Chapter 12: no painless way to put me out

The inside of the farmhouse is every bit as bright and clean and airy and pleasantly old as the outside. Daryl stands in the entranceway looking at the wooden bench to his left, glossy with age and under which sit pairs of shoes laid out in a neat line, at the polished wood floors, at a few family pictures on the walls, at the equally clean and bright rooms he can see beyond, at his boots, his hands - thinking about how he doesn't fit here, doesn't fit at all, because his clothes are ratty and his hair is hanging in his eyes and he needs to wash his hands and he has dirt packed under his fingernails.

Feeling like this is all probably a big fucking mistake.

But Beth is unerringly, relentlessly cheerful, and she moves forward into the front hall with all the confidence of a girl used to successful convincing. She glances back at him and nods her head toward the wide entrance to what turns out to be the dining room - large table made of the same kind of dark wood as the bench, side table, cabinet full of crystal - and into a sunny kitchen beyond, where her mother is standing over the sink peeling potatoes.

He stops moving when she does, goes back to standing there and feeling awkward and out of place. He's good at that. Right now he's going to stick to his strengths.

Beth goes up to the woman and kisses her on the cheek. "Hey, Mama. Whatcha need help with?"

The woman leans into the kiss, smiles, and Daryl feels a pang of something he wasn't feeling before, with Greene. With Hershel. This nice woman. This nice family. He's in their home, and it's a nice home. It would feel good to be in if it wasn't for the tightness in his gut, and now he recognizes that it isn't about feeling out of place. At least not completely.

It's about this being the first time he's been in a place like this and seen its people up close. How they are with each other. The kind of family who's produced a girl like this. She goes in no fear of anything. She's confident of the world and her place in it. Not arrogant; from the beginning he's sensed pretty much none of that in her. She's not arrogant, and maybe only a little spoiled in a youngest-daughter kind of way. She's confident that she's loved. Confident that she'll come home to these people and they won't be drunk and she won't be screamed at or hit.

A piercing realization, a thing that stabs into his chest like an icepick: Beth Greene is brave in a way he will never be.

He's always assumed things might be too late for Merle. Now he wonders if things are mostly too late for him.

But Beth is saying something, turning to him, and so is her mother, drying her hands on a dish towel. He saw her from a ways away that day outside the church, but this is his first time really seeing her up close, and she is indeed pretty in the way older women are, a deep prettiness, her hair pulled neatly back into a clip and her eyes warm.

They focus on him, move briefly over him, and he sees a flash of skepticism. But it's not mean. She just isn't sure about him.

He feels a very brief and very undesired pang of resentment. It's not something for which he should resent her. He wouldn't be sure about himself either.

"Hi," he says, and he's not sure what else to say.

"Mr. Dixon?" Half a question. She isn't moving toward him and he doesn't know what that means. Beth is looking from him to her mother, and while there's no anxiety on her face, she does look sort of expectant. Like there's more she wants here. More from him. So he gives Mrs. Greene something between a shrug and a nod.

"Yeah. Uh. Daryl." He glances around, mostly because looking away takes some of the pressure off, and mutters, "You got a nice house."

"Thank you. Daryl. It's been in the family a long time." She hesitates. "Beth says she invited you to stay for dinner?"

He shrugs again. He wishes he could say That was her, that was all her, I was ready to leave, she just completely took over and it was very weird, I can leave now if you want, I'm sorry, also it was her damn fault. But of course he says none of this. He just stands there and goes back to feeling awkward. Familiar territory. Retreat there, await further instructions from the commander.

Good sweet Christ, what is his deal.

"Well, that's fine, I know you were out helping Hershel? Yeah, we shouldn't just send you away without feeding you first. Shawn is still out taking care of a few things - maybe you can help out here too? If it's not too much trouble?" She gestures at the counter to the left of the sink, where a pile of green pods sit in a bowl. "We're having a roast. You know how to shell peas?"

He doesn't. He nods.

"Good, that means I can get some laundry off the line before it gets dark. Beth, you can take it from here?"

