Author's note: You need to know a couple of things before we get started:
a) Stuff dealt with in here in very explicit terms will include depression, general mental illness, general violence, suicide attempts, suicidal thoughts, self-harm, traumatic brain injury, past sexual assault, and overall sexual uncomfortableness. This is not going to be a fun trip. This is going to get really upsetting. If you don't think you can handle the above, if you don't think you can stand a degree of relentless angst and authorial cruelty, if you want fluff of any kind - and good God, I do not blame you - don't come in here, 'cause ain't none to be found. That said, for those of you concerned about the ending: You may know that I play irritatingly coy about endings, so I promise nothing. But I will say that if this is a Rocks Fall Everyone Dies Everything Is Awful Forever thing, it'll be the first one I've ever written in this fandom. So.
b) I am Problematic in here. Like I said, I'm dealing with mental illness and traumatic brain injury, and I haven't done a tremendous amount of research, and I'm not being super careful about making sure all the effects and symptoms and implications line up. I own that. I'm bringing things in and tossing them around for the convenience of the story. Again: hella problematic, and see the warnings above if you think you might find that too upsetting. In addition, what Daryl does in here? Yeah, it's a bad idea. It's a monstrously bad idea. I in no way intend to suggest that it's anything but a bad idea. I also don't intend to do a whole lot of direct engagement with the fact that it's such a bad idea, aside from general horribleness, so be aware of that as well.
Okay, I'll shut up. Here we go.
Chapter 1: in time this won't even matter
Fifteen miles outside the Atlanta city limits is where they part ways.
It's uncomfortable. It was never going to not be uncomfortable. Aaron stands awkwardly in that expressively awkward way only Aaron can stand, and looks from Daryl to Edwards and back again. They've talked about this, about what has to be done - about what Daryl has decided has to be done - so there's no more discussion to be had at this point, but the potential for it is hovering in the air like smoke. And there is smoke. Daryl is smoking, because it's something to do with his hands - and because the nicotine is perversely soothing, stroking through his blood like soft little fingers.
Except thinking about it like that twists up his gut all over again.
It's a cloudy morning, threatening rain. Colder than it has been. He can't help but think this is appropriate - this and the black hulks of the burned-out suburban housing development they're in the middle of. Not many walkers here, for a wonder. They have time.
"You're sure about this." Aaron's gaze flicks past Daryl to the bike behind him. To what's already there, waiting. Waiting in silence. Silent since they left. "You..." His voice drops, as if he doesn't want Edwards to hear him, even though Edwards is standing right next to him. Edwards is fiddling with his own fingers and looking not only awkward but profoundly nervous. Edwards is not a fan of this idea. Edwards has a lot of misgivings, though he's voiced them only hesitantly.
Daryl has been wanting to break his nose since he properly met the guy. Never mind what he did. Never mind that he probably owes the man a debt he'll never be able to pay.
He ignores him. Nods at Aaron. Yes, he's sure - to the extent that he can be sure of anything right now. Which is difficult. The world was ripped out from under him once, then again, and now a third time, and he never would have expected it would happen like this. Never in a million years of wild imagination.
"I can't go back." He shakes his head. He's not going to look at the bike. He can't, right now. If he does he might not be able to talk. "Not like this. I can't... I can't do that. Not to them. Not to her." Maggie, he means Maggie, because she's been the center of the reasoning he's expressed, though he knows - and is sure Aaron suspects - that ultimately Maggie is an excuse. A cover for something far more selfish. "When I can. You tell her."
"Thanks for that, friend." Aaron's smile is wan. But he'll do it. He's a good man. One of the few left. She was right, they do still exist, and it didn't take Daryl long to figure it out, and Aaron will do this for him because he understands.
He knows what it is to lose someone.
Find them again.
"I'll come back." He's said it before and he's saying it now, and it's meant as a promise but it sounds weak. He's not sure of anything and that includes everything he's saying. "I'll come back with her. Soon. You tell her that too. Alright?"
Aaron nods. Then, quietly, "You know she's probably never going to forgive you."
