Beth makes her plans to leave early the next morning, thoughts and ambitions rising with the dew. She feels, as she always does after a night of reflection, like the shiny pink skin of a still-healing wound. Fresh and raw, but reinvigorated with purpose and reminder. To forget is not to forgive, like her Mama always used to say.
Ross had come to relieve her a little after midnight, late after stacking the swollen bank with makeshift sandbags just in case, and she caught a few straggling hours of sleep before dawn. Is extra careful not to rouse the kids when she startles awake, just brushes her hands over their curls reverently, latches the tarp closed carefully behind her.
Most of the town is up, as well, operating on days that begin and end with the sun. She washes her hands in a spare pail of fresh rainwater, rinses her neck and face, hoping the icey coolness will smooth away any worry and tiredness, before starting over to town square.
The bank vault key clunks ominously around her sternum when Beth jogs a few steps to the left of Wash Street, moving to help Zhou with a particularly cumbersome load of firewood. Her departure'll be a point of contention with the council per usual, and Beth accepts Zhou's sunny smile while preemptively beginning to dread the conversation she'll need to have. Again.
She finds ¾ of Harper's Ferry's elected officials right where she expected; congregated in the municipal center turned mess hall, chipped mugs of José's bootleg coffee cradled in their fingerless-gloved hands, the morning chill lingering for just a bit longer. Noemi, Old Jemmy, and Maude— all of whom wave sluggishly in her harried direction, fixing a cup of powdered milk and coffee ground slop for her.
The council was elected the best way everyone knew how, little scraps of paper and testing pencils found in the abandoned high school, tallied up numbers, like an elementary election. Nobody even ran— nobody protested the five 'winners', either.
Noemi's closer to her age than most, mid-twenties or so, a mass of thick curls drawing the eye first, a chewed-up pen invariably tucked between her teeth. She's a bit shyer than most, preferring the company of her chicken-scratch numbers on her scrounged-up clipboard more than others, a little anxious at times, but sweet and resourceful nonetheless. Noemi is known for her meticulous bookkeeping, updating a scrupulous track of their supplies and the demands daily, every spare can and nail carefully accounted for. Though lately, her tally marks have been turning into zeros, and her subsequent restlessness has made her presence nearly unbearable.
Old Jemmy, on the other hand, is the picture of ease, unshakeable as an old oak in a storm. Most of them had stumbled upon Harper's Ferry purely by accident, lured by abandoned highways, a town mostly deserted and preserved, but Old Jemmy was born and raised around here. He was an Appalachian through-and-through, with knowledge about these ancient mountains that had saved their asses over and over again. He was the kind of man Daddy wouldn't have approved of; crass and coarse, skin pockmarked with scars from who knows what, a beard stained yellow with snuff juice, scrappy and wiley, seemingly unkillable.
And Maude, both serene and stern. Mid-fifties, cropped red hair fading into grays, tough love and pragmatism packaged in a five foot body. Most importantly, a doctor, once a highly-respected trauma surgeon; she got out of Philly in the nick of time. These past few months of malnutrition have been particularly hard on her, bags of violet deeper than the blooming wildflowers beneath her eyes. Gore and carnage, she can handle— it's the slow death, tepid and indolent, nearly unstoppable, that Maude can't stand.
Beth somehow fits into their motley committee, too. A twenty-one year old girl with a Southern twang and an incomplete high school education, a handful of scars from a handful of near-death experiences, no family to speak of. The kinda limited but practiced knowledge about weapons that comes with a few years of survival. It'd taken her a long while of attempting to comprehend why she was voted in charge of Harper's Ferry to come to the conclusion that she would never understand it.
YOU ARE READING
safe in your skin | the walking dead
Fanfictiondaryl dixon / beth greene it's times like this, when all is going to hell and her old ankle injury throbs with the darkening clouds, that beth allows herself to remember. she doesn't go too far back, 'cause she knows she'd go swimming too far deep i...
