I'm admitting this: I got submit-happy on this one before I did a final proof-read, I just got dizzy looking at it again so I just went for it :-[ Thank you for all the comments, I can't tell you how much they help(!). As an example, a reader mentioned how it seemed like Beth was blaming Daryl for the situation they're in with the baby, and I had never meant it to read that way, so it's incredibly helpful to hear how others encounter the story. Keep it coming, please! :)

With a long gnarled branch Beth stokes the catching fire as the daylight grows dimmer. By their estimations they'll reach the highway, or some road or another, by the end of day tomorrow. It's been quiet since the storm. Aside from their knives, Beth and Daryl are down to one round and the bolts Daryl's fashioned from straight-enough branches. But they're holding on. They've encountered walkers, but not many, mostly they're still catatonic from the downpour; their takedowns have been quick. They're getting by. As the sun gets nearer to setting they settle into another makeshift campsite set within their tripwire alarm line. Daryl sharpens their knives, Beth cooks the raccoon.

They're quiet as their meal roasts, as they sit in the lengthening shadows. They can't talk about the changes of the past days; neither can they dwell on how different things had been less than a week before. Their trajectory had been unforeseeable, and it's too soon to pass time with idle conversation. They've lived in quiet together before, it'll pass; they need time.

The quick clash and scrape, strike and scratch of the two blades sharpening against each other jolt metallic sparks into the air as the fire cracks and licks. Her knife otherwise utilized, Beth uses twigs to serve the meat when it's ready. Two skewers in hand, she crosses and sits beside him. Wordlessly she hands him one.

Daryl sets the blades aside, and his eyes crease softly as they find her face, "Thank you," he grunts. In answer Beth's mouth turns up in the suggestion of a smile, it's all they can outwardly muster. They eat, and the sky fades from orange to light grey. They chew, and their vision balances blankly on the flickering flames. The night air bites at them in chilly gusts, and they inch a little closer to the flames. More blankets would be nice now, a bed to look forward to, some warmth. Neither though makes a move for a blanket in their packs, rather they sit frigid, bracing their backs to the night. Somehow it seems one thing to be eating, to be walking, to be breathing, while others they've loved are not, and never will be again, but being warm, craving comfort, seems quite another, and they can go without it, if in anyway it marks the losses. This thing they do is unspoken, unacknowledged, but mutually felt. There are no graves, no markers, no memorials; no pleasure is all they have to offer.

Behind them there's a stirring, shifting of brush and undergrowth, a light snapping of a fallen twig— In an instant they're both up and primed for action, brandishing weapons and readying for an attack. The crossbow raises, and Beth, with only one round remaining in the pistol tucked into her back waistband, grounds her feet and raises her newly glistening blade. "Who the hell's out there?" Daryl growls. Beth looks at him. "Naw—" he shakes his head, never taking his eyes off the woods "—they ain't dead." Beth's hands grip tighter to her knife. "Come out!" he barks. Two pairs of blue eyes train themselves on the brush, focused, lethal, waiting. There's a rustling, then a snapping in the undergrowth, then a branch pushes back and a person emerges.

"Oh my God!" Beth gasps. Her knife drops from her fingers and she's up and running at him, choking on a laugh and a cry, pulling him into her arms. "Simon!"

Daryl too lowers his weapon and moves forward with quick long strides; swelling with emotion he grips Simon firmly at the shoulder in fondness and in relief as still Beth grasps onto him, unprepared to let him go. "Anyone with you?" Daryl asks, peering dimly into the growing darkness.

Miserably Simon's towhead shakes the terrible answer. "No."

Daryl's eyes search and scan his face and figure – he's sallow, and sleep-deprived and spent; his beleaguered body has withstood and battled too much in the past days. "What happened?" Daryl questions, as finally Beth releases their reunited friend. "Who're they with?" The battle-ready gruffness behind his interrogation is tempered by the winces of pain.

"I dunno…" Simon seems lost some, hazy in the reality of actually having found these two. By the looks of him his legs may give out beneath him at any point. "… I …" his gaze wanders from her to him, to their fire, back to them "… thought the fire might be yours… I thought… I thought m'be you'd still be out here…"

"How'd you get away?" Beth asks, her hand still clinging to his arm, not ready to let him go.

"Didn't…" he gets out. "Wasn't with them when—"

Daryl's grim questioning keeps him focused, "Did'you see what happened?"

"No." The boy's misery is palpable. "They took them all… I been on my own…" He's in a daze, exhausted, hungry and dehydrated. "Michael's dead… And James…"

"We know," Daryl nods mutely.

"I was… I was out, in country," he relates. "I was harvesting greens… Fires were lit, under control, nothing more t' do; I went out. I, I don't know, I wandered, wasn't thinkin' of anything. I was just, y'know, walking…" Visibly his memory takes him back, retracing him through the footsteps taken that ultimately broke him from his brothers. "Took longer than I should'a," he continues. The teen's noticeably conflicted – the walk he took that saved his life, chance had dictated would be the difference between his survival and his friends'. It is ruthlessly random, and it is difficult to live with. "I got back," he tells them, "they were gone. All of 'em." Simon rubs dully at his face, "I took off, but I couldn't find 'em. Then the storm. Been out there on my own, five days." Beth listens and watches, and never does her hand cease rubbing his arm.

Wordlessly Daryl turns away and hands over a half-full canteen. "You been eatin' anythin'?"

