goldstarwife | (no subject)

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beth greene

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She's walked by it more than a dozen times now. The figure seems odd to consider when she's been in Darrow such a short time, but Julia didn't hesitate to go out looking for work, which came about rather easily. With the holidays approaching, every store possible seems to be hiring seasonal workers, and it seems like as good a place to start as any. She has plenty of experience as a shopgirl, and though that may have been some seventy years ago, she doesn't think things could have changed so much as all that. The registers are different, the computers that operate them even more so and entirely baffling, but most of what she finds herself doing is the same as it ever was. The routine of it holds no inconsiderable amount of comfort. It's hardly fulfilling, but neither was it before. She doesn't need fulfilling; she just needs to be doing something, even if that's only just going through the motions of a life like she did after Michael died.

There could be more for her, if she wanted that. Something in her woke up when Donny first dragged her up to sing with him, and the past few weeks, before this place, she felt more alive than she had in well over a year, or maybe more than that. Despite knowing that she couldn't have had any say in showing up here, though, it feels a little like maybe it's time to give up on that dream. She can still scribble her poems in a notebook, still consider that they might make good lyrics. She can go back to singing in a church choir. But losing the band and the chance to compete has been a considerable blow, and in the absence of that, it's easy to chide herself and call it foolish, say that she ought to put the whole thing to bed.

It would be easier if she didn't pass by the music store on her way to and from work each day. Every time, she's tempted to go in and look at the instruments, and every time, it hurts a little to make herself keep walking instead. In the end, she wears down easily. It can't hurt to look, to have something to occupy herself with. Growing up, they always had at least a piano in the house. Her apartment now is empty and inhabited only by her. A hobby wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

When she finally does walk in one afternoon, it's almost surprising how much there seems to be. At least her own choices of instruments are few. She doesn't know where in here or even if she might be able to find a ukulele, but she's in no hurry, instead wandering around slowly, the sight of everything bittersweet as she takes it all in.

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"But it's hard to take a step like that," Julia says, nodding in understanding. Back home, she hadn't left her job until she got let go, and even then, she tried to get as much as she could out of her last days there. Granted, they'd also been trying to put aside as much money as they possibly could for their travel expenses, to get them to New York, but without that, or after, she might well have been able to get by doing nothing else. She's just not sure she would have. There's nothing glamorous about being a shopgirl, but that job still kept her going when it would have been too easy to buckle and fall apart entirely. Giving it up would have felt like too much of a gamble.

"This seems like a nice place to work, at least."

"Oh, it's great," Beth says. "The owner, Mark, he's so sweet. If we're not busy, he pretty much lets me do whatever I want, as long as the place isn't a disaster. And he started this program where we teach some music classes for kids who might not otherwise be able to afford it. Mostly piano and guitar, but it's a lot of fun."

Even with the success she's having, she's not sure she'll be able to give this place up entirely. Mark would want her to, he'd tell her to dedicate herself to music, but she loves it here.

"I was gonna be a music teacher anyway," she adds. "So it sorta seems like havin' the best of both words."

"Get a little of everything that way," Julia says with a nod and a smile. For a while, her biggest aspiration had been teaching the children's choir at church; as far away as that feels, she's reminded a little of it now. Even that feels far away now. It isn't as if she has any reason to deprive herself of anything, when she couldn't have had any control over her being here, but singing still feels like a part of a life that's not hers anymore. It wouldn't feel right to go back to it on her own now.

At least, that's what she tells herself. But holding an instrument, having sung even a snippet of a song, she feels more like herself than she has since she first got here.

"Can I hear one of your songs?"

"Sure," Beth says, then wanders down the wall with the guitars until she finds her favourite. It's far too expensive, she'll never be able to afford it unless she gets famous, but she can play it whenever she wants if she's at work.

Sitting down on one of the stools, she makes sure it's in tune before she begins to strum thoughtfully. There are so many songs she can sing, some she's already worked until she thinks they're as good as they'll ever get, others that are still rough.

In the end, she picks a song about Curtis. They're consistently her best ones, the emotion the purest and most true. It's a bit of a sad song, one she's written more recently, but at least it's not as sad as the ones she wrote right after he disappeared.

It's a lovely song, different than most of the music that Julia knows and listens to, but something she can appreciate all the same. The lyrics have a lot to do with that. She doesn't need to know the story behind it to feel like she gets it, most of hers being of a similar nature. Love, the loss of it, and trying to move forward from that have become cornerstones of both her life and her lyrics. She was lucky enough, once, to find someone who could set them to music. Now, that seems like all the more reason to set that potential career aside. It's not something she's cut out to do on her own.

That's all beside the point now, though, and she smiles, a little wistful. "That's beautiful," she says. "Forgive me for asking — I know it might be too personal — but you've lost someone, haven't you?"

"More than one someone," Beth admits with a little smile and a laugh. "But, yeah, this song I wrote about this guy Curtis. We were... y'know, we were only together for a year, but it was a long time comin' before that and I think we were in love a long time before we even realized it. Before I realized it anyway. He was a lot smarter than me."

It's clear in the way she talks about Curtis that she still loves him and sometimes she feels guilty about that. Jason is an amazing guy and she likes him so much. He's sweet and smart and kind, and he deserves someone better than she is. Someone who isn't still in love with her last boyfriend.

"But he disappeared from Darrow," she says. "Like people sometimes do."

