies and gentlemen. So, the most recent episode of TWD 5x10, entitled "Them" really struck a strong cord in me. It also brought up a little detail about Daryl that I think a lot of us have speculated about over the series, the concept of self-harm and whether it's ever been something that Daryl's done to cope. Some say yes, some say no. Well, now we have proof, he's done it at least once. I wanted to explore a little of that idea, as well as some of the other themes of the episode. I hope you enjoy if so, please let me know! Reviews are love! **_

_**Warnings: One or two swears. And obviously angst. **_

* * *

He didn't have enough strength in him to feel anything when his family pulled and nudged and prodded. All through that trip through hell on the highway, dragging their feet, feeling the sun pounding down on their backs, throats like sandpaper, bones aching, spirits broken. What did they want from him? Did they want him to fall to his knees, to scream and cry and sob like Maggie? Didn't they know by now that wasn't him? That he didn't have that in him and he never had?

Daryl was many things, but vulnerable was never one of them. He just couldn't be, not in front of them. Only her.

"I know you lost something back there."

Rick tried to get him to open up but Daryl didn't see the point. Maybe at one time he might have, but not now. He was as physically weak as he had probably ever been, except for maybe that initial run from the prison, where he'd literally tumbled to his knees and then his back, gasping for air, his tar encrusted lungs wheezing for oxygen. Even then, he could remember the acrid choke of burning stone and flesh, the stink of fear reeking off of both of them as they were forced to finally rest. He was weak enough without opening up all those wounds all over again.

In truth it was all cowardice and always had been with him. Sure, he could fight a herd of Walkers, sure he could take on armed cops without blinking an eye. But starvation? Dehydration? There were some things a man just could not physically resist after enough time, and he couldn't risk crippling himself even further with the soul sucking pain of the unforgettable image of blood spattered blonde hair and a cold corpse in his arms. Whether he liked it or not, they were still alive, and that meant he had to keep going, and so the only thing he could do was ignore the pain, and ignore everything else that came with it.

He was able to resist Rick. Carol was harder. There was so much conflict there, so many things that were unresolved. He guessed they were trying- they were doing what they could, maybe only what they were willing to do, to try and make sense of what they had become. Either way, she knew him in ways nobody else ever would. She was closer, but today, it was too close. Today it felt abrasive, steel wool against thin, burned skin.

He could hear her words but he just didn't let it sink in. He was too exhausted to let it in today. Too tired, too weak to handle it. She tried a different approach, maybe hoping to get him to say at least something; reaching for him physically, trying to smooth the cowlicks in his hair, even pulling him down for the brush of a faint kiss on his temple. It wasn't the first time, but it was the first in a long time. Normally he'd flinch a bit, but eventually enjoy it, though he'd never gone so far as to reach back for her. Today he just couldn't. He didn't have it in him. What he really felt was how badly he wanted to feel the entwined grip of small, slender fingers between his own, and how much he hated himself for wanting it so much. Sensing that all of this was going nowhere, and his desire to be left alone, Carol departed, leaving him with her knife pressed in his hand.

On his way back to the group, he unsheathed the tool and turned it end over end in his hands, feeling it out. It was a little small for the size of his fist, but he immediately saw how well matched it had been for her. He absentmindedly tried to remember if she had ever killed any Walkers with it, but his brain was too foggy and disoriented to recall. Even now, in this stupor he felt himself sinking further and further into, he remembered how she could still see the living dead as something that had once been human. That could still be respected and remembered as something more than creatures who had no other desire than to eat them alive.

He killed his train of thought by coming back out of the woods and onto the road to rejoin the group. He couldn't let himself think that much. Thinking was how he was going to dig himself into a mental grave.

_"You have to put it away. You have to. Or it kills you." _

He heard her voice inside his head, pinging off the inside of his skull, frazzling into static at the edges of his brain. Exposed in the sun, the heat helped to dissolve his thoughts. He sunk deep into the physicality of his surroundings and his own flesh and tried not to think anymore. Maybe ever again, depending on how things went, but of course he couldn't, because every bone jarring step, every twitch of motion, somehow, he could remind himself of her.

