They had left the hay barn soon after Daryl had moved the bodies outside, after Beth had finished wrapping Jocelyn up as delicately as she could. Moving quietly to gather up their belongings and head back in to the snow, they had only spoken for Daryl to say they would get a car from the farm to work, head out from there. He had been to the local town, knew of a few places they could maybe hunker down in for the rest of Winter. She had nodded, gloved hands pulling on her backpack straps and her eyes on the snow. She was sick of this shit.

Beyond sick.

The days were slowly getting longer and it was probably the new year, but that meant less to Beth than it ever had before. Every day was just another day now. Another day to be cold, to scavenge for food, to fight just to breathe, to wonder if it's the day a Walker got you, or the cold, or hunger, or a man simply wanting what you had.

They had made it to the farm, Daryl had ushered her in to the little cottage for a final scavenge whilst he sorted out the car. He had been lying to her, he still was, about the car, but when he had called her name, it was ready, the engine running. They had driven slowly, and silently, Beth's focus on the white passing by. For the first time in months, the silence that had been in that car had felt mildly uncomfortable. Things had improved in the few week's since. Time had blurred, once again, but Beth reckoned it was getting closer to February now. It would be spring soon enough.

"Oh, wow!" she suddenly gasped.

"Huh?" Daryl grunted from his position on the window seat. They had found a small block of apartments, only four floors high and four apartments on each floor. First they had cleared the ground floor of Walkers, quickly securing an apartment on the second floor before heading back to the first four apartments and scavenging them for everything they could ever potentially use. Due to the snow, Daryl reckoned they were safe from the Walkers if they were high enough up and did not make too much noise. It being just the two of them, there was no reason for a high amount of noise and as long as they could keep warm enough huddled in a bed together with one hundred and one blankets, food would be the only limiting factor. The ground floor doors and windows had all been secured, a few by Daryl himself, and then they had started working through the remaining seven apartments. In the end, there had only been a small handful of Walkers to dispose of. Daryl had figured it was because most people had left their homes even if the little town was however out of the way. The Walkers they had needed to kill and dispose had all been either elderly or a family of four from one of the third-floor apartments.

There had been blood everywhere in that apartment, neither had said anything, but Beth thought it looked like one of the family had turned and then took the other three with them.

They were still camped out in the second-floor apartment and, after the few weeks they had been there, it really felt like home to Beth. But she had lost the last two places she truly considered home and it worried her sometimes enough to keep her awake at night that this would just be another home to lose and that attachments were for the weak. Then she would think about her attachments to her family and to Daryl in particular. She would find herself staring at him in the dim moonlight at night, her mind filled with thoughts of losing everything and how much it would hurt her.

"It's warmin' up, right? Figure we're mid-January already."

"Nearer February."

"Judith'll be one soon, it's almost spring."

He grunted, checking his arrows as she sat on the lumpy couch across for him. They spent their time awake in the living rooms, making a conscious distinction between daytime and when they slept in the smallest bedroom, trying to conserve heat. Sometimes they did spend extra time in bed, just because it was too cold to brave the other rooms, to venture out from the blankets. It was rare that her daddy ever let her have the weekend to laze about in bed, but sometimes she felt like her and Daryl snuggling in bed just to stay warm was like a lazy Sunday morning.

"Remember this time last year?" she asked wistfully. "Hadn't even found the prison. Lori was still…" She sighed sadly. Life was measured by death now. "It was safe, right? Could'a' been home for longer, yeah?" The answer was obvious and she felt so pathetic asking it, she was glad when he did not answer her, did not belittle her, call her out and make her feel like a little girl. Not that she had felt like that since the moonshine shack, the night that things had changed.

Beth still wondered sometimes if that had been the first time he had ever really opened up, maybe to anyone. Maybe she was the first person to seem him vulnerable, to see him cry.

"We survived that winter though," she continued across the silence, suddenly feeling an odd combination of melancholia and home sickness. She missed the prison, the farm, her mama and Shawn, Daddy and Lori. She wanted to see Maggie and Judith again. She wanted to go out and find them now, damn the snow that was still thinly laid outside. With a frustrated growl Beth stood up angrily and Daryl finally looked over.

"Ya gonna cry, Greene?"

"Bite me, Dixon," she retorted. Since the Wolves and leaving Harrison's farm, things had been quieter than normal and it was all on Beth. Daryl was his usual silent self, not trying to push or pull her, but she felt his eyes linger on her in the silence and knew that he was concerned. Everything felt so hard and pointless, pathetic and meaningless. She knew it was all on her. Though, even with his concerned glances, Daryl was probably enjoying the silence. "Gonna check another apartment."

Neither of them said anything else as she left their place, armed and her knife in her hand just in case, because neither of them were complacent. Neither of them would ever become complacent again. Not after the farm. Not after the prison and certainly not after the funeral home that ended up with her in Grady. No matter that the building was clear and that, in the silent world that now existed, it would be hard to miss the sounds of a Walker breaking in to the place, there was always the possibility of something.

