Lyrics used herein from "Farewell" © Bob Dylan.
It's all over, now. Scattered, fallen apart.
It's all been wiped away, in an instant, like one of those crazy Buddhist sand paintings they would show on the History Channel, all of those monks slaving away on their knees, carefully drawing with tiny streams of colored grains, tracing improbably beautiful images on the bare ground. He remembers watching, unaware he was holding his breath, waiting for the lines to smear and the colors to blur. For someone to make a false, accidental move or an intentional, destructive one.
But one of the monks had explained: the images were intended to be temporary. The creators themselves would wash them away after the image was complete. Nothing can last, the man with the round, serene face had said to the camera, Beauty is temporary. Nothing can last. And then he had smiled, wiping away his work with one gnarled hand.
And now, pushing Beth's small form forward through the frayed barbed wire of the prison's gates, Daryl thinks the same thing: Nuthin' can last. It's all over, hell to beauty.
And like colored grains of sand, the former residents of the prison scatter and blur, smeared by away, as if they'd never been there.
ooooOOOOoooo
Night.
The dangerous orange light of the campfire pokes a glowing hole in the velvety, greenish blackness of the forest.
They have little choice: the rendezvous point with the bus is miles away on foot, in the opposite direction from which they fled. In the morning, he'll regroup, get a better sense of what to do. For now, he's just glad to be alive.
He skins a rabbit he caught, by sheer luck, right before sunset. He glances up at Beth. She punching holes in the top of a can of beans she had in the sack she grabbed on the way out of the prison yard. Smart girl, he muses, wondering if he would've had the same presence of mind. Especially considering she witnessed her father's slaughter mere minutes before.
She looks very young suddenly. All of the brittle pieces of armor she's built around herself, to survive, have fallen away. She looks more like the teenager he met nearly two years ago on Herschel's farm than the bristly and sometimes flippant young woman she'd become in the prison. Her eyes are full of her father, her arms vastly empty without Li'l Asskicker to fill them.
Her eyes catch him watching, large and luminous. He is uncomfortable with her beauty, with her youth, her newly apparent fragility. He has no words to help, he knows. He waits for her to speak. Women usually do first, he notices. Not always, he amends, pulling the skin carefully away from the rabbit's haunch, with Carol, it was more like a toss-up, who'd speak first – he clips the thought at the root, before it can grow and blossom into the deep regret and loneliness he knows it holds, like a poison flower.
"I'll take that," Beth finally says, gesturing to the rabbit, naked and red in his hand. Her voice is surprisingly clear and firm. He hands it over to her, stands, stretches. She skewers their dinner expertly, settling the animal over the flames.
She stands too, walks over, to be next to him. Neither of them wants this, to be here, but they are. Together. He is the adult, the man, goddammit, but he doesn't know what to offer her.
"Was thinkin'," she finally says. "Was thinkin'. Glad that bastard just took his head off. Daddy woulda wanted it that way. Clean. Final," her voice almost cracks on the last syllable, but she blinks, the flames of the fire capering in her eyes.
"Yer right," he chokes out. He thinks of Herschel, his calm, reassuring presence, seemingly everywhere in the prison, and something twists in his gut. He can't quite think of the man as dead and gone. "Your Pa was a tough old bastard."
She looks up at him, considers for a moment. "Guess he was. Never thought of him that way, but yer right." She sighs, says in a softer voice. "I'm gonna sing somethin' for him, real quietly, if ya don't mind?"
"Go on, then," he responds, folds his arms. To protect himself. As if that is possible.
Her bell-like voice bores into Daryl's guts as she begins.
"Oh it's fare thee well my darlin' true,
I'm leavin' in the first hour of the morn.
I'm bound off for the bay of Mexico
Or maybe the coast of Californ.
So it's fare thee well my own true love,
We'll meet another day, another time.
It ain't the leavin'
That's a-grievin' me
But my true love who's bound to stay behind…"
Her voice finally hitches, derails. Collapses. He does the only right thing to do, and puts his arms around her. She sags, sobbing, a little girl who just lost her Daddy, finally. He fights his own tears, and his own haunted thoughts, of everything else that's been lost, and might never be found.