Authors Notes at the end

Some days he can pretend that the rest of them don't exist.

Deep in the woods, the air is still and thick with the smell of rot and growth and things that were dying to come back to life. It's as if there is no one else at all. Just the sigh of wind high overhead, leaves brushing over each other, the slow drip of rain, and the soundless breathing of the world.

If Daryl stops, tucks against a tree trunk and listens, he can hear the small things creep beneath the bark. They pay him no-never-mind as they crawl along, tending their own business and willing to let him do the same.

Nothing else there. Just him.

Just him and the trees and the leaves they dropped and the loam under the leaves and the things that ate leaves and shat loam and ate each other in a quiet, steady murmur. When he went into the woods, he slipped out of the world and the messy business of loud neighbors and broke-down trucks and his father's temper and the economics of finding enough change to buy gas to get to work. It was a kind of magic – he stepped into the brush and the rest of it went away.

If he found a hollow in the woods, and sat still, it was as though he slipped straight out of existence – slid sideways into some other universe, and all the rest of the world just forgot him. Went straight on breathing and blowing and growing, as if he wasn't even there anymore.

Sometimes, he could be the last person alive, anywhere.

It's too much to be asked, that he gets left alone. The whole group is so damn *needy*. Swallowing down all the food and spitting out bag after bag of trash, sucking down any game he brings in, eating up the night with their talking and fussing, chewing up his piece of mind with arguing and picking at each other. Every time he turns around, someone else wants him on their side for a spat about whose turn it is to stand watch, what they should eat next, if they should risk hauling water for laundry every other day or every third day.

As if he cares. He'll wash his own ass and his own clothes and he's not about to consult with anyone else about whether canned mustard greens are worth eating.

He starts snarling at everyone within eyeshot. It keeps most of them away.

It's a good day, when he can leave the quarry without anyone – even Merle – and step into the woods alone.

Those nine days, when he was out in the woods, and gradually getting used to the idea that he really was lost, that he didn't know where he was, and no one else did either, and worse, that this was actually a pair of bad things - those nine days, he lost track of how many different ways he imagined that he'd come home.

First that he'd follow his own tracks back. Then that he'd follow the moss on the side of the trees. Then that he'd find a stream and use that to guide himself home.

But he lost his trail – lost it, then found it, then fouled it all to hell and gone. Then he realized that the moss grew wherever it felt like growing – he stood for what must have been an hour, staring at three different trees, all with great emerald blankets spread over their sides, each one facing a different way.

It was near enough to make his eyes sting, bring his mouth to quivering. No matter how many times he looked at them, the three trees stayed the same. Even after he snatched up a limb and took to waling on the biggest one, right through the moss, until the green velvet sagged and flaked off and the branch broke under his hands.

So he gave up on trees, and found him a crick to follow.

By the time the stream petered out into a swampy bog full of flags, skeeters and snakes, he was wrung dry of tears. He sopped the sweat out of his eyebrows, picked his way back through the black muck to the cattail thick bank, and found a hollowed out cypress to crawl into.

When he woke up, it was dusk, the tree had pressed a mark into the side of his face, and the air was full of fireflies.

He lay there as the dark crept in, watching the bugs flicker in and out like stars, until he fell asleep again.

As they hustle out of Atlanta, leaving without his brother, running loaded with iron, with sweat falling like rain on the asphalt as they followed the white lines back to the quarry, fireflies dance in the edge of Daryl's vision.

He wipes at his face, shifts the bow strap on his shoulder, keeps running.

The little girl's mama – Carol – her face is tight and she holds herself like she would break if a strong wind came through. She hasn't stopped crying, really, since the walker attack. All the way across the camp, Darryl could hear her – a steady, wheezing hiccup. It's not like she was ever really pretty – grizzled hair cut dyke-short, pathetic stoop to her shoulders, tits saggy as an old cow – but with her eyes swollen and her nose red and dripping, she looks…shrunken. Leaky, like everything worth while has seeped away.

He hadn't thought she'd have the strength to raise the mattock once. The third time it comes down, there isn't much left of Ed's face. Daryl watches her swing the blade up again and thinks some ways of losing people are worse than others.

