So this is my final submission for Bethyl Week on Tumblr. I thought I was done after the last one but this one hit me and I just had to write it. It's a bit slapdash so I hope there are not too many mistakes. Hope it doesn't disappoint. This is for the prompt "memory" but that should be obvious from the story.
I plan on adding to these as time goes by or as inspiration hits but as I have said I really want to get back to Burn because that has been very neglected.
Thanks to everyone who is reading and commenting. As always I own nothing.
"When I was eight, Daddy took me to the winter carnival just before Christmas. It was so cold, so very cold. It even snowed a little."
She sits between his legs, back pressed to his chest. They're alone again, dinner's done, everyone's inside playing an old battered game of Monopoly that Carl found earlier in the week. Everyone except them. He doesn't know if anyone will notice, he doesn't much care if they do.
They still do this. Sit together in front of the fire and talk into the night, watching the shadows grow longer as their hair and clothes become smokier. As together they bare more of their souls much like the way they've now slowly - so very slowly - started to bare more of their bodies.
It's different though. Different from before, different from when he vowed to protect her and her red dress from all the walkers in the world. Different because now she presses against him, holds his hands and he kisses her skin, whichever inch is closest to his lips.
"So cold," she says again.
"Maggie shove snow down your jeans?" he asks.
She shakes her head and her hair touches his mouth, fine gossamer strands sticking to his lips. He doesn't wipe them away.
"No, Maggie didn't come with. Was just me and my dad. I was sad and he wanted to give me a treat," her voice still has that lilt in it, the one she gets when she talks about her father. The one that tells him how much she still hurts.
His arm tightens slightly on her waist and she leans back into him as he pushes the strap of her purple vest off her shoulder to press a kiss to her skin.
"Why were you sad?" he asks.
She snorts.
"Because Alan Turner told me he liked Penny Morris more than he liked me because she was prettier."
He grins against her shoulder.
"Dumbass," he whispers.
Even though he can't see it, he knows she is smiling.
"No, he was right. Penny Morris was much prettier than me," she says.
"Blind dumbass," he says and she chuckles softly, covering his hand on her belly with her own and twining her fingers through his.
"So Daddy decided to take me out for a treat to make me feel better," she continues. "We rode on the Ferris wheel and then we drank hot chocolate and ate hot cinnamon rolls. Daddy bought me a stuffed dolphin."
He grins at the thought of little Beth Greene, face stained sticky, pink beanie covering her unruly hair while she prances around with a stuffed dolphin. Her little eight-year-old heart breaking over a snotty-nosed boy who's all knobbly knees and missing teeth.
"Just me and Daddy. It was just a day for the two of us you know?" She twists in his arms to look at him. It's that look Beth gets when she really wants him to understand something, when she really needs to know that he understands all of what she's saying. That this isn't just a story about a stuffed dolphin and marshmallow hot chocolate.
He nods slowly, hoping that he does get it. He thinks he does, he thinks he gets Beth Greene on the same visceral level she gets him. In that almost savage place where words aren't needed and communication is just another form of touch or movement. He thinks he gets it. But sometimes he has to remind himself that even in this world, this new and primal world people need words, words to understand. Even people like him and Beth.
He bows his head and kisses her shoulder again and she watches closely as he does. Closely, like she's testing him.
He thinks she'll pull the strap of the tank top back up but she doesn't and settles back against him.
"I got lost that day," she says. "They had a Santa and kids could sit in his lap and tell him what they wanted for Christmas."
"What did you want for Christmas?" he interrupts, fingers skimming her shoulder.
"Alan Turner," she answers and he snorts.
"That loser?" he asks, shaking his head. "Dunno what you saw in him Beth."
She giggles and he kisses her neck again, breathing deeply, breathing until he can smell the earthy scent of her under her soap. The musk of her. The Beth of her.
"I saw Santa later out of his costume and with his white hair and his beard I thought he was Daddy," she continues. "So I followed him by accident, couldn't understand why he was walking fast, why he didn't stop to look at me or talk to me. Daddy searched for me for hours and hours, called the police even. He was frantic."
He nods even though "frantic" isn't the right word. Bezerk. Devastated. Destroyed. Annihilated. Yeah, those ain't right either. There ain't a word for how you feel when you lose Beth Greene. Language wasn't cruel enough to come up with one.
He knows because he knows what it's like. He knows what it's like to look for her and not find her. The thought alone chills him and he wraps both arms around her waist and pulls her close, not caring that she can likely feel him, hard, against her back.
"How'd he find you?" he asks, almost scared to hear her answer.
