After, little changed with them, except they stand a little closer, hold each other's eyes a little longer, and now every night bed down together. It is easy to live this way together, natural. All awkwardness and adjustments had been made long before this point, during their first days out together. Long since the fire they'd been in league; long since the funeral home they'd been in sync. Now, with this thing between them, everything falls into place and they stand together a strong synchronous unit.
Daryl would not have chosen Beth Greene as his fellow on the road — were there such things as choices left — but through these months as refugees on the run she had proven herself, as a comrade, as a road soldier, as a companion. Though she is not big she is fast; though her muscles and build are small she is strong-willed and resolute. The girl is steadfast. And now, now that he loves her, knows that he loves her, he can't help but to.
For how does a person not love the sun in a world of darkness? Or the North Star when he's lost? Or the line holding him fixed when he's become untethered? How does a person not love Beth Greene?
He cherishes her above all else.
From the beginning, from their first day on the run, he had taken the lead — protecting her, taking her kills on top of his own. He'd had no choice: protect her as he would himself or she'd be gone, and he'd be left on his own, alone, cold and hardened — his brother with one hand more. Looking out for Beth had in some part always been looking out for Daryl. But it's more than than that now, much more than protecting the group, than keeping some shred of humanity alive through her. More than looking after Hershel's younger daughter. Her survival is his survival, measured maybe not in breaths, but by everything else that matters.
He needs her, fearing what he would become if he lost her now — Rick at his worst? Or something altogether darker, more dangerous, unreachable, and utterly unredeemable? Without question, he cannot leave her. Changed as she has, Elizabeth Ann Greene is not built to be the last man standing. If the world as it stands does not destroy her, the people left standing in it surely will. Daryl cannot see surviving past her, and he cannot hope she'd survive long past him, so with little choice but this, he trudges on, with her at his side, believing that somehow against the odds they will come through this together, as a unit, as they seem meant to be.
They stay off the roads, and out of the towns, except for when a run is all but vital; they've both had their fill of other people. Though there may be strength in numbers there's no telling who those numbers would be. Strangers don't seem worth the risk of walking into something they can't get out of. And so it remains two pairs of booted feet trekking across the countryside, plowing through tall grass, slogging through marshes, tramping through the wilderness, one after another, one beside the other. And as they toil on, Beth is no longer left to linger on chance occasions during which an elbow or shoulder might touch in passing, nor the quiet moments in which a soft gaze discreetly fixes and holds. In one sweltering afternoon's show of fortitude, she'd done away with any need for parsing or happenstance. They've never had such access to something or someone more than they do now with one another. If Beth wants to take his hand or feel his lips on hers, she does. If Daryl's compelled to test this happiness, he merely reaches out to touch her. He's taken to idly grasping the back of her neck, or tugging on the back loop of her jeans as she passes, or running his weathered index finger down the length of her sweet hominy hair, just confirming she and this is real.
It's been a fortnight of this, and it feels like a lifetime. Not in length of time maybe, but as the order of things.
But unity is not tranquility. And Daryl especially is not without crises of faith. He's lost everything good he's ever had, everything and everyone he's ever wanted have left or been taken away too soon.
The absences haunt him.
... If Merle did not last in this world, how possibly can Beth? ...
There are times she finds him brooding, silent for hours, glowering at the unknowable future ahead of them, figuring out some balancing equation only intelligible in his own burdened mind: If he surrenders what is most dear, will it not be taken away from him so irrevocably? ... If he stops this with her now, keeping with her only as a companion, at the price of his pleasure and contentment, will it buy her time? ...
He gets this way after close calls sometimes. Like today. They had been stupid, and not fast enough, and because of it got separated by a throng of biters. Careless.
There were maybe as many as twelve, and in little time they were upon them, seemingly everywhere. In her fight to keep clear of them Beth had backed herself against a tree. Slashing at the walkers as they advanced, she fended them off, gouging in skulls and eyes and brains where she could while he fought madly to get to her. With deliberate calculation, Daryl bashed in rotted heads with the blunt force of his bow, swinging it back and forth, this way and that. He couldn't get at her, he couldn't clear fast enough. Daryl saw them closing in around her — Fucking stupid to have broken formation! — All it could take is one foul scratch.
