Ivy wasn't moving.
The night was dying young and he couldn't see any reaction from the girl against the wall; just another a shadow in the darkness.
"Open the damned gate," Daryl snarled, yanking it with rage. The headlights from their truck illuminated enough of the scene to set every nerve in his body on fire, livid with fear. They couldn't tell if Ivy had been hit with one of their bullets or had gone down by a walker, but she wasn't moving.
A wall stood in his way.
A yard of death stood in his way.
"Hey, move it!" Abraham snapped. He shoved Daryl backwards with hands strong enough to force him into shifting away from the metal gate, strong enough to catch a fist when he tried swinging. "We'll ram the front door down. Move it, Dixon."
Alexandria looked bad.
He had imagined the worst when they heard the distant shriek of a horn, losing half their entourage in the process. But Ivy had gotten a hold of a radio, had told him everything was holding up, that she was waiting for him to get back.
But then they had been shot at and separated, Daryl delayed by strangers in the woods. Every second was wasted as he tried to reroute and redirect, losing control of the situation entirely.
Glenn was picking walkers off with the artillery weapons from the top of the truck, focused on clearing the park wedged along the wall. Maggie and Beth were barely visible from the look out platform and fear was a tight string that connected every single person in their little unit. Abraham had Rosita somewhere, Glenn could only see Maggie and Beth, and Daryl just needed to get to his daughter.
"Hey!" Tyreese barked, swinging his hammer hard as he jogged down one end of the street with Sasha. They cut a smaller path together and covered each other neatly, bright with frantic energy. "We got this."
"Well, I'll be damned," Abraham said, forcing grim amusement into a mix. "Maybe this place isn't ready to roll over and die yet."
His expression looked manic in the harsh lights of the truck and Daryl wondered if it was a match for his own.
Sasha covered Tyreese as he unlocked each of the locks on the gate. Most of the walkers were tighter near the heart of the community but the outskirts of the swarm were visibly pulling in their direction. Once Tyreese managed to open enough space, Daryl slipped through and sprinted across the pavement to get to the park.
Carefully designed plant beds had been torn apart. Their gunfire left the walkers in a heap of twisted bodies, something for his feet to stumble over as he closed the distance to where Ivy had slumped down tight against the wall. Something moved at her feet and Daryl drove his foot down in a hard stomp, crushing the skull of a partially stunned walker before it could revive itself.
He slid to his knees. "Are you bit?" Daryl demanded, roughly grabbing onto her hands and yanking, ignoring her attempts to pull back. "C'mon, answer me, damnit!"
It didn't matter that Ivy wanted to fight him off of her. Daryl was bigger. He was stronger.
He was fuelled by sheer desperation that she was never going to win against.
The darkness consumed both of them and Ivy let out a half-scream as Daryl forced her away from the wall and towards where it was easier to see. The truck was still running, headlights cutting a hard line of light. "Enough," Daryl snapped at her. His hands yanked her one arm out and he tried to check for bite marks. "I ain't tell you twice, Ivy Dixon. Settle down for a minute."
There was enough light to see by to tell that she hadn't been clipped by a stray bullet. But the light only illuminated how dark her skin and clothes were from blood, how gore painted her from head to toe. Daryl needed to know more, his fingers tracing up her arms as he tried to feel for any damage.
"Is she clean?" Abraham barked as he dispatched one of the walkers ambling up towards them with greedy, glazed eyes. It hit the ground and stayed down. "What's the situation?"
Daryl didn't know.
He forced her forward, twisting her arm slightly to inspect her shoulder. Ivy made a low sound of pain and Daryl flinched, knew that he was hurting her but was incapable of stopping. Impatience and desperation ruled him entirely.
Daryl couldn't be gentle when rage was burning hot through his veins.
The night had turned his daughter into a chalk outline filled with violence. Daryl checked the other arm briskly and held her back as she strained towards him—
Rage extinguished instantly.
His grip softened and Ivy hooked her arms around his neck and clung without saying a single word. The chalky taste of fear still flooded Daryl's senses but he took a moment to get his own arms around her, his palm catching on back as he kept her from knocking over. "I'm here," he managed to say properly, wrangling the irrational part of his mind that counted her ten fingers, counted each shuddering breath into proper submission. "I've got you now."
Her arms were clear of any bites. Her jeans, minus the knees, looked largely intact. Whatever the damage was, amputation wouldn't be in the cards for the evening.
