Note: So we're definitely in the final few chapters. I said I wasn't going to let people know when exactly the ending was coming, and I'm not, but I will say that we're approaching it, and pieces are sliding into place for the finale.

I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to shell out the final two or three chapters. I will say that I'm thinking right now that I'll follow the I'll Be Yours For a Song model somewhat, and write them ahead of time so people aren't waiting so long between them. I'm not sure I'll post them all at once. We'll have to see. What I'll promise is that while I'm probably going to be cruel about it, I'll try to not be too cruel.

I did say at the beginning of this horrorshow that there would be authorial cruelty.

And I'm also going to continue to be manipulative. Some of that is simply because I'm a jerk, but as I've said before, most of it is that I'm trying to convey the sheer terror of being in someone's mind when they literally don't know what's real and what isn't. Which is probably the most terrifying thing I can think of.

Along those lines, for anyone interested in these things, a pretty significant mood/aesthetic influence at the moment is the film They Look Like People, which is amazing and moving and has the honor of being the only horror film in my adult life that I had to stop watching until I could finish it with someone else in the room. It's not gory. It's not jump scare-y. It's just flat-out terrifying, and emotionally powerful in ways I didn't at all expect. It's on Netflix right now, and if you see it, I think you'll immediately see why and how it's related to this story.

Okay, shutting up now. On with the horror. Thank you so much for (still) being here. ❤️

Chapter 34: an open mouth screams and makes no sound

I took the bullet for all the wrong reasons, I'd just as soon kill you myself, I say. - Richard Siken

She has the gun.

She knows it so well by now. She knows it before the hallway comes into any kind of focus - not that it ever comes into full focus at all - because she feels it, the cold weight of it, the density of the death waiting inside it. In the worst way possible, it's comforting, because it means certainty. It means an end.

It means it's finally going to stop.

She tightens her fingers around the grip, blinking in the light. As always, the light is wrong, all the lines and angles wrong, because this is where everything went wrong, where nothing happened the way it was supposed to happen. This is Ground Zero, where the bomb in her life went off, megatons to surpass watching her mother and big brother stagger dead out of the barn or her father's head rolling bloody into the grass. She believed nothing could ever be that bad, and then Daryl Dixon was killed in front of her and she had to reassess everything that bad could ever mean.

Wrong.

She was so wrong.

Now she has the gun, and they're all standing around her, standing in that quiet calm tableau they always occupy and to which they confine themselves, because none of them matter. They're removed from this, unimportant, inconsequential. They had nothing to do with it in the end, not even Rick, because he made his move after it was already over. The world includes him and her and nothing else. Not even Dawn is in this place, other than as a shade somewhere behind her.

Except the tableau is also wrong.

They're always blurry, always faceless. That in itself isn't unusual by now. But they're more than that, as she looks around; they're dark and getting darker, sinking into shadows, not frozen outside the bounds of this world her mind has constructed but inside it, part of it, watching her. Silent observers with unseen eyes.

They don't mean well. Their intentions are not good. She knows this just as one knows anything in a dream: with confidence as hard as bone. Too icy to be anger and too bloodless to be hate, but they're staring at her with the deepest malevolence she's ever felt, and utterly inhuman. Alien. Beyond her understanding.

She looks down at the gun in her hand. She can't fight them. She can't run. She never could, not from this. This has to happen regardless, and it's not just that she loves him. It's not just that he deserves mercy. It's not just that he deserves to be set free.

It's that it never could have gone any other way.

Now he's there on his knees in front of her, exhausted, shaking with agony, covered in filth and old blood, all rags and torn skin. Him as he truly is, as all he can ever be, which is only one of the many reasons why it's cruel to make him try be something else. He's groping at her with the infected disasters that are his hands, and weak, dry sobs are wrenching out of him.

Though when he raises his head, chewed lips moving, there are still no tears.

Please. Please get it right this time. Please make it stop. Please make me better.

Make me all right.

