Really want to thank all reviewers, it definitely keeps me writing!

"Hey," Daryl nudges her awake in the morning. "Look'a whut you did."

Beth rubs her eyes, pushes herself up, and looks in the direction he's pointing the knife. Over the fire he rebuilt roast three small fish. Their skin is crisping and wrinkling in the heat as they cook and little drops of oil drip and sizzle on the embers. Nothing ever sounded, looked, or smelled so good. Beth looks at him then back to the fish, the smile she wears is disarming.

They eat quickly, licking their lips and their fingers, savoring every morsel they can find. Three small fish shared between two people aching for sustenance do not amount to much, but it's something and already it's a considerably better start to the day than the one they'd lived through the day before.

After breakfast Beth disassembles the fish trap, scattering the twigs in the current, then uses her knife to cut fabric from her outer shirt, producing two foot-length strips. She then layers the large multi-lobed leaves from the night before atop them.

Daryl watches her with mild interest, "That bloodroot?"

Beth looks up, "Uh-huh." The green leaves, looking almost like lily pads, grow low to the earth beneath white blossoms resembling something close to a daisy. She'd found a patch of them as she had searched for fuel and kindling for the fire, and had spent some time collecting the leaves.

He nods quietly. "Smart." In its history, the plant has been used to treat ulcers, skin infections, and as a non-ingestible oral antiseptic.

Next, foot by foot, she holds the leaves to her raw and cut soles, keeping them in place against her with the cut fabric strips, then, with some maneuvering, carefully she tugs her socks on over them for the purpose of extra padding and guard against wear and infection. Daryl observes, then does the same with the half pile of bloodroot she'd left unused. If it doesn't work, and the leaves shift and move as they walk, it won't cost them anything; it can't much hurt to try.

Picking up his unimpressive excuse for a weapon, Daryl pops a small twig in the back-side of his mouth and chews idly on it as he studies the sky. "Stay by th' water," he thinks aloud. From the side of his mouth Daryl spits to the ground, "Follow the creek, chances are we'll come across some campsites. See what we c'n git."

Beth rises and stands on her oddly wrapped feet. She would have been better off binding them she realizes, but the weather is shifting, and she can't afford to cut up all her clothes. She wishes for those wool sweaters they surrendered. Such bad luck— "Have we done this stretch of the river already?"

Daryl spits again, "No."

She turns, looking around them, scanning the woods. "How do you know?"

Daryl looks at her, bobbing the twig back and forth in his mouth with his tongue. "'Cuz. This is far west of where we been. We haven't seen this creek b'fore." He jerks his head, "Com'on." Beth follows after him, and they start their day's journey, keeping eyes out for game trails, walker tracks, and signs of the living, collecting and eating what plant life they know to be safe as they go.

Daryl walks with shoulders squared, his back straight, leading them downstream. Beth follows, keeping her eyes on the winged stitching on his back, wishing he would speak to her, wishing for the silence between them to end, for the space dividing them to close. She doesn't care what he speaks of, she longs to hear that singular deep and scratchy, soft and boyish, volatile and brash voice of his. But it's the brook that babbles, and it's the birds that call. And the rest is mostly silence.

As they walk more and the hours pass, the only thing keeping Beth from thinking continually of food is the pain in her feet and the dull, sometimes piercing ache in her back. They need weapons, they need more food, they need supplies, and they need a plan. They need to find their ways back to one another. They need many things. But paramount to all of that may be their need for shoes.

Beth's western boots were never the best for long-distance walking — though well worn-in they gave her blisters when covering so many miles, and there was little to no give in the soles — but what she wouldn't do for them now. Daryl hasn't said anything, but she knows he's missing his boots. Every step he takes reveals the bloody undersides of his feet. They need footwear; they're much slower without it and slower is dead. If not that, it still won't do, their walking around with bloody cut up feet. They could get infected, they could become bigger targets for walkers. While footwear may seem trivial in comparison to weapons and food, their lack of it is something they have to change. And if they can't get it done in the woods, they both know eventually they'll have to venture back to a highway, back to a town.

For the time being though, they press on on the path they've marked for themselves, staying under the canopy of trees, sticking close to the creek, trusting something will turn up.

