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“I’m at the train station.” Daryl’s voice was a low husk over the line, a rumble barely audible over the background noise at the other end of the phone. Rick felt himself still, a calm settling over his body and his mind going empty and calm. “Come and get me.” Daryl said, and Rick felt his chest shift with his breathing, calm and steady.
When Rick stepped out of his car onto the warm footpath, looking up at the brightly lit station, he took a moment to think how strange it was that Daryl had come by train. Daryl hated travelling anyway that wasn’t his own beat-up old truck or a motorbike. It’s how he’d been for years, for longer than they’d know each other.
If Rick thought about it, he’d realise he wouldn’t be surprised at all to find out Daryl and his brother had never travelled anywhere by train or plane. It wasn’t how they were; it wasn’t Dixon enough.
The station was busy, the noise of the trains and the bustle of the crowds made it seem claustrophobic as it echoed around the too large space, bouncing back at him amplified. Daryl stood just outside the doors, off to one side smoking casually and staring up at the sky. Creeper vines of smoke drifted up above his head and formed a hazy halo in the evening air.
Rick took a moment to study him. Daryl, with his worn flannel and jeans should have looked out of place in the busy station. But he didn’t, He looked like any other man and something about that seemed wrong to Rick
Daryl turned to him before Rick made himself known and they stared at each other for an endless moment. Daryl was washed with the multi-coloured lights of the city, neon signs and streetlights painting his shadows deeper and making him something other.
He flicked the butt of his cigarette to the side and nodded his head once, before stooping to grab his bag at his feet and cross to Rick.
Rick wanted to say a hundred things, he wanted to hit him and kiss him and tell him to leave. The words filled his throat, choking him and making it hard to breath but none of them escaped, blocked in by the hundred other unsaid things. He wanted Daryl to look out of place, foreign like he should in the bustle of a city evening. Instead, he nodded him on and lead him through the crowd towards where he’d parked the car. Their steps fell into sync and their shoulders brushed as they weaved through the crowd in silence.
There wasn’t enough air in Rick’s small car to sustain them both. Daryl took up too much space, silent and steady, made up of gold and brown and so unnaturally still in the passenger seat. Not saying a word as Rick manoeuvred them through the city streets.
When Rick glanced over at him, the streetlights painted him with burnt orange. He looked tired, bags under his eyes and his cheeks hollowed. Feeling Ricks gaze on him, Daryl shifted his eyes to look back at him.
In the dim light Rick couldn’t make out the colour of his eyes. When Daryl moved his head just a little, light slipped under the hood of his lashes and flashed on the whites of his eyes; But Rick couldn’t read his expression, couldn’t see anything in his shadowed face.
Daryl must have seen something on Rick's though, because his thin lips twisted, not really into any expression, just reacting to what he saw. Rick waited, his breath in his throat as he waited for some hint from the other man. Some days, it felt like his whole life was spent waiting for a hint from Daryl.
The car behind them blared its horn and Rick looked back at the road and the green light hanging above their heads. When he glanced at Daryl, his attention was back out the window and they continued moving through the city lights.
***
The sun glowed honey gold in the early hours. Peeking through the buildings and glinting off the glass and chrome before getting lost in the dirty corners of the city. From the window in his living room, Rick watched the world wake up.
Daryl was asleep on the couch, his broad chest rising and falling in a slow, hypnotic rhythm which calmed something deep inside Rick.
The coffee maker let out a beep and Rick crossed to it, pouring the hot black liquid into his chipped mug and returning to his post at the window. Holding the mug between his palms he let the warmth seep into him.
The sheets on the couch rustled and Rick twisted his head just enough to see Daryl’s sprawled form, one arm raised as he rubbed tiredly at his eyes.
“You in trouble?” Rick asked turning his eyes back to the city. There was a soft laugh from the couch which turned into a cough, a familiar, rough noise which Daryl always woke with. The noise hit like a blow with its familiarity.
“You going to turn me in if I am, officer?” Daryl’s voice was low and rough with sleep. Rick felt his lips twitch.
“Depends what you’ve done.” He wished that was a lie, wished it wasn’t so painfully honest and yet still not honest enough. He knew in his gut, deep down into the core of him, that no matter what Daryl had done, what trouble he’d found himself in, Rick would never turn him in. Instead, he lived with the heavy knowledge that no matter how bad it was, Rick would do anything to keep Daryl safe.
“It’s nothing.” Daryl said, pulling himself up. Rick turned to watch as he ran a hand through his hair and rubbed roughly at his eyes before crossing the small room on bare, silent feet to the bathroom which he entered, leaving the door ajar like he always did.
Rick took a sip of his coffee and listened to the sounds of the other man in his bathroom, the clunk and rattle of his pipes and the other sound, one he so rarely heard, of another person moving through the familiar spaces.