Taking his hand in hers, so gentle because she doesn't want to hurt him worse - and this won't hurt. That's the point. This is going to end the hurting. Other hand raising the gun and pressing the muzzle against his forehead, where she knows there won't be any mistakes, where nothing will go wrong. The shadows around them have receded, and like it should be, it's only him and her and this one last thing she can do for him.

I love you. Soft, shaking. Him. Her. She doesn't know and it doesn't matter; it's true either way. She loves him this much, her love is this strong.

Strong enough to let him go.

I love you.

She hates goodbyes. So does he. So she doesn't say it. She pulls the trigger and it's not even very loud, though it echoes into her ears, and she sees the blood spattered all over the floor, a tiny bomb gone off and flinging his head back as she releases his hand and he crumples and comes to rest in the expanding pool of his blood and at last is still.

This is where she should leave. Where normally she would. She's closing her eyes, expecting to.

She doesn't.

She stares down at him, gun trembling like the rest of her. The light seems to be dimming, the shadows abruptly closing in - slow, very slow, but even if she sees them only on the edges of her vision, she knows. The light is somehow dimming, yes, but also brightening, harsh and garish, beating against her eyes and making them sting like tears.

His hand twitches.

She's frozen. She gapes at it. At him. Twitching fingers sliding through his blood, twitching like she saw when he was standing in the street that night and looking at her. No. No, he can't turn. She shot him in the fucking head, there's no way he can turn, but then his entire body jerks, bucks upward in an arch that makes her think nauseatingly of an orgasm, and he's rising onto his knees with a smoothness that no human ever has or ever could possess, looking up at her with blood trickling down his face, and what she sees there…

He's gone. All the light of Hell is in his eyes.

His pupils twitch like his fingers and grow, expanding to devour the whites in a single snap. His eyes are pits, black, huge and growing, growing like the hideously cheerful smile spreading across his face far wider than a smile should be, smiling fit to split his face in two, and when he parts his lips, rusty razor blades shine in that awful light. And she knows without having to see it that he's fully erect and hard like a diamond blade, ready to stab and impale and rip her apart from the inside.

He traveled six hundred miles for her. Tracked her. Hunted. He's very hungry. He's starving.

He's going to feed.

Shadows.

Shadows aren't stopped by walls or gates. Shadows are everywhere and they come and go according to their own whims. He knew them. Became intimate with them like friends, like lovers, like himself, because they were all those things and so much more. They walked with him. Clothed him and covered him. Hid him and sheltered him. Protected him, kept him company, whispered to him out of the dark. Horrible things lurked inside them but he never blamed them for that - might as well blame a snake for biting, and anyway wasn't he a horrible thing too?

Didn't he belong there? With them?

The walls don't keep them out. They're with him when he gets up from his nest and emerges from his room and drifts silently through the sleeping house, the flames for once died back and the crawling horrors quiet in their holes in the world. He feels big. His eyes feel big, his hands, throbbing with pain but also with what they can do. What they might do.

What they're going to do.

He's growing into the world, swelling with the shadows as they fill him. He welcomes them. Wouldn't be able to fight them even if he wanted to, which he doesn't, because he needs them for this. What he's decided, this plan even when he doesn't do plans anymore because plans on the whole can't be trusted and have a tendency to get you shot in the fucking head.

He realizes, bare feet crushing grass cool and damp with dew, that this plan might also result in him getting shot in the fucking head, and he wants to double over with laughter, muffling hysterical giggles with his hand.

Not like he hasn't been through it before. He shouldn't assume that getting shot in the head will actually do very much to him.

Not only the shadows are with him. There's the moon. He slides easily from darkness to darkness but turns his eyes up to her light, wishes he could go out into it and bathe himself, though he can't take chances. Can't risk getting caught, and they do keep a watch even in the small hours. On the way out isn't such a problem, will likely only prevent him from doing what he's planning to do, but on the way back is a whole other story, because that's going to be kind of hard to explain. They'd lock him up again.

Worse, maybe.

