Chapter two! I know the chapters have been a little on the short side so far, but I like to end them on cliff hangers just to be a little bitch so... sorry, not sorry, I guess? Looks like this will be a multi-chapter fic after all. Still no clue where this is going, I just type and hope for the best to be honest although, I've got a rough idea and there will be eventual smut, I promise. Now, enjoy!

Running makes Beth forget, just for a moment, what she's done. The horrors she's endured since she's been away from Daryl, been alone. It stops her from thinking about how stiff she is with dried blood, how pungent she smells covered in it, amongst other things. She forgets it for a moment and she just feels like Beth Greene again: braid in her hair, goodness in her heart, Daryl beside her, running for their lives. She forgets until they reach a stream and they collapse, down on their knees with no more strength left to continue. Daryl sprawls on his back, like the first time they ran but she doesn't. She hunches over the stream, the moon lighting her up enough for a reflection.

A blood bath is an appropriate way to describe her. It's caked into her skin, showing nothing but bulging eyes, pupils blown wide, and her hair is crimson like she dyed it with blood too. Unbound and sticking to her neck, her cheeks with sweat. She can't see the rest of her, but she doesn't need to because she can feel it. Gore and brains and blood and guts packed under her fingernails with mud, pressed so deep in her skin it's like it's absorbed her, provided her new flesh and her clothes are stiff with it, stuck to her, everything clinging. It's awful, feels awful as much as it looks and she makes a sound, a whimper maybe as she hastens to look away from herself, from the evidence of what she's become.

Daryl sits up behind her, breathing ragged and thirsty. "Gonna tell me what the hell happened now?"

"It don't matter," she says again, looking away from the water up to him.

"We bin over this an' it goddamn does, now tell me what the fuck happened, Beth!"

His hand locks around her shoulder and she flinches, jerks hard enough that he falls off. "Leave me alone! This is your fault! All of it!"

"Says the stupid little girl who wanted to see a damn dog!" He shouts back, surging up to his knees like she is.

Beth growls, her heart racing. "Didn't come after me though, did you? Didn't try to fuckin' save me!"

"Fuck you! I ran all damn night for you!"

She pauses in confusion as she stares at his heaving chest, his clenched hands. She wants to believe him, wants to believe that he would run all night for her, come looking for her, try to save her from the hell she went through but she can't, she just can't because he's a tracker for Christ sakes and he never found her, he never saved her, so how can it be true that he ever tried?

"You're lyin'," she says in the end as she looks away, into the grass they're surrounded by.

"Am I? Beth, I swear. I ran. Couldn't find you, girl but I tried."

His voice is so sincere, so earnest and she craves the beauty of knowing that he tried, but she can't. She spent too long cradled around herself, certain that he would burst through the door wielding his crossbow, haul her out of the hell hole she was in and run with her, run far away so that she was never taken from him again.

"Don't matter no more," she dismisses instead, not interested in going around in circles.

Daryl growls in frustration, falling back on his ass to the ground. "Just tell me why you're covered in blood, girl. Walkers?"

"No."

"What d'you do?"

"You really wanna know, huh?" She whirls on him with trembling hands. "I ripped the guts out of the men who took me, okay? I sliced open their bellies and I teared them out with my fuckin' fingernails," she grinds out through clenched teeth. "Should do the same to you for ever lettin' me go through the shit I did!"

Daryl's face remains like stone but his jaw tightens just a fraction. "They hurt you, girl? They touch you?"

She scoffs, glances away back into the water. "They didn't rape me, which is what you're really askin'." He breathes a huge trembling sigh and it makes Beth's eyes water, makes her keep speaking even when she wants to keep her mouth shut. "Wasn't even the first guys to take me."

Beth looks to Daryl's confused face and makes a noise beneath her breath, ripping up grass with her fingers and shredding them. He shuffles a little closer, his voice soft and not at all like him. "You can tell me, girl."

"Why? So you can kill 'em? Already done that. They're gone an' that's all that matters."

She stands, looks around at the sky beginning to lighten with the dawn. Daryl stands with her, the crossbow tight in his grip. "Wanna find somewhere to hole up?"

