Title: More Wise, More Strengthened For the Strife
Author: kenzimone
Disclaimer: I really wished I owned it
Fandom: The Walking Dead
Rating: PG
Word count: 3,500
Summary: She thinks she might be dead. [5x08 fix-it fic]
Note #1: Fix-it fic for 5x08. It's basically how I want 5x09 to play out (because my muse is still in overdrive and I've regressed from anger to denial). Warning(?) for religious themes. Unbeta'd.
Note #2: Based on speculation floating around the Internet (which means it's probably been done already), as well as inspiration taken from events in the The Walking Dead comic and Angelo Hays' life. Certain survival skills are courtesy of the writers of Cracked. What little medical stuff appears is mostly made up and probably wrong, and I've had to tweak the timeline of a certain character's journey to make this work, so feel free to suspend your disbelief at any time.
If Thou shouldst bring me back to life,
More humbled I should be,
More wise,—more strengthened for the strife,—
More apt to lean on Thee.
from Last Lines by Anne Brontë
It's so quiet.
That's what bothers her the most. Not the darkness, or the cold that has settled into her bones, but the silence.
It's not at all like what she's grown used to over the past months, muted echoes of a world that once was slowly fading to give way for something else, a quiet much older, primal and all-natural. No, this is nothing like that; this silence is oppressive and all-encompassing. Smothering.
She thinks she might be dead.
It's the only way she can explain the heaviness of her limbs, the numbing cold and the darkness, so deep that she thinks she would be able to reach out and touch it, could she move.
She killed a man. Killed two, though only one willfully, and she wonders if this is her punishment. To be trapped in some kind of limbo, alone in the cold and the dark with nothing but her sins to keep her company.
The thought rips a groan from her, and suddenly she's choking on air, stale and far too thin. She coughs, tries to sit up and draw her knees towards her chest but only succeeds in slamming her forehead into something solid overhead, and a sudden, blinding pain lances through her skull, sharp enough to bring tears to her eyes.
She falls backwards, hands flying up to cover her head, and finds herself prone on her back on what she thinks might be a padded cushion, something soft tickling the side of her face.
There are flowers in her hands.
...
She can't remember what happened.
Her family was coming for her, and she recalls getting ready, sliding the scissors into her cast and then... then there's no more.
The left side of her face is covered in dry blood. It itches, flakes away when she touches it, and there's a wound running along the side of her head, from her temple all the way back into her hair, a deep gash that no one bothered to stitch closed or bandage. It's hot to the touch, throbbing in time with her pulse and sending spikes of fire running through her head. Her stomach roils, and it has nothing to do with what she suspects must be a concussion.
She's trapped in a box. A coffin. Must be. Confined on all sides, walls close enough to touch, and when she beat her fists against the lid it produced nothing but a dull thump. Not just trapped in a coffin, but buried. She broke two fingernails ripping at the cloth lining the lid, scratching at the wood in a sudden fit of panic before she realized what she was doing.
She wants to cry. Wants to curl up in the dark and sob until she's used up whatever little air she's got left. Wants to bury her face in the flowers Maggie must've picked for her, inhale their scent and let that be the last thing she does. Fade away to the thought of how lucky she should count herself, to have been loved enough to be buried in a coffin instead of simply wrapped in a sheet.
But she doesn't cry anymore, does she? And so she takes a deep breath instead, lungs screaming at the lack of oxygen, and focuses on what's important.
She's not dead. They buried her, thinking she must've been, but she isn't.
She's not dead.
Beth pulls her shirt up, tries to cover her mouth and nose the best she can, and then she braces herself against the coffin lid and starts to push.
The wood groans under the strain and then starts to splinter, dirt slipping through the cracks. She uses her hands to shovel it down toward her legs, feet stomping and compressing it into the bottom of the coffin. It seems like forever, but eventually the earth stops pouring in through the splintered wood, slows to a small trickle that she can barely feel.
