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Wild Things (The Moonshine Poet) - The Walking Dead - Beth Greene/Daryl Dixon - 3/3
Title: Wild Things (The Moonshine Poet)
Author: Abelina/Abby/Abelinajt
Fandom/Pairing: The Walking Dead – Beth Greene/Daryl Dixon (Bethyl)
Rating/Warnings: M/E for sexual content, language, violence.
Summary: The night they burned the shack to the ground, Daryl Dixon has a revelation. Now they’re running through the night together like a pair of wild things, and when Beth Greene takes his hand, he realizes he never wants to let go. He wasn’t sure where they were goin’, but for the first time since the prison fell, he felt like they were moving forward, heading for something instead of just tryin’ to survive. And that, he knew, was entirely because of Beth Greene. An alternate timeline following the events of Still.
Notes: This was written as a very long one-shot, clearly too long for LJ so I've broken into three pieces for posting, but it's meant to be read as one long fic, not concise individual chapters.
All Parts Here
They were kinda like idiots over the next few weeks, the sort of clingy lovebirds he’d’a laughed at once upon a time, except he got it now. But Daryl didn’t think they really understood what it was like to find your other half, those morons back when the dead didn’t walk, when the most trouble they were gonna have was over not gettin’ extra sauce on their burger.
So he figured they kinda had the right to be obnoxious, especially since nobody else was around to be bothered by it. And truth be told, he liked the feel of her fingers in his, liked the way she giggled and how she made him grin like a fuckin’ lunatic. Really, he just fucking loved her and he let that out in whatever way it wanted to shine.
They couldn’t always risk it, making love like that first night—and they’d called it sex, but they both knew better—but that didn’t stop them from revisiting the tree idea, or whatever they could manage to accomplish with whatever time they had. And they tried to be careful, they did, but even Beth had to admit it wasn’t that easy.
Often, though, they just sat together through the evening, between eating supper—if they caught something that night—and when Beth would lay down to sleep, talking most nights, playing their game of ‘I never’ and sometimes—lotsa times—kissing each other breathless. Then Beth would sleep, laying her head on Daryl’s lap or sometimes cuddled up in front of him. Daryl always took first watch, not for any reason other than they’d sorta always done it that way.
"I never heard you laugh, before that night at the shack," said Beth.
It didn’t really matter anymore whether anyone drank anything or not. ‘I never’ had become a way to tell each other things they might not have had the balls to say otherwise, though that was more his problem than Beth’s.
"I never knew how."
Beth didn’t take another turn once he answered, instead just tucked her head beneath his chin and snuggled into his side. He tightened his arms around her and looked up to the sky, to the stars shining down on them and thanked whoever up there might be responsible for bringing Beth Greene into his life. Because lord knows he didn’t deserve her, but he wasn’t gonna let that get in the way.
They’d been following the railroad tracks for a while when the weather started changing. The leaves had been turning brown for weeks now, but it had still been hot as hell out until today. There had been cloudy days of course, over the months they’d been travelling, but today’s overcast sky came with a chill.
So they’d diverted from the tracks into a little town, taking on the risk of walkers in order to find some warmer clothes. When Beth found the sporting goods store, looted yes but still with a ton of crap inside, her eyes practically begged him to look.
He really should’ve questioned things when they found the bow. The fucking deluxe ladies model that was more than good enough for Beth to use, and even better than that was she could draw it herself. The place had no guns and no bullets, but a full stock of arrows and arrow tips and they loaded as many as they could into their bag. Amongst the former merchandise littering rest of the store, which had been picked over but not fully, they managed to find a couple of long sleeve shirts each plus a fleece-lined hoodie that fit Beth.
She didn’t say, but they both knew the smaller stuff got left behind because the smaller people didn’t always make it.
“Good thing you’re tough,” he told her, tapping her nose with his finger and making her giggle.
He should’ve known, when Beth drew the bow with ease and bullseyed the target he’d drawn outside on the post, that their luck was gonna run out.
But he didn’t know it until later, until they’d decided to chance searching the gas station for some canned goods instead of getting out of there like they should have. Didn’t know it until the group of men charged down the street at them, an angry horde demanding their arrows back because they were claimed, whatever the fuck that meant. And by then it was too late, he had an arrow pointed at his face and one of the fuckers had Beth’s arms pinned behind her back, talkin’ shit about claiming her.
And Daryl should’ve known, but he didn’t, not fully, just how strong a woman Beth Greene really was.
“I’m nobody’s claim!”
Beth’s words pierced through the shouting of the men, but they didn’t stop to listen, they merely stopped to laugh, and that was their mistake.
Before he could blink, Beth headbutted the man holding her, and when he cried out and let go, she whirled on him and buried her knife in his belly. And the archer on him wavered for a second, a split second but long enough for Daryl to loose his bolt and shoot the guy through the head at close range. Before he fell, Daryl shoved both dead man and crossbow into the others behind him, knocking them off balance so he could draw his knife.
And then they were on him, and he lost sight of Beth in the melee, but he couldn’t stop to look for her now because it was five to one and he didn’t like the odds but he wasn’t about to go down without a fight. He took one out with his knife, which he lost when the man went down, and he took a blow to the kidney and was struggling to stay up. If he went down they had him and then—then Beth.
He heard the thunk of an arrow. Then another. And a third, and suddenly it was just him and this other guy, a silver-haired asshole lookin’ like some sorta cowboy biker. And even though his buddies were all dead at his feet, Beth’s arrows in their heads, the asshole had the balls to smirk at him like he was still gonna win.
And that’s when he drew a gun.
“She’s out of ammo, and you’re down to just your fists,” drawled the man, looking Beth up and down over Daryl’s shoulder. “Can’t say the odds are on your side right now, though points to you for your well-trained bitch.”
Daryl clenched his fists until his rough nails dug into his palms, but he was stuck, again, because there was nothing he could do that didn’t end with him dead and Beth left on her own with this asshole and his damned intentions.
“So here’s how I see this going down.” The man was cocky, confident, his grip loose on the gun like he knew it didn’t matter. “You’re going to get on your knees, and you’re going to beg. But ah, no, not for your life. You’re gonna die no matter what, you understand that, don’t you? Good. No, you see, you’re gonna beg me for hers.”
“No. He won’t.”
