Note: Three things.

First, I've decided to do something very mean. Those of you who are familiar with my stuff - especially Safe Up Here With You and I'll Be Yours For a Song - will know that I subscribe to the notion that authorial cruelty is useful when used well (killing a character stupidly for no reason and then going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is not using it well). To a significant degree, I write things like this to fuck with people. I am fucking with you (I told you at the beginning that you were proceeding at your own risk).

So I'm not going to warn you when the ending for this is coming. It's just going to end.

And this might be the first fic I've ever written in this fandom where I can't promise an uplifting ending.

The second thing is to emphasize that - as with Safe Up Here With You - I'm playing very fast and loose with things like traumatic brain injury. I'm not doing much to make this medically accurate or anything. If I get stuff right, it's probably by accident. I realize and completely own that this is an extremely problematic thing to do, given that this is real stuff that truly affects people's lives in profound and profoundly difficult ways.

So this is an admission, an apology, and a warning that if you're likely to find that upsetting, it's happening here.

In addition to all the other massively upsetting stuff going on.

The final thing is that I want to make it very clear that - as with I'll Be Yours For a Song and Safe Up Here With You - this is not just a Bethyl story. The focus of this is not purely romance. It's about Beth and Daryl and their relationship, yes - I mean, obviously - but it's about a lot of other stuff, and their relationship is one thing of many. I don't want people to expect something and then be disappointed. I've had people say things to me like "if they're not going to end up together, I wish I never started reading this." Fair enough. People who depend on that kind of ending to make the whole thing worth it for them may want to consider reading something else.

I'm not saying this won't have an ending where they're together. I'm just refusing to promise that. So don't ask me to. And it's not the point of the story.

If you stick around, thank you for reading. As always. ❤️

Chapter 7: that part of me isn't here anymore

The names of flowers that open only once, shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops, or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep, or caught in the throat like a lump of meat. - Richard Siken

The Boy and the Baby come back.

He's been told they're coming back, anyway, and he draws his own conclusions. A healthy portion of his mind got blown out the back of his skull but he's not an idiot. The Boy and the Baby are Rick's, were living with Rick, and they weren't here when he got here, so the obvious implication is that the Boy and the Baby were sent away because of him.

They can come back now because Rick and Michonne and maybe Carol have decided that he's not a threat.

It's possible. He's still really not sure. A lot of the time he thinks he's a threat to everyone including himself, but he's been living that way for a very long time now and he's used to it. And his context has changed. Some pretty major things have changed. Maybe he's only a threat sometimes. Maybe he's not one so much anymore. Maybe the things he sometimes thinks about doing to people, to himself, aren't going to happen.

Maybe the things he was thinking about doing to her aren't going to happen.

Maybe he won't do them.

It's been two days since he saw her and it's hurting less. Everything is hurting less. He can't remember if he actually told Carol about his headaches or if she found out on her own somehow, but they had pills to give him for the last big one, and he took them with enormous skepticism and not a little suspicion but they actually helped. Didn't make it go away, but he closed the curtains in his room and curled up in his nest in the corner and weathered it. It passed. He didn't feel as sick and it didn't last as long, and after it was over he felt all right.

Rick says he'll get better. Rick is full of shit. Rick is completely and utterly full of shit, has been for a long time, but he looks in Rick's sharp, clear eyes for a few seconds and looks away again and as far as concepts go…

In some world he guesses it might work out that way.

(On more than one occasion it's been a source of extremely dark amusement to him that one of the things left to him is his imagination. More than left to him; always a powerful mental instrument, it seems as though its power has grown beyond containment. It does what it wants to do, follows its own courses of logic, and if he's lucky it clues him in regarding what's going on. So the consideration of hypotheticals, though he finds it annoying and pointless, is very much within his capabilities.)