"Mmhm." Beth is already taking the peeler from her mother, plucking one of the potatoes off the cutting board by the sink. Mrs. Greene kisses the crown of her head and heads for what Daryl assumes is the back door, giving him another faint smile.

Beth glances back at him, a potato in her hand. "You gonna get to that, then?"

He hesitates, looking from her to the counter. He thought she was going to get him into trouble and she has, but he has the self-awareness to know that this particular trouble was all him. There was a right thing and a wrong thing to say there, and he went right for the wrong thing, and now he's stuck.

He lowers his head, doesn't quite look at her. "I don't," he mutters.

Beth cocks her head, brow arched. "I didn't get that."

A rush of exasperation, which is helpful, because it makes him feel a little stronger and a little more on top of things. He raises his voice, and only afterward thinks he might have been overheard. "I don't actually know how to shell no fuckin' peas. Okay?"

Beth stares at him for a moment, blinks, then breaks into a soft laugh. "Why the hell didn't you say so?"

He shrugs, makes a noncommittal noise. I'unno.

He does know, and he's back to completely blaming her for it.

She sets down the potato and the peeler and moves over to that side of the counter, beckoning him. "C'mon, I'll show you. Ain't hard."

As has been the case this whole time, he supposes he doesn't really have any other choice. He crosses the room to her and stands beside her, looking down at the bowl full of pods. She reaches up and pulls open a cabinet full of various kinds of pans - he recognizes a couple he thinks are probably for baking bread - and produces a colander, sets it down beside the bowl.

"Here." She picks up one of the pods and holds it so he can see, breaks off the end, grabs a little string thing and tugs in a single practiced motion. The pod sort of comes unzipped and opens neatly. She flicks the peas into the colander and tosses the pod into the sink, then looks back up at him. "You try."

He does. It's clumsy, but mostly just in how he moves; she's right, it's not that hard, and he thinks he gets it.

"That's it." She leans against the counter, watching him, clearly bemused. "You never shelled peas before? I mean, it's not that weird that you haven't, but."

He gives her a look. "Glad you ain't judgin' me."

"I never judge you. Name one time I judged you."

He can't. He gives her another look and goes back to the peas. "Ain't you got shit to peel?"

"How old are you?"

He stops again and this time the look he gives her is - he can tell - utterly and openly bewildered. And he's sure she can see that he's uncomfortable. He has no idea why she would hit him with that question, now of all times, and she's just...

Why? Why is she like this?

Why doesn't he hate it?

"What the fuck, girl? Why you askin'?"

"'cause I wanna know how many years you haven't been shellin' peas in." She gives him a little smirk and actually hops up to sit on the counter next to him, swinging her legs just a bit - something that should be childish and yet - with the way she's doing it - isn't. "C'mon, why wouldn't you wanna tell me? You embarrassed or somethin'?"

Back to the peas, because it gives him something to do with his hands, and for some reason he feels like he desperately needs that right now. "Why the hell would I be embarrassed about that?"

"Yeah, that's what I'm wonderin'."

He shoots her a glance from beneath the fringe of his hair, something a bit less than a glare. "How the fuck old are you?"

"Eighteen. Few weeks ago." She kicks at his thigh. "See? Not hard."

He sighs. He's pretty sure this is yet another thing she's not going to let drop until he tells her, so what the hell. "Thirty eight."

"Really?" She sounds honestly surprised, and it twists something in him just a little, because why? Why would that surprise her? What did she expect to hear? Was there something she wanted to hear?

He completely fails to open one of the pods the way she showed him and has to dig at it with his thumbnail.

"What?"

"I dunno, you just don't act like it."

He lets out a softly incredulous laugh. Because incredulous is how he's feeling at this point. All of this is taking on the sense and logic of some kind of vivid fever dream. "How the fuck do I act, then?"

