Chapter 26: if I let you back in close

She stares at it for a moment. The beach, the door, the two of them together in their juxtaposed context. The moment expands, swells and acquires density, and she feels it settling around her shoulders like a blanket. Like a yoke. She'll have to carry this, she's dimly realizing as she beholds this thing - yet another one - that doesn't seem like it should be. She'll have to add this to the pile of shit that makes no sense but is nevertheless now a feature of her experience of life, and haul it around with the rest.

You're moving forward, Maggie whispers behind her ears. And it's making you strong. You know that.

She grits her teeth. She was already strong. Had to be, to make it this far. How much more does she need?

Fuck of a lot. Probably. Because that's the deeper whisper, all that pity and those petty little voices and behind-the-back stares in the hallways, the sidelong narrow-eyed looks of the teachers, the doctors studying her much too closely and chewing on lips with sour breath and pens and scratching condescending notes, the nurses with needles and restraints and the clamp grips, and the relatives who - every day - made her feel as if she was being carved away from the world.

And her standing in the bathroom with a shard of bloody glass in her hand, staring at her own shattered face in the remains of the mirror.

You're not strong enough.

Over and over she clenched her fists in the dark. After the mirror and the glass, in the hospital. She clenched her fists and felt her unbandaged wrist flex and swelled with a frozen rage she never felt before, and which has never truly left her.

I am strong.

"Beth."

She jerks at his touch, whirls - and instantly feels bad when he takes half a step back, brow furrowed and mouth tight with apprehension. Daryl isn't one of them.

No one here is.

But God, the past chases her like a pack of ravenous wolves, and apparently it can catch her literally worlds away.

"Y'alright?"

She nods. She thinks it might actually look pretty convincing. Anyway, it's true. She's all right. She's not sure what the fuck else she is, but she's on her feet and breathing and thinking and she's still armed, so she's all right. That's how this particular proof has worked and is working and will probably continue for the rest of whatever life she has. "Where the hell are we?"

"Not sure. They're talkin' about it now." He's left his bow behind - tells her something in and of itself - and inclines his head back toward where Rick and Shane and Michonne are now conducting a second huddled conference. Glenn is crouched a short way to the side with his eyes closed, appearing to be lost in some kind of meditation. As Beth watches, he lowers a hand and lays it - palm flat - against the ground.

Glenn is very weird. Not that everything else isn't.

"What're we doin' next?"

"Guess we'll know when we figure out where we are."

Beth tilts her face up and gazes at the sky. It's a cloudless dusky pink, a faded rose color like antique wallpaper, and it looks like it might be dawn or late sunset or really anytime. There's no sun, but out across the flat gray water there's a hint of one hiding just beneath the horizon, that might rise or might fall when it makes up its stellar mind.

All those suns. She saw. Didn't she? Weren't they there, all clustered like the golden pollinated heart of some unfathomable flower?

Didn't she see that?

In the red?

"Are we anywhere?" she whispers, and he touches her shoulder again. Both of them. Lays his hands on them, his big, warm palms cupping their slopes, and she leans into the touch. A little. Just a little.

She still feels like maybe they should be careful. Even if she can't say exactly why.

"That thing says we are."

"Mm?" Her attention was keeping itself locked on the sky, bits of it beginning to drift into the steady, gentle crash of the waves, but he says that thing, and while it takes her a second or two to figure it out, by the time her eyes are lowered and she's looking straight ahead, she knows.

There's really only one thing he could mean. There it is, bizarrely unassuming, like it has every reason for standing there hinged on thin air, leading to nothing whatsoever that she can see. Like it belongs precisely in this place at this time. And she's not sure she'd even argue with it.

"What is it?"

He squeezes her, and when he speaks his voice is a low, amused rumble that she can almost feel in her shoulderblades. "'s a door, girl."

"Fuck you," she says amiably, and steps away from him. He lets her go, but as she moves carefully forward across the grass toward the sand - placing her feet one at a deliberate time like she doesn't entirely trust the ground, because she sure as shit doesn't - she knows he's following her. Of course.

If he wasn't, she might have to figure out a way to ask him to.

The ground seems trustworthy, anyway, and the rustle of the grass gives way to the yielding slide of the sand as her boots press into it. It's not the loose sand of a vacation beach; it's a pale gray and packed as if from repeated high tides, and a few feet ahead is a long line of debris - sticks and strands of grass and what looks like kelp that marks the high tide point itself.

And there's the door. Nearer and nearer - less than ten yards away now - and she's assuming that if it was actually dangerous in any immediate sense Daryl would have stopped her long before now, so she keeps going.

It's a rich red-brown - Beth has never been able to keep track of the different kinds of furnishing wood but for some reason she's stuck on mahogany - and aside from two panels bisecting it in the center, it's unmarked. Except there is a knob - brass gleaming in the strange half-day light.

And beneath it, there's a keyhole.

