FOREST FIRE ¹ ━━━ the walking dead ✓

20 | a fair amount of provocation

"He was holding on to hope," Freya stated, feeling compelled to defend Hershel in light of his hospitality. "I'm not a very hopeful person, — ask anybody, they'll tell you — but I don't think your dad was stupid, and I don't think you were either. You didn't want to accept that your family was gone. You wanted to believe that they could come back."

"And they didn't," Beth reminded her curtly. "Ma. . . she tried to bite me an'. . . An' I kind of wish she had."

Freya chewed on the inside of her cheek. That was. . . A lot. Perhaps her pessimistic self wasn't the right person to be posted up by the — evidently — suicidal teen's bedside. "Well, for what it's worth, I am really glad that you didn't get bit."

Beth finally turned to face her. "You want me to live in misery for the rest of my days?"

"You're sixteen, Beth. You've got a whole lot of life left."

"Not in this world."

"You don't know that."

"Isn't it obvious?"

Knuckles gently rapped against the closed door, followed by a verbal call of, "Knock knock." Lori pushed the door open and stepped inside, balancing a tray that held what Freya presumed to be Beth's lunch. The Grimes matriarch set the tray down on the cabinet beside Freya's chair and offered Beth a warm smile. "How about this? You eat up all your food, we'll get you up and outta here and go take a walk. What do you say?"

Beth didn't say anything. She blinked slowly, showing neither refusal nor inclination.

"If not outside then maybe you could just go upstairs?" Freya suggested, figuring it might be painful for Beth to go back outside to the scene of the crime — the place where her mother's face had been mutilated by a rake. "Check in on Maggie. Or steal some of her magazines or somethin'?"

"You're pregnant," Beth stated bluntly, not sparing Lori a glance. Her eyes burned into the wooden cabinet her lunch rested on. "How could you do that?"

Lori's expression faltered slightly but she pressed her lips together, concealing her hurt from the teenagers. "Uh. . . I don't really have a choice."

"You think it'll make a difference?" Beth asked.

Lori nodded. "Of course it will."

"Babies are the future," Freya said, a small smile pulling at her lips. "It'll give us a reason to keep fighting on the days we want to give up. Can't just leave a baby to fend for itself."

Beth lifted her head up. Her big, blue irises shone beneath her heavy eyelids. "But the walkers will get it anyway, so what's the point?"

Freya swallowed down the growing lump in her throat. "Well, we won't let that happen."

"I don't think you can stop it."

"But we can try," Freya told her, glancing to her mother's stomach. "We try until there's nothing left to try for."

And just like that— Beth's head collided with her pillow once more.

It seemed that Freya's uncharacteristic optimism had forced her back into a despondent state.

A guilty conscience lay heavy on the fifteen-year-old's shoulders. She hadn't meant Beth any harm. She was just trying to be positive, look on the bright side for once, — channel her inner Beth, the person she was before her grief took over — and not drone on and on about the multitude of gloom ahead of them.

In all honesty, Beth's words held more truth than Freya was comfortable admitting, but you couldn't just give up preserving the good because there was a high likelihood of evil encompassing your life. Existence had always held that possibility, the world wasn't exactly known for fairness and equality Before either.