Chapter 7: in a fire now we will go
He stands and watches her, but once again he doesn't go out to her.
It's a cool morning. A little gray - overhead, not on the horizon; a high shelf of cloud the trajectory of which is difficult to determine. It doesn't seem like it matters much, and as he stands at the door to the deck, still shirtless, still blinking owlishly in the beginnings of the light, he feels the numbness from the night before lingering.
He doesn't want it, that essential lack of feeling. Even though he senses he might need it. What's coming next... It might be fine. Everything has been swinging wildly back and forth between mostly fine and completely terrible, and there's no hard evidence to make him assume today will be one or the other. Probably it'll be both. But there's no reason to assume immediate terribleness. And after she did this she seemed happier. Both times.
He watches her all lit up, that same quality of pristine coldness - something impossibly distant, impossibly separate. Unreachable. You don't try to save a statue.
You don't try to save a dead girl.
Unless you're as insane as she is.
He turns and begins to make his plodding way toward the bathroom, planning ahead to breakfast - canned pineapple and oranges - and scanning his own interior for anything to grip and hold onto. Yesterday doesn't seem real, and he doesn't think it's just the numbness. None of what happened - what he can remember, and a lot of it is weirdly hazy, dreamlike - makes any sense to him now. The deer. The walker. The deer again. Her, soaked in blood, eating. Feeding. Washing her after.
Her washing herself. Her breast, her hard little nipple peaked in the firelight.
That last shivers through him and he shoves it violently away. That was... Everything was strange. It was a moment. It's over. There's no point.
Looking at himself in the mirror, in the colorless light pushing its way through the frosted glass window. From downstairs he can hear the slide of the door, though her bare feet are silent against the hardwood, at least from where he is. He listens anyway; one of the steps creaks and he'll hear it if she's coming up to him.
And if she does?
He braces his hands on the edge of the sink and stares into his own eyes, half obscured by his hair. They look sunken. His cheeks are hollow. He's pale and the lines are standing out on his face just as dark and sharp as her scars. He looks old.
He feels old.
If she came up here? If she tried something? Last night she was docile. She was easy. Again, he thinks about that, about how she very possibly would have done just about anything he told her to do. That by giving way a little, letting her have what she wanted - or at least not resisting her or trying to stop her when she took it anyway - he got what he wanted. Or at least as close to it as he's likely to get right now.
You gave her a treat and she was good for you.
He glances down; he's gripping the porcelain so hard the blood has been forced almost entirely out of his hands. They look like dead hands. Fresh walker hands that haven't yet started to rot.
He doesn't want this.
He closes his eyes, sets his jaw until it aches. He's going to be good to her today. He's going to try. He's going to trust her as much as possible. He's not going to treat her like a fucking child. She's not a child. She's still Beth. In terms of her behavior she might indeed be presenting herself as something between a sweet, sad little girl and a spiteful little girl and a monster, but she's still Beth. She's broken but she's still Beth, and she's not gone.
If she came up here to him? He would turn to her and touch her shoulder, lead her back downstairs and do what he's going to do anyway. He'd put food in front of her and make sure she eats it. Make sure she washes up, gets dressed, and yes, these are things he would do for a child, but he won't fucking think of her that way.
She's Beth. Nothing he could do for her can change that. Nothing he could do with her. He's not that powerful.
Nothing he could do to her.
He pulls a shirt on, throws some water at his face, goes back down.
She's walking along the bookshelves, running a hand over the things on them. Books. The sculptures, the vases and figurines. There are now a bunch of very noticeable gaps where more of them used to be. At some point - probably not very long from now - she's going to run out. What then? Where will she go for her pretty little things to destroy?
This is assuming they'll be here long enough for that to be a problem. Which he is - he realizes it as he does it. He's assuming exactly that. He genuinely believed this might take only a few days. He was that fucking naive. Thought he was that powerful. He could bring her up here and she would be with him alone, like it was, and she would remember.
He could bring her up here and have her all to yourself.
Couldn't you?
He clears his throat and she turns around. Her eyes are dreamy, not entirely alert, but it's better than it has been. She's focused on him. She sees him. And she smiles, just a small flash of her teeth.
Crooked in the front. Somehow that tiny detail always caught his attention, always drew him. He sees it now and it's like the whine of a mosquito in his ear.
Teeth on his throat. Jerking, tearing. Ripping. Blood flooding his mouth, his sinuses. Arching and making it run up his face to burn hot in his eyes. World full of blood. It was a home she made for the both of them.
She runs an absent hand through her tousled hair, as if she's trying to push and pull it back into some kind of order - and maybe she is. Could very well be. He can let himself believe that. It's not a huge risk if he's wrong. She always took care of her hair even on the bad days, if she could. Combed it out with her fingers. Worked out the most egregious tangles. Pulled it back, braided it, and it hits him all over again that it's pretty much too short to braid the way she did and will be for a while. If she work a brain into it, it would be nothing like it was.
"Hi." She cocks her head slightly, frowning. It tugs at the long scar on her brow. "Are you alright?"
"I'm." He clears his throat again and twitches his gaze away from her. To the shelf behind her - to a gray ceramic thing that looks vaguely like a giraffe. To the standing lamp a little way to her right. To the sofa, that ugly coffee table, to anything but her. "Yeah. 'm fine."
"Okay."
Suddenly she's moving toward him, smooth quiet strides over the area rug, her expression clearing. Once again she has that look of dim, flat contentment. Gotten what she wants. Gotten her way. So how long does this last?
What might he be willing to do in order to keep it going?