It's while scrambling over a small bank of rocks and boulders at a bend in the stream that they spot and then stalk a lone walker. It's something female, staggering and hobbling in the distance through the trees. With a silent signal between them they go after it, staying upwind of it as it lugs itself on through the afternoon shadows. When close behind it, Daryl pulls the thing by the collar of its tattered camping gear and drives the knife in soundly, down through the back of its skull. It's a lucky find and a lucky kill. Had the thing been one in a mass of walkers they might have had to have let it pass, avoiding it rather than killing it, but as it was, she was on her own. The thing is about Beth's size, somewhat taller, and from the limited decay she doesn't appear to have been dead too long. The face is hollow and sickly grey, but it hasn't yet begun to rot. Daryl observes no clear signs of death — no bite marks anyway, though there are traces of vomit on her face and on her front. Most likely she ate something toxic, some plant or berry.

It's a shame, Beth thinks, for it — no, this woman — to have made it so long, seemingly on her own, just to have it ended by hunger, or by chance. To be in the world with all its varieties of monsters, living and dead, and to be killed merely by eating the berry from a leaf with three prongs and not the berry from the one with five. The same could happen to them. They could die of hunger or exposure, or blood infection if their feet aren't tended to. And unwittingly it strikes her: Would that be better? Is the fate of this crumpled figure before her not so much a shame but unseeming grace? The idle thought stays with her, taking hold as Beth watches Daryl inspect the body.

She doesn't mean it. Of course. These thoughts of 'better'. These considerations of 'grace'. It's only a passing thought...

Her mind needs not turn this way. Though she's hungry, Beth knows starvation is still far off, as is also the deep chill of winter. They have time, she and Daryl, to change the things that beleaguer them. They will find food, they will find shelter, they will make no more mistakes, and this lonely hapless fate before them will not become their own. She need not consider its merits.

But still, as she thinks on how she came to be in this circumstance, her body aching and her stomach empty and churning, Beth finds herself involuntarily wondering if an accidental end of some sort would be best... given all they know of the way this world works, of its many ways of killing and downtrodding. If Daryl's right — if there is no good end to reach — would it be better to die of something mundane, something altogether passive and nonviolent?

Beth shakes her head. Since when did she start looking to be passive? Since when does she consider easy ways out? Why are thoughts of this nature finding footing with her? She turned her back on that two years ago.

Beth isn't looking for a painless fearless way to die. It is not for that she has been searching in these woods these long months. These past two years she has not been fighting for a way to die on her own terms, it's to live that's kept her fighting. It must be still.

Beth pries herself from her morbid reverie and drops down beside Daryl and the unlucky figure between them. Daryl searches the clothes and pack; Beth goes straight for the feet, unlacing the hiking boots double time. There should be no easy way to die. Life is not easy — it never was — but it is not to be given up on. It is to be fought for and protected. It is to be tended. There is no 'out' to look for.

What's left of the thing's skin threatens to slip off with the boots, but Beth maneuvers them carefully and the socks help keep the epidermis free. Things are not that bad. As they now stand, circumstances are not too dire to recover from. Carefully Beth inspects the boots. She has to be scrupulous; they get blisters just sitting these days it seems, and as cut and raw as her feet already are, she can't afford any errant walker blood near her exposed skin. Satisfied, she moves to tie them on, but Daryl knocks her hands away leaving the boots where they drop.

There is little salvageable from the clothes. The pack she's carrying, unfortunately, looks to have been snagged on or ripped by something; there's a huge tear down one side and there's little left within it. Inside at the bottom is a folded emergency blanket, a bandana, and a paperback book. The outer smaller pocket, still intact, contains a travel sewing kit in a small tin, a compass, a magnifier, a small pocket knife, a baggie with four pain medication tablets, and three packets of instant oatmeal. In the clothes pockets there's a keychain with a mini flashlight and a folded picture of a man. It isn't much, but it's a start. It isn't nothing.

Beth and Daryl collect their bounty — the pack, the shoes, and the flannel strips of fabric Daryl cuts from the corpse's outer layer — and retrace their steps back to the stream. "Here," Daryl tells her, "sit." Daryl seats her on the rocks by the water's edge and there he takes her feet in his lap, pulling off her socks, the leaves and all. He washes her feet then leaves them in the icy water to soak. He uses one of the scraps of fabric as a rag, dipping it in the creek and ringing it tightly then brushing over the insides of the boots. He's careful not to get them too wet, but he brushes over the lining, inspecting the rag for blood or other fluids each time he pulls it out. Satisfied, he sets them aside to dry and leaves her thus with her legs soaking in the cool forest stream. "Stop here a while," he says, squinting up into the sun. "Eat som'in'; let 'em dry."

