THANK YOU(!) to DarylDixon'sLover, galwidanatitud, speachestx, reptilegirl, Str1der2015, sweetbabyboo, Hasick, fritzo, and Kyr for being lovely and taking the extra time to leave feedback (!), and to all the readers who are still hanging in with this story or who just have found it! I so appreciate you!
One quick AN before getting started: The nature of the story clearly begs the question I most frequently get from readers: "Will they ever find the group?" There is a very solid and decided answer to that, but as this story is essentially the story of Beth and Daryl struggling to survive their separation from the group, revealing the 'yes' or 'no' outside of the story seems like it would cheat the storytelling. Readers asking the question in comments has always read to me like a fun rhetorical response to the story, a sign of engagement and investment rather than an actual demand for a reveal, one that I've always enjoyed reading. But in response to a PM I received earlier this month, if the not knowing something (whether it be that or something else) is seriously threatening your continued readership, feel free to PM to discuss. Okay, happy reading!
Hours pass and Daryl rests. They all do. The stowed car lingers in silence as the day grows long, the events of the night holding their voices hostage and curtailing their industry. All are exhausted. All three are haunted. They drift, aimless under the weight of violence and the burden of regret. Beth sleeps several hours more. She wakes once to sip some water then sets herself to sleep again. Daryl abides the pain. Sweating it out and gritting through it, he takes it on, drifting in and out of the fire and throbbing of his hurt. The physical is more manageable than grappling with the self-reproach.
Foregoing anything that might mitigate the pain relief, Daryl does swallow another antibiotic. He'd rather save them, for a time when they're more in need than this. Never wishing Beth or Simon ill, he would rather it not be he who among them is in need. Would rather not diminish their supplies to the detriment of them. His thoughts turn to T-Dog, and of that nasty blood infection he'd had. It was Merle's supply that'd saved him then. He thinks too of the fever that ravaged the prison. Without the meds, the casualties would have been so much heavier.
The indisputable reality is they need medication on hand. They'll need it for them, for the future, and they'll need it for the baby. Infants get sick. Too small and new, they can't fight off what others can, and if the present serves as any indication, they'll still be on the road when the child comes. With no way of foreseeing what lies in wait, they must store up in preparation against the worst. Scarce more and more these days, and never since the start easy to come by, drugs need to be made to last. But then too, there's no risking getting worse. He won't risk an infection that might leave them on their own, not when he had the means to stave it off, or at least to try. He can't leave them, not like that. Not at all.
Uncomfortable and in pain, Daryl tries to sleep. He'll survive this, he thinks, if there's no infection. They'd know by now if he were bleeding out, there'd be some sort of sign of it. He can't see himself, but he does not feel pallid, not like before. He feels no danger of passing out again. He has movement in his limbs and extremities, and when he's pissed there's been no blood. He's weak to be sure, as would be expected, but he isn't dying, and thus he begins the waiting game.
A sober quiet settles heavily upon them, closing in on the barn and inside the familiar confines of the SUV. The world they occupy in the aftermath of the terrible night is small and cramped, closed to just they three. What before had been so open in the black of night, plagued by the unknown, haunted by the brutality of strangers and the never too-far-off threat of death, trialed by untested terrain and awful sounds that tormented and provoked, they reduce to a space they can know. Four wheels and walls, a floor and a roof, enclosed again by four more walls, a roof atop and well-tread earthen ground comprise the limits. The comfort they seek to create here may well be self-deceiving, as artificially constructed as any other safe haven that's easily fallen, but in the stead of true security, in the absence of flight and imminent peril, without a place to go or a plan in place, they settle into this created nest of resting. The barn, the vehicle, the blood-matted bed of stained blankets and linens, is as much comfort as they may hope to find, as safe a moorage for them as any other. They will be tracked or they will not be. Daryl will recover or he will not. The truth is ever with them, regardless of how often hope and immediacy push it away: They will survive until they won't. Numbers, time, groups, luck, they all run out. They can fight against it, but death comes to all, as in truth it always has. Theirs is not a surrender to death or futility; they will continue to move against both, but for now, theirs is a shuttering down, a sheltering in place, a conserving and cultivating of both reserves and resolves. To move forward, they for a time cannot move at all. Faith is a tricky thing to find in the dark. It lights the way but if left out in the cold too long, if dampened too often, if beaten down and tread on too brutally, it will diminish, it will retreat and it will fade. To reignite the embers, they must block out the wind, the cold, the threats. They must focus on a world they can recognize, if never control.
