Chapter XXXVII: Them
One foot in front of the other is a pretty easy way to live. It's simple. Step by step. Literally. You take things one small problem at a time. Pothole? You step over or around. Tired left leg? You pause for a minute or two, lift that left foot up, let the other take your weight for a while. Boring scenery? Try putting your brain on autopilot, let it control your path, and allow yourself to drift into memory or your own imagination.
That's how I got to know the world again. In chunks, in small problems, in little hurdles that reclaimed my soul bit by bit. And time was a hefty, awkward glacier sliding about the place, unsure of where to settle. I let myself ride along. With each beat of my boots against the pavement, I recalled the past, and I brought together, in fits and starts, my two selves: the girl on the outside, the one who was sweating, aching; and the girl on the inside, the girl who kept an angry vigil.
The distance between the two was absolutely necessary, no matter what anyone else may think. I needed to look at them as distinct elements, experiences - in order to disentangle myself from my own guilt. In this way, I was able to come to terms with the inevitable truths I should have learned a long time before. Now, that wasn't a sure fix. I still felt disconnected, a little hazy, as though I were living just behind some sort of veneer - clear and thin, but forming an interface between myself and the rest of the world. That glass bubble again.
Some things, though, broke through.
Cramps and aches, tight calves and dry mouth - life was a series of sensations then. I understood it, finally, to be a punishment. Death and misery, loss and angst, unrequited love and the fine-tuned horror of a slowly-breaking heart. It really was just a goddamn vale of tears and I was just another idiot stumbling down it. Fighting to stay in it. Clinging to the sides, pleading to remain, to try another day. Now, for the first time, I began to wonder why I was even bothering. Not that I was actively looking for a way out - I just...felt myself slipping. The girl on the inside didn't like this. But I did.
When the second van lost fuel, though, I nearly did, too. It was with a great sense of defeat and - strangely - a flicker of anger, that I slid out from the middle set of seats, hitting the pavement with tired, dusty boots, shrugging the backpack more securely over my shoulders. In the van, at least, I'd had more time to write, snuggled up against the window, angling the sloth notebook just so - scribbling away heartache and bad memories, shedding them like an unwanted skin.
The walking wasn't hard, just long. And the interminable silence I shrouded myself in only made things worse, as I didn't even permit myself the comfort of conversation. A few times, Carol tried to draw me out, and Tara, too - still staunchly determined to befriend me - but I resisted. With grunts. Shrugs. Quick footsteps to the side of the road. A wandering gaze.
Less than sixty miles. Then forty.
The walkers bloomed behind us, appearing from nowhere, a small knot of just five or six. I turned to watch them, and then paused, sweat dripping from my brow as I considered the logistics. Just five or six, but what - fourteen of us? If you counted Carl. Thirteen if not. We could take them, easily.
If we were operating at full capacity. Which we weren't.
Because here's the thing about hope - it needs something to cling to, something to anchor itself to. Without a solid foundation, it will quiver in the wind, die against the battering of truth. The truth for us, in those days on the road, was that we were hungry, we were thirsty, we were spent, and we didn't have much time left. DC was certainly still our destination, but I couldn't even bring myself to care. What would be there for us? Another threat, most likely. Another run for our lives. We'd already lost three en route. How many more would die?
Would I die?
The thought crept unbidden to my mind, though the girl on the inside tried to keep it away from me. I'd faced death before, numerous times, but had never pondered it. Never had time to think about what it would be like. For everything to be just...over. No adrenaline pumped through my veins, no instinct to keep going for love of someone or something else. There was just me - the girl on the outside, the girl on the inside - and the sultry heat of the dying year.
My eyes flicked ahead as I turned away from the walkers, focusing on Daryl in the distance. In the weeks since leaving Atlanta, when he'd emerged from the hospital bearing poor Beth's body in his arms, he had retreated deep within himself, to a place none of us could follow. He spoke, but his words were intermittent and gruff, voice raw with unshed tears. And he participated, as he always did, looking out for the group - searching for food and water, bringing back what he could. But there was no conversation for me, save for his brief, daily check-ins. A glance back here and there, to make sure I was still walking.
