To my dear Guest reviewer: I have no intentions of fucking killing off Beth! I promise you that! I have a very important, very cute ship that absolutely HAS to be made reality that I simply cannot do unless I keep her alive. And no, it has nothing to do with Daryl...Still doing the whole Grady storyline to show Rick's devolution again, but try to remember, Ani worked with the APD before the world went to shit.

Gah! So close, and so many views! Thank you to my viewers and hopefully I'll get some more reviews. I really hoped y'all like the flashback with Ani, because I was kinda torn on whether or not I wanted to do it, but I think it meshed well with the story...

Early the next morning, Daryl took Beth out to teach her how to track. While teaching wasn't his forte, Beth proved to be an excellent student, even if the trail was obvious. He'd shown her how to properly hold the bow, too. Currently, she had the sight at eye level, bolt loaded, concentrating on the trail he'd pointed out for her to follow while leading him to it's end.

"Are we close?" she asked him.

"Almost done," he answered.

"How do you know?"

"The signs are all there. You just gotta know how to read 'em."

"What are we tracking?" she asked after lowering the bow.

"You tell me," he told her. "You're the one that wanted to learn."

She looked around, "Well, somethin' came through here." She moved over to where an obvious trail was mucked through the leaves, "The trail's all zig-zaggy. It's a walker!"

"Maybe it's a drunk," Daryl mused.

Beth smiled proudly to herself as she raised the crossbow back up and continued on, "I'm getting good at this. Pretty soon I won't need you at all."

"Yeah, keep on trackin'," he told her, gesturing down the trail.

The trail eventually lead out into a small clearing in the trees. It was only a few feet wide, but sitting in the middle was a walker with its back to them. Clearly eating something, it didn't even notice their presence as they came up behind it.

"It's got a gun," Beth said quietly to Daryl, who just gestured at her to take the shot.

Daryl stood back and let Beth take the shot herself. Beth slowly moved towards the walker, mindfully placing her feet down to make the least amount of noise. Daryl couldn't help but be a little impressed by how quickly she picked that up. Ania had told him that she always loved dancing as a kid, which was how she had managed to get so light on her feet. He wondered if Beth had done some dancing too, which would explain why she was so good so fast versus him just being heavy footed for the longest time. He'd taken a couple months to learn how to be that quiet, longer still to be completely silent. He was lost in thought when he heard the click and Beth's cry of pain. Watching her go down, he quickly sprang into motion, running to her side as she did her best to shoot the walker that was now looming towards her.

The bolt she fired would probably killed it if it were alive, but she'd hit too far to the left in the jaw to hit the brain stem. Daryl grabbed the bow from her as he passed her, quickly bashing the walker upside the head with the butt of it before sliding to his knees at her ankle. It was a common trap, thankfully meant for wolves and bobcats more than bears. While it didn't puncture her ankle, it did do quite a number on the joint as far as spraining it went. As Beth rolled her ankle, Daryl checked it himself as best he could with the boot still on.

"Can you move it?"

"Yeah," she answered.

"Come on," he said as he helped her up.

He kept his arm around her waist and hers around his neck as he helped her walk along. Those traps might not be deadly themselves, but he hated people who used them. It was no better than what Rick had done to Merle way back when; leaving the animal open and exposed with no way to eat or drink or defend itself if a larger predator came around. His snares usually involved a killing blow; a stick sharp enough to puncture the animal used to ensure the least amount of struggle or pain for the animal. That was one thing he and Ania had agreed on whole heartedly. Animals were necessary for human survival, but that didn't mean they needed to suffer for it to happen. And some idiot had left that trap there at the end of the world and almost gotten Beth killed. Jackasses, the lot of 'em, he thought to himself as he continued thinking about what kind of 'hunter' used a live trap like that.

They'd been walking for about twenty minutes when the trees started thinning and then became too straight to be anything but a maintained plot of land. Heading through them, they came out of the woods onto hallowed ground. The cemetery stretched pretty far, the large funeral home standing in the distance a sight for sore eyes for both Daryl and Beth. They began hobbling towards it but only made it a few steps into the cemetery before Beth's ankle gave out again.

"Can we...can we hold up a sec?" she asked, bending down to rub it.