"I'm sorry. For your loss," Julia says with a small, bittersweet smile of her own, one that's understanding rather than pitying. "And I don't mean to pry. It's... My husband died a year and a half ago. So some of that sounded, well, familiar." Having been through it, she thinks, it's easier to tell when others have as well, not least when so many of her songs have been about Michael, or about trying to move on after his death. Trying to try to, maybe. For a little while, she thought maybe she was getting there, but showing up here has changed all of that, taken away the chance she might eventually have had with someone else.

That thought, she buries as quickly as she can. The rest, though, is simpler under circumstances like these. She's always hated being a war widow, with how people look at her when they find out and how she's supposed to feel about it, but it's different with someone who's been in a similar position. A disappearance can't be too unlike a death. For her, in a way, Michael did just disappear, anyway, gone somewhere on the other side of the world, her whole life changing in one intangible blow.

"I've written about it, some. I guess it's all you can do, isn't it?"

"No, it's okay," Beth says in a rush. There's something about Julia she just likes right off the bat, something she feels comfortable with and she knows not everyone would just trust their instincts like that, but Beth thinks she's gotten pretty good at reading people after all the stuff at the hospital. She likes Julia.

"And I'm sorry," she adds. "That's awful and... it's hard, isn't it?"

Harder than just hard, but they don't have a lot of other words for what it is. Sometimes writing about it is really the only way to deal with some of the feelings that come along with it. Beth worries sometimes she writes about it too much, sometimes she wonders if it even really helps.

"It is," Julia says simply, nodding. For all that it's nothing she would want anyone else to have to go through, it's easier to talk about it with someone who's been there, too. She's had more than her fair share of pity and sad smiles, people who think they know what it must be like but don't actually have a clue. Instead, there's a sort of shorthand here, a quiet understanding. Of course calling it hard is an understatement. Neither of them needs to be told as much.

She laughs, a soft but largely humorless sound. "Awful and hard, both. The sort of thing you wouldn't wish on anyone."

Even the worst people she's met don't deserve to go through such a hard loss, Beth has to acknowledge that. She would wish all kinds of things on Gorman and even Dawn, knowing how that ended, and the Governor, too, but she doesn't want to think of them losing loved ones.

Even though she knows they had. They all had.

"But music helps," she says with a little smile. "I think sometimes people underestimate just how much it can help."

Even just listening to music has always been her go to when she's in a rough mood. She had spent hours in her bedroom on the farm, listening to albums her father alternately loved and hated, just for how they made her feel.

"They really do," Julia agrees, earnest and without hesitation. "It's the first thing that sort of... pulled me out of the slump I'd been in. Got me living again." She'd been getting by, before Donny came along with his talk of a band and going to New York and making it big, but that was all. Drifting, going through the motions, isn't the same as really having a life. Of course, showing up here, she's wound up back where she started in a lot of ways, but it feels safer for now, when she's lost everything she'd finally managed to rebuild.

"Funny. That feels like so much longer ago than it actually was."

"I know this is gonna make me sound like an old maid or somethin', but time sure does have a way of gettin' away from you, doesn't it?" Beth asks, laughing softly. She knows she sounds like her father when she says things like that, the kinds of platitudes that might seem insincere coming from someone else, but Hershel Greene had always managed to make them sound as if he meant them.

And as if they meant something new, just because he was the one saying it.

"But it's true," she says. "One day you're doin' something new and you look back at memories and they seem to exist in this far off place you can't touch any longer. But then you really think about it and realize six months or a year ago really isn't that far away. It just feels like it... like it's all gone."

"You don't sound like an old maid, I promise," Julia says, letting out a surprised little breath. "I... wrote something saying the same sort of thing once." Maybe it shouldn't be unexpected, but for all the boys who didn't make it home from the war, she isn't really used to talking to people who've been in a similar position to hers. There's something almost refreshing about it, being reminded that it's not just her, hearing words so close to her own coming from someone else. She'd have liked Beth instinctively, she thinks, but it's even truer for that sense of kinship, of understanding.

"That, or we both sound like old maids. Which might be just as likely, I don't know." Judging by her smile, she doesn't really think that's the case, but being a touch self-deprecating about the whole thing has helped her stay sane. "It really does, though, I think. Just passes before you can even realize it."

"I'm okay with that, I think," she decides with a laugh. There are things she worries about, perceptions of others, especially now that she's getting deeper into this entire career as a musician, but when it comes to Julia, it's a little different. They've only just met, but she likes to think they have a connection already, similarities they might not share with others.

"Sometimes it's crazy for me to realize just how long I've been here," she admits. "I was only nineteen when I arrived and now I'm twenty-four."

It's the longest she's been anywhere since the farm. Without Darrow, she doesn't think she'd have ever found something else like this. Nothing in her home would have ever been so stable.

"And five years can seem like a lifetime," Julia says, that much, too, a matter of experience. Five years was long enough for her to go from a wife to a widow, to think she knew what her life was going to be only to have it turned on its head. Maybe in a place like this, it might be a bit more understandable at home, where everyone was trying to go back to the way things were while that, for her, was entirely out of reach. Here, everyone who shows up from somewhere else has had their life stripped away in some regard, which might help a little, but it's still now, talking to Beth, that she feels like she's found someone who gets it, with similar losses behind them.

"It's hard to imagine. Being here for that long. I don't know how you've done it."

In Beth's case, there really isn't any other option, but it's not as if any of them have a choice. Still, for all she's told Julia today, she doesn't think she's ready to start talking about how she died at home, how Darrow is really the only life she has, so she only shrugs and smiles.

"It's not so bad in a lot of ways," she says. "It can be weird and it's different, but a lot of the people here are really good. I'm not sure what I'd do without them."

Of course, if she left Darrow, she'd have no way of knowing what she was missing. The very thought of it all is too much most of the time.

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