He skittered away for the third time, telling Abraham that he intended to look for water, and in truth he would keep his eyes out for signs, but he knew damn well he wasn't going to find any. What he was really doing was trying to get away from the voices. The voices made him think.

He wandered away from the highway, coming down a small slope until he saw an abandoned barn about fifty yards away. Exhausted and unwilling to trudge back empty handed yet again just yet, he flopped to the ground and retrieve a few bent out of shape cigarettes from his pocket and a Zippo lighter. It was a waste to be smoking when he knew he wouldn't really enjoy it, but maybe the sting of the nicotine and the cloying cloud of chemicals would help to smoke out everything else. He inhaled, causing the lit end of the cigarette to crackle and flush with bright orange embers while he held the smoke tight in his lungs for as long as possible, letting the heat sear his insides as he stared aimlessly at the barn.

_"I remember. When that little girl came out of the barn, after my mom. You were like me."_

He finally exhaled, breathing out smoke through his nose and mouth, the taste of the tobacco all but wilted and rotted away. It was barely even worth smoking at this point. He didn't even really feel the nicotine the way he used to. He leaned his head back against the tree he was resting against and vaguely wondered if the fact he was so numb to everything was helping him to keep breathing, or if it was slowly strangling him from the inside out. It felt far too much the same way it had when the prison had first been taken. Just staring aimlessly at the fire, chewing snake meat and not saying a word to her no matter how much she'd tried to get him to speak. Just feeling the raw, gaping hole that had been blown through his life and having no other way to keep going but to just turn everything off and ignore the rest of the world.

He wished he could be like her, he wished he could still want and strive for things the way she had, but there was nothing left in the world that he wanted anymore. Not the way he wanted her. Without her here to dig him out of his mental grave, he sank deeper and deeper in to the cold, dark earth of his own mind. He didn't know how or why she'd been able to dig him out that first time, all those times when all he had wanted was to give up. He didn't know if he had it in him to overcome that on his own now. All he knew was the grip of a numb chill that was so close to death itself had a hold of him.

He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and stared at the plume of ash forming at the tip, and on an impulsive whim, he crushed the burning butt into the edge of his hand. Sizzling pain smarted as he held it there, feeling the embers ground into his skin, a sharp, searing sensation that was very different from most of the wounds he felt on the road.

It wasn't the first time he'd done this. There were times when he was younger, when he was so afraid that maybe he could never feel anything the same way a normal person did, that he was too far gone, that he'd resorted to hurting himself just to feel _something. _Just to shake off the numbness, to bring him back into something real. He didn't feel grief or loss or even fear the same way everyone around him did. Merle and his father did so much to beat all of it out of him, to strip his humanity away, to skin him over and over and over again until he grew so calloused and detached that he just didn't understand what feelings were anymore, or that he'd ever had them in the first place. For so much of his life he'd walked almost like an alien amongst his fellow man. He was inherently different from them somehow. For the longest time, the only thing he'd had in common with them was that they all felt physical pain the same way. Nerves firing, skin scorching, the slight smell of burned flesh, the throbbing ache that was now occurring even as he pulled the cigarette away and brushed the ashes off his hand. It stung and smarted, flaring even harder when he flexed his thumb and pulled at the skin.

_"You're gonna miss me so bad when I'm gone, Daryl Dixon." _

He let the cigarette fall to the ground as the grief welled up inside in a place that he couldn't suppress anymore, like a geyser of super-heated water that couldn't be contained. He found himself struggling to breathe as his head hung between his arms that were resting on his knees as hot moisture pricked his eyes.

_"You got away from it. You did."_

A painful sob ripped through him as his fists clenched and his eyes shut as he did his best to hang onto the last bits of the crumbling wall inside. He felt like he was going to be swept away, like he might actually drown this time, and there was no sweet girl with winter sky eyes and birdsong voice to save him now.