Daryl just had to finish picking up the pieces. He had to centre himself knowing that he still had a job to finish.
His heart jolted when he felt skin beneath his hand. Ivy grimaced against his shoulder and straining slightly to escape that touch where it hurt.
Something had torn the back of her shirt.
"I don't know," Daryl called to Abraham as he scooped her up easily from the blood soaked ground, admitting every single fear running circles inside his skull. "Let's just get this done."
The world felt small in his arms.
"Just... give me a gun. I'm out of bullets," Beth demanded with a hand outstretched to Glenn. "I can stay with her."
Ivy's skin was cool to the touch. They had maybe hours to clear Alexandria enough to give her space to go down quietly and with some comfort if she was bitten. And, if fortune aligned itself to every single hope in Daryl's desperate soul and Ivy wasn't bit, he needed to clear the danger to start mending the damage.
"Get up in the truck," Daryl ordered with a savage bite, jerking towards where it sat. Glenn got the door open and helped Beth mount the height, scrambling up onto the seat. When she vanished back he moved forward, lifting her up before faltering for a moment.
He didn't know how to put her down. It felt like laying her down in a grave. But his arms managed, gently getting her upright on a seat, loosening her fingers from where they caught on the material of his shirt stubbornly. "I'm coming back, sweetheart. Just sit tight for a moment."
Ivy was a born runner so he had Beth hit the child safety locks and tested the door himself before backing away and reaching for the nearest weapon. Gun fire tore up at the night and Abraham shoved towards it, a wolf leading a pack into the sea of the undead.
His body ached from wiping out across pavement earlier but Daryl didn't falter. He caught one walker with a hard blow to it's face before shooting it, drive three back before peppering them with bullets. Maggie caught the rogue one trying to catch him on the side and clipped it hard with her own weapon, driving it off direction. "Watch your back," she snapped as she executed it. "Don't get distracted yet."
Ivy could be infected.
Ivy could be infected and turning in a locked vehicle with her best friend holding a gun.
He was endlessly distracted but Daryl couldn't let up for a second. The street was turning into a graveyard and he merely finished up business. They only had one shot of taking back the remains of Alexandria and his thoughts were trying to drown him; distracting him as he bashed a skull in at the spot where Ivy picked flowers, at the spot where Ivy skinned her knees, at the spot where Ivy liked reading the most.
They were a long way from that rundown house in the middle of the woods. Their roots stretched across the entire community and he felt them grab at him blind.
Light flared from across the distance and they kept driving into the undead. His rage was mere grief. He saw the diner stretch wide and Ivy sit alone at the table with every single person they had ever lost.
One walker turned towards him with an outstretched arm. Her blonde hair was matted in thick clumps and grey skin peeled in places like paper. The body had been small and claw marks tore down her chest like something had attempted to rip straight through her ribcage and into her heart.
That girl hadn't survived the hurt.
Her hunger was mere gravity and Daryl tried to be kind as he shot her down, a single bullet severing that black life haunting the body.
Glenn tripped over a body on the ground and he caught him on instinct, reaching for the man with one hand meant to support. They never felt so far from Atlanta and Daryl remembered those early days, the thorns lodging themselves into their souls as their world crashed and burned around them.
He had hated everyone alive.
And then Ivy brought bits of life back into his soul, set him on a different road.
Daryl had recognized Ivy because she had been hurting. He would have known her anywhere because of it.
Bullets broke the night into pieces and Daryl shifted through the ruins, killing on reflex just to get to the end of the journey. Rick's house stood out of the gloom, Deanna's home. The porch where Abraham smoked cigars because Rosita disliked the smoke, the park bench he retreated to for comfort.
He looked at the entire world and saw everything he could ever love in it.
People were on the other side of the herd and they were pressing in tight, slashing and fighting against death. Abraham dropped his gun and barrelled through a loose net of walkers to get to the slender form of Rosita, the woman driving her machete straight down through the skull of a walker before jerking back, retreating to pick a new target.
He caught her blindside and threw a body into a picket fence. It caught the sharp wooden edges and stayed down, arms thrashing in discomfort while it struggled. "Don't you dare stop," Abraham ordered as he took a stance at her left, swiping a fist out and knocking a body backwards.
Rosita barely spared him a glance. "Don't—" she bit out, kicking a knee in before swinging hard, "tell me what to do."