I'd thought, after my "you'll have to pry me off you with a crowbar" confession weeks ago, we'd have been much further ahead by now. But that, of course, was back before the truth of Terminus, before the horror in the city. Back when I thought we were headed to a nice, safe home, where we'd have the luxury of growing closer and I could further explain everything I felt for him. Now, though, we were on the road, and I had killed a man, and he'd held a dead girl in his arms and had found himself so deeply entrenched in a pain I couldn't access. I didn't know how to pull him out, and that made me feel guilty. Because if I really did love him, I would be able to do that for him. I would understand the intricacies of his emotions, would know how to point out the right things and comfort him.
What a terrible not-quite-a-girlfriend-but-much-more-than-a-friend I was.
It was too hot for the fall. Almost as though the sky itself was angry at us, frustrated that we were still alive, still walking. We needed rain, desperately; our water supplies were running low and the surrounding area, as we inched closer to the Virginia border, was clearly suffering some kind of drought. Rain would be our salvation, the biggest relief we could get. Meat, berries, plants - those were easier for us. Between Daryl and his crossbow, and our burgeoning knowledge of flora, we were able to put together a few small meals a day. It wasn't enough to keep us going, but hunger pangs abated and the sweet taste of some mushed berries helped to quiet Judith's cries. Somewhat.
Behind us, the walkers were building up even more, but Rick was still resolute in his intention to wait for a better vantage point, somewhere where we could exploit the landscape or some feature to help us tackle the numbers. Otherwise, we'd be expending energy reserves we could not afford to wholly deplete, though we were all scraping the barrel.
Daryl was gone, having slipped back into the green camouflage of the woods with Carol some fifteen or twenty minutes before. She'd stolen the words from my mouth, my dry, aching mouth, before I'd had a chance to form them. Dully, I watched them go, kicking myself for losing an opportunity to talk to him. I just wanted to talk.
But about what?
Beth? Yes. The loss that weighed so heavy on him, the guilt that had dragged him down to the very bottom of his own mind. I didn't know the whole mysterious story about the hospital, or about their time together on the road - but I knew something had been forged in their time together. Something bigger than what they'd had at the prison.
I knew Maggie had lost a sister, a friend. I knew I had lost a bright girl with a smile that could pull me from the grimmest thoughts. But I didn't know what Daryl had lost, and that ignorance certainly left me at a disadvantage.
The girl on the inside chafed at my foolishness, standing there wondering how to approach a grieving man when there were fourteen starving, exhausted people standing around me, and a pack of walkers on our tail.
Right. That.
I pivoted on my heel as deftly as I could manage; sluggishness from poor diet and dehydration had entered my bones and my muscles were currently fomenting a rebellion. The feint worked; the walker reached for me, and then I was gone, and she went tumbling into the creek below. Again and again, I folded my body away, tempting them with my exposed flesh and raised voice - and then I would abruptly jerk away, dead fingers just a centimeter away, and let them fall.
It was a dance, a dance I lost myself in, a tempting of death, and a turning away. I'm not dead.
The words collided with the reality. I hadn't thought them in weeks, hadn't touched that reminder. But the energy with which they slammed back into my brain caused that old rift, that old dissension, and I felt the schism.
The girl on the inside snarled and spat, and I froze. Unsure of what to do next. Around me, chaos blistered hot and ready, as Sasha went off-script and the walkers amped up, and we were forced to go hand-to-hand. Glenn shoved me hard, realizing how spaced out I was. And I watched, I watched as the rest unfolded. And I didn't give a single, solitary shit.
Daryl left again. This time, I couldn't even summon up the desire to leave with him. The girl on the inside had the wheel, and she was pissed. Having to handle things again. I let her guide my motions, one foot in front of the other - avoid the pothole, rest the left leg, take a breath and dive into the past. I'd been to DC before, I knew it well; I'd walked hand-in-hand with my father, a child in awe of time. Would it be the same? Would the flags still fly? Was it possible it had remained, a bastion against the wild decay of our world?
I sat by the roadside, and I wondered. I wondered why, and I wondered when, and I wondered who I would be when I walked in DC again. So much had changed. So much had been wrought so deep within me, structures I couldn't yet comprehend.
I was desperate to cry, but I was too damn dry.
Leaves stirred, across the road, and Daryl emerged, though our hands rested on our knives and our weary hearts jumped into our throats. The fight with the walkers had taken too much, demanded too much. And now we were spent.
