Days pass, and weeks. A month and a fortnight they work and live together. They grow accustomed to each other, and to the manner in which each inhabits the life of a survivor. They've come to trust one another, their judgment, their abilities. No longer when Daryl leaves to walk the snare lines does he duck his head towards Beth and Simon telling them to stick together. The construct of three and three is no more.
In melding the groups together it did not take Bonnie, Walter, and Hadeel long to look past their own filters, their own experiences of this new and darker world, and to see the thing between the girl Beth and the fully adult Daryl as completely equal in footing. Unlike what they might have initially suspected, she is not indentured or indebted to him, he is not manipulating her. Once assured of this, and it did not take long, they were able to reconcile with Beth's condition and the overall dynamics of the group. Walter had only questioned Beth because of what he's seen along the way; Hadeel's watchful eye stayed close because of what she's known, what she's been through. But Beth and Daryl are not that, nothing close. It did not take them long to discern, and in some way the certainty of this helped to bring them all together.
Together they live around the silences of each other's unspoken pasts, picking up pieces of one another's history from the trails their paths cut. Here and there the newcomers hear the names of six young men and accounts of their life in the Georgian backwoods. So too do they hear of a Rick, a Maggie and Glenn, a Carol and a Carl. They hear of a little girl born into this world and of her mother who did not survive. And similarly Beth, Simon, and Daryl patch together the traces of the steps that lead these three to traveling the road together. He'd been married, had a wife and two stepsons. For a career he'd managed several parking lots for the city of Covington, up north in Kentucky. That was before the turn, before he and his family started heading south to link up with his wife's brothers. It was outside Knoxville that things broke down. He lost his older son first, then his wife and their younger boy together. In South Carolina Bonnie saw her long time partner ripped to shreds when the refugee camp they were in fell. The chaos of Columbia turning saw them, their two coworkers, and the fourteen wards of the state entrusted to their care, caught unprepared and poorly equipped to combat the rapid collapse of their camp. Like dominoes the people she knew, cared for, and loved, fell and turned, till only a precious few were still standing. That was when the state guard descended upon them and evacuated the living. They'd been taken to Fort Jackson and then left to fend for themselves. Initially there were upwards of two or three hundred refugees, but after several breaches from the dead, and fights and tensions breaking out amongst survivors, the numbers quickly dwindled. When the food ran out, so did the last remnants of civility. The place disintegrated quickly and people broke off in groups and clans, on their own and in pairs. Bonnie and the two remaining teens entrusted to her care set out with nine others. In the world that was no longer the world, they cut their teeth and learned the basics of survival: Strike the brain; scavenge; stick together; assimilate. Over time losses were suffered, the group both shrank and swelled. Bonnie's two minors never made it to the Georgia border. It was well more than a year in when Bonnie's refugee group merged with the handful of people Walter was by then traveling with. Little is learned of Hadeel's story, but what Daryl'd initially read as hollowness proves to be more haunting. Nothing about her is empty; just by watching her it's clear she carries far too much. At some point she'd been separated from her family, her parents and her sister, and taken. She was held. For some length of time. In that time she was all alone, except for when she wasn't; and her treatment by her captors - judging by the guardedness with which she comports herself, her affinity for being nearer Bonnie and Beth - was less than humane. Little more needs to be known about the men who held her; her broken, hunted ways betray enough. Through her caginess, through her aptitude for absolute stillness and her tendency toward restlessness, and those active, cunning, wounded eyes of hers, the human capacity for cruelty, objectification, and heartlessness take form, cutting deep scars. When near, Daryl takes care to afford her space; he never touches her, or stands too close, he knows he makes her nervous - the stature with which he bears himself, the sturdiness of his frame. Though the stories have never been recounted for him, he knows what he must represent for her, and quietly he maintains some radius between them. Daryl understands what it is to cower even when standing tall and strong. Her ordeals did not break her, she survived to become a key asset to this group, but recovery is slow, and does not travel a straight path. It'd taken him all his years to live past his early life. That, and a lot of blustering and brashness, bad behavior and bravado; it took the fall of the world, and a slip of a girl easing her way in and burning a house down, to come close to the man he might have been all along had chance forged him any differently.
In the wake of lost pasts, lost lovers, lost families, and unspoken trauma, these six merged together with a conscientious and industrious focus on the now. In time all names but each other's drop from their lips. Life takes the form of functionality and routine. Food is sought, scavenged or killed, prepared and eaten. Water is collected, boiled, and drunk. Walkers are killed, corralled, skirted, and fought. Defenses are made. Perimeters are monitored. Days are repeated. One after the other after the other. Life lived on repeat amidst peril is something other than mundane; monotony is a relic of the old world, but little serves to disrupt or distinguish the days from one another. Walkers come in different numbers, some days it rains, some days there's fog, some days chill them to the bone. Twice they spotted travelers on the highway, and another two times they detected scavengers picking through the town, but they never met. Their precautions preserved their low profile and in the weeks that passed they suffered no clashes with the outside world. It seems like maybe, if luck holds out, they might never.
A kiss presses softly to the side of her face, "Hey there," his raspy voice greets her warmly as Daryl passes by, moving into the room. "How 'ya doin'?" Beth smiles. "It's cold in here, you been moving any?" Leaning the crossbow against the wall he hitches the waistband of his trousers and strides into the open kitchen.