"She might get it." Might. But he doesn't really believe that. Maggie might forgive him, but she'll never get it, because she wasn't here, because she didn't have to look at this and decide. Didn't have to face what it meant. What has to be done.
Then again, she might not have had any more idea than he does. Maybe she'd get it after all.
"Take care of yourself." Aaron steps forward, reaches out, and Daryl takes his hand, clasps it. He has been a friend. An unexpected one, but a friend all the same. Every one of his friends since the world fell apart has been unexpected, if it comes to that. He never saw them coming.
Never saw her coming. Never saw her coming either time.
"You too."
He glances toward Edwards and favors him with a single tiny nod. He can manage that. Maybe someday he'll even manage a thank you.
That very much remains to be seen.
Hesitation, just for a moment. Then Aaron turns, lays a hand on Edwards's shoulder, begins to herd him toward the car.
Daryl watches them go. Watches them climb in, the car rumble to life, watches them circle around in the wide, shady intersection, watches them drive away. Thunder mutters in the distance and he tips his head back and stares up at that unfriendly sky, drops the cigarette onto the pavement and crushes it out with his heel.
He turns to the bike. She's there, sitting on it, and her flat, slightly blank gaze is fixed on him. She's utterly expressionless.
He sighs and looks briefly away. At the blackened carcass of a minivan. An equally blackened body, curled fetal in a final, lethal return to infancy. At the houses, all the houses, at how the two of them are surrounded by corpses of all kinds. In the distance, finally, he sees a couple of forms shambling toward them. They can't stay here, and not because of any physical danger. This place is bad for her. Every second they remain, he senses it pulling her further and further away from him.
She's already so far.
He manages to look at her again. Squares his shoulders. "Ready?"
Nothing. Then she nods - once, slow - and something that isn't at all relief but might someday be rushes into him. That much. She can do that much. Surely that's a good sign.
He's not in any way, shape, or form equipped to handle this.
He doesn't think anyone else would be. Doesn't think anyone else could.
"Alright." He closes the rest of the short distance to the bike and swings a leg over, settles in front of her. "Hold on."
Girl, please hold onto me.
Another moment of nothing. Then her arms wrap around his waist and they feel firm enough. He doesn't think she'll let go and fall.
Except she might. He knows that. This is a risk, and a huge one. It's all a risk now. Every minute with her is risking everything. She might release him and tumble and break her already broken head even further, and there won't be any getting her back this time. They don't get that many second chances. Third chances. Fourth.
She might release him because as far as she's concerned, she never got a second chance at all. As far as she's concerned, she might as well not even be here.
As far as she's concerned, she's dead.
He guns the engine, makes it roar. He wants to roar with it. Explode his pain and terror out through his throat. He doesn't know if he can do this. He doesn't have a choice.
He takes them out of there and devours the road.
She doesn't let go.
He fell when he saw her.
He completely collapsed. The legs disappeared from under him and he went down, knowing that Aaron was gaping at him and not caring. All he could see was her. He was sure he was insane, finally, that he had broken under the weight of everything like he had been so certain he would do for so fucking long. It was heavy, he had been doing his best to carry it, trying, trying for her, but he's just a man and there's only so much he can do, and maybe at last it was too much. Being here, so close to where she died and where he said his horrible, abortive, mutilated parody of a farewell.
He fell. Wanted to crawl toward her. If he was insane he didn't want to be well. He would accept this, welcome it, because he was exhausted and he didn't want to try anymore, and she seemed so real, when Edwards led her to them and he groped for her, her knees, and Christ, he wanted to kiss her feet.
No, she was real. He could touch her wounds. Doubting Thomas, he was. Even though he wanted to accept it without question - sane or insane. They stared at him as he touched her cheek, her brow, the last terrible one that took her away from him. All healed.
Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.
But she stared at him too, uncomprehending. She didn't know him. Then she did, bit by bit; he watched it dawning in her eyes. But it was a gray morning, smothered in cloud. She shook her head. She pulled back a little. This man, dark and wild-eyed, unable to stop touching her now that he'd started. He could see himself, then. How she must see him.
He's not blessed.
