PROLOGUE
I know you look at me and you just see another dead girl.
There she was standing before him; a sight in which he never believed he would be fortunate enough to ever witness again. He wanted to reach out his arm, his calloused fingers reaching for her but he hesitated, unsure as to whether his mind was playing tricks on him again thus creating an illusion of something that he had wanted so much in the world to be true.
He thought back to the last time he saw her. The golden tresses of blonde hair tumbling down her back as it rested in a messy ponytail stained with crimson. The same blue eyes that he would stare into for hours upon end as they spoke in the stillness of the days that surrounded them, the true epitome of a window to her soul – which now, as she stood before him, were betraying the cool composure she was trying so hard to maintain. Her hair was shorter, cut to just below her chin with jagged ends that suggested a knife and impatience had been used instead of a steady hand and sharp scissors.
She was older, by just a small amount of time. It had been two years since he had seen the life seep out of her on that fateful day – the same day that seemed to burn his mind every time he thought of her. Or so he had thought. His eyebrows furrowed in confusion, betraying his own composure, which was reminiscent of a child trying to figure out an equation. He had been sure that she had been taken from them, from him. They had all been sure. She had been shot in the head. No one came back from that.
He blinked a few times, still believing his mind to be playing tricks on him like they used to do in the days, weeks, months, even years after Merle's untimely death. The visions of Merle were so vivid that Daryl had believed if he had reached out to touch his brother, that his fingers would brush against the face of his brother. The visions became a constant fixture in his every-day life, and soon it became a relief once sleep took him away for a short time.
He caught murmurs around him and he tore his gaze from the ghost of his past to see as Maggie stood just as dumbfounded as he was. He saw it in her eyes, the disbelief, the sadness, the overwhelming relief. Her reaction was the only confirmation he needed.
She was alive.
After all this time, she stood before him once more.
He caught a figure behind her, and moved his gaze from her reluctantly - hoping that once he looked at her again that she would still be stood in front of him and not dissipate into thin air like she had done many times before. His gaze moved to the person that was poised just a few inches away from her.
He thought back to that morning when he woke with the same feeling of heaviness upon his chest that he had endured for so long that it had become a permanent fixture to his life – in the way he stood, moved, slept. But in that moment, as his eyes trained in on the woman next to her, the tightness in his hands and chest released from within him and he felt that he was able to breathe a sigh of relief – one that he sought great comfort from.
The spark in her eyes that he remembered her to have was gone, but the smirk he had familiarised himself with etched across her face was there and he knew.
She had promised him her return but as the days had stretched into months, it seemed unlikely he would ever see her again. The world was cruel, but she had been defiant.
And with her return, she had brought the missing piece in his life: Beth.