Daryl didn’t understand, at first, what happened. After Beth spoke, the douchebag wannabe cowboy dropped to his knees, the gun clattering to the pavement. And he made some strange wheezy, gurgling noise before he fell over sideways. It was then that he saw Beth’s knife sticking out of his throat, the fucking thing still quivering from its flight through the air.
He whirled around and she was there in an instant, up and in his arms, and they dropped to the pavement together in the middle of the carnage. But they couldn’t stay here—if there weren’t walkers now where would be soon. Beth scrubbed her hand across her teary eyes and nodded, and as quick as they could they retrieved their bows, knives, and arrows, the dropped gun, and got the hell out of there like they should’ve done in the first place.
Beth didn’t cry, not after that moment when it ended and they made it out alive when they both should’ve been dead. But she also wasn’t hiding how much the incident upset her. Even knowing they were bad men, she’d had to kill most of them and it rattled her. Because she was Beth, and she was good, and that was something about her he couldn’t, wouldn’t, ask her to change.
“But it was you or it was them,” she whispered, huddling for warmth beside him in the little grove of trees. “And I wasn’t going to let you die, Daryl.”
Daryl dropped a kiss to her forehead and pulled her in close, until she curled up on his lap with her head on his chest. “Sorry you had to. But, Beth, you were fuckin’ amazing back there. You know that, right?”
She sighed, the sleepy sigh she always made except this time it was laced with something else he couldn’t quite read. “It’s because of you. It’s all you.”
“No.” He shook his head and tightened his arms around her. “You can look after yourself, remember?”
That made her giggle, even though it was a weak one, and her lips tugged up in a little smile. “You taught me how.”
“An’ you wanted to learn.”
She was quiet after that, for a little while. Long enough he thought she might have fallen asleep. But then she spoke, her voice soft and tremulous. “I never knew I could love you this much.”
Daryl smiled into her hair, felt his goddamn eyes start to water like the lovesick idiot he was. And he whispered, “I never believed in love, ‘til I burnt down a moonshine shack with you.”
What he loved best about making love to Beth, besides making love to Beth, were the noises she made. She weren’t a screamer—her loudest sounds barely competed with her laughter for volume—but she made lots of them. Soft sighs and drawn-out ones, breathless gasps and those almost musical cries when he buried his cock deep inside her. This sound, though, this guttural groan she dragged up from somewhere in her belly, this was his current favourite.
He’d never done this before, but going by the soundtrack—there it was again, that new groan that made him want to come into the floorboards—he wasn’t doing a bad job of it. Beth’s heels dug into his shoulders and her fingers clutched fleetingly at his hair, sometimes pulling, sometimes digging in and tangling ‘til he thought she might scalp him, but it’d be worth it for the taste of her alone. He would walk around for the rest of his life with a big bald head if it meant getting to hear her groan like that.
He thrust three fingers inside her, curled the way she liked best, while he teased her clit with the point of his tongue. Her thighs clamped around his head like a vice, and she pulled at his hair again, groaning that way while her stomach muscles clenched beneath his palm.
“Fuck, Daryl! Oooh, oooh I’m gonna—”
Beth came with a series of those groans, each one drawn out longer and longer until the last one ended in a breath of air, and he worked her through it with fingers and tongue until she relaxed her legs and the pull in his hair became a gentle tug. He crawled up until he was lookin’ down at her, and she smiled back up at him in that sleepy/satisfied way she had that pleased a part of him he didn’t even know he possessed.
She reached up and trailed her fingers down his chest, heading toward his belly where she knew damn well he was ticklish even if he tried his best not to admit it. “I thought you said you never did that before?”
“Can’t help it if you fall apart whenever I touch you, can I?” And he was teasing, but only sort of, because it weren’t a lie. He couldn’t believe how responsive she was, how she seemed to ache for his touch and how wet she was before he ever got there, but he weren’t gonna question it. He loved her for it, for trusting him enough to let go like that when they were together.
Judging by the extra flush of pink colouring her cheeks, she knew it too. But she was Beth. Beth who loved sex and wasn’t afraid to admit it, and she dragged her heels down the backs of his thighs, dug them in behind his knees and pulled.
They both groaned when he slid inside, when he filled her up until she surrounded him completely, buried in the heat of her, the desire of her. And he looked down at her and she looked up at him, that little smile still shining there that was all for him, the smile that did funny things to his insides.
“C’mere,” Beth whispered, her hands gliding over his shoulders to pull him down to her.
He tucked his face into the crook of her neck and Beth did the same, and wrapped her legs around him while they rocked slowly together on the floor of this little shed in the middle of nowhere. Her breath flitted over his skin, cooling the sweat and making him shiver while she shivered beneath him in the same way. He barely withdrew before sinking in again, but she tightened her muscles around him, squeezing him tighter each time he pushed back in, moaning into his neck and scraping his flesh with her teeth when he pressed in hard right at the end.
It wasn’t long before Beth was coming around him, and he was helpless to stop his own orgasm once he felt hers began, rolling through her body and into his where they were joined. She arched her back and he plunged into her, his groans drowning out hers as he spilled inside her. As hard as it was, tryin’ to pull out when he felt the end coming on, the truth of it was, as stupid and dangerous as it was, he never wanted to come anywhere but inside Beth, and Beth never made a move to stop him.
“I don’t even think it could happen,” Beth said, as she walked along the rusted rail, arms out beside her for balance.
The comment came out of nowhere, yet he had no trouble at all following along and jumping right in. “You haven’t… had that… since the prison, right?”
Livin’ on top of one another like this, even before the night of the fire, he couldn’t help but be aware of stuff like that. Made it easier to take the lack of evidence now when he knew she hadn’t bled at all in months.
Beth made a motion as though to shrug her shoulders, but it threw her off balance and she had to swing her arms around to recover. “I learned about this, in biology class,” she said, once she started walking again. “Women in survival mode, lack of body fat, bad diet. Even happens to like, extreme athletes. Kinda our reality right now.”
“Still,” he said, clearing his throat a little.
“Still.”
She was quiet for a bit, and he knew that meant she was thinking about what she wanted to say next.
“I don’t want it to happen,” she said, finally, hopping down from the rail to walk beside him on the ties. She looked up at him, eyes wide, worrying her bottom lip a little with her teeth. “Having—” Her cheeks coloured pink, and she cleared her throat as though forcing herself to continue. “Having a baby, when things are like this… It’s terrifying, and, like, what kinda life is this for a child?”
