Author's Note: Spoilers through 6x14 "Twice as Far"
Him or me.
The words inside my head were punctuated by the shwoop/click of the shovel. The dirt thumping down on Denise's sheet-covered body. Three feet down, not six, because they didn't have that kind of time.
Him. Me.
My hands were unblistered. It didn't happen much, hadn't happened much in longer than I could remember, now. My shirt was clean, and white, and not a speck of blood stained it. And yet we were digging graves again, in this clipped grass suburban paradise that looked so much like my daydreams from when I first married Ed that it made me a little nauseous every time I stepped out my front door.
Daryl looked the same as he always had, though. Sweaty, the stark muscles of his arms smeared with dirt and a little bit of motorcycle grease. His hair dirty and wet where it fell over his eyes. But he was cracking around the edges today, emptying bottles of booze into his mouth without even glancing at me to see if I was judging him for it.
The bottles were so small. That's what killed me, the hopelessness of the effort. How bad he must feel to try it at all, when he'd told me dozens, hundreds of stories of the terrible things drunken people had done in his life.
If I stayed in Alexandria, he'd be digging my grave someday. Or I'd be digging his.
No bottle of booze would be big enough to ease that, no matter who was in the hole and who was left up top.
I stopped digging. There wasn't any point. It wasn't helping him, which was the whole reason I'd come. I couldn't help him. The only reason I'd stayed after Beth was because I thought I could, but what was the point? If we weren't burying Beth, it'd be Maggie. Maggie's baby. Glenn. Rick. Michonne. Everyone he loved, everyone we loved would eventually die, no matter how many we killed to try and stop it. I couldn't save him from that, not if I brought home every gun in the armory.
"You were right," I whispered. Thinking of how flat and sure he'd sounded when he said, I shoulda killed him. "I knew it when you said it."
Clearing, the way Morgan had said. Killing everyone else. That was the only way to stay safe. But it had driven him mad, in the end, and I wasn't far from that right now.
Daryl was already in the grave dirt clutches of madness, locked up dark and tight inside his own head where nothing could reach him until he broke enough things, killed enough things, to remember who he really was.
I leaned on the shovel. I should never have urged him to be better. Better was an illusion, lives saved like the roll of a dice, black dots flashing over white faces so fast you could never see what you'd end up with until it all came to a stop. And then it was too late. You were stuck with a Governor, or a Noah. A Dwight, or an Axel. A wolf, or a lamb, or a wild card like Father Gabriel that was a little bit of both.
Safer to just clear. Safer to kill them all.
I could have, once. Now there was a crumbling in me. It wasn't the same as when I used to curl into myself and go away in my mind while Ed destroyed my body. I was strong, now, and there was no part of me that knew how to give in anymore. It was just that everything that was left of me was so black. I could feel it, when I inhaled the smoke of a cigarette. That poison, cradled in my lungs like it was at home there.
I knew why Daryl smoked. I knew, now, why it was a comfort to him. I should have broken every cigarette in the world once I understood it but instead I left my pack to him. It was some small comfort, and no matter how clean he was, he'd always feel a stain inside him that the smoke called to. Daryl was born to be noble, and his family had done everything they could to beat that out of him. Still, he came back to it.
Even if I left today and he joined the meanest, nastiest group left in the world, there was something clean at the center of him and it would keep rising back to the surface. Which meant someday he'd show the wrong person mercy and they would kill him for it.
I dropped my shovel. When I walked away, he didn't call me back. He was feeling that stain, and it was better that he did. If he kept breathing in that smoke until he went dark again, he might last a little longer.
Tobin's door was the one I opened. He wasn't home, though my ashtray lay on his porch. I'd moved out of my own house days ago, because I knew my family would sense the shift in me. They'd get desperate, the way Daryl had when he asked me this morning what my kidnappers had done to me. He never asked me a direct question until he knew I was losing my mind.
If I hadn't murdered all those people on the killing floor, he would have done it for me. He was only minutes behind. I didn't want their blood on his hands, either.
I stopped inside Tobin's door and stood there like my body was a thing just propped up in the world, separate from me. I think I understood how Lucifer might have started out as an angel. You did one thing you really believed in, and another, another. Until love twisted itself inextricably into evil. Until your soul was a black hole, imploded on itself and dragging in everything around it.
Was there a way to live in a world this brutal and keep your humanity?
How could there be, when killing was the only way to keep from becoming one of the shambling monsters, and killing turned you into another kind of monster, all the same.
I had no answers. Maybe nobody did. But I wasn't staying to find out. If I had my way, I'd never speak to another human for all the days of my life.