"What'chya doin'?" Daryl throws a sharp glance over his shoulder at her as he tends the flames of their evening fire and turns over the skunk they'll soon be eating.
From behind him where Beth has seated herself on a rock, she's climbed her bare feet to his shirt back, under his open leather cut, padding them up and down in place, pressing him lightly, quietly and comfortably massaging his muscles as best she can with her small squarish toes. He looks back at her again but she just shrugs and smiles lazily at him. "Nuthin'."
Daryl shakes his head with a stifled smile muttering, "Strange."
"What was that?" she prompts once his head's turned back towards their roasting repast. But she'd heard.
"You're strange, Girl. 's whut I said."
Of course she'd heard. Cut off from the world except for the sounds of the wind and the crickets and cicadas and the birds and the gopher frogs and the running of water and the rustle and scurry of small four-legged creatures and the shuffle and groaning of dead moving walkers, his voice, deep and raspy and gravely and complex, stands out to her so distinctly in the grey quiet noises of the wilderness. She hears every word he says. She would now if there were dozens, or hundreds of people around, so accustomed and attuned her body has grown to his. She only makes him repeat himself because it makes her smile, and because when his words are few they must be made to last. Like Beth can now read the signs of the forest she can also decipher his meaning in his grumblings. Telling her she's strange is Daryl for something closer to: 'The ways in which you are different from me, and take me by surprise are precious to me. Do not change from who you are.'
Such words would never actually emerge from his drawn mouth, but they do from his lips in the moments when softly he kisses her face — her temples and her eyelids and her forehead; likewise they do from his fingertips when he allows himself the luxury to take her slowly in his hands. Words, she's found, mean less and less in a world governed so completely, in all respects, by action. In everything he does Daryl Dixon tells her he will stay with her, and he will love her, for as long as he is able. A truth she knows so well it may be carved into the grain of her bones, and into her tendons and the fibers of her muscles.
"Well," she says lightly, edging her raw feet toward his shoulders, "you're stuck with me."
Daryl reaches behind him and takes hold her toes with one hand. "You said it. Stuck."
Beth smiles, though he cannot see it, then tugs back her foot and continues to prod and press absently against his back, watching him tend the fire and the meat he's cooking over it. It had been a lucky kill. Daryl flung the knife through the air, spinning with precision, striking the animal right in its chest. Though they may smell like their meal for a couple of days, they will not go hungry. They may even have to let some of it spoil if they can't eat it fast enough, a unique and disheartening proposition.
She's been sitting there, watching him from behind, studying the back of that greasy, sweaty, mangy head she knows so well, and loves so dearly, and would recognize anywhere. She's been thinking, while their dinner roasts over the fire, crackling as the flames jump and lick the meat, that by all odds they should be dead, or close to it. But they are not. He is cooking a meal they both will gratefully soon eat. A meal of game caught without his Busse hunting knife, without his crossbow, or the advantages of snares or firearms. With nothing they have survived. From nothing they have found reasons for persevering. They have found themselves. They have found each other. Though the outside world relentlessly finds ways to crush and bear down on them, they have not been trampled. Beth never knew she had such resiliency within her.
She watches him, thinking about Daryl Dixon, her may-be only living family, and all his complexities and all she knows of him and can rely on him for, and all she'll probably never know of him, all the things he'll never let her hear. Loving him in her old life would have been unthinkable. Loving him when she met him would have been absurd. Loving him in the prison would have been complicated, and poorly received, and difficult to realize. But loving him in the woods, on the run, had come easily, once they'd started talking; once they burned down everything but the selves they are surviving as, the selves they're keeping alive and forward-looking on the road. It was something that came naturally, once they discovered themselves open to it. It — this kindred connection — is one thing they have going for them, even when all else is lost. So as she sits there, thinking on him, and all he means to her, she bends her knees further some, putting just the smallest fraction more of pressure on his back through the naked soles of her feet, watching the dirty wings of his cut lift and rise above her feet.
Those wings... Daryl isn't an angel. He may be plagued by demons and haunted by his better angels, but what she sees is a man, her friend, and her companion — her comrade and her love. And if he's been on the run from the things in his past he needs to stop, because they're on this road together, and their enemies need to be the same and their causes do as well. Daryl makes her stronger, helping her to shed the weakest, most broken parts of her.
She can do the same for him.
In time she speaks, giving voice to her thoughts, "You don't have to hide them." She's said it as lightly as she might say anything.
"Hide whut?" he grunts, poking at the meat with the knife, realizing he'll have to cut it into still smaller parts if it's to cook evenly.
Once more her feet dance innocuously against his back. "You know."
Daryl stiffens.
Had she seen them? They'd been on the road together for weeks now. Longer. They've been in all states of undress in that time, and being on the road as a pair renders modesty all but nonexistent, but still, it's second nature to him to hide his back when he is able; he wouldn't have thought she'd have seen, not really. Even when he made love to her. Had he slipped? How long ago? How many times?
Daryl leans forward, just enough to put an inch or so of space between her toes and him. Just enough distance to signal to her she's treading on a path she should not.
"I haven't seen them," she answers in response to the unasked question. She's making an effort in this exchange not to get too earnest, he's skittish already as it is. But she's started to take notice of the effort he makes to keep this old truth of his from her, and she's decided she might try to lift at least this burden from him.
He'd rather say nothing about it — rather drop it all together, rather go on pretending (if that's what she's been doing up till now): There's nothing to have seen. But her words hang heavy in the air, and if he lets them linger any longer they'll have too much weight. "Whut're ya on about?" he barks.
