Lost in Dreaming

Chapter 3

"Want my help, there?"

He finds Beth in the woods, sitting on a log across from him, blue eyes boring into his. Blonde hair matted with dirt, arms stronger and leaner, covered in cuts from thorns and with slight rips in her jeans.

He holds up the snake he's skinning in his hands, confused. "With dinner? I got it already," he answers, and continues skinning. He feels heavy, for some reason; hopeless and lost, as though something terrible has happened. He knows he's lost something invaluable; whether it's the prison or Alexandria, now, he can't be sure, but he can feel the frown on his own mouth like a weight. When he glances up at Beth again, there's something old and unending in the strange look on her face.

"Are you sure?" she asks. "It'll hurt someone."

He looks back down at the lifeless snake in his hands, but the fresh kill feels inexplicably cold against his calloused skin. His fingers skim against the metal of it's scales.

"I know," he whispers, because he feels it now, innately; knows it is dangerous, knows that if given the chance it will spring to life and devour her before his eyes. "That's why I can't let you help me."

She nods sagely, and then suddenly the real Beth is there instead, bright and shining and defiant.

"Let's go do somethin'," she says, eyes glinting in the firelight. "I don't wanna stay in this suck-ass camp anymore." Along with his unexplainable melancholy he feels a surge of nervousness, too – he doesn't know this girl all that well, and he'd honestly rather sit by this cold fire and be alone.

Only, when she suddenly isn't there, he realises how lonely being alone truly is. He stands on shaking legs, dinner forgotten; intense fear gripping his heart and flooding his veins with ice.

"Beth!"

There's no reply, and he scrambles desperately past the walker alarms strewn around their little space, trips and crawls over them before pushing himself to his knees and running through dense trees.

"BETH! BETH!"

She's not there, but he hears the moans of a thousand walkers not so far away, and then a long, bloodcurdling scream.

"I GET IT NOW! I GET IT NOW!" he hears her shout, voice almost lost in the sea of groans and shuffling footsteps. "I GET IT!"

"BETH!" He screams, horror carving a hole in his chest – he feels numb with terror, and when he tries to run through the trees towards the sound of her voice, his legs won't move. "BETH! BETH!"

– DARYL! DARYL! – screams a voice, but it isn't Beth's. It tears through his ears, and yet it sounds so far away. He doesn't know why Carol's here in these woods somewhere; she doesn't belong here with him. This is their place, his and Beth's forever, and he doesn't want to let her in.

"BETH!" He screams.

A piano springs to life in his head; small, nimble fingers gliding across heavy, dusty keys.

"What?"

He turns around and there she sits, elbows resting on the dusty surface of a long-forgotten bar, dirty cup in her hands as though she'd been waiting here for hours.

At the sight of her, alive and worse for wear, but alive, breathing, Daryl feels relief so intense that his legs almost give out from underneath him. Her disappearance is forgotten, though, when he sees the peach schnapps bottle beside her, and he scrunches up his nose. "You ain't drinking that, are ya?"

"Why not?" She throws the cup away and it smashes silently at his feet. She tilts the bottle to her lips and drinks, and when she pulls the bottle away a dark red liquid covers her mouth, dripping from her chin and on to her yellow shirt. Inexplicably, the same colour pours from her head in a steady, silent stream.

It makes him uneasy, and he moves towards her, hands reaching for her face to wipe that strange crimson away. The sounds of that unseen piano grow quieter. He can't remember the notes anymore, can't always recall them in waking life; but here he remembers every chord, every quaver, every tone. With a surge of despair he realises it's slowing, growing quieter, spiralling away from him.

– Daryl, Daryl, come on, Daryl, Daryl! – he hears Carol again. Invisible hands shake his shoulders, but Beth's right here, right in front of him, and he pushes Carol's screams away.

Beth looks up at him, eyes glittering, and though she's clean again he can still feel that blood on his hands, staining through his skin and seeping into his bones forever.

"Why are you sad?" she looks up at him worriedly, and with a sudden rush of desperation he grips her shoulders, afraid she'll disappear any minute.

"Because it's ending." He feels it deep in every fibre of his being. He hears the slow of the notes, sees her fingers on the keys in his head grow tired. He can see the coda coming just around the corner.

She keeps looking up at him, and he can't help but think that this Beth who lives in his dreams and haunts his nightmares has never looked more like Beth. There's a soft wonder in those blue eyes and in the gentle upwards curve of her mouth; in the hushed tone of her voice and in that southern lilt that used to make something in his chest soar.

"No," she whispers, and the look on her face is so heartbreakingly beautiful that he can't help but grip on to her tighter, afraid she'll be taken from him again. Warm hands reach upwards and cup the sides of his face; he feels his eyes flutter closed and he breathes her in. She smells like the woods; like the earth, like fresh air and something new. He breathes in a little deeper and the smoke hits his nostrils, stings just slightly but not threateningly, and he knows the world is burning around them.

When he opens his eyes again, she's still there, his face hot in her hands. The glow of the fire illuminates her features; one side cast in the shadow of the trees, the other bathed in flickering light.

Beside them, to his left and her right, their moonshine shack is burning. Flames curl around the wooden corners, the roof seems to breathe inwards as though about to fall in – the house seems to cry, but Daryl isn't sad about it. He knows that they were just there only minutes ago, that they burned it down; that those flames are burning away the last reminders of the people he and Beth used to be – that scared little boy and that weak little girl. And though from far away he hears his mother screaming inside, can almost see kids on their bikes and hear sirens and see that fire truck parked outside the remains of his house, it's the first fire that's ever made him smile.

