WHO: Daryl Dixon and Tris Prior WHAT: A meeting WHEN: Wednesday morning WHERE: WARNINGS: Zombies, tbd STATUS:: Gdoc'ed, Incomplete
More and more people were arriving, it seemed, from timelines with Walkers. It didn’t exactly make Daryl sleep well at night to know that. It didn’t make him feel better about life to know that there were more of them now who might randomly start eating people. More people to keep an eye on. There were three of them from home (well, as long as Beth was still around, he hadn’t heard from her in ages), and three of ‘em from Georiga’s timeline. That made six possible Walkers, in a place where who the hell knew what was gonna happen from one day to the next.
It did make him happy that Carol was here. If Daryl let himself get close enough to anyone to have a best friend - it was Carol Peletier. She was one tough lady, and he admired that about her. He’d not seen as much of her lately as he would have liked, but he planned to change that; and soon. He should ask her over for dinner or something. Or maybe out, since he wasn’t anything like a decent cook.
He was outside on this cool morning, inspecting his reinforcements, making sure everything was still in place. With more and more of ‘em here, they had more and more possibility of being important in more than a hypothetical sense, so he was puttin’ in extra nails and putting more boards in place. Walkers were strong, but they weren’t very bright, so hopefully they wouldn’t figure out how to just rip them off the walls.
He heard footsteps behind him and whirled around, a bit surprised to see the young girl who claimed to have known him, and who he’d met at the sub shop. What was her name? Oh yeah, Tris?
“Hey,” he said, his voice sounding a bit gruff but not unkind. “You’re up early.”
***
Tris gave him a small, but genuine smile. "I don't always sleep very well," she admitted. "The nightmares can sometimes be a bit to handle, so it results in me prowling around early in the mornings and hoping that I don't disturb anyone who is trying to get their own sleep." She tried to give a careless shrug. “No point in waking up other people because I can’t deal with my own reality – even when I’m positive that things around me are real and not some Erudite torture simulation.”
There were reasons that she had trouble talking on the network sometimes. She just still couldn’t trust that the computer wasn’t part of a device to harm her and others that she cared about.
She looked at his carpentry and chewed on her lip. “Are you making defenses in case something happens where zombies show up here?”
Because that was something that she had come to accept as a part of other people’s lives. It probably came from the fact that Shaun had pretty much told her how to kill him and Georgia if that happened. She didn’t want to hurt anyone else that she had come to care for and respect, but she could understand the necessity of it. It was probably all of the Dauntless training and the fact that she wasn’t a completely selfless person like her Abnegation family.
***
“Yeah. Or in case one of us dies.”
If any of the six of them died, they’d turn. And when they did...well, it could be an absolute disaster for everyone involved. If they didn’t kill half the people in town and start a horrible outbreak, then they’d at least scare most of the people in town to the point that the laws that were already pretty shit would just end up getting worse. And Daryl sure as hell didn’t want to be responsible for that.
“Cause you know how it goes, we turn when we die. Everyone from my timeline and Georgia’s timeline’s already infected. At home, as long as we stay alive, nothin’ will happen. But for Georgia? They can just turn for no reason, apparently.” He shrugged, but his face made it clear that he wasn’t at all fond of this idea.
“So, yeah. Better safe than sorry. And I get you about the sleeping. I don’t think I’ve slept well since all this shit came down.”