Note: This was written to a prompt: "Daryl & Beth run after the prison and spend half a year with each other until they finally come across ASZ and the rest of TF. But whatever happened in that time left its marks, both good and bad. So even when they get some space and safety, they still can't get out of each other's sight for more than a couple of minutes without panicking. Where she goes, he goes. He can't sleep without her in the room, she can't eat without knowing he had some too. So when Beth decides to take a bath, just leaving the door unlocked won't be enough."

Seemed like a great setup for smut, but I decided I wanted to take it in a bit of a different direction, and explore two people engaging in an incredibly intimate kind of touching without any sex involved. Think it came out pretty well (but you tell me).

❤️

Everyone else thinks it's weird.

She knows this. She's still capable of recognizing what other people are likely to think of as weird. So is he, and probably more keenly than she is; he's always been aware of precisely how and why he doesn't fit in, because she knows him well enough by now to know that he doesn't feel like he ever has. Ever has fit. Ever has belonged. Except in one very specific case.

For him, she is exceptional. This doesn't make her feel especially good. Neither does it make her feel bad. It simply is. She is every meaningful exception.

Has been for half a year.

Anyway, she knows they think it's weird. She can deal with that. She loves these people, loves them so much it squeezed the breath out of her when she saw their faces, and she collapsed to the pavement just inside the gate and reached for them and hugged them and was hugged and she cried so hard, cried until her face was swollen and aching, her eyes even more so. Six hundred miles from there to here - six hundred miles of fear and exhaustion and grief and hope, simple little joys, simple little beauties, and they both found a way to live with each other that went beyond self-sustaining, and they both found a way to be content with the idea that they would never see any of the rest again.

Then they were wrong. Both of them. Long after they both stopped looking, they found everyone again.

She was being hugged by Maggie, rocked back and forth with her tears and Maggie's tears mingling as her sister kissed every inch of her face in frantic disbelief, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Daryl, Daryl with his arms wrapped around Carol and every muscle in his body trembling, and she couldn't find words for the happiness she felt then.

Except he opened his eyes and his gaze caught hers, and she felt something else.

And after that it was weird. For the rest of them, it was.

Being unable to find words: a lesser weirdness.

They talked a great deal in their first weeks together. A lot for him, anyway; she did the majority of the talking but not the vast majority, and as they slipped into it as a kind of time-passing routine, he got more comfortable with it. Opened up to her like a much cliched dawnflower. It was like the porch but more so: little glimpses of his life before, some overtly significant and some that might seem unimportant to anyone who wasn't paying enough attention. Merle. His father. A few times, his mother, though it became clear to her early on - though he never explicitly said as much - that there's a lot about his mother that he doesn't remember. Not just that she died when he was young; he wasn't that young when it happened. Something else that became clear to her - that she already suspected - was that there was a lot he probably wanted to forget. A lot it was better not to remember.

Except of course he does, because he remembers so much. Because such is the working of the brain of Daryl Dixon.

But here, there's a lot he's forgotten. He told her some of what he could, and she formed the image of a woman who made a considerable amount of sense out of the man telling her story. A sad woman, a scared woman, a woman with the hope beaten and drained out of her, a woman who drifted through life like a ghost until she burned to death in her bed.

He told her some of his father. Less, and yet more, because these memories hurt with all the haunting of the original pain. Pain saturated them. There was no memory of Will Dixon - that he told her about - that was absent pain. Actual beatings, sure, but the real pain in them ran a lot deeper than that. Betrayal. Confusion, frightened bewilderment, because for so long he was so sure that he'd done something to deserve it. At least some of the time. And he had no idea what that might be, except the plain fact of his own existence.

He told her some of Merle. The most of the three. The love there was agony to hear. Agony to tell, she was certain, watching his face in the firelight. He never looked at her. He blinked, hard. Swiped his hand down his face. Didn't cry.

Until he did.

Talking about the closest thing he ever had to a real Christmas, when he was six before his mother burned and his brother left, helping his yet-unburned mother string the lights around their pathetic little tree in a few moments of peace with his father passed out drunk in his battered and cigarette-burned recliner, the glow of flickering purples and blues and golds, and somehow for some reason that was what broke him, and he curled in on himself, stained red in the firelight, and wept.

And she crossed the space between them and held him, and like before he let himself be held.

And it was okay.

