AN: This is my first Walking Dead piece. Also, I have been out of the fanfiction game for at least five years so please be patient with me. Ok, so a few quick notes about this story's universe: Daryl and Carol never saw that car that night and Beth has been at Grady the entire time since. I have taken liberties with Beth's Grady experience, making it somewhat of a rougher experience than we got on the show. Each chapter of this story will reflect on Beth and Daryl's reunion from a different character's perspective. The timeline of the show always confuses me so for my purposes, about 9 months have passed between the night at the funeral home and present day. Also, please note the M rating is for language and mention/description of non-consensual sexual activity. Eventual Bethyl!

Daryl

"Bone deep, that's where the ache lies."

The sun had peaked over the horizon sometime just in the last hour, Daryl Dixon stood in the shadow cast by the steel wall that stretched around the borders of Alexandria, Virginia. Somewhere, on the other side of the barrier, birds were chirping; the quiet little chirrups that could only be coming from a nest of freshly hatched eggs. The wall protected their community from the undead who would eat their flesh and from the very much alive who would take everything else they had to give; it was less successful against the later. He was on the safer side of the barrier, staring at the skeletal remains of three burned out cars, some of the last of the wreckage from the final blowout with the Saviors the month prior. He chewed a thumbnail, eyed the stain of dry, clumped brain matter that spattered the driver's side head rest of one vehicle. He couldn't remember who's it was, wasn't sure if it was an ally or a savior or one of their own. The deaths had all meshed into one long movie that played in his head on a loop.

With a flap of wings a large robin, presumably the mother of the little cluster making the fuss over the fence, landed on the hood of one of the cars. Daryl watched her watch him. Just last winter he would have resorted to shooting an arrow thru the little things heart and eating her like a feral dog, just to make it through the day.

"Sorry," he grumbled, "ain't got nothin' for ya. You picked a hell of a time to go reproducin'."

Nature was, after all, still running its course. The birds and the deer and the bugs and everything else didn't know the world had gone to shit. Spring was settling in and despite the corpses dragging their way around it, the Earth was doing what it always did. The bird blinked at him curiously before disappearing just as quickly as she'd landed, back over the wall.

"Interesting choice of conversation partner, considering you won't give the rest of us more than a grunt."

Usually Daryl was good about knowing when people were around, especially when they were approaching him. He hadn't even heard Aaron's footfalls. Admittedly he was off his mark, had been starting sometime between watching his best friend get his head beaten in with a baseball bat and the two weeks he'd spent having his sanity pushed to the limits by Negan.

He glanced at the other man, taking note of his perfectly pressed shirt and khakis and offered him little more than a nod. What was left of Alexandria's residents were mostly still sleeping, but he wasn't surprised to see Aaron up and at em' and clear eyed. With his neatly curled hair and clean shaved face and immaculate clothes Aaron somehow always looked like he was headed out to an office job for the day. Daryl scowled when he realized he was being regarded with an odd expression.

"Wha?"

Aaron smiled, his eyes twinkling with amusement.

"The haircut."

Daryl had almost forgotten. Forgotten that he'd stood in the powder room of Rick's house last night with a pair of silver sewing sheers and then an electric razor, working in the mirror until he resembled the person he'd last been in the first weeks following the end of the world.

"Tired of it gettin' in my face," he shrugged. Daryl let the rest die on his tongue. Like how ever since he'd spent an endless cycle of nights and days in a windowless cell, living with his own piss and shit and forbidden to bathe or change his clothes that he couldn't stand the feel of his own body or the dirt that always seemed to be accumulating on it. That the feeling of his hair sticking to his forehead every time he sweat had begun to make his skin crawl. That he'd taken an hour-long shower when they'd finally drug their selves home after the final battle, washed Negan's blood from under his fingernails and out of his hair but he could still see it there when he looked in the mirror.

"Suits you," Aaron assured but from the way his lips were itching to turn upwards Daryl had a feeling he may have done more of a butcher job than he'd thought. He simply squinted in Aaron's direction before turning back to the automobiles before him. He crouched down to open the steel toolbox sitting at his feet and retrieved a heavy wrench. He liked Aaron enough. He wasn't family, not a brother like Rick or Glenn, but he considered him to be tough and reliable and generally his company didn't make Daryl want to slither away into the woods. Sometimes though, the other man just didn't know when to leave well enough alone.

"So anyway, I spoke to Rick last night."

And he still hadn't left.

"We agreed it was time to start scouting again. We're not going to be able to sustain or protect this place properly without a higher population, about time we started trying to fill these houses again."

Most of Alexandria's original residents were dead, give or take a handful including Aaron and Eric. "I wouldn't let us in," Glenn had quipped once, when Aaron had found them starving and hopeless back in Georgia and they'd still been suspicious. There was a long grocery list of ways Alexandria had done good for them, but he knew they hadn't done much good for Alexandria. He popped the hood of the car closest to him and began fiddling around inside.

"Thoughts?" Aaron pressed, "I'm leaving tomorrow, probably be gone for at least a week. I thought you might want to come with me, try to get back to normal."