She nods, fingers wrapping around her knife in its sheath, just to provide her with some comfort. "Need some clothes though, can't stand these no more."

"One problem at a time," he grunts and then jerks his chin. "C'mon."

They continue to walk in silence, despite her believing Daryl would pester her with questions that she doesn't want to answer, but she seemed to have forgotten in their time away from each other that he's not a very talkative man and silence is more than fine with him, as it is with her, now. It feels like they walk for hours and with the bright sun over them, it's more than likely they have. She's not sure how tired Daryl is, but she's gone many nights without sleep and she may be dead on her feet, but she can keep going if she has to. It's with that thought that they turn the corner onto a street once dedicated to a strip mall.

They fall back immediately, not having to converse to be in sync with each other, which is something Beth has to marvel at. Simply because she wonders when such a thing happened. Whether it was when they were running together or whether it's because they've both changed in their separation and therefore, who they are now is better suited to one another than who they were before. He keeps his hands locked on the crossbow and nods at her.

She takes her cue and glances back around the corner, tallying up the walkers. "'Bout ten that're visible. Could be more, lot of alleys an' some in the stores too."

Daryl nods as she pulls her head back in, unsheathes her knife and raises it in her palm. "Let's get you some goddamn clothes then find somewhere to hole up, 'cause girl, you fuckin' stink."

Beth rolls her eyes. "Look who's talkin' squirrel guts."

He snorts before they pull themselves together again. A nod is exchanged between them and then they both duck out at the same time, working together to take down walkers that turn towards them, reaching out severed fingers and moaning hungrily. There are more in the alleys, as it turns out but only a handful of which Daryl takes down while she glances inside a clothes shop and bangs on the door. Before, she would have jumped when a walker slammed itself against the window out of the darkness inside, but now she stares at it and sighs.

Yet another one to deal with and she's so fed up with blood, especially the black, rotted kind that sprays out of walkers. Daryl dips his chin as she indicates the window. Beth tries the doorknob, expecting it to be locked but it swings open and she slips in, raising her knife to embed it into the walker's forehead as it rounds the door towards them. She grunts as it gets stuck trying to come out. Really, she knows better than to go through the skull because it dulls the knife, but the eye socket wasn't available. Using her foot, she pushes its body off the blade with a grunt and steps over it when it sprawls to the floor.

She hears the door shut behind her and Daryl turns the lock, glancing out through the blinds at the strip they just come through. "Anythin'?"

He shakes his head though he doesn't turn to face her. "Probably more 'round though. Shouldn't stay long."

"We'll stay if no more comes," she disagrees despite the look he throws over his shoulder at her.

"Just get some clothes girl, so I can go get us some food. I'm starvin'," he grunts.

Beth rolls her eyes but begins to search through the mess of the shop, rifling through upturned racks and tipped over piles of clothes. There's a display of bags that she comes across and she selects a backpack to use later. She can hear Daryl rooting through things too as she finds herself another pair of jeans and a black sweatshirt. It's a little hot for the sweatshirt right now but they haven't got blankets for the night time so she selects that to stuff in her bag and finds a t-shirt instead. She grimaces when she finds only white t-shirts left. Whoever looted before her was thinking the same thing as she was: a white t-shirt would be red with blood by the end of the day.

Beth sighs and selects one anyway, turning around in the mess she's stood in to find anything else of use. There's a pack of plain ankle socks covered in a little dust that she shakes off and a selection of thongs that no one seemed interested in before her. Bastards. Even still, fresh underwear is hard to come by and she takes the last ones in her size.

"You done?" Daryl interrupts her second circuit around the store.

She scowls at him. "Would be if you weren't makin' so much damn noise."

"The hell you talkin' 'bout girl? I'm a goddamn tracker, I don't make noise."

"You haven't stopped rustlin' the whole time I been lookin' for shit!"

"Rustli-" Daryl cuts off as a squeak sounds, yet none of them are moving.

Beth whirls with her back to his chest as he raises the crossbow over her shoulder, his arm brushing her cheek as she raises her knife too. "Who the fucks there?"