His coffee was bitter and hot, almost too hot against the flesh of his mouth and throat, but Rick let that heat spread through him, let it creep into his body and hollow out a place for itself against the tense, strained muscles and the humming, electric feeling under his ribs of anticipation, of knowing Daryl was back with him.
***
He’d been barely sixteen the first time he saw Daryl Dixon, scrappy and lean, like a wild dog hidden under messy blond hair and his brothers cast off clothes.
Rick had moved to the small town from a city and had never seen someone like Daryl and his family. They were ugly, brash and loud and rough. Daryl, sandwiched between his Pa and his brother, both barrel chested, burly and mean looking, had been almost waif thin, scrappy where his brother was tough. Rick had watched them with fascination, nodding with half an ear to Shane, his new friend who was cocky and arrogant and fast turning into the best friend Rick had ever had.
When Rick became a cop he met Daryl officially, pulling him from bar fights his brother had started, or off private property when he was hunting. They became a small constant in each other's worlds.
Rick had never seen himself as one to buck convention, he liked the rule of law, liked the black and white nature of good and bad. Despite that, a friendship formed between the cop and the scrappy boy who’d grown into a tough man, frequently on the wrong side of the law.
At twenty-four Daryl had scoffed at Rick’s view of the world, smoke coming from his nose and his lips chapped where they were wrapped around the butt of his cigarette. “Ain’t nothing as black and white as ignorance.” he’d said, eyes levelling on Rick in his neat uniform and polished badge before he stood, stretching with a groan and his shirt riding high, showing the soft flesh of his belly and the stretch of abdomen and they both pretend Rick wasn't looking.
***
Being at the station felt wrong. Rick’s shirt collar chafed and his desk chair squeaked. He whiled away the hours staring at the clock mounted high on the wall and working his way slowly through the paperwork on his desk. He couldn’t help thinking last night was a dream, that he’d go back to the small apartment he called home and it would be as empty as it always was, no beat up duffle bag by the couch and dirty mugs in the sink.
Daryl didn’t fit in this world. He’d never fit in Rick's world, not back in Kings County, not here in the city. He was the strange shadow that appeared, wrong and ill-suited to Rick's life to remind him there was so much more out there. That the world was bigger and people were complex.
It made being a cop, which was so often all Rick felt he was, seem like a made-up profession; too black and white, too starkly good versus evil. He wanted to hate Daryl for the shades of grey he brought into his world, the nuance and fine detail. He wanted to not see Daryl in the kids he picked up on the job. To not see the hardened criminals he fought with in Daryl when he curled his lip up or adjusted his weight, readying himself for a fight.
It was always the same, every time Daryl appeared in his life with no warning, no time to realise it was a bad idea, Rick was shaken from the lull he’d settled himself into. His neat little world was torn open by Daryl’s unforgiving hands and Rick couldn’t help but love it. Couldn’t help but realise that the times between were just waiting, a parade of days where he did his job and lived his life and pretended he wasn’t waiting for a phone call that didn’t come.
Abe threw himself down into the chair at the desk opposite Ricks and grunted at him. Rick lifted his eyes from where they’d been sightlessly staring at a casefile and met Abe’s dark gaze.
“You’re miles away, brother.” Abe said, voice rough and low. Rick settled back in his chair, his eyes drifting once more to the clock.
The station coffee left a stale aftertaste in his mouth and the A/C cooled the sweat that beaded on his skin into a sticky sheen which he wore for the rest of the day. He didn’t know if he wanted to run home and see for himself that Daryl was still there, or stay here forever.
Looking back at Abe, he shifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Not miles.”
***
Rounding the top of the stairs and onto the fifth floor of the old apartment building, Rick’s lips quirk when he saw Daryl in the doorway of his apartment. Chest and feet bare, Daryl looked comfortable in his worn jeans, leaning against the door jamb, unlit cigarette hanging from his lips like he’d forgotten about it.
Rick slowed his steps and observed the other man, who watched him back. “You got no food.” Daryl said when Rick stopped, a few paces in front of him.
Rick looked over Daryl’s shoulder into the apartment, taking in the duffle bag dumped on the ground near the couch, worn clothes spilling out onto the floor, the window open and the TV soundlessly flashing colours into the shadows of the room.
“Let’s go for dinner.” Rick said.
The cigarette between Daryl’s lips bobbed when he smiled, a quick flash of curled lips before he ducked his head in a nod.
They walked the two blocks to a small, crowded diner. Its bright lights washed away the shadows which had begun to lengthen, pushing the night back from its glass-fronted shop.
Inside was warm and smelt like greasy food and spilled coffee.
When they were seated at a booth in the corner, Rick opened his mouth to talk, to badger him with questions and demands. The questions always came when the other man reappeared, questions he didn’t want to know the answer to and didn’t know the words to ask.
