Title: The Noise a Secret Makes

Summary: Rick Grimes is a young deputy who thinks he knows his town like the back of his hand. Then Beth Greene gets snatched off the street in the middle of the night and he realizes just how many secrets King County has to tell. Daryl Dixon's just a young man with a bad reputation in love with a girl he doesn't deserve, but that doesn't mean he's about to let the world steal her away from him.

AN: Will be told in alternating POVS. This is a Bethyl story but also will heavily include most of our favorite characters and I hope you will give it a chance even if you're not typically a fan of that pairing. Ages have been altered to accommodate my plot but I am trying to keep everyone in character. This is ambitious for me because I am notoriously bad at keeping up with multi-chapter fics but I have a pretty sold ten chapter outline completed and I think I'll be able to keep up with it.

WARNING: Foul language, eventual descriptions of including but not limited to: abuse, rape/non-con, graphic sexual content, alcohol abuse, drug use.

Chapter 1

Idle Hands

7 Minutes Before

The deputy knew better, he really did. Rick Grimes had been on the force for 8 years now, baby faced and fresh out of a 2-year associates program at the junior college up in Piedmont when he got his badge. The school thing had just been to appease his mother, he'd known what he wanted to do with his life since he'd gotten that first plastic holster equipped with a cap gun on his fifth birthday and gotten to ride to school in his granddaddy's cruiser. She was insistent though, in that guilt tripping way a mamma could be, especially a southern mamma who'd only had one baby when she wanted more. Tradesmen and laborers and lawmen were important she'd say, the backbone of the country, but it wouldn't be so awful for someone in their family to have a diploma issued from a higher institution than the King County public school system.

So, he'd gone off and gotten his mamma a piece of paper and then he'd come home and gave himself to the State of Georgia, for better or worse. Now at 28 the old guys still called him kid, but he knew he was good at his job. And like most men and women in his line of work, he knew you just didn't go around saying' the word. Hell, you didn't even have any business thinkin' it.

Not unless you were hurtin' for a rough shift; felt like runnin' or fightin' or maybe not going home at all at the end of your tour. Just letting that two syllable demon roll off your tongue was asking for trouble; jinxing or cursing or whatever word you wanted to use for shooting yourself in the damn foot.

He knew better, he really did. So even if he was alone in the cruiser, just musing to himself, he winced when the word slipped between his lips.

"Damn quiet tonight."

He ran a hand through his short crop of black curls and glanced around the cab, as if anyone might have heard. Only silence echoed back around him.

Yea, he was temping the fates to bring trouble down on him. But shit, it was quiet, even for a spit of a town like Colter.

The Quick Stop was tucked off Potter Road, hugged tight on both sides by heavy woods. The place wasn't nothing more than a little concrete building with long glass windows plastered with advertisements for Skoal tins, cigarettes and junk food. The 'Q' and 'U' in the painted sign had long faded into nothing which is why the folks in town all affectionately referred to the place as the 'Ick'. There were three gas pumps in the lot, illuminated by a flickering neon light and one wore a hand-written sign taped to it announcing it as 'out of order'.

Occasionally the air conditioning unit next to the air pump on the right side of the building would cough to life and with his window cracked Rick could hear the rhythmic hum of cicadas in the trees. Other than though, nothing.

He blinked out into the inky Georgia night. The stars were muted, thanks to the heavy clouds that had been hanging all day, threatening a downpour with the sporadic drizzle on his windshield. The silence in the car mimicked the weighted droop of the sky, sitting on his chest and shoulders. It was strange and you couldn't help but to expect the devil to come knocking on a night like this, one that seemed so peaceful. Idle hands and all that.

Which is why he nearly jumped out of his skin when the little bell over the entrance to the 'Ick' jingled. Rick cursed himself when he saw his partner snicker as he made his way back to the cruiser.

"You fallin' asleep out here too?" Deputy Shane Walsh goaded as he pulled open the passenger side door, "Damn near gave Axel heart failure when I walked in. Told him fallin' asleep at the registers a good way for a fella to get robbed."

Shane climbed into the cruiser messily, grasping an armful of junk food against his chest and Rick snorted. The Ick had been held up more times than he could count. Colter had been a more picturesque small town once, a post card kind of place where mailbox baseball and the occasional meth lab were the crimes of the century.

In the last ten years things had changed, policing King County wasn't the same work his granddaddy had once done. The mill on route 9 had closed and left a lot of folks out of work. The guys from the State Police had come down to train them on the "Opiate Crisis" just as it began to bleed its way into their county lines. People were broke, they were desperate and they were high. It wasn't rocket science that the crime rate had gone up; burglaries, domestics and ODs were at an all-time high.

"Wasn't sleepin'," Rick assured defensively as he tightened his lips and squinted in dismay at Shane's selection of midnight snacks, "just thinkin'."

"Oh yea?" Shane snorted, making quick work of unwrapping one of the two hotdogs he'd purchased and inhaling half the thing with one bite, crumbs dotting his brown uniform shirt, "Bout what?"

