Chapter Text
When winter arrives, it dances in gently and with mercy for the living. The season slowly turns over, temperatures dropping bit by bit until the morning’s dew turns to frost. It eases Daryl’s anxieties about surviving the cold as he’s had time to prepare their settlement with the basics.
They’ve been smoking meats for weeks, gathering piles of firewood, creating knitted blankets out of old clothing scraps, and hauling all sorts of odds and ends from runs to nearby abandoned towns, nabbing the things that got picked over because they require a little more work and time to utilize.
They possess that now—time. The woods are oddly silent of both the dead and the living, and there’s a sense of relief from many, but Daryl doesn’t let himself get too comfortable. Can’t. Comfort makes you slow, and slow makes you dead.
That’s at least what Beth says to him while they whittle arrowheads on the porch of the house Beth shares with her sister and a few others. Daryl can feel her regard him as he works. Her gazes are level now. Not once has he ever seen her look down her nose, but now she seldom watches him with her head tilted down, eyes peering up from beneath her eyelashes. These days…Beth meets his eyes with a gentle firmness and a bit something else he can’t put his finger on. A bit of laughter, maybe. Makes his stomach turn, and, shit, he swears he doesn’t blush.
Not that she’d be able to tell with his hair to his tops of his shoulders, lengthy and greased with the dirt and oils of apocalypse living (forget that indoor plumbing and hot showers are available) blocking his ruddy cheeks, the scruffy fuzz he calls a beard, and his chapped lips. Daryl wants to hide his face as adamantly as she presents hers.
Wide sunburned nose, round blue eyes, a small rosy bow of a mouth, and sizable marks of experienced violence, Beth’s scars cut across her face, lovely prominent pink and white decorations, a declaration she seems to wear with pride. To Daryl, they tell a story of a survivor, a warrior, packaged as a slender young woman no one believed could last a one fuckin’ year into the end of the world. They were wrong. Goddamn, they were so fucking wrong.
“Liam’s asking me to teach him how to hunt. Can you believe it?”
He huffs a bit and smirks, “Naw—boy must be desperate for a teacher."
“Must be scared of you.”
“Good. People are gettin’ too friendly.”
Beth laughs a good laugh. “Can’t have that,” she says.
“Nope.”
“Daryl,” she chuckles, “you do know everyone here loves you. They think you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
That makes him look up and directly at her to see if she’s playing him for a fool, but her gaze is even as ever.
“Everyone?” he asks, but he ain’t angling.
She purses her lips so they pucker and she looks adorable (not that he would ever tell). Head tilting to the side so her ponytail swings over her shoulder and rests against the hill of her collarbone, Beth exhales noisily, probably annoyed at his ornery antisocial tendencies.
“Ain’t no such thing as sliced bread no more, Greene.”
“It’s a saying, Daryl.”
“Bunch of nonsense is what it is.”
“Hush your mouth,” she tells him, “I don’t want to hear your bullshit.”
It’s funny the way Beth swings from precious Southern belle, once a regular in the church youth group choir, to the woman the world’s shaped her to be—all at once a rose, but a rose with sharp thorns. What would Hershel think of her? Sweet Beth, the baby sister, the apple of her Daddy’s eye. Strong Beth, the sister that came back from the dead, the heat in Daryl’s veins.
It’s true. She just comes into his line of sight and he’s warming all over. Her hands brush against his forearm and it’s engulfed in flames. She smiles and his whole stupid, ugly, old body burns.
What the fuck?
Daryl’s blushing again for some reason. It’s her, she knows that much at least. Something about her makes him red as a good sunset, and it’s so goddamn cute.
Makes her uncomfortably aware of how her wet underwear feels in her jeans half the time she’s in his vicinity. Dirty and lustful. It wasn’t the way she imagined feeling after a man. In her younger dreams, her love for her beloved was always so chaste and pure, driven by fantasies of boys in cowboy boots riding horses across her daddy’s farm to take her hand in marriage and maybe sing her a song or two. Silly things. The sorts of details a good, virginal Christian girl would yearn for, except she’s not most of those things anymore.
But with Daryl, while she still felt romantic about him, she also struggled with the deep desire to lick at the line of his neck and grab a handful of his crotch to just feel that part of him that made her bite her bottom lip at night whilst driving two…three fingers deep inside her wet heat and curling them up just so.
Lord, she wanted Daryl so badly she sometimes had half a mind to grab his meaty hands and stuff them inside her jeans herself, just so he could feel, he could understand and have irrefutable proof that she longed for him as painfully as she sometimes suspected he longed for her
But…she wasn’t certain. Damn it. The lurking chance that he felt only friendship for her never left her alone, but her resolve was weakening, and Beth knew her truth would be exposed soon.
“I got you somethin’,” Daryl suddenly says, interrupting her unclean thoughts. He’s fiddling with the little leather pouch he wears tied to his belt.
Curiosity nips at her gut and she feels stupid butterflies swirling around in her stomach. “What? When?"
“Last week. When we went on the run to that general store.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I know it.”
Beth ditches any pretense of working on her arrowhead and leans back against the whitewashed wooden pillar, and feels the old paint crackle and fall against her jacket. “Daryl…” she says slowly towards the front lawn, “…if you keep bringin’ me gifts, folks are gonna think you’re sweet on me."
She can’t bear to face him, not when she’s toying with him so mercilessly. Any other man would welcome old-fashioned flirtation, prepared to show off his charm, but Daryl isn’t other men, and Beth is acutely aware of that. He’s easy to tease, easy to embarrass, easy to offend. He’s…sensitive. She can hear his defensive snapping, I ain’t sweet on nothing!
But. He doesn’t snarl.
Daryl says, “Let’m think it.”
Her breath catches. When she finally finds her composure, Beth turns to him and holds out her palm. “Alright. Let’s see it then.”
His eye contact is ferocious, hooded gaze glinting, a smile playing at the secretive corners of his mouth, and Beth thinks he’s more handsome today than he was yesterday. Nothing happens for what must be a minute. Her fingers tingle through her gloves.
Shrugging, Daryl loosens the opening of the pouch and reaches inside with his index and middle fingers. He pulls out a thin plastic cylinder with a shiny, colorful label. Chapstick.
He twiddles it like an unlit cigarette before popping the cap off with his thumb. The pink balm that twirls up is smooth and unused, and Beth’s panties are once again in their excited state as the object of all her wholesome and filthy affections slides the balm across his lips. His tongue slip out to get a taste, and he just says, “Strawberry,” like he hasn’t just made her heart stop.
“My favorite,” she breathes out and beams too brightly for a sunless, gloomy day.
And then Daryl’s shifting uneasy in his seat, rucking up the lapel of his jacket and tucking his chin into the shearling collar. He snaps the cap back on the lip balm and tosses it at her with barely even a glance. A dark look passes over his brow but the damage is done. She knows. He must feel similarly to her—he must.
Right?