They were in the woods. They'd been running for a while but they were walking now. Daryl was out in front, the pale wings stitched on his back moving silently through the trees. Beth followed, feet dragging, and Asha's eyes fixed on the lone braid amongst her blonde ponytail. Beth's hair was a shade darker than Asha's, more golden in tone than her own washed out pale blonde. Oddly enough, Beth was almost the exact shade of blonde as Ren had been.

Asha jerked her eyes away. She forced herself to look around with some semblance of alertness. Watch the trees; listen for the dead – for any threat. Daryl was trusting her to watch their rear.

Her alertness lasted all of a few minutes before her mind started to wander. She couldn't seem to hold a thought in her head.

She knew why.

Images flashed in her mind, images her mind shied away from – blood spatter, brain spatter, the Governor's hand gripped in Hershel's hair, Hershel's head swinging, Nash teetering in the wind.

Her mind skipped around, focusing instead on the light falling green through the leaves, a beetle crawling on rough bark, Daryl's winged back, the sunlight bouncing off Beth's hair - anything to block out the images flickering in her head.

Nash.

She'd mourned him after Seth, had still been mourning him, but seeing him again had wiped the slate clean. The word was overused, but it really had been a true miracle – and having that ripped away in a barrage of blood and brains, it was somehow worse than losing him the first time. Her mind couldn't hold it. It skittered around, from Nash, to Hershel, to the smoking prison ruins, to the knowledge that their group was gone.

She shook herself.

Not all gone. She had Daryl and Beth. Michonne was not dead. Daryl had seen her run the Governor through, so she'd survived until the worst of the battle was over. Rick, Maggie, Glenn...Asha grit her teeth. She had no idea where the rest of them were, if they'd survived…

She stumbled, realising she was wandering blank minded again. She tried to focus. There was sunlight bouncing off Ren's hair. She blinked a couple of times. There was something wrong with that thought but she couldn't place it. She could feel reality flaking away.

The trees, girly, watch the trees.

'Merle?'

She twisted. There were people in the trees, slow moving people.

The trees...

'Merle? Where are you?'

Some of the people turned towards her.

None of them were Merle.

Why was Merle be wandering in the woods. Her heart thudded painfully. Was he hurt? There was an itch at the back of her mind and she shook her head again, but it felt like it was packed with cotton wool. Nothing made sense.

There was a high pitched frantic sound behind her, but it sounded far away.

One of the people loomed towards her, but it wasn't Merle. It was a woman. She looked wrong, angry. She came close, right into Asha's face and Asha shoved her aside irately. The woman toppled awkwardly to the ground.

The smell…

It was the smell that brought her back – that sadly familiar stench of week old fish guts left rotting in the sun.

She gagged, tasting it in the back of her throat.

Not people, walkers.

Their snarling suddenly rang clear in her brain. A bolt zinged past her ear to bury itself in the face of a deadhead – one who was dangerously close to Asha's left shoulder.

Someone who sounded like Ren was screaming her name behind her.

She snarled, pulling her knife and driving her boot heel through the head of the walker she'd shoved to the ground. Then she lay about with the blade, until the whole world was reduced to the sound of snarling and the thunk of falling flesh, white noise that blocked everything else out. Finally there were no more walkers in easy reach, but she could see some still, in the distance among the trees.

She smiled grimly, flicking the blood of her blade before starting after them. She was going to kill them all.

A strong arm wrapped around her waist, hauling her off her feet.

'Are ya outta ya fucking mind,' a voice rasped in her ear. 'What are ya trying to do? Get yourself killed?'

She hissed, struggling to get away, her mind a red haze.

'Stop it Asha.' The voice was harsh. 'Enough.'

She twisted, arm coiled to attack the owner of the vice like grip, and came face to face with a set of piercing blue eyes. They cut through the haze. Daryl.

Over his shoulder, Beth was wide eyed and shaking, knuckles white where her hand gripped her knife. She suddenly registered the horde of dead lying around them. She was bloody to the shoulders, Daryl the same, and even Beth was splattered in blood.

As the world leapt back into focus, so did her pain.

Her brother's head exploded again in her mind.

Nash...

