Somehow, time passes.

Daryl knows exactly how many days it's been since he's slept in an actual bed. Details like that have always managed to stick with him. He knows it been five hundred and eleven days since he held her. There are times he wakes up covered in sweat to Rick or Michonne offering to sit with him. Sometimes, on the bad nights when all he can hear is the rasp of her last 'I love you', he says yes.

Rick is quiet, he can picture the tears running unchecked as Daryl pushed his knife into that small spot behind her ear, remembers the panic in Daryl's eyes when the blood started to seep into her hair. He can still see the way Daryl's shirt caught on his chin, and then on his elbow, as he scrambled for something to soak it up.

He left, was gone for weeks after she died.

Stay who you are, not who you were.

He came back. Thin and hoarse, but he came back.

Daryl doesn't know what everyone thought when he showed up. He knows Maggie cried watching him replant a scraggly rose bush on her grave.

His lips are always chapped, he burns through stale cigarettes one right after another.

There is an unopened tube of cherry Chapstick in his pocket, dirt working it's way beneath the edges of the plastic seal. His thumb traces gently over a small blonde braid stitched on the inside of his vest.

Time passes.

Every time someone else says her name he pulls his bottom lip between his teeth. Maggie mentions her. Talks about days before Daryl even knew she existed. She talks about it like she doesn't remember the way he swore until he couldn't breathe then pressed his face into her stomach and sobbed the first time someone said her name after they buried her.

More people die. Carl comes down the stairs one night and sits on the couch, asks if it's worth it to care. Sniffs back tears and asks how he's supposed to live afraid all the time. Daryl clears his throat, sits for minute. "You gotta keep it there, the scary shit. Tuck it away if you hafta, but you gotta keep it."

"W…why?"

Daryl shakes his head, shrugs, "If you ain't afraid of nothin', you got nothin'."

Judith learns to talk. She says Dada and Chonne, Carl, Maggie. She even says Daryl. There are other names she never really learns, at least not the way she should.

Days flick past, nights drag.

There are nights when even the couch feels too big and all he can feel is cold where she should be.

There are nights he wishes he could forget she ever loved him.

There are nights he lays awake adding the seconds until they turn into minutes, then hours, and then another day without her. Five hundred and twelve.

He's not really sure if she was right, that night on the porch, that he would be the last man standing. He hopes she was wrong. He hopes Rick made it to Carl, that Michonne reached the fuse. He presses fingers into the bullet holes in his stomach and looks at the way the blood coats his hand. He thinks about Merle and his ma, wonders if they felt like this, if they knew. He's sure she did.

He lays there, bleeding out into the dirt, for some stretch of time. It's hard to move too much and his vision is blurry. His eyelids drop and he hears Rick talking above him. He presses his eyes closed and thinks of her face. There's the weight of hand on his shoulder and Daryl uses the last of his strength to push his forehead against the muzzle of Rick's Python.

There's a flash when Rick finally squeezes the trigger but it never fades to black. Daryl blinks and sunlight fills his eyes, it's pouring in through a familiar window. He squints against it and knows exactly where he is.

Their bedroom. Not the last one in the Safe Zone, the first one, in the little brick ranch. The light streams in through the boarded up window. Daryl glances around the room from the bed, taking it in again, the crib is still there but the baby in it is littler than Judy was. He has to close his eyes and turn his head from the wisp of sandy brown hair and bright blue eyes.

He breathes in the scent of her hair.

"Beth."

Daryl squeezes his eyes shut and inhales again. Her thumb drags across his chapped lips and he has a fleeting thought about the chapstick. She's warm against him and he can hear her content sigh when she finds that spot pressed close next to him where she just fits. That perfect place, curled together in their bed.