Ergh, couldn't stay away! (Action research & lit review be damned...) Thanks so much for all the valuable feedback! xx
They reached the highway and each looked in either direction, and when neither boasted of an easier or surer path, they headed northeast, back in the direction from which they'd come, of the prison and the farm and Atlanta. The feel of asphalt underfoot again took some getting used to, feeling strange after journeying so long over only the overgrown forest floor of the woods. They walk sometimes side-by-side, sometimes single file, sometimes with one of them trailing ahead or lagging behind. They walk, leaving behind them so much, looking for yet another new beginning.
When they're come across, cars are checked and scavenged. Rarely do they find anything of much use – never finding food, never finding fuel. The day's grown late on their second day of walking when they come to a town by late afternoon. Beth thinks she may have been there once, long ago, with her mother maybe, but she does not look at it that way: it's just another grouping of abandoned buildings, maybe or maybe not holding some portion of whatever will help them to survive. They try three shops, a small sporting goods storefront, a barbecue joint, and a consignment shop. For their effort and walkers killed they get two knives, a third backpack, two blankets more, three arrows, some sacks of souvenir biscuit mix, a bottle of barbecue sauce, a small tub of dry rub, some soap, a winter coat for Simon, and a second machete. If they were making a camp they might have taken more, but making camp in the first town they come to is not the job they have. And they do have a job.
Weary, and not in need of much that can still be rummaged free from an already ransacked town, they three run through only two houses. They pick up some batteries, some takeout packs of soy sauce, a small glass jar of mashed pears, a half-full canister of popping kernels, toothpaste, flashlights, an expired bottle of vitamins, warm clothes and fresh socks, two over-the-counter pain killers, four flathead bullets and seven casings, and a bottle of crystallized honey. They want weapons, but there isn't much to be found; they want easy food, but it's mostly long gone; they make do with what they get. They spend the night in the third floor of a brick office building, Beth on some mid-level executive's leather industrial sofa, Daryl and Simon on the floor beside her. When the sun rises so do they. They leave town by way of checking cars. When – to no one's surprise – none start, they make for the highway, expunging some numbers of the stumbling, pacing, ever advancing dead as they do.
They carry on like this for days, walking, scavenging, picking over forgotten artifacts of another time, then moving on. They take rests, longer ones than Beth and Daryl ever had on their own. Her body needs to rest. Most nights they find a way to sleep indoors, some nights they do not. In traces of conversation they make the outlines of a plan. Find a place – find the right place to stay and build up. Regain strength, collect weapons, outlast the winter, make things work.
For weeks Beth walked and rose and slept and ate and spoke and kept silent, not knowing if her child was still with her. For weeks she took steps forward, never knowing if they brought her ever closer to one day seeing her baby's face, or if every stride took her further and further from the tiny family that almost had been hers. There existed no signs to guide her, it was just too soon, too early for definite indicators to manifest; she feared harnessing her hope to what she could not rely on, so as best she could she disbanded all her hoping, deferring it until she could trust it. Like her companions, Beth steered her focus on shelter. But there is more to their journeying than shelter — they look for more than position, more than walls and more than defensibility. Daryl never says it, but he's looking for people.
Several weeks on the road, under a low layer of clouds that block the autumn sun, leaving everything blue and grey and cold, Simon passes her the bottle of water he carrying at his hip. Beth looks at it, and Simon looks at her, at her and the couple of pebbles he's noticed her sucking on and moving about in a pocket in her mouth. "Drink, if you're thirsty. We've got the water." Leaving the river had marked a stark deficit in their water supply – now mostly it comes from toilet tanks or filtered from pools still left from the rain – but it's working. So far it's been sustainable. She can drink if she's thirsty.
Beth accepts the canister. "I'm not especially."
Simon squints a cockeyed smile at her, "You just really missing chewing gum?"
"Huh?"
"You've got rocks in your mouth. Y'hungry?"
Beth's head shakes a slight 'no'. She was hardly thinking when the small chunks of hardened mineral made it from her hands past her lips; she certainly hadn't considered anyone would take note – chewing idly on twigs is not uncommon amongst them. Up ahead by some paces Daryl glances over his shoulder at them. "Whatch'ya doin'?" he asks her.
"Nuthin'." Beth fashions her voice light and girlish, they way it sounds when her dimples are more defined, they way she's always had of deflecting unwanted attention. Daryl studies her for a brief moment, then again faces forward, whistling into the woods to see what animals stirred. None did, and they walked on, down the highway, towards the next town.
That night in bed, wrapped in blankets in the back office of a small accounting firm, with Simon sleeping some feet away, Daryl speaks to her in a low tone. "Them rocks o' yours—" his brow waits in expectation as Beth's eyes find him and focus "—they sparkle some? Kind'o rough, an' granular?" She yawns in answer. "Beth?" he stirs her some with a shifting of the shoulder he lies on.
