━━━━━━ CHAPTER EIGHT ━━━━━━
Who The World Was Made For
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          "NO," DARYL REFUSED FOR THE SECOND TIME already to let Mallory get past him with this. The narrow corridor of the prison was making it easy for him, a man of a considerable build, especially when compared to hers, to block her way; all it took for him to morph into a human barricade in front of Mallory was from his broad shoulders his arms to spread to the side, each palm planting itself on the surface of the wall there. But he needn't even do that much to be an obstacle in her path. Just standing there, arms crossed at his chest was sufficient; she wasn't getting through.

"We were supposed to stick together," Mallory argued, keeping the quiet tone demanded by their conversation being done in secret, on stolen time, even if doing so required her to step close and inch her chin upward. "Remember that?"

Daryl's never had someone look at him with as much worry as Mallory had in her eyes just then. All his life, he's always been tough enough to become a human repellent towards the pity and concern of others; he didn't look like the kind of guy who'd need anyone's help, so he got by without any to prove them all right. Waiting on the mercy of others was all about making guys like him starve. Not even Mallory had ever looked at him with such intense concern before and not because she didn't care enough in the past not to worry about him each time he was late in returning at night from "work", each time he came back bruised or bleeding and refused to go to the hospital, but simply because he demanded of her not to pity him, nor ask more than she was ready to accept. What they had was too precious to put in the same bowl with his brother's business.

But times have obviously changed.

Mallory had in her eyes the same look he thought himself capable of sporting too in the height of his despearation. If anything, the end of the world had changed one thing about everyone, making people realize how precious it is to have a connection with someone else. While he found himself caring about the people he survived with, he never thought he'd witness himself become that someone who is cared for.

There was simply something completely and utterly strange about having her, or anyone for that matter, this worried about him. In the face of such uncharted grounds, Daryl had no instinct to help him out, so his perplexed defenses were starting to come through in the shape of abrasive, borderline rough speech.

"We didn't know back then that Glenn and Maggie were taken," he reminded her in return.

Though the acid of the comment Your promises mean nothing awaited on her tongue, Mallory swallowed it down and buried it within a silent pout to think of a better answer. It let itself be waited.

"I won't be gone long," he attempted to pacify her calmly one last time.

"You don't know that," she almost cut him off, furious at the mere idea, but unable to hold back the little fragility it lit within her to say such things. "Just let me go with you, please."

"No." And that marked the third time he had to refuse her. Something in his patience was starting to snap. "The deal was that you have my back against Walkers. We'll be dealing with humans here and last I checked you ain't got no immunity to them. It's us men going—"

"Michonne is going too," Mallory interrupted.

"'Cause she knows the damn way, woman," Daryl sighed exasperated. "I thought we've decided not to tell anyone about your...," he trailed off, gesturing briefly at her. "Don't ya think it will look hella strange for me to just drag you, a wounded woman," his words drew Mallory's hand up at the side of her neck, where a clean bandage met her, "around with me when you're clearly not built for the in's and out's of a rescue mission?" Seeing as he's turned only slightly more rough around the edges of his speech, he sighed a second time in an attempt to soften up those ridges and not leave with any bitter remarks weighing him down. "Look, I know what I'm doing."

Three refusals and his fresh contouring of why exactly she shouldn't be wanting to follow him out to this town, finally dawned on Mallory a small defeat. She looked away. With a stark seriousness to her features, she dug her right hand into the pocket of her jeans and she brought out something held in her fist. "Give me your hand," she demanded bluntly.

Though a little reluctant to linger any longer on that hallway — the longer they were both there, the more likely it was for the rest of the group to notice; though fairly enough, a part of Daryl wished they had noticed, because any normal mind's thought wouldn't be that they are hiding something of a secret, but that they are hiding a relationship, which was a rumor with a benefit in keeping that blonde convict well away from Mals while Daryl was out, one less worry off his plate because oh, he did worry — he complied, extending his hand and turning his palm upward, awaiting the mysterious gift.

The second he felt something cold on his skin, he should have known this was about to be no good.