She reaches it and stops a foot or so away, gazing up at it. It's a good couple of heads taller than her, though not as tall as it appeared from a distance, but there's nothing about it that's currently intimidating her. From back up on the grass it had seemed unassuming, and it still feels that way. It's not here for any ominous purpose. It doesn't feel to her as if it's her for any special purpose at all.

It just is.

She does what she figures anyone would do in this situation and walks around it, examines it from the other side. Stands exactly at the midpoint between the two and tilts her head back and forth.

They're identical, those two sides. Nothing in front. Nothing behind.

"We don't have names for 'em," Daryl says quietly. "They're just doors. But when they show up… They don't do that just anywhere."

He's behind her, very close, but she doesn't jump. She wonders if he could ever startle her again, simply by being there. Maybe she's beginning to expect him to be.

She doesn't turn. "This isn't the only one?"

He hums a soft negative. "We find 'em here and there. Dunno where they come from. Who made 'em. They've just always been… around. I guess."

The knob keeps grabbing her focus, holding on. Gripping. Cool little fingers gliding across her mind like the gleam of the brass. She wants to… Touch it? Close her hand around it, cup her palm over its breeze-cooled metal. Feel its solidity, its density. How it fits her, the joints of her fingers and thumb. What then? Turn it?

She knows without having to try that it would be locked. And she doesn't have a key.

"You ever open 'em?"

"Never seen 'em open."

"That's not what I asked you." Slowly she turns to face him, arms crossed. If he's genuinely being evasive there's no obvious reason why, but it's not as if any obvious reasons are needed for anything at the moment. But he's meeting her eyes without flinching, without dropping his own, and one of the few things she's sure of now is that he can't lie to her.

He said he couldn't lie to Rick, early on. His eal… And now his agend.

"I've heard of 'em bein' opened," he says, voice low. Faintly thoughtful. He shakes his hair out of his eyes and shrugs. "But nothin' I'd trust. Nothin' I'd be sure about." He hesitates, then, "Don't ask me what's on the other side. I dunno. No way to say."

"Do any of you know anythin'? Ever? At all?" Once - earlier today, in fact - she would have been angry all over again. But at this point it's just funny. She thought she was clueless, when this all began. Thought she was lost. But here they are, creatures who have always lived on a side of the world where she's still a newcomer, and even with their pathfinder she seriously doubts any of them know much more than she does. At least when it comes to things that matter.

So she's smiling. It's small and very dry, but she is, and after a few seconds he returns it. Just as small. Just as dry.

For the first time since she climbed off his bike in that fucking parking lot, she feels mostly okay.

"These days? Not so much."

He extends a hand. She regards it in silence for a few seconds more, then takes it. It's very warm in the cool, constant breeze washing in with the waves, the breeze that catches strands of his hair and tosses them lightly around. Bits of his face coming into view in light that makes him look even stranger than normal, his narrow eyes and the hints of his incisors and the sharp ridges of his cheekbones - even fully a man he looks like he's perennially on the cusp of changing. Like he hasn't quite mastered the skill of passing for human.

The Wolf just beneath his skin.

Or possibly he has a slightly harder time holding the form when he's with her. If it usually takes any effort at all.

It's insane given what's just happened and what's happening and where they are, what they might be up against, but it hits her all at once: She could kiss him now. If she wanted. Jettison that sense that they should be careful and haul him close, push up on her toes and kiss him, rake her hands into his hair and arch her mouth open wide and wet against his, dance over those lupine teeth with the point of her tongue. Press close and lick at him the way she did. Feel that monster rippling beneath his surface, clawing to get free.

She could kiss him now and fuck them if they see. Fuck them if they have some kind of problem with it.

He's hers.

He wants to be.

He glances over his shoulder. She follows his focus; the conference appears to have broken up, and Rick and Michonne are pacing in in opposite directions around what looks like might be a rough circle, bending now and then to do something she can't see. Carol is crouched in the center of it - assuming there is a center - and a flickering golden light like a candle is springing into being beneath her hands.

"Should get back," Daryl murmurs. "Looks like they're makin' camp."

"Not yet." She does tug - she tugs hard, suddenly needy, hungry for him with all the shivering emptiness left behind by fading fight-or-flight - and he stumbles in close, head whipping back around and reaching for her. But before he lays his rough hands against her face and tilts her head up to meet him, she catches something sharply alarmed flashing behind his animal eyes.

Then the cool salt air dissolves into his heat and hers and a rushing exchange of it, his teeth digging into her lips and his fingers tangling in her loosened hair, the ghosts of claws scratching the sides of her throat, his tongue curling against hers and welcoming her into him as his chest vibrates with a deep growl. She's gripping his arms, muscles flexing under her touch - that shivering ripple. His bones grinding against each other as they collide and try to pull apart.

His whole body wants to be something else.

