The Darkest Storm

For just the slightest of moments, the disconnection she felt was unfathomable.

With each raspy breath Darcy takes, she cannot tear her un-blinking eyes away from the body in front of her. Her own is solid and un-shaking, muscles tense and her posture rigid. To him, she appears wild, aiming a single arrow straight for his chest with bulging eyes that followed.

Daryl stands with his mouth slightly ajar and his eyes narrowed with concern, but sternness. “It’s jus’ me.” He tells her, holding his crossbow down in front of him.

Darcy stares as if, in a way, she is uncertain that even he is real. “How much did you hear?” She asks, knowing he’s been in her presence for a while.

“Enough.” He tells her quietly. Daryl scans her up and down, noting her body has no sign of easing up. “Ya gonna shoot me or what?”

Darcy wriggles her fingertips around the nock of her arrow and swallows hard. Hesitating, and quite unsure why, she lowers her bow. When she does, Daryl suddenly walks past her to the tree where her uncle stood before. A shiver flows through her when she thinks of the possibility if her uncle was real standing before her, and the proximity he was to Daryl.

Daryl yanks the arrow from the trunk, looking at the shaft and noticing the break in the wood. He tosses it to the side with her facing him slightly, but her eyes were on the forest floor. The look he gives her is too solemn and unyielding.

“C’mon.” He tells her, walking past her again and towards the road.

She looks to him, expecting, wanting him to say something. Either how crazy she was for letting him into her mind or some support telling her that everything was going to be okay. But he says nothing. Daryl walks her out to the road in silence.

Darcy looks up at the sound of a revved engine. The van is loaded with what little equipment the group has left, plus the group members themselves. The driver’s door is open and Daryl climbs inside. He slams the door with a little more force than necessary, just as Bob slides the back door open for Darcy.

“Everything okay?” He asks her, since there was nothing else to do, or think about, as if it was okay to ask such a simple question. “You seem...”

When Darcy has re-slid the door closed, her eyes unintentionally flicker to Daryl’s, who is looking back at her in the mirror. “Fine.” She forces a smile.

-

Darcy slept hard. The sky was already starting to dimly light itself by the time she opens her eyes. She’d been dreaming about, what else, Philip. His voice is still echoing through her ears when she wakes up. And then she realizes as she glances down at her hands, they weren’t dreams.

The nock of her bowstring has left two parallel cuts just on her fingers. She had pulled so hard for so long that the edges had cut through her callous skin, letting speckles of blood trickle through but dry quickly, just like a paper cut.

Darcy looks up, through the car window, and notices the tall structures they’ve started to pass. The town and the world revealed itself as empty, with a silence that stretches from eternity to eternity, rendering time and sequence of past events meaningless. There was only a never-ending now, in the most horrifying way possible.

“Ya know, this…” Daryl breaks her out of her thoughts. Her eyes shoot to the rear-view mirror and meets his immediately. “…This thing tha’s happenin.’ We ain’t got a clue to what’s startin’ it all. With the walkers…it’s a different fight. With your uncle - another fight. But this, it ain’t like any of that.”

“I know.” She says quietly. Taking a look around, Darcy notices everyone else is asleep just like she was.

Daryl bites his bottom lip as he glances out to the road and then back to her. “Look, I ain’t a fool to actin’ like I know what’s going on with ya. With Merle it happened only a few times and hell he was just as annoying as ever.”

“What only happened a few times?” Michonne begins to stretch and speaks in a yawn.

Daryl taps his thumb against the steering wheel. “Nothin’.” He says rather too quickly. “Just swappin’ war stories.”

“The hell you let me sleep for?” Michonne sits up and takes the map off the dashboard. “You know where we at?”

“Just a few more miles. Comin’ along the back roads.” He points. “We’re gonna need to find that building and quick. Already lost too much time. We gotta get in and out.”

“Take this road right here.” Michonne points.

“Ya’ll best be ready.” Daryl calls out. “We don’ know what we’re dealing with.”

The building was six stories tall with four identical faces, each presenting three rows of balconies with rusted metal railings. It looked just like the others, small and narrow, dumpsters lining the inside alleyways further down in the darkness. Brick by boring brick was towered high on all buildings on either side, and useless escape fire ladders hung limply, dangling just so they were hanging on by a thread. On the outside, it seems completely empty.

It was at this time; Darcy hasn’t fully registered the threat that was currently waiting for them back at the prison. Her friends, her home; it was all being destroyed by some glorified cold that they had no resources to stop.