She stops in front of him - not close. Hands at her sides, head tilted up to meet his gaze, and she's glowing. She's actually just about literally glowing, as if she soaked up the young sunlight when she was out in it going through her little ritual. As if last night, kneeling in front of the fire, she soaked that in too. Before all this, alone with her, it seemed to him that she always had light around her, that somehow she attracted it even on darker days, but every time he wrote it off as his imagination. He wasn't doing well then. It wasn't by any means impossible that he might see hints of things that weren't there. Even after... He had reasons for seeing that then too.
But he'd swear it's real. Swear it's there. Cheeks flushed, the skin of her neck and bare arms creamy. Her hair.
He swallows. It's like a stone going down his throat.
"What's for breakfast?"
"I'll get it."
She tilts her head again. Little bird. "I can help."
"Nothin' to help with. 's just cans."
"I want to do more." She was glowing; now her face is darkening. Not much, but he doesn't mistake it. Storm clouds, not yet here but threatening on the horizon. "Why aren't you letting me do anythin'? I'm not a kid."
He could brush her off. Or try. But she's Beth, even if she sounds like a sullen child, and he lurches to his very core as he goes ahead and says it.
"You're sick."
She blinks at him, the clouds broken up and blown momentarily away by the force of her confusion. "I feel fine."
"You keep thinkin' you're dead. You ain't fine."
Just like that, the clouds roll back in - crash in, bringing thunder, and her face twists, reddens, lips pulling back from her teeth. Little bird; little beast. Not a walker; walkers moan and groan and hiss but they don't snarl, and their eyes don't blaze. Which isn't hyperbole. That eerie glow is surging brighter. Not sunlight but the volcano of madness rumbling inside her.
He stands there and plants his feet. He can't be ready for this but he's going to try. After yesterday... He can. He can take something awful, something that should be unbearable, and he can bear it. He can. If she's a storm, he can bend and not break under her.
Everything in him is going cold again.
He's expecting an outburst. He's expecting her to hiss at him, let that spiteful girl out to play with him, maybe just attack him, come at him with her claws and her teeth, but she does none of those things, and he was right. He can't be ready. Because all she does is step closer and reach up, lay her fingers against his lips. Like when he gave her back her knife and she touched his face, they're cool. Smooth. They burrow under his skin and tie up his nerves, and the outline of the bruise he left on her wrist blooms dark in his vision like threatening unconsciousness.
"You had my blood on you," she says softly, and that's when he knows. There's no other way. Nothing else to explain it. Edwards never would have told her something like that, even if he had noticed. No one else would.
She remembers. He was sure she was dead, but she was alive enough to see it. There was enough of her left to remember.
"Right here. On your mouth." Gentle. Relentless. The storm is gone again; there's nothing on her face now but beautiful, pitiless calm. "Maybe I was turnin' already. Maybe that's how I saw it. I was confused. Everything was spinnin' around. Nothin' was the right shape."
He can't move. She's pinned him with a touch. Is he bending? He doesn't know anymore. This isn't a gale. This is something so much worse, and he could never have expected this but he should have expected something he would be completely unable to deal with. And he could tell her that she couldn't have been turning anyway, that she was shot in the fucking head, but he already knows that won't help. Won't do a damn thing. She's smart. Very. She can think around any argument he can throw at her, and she can just ignore the rest.
She's always been so sure of herself.
"Everything was screamin'." Even softer. Barely a whisper. She's close enough that he can feel her breath on his neck, warm puffs of air. So alive. Jesus fucking Christ, she's the most alive thing he's ever seen. "I always wondered what turnin' was like. Maybe I bit you." Her fingers are moving, sliding from his mouth down to his chin, through the scruff there, along his jaw and dipping into the hollow of his throat. "Right here. Maybe that's how it happened."
He can see flecks of green in her eyes. She turns her head and the sun catches her, turns her hair to cornsilk strands and lights up every color in her irises. Gold, now. Violet. Her eyes look like opals.
She fixes her gaze on her hand, on where it is, almost frowning, deeply thoughtful. And this isn't Beth.
He doesn't know who this is.
She hooks her fingers, digs her nails into the skin over his carotid artery. He sucks in a breath and doesn't move, and the truth lurking inside it crashes in on him like a wave.
He doesn't want to.
"Maybe I killed them all," she whispers. "I couldn't go to Heaven after that. I couldn't be with Daddy and Mama and Shawn. Maybe I killed them and I didn't let them turn. But you turned. You would. You'd turn and you'd be with me. You'd want to. Wouldn't you?"
Beth. He's just mouthing the word. There's no voice behind it, no air. Every time he breathes, those hard little edges dig in deeper.
"We're together again. Just us. You said we'd stick around. You didn't want to find the others. You didn't want that at all."
Nothing else. She's silent, staring at him, breath caressing his skin. He could tear himself back. He could shove her away. Of course he doesn't, of course he won't; his eyes half close and almost imperceptibly his head tilts back and he gives her more of himself. Offers. It's that thrumming, buzzing numbness - a feeling like the blow of a hammer through a pillow: that right now, like this, he might not have anything left to lose.
Which is insane. He has everything left to lose. He has so much more to lose than he did two weeks ago.
Yet here he is.
At last she nods, confirming something to herself, and before he can even hope to process what she's doing she lifts up on her toes and presses a kiss to his cheek. Slow.
It lingers.
"I get it now," she breathes. Lays a hand on his chest and uses it to push herself away. Steps past him and heads for the kitchen without looking back, leaving him standing, gazing blankly at nothing. At the space where she was, like he can't comprehend how she came to be there and now he can't hope to comprehend her absence. Behind him he hears the clink of her getting bowls, silverware.
Yes.
She's not the only one who got what she wanted.
