Things are really, really awful at the beginning of this. I think so, anyway. Just... Please proceed with caution.

Chapter 12: I know you tried to rescue me

All night I stretched my arms across him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing with all my skin and bone: Please keep him safe. Let him lay his head on my chest and we will be like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed to pieces. - Richard Siken

She's shackled spread-eagle to one of the walls, naked, and he's shooting arrows at her.

For the most part this only puzzles him. He's not sure why this is happening. It doesn't make a lot of sense, why she should be chained to a wall in the bright high-noon sun. Who did that to her seems like a important question, as is the question of why it was done. In any case, it's also strange that he's firing arrows at her, because he doesn't remember deciding to do so and he doesn't know why he would want to.

Though he's pleased, as he sends one straight into the soft flesh of her abdomen just beneath her ribs and stabs a short, high scream out of her, that his aim is as good as ever.

It's also strange that he has the bow again.

He reloads, recocks, and takes aim.

He's also never seen her naked. Never in all the time they were together. He was careful not to. There was absolutely no hope of any real privacy between them, and what with one thing and another he had plenty of opportunities to see her tits at the very least - and wouldn't Merle have given him shit for passing up the opportunity to take a gander at those cute little bee stings, not much to get your hands on but you go with what you got, don't you, brother? - but he was very careful about avoiding that, and also he didn't want to, and also he's never really wanted that kind of view from anyone.

Though with her, the care with which he avoided it was particularly intense.

Here she is, though, in living color.

Well. Probably not for much longer.

Though he's taking care - now, about this - to make his shots both painful and non-lethal, or at least lethal only slowly. She's bleeding from bolts in her belly, her arm, shoulder, a part of her thigh where he was sure he wouldn't hit the artery, but the bolts actually serve to plug most of the worst of that and she's bleeding slowly, and if she bleeds out it's going to take a while.

She's screaming an awful lot. Screaming, sobbing, her scarred face shining with tears and snot, and it all drips down her chin and spatters shining onto her chest.

Even if he wanted to see her tits, there's not a great deal there to see.

She's asking him why he's doing it, pleading for him to tell her, and he doesn't know. He takes aim at her other shoulder, fires, and she throws her head back and shrieks and he's still really at a loss.

Her blood glitters in the sun like streams of liquid rubies. It's pretty. Prettier over the creamy perfection of her skin.

He doesn't know why he's doing this, as he reloads, except that it feels inevitable. It feels like something he was always going to do, and was just waiting for the appropriate time and place. That he would know when it came, and he would act, and it doesn't matter who chained her up like this and really it doesn't matter why they were so obliging. What matters is the fulfillment of a certain destiny: That he'll cause her as much pain as possible, do as much damage as he can, and then kill her, and he will do all of these things with carefully measured skill.

He's very good at killing. It might be the thing he's best at. He's actually not very good at much else. It might be all he's truly good for.

So he's going to destroy her now because he was never going to do anything else.

Saving her was a mistake. Now he's going to correct it.

He takes aim and waits, feels the comfortable weight of the bow in his hands and the solidity of the stock against his shoulder, takes pleasure in the act of sighting and the point of the bolt and all that potential energy coiled and ready to fly. He waits also to give her a bit more time to suffer; her head is hanging between her shoulders, hair clumped and stringy and soaked with sweat, and he can tell she's exhausted, in shock, and it's fairly impressive that she's still conscious at all, but this has to be done right because he's only going to get a chance to do it once.

He fires into her chest. Not her heart; right breast, just below her nipple. Right lung. This time she only jerks with the impact and releases a rasping, hiccuping cry and slumps again.

One more thing, something to wake her up, because he wants her around for the finale. He bends and reloads, recocks, straightens up and takes aim and fires a perfect shot into the triangle of tight curls between her legs.

It punches into her, the impact very audible, and she convulses and by the way her arms wrench back and up he can tell she's dislocated both of them in a single spasm. She screams louder than he's heard her, louder than he would have believed she could, and it's jagged at the end and it breaks off suddenly and he thinks she's probably torn something in her throat.

He lowers the bow, shoulders it, and walks across the crisp grass to her.

He's done this extremely well. He's pleased with that, and even a little proud. She's still with him, and somehow she finds the strength to raise her head when he stops in front of her, her jaw slack and her eyes unfocused. Her mouth is moving loosely, as if she's trying to say something. But she ruined her voice. That sweet voice. She doesn't have it anymore.

Of course there's a gun holstered at his hip, and of course he grips her by the hair with one hand and draws with the other, and of course he presses the muzzle to her brow. Very carefully. Almost gently. Just the right spot. Not where his scar is.

