Beth doesn't remember the prison falling. Not exactly, not the way one should remember the destruction of one's existence for the second time. She had her little pistol, the one she learned to shoot when Rick's group showed up at the farm. She knows she saw her father die. She screamed until the back of her throat felt like she'd swallowed burning coal. She knows she got out. She ran out of ammo and Daryl slammed his crossbow into the walker that would have been her end and then that's really it.
When she closes her eyes she can still see the barn burning, Patricia being chewed apart, walkers moaning their claim over her family's home through the back window of a green car. But of the prison, all she can draw up is Hershel's head rolling and the screaming, and then she was with Daryl and it was over.
She does know the fences crumpled when the tank rolled over them. Her first thought was Judith, then Maggie, and then Glenn. She doesn't feel bad about this order, because Judith was a baby, and her sister could fend for herself. She feels even less terrible about it when she and Daryl find the message her sister left for Glenn in walker blood.
Glenn, go to Terminus. Maggie.
Beth stares at the words and knows that somewhere, something in her should be shattering, but all she can do is stare and wait for Daryl to see.
He is so quiet in a woods full of dried twigs and refuse, and it still amazes her, after all this time. He comes up behind her deliberately, leaves crackling underfoot for what she knows is her benefit. She turns to look at him, but Beth can't meet Daryl's eyes.
"What're you stopping for, girl?"
He sees the message behind her, and Beth stares through him at the train tracks.
I know you look at me and you just see another dead girl.
She feels like she should have realized that the only person she shared blood with on this earth was biding their time until they didn't have to take care of her anymore. That she was a weight to be carried until this world swallowed her up like it swallowed up everything small and weak.
There's nothing inside of her anymore, nothing even worth thinking of suffering for, so she lets Daryl grip her shoulder and turn her back towards the trees.
"Tracks're too open. Let's get some cover."
Underneath the trees, Beth's nails press little half-circles into her palms. The sun is sinking behind them and she realizes they are following the train tracks, just a few hundred feet inside of the woods. She stops.
"I don't want to go to that place, Daryl."
He sucks his teeth. "Come on, girl."
"Not even. My own sister. Is looking for me." She spills the words out of her like broken glass.
"Pro'bly thinks you're with 'em. With everyone else."
"I know what you all thought of me. I know you were waiting for me to get bit or starve or fall or…or…I don't know." She forgets how tightly her nails are pressing into her palms until the flesh starts stinging.
"But, Maggie? Maggie? Dammit, Daryl, what's the point?"
Beth hasn't cried since the moonshine shack, and she doesn't want to start now. Now that Daryl has started to look at her with something like respect. Now that when a walker approaches she grabs it by the hair, snaps its neck back and stabs her knife in its skull without wincing.
I'm not Michonne. I'm not Carol. I'm not Maggie.
Daryl is looking at her, one hand on the strap of his crossbow and the other by his side. He knows this feeling. His father resented him, his mother left him, he was his brother's afterthought for the majority of his life. But how can he say to a girl who keeps telling him to have faith that this is why he has none? That sometimes there is no hope, no light. That sometimes life just is.
"Where else we gonna go?"
She tries so hard to fight the burning behind her eyes. Like hell if she wants another headache from crying to deal with on top of setting up camp and sitting watch. Like hell. She sits down, leans her back against a tree. Maggie is alive. This should lighten the ever-sinking weight inside of her, but there is only so much to keep her floating in a world like this where even her own sister doesn't believe she made it.
"Can we just set up for the night."
It isn't a question, and he doesn't answer. Daryl slings the crossbow over his shoulder, lays it at Beth's feet. There is twine in her pack and those hubcaps they grabbed from that car. As she has done for uncountable nights, she stands up and begins forming their alarm. She loops the twine, hubcaps, some cans around the trees as Daryl digs a pit for a fire.
Though they haven't seen a walker in almost two days, Beth knows she is being unreasonable. Daryl insists they go until they can find shelter most nights, and though her feet ached the first few days, she kept pace next to him without complaint.
I survived and you don't get it, 'cause I'm not like you or them.
The last roof they slept under was an old shack that reeked of mildew and putrefaction. The walker inside snapped at their kneecaps from its wheelchair. Its arms reached so violently when they opened the front door it fell onto the floor. Daryl shoved a crossbow bolt through its head. He dragged the body out while Beth watched for movement.
There were war medals she didn't recognize on the bedroom walls and cans of meat in a box next to a bed on a low platform. Handicap accessible. She removes the bedding from the mattress. Daryl comes back into the room.
"Seems alright. For a night," he mutters.
