Chapter Text
Prologue
“It look like it’s gonna let up anytime soon?” Rick asks, nudging Beth toward the edge of the tin roof of the outdoor kitchen.
Beth takes a step over and peeks up at the cloud-darkened afternoon sky. “Probably not.”
Rick shrugs and nods, raising his arm for her to tuck back in to his side.
“Gimme some of that coffee,” she mutters, ignoring Rick’s smirk when he passes the mug to her. When she hands the mug back she reaches up and threads her fingers through his to loosely clasp their hands together - it still feels a little strange doing that out in the open even though it’s been weeks now since they’d stopped pretending they weren’t together.
Two engines roar - the old red Jeep that Sasha, Glenn, and Maggie had taken out on their scouting run the previous day, followed by a black Dodge Charger, are pulling up to the gates.
“Isn’t that the same kind of car those brothers had?” Beth asks, squinting.
“What, tweedle-dumb and tweedle-crazy?” Daryl pipes up.
Carol elbows him without looking up from scrubbing at the grill with a metal brush. Daryl elbows her back.
“Yeah it is,” Rick answers before taking another sip of coffee.
The cars are both idling, inside the yard now where they could go park alongside the rest of the vehicles, but the Jeep creeps up closer to the inner gates, the Charger following behind.
“Think they have a lot to unload?” Carol wonders, squinting at the cars.
Rick shrugs and stays where he is, mug firmly in hand. Beth glances over at Daryl, who is inspecting an intermittent drip from the roof from every conceivable angle. She purses her lips and stays put too. Finally both cars stop and park right outside the third set of gates that close off the immediate entries to the cellblocks.
Glenn opens the driver’s side door of the Jeep and sticks his head out just far enough to yell, “Really?!” at the four of them shamelessly standing and watching from under their cover.
“Y’all didn’t bring no umbrellas?!” Daryl yells back.
Glenn lifts a finger through the narrowest possible opening of the door before shutting it again, still inside. The driver’s door of the Charger slams and a young guy in combat boots and a tan cotton jacket strolls pointedly through the downpour, giving them all a little salute.
“Hiya everybody. I’m Zach.”
_
“ You'll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in the fields of gold ”
Beth hums the next few lines and cranes her neck to see Judith’s eyes closed, a little dribble of drool at the corner of her mouth soaking into Beth’s shirt. She’s limp against Beth’s shoulder and her breathing is steady. Beth crouches slowly next to the blanket-lined filing cabinet drawer pulled out onto the floor and lays Judith down carefully. The baby murmurs and stretches before settling. Beth keeps humming to herself as she quietly rinses out Judith’s bottle in a bucket of gray soapy water and sets it to dry on a threadbare towel spread out on the desk set in the middle of the room. She wipes her hands on her jeans, pulls the .22 out of her back pocket and sets it on the desk before sinking onto the desk chair and pulling her legs up.
When she closes her eyes she can hear the kids a few rooms away, fighting and playing, Carl’s voice rising above theirs occasionally. It’s hot and still in the closed-up room, and she thinks about getting up to open a window but heat and exhaustion pin her back. Still there’s a constant restlessness that keeps her from succumbing to sleep even now while Judith is settled.
Life is going on outside the walls of this room, life and death and blood pouring out of eyes and noses and mouths, walkers snarling from inside cells that used to be homes. She could pretend none of it is happening, that things will just be the same when she eventually gets to leave this room.
Someone will be left , she repeats to herself, over and over in her head.
Someone will be left alive and help her keep the kids fed and safe. It’s been a day since Maggie came last to tell Beth what she already knew, that Dr. S was dead and Daddy had gone out to take his place.
Someone will be left. Someone.
A knock sounds at the door, startling her.
“Beth?” It’s Rick, his form murky through the thick glass panel in the heavy door. Beth struggles up quickly and crosses the room.
“Yeah, I’m here,” Beth answers.
“How’s Judy?”
“She’s okay,” Beth glances over her shoulder to see Judith still asleep in her little makeshift crib. “She’s finally sleepin’.”
“Good, good.” Rick pauses. “Listen . . . baby, I’ve gotta go out. We need food, supplies, and there’s just not enough-”
“Okay,” she says quickly. She knows. “You’re takin’ someone with you?”
She ticks through who could be left, healthy and able.
“Yeah,” Rick says, voice muffled. “Carol,” he adds.
