You know. I had all of these intricate plans about how I was going to not do this.

"Did you hear the news?" Aaron has a way of reading Daryl that manages to be both comfortable and mildly alarming. He watches him carefully as he speaks. He doesn't say 'good' news, the way that a lot of other people would. He understands that to Daryl it's not good news or bad news until it proves itself. It's just news, and maybe it's leaning towards bad for reasons that Aaron doesn't dismiss, no matter how tempting.

"'Bout Maggie?" Daryl guesses, stomping out his cigarette and watching the ashes flutter towards the spokes of his bike.

"Maggie and Glenn," Aaron shrugs, judicious, as always, he pauses in packing up the trunk, and looks at Daryl square, gaging a reaction, like maybe it's worse than he thought.

I guess he's got something to do with it. Daryl nods, and because it's Aaron he doesn't have to fake excitement, or hide worry, or every say anything about it. He knows. It means things.

"While we're out there, we should keep an eye out for baby things," Aaron is practical like that, but there's a warmth in his voice that gives away hope for the best.

"Yeah," he's long past trying to ignore the ache, he just lets it rest right where it belongs, pressing against his shoulders and into his chest, like someone wrapped around him, squeezing. He's got more practice at hope these days, but he's no expert, awkwardly, he tries his hand at a little optimism, "I 'spose we'd need that stuff sooner or later…" but he trails off, realizing that he's already imagining everything going wrong, Maggie dying before the baby can come to term. The baby being born but not thriving. Maggie dying like Lori did.

Sometime, it will work. Sometime, for someone. That's as much hope as he can get. Wanting it to work for Maggie and Glenn is a dearest hope, but it makes him angry, the more he wants something, the bloodier it ends.

"Exactly," says Aaron with a small smile. "I'm just going to go say goodbye to Eric and then we'll head out. Maybe, ten minutes?"

Daryl nods him off, hands in his pockets. He's not looking forward to this trip. Usually, he can't wait to get outside of these walls. But going back there?

He and Glenn had exchanged some sharp words about it, the night before when he told Daryl that Maggie was pregnant. They didn't part on good terms. Looking up, Daryl sees Glenn down the street, making a beeline towards him, "Ah, shit," he grumbles. The man just can't leave well enough alone, he's got to try and what? Mend fences?

Daryl snorts. He and Glenn aren't like neighbors who've gotta work out their differences to keep the peace. Daryl would die for Glenn, and Glenn would die for Daryl. He ain't worried about leaving for weeks with them mad at each other, but Glenn would be. He'd worry.

It's plain on his face that he wants to kiss and make-up before Daryl dives back into the wild. His face is hard as he nears Daryl, lips in a thin line. "Hey." He glances at the gate.

"What do ya gotta say, Glenn?" Daryl put out his cigarette too damn soon, it's glaring up at him from the ground, knowing that he regrets discarding it.

With a sigh, that ends with a locked jaw, Glenn gives away his continued anger. "You've gotta snap out of this, Daryl."

"I gotta?!" Daryl flares up at that, "It ain't me who's got the problem." But he knows that's horseshit.

"It's been almost a month and we've been lucky. Nothing Rosita couldn't handle, but this community needs a Doctor. We only know of one left in the world. Now Maggie's pregnant. Do you really want her to go through that like Lori did?"

Fuck! Don't drag that into this. Daryl just shakes his head, jaw grinding. It was a completely different situation. But not different enough. Guilt starts to creep in. "Look I said I'll go back, so I don't know what else you want from me?" Daryl barely separates his teeth as he spits his words out.

"I want you to understand why it's important. I want you to think about that. Why did I have to be the one to bring up Grady to Aaron, Daryl? It's your job here to look for people. You know about the hospital."

"They ain't good people."

"Well—they aren't cannibals!" both Glenn's hands slap against his thighs in exasperation. "Look, I get it. They aren't my first choice either—except they are, because there's no one else! We clashed and it was bad, but they aren't monsters. They're trying to live some kind of organized life and maybe they just need a place like this to—Rick was going to let them come with us!"

Daryl shakes his head hard against every word. "What if it had been Maggie? Would you ever go back there again?"

The silence that follows rings like a church bell and Daryl can't breathe. He wants to look away from Glenn's face as something shatters behind his eyes. As he realizes what Daryl is saying. What he hasn't brought himself to say yet. Mouth open, Glenn can't respond right away.

Scoffing lightly, Daryl turns and kicks at the cigarette butt already ground into the dirt. "Nah, you wouldn't."

"Maybe not," Glenn admits quietly, "But... think about the prison, and everything bad that happened there. We got Tara out of it."