He can't believe that once he wanted to go back into that fucking cell, crawling out of it like a sack. Or he can believe it of himself, but he loathes that person now, possibly more than he loathes every other person he's ever been and the person he is at this very moment. He's extremely worth loathing. Consider what he's doing, what it means.

Christ, she's so fucking stupid, it grinds his teeth to powder. It hurts. It hurts because she shouldn't be.

And he can't protect her from it. She has to suffer the consequences like everyone else.

Shadow to shadow beneath trees and the eaves of houses, thanking each, torn hands spread into them. Cool as the grass, rougher pavement matching it in temperature under the soles of his feet. Came so far like this, and he can go another short distance that way, no problem. He's aware that it might end up being for nothing, that the place might be guarded specifically or that it might be locked, that probably it's locked, except he doesn't quite believe that. It will be unlocked. He knows this.

Knows it like in a dream.

They're all stupid, fattened on petty luxuries, slow and far too trusting. That they've let him stay here this long is more than ample evidence of that. If they were smart they would kick his ass out the gates. If they were really smart they'd shoot him in the fucking head but we've already established that doing so might not have much of an effect in the end. The damage is done. Done with months ago.

He died once. Still not sure you get to do that twice.

His mind is wandering again. That's fine. His feet know the way, and his eyes can watch for watchers watching him.

They're stupid and slow and fat and trusting, oblivious, only Rick and Michonne and Carol and the Boy possessing anything like a correct understanding of the realities of their situation - and her, always her, even if she's such an idiot as to love him she sees a great many things more clearly than the rest - and they wouldn't lock the armory because it wouldn't occur to them that such a threat could come from their midst, and after the attack they apparently suffered, they'd want fast access to weapons without someone needing to hunt around for a key.

They're prepared - or they think they are - for an attack from outside the walls. But walls don't keep out shadows. And they allowed a snake slither into their fool's paradise. Their Eden.

Lights, but none of them are ever particularly bright. Windows all dark. Shapes on the walls, dim, but of course they aren't facing inward. Aren't even glancing in his direction. Scorn flares into hot contempt bursts into poisonous murderous rage as he crouches in one of the thicker shadows, peeling scabs off his knuckles and gnawing at them. They should fucking die, all of them, none of them belong here, none of them deserve this parody of the old dead world, it's not right that they're here, and right is in itself a tale told by an idiot but it's still true.

They should all be slaughtered, trapped by their walls, sheep in a pen. Strung up and bled out and gutted. They should all burn.

And then he could go to her and have her, and keep her with him. He could take her into the dark - where she belongs too - and hold her close forever. Never let her go. Like it was supposed to be.

Well. First things first.

He's very close, and it doesn't take more than another minute or so of careful navigation to arrive at the door. The shadows have obliged him and cloaked the doorway, and if he's quick and quiet he won't be detected. It was a house, once, but he looks up and surveys it and sees nothing to indicate that it's currently being used that way, and even if it is, it makes little difference. He'll be quick. He'll be quiet.

They won't stop him. He knows that too. Because he's supposed to do this. This is supposed to happen.

It never could have gone any other way.

The door opens at his touch and he goes in.

Boards creak under his feet but not much, and he's not worried. The shadows extend into what was obviously once a front hall, not unlike the one in Rick's house though devoid of any real furnishing or decoration, and the layout doesn't seem identical but it also isn't unfamiliar. He stands for a moment, scenting the air - not that he can smell a gun but he can sense other things when they're there to sense. Sweat. Breath. Life. Has before, out there. Didn't only hunt animals.

At least as far as the immediate area goes, he's alone.

Good. Simple, then.

His instincts aren't always honest with him but they lie to him a fuck of a lot less than pretty much anyone or anything else, and inasmuch as he trusts anything at all, he trusts them. Now they're hissing right right and he turns that way, goes through that door, and there they are, yes, and he doesn't care for guns but even he has to halt for a moment and take in the glory of what he's seeing, bathed in moonlight and one of the dim lamps just outside the window.

