Notes: A lot of the fiction considering Carl/Beth takes it for granted that Carl will be the one to have the crush. It's also hard to address the relationship "as is" because the age difference really would matter at their ages. I wanted to try to consider how Beth, with more "relationship" experience, might feel attracted legitimately to Carl in the present, and what could provoke that. It seemed to me that there would be some real issues for her about her own uncertainties when comparing herself to Carl which would complicate it further. Plus, writing internal to a seventeen year old girl? I remember how disorganized things felt at that age...so much all at once.
**Edit 3/23/13 for typing errors. Also, Thanks to an anonymous reviewer who clarified the difference between "Hoo-rah" and "Oo-rah" that I had never discerned from listening, and so didn't even know I had mistaken! (I'm very glad, too, since it turns out I would have been eaten alive by Marines for making it! Zombie Marines, I'm assuming, but maybe not? ^_^)
Disclaimer: Copyright for The Walking Dead belongs to AMC, et al. My writing belongs to me, as do errors.
Title: "Rain, Shame Zombies, and Marines"
She ended up sitting in the Hyundai with her head on the steering wheel with tears leaking from her eyes in misery and frustration. After Woodbury how could she even bother Maggie with this? Her dad was an absolute impossibility. He had managed not to have an aneurism about Glenn and Maggie rocking the tower every four hours. But Beth was pretty sure he'd spent all his "let your daughter grow up" tokens already. All the men were out. See the spent tokens. Her dad would probably pull out the shotgun if she had a conversation with any of them that didn't revolve exclusively about baby formula, ammunition, stew ingredients, or walker guts. And walker guts were probably questionable. Carl hadn't let her come near him since "the incident." It was like a huge federal issue now and was ruining Hell worse than it already was. She supposed maybe Carol, but she was so busy all the time, and besides...Carl talked to her about stuff, so it would be pretty strange.
She cried harder. She missed her mom. She needed a hug. She needed a girl talk, and some ice cream.
She needed to stop acting like a fucking baby.
That was the worst of it. This whole thing made her feel like she was thirteen again, like she had no maturity, no emotional stamina, no guts, no grit. It made her feel weak and stupid. And she hated weak and stupid, because there was nothing worse in the world anymore, absolutely nothing worse at all, than weak and stupid. Weak and stupid got you dead. Look at Carl. Carl wasn't weak and stupid. Carl didn't cry. Carl wasn't all warped about not having somebody to tell him he looked pretty. He didn't worry about being a pervert. Carl had never tried to kill himself, even after all the shit he'd had to live through...had to see...had to do. Carl stepped up. Carl grew up. Carl was an adult and she was a child.
How was that for an ugly realization? That dried up the tears but it left her feeling stomach sick. He was going to leave her in the invisible land, too, but it wouldn't be because of her age. It would be because she didn't earn the right to leave.
She had already been wondering if she was some kind of child molester or something. He was thirteen years old for crying out loud. She was nearly eighteen by now. She would have graduated this year, and been going to college. She'd been in high school. She'd had a boyfriend, and she and Jimmy had gone steady for more than a year. She'd die if her father ever found out, but she wasn't exactly inexperienced with boys like he thought. You just couldn't even be alive at school if you didn't know something real about the opposite sex. Jimmy would never have looked at her if she was all shiny virginal. She sure wasn't a slut like Virginia Carpenter or Callie Freeman in her class or something, but she also didn't get all her information just from internet porn.
She should be drooling saliva over Daryl, or at least Glenn or something. But here she was having inappropriate thoughts about a thirteen year old boy. It had started when he grew like three inches in as many months. And his hair got long and he started walking different, and his hands got big and his wrists thickened. For some reason that had been the hottest thing: all his shirt sleeves were too short, and she couldn't help but compare how small her wrists looked compared to his, or how his hands would fit...places. And he had this serious way he held his mouth, so that when he smiled it was such a contrast that it seemed like this really special present. Then he got all intense, and suddenly he wasn't just a kid with a gun. He was a guy who could back up whatever he said he'd do. And she'd watched him do it. He made these decisions, and then acted on them – no questions. He made promises and damn if he didn't keep them. He was being what the men were, but he wasn't a man. It wasn't playacting either. He just was.
She was used to boys her age acting tough. Deep down she knew, just like the girls knew about themselves, that boys playing men weren't really ready to be men. They still lived at home and their parents paid for their cars and their food and their clothes and their games, would pay for their tuition, and could still tell them to be home at midnight and ground them if they weren't. Tough talk was just talk. They backed down from their parents like they backed down from each other, and if they didn't the girls actually thought they were pretty stupid.