Hunger gnawed at the inside of me, scratching angry nails down the cascade of my ribs. I arched into the ache, nestling myself more firmly into the ditch, allowing the roll of the earth to support me. Was I fading?
And then a snap. A twig giving way. A flutter of green, but we were all accounted for.
Four dogs, menacing and foaming at the mouth, emitted low growls as they sized us up. We all stiffened, Daryl and Rick shifting into movement, but they weren't quick enough. With four lightning-fast rounds, Sasha shot each of them, and their bodies fell to the ground with light thuds.
I closed my eyes.
"Eat."
Abraham loomed, a shadow, a Highland warrior stepped right from the page. Two chunks of meat sizzled on the end of a stick, and I closed my eyes again. I wouldn't look, let alone put that in my mouth.
He had no claim on me.
I shifted again, having turned my back to the fire nearly an hour ago. I'd closed my eyes against the scrape of Daryl's knife, against the first crackling of the flames.
"Come on, sweetheart, you're dead on your feet. Eat up. Just don't think."
I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I couldn't.
The girl on the inside was pissed, because she was all instinct and logic these days. I was dying. I hadn't eaten anything more substantial than leaves and a handful of berries in days. My stomach was aching, my bones were breaking, and my soul had shattered a long time ago - but protein wouldn't fix that. Especially not this kind.
I ignored the "sweetheart." I ignored the logic. I shoved back against his hand, clamping down on my shoulder.
"Don't be stupid, kid."
"Fuck off," I muttered. "Just fuck off."
"Eat the goddamn meat!"
"Hey!"
The stick went flying into the dirt; the scent of whisky was hot on the air, and I looked up to see Daryl, squaring off with Abraham, dust kicking up from their feet. "Don't talk to her like that," he growled. "You leave her alone."
Abraham looked down, met my gleaming gaze. "Christ," he groaned, tossing his hands up in exasperation. "Fine. Starve to death. Let her be a fucking idiot. Go right ahead."
Raw anger clenched at my stomach, but it had nowhere to go. The girl on the inside was angrier at me than at Abraham, so I tucked my knees up under the embrace of my arms and I faced the way we had come, the way back. Could we go back?
Back, back, back - let's rewind the tape. Take me back to a prison field, to a farm, to a quarry with turquoise water and a friendship just blooming.
"Riley," he said gruffly. "You good?"
He settled down beside me, further onto the road than I was situated, his knee grazing my thigh as he got comfortable. A fresh slice of meat sat wetly in his palm, greasy but cooled. He reached out, and I turned my head roughly. "No, I don't want it." Around the edges of my words, a sob lurked. "Please. Please don't make me."
I'd never even had a dog. I liked them, as a concept. But there was something more symbolic there - some line I wasn't yet ready to cross. We do what we have to do to survive, I know that. That's the rule, but there was such a reduction in that action. If I reached over and plucked that chunk of meat from Daryl's hand and called it my dinner, I was reducing myself to function. To a body in need of protein. My survival depended on that.
The hot cascade of a stranger's blood had been much the same.
These thresholds, we cross them sometimes without knowing. The heat of the moment demands particular kinds of strength, and more often than not, instinct will simply take over. Helpful, really. It keeps your brain from having to actively make those tough decisions, the ones that keep you up at night later on.
But this was a threshold I knew I was poised over. The girl on the inside, and the girl on the outside - her skin searing under the proximity of his body, desire and rue melding in an uncomfortable and disconcerting tangle in the pit of her empty, empty stomach. What the actual fuck was wrong with me?
"Riley," he said again, voice huskier but distant this time. He was a million miles away, another girl on his mind, the one he couldn't save. "Please, girl. Please. Just don't think about it."
I couldn't hold them back. Fuck, I hated crying, but there was just something so...so final about this. If I gave in, I was admitting that things were really goddamn bad. I was admitting that I was dying, dying on the road to slim hopes. "No. I'll wait, I'll find something else," I said heavily, turning to face him fully, knocking down the wall of my knees and the guard of my arms and letting him see the tears streaming down my cheeks. "Please, Daryl, please don't make me."
