It was a beautiful fall day; the sun a ball of butter in the turquoise sky that stretched overhead, vast and limitless. Daryl tried to enjoy it, taking deep breaths of the crisp, clear air while beside him Beth told him stories from her day. He didn't hear much of what she said, focused as he was on not dissolving into a puddle of guilt. Because every day brought him closer to leaving with Aaron and he still hadn't found the words to tell Beth he was doing so.

They sat together on the front porch of the vacant little house they'd found, having agreed to meet there after both classes at the school had let out for the day. Despite the unfortunate events that transpired inside of it the first time they'd visited the house had charmed Beth, wrapping her in a spell that Daryl didn't understand but loved to see. She continued to talk about it and drag him to it, simply being near it putting a smile on her face and a dreamy look in her eye. They met there a couple of times a day, using the space as an escape from the suggestive smiles and teasing remarks their family members had yet to tire of.

When they'd followed Maggie inside that night, the majority of their family was there, lounging about the kitchen area and living room. The hum of their quiet conversations came to a halt as he and Beth stood in the entryway side by side. Neither of them said anything but Daryl could feel their eyes focusing in on their joined hands, their tangled fingers succeeding in sharing the news. Which, if the soft, knowing smiles and "Fucking finally!" muttered by Abraham from the kitchen were any indication, was hardly news at all. Beth chuckled at their approval, a self-conscious flush spreading over her cheeks as a couple of people applauded and Rosita whistled. In the moment Daryl couldn't find it in him to be embarrassed, however, a surprising feat for someone as normally self-conscious and touchy as himself. Right then, with her hand in his and his family's support he had everything he'd ever wanted.

Their news had been nothing, however, compared to Maggie and Glenn's dinnertime announcement the following day.

Glenn, Tara, and Eugene were to leave the next morning with Nicholas and Aidan for a supply run to a tech warehouse about thirty miles south that would likely take the entire day. Eugene and Deanna had apparently spoken about finding replacement parts for a dysfunctional solar panel whose absence was causing occasional power outages in several homes. In lieu of this, their first significant parting since joining Alexandria, Maggie called everyone together for a family dinner.

Daryl had come straight over from Aaron's, having spent the bulk of his day working on the bike. His hands were black with grease and dirt, the sharp, oily smell clinging to his clothes and hair. He'd made a beeline for the dining room and whatever delicious smells wafted towards the front door, and then proceeded to grumble audibly when Carol met him halfway and sent him upstairs to wash up. It was only dinner after all. Who cared if he was dirty?

But walking into the dining room minutes later, his hands pink and freshly scrubbed, Daryl was mildly impressed.

Maggie had managed to squeeze fourteen chairs around a table meant to seat ten. She had draped a spotless white cloth over the tabletop and set it with matching blue and rust colored plates. The overhead lighting had been dimmed—presumably for ambiance—and two flickering candles placed near the center of the table cast glimmers of yellow light onto the silver bowl of the spoons and sharp fork tines bedded neatly on the napkins beside each plate. A pot of seasoned rabbit stew sat in the middle of the table on a pot holder shaped like an apple, tendrils of pungent, silver steam rising up over the table. One whiff set Daryl's stomach to rumbling and he took a seat between Beth and Tyreese, eager to dig in.

There was a cacophony of clanking dishes and indistinguishable chatter as everyone's bowls were filled and the strange winter-greens salad that Daryl thought resembled tossed lawn clippings and yard waste was dutifully portioned out onto each plate. Once everyone had been served Maggie cleared her throat.

"Before we start, I just wanted to say a few words," she said as a pleasant hush fell over the table. "First off, I want to thank you all for coming tonight, for adjusting your schedules so that we could be here together. It seems strange to think that not eating together like this has become our new normal, but I suppose that's a normal we should all be grateful for."

Around the table people nodded and smiled in agreement. Alexandria and its leader's demands certainly kept them busy. Truthfully Daryl hadn't thought about it much, too wrapped up in his own worries and personal drama to notice that they hadn't been together as a group in several days.

Across from him Maggie exchanged a look with Glenn who merely smiled and reached over to grasp her hand. A mischievous glint lingered in both pairs of eyes. "I called you all here, not just because Glenn and Tara and Eugene are going on a run tomorrow, but because Glenn and I have some news."

Daryl heard Beth's sharp intake of breath beside him. He glanced over at her worried something was wrong but she paid him no mind, her slightly widened eyes staring fixedly across the table at her sister.

