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Daryl woke up shaking.
He did most days. Sometimes his cheeks were stained with the tears he cried in his sleep, other times he couldn’t shake the crippling nausea that racked his gut, forcing him to scramble away from where he slept to wretch into some bushes. Most days though, he would wake up feeling empty. A soul-crushing void where all the love he had for his old life, his old people, used to reside inside him. He didn’t remember them. He couldn’t. No matter how hard he tried. But he knew that they were there, because he missed them. God, he missed them so desperately. He felt it clawing inside of him, screaming at him to remember the people that were gone. Ripped away from his memories but not from his heart. And every morning when he awoke Daryl trembled, hollow and scared, unable to trust his torn up mind.
He had his name at least. Daryl Dixon. A plastic medical wristband with his name scrawled in neat lettering scratching uncomfortably on his wrist was one of his first new memories from when he opened his eyes here. It was here he learnt that he had been tossed aside- left to rot with all the other discarded experiments. But his wristband was intact, and he had his name, his real name. And that was more than most here. He didn’t remember what had happened to him. Maybe it was better that way. Maybe forgetting everything was a mercy. Daryl was found, shivering and twitching on the streets of France, unable to form a coherent sentence let alone recall what had happened to him, by a group just like him. People who had been taken and used. They took him back to their base and coaxed him into a bed. Someone fed him a tea, to which he mindlessly obliged, and before he knew it he was sleeping. He slept for four days. And when he awoke, a man with a broken pair of glasses taped at his nose sat with Daryl to explain what had happened to him.
He was a test subject, he was told. Just like everyone else here. A group of scientists that survived ‘the collapse’ insisted they could find a way to rewire the brain so that it was immune to reanimation after death. But the only proof of this experimentation Daryl had was his arms full of needle prick scars and bruising. That and his name tag.
Daryl.
He knew it was his. It was the only thing that felt right. Felt certain. Even on the bad days, when he couldn’t bring himself to get out of his sleeping bag and his mind spun aimlessly, unable to navigate through the endless fog of loss, he knew his name was Daryl. And he knew that there was a world that he didn’t belong in that crumbled and he found a new life- a better life- amongst the chaos.
Sometimes he would get flashes, usually in his dreams, of what he presumed was his old life. A motorcycle. A woman’s smile. A hand reaching out to him. A crossbow. A white flower in a bottle. But he didn’t know what any of it meant. Didn’t know why these things were once important enough to him to stick in his scrambled mind. Another man in the group, an old guy who clung to a walking stick to hobble around, had told Daryl one particularly bad night after dinner that people do return to the light. He explained that people had come to them way more far gone than Daryl, had slowly been able to drag their memories back. Every night he prayed that it would happen for him too. He didn’t know if he was religious before, he wasn’t even sure if he was now, but he prayed all the same; begging for a second chance to be Daryl Dixon again.
There was another name though. One that these people said he was babbling, over and over again when they first found him. A name that he mumbled in his sleep. A name that felt just as much a part of him as his own two hands. A one word mantra that made him certain that he had someone, at least one person, that he cared about.
Carol
The name that he couldn’t put a face to- only a sense of home. The name that tasted bitter on his tongue, like sadness and regret. But his heart ached longingly at the sound of it. Daryl tried- god he tried- to remember something from before. Who was he? Did he have a family? Who was Carol? Who was she to him? How long had he known her? Why was her name the only thing that stuck firmly in his fragmented mind?
“Carol.” Daryl mumbled to himself quietly as he took a shaky breath and tried to calm himself. Her name helped anchor Daryl’s mind and bring him back to the present. “Carol. Carol. Carol.”
“Who’s Carol?” Asked one of the women in the group as she took a pot off the fire. Daryl remembered that she was found by the group after him, but he didn’t know her name. He didn’t bother learning anyones name. And didn’t want to get close to anyone here. No one at all. Most of their names were made up anyway, not all of them being as fortunate as him to have their tags still intact. The man with the walking stick had said talking about the things he could remember might help bring other memories to the surface.
“Don’t remember” Daryl said plainly, pushing himself up to sit “And the bits I do remember are too foggy. I don’t even know if they’re real.”
He had so many questions and no way of getting answers. Every day he woke up and debated leaving this group of strangers in search of the person that was, for some reason, so important to him. But every day he gave into the urge to stay. At least here he was safe. At least here he was surrounded by people that understood what he was going through.
“You must have loved her a lot.” She commented, pouring two mugs of warm tea, handing Daryl one, and settling down opposite him to drink her own.
“Why do you say that?” Daryl mumbled into his mug, not wanting to face the possibility that he had once loved someone so much that her very name had survived the cracking of his mind, but now he couldn’t even conjure up her face.
“You know her name, don’t you? That must mean something.” She shrugged, as if it was clear as day. When Daryl didn’t reply, the woman prompted “Tell me about her?”
Daryl hardly glanced up.
“I know her name was Carol. I know that we must have survived together.” Daryl began, staring absently into the fire as he spoke aloud some of the things he had pieced together for the first time. “I remember that she liked the colour red. I remember that she liked baking, and she was good at it too. Always smelt sweet, like she’d just made a fresh batch of cookies.”
Daryl felt sad all of a sudden, washed with the sense of deeply rooted loss. These things must have been true for them to hurt him the way that they did. But it was like he was trying to hold on to the details of a really good dream as it slipped away when he woke.
“I remember hugging her and being happy. I was so, so, so happy. The happiest I’ve ever been in my life” He continued through the lump in his throat. “And I remember hugging her and being sad. She was sad too.”
As he spoke, things fell into place, ordering themselves neatly in his mind. And he grew quieter, knowing he still couldn’t fill in all the gaps.
“And she told me something very important, but I don’t remember what she said. Or what she looked like. Or how she talked. Or the way she laughed.” Daryl shrugged sadly. “There’s nothing there. It all just gone.”
“Are you going to go looking for her?” The woman asked gently, entranced by the way he spoke about Carol
“I’m gonna try. One day.” Daryl nodded firmly.“But she could be anywhere. She could be anyone.”
“She could be me.” The woman smirked and Daryl snorted out a small grunt of laughter at this strangers absurd attempt of humour
“There’s one thing I do know about her, just one thing.” Daryl assured with a shake of his head. “If I loved her as much as I think I do, and I met her again, I would absolutely know it was her.”
“That’s pretty romantic.” Smiled the woman with the short grey hair as she played idly with the twine around her wrist. “I’m sure she loved you, too.”