Okay, this is the start to the next phase of the story I wasn't/am not too sure on.

[You'll note a use of the word "whale"; I debated for a long time between the nonstandard, now more common spelling of 'wail' but from the reading I did, "whale", I believe, would be the correct spelling (stemming from, I believe, whalers beating/lancing their prey).] okay... [THANK YOU! for sticking with this story — I apologize for the long absence in updates (at least it wasn't 6+ months!) but it's so easy for me to get sucked into a fanfiction writing vortex, and with the demands of work and grad classes, I can't walk that line. This post is marking the occasion that I'm seeing Emily Kinney perform tonight! 10/14/14]

While Daryl packs their camp Beth takes her knife, as well as several of the carefully selected leaves she carries with her, and steps into the trees for a moment of privacy, remaining alert to her surroundings and being careful not to venture too far. Unzipping and tugging down her jeans Beth squats and looks up into the patches of blue sky through the leaves overhead, studying the late morning sunlight twinkling down in a haze through the shifting shadows and breeze-rustled branches. It's a later start they're getting this morning, very. Normally they'd have been walking for hours by now, but this morning it wasn't in them. Their bedroll had been somehow more comfortable this morning, and the running of the water in the creek was especially tranquil, and the morning air was not too cool to prompt them to immediacy, and as they still had food from the night before they took the morning off. They sat around, they sharpened their blades, they mended the laces of their boots where they were too worn through; they talked, they made love, they killed a stray walker.

Somewhere in the foliage above a woodpecker calls, whip-poors, and hammers.

Behind her in the trees there's a snap, and a crunching in the fallen branches and leaves on the wooded ground. Beth's head snaps in the direction of the sound, the footsteps she hears are not Daryl's — too heavy, and from the wrong direction. They're too deliberate and quick to be walkers'. Suddenly from the shadows appear two boys, by their looks near her age, standing there dumfounded, just as surprised to see her as she is to see them. All three freeze.

"It's a girl," the taller leaner one says.

"Ye-ah."

Her heart and breath stop cold; eyes fixed on the intruders, Beth refastens her pants with expediency as they step towards her; instantly Beth moves for her knife but her attempt to scream for Daryl is choked off, they're on her fast, a hand over her mouth muffling her cries, pulling her up, fists wrapping tightly around the wrist of her right hand wielding the knife. Arms around her waist and thighs, wherever they can get a quick and solid grip on her, they drag her, carrying her off with haste, back into the thick of the woods and the direction from which they'd come.

Beth flails and kicks, thrashes and fights but together they've got a fast hold on her. She bites at the hand stifling her but she can't get at enough of it to make much of an impact. Beth Greene's body is screaming, every nerve and cell in her raging for escape, rioting with feral fight. Every second she's not screaming is distance put between her and Daryl. Finally their running and her violent thrashing and the moisture from her biting mouth cause the hand to slip some and Beth cries out.

"DARYYYL!"

The boys keep moving through the trees with her, "Shut her up!" one says in a panicked voice.

"What'd she say?" the other asks.

"Dunno." They're getting winded from the effort of dragging her and fighting off her fierce battling.

"Sound like a name?" They look at each other and pause in their progress, still holding on to her.

Suddenly under fierce impact all three figures are knocked to the ground as Daryl charges through the trees barreling into them. Beth gets knocked free from their grips but remains tangled up with the smaller of them, who's too stunned to move off her, while Daryl whales on the one closest to him, pulling off the knife the kid had been carrying and chucking it out of reach. Relentlessly Daryl grabs him up by the chest of his shirt and brutally pummels his face over and over and over again, with a ferocity Beth's not seen in him. The other pulls free from the tangle and throws himself on Daryl to pull him off but it has little effect on Daryl's blind rage and then the smaller boy's off all together, frozen standing stark still under the threat of Beth's knife she's now holding at his throat.