"I picked it up from his corpse before we left," she explained herself, holding Daryl's hand now still so he didn't drop on the ground her finger.

"Jesus, Mals," Daryl looked away. "I ain't wearing your fucking finger!"

"That asshole cut it off me and wore it around not for fashion," she raised her voice only to match his, "but because apparently it confused Walkers. It let him sneak around more often than not." Mallory closed his hand on it. "Just put it in your pocket, alright? If it really does work, even if just a little, to tell the difference between life and death out there, I'd rather you have it than throw it in some trashcan or burning it away."

"What part of going against humans ain't you getting?" He mumbled with annoyance, pocketing her finger, trying to act as if he hasn't carried stranger things before. It was the principle that bothered him: how could he carry something that used to be part of her? Something that otherwise, had been stripped brutally from her body.

"Walkers outnumber us on this earth," she responded. "This ain't our world no more, so how about we play it safe and stop pretending like they ain't everywhere we go already?"

After a short, unintelligible agreement with her, Daryl sighed, straightened up his posture by fixing the strap of his crossbow on his shoulder, and then finally turning around to leave. He didn't bother thinking of saying goodbye, because he did not believe this was something from which he had chances of not returning.

"Daryl?" Mallory called after him. Her heart clenched at the sight of him leaving. She couldn't explain it, past acknowledging that things were different since they came back to the prison, in terms of how she felt about him. Now, he wasn't just someone she cared about and owed to more than she could ever give, but also someone unique — no one she had met had been so understanding, so caring around her. Though she never stopped loving him to begin with, not even she would have expected to fall in love a little deeper so fast.

Then again, her last year has rendered her aching for even the bare minimum.

"What?" He stopped, only casting half a glance over his shoulder.

The very last thing he could have expected then was to feel Mallory's arms wrapped around him from behind, her warmth pressed against his back and her palms spread onto his abdomen. Her inhales, her very heartbeat, Daryl could feel them all, filling in the gaps of a picture that spoke much better than words ever could on the behalf of every single emotion that had driven Mallory mere moments ago to be this stubborn and unreasonable, borderline annoying.

Love would always be irritating.

She embraced him tightly because she wanted to have it no other way; she wished to feel his heartbeat, not only hear it. Her soft breath fanned on the fabric of his shirt, where she stayed quietly.

Fact was, a goodbye was not what she was asking for, but a failsafe instead, a goal in front of which he was proved to be anything but made of stone.

First, he let the strap of his crossbow slide off his shoulder, all the way down to his hand, so he could lower the weapon to the ground and make room for Mallory to shift her head's rest on his back a little more comfortably. When the sensation of her warmth pressed between his shoulder blades, Daryl too sighed, raising his free hand up to hold hers put on his abdomen.

To her surprise, Daryl's rough thumbs started drawing on her soft skin the same circular patterns he had gotten her used to back in the good days when a room with a window to the waves had made them both believe the world belonged to them. Back then, he thought himself a painter, massaging these patterns on any single square of bare skin of her he had access too, claiming through little smiles that she simply had to much tension built up from work and he was fixing that for her. If that was but a joke framing an excuse to touch her as often as possible, then the joke was on him, because Mallory could vouch that whatever this was, has never not worked towards having her tensions dissipate.

Daryl relished in how quickly Mallory had melted onto him, her breath calming, her heartbeat relaxing. It exalted his spirit to think that his hands were a safety that she trusted enough to lower her defenses to still, much like it saddened him ever so slightly to brush his thumb over the rough edges of the place that brute had cut her finger from, the scar left behind being the product of not even having the means to properly bandage the wound while it was fresh.

Regardless of where his emotion swung between those two extremes, he had to break the silence, finding his voice now to have lost the aggravated tone of earlier and instead adopt a gentle solemnity, "I'll be careful out there." There was a certain urgency to getting to that town, because the longer they delayed, the slimmer were the chances for Glenn and Maggie to be found alive.

"I know you will," Mallory murmured, undoing the clasp of her hands and slipping away from underneath his touch. The second her step back was taken, Daryl lingered no more on that hallway.

