Oh so tired, but this scene is one of the ones that was stuck in my head.
Hope y'all enjoy; it's nice to be able to write SOMETHING that isn't fighting me every step of the way…

The first week had been the weirdest for Alex, that was for sure.

After so long of being alone and fending for herself, she'd found that readjusting to being around people was not as simple as she'd first thought. She'd been introduced to everyone at camp, which had been daunting in and of itself because there were so many people for such a small camp; she was awed by the fact that this many survivors were here, considering that quite a few were small children. They would be defenceless against a walker, and yet here they were safe and alive.

She had to get used to sharing her space with others, particularly with people like Merle around who seemed quite intent on being a stereotypical sleaze. However she found herself not really bothered by his lewd suggestions or his sexual undertones towards her, because quite frankly although he was capable of being incredibly vulgar, he had yet to lay a hand on her at all.

It seemed that Merle was many things, a drug dealer, a redneck, a racist and a little bit sexist; but he was no rapist. She was willing to bet that he wouldn't ever actually strike a woman, because he seemed to have an intense dislike of Ed Peletier.

And that she could understand.

Upon only one meeting in presence with the lazy, selfish pig of a man, she hated him. She saw the way he looked down on the women of their ground, saw the way his wife Carol would avert her eyes when he glowered at her, the way his daughter became fidgety and quiet under his stare. He was everything a man should never be, and he'd survived the apocalypse so far?!
How he had, was anybody's guess.

She liked Carol though, when Ed was not around she was genuine and giving, always willing to try and make things better for other people. Another person that she got along with wonderfully was Glenn, which was understandable given that he was the first person that she'd had contact with in weeks. Alex found herself enjoying Dale's company as well, and he'd been surprised when she'd offered to help him one day with repairs on the RV; and she'd had to explain her previous employment as a mechanical engineer.

While she didn't work on cars specifically, the mechanisms of a lot of engines and motors generally had similar principles to function. After tweaking what she did know with a little help from Dale, she was easily able to sort through the basics and make the Winnebago run a little easier.

She was much better at dealing with the component of the vehicle that generated their heating and electrical items, but she was willing to learn from him, and as such she'd developed a good sense of professionalism around him. She'd never say it to his face, but she was fond of him mostly because of the way he reminded her of her father.

Just older, and with much whiter hair.

The two girls he had a strong friendship with, Andrea and Amy, seemed like nice enough people. Amy was sweet, if not a little naïve, but Alex suspected that had something to do with Andrea. Andrea was tough, independent and seemed very protective over her little sister. The Australian spit-fire didn't really see anything wrong with it, but she felt that perhaps sheltering Amy so much from what was out there, might not be a wise decision if the world came crashing in on them all.

The Morales family was one that Alex found to be lovely. Morales was funny, friendly and seemed quite okay with her wicked sense of humour, which scored major brownie points with her. His wife Miranda was fantastic at cooking with the very minimal materials they had available, and his kids were brilliantly behaved. Another person she liked was Jacqui, who was motherly and loving to almost everybody in the group, with the exception of the Dixon brothers and Ed; not that she was rude to them, she just kept her distance. The woman seemed to have a close friendship with Jim, their mechanic, who Alex was neither here nor there about.

He seemed nice enough, but was generally pretty distant for the most part.

Shane had become less wary of Alex as she'd proved herself capable and useful to the group, and that she wasn't going to go mad and shoot everyone and steal their stuff. She always smirked when she thought that, picturing herself going on a rampage just to steal a few cookies. His charges, Lori and Carl, seemed decent enough, but she couldn't say that Lori was her kind of person.

Nice enough, as far as niceness went…but the woman was too highly strung for Alex's taste. She was a 'have a drink and make some stupid jokes while singing terribly off key about Australian pride' kind of girl. With Lori everything was always so serious and dramatic, and Alex didn't do drama, not even in high school. The thought of how even in a zombie apocalypse women could still be catty, made her scoff to herself as a smirk crossed her face.

"The hell you smilin' about?" came Daryl's voice.

Her ears pricked at the remark, shouldering her old rifle and straining forward to look over the side of the RV to see Daryl standing there with his crossbow slung on his back and his usual shrewd, unimpressed expression.

"Nothing much, sour-worm." She smiled, saluting him with two fingers.

She heard him spit on the ground in front of him in annoyance which made her wrinkle her nose a little. Sure, she wasn't exactly what anybody would call classy, but she detested spitting. "Told you not to call me that, stupid bitch."

