For Blue Skies
A Daryl centric one-shot. Snapshots of his travels after the escape from Terminus and beyond, but ultimately focussing on his struggle between finding Beth and letting her go. Companion story to Signs, but can be read separately.
It all happens so quickly, he doesn't have time to process it.
In one moment, he sees his brother – not by blood, but in no way less family – on the ground, gun held to his head, Michonne beside him in the same position. In the next he hears his own voice cut through the countdown – ten mississippi, nine mississippi, eight mississippi – you want blood. I get it. Take it from me, man – and in what feels like an instant pain erupts throughout his body, setting his nerve endings on fire, forced to the ground by the strength of the blows descending on his face, his torso, his legs.
He hears a gun shot, and another. He hears the terrified whimpering of what can only be a young boy, and then a guttering, choking sound. There is no time to let that familiar flare of dread course through him; to wonder if Rick is dead, if Michonne is dead, if Carl is okay - before another shot screams in the air again. In the confusion Daryl is back on his feet, fists raised and flying, and when Rick tears a knife up and into the chest of the last of Joe's group, he is standing with what is left of his family. Blood covers Rick's mouth, dripping from the coarse hair of his unkempt beard and down his chin, eyes wide and wild. Michonne kneels on the ground, stoic but shaking; Carl's head cradled in her arms, face blank. His legs almost give way from beneath him and he stumbles against the car for support, ragged breathing tearing from his lungs and escaping his blood-cracked lips.
His family is here. Something in him sparks to life at the realisation; they are here, scathed but alive, and it could be so, so much worse. It could be better, says a voice in the back of his head – it sounds suspiciously like Merle, but lighter, somehow, blonder and brighter – but he pushes it away.
"She's just gone," he tells Rick later, as they sit in the dirt, backs against the car. Rick wipes what he can of the blood and dirt from his face, and says nothing more of it. If any part of him wants to ask Daryl what happened in the weeks they were apart, he doesn't indulge it. There is some untended pain there – a grief in the way Daryl won't meet Rick's eye, and Rick knows better than anyone that to shine a light on another's misery is to magnify it. Instead, he lets Daryl shift the focus of the conversation; listens to him talk about the group he had found himself a part of, hears the guilt in all of it. "You're my brother," Rick tells him afterwards, because how could he not be? and when he tells Daryl it's not on him, he hopes he realises the depth of what Rick's telling him – that it wasn't his fault, none of it. Not Joe and his group, or Beth's absence.
Rick forgives Daryl, because Rick knows how easy it is for someone to slip through a person's fingers, no matter how tightly they try to hold on.
It all happens at once, and he can barely comprehend it.
In one moment, they enter Terminus through the back door. In the next they're in the court yard, and in one breath Rick moves; smacks a plate from a man's hand, grabs something from his pocket and holds him at gunpoint, and in a split second Daryl has pulled his crossbow up and on to his shoulder. The watch. The riot gear. The poncho.
An instant later they're running; he hears screams, he hears help us, he hears save us, and in the next heart wrenching instant he thinks Beth Beth Beth, but it's all happening so quickly that he can't act on it, or dwell on the horror flooding through his veins, because in the next instant they are outside and they are outnumbered.
-the ringleader. Then the bowman. He hears the samurai as if from far away as the blackness of the train car swallows him.
"She's gone," he tells Maggie later, as they sit on the cold steel of the train car floor. The vague reply isn't enough for Maggie the way it was for Rick, and through the solitary crack of moonlight beaming from the side of the heavy, locked door, her features are illuminated and he sees those green eyes trained on him in despair.
She breathes in, a sob rattling in her chest, and in the dark he squeezes his eyes shut against it; some vain attempt to shield himself against the unbearable weight of her pain.
"What happened?" she asks, and Daryl doesn't know where to start.
Around ten hours or so have passed since he was herded into the train car, and some of his group have since fallen asleep. Carl half sits, half lies between Michonne and Rick, his eyes closed, but his breathing uneven, and Daryl has the distinct feeling he is listening. Michonne is still, her back to the wall, while Rick had fallen into a fitful slumber some twenty minutes ago. Glenn is beside Maggie, his eyes closed and hand loosely intertwined with hers, and a soft snore escaping his throat every now and then. Of the newest members of the group, only one remains awake – the red haired man Daryl thinks is called Abraham, who merely sits cross-legged just off-centre of the middle of the train car, eyes open as he seems to stay awake through sheer force of will.
