The Hard Part [Daryl x Reader] Ch. 2

The only signal that you were regaining consciousness was from the echoed blur of words that slurred their way through your ears, doing so as incoherently as if they were being spoken underwater.

Fade out.

The voices came back clearer than before, pulling you again from the numb sea of black that sloshed around in your head. Your mind lazily pulled together some of the sounds into words, forming a brief "not too much I can do for" before blanking out again.

When your second-long dip back into unconsciousness was again ruined by foreign voices, you began to subconsciously string together what you heard into words, and them into sentences as your mind groggily began to function.

"How the hell'd she find this place anyways?" you heard someone ask.

A sudden shift of voice threw you off for a moment, this one male, but you caught the end of his statement.

"-wandering around, probably. Not one of your friends?"

"Never seen 'er before."

"Mm. Well, I guess we'll know soon enough," the male voice said. Your mind vaguely connected his voice with the one who had asked if you'd been bit, but the connection dissipated as your mind shifted its function, working more painstakingly on dragging you out of the void than on what was going on. When you involuntarily tried to open your eyes, you realized how unbearably heavy your eyelids were. With this awakening of your nerves, you realized something else.

"I have my people out around the perimeter in case anyone tries to come after her."

A pain began to creep into your consciousness, the side of your head beginning to pound with a dull throb that resonated through your thoughts. With a rhythm that matched your pulse, a hammer slammed into your skull with an increasing intensity, awakened by your return to feeling. Not so slowly, the pain turned into agony as the aching intensified, as if you were getting a migraine all at once and someone was continuously playing Whack-A-Mole on your forehead. God, it hurt. It hurt. It HURT.

Suddenly, your eyes flew open, propelled by a massive thud in your head from the sheer pain. You caught a brief glimpse of the man who you'd first seen, along with a girl that you hadn't, one with short brown hair and blue eyes. The man was sitting a ways from where you were, and the girl standing next to him. Neither were holding a hammer, but there was no other explanation for this insane burst of pain. You didn't see anything more as your vision became blurred, your eyelids flicking back down and plunging you into darkness once more. Your ears registered a low groan, which, combined with the vibration in your throat, you took to be yours. You felt your hand shift, an extremity that you hadn't even felt until now as awakened nerves blazed through the numbness.

It was silent for a moment before the woman spoke.

"She awake?"

"Not yet. But we'd better get her to the shed before she gets that way. Give me a hand."

You felt something touch you briefly, but once you felt the bed drop away from under you, your mind took a dive back into the black abyss.


Returning to consciousness once more was no welcome thing. This time it didn't just creep along and slowly let your senses catch up; it struck suddenly without warning. Your eyes shot open, the light, forever waiting for a break in your defense, stabbing into them mercilessly. The pure white was switched back to black as your eyelids realized their mistake and pressed themselves together as tightly as possible, as if trying to soak out the last remaining rays of sun from your retina. Gradually, they let themselves peel apart, the blinding light morphing into colors and the colors in turn morphing into shapes. Not that there was much to see despite your regained vision.

The slamming within your head had simmered into a dim pulse, just enough to refuse loss of its memory, but not flexing the entirety of its paralyzing agony either. A new pain had sprung up in your absence of consciousness. Your wrists were bound together tightly, the bones on either hand grating against the other. Whatever they were bound with had rubbed painful marks into your skin, of that you had no doubt. You could tell from the sharp sting of material in an open wound.

You glanced back, turning your head until your cheek rested on the wooden planks that held up the rest of your body. The motion sent your mind swimming, spots popping up in front of your eyes as a sharp pain sloshed through the liquid in your head. A few stifling moments passed before you regained your senses.

You shifted your hands to the side a bit, the sting bursting up before dying back to its previous form. Straining your eyes to the side as far as you could, you could see a small amount of dried blood staining your skin as well as the metal that was bound around it. A sigh escaped your lips as you straightened your head, leaning back against the wooden wall. Whoever had bound you had done it too tight. It would be hell to get out of this.

Not that your mind was able to think well enough to form a plan to that end in the first place.

Suddenly, the sun streamed into the small building with a vigor, shooting into your unsuspecting eyes and making them slam closed once more. You heard rather than saw someone walk in, the door closing behind them and slicing the sadistic light stream in the midst of its stabbing motion. A slight whimper felt its way up your throat as you forced your eyes open again, your mind taking a dive into water once more as it tried to recover from the burst of light. For a moment, the splashing of your drowning brain blocked out your coherent ability to comprehend what you were seeing. But the second your consciousness broke the surface, you recognized who was standing in front of you.

You remembered him from before. With the arrow. And the crossbow.

You had the throb in your head to prove it.

His eyes stared down into yours, a steeled glare clashing with your meek glance. Anxiety began to gnaw at the edges of your mind as your thoughts worked towards what you knew this to be. The man didn't have his crossbow slung over his shoulder, but you doubted that he needed it. Curling those hands into fists would serve its purpose just as well as the weapon. You didn't know what he was going to do to you. What he was capable of. But the more you felt his gaze burning into you, the more your anxiety began to escalate into fear.

