In his dreams Beth was everywhere.

Hunting in an old forest with trees so tall they blocked out the sun, he walked on quick feet with his crossbow raised, moving stealthily through the cool, pine-scented shadows. He wasn't sure what he was hunting, exactly, until he heard her voice whispering his name, the sound moving around him like wind. A sense of urgency burned bright in his chest and he chased flashes of her ponytail, a glimpse of her boot or a pale hand curved around the trunk of a tree, following the sound of her laughter deeper into the forest. He ran hard, weaving through the trees and willing his legs to move faster but over and over again she evaded him, vanishing just as he was about to grab hold.

Suddenly, he was back in the funeral home, walking calmly down a dark hallway towards a room where orange light flickered. Outside a storm raged, rain pelting the roof and flashes of lightening filling the house with eerie blue light. Thunder cracked across the sky so loudly it shook the floorboards beneath his feet. As he moved closer to the room, through the noise of the storm he could hear soft piano music being played. Fighting the urge to smile, he picked up the pace knowing he had finally caught up with her.

The room looked just as he remembered it, with the piano along one wall and rows of chairs facing an empty coffin at the front of the room. She sat with her back to him, fingers dancing gracefully over the piano keys and playing a song he recognized. Relieved to see her, he called out her name only to feel his chest tighten and the breath lodge painfully in his throat when she turned around.

The sutures on her forehead and cheek had been ripped open, black strips dangling uselessly from the angry wounds. Trails of dark, dried blood stained her face as a steady stream of scarlet oozed from a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. She smiled at him with lips coated in blood.

"You found me," she said matter-of-factly, as if there hadn't been any doubt that he would. Daryl tried to move to her to stop the bleeding but it felt like his legs had been filled with cement. Lightening flashed again, momentarily blinding him, and when it was gone suddenly so was Beth. He moved into the room, knocking over chairs, looking around frantically for any sign of her. It wasn't until he looked to the front of the room that he realized Beth lay still in the open coffin with her arms delicately folded across her chest, unseeing eyes wide open.

He awoke with a start to find himself back in the hospital, surrounded by sterile white walls. Immediately he looked to Beth and watched her chest rise and fall, listening to the sound of her steady breathing. She was alive, still breathing, still here. Daryl shook his head to try and clear the image of her lying so still in that coffin out of his mind, thinking that if he didn't the nausea it was giving him would have him leaning over a trash can before long.

"You okay?" Maggie asked. She was leaning with her elbows on the bed, her hands cupping Beth's and looking at him with concern. He hoped he hadn't said anything damning in his sleep.

Slowly he sat up and rubbed a hand over his face, willing his racing heart to calm down. Dreams like those were precisely the reason he didn't sleep much anymore. "Yeah, 'm fine," he said, hoping she would think his voice was thick with sleep and not fear.

She watched him carefully for a moment before jerking her head to a bottle of water and a granola bar that sat on the side table beside the bed. "Carl brought some food a while ago. He left yours there on the table. I could've sworn there were two…"

Daryl chuckled once as he swiped the granola bar and water off of the table. No doubt Carl had pocketed the other to eat in secret, the little punk. He sat back down heavily in the chair and ripped open the plastic packaging with his teeth.
"Don' matter," he said with a mouthful of tough, expired granola and raisins. "I ain't that hungry anyway."
"Liar," Maggie said under her breath, and he lifted a corner of his mouth in response. She smirked back as he shoved the rest of the bar in his mouth.
He nodded at Beth as he chewed. "How's she doin'?"
Maggie shrugged, sighing heavily as she began slowly stroking Beth's hand. "About the same."

He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, absentmindedly rubbing his chin and thinking that Maggie looked as tired as he felt. The circles ringing her eyes were as dark as bruises, the slump in her shoulders physical evidence of the worry she currently carried.

"I was just thinking about the time she fell out of a tree and broke her arm," Maggie said suddenly, a small smile creeping onto her face.

"She broke her arm?"

