[fic] Holding On [1/5]
Title: Holding On [1/5]
Author: badboy_fangirl
Fandom: The Walking Dead
Characters/Pairings: Beth POV; Daryl/Beth (past Beth/Zach); with appearances by everyone else.
Word Count: ~3500
Rating/Warnings: R / Spoilers through all of season four. MENTIONS OF RAPE, POSSIBLE TRIGGERS.
Summary:
Author's notes: This is a companion/continuation fic to Empty Handed. You may read it without having read the first fic, but it won't make as much sense, IMHO. Also, many thanks to Cricket for the beta.
When it gets cold
And it feels like the end
There's no place to go
You know I won't give in
"Beth? You asleep?"
She rolls toward the sound of Carol's voice, her eyes landing on the embers of their campfire.
"No," she replies, her voice very quiet.
It's dark here, so dark that the embers seem like beacons in the night.
Beacons of what, Beth isn't sure. Hope? Death?
Part of her wants Walkers to come crashing through the underbrush, just take all the choice out of it. She has her moments when her bloody wrist in the bathroom at the farm is the only thing she can think about.
(That's probably why she thinks about Daryl all the rest of the time.)
Carol clears her throat. Beth knows she knows what happened to her, but she hasn't asked yet. She doesn't want to talk about it, anyway. There's nothing to talk about.
"Honey, I just want you to know, I've been there. It doesn't take it away, or make it better, but I just want you to know you're not alone."
She feels the wetness of tears on her cheeks before it registers that what Carol said touched her.
"My mom had this book," she says, sniffing the tears away, barely letting the few that squeeze out make it all the way to her chin. "It had a lot of nice quotes in it, words of wisdom, stuff like that. I remember this one, because I didn't really get it when I was a kid. It said, A man who's worth your tears will never make you cry." She can't make out more than Carol's shape in the darkness, the small lump of Judith resting against Carol's chest, but she stares hard at that place, willing the older woman to say something that will give Beth more comfort than knowing she too had men do brutal things to her. "You think Daryl's the kind of man who would never make you cry, if he really loved you?"
She can't see her, but she can feel the way Carol goes still, how even the air between seems to stop its movement.
"Daryl is absolutely that kind of man," Carol says.
"You think he's still alive, right?" Beth whispers, swallowing hard to keep the tears from coming back.
"If anyone's still alive, it's Daryl."
And because that's what Beth has wanted to believe all along, she drifts into the first deep sleep she's had since she lost him.
The first song Beth Greene writes about Daryl Dixon starts brewing in her mind the night she's raped. She lies under the starlit sky, plotting moves against her attackers, and a melody forms in her head.
She even hums it to herself to see if they're paying attention to her.
(They aren't.)
The first lyric cements itself on her tongue after she drops the smoking gun on the ground next to one of the dead bodies.
Memory, louder than sound, stronger than muscle, runs through me.
They see two different signs for a place called Terminus. Beth feels uneasy about it, but Carol and Tyreese both think they should go and see, at least. They are surviving, but it's difficult, especially with Judith.
That night, she prays for the first time in a long time. For help, for guidance, for the wisdom of her daddy to rain down on her.
The next morning, as they're breaking camp, a man named Gabriel Sanchez, his wife, and his two teenaged sons come walking out of the woods.
Beth knows an answer to prayer when she sees one.
When Gabriel tells them that he's a pastor, Beth shares everything about her father's death. Not just his death, but his life, too, and how all the goodness and faith she has managed to hold on to came from him. The long walk allows for a lot of cathartic talking, and the captive audience asks questions if she ever stops.
It keeps her moving forward during the day, just like thoughts of Daryl keep her calm at night. She hoards those things even when Carol asks her for details. She talks about the benign events, hiding in the trunk all night, him teaching her to track, finding the funeral home. She doesn't mention Daryl breaking down, crying in her arms. Or how he'd told her about his life before the turn. Or how he'd let her hold his hand, and asked her to sing to him, and watched her with eyes that haunted her dreams now.