He lets her get the bowls. Really it's not even a matter of anything he does or doesn't allow; by the time he manages to turn and go to her, she's set them out on the counter. But she's there in front of them, unmoving, and when he stops at her side and looks at her, her frown is heavy with consternation. It might just be that she's not sure where the cans are. But they're behind her and to the right. She must have seen them before now.
She's standing here like this, motionless and confused, because she genuinely doesn't know what comes next.
It pierces him when it arrives: He told himself he wasn't going to think of her like a child. But what he was planning to do, to feed her... That's exactly what it would have been. Now he has a chance to reexamine it. Perhaps do something different.
He touches her shoulder again, lays a hand over it. Light. Careful. When he speaks he keeps his voice low and smooth. Soothing.
"I was gonna crack open the pineapples and oranges." He pauses, gives her shoulder a little squeeze. He can feel the bones too sharply under his palm, ridges pressing into him. "Can you get 'em for me?"
She still isn't moving. But he can feel her muscles shifting, can feel that she feels him, is reacting, and as with everything else, it's something. What she just said, what she just did to him - it doesn't matter, and that's another thing he's coming to realize: he really will take anything. He'll take it and he'll put it away, because there's nothing else now but her. She's going to keep trying to hurt him, and she's going to keep hurting him without trying, and he can give up or he can stand and take it.
"Pineapples?" She echoes him so softly, barely more than a whisper. She sounds bewildered. Nothing like the gently relentless keenness of before.
"Cans." His other hand finds her shoulder, rests there. It rises and falls as she breathes. "You wanted to do somethin'. That's somethin' you can do for me."
Nothing. Then, slowly, she pulls away from him and steps around, past. He turns to follow her progress and he's half certain that she's just going to wander away, but she goes straight for the stockpile on the counter and picks up the cans, the right ones, and brings them to him. Holds them out, meeting his eyes without wavering.
He takes them from her. It's a tiny thing, what she's done. What she just did for him. On the face of it, it's not even all that different from other things she's done since they got here. She might not be able to function well, but she's made it clear that for the slim majority of the time, she can function.
But he asked her to do something for him and she did it. He didn't trick her into it. He didn't manipulate her. He didn't make her think it was something it wasn't. He asked her and she did. She tried. She's been trying. Under the cloud of the other things that have happened, that she's done, he almost lost sight of that.
"Thanks," he says quietly.
Yesterday was awful. But that was yesterday. Today might be better. It really might.
Maybe he can do something.
She's almost done with her steady, mechanical eating when she stops, spoon full of syrupy orange and halfway to her mouth, and looks at him.
"What happened to the deer?"
He looks back at her, and while his stomach doesn't quite sink, it becomes noticeably heavier. Everything does, and it's pure resignation. She remembers; of course she would want to know. She might be content to eat what he's giving her, at least for now, but she wanted fresh meat, fresh blood, and having it made her happy.
A treacherous part of him, sluggish and dragging itself through the dark, regrets what he did with it. Even if today it wouldn't be nearly as fresh and might not do much to satisfy her.
"It got taken." And if she's asking, she didn't see it on the rocks below when she was performing her morning sacrifices. Or she saw it but she didn't understand what she was seeing. "Guess I didn't hide it well enough."
"Oh." She looks disappointed, but indistinctly so. He can't see any sign of anger, any sign of frustration that might turn verbally or physically violent. She frowns at her bowl, her spoon and her hand, then brightens as something seems to occur to her. "That's all right. We can go hunt. We can get more."
And that's when he knows he's trapped. He set something loose that he's not going to be able to contain. He set something up and he's not going to be able to get out of it. She has a taste for it now. And she's not going to just forget, and sooner or later she's going to stop putting up with excuses.
She's gone back to eating, spooning the last of it into her mouth; watching her, he thinks of footage he once saw on some TV show or other of a Japanese robot building a car. Her lips are shining and sticky with syrup, and a drop of it has escaped and trickled down to her chin. It looks like a tiny, dully glistening gemstone.
Her chin dripping with blood. Her ruby smile.
If he doesn't give her what she wants, she'll find a way.
But he's not going to leave it at the meat and the blood. At that way of reaching her. She's Beth; she's given him glimpses of what he's trying to find when he really got down to it and treated her like Beth, and he has to keep doing that. That's the one way that shows any promise at all.
He can do something. It might be stupid, might be crazy - especially after yesterday - but so is literally everything else he's done, and so is being up here at all. There's really nothing he could do that isn't. So as he sits on his bed and pulls on his boots, his attention strays to her and locks there, unable to get free. Locked on her shoulders, her back, her hands pressed against the glass at the front of the room, and the opalescent eyes he can't see but which he knows are staring out at purple-blue-green peaks and valleys, all drenched in late morning sun - the sun that outlines her body, folds her against itself.
This is going to be a pain in the ass. But he actually feels pretty good about it. She has her knife and she's demonstrated that she remembers how it works. And if he returns to her gnawing on another animal, there are plenty of worse things he could find.
He stands and shoulders the crossbow.
"I'm goin' on a run."
She glances over her shoulder but doesn't face him. When she speaks her voice is level, but not flat. "Alone?"
"Yeah." His fingers wriggle briefly in the empty air, as if they need to grab something and hold on. But to the extent that he can, he's going to be honest with her. "Like yesterday. I'll get in and out quicker if it's just me. And it'd be good if someone was here to watch the place."
Which isn't a lie. It would be good. Provided she can protect herself. Provided she understands that she needs to.
She shrugs, still not turning. "Suit yourself."
