━━━━━━ CHAPTER ONE ━━━━━━
They Always Punish Their Saviors
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          WHEN YOU'RE FAMISHED, nothing should look unappealing to eat and quench that constant pain that had replaced your stomach, but when the plate hit the ground and Mallory saw the raw piece of meat drowning in a bath of blood, though there was nothing for her to regurgitate, acid climbed up her throat, forcing her to swallow it back down. Her only solution was to close her eyes and look away from the same "meal" that she had been given every day for a week now — eventually, Holroyd believed, she would be too hungry to refuse what he was giving her.

"I'm not one of them." Mallory disliked the sound of her own hoarse voice so she talked as little as she could spare the silence. Despite knowing what sight awaited her once she opened her eyes, her heart clenched all the same to see her wrists in chains, the ring finger from her right hand missing over the spot of blood dried on the floor. "You know I am not," she added with a sigh of exhaustion, but as soon as that sigh had her sight climb up to Holroyd's face, she caught glimpse of his knife's shine in the light of a candle flickering on his work desk besides her prison wall.

She flinched but there was truly no where to escape and both of them knew it.

Mallory's back pressed against the wall behind her, the chains holding her wrists and ankles rattled much louder than the shadow of her whimper. Her eyes close again, if only out of instinct. The ghost of her finger needed no sight of that trophy hanging around his neck for her to know from experience exactly what that man could do with his knife. However, once the tip of his blade grazed superficially over her cleavage, it was obvious he wasn't looking to cut anything more from her just yet.

Holroyd dragged the blade over her rapid heartbeat and moved her unbutted shirt aside, uncovering thick scars that marked her body. "These," he looked at those scars in disgust because should the world not have gone to madness, those scars should stay hidden save for the eyes of a mortician, "say otherwise. How many times did you die, woman?"

It was the same question, time and time again thrown in her face. "I told you—"

The knife quickly climbed to her throat, making Mallory hitch her breath and hit her head back on the wall. "One of us would never have to be asked a question like that. Death's the end. You cross past that line and keep on walking, you become one of them." With a puff, Holroyd straightened up, sheathing his blade on the side of his belt.

"Yet they don't talk like you and I, do they now?"

He hit the plate closer to her, careless as to the blood he spilled on the groud besides her, "Eat." With two fingers, he plucked out the flame from the candle, plunging the basement of his home into complete darkness. Mallory had long since given up on screaming, on begging for her freedom, so she pulled on her chains as he left not to cause a scene, but to make room for her to lay down. Once the door to the basement closed and she heart the lock click into place, she kicked the plate and the raw meat away from her, enjoying the shatter far more than the damp sound of flesh splattering on the ground.

How did she get there?

That question was a plague to her mind but nonetheless it haunted her, because memory was a shackle as much as it was relief. Her life used to be so good a couple of years ago. She had it all, so to say. As much as someone coming from a barely middle class family could have.

In these moments of darkness and silence, Mallory liked to picture her old town, the harbor. Time had diluted the humane details about it from her mind, but the essence of life was there, in the sound of waves hitting the old pillars, washing foam on the shore filled with thousands of shattered shells cracking beneath her sandals. She remembered laughter. Her cousins were still young and laughing on that beach where the winds howled yet their song was soothing. The far ocean called to her, but it was there, on that beach, with the scent of seaweed in her nostrils and the salty taste on her tongue that she found peace.

It was not a matter of how, but rather a question of why she got there, wrists sore and heavy, body scarred beneath clothes with a stench of their own.

That was a question that in theory Mallory knew how to answer. She's been blaming years worth of bad luck, before this whole nightmare even started, on that one day when she kicked everything good in her life in search for more. Everything went wrong since she left on that second voyage.

First her father, then her uncle, then the whole world went to shit—

Steps in the house above creaking the wooden floors snapped Mallory out of her usual delirium of thoughts blurring her hours of quiet torment together. There was nothing she could do but listen and what her ears told her was something anyone could really tell with just a bit of attention to detail: there was more than one person walking above. Had it been Walkers, she would have heard much more than just steps, so she had to recall that Holroyd did promise at some point that he'd get a real doctor to look at her and all the samples he's been collecting from her. At least through that, he had once admitted he was no real doctor; when the whole thing started and the first cases popped up in the states, he was considering dropping out of med-school.

