HAZARD,
❨ v. matter ❩

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          DARYL HAD BEEN driving for how many hours, he did not know. They were silent, and that was easy. He could think when it was quiet and he had some sense that it was just him. But every so often he would look to the side and realise he wasn't. The girl made his thoughts feel insecure. She simply lay there, not doing a thing yet she still had that effect on him.

          He eventually stopped the car, pulling into a side road that wound through trees and over terential dirt. It seemed the rough conditions shook her awake, and her eyes flitted open from her curled position on the seat. Hands twitching, they rose to her eyes and pressed firmly.

          Marley let out a small squeak as her neck clicked and she rose upwards. Her back straightened, looking out the window, and not giving a glance to the man beside her.

          He tried to presume what she was thinking, but his perception let him down.

          Daryl watched the girl trace her fingertips over her forehead, feeling around the damaged area and gritting her teeth in discomfort. Her big, green eyes were wide and watering. Now, there was something he could perceive. All her fear and hurt, coming at her like a ton of bricks dropped upon her shoulders. All too late, and due to the effect of a dead man.

          She didn't say a thing, and didn't even whisper. Her words fell short as she peered through the glass of the window, clutching the edge of the door and viewing the amass of trees. She swallowed heavily, remembering.

          Marley glanced over her shoulder, to Daryl who did nothing but stare. She took her bottom lip between her teeth, nibbling like a mouse before asking him a question. "Do you-... um? Do you have any aspirin, or water— or something?" She seemed to beg in her weak tone, feverishly wrought and miniscule.

          The man coughed roughly before answering. "In the bag." She didn't know where said bag was so all she did was sit. Her eyes wandered to the back seat, where she would have thought to have woken up. But as she recollected what Jimmy had said about the kind Jess. The man who humorously assisted the disheveled, and lingerie riddled girl who appeared on his doorstep. It took meer seconds for him to decipher that this girl, Marley Van Allen as she had introduced, was no trouble.

          Or so he thought, and Marley doubted.

          (She doubted her value, and the vexation that came with her company, simultaneously.)

          Daryl, watching her as she remained inert, despite the blood previously dripping down her neck, became frustrated. So he did the only thing he could ever come up with, and he stormed away from the car with such force the girl flinched for the millionth time that day.

          The only thing he could remotely think of doing was starting to get settled, for some reason. To start finding some substratum and foothold. Even if she didn't agree, he would try. And he could tell her mind was somewhere else, definitely not here, when he cast his eyes through the back window and spotting her staring at the space he once occupied.

          Again, he made no effort to unriddle it.

          Daryl simply unraveled the bags that were strapped into the trunk of the car, hauling them on his shoulders. He strained under the weight and scowled under the lowering sunlight. He was annoyed, maybe even beyond that, but something inside him made the actions that would go with that emotion, reel in on themselves.

          When he found a spot in the woods, a flat surface to take nest, he turned to the girl once again. She was a twenty-year-old girl with ever forming bruises across her body, and Daryl's eyes unintentionally softened at the sight of her. The familiarity was getting stronger, the planes of her skin were becoming close to second nature in his brain... and he hated it.

          stupid, stupid.

          Despite the rumination of this withheld intrigue knocking in his skull, he stormed over to her door and opened it hastily. And he was met with her curled form, still staring off into space and turned away from his eyes.

          He growled heavily. "If you're not gonna fucking help, try not being useless." The words rushed out like a freight train, and he couldn't stop the rough exterior he now emanated. He couldn't help the way his eyes squinted at her with an accusing scrutiny.

          It didn't falter even when she turned to him with those prodigious, doe green eyes. They spilled over with tears, and they fell when she set free an exhale.

          Still no change, yet he yearned to be brave and do it.

          Daryl sighed heavily. "Look, you'd be dead if it wasn't for me so do me a goddamn favor." She looked at him with question. "And get out and do something."

          She didn't answer, not even a decibel above silence. Marley was turned in on herself, like an armadillo with its guard up, but her armor was fragile and cracked and she didn't know how long she could cope with it. The girl didn't know what to do with herself anymore, not when she's been practically gifted with freedom but at the worst of times. Surrounded by the dead, yet still daydreaming about the times she has passed out due to her boyfriend.

          ...Ex-boyfriend.

          She didn't really notice Daryl until he had his hands on her arms, pulling them so she toppled straight out of the car. Her body didn't cooperate, and she didn't follow the man, as her knees hit the ground and she simply lay there.

          An empty shell within herself who still didn't much notice the man standing above her, apologies hurtling from his mouth, the one who saved her life.

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          Still there, and freezing cold. Her body curled into the stones, etching into her skin like ancient markings. She took her hair between her hands and rubbed her fingers against the firey tendrils. All she could see was bright orange and red.

          Not only that but the embers from the campfire not too far, the one Daryl had set up whilst he left her to her vices. He shouldn't have left her to press herself into the floor, and scratch her nails into her head.