Anyway, the Boy and the Baby come back, and the Boy stands in the doorway and looks at him there on the couch like he is every bit the threat Rick and Michonne and Carol have apparently decided he isn't, and he looks back at the Boy with no offer of argument. No, he was wrong. He knows it instantly. The Boy is right, what he's not saying, what he's saying in every way that isn't about speaking - in his eyes and his stance and where he's holding his hands. The Boy is right: He's a threat. He's a threat and that hasn't changed, and he might as well resign himself to being one. Hoping that it doesn't come out. Hoping that even if he's a threat, even if he's dangerous and full of poison, he can successfully pretend that he isn't. Because really, really now if he's totally honest with himself, abandons all the many many lies he knows he's been imbibing as a regular part of his diet because a lot of the time he's not sure what's true anymore…

He hopes he can pretend because he thinks he might like to stay. For now.

(Hope is something with which his relationship remains difficult. He understands its stupidity and its uselessness and the trap it presents, the ways it can in fact be a liability of the worst kind, but he also recognizes that it's nearly impossible to avoid. You want things. You dare to imagine that you might get them, especially if your imagination is a good one. It is a trap, one he's constantly caught in, and he regards the entire business as an unbelievably bad joke and hates it as much as he hates anything, and hates himself for falling into it again and again and again when the world should have taught him better.)

Carol follows behind with the Baby. He looks at the Baby for a moment and then he can't anymore. Gets up. Goes to his room and shuts the door. Sinks down onto the floor with his back against it and squeezes his eyes closed and hope is a bad joke but he hopes that no one tries to make him come out.

No one tries to make him come out. He stays in there through dinner, and after he listens to plates and knives and forks clinking and voices talking around - he gathers - that slick fox-fur table, there's a soft knock on his door and something scuffling on the floor outside. And footsteps going down the hall.

He opens the door. There's a tray, plate, meat and potatoes and rolls.

Carol didn't bother with silverware, but there's a napkin.

He drags the tray back inside and shuts the door again.

Carol. There's Carol and that's a good thing. Actual good thing. They exist, here. One does. More, could be. Chances aren't amazing but it's not impossible. He has food and clean water and he's safe for now and he has four walls and a roof. And people are mostly leaving him alone. Was expecting they'd be continuing with him as their little project, fix him like he thought, but so far that hasn't happened.

Eating in the twilight, sucking at his fingers and staring at the half-curtained window. World outside there. All big, feeling bigger now. She's in that world, somewhere. No, not somewhere; he hasn't seen her since that time but he knows where she is. He knows exactly where she fucking is.

He could go to her anytime he wanted. Bathe in her fire.

In her blood.

Maybe he's not a threat. Maybe he won't do those things. To her.

Maybe.

Carol sits him down. Sits in the living room. Doesn't like that; exposed, even though he can be in here sometimes and it's not unbearable. Pulls in on himself, hunches, won't hold his eyes still. No one else is in here and he knows that except for the Baby they're all off doing whatever the fuck it is they do when they're not here, but that could change at any time, someone could just come in, and he has no control over this and while he's pretty sure he's been behind these walls close to a week now and lack of control over his immediate environment has been less of a problem, it abruptly and very much is.

Reading signals. Reading her. She knows. Knows he's uncomfortable, knows he doesn't like it, and she's trying to make him do it anyway. Trying to make him try. Seething resentment. Resentment like a pit of snakes. He still hasn't figured out how to say no to her in a way that'll stick.

Sitting in the armchair. Her across from him in the loveseat. He thinks that's a very stupid term; that might be a holdover from before the hallway and the bullet. Thinking that. He has preferences and opinions which managed to cling to the walls of his skull, along with a fair amount of his memory even if he can't always retrieve certain pieces when he wants them.

(Predicting what will take his mind by the hand and lead it into a session of wandering is nearly impossible. It might be anything; there's no logic behind it that he's been able to discern, to the extent that he's tried at all.)

Picking at his fingers. They haven't healed. Broken nails less broken but his fingertips were chewed up by the pavement and then chewed up by himself. Hasn't completely stopped chewing. It's better but there are still a lot of scabs and he bites them off and they bleed.

Carol watches him do this and then she watches his face, and he stares back at her through the stringy curtain of his hair because fuck it, if she knows he's uncomfortable he wants her to know that he knows.

She's making him do this and he doesn't understand why.