She was thinking about Lori, about Judith, and he knew it because he was thinkin’ about them, too. The list of what could go wrong, that made something once normal, mundane, into the riskiest situation they could encounter, was longer than he cared to consider. But—
“But if it wasn’t like this,” Beth said, voice dropping almost to a whisper, “if things were different and, it happened, Daryl—if it happened, I think I’d be okay with that.”
Her eyes were shiny when she looked back up at him, a bit of uncertainty there as though she thought this might be the thing that finally drove a wedge between them. She was wrong, though. Oh, it terrified him to the point sometimes where he couldn’t sleep after once again not pulling out, a fact he wouldn’t deny even if she asked though he was sure she knew it. Being a father weren’t something he ever wanted, and not just because he never thought he’d have the chance. But this was Beth, logical when she needed to be and still very much a woman who cared deeply, deeper than he thought any one person could, and if she felt this way, if she thought that having his baby could be something she’d be okay with—
And that was just the thing of it, because he didn’t want it to happen—neither did she—not now, not with the two of them on their own like this, without support, without shelter, without any sort of certainty. But if he took all that away, if he considered the idea in absence of the danger—yeah, he could feel the same warmth in his belly as he felt in her whispered words. Beth, with his baby…
So he wrapped his arm around her waist and reeled her in until she tucked up into his side and slipped her arm around him, too. And he couldn’t speak, because he didn’t really know what to say, but the thing about Beth was she didn’t ever need him to say a word.
“Because it’s you,” she said, speaking for him in the end—because that was the truth of it. “Because it’s us.”
Mid-afternoon on a cloudy day, they came across the final sign before reaching Terminus. They could easily get there by nightfall, but the idea of the place still made him uneasy, and Beth felt the same way.
“Can we just stop, for the day?” she asked, eyes following the coloured-in track lines toward the centre of the map. “Go in early tomorrow and check things out first?”
Relief settled onto his shoulders, because he weren’t ready to find the end of the line yet, either. Too many questions—what was Terminus, could they really trust it, were any of their family even there?—but if Beth had wanted to go tonight he’d have pressed on despite his misgivings. He should’ve known better. The two of them had fallen more and more in sync and now, more than four months since the prison fell, he could barely think a thought without seeing it written across her face, too.
So they left the tracks and headed into the woods, backtracking from the sign a ways, too, since it felt like a boundary, like the edge of guarded territory. They walked for a while, looking for a cabin or a structure of some sort. Nothing man-made appeared to them, though, so they made their camp as they usually did, except instead of a clearing, this time they stopped beneath a bit of a cliff, where a rock overhanging provided a bit of shelter from the wind and the trees grew thick around them, hiding them from view. Terminus within walking distance kept him a bit on edge, and he could see it in the way Beth kept glancing over her shoulder while she set up their alarm.
Having the cliff at their backs helped, and once they got their little fire going it was almost cozy beneath the little ledge.
“I hope they’re all right,” Beth said, sipping at her fire-warmed water.
Daryl stroked the back of her neck with his fingers, smiling when she shivered a bit beneath his touch. “Me too.”
He didn’t know what they’d find, once they reached Terminus. Two months ago, Maggie was alive. Maggie, Sasha, and Bob, lookin’ for Glenn. Of the others, they’d seen no signs, but that didn’t rule anything out, just made it less likely. Beth held onto the hope that they would find everyone, eventually, alive and as well as they could be, surviving out here just like the two of them. Part of him wanted to deny that, but mostly he found his heart leaning toward hers on this. It was unlikely, so fucking unlikely, yet the hope that burned in her heart had seared into his, and all he wanted was to prove the universe wrong, to let it find out the hard way that Beth Greene was right all along.
Nothing. In the end, Terminus was nothing. Just burnt out ruins and walkers amongst the wreckage. Something had gone down here, something terrible, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of it now, weeks or maybe months later. And he didn’t try, either, just gathered Beth up in his arms and let her cry into his chest.
The day after Terminus, Beth caught her first deer. The light in her eyes, the light that had dimmed for a while, flared to life again when her arrow hit home and the deer fell dead on the spot. And she breathed out a deep, heavy breath, fighting the grin that eventually took over, lighting her face up until the smile ran over onto his face, too.
“Did you see?” she asked, sounding kinda breathless.
“I saw,” he said, setting down his own bow because he knew where this was gonna go. “Good shot, Greene.”
He wasn’t surprised when his back hit the tree a moment later, arms full of Beth, her lips hot on his, her tongue pushing through the loose seam of his lips. Daryl dug his fingers into her hair and spun them around, landing her back on the tree without breaking the kiss. She practically climbed up his body, then, digging her heels into the backs of his legs, shimmying up with her arms around his neck until she was positioned just right, and he ground his erection into her, both of them groaning even though still fully clothed.
Didn’t take long to get her out of her jeans and unbutton his, and when he slid into her it was like coming home, as fucking cliché as that sounded, because Beth Greene was the only home he needed.
Her eyes bored into his and refused to let go, and he pounded into her, slamming her body into the trunk as hard as she drove herself onto him. And she mighta been full of him but he was full of her in a different way, a way that bubbled up and out of his chest in between the moans, between the noises their lovemaking drew out of them both.
“Daryl…” Beth groaned into the woods, tightened her legs around his hips, tightened her muscles around his cock and pulled him in, into her body and just into her. “God… don’t stop.”
Never. He’d never stop. Loving Beth Greene was the greatest thing that ever happened to him, the easiest, the best thing he’d ever done. No matter what happened, he wasn’t letting go.
“We better start looking for somewhere to spend the winter.”
The rain hadn’t let up all day, and there was a chill in the air that seeped right into their bones. The past month they circled the area around Terminus, but found only remnants of things that had gone on, never any of the people involved. He was really starting to wonder about what she’d said, those months ago at the shack, about him bein’ the last man standing. Last man and woman standing, he amended, watching Beth staring up at the statue of Christ in the ruined church they found.
He didn’t want to stop searching, not for either one of their sakes, because he hadn’t known how much her hope, their hope, kept him going. But they couldn’t spend the winter on the run, not without the support of a group like that first winter after the farm. Their best chance was to find somewhere to stay and start gathering supplies and hunting game to see them through to spring.
Beth turned away from the statue, eyes a bit shiny. “We’re not giving up, though,” she said, echoing his thoughts more than she could realize.
Daryl reached for her, and she tucked herself into his arms. “No,” he whispered. “I never will.”
