You have told him. Yes, the decisive words came out of your mouth. These words had found their way and freed themselves in the air. You said it the worst way. You said it without realizing it. A spontaneous gesture. This bitter truth had finally come to the surface and floated among you both in this unearthly night. Without tact, without delicacy, you had announced to a man the death of his brother, as if nothing had happened, as if you had delivered news from the neighborhood. Daryl remained motionless, one hand taut on the branch. He didn't turn to look at you, he didn't approach to ask for explanations. You took a step forward as if to reach him, but to the noise that caused your movement, Daryl clung to the branch and jumped away. You were petrified when you saw him running into the forest, like a wounded animal looking for a shelter to die. You were aware that you had broken him, but you never thought he had any hope for Merle. You mistakenly believed that he had given up on having imagined it. Maybe it was just like that until a few minutes ago. Perhaps the search for his brother was a trivial excuse, but the fact was that he never expected that statement, especially from you and especially at that time. In that feeling, he had turned his fears into reality... You knew he wanted some time for himself, but you also knew that Daryl could just as easily be a prey in this emotional state he was in. The darkness had engulfed the surroundings and made it difficult to see everything near you. But now you had made it your habit and trained your eyes to see what was necessary in the dark. You stepped forward anxiously and grabbed the knife that you had hidden in your boots. You went to the spot where the figure of the archer had faded, hoping he hadn't gone too far yet. Your feet collided with something and judging by the smell, it was easy to understand what it was. Daryl had already killed some walkers. You suddenly heard sounds, someone was nearby. So you stopped spontaneously to focus on that sound to better understand where it came from. Footsteps, but they weren't heavy or shuffling. As the sound grew louder, you turned around, but someone grabbed your wrist and let you rotate. You now were between a body that covered your mouth with one palm.

"Easy...", a male voice whispered. You shuddered and recognized the tone.

"What did you think, sweetie?", he asked: "Did you want to leave?"

You tried to squirm to free yourself from his grip. But as soon as you felt the tip of a blade on the abdomen, you stopped trying. You had been stupid to run after Daryl, he was right. Daryl didn't need my help, let alone your closeness. But now you had a more pressing matter to solve, You had to escape Len. You wouldn't have allowed him to touch you a second time. He licked your neck and gave you a disgusting feeling. After a deep breath, you lifted your leg and hit him with the knee in the crotch. This allowed you to take the hand holding the knife and disarm it. Then you kicked him on the knee and forced him to surrender. He fell to the ground, groaning and cursing you, but you ignored his words, which were as far from escape as possible. But you stumbled over the body of this man and landed on the ground. Len was back, more angry than before. He tried to grab your wrists to block you. You reached out your arm, looking for something, hoping to hit him with a big branch or something else. Your fingers sank into the ground, clutching a boulder, and with a swift blow you hit the stone in his face.

"Dumb slut!", he screamed in pain.

You pushed him away slightly because he was busy touching his bleeding head. You hurried out of the clearing and were strangely excited to see the hut. Although he had abused you, Joe wouldn't have broken the rules. You would have been safe near him. Even when you thought about it, it made you shiver. You heard some voices and understood that they were awake. Surrounded by the trees, you arrived in front of the hut. The group mumbled something about you, wondering where you were and whether it was necessary to look for you. As soon as they saw you, Joe looked at you and studied you carefully. One of the men interrogated you and pointed a pistol at your head.

"Where the hell did you go?"

"Pissing.", you just answered calmly.

"And your new friend?"

"I dont know."

Joe touched his shoulder and told him, without opening his mouth, to calm down and leave you alone. As he turned to protest, footsteps alerted everyone, eliminating the various security measures if a few walkers had arrived. Instead, it was Len himself who cursed as he pressed his hand against the wound. Here in the open, the moonbeams allowed you to see more clearly. You had hit him on the forehead, which seemed to have burst.

"Where were you?", Joe asked, pretending that everything was fine.

Len looked at you and tried to find out if you had said anything.

"Do I have to ask for permission to go outside?", he asked sullenly.

"Where did you get the injury from?", Joe asked, looking at the weapon in his hands. Len answered with a lie and stared into your eyes. He was afraid you had talked.