For a second it looked like Daryl knew, like he could see the shape of the questions forming in Rick's mouth and he would answer each and every one of them, his low, gravelly voice shaping answers which would both sooth and aggravate with their honesty.
The waitress broke the spell, and when Rick looked up from the menu he found in his hands, Daryl’s attention was out the window, his gaze slipping past the busy road and the buildings opposite, further than Rick could see, at things Rick couldn’t imagine.
***
Silence didn’t rule their time together, didn’t press them in from all sides and steal the words from their lips. They spoke when they needed to, and without words, their conversations seemed expansive. The twitch of a lip wrote novels and the small details of an expression created and mended worlds.
They slipped into the spaces beside each other with ease, like the spaces were made for them and they’d never spent time away. They moved in perfect synchronicity, and it was easy to forget that they were ever apart, that in some aspects, they were nearly strangers to each other.
***
They kept the window in the living room open, despite the noise of the city street which drifted in. Daryl preferred it that way. Rick liked the sound of the city, the never sleeping world outside his window was a comforting and familiar friend.
He didn’t think Daryl would like it, couldn’t imagine the other man could survive with humanity pressing in so close on all sides. He was reminded that he didn’t know the other man as well as he thought he did, that he only saw this man every few months and that he wasn’t the same boy he’d known in their small town ten years ago, when the shape of Daryl at the window became as familiar a sight as his used coffee cup resting beside Ricks on the sink each morning.
Daryl looked up at the sky when he stood there, tracing the shapes of the buildings across the sky. Rick always looked down, watching the dance of lights and the endless movement of the city five floors down. He wondered if he should read something into it, if such a small, innocuous detail held more weight to it than Rick wanted to acknowledge.
***
“Where has he been?” Maggie asked over coffee when they bumped into each other at the courthouse.
She’d grown so much from the pretty, wild farm girl she’d been when they first met. The city had honed her edges razor sharp and banked the fire behind her eyes, but hadn’t doused it. She’d only met Daryl a few times, back in Kings County where they’d both grown up.
“I don’t know.” Rick said, avoiding her eye. “I didn’t ask.”
Rick never asked. Daryl disappears from Rick's life and leaves no trace behind. He disappears into the horizon and Rick lives with the tight weight in his chest which he gets so used to he doesn’t notice it most of the time. It’s the fear of never seeing him again, that this time, when Daryl vanished into the distance, it was the last time Rick will ever see him. He waits, not even realising it, until he gets a phone call with the gruff voice on the other end of the line. Sometimes there’s no call and Daryl will just appear at Rick's door, or outside his work.
Maggie pursed her lips and blew at her coffee, her eyes fixed on Rick. She’d met Merle too, strung out and hollering. She’d been wide-eyed and scared, her back straight and her chin out as she watched the older Dixon, his bloodshot eyes rolling in his head. Daryl had dragged Merle away, his eyes down and spitting ugly words at his brother as he piled him into his beat-up truck and driven him out of town.
As he pulled out onto the road, he’d looked at Rick, his face shuttered, thin mouth twisted down and eyes dark and sad. Rick had watched the other man, his sometimes friend who fascinated him in ways he could put words to and had felt fiery, possessive fury at the brother who stumbled in and tore Daryl’s attention away.
Rick had waited at Daryl’s small apartment all night, sitting in his car at the back of the garage and watched the entrance, compelled to stay by some unnamed emotion which made his skin tingle. It was the desire to be around the other man, to not lose the man who pushed him, challenged him constantly and made Rick feel alive in a way he’d never known before.
He’d waited until the dawn light washed the world pale blue and he’d had to go to work.
Maggie had never said anything about the occasional appearance of Daryl in Rick’s life. Sometimes staying for days, sometimes just an hour. Rick hadn’t mentioned him the first few times Daryl had appeared unexpectedly, but when Maggie had found out in her own way, she’d looked at Rick with wide, wounded eyes.
Rick found it strangely liberating to tell her now, to drop Daryl’s name in casually, like the very act of naming him, of affirming his existence in Rick’s life made it more real, permeant in a way he longed for.
“You should bring him to Glenn’s birthday.” Maggie said, eyebrows raised as though challenging him.
***
Daryl turned his head to look at Rick when he entered the apartment. He was profiled against the last of the late sunshine coming in through the window. His features were lost in shadow, back-lit as he was. Rick stood, watching him for an endless moment.
The late evening light painted splashes of colour across his bare skin, highlighting his collarbones and the shape of his body, getting lost in the secret places of his form. Rick watched as he ducked his head, hiding his face behind his shaggy hair.
In Rick's small home, Daryl was beautiful. Scarred and pasted back together with clumsy hands and dark tattoos, beautiful shouldn’t be a word used to describe him. But Rick had never been a poet, never found the right words when he needed them. He could trace the honey light across Daryl’s skin, could mouth blessings into the jut of bone and let his breath catch at the sight of him, how he moved, how he held himself. Rick could hunger to keep him, but he couldn’t think of another word to describe him in that moment, but beautiful.