She talks. He listens. He can do that. Listening isn't giving any ground. She says he's doing better, and God, swear to a nonexistent fucking God, the next time someone uses that word in reference to him he's going to hurl them to the floor and stomp on their throat until they stop moving.

No, he isn't. Better. He digs his thumbnail into a long scab on the back of a knuckle. He hates that word. Better. Hates it maybe just a tiny little bit like he was hating her. For being beautiful, and the wanting.

The wanting and never having.

Anyway, there's that hateful word, and then they want to help him, more than they have been, they can't, they don't have the expertise, they don't completely understand what happened to him.

Well, join the fucking club, bitch. All of them can join, there's no membership cap or anything. What happened to him is incomprehensible. What happened to him is that he got shot in the head and then he got left in the trunk of a fucking car, and then he walked here across three states and there is no way that he's ever found to make sense of any of that.

They don't have the expertise. So, okay. Teeth grinding. Not much but some. He doesn't at all like where this is going. Doesn't know exactly where that is, but he knows enough to know he doesn't like it. Doesn't like the terrain, doesn't like the lack of signs, and the road is tilting at a sickening angle.

Someone is going to come and talk to him. That's all. Just talk. He doesn't have to say anything he doesn't want to say. Mostly she actually just wants to listen.

Stares at Carol. Harder. The question is presented: Why. The fuck. Would she want to talk to him. Would he want to talk to her.

Because it might help her understand what happened to him. And if she does, maybe they can help him.

So this is about fixing him after all.

He continues to stare at her. Thumbnail digs and digs; feels scab peel away. Digs under, peels it further. Slow. Blood welling, gleaming little jewels emerging from his skin. The pain is a bright point of light in the corner of his vision. Focus on that.

There are so many things in this room that he could break. Including her. Including himself.

He doesn't say that he'll talk. But he doesn't say that he won't. And after a few moments of silence Carol gets up and goes to the front door, and Christ, this is an ambush. This wasn't about some time in the indefinite future. This is about now. Out here, exposed, and he didn't see it coming because, now with such horrified realization, he's been trusting them. He trusted them from the beginning. At least in every way that matters.

Now he gets fucked in the ass.

Almost lurches to his feet and flees to his room. Instead - not really sure why - he stays where he is, and a woman comes in, and she's chubby and dirty blond and he's never seen her before and she's doing a very poor job of hiding that she's nervous, and Carol goes to the kitchen and as this strange woman sits down across from him he considers the merits of grabbing her by the hair and smashing her face through the glass top of the coffee table.

There's merit there, to be sure. But not enough to do it.

So she starts talking. Names. Okay, he mumbles his. Remembers it; it's easier to remember because people have been using it all the time, even if it tastes like ashes in his mouth. She's Denise; he forgets it ten seconds later because it's an unimportant detail and doesn't need to be retained, at least not in any conscious sense.

Names. Moving on to what she knows about him. Everyone thought he was dead, in Atlanta. He showed up very suddenly, very unexpected as it is when dead people do that. Rick, Aaron - walkers. Killed, helped them. Had some trouble after, behind the walls. Got into a fight?

He looks at her and an icy and extraordinarily welcome tranquility steals over him, and he informs her that he could have killed both of those people with his teeth.

Would he have done that?

No hesitation. Yes.

Why?

They didn't matter. They happened to be there. They were stupid and slow and if they deserved to live he never would have gotten as far as he did.

Would he try to do it again, if he got the chance?

Doesn't answer. Shrug. I'unno. But there's the issue of consequence, which there wasn't before, and this is not a difficult situation to analyze. If he hurts someone, they won't let him stay. If they don't let him stay, he's back out there in the cold and the wet and hungry and thirsty all the time, and walkers, always walkers, so never really sleeping. Never resting. Always moving. Fighting. Killing. And he could do that again. Thinks about the stupid, slow people. How easy to die. Doesn't want to be like that, fuck no, if that's what this obscene place does to you.

He shouldn't be here. He doesn't belong.

