Original Prompt: "Okay but now I want Beth comforting Daryl after a nightmare in tiny apartment verse."
It always starts with a little whimper. It's not the kind of sound Beth ever would have imagined coming from Daryl's lips. Grunts and growls and even sometimes laughs, yeah, but not whimpers. But then again, those whimpers aren't the sort of sound she ever hears from him except on nights like this, nights when his past catches up to him in his sleep.
It doesn't happen every night. Sometimes not even every week. She thinks it's happening less and less often, as if his new life with her in their little apartment is helping to push back the darkness of his past, like a slowly widening circle of light around him keeping the darkness at bay. That light that they've made, it works more and more with each passing day, but some nights, it still isn't enough. Some nights the darkness gets through. It doesn't happen much, but when it does happen, it starts with a whimper.
His lips part in a whisper, and in his sleep he groans, and his body begins to shudder as his skin goes damp with a cold sweat.
Beth knows this because she's always right there. Every time, that first whimper seems to pull her right out of sleep as if some part of her knows the moment she hears it that he needs her.
She remembers how when she was a kid, her Mama used to always know when she was sick or scared at night. How sometimes all she had to do was whisper her name or softly cry, and her Mama would be there in the doorway, like she just knew. Beth had always thought it was a mother thing, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was just something she got from her Mama. Another thing they had in common.
Whatever it was, every time he gives that little whimper it pulls her right out of whatever dream she's having. She just knows, and she is there. For him. She might be groggy, but she's still there for him.
Every time, Beth finds him curled on his side, in a sort of fetal position that makes her heart ache a bit because it reminds her of a scared little child. In fact, she's never seen him more child-like than he is in the middle of the night, when memories of his past catch up to him and he curls up like the child he was, or maybe like the child he was never truly allowed to be. A child who was tormented, a child who always felt alone.
But he's not alone on nights like this, because she's there. She's always there. Shifting up against his back from behind and pressing her forehead against his warm bare skin, wrapping her arms around him as he tremble against her. She doesn't wake him, at least not forcefully. When he's dreaming of what she knows he's dreaming of, the last thing she wants to do is grab him and shake him awake.
Beth knows he needs to find his way through it, but that doesn't mean she can't guide him. And she does, with sweet whispers against his back, "It's okay, Daryl, I'm right here. I'm right here, sweetie, I'm right here with you…" It's the only time she calls him nicknames like that. The only time she needs to, when he is trembling like that frightened, lost child.
With soft kisses to his back and the brush of her hand up and down his arm, she feels him begin to shift. She feels him come out of his nightmare with a tremor and a gasp and a jolt in her arms. She doesn't ask what it was that he was dreaming about. She never asks, not just because she doesn't need to, but especially because he doesn't need to.
He doesn't need to talk about it, to give those words voice, to make them feel even more real than they felt when he was caught up in them, tangled in them, haunted by them. She doesn't need to hurt him more by making him relive that all yet again.
Instead she just holds him as he draws in deep breaths and shudders in her arms. She holds him, rubbing her hand up and down his arm as her lips press over his back, trace across the marks on his back to sooth the same scars that burned fresh in his nightmares. She holds him as if she could wrap her frame around him like she isn't half his size, as if she could protect him, shield him against everything bad he's ever gone through.
Beth hold him until his trembling finally begins to fade, until he shifts to find her hand and laces their fingers together and then tugs their entwined hands right up to his chest.
"Baby girl…" He whispers the nickname, rough and shaky in the darkness.
"I'm right here," she murmurs back again lips grazing his shoulder and lingering there, reassuring him with the warmth of her kisses and of her body, pressed against his own. "I'm right here, Daryl, and I'm not going anywhere. Just close your eyes again, alright? I'm right here. I've got you."
She does not let go, and he does not turn. Not on those nights, the ones that start with his whimpers. They stay like that, her pressed against his back with her lips to his shoulder and her hand curled in his and clutched tightly to his chest as they lay there in their warm bed that fits just snugly right in their tiny little bedroom.
On those nights, she is like his shield. The nightmares don't come again when she holds him like that and keeps him safe. When she reminds him that he is loved, and that the things that creep up from his past to worm dark tendrils into his mind can't hurt him, anymore. Not with her there to keep him safe, in their tiny little apartment all full of their love.