It ain't the same thing at all and he knows it, but Daryl doesn't call him out, he just glares at him. The man's smart enough to work it out for himself. The truth is, Daryl wanted to make his way back into Georgia for one reason only. At no point did his plans involve returning to Grady to let Aaron talk those bastards into joining up with Alexandria.

"Just, please. Think about the baby."

"I said I'd go, Glenn," Daryl barely speaks.

"Thank you. But that's not good enough. Don't just go. Make it a mission. We need a Doctor, and I think you need this." Whatever Glenn means by that, Daryl isn't willing to ask, he looks at the dirt until Glenn finally retreats, leaving Daryl alone with his bike and a long road ahead.

An alarm rings. But it's not The Animals rendition of House of the Rising Sun, which is disappointing to Beth because she thought it was a clever choice for an alarm. She tries to grope for her cellphone, but sleep hasn't quite let her free yet, her fingers barely move and besides, that's not her cell-phone alarm waking her up. It's a high, demanding pulse of a ring, more like a chirp. Maybe it's coming from another room? With a groan she tries to move again, head pounding. More than just her fingers are twitching now, but her whole body feels heavy and sore, like she slept all tied up in a knot.

It's dark. Maybe it's daddy's alarm. He'll want help with chores before school. Mom will come in the room in a minute. Slowly, Beth opens her eyes to nothing and starts to sit up. It's warm but there are no blankets. Her throat is dry, she's inside of a small, tight box and her head throbs in pain.

Panic happens all at once, her own whimper is louder than the car alarm—and now that she can tell what it is, not her father's old-fashioned alarm-clock telling him to get up, but a shrieking car alarm, maybe a few blocks away. It's so dark, and the shape of this box it odd and solid.

She kicks out a leg and reaches up with one arm. Her hand is in a cast that clunks against the low, metal ceiling. Her foot connects with something softer. On the ground below her, knuckles brush with a solid metal tool, a crowbar. She freezes and takes in the tight surroundings. She's shut inside of a trunk and for some reason she remembers exactly how it feels, even though she knows she's never been shut inside of a trunk before.

This is familiar. Why is this familiar?

Her eyes aren't adjusting to the dark, but she manages to figure out which side is the back-seat and which side is the lid of the trunk. The lid won't budge, but feeling around on the floor she manages to find the lever to pop open the seat.

Please work. The seat does pop open and light floods in, harsh, golden light. It must be high noon.

It isn't until Beth climbs into the backseat of what turns out to be a black Honda Accord and sits stunned, blinking into burning white light that she realizes she hasn't let go of the crowbar. She's still clutching it in the hand that doesn't have a cast, the thought of putting it down makes her feel fearful and shaken, so she doesn't, she grips it like a lifeline as she blinks and her vision clears.

"Where am I?" there's no one to answer, but she wants to hear her own voice, if only to know she can still speak. As her vision clears she grazes past ruby-tinted windows, climbs out of the car and falls onto a long, deserted road in need of repair.

A ways down the road, there's an overturned firetruck, painted in what looks horribly like blood and similar carnage. Even from this distance, she can see that the windows are smeared with gore. The firetruck is such an imposing disaster that it takes a few seconds for her to notice that there are other cars, also painted red, and stopped in the middle of the road, no regard to obstructing traffic.

It's like she's been shoved into a game of 'name everything that's wrong with this picture' how many points is it worth to notice that all the cars are facing the wrong way on the highway? Opposing traffic catches her eye. It's stopped dead, and every single car seems to be deserted. Ages ago, by the state of them.

Gripping the crowbar now with both hands, her cast crunches around it, but can't stop herself. The alarm in the distance whines to a stop. Dead battery. Her shoulder itches. Passing the crowbar into her injured hand, she reaches back she finds that there's something dried there, it flakes off. There's dried blood under her nails and that's when she realizes how sticky it is back there, how it's trailing through her hair, but she's afraid to follow it up to the source. She knows it's coming from her head. Tentatively, she touches, just next to the concentration of a dull ache. It's not bleeding, but she definitely took some kind of a bad blow to the head.

And nothing is familiar, or makes sense.

Except being inside a trunk. Upon remembering how strange it was to be locked inside a dark trunk and feel like she'd been there before, an image comes to her, accompanied by a feeling. She's folded up, sitting inside of a large trunk, there's a flash of silver before her face, the blade of a knife. She's not alone, there's a man sitting across from her. Something's happening outside, something loud and angry, like a storm. Light spills inside the trunk through the busted lid, illuminating the light and pair of focused blue eyes.

That's Atlanta in the distance. But it can't be. It's… dead.

There's no other way to describe it. Even from this distance Beth can tell it's lifeless. If she walked towards it, she would just find more of the same. More cars. More broken things. More gore.