And she wasn't healed.
It takes them about four hours. They hit the foothills and then the true mountains and they climb ever-upward, switchback after switchback, winding. The ground drops away into blue mist and the pines rise all around and fall beneath them, and it's beautiful. He never loved these mountains - they were his childhood hell - but he can see why people do.
It's a certain perversion that he's bringing her here.
I know a place. Came across it once. Big, high up. Isolated. Didn't see any walkers... If it's there, if it's the same… If there are any it's only a few. There's a well. Clean water. Not that far from a town, we can forage. I can hunt. We'll be alright.
It's beautiful up there. Mountains. Air's clear. She might... If she sees it. She went there on vacation a few times. She loved it, she told me.
It's as good a place as any, right?
Right.
They climb and the sun peeks weakly through the clouds and sinks into mid-afternoon. Almost there. Through the town - it wasn't big, no more than a couple thousand people at most, and it existed primarily to serve vacationers. Like she must have been. There's a few stores and for the most part it looks untouched. It's in the middle of fucking nowhere, and he theorizes that most people packed up and headed toward Atlanta when word reached them about the refugee centers and the CDC working on a cure.
They pass through the center of it. He sees two walkers stumbling down a side road. Nothing else. He has a full pack of supplies - first aid, canned and dried food - so a trip back won't be immediately necessary, but it's good to know it probably won't be an ordeal when he finally has to do it.
Especially since he'll almost certainly be doing it alone.
She's a warm little weight against his back, and she has been the whole way. His fears haven't been realized. She didn't let herself fall. And he realizes, as they leave town, that he could have tied her to him but he didn't, and he didn't because he needs to trust her. He needs her to understand that he trusts her, to the extent that she can understand it at all. He needs her to see that she can do this.
Like the walker in the clubhouse. She said she could take care of herself. She did.
He waited and watched, and let her find out.
They leave the town behind, below, and after another twenty minutes he can see it rising over them, its broad front clinging to a rocky crag and almost leaning precariously over it. Walled with huge panes of glass, and as they get nearer he notes that somehow none of them appear to be broken. Some rich fuck had himself a vacation house here, all in splendid isolation, and then the rich fuck left and probably died and never returned to it, so here it stands. Cold and shining, gleaming in the hazy sun.
She could fall from it. She could jump.
But he needs to trust her. So this is ridiculous, this is its own fun brand of insanity, and he knows it, knows that if she kills herself up here – opts out – her blood will be entirely on his hands, but it's also a fact that if she's so far gone that she does that, finishes the job she started and turned away from on the farm, it won't matter, because in that case he never would have gotten her back anyway.
So he'll just follow her. It's not melodramatic. It's practical. The morbid convenience of it fills him with black amusement. He's thought about suicide many times since he carried her down those stairs. Each time, he turned away because she did.
They rise and rise, and as they do he becomes aware that she's holding him tighter, and very slowly the awareness begins to tear him apart inside. She's holding him - she doesn't want to fall.
At least not right now.
Thank you, he thinks, and it might be a prayer to her or to a god in whom he hasn't believed in a long time, or to the universe in general. Thank you. Because as that gleaming house gets nearer and nearer and the shaded road swoops in increasingly sharper curves, the bike leaning into them, he's actually believing. A little. He's actually finding some faith.
It might kill him.
It might kill them both.
He went from not believing it was true to wanting it to be true to - and this is horrible, he will never in a million years admit to this, he can barely admit it to himself - wishing it wasn't. Wishing she was dead after all. Because he already lost her, he already ground himself through that, and it might have been easier than gazing into those clear, blue, blank eyes. That flat gaze.
What he got back wasn't her. He looked at her and she wasn't there.
Then he saw that she was. It was like a tiny spark, way down in her void. Almost snuffed out. But he didn't think he was imagining it. He held her face in his hands and leaned close, and for a moment he didn't let her fight him off. He forced her, and it hurt to do it, he hated himself, but he had to know. He had to see.
She jerked free of him and stumbled back, and Aaron caught her and stared at him, eyes wide - clearly appalled.
Aaron doesn't know shit.
