Chapter XXXVI: The Girl On The Outside

one

Blood drips from her, unseen and red, as she runs. She battles her way through the storm, flesh both dead and live crushing at her skin, as flames lick at the edges of her sight. He's been taken, and she's not sure where. She runs despite the fear, the question bouncing from nerve to nerve. The unknowing sings hot in her veins, and she wishes for an answer. It comes in the form of a hand around hers, a tugging toward freedom, and she sinks into the feeling.

"Come on, come on," he says, and curses over and over again. This language is theirs: it's silent and secret, with a world of words hiding between the ones they do say. He pulls on her, then pushes her, and then there's a new hand on her back, and she's running, she runs, she gives in to the taste of clearer air, not choked by smoke and ruin. She runs, and she thinks of her mother.

After, in the cool, shady paradise of a silent, autumn-brushed forest, she's able to take a breath, clutch at the stitch in her side, and sink to her knees. A woman she hasn't met yet grabs her then, hugs her as though they've known each other for years. "Shit," the woman says. "Shit, you okay? You okay?"

I watch, and I listen. The woman brushes a hank of thick, black hair from her face, better to focus on the stunned, frozen girl on the ground in front of her. "Seriously, dude. You okay? You look a little…"

She doesn't answer, and I'm not surprised. The words are too sharp and her throat is so dry - they catch on the way out. The dark-haired woman tries to smile down at her, reaching out a helping hand, but the girl on the outside, the one I watch, she just turns away, settling down on the leaf-strewn ground, rubbing idly at her ribs.

I know this girl. The girl on the outside. I know her pretty damn well - I've known her tiniest moments, the infinitesimal memories that make up her life and her history. I lived that history with her, after all. But now we're at odds. She was caught between the hope she'd had and the life she was given. Her time behind the walls had handed her a false sense of instinct and courage. I mean, sure, she was plucky. Eager. Full of feelings and plans, coveting the promise of a brighter future. She'd wanted to be a friend, have a job, eat better food and drink herself into an anonymous stupor. She'd wanted to be a lover, too. At night, she'd lay awake, alcohol stroking a dull blush into her skin as she imagined the man sleeping above her, about what he would look like in the throes of shared pleasure.

I was right there with her. Always. But now, I'm feeling differently. I'm tired. Tired of her, tired of us. Tired of the same old conversations, spinning round and round. She lasted almost two years without actually, intentionally, honestly killing another person and seriously - good for her. Us. Completely commendable. But let's look at the facts now, my little love, let's look at the truth. A good hard look. The world belongs to the dead, so if you're still breathing, you sure as hell better be fighting. And sometimes that means we compromise, and we don't linger too long in the margin between morality and survival.

That man, the one who climbed on top of her, of me, and wrapped his hands around our neck - well, I had to do it. It was that or death. And I was so damn lucky that hatchet had fallen nearby, and that he'd wanted to watch my face as I died - if he hadn't turned me over, I wouldn't have been able to reach for the hatchet. I wouldn't have been able to aim at his temple. I wouldn't -

But I always would. I would've tried. Because that's the bargain we strike now, every second we breathe, we live. We barter in blood and bone. And we wish for something easier.

LINE BREAK

She's jealous when he hugs Carol. She tries to focus on the miracle of the baby, the little girl with arms outstretched and the confused look of a child too used to a variety of faces, as she appraises her father and brother.

She's lonely as she watches Daryl bury his face against Carol's shoulder, as the two of them sway and savour the moment. Guiltily, she realizes that she hasn't thought much about the woman she'd once tentatively called her friend - not since the last day at the prison, when she wondered where Carol was, as she hurried the kids out of the kitchen. The kids.

This reunion hurt us both; I'm not going to bother lying. Taking stock of who had lived and who hadn't shown up in the train car, counting down the levels of grief as Maggie's face came into view, and Sasha's, and Glenn's - but there was no Beth, no Julia, no Levi, no Mika or Lizzie or Molly or Luke. She plays with the pain, taking bets and tucking things away to consider later. When she's stronger. Problem is, I don't know if she'll get stronger.

I really don't.

I mean, I saved her. I was the one who drove the hatchet in, who chipped away the last vestiges of humanity, who revelled for a moment in the salvation of hot blood and a dying groan that didn't belong to me. And as I took a breath, she fled my side, running amok in her own selfish fear. "Don't touch me," and all that, and then hugging Daryl close. Pressing herself into him as he told her it was going to be okay, that she'd done what she had to do.