The space between the disappeared in four long strides. Rick stopped, a hairsbreadth between them and let the pause linger. Daryl held still, his eyes fixed on Rick, and for a second they shared breath. The small space between them thrummed with energy, trapped lighting and the smell of ozone and sweat. When their lips met it was like coming home, like Daryl’s voice, low over a phone line.
It had been months since they last touched, since Rick had tasted Daryl’s lips against his own and it was like no time had passed, that this kiss was a continuation of their last, that every kiss they’d ever shared was all part of the same moment. Daryl shuddered at the contact, his hand clutching at Rick’s curls and his eyes closed as though in pain as he pressed himself closer to Rick.
They moved through the heavy heat of the room like it was water, their bodies slick to the touch and breath hot against skin. Daryl was sinew and strength and solid mass under Rick’s hands. Rick traced every inch of him, running his hands over his scars and pressing sloppy, wet kisses across his skin. The brush of his beard teasing a red flush onto Daryl’s skin which Rick mouthed at, chasing the sting away. Daryl was strong and sure, his grip firm as he moved Rick where he wanted him.
The first time they’d done this, Daryl had been shameless beneath him. A writhing, beautiful creature, the wild animal he contains in his day-to-day let loose as he let his pleasure take over. That first time, Rick had felt like his own pleasure had been torn out of him, ripped from his core and trapped within the other man.
They’d fucked in the rumpled sheets of Daryl’s bed. Rick had opened him up, eyes on Daryl’s flushed, sweaty face half lit in the dim light of his cheap room over the garage. The afternoon sun had caught in Rick's eyes when he threw his head back at the tight grip of Daryl’s body when he pushed in.
Daryl had disappeared the next day without a word. Every time the sun glared bright in Rick’s eyes, he could smell sweat and lube and motor oil.
Rick hadn’t heard a word from him for three months. When he’d called, Rick had met him at a dive bar on the edge of town, just outside the town limits, in the nowhere-land populated by the outcasts of their small-town world.
They’d eaten stale chips from a crumpled packet and drank watery beer at the counter. Their shoulders brushing against each other as they talked about anything and everything that wasn’t what they’d done together.
When the bar had closed, they stood outside in the dusty gravel of the carpark and looked at each other. They’d parted with a nod and Rick had watched Daryl cross to his brother’s bike, throw his leg over the low body and rev the engine to life.
Rick had watched as the red taillight wove down the empty road and out of sight, Daryl’s dark form a shadow in the night.
Now, they lay in Rick’s bed, which had only ever held Rick since he moved to the city and two better job a years ago. Sweat slicked and still panting with the taste of the other man on his lips, Rick stared up at the familiar ceiling, watching how the lights which came up from the streets below danced patterns across the cream paint.
Rolling his head on the pillow, Rick studied Daryl’s profile, the sweat drying on his skin glittered like diamonds in the light where it lay thickest. Daryl let him look, his eyes soft and heavy and when he leant forward, his lips tasted like the salt of their sweat.
Pulling back and running a tongue over his lips, Daryl rolled out of the bed, wrapping the sheet which had come loose around his waist. He kicked his way through the debris of their clothes towards the window which he opened with a grunt. He pulled himself out onto the fire escape and after a moment Rick followed, pulling on a pair of rumpled jeans as he went.
The air was warm, a close, gentle heat that smelt like electricity and hot asphalt. There was the zest of salt from the sweat which still clung to them, pooling in the deep hollow of Daryl’s collarbones and at the curve of Rick's spine.
Daryl lit his cigarette with the whoosh-click of his lighter. Rick watched the smoke and studied how the lights from the street below painted him in bold brushstrokes of colour. Daryl watched him back, his attention drifting from the sky, through the haze of his cigarette smoke, to Rick, where they lingered, taking in the lines of his body and inspecting every detail as though it would tell him something Rick wouldn’t offer freely.
Some days Rick thought he should get married, find some pretty wife and have a couple of kids. They’d buy a house together and dream of a bigger one. He wondered if he’d be happy with that, a pretty wife who loved him and watching his kids grow up. Some days he wanted it, wanted the easy life his friends were building for themselves, normal and quaint. Comfortable.
Looking over at Daryl, watching his bare chest rise and fall and his cheeks hollowing around his cigarette, Rick knew he didn’t want it, didn’t want what everyone kept telling him he should chase.
Daryl passed him the cigarette wordlessly, breathing out a long stream of smoke like dragon’s breath. Rick flicked his eyes down to the street below when he lifted it to his lips and took a deep drag, letting the hot smoke prickle against his throat and lungs in a way he always associated with Daryl. When he passed it back, Daryl was resting his head against a rung of the handrail and staring up at the sky.
