A/N: Sorry this update has taken so long. I went to the hospital this week and also have been working 6 days a week so in all honestly… I have actually forgotten what day of the week it is! BUTTTTTT to make it up to y'all I am going to post again on Thursday/Friday. Make sure to follow this story so you don't miss the update!
Over 100 followers! I am so amazed and humbled. Thank you so much for your support! Special shout out to those who reviewed: BrookePloves5H, Tania Ibarbia, Emberka-2012, Heidi191976, NicoleTheresa1, SixJay, Reignashii, DarylDixon'sLover, LadyScarlettDixon, and guests. Y'all are the best!
Companion song: "I think I'm paranoid" by Garbage
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.
Thanks for reading! Please review before you leave, reviews make my heart happy. (:
/
Chapter 15: Weird
On. Off. On. Off. On. Off.
Light bulbs were weird.
She stood in the bathroom, the one with a warm water and flushing toilet, and flicked the light switch on and off while she marveled at the brightness inside. Morgan and her had come across plenty of batteries and they had flashlights or lamps that they used occasionally. But having a switch that controlled the light and not having to be worried the power running out, it was… well… weird.
She couldn't sleep. It was kind of Aaron and Eric to open their home to her, Morgan and Lucky but this place was too perfect, too clean, too unlike anything she could ever remember seeing in this world. Morgan hit the big, fluffy bed and fell asleep instantly. He trusted Rick completely, and if Rick said this place was safe, Morgan believed him. She could hear the snores coming from his room next door, a sure sign that her father figure was sleeping soundly because she had only heard him snore a handful of times over the last two years. Alexandria and this house were just like the world Before. This fact comforted Morgan, but it put her on edge. It felt as if it belonged in a book or one of the old photographs she always saw hanging on walls of the abandoned houses.
Lucky was happily curled up at the foot of the bed she wasn't using but he was still awake, staring at her like she was a loon.
"Don't gimme that look. It's strange bein' in a house like this," she complained to the dog that only perked up his ears and continued to stare.
She hadn't even showered yet because the thought of dropping her guard completely by getting naked and standing in a five-foot tile box seemed ludicrous. So here she was, still in her somewhat dirty clothes scavenged from airport luggage, pacing barefoot around her room. The only concessions she made were taking her shoes off and setting her bow down, but her knife remained in its sheath on her hip. While she was pacing around the hardwood floor, trying to dissipate her nervous energy, she thought she heard someone outside her door, just a creek of a floorboard. But Lucky hadn't moved. She was just being paranoid. Beth knew that if there were any real threats the mutt would be bristling, his heightened senses and ability to detect danger had always made him an exceptional companion in this world.
She tried to lie down and sleep, she really did give it a chance, but her eyes remained wide open. Maybe it was the claustrophobia from the walls of Alexandria or maybe it was just because she was used to being on watch at this time of night.
Beth grabbed up her weapons and slid on her boots. Lucky cocked his head to the side with perked up ears.
"Let's go check this place out, Luck."
She wasn't going to wait until tomorrow for a tour. As soon as her hand touched the doorknob, the dog bolted off the bed to follow her into the night.
/
He fidgeted. The harder he tried to sleep the more it evaded him.
Daryl had waited on the porch for Rick to come back from the medical clinic. He stood in front of Daryl with one hand on his hip and the other scratching the scruff on his chin for a long time. Rick's green eyes were erratic and filled with bewilderment. For only the second time in the four years they had known each other, it appeared that their leader was actually speechless.
Their eyes met. Daryl's questioning, waiting for Rick to confirm that it really was Beth, and Rick's confused and guilty.
"Family dinner tomorrow. They'll be there," he stated simply before walking up the steps to the house.
"You really found her." He said over his shoulder with one foot inside the threshold, before closing the front door behind him knowing that Daryl would come in when he was ready.
His pulse raced.
So Rick saw her too.
A while later, he went upstairs, showered off and got into bed but he was wide-awake. Daryl was too overwhelmed with this information: Beth being alive, Beth living out in this shitty world for the last 2 years, Beth losing her memory, Beth punching him. The knowledge that Beth was now only a few houses away had him itching to get up and go to her.
He wanted to see her again. Being with her earlier at the airport hadn't been enough. He needed to see her, to soak up the sight of her like a plant needing to drink in sunlight. But he couldn't. He promised himself that he would leave her alone. He was dangerous, he'd gotten her kidnapped last time he tried to take care of her. After getting sick of fidgeting in his sheets for hours, he went back outside to smoke his last cigarette; giving in to one of his vices in order to suppress the urge to run up the street to Aaron's house. It wasn't working though. The burning in his lungs was just amping him up more.