Daryl grunted, dropped his wrench back into the toolbox with a thud that made Aaron jump and retrieved a flathead screwdriver in its place.

"Normal checked out a while ago and ain't coming back," he grumbled, "I'm good, rather stick around here. Wanna scrap these cars fore' we move em out of here, stock up on any reusable parts."

Aaron's expression told him that he knew it was just as much of a bullshit job as Daryl did.

"Look Daryl, I know things haven't been easy for you recently. I just… when I met you, you believed in good people, like I do, believed they were still out there. We can't let what happened, can't let Negan, take that from us."

Daryl's hands moved expertly inside the heart of the vehicle like a surgeon. He gave Aaron a steely side glance.

"I didn't let him take shit from me." A voice inside Daryl's head scoffed. Negan may not have taken his life, or his dignity or his freedom. But he'd taken other things, like sleep and the ability to feel at ease in the company of others; although he'd never had much of that even before the dead started waking up and trying to eat everyone.

"Fair enough," Aaron sighed heavily, pinched the bridge of his nose, "Look, we can't just hunker down here and say forget everyone else out there, that's all I'm saying. There are good people out there, I have to believe that or none of this means anything."

The birds outside the wall were still chirping, louder now and Daryl wondered if their mother had managed to find anything to feed them yet. He remembered the long winter after the farm, when Judith was growing inside Lori and they lived a daily mission of finding nourishment for the unborn child that Daryl now loved like his own blood. Aaron's words danced through his brain, synchronizing with a memory he kept tucked safely where he could visit it nightly. He didn't realize he'd checked out, was staring blankly in Aaron's direction.

"What?" Aaron ran a hand across his face as if there was something there he couldn't see, "what did I say?"

Daryl shook his head, ducked his chin and tucked himself back under the hood of the car.

"Ain't nothin', just reminded me of someone."

"Your brother?" his slightly less than welcome companion questioned, probably because it was the only person from before he could remember Daryl ever mentioning, even briefly during the limited conversations he'd forced out of the other man while they were out on their excursions.

The noise that came out of Daryl's mouth was half amused. Merle probably could've authored a book just full of things that would offend Aaron.

"Trust me, you wouldn'ta been invitin' Merle Dixon over for spaghetti dinner with you n' Eric." He got back to work, twisting washers and screws lose and depositing them into his pockets. When he realized that Aaron wasn't leaving, was still staring at him expectantly, Daryl grunted. He came out from under the hood, leaned both hands against the frame and spoke with his eyes on his boots.

"Used to be a girl…Beth… she was always going' off something about good people too. Bout' havin' to believe they were out there."

"Beth…Maggie's sister," the other man clarified, remembering hearing her name spoken in mournful whispers. Daryl made a noise in his throat that he assumed was a confirmation. "I never actually…Maggie said they didn't know if she was alive or not, what happened to her?"

"I lost her," Daryl's voice remained steady but his knuckles were white where they gripped the car, staring into the hood as if it was an endless ocean. "All that hopin' bout people…was people who took her, livin' breathin' ones."

He didn't glance at Aaron but if he did he would have seen the small O of realization the other's man's face fell into.

Daryl scrubbed a callused hand over his face and swore in the darkness of his own eyelids he could see those big blue saucers of eyes scowling at him for being so short with the kind man trying to befriend him. "Hell she was half the reason I agreed to go out on those runs with ya in the first place, thought maybe we'd…", he trailed off, "she woulda liked you."

"You loved her." Aaron didn't ask it like a question, just declared it kind of quiet and surprised like an ah-ha! moment. Like a nervous, trembling, hopeful "oh" whispered across a candle lit dinner table.

"Don't matter now," Daryl dismissed, slammed the hood of the car shut.

"I think loves about the only thing that does matter anymore," Aaron insisted quietly. Daryl shook his head, dropped his screwdriver and walked away.

On the other side of the wall away from Aaron and the other faces that would be waking up soon and following him with their eyes as if he might dart or cry or lose his fucking mind at any second, Daryl knelt in the dirt. He used the white buck knife he still wore strapped to the back of his belt, the one he'd found on the road the night he lost her, to dig; twisted and turned it into the hard ground until he produced a handful of squirming earth worms. He followed the sound of the baby birds cries to one of the dogwood trees that lined the south side of their community. He dropped the worms unceremoniously into a pile near the base of the tree and fell back to rest against the steel wall, one foot out in front of him and the other pulled up to his chest. When the mother bird landed cautiously some feet away, he followed her hesitant hop towards the worms, knowing good and well she watching him. He didn't move a muscle, barely let himself breathe as he observed her use her beak to pick up and transport the meal to her babies. Daryl held Beth's knife in one hand, worrying the handle between his thumb and pointer finger while he gnawed at a nail on his other hand.

The chirping from the nest above began to quiet just as he sang, barely audible under his breath and nothing close to how it had sounded coming from her.

"Oh your old hometowns so far away, but inside your head there's a record that's playin'. A song called hold, hold on. Babe you gotta hold on."