Note: Want to thank people who have been sticking with this. I know it's been a rough ride so far. Wish I could tell you it'll get easier, but hopefully it'll be worth it at the end (have narrowed things down somewhat as well as realized an unexpected twist, but there's one crucial thing regarding which I remain unsure).

Personal note: I didn't mean to give Daryl what amounts to dermatillomania/dermatophagia, but I did, and given that I have it/them, that kind of means a lot to me. I think there's canon support for a mild form of it; he's often biting/chewing at his fingers.

Chapter 10: just one step at a time

His voice on tape, his name on the envelope, the soft sound of a body falling off a bridge behind you, the body hardly even makes a sound. - Richard Siken

He manages to keep his gaze on hers for another few seconds. Then he has to look away.

She can tell he has to. It's not a conscious decision. He looked at her for as long as he could, until something in him couldn't bear it anymore. He's withdrawing to protect himself. At least he's only withdrawing this one thing, because he's still here. She can feel it like a field of thrumming warmth that extends from him to her. Connection.

God, this is so much more than she thought she would get. Today. Maybe ever.

Except now the silence is stretching out again, and she wants to say something, wants to fill it - needs to. He's speaking to her. She doesn't want that to stop. With a frantic kind of exhilaration, she thinks she might do anything to keep it from stopping.

She does have the option of simply saying what she means. Being straight with him and not overthinking it. It always worked fairly well with him before, even when it didn't. Even when it blew up in her face. That much was never a bad move, regardless of the wreckage in the aftermath, because in the end it always ended up being the thing that needed doing.

She can't do anything else. And he doesn't deserve anything less.

"I'm sorry I've been… stayin' away."

Single shake of his head. He lifts the cigarette to his lips and inhales deeply, length of exhalation to match. Once again all she can see are parts of his face. Nowhere near the whole thing. "You had to."

"We thought…" Rick thought and I agreed because to be honest I was thinking it the second you called me a bitch and a stupid little cunt and told me to get the fuck out. She looks down at her own hands, her tears a drying sheen across their knuckles. This is, in so many ways, also so much harder than she expected. In addition to being so much more. "...it might be better. For you. It might be better if you had some time."

"Had time," he says softly. She has no idea what he's looking at now, where his visual focus is, and for some reason that bothers her deeply. His eyes are lost in the shadow of his hair and he could be looking at anything. His eyes could be closed. "Had a lotta time. You know how long it takes to walk six hundred miles?" He snorts something that might be the hollowest possible laugh and tilts his head in a way that indicates a glance in her direction. "Actually you do. Right?"

This doesn't feel like a step backwards. An edge has crept into his tone, something sardonic and bone-dry, but it's familiar, and there's nothing about it that feels malicious to her. Nothing about it that feels like a flashing danger sign. If anything there's a bizarre kind of comfort in it, because right now he sounds the most like himself that he has since he came through the gates.

She rolls an awkward shoulder. "We didn't walk the whole way. Had some vans." She pauses a beat. For some reason this part feels even more difficult, and maybe it's that the walking distance feels paltry in comparison, or maybe it's just that they were so close to falling then, and a significant percentage of her had wanted to fall. Had been looking for the right place to do it. "Quit on us about seventy, eighty miles from here."

He grunts. She's half expecting some kind of biting retort to that, how then she really can't possibly fucking imagine the timeframe he's talking about, can she, how of course she would have a goddamn van while he slogged the entire way on foot, of course that just figures.

But there's just that grunt, his head still down. Then, "Takes a long fuckin' time."

He's lucid. Or he seems to be. Lucid and sounding like him, and if she doesn't keep hold of herself she's going to start crying again.

She weaves her fingers together, and as she does she sees his again, loose between his knees, and she sees what's happened to them, what he's done to them, and she still doesn't know exactly what Michonne meant when she said he hurt himself, but this doesn't look like damage done in a single event. Some of the raw, skinned places are old. Some are sort of healing. There are scabs. Some of the scabs look freshly picked open.