'He was still alive,' she moaned. 'Nash was still alive. I abandoned him.' She choked on her own breath. 'Why didn't you let me keep looking for him?'

Daryl flinched back as if burnt, letting her go.

She hadn't even realised those words were in her head, let alone coming out of her mouth. Her eyes widened. She heard their echo and wanted them back as soon as she'd said them. She reached for him

'Daryl, I didn't mean…'

Daryl snarled. 'Ya meant it.' He gestured around them. 'If ya done with ya fucking temper tantrum then can we fucking go now. I ain't letting ya damn death wish take me and Beth down too.'

He turned his back on her, striding away. Beth, chest heaving, turned after him.

Feet dragging, Asha followed them, a new hollowness carving out her chest.

She hadn't meant it...had she?

They walked through the woods. They were silent. They were almost always silent now. A handful of days had passed, nights spent hiding in abandoned homes or cars or camping out under the trees in with the scant provisions they'd scavenged from already well picked over houses. He kept them away from the towns as much as possible, never knew who was around.

He shifted his grip on his cross bow. He'd been carrying the thing continuously so long now that it felt like his hand was permanently moulded to its shape. Wasn't a bad feeling exactly, but some part of his brain wondered at the way he felt incomplete without it in his hand. He concentrated on the trees, the trail, looking for signs that something had been through there he could hunt. Or that other people had come this way.

He tried hard not to think about the prison. He could still smell the place burning. He grimaced. He should have known it wasn't going to last. He'd never had a home in his life, why had he expected that to change?

His eyes slipped across to Asha and he jerked them away.

He tried even harder not to think about the people they'd lost.

They'd ended up south of the prison. Daryl ground his teeth together yet again with the sour realisation of the deficiency of their evacuation plans. Why hadn't they had a designated rendezvous place? Stupid. There was no reason for them not to have somewhere planned. They'd relied too heavily on that damn bus.

Didn't matter now. Their people were either all dead or all lost. He tried to tell himself that it didn't matter. He'd survived on his own before. He could do it again.

He could almost convince himself of that.

A small voice in the back of his mind asked him why he bothered going on, what he thought was going to get better? He didn't have any answers. He'd never had any answers. That voice was an old friend and he had plenty of practice ignoring it.

He kept them heading south. The further south they went, the easier the winter would be.

He was driving them hard. They moved, or he hunted and they ate, and then they moved again. Until they were too tired to move. then they slept – or at least some of them did – and did it all again. To their credit, neither woman had complained, though their eyes were black rimmed with exhaustion.

Daryl had never needed much sleep, although he knew he was pushing that ability to the limit at the moment. Asha was capable of sleeping a solid ten hours when things were going well, but she hadn't slept through the night since fleeing the prison. She started each night curled in on herself, shoulders shaking until she suddenly jerked awake. When she came to relieve him from watch, she was always white faced and slick with sweat.

By unspoken agreement neither of them ever woke Beth. Although she tossed and turned she could still sleep through the night and it seemed neither Asha nor Daryl wanted to take that from her. It did little for the young woman's mood however.

Beth had been quiet the first few days after fleeing the prison, but had then begun inquiring how they were going to find the rest of their group. Her increasingly insistent demands had been met with silence by both Daryl and Asha and her anger had surged in response. Walking now, Daryl could feel her glare boring into the back of his head, even as he listened to her feet dragging through the leaf litter.

Asha...Asha's face just became blanker and emptier by the day. The first night after the prison, after Beth had fallen asleep, she'd gripped his arm, eyes burning, lips moving fervently as she'd murmured some crap about how she hadn't meant what she'd said about Nash. He'd seen her mouth moving, forming the words, but it was like there was a veil over her face and all he saw was her eyes full of loss and her voice gasping out the words, "I abandoned him. Why didn't you let me keep looking?"

Just another person he'd failed.

He didn't have any words to answer her, so he'd stayed silent, and eventually his face had closed over and she'd turned away.

Since then, at first he'd seen her struggling, biting down on her bottom lip as he watched her out of the corner of his eye. He'd thought she was trying to find the words to say something to him, but those moments had become less frequent, faded, as they both focused on surviving.