Two springs before the end of the world, a doe had led a pair of gawky dotted fawns through the trees, not a dozen yards from where he sat in a wild plum thicket, watching for turkeys. In a bank of ferns, she had nosed them all over, waited as they nursed and licked their heads until the young things tucked up their miles of long legs and settled down among the bracken. Daryl had sat, waiting, as the day wore on and the white petals drifted down.

Hours later, with the light gone gold and cold, the doe had come back, picking her way delicately through the brush. The fawns rose, stretching, and indulged in a brief spat of cavorting on twig-thin legs before nursing again. The doe stood watch, great ears spread, turning her head this way and that, eyes dark, lovely, deep.

Daryl waited until the quiet crackling of their passage had faded away. He was shivering as he hauled himself to his feet, and the prickles in his right leg as the circulation returned made his eyes water.

He carried the image of the doe's eyes home with him, tucked close and tight. When work got too be too much and his neighbors laughed too loud at the sitcom on the tv and the smell of unwashed dishes and milk-soaked dishrags and rotting beer dregs made his mouth taste like something dead, he shut his eyes and thought about that deer, and the way her gaze had slid straight over him, straight over and away, like a rock skimming over the surface of a pond.

He wonders if there will still be fawns in the spring. He heard somewhere that fawns didn't carry any smell, so that lions and wolves and bears couldn't find them and eat them, and so long as they stayed tucked down and silent, nothing would find them.

He doesn't know if it's gonna be the same for walkers.

Daryl never thought that he'd find anyone who pissed him off the way his old man would, and he still hasn't. Doesn't stop Hershel from finding a dozen different ways a day to get under Daryl's skin. High-handed, impossible to talk to, and never leaving off the way he frowns at everything anyone does. Old man walks slow, talks slower, has to pull out his glasses for fine work and takes as long to study at something as he does actually getting it done. Had it been up to Daryl, he'd have left the old man and his farm to rot.

And he will, too, soon as the stitches in his side close up. Hell if he's going to put himself in debt to the old man again.

The third day he spent in the woods - he'd about decided he wasn't lost, not really, just camping by himself for a while, and then changed his mind and thought he might be lost after all - that evening found him back at the hollow cypress.

The wind settled into stillness just after dark. Daryl went to sleep listening to the katydids sing and woke to find the world gone thick and pale. He crawled out of the hollow and just sat there, shivering a little in the damp.

A dragonfly came tottering out of the mist and settled on the leaf mold beside him. It cocked both big eyes at him. Dew settled onto the gauzy wings, one drop right over the dark spots that made it look like the dragonfly was carrying a backpack. The eyes and legs were black and shining, but the rest of the body was blue grey like the mist.

Then it was off again, buzzing away on whatever errands dragonflies had on foggy mornings.

The dew soaked his jeans to the knee before he'd gone a hundred yards, and it was past noon before his shoes dried out. Along the way he saw another dozen dragonflies, all the colors of every flower that ever was, none of them ever the same.

He watches Carl and Beth, half an hour from a freezing scrub-up in an ice-rimed creek, playing a near-silent game of tag around the sun-soaked boulders. They're the only thing that passes for kids among the group, and they rarely have enough energy to waste any on cutting up. But the sun is bright and almost warm, they had a pair of good-sized coons and three cans of pineapple crush to eat the night before, and from where Daryl is sitting watch, it's a good day.

He thinks about just walking away, some days.

It's a feeling so old and true that he could be ten again – ten years and five weeks, fourth grade, fourteen days into July, when the blackberries were nodding on the bushes and the rabbits thick in the grass and time went on for always.

It could be. He could.

Just stand up and head out, keep on going and never look back.

It's not his damn job, to look after the women folk. Hell, by this point, most of them can take care of themselves. And for what else needs doing, they got Glenn and Hershel.

And Lori's got her own damn husband.

His point is, he's looking after the whole group, not anyone in particular. Let Lori play favorites with her boy and Glenn with Maggie and Maggie with her little sister. Daryl's not getting involved in that crap.