Did he tear the world apart? Did he kill and maim? Did he sell his soul? Did he break himself? Did he sacrifice himself and everything he loves? Did he beg and plead? Did he steal and destroy? Is that the only way to get Beth Greene back? Seems like small sacrifices. Seems too easy. Seems effortless.
She laughs.
"Santa eventually realised there was a strange little girl following him and brought me to the information desk. Waited there with me the whole time until Daddy arrived. Told him 'Merry Christmas' as he handed me over like I was a gift or something."
A gift or something.
No something Beth, he wants to say. No something. A gift. The best fucking gift anyone can ever get.
"Daddy always said that Santa gave me to him for Christmas that year," she chuckles softly, no idea the effect her words have had on him. "Maggie always said that just because Daddy had been naughty shouldn't mean the rest of them needed to suffer."
He snorts into her hair and kisses her neck again, watching her skin turn to gooseflesh under his mouth as she runs her fingers over his forearms gripping tightly around her waist.
She's silent as she rests against him and he knows it's one of those times that he should say something, but he doesn't know what and he wishes she'd just keep on talking, keep on singing, keep on running her fingers across his skin, across his ink, his scars.
He remembers that day back at the cabin shouting at her, screaming in her pretty face that he never got anything from Santa Claus. He hadn't. Certainly nothing like Hershel got that day at the fucking winter carnival. Christmas was just like any other day in the Dixon trailer. His Ma crying and smoking cigarettes in the kitchen, face smudged black with mascara and bruises. His old man snoring on the couch, a half empty bottle of something just about tipping over in his hands, a skin magazine spread out across his chest. There was no food in the fridge, never was. Sometimes Merle was home at Christmas if he wasn't in juvie and he'd take Daryl out into the woods to the creek and they'd hunt squirrels and cottontails and roast them over a fire in an insane parody of a family lunch. Other times he'd go hungry or steal some scraps from the neighbours when they threw their leftovers out. Mrs Ellis caught him the one year, his hand in her dustbin, remnants of some too-sweet chocolate pudding on his face. She put a plate out on the back step for him that he was too nervous to take until it was cold with congealed gravy. He wolfed it down anyway, thankful. And like an animal, a cat trying to please its master, he'd left the carcass of the next cottontail he shot on her step as a thank you.
She never invited him inside. It was better that way. You don't let a feral cat into your home. You might feed it and value it because it kills the rats in your barn, but bring it inside and it'll claw and scratch you, ruin your furniture and piss in the corners.
Unless you're Beth that is. Unless you're so fucking good and so fucking pure that even that bad-tempered stray that shreds your arms and legs with scratches, that bites you even as you're feeding it, seems worthwhile, seems worth taming. Seems worth keeping around and loving.
He doesn't blame Mrs Ellis. She did what she could. And at the time, to a eleven-year-old boy whose back still stung from the thwack of a leather belt, whose wounds still bled from the bite of the buckle, it was enough.
He sighs silently. Another story he has, another memory he can't share, another part of him he can't show. It's times like this that get him down, times like this that he questions what the holy fuck he's doing with Beth Greene. What the fuck she's doing with him and what she thinks he can offer her. Because he sure as shit has nothing.
Not even a story.
"Sorry," she says all of a sudden.
"What for?" he asks bowing his head to her shoulder again and breathing in her sweet scent, kissing the small dusting of freckles there that he can barely make out in the long shadows. He knows they're there though. Same way he knows there's a small beauty mark on the rise of her right breast, a light birthmark in the small of her back. He wonders if he'll ever get the chance to uncover more of her marks, if he'll ever truly show her his. He hasn't let his mind go there, not often at least. It's tough. Tough with her and her eyes and her hair and her skin. Tough with the way she touches him sometimes, the way she presses against him when they're alone. She ain't oblivious, she can't be. Beth ain't that dumb and she ain't that inexperienced either. In some ways he thinks she's more experienced than him.
Some ways.
Say what you like. Beth Greene is an old soul. He sees that in her eyes too. Clearer than day, clearer than her love for Maggie, for Judith, for Glenn. Dare he say for him?
No, no, he doesn't dare it. Except all the time, when he's thinking crazy thoughts and he does.
He kisses her again, finding the courage to let his mouth linger, journey from her neck across her shoulder and back again.
She shivers.
"Sorry, you didn't have good Christmases."
He could let that sink, he could let himself travel further down the rabbit hole into the misery that his memories hold for him. But not now, not now when he's got her and she's in his arms and letting him put his mouth on her. Although fuck knows why she's allowing that. Fuck knows why she ever allowed that.
"Was on the naughty list," he whispers, kissing her ear, trying to keep things light.
She chuckles. "Yeah, Santa knows where it's at."