"Alright." He looks toward the door, almost starts toward it - then stops. Treating her like Beth... Not like she's fragile. Not like he has to watch every fucking thing he says. She was always straight with him, blunt like a punch even when she was soft about it. Harder with the truth than he ever was. She never treated him like a child. She had expectations of him.
He's not going to insult her now.
"You gonna do anythin' to yourself?"
"What?" But she knows what. He can hear it. She knows and she's asking because she wants him to specify, and he can't tell why she wants that, and while it doesn't actually go so far as to worry him, he's not fond of it.
He can almost trust her. But he's not going to be able to fully trust her until she's well.
"You gonna hurt yourself?" He pauses and then pushes on, jaw tense and hoping she won't notice. "Yesterday you told me you were gonna if I didn't take you along. I need to know you're not gonna do that."
She does turn, finally, and crosses her arms under her breasts. She's changed and she's wearing a different pair of jeans - he only managed to bring her two and he's not sure she can wear the bloody one now - and a top which, he notes with a jolt, is almost the same shade of yellow as-
He can't read her face. Some of it is the light, some the distance, some just that he can't. But she shakes her head, and he doesn't sense any dishonesty in it.
Before this, she never lied to him. Not once.
"Alright." Still he hesitates, studying her, and now she's studying him right back. Not defiant, and not aggressive in any way he can see. She's just... searching him. He has no idea what she's looking for.
"I'm gonna get you some stuff," he says. No manipulation whatsoever. This is his sole reason for going, and it's yet another reason why he wants her to stay. And it's a reason he likes. "I want it to be a surprise."
"Oh."
And she smiles.
It's tiny. At first he thinks it might be his imagination. Is sure it is, sure it's wishful thinking, sure that he is, as she said, merely seeing what he wants to see, and he does want to see this so bad. So fucking bad. Before, all that time before, he came to understand - in the midst of doing it - that he was trying to make her smile. Even in the shack, before the moonshine, talking to her about his father, his fucking father, and somehow erasing the horrible things and just making it funny in kind of a pathetic way. Making it a joke. Seeing her smile. All that crying she had been doing, all that sadness, how he hated seeing it and he couldn't do anything, and then she smiled and it was because of him, and it reached into him through his eyes and sparked down the tangled cord of his spine and wound itself around his heart.
He made her smile. He couldn't imagine ever getting tired of doing that. Then she was gone and he knew he was never going to get to see that smile again.
But here she is. And he shouldn't be sure because he can't be sure, it's so dangerous to be sure now, but he is: He's sure that he'll leave and he'll come back and she'll be all right. And she'll be waiting for him.
"I'll come back soon," he says, and he goes for the door, walks out, and inside he's feeling the closest thing to peace that he thinks he's felt in...
He doesn't know anymore.
As he goes to the bike, he doesn't even notice the long, dried smear of blood. He just steps over it. That was yesterday. This is today.
She's all that matters.
Getting down there is more of a hassle now, but it can be done. He left a pair of the gloves on the seat of the bike and he takes them with him, stops at the roadblock they made and unwinds the two wires. He half expected to find a walker pinned against them, maybe more than one, but there's nothing in sight. Nothing he can hear. Quiet late morning, the distant piercing cry of a hawk, the breeze in the treetops. He stands for a moment, one of the wires wrapped around his gloved fist, head back and eyes closed and letting the sun bathe his face
Hope is such a treacherous road now. But he wants to walk it. He wouldn't have come up here with her if he wasn't committed to doing so, if he wasn't willing to risk what he has to risk and do what he has to do.
And she would want that. He's sure. She would want him to take that road, follow it to the end. She would want him to try.
Possibly this wasn't a tremendous fucking mistake after all.
When he pulls up the big road through town and cuts the engine, everything is still quiet except for the distant rattle-moan of the walkers pushing at the chain-link, and even that seems more subdued than it did. They sound like they're getting discouraged, losing their focus with nothing to zero in on in sensory range, and maybe they're slipping back toward their mysterious kind of biological sleep-mode. The sound of the bike engine probably woke them up again, but it's possible that it will less and less each time.
Maybe there won't be many more times anyway.
Maybe this can be the last time.
You fucking idiot.
But he's not hearing that as he climbs off and heads toward the store he parked in front of. It's small, ragged blue awning hanging over the door and emblazoned with a heavily stylized drawing of a mountain peak and a few pine trees. The big picture window announces GIFTS and SOUVENIRS and behind it are displayed exactly that - t-shirts, books, pins, big cheap figurines of bears and wolves, soaring eagles. Useless shit, especially now, but he's not here for them. He knows stores like this - has been through more than a few since the world went to shit, because they often contain shelves of dried fruit and nuts and various kinds of chocolate - and he knows they also often contain something else.
None of the glass is broken, but the door is locked. He wraps his fist in his bandanna, smashes out the glass by the handle, pulls it open.
Inside it's dim and silent, racks of clothes and case after case of trinketry forming a weird, half-seen funhouse maze, but as his boots crunch over the scatter of glass, his bow is already up. He got stupid before. It's not happening again. He's not dying on a run like this, for this. In addition to everything else, it would be fucking humiliating. Because part of him regards the fact that he's even here as humiliating, as ridiculous, risking his life for bullshit she won't care about, that will probably mean nothing to her. That has nothing whatsoever to do with keeping either of them alive.
Except it does. It really does. It does, in every way she would understand, because she always loved the beautiful things that had no reason to be there other than their own beauty, and those things were taken from her, and it's not right. It's not how it was supposed to be.
And she smiled at him.
Right on cue: groan-shuffle from the back behind a long counter that runs almost the length of the wall. He stands and waits, unperturbed, as a tall, skinny figure dressed in a rotting blue sales clerk uniform emerges from the shadows and stumbles toward him, eyes like dusky marbles in the thin light. It's a few yards away, already reaching for him, when it catches a foot on a fallen rack of sweatshirts and pitches forward with a grunt that sounds almost exasperated.