Day turned to night painfully slow at the prison, and though a good night's rest was a luxury Mallory should by all means dreadfully need already in order to maintain her sanity, as soon as her head laid back on the pillow, she found herself at a loss. Worries for Daryl aside — something she had the luck of being able to do only by consideration of just how good of a hunter he was back in the day as well; she imagined he could have only gotten better within one year of hardcore practicing for the sake of his survival —, Mallory was unsure how to fall asleep. Perhaps she had forgotten how. Lately, she's been forced to find the relief of a rest only by fainting into it, so to sit back on a creaking bed with her hands clasped over her chest and stare at the arches of the bed above, she was trapped into waiting. Waiting to be so exhausted that maybe sleep stole her away on its own.

Outside the open door of her cell, she heard the voices of the three still wide awake. The baby had fallen asleep so the younger girl, Beth, joined with Carl on the stairs, the old man, Hershel, watching over them both. Mallory was aware that this was a time as good as any to take her lack of sleep for a sign that perhaps she should join them on their conversation, but she decided as quickly as that idea came to her to leave getting attached to people for another time.

Distant screaming is what instantaneously dismantled both Mallory's inner debates and her death-defying stillness. She stood up, on the edge of her bed and listened a little while longer.

"The tombs are filled with Walkers that wandered in from outside," Hershel's explanation to whatever either of the kids said reached Mallory's ears. "Someone else could have done the same thing."

"Where?" Mallory walked out of her cell, down the stairs the kids were sitting at the base of.

"I'm going," Carl offered before Hershel could answer the woman, thus giving him something new to care about first. He lifted his left crutch and blocked the boy's way.

"I can't let you go."

"My father would go," Carl retaliated.

Mallory hurried down the stairs and placed a hand on the crutch, in order to push it down, "I'll go with him. Don't worry."

"I don't need your help...," the boy puffed in response, but Hershel let both of them pass and Mallory wasn't exactly up to getting outrun by Carl. The corridors were better known by him, so he was leading the way, with Mallory close behind him, following a dark part littered with rotten, headless corpses, molding into the walls' yellowed hue.

Following the screams until they would no longer be distant seemed like the right play just then, but after walking for a while with Mallory, Carl couldn't help but notice with an aggravated whisper, "Where's your gun?"

The good days were certainly gone if a kid ended up holding a gun and questioning why she, an adult, didn't have one too. "I have a knife with me."

His disapproval of her nonchalance came as a rather discreet shake of his head, but only after a short silence, reaching the boiler room beside whose cracked door Carl initially froze in hesitation, he remembered he did have one curiosity that made him glad to see Daryl return with Mallory at his side the other night. "How'd you do it?" He inquired, moving the flashlight from the door onto Mallory.

"Do what?" It's been a while since Mallory had seen any children at all, so inevitability, Carl ended up reminding her of her youngest nephew. He should have been about as old as Carl. He too was just as inquisitive about everything and all she was doing. She hoped he was alive and still asking those silly questions of his too.

"The thing," Carl sighed, struggling to find the right words. "The day the Walkers got in and you had to leave. You stood there," he flashed some light on the door again, "and none of the Walkers ate you. You weren't smelly, so..."

"Thank you," Mallory hoped to smile away the question, but Carl did not care for smiles.

"How'd you do it?" He insisted.

Mallory shrugged, hesitating for only as long as it took her to understand what exactly she was hearing coming from the right side, a sound that only she heard, "I don't know." She retrieved Daryl's spare knife from her belt, "I guess, I just got lucky." With a step back, she got out of the way of a Walker about to lounge from the dark corridor to the right onto them. The Walker had Carl fixed as an end goal to its groan's beginning though Mallory had until then stood in its path. Before it lasted a single full second in the luminescence of the boy's flashlight, she drove the knife through the back of its skull.