They wait. They breathe. They live.
Movement is reserved for what's necessary. Words are withheld. Nothing needs to be said, they can function in silence. Intermittently Simon ventures outside to check on the stew, rotating the position of the heat panels with the sun. He moves with rote occupation but not with drive. He feels himself more hollow than hunger can account for.
Beth wakes. In silence she touches Daryl's forehead, testing for signs of fever. She presses her lips to his sweat-matted brow. There is warmth there, but not so hot as to alarm. Gingerly, she inspects his dressings, careful not to aggravate or restart the bleeding. Detecting no discoloration to signal infection but finding the dressings mostly soaked through, Beth washes the wounds and redresses everything. Running low on bindings, this time she uses duct tape to hold the gauze dressings in place. The added pressure she hopes will inhibit further bleeding. Taped and bloody and bandaged he makes for a rough and ragged sight, but there isn't water to spare to clean him, and all three of them are haggard worn-down specters of themselves.
Beth, who in the chaos of their flight had been focused and able, clear-minded and quick to act, now in the wake of their retreat slows and quiets. Her thoughts stew and storm within her and with the absence of occupation or urgency, she stills and hardens, lowering herself below the surface. Simon, who in the moment had not been able to process what they'd seen, what they'd been a part of, is buoyed now in the quiet. In the same space that Beth finds too big, too cavernous and empty, he finds comfort. The air is chilled but filled with them. On his ears are the soft faint inhalings and exhalings of his still-breathing family. If one of them moves, shifting their weight or position, the other two feel it as the otherwise motionless car also moves. He can reach and touch them if moved to, he can speak to them if he needs. What had happened had been terrible, but the world's been terrible for some long while now. Maybe everybody can't be saved. At least they had tried. Maybe Daryl was right, maybe they at least had spared them agony. He doesn't know.
As it can't be changed, Simon doesn't want to know. He wants this — what he has. What, thankfully, he still has. Them. The change had taught him not to long for what could no longer be had. More than that, living in the woods had trained him not to want for what he didn't need. They traveled light, they lived light, and they had adjusted. All this world is now is adjustments. Roots are only settled long enough to be transplanted or ripped out. He can live like that. Simon can live light. With Beth, and Daryl, and the baby. He can do that, if that's the new adjustment being asked of him. He can fix his hope on only them if adding others exacts too high a cost.
Time passes and Beth stares blankly at Daryl. Unable to smile and cheer him with chitchat, all she sees is the bandages and hurt. Her gaze is full of blood and risk. And last night. She'd been far off, but she'd seen enough. From the start, she'd known what they were witness to. Maggie comes to mind, and the story she'd never told of being held captive by the Governor. Beth remembers the threat Randall's group had posed. She recalls the visceral fear that had coursed through her when first carried off by Peter and Michael. Rotely she recounts to herself all the times since the farm she or her family has been menaced with the threat of sexual violence, and all the times she'd seen the ugly traces of it on the road. Still seared in her memory is the self-storage facility they'd sheltered at during their long winter on the road. She never forgot that bed. Or the chains. And then again surfaces the cabin, and all that transpired in the night, and equally what had not. They failed to save them. Regardless of their intentions, they had not helped.
But it isn't even the helplessness that's haunting her. Beth'd watched her own father slaughtered. She'd fled the burning ruins of the prison knowing others — those more defenseless, the sick and the small — were still there being left behind. She knows helplessness. She's reconciled with it, to a point. To a point, too, she'd reconciled with the cruel unaccountable randomness of chance. But there are times when it is too strong, and it is then when, unabated, the unanswerable questions flood in. Why those women? Why not her? Or one day her child?
And then the other question arises: Is it not a matter of Why not but When?