"Been sewing." Daryl shoves a fistful of dried meat into his mouth then leans over her shoulder and inspects what she's doing. On top of tending to the solar oven they'd some weeks back installed on the roof, Beth's spent the afternoon ripping out the seams at the waist of her jeans and stitching in patches of cut denim. On the road two winters ago she'd watched Lori use her own back pockets to widen her waistband; now from garments salvaged from town Beth works at the necessary alterations to her own modest wardrobe. In these passing weeks Beth's watched and grown, anticipating and preparing for her time to come. Still far from full term, her belly grows, the fullness of it each day making a little fainter the memories of the hours and days spent in uncertainty and doubt. "Could do your pant legs," she offers once again, "while I'm at it."
"They're fine," he chews, and swallows, "don't bother."
"Daryl," she reasons, speaking in that subdued rational voice he knows so well, "you've got them tethered to your ankles. I could stitch 'em together; reinforce them there, maybe too at the knees, from the inside."
Licking his fingers, Daryl shakes his head. "They're all right."
"Or, we could just find you a new pair." She doesn't seem to have any hope of him agreeing to that.
"Said don't bother." Though still more than three months away, Beth's time is approaching – measured in the mending of waistlines and in sleepless nights, in bouts of energy and the amassing of necessities. The coming of the child weighs on Daryl, and even as Beth prepares, reading over and over the pages of the delivery books she found amongst the shelves of the town, he silently runs scenario after scenario through his head. He'd been discouraged after learning neither of the women they joined with had ever born a child – never married, Hadeel was still enrolled in her Master's program when the world fell, (she suspects now her body's sustained too much trauma to ever entertain to sustain a pregnancy), and Bonnie's persuasion never would have brought her a child through her own conception. Even Walter's two kids had been born before they'd become a part of his family. Daryl had hoped to find assets, allies of experience for Beth and he in this endeavor; they had not, and so his uneasy anticipation keeps him moving, and – though he pushes himself to expect nothing but a safe outcome – ever slightly on edge. It certainly keeps him resistant to letting her fuss over him. It does not faze her; whatever rattling around he's doing now will abate she knows when it matters. She relies on nothing like she relies on his steady strength, and that thing in him that's always got him checking their backs, but still believing things can work out. It's Daryl, and she needs nothing in the world like she needs him, exactly damaged and resilient as he is.
"Will it rain, do you think?" Beth asks, navigating his temperament.
Daryl glances at her, simultaneously resentful of her ability to steer him to conversation and admiring of her skill at doing it so easily. His crossed brow slackens. "Skies're clear." He takes a swig from her water glass, "Don't think we'll see another rain for more than a week still. Prob'ly more."
Her face shadows with concern as she looks up at him from her needlework, "We need the water."
In answer his eyes meet hers, holding them for a time, then he shrugs, shrugging off her worries and his, "We've got enough. Rain'll come." Dragging out the chair beside hers Daryl straddles it with his old easy swagger. "Storms'll be on us soon. More likely we'll drown b'fore dry out." As a sort of reassurance he grins cockeyed at her, and when Beth places her hand on his he bends down to it to kiss. "We're doing okay."
"That's not like you to say," she smiles.
Daryl smirks. "Then it must be true."
Pulling tight her thread through the stiff denim, Beth smiles and lifts her woolen feet from the ground, finding room for them in his empty lap. His eyes drift down, again his expression softens, and he takes her feet into his calloused hands, pulling one sock off and then the other, to rub and warm, working them with the bones and muscles of his work-solid hands.
Subject to this attention Beth's body sinks back some in her wooden kitchen chair and her eyelids flutter in muted distracted pleasure. "...Do you think about it?" she asks, a little dreamily. He glances at her through his thick fallen hair, but his hands do not stop molding and kneading the arches and bends of her feet. "...Who it'll be?"
"'Be?'" his heavy voice rumbles. "Got a feelin' it'll be a baby." Beth pushes through another stitch, watching the thick navy thread pull taut and straight. "One tha' looks like you if it knows whut's good for it." Gripping her feet together Daryl holds her there, and looks at her that way she remembers he first looked at her, so long ago that night they'd been stormed by the dead in the funeral home. That night when it was still too soon to say it, still too soon to act on it, or to know it even for certain for what it was, but in whatever manner he did then, he loved her, as he does now, only more so, deeper, and in all respects.
Her feet pull some from him now as suddenly her posture straightens and the features of her face brighten and pause. So open and beautiful is she in the moment he can look nowhere else but at her. Drinking her in, he watches her as she inexplicably almost shines in a self-contained giggle, and then her stitching's dropped to the wayside and she's leaning forward, gripping at his forearm, tugging his hand to her, and holding it fast to her waistline. Motionless, Beth watches his hand, and Daryl watches her. She holds him there, waiting, and then it happens. Again she swallows her delight. "Did you feel it?" she whispers.
Daryl's eyes, suddenly soft and glistening, look from her to her hand covering his, and to the shape of the child fluttering and quickening beneath their grasp. "Hell…" his strong voice quivers.
Beth blinks softly. "…I'h thought I felt it earlier today." With her free hand Beth reaches to him, first cradling his face then brushing clear his eyes. Daryl clutches the hand and deeply presses his heart into it, his lips, his love, his faith.