Seemed like a shitty trade, but she told him things too. Those storied birthdays and holidays and summer picnics, summers in general, long and lazy and warm, swimming in the afternoon and fireflies at dusk and stars at night. Working on a farm, sure, but you find ways to shirk your chores and sneak off to do nothing at all. Bright, spicy autumns. Cozy winters. Brilliant blooming springs. She was never sure why, but her stories broke down by season, and she didn't resist the inclination.

He and she couldn't have grown up more than a hundred miles or so from each other, but they were in different worlds, different universes, and it wasn't just the nearly two decades between them.

She still doesn't know exactly how old he is. She never asked.

She wondered a couple of times if he even knows. Whether, if she asked him for the date of his birthday, he would be able to tell her.

It doesn't matter.

They talked. About history. About more: about preferences and dreams and jokes, fears, desires - secret things. Those came once the histories were largely exhausted. By then he was willing to say at least some of them, and she accepted them as the treasures they were. Are.

Then they stopped talking.

Not completely. But mostly. They spoke when they needed to - plans and directions. Warnings. Requests for physical status after fighting: Are you alright? Where does it hurt? Otherwise there was silence, and it was silence of a kind she had never known.

Silence she could slip into and wrap around herself like the softest of blankets. Silence that shouldn't be filled.

So after a while she started to lose the words she no longer needed. Without meaning to, she put them away.

The day they arrived, everyone had so many questions. Haltingly and awkwardly she tried to answer them, was sure she failed. He had an even harder time than she did. His obvious struggling was part of what made them cut off the interrogation and back off from the two of them. Leave them alone to eat. Show them where they could sleep. Give them clean clothes. Present the existence of a shower.

And the shower - and later the beds - was where things started getting weird in a way no one could ignore.

That first night, they ate together in a real dining room at a real table, real chairs, real plates and utensils and real water they didn't have to boil first, and it was so strange she almost hated it. She sat there and stared at him in silence, and he stared back, and together they managed it. The fact that they were hungry beyond belief helped, though for the most part, for those six hundred miles, they did well with food and water. Did well with most things. Doing well is still extremely relative, and they spend a lot of the time at least mildly hungry. It faded into the background. Became another feature of the landscape. It ceased to bother her. But their hunger then wasn't mild, and they both ate, and did so in spite of the fact that people were hovering and trying not to hover, and that made it even stranger.

She ate without tasting. Could tell the food was good - meat not only cooked but seasoned, fresh vegetables that could only be gotten from a real garden - and she felt good after, belly full in a way it hadn't been for a while, but somehow the taste never really registered. That wasn't so strange, for her or for them, and in fact they wouldn't have known. That she ate was all that could have mattered to them.

Then the shower.

She forgot how it worked. She didn't, but she also sort of did. Not like the prison, here. Nothing communal. A room to herself, and a closed door, and when it became clear how they all implicitly expected it to go down, her throat tightened up and she shifted closer to him and felt the tightness in him too.

She hadn't thought about it. Hadn't had any reason to.

They rarely bathed, but when they did, they did so within a few feet of each other. Backs to each other, one keeping watch all the time, but so close. Had to be. Couldn't be far. Very much within sight if one turned around, and she caught glimpses once or twice - naked back, ass, bare thigh - and she knew he did too, and it didn't bother her. It was merely what happened. In the context of everything, it didn't much matter.

There was a door, and they were expecting her to close it, and he would not be on her side of it.

She thought about fighting them on it. For a few seconds she almost did. He remained silent; he was waiting to see what she would do. They gazed at her in a kind of expectation that was almost innocent. She looked at them - looked at Maggie - with her arms full of fresh clothes and a towel, and something rose up in her and whispered a single word.

Normal.

Then another: Try.

She gave him a helpless look, attempting silent apology, and she was certain they sensed it when she closed the door between them. That it hurt her. That it hurt him. It had to be obvious. For nearly half a year, neither of them bothered to conceal their feelings.

She stood under the spray and felt the miles slough off her, and she hugged herself and bit her lip and tried to mentally measure the distance from her to the door and the door to… wherever he was.

He was right outside when she opened it. Stared at her. Like before, she stared back, clean and skin scrubbed pink and smelling of floral shampoo.

One of the things both of them forgot how to say, left somewhere hundreds of miles back because it simply wasn't necessary anymore: I'm sorry.

He closed the door behind him. She forced herself to walk away. Every step tore something inside her.

Later, in bed. In the dark. She couldn't sleep, at least not until the final couple of hours before dawn, and then not very much or very deeply. A lot of it was the bed - too soft. Too big. Full size mattress; she hadn't slept in one of those since the farm. It gave under her weight and she kept snapping out of the lightest of dozes, sure she was sleeping in mud. Sure she was falling.