This was a process. It took him a while to do this to himself. And it's ongoing.

What else has he been doing?

"What happened? At Grady?" She doesn't want to ask, but she needs to do this too. This is probably something she'll never fully understand, not least because he almost certainly doesn't fully understand it, but she needs to come as close as she can. What he's been through since, she has to know as much of that as she can too - needs to see him - but she has to know where it started. How.

Maybe a little of how it all went so wrong.

He stiffens again. This time it's worse. This time it's the stiffening of mounting defenses. The cigarette wobbles in his mouth as he bites down on the filter.

"A lot."

"Can you tell me?"

He shoots her a look. There's something almost furtive about it, and it wrenches at her. He doesn't want to tell her. If he doesn't want to tell her, if he actively wants to conceal it, it's bad. Thus far he's had few reservations about conveying information regarding the atrocities he's allegedly committed. He doesn't apologize for them. He never seems ashamed of them.

Rick hasn't said, Michonne hasn't said, but she knows how he would do it. He would shove them in people's faces. He would wield his own crimes like weapons, ultimately against himself. Hurting them for daring to care about him. Hurting himself for daring to be something that anyone cares about.

Now he doesn't want to tell her.

A sudden breeze whispers across the porch, tugs gently at her hair. Tugs less gently at his. Tugs it aside from the left side of his face, the side she's sitting on, and with a cold lurch she sees it: a little moon-patch high on his brow, barely a depression, mostly just the gray of scar tissue.

But not only that. Part of it is scabbed over. Not much of it, a sliver the size and shape of a fingernail's edge, but it's there and it's fresh.

He's been picking that open too.

"You don't have to." She twists at her own finger, her hand. She didn't wear her bracelets today - it's something she's come to care less and less about - and when she turns her left wrist to the light her eyes trace the thin line over her veins. He's seen it. She never explicitly showed it to him, never formally invited him into that part of herself, but he knows it's there. He used it against her. "You don't have to tell me anythin'."

"I woke up." Once again he barely lets her finish. Head still down, chewed fingers worrying at the cigarette. "I don't remember." He falls silent, and she can practically see his wheels furiously turning, spinning in the mud. He's trying so hard. "There was… Screaming. You." He turns his head further to the side and his eyes flick very briefly to hers and then away to nothing at all. "After… I dunno. I dunno. I just woke up."

"How did you get out of the car?"

"Don't remember."

"So how did you know about it?"

Yet another pause, and it's different. Or it's more like before. His fingers don't stop moving but the quality of the movement subtly changes, and so does the tension in his shoulders. His breathing.

His wheels have stopped spinning; he has that information. He's just not sure whether he can give it to her. Or whether it's something he's willing to do.

As it turns out. "Edwards."

She already knew. Couldn't be anyone else. There's no other way he would have made it. All the same - in a sense she can't explain - she's surprised. Edwards wouldn't owe him anything. Quite the contrary. It's likely that Dawn's death ultimately didn't change very much where the day-to-day operations of Grady Memorial were concerned. Resources would be scarce. A living Daryl Dixon would have had every reason to be a major problem for them. Very possibly they would pump resources into saving him and he would die anyway. Or be so brain-damaged that he might as well have done.

But she knows why. Edwards wasn't a fool. He was a lot of things, many of them nothing to be proud of, but he was far from a fool and extremely far from oblivious. He would have seen her on that floor. How she was holding the dead man. Holding on. Clinging. He would have known.

He did owe her. Or he would have felt that way.

"He saved you."

And he's just gone.

She knows instantly that it was the wrong thing to say when his head snaps around, eyes narrowed through the ragged curtain of his hair, only one fully visible - and not blank. Blank would be better, blank would be a comfortingly neutral nothingness, but this is exactly what she saw in the cell. Black holes in his head. Lightless. Empty.