***
The lights go out on the fifth night Daryl is there. They go out with a dull thud and the moment after, when all the flecks of light inside and outside the apartment flick off at once, the world hangs in limbo, a second of confusion and surprise before noise builds. Doors into the hall open, voices come from windows and sound rises from the dark street below. Daryl and Rick remain where they were for a second, caught in the freefall of sudden darkness and rising voices.
The small fan that rotated listlessly in the corner of the room had never offered much reprieve from the heat, it had been a measured breeze which they always hoped would be stronger than it was. With even that small moment of comfort gone, they left the boxy and suffocating apartment and wandered the late-night streets, more crowded and shadowed than usual.
The stoops of the buildings were scattered with people seeking a moment’s relief from the close heat they’d gotten used to not dealing with. The pavement under their feet was hot and smelt like dry dust and ozone, and the air was still and heavy against their skin.
They walked side by side, shoulders brushing in the shadows. as the hour grew late and the streets emptied out, as people returned to their open-windowed homes to lay unsleeping on their beds, Rick and Daryl moved slower, the darkness easing some of the restraint they wrapped themselves in.
Rick felt reckless in the late night, apart from society, as though with the lights out and electricity cut, he reverted to a wilder state.
He pulled Daryl into a kiss in the middle of the empty street and it made Ricks skin feel tight and electrified, sparking against his nerves and simmering hotly through his body. Daryl licked into his mouth, hot breath against his skin and body pressed against Rick's, pulling him closer with a calloused hand.
“Fags” the cry echoed off the tall brick walls. it came from nowhere and everywhere. Daryl moved away, his head turning unerringly towards the scrappy kid in worn jeans and a too large wife beater.
“What did you say?” Daryl asked, voice low and smooth, gravel rumble slipping through the still night. The kid looked shocked, eyes wide and lips sucked into his mouth like he hadn’t expected anything to come of it. Daryl moved like a snake, every muscle in his toned body working in tandem and there’s something frightening about his fluidity, his ease with his body and the suggestion of violence in the tilt of his head.
Rick should pull him back, tell him not to scare the kid. But Rick can't look away from the roll of Daryl’s body or the fear in the kids eyes when he gets a proper look at them.
Daryl wouldn't kill the kid, wouldn't even really hurt him if he didn't have to. He didn’t take pleasure in violence or inflicting pain, he wasn't reckless and hot blooded like his brother, he was a cold simmer which was in some ways more dangerous.
The cop in Rick told him to move the kid along, to get between Daryl and his prey and diffuse the situation as best he could, like the was taught to do in the academy. The man in Rick wanted to watch Daryl crack wide open.
“Fuck off, kid.” Daryl said with a flick of his head, dismissing him.
Rick met Daryl's eyes as the kid ran off down the street, the soles of his sneakers slapping against the pavement in sharp smacks which echoed strangely around the empty street. Something in the air between them crackled like the sky before lightening,
The two of them had always teetered on the edge of violence. Daryl never forgot Rick was a cop, that they’d met with Rick’s handcuffs around Daryl's wrist and his partner struggling to contain the ferocity off Merle. Daryl had been docile, exasperated at it all but unresisting once he saw his brother was alright. He and Rick had talked idly as they watched Shane, curse up a storm as he stemmed the flow of blood from his nose.
The second time Rick had arrested Daryl, he’s spat insults at Shane the whole way, ugly, cruel slurs against him, his family, his heritage, his future.
It always took Rick by surprise to see Daryl fight with barbed words and harsh truths. He was as dangerous with his slurred, cruel insights as he was with his fists, it was easy to forget that just because Daryl was quiet and calm when they were together, he was a Dixon and fire ran in their blood.
Rick couldn't help but admire it, even back then, when they were strangers Rick couldn’t help but watch the younger Dixon let loose.
In the hot quiet street, he thought about how he was beneath Rick, giving himself over to his pleasure, beautiful and unashamed, flushed and sweaty and taking his pleasure. Daryl gave himself to everything he did, fighting or fucking, it didn’t matter. It was the times between which fooled you.
***
The sky is high above them, the rooftop is lit by lanterns and fairy lights Glenn had strung up months ago and forgotten about, until their small apartment became too close and hot for them to stand. They ushered everybody out onto the rooftop, beer bottles sweating in their fingers and the hot night air heavy against their skin, the promise of a storm hanging heavy in the still air.
They sat in a haphazard circle, leaning back in their mismatched chairs and talk bullshit as the drinks flowed. The group had welcomed Daryl, accepting the vague introduction as a friend of Rick’s from Kings County without question. He was quiet, his pale eyes watching the group of friends, taking in the way they worked together, his gaze always slipping towards Rick and pausing there, watching how Rick was with these people he didn’t know.
