The Fear (The Walking Dead / Daryl Dixon)

Chapter 12 - Finding Hope

You know that feeling when you wake up some mornings and you just know that it isn't going to be a good day? You just know that there is bound to be one, more than likely more, things that's going to go drastically wrong, like a feeling of being cursed for the day before you've even done anything?

Well that is exactly how I felt when I woke just before the sun had risen, inside a one man tent with another person next to me and one light blanket covering my body. Yes I remembered exactly what had happened the night before, but how it got to me actually sleeping in the tent instead of going back to the house I was a little fuzzy on, particularly in my still half asleep state. In fact, I'm not even 100% sure how we managed to even make it back to the tent, but anyway.

Discovering that Daryl was still asleep, thankfully, I quietly shuffled out from under the blanket, finding all my clothes except the oversized hoodie that appeared to have vanished (and by vanish I mean it was somewhere in the woods, but I wasn't going searching at this hour and I really just wanted to get back to the house before anyone else woke up).

On the way back down to the house I decided that I wouldn't go through the camp and instead found myself going the long way around, circling the house to enter through the back door to avoid any possibly awake people.

My hair was a mess, my clothes were crinkled something awful, a felt lightheaded due to a lack of a full nights sleep and an early rise and I was walking on my tiptoes.

I was doing the god damn walk of shame in the middle of the bloody apocalypse... on my own freaking property.

Thankfully there were very few floorboards in the house that creaked and I knew where they were so I got to my bathroom quietly where I would find a packet of morning after pills in the top draw. Unfortunately, my bathroom was actually a shared connecting bathroom between mine and Maggie's rooms and after I had taken the pill my still clumsy and groggy 4am-self knocked over the bottle of Listerine and caused a loud enough crashing sound to wake my sleeping sister.

"Kat?" A sleepy Maggie called from the other side of the closed door.

"Shit." I whispered, quickly picking up the bottle and placing it back on the table and then throwing the pill packet back in the draw and slamming it shut just as Maggie came into the bathroom. "Hey." I smiled casually.

"What are you doing?"

"Woke up early, was going to have a shower." I shrugged.

Her eyes flicked to the top draw and then back at me, obviously having seen me shut it as she was opening the door and I had slammed it pretty loud as well. Her eyes then scanned my clothes that were obviously the same ones I had worn yesterday. Well this was going splendidly.

"Carol said she sent you to try and convince Daryl to come back down to the camp." Maggie stated carefully and slowly with an almost half raised eyebrow.

"Yeah, she did last night. I, ah, couldn't convince him though."

"Right... well Shane brought Lori back, she took my car and crashed it." Maggie explained, not saying anything more of the Daryl matter.

"What?!" I quickly readjusted my tone, realizing that that was probably a little too loud. "Are you kidding me?!" I whispered yelled this time.

"Nope. And Rick, Glenn and dad aren't back yet." This was when my stomach turned and knotted. I hadn't really thought anything of it earlier. That's why I had agreed to go and talk to Daryl in the first place. Beth was recovering and Rick had gone to fetch dad. Nothing bad ever happened in town, nothing three men couldn't have handled anyway. I honestly thought if I went up to talk to him by the time I came back down they would be back and that was when I had just thought I'd be going up there for half an hour tops.