A few good kicks, a few pushes against the cheap wood of the lid, and she manages to worm her way out, feeling her way past the jagged edges of the broken wood. She sits upright, lower body still inside the coffin while the rest of her crowds into the hollow space left by the avalanche of dirt. The earth is loose, cold to the touch and moist. She leans her temple against it for just a moment, feeling the coolness soothe the pressure in her head, before taking one last deep breath. Then, closing her eyes, she begins to claw her way up towards the surface.
The grave turns out to be not quite six feet deep, and her hands break through first, just as her lungs begin to burn. She kicks her legs and tries to move the dirt under her feet, climbs it like a steep set of stairs until she can pull herself out, fighting against the rush of earth as the grave caves in on itself.
It's late afternoon. The sun's setting behind the trees, and a soft breeze tugs at her hair, swooping a curl across her face to tickle her chin. The grass beneath her palms is dry, turned a brittle yellow beneath the sun, but in that moment, resting in the shadow of a makeshift cross raised for her, it's the softest thing she's ever felt.
...
There are bodies everywhere.
Walkers, she thinks. She's pretty sure. Her balance is off and she's seeing double, but she can smell them, that sickly, deep rot that sets them apart from the living, and a couple have had their heads cut clean off.
They litter the graveyard, and she follows them like breadcrumbs out onto a dusty path and towards what turns out to be a church. They're in there too, scattered among the broken pews along the aisle from the doors all the way down to the pulpit; she stumbles her way past and over them, trying to be cautious just in case but failing, too overcome by exhaustion and pain.
There are two doors at the back of the church. The first one she tries reveals an office with a desk, covered in books, and a blood stained couch. She curls up on it, closing her eyes, and trusts that the stink of the dead will mask her own scent and keep her safe while she sleeps.
...
There's no food to be found anywhere in the building. She looks but comes across nothing but empty cans and jars, long since licked clean. There's rain in the air and she gathers as many containers as she can carry, makes several trips, and lines them up outside in the garden in the hope of gathering some water.
She's thrown up twice since she woke from her fitful sleep, hacking up nothing but bile, and her head keeps on throbbing with no sign of stopping. She retreats back inside, through the splintered doors that only just manage to hang onto their hinges and that swing open again when she tries to close them.
It's so quiet. Not the otherworldly silence that she'd woken up to in the grave, but a stillness that seems to push almost as deep. She wonders where her family is. Wants to know where they could have gone, how long she spent buried for the dirt to grow moist enough to cake her clothes as she clawed her way through it. She wonders if she's the only one left, the only truly living, breathing thing still standing.
The thought makes her head swim, makes her swallow only to be reminded of how dry her throat is, and she weaves her way down the aisle, tripping over rotting arms and legs, and makes it almost all the way back to the office before her knees give way beneath her and she falls, catching herself on the banister in front of the altar.
There's a silver cross there, lying on its side on top of the purple altar cloth, and she can see herself reflected in it, a warped mirror image of a bloodied, dirt caked girl set against a backdrop of corpses twice dead.
"Please," she says. It's the first word she's spoken since she woke, the first sound she's made apart from groans and cries. It doesn't come out right, more of a croak than actual speech, scratching at her throat as she forces it past her tongue once more: "Please."
There's a Bible on the pulpit, but it's one of the thick ones, old and well used, pages brittle with age and text too small for her to focus her swimming vision on. She wants her Daddy's Bible, the one he'd read from in the evenings after supper, margins full of notes and scribbles. She wants to hear his voice now, reminding her of the faith she had possessed as a child, the faith that had seen her through the world ending, that she had clung to until her family began dying one after the other, and that she'd lost somewhere in the ensuing fray.
It feels too late now. The men she's killed and the path her actions have taken her down, her sins too great to be washed clean of. But she has to try.
"I'm sorry," she says. "Please. I'm sorry."
There's a small bookcase in the office. She can't make out any of the titles, but most of them are as thick and heavy as the Bible on the pulpit; volumes on church doctrine and history, letters written by the early church fathers, no doubt. Near the bottom of the bookcase she finds a stack of thinner books, pamphlets on what she thinks might be grief and salvation, and, finally, a children's Bible story.
