A/N: Sorry it has taken me so long to update. I sort of felt like I needed a mental break from TWD world. But I am back and plan on doing some regular updates with the next few chapters!
I apologize in advance for any errors, I did not have time to edit or reread. I hate posting without looking it over because I am a perfectionist but I am trying to let it go :P
Companion song: "Fire in my Bones" by Fleurie
Disclaimer: I do not own or have any rights to the characters/plot of TWD series. I am just a fan exploring the marvelous, macabre world Robert Kirkman created.
Enjoy lovelies! Leave a review to tell me what you think!
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Chapter 28: Scars
Glass rained down on her and all she could do was cover her face and wait for it to stop. It didn't take long. Beth could tell it was over because instead of glass hitting her, it was freezing cold raindrops.
Beth grabbed her bow and sat up quickly while she saw Daryl doing the same thing out of the corner of her eye. The glass bits stuck in his shaggy hair told her that the window over him had broken too. She carefully stuck her head out of the window into the storm and strained her eyes looking for anyone or anything in the surrounding area. There was nothing that she could see through the thick, pouring rain but the black sky told her that the storm was only just getting started. She could hear the faint growls of walkers over the roaring of the wind outside.
"Let's get in the freezer," Beth said, trying to keep her voice down to avoid attracting the walkers, after she ducked her head back inside.
Daryl nodded in agreement and he started shoving the few things from the floor back into his bag. Beth pushed into the kitchen and checked the back door again. It was still holding up but it was just plain wood. The freezer door was made out of heavy metal and hopefully would stand up to the storm… or the walkers. Lucky followed her reluctantly into the walk-in. She could tell he didn't like the enclosed space. Lucky, similar to Beth, liked the freedom that large, open spaces could provide.
Daryl joined them after another second and closed the door with a quiet thud. It was pitch black inside the freezer and Beth's eyes weren't adjusted to the darkness. However, she could still tell where Daryl was. It was inexplicable; somehow she could just feel his presence in the darkness.
While she was sitting there, letting her heart rate go back to normal, she heard Daryl curse into the silence.
"Shit," he said and then began rummaging in his backpack.
"What's wrong?" Beth whispered.
"Can't find my lighter anywhere," he grumbled.
She reached into her own pack, which she kept meticulously organized, and pulled out a small lantern. It could squish almost flat because it had tiny LED blubs, and it a solar charger. Beth could still remember the say she found it. It was in a tent out in the woods while she was hunting, next to a stuffed animal and a child's decomposing skeleton. There was another, larger skeleton in the tent next to the kid but this one had a bullet hole through its skull. She figured the kid had died and then the dad had killed himself after he felt like he had nothing left to live for. She hoped the kid had died peacefully but she could not bring herself to investigate further. Beth always felt like scum when she looted from people but she figured they didn't need the lantern anymore and it had become a lifesaving source of light for her since then. Luckily she had left the solar panels out on the roof to charge before they went on this disastrous mission in the rain.
She turned it on now, and it was so bright in the bleak freezer that Daryl shielded his eyes.
He stared at the lantern with amazement.
"Nice find," he grunted under his breath by way of thanks. When Daryl turned around to check on Lucky she saw the dark stain spreading along the back shoulder of his light gray shirt.
"Daryl, you're bleeding," she kept the little lantern in her hand as she stepped over their bags to go to him.
Beth couldn't even see how big the cut was so she began peeling off his shirt before he'd even responded. Daryl nearly jumped out of his skin when she lifted the fabric, pushing away her hands and spinning around so his back was now against the wall.
"What do you think you're doing, girl?" he half growled and half shouted. But she'd never seen him look scared until this moment. In the few short months she had known him—or could remember knowing him—she had seen him kill hundreds of walkers and run towards trouble but right now he looked like a cornered animal.
She backed off a little, confused about why he was so upset all of a sudden, but she still insisted, "I can't see the cut with your shirt on Daryl."
"It doesn't even hurt, can't be that bad," he protested.
"I think you might need stitches. It's a lot of blood."
He tried to look at his own back but just ended up looking like a dog trying to catch their tail. After failing to inspect his own wound, Daryl stared into her clear blue eyes. Beth could tell that he was searching for something in her but she had no idea what it was. He'd looked at her like this before, like he was trying to read her mind. She hated these looks because his own dark eyes felt like they were piercing her soul and she tried not to squirm under his scrutiny. After a minute, or five, it was hard to tell, he sighed in defeat. His shoulders sagged and he turned around to face the wall again.