They didn't haunt her in bad way. With Daryl it was all good. With Daryl it was anything she wanted it to be.
His thoughts were a mystery she wanted to unravel, things she had to interpret based on very little evidence. So she spent hours thinking of each of the things he had done, and trying to figure out if it meant what she thought it meant.
Sometimes, to force out the bad memories of those men who hurt her, she thought of the gentle way his hands had been on her ankle as he wrapped it in a bandage he found in a cupboard; she imagined them on other parts of her body, in the places those men had violated. Not always, but occasionally, the thoughts made her breath come faster, made her ache in a way that reminded her of Zach.
The few times they fooled around, she suspected that she might really like sex, if she could have focused on him and what he was doing more. Most of the time, though, she was thinking about Judith, or how much food they had and if Daryl might catch something when he went hunting, or what her daddy would think if he knew she was letting a boy put his hand down her pants.
It was definitely fun enough for her to do it multiple times, but she'd never gotten lost in it. It had never consumed her. Zach had been cute, and gung ho, kinda reminding her of a puppy, and he liked her so much that it was almost enough.
In the end, it hadn't been. She never gave herself fully to him, and then he was gone, so it didn't matter that she probably hadn't liked him as much as he liked her.
When she had truly understood that Daryl liked her, when it had sunk in and put steel in her spine, she had been miles from him laying on the cold hard ground, bleeding from between her legs.
She hasn't cried. Once she realized what was going to happen, and that they didn't care what she wanted, she went some place inside of herself, that place that Daryl had not understood. She thinks he'd be grateful now that she had that place.
In the darkness of a dying campfire, she feels her cheeks warm when she wonders what he would think of her pretending his hands were ghosting over the skin of her belly and hips, sliding down the front of her to sink between her legs.
She feels guilty about it, and then feels stupid for feeling guilty. But finally one night she asks Pastor Gabriel if she can talk to him privately. She doesn't tell him about her fantasies, but confesses to killing the men who raped her.
Big tears well up in Gabriel's eyes, and he reaches for her, pulling her into a fatherly embrace that she supposes ought to loosen the emotion for her, but it doesn't.
"I'm sorry that happened to you, Beth," he murmurs, brushing her hair back from her face. "I think killing them was self-defense, but you still have to work through the forgiveness thing. Jesus forgave those who nailed him to the cross; he does expect us to find a way, but I know he's patient as we work through it."
Beth nods and thanks him for listening. Maybe some day she'll work up the nerve to talk about her dirty thoughts about Daryl.
But then the next time Carol brings up Daryl, gently probing for more information, Beth realizes she'll never tell. They are part of her precious cache of memories, even if they're made up. She won't give them away for anything.
Instead she writes the chorus to the song she started weeks earlier.
Your worship, your devotion, your adoration
Puts me on the pedestal that releases me
Life is ruined, life is over
Lies can no longer bind me
The day they arrive in Washington, D.C., Beth can't help but look around--gaping really--nervously. The city reminds her of Atlanta before the turn, or even New York. She'd gone there once on trip with her mother and Maggie when she was 13. They had seen a Broadway show--The Lion King--and taken the Ellis Island Tour, and it had been overwhelming for her because she was used to small towns and wide open spaces. At the same time she had loved the feeling there, the energy, her mom called it; she always planned to go back someday, maybe for college or something.
Washington is strangely busy. There are cars and people walking everywhere. They are dressed in nice clothes and look like they're hurrying to their destinations.
Not running from Walkers, but going to jobs, or appointments, or meeting their loved ones for lunch.
She even sees a man on a cell phone, and she looks around wildly to catch Carol's eye, to point it out to her. Carol seems equally astonished at what they're encountering, but Gabriel's wife, Lillian, pats Beth's arm. "It's just like we were told. The city is intact."
It turns out, it had never fallen completely apart. When the outbreak happened, there had been protocol to protect the White House, and within the first year they had begun extending their fence borders. They now stretched out over 100 square miles, but it had been a slow process. All the same, their group is amazed as they get inundated with information, when they see that in some ways, for some of these people, life never ceased at all from the way it had been.