Rationally predatory. Completely insane.

"He didn't save me." He pauses, jaw working, and two of her knuckles crack as her hands clench in each other's grip. She got more than she expected; this is what she actually expected, at least if things went bad, but now she knows there was no way to be ready for what's truly happening right in front of her. This isn't like the cell, because what she saw in the cell was all she saw. She came in and he was already gone. She didn't lose him there.

She didn't watch him slip away from her. She didn't watch him vanish.

"He didn't save me," he repeats softly - a totally different quality of softness. All the tenderness of a wolf. "I took out his eye."

She swallows and it sticks in her throat. Closed up again, clenched as her hands, aching dully like the memory of a bruise. She won't be afraid of him. She won't.

But she should be.

"Did you kill him?"

He shakes his head, slow, and she doesn't feel a single iota of relief. She knows better. "Killed the rest."

Oh, God. "Them…" All her tears are gone. Frozen over. She abruptly realizes hasn't blinked in what feels like a while. "Everyone?"

She hadn't made any real friends there, no. Not except for Noah. Wasn't about disliking people - though there was plenty of that - and it wasn't about wanting to be on her own, which she never felt. Not then. Not like now. She liked being around people and she liked it even more when she could be helpful, useful, contribute in a way that she could see. She fed on the energy of it. In its way it was power.

Not Grady. Not being used.

But it wasn't even about that. It wasn't about resentment. It was simply that she wasn't going to stay. She was going to get out. Maybe it was cold, maybe it was slightly unlike her, but she figured there was little point in forming any more attachments than were useful to her. Little point in getting close.

Except she had liked so many of them anyway. Of course she had. Of course she wouldn't have been able to help it. Prisoners just like her, many of them worse off, scared and sick and desperate to get free and terrified to go outside at all, confused and lost and just trying to survive. All in the same shit together, and if she could have somehow taken them all with her when she went, she would have done it.

Sick people. Scared people. Weak people. And Daryl is looking at her with those horrible dead eyes and telling her that he spared Edwards - sort of - and killed the rest.

But again, that single shake of the head. "Cops."

And it hits her what that means. When he said the rest she thought about people in beds, people shuffling around in scrubs. For some reason she didn't think of uniforms and badges, and she didn't think of training and guns. All of them with guns. And Daryl Dixon waking up brain-damaged and frightened and dazed, maybe in a coma for a while - wouldn't surprise her - and God knows how much worse he was when he hadn't had a chance to do much healing, as bad as he is now, and he faced down all those officers with all their guns and he killed them.

She saw him. She thought she did. Saw him, saw the bare outlines of what he might be capable of, saw the lethality coiled inside him like a pit viper.

She didn't. She didn't see anything.

It's possible that she's looking at the most dangerous man she's ever encountered in her life.

"Did they try to keep you there?" She keeps talking, rummaging vaguely for questions, because she doesn't know what else to do and she can't look away from him. Her tears are still drying on her face, she can still feel the gentle passage of his thumb across her cheek, and with those dead, empty eyes he's pinned her like a butterfly to a mounting board.

Yet another head-shake.

"So why?" She sounds far more desperate than she wants to, and beneath all the other roiling emotions she can't hope to name, she's irritated with herself. She knew it was going to be bad. She should be stronger than this. "If they didn't… Why'd you do it?"

He cocks his head - puzzled animal in the cell, standing in the street and watching her through the dark. "They took you."

Oh.

"Daryl…" Soft. She could drop this, and in fact that would probably be the wisest move, but very little she's done here has been wise in any way, shape, or form, and there's really no reason to change tracks now. "The ones who took me… They were dead. By the time you got there. They were already dead."

Not that he would have known.

"They took you," he repeats, and there's an edge of insistence in it - not exasperation, but as if it's important for her to understand his logic and he can't quite tease out what's tripping her up like this when really it's all so simple. "Don't matter. All of 'em. They took you. Kept you. They didn't get to live."

