This was heavily influenced by my own feelings about my young wedding and subsequent divorce. So it's mostly Beth and less Bethyl, oops. I may do a second part to this though if people like it enough and want one.
Title: The Unexpected Road
Word Count: 1938
Universe: Non-Zombie AU
Rating: General
Brief Summary: People have been telling Beth since she was six that she'd end up married to Jimmy someday. It's just expected. So why, on the day of her wedding, does it feel so wrong?
Notes: I have a lot of feelings about girls and marriage, obviously...
There's this thing about being a girl: getting married is expected. Wanting to get married is expected. Is it any wonder, when it starts so young?
You play house or play with dolls, cradling your sweet baby doll close as everyone jokes about you 'practicing' for when you have your own kids someday. You dress yourself up in oversized white shirts or your Mama's discarded white sundress, so big on you that it hangs off one shoulder and trails on the ground as you clutch a bouquet of wildflowers in your hand and practice getting married, to your favorite teddybear or the herding dog, or eventually, to the boy you're friends with.
You're so used to it, this expectation, that it seems normal when it turns from silly fun to serious talk. You giggle and laugh in high school, when relatives and family friends joke about your boyfriend, about high school sweethearts and true love and being together forever. You smile when they talk about how they met their husbands and wives in high school too, or how their parents did, or their parents parents. You duck your head and blush when they tease you about your boyfriend, because it's just what's expected of you, isn't it?
It's expected that this teasing turn into serious questions, that you get "but when are you and that sweet boy going to get married" probably even more than you get "where are you going to college" or "what do you wanna be when you grow up?". If you feel annoyance at being asked when he's going to 'pop the question', it's just because you don't know when he will, right? It's not because you don't want him to. Because of course he will. It's what's expected. It's what's supposed to be.
People have been telling Beth Greene she'll end up married to Jimmy Hensen since she was like six years old. So when he does pop the question, she says yes, because it's expected, right? It just is.
There's another thing all tied up in this, in the questions people ask. After you say yes, people ask the same things: when is the wedding and have you picked a date yet and where will you have it and oh you two are just so perfect together, wouldn't your mama be proud? And if you get flustered, well, blushing brides and all, right?
There's so many things no one asks.
They don't ask: Aren't you too young to be getting married?
And they definitely don't ask: Are you sure you want to get married?
No. No one asks that, and why would they? You're a girl and all your life you've dreamed of falling in love and getting married, raising a family in a perfect little home. It's expected, and Beth Greene has always done what was expected.
(Except once. Just once. But no one talks about that, not beyond sidelong glances at her wrists or worried mutterings when they think she's not listening. That was a detour. A trip off the path that she's since gotten right back on.)
So no one asks the tougher questions. Not her friends, not her Daddy, and certainly not her older sister Maggie, who is too busy trying to plan the perfect wedding their Mama would have wanted to wonder if any of it is what Beth wants.
And when Beth seems a bit nervous and unsure, when she manages the night before her wedding to get across some tiny sliver of her nerves… well of course Maggie has an answer for it.
It's just wedding jitters, isn't it sweet? All brides get them!
Alone in her room, Beth can't help wondering if that's true. Do all brides get jitters? Do they all feel a worry in the pit of their belly, or hear a voice whispering in the back of their mind: wrong, wrong, wrong. Do all brides lay in their beds crying at the thought of walking down the aisle the next day?
But even as she cries herself to sleep in her childhood bed, Beth tells herself it's normal. It's just wedding jitters. It's expected.
The unexpected doesn't truly come until the day of her wedding, when she's finally got a moment to herself alone. She's standing in front of the long mirror in her bedroom. The corner of it is broken, as it has been since she was ten and threw her copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at it in a fit of anger. There are water spots on the mirror, too, and a hint of warping in the corner, but that isn't why the reflection makes her so uncomfortable.
This mirror has seen so many versions of her. It has seen her in the over-sized yellow rain boots she'd worn obsessively for a month as a child. It had seen her from sundresses to jean shorts to pajamas to Halloween costumes. It had seen her in the simple black dress she'd put on as both armor and camouflage to attend the funeral of Shawn and her Mama, just as it had seen her in the clothes she'd come home from the hospital it, wan and with a thick new bandage on her wrist.