He remembers that this was where it all really began. That this moment, right here, was where they started.

"It is," he whispers, and grips her tighter, pulls him to her, lips ghosting across the skin of her forehead. "It's ending," he says, and yet he can still hear that piano and the lilt of her voice somewhere in the back of his mind – quiet, but not quite gone.

"No, Daryl," Beth whispers, breath mingling with his in the small space between them. She smiles, and his heart aches in his chest from longing. "Your song's barely even started."

When he opens his eyes, Carol tells him that she loves him, and he finds himself saying it back.

It happens when his eyes dart open, when his lungs suck air through his gasping throat, when he sputters water and his chest heaves with exertion. It happens when Carol pulls him from a river all alone and saves him on the banks, his face wet with cold, muddied water and hers wet with tears.

Something had happened a little ways up ahead. He and Carol had wandered further afield in the never ending search for supplies, when the bridge they'd been crossing had given way beneath their jeep and they had come crashing down to meet icy water. It's not the first car accident they've been in together, but it's the first time Daryl almost didn't make it. Later, he'll remember the way fear had carved a hole in his heart, had settled there, growing more intense by the second as he tried harder and harder to pull his leg free from the wreckage trapping him inside the jeep; will remember the simultaneous hope and panic when he looked beside him and saw Carol wasn't in the driver's seat – hope that she had escaped, panic that she might not come back for him. The way the corners of his vision darkened with every bubble of air that escaped his pursed lips. The way that freezing numbness had seeped through his skin. The way everything stopped hurting. And the way he'd felt when he'd been transported back to those woods, with her, telling him that his life was only just beginning.

His chest aches, his breaths come out in wheezes, but at the sight of Carol beside him something deep within him stops and settles.

"I thought you were dead," she sobs, and she grips his hand in both of her own, forehead pressed against his knuckles. "I thought I'd – "

"S'okay," he rasps, and takes a deep breath of beautiful, clean air before he talks again. "Take more'n that. My song ain't over yet."

And then Carol tells him that she loves him, that she always has, and before she kisses him he tells her that he loves her, too.

And he does. He does love her. They've been through too much, he and Carol, for him not to. He's seen Carol as the wilting wallflower, the abused housewife; as the grieving mother and then the hardened warrior; has watched her grow from one to the next, remembers when Terminus was burning and that moment when he'd looked into her eyes but had found someone entirely different in them. Remembers how he'd known, then, that something terrible and unimaginable had happened to her – something dark and endless that had made her a survivor but had stripped something of her humanity away at the same time. And he remembers, too, how she had dropped everything to try to bring Beth back to him, how she'd grieved by his side, and how slowly, little by little, that humanity had come back to her. How his best friend had come back to him. She's been the strong, steady presence in a world falling apart at the seams, and in some way, Daryl knows, he and Carol are the same; cut from the same cloth, have lifetimes of experience in common that he's never shared with anyone before.

And he does love Carol, he realises, as he kisses her back. But it's in that moment, too, that he realises how truly, endlessly, and devastatingly he had been in love with Beth Greene. How hopelessly and powerfully he had been in love with that blonde haired girl who'd taken him from the ruins of the prison and breathed life into him just by existing; who'd taken the pieces and fragments of his life and made him a whole person.

Carol is smart and strong. She's capable and independent and caring; she makes him laugh, makes him feel like maybe the world won't end. She's the woman he wants to want. He loves Carol, but he's not in love with her.

Because this love he feels for Carol pales in comparison to the way Beth made something in his chest soar whenever she smiled, or the way every graceful movement mesmerised him, or the way the sound of her voice twisted and turned inside him like a tidal wave. The way she'd laugh with surprised joy when she'd catch their meal that night, or the way she'd silently lace her fingers through his as they laid in the dark. The way he was so sure, when he'd lost her, that half of his soul was still out there, waiting for him - and the way he'd felt when he finally found it again, standing behind Carol's wheelchair between cops and doctors, blue eyes wide in her face as she looked back at him. The way it was the happiest damn moment of his entire life. The way he'd felt that they were finally one whole person again.

The way he'd felt when that woman had said Noah's name. When Beth had looked him in the eye for the briefest of seconds, that look on her face, and the way he'd known – the way he felt everything inside him scream out for her as she pulled Noah into a hug and then turned her back on him forever. The way something inside him tore away and spiralled endlessly out of his reach when she had crumpled to the ground.

The way, when she died, that he'd felt half of him go with her.

And so, he stays with Carol. Because he does love her. And for the next nine years, he pretends his eyes don't absently look for a blonde head in the groups of survivors on the pristine streets of Alexandria, or that his eyes don't prickle with tears at the sound of a girl singing or that his throat doesn't clench strangely at the taste of peanut butter and jelly or diet coke.

Because his song isn't over yet, and the Beth that still lives on in his head chastises him when it becomes too hard; tells him that it's alright to let someone get too close. Tells him that the hardest thing in this world is to live in it.

So he lives in it with Carol, and he's all the better for it.

(A/N: Don't be alarmed by the Caryl thing happening here. It seems to me like a really natural progression of their relationship, but this is of course Bethyl through and through! Please feel free to read a review. You will be rewarded with the knowledge that you've made someone's day. Merry Christmas!)