"Stuff," Rick shrugged non-committedly and then grasped at his heart in feigned pain, "Gives me indigestion just lookin' at that thing," he groaned in the smooth Georgia drawl that clung to both men's words. The senior of the two deputies reached for his thermos of black coffee in the console and took a long sip.

Shane dived into his late-night meal, humming in appreciation between bites. He scoffed at the look of disgust on his friend's face, lips curled into an amused grin and eyes rolling towards the sky.

"C'mon man, remember we used to live off these things?" he reminded, "look at us now, didn't do us any harm."

Rick leaned forward, draping his arms over the steering wheel and suppressing a yawn.

"We just didn't have a damn thing to do besides ride our bikes to the Ick and eat hotdogs," he countered tiredly.

Colter was one of two towns housed in the borders of King County and where both deputies had grown up. Population 3,120, it was the kind of place where even if you didn't know everyone, you knew of them. Before he became a cop he'd known everyone's gossip in a barber shop kind of way, but being a deputy was like having a behind the scenes pass to the town and it wasn't one he wanted most of the time. There really wasn't a way to un-see your high school History teacher parked up with a lady of the night or cope with the realization that the sweet old man who owned the video arcade had been beating the holy hell out of his wife for years.

The neighboring town was Riverwood and they shared most of the important things, like the movie theater, hospital, strip mall and the new Big Spot department store. The King County Sheriff's Department covered both towns and some stretch of surrounding highway, but he and Shane were almost always assigned grids in Colter, on account of knowing their town like the back of their hands.

Back in third grade the state had started closing some of the small county schools and combining them. Back then Shane's folks lived on the border and he'd been going to Riverwood; then they started busing him over to Colton and Mrs. Hill had sat him next to Rick Grimes. Just like that, they'd never really left each other's side. Most folks in town joked about them being brothers, despite Rick's fair skin and blue eyes compared to Shane's olive complexion and intense brown orbs. It hadn't surprised a soul when Walsh went into the deputies' academy just a year after Rick graduated.

"And look at us now," Shane nudged his partner with one elbow as he balled the silver hot dog wrapped up in the same hand and popped the tab on a can of coke between his knees with his other. "Not a thing to do but park our cruiser in the Ick parking lot and eat gas station hot dogs."

He tilted his soda in a toast towards the MDT screen between them where the job board had sat empty all night.

"Yea well," Rick slouched slightly in his seat and retrieved his hat from where it had been abandoned on his lap, he placed it back of his head and tipped the brim down over his eyes. "Excuse me while I catch ten minutes and pretend I'm home in bed with my wife and not trapped in here smellin' your burps."

"So, things are good?" Shane inquired through a mouthful, shrugging and unoffended by his best-friend's comment "tween' you an' Lori?"

"Yea," Rick smiled lazily under his hat, "you know us. Always fussing' then workin' things out. Things are really good actually."

He continued to feign sleep and expected a retort about him being whipped, the same kind he'd been enduring since he and Lori got together in high school. His devotion to the strong-willed, brown eyed girl had from day one been the only kink in he and Shane's friendship. Shane liked to party, he liked to meet girls and he was not shy about the fact that he thought his friend was settling down way too soon. Not that Rick had ever cared, he'd been ready to settle since he was seventeen on his first date with the new girl from up state.

He smiled when he remembered the conversation with his wife three nights ago and resisted the urge to spew every detail to his partner like a school girl. She'd made him promise of course, it was still early.

There was no teasing from his friend this time, Shane merely nodded in agreement, crumpling his trash into a ball and swiping his hands against the knees of his uniform pants. The car fell into a silence until a soft clicking noise filled the space, Shane's thumbs texting away furiously on his cellphone. Rick squinted open an eye and glanced over at him.

"What'd you do to piss Amy off this time?"

Amy was about the closest thing to a steady girlfriend Shane had ever had, always keeping the girl at an arm's length and not letting her get too close. Every time things got too serious he would break it off with her and Rick never really understood why the little blonde was always waiting around for someone who could be so up and down with her.

"What?" Shane looked genuinely confused for a moment before his upper lip quirked, "oh yea, you know, same old bullshit with her."

He locked his phone and slid it back into a pocket, ignoring as it began buzzing audibly with numerous texts.

"Shit," Rick whistled, "sounds like she's texting you a novel to edit. What happened, she find out about you and Andrea at the work party?"

Shane was rolling his eyes, about to rebuff when the radio in the console between them crackled to life.

"Cars stand by for a priority call," the dispatcher's voice cut through the night and both men sat forward in their seats, "Possible abduction in progress, Welks Lane and Morgan Street by the abandoned funeral home. No flash information, male caller screaming for assistance that a female has been taken in a black 4 door car. Male is in foot pursuit of the vehicle on Welks, still awaiting updated location information. Cars use caution."

The dispatcher began to repeat the priority again as Rick threw the car into gear and hit the siren switch and Shane fumbled with his seatbelt. He may not have been looking for action but there were only six units working in the county on a Wednesday last out shift and damned if they weren't going to be the first one on scene.

"Charlie 22," Rick replied into the radio, "put us in, we're about 3 minutes away."

"Charlie 22 copy."

It would be fifteen days before he even remembered what the word quiet meant.