"Asshole!", you replied. The others giggled, amused by the scene they imagined. Joe joined their laughter. Suddenly, however, he reached out his arm and a shot echoed through the air. Len fell groaning to the floor. His hands pressed against his leg, from which streams of blood dripped.

"If I hate something, it's liars.", Joe said with a grin while Len screamed and cursed you again.

"I didn't do anything, this whore invented everything!"

You were petrified by the violence, not that you didn't know what they were capable of, but you had trivially thought they would take care of one of their men. They were beasts... Joe put his arm around your hips and told you to re-enter the hut. The door closed now, you heard the screams and beatings...

"Was it so obvious?", you asked curiously.

"To tell the truth, no.", he answered gravely: "You were pretty calm but also pretty excited, so nobody thought he touched you, but I noticed you were short of breath and dirty. Well, you could have escaped one of those things, but that certainly wouldn't have explained why you're so dirty, and then the wound on his head, it was one very clean, irregular wound."

He was rightly the boss. Nothing escaped him and he kept his men on a leash. Len's screams grew louder. As if you had said something, Joe kept talking and looked out of the window at the massacre.

"I don't say that we are in heaven, but we are fit for this reality, we have no difficulty surviving. The contrasts only arise between them, they are not intelligent, but they are animals. My job is to control the situation, to train them. Len was a weak connection and a subject of imbalance, dangerous to the group, and if it were not for you, he would soon have been dead."

"I don't care what you are, but I would say monsters instead of animals."

Without turning away from the brutal scene, he corrected you: "No, sweetie, if you think we're monsters, that means you've handled the Apocalypse well."

You realized that he could very well be right. The epidemic had produced the worst in humans. Suddenly you realized that Len's voice was gone for a few minutes, predicting what you would see if you opened the door. A disfigured corpse.

"I've noticed, you know?", said Joe.

"What?"

"The same day I met you, your eyes... Your eyes have something different, I immediately realized that you're not a naive girl, as if your eye color changes to certain situations."

You did not understand what he meant, but his reference to the rape annoyed you a lot.

"This reality is plaguing all of us, and if you stay alive for a long time, you'll soon be no different from the monsters you fear."

~

These damn rails never seemed to stop, but stretched miles away. The exhausting heat made this simple act not easier to go on. Your legs begged for mercy, but you had to ignore them. Joe's words had crept into your brain and stubbornly stomped. It was enough for you to look at yourself to understand the metamorphosis of your mind without my knowing it. You hated to problematize yourself, but that bastard Joe had put you in that crisis. If you weren't yet a monster, something was missing... Len's cries hadn't stirred any emotions in you, in fact you were happy with the fate that had been granted to him. You watched as Daryl ignored you, angry and hurt in his soul. You did not try to say anything, you knew that when it was the right time, he would talk to you again. That's how he was, he needed time to cool off, but above all to recognize and accept the death of his brother. As soon as the sun rose, the archer had returned to the group as if nothing had happened. Nobody asked him anything, not even Joe. You understood that he did it often. He had seen Len's body but hadn't wondered what had happened, nor had he looked at you. Since you were still in their group, it was only for him, otherwise you would have tried to escape. But apparently Daryl did not think so, maybe you only molested him. You were shocked by his way of doing things, you were surprised that he didn't want to know more about Merle. Not that you could give him an explanation, because Philip had said little to you. Daryl ran behind, on the other side you ran at the top and prayed that they would find the people who they hunted in a hurry. You still didn't know what to do, of course the first decision was to escape but at the same time you were not sure of their hunting skills. It was possible that these people were just victims and that they had to kill some of their men in defense. After all, they weren't very friendly and nice... You took on the problems of other lives. You knew that you would feel guilty if only you ran away. First, you had to make sure what types of individuals it was, but you still didn't know how to behave. Even if they looked like good people, how could you help them? At that very moment, everything depended on his mood.

Joe came closer, as if to whisper: "Since you came us, this man is just more disturbed."

"Oh yes?", you said, waking your thoughts. He looked around to see if he could speak quietly or not.

"There is no need for you to belong to him."

"I don't care.", you replied, hoping that Joe would let that issue go.

