"Santa's not going to be able to find us this year is he?"
Carl's voice was soft, his words meant only for his mother's ears as he twisted the small glass ornament around in his hands. They had been lucky enough to find a house to hole up in for the night and Rick had insisted that they clean out every nook of it for any supplies they could scavenge up. Lori and Carl had been clearing out the closet in the first floor hallway when they had unearthed a box of Christmas ornaments.
Beth had just finished going through one of the bedrooms with her father and was heading down the hallway, her arms full of a stranger's clothing, when Carl's soft question reached her ears. She forgot sometimes that Carl was still just a child but as she listened to Lori's sharp intake of breath before she bent down to whisper to her son Beth knew she wasn't the only one.
"No honey. I don't think he will." she excused herself then, pushing the closet door shut and walking past Beth to hole herself into the small bathroom.
Carl met Beth's eye from across the hall and shrugged. "I don't really believe in Santa you know." he whispered as he took a step closer and cast a look down at the closed door of the bathroom. "I just thought maybe hearing that I still believe in that kid crap would make her feel better." he let out a long sigh and Beth shifted the bundle of cloth in her arms as she stared at him, still seeing the bits of child in him peer through despite his words. "I guess I was wrong."
He left her then in search of his father and for a long moment Beth simply stood in the hallway, her eyes glued to the lone green ornament Carl had dropped before her father spoke behind her.
"Bethy? You alright?"
She shook her head, blinking back images of Christmas tree lights and church bells before smiling at her father over her shoulder. "Everything's fine."
And with the idea taking root in her head she knew she was right.
Just this once everything would be fine.
….
It took her a long time, longer than it should have really, to gather up the supplies that she needed.
Part of it was because they were constantly on the move, nowhere safe enough for them to stop and rest their heads for to long. Another part of it of course was the fact that she was doing it all in secret, hiding away from the others presented a chore that she had not anticipated. She was almost caught once, when Daryl's trend proved to be to light for even her keen ears to pick up.
Beth had managed to shove what she was working on behind her back before he caught sight of her, clearly not believing her smile or her words that nothing was going on. It didn't matter. He didn't ask her what she was doing and she wouldn't have told him if he had.
It took her a few week to gather everything she needed. Weeks where her pack began to grow heavier on her back and she was starting to have trouble hiding everything from the others but soon enough she decided it was time. She had no way of knowing what the actual date was but as they all huddled together on the floor of a dusty rundown shack, shivering from the cold with barely more than three bites of squirrel in each of their stomachs, Beth knew that this was it. What she was going to give them was exactly what they would need after this night.
She made do with what she had, they always did after all. Beth was lucky that it was Daryl on watch and not anyone else. Everyone else would have questioned her but Daryl simply raised his brows at her as she carefully crawled her way out of her father's arms and crept towards the small table in the corner next to the window sill he sat on.
He watched her curiously but when she put her finger up to her mouth in a gesture for him to keep quiet he merely rolled his eyes and looked back out the window. Slowly Beth unzipped her backpack and began to pull the painstakingly wrapped objects out of it. From the corner of her eye she thought she saw Daryl's eyes widen but when she looked back at him he was simply facing the window again.
Carefully she piled all of the objects on the table and began to artfully arrange them. She made due with the lack of a tree, or anything festive really. The presents were wrapped in magazines or newspaper, most held on with tape that was falling apart, a few she had even had to use glue sticks on when the tape ran out.
It didn't matter. Beth knew that no one would mind the horrendous wrappings. Her mind brought up memories of tying ribbons onto boxes with her mother while Shawn kept tugging all their bows undone and her heart tugged painfully at the reminder that this was her first Christmas without them.
She cast Daryl a quick conspiratorial smile that he did not return before heading back to her blanket and curling into her father's side where she fell into her first real sleep since the farm.
She awoke to Carl's exclamation of joy, Beth fought to keep her grin down as she sat up and took in the sight of everyone cheerfully laughing as they looked at the table. T-Dog shifted to the left then and Beth gasped in surprise.
A small tree branch had been placed on the table, the branches still holding a light dusting of snow. The branch was small with no leaves even left on it but the presents had been moved to cluster around it anyway. She knew on sight who had done it, who had given them the gift of a tree.
Her eyes searched the jubilant faces then to catch Daryl's eyes from across the room. His blue eyes held hers for a long moment as everyone around them asked who had done it, who had found the presents and the tree. He didn't say anything and neither did she, but when Rick passed him a small box wrapped in five month old comics Daryl actually looked surprised.
Rick clapped him on the shoulder before he let out a small laugh and looked around at all of them, for once all smiling faces, as he spoke. "I guess Santa found us this year after all."
This time when Daryl met Beth's eyes she thought she might see just the ghost of a smile.