"You alright?" he asked softly.

"I just need to sit down," she said as she gingerly put weight on her ankle while Daryl moved away.

"Alright, hold up," he said, looking at the funeral home in the distance before putting his crossbow on across his chest. Bending down in front Beth, he held his arms at the side and told her, "Hop on."

"You serious?"

"Yeah, this is a serious piggy back. Jump up."

"Won't Ani be angry?"

"Does everyone think she's got a stick up her ass or somethin'? I'm just helpin' you get to the funeral home," he gruffed a little heatedly.

"No, sorry, just, well, I wouldn't want my man givin' other girls piggy backs," Beth said as she hopped onto his back.

"Yeah, well, Ania ain't like other girls. She knows what's hers is hers. Man, you're heavier than you look," he told her as he began walking, thinking how she was like Ania in that respect; they both had tiny bodies that looked light as feathers but were actually pretty solid.

"Maybe there are people in there," she suggested.

"Yeah, if there are, I'll handle 'em," he told her.

"There are still good people, Daryl," Beth chastised, mimicking Ani's dead-pan voice.

"I don't think the good ones survive," he said honestly.

"Ani did. You did. Before all this. You survived, right?"

"Wouldn't call that survivin'," he mumbled as she slid off his back, standing to look at a headstone.

Beloved Father, it read, Daryl at once understanding why the girl had stopped. He looked behind him, catching sight of some wildflowers growing by a walkway marker. Grabbing them from the bottom, Daryl pulled the flowers completely out of the ground, brushing the dirt off the roots before placing it on top of the marker. As he stepped back, Beth wrapped her hand around his for comfort as well as a show of support. Pulling on her hand before dropping it, he turned to let her jump back on his back, he took them all the way to funeral home.

He helped her to stand leaning against a post on the porch before walking up to the door and slamming it open. Daryl pounded on the door frame before whistling loudly, telling Beth to give it a minute before they went in. When nothing came out, Daryl slowly walked into the house, Beth trailing behind him and silently shutting the door. She commented about how clean it was, which was something that was greatly bothering Daryl. On a hunting trip with Ania once, they'd found a similarly clean place and ended up having to kill the people who lived there who simply refused the fact that they couldn't come back to the prison, Ania muttering 'forty eight' under her breath.

"Yeah," he told her. "Someone's been tendin' to it. Might still be around."

Moving silently and cautiously, Daryl moved over to where there was an open casket, a man lying inside. He looked like he was still a fresh corpse, so Daryl ran his fingers down the face, leaving streaks in what he now knew was makeup on the cheek of the man. Scrunching up his nose, he wiped his hand on his pants before walking further into the funeral home and down a flight of stairs. Looking at the decomposing body on the morgue's table, Daryl cleared his throat before turning around and putting his bow down. He really wasn't comfortable with dead human bodies anymore, and the fact that there were two just lying around had him just as much on edge as the place being clean and the one upstairs having makeup on did.

"Let's get that ankle wrapped," he said as he began looking through the cupboards in the morgue for bandages. He noticed Beth staring at the dead body as he used his teeth to tear the packaging of the gauze open, commenting, "Looks like somebody ran out of dolls to dress up."

Beth looked at him crossly, telling him, "It's beautiful. Whoever did this cared. They wanted these people to get a funeral. They remembered these things were people," she paused as Daryl looked down, thinking about how innocent the teen saw the world, "before all of this. They didn't let it change them in the end. Don't you think that's beautiful?"

He could tell that she was looking for a positive answer from him, but Daryl honestly couldn't give her one when he found the entire thing to be pointless, a waste of time, and, quite frankly, disturbing. "Come on," he told her before kneeling down, taking her boot and sock off and wrapping her foot. He let her put her own shoes and socks back on before they left the room. Finding a kitchen, they quickly began pouring through the cupboards, Beth coming up empty.

Turning to Daryl, she asked hopefully, "Did you find anything?"

He was still opening cupboards when she asked, opening the next to find a smorgasbord of non-perishable goods she whoa'd at, "Peanut butter and jelly, diet soda and pig's feet. That's a white trash brunch right there. Ania'd be cussin' up a storm about the pig's feet, though."

