A/N: I am so excited that people seem to like this story (can't believe I'm only 3 chapters in and already have 46 followers! Yayyyy!) I had a hard time with this chapter… so please let me know what you think.

Companion song: "Dig" by Incubus

Disclaimer: I do not own or have any rights to the characters/plot of TWD series. I am just a fan exploring the marvelous, macabre world Robert Kirkman created.

/

Chapter 4: Confessions

Beth stopped. Her stomach was fluttering at the idea of leaving Georgia. Something was missing. Someone should be there with her, crossing the state line with her. A sense of emptiness engulfed her. It was the same horrible feeling she got in her nightmares when that angel wasn't there to lead her through the forest.

She desperately wished she could remember this person she was missing; this person who made her heart ache.

Kyle had paused, looking at her like she was a wounded kitten.

"What does it feel like to miss someone?" she asked.

He sighed deeply and scratched the back of his neck.

"It hurts every bone, every inch of your body. It feels like all your cells are trying to escape from you, they're searching for the other person. Each second they are not there tears away a layer of you, like an onion, and you think that soon there won't be any more layers to peel away… but that's not true… somehow it's endless."

His face was distraught and distant; Beth knew that he was thinking of his family. She nodded in understanding at his explanation, and felt a jolt of jealousy for her companion. He had the memories of the good times with his wife to relive but Beth just felt a sense of emptiness. There was nothing she could do about this, to fill this void, so she shook her head to clear it before joining him in South Carolina.

After some time passed, in silence for once, they came across a town and decided to stop for the night, maybe longer if they didn't find any water. They cleared a CVS and found three bottles of water that had rolled under a shelf, a few cans of tuna and some stale crackers in the food section. There were some dark clouds rolling in from the west so they were hopeful that it would rain soon, maybe even tonight. They set up tarps on the roof to capture any rainwater before going back inside to search the store.

Beth was willing to bet that people had come in here and headed straight for the pharmacy, which was emptied, and thus had missed a lot of the other useful items that were left scattered through the building. There was an entire section of makeup and Beth stared at everything in disbelief. She couldn't even remember what all these items did.

Kyle saw her gaping at the shelves and laughed, "That's the exact same face I always had when my wife asked me to pick something up for her!"

A few minutes later, Kyle had grabbed up a blue box from the floor of another aisle, the only box of this kind because the shelves in this aisle had been mostly emptied. He sheepishly handed Beth the box with an awkward shrug.

"Might need these," he mumbled as he pushed the box into her hands.

She couldn't read the box, of course.

"What is this?" she asked, wishing she could read or remember what these items were that made her normally outgoing comrade seem so timid.

"Uh… er… well," he stammered.

"Shit. I was never supposed to have this conversation, Lisa was supposed to handle this," he muttered to himself almost.

He finally spit out, "They are tampons. Guess you don't really remember them, maybe you will when the time comes. I certainly hope so. I sure as hell can't be doing any type of demonstration! Use them for your 'lady's vacation' or whatever. Don't know how old you are but I'm sure your parents would have given you 'the talk' already about this and boys and pregnancies. I guess I could answer questions if you have them now that you can't remember that talk. Don't really know how that conversation goes, didn't expect to have it with Ashley for another 10 years…"

Beth actually laughed at his ramblings, he soon joined in and their laughter echoed through the small store.

"I will just let you know if I have any questions, although it's not really a high priority right now. Water, food and not dying are basically the only things on my to-do list," she said and Kyle looked visibly relieved at being let off the hook from having 'the talk.'

The sun had already set and storm clouds covered the stars and moon, it had become too dark to see her hand in front of her face. So they shared a can of tuna and a can of green beans in the dark before settling into their new sleeping bags.

Beth's dreams that night were distorted.

She watched Kyle age quickly before her eyes as they walked and talked on the road. He wore suspenders; his beard grew out and went white; his hair grew longer and grayer until it rested in a small ponytail at the nape of his neck; he lost his leg and began walking on crutches; his facial features morphed until it didn't even look like Kyle anymore. Kyle McGinley was the only person in the entire world that she knew, but something about the old man was comforting to her.