He chewed at the inside of his cheek, then reached for my hand. It looked thin and pale in his, but he held it gently. Long enough for me to see a strange new scar, puckered and raw, between his thumb and index finger. But quick as I'd noticed it, he'd turned my own hand palm up, and with his other, placed the meat in the middle of it. I didn't twitch away. "Eat. Pretend it's squirrel. Pretend I finally cooked it for you."
Care filled me more than the meat. The girl on the inside calmed, came back. Gradually, events relayed themselves into logical sequence, so that life was one foot in front of the other again, and despair was the only thing roiling in my stomach. Keeping the meat down was my one priority, until the water.
Thirst had made a desert of my body, squeezing out the last vestiges of will and motivation, levelling me, quite literally, to one limp step at a time. I fell to the back of the group, my pace lethargic and broken.
Home was a distant galaxy, cold and unknown. The concept rattled around my mind, something I had once understood intimately - in the boxy contours of a dorm room; the pale blue of a tent; the stone walls of our cell. But now, on the road, with the wrong food in my belly and my veins sprawling like mudcracks in my body, I couldn't quite recall what the word meant. Was it my mother? No, she was dead.
Was it the prison? No, that burned.
Was it the little house I claimed for myself? The tight embrace of Daryl's arms? The hard wooden pew against my back? Or was it the road, the endless road? How in the hell of it could I actually be sure we were headed to DC, anyway? This was a death march. A fucking death march. And here I was, bringing up the rear.
In my periphery, a bottle with a deep, amber liquid twirled, jiggled invitingly. "Sorry, sweetheart," Abraham said roughly. "Lost my temper back there. Drink?"
I paused. Weighed my options. A drink would be easy, I told myself. One sip, a little bit of fire on my tongue. It could burn away the flavour of my own pathetic surrender, sear the memory of Beth's song from my ears. One sip of flame, and I could be purged.
That was the old bargain. The bargain of the girl who'd craved release and relief, bartered for it in the dark and in her private moments.
Don't you fucking dare.
That was the girl on the inside, the girl who confronted pain. She liked to face things head on, take them for what they were worth.
But one drink. One sip.
Daryl had stopped walking, and I met his gaze over the top of the proffered bottle. He wanted to answer for me; he was desperate to do it. A "fuck off" danced just behind his mouth, closed firm in a line. He wasn't going to, though, I knew that. He was letting me choose, letting me feel the full weight of my own decision here, and I was damn grateful for that.
He was letting me be my own person. An adult. A woman capable of deciding whether or not to flip off survival or make the safer choice, and bet on herself. I indulged in a deep, fortifying breath before answering, fairly tasting the sweet burn on my lips as I did.
"No thanks," I said, shaking my head, voice cracking on the words. "And it's fine. I get it."
Daryl melted back into the woods.
And me? I found myself drunk on liberty - liberty and strangled hopes.
The water bottles were arranged so neatly, I wanted to smile. It was the sort of thing I once would have taken pleasure in - setting up the four larger bottles in a nice square; forming a triangle with ten smaller ones right beside it. The note, tucked carefully under the one of the big bottles, was neatly-composed and to the point: From a friend.
But all our friends were dead.
Rick snatched the note from the ground, stared at the paper so intently I thought it might actually catch on fire. From a friend. From a friend.
Someone was watching us.
Someone who knew our path would continue down this main road; the water was fresh and clear within the bottles, and the plastic itself was spotless, as though it had only been out for no more than a few hours (at most). The simple fact that the paper was still there and intact was most chilling - had our "friend" just finished signing off when we'd made our way around the corner, about a quarter of a mile back?
It pained me to jump to the absolute worst conclusions, but the girl on the inside was insistent, and Rick's expression said it all. This was wrong. Problems didn't get fixed this easy, not of the magnitude we were dealing with. Thirsty for days and days, no rain, no river, nothing spectacular in the cars we'd raided - and now there were litres of fresh water right in front of us? No. That didn't happen.
Poison, perhaps. Or just a trap. Get us to stop long enough on the road to overpower us, take our shit, leave us bloody and broken on the pavement.
Fear fluttered deep within my stomach, and my hand inched naturally to my knife. Were we being hunted, I wondered, heart thudding in my chest? Around us, the forest, despite the waning of the year, still grew thick and lush, the result some sort of Indian summer, perhaps - the growth was substantial enough to conceal a watcher, maybe more than one. God, there would have to be more than one, if they were coming after a group this size.