Communications failed, and they were unable to protect the rest of the country, but they were back online now, and even established connections with people in various patches across the world.
Sometimes Beth feels jealous when she meets those people--the ones who never lost anyone, who don't even know what it is to kill a Walker, or to be terrorized by men like the Governor. Beth knows men, women, and children get raped every day all over the world, but the length her attackers went to in obtaining her fills her with so much anger. It gets broader and deeper when she thinks about Daryl in that funeral home with her. How they had found hope there in jars of peanut butter and jelly, how he had found something greater than hope within her. And though she can see it's a blessing to have found this place and to have the chance to start over, every night when she says her prayers she's rattling off a list of people she doesn't know that she'll ever see again. She doesn't try to root the disappointment out of her breast over it, because it's sort of a way to hold on to Daryl, and Maggie and Glenn, Carl and Rick.
She knows Daryl would be skeptical; he would think they were silly and pretentious in their fancy clothes.
He might even hate them for their ease. She cries many tears in those first few weeks when she realizes she sees them the way he'd seen her; they don't even know how good they have it.
How could they?
She gets a job with the Registration Department, because basically everyone who comes through the fence gets put in somewhere. They're asked what their abilities are in some semblance of a job interview, and because Carol was a stay-at-home mom before the turn, she gets to work in a preschool. The good thing is she can take Judith with her to work. Tyreese takes a position with the Task Force, and spends his days patrolling the city for Walkers; none can get into the city, but people die. With everyone carrying the virus, the threat is always near.
No one has been bit inside the city for more than six months. Beth misses her Days Without an Accident sign from the prison, and starts keeping a tally on a wall calendar she is given when she starts working at Registration.
The best thing in the world for all of them seems to be assimilating back into the lives they remember. Pastor Gabriel starts a church group. Beth takes the GED because she hadn't really finished high school, though between her father and Patricia she had continued learning once they were confined to the farm.
They all have to go to the doctor soon after they arrive also. They get physicals, have their blood drawn (confirmation on all Walker-infected persons, just for the record), and get tetanus shots. The doctor Beth sees isn't really a doctor at all, but a nurse practitioner named Debbie. She is gentle and kind, as if she's expecting Beth to tell her what she ends up sharing, and Beth realizes there must be a lot of violated women who come in from the outside.
The thought makes her so angry, she almost can't speak. Rage chokes her, not tears, not softness, just pure fury. Debbie does a pelvic exam on her and tells her she's healed just fine, and that everything looks good, but they'll test her pap smear and her blood for any STIs. It's been long enough that Beth already knows she's not pregnant, but honestly she hadn't even thought about any diseases. Her stomach heaves and she sways on her feet, which Debbie notices so she invites Beth to sit back down.
"I know some rape counselors," Debbie says, writing a phone number down on a piece of paper for Beth. "A support group might be a good idea."
Beth pockets the number, but decides Pastor Gabriel is all the counselor she needs.
(Debbie calls a few days later to tell Beth she's clean.)
A couple of weeks later, she and Carol move into a little house with Judith. It has three bedrooms, and while it feels too big for them, because Carol keeps the baby in a crib in the room she takes, they soon find themselves filling it up. Tyreese comes over on a regular basis, and they all make easy friends with people from work.
The street they live on is one that actually got taken over by Walkers at one point, but had since been redeemed and put behind the safety of the fence. The house had fallen into some disrepair, and whomever had once lived there had left most of their furniture and belongings.
All the same, Carol suggests that they re-paint the rooms, do things to make the place uniquely theirs, so they head to the hardware store. Beth chooses yellow for her bedroom, and hangs gossamer curtains in the window that have daisies embroidered on them.
In the living room, they settle on a deep red for one wall, and powder blue for the remaining walls. They never speak about it, but to Beth it's a memorial. The red is all the blood behind them, all those they've lost, and the blue is hope, hope that somewhere, somehow, those people who are never far from their thoughts are safe.