"It all looks good to me," Beth said as she pulled a couple cans outs of the cupboard.

"No, hold up," Daryl said, backing off himself. "Ain't a speck of dust on this."

"So?" Beth asked.

"That means somebody just put it here," he said, scrutinizing the food. "This is someone's stash. Maybe they're still alive." He paused for a moment, considering their options, before telling Beth, "Alright, we'll take some of it and we'll leave the rest, alright?"

"I knew it."

"Knew what?"

"It's like I said, there're still good people," she told him, giving him a meaningful look. "Ani knew it, that's why she tried to bring people back to the prison." Rather than answer, Daryl just opened a jar of jelly and dug his fingers in, bringing a chunk of jelly up to his mouth and slobbering it down with a grunt. "Gross," Beth commented while turning away.

"Oi, those pig's feet," Daryl told her while pointing to the item in question. "They're mine."

After eating their fill for the first time in days, Daryl got busy setting up some snares while he told Beth to sit and rest her ankle. She found an old piano and started playing while singing, although the piano was slightly out of tune. She didn't hear Daryl walk in, nor notice as he leaned against the wall listening to her. He'd bitched about her singing, but it was just because he was jealous of how carefree the girl could be. Ania used to sing to him all the time; she absolutely loved to sing. But rarely did she sing in front of the group, especially after it'd grown with the addition of Woodbury. Whenever it was just them, she'd sing any time he asked, almost any song he requested. When it was the two of them and Merle, Sophia and Carl, she'd sing a couple songs before ending with Metallica's version of Whiskey in the Jar. He couldn't help the sad smile that formed on his face thinking about how his brother had teased her that women couldn't sing Metallica and she'd thrown it right back in his face, wowing them all with it. She just wasn't like Beth; unless she was drunk or doing karaoke, she hadn't sung on stage since taking choir in school and getting shit on by everyone including the teacher for her voice, not because it was bad, but because she couldn't read the music and so learned how to sing the song in the way she thought sounded best, which generally included parts of all three vocal groups. In a way, Ania's shortcomings when she had such an amazing voice was why Beth singing irritated him as much as it had yesterday when they were drinking.

Clearing his throat, he startled Beth into silence as he took off his crossbow and entered the viewing room, "The place is nailed up tight. The only way in is through the front door," he said before putting his bow down and jumping up into the open but empty coffin the room held.

"What are you doing?" Beth asked quietly.

"This is the comfiest bed 'sides Ania I've had in years," he told her.

"You mean besides the ones you shared with Ania," she corrected.

"No, I mean sleepin' on Ania is still more comfy than this."

"You two are so weird."

"Maybe, but it worked."

"It works," she corrected again. "She's alive, Daryl."

"Maybe," he complied before laying back and getting comfortable. "Why don't you go ahead? Play some more. Keep singin'."

"I thought my singin' annoyed you."

"Well, there ain't no jukebox, so you might as well," he said. "'Sides, it's not your singin' that annoys me. Ania loves to sing, she just can't in front of people without a little liquid courage, unless it's old people. She never could say no to the old ones."

"She sang to us a few times," Beth mused.

"Yeah, when it was just the group of us from Atlanta and the farm. When Woodbury came along, how many times she sing to y'all after that?"

Instead of answering, Beth turned around and started playing and singing again. Daryl simply lay there listening to her play song after song until it got dark and she fell silent. Making a bed for herself out of some cushions she found lying around the room, Beth felt like she was with her big brother Shawn for the first time in a long time. Daryl helped her feel safe and confident, just like Shawn had done, and it made it easy for her to fall asleep.

For the most part, Daryl couldn't sleep, catnapping his way through the night and vividly dreaming of Ania every time his eyes closed, only to startle awake to visions of her torn apart or tearing him apart. He would look over at Beth to make sure she was safe each time before heading outside. One good thing about that bag from the golf course, it'd had a few packs of cigarettes in it which allowed him to calm his fraying nerves. Beth didn't even realize how much their drunken escapade had affected Daryl, making him realize that he really hadn't looked for Ania. He'd written everyone off for dead the minute they got separated. Now, all that was left was guilt, and he couldn't help but pray she really was out there and safe.

