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Beth is trying to be more observant.
It’s something they’re all working on, she supposes. There are skills that used to be helpful, before, like calculus or clipping coupons or sweet talking the owner of the bakery into giving you an extra dozen cookies you pick up for the 8th grade bake sale after Maggie burns the ones in the oven. Beth had been honing those skills for several years.
But none of that matters now. What matters is spotting edible berries in the bushes by the roadside, and noticing migration patterns of birds, and judging the distance between you, the walker, and the path of least resistance for an escape. And all of those things require observation at the highest level, and though it’s only been a few weeks on the road since the farm burned down, she’s getting pretty good at it.
There’s only a small problem. Berries and birds and walkers — none of those things care if you’re watching them closely. They’re not people, so they don’t provide any mystery. Nothing to ponder over, try to figure out, stay up late into the night turning and twisting bits of information over and over to try and make some sort of sense from it. They’re just things, things she’s training herself to find out in the wild.
Getting more observant means Beth is realizing that Daryl provides mystery — a lot of it.
She first noticed it one cold night when they huddled together for warmth.
Rick sighed and wrapped an arm around Carl, rubbing his son’s shoulder to try and get the blood flow back. Maggie was wrapped up in Glenn’s arms, and Beth was close to her father, Lori on Rick’s other side and T-Dog with his back to the fire so that he could stand watch but still close to get the heat from the flames.
Daryl wasn’t beside anyone, but he didn’t seem bothered. Every now and then he’d swing his arms, or flex his fingers, or do a little twist. Beth watched him wordlessly, the movements seemingly at random but then at regular intervals the longer she took note of it. Daryl did it mindlessly almost, Beth thought, and wondered why. No one else did it. She couldn’t imagine why he would be.
They slept back to back for warmth. Daryl took over watch from T-Dog and Beth offered to take the shift after him. Usually Hershel or Maggie would tell her no, but it had been such an exhausting day, she could tell they wanted to sleep too. So she drifted off into something akin to sleep but not quite, still attuned to every single rustle in case it meant danger. Then, probably too soon, she sat up and went to approach Daryl.
He had his back to her, still looking out into the dark, but then he brought his knees to his chest in a short burst of energy — one two, one two — before she stepped on a twig and he looked back instantly.
“Sorry,” she said quietly, trying not to wake anyone else up.
“Your shift ain’t gotta start so soon,” he told her, eyes narrowed, without any preamble. Daryl never minced words.
“I’m not sleeping,” Beth informed him, sitting beside him on the log he’d chosen for a perch. “If you can, get some rest.”
“You sure?” Daryl eyed her skeptically and Beth couldn’t help but bristle slightly.
“I got it,” she assured him, a hard edge to her voice. No one ever thought she’d be capable, but she was. She could do this.
“Mmkay.” Daryl didn’t say anything else, but he didn’t leave either, instead sitting down beside her. Beth knew better than to push the matter — Daryl could be testy sometimes. He didn’t say a lot, so Beth granted him the same courtesy. That was, until, he swung his arms.
“Why do you do that?” Beth questioned him and Daryl looked sidelong at her, one eyebrow quirked like he was confused until realization sank in and he shrugged.
“Just something for the cold,” he muttered. “Helps keep your circulation up.”
“Oh.” Beth scooted away from him just an inch, so that she could try it out. A few arm swings later and some of the feeling returned to her fingers. Impressed, she did a few more before stilling and looking over at Daryl. “The other stuff you do, that to keep warm too?”
“Uh huh.” Daryl’s eyes were firmly focused to some far off point in the distance and Beth looked that way, but saw and heard nothing.
“How’d you know to do that?” Beth asked and Daryl didn’t look at her as he answered,
“Since I was a kid. Gotta keep moving or you’ll freeze to death,” he replied simply, like it was nothing. Beth frowned and looked out into the depth of the night, trying to imagine a young Daryl in the middle of the woods, in the cold and the dark, arms swinging and knees pumping, moving to stay warm.
Daryl stayed beside her for the entirety of her shift, and when Rick rose to take over, Daryl went to sleep on the other side of her.
That is Beth’s first clue. Not a great one, by all means.
Then comes the next time.
Food was slim. Food was always slim. Daryl was a great hunter, but only when they had enough time to actually hunt. And lately, it had been nothing but a day here or a night there, constantly on the run as walkers circled closer and closer and closer. Their meals, usually scarce, were now farer and fewer in between.
Beth was trying not to show that the lack of sustenance was getting to her, but it was hard not to be short and testy with her father or Maggie. The constant gnawing ache in her belly made it hard to think about anything else, let alone have patience for it. And she didn’t feel that bad, not when she could tell that it was the same for everyone else. They were all feeling it.
Except for Daryl.
But maybe that was just because Daryl’s usual mode of being was annoyed and short. Beth didn’t think so though; she hadn’t picked up any discernible difference in his temperament in the last several days since their decent meal and now. He just seemed… Unbothered by it.
