A/N: Thank you so much for reading and for all the follows, favorites & reviews. Special thanks to: .94,NicoleTheresa1, Emberka-2012, Panda Blitz, SixJay, DarylDixon'sLover, lupadaisy, Tania Ibarbia and guests! It means so much to the effect that my writing can have on readers. All of you make my heart happy. (To answer your questions I will only say that Daryl and Beth will be reunited VERY soon.)

Companion song: "Came Back Haunted" by Nine Inch Nails

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.

Now we pick up where we left an injured Kyle and our new killer Beth—

/

Chapter 8: Pact

After limping as far as they could in the dark, they finally took refuge in an old apartment building. It was a small, brick building, only two stories with some cars parked directly in front of the first story windows. This made Beth nervous, not wanting to run into any more people inside but all the other buildings nearby were only one story and she wanted the higher vantage point that the second story would giver her. Plus, she wasn't certain Kyle could hobble any further to find something better.

They had walked for the rest of the day and into the night. Luckily, the storm had died down during their escape. He was as pale as the moon that poked through the clouds. His dark, close-cropped hair contrasted with his ghostly complexion and he had a slightly glazed look in his eyes. They were both exhausted; Kyle from the blood loss, Beth from bearing his weight and from taking down all of the rotters they passed on her own. Kyle still gripped his knife in his hand as they crossed the threshold into the building, but he hadn't used it since they left the store. He was too spent to even lift his arm.

After she cleared one of the apartment units, she dropped him onto a sofa and set her extra bags on the floor before she turned to clear the rest of the building.

Kyle protested, "I can't let you go alone." He started to get up but collapsed back onto the cushions with a thump as soon has he put his full weight on his hurt right leg.

"Just stay here and be quiet," she hissed at him before gently shutting the door behind her.

She kept her backpack on her in case they had to run suddenly and she crept from room to room in the building. Outside of each door she paused, listening for any sound of rotters. Beth didn't want to knock in case it announced her presence to any live humans in the buildings.

Her footsteps were silent, like a nimble cat through a mossy forest. Beth had no idea how she learned to walk so quietly but she could tell she hadn't always moved like this. This hunter's gait felt forced and unnatural to her body still. But regardless of how awkward it was, she still knew how to be silent. And in this world, that was a priceless skill.

Overall, she found only two rotters in the entire building that had 20 apartment units. The corpses had been closed into one of the upstairs apartments together. From what she could tell from the wedding pictures on the dresser, it had been their apartment before the turn, it was hard to say for sure though because they had been so decayed that they were almost just moving skeletons. Beth guessed that they had lived there before the turn and holed up together in the beginning, dying shortly after that. It seemed morbid that they had never really given themselves a chance—just tried to lock the real world out.

The part of her that wanted to find the silver lining, however, seemed to think that it was good that they had locked themselves in like that because at least if they had to turn into monsters, they had never ripped apart a human. From their weak state, Beth felt certain that they hadn't fed since they turned.

Plus, they were together when they died. She thought.

At this, a soft smile crossed her face. She found that there something beautiful about being with your loved one until the end. Death was terrible but at least they had each other, they didn't have to live alone in fear or kill each other after they turned.

Beth returned to Kyle in the downstairs unit. His ashen face lit up with relief when he saw her.

"All clear," she nodded at him. "Let's move ya' up to one of the top floor bedrooms so I can have a better spot to take watch from."

They shuffled up the stairs and Beth addressed his wound once he had settled on a queen-sized bed in apartment 11, a corner unit. It was the middle of the night but the storm clouds had completely disappeared and the full moon gave her just enough light to see the bullet hole. She found candles in the apartment and lit them nearby to get a clear view. He had to take off his tight, bloodied jeans in order for her to see the injury properly. She didn't even blush at the sight of him in checkered boxers but she still handed him a pair of men's red basketball shorts from his pack. She cleaned his leg with a towel from the bathroom and what was left in a small bottle of rubbing alcohol. He winced and hissed when the alcohol flowed over it.

There was no exit wound.

The bullet was still lodged in his leg. Beth knew this wasn't good but she didn't want to worry Kyle more than necessary so she didn't say anything. However, Kyle was a smart man.

"It's still in there. Don't suppose you've got any needle nose pliers in your Mary Poppins bag over there?" he laughed at yet another reference that Beth didn't understand.

