Chapter Text
Carry on,
You will always remember
Carry on,
Nothing equals the splendor
Now your life's no longer empty
Surely heaven waits for you
- Kansas, 'Carry On Wayward Son'
~
The night was warm, almost oppressively so, and Daryl Dixon was running like hell from a raging fire.
With each step his lungs filled painfully with woodsmoke and ash from the burning shack. His head swam, and every so often he shook beads of perspiration from his brow. It had been a long time since he'd let himself have a drink. A damn drink, as she'd called it.
Daryl could still hardly believe it. Any of it. It all seemed too surreal to be real. Hazily, he supposed to himself that's what 'surreal' meant.
He'd heard tell by folk who still cared about such things before the turn, that lightning never struck the same spot twice. Well, Daryl Dixon had been struck more times than he could count today alone, and by a lightning-storm in the shape of a girl.
Not for the first time in that long, strange day, they were running for their lives. Only, now it felt like they were actually running toward something, not just....away.
He had now slung his bow over his shoulder along with the pack, and as he ran it clanked heavily against his back. A literal cross he had born for years in the protection of others weaker than himself, and one that he now bore for her and her alone.
As Daryl shifted the odd vine or branch out of his path, as the twigs of the forest floor crunched beneath his heavy hoots, he wanted to laugh with the feeling of leaving that place behind, of destroying the ugliness and the want and the hurt and the pain and the grief.
Of forgetting, of letting go.
He wanted to reach out for the slip of a girl who now shadowed his steps. He wanted to take her in his arms, sweep her up into a bear-hug, a redneck thank you for a gift beyond repaying.
But instead, yellow-bellied, lily-liver'd coward that he was, he just stopped suddenly and let her run into him.
Before today, before tonight, he had tried, tried so damn hard to fight it. But now, he found he just couldn't help himself. Every so often he'd halt, and turn, and wait for her to catch up. Wait for her to be by his side once more. For the forest was dark, and the moonlight only so bright. The moonshine however…that searing substance still burned hotter than any fire inside him.
Standing there, looming over her, Daryl wondered fleetingly if it was the same for her. His mind a-swirl with the import of what had just passed between them back there on the porch of that now-burning shack, he thought back to it, back to the moment when he'd realized that little Beth Greene had entered his world, and had changed it, forever.
~
Sitting there on that moonlit porch, at first he'd struggled to remember how he'd ended up there in the first place.
One moment, it had been daylight and he was outside, the next it was night and the moon was beaming down on him in that dark space. (Or was that her face he saw there, shining?) It could have been a minute, it could have been a hundred years for all he knew. He thought that maybe when they'd crawled under that clock they done gone and traveled through time itself. He thought maybe time was movin' ass-backwards, 'cause hadn't it been night already?
(Inside the trunk of the car, where heat-lightning had struck once, twice, maybe more. Inside that hell-mouth out there on the road, and later, inside the cavernous halls of that infernal place of the dead.)
He couldn't remember because he was trying not to gape at her open-mouthed like some lovestruck pup. Trying to keep his guard up long enough not to go and do something stupid. Trying to distract himself with his hands, his knife, only to find that nothing could have kept his eyes from her.
Not when she looked right back.
He'd become practiced at staring at her these past weeks on the run, though every time he caught himself he told himself he'd just been trying to frighten her, trying to scare the last shred of innocence and hope out of her.
Now it was she who scared the living daylights out of him.
Or rather, the look in her eyes, the words that spilled out of her pretty mouth.
“I’ll be gone someday.”
He could only gaze back at her, could only plead with her to stop.
“I ain’t afraid of nothin’,” he’d told her, out there. A lie, one of the very few he’d uttered. Now, more than ever, he feared this one, final loss that, throughout all these last weeks in the woods with her, he’d been so certain would come.
But she was not blind.
“You were like me.” She’d seen right through it, just as she’d seen right through him, to his very bones, to the marrow, to the caged, messy darkness within.
There was nothing left to hide, and no one to hide it from, once she’d seen, and so it had fled from him in great gasping sobs.
And when her arms had come circling around him, her head resting against his back, her hands around his middle, small points of fire burning him even through his vest, he could no longer pretend. He’d rested the back of his own weary head against hers, and it was just as he’d remembered from that night in the prison—a brief moment of heaven, the tickling wisps of that bright-gold hair against the base of his neck, as days, weeks, months—years, even—of soul-deep sorrow had flooded out of him. She’d held on, she’d held on and ridden its waves, and did not drown. Might be she’d kept him from drowning, kept his head above water, when the dark waves reached out to pull him under.
Even that, she seemed to understand. Like she could see right to the bottom of his now-empty glass.
“I wish I could feel like this all the time. And that’s bad.” The simplicity, the truth of her statement hit him like an all-too familiar punch to the gut. How could she know? How could she know what had haunted him his whole life, first in the shape of his father, then his brother…and, finally, himself?
I'm a dick when I'm drunk, he thought desperately. Or maybe he said it out loud.
His head had filled up with crazy thoughts, then. Maybe when she'd sipped that moonshine, she'd drunk him up right along with it. Maybe, instead of going blind, she could see through everything, right through him, to the ghosts lurking in the corners.