XxX
Even the drab gray of the prison walls looked festive once Beth was done with them.
She had been painstakingly cutting out snowflakes from notebook paper for days now. Daryl would catch sight of her bouncing Judith on one hip and sticking the flimsy white paper to the wall with her free hand as he paced through out the prison. He heard her too, singing Christmas carol after Christmas carol under her breath as she worked. Sometimes she even managed to rope Carl into helping her but he never sang as he hung up whatever decorations she had manged to make.
The kids from Woodbury helped her though, and they sang and giggled and actually acted like children. It was unnerving to him, to see kids actually being kids. He hadn't had much of a childhood himself and had never been one to spend time with kids. Only kid he'd ever spent any time with was Carl and he was about as much of a kid as Daryl had ever been.
He felt like he ought to protest this whole Christmas thing. It was a waste of resources he felt, letting Beth and those kids cut up all that good paper. Not to mention the fact that people were starting to ask him and the others to look for certain special stuff when they went out on runs. Felt like a whole bunch of unnecessary risks to him but somehow Daryl managed to keep his mouth shut. It wasn't like he felt that they ought to have a Christmas, he had survived his whole childhood without any real holiday after all. Closest he had come to Christmas was the time his mother had wrapped one of Merle's old sweaters in a newspaper and given it to him with a drunken rendition of silent night.
No, he'd never had a real Christmas before. Not until damn Beth Greene.
It was her fault really, her and her carols and paper snowflakes, her with her soft whispered words to the kids about being good so Santa would find them. Her wrapping up whatever little thing people had managed to scrounge up for each other in an odd assortment of torn magazine pages and newspaper. And of course, her with her stupid, "Let's have a secret Santa!" idea making him have to look for a whole bunch of extra shit when he was out on a run.
Could've been worse though. Had Beth not come up with that idea people would've still wanted to do some form of Christmas and then instead of everyone only having to get one thing for one person everyone would have been asking him to find tens of unnecessary crap for each other. At least with Beth's idea he didn't have to waste as much of his time.
Of course if she hadn't come up with the idea than he wouldn't have been faced with the daunting task of finding her a gift. Because of course when he pulled his hand out of her beanie, tiny scrap of paper clasped in his hand, of course it had her name swirled across it in her pretty bubbly handwriting so unlike his messy scrawl.
Daryl had never once bought a Christmas present in his whole life. Once when he was in grade school he made a picture out of macaroni (he can't even remember what the picture was, a tree? A bird?) but when he got home Merle had only laughed at him before his dad yelled at him for wasting food and 'making art like a girl'. Daryl had never even thought about getting a Christmas gift after that, let alone making anything that even resembled art.
And now not only did he have to get a Christmas gift but he had to get one for Beth fucking Greene, Beth who had made sure very single person in their group last year got not only a present but one that all of them needed and enjoyed. A whole year later and he could still remember the smile on Lori's face as she turned the copy of her favorite book in her hands and the easy set of Rick's shoulders as he helped Carl attach the silencer to his gun (for the life of him Daryl couldn't figure out how Beth had found one of those without anyone seeing her take it).
Daryl himself still used the gift she had gotten him, the first real Christmas gift of his life. It had been a silly thing really. Nothing compared to what everyone else got and Daryl knew that Beth herself must have never thought what she had given him would have that much of an impact on him but it had. She might have thought it was stupid and not even a good gift but when Daryl had opened that box (wrapped in comic pages of all things. He had the strangest feeling that she was trying to tell him something) and those black shoelaces had fallen into his hand Daryl couldn't help but feel grateful. His boots had been falling off his feet for weeks but it had always seemed like such a strange thing to ask people to look out for and then Beth was giving him what he needed without him even having to say anything. It may have been silly and frivolous but every time he looked down at his boots he felt a surge of gratitude about the gift.
Which was exactly why he was at such a loss for what to get Beth.
He had almost asked Maggie or Carol to trade him names but he knew that both of them would only refuse and perhaps even tease him. So he resolved himself to find something for her and kept his eye out, every time they went on a run he scoured the areas for any little thing to give her.
He thought about bracelets and books, pencils and hair ties, but none of them seemed right. None of them seemed like something to get Beth. He wanted to get her something she not only needed but would want. As time went by he began to curse the stupid idea and all of Christmas really but finally, finally his eyes landed on the perfect thing. He hadn't even been looking for something like it and yet there it was.
The perfect gift for Beth Greene.
After he found it he began to grow impatient about waiting to exchange gifts. He wrapped it himself, nicking a page of Beth's newspapers when she was off making a bottle for Judith. He'd never wrapped a gift before and it certainly showed in the torn edges and exorbitant amount of tape but Daryl figured she was just going to rip the paper off so he didn't fret about it to much.