Oh, come ON.
At the same moment his bolt hits it between the eyes and snaps its head satisfyingly back, orange and gold fletching standing out oddly bright as a shaft of sun catches it. The walker crumples and lies still.
Daryl bends a knee and jerks the bolt loose, straightens and listens. Nothing else. If there was anything else, it or they would almost certainly have come as soon as they heard the first one.
Still. He cocks the bow, reloads, lifts it and moves on.
The place seems bigger than it should be, more mazelike the longer he's in it, but tucked in a half-hidden alcove near the counter he finds it. Not large, not a huge selection, but it's better than nothing, good enough that he won't have to search anywhere else, and when he turns the spinning rack the dangling gold and silver and beads glitter in the same shaft of sun that caught the bolt. Earrings, necklaces, pendants and bracelets.
He studies them. Looks up and down. He'll know it when he finds it. He'll know them.
In the days after they ran, he started noticing things about her. Wasn't fully aware that he did, or that he was carefully tucking each observation away into the mental filing cabinet where he tends to keep them and always has. He noticed the journal, noticed the braid in her hair and how she maintained it, noticed all the tiny things she did to keep herself human. He noticed her jewelry, how she always wore it - which could be explained easily enough as her simply forgetting that she had it on at all, but he knew her well enough by then to know that wasn't it.
Her earrings, those delicate little flowers. The gold heart around her neck, lying against her breastbone. Her bracelets.
They were her. As much as feature of her as anything else about her. Not just something she wore, because everything she kept and wore and did was a kind of resistance, a strike against the dark - the deepest and most fundamental manifestation of who she was.
Who she is. Still. Under everything.
Has to be.
He turns the rack like a turbine, as if it could power something - a full steady rotation and then another, allowing his eyes to unfocus slightly. The glitter and flash catches him, pulls him in; he recognizes the slowing hyper-attention of hypnotism. This is also stupid, he really shouldn't be letting that happen, but he does, and the fifth time around he stops the turn hard enough that the dangling chains and earrings swing.
He picks one of the earring pairs off the rack and holds it up.
Small five-petaled flowers, what looks like aquamarine. Not the same as what she had, but close, and the blue of the stones will set off her hair, be set off by it. Make her brighter.
He pockets it, turns the rack again.
It doesn't take nearly as long to find the other things he wants. Bracelets and wrist cuffs hanging on a thin plastic tube; he slides five of them off and hooks his fingers through them, examines them. Brown leather thongs beaded with blue and green and gold glass. Plain spherical beads but also cubes, stars and more flowers, even more complex shapes. Again, it's not much like anything she wore before - a little fancier, for one thing - but it's close enough. And lifting them into the light, staring through them with his gaze dancing from bubble to bubble and imperfection to imperfection, they feel so much like her.
She'll like them. He knows she will.
Into his pocket to join the earrings, another turn - to the necklaces and pendants - and there's the last thing.
Very simple. Very plain. A silver chain from which dangles a bird in flight, wings fully spread and head raised as if it was cast in mid-song.
He slips it free and cradles it in his palm, staring down at it. Imagining. Undoing the clasp, nudging her hair aside. Laying it against her throat. Sliding the clasp back into place. A fingertip against the warm, soft skin at her nape, downy blond hair above the top of her spine.
He closes his fist and squeezes his eyes shut.
Stop.
But there's a point - in reference to whatever, to something he doesn't want to see, doesn't want to know - at which he won't be able to. And he has no idea where it is.
He leaves, and he's almost hurrying.
He could be done. For a moment he thinks he is, until he remembers something else. Her hair, what she used to do with it, and it's shorter but it's long enough to get tangled now and it's lengthening all the time. He makes his way down the street toward the pharmacy he hit the first time here, and inside he stops at the half-aisle devoted to cosmetics and accessories. He scans past eyeshadow and foundation and lipstick, nail polish and manicure sets, until he reaches the brushes and the hair-ties, and he picks up one of the former and a multicolored pack of the latter - elastic, simple as anything else he's found for her, but wound through with faintly glittering metallic thread. Maybe she can't make much use of them now, or wouldn't want to, but soon...
And he stands there with these things in his hands, the almost unnoticeable weight of the jewelry in his pockets, and maybe it's not true and he's overreacting because it's been a fucked up few days and he's very aware that it's fucked him up pretty badly even if he's managing, but he thinks about these things he's found for her, and the candy, and the girl into which she keeps transforming, a younger girl, much younger, immature enough to be a specific kind of petulant and resentful and generally difficult, and he thinks about feeding her and putting her to bed and he thinks about her breast in the firelight and her nipple, and how he knows that if he cupped her it would be a hard little nub fitted against the creases of his big palm, and he almost hurls the brush through the window.
STOP.
She's not a fucking child.
He shoves these last two things in his pockets and stalks out of the store, climbs on the bike, chews up the road.
Behind him and falling away, the rattles and moans of the penned-in walkers echo off the walls of his ear canals.
She's waiting for him.
She's sitting on her bed, bent over the journal she's resting on one crossed leg, and he can tell even at a distance that she's not writing the way she was. It's not that desperate and constant scrawling, the same motions over and over again - once more that terrible resemblance to a machine. The movements of her hand vary as she carries the pen down the page, and now and then she pauses.
He clears his throat and she looks up - a startled jerk of her head - and pulls the journal in close to her chest as if she still expects him to snatch it away from her and hurl it into some abruptly existent fire.
