Daryl Dixon Imagines

Gold

By darylcuddles on Tumblr

The colour of the early morning sky — peach-pink with a tinge of sickly yellow — was strikingly similar to the colour of my vomit, which rather artistically splattered the toilet bowl I was throwing up in.

  A pair of fists seemed to wrap painfully around my stomach, and the last of yesterday’s ‘dinner’ (half a can of beans and a stale energy bar) fell from my lips. I retched three more times, each time throwing up nothing but bile. The back of my throat burned, the inside of my mouth tasted acidic and my hands trembled where they weakly clutched the rim of the toilet.

  “Shit,” I said hoarsely. “Shit shit shit.”

  I’d missed a period. This was the third time I’d been woken by a need to throw up my insides. The only pregnancy test I needed was the ability to put two and two together. “Shit,” I said again, resting my flushed forehead on the cool toilet seat and cursing myself and the world I lived in. The group’s wounds, mine included, were still fresh after Lori’s death two weeks ago. The last thing we needed was another pregnancy, another baby. I shook my head violently, which made me vomit again, but at least the thought of a baby was gone from my mind.

  I took deep breaths, staying glued to the toilet for a few minutes to make sure that the vomiting was over, and then I clambered to my feet and walked shakily back to the cell that I shared with Daryl Dixon. Secretly, of course. Our relationship involved a whole lot of sneaking around: Daryl sneaking into my cell after the others were asleep and then leaving before they awoke in the morning, and vice versa. As far as I knew, none of them had so much as an inkling of what was going on between me and Daryl, what had been going on for months.

  I pulled the curtain of my cell aside and eased myself back onto the lower bunk, where Daryl was still dozing, his eyelids twitching a little, his face illuminated by the hazy light beginning to filter through the curtain. The top of the threadbare blanket was resting just below his nipples, and his chest rose and fell with his soft breath. Each exhale escaped through his slightly open mouth, the small puff of air the only sound in the cell: the only sound in the whole prison, to my ears.

  He mumbled sleepily as the mattress dipped with my weight. “Y/N?” His eyes stayed closed, but he reached out and draped his arm over my stomach, the pads of his fingers rough and warm on my skin. Small moments of affection like these were still few and far between, even though we’d been fooling around for so long. They mostly happened when Daryl was sleepy and/or drunk. I savoured every one of them like they were drops of liquid gold. I collected them in a jar for the goldless days when Daryl acted like I was a stranger. A stranger who slept in his bed, scattered kisses on his scars and whispered I love yous against his neck in the middle of the night. Daryl had difficulty with closeness, both emotional and physical, and I think sometimes he was overwhelmed by the fact that I cared for him, and he cared for me. He dealt with this in the only way he knew how: distancing himself.

  Daryl had attached his lips to my neck, and the palm of his hand pressed against my stomach lightly. My mind flooded with guilt and fear, numbing the tingling of pleasure that Daryl’s kisses brought. My heart pounded at a million beats a minute, and my breath shuddered as I threaded my fingers into Daryl’s hair and opened my mouth to speak.

  “Daryl,” I said weakly, twirling strands of his hair around my fingertips, trying to calm myself. My hands were still trembling, partly from the aftershock of my morning sickness, mostly from the almost nauseating trepidation that rippled through my body.

  “Mhmm,” he hummed against the sensitive skin of my neck. His lips trailed down and he grazed his teeth on my collarbone, making me shiver.

  “I n-need to tell you something,” I said hesitatingly.