Hot Cocoa

You looked up from the white, cotton balls that you were trying to turn into convincing-looking snowflakes for the school's Christmas play that was coming by the end of the week, and through the window you saw Daryl Dixon walking towards the classroom.

"Look, your uncle is coming to pick you up."

Little Dixon looked up from the cardboard in which he was drawing the silhouette of angels and nodded, smiling, but he focused back on his work. He was quite an artistic kid, and quite good at that. When you had told so to his uncle, one of the times that he had come to pick him up, Daryl had blinked at you and then frowned, muttering that he didn't know where he got that from.

Little Dixon was a good kid, no matter that his life wasn't easy. You didn't know much, you were new to the town, having started working there that course, but you had heard the rumors about the Dixons. You knew that the mother of little Dixon didn't want to have anything to do with his father or even her kid, having dumped the baby on his father almost as soon as he was born, and she had fled. The father, Merle Dixon, didn't seem to be that much of a father figure either, apparently he was not only a drug addict but a dealer too, who had spent most of his son's six years of life coming and going from jail, where he was now, you hadn't had the chance to meet him yet.

And so, it seemed that Daryl Dixon, the kid's uncle, was pretty much his guardian, taking care of him. You heard people gossiping about him too, but for now, Daryl seemed like a decent enough person to you. You didn't know him much, he was a reserved person, but he was attentive and supportive to his nephew, and when he came to pick him up, he always helped you to clean the mess in the classroom before leaving.

You had started this extracurricular art activity a month after you started working at the school, realizing how many parents in that town were still working after their kids finished school, and so you stayed with them a little bit longer so they could wait for their parents there. Daryl was usually the last one to come, he seemed to work long shifts t the local garage, he always apologized for it, but little Dixon was a good kid. His life was rougher than it should be, so you liked to provide him with that moment to enjoy just making art and playing around. You knew that other kids used to bully and bother him, picking up what the townspeople gossiped about the Dixons, following that hateful example, but the ones who shared the extracurricular activity with him were starting to stop it and even working together with him sometimes, and you were proud that all the effort was bringing something good.

Your reasons were not entirely selfless, though, you had started the extracurricular activities with the idea of it giving you more points in your curriculum, with the hopes that you'd be able to get a job in a school in another town soon. You had gotten that job because nobody else had wanted to go to that small town in the middle of nowhere. You had thought that they were silly, but life in a small town where everyone knew each other since forever was proving to be hard. You were there since September, it was December now, and you still had no friends or acquaintances, people didn't seem to like you, nobody seemed to trust you, and even the other teachers didn't include you in anything they did or in their conversations. Considering your outsider life, you had soon realized that you didn't mind the extra hours that you did after school as much as you had thought you'd do.

"Good afternoon Daryl," you greeted when he walked into the classroom. "If it's still afternoon."

"Hey," Daryl greeted. "Yeah, sorry about the hour...are you ready to go, kid?"

"Can you wait? I want to finish this..." Little Dixon held up the cardboard angels that he was working on.

"Looks great, kiddo." Daryl nodded, taking one of the cardboard angels. "But we gotta go, it's gotten late and Y/N has a life outside this school."