When they woke up in the morning, Daryl mentioned getting some breakfast, remembering all the food still upstairs. There was even soda, even if it was just diet cola. Beth tried to make her way to the kitchen, but Daryl was impatient due to the growling in his stomach and the need to take a piss. She tried to tell him she was going as fast as she could, and really, she was, but Daryl wasn't have any of it. Even Ania moved faster with a bullet to the leg, not that he'd let her move too much on her own after that anyway.

"Forget that," he said as he bent down and scooped the teen up, realizing it was fun to tease a little-sister type person; that must be why Merle was always up Ania's ass. He carried her all the way to the table. "Alright, there you go. Whew, let's eat." No sooner had he sat down, though, did the cans outside start to clatter, causing both of them to jump up. "Stay," he told her as he grabbed his bow. Quickly heading out into the corridor, he checked to see if there was anything in the house before opening the door. There was nothing there except a one-eyed white dog. "It's just a damn dog," he yelled back at Beth before kneeling and trying to get it to come to him. "Hi," he said quietly, slowly reaching out to touch it. "C'mere boy." No sooner had he gotten a finger on the dog did it yelp and run away.

Daryl sighed and stood up, slowly closing the door when Beth startled him by talking, "He wouldn't come in?"

"I told you to stay back," he chastised her.

"Yeah, but Daryl, you said there was a dog," she told him as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

He couldn't help but offer her a comforting hand on the shoulder and say, "Maybe he'll come back around. Come on."

Daryl helped her back to the kitchen, once again picking her up and carrying her to the kitchen. They shared a meal together as the sun began setting, lighting a couple candles to see. The dog came back twice more during that time, running as soon as Daryl got close enough to touch it the first time, and only letting Beth touch it's ear lightly before taking off. Beth pulled out some paper and a pen and started writing, prompting Daryl to ask her what she was doing.

"I'm gonna write them a thank you note," she said simply.

"Why?" he asked as he ate from his tin.

"For when they come back," she said. "If they come back," she ammended after a pause. "Even if they're not coming back, I still want to say thanks."

"Maybe you don't have to leave that," Daryl told her after a moment of deliberation. "Maybe we should stick around here for a while. They come back, we'll just make it work. They may be nuts, but maybe they'll be alright."

"So you do think there are still good people around," Beth teased. Daryl just shrugged one shoulder before Beth chuckled and asked, "What changed your mind?"

Daryl thought about it for a moment before looking at Beth. It was her, her and Ania. Somehow, these two tiny women had survived the end of the world and still saw the best in others. Still put up with an asshole like him. Looking back to his food before looking at him, he couldn't help but compare how Beth wasn't letting him get away with his bullshit with how Ania did the same thing with Merle. She was always building him up, too, or calling him out. Honestly, he could only really see a difference in between how the two acted as siblings towards the brothers was the fact that Ania would physically reprimand Merle whereas Beth barely managed to cuss him out.

"You know," he said, not really wanting to tell her that he'd been comparing her to Ania, even if it was just how sisterly they acted.

"What?" she laughed.

"I dunno," he mumbled, embarrassed by how she was acting because he knew she knew he was thinking about Ania at the very least.

"Don't...'mmminnooo'," she mumbled with an eye roll and a smile. "What changed your mind? You'd tell Ani, right? You can tell me, I won't laugh."

He gave Beth a hard look before looking away, taking a bite of food before mumbling, "You and Ania. You always see the good in everythin'. Kinda hard not to think there might be good left when you're constantly rammin' it down my throat like Ania does Merle."

"Are you sayin' I got a new big brother?" Beth laughed.

"Said you wouldn't laugh," Daryl practically pouted, going back to his food.

"I was just thinkin' yesterday how you reminded me of my big brother," Beth told him. "He was always-"

Her words were cut off by the sound of dog whines and the cans being disturbed again. Daryl took a last bite of his tin before throwing it down on the table. "I'm gonna give that damn mutt one more chance," he said as he grabbed a jar of pig's feet and stomped off towards the door.

Opening it, rather than being met with a skittish dog, he was met with several walkers. Slamming it shut as best he could and holding it shut against the walkers and hollered for Beth. She came running into the room holding his crossbow, tossing it at him when he gave her a motion to. Telling her to run, he turned around and took aim, leaving the door to open. The first walker to stumble in got an arrow through the eye before he ran down another corridor.