But he's holding it in. Holding himself together with all the strength he can muster. She nearly grins; she gets it. He has to. If he didn't, they might do something very inappropriate right here on the sand.

Daryl. She mouths it against his jaw, bites at him, and he shivers and gropes at her, jerks her hips against him - his cock a hard, straining bulge in his jeans and so ready for her hands, both hands around his impossibly thick shaft with precome dripping over her knuckles, and the silk of his fur over her skin and tickling her pussy, his huge thumb on her clit, stroking and grinding and her tongue lapping at his muzzle and his enormous body pinning her down and FUCK there are people close enough to see them both and it turns out she does care about that, because she's yanking herself away, panting, blinking up at him like someone shaken out of a dream.

This is getting out of hand.

He looks like she feels: Flushed. Shaken. Shaking. Maybe a bit stunned. Pressing his fingers to his lower lip and bringing them away smeared with red.

Her blood or his?

Has it ever really mattered?

"We can't-" he breathes, and she cuts him off.

"I know."

He nods. Drops his hand to his side. He's still sporting an extremely obvious erection, and even if she's not sure exactly how their undoubtedly keen senses work, she's almost certain that if she goes back to them now they'll smell her like a bitch in heat, and while no questions will be necessary, it'll be really fucking awkward.

"This is crazy." She delivers the observation with the distant cousin of a smile - just as dry as before, but also as shaky as she feels, and his ragged laugh matches. He looks away, out at the endless slate ocean, and his hair sweeps across his face with his gaze and she can't see his eyes anymore.

Something unseen is coming in with the tide.

"Look around, girl. Sanity's a luxury we ain't got."

"The world's ending."

She says it abruptly, but it doesn't feel abrupt. She doesn't know how she knows, but she does. She knows it deep, knows it like the echo of a dark song working its way through her marrow, and the knowledge has always been there. It was there when he took them through the Night Gate, it was there when she let him into the rooms of ruin in which her life died, it was there when he showed her the hole in the universe, it was there when she fell through scalding light info whatever this place is, and it's been there ever since she fell to her knees in the burning grass and cradled her father's head in her gore-streaked hands.

It's been there since she saved a monster who turned into a man.

She knows it like she knows him. More and more of it all the time. Clearer and clearer. Even if so much still isn't. If there's magic lurking anywhere inside her, anything remaining of a pedigree she also somehow knew she had, it might be part of that.

She's always belonged here, after all.

For a long moment - longer than the word moment really fits - he merely looks at her in silence. The rippling she started when she kissed him hasn't stopped; if anything it's intensified, and as the breeze whips itself into a wind and throws rapidly shifting bands of light and shadow across his face, the last vestiges of anything remotely human in him are blown away into the swirls of loose sand hissing around their feet.

He's worrying at something on his left hand. She lowers her eyes to it and sees, and it stabs her between the ribs, cold and thin.

The shape of a cross is burned a furious red into his palm.

Her cuff.

Like he didn't even notice when it happened. And she's not even sure when that was.

"Ain't endin'," he says, almost too soft to hear above the crashing duet of water and air. "'s just movin' on."

Nothing. She doesn't… There's nothing to say to that. There's no point in even searching for a response. None would fit. None is necessary. She hears and she takes it in, folds it into the knowledge already nestled inside her. It fits there. There's no conflict. He's right. So is she.

When something leaves you behind, it might as well end.

"I wanna walk for a while."

The way he says it - quiet but more direct, not so much a declaration of something as a thing laid down in front of her, presented to her - she knows he's asking permission to leave her. And it doesn't freak her out. It doesn't wrench at her gut, doesn't send fear lancing down her throat.

He is what he is. So is she. To and for each other, and nothing can change that now.

Even if she wanted to change it anymore.

She dips her chin. "Go ahead."

He nods and takes a step back, and when his bones start to crack, start to stretch his skin as his body rearranges itself, she feels only the briefest flare of lust. All the heat that surged up between them has died back - still there, but banked. Smoldering.

She glances at the others - now gathered around the light Carol was making, and if they'd been watching they aren't any longer. She looks back at him and she's in time to see his massive shoulders hunching, shrinking, long head pulling into a smaller version of itself and his legs evening out as his back levels.

Big black wolf standing there on the stand, gazing up at her with fur shining and eyes caught and mirrored by the hidden sun's light.

She wants to run with him. Pull off her boots and toss them into the grass and run barefoot across the sand until all of this is gone, so far behind them it might have ended. She doesn't care if she's a witch. She doesn't care if she's important somehow, or this all Means Something everyone continues to refuse to fully explain. She doesn't give a fuck.

She just wants to run.

"Go," she whispers, and he trots away.

He doesn't run.

She turns and looks at the door for a long time. At the gleaming handle. At the hole where a key might go, if someone had one.

Then, wearily, she hauls herself back up onto the grass and toward the family that isn't now and never will be hers.