So when he stops on the way off the back porch steps and puts a knife through the eye socket of the walker in overhauls, it's just so he has a handful of seconds to reach back inside and snatch the last bolt out of the pantry door. And it was just an accident that he jerked open the pantry. And of course the box of ritz was right there, and he could snatch that up and run, right? No big deal.

It was a waste of good rations when she kept puking up everything, is all. And she kept getting slower. He's tired of waiting on them. That's all.

Seven or eight days in the woods- some time around then - the heat settled in and brought every sort of biting thing with it.

When the thunderstorm first rolled up, it was cool air and the skeeters taking off and the best part of a day that had sucked pretty badly so far. Made it so he picked up his head, shuffled along a little faster – never mind that he had no idea, not a one, where he was going – until he found another patch of blackberries. He wandered on, afterwards, sucking at a thorn through the purple juice on his thumb, thinking this aint so bad, really.

That lasted for maybe half an hour, until the downdrafts started feeling like ice water on his skin, and the rumbling thunder broke closer and closer.

The hail bounced straight through the trees and stung his shoulders. Daryl gave up on huddling under the magnolia when rain followed the ice balls and soaked him good and proper. He lit out when the lightning came down right beside him – no lie, he'd swear forever that the bolt hit within an armreach beside him – and ran as fast as he could, water lashing at him as he dodged through the small pines, ran until the breath came harsh in his throat and the storm finally out ran him and plunged onward, chasing the last of the blue sky.

Daryl lay on the wet needles and shivered until the thunder no longer echoed in his head.

They're stuck in the house, eight walkers at the front door, five at the back, and it would be worth the ammo to clear them out if a herd of forty-fifty head hadn't wandered past less than twenty minutes earlier. So it's time to think outside of the box.

Truth be told, it was the chinaman's idea, but once he had explained, Daryl took it and ran. Up through the attic access to the ventilation grill, strip down the mesh screen and then quietly wedge the grill itself off the outer wall. Hang out, settle the coil of clothesline over his shoulder, get a damn good grip on the roof edge and heave himself up. Then it was as simple as crawling over the roofline – or as hard, as T- Dog didn't wiggle nearly as well as others – and slipping to the back corner of the house, where the shed made a protected L around a set of French doors and a high hedge that gave them a straight shot for the vehicles.

If one of those walkers'd started chewing on Merle's bike, Daryl was gonna be pissed.

The roof sat steep back there, to pour the rain straight down to the deck, which was plenty crowded with just three walkers. Daryl slung the rope over them easy enough, but he couldn't have hauled them up and stuck them by himself. T-Dog's arms rippled like black snakes on a limb as he pulled the rope up hand over hand until their skulls were within reach.

They dumped the last of them over the ridgeline and sank down together against the chimney, listening to the walkers on the front side groan and mumble at the disturbance.

"Just like pigs," Daryl said, sniggering into his shirt collar. He'd caught a pair of feral shoats like that one year, him and Merle, and damn if they hadn't been good eating. It had been a good day, one of the best.

Now T-Dog just gave him a blank look. An empty hole opened up inside Daryl. For a moment he teetered on the edge of it.

"Hey, guys!" Glenn hissed, down on the deck. "We are leaving!"

"Hold yer damn horses, gook," Daryl said, and slugged T-Dog in the arm. "Co'mon. Race you down."

Some days, still, he wants to pretend that he's the only one.

They're noisy, they stink –

And yeah, maybe he smells a bit, too, but there's only one of him, isn't there? –

-they're greedy, they're blind, and they find every single last one of his nerves and stomp on them all with great huge lugged boots.

He catches himself, sometimes, pouring over his list of grievances – the jokes he'll never be able to tell, because none of them think nigger jokes are funny and none of the guys will laugh at his dirty jokes around the women. That nothing any of them ever caught tasted near as good as the squirrels he roasted himself. The extra miles he had to put on, moving ahead of the group's slow creeping progress and then back again, because the men wouldn't push the weaker ones into moving faster. Hershel's tight lipped prudish nature. Carl spending every day proving he's a bigger idiot than any three normal kids. Carol watching Daryl all the time, with big eyes like her daughter's. Maggie's suspicious glare any time he looked sideways at Beth – and Beth's skittish, flighty nervousness, as if he could pop her cherry just by nodding at her. The spear-chucker's gross bulk and fat greedy fingers. The way Daryl could swear he could smell fish on the chinaman's breath, clear across the clearing. The lawdog's woman's pinched mouth weakness. That Rick had lost Daryl his brother.