"We got out of the prison together," he begins quietly, voice ragged, and tries to ignore the way something aches in his chest at the thought of her. "We were alright for a while, me and her. Found this house – a funeral home, and it was good there for a couple days. More I look back on it, more I think now it was some kinda trap. It was too good to be true." Maggie shifts beside him, eyes shining with tears, but she waits for him to continue. He draws in a breath, and it seems to draw his heart up into his throat – hopeless grief carves a hole in his chest, settles and makes a home there; an unbearable ache he's been trying for weeks to ignore that now blazes throughout his entire being. "Someone took her," he says, and it hurts. It hurts.
"Who?" Maggie asks, and her voice breaks into a sob. His eyes feel hot, suddenly, his head is sore; and he hasn't cried since the day Merle died but something warm and wet rolls from the corners of his eyes and he tastes salt on the tip of his tongue, and it's all he can do to keep that weak shake from his voice when he replies.
"I don't know."
It could have been Joe. It could have been one of his group; could have 'claimed' her, could have taken her from him, but those guys never had basic supplies let alone a car to carry them in and Daryl only ever saw them walk.
It could have been these people. Terminus. She could be in a train car beside this one, sitting in the dark just like he is; she could be one of those people who had screamed out to him for help as he ran past cage after cage of flesh and bone. Dread flares within him and drops to the pit of his stomach. She could be in one of those cages. She could be the flesh and bone.
He feels sick.
Or, it could have been neither. Beth Greene could be alive and safe in a world next to his; surviving and living, waiting for him. A light seems to spark somewhere inside him and he tries to push it down – Daryl knows better than anyone that to hope is to be disappointed, that to wish too hard for something is to have it never happen – but he can't banish the feeling rising steadily within him, growing stronger second by second.
And he knows it is only his desperation speaking to him, but he can't help but cling on to this one shred of hope, because Beth would. She'd hold on to it tight as she could, with both hands, and she'd look up at him and shoot him that small, knowing smile while telling him that there are still good people in the world, Daryl, don't you remember?
Maggie shifts beside him to raise her right hand, and squeezes his arm. It's a small gesture, but it carries the weight of entire worlds.
"It's not your fault," she tells him. "It's not."
Maggie had thought Beth dead long before she had laid eyes on Daryl in this train car. It was why she had looked so hard for Glenn in the weeks after the prison had fallen - he was the love of her life, and her sister – bright and good and sweet and weak – was already, logically, gone. She had distracted herself from this grief by searching for her husband instead, but now, confronted by the silence of the train car, it floods her senses like a tidal wave.
Maggie forgives Daryl, because he hadn't given up on Beth the way she had.
It all happens so fast that he has no time to think about it.
In one instant he blearily opens his eyes to the sounds of gunfire ricocheting off the outside of the train car. In the next he and the rest of his group are on their feet, and in what feels like one second the door is flung open and he has to squeeze his eyes shut against the blinding sunlight pouring into the dark depths of the container. It happens so quickly that he has no time to savour the rush of relief coursing through him at the sight of Carol's face staring in at them, only the time to hear her one word – move! – and in the next second he is outside, Rick in front of him, the others following; Tyreese shoving a gun in his hands.
In the next moment he realises that that blinding sunlight had not been sunlight at all, it had been fire – bright, burning flames engulfing the building before his eyes – the Terminus building he had ran through earlier, where those poor souls had screamed out to him from unknown depths of terror. In a heartbeat he sees a walker descend on Glenn and he fires without thinking; the semi-automatic sending him back a step but saving his brother's life nonetheless, and through the ear-splitting crackling of that all-consuming fire and the groans of the dead around him and the bullets tearing through the air he doesn't have time to think that maybe she was in there, because in the next second they are running. From somewhere behind him he hears the creaking sound of the other train car doors being forced open, he hears voices, human voices, a multitude all at once, screaming in fear, in relief. He shoots, and he shoots, because there are walkers all around them, attracted by the flames or the sound of gunfire. Terminus is falling and he doesn't have time to acknowledge the sheer relief flooding through him, or the terror seeping its way into his bones. He shoots and shoots and then nothing; he clicks and clicks and there is nothing – he is out, he's out -
-thought you could use this – and his crossbow is thrust into his arms in place of the spent semi-automatic, and he doesn't have time to grin at Carol in thanks before he has dropped the useless gun at his feet and is hoisting the familiar weight of the crossbow on his shoulder. In an instant his arrows are slicing through the air and into decaying grey matter. In the next he is in the passenger seat of a jeep; other members of his family piling in, and the rest of the survivors taking command of two other vehicles and in the next they are out of there.