Not just a few guns. A lot of guns. No just handguns but shotguns, assault rifles, at least one sniper rifle that he can see. Not a ridiculous number, but plenty for a place this size. Wonders where they got them all from. Seems to recall Rick saying something about stocking up after the attack, getting way more aggressive about runs, taking out more than one person to get what they had, but it doesn't fucking matter where they came from.

All that matters is that they're here. Room full of cold, smooth, decisive death. A banquet of it. Christ, he could take his pick and probably no one would notice for a while.

No. No, that's not true. There are fewer of the big ones, he sees as he moves closer to the racks, reaches out a hand to trail his ragged fingertips over them. One of those would be missed. But there are more handguns, also set back further from the door, closer to a corner by stacked boxes of ammunition, and it's much more likely that he would have some time with one of those before someone discovered its absence.

And anyway, how fucking big does he need? Anything he could possibly want to use it for wouldn't require a fucking assault rifle. He chides himself. That's ridiculous. This is very exciting to be sure but get a hold of yourself. Get a fucking grip.

Grip. Heavy and cold in his hand, cradled in his palm. Had one once. Remembers. Never liked it much even then, or at least it was never his preference, but he was good with it because he was good with anything that required aim. Not as good as her, but then again, how could he be?

Squeezes his eyes shut, squeezes the gun as his chest turns itself inside out, bloody and glistening.

She's so fucking good. She's good and he's sick, what he's doing, this is so sick even if he doesn't have a plan, even if he's not sure what this is even for, but he's doing it anyway. Something broke that night with the mirror and something terrible is riding him around like a fucking horse, has been for some time now, and he can't stop it, can't make it stop, he's not all right, he should stick a shell in one of those shotguns and shove it in his fucking mouth.

Breathe.

Not all right but he can be.

And he's come this far.

Weight of the gun like an anchor. A center. A gravity well he can fall around, spiraling ever-downward. This is it. This is right. He has what he came for. He can't linger.

He has to go.

The shadows carry him silently back into the dark.

He puts it down on the floor in a pool of moonlight and sits and stares at it, his breath locked in the cage of his chest. He sits and he stares at it and he tries to understand what he's fucking done.

He could take it back. He could go now before the sun rises, before the sky begins to lighten and the shadows flee. He could probably make it, and like the reverse of the journey to get it, he only truly has to worry about being caught on the way there. He could do that, he should, because what the ever-living fuck is he doing with a fucking gun?

He's insane. That's what he's doing with it. That's why he has it now. He's utterly insane and his fundamental motivations are a mystery to him. He is ultimately incomprehensible.

(Long ago he gave up on any genuine understanding of himself, not because he believes he is incapable of understanding but because he is settled in the certainty that there is quite simply nothing to understand. His mind is a storm of chaos, devoid of logic or reason, and whatever choices he makes or actions he takes are therefore inherently absurd. His life is meaningless. His death was meaningless. He is meaningless. Everything is meaningless.)

(The knowledge is the most perverse kind of comfort. At least when it comes to this he doesn't have to try.)

No. Don't go back. Don't give it back. He's shaking, looking at it, teeth chattering and clammy sweat breaking out on his brow and in his palms. He wants it. He wants what it means, what it is, he wants that sweet cold death sleeping inside it. He's close to it in a way he hasn't been in such a long time. It's like he's holding a shard of glass, his veins pulsing so near the surface, facing this option in the most direct way possible. Previously he considered it just that: an option. No more significant than any other. Now he considers it and he feels marrow-deep lust.

Of course. It's obvious. Knew it before, but he didn't. Not really. Not like this.

Didn't want.

He took one of the smallest ones. It's so small now, lying there in the pale light. It's such a little thing. Much smaller than what killed him. But it's all right. It would probably be enough. Even if he's died once, he can probably do it again. Especially since he has. He's had first-hand experience. It's really not that hard.

He is, though.

Oh.

Fuck.

