CHAPTER THIRTY,
fallen angels

WITH SAMANTHA'S WORDS still present in Rick Grimes head, he managed to gather everyone up for a group meeting. The sun was beginning to lower itself down, stretching from the horizons and creating fire hearths.

The young woman sensed hesitation in the air, some even against the idea (she's not going to name anyone) but she was just both relieved and happy that the leader had considered her.

"Hey," A voice pulled her from her thoughts and she lifted her head up, her lips out stretching at the sight of Nathan. It dropped when she looked down at his hands, crescent moons embedded deep into the paleness of his skin.

The action of her grabbing that hand made him go tense, his breath getting caught in his throat. "What happened there?" She asked, lifting it to her eyes and scanning it with a frown.

Something about his eyes concerned her - she was no longer looking at walls, but a bruised boy who looked unmistakably lost, as if he couldn't find his way out of the woods. Nathan pulled back his hand and forced a smile she can see right though. "Just an accident."

A soft sigh left her lips. "Nate, it's okay if you're not okay," She assured him gently. "This whole Randall thing-"

"It's already decided." He interrupted.

This saddened her because she knew what is already decided, and she hated how it has to be this way, hates how much he has changed. He was no longer the person she knew before, but that's okay because Nathan is still her best friend and no matter what - she'll always love him.

"Alright, let's gather up." Rick called out.

The two best friends took that as their cue to enter the farmhouse.

Upon walking in, Samantha noticed her brother near the fireplace, so she took her position as the younger Walsh sibling and stood next to him. She surveyed the survivors, noting that everyone was in here.

Her eyes found Daryl.

He was leaning up against a cabinet, farther way from everyone else. He felt her stare and caught it, watching as she ducked her head away out of instinct.

It was silent for a few moments, before someone decided to speak,

"So, how do we do this?" It was Glenn. "Just take a vote?"

"Does it have to be unanimous?" Andrea was the next to speak up.

The air was tense. They all had different opinions on what to do with the issue, but none would find the solution. "How about majority rules?" Lori offered.

"Well, let's just see where everybody stands," Rick moved forward to the center. "Then we can talk through our options." There wasn't many options though. It was either kill him, or don't.

"Well, the way I see it, there's only one way to move forward." Shane stated.

Dale no longer could keep his patience maintained. "Killing him?" He snapped, looking at Shane through narrowed eyes. "Right? I mean, why even bother taking a vote? It's clear which way the wind is blowing."

"Well, if people believe we should spare him, I wanna know." Rick spoke gruffly.

Samantha looked at her brother. He was staring dead at Rick. She already knew his opinion, and that saddened her too.

"Well, I can tell you it's a small group," Dale said. "Maybe just me, Sam, and Glenn..."

Dale hadn't spoken to her, but what had happened this morning he knew where she stood.

Glenn was completely silent, before his eyes slowly trailed up to meet the older man. There was clear guilt on his expression, and right then Samantha knew he had changed his mind. "Look, I think you're pretty much right about everything, all the time, but this-"

"They've got you scared!" Dale accused.

"He's not one of us," Glenn argued, gesturing towards the shed. "And - we've lost too many people already."

Dale looked at Maggie from across the room. "What's about you? Do you agree with this?"

Maggie didn't answer him. She looked at Rick instead. "Couldn't we continue keeping him a prisoner?"

"Just another mouth to feed."

Samantha glanced at Daryl with her eyebrows raised in surprise. He stared at her for a moment before shifting his gaze. She knew where he stood now.

"May be a lean winter." Hershel added in agreement.

"We could ration better." Lori suggested.

"Or he could be an asset," Dale tried. "Give him a chance to prove himself."

"Put him to work?" Nathan repeated dubiously, as if the idea was insane. "I don't feel comfortable with that."

"We won't let him walk around." Rick agreed, voice stern.

"Put an escort on him." Maggie suggested, wanting to delve deeper into the solution.

Shane scoffed. "Who wants to volunteer for that duty."

"I will!" Samantha snapped, her voice bringing all eyes on her, including the hard ones of her brother.