By the time the sun came up, barely visible through the cloud layer, they had already resumed their search of the store. Kyle had found a few tubes of chapstick that had rolled under an overturned shelf, and passed a couple to Beth. She stared at him with a questioning look in her eyes.

"Trust me, that'll be as good as gold when it's winter, you're dehydrated and your lips are more cracked more often than a plumber's butt," he laughed at his own joke, another one that Beth didn't understand, and he pushed the little tubes into her hand.

There were a lot of useless items: boxes of hair coloring, endless magazines, and a set of metal crutches. She paused at the crutches, remembering the old man in her dream the night before. Maybe crutches were useful, or would be one day when Kyle grew old, but she knew it was impractical to carry them on the road. She put numerous paper cards in a pile to use as kindling later that night. Beth found a few small boxes of crayons, she threw them in the bottom of her bag but she didn't know what she would use them for yet.

Kyle shouted from across the store.

Suddenly, Beth couldn't find her voice to respond.

Too many things were going on in her mind, it seemed to short circuit and she lost her ability to talk again.

But she was still able to move.

So she moved quickly.

She hiked the pack up on her shoulders—unsure if they would need to leave immediately—and ran through the aisles trying to pinpoint where Kyle was. When she found him he was crouched over on the floor. She glanced around but there was no sign of a struggle, no rotters, nothing. Then he turned around and there was a look of glee on his face.

He held up a pack of red playing cards.

"Hell yeah! Finally found something good to pass the time, can't believe I didn't find any in the houses over the past two weeks!" His voice faltered when he saw her face and her raised knife. "What're you doing there, killer?"

"Kyle, I thought you were hurt! Don't shout like that you idiot," her words were accusing but her face was relieved and her tone told him that she was not really calling him an idiot.

"Sorry, kiddo! I didn't mean to worry you. Why don't you sit down so I can teach you how to play some card games! Can't really go anywhere today anyway since we're waiting on the storm, might as well finally do something fun," he conceded as he glanced out the windows that lined the top foot of the store.

It had started raining a while ago. Even though she knew it was only mid-morning, the sky was dark. The wind was blowing so hard that she thought the tarp might have blown off the roof.

"Let's check the tarp first, then we can play… on one condition," she warned.

"What?" Kyle looked suspicious; he didn't know what the condition would be.

"Don't call me kiddo."

He snickered, "Deal."

They checked their tarp on the roof; it was still secure and slowly filling with water. They filled the empty bottles with the water that had already accumulated. Kyle ran back to the stairwell to get out of the rain before he got drenched.

Instead of joining him, Beth stood in the rain. She took off her bloodstained top shirt, leaving her dark blue tank top on, and left it hanging to soak in the rain. She pulled out her ponytail, brushed out her long hair with her fingers and let the water draw the dirt out of her blonde tresses. After just a few minutes in the storm she felt cleaner and more refreshed than she could ever remember. Although, her memory only spanned back a couple weeks so this wasn't saying much.

While the sky looked tormented and the trees shook violently with the wind, the rest of the world seemed peaceful. She couldn't see any rotters, couldn't hear growling and it was too hard to even attempt to see or hear anything through the downpour. It probably should have scared her, being so blind to any approaching dangers. However, it was freeing… there was no point in worrying since she had no power to control anything. It was then that she learned something else about herself: she loved the rain.

Finally, she went back inside, dripping on the floor as she went.

What she couldn't see through the rain was the stranger watching her. In the bank across the street, shielded by the shadows, a man stood observing her private, peaceful moment in the rain.

/

Kyle was shuffling the cards in the back of the store, sitting with two open cans of food and their fresh water bottles, when she came down the stairs soaking wet.

He had never seen her with her hair down or with such a large smile on her face, it caused deep laugh lines in her cheeks and he immediately grinned too. This true smile of hers was rare but infectious. He couldn't bring it about with his jokes, which only ever earned him small smirks or light laughs.

Searching through his pack, he found the small, brown blanket he had grabbed from a house last week. He thought it could double for warmth and possibly adequate camouflage in a pinch. He tossed it to her.

"Dry off, kid. Didn't your mom ever tell you that's how you catch a cold?"