And so I relish, for a minute, the stink of envy rising from her skin as she watches this particular reunion. She remembers now the old deal she made in her own mind. That if he chose Carol, or Carol chose him, she would step aside and smile. Because Carol was better. Braver. Beautiful. Strong. Good for him. And God, that's all she wanted. For him to be happy.

But the jealousy snakes through the cracks of that past resolve, combined with a strange kind of embarrassment: it's hot, and fluid, and floods her skin with red. The dark-haired woman notices, looks down at clenching fists. "Hey," she says, bending down again. "You good?"

Only he's allowed to ask her that.

She doesn't like that this woman, this newcomer with her pretty hair and her pretty eyes all of a sudden wants to to know if she's good. Because she's not. She never will be again. And for all her impassioned confessing in the woods - "I am not leaving you again. Ever" - had things really changed? He was more comfortable with her, she knew that. He'd held her close in the aftermath, and in the train car, in the dark, before he was taken, he'd dropped some words of comfort in her ear and sat for a while with his arm around her shoulders. She'd gotten some shallow sleep against his chest, counting his breaths instead of sheep. His chin had rested on the top of her head, and she'd never felt more...more...more known. As though he could anticipate her emotions without her having to articulate them.

She knows that's the way they are with each other. That's the language they speak, and most times, it's fine. But she wishes he would say it back. The abject relief he shows when his arms wind around Carol - he's not hiding that in the dark. Not tugging her behind a tree to tell her how much she means to him. Carol knows. Carol gets to hear it. Hell, Carol gets to feel it.

And that burns her more than the loss of so many lives. What a fucking bitch she is.

Hi.

I'm chaos.

I'm going to shake your hand and rock your world. I'm going to upend the good memories, toss them into the blue. They don't matter anymore. I'll entreat the worst parts of your soul out from the marrow of your bones and make them dance in full view of anyone you've ever loved. I'll steal your hopes and bury them in the sky. I'm every nightmare you've ever been too brave to have.

I'm an ancient goddess, made of wood and flame and stardust and the grime of a thousand sins. Prop me up beside the fire, angel, because I'm about to burn this fucker down.

two

The church makes her think of her father, though to her knowledge, he'd never stepped foot in one. Not with her, in any case. But he loved wood, and arches. The strong ribbing that holds a building together, balanced and sure. She sits in a pew near a boarded-up window, and she wonders about faith. A story, just one, with many parts - a beginning, a middle, and a living end. And how it drives people on. She can't grasp at it, but I can.

It's just belief. In something bigger. She's empty now, so she can't understand, but I'm full to brim with everything she used to feel. Love and lust and loss and a deep-seated misery, burrowing into my bones. But that belief keeps you pushing on, and whether you worship God or money or someone else, you keep moving forward.

What did I believe in? Who could I pray for? Who could I pray to?

She doesn't do anything, and nobody asks her to do anything. Rick puts the baby in her arms, and that's something, I suppose. Judith needs to sleep. To forget. The new man, the preacher, with the name of an angel and guilt dripping from his lips, he tries to reassure her, smile at her. He knows she's weak, and figures she's the easy way in, based on the way everyone coddles her. If he can make good with the quiet girl, the innocent young woman who sits demurely in a pew, stroking the baby to sleep - if he can make good with her, maybe the others will trust him.

I see this. I read the cowardice in his eyes and I shift and wrap myself around her. I give her a moment of steel. "Go away," she snaps, and damn, I'm proud. Daryl notices, and he settles beside her. The preacher cringes - but whether it's the purple bruise around his eye or the glare he shoots, the crunch of leather combined with a foreboding growl, she can't tell. Maybe it's the contrast, the vivid, painful, heartrending contrast of those hands, the ones that have caused death, many in the few days prior - maybe it's the sight of one of those hands reaching down to cup the baby's head, the baby she holds in her arms. Tenderness and mercy, held by blood and war. The preacher backs away, leaves them be.

For a split second, I want to cry at the sight. Just for a second, mind you. Judith snuffles in her arms and Daryl lets his eyes meet hers for a full, heated minute, and there's something pushing between them. Or pulling, I'm not sure. There's a tug, a little hey, fuckers, pay attention. But there's also blood on his shirt and she can't help but touch that little spot in her mind, the one I hold. The one where I keep the darker secrets, gloating over them like bright jewels. There are ghosts there.

"Take her," she says. She chooses a pew at the back, and in the fading afternoon, in the raw aftermath of too many days of gore and slim triumphs, she sleeps.