Beth shoved one back from her with all her might and grabbed another, much smaller, one towards her, driving her blade in hard and true, in and out so fast, catching no resistance on her quick retraction. He didn't see what followed. When he next looked in her direction she was no longer visible. Gone. He'd hoped she'd ran but could not tell if she had. There had been no scream. No cry for help. Daryl kicked back a massive hulking walker, giving himself time to load a bolt he pulled from a splattered skull and shoot it dead between the decaying caverns that once had been eyes before the thing lumbered back at him. Still, he couldn't see her. Only walkers, in every direction. His mind seized and churned as he fought the dead things off: Surely she would scream if she were caught. Surely she would run if the opportunity were there. Surely she would not go down in a vacuum of silence. Girls do not just disappear... Fighting on, he'd bashed in another walker then made a run for it, cutting back through the woods towards her direction, towards where she would have run, every step keeping a trained eye watchful for her tracks, three walkers still at his heels.
She had run; he crossed her trail. But she had been dragging something by the looks of it — there, the carcass of that smaller one she'd killed. No doubt she'd clung to it as a shield to get herself out of the pack. Clever girl. But, clear there in her tracks, Beth had stumbled and hit the ground; something had been in pursuit of her. The frantic scrambling was marked all over the forest floor around him. Daryl had pressed on then, keeping his pace quick, running to catch up with her, running to outpace the walkers following behind him.
He'd found her, maybe a quarter-mile from the initial attack zone, on her knees, finishing off a walker, plunging her blade in through its skull. The kill complete and her adrenaline racing, she had been quickly on her feet again, geared up and set to double back to him when she nearly ran into him.
"Beth!" he'd shouted. "Run!"
And she did. The woods were not clear yet and Beth ran, knife in hand, bounding over fallen tree trunks and scrambling through brush and brier. Daryl followed, but not before seeing again the walker Beth had used as cover — the form of what once had been a girl.
Beth had run. And so had he. And they had made it out. They got away, again, but it had been close. When they were clear, panting and heaving, trying to catch their breaths, he saw the tear in her sleeve, the bruises already forming on her wrists and forearms. Her life had been in true jeopardy. And if things had gone wrong, if she couldn't have handled it, he wouldn't have been able to get to her in time. He'd already let the prison down, what good is he, or any of this, if he can't keep one girl alive? One person aside himself?
The help he'd given at the prison? The people he'd brought in? It was nothing. In the end, when it mattered, who had he really saved? The names and faces had run mercilessly through his head as he and Beth moved on from there, trudging onward through the woods for most of the day. Sophia ... Dale ... Andrea ... Merle ... Hershel ... Everyone ...
Finally, they had come to a cluster of saplings near a massive old blackjack oak that together formed something of a natural barrier on one side. There they've been sitting, within the borders of their hastily strung alert line, quietly regrouping.
Occupying his hands with the methodic sharpening of his knife, Daryl reflects ruefully on how close a run-in this had been. His mind's eye brings back the image of Beth's tactical kill: age no longer determinable, but by the size and the look of the clothes and shoes a teenager, maybe fourteen, maybe less. That Beth had not only killed her but employed her body said a lot. Beth takes it hardest when encountered with the young ones; she doesn't like to be the one to kill them when given the preference. Despite the danger they pose, her empathy for them remains acutely intact. But in dire straits she had used her head and acted quickly; she had gotten herself out. She had done this to survive, but it meant that it had been close. Had there been no small walker — and given what became of most children, either at the hands of their parents or at the jaws of the walkers, ninety-nine times out of a hundred there won't be — she might not have gotten away. Not this time.
And so he broods. While Beth seems demonstrably unaffected. Which gets under his skin; he doesn't like her getting cavalier, if that's what this is.
The knife no longer a sufficient outlet for his ire, Daryl rises and paces. Beth watches.