"Absolutely not."

"Jesus Christ, you act like I'm dependent!" She fumed, glaring at her brother with both outrage and stubbornness combined, to which he mirrored equally.

"We're handling it." His face was twitching, trying to set the leash on his baby sister but it kept slipping off.

"Handling it?" She repeated with sarcastic laughter, rubbing her head furiously. "If handing it is coming back looking all fucked up, then I would say it's quite the opposite-"

"Samantha, enough!" Rick's authoritative tone bounced off of the walls of the front room, shutting her up and causing her chest to rise up and down heavily with anger trying to escape from its cage. "No one should be walking with this guy."

His eyes were dead set on her when he said this.

"I wouldn't feel safe unless he was tied up." Lori muttered.

"We can't exactly put chains around his ankles and sentence him to hard labor."

"Look," Shane began. "Say we let him join us, right? Maybe he's helpful, maybe he's nice. We let our guard down and maybe he runs off. Brings back his thirty men."

Knowing what those men were capable of, knowing what they had done to people - to women. The thought of them attacking my group made dark thoughts form in in her head.

"So, the answer is to kill him to prevent a crime he may never even attempt?" Dale cried out, appalled. "If we do this, we're saying there's no hope. Rule of law is dead, there is no civilization!"

"Oh, my god." Shane muttered, turning away.

"We could drive him out further. Leave him like you planned?"

"You barely came back last time. There are walkers, you could break down, you could get lost." Lori listed off.

"Could get ambushed." Daryl inputted.

"They're right. We should not risk our own people."

"If you could go through with it," Samantha looked at Patricia. She seemed small compared to to them. reminding me that she wasn't a very talkative woman, especially after Shane and Nathan made her a widow. "How would you do it?"

Samantha remembered the rope that Rick had held and the uncertainty in his grip.

"We could hang him, right? Snap his neck." She turned to Shane with a look of annoyance and he responded with a shrug.

"He would probably struggle for hours." Samantha pointed out.

"She's right," Rick agreed, letting out an uncomfortable breath. "I've thought about it, and shooting is more humane."

T-Dog brought his arms to his chest. "What about the body? Do we bury-"

"Hold on, hold on!" Dale interrupted loudly. "You're talking about this like it's already decided!"

"You've been talkin' all day," Daryl stated, gesturing his finer in a circle. "Goin' around in circles. You wanna go around in circles again?"

"This is a young man's life!" Dale shouted. "And it's worth more than a five minute conversation!"

Nobody spoke.

"Is this what it's come to?" He spoke in disappointment. "You save him, and now look at us. He's been tortured, and he's gonna be executed."

Samantha bit her lip, frowning.

"How are we any better than those people we're so afraid of?"

"For one, we don't take advantage of women," Nathan drawled, craning his his neck to look up at Dale. "We all know what needs to be done."

"No, Dale is right," Rick said. "We can't leave any stones unturned. We have responsibility-"

"So, whats our solution?"

"Let him finish!" Lori snapped at Andrea.

The situation escalated as people begun to speak over each other, desperate to find the right solution that would make then sit right in their skin. Samantha couldn't find the words to speak to express how disappointed she was in her group.

"Stop it," Carol spoke for the first time. "I'm sick of everybody arguing and fighting. I didn't ask for this. You can ask us to decide something like this," Her eyes were a sea of exhaustion and grief. "Whatever you decided, leave me out of it."

"Not speaking out, or killing him yourself, there's no difference." Dale declared.

"Dale." Samantha groaned, knowing exactly what he was trying to do.

"That's enough," Rick ordered, trailing his eyes away away from the opposing elder before letting them fall on everyone else. "Anybody wants the floor before we make the final decision has the chance."

Nobody moved from their positions, nobody even spoke. Samantha watched everyone, hoping that someone would change their minds, hoping that someone would give Randall a singular chance, but none did.

"You once said," Dale directed his words at Rick, becoming more desperate. "We don't kill the living."

"Well, that was before the living tried to kill us." Rick retorted.