So, alone, but ready, Beth made her way to one of the other apartments on the same level that they had already checked over. They checked all of the rooms for supplies – the essentials, but they had not picked through the twelve other apartments of life for games or books, fun and frivolous items that were simply going to help Beth at least pass her time with only Daryl for company.

Not that she minded his company one bit, but at the end of the world, trapped in a frozen building with a long journey still ahead of them, having only him to talk to had become a bit of a frustration for her. Maybe she would find a game that she could convince him to play, or find a book that piqued her interest and she could waste away a cold day or two. She was craving the woods and nature, she knew that Daryl was suffering from some sort of cabin fever, but masking it for her.

Rifling through a pile of magazines, fingers brushing over the spines of books, Beth heard the door push open slightly and she sighed in feigned annoyance at Daryl. "I'm fine on my own."

He had told her a few nights earlier, under the cover of dark, her head on his chest, that she worried him. She had asked why and his fingers had slid over the healed slit on her wrist. Something in her chest had hurt, throbbed in pain at his lack of words, at her own, and at how well he knew her. It was true that sometimes she did feel like giving up, like curling up in a ball to never wake up again. But she never felt like she had, when she had not wanted to live, before she had chosen to stay and live.

"'n' I told ya – I ain't leavin' ya. Ever. Okay?" she said and looked over at the door, except it was not Daryl that she saw standing in the doorway. Instead Beth saw a rather large, dark man, glasses on his face and long knotted hair and he almost filled the door. He had a gun, in a holster and a knife out in his hands. Beth's fingers flickered over her own knife, still firmly in her hand and her eyes narrowed as the man's knife lowered slightly.

"It's just for protection," he said. "From the dead."

"Yeah, well, I met too many people now who're worse than the dead."

"Must be hard."

It was. It was so hard for her that Beth wondered if all her faith was gone.

"I mean, living out here, just you and…" He left the question hanging, waiting for her to answer but she did not.

"'n' me," Daryl's gruff voice said from behind the guy, an arrow pressed to his skull.

"Whoa!" the stranger said with his hands up in defence. "I'm no threat. I'm just scavenging."

"This place is ours. Move along," Daryl growled.

"Okay. Okay, I can do that. Got a friend here, she's upstairs."

"She won't find nothing," Beth answered, wondering if it truly were just the two of them.

"Yep, fine, we can do that. Just… just let me wait for her or go find her. We'll leave you be, don't want any trouble. We have people waiting for us back home."

"Home?" Beth asked.

"Yeah," he nodded. "A few of us, safe. We still need to make runs. That's what I do. We take people in sometimes."

"Sounds familiar," Beth smiled lightly, almost wistfully. "We used-"

"Girl!" Daryl growled, at her this time. "Ya got this?" he asked, pushing the man further in to the apartment and down on to a chair. "Do I need to tie him?"

"No," she sighed, holding her own knife firmly in one hand and taking the stranger's from him whilst Daryl removed his gun and shoved it in to his own waist band.

"I'll go find ya friend. Best only be the one," Daryl grumbled as he left the apartment, leaving the door open slightly so Beth could hear him from outside. It pained Beth to see him so distrustful, it pained her less so that she was so distrustful. She hated herself when she needed to hold a weapon on a man when all he had done was walk in to a room where she was. This man and his friend might not be any threat whatsoever.

She turned to the guy. "You really think where you guys got is safe? Everyone always ends up running." Part of her was asking in doubt that he could have somewhere whilst part of her wanted to hope that it was true and that, maybe, she and Daryl could be safe there, too.

"No. Not really. We got overrun with the dead a while back, but we fought back. It's better than being out here, living so wild. We still lose people, but we find them, too. Take in good people."

"Good people," she almost laughed. "I used to believe in them."

"Are you a good person?" he asked and she eyed him as if he were testing her like Rick and the others used to have questions to ask newcomers. She thought of the two men Daryl had called wolves, that Daryl had killed because he had to and so that she did not.

"Yeah, I am," she finally answered with reluctance, putting down the knives to thumb through a book. "But this world ain't that simple anymore."

"We are. My people, the ones I live with. We'll fight to protect our own, but we don't hurt anyone without reason. We're all good people. A family now."

Just as Beth was starting to wonder if it really could be true, the door swung open wildly and loud. "Let him go!" the woman demanded, coming straight up to Beth, a gun directed at the blonde.

Beth was too far from her knives to be able to reach them in time and her mind went blank and red from anger when she saw the brunette standing in front of her, a gun trained on her, as memories from long ago flooded her. Instead, she reached for the nearest weapon she could – a small pair of scissors.

"Heath, you okay?" the brunette demanded.

"I know you," Beth declared, standing up tall and straight. "I get it now," she snarled, bringing the scissors up to the brunette's throat. "I get it."