━━━━━━ CHAPTER TWO ━━━━━━
Lessons of Trust
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          THE SCENT OF ALCOHOL INTOXICATED the very air between them. Humidity made it ever the more fragrant in the aftermath of a busy day that had left the bar feeling desolated right in the first minutes of the closing hours. It was the early summer of 2006 and the radio played the classic rock on a much more diffused tone than mere moments ago — the sound seemed to have distanced itself from the scene like a storm passing over a town, leaving room for the sound of waves to wash through the open windows in the back and the brush of the broom across the floors to become ever the more soundly. Thus was created the illusion that one could hear the pin drop there during the cleaning late hours of the night, when the clock pointed a lot past midnight.

Though he personally would grow to remember only fragments of what had happened there and then between them, Daryl had been staring at his empty glass since Mallory started cleaning the floors. He's been a quiet company the whole night and imagining there must have been something troubling him, she wasn't planning on poking a possibly ticking bomb, not until her hands were free of duties to carry out and she could wrap her arms around him.

"Don't go," Daryl mumbled, barely intelligible.

Mallory's broom came to a stop and she looked up from the floor only for a sneeze to interrupt her immediate confusion. After promptly brushing her nose, leaving it behind flushed in red, she furrowed down her eyebrows, taking only but a quick note of his empty glass, not long before having been filled with beer. She gulped dryly, then tilted her head, "What's that, honey?"

He hesitated to look away from the bottom of the glass, "Just don't go." After a deep sigh, Daryl finally squinted up to find her eyes, "Please."

Though she opened her mouth at first to inquire about what he meant by his plea, Mallory instantly realized she knew exactly what all of this was about, so she closed her mouth and sighed, going back to sweeping the floor even if just to quickly even the pile before she set the broom aside and wiped her hands on her apron. Daryl watched on rather impatiently and perhaps neither of them knew the delay had stirred his stillness into anger's brew.

"We talked about this," Mallory noted, walking over to his table. After leaving a pat on his bare forearm sticking out from pulled sleeves of a plaid shirt, she started cleaning his table, thus counting more bottles of beer than she recalled being brought to him during her shift. "I'll be back, you know. Before you even get the chance to properly miss me, I'll be back."

"You don't even know how long you'll be gone, Mals," he shook his head ever so slowly, bowing his gaze back to the now empty table. "Could be months and it could as well be years."

"We've got phones, don't we?" Mallory shrugged it off. During their first discussion on the matter, she's been far more compassionate and even touched by Daryl's concern to missing her too dearly, but given that conversation had been weeks ago and it ended with his acceptance of her decision, everything that followed disturbed her; it started smelling fishy, like someone was countouring his concerns in his mind when she wasn't looking. It wasn't particularly difficult to pinpoint the culprit that was making her boyfriend restless, for he had started getting agitated on the matter only after a night out with his brother after all.

"It ain't the same thing," Daryl turned around in his seat to watch Mallory drop the empty bottles on the bar's surface. He was expecting her to turn around, but the lack of patience made his right knee bounce. "I just don't get it. Why? Why do you want to go?"

"We need the money, Daryl," Mallory reminded him ever so softly before looking over her shoulder. "Unless, we don't share the same dream no more?"

He was taken off guard by her insinuation, so quickly dazzling him into rapidly shaking his head, "Of course we share it. But you got this job and..." After gesturing around them, he found boldness in himself sufficient to stand up.

"Tsk," she disagreed. "You know it's barely enough. The voyages are better paid-"

"And you got me, Mals," Daryl continued the thought she had interrupted, making her turn around at long last. "I am working too," there was half a whine trapped in his voice. The other half dwelled in the shadow of insecurity. "Why won't you trust me to provide for us?"

"This has nothing to do with trust," Mallory's eyebrows followed downwards with her frown and she abandoned her work to approach Daryl instead. "I trust you," she gently picked up his hands, but as soon as he riddled into her intonation, Daryl took a step back, shaking her hands off of him.

"With a 'but' after it, those words mean nothing."

"What do you want me to say?" Mallory argued, crossing her arms over her chest with a sigh. "That I hate to know exactly the sort of business your brother got you wrapped up into cause you've got too good of a heart to ever say 'no'? I get it, honey, he's your brother... but I can't help how I feel, I trust you, not him, and I would much rather lawful money pay for our wedding when the day comes, than stuff that could take you away from me and put you in a jail."

