Just Wait [DarylxReader] Ch. 3

What time was it?

Your body didn't so much as twitch as the question flared up in your mind, as it had countless times before. Your stiff muscles hardly allowed any movement without a great deal of will behind it, the factor of which you were strongly lacking in. Time. Time had all but become the heat filtering through the rafters in relentless waves. Time had become all but the sharp sting of dirt in your cuts and dull pain from your bruises. Time had become all but torture worse than any being could ever inflict. Day and night were communicated only by the cycle of unbearably hot to icicle cold. And sometimes you would miss it due to the fluctuation of consciousness that you endured.

Those days seemed to stretch on forever with no endpoint in mind.

What time was it?

You weren't really sure why your mind hated you so much, to ask you these questions when you had no way of knowing them. Calling out to whoever stood guard at the door only earned you silence. Your drifting between worlds of the living and those of uncomfortable dreams made even the sun unreliable. One moment you guessed it to be around noon, and the next the moon was glaring down at you through the holes in the wood. When the void called, you had no strength to resist. Eventually, you just stopped trying to guess, and allowed your mind to do its worst.

And it did. Without a problem.

What time?

The man hadn't come back since the first time, after he'd torn out every piece of information he could get from you before you physically couldn't take any more. The throb in your head had gone down considerably, but you still held the new marks. Before you'd closed your eyes, you could see your shirt, stained with what you presumed to be a mixture of blood, sweat, and dirt. You could still feel the dried blood along your face, and on the rare time that you'd tried to move, you'd had to peel your hair away from the wall, glued as it was with the red liquid to the hard material. You presumed that you looked, quite frankly, like shit.

But you weren't exactly trying out for a modeling gig, now were you?

What...What time?

Vaguely, you wondered how long it had been since the man had come. A nagging voice inside of you said a day or two, a paranoid voice said a few hours, and a conscious mind said years. Maybe it was the heat delirium, but somehow it made sense for it to be all three.

Your muscles tensed as your mind began running off the edge, and then relaxed without your permission as the cold blackness engulfed them. Your thoughts lost their coherency. They stopped forming into words, and abruptly slipped into nothing but bursts of what should have been, what could have been, what...what you...things your incoming wave of unconsciousness wouldn't let you finish.

Dropping...dropping...dropping...and gone.

Suddenly, the nerves in your body leapt to life. Your eyes flickered open, moving sluggishly even though it was powered by the powerful combination of shock, fear, and surprise. It felt like only a second had passed, as if maybe you'd never even gone away, but the position of the glaring sun through the rafters told you otherwise. It also told you something else. The black silhouette of a figure was before you, the white light burning from behind it and blinding everything but the figure's highlight. A low groan resonated in your throat as your eyes closed lightly under the pain of sudden light, your body involuntarily shifting for no apparent reason. But your eyes soon opened again as your half-curious, half-frightened mind forced them to do so.

A few agonizing moments left your vision in focus, the glaring black-on-white image slowly gaining shape. The two base colors peeled themselves back, allowing others to pour in and fill their place until you were left with a full picture.

He was back.

The thought dazed across your mind, not able to sink in as it should have as it battled with your involuntary need to recover your senses from the void. As your injured mind forced itself back to life, and the gears started turning, albeit very gradually, once again, you slowly began to realize how bad those three words could turn out to be. Vague memories of the last encounter hardly needed to be reconjured; you were still suffering quite adequately enough to not need any reminding. It was grotesquely funny, in a way. Dread settled instantly in your heart, layering on top of all the other agonies, just by his image.

And you didn't even know his name.

Your eyes watched him dimly as he pulled up a stool from the corner and seated himself. He was back. You weren't going to survive this one. You were barely holding on to life from the last. You were done. You were so very, utterly done. After everything you'd gone through, after all the sacrifices, after all the losses, after all the struggles, this was where it was going to end. But you were so deep in the water that you quite decidedly stopped caring about whether or not you drowned.

For a moment, silence lingered across the air.

"You change your story since last time, Sunshine?" he asked, once again being the one to break the quiet.

You couldn't get a reading on his voice, but then again, you couldn't really get a read on anything. Your throat was so dry. Your mouth was something you hadn't recently tried to open. Now that you realized it, your mouth was like cotton. But one time, one time was all it took to know what would happen when you didn't answer fast enough.

"Do you want me to?" you rasped, the danger of the situation making your body, for once, work in your favor. Your cold, half-dead eyes stared at him, and you could only imagine how great an impression you were making of some crazed soul on her way to her grave. "I told...I told you everything. Didn't lie about anything."

"Just makin' sure. Wanted my story to be straight. Consider this a last chance to set shit straight before we decide what the hell we're gonna do with you," he said, his steeled blue grey eyes not seeming to be affected by how you appeared. The two orbs stared right back at you, unwavering. "Pickin' whether you live or die after we're done here. Just a point 't throw out, dyin' seems to be the heavy vote."

The dull feeling of dread increased again, but it didn't twist into a knot like it should have. You felt a thread of fear needling itself through your heart. But your ever-blank list of reasons to stay alive in the first place blanketed those emotions. Your eyes didn't so much as widen.

"If y' care to say somethin' to change that, now's your chance."

You surprised yourself by giving out a dry laugh.

"What do you want," you paused to clear your throat, the jagged rasps making it difficult to understand you, "me to say...? That I have some group that'll pay to have me back? That I've got...some kind of supplies stashed away in the woods that I'll lead you to?" A brief memory flashed in your mind, but you ignored it. "That I've got...got the cure for the disease in my back pocket-- what? What do you want me to say?" you asked, your voice getting downright exasperated at the end. You weren't sure if your cracked voice stopped your point from getting across or not.

"Guess that's up 't you, Sunshine," he said flatly, not seeming phased at the least by your words.

You shifted around, your position rendered uncomfortable by the gradual awakening of your senses. After a moment, you rested the back of your head on the wall, your face slightly tilted upwards.

"If I don't change anything...you going to kill me?"

"Seems like the best option."

A noise that sounded a bit like sarcastic laughter escaped your lips. "Options. The way I...see it, you've really got only three."

"Feel free to enlighten me, Sunshine."

"Well...you could leave me out somewhere...probably blindfold me or something...and ditch me someplace that I can't find you again. Just go back to how it was before. You could keep me around...use me for slave labor or whatever...bring on another mouth to feed. Or you could kill me, and have it all over and done with. No problems. No planning. And no more girl in your shed."

"Not makin' a strong case for keepin' you alive."

"Wasn't trying to...," you said, your voice barely above a whisper. Your words were already cracking too much, and your throat wasn't complying easily with letting words pass through. Speaking was getting to difficult to continue.

The man was silent, not seeming to know how to respond to that. After a few moments, he stood up and shoved the stool back to where it had been before. He was done.

The sound of your weakening voice made him stop just before he closed the door behind him.

"I...I know I'm not exactly in a...position to request...but please - pick the last option before you pick the first," you said, knowing that the chances of you surviving after this was slim to none. And you'd much rather it be by a bullet to the head than a disembowelment by a Walker. A grim acceptance of death had settled into your heart, mixing with the dread so completely that you couldn't tell the two apart. If they decided you were just going to die, then so be it.

There were worse things than that. Much worse.

You thought...or maybe imagined that you saw just a glimmer of respect in his eye before he closed the door, and locked it.

For a few moments, your eyes lingered on the doorway, before drifting closed as your mind resumed it's agonizing routine. But this time, it had a new obsession.

How much time is there?

How much...?