Though she knows too well no answers will come, it torments her, troubling her like a brewing storm. Faith in survival and family and love cannot combat the peril of random cruelty and chance. All there's to do is pick up the pieces every time life is crashed into, splintered and cast adrift. Countless times she's reclaimed remnant shards of a broken way of life to piece together again something worth living, but her fortitude is wearing thin. With little to replenish it, she's finding it harder to hold onto herself, let alone the others, let alone the world they're trying to create. It isn't exactly futility against stacked odds, nor threats of violence, nor their vulnerability to it, nor the unknowable nature of their futures that's weighing on her, but something maybe to do with the unremitting relentlessness of it. There isn't a respite, nor a seeming end to any of it, not until everything ends. She'd wanted that ending once, the solace of the finality of it, but she was scared then and still unaccustomed to the change in the world. And sunk within her mourning, she had not been thinking clearly. That time is long past. In the years since she's fought against death's end. There've been times when she's been brave against it. She's been steely, impervious, pragmatic, resilient, defiant. For so long, during times without much reason to hope, Beth has been a bulwark against the rising tides of terror and trouble, but though there's been no capitulation, she's wearing down, like earth and stone under water. Death will come to her, to Daryl, to Simon, to her child. It will likely not be natural. By biter or by violence, it will likely not be illness or age that takes them. She has faced this. But it drags on her. Heavier with each failure, each letdown, each loss, accumulating like weeds on an anchor. Now she feels herself closing in on herself. In the absence of solace, Beth concentrates and quiets the riot within.
Daryl and Simon eat. In turns, they each relieve themselves. They drink water sparingly. In turns, Beth and Simon each walk a patrol. The hours pass, the sun changes in the sky. Beyond their world, the shadows shift, but there is little change within the barn save for the light growing dimmer. The slats of light through the aging planks grow shorter and fall flat to the ground. From time to time, one of them rises to relieve themselves, or to stretch their legs, or just for something to do. Beth, silent and inanimate for hours, aside from checking periodically on Daryl, twice drifts back into the quiet nothingness of sleep.
Eventually, the sun sets and the stars emerge. The night is cold, and the vehicle dark, lit only by a single overhead lantern, only on when actively needed. Though the barn protects some against the winds, the aged walls do little to mitigate the temperature, and still the wind whistles through the boards and planks of the dilapidated structure. Bundled as they are, and in such a small confined space as the car, the chill is more tolerable than what they withstood the night before, but still, it is inarguably cold. Under cheerier conditions, the temperature would be less noticed, but without movement or occupation, their bodies grow stiff and weary. The chill creeps in, seeping deep, leaving them rigid and without hope of comfort or warmth. Because he must, Simon turns his thoughts away from the night before, and in the desolate quiet of their mutual reverie, his mind drifts back to other woods, back to the forest camp, and to before. Had they been able to remain, they'd face deeper colds than this in their huts on their little island warmed only by pit fires. But they would have been together, and they would have not known first hand the terror some humans can bring with such ease onto others. Simon still can see their faces. The face of the man he'd killed in cold blood. The faces of the strangers he'd been trying to help when he'd chosen to kill that man. He'd done it easily. More easily than he ever would have thought he'd be able. It isn't regret he feels — he saw what those men could do, did do. They deserved to die. It is not regret, but he does feel it. He suspects he won't soon forget the feel of it — the certainty of what he was about to do, the unflinching decidedness of his wrist. The man's body had been warm in Simon's grip, his blood had been unmistakably hot as it spilled over his hand. Expelled from the car and in the open for so long, fingers gripped tightly about his blade, Simon's hand had been so cold until… Simon forces a stiff cough, a sort of physical retracking of his train of thoughts. Daryl's killed men... By his count many. Having never known the archer before, it's impossible to know how much the doing so has affected him. Daryl faces things as they come, that much Simon knows of him. He does not seek trouble or violence, but he stands steady when confronted with it. Simon feels the need to be that way too. In their camp in the woods, living with his assumed brothers, he'd felt capable and sure minded. He'd known what they stood for and how to stay safe. He'd been the youngest, but it hadn't set him on uneven ground, and if anyone, it was Michael, who was three years older and second to James among the oldest in the group, who'd been the one who'd been babied. During their time together, most of their conflicts had been with the dead. Though they had been enough to drive them from the roads and towns and into the woods, their run-ins with the living had been less physically violent and more nuanced in their insidiousness. Since leaving the camp, Simon's encountered twice what it was they'd been seeking to avoid when they'd retreated to the trees. He's seen what sort of hate and cruelty expelled Beth and Daryl from their constructed home and cut asunder their created family. He's seen too what makes the difference between himself and them. Daryl and Beth have been on this road longer. He wonders if by now they feel these things less…