He ran his hand through his thick silver hair and smiled. You moved your eyes and focused on the horizon. You still could not digest the fact that you were in the company of the bastard who had raped you, and at the same time you were amazed at how calm you were. Your heart told you to attack him and put an end to his life, but your brain begged you to do the right thing, not to be a murderer, a monster like them. It would have been vengeance, an eye for an eye, an almost legitimate action... Still, something in you knew it was the wrong thing. You had to try to keep your being, your person, stable. The world had changed, but you could fight and didn't have to bow to this destructive power. Your identity had to stay intact. Still, it was a complicated challenge.

"Each one of us plays a character and plays a perfect role. Your friend here, for example, has decided to be a lone wolf. He thinks of being alone, of not needing anyone, but we both know that a wolf always belong to a pack in the end. And you, you're a diamond.", Joe said.

You looked at him and didn't quite understand what he meant, in the hope that he would give you an explanation.

"You're a diamond, you act as if nothing could upset you, but what you have not understood yet is that you're no longer innocent.", he added. "You are an impure diamond, something you don't seem to recognize at first glance."

"Well, thanks for the allegory.", you interrupted him: "But this psychologist shit doesn't interest me. I am what I am..."

A slight grimace appeared on his face: "What I'm telling you is that you've always been like that. A diamond is impure from birth, there's a break in it during its formation in the ground. Of course, you've suffered its own weight on load, but your impurity is not caused by external actions."

These words have beset you. Joe had just told you that you had a dark side, a part of you that you hadn't met, unlike him. For this bastard, it was obvious what you were. He tried to make you give up, to invite you to be what you're without following reason. He wanted you to act impulsively, to turn the outer reality into what you should have been from the beginning, as if past life had been just a cage.

"If you have to follow your logic, Joe... Then you act as if you were somebody else."

He looked pleased, glad that you had finally understood. "It's like that and that's the point."

You looked at your palms and allowed the sunrays to show those abrasions that you had stupidly done. As much as it hurt to admit it, maybe he was right. You have always been 'broken'. And maybe it was this peculiarity that allowed you to stay alive today. This could in principle also have advantages. It was up to you to manage those qualities. He probably did not mean anything malicious, maybe you just misunderstood his words. Maybe he tried to tell you something else...

"And you Joe, what would you be?", you asked. He looked at his men and raised his eyebrows.

"I am a leader, an alpha animal... My job is to keep these children at bay, to impose discipline on them. But to respect me involves a series of actions that I would normally find quite unpleasant."

You held back a laugh, incredulous to have heard that and he was amused to see you like this.

"What's the problem, don't you believe me?", he asked calmly. Your hands clenched into fists to crush his damn face.

"I can't believe you are so damn serious, do you think your people see you this way with different eyes?", you asked angrily: "Do you think that I believe in such bullshit? That's absurd! You tell me, that you did what you did just because your damn gang was still going to execute your orders?"

Joe changed his expression and became more serious.

"Do you think it's easy to be responsible for this barbaric mob? If I want to be considered a leader, they have to fear and appreciate me, I can not avoid certain situations, I have no reason to lie to you, I wouldn't have an advantage.", he said, returning to his group.

And you felt exposed to purgatory. He described your abuse as an accident on the way, as something he had to attend, as a situation he had to face in this way. And you, like an idiot, even thought about it, because that bastard had said at least one truth, and if he would lie to you, it wouldn't have worked. Basically, he forced you to reevaluate his character. He had not asked you to forgive him but to understand him. You turned around as someone attacked your arm and forced you to follow his furious gait. You plunged into a clearing, away from prying eyes. To say that he was pulling you would be a euphemism, more than anything else he tore you away. He took your shoulders and threw you against a tree, forcing you to stay still. His icy eyes weren't exactly inviting at the moment; On the contrary, they seemed to want to cut you into tiny pieces. It was Daryl Dixon.

"The hell's that shit?", he yelled at you.

"What do you mean, Daryl?", you replied, moving his arms away from you.

"Ya' can't really be that stupid, it ain't a game!"

"It would be easier to talk about it, if you would kindly tell me what you are referring to."

"Joe fucks with ya' mind, that's not normal!"

"If there is something that doesn't seem normal here, it's you.", you replied annoyed.