They barely spoke now.

The bitter emptiness he felt at the loss of their group was magnified each time he met her eyes. So he tried to stop looking at her, or at least meeting her gaze.

He glanced across at Asha. Her eyes - for the moment at least – were alert, the rifle barrel held loosely in her still healing hand. Her fingers twitched as he watched her. She'd started regularly bending and flexing her fingers, and he knew Hershel had told her she had to do so to stop the tendons fusing to the bone as they healed.

At least she was paying attention now. He grimaced sourly to himself. He could still picture the way she'd walked aimlessly away from him and Beth into that horde of walkers - vacant eyed and ignoring both his and Beth's calls. Ignoring the walkers even, until that first one lurched forwards and near scrapping her with its teeth before she finally seemed to register where she was.

His stomach had turned to ice.

He was still pissed at her for being so stupid.

She hadn't been much better the following few days, and he'd found himself repeatedly looking over his shoulder to check she was still there. However they'd come across plenty of dead those first few days, and it had only taken a few encounters for her inattention to fade. She'd thrown herself on the dead, eyes blazing and with reckless fury. She'd been alert to the danger among the trees since then.

Daryl suspected she rather looked forward to venting her fury on the dead.

Asha must have felt him looking, and her eyes met his for a moment, her face expressionless, before sliding back away into the trees.

She reached into the small pack she'd scavenged, pulling out the last of a small packet of stale crackers - the last of their scavenged supplies. She held them out to Beth, whose stomach had been growling at them for the last hour or so too.

Beth frowned at her. 'You two have to eat too,' she said.

Asha shrugged, eyes turned out to the woods.

Beth crossed her arms sullenly. 'I mean it'.

'We do,' Asha said without turning around, voice empty sounding. 'We're just more used to trail rations than you.' She shook the pack insistently, waiting until Beth sighed and took it.

Despite their differences, Daryl and Asha had fallen easily back into the patterns they'd kept for the months they'd been out looking for the Governor with Michonne. They flanked Beth as they moved. He always took point and Asha always watched their tail. Even without looking at her, Daryl knew exactly where she was. He could close his eyes and point to her. Sometimes he suspected the habits from those months were the only thing that kept her moving. She hadn't once asked where they were headed and whilst she was mostly alert to their immediate surroundings, she didn't really seem to care where those immediate surroundings were any more.

She hissed suddenly, low and softly. Beth froze. Daryl scanned the trees on his side of the woods, checking they were empty of walkers, before stepping silently to Asha's side. Her eyes were fixed on the ground. She wasn't a tracker, but she was observant, and the pointers she'd prised out of him whilst they were searching for the governor were paying dividends now. She gestured at the bent twigs and crushed leaves leading from the trail they'd been following, glancing at him with narrowed eyes, before he nodded shortly at her, and her face relaxed for an instant.

He gestured for her and Beth to wait as he stepped in to the brush. The trail was fresh. They hadn't had any weather over the last few days, nothing to wash it away, so it was only a day, maybe two old. Thirty or so odd paces down the trail, it opened out into a clearing, the beaten ground bearing the clear marks of a camp fire and several sets of footprints – men's sizes, four or five pairs of them. He circled the area once before looking up at a slight sound as Asha stepped out into the space.

'Told ya ta stay,' he ground out.

She shrugged, eyes on the ground as she followed his tracks in a circuit around the camp site.

'I count five,' she said stopping beside him. Eyes narrowed and lips pressed into a thin line she pointed at a distinctive tread with a cleft from the heel. 'Like I saw in Braysville.'

He grunted. 'Don't say nothin' to Beth.'

She nodded, bottom lip trapped between her teeth, thinking. She hesitated and for an instant he thought this time she was going to say something, but then her face closed over and she started back towards Beth.

He suppressed the acrid swirling in his stomach. They didn't have time for that bullshit anyway. It was all about survival now.

Asha scanned the lonely stretch of back road, but she watched from the corner of her eye as Beth twisted the key in the car ignition. There was bugger all chance the car was going to start. Doors open, broken window gaping, it looked as though it had been abandoned for an age - and was going to stay that way Asha assumed as she saw Beth's shoulders slump in her periphery.