Simon thoughts turn again to the man he'd killed… It wasn't wrong. They'd sought out that fight, at his own urging no less, but to kill an aggressor in the stead of a person who hadn't sought a fight at all, it couldn't be wrong. Although the sense memory of the thrumming of the man's pulse, of the heat of his life's blood warming Simon's hand, will no doubt stay with him, he can take it. More, he guesses, than if they'd never come down off that ridge. He does not wish to be a person who stands idly by. This world calls for action, and he guesses that if Daryl and Beth can go on, even find love and make a family while living in it, then he can too. He can't change the new order of things, cannot keep the dead from shaping the course of the world, but he can keep hold of the belief that they can fight for the better nature of humankind. He looks again to Daryl, bloodied, shot and cut. He doesn't look to be giving up. The archer looks as resolved as ever, if a little pale and worn down. The kid wonders momentarily if there'll ever come a day when something truly breaks Daryl Dixon, but even hypothetically Simon has no desire to speculate on the bleakness of what that blow would be. He tries to turn his thoughts from loss. He's survived his own. He's lost every person he's ever known and loved, but he's kept going. The faces of his true family and of his forest brothers stay with him even though they are gone. He holds on to that. He is thankful for this found family of Daryl and Beth, but in the time before their reunion, when he'd been truly on his own, he hadn't given in. He won't now.
Sitting there in the grim aftermath, faces from his past flood past him. Family changes as the dangers of their world deplete it, but even so, a survivor's family still has the capacity to grow. Living makes it so. Each of them stowed away in this car is proof of it. They can move on from here, just as they had after losing James and Mike and the others, just as the two of them had after the prison. Daryl breathes steadily beside him, and somewhere near Beth nurtures a new and growing life, and Simon resolves he can still believe in the world he used to think was possible. Albeit there are monsters worse than the rotters, but they're not everyone, and they can't always win. And he is not alone. And Beth is not alone. And Daryl is alive, and he is not alone. And their child will never be alone. And this, in the ugly shadows of violence and violation, is what Simon clings to. It's what, now more than God, he chooses to believe in. Family.
Daryl coughs and grimaces as he shifts uncomfortably. Despite the cold, his brow is damp with sweat.
"Y'alright?" Simon stirs, reaching some for the flashlight should he need it.
"Mm," Daryl grunts.
"Need anythin'?" Drained, Daryl shakes his head mutely. "Beth'd say t' drink some water."
Cracking one eye open, Daryl waves off the bottle he's offered. "Where's she?"
"Stretchin' her legs, I think. M'ybe j'st takin' a leak."
"Place secure?" Daryl's voice is more knotted and gnarled than is its norm.
"Mm, hm," Simon nods. Rubbing at his eye, the boy tries to find again the way to making conversation after the blackness of their night. He sniffs, unsettling the silence he's been sitting in. "Hasn't been gone long. She's got her blade, an', I think two rounds." Daryl lets his eyes shut again. He hasn't stood since he and Simon made it to the car. With the blood loss and immobility, he isn't confident now he could. It's foreign to him, this feeling so disconnected from the world. Daryl has little concept of where it is they've stashed themselves. He hasn't seen the property or the road they drove in from, or even the barn they're housed in. But he trusts his company. Though he dreads ever leaving them to it, he trusts they each can take care of themselves. Certainly they can survey and clear a camp. If they've deemed it safe he'll take that. But it isn't reason alone prompting him to ask. Daryl wipes at his brow and lies back uncomfortably, waiting for hours and days to pass toward recovery. Simon watches. He wonders at the level of pain Daryl's feeling. He wonders how much of last night's horrors and failures are seared in Daryl's mind. How much of it has he pushed away and how much of it will he carry with him? But none of this is what Simon speaks of. "Daryl?" Daryl's brow lifts at one end in answer, an act barely visible through the dusk. "You said, you said the prison family, the ones still out there, you said—"
"Know whut I said," Daryl's low voice rumbles, cutting into Simon's prelude.