And he wasn't there. And that was really why.

Normal. Try.

Lying curled on her side and staring at the window, the rising moon, knees drawn up and arms tucked against her chest. He wasn't there. He was gone. Somewhere else in the house. Was he like this? Was he awake in the dark with his gut crawling circles inside his middle? Heart clutching?

Trying, also. For them, or because she was?

It wasn't like they slept all wrapped up in each other. But so close. Always so close, while one of them took a shift on watch. She could reach out and touch him if she wanted. Sometimes she did, to remind herself that he was there if she woke up uncertain. Fingertips on a boot. A knee. His thigh.

More than once, his big warm hand curled around hers in response, squeezing. Knowing why she did it, because he would do it too.

They weren't alone. Ever.

The bed was too big. The room was too big. Too empty. Too quiet. She burrowed into the pillow and covered her face with her hands and tried not to cry.

So it goes on like that for a few days, and they make an undiscussed effort to balance and moderate, and she can tell they all think it's weird. It's weird how they're together from the moment they're both awake, and they both wake up and emerge into the world at the same time. They eat together. They sit together on the porch, not speaking. Given a tour of the place on the second day, they go together, and on its face that makes total sense because why not show them both at once, but they stay so close, close enough to hold hands even if they don't, and she can feel them trying not to look at her and at him, trying to pretend that there's nothing awkward about it. Totally normal.

Taken to talk to Deanna, he insists without saying more than five or six words that he's going to be in the room with her while it happens. She stands with him and says nothing but she's pretty sure she makes it clear enough that she's backing him and will in fact do more than that if necessary.

Some resistance to this. But not much. Maybe everyone is finding it weird but Rick and Michonne at least seem to almost understand. At any rate they're the ones saying Let them, why is it a problem? Might even be a good idea.

They all let them. As usual, Beth does most of the talking. Not that there's very much to say. Ultimately, the majority of those six hundred miles were kind of tedious.

He sits in a chair to the side while she takes her turn. His gaze is locked on her, as if he needs her to anchor him. As if he needs a tether. As if he would drift away without one and be lost.

More eating together. Sitting together. Being together. Every time someone makes an effort to separate them, or does something that would practically require their separation, she finds herself going stony and cold and he comes close to bristling. Close to bearing his teeth and growling like a dog when someone gets too near his mistress.

They back off. Either abandon the idea or adjust it so he and she can remain together.

They think it's weird but they're willing to accommodate it.

But the second night, she closes that door between them, and she stands with her back against it and squeezes her eyes shut and listens to him walking away. His footfalls are slow and heavy, as if he has to struggle for every step.

Normal. Try.

She grits her teeth.

Then, toward the end of the first week, she wants a bath.

She doesn't even know when she last had one. The farm, of course, but that's only by process of elimination, and splashing around in a cold stream doesn't even remotely count.

She used to love them, having them. Used to draw them and dump in an extravagant quantity of bubble bath or one of those bath bombs with the glitter and dried flower petals in them, sit with her head back and her eyes closed and feel herself slowly melting. Inhaling thickly fragrant steam.

When that was all gone, she stopped herself from caring about it. Forced herself. Didn't even have to try all that hard; they had a lot of other things to worry about, and it wasn't difficult to shove the desire for most luxuries to the side, especially when even basic things started counting as luxuries. Safety. Warmth at night. A full stomach.

But now she has those things and then some. So all at once and quite out of nowhere, she wants a fucking bath.

There's no bubble bath. There are no bath bombs. That doesn't matter. She informs them of what she intends to do, and she's ready for moderate protest, because it's entirely unnecessary and it'll use a lot of the house's hot water for the day, but instead everyone pretty much shrugs, and after a moment or two she realizes why.

It's a normal thing. She wants to do a Normal Thing.

Great.

She sits on the edge of the tub as the water runs, wrapped in a towel. She dips her hand beneath the tap and keeps it there far longer than she has to in order to fix the temperature, half closes her eyes and breathes deep. The steam is kind to her lungs, soft and gentle, and it doesn't have to be fragrant to make her pleasantly lightheaded. The warmth it carries seeps into her bloodstream and flows all through her, and she's not even immersed yet but already tense muscles she didn't even realize were there have begun to loosen. Unravel. She's unknotting.

She's alone, and for the first time it doesn't feel completely wrong.