Glenn said, "A while back we had a conversation about the future, about what we both wanted our lives to be. And then, after we came here and saw what the potential this place has and how it could really make those things we talked about a reality... I don't know. It just felt to us like our decision made sense. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it was intentional. And while we didn't expect it to happen as quickly as it did, we're really excited to be able to share this with all of you."

With a nervous smile Maggie took in a deep breath and said, "We're pregnant."

A different kind of quiet fell over the table as the surprising news sunk in, thick and humid like the air before a summer storm. It was clear no one knew what the appropriate response was, even if Glenn had just said that this was something they wanted. But Glenn could barely contain the proud smile twitching at the corners of his mouth and Maggie looked around the table, eyes wide and expectant, and her face alight with hope that, despite everything this could mean, they would be happy for her.

The sound of a chair scraping across the floorboards broke the silence and beside him Beth stood, untangling herself from the tablecloth and letting her discarded napkin float to the floor. She made her way around the table before throwing her arms around her sister, her silent, powerful congratulations bringing tears to Maggie's eyes and relieving the tense spell that had momentarily suffocated the group.

There was a flurry of hugs and handshakes, plates rattling against the table top as more chairs were pushed back and people stood to offer their congratulations to the would-be parents. Daryl reached across the table and slapped Glenn on the shoulder but remained seated, watching Rick and Carol at the head of the table carefully. Their histories regarding pregnant women and children in this new world were hardly positive. But if either had any opinions about the news they kept quiet, merely exchanging an unreadable look with one another.

A moment later Rick stood and raised his water glass and others followed suit. "To Glenn and Maggie," he said with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes.

"To Glenn and Maggie," everyone echoed.

The good news was overwhelming, the comfort and unbridled happiness of the group practically tangible. Beth had tears in her eyes, so thrilled was she. And even though he knew better, Daryl wanted desperately to believe that it was the lasting sort, a before kind of happiness that they wouldn't have to fear being ripped away. Because of this he was loathe to spoil the mood with his news, to bring even an iota of darkness back into their moment of bliss.

Not to mention Beth had been making plans of her own. She hadn't said a word to him about it, but he could see them, whatever they were, dancing behind her eyes when she looked at him, or when she gazed up at the house they now spent their free time together at. Normally it wouldn't have bothered him; her hope and ability to find delight in the strain of their everyday life was one of his favorite things about her. But the knowledge that his news would in completely alter her plans made him feel worse than terrible.

If Beth sensed his distress or found his increased brooding silence this particularly gorgeous afternoon alarming she said nothing about it. She grabbed his hand instead and sidled up to him, gazing up at the sagging porch roof with a far off look in her eye. It felt a little strange to be with her in the middle of the day, touching, without the cover of darkness for anyone to walk by and see. But it was also liberating, and Daryl couldn't help but think—as he had been doing since the moment she'd admitted she'd heard him when she was unconscious at the hospital—that his world made some kind of sense again. And if it weren't for the voice in his head pestering him to tell her that he'd assumed the role of Alexandria's second recruiter, that their happy reunion did in fact have a time limit, he would have felt something akin to happiness.

"I like this house," she declared suddenly. Her breath was a barely noticeable puff of steam and Daryl watched it drift up and dissipate before he replied.

"I gathered," he deadpanned. She lightly rolled her eyes, hardly bothered by his not-so-subtle mocking tone.

"It's got character. Hutzpah."

Daryl frowned at her. "Hutzpah?"

"Yeah," she laughed. "I don't know how everyone else can just ignore it. How they can't see what a nice place it really is."

"I see it," he said, his voice low. He felt her eyes on him, staring at him as he stared at the worn wooden step beneath his feet and he battled the heat rising in his cheeks.

"You know, speaking of which… I've been thinking about some things. Things I kind of wanted to talk to you about."

Immediately Daryl tensed, the hope in her soft spoken voice flooding him with guilt. Whatever she was thinking, whatever dreams she'd cooked up were like a balloon, and he was the needle poised—however reluctantly—to pop it. He supposed he should be grateful that the subject had come up organically, considering how he'd been wracking his brain for a natural way to bring it up that wouldn't feel like dropping a bomb. Ready or not, that time had appeared, all on its own.

"Yeah," he mumbled, shuffling his foot against a crack in the step. "I've got some things to tell you too."

Beth's smile was bright and gleaming in the muted afternoon light. "Oh!" She said, giving his arm a squeeze. "Okay then. You first."