"Too deep to get out with my fingers… It missed your major artery though. I think I'm gonna just have to stitch it up as is and pray for the best," Beth was hesitant about this plan, but she didn't have a lot of options at the moment. "But it's your leg after all so what do ya think?" she asked him.

She was standing over him, watching the apprehension on his face as he leaned back on the bed

"I guess you're right. Just do whatever you gotta do," he replied finally, his brown eyes resolute and trusting.

He trusts me to fix him up. Beth felt a heavy weight of responsibility on her shoulders at this thought. Having someone else's health, and maybe even their life, in her hands was both a burden and a gift. She could feel the faith that Kyle had in her and she didn't want to disappoint him.

As she readied the suture kit and bandages, Kyle grabbed a pillow and stuffed it in his mouth, knowing that any shouts of pain would only bring rotters to their location. However, her stitching was delicate and swift so he didn't feel the urge to scream. Instead, he began rambling—his favorite distraction.

"Some fast thinking you did back there. Hiding that gun, getting him to chase you to the right place and acting all panicked, I even believed you for a minute there! Thought we were both gonners. But you saved us… sis," he added the last part to see how it would feel. It felt good and he felt a big, toothy grin take over his face.

Kyle missed his little sister, and he did find some similarities between her and Beth. He taught both of them how to fight, they teased each other but also trusted one another. Beth certainly felt like his family now.

He noticed that the corners of Beth's mouth, which had been pulled down into a deep frown as she worked on his leg, pointed upwards now too.

"I learned everything from you… bro," she tried the term now too and she nodded contentedly as she continued sewing his leg. She wondered distantly if she had any brothers or sisters and her heart constricted with the awareness that she would probably never know the answer to that.

When she finished with his leg and cleaned up the small cuts on his knuckles and neck, she ordered him to drink a lot of fluids and almost stuffed food directly into his mouth. Once they finished their quick picnic dinner on the quilt of the bed, he laid back.

"I'll take watch, just sleep as much as you can so you can get better," she instructed as she dragged a chair over to the window and crossed her legs delicately underneath herself.

Kyle was out in mere minutes. She could hear his steady breaths and occasional snores from her perch next to the window. Beth felt physically drained but she knew someone needed to keep watch; they couldn't afford being caught off guard again.

As she sat in the chair, her bones aching and her muscles cramping, her mind drifted back to the events in the store this afternoon. Kyle and her made it out, almost unscathed. They had been ambushed and outnumbered but they made it out with a few bruises and only one non-fatal bullet hole. She couldn't help but acknowledge how lucky they were and she cringed at the thought of how badly it could have gone if those men got their way. Beth said a small but sincere thank you to whatever stroke of fate or divine interference had allowed them to escape.

But there was a nagging feeling in her gut. It wasn't about the man, Ned, who they had left behind. Beth still felt certain that had been the right call, leaving him alive. The knot in her stomach was about the unnamed leader that she had killed in cold blood.

We don't kill the living. Said a distant, southern voice in her head. She didn't know who the voice belonged to, but she felt it was one that she could trust… one she should listen to.

Beth had broken this rule. Pulling that trigger, his heavy body going limp on top of her, the blood spilling out of his temple, the vacant look in his dark eyes. She tried to justify the murder, telling herself that he would have killed Kyle and abused her until he killed her too. Even though she knew these were facts, she was still disgusted with herself for trying to rationalize her actions. She was a killer. She had started with a fresh, pure slate when she woke up without her memory only weeks ago but she had already tarnished her second chance. Her clean slate was now splattered with the blood of the man whose life she stole, the man whose name she didn't even know.

Under the weight of this guilt, she now felt emotionally drained too.

She tried to empty her mind as she watched the sun come up. Kyle's steady breaths helped to soothe her by matching her own inhales and exhales to his. A few rotters had ambled by the building throughout the day but none of them gave any sign that they could sense that live meat was upstairs. The shadows on the ground outside got shorter as the sun moved higher in the sky. She paced around the room, keeping her eyes on the three different windows in the room, her 180-degree view. Finally giving in, she tore into her pack and grabbed some food, eating quietly as Kyle still slept peacefully. Beth couldn't understand it—he killed two people today and yet he seemed undisturbed. The sun was on its downward slope when he finally woke.

"Feel like I've been hit by a truck." He winced with pain as he took stock of his injuries and looked out towards the windows.

"Damn, I must've slept for 15 hours or more! You must be exhausted, you should have woke me so you could sleep," he scolded.