"Daryl." She speaks his name. But Daryl shakes his head and keeps pacing. He's in his head, and he's letting things get to him. Beth reaches out and touches her fingers to his hand as he passes, gently trying to keep him in place. At her touch Daryl lets himself linger a second or two. His fingertips momentarily intertwine with hers, but shortly he strides on, letting the connection between them drop. She can see his mind's in turmoil and wishes he'd only speak the words building in him. "Daryl." But he's near his boiling point and she can't get through to him, not with that temperate earnest tone of hers.
Daryl paces. Mindlessly he tears off a low branch as he passes before bitterly chucking it into the woods. He's got to get his head straight. He's got to reconcile himself with her and with this world, or he'll never be able to stand it or know a moment's peace. "I love you, Beth," he asserts definitively as he turns from her. "I do, but, things don't work in this world like that anymore. They just don't." His graveled voice drops some then, "...Nuthin' ends well."
"What about Maggie and Glenn?" her small brightly defiant voice counters.
"Whut about 'em?" he volleys back.
"They could still be alive."
"This could all be just a bad dream," he charges rhetorically. "I c'n pinch ya; y'can find out."
"Daryl, stop it." Beth looks at him, squinting through the sunlight to really truly see him. "Do you want me to leave you alone? Is that what you're saying? Go back to before?"
Daryl exhales, deflated. He isn't saying that. Being left alone is exactly what he does not want, never wants. God, never let Beth Greene leave him alone. He doesn't know what he's saying exactly, but he knows he cannot lose her. He's pretty sure one more loss, and hers especially, might kill him; he can't be left standing there if Beth disappears, he couldn't take it. He can't be like what she'd said — he can't be the last man standing. Daryl shakes his head and grunts, "Mm'dunno."
"You can't change anythin'," she insists. "The turn, the farm gettin' overrun, the outbreak at the prison, the, th' Governor—" Daryl grits at the mention of his name "— we couldn't change any of it. It's not our fault." She looks at him in earnest, "It's not. ... You don't have to worry." Daryl bristles, all he does is worry. This thing with her, it just makes things worse. Harder. "You're not responsible," she tells him. "And," her river eyes flit to his and that small half-smile of hers breaks across her somber face, "if we're not living, why are we fightin' to stay alive?"
"This isn't a soap opera," he hurls at her brusquely, far from being in the mood to be charmed by her. "We're not here tuh, tuh—"
"Have a li-afe?" she challenges. Taking the slightest step forward, Beth does not flinch from looking him in the eye. To the degree that he is volatile and ill at ease, she, in turn, is calm and certain. "You gotta take a risk, Daryl. You've gotta. And—" she preemptively cuts his rebuttal off, "I'm not talkin' about out there, with the walkers and the—" Beth hesitates over the word for the people in the world, people like the Governor, and Randall's group "— others. You do that, I know. You've always done it. That's not what I'm talkin' about." His jaw set and rigid, Daryl hazards a cagey glance at her and her impregnable conviction; riled and circumspect, Daryl hears her out but withholds judgment on what she's saying. "You can have this," she tells him. "We can be together. We can still be happy. Everythin's not gone."
Swiftly Daryl's eyes shift away from her at the sound of something only an attuned ear would hear; with haste, he raises his bow with rote immediacy and dispassionately shoots and kills a forward stumbling walker. Daryl scans the horizon. When satisfied, he lowers his bow and shifts his eyes back to her. Slowly, the words come after his restless uncertain eyes struggle to hold her in his gaze. "Y' think?"
Beth swallows and nods at him assured. "I do."
That'll have to do. What else is there? Beth's faith is all they have. His bow and her belief. Daryl'll have to let that be enough. He can't fight the world and himself. Blinking and setting his jaw, he shifts his stance, unbristles and stands down. Slinging the crossbow around to his back, he shuts it down, all of it, and resolvedly fixes his eyes on the road and on her. Daryl fixes his mind on survival and on Beth. He'd never been one to second guess himself, or get stuck in his head. By nature, Daryl Dixon is a linear thinker who takes forward action, taking things as they come, seeing the long view of things, and saying 'fuck it' to the world. This day saw him bested and overtaken by irrational fear, but he shuts it out now, reverting back to his true nature.
