Author Note: This happened because I wanted to write something fucked up. It's been a while. You may therefore, if you wish, consider this almost a Safe Up Here With You redux, though more tentative in some ways and potentially a good bit weirder.
If you read Safe Up Here With You, pretty much all the same warnings apply - violence, disturbing hallucinations, self-harm, suicidal stuff, potential sexual fucked-up-ness. I expect this to get disturbing. I'll be trying to make it disturbing. It'll also probably get problematic - I'm letting my id out to play a bit. So proceed at your own risk is what I'm saying.
For anyone who cares at all about "feel" influences, there are two major ones at work here: a lot of stuff by Nine Inch Nails, from which the title and probably a lot of the chapter titles will be drawn, and the art of Zdzisław Beksiński. As I write this my final night in Poland is drawing to a close, and today I spent a good bit of time in the Beksiński exhibit in the historical museum in Sanok, which I really recommend you visit if you're ever in this part of the world.
As always, thank you for reading. I'm beginning this during a tough writing period, so it means a lot.
Chapter 1: all the living and the dead
It's a cloudy gray twilight in early summer when they bring him in.
At first she thinks she's having a nightmare. Another one. Another one in a series which has proven itself regular and reliable and so far devoid of any hint of an ending. He's always in them - she has no nightmares anymore where he doesn't feature, as if that's the one place in which he survives. Where she keeps him alive as an instrument of torture, no matter how many times everyone has told her that what happened wasn't her fault.
She knows better.
He's always in her nightmares and it's always of those final moments, though sometimes the details change. Sometimes when he shoves her out of the way the bullet goes through his neck, jets blood against the bland hospital walls. Sometimes it goes through his heart. Hits him in the gut. Sometimes he takes a long time to die, and he sprawls there on the floor in an expanding pool of the blood that should have been hers, and when he stares silently up at her she can see that he's so scared and in so much pain and she can't help him.
And sometimes he hates her. He mouths it, even if he can't speak. It's her fault. He hates her. She killed him.
Sometimes the gun is in her hand.
Sometimes it's just the scissors.
Sometimes it's so much worse than that.
But it's never like this, and she drops the crate of canned beans she's carrying and doesn't feel it when the corner of it smashes into her left big toe - where later the nail will be a horrifying bruised black. It's never like this: He never walks in through the gates, glancing around through the wild tangle of his hair, every movement sharp and furtive. He's never led in by Rick and Aaron - Rick walking like a man who's just taken a shovel to the head, clearly stunned, not far from staggering. He's never filthy and spattered with blood and dressed in what look like the ragged remains of four or five separate sets of clothes, and he's never gripping an equally filthy machete, caked in walker guts and gore - and somehow that's the worst, somehow that's one of the worst things her traitor mind has ever hurled at her, because he looks so wrong that way.
That's not how he fights. That's not him.
But it's just a dream.
Except then people are stumbling past her - Maggie and Glenn, their own crates abandoned, and she catches glimpses of their disbelieving faces before they're well past her and closing in on a man only she should be able to see. She turns her numb head - numb face, numb mouth and eyes, her whole fucking body as useless and stupid as it was that day - and there's Carol, Carol with Judith on her hip, and it's been a while since Carol appeared to have much going on beneath her mask other than cold reptilian calculation but now Carol's face is twisted with the tears breaking through that mask, like part of her was almost dead too and is only now stirring and beating its way out of some internal coffin.
They put him in the trunk. They put him in the fucking trunk. Now he's here. He shouldn't be.
To be is the operative verb here. And he is.
He's not a nightmare. He is.
Without meaning to, she's following them. That makes sense; she can't imagine a scenario, waking or dreamed, where she wouldn't. She's following and limping for some reason that escapes her, staring as they gather around him, as they reach for him, as he jerks himself backward with a violence that somehow surprises her not at all. As Rick darts between them and him and holds up his hands, shakes his head, is saying something she can't make out, because she can't hear anything over the ringing in her ears.
In her nightmares he's never edging backward with his center of balance spread low, coiled like an animal, his grip on the machete tense enough to see from yards away. In her nightmares his teeth are never bared like something enraged and feral and terrified.
In her nightmares he's always dying. In her nightmares Daryl Dixon is never alive.
He finally catches sight of her when she's nearly reached him, and he freezes. Goes rigid. Shaking at his edges. Every muscle in him wound so tight it might snap.
That taut line from her to him. Reeling them in. And then she sees the way he's looking at her and all at once she wants to run.
Should. She should run. She froze when he did, she's shaking like he is, and he has his machete and with all the inevitability of every nightmare she's ever had his eyes sink to her belt and what she's carrying there.
What she's carried since they left him. Too big for her, really, but she carried it. Because it was what she could carry. And if sometimes she particularly felt the weight of it, that only seemed fair. That only seemed right.
His focus settles on the knife and everything wound so tight in him breaks. She almost hears it - hears, when nothing else is reaching her. The snap of something both thick and horribly brittle.
Rick is still talking. More people gathering around them all, dim and faceless. Rick is saying something upsetting - just in front and to Daryl's side, mostly a blur in the periphery of her vision but clear enough that she can read his expression. Rick is upset, and as Carol takes a step back - nearly stumbles, keeping hold of Judith but clutching briefly at Rick's arm - whatever he's saying is clearly upsetting the rest of them as well. But she doesn't need to understand. She understands nothing, doesn't imagine she can or ever will at this point, because Daryl Dixon is alive and standing in front of her and not a nightmare, but he's a wraith, eyes glowing pale coals as he lunges at her, mouth gaping in a wordless scream that pierces the gunshot-whine in her ears and shatters the inside of her skull like a bullet.
She should run. She doesn't. She stands there and she waits for him to reach her. She has no idea what will happen when he does.
She's not sure it matters.
Someone else yelling. Shouts of alarm. A rush of bodies and Rick tackles him and takes him down, Carol joining him with Judith no longer riding her hip. Rick is kneeling on his back, twisting his arm. He hasn't stopped screaming and he hasn't stopped staring at her, searing her with those haunted, hunted eyes. The machete has skittered out of the reach of his clawing fingers and his nails are splintering and bleeding on the pavement, but he's not trying to get the machete.
He's trying to get to her.
I hate you, he mouths in her nightmares. He gazes up at her in his swelling halo of blood, neat little hole in his brow, and even if the bullet took his voice away, he makes sure his words reach her. They're riding that cold, flat, dead gaze.
You fucking killed me, you stupid useless bitch. Look at this. Look at what you did. Because this is what happens when stupid useless weak little bitches latch onto strong people like parasites.
You killed me. You killed me and I hate you.
He's not mouthing that. He's not mouthing anything. He has no words. Just that awful scream, now subsiding into a wretched kind of sobbing as his head sags and his hands go limp. Very suddenly. Like he's been shot.
Then she can't see anything for her tears, and she's falling to her knees - bare knees, skinning them instantly. So they're both bleeding now, damaged by the ground.
No one is looking at her. Not even him. Not anymore. That's probably a good thing.
She rocks forward and covers her mouth with both hands, and when she closes her eyes the bloodless twilight turns a deep, rich red.
In her nightmares it's never like this.
This is worse.