Daryl was striding silently through the woods with his crossbow in his hands, when Greene's bright voice cut through his thoughts. He was almost grateful, to be honest. He'd been having one of those times when his thoughts ranged back to the prison (the screams and the chaos) and the people he'd failed and lost , like the father of the girl who had been pacing beside him, walking with extra long strides to keep up.
"Daryl, look!"
At least she had been keeping up, before she'd stopped for something. Daryl turned to look and found her crouched down right beside a bush. Her blond hair was in it's usual ponytail (with a tiny little braid on the side that he kept wanting to tug on) and it was swinging gently against the back of her yellow he took a step towards her she turned to look over her shoulder to fix him with those big blue eyes, and flashed him an excited grin.
(For just a moment he felt something similar to that look go right through him, excitement in heat form, curling through his body for just a second before it faded.)
"What is it?" He asked, his voice rumbling a bit in his chest as he came up behind her to look down.
"It's rabbit tracks!" She pointed to the ground, paused and then glanced back up at him, looking hopeful and unsure at the same time. "Right?"
His brow furrowed and he crouched down next to her. Their knees bumped (there it was again, that weird feeling, a quick flush of heat) and he peered down at the tracks she'd spotted. He knew she was right with one glance, but when a lesson presented itself, he wasn't gonna squander it. Especially since she'd been proving to have a knack for this, ever since he'd agreed to start showing her.
"Why d'you think it's a rabbit?" He nodded down at the ground, inviting her to tell him.
He was distracted for a moment by the way her nose crinkled up in thought, but pushed his gaze back down when she pointed, "Cause of the way the tracks are? It's got the two small front feet and the two bigger back feet, with that little drag to it. Offset bound, see, I remember!"
"Yeah, y' do." It wasn't quite a 'good job' out loud, but it was in his expression as he nodded at her and rose to his feet. "C'mon. Let's see if we can track it, then."
He led the way in the new direction, occasionally nudging away bushes to show her where the tracks went. He had been keeping mostly quiet again, caught up in the hunt, when Beth's voice broke in. "You know, I saw this show on the Discovery Channel once. About these rabbits that turn white in the winter. You ever heard of that?"
Daryl grunted, and then added after a moment, "Snowshoe hare."
"Yeah!" She turned to him and shit, that bright look on her face was distracted. He didn't even understand why. "Did you see that episode or something?"
"Ain't never watched no Discovery Channel." Daryl made a face and ran his hand through his hair, before adding a little less roughly, "Didn't need to, anyway. Too busy livin' out in it. We ain't got snowshoe hares down here, but up North a bit. Never saw any myself."
He didn't tell her that he'd read about it in a book, once. That he'd gone to the library, of all places, when he was a kid, a whole book about North American wildlife. He'd gotten into hunting at a young age, and he'd been curious, but reading books wasn't something his Dad or Merle would've approved of. They'd have said it was for pussies, even if it was about hunting. It had been cool, though. He'd seen pictures of black bears and brown bears, and studied the differences between mule deer, whitetail deer, and blacktail deer. And, of course, rabbits.
"I just think it's really cool," Beth said after a moment, easy with her conversation as always, "How would you hunt one like that, if it blended into the snow?"
"Still makes tracks, don't it?" Daryl gestured down at the dirt, "Don't usually hunt in the snow too much down here, but sometimes it's even easier to see the tracks in it."
Beth chuckled as she ducked under a branch. A twig got caught in her hair and he slowed with her as she struggled to get it free, still chatting away, "I'd probably get distracted. I used to love snow. We almost never got it, so it was like a holiday when we did, you know? Like Christmas. I'd bundle up and run outside and make snow angels. We never got enough to make a snowman, though, but I was really good at snow angels."
Somehow she was only managing to get the twig even more twisted into her hair and finally Daryl moved without thinking. He came up beside her and reached down, gently unraveling the little stick from where it was caught in her silken blonde strands. It was only when she looked up at him with a little smile that he realized how close she was, and how big and blue her eyes seemed today.
"Ain't never made snow angels," he remarked roughly. Even talking was better than thinking about Beth's big doe eyes. "Not very manly."
Beth surprised him by snorting. "That's silly, my Daddy used to make snow angels with me all the time."
He saw the pain go across her eyes the moment she said that, and he wished he could wind back time even if only enough to take back what he'd said, to stop himself from reminding her of her father. It killed him whenever he saw that pain in her eyes and knew that in some way it was his fault, for not finding a way to save Hershel.
Daryl would have said anything, to stop her from looking like that, which was probably why he opened his mouth and started, "Tell y' what. If it snows... I promise I'll let you try'n convince me to make a snow angel. But only one." He frowned at her, and said roughly, "And you'll have to convince me, first."
Just like that the pain disappeared from her sweet face and she was all sunshine smiles again. "Deal. Just you watch, Daryl, I will have you convinced in a heartbeat!"
He didn't doubt it. As he pulled the twig from her hair at last and tossed it to the ground, his fingers briefly grazed her forehead. For whatever reason there was a faint pink flush on Beth's cheeks, and it instantly put an image in his mind: Beth, bundled up for winter, a little hat tugged down over her hair, her blue eyes all bright and shining as she fell back onto the clean white snow, her cheeks all flushed pink by the cold as she grinned up at him and laughed and waved her arms to make the angel wings he was pretty sure already belonged to her...
Yeah. He had a feeling Beth Greene would have no trouble convincing him to make a snow angel. Or do pretty much anything at all, to be honest.
The thought had him scratching at his head with an arrow as he pulled back and said gruffly, "Come on, Greene. Let's go track that damn rabbit."