I'll just go check on her. Make sure she settled in okay. As soon as I know she's all right I will be able to sleep, he told himself.
He knew this was a lie. He would never be able to get enough of Beth to be satisfied. However, he stubbed out his cigarette and was already walking across his front lawn without consciously deciding to do so.
Many of Alexandria's residents felt safe enough to leave their doors unlocked and Daryl had been over for enough dinners to know that Aaron and Eric were included in that group. He opened the front door to Aaron and Eric's place and was met with a dark, silent house. Daryl crept up to the second floor to the two guest rooms. Their house had the extra rooms as a safety precaution. Allowing space for newcomers or people who needed to get out of their own houses, like Jessie and her kids who stayed there a few times when Pete had been particularly violent or Jake when the rest of his family was quarantined with a fever. The snores coming from the first room told him that Morgan had easily settled in, but the second room, the one he figured must be Beth's, had quiet footsteps emitting from it.
After a moment of listening to the movements, he could tell she was pacing. The pads of her feet softly passing by the door that he stood outside of.
Apparently, Beth couldn't sleep either.
He resisted the urge to knock and decided instead to go out to the couch. He would leave first thing in the morning but for now it would make him feel better knowing he was under the same roof as her, able to protect her, able to stop her if she was trying to run away. He had seen her looking like a caged animal when she entered the walls and he knew she didn't really need his protection since she had made it on her own for two years. But even if it was illogical, he would stay anyway.
Ya' stubborn sum'bitch, thought the Merle in his head.
From the couch, below her room, he could still hear her tiny footsteps pacing. After a little while, they stopped. Daryl figured she had gotten into bed and this made him relax against the plush, green couch. He let his mind drift for another hour and thought that he might be able to get some sleep after all. When he heard soft clicking down the stairs he bolted upright, standing and lifting his bow from where it rested on the coffee table in one smooth motion.
Beth's large dog came trotting out of the shadows with his nails clanking on the red hardwood floor. Then Beth, with her own bow slung hastily over her shoulder, came down the staircase too. She gasped at the sight of him and automatically reached for her knife but as soon as it registered that it was Beth, he dropped his crossbow and this relaxed her a little.
Their blue eyes locked on each other in the darkness.
"Sorry, didn't mean t' scare ya'" he mumbled quietly. Not knowing what else to say or how to explain his presence on someone else's couch in the middle of the night.
She smiled. It was a knowing smile, the kind of smile that teachers used to have when they talked about how babies are dropped off by storks, the kind of smile that people had when they knew a secret.
"Don't worry, you didn't," she kept her voice low too.
He couldn't peal his eyes away from her. She was still in the same dark jeans and white tank top as earlier but she had removed the braid and piled her long, blonde hair on top of her head in a messy bun instead. Daryl knew he was staring like an idiot but he couldn't help it. After thinking someone was dead for two years, it was normal to stare, wasn't it?
As the silence in the room grew thicker, Lucky came over and sniffed at him then. Whatever he smelled seemed to appease him because the dog gave Daryl's hand a small lick. Beth's mouth dropped open at the sight of this and her eyes narrowed at him. He couldn't tell if she was confused or suspicious but her hand did leave the hilt of her knife after that.
"Psst," she hissed at the dog, which moved back over to her side instantly. "Let's go, boy," she said to the dog again, finally breaking eye contact with Daryl as they moved towards the front door.
"Where are you goin'?" The words were out of his mouth before he could think. He couldn't help it, he was worried that she was going to climb the gates and leave or maybe that this was all still a dream that he would wake from as soon as she left.
"Out," she said tersely. But then, upon seeing Daryl's brow furrow in concern, she seemed to reconsider this vague answer and elaborated further. "I'm goin' for a walk, just around town. Can't sleep up there," she explained with a small shrug.
"I'll… I can…" he stuttered. He was going to say that he could go with her. "You shouldn't go alone, ya don't know the town yet." The offer was still there, but he tried to conceal it behind this weak excuse.
The same knowing smile drifted across her face again, it was pretty clear that she thought the idea of her being in danger was ridiculous.
"I'll be fine. 'Sides, I'm not alone… I've got Luck with me," she tilted her head towards the dog that was eagerly waiting by the front door.
She reached for the front door again with her back to him. Daryl motioned automatically to come with her, despite the fact that she'd already dismissed his offer.
Beth whipped around and there was a much fiercer look on her face now.