But she's here. She is. Every night, right across the street. Lying down like he does. Tucked into the corner, her song faint in his ears and we'll be good, reaching toward the window. Reaching for her. Moon gone bloody and burning in the space that separates him from her.

If he stays he can be that close to her. Keep being like that. Maybe closer.

Because he's fucking suicidal.

So no. No, he wouldn't try to do it again.

Why not?

There's no point. And also. Also. Pausing, carving a space out of the air. Holding it in his scabby hands, staring down at it. Truth goes in here, slots in like a puzzle piece. Why should he give it to her? How the fuck has she earned anything from him? But it's coming anyway. What he means.

Also, he wants to stay.

All right.

More questions. He keeps his eyes locked on his hands, tears slowly at his cuticles. Bites at them a few times, pulls away the skin. Is he eating all right? Shrug-yes. How about sleeping? More shrug. Sucking the blood off his forefinger. Is he getting along with Michonne and Rick? If getting along means that he hasn't done something unforgivable or violent or unforgivably violent, then yes, he has. Carol? Carol is good. He'll admit that. He's not sure he exactly likes her, but she's good. Carol helps him. Carol often seems to know what he needs before he does. Carol keeps forcing him to try but apart from that she doesn't appear to want anything from him.

Is there anything he enjoys? Anything he does for fun?

Fun. He silently mouths the word, blinks at her. Three fingers are now bleeding, and he's working a small bit of loose chewed skin between his teeth. Fun. Is fun what you call it when the pain stops? Is that what that means? Is fun the joy of the reprieve that even sleep won't bring him?

What the fuck is fun?

Moving on.

More. Stupid, petty little digs for useless information. Mostly ignoring now. Answering in shrugs, grunts, single syllables. It all sinks into a low, vaguely hypnotic drone.

Until suddenly the drone is shrieking alarm bells at him.

His attention had been half wandering again, meandering from the slow destruction of his own hands to the scatter of light on the floor as the sun beams through the leaves of a tree outside, to a fly throwing itself ceaselessly against the window, as if at some point the glass might disappear. As if it might get out. Make it. But he's also aware that her nervousness has been fading and something else has been sliding into its place; she's not precisely confident here with him, but she's calm.

And she goes quiet and her eyes bore into him and she asks these questions. These next ones. Seeing them coming at him like the distant headlamp of an oncoming train. No tracks to step off of. The world is the tracks and he's bound to them.

Does you ever see or hear things that no one else can see or hear?

Does you ever think about hurting other people?

Does you ever think about hurting yourself?

This last asked with her gaze like a sniper's red dot on his twitching hands, his fingers oozing blood.

Does he ever. Well. Doesn't he. Doesn't he? Well.

Yes.

He doesn't answer her at all. He stares down at his boots. He watches bloody holes open up in the floor and beetles swarm out and over their feet, beetles except they're not quite beetles because they're crawling on rotting human legs, patchy with skin that's begun to drop off. Beetles with human eyes looking up at him, those eyes cloudy and rolling with death and gently reproving.

Does he? It's not complicated. There's one answer to all three and it just so happens to be three words. What could be simpler? What does he have to lose? This place, sure, but look out that big picture window, look outside, because did he forget that it's all burning? All flames? All screams?

And now he has these three questions. She already knows the answer to at least one of them. It's not a final exam. It's not a guessing game.

It's not I Never.

The beetles are crawling up her legs, into her lap, over her breasts and up her neck, pouring into her eyes and throat. She opens her mouth to speak and vomits insects. He rips so hard at a cuticle that a strip of skin pulls free all the way up to his first knuckle.

Does he? Not sure he says it aloud. Not sure of anything. But does he?

All the time.

When Daddy was still around, Daddy would probably have termed this a Family Meeting. Family Meetings never take place because of something good. No one gathers around the kitchen table or in the living room like this when there's some delightful surprise to discuss. It just doesn't happen.

Family Meetings are always bad news.

This wouldn't be the first one they've had since they got here.