The front is colorful, greens and blues and white blurring together into a bold mess, and when she opens it to the first page she finds it covered in illustrations. A single sentence in large print spans the bottom of the second page, and if she concentrates she can just about make out the words, head aching with the effort of focusing her blurry vision.
It's the fourth verse of Luke 15, the parable of the lost sheep.
Her breath hitches and she crumbles, draws into herself and hugs the book to her chest as she cries, groanings too deep for words tearing from her throat as the first drops of rain hit the windows.
...
The storm is violent, lasting through the night and into the next morning, rain so heavy that it leaves behind more rainwater than she would've dared to hope for, collected in the cans and jars. She drinks her first mouthful of it right there in the garden, kneels in the wet grass and gulps it down as fast as she can, trying to not make herself sick, and her stomach expels it almost immediately. She's more careful after that.
She manages to carry the water back into the church without spilling too much, and she divides it between the containers and then sorts them into groups representing daily rations. Eight groups for eight days. Eleven, if she's frugal.
They'd fed her well at the hospital, better than what she'd grown used to, and she's counting on the weight gained during her stay to help keep her alive. She's too weak to head out and look for food, too off balance and in pain to best any Walker, but she can forage; she picks berries from the bushes behind the church and gathers the last of the good apples from beneath a tree by the graveyard. When she divides it all up she ends up with a few meager meals, but it's enough to survive and hopefully she'll manage to keep the food down.
The gash on the side of her head continues to throb and sting even after she's cleaned it, dabbing carefully with cloth torn from the pulpit fall and soaked in water. She finds an extra set of altar cloth in a drawer in the office desk and tears it into long strips, purple fabric coarse but clean, which she then uses to bandage her wound.
As the days pass the ache in her head slowly begins to clear, and her vision starts to improve. She allows herself to sleep, and she dreams of things she can't remember, things that have her waking up gasping and clawing at the cushions of the couch.
Still, with every morning, she gets a bit better.
She tries to keep track of the days using her meals, making it a habit to eat at sundown. Sometimes she sleeps for longer, skips a day and wakes up in the middle of the night, heart beating fast and ears straining as she tries to locate whatever sound roused her from her sleep.
The bodies outside help just as she hoped they would, their rot keeping the Walkers disinterested, and on the few occasions she's heard the dead shamble past outside they always keep moving, none ever displaying any desire to enter the church.
She suspects the bodies keep the living away too, the ruined open doors of the building only serving to drive the point across even more clearly, of a place that has been stripped and abandoned, left devoid of anything useful.
They're the ones she fears the most, as she hunkers down on the couch behind the closed door of the office; the people roaming what's left of the world. It was silly to think she was the only one still here. She realizes that now.
Her irregular sleep pattern makes her plan to keep track of time difficult. Even with the water and fruit to help tell the passing of the days she's still left guessing, and by the time she's down to her last jar of water she thinks it must have been more than eleven days – maybe as long as two weeks – since she crawled her way out of her grave.
Her headaches are almost gone by now, her balance restored. While her vision still refuses to focus on the tiny text of the Bible on the pulpit, the world has grown significantly less blurry, and the gash on her head is healing nicely.
It's almost time to leave. She feels an urgency to go, to move on, to find the others, but at the same time the thought terrifies her.
She has no weapon, and no direction. Wants so desperately to find her family but has no idea where to start looking. The office at the back of the church is safe, the couch soft and the walls sturdy enough to protect her from any one of the elements.
There's no food or water, but there might no be any out there among the dead, either.
It's the lingering concussion. She knows it is. It's making her weak when she needs to be strong, making her cry when she didn't anymore.
By now it's late afternoon and she's holding her last jar of water in her hands. She places it on the floor in front of her, kneels and leans forward until her forehead touches the carpet, fingers digging into the fibers.
"Please," she prays. "Please, Father, help me."