He can't risk the same thing that happened to him happening to her.

He looks at her for a long time. She was always so beautiful, and even like this she's beautiful. And she'll still be beautiful after he does what he's going to do. She might be more beautiful than she's ever been, because this is what was always supposed to happen, and it's ending perfectly.

"It should have been you," he whispers, and he pulls the trigger.

Yes. It's beautiful.

Screaming. Might be. Screaming, screaming as loud as she was. Or not. He's not sure, his throat feels like someone ran a cheese grater over it but there could be any number of reasons for that, and silence is jackhammering between his ears. Twisting in the sheets and fists flailing, fighting to get free, fighting the air, the world, everything, blood gushing into his mouth from his tongue as he bites it in half and his bandaged fingers scrabbling on the floor, clawing at his face, clawing it to gory ribbons, and the dark is like a cannonball smashing into his head.

No, that's the floor. The wall. Throwing himself against it until it dents and caves and he's showered with plaster and drywall, hitting himself as hard as he can, trying to break something. Shatter. Maybe he's doing that, because he should, he should disable himself completely, he should have someone take a sledgehammer to his knees and not just because it's what he deserves. He should have someone put his foot against a block and hobble him. Maybe he's trying to crack his monstrous, disgusting skull open.

Maybe he's trying to finish the job.

Or maybe he's not. Maybe he's just curled on his side, or lying here on his back and staring at the flames licking across the ceiling, and somehow breathing, somehow existing, and wondering why that's still the case, and wondering why - even now - he can't cry.

Sometimes she has the scissors.

Sometimes she has the gun.

Sometimes she has the gun and she's where Dawn was, the light bizarre and somehow falling crooked across the world, and no one is moving. No one appears to feel any sense of urgency, even though this was and should be a desperately urgent situation. They're merely watching this tableau, bearing silent witness, and in fact every one of them is faceless, smooth blank nothings where their features should be. She knows who they are, knows their names and loves them all, but ultimately they don't matter. Ultimately they're of no significance.

The only person of any significance is kneeling in front of her, slumped and shaking, clinging. Holding on by his ruined fingers as his breath comes in harsh rasps. He's filthy, blood-streaked and stinking of decay, because all the showers in the world couldn't wash off what he truly is. He's so tired and he's in so much pain; she's amazed that he can hold on at all. That he's made it this far. That he's still there. He's so strong, and he's tried so hard.

But it's cruel to make him continue like this any longer.

And he doesn't want to continue. He's making that abundantly clear. He's whispering to her in his hoarse, broken voice, and in the utter silence around them she can hear him distinctly even with his head bowed. Just like in her mind's eye she can see the moon-patch scar on his brow - crusted with fresh blood because he's gouged it open as if digging for the bullet that's already passed through - where everything should have ended and didn't.

Please. I just want it to stop.

Get it right this time.

And she can. She has this chance, this precious chance to get it right, to free him, because he's trapped, because he doesn't belong here, because she loves him too much to watch him live in Hell.

Her aim is good. It's stunningly good. But she doesn't need good aim for this. There won't be any mistakes this time. He raises his head and stares up at her with his weary, hopeless eyes, and he closes them as she gently presses the muzzle against the center of his brow.

He's smiling.

It's a beautiful smile.

Somehow she would have expected a gunshot at close range to be much louder.

This is more of a sharp tapping.

And she's blinking into the dark, too confused to feel anything else. Just the dark and then the dark in motion, swirling sickeningly around her, and she can feel his desperate grip loosening and falling away as the bullet crashes through his brain, the bullet she fired from the gun she held, and she's flinging herself sideways and retching, shoving herself up to sit and dropping her head between her knees and breathing in huge, aching gasps.

She's going to throw up. She's going to vomit a soup of broccoli and instant mashed potatoes all over the hardwood and the tastefully patterned blue and white area rug.

No. She's not. She's breathing and she's not. Thin, watery control is seeping back into her and she won't. But it's never been that bad. Somehow even when there's been more blood and his brain and fragments of his shattered skull spattered over her, when he's taken forever to die and stared up at her with cold and vicious hatred, even when she's shot him herself - which has happened, more than once - it's never been that bad.

He's never asked for it. Begged for it. It's never been like that.

She jams her teeth against each other and rakes her hands through her hair so hard it sparkles stings over her scalp and her eyes water - not just from that, but it doesn't help - and she's reaching over to cut the light on, because there's no fucking way she sleeps any more tonight, when she hears it again, and it's no bullet and it's no dream.

It's tapping.

It's tapping at her window.