"Can we...um, drink it?" Tara asked, breaking the stunned, hollow silence.
I shook my head forcefully, looking around to see that Daryl had joined us again. "No, we shouldn't," I said, as Rick handed him the note.
"What else are we gonna do?" Her frustration was both palpable and logical: we were thirsty as hell, couldn't go on for one more day without finding more water, and it was right there. But the risk was too high.
Rick exchanged a steely look with Daryl. "Not this," he said sharply. "We don't know who left it."
"If that's a trap, we already happen to be in it," Eugene pointed out, that slow Southern drawl grating on my ears, though it was the first I'd heard him speak in a while. "But I, for one, would like to think it indeed is from a friend."
"What if isn't?" Carol asked, gun shifting in her grip. "What if they put something in it?"
"Then let's hope we go quick," I muttered darkly, stepping back and closer to the ditch. I looked up to see Daryl staring straight at me, brow furrowed as he studied me. He'd heard. Of course he'd heard. The man could hear a fucking squirrel from a mile away. His mouth opened, ready to question me, I'm sure, but we were both distracted by a rapid series of movements from the middle of the group. Eugene.
Rosita said his name sharply, a cold reprimand, but Tara was kinder, but no less incredulous: "What are you doing, dude?"
"Quality assurance," he said quickly, lunging for one of the smaller bottles and unscrewing the cap.
When we'd found out that the true mission to DC was actually a sham, that Eugene didn't truly possess a cure for the sickness (whatever it was in our brains that turned us to walkers when we died), I'd assumed that Abraham, who was rightfully devastated by the lies, to just simply not give a shit about what happened to him anymore. I couldn't fathom that kind of betrayal: like, here, let me just hand you every hope and lingering sense of purpose the world possesses, I'll give you a mission and a reason to wake up, and then I'm going to pull the rug out from under your feet and take it all away, okay?
But I was wrong. Marginally. Maybe it was the alcohol, or some residual affection, but as Eugene tipped the bottle to his lips, Abraham reached forward to bat it out of his hands, a splash of water cascading across his face and in a wide, dark slash against the dry road. I waited for the simmer, for the telltale hiss of some poison, but there was nothing.
"We can't," Rick repeated, voice ringing with cold surety.
So this is how it ends, I thought. This is how I die.
On the side of a road, blood turned to dust in my veins, unaired love on my lips. A corpse, withering away only to stand up again, to consume mindlessly and wander guided only by base instinct, by ancient truths buried deep within my brain. Truths we had wilfully forgotten.
As thunder roiled, faintly at first, then growing in confidence, I swayed for a minute or two, on that road, thinking of my own death. In far clearer terms than I had ever thought about it before. Would it hurt, I wondered? To just slip away? Would it be better to lie in the grass, or under the cover of some thick branches, or to just keep on walking until I'd dropped?
And what would it be like, I thought, to watch them go?
To watch him go?
Breath shattered in my lungs at the thought, the one I'd danced around for a long time but had never directly looked at. What if Daryl died? What if the heat, the searing heat of want and love scoring through me now, what if that were to just become futile, pointless, as I stepped over his lifeless body and walked away?
The prospect was a silent scream, a beating of fists against the side of a mountain. Hopeless, pointless, utterly without purpose. And yet I turned to him, this dead hope in my eyes, willing him to understand. If I were to die of thirst and hunger, he should know, shouldn't he? How fiercely I feared a world without him in it? "Daryl," I croaked, heart in my throat. "Daryl -"
But the storm had broken before I could, spilling out into a cool, cleansing rain that soaked us through, and my mouth tipped back and opened to drink it, to let it flood me, and I turned away from his empty gaze, knowing even I could not fill it.
The barn was dry. That was the one thing going for it. The hurricane lamps were a nice addition, and the sprawling comfort of space was another. We'd spent weeks in close confines - vans, small houses, a bakery, and then the road. Crammed together, desperation and misery claiming the scant spaces between.
We'd separated, breaking off into smaller groups, some sleeping, some keeping watch. Outside, the storm raged, potent and deafening, and despite the fact that I was almost twenty-four years old and had, you know, killed a man, I found myself cringing and jumping with each boom.