He's gone when she wakes in the night. Moonlight brushing over her skin, softening the scars beneath the tender glow of a distant world. And she luxuriates for a while in that purging. Like being washed clean. Like she'd never touched a gun or a hatchet, or the heat of a killing wound.

She looks around for him in vain, but keeps the question to herself, especially when she realizes Carol is gone, too. So there's that, she thinks.

Unsure of what the shared absence means, she occupies herself with a meal, scraping the last vestiges of creamed corn from a half-eaten can as stealthily as possible. Around her, the small world she owns now sleeps, signs of life bursting forth in snores and coughs and the shuffling of bodies on the hard pews and floor below.

"Hi," a voice curls from somewhere near the back of the church. A familiar voice, and her eyes flick to the source, to the dark-haired woman who, it seems, just wants to be friends. "You're Riley, right?"

Four other women press at her memory. "Remember us?" they ask.

Chloe. A song she didn't want to stop singing. And Brandy, the vice, the hangover. Michonne and Andrea, her home in the wild. Only one of them still alive, and now something was wedged between them. Mich was moving towards something bigger than they had been in the woods, and she wasn't sure if she was allowed to follow.

But this new woman, she's earnest. And she's got a kind face. Not much older than her. So she lets herself relax, and nods. Yes, she's Riley.

So am I.

Her name is Tara, which is pretty and gentle as a rolling green hill. She's scared and guilty, but won't tell her anything. Instead, she asks again about her welfare, offers to get her another can of food. I watch as a friendship unfolds, a new one, an unexpected one. She'd met Chloe as a shy girl, far away from home; Brandy and Mich and Andrea, they'd known her in the after. The footnote, the one which amended the child she'd been. Now, for the first time, she met someone as a killer. An honest-to-God killer. Not a person who sometimes had bad dreams about where those bullets had flown in Woodbury, if they'd struck a skull or an arm. No, now she knew. Knew what she was capable of. Now she'd paid her entrance fee, her bloody, bloody dues.

And the truth of that stings. Even as Tara asks questions, tries to pull her away from the edge, she feels the burn of it, chasing up her spine, and darkly, she ponders how close it feels to those little sparks of pleasure. The ones his touch could send through her body, though he probably had no clue he was doing so.

If faith is fire and grief is, too, then why can't she just go up in smoke? She believed so hard in the life they were building. Yes, she drank. Yes, she tried to forget, to push the bad things away, but she'd wanted it, she'd wanted it so fucking bad. Freedom. Lazy mornings. Peace and quiet. The sweet crush of a fresh tomato between her lips; hot skin under her mouth. She'd stopped pushing it all away and she'd opened her arms up wide, only to lose it all. In a few days.

Tara notices the shadows come back, and she stops talking. Her last question trails off into the night, into the sacred silence of this church of killers. "Want to get some more sleep?" she asks.

But something new has crept into her thoughts. That question - that curiosity. The sparks in her spine, the ache in her soul, the yearning in her veins - why is pleasure so close to pain? Why does love always end in loss?

And where is he?

Once, I had a dream. A hot one. Like, damn hot. I woke in a sweat, with ghostly kisses searing my neck and chest, still wanting, still reaching, still tangling dark, sweaty tendrils of hair between my fingers. "Hey," he said, voice raspy and gruff from sleep. "You good?"

I almost toppled from my bunk. In the dream, he'd asked me the same thing only moments before, but in an entirely different context.

"Y-yeah."

"Bad dream?"

"Uh, sort of."

But here's what I never told him: it was only bad because it ended.

three

Bob is gone. Another question.

Sasha pushes her to help, but she can't. Despite the hope that Tara levels at her, despite the incredulity of the other newcomers - who look at her in plain disbelief that she's made it this far - she can't do anything. She sits, and she holds the baby. Feels life fluttering low against her belly and it helps, it helps - Judith's heartbeat is the closest thing she has to salvation, in those moments.

Time grows long and then short, and she slips into a deep, luxurious lagoon of memory. She remembers her mother. Her dad. Her brothers. Life as it had been. Structured and orderly, seven days at a time. When was the last time she'd thought about a Monday? Or January the thirtieth. Who gave a shit about January the thirtieth anymore?

Her mother had loved her, but had struggled to show it. Her father had adored her, and showered her with it every day. Her brothers had teased her and pushed her and loved her and enraged her and given her the youthful, phantom high of secondhand smoke. And they were dead. They were not in this church, nor in any graveyard she could ever visit.