Christ, why. Sudden hot frustration grips him: Why does she have to do that. It wasn't him that burned it anyway.
He grits his teeth, shoves it back. Not now. Not when he has these things for her and he's going to put them in her hands.
"You're alright," he says quietly, lifting the crossbow's strap off his shoulder and leaning it against the low side of the sofa, and it's both a statement and a question.
Nothing. Just her wide eyes and wide gaze frozen on his face. Then - slowly - she nods, and equally slowly he goes to her and crouches.
He's not sure what he's expecting. But she closes the journal and sets it aside, pushes up to her knees and shifts closer to him. "You said you were gonna bring me somethin'."
"Yeah." Moment of truth. Maybe he should be more nervous than he is; his fingers are barely shaking as he reaches into the pocket containing the jewelry and lifts it out, opens his hand to her and lets those pretty little things shine in the sun. Same sun that makes her shine in the same damn way.
She looks down at them, expression unreadable, eyes unreadable. She doesn't move, not an inch; he can hardly even detect any breathing. All at once he's not sure he's breathing either. On some saner level he knew when he decided to make this run that she might very well stare blankly at these things, even reject them, but she's not. She's just looking at them, the distant outline of a thoughtful frown behind her brow, and as he watches her with his lungs rolled up like window shades she lifts a hand and plucks the necklace out of his spread palm, holds it up and follows the smooth spin of the bird with her unreadable eyes.
The corner of her mouth tugs ever so slightly upward. A twitch that halts and keeps its place.
He can breathe again.
He reaches down with his free hand and gently takes hers, curls his fingers around it - still soft, still cool. That bruise... That, too, was yesterday. He won't be like that now.
"C'mon."
He helps her to her feet and leads her to the downstairs bathroom.
He's never seen her look at herself, not since he lost her for the second time. It's a very strange thing.
Standing in front of the mirror, him standing behind her, he watches her tilt her head this way and that, following her own movements with a vaguely nonplussed look on her face, and he thinks of footage of animals he's seen who catch sight of themselves in a mirror and become convinced that they're looking at a potential enemy. Or merely another animal, as confused as they are, the bafflement continuing until they notice that there's no sound or scent and they lose interest and wander away.
It's bad to think of her like that. He doesn't want to. But he does anyway.
He fitted the earrings into her lobes when it became obvious she wasn't sure what she was supposed to do with them, and she kept still and turned when he turned her. Except for the once, she hasn't spoken since he came back, but she hasn't made any move toward making a problem out of things, and he'll take it and be satisfied. He wasn't sure about the bracelets, but when he finally decided to suck it up and lift her forearm - fiercely ignoring the bruise - and slide her hand through one of those leather loops, she suddenly seemed to get the idea and did the rest herself. When she was done, she kept her arm raised, gazing at the beads, apparently lost in contemplation.
So he let her do that for a while. Then he turned her toward the mirror and gathered her hair and pushed it to one side, took the necklace in his hand, unclasped it.
He can do this. It's not going to be like that. Like in his traitorous mind.
"You remember what you had before?" He's not moving fast, settling the bird beneath the hollow between her collarbones and lowering it to rest against her sternum. He's also not expecting any response from her. He's just talking, because he's not sure he's entirely comfortable with the silence in here. "I know this isn't totally like it. Think I did okay, though. Looks good on you." Looks right. "Couldn't find any hearts. But I thought you'd kinda like the bird. Maybe."
She's quiet. Gives no sign now that she even heard him. She could be lost in herself again, lost in her own reflection, understanding nothing. When she goes in there he still doesn't know how to bring her back.
All he can do is what he can do.
He closes the clasp and releases the chain.
And for an awful moment he's sure he is going to do it. Won't be able to stop himself. His fingertip will linger, his fingertips, her skin and how smooth it is and how it feels so good to touch it and feel the life flooding deep under it like an underground river.
He doesn't. He pulls his hand away and her hair covers her nape again.
He thought this might be the point at which it would come back to her. This might be when he would really see something in her, recognition or even memory, and she might touch these things and know them and comprehend what he was trying to do for her. He was trying to reach her, and she might be reached. It's so stupid to hope, but he hoped. He found some faith and he held on and refused to let go.
But she tilts her head again and blinks, and he knows he's not going to get anything from her. And he finds that he's barely disappointed. He's just very tired.
Without his intending them to, his hands found her shoulders, and now they leave and drop loosely to his sides. He tried. It's a dull thought and it does nothing to block the oncoming grayness he can sense around the edges of everything, but he supposes it still does count for something.
And these pretty little things are pretty on her. It's good to see.
"Alright," he murmurs, and he starts to turn away, heading for the door because this isn't a large room and suddenly it feels far too small, but she whirls and catches him, curls her arms around his middle and holds on, her head pressed against his chest. She's on him before he knows it, and before he can stop himself - or work up any inclination to do so - he's reciprocating, his own arms wrapped around her and hugging her tight.
She did this before and all he could do was touch her fucking elbow, because she blindsided him. He wasn't ready for that. There was no way he could ever be ready for her, warm and solid against him, small and strong, whatever she used to wash her hair that day so fresh and clean and filling him up when he inhaled.
Not the same scent, when he lowers his head and rests his cheek against the crown of hers. Not the same soap. But still fresh. Still clean. And she's still small and strong and she so, so alive.
Time warps, twists in on itself. He doesn't want to move, and it might be that sheer desire to stay in the moment that keeps the moment going. It's so easy to hold her like this, easy like it might eventually have been if she hadn't been taken. What they might have had.
Might have done.
But he can't.
Stop.