"Hey!" she hissed, stopping Daryl in his tracks. "I don't know you. Now, I'm goin' for a walk… alone," she emphasized the last word. "Don't follow me."
Even though her words were harsh, they still managed to sound like a plea in Daryl's ears. Of course, she didn't remember him anymore.
Shit, baby brother, she doesn't even know ya and ya already screwed up yer chance, mocked the Merle in his head.
He merely nodded once to show he understood before she bolted out the door.
Daryl understood loud and clear that she had known him for a few hours and already she didn't want him around.
/
She walked the entire perimeter of the walls twice with Lucky silently trotting at her side or occasionally wandering away to sniff at something. She noted where there were newer patches of the fence, where she heard growls outside, the guard tower's blind spots, where the people on patrol walked.
Then she walked through the town, it was small but had so many things that she considered luxuries in this world. There was a chicken coop, a pigpen and a large garden. Beth's mouth watered at the thought of all that amazing, fresh food. Most of the vegetables she ate were ones that had been sitting in a can for years and plenty of them had been passed their expiration date. It had gotten better after Morgan had found the edible plant book in one of the libraries they stayed in. The book at least allowed them to confidently eat more things they found out in the forests.
However, this garden and these animals… they were something more. They were a sign of permanence. Something she thought was impossible in this world.
Her mind kept wandering back to the archer that had been sitting on the couch earlier. What was his problem? Why was he there instead of in his own house? Why did he keep staring at her? Were his hooded blue eyes really the same ones in her dreams? And why did he try to follow her?
It was obvious that he knew her before she had been shot, he had told her as much. But what did that mean? She was worried about meeting her family tomorrow and the expectations that all of these people would have. Beth couldn't remember what she was like before… but what if they wanted the old Beth back and she was too different now? The leader, Rick, had been staring at her in the medical clinic and she could feel the comparisons being made. It was like he had a mental checklist of what she used to be like and he had tried to see if the new Beth met the guidelines in his head.
The archer's gaze was slightly different though. His eyes weren't expectant; they had been hopeful. But above all they held guilt, like Lucky on the few occasions when he hadn't listened to her and had wandered off too far. It was this guilt in his eyes that confused her most… and what made her think that he had something to do with the bullet hole in her head.
Either way, it wasn't something she would figure out tonight.
After she walked around the quiet town twice, she decided it was time to go to sleep. When she entered the house, she saw the silhouette of Daryl Dixon lying on the couch. His eyes were open, staring up at the ceiling, with one hand behind his neck and boots crossed at the ankles. Lucky went over to him again and pushed his cold, wet nose against the man's cheek.
What in the world has gotten into that pup? She wondered again. She'd never seen him act like that with anyone but herself. Lucky didn't even do that kind of thing with Morgan.
Daryl's hand patted the dog twice on the head while Beth moved towards the stairs silently. Lucky padded over to her but she paused with her foot on the bottom step.
"Told ya I'd be alright… you didn't have to wait up," she murmured, feeling responsible for this man's lack of sleep.
"Saw that caged-in look, thought you might take off," he shrugged, not meeting her eyes.
The ends of her lips tugged down into a frown. How could this man read her so well? It was like he knew that she'd been planning escape routes on her walk.
"Still haven't decided yet," she responded truthfully.
His blue eyes snapped up to hers, even in the darkness she could read the panic written all over his face. He was so easy for her to read too, but Beth didn't understand the why behind anything he had done so far.
The genuine concern she saw made her uneasy and she took a page from Kyle's book, using humor to ease the tension. "Can't leave without that old man snoring up there or without stealing some of the shampoo," her hand flitted up to her ratty, greasy hair.
Tension remained in his face; humor was clearly not going to appease Daryl Dixon.
But she wasn't there to calm him or quell his panic—she didn't even know this guy and he was already following her. So she turned, without saying anything else, and walked up to her bedroom where Lucky was already waiting on her bed. Though her thoughts still raced, about meeting her family tomorrow and concerns about if this place was really as it appeared, she felt peaceful enough to go to sleep now. Her mind was colored with thoughts of the man downstairs as she drifted off.
The next morning, Daryl was gone when she came downstairs. A woman named Deanna, whose late husband had built the walls, gave Morgan and Beth a tour of Alexandria. The tour was informative, but there wasn't much that she hadn't already seen the night before. Beth didn't speak the entire time, letting Morgan ask questions while she observed the people and the differences in security during the day.
She noticed that only the guards on the walls and the sniper in the tower carried guns. Only a handful of people in the town had knives, or weapons of any kind, on them. After everything she had seen, she wasn't surprised that they had been lulled into a sense of security. Since the beginning, the walls had only been breached a handful of times—each time killing only a few people. They were confident… they were complacent. Morgan and Beth had not yet been asked to hand over their weapons but she felt certain that it would only be a matter of time.