She looked at him and nodded. "It was just before her fifth birthday. She was a tiny little thing, had no business being in a tree. But Daddy had told her this story about a family of fairies that lived in the oak tree we had out back, told her they had wings like butterflies and rode dragonflies like horses. So she took it upon herself to go and find the place where the fairies lived. She got a hold of the step ladder from the pantry and dragged it all the way outside to the tree, used it to reach the low branches. Then she hauled herself up and just started climbing."

Daryl could picture it as easily as if he'd been there. Little Beth with chubby pink cheeks and a head of wild blonde curls, determined and fearless, in search of the magic she was sure existed.

"How far'd she get?"

Maggie smiled a watery smile. "Not very. She would've gotten stuck before she got too high, but the silly thing upset a squirrel before that could happen. It scared her so bad she let go of the branch and fell right out of the tree."

For a moment they let themselves chuckle at the thought of Beth pulling herself up onto a branch only to be met with the beady black eyes of a squirrel. The laughter was short lived, however, and suddenly Maggie's lip was quivering. She caught Daryl's gaze and answered his unspoken question.

"It's just… I did this before back on the farm. With Andrea," Maggie said, her green eyes filling with tears. "Held my baby sister's hand and told stories to… to keep her close when was so far away."

"She's strong, Maggie," Daryl said firmly. "She's gonna wake up."

She pressed her lips together and nodded as a tear rolled down her cheek. There was something about the way she did it, as if she were just going through the motions that made Daryl wonder if maybe her faith in Beth's recovery was wavering too.

"It wasn't your fault you know," she said after a long moment of quiet. He looked down at the floor and bit his lip, not having to ask her what she meant. "I know that's why you're in here so much… why you haven't left her side. But you shouldn't feel guilty. You're the one who found her, after all."

It was nice of her to say, to let him off the hook so easily. But she hadn't been there. It was his fault. He was the one who told her to leave that night, the one who had separated them. That choice had landed her in a place where people had beaten her and scarred her face and shot her in the head. He felt incredibly responsible for everything that had happened to her since the moment he'd left her side, and he wasn't going to leave her again.

Daryl felt the heat rise in his face under Maggie's gaze as he tried to ignore the thoughts that said his guilt wasn't the only reason he refused to leave her side. He saw her eyes so big and blue, staring at him in the kitchen of that funeral home where it all went bad every time he closed his own. The way something inside of him had stirred under her open and honest gaze, something he hadn't had a chance to make sense of before both it and she were taken from him. How for a moment she'd had him believing that as long as they were together everything was going to turn out alright.

He was saved from a response with the sound of approaching footsteps. Rick and Glenn appeared in the doorway and Glenn walked immediately to Maggie's side, placing his hands on her shoulders and acknowledging her tears with a worried frown. Rick stood at the foot of the bed with his hand resting on the hilt of his gun in its holster.

"She looks good," he said with a nod at Beth as Maggie hastily wiped the tears from her cheeks. "Her color's much better. Bet it's just a matter of a time till she's up and moving."

Glenn looked down at Maggie and gently squeezed her shoulders. "Hey. Why don't you and I go for a walk? It's almost dinner time; we can stop by the cafeteria on the way and get something to eat."

She hesitated but eventually nodded her consent, giving Beth one last sad look before following Glenn into the hallway where Michonne, Tara, Abraham, and Tyreese stood huddled in conversation. Tara threw her arm around Maggie in a sideways hug, folding her seamlessly into the group.

"How're you doing?" Rick asked, furrowing his brow when Daryl only nodded in response. He sighed heavily, leaning forward and resting both hands on the plastic footboard at the end of the bed. He looked tired too. "We need to start thinking about what we're going to do once we get outta here. Noah was telling us last night that Beth was trying to get him home to Virginia. He's got family there, says they had a small settlement. Walls. Good people. And with Eugene being… well… now that D.C's out of the picture, I figure it's not a bad place to start."

Daryl rubbed a hand over his face and nodded, feeling that resigned defeat he felt whenever life handed them chances and then took them away again. Glenn had been the one to tell him about Eugene's lie, waiting until Abraham had left guard duty before summing up their disastrous jaunt to D.C. Daryl didn't know why they were all so surprised. It had sounded too good to be true, so of course it had

been.

"Don't see why not," he said. "It's a shorter trip, anyway. Less supplies, less risk. Probably be good for Beth to get somewhere she can rest for a while once she wakes up, too. She might need time, but I don't want her in this shithole any longer than necessary."

