AN: Sorry, it's been quite a while. I've been extremely busy lately opening a brand new unit at my hospital. This is more stream of consciousness and fever dreaming than plot advancement, I apologize in advance if you're not into that sort of thing but it's something I wanted to do for foreshadowing's sake. I'm working on another chapter also, hopefully that's not too far behind.

Heat

Fire laced his skin and he heard Beth's voice, muffled as though it was coming from the top of a well, somewhere far above him, "Oh please, c'mon"

Her voice was distressed, pleading him. Try as he might, Daryl was unable to reply. Where he was was dark and strange. He felt extremely hot. Daryl lifted his head up and looked around. He was sitting at a desk. He leaned back and looked around: Beth's bedroom.

Daryl pushed back and stood. The stereo softly played some song he didn't know. He moved tentatively around the room, looking at the makeup of a teenage girl's room. It seemed like things within the room had been untouched for a while, months even. The air in the room was unnaturally stiff and hot, it was difficult for him to breathe.

He crossed the room and looked out the window. It was pouring rain, he instinctively reached up to touch the glass. It was shockingly cold. It was a relieving feeling. He decided he wanted to be out there, he needed to cool himself down and get some fresh air. Daryl left the room and crossed the hall, heading to the stairs.

A soft voice floated up from the first floor, accompanied by piano notes. Beth's voice filled the staunch air. As he descended the stairs, he noted that the walls had changed. These were the stairs of the funeral home. Somewhere candles dimly lit the house. Daryl reached the bottom of the stairs. Singing floated toward him from the parlor to his left, almost palpable as it traveled on the air. Daryl coughed, he was sure the air had become even worse. It scalded his throat as he breathed it in.

At the sound of his cough, the playing stopped abruptly. Hesitantly, Daryl moved forward towards the parlor, rounding the corner. In the middle of the room, Beth stood. At some point she must have quietly stood up from the piano. She was wearing some silly, pastel nightgown, something more like a vestige of from teenaged life. It looked odd on her, despite the fact that, in all honesty, it fit her chronological age. Beth watched him carefully, her expression unreadable. The room was so hot, Daryl felt he must be sweating bullets.

"You know you can't be here" she hissed between her teeth, her eyes darting wildly behind him as though she expected someone to be close behind.

"I-" he began, his voice cracked and dry in the intense heat. Beth moved swiftly across the room, shushing him as she came towards him. Before he could process the situation, she was before him, and she had her hands on his forearms. She was inches from him, her eyes full of mischief and bright with excitement.

"Just hush, don't say anything. My dad could be awake right now. He'd kill you dead" she chided softly. Beth was standing extremely close to Daryl, making him nervous and turning his already dry throat to complete dust.

Daryl blinked hard and nodded weakly. Beth smiled and leaned towards him, pushing herself up on her tip toes to kiss him on the cheek. The action sent a jolt through him, her touch considerably cooler than his skin. Part of him wanted to envelope her in his arms, despite everything and the unreality of the situation, and hold her close to him. He resisted, and instead stood dumbstruck by her presence. He noted the light dusting of freckles on her nose, saw her head haloed by the candlelight playing on her blonde ringlets. He smelled a faint scent of honeysuckle and wondered idly if it originated from her shampoo.

"I mean, I get it, things are different now. But not that different. I know we don't really know how long all that that's going on out there will last, but it seems dangerous nonetheless. I want you to be able to stay here, but you can't upset daddy" she reasoned.

Daryl felt compelled to play along, he didn't see what other choice he had. For whatever strange reason unknown to him he wasn't Daryl to her right now, he understood that at least. "What do you think's going on out there?" he asked.

She paused to consider for a second before she replied. "If I had to say, I think it's a flu or some kind of virus thing. Maybe, it's even tuberculosis, you know. Something we need to wait out"

Daryl felt a pang of deep sadness. This was pre-suicidal Beth, pre-awareness of walkers. She was under some delusion that they were waiting out a spike of flu. He wondered if Herschel was aware of what was really going on, wondered if he was shielding his daughters.