Something Daryl noticed.
"You good?" he asked lowly, moving closer after tossing another useless stick on to the small fire he'd worked his damndest to make.
"I'll try," Glenn said, reaching for another piece.
"Nah," Daryl grunted, shifting again where he sat, our legs brushing. I wondered if he'd realized how close he was getting to me, or if the dim light of the barn just made it too difficult for him to gauge. Not that I was complaining or anything. "It's too wet."
Another aching clap of thunder shook the barn, and I shivered. Jesus. I hated loud noises. Prickly tendrils of fear went chasing up my spine at the chaos of the noise, causing my hands to clench stiffly in my lap. Nope. Wasn't going to fucking cry over a thunderstorm.
"Hey, you good?" Daryl asked again, once quiet conversation had resumed in the rest of the circle.
The fire made a stranger of him, casting his face into sharp relief here and there; his hair had grown so long, so dark, that it shadowed his eyes and made me simultaneously yearn for the shorter, lighter hair he'd had when we first met, but also fight the urge to run my fingers through it now. "Fine," I whispered. "Just fucking hate thunder."
Months ago, that would have earned me a smile. A "Stop, girl" - his code for getting me to shut up before I ruined the image he was working so hard to project. Maybe a little shove. And I'd have shoved him back, stuck out my tongue, chanced my goddamn luck and leaned against his shoulder for a minute.
But now he just nodded, taking it in and turning away. Preparing to slide back into that resolute silence.
Until I took his hand in mine.
I'd noticed the scar earlier - gray and puckered, strangely circular. I was used to scars and marks on Daryl's skin, as well as my own, but this one was different. It had taken me all afternoon to puzzle out what it actually was, where it had come from.
It was a burn. Likely from a cigarette being pressed into his skin.
I cupped his hand in both of mine, drawing it into the nest of my lap. He didn't resist, just let it happen, and gently, I stroked one finger over the range of his knuckles, keeping clear of the sore. "Don't do that." My eyes flicked up with my words, heated but quiet. I watched his face, his steady, sad gaze meeting mine ruefully. "D, don't do that to yourself."
The words were simple and flimsy, a childish demand. But I hated to see him in pain, hated the thought of him so desperate to feel anything but that dull, yawning roar of grief and guilt that he would willingly inflict this pain on his own body. "Don't," I said again, and hoped he understood that there was more, there was so much more, plaintive words of care I didn't yet have the courage to say. I stroked his hand again, punctuating the word with physical tenderness, a language he wasn't yet used to. And in a swift movement, he entangled our fingers, so that the warmth of his palm spread through mine. He was touching me. Anchoring himself to me.
I kept his hand there, and he didn't pull away. There was no force, just acceptance. Just a deep sense of This is what I can give you right now. I wanted to talk, wanted to tell him again that the fall of the prison wasn't his fault; that the golden-haired tragedy he'd held in his hands wasn't his fault either. That I knew he'd lost something in Atlanta. That I knew the pain ran deep, deeper than he had the strength to delve right now. But that when he did, if he needed me, I could be there.
No one noticed our small embrace, but I relished it - the sparks chasing up and down my spine at the feel of his skin on mine. Now was not the time to feel that, but I couldn't help it.
"He's gonna be okay," Carol said, breaking the silence. I waited for Daryl to slip his hand from mine, but he didn't. Just sat there, forearm draped over my knee, hand in my lap. "He bounces back more than any of us do."
Dazed, I tried to figure out who she was talking about, and then followed her gaze and Rick's to where they landed on Carl and Judith, snuggled up together and sleeping soundly against the back wall of the large stall we'd decided to settle in for the night. It amazed me that they could sleep so soundly while outside, the world was torn apart, but exhaustion had absolutely shattered them.
Carol was right; he would bounce back. Carl was resilient, incredibly so - and not for the first time, I wished I could be, too. I wore the past like the scars on my legs and my forehead, stories tracing into my flesh. The burden of what I had done, hadn't done, the people I had lost - I wanted to be free. I wanted to have a home again, build something like we'd had at the prison. I wanted to introduce myself to new people with clean hands and a light heart, but how? Everything seemed so futile now. A whimpered plea into the Grand Canyon - no one would hear me ask for forgiveness, for anything. Because they'd done worse, or they'd lost more.