"Yeah," Rick said after a moment, drawing the word out on an exhale. "This place ain't exactly welcoming. Couple of cops came by the room yesterday afternoon claiming first aid equipment had gone missing from some locked cabinet. They said they needed to search all of the occupied rooms, but they only searched ours. Made a big show of dumping out backpacks in piles on the floor and making people empty their pockets. Then when they didn't find anything, they had the nerve to hand us a clipboard of chores on it, gave some speech about how everyone who wants to eat has to work. I'm all for helping out, but to tell hungry people they can't eat until they mop a hallway? In this world? That doesn't sit right with me."

"Fuckin' bullshit is what it is," Daryl growled, crossing his arms across his chest as he leaned back in the chair and stretched his legs out in front of him. Rick smirked but nodded his head in agreement.

"I'm not sure how much longer it's safe for us to be here, to be honest," Rick said after a moment of companionable silence. There was something in the tone of his voice that made the hair on the back of Daryl's neck stand up, his words sounding more like a veiled warning than an admission of worry.

"We'll be fine," he said firmly. "We've dealt with worse than these assholes."

Rick nodded again, running a hand through his lengthening—and graying—hair. "I know, I know. It just feels different, trying to live among them. And being so god damn vigilant all the time… I don't know whether I should have us playing defense or offense anymore."

Daryl frowned. That was a valid concern, one he didn't have any helpful answers or advice for.

"I'm worried about you too, brother," Rick said quietly. Daryl had nothing to say to this either. He still didn't know how to handle when people expressed the fact that they cared about him or what to do with the strange, warm-but-itchy feeling it gave him. "You've been in this room for days. You've barely slept or ate… I know you want her to wake up. We all do. But you've gotta keep your strength up. Get some rest. And I'm concerned about what will happen if…"

"If what?"

Rick shifted his gaze to Beth's face, watching her for a moment with a sad look in his eyes before looking back at Daryl.

"If she doesn't wake up," he said.

If Daryl was being honest with himself, he'd been wondering the same thing. He thought back to the way he'd reacted when he thought she was dead, at how quickly he had fallen into grief so thick and dark it felt like being buried alive. And now, to have this glimmer of a second chance dancing in front of him, still just barely out of his grasp… it was keeping him going. What would he do if that glimmer disappeared? Daryl swallowed, staring intently at hands that had balled themselves into fists.

"She made me better," he said finally, the words leaving his mouth before he realized he was saying them out loud. "When we were out there on our own, just the two of us… I was so fuckin' angry and ashamed I didn't look harder for the Governor. I was an asshole, treated her like shit most of the time."

Up until the night he and Beth had burned down the moonshine shack, he could feel himself slipping. Reverting back to the short-tempered, foul-mouthed, sullen asshole he had been back when he was following his brother around Georgia like a puppy dog. He hadn't wanted to, but it seemed safer than Beth's way of coping—tracking ghosts and living on hope—and it had made him say and do some stupid, very asshole-ish things.

"I was real close to losin' my grip. And Beth just kept pushin' and pushin' me away from that edge, yellin' and swearin' and fightin' for me before I even knew that's what she was doin'. She made me believe that goodness wasn't gone and faith was worth holdin' onto when I lost sight of both." He paused for a moment, unable to resist looking at her face. "She's the best person I've ever known."

Daryl made a point not to look at his friend though he could feel the weight of his gaze. Whether it was his previous training as a cop or an inherent personality trait, Rick was incredibly observant when it came to people, and Daryl was afraid he'd revealed too much.

"Daryl, you and Beth…?"

"Rick?" Glenn said, interrupting from the doorway. "You mind coming out here for a minute?"

Rick nodded at him and turned to follow. Daryl braced himself as Rick paused to look back at him, opening his mouth as if to finish his interrupted thought. Instead, he reached over and without saying another word, placed his hand on Daryl's shoulder and gave it a squeeze before turning to join the group outside the door.