Maybe she could see through time.
(He thought he wasn't so lit as to believe that. Not really.)
Until she spoke again.
“You’re gonna miss me so bad when I’m gone, Daryl Dixon.”
In that moment, he felt those words, far sharper than the knife he held in his hands. Felt them cut deep, right through flesh, muscle, and breast-bone. If she were gone, she would take the heart right out of him, would wrench it, torn and bleeding, from his chest. Oh, he’d be the last man standing, he would. But what kind of man stands without a beating heart? Nobody. Nothing. Just another walker; more than dead, but less than alive.
He would not see her gone. He would rain yet more hell upon this hell-on-earth. He would burn the world to ashes, first.
So it was that when she uttered the very words, he knew.
“We should burn it down,” she said, her smile mischievous, her face emanating such light he thought he was going blind. Bad moonshine, her father had warned her.
Hershel, you old sommabitch. Daryl could have laughed out loud, he could have cried. Might’ve warned a man about your daughter instead.
How little she'd known of the world, he’d thought. How little she’d seen before it all went to shit. Confident in his despair, he had told her there was nothing left worth seeing out there anymore anyway. But she, shining there beneath the moon, had rendered the words meaningless. She'd always been worth seeing.
He should have known; he'd always seen her.
Or had he? Daryl Dixon considered himself to be an observant man (and that was putting it modestly), but today he sensed that he'd nearly missed something mighty important. Something right in front of his eyes. He thought of how he'd tried to ignore her, tried to ignore how she made him feel all these weeks—all jumbled and aching and protective inside—and how he failed, utterly.
He recalled the defiant, challenging look she tossed back at him, like the small, piercing darts he'd thrown with a vengeance, when he'd shouted at her and handled her so roughly. Handled her like she was nothing but a bottle of Peach Schnapps, fit only to be smashed upon the ground. Anyone else might've turned tail and run. Anyone else, except Beth Greene.
There was a time that a glass in his hand was for shattering.
But she was not.
(Not just another dead girl.)
No, sitting there in that bright-yellow shirt (stained now, he remembered, his fault, his fault), she was the ray that shines through and starts the fire. Light can be refracted, absorbed, it can travel through eternity, and still it remains light. "You gotta stay who you are," her words echoed, through time.
Oh, she scared him alright.
He thought how, after his shuddering sobs had finally ceased, after the tidal wave of sorrow had finally ebbed, she had still not let go, but had calmly, kindly—and yet, without any judgment or pity—led him back to the cabin, her fingers clasped upon his arm. He had not shied from that continuation of her touch, but had let her guide him, meek as a child, and she, deceptively strong even as her small hand prodded up onto the porch.
He remembered now. How he got there in the first place.
He glanced at the young woman before him, living, breathing, smiling. Smiling at him. As though he was not, after all, nobody. As though he might, just might, be somebody.
Used to be a glass in his hand was for drowning in. Daryl briefly examined the empty insides of his jar before stealing another glimpse at the girl shining across from him. In that moment, realization washed over him: she might’ve stopped him from going under earlier that day, but tonight he was close to drowning again—drowning in her.
And then, as though he could no longer remain there in her presence without his heart exploding, shattering into a hundred million pieces, Daryl stood up. He pried his knife out from where he’d thrust it into the wooden planks of the porch floor, and smiled back at her. (Just slightly, he was out of practice, after all.) To Beth’s upturned, expectant face, still glowing beneath the shining moon, he spoke the words to her, his agreement, his admission that he would follow her to the ends of their already-ended earth:
“We’re gonna need more booze.”
Now, glass was for starting fires. For burning down dark, ugly pasts, and all the shadowy spaces in-between.
~
Out there in the forest, they were moving together again. Shadow and flame now both behind them. Finally, they'd made it far enough away from the fire and the incoming walkers that they could safely pause, just for a moment. Take a much-needed breath.
For a heart-stopping second or two back there he'd lost sight of her again amidst the underbrush. But then…there she was, shifting a hanging vine from her beautiful face. Still bright, still shining. Still blinding to a man's eyes that had failed to see beyond ugliness, beyond pain, for so long.
And then she was standing before him, once more.
"Come on," he rasped down to her. His rough croak sounded far harsher than he'd intended.
But she was still smiling up at him, as though harsh or no, any word at all was welcome from his lips. He felt a surge of anger and guilt at himself for the weeks that had just gone by, but it was no use trying to change the past. No, she'd done gone and set the past free. Sent it up in smoke and ashes. Remade it, remade him.
And so it was Daryl found himself smiling again. Mustering up his courage, he found his inner-iron—reforged now in her burning heat to some kind of steel. And so he let himself, just for a moment, rest a hand upon the slightness of her back, the sharp blade of her shoulder.
As they moved through the darkness of the night-forest, two shadows beneath a pale, silver moon, the re-made man remained all-too aware of the little lightning-girl striding swiftly beside him. Despite the moonshine surely going to her head, she pressed on. As though it weren't nothing at all. As though this was where she'd always been and always intended to be.
By the time the dark night had lightened into dawn, Daryl Dixon was no longer sure whether Beth Greene sprinted at his side, or if he ran at hers.
~