“Okay,” Beth repeats.
“Beth-”
“Don’t say goodbye,” she cuts him off quickly. “Say somethin’ else. Don’t say goodbye.”
She hears the soft exhalation, a pained almost-laugh, and waits, pulse pounding painfully in her throat. She trails a fingertip along the glass.
"This was our room, wasn't it? You know the one, that night?"
"Yeah, it is. I remember."
She remembers. After Jackson had shot up the cellblock from the guard tower while Maggie fought him off and Beth hid in a cell with Judith and Tyreese. She had been certain, dead certain, that it was the Governor back to take them out, come for Michonne to kill her for putting down his already dead daughter.
But after. After Rick had sprinted, shouting for her and Judith, into the cellblock, after the adrenaline had run out, after the night had settled in, they'd come here, to this room. She'd been certain then too, certain she could finally say she loved him back, certain that all the hope she’d let flow back inside her wasn't just for Judith, it was for Rick too. This man who loved her so much that there was a room for Beth inside him alongside Judith, Carl, Lori.
Rick, who had now come to say he was leaving.
“Anything good to read in there?” Rick adds.
“Not really.”
“We never finished To Kill A Mockingbird.”
“Yeah.”
Rick presses a hand to the glass briefly, and then he’s gone.
_
Her daddy’s knees hit the ground.
Rick reaches back blindly. Beth grasps his hand.
It’s not enough.
_
“Daryl?”
“Mm?”
Beth pauses, letting the overwhelming high pitched chorus of buzzing cicadas, chirping crickets, and the odd bird call, drown out her thoughts. It’s a long pause, long enough that Beth’s sleep-addled mind loses the thought. She starts to drift again, wraps her arms tighter around herself against the cooling night air - she’ll need a coat soon and so will Daryl, long sleeved shirts at the very least. She hadn’t meant to track the days at first but it’s been ten since they left the prison- since they lost everything and had to run.
But not quite everything. That day at the moonshiner’s shack in the woods was six days ago. That was something - a change, a shift, a new thread stretched between the two of them. Things had gone easier since then. As much easier as it could probably get considering they were two people outrunning the dead while living off nothing.
Beth glances up at Daryl from where she’s laying on her side on the ground for her shift sleeping while he sits leaned against a tree on watch. They watch each other, the barely-there light of the fire casting soft orange light across both their faces and tiny glints in their eyes. Beth flexes her fingers in the dirt beside her cheek.
Daryl nudges her knee with the toe of his boot. “‘Sup?”
Beth shakes her head. “I guess I forgot.”
Daryl nods and goes back to staring out into the black of the woods around them, probably tracking each bird call in his mind as they sound. “Get some sleep, ‘s your turn in an hour.”
“Okay,” Beth murmurs. She doesn’t close her eyes right away, but she doesn’t see much either, just lets her vision blur out as firelight dances on all the nothing around them.
_
Beth rolls over and looks out the window at the bright shaft of moonlight coming in through the window.
She doesn’t draw the blinds at night, lets the light from the stars and the moon and the sun all reach her in turn through the dingy windows. The sheets are thin and papery and so are the scrubs she's wearing and their rustling is loud in the quiet room. It’s different from the chorusing insects and the wind in the trees when she and Daryl had still been roughing it in the woods before the funeral home. Different from the echoing walls of the prison for those six months, from the metallic rattle of the storage units they’d tried to make work before that. Different from the creaky antique bed she’d slept in at home on the farm.
And now here, the quiet hospital with its dark halls, contraband music, and all Dawn’s bullshit.
Dawn, who thinks Beth is weak and stupid and frightened. Dawn, who only sees the sheltered and shattered girl Beth had been at the farm. Dawn doesn’t see the hungry quick-footed animal Beth became after her home burned and fell to the herd, or the caregiver ready to run and kill and die for the people she loved and who loved her.
Being apart from them, from truly all of them now, Beth feels skinless. The sheets and the scrubs and the cast on her wrist seem to chafe all the time, to scrub down to her bones. Down to the hardest of her.
You gotta stay who you are, not who you were , she’d said to Daryl.
She’d meant it for them both, meant they both had to stop dragging the ugliest and saddest of their pasts around with them and let it all go into the air like so many floating sparks and ashes. To run out of the fire pure and fast and new.
And they had.
Running together, walking together.
And then it was over.