He grins into her hair and she hooks her hand round his knee.
"Thing is," she says. "Even though it was scary, it still is one of my best memories. Me and Daddy, eating cotton candy and playing on the rides. Daddy holding my hand and telling me that Alan Turner was a fool."
"See," he says nuzzling her neck with the tip of his nose, liking the way her breath hitches and that small whimper she makes. "What did I tell you about that Alan Turner? Knew he was bad news."
He feels her laugh even though he can't hear it.
She takes his hands on her waist and he can't figure out if she's trying to get him to grip harder or if she's trying to prise his hands into her own. He loosens his fingers. Let her do what she wants, he doesn't mind either way but she just seems to need him to flatten his hands on her belly, not hold them balled into fists like he was when he thought about losing her.
He likes it like this, the feeling of her skin through the thin strappy shirt she's wearing, the way it's torture that his hands aren't against her flesh.
He holds her, fingers rubbing patterns into her body, the drag of his thumbs snagging on the thin material of her shirt, the smell of her hair as it tickles his nose, his mouth. The way she's flush against him and if he moved his hands up he'd be cupping her breasts.
He doesn't want to think of what would happen then, because in his head, she's already under him and he's bearing down on her like a wild animal taking its mate. Marking her.
He wonders what she would think - these visions he has where he's pawing her, where she's exposed to him, where he's kissing her thighs, her hips...
"Don't you have any like that?" she asks suddenly and his attention snaps back to her. But not before he feels himself twitch against her back. He knows she feels it too. He knows by the small gasp she lets out, the way she only pretends the shift against him, closer to him is a coincidence. By the way every inch of skin on her body is pebbled. By the smell of her. The new musk of her.
"Like what?" he asks, husky, deep, low.
She leans further into his chest, stretching her legs out in front of her and the movement gives him the chance to slide his hands over her ribs until he can feel the undersides her breasts against his index fingers.
She swallows. "A memory, you know? One that maybe started out shitty and then turned out good? Or one that was good and then wasn't so good but you still think about it?"
He sighs. As much as he loves this, being here with her, his mind relaxed enough not to get in the way of his hands and mouth, this is always the part he hates. The part where she wants to find out more and he wants to tell her more. Where he wants to make her laugh, wants to lie to both of them about his childhood. He won't though. Lying to Beth Greene goes against some cosmic law, goes against everything he is. Still he wants her to see him as normal. Unscarred. As someone who she can hide her secrets and fears in.
But he can't because there are too many beatings hiding the good memories, too many nights cold and hungry and angry listening to his parents rock the trailer with their screams and then later listening to them rock it again, the sound of bed springs a chorus as they fucked the day away.
That ain't no story for someone like Beth. Ain't no story she wants to hear. Seems wrong to bring it into this space, wrong to let it live between them, wrong to let anything his old man ever did near her.
He looks down at his hands, flat on her ribs, index fingers so close to her breasts that he imagines he can feel their softness, their heat.
Yeah, he thinks, that too.
All he'd have to do is stroke up, a mere millimetre, maybe not even that much.
His hands on her breasts. Dirty hands, Dixon hands.
He slides his palms back down to rest against her waist. Better. Decent. He should probably take them off her altogether but he can't. Even though he should.
Sometimes he imagines that it isn't easy, that it shouldn't be this easy sitting here with her like this. Shouldn't want to share this much, shouldn't feel so calm despite the red, lust-tinged thoughts in his head. Secrets his body is more than happy to betray over and over again.
But Beth makes it easy.
Always has with the way she invades his space, the way she pulls him out of himself when she knows he needs it and leaves him be when she knows he doesn't. The way she seems to know his moods, his dramas, his rage and his tenderness.
Lately, he's been forgetting himself around her. Sometimes he's already halfway across a room, reaching out to pull her into his arms and lay his lips against hers before he remembers that no one else knows.
Even though he knows they do.
They all do.
Even if no one is willing to say anything yet.
He doesn't care.
He ain't gonna walk around like Beth is some kind of dirty little secret he's ashamed of. He ain't. Because when he looks into her eyes, when he sees how fiercely she loves him - yes, he'll use that word to describe her feelings, he's not ready yet to use it for his own - he knows he ain't ever had anything as pure or as good in his whole life and that he ain't ever going to have it again.
She makes it easy, she makes him fall into it, into them. Makes it all seem so logical, so natural. Like she fills all the holes he has inside him, how she fixes the broken pieces and smooths the rough edges and somehow - he still doesn't know how - he does the same for her.
Yeah, he's going to need to talk to her about that because it sure as shit doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. This idea that she could want him. Not just need him, but want him. It's insane. But then again, they're both insane and he's ok with that.