Beth pulls an oatmeal packet from the bag, tears it open, careful not to spill any of the contents, and dips her cupped hand into the cool water to dribble some into the packet. She scoops in a little more, then shakes it some and lets it sit. She produces the remainder of the berries she has from their walk and divides them between them. Beth hands the cold oatmeal to Daryl but he shakes his head.

"Go ahead," he nods. "You first."

"Uh-uh," she refuses and passes the packet to him again. Daryl looks at her, through his falling dirty hair, studying her, then takes the packet, dipping two fingers in and scooping the mush into his mouth. Beth looks at him, waiting with a hidden smile for some kind of reaction to register on his face, "How is it?"

Daryl snorts, "Pretty much whutch'y'd expect."

Beth chuckles, and he pops a palmful of berries into his mouth. Daryl takes one more scoop of oats then hands the pouch off to her. Beth eats the remainder, dipping her index finger in, slipping the sticky cereal between her lips. As hungry as they are it's hard to stop at one half-packet each, knowing there's two more just waiting for them, but these two are well-trained in self-discipline and they ration what they've got. Rationing is a duplicitous thing by nature: Pessimistic in one respect, in its expectation food shortages will persist, but in another respect hopeful, in its trust that in having stored food it will be there when it's needed. They'd rationed those peaches and crackers, saved the cigarettes and candies, but in the end, they'd lost them all. Undeniably it would have been better that day to have had full stomachs and empty pockets. Keeping the two packets of instant processed oatmeal while their stomachs are as empty as they are, having been reduced as they had to eating worms the night before, is an act of trust, and hope. It is their perseverance.

Beth finishes the berries as her feet flutter lightly in the water. Daryl watches the bend and arch of her toes in the cool clear splashes. He watches the sky. Somewhere high above them a bird flies, soaring in the clouds above. It's too high, too bright in the sky to see what kind, but it is beautiful. Even if it's a buzzard, circling around, preying on something dead; in that blue sky above this earth, not among all this, it is beautiful. Daryl looks away. He tears his filthy socks off and plunges his torn-up feet into the stream, letting the current gently tug them as they drift.

Keeping her feet in the water, taking all the pleasure from it she can, Beth reaches into the hiking pack, reaching for the small plastic baggie. She tucks the four pills safely into an inseam pocket in her jeans, then reaches down, and dips the baggie into the water, scooping it back out as a sort of canteen. She smiles at the success of it and offers it to her love.

Daryl just scoffs and instead bends down and dunks his head into the water, drinking up the stream like an animal and pulling back and shaking off like the neighborhood stray. Beth laughs, a little, and drinks from the water pouch herself, refilling it several times as she takes deep generous gulps. The water spills down her face as she drinks and drips down her graceful long bent-back neck. Daryl watches as her throat constricts as thirstily she swallows. In silence, watchful, Daryl licks the remaining water from his lips, and wipes his dripping brow with the back of his hand. Then he's back at work.

Daryl takes two bloodroot leaves from where they'd dropped to the ground and chews them up with his front teeth. Spitting out any trace juices in his mouth, he pats his lap for Beth to return her feet to him. She does, and as they lie dripping in his lap he lifts each one applying the crushed juices of the plant to her open cuts and blisters. Beth starts a little at the first sting and Daryl lifts her feet together to him and blows softly on the burn. Beth slackens and he keeps at it. When satisfied he's cleaned and dressed the sores as best he can, Daryl rips apart the flannel shirt he'd cut off the hiker and gently binds her feet, only then pulling her old tattered socks on after. It is then that he brings the first boot, still slightly damp, to her foot.

Beth loves him. She just absolutely does. She loves him for his care, for his integrity, for his faithful, loyal, steadfast heart — guarded and hard to reach but so open once it is. She loves him because in these days when he can't find anything good to think on and he is unable to love himself he would not allow her to hazard her feet inside those boots till he made sure she would be safe. And she watches him adjust the boots, feeling for fit, looking for flaws; there's still plenty of tread left on the soles but the boots are too large, by a full size or more. But better too large than too small. She cuts more from the flannel shirt and he works at stuffing the toes and heels. They add more strips until the boots fit tolerably, then Daryl ties the laces tightly at her ankles. These are good boots; they will serve her well. They will keep her going.

Her back still hurting her, Beth winces as she rises and takes a few steps, trying out her windfall. Wearable. More than. She flashes a smile at Daryl. First the fish, now shoes. These things are huge. Precious invaluable fuel for their spirits and for their travels.