Except he does. He so does, and Daryl knew it, but he was spiteful and raw, bleeding out from the inside, and he didn't want sympathy. He didn't want understanding. He wanted not to be seeing what he was seeing, what he couldn't unsee.
I'm sorry. She's suffered massive trauma, we're not exactly equipped... I did my best.
Fucking Edwards. Fuck you, did you really? Did you love her that much? Did you try everything, did you break yourself trying, did you run all night until you literally couldn't stand? Did you despise yourself for it after, because you suspected that maybe if you tried, you just picked a fucking direction, you could have gone another half mile? Another mile? Two? More? That maybe there was another hour of it in you, hours if you dug deep, and you didn't really give her all you had? Would you have given everything, every part of yourself, to go back and get it right? Would you have handed over your legs, your arms, your nose and eyes and ears and tongue, your dick, would you willingly have sent yourself into motionless silent darkness if it meant she came back whole and alive and she fucking knew she was?
Would you have done that, you worthless prick? Did you really try?
Yes. He probably did.
She pulled away from him, turned, appeared to focus on Edwards. Reached up and - calmly, quietly, and with no apparent pain - began to claw at her own face.
Grabbing her wrists. Grabbing her hard enough that her bones ground together in his hands. She was bleeding. She wasn't doing it in half measures. She meant to score her flesh and she meant to do it as deeply as she could. Her struggling again, twisting in his grip, and all the time gazing up at him with that awful blankness.
What the fuck. Bellowing. What the fuck is wrong with her.
Edwards, low. Trembling a little. Afraid, because he saw what happened to Dawn, and he was probably full of visions of his own death and didn't think it would necessarily be quick.
She doesn't believe she came back. She thinks she's dead.
She thinks she's a walker.
Except not all the time. That's the thing. She goes in and out. Most of the time she's quiet, calm. In fact, she's calm as a rule, but the good periods - which are the longest - aren't marked by those occasional bizarrely determined bouts of self-injury. They know she thinks she's a walker because she told them so, or so Edwards reported; she seemed confused about why they were trying to feed her strawberries, because she needed meat, fresh and raw and bleeding, ideally still screaming. She wasn't violent about it but she was adamant. She made it very clear.
She wouldn't eat the strawberries. They tried a few other things. Nothing worked.
After a few days - when she should have been and in fact was perfectly capable of eating on her own - they restrained and force-fed her. She didn't sleep. She wouldn't stop screaming.
But she does have good days. This is a good day. He wasn't sure until she held him tighter, but now he knows, and when he pulls up the long drive - broad and stately, no doubt meant for the use of very expensive and preferably foreign cars - and the entire house comes into view with its other large windows and its multiple slanted roofs, its wide deck, its garden with a dry stone fountain and the careful landscaping almost entirely overgrown, he feels another clutch of hope.
He stops by the front door. Cuts the engine. Waits. She should let him go, let him get off the bike, get off herself, but she doesn't release him, and he doesn't try to make her. Because there's this, her arms around him - strong despite the degree to which her muscles atrophied - and he needs it. She does too, or that's what he's telling himself, but really he does. He can feel her chest expand and contract with her breath. She must be able to feel his. She must.
I'm alive. So are you. We're the same.
Gradually her arms loosen and she shifts away.
She's already climbing off the bike as he is, and as he turns to get the pack and unstrap the bow, she walks forward, her gaze swinging everywhere. The trees all around the house, the house itself. The sun has well and truly emerged now, though it's still haloed in haze, and it catches her hair. Lights it up gold. In the hospital they had to shave it all off when they operated on her - little bald Beth, he can't decide what the fuck to do with that image - but it's grown out some and it's long enough to hang around her face, long enough to almost cover the nape of her neck. Even if it wasn't for the scars he would be reminded of what happened to her every second he looks at her, but she's still crowned in soft gold and it still makes him ache, and he stands with the bow over his shoulder and the pack over the other and watches her, his breath a cold knot in his throat.
He catches a glimpse of her face. She's focused, and she looks mildly interested in everything she's seeing.
Interested. Shit. Yes.