A hospital full of sick, scared, weak people and a one-eyed Dr. Steven Edwards. She wants to laugh and it's horrible and absurd - she wants to laugh because it's horrible and absurd. No part of this has ever not been absurd, and it began when she watched the bullet blow out the back of his skull and it's only been getting worse since then, absurdity piling onto absurdity. This conversation - here on the back porch of a normal house on a normal street on a warm sunny day in early summer while the dead roam outside the walls and humanoid animals rip each other to pieces over scraps - is by far the most absurd part of the whole narrative, the apex, and she bites her lip and prays that he'll take whatever he sees on her face for simple unease.

In his current mental state he's likely to regard making someone uneasy as normal and healthy and safe.

But then it's real unease, and in fact it's worse than unease; an icepick rolls its point down the knobs of her vertebrae and it takes everything she has to keep from recoiling when he lifts his hand again and cups her jaw, thumb tracing along her cheekbone. The touch is still gentle, still careful, but it's not hesitant, and his eyes are no longer dead. What's in them is like the light from before.

If the light was shining straight out of the bottom of Hell.

"They took you away from me," he breathes.

She says it. She doesn't think. She can't. If she thinks about it she won't do it, and if she doesn't do it she might very well lose this completely. She smells sour blood and decay and clammy sweat and she thinks about him standing outside her window for hours upon hours, watching her with his hand pressed against the glass, about his innocent wonder and fascination and what it might become if a bullet ripped through it, and if she stops to think any more she'll be afraid.

And if she's afraid he'll know. Sense it. Close in.

She doesn't think he'll mean to. He wasn't meaning to hurt you. He'll just do it, because even if no one can see it, there's essentially a W on his forehead, and God knows if it'll ever come off.

So she'll do what she has to do.

"I know you were at my window last night."

He collapses.

It's all internal. She watches it happen through the window of his one visible eye; the infernal light fractures and folds in on itself, and what's left behind is what she saw to begin with when he looked at her, when he said he was sorry, when he wiped away her tears. The fear, and the fear is flaring like a fire abruptly soaked in propane. He blinks and jerks his head, looks down and away.

"I didn't…" And he says nothing else. Just trails off. The cigarette tumbles from his ruined fingers in a tiny puff of ash when it hits the flagstones, and he doesn't seem to notice.

She wonders if she hit him. If that's what she just did. Because he's dangerous, but she has power here that she doesn't yet fully understand, and it's power over him like she's never had.

Never wanted.

"I didn't," he murmurs again, and it's not denial. He's not trying to cover it up. He was always shit at lying to the extent that he ever even tried, and she doubts very much that he has that capacity now. It's something else, and it aches in his voice. Fear but not quite. Shame but not quite. Confusion, always. He's probably always confused now. Never certain of anything.

Always a little bit lost.

"Daryl." She's reaching for him at the same instant that he lifts his left hand to his mouth, teeth capturing his thumb - the thumb that stroked through her tears - and she sees it on the side of his hand, between the knuckles of his thumb and forefinger and further back toward the bony knobs of his wrist.

It looks like a crater. Like something interstellar smashed into him and left a hole. The skin around it is angry red and slightly swollen, and the wound itself is only partially scabbed over and oozing what thankfully looks like plasma and not pus. Maybe it had been closed but it's opened up again, and she's sure he did the opening and on some level meant to do so.

And it looks very fresh.

He hurt himself, Michonne said. And she looks at the relatively neat edges of the thing and then down at the cigarette smoldering on the stone, and she knows.

She's moving before she can stop herself, reaching for him and closing a hand so lightly over his wrist, and he spasms and twists away from her, his whole body drawn in and facing her with his breathing coming in shallow pulls and eyes wide and terrified and sharp as knives.

Fuck.

"Okay." She holds up her hands, scoots back a little. "I'm sorry. Okay. It's okay, Daryl. I won't."