He extricates himself, hands once more on her shoulders as he steps back. Her face is still difficult to read as she stares up at him, but she's alert, and her gaze is narrowed in on him. Narrowed sharp. She does see.
He got what he wanted.
But he's not sure she did.
Dinner is quiet, and not by candlelight, because the sun is still in the process of setting. He left her alone for most of the rest of the day, not done much of anything; he sharpened his knife and put it away, waxed the crossbow's string, wandered the house again - as if he wasn't well acquainted with every foot of it by now. He picked that afternoon to go through one of the bedroom closets, the unlabeled boxes - which proved to contain nothing more useful or interesting than a bunch of photo albums and some old clothes. Ties. Shirts. A hat - vaguely like Dale's. He put it away again in the bottom of the box, piled everything else on top of it.
He didn't look at the photo albums. He doesn't want to know. This place already feels full of cold, impersonal ghosts - ghosts of the house itself and all its things rather than the person or people who used to live here. He doesn't want to give those ghosts faces and names. It's really better if they aren't human in origin.
She read, as far as he knows. Made her strange rounds of the bookshelves, touching, running her fingers over their contents. He wonders if she's selecting the things she'll destroy in the morning.
Then dinner. Canned beans, canned sausage. Tomorrow he really needs to go out and see what he can find in the way of fresh things - greens if nothing else. There might be gardens in town. He hadn't wanted to go back there so soon but he should look. Should have looked today, but he didn't want to stay any longer than he had to.
He'll be all right.
She finishes, sets down her spoon, looks up at him. He freezes and looks back, and he knows before she even opens her mouth that she's going to ask him something and he's not going to like it. No idea how he knows. Maybe just because he's actually getting to know this bizarre, capricious, remotely demonic creature she's become.
"Are you goin' out tomorrow?"
He grunts. "Might."
"Alright. Well." She pauses, chewing at her lower lip. There's a spot of grease at the corner of her mouth and he wants so badly to wipe it away. "If you do, and you won't take me, can you get me some meat?"
She doesn't mean to cook. She doesn't mean spitted and roasted. He knows that too. She had some. She's assuming she can have more. That he'll allow it. Facilitate it. Didn't he get her to help him bring back the carcass? For her to eat? How else was she supposed to interpret that?
He's so fucking stupid.
And he got what he wanted. And she'll be so much easier to handle if she does too.
He meets her gaze without flinching, without giving in to the violent, nauseating clench in his gut. It's not just her eyes. It's the blue glitter of her earrings, the glassy sheen of the beads circling her wrist. It's the singing bird in flight.
This is Beth. There's nothing he wouldn't do for her.
"Yeah. I will."
Later, by the fire, he brings her another bowl and sets it down on the floor where she's sitting and writing, and he sits down beside her. Nudges it closer to her with a soft scrape against the flagstone hearth. She folds the book against her chest, still looks apprehensive, but then she glances at the contents of the bowl and her apprehension melts.
She reaches out a hand, presses her fingers into it and rakes them through. The dull rattle is like her beads. He watches her - eyes, mouth, every muscle shift and every hinted emotion - and tries to breathe.
At last she raises her head. She's not smiling, not exactly - or he can't see it if she is. But her face is doing something. It's not blank. Not at all.
"I like the blue ones best," she murmurs.
He nods. "I know."
They're all blue. Every one. He sorted them out, set them aside.
"I told you."
"Yeah. You did."
She scoops a few into her cupped palm and lifts them, peering at them as if she's come upon them at random. Completely unexpected.
"By... the fire." She turns her head and her earrings sparkle like tiny stars, gone silver in the firelight. "After? After we burned it?"
Oh my God. He exhales heavily, too heavy to be a sigh. Fuck not hoping. How is he supposed to do anything but hope? She never allowed him to do anything else. She blocked off every other avenue and foreclosed on every other option. He had to hope. There was no other way to be with her and by the end being with her was all he wanted.
"After we burned it," he whispers.
"You gotta stay who you are." She lowers her face, her eyes, and tucks the journal into her lap. She picks up one of the M&Ms, lifts it to her lips, slips it between them and closes her eyes.
If the entire room was on fire he wouldn't be able to look away from her.
"Not who you were." Not even a whisper. Carried out of him on a breath thin as paper. She nods slowly and doesn't open her eyes, plucks up another M&M and holds it between her forefinger and thumb, extends it toward him.
This is Communion, he thinks with all the sudden, wild force of a summer storm, wind howling through his skull. This is a fucking Eucharist. She's trying to save his soul. They're in Hell together but she's still trying, because she can't stop. Because even broken and scared and lost, even shattered into too many pieces for him to ever reassemble, she can't stop trying.
This is Holy Communion, which he has never in his life taken, because it would be an empty act in praise of a God who was never there.
But he does believe in her.
He could take it in his hand. He doesn't. A dream has descended on him, drifting to him through the light, settling over both of them like a canopy. Anything might be possible, so everything is. So he keeps his hands planted on the floor and leans in, closes his lips around her sanctified fingers and sighs as the sweetness melts onto his tongue.
He doesn't touch her again. Doesn't watch her go to bed. He sits in front of the fire as she leaves and he doesn't look over his shoulder. He listens to the sounds of her moving around, going upstairs, coming back down, the rustle of her sheets as she slides between them. He stares into the flames until they've burned themselves into his vision, dancing and leaping in purples and greens and blues.
He might be trying to make himself blind.
Stop.
But it doesn't take.
His eyes fly open in the dark, in the moonlight, and he thinks it might be like before - he might have to tear himself up and out, destroy the space between them and hold onto her. Keep her from spinning into the night, over the cliff edge to explode on the rocks below. He's on his side, sheets tangled around him, but he's ready. Staring at her, muscles tense to spring, watching her twist and writhe.