He clears his throat, and he has a flash of the back of her all lit rich gold by candlelight, drawing that music out of the old piano with her clever hands. Standing there and watching her while something happened inside him that he couldn't hope to explain and still can't.
She glances back at him.
"'s nice," he says, and he sounds so fucking stupid. "Right?"
No answer. Not that he expected one. She does talk but at highly irregular intervals, and it's almost impossible to predict what will get a response out of her. If she says anything at all to him it's a gift.
She looks interested. For now he can be satisfied with that.
"Alright. C'mon." He joins her, walks past her, looks back to make sure she's following. She is, though he knows that it's almost certainly half reflex and not that she actively wants to come with him.
She follows people. She follows them because they're meat.
The double doors are unlocked. He unshoulders the bow and pushes one open, touches her arm, guides her gently inside.
It's big. It's bigger than they need.
He stands in the foyer, looking up at the high cathedral ceiling, and he feels like he's walked them into an actual cathedral. Their footsteps echo. Everything is sleek and shiny chrome and light wood and white walls and very modern. The furniture is sparse and it doesn't look like it was made primarily with comfort in mind. There's almost no art on the walls, few decorations of any kind, and what's there is colorless and abstract in a way he finds vaguely disturbing. It feels cold, distant, unlived-in, and as he moves slowly forward toward the cavernous central kitchen/dining room/living room, which is walled in that glass for reasons of scenic appreciation, he feels - with a sickening lurch - as though he's walking into her mind.
Angles. Lines. Clean. Blank. Pristine in a horrible way. Fixed in a calm and deadly logic. She's calculating. She's highly rational in the most irrational way possible. She's completely insane, and he was insane for wanting to come up here with her.
He tells her to stay put, rapidly checks the whole place. It's clear. Not only no walkers but no bodies of any kind. Thin, undisturbed layer of dust everywhere. No sign that anyone's been up here in forever.
It feels like a clean, bright mausoleum.
He returns to the foyer with the bow over his shoulder. He has to pretend to be something resembling enthusiastic. He has to do it for her. He turns back to her and he takes her hand, and she doesn't try to pull away from him. She looks down at their fingers, brow slightly furrowed... And she folds them together. She threads them.
He almost bursts into tears.
She looks back up at him, brows still knitted together. Puzzled.
"Where are we?"
He swallows. She's talking. She's holding his hand, she's aware that she's holding his hand, and she's talking to him. This is better than he hoped it would be, so much faster than he expected - because is it? Is this good and traceable to what he's done? Is this place helping her, and already? Was he right? Did he somehow actually get it right?
"We're in the mountains. Remember? I told you I was takin' you up here. 'cause you need..." He looks down at their hands, at the floor, at the wall. He can't look at her. Just for a few seconds, he needs to pull himself together. When he first broke in front of her back in Atlanta it upset her deeply and if he does it again he has no idea what it'll do. "You need to rest."
"Oh." She takes a breath, frowning harder, and tugs her hand free from his. She does it carefully, with clear conscious intent, and he doesn't try to stop her. He's determined that if she's not actually attempting to hurt herself or him, he's not going to try to stop her from doing anything, and neither is he going to force her.
She walks away, into the big room, the impacts of her boots on the hardwood ringing off the bare walls. He hangs back and follows her slow progress, and he shivers when she runs her hand along the back of a long, low sofa, a built-in bookcase full of black glass sculptures and vintage hardbacks, the stone mantle of the enormous fireplace, a chrome standing lamp. She's engaging. She's there. He wasn't wrong. He did see something and it wasn't his imagination, wasn't wishful thinking. She's in there, somewhere, and maybe she's not complete, maybe she's in pieces, but he can find her, help her find herself, reassemble and stitch and glue and put herself back together again.
He can do this. He can have a little faith.
She reaches the wall of glass and lays her hands flat against it. Tilts her head back and looks up, scans the entire thing. Like she's mapping it. Committing it to memory. He picks that moment to follow her, though he keeps his distance, keeps himself to the center of the room - by the sofa and an ugly iron and glass coffee table that looks like it might have cost a few thousand dollars.