You swallowed dryly.

"You find this place by yourself?" he suddenly asked, the sound of his voice shattering the silence.

You stared up at him for a moment, your mind soggily trying to form an answer. What even was this place? Your mouth opened but no words followed it for a few paralyzing seconds.  

Again, his voice tore through the hanging silence.

"Don't make this hard, Sunshine. You get here by yourself?" he asked again, starting to pace slowly in front of you.

Your eyes followed him dully, words forming in your throat as you struggled to get them out.

"Yes," you finally said. Your voice was raspy and the sound crawled painfully up your raw vocal cords.

"How?"

"I," you shifted your body, trying to straighten up while your tongue worked to get moisture back into your mouth. "I...I can't remember," you said, your mind too focused on the effort of speech to recall any memories.

"Well you'd better start rememberin' pretty damn fast," he said, his eyes locking themselves on you, "because this is gonna get real hard for you if you don't." His voice said exactly how serious he was about that.

Your head rolled back to the wall, your mind struggling to process the realization of danger and reform your memories on top of trying to formulate how to speak it. "There...there was a..." Something. Something about...that...thing...

All of a sudden, pain exploded in the side of your head, knocking you to the side with momentum to spare. Your nerves screamed in panic at the sudden change, your mind reeling with shock as your synapses fired off one after another after another. Your mouth was open in a silent cry of pain, your eyes wide and staring off at nothing. The pulsating thuds started up with a vengeance. Some kind of warm liquid slowly began parting through your hair follicles and dripping down onto your skin. Wood beneath you. Head pounding. Mind frozen. Pain.

Through the shrieks of your body and excruciating claws of agony, you could almost feel your mind spinning from the jarring impact. The alien feeling of being lifted from your side and forced back into a sitting position almost made you slip under the sea of black that was beginning to pour into your senses.

Your half-open eyes struggled to focus, your gaze shifting around dimly before you could distinguish the man's face. His arm was reached out towards you, probably gripping the collar of your shirt. Or maybe your neck; you honestly couldn't tell.

His lips moved, but no sound could press through the drum solo that was playing mercilessly in your skull. You watched him vaguely. What was he saying?

The sudden feeling of being pulled away from the wall behind you was short-lived, as you were quickly slammed back against it.

"Answer me!" you heard dully, the words crawling past your defense of pain. You stared past him, your mind barely acknowledging that he was there and your eyes having no such courtesy. But when you saw his fist begin to lift again, a sudden burst of panic made your mouth work without your consent.

"A car!" You suddenly burst out, your eyes regaining their ability to actually see and sparkling immediately with fear, before closing in the agony of speaking mixed with everything else.

You could feel his gaze on you. "A car?"

"Yes, yes a car," you said, a desperate tone settling in your voice. Your mind was still drowning in disarray, but terror forced it to give you what you needed to know. Flashes of memory shot in front of you, displaying themselves on the back of your eyelids. "It...It had supplies on the hood," you said, your eyes opening half-way as your head rolled across the wall in pain. "It said something about...about a 'Sophia'."

The man visibly tensed at the name, but you continued.

"I stayed the night...around the car and no one came....I...I figured someone had to be around...not too far from there since...they must've been looking for someone...I kept going down the...road to that town..over there. Got ch-chased until I fell over the fence...," you said truthfully, your voice cracking and stuttering, but still understandable. Your eyes closed in strain, before opening again with even less life and roved across his face, hoping that your answer was acceptable.

For a moment, the man seemed to think over what you said, weighing it against what he knew. Finally he stood up, his gaze not leaving you. Your eyes tried to follow him, but  it proved to be too difficult, and your vision fell back to the ground. Blood had started up a small stream down across your cheek, falling down to your chin, and the pounding again became your first thought.

"Anyone coming to find you?" he asked.

It went on like this for what must've been an hour, although it felt so much longer than that. He would ask a question, you would struggle to give him the answer he wanted, and sometimes if you didn't tell him fast enough or didn't sound truthful, he'd add another unbearable agony to your list.

When the door finally opened and his footsteps faded out as the door closed and locked, you were on the ground. A black eye was starting to form, and blood was spattered across most of your face. The consistent thuds hadn't let up in the least, but your fresh wounds overpowered it until it meshed into one massive network of pain. Your consciousness swam with a rapidly draining will, and your eyes seemed to have lost the ability to open. Slowly, you felt your hearing shut down, and your limbs quietly vanished into a dark loss of feeling. This numbness laced its way up your body, halting for a moment at your head before engulfing it too in its uncomfortable surrender. Your overworked nerves burned for a moment, before releasing their grip and falling into the void.

Just before you lost consciousness, a single thought struggled against the waters before it fell with its brothers.

I should have just died with the Walker...