Except she's not screaming. It's not screaming that woke him.
He can see her across the room, distant, her pale outlines rising and falling in graceful sine waves as she lifts her hips to meet the hard, rhythmic thrusts of her hand. She stripped and kicked the sheets down into a mound around her ankles, stretched out with a firm grip on her breast and twisting at her nipple, her legs spread wide and her other hand working between them, palm smacking against her mound and almost drowning out the wet squelch of her cunt as she fucks herself.
No idea how he's hearing that over her gasps and ragged moans but he is. No idea how he can see the sheen of her juices smeared across her inner thighs but he does.
Because she's not across the room at all. She's close. Lying beside her like this, he can see everything, and now it's not moonlight soaking her but the last of the light from the coals, somewhere between crimson and oil-black. He can see the sweat beading her skin, the cords standing out in her neck as she throws her head back, the silver bird gone gold and fallen against her throat. Red stars in her ears as she rolls her head from side to side, mouth wide as the noises forcing their way out of her deepen and roughen. He can look down and watch her pinch her nipple, tug cruelly at it, torment it into a hard little peak and go to work on her other one. Her waist lengthens and folds as she crunches herself up, falls again, lifting herself with her feet planted flat against the mattress. The rattle of cut glass at her wrist.
He can see her juices beading in her pubic hair and clumping the curls together. Her slick fingers as they pump in and out of her cunt, quick glimpse of her clit swollen past its hood as her palm lifts and grinds down again. Her lips sticky and squeezed beneath her hand, beaded strands stretched between the two.
She's so wet. She's so fucking wet.
He shouldn't be able to see any of this but he does. He sees everything. And the light is spilling over her and staining her red, all that sweet wetness between her legs the color of blood, it is blood, her shining lips streaked with it, a line of spit on her cheek not spit at all and congealing, and when she shakes and wrenches herself up as she fucks in deep as she can, her bared teeth are those cut rubies. She's bathed in it, fed and contented herself, and now she's doing this, because apparently being dead is no obstacle to making herself come.
Oh God. Frantic, every muscle tense and tight and looking ready to bust through her skin, both hands on her cunt now, fucking and circling her pounding clit. Oh my God, oh God, oh, oh, ohh-
He's so close, he can smell her, smell her sweat and her sex, smell what it would be like to bury his face between her legs and eat her alive - feed on her, be the one drawing these sobs out of her, dig his teeth into her and rip at her with one hand on his cock. He does, he is, jerking himself rough and fast with his pulse thudding in his throat and his head, but all he sees and feels and wants is her.
Flesh and blood.
Meat.
Reaching for her with his free hand as she arches higher and higher and finally extends so far and so sharp he thinks she might be about to snap her spine, and he hooks his fingers under the chain around her neck and folds the bird into his hand, squeezes it so hard he feels its beak piercing him, and the narrow jab of pain is what kicks him over the cliff with her, spurting hot and thick all over his fist and her hip and belly and biting back his cry as she lets hers go.
oh Jesus Christ DARYL
Shaking still, all control he ever had burned away, and somehow through the flood of his orgasm he can focus on the blood spattered over her and coating her thighs and her spasming hands, across her skin and his fingers and his shaft, running down his knuckles. Dripping from the slashes across her face.
Trickling down her brow from the hole in her head.
Sun stabs into his eyes.
He twitches, groans, rolls away and folds an arm over his face, burrowing into the pillow. His head hurts. Everything hurts. His arm was better but now whatever he did to it is grinding beneath his skin, joints like scraping boulders every time he moves it.
Sitting up seems like a questionable decision. But he does it anyway, because that seems to be how he operates these days.
He didn't even drink. Not that he recalls.
He stays put for a few minutes, hunched over with the sheets slipped down low on his waist and his hands pressed against his eyes, until he feels capable of getting up and looking at anything for more than a few painful seconds. He rolls to his knees and shoves himself to his feet, hissing with pain as his arm flexes again, and pushes his hair back from his face as he squints toward the mattress by the window.
No one. Of course. The sun is high enough to shine; she'll be out on the deck doing what she does.
He stumbles across the room toward the window and the sliding door, contemplating painkillers, contemplating the possibility that he hurt himself worse than he thought - or somehow hurt himself all over again. Slept the wrong way, twisted it under him. Didn't feel it until now. It could be possible.
Anything could be.
He sees her, her small form swallowed up by her t-shirt, bent over the railing with her hair a bright halo combed by the wind. Like before, like all the times before, and he stops, gazes out at her, lays a hand against the glass and pulls air into his lungs like taking a long swig of whiskey. Hoping it might dull something. Not that it ever would.
He's alive and she's alive, and that means it's going to hurt. It never meant anything else.
Something glitters in her hand, winking as the sun plays over it. He follows it, bemused; it's not anything he recognizes from the shelf. Not any other part of the house as far as he can recall. She extends her hand and it dangles, wrapped around her fingers, silver in the morning.
Silver.
He slams both hands against the glass, everything in him surging into a scream and ready to tear out of him, crack his chest with the force of itself, but he can't do anything. He can't ever do anything. The bruise on her wrist is stark, hideous, purple-black - exposed. Naked. He doesn't have to see her earlobes to know that no flowers are blooming there.
He watches as she lets that silver bird fly.
Lets it fall.
Pain stabs into his left hand and he whines, jerks his away like the glass has burned him - for a split second he's sure it has. But it's not burning. He sees what's there in the center of his palm and his veins fucking crystallize.
A prick, tiny and red. Not bleeding, but it was. Something that could have been made by a pin. Could have.
Wasn't.