He took a deep breath, fiddling with his hands and dreading what was to follow. "Couple days ago Aaron asked me somethin'… offered me a job."

She laughed again. "A job? Can he do that? Deanna assigns members jobs."

"Well, sort of. This one was specific to him."

Her smile dimmed. She said quietly, "But Aaron doesn't work inside the community."

"No," he replied, the instant worry in her voice making him feel breathtakingly small. "No he don't."

Daryl reached deep down inside, trying to find the strength to continue and watching as understanding darkened her eyes.

"I'm going to go with him," he said finally. "I'm going to be Alexandria's other recruiter."

Beth slipped her hands from his arm and wrapped them tightly around her torso, putting space between them on the creaking step. "For how long?" She asked stiffly, her gaze glued to her lap.

"I don't know. Until we need to come back I guess."

"No, I mean how long are you planning on being a recruiter?"

Daryl sighed, picking intently at the loose skin around his thumbnail. "As long as I'm able."

Judging by the look she shot him, this was not the right answer.

"After everything you're gonna leave? Just like that?" He merely looked over at her with a softened scowl. His eyes pleaded with her to understand, but for once Beth wasn't picking up on his nonverbal cues. She clenched her jaw. "When are you leaving?"

"Day after tomorrow."

For a brief second Beth looked as if she'd been punched in the stomach. "Thanks for the heads up," she muttered.

Daryl tried to explain. "He only asked a few days ago, the night you punched Aidan in the face. Between that, and Maggie and Glenn havin' a baby… you were happy. And I-I didn't know how to tell you 'cause I knew it would upset you. I was the reason you were unhappy before. I didn't want to be that again."

"You weren't even gonna talk to me about it first?"

"I didn't know I had to ask your permission," Daryl grumbled at the ground. It seemed pointless and needlessly hurtful to explain that she was the driving force behind his original decision to join Aaron, her absence making his life in this place unbearable. Especially considering how that absence was not something she had wanted in the first place.

"That's not…" Out of the corner of his eye he watched Beth shake her head as if she were warding off a pesky fly. He watched her hands clench over the mounds of her knees, her knuckles turning white with restraint as she took a deep breath to quiet her frustration. "But you talked about working in the motor pool!"

The motor pool was where the majority of Alexandria's working vehicles were housed, as well as where the ones from the outside that weren't working came to be restored or dismantled for parts. It was a small outfit located towards the back of the settlement and run by a man named Ray and his son Adam. They were Daryl's kind of people. A perpetual layer of grease lay embedded in the beds of their fingernails and the smell of metal and oil clung to their clothing at all times. Both were large, brusque, and relatively unfriendly, although their talent with motors and machines was something Daryl found almost artistic.

It was true that he had briefly considered volunteering his mechanical skills there, thinking it wouldn't be so terrible to spend his days bringing new life back to the metal shells that sat neatly lined up alongside Ray's garage and into his backyard. But that was before, when he was still trying to force himself to fit into the mold this place had carved for him.

"They don't need me," Daryl said. "Aaron does."

"He has Eric!"

"He don't want Eric to do it anymore. Not after the last time."

"So you've been nominated to risk your life instead," Beth snapped, the words clipped and biting. "You're the one who gets to go outside, being hunted and starved, putting yourself in harm's way over and over again. And for what? For the possibility that you might find someone only half-crazy to drag back here?"

She obviously felt betrayed by his choice, as he had assumed she would be. Still he felt her sudden and uncharacteristic lack of empathy like a slap in the face and replied in his own clipped, biting tone. "He asked. I said yes."

"Why?" She cried, throwing her pale hands up in the air in exasperation. "Why would you say yes?"

"Because I can't stay here Beth!" Daryl admitted. The words tasted like failure, but he pushed on. "I can't… be here all the time. This place, it ain't the same for me as it is for you. Or any of you, for that matter. I can't just shack up in some fancy-ass house, pretend to work a 9-5, come home to eat dinner with the family. That ain't me. That was never me."

"It doesn't have to be that way if you don't want it to," Beth said. "No one's trying to force you be something that you're not."

He shook his head. "This feels right. It…It's the right thing to do."

"Daryl we finally found someplace that's safe. Someplace we can live. Why are you so ready to turn your back on that?"