"Wait! Wait!" the kid at knifepoint yells. Daryl doesn't flinch, his ruthless blows and kicks keep coming. "We weren't taking her!" he yells desperately. "I swear!" The kid under Daryl's fury is choking and coughing, his face already bloody pulp. "You're killing him! Pe-ter!" His young voice breaks in alarm as he tries desperately to get at his friend but Beth's panic keeps her hand at his throat and her blade at the ready.

Daryl lands one more heavy blow on his target then turns, his fists bloody and shredded, his chest heaving in passion and his face red and hard with aggravated unbridled vengeance: They are NOT going through this again. Seeing Beth with the knife at the kid's throat Daryl in one motion yanks out his own and holding it in replacement of hers in tight position against the straining jugular, pushes Beth back from the violence, back from her first act of close aggression against a living human being. He wants her strong, he wants her quick to act, he wants her brave and full of fight, but he'll keep her innocent of letting living blood while he can; he grips their captive tightly round the neck with his densely muscled left arm, mercilessly thrusting him back against a tree, jabbing the freshly sharpened blade ever closer to the unbearded flesh of this boy less than half his age and half his mass.

"Who are you?!" he roars. Daryl pats the kid down and pulls off him a blade, and a handgun, throwing them at Beth's feet.

"We weren't taking her!" the standing one shouts. "We thought she was alone!" he gets out, despite the blade held so close it's nicking at his flushed and sweating skin.

"Shut up!" Daryl seethes, pulling him up and slamming his head back hard against the tree trunk. "Who are you?!"

The kid is at a loss, his head is throbbing, his friend is struggling to breathe in short sharp wheezy gasps, and it's been too long now — there's no way anymore to answer who he is. Who are any of them? "I'm, we're no one," he stammers.

Daryl draws back his bloodied fist, readying to connect. "Daryl," Beth interjects with grave evenness. "Let him talk."

His sharp eyes flash round on her, "What?"

"Give him time to explain," she appeals dryly, still standing with her knife at the ready and in her belt the blade Daryl had pulled off the crumpled figure at her feet.

"Give 'im time to lie's whut it would be," Daryl snarls. "Give 'im time till more of 'em show up."

The kid nods over the sound of his companion wheezing and gasping for breath where he still lays crumpled on the ground. "There are more of us." Daryl moves to kill him right then "— But we're not going to hurt you!" he adds. "We saw her — alone — she looked afraid. We took her with us — we didn't mean anything!"

Daryl glares at Beth as if to say 'you asked for these lies.'

"I was screaming," she lays against her would-be captor. "You covered my mouth. I was fighting you off. You held me down." Daryl's eyes narrow further in vicious hatred.

The kid sputters and stammers in a panic to be heard, "We thought you were alone; we thought you were scared."

"You gagged my mouth," she charges.

"Screaming gets their attention," he defends. "Draws 'em in." Again his voice cracks, "We didn't know." He looks in genuine desperation from Beth to Daryl to his fading friend Peter, back to Daryl and Beth. "Girl out on her own? We thought she was afraid. We thought we were saving her." Daryl studies this kid's eyes, his demeanor, and slackens off by a fraction. "We're not like that," the kid says in his own defense now that the knife isn't quite as threatening.

"Ev'rybody who says they're not like that, is like that," Daryl spits.

"I swear," the kid says, his voice breaking once more. "We're not. We stick to ourselves; we don't mess with other groups. We lay low."

"Yeah?" Daryl challenges. "You call snatching up girls 'gainst their will 'layin' low'? You call that 'not mixin' with other groups'?"

The boy shakes his head with grave vehemence, "It was a misunderstanding."

Daryl looks him over once more then sufficiently convinced, at least for the moment, shoves him back, hard, so that the kid bounces off the tree trunk and stumbles, "Misunderstandings git you killed."