It had seen her once, so long ago, in another white dress. It had belonged to her Mama and it had been so big that the sleeve of it had hung off one shoulder and the hem had trailed on the hardwood floors till it was dusty and frayed from snagging on the wood. She'd had a napkin pinned to her head and a ragged bunch of wildflowers in her hands and the irony was, she'd been on her way to 'marry' the same boy she was set to marry for real today.
Jimmy Hensen. Mrs Jimmy Hensen. Beth… Hensen.
It was what people had been expecting of her since she was six years old. Graduate high school, say yes to Jimmy, marry him, move in with him and have a nice little family, probably at least two perfect little blonde haired children. Be a wife, and a mother, and be happy with it.
Beth Hensen The way it was supposed to be, right? The way she was expected to be.
But standing there looking at herself in the mirror, she knew it wasn't right. She felt it in that moment, like a jolt of lightning right to her gut and spreading in a flash through every inch of her being. It didn't matter if it was what was expected of her because she didn't want it.
She really, truly, desperately didn't want it, in a way that now crackled through her veins and lit her with an anxious sort of fire.
Like a horse startled by the rumble of a storm in the distance, Beth spooked and ran. She ran right out of her bedroom door, down the front stairs and right out the front door without a thought for all the people gathered right now in the back yard.
She just ran.
She wasn't thinking straight. About the running away, that she was clear, but about the how of it, not so much. If she'd been thinking she would have hopped into Otis's truck where he always left the keys in the engine. If she'd been thinking she might have even taken a horse, or tried to find Maggie's boyfriend Glenn's coat and borrowed the keys to his car.
But she wasn't thinking about anything but getting away, which was how she ended up running down a gravel road, kicking up dust in her wake and staining the hem of her pristine white dress as her perfect pinned up curls began to unravel, wisps flying into her face.
When she heard the rumbling of an engine behind her, she had one heart wrenching moment of panic. She was sure it was Maggie, sure her sister had saw her and was coming to scoop her up and drag her right back to her boring, expected destiny.
But when she turned, the person she saw was so far was Maggie it was a laughable relief.
He was on a motorcycle, a fierce looking thing that rumbled so loud her ears almost ached. He had sunglasses shading his eyes and dark shaggy hair that streamed out behind him. His jeans were worn and ripped, and as he unexpectedly came to a stop just a few feet from her, Beth had just enough time to notice the white angel wings on the back of his leather vest,
Then he turned, lowered his sunglasses, and their eyes meet… and nothing about it was expected. In that moment she could see so much in his gaze. Confusion, annoyance, deliberation, even bewilderment perhaps at why he'd stopped at all… but also something else. Something warm, something so familiar that for a moment she finds herself on the brink of asking: have we met before? Don't I know you?
Before she can ask, his gruff voice cuts into the silence, "Need a ride?" He looks almost bewildered at himself, as if he hadn't at all planned on asking. She wouldn't blame him. Who would think any good could come of picking up a girl in a wedding dress on an empty country road?
But he asked, and in the seconds before she answered, Beth could almost see the two paths stretched out in front of her.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
One was clear; she could hop on that bike and have him take her right back home. To her Daddy and her sister and Jimmy; to Mrs Hensen and a pretty little house and two perfect blonde-haired kids.
The other though… the other was far less clear. The other involved her hopping on that bike and driving off to somewhere unknown. Wherever the road took her, wherever the bike took her, wherever this man…
"What's your name?"
"Daryl," he said just as gruffly, "Dixon."
Wherever Daryl Dixon took her. She mouthed his name, tasting not only the syllables of it on her tongue, not only that sense of familiarity once again, but the sweet and unexpected tang of possibility. Of the exciting, the unknown, the unexpected.
In one easy movement she was straddling the bike behind him, the pristine white skirt of her dress rucked up around her legs and her arms sliding around his waist as she said simply, "Beth Greene."
If he mouthed her name in any similar fashion as she had his, Beth didn't see it. But she did see the look of curiosity in his eyes as he glanced over his shoulder and asked, "Where to?"
And she definitely saw the hint of a smirk in his eyes as she breathed right back, "I don't care. Anywhere but here." That smirk was mirrored in her own smile a second later as she tightened her arms around his waist and added, "Take me somewhere unexpected."
The engine rumbled beneath her thighs and as they drove, the wind worked it's way through her hair until each neatly pinned curl was undone and streaming in waves behind her, and as she clung to the man in front of her, all Beth could do was laugh.
Because there were no more expectations. It was just her, Daryl Dixon, and the wide open possibilities in front of them. She finally just felt free.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