It doesn't happen at Rick and Michonne's place. Happens at the Greene-Rhee homestead. Just like the images and associations in her head and memory, they all crowd into a living room drenched in gentle early evening sun, distribute themselves on couches and in chairs. Crowd might actually not be the best word for it. None of the outer ring of their group is here. None of the DC contingent is particularly concerned in this, nor Tara, and they all decided pretty unanimously that Sasha shouldn't be involved in this part either. It's not that her opinion doesn't matter, here, it's just.

Family.

And there's a lot fewer of them than there used to be.

Carol is absent - back across the street, ostensibly taking care of Judith, but Carol could take care of Judith perfectly well right here, so obviously that's not why she's missing.

Maggie and Glenn pressed together on the sofa. Rick in an armchair. Michonne leaning against the mantle, fingering a little glass horse. Carl some way removed, leaning against a wall. He's more than old enough to be here. And the reason for this meeting is a man with whom, for the present, he has to live under the same roof.

And her. In the other chair, by herself. Knees drawn together and her hands clasped on top of them. She's fascinated by a complex curling knot in the pattern of the blue-green-brown rug beneath her boots. Thinks that if she could reach down and really get her fingers on it she might be able to work it loose. Unravel the entire thing and leave it lying there like a shed skin.

Him by the fire, dragging it off a mudsnake. Stripping it all in one jerk. He could do that. She liked to watch him. Bizarrely, for a while it was one of the few things she liked, and one of the vanishingly few things she genuinely liked when it came to him.

She tugs at the beads around her wrist and their clink brings her back. Better than some of the other things she could do to get her own attention.

"-saw him today," Rick is saying. "Few hours ago. She still has to talk to Deanna. Then Michonne and I talk to Deanna, then we see what we see."

"How bad is it?" Glenn. Glenn holding Maggie's hand - subtle and soft, not the clutch of people huddled in a cold hospital waiting room dreading the diagnosis of whoever it is they care about lying behind those awful double doors where people go to be sick and to die.

"It's bad."

Two words like stakes driven into the ground, and everyone is quiet for a bit.

"Didn't give me much in the way of specifics. I mean, she wouldn't get all technical, it's not like I know what she knows." Rick swipes a hand down his jaw; what was light stubble is beginning to darken. "But yeah. There's…" He exhales. "There's a lot wrong."

"Bullet went through his damn brain," Michonne says, and it's in the flatly hard tone she uses when she's stating something awful, something she hates, so she's going to kick it out there with special force behind it. "We're not just talking about emotional problems."

"No. No, we're not." The look Rick gives her is fathomless and completely unreadable. "And Denise says she's really got no way of knowin' for sure how bad that part of it is. Not with the equipment she has. So it's just… It's tough to know what to do with him."

Maggie leans forward, tugging her hand free and using both to push her hair back from her face - which is pale. Drawn. She hasn't been sleeping well either. None of them have. It's not just that he's back, Beth thinks. Is pretty certain. And it's not just that he came back broken. What she's felt hanging over all of them is what Daryl said to her with that ghastly bestial tilt of his head.

You left me in a fucking car.

"But what's actually going on with him?"

Rick sighs again, shoots Michonne another glance. "He's… It's hard to explain. He forgets a lot. Sometimes seems like from one moment to the next. Not sure he always remembers names. He doesn't like a lotta light, people, noise… tends to keep to his room. He gets bad headaches - guess it stands to reason. He talks some, and most of the time he makes sense, but he hasn't really connected to anyone but Carol. I don't think he feels safe here."

"Is he dangerous?"

Every eye swivels to Carl. Every neck pivots. Maybe he's leaning, arms folded over his chest, but he's standing straight, everything about him straight, steely frame, unbudging. Icy. His eyes are Rick's eyes, and that's true more and more often, and sometimes Beth looks at him and something in her twists, capsizes. Sinks. Rick was a softer man for a long time before he was beaten and burned into what he is now. But Carl?

Carl is starting early.

"Well? Is he?"

The question everyone has been wanting to ask, and no one has. She closes her eyes. She could have asked it. But she already knows the answer, and if she says it aloud there's no taking it back.

Rick shakes his head, once. "I don't think so."

"Does Denise think so?"