Blue is the color of all the tears I spilt
Knowin' you'd wipe them away, if you could
They sit on their over-stuffed sofa watching Judith play with her toys in the middle of the floor, and Beth smiles. She turns her head to look at Carol on the other end of the couch; she has red paint on one of her cheekbones. "If I never see him again, it doesn't change anything, you know. Maybe I could've only fallen in love with him from far away."
Carol's eyebrows go up in surprise; Beth can see that she's not shocked at knowing this, just at hearing it aloud when she's been so stingy with the information she shared about Daryl.
"Knowin' Daryl, he'd have tried to talk you out of it, anyway," Carol says, nodding her head. "If you ever see him again, he won't be able to convince himself it's something other than what you say."
Beth's chest gets tight, the emotion too heavy with no place to go. She'd give anything to see him again.
"So, look here."
Lydia, Beth's immediate supervisor, says as she leans over her shoulder, pressing buttons on the computer keyboard. "Put your sister's name in here, and her birthdate, and if she ever comes in, it will flag it. You'll get a notification, immediately. If you're at your desk when it happens, you'll know the moment she comes in."
Beth types in the information as Lydia's standing there. Then her friend asks, "Maggie's your only surviving family?"
Beth nods. "Blood kin. I have lots more family, though. I know their birthdates, too. Can I flag all of them?"
"Yes, if you know their birthdates. No point getting your hopes up without two confirmations. The odds of the same name and the same birthday are, like, one in a million."
Lydia goes back to her cubicle, leaving Beth sitting there. She types in Carl and Rick's information, as well as Glenn's. She wants to put Daryl's name in, but when she realizes she doesn't know his birthday, she nearly loses it.
She remembers his angry face, the accusation about not shedding tears for Jimmy or Zach.
She won't shed tears for Daryl because he's not dead.
He's not.
Seeing the alert for Maggie's name (a flashing red pop-up on her screen) causes Beth to scream, scaring everyone in the office with her. She runs to the door that leads to the outer room of Registration, and though there are about twenty people milling about, her eyes find her sister instantly. Bedraggled, dirty, but still Maggie, with an incredulous expression of surprise as she spots Beth.
"Beth!"
Beth has the presence of mind to get rid of the dress shoes she's wearing before she takes off running. As she and Maggie joyously collide, she sees Rick and Carl, but the momentum of her body takes them both down to the floor. She feels Maggie start laughing, and she thinks she's laughing, too, only there are tears as well, and she's just hysterical, all the way around.
Someone pulls her to her feet, and she's eye to eye with Carl now. He's grown so much since the last time she saw him. They're all saying her name, but in the midst of all of it, what she hears is Rick's voice, raised above the cacophony of sound. "Come here!" he shouts.
And then, "Daryl!" even louder.
Beth's head snaps up, and she feels her neck pop, a shooting, tingling sensation racing down her spine. She's clustered in the middle with everyone surrounding her like a happy swarm of Walkers. But when she hears his name, she only has eyes for him.
She knew he wasn't dead.
She should have known he would find their family and bring them all back to her, somehow.
(Because he's Daryl Fucking Dixon.)
As happy as she is to see everyone, to be clasped in their arms, and feel their hands touching her hair, her arms, her back, she pushes free from all of them as her eyes lock on his face.
She can see everything that she clung to through her darkest days, right there in his expression. It hadn't been a fantasy that she made up to survive. It was real; he was real, and the light in his countenance reaches out to her, pulling her home with speed and precision.
She's across the floor and in his arms before she's even completed the thought. She hits him hard, feels him grunt under the impact of her chest against his. His arms wrap around her even harder, holding her there, in place.
He smells familiar, another thing that had haunted her in a real or not real way; the vague scent of leather from his old vest, and the open road, and whatever made him Daryl. In her ear, his voice is soft, rough. "You," he says. "It's you."
She clutches him desperately, not caring what anyone thinks. "It's me," she says back, and it's irrevocably the truth.
All the parts of her have finally returned; all the reasons she kept breathing, and pressed on, have come back to her.
Beth is, and has always been, the luckiest girl in the world.
