A/N: Got it out in less than a week because I was too excited. Thanks for all the support/follows/favorites. Please leave reviews (good or bad, I love the feedback!)
Companion song: "All I want" by Kodaline
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.
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Chapter 5: Alone
He couldn't let go of her body. Their family evaded the walkers and piled into the cars, Daryl got in the fire engine with Glenn, Maggie, Michonne, Abe, Eugene and Rosita. Beth was cradled in his lap, still and silent.
Maggie was sobbing uncontrollably into Glenn's shoulder; he also seemed shocked but he was stroking Maggie's back consolingly. Michonne sat stoically on his left and kept glancing over at Daryl and Beth—he knew that the samurai was astute and she was observing his reaction. The three newcomers in the front seat occasionally spoke softly about where they were going or which route they should take to get out of the city but Daryl was lost in his thoughts, numb, so he didn't actually hear them.
He didn't care where they were going. He didn't care if they stumbled into a herd of walkers. He had lost all of his hope the moment Dawn's gun went off, the moment he saw the red spilling out over Beth's blonde hair.
Daryl had shot Dawn without thinking; it had been a reaction to seeing someone hurt Beth. Somehow, he thought he could take it back. Like if he just shot the cop it would reverse time and Beth would be okay.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that the world didn't work like that. He could hear his own voice talking to Beth on one of their last days together, "I don't think the good ones survive."
But knowing this, knowing that good people couldn't last in this world, had not prepared him for seeing her now.
Broken, bloodied and motionless.
The last time he held her in his arms like this, in the kitchen of the funeral home, she was laughing gleefully with her hands gripped around his neck. Remembering this made his heart clench so painfully that he would have fallen over if he were not already sitting down. He locked these memories away; he wouldn't let feelings overwhelm him in front of all these people. Beth had caused his defenses to crumble but now he needed to start putting his walls back up.
Daryl reached over, swept some of the hair off of her face and used the handkerchief in his back pocket to wipe away some of the blood on her throat. Her body was motionless but it was still Beth.
From his position, holding her small frame in his arms with her eyes closed softly, it almost looked like she was sleeping.
But he pushed this hopeful thought down into the deepest caverns of his mind too. Mentally adding all of his other happy memories of Beth that were now kindling for a fire of misery.
He tried to grasp the immense and incomprehensible truth… that she was gone.
She is gone.
She is gone.
No matter how many times he repeated it in his head, he couldn't believe it.
He would never see her smile again, never hear her sweet singing, never have her small porcelain fingers intertwine with his. Never again would she help him overcome his demons. Never again would she manage to say the exact words he needed to hear. Never again would she remind him that he was good… and in Daryl's mind, this was ironclad proof that he wasn't good. Because he hadn't been good enough to save her. Daryl had believed, for the smallest of moments, that he could be good enough to keep her, the essence of divine innocence, alive.
Beth's motionless body was proof that the good ones don't survive this world.
/
Sooner than he would have liked, the huge fire engine ran out of gas. The entire caravan stopped and there were no other cars around to siphon fuel from so they knew that they would all need to squish into the two remaining smaller cars until they found another working car. This meant there was no room for Beth. But Daryl couldn't leave her like this, with a gaping hole in her head, unburied on the side of the road. She deserved so much better, she deserved a white marble tombstone covered in daisies, deserved to have a proper Catholic service. He wished Bob or Hershel was there to stitch up the wound but Carol stepped forward and offered to do it before he even asked. They actually found a suture kit in the fire truck.
With careful, steady fingers Carol stitched the entry and exit wounds. Glenn had taken Maggie away—they were sitting on the side of the road about a quarter of a mile up. Most of the group was standing watch to make sure no walkers stumbled out of the forest. Everyone spoke in hushed voices and was avoiding his eyes. Daryl stayed in the cab with Carol and Beth, wanting to stay by her side for as long as possible. He wondered what happened to her hand, because it was in a cast, but he would never have the chance to ask her. Even though Daryl hated shows of affection and he knew Carol was watching, he reached over and held Beth's uninjured hand. But it didn't feel the same without her squeezing his hand in return and soon he placed her hand gently back down onto the seat next to her.
While Carol continued working Daryl took his knife off of his belt and slid the sheath, branded with a D, onto Beth's belt. It felt wrong to be undoing her belt but he couldn't leave her with nothing. It was stupid, but Daryl wanted to make sure she was protected. And in this world, you needed a weapon. He also left his full canteen of water.