_"You have to put it away. You have to. Or it kills you." _

He lurched up to his feet and trudged back to the group, every inch of him aching so deep inside that when he finally made it back to the road, he didn't even try to hold his head up. It was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other as he mentally thrashed back and forth, trying desperately to dig himself out of a grave that was rapidly filling in to entomb him forever.

When the rain finally fell, physically he could feel relief, and somewhere in a dark, dusty corner of his mind, he wondered if maybe she'd put in a good word for them with the man upstairs on their behalf. She was the kind to believe in angels and good people and taking in strays. As the rain continued to hound them, he ushered the group back into the barn to give them cover, all the while grateful for the howling of the storm to block out the unsteady feeling rattling through him. He recognized it for what it was now though. It was the same feeling that she gave him, whenever she dug her fingers into the meat of his damaged, unwilling soul and pulled so hard that it strained everything they both had, but she refused to give up until she'd hauled him free of his mental grave.

He listened to Rick tell his story and even though he gave no outward sign of acknowledgement, he was paying attention, listening to every word, the cadence of his voice, the heavy weight of the words. Daryl didn't know exactly why, all he knew was that somewhere in all of that, he felt like something kicked him in the side of the head and woke him up. Maybe he couldn't see for shit, maybe all he knew was that if he didn't try, he might as well be dead, and he refused to spit on her grave like that any longer. She wouldn't want this for him. She wouldn't let him get away with it before, and if he could say it to Carol and believe it, then he could say it to his brother in all but blood and believe it too.

"We ain't them."

Rick shifted his gaze and looked at him with his head tipped to the side a bit, holding Daryl's eye contact steadily. "We ain't them," he agreed, but there was something darker and much more foreboding in those words than Daryl could let stand. He snapped a few sticks and fed them into the fire and rose up to his feet.

"We ain't them."

He didn't know where they would go from here, and in some ways, it didn't even matter. Whether they found another place to live, hell, whether they even made it to see the next sunrise. It didn't matter. It only mattered that he tried.

He went to keep watch, pacing slowly with his crossbow, still feeling the weight of his grief and guilt and pain but instead of her small echoes haunting him, they swarmed his mind and comforted him. He remembered her giddy drunken smile as she shifted forward and looked him dead in the eye and said _"We should burn it down." _He still had scars, but the two of them had burned down the bars to the prison that had held him caged all his life. He couldn't crawl back into that hole now. She'd set him free. It was a dishonor to all she stood for if he was going to give up.

He felt more than heard the mob approach. There were so many of them out there, there was no way that they could fight them all, not as weak as they were, and they had nowhere to run. He moved like a blur, tightening the chain, pulling down the latch, instinct hurling him against the door, throwing every bit of his weight against it as he felt the horde slamming against the doors, trying desperately to rip them all to shreds.

Maggie saw him first, rising slowly from her half sleep, realizing something was wrong. She ran forward and added her weight right next to him, desperate panic but also recognition flashing through her eyes. They had made their choice to fight, both of them in the name of the one they'd lost. She hadn't given up, and Daryl resolved that if they made it out of this alive, he would tell her so.

Sasha came next, throwing herself against the door, and at that moment as the thunder snarled and the Walkers moaned, the rest of the group woke. Rapidly they came, all of them adding to the pile against the door, and the irony was not lost on Daryl that Rick's self proclaimed walking dead were in equally opposing forces against the actual undead monsters just outside. It was them against the dead, and maybe that was all they were ever going to have anymore. Pain flared through every inch of his being as exhaustion hammered at his bones, ripped long claws against his muscles, tried with desperate force to pull him under and make him give out.

Pushing and shoving and holding the horde back, he felt the trembling, beaten down muscles of his family all around him. Herded in and contained, their body heat and the feel of their skin and road stained clothes pushing and rubbing against him made him feel as though he once again belonged. She was gone. His beloved little songbird that sang him to sleep, held his hand and challenged all his fears without any of her own was gone, but these people had been her family too. He'd die for them, and he'd live for them too. Just like she had.