He does, though, have just the next moment to himself. Just one instant. He turns his head and looks behind him; looks to the loading bay and sees one more jeep, empty, but against the burning backdrop of the Georgia skyline there is no black funeral car with a white cross in its back window.
"Did you see anyone else?" he asks Carol a few days later, their feet crunching on dry twigs as they navigate through a forest in search of food. She glances at him, and he knows that Carol must know he's talking about Beth, because everyone who survived the fall of the prison is here, set up at their makeshift camp, but the youngest Greene daughter. He could just ask, outright, but the more time passes the more difficult it becomes. To say her name aloud is to tear and rip anew at the annoying, Beth-shaped hole she's left in the centre of his being.
He stares ahead, eyes trained on a spot of the dense trees before them, but he knows Carol is giving him that look that only she can give. That hard look that somehow still speaks volumes of comfort and empathy. He's never quite been comfortable with it; Carol's way of looking at him as someone worthy of her kindness. She was the first one who ever did, and despite his immeasurable gratitude for it, it still makes him uneasy.
"No," she says, and he doesn't know whether he should feel relieved or saddened by her reply. Her voice is quiet, an edge of grief in her tone that Daryl wishes he couldn't hear. "I didn't see her, Daryl, I'm sorry."
He shrugs beside her, arm brushing against her shoulder. " 'S okay. Not like it's your fault."
He makes the mistake of glancing at her after a few seconds, and sees the measured look she's giving him. Not cold, but hard, the way all her stares are, now; unwavering, forceful.
"It's not yours either," she says, and there's a strength in her voice that he can't help but listen to. "You didn't abandon her. She was taken. You couldn't have known, Daryl. You couldn't have done anything."
Carol is different from the last time he saw her. There is an inarguable resolve that seems to burn within her now; an intangible strength he envies. She is not the same wallflower of a woman he met on the outskirts of Atlanta, trembling in the face of her husband or crying for her daughter. There's a calm level-headedness about her now, and yet there is a despair behind her eyes that wasn't there even in those early days. Back then she was wilting; unhappy, but resigned. But now, beneath her impenetrable force of will, her eyes howl. They scream. Something has happened in these months they spent apart; something that has carved her into a survivor and yet has stripped something of her away in the same breath.
Carol forgives Daryl, because she has done so much worse.
It all happens so suddenly, and in his urgency he cannot calm down.
They had stumbled across a church on the outskirts of their forest on their drive towards Washington D.C., and decided to check it out for supplies. Carol and Tyreese's strategic raid of Terminus before they burned it to the ground weeks before had proved profitable, but eventually they would need more essentials, and when the well fortified church had fallen almost into their laps it was an opportunity they could not refuse.
Three jeeps pull up outside the church; two stay occupied, while Daryl, Rick, Michonne and Rosita approach the double doors. He knows, before he has even climbed the first step, that these doors will not open. There's a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach; a creeping sense of foreboding that he doesn't understand.
They try a side door, and it swings open.
The church pews are empty, except for one man. He sits, solitary in the first row, staring up at the altar and the elegant stained glass windows. He jumps to his feet, visibly startled at the creak of the door, and when he turns to face them, wide brown eyes peer out at them from beneath black eyebrows.
He is dark haired, dark skinned, and though the rest of his clothes look worse for wear, the dog collar around his neck is pristine and immaculate. He introduces himself as Father Gabriel, and good lord is he happy to see living people. He's been living in this church all alone for almost five years, ever since the outbreak started, and there are tears in his eyes when he clasps Rick's hand with two of his own and says he and his group can stay as long as they want in his church.