Their voices were a soft hum, a welcome white noise to the thoughts currently trying to take up every available space in his head. He didn't understand why he was so reluctant to share the details of what had happened when it was just him and Beth out on the road. There was something about keeping that time just between them that made it more real, more special, as if talking about it and letting other people in would sully it. This was the first time he'd even remotely felt like talking about it, but he'd needed Rick to understand even if it was just a little bit why he wasn't going to let her go.

"Daryl?"

For a moment, he thought that wishful thinking had led him to imagine the sound of her voice. That exhaustion had finally driven him to hallucinate or that maybe he was still stuck in some nightmare chasing a ghost. But in his dreams her calling out his name was never more than a breath, a barely-there whisper of sound that drove him half mad. This sounded different, alive and present. He held his breath and looked up slowly, glancing at her face through the dark fringe of hair that fell in his eyes, afraid of being disappointed.

But there she was, blue eyes open and blinking at him like they'd never stopped. Swallowing the surprising urge to lay his head on her stomach and cry with relief, he leaned forward hurriedly and reached for her hand, joy and relief ballooning throughout his body and making it impossible for him to feel self-conscious about the gesture. She smiled weakly at him with heavy lidded eyes and gave his hand a gentle squeeze.

"Hi," she said, her voice sounding hoarse from disuse.

"You're awake," he whispered back, feeling stupid for stating the obvious but needing to say it out loud anyway.

Beth looked around the hospital room, wincing in pain when she moved her head too quickly. She frowned at the sight of the IV dripping through the needle taped to the back of her hand and looked back at Daryl with a muddled look on her face. "What happened? Are… are we at Grady?"

Daryl chewed on the inside of his lip for a moment before nodding. "What do you remember?"

She squinted slightly, as if doing so would help her see the past more clearly. "Dawn told Noah he had to stay in my place. And I was really angry. I…I think I stabbed her?"

"She shot you," Daryl said, trying to break the news gently. Just those three words were enough to set his blood boiling, the anger filling him with fire and hatred. He had to remind himself that the bitch was dead. She was dead and Beth was not. "We all thought you were dead but the doctor came over and found a pulse, rushed you into a room, and fixed you up. The bullet grazed the side of your head, but when you fell you hit the back of your head, too. You lost a lot of blood, and you've been out for almost two days."

At the mention of the doctor Beth frowned, her mouth twisting in obvious contempt. She slowly lifted her free hand to her head and felt around for the rectangular, white bandage that covered a portion of her head above her ear, tracing its edges with her fingertips. "Where's Dawn?"

"Dead," Daryl replied, looking down at their joined hands on the thin blanket. "I shot her."

When he looked back at her he saw a strange mixture of sadness and relief fighting for control of her features. Briefly he wondered if she would be disappointed in him for killing her or, God forbid, actually sad that the cop was dead. "I'm sorry you had to do that," she said finally, squeezing his hand again, and he realized that her sadness was for him, not for Dawn.

Daryl shook his head. "I'm not."

And he wasn't. Of all the lives he had taken since every day had become an ongoing battle for survival, he regretted this one not at all.

"Oh my god."

Daryl turned his head to the doorway where Maggie stood with a hand splayed across her chest, her eyes wide with wonder at the sight of her little sister awake and talking. For a moment she appeared to be frozen in place, overcome with surprise and disbelief. Daryl subtly let go of Beth's hand, and then Maggie was running across the room to Beth's side, leaning over her and placing trembling hands gingerly on both cheeks. She was smiling and laughing as tears of relief spilled over her cheeks.

"Oh my god Beth, thank God! Thank God you're alright."

Beth hesitantly lifted the hand he had just let go of to her sister's face, touching her cheek as if she wasn't entirely sure she was real. With a jolt Daryl realized this was the first time that Beth had seen her sister since the prison. Tears filled her eyes too once she'd convinced herself Maggie wasn't going to vanish, and he watched her throw an arm around her neck and pull her down for an embrace.

Suddenly the room was crowded as the group from the hall came in. Glenn, Rick, Carl, Michonne, Tyreese, Abraham, and Tara all moved into the small space, watching the reunited sisters with genuine smiles on their faces. Rick gave Daryl a knowing smile, but it didn't bother him. He didn't think anything would ever bother him again, because Beth was awake.

She'd come back to him.