...chapter two...
Author: badboy_fangirl
Fandom: The Walking Dead
Characters/Pairings: Beth POV; Daryl/Beth (past Beth/Zach); with appearances by everyone else.
Word Count: ~3500
Rating/Warnings: R / Spoilers through all of season four. MENTIONS OF RAPE, POSSIBLE TRIGGERS.
Summary:
Author's notes: This is a companion/continuation fic to Empty Handed. You may read it without having read the first fic, but it won't make as much sense, IMHO. Also, many thanks to Cricket for the beta.
When it gets cold
And it feels like the end
There's no place to go
You know I won't give in
"Beth? You asleep?"
She rolls toward the sound of Carol's voice, her eyes landing on the embers of their campfire.
"No," she replies, her voice very quiet.
It's dark here, so dark that the embers seem like beacons in the night.
Beacons of what, Beth isn't sure. Hope? Death?
Part of her wants Walkers to come crashing through the underbrush, just take all the choice out of it. She has her moments when her bloody wrist in the bathroom at the farm is the only thing she can think about.
(That's probably why she thinks about Daryl all the rest of the time.)
Carol clears her throat. Beth knows she knows what happened to her, but she hasn't asked yet. She doesn't want to talk about it, anyway. There's nothing to talk about.
"Honey, I just want you to know, I've been there. It doesn't take it away, or make it better, but I just want you to know you're not alone."
She feels the wetness of tears on her cheeks before it registers that what Carol said touched her.
"My mom had this book," she says, sniffing the tears away, barely letting the few that squeeze out make it all the way to her chin. "It had a lot of nice quotes in it, words of wisdom, stuff like that. I remember this one, because I didn't really get it when I was a kid. It said, A man who's worth your tears will never make you cry." She can't make out more than Carol's shape in the darkness, the small lump of Judith resting against Carol's chest, but she stares hard at that place, willing the older woman to say something that will give Beth more comfort than knowing she too had men do brutal things to her. "You think Daryl's the kind of man who would never make you cry, if he really loved you?"
She can't see her, but she can feel the way Carol goes still, how even the air between seems to stop its movement.
"Daryl is absolutely that kind of man," Carol says.
"You think he's still alive, right?" Beth whispers, swallowing hard to keep the tears from coming back.
"If anyone's still alive, it's Daryl."
And because that's what Beth has wanted to believe all along, she drifts into the first deep sleep she's had since she lost him.
The first song Beth Greene writes about Daryl Dixon starts brewing in her mind the night she's raped. She lies under the starlit sky, plotting moves against her attackers, and a melody forms in her head.
She even hums it to herself to see if they're paying attention to her.
(They aren't.)
The first lyric cements itself on her tongue after she drops the smoking gun on the ground next to one of the dead bodies.
Memory, louder than sound, stronger than muscle, runs through me.
They see two different signs for a place called Terminus. Beth feels uneasy about it, but Carol and Tyreese both think they should go and see, at least. They are surviving, but it's difficult, especially with Judith.
That night, she prays for the first time in a long time. For help, for guidance, for the wisdom of her daddy to rain down on her.
The next morning, as they're breaking camp, a man named Gabriel Sanchez, his wife, and his two teenaged sons come walking out of the woods.
Beth knows an answer to prayer when she sees one.
When Gabriel tells them that he's a pastor, Beth shares everything about her father's death. Not just his death, but his life, too, and how all the goodness and faith she has managed to hold on to came from him. The long walk allows for a lot of cathartic talking, and the captive audience asks questions if she ever stops.
It keeps her moving forward during the day, just like thoughts of Daryl keep her calm at night. She hoards those things even when Carol asks her for details. She talks about the benign events, hiding in the trunk all night, him teaching her to track, finding the funeral home. She doesn't mention Daryl breaking down, crying in her arms. Or how he'd told her about his life before the turn. Or how he'd let her hold his hand, and asked her to sing to him, and watched her with eyes that haunted her dreams now.
They didn't haunt her in bad way. With Daryl it was all good. With Daryl it was anything she wanted it to be.