The van comes to a slow, screeching halt. As Bob, Michonne, and Tyresse gather around the hand-drawn map from Hershel, Daryl slows his pace when climbing out. He glances to his right, seeing Darcy check her clip in her pistol and sliding it into her holster.

Darcy rubs her forehead roughly with the palm of her hand. She feels the sun beating down on her neck. A few slow steps and the stir of the gravel underneath Daryl’s feet reach her ears. The dirt clouds the air around them.

She wonders if Daryl can see her struggle; wanting so badly to be in the present, enjoying (if only for a moment) and living with those she has grown so close with and so protectant for one another for the past few years. Daryl, especially, she wishes she could focus back on him. She desperately yearns for his closeness, appreciation, and knowing nods they’ve developed over time. But at the same time, he wishes she could see he’s been trying to give her those things this whole time.

Darcy thinks back to the farm, a time compared to now, seemed like child’s play. Searching for a little lost girl seemed so much simpler than their current venture. But, it’s not just Sophia she thinks back on. Darcy remembers mostly, trying to pull Daryl back into the group’s embrace, forgetting his ways of his brother, and finally realizing the potential everyone else saw in him.

Sure, there were moments, and needless to say still are, times where he’d pull back, hesitate, be ashamed of himself for what he’d do or say, especially with her, but Daryl has grown so much since then. And, now it seems, as if Daryl and Darcy have switched roles; attempting to pull Darcy back to where she was before, confident in who she was and what she thought, doing what needed to be done for the good of the group. Overall, he wanted her to be around with that certain spark in her eye that told Daryl she was there for him, and told him everything was going to be okay.

“I don’ know what to do.” He whispers. The softness and unfeigned veneer he speaks breaks her from her enigmatic mind. “But, I need ya here, with me on this just like ol’ times.”

Darcy blinks and takes a wary look over his shoulder at the others, “I’m trying.” Her shoulders sink and her eyes drop.

“Hey.” He approaches her softly, reaching up a hand and cupping her face gently. “We’re gonna get ya through this, ya hear me?”

Darcy forces a nod and closes her eyes. Daryl grits his teeth, blatantly scared for this woman and all she means to him. “Ain’t gonna let anything bad happen to ya.”

In a quick and aggressive attempt that can only be Daryl caring, he brings her head towards him and kisses her forehead. He lets go, turning his back and walking away to join with the others. But for a moment, Darcy doesn’t move.

She takes a long, deep sigh, which acts as a way to catch her breath and to prepare her for what awaits them in the building up ahead. But she also does it to clear her mind, to act as a barrier from the relentless remorse she’s been feeling all this time ever since her Uncle had taken Glenn and Maggie.

Darcy stares down at the ground. Her stomach feels hard. There is a lump forming in the back of her throat. She knows what’s happening to her. There are two things that are now vibrantly floating around in her mind that she knows she has to overcome for all this madness to go away. Darcy must accept what her uncle has done, and then, she must forget.

Animosity, disappointment, shame. All just some of the words that Darcy’s thought jumps to when the image of his face comes to view. The entire situation is a big, jumbled mess inside her mind that she can’t figure out.

But all of those are powerful forces that take time to overcome. They can produce overwhelming emotions or call to mind never-changing horrifying experiences, and they seem to entangle and twist themselves into the folds of a person’s mind time and time again.

They seep inside, conforming to who the person once was and can either make them, or break them. These forces can deter all hope and effort to remain vigilant to a cause, turning cheeks to focus towards a path of destruction, mayhem, and angst, where a person knows pain cannot be avoided but faced head on.

Darcy remembers fully that day when Sophia came out of the barn. It was then she accepted that the times they now lived in and had to survive every day were inevitable; death surrounded her and those she’s grown to love, that people change and their true selves were forced to be brought to the surface for all else to see.

If she could accept an inescapable death of those around her, not like it, but accept the possibility, she can accept the actions and consequences of her uncle. It was just another setback, nothing more, nothing less. It was time to put this nonsense behind her; there were more important things that needed to be handled.

“Ay!” Darcy looks up to the others, all-waiting back on her with expectant stares. They needed her, respected her, and appreciated her. Most importantly, she saw no blame placed on her for what her uncle did. “You ready?”

Darcy slides the van door closed and takes her bow off her back, “Yeah.” She yells over to them, her characteristic stamina and grit has slowly returned.

Daryl sees the spark in her eyes when she passes him. “Tha’s my girl.”