"—An' about meeting up with them."
"Y'tryin' t' say som'in'?"
"I don't know what they look like." Daryl's head shifts just slightly more to face Simon's direction. "Could be face t' face with them and never know it."
Daryl cracks both eyes open here. He looks at the kid through the dark shadows, then shuts his eyes again, settling back against the pillows and blankets. He surprises Simon when his gruff murmuration breaks the silence he'd thought had settled. "Maggie's pretty," he begins. "She's tall. Dark hair, wears it short. Least she did. Dudn't have th' baby face like Beth." Simon listens intently. "Glenn's Korean. Wears his hair longer, pushed back, little beard an' mustache. He's got this smile. Rick? M'ybe 5'10. Wiry build. Curls. Bearded, with some salt n' pepper. His boy Carl'd be in an ol' sheriff's hat. M'ybe fourteen. They're light-skinned. Michonne's got dark skin. Wears her hair in dreads, uses a —"
"—A katana," Simon finishes for him, "I know." It isn't as though he hasn't heard stories. These are names he knows; names and stories without faces.
"Right," Daryl nods. He sees these faces and more just as clearly as though they were here in this car with them. It's a strange sort of comfort to him to recall their likenesses aloud. For some reason though, he's glad Beth isn't there while he does it. He couldn't say why. At any rate, it's smart, he guesses, telling the kid what the others look like. Maybe they should have done from the start, but any necessity for doing it is inherently colored by the implied absence of he and Beth, and Daryl doesn't operate that way. Bringing them back to the point, Daryl lightly whaps the back of his hand on Simon's knee. "You ask folks th' three questions. You ask 'em if they've heard 'f a prison; 'r say th' name 'Hershel.' If you meet 'em, you'll know 'em."
In the stillness of the SUV Simon swallows. Perhaps he too is thinking of the implied conditions that would lead to introductions made without the presence of Beth and Daryl. "And what do I tell them?"
Daryl blinks, he can see all of them, and Carol; he sees Beth, and those days with her right after the fall, and all the long months that have transpired since. "Ev'rything."
Outside, beyond the ramshackle barn, Beth sits small within herself where she'd stooped low to the ground after having twice walked the perimeter. Objectively she recalls the frozen bite of the previous night, that aching longing to find warmth, but the thought of it is so distant from her now she can hardly conceive of that urgency. Instead, frozen where she sits, Beth is numb to the chill. In the bedlam of battle and their subsequent flight, there had been things that needed doing. They needed to escape, Daryl's bleeding needed to be curbed, they needed to dodge walkers, evade pursuit, and take shelter. With a litany of must-dos bearing down upon them she had been up to the tasks, but there are no tasks now. No walkers to clear, no food or water available to be sourced, no further tending to Daryl but the maddening watching and waiting. Having a job to do has always kept her tethered in times of chaos or trauma, but she's been left utterly without office. Time, and silence, and waiting without an undertaking has left her unmoored. She's never been one for idleness. Beth is ill at ease with inertia and having been rendered so at odds with her own instincts. Hope and faith are not big enough work for her at present. Still feeling deeply the fatal futility of their failed efforts, she craves the physicality of an occupation. In the absence of it, she galvanizes what parts of her have been left raw and exposed from this ordeal, and Beth closes in upon herself.
Thank you! Hoping to get another chapter up by mid-August, if not before. Happy summer, all!
AN: I'm trying to make a call about the next chapter; if anybody wants to be a sounding board or do a little mini beta read, let me know :)
I'm also (probably needlessly) rethinking a few elements from chapters 1-4 regarding the beginning of their physical relationship. If anyone has thoughts on that or wants to be a sounding board, again, I'd love the perspective. THANKS!
New readers, if you've just found the story and made it all the way through (first, WOW! Thank you!) I'd LOVE to hear from you!