Daryl entered Beth's space with the cautiousness of an animal. Hyper aware and still.
He'd been outside her rooms at the San Jose House nearly each night before, standing beyond the gate and saying goodnight. He would watch her disappear across the threshold before retiring back into the shadows of his own affairs. Dawn came soon after, and he liked the feeling that he was ending a day and starting a new one with her.
Inside her room it smelled like flowers. Was that...lavender? He didn't know how it was possible, and he couldn't make himself move any further. But Beth didn't act like he shouldn't be there. In fact, she was tutting over him. Nobody did that. He watched her as she paced about the room, a phantom with purpose, her skirt whispering over the floorboards.
Like the varmints of which he hunted, Daryl coated himself in the shadow of her single oil lamp. It was here, whether coaxed into the illusory by the darkness, the quiet, or the scents of the fantastical, that Daryl recklessly caught himself daring to imagine Beth actually being someone in his life. He being in hers. Meaning something to her and getting her in his existence. It was out of his line, and crazy, yet here he was standing in her room. Maybe it wasn't as impossible as he thought.
She had him sit on the bed. He didn't want to, but he knew there was no arguing with her tonight. The back of his thighs touched the tightly folded top sheet, knowing he was soiling the clean looking blanket already by the contact with his filthy pants. Slowly, and uncomfortably, he lowered to a sit. He felt even dirtier here in this pristine, impersonal room that smelled too of soap and linen. Though he felt ill fitting here in this space he was glad for it, for her, that this lodging seemed to have some kind of modicum of safety and hygiene she could retreat to from the storms of dust and renegades beyond these walls.
She sat next to him and he felt the bed give just slightly with her small weight. She was close. They'd been near to one another before, never as close as the first meeting, and Daryl thought about that kiss often, but it felt like cheating. Beth was wearing a conservative dress now, the one she changed out of before getting less-dressed to go onstage in tassels and buckles, and the one she changed back into to go home, or in town to play piano at the hotel. He'd seen her barely clothed, but this was something different- she had invited him in. She was initiating, and there was no money involved.
He almost felt his face flush from what he'd done before and he avoided looking directly at her, as if in their proximity she would hear his thoughts. He watched her hands, pale fingers holding a cloth dipped in something. Tonic? Antiseptic? Where did she keep all of this? She had only one large trunk in the corner of the room.
She opened her hand to take the soiled handkerchief from him, tossing it somewhere behind them on the bed. His palm was stained with dark blood, caked and drying in places around a clean inches long slash through his flesh. Strangely he felt her nearness more than the throb of the fresh wound. She cradled his upturned hand in her own and brought the treated cloth to touch the wound. A sting burned through him and his hand jumped with a wince.
"I'm sorry." Their hands hovered in the air for an unknowable breath of indecision. Daryl felt something stall inside of him, then relented, and lowered his hand back into hers. Beth then touched him with the cloth so lightly it was like breaths of air wiping away the smears of blood.
"It doesn't look deep." Her head remained arched downward, methodically cleaning the cut with attention to causing the least pain. Daryl was glancing at her hair, the strands somehow both yellow and white entwining all around each other. "Who was that man?"
"Dunno. Think-"
Daryl stopped himself. He'd mentioned his brother to her but not in any detail. The act of trusting someone, and someone so very different from himself, there was still hesitation within him to do so.
Discreetly lifting his eyes without moving his head he observed her as she tended his hand. Her mouth was pursed in concentration. He realized how much he wanted to kiss her- for real, with no strings or coins attached.
To avoid the feelings her lips aroused he let his eyes linger on her hands, the kind that looked like they ought to be ensconced in lace as delicate and pristine as herself. Beth Greene was the epitome of a southern woman, those who's sole goal was to make you feel better after having been in their presence for even just a moment, who's acquaintances always left one feeling kinder and utterly welcome. He'd heard of these women as one hears myths of goddesses. He never thought they existed, or that if they did they would never treat someone like him in such a way. He could never reach the places or have access to where he could be touched by their mythic grace.
Beth glanced up and was greeted by the attention of his eyes. Her face flinched with a timid smile. "What?
He gazed a few moments before speaking. "Never told me how you got here."
Her eyes returned to his hand and he watched her sigh deeply. It rolled over her shoulders and down her back. After the exhale was expelled from her body a pensive quiet came over her. After a beat she told him: It started when she left home with intentions of making a name for herself as a performer. Maybe she'd be a concert pianist, or a colorful vaudeville star; it had been her lifelong ambition. She had gotten work, small engagements in small theater venues, and things had gone well with the assistance of family friends until she had decided to travel further. West of the Mississippi all bets were off. It was like she'd entered a different country. People were less amiable and any sense of civility more obscure.
In one of these new lowbrow places she'd quickly been sighted as a naïve mark, misled and swindled out of train ticket, resulting in her arrival to the next town she could afford. Now when she wrote to her family back on the farm in Georgia- a brother, sister and father, a war amputee- she said she played piano and sang in fine establishments in reputable towns and made no mention of brothels, gambling, outlaws, gunslingers or murder.