But there's something wrong with his hands, and Daryl doesn't know what it is. They look wrong on Father Gabriel, though he can't explain why.
After Terminus, that faith Beth had instilled in him had been destroyed again. It was the same for all of them; all of those who had survived, piling into the church, weapons concealed in sleeves, eyes wary, ready to run or fight at a moment's notice. And so Daryl has to wonder if he's just being paranoid - if maybe, just for once, he can push down this feeling creeping across his skin; this voice that whispers insidiously in his ear, that sounds less and less like Merle every day and more and more like her - and forces himself to take advantage of what on the surface appears to be a good situation.
They'll stay one night, and no longer. Abraham and Rosita are adamant about that. We need to get to D.C. pronto, they parrot, while Eugene stands somewhere behind them, shifting guiltily from foot to foot, though Daryl isn't sure why. They'll stay one night, and Father Gabriel promises them a share of his supplies upon their departure; another piece of this puzzle that is the priest, because how could one man holed up in a church for five years have so much dry ration food at his disposal?
He pushes his doubts down, so far down he can push them down further and pretend they don't exist, and helps himself to a piece of rabbit Sasha had caught and cooked earlier that day.
He steps out back for a smoke, and that's when it all happens.
In one instant, he's pulling a cigarette from a tattered pack in his vest pocket. In the next, he draws it to his lips, lights it, inhales. In a heartbeat his eyes fall on a white cross. In the next they squint and his cigarette drops to the ground. In one second his heart drops to his stomach and his blood seems to freeze in his veins; there is a roaring in his ears – everything around him shifts and slides out of focus; the trees, the gravel of the driveway, the steps he fucking stands on may as well not be real – nothing is real to him but the dilapidated shed in the corner of the yard and the black funeral car parked inside it.
In the next moment he is inside again, his crossbow drawn and shoved roughly in Father Gabriel's terrified face; Rick pulls out his gun beside him out of sheer faith in Daryl's judgement; Michonne's hand on the hilt of her sword and Maggie and Glenn's on the triggers of their guns.
"Where is she?" he breathes, and there's no time to notice how badly his hands shake on the draw of his crossbow or the way his voice is a cracked whisper, because everything is a blur. He is in some dream; some nightmare where everything rushes around him and try as he might, his hands grasp nothing.
Father Gabriel raises his hands slowly in some gesture of surrender. "Please," he whispers, and his voice trembles, and there's something wrong with his hands. "Please, I don't know what you're talking about."
In an instant Daryl lowers his crossbow and fires an arrow through the man's leg. He lets out a scream of pain, falling to the floor, clutching the wound beneath his left kneecap, blood flowing like a river and staining the red carpet a darker shade of gore. Daryl wastes no time; one second later his crossbow is raised again, aimed at Father Gabriel's head, and he hears the scream being torn from his own throat as if from far away –
-do to her? What did you do to her?-
and feels the heavy grip of Rick's hands on his shoulders, trying to pull him away; hears Maggie's heart wrenching gasp from somewhere behind him and the pained, inhuman sound of her sobs.
He reaches for his crossbow but it is no longer in his arms; it is held in Tyreese's, and in an instant he has lunged for Tyreese and finds himself knocked to the floor in the same breath.
-Daryl, stop, calm down, wait-
"Just kill me," Gabriel cries, and when Daryl turns his head to seek out the source of his hatred, he sees Rick's gun already pointed at his forehead. His eyes are staring up at Rick, wide, a sickness in them, and when his hands reach up to grab the gun and pull it towards his own head, Daryl finally understands what is wrong with his hands. They are not a priest's hands. They are calloused, rough; the hands of a hunter, the hands of a killer. "Please kill me," he sobs. "I chose my life over theirs. Most of them stayed outside the church – yelling – screaming for me to let them in. They never left - they didn't stop - until the dead came in. Women, children, entire families."
"You took her in your car!" Daryl roars, and in one breath he is towering over Gabriel, his hands around his throat, barely registering Rick's shouts –
-Daryl! Stop! Don't do this!-
"I'm sorry," the priest wheezes, and hot tears roll down his cheeks, staining clean streaks of skin on Daryl's dirtied hands. "I don't know which one you mean. There were so many."