Beth smiled against his chest and giggled softly. “I never thought you could.”
The decision to leave Terminus and the surrounding area was not one made lightly, but the sort of place Daryl hoped to find, a good solid cabin in the woods, close enough to a town that they could make supply runs, but far enough out to hide them, just didn’t exist around here. So after months of travelling, they ended up heading back the way they came.
Frost covered the world in the mornings now, and today, though the sun shone bright overhead, the frost lingered in the shade throughout the day and even in the sun the ground didn’t quite thaw out all the way. A large group of walkers forced them to take a detour out of the woods around midday, and they avoided them successfully. Their detour brought them out onto a road, which Daryl tried to avoid when he could, but he wanted to put a good-sized river between them and the herd and the quickest way to do that was to stick to the pavement and head back to the woods once they crossed the bridge.
“A few miles, maybe,” he said to Beth, when she glanced at the road and looked at him with her eyebrow raised.
“All right,” she said, reaching to take his hand. “Kinda nice for a change, havin’ the sun on our backs.”
It was, actually, even though being so exposed made his belly tighten with nerves. Leave it to Beth, though, to come up with the silver lining. ‘Cause he might be nervous, but at least he was warm now, out of the cool shade of the woods. And he held her hand and let her swing it between them, like the obnoxious lovebirds he knew they were no matter how hard he tried to tell himself otherwise, and he could almost pretend, right then and there, that the world wasn’t shit, that the frost on the trees was just something beautiful and not a harbinger of the hard winter ahead, and that he and his girl were just out for a walk in the afternoon sun.
Lost in the daydream, he didn’t see the vehicle until they’d almost reached the river, tucked off the side of the road just before the start of the bridge. And by then, they heard the walkers below, heard the shouts of people fighting them and then—then—the cry of the baby.
There wasn’t time for discussion. They pulled their crossbows from their backs and ran onto the bridge, loosing their arrows into the fray below. A dozen walkers, more of them pilling out of the woods even as the previous waves fell, trapped a group of five—four adults and the baby—between them and the fast-flowing river. They looked like they knew how to fight, and walkers were falling everywhere, but they were so outnumbered Daryl was certain they’d be dead soon if he and Beth hadn’t shown up to even the odds.
A shout came from below. “Run!”
Daryl kept shooting, he and Beth providing the cover the little group needed to scramble back up the steep path to the road. The guy with the baby came first, then the others, and he was almost out of ammo by the time the last of them made it to safety. Beth’s crossbow clattered to the bridge deck, and he looked over at her standing there, eyes wide, mouth open like she’d seen a ghost. And it occurred to him, after a moment where nobody spoke at all, that he better turn around.
Rick. Michonne. Carol. Carl—tall, grown-up Carl—holding Judith.
There. Standing on the same goddamn bridge in the same middle of nowhere highway on the same fucking day. Alive. Alive like she fucking knew they would be.
Daryl’s legs stopped workin’ right, and he dropped to his knees on the pavement. He didn’t know if he was laughing or crying or some stupid combination of both and he really didn’t care. Because they were alive, and she was right.
Take that, universe. Beth was right. She was right all along.
They all piled into Rick’s SUV after reuniting on the bridge and taking a few quick minutes to gather up some arrows, and headed for what turned out to be a temporary camp just a few miles further down the road. They were all there—Glenn and Maggie, Tyreese, Sasha, and Bob—plus half a dozen new faces. Daryl caught Beth’s eyes from across the clearing, over Maggie’s shoulder where, ten minutes on, the elder Greene sister still hadn’t let go. And behind the tears, both his and hers because they were kinda flowin’ freely right now and he couldn’t stop it if he tried, he saw her joy, her pride in herself that she hadn’t given up and that they’d gotten here at last.
When they’d all shed their tears, shared their hugs, everyone gathered around the fire. Beth extracted herself from Maggie to tuck in beside him like she always did, and Daryl noticed the curious looks that drew from the crowd, especially when his arm went around her to pull her in close, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t like they were gonna try to hide it anyway.
The stories came, then, about what happened to each of them when they left the prison, how they met up in Terminus and what had gone down there. Beth gasped softly when she realized that Gabriel’s church was the one they’d stood inside, just a few short weeks ago, when they made the decision to stop for the winter. They heard about D.C., and the aborted attempt to go there. On the reasons why, people were mostly silent, but the strange guy with the mullet seemed to shrink back a little when the topic came up.
“So we came back,” Rick said, his gaze travelling back and forth between Daryl’s and Beth’s faces. “And we found you two.”
Beth giggled and Daryl laughed at the same time, making Rick’s eyebrows shoot up a little but Daryl paid that no mind. “Think the two of us found you, brother.”
“And something else too, I think?” Carol suggested, and Daryl might’ve scowled at her if not for that stupid sweet smile on her face.
The stories continued on and Daryl mostly listened, holding Beth close while she told their story, at least the parts of it she wanted to share, about getting out together from the prison, running from a herd for a full day until they’d hidden inside that car, about living rough and learning to hunt and even what happened the day they found her crossbow—since Carol had remarked how surprised she’d been to realize the second archer was Beth—right up to finding the remnants of Terminus, searching for signs and finding nothing.
“So we headed back, and found you.”
The conversation that settled around after that was the general kind, and though a question or two travelled their way, mostly he and Beth retreated into each other. She’d started to cry, sometime after the end of her story, not with big heaving sobs, just a flood of tears and quiet, almost giggly little breaths. She was happy, he knew, so happy she couldn’t keep it in, and there were other things in there too but he wouldn’t push her about it now.
So instead he rested his cheek on her forehead and with gentle fingers swiped away some of the moisture on her cheeks. “I never thought I’d be so glad to see you cryin’.”
Beth laughed, turning to hide her face in his shirt because she was now crying and giggling and getting snot everywhere. “I never—”
She couldn’t finish, but that was okay. He knew what she meant. “I fucking love you, you know that, right?”
She did, and the clutch of her fingers at his chest was proof enough. “I love you, too, Daryl Dixon,” she whispered, kinda blubbered actually, her words wet and emotional and muffled in his shirt. “And I’m not gonna stop.”
And the only response was the simplest one, even though the poet inside him wanted to write her sonnets about burning fires and the light in her eyes and the warmth inside where her love for him lived. Instead, he smiled into her hair and whispered, “Never.”
Beth’s next breath held a hint of a sigh, and she burrowed even deeper into his arms. “Never.”
