Author's Note: This is my first published fanfiction. I am a self-proclaimed lifelong lurker and lover of fanfiction. I have been a huge Bethyl fan and lurker of all things Bethyl since circa season 3. I've been trying to cope with the loss of her character, and my coping usually ends up in the form of writing. First and foremost, I'm a fan of this show, and...well, fanfiction. Always looking for new stories to read. So, why shouldn't I publish for others out there like me? I've got a LOT written and a good idea of where this story is going. Starts out pretty slow, long-winded at times. The pace will pick up in a few chapters if I decide to continue. All mistakes are my own. I do not own and am not in any way affiliated with The Walking Dead, sadly. Let me know what you think; reviews will likely motivate me to write more, write faster, and, hopefully, update quicker. If not, I'll probably keep posting anyway for my own catharsis.

Here we go ~ CLB

Chapter 1: using white lighters to see

In the end—or, in the beginning?—it doesn't matter how she got there. The old her may've argued that it does matter, but the new her knows that now it's not important. She made it back to her family with the help of her ability to remember how to track, how to fight, and how to differentiate between the ones who were good and bad, with a dash of miracle on the side.

She had arrived at the Alexandria Safe Zone and reunited with her family.

There were apologies and tears and welcomes from her family; the ones she knew and loved and the new extensions. There were smiles and laughs and sobs filling her senses, wonder and awe from those who still couldn't believe Beth Greene had made it, that she wasn't just another dead girl, despite all they'd seen.

There were steely blue eyes, half covered by dark, dirty hair, that widened and narrowed, gazed at her and left her in the same breath. No words of welcome from her last companion, her only companion for so many weeks. No tears, not that she expected any—not from him. She may have seen the slightest bit of surprise in his eyes when she first set foot in this new community, when she defied all odds and then some, showing up alone, beaten and battered with new scars.

She didn't have much time to think on it for the first several days after her return. Those were spent in the Rhee house, with Maggie fawning and hovering over her, repeating the same unnecessary apologies and treating her like a porcelain doll until Beth began to feel the sharp edges of legitimate anger and resentment towards her older sister.

Beth didn't say much. To anyone. She let Maggie go on and on, allowed her to go through every stage of grief so that she could find acceptance and put the rest away. It didn't matter, not anymore. Glenn looked on quietly and with a vaguely apologetic look on his face.

When a few days had gone by, Beth began to feel suffocated. Claustrophobic from the constant hovering, the questions, the doting. She could see why her family had chosen to stay here; it was certainly the closest thing to a safe haven that any of them had likely encountered since the prison. She heard the stories of Terminus, of the return and redemption of Carol, who she had only been allowed to speak to briefly when they were together at Grady, of their harsh travels through the heat of the summer, and their invitation and journey to the safe zone, led by Aaron.

She met the new members of their family as well as the people of Alexandria, who were mostly kind although naïve and inadequately equipped or prepared to handle what was beyond their walls. She learned that most of them had been at the safe zone since the beginning—or the end.

It was late. Everyone was in bed with their lights off as far as she could tell down the stretch of road that divided their community. Quiet surrounded her physically, but her brain, damaged as it was, wouldn't shut off. She'd been reading some medical books she'd found in the infirmary and realized she'd been lucky that most of her memories remained intact, that the headaches had dulled in intensity and frequency over time, and that she could speak, even if it took her a little more time than before to find the right words and arrange them in the correct order to form a coherent sentence.

The feeling of suffocation was worst at night. When she could hear the faint giggles from her sister and brother-in-law's room across the hall that eventually bled into light snores filling the house until the morning hours. When the quiet was so thick that she longed for the snarls of the undead or the soft chirping of the insects in the woods that she had traveled—alone—for so long.