Hesitation. That hesitation is a critical error and it's piercingly obvious that Rick knows it as he clears his throat. "She's not sure."

"She's not sure," Carl echoes softly, and practically launches himself away from the wall. Stalking forward, clenched bone and coiled muscle. "Are you kidding? So why is he back there?" He flings a hand toward the door, the street, the house beyond. "Why is he back there with Judith? Why the fuck did you leave her alone with him?"

"She's not alone." Not Rick this time but Michonne, very quiet. Very level. One of the few people now who can talk Carl down like this. "Carol is there." She pauses a beat. "You're not going to tell me Carol can't handle him."

Carl has stopped a couple of feet from the proper border of their manufactured circle, his jaw working and eyes narrow and no part of his face young. No part of his face sweet. No kindness, no mercy. The little boy she first knew at the farm is gone, and that's been the case for a long time, but every now and then she sees it in a way she usually doesn't, and she thinks about Daddy and Tyreese and Bob and Noah,and she thinks about Rick and she thinks about Carol and she thinks about Daryl and the ragged, gaping hole inside him where a good man used to be, and then she thinks about herself.

And she thinks I don't think the good ones survive.

They don't. One way or another, sooner or later, they all die.

And it's not the bad ones who make it. It's them. Who let it go, the light inside them. Who gave it up just to keep walking. Left it in the road as shed weight because they couldn't bear to carry it anymore. It's not the good ones who survive, and it's not the bad ones either.

It's the weak ones.

Glenn and Maggie.

Yes, they're still here. But for them it's just a matter of time.

"I don't want him there." Carl is not presenting this for debate. "I don't want him under that roof. Not with us."

"So where would he go?" Glenn scans the room, brow furrowed - not alarmed, not yet, but Glenn cares, cares because he always does, and Glenn knew Daryl in Atlanta in the very beginning, and that counts for something. At least when you're Glenn. At least when you're still holding on. "We can't just kick him out on the street. And you're not telling me we're sending him back out there."

"He can go back in the cell."

"He's not going back in the cell." Rick sounding like an actual father is also something rare these days - louder, firmer, deeper and more of a solid thing shoving its way into the air, but it does happen. "How the hell is he supposed to get any better if he's in there? God's sake, Carl, that's Daryl."

"That's not Daryl."

She didn't mean to speak. Didn't want to. Didn't want to say this, because what the fuck is the point? What does it change? It won't make him more Daryl. Won't bring any of him back. And it probably won't change any minds. She sure as hell doesn't see it changing Rick's. And Carl…

Carl is the closest to it. But even he doesn't get it.

"It's not," she repeats softly. Her hands are still clasped, and now they're clutching at each other, nails digging in and knuckles pale. The words are for everyone, but she can't take her eyes off Rick. And she can tell he can't look away. "You want it to be him. You're hopin' it can be. You're hopin' there's still somethin' left of him in there. And sure, maybe you're right about that. Maybe there's somethin' left. But what's there now, that's not him."

Somehow she gets to numb feet, and on numb legs she starts toward the door. She can feel them watching her in silence, and the silence has a stunned quality. It fills her with sick laughter that she refuses to release. Of all the people who would say that. Of all the people who would deny him. They still don't understand what happened.

They still don't understand what happened to her.

She drags the door open and enters the oncoming night, leaving the house behind. Fireflies everywhere, rising like stars falling in reverse and nestling themselves in the bushes and trees. Down the street three kids dart across lawns and through hedges with mason jars, catching them and trapping them inside.

No, don't. Don't bottle up that little light. Don't lock it inside. As if she's cold, she wraps her arms around her middle as she makes her slow way down the street. This was her favorite time of year - this and Christmas. A transition point. A cusp. Not yet the sharper cold of January and February, not yet the relentless heat of July and August. Was her favorite because she can no longer think of it that way. It's all those winking tiny lights trapped in those jars - glitter of sun off glass and clear liquid. It did taste disgusting, even in the second round, and the third and the fourth, but she didn't care because he was with her and it felt like maybe that weight they had both been dragging around had lifted.

She was wrong, of course. But for a while it was good again.