Her gut had been threatening to heave its contents all over the floor; now it ices over. She hasn't even raised her head and looked and she already knows who it is. It couldn't be anyone else. And she asked him, she asked him not to and she really believed he understood and he wouldn't do it no matter what else is going on in his head, and shit, that he would not only do it anyway but that he would do it now.

She closes her eyes and leans further forward. That he would do this to her now.

That she would have the gall to give a fuck about that.

But she's lurching to her feet and stumbling groggily in the direction of the window when it hits her: He's tapping. He's not watching her while she sleeps, watching her with whatever sick possessiveness he might be incubating like a virus. He's there and he's tapping, because he wants her to know he's there, because he wants to see her. He wants to talk to her.

Like she told him he could.

She didn't tell him he shouldn't come over at night like this. She thought that might be implicit. He seemed to understand other things. But really - she stops, staring at the shadows beyond the windowpane and searching for him, for the light in his eyes - why shouldn't he? Why shouldn't he do that? Why shouldn't he need to?

Everything is worse at night.

She bends close and there he is, standing back a little and looking in, barely more than a darker shape on a field of darkness. The night is moonless and a wind is whipping up outside, yanking at the trees - that storm almost here. His hair is blowing in his face, obscuring most of it, but he's hunched and hugging himself, and she doesn't need to see his face - or his eyes - to know that something has happened to him.

She answer-taps and he steps forward, glancing around nervously - yes, he's not oblivious. She didn't tell him that this wasn't ideal but he would have known anyway. She thinks. At any rate, he seems to have done. He seems decidedly uncomfortable about being here at all.

Breathing is easier now. She can do this. What she can't do is ignore him. Never. Never that. She doesn't want to. What she wants to do is plunge through that flimsy barrier of glass and shatter it with herself, cling to him as tight as he was clinging to her, hold on like she always should have done, like she did in the hallway with his blood staining her hands and mouth, like she has a chance to do over again and she can't seem to find the balls to do it because yes, he is scaring her, and she's too much of a fucking coward.

Which he isn't. Whatever else he's lost, courage isn't something he's lacking. It's brought him here.

She gestures toward the front of the house, mouths I'll be right there, and he nods and melts into the shadows.

Be right there. Yes, she will. She closes her eyes again and turns, and fights back a violent wave of shivering as her stomach coils in on itself and her throat twists shut. She was always going to be there.

The second he walked through the gates was the second they both ran out of choices.

He's on the porch when she opens the door, but not right in front of her. He's huddled to the side, out of the way and in another thick band of shadow, arms still wrapped around his middle. He jerks his head up, and it's dark - she hasn't turned on a single light - and his hair is still hiding most of his face, but she can see enough.

His eyes are huge and black, and not because they're rejecting the light. They're hollow. He's trembling. She sucks in a breath that chokes itself halfway to her lungs, and he steps forward and she can see him fully.

She thought of him as a wraith when he came in, something wildly undead that had nothing to do with walkers. He looks like that again, haunted and haunting and desperate, bloodless, fleshless, eyes pools of inky emptiness, and somehow not entirely real. Not entirely part of the world. Or something that shouldn't be here. Something that doesn't belong.

Thunder growls and the air already smells like ozone. Somewhere a wakeful bird screams.

"I'm sorry," he breathes. Jesus, his teeth are practically chattering. The night isn't that cold. If anything it's gotten warmer, muggy with oncoming rain. But she's not oblivious either. It's not cold that's doing it to him. "I know, I know, I'm sorry, I just. I just. I just had to see you. I just had to do that." He swallows and ducks his head. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Because it is. Without thinking - and that's good - she reaches out and grazes her fingers over his bare forearm, and he doesn't flinch. He doesn't stop trembling, but he doesn't pull away, and he lifts his gaze to her again and the light is there.

Flicking. Faint. But there.

"Did somethin' happen?"

He takes a breath, and then another. They're jittery and shallow. It sounds like he hasn't been taking enough of them. "I can't sleep."

She could read him before everything went to hell and she can read him now, and that's not all. That's not nearly all. When she saw him last - barely a day ago though it feels like a year - he wasn't like this. Terrified, then dead and gone, then that awful thing lurking in his touch, but then him again, and he had been stable enough. Contained. Maybe not talkative, but he sat with her, and when he asked her to go - the approaching pain horribly apparent behind his slightly unfocused eyes - he asked her calmly. Gentleness there, even, or something that wants to remember how to be gentle.

Now he looks like a sufficiently loud noise might knock him over. The terror he was feeling with her before is nothing to this. Maybe he hasn't flinched at her hand, but everything in and about him is screaming that he wants to turn and run.

Where the fuck would he even go?