Beth stood up quietly and stood in the doorway of her room. Her room. Her room that didn't feel like her room in this house that didn't feel like her house in this community that she felt was slowly driving her towards insanity. The way the people here carried on was absurd, though no one would hear her admit that aloud. Dinner parties. Book clubs. Cooking lessons. Really? A small part of her recognized that the old her would have been delighted that these people were choosing to live, not just exist. But the new her, hardened by the world and all of the bad within it, thought that they were all a bunch of idiots, clinging to the luxuries of a world and a life that were long gone. It was only a matter of time before the rude awakening happened. Before their shitty walls fell down and the plug was pulled, swirling all of those who'd blatantly ignored what the world was now down the drain.

Once she was satisfied that Maggie and Glenn were sleeping (and thank some god that they were both heavy sleepers), she padded down the carpeted stairs and slipped on her boots. She grabbed a knife from the block in the kitchen and stuck it down low into the inside of her boot and covered it neatly with her jeans. Maggie'd bothered her for days about sleeping in pajamas "like a normal person." Beth had shrugged and said nothing, unwilling to let herself feel vulnerable and unprepared to run if and when needed. She didn't expect her sister, who had adapted unbelievably well to this new environment, to understand.

She closed the door silently and exhaled the breath she'd been holding deep and tight in her lungs. The nights were getting cooler; she could almost see her breath if she looked hard enough into the night.

She sat on the front porch steps for a while, feeling a small bit of relief. At the gates, she saw the guards on watch, whispering quietly to one another. Not doing much watching or guarding. She couldn't make out who they were, but she hoped like hell they weren't any of the assholes high on pseudo-authority who would scold her and send her back to bed. She'd noticed more of those around here than she'd like to admit, and not all of them were outside of her own family.

She didn't think about the past if she could help it. Coping mechanism, so the medical textbooks claimed. She didn't think about the last time she was with her family. About her daddy. Grady. Noah, who she'd learned hadn't made it long after his successful escape and her unsuccessful one. She didn't think about all the ones she'd learned her family had lost between the time of her "death" and resurrection.

She didn't think about the weeks she'd spent with Daryl. Their last meal. Their last conversation, which had never been finished. He walked around this place like a ghost but with some kind of a purpose. He wasn't around much, really. Not one of the many constantly hovering. She'd appreciated that in some sense; she'd had more than enough of the hovering. But he'd barely spoken a word to her, barely acknowledged her since she'd returned. She felt his eyes on her when they were in the same room or the same vicinity outside in the light. Only when she was looking somewhere else, or pretending to.

She hadn't been assigned a job yet but she'd learned that Daryl was a recruiter along with Aaron. She envied that his job requirements included leaving these walls at regular intervals. Dangerous, yes, but she wasn't entirely convinced that the inside wasn't just as dangerous.

She began walking down the road, aimlessly, lost in her thoughts, half-formed as they were. She thought of finding a purpose, of how happy—or as close to happy as she got these days—that she'd be once she was assigned a job. Something she could use to exhaust herself enough to sleep at night.

"Better hope them dicks up there don't see ya out here." His voice came out of nowhere, just as she was deliberating over which way she'd walk next.

She couldn't see him in the darkness that engulfed the streets, an unwritten rule that the residents kept all their indoor and outdoor lights off at nighttime. Only source of light was up near the guards' posts at the gates. And the moon, casting silvery shadows along the roads and houses enclosed in this suburbanite prison.

She stared toward the direction from which his gravelly voice came, eventually saw the cherry blaze at the end of what she assumed was his cigarette. He was leaning up against the siding of the house that she'd discovered was his; he shared it with Rick, Michonne, Carl, and Judith.

"Daryl." She mumbled quietly, first stopping in her tracks and then proceeding slowly to where she now knew he was standing. "What are ya doin'?"

"Knitting," he quipped. Humorless. Bordering on irritated, if she had to guess. She shrugged it off, leaning up against the house beside him. As if this weren't the most they'd spoken to one another since she'd returned. As if they'd been friends, as if they'd been something, before.