Rick wondered if he was passing some unknowable test the other man had devised.
“How’s Jessie? I haven’t seen her around.” Glenn asked, his voice bright and friendly and knocking a hand gently against Rick’s arm as though reprimanding him for her absence.
“She’s fine, busy.” Rick said into the mouth of his beer bottle. He kept his eyes down, not yet able to look at Daryl when he could feel the air between them go thin as tension blossomed in the heat.
Nobody noticed the tension which suddenly threaded itself through his muscles, but Daryl knew his tells, knew his body and how he looked when he lied. It wasn’t even a lie, but the innocuous sentence meant more than the words, and he knew that would show on his face if he locked eyes with the other man.
He and Jessie were never going to be real. She hadn’t loved him, couldn’t, though she would deny that with fire in her eyes if he’d ever said it to her. She’d needed someone to save her, someone to pull her out of the shattered pieces she’s found herself with after she’d left her husband. She’s needed a kind touch to teach her not to flinch anymore.
For a time, Rick thought he wanted to be that, wanted to and could. They’d barely done more than kiss. Sweet, gentle kisses in the bright sunshine as they walked hand in hand. It had felt like it would be easy, she talked about simple, domestic things which Rick had never desired or thought about. She talked about her clients at the salon, the snippets of gossip that made up their days and Rick had listened attentively, nodding his head and smiling on cue.
When they parted after each date, a chaste kiss on the lips and Jessie’s eyes liquid and large, Rick had felt out of place. Jessie was tender, gentle warmth and kindness, and Rick had wanted the restrained animal of Daryl, the coiled fury and placid calm, he wanted the wary eyed stillness wrapped in the dark or gilded by sunlight through a canopy of trees. He’d wanted the promise of violence in every careful movement and someone who challenged him, pushed him and dared him to do better, to see the world more clearly and do something.
Jessie wasn’t ever going to be that, she didn’t know how and shouldn’t have had to. Their dates became more infrequent and eventually stopped happening at all. Rick hadn’t minded in the end; he didn’t think Jessie did either.
But Rick’s friends always worried about how alone he was, would push pretty girls at him, sisters of their girlfriends and wives, nice neighbours they knew and civilian support at the station. Their eyes going dark and worried when he smiled politely but remained unattached.
He looked across at Daryl, who sat with one strong arm over the back of his chair, his shoulders straight and his head tilted as though in indifference, Rick tried to catch his eye, tried to convey some of this to the other man. But Daryl refused to look at him, and Rick sighed into his beer and took a long swallow. In the distance, thunder rumbled through the air.
“That’s a shame,” Glenn continued, “She’s cool.”
Rick murmured in agreement, his hand fisted around the neck of his bottle and wondered if he imagined the ugly sneer which flashed across Daryl’s face.
***
They barely make it back to Rick’s small apartment before the storm broke. Dark sky cracking open in a flood of rain which hissed against the hot ground and made the air thick and damp, heat captured between the sky and the earth.
The storm inside the apartment was quieter but rumbled with the thunder and promised to cause more damage than the deluge outside. They move through the dark, the hot air captured in the closed off room and pressing around them like a physical thing, like wading through treacle. Rick gasped in a breath that didn’t fill his lungs and took the plunge.
“There’s no me and Jessie.” he told the room and the still shadow who moved through the space to stand by the window. “We went on a couple of dates, nothing happened.” he told the shadows back.
“You don’t need to explain yourself to me.” Daryl said after a moment, voice barely more than a rumble. “You can do whatever you want.” he said, turning around to face Rick, squaring his shoulder and lifted his chin, eyes narrowed in the dark. “I do.”
Daryl has always had perfect aim. Just because he doesn’t talk as much as other people doesn’t mean he doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know exactly the right words to hit their mark and make Rick crumble.
Rick felt fire rush through him, his temper caught alight and ripping through his body from the twist in his gut, which had writhed since Glenn had innocently asked about a friend, to his throat where it settled like razors.
“Is that what you do when you disappear?” he asked, low and deadly calm. “Fuck whoever you want, bend over for every guy who asks you for it?” He had never really been a jealous man, never stopped other kids playing with his toys when he was young. But the thought of someone touching Daryl, of Daryl letting someone touch him, to wring out the desperate breaths and perfect moans from his throat and see him like that, so entirely taken over by his pleasure made his blood boil.
He wanted to tear him apart, to tear apart any man who has ever dared to touch Daryl Dixon.
They never talked about this, never gave form to this thing that they did, never found the words to label it. But Rick wanted Daryl, wanted every part of him and never wanted anyone to take him away.
“So what if I do?” Daryl hissed, face going flushed and his dark hair sticking to his skin from the humid room and the drops of rain that had caught them before they made it inside. “So what if I fuck every bastard from here to California? Spread my legs like some no-good slut too stupid to charge for it? It’s none of your damn business!” he ended in a shout. His chest heaved with his breaths and when he spoke again it was a low growl. “You don’t own me. You don’t have any hold over me.” he spat the words out like they tasted foul in his mouth, his words coming out desperate, as though trying to convince not just Rick.