Though she had thought she's handled it well, everything about their conversation had only escalated from there. Words they didn't mean. Broken glasses. Shards cracking underneath their steps. An argument broken by her brother and poked into extreme by Merle. A scandal that the town was going to whisper about for long enough that Mallory and Daryl's stubborness alike had been irked into action. It was a bitter tone to separate on, but the more bitter tone was yet to come from the radio silence that followed once she left at sea waiting his call, and Daryl stayed at home by the phone, waiting for a sign as well.

Waiting games without end seemed to have been their destiny, but that comforting state of having given up sufficiently to perhaps move on, proved to be false — Daryl had no other way to explain what had happened but fate.

Well, he could always say God had heard his prayers from years ago and He worked slowly towards giving him that second chance he begged for. But then again, he was not a man of faith, not really, at the very least not sufficiently to believe that in this Godless world, there is someone up there looking down on what has come of humanity and still thinking they are not yet completely lost. After all the gore and suffering he had witnessed, Daryl was firmly convinced God would not have allowed this hell to reign any longer. Because they endured on, he knew it had to be fate that brough Mallory back in his life.

"You got to her just in the nick of time," Carol noted, a little half-hearted. "Had you delayed any longer, she would have gotten a really bad infection from the wound on her thigh."

"What kind of sicko cuts up women like that?" Maggie mumbled along, disgust flashing across her features.

"What about her?" Rick insisted with a different accent which finally got Carol to sigh and nod.

"She's jumpy. Hungry. Dehydrated. Can't really blame her for being picky about who touches her where. Who knows what else that bastard she mentioned did to her." After a short pause, she stole a glance at Daryl, hoping in vain that he will come up with an explanation, but instead managing to bring that unwanted attention from Rick back on him.

The sensation of eyes burning holes into him put a pause to the restless pacing Daryl had going on. He lifted up his gaze to the rest of the team, but said nothing, forcing Rick to repeat the question he had dropped when prompted out there.

"So," he started, "who is she to you?"

"That's none of your concern," Daryl retaliated. "And even if it was, I don't see what difference it would make. I told you know I know her well and that I am vouching for her to stay. Shouldn't that be enough?"

"You know her, man," T-Dog accentuated. "But she's a stranger to us."

"An odd one for that matter too," Lori sighed. "I mean, why was that man keeping her in chains in such horrid conditions?"

"Because the world is full of assholes," Daryl retorted, "and no way the apocalypse got rid of all them cruel bastards because they got the knick of survival like cockroaches do. How about y'all cut Mals some slack instead, ay? I'm sure once she catches her damn breath she'll be more than happy to plea her case to y'all..."

Part of him knew that he could have easily been truthful and direct, earning himself the pass of emotional connection, perhaps even some sort of sentimental bribery — think you would have found Lori out there like that, Rick, and the group questioned your sanity for wanting to have her welcomed into it.

But sanity demanded of him to be reasonable: him and Mallory did not part on good terms all those years ago. To claim they still had that relationship status simply to get her into the group, even if for her own safety, might prove to be troublesome in the long run, should she choose to be upset with him like back on that warm and humid early summer night. But she seemed happy to see you, the foolish side of him whispered only to be quickly dismissed with a shake of his head by a more prominent thought. She was happy to get out of that basement, not necessarily to see me.

With his voice faded away, Daryl moved forward, towards the connecting room between the two prison wings, place where they have left Mallory, along with the two convicts still alive from those they have discovered not that long ago. His path was abruptly blocked by Rick.

"Move," Daryl demanded bluntly, albeit mostly due to tiredness, a state clinging to him harder than a drowning man to their saviour.

"She's not staying in our wing, man," the heavy heart with which he said it carried very little compassion onto Rick's tone. "We can't be sure who to trust. You know how it goes."

"I trust her."

"That won't be enough."

Satisfying his anger's spark with merely looking away and pushing past Rick, Daryl strpped into the connecting common room only to turn around and close the barred gate behind himself too. "Then I am staying with her." It ain't no way I am letting Mallory sleep alone, in the same room with convicts that haven't seen the opposite sex in God knows how long, he told himself, a reason which otherwise needn't be spoken for it to be understood by pretty much everyone staring him back from across the bars.

One such unspoken thing that could be read with a good look in Daryl's eyes was also the nature of his history with Mallory, or so Carol believed, that she had figured them all out.

Daryl approached with a practiced line and a goal in mind to sit next to Mallory on the ground, but before he could go through with his fast-made plan, he found himself coming to a stop and hesitating awkwardly whilst looking down at her. Is that seat taken? was all he had to say, but the words knotted in his throat and his mouth gaped ever so slightly like that of a fish out of water.