And looking at him now… He is alive. He's alive, and all signs indicate that at least for now he does want to stay that way. Once again, facing that, it's like she can finally fill her lungs. Like her heart is finally beating strong enough to send blood to the rest of her.

So maybe she needed to see him too.

"Me neither," she says softly, and steps aside. "Why don't you come in."

For a long moment after she closes the door he stands in the dark front hall with her, his arms falling to his sides, and he says nothing. He's glancing around, scanning everything, probably seeing immediately - if he didn't already know - that the floorplan is essentially identical. She wonders if he'll find that comforting or simply not care.

She has to figure out what to do with him. She feels like she's wandering through a dream, her thoughts stuttering and muddy, but she has to figure that out. The dream-haze is also lifting the longer they stand here, and it dimly occurs to her to question whether she should feel overly exposed in just her shorts and camisole, whether she should have taken ten seconds out of her busy schedule and tossed something on.

She doesn't feel exposed. He's not making her feel that way, and not just because he appears to be having trouble looking at her at all.

At last she touches his arm again. Apparently that's okay, at least for the present, and touching him reestablishes that he's real and he's here, and that's another good thing. That's something she wants more of. The knot in her gut and throat loosens a little every time it happens.

And she remembers touching him before. Him touching her. So hesitant but then eager, like he was learning how, until he was scooping her up in his arms just to make her laugh and it worked, her arms around his neck and his hold on her strong and sure.

She's knotting up again.

"The coffee sucks." She smiles faintly. "But the tea is okay. You want some?"

He looks at her, shrugs, looks away. A shrug from him probably amounts to sure, which is at least well-mapped ground.

"Alright." She has to figure out what to do with him, and she doesn't have many good options. She can only imagine what might happen if Maggie or Glenn or both of them wakes up and finds him here like this. It would be best if that scenario remained confined to her imagination. "No one knows you're here, do they?"

He shakes his head. Of course they don't. Same deal over there. She doesn't think anyone has actually attempted to prevent him from going anywhere - as far as she knows he hasn't tried to leave the property at all, hasn't given any indication that he wants to - but in this case there might have been an issue. It might have been unpleasant.

She and he and whatever's between them are still enormous elephants in a very small room.

"Go back to my room and wait for me." She gestures down the hall. "You know where it is."

For a moment longer he stares at her, as if he doesn't completely understand, and she's about to repeat it when he nods and turns, moves silently in the direction she indicated.

He glances back once, and what she sees on his face is far too complex to be called gratitude, but if it could be, it would be the fiercest gratitude she's ever seen.

In the dark she let him in, and in the dark she makes tea.

She doesn't use the stove, the kettle - the microwave is quiet and faster and an all-around better option, and they've been doing a good job lately of minimizing their power use. She stands in front of it and watches one mug of water spin, and then the other, her fingers tapping the cardboard box of tea and wondering if she's ever going to get a handle on anything much. It's probably stupid, probably she should have known better, but part of her had been hoping that given some time, she might get better too. If he settled, so might she. She might settle anyway, into a world where he's still breathing. But she hasn't. If anything she's doing worse. It's not just the dream; she gets closer to him, makes a study of him, and everything she sees that gives her hope also rips her apart just a little more.

Hoping.

It's such a bad idea to do that.

She drops the bags in and carries the mugs down the hall to her room.

There's a small lamp on the dresser by the door, not very bright, and she sets one mug down and cuts it on and hesitates, blinking as her eyes adjust.

He's sitting on her bed. He's sitting like she saw him sit by too many campfires in the first few days after the prison fell, when everything was at its worst, with his knees drawn up and his head down. Except they were never drawn up this much, his arms were never wrapped tight like they are now, and he wasn't this thin. Because she sees that with a fresh sharpness that stabs her: He's so fucking thin. Or he appears that way now, more than he did on the porch, His frame far too sharp beneath the fabric of his shirt. And it's not just that; the shadows are collecting under his eyes and his cheekbones and he looks gaunt, he looks old, but at the same time he looks small, and more than anything he looks for all the world like a scared little boy.

Because in so many ways that's exactly what he is.

He looks up, and she wasn't wrong about his eyes. Huge, very dark, but also very much his own, and it's horrible, but it's possible that when he's most frightened he's also most himself.

That says a lot of things, and none of them are good.

His feet are bare beneath the frayed hem of his jeans. She realizes that he must have walked over that way, and is totally unsurprised. Except for something dark wedged under the nail of his left big toe they're clean in a way that startles her. Clean and pale and curiously unscarred, a webwork of blue veins standing out beneath his skin.

"Hi," he says, soft, and she picks up the other mug and crosses the room to him, sinks down beside and facing him, and offers it to him. Cautiously, he takes it, sets his nose over the steam and inhales.