Author: Abelina/Abby/Abelinajt
Fandom/Pairing: The Walking Dead – Beth Greene/Daryl Dixon (Bethyl)
Rating/Warnings: M/E for sexual content, language, violence.
Summary: The night they burned the shack to the ground, Daryl Dixon has a revelation. Now they’re running through the night together like a pair of wild things, and when Beth Greene takes his hand, he realizes he never wants to let go. He wasn’t sure where they were goin’, but for the first time since the prison fell, he felt like they were moving forward, heading for something instead of just tryin’ to survive. And that, he knew, was entirely because of Beth Greene. An alternate timeline following the events of Still.
Notes: This was written as a very long one-shot, clearly too long for LJ so I've broken into three pieces for posting, but it's meant to be read as one long fic, not concise individual chapters.
All Parts Here
They were kinda like idiots over the next few weeks, the sort of clingy lovebirds he’d’a laughed at once upon a time, except he got it now. But Daryl didn’t think they really understood what it was like to find your other half, those morons back when the dead didn’t walk, when the most trouble they were gonna have was over not gettin’ extra sauce on their burger.
So he figured they kinda had the right to be obnoxious, especially since nobody else was around to be bothered by it. And truth be told, he liked the feel of her fingers in his, liked the way she giggled and how she made him grin like a fuckin’ lunatic. Really, he just fucking loved her and he let that out in whatever way it wanted to shine.
They couldn’t always risk it, making love like that first night—and they’d called it sex, but they both knew better—but that didn’t stop them from revisiting the tree idea, or whatever they could manage to accomplish with whatever time they had. And they tried to be careful, they did, but even Beth had to admit it wasn’t that easy.
Often, though, they just sat together through the evening, between eating supper—if they caught something that night—and when Beth would lay down to sleep, talking most nights, playing their game of ‘I never’ and sometimes—lotsa times—kissing each other breathless. Then Beth would sleep, laying her head on Daryl’s lap or sometimes cuddled up in front of him. Daryl always took first watch, not for any reason other than they’d sorta always done it that way.
"I never heard you laugh, before that night at the shack," said Beth.
It didn’t really matter anymore whether anyone drank anything or not. ‘I never’ had become a way to tell each other things they might not have had the balls to say otherwise, though that was more his problem than Beth’s.
"I never knew how."
Beth didn’t take another turn once he answered, instead just tucked her head beneath his chin and snuggled into his side. He tightened his arms around her and looked up to the sky, to the stars shining down on them and thanked whoever up there might be responsible for bringing Beth Greene into his life. Because lord knows he didn’t deserve her, but he wasn’t gonna let that get in the way.
*~*
They’d been following the railroad tracks for a while when the weather started changing. The leaves had been turning brown for weeks now, but it had still been hot as hell out until today. There had been cloudy days of course, over the months they’d been travelling, but today’s overcast sky came with a chill.
So they’d diverted from the tracks into a little town, taking on the risk of walkers in order to find some warmer clothes. When Beth found the sporting goods store, looted yes but still with a ton of crap inside, her eyes practically begged him to look.
He really should’ve questioned things when they found the bow. The fucking deluxe ladies model that was more than good enough for Beth to use, and even better than that was she could draw it herself. The place had no guns and no bullets, but a full stock of arrows and arrow tips and they loaded as many as they could into their bag. Amongst the former merchandise littering rest of the store, which had been picked over but not fully, they managed to find a couple of long sleeve shirts each plus a fleece-lined hoodie that fit Beth.
She didn’t say, but they both knew the smaller stuff got left behind because the smaller people didn’t always make it.
“Good thing you’re tough,” he told her, tapping her nose with his finger and making her giggle.
He should’ve known, when Beth drew the bow with ease and bullseyed the target he’d drawn outside on the post, that their luck was gonna run out.
But he didn’t know it until later, until they’d decided to chance searching the gas station for some canned goods instead of getting out of there like they should have. Didn’t know it until the group of men charged down the street at them, an angry horde demanding their arrows back because they were claimed, whatever the fuck that meant. And by then it was too late, he had an arrow pointed at his face and one of the fuckers had Beth’s arms pinned behind her back, talkin’ shit about claiming her.
And Daryl should’ve known, but he didn’t, not fully, just how strong a woman Beth Greene really was.
*~*
“I’m nobody’s claim!”
Beth’s words pierced through the shouting of the men, but they didn’t stop to listen, they merely stopped to laugh, and that was their mistake.
Before he could blink, Beth headbutted the man holding her, and when he cried out and let go, she whirled on him and buried her knife in his belly. And the archer on him wavered for a second, a split second but long enough for Daryl to loose his bolt and shoot the guy through the head at close range. Before he fell, Daryl shoved both dead man and crossbow into the others behind him, knocking them off balance so he could draw his knife.
And then they were on him, and he lost sight of Beth in the melee, but he couldn’t stop to look for her now because it was five to one and he didn’t like the odds but he wasn’t about to go down without a fight. He took one out with his knife, which he lost when the man went down, and he took a blow to the kidney and was struggling to stay up. If he went down they had him and then—then Beth.
He heard the thunk of an arrow. Then another. And a third, and suddenly it was just him and this other guy, a silver-haired asshole lookin’ like some sorta cowboy biker. And even though his buddies were all dead at his feet, Beth’s arrows in their heads, the asshole had the balls to smirk at him like he was still gonna win.
And that’s when he drew a gun.
“She’s out of ammo, and you’re down to just your fists,” drawled the man, looking Beth up and down over Daryl’s shoulder. “Can’t say the odds are on your side right now, though points to you for your well-trained bitch.”
Daryl clenched his fists until his rough nails dug into his palms, but he was stuck, again, because there was nothing he could do that didn’t end with him dead and Beth left on her own with this asshole and his damned intentions.
“So here’s how I see this going down.” The man was cocky, confident, his grip loose on the gun like he knew it didn’t matter. “You’re going to get on your knees, and you’re going to beg. But ah, no, not for your life. You’re gonna die no matter what, you understand that, don’t you? Good. No, you see, you’re gonna beg me for hers.”
“No. He won’t.”
Daryl didn’t understand, at first, what happened. After Beth spoke, the douchebag wannabe cowboy dropped to his knees, the gun clattering to the pavement. And he made some strange wheezy, gurgling noise before he fell over sideways. It was then that he saw Beth’s knife sticking out of his throat, the fucking thing still quivering from its flight through the air.