But at thirteen, Carl wasn't any of those things. Nobody got things for Carl. He got things for other people. Carl made choices for himself, and for other people, and they were the right choices. He saved people's lives. He'd saved her life. When he tried to give her an order or intimidate her, it worked. She'd have never let Jimmy tell her what to do. She knew she was smarter and more mature than Jimmy. With Carl? She didn't think so any more.
But he also had this way of listening, like she still mattered. He seemed to miss having fun, and laughing, and he actually wanted to think about things that weren't awful all the time. Nobody else wanted that anymore. Everybody else seemed as if thinking about it hurt their feelings. He'd never been to high school or even junior high, and he'd sometimes ask her what it had been like – as if he felt he'd missed out on something cool. It was kind of like the way she used to ask people about taking trips to Europe or Africa or something, like he was hearing about this really interesting place that he'd never get to visit but was full of sights and sounds and people that he wished he could be part of. He seemed to like to hear stories about people she had known and things she'd done. He especially liked it when she talked about her classes, of all things. It made her feel smart, and even though she'd gotten good grades Jimmy had never once cared when she'd made the honor roll.
Part of it was probably, too, that none of the men ever looked at her. She was pretty sure her Dad had threatened to castrate them if they so much as glanced at her butt. She wasn't stupid. She knew about the group Randall had been part of. She and Maggie had an honest and frightening talk about rape right after they left the farm, and then...the governor happened. It was so lonely, and it just felt bad, like nobody cared for you. It was like losing a whole part of you. It was worse than being ugly. It was like you became invisible – like you didn't have a body at all. At least the adults could look at each other. It was okay for them. They could catch each other at it, and at least feel like they mattered, like they existed. What really scared her was that because she'd always be the youngest girl, no matter how old she got they'd never see her as an adult and they'd always leave her in invisible land.
That's why earlier that day when she caught Carl looking down her shirt she got such a thrill from it. She'd been hanging laundry with Carol and bending steadily down to the basket and up again, not even realizing that each time she did her loose blouse was showing things off completely. Carl had been keeping a nominal watch for them as they worked the line. She'd just stooped for a pair of his jeans, when she glanced at him and saw his eyes were already glued to her and exactly where they were glued. He immediately turned away and blushed hard. She did, too, but it was from the pleasure of realizing that if he was staring there was something that he liked there. She couldn't help but laugh for joy. Before she could even think about it she heard an ugly noise come from Carl's direction, and he was stomping off. She realized, with stomach-plummeting dread, that he would probably think the worst, like she was laughing at him for being a pervert or something. She hadn't known what to do. Because just like the men having thoughts about her would be considered obscene, it stuck her then that it might look the same way if she went and said something like, "Oh, yeah, it turned me on to show off my rack to Carl." She thanked God that she at least hadn't had her bra in the laundry that day and was actually wearing it.
She missed it so much! She missed kissing. She missed holding hands. She missed the way a guy looked at you when he was dying to get even closer to you. She missed experimenting, and being awkward with somebody, and then not being as awkward the next time. She missed being able to be with people who could understand that she wasn't part of some category that was labeled "thou shalt never touch, nor shalt thou see, nor shalt thou ever get any ideas that this category ever haveth needs of a sexual-eth nature."
Oh my god. Had she just thought about having sexual needs and Carl Grimes at nearly the same time? Because you couldn't exactly date in the zombie apocalypse. And who would let a thirteen year old date an eighteen year old anyway? If it were the other way around and she were thirteen and he were eighteen there would be no way anyone would let that happen. And they didn't have any privacy anywhere, even if she could figure out how to talk to him and make him understand why she'd laughed, and to explain how weird this all felt, and then die of shame when he called her a pervert and told their dads. And then to come back as the only walker ever to have died of shame. And then to bite Carl. Oh, God, could this get any worse...because she thought briefly that biting Carl would be really fun and sexy. And there was nobody at all to talk to about this BUT Carl – and then the shame zombie thing.