"Chamomile."

He nods. "I know."

He would know. It's not like she ever discussed botany or anything with him, but she got to know him well enough out there to know that when it comes to things like that he's practically a walking encyclopedia. Just not a very verbal one. He couldn't have lost all of that. He knew it was chamomile the second she walked through the door.

He's quiet for a minute, simply holding the tea, and it's a quiet full of potential words so she leaves it be. He's gathering himself and he should be able to do that in peace. She can discern a very slight tremor in his hands - which are bandaged, so that's something, though some of the bandages are stripping off and revealing freshly torn skin beneath - but he seems calmer.

"Thank you," he murmurs at last, and she exhales and attempts a lopsided smile.

"Like I said. Couldn't sleep."

He rolls a shoulder. "Still didn't have to let me in." Lifts the mug. "Didn't have to do this."

She tilts her head, fingers wrapped around her own mug, and feels her mouth tighten. That he's pointing these things out is strange in a way she can't identify. "I wasn't just gonna leave you outside."

"No." He suddenly and steadily meets her gaze, his own clear, and she almost jumps, even though his voice is - if anything - even softer. "You weren't." He lowers his head again and sips at the tea with an odd kind of delicacy, closes his eyes, and she holds her breath and thinks that possibly it's better.

"If you- if sleeping's a problem," she says after another minute or two of nothing - and the thing he said about just having trouble sleeping is bullshit and she knows it and she says it anyway - "Denise has-"

"Klonopin." He nods. "She left some."

"She came to see you." Not a question, and it earns her another nod.

And then she does something truly foolish, knows that it's foolish just like what she said before was bullshit - not only foolish but insulting - and she's beating her fists against the inside of her own skull and screaming at herself to stop even as the words emerge from her mouth.

"What was she there for?"

His head doesn't move but his eyes snap to her, instantly sharp, and it takes every fragment of spine she has to keep from edging away from him, and maybe dropping the tea on the bedside table and fleeing across the room. Black eyes. Not dead, no. That might be better, because when he went dead and told her about what he did at Grady, he wasn't threatening her at all. He isn't now, but there's how he's looking at her.

Anger, yes. A healthy amount of it. But not explosive anger. She doesn't think so. Which is somehow worse. It's run through with pain, as if she's slapped him and it wasn't completely unexpected but he was thinking she wouldn't.

He looks betrayed.

"You know. You were all over here talkin' about me. With her. Weren't you?"

His voice is quick, the syllables pointed at the end as if he's firing them at her, and she bites at her tongue, her tea cooling in her lap. This can't already be fucked up.

Oh, yes, it can. "Daryl-"

"Christ, Beth. I'm brain-damaged, but I'm not stupid. You think I can't add two and two and get four? Think I can't do that?" He lowers his own mug and leans in, teeth slightly bared and eyes narrow, and it's not exactly like the shack, he wasn't close to her like this then and if anything she could feel him coiling away like a snake in preparation to strike, but in so many ways it's the same thing.

Is that what you think of me?

"Daryl." She nearly puts a hand on his chest and pushes him back, and she stops herself. They're not at that point. Not yet. "I didn't mean-"

"How about you don't fuck around with me?" He jerks his head in the direction of the street. The words are sharp, his gaze, his movements; he's a loaded bolt just looking for a target to be fired at. "All them over there, that's what they're doin'. Don't you do that too. Don't you do it."

"I'm sorry," she whispers. And she is, and she should be. It was a bad fucking step. He knows; it would be unlike him to not know, regardless of how much of him is broken. His perceptiveness always bordered on the uncomfortable. He could always untangle a situation, see all its strands in distinct isolation.

Except when it came to himself.

He's breathing as quickly as he was speaking and the trembling has returned, and she can see the containment starting to wear away, and Denise is murmuring in her ear.

When he does things like that, I don't think he can control it. I don't think he could if he wanted to.

This could be another foolish thing. She almost certainly shouldn't do it; when she touched him on the back porch it upset him, and just because it hasn't done so tonight doesn't mean it won't now that he's worked up - and like this, panic in him could be incredibly dangerous - but she does it anyway. If instinct applies here, it might be the best director she has. She reaches up and presses a hand against his chest, but she doesn't push, and his heart is fluttering under her palm like a trapped and panicking bird.

And he freezes, eyes slipping half closed. Takes a long breath as a shiver rolls through him.

"I'm alright," he breathes, and again she knows he's mostly not talking to her. But she answers anyway, softly.

"Yeah. You are."