He whirled around and she was there in an instant, up and in his arms, and they dropped to the pavement together in the middle of the carnage. But they couldn’t stay here—if there weren’t walkers now where would be soon. Beth scrubbed her hand across her teary eyes and nodded, and as quick as they could they retrieved their bows, knives, and arrows, the dropped gun, and got the hell out of there like they should’ve done in the first place.
*~*
Beth didn’t cry, not after that moment when it ended and they made it out alive when they both should’ve been dead. But she also wasn’t hiding how much the incident upset her. Even knowing they were bad men, she’d had to kill most of them and it rattled her. Because she was Beth, and she was good, and that was something about her he couldn’t, wouldn’t, ask her to change.
“But it was you or it was them,” she whispered, huddling for warmth beside him in the little grove of trees. “And I wasn’t going to let you die, Daryl.”
Daryl dropped a kiss to her forehead and pulled her in close, until she curled up on his lap with her head on his chest. “Sorry you had to. But, Beth, you were fuckin’ amazing back there. You know that, right?”
She sighed, the sleepy sigh she always made except this time it was laced with something else he couldn’t quite read. “It’s because of you. It’s all you.”
“No.” He shook his head and tightened his arms around her. “You can look after yourself, remember?”
That made her giggle, even though it was a weak one, and her lips tugged up in a little smile. “You taught me how.”
“An’ you wanted to learn.”
She was quiet after that, for a little while. Long enough he thought she might have fallen asleep. But then she spoke, her voice soft and tremulous. “I never knew I could love you this much.”
Daryl smiled into her hair, felt his goddamn eyes start to water like the lovesick idiot he was. And he whispered, “I never believed in love, ‘til I burnt down a moonshine shack with you.”
*~*
What he loved best about making love to Beth, besides making love to Beth, were the noises she made. She weren’t a screamer—her loudest sounds barely competed with her laughter for volume—but she made lots of them. Soft sighs and drawn-out ones, breathless gasps and those almost musical cries when he buried his cock deep inside her. This sound, though, this guttural groan she dragged up from somewhere in her belly, this was his current favourite.
He’d never done this before, but going by the soundtrack—there it was again, that new groan that made him want to come into the floorboards—he wasn’t doing a bad job of it. Beth’s heels dug into his shoulders and her fingers clutched fleetingly at his hair, sometimes pulling, sometimes digging in and tangling ‘til he thought she might scalp him, but it’d be worth it for the taste of her alone. He would walk around for the rest of his life with a big bald head if it meant getting to hear her groan like that.
He thrust three fingers inside her, curled the way she liked best, while he teased her clit with the point of his tongue. Her thighs clamped around his head like a vice, and she pulled at his hair again, groaning that way while her stomach muscles clenched beneath his palm.
“Fuck, Daryl! Oooh, oooh I’m gonna—”
Beth came with a series of those groans, each one drawn out longer and longer until the last one ended in a breath of air, and he worked her through it with fingers and tongue until she relaxed her legs and the pull in his hair became a gentle tug. He crawled up until he was lookin’ down at her, and she smiled back up at him in that sleepy/satisfied way she had that pleased a part of him he didn’t even know he possessed.
She reached up and trailed her fingers down his chest, heading toward his belly where she knew damn well he was ticklish even if he tried his best not to admit it. “I thought you said you never did that before?”
“Can’t help it if you fall apart whenever I touch you, can I?” And he was teasing, but only sort of, because it weren’t a lie. He couldn’t believe how responsive she was, how she seemed to ache for his touch and how wet she was before he ever got there, but he weren’t gonna question it. He loved her for it, for trusting him enough to let go like that when they were together.
Judging by the extra flush of pink colouring her cheeks, she knew it too. But she was Beth. Beth who loved sex and wasn’t afraid to admit it, and she dragged her heels down the backs of his thighs, dug them in behind his knees and pulled.
They both groaned when he slid inside, when he filled her up until she surrounded him completely, buried in the heat of her, the desire of her. And he looked down at her and she looked up at him, that little smile still shining there that was all for him, the smile that did funny things to his insides.
“C’mere,” Beth whispered, her hands gliding over his shoulders to pull him down to her.
He tucked his face into the crook of her neck and Beth did the same, and wrapped her legs around him while they rocked slowly together on the floor of this little shed in the middle of nowhere. Her breath flitted over his skin, cooling the sweat and making him shiver while she shivered beneath him in the same way. He barely withdrew before sinking in again, but she tightened her muscles around him, squeezing him tighter each time he pushed back in, moaning into his neck and scraping his flesh with her teeth when he pressed in hard right at the end.
It wasn’t long before Beth was coming around him, and he was helpless to stop his own orgasm once he felt hers began, rolling through her body and into his where they were joined. She arched her back and he plunged into her, his groans drowning out hers as he spilled inside her. As hard as it was, tryin’ to pull out when he felt the end coming on, the truth of it was, as stupid and dangerous as it was, he never wanted to come anywhere but inside Beth, and Beth never made a move to stop him.
*~*
“I don’t even think it could happen,” Beth said, as she walked along the rusted rail, arms out beside her for balance.
The comment came out of nowhere, yet he had no trouble at all following along and jumping right in. “You haven’t… had that… since the prison, right?”
Livin’ on top of one another like this, even before the night of the fire, he couldn’t help but be aware of stuff like that. Made it easier to take the lack of evidence now when he knew she hadn’t bled at all in months.
Beth made a motion as though to shrug her shoulders, but it threw her off balance and she had to swing her arms around to recover. “I learned about this, in biology class,” she said, once she started walking again. “Women in survival mode, lack of body fat, bad diet. Even happens to like, extreme athletes. Kinda our reality right now.”
“Still,” he said, clearing his throat a little.
“Still.”
She was quiet for a bit, and he knew that meant she was thinking about what she wanted to say next.
“I don’t want it to happen,” she said, finally, hopping down from the rail to walk beside him on the ties. She looked up at him, eyes wide, worrying her bottom lip a little with her teeth. “Having—” Her cheeks coloured pink, and she cleared her throat as though forcing herself to continue. “Having a baby, when things are like this… It’s terrifying, and, like, what kinda life is this for a child?”
She was thinking about Lori, about Judith, and he knew it because he was thinkin’ about them, too. The list of what could go wrong, that made something once normal, mundane, into the riskiest situation they could encounter, was longer than he cared to consider. But—
“But if it wasn’t like this,” Beth said, voice dropping almost to a whisper, “if things were different and, it happened, Daryl—if it happened, I think I’d be okay with that.”
