First and Last

1/27

Daryl didn't like this. He didn't like it at all. He couldn't put his finger on why he didn't, though. Alexandria was heaven in that deadly world they now lived in. It was safe, it had sturdy walls, food and shelter. Yet Daryl didn't like it, he couldn't help but feel on edge, his body urging him to run away from the place.

It was too good. There had to be something hidden, something dangerous in that Alexandria heaven. It wouldn't be like that Terminus place, maybe the people in there might not try to turn them into food, but it couldn't be as good as it looked. They couldn't trust it, no matter the people in there seemed weirdly harmless and even a bit helpless to have survived the harsh world.

Aaron, though, the man who had found them and brought them to Alexandria, and his boyfriend Eric...they didn't seem that bad, they didn't make Daryl feel like they were hiding something. But he couldn't be sure. Their leader, though...Daryl didn't know what to think. He hadn't liked that stupid interview he had to do with her, feeling out of place and uncomfortable as shit. He didn't trust her and yet he couldn't really say that she was planning something to harm his people in some way.

Daryl knew they needed this, though. They had lost their home and most of their people, because he hadn't been able to find and stop the Governor. Then he managed to find his family again but lost Beth, let the girl die, broke her sister's heart again. They had been wandering since then, looking for shelter, another place where they could stay, finding nothing but death until now, until Aaron took them to Alexandria. They were dehydrated, unable to find water anywhere. They were starving as he'd been barely able to find anything to eat.

So, yes, they needed the place, strange or not. They had a baby with them, Judith needed it, the shelter, and the food, and the water, the protection, everything. The kid too, Carl. They deserved it. And so they would stay.

That didn't mean Daryl liked it.

If he was honest, it wasn't only him not trusting the place. It had more to do with how everything and everyone looked. Everything was too perfect, untouched by the world outside the walls. Big, expensive-looking houses, perfect green areas...it made him uncomfortable. The same happened with the people. They looked perfectly put together, as if they belonged in those houses, as if they had never stepped foot outside. They looked like the kind of people who'd take a look at Daryl, shake their heads and murmur their bullshit, or who'd laugh at him aloud, the kind of people who'd think him a good for nothing, who'd despise him.

It had been like that his whole life, in his old town, with people looking at him like that and gossiping their bullshit. Then in that quarry where he first met some of the people who were now his family...but he was painfully aware of what they had thought about him at the beginning, he knew the way in which they had looked at him, in a similar way that the people in his town did...these Alexandria people, they kind of looked at him like that too.

Daryl didn't care. Screw them. He had never cared. Let people talk and gossip all the shit they wanted...Yet he felt self-conscious and uncomfortable, he couldn't help it, he felt all eyes on him, he could almost hear their thoughts...he felt like crawling out of his skin, like running away...But the baby and the kid needed this, they deserved it, and his family needed it. Rick had decided they'd stay, and so Daryl'd deal with it.

Once all the interviews were finished and Deanna announced she allowed them to stay, she explained they'd be given housing, clothes, and food. But first, they had to give up on their weapons if they wanted to be allowed to stay in there, and so they were lead to a storeroom in which they had to leave their weapons in custody, the woman working there assuring them she'd take care of them and to not worry, Alexandria was safe and they wouldn't be needing the guns.