He shakes his head, twice and forceful nearly to the point of violence. "No, it's-" He ducks his head, grimacing, and it's like she can see it through his skin: He's beating against the inside of the cage that is himself, hurling himself at his own walls, clawing at them. After he came through the gates he tried to claw his way to her, and he never stopped.

And she doesn't know how to help him.

"I'm alright," he mutters under his breath, and she doesn't think he's talking to her. "I am. I'm alright."

She doesn't move. He doesn't look at her. The foot or so between them is spreading itself into a chasm. It's entirely possible, she realizes, that this is just how it's going to be from now on. Moments where the sun breaks through for him and he can see the sky, followed by the clouds rolling in again. Fog. Storms. Thunder, lightning. Darkness.

But he was there. He was.

He still is.

"I asked Rick for some coffee," she says, pitching her voice low. Smooth. "I'm gonna go in and get it. Do you want any?"

He shakes his head, but it's less violent. It's not really violent at all. He's slumped over his knees, his hands hanging loose, and once again - now that she's seen it - it's difficult to take her eyes off his mutilated fingers. It must hurt to touch anything. It must hurt no matter what, and he won't let it stop hurting.

She's not going to be afraid of him; she's also not going to start crying again.

She gets up and climbs the couple of steps to the top, and she's gripping the door handle when he turns at the waist and looks back at her.

The sun has broken through. Not much, but it's there.

"Come back." His left hand twitches, the fingers squirming against each other. "I mean… Not now. After you get the coffee." He swallows. "I can be alright."

She bites down on the insides of her cheeks. What he's really saying.

Don't leave me. I'll be good.

"I know you can," she whispers, and she shoves herself into the house.

Rick is alone in the kitchen, leaning against the polished granite countertop and drinking his own cup of coffee, and staring generally into sunlit space. He glances up sharply as she comes in, and with the way his eyes move over her she gets the distinct impression that he's scanning for injuries. Even though if anything had happened, he would have heard it. Heard it and come running.

She opens her mouth and he nods at the microwave before she can speak. "Didn't wanna interrupt."

The coffee is warm enough to not need any further zapping - and also she doesn't much care - but she pauses in front of him, looking up at him as if they're exactly the same height. She hasn't truly looked up at him since they left Atlanta. "How long were you listenin'?"

"Long enough to make sure he wasn't gonna try to take your head off." There's no evasion in it, nor is there any sheepishness. He was doing what he does, and he's confident that she'll understand that and have expected it. But then his voice drops and softens, and he takes a long breath. "Long enough to make sure it's okay."

"It's okay." She hesitates. Once she gave out hugs like candy. She dispensed them freely and with a low-key everyday joy. Those points of contact, warmth, connection. Bonds strengthened. Family taught her how to make family and she did in every way she could.

Now she reaches out and touches his arm. It lasts for a couple of seconds and then it's over.

"Thank you."

He shrugs, looks down. He's fucked. He's fucked and he knows it. He argued his way into something he can't possibly win, and he's arguing to stay in it. Fighting. He'll have to be physically removed, if he's removed at all. Since this all began, Rick Grimes has been fighting his way into worst case scenarios, and by now he's charging into them, waving a gun and a machete and declaring preemptive victory.

But he still knows he's fucked.

She leaves him and goes back outside.

Daryl doesn't appear to have moved. But this time he immediately looks up at her when she sits back down, and she can see more of his face. It's not just his hair; she keeps thinking that it shouldn't be possible, but it literally is as though he gathers shadows in and releases them, puts them on and takes them off. He's uncloaked himself. Or he's started to do so.

His eyes shift to the mug in her hands and up to her face. "All the coffee is that instant shit now."

"Yeah, it is. It sucks." She gives him a small smile as she raises the mug, and if he doesn't return it, he also doesn't look away. "You go with what you got."

He nods. You do. This is a truth he's probably better acquainted with than most of them.