His thoughts were a mystery she wanted to unravel, things she had to interpret based on very little evidence. So she spent hours thinking of each of the things he had done, and trying to figure out if it meant what she thought it meant.
Sometimes, to force out the bad memories of those men who hurt her, she thought of the gentle way his hands had been on her ankle as he wrapped it in a bandage he found in a cupboard; she imagined them on other parts of her body, in the places those men had violated. Not always, but occasionally, the thoughts made her breath come faster, made her ache in a way that reminded her of Zach.
The few times they fooled around, she suspected that she might really like sex, if she could have focused on him and what he was doing more. Most of the time, though, she was thinking about Judith, or how much food they had and if Daryl might catch something when he went hunting, or what her daddy would think if he knew she was letting a boy put his hand down her pants.
It was definitely fun enough for her to do it multiple times, but she'd never gotten lost in it. It had never consumed her. Zach had been cute, and gung ho, kinda reminding her of a puppy, and he liked her so much that it was almost enough.
In the end, it hadn't been. She never gave herself fully to him, and then he was gone, so it didn't matter that she probably hadn't liked him as much as he liked her.
When she had truly understood that Daryl liked her, when it had sunk in and put steel in her spine, she had been miles from him laying on the cold hard ground, bleeding from between her legs.
She hasn't cried. Once she realized what was going to happen, and that they didn't care what she wanted, she went some place inside of herself, that place that Daryl had not understood. She thinks he'd be grateful now that she had that place.
In the darkness of a dying campfire, she feels her cheeks warm when she wonders what he would think of her pretending his hands were ghosting over the skin of her belly and hips, sliding down the front of her to sink between her legs.
She feels guilty about it, and then feels stupid for feeling guilty. But finally one night she asks Pastor Gabriel if she can talk to him privately. She doesn't tell him about her fantasies, but confesses to killing the men who raped her.
Big tears well up in Gabriel's eyes, and he reaches for her, pulling her into a fatherly embrace that she supposes ought to loosen the emotion for her, but it doesn't.
"I'm sorry that happened to you, Beth," he murmurs, brushing her hair back from her face. "I think killing them was self-defense, but you still have to work through the forgiveness thing. Jesus forgave those who nailed him to the cross; he does expect us to find a way, but I know he's patient as we work through it."
Beth nods and thanks him for listening. Maybe some day she'll work up the nerve to talk about her dirty thoughts about Daryl.
But then the next time Carol brings up Daryl, gently probing for more information, Beth realizes she'll never tell. They are part of her precious cache of memories, even if they're made up. She won't give them away for anything.
Instead she writes the chorus to the song she started weeks earlier.
Your worship, your devotion, your adoration
Puts me on the pedestal that releases me
Life is ruined, life is over
Lies can no longer bind me
The day they arrive in Washington, D.C., Beth can't help but look around--gaping really--nervously. The city reminds her of Atlanta before the turn, or even New York. She'd gone there once on trip with her mother and Maggie when she was 13. They had seen a Broadway show--The Lion King--and taken the Ellis Island Tour, and it had been overwhelming for her because she was used to small towns and wide open spaces. At the same time she had loved the feeling there, the energy, her mom called it; she always planned to go back someday, maybe for college or something.
Washington is strangely busy. There are cars and people walking everywhere. They are dressed in nice clothes and look like they're hurrying to their destinations.
Not running from Walkers, but going to jobs, or appointments, or meeting their loved ones for lunch.
She even sees a man on a cell phone, and she looks around wildly to catch Carol's eye, to point it out to her. Carol seems equally astonished at what they're encountering, but Gabriel's wife, Lillian, pats Beth's arm. "It's just like we were told. The city is intact."
It turns out, it had never fallen completely apart. When the outbreak happened, there had been protocol to protect the White House, and within the first year they had begun extending their fence borders. They now stretched out over 100 square miles, but it had been a slow process. All the same, their group is amazed as they get inundated with information, when they see that in some ways, for some of these people, life never ceased at all from the way it had been.