"Yeah. Yeah, maybe" he replied weakly. Daryl wished for an open window, there was no air in the room, it was all stifling hot nothingness.

Beth turned and walked across the room to stand near the window, "I only wish mama would call or get back out here soon. Must be held up in a barricade, maybe she's even sick too. Which worries me, but she's pretty healthy otherwise, so she'll beat it"

He looked away from her. Yeah, she knew nothing at all at this point. Daryl was unbearably hot, he was positive now that he saw heat waves in the room.

A creak came from upstairs and Beth's eyes widened. Out of the corner of his eye, Daryl noted that faint flames curled around the drapes and licked up from cracks beneath the floorboards.

"Okay, you really have to go" she said quickly, darting across the room to peck him on the cheek and scamper halfway up the stairs. He was suddenly painfully aware that the house around them was completely on fire.

"Beth. Come back here, we have to leave here now" he said, trying to be stern but sounding more scared and desperate.

"Leave?" her expression bemused and playful, as flames curled around her and swallowed her, "Leave, and go where?"

Daryl reached out to grab for her, but she turned and disappeared up the stairs. His skin singed and peeled before his eyes. He smelled his own hair smoldering and the distinct, disturbingly sweet smell of burning flesh. He gasped in extreme pain and turned towards the door. Daryl moved slowly and with great difficulty as he made his way to the door. Each movement was excruciating. His body felt like it was coming apart at the joints. When he finally found the door through the bright, hellish flames he fumbled with the white hot knob and pulled it open with all his strength. A vacuum of cold meeting hot yanked him out the door and he fell out onto the porch, his vision leaving him as he felt one last shock of pain.

Ice

Somehow, Daryl went from falling to his knees to stumbling off the porch through blurry eyes. It felt almost as though his skin audibly hissed as cold rain hit him. The drastic change in temperature made his head whirl, he saw bright white halos around his vision. He tried to steady himself and failed, he went back to his knees.

A violent tremoring wracked his body, Daryl was so unbearably cold. He tried to draw air into his lungs but found it to be made of ice shards. He coughed as the air bit through his throat. It felt as though his chest had been filled with spun glass. A terror gripped him, he felt starved of air.

"Shh, it's okay, I'm here" Beth's voice cooed softly, somewhere near Daryl's ear. He felt cold blankets bunch up around him as a warm body pressed itself against him. He attempted to focus himself towards the heat, trying to harvest it and collect it within. The shaking slowed but refused to stop.

"No, no, come on. Push through it, Daryl, please. Fight it" Beth said, an edge of fear to her voice. She hugged herself tightly to him, he felt a channeled need radiate to his icy form.

Daryl's vision began to clear and solidify. He found he was staring down into the tumultuous, chaotic surface of standing water receiving rain. He realized he was kneeling in a mud puddle he'd fallen into. The shallow water pooled at his knees, his hands buried into the cold and squishy mud. Between the torrent above and the puddle below, Daryl was drenched to the bone with ice water. The night was pitch black and heavy, the sound of the downpour drowning out all other sounds.

A clear and insidious thought wound its way up to Daryl from the mud seeping beneath his fists. This was as good a place as any to lie down and stop. His joints felt calcified and cemented in place, his muscles tightly wrought over frozen bones, and his skin wound even tighter and pulled taut over it all. To move would destroy him, he just knew that if he tried to stand again he'd shatter completely. Underneath everything, the cold, the rain, and the night, Daryl felt an even more terrifying pang deep within himself. He felt as though something wasn't right with his insides, as though his inner machinations were rusting to a halt.

He was decaying, and he was dying.

At least, he was afraid he was. The rain kept up its onslaught and hit his back and head relentlessly, funneling off his downturned face to become a part of the mud puddle. It would be so easy to just join the rain and let it guide him down to rest in the mud. Despite this, he just couldn't release the strength in his forearms and knees.

Daryl slowly became aware of a new development to his situation. It occurred to him that the mud beneath his fingers shifted and sieved away from his spread fingers. He concentrated idly on this sensation, and felt a shock of surprise as warm fingers curled upwards from below the mire and thrust themselves between his own. It should have been horrifying but Daryl felt the echo of some distant feeling of calm flow up to him from the fingers.