“I’d go for some squirrel right about now,” Carol remarked, equal parts whimsical and serious.
“Work on getting some tomorrow,” Daryl remarked evenly, not offended in the slightest by the comment.
“Don’t think I’ve gone this long without eating since I tried that hunger strike after Daddy grounded me for smoking in the barn,” Maggie declared, obviously trying to lighten the mood and Beth smiled at the memory of it.
“You lasted what, three hours?” she teased her older sister and Maggie managed a smile.
“Yeah, I kicked up a real big fuss about everything, and then mom made apple pie with the green apples, just the way I liked it.”
“A reward for smoking,” Hershel added dryly and that earned a few snickers of amusement from the group.
“You still took my keys away for a month,” Maggie retorted, but then reached over and gave Hershel’s hand a squeeze.
“I got norovirus once, when Carl was little and first went to daycare,” Lori reveals, giving her son's hair a little tussle with one hand. “I didn’t eat for four days, because I couldn’t keep anything down. I thought that I was never going to stop throwing up. In the end, I think it was a month’s diet of saltine crackers before I felt up to anything else.”
A few snorts, a few sympathetic pats from Rick. Then Carol tells them about the time Sofia had colic and she couldn't eat or sleep for days straight, juggling a screaming infant without any sort of help. Glenn, chuckling, brought up the time he spent all his money on video games the day after payday, then had to scrounge and starve until his next check, declaring that a cup of noddles would be gold at the moment.
Then Daryl butted in with, “y’all ain’t never had to hunt to get food before? Hell, I been without dinner more’n a week before.”
Everyone got a kick out of it, except Beth. She frowned and stared at him as another piece clicked into place. He wasn’t bothered by this — of course he wasn’t. He’d been through worse. He’d been half starved long before this. Before the world turned, Beth had never been without three squares meals a day, with a homemade dessert in the fridge and snacks plentiful, so yeah, hunger was new to her.
It wasn’t new to Daryl. Maybe it never had been.
Beth thinks about this more than she should. Beth stays up late into the night, unable to sleep, and wonders about Daryl Dixon, who he was before this, and why he is the way he is now. She thinks she knows some of it, and she's even more aware of how much more there is that she has not a clue about.
Rick had a short temper. It might not be something any of them wanted to admit, but Beth could see it for what it was. Of course, if anyone had any right to have a short temper, it was him. The one they expected to lead them, and find them shelter, and get them fed, and have a plan for when the walkers got too close or the cars ran out of fuel or the bag of ammo began to feel a little light. Beth understood that it was pressure. But man, the man could yell.
“Goddamnit!” Rick shouted into the sky, furiously shaking his hand.
“I’m sorry dad!” Carl wailed, having been the one who slammed the door a second too early, leaving Rick’s fingers caught in the gap. Everyone else was wincing in sympathy, except for Daryl. At Rick’s first yelp, he’d taken a hasty three steps back and now he was standing between the still cursing Rick and Carl, hanging halfway out the door as he watched his father anxiously.
“It’s fine Carl, I’ll be fine,” Rick grimaced, squeezing his fingers.
“Sorry,” Carl repeated once again and Rick nodded, giving his hand another final shake.
“It was an accident,” he told his son, reaching out the with his undamaged hand. Daryl took a half step forward, but then stopped when all Rick did was pat Carl’s shoulder. “An accident.”
They all piled into the car, Beth scooting in beside Carl, twisting to watch through the rearview mirror as Daryl climbed onto his bike.
And that’s not the only time Rick’s temper seems to get the best of him. It’s hard to keep secrets when they live like this; crammed into tight spaces, huddled around fires, trying not to ever be out of the reach of Rick’s bullets or Daryl’s arrows because safety comes in numbers and in proximity. But that type of nearness, coupled with the roughness of scrounging for every morsel of survival, means that there’s no where else to be when Rick and Lori’s whispered fights escalate to something more.
“And I told you, we can’t!” Lori hissed, her voice not quite as low as she thought it was. Rick growled in frustration, pacing the floor of the creaky old house they’d been holed up in for the past couple days.
“Lori, there’s more at stake here!”
“And I know that, but I don’t think that we need to —“
They all had different ways of dealing with it. Maggie and Glen liked to pretend it wasn’t happening. Of course, it was easy for them to distract each other, and gross for Beth to have to watch that. Hershel always seemed to engage Carol in some sort of conversation, and T-Dog did his best to chime in. Carl evaporated, like there was something else to do.
But Daryl never went far.
At first, Beth thought it was nosiness. Or that Daryl was doing something macho, like backing Rick up. He wasn’t though. He never watched Lori, he never made any sort of movement towards them, and he never said or did anything when Rick and Lori were done fighting. He just stood and kept his gaze steady on Rick.