Beth nods. "Ain't much around. Found some food. Blanket we can take with us."
"It's gonna be cold. We might as well stay." He puts down his bow.
The smell of walker is in her nose. She blinks and sees the ooze on the foyer floor from the thing that used to be an old man that slept beneath medals. He died in the entryway of his house, waiting. Or maybe he just died.
But I made it.
"Might as well," she concedes and sits down on the mattress next to Daryl.
There is a chair in the corner, which Beth lines up with the doorknob. If won't stop anything, but it'll give them a warning. The windows are boarded up. They light one of their few remaining candles.
For dinner, they break into the cans. She stabs a little chunk of canned meat on her knife and holds it over the tiny flame.
"Just like hot dogs over a campfire." She smiles to herself.
"All the animals we've skinned and roasted over a fire and you're thinking of hot dogs."
Beth laughs low and looks up at Daryl, who is digging meat product out of a can with his fingers.
"Just you, girl."
These are the sort of jokes they have now, in this world. The animal carcasses they have chewed at like wild things, so desperately hungry that Beth forgets being seven and crying until she threw up when Hershel ran over a rabbit with the tractor.
"You miss campin'?" She asks him.
"Nah."
"I think I would have liked it more, back then, if I knew." The candle flame is doing nothing for the meat, and she pops it in her mouth. Beth thinks briefly of the privilege of finding meat in a can nauseating, before the turn.
"Woulda been nice."
"Would've? I thought you camped all the time."
"I mean if—it just woulda been nice is all."
Beth gives up warming meat and digs in with her fingers. She looks at the man in front of her and wants to believe he's saying what she thinks he's saying. Yeah, she thinks it would have been nice to go camping with him too. But now what they're doing is fighting and sleeping and waking up another day hoping to do it again. This isn't camping. This isn't sweet, laying under the stars thinking about how nice it is to be away from everything. This just is.
She has been walking through miles of Georgia forest for weeks with Daryl Dixon, praying to find a familiar face and wishing away the frost. Daryl is probably right, everyone they know is dead, and if they aren't they will never see them again. But, there is this tiny flame, and Daryl digging sloppily into a can of something like meat, and it just is.
Daryl is looking back at her, blinking slow, and something in the bottom of her stomach tightens. His eyes are dark. She wonders what he sees.
"Yeah. It would've."
They blow the candle out a little later, and lay side by side on the bare mattress. Daryl spreads the blanket over the two of them.
"You got enough cover?" His voice rumbles through the springs and up Beth's spine.
"Yeah."
She wakes up in the morning with Daryl's arm around her waist and his chest tight to her back. Her feet are between his shins and this feels like safe, like wishing on stars for bigger things, like camping. She doesn't move.
He wakes up too soon.
"Hey, girl." He buries his nose in the crown of her head and takes a deep breath.
"G-G'morning." Daryl starts at the sound of her voice and extracts himself from her.
"Beth, sorry—" He watches her, tense, from the other side of the bed.
"'s fine, Daryl. 's fine."
He doesn't look at her while they're raiding the house. They find more candles and cans of meat and a backpack that Beth manages to fit the blanket in. They start walking with the sun behind their backs. Beth's scalp is still tingling from where Daryl Dixon breathed her in.
They left that shack behind almost a week ago, and every night since has been tightly wound muscle and finer tuned ears and a few brief hours of sleep while the other keeps watch. Beth sleeps with her back against Daryl's leg, while he leans against a tree. He rests with his head on her thigh, one hand on the crossbow.
The night she sees Maggie's message they stop early. Usually they push until the edge of 'too dark', in hopes of finding a roof. Tonight they share a can of beans and are out of things to do before the dark has set completely in.
"I'll take first watch." She tells him, from across the fire.
"I got it. You get some rest."
"I said I'll take first watch."
"Alright then."
Beth leans up against a tree, her knife in her lap and her pack at her feet. Daryl settles a few feet away, head resting on his rolled up bag.
"Daryl?"
"Yeah?"
"Can you come here?"
He rolls over and she watches him. His hair is dirty and long and she is sure hers is too. She wonders what he is looking at. He grabs his pack and sits down next to her.
She feels his hand snake around her waist. Beth shifts and leans against him. Her body feels like stones sinking in a lake, and his is sinew and corded muscle keeping her afloat.
"We might as well go, right?" She throws it into the air.
She lets her head fall to his shoulder. He leans over and takes a deep breath.
"Might as well."
His arm squeezes her tighter to him. "Sleep, girl. Let me get this."
And you don't get to treat me like crap just because you're afraid.