Daryl liked the idea of someone in need, on the run, stumbling upon her and seeking sanctuary in the truck only to find a knife and clean water. It would be like Beth saved them. This was the best thing that Daryl could give her—an opportunity to save one more person like she had saved him.
Plus, he hated the idea of leaving her alone, so he hoped this small piece of himself he left behind with her would somehow atone for that.
Carol finished sewing and bandaged the back of Beth's head before patting his arm and getting out of the car. All of the other group members came over in pairs or on their own and said goodbye to Beth in their own way. He worried he might be intruding on their private moments with Beth but nobody said anything; after spending so much time on the road and living in close quarters of the prison they were used to having no privacy. Some, like Sasha, stayed completely silent. Others, like Noah, had tears running down their cheeks. Rick came over with Judith on his hip. Rick bent over and gave Beth a light kiss on the forehead, the side that was free of stitches. He whispered something in her ear that Daryl couldn't hear and the infant took the opportunity to tug on Beth's shirt. For all intents and purposes Beth had been Judith's mother since the day she was born—Beth fed her, changed her, played with her, comforted her, read to her…sang to her—and Lil' Asskicker definitely knew this, seeking Beth's affection even while she was wrapped in her father's arms.
Rick gingerly removed the baby's grip on Beth's sweater and then looked over at Daryl. There was remorse and empathy in his eyes.
"Whenever you're ready brother, close this up real tight and we'll be waiting in the car," Rick was somber as he headed back to the rest of the group.
Once Beth and Daryl were alone, for the first time since the funeral home, he felt like he should say something: a profound goodbye, a prayer, a eulogy, something. But Dixon's were never any good with words, Daryl least of all.
The dirty, calloused hand reached out again to grip the soft, pallid one resting on the back seat. Just like she had reached out to him at the old gravesite. He ran his fingers over the skin on her hand and noticed that there was one small callous on the palm of hers and this made him smile. The farmer's daughter was delicate, yes, but she was no stranger to hard work. Her body hadn't turned cold yet and for that, Daryl was grateful. The little warmth that remained in her made it easier for him to remember her alive—the warmth that always radiated out of her whether she was smiling for no reason or getting fired up and yelling at him.
"I'm sorry," his voice was hoarse from disuse. "You were right…You were right about everythin'. I miss you already."
This simple acknowledgement was all he could get out. Beth's little offhand joke, "You're gonna miss me so bad when I'm gone, Daryl Dixon," repeated on a loop in his head. She was more right than she could have ever known.
He stared at her beautiful face for so long that he could have sworn he saw her eyes moving under her lids. But he wrote this off. He was sleep deprived and in shock, what was left of his logical side knew that he was probably hallucinating. He wanted to memorize every feature: the soft arch of her eyebrows, fullness of her bottom lip, the way her collarbones protruded from her tiny frame. Daryl noticed the heart necklace that she always wore, the chain had broken and she had replaced it with a black string. There were two hearts, one big and one small. He had never asked her where it came from or what it meant to her, and now he would never know. This was yet another thing to add to his list of regrets where Beth was concerned—things he would have done differently if he had a chance for a do-over.
It was an internal debate. He didn't want to take anything from her… but he also wanted to keep a piece of her with him. So he took the little silver necklace and put it in the pocket of his angel wing vest. He knew it was selfish, but he figured Beth would have understood.
The sun was already sinking below the horizon, the sky quickly changing from orange to dark blue, and he knew that he had to leave. Making his family wait for him, on the open road in the dark, was putting all of their lives at risk. So after one final, tender kiss on her uninjured cheek, he closed the door to the truck and joined his family in the car.
/
Over the next few days on the road, the guilt ate away at him from the inside, making painful holes in his soul… eventually leaving a hollow shell of a man. He was as empty and as mindless, as a walker. Just putting one foot in front of the other.
Glenn was driving the van in his typical, slightly reckless way. Daryl had heard the others in the car teasing Glenn about how people were not pizzas so he had to be careful with the cargo now and other jokes about if they didn't make it to DC in under 30 minutes they wouldn't pay him. Daryl was too lost to find any humor in the jokes. Normally, Daryl drove any car he was in, unwilling to relinquish control to others, but his family did not seem to think him fit to drive right now. A small piece of Daryl reluctantly admitted that they were right, he was too preoccupied and distraught to focus on the road right now.
Daryl was still drowning in the sea of endless grief when they hit the Georgia state line. However, he was aware enough to see the big blue sign fly by outside his window.
"Goodbye, keep Georgia on your mind," read the sign with a big peach.