"Hm?" Beth curls into him, hardly able to keep her mind awake to listen to him, much less to answer.
"Those rocks Simon 's on'ya a'bout – they glimmer? They rich in color?"
"…Daryl…" she sighs into his chest as she tries to sleep.
"You got any o' 'em on you? Greene?"
"…Mph…" she turns over. "…Pocket…"
Daryl sits up and reaches his fingers into each of her exposed pockets till he pulls out four good-sized pebbles, jagged in their edges, rough to the touch. Daryl leans back, keeping the small rocks in his hand. One by one they pass under his thumb as he rolls over the pebbles in his palm, turning them over, lending his attention to each. In the dark of the room he can just catch the smallest glints of something as the sedimentary formations shift in the near nonexistent light. "Beth." He says her name again, this time lowering his lips closer to her ear, "Beth." She does not stir, she does not speak, but Daryl sees her eyes open, and he knows she's at least partly listening. "Rocks got iron in 'em; these rocks got iron in 'em." Beth's slow involuntary breathing takes in another deep breath, he isn't making sense to her, but she'll let his words soothe her to sleep. "Girl—" he speaks, jarring her to better attention "—if your body's tellin' ya you need this, it's your body tellin' you you're anemic. Your blood's low in iron. Beth—"
Tired though she is her blue eyes are on him now, active and searching. And? her eyes implore him; his conclusion is cloudy but she's taken his intended meaning. "'…Cuz I am, or 'cuz … I'm not?" Daryl does not answer, but she presses, knowing he must have some notion either way, or he would not have ventured saying anything at all.
"Could be you're not," he mutters flatly.
Beth's known this for weeks; she knows there was blood. But, in these days, through these many days of walking and willing the outcome she so desperately wants, it continues to come to her: the thought that perhaps it was not enough, not enough to signal the end of even that small a life. And had it been so much to render her anemic? It's lessened now, been less regular, in these years with less food assurance, less rest and greater physical demands, but Beth has seen her body lose blood many times for many years, she'd never been anemic before... Lying there Beth thinks of how the pebbles had glinted in the roadside, of how she'd just seen them and unthinkingly known what they would taste like, what it would be to have them in her mouth. She had known that she should do it. It wasn't even as half conscious as that, she'd simply known to do it.
Something strains and lifts within her heart. Maybe this could be a sign – possibly all was not lost, and if she lets it, her body will rest and recuperate and once again grow strong, and in time it will tell her what she's waiting to hear. Maybe one day her jeans will not be able to fasten, maybe one day her body will swell and show her. It is a chance; it is a thing to hold on to.
The days wear on. They move from road to road, from town to town, from one dead car to another. As they do Beth's glimmer of hope stealthily transforms itself into a silent stalwart belief. She does not speak the words, she does not tell Daryl, in her body she feels no discernible difference – save for the pebbles she did not discard – but she believes. She knows. Without knowing anything she believes she knows. Believing keeps her going.
In all these weeks they have not stopped to settle in. The weather does not demand it yet so they do not stay put. They have no reason to, each of them is mobile, nothing anywhere they've been has compelled them to stay; they have found no other people. Days pass them, one like the other: they kill walkers, they search for food, they travel light, and they keep their eyes open. And Beth makes herself believe.
Beth's eyes open in the night, something woke her, startled her to wakefulness. She looks around – all is as it was in the real estate office where they've set up for the night. Beside her Daryl's breathing is quick and restless. "Daryl," she whispers to him. She keeps her face close to his as she waits for him to wake. "It's all right." Daryl's eyes dart open to her. The blue flashes back and forth as gradually he takes her in, and when he sees her the lines in his kind haggard face deepen. Harried, Daryl exhales the breath he'd been unknowingly holding. "Hey," she smiles at him, softly in the quite darkness. "You all right?" Unsettled, Daryl flinches some and uses the back of his knuckle to wipe away at his face. Silently he sniffs. Still so close to him, Beth slips her hand into his. Daryl looks at it there, resting in his own, warm and solid. Real.
"Had'a dream," he finally says.
"About me?" Something in the way he's looking at her, holding onto her hand, put it in her head, prompted her to ask.
Again Daryl sniffs and breathes. "Mm,hm," his soft gaze balances on her. "An' Rick—" Daryl's voice is even heavier and more gnarled in the solemn darkness "—'n Glenn 'n Carol."