Another few seconds and he pulls back, drawing in on himself and shooting her a glance, his teeth worrying at his flaking lip. "I just. I need you to not do that." He pauses and squeezes his eyes shut, his face twisting with pain she doesn't know how to define. It's too big. It incorporates too much. "Please."

"Okay." It's all right now, she's sure; once more she touches his arm, lays her hand over the tight, narrow muscle, and he doesn't yank it away. "I won't. I'm sorry."

He ducks his head - an apology of his own, she thinks with a degree of surprise. And he's silent again.

She sighs. "She was here. We talked about you." Because now they've arrived at this, and it's pointless to pretend they haven't. It would just insult him again. "She was talkin' about ways to help you. Among other things."

He flicks another glance at her. "She can't help me."

Keeping her voice low, steady: "She thinks maybe she can."

"How the fuck?" He laughs, rough and brutally short. "She gonna grow me a new brain or somethin'?"

He wants to get better. Part of him believes it's possible.

"She said there were a few things. What's so bad about tryin'?" Everything. Everything is bad about trying, because like faith, it ends up getting you killed. Getting someone else killed. She's saying shit she doesn't especially hold to and she's not sure why, and in her dreams she's putting him down like a sick dog. "Is everythin' great right now, or somethin'?"

He looks at her again. He looks at her for a long time, looks at her until she's squirming and hating that she is, all of him seeming to flow away and leave him a husk before her. A husk whose face is wrenched, every part of him wrenched, not wrathful and not hating her but just sad.

Lost.

"Beth," he says, so softly she almost can't hear him. "I'm in Hell."

Her throat clutches at itself and the ceramic is hard as diamond under her hooked fingers. Fuck, she doesn't want to cry in front of him. Not again. He'll hate it, it'll hurt him - not least because he won't be able to make it stop - and it'll risk spiraling this whole thing out of control. But her eyes are stinging and the world is blurring into fuzzy indistinctness, and for a moment she has to turn away from him. And that in itself is horrible.

"Sometimes I know I am." He pauses a beat, and she can't make this stop either. "Everything's burnin', forever, and I know I am. The fuck else could this be? I'm in Hell. And I ain't never gettin' out."

"That's not true." Hoarse whisper. It's all she can manage, and it sounds pathetic against his flat certainty. But he doesn't answer, and after another couple of minutes she can stand to look at him again. His knees are pulled in closer to his chest and he's staring down at his half empty mug, hair hanging in his face.

"Daryl, it's not."

He shrugs. "Maybe." Pause. "You were talkin' about whether or not you're gonna let me stay."

Naturally he knows this too. It's not a difficult thing to infer, the most educated of guesses. So without bothering to deny, she asks. "How do you know?"

"'cause Rick came in real angry. He's shit at hidin' stuff." The dry, withered remains of a smile. "Always was."

"He wants you to stay."

He glances up, mouth a thin line. "He's a fuckin' idiot."

She wants to smile too. Maybe less withered than his. He's not speaking with any particular humor, but there's something so perversely amusing about the ludicrousness of this whole thing. "Yeah, he is. Not about this, though." She sets her mug down; as on the back porch, she mostly got it to give her hands something to do anyway, and it's not helping much. "Denise said you wanna stay."

He rolls a shoulder.

"Do you?"

"I don't belong here," he says quietly, and that appears to be the only comment he has to offer.

But it's not a no.

For a little while she simply watches him in the dim light, his bandaged fingers moving slightly against his mug, moving as he takes another sip even though by now it has to be lukewarm at best. Gazing down into it with his brow furrowed and his jaw working as if he's trying words out in silence before he actually employs them. Again she's punched in the chest by how thin he is, how even on their worst days he never looked like this, was never this far away from her and simultaneously this impossibly close. But he was also passive then, or sliding into passivity. Right now he's fighting - something else she can almost see through his skin. She thought after the meeting about how he hadn't given up, and he hasn't.

And whatever happened tonight to shake him so badly, to frighten him that much, he didn't hide. He came to her. The enormity of that for him is something she's not sure she can adequately conceive of. She's not sure she can understand.

If he's fighting, he believes there's something here worth fighting for. Even if he doesn't know it.

She faces him more fully and sits crosslegged, reaches out and touches the back of his hand with a single fingertip. No hesitation. She can't hesitate, can't call attention to what she's doing, and he still doesn't flinch. "Why are you doin' this?"

He looks up at her, frowning. "What?"

"Your fingers. Why are you bitin' them like that?"

He blinks at her, clearly nonplussed. "'cause… I mean, I have to."

He says it as if it's self-evident, as if it's something she should implicitly understand - as if it's a common thing to do and the reasons behind it are correspondingly common knowledge. Whether or not he actually thinks that is another question entirely.