Daryl looks at her, and quietly his displaced passion and unrest refocus now on Beth. He steps toward her, the singular intent in his stone blue eyes hooded beneath his knitted brow. Wordlessly he takes tight hold of her at the hips. Slipping his hands onto her, feeling the sturdiness of her frame there beneath his grip, Daryl inches closer. He mutters, looking into her large blue eyes looking right up at him, "M'kay." Holding her there to him, Daryl breathes. He pulls her in, and kisses her, holding her fast and close. His earlier thoughts of forsaking her and this already feel foreign and distant. And though he's kissed her before, and with more passion than this, and hell, they've slept together even, it's in this moment of unity that the biggest change happens. In this acquiesence Daryl allows her in, more than he has so before, laying down walls that have been up for decades. He is not alone, she is with him. And she is not afraid. They can fight together for their future.
Suddenly the day's aggression transforms into a different tension. His pulse quickens and his desire to have her, to ravage her, to be consumed by her, rages. A sensation fuels Beth as she feeds off the fire in his eyes, and she draws him in, meeting his tongue with hers, reaching for him to keep him close. Her arms, those thin sunburned things that had so recently been fiercely fighting off walkers, enwrap him with unguarded enthusiasm. Daryl grunts slightly as he lifts her, backing her against the broad weathered trunk of the oak. Their kiss deepens and intensifies as she pulls open his shirt and vest and he fumbles with belt buckles and zippers and holsters, looking for a release, looking for her. Her jeans undone, Daryl tugs them down her creamy thighs, leaving them in a bunch below her knees, and holding her at the waist he kneels down and kisses her navel, biting at the fraying elastic in the waist of her underwear. With only his teeth he tugs them low enough so that he might kiss her there, one hand gripping round her, holding her in place by her bare pert ass, the other reaching up to her small breasts beneath layers of worn and tattered garments. Beth's fingers grasp at the gnarled tree bark for support and find balance in gripping his sweaty hair at its roots. She breathes in, cutting off a moan of unexpected pleasure. The delicious sensation is entirely new to her but only wets her appetite; her desire for her archer builds and her hands tug at his hair to call him back to her. Daryl rises, kissing her torso and then her soft freckled chest where she's pulled away her top. Caressing her face and jawline, taking her girlish breast in his mouth, playing secretly with her in her aroused inner folds, Daryl pauses his campaign to look her in the eye.
Beth smiles at him and blinks, then pulls him to her in a kiss he answers with matched intensity. His undone trousers loose at his hips, Daryl would lift her to him again but his hungry pursuit of her is hindered by the obstacles of her boots and jeans and when her sweet slight hands travel past his flexing shoulders, beneath the collar of his sweat-soaked shirt and down his back— Daryl flinches and starts. Instinctively, Daryl pulls back from her and quick as anything turns her around. In one fluid movement Daryl runs his hands down the length of Beth's arms, lifting them above her and leans her against the tree. Strategically out of her reach but keeping her very much in his, both Daryl's lips and hands travel the terrain of her nearly naked body, pausing to further push down her jeans, nudge her footing a little farther apart, and reach around to find her pleasure. Above both their heads, his left-hand wraps in hers where it presses against the tree trunk, supporting his weight against her. Still unaccustomed, Beth gasps and constricts as he enters but she gives way to his passion and melds into him at his touch, wherever and however it reaches her. Daryl presses on, making love to her as his crossbow at his back keeps rhythm with his thrusts, and when there is nothing left but to capitulate to his desire and exhaustion he holds her fast, gripping her body to him, burying his face in the soft bend of her neck where her golden hair falls lightly on him, and Daryl lets go everything — surrendering himself to the mighty, exquisite thundering of it all, pulling back just in time. "Be-eth," he hotly breathes into her ear as the lithe and gritty beauty shudders limply in his arms.