Beth was delicate and she was beautiful but she'd made it here, and she hadn't just survived but was living- something Daryl wasn't sure he'd ever truly done in his whole life. And there was a hell of a difference. You could spot them, the people who were just surviving. They had a look about them. They wore it- all the things you weren't doing, all the things you were carrying.
To live was to be free; there was an ease to the nakedness of it. When you were surviving nothing was easy. Breathing itself is a chore. One wore the burden of the work, but it was noticeable mainly to others in the same unique cycle of suffering.
Cutting into his brooding reverie, Beth asked about him.
Did she know how much she set him on edge? With the reveal of her honest admission Daryl felt he owed it to her to say something. She made him consider things he never would have before, like contemplating what it would be like not having to shoulder the burden of his story by himself, and not feel so entirely alone with it. He weighed the risk of telling her, how she could out him and his brother and everything; how stupid and dangerous it was to trust someone he barely knew, especially in a place like this.
This girl, she could ruin him.
He looked at her again. "Don't want you to be a target for anythin' because of what I tell you. It probably ain't safe to be a friend a'mine."
Her gaze roved his face, those big doe eyes. Then she smiled just for him. "I'm not afraid."
The first time they'd met, up in the crib, she had shirked away from him with a myriad of emotions and sensations. Judgments. She never drew away from him in disgust since, not in the way she had that first evening. Tonight in town she'd grasped his arm and hadn't let go. She was still touching him now, sitting next to one another on her bed.
Daryl believed her.
He told her about how he'd followed his brothers trail, leaving Georgia, across the same muddy river, tracking through the deserts of the unmapped West. How he'd found Stub, the newspaper clipping, the massacre in Mexico, the Cowboy gang and the Faro game earlier that night.
"Rick's gotta be watching me. Knows if I'm around, Merle may be around. At some point I'll have to move on."
She'd listened to him in some kind of awe, though he couldn't verify that's what she felt. He didn't pretend to know anything about a woman like her or what was in her head, but her eyes said things. Showed things. She shook her head lightly, like shaking out of a trance. "You want to leave here?"
"You wanna stay here?"
He was stoic but one could tell in his tone, the slight lift of the bridge of his eyes, when he employed dubious sarcasm. These were things she'd pick up on, the personality in him she would learn the more time she spent with him.
She shook her head with a small laugh, "No." It was quiet for some moments. Was she done tending the wound on his hand? It no longer stung, but so overcome by her Daryl felt that less than the awareness that neither of them had moved any further away from one another. "Suppose it was a silly dream I had, to imagine notoriety and all."
"Nah," he told her. "You could do it." He recalled the first sound of her singing and then the tinkling keys of the piano when he'd looked in the window of the Grand Hotel. She and her sounds had always seemed mesmerizing. "Ya deserve it."
A brush of color touched her face, then she arched her head to gaze dreamily out the window. Daryl followed suit, the weight of their confessions having made the room heavy. The blue tint of dawn was beginning to line the horizon.
"What kind of work makes you happy?"
It took him some moments to grasp the inquiry, and even then he wasn't sure of the interpretation. No one had posed the question to him before. Being 'happy' had never countered into it; was anyone supposed to be happy at their work? It was another thing he had never felt was a possibility for him. Beth's family was one of substance and accordingly her dreams had been glossy, extravagant things. All he and his had ever done was attempt to survive- another day, another night. He did what he had to, not what he wanted and he'd done so for so long he no longer knew what he actually wanted.
Feeling bold and almost inebriated by this moment he gave himself permission, under the influence of those big doe eyes, to actually ponder an answer.
He didn't like people much. He was good with Stub but that was because they understood each other, he didn't think himself a man who could break and train horses. The draw out here in the West was gold and mining. He hated the idea of the underground, no way out. Walls closing in, threatening to cave in, living like a damn mole. He liked the woods and wilderness. The stillness had always been to him a place of almost touchable solace. He became aware of the elongated silence where his answer should have been and could only offer her a shrug.
"We'll think of something," she said easily. Reassuringly. "Soon."
We.
There was such sincerity in her, Daryl didn't know what to make of it, he just stared.
Yeah, he decided, she could ruin him.
...
A town with such a name to drew all kinds of people to their deaths- even aforementioned ones. Tombstone was an in between world, a purgatory of sorts, where came those looking to start anew, and those who had accepted the end.
For those beyond the realm of medicinal help, the dry climate of the desert was recommended for lungs that were drowning in disease. The tuberculosis patients were easily spotted- the wrecking cough, reddened around the eyes, often pale and glistening. They floated among the townsfolk when able, and the healthy walked beside the ill, pretending as though the other weren't already dead.
In the lobby of the Grand Hotel Beth stood from the piano bench, smoothed on her gloves and gathered her reticule. On her face was a small smile, the same one that had been there since Daryl's exit from her room that morning, a love struck kind of look from only sitting next to someone and touching their hand.
A gentleman in a suit accompanied a woman in conservative dress into the lobby. She moved slowly into the foyer and dabbed at her forehead with a cloth. Before they progressed upstairs the man broke away to approach Dale behind the bar, the older man in the process of cleaning up his station.