The kid finds his footing then rushes to his friend; the boy Peter's still heaving and struggling on the ground, nearing unconsciousness. "Pete. Pete? Can you hear me? You all right?" Watching him attend to his friend, Daryl sees how young he looks as he does, though he must be something closer to eighteen or nineteen.

For a brief moment Beth and Daryl stay back at a distance as their adrenaline slows and their chests heave a little less, remaining ever watchful of the two strangers. Daryl keeps his eyes trained on the woods, watching for what will come at them next. Then he's tugging Beth by her upper arm and leading her at a fast pace, with the boys' seized weapons in tow, through the trees back to their camp. He might have bought the story these guys are relatively harmless — the one who had been talking had had truth in his eyes — but to mix with others is to invite complications. He's getting Beth, their gear, and himself out of there now, putting a hell of a lot of distance between them and those kids they're leaving behind, bloody and weaponless. As she's being pulled Beth looks once behind her at the figures, then without Daryl having to prompt her she turns away and fleetly shifts with him through the woods to their modest camp, keeping her focus on what she must.

Behind her, mixed with the rustlings and chirping of the forest sounds, Beth can hear the boy crying over his battered friend, but she keeps her eyes fixed on Daryl, and briskly pulls on her pack and helps gather the few scattered items Daryl'd let fly from his hands when he'd heard her cry.

Without overture Daryl breaks from his rote immediacy and is cradling her head by the back of her neck. "You okay?"

"Mm,hm."

Daryl nods, and shoulders his pack. "You did good."

"Daryl—" She wants to ask him if they'd played that wrong. Are they too quick to see enemies? She knows Daryl's answer already: 'Seein' enemies is what keeps ya alive.' She knows too it wasn't more than five minutes ago she'd thought all was lost for her — she was being taken, separated from Daryl, alone in the overpowering grasp of masculine hands, and the intense resonance of that fear is still electric within her, but— those boys they're leaving behind aren't much bigger than Carl. Those adolescent cracks in the one's voice weren't missed on her. Daryl had believed their story, otherwise the other wouldn't still be standing, and now one's left all but unconscious and both are left without weapons.

There may be a group out there waiting for these two — even looking — but there may not be. It's an easy enough lie to tell when you're outnumbered or overpowered. Beth's feet and eyes follow Daryl's, keeping his pace as they head east double-time, but her mind lingers with those two…

And then they're stopped. Their path cut off by a herd, maybe two dozen, moving through. Daryl's wrist flexes behind him in his signal to Beth to be still. She's already turned round, retracing their steps in silence when he gives the signal to retreat.

As they move, again Beth hears the boy they left, struggling in a panic to revive his friend. Her head wants to turn slightly in their direction, but she keeps apace with Daryl, and trains her focus on what matters: Daryl and she, and the path they've been forging, and getting out of there alive. They keep moving. Moving is survival, no matter the threat, no matter what is being left behind.

Through the woods the shuffle and dragging of close by walkers sounds nearer. Daryl's pace quickens, never noting that Beth is looking down at her belt, and at the confiscated weapons she's carrying. Behind her sounds the scrambling and frantic desperation of the one trying to revive or lift his friend and to get out of the path of the roaming walkers, evidently close now on their heels. 'He doesn't leave him,' she notes to herself, when doing so would be the surest path to survival. Branches snap, Beth hears grunts, and cries, and the unmistakable groaning and gnashing of the dead. The math calculates itself — two bodies, only one of which mobile, no weapons, and advancing walkers: those boys, at least one, won't survive. She acts before she thinks it through, acts before Daryl can stop her, and before she questions the wisdom of saving someone who, misunderstanding or no, had just held her against her will.

