Chasing Amy (Daryl Dixon/The Walking Dead)

Chapter 54 - Weakness

Daryl would have never expected to be standing above her grave...

Amy's grave.

A part of him didn't really see it as the final, foreboding, object he knew it to be...

A hard reminder poking out of the dirt, above the remains of the deceased. A reminder that, at any moment, this could be him, lying in the dirt.

There was nothing in this world more final or harrowing than the sight of a grave dug in the dust. He'd seen them too many times, dug most of them for the past group members himself.

He was familiar with them.

For Daryl, right at that moment, coursing through the space between himself and the dust, was a hollow feeling...

Devoid of grief, sorrow, desperation.

He felt like he should have been more upset. He'd noticed when the others watched his features, they expected him to feel worse after Amy's disappearance, waited for some kind of breakdown in Daryl's flaring temper of late.

He was a man who had learnt to trust his gut, his brain, over anything - anyone - else... But he was struggling to decipher what exactly his gut was telling him as he stood above this one particular grave.

In the most inexplicable way, it just didn't feel real.

And Maybe he didn't feel anything because he was so accustomed to shoving his emotions somewhere deep inside his mind...

Maybe he didn't feel anything because it was just an empty grave, with no ties to the person it belonged to.

Maybe it was because a tiny portion of his gut knew, knew, she was still out there, alive.

However, the last time he'd trusted his gut, Daryl found himself searching for a little girl who was long dead.

His eyes flickered to the grave exactly beside Amy's, which belonged to Carol, the other woman whose fate was unknown... Assumed dead.

The survivors remaining in that cell block had assumed one thing about Daryl; he was grieving.

But, strangely enough, after the night he'd just had, lying in the dark without the presence of one Amy Wilson, Daryl had come to his own conclusion...

If she wasn't there with him; she wasn't alive, nor dead.

The thing was, that with everyone around him persistent in their attempts to find the two women, Daryl couldn't help but feel that aching sense of déjà vu...

And it made him less and less willing to back into those corridors, those tombs, less willing to go on another search that would ultimately leave him either physically or emotionally exhausted, and with an answer that had a larger chance of ending with death than life.

If she wasn't with him, she wasn't dead.

But she wasn't alive, either...

Daryl just wasn't sure he wanted to find out which she truly was.

Because, now, finally faced with the opportunity to find the young woman, he found himself cursing all of the times he'd told her she was a waste of time... That she was stupid, that she'd never make it.