She turned her attention back to the road as Beth pushed wearily out of the driver seat and started collecting bits of broken rear view mirror. The light was fading fast, the evening well on its way to full dark. Asha stared blankly along the road, at the trees. Nothing moved. The air was still, the way air often is at nightfall when the daytime breeze has faded. Its heaviness matched the heaviness in her bones. She would have slumped down on the asphalt if she wasn't afraid that she'd never be able to get up again.

Asha used to like the quiet of nightfall, but now every twilight was full of all of the twilights that had occurred since the turn, resonating in a long line of locked down memories that she didn't want to face any more.

There was a lot she didn't want to face any more.

Daryl, pacing as he did every day in front of her, was simply the most immediate. She hated herself for what she'd said about Nash, for putting that out there and on him. On reflection she knew she didn't hold Daryl accountable for the fact that she'd given up the search. But in that moment – with everything in her stripped raw and screaming with a pain she had no idea how to deal with – her instinct had been to try to shift some of it elsewhere.

What she'd felt ever since went a long way past regret.

She'd tried to tell him, to apologise, but he'd just narrowed his eyes at her, weighing, and his face had stayed hard and closed over.

She'd thought about trying again, but his face was flat every time he turned in her direction, eyes like ice, and every time she opened her mouth her throat thickened and the words stuck. With each failed attempt, it became harder to try again. She could feel him slipping away - with every harsh look they exchanged, every heavy silence.

She couldn't blame him for rebuffing her apology. Words were cheap and her actions had been Nash-centric to the point of obsession for a while before that. She could see that much now at least.

The distance growing between them hurt, but it was simply one hurt in a sea of many. The pain was dull, beating on the outside of the apathetic shell that was building up like scar tissue around her consciousness. All of her feelings, sensations, herself, seemed somehow blunted. She knew they were there, but they were somehow small, shunted away in a corner. She moved where Daryl directed, following the smallest jerk of his head or wave of his hand. She watched their trail, and for other trails, but beyond that, she was finding it hard to focus on anything.

God she was tired. Her body ached from sleeping on the ground and her hunger was a constant gnawing in her belly.

At times, night usually whilst she lay in the dark, too crippled by fear of her dreams to sleep, she wondered why she carried on. More than once she considered slipping away into the darkness beneath the trees, but then she would find her eyes on Daryl, tracing his barely discernible outline where he kept watch, and instead she would get up and relieve him. She didn't think about what stopped her too hard. Thinking led to feeling, and feeling she was pretty sure led to madness for her at the moment. It was better just to keep everything shut down.

Daryl suddenly loped from darkness between the trees on the side of the road.

'We got company,' he said bluntly. 'Close. The dead. A lot of them.'

Asha saw the tremor run through Beth and had to admit she felt the same at the prospect of spending half the night on the run.

She passed a hand wearily over her face.

Run or die.

'Here,' Daryl said, gesturing at the open boot. It yawned cavernously and Asha stared at it blankly, not realising what Daryl meant until Beth clambered in.

'We'll fit,' she said, face pale in the darkness.

The car was an old style sedan, huge. It could easily fit two people, but it would be tight for three.

Asha jerked as if electrocuted, feeling the flesh seize and crawl across her back and run in shivers down the backs of her legs.

'We can outrun them,' she said shaking her head.

'Until we can't,' Daryl growled, 'and we got no idea where we're runnin' in the dark.'

Asha took a step backwards, eyes fixed on the blackness in the boot.

'We'll be trapped.'

Beth was watching her wide eyed.

Daryl stepped towards her, crossbow swinging.

'We ain't got it in us to spend half the night running.'

Asha's blood thumped in her ears and the skin rippled across her body. Her voice dropped.

'I can't get in there,' she admitted.

Daryl's eyes sharpened and he suddenly swung his crossbow up and fired over her shoulder. Asha flinched, glancing back at the walker pitching forwards with the bolt between its eyes. Behind it, the shadows under the trees started to seethe.

'Ya gotta,' Daryl growled.

Asha nodded jerkily. They were out of options - but her feet were to the ground rooted to the ground, and Daryl had to grab her by the arm and propel her into the trunk.