That, most of all.

He goes off in the woods by himself, and does, and still can, better than any of them. But the woods are different now. The sounds changed, in the days after the start of the end of the world. First the deer went more quiet, then the litt'ler critters. Now, the birdsongs are quieter.

Even the mockingbirds don't holler like they used to.

Some days, it's even better than it ever was. He's not the most dangerous thing in the woods, and the sense of danger makes the breeze sweeter, the colors brighter, adds a melody to the rustling rhythm of leaves. He breathes deeper, finds himself smiling more, tasting the freedom and the hum of risk in his blood, the knowledge that all this, too, could be gone – unless he was careful, unless he was good.

Some days are like that. Those, he thinks sometimes, those are the best.

Other days – when he is tired, when it's been three days without a kill, when they've had another close call and another opportunity for the group to demonstrate just *exactly* how screwed they would be without him – other days he wishes like hell Merle was around.

He wants his brother at his back – to know that there is someone stronger than him, as tough as him, as good as him – someone he can depend on.

But Merle's gone, and it's Rick's fault, and some days, Daryl just can't let go of that.

Past January, maybe mostly past February, they're not really sure. The days are longer, but the weather's no warmer. If anything, the mud and rain get worse.

It snows on them five, maybe seven times, depending on who was counting which flurries of frost flakes. The woods are more silent now, the walkers gone slower and stupider and more likely to just stand in one place, rocking.

T-Dog guesses that it has something to do with the cold. Hershel opines that it's the length of time since the outbreak, that after all this time the bodies are just finally beginning to fall apart.

Daryl puts a bolt through the skulls of three walkers and finds the bone just as tough as its ever been. When he jerks the bolt out, the head comes apart with a crunch like the sound of footsteps on hoarfrost, and nearly as satisfying.

He tracks the last one that way, following the melting drag marks through the crystallized red dirt, and walks back in its footsteps afterwards, heading back to the road where Rick and Maggie are sucking gas out of an abandoned station wagon.

It was the most godawful mess he'd seen in five months – and with this crowd, that was saying something. Shrieking turkeys scattering everywhere in the pre-dawn light, the hard-flung net reaching up, up –

- and then crashing down again, Carl flopping on top of it and with not a single bird beneath, Daryl's first shot flying off into no-place and Glenn darting after one tom right in front of his sights for the second one, three other people screaming louder than the turkeys –

- and Maggie, long legged Maggie sprawled out on the ground, pinning something that flopped and hollered and beat at the dirt and Maggie's hair and pecked at her face until Daryl and Glenn and Carol and Carl all threw themselves over her and one of them got a hand around its neck and twisted the tough stalk.

A hen, of course. Daryl spat and sighed and shoved himself out of the heap. He stood there, rubbing the back of his head and scowling as the rest of them untangled themselves – a hen, damnit. Granted, turkeys were tough, and it was early for her to have started laying, but still – he spat again and stomped off to find his lost bolt.

When he came back, Maggie was still lying on the turkey, claiming she still felt it wiggling, I'm not letting it get away! Around her, Carol, Glenn and Carl stood snickering like idiots.

"Girl," Daryl started to say, then gave up and bent over her. "Lookit here," he said. "Listen to me, turn your damn head," when she kept her chin ducked down away from the front end of the turkey. After she finally flopped her head around and shook her hair clear, Daryl showed her where he was pinching the mottled flesh between thumb and forefinger. The head flopped loose as snot, nothing but skin holding the noggin to the rest of the bird. "You can get up now. Ain't going no where."

He stepped back and snatched up his crossbow as Maggie rolled upright, cradling the hen tight to her chest. The rest of them were still laughing into their hands.

"Jesus," Daryl said, "what kinda farm girl are you, don't know what a bird does when you wring its neck?" She scowled at him but took the hand he extended to haul her to her feet.

Daryl slung his bow and headed back to where they'd left the others and the vehicles at the edge of the old corn field.