"Pardon me, sir," he began fretfully, and Dale paused in his chore. "I'm terribly sorry to bother you again but, the window pane in our room still hasn't been fixed."
"It hasn't?" frowned Dale, who had seen the note himself as it traveled down to the Swamper's post for attention a day, maybe two days, before. It was unusual for such a task to not be addressed.
"It's rather hard to find a suitable device to prop into the frame, and we do so appreciate the breeze- when there's a breeze. My wife, as you see, is-"
"No need to explain, sir," Dale gently shook his head as the gentleman glanced back to the other woman in the room, who's condition was dishearteningly visible. She and Beth were speaking, the wife generously sharing compliments on her forte and how much she enjoyed that mornings arrangement. He thought he overheard her say something about knowing scales, and how tiring she found it to practice as of late. Dale gave the man his most sympathetic smile. "The window will be fixed today, if I have to do so myself."
The gentleman bowed his thanks and turned back to his wife, still sharing soft words with Beth. They all parted kindly, then when just before reaching the staircase, the woman fainted. Graceful as a swan as she gave a light utter and swooned.
"Ah, hell!" Her man caught her before she reached the floor, clearly used to this occurrence, and was immediately swarmed by all those present in the room- Beth herself, the elderly bar keep and the bellhop. The woman was laid upon the settee where she was already beginning to blink, but remained unfocused and dazed.
"Wha-what can I do?" the bellhop stammered, the most nervous of the group.
"Get a jug of water and a cloth," Beth instructed as the man encouraged his wife with words and caresses.
"C'mon, Mattie girl. Look at me, honey."
"There may be some elixirs in the basement store-" Dale offered.
"I'll go, Mr. Horvath."
Dale assented to Beth with a small nod, his old bones grateful to be relieved of climbing the cramped staircase. "You'll find them in the cabinets on the far wall, on a middle shelf toward the left. Thank you, Miss Greene."
"I'll only be a moment," she assured the couple and swept toward the staircase, the man patting the cloth to his wife's forehead.
Beth's hand clutched the spiraling rail along the staircase. Cramped and rickety the trip was not to be made by those claustrophobic or prone to panic in physical uncertainties. Her way of reaching the bottom was carefully, appearing a bit clunky in manner, but as swift as possible so as to hurry the conclusion of the event. Down in the shaft it was frigid, as if the stairwell had dropped her into a hole in the rock of the earth where the sun never reached. Due to smelling heavily of must like that deep within a cave, and a general sense of macabre foreboding, Beth and the rest of the staff never spent much time here. This was the Swamper's lair.
Beth engaged a lantern that hung on the wall and proceeded forward. She did not call out or give notice of her presence- she did not plan to be here longer than necessary. She could hear her footsteps landing on the earthen rock of the floor, the walls themselves nothing but stone, and her cautious breaths as they came raggedly. Had she moved the lantern to the left she would have seen the den of the Swamper and the shanty like room in which he dwelled, created by his own hand, but not looking for phantoms or to be where she did not belong Beth followed Dale's instructions and went straight for the shelving structure.
Middle shelf toward the left. Middle shelf toward the left.
If she repeated it she wouldn't think about the cold, or how it felt as though anyone or anything was lurking in the shadows, just out of view, silent but dangerous. She found the vial behind a similar one and brushed with dust that darkened her fingertips when touched. The glass was cold against her skin. Hurrying to step away she did just so, and the worn sole of her shoe slipped. Righting herself before she fell Beth grasped the shelf and looked down. Beneath her, and tucked against a wooden crate, she noticed a shocking dash of red- like blood.
It seemed to pool in a small swirl, but upon further inspection she realized this red was that of a cloth, thin and draped on the floor. She was lucky she hadn't careened to the ground. This basement was getting to her, playing with her sensations and making her limbs quake. She retrieved the cloth from the floor before anyone else's foot could meet it in the same manner. Once in her hand she could see it was filthy and snapped it once to rid the dust, a puff of it rising into the air. And on the hem a long smudge of- ink? Beth brought the cloth closer to her eyes. Her entire face distorted at what she saw.
...
The first thing Beth noticed about the district was the smell, and far before she even advanced on the main thoroughfare. Her pace was swift and she didn't bother searching for the source. Dirt streaked faces peered up from their work as the apparition of a woman in white ran through their streets. She was not one of the regular customers, and no women of means lingered in this part of town. Things were brought to them; it was unthinkable for one to venture here on their own.
Beth didn't know how long she would have to search. Most everything her eyes fell upon looked the same, the faces she passed included, and all gaped with unwelcome. It was when she recognized Stub tethered outside a shanty that relief washed through her.
"Daryl!"
He jolted upright from somewhere within, alarmed and visibly nervous at her appearance, meeting her half way in the street. The man named Rhee watched on.
Beth paused in front of him, stunned by her own gall to have arrived here and how Daryl stood before her as if he he'd take on whatever it was that had upset her, he just waiting for her to direct him. But it wasn't like that- she didn't think.
Extending her hand she presented to him the red scarf with the ink scrawled on the tattered hem. She could see his eyes take it in, abstractly at first, then the intensity she was growing increasingly used to darkened through his features.
"I think I found your brother."