Her answer had been overall unsatisfactory and hardly credible, but given the screams sounded now much closer than before, Carl decided to take that Walker for a sign to rush to the origin of the concerning sound. It proved to be right around the corner. Five people, one of which was wounded, were outnumbered by Walkers there, dead which had probably followed them from the outside of the prison.

At Carl's instinctive call, they ended up bringing the five of them towards the inner prison, in the same area that the convicts and Mallory too stood, provisionally, before the group made any decisions about them. These people got the same treatment, though by the time Carl locked them there, both him and Mallory knew there were only four survivors they rescued — the fifth had died.

Though the commotion inside the prison had been stopped and there was no reason why Mallory shouldn't be able to sleep now, placing her head right back on the pillow returned her to the same problem of insomnia, only now, a bad feeling stirred in her chest as well.

Something was wrong and she didn't exactly know what.

At some point during the depths of the night, sleep had finally stolen her away, right into the arms of the same nightmare that had Mallory flinch awake the second light slithered in the cell block. That is when she finally realized what was wrong: they should have been back by now.

The sun kept rising on the sky and her restlessness watching the treeline surrounding the prison and the road leading up to the entrance only grew.

When the car they had left with finally came into view, Mallory couldn't deny it felt as if a great weight had been lifted off of her chest and she could finally breathe. It was therefore, all the more painful to slowly halt her steps when everyone got out of the car and Daryl wasn't there.

Though her sight blurred around the edges at the implications of that, and her ears started ringing over the incriminating shouts her own mind rained upon herself, Mallory made out what Rick was explaining to Carol. Merle was alive. Daryl left with him.

She knew how selfish it was, but still she couldn't help but think it, There goes Merle taking him away from me a third time.

When her lost gaze met Rick's, the latter only glancing uphill, over Carol's shoulder who hugged her sobs into his chest, Mallory finally unfroze herself from the spot. She marched down to the front gates only a single thought in her mind: I am not doing this a third time.

"Hey," Rick let go of Carol and reached his hand out to stop Mallory. At first, she escaped his reach, but after Rick called on her again and continued a couple of steps forward, his hand clasped on her upper right arm and held her in place.

"Let me go," she demanded, with a sort of numbness that Rick had often recognized, much to his dislike, in himself.

"You don't have to leave," he loosened up his grip only a little. Though he could not pretend to phantom what exactly was between Mallory and Daryl in the first place, he knew for a fact that if he let go of her then, he was letting her walk towards death. This woman didn't strike him for someone of any danger whatsoever and after what she's been through, he could only imagine that her mental state was as frail as her in front of the dire times they lived in. He doubted she even knew how to fend for herself. "You still got a place here."

"I don't know you," Mallory met his eyes. "I was only staying here for Daryl."

That's when he saw it, her hellbent determination's flicker. Such a sight prompted Rick to let go and to instead walk in front of Mallory, changing thus his approach. "How good do you think your odds are out there in finding him, hmm?"

She wasn't fooling anyone, not even herself. Daryl left her for his brother and she couldn't give less of a fuck about it — she still wanted to find him and stay by his side.

"Not now," Carol took Mallory's left hand, even clenched into a fist as it was, into her own and tugged her ever so gently back from the staring contest she had going on with Rick. "Not now, dear," Carol still had traces of tears in her eyes, but she met Mallory with a warm pat on her back. "There's too many Walkers out there to go now. As soon as they clear out a little, you'll have better chances, so let's wait it out, okay?"

AUTHOR'S NOTE :   
    Daryl breaking Mallory's heart even just a little after that hug they shared seems like such a cruel thing 😭😭😭

But it is what it is, in some way, I get it. I too would leave anyone for my little sister and I would genuinely do anything for her. Then again, I am the older sibling, it's sorta natural to have a sense of responsibility over her, but my heart breaks for Daryl and how he feels he gotta be of service to anyone but himself.

Merle really on hid third try to break our ship up 😭😭

Also, gotta say, I love the dynamics Mallory develops with Carl, Carol and Rick ❤️ The Rick one is only just started but imma tease this much: they are a lot more similar than even they anticipate at first. The parallels are gonna be strong between these two 👀👀