"It's all right," she mumbled, although her eyes were already sliding shut where she stood.

She helped him over to the chair, got him situated, brought food, water and his ice axe over into his reach.

"Wake me if you see anything," Beth said as she curled under the covers, drifting off as soon as her head hit the pillow.

Her dreams were haunted by the cold eyes of the man she had murdered. And she tossed in her sleep. She woke up after only a few hours feeling agitated and unrested.

Kyle turned to face her as she sat up with a frustrated sigh.

"You okay?" he asked, reading the tension on her face.

She shrugged, not ready to ask him what she needed to ask him.

"How's your leg feelin'?" she asked while she walked over to him to inspect his wounds.

"Hurts like hell, but it's still attached so I guess that's what counts," he joked. This comment made her freeze. The small blonde was remembering the dream where Kyle turned into the one-legged old man.

They sat in an uncomfortable silence as they ate and tried to get cleaned up. Beth knew that the silence was killing Kyle, she could sense that he wanted to fill up the quiet with some anecdote or chatter like always. But he held his tongue, knowing that she needed time to muster the courage to talk.

"How can you be… so calm?" she began. "After what happened… after what we did to them?"

Kyle breathed out loudly and scratched the back of his head while he considered his response.

"When my little sister was attacked, I was furious. I saw red every time I even thought about those scumbags who hurt her. When I saw those guys yesterday… and I heard what they were going to do to you… it was like I had finally found those men who assaulted her all those years ago. It's a strange feeling because if I had found them back then I would have beat them into the ground, sure, but I would never have killed them like I did yesterday. But it's different now… the world… I guess you can't really understand since you don't remember what it was like before…but there are no laws, no prisons to put those people in. It's either you let them go and take the chance that they hunt you down later or you eliminate the threat. I couldn't save my sister back then, and I didn't intervene at the hospital where all the women got attacked… but I learned my lesson. I wasn't going to stand by and do nothing while they hurt you. The options were kill or be killed," he was fired up, she could see his brown eyes blazing and the words fell out of his mouth quickly.

He took a deep breath, steadying the anger that had flared up in him "I am calm because this is the way the world works now. I spent too much time being scared and letting the fear distracted me from doing what needed to be done. Doing the right thing isn't black and white anymore; sometimes it means you've got to choose the lesser of two evils. And letting those guys go free… to allow them to continue killing and hurting more women… that was the greater evil."

Part of her understood this, it was a logical argument to just weigh the options and pick the path that was better in the long run. But another part still recoiled with the knowledge that she killed another living human. There were so few people in this world. Beth had been awake for a month and she had only seen six other humans— three of which they had murdered.

"I'm sorry, Beth. I didn't mean to scare you. I just want you to be safe," his eyes were fierce, his can of food had been forgotten in his hands.

"I'm not scared," she said truthfully. She wasn't scared, of him or of the men in the store. But that didn't mean she relished the thought of killing people, even if it was the "right" thing to do.

Silence fell between them again and Beth's mind was blank as she finished the jar of peaches on the bed. However, Kyle's was not. The crease between his brows and movement of his eyes made it clear that he was working up to say more.

"Listen, Beth." The low pitch of his normally easy voice made her eyes snap up to look at him. He pushed himself out of the green chair by the window and hobbled over to sit on the side of the bed.

"I need you to make me a promise," he continued.

"What?" She replied hesitantly.

"Well… you know that if someone dies, even if they aren't bit, they will turn," Kyle's eyes were still on her and she nodded slightly. "If it ever comes to that, if I am dying or bitten, I want you to kill me before I turn. I don't ever want to become a rotter, mindlessly scouring the earth to find people to eat. I want to be back with my family."

His eyes were distant for a brief second before desperately looking back at her. The brown eyes were pleading. This was his dying request and she couldn't refuse him.

"Yeah, okay," she said dejectedly, she didn't want to kill him but she wouldn't leave him as a monster. "But you gotta promise that you'll do everything ya can fight it. Don't leave me alone in this place."

It was the first time she actually asked him for anything, Kyle realized.

He laughed, unable to deny a request from her when she was looking at him like a child asking him to check for monsters under the bed, and replied, "Of course I will kiddo!"

/

The next few days passed excruciatingly slowly and they continued to travel north. Kyle limping while Beth carried the bags and killed rotters.