_
Chapter 1
“If that’s what it takes,” Sasha says grimly, looking down at the diagram Rick has scratched into the dusty warehouse floor.
“It’s not,” Tyreese presses. “If we get a couple of her cops, alive, out here. We do an even trade, theirs for ours. Everybody goes home.”
“Yeah,” Rick says with a grimace as he stands. “It’d be great if everybody just got to live.” He looks up and takes a step toward Tyreese, then another. “But I need you to think about that last time we saw a hostage exchange, and how that went down.”
Tyreese’s gaze drops to the floor, but Rick stays in his space, only turning to look Sasha, then Daryl, as he continues.
“We show up with two of their cops to trade, shit goes south like we know it will, what happens then? Beth and Carol get put on their knees with guns to their heads just like Hershel and Michonne. How’s that gonna end this time? How are any of us gonna look Beth in the eye and say we thought that was the right play? We know how this goes, how this has to go. We are getting Carol and Beth out of there alive, and we are all goin’ home. Anybody doesn’t like it,” he adds, addressing the small group of them as a whole, “you can tell ‘em you’re sorry. After it’s done.”
_
The sun has fully set that evening when Dawn drops a pile of sheets on the bed in Beth’s room, dimly lit by one small lamp. Dawn still has O’Donnell’s fingerprint bruises on her throat and when she drops the sheets Beth can see her hands are shaking.
“These are clean, get them folded before they wrinkle.” Dawn pauses and catches Beth’s eye. “They go in exam two when you’re done.”
She turns and leaves, doesn’t close the door behind her. Beth watches the empty doorway for a moment before she sets to work on the sheets, folding them quickly so she can have her excuse to go check on Carol. The fabric shushes through the air in the surrounding silence; the hospital feels eerily quieter than usual, somehow more oppressive. There’s no music coming from Jeffries’ office tonight, no voices of the officers chatting or playing card games like they sometimes do.
Beth pauses, something unnameable making her stop and look around. In the hush there’s a whisper of a sound and Beth looks up expecting to see one of the other wards or maybe Dawn walking back in but-
It’s Rick.
Her hands freeze clutching the sheet and she can’t make a sound, couldn’t even if he hadn’t held a finger to his lips immediately to signal her to stay silent. All she can do is blink and stand rooted to her spot on the floor.
He’s ragged and wild-haired, his clothes dirty, eyes blazing. He can’t be real, can’t be here, alive, reaching toward her and holding a pistol with a silencer on the barrel out to her grip-first, beckoning her over.
“C’mere, it’s okay,” he beckons her, that barely voiced whisper they’d all gotten used to communicating in those months out in the wild after the farm, more lipreading than hearing.
She crumples the sheet in a pile on the bed and steps around carefully, already on tip toes to keep the sneakers they’d given her from squeaking. When she’s within arm’s reach Rick grasps the back of her neck and presses their foreheads together. Beth breathes in shakily, his scent standing out from the antiseptic and bleach smell of the hospital- dirty rainwater dried into his shirt, old blood and sweat and him , familiar. She pushes into him and grips at his wrist just to feel something more of him, something to hold onto to convince herself he’s real. There’s a gasp stuck in her throat with every breath and a war between happiness and panic in her chest - warmth and relief and abject terror that he got all the way here and found her and that it could end up being the reason he dies.
Rick releases her only to push the pistol into her good hand and turn so she can follow him like a shadow, tuned in to his every breath.
“Who else?” she asks in the same near-silent voice once they’re flattened against the walls on either side of the open door, each leaning out barely far enough to keep an eye on either end of the hallway.
“Daryl, Sasha, Ty, Noah.” He pauses, nodding to her in question, “Carol?”
“Still unconscious. The cops?”
“Got the one at the doors on our way in, they’re takin’ care of the rest-” Rick cuts off and signals and Beth flattens back more into the wall, pistol ready.
Several silent seconds later Dawn walks into the room past Beth and Rick, not seeing them where they’re hidden in the shadows. She’s about to turn around, clearly suspicious of the untidy pile of sheets on the bed, looking for Beth-
Beth fires one muffled shot to the back of Dawn’s head.
Rick catches the body before it can hit the floor, dragging it over to keep out of view of the hallway. He’s got Dawn’s pistol and her billy club stuck in the back of his belt and her keys and handcuffs in his pockets before Beth can fully take in what she’s done. She drifts away from the wall, pistol hanging loose in her hand at her side, her eyes locked on the growing pool of blood around Dawn’s head, but Rick steps over the body to push Beth back into place against the wall next to the door.