"Beth! Pry open a window! Get your shit!" he yelled at Beth as he ran through the halls.

"I'm not gonna leave you!" she hollered back.

"Go out! Go up the road! I'll meet you there!" he said as he kept the dead chasing him.

He lead them down the corridor and into the morgue, firing two more arrows that found their purchase. Picking up a scalpel and large needle used for autopsies, Daryl moved the table with the corpse on it in front of him just as the walkers began pouring into the room. Using it as a barrier between him and them, he started aiming the knives for any skull that was close to him. Eventually there were too many dead bodies lined up, forcing him to crawl under the table and over to another one that had been further against the wall. He used that one to wedge against the counter, trapping a large number of the walkers in the morgue and leaving him with a few stragglers he easily took out as he went back up the stairs, retrieving his bolts along the way.

He ran like hell, getting out of the house and smashing a walker right in the face. It didn't take him long at all to reach the road, expecting to find Beth standing there waiting for him. Instead, he found her bag and nothing else. Looking at it questioningly, he couldn't help but fear the worst. The sound of squealing tires alerted him to the vehicle that was on the road with him. A white cross on the back, it took off faster than he could call out for Beth prompting him to chase after it. Even though he lost sight of the car early on, he chased the damn thing all night, only pausing momentarily to catch his breath before starting at full pace again.

By morning, he was exhausted, his body was sore, and he could hardly hold his head up. Soaked with sweat, he came to a crossroads. There was no way to tell which way the car had gone, no way of knowing where they were heading. Feeling the hope she had instilled in him die out, his grip on the bow faltered and it clattered to the ground before Daryl himself followed suit. Putting his head down, he couldn't help but feel like a failure in every sense of the word. He'd given up as soon as shit had hit the fan, gave up hope for his girl, hope for his brother, hope for his family. And Beth had done her damnedest to put it back in him and he'd just thought that maybe she was right. Now she was gone to. Should never care for nothin'. Always gets taken away, he thought to himself as he sat there.

He was still sat there a few hours later when someone walked up, "Well, lookit here."

Daryl found himself surrounded by men, one of them bending down to pick up his bow. He moved quickly, punching the man in the face while simultaneously picking up his bow and standing up. Aiming it at the man he knocked down, he was well aware that several weapons were locked, loaded, and ready to shoot and all aimed at him.

"Dammit, hold on!" the man on the ground said.

"I'm claimin' the vest," one of the men behind him said. "I like them wings. Like that girl's. Can't wait to catch up with her."

"Hold up," the man on the ground repeated, Daryl wondering who the man behind him was talking about; he only knew of Merle and Ania having wings on their vests. The man on the ground started laughing hysterically before he climbed to his feet, "A bow man. I respect that. See, a man with a rifle, he could have been some kind of photographer or soccer coach back in the day. A bowman's a bowman, through and through. What you got there? Hundred and fifty pound draw weight? I'll be donkey-licked if that don't fire at least three hundred feet per second." Daryl continued to stare at him, not phased by the man's words at all. "I've been lookin' for a weapon like that. Of course, I'd want one with a bit more ammo and minus the oblongata stains."

The man behind him began chuckling, "Get yourself in some trouble, partner?"

"You pull that trigger," the man in front of him said, reclaiming the conversation from the nitwit behind him, "these boys are gonna drop you several times over. That what you want? Come on, fella, suicide's stupid. Why hurt yourself when you can hurt other people?"

That sentence sent Daryl on a whirlwind, because it was the exact opposite of what Ania had told him when he'd asked her why she had really started cutting herself. Explaining that all there was was rage and anger, she'd said it was easier to hurt herself to feel something than to hurt other people. Even though in this era she would hurt or kill anyone she needed to to protect herself and what was hers, she would never enjoy hurting others. She would rather hurt herself than others. The smile the man gave him was pretty much the same soft one that she'd given him, too, though he knew there were different meanings behind them. Still, the man had said something about a girl and a vest similar to his.

"Name's Joe," the man in front of him said.

Lowering his bow and deciding he would take the chance for the time being, he lowly replied, "Daryl."