          Eventually, after the darkness seemed to have been swiped from her eyes — she stretched her legs.

          "Um," she muttered, wobbling lightly in her toes, under the eyes of Daryl who had kept them far away until then. "Um," she repeated. Words failed her. They were sucked down to darkness and lit with the flames that stood in front of her. She wanted to speak, she wanted to talk about it — but she was so used to a forced silence, she welcomed her stuttering throat.

          She found home on the ground, crossing one leg over the other as leaves stuck to her ripped jeans in wet layers. She dug her hands into the ground, getting dirt under her nails and absent-mindedly cleaning it away. Her eyes reflecting the dying flames, as embers rose the the sky in an orange tornado. The heat was familiar, and the burn was just a memory too.

          Yet, even with her seemingly swollen vocal cords, words stumbled past her lips — more of an exertion than an actual effort, as if her body spoke yet she didn't.

          "Why... did you kill him?" The question was sinister, and riddled with possible answers to make you squirm, but it didn't come as Daryl's eyes lifted to hers in an almost offended manner.

          Marley shook under his eyes, instantly regretting letting her lips say such words. But it needed to be asked, at least that's what her tongue had wanted.

          It took Daryl a while, before he found the courage to actually speak. It wasn't apologies or denial, it was a simple question reverberated back. "You wanted him alive?" If she answered 'yes', Daryl could see himself feeling sick.

          Again, neither giving the other a straight answer. Daryl and Marley spoke like argumentative philosophers, questioning each others integrity in their own curiosity.

          When it didn't look like her lips would move anytime soon (with the man impatient), he called her out. "Ariel?"

          "I'm not Ariel," she instantly replied, looking through her lashes like a warning. Lips pursing and her cheeks hollowing, tears glistened her waterline as she breathed heavily. "I don't want to be Ariel anymore — I'm Marley."

          "I'm Marley."

          "Why'd he call you Ariel?"

          The spark in conversation surprised the girl, and she furrowed her brows. "What?"

          "What's Ariel?"

          She brought her fists to her eyes, sucking in oxygen to hold her breath for three seconds. After that, furiously wiping her cheeks. "Stage name — it's a stage name."

          "What?"

          "You should know, your brother went to the castle a lot. I presume he talked about the girls."

          No memories of the conversations with Merle stuck much, and the man's words never meant a lot to him — not when they weren't ridiculing him. Daryl slowly shook his head. This made the girl turn into her shoulder with bashful cheeks. They turned red, not under cute embarrassment but in shame.

          She whispered, them falling to ash. "Dancers — a kind word." Her hands in her lap, she played with them. Marley hadn't gotten used to the dirty ridicule that came with being a dancer. "I don't like being one... since I was sixteen."

          Daryl was turned off by the sudden confession. Conversing with this girl seemed to be like tiptoeing on landmines, a sudden territory of uneven chances. And his hypothesis of the situation was only confirmed when the girl didn't stop talking.

          "I'm twenty now.'

          What he didn't know was that this shattered girl didn't have anyone new, or even anyone. No person to whisper such things, even if they didn't seem like they were listening. She only ever spoke to souls long gone, or those too far gone to understand that the pain was a bad thing. Daryl was this new, and possibly exciting piece of company to disclose the darkest of things.

          Jimmy Blake forced things out of her she had been blind to witnessing — Daryl was, hopefully a secretive companion of confessions her skin needed freedom of. Like the tattoos on his back, they were pierced into the epidermis with words and bruises — scars like his, a mind clouded.

          But even after being unchained, her aura was still shackled. She missed him, to utter truth.

          Hhe was forcefully her world, and now what was she supposed to do.

          "He took me there... he— looked after me," Marley's words were haughty and breathless. "I think. I don't know anymore."

          As Marley sobbed through words, Daryl had nothing say. Either that or they were held down, building up like bubbling chemicals.

          "I don't know what to do."

          And after that, she laughed. She giggled almost madly, a gleam in her eyes brought on by tears and utter relief. "He looked after me." Daryl turned his eyes away from her swelling cheeks and glistening lips. She bit and licked them whilst furiously wiping the salty liquid from the edges of her rosy lips. Bee-stung, almost bleeding. This girl seemed on the edge, since her mind was now crippled without her torturous crutches.

          "After my mama and papa died, he was all I had. My brother left. Jimmy was all I had. He looked after me."

          "Or he didn't — what does it matter anymore?"

          A sudden gloom settled over her features, and as the flames licked shadows across her skin, Daryl watched them dance along her neck and arms. The way her eyebrows suddenly furrowed, how her green irises turned dark when the shadows hit them just right. "What does it matter anymore?"

          All suddenness and wired nerves strung away from her, and Daryl was left with a Marley who hardly knew how to feel anymore. A blank canvas no longer afflicted with the bruises left from her boyfriend. But the girl had become those colours so much, when the brush was taken away — she felt ghostly. "What do I matter anymore?"

          "What does it matter anymore?"

          what does it matter anymore?

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( edited ✓ )