Daryl swallows any smile in return, but he nods. He's not there yet. He cannot smile, but he watches her, blinking at her and her lasting youth, and at the ease with which she seems always to recover.

As he sets about better wrapping his own feet, binding them and tying them with rags, Beth uses safety pins from the sewing kit to piece together the pack as best it can be, and squares away the meager start to the stash they will rebuild. It's time to move on. Beth slings the pack over her shoulders and Daryl, with the new knife pocketed and the pipe in hand, and she with her knife her new boots and a baggie of water, begin again their walk, continuing downstream.

It has been a good day, Beth thinks as she walks, admiring the light where it sparkles on the ripples in the water. But Daryl still needs shoes. Maybe getting him those will get him back closer to himself. Though he'll never be quite himself without a bow in his hands.

Through the afternoon, every walker they find has worn its shoes into the ground, or are too small or too large for Daryl Dixon. At one point she'd suggested they grab him some too-small sneakers in not too terrible shape and bend the backs down or cut them out to make a kind of slip-on, that at least would give him some coverage, but he only made it a few paces in them; it was awkward and slowed him down. Should they have to run, and sooner or later they always end up running, they would prove to be no use and likely a liability. In the end, he opted to go on as he had been rather than to persist with the manufactured incumbrance.

It will be two more days of quiet walking before they find him something workable. By then his feet will be a muddy bloody mess. But the score is worth it. The boots he'll finally don will be near the perfect size and come off a corpse in a vehicle on the side of some old country road, an apparent suicide, or execution. They're in good shape, the boots, and while they stink from having long contained the appendages of a rotting corpse, they're clear of walker blood.

Mostly Daryl and Beth continue to stay off the roads entirely. The road is where people are. But it is also where the things that once were and belonged to people are, and after two meals of de-winged termites when there were no fish to catch and no game to hunt and the oatmeal had run out, they will reach the inevitable conclusion they need to widen their search. They need things: shoes, supplies, weapons. Beth doesn't hold out too much hope for finding weapons right away, but she's confident they will in time.

Their venture back to the roads is brief and calculated. They circle round to it and lie in wait for more than half an hour before stepping out from the cover of the woods. All goes smoothly. They find two cars to search, no sign of the living, and not so many dead they can't handle it. On top of the boots, which by far account for the best of the haul, they acquire a real canteen, a tire iron, a tarp, a lighter still a quarter of the way full, a stubbed-out cigarette Daryl has no qualms about finishing, a blanket, and twine. Beth also finds, crumpled under one of the seats, a one-third bag of stale goldfish crackers. They are gone within seconds, the taste of salt and grease now foreign to their tongues and lips.

...

Night falls on their second day after the bandits. Fish in the morning. Boots for Beth. A small cache of supplies. Oatmeal and berries some time midday. Foraged hickory nuts and another half packet of oatmeal at night, with some sampling of termites roasted within the sewing tin tucked in with the embers. They're keeping at it.

The moon is thin; in two more nights there will none. Above them, the sky is dark and inky. Beth lies there, tucked under the weightless metallic blanket, trying to sleep, trying to get her muscles to relax, to lose the sensation they are still in motion, still walking and climbing and running and stepping.

Daryl hasn't spoken in hours. Feels like days. She'd offered to take first watch but he'd only scowled at her and thrust the pack and blanket at her. Something else they need is a new perimeter line to string.

An hour passes. For some time Beth drifts lightly in and out of something almost like slumber. She tries again at adjusting herself against the hard ground where she lies trying to fall asleep. Distantly she watches the embers of their fire slowly dim as gradually they die out. "Do you," she glances at him where he sits nearby, his knees up and held in position by his arms, before she looks up to the stars, "do you think there's anyone still left out there?" It's rare that Beth brings up the others anymore. Talking about it always gets to him, so at some point, she just stopped, but tonight she doesn't care. She can't get their extended family out of her head.

Quietly, Daryl looks up from his glower. He glances at her, then looks away, off into the distance. He doesn't want to talk about this. He doesn't want to talk to all. But Beth doesn't fall asleep as he wishes she would. He watches as she sits up again and pulls their knife from where it's plunged into the ground between them. She holds it in her hand a while, looking at it, feeling it's familiar weight, then raises it, tugs on a longer strip of blonde hair from the back of her head and saws at it vigorously, wincing some as she does. Daryl's eyes shift sharply to her. Slowly the extra lengths of hair fall, sprinkling on her shoulders, her jeans, and about her on the ground. She pulls another piece and awkwardly saws at it.