Mallory, sitting with her knees pulled up to her chest and her hands pressed close to her heart, wouldn't have minded patiently looking at him for a while, given as she wished to be able to tell how much had changed about him since last they saw each other. Finding mercy in herself first before curiosity instead, she moved one hand away and patted the seat besides her, to save him the need for words. Indeed, in complete silence, save for his puffs and faint groans, Daryl sat down beside her.

"Thank you," she muttered not long after.

"Don't mention it," Daryl shook his head. "Anyone decent would have gotten you out of that place, you know." He watched disheartened how the only answer she could muster for him was a faint hum and a short nod. On their better days, she used to talk without end, she used to sing to every tune and not go a single day by without music surrounding her. In a flash he recalled having been webbed into her schemes during winter, with Christmas around the corner; she made him smell of cinnamon and gingerbread while toying with her old man's even older guitar around the small town. Even though Merle had his fill of laughter at the silly hat he wore and that invisible leash he claimed to see around his throat every time Mals was around, Daryl had to be honest with himself: those were the good times.

"How did you get there, Mals?" He sighed. The longer he stared at her, the smaller his heart got, cowering away in terror to imagine what she's been through. Having looked Hell in the eyes himself didn't help him in any way whatsoever to diminish the effects of worry, because while he knew she's had men in her life to teach her to use guns — like her old man and harpoons, her brother and the family shotgun, and even himself and that very crossbow he now had —, she didn't carry any and of she had before, her skills didn't belp protect her from that man who chained her up in his basement.

"Bad luck," she shrugged. "It's all I've been having this past year," she continued after a deep breath. "In fact, I believe you are the first good thing that's happened to me in a while."

"Now you're just flattering..."

"You were right," Mallory interrupted. "I should have never left. By the time I realized that, we were stranded on foreign land. So much time wasted. And when I came back, you weren't home."

"You were at the house?" He inquired in pure disbelief.

"Talked to Merle," she nodded along.

"He never told me."

"I guess it was for the best."

"No," he firmly disagreed, turning ever so slightly around towards her.

"Yes," Mallory didn't hesitate to correct him, an apologetic smile on her cracked lips. "I got into an accident. When this whole thing started, with the dead and all, I was in the hospital. Something tells me if you were home that night, you would have been in the hospital too, one way or another. I wouldn't wish on anyone to have been there when it all went to shit. It was a massacre..." With a quick sniff, she looked away, "Sorry. I don't really like remembering that day."

Daryl's warm hand dropped on top of her own, rested in the space between them. "I'm...," he hesitated, tampering a tightening of his hold on her. "I'm glad you're alive," finally, the admission left his lips with a sigh.

Mallory moved her hand underneath his touch until her knuckles grazed the ground and she could probably interlace her fingers with his. It felt so odd to be missing a finger, but so right to hold his hand. "I'm glad you're alive too," a smile, be it weak and as faint as sunlight behind thick fog, appeared on her lips. It was their riddled I missed you, that spoken relief of seeing each other breathing and sane, not some ripped apart carcass of what was once a human.

"You're friends seem like good people too," Mallory noted, keeping a relative quietness to their conversation.

In response, Daryl initially only nodded; he'd be a flaming liar not to admit holding her hand again was not on his doable bucket list for the end of times, however it was a pleasant surprise. The first good thing to happen in a long time. "They can't wait to get to know you too," he eventually said, albeit sarcasm impedimenting his attempt at ironic excitement. Shifting his posture a little to get more comfortable, Daryl continued, "They'll be prying a lot, but I am sure they'll be quick to let you stay."

"I can stay?" Mallory on the other hand had been jolted fully awake by that prospect, turning bewildered towards Daryl. Thinking back at the years spent surrounded by either the dead or people wishing to cut her open in the name of science and entertainment alike, the prospect of being somewhere safe, with a familiar face that she could trust, seemed too good to be true.

"If you want to," Daryl narrowed his eyes trying to make out exactly what Mallory's wide eyes tried to tell him. The more he stared, the smaller his heart got, knotting itself into a bitter dot of realization that she wasn't joking about that bad luck she's had.

Unable to stop herself from showing a strain of desperation, Mallory nodded. Perhaps in another time she would have felt pathetic to be this needy for a shred of kindness, of safety, but in the world they lived in, such things were indeed as rare as precious metals once upon a time.

"Good," he too couldn't help himself a sigh of relief. "You were right too, you know?" He met Mallory's gaze as it raised, "I wouldn't have wanted to build our family on money earned from drugs and parking lot beatings. So perhaps you could say we were both wrong."

AUTHOR'S NOTE :   
         The absolute hold these two have on me gosh... 😭 Just finished watching Season 3 but ya bet imma rewatch it selectively so I can properly write out this act.