The fiery little foreigner leaned her weight onto her gun from her seat in the deck chair, her expression somewhere between annoyed and cheeky, "Then stop making it so easy. Smile sometime, then you wouldn't look like you ate a sour-worm. Just saying."
"Shuddup." He slurred, his serious expression intensified as he narrowed his gaze and slid his eyes away, shifting the crossbow to a more comfortable height.

In the last week or two that she'd been with the group, she'd come to realize that the most entertaining thing to do in camp, was piss the crossbow wielding redneck off, because his reactions were petulant, almost childish in the sense that he would sulk or swear. His expression was constantly that of someone who had sucked a lemon or a sour-worm; hence the nickname. He was generally quiet, when he wasn't snarling at people who got in his way, the guy seemed to have a lot of anger, but Alex had decided that whatever the reason it was his business and she didn't really care.

All she knew was that he was fun to argue with.

It wasn't until a minute or so, that she realized that Daryl was still standing at the base of the Winnebago with that scowling expression; just standing there like he was waiting. Confused, she picked up a small, chipped shard of stone from the roof of the vehicle and flicked it down on him, chortling with amusement as he snapped his head up to her with that irate, pissed off expression.
"Did you need something, mate?" she asked casually, "Or do you just enjoy my conversation."

He scoffed at her, a very slight smirk in the corner of his mouth to show that the remark had something amusing about it, "Y'wish." He paused for a few seconds before shrugging non-chalantly and making a frustrated sound as he continued, "Merle's sick."

Alex's eyes widened, her fingers tightening around the handle of the rifle in worry, "Is he okay? Does he need some help?"

"No." he snapped, "He's fine, just got a flu; can't get his ass up to go on huntin' for tonight."

She looked at him with a suspicious and curious expression. She knew for a fact that Daryl would not be telling her this purely for conversation's sake, he wasn't conversational. The guy barely ever really said anything to anyone at camp unless it was something to report, and he and Merle usually kept to themselves.

"And you're telling me this why?" she said shortly, placing an elbow on her knee and resting her chin in her hand with a bored expression.

To her surprise, Daryl started to chuckle to himself with a sneering, vengeful grin. It wasn't a 'happy' chuckle to say exactly, it was more of an 'about to wreak some kind of trouble' type chuckle, and to be honest she found that to be worse than his cold shoulder routine. Suddenly he pulled the crossbow off his back with the speed and precision of someone who had done the motion a million times before, and who could probably do it in his sleep. Before she could even move, he pulled the trigger.

Pulled. The. Trigger.

An arrow whizzed past her cheek and imbedded into the pole of the umbrella on the roof, her eyes widening in shock at the wind that rushed her skin. Daryl lowered his crossbow and shot her a smirk as he watched her jaw-dropped expression.

"Y'all said you could do better than catchin' squirrels. Let's see how well you hunt, 'roo wrangler." He said harshly, "Dale's takin' over watch, move it."

He turned and started to walk away, motioning to Dale by pointing at the RV over his shoulder with his thumb and didn't say a word, just slung the crossbow over his shoulder and headed towards the woods, not waiting up for her to follow.

As the shock of the sudden event began to subside, Alex gasped and turned to look at the arrow, as if only just comprehending what had happened. Suddenly the shock was replaced by a deep, welling feeling of anger, the sensation of being unbelievably pissed off with someone. Narrowing her eyes and growling to herself, she seized the arrow and pulled it from the plastic pole and rounding in his direction. Shouldering her rifle, she grabbed the roof rack and swung herself on the ground before charging after him like an angry bull.

"You crazy, sour-wormed, redneck fucking cunt-face!" she thundered, "You just fucking shot at-"

"Hey!" he snapped, spinning around and pointing the crossbow at her with a stern, intense expression, "You stupid, kangaroo bitch? Y'keep screamin' like that and every walker in 20 miles'll come running up here. Fuckin' keep it down."

She had stopped in her tracks as he'd pointed the bow at her, and was left opening and closing her mouth like a fish as he turned around and kept walking. Clenching her fists, Alex felt irritation broiling in her chest; pissed off that he'd made it sound like she'd done something stupid, and annoyed that he was right.

Gritting her teeth so hard that they ached, she tightened her grip around the arrow until her knuckles went white before swinging her arm back full force and ditching it. Alex's aim was true, and the arrow smacked him sideways in the back of the head with the metal bar in the middle.