Walkers came out of the treeline before they were halfway there, of course, and they finished the last hundred feet at a dead run, with no time but to throw Carl and the turkey in the Suburban and the rest pile into the Jap car while Daryl stomped the Triumph into life.

Nine hours later, Glenn was still re-telling the story for the benefit of those who hadn't been trapped driving with him all day, as Carl's version seemed to have been somewhat garbled. Daryl sat by the door and waited for his butt to stop quivering from the rattling motor. Against the service counter, the hacked up bird simmered in their biggest pot. Shame to treat the turkey like that, but most of what they ate any more was soup of some kind.

Another round of quiet laughter around the group, not even echoing off the walls of the drycleaner shop. Daryl craned his neck to look out the front door again – parking lot still quiet, still empty – and when he turned back Maggie was in front of him, sunk down on her heels.

She held out her hand, fist clenched around a handful of feathers.

"This is all the long ones that weren't broke. I'm sorry most of em got ruined." She gestured again with the feathers. "Here, for your arrows."

Daryl sighed. "Thanks." The blades bent under his touch, sprang back as he ran his fingers along the edges. The quills were in pretty sorry shape, but he really hadn't expected any different.

"Next time, we'll do better. Be quieter." She sounded chipper and hopeful. It was infectious – Daryl actually found himself considering trying again, with a bigger net.

He scowled back at her grin. "And not lay on top of the damn thing for an hour, okay? Save that for Glenn."

For a second her face froze. Daryl's jaw clenched. Then the smile was back, wide and wicked, and she slapped the side of his boot as she rose. "You bet." She swaggered back her place by Glenn, squeezed her father's hand and tucked her chin against Glenn's shoulder.

Daryl rummaged around for his little knife and the fletching string. No sense waiting to lose all the light.

The morning after the thunderstorm, every inch of him still wet, he followed a set of hound tracks - a pack of them, pug marks clear and sharp in the mud - to a firebreak, and from there to a powerline right of way, and then down to Route 219, three miles from the Shell station. He stepped out on the asphalt and headed straight for the house, the woods at his back.

The next weekend, with two candy bars and a single blade pocketknife, he went back.

The sky had been sullen and grey for three days of increasingly pissy weather that left them all cold and shivering and miserable. But by the end of the day the front started clearing off. The sky to the west went blue and blue-green and yellow-gold and then the setting sun reached out and set the underside of the clouds ablaze.

Daryl leaned against the frame of the open barn loft, perched twenty feet off the ground, and tugged his poncho closer. The wind was sharp, whistled as it blew past the shattered windows on the east side. The glass had been grimy and all but impossible to see through. Now he had two windows and the door, and the whole of the front approach of the barn under his eyes. The vehicles were parked down stairs, out of the weather and out of sight, but facing out, ready for when they left.

Glenn had the back, where a mass of catbriar and blackberries would slow down any walkers. Between Glenn and the brambles, the back was good.

The hay bales stacked behind him were a good windbreak for the rest of the loft, kept it snug. The wind was fresh in his face, damping down the sound of the group behind him as they settled in. He could barely hear T-Dog snoring – rolled up in his blankets and catching a few hours sleep before he relieved Daryl at the front. Five hours wasn't much, but T could handle it. Better than Daryl, sometimes.

A series of clicks and metallic whines – can openers, working on the haul they'd found two days before. Taps as they scooped cold what-ever-it-was into bowls that had been washed – well, they'd been wiped pretty good - the day before. He caught snatches of conversations – Carl had found something interesting (of course) hanging on the barn wall and now Maggie and Carol were trying decide if it was worth the weight to bring with, or if they could dump something already in their packs. Not ammo, Beth said, breaking in, and Maggie answered, of course.

Rick was likely nearly asleep, leaning back against the wall. Lori, too, on a deep pile of hay. Someone would make sure they had a blanket over them.

Someone would leave a bowl by the foot of Daryl's bedroll, another bowl tipped over to keep out the dust, and a ragged cloth draped over it all. If he turned his head, Daryl thought, he would probably see Carol at it now, tucking the towel ends in.

He didn't have to.

