my tears ricochet

Chapter Seventy Nine

And Ivy had been available. Ivy had been willing.

That was the problem with his daughter. She had learned to tolerate getting hurt. She was comfortable with the bruises that came with a near miss.

"What would you have done?" Rick asked Daryl, turning from the long stretch of road in order to properly face him. "If you were there and it was your kid and mine, what choice would you have made?"

"If it was your people or my brother, who'd you pick?" Daryl sneered lightly. He shoved the cigarette back into the empty box. "You making a habit out of this?"

Rick closed his eyes. Exhaustion lined his face like he was a man etched from granite. "I wish she hadn't been there. I wish it had been anyone else."

"But it wasn't." It was Ivy, it was his daughter on the line.

"We keep going. It's why we're here now. Those kids? Without them? We're the worst versions of ourselves."

"You got your happy ending. Carl woke up and he'll live," Daryl bit out. "My kid? She went against that alone because you needed a distraction."

"I made a bad call."

The remains of loyalty burned through his chest. Rick had covered Daryl, covered Ivy each thousands of times over the journey. He had gone into Woodbury once for her sake and then returned to drag him back out. The two men were tethered to each other in the miserable state of the world, invisible lines crossing back and forth.

In a different life, Daryl wouldn't have looked twice at Rick.

In this life, Rick was somebody.

"I'm gonna say this one time and you'd better listen," Daryl said. He forced the words out like a mouthful of bloodied nails. "Back in the beginning? Merle wanted to rob everyone blind. We all fell into each other at the quarry and he was seeing an opportunity to start getting ahead. Shit didn't play out in the end. But I would've gone with that bad call. I would've done it and I'd have felt it, but I'd have kept going. You and me? There's no more chances. There's no more room for error. My kid ends up dead because of you? I'll take yours out."

A line fractured.

But fractured bones could heal.

Fractured bones could heal if their owner kept smart. And Daryl only had the patience for one chance.

Rick was silent, bristling slightly at the promise. But the tension fell slack. Blue eyes met his and they were similar to the brightness of Merle's eyes. "I know you, Daryl. I knew what you were going to be. Lori saw it first back on the farm. But we've all seen it, we've all known it. You're not who you began this world as."

A single cigarette rattled in the box and Daryl felt his heartbeat echo that movement.

And then he frowned.

A man was standing on the road watching them.

.

Ivy's bag was sitting on the table. After her one and only attempt at running away, Daryl had made her unpack the bag before taking it to stash with his own possessions, keeping her from a repeat performance. She hadn't needed to go looking for it since. "What's this?"

"You're staying the night at Enid's. Pack your stuff."

She froze. "Where are you going to be?"

Daryl hadn't even bothered to kick his boots off at the door. He stepped around the table to grab the spare pistol she had taped to the bottom of it. Even since the attack on Alexandria by the Wolves, guns were present throughout the community.