Hey there readers! It's been sooooo loooong! Truly I didn't anticipate this long of a gap in postings. THANK YOU for your patience! I hope you all are well and had a happy and healthy holiday season with your family and friends. Well, the writing I expected to get done during winter break never happened, as I was working on too many things in real life, and now I'm back at work and back at grad school, so posts will still be slow, but I've got pieces I'm working on. So thankful for those who have hung around, and for any new readers out there! Hearing from you makes my day! (And may even push me to get to work on the next chapter a little faster.) xoxo
"This one room won't work," Simon reasons, stepping backwards in the room, taking it in. The morning light breaks silently through the muck-stained windows in bright dusty streaks that cut the room.
"Yeh?" Daryl questions. Needlessly he pries the tip of his knife into the painted window ledge where he stands, peering through the shaded panes, surveying the street. "How much real estate you lookin' for?"
The look Simon shoots him is dry, "For a winter?" His incredulity is benign, but not undetectable. "You an' her, an' me and one room?"
The archer responds without much effort, without more than a brief distracted glance away from the street. "—Whudd'a 'bout it?" Daryl's never been one for closed quarters, but there's only just the three of them, and his mind's on exit points, and entrances, and weaknesses and blind spots. Though he's often sought solitude within a group, he's far from accustomed to any circumstance of his requiring special consideration for bunking or living arrangements. To him, he and Beth and Simon still made just a standard three. Maybe it's because for all that time it had just been him and Beth, long before it'd transitioned to him'n'Beth; maybe because under tents and huts separating out into smaller groups just happens as a matter of course, and their twosome had been a byproduct as much as it had been anything more; maybe because they hadn't even maintained a bed of their own the night before, much less a room; or maybe it was his having been without a private life – one sexual or romantic in nature – for such a stretch of time he's not adjusted to shifting other parts of his life in regard to it, meaning that unquestionably, inexorably, he is hers, and she his, intractably they are a team, but to his eyes, trained on the road and survival and a life of forced transiency, this one room presents itself as sufficiently accommodating. Three bodies can occupy a room. He's not about to watch romance redefine life on the road, on the run. His thing with Beth Greene is paramount in his eyes, but it is not a thing to disrupt the group or to make specialty demands. He can control himself. They aren't in need of a love nest.
Simon only shrugs, unwilling to press it any further. "Winters c'n be long," is all he ventures more to say.
"This is Georgia," Daryl snorts distantly, "not Michigan." He moves away from the window in brash lanky strides, "Ain't like we shuttin' in for the length of it. Weren't we all about to hold up outdoors?"
"What about the smoke?" Beth points out more pragmatically, side stepping the issue of sleeping arrangements with grace. "This place filled up last night, we can't breathe that in all winter."
Daryl scratches his jaw; his eyes scan the room with new sight. "Why're we sayin' this place? This is what we're sayin' is 'it'?"
Simon runs through the list again. "It's off ground level. Walls are brick."
Daryl bites at is thumb as he paces over the splitting floorboards, "Only one way in." His hooded eyes run over every detail for the countless time. "Two ways out."
"We'll run out of water," Beth warns. Last night they'd scooped water from the toilet tank, but that will only last the day. They can't last a winter emptying the tanks of every toilet in town. Though, they could, if they had to. "Mighten we find some place with a well? A chimney?"
Simon tucks back a corner of the wool blackout blanket and peers out the eastern window, "Could maybe find a well."
"We move in too deep we're cutting off our view of the road," Daryl hazards. "No way we c'n keep watch on all sides – but chances 're tha' whatever'll be movin' through here 'll be comin' off the road." His eyes move to the room's door. "Could expand to a second room," he observes flatly, "keep from feeling too shut in." His head jerks briefly upwards, "Cook on the roof if we hafta."
"Cooking's only half of it." Beth's lashes blink deftly over her large blue eyes, "What about heat. It's already cold, and only going to get worse."