So then of course there's a knock on the door. Twice only, soft, and she doesn't have to get up and open it to know who it is.

This is a crossroads, she thinks as she sits, eyes fully closing. She came to it without meaning to, but maybe she should have expected it, because this is the first truly Normal thing she's tried to do. Normal in a way hardly nothing is now, normal in a way that reaches back and back and touches the world of Before, so it's a kind of normal that fits this place in a way nothing else could. This place with its electricity and its fully functional kitchens and its sidewalks and lawns. This place, which is so fucking bizarre she can't stand it.

This is Normal, which is why it's too strange to bear. For a few seconds she could bear it. Now she's sitting here in a cloud of steam and her hand is shaking under the water, and all at once it's so hot it's burning her, even though she hasn't touched the knobs.

She's an idiot, and this is idiotic, and this might also be an idiotic method of shoving the idiocy away from her, but oh fucking well.

She rises and goes to the door, opens it, steps aside and lets him in.

Now this is weird.

He stands there after she shuts the door, looking around and everywhere but at her, hands at his sides. They're worrying at themselves, fingernails picking at fingernails, and she steps away from him and gazes up at him, breath snagged at the base of her throat. He's been close to her when she was naked, but he's never been this close, and the towel doesn't exactly count as clothing. She shifts from foot to foot. Tracks the darting movements of his eyes. Waits.

His focus swings to her, like she knew it would, and stops. Freezes. He swallows hard, glances down at his boots and back up at her, head still ducked and his hair hanging in his face.

She wonders if anyone else knows he's in here.

"I just wanted…" He shrugs very awkwardly. Even if he hadn't been out there alone with her and living in near-total silence for weeks upon weeks, she doubts he would be able to explain himself. What he wants and why he wants it. She's not sure she could, because every second he stands here and looks at her and doesn't look at her, it's clearer to her, and she perceives how indescribable it is.

An uncomplicated fact: what a man is supposed to want from a woman in roughly this situation.

He had a lot of chances out there to want that. He had a lot of chances to show her, if he did. She doesn't believe she would have rejected him out of hand, now that the idea of it is drifting through her head, easy and calm as the steam. It should have occurred to her before, and somehow it didn't, but now that it has, she doesn't think it was fear that was stopping him.

Fear of being told no. Fear of being told yes.

Doesn't think it was fear that was stopping either of them.

That's not what he wants. Staring down at her, eyes larger than normal and dark in the shadow of his brow and his hair, she sees no sign of it. Doesn't feel it in him. Desperation, sure. Hunger. He aches with it.

But not that kind of hunger.

Not taking her eyes off his, she opens the towel and lets it drop to the floor around her feet.

He scans her. Quick, seemingly instinctive, before his attention returns to her face. No heat there. Only piercing earnestness, and a healthy dose of anxiety. His hands are quivering, his teeth working at his lip. Gnawing.

He's just short of scared.

All those times he didn't look at her, and it didn't feel like he was trying not to. The times he caught glimpses of her and she didn't care. No big deal. Maybe not just because it was the closest of close quarters anyway, and you can't afford to give a shit about shit like that. Looking at her now, and everything she sees. Things she took for granted and never thought about.

Maybe it took something this bizarrely normal for her to understand so many things. Half a year of them.

"It's okay," she says softly, reaches down and takes his hand - stills it in hers. Threads their fingers, like she has more than once. She has these words, and she trusts they're enough. "Daryl… You can."

He looks down at their joined hands for what feels like a long time, and he continues to gnaw at his lip, but it's better. The tension in his shoulders is dissolving into the steam. And when he lifts his head, his gaze travels up her body more slowly, more intently. Interested. Curious.

She's never felt less naked in her life. Not like she what imagines naked should feel like in this situation, anyway.

She gives him a smile, and it feels good. It feels very good. It feels better than any words she could scrape together right now. She gives his hand a light tug, steps backward toward the tub.

"C'mon."

She doesn't need help climbing in, but he holds her hand anyway, keeps holding it as she lowers herself into the water with a shuddering sigh. He lowers himself with her, settles beside the tub with his body angled toward her and once again gazes at their linked fingers. Strokes his thumb over her knuckles. Covers hers with his other one.

Watching him, she leans back and rests her head against the cool tile. Her hair is up in a careless knot, ponytail folded over, but a few strands have escaped, and when he looks up at her, he extends a hand and tucks a couple of the thicker ones behind her ear.

A healthy part of this - of what's suddenly emerging - is mysterious to her.