What happened? Is this hell? She doesn't remember dying, but maybe she wouldn't. Beth isn't sure what she would've done to earn herself a place in hell, or why hell would look like Atlanta's corpse, but she doesn't have much to go on.

The last thing I remember… but it's escaping her. She doesn't have a "last thing" to call up, just general feelings of looking forward to a birthday, wondering how quick she can get chores done, before daddy will let her go on a ride. Trying to work out how to put a little distance between herself and Jimmy without making everything awkward. Annoyance with school. Pleasure in putting together a new playlist. Normal things.

Nothing, nothing at all that might lead her to understand a grave head wound and a hand that doesn't want to let go of a crowbar. Let alone, something to help her understand the state of this world she's just woken up in.

Why am I alone? She's forgotten things. She's forgotten about being in trunks, but she remembers blue eyes and feeling safe, in spite of a storm.

A shuffling, strange kind of snarling sound alerts her attention away from Atlanta. Nearby the firetruck, she sees a person, standing droopily in the middle of the road. "HEY!" she shouts and starts at a quick pace towards the figure, "Help! I need help!" her voice almost breaks, as fear floods into her that she can't explain to herself.

The person turns and shuffles towards her, and the awkward, gaiting halt of a walk gives her pause, "Are you okay?!" he can't be, he's definitely hurt and he's covered in… grey. Dirt and dust coat him. The closer he gets, the uglier and filthier he appears. "Oh my—" the fear is almost overwhelming as the person lets out a snarl, his jaw is broken, dangling an inch above a collarbone. Long, threatening limbs outstretch towards her. His skin is sliding off, exposing rotting bone.

He gets right up into her face and she doesn't even think, she doesn't have to. Her body knows what to do, even if her mind it still fixated on this image of living, death, hungry and driven. The crowbar flies up through the dangling flesh of his broken jaw, up through the soft palate and into the middle of its head, brain-stem pulverized.

In shock, Beth stares at the dead thing; so mangled and decayed that it had to be dead before she knee-jerk shoved the crowbar into its head.

"I got him like this, up through the jaw!" Maggie's voice comes to her, a hushed whisper from long ago. Her pretty big sister has a face splattered in red, but she grins with tears in her eyes, "The men were all still shoving at their chests and trying to stab through body-armor," Maggie smiles into her elbow, green eyes laughing as she twirls the dagger in her hand, clean except where the hilt meets the blade.

The body drops and Beth takes a few steps back, the bloody crowbar slapping against her thigh, as she takes in a few stinking breaths and tries not to think about how weak her knees suddenly are.

Maggie. Maggie who kills walkers. Beth who kills walkers too, but only after watching Maggie and… and others. There are others, but their faces won't stay still inside her head.

Walkers are everywhere, they're people—or they're what people become now, when they die. That's why the world is like this. How long has it been like this?

The world feels like a nightmare, bewildering and frightening, but slowly Beth finds what she needs to inside her head, she remembers walkers, but doesn't remember how it started, or when it started. She doesn't remember who became walkers. She examines her shaking hand, but it's definitely alive.

Beth is no walker. Yet.

Why am I alone? Where's daddy and mom? Where's Maggie? Shawn? What about Otis and Patricia?

The weakest and youngest of them. If she's not with them, they must think she's dead. That much doesn't take a lot of thinking for her to work out. She's got to find them, and there's only one place she can remember where she saw them all. In her mind, the Greene Family Farm is heaven, as opposed to hell where she woke up.

Atlanta is dead. The road is long. Home is that way.

After some moderate begging I agreed to write a Bethyl-Amnesia fic! This is probably not going to be super long (HA REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I SAID THAT?!) and I'm planning on having Beth get her memories back steadily and more or less quickly, since I'm of the opinion that the bullet either completely missed her brain, or mostly missed her brain, just based off of the theory of the bullet's trajectory NOT being a production error... okay, how sad it is that there are theories that start with "What if the crew DIDN'T screw up?!"

But, a good friend of mine who knows a little more about serious head injuries than I do sat me down and explained that if the bullet did miss her brain, or perhaps only scratched it as it curved along the skull to exit, Beth could still suffer from memory loss through a combination of emotional trauma and hydrostatic shock to which I shrugged and conceded "yeah okay fine ill write it geez" so here is my take on Bethyl-Amnesia! Some memories will be stuff we saw on the show and some of it will fit more into the realm of head-canon-y deleted scenes.

I'm going to be switching back and forth between Daryl and Beth POVs as seen above.

Please feel free to provide thoughts, jokes, suggestions, criticisms or curses, I love hearing from you guys! Thanks for reading!

And, as always, a song from my Bethyl playlist.

The Lightning Strike - Snow Patrol