"But don't you see? If we do this, the people that we were - the world that we knew is dead," Dale looked close to a meltdown. "And this new world is - it's harsh! it's survival of the fittest. And that's a world I don't want to live in."

There was a laugh.

Such a reaction had been unexpected, nobody even thinking that someone would find a situation like this funny. The source continued and all the survivors turned, finding his face in his hands as his whole body shook with more continued laughter. It was as if he was hearing something unbelievable that he found the hilarity too hard to pass.

Nathan Barton did, and he thought it was completely bullshit.

"The world died a long time ago," Nate turned to Dale now, a large smile on his face. The smile wasn't genuine, but downright full of mock. "It's always been harsh, old man."

Nathan stood up, his eyes never leaving Dale. The smile no longer was on his face, instead he looked so, so angry.

"You weren't out there fighting and risking your life for your country," He hissed, his words like venom. "You didn't see people being slaughtered left to right. You didn't see brother going against brother. You didn't see children being killed right before their mother's eyes."

Now he looked at all of them. His eyes were dark and stormy, but he was no longer in the same room as them - not mentally. He was somewhere else, somewhere that caused his irises to be filled with so much pain and trauma.

"How fucking dare you guys think that our old world is better than this," He continued. "You weren't out there. You guys didn't see the constant bloodshed. You didn't see at all,"

He rubbed his face, releasing another bitter laugh.

"You think Randall is innocent?" Nathan demanded. "I've seen men like him laugh in the faces of victims as they bled out!" His voice rose into a shout. Samantha saw his hands curl into fists and a shaky breath left his body.

Nathan gazed around at the group, daring anyone to go against him. Nobody did, yet Dale didn't back down - he still had a fight burning inside of him.

"A young man once told me that this world didn't need a hero, but what it truly needed was a monster," Dale said softly, looking close to tears as he spoke to him. "It's never too late to change that."

For some reason this caused the soldier to pause, the look the two of them shared making Samantha come to the conclusion that they were speaking of something that they only knew, and that the other survivors could never understand.

For a split moment, that bruised little boy came back and Nathan appeared to be in those woods again as he glanced around, but unfortunately that moment only lasted a second before it was completely gone and replaced by contempt.

"You already know my vote. I'm done with this pathetic bullshit." He growled, turning on his heel and walked out, his footsteps loud but the the front door slamming shut behind him even louder.

Samantha wanted to go after him, but she knew that if she did, she would be caught in his crossfire too. She's learned that he needs to cool down first before being spoken to.

Nobody spoke for a few moments, all digesting Nathan's blow up and realizing his words to be true -But Samantha had always known that her old world was far from perfect, yet she still refused to play God.

Dale was distressed, and she finally found the motivation to move from her spot and went over to him, placing a hand on his shoulder. "You already know where I stand." Samantha whispered. Dale looked at her then, the thankfulness clear on his expression but it wasn't enough.

"I'm with them too." Andrea's voiced, astonishing rhee brunette. She would've been last person Samantha thought to be on their side.

"Anybody else?" Rick questioned. Silence was the response, and the leader shifted his weight to look at the elder.

"Y'all gonna watch, too?" Dale asked, looking around in despair. "No, you'll go hide your heads in your tents and try to forget we're slaughtering a human being," He shook his head in disgust. "I won't be a party to it."

He left his spot and begin making his exit. He stopped near Daryl and grabbed his by the shoulder, his next words being the words of a defeated man,

"This group is broken."

━━━━━

Twilight replaced the sunlight and stars soon scattered the sky. Samantha sat at the porch at the farmhouse, observing the constellations but ever so often her eyes would wander to the barn.

A bullet would be the thing that took away Randall's life - a boy who had no chance of survival once he ran into them. Her mind went back to Dale's final words, and she hugged herself closer to prevent the shiver that they brought.

"This group is broken."

Samantha fully believed they weren't broken, they just lost their way, but could she really blame them? This new world was a maze, each twist and turn filled with unpredictable things.

"Thank you."

Samantha jumped, her head snapping to look at the owner of the voice. Dale stood in front of her, calm but not accepting.