That's okay.

He's working his focus down her body again, that same intent curiosity that somehow approaches innocence. Down her throat to her chest, her breasts just visible above the water, warmth lapping at her nipples and making them gently harden. On downward, rippling lines through the water: her ribs and belly, her hips, the curls between her legs, her thighs and knees and all the way down to her feet. Like an exploratory hand, learning her - but with no interest in possession.

Right in this moment, he has everything he wants.

He returns to her face and rests there, and she's smiling again when she reaches over and hands him the soap.

She's not thinking. She's just doing. She's been thinking for days, thinking too much, trying to walk a tightrope she never should have stepped onto, and she dragged him with her and that's so unfair. This isn't an olive branch, because there's no conflict to make peace of, and she's not making anything up to him, because she owes him nothing and he would probably be offended by the very idea. But there's some distance to close. There's some new groundwork to lay.

Things won't be like they were. You can't just take a bath after the end of the goddamn world.

He takes the soap and blinks at it, as if he's not sure what it even is. Which is kind of funny, considering, and she breathes a laugh and he jerks his head up, lips slightly parted as if he's actually about to ask her what the fuck she's implying.

So she whispers it again. You can.

He does.

She remembers after the shack burned, how he touched her - only a little at first, fleeting ghosts and grazes of his fingertips, and then more and more until he was laying his hand on her shoulder, folding his fingers through hers, swinging her easily into his arms and carrying her. So careful and so hesitant but bolder as he learned how to touch her, what felt good and what made her happy and what did both for him. And there was never a huge amount of it, he never seemed to get greedy, but he fell into it with a kind of joy she wouldn't have imagined someone would find in the simple act of touching.

It's like that all over again.

He doesn't bother with a washcloth, and she's glad. She didn't want him to. He works the soap into a lather between his palms and lays them over her upper arms and her shoulders, sweeping his slippery thumbs up the sides of her throat, tracing the dips and rises of her collarbones - moving lower. All so slow, massaging her, and when he begins he's trembling the smallest bit, but by the time he arrives at her breasts, that's gone and he's steady, bold like he was in those first days, and she sighs and closes her eyes as he glides his fingers over their slopes, circles around the outer curves and then in to her nipples. Exploring her just like his eyes did, interest slipped into fascination, and his gaze flicks back up to her face when he passes over the hard little nubs, direct contact, and she shivers.

Asking a question without asking it.

Is this okay?

She nods, and he gives her a smile so small it's nearly invisible, but it's deep.

He's happy. Happier than he's been since they walked through those gates.

Heat flushes between her legs when he returns with more soap to the undersides of her breasts and continues his journey downward. She doesn't look for it; it simply comes, and it's a little surprising that it hasn't been there before now. She pushes it firmly away. It can be there, but she doesn't have to give it any ground, because that's not what this is and that's not what either of them wants it to be, and when he reaches that triangle of curls he strokes briefly over it before moving on. Acknowledging that it's there, that it's part of her and that he loves it accordingly, and that's all.

He doesn't need to learn all of her.

He doesn't stop until he reaches her feet, and when he noses slick fingers between her toes she kicks and splashes a bit and presses a hand over her mouth to muffle a giggle, and this time his smile is wider. Pleased. Once more so clearly happy that it sends a flush of warmth all through her that has next to nothing to do with her cunt, and he tweaks her big toe when she wiggles it at him.

Back to her shoulders, massaging again, and she closes her eyes and empties her lungs and melts under his hands like she used to melt into bubbles and glittery foam. This is luxury, these rough callouses and his strength. This is fucking decadence.

And it was here the whole time.

She's never closing the door on this again.

Rick sees them come out of the bathroom together. She gives him a nod and sails on by.

They wait until they're well out of range of his eyes and ears to look at each other and dissolve into silent laughter.

No closed doors that night. No explanations for anyone; they aren't owed any, and anyway she has no idea how she would even begin. Once again, it's not merely a question of her having lost words. The right ones don't exist. There isn't a name for this, or at least not one she's ever encountered.

It is what it is, and it is exactly what it needs to be.

The bed isn't too big anymore as she curls against him in the dark, as he gathers her into his arms and buries his face in her hair and releases a huge sigh. Relief there, every bit of which she feels. They had it all wrong. She had it backwards. Whatever this new life consists of, they don't have to let it take things away from them. They can take new things for themselves.

She snuggles into him and smiles.

Normal.

Fuck that.

Try.

That, they can do.