"Whut're y' doin'?"

Beth looks at him, mildly surprised he's interested in anything she's doing. He hasn't been talking to her. Not really. Aside from tending to her feet he really hasn't been touching her, or even looking at her much. He's looking out for her, watching her back and watching where she steps, but in other ways, he's shut down. "It's all uneven. At least it can be the same length." She goes back to it, struggling with the angles and the tension.

Daryl exhales and rises, "Here. Give it here." He takes the knife from her and grips a long chunk of blonde and positions the blade. "Here," he takes her hand and pulls it to the back of her head to secure the strands at her scalp to limit the pull. And he saws. Bit by bit, getting her butchered hair to roughly the same length, keeping it as long as possible, which is not very. "Carol, m'ybe," he lets slip in a mutter.

"Huh?"

"Carol's still out there."

Beth tries to move her head to see him but she can't the way he's got her gripped. "How do you know? How do you know Carol's alive?"

Uncomfortably Daryl coughs. "She wasn't there, when the prison fell."

Now Beth pulls away so that she can see him. Daryl, knife in one hand, cut strands of blonde hair still in the other, backs off a few steps. "What does that mean, she wasn't there? Where was she?"

Daryl hedges, this isn't an easy story to tell. His words catch a little in his throat as he starts, "During the epidemic, when you was quarantined with th' kids," Daryl pauses, scratching at his lower lip while Beth's large blue eyes watch him in expectation, "Rick an' her went on a run." Beth waits for more. "Rick came back without 'er."

"I don't git it; why?"

"'Cuz." It's so hard for Daryl to say. "Of what he foun' out." He looks at her beneath his long falling greasy hair. "It was her. Karen an' David. It was Carol who done it."

Beth doesn't know how to receive this news. "Carol?"

Miserably, Daryl nods. "Rick gave 'er a car. Some supplies. They split out on the road."

"Rick told her not to come back?"

Daryl's unexpectedly struck by her reaction. "She killed two of our own. Defenseless. Sick."

"It's Carol."

Daryl's voice softens and breaks, he's so torn over this already, "How could he bring her back?"

"We brought Merle in, after what he did to Maggie and Glenn. Rick was going to give Michonne up to the Governor. We let in the people from Woodbury, even after what they did to us. We would've done it twice, if things had... It's Carol," she repeats quietly but emphatically.

"This is coming from you?" Daryl's guilt rares up. Maybe he should have fought Rick harder on this. Why hadn't he gone to look for her? "Girl who doesn't kill walkers f'r fun. Th' girl who thinks burying them is 'beautiful', who wants to cover up rotting corpses and give 'em a prayer? You'd let someone back into the prison, with all those kids, with Judith, who killed the unarmed sick? People you knew, and lived with?"

Consciously Beth quiets her voice; it's done, all of it months behind them. She doesn't mean to accuse him. "Ih'm not sayin' it's right, but Daryl..." Beth blinks solemnly, "she did it to protect us."

He can't look at her. His words are near inaudible. "I know."

"It's Carol," she says again gravely.

"I know."

Beth looks at him, "Why didn't you say this sooner? We could've found her."

Daryl pokes at the fire with a twig. "She 's in a car. The trail was cold when we started. We can't find her."

"But you think she's all right?"

"Yeh," he grunts. "She's all right."

Beth looks off into the distance, thinking over this revelation "... Do you think she found a group? Do you think she saw the explosions?" She glances back at him, "Do you think she knows we're not there anymore?"

He's exhausted, has been exhausted. He wants to reserve his energy for finding supplies, for keeping them fed, for getting them weapons, and back in the routine they'd had before they so inauspiciously ventured into that damned town. "I don't know, Beth," he sighs. "I dunno. Now, com'on," and he takes steps toward her and gently turns her head back into position as he works to finish the job on her hair.

"... Do you think ..." she ventures to ask, seeing as she's already broached the subject, "... Maggie...?"

Standing now in this moment as he is, with the way things are, everything in him is telling him 'No, Maggie didn't make it' but he can't tell her that. Not right now, not this night. But neither will he lie. At present, the best he can muster for her is ambivalence.

"Dunno..."

Thanks! Hope that brief 3-paragraph flash-forward didn't confuse.