"How ya been? Haven't had a chance to talk to you much." Or at all, she added silently.

"Fine." His answer was short, with no hint of any desire to elaborate or even continue this sort-of conversation.

She was quiet for a long time. Just breathing. Looking at nothing but the blackness that somehow soothed her, made her feel less afraid than the cozy home she'd left earlier that night.

"We ever gonna talk about it?" She'd asked it quietly, figured she had nothing to lose. He'd already essentially been ignoring her existence, avoiding her looks.

He paused mid-exhalation, the smoke curling around the two of them like some mystic fog, cocooning them from the rest of the world, inside and outside of the walls.

"It." He repeated. Not really a question, so she didn't even begin to form an answer.

"Told ya long ago, girl. Don't know what you want from me." He said it quietly; she could tell without seeing that he had bent his head down, staring at his boots, or the ground, or the earth's core.

"Don't want nothin'. 'Cept maybe you could put in a good word for me to Deanna or Aaron or whoever it is that decides our jobs." She chanced a glance at his face, saw a small grimace webbing out across his features and ending in the crinkle of his eyes.

"What job is it you're hoping for?"

"Anythin' that gets me outside these walls. As often as possible." She responded without hesitation. She knew that if anyone were to understand this, it'd be him.

He grunted. She wasn't sure what this one meant, though over the time she'd spent with him and him alone, she'd come to understand many of his nonverbal responses.

"Maybe they need a hunter?" She suggested.

"Yeah? Think they'll just send ya out, some girl that just got here, make you responsible for feedin' all o' these people? Ain't learned much out there, have ya?" His tone held a bit of condescension, but Beth wasn't offended.

"Learned that givin' people a chance ain't the worst call in the world to make sometimes. 'Specially if no one else wants the job. Only one more qualified to do it's you, and you're on the recruitin' team." She tilted her chin slightly and turned towards him, somewhat startled that he was looking right back at her, or at least she thought so. Hard to tell in the dark.

"Ain't got no huntin' team. Bring back what I can when we go out on recruiting missions. Ain't nobody else here a hunter. And we never got the chance to finish your lessons." He tossed his butt onto the ground, stomping it quietly with the tip of his boot, and crossed his arms over his chest, letting his head fall back silently to lean up against the house. His body had turned slightly towards hers, but he mostly remained facing forward. If someone'd walked by, it'd appear he was taking no interest in the conversation from the youngest Greene girl.

"Well, maybe they'd let me join the recruitin' team. When we aren't recruitin' we can hunt. You can keep teachin' me. I'll stick by ya, keep learnin'. Kept myself alive for quite a while out there on my own, y'know. Think they'll go for that?" She turned her body more toward his, her eyes fighting to look into his while his darted around, avoiding her face entirely.

A brief flash of what could only be described as a tornado of emotions appeared over his features. Pain. Pride. Sorrow. Fear? She wasn't sure. It was all gone too soon.

"Maybe. I'll talk to Aaron 'bout it. Let ya know. Better get back inside." He started to turn away from Beth to head towards the front porch of his house.

She reached out her hand on impulse, lightly touching his shoulder and not missing the way he tensed when he felt the contact. Nevertheless, he froze in his tracks, head tilted slightly to one side.

"I—" Beth started, suddenly feeling foolish and unsure of herself, though she wasn't sure why. Just a few short—weeks, months?—ago, he was carrying her bridal-style across the threshold of the funeral home kitchen to set her down for a meal he'd "prepared."

"Thanks, Daryl." She all but whispered, letting just a bit of emotion seep into her words. She wanted him to know she meant it.

"'S'nothin'," he shrugged and walked towards his house. She followed a few paces behind, passing him up as he turned to climb up the steps to the front porch of his home. She continued back up the road toward the north end of town, toward her house. She wasn't sure, but she swore she felt his eyes on her, boring a hole into the back of her head as she walked away. Another hole, she thought warily, shrugging it off and continuing home.