He climbed in after her, twisting his bandanna around the latch on trunk to hold it near closed without being latched. Their world was suddenly reduced to darkness and the mere inch and a half of night air visible through the gap.

Asha's chest heaved as the space narrowed, breath hissing as it jerked through her.

Daryl glared at her, eyes burning in the darkness.

'Asha,' Beth whispered, reaching out to grip her arm. 'Slow breaths, calm down.' She glanced at the shadows shuffling beyond the crack in the trunk.

They were going to hear her.

Asha cupped both hands over her mouth trying to muffle the noise, fighting to take a full breath.

She closed her eyes.

In the darkness, wedged tight between Daryl and Beth, she was suddenly somewhere else. Somewhere black, with sweaty flesh pressed hard against her and cold twisted metal digging into her back. Her nose was full of the stink of sour breath and blood and something thick and musky - and her ears were full of her own muffled cries.

Her body bucked, rocking the car, and she snapped her eyes open.

Under enough pressure, everyone breaks.

She fed the heel of her palm into her mouth against the urge to scream.

Her body spasmed again and Daryl planted a hand on her shoulder to keep her still. Asha cringed away from his touch and his eyes narrowed into slits.

In the stale cramped quarters the contact was both unbearable and inescapable.

The car rocked as the dead knocked against it. The inch wide sliver of night air was filled with shifting shadows as the dead shuffled past.

Asha tracked their movement with frantic eyes, fixing on them with a desperation that had nothing to do with fear of them getting in.

Walkers, Asha. This is a car boot, not a rail car.

The flow of dead continued for hours. Asha was sure it was hours. Although it seemed never ending, it eventually began to slow, thinning to a trickle. Pressed between Daryl and Beth, Asha felt some of their tension fade. Beth eased her knife into her other hand and flexed her white knuckled hand. They waited as the stragglers limped passed in the darkness, until only the silence dragged out in the long minutes.

Without the distraction of the dead Asha felt her panic rising again. Her chest started heaving as she sucked air around the heel of her palm still jammed in her mouth. She could feel Beth and Daryl glancing at her, their eyes sliding quickly away.

Asha forced herself to count to a hundred. Then she shifted, and Daryl clamped a hand on her arm.

'Not yet.'

The fresh air easing through the cracked open boot was tantalisingly close. Lips twisted and body shaking she managed another suffocating count to fifty before she lunged forwards, untwisting the cloth around the latch and ignoring Daryl's growling.

Cool night air flooded in as the boot creaked open, and she lurched stiff muscled on to the night dark road. She staggered a handful of paces away from the confines of the car, before sinking to her knees. Keeping a wary eye out for the dead, she sucked in breaths. She could taste blood and looked down to see blood seeping from the sharp indentation of her teeth in her palm. Shaking, she eased her hand to her mouth and sucked the wound gently.

She'd thought she'd blocked all that out – or at least wrestled it into somewhere that she could manage it.

There was a light touch on her shoulder.

'Asha?' Beth asked softly.

She jerked out of reach and staggered a few more paces away.

Any contact was too much just then.

Beth held her hands up. 'Are you ok?'

She nodded fitfully and could see that Beth didn't really believe her.

Daryl was behind her, frowning.

Asha forced her breaths to lengthen and tried to mask the trembling in her limbs.

'What now?' Her voice shook as she looked to Daryl.

Beth looked at him too. Their route was always up to Daryl.

Still frowning, he stepped off the road and yanked the bolt he'd abandoned earlier from the corpse's head. Then he gestured with it down the road, waving them on crosswise to the path of the dead.

Asha let Beth and Daryl get a good handful of paces in front of her before, and then she followed at that distance – knowing she was behaving irrationally but still wielding the space like a barrier. She knew Beth and Daryl noticed, it was written all over their faces when they glanced back at her, but the sun was up for hours before she was able to let the gap close.

[A/N: Hope this wasn't too much of a drag to read, but none of them are in a great mental place at the moment. Reviewers, as always you rock! And I love all the new follows and favourites.

I know I forgot to have Asha notice the distinctive tread when she was in Braysville (oops) - something to add on the rewrite.]