She thinks about crypts across the ocean, of queens and poets buried beneath the flagstones - an endless funereal accompaniment of centuries of worshippers' feet, treading carefully over their beds. A cathedral will reach so high, but it is built on the dead.

She hopes the bones of this church are as good and sturdy, wherever they are.

When the killers come, she curls into herself. They bring the horror back, the awful truth that Daryl hadn't wanted her to know. Gareth and the others, what they'd wanted from them was so much darker, so much baser than even her shell-shocked, beleaguered mind could imagine. She holds Judith as they die, as the screams rise, high as a cathedral's vaults, reaching for the sky.

The bones hold. For another day at least.

But Bob's don't.

"Wanna go with us?" Tara asks.

I'm not sure why she's bothering. In the hollow time after the slaughter, she can't say anything. She barely blinks. She stares at a book on the floor, a book that some people thought could tell you how to live a good life, but that was before the world fell apart. The manual no longer applied.

"Eugene has a cure," Tara reminds her. "There's got to be something in DC. People would make sure there was."

But that's in the movies. In the movies, the President always survives, and there are secret bunkers and deals made in the dim past that surge to new meaning when the world falls to pieces. In the movies, the guy always gets the girl and the credits roll while they make love, depending on the rating. In the movies, the bad things stop eventually, and as you're flicking off the remote and disentangling your body from blankets and a healthy coating of Cheeto dust - the bad things just stop. You don't have to live with them. You don't have to worry about your own food and your own blood and everybody you love.

The bad things just stop.

In reality, DC is probably a wasteland. And the only difference between there and the woods here is that the walkers roam in three-piece suits and dead cell-phones rattle in their pockets. And even if Eugene does have a cure, she thinks, what guarantee does she have that they will get there at all? There's a world between Georgia and Washington. A world of the dead, and a world of uncertainty. And she can't leave without him. Not without an answer. He's still out there somewhere. He didn't say goodbye, so she has to trust he means to come back.

She doesn't tell Tara any of this, because hope tastes good and Tara's drunk on it now. And if there's anything she knows, it's the inviting liquor that curls down your throat, burning away the doubt and the sorrow as it goes. She knows that well.

When he comes back, he brings her a bag and a stranger.

The boy is younger than her, but older than Carl, and his eyes are heavy with exhaustion and worry. And even though there's a story to be told, she doesn't bother to listen, curling back up on her pew and pressing her lips into the wood so she won't scream.

He tells the story to those who do listen, and as they build a plan, he comes to her. Rests one hand on the curve of her hip. Just for a second. "Hey," he says. "You good?"

She's not. And he knows that. But he doesn't always know how to start a sentence, not when it comes to her. It's easier for him to do it this way, and because she loves him, she lets him.

"Brought you something."

The backpack is green, dark green, with no bloody stains or gaping holes. When she rolls over and sits up beside him, he places it in her lap, gently as Rick had placed Judith. She holds it just as reverently, shivering with an old, familiar heat as he reaches over to unzip it, his arm just brushing her chest. When he realizes, he pulls back, but not before looking at her face. To check. To verify.

She can't feel anything, though, beyond the faint flames of that heat. It flickers and dies.

He begins to pull out the gifts: notebooks, eight of them. Two are bound in something that looks quite like leather; five others are plain black and thick; and the last one makes her smile, despite herself, despite her aching emptiness - a cartoon sloth lounges on the cover. And then there are pens, a rainbow of them, spilling from his hands as he shows her. "I know you liked writing in that one on the road," he says. "Carol and I were in an office and there was just all this stuff...just laying around. Don't know where that one came from" - he jabs a thumb at the sloth one - "but I, uh, I figured your other one is probably pretty close to full by now."

I'm a killer now, but my heart still clenches at his unbidden kindness. Here, she was thinking he'd left her, abandoned her for Carol, and he'd thought of her even then. The writing had helped. Even I can admit that. Scribbling down memories and the history I had crafted - it had helped me to cope after the fall of the prison. As though I could collect in one place every person I had been. Every place I had been alive.

That notebook was somewhere nearby, I knew. She'd tucked it into the weapon bag, the one that Rick had buried. I hadn't wanted it back, but Daryl had. He'd put it in his back pocket, as though it mattered to him. Her story. My story. As though he wanted to read it again, to remember it all.

"I didn't read it," he says, and though she hadn't seen him take it out, the slim black planner she'd stolen from her little house is in his hands now. He runs one thumb over the cover, where the date of a year they had lived apart is emblazoned in gold. A date of a year with no need for appointments or reminders, tidy to-do lists jotted in the margins of a straight and sure little advance of days. Dentist, Tuesday. Date night, Thursday. Kill a fucking corpse, Friday 5.

