"Look, I'm just saying, I don't want you to get your hopes too high. There could be other people with a baby out here. We don't know."
"You're right," she says, "we don't know." And that's all she'll say on the matter while they tromp their way back to camp.
They'd scouted the area, found what may have been two sets of foot prints, but he couldn't be totally sure in all the leaves, pine needles, fallen branches, roots. There was some trash around, limbs snapped off here and there. Could have followed it some, at least a lot easier than his chances had been with Sophia or Beth, but he'd made a quick executive decision to go back to Rick with this information.
Even so, when he glances up from the forest floor to Beth walking just ahead of him, saw the determined grit to her jaw, the straight of her back, he knows exactly what she's thinking. He can nearly see her chanting in that head of hers, Judith, Judith, Judith. Her chin is up, a resolute confidence to just the way she's holding herself and moving that strikes him funny, for some reason (struck in the gut with something like a hallucination, like a vision, but it's right in front of him, he's looking right at her: he thinks, this is the woman Beth will be, that she is. He sees the coltishness, the unsureness in her own body and its capabilities, washing away from her.)
It leaves him gasping, grasping for a handhold, and to catch up.
He knows Beth needs her hope, but Judith... she was just an infant. No one had seen or heard of her or the kids, but they'd found Luke's boot. He thinks of Carl telling them of her empty car seat at the burning prison.
Worse than thinking of wherever Beth had been, he'd tried not to think of Judy at all.
He grabs at her arm, just enough to pull her to a stop. "Beth."
When she twirls around to face him, her eyes make him flash back to when she'd been picking fruit for the kids, they'll be hungry when we find them. Decisive, just a little bit obstinate. It's this look she gets, he knows now, when she's gettin' ready to spit out something that normal, sweet little Beth Greene wouldn't say unless she were real riled. Gearin' up to fight for what she believed, what she needed to believe in.
He ain't lookin' for a fight. He lets his hand slip from her arm, to her fingers. He thinks of touching her cheek, putting his big clumsy dirty palm on her face, but he hasn't got the balls. Not yet. "Just don't want ya... hurtin' more."
Her face softens. He sees it happen like magic.
Her small, dry, warm fingers curl around his, squeeze. "We'll be ok."
He chews his lip. Ducks his head. Nods. Feels like a fool for not being able to meet her eyes, feeling too overwhelmed, definitely in over his unschooled fucking head.
She drops his hand, a merciful release.
They keep on.