He realizes it all at once in a single searing throb of blood from the base of his skull straight down his core and into his cock. He's rock-hard, doesn't know how long he's been like that but it's possible he has all damn night and is only noticing it now, and he doesn't take his eyes off the gun as he drops a hand between his legs and cups himself through his pants. Squeezes. Whimpers softly. Running his gaze over the thing like his fingers, like his tongue, the sensuous delight of cool metal and the heat of his cock under his palm as he gives it another slow squeeze.

He was hard before, nights ago, thinking of her. Like this, only he was naked and sitting in the moonlight with his disgusting body purified in its glow, his disgusting desperate urges, the thought of his heat and her heat and plunging into her, melting into her and her into him, through skin and flesh and muscle and bone. Stripping it all back, opening her, laying her out beneath him. So red and soft and wet. So beautiful.

He punished himself for it, tightened his hand around his shaft until he could no longer differentiate at all between the pleasure and the pain. Didn't stroke, didn't jerk; he merely clenched until the exquisite agony bent him double and he thought his balls might burst and splatter bloody sperm all over the floor.

He had to do that, or he would have had to bite his own fucking fingers off and crunch the bones between his teeth.

But this is different. It's not her.

It's just him.

It's him and it's it and his mouth is flooding with bitter saliva as he gazes at it, thick with arousal, though of course his eyes are dry as Death Valley. It, grip and barrel and muzzle and his fingers working his belt open and tugging his zipper down, and he's reaching for it at the same time as he wriggles his fingers into his fly and draws out his cock aching and already slick with precome. Gets it in his hand. Both things in his hands. Wants to laugh. Wants to fucking sob, fingers wrapped firmly around his shaft as he lifts the gun in the other and turns it on himself, looks into that singular lidless eye.

He was fucked when that cop whore pulled the trigger. Skull-fucked.

He was fucked to death.

He doesn't need to check that it's loaded. He loaded it before he took it, then double-checked to make sure it actually happened. It's loaded and there's a round in the chamber, and placed right, it'll only take one. The moonlight is blinding him as he gives himself a rough, trembling stroke and then another and he shudders with how fucking good it feels, pleasure like the storm pounding against the insides of his head, lightning crisping his nerves. His fingers are scorching prints into flesh roaring with infected blood. Glancing down; he's seen this before, patchy flaking skin and running sores, foreskin peeling loosely back to reveal a bulbous gray head and a slit dripping pus.

Dripping and bobbing above her spread legs as she fumbled and clawed and snarled at him to fuck her, fuck her, stick your fat cock in my pussy and FUCK ME.

Stop.

No. He's not stopping. He's moving firmer and faster as he raises the gun to his lips and trails them along the barrel, flicks out his tongue, tastes oil and steel, and he almost shatters his teeth on it and shrieks the lining of his throat away as he thinks of Rick, what he said to Rick before he tried to break his wrist. Who did you get to suck your dick?

Thinks of that and the tears in Rick's eyes, the surge of nauseating power knowing he could cause that kind of pain to someone like this man.

Make someone he loves hurt the way he does.

Fuck, no; hurl the gun across the room, hurl himself across the room and try to bludgeon himself unconscious against the wall, gouge his eyes out, anything except keep doing what he's doing. Jerking off with a gun in his hand and thinking about how shit, it would be so easy to finish what the cop whore started, it would be so fucking easy like this to finally make it stop. Ejaculate a bullet into his brain and be done and gone.

Be better.

Peals of laughter from the corners of this hateful room, the eyeless skinless things creeping toward him out of shadows turned traitor and sloughing off rotting bits of themselves as they come, the deafening drone of the flies crawling in and out of his ears to lay their eggs inside him. Every word a death rattle, a friendly suggestion that he take a good long look at himself right now, because this is the cancerous heart of it, the final ruinous truth: he's not a good person who's trying and getting better, and he's not a razor-toothed demon who rips apart cats and babies and is going to take the woman he loves and fuck her to death and eat her alive her while he does. He isn't anything remotely close to that impressive.

He's just a very sick man.

And sooner or later he's going to kill someone. Because he's still a killer. And sooner or later he kills everyone.