With that thought in mind, Mallory couldn't help but clench her right hand into a fist. The ghost of her missing finger ached out one more thin line of blood.

Believing the scenario she conjured for herself to explain the noises, she sat up, slowly, but nonetheless careless of the noise her chains made.

The footsteps stopped.

What? Mallory couldn't help but think, looking up at the ceiling of her prison where the reek was interrupted faintly by the scent of candle smoke, a perfume that no matter how old and tortured, she still shamelessly associated with birthday cakes and wishes. Does he think I'm trying to escape now all of a sudden? As if I'd have better odds against chains than I had against rope and wire before. Though revolted, she resisted the urge to shout anything at all back at Holroyd, perhaps because that little and faint part of herself who thought back at birthday cakes wanted to believe there was someone else alive in that home, someone more reasonable than that psychopath, with whom she could bargain for her life and actually have a chance to make it to daylight again.

Oh, how she missed the sun.

Without windows, days blended into eternal nights. Had it not been for her thoughtful prison guard and his taunting reminders of days, she would have lost track completely of the time she'd spent locked down there.

After what felt like a century of waiting, the footsteps resumed, in two different directions. There were definitely at least two people up there and one was clearly heading for the entrance to the basement.

Inexplicably, Mallory felt her heartbeat climb to her throat. That hopeful part of her mind spread its disease and pointed out to her the strange feeling that those steps were not really the same steps she'd been hearing each time Holroyd got down to pay her, his secret pet project, another excruciating visit.

Yet despite hope knotting in her chest, it couldn't climb up her throat, for she had no bravery to speak; she hasn't lived this long into this nightmare of a world without the obvious repercussion of learning the hard way to know better than to hope for saviors. At best, she was going to meet a more docile psychopath who will make the mistake of breaking her free of her chains before threatening her in some way. But given her luck, it was far more likely that she was going to provoke a colder person, in which case, perhaps she will be given the mercy of a final death: a bullet to the head would do.

Though she thought herself petrified in the face of darkness tampered by the sound of unsure and approaching steps, Mallory heard the rattle of her chains, sign that she started shaking.

Whoever the intruder in the basment was heard the chains too, because before she could stop herself, a blinding white light shone right in her eyes.

Instinct got the best of her and she lifted her hands up long before she even mustered the concentration she needed to know what to say. Between wanting the torment to end and wanting to live was only a thin line.

"Mallory?"

The inquiry intoned by a masculine voice towards her caught her completely off guard. She squinted up into the flashlight, unable to even distinguish the silhouette holding it while she mumbled, "How do you know my name?"

Her voice seemed to have clarified the confusion behind that initial question from the stranger. Either that or seeing her face clearly had told him enough to lower the flashlight and rush to her side in boot-heavy steps. "Are you bit?"

There was something painfully familiar about the voice coming from a silhouette she started to distinguish. The flashlight dropped to the ground besides her along with a crossbow and about then, Mallory decided to answer by shaking her head. Taking note of her answer, but not quite trusting it, the man dropped to his knees in front of her and lifted her chains, trailed his hands up to her wrists, then stopped. "What happened to your finger?"

So focused on trying to make out the man's features, Mallory had a hard time remembering to answer. It was not until he called her name again that she blurted out, "He cut it off."

"He? Who?"

It clicked. Instantly, her heart dropped. Her eyes got wider.

His voice was like the vivid memory of the beach, with all its palpable sensations. His voice was the equivalent of candle smoke, whose gravitational pull into memory she couldn't escape.

"Daryl?" Quite beyond her control was the shiver in her cracked voice. It can't be you and all that disbelief blended in with an ovation of joy that he was alive and well.

"It's me, alright," he nodded, far busier in trying to brute force the chains off the wall. "How the hell did you get here? Shouldn't you be like miles away? I quite liked knowing you're on your boat, away from this mess."

"I came back." There was so much more Mallory wanted to say, but the soreness of her throat made it hard to even utter those few words she mustered out. "I looked for you-," a violent cough interrupted her.