She doesn't answer. He tosses down the pod he's working on and turns to her, and that's when he realizes how close she really is, how sitting like this her face is pretty much level with his, how he can smell fresh hay on her and that same soap from the first night - mild and clean and not heavily floral or heavily fruity. And the sun through the window over the sink is catching her hair, her eyes look very large and very bright, and - this is crazy, this is absolutely insane, it's just more fever dream logic and he shouldn't because it would be so fucking weird and actually kind of creepy and he's sure she would kick him away from her - he wants to lean in even closer to her, centimeters from her warm skin, and inhale deeply.

Just pull her into his lungs and keep her there.

Fuck.

He finally does glare at her. "Go peel your potatoes, why dontcha."

She looks at him for a moment, her expression completely unreadable, and for the span of a second he thinks she might be about to do something. He has no idea what, but something. He can see the wheels turning swiftly behind her eyes.

Then she pushes him lightly back with a hand on his chest and hops down. "You're still bein' a jerk," she says amiably. "Just so you know."

He does know.

Better a jerk than a creep.

The rest of dinner is prepared in silence, except for when Mrs. Greene comes back in to check on the roast in the oven - which, Daryl wouldn't mind admitting - smells fucking amazing, and she doesn't talk to him much, though what she says is perfectly pleasant and cheerful. And dinner is mostly the same way, in the big dining room, and the food is, as he suspected, amazing, and for the most part they leave him alone except for some abortive attempts at small talk - which he fields as best he can, but he can't really do much about not being good at it.

Beth talks a lot more, with what feels to him like particular intent, and it's not very long before he realizes what she's doing. She's cutting in before his short answers - to questions about what he's doing in town, where he came from, other general things - become too awkward, steering the conversation away from him. It's subtle. It takes him a bit but he does get it.

She's saving him. She can tell he's not comfortable with the attention, and she's lifting it off him. And what he feels then is a rush of gratitude so immense and so profound that it almost clenches in his chest.

He thought before, when she laid off her own questions when it became clear to her that she was getting close to something sore, that she was kind. But he's beginning to see just how kind she is.

Other things: He's pretty sure his table manners aren't as bad as he was afraid of. He remembers napkins exist and how to use them. Shawn might be overprotective, but as far as he can tell Shawn isn't yet giving him any form of Death Glare, even though he's sitting next to Beth - which she arranged and which no one seems to mind, which he thinks is a little strange, but.

And that's...

Hershel says grace at the beginning of the whole thing, and they all hold hands. Mrs. Greene on his left, her hand soft and smooth and cool...

And Beth on his right. And her hand can't possibly be that warm but it feels like it's burning him.

It's a relief to let go of it.

Dinner ends. Ice cream; he begs off and says he has to get back, thanks so much, he hopes it wasn't an inconvenience, and he actually feels like he's being pretty goddamn polite, and that's good, because...

Because he wants to do this again. For a lot of reasons. He wants them to like him. He wants to come back. It's something new, it's a family who feels safe with each other, the house feels good to be in, and all of that kind of hurts in fact, but it also feels like...

The hurt isn't bad. He doesn't completely dislike it.

And there's her. Honestly. Yes. There's her.

Out to the truck. Mrs. Greene actually gives him some leftover roast to take back with him. They do like him. At least a little. Or if they still aren't totally sure about him, they're willing to give him a chance. Because the thing is, they feel like the kind of people who might default to giving someone a chance, as long as there's no clear reason from the start not to.

But when he walks out the door he knows Beth might follow him, and he violently doesn't want her to. Because they've already tread the line of a fair amount of strangeness tonight, and if she pushes it, if she does more along these lines...

They might decide they're really not so sure about him.

They might decide they don't like him so much.

But she doesn't follow him. He sees her at the door for a moment, and then the door is closed and he's opening the driver's side door, tossing the wrapped roast beef onto the passenger's seat, turning the truck around and heading down the drive. The sunlight isn't yet completely gone but the stars are already showing here and there, and he looks at them as he drives. Radio on, quietly.

you're just like an angel
your skin makes me cry
you float like a feather
in a beautiful world
I wish I was special
you're so fucking special

He turns it off. Sort of hard.

note: Song is "Creep" by Radiohead