When the day finally came to exchange presents he couldn't find her at first. He had to work his way past the whole damn cell block, listening to everyone's exclamations of joy and thanks, stepping all over the discarded papers before he finally found her. She was sitting by herself in her cell, twisting a small package in her hands. At the sound of his footsteps she looked up with a start that quickly transformed into a small smile.
"Merry Christmas." she whispered as he stepped awkwardly into her cell. He'd never been in there before and somehow with all the drawings she'd put up on the walls, all the ways she'd made her cell look more like a bedroom, Daryl just felt out of place and awkward.
He thrust the badly wrapped present at her, suddenly find it hard to look at her but unable to tear his eyes away as her smile widened. Her blue eyes lit up as she took the present from his hands, their fingers just brushing as she whispered, "For me?"
Daryl merely grunted as she looked up at him with a little laugh. Before his mind could even work out what the laugh meant she was passing him the small box in her other hand. "I pulled your name too."
He had forgotten, or hadn't truly realized, that Secret Santa worked both ways. You gave a gift and you got a gift. But what were the odds of him and Beth both drawing each other?
Daryl swallowed roughly, suddenly even more nervous for her open her gift as he took his from her. He grumbled a thanks and for a moment they both simply watched each other, neither moving to open their present. After a few minutes of this Beth smiled again before whispering, "Together?" and moving her fingers to the corner of the tape covered mess that was her gift.
The box Daryl held was wrapped cleanly and with care, he felt foolish all of a sudden for how badly her gift looked. He should have asked Carol for some pointers on how to wrap a present but it was to late now so he simply nodded and both of them began to rip the wrappings off.
Because of the sheer amount of tape on what he had given her Daryl finished unwrapping his gift before her. He tipped the box open into his hand and a long black strip of cloth fell into them. It took Daryl a moment to place it for what it was. The rough nylon material, the hooks on either end, the sturdiness of it: Beth had gone and gotten him a new sling for his crossbow.
He found himself speechless, searching for words of gratitude that he couldn't quite find. He didn't know when she could have noticed how threadbare his old sling was getting or how she could have possibly have gotten hold of one of these since he knew for a fact she hadn't been beyond the prison fences since they got there. The gift he got her suddenly feels weak, not good enough for what she had gotten him but as he turns his eyes to look at her he sees that she had finally managed to pry open the tape covered mess he had given her.
She held the long blue scarf in her hands, rubbing her fingers over the soft material with a smile before she looked up at him in wonder.
"It's beautiful." she whispered before she reached up to wind it around her neck, smiling as she burrowed into its warmth. "Thank you."
The blue of the scarf made her eyes seem even brighter and combined with the smile she was giving him his chest was beginning to seize up and suddenly it was to much, being in that tiny cell with her smiling at him. He barely grunts out his own thanks before he was darting past the shower curtain she used as a door, both needing to get away from her and intent on finding his bow so he could test out his new sling.
XxX
The weather was only getting colder. With each day Beth was sure the temperature had dropped another ten degrees as she and Daryl wondered in an ever growing circle with the prison at its core. They had seen no signs of the others, not since the railroad tracks with the bloody remains of some of the children. Beth still shuddered at the memory, still felt that heart wrenching guilt that she had been unable to save them or any of her other charges. But every time she felt herself slipping into that place of unbearable guilt Daryl was there somehow pulling her back out again with a word.
It almost amused her, how quickly their relationship had changed after they had finally screamed themselves hoarse at each, had finally admitted the awful truths of everything they were feeling. Once it was said, out there in the open, Beth had felt like a weight had been lifted from her. She could see in Daryl's eyes that he felt it too and when they had set that house ablaze she knew they were burning those words up as well.
After the fire it felt like a fresh start, both separately and together. Where before Beth was lucky to get five words out of Daryl a day now he would sometimes even instigate a conversation. He still wasn't much for talking but now their silences were companionable instead of uncomfortable. It was during one of those silences that Beth finally admitted what had been on her mind the last few days.
"I think its Christmas today." her voice was soft as she accepted Daryl's help over a fallen tree. His hand was cold in hers and Beth herself was fighting down shivers from his touch. She wouldn't have brought it up really, it wasn't like they would feel like celebrating even if they could, but she needed to talk about something to distract her from the cold. The holiday had felt like one of the least painful options.
Daryl didn't just grunt her off like he would have mere weeks ago. Instead he paused to think about it, his brow furrowing as they continued their way through the underbrush. "Might be." he finally conceded in his rough voice before casting her a look from the corner of his eye. "You scared Santa won't find you out here?"
Beth started in surprise, the way she always did when he teased her or made anything that even remotely resembled a joke. There was no malice in his voice and after a moment Beth managed the smallest of smiles, his drunken words ringing in her head (Never got nothin' from Santa Clause!) before she spoke. "I think Santa shown he's never been the best at finding the good kids."