Horror floods his senses, the blood in his veins turns to molten fire and all he sees is blood. There's an ear splitting snap and Father Gabriel lies sprawled on the ground, his face bloody, his nose broken and a bruise already forming under his eye.
Hands descend on Daryl's shoulders and pull him back, and try as he wants to he cannot fight them; can't hurt his family and could never dream of it, and so he only lets them pull him away from the bleeding man before him as Maggie wraps her arms around his shoulders and drags him down with her; she's speaking, he knows, but it feels as though he's listening to her under water; knows what she's saying, but can't acknowledge any of it. A paralysing numbness has washed over him, and kneeling on the ground beside Beth's sister, he's confronted by the hopeless grief of her disappearance all over again.
"She's gone?" he asks Gabriel later, as he sits in the same position while the priest is tied to a chair beside the podium at the top end of the church hall. The wound in his leg had been cleaned up and bandaged, at Rick and Maggie's insistence that they keep him alive and find out what had happened to Beth. There's distinctive swelling around the priest's nose and his left eye.
"I had to," he whispers; and there's a sickness in that voice, in the way it is brimming with defensiveness and self-hatred all at once; in the way the brown irises of his eyes seem to shake with every word. "I had to take her. I couldn't have taken you both, you were too strong, but she had an injured ankle. It was easy. I just pulled her in the car-"
"Shut up," Daryl growls, voice like broken glass. "I know what happened at the funeral home. I was there." His head falls into his hands, elbows resting heavily on his knees. He squeezes his eyes shut, tugging his hair between his fingers. The only thing keeping him from standing up and mutilating Gabriel Stokes where he sits is the numbness crashing through him in waves.
"Did you kill her?" he whispers, and when he peers at the priest between his fingers, the man is shaking his head, horrified.
"No!" he says, staring at Daryl in shock. "No, never. They never ask me to kill people. Just to deliver them."
Something within him dies. Tyreese, sitting on the first pew a few feet ahead of him, dares to ask the question burning on the tip of Daryl's own tongue. "Terminus?" he asks, and his voice cracks over that one word; those syllables like gunfire, roaring in Daryl's ears.
Gabriel Stokes' dark eyebrows furrow slightly, and he looks back at the large man in genuine confusion. "What? No. The hospital." His tone declines to a hushed whisper, and his gaze is far away as he stares at the dark red carpet of the church hall. "I give them people, and they give me food. It's why I have so much."
Nausea twists its way up Daryl's stomach, and for a few disorienting moments he's sure he really will be sick. It passes, and he forces himself to speak. "Why did they want people? What happens to them up there?"
Gabriel shakes his head slowly, his expression forlorn and solemn. "I don't know," he answers. "I don't want to know."
Daryl lets out a breath and rubs his eyes against the heels of his hands. Nothing feels real, and that dull ache he's carried in his chest for months only seems to grow now; darker, sadder, stronger.
He misses Beth Greene. He's missed her for months, had missed her since he'd first saw her abandoned bag in the middle of the road and that funeral car driving away; had missed her since he'd run, and walked, and then crawled for miles before collapsing on that dirt crossroad.
He had been just fine before he knew Beth; before he really knew her – he had been content to be pessimistic, to expect nothing, to see the bad in people, before she had torn into his head and instilled that spark of hope in him. It was impossible to be around Beth Greene and not begin to believe in the inherent goodness of humanity. She had changed his mind. And now, in her absence, he has been confronted with nothing but the evil in the world and try as he might, he cannot cling on to that unwavering faith the way she always had. That belief in goodness she had filled him with was taken from him when she was; Daryl just doesn't have it in him anymore, and that's sadder than he has words for.
"There's nothing you could have done," comes Gabriel Stokes' voice, and the steady quietness of his tone seems to crawl over Daryl's skin. "I would have taken her whether you'd been there or not." His voice dissolves into sobs then; tears escape his eyes and roll down the dried blood on his cheeks. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."
Gabriel forgives Daryl, because he cannot forgive himself.
It all happens in a blur, and finally he is confronted by the reality of it.
In one breath they had left Gabriel Stokes behind and gathered as one, piling into the three jeeps. In what felt like a single instant, they had followed the priest's directions to the hospital, and in a heartbeat he had flung himself from the passenger seat to stand on the cracked concrete of the abandoned hospital driveway.