"You know as well as I do that ain't true. This place ain't any safer than the farm or the prison or any other place we've pretended was. These people are weak and spoiled and stupid. They have no idea what's really out there or how to protect themselves, and the second what's out there realizes that this entire place will go up in smoke."

"And yet you're willing to bring more people back behind the walls. To protect people that you claim to have already written off."

For a moment Daryl said nothing, merely chewing on his bottom lip. He wasn't explaining himself well to her, and he supposed from an outsider's perspective the desire he had to leave Alexandria conflicted strongly with the job he'd agreed to do. But of everything presented to him this was the only thing that made sense to him. He could protect Beth and his family from afar by bringing back people who knew what they were doing.

"There are still people out there, Beth," he said finally. "You told me that. Good people just like us who don't know this place is here, who can help Rick and Michonne and your sister make this place what you all want it to be."

"Maybe you're right. But those people don't need you. We do. I do."

In the pause that followed Daryl was momentarily struck by how beautiful she looked when she was angry. Her windblown hair hanging loose and wild around her face, the proud lift of her delicate chin, the petal pink stain of her china doll skin. And those blue eyes rekindled with passion and fire, the same fire that drew him to her day after day even when their flames were targeted at him. She was everything that he had never dared hope for, the realest, purest thing he had ever been a part of. Every brave, crazy, beautiful, frustrating part of her was right there within his reach, and it occurred to him in that moment that this decision he had made might be the thing that changed her mind about him and took her away.

"Beth." He spoke her name like an apology. Her body remained stiff but her lips quivered, the tiniest crack in her resolve. She closed her eyes, and when she finally spoke her words carried a lifetime of weariness.

"It's just… I thought that we were finally done with all of this."

"All of what?"

Beth sighed. "Saying goodbye. Being apart."

"I ain't sayin' goodbye."

A technicality and they both knew it. She rolled her eyes half-heartedly and he couldn't blame her.

"I ain't. And I ain't leavin' you, Beth. I'm just… leavin' Alexandria. I'll come back."

When she reopened her eyes the questions lay heavy in the shades of blue. She didn't say a word but Daryl understood. He realized his practiced nonchalance, while meant to help make it easier for her to let him go, was only serving to hurt her instead. What if he wasn't back soon, or ever? What if the recruiting didn't go as smoothly as he promised? What if they didn't find any of those good people they both were trying to believe existed, only bad ones that made it impossible for him to return?

"Maggie warned me that you'd do this," she said calmly. "That you'd leave. She was worried what it would do to me if you left. Truth is she didn't have to. Warn me, that is. I've known since the day we got here that there was a possibility you wouldn't stay." It wasn't an accusation or fuel for her argument, merely a statement of truth. Still, Daryl felt it like a blade to the gut, the knowledge that both Beth and her sister had suspected this about him all along.

"I told her I'd go with you if it came to that," Beth continued. "That I'd leave this place behind and never look back if that's what you wanted."

He was surprised by the depth of her loyalty. It had never occurred to him to ask her if she wanted to come along. It wasn't a terrible idea. After all, Beth was just as good if not better than him at weeding out good people from the bad. Maybe if he spoke to Aaron…

"But now that we're here and this is actually happening… I don't think I can do that," she finished softly, regret and disappointment resting like a heavy hand on her shoulders and making them sag. When she finally met his gaze he could see the spark of anger fizzling in her eyes, and in its place was a sadness that made his stomach clench. It was almost as if she were embarrassed by the fact that she was happy here, ashamed by her willingness to keep trying to make this place a home. "I don't think I want to."

The world fell away as they looked at one another, a distant blur of meaningless shapes and shadows. Daryl felt like he was being torn apart at every seam, pulled in two different directions by the woman he'd chosen and the freedom he'd never wanted to give up.

The tense silence was broken by the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps. He raised his head to find Carl bounding around the corner in a blur of skinny limbs, his head whipping back and forth as he scanned the cul-de-sac, clearly in search of them. Immediately Daryl's stomach began weaving itself into knots of apprehension, knowing whatever had sent the solemn-faced teenager sprinting after them was nothing good. Beth saw him too and stood, putting their conversation on pause as she made her way down the steps.

"You need to come," Carl panted from the road as they approached, the rubber soles of his boots squeaking and scuffing against the pavement as he slowed to a stop at the end of the path.

His voice was dry and brittle sounding, and the knots of worry tightened sharply in Daryl's gut. Beside him Beth whispered, "Who is it?"

"Tara," the boy replied. "Tara and Glenn."