But her hand still reached out for him when Abraham staggered, slightly off balanced from one attack.
Her light burned and his fire caught wild, a match for each other. They kept moving in sync, dance partners playing an old sport, comfortable in the motion of hacking and slashing.
The people of Alexandria were mixed amongst their people and Daryl felt as they took back inches of their space, unrelenting as they kept rushing towards the herd. Maggie was between him and Glenn and they formed a tight triangle together, a hazy memory of the conquest of a prison yard blooming in the background of his memories.
Walkers gnashed their teeth and Daryl made them go silent.
Stars started to burn out and he saw every demon he ever knew- his father and his brother together, Joe's wild men, Phillip, the people he had grown up knowing to avoid, the people who had failed him. They were nothing and yet they died again and again, tricks of the shadows and nights, rotting teeth failing against the rage that never died.
He had a job to finish.
Daryl forced the diner doors to close tight. Bone splintered from the force of it. Blood smeared across the ground, soaking deep into the roots.
Glenn covered Maggie, Maggie covered Daryl, and he was already turning to cover Glenn's side. The light touched his family even in the darkness, bright enough that he could touch it.
In another universe they would all sit across the kitchen table from each other and Daryl would never lose a single thing again.
The last star died alone and Daryl stood above a wasteland of death.
.
"She went down," Rick said, hoarse. "Outside of Jessie's. We were surrounded by walkers and they got her."
Daryl froze. His knife had fallen from his grip and he had started to turn back in the direction of the gate. "What?"
"Ivy. I had her and I lost her."
His brain went white hot as Daryl processed the sheer distance from Jessie's home to the gate itself. "How'd you lose her?" The words came out slick like a snake and he remembered how tight Ivy's spine had been pressed against the wall. That catch of her scream right before he ever saw her pinned without a bullet left to her name. "How?"
Michonne's eyes were glassy as she cut around Rick, blood dripping from her sword.
"We... we went out in the herd. They were going to tear the damn door down and we dressed up in their guts to try and make it out."
Daryl had told Ivy to hide. Daryl had promised her that he would find her.
"It was just a chain reaction. They got Jessie first before her kid. Carl got shot in the process... Ivy went after."
It was a sick pattern that Daryl kept catching himself in. First Merle took the hit on a rooftop and somehow Daryl lost him twice.
He wouldn't lose Ivy.
"We found her," Maggie cut in, neatly sliding between him and Rick. "She made it all the way to the wall by the gate. Her daddy got her just in time."
New pain shot through his chest and Daryl let Maggie draw the line on his behalf, storming across the streets as he tried to process his daughter's desperate flight alone, flinching at the sight of ragged remains left for the sun to warm. His grip the entire drive away from the quarry had been white knuckled and tense, and Daryl had the sheer luxury of being able to outpace the herd. He had Glenn and Abraham driving at his side for a fallback option.
Ivy had been on foot in the middle of the chaos.
And she had been fighting with teeth and nails, screaming at the walkers as they cut her off from every direction.
The streets were a bloodied ribbon of endless violence and Daryl followed his daughter's passage and tried to blink away the illusions his traitorous mind drew up. Glenn rushed to catch up and Daryl bristled from impatience, kicking one body out of his way. "Stop thinking what you're thinking," Glenn warned him as he dogged at his heels. "Shut up. It's not helpful."
She wouldn't want to die. A girl who spent a lifetime fighting wouldn't want to go down easy.
It would break him apart to watch.
"I don't know if she's bit," Daryl snapped at him, kicking the crooked looking skull of one walker on the ground.
She had been painted in violence. The blood needed to come off first to know any better.
"This day? It's just starting. That's what Hershel always said. So stop being stupid and give yourself a minute," Glenn warned him. "This could turn to shit and you need to be ready for it. But, it could also be fine."
They had an illusion of a great day once. And then Phillip had knocked on their door and killed Hershel for a little showman's trick. And Ivy had been gone, vanished, lost for weeks while he scavenged for footprints with nothing.
"I'm alright," Daryl grunted, holding himself together.
Ivy had been running on foot against a sea of the undead. The distance made his bones ache.
But then he saw the park and the gate, their truck sitting parked exactly where it had been left. Daryl stepped across a purse with a rotting strap and over the grass, devouring distance, devouring space. A walker was clawing futilely at the door and he grabbed it by the neck and bashed it hard against the metal surface, bone cracking as easily as an egg would.