"What?" She retorted.

Dale sat next to her on the steps, adjusting the rifle in his hands. "I know you're the one that got Rick to set up that meeting," He explained, smiling at her softly. "I want you to thank you for that. You gave us a chance."

Samantha shrugged. "I had to do the right thing."

Dale glanced at the shed. The men were in the midst of taking Randall out. She saw a sigh rock the old man's shoulders. "Dale, did you ever want kids?" Samantha asked, trying to keep him distracted. The look on his face broke her heart and she didn't want to see it anymore.

Dale stared at her with old, wise, and gentle brown eyes.

"Of course I did," He answered, smiling. "Me and Irma tried for years. We eventually were able to conceive, but she miscarried."

Samantha frowned, familiarity and sadness sweeping through her. Miscarriages was a horrible thing that any woman can go through. It felt like a piece of your soul was ripped away from you. Hers was especially hard to think about, so she stored it as deep as she could. "I'm sorry."

"Sometimes I find myself thankful that we did," Dale admitted. "I would never want my child to go through this."

Her first thoughts went to Lori and the unborn child in her womb. Whoever that child was in relations to mcgee - either my niece or nephew or just Rick's child, She was going to protect them with whatever she had. She was going to give them happy memories and give them a chance.

"Samantha, I hope you know this, but you and Andrea - I love you girls like I would love my own. We're family." Dale spoke softly, holding her hand with his own.

Samantha couldn't find the words as she stared at him. The fact that Dale thought of her as a daughter made her feel warm inside. Samantha and Andrea had filled up those vacant spots in his life, and she never felt more honored. He didn't have any biological family left, but he had them.

"I think it's safe to say that I'm your favorite Walsh," Samantha quipped. Dale rolled his eyes playfully. "But thank you. You would make a great dad. Hell, you're already good at being the grandfather of the group."

Mock hurt was pinned on his face. "Are you calling me old?"

"No, I'm calling you family too." She corrected, grinning cheekily.

He glanced back at the barn before he could respond. The men were bringing Randall in there, and at the sight of this any hint of joy left Dale's face.

"I can't be here to hear it," Dale murmured, standing up and brushing himself off. "I finished the book. It's in the RV if you would like it back - "

She waved him off. "It's yours."

A smile was brought to his face again. "You really love spoiling people," He chuckled, shifting his gun to where it was hanging lazily over his shoulder. "I'm gonna go for a walk."

"Wait, Dale."

He turned back to her with a questioning eyebrow raised. "Yes?"

"You really are an angel, huh?" She said, her grin unfaltering. The nucleus of our group.

"I haven't fallen yet." Dale answered, a bright and loving smile plastered across his face even when he was walking away.

Samantha watched his figure for awhile, until she dragged her attention back to the barn. Maybe Dale had the right idea, and she should get away as far as possible. However, before she could even put the thoughts into action she saw something that caused her jaw drop in shock.

Daryl was bringing Randall back to the shed.

Samantha immediately jumped from her seat and followed, brows furrowing together and her heart hammering with hope. Had Rick changed his mind? Had they not lost their way after all?

By the time Samantha got there, Daryl had already tied Randall up and was heading towards the door. He paused once he noticed the twenty year old, looking at her in curiosity before quietly finishing up.

"You guys are keeping him alive?" She questioned with anticipation.

Daryl locked up the shed door. "Dude was lucky Carl was there," He stated, turning to look at look at her. "That basically saved his life.

The thought of Carl almost seeing something so brutal made her feel disgusted, but if he hadn't been there Randall would be six feet under. Samantha was relieved. Not just for the fact that they didn't go through with the plan, but for Dale too. They had won. He had won.

"You know," Samantha started, suppressing a giggle. "maybe one of these days, I'll be the one saving you instead of the other way around."

Daryl peered at her with a thoughtful expression, then his eyes darted to his feet and he chuckled.

"Unless you want to save me," She teased, grinning like a sinner at his silence. "I think that Daryl Lone Wolf Dixon is starting to like me."