And now here she sat, looking out the windshield of the green wagon, the squished bug guts marring her view of the prison. She heard a roll of thunder, and then huge raindrops splatted on the window. At least they'd help with the bugs. And maybe it'd cool things down some, and decrease the late summer fire hazard. She rubbed her eyes and scrubbed at her cheeks to clear the tear tracks, and snuffled in a most unladylike way. That struck her as funny, and it made her think of her mom. Her mom had always been trying to get her to be more ladylike. It seemed so old-fashioned to say it like that. If her mom meant "grow-up" why not just say it? Her mom used to scowl, and Beth would just ignore her until one day her mom had thrown up her hands in the air and said, "Fine. If you don't want to be a lady, then how about being more Marine-like? Marines have manners. I guess I could stand you being a Marine. Your Uncle Byron was a Marine. Oo-Rah!" Beth had turned to her mother and had completely forgotten whatever thing she had meant to say. Instead she had squeaked out, "Okra?" And her mother had been unable to keep from laughing, and then Beth was laughing, and they were hugging each other, and Beth had been really glad she had a mom who wanted her to grow up right.
The rain was really coming down. It was forming puddles quickly in the depressions where the yard concrete had settled and shifted over the years. That's something she remembered doing with her mother, too – jumping in puddles. She'd only been maybe nine or something, and they were visiting up to Georgia State for one of her mother's women's group functions. Beth had felt pretty important to be at the college, and she'd gotten to eat in the big dining room with three forks, and there had been cheesecake. After lunch she and her mom had set out to walk back to the car which was down at the bottom of a big hill, but just as they started down it started to pour rain. It happened so fast that there wasn't even time to open an umbrella if they'd had one. One second they were dry and the next they were soaked to the skin. Her mom had looked down at her with water running off her bangs, and she had smiled this huge grin. Then she was running, holding Beth's hand, and she took a leap and landed smack in the middle of a huge puddle that had formed where the sidewalk dipped. Her mom had laughed like a little kid, and Beth had laughed so hard! And they jumped in every single puddle on the way down the hill. They ran through all the streaming rivulets and tried to catch droplets on their tongues, and spun in circles holding hands. By the time they got to the car they were exhausted from pure fun and Beth's tummy hurt from laughing and her cheeks hurt from smiling so much. She had hugged her mom before they got into the car. She remembered how magic it seemed that even though Beth was starting to get a little cold and goose-bumpy from the wet, her mom was so warm that the hug made it all go away.
She opened the car door and stepped into the afternoon shower. She closed the Hyundai up tight, and turned her face up into the rain. She was surprised that it didn't hurt. Not the rain, but thinking about her mom. It didn't hurt. It felt pretty good. She spread out her arms so she could feel more of the drops. Her hair was already soaked and she could feel the cool stream draining down her back from the bottom of her ponytail. Her socks were getting wet, and the idea that her boots were filling with rain seemed silly and fun. How backwards! Boots were supposed to keep the rain out, not in! Her mom would have liked that. She smiled and opened her mouth to catch some drops.
Rain smelled good. It washed down the scent of the walkers. Beth saw a flash of lightning against her closed eyelids. She tried to remember the rule about counting between lightning and thunder to figure out how far away the strike had been. You were supposed to count the number of seconds between the lightning and the thunder and divide by five, because the speed of light was about five times faster than the speed of sound. Beth counted. One, two, three, four, five...and a grumbling shook around her as the thunder arrived. It was actually a sonic boom; she remembered from her physics class. Five divided by five was one – one mile away. That was pretty close.
She had known Carl for one year. He'd had to go from being a regular kid who probably played with toys at twelve to a guy that killed things every day at thirteen. That was like growing up at the speed of light. She had grown up for five more years than he had in the world before. That kind of growing up was at least five times slower. Maybe it wasn't quite so strange that their math was hitting her the way it was. They were reaching the same mile at about the same time, even though light and sound got there different ways.
She dropped her arms and lowered her head. She opened her eyes and looked around. Things looked so much less gray than before the rain. It had shed the dust from the building and the grass, the trees and the courtyard, the fence and even the sky. The rain spilled through her eyelashes and she had to blink her vision clear. Her clothes were plastered to her, and it made her feel better somehow. Yes, there was her body, right there. The dust had even cleared from her. No matter what else had happened, she could be glad of one thing: a boy she liked had stared at her and liked what he saw. It didn't have to matter exactly who. It didn't have to matter exactly what would happen next. She would have to fix things with Carl, for sure, but maybe it didn't have to be a shame zombie outbreak. She was more grown up than that. And, yeah, so was he.
She thought about her mom again. Her mom had said that she'd be proud if Beth was a Marine. Well, most of the time she kind of was. She took orders, she did her part without flinching, she carried her weapon, she defended her fort. She thought her mom would tell her to give herself credit. None of that was weak or stupid. She looked around the courtyard. The rain was letting up, but the puddles looked surprisingly deep. She also thought her mom would want her to take advantage of all of them.