The water tastes bitter going down, and her stomach growls as she places the empty jar last in a long line of others. She sighs, pushing herself up onto her feet and waits for the vertigo to pass, prepares for one last trip into the garden to glean the bushes in search of any berries she might've missed.
The office door swings open with a soft groan and she steps out and freezes, hand coming up to grasp the door frame.
There's a man standing before the altar.
He's dark skinned and tall, wearing a long brown jacket and carrying a large pack strapped to his back. He looks capable. Dangerous.
He'd been facing the other way when she opened the door but now he turns to look at her, surprise written across his face, and she suspects her own expression mirrors his. He's holding a map in his hand and she recognizes it from amongst the trash scattered before the altar; she's seen it before, picked it up and looked at it but discarded all the same, the details and writing still too tiny for her to make out.
"Hello," the man says.
Beth grips the door frame tighter, leaning her weight against it. The man doesn't move. More importantly, he doesn't reach for his walking stick, leaning against the banister, or give her any reason to suspect that he's carrying another weapon, ready to be used.
"Hello," she responds, swallowing against the tightness of her throat.
There's a long pause, during which neither of them speak.
"Are you staying here?" the man asks at last, and he seems to be choosing his words with care, like she's a skittish animal, a wild fawn bound to leap away if he makes any sudden movements. She wonders if he's right; wonders what she must look like, clothes and skin stained with dirt and blood, complexion pale and hair in disarray, stitches on her face and strips of purple cloth wound sloppily around her head.
"Yes," she says, over the frantic beating of her heart. "For now."
The man nods thoughtfully, eyes flickering to her makeshift bandage. "Are you hurt?"
She reaches up to touch the wound through the cloth, and the stinging pain briefly flares back to life. "I was," she says, slowly and carefully, in a tone to match his.
The man gestures to his backpack. "I have medical supplies. Bandages, and some disinfectant. I could clean that for you."
She's drained and hungry, and she wants so badly to feel this; hope, relief, gratitude – all the things she hasn't allowed herself to acknowledge in so long – blooming in her chest.
Please watch over me, Lord. Let me trust this man.
"I'd like that," she says.
...
She lets him unwind the cloth from her head, lets him clean the wound and cover it with fresh bandages. It's too late to stitch it closed now, he says. Will leave a nasty scar, a deep gouge across the side of her head, but she tells him it doesn't matter.
She's alive.
He asks to check the stitches on her face and she nods, marveling at the strange feeling of another's hands on her skin. These will scar too, he says. She shrugs in reply.
His name is Morgan, and he's heading north.
"I can shoot," she offers, surprising herself. He's given her a candy bar, and she tries to pretend she isn't starving, that she isn't trying to take small bites in an attempt to make it last. The chocolate tastes even better than she remembers, the caramel shockingly sweet on her tongue. "I'm a good shot. I can track a bit, too, and trap rabbits."
Morgan's face is weathered and his eyes are those of someone far beyond his years. She can empathize with that, can return his gaze with her own because she's done things too, things that are unforgivable in the sight of God and impossible to forget.
"I'm following a man," he says, slowly. "I was in a dark place for a long time, and he helped to pull me out." There's a heaviness weighing down his words, a world of meaning behind them. "That map," he continues, gesturing to where he's tucked it into one of the pockets of his backpack, "was his, and I think it shows where he might be headed. The route's marked, leads to D.C.. Are you headed that way, Beth?"
He's still speaking to her in that careful manner, like he's afraid she'll break apart if he's not gentle enough. It lights a fire inside of her, a desire to prove him wrong. She tore her way out of her own grave. She's stronger than he realizes.
"I need to find my family," she says, studying the empty wrapper in her hands. "They think I'm dead. They found me a coffin and buried me in it, but I crawled out. I need to find them. Daryl and Maggie – she's my sister – and the others, if they're still alive. Rick and Carl and Michonne. But I don't know when they left or where they were headed. I don't know where to start looking."
Morgan grows very still where he kneels before her, eyes studying her face with sharp, quiet intent. And then, for the first time since she's met him, he smiles.