Her eyes were shiny when she looked back up at him, a bit of uncertainty there as though she thought this might be the thing that finally drove a wedge between them. She was wrong, though. Oh, it terrified him to the point sometimes where he couldn’t sleep after once again not pulling out, a fact he wouldn’t deny even if she asked though he was sure she knew it. Being a father weren’t something he ever wanted, and not just because he never thought he’d have the chance. But this was Beth, logical when she needed to be and still very much a woman who cared deeply, deeper than he thought any one person could, and if she felt this way, if she thought that having his baby could be something she’d be okay with—
And that was just the thing of it, because he didn’t want it to happen—neither did she—not now, not with the two of them on their own like this, without support, without shelter, without any sort of certainty. But if he took all that away, if he considered the idea in absence of the danger—yeah, he could feel the same warmth in his belly as he felt in her whispered words. Beth, with his baby…
So he wrapped his arm around her waist and reeled her in until she tucked up into his side and slipped her arm around him, too. And he couldn’t speak, because he didn’t really know what to say, but the thing about Beth was she didn’t ever need him to say a word.
“Because it’s you,” she said, speaking for him in the end—because that was the truth of it. “Because it’s us.”
*~*
Mid-afternoon on a cloudy day, they came across the final sign before reaching Terminus. They could easily get there by nightfall, but the idea of the place still made him uneasy, and Beth felt the same way.
“Can we just stop, for the day?” she asked, eyes following the coloured-in track lines toward the centre of the map. “Go in early tomorrow and check things out first?”
Relief settled onto his shoulders, because he weren’t ready to find the end of the line yet, either. Too many questions—what was Terminus, could they really trust it, were any of their family even there?—but if Beth had wanted to go tonight he’d have pressed on despite his misgivings. He should’ve known better. The two of them had fallen more and more in sync and now, more than four months since the prison fell, he could barely think a thought without seeing it written across her face, too.
So they left the tracks and headed into the woods, backtracking from the sign a ways, too, since it felt like a boundary, like the edge of guarded territory. They walked for a while, looking for a cabin or a structure of some sort. Nothing man-made appeared to them, though, so they made their camp as they usually did, except instead of a clearing, this time they stopped beneath a bit of a cliff, where a rock overhanging provided a bit of shelter from the wind and the trees grew thick around them, hiding them from view. Terminus within walking distance kept him a bit on edge, and he could see it in the way Beth kept glancing over her shoulder while she set up their alarm.
Having the cliff at their backs helped, and once they got their little fire going it was almost cozy beneath the little ledge.
“I hope they’re all right,” Beth said, sipping at her fire-warmed water.
Daryl stroked the back of her neck with his fingers, smiling when she shivered a bit beneath his touch. “Me too.”
He didn’t know what they’d find, once they reached Terminus. Two months ago, Maggie was alive. Maggie, Sasha, and Bob, lookin’ for Glenn. Of the others, they’d seen no signs, but that didn’t rule anything out, just made it less likely. Beth held onto the hope that they would find everyone, eventually, alive and as well as they could be, surviving out here just like the two of them. Part of him wanted to deny that, but mostly he found his heart leaning toward hers on this. It was unlikely, so fucking unlikely, yet the hope that burned in her heart had seared into his, and all he wanted was to prove the universe wrong, to let it find out the hard way that Beth Greene was right all along.
*~*
Nothing. In the end, Terminus was nothing. Just burnt out ruins and walkers amongst the wreckage. Something had gone down here, something terrible, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of it now, weeks or maybe months later. And he didn’t try, either, just gathered Beth up in his arms and let her cry into his chest.
*~*
The day after Terminus, Beth caught her first deer. The light in her eyes, the light that had dimmed for a while, flared to life again when her arrow hit home and the deer fell dead on the spot. And she breathed out a deep, heavy breath, fighting the grin that eventually took over, lighting her face up until the smile ran over onto his face, too.
“Did you see?” she asked, sounding kinda breathless.
“I saw,” he said, setting down his own bow because he knew where this was gonna go. “Good shot, Greene.”
He wasn’t surprised when his back hit the tree a moment later, arms full of Beth, her lips hot on his, her tongue pushing through the loose seam of his lips. Daryl dug his fingers into her hair and spun them around, landing her back on the tree without breaking the kiss. She practically climbed up his body, then, digging her heels into the backs of his legs, shimmying up with her arms around his neck until she was positioned just right, and he ground his erection into her, both of them groaning even though still fully clothed.
Didn’t take long to get her out of her jeans and unbutton his, and when he slid into her it was like coming home, as fucking cliché as that sounded, because Beth Greene was the only home he needed.
Her eyes bored into his and refused to let go, and he pounded into her, slamming her body into the trunk as hard as she drove herself onto him. And she mighta been full of him but he was full of her in a different way, a way that bubbled up and out of his chest in between the moans, between the noises their lovemaking drew out of them both.
“Daryl…” Beth groaned into the woods, tightened her legs around his hips, tightened her muscles around his cock and pulled him in, into her body and just into her. “God… don’t stop.”
Never. He’d never stop. Loving Beth Greene was the greatest thing that ever happened to him, the easiest, the best thing he’d ever done. No matter what happened, he wasn’t letting go.
*~*
“We better start looking for somewhere to spend the winter.”
The rain hadn’t let up all day, and there was a chill in the air that seeped right into their bones. The past month they circled the area around Terminus, but found only remnants of things that had gone on, never any of the people involved. He was really starting to wonder about what she’d said, those months ago at the shack, about him bein’ the last man standing. Last man and woman standing, he amended, watching Beth staring up at the statue of Christ in the ruined church they found.
He didn’t want to stop searching, not for either one of their sakes, because he hadn’t known how much her hope, their hope, kept him going. But they couldn’t spend the winter on the run, not without the support of a group like that first winter after the farm. Their best chance was to find somewhere to stay and start gathering supplies and hunting game to see them through to spring.
Beth turned away from the statue, eyes a bit shiny. “We’re not giving up, though,” she said, echoing his thoughts more than she could realize.
Daryl reached for her, and she tucked herself into his arms. “No,” he whispered. “I never will.”
Beth smiled against his chest and giggled softly. “I never thought you could.”