Communications failed, and they were unable to protect the rest of the country, but they were back online now, and even established connections with people in various patches across the world.
Sometimes Beth feels jealous when she meets those people--the ones who never lost anyone, who don't even know what it is to kill a Walker, or to be terrorized by men like the Governor. Beth knows men, women, and children get raped every day all over the world, but the length her attackers went to in obtaining her fills her with so much anger. It gets broader and deeper when she thinks about Daryl in that funeral home with her. How they had found hope there in jars of peanut butter and jelly, how he had found something greater than hope within her. And though she can see it's a blessing to have found this place and to have the chance to start over, every night when she says her prayers she's rattling off a list of people she doesn't know that she'll ever see again. She doesn't try to root the disappointment out of her breast over it, because it's sort of a way to hold on to Daryl, and Maggie and Glenn, Carl and Rick.
She knows Daryl would be skeptical; he would think they were silly and pretentious in their fancy clothes.
He might even hate them for their ease. She cries many tears in those first few weeks when she realizes she sees them the way he'd seen her; they don't even know how good they have it.
How could they?
She gets a job with the Registration Department, because basically everyone who comes through the fence gets put in somewhere. They're asked what their abilities are in some semblance of a job interview, and because Carol was a stay-at-home mom before the turn, she gets to work in a preschool. The good thing is she can take Judith with her to work. Tyreese takes a position with the Task Force, and spends his days patrolling the city for Walkers; none can get into the city, but people die. With everyone carrying the virus, the threat is always near.
No one has been bit inside the city for more than six months. Beth misses her Days Without an Accident sign from the prison, and starts keeping a tally on a wall calendar she is given when she starts working at Registration.
The best thing in the world for all of them seems to be assimilating back into the lives they remember. Pastor Gabriel starts a church group. Beth takes the GED because she hadn't really finished high school, though between her father and Patricia she had continued learning once they were confined to the farm.
They all have to go to the doctor soon after they arrive also. They get physicals, have their blood drawn (confirmation on all Walker-infected persons, just for the record), and get tetanus shots. The doctor Beth sees isn't really a doctor at all, but a nurse practitioner named Debbie. She is gentle and kind, as if she's expecting Beth to tell her what she ends up sharing, and Beth realizes there must be a lot of violated women who come in from the outside.
The thought makes her so angry, she almost can't speak. Rage chokes her, not tears, not softness, just pure fury. Debbie does a pelvic exam on her and tells her she's healed just fine, and that everything looks good, but they'll test her pap smear and her blood for any STIs. It's been long enough that Beth already knows she's not pregnant, but honestly she hadn't even thought about any diseases. Her stomach heaves and she sways on her feet, which Debbie notices so she invites Beth to sit back down.
"I know some rape counselors," Debbie says, writing a phone number down on a piece of paper for Beth. "A support group might be a good idea."
Beth pockets the number, but decides Pastor Gabriel is all the counselor she needs.
(Debbie calls a few days later to tell Beth she's clean.)
A couple of weeks later, she and Carol move into a little house with Judith. It has three bedrooms, and while it feels too big for them, because Carol keeps the baby in a crib in the room she takes, they soon find themselves filling it up. Tyreese comes over on a regular basis, and they all make easy friends with people from work.
The street they live on is one that actually got taken over by Walkers at one point, but had since been redeemed and put behind the safety of the fence. The house had fallen into some disrepair, and whomever had once lived there had left most of their furniture and belongings.
All the same, Carol suggests that they re-paint the rooms, do things to make the place uniquely theirs, so they head to the hardware store. Beth chooses yellow for her bedroom, and hangs gossamer curtains in the window that have daisies embroidered on them.
In the living room, they settle on a deep red for one wall, and powder blue for the remaining walls. They never speak about it, but to Beth it's a memorial. The red is all the blood behind them, all those they've lost, and the blue is hope, hope that somewhere, somehow, those people who are never far from their thoughts are safe.