The hands within the mud continued to move upward, displacing Daryl and thrusting him slightly up and away from the puddle's surface. The force pushed him from kneeling to a position of sitting on his haunches.

He watched in bizarre and silent fascination as his eyes adjusted enough to make out the detail of his hands beneath the water's surface. The other fingers interlocked with his and his eyes traced the hands to their forearms to a barely visible face.

Below the shifting and cracking surface of the rain on the puddle, Daryl saw the tendrils of blonde hair billow. Beth's eyes blinked slowly and fixed themselves of Daryl's. The borders of her face rippled and displaced constantly but Daryl could read her lips clearly.

"Move. Now. You have to move" she instructed.

And he did.

Without fully comprehending it, Daryl released the hands and pushed himself out of the water. He stood. He wavered some but not as much as before, he was dizzy but he was not unstable anymore. Daryl was still freezing cold but something warm and mentally tangible had burrowed itself down inside him. It was something he had to protect, something that he was able to focus on that negated the once overwhelming significance of numb stiffness that his body felt. He had no idea what this new thing was but it revitalized him somehow. Above all else, Daryl felt driven to get it inside and out of the rain and cold.

He scanned the perimeter of the yard, squinting through the rain. He was outside of the funeral home and noted blurs of gravestones doting the ground. Something caught his eye that he had never placed before: a windowless small shack buried almost out of sight near the mouth of the forest. Daryl squared his shoulders and headed briskly towards it, navigating through thick patches of mud and partially submerged headstones.

Closer up, the shack looked less abandoned. It seemed as if someone else had been there recently. Something told Daryl that someone might still be there, and he felt a reluctance to approach the door. Instead, he went around the side of the shack, lee of the rain. Daryl crouched down and pressed his back up against the shack, pulling his knees to his chest. Now completely out of the rain, he sighed and wrapped his arms around his knees. He felt a semblance of warmth within himself and he relished the feeling. After almost giving up on his own life, small things were important. It didn't matter that he was uncomfortably soaked and dirty, he was alive.

As things tended lately to completely defy logic, it didn't surprise Daryl much to see Beth sneak gingerly around the back of the shack and tiptoe over to where he sat. Being wary of the onslaught of rain, she carefully lowered herself to the ground, taking care to sit on the patch of dry ground next to him. He looked her up and down. She was almost entirely dry, save a layer of raindrops on an oversized men's rain jacket she wore. Idly, he wondered if it was Herschel's, or maybe Mike's. Regardless she looked nothing like someone that had recently emerged from the ground through a mud puddle like some bizarre pseudo-siren.

"Do you ever wonder what they do when it rains like this?" she asked him, failing to preface her thought at all.

"Who?" he asked.

"The walkers. I mean, you see them with a slight rain, or a drizzle. But have you ever seen them wandering in a downpour like this?" she mused, looking out at the rain.

Daryl shifted his weight and released his legs. He almost felt normal again. "Can't say I have, I reckon"

"I wonder if they take shelter, if they find being soaking wet annoying" she said, smirking softly.

Daryl shrugged. A sound of shuffling and moving inside the shack distracted him. He still felt unsettled by it for some reason. He found himself hoping the door to the shack wouldn't open. Listening intently, he tried to imagine what movement was occurring behind the wall. It sounded like someone shuffling around, a clink of glass on glass vaguely audible. Someone picking things up and moving them. Despite how wary and guarded he was, Daryl suddenly found himself extremely sleepy. Against his better judgment he pushed himself into a semi-lying position, his eyes heavy-lidded and his blinking slow.

Beth continued staring out across the field, seemingly oblivious both to Daryl's fatigue and the activity in the shack. "That'd be interesting, if they got annoyed. Really if they feel anything at all. I wonder if they have any sense of self, or perseverance"

He was half-asleep. He couldn't focus on much anymore. Beth was warm next to him and the patter of the rain was lulling him. Daryl fell into a deep sleep, and the door to the shack swung open.