She takes it from him and slides it into the bag with the others, plucking a red pen from his hand. Her fingers graze his palm as she does so, and he looks up, eyes full of questions they don't really have time to ask or answer right now.

"You left."

He nods, worrying at the inside of his cheek as he does. "I know. Carol and I, we...we saw the car, Riley. The car that took Beth."

Beth. I lean back into the anxiety, the fear. And I watch. Watch as her face changes, constricts into confusion. One of the last bastions of hope they're able to hold - Beth.

She doesn't say anything else, just continues to stare at him, that blank-eyed study. "We didn't find her, but the kid - Noah - he knows her. Knows where she is. Thing is, they took Carol, too."

Daryl continues, talking about a hospital, and a group, and getting Beth and Carol back. He grows more and more impassioned as he goes on, citing the burgeoning elements of the plan and the inevitable return to Atlanta. "We'll get 'em both back, Riley," he says, hope brightening his gaze. Too bright, so she looks away.

"You left me," she says now, looking down at her knees, at the backpack in her lap. The backpack he brought her. He'd thought of her, while he was with Carol, while he was looking for Beth. He'd thought of her, too. But there's something petulant in her voice now, something childish playing at the back of her mind. She's angry. Angry that she woke in the middle of the night, and he wasn't there. Angry that, despite everything she'd told him in the woods, they are no further ahead. Angry that he's not a different kind of man.

She chances a quick glance up at his face, and then instantly wishes she hadn't. I wish she hadn't. Really, I do. Because he bears the hurt, bewildered expression of a kicked puppy, eyes wide as he tries to understand what she means. Yeah, he left her. Left me. But he did it to help Beth, to help the group. If she'd been with him and Carol by the roadside, she'd have come along, too.

Daryl looks around, but no one else is listening. The plan takes too much energy, too much time. It consumes them all.

"I...uh...I'm sorry," he says weakly. "Just...I saw the car, the one with the white cross, and I didn't have time to come back and explain."

He means it. I know he does. Months ago, he would have cussed me out for being so accusatory about something so simple. He would have pointed out how petty I was being, how selfish. He would've used those words because they were simpler, safer than thinking about how my reaction underlay something much bigger than they could encapsulate. He knows she's worried, he knows she's hurting. He knows she cares.

That care pushes between them on the hard wooden pew, leaving them both uncertain as to how they should proceed. But he starts talking anyway: he's going back to Atlanta, and he's already spoken with Rick - she'll be staying at the church, with Carl and Judith, and the preacher. Michonne, too. He says this all lightly, as though it's not a big deal, but she can tell by the way he chews on his thumb between the words that he's upset, or at least, on the brink of it.

She had seen Rick's eyes dart over to hers as they'd spoken. Watched as Daryl had followed his gaze, the weight that had lowered into his face as he examined her.

I'd seen it. She'd pushed it away. Into that dark little space, for me to curate.

Happily, I tended to the darkness.

That night, she slips into her history. I don't even try to stop her. I keep a lonely vigil as she meets her mother, coming to her as a little girl, covered in grass stains and the sticky cascade of a purple popsicle. Her mother - my mother - oh, the thoughts tangle now. Who are we? Who am I? A prisoner in a mind, the girl on the inside, that's me - all fire goddess and destruction and guardianship. I keep the homefires burning; I keep the record spinning.

I tumble in metaphor and rue, even as our mother's hands glide through our hair, wipe the purple from our face and hands. She's not angry, and it's the babysitter's day off, and the summer is sweet and succulent as a ripe strawberry, in the palm of our hand. She laughs now, and the music grinds to a halt, because instead of purple ice, it's blood, and it's red, and it's sticky. It won't come off.

"Mom?" we say together. "Mom, am I a good girl?"

four

They always come, in the end. The dead, I mean. Moaning and shuffling. I'm not surprised. She is, though. She screams. Michonne looks at her in disbelief, and I know what she's trying to understand: how did Riley - hardy, brave I'll-do-my-best-if-it-kills-me-even-if-I'm-scared-shitless Riley - become this?

And in the end, when it's over, when the world has shuddered to quiet, and Glenn has her in his arms, asking himself the same fucking question, she wonders about the answer. "Hey, shhh," he says, pressing his lips to the crown of her head. "Hey, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay."