"Beth?"
She turns. Looks at him. Licks her lips. His heart is pounding into his throat.
"Who are you?"
He can't help it. It's not breaking, he tells himself. It's not loud or violent. She might not even be processing what he's doing, might have no idea how to read his face. She has a hard time with faces now. Maybe that's a good thing.
He goes to the sofa and drops the pack, drops the bow, sinks down onto it and buries his face in his hands.
She does eat. Now, she does. It's hard to say if it's a sign of her coming back, but not too long after they had to force feed her, it was like a switch flipped in her head and she understood that she could eat normal food, and she was quite willing to do so. She insisted that it wasn't what she really needed, but she ate and she didn't get into any fights with anyone about it.
She ate mechanically. There was no sign that she enjoyed anything, disliked anything, tasted anything at all. But she ate, and she didn't starve and they didn't have to fuck around with IVs or feeding tubes anymore, and that was more than enough to consider progress.
Or so Edwards said.
He packed candles but it turns out there's a drawer full of them and a lot of them scattered around - part of those cold, weird decorations - and he gathers some of them together on the short, blocky dining table, and as the sun goes down he lights them and sets out dinner. It's just beef jerky and cans of peaches and cranberry sauce and a package of Oreos, nothing fancy and frankly pretty weird, though they're more than used to throwing together weird food combinations by now. Depending on what he finds in town they can maybe put together something better, but for now this is at least food and there's plenty of it. Maybe he should be rationing more, but this is their first night here, and he's so fucking stupid for wanting to do this and it feels so pointless and he doesn't know why he's giving in to this impulse, but it could be a sad little party.
Sad little white trash brunch. He'll actually do it, if he can. If the town has them. He'll get some peanut butter and jelly, soda, he'll even try to get his hands on some pig's feet, because that's something she knows and maybe she'll taste it and remember.
He didn't expect to feel so pathetic every second he's doing this.
She's lying on the sofa. She's not sleeping. Her eyes are open, and she's not blinking as much as she probably would under normal circumstances. But she's not blank. She's watching him. She's been watching him all afternoon as he moves around, makes sure the house is clear, makes sure there's still running water, gets together what supplies he can find. There are bedrooms, three of them, and they're big. He wasn't sure whether or not they should use them, whether she should sleep alone, but the idea of a bed is very attractive. Especially these, which are very soft, and the sheets on them are a bit musty but softer and silkier than any he's ever slept on in his life. Like the rest of the stuff here, expensive. What is it about sheets? The thread count or some shit? Something like that. It must be ridiculous.
In the end he dragged two of the mattresses into the main room, kicked aside a table and a couple of chairs to clear some floor. They aren't together - they are, in fact, on opposite ends of the room with hers near the window, because he feels like she should have at least a little space to herself - but he'll be with her. He'll be able to keep an eye on her. It might not make any difference, but he'll feel better.
He doesn't trust her. He can't. Not totally. Not yet.
There's another pack on the bike. He didn't let her see him filling it. He'll bring it in later, and he'll do it when he's sure he can hide it well. There are things in it he doesn't want to ever have to use.
There are syringes and a couple bottles of sedative, which Edwards has showed him how to administer. There are pills to do the same job, only milder and slower and less potentially dangerous. There are cobbled-together versions of the restraints the hospital uses.
There's a length of rope.
There's a gun.
He agonized over that last. If she found it. If she decided to use it. On herself. On him. But then he thought about the cliff and about jumping, and he figured the same logic applied. If she wants to do it, if she's really determined, it doesn't matter what the fuck he does.
She'll find a way.
She's been watching him as he tries to get things settled. Watching him put the sheets back on the mattresses, find blankets. It's only early autumn and still warm, but it does get chilly up here. Watching him arrange things in some kind of order. Watching him.
He doesn't like the way she's watching him. But unless she tries something, there's nothing he can do about it.
He finishes, turns to her. "C'mon over."
She doesn't move. Watches him. Blinks.