They stood in silence and the moment stretched between them. The sound of the rain against the windows was a white-noise which blocked the world from the small dark space they found themselves in. Daryl’s chest heaved with his breaths, broad shoulders held in a tense line as he held himself back, from what, Rick didn’t know.
Rick’s vision had narrowed, his mind taken up with the man that stood in front of him, who was always just out of reach and disappearing into the distance.
When they join, its desperate. The frayed edge of control unravelling as their breaths shudder at the first touch. He pulled Daryl closer, pushed further in, trying to meld their skin into one being. His hands grasping at the damp, tanned flesh under him, he felt like he was losing him, that they weren’t going to be okay and they never would be.
Daryl gasped into his mouth and struggled in his hold, every touch was earned, fought for and likely to leave bruises when they parted. They fucked on the floor, Daryl’s back arching against the familiar carpet, one hand fisted in Rick’s curls and the other clasped in his hand, their fingers interlocked and the hold so tight, their knuckles bloomed white.
Rick cradled Daryl’s head in one hand, braced against the floor with the other. He leaned close over him, their panted breaths mingling and both of them unable to look away as they joined with desperate, hard thrusts as though if they pressed hard enough, if they joined in the right way, they wouldn't ever have to part.
“How many?” Rick growled, not realising he would until the low rumble had slipped through clenched teeth. Daryl looked up at him a strangely placid expression settling over his features until Rick shifted his hips and nailed his prostate, Daryl’s eyes squeezed shut as though in pain and a sound somewhere between a gasp and a moan was punched out of him. Rick pressed closer, his grip on the other man going impossibly tighter, “How many?”
“Only you.” Daryl gasped as a shudder ran through him. He bared his teeth at Rick and spat the words at him “It’s only ever been you.” in a rush of breath before his body went rigid with climax. He said the words like he hates them. Like they were something ugly and cruel.
***
Daryl had always tried to push Rick, just to see how far he could. It was a private game they played in the small town where they settled into their roles of good and bad. Twenty-three years old, Daryl had been cocky, fine boned and scrappy still, but filling out and made hard and mean by his family and angry by the town.
He’d have a beer with Rick one night, then laugh when Merle cussed up a storm as they were dragged into the station the next. He’d challenge Rick on everything, sometimes just to argue with him. And Rick let him, let the discussions drag on, bit back smiles when Daryl made it a game to catch his wrists to cuff them and played officer to his criminal.
Daryl needs conflict. At twenty-four in his small apartment over the garage he punched Rick in the mouth for saying Merle was a bad influence, before grabbing him with both hands and kissing him, clumsy and desperate and mean, before falling into bed with him. Their first kiss tasted like blood and both men had gasped into it.
Just because he lived on the knife’s edge of violence didn’t mean he was incapable of tenderness. Even then, when they were punch drunk in the late afternoon he had pushed into Rick’s touch, had traced over his features with gentle fingers and breathed kisses into his skin.
In Rick’s apartment in the city, ten years later, they continued as they’d started. Moments of tenderness interspersed with the promise of violence, of conflict. When they touched, it was like first time never ended and they could continue on as they had. That nothing had to change and they’d be okay, they’d figure it out.
But they were older now, their lives were different and they both knew, but never said, that they couldn’t continue as they were. Sometimes Rick looked at him, standing by the open window in his small apartment and thought that he was losing him. Then he remembers he’s never had him to begin with.
Rick is torn between tenderness and rage in those moments. A strange desperation wells in his throat and he can’t help feeling like something went wrong, all those years ago when Daryl skipped town after their night together. That they’re in limbo, waiting for something to knock them back on course and the years between that mistake and then, was just waiting.
***
The sheets on the other side of the bed were still warm when Rick woke up to the predawn darkness. His eyes flicked over to the window where Daryl sometimes sat and smoked, but the window was closed and there was no sign of the other man.
The worn carpet was soft under his bare feet and he moved across it silently as he made his way to the door of his bedroom.
Daryl stood in the middle of the living room, his skin kissed by blue shadows and gilded gold by the streetlight coming in through the window. He turned his head to the door when it opened and he and Rick stood, looking at each other for a long, silent moment.
Daryl was so still, he always was, but it seems unnatural in the night, like this was a snapshot of a stolen moment, unreachable and unalterable, his path set in front of him extending outside Rick’s reach.
“You’re leaving.” Rick’s voice is low in the early hour. It seemed stupid to state the obvious but Rick felt like he would explode, simply burn up from the inside if he didn’t say it. Daryl’s chin dipped and his eyes skidded away as though he’s sorry.
