So I'm really sorry this chapter isn't as long, but I have had a lot of uni work and also the social commitments of seeing, cooking for and entertaining flatmates and friends. Also, I like to think this chapter, due to its content can't be as long as the others, purely as it doesn't cover as much plot wise as perhaps I have before. Anyway, I shall see you all in an update at some point this weekend.

As always, thanks for the support!

The Take-over

He looked around. He turned to the walker stabbed it in the head, his eyes too busy combing through all the people for the specific one he cared about. A small step to left and he took down another man, the grunt more out of worried frustration than anything else.

He needed to save his family. That's all that crossed his mind in this moment. He had to fight and survive and get everyone on that fucking bus. The Governor himself, the total bastard would be taken care of- if not Rick or Michonne some other

Nothing had been right since the speckled-kid shower incident. The pestilence that swept the prison moved too swiftly, too silently for there to be any form of understanding. It all happened so fast. One minute he was wrapped in the warm memories of feeling human, and the next he was running down the hall to witness what becoming human had become. Death. Devastation. Undead cannibalism.

And all this change unsettled him. An impending feeling of doom came with each deterioration of their quality of life. Something big was coming, only this ridiculous bloodshed of a battle wasn't what he had expected. First the damn kid caused cell block D to be annihilated; families torn apart in safe walls and a chaos of panic infecting every stinky square inch of their home. Then the problems with the fence, its constant failings and fear of it breaking putting them all on edge. The continuation of healthy people collapsing into coughing bloody spew and dying. The murders of Karen and David. Carol.

He felt that blow like a new kick in the gut. It was the relatively new news that he was still processing with each stab and shoot of his arrows, his hands shaking with the vengeance of self-made dictatorship. She had been cast out, alone. And it upset him more than anything that the woman who understood him best wasn't here- but then, he thought begrudgingly, maybe that was for the best. It's true that Carol had proven she could hold her own, but it was, in a way, better she was far away from this equation. There were already too many people here he was afraid he was going to lose.

The second he resolved his content with Carol having been cast out to miss the heinous folly of man, he moved onto the next group of people to save. Evening the odds wasn't going to be easy. Not easy but not impossible. The higher ground advantage that they had, the fence and the escape plans were all good- but their use was pivotal of being harnessed correctly. And that, well that required some way of communicating to the masses. The Governor's men had thrown down the fences and were on equal grounding with their own men, a mix of survivors killing survivors.

And they had a tank. The spark of imagination, a little voice of calm calculation spoke out about evening the playing field. As if his imagination was running in real time the explosion of a grenade in the tank startle him as much as the people around him.

He shot a man in the head, miserable for the need but feeling it was the most merciful option, bowing wounded just made you target from the third army- the army of the resurrected walkers cashing in on the warm bodies and distracted panic. Had Daryl been a religious man- the thought sucked his gut in uncomfortably as an image of Hershel entered his mind- he would say a prayer for the man. But that was by the by and Daryl made a choice of which one of them got to live, and which one got to die.

The bus was leaving, the silhouettes of frightened people just visible from the angle he was at. A sense of mixed emotions crossed him, a childlike urge to be part of the passengers; to be free and driving away to the safe place in company of shared pain. But an anger in him made him cease the moment smashing in the walkers' heads and trying to think of his own route out. They were overwhelmed only so long before the prison belonged to the walkers again, and why fight it? How could they live in a place where every view framed the place where Hershel was killed?

Beth.

Shit, in his worrying of Carol he forgot the other member of his direct family. Rick and Carol could look after themselves, but the kid? Oh shit, say she was on the bus. Of course she'd be on the bus, with Judith and the other kids crying about her poor, poor father. He'd do anything to undo the truth of the matter, but he hoped she had sucked it up and taken a dose of the Greene spirit with her.

But across the way, between the too many people dying and few still fighting, a flash of blonde hair swung with the momentum of the pathetic need to live. His peripheral vision pulled her out easily, the small, pale thing striking with a distinct air of unrehearsed gait.

He saw her and it came back. He saw the months of a smiling happy girl, her cheeky smile and soft voice singing to a baby. Then he saw her now; dirt and tear streaked. Her moves were getting sloppy, but there was an underlying determination in her gaze that brought back the content of Daryl's future nightmares.

After all, he was the one who had pressed the weapon into her hand in the first place. He had stood by her at the gates, heard the gut-wrenching cry for her daddy mingling with the scream of her sister. His eyes couldn't appreciate what he had seen, his eyes burning form the image as if it were some joke with an incomprehensible punch line. Yet somewhere separate, a different part of his brain registered the sound of total heart-break. Then the sound of hushed nothing. Then the sounds of war.

The gun he had given her had been discarded, at some point it had been thrown away useless to her. He watched her small wrists from a moment moving quickly, twisting sharply with a lost rhythm of pain. For every walker she took down another two had been distracted over. She was battling a losing war, yet still battling in a dazed rage.

He walked over, guided by the leading voice in his head, taking down walker and walker to get to her. She didn't notice him until he spoke in a gravelly voice, it sounding foreign and too human for where they were and what they were doing. Time was rushed and yet it felt like they'd been fighting for decades.

''We gotta go, Beth, we gotta go''

The fighting was over. They had lost. He took her hand, his own voice and body running three times ahead of his sluggish brain. Her eyes were large and blue, taking an eternity staring into his own like he might make her see some sense in the needlessness of recent events, some compassionate explanation of what was going to happen. There was none to offer, nothing for him to provide or say to shelter her from the horrors of their world. He imagined seeing a small part of her die right then in that moment, and with a last breathy tug at her arm he left the little piece of her and the little piece of him stood there gazing at the smoking remnants of their home, as what was left of them turned their backs and ran.