Daryl reached his hand up, grabbed the collar of his shirt behind his neck and pulled it up and over his head in one fluid movement.
For one tiny moment, Beth's full attention was on the dark tattoo on his right shoulder blade. But before his gray shirt even hit the floor, she saw why he had jumped away from her. The scars were not terribly noticeable in the dim light because they were white but so was his skin. However, once she saw them she knew she could never un-see them. His back was covered in them. Most of them were stretched out which told her he'd grown into them… meaning he must have gotten them when he was still a little kid.
Beth thought of her own scars. The scar on her neck from the gun shot or ones she got from fighting all made her feel strong, they were proof that she was a survivor. But the deep ones on her wrist, the one that were clearly self-inflicted, were different. Those scars made her feel weak and vulnerable.
That must be how Daryl feels, she realized. And she guessed that he probably hated feeling weak and vulnerable just as much as she did.
So she chose not to say anything about them. She stifled any apologies or comforts she wanted to say and instead she went straight for the large cut on his left shoulder. It was deep and bleeding heavily but luckily the edges were neat and even.
"I was right," she said with a steady voice. "You need stitches."
He didn't respond as Beth reached into her bag to get her first aid kit.
"What did you cut it on?" she asked, trying desperately to think of normal questions so she didn't blurt out something stupid like 'Who did that to you?'
"Slipped from the damn rain and clipped the edge of the counter," his response was low and hesitant but his shoulders relaxed and she suspected he was relieved that she was ignoring the scars of abuse.
Beth grabbed the needle and thread out of her bag and said lightly, "Sorry, all I've got left is red."
"Ain't plannin' on being in any beauty contests," Daryl shrugged as he glanced down at her fingers threading the needle.
The blonde took a deep breath to steady her hands before placing them carefully on Daryl's back. His skin was cold from the rain. It was amazingly smooth in the spaces between the scars and Beth could feel the hard muscles underneath the surface. She had no idea why her hands were shaking, it wasn't like she was scared, but suddenly she felt nervous. It was obvious what he had been looking for earlier—he had been looking to see if he could trust her. The weight of his trust was making her hands shake she realized. She wouldn't break that trust.
"This is going to hurt," she said. Daryl tensed again and she realized how stupid her comment was. He had obviously felt much more painful things in his life.
He let out a small breath of air as the needle bit into his skin. Beth didn't bother to make the stitches exact or pretty, she focused instead on finishing quickly and trying to be as gentle as possible.
When she finished she grabbed his shirt from the floor, which was already wet from the rain that had plummeted in through the broken window, and used it to gently clean off the blood all over his back.
Beth had the unexplainable urge to press her lips to a particularly terrible scar that ran directly across his spine, she could almost see the belt buckle impaled in his back. But she stifled the impulse to run her fingers gently over the scars and stepped away from him again.
"All done," Beth annunciated the words as she sat down next to Lucky. Her hands were still itching to soothe his pain so she grabbed her quiver of arrows and looked them over unnecessarily just so she had something to occupy her hands.
Daryl didn't say anything but he did grab a button up flannel out of his bag and shrugged it on.
They sat for an hour or more without saying a word. Beth pulled another can of food out of her bag and the pair of them passed it back and forth. Once there was a third of the can left Beth poured it out in a corner of the floor and Lucky inhaled it. Then they just listened to the storm raging outside.
"How long do you think it will go on?" Beth asked while she hugged her knees tightly into her chest.
"Dunno. Last year about this time it rained for five days straight," Daryl said. He looked over at her helplessly and it was clear that he did not want to be stuck in this walk in freezer for five days.
She guessed that it was nighttime already though it was hard to tell since they couldn't see anything from outside. Beth had pulled on the extra shirt she had in her bag but the rest of her clothes, including her jacket and small blanket, was still soaking wet from their run from the cabin earlier. She was freezing but she tried not to let her teeth chatter. Lucky was napping on her feet, with the dual purpose of keeping her feet warm and also making sure that she could not leave without waking him up.
"I'd give ya my jacket but I left it out there when that damn tree broke through the window," he jerked his head to motion out towards the main part of the restaurant.
She only smiled in appreciation, knowing that Daryl wasn't really trying to make conversation with her. Beth guessed that the man could go weeks without saying a word if he wanted to. Normally, she would have been perfectly content to sit in silence but today she was burning with questions. Only she didn't want to annoy her companion. After another hour with only the storm and Lucky's small snores, Daryl finally broke.
"I can practically hear your brain humming. Why don't ya just spit it out?" Even though his words were rude she could hear from his voice that he was smiling.