"Don't push it." He muttered, the humor as clear as day in his voice as he looked upward at the sky, and she caught a glimpse of a smirk on him. It seemed that was the closest thing to a smile Samantha was going to get.

She looked closely at his features, wondering what a genuine smile would look like on his face. Perhaps he would look less brooding and angsty, maybe even a little more handsome. But the fact that Samantha made him almost smile was enough of an accomplishment to her. He deserved that almost smile.

Daryl slowly looked back up, their eyes meeting. Blue clashed with green, colors swirling and creating many things, but she was too busy looking at his details.

His eyes were the deep bluest of blues and I was drowning within all the too many details of them. However, his waters weren't unwelcoming and cold like they usually were. They were calm, full of life and uncertainty and...

Soft.

Softness was something that wasn't a Daryl Dixon. He was a serious man, a man with bruised knuckles and words full of fire - yet here he stood, looking at her differently than he looked at anyone else, and he didn't even know.

A blood curling screams ripped through the air and frightened Samantha to her core.

Quickly pulling the dagger out of her combat boots, they both raced in the direction of the scream. Another scream roared into the night and anxiety went up. Samantha was beside Daryl when we found a walker hovering over something.

Daryl went quickly into action and shoved the walker off, his buck knife going into the skull. Blood marked the grass and surrounded her feet, her eyes trailing to what the walker had been ripping at.

Her blood ran completely cold.

"Dale!" She shrieked, her heart breaking slowly and painfully as she dropped to her knees beside him. "No - no! Dale, not you!"

His eyes were wild, choking up on his own blood. Tears were streaming down Samantha's face as her soul was being torn apart. She examined the life threatening wound, and she almost puked her guts out. His stomach was open, his insides on the outside.

Dale's pain filled eyes were pinned on her, his shaky hand finding her own and squeezing tightly.

"Hershel! WE NEED HERSHEL!" Rick screamed.

The group had arrived, each and every one of them were filled with panic and anguish.

"Dale, Dale, Dale!" Samantha had become hysterical, her sobs violent and uncontrollable, watching the man who she thought of as flesh and blood suffer in the most gruesome way possible. Andrea was next to her, grasping Dale's other hand as she cried out in despair.

"We've got to get him to the house!"

"Rick, he won't make the trip." Hershel stated

"We have to do the operation here. Glenn, get Hershel's bag from the house!" Rick ordered frantically.

"Rick, he won't make it!" Nathan repeated. "He's done, man!"

"No, HE'S NOT!" Rick spat. The look on his face was heart wrenching, because he knew Nathan was right. They all knew that there was only one way to end this.

Dale was spluttering, his hands gripping Samantha and Andrea so tightly, as if he was afraid to let them go. He was trying to tell them something, but Samantha couldn't decipher what it was until she looked in his eyes. I love you they said. I love you both.

"Oh, god!" Samantha cried even harder, her chest feeling as if it's been caved in. She haven't been this frenzied since Jean died. She haven't felt this much grief in so long, and it was too much to bear. "I love you! We all love you!"

"Do something!" Andrea was screaming. "He's suffering!"

Filled with regret, Samantha watched Rick pull out his pistol and point it at Dale, who looked back at the barrel with fear.

Strong arms pulled Samantha up and away from Dale's grip. Shane brought his baby sister into his chest and embraced her tightly. She cried out into his shirt, waiting for the fatal gunshot.

But none came.

Samantha looked back and saw Rick was hesitant, the pistol shaking in his hands. He couldn't do it. "I can't..." He whispered.

Then Daryl stepped forward. Not only did he take the gun from Rick, but had had taken the duty of putting Dale out of his misery. Ever so slightly, the elder lifted his head against the gun, accepting his fate and ready for death.

Dale was ready. He didn't want to live in this new world, he wasn't built for it. He would rather die with his humanity then let this world strip it away. It was his armor, and like a knight he would die with it on.

"Sorry, brother."

And then he squeezed the trigger.

The shot rang out through the night, and Dale Horvath was no more.

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟnote

#daledeservedbetter

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