"Why do you have to?"

"I don't-" He stops and releases a frustrated sigh, spreading one of his hands - gingerly, as if the act of extension hurts him, which it probably does. She knows this when she sees it: He's searching for uncooperative words, groping for them - trying, in spite of the difficulty in something that should be easier for him. He's trying for her. "It feels bad if I don't." He points to his chest, low. "Here. And other times. I just… I have to do it."

His voice is tight, and it's not all frustration. He sounds vaguely bewildered - beyond what she now recognizes as his usual confusion - and when he looks down at his hand as if it's not even his she sees it so much more clearly, and she thinks obsessive-compulsive. "I don't want to. But I want to. I need to."

"You need to let them heal." Gently, as gently as she can. She guesses - knows - that it was Carol who bandaged them for him. Got him to let her. In a flush of treacherous imagination, she considers how utterly impossible this would be without her. If they had lost her too. "They'll get infected."

He slaps his hand against the mattress and she jumps, stifles a tiny yelp - but he's not angry. Not as far as she can see when she centers herself and studies him, the way his features appear frozen in mid-wince.

He's miserable.

"You think I don't know that?"

"Okay." She leans forward and lays her hand over his - ragged bandages rough against the pads of her fingers and the softer skin beneath - and he merely gazes at it, at hers, and doesn't move at all. "It's okay. Just… Try not to. Alright?"

He nods. But there's no conviction in the gesture, and she knows he doesn't believe it'll make any difference.

And maybe it won't.

Wordlessly, he holds out his mug. She takes it and puts it down beside hers, and he looks at his hands again. "I don't wanna do any of this," he murmurs, and her nails dig into her palms as she clenches her own hands into fists. Clenches everything, shoulders and throat and legs and torso, and no longer cares if he notices and wonders about it. She's sick of hiding things from him anyway. She's not strong.

If they can't help him she has no idea what she'll do.

"You lied to me."

She starts - not a jump but deeper. Stares at him, eyes wide. It came out of nowhere, and what he might be talking about is a blank space in her head. He doesn't sound angry - doesn't even sound particularly upset this time - but he sounds sure. Maybe a tiny bit reproachful. Either way, calm.

"Daryl." She swallows, hard, and it lodges between her collarbones. "I don't know what you're-"

"You could sleep. You were sleepin'. I saw you." He half shrugs, and the corner of his mouth lifts into something that might actually almost be a smile. All at once the misery has disappeared and he looks different. He looks brighter, clearer. He looks there. "I wasn't, like… watchin'. But I saw you." He stops and studies her more closely. Leans in, searching her with his gaze. Still no trace of anger. "You were dreamin'. It looked… Looked bad."

Oh.

She drags in a slow breath and rubs a hand down her face, presses her fingertips against her eyes until white spots bloom and dance. No point in denying this, either. Though she's not telling him what it was. Fuck, there is just no fucking way she's ever telling him that. It would be great if it was already partially forgotten, dissipating like any other dream long enough after waking.

"'s alright. I ain't mad." Again with that minute curl that at least contains the potential of a smile. A microscopic edge of amusement, and not at her expense. It's her turn to be confused. This is incongruous. This doesn't fit any of the rest of this deeply surreal conversation. Though, given how surreal it is, none of it really fits with any other part anyway.

And then he touches her. Simply reaches out and does it, his mostly gauze-capped fingertips ghosting over her bare shoulder, her upper arm. It's hardly anything at all, but he's not hesitating. He's not afraid. He's not forcing himself to do it, or doing it with any evident anxiety about the possibility that she won't want him to and will react badly. He's just doing it, and when she stiffens he lifts his hand away but doesn't recoil.

He's touching her like he did. At the end.

"Y'okay?"

She gapes at him. She can't help it. So often since he died - which he did, even if he didn't - he's been a ghost she carries and now he truly is one, the shade of a man she knew sitting in front of her in a body that isn't quite his own, in which he doesn't quite belong. So piercingly present, so undoubtable, and not the man who came to her tonight, who tapped on her window and huddled shivering in the dark. The thunder has been absent for a while but now it growls, much closer, and she gasps and her hands fly to her mouth before she can stop them.

He doesn't seem to notice. He's just looking at her, like he was. Waiting for an answer.

"I'm okay," she whispers through her fingers, and he nods, appearing satisfied.

And he's gone.

The change is abrupt, startling, and it takes every part of him simultaneously. He draws in and turns his face away, lowers his head, and the tremor is back and running all through him like an electric current. It's him again, not who he once was but who he has to be now. He's not just drawing himself in; he's shrinking as pieces of him carve themselves off and disappear, and in the set of his shoulders and the wound tension of his arms she sees now-familiar terror joining the misery from a few moments ago.