Simon drops the curtain, and turns back to the room. "If we don't light fires inside, we c'n heat rocks, or bricks, 'n bring em' in. If we keep the rooms sealed well, it'll be something."
"Not much," Daryl reflects.
In this apartment the three of them find they're at a crossroads. The unremarkable nature of the building is an underwhelming end to the price their journey's exacted. It is not a fortress, it offers little in resources; it isn't much of anything. Truly it is much like hundreds of other similar buildings they've scavenged and forgotten. But the days are colder now, let alone the nights, and walking for the sake of walking serves no greater purpose, certainly not for Beth.
Realists all, it goes unspoken each of their party has been waiting for, hoping for, a reprieve, a breakthrough. Through their many miles logged they've been holding on for a community they could join, something larger than themselves; but they can't hold out forever for a deus ex machina that may never come, may no longer exist. They have got to save themselves. In such circumstances has this commonplace apartment – indistinguishable from so many others – come under consideration as the site where they'll make that stand.
It is not, though, easily done, the giving up on the hope of finding just what they need, if only they'd walk a little further, endure a little longer. Finding faults in what is less than they require is second nature; finding the courage to accept what they have and to work with it is the challenge. But still, something from their night before – of the fruit and the feasting and the heat from the modest fire – remains; a sense of comfort, a sense of homeyness and warmth still lingers from their late hours, and binds them to this spot, perhaps more so than it should. Somehow, settling on this room, in this unremarkable structure, has been rendered easier than doing the same would have been in any of the other places they've traipsed through before. Through a meager sense of connectedness, self-preservation compels their stopping when pragmatism and logic would merely force another shrug.
"Look," Simon's even voice breaks through the debility of their ambivalence, "anything'll be better than staying out on the road."
"He's right," Daryl nods. "Fire 'r no, we'll fair better with walls. No exposure to the wind or th' rain." From beneath his shadowed brow he glances in the direction of Beth. "Nowhere's gonna be perfect."
"We can make it work," Simon affirms in earnest industry, still as affable as ever.
In turn Beth inspects the small room. She suspects he's right. Since the turn they've made a life of making things work, and times have found them in much less unforgiving circumstances than this. They can surely sort out the heating, and they can troubleshoot their water supply – most any place they settled would require the same; there is potential here to make it work. And yet somehow, after the forest camp, with its huts and its hammocks and its holes in the ground even, the four-walled second floor apartment seems somewhat like settling, like a step down, if such notions are still conceivable. But even as the thought comes to her Beth knows it isn't the room that makes her feel so. As well situated as it was, with fresh water at the ready, and game and fish and greens, it's not the forest encampment itself or its prospects she mourns.
Hoping though she has been – like her companions – to find a settlement to call home, it isn't the not having found one fueling her reticence as her soft eyes detachedly and soberly assess the space. Packing in – staying put for a season, feels to her now a surrender – an abandonment of their family. On the road, on the move, they always stood the chance of making the essential discovery, of happening upon a reunion. Or a reunion happening upon them. Closing these doors behind them – despite having already allowed herself to think of the wooded camp as home - shuts out much more than the inclement weather. It is a withdrawal from the larger world, from her scattered family, a phantom ache that continually plagues and menaces. But assuredly at some juncture doors must be closed; they cannot last forever as they are. Daryl isn't wrong, in his emphasis on them over the others. It is a matter of prioritizing.
Beth swallows. "All right."
"M'bye c'n find a potbelly stove 'r somethin'…" Simon reflects to himself.
"Could fix a kind o' chute on a barbecue m'ybe," Daryl muses gruffly. "Dunno what kind o' luck we'll have sourcing a stove." He hitches his tattered trousers up higher at his waist, "'We'll figure it out."
As Beth too looks, assessing what modifications are in need and what solutions possible, she is mindful not to see a home. This will not be a home to her, but a shelter from which to garner strength. Shelters can be utilized and turned away from; Beth will not lose another home, will not put her faith in any standing walls. Daryl is her home. Their growing child is her faith. This place is just a structure she will not be sorry to one day leave.