Daryl rested a quick pat on her back, albeit unaware such a gentle touch would awaken her flinch. Electrified by it as one would be after receiving a whip's lash on their bare skin, Mallory shot back her gaze upon him, eyes filled with tears. "You can't be here," she decided, her voice faded into intelligible blabbering that Daryl could only really blame on the same thing as her cracked lips.

Though disbelief ran both ways, after a moment's hesitation, Daryl sighed, shaking his head, "Yes, I am, Mallory." And you're lucky I am here, he wanted to add but stopped himself before the words slipped through. "I'm gonna have a look upstairs for the keys to—"

"The key's with him," Mallory interrupted with a momentary lucidity whose real reason of existence was visible in the sudden clasp of her hand over his: she didn't want to be alone. Daryl simply placed his hand over her own, in an attempt to reassure her, but Mallory held tighter. "If he's not upstairs, it means he's out for supplies. And he'll be back soon."

Hearing her growing aggravation and panic, Daryl hushed her, "We'll get you out of here before he's back, alright?" Though much more flared in his mind begging to be voices, all he found it proper to do was pat her hand and slip away from her, leaving both the crossbow and the flashlight there with her. "I'll get the others to come help me with the chains," he explained before she could protest, as he had already seen enough of her clinging to air. "We're getting you out," he too was as decisive as her on scenarios he needed to play out.

It was only once he turned on the way out of the basement that the reality came crashing down weight on Daryl's shoulders and he almost lost his footing. Mallory Cohen. Oh, she was a ghost at the back of his mind, one he hasn't visited in years, not properly at the very least since the world had gone mad.

On his better lonesome nights he told himself he was safe on her ship, with her people, away from the dangerous shores. When those nights turned bitter, so did his thoughts, leaving room for scorn, for anger, everything but a twisted image of the guilt and regret he had stored in his heart when it came to her. If there was one thing he wished he hadn't listened to his brother about, it was the way he had dealt with Mallory's second voyage.

"Rick," Daryl called out eventually.

"All clear in the basement?" Rick asked whilst turning around, because once he had, he was startled to see his friend a little paler than usual.

"Yeah, not really," Daryl's gaze dropped to the ground. "There's a woman chained down there."

"Is she bit?"

"Nah," he shook his head quickly. "But she's bleeding. The house's got an owner and he kept her there, we need to get her out."

"Daryl...," condescending to say the least, Rick sighed unsure on how to handle the hard answer.

"I know her, okay?" Daryl hurried to say, lifting his gaze with a sort of beseeching in it that he was questioned on that matter no more. At least not then, not when his mind was scattered and he barely understood the how's of it himself.

"What do you mean you know her?"

Of course, he'd have no such luck.

Where would he begin explaining what he means? Should he admit he had one day held her hand in blissful dreaming of a future in which he married her? In which they had a family of their own and he could be a better father than the one he had? Perhaps he should explain the smaller moments he recalled with fear of the happy days, and how fast they had passed him. Or should he admit to Rick that this was a woman he had failed to keep close? One he ultimately thought himself unworthy of and years of silence have convinced him of it too? It was for that last reason that he now felt cold sweat on his palms and down his back, some sort of excitement mixing with fear, despearation and strange relief behind his eyes.

There was no easy answer. None that he could give without feeling like cutting off his own tongue first.

"I just do, alright?" Daryl clenched his jaw. "We need to get her out of here, man. We ain't got time to share stories of the past. Trust me, she's as harmless to the group as they come. Her old man used to be a sailor." Truth was, regardless of what answer he would find most suitable to describe how he knew her, in the end Daryl knew better: he could never have left her like that. Never.

AUTHOR'S NOTE :
          Here we go! I believe a creepy and strong first chapter is what we got here. I wasn't so sure about the idea of Mallory and Daryl already having history from before the apocalypse, but now it's like my favorite thing ever. Unfinished love stories are the best okayyy.

"Right person, wrong time" getting a second chance >>>>>>>>>

And yes, Mallory 100% believes all the bad things that have happened to her are because she left Daryl when she did, in anger and out of spite. 😭😭 My baby's been through too much. They all have tbh oof