“Stay with me.”
He presses a hand gently to her middle, guiding her so he’s between her and the door.
“Eyes up, come on sweetheart,” he ducks to put himself in her eyeline. His eyes are so fiercely blue, somehow sharper than she remembers them, boundless. “We’re getting Carol, and we’re getting out. Don’t think about anything else but that. We’re goin’ back to Judith-”
“She’s alive?” Beth’s chest seizes and hot tears sting the backs of her eyes. She doesn’t know if they’re for Dawn or herself, for Rick or Judith. Rick smiles and clutches Beth’s shoulder.
“She’s alive. Maggie, Glenn, Carl, Michonne, they’re all waiting for us.”
Beth swallows, blinks back her tears, and nods. Her eyes fall to Dawn’s shined black boots and Beth nods Rick’s attention that way.
“That’s Dawn. Sheppard, Lambson, and Licari went out a while ago, they heard shots, that was you?” Rick nods and she continues, “O’Donnell and Gorman are already dead. Before you got here.”
Rick holds Beth’s gaze for a moment until she nods back just slightly. Rick purses his lips and looks back to the hallway, Beth over his shoulder, and it’s silent for a beat, then there’s a muffled brief struggle and a thump and Daryl peers around a corner a moment later. Beth psst’s at him and he gives her a nod through the dark of the hallway with a glint in his eye bright like the fire as it swallowed up that shack in the woods and she can’t , she can’t believe any of it, they’re here and she’s going home.
She can still feel the kickback of the pistol reverberating through her arm, the sound of Dawn’s body slumping to the floor.
Daryl motions to the double doors at the end of the hallway and mouths, “Ty.” Rick nods and looks back to Beth,
“Carol?”
“Exam two, that way.”
Rick tips his head for her to follow, then nods to Daryl and they creep down the hallway, Beth and Daryl slipping into Carol’s room and Rick keeping watch at the door.
Carol blinks awake when Beth touches her uninjured shoulder and Beth shushes her, moving quickly to get her IV out and bandaged and her other arm into a sling before she and Daryl get her up from the bed. Beth supports Carol’s injured side while Daryl slings his crossbow on his back and puts a pistol in her good hand, then wraps an arm around her as well and they follow Rick out the door.
Sasha and Noah are in the hallway waiting, the double doors behind them still just barely swinging and Sasha holds up two fingers and signals all clear. Two guards left then, and Tyreese still to meet up with. They all share a look and start toward the other end of the hallway, where through the other set of double doors is the corridor that leads to the stairwell and down, out into the parking lot and beyond that-
Something bumps at the other side of the doors and they shuffle back, slowing and raising their weapons. Rick takes a few steps forward and Beth adjusts her arm around Carol, wincing when she jostles her cast.
Something bumps at the doors again and then pushes through-
Tyreese.
Dead.
Beth staggers under Carol’s full weight suddenly as Daryl lets her go to grab Sasha, holding her back and covering her mouth to muffle her scream. Beth squeezes her eyes shut, tries to will away the image of Tyreese gray-eyed and snarling, shambling toward them down the hallway until Rick fires and he drops.
The floor vibrates beneath their feet with the impact.
Everything is silent except the five of them, their ragged breathing and barely voiced cries and sniffles as they start moving again, step by agonizing step past Tyreese’s body toward the door. Rick leans down and swipes the beanie from his head, passing it back to Sasha but she just stares at it, her face crumpling. Noah takes it instead, shoves it in his pocket and motions them forward.
No one says a word as they make their way down flight after flight of stairs to the ground floor. When she pushes out the doors into the cool night the first thing Beth hears is Maggie, calling her name softly. They run at each other through the dark, shock and tears overtaking both their voices, arms around each other tight as they stumble together.
A blow of renewed sorrow hits Beth suddenly and she remembers all over again that Daddy’s dead. She clings tighter and sags in Maggie’s arms under the weight of all of it, Daddy and the prison, the blood pouring out of Dawn’s head up all those flights of stairs, Tyreese’s body dropping in that hallway.