There is no one here. The looming hospital building is abandoned; massive, dilapidated, burned out in places. The bodies of long-killed walkers are sprawled on the ground he stands on, unmoving, no longer a threat.
The doors of the jeeps open and shut; Rick stands beside him, taking in the scene. Maggie runs ahead, her gun left forgotten on the dashboard of one of the Terminus jeeps.
"BETH!" she screams, and there's something so heart-wrenching in the way her voice catches over her sister's name that Daryl's eyes prickle with heat. He wipes his forearm against them, stubbornly, and everyone is running now – split into six groups as though they had been prepared for this search all along.
His legs move as though by their own accord and he reaches a door already left ajar, a side door that gives way to a set of stairs. He moves without thinking, taking them three at a time, while Carol does the same behind him and Tyreese follows wordlessly; the rooms all look the same, grey walls, grey floors, everything grey but that crimson sprayed on stretchers, on beds, on smashed hospital equipment, on bodies, but none of them are her, not yet –
They reach the next floor, and she isn't there; they take the next flight of stairs and she isn't there; they pass hospital room after hospital room until they reach laboratories, vials smashed on the ground, and that feeling he had felt upon approaching Father Gabriel's church – that sense of foreboding, that terrible finality settling in his chest and weighing down on him only intensifies, reaches a crescendo and then –
A yellow polo shirt. A grey, knitted cardigan. A pair of faded blue jeans and a pair of tan boots.
All bloodstained.
"She's gone," he whispers to himself later, lying alone in his sleeping bag; everyone asleep but Rick, Abraham and Tara, the three scattered at different corners of their temporary camp, keeping watch. For months now, he had pushed it away; that overwhelming grief and guilt that threatened to swallow him; had walked around that hole in the world as if it wasn't there.
But now, in the face of the black, starless sky above him, and in the deafening silence and the sight of her bloodied clothes burned into his mind, Daryl is confronted with the reality of Beth Greene's disappearance.
Beth Greene is gone. She will never breathe the same air, occupy the same space or walk the same roads as him ever again. She will never irritate him or make him smile anymore; she'll never angrily stick her middle finger up at him again, or look at him with that strange, knowing smile reserved just for him. She'll never properly learn how to hunt down dinner with his crossbow, never get the chance to track prey like he'd tried to teach her – she'll never call him 'Mr. Dixon' in that sometimes sarcastic, sometimes teasing tone of hers.
She'll never give back what she took from him. She'll never restore that blinding faith she had carved into the centre of his being, the same faith she'd ripped away from him when she was taken. They'll never burn down another moonshine house, will never flip their middle fingers to the world together. They'll never get to finish that conversation they'd started in that dimly lit kitchen, he'll never get to tell her it was you, it was you, it was you, and thank you, thank you, thank you. They will never be again, ever, and the weight of that realisation is too overwhelming and unbearable.
He teeters on the edge of the hole in the world. He's walked around it every day for seven months, eyes firmly focussed on other people, on other things, on anything but the grief in his chest or the guilt on his shoulders. Anything but that gaping hole that's torn and ripped through his universe. But here it is now, and he allows himself to stare into the dark depths of it. Beth Greene is gone. Beth Greene is dead. He teeters on the edge, precariously, but doesn't quite fall in.
She wouldn't let him fall in. She'd jump into him from behind, wrap her arms tight around his torso, bury her face in the space between his shoulder blades and she'd anchor him to the world. She wouldn't let him fall in, and that's enough for him not to jump.
Daryl forgives himself, because Beth would never forgive him if he didn't.
It all happens so slowly this time, but yet again, Daryl doesn't know what the hell is going on.
It had begun with Aaron. The air was cold, the sky overcast. If Daryl had to guess, he'd think it was around December, but he couldn't be sure – Sasha had been trying to keep count of the days, but they couldn't be certain of much anymore. Where they walked, overgrown grass covered in a crisp layer of frost crunched beneath their shoes. The jeeps, of which there were only two left now, were parked only a few feet away on the otherwise abandoned road. Daryl had just wanted a little air, and the chance to stretch his legs while he and the others waited for Rick, Michonne and Carl to come back from a run. They'd ventured towards a farmhouse up ahead, one that looked not so different from the one he'd first met Beth at, back when he was angry and intimidating and she was meek and intimidated. The corners of his mouth had turned upwards involuntarily at the reminder, and not for the first time he wondered how different things could have been.