The smile vanished from her face instantaneously.

And he knew he had messed up. Of course her mother probably had told her this, but Beth couldn't even remember what color her mother's hair was, much less the lectures she had given.

"Sorry Beth, I didn't think. It's just an expression. It popped right out of my mouth, you know this thing doesn't have a filter," he sputtered, indicating his big mouth.

The drenched blonde put on one of those small, forgiving grins as she shrugged, taking the blanket and patting her hair off. He watched as she sat down cross-legged in front of him and motioned towards the cards.

"What are we playin'?" she asked flatly.

After a second of inspecting her face to make sure she was okay, he dealt them each 5 cards and started explaining how to play poker. They ended up sitting there for hours as the storm raged on outside. Beth was pretty damn good, mostly because he was terrible at lying so it was easy for her to call his bluffs. This used to be one of Lisa's favorite things, because she always knew if he wasn't being truthful like when he would "forget" to mow the lawn or would go out to happy hour with his buddies but tell her he was working late.

He was building up the nerve to tell Beth the truth about the hospital and about her family… at least he was going to tell her everything that he knew.

How do I start a conversation like that? he wondered. 'Oh by the way, everything we've told you since you woke up has been a lie.'

The conversation did not go well in his head.

But he knew that she deserved the truth, even if sucked.

"Beth, I have to talk to you about something…"

She looked at him expectantly. In that moment he knew that she had been waiting for this conversation.

She already knew the doctor lied… plus she could probably tell that I've been steeling myself for this talk for hours.

This knowledge gave him the strength to push into the conversation.

"We lied, the doc and I. We don't have a friend who lives in Virginia…" he paused here and it felt like an eternity to get out the second half of the sentence. "… you are the one with a friend in Virginia."

There was a tiny gasp of air as she processed this news.

"Who is it? How do you know them?"

"His name is Noah and it's a long story. It's not a good story though… are you sure you want to hear it?" he asked tentatively, unsure how much new information she would be able to handle.

She nodded, her face was hard and her eyes were determinately focused on him as if she was afraid to blink and miss something.

"Well, first you should know about Grady Memorial Hospital, it was a really messed up place. It started out good, they saved people from the rotters, took them in and gave them medical treatment and in return the patients stayed and helped out. But as the world went from bad to worse, the hospital changed too. The people got ruthless; they would do anything to survive even if it meant killing people or leaving them behind... The leader was this woman named Dawn Lerner."

The cards they had been playing with were all but forgotten, lying scattered on the floor between them.

"I suppose it's hard to say if she was really bad or good, I think that line has gotten a little blurred now… maybe she was a good person who did bad things. I don't know." Kyle's honey brown eyes turned almost black when he continued, "We stopped taking strong people in, she was afraid they would take over or we would use resources on them and then they would just take off without 'repaying' the hospital. So we only took in people who were deemed 'weak'—people would be too afraid or unable to leave the hospital, people that the officers could push around…and take advantage of…"

"It was terrible Beth… and I wanted to leave but I… I didn't. I was on my own for so long after I lost my family and I just didn't want to be alone again. So I stayed. Then we found you and the hospital changed again," he finally met her eyes.

He felt so ashamed to tell another living soul about the hospital, especially someone so innocent with no memories of the evil in the world. While he never actually partook in the violence against the wards, he never stopped it either. And somehow that wasn't any better. Kyle was worried he had let Beth down but when he looked at her, he didn't see any judgment or disappointment. She was just listening; she just wanted to hear what he had to say. It was unexpected but it was the push he needed to keep talking.

"We picked you up off the side of the road, a small girl, we thought you were weak. But you weren't alone… we had to lie and tell you that you weren't with anyone because Dawn was afraid that you would leave to find the guy you were with. I don't know who he was, didn't get a good look at him, but we saw him from the road cutting down rotters easier than if he was slicing through butter, we could tell that he was strong, way too strong. We couldn't take him—probably couldn't have even gotten him into the car with us. So we… we knocked you out and took you but we left him. He chased after the car until we finally lost him."