“Yes.” Daryl’s voice was barely above a rumble. Hoarse and low.
The moment stretches between them. In the dim light Rick felt far away, detached from the real world and cast loose from reality. It felt like if he didn’t say a word, if he refrained from moving, this moment would never end and the wouldn’t have to deal with what came next.
He spoke anyway. “Where are you going?” he asked and wondered if he really wanted to know. He didn’t know where Daryl went when he left, what he did or who he became. Their time apart was a blank spot which hovered between them, neither man willing to fill in the shape.
Daryl shrugged one shoulder and bowed his head. His bag was open at his feet and Rick moved his gaze down to it for something other than Daryl to look at.
“Does it matter?” Daryl finally replied, the words a dark croak in the night. “I can’t stay here.” he rasped. His eyes darted out the window and in the silence Rick could hear a car passing below and a garbage truck in the next street.
Rick knew that, had always known that. When he’d moved to the city the thought had crossed his mind that he had taken the job and the apartment for that very reason, if Daryl never came, he could never leave.
Words filled Rick’s mouth but he would never say them. Pleas to stay, promises to change however Daryl wished it, he would beg and bargain, demand and bully. The words clamoured in his throat and he could taste them like the sweat he kissed from Daryl's shoulders and the taste of beer on his lips.
He would never say them because he would never wish to change Daryl. Never try to make him someone he wasn’t and if Daryl needed to leave, to vanish into the abyss until he deemed it time to pay Rick another visit, then Rick would accept that. He would hate it and rage against it in the safety of his own mind, he would ache with longing for more, for him to stay and for him to love Rick as he loved Daryl, all consuming and with a desperate, ugly devotion, but he would accept it.
Daryl turned his eyes to Rick and they were twenty-four again in his small apartment. They were twenty-eight and dancing around the topic. They were thirty and touching each other like it hurt to let go. They were thirty-four and it felt like a goodbye, when they’d never had goodbyes before.
A muscle in Daryl’s jaw twitched and his hands fisted at his side. When he spoke, it was barely audible in the quiet room. “Come with me.”
“I have a life here.” Rick says, low and steady, He thinks of working with Abe, of coffee’s with Maggie and watching the game at her and Glenn’s place. He thinks of the takeaway menu’s in his kitchen drawer and his empty bed at night. He thinks about the pretty girls who bat their lashes at him and promise him normal. He lowered his eyes before continuing. “I can’t just give that up because you ask.” he swallowed, “What happens when you get bored and leave again?”
Daryl’s eyes went wide and his mouth shaped words he didn’t give voice to. Rick watched as he turned his head and he looked out the window, the planes of his face burnished by the streetlight, looking angular and hard, he was older now, his face strong and mature. Rick didn’t know when that happened, when the fine boned twenty-year-old shifted into the man he was now, it happened when he was away, Rick’s life was on hold and Daryl was busy growing up. The thought hit him like a punch to the gut and he had to swallow the tight feeling in his throat, it sat like dread, like his world collapsing in on itself because all he could think was that this time was the last time, this time, there’d be no phone call telling him Daryl was back, that this thing between them could continue.
“I never get bored of you.” Daryl said, eyes returning to Rick.
“But you leave.”
“So you don’t.” Daryl’s voice was tight and his eyes were wide as though he was scared. “I wake up every day when I’m with you and wonder if today's the day. If today, you realise I’m just a hick with bad blood who ain’t ever gonna make you happy.” His words hang in the air between them.
“You’re a fucking idiot.” Rick snapped, voice cutting through the blue shadows. “I ain’t gonna tire of you, I ain’t gonna be surprised by you.” he took a breath which felt like a gasp “I know you Daryl, and dammit, you make me happy,” he shook his head and frowned at the other man, “I’m only happy when you’re here, when I know where you are and that you’re with me.” he closed his eyes and pressed his thumbs into his eyes as feelings roared under his skin and filled his head, violence and tenderness thrumming in his blood and in the air between them. “I’ve waited for you for ten years.”
“Come with me.” Daryl said again, voice stronger this time. Rick looked at him, at the way his eyes were wide and scared and the way his chest seemed to heave with each breath.
“Where?” he rasped and it sounded like begging to his ears. He watched Daryl’s throat bob as he swallowed.
“Home. Kings County.”
It felt like it was the only answer Rick could have accepted and he hadn’t known it. Rick thought of going back there, to the small town where they’d gotten to know each other over minor arrests and beers in the only bar in town, where Shane was still a deputy and called him every other week, where they’d played cops and criminals and had fallen in love with each other.
He wondered if returning with Daryl would be like no time had passed, like the years between their first night together and this, all those years waiting for a call, would disappear and they’d go on like they were meant to.
The space between them disappeared and Daryl welcomes his touch, when they kiss, Rick thinks that they’re going to be okay.