Daryl paused mid step to look down at her and Beth met his eyes boldly. She knew he had just been teasing her, was trying to distract her from her memories of Christmases past, but then again so was she. She did not pity the man before her but her heart ached for the boy he had been once, and the childhood he'd never truly had.
For a long moment neither of them said a word, simply staring at each other in the cold winter twilight before Daryl was reaching over, tapping her arm to get her moving again as they continued on their way.
XxX
She was singing again, bouncing Judith on her hip as she spun slowly in a corner of the crowded room. She was singing just loud enough so the others could hear her but not so loud that people couldn't carry on their conversations around her. It was like she was a radio, playing softly through the night.
Daryl watched her from across the room, clutching his undrunk ration of wine in his hand as he tracked her movements with his eyes. He did that often, too often he knew, but there were still times when he woke up with frantic breaths, expecting her to be gone. There were still times when he had nightmares that she hadn't left the hospital with them, that he had let her walk back to that cop and do what she had confessed to him one dark night that she had been planning on. There were still times when he thought Beth was still gone from him and when that happened the only thing that would calm him was the sight of her or the touch of her skin.
As if she could feel the heat of his gaze on her Beth's eyes suddenly flickered to his, hanging on tight as she finished the last of her song. Excusing herself she passed Judith over to Rick before making her way across the room to where he stood. Daryl sucked in a deep breath as she approached, fighting down the sudden urge to down the wine like a shot. He knew from experience not to get drunk with Beth Greene.
Her hair was down and shining in the candlelight and his mind was drawn to another room, with other candles and a table loaded with food. A meal that for a long time he feared would be their last. A meal where he finally realized that whatever it was he was feeling for Beth Greene was a lot bigger than he had originally thought.
He still felt that way now, still felt like the feelings he has for her are larger than him, than the whole world at times. When she smiled at him the way she was smiling at him now it took every ounce of his self control not to confess the feelings he still refused to put a name to.
Still he sometimes let himself play with the idea that she felt something for him too, that that was the reason why she always slept close to him on the long trip to the safe zone, why they spent so much time together, why she sought him out at the end of a long day, why when she smiled at him it looked nothing like the smiles she gave to everyone else.
She has just come to a stop in front of him, opening her mouth to speak when Glenn's voice rung through the chatter of the room.
"Guys look! Its snowing!"
Everyone began to cluster to the windows, some of the braver people even slipping outside to see the first snow of the year, but Beth did not even spare a glance over her shoulder as she watched Daryl curiously. For a moment neither of them said anything, just listened to everyone exclaim about having a white Christmas as they gathered coats and hats to go out and join the people streaming from the other houses. Finally Beth spoke, her voice a strange mixture of curious and teasing as she questioned him.
"What're you standing there for?"
Daryl frowned, unsure of what she meant. He had been standing in the corner because he didn't feel like talking to anyone, not with her singing to Judith and Rick in a deep conversation with Michonne. Everyone had looked so happy, so remarkably carefree that all he had wanted to do was stand on the edges and watch them. But with the curious tilt to Beth's head Daryl knew that she was asking him something else.
"What'd'ya mean?" he finally mumbled, confused as he so often was when it came to Beth.
Her look of confusion then melted into a smile that only grew wider as he eyed her wearily. It looked like she was thinking of several different things to say but what she finally settled on were two simple words.
"Look up."
His brows knitted in confusion at the request but he followed her orders, his eyes widening at the sight of the green sprig hanging directly above his head. He opened his mouth to protest, to inform her that he truly had not know that the sprig of mistletoe was hanging above him, that he always stood in this corner when there was a lot of people in the house, but before he could say anything Beth took another small step towards him.
Daryl nearly dropped his cup of wine in surprise at her closeness. It may not have been the first time they had been that close together but Daryl felt himself freeze just the same. This was different than all of the other times, different because of the rapid rise and fall of his chest and the wild and fearless look in her eyes. Different because when Beth rose up on her tiptoes she did not press the kiss to his cheek like she did sometimes with the others in the group.
No, her kiss landed right on the corner of his mouth.
It could not have lasted more than a few seconds before she pulled away, looking just as surprised as he felt. But then the sweet just for him smile was on her face again as she stepped forward to slip her arms around him, burrowing her head into his chest as he rose his suddenly heavy arms to wrap around her back.
"Marry Christmas Daryl." she whispered, her voice muffled by the cloth of his shirt.
Daryl's eyes drifted up to stare at the green sprig above them. He did not know whether he wanted to hug or kick whoever had put that up there as he whispered in return, "Merry Christmas Beth."
AN: Happy holidays everyone!