"What'd you use to do with all your time?"
It's night time, the sky is clear and the stars shine brightly. It's quiet and hot, a little muggy so the cicadas are out in full force. Beth is laying in the grass a few inches left of Daryl's knee, where he's cross-legged, their hands connected, focused on the endlessness above them. She's never known anything other than relative quiet and timelessness and warmth (except for the Cold Times) and Daryl.
He lifts their connected hands to scratch at his arm and makes a noncommittal grunt. Beth is patient, she doesn't know any other way to be with Daryl, and focuses on connecting stars and the feel of the breeze lifting the ends of her hair. It doesn't shock her when he speaks – the deepness of his voice rooted inside her a long time ago, makes her feel connected to him in a very solid way.
"Didn't really do much. Wasn't so different." He quiets, looks down to see her looking up, but not at him. That's not necessarily true, so he tells her. "World was different, but I wasn't doin' shit. Was young then, didn't have to do shit. Drank, slept, hunted…survived."
He grunts and stretches his legs out before letting the rest of his body rest beside hers, feels the still damp grass in his too long hair, contemplates letting her cut it when there's some daylight tomorrow. Tries not to think about how his back aches and his knees hurt, tries not to think about getting old. He starts thinking about why the hell he's aging so fast when he realizes she's quiet, still looking up, still waiting on more words.
There really isn't much more to it, and she knows that. Beth Greene knows everything there is to know about Daryl Dixon's life from Before. About his daddy and his brother and drugs and beatings and girls. He's running through the nineteen years he lived before the end of the world, trying to find something new to give her when he hits on a particular memory – almost getting shot while watching a kids cartoon with his brother and some asshole. Daryl doesn't think she knows what the fuck a cartoon is.
"Used to watch TV." She nods – she knows what a TV is, asked about the big piece of junk in their attic one day when she was young. Daryl wasn't sure what to be with her yet though, and she was sad and missing her daddy so when he gave half a response she left it at that.
But surprisingly, they haven't talked about it since.
"Used to watch cartoons, all kindsa stupid shit. Wasn't nothing serious, really. Just supposed to make people laugh. Used to watch 'em when I was a kid, until I couldn't anymore. Used to watch 'em when I got older, would get all kindsa fucked up with my brother and laugh at cartoons all day." His voice is quiet and she's turned to look at him, like she does when he finally gets into explaining things.
It's a dark night, the moon is just a sliver, but Beth has those damn eyes and he sees them so easily as she blinks up at him, eyebrows furrowed. The concept of a cartoon is foreign to her, about as foreign as purposefully relinquishing ones awareness to do nothing all day, and his heart pangs a little.
The world will never be what it was. The herds of walkers passed through their place in the world a bit ago and people don't really make it up to the farm too frequently anymore, so it could be easy to pretend everything is okay again, but Bethany Anne Greene doesn't understand the simplicity of a fucking cartoon and there's nothing okay about that at all.