The moment was hugely significant for Daryl. He was finally getting out of the state that had held a world of suffering for him—from his abusive father, to the drug-haze years with Merle, to the death of a long list of people during the apocalypse. He felt a small glimmer of hope inside him. It was dim, like a single candle lit at the bottom of an endless cavern, but it was there. Maybe life outside of Georgia would be better; maybe he could escape his past. The thought was involuntary, and foreign to him. Feelings of hope were something he only ever associated with Beth and he couldn't help but think desperately of how happy she would be if she were there.
It was the first of so many moments that Beth should have been there for.
He wished she was there with him, wished they could leave this shithole together. But instead, she was doomed to fade into dust in the Georgia heat, unburied just like her father.
Every night he was haunted by nightmares. Mostly they were about losing Beth. Some nights the scene from the hospital replayed over and over, he just watched her head whip back upon impact from the bullet. Other nights, she was kidnapped again and he simply ran after her forever, like he was on a treadmill that rotated endlessly. A sense of helplessness came along with these dreams… and a sense of self-loathing. Daryl hated being helpless. He would always go down with a fight. The self-loathing was because they were not really dreams, they were memories and he had really let those terrible things happen to Beth. In other horrible dreams, he found her as a walker and had to put her down, just like Merle. These nights left him in a panic, waking with a start and his heart pounding.
However, the most painful nights were the ones where everything was normal in his dreams—seeing Beth in the prison caring for Judith, the exchange at the hospital going perfectly well, Beth hugging him and the rest of their family, or his subconscious filling in what would have happened if he had never opened the door in the funeral home. These were the worst because he would wake up happy. For just one moment upon waking he was completely unaware that it had been a dream, having been sucked into the false, blissful dreamland. But then he would look around, taking in his surroundings. Upon not finding the bright blonde hair among his sleeping family, the cruel reality would wash over him, like rinsing fresh wounds with lemon juice and salt.
Needless to say, Daryl was not sleeping much. The dreams that haunted him kept sleep just out of arm's reach. He volunteered for watch shifts in order to avoid sleeping and when Rick forced him to leave his post he would keep himself awake by punching his leg. Daryl slept only the absolute minimum he physically could, which kept the dreams away but did not help his focus or health. He felt like a car running on fumes.
He kept thinking back to Rick's plan in the hospital. Why had Daryl sided with Tyreese? It seemed like the more humane plan at the time, just switching people, no bullets flying. But he should have just stayed out of the decision-making, should have left it up to Rick. Every time he made a decision it got someone killed. Sophia had died in the same woods he had searched; Zach had died while Daryl was leading a run; Hershel died when he stopped looking for The Governor… and then Beth. Beth died because he had been too distracted, too damn stupid, to look out that front door of the funeral home before he opened it. She had been taken while he was supposed to be protecting her and then when he finally got the chance for redemption, he picked the wrong plan to help get her back.
Then Tyreese died too. In his morbid state, Daryl found a way to blame himself for this as well. He should have been in the group that went to check out Noah's old neighborhood, he was a strong fighter and a good shot, he might have been able to save Tyreese. But he was still so out of it that Rick didn't let him go. So he stayed behind and continued his mourning while everyone else did the hard work and they lost another member of their family.
/
Weeks had passed but Daryl was nearly oblivious to the passage of time. He had progressed from a fog of sorrow into a sense of callous indifference. He sensed the whispers of the group but he didn't care. Saw them glancing at him when they thought he wouldn't notice. Could hear the questions that flew around him in hushed voices.
But he could not have answered them even if he wanted to because he knew that they were asking the same questions he was asking himself: What was his problem? Why did Beth's death still press on his heart with the weight of a semi truck? Why hadn't he felt like this when anyone else died? When would he snap out of it?
Daryl didn't have any real answers, only his own suspicions about why he was still so distraught. He had a nagging feeling about the similarities between his current spiral into delirium and Rick's lunacy after Lori died. He thought back to the last night in the funeral home, the conversation that was interrupted. He tried to fill in the blanks: what her reaction meant, what he would have said to her, what the days following would have held for them. But of course, he didn't have any real answers to these questions either. The only thing he did know was that whatever this feeling was… it was something he had never known before.
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A/N: No cliffhanger this time y'all (:
Next chapter is ACTION PACKED and you will find out who/what broke into the store where Beth and Kyle are hiding.
As always, thanks for reading!
Please leave a review in that little box below before you leave! I would love to hear what you thought of the Daryl chapter. Hopefully it wasn't too sappy but it was important for Daryl's character development and it will set up some things in the future *wink wink*