I want a cigarette, and she does, too - so bad. She's gasping for it, willing to do just about anything for one. Like drive a hatchet into someone's head?

Oh, there it is.

Tragedy is golden-haired and limp in Daryl's arms.

Maggie's grief is an aching aria, rising high above the city. Silently, she sings along with an open mouth, nothing able to come out save shallow, gasping breaths. Small snatches of air that leave her raw. They burn, acid on her tongue, because she doesn't deserve them. Beth does. Beth should be alive right now - so young, so beautiful, so loved.

Beth had never killed anyone.

Innocent.

In the van, at first, in the days following, she tries to reconcile herself to the truth. I do, too. I encourage it. Better to live in reality. My goal is to bring us back together, the girl on the outside and the girl on the inside, so that we can go back to normal.

But absence throbs in the space between. And that absence - the utter lack of Beth, and now Bob, and Tyreese, and all the others lost in the smoky, dim haze of the prison's fall, the dark days before. There will never be a "normal," not in this world. She needs to accept that. I have. Life will be short, and hard, and riddled with loss. It's just the way it is. She can't fall to pieces every time something bad happens.

She hopes Daryl will sit next to her. But he doesn't. He avoids her - avoids everyone, really. Sits alone in his guilt and his grief, and she longs to reach out, but knows it won't do any good. He just carried the body of a teenage girl, a girl he'd fought hard to protect and save. He'd carried her body and he'd buried her body.

Days pass. The vans run dry and they can't find any more fuel, so they walk. And in the walking, she finds herself. One step at a time. No one speaks to her, not even Rick, who lets her know it's her turn to take the baby with just a little nudge to her shoulder.

She finds me. In between the trees, as they melt together in a wall of faded greens and golds and oranges. She spots me in deep memory, traces the killer in the old home movies she plays sometimes in her head. Birthday parties and Christmas mornings and her high school graduation, when she'd tripped on the edge of the stage and had audibly cussed, much to her mother's eternal mortification.

I find her, too. I find her in the bunk, back at the prison, tucked beneath her sheets and counting his breaths. Screwing her eyes shut in the morning as he dressed, marvelling over his boldness, his comfort - she could've opened them at any time, rolled over and gotten an eyeful, but she hadn't.

Together, we linger in the before. Sinking into it like a warm bath after the longest fucking day. It's wine, sweet and heady on her tongue. A balm and a comfort, slithering through her veins.

Hi. I'm chaos.

The road is no home. I tell her this. We're getting closer again, I'm working my way around the stone and the iron, but she's still not listening. The road is no home, my little love, so we've got to keep going.

He won't talk to her.

She walks in silence, but savours the clarity.

Facts bubble up, make themselves known again. Who she is. Who I am. We meet in the middle. Together, we sort them out, meet in a new space.

I'm the killer, I tell her. I'm the one who killed him. I'm the one who saved your life. And you can't escape it, honey, because you're the killer, too.

And it's that, it's that in all its potent simplicity, that changes things. She is the killer. I'm the killer. I did it. I saved my own life, reached with my left hand for a slim chance at salvation, and I took it for myself. I didn't squirm there on the ground hoping Daryl would pause his beatdown to come and help me. I didn't beg. I just reacted.

The girl on the outside, that chilled her. And I get that, really I do. I understand why she wanted to be apart from me for a while, why we had to have some space. There are some things you just can't face on your own. Some issues need to be taken apart, like a puzzle. Look at each piece individually, before you start matching colours and edges, laying out the corners and working on the frame. You build to understanding; you don't just know it. And her, the girl on the outside, she just needed some help. My help.

There's blood on my hands, sure enough. And it's scarlet and searing. But there are ghosts at my heel, and demons on my back and that's just the way it is. This is who I am. This is what I am.

No cheesy shit about being a survivor. Because there's no real victory in that, not when the path to that survival is littered with dead love. Young girls, with black hair and blonde hair, with music in their bones and smiles on their lips, dying because they had tried to live. I bury them now. We bury them together. Along with all the others. Beneath the flagstones of the cathedral, and we reach for the sky, we reach for the sky and we hope the bones will hold. We hope, we hope.

And with that, she holds my hand. Doesn't pull me in yet, not fully. But she holds my hand and she lets the truth wash over her. The girl on the outside whispers the words to herself by moonlight, when her belly aches with hunger and her throat screams with thirst. She reminds herself of what she had to do, what she will have to do again. To live. And she makes her peace. A quiet peace. A reluctant, squeamish kind of peace. But she understands now. The girl on the outside? She gets it.