AN: Chapter 2 in the Armor Collection.


Heaven

One evening, they let the undead heard them like sheep to a hilltop. There aren't many, six tops, which is child's play compared to what they've faced before. Except Beth's got a bum ankle and there's no ammo left in the handgun she took off the animated corpse of what had once been a wildlife ranger. She's gotten good with the knife, maybe even great although he doesn't tell her that out loud, but Daryl's down to three arrows and they haven't had a proper meal since two breakfasts ago. The incline isn't very high, but it's steep enough that the walkers keep sliding down it onto each other like they're under an unseen avalanche. So, they decide to take a moment, sit, breathe. Beth makes a comment under her breath, something about how the hill would have been perfect for sledding and then scoffs at herself, remembering where they are. Daryl knows that she assumes he finds those kinds of comments immature but the truth is he loves getting lost in her little scenarios, just for a second. He likes picturing Beth all bundled up, careening down a hill on a steel trashcan lid.

The walkers continue their assault on the hill and continue to turn in at the knees and then topple onto one another, no balance in the afterlife apparently.

"What was it like?", she inquires suddenly, not looking at him but into the eyes of what had once been a woman with a bob of brunette hair, "when you had to end it for Merle?"

He's not offended, because even he can see Maggie in what's left of the face of the walker who keeps sliding back down the hill on her knees. So, he explains it the best he can, which probably isn't very well at all. About how part of him felt guilty, part of him knew he was doing what his brother would want. He leaves out the part about how something deep down inside him had hummed with just the slightest amount of pride. Merle liked to talk about an imaginary world where he'd raised Daryl, kept him safe, was strong for both of them. It was all bullshit because Daryl was the one to live, he was the one still there and it hadn't been from any help of Merle's.

"I wish I was that strong," Beth sighs quietly beside him when he's finished. Her long, pale fingers that turn blue sometimes at night when the temperature drops like it has been lately, using the sharp end of a broken twig to scrape brain matter from the serrated edge of the hunting knife she always wears strapped to her belt. Her hair is escaping from the braid she pulled it into that morning, curling around her ears. There's a smear of dry blood on her chin, aftermath of her mouth slamming against the shoulder of a walker after it fell back into her with her knife in its skull. He doesn't fuss over the injury, she'll only insist she's fine. She is fine, Beth doesn't fret over much including the ankle she's been dragging for two days. The fussing would be for his own benefit, because something inside him wants an excuse to hold her chin and splash water over her lips.

"You would be, if ya were in the position," he assures with a shrug. She shakes her head, hands stilling on the knife and falling limp over her knees. Her usually impeccable posture wilts. Elbows slumped on her thighs, she turns to him.

"I had a brother too Daryl," she reminds him, suddenly sounding like her throat is closing up, "I was in that position, my whole family was. I wish we'd been strong enough to just let him go, stead' of lettin' him bump into walls in that barn, for months, rotting."

Shawn. He remembers the name from their conversation at the shack and from Beth and Maggie's guttural cries the day Shane had let the walkers out of her father's barn. Her mother had been in there too, their neighbors and friends. Sophia had been in that barn. There had been some times he had agreed with Shane, even when the other man's mental stability had begun to splinter. He'd been the first one to accept a gun, take his place in the firing squad. By time the last of the dead had fallen for good, Daryl had quietly shifted all his loyalties to Rick. For all their gun toting bravado, it had been left to Rick to do the heavy lifting and put Sophia down. He was glad he couldn't remember if it was his bullet that had brought Shawn, or her mother, or any of the other people the Greene's had still considered their family, to their backs. They'd gone about things so wrong that day.

"Ya'll didn't know," he dismisses as kindly as he can, fumbling with his fourth arrow that is broken in two pieces, "can't blame yer old man for wantin' to hope."

"We knew," she interrupts, her baby blue eyes darkening like an afternoon storm rolling in. He has a feeling she's tired of excuses being made for her and hers, tired of the naive, secluded country folk label everyone had thrown on them. "Maybe we didn't say it out loud, and maybe we all pretended to believe daddy when he said a cure would come, but we knew. And we left them out there, let them stay like that, just didn't want to deal with it."

One of the walkers at the bottom of the hill seems to get some leverage suddenly, makes it two or three paces further than any have yet and he almost has her up by the elbow ready to run. Then it falls straight backwards, almost comically into the worst trust fall ever because the rest of the dead don't even register the added weight as it flattens the lot of them like dominoes.

He thinks about making the trust fall joke because it seems like something she might find funny and her whole face lights up when he makes a joke, even if it's a shitty one. Except she's cleaning the knife again, this time scowling. She freezes, turns to him and he never knows what he's supposed to do when she looks like this.

"What If…what if they couldn't…couldn't move on until…" she sounds disgusted and angry and trails off.

The sun's starting to dip lower in the sky and the chill is just settling around his shoulders. After a long moment of contemplation, which is just him giving her a minute to get her emotions under control, he looks back to her, searching for an explanation to her previous statement.

"You mean like heaven?" he clarifies. Her lips are tightly pursed together, her jawline stiff.

"I guess it sounds dumb," she muses, maybe a hint of something defensive in her tone, "but I guess that's what I mean."

She finally stops picking at the knife and sheaths it, cracking her knuckles and looking anywhere but at him.

"Not dumb. Faith's not an easy thing to shake," he reasons, "not that you oughta' shake it." She looks pleasantly surprised and he reminds her, "Ya ain't the only one born and raised in the Bible belt."

He knows she'd expect him to laugh off her ponderings about heaven and God. Daryl isn't sure what he believes, but he knows that the way people like him and Beth grew up it was engrained in them to be heaven seeking and hell fearing. Even his daddy used to lament about sinning as he took a leather strap to his children's backs.

She's looking around, at the sky and tree line and now anywhere but below them.

"You know with some of the things we've been through I've thought that there's no way there could be a God. Just figured this is it, human extinction and we all might as well stop fighting it and give in."

He remembers, back on the farm, when she'd taken a glass shard to her wrist. She still wears the scar, pink and raised below a gathering of leather bracelets. He's only recently noticed it when she took them off to wash her arms in a creek bed. Back then he'd dismissed everyone else's whispered worry, because what did they care about some stupid girl they didn't even know. He hadn't meant it of course, never meant most of the hardened words he's thrown around. He'd noticed the slight blonde around the farm and back then it hadn't been her smile to draw his attention. She'd been a bit of a ghost, lost behind the eyes and lurking in Maggie's shadow. She came alive to him that winter on the road, before the prison. Singing by the fire, her voice warmer than the flames for their cold bones.

Finally, she matches his gaze and he has to look away, too afraid to play the tennis game of stares. He remembers the horrified look on Dale's face right before he put him down. And Sophia, lost alone in those woods that could even scare him these days. He remembers their prison gates, the first real home he's ever had in his entire life, falling in around them.

Then she laughs, a small one and it isn't at all sarcastic, more like wondrous and a bit confused

"And then some other thing happens… and I think, how can there not be? How could those things have come to be without some higher something playing a part? How can we not fight for this world?"

Rick waking up from a damn coma and somehow finding his wife and son miles and miles from where he'd last left them. Judith's entire existence. Glenn and Maggie's love. Michonne wandering up to their gates, unscathed by the walkers surrounding her. The fact alone that the two of them are still around to ponder the existence of a higher being at all.

Those blue saucers bare into him. He knows she isn't really asking him, isn't expecting an affirmation or dismissal of her faith. She's just talking, because she trusts him. Same way he'd just rehashed his encounter with Merle's corpse to her, for the first time to anyone. Because he trusts her.

"We could try to get some rest up here," he suggests simply, "don't seem like they're very good at climbing hills. Soon enough squirrel or something will come along and they'll wander off."

"Ok. You're not keeping watch alone though, we'll both stay up. Just let our bodies rest," she folds her long legs under her and situates herself against her thin pack, watching him with a half grin and half something else.

And God Damnit he wants to tell her that heaven has to be real, right there at the top of that hill with the dead trying to claw their way into it.