"I… uh… I was wondering…" she was suddenly tongue tied. So she decided to ask a different question. "What did you do before all of this?"
She thought it would be a safe question. She heard a ton of people in Alexandria talking about their old lives all the time. But Daryl's reaction clearly told her she had been wrong. Beth thought seriously about taking the question back because he was looking so stern but then Daryl laughed a little.
"What's so funny?" she asked, feeling like she was being left out of an inside joke.
"That used to be a hot topic around the prison, but I didn't do anything. I was just a waste of space," he said this but didn't seem too sad about it.
"You make yourself pretty useful around Alexandria now, huh?"
He shrugged and she knew this was his way of accepting a compliment.
Beth was still shivering despite being tucked into a tiny ball so she moved to lie down next to Lucky for warmth. She still hadn't asked him the question she wanted to ask him but judging by the continuous pounding of the rain outside she would have more time tomorrow.
"Do you want to take shifts or do you think we can both get some sleep?" she asked him even though her eyes were already feeling heavy.
The door was heavy and locked so walkers definitely couldn't get in. People could, of course, but she doubted that anyone was out in this storm without getting blown away.
"Think we'll be okay. Our tracks will be destroyed by now," Daryl said as he shuffled into a more comfortable position using his bag as a pillow.
Beth checked her knife and weapons were in reaching distance and then clicked off the lantern. The floor was getting colder by the minute but Beth ignored it and just tried to quiet her mind to sleep. She couldn't stop thinking about Daryl's back, wondering if it hurt even now like her scars sometimes did, wondering how long those terrible marks took to heal, wondering what kind of monster would have done that to a child. It would have been funny trying to picture a child-version of Daryl if the image wasn't marred by what she knew little Daryl had to go through. And based on what he was like now, she guessed he had to go through it all on his own. Beth could never tell Daryl what she was thinking; she could only imagine his fury and disgust at her sadness for him.
"Daryl…" she whispered, not wanting to wake him up if he had already managed to fall asleep.
"Yeah?" he grumbled back warily.
"Your… tattoos. What are they?" Beth asked. "Are they angels or demons?"
He was quiet for a long time before saying, "They're both." Then she heard him mutter under his breath, "Everyone is both."
The blonde nodded, even though it was pitch black and there was no way he would see her.
They lapsed into silence again but after a few minutes she heard his gruff voice coming out of the darkness, "Beth…"
She mumbled a small "Yeah?" in between chattering teeth.
"Thanks," Daryl said simply.
Beth wasn't sure what exactly he was thanking her for, but she had a feeling it was for ignoring his scars.
"Anytime," she said back, loudly and clearly. And she hoped he understood that she meant he talk to her about it anytime he was ready.
The pair was quiet and Daryl's breathing was even and steady. She tried to match her breaths to his but she couldn't because she was shivering too much. Beth lost track of how long she laid there trying to drift off but she heard a growl at one point and thought for a second that it was a walker outside the door until she heard Daryl shuffling. He grunted as he stood up and then plopped down next to her.
"Ya need to eat more, girl. Nothing but skin and bones and yer gonna freeze to death," he scolded. She knew he was kidding, she was more muscle than anything else but she was still tiny even with the lean muscle.
"What are you—" she was cut off when he grabbed her hip and pulled her into his body.
"Survival 101. Body heat," he quipped.
She had never really been this close to someone that wasn't trying to attack her. But her heart was still racing just like she was in a fight but for once she didn't have the urge to fling the other person away from her. Daryl was warm and she could already feel his warmth seeping into her own bones even though they were just laying side by side—hips and arms touching.
She looked over at him; her eyes had adjusted slightly so she could just make out the outline of his face. The hunter's eyes were squeezed tightly shut almost as if he was in pain. Somehow, he still knew that she was looking at him.
"Just go to sleep Beth," he commanded through gritted teeth without opening his eyes.
Beth smiled a little, lying between Lucky and Daryl she had warmed up enough that the long day finally caught up with her and she drifted off to sleep.
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A/N:
Chapter entirely from Beth's perspective this time! I have read the reveal of Daryl's scars in a LOT of different stories but I can't remember ever reading it from Beth's mind so I wanted to try it from a new angle. And no, we will not re-read this scene again from Daryl's perspective (I get bored when people write the scenes twice from different perspectives, sorry!) so it is up to you to guess what our favorite hunter was thinking. ;)
I had a really hard time with this chapter so PLEASE REVIEW to let me know what you thought of it from Beth's perspective.
Next chapter: we will be introduced to some familiar, new characters from the show… **dun dun dun**