And he tried to make her smile. He was so exhausted and he was in so much pain, and later it was awful, but before that happened he joked about the state of the shack and tried to make her smile, and she saw the tiny lights rising in his darkness when he succeeded.

Good man. Gone now.

Or maybe she's just seeing what was always there.

She's approaching the gates, the place where he came in. Lights on the wall, people taking evening shifts. Talking, laughing. Gossip and their own jokes. Like everything is normal. Like everything is okay. Like the dead don't get up and walk, and sometimes come back. Sometimes follow you six hundred miles and at the end don't understand why they did that, why they did anything, and they're scared and in pain and you can't help them. Like that never happens.

Like everything is fun. Like everything is a big game.

I never got shot in the head.

I never died for a stupid girl who threw a tantrum with a pair of scissors.

I never got left behind by people I trusted.

He would be plastered by now. But as she stops and stares at the gates, thinks about what's beyond them, what she knows, what she left a six-hundred mile trail through, a trail that he somehow followed, there's three more now, and they both have to drink deep and long, because it always works both ways in the end.

I never got out.

I never made it.

I never changed.

There are nights where she's not sure whether she dreams.

This is because there are nights where her brain displays a remarkable lack of creativity, and what she dreams about is exactly what happens: she lies in bed, the full-size bed that somehow seems so huge, and stares at the ceiling and tries to sleep and fails. She dreams that sleep won't come for her, that it's abandoned her, and she can't find it in the dark no matter how hard she looks.

She dreams - or doesn't - that she twists in the sheets for a while and searches vainly for a comfortable position, can't find that either. The sheets tangle around her legs and in frustration she kicks at them, ends up lying in a tangle of herself with her camisole rucked up around her breasts and her shorts pulling awkwardly at her crotch. The world outside is far too big and the world in here is closing in on her, tightening on all sides, folding up like a collapsing universe and preparing to crush her.

Closing like the trunk of a car.

She doesn't need to dream that something went horribly wrong somewhere and it should have been her, should have been her brow with that neat little hole in it, her skull exploded in the back, should be her brain ruined now. Or no; she should have died. No one should have survived that. She should have died and rotted in the trunk of that car, and he should be…

But it wouldn't matter. He would be like he is now either way. Maybe not quite this bad, but he would be broken. He would be ruined. Dead.

In his own way, he wouldn't have survived, because the good ones don't survive.

She couldn't carry him. She wasn't strong enough. But she imagines if it had been different, if he had carried her. It would have been horrible beyond comprehension, but he would have done it for her, he would have cradled her so gently against his broad chest and carried her away. He would have held her until he couldn't hold her anymore. He was strong. He wouldn't have let her go. He would have been dying too but she would have been safe with him.

Would have been.

Is he dangerous?

He wasn't meaning to hurt you.

But is he?

She jerks herself out of bed; all at once there's hardly any air in the room and she's clawing what there is into her lungs, practically wheezing. She stumbles to the window and yanks the gauzy curtains aside, fumbles her fingers into the depression at the sill and shoves up the window.

Her room is also on the first floor, essentially in the same place as his, given that all the houses in the Zone were constructed according to no more than two or three separate plans. She wanted it here, for reasons she couldn't then articulate. Wanted it near the ground. At some point she understood: She wants to be able to run if she has to, and she wants to be unencumbered by stairs. She's never truly felt safe here, but up there it would have been worse.

Up there she would have felt the cold edge of danger in a much keener way.

Now she looks out at the silent world. Moonlight so bright it throws hard shadows. Nearly full; next night or the one after it will be. No lights on in any of the houses she can see. The Zone is asleep.

She's not.

Neither is he.

He's standing in the middle of the street. Just standing, utterly still. The moon should be highlighting his every feature, making him marble and jet, but it's not.

He's utterly black. He's a hole in the world.

Head tilted in that animal way, like he's coldly curious about something. Like he's trying to work something out. Trying to decide what to do. His hands are hanging at his sides. He's yards away, she shouldn't be able to see it, but she can and she does: His fingers are twitching.

There's no air here either.

At some point she blinks and he's gone.