When the three returned, there was a fourth person with them. He was Rick's height, with dark blond hair that reached the nape of his neck. He looked at Daryl through hazel coloured eyes. Try as he might, Daryl couldn't help but notice that those eyes were kind, and decided that maybe Beth Greene's influence on his life hadn't disappeared completely after all.
Aaron came from a community called Alexandria. It was safe. It was protected. It had plenty of supplies, but they couldn't go wrong with more people to live with them and contribute. Aaron's job was to look for survivors, observe them as a group, and assess how they interacted. If he deemed them good people, he'd introduce himself and invite them back with him.
"We're honoured," Abraham had bit out, to which Rick had nodded in some form of agreement.
"It sounds too good to be true," he'd said to the group, Aaron out of earshot. "We've seen this before. We saw it in the Governor. We saw it in the Termites."
There was a pause then, before Michonne had glanced towards Aaron, a few hundred yards away, and a soft smile had graced her lips. It looked almost foreign on her, Daryl thought, and when she turned her eyes to look at Rick, the smile only grew. "He's nothing like the Governor," she'd said, and with such conviction it seemed to shatter Rick's wariness to pieces. "And Termites? They'd be screwing with the wrong people."
Rick had looked back at her for a moment, the corners of his mouth lifting up into a small smile before a short bark of laughter escaped his throat.
"Then let's vote on it."
It happens so slowly.
They are walking now, through the main street of the gated community, Aaron on one side, and a man called Douglas, the leader of the Alexandria Safe-Zone, on the other. There are houses, rows and rows of them, where he can see families through the windows as he walks by. Residents walk the streets freely, but never straight past each other - always stopping for at least a couple of minutes of conversation before continuing cheerfully on their way. Kids play on the sidewalks, unperturbed by the world outside their walls - even climb the jungle gym in the little play park set in a small cul-de-sac between a house and what must have once been a shop.
For a moment it reminds him of Woodbury, but when he glances over at Michonne he sees that small smile still tugging on her lips, and feels immeasurably relieved.
A woman emerges from that building Daryl thinks must have once been a general store. She's young, somewhat overweight but pretty and cheerful looking.
"Olivia!" Douglas calls her over, and upon seeing the group she shoots them a smile and walks towards them. "This is Olivia, she's in charge of the armoury. Olivia, these are our new guests. If they decide to stay, that is."
"Oh, excellent!" she replies, and her voice is friendly, a genuine warmth in her twinkling eyes."You've come at the right time. It must be freezing out there at this time of winter, with no shelter."
It happens so slowly.
"Beth? Beth! Come and meet the newcomers!"
He hears the name, but he doesn't dare hope. He turns his head slowly, casually; fully expecting a different Beth, and steels himself for it. He knows if he looks and expects to see his Beth, blonde, bright and shining, then the disappointment will probably kill him and tear open that old wound that he's tried so hard to leave alone to heal.
It happens so, so slowly.
She stands sixty or so feet away, in worn black jeans, grey winter boots and a puffy, white winter jacket. He's far away, and the features of her face are too blurry to him, but he knows with every fibre of his being that those too-blue eyes are staring out at him in shock from beneath dark, perfectly arched eyebrows. Long blonde hair tumbles out from beneath a white knitted winter hat, wispy in places, framing her pale skin, cheeks flushed red in the cold. Pink lips form a soft 'oh.' And he's too far away to tell, but he can see it - in the way the corners of her mouth drop, the way her face seems to crumple - that hot tears are spilling from her eyes, down her cheeks and meeting at the point of her chin to drip down and melt the frost on the ground she stands on.
Something stops and settles within him.
She seems to move in slow motion, one leg before the other in a delicate balance. In his peripheral vision he sees Maggie move, until she is running and directly in his line of sight, arms outstretched, her sister's name spilling frantically from her lips like a mantra. Maggie is a blur to him, but Beth's movements are slow, and he savours them with every breath that clouds in the air before him.