He's scared all the time. All the fucking time. His world is terrifying.

Hell.

"I had a dream." It rides out on a ragged breath, half muffled. "I was…" He briefly presses his forehead against his knees, features wrenched into an awful grimace partially visible through the fall of his hair, and she realizes that he's rocking very slightly. He's broken open, been broken, because whatever sent him here, he escaped it for a little while, but now it's caught him and hooked its claws into him and it's not letting him go. And it's forcing him to say this, and he doesn't want to.

She doesn't want him to.

It's like his trembling is contagious, and she's shaking too when she reaches for him. He's telling her. She couldn't tell him, can't, but he's telling her, and she closes her hand over his again and her grip is tight, even though part of her is aware that she might hurt him. "Daryl… You don't have to-"

"I was hurtin' you." It rips out of him in a single ghastly rush, fast but not nearly fast enough and clearly making him feel every syllable as it rakes past his lips, and she's sure he must be crying except when he hauls his stricken eyes up to meet hers they're completely dry. He's shaking his head in small, ferocious twitches. "I was hurtin' you so bad, I swear to fuckin' God, Beth, I don't want to, I don't wanna do that, I won't, I swear I won't. Fuck, I swear I never will."

It was already in her mind, knowing it happened, knowing something she should have had no way of knowing. But this was inevitable. She was dreaming her dream and he was dreaming his, and it sent him here when he would have wanted to run from her, when he did want to, and he still does. She's certain. She knows him. And he's shuddering, anguish tumbling through him like a boulder plunging downhill, and she can be here for him, she can even touch him, but she can't fix this. She can't save him.

God, she should be able to. But she can't.

She can do this.

Thunder snarls as she thrusts herself up and forward, her body battering itself through the air, through the space between them like that flimsy sheet of glass, and when her arms close around him it's to catch him because he's already burrowing into her with a broken moan, hands curling into the fabric of her camisole and his breath rough and desperate against her throat. He's shaking even harder, shoulders hitching like sobs even if he's not weeping, and she rocks back on her heels and lays her cheek against the crown of his head, one hand combing into his hair.

Her palm cupped over the back of his skull. The place where their world exploded.

"I know," she breathes. She doesn't know anything of the kind. She squeezes her eyes shut against the tears and there's no fucking point and there never was. She honestly thought she had done all her crying weeks ago. She thought she had nothing left inside. She was wrong about almost everything she possibly could be. "It's alright. I know you won't." She pulls him closer but it's not as if there's really any space left between them, with his arms tight around her waist and the rest of him practically in her lap.

Small.

So much of him is just gone.

But his arms are strong.

She doesn't know how long they stay like that. But eventually the shudders subside and he quiets, no longer breathing in those rasping heaves, knotted muscles beginning to loosen under her hands. He's heavy like this, and without exactly meaning to she lowers herself onto her side, still holding him and taking him with her - and perhaps this shouldn't feel as natural as it does. Perhaps it should feel profoundly unnatural. Perhaps she should be struggling with it, tangled with him like this in her bed and touching more than they ever did in all that time together, him pressed against her and even now seeming to want to literally hide inside her, head pushing into her breast. But it doesn't feel wrong and there's no struggle here; she strokes his hair - damp with his fear-sweat and her tears - and his back, unconsciously traces the knobs of a far too prominent spine, and when his breath settles into a slow, even rhythm she finds herself matching it. Everything in her is loosening too, easing, because maybe pieces of him are gone but he's right here, he's warm and solid and living, and he came to her when it must have been the hardest thing in the world for him to do, and he's trying.

She's holding a dead man who simply refuses to die. Even when his own brain is probably doing its level best to kill him.

"I want it to stop," he whispers, and her chest seizes - God, no - but he doesn't end it there. "I don't wanna be like this anymore. I wanna get better."

Oh.

She has no idea how she can hold him tighter, but she does. Loosening, relaxing, but tighter, tighter than she ever did in that fucking hallway, because she has a chance to get it right this time and she's not letting him slip away.

Part of him believes it's possible.

As long as that's true, we've got some hope.

"You will." She doesn't know that either. Hope has seemed like the cruelest trap imaginable. But it wouldn't kill you to have a little faith. And maybe it doesn't always. Maybe sometimes it doesn't have to be like that. Maybe sometimes, through six hundred miles of a hell she can't begin to imagine - a hell he hasn't escaped even now - it's all that keeps you alive.

He had it for her, in the end. Maybe she can have it for him. Maybe she can do that too, even if it won't save him.

"You will."