He hasn't stopped. Hasn't missed a fucking beat. If anything he's even harder, the gun pressed against his lips and precome smeared over his fingers, the wet smack of his own hand like a jackhammer beneath the thin whines bleeding through his bared teeth. He doesn't know if this is even pleasure anymore. Doesn't think it's pain. It's mounting release, it's the bullet sliding into the chamber, and he doesn't give a fuck that they're going to find him like this with his fly down and his soft, pathetic little dick still clutched in one hand and the gun loose in his other. It doesn't matter.

What matters is that he's given himself what he needs to make it stop.

Circle of pointing shadow-hands and a ring of glittering smiles as he thrusts the gun into his mouth, so far in that he feels the muzzle jab his soft palate, bottoming out against the back of his own throat, and every fractured part of him screams oh fuck YES and blows straight through the top of his head as he pulls the trigger.

It clicks softly as warm, sticky come pumps over his fist.

For a long time he doesn't move except for his shivering and his heaving breaths, until they subside into nothing. Then the gun slips from between his lips and drops with his hand into his lap, barrel shining with spit to match the cooling semen shining on his fingers. He sits there and he looks down at himself, and the room is empty and silent.

If she could see.

If she could fucking see this, if she could see the wretched truth of him, she wouldn't run screaming. Her face would screw up in a revolted grimace as she recoiled, and her hand might fly to her mouth to muffle an appalled laugh. She wouldn't fear him. She would detest him. He would reach for her and she would slap him ruthlessly away, kick him into the dirt, and then she wouldn't bother to muffle her scornful laughter at the very idea that she would ever want to touch him now. That she would ever abide him touching her. That she would want to get him all over her hands, have to wash him off herself.

She never loved him anyway. Maybe at one point she thought she did. But it wasn't love. It never could have been. At best it was pity.

Pity, which it turns out he isn't worth. She might as well pity a possum in the final stages of rabies, dragging its dying body through the world, screeching and snapping uselessly at everyone with shit caking its hindquarters and dry foam crusted around its mouth. You don't pity something like that. You do one of two things: you leave it to die, or you give it some assistance with the process.

Apparently, if things were to go that way, he would need the latter.

He watches the moon slide across the floor. The dark, empty silence persists.

The moon is almost gone and the come on his hand is congealing and drying to a scale by the time he finally moves. He isn't thinking about it very much. It doesn't require a lot of thought. He stuffs his dick back into his fly and zips up, wipes his hand off on his shirt. Picks up the gun and examines it in the last of the milky light. Drops the magazine into his palm.

Nothing in the chamber. But it's loaded. It is. He didn't imagine that part.

He slaps the magazine back in.

He's not taking it back. It's nearly dawn and he shouldn't risk it, but he's also not taking it back because he doesn't fucking want to. He wants to keep it. Doesn't know exactly why anymore, because using it to make it stop appears to be beyond his present capabilities, but something eyeless and skinless and grinning in the inky shadows of his mind is whispering that he should have it. There are all kinds of other reasons.

Even if he doesn't know what they are yet.

He crawls to his nest with it in his hand and as he curls up under the blankets he's holding against his chest like a treasure. He can't keep it in here. It's almost safe, probably, because for the most part people don't seem interested in doing any poking around on the rare occasions when they're in here at all, but it's not safe enough for his own comfort.

Comfort. That's hilarious.

He can't keep it in here. Has to put it somewhere else. But he's too tired to think about another solution. Sleep now. At least a couple of hours. Then he can figure out what the hell he's going to do.

She wouldn't fear him, if she could see the truth of him. She wouldn't pity him. She would detest him.

But she can't see the truth, now, can she?

She can't see a lot of things. Even when they're so close. Even when they're right in front of her. Even when they're beside her. Behind her. Even when they're on top of her. And he can't make her see.

So he can't save her. Not that he gets to save anyone anymore.

Not that anyone is worth saving.

No good. No bad. No devils or angels, sinners or saints. Just weak people. Sick people. Dead people. And the people who can't die.

No matter how much they want to.