Beth positioned herself across from Daryl. There wasn’t much room in this house, but there were plenty of doors and that made it easy to hide behind one, her eyes slotted through the gap so that she could see Daryl across the way. Rick and Lori paced between them, the fight they were having the same one they’d been having for weeks now. Beth didn’t care what it was. She cared to know why Daryl cared.
Rick said something and threw his hands up. Lori took a step forward, her finger wagging in Rick’s face, and it was only when Rick turned and loomed over Lori that Daryl moved. Just a half step. Not much. If anything, it was him tensing. But then Rick turned around in a huff and walked away from Lori, shaking his head, and Daryl relaxed again. A half step back into the shadows, where he’d been the entire time.
Beth eased herself up and off the grimy floor. She’d seen enough.
The other thing about living so close is that none of them sleep apart. Not ever. Even if it’s not freezing cold, they still sleep in the same room, or on the same piece of ground, or with the cars circled close together. It’s a problem for Beth, because she’s always been a light sleeper, and some nights there’s more to wake her than others.
Usually it was her father’s snores that woke Beth up, if she even managed to fall asleep in the first place. She usually took up a spot near him, just so that when the thunder started rumbling in his chest, Beth could prod him and force silence for a few minutes longer.
Once, it’d been Glenn and Maggie’s giggles that had filled her ears and consciousness, and she’d had to feign a bathroom break just so that she wouldn’t be too grossed out by what came next.
Tonight, it was mumbling.
Beth lifted her head up a few inches off the backpack she used as a pillow on the better nights, looking around the room. Maggie was on watch, and therefore standing outside to keep an eye on things, but everyone else seemed deep at rest. Lori and Carl and Rick, Carol and T-Dog, Hershel and Glenn and — ah.
Daryl was in the corner, the poncho wrapped around him, and he was twitching and muttering in his sleep the way Beth sometimes did when she was having a nightmare. In the low light, Beth can’t quite make out a facial expression, but she can tell that it wasn’t a pleasant dream because of what Daryl was saying — or more accurately, moaning.
“No… No… Stop… Dad, stop… Don’t… Please, don’t… I… No… No…”
Beth didn’t know what to do. She was fairly certain that if she tried to comfort Daryl, she might get an arrow through the eye. But only the other hand, no one liked having a nightmare. She would want to be woken up if it was her. She didn’t know Daryl Dixon’s dreams, or his nightmares, but she couldn’t imagine they were pleasant.
She sat up fully and pulled her backpack around from behind her. She scraped it against the floor to make noise — not a lot, but enough that anyone who wasn’t deep in sleep or not finely attuned wouldn’t notice it. But someone dreaming, someone who woke up at the slightest hint of a problem? A little noise would snap them right out of it.
Daryl did jolt awake, sitting halfway up. Beth pretended to not notice him; instead, she pulled the raggedy sweater out of the backpack and wrapped it around herself like she was a little cold and needed something cozy. Then she plumped the much flatter backpack and arranged it down on the ground again.
It wasn’t nearly as comfortable, and she wasn’t sure she’d manage to fall asleep again, but Beth deemed it worth it when Daryl slowly sank back down and arranged himself. If he had another nightmare, Beth didn’t hear a peep from him until the sun rose up to start the day.
All that adds up to something. Beth has an inkling, deep within her psyche, but she doesn’t want to touch on it. She has a feeling it will be a little bit too painful. She knows, but she doesn’t want to know, because she has learned that if there’s leaves of three, leave it be, or that if there’s moss growing on the tree, you’re looking north. Good days are usually followed by bad ones, and if you go more than a day or so without water, your tongue starts to feel like it’s cracking right up the center and you gotta find drinkable water. She has gotten observant.
If you flinch at loud noises, and you can handle hunger without blinking… If you beg for it to stop in your dreams, and you worry about what might be done to a woman or a child in a man's anger… Beth has been watching. She’s adding up the total. And deep down, she knows.
“Have you ever noticed anything about Daryl?” she asks Maggie one day, as they’re down in the ditch trying to preserve a little bit of modesty as they go to the bathroom. Maggie’s eyebrows furrow as she slides her gaze Beth’s way for a moment, then goes back to looking into the woods for any sign of anything concerning.
“What about him?”
“Like… The way he acts,” Beth says, trying to explain it without having to say it outright.
“What, like being gross or something?” Maggie frowns and Beth has to be quick to shut her down, lest Maggie get the wrong idea.
“No, no! Not that. Just… You know, how he sometimes… Do you ever wonder why he’s so good at… Like what he did before this?” Beth stammers and stops and starts and Maggie gives a little shrug.
“Not really, no,” she states, like that’s all there is to it. And maybe for Maggie, that is it. She doesn’t see Daryl, doesn’t care to look beyond the man who gets them food and watches their backs and never makes a fuss. Maybe Maggie’s keeping an eye out for other things — other people.
But Beth has been looking. Watching.
Observing.
And she thinks that Daryl has been hurt before. Hurt badly, hurt deeply. She doesn’t want that to happen again.
Beth won’t let it.