At last, the horde abated. Whether knocked away because of the storm or because they finally were distracted by something else, it didn't matter. Eventually the pressure eased away, and the group pulled back, but not daring to go outside. The storm was still raging and Daryl finally eased to the ground and sat with his back against the wall and listened to the wind howl and the thunder snarl and the rain pound against the roof. Was that her too, blowing the storm all around to protect them and drive away the dead? Daryl had never been the religious kind, never been the kind to believe in angels or miracles or anything that he couldn't see with his own eyes, but he'd never seen a herd just give up before. He remembered her anger in their first makeshift camp, the way she'd finally unleashed her fury at him for denying who he really was at the whiskey still. He smiled a little for the first time since Atlanta, and looked to the side and spied the little music box that Carl had salvaged and given to Maggie to try and cheer her up. He picked it up and gently unscrewed the bottom where the motor lay and painstakingly cleaned the grit out of the little washers and strings. It was a silly thing, it had no value to their survival, but he knew it would mean something to Maggie, and he wasn't ignorant of the fact that there was a gaping wound deep inside her too. He was learning that those small things sometimes meant the world. From a Cherokee rose in a beer bottle, to comic books for a soldier trying to still be a child, to a working music box for an older sister that had lost her younger half. Sometimes it was the little things that mattered most. Beth had understood that too.

Maggie woke close to dawn and came to sit next to him. At first they didn't need to say anything, they just sat in the same space and breathed together, sharing the pain between them in different ways. Daryl realized that Maggie hadn't quite made up her mind yet to put away the pain and decided he would help if he could. He didn't know if it would make a difference, but he knew staying quiet wouldn't be of use really. He noticed that she was watching where Sasha lay pressed up against the wall and glanced at her out of the side of his eye.

"He was strong," he said softly. He knew the ache of losing a sibling all too well, especially an older one.

"Yeah. He was," Maggie agreed, not quite looking at him but nodding.

"She was too." It was the very first time he'd said anything directly about her since Atlanta. He didn't know if he would have been able to say it to anybody but Maggie, but it was a start.

Now Maggie looked over at him. She looked almost hungry, as if wanting to know all that had transpired between her sister and the man next to her. It was then that Daryl became aware he hadn't said anything to anybody but Rick, and even then it had only been in vague terms. It was so hard to talk about what had happened because it was all so misty and insubstantial in terms of something to describe. He couldn't put words to what had happened. All he could do was feel it, and feeling it all roil through him, seeing blue eyes instead of Maggie's green staring back at him, he swallowed back the fear.

"She didn't know it, but she was."

In truth, that was a partial lie. She had known it. She had yelled it at him at the still, proven it when she helped Noah escape, in all the little things she did. He didn't know how to verbally say it to Maggie though, not without wrecking his voice and shattering all the calm he'd fought so desperately to pull together after weeks of feeling like a ship that had run aground on jagged rocks. Maybe when it didn't hurt so much to talk about what they'd lost he'd be able to tell her exactly how strong Beth had been. How much of an impact she'd had. In the mean time, he had something else to hopefully pacify her with.

"Here," he said, passing her the music box. "Cleaned the grit out of it."

She looked down at the box and let her fingers caress it ever so softly. "Thank you, Daryl," she whispered, and when she looked back up at him, he could see she meant it for much more than just the physical object in her hands.

They had next to nothing left this morning. The pain was still there. He still desperately wished she was at his side. He still heard her voice inside his head, he still felt the ghost of her fingers entwined with his, the feel of her head on his shoulder. All of it was still there, but it hurt less today than yesterday, and if that was as good as it was going to get, it was enough. He'd lived to fight another day, and he'd keep doing it until something else got the best of him. He wasn't going to give up. She didn't.

So he wouldn't either.


End file.
