A/N: Minor Trigger Warning: Beth makes a joke about her prior suicide attempt that really is not in good taste.
"What the hell are you doing up there, girlie?"
Beth had felt the stool she was using to reach the top shelf of supplies in the laundry room wobbling, but the startled jerk she gives at the unexpected and loud male voice completes the impending disaster. There's a snap of shattering wood and she gets a split second of fear shooting adrenaline through her thin frame. But the hard impact with the concrete floor that she expects doesn't come.
Instead, she hits a solidly masculine chest, breath knocked out of her from fear and impact. The metal of Merle's prosthetic bites into her skin just a bit, even as he adjusts his grip with his remaining hand to set her carefully on her feet.
"Christ on a cracker, kid, you trying to kill yourself or something?"
The weird part is, Merle sounds concerned, like her dad would, if Hershel caught her doing something risky. Maybe Beth's risk is stupid for their world, a wobbly stool to reach laundry soap versus fighting walkers to find food and supplies for their people, but it's probably one of the reasons everyone just rolls their eyes when she says she's not a kid and wants to do more than babysit Judith and wash people's underdrawers. It was a stupid stunt, not a useful one.
Something spiteful rises up in her, a mean streak she normally reminds herself is ungrateful and should be squashed. She thrusts her bracelet covered wrist out at him. "Nope, tried it once. Didn't take."
The look of complete shock on Merle's face is priceless, even as the shyer part of her is screeching in the back of her mind that she just taunted the most unstable personality in the prison. Worse, this is a man who cut off his hand to escape being trapped in the Georgia sun and dying a slow and painful death. Her little jaunt with the broken mirror glass is nothing compared to what he's done to himself.
The anger she expects doesn't come. Instead, Merle bursts out laughing, a rich, deep sound that echoes in the laundry room. He pats her on the back like she's done something special, like her daddy always does to Glenn and Maggie when they come back from a successful supply run.
"Well, shit, you do have some bite to you. Was starting to wonder if you were just a damn little ghostie floating around here letting people use you for free labor."
Beth juts out her chin, feeling younger than her seventeen years as soon as she does it, but then changes her mind about arguing. It's not like she hasn't had the same thoughts about herself. "Seems like that's all anyone wants to let me do."
"Maybe the problem is that you keep asking permission instead of begging forgiveness. Ain't that your sister's basic idea on how to get through life? Sort the shit out later after she's done what needed doing?"
Huh. She's actually never thought of it quite like that. So many years, she was the good daughter, never giving her parents any grief. She didn't want to be like Shawn and Maggie, who both made Hershel and Annette spend many a late night trying to figure out how to sort their mischief out. It often seemed the only way to stand out was to be the one kid they didn't have to agonize over.
"No one's gonna teach me anything useful that's outside the fences. Not even Daryl."
Beth got lessons on shooting a gun, starting back when Shane taught everyone on the farm and later on the road that long, cold winter because they couldn't risk her not being skilled. Besides, even her father admitted it would be hypocritical to deny her a gun when Carl had one and was four years younger. But she's asked to go on supply runs and to learn to hunt, and the answer's always no, usually along with a backhanded compliment about how good she is with Judith.
Sometimes it's like she's a teenage mother, just without the actual pregnancy. She loves Judy, would do anything for the poor motherless girl, but even on days like today, where Rick let his guilt build up enough that he's taken the baby to spend time with him and Carl for a few hours, she was sent off to the laundry instead of learning anything new. Despite Carl losing his gun privileges for shooting that surrendering boy in the woods after the Governor's attack, Beth's still more restricted than a thirteen-year-old boy.
"Been asking the wrong people to teach you then. You gotta start marching to your own drummer, girl."
"You're seriously offering to teach me?"
Beth knows Merle's done a lot of bad things. She saw Maggie and Glenn after the Woodbury rescue, and Glenn still can't manage to stay in the same room with Merle for long. But Merle has also been working on what Carol calls his 'redemption story' since then, one that started when he and Michonne returned to the prison together with a weird and unwavering friendship born out of Merle's abortive attempt to follow through with Rick's stupid plan to surrender Michonne. Beth just didn't think Merle's personal growth would ever include doing anything to help her.
"It'll stir some shit up if I do, but ain't the first time I've been accused of that. You want to learn, I'll teach you. Ain't nothing Daryl knows that I didn't know first, and I can sure as shit top anything Officer Friendly can come up with."
He's smiling at her, but it's not that toothy grin that Carol and Michonne both call shit-eating. It's something softer, in which she's only seen him direct at Daryl when he thinks his brother isn't looking. There's a different smile for Carol, one that lacks the wistful look of this one, but Merle doesn't hide his smiles from Carol. Beth thinks he's sweet on Carol and wonders if it's mutual, because the older woman blatantly flirts with Merle. Hard to tell for sure, since Carol does that with Daryl, too, always making the younger Dixon blush.
It will stir up a hornet's nest the size of Texas if she accepts, she knows. But she's asked for months and always been turned down. It's just their loss for refusing that she gets to pick out her own mentor, isn't it? All she's got is washing other people's dirty clothes, without any help today because even the Woodbury folks they took in are outside enjoying the sunshine.
"When do we start?"
Merle's troublemaker grin shows up now, but Beth feels it mirroring on her own face, so she finally understands why Carol and Michonne always sound fond when they talk about the expression on Merle. He slings an arm across her shoulders just like he would Daryl and starts directing her toward the door.
"Best time to make your escape, kiddo, is when they expect you to be busy elsewhere. Ain't no one gonna come looking for you now, because they might feel obligated to help you put that scrub board to use."
"They'll see us leaving. Ain't no way they'll open the gate for me."
"Funny you say that. More ways out of this place than the front gate, if you care enough to look. You remember that place where the fence failed last week?"
Beth nods, remembering the maintenance crew had to actually replace the chain link there.
"Bet you can climb like a monkey if you set your mind to it. You got that wiry, lanky look to you like Daryl did as a kid."
Understanding dawns. The new fencing is sturdier than the original in that section, but it doesn't have the barbed wire at the top yet. As much as everyone worries about human attackers after the mess with Woodbury, the initial priority was keeping walkers out, and they don't climb. How Merle will climb with just the one hand, she doesn't know, but he seems confident about the spot as an exit, so she assumes he already tried it at least once.
"Yeah, I can climb. Used to spend half my day up in a big oak tree back home when I didn't have nothing else to do in the summers."
"Meet me there. Gonna go snag my supplies for hunting. You got your little gun, but we need something quieter out there so I don't gotta explain to Daryl why I'm bringing you back covered in walker guts after we summoned a herd shooting squirrel."
"What if we actually kill something?" she asks as they reach the intersection of two hallways where they'll need to split up if she's going to the fence while he goes to the living quarters.
"Well, I guess you'll have something to sweeten up the asking the forgiveness part, right?"
Merle squeezes her shoulder before dropping his arm and strutting off down the hallway in that rolling, confident walk of his. Maybe this wasn't how she expected her day to go, but for the first time since they obtained the relative safety of the prison, she feels like she's going to be doing something other than being the resident maid and babysitter. Her rebellious streak just took a few years longer than Shawn or Maggie's to show up, apparently.
Setting off for the designated meeting spot, Beth can't help but grin. This is going to be fun.
A/N: The Hummingbird series this is part of will consist of one-shot stories with no intention of expanding to longer pieces later. Please see my profile about the premise of the series. Canon Note: Pick your poison on whether or not everything (deaths, etc) was canon, other than obviously Merle didn't get himself mutilated and murdered if he came back with Michonne.