"So it was a good dream," she smiles faintly, snuggling back into him, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb Simon. Her head rests on his still heavy breathing chest, and her bare legs — despite the growing cold, she's found herself no longer able to bring herself to sleep in her filthy constricting jeans — wrap tighter about him in their makeshift bed. As she speaks, her eyes lift up and back as though she could almost see him there behind her while she lies against him. She likes to hear his heart beat. "They tell you where they were?"
Daryl's head shakes imperceptibly. "Mm,mm. But, they were alive, and—" he stops himself. Daryl breathes. "An' you—" something is his deep hoarse voice waivers and threatens to break. "You—" he starts over. Beth snugs herself in tighter to him. "—You were a mother." That word comes loaded with so much emotion it is tough to construct. Against him he can feel Beth's breath stop. "Beth?"
The breath she finally takes is audible. "—There was a child?"
Near motionless as they remain, she feels his eyes shake his answer 'no.' "You w're round," he manages. "So beautiful– I had my hand on you, underneath I felt it kick." Daryl sniffs and blinks back what he feels too deeply. He can sense her young face fixing on his words, listening so intently. "I could feel it – swollen in your belly – a heartbeat." Beth breathes; a half sob shudders in the smallest spaces between them. His sad open eyes find her, and her chest constricts when she looks at him, so desperately does she want to make things all right for him, all right for herself. "—It was right there—" Daryl's small husky whisper sounds in the dark, sad and lonesome and haunted. Wrecked, Daryl brushes back a tear and swallows his emotions down. He would turn away from her, curl into himself and turn his back to her, but he's meant to be past that with her, so very far past that, thus he fights the urge to shut down and turn inward, instead remaining as he lies, exposed, inert, and helpless. So caught is he in the agitation of his misery, unable to focus it or endure it, he remains restless on his back, fists clenching and unclenching, expression tensing and worrying. Battling inner chaos he exhales like a bull, raging in a pen.
To reach him, Beth's cool fingers touch the haggard scruff of his jaw, and she holds his face to hers and makes him feel her presence – "Daryl," she speaks to him in hushed tones, "I'm here." Her eyes remain fixed on him though he's refusing to let his eyes find her, then again he sniffs and exhales and shifts his worn out body, and then all at once she's caught up in his steely arms. Spurred from his remoteness Daryl must reach out to her in this, tucking her in a sort of fervent headlock he brings her in by the crook of his arm. There, sheltered privately together by blankets and blackness and the heat of the other's aching body, they breathe together, in time and in league. His attention holds her to him, but it is not with his eyes he sees her. Daryl is pulled to her in misery and solace, in despair and in hope, in the absence of life and in the mortal fight to preserve it. In their impassioned embrace heartbeats quicken, tempered though they remain by the severity of life and loss. His face, damp with the stains of solitary tears, finds hers and Daryl's urgent mouth closes on Beth's. If she is near he needs to feel that she is, if she is real he needs to know it. Messed up as he is he will take comfort in her; he will lose himself in something better than the world if he can. Beth – still breathing, still fighting, still believing – is better than anything still remaining in the world, and he finds himself mindlessly driven to draw himself into her, to feel when her heart beats, to measure every shortened breath of hers against his skin, to taste the rush of blood stirring while he both cradles her and forages her. Almost aggressive is he with the shedding of impeding clothing as he pulls her down to him. Circumstances have not brought them to romance or even desire – this is more urgent, more vital, more primal in its nature – suddenly he must know she's alive, he must feel her warm, her chest rising and falling with each heated quickened breath beneath him; so moved Beth pulls at him, she too undone by the riotous mandate of her body. It is not beautiful, but it is true, and as honest as they can be with one another. Daryl's soft grunting is wild and untamed as he takes her in their bed, blindly uncovering new life with her. Unrelenting, his passion is animalistic as Daryl holds her small waist arched to his. Aching for what he cannot name, he grasps her pretty face and angels her sweet mouth to him to be devoured. In muted silence his tongue finds hers, his lips and fingers tangle in her life and her strength and her undying will. Feverishly, desperately, gravely, and with hope he presses to her, allowing himself some relief, some connection, some direfully needed bolstering of their love. In the wild, in the darkness, in the wake of grief and unflinching, agonizing uncertainty, Daryl makes love to her, insisting with every thrust and grasp and breath and release that they remain as they once were: alive in love and in unison.
The times do not permit them happiness or joy, not lasting, but this tangled night affords them comfort and solace and an end to isolation. Beth's soft silent gasps for breath catch in his ears as she clasps him to her, moving always with him, following his lead, ever in sync. Exhaustion does not stop them, the threat of walkers roaming beyond their walls does not hinder them, the proximity of Simon, the losses they've incurred do not impede them; there is a vitalness that chases their endeavor until they finish, muted, still grieving, but somehow, in some way, restored.