Chapter 6: grey would be the color if I had a heart

A seaside framed in glass, and boats, those little boats with sails aflutter, shining lights upon the water, lights that splinter when they hit the pier. - Richard Siken

She's on her way to her morning shift on the wall when Rick comes to her.

He catches her down the block from the house. She has her rifle slung over her shoulder and she turns and watches him cover the last few yards to her - and this is yet another thing she was fairly certain would happen, just like she's fairly certain about what he's going to say and why.

The weight of the rifle is grounding, an anchor, and she allows herself to be pulled by it, and she doesn't think of the weight of the crossbow - the weight she remembers a little of every time she shoulders the rifle, every time she raises it and takes aim. Big gun for a small girl and she handles it with an accuracy that shut the few initial scoffers up right quick. Her first shift on the wall, the ones who hadn't seen her shoot were amused. Then they saw her shoot and they weren't amused anymore. They were just staring at her

And she didn't think about how he would have been so proud of her, and he would have been trying to hide it and not doing very well.

She hasn't seen the crossbow since the day he died. They left it behind. Just dropped it. It didn't even get as much as the trunk. Could have been buried with him like a hero in a legend entombed with his sword.

So Rick comes, and when he reaches her he stops and looks down at her, eyes shadowed in the mid-morning light.

She doesn't wait for him to speak. She just asks. Wonders if she might be doing him a favor by getting there first.

"How is he?"

"He's alright." Rick rolls a shoulder. His voice is low. Steady. It doesn't sound like he's expending too much effort in keeping it that way, which is good. "He ate some dinner. Didn't make trouble." He gives her the faintest, thinnest edge of a smile. "Actually took a goddamn shower."

She laughs. It's as thin as his smile, hollow, and she doesn't really feel it, but she does. It won't make him less insane, but at least he won't look so much that way. Be good for everyone else, in terms of their ease. Be good for him, perhaps in a number of ways.

"Gave him his own room. He slept. Pretty sure he did, anyway."

"Not in the bed," she says. Not a question.

"No." Rick hesitates. "On the floor. Took the covers and the pillow and made up a place in the corner."

"So he couldn't get snuck up on." Yes. He wouldn't do anything else. She looks away and releases a long breath. It doesn't shake much. Across the street, middle-aged Mrs. Campbell is bending over her rose bushes, shears in her gloved hand. They gleam in the sun.

The Wolves would have said - with plain and almost innocent earnestness - that Mrs. Campbell and her rose bushes don't belong here. They would have said she and they should both die, for their own good. She knows without having to verify it that Daryl would completely agree.

"Won't let Carol cut his hair." Again, thin smile. Thin amusement. "But yeah. He's doin' alright. At least so far. Not sure I'm gonna have Carl and Judith come back tonight, but maybe tomorrow. Carol should probably stay." He pauses again, and she isn't looking at him but she feels the weight of his scrutiny like the rifle on her shoulder. "Right now it seems like he's most comfortable with her. At any rate he'll listen to her, which is more than he'll do for Michonne and me most of the time."

"They're fine with us another night." He hasn't asked. Probably already knew he wouldn't have to. But there's more, and she turns her gaze back on him and his awkwardness is like an aura shimmering around him. Rick is hardly ever truly awkward anymore. It's not a good look for him. It does unattractive things to his shoulders. His hands. As if he's literally vibrating - almost imperceptibly - with the thing he doesn't want to say and knows he'll have to regardless.

Spit it out, asshole. She's tired. She didn't sleep much. Could have taken another Klonopin - Denise almost certainly would have given her one - but sedatives don't grow on trees and she's gone with less sleep before, and anyway…

Anyway, she can think of other people who might need it more than her.

"I'm guessin' you already know I think you should stay away from him." Abruptly his awkwardness is gone and he's just standing there, Rick Grimes, hard around the crust and the mantle with a softer, churning core. Not exactly thrilled about it, but doing what he has to do without a single second guess. "Not for good. Just for now. Just till he's doin' better."

Because of course he'll do better. Of course no other possibility is going to be admitted here. Mostly Rick is a bloodless realist, and he would obviously like people to think he is all the time, but the part of him that still wants to believe hasn't been entirely burned out of him, and now and then it crawls to the surface and peeks its scarred head out into the sun of the world. Daryl will get better because Daryl will get better, because that's what's going to happen, and it wouldn't kill everyone to have a little faith.

Yes, it will. Faith kills people all the time. Sure as hell never saved anyone.

But she wants to believe it too. She really does. She wants to believe that she didn't see what she saw in Daryl's eyes. Which was nothing. A gaping hole where he used to be. Burrowed into and eaten out from the inside.

How in her mind she saw the maggots in him. Making him a decaying shell.

She nods. Yes, she knows. "I talked to him," she says quietly.

"Michonne told me."

Of course she did. "Don't tell me it was stupid. I know it was."

"He wasn't gonna go after you." Confidence in that. Not stupid confidence. Rick is a lot of things right now, including optimistic to the point of possible delusion, but stupid is not one of them. Maybe Daryl isn't Daryl anymore, but Rick can look at someone and read them passably well, and Daryl has always been shit at hiding things. And that's one aspect of him that she doubts has changed. "He wasn't goin' after you before. Not like that. He wasn't meaning to hurt you."

"No. He wasn't."

Wasn't meaning to. But he might have anyway. Out of sheer desperation. Terror. Out of the confused, anguished rage he spat at her in the cell. He might have crushed her just trying to hold onto her. He might have choked her to death simply clutching her to him. She can easily conceive of that. She saw something else in him, and it's that he's not totally sure of anything he sees or hears or feels. He's not sure of anything at all.