He sighs. Everything in him is very heavy. "Beth, c'mon. You gotta eat." He jerks his chin at the plate - there are plates and he's going to use them, he's going to make this as civilized as possible. "We got cranberry sauce, you love that. It's the jelly kind, y'know. With the ribs from the can."
She does. She did. She did love it. They came upon some once and he got to see it for himself.
She doesn't move.
"Beth," he murmurs again, and he starts toward her.
He's less than five feet from her when she gets up, startlingly fast, every muscle tense, legs slightly spread and center of gravity low. Her face is impassive but everything about her body screams fight or flight and he freezes, almost falls back, because she's dangerous. He knows she is.
God, he doesn't want to have to actually find out how much.
But again, she doesn't move. She's just there, and then, bit by bit, she relaxes. Whatever she saw, whatever got her up like that, it's gone.
Or she doesn't care about it anymore.
"Daryl," she says softly, and there's nothing else, but she knows him again. She at least knows him in the vague way in which she slowly came to recognize him, which he'll gladly accept in lieu of that hideously total lack of any recognition at all.
"Yeah. Yeah, that's right." He steps toward her, reaches for her, and she allows him to take her elbow and when he tugs she moves unhesitatingly. Placid. Calm as a cow.
God.
He leads her to the table and she sits down and eats on her own, without any prompting. She eats and she eats everything in front of her, but she eats in that same automatic way, as if she's refueling a machine, and when she's done she doesn't comment on any of it or ask for any more. She simply stares down at her plate, once again with that faintly puzzled expression.
If it comes to that, he eats in much the same way. He tastes nothing. He eats because he has to be strong. For her. He doesn't take his eyes off her the entire time.
It's something. He has to keep thinking like that. It's something.
There's a woodpile outside and he gets a fire going - big and bright and throwing odd shadows around the room. It's already cooling down a good bit and he guides her over to it and sits her down on the floor in front of it, gets her a blanket and puts it over her legs. She doesn't seem aware of it - or she doesn't seem to have any opinion about it - but she doesn't resist him, and again he counts that as something.
He sits down next to her, crosslegged. Not too close. But close enough for her to feel him.
There's a long period of nothing but the crackle of the fire. Then he takes a breath and drags himself together, wrenches, and forces some words out of his useless fucking mouth.
"You sang by the fire. Remember? Used to do it a lot."
Nothing. But he didn't expect anything. He pushes on.
"At the prison, first night we were there. With everyone. We cleared out the walkers. That was..." He trails off for a second, chewing at the inside of his cheek. Biting until he tastes copper. "That was a good night. You were smilin', everyone was. You'n Maggie, you sang together. You remember that?"
Nothing. Except- The corner of her mouth twitches. Maybe. It might have done. The corner of her mouth, and then her hand - he's not imagining that - settling over the blanket, drawing it up a little higher. Not reflex, not unconscious and meaningless motions to go through. She's pulling it up because she wants to.
"You remember what you sang?" His hands are shaking. This is awful. "C'mon, you gotta remember. What did you sing?"
He falls silent. He can't push anymore. He knows he should wait, give her a chance, but he also almost can't bear to. It took everything out of him to say what he said, to remember it himself. That night, watching her by the fire, lit up like she is now, so beautiful, and listening to her and that was beautiful too and it hurt, and he didn't understand why. Still doesn't. Not completely.
He didn't...
She looks at him. Looks right at him. Focuses. Licks her lips and parts them.
Yes. Yes, girl, c'mon. Try. Try for me.
She looks away. She doesn't say anything. She doesn't look at him again.
At some point he gives up and puts her to bed. He tucks her in like a child. And he feels like maybe he shouldn't, like it's wrong somehow, like it's stepping across some kind of line, but before he leaves her he strokes her hair back from her face, and allows his hand to linger. Her hair is soft. She's soft. Still, even now, even when her eyes are so hard. Soft and warm, and alive.
He does break then. It's quiet. She probably doesn't notice. She doesn't seem to notice when he leans down and presses his lips to her temple, lingers there too. She smells fresh, clean. Bright. She smells like the color of her hair.
Goodnight. Goodnight, girl.
We'll try again tomorrow.