Glenn’s familiar strong grip closes around Beth's shoulder and she reaches up to his wrist too, acknowledging. Then the yells start, hands pulling at her, dragging her out of Maggie’s arms to get them both moving. Walkers approaching. Too many to count by the sounds of the snarling, maybe even too many to count if it were daylight.
Beth swipes the tears out of her eyes and tightens her grip on the pistol.
There’s a fire engine parked by the gates, and more people Beth doesn’t recognize by their silhouettes already forming up to keep a clear perimeter around it, but the walkers are pouring in everywhere and in the distance a car’s headlights are approaching, the patrol officers yelling to each other as they get out and attempt to get through the herd from the other side.
Maggie and Glenn lead the way, Carol fires when she can lift her arm high enough to aim, Daryl and Sasha on either side of her for cover, Beth and Noah close in the gaps at their backs, and Rick brings up the rear like a wrecking ball, machete swinging through the air, splattering blood out onto the pavement as they travel in a tight morphing circle. The cops’ gunfire and shouts grow nearer and they’ll see them soon and know for sure the gunshots aren’t coming from their people, and maybe the herd won’t be thick enough to protect them from the officers if they decide to follow Dawn’s orders and come after Noah and Beth, or maybe it will be too thick for their group to get through and get out.
“Don’t fire on them, Lambson’s-” Noah cuts off with a yell. There’s a walker latched onto his shoulder, and Beth turns out of formation to fire through its forehead at point blank range, spattering Noah's face and hers with cool black blood.
“He’s a good one,” Noah gasps.
For a split second Beth and Noah lock eyes, close enough to see through the darkness, and she’s so furious at the give-up already in his gaze, the waste of it all.
She grabs him roughly and shoves him into the middle of the group with Carol. They’re yards away from the gates and the fire engine, half a dozen walkers in their way. Shots start ringing out in rapid succession into the herd. Noah’s emptying his magazine, Beth realizes, probably meaning to stay behind as bait, but while Rick brings the machete down through one walker’s forehead Beth runs out and kicks another in the hip to knock it out of her path, fires up through a second one’s chin, slams her cast through the jaw of a third with a scream, and as she’s turning back for the first one she’d kicked she sees from the corner of her eye Daryl shoving Noah up into the back of the engine after Carol.
Sasha sprints around the front toward the passenger side while Maggie jumps into the driver’s side, and Glenn uses the door as a shield as he continues to fire into the swarm of walkers. Rick yanks on Beth’s arm, pulling her back, and she gets off one more shot to take out the last walker approaching too close for comfort. He fairly tosses her up the ladder to scramble up into the back, Daryl there reaching down to help haul her up and Rick after her.
The rest have loaded in and they take off, engine roaring, walkers bouncing off the sides as they speed out through the thrown-open chain link fences.
A lone shot rings out faintly from the parking lot like a gasped last breath.
_
Noah doesn’t last long at the church after bleeding steadily all the way back despite Daryl’s grip on a balled up shirt over his wound.
“The other wards, they’ll make it,” he mumbles, barely-lucid but holding Beth's gaze suddenly. “Don’t ever go back there, not for me, not for anybody. Don’t go back home, just keep going, go home, they’re waiting. Stay,” he trails off, teeth chattering with chills from his fever.
Beth holds his hand as he goes. His mouth is still and slack when she steadies his head to push the knife in through his ear. When she walks out of the office she drops the knife limply to the floor. She’s empty of everything, no more tears left to well up.
It’s silent all around until Judith whimpers.
Beth’s heart lurches in her chest, out of time for a few beats and then she cries, a dry sob, and stumbles forward toward Carl, holding onto one of his arms as he helps her sit on a pew and sets Judith on her lap. Judith feels different already, barely heavier and more still in Beth’s arms than she remembers - she always used to flap her feet when she was handed from one pair of arms to another like a greeting, excited for whoever she saw.
Beth closes her eyes, breathes in against the top of Judith’s head and in an instant she’s back at the prison, outside surrounded by sunshine and grass and home. Everything else melts away; the last month, the day they parted, even the days before when they’d been locked in the admin building listening to the kids bickering and playing in the next room and later the gunshots and screaming from outside.
Rick sits down heavily next to them, his arm around Beth's shoulders, other hand cradling the back of Judith’s head briefly before dropping to his lap.
Beth had never fully pictured a reunion, wouldn’t let herself even as she stubbornly held on to hope that there would be one.
She never would have pictured it like this.
_