The sunset slowly faded away, rose drifting into grey, leaving the fields layered in darkness.

Rick's hand clasps his, and pulls Daryl to his feet, slaps his shoulder and goes on to the walker thrashing in the leaves, trying to pull free of the bolt pinning its shoulder to the log. The half-rotten log gives first – the walker is new, not hardly decayed at all – and is halfway to its knees before Rick's blade parts its hair. Daryl grins at the way the walker reacts – a sudden stop, almost a blink, as if it had just gotten the shock of its undead life – and Rick is grinning back when he turns back around. Two men, hunting things, doing it right.

The rain comes down slow and steady, drips on the discolored sidewalk in front of the bookstore. They propped a sheet of roof tin against the window, to help keep the cold out, and the rain rattles on the tin like it used to on the trailer they lived in, south of Macon, years ago.

Daryl makes a tooth pick from a bit of paper torn out of a trashy romance, uses it to fight after a bit of old peanut skin stuck between his back teeth. Two days, and it's still there, no matter how he worries at it. Maybe if we'd had something to eat in the last day and a half... The paper cuts at his gums, makes his mouth water with the copper taste of blood. He scowls at the pink stain on the paper scrap before tossing it aside.

Outside the street is still empty, aside from the corpses of two walkers they had hit on their way into town. Just those two – the town is little more than a blinking yellow light, a gas station, two bars and this bookstore. It has nothing to offer them but four – three and a half – walls and a roof.

The woods are breaking with new buds and muted birdsong, but it is still March, still sopping wet, still cold.

They're all thinner. They're all still alive.

Daryl tears another bit of paper out and watches dusk settle in.

Sometimes, he dreams that the rest of them don't exist. Just him, walking alone in the woods, wearing a cloak of maidenfern and a hat of catfish skins.

(The catfish hat keeps away the walkers. It's his own damn dream, but he doesn't write the dream rules and he can't keep the walkers out of it. Just, the hat works. He knows it does.)

He walks alone, fern-festooned sleeves brushing against sprays of Cherokee roses and wisteria, following a pair of possums as they waddle down the trail ahead of him. The brush opens up, and the possums turn into herons and spread grey-blue wings as they take off across the lake. They circle around, eyeing his hat, and then they show their true forms and are dragonflies as they circle again and leave.

And then he wakes, in the darkness after the fire has burnt down, and the camp is silent, and it's as though he's alone, as if the rest of them had woken in the night, gathered their bedding, and slipped away.

For a pair of shuddering heartbeats, he's alone.

Then someone coughs, the watcher shifts position and crunches leaves underfoot, and Daryl's eyes pick out the forms huddled beneath blankets – one, two, three, moonlight on grizzled close-cut hair, five, two bodies lying close together in a single set of blankets, the watch, nine. And him, which makes ten.

He breathes in, breathes out. Lays back down again, watching the moon drift through the branches over head.

(Catfish skin cap? Christ, he's glad Merle will never hear about that one.)

Someone coughs again. He'll have to remember to remind Rick that they need to get some more medicine, next town. Tomorrow.

The moon blazes bright and makes the whole woods shine, throws liquid silver over the world. In the morning they can gather it up, be rich as kings. Maybe silver would work on zombies like on shape-changing werewolves. Vampires. Something.

Jesus. Werewolves and hats of catfish skins and silver dripping off the moon. If this is food poisoning from that dodgy stuff they got from the gas station's storeroom, he's going to have to beat the hell out of Glen.

Tomorrow.

The woods are deep, dark, and lovely beneath the moon. Daryl thinks about staying awake, just to watch it for a while. But tonight he doesn't have watch, and tonight he ate, and tomorrow they all have stuff to do. He tugs the blanket closer, breathes out, and slips out of the world again.

*end*

Title: Miles to Go

Characters: Daryl Dixon, ensemble

Summary: Some days, he can pretend that the rest of them never existed.

Words: 5K

A/N: Set mostly during the winter after Beside the Dying Fire (S2/hiatus). Not mine. They were broken when I found them. (They were *so* broken, all I can think of is ways to try to make them more whole. And that's saying something.) Title is from Robert Frost. Thanks to Flora for beta & encouragement.