That alone is immensely dangerous.

She should stay away from him.

"He's gonna get better," Rick says softly. Echo and emphasis both. "He just needs some time. He made it this far."

And she can't take it anymore. Because she held him in that fucking hallway and she was soaked in his fucking blood and she watched the bullet that should have been for her crash into his fucking skull and blow it apart, and she spent the last couple months of her life convinced that his body rotted away to nothing in the trunk of a fucking car without a funeral or flowers or a song at his graveside and sure, Rick loved him and loves him and Rick isn't stupid but Rick doesn't understand a fucking thing.

"Go look at him and tell me he made it."

She turns before he can say anything else and walks away.

She should stay away from him. And she will. But the houses are across the damn street from each other and there's only so much she can do. She comes home later in the afternoon, hungry and tired and sweaty from the early summer sun, and the thing is that she's sure where he is. Where in the house. What room they'll have put him in. Spare bedroom downstairs which used to be Michonne's until - without fanfare or comment from anyone - Michonne moved up into Rick's room as if she'd always been there. Way to the side of the house but it has a view of the street obstructed only by the spreading branches of a small Japanese maple.

Not enough to block her from him.

He'll be watching the street. He'll be watching because he is.

She's telling herself to not stop. Keep on walking. She's spent all day trying not to think about him and somehow she's just about succeeded, and she doesn't have much further to go. A few more yards. Up the porch steps and inside. Go to her room and curl up in her bed and try to doze. Try to continue to selectively forget him. But she feels him looking at her and she stops, hands clenched into fists - one at her side and one around the strap of the rifle - trembling slightly because all of her is trembling slightly, her eyes locked shut.

How much is she hurting him simply by doing this? By simply standing here where he can see? How much damage is she causing? How much is he willing to forgive?

How much does he want?

I'm sorry, she thinks - mouths silently. She just wants to go inside and maybe not go to bed, maybe play with Judith and go back to trying to pretend to be normal, which in her admittedly subjective opinion she had actually been getting semi-decent at. She doesn't get to have that now. That might be her penance. I'm sorry, Daryl, I'm so sorry, I'm so, so sorry.

He's gone. The pressure of his observation. Closed his eyes or turned away, but it feels like he vanished. He was never there. The room is empty and his return was just another nightmare in an endless series, stretching forever into a future of pretending to be everything she's not, because you can't belong here if you're as fucked up as she is. Even if in her most brutally honest moments she's not sure she wants to be here at all.

That's her penance too.

She climbs heavily up the porch steps and goes into the house. She curls up on her bed. She doesn't sleep, and she doesn't come out for the rest of the evening.

Can't look at her anymore.

Wanted to. Did. Like staring directly into the sun; he's blind now. Stumbles toward the stripped bed he couldn't bear to sleep in, half falls onto it and once again feels his new clothes like a net in which he's been trapped. Whines very softly and it hurts his throat, because God, God, she's so beautiful and he can't do this, he can't begin to process how it's possible that he's here in the same universe as her, crashed his way into it, and seeing her there, now, he does want to stay here, wants to even if he doesn't belong here and never will.

She does. In another life she could have helped him. Even if she couldn't have taught him how to do it, she could have taught him how to pretend.

He wants to say he's sorry. Rip down the door, launch himself through the window, sprint across the lawn and the street and tumble to his knees in front of her and grope for her hand, let her burn him. He deserves it, he should burn. He's sorry, he's so sorry he said those things to her, he didn't mean them, he dragged his ruined fucking carcass six hundred miles to find her and he has and he has everything he wants if she won't turn her radiant face away, won't abandon him in the silence without her song, if she won't leave him again.

He forgives her for that, oh, he does, he does, he never could have blamed her for that, never.

She's perfect, sinless, and he's wretched and he would joyfully die for her a hundred thousand times more and he's so sorry.

No. No, he's not. He's not sorry. He's not sorry at all. She's a heartless little bitch and she left him, and she's been hurting him ever since simply because she can, because she has the power to do it and it amuses her to toy with him. Called him north like a siren, dashed him to pieces on her rocks. She'd laugh at him for it because he's pathetic and predictable. Trainable. He won't be Rick's dog but he'll be hers, parasites and mange and sickness, shit-caked hindquarters, heart full of worms.

Rabid now.

Christ, she made him want her. Realizing it. Bits and pieces of it. Aching to be there on his knees in front of her. Wanting that. Made him.

Cunt.

She stopped there on purpose. She knew he'd see her. So sprint across the lawn, across the street, grip her by her delicate throat and hurl her to the ground and smash her head against the pavement, break that beautiful face into ragged shards of bone and mangled flesh, crack her skull open and spill her brain across the street and crush it into paste with his heel like the butt of a cigarette and see how she likes it.

See how she likes dying for no reason.

No.

Breath so tight it won't come, fists beating at the inside of his lungs. Drawing his legs up and curling onto the bare mattress, squeaking springs under his weight like tiny screams. Like he's hurting them. Everywhere, hurting. Raking his fingers into his hair and yanking at it until his eyes should be watering but they're bone dry.

He can't cry.

He's so sorry. For thinking these things, for being what he is, for being where he doesn't belong. He's so sorry. He's not. He is. He's not. He hates her. He could kill her, he hates her so much for what she's doing to him now.

He loves her so much he wants to burst into flames.

He does, he is. For her. He's burning in this empty bed. He's burning down to nobody and nothing, which is what he is. Was before and is now and always will be.

And he's so sorry.