Blue is the color of all the tears I spilt
Knowin' you'd wipe them away, if you could
They sit on their over-stuffed sofa watching Judith play with her toys in the middle of the floor, and Beth smiles. She turns her head to look at Carol on the other end of the couch; she has red paint on one of her cheekbones. "If I never see him again, it doesn't change anything, you know. Maybe I could've only fallen in love with him from far away."
Carol's eyebrows go up in surprise; Beth can see that she's not shocked at knowing this, just at hearing it aloud when she's been so stingy with the information she shared about Daryl.
"Knowin' Daryl, he'd have tried to talk you out of it, anyway," Carol says, nodding her head. "If you ever see him again, he won't be able to convince himself it's something other than what you say."
Beth's chest gets tight, the emotion too heavy with no place to go. She'd give anything to see him again.
"So, look here."
Lydia, Beth's immediate supervisor, says as she leans over her shoulder, pressing buttons on the computer keyboard. "Put your sister's name in here, and her birthdate, and if she ever comes in, it will flag it. You'll get a notification, immediately. If you're at your desk when it happens, you'll know the moment she comes in."
Beth types in the information as Lydia's standing there. Then her friend asks, "Maggie's your only surviving family?"
Beth nods. "Blood kin. I have lots more family, though. I know their birthdates, too. Can I flag all of them?"
"Yes, if you know their birthdates. No point getting your hopes up without two confirmations. The odds of the same name and the same birthday are, like, one in a million."
Lydia goes back to her cubicle, leaving Beth sitting there. She types in Carl and Rick's information, as well as Glenn's. She wants to put Daryl's name in, but when she realizes she doesn't know his birthday, she nearly loses it.
She remembers his angry face, the accusation about not shedding tears for Jimmy or Zach.
She won't shed tears for Daryl because he's not dead.
He's not.
Seeing the alert for Maggie's name (a flashing red pop-up on her screen) causes Beth to scream, scaring everyone in the office with her. She runs to the door that leads to the outer room of Registration, and though there are about twenty people milling about, her eyes find her sister instantly. Bedraggled, dirty, but still Maggie, with an incredulous expression of surprise as she spots Beth.
"Beth!"
Beth has the presence of mind to get rid of the dress shoes she's wearing before she takes off running. As she and Maggie joyously collide, she sees Rick and Carl, but the momentum of her body takes them both down to the floor. She feels Maggie start laughing, and she thinks she's laughing, too, only there are tears as well, and she's just hysterical, all the way around.
Someone pulls her to her feet, and she's eye to eye with Carl now. He's grown so much since the last time she saw him. They're all saying her name, but in the midst of all of it, what she hears is Rick's voice, raised above the cacophony of sound. "Come here!" he shouts.
And then, "Daryl!" even louder.
Beth's head snaps up, and she feels her neck pop, a shooting, tingling sensation racing down her spine. She's clustered in the middle with everyone surrounding her like a happy swarm of Walkers. But when she hears his name, she only has eyes for him.
She knew he wasn't dead.
She should have known he would find their family and bring them all back to her, somehow.
(Because he's Daryl Fucking Dixon.)
As happy as she is to see everyone, to be clasped in their arms, and feel their hands touching her hair, her arms, her back, she pushes free from all of them as her eyes lock on his face.
She can see everything that she clung to through her darkest days, right there in his expression. It hadn't been a fantasy that she made up to survive. It was real; he was real, and the light in his countenance reaches out to her, pulling her home with speed and precision.
She's across the floor and in his arms before she's even completed the thought. She hits him hard, feels him grunt under the impact of her chest against his. His arms wrap around her even harder, holding her there, in place.
He smells familiar, another thing that had haunted her in a real or not real way; the vague scent of leather from his old vest, and the open road, and whatever made him Daryl. In her ear, his voice is soft, rough. "You," he says. "It's you."
She clutches him desperately, not caring what anyone thinks. "It's me," she says back, and it's irrevocably the truth.
All the parts of her have finally returned; all the reasons she kept breathing, and pressed on, have come back to her.
Beth is, and has always been, the luckiest girl in the world.
...chapter two...