[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 412 - Poor Daryl Confesses Everything

Leon watched Daryl's retreating back, the man was practically sprinting like his ass was on fire, and his brow furrowed hard.

Something was off with this guy.

It had started at dinner.

That restless, can't-sit-still energy, like he had a live hedgehog stuffed down his pants.

Painful to watch.

Leon tucked the cigarette between his lips and followed at his own pace.

He skipped the main door and cut through the side fire exit off the cafeteria, looping around to the prison's main road. Perfect position. Daryl's path: blocked.

The night wind was bitter. Cold enough to sting.

Daryl had his head down, charging forward like a lone wolf desperate to reach its den, not looking at anything.

THUD!

He walked face-first into a wall of flesh.

Leon stood blocking the way. Nowhere to go.

"What the f—"

The curse came out on reflex.

Then Daryl looked up, saw Leon's face, and swallowed the rest of it back down.

Didn't matter how foul his mood was. The man in front of him had earned at least that much.

"What are you running from?"

Leon exhaled a slow breath of smoke.

"Ain't running."

Daryl's eyes slid away.

He tried to step around him. Leon shifted one step sideways and blocked him cold.

"Something's eating at you."

Leon studied him with open curiosity.

Daryl's throat worked. His grip tightened on the crossbow until his knuckles went white, but the weapon gave him nothing. No comfort. No edge.

He didn't want to say it.

He couldn't say it.

It was too, too goddamn humiliating.

"It's nothing."

He turned his head aside.

"Just wanna go back and sleep."

"Look at me, Daryl."

Leon's voice was quiet. Flat.

Daryl looked up without meaning to, and his whole body locked.

He didn't want to look at those eyes.

Dark gold, the pair of them. Like two whirlpools. Like they could reach down into his chest and drag up every rotten, festering thing he'd buried in there and haul it out into the open.

He couldn't stop it.

I'm done.

That was all his brain had left.

"I... I goddamn..."

His lips trembled. The words he'd planned to carry to his grave came pouring out, unstoppable, like a dam going to pieces all at once.

"I think I... I've got feelings for Carol."

The moment it was out, every ounce of strength left his body.

Leon's eyebrow went up.

Shit.

He'd expected something serious.

This was it?

Fell for a woman, and that had him running like he'd seen a ghost?

Leon had always known, too, back in the original story, Daryl had carried something for Carol, feelings that eventually softened into something more like family. It wasn't new.

"But, but I goddamn —"

The agony in Daryl's voice was real now.

"I'm a bastard! Same as that old drunk — a complete, rotten bastard!"

"When I look at her... I think about my mom."

"I like watching her take care of Sophia. I like her, and I'm goddamn sick for it! I'm some freak with a mother complex!"

"My reasons for getting close to her were never clean! I just wanted, wanted to find my mom in her!"

"I'm garbage!"

He roared out that last word and then the spine went out of him completely. He sagged against the wall behind him, chest heaving, pulling in air like he'd just surfaced from drowning.

At the cafeteria entrance, Rick and Glenn had been walking out at exactly the wrong moment.

They both stumbled. Nearly went down face-first.

The two of them stared at each other with identical expressions of pure horror, then shrank back behind the door without making a sound. Two startled rabbits retreating into a hedge.

Shit.

Daryl... likes Carol?

And he's got a mother complex?

This was more explosive than finding out walkers could throw a house party.

Rick's head was ringing.

He'd always figured Leon and Daryl got along because they were the same type: quiet, no-nonsense, let-the-actions-talk. Two men who didn't need words.

But close enough for this? Close enough that Daryl Dixon, thorns and snarl and barbed wire all the way down, would crack open like this in front of him?

How the hell did Leon do it?

The man could put walkers to work as free labor. And apparently he could make a wild wolf like Daryl cry in front of him like a kid who'd lost his mother.

Rick felt his entire mental model of Leon shift, quietly, one more time.

➤ Next: Realizing the New Ability Brought by Evolution