Changed in these years and in these months though he has, Daryl still has his triggers, and the marks of his past are one, provoking from him a tone of voice he does not in practice use with her, but Beth looks past his surliness, a thing easy enough for a person to do once Daryl's let them in. "I can feel them, you know. Under your shirt, when—" But she doesn't have to finish, he takes her meaning. When he was feeling her, her perfect young body, beautiful and alive and unmarred, she was feeling those. Ugly risen welts that bear the witness of his upbringing.
His default is to bristle. His go-to is to buck and bluster, to regress and retreat or else to confront and intimidate. But really, how long under these conditions had he thought he could keep it up without her seeing? Without her knowing? He has a choice: to rage or to shut down, or to let it go. He can't go mute on her; he's tried it, it doesn't work. And she doesn't deserve it. Yelling at her serves no purpose, she's all he has. Yelling wouldn't change anything, and anyway he isn't angry, not at her.
Daryl speaks no words. And that's all right with her; Beth hadn't said something to get him to speak in return. She's not after a story. All those stories burned down in that dilapidated past-haunted still. She'd only said it to put him at ease, but there in front of her, hunched over the fire, Daryl is not at ease. These marks, these marks he's carried with him for years...
He can't be rid of them.
The world ends, and they're still there, hounding him, getting between him and other people, like they always had done. He covered them with tattoos, he covered them with clothing and his winged cut; he covered them with evasive maneuvers and aggressive posturing. But these scars cut deeper than his flesh and it's that that's hard to cover. Hard to break fully free from.
"I'm not asking you to show me." She never mentions that of course he has scars on his back — they've always been visible on his shoulder blades, creeping out from his ubiquitous cut-off shirts. She does wonder though, if maybe he's right, and the full view of it, the full measure of past hurts in physical shape will be too much to be confronted with, worse than what she's expected. "That's not why I said something." Beth drums her fingers lightly on her knees as she watches him react through the silent tensing of his muscles. "All I'hm sayin' is —" she takes a moment "— if you trouble to keep them hidden — or," she edits herself, conscious not to ascribe intentions that are not his own, "out of sight— You don't have to," she says plainly. "I don't care."
Daryl, unable to manage anything but, glares back at her with a sharp sounding snort, "Real nice." For sheer lack of experience or knowing in what other direction to direct himself, Daryl nears closer to picking a fight with her, but Beth's not letting herself get drawn in; they had had a good day, after a beautiful night, they're trying to get back on track, and she's trying to get closer. And he should know better than to take her meaning as disengaged apathy. So instead, Beth gives him another light prodding with her foot.
"Didn't mean it like that."
"Great," he grunts. "Now c'n we drop it?"
"Dropped."
It's too long now to know for sure why he keeps this hidden. Hidden mostly from the people he suspects would care. Shame? Self preservation? Deflection? It's done on instinct now, rote mechanics of hiding — practiced, seasoned detachment. Muscle memory and a well guarded heart both are difficult to break.
The night passes. They eat their dinner. They talk some. They sit close; the nights are growing colder day by day. Had Beth brought this up a week ago, or more, Daryl's bristled back might not have fully gone down the rest of the night; he'd be on edge, withdrawn, brooding and standoffish. The quiet affection he normally shows her would be noticeably absent, and though they would still sleep beside one another, as not doing so would be silly, and would make too much of a thing he'd be trying to forget ever took place, he wouldn't kiss her, or take her in his arms, and the thought of sleeping with her would not cross his mind.
But it is not a week or more ago. A lot has transpired in the interval of then and this night. He'd only just got Beth back in his arms the night before, he won't shut her out again so quickly. Shutting down would be easier, it would be familiar, but it would be the wrong thing to do. She hadn't been wrong, Beth, when she'd said things like this, the ugliness of the old life, needed to be put away.
If he let the scars of childhood, of loss, and terror, and disappointment and abandonment come between him and her, that'd put him right back where he'd started, no better off than when he'd first joined the group outside of Atlanta, following Merle, looking out for number one. There would be no 'new' life and 'old'. That's not who he is now, in the darkness with her in the sliver of light from the new breaking moon. That's not who he's been in a long time. Like Beth said, he's got to stay who he is not who he was. The past is not everything. And these days, it seems more like nothing. As a child, Daryl lost out on a mother, a father, an older brother, and his innocence. Grown, in these past three years after the world's turn, he's lost that same brother, and an entire assembled family. The scars of years gone by are quickly being overshadowed by bigger, more weighty losses. Sophia. Dale. Lori. T-Dog. Andrea. Merle, who was maybe at his best just before he died. Hershel. All the many many others. That pain, those losses, cut deeper than his daddy's belts and canes. They weigh heavier upon him.
Of all those losses... She's all that he has left. Why would he shut her out?
So instead, in opposition to all his years have trained him for, he lets her in. Daryl tugs on Beth where she lies beside him beneath their foil blanket, and pulls her onto him. "Love you," he utters, stroking her cheek lightly with his calloused thumb, looking into her dirty youthful face. "Pretty girl."
Beth doesn't hesitate, her blue eyes shut and she kisses him. With a heart that is honest and open and forthright. And he lets her make love to him, like he hasn't allowed her to before. And when she takes him in her mouth, fumbling a little as she's unpracticed, she grips his hand so tightly in union, and he holds on to her, and what it is they're trying to build, and lets the rest of it fall away to settle in the ashes of that forgotten wasted house and the old memories it harbored.