Daryl Dixon froze in his tracks and clutched the back of his head, his hand gripping tightly into his dirty hair before he turned and shot a glare over his shoulder. With a stare like white-hot ice he watched as Alex walked up in his direction, her fists clenched firmly at her sides and her face set in an annoyed, stern line as she approached. As she tramped past him to the edge of the woods with leaves crunching beneath her boots, they shared a unified glare.

"Go get them squirrel." He muttered with a sardonic glare, a smirk in the very corner of his lips. The cherry-haired girl pulled the beanie from her back pocket and tucked all of the red strands underneath it, effectively hiding her hair. Alex then shot him a scowl over her shoulder with a low tone to her voice.

"Go fuck yourself." She snarled, pulling her machete from the holster and swinging it imposingly before slinking off into the woods ahead of him.

-0-0-0-

"You sure you done this before?" Daryl said in a rather bored tone, standing atop a boulder with a wide-legged stance and his crossbow held low. He was watching Alex fail miserably at trying to track their game through the woods.

As expected, she shot him a foul look, annoyance evident in her eyes. It made him scoff at her, as though she was being petulant.

"Still mad I got the drop on ya, huh?"

"The drop? Bullshit, you fucking shot at me you moron." She muttered back, kneeling down on one leg to try and find the tracks of the deer they'd been following, but in her insistence to prove that she was just as good as him, Alex had forgotten that tracking a light-footed deer through a leafy forest was different than chasing a heavy-stepped kangaroo across a dry, sanded bushland. She'd lost the tracks, and she didn't want to confess it.

Her pride screamed at her not to concede.

"…You lost it, ain't you?" he remarked smugly, ignoring her remarks about him shooting at her.

Looking up at him with a glare, she prepared to fight him on it; but a realization crossed her mind. This wasn't about her pride, it was about food for the group…she couldn't afford to be ignoring her failure simply out of spite to one smug-ass-all-hell redneck. With a defeated exhale, she braced a hand on her raised knee and nodded before getting to her feet.

"I lost it." She confessed.

"Pssshhh," he tisked, jumping down off the rock and moving to her spot to where she'd been examining the tracks, "thought you said you'd done this before."

She felt ashamed of her miserable, crash-and-burn, fall-through-the-ground-into-a-puddle failure, despite having been so confident in her capabilities because of her practice back home. "I have…but jeez, mate. I've never tracked deer before. They're different."

"And what'd you track, huh? Them 'roos you always talkin' about. Didn't do us much good here now, did ya?"

"I-…" she cut herself off before agreeing with his irritating, 'I-told-you-so' tone. She needed something to take the piss out of him, and seeing as he was an American she decided to use his cultural ignorance to have some fun. Oh vengeance was a bitch, but how she loved it. "…You ever heard of Drop Bears?"

Daryl stopped and looked up at her with a raised brow before jerking his head in a particular direction, pointing out the way the deer must have gone. She fell into step behind him before he finally answered her question.

"The fuck's a Drop Bear?" he asked sceptically.

Unable to resist, Alex felt a grin carve through her cheeks as she held her rifle ready for any trouble. She licked her lips and prepared to feed him the biggest load of bullshit she could lay on.

"Well, you know what koalas are? They're those fluffy grey teddy-bear looking things from Australia; the ones that sit in trees eating leaves, kinda dopey looking?"

The crossbowman gave a shrug as he walked, "Sure, I guess. They sell toys of 'em in souvenir shops an' shit, right?"

"Yeah." Alex answered, putting a serious tone to her voice, "Well…don't let the cute and cuddly thing fool you. They're only like that when they're eating the leaves, the eucalyptus inside them is an alcohol agent, and they basically get drunk on them. Sometimes they fall out of the trees."
Daryl stopped in his tracks and looked at her with a non-believing scowl, one eyebrow raised to show he was listening. "Drunk teddy bears…right. Fuckin' weird country you're from; no wonder you're a head-case."

"Back at you, redneck hick asshole." She snapped back, following as he began walking again, "Anyway, when these things stop eating, they go almost fucking rabid. They become really aggressive. If you're walking in the bush and they see you, mate they will fucking leap down on you and claw the fuck out of your face. They're violent and dangerous, and can do some serious damage."

"The fuck?" he balked, glancing at her as she fell into step beside him, his crossbow still raised and poised for the slightest movement, "For real?"