Beth's heart clenched involuntarily at Kyle's words. With her stomach in a knot she wondered who this mysterious, strong man was that she had been traveling with… the man that had tried to run on foot after a car to reach her, to save her. She wondered how long he ran and what he knew of her fate now. Did he think she was still out there? Did he believe her dead or was he still looking for her? She became suddenly sad, an unexpected longing rose up within her and she felt a tug, as if her body was trying to pull her towards this man that had been left on the side of the road.

Kyle, oblivious to Beth's inner turmoil, continued with his confession, "When you woke up at the hospital, Dawn tried to keep you docile but she couldn't. You helped Noah escape; I think you would have taken him all the way to Virginia on your own. Never seen such a good shot while someone was running, you took out at least half a dozen rotters without wasting a bullet!" he looked over at her with a smile. He decided not to mention Gorman, he didn't want to bring up the fact that he had assaulted her or that she had been instrumental in killing him. He didn't know the full story but it had been obvious that it was Beth who locked Gorman in the room with Joan and Kyle had known that dirty, pervert well enough to guess the reason why Beth had done it.

"But the other officers grabbed you before you got out and locked you back in the hospital. Eventually your group came for you, I don't know how many were in your group, when they showed up there was 3 big guys, another woman, and Noah. That's when things went wrong. I think you were trying to save everyone from Dawn and the assaults and the imprisonment… Dawn got greedy and wouldn't let Noah leave, so you stabbed her. She reacted and… she… she shot you." he ended abruptly, unsure what words could explain the horror of seeing someone shot at point-blank range just for trying to save her friend.

"But Doc was too scared to tell you, he was worried that if we told the truth you would be afraid of us and blame us and you'd run off on your own…" he confessed.

She sat in silence for a few moments absorbing the new information. The intermittent thunder booming and patter of rain from the storm outside was the only noise they could hear. Kyle stared at her trying to determine if she was mad at him or afraid of him or if she was going to cry or be flooded with memories. Instead she just nodded her head softly with a small smile on her face.

"Thanks for tellin' me Kyle. So my group was alive and they left with Noah? How do you know where they're goin'?" there was a spark in her eye, she looked happy to hear that her group had been alive and well. The blonde also looked determined, her face somehow serious even with the corners of her lips turned up.

"Yup, they were alive over a month ago… but I guess that's no guarantee that they're alive now. It's only a guess that they're taking Noah up to Virginia, because he talked to us a few times about his family living in a community with walls up there and that was where he said he would go whenever he earned his freedom from Grady. It was the only lead we had and we knew that Noah would help you whenever we got there. I don't know if they're still alive, or if they are really going there, it could just be a dead end," he didn't want to get her hopes up and didn't want her to try to run off on her own in case the town had been overrun.

She smiled even bigger though, it was a warm smile that made her eyes squint, and replied jovially, "It wouldn't kill you to have a little faith."

He had a moment of confusion. This was exactly what he would have expected his late wife, Lisa, to say. Some moments Beth seemed so young and naïve, like a daughter or little sister he needed to babysit, but other moments she was wise and charming, reminding him of his wife. Her faith—in humanity, in him even though he had lied, and in reuniting with her family—it all astonished Kyle. He was actually speechless as he stared at Beth, still slightly damp from the rain huddled in the blanket and smiling at him from her place on the floor.

How has a genuinely good person like her survived in this world? How can she still have faith after getting shot in the head? he wondered to himself.

His musings were broken by a loud crash from the front of the store.

"The doors!" Kyle shouted, jumping to his feet and grabbing his ice axe off the floor next to him.

Beth was already standing, machete in hand, as they ran from their card game to see what had gotten into their hideout.

/

A/N: Please don't hate me for the cliffhanger **runs and hides**

Next chapter is a DARYL CHAPTER! You excited? Because I am. Let me know if there is anything specific you want me to address in the chapter.

Thanks for reading, favoriting and following! It makes me happier than Michonne reuniting with her katana (well, maybe not happier, but equally happy).

I'm sorry if this chapter was slow, I really struggled with it but I felt it was necessary for Beth to finally hear about her past… please review to tell me what you thought of the end product.

Also, message me if you write any Bethyl fics! I am always looking for new ones to read. (: