Author's notes

Disclaimer: The universe and the canon characters are the propriety of The Walking Dead's creators.

This short story is a translation of a fanfiction (three chapters, completed) I wrote myself in French a few months ago (it was called Promenons-nous dans les bois). Please, keep in mind that the original version was written in early October 2012, before some revelations about Daryl's past. So (I know) there is one major inconstancy with the show, and that makes my story slightly AU. I hope it won't be too much of a turn-off for you…
Also, if something doesn't seem clear (especially the "present" events), don't worry, it will become clearer with chapters 2 and 3.

This is the first time I write fiction in English. I think you will "feel" it in the sentences structures... So if you have any advice to help me to improve my writing skills in English, please don't hesitate to tell me so in your reviews or in a PM. It would be so helpful!

Finally, I want to thank several people.

First of all, my dear beta-readers.
Praxid, who did a wonderful job editing this fanfiction; who gave me so many good advices to improve this translation. She was such a great help!
QueensGambit, who was the second set of eyes for editing and improving this fic.
Thank you so much, the both of you! I wouldn't have been able to publish this, if not for your hard work.

I would also like to thank BeingLolaStar, who found the title for this translation. Her knowledge of nursery rhymes was very helpful!

And last, but not least, a big thank you to Eponyme Anonyme, who encouraged me through the whole translating process,who agreed - since she knew the original French version so well - to give me her opinion about this English version, and who introduced me to Praxid.

I'll cut the rambling here, and leave you to your reading. Please, enjoy!

If you go out in the woods today

1. Scarlett

"Salomé, Salomé, dance for me. I pray thee dance for me. I am sad to-night. Yes, I am passing sad to-night. When I came hither I slipped in blood, which is an evil omen; and I heard, I am sure I heard in the air a beating of wings, a beating of giant wings. I cannot tell what they mean ... I am sad to-night. Therefore dance for me. Dance for me, Salomé, I beseech you. If you dance for me you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it you, even unto the half of my kingdom."

Oscar Wilde, Salomé.

He's feeling the pain slowly, progressively overwhelming him. It radiates from his right upper thigh, like some successive waves whose the on-going, swirling surfs make his skin tremble, his muscles flinch, until his whole body is dashed by slight spasms; a sea stirred to wildness by the rage of a gaping wound from which the blood is now flowing freely. Daryl is feeling the pain and he is trying to nurse himself, nursing the hope to heal his gash. With a wavering hand, shipwrecked in that ocean of crimson purple, he tries to hold back the warm and thick gush from leaking out more; the hand drowns, reddened, confused like a new-born bathed in blood. Daryl thinks - even as a child he knew – that he is born a murderer. With the first imperious stare from his father, he was convicted for the murder of a mother he would never know. His sentence was a daily retribution, an everyday torment he would always suffer without breathing a word, without flinching. He would learn not to cry any more, not to wince any more, not to hurt any more, not to feel any more – nothing - because those blows, those insults, those slamming doors, those taunts, those belts whipping his back, those blades entering his skin, those fists meeting his face, this perpetual belittlement, his childhood's bleak nursery rhymes – you're a failure, a loser, a pussy, a faggot – and those expressions full of anger and contempt, he deserved them, a fair punishment to atone, maybe one day, in the end of a life, for the terrible sin of his birth.

Daryl pushes off the walker lying on the top of him, a bit. It's dead for good, a hunting knife stuck down, to the hilt, in its eye. While expiring its last breath, the zombie has exhaled a fetid odour - maintained by its decaying, decomposing flesh - exactly toward Daryl's face - twisted by pain. The scent hits him full-on, permeating his wrinkled nostrils - creased with disgust; his throat frenetically working to repress the heaves, too late. His paltry meal, more liquid than solid really - partially digested only – ends up spread out on the grass, blending with the mud, the blood and the pieces of putrid skin here and there. Daryl closes his eyes just one moment, squeezing his eyelids tightly, with all his strength. Let it all go away, fade out - all that pain, unbearable now. But he doesn't cry - he can't - he didn't learn how. No, he'd forgotten how, and there is no time to learn again now. But he's forgotten how to feel, as well, so let it all go away – disappear. He closes his eyes again, squeezes his eyelids harder - with all the small strength he still has left. But it isn't enough, the pain stays, firmly settled there, and the shame too. That bitter shame he had felt, many years ago, when he vomited, at the edge of the football field, under the neighbourhood kid's sniggers and jibes - and Scarlett's.

Scarlett… Scarlett and her long curls - dark and silky. Scarlett and her big, gorgeous, brown eyes that always seemed surprised. Even as an eight-years-old, she was already made to break hearts. Daryl's wouldn't be any exception. Of course, the young Daryl fell in love with her – right along with every other boy in his class. He fell in love with her bright smile, with those lovely little dimples that hollowed her pink cheeks. With her crystalline laugh, so beautiful, so pure that it was impossible to identify it as mocking, haughty, condescending. With her locks, always adorned with fuchsia ribbons, bedecked with little pastel barrettes shaped like dragonflies - like butterflies. And so she looked like a forest fairy, a nymph like the ones in the tales Miss Ruby told at kindergarten. The illustrations in those children books seemed like they'd fallen out of one of his fabulous fantasy. Those mythical creatures would always come to help Daryl when he dreamed. They would take him away into the dreamscapes, where he would hope to lose himself forever. But the nightmares would catch him every time, and he would end up losing himself in dark, dismal, disturbing mazes - praying the monsters wouldn't find him. Praying a divine force would seize him. Praying wings would grow on him so he could fly and fly away from all of it…

Most of all, Daryl fell in love with Scarlett's big doe eyes, eyes that made him want to track her, to hunt her, to tame her too. He hadn't understood yet who was the predator and who was the prey. Only a few scattered, diffuse, blurry recollections remain now from that time - as if a misty veil covers the memory's scope. A veil that sometimes clears away for a moment, then darkens again. Now, all that remains of that first love – firmly anchored - branded with red-hot iron in his mind, is the lesson it taught him. Engraved within him - like he engraved their two names, surrounded them with a clumsily drawn heart. Separating them by a small "plus" sign that would unite them forever - sheltered in that heart's reassuring cocoon. Resting on the bark of a big oak with russet leaves. Quercus virginiana, it was called - Daryl read that in a botanical reference book. One with a green cover and purplish letters, copiously illustrated, that he loved reading for hours and hours. Because, some day, when he grew up, he would be a botanist. He would know everything about plants and trees. One day, he had proudly announced it to his father - who hadn't been proud at all. Bota-what? You think you're better than us, you little shit, and what's up with that talking, saying words you don't understand just to show off! And he had laughed with that mocking, raucous laugh that had hurt Daryl so deeply; he couldn't be a botanist. And so "Daryl+Scarlett", their names tied, protected by that symbolic heart, on that centenarian tree didn't tie them forever. And now, lying there beside the walker, next to the puke and blood and soiled dirt, Daryl finds himself wondering if that craving relic still exists, any more…

Another episode from that long gone time comes back to him. In class, he managed to sit down just behind her, so he could stare endlessly into the brown, tawny cascade of her hair, where those rosy insects flitted, letting themselves being submerged by a wayward strand of hair, only to re-emerge later when Scarlett coquettishly tidied her hairstyle up. And Daryl always let himself be engulfed by the show playing out in front of him. He was picturing himself with his goddess in the autumnal looking, swampy woods. And she would stare at him with her brown irises and he would take her home, as proud as his big brother Merle when he brought a magnificent deer from a hunting trip, the previous Sunday. That had made Daryl admiring, and a little bit envious, but, most importantly, it fed the two brothers while their father was missing - along with the housekeeping money. Gone God only knows where and for how long. And Daryl was stargazing the back of Scarlett's head, absent minded, dazed by the beauty of those airy curls. He wanted to bury his face in them, and he found his mind escaping into fantasy worlds that belonged only to him - and into which he invited Scarlett for an enchanting journey. The teacher's voice was always so far away, like a monotonous whisper. And that only made his inner world more realistic. The teacher's long-winded lecture would become the humming of insects in Daryl's magical forest. Distracted, has his head in the clouds, unable to focus on anything, lazy, doesn't work at school - the symptoms were regularly revealed to progressively be diagnosed as an incurable disease, stupidity mixed with a deplorable social environment. After numerous examinations, year after year, the physicians-teachers were often fatalistic, resigned – only sometimes hopeful, ready to try any ultimate, unprecedented treatment. All of them around the sick child's desk, they had determined Daryl's fate.

But, God, how Daryl had loved that girl. He even had resolved to seek advice from his older brother - whose knowledge on the subject seemed peerless and who, surprisingly enough, had taken his youngest brother's request very seriously. Merle wasn't the kind of man who liked long speeches, useless he thought. Observation and practicality were, according to him, the only possible teachers. Now, Daryl especially remembers his first impressions, the plumes of smoke that gave the seedy bar an atmosphere slightly phantasmagorical; the men with glassy, streaked with busted veins, eyes, with yellowish fingertips, with a breath full of beer or whisky; the women wearing too much make-up, their lip-stick dripping, their rouge too red, and their eyelids too dark, trying to entice the men with a few provocative flutters of lashes. With their too-small clothes, their too-high heels, on which they seemed to waver. Some of them were dancing on a podium, stripping themselves slowly from their clothing, making their hips slither like long snakes wearing scarlet lace - reeking fire and brimstone - revealing their slightly withered breasts and their slightly flabby stomachs, covered by the clamour of a male crowd gathered around them. Merle had led him to the bar, ordered an amber coloured whisky and had commanded him to observe. And Daryl observed, and listened, to the brief, vulgar conversation between his big brother and a woman tightly wrapped in a claret jean mini-short. That conversation quickly ended up in a kiss - Merle's hands touching and feeling and rubbing every square centimetre of his one night stand's flesh. He dragged her toward a door at back of the room, probably leading to the toilets, prompting Daryl to remain there and to order himself a drink.

And when Daryl, armed with his bravery and his brother's advices, resolved himself to unveil his feelings to Scarlett; she laughed at him. He still remembers the short, derisive burst of laughter and the contemptuous expression disfiguring her pretty features. In that one moment - in the space of a few infinitesimal seconds - she became ugly, like a demonic spirit that took on a pleasing shape to tempt mere mortals, and revealed inadvertently its true face. How Daryl, that redneck kid, that scrawny little boy – shrimp was Merle's nickname for him then – wearing a hundred-times-patched-up, too-large jacket, could have imagined that she, Scarlett, living in one of these beautiful and spacious houses on the top of the hill overhanging the town – and she even must have a swimming pool in her garden, thought Daryl, and a playroom, with a trampoline perhaps – could even consider liking him? He couldn't possibly think she would take his hand - a hand he probably hadn't wash in at least three days, that must have been covered by all kinds of germs mommy and daddy had warned her about – could he? How could he have kept up such a delusion? Anyway, her parents would never agree for them to play together. They weren't from the same world, and that was it! And it was so funny, so laughable, really!

And, Daryl had taken a stroll into the woods, with his broken heart. The woods was his refuge, his sanctuary, and he got lost and he had roamed about, hours and hours, days and days, and it had been far from the fairy tales' initiatory journey. There were no ogre, no gingerbread house, no Little Red Riding Hood, no wolves, no wizards, no brown-haired and doe-eyed nymph either. Nothing. Then, after having at last found his path outside the labyrinth of trees and bushes, after having come home, after having rested, after his father had come back too from his own ethylic winding labyrinth, he came down with the flu. His father nagged at him - Dixons aren't pussies and they don't get sick; not that Daryl had wanted to stay at home with his company anyway. So, in spite of the nausea, the fatigue, the headache, the fever, he walked the path to school. The day passed in slow motion, his hazy mind barely awake, sometimes it was full of cotton, and he would sink into it; would struggle to move forward. Sometimes there was a giant anvil hammering at his temples, and making them resonate. And, leaving school, passing by the football field, surrounded by all his classmates, he had been overcome by an atrocious nausea that he tried in vain to contain. But it was no use, and in a repugnant squelching sound, he puked up the contents of his lunch, red-faced with the shame of being seen like that by such a large assembly. Scarlett was there of course, she who had so cruelly rejected him a few days before. She was the first to laugh, the first to hurl some disparaging and mocking comment, and the others had followed the lead, increasing Daryl's embarrassment. Scarlett was the first to break Daryl's heart and the young boy swore to himself she would be the last. Never again he would let himself to be so vulnerable, never again he would open his heart to anyone; he wouldn't lay it at a girl's feet again, senselessly waiting for her to stomp on it like Scarlett did. He would be stronger from now on. And Daryl kept his word.