None of the cars they passed worked. Kyle said that if a car had been sitting around since before the turn, the battery would probably be dead. Their only hope would be to find a car that people had still been using recently, but the odds of finding one were slim. Plus, Beth didn't like the idea of finding a car that people had been using because that would mean putting them in the path of others.

The haggard pair only made it a few miles each day but they had moved off of the main interstate, opting to take the smaller back routes towards Virginia.

"Cities have more people, which means more rotters. Plus, people probably looted the big cities early on," Kyle had reasoned.

All the time on the road and on watch gave her plenty of time to finally consider what Kyle told her in the CVS before the group of men came crashing in. But Kyle's story only generated more questions about her past. She thought about her group, her "friend" Noah who lived in Virginia, and the "three big guys and a woman" who risked their lives to rescue her from the hospital. It must have been them who sewed up her bullet wound and who gave her the knife she woke up with... But if they thought she was dead why did they leave a knife and water? Who was the "too strong" guy that they had taken her from? Was he one of the people who came to rescue her? Was it the man in the forest who she kept dreaming about? What happened to her real family? Was anyone from her family still alive? What was she like before she got shot? Why had she been shot? The questions swirled endlessly around her mind like a tornado. She tried asking Kyle about some of them but he didn't know the answers either.

"I'm sorry, I wish I knew… but I tried to stay away from the wards. I was too ashamed of the lies and how we ripped y'all away from your families to face any of you," he explained with his eyes downcast. She noticed that Kyle did this whenever the hospital was brought up.

It was in these dark moments, when her mind was inundated with inexorable questions, that she was most thankful for Kyle. His incessant talking, jokes and games provided a distraction.

All the extra time they had also gave her the opportunity to continue training with him. He wasn't able to spar with her, since he still couldn't put much weight on his leg, but he taught her techniques and how to use various weapons they had collected. She assembled and disassembled all their guns until she could do it with her eyes closed. They didn't want to waste ammo or cause too much noise so she didn't get to practice shooting. He also taught her how to swing his ice axe with some skill. However, she didn't have enough muscles to wield it with the deadly strength that Kyle did, so he also gave her some homework. He showed her exercises to build upper body strength. Every night, after changing the dressing on his leg, she would do pushups on the floor and Kyle acquired a huge toothy grin as he counted down her reps from where he lounged on the bed with a can of food in his hands.

However, the most surprising day was when she began practicing with the recurve bow.

They had taken off her cast a few days ago using a small handsaw they found in a mom-and-pop hardware store so her hand was weak from disuse. But when she nocked an arrow and pulled back the string, it felt familiar in her grip. Something about the feathers running through her fingers made her heart clench. She already knew, without any instruction from Kyle, to breathe in, aim, breathe out and let go of the string. Her aim was fairly accurate too. The first arrow was only two inches shy of the knot in the tree that she was aiming at. Her second try flew straight into the bullseye and stuck with a small thud.

Kyle whooped loudly and pumped his fist in the air.

He would be proud, Beth thought as she felt her heart swell with pride.

It was another one of the strange, fragmented thoughts that she had come to expect. She was smart enough to recognize that they were a connection to her past, her memory fighting against the wall in her mind to try and break into her consciousness. However, she didn't know anymore than this. Who were these people, whose eyes she could sometimes see or whose voices would come to her briefly? The familiar, comforting faces that entered her dreams but were nothing but forgotten, blurry ghosts as soon as she opened her eyes. Beth guessed the "he" that would be proud was the guardian angel that she regularly ran through the woods with in her dreams. She still hadn't seen his face, only followed him, trusting the mysterious man to lead her to safety. But he was carrying a crossbow and she had a suspicious feeling that the dark-haired archer was the reason she had such excellent aim.

Beth continued to speculate about the man while she pulled the arrows from the tree and headed back inside with an unsteady Kyle.

Since it was a quiet and allowed her to take out rotters without getting too close, she decided to adopt the bow as her weapon of choice.

/

A/N: As always, thanks for reading! Please favorite/follow and before you go please leave me a review in that pretty, little box below. I promise to update soon—if I hit 65+ reviews I will update twice next week!

(PS. does anyone actually like or listen to the songs I post each week?)

Sorry that this chapter is a little shorter and later than usual. I had a case of writers block that slowed me down but the good news is that the next chapter is ACTION PACKED and will set Beth on the path towards our Bethyl reunion... Stick with me people. (:

Until next time, lovely readers.