Black, watery blood smeared across the surface and he let it all drop away.
Beth fumbled for the lock and Daryl was grasping it hard, swinging it open and raising his arms for his daughter. Ivy went easily, silent, her feet hitting the ground for a mere second before being picked up again with her arms automatically locking around his neck. "Let's get you home," he said, blinking away the wreckage. "Just a little further."
Ivy had zero awareness for the entire world but it was okay. Daryl had her. They left Glenn and Beth behind and continued home together, the pair equally tense, burnt out from a lifetime of fighting.
She stayed eeirly compliant as Daryl carried her across the streets of Alexandria, numb to the carnage scattered everywhere. The sun was bleeding colour across the horizon as it rose; bright passion amongst the depth of chaos, first light a mere flare to follow home. "Keep your eyes shut for a minute," he instructed her as he looped around a pile of bodies sprawled out in a pile.
It's frivolous trying to protect her from seeing the face of death. Ivy was already familiar with it. Ivy had been baptized in it's blood during his absence. It shouldn't matter anymore but Daryl still turned slightly, angling himself to shield his precious cargo from seeing any more of it.
The streets were empty of animated walkers but Daryl kept a wary eye out for any movement as he drew closer to the apartment, trying to centre himself on the feeling of Ivy breathing, the slight motion of her ribcage beneath his hand. A few people moved in the distance but they kept going alone, the pair of them fused together by blood.
One small blessing was that the walkers had been pulled back from the street level door to their apartment. Several of them were sprawled out over the ground in the tattered remains of the their clothing and he had to walk carefully over the mess just to make it to the door, adjusting his hold for just a second to force it open.
Someone had managed to hit the main power grid and everything was turned back on. Dull light burned from the fixtures and it was a relief to work his way up the stairs without competing with the darkness. "Almost there. C'mon. You're almost home," Daryl murmured, setting her down so he could pull the key out from his pocket and unlock their door. It swung open and it was like looking backwards, the room untouched privacy from the damage along the streets.
Ivy's clothes were dark with blood and it made her skin both slick and tacky in areas; drying in awful streaks of decay. "Alright. It's just you and me, sweetheart. I've got you," he murmured as he sat her down on the tiled bathroom floor. "Just hold on for a minute."
He got the water running and adjusted the temperature because Daryl knew Ivy, knew that he couldn't trust her fully when she was this detached, knew that she was locked somewhere between flight and fight, knew that she needed someone to take control of the situation entirely.
And Daryl had a job to do still.
Ivy gazed blankly at the wall and he took the opportunity to swipe his razor off of the bathroom counter before leaving the room to stash it somewhere safe. If her mood pitched lower, Daryl wasn't taking chances.
Her bedroom door was open and Daryl stepped through, navigating the mess to rummage through her closet for clean clothing. A glint of a knife distracted him for a moment before he found what he was looking for and Daryl quickly returned, stumbling over his own feet to find Ivy exactly where he had left her.
"I've got the water running. You're gonna to clean up for a minute, okay?" He said, voice as soft as he could manage in the moment. "And then you're gonna put these on."
Orders were useful. It kept his emotions in line and it gave Ivy a task to focus on. She processed the words with a distant expression, gaze shifting from the running shower to her own bloodied hands. Daryl realized she had small pieces of bone caught in her hair, sections matted from gore. "Okay," she mumbled, struggling to stand.
He ducked down to help her. "I'm outside that door. You've got seven minutes, got that?"
Daryl couldn't tolerate any longer than that. His daughter was small. She was hurt, she was a reflection of the girl he had first met in an abandoned house, fearing everything first before considering to trust. She looked both numb and defeated; overwhelmed by the concept of surviving.
Seven minutes.
He could give her that and nothing else.
He left the bathroom door open slightly while he rummaged in the kitchen for the first aid kit, nervous about going any further than that. There was the slightly audible noise of movement from within the room and Daryl didn't bother to waste the effort in knocking on the door to check on her. The water was loud enough that he knew, without a doubt, that it would drown his voice out to the girl.
Eventually the water shut off. Daryl heard the plastic curtain shove back and he gave her a moment as he rummaged through the cabinets for the small stash of liquor he had squirrelled away, hopefully unknown to his daughter. He kept it up high and it looked untouched.
He brought the supplies to the bathroom door and heard water from the sink running. "Hey," he called, receiving no response. "I'm coming in, okay?"
Either Ivy didn't hear him or she still wasn't firing on all cylinders. Daryl gingerly pushed the door open and flinched at the sight of his daughter scrubbing violently at her hands with a cloth, desperately attacking the bits of blood that hadn't come off in the shower. Daryl was moving before he fully registered it, dropping the supplies on the counter and knocking her hands out of the way as he took the rag for himself, gently rubbing at the patches of stubborn blood. "Hold on," he demanded as her fingers flexed in response.
It was painful to see how small her hands were in comparison to his own. Blood was dark beneath her fingernails and he worked it away carefully, rinsing the skin off and patting her hands dry with a towel. And before she could see the smear of blood across her cheek in the mirror's reflection and panic, Daryl cautiously made it vanish, a slow process of cleansing the girl from a veil of nightmares.
Ivy tracked his movements with a wary expression like she was expecting to be hurt.
The blood vanished and the fear kept lingering.
Daryl had plucked specific clothing for his purposes. She was wearing a pair of cotton shorts and one of her tank tops that showed her arms plainly. She normally opted for layers to shied her scars from view but he needed to physically see that her skin was free from any bite marks, to know that he still had time, that the infection wouldn't fester about unknown.
"Let's see the damage, okay?" Daryl asked even though it wasn't a real question, gently catching her by the waist to sit her on the countertop before opening up the first aid kit. She jerked away at the motion of it and he caught her leg lightly to secure her from falling. "Easy. I ain't going anywhere. Just sit tight for a minute."
Her knees looked ragged from scrapes and gashes. Daryl swallowed his own grimace and dabbed at them with the damp cloth to help work away the crusted, dried blood. "How the hell did you manage that?"
"I... fell."
Ivy said it like a question, her voice raspy from screaming.
Her clothes were discarded in a heap and he made a mental note to toss them later. Even the shoes were wrecked with gore.
"This'll sting, I know."
He heard a shaky inhale as he disinfected the wounds, meticulous at cleaning each gash and scrape with the awareness of how much rotting blood his daughter had been coated in already. Her leg jerked twice and Daryl forced himself to keep calm, refraining from snapping even as his patience wrapped itself into knots. She was merely reacting to the aftermath and he was trying to keep the world together, mend the damage before it could set deeper.
Tending to her bruised knuckles was apparently habitual enough that Ivy settled down slightly, docile again with his inspection. Two swollen fingers were the same as the ones she had fractured once before and he taped them secure, heavy with his own emotions. "Someday I'll teach you how to punch without shredding these hands up," Daryl promised, swallowing his flinch at a future.
They weren't finished yet.
Her palms were as scraped up as her knees were, evidence of a wild flight through Alexandria. Daryl tried not to picture it. He shut the door on the wild, terrible image.
Her left upper arm was a mess as if she had been dragged across pavement. It took time cleaning that particular injury, cautious to avoid setting her off again. "Easy," he soothed, forcing his voice to sound softer to his own ears. "You're okay."
Hands had left a heavy press of shadows across Ivy's shoulders, bruises already darkening by the hour. Daryl gently pressed his own hands over the marks and felt the outline of trauma, feeling the delicate shift of a girl beneath his palms.
Something had gotten close to taking her from him. The line between Ivy living and dying was barely visible anymore. Fingers had squeezed so tightly that they left perfect prints across the skin, catching a wild girl and nearly winning.
But so far no bites.
Ivy had no visible bites on her legs or arms. Her shoulders and neck were clean from the awful carnage that had taken Oscar and Sophia.
But her shirt had been ripped at the back.
Daryl slowly drew himself away and brought his hands up carefully, matching signs to each word as he spoke. "I need to check your back for any bites. Sorry, kid. But you need to let me."
Betrayal flashed plain across Ivy's face and a low whine built in her throat. Daryl knew that he was infringing upon a lifetime of old trauma, pushing against a razor sharp boundary. But it was easier to feel anger over fear, to mask it all with the uncomfortable need to control everything.
He had a job to do still. "Are you going to cooperate?"
The question hit a sensitive nerve and Daryl saw the very instant that she shifted from passive to alarmed, tension springing to motion as she tried to slide down from the countertop. "No, please, dad, I don't—"
Daryl caught her easily and simply held on tight until the fire started to burn itself out. He locked her tight against him and gently cradled her head against his shoulder as she tried to twist free.
He wanted to give Ivy choices where he could, but at the end of the day, Daryl was going to look after his child. And sometimes that meant parenting when she was still trying to rebel, looking after her when she didn't know how to be looked after. Parenting from afar while Ivy spiralled in the prison had been absolute bullshit and Daryl wasn't playing that game a second time.
Glass bright eyes met his and he saw the fear burning there. "C'mon. Slow it down for me, sweetheart. I need you to settle down for a minute. Can you do that?"
"You're mad, you're going to be mad," Ivy choked out, squeezing her eyes shut and pushing against Daryl's chest hard. "Don't want you—"
"You think I'll be mad?"
She gave him a jerky nod. The wariness glittered from her eyes and it was like looking backwards at the girl he had first known, the girl who had done anything to avoid getting hurt. Despite the bruises across her shoulders, Daryl could see old cigarette burns like constellations in the sky, legacies of a violent childhood.
It had been like dragging teeth to find out the details of the kind of man her father had been. He knew bits and pieces and had filled in the blanks between. The man had liked using a belt to punish with and very rarely Daryl had seen proof of those cruel scars and knew enough to avoid touching his own belt in the middle of an argument.
"I'm going to let you go for a minute," Daryl told her plainly. He pulled back so she could see his face, to see the intentions he swore by. "You're going to sit here and wait. Can you do that for me?"
It took a minute before she consented, her chin jolting up in a vague agreement.
Daryl left the room to remove his belt out of sight from her vision. He tossed it in his closet to deal with later before returning, hands held out for her inspection. "Remember the deal? You're my kid here. I look after you. You're going to let me do my job, Ivy. I don't want to force you, but I will if I have to."
"I'm not bitten," she tried, shifting slightly as her gaze jumped to the door behind him. "I'm fine, I really am!"
He needed to see the proof for his own heart.
"Sorry, sweetheart. I still need to check."
Despite her resistance, Ivy was shockingly compliant as he lowered her back down to the floor carefully. Her one ankle had swollen up slightly and she stepped gingerly on it as she turned around, allowing Daryl to grasp the edge of her shirt.
He gently pulled the material up as far as he needed to and felt the tension radiated down her spine. The scars were visible and his own ached in response, twins of the same violence. Ivy jumped when his finger traced one old mark, following the slight curve of it.
They were awful to look at. Bits of pain and abuse forever pressed into her skin, all the marks of a broken house. "You'll never have another scar like this," Daryl promised her, voice so quietly she never would have heard it. "Not from me."
A few light bruises marred her lower back and she had a cut across her shoulder blade that looked identical to his arm that had gotten torn up on the pavement earlier. It was raw looking and and red but the bleeding had stop. "Is it okay?" Ivy whispered, shoulders curving inward. "Am I safe?"
"Yeah," he said, hoarse. He repeated himself louder but held her still before she could escape his hold. "Hey, give me a second."
Ivy didn't seem to hear the words but allowed him to keep her steady before he moved away for the disinfectant, gingerly cleaning the abrasion before plastering it with two of the bigger bandages from the kit. Her shoulder twitched as he worked but tolerated it, discomfort radiating off of her. Daryl gently allowed her shirt to fall back into place, turning her around and laying his hand across the back of her neck for support.
"You know why I did this, right?" Daryl asked, struggling to put the words together. But relief struck through his chest hard and it was suddenly easier to breathe around the anxiety holding him like a vice. "I got scared when I saw you against the wall. I didn't think we'd get them down fast enough and then I didn't know if you were going to survive this."
Putting feelings to words was new territory still. Harder when they weren't fighting with each other, masking every other emotion with anger.
Some of Ivy's desire for fight-or-flight seemed to have thawed. "I wanted see you again," she admitted, voice catching on residual terror. "The entire time... I just, I needed to keeping going. But I wanted you there."
"And I found you."
"Yeah. You found me." Her voice was hoarse from screaming and Daryl remembered the sound of her voice against the wall, the way she had been pinned there.
"I was always coming for you," Daryl told her, promising it. "Nothing was stopping me."
Not death. Not the living.
It took some coaxing to get her to choke down some of the whisky he had poured her in a glass to help dim the edge of shock before moving her to a chair in front of the locked door with a pistol in her hands. The gun had been a compromise when she got anxious at the idea of separating for a few minutes and Daryl didn't think she even knew that the gun was unloaded of any ammunition.
Earlier in the course of Ivy's house arrest for sneaking out of Alexandria, Daryl had opted to mount a few bells to the top of the front door so he might hear any future attempts to sneak out. They helped settle his own nerves as he got her positioned in a way to limit her panic from escalating further, confident that he would hear if her panic did shift completely into 'flight'. Having a task like keeping watch grounded her a fraction and softened some of the hysteria building up.
He wasted a few minutes in rinsing bloody water from the floor of the shower down the drain before rinsing off the blood and grim from his own skin, kicking his dirty clothes into the pile with Ivy's. They could get new things. Daryl couldn't replace a daughter, but he could scavenge for different, clean sets of clothing.
Dressing his own injuries was an old practise that didn't take long, roughly cleaning out the gashes and sores before dressing them. The process was rushed and she had clearly started to spiral out in his absence, her hands trembling and on the edge of losing her own patience. "Your hurt?" Ivy rasped, blinking at the sight of bandages plastered across his arm from where he had taken the brunt of the asphalt in his wipeout.
"Don't worry about it," Daryl told her as he came around her, taking advantage of her being still seated. Her hair was still wet, scrubbed clean with some of the products in the shower, and he gathered it in his hands and started to work. Ivy was going to be okay but his job wasn't finished yet, it wouldn't ever be finished, but Daryl needed to start getting her settled into the sphere of his protection.
And braiding her hair seemed like a safe place to begin.
Maggie had trimmed the ends for her recently and it made the work slightly easier, hair less likely to catching and tangle. Three sections started forming a rope and Daryl kept the movement gentle, opting for simplicity over the more complicated patterns he had learned. Every time he blinked he saw Ivy against the wall, but this time a ruined version of his daughter; dead, bleeding, bitten, shot.
He wouldn't complain when she flinched, jumping at the light touch of his hand against her shoulder.
The fear would eventually smooth over.
He wasn't going to bury a child. He wasn't going to be the thing to put her down.
The braid was secured with an elastic from his pocket and Daryl crouched down, hooking her arm over his shoulders before gathering her up in his arms and abandoning the chair to the middle of the room. Ivy's fingers caught at the material of his shirt, holding fast, relaxing just a fraction as he moved down the hall.
However, Daryl was torn between the two bedrooms. His feet locked into place as he considered the options, considered the fact that pushing at lines might leave more bruises for the future. Ivy had snuck into his room twice to sleep beside him at night but it had been always her choice, her decision to make that move.
He knew the mere outlines of her trauma and was faltering between instinct and concern, wavering between his options. Ivy suddenly clung tighter, a low cry starting as she felt his indecision and it got him moving, picking his room to place her down on the bed.
It was safer than trusting her bedroom, Daryl told himself. She had a habit of stashing weaponry in places, like the knife in the closet. The last thing they needed was a nightmare triggering a sense of urgency to find something to fight with.
His intention was to sit up with a properly loaded gun and keep an eye on the door himself but Ivy's hand refused to be pried loose of his shirt and it was easier to follow her silent demands, sliding in beneath the covers himself, allowing her to wrap her arms around his chest and plant her head directly over his heart, clearly intent on listening to proof that Daryl was still there.
Ivy shifted once and her tension was suddenly gone, one hand flat across his chest to feel the steady rise and fall of his breathing. "I missed you," she mumbled as her eyes slid shut. "Can we stay here for a bit?"
It was reflex that his arm squeezed around her tighter. "Yeah. We ain't going anywhere," he promised her, tilting his head back slightly and blinking away the illusion of a girl waiting for him from inside a diner. "You're safe now. I found you and you're safe."
"Are you okay?"
The question took him off guard. "What?"
She sighed, edging closer to sleep with the combination of a bit of whisky and drop in adrenaline. "You took care of me and I'm okay now. But are you okay?"
His heart was still hammering like it wanted to escape his chest.
"I'll be fine," Daryl told her. "You never leave my sight again? That'll help."
And never seeing her expression look so haunted again.
He allowed one hand to come up and play with her hair slightly, silently convincing her to give into the demands of sleep. Ivy mumbled something incoherent before fading out, unaware of the bright sun beyond the curtain.