"You weren't ever really gone," he tells Beth later, as they sit on a sofa in the house she's lived in for over a year now. The cushions are comfortable, and the idea that he, Daryl Dixon, is half-sat, half-sprawled on a decent couch in a zombie apocalypse is downright laughable. The dim light of the lamps on top of Beth's scarce bookshelf give the rest of the room a warm glow, and he's struck suddenly by the familiarity of it all. It reminds him so much of that kitchen, candlelight flickering, both illuminating the features of her face and darkening them simultaneously as she looks back at him just as she had all that time ago.
"How d'you mean?" she asks, curious smile on her face and a lilt in her voice. Her light blonde hair is loose around her shoulders and her plain white t-shirt; slightly darker blonde roots growing in as a testament to how much time has passed since he last saw her.
He feels self-conscious under her scrutiny suddenly, and shrugs.
"C'mon," she says, and the sound of her bemused laughter tumbling from her lips is everything he thought he'd never hear again. "How d'you mean?"
He grunts. "Y'know."
"Don't 'y'know'," she mimics him, and where once upon a time it would have made him incredibly frustrated or uncomfortable, it now only forces a short bark of genuine laugher from somewhere deep within him. "I was gone forever." She's strong, just as mentally and emotionally strong as he remembers her, so when her smile cracks just an inch in her next breath he's taken aback. "I thought you were dead."
He stares at her wordlessly, eyebrows drawn into a frown, and before he can say anything she's smiling again, her eyes bright with unshed tears.
"I was there. I was at Terminus. I followed the signs, because part of me knew that if you saw them too, you'd go there looking for everyone." She stares off at something over Daryl's shoulder, voice wavering slightly, and his heart leaps into his throat. "I saw the ruins. The walkers. And when I saw none of them were you, I thought you and Maggie and anyone else must have died when that building caught fire."
A tear slides down her cheek, but she doesn't move to brush it away. It was something he had grown to like about Beth, respect her for, even. He bottled all his own thoughts and feelings away, buried them deep within himself where no-one could see them, while Beth wore her emotions so plainly on her face. When Beth was angry, she was angry; when she was happy, she was happy. And, somehow, she was all the stronger for it.
"I thought you were dead," Daryl says, and Beth turns her head to look at him full on, her blue eyes wide and inquisitive. "At the hospital. I found your clothes." It takes everything he has to keep his voice steady. "We looked for you, and I thought you were dead. But I never really believed you were gone."
She tilts her head. Their conversation has come full circle.
"Y' never really left me," he says, and something shifts in her gaze; her thin eyebrows pulled into a serious expression, her small mouth left slightly open. "Even when I thought you were dead. I'm only here now 'cause I think there are still good people in the world."
Something twitches at the corner of her mouth, and involuntarily her lips twist into that small, knowing smile that could only ever belong to her.
"What changed your mind?"
"You did," he replies, and something in the world clicks back into place.
"Oh." Her smile only grows wider, and he thinks Beth knew all along.
It's like a damn faucet. He's spent years stowing away every single personal and emotional thing he could ever say to someone, and now that he's let one thing slip it's like an ocean crashing through a dam.
"I'm sorry I didn't stop him," he tells her, eyes trained on her pale face, orange in the glow of the lamp behind her. Something in his face speaks volumes of sorrow, and Beth's heart almost breaks in her chest at the look he's giving her. "I'm sorry I let him take you."
Beth stares back at him, speechless. She pulls one leg from underneath the other and rests her bare feet on the soft carpet of her living room before standing up. Daryl follows her with his eyes, questioningly, until she moves behind him and he can't see her anymore. Wordlessly, she kneels down on the floor behind his back and wraps strong arms around his torso, head securely between his shoulder blades, and anchors him to the world.
Beth doesn't forgive Daryl. There was never anything, in her eyes, to forgive.
(A/N: Hiya! Thanks for reading all the way to the end of my first toe-dipping expedition into The Walking Dead fandom. Since it's my first TWD story, any feedback would be totally amazing. Whoever you are, I really hope you enjoyed reading (and also secretly, or not so secretly, really hope you'll review). Bye byeeee.) Update: I've since published a Beth-centric two-shot called Signs, which goes hand in hand with this story. It's not necessary to read both in conjunction with one another but you might find it interesting. Cheers! :)