Simon gulps thirstily; the rain had done him little good with no receptacle on him to collect it or contain it. He takes a breath and drinks again. "What I c'n find." The group of boys had become expert foragers, but a lot of their diet relied on trapping and fishing, and on the staples they kept in camp. Forrest greens and tuber roots had never been plentiful or substantial enough to sustain them.

Beth leaves his side only to fetch him food. On her knife she brings him three large strips of meat. "Sit," she says softly, returned to his side.

Simon does. His misery and loss are consuming, but his still-living body demands attending. Voraciously he eats, having had only greens and a small rabbit he'd had to eat raw several days back. "Set some snares," he says chewing, "but not much luck. Didn't want to waste my gun—" he chews and swallows "—only had three rounds anyways." Continuing to eat, Simon finds struggles to find the breath to speak as his pace of chewing and swallowing never slackens. "—Waited out the storm up a tree, hopin' t' Christ—" he swallows "—didn't get struck by lightning." Simon takes a breath, takes a bite, and continues, "Didn't have a go-bag with me. Stupid," he repines. "We should'a had 'em on us always."

"What you got on you?"

"Now?" Simon clarifies. "Cashed out revolver an' a machete." His head shakes, "Had nothin' t' start a fire – left it all with, Pete." Peter, John, Rob, Tom, where are they now?

These names, these thoughts, cast a dark pall overhead, and Simon's countenance grows cloudy. Daryl and Beth let him eat. The evening fades to black around them, leaving only the fire's small circle of light to aid their vision. "Here," Daryl mutters, and he reaches behind him to his pack and rummages until he pulls something out. Daryl extends his arm, and packed frantically that night, but the aces the thing in Simon's hands. It's the night goggles. Little from camp came with Beth and Daryl when they'd frantically packed what they could, but the binoculars had made it out with them. Daryl has nothing else to offer, save James' book, now warped and drying thick and curled from the rain. Simon's handles the glasses, turning them over in his hands. These are not his friends, they carry no meaning in them, but they had belonged to all of them, and now only he is left to hold them. Simon's thumb rolls without out purpose of the lens dials, feeling the uniform grooves beneath his skin; there is a haunting in the objects people leave behind…

Sitting there across him, watching him with the artifact of an already distant life, Daryl recalls his and Beth's first night in camp, when he'd stood watch with Simon, uncertain of who they'd fallen in with. He remembers how the fair-haired kid, a good half-foot shorter than himself, with those big military glasses resting on his brow, had sounded much older than his fifteen years as he talked him of his friends, of their camp, of their family. Beth also watches Simon in the glow of the campfire; her heart full, it clings to this one return — the first reunion since the day long back when the prison fell. Beside her Daryl snaps twigs methodically between his thumb and index finger, repeatedly, over and over. The brittle breaking of the wood punctuates the silence and the absences that should be filled. When he's out of twigs to break Daryl speaks. "We had t' stop," the heavy raspiness of his words increases the confessional quality of this statement. "After Michael an' James, we turned around." Simon nods in silence, he understands. There always had been a solemn pragmatism about him. "Conscripted, seems like," Daryl adds darkly.

In time Simon's young harried face looks to both of them, lit by the darting, leaping shadows of the pit fire, "Do we go back to camp?"

"Naw," Daryl's head shakes with his grunt. "Can't."

"We're headin' to the highway," Beth tells him. "A day more, you never would've found us." If she hadn't have fallen, if they hadn't had to have taken their time – staying put for as long as they did, keeping the slow pace they did, they never would have found Simon; he would have been left out there all on his own. "They were all together?" she speaks softly. "All taken? You sure?" She has to ask; finding Simon gave her cause to hazard to hope.

"They're gone," Simon confirms. "I don't know where."

Daryl shakes his head in a sort of cringe; he scoops up the twig pieces and chucks them into the flames. "Sorry," he murmurs in the dark.

The night lingers on Simon's answer, "No one makes it out alive."

When they sleep that night, Daryl lies beside Beth, holding her to him as he always does, and Beth, tucked warmly into him, holds Simon's hand tightly in hers.

In the morning they three rise, eat quickly, and with Simon shouldering the second pack, they head north in search of a road in a new direction.

As they walk, Beth trails some behind, finding comfort in watching these two people in her life remaining at all times in her vision. They found Simon. One MIA recovered. If they could him, they could still maybe find others. It's not just the two of them. And if it can be three, perhaps it can be four. Perhaps they already are four… Beth walks, keeping her eyes on a weathered pair of wings and a dirty blond head. Live, she intones. Live. Thinking it can make it be so…

Ahead of her Simon and Daryl walk, Simon with a machete at his hip and Daryl with the crossbow slung across his shoulder. They talk little as they go, exchanging few words, and Beth makes no especial effort to catch what is said between them; it is enough for her to see them there, and silent she follows after. At some distance out Simon glances back over his shoulder, then again looks straight ahead. "Beth okay?" he asks. "The baby okay?"

Daryl's stony expression twitches. His long strides do not waiver. "She fell," he grunts.

No words follow, only forward motion as on they walk. Simon is terribly sorry to hear this. The baby's a thing he's been holding on to; often he's found himself thinking on it, and hoping on its behalf. It tears at him to hear in Daryl's tone, and to read in his stark absence of words, there may be no baby to hope for, but he knows they have no need for him saying so. They're sorry enough on their own. The three of them walk on.

Live.

Live.

Live.

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