Lawns were mowed, flowers neatly planted in window boxes, windows completely intact, not an inch of dirt on anyone's clothing.
It was unnerving.
The sense that this town was another world entirely from the one she had been living in for the last two years. It was separate from the only world she really knew. Morgan was in awe.
"Looks just like the old world," he told Beth quietly as they trailed behind Deanna. "Jenny and I always wanted a place like this, nice gated community, house with a wrap-around porch. That was the dream." He chuckled to himself, "Gates are a little bigger now."
She nodded, understanding Morgan's need for the comforts of the world he remembered from before the dead started eating the living.
Beth saw the hunter again on their tour; he was sitting on the porch railing of a house speaking to a lean black woman with dreadlocks and a young Asian man. The Asian man's jaw dropped open in shock. The black woman's gaze flitted over the blonde and there was disbelief in her eyes but her face remained neutral. Then she saw Morgan, and she narrowed her eyes at him slightly. Beth looked at Morgan out of the corner of her eye and saw him cower under her gaze. He moved off the street towards the porch and the woman came down the three stairs to meet him on the lawn. Beth followed him while their tour guide stayed on the street maintaining a distance that allowed privacy.
"I wanted to apologize, about the last time I saw you. I wasn't right in the head and I regret my actions," Morgan was blunt, making no effort to sugar coat it.
"We all got a second chance when the world ended," she flashed her white teeth in a small smile that made her eyes warm. "Some people are even lucky enough to get more than one second chance." Her eyes flickered to Beth, but they were not judgmental and Beth instantly took a liking to her.
"I'm happy you're here now," the black woman finished simply and the blonde couldn't tell if she was referring to Beth or Morgan.
Morgan smiled too, knowing that the subtext of her meaning was that he had been forgiven. Beth knew the story of when they had come to the town where Morgan had lost his mind, shot at a child and stabbed Rick.
"I'm Michonne," she extended a hand towards Beth. Her skin was soft, the skin of someone who had lived safely behind walls for two years, but they were strong, the strength of someone who had not forgotten the horrors that existed outside the walls.
"Beth," the blonde replied. She wondered if she knew Michonne before she was shot. This woman had been with Rick and his son whenever they saw Morgan all those years ago, so she assumed that she had known this woman. There was an automatic sense of camaraderie between the women. Lucky let Michonne reach down and pet him behind the ear. However, no memories returned.
But there was no disappointment or shock in Michonne's face; she had clearly been warned about Beth's memory loss.
Michonne seemed to have realized that Beth had needed a minute to work through some thoughts. The silence between them wasn't uncomfortable and Beth was grateful that this woman wasn't a chatterbox like Deanna or Aaron's husband, Eric.
"We'll see you both here later for dinner," she said with sincerity.
"Looking forward to it," Morgan grinned even more broadly, happy to be accepted into the fold of Rick's group after he had messed up so badly the first time he met Michonne.
Beth merely nodded in agreement and found herself wondering just how many people were included in this 'family dinner.'
Before turning to join Deanna on the street in order to continue their tour, Beth glanced over to the porch. The younger, Asian man still looked dazed. This man obviously had known Beth—there was no other explanation to why he was looking at her like he was seeing a ghost. Daryl was still sitting on the porch banister with one arm resting on his knee. As soon as she looked up, she found that his eyes flitted downward. He wouldn't meet her gaze for some reason. Maybe it had something to do with the purple welt that spread across his eye. A small ripple of guilt racked through her but she pushed it away; she shouldn't feel sorry for defending herself.
Yesterday he tries to hug me and follows me home, now he won't even look at me… What is this guy's problem? Who was he to me before I got shot?
She couldn't help but wonder if this family dinner tonight would help her find answers that she had been searching for during the last two years or if it would only bring up more questions.
/
A/N: Thank you everyone for sticking with me even though there was a gap in posts. I'll post another chapter later this week so make sure to follow the story so you don't miss the update!
Next chapter Beth meets everyone and we get to see life from another person's perspective. ;)
I am looking for someone who can draw or use the computer to create art in a similar style to the art on the websites below (I don't own that art which is why I left them on the page of the original artist and did not upload them to my site). It is for a TWD project so PM me if you're interested!
106646397675095548148/MinimalistPixar?feat=embedwebsite
art/Take-Her-To-The-Moon-For-Me-544919293
Thanks for reading and please review beautiful Bethylers!