The world doesn't make sense, so there ain't no reason on earth why he should either.
"Daryl?" she presses, bringing his hand to her lips and kissing each fingertip before putting it back on her, a little higher than it was before.
His kisses her earlobe, biting down a little, just enough to pinch and her whole body erupts into gooseflesh again, this time so fervid he can feel the tiny bumps through her shirt.
He smirks a little into the darkness.
Her voice is low when she speaks.
"Ain't going to distract me that easily Mr Dixon."
Mr Dixon.
Yeah, that gets him every time.
He kisses her shoulder again, letting his beard tickle her, before his tongue darts out to taste the sweat, the salt of her skin. She makes that sound again. The whimper.
Yeah, that gets him every time too.
She doesn't object when he tugs the purple strap off her other shoulder and starts kissing the skin there. Soft, slow, but firm, letting his teeth graze her flesh as he imagines breaking it one day. Marking her like she's some kind of territory he's conquered. He knows that's ridiculous. Knows it's primal and that the human race is supposed to have evolved past this caveman thinking, but he can't help it, even though he knows the truth of it is she's marked him. Marked him already, way more than his shitty childhood ever had. She marked him that day outside the cabin, marked him with her love, her kindness, her goodness. He knows that when - if, he tells himself, if - the day comes that they consummate this thing between them, even that can't mark him like she did that day. It may come close but it'll never be as final, as irrevocable as her arms wrapped around him while he gave her everything that he was for safe-keeping.
And she has kept him safe.
No one has ever kept him that safe. No one ever will.
Maybe one day he can do the same for her. Do a better job of it than he did before.
She turns in his arms then, her shoulder slipping out from under his tongue, so that she's kneeling between his legs, facing him.
She strokes his hair away from his eyes, gentle hands across his forehead and he closes his eyes as she touches her lips to his. He's not wary any more as he grips her neck and holds her there, his tongue brushing wetly against hers, tasting the shot of cheap gin they'd all had with dinner and the hint of the tinned pears they'd shared.
God, he loves this. He can't help himself, can't even see straight when she kisses him, can't speak when her hands are on him. It feels like being high all the time. She is that fucking drug addiction he was so worried about. She probably stands as much chance of killing him too.
Her hands wrestle their way into his shirt, dancing across his stomach, his ribs, moving up to rest on his chest as his hand digs into her waist, hard again. No matter how soft and gentle he tries to be when his hand finds that dip, the curve before the shameless flare of her hips, his mind turns red and his entire body aches for her.
He wants to sweep her up, sweep her up like he did once before. Wants to take her to his room. Drop her on the bed so that she bounces a little before he climbs in with her. Wants to uncover her piece by beautiful piece until he has all of her, laid bare to him, open to him. Wants to put his mouth on her waist, her hips, her breasts.
Dixon mouth.
The thought stills him and his grip goes slack on her as she pulls away, confused. There's a mad moment when he thinks she'll leave even though she's never done that. Never left him hanging. Passive aggression ain't Beth's way. Never has been. She ain't prone to tantrums and outbursts either. She's worse, always wants to talk shit through, always needling, always hitting him with her insight, with the way she sees right through him no matter how hard he tries to hide it.
"You ain't them you know," she whispers.
There she goes, Goddamned woman reading his mind. Again.
"Stay who you are," he says huskily.
"Yeah," she answers, voice also thick, gravelly. "Not who you were."
He kisses her again, gently, chastely. Not ready yet to go back to that fiery passion. Not ready to test how far away he's pushed his past.
Instead he toys with her hair, touches her cheek, her nose, her chin. She's beautiful in the firelight, eyes bright, hair tinged an orange gold, shadows playing on her skin and suddenly he has his memory.
His best memory, the only one he owns, the only one he'll lay claim to, the only one he'll ever want and the one he holds onto every day of his life.
The one he can't tell her.
Because he can't tell her that watching her at that damned piano, that eating that white trash dinner of pigs feet and peanut butter is the best damn memory he has.
She'll think he's lying. That he's being a sap. He is, but he isn't.
You know.
It's true.
"Tell me," she whispers.
You in the candlelight, you holding my hand, you in my arms, you singing, you and those big blue eyes.
You Beth, You.
He thinks he said the last part aloud.
He did.
She's looking at him. She doesn't look like she thinks he's lying.
"Oh," she says.
Confident now he pulls her to him. Confident that he has her, that he found her where little Alan Turner didn't. Confident that just like Santa gave her to her father, her father in turn trusts him with her. Him. Daryl Dixon.
He grips her hips again as he fixes his mouth to hers, as she turns to silk under his hands.
Yes, Beth. Oh.