She's staring into the mug's gritty brown depths, searching for some other way to reach for him since Grady doesn't seem like a place to which they should return - a job for Denise, maybe - but he does the reaching for her, clears his throat and gazes intently down at the bright, freshly painted wood between them.

"Your window… I just needed to see you. Make sure you were… safe." He raises his eyes, and the fear has at least somewhat receded. "Just see you. That's all."

So he knows - or some part of him does - how what he did might be interpreted. That's good.

That might be very, very good.

"It's okay." And she means it. It is. Because she gets it and she believes him; he needed to see her. He was slowly suffocating; he needed to be able to breathe. He wouldn't have done anything more.

This time.

"It's okay. Just…" She rests the mug on her knees, fingers wrapped around its uneven green ceramic body. It's one of those slightly upscale deals that's supposed to look handmade and might even be so but not for any other reason than for people to feel good about owning something handmade. "You can see me. You can. Just please, Daryl… Please don't do that again."

Because dancing around it is only going to make it worse. And if he's going to respond well at all, this feels like a promising moment. But sudden pain edged with mortification washes across his face, and her chest tightens.

"Sorry."

"I said it was okay. I meant it."

He ducks his head, biting at what remains of his thumbnail. "Did I scare you?"

"No." She can say it without lying, and of that she's immensely glad. And when he looks up at her again, relief is faintly smoothing his twisted features. Though pain remains.

"Good."

"You can see me," she repeats. She's making the decision as she says it, and she knows it's not going to be a popular one. But dammit, it's hers. It's for her to decide. If anyone else has a problem with it they can take it up with her and she can suggest that they go fuck themselves. "You need to, you come across the street and you see me. Not just look. Talk to me. I mean… I'm not always there, but-"

He nods, still gnawing at his thumb. "You pull guard duty." The gnawing ceases and the thumb lowers a bit. "You on the wall?"

She hasn't once seen him really outside since he got here, and she has no way of knowing how much of that day he even remembers. But he'll have observed, and he'll have retained anything that could help him stay alive. "Yeah. You saw the walls."

"Comin' in. Hard to miss." The wan ghost of a smile passes across his face. It's more like something she herself is imagining rather than something that's actually changing his expression in any way. The trace of something he once gave her. "This place don't make no fuckin' sense. It don't belong here. No one belongs here anymore."

Ice trickling down her spine. She keeps making these connections in her head, and then the connections make themselves right in front of her.

No one heard them say much, because everyone involved on both sides was dead very quickly, but what did get said was marked and remembered. Because no one truly believes it's over.

"No." Sip of coffee. It's something to do with her hands. The coffee is cold and bitter and awful, and she swallows it like a thing she deserves. "It doesn't."

"The walls," he murmurs, staring out at the one in front of them. All at once he's distant, but she doesn't think it's confusion, or another one of those patches of blankness. It's thoughtful distance. He's pulling back to a wider view. Processing. Mulling. "Everyone's trapped here. Locked in." He closes his eyes, his hands once more lax and softly curled in his lap. "Sometimes it's all on fire. All of it. Everybody's dyin'. No one gets out. No one makes it."

She should be arguing, even if only as gently as she can. She should be telling him that he's wrong. It's all right. It's not on fire. No one is trapped. Everything is okay. Everything is going to be okay.

She won't insult him. Neither will she lie aloud to herself. Not here, not now.

He opens his eyes and looks at her, and it's not jerky or overtly rapid but it's like she blinks and he's there, like there's no transition, and she gasps. He doesn't seem to notice. He just looks at her, and he hasn't gone anywhere and the Hell-light isn't shining, but what she sees there inside him turns that trickle of ice into a spike.

"This place is gonna burn, Beth. They always do. They always burn." This time the smile isn't a ghost. It's there, clear, and it's so tired and so sad, and she knows that she's looking at someone who took a bullet in the head and came out shattered and ruined and also wise in a way she'll be blessed to never understand. "And then we always run."