You weren't in the mood to discuss. You risked saying things that you did not think about. You were able to control yourself to stay reasonable in all these days. But Joe had shaken you, reviving your companion's death and the abuse, but not just the one you had to endure silently.

"Don't be a stupid, naive girl.", Daryl said: "I will not take care of ya', so stop behavin' like a bitch."

You stepped away from his threatening form. "If you didn't care, you wouldn't be here to tell me."

"I don't care!", he answered immediately.

But you knew that you were right. It was useless for Daryl to create that distance because it was easier for you to understand.

"Listen, if you have nothing else to say to me... Then I'll go back now.", you said and started walking.

But he stopped you and grabbed your wrist.

"To these assholes who raped ya'? Damn, if I hadn't been there, the others would've done it already again!", he muttered: "What the hell 's urgin' ya' to go with 'em? What did Joe tell ya'? Do ya' really believe his shit? It's brainwashin'!"

Daryl offered to help you. He threw you back into the reality that you had missed. You released your wrist from his grip and approached the archer to make him feel uncomfortable. You didn't have to scream, unlike him you knew that even in lower tones you were honest and serious.

"And you also know that it would be pointless to repeat it over and over again. We are like this, right? We certainly take things for granted, but one thing makes us very different. I'll face all the shit I encounter.", you whispered and felt some tears on your cheeks: "I do not run away, I do not avoid confrontation. Nobody brainwashed me and you do not care, anyway what Joe just told me. It just annoys you that you still see me, it hurts you to see me stronger than yourself... It makes you nervous to listen to me and learn now."

For a moment you seemed to see him more relaxed, but after a few seconds his eyes brightened again.

"Do ya' expect me to be like one of those assholes, to call ya' a bitch? Fuck! Ya' could've told me of my brother! Tell me the truth, that day 'n the supermarket... That damn day when ya' told me you'd tried... Ya' knew he's dead, right?", Daryl said: "Do ya' think I'm a fuckin' idiot? I wouldn't 've been happy to find him 'live, but he's my damn brother. He's my blood. But maybe I'm an idiot 'cause I trusted ya'!"

He started to move away, but this time you were able to lock him by the wrist.

"Daryl, please don't run away... Do you think it was easy to keep this secret? I worked for the Governor, I was with you to execute orders, you have no idea how hard it was for me. Every time I looked at you, talking to you, I thought of Merle. When I came back to warn you, I realized what Philip actually was. That day in the prison... I wanted to tell you. After that I never had a chance. Yesterday it happened, I was mad at you... To be honest, I was hoping to tell you in a different way, maybe at another time... But we both know that there would never be a good time. Daryl, strange as you may see it, I was a good friend of your brother. I can not know what it was like before Woodbury, but there... Shit, he was always in a good mood and we used to go on expeditions together, you know? He talked to me about you, about his little brother, about the brat what you were and what he loved..."

"Just...", Daryl started suddenly, but you kept talking.

"I've been in chaos for six months, on a damn expedition to find shelter, a second home. I'm not telling you how all of my comrades died, but I survived. I was through winter alone, and as I came back to Woodbury, I couldn't see Merle. I thought he was home, drunk as usual, then a soldier told me he had cheated on us and that he had come back to you. Daryl, believe me, I was so happy for you... Merle had managed to meet you after all this time, you were together again. I didn't think he was a traitor. I thought he was happy again."

"Just tell me how he died...", he said.

"The Governor, he killed him...", you admitted, looking down. "Merle came back to ask for a truce to clear everything, after all, it was Philip himself who rescued him near Atlanta."

You stood motionless, like the trees near you. There was nothing to add, you had freed yourselves. Although you were often annoyed with his way of acting and being but you realized how similar you were. You were only able to open properly in the discussions, but your former companion had helped you at that time, while you couldn't do the same for the archer. You didn't know if he ever had anyone to make him talk. In a sense, you identified with him. You knew exactly what it meant to lose someone. Your little sister... You were somewhere the opposite of Daryl, although he was the victim of the same tragic fate. So you put your face on his chest and embraced him in a hug. You exchanged the roles of your first embrace, this time being the one who had the courage to embrace him, while he was the one who chose to remain silent and not return that gesture, not least the whole action. Maybe you were wrong, but his eyes seemed now shiny and free...