*~*
The decision to leave Terminus and the surrounding area was not one made lightly, but the sort of place Daryl hoped to find, a good solid cabin in the woods, close enough to a town that they could make supply runs, but far enough out to hide them, just didn’t exist around here. So after months of travelling, they ended up heading back the way they came.
Frost covered the world in the mornings now, and today, though the sun shone bright overhead, the frost lingered in the shade throughout the day and even in the sun the ground didn’t quite thaw out all the way. A large group of walkers forced them to take a detour out of the woods around midday, and they avoided them successfully. Their detour brought them out onto a road, which Daryl tried to avoid when he could, but he wanted to put a good-sized river between them and the herd and the quickest way to do that was to stick to the pavement and head back to the woods once they crossed the bridge.
“A few miles, maybe,” he said to Beth, when she glanced at the road and looked at him with her eyebrow raised.
“All right,” she said, reaching to take his hand. “Kinda nice for a change, havin’ the sun on our backs.”
It was, actually, even though being so exposed made his belly tighten with nerves. Leave it to Beth, though, to come up with the silver lining. ‘Cause he might be nervous, but at least he was warm now, out of the cool shade of the woods. And he held her hand and let her swing it between them, like the obnoxious lovebirds he knew they were no matter how hard he tried to tell himself otherwise, and he could almost pretend, right then and there, that the world wasn’t shit, that the frost on the trees was just something beautiful and not a harbinger of the hard winter ahead, and that he and his girl were just out for a walk in the afternoon sun.
Lost in the daydream, he didn’t see the vehicle until they’d almost reached the river, tucked off the side of the road just before the start of the bridge. And by then, they heard the walkers below, heard the shouts of people fighting them and then—then—the cry of the baby.
There wasn’t time for discussion. They pulled their crossbows from their backs and ran onto the bridge, loosing their arrows into the fray below. A dozen walkers, more of them pilling out of the woods even as the previous waves fell, trapped a group of five—four adults and the baby—between them and the fast-flowing river. They looked like they knew how to fight, and walkers were falling everywhere, but they were so outnumbered Daryl was certain they’d be dead soon if he and Beth hadn’t shown up to even the odds.
A shout came from below. “Run!”
Daryl kept shooting, he and Beth providing the cover the little group needed to scramble back up the steep path to the road. The guy with the baby came first, then the others, and he was almost out of ammo by the time the last of them made it to safety. Beth’s crossbow clattered to the bridge deck, and he looked over at her standing there, eyes wide, mouth open like she’d seen a ghost. And it occurred to him, after a moment where nobody spoke at all, that he better turn around.
Rick. Michonne. Carol. Carl—tall, grown-up Carl—holding Judith.
There. Standing on the same goddamn bridge in the same middle of nowhere highway on the same fucking day. Alive. Alive like she fucking knew they would be.
Daryl’s legs stopped workin’ right, and he dropped to his knees on the pavement. He didn’t know if he was laughing or crying or some stupid combination of both and he really didn’t care. Because they were alive, and she was right.
Take that, universe. Beth was right. She was right all along.
*~*
They all piled into Rick’s SUV after reuniting on the bridge and taking a few quick minutes to gather up some arrows, and headed for what turned out to be a temporary camp just a few miles further down the road. They were all there—Glenn and Maggie, Tyreese, Sasha, and Bob—plus half a dozen new faces. Daryl caught Beth’s eyes from across the clearing, over Maggie’s shoulder where, ten minutes on, the elder Greene sister still hadn’t let go. And behind the tears, both his and hers because they were kinda flowin’ freely right now and he couldn’t stop it if he tried, he saw her joy, her pride in herself that she hadn’t given up and that they’d gotten here at last.
When they’d all shed their tears, shared their hugs, everyone gathered around the fire. Beth extracted herself from Maggie to tuck in beside him like she always did, and Daryl noticed the curious looks that drew from the crowd, especially when his arm went around her to pull her in close, but he didn’t care. It wasn’t like they were gonna try to hide it anyway.
The stories came, then, about what happened to each of them when they left the prison, how they met up in Terminus and what had gone down there. Beth gasped softly when she realized that Gabriel’s church was the one they’d stood inside, just a few short weeks ago, when they made the decision to stop for the winter. They heard about D.C., and the aborted attempt to go there. On the reasons why, people were mostly silent, but the strange guy with the mullet seemed to shrink back a little when the topic came up.
“So we came back,” Rick said, his gaze travelling back and forth between Daryl’s and Beth’s faces. “And we found you two.”
Beth giggled and Daryl laughed at the same time, making Rick’s eyebrows shoot up a little but Daryl paid that no mind. “Think the two of us found you, brother.”
“And something else too, I think?” Carol suggested, and Daryl might’ve scowled at her if not for that stupid sweet smile on her face.
The stories continued on and Daryl mostly listened, holding Beth close while she told their story, at least the parts of it she wanted to share, about getting out together from the prison, running from a herd for a full day until they’d hidden inside that car, about living rough and learning to hunt and even what happened the day they found her crossbow—since Carol had remarked how surprised she’d been to realize the second archer was Beth—right up to finding the remnants of Terminus, searching for signs and finding nothing.
“So we headed back, and found you.”
The conversation that settled around after that was the general kind, and though a question or two travelled their way, mostly he and Beth retreated into each other. She’d started to cry, sometime after the end of her story, not with big heaving sobs, just a flood of tears and quiet, almost giggly little breaths. She was happy, he knew, so happy she couldn’t keep it in, and there were other things in there too but he wouldn’t push her about it now.
So instead he rested his cheek on her forehead and with gentle fingers swiped away some of the moisture on her cheeks. “I never thought I’d be so glad to see you cryin’.”
Beth laughed, turning to hide her face in his shirt because she was now crying and giggling and getting snot everywhere. “I never—”
She couldn’t finish, but that was okay. He knew what she meant. “I fucking love you, you know that, right?”
She did, and the clutch of her fingers at his chest was proof enough. “I love you, too, Daryl Dixon,” she whispered, kinda blubbered actually, her words wet and emotional and muffled in his shirt. “And I’m not gonna stop.”
And the only response was the simplest one, even though the poet inside him wanted to write her sonnets about burning fires and the light in her eyes and the warmth inside where her love for him lived. Instead, he smiled into her hair and whispered, “Never.”
Beth’s next breath held a hint of a sigh, and she burrowed even deeper into his arms. “Never.”
~ Fin