Because I like being sad, apparently.
The other senses to come.
Chapter 1: Scent
She could still smell it.
Bloody decay; scorched earth and flesh. Dirt kicked up under dragging, dead feet. Putrefaction seeping up through grass, blanketing farm-fresh summers and that distinct winter bite that froze your lungs when you breathed in too much of it.
The stink had them all wrinkling their noses in misery for the first few months of—whatever this was.
Even now, well into the future, Beth wrinkled her nose as the old scent of death lingered on the breeze. It followed them everywhere they went. It had hung in the still air of the prison cells; old and musty, not so obvious, but still there.
Maybe it wasn't following them. Maybe, now, they were just in it.
In any case, it had seemed like it had chased her through the trees when the prison fell. Aware of too many things and absolutely nothing at all, that fucking stench slogged after her and Daryl as they fled further from the devastation.
Her father's death was on the wind, now, too.
She smelled it in the vomit she couldn't hold down any longer, in the dead leaves she heaved into. The pine didn't mask the burning in her nose and eyes.
She smelled it in her starvation, because nothing more was coming out of her. Daryl waited, eyes shifting relentlessly over the bent and shaking girl and the direction of his lost family. The danger.
When they ran again, Beth wondered if he could smell it, too. The sorrow.
...
The smell invaded the trunk of the car they huddled in. The swarm groaned by, death rolling on its way, astonishingly passing by two prone survivors.
The trunk held its own miasma of scents, but Beth was starting to wonder if she could actually smell anything anymore or her brain had just burned the funk into her nostrils.
Sweat, blood, rotting flesh.
Like an animal, Beth thought for a moment, she could smell the tang of fear. It was almost exciting, to smell something new.
She shifted her weight as the dead things ebbed around them. Suddenly, in that small space, she caught the scent of the forest, and it didn't hold death in its roots.
...
The moonshine's fierce bite almost makes her sneeze into her glass. Daryl grunts in what might be amusement, and, as a result, Beth almost smiles.
The wind kicks up, and that smell wafts against her, but it is fainter now.
She smells the squirrel Daryl had caught and cooked, long since eaten.
Again the scent rises when Daryl becomes angry with her. Outside, Beth's nose spasms at the walker Daryl pins to a tree. The arrow sticks it good. She smells the dead thing, and the hopelessness is suffocating.
When she buries her face into Daryl's back, her arms going unflinchingly around his waist, Beth smells motor oil, sweat, leather, and smoke. She takes the deepest breath she has in ages.
...
Beth smells it in the peanut butter and pickled feet. Even though her nose wrinkles at such a thing, her lips curve into a genuine smile.
She smells it in the residual formaldehyde, and the once sickening smell of that is even welcomed after the violent death outside.
...
She smells it in the darkness of the kitchen—leather, oil, smoke—and the burning of the candles.
Change.