Three Times Daryl Dixon heard the word useless, and the one time he didn't.

i.
His momma worked at the local diner, and would dress up fancy like them waiting folk. Pink dress with a little white apron; hair done up like a belle. He never saw her wearing anything else. She always looked like an angel, even with the Virginia Slim sticking out of her mouth leaking smoke across her eyes like a splash of paint.

She'd work until she came home with sore feet. Sometimes her hands were bleeding. She'd laugh it off and rub his bare and boney shoulders, and when his pa would come in she'd push him off to his room with a breathy sigh of smoke.

"Go an' cover your ears up, Daryl-baby," she'd always whisper.

And even with his ears covered he'd still hear his father yelling out something about useless whores and their no good babies.

ii.
The first time he goes hunting, his uncle takes him. He ain't like his pa. He's got a coldness to him that translates to silence. Lives and breathes and bleeds with the land, his pa always says, like a damn animal.

Daryl follows him out into the bush with wide and wild eyes. He steps on every twig or leaf; he stumbles through every ravine; he trips in every creek. His uncle never says a word, never turns and cuffs him around the ears to remind him to be quiet. He just keeps walking and looking and breathing.

"Why ain't he gotta gun?" Daryl had asked his mother once.

She had looked up at the rifle slung over their fireplace. His father's. "Your uncle thinks guns make a man violent."

When he had asked his uncle himself, the man had simply looked down at the boy. "They make a man useless," he said. "You need to have purpose if you hunt, boy. Just remember that."

iii.
His momma dies in her moo-moo. Not her pretty pink dress and her little white apron. Her hair is down — not done up like a belle. He has to phone Merle in prison and tell him. He's not even ten.

"Fire ate her up. Ain't nothin' left."

His father sat into the nights and drank himself to bed, muttering about useless whores leaving him behind.

iv.
Merle was alive. He had long accepted that the man was dead. Gone — dusted bones picked clean by the birds. Hell, maybe even a walker.

Daryl hadn't been thinking straight. He just wanted his brother back and damn the consequences; he just wanted the familiar, even if it was brutal and tough and cruel. But Rick had been standing there looking Daryl in the eye.

"I need you... are you with me?"

"Yeah."