She doesn't mean to say what comes next. She keeps saying things and doing things and not intending to, and that's fine, because when she first walked across the damn street she knew that thinking too much was going to be her enemy, and this has gone better than she ever dared to hope, because generally hope is bullshit.

But maybe not always.

"Yeah, well." She rolls a shoulder and gives him a reiteration of her own smile. It feels like his has touched hers, reshaped it. Not that she needs much help being tired or sad. But there's this. "We got out together once. Maybe we'll do it again."

She came.

She doesn't stay much longer. He doesn't say a lot more. Storm is rolling in, thunder in the distance, and when it gets too close and he asks her to go she seems to understand, seems to get that it's not that he doesn't want her to stay, except he really doesn't want her to stay. He doesn't hide pain - there's no fucking point, why should he? - and she can probably see it anyway.

And he can ask her to go. He can ask her to do that. Ask her. Just ask her. And she'll go and it's okay because he'll be able to see her again, because she came to him and she told him and he believes her. She wasn't just saying it to placate him. She wasn't just saying it to keep him away from her window. She wasn't saying it to get something from him. She said it. Meant it. He can see her.

See her.

Later, thinking: He did. Not blinded. Not burned. She touched him and that was too much, it was like a fiery whip across his hand, but he knows she didn't mean to do it - sweet girl, she never would have meant to do that. And she forgave him. She forgave him everything. She was patient with him and he made it. He came through it and it didn't rip him apart. He didn't bleed or vomit poison into her eyes. He didn't burst open like a sore and soak her with his infection.

He didn't hurt her. Those things he was thinking about doing to her, he didn't do them.

He touched her and she let him.

And he was bathed in light.

(A memory, even now very strong and very distinct: Standing outside the shack with her in the expanding wave of fallout, having exhausted his rage and turned away, and then having finally found the crack in the dam of himself and broken it open - maybe I could've done something - when she seized him and bore him up even as he was crumbling, she pushed him forward with the impact of her body and he reflexively raised his face into a beam of light. It should have blinded him but it didn't, and he blinked up into it and saw things for which he did not and never will have a name. Much later he was certain it was the moonshine or the rage-delirium or a fault in his usually reliable recall or some combination of any number of variables, but at the time he could have sworn that the sun was shining from the other direction. That the light into which he was staring couldn't have been sunlight. That it must have come from somewhere else.)

Lying in the curtain-made dimness with the storm grumbling in his head, eyes closed and rocking on a sea of nausea so persistent that it's really more tedious than anything else, that's what he comes back to. Orbits. He touched her. It's a revelation. It shouldn't be possible. He should have burst into flames. Or she should have killed him with a look, killed him for his presumption, blackened his bones and turned his flesh to ash. He touched her and she was warm, warm to her core with the beat of her heart and her blood in rivers beneath her skin, and she allowed it and it was all right.

He would have drunk her tears like rain. Head back, eyes closed, hands out and palms up. Exulting. Exalted.

He curls his aching hands against his chest and feels that warmth still beneath his fingertips. Not his own. He has none of his own. He's the moon and he has nothing that she doesn't give him. Today she gave him warmth and light and he'll shine.

All through the rest of the storm, through the afternoon of the Boy's glares the two times they cross paths and Rick's sadly puzzled eyes and Michonne's inscrutable looks and Carol, Carol asking him about it and for once not immediately picking up on it when he tries to hint without grabbing her and screaming at her to back the fuck off that he would like to be left alone… All through it, he's still warm. So it's all right. It is.

All through the sleepless moonlit night, gazing out the window at where he knows she is but where he will no longer go, he shines.

Further note: For anyone who cares/is interested and didn't catch it, some of Daryl's dialogue is indeed drawn wholesale from JSS/6x02. I didn't expect this aspect of the story to be more than a passing reference but I'm glad it's become a bigger feature.