Beth bursts through the brush with her blade already arched and drives it down into the nearest rotting skull as she sees the one kid standing over the limp wheezing body of his friend, trying to jam a broken-off shrub branch through the decaying eye socket of another attacker. Beth makes her kill but another walker falls onto her, grasping at and tearing at her pack, scratching ever closer to her; Beth struggles to get the angle of her knife right for impact when the weight is pulled off her and Daryl's slamming the thing against a tree and bashing its head in with his pipe. Beth steps in behind the walker on the stranger and pierces up through the back of its neck into its brain. The thing falls limp against her blade and she tugs and jerks it out as the corpse hangs heavy from it; the guy she saved looks at her, stunned, breathless. "Thanks," he coughs. Behind them Daryl's a whirl of motion, kicking back the remaining advancing corpses, mightily swinging one back into the other, falling down atop them and plunging his knife at full force into first one then the other's skulls. When he's back on his feet, his hands dark with the black goopy blood and still breathing heavily, he grabs Beth roughly by the back of her pack and pulls her close, "You crazy?" he barks. Beth doesn't get the chance to answer, the herd is heading towards them; he shakes her into action and pushes her ahead of him, "Move!" Beth stumbles forward into a run and Daryl behind her steps over the kid's body he'd impaled to the ground and keeps going.

The kid who by Beth's intervention had been temporarily granted a stay of death is again left to his own defenses — left with a stick, a defenseless companion drifting in and out of consciousness, and a standing target for the advancing herd.

The boy stoops and lifts his friend but the battered Peter is limp and cannot support his own weight, surely Daryl's booted kicks did some damage; the other struggles to support him but stumbles. The herd draws nearer. The boy scrambles again, unwilling to leave his friend, unable to do more than drag him, and at a speed that will surely get them quickly overrun. He tries again, and just as they falter, Beth is there — faster than Daryl can note her absence and stop her — ducking in and tucking under the battered one's other arm for support. She does not fully rise though, does not help them off the ground until the words are spoken: "If you try anything — if your group tries anything—" Beth holds his eye line to ensure he's listening "—he—" her glance flashes toward Daryl for emphasis "—will kill you." She says it flatly, without passion, so assured of this is she it doesn't need to come out as a threat. "He won't hesitate. And—" her bright girlish eyes fix on his with meaning "—I won't either." And there's no doubt she means it, though Daryl himself is shocked to hear it from her. Then she's helping them both to rise to their feet and clear out.

The one called Peter's eyes are nearly swollen shut but the other one looks at her, her actions entirely unexpected and unprecedented. He nods, accepting the help, and they step forward, the injured boy held up equally by Beth and the other, and they move, over brush and branch at the fastest pace they can, toward Daryl who'd backtracked when he'd discovered Beth was no longer with him.

Huffing from labored breath, angry as hell, and still removed by a distance of several feet, Daryl watches on in exasperated rage, like his mind can't work this fast to keep up with all the changes, but after two more labored paces Daryl stalks forward, pushes Beth out of the way, and takes her place, bearing most of the weight of the prostrated youth on his own broad shoulders, and then they're moving, fast, out of the path of the walkers, into the further cover of the trees.

After some time, and the threat of immediate danger has been, at least for the time, outpaced, the two of them — Daryl and the kid — stop, mute and confounded by this development, and look at one another; but there's naught to do but walk on. Which they do, trudging steadily, keeping ahead — they hope — of ambush.

"Michael," the one speaks as they traverse the rocky, rooted underbrush. He indicates his inert bloodied friend, "Peter."

The echoing quiet of the woods is broken when she — who Daryl's insisting walk ahead of them, ever in his eye line — answers. "Beth," she speaks softly. "This is Daryl." Daryl grunts.

They travel on. Presumably in the direction of these boys' camp. Presumably not into a trap. Or danger.

A/N: This chapter has been revised from it's original version — hopefully the added paragraphs and immediate threat of walkers maybe lends a little more likelihood that Beth might help these two, despite what she has been through… I may yet go back and revise this still more as I agree this transition to something close to begrudging trust is probably too quick and unfounded... (It's the best I've got right now, I think I'm anxious to move ahead... but like I'd said, this whole next segment of chapters I'm not feeling quite solid on...)