Alex nodded, her face solemn and serious; but inside she was hollering her head off at how gullible the redneck was. Koalas were not dangerous, and they were not called Drop Bears; even though it was true about them getting drunk on eucalyptus and falling out of their trees, "Yep. I'm not used to tracking docile little deer, I'm used to Drop Bears that'll tear your face off, and kangaroos that'll kick your spleen into your lungs with their back feet."

The younger Dixon shook his head with a heavy sigh, "Your country's fucked."
She shrugged, appearing nonchalant and at ease, "We have some of the most dangerous and deadly wildlife in the world…unless you count the walkers here, I guess."

"Yeah well-" suddenly the sound of a twig or leaf of some kind snapped and rustled, and the hunter had his weapon aimed in the second that it took Alex to blink. If there was nothing else about this man that she liked at all, she could at least admit that she felt incredibly safe with his crossbow on their side; he was no amateur with that thing.

He turned to her and pressed a finger to his lips, motioning for her to be silent before gesturing for her to raise the gun and circle to the right. He mirrored the action by circling left, and in the clearing between a couple of the trees, Daryl spotted the deer that they were looking for. Treading lightly, he moved with the grace of an incredibly skilled killer, almost assassin-like in his posture.

Catching eye contact with Alex, he reached his left hand down to the right side of his pants where his belt would be without lowering his crossbow, tapping two of his fingers on the spot before pointing at her.

Machete, he was saying.

Nodding, Alex narrowed her focused gaze and put the gun back across her chest and unsheathed the blade as quietly as she could manage. The deer had yet to pick up on them, grazing on a small patch of mossy grass, seemingly quite content. She lifted her head and watched Daryl as he weighed their options, finally deciding on a strategy.

He pointed at her, made the motion for 'machete' again, and then motioned a line from the deer to himself, lifting his crossbow to show her. She got the message, chase the deer and it would head directly in his line of fire, giving him a clear shot. Slowly, Alex raised the weapon and took a few steps into the clearing. The animal raised its head and watched her, she noticed the way its muscles twitched in tension, preparing to run.

Moving a little closer, she slowly stepped across the ground and brandished the machete at it; she didn't want to charge at it because there was a chance of it heading in the wrong direction. Just as she had hoped, it made a path back away from her towards Daryl, trotting away without being in a charge.

In a split second, there was the high-pitched sound which made the unmistakable point of an arrow being fired. It hit right on target, directly through the animal's skull and killing it instantaneously. The young woman found herself thoroughly relieved, he had ended the animal's life as quickly and humanely as possible, but whether this was from compassion of the desire to not lose his hunt she could not be sure.

The two of them approached it, admiring their spoils from the hunting trip. They'd been out there a good few hours, and they would need to get back to camp quickly in order to skin it and prepare it in time to make a meal of it. She gave a heavy sigh and squatted down beside it, pressing a hand to its neck to check for a beat that she knew wouldn't be there.

She started to feel a little homesick. Sure, this was no 'roo hunt…but it was a hunt nonetheless, and hunting trips like this one were about as close as she would get until she could make it home and see her family.

If she ever did make it home…

"Looks like grub's gonna be good tonight, hey?" she said with a smile, "Gonna be a fucking pain carting this beast back, though."

Daryl shrugged and reached down to pull out his arrow with a sickening squelch. Alex ignored the sound, not really bothered all that much considering she had grown up skinning quite a fair amount of game with her father. The hunter got to his feet, cleaned the arrow off with a do-rag and placed it back where it belonged on the bow. He looked down at their kill and offered a puckered, somewhat reluctant smirk before he spoke.

"Didn't do too bad, Roo." He said absently, "Maybe next time you'll actually catch something."

Alex shot him a snark, half-hearted glare as a reluctant smile tugged the corner of her mouth, "I'm not a bad hunter, mate…Just gonna take some practice to get back into the groove. Once I do, I'll leave your 'hunting skills' in the dust."

He shook his head with an exhaling scoff and helped her to lift up the heavy weight of the fairly medium sized dear. She noticed what appeared to be (heaven strike her down if she was imagining it) a rather pleasantly jovial smirk, the mole on the left side of his mouth raised a little higher from the motion. His voice was mocking and challenging as he spoke next.

"Do better than squirrels my ass you did."

If you ever get told about Drop Bears, I assure you it's bullshit ;)
Us Aussies just like to mess with you 'Mericans.

MWAHAHA.