A sob hitched in my throat, but I didn't let it out. If I did, Daryl would pull away, overwhelmed by my emotions, and would want Michonne or even Carol to take over, and I didn't want them right now. I just wanted him.
"I used to feel sorry for kids that have to grow up now. In this," Rick was saying, and I tried to focus on him, just him, the sound of his voice over the storm. "But I think I got it wrong. Growing up is getting used to the world. This is easier for them."
"This isn't the world," Michonne interjected. "This isn't it."
Glenn sighed, bitter logic escaping him before he could think twice: "It might be. It might."
I allowed the conversation to flow around me, and I looked down at Daryl's hand, twisted and braided with mine. With my free hand, I let one finger glide against the back of his palm, and then glanced back up. Was that okay? Was it too much? He met my eyes, metal and ice, and he didn't move a single fucking muscle.
"That's giving up." Michonne sounded tired; so damn tired.
"It's reality."
Glenn was right. The world was the way it was now; I'd accepted that a long time ago. The world was death and destruction, and really, it always had been. We'd just gotten very, very good at dressing it all up, distracting ourselves from the inevitable. The walking corpses were a new addition, though, I'd grant him that.
But the world was also a hand in yours, the breathy snuffles of a sleeping baby. The world was an inching toward something real. Food in your stomach. Heat on your skin. Fresh, clean water sliding between your lips.
I opened my mouth, wanting to share, turning away from Daryl just for a second, but Rick beat me to it. "Until we see otherwise," he said lowly, "this is what we have to live with."
The flames crackled between us, and time did too. History rising up, the past we had all shared. The quarry, the farm, the forest, the prison, the road - we had lived together in the worst of it, found each other again after everything. Wasn't that a fucking miracle?
Rick scrubbed a hand through his thick, wild beard. He looked so different now; a far cry from the smooth-faced policeman I'd met such a long time ago. For a moment, as he cleared his throat and prepared to speak again, I wondered what I looked like now. It had been weeks since I'd seen myself, in the mirror of the little house - my hair was tangled, I knew that, knotted here and there. And there were scratches running up and down my arms, from branches slapping at me as we cut through the woods. When I saw myself again, really saw myself, girl on the outside and the inside - would I be a stranger?
"When I was a kid," Rick said, and his voice was heavy, weighed down with ruin, "I asked my grandpa once if he ever killed any Germans in the war. He wouldn't answer. He said that was grown-up stuff, so...so I asked if the Germans ever tried to kill him."
He paused, long enough for me to be back on the ground, hands on my neck, stolen blood on my face.
"But he got real quiet," he continued, and I shifted, leaning just a little of my weight against Daryl's sweat-slick arm. Craving comfort neither of us were wholly sure how to give. "He said he was dead the minute he stepped into enemy territory. Everyday he woke up and told himself, 'Rest in peace. Now get up and go to war.' And then after a few years of pretending he was dead, he made it out alive.
"That's the trick of it, I think," Rick added, glancing up and around at our small group. "We do what we need to do and then we get to live. But no matter what we find in DC, I know we'll be okay. Because this is how we survive. We tell ourselves...that we are the walking dead."
I'm not dead.
If words could be poisonous, his were. They trickled into my ear, bitter hemlock, and I stiffened against Daryl's side. No. He didn't like it either, clumsily extricating his hand from our shared grip to grab another handful of kindling. He snapped them into smaller pieces, frustration clear in his every jerky movement. "We ain't them," he said gruffly. He moved into a crouch, looking straight into the flames.
"We're not them," Rick conceded gently, leaning forward. "Hey. We're not."
I reached for Daryl as he stood, my fingers missing the edges of his leather vest so softly that he didn't even notice. At least, I hoped he didn't.
He reached down for his crossbow, pointedly ignoring me now, so I tucked up my knees again and built myself a little wall with my arms. Can't hurt me. I'm not dead.
"We ain't them," he repeated, and the stall door slammed behind him.
Fury battered at the door, loosened as they were, bound only by chain and good intentions. I pressed myself against the wood, our hands overlapping, and I groaned with the weight of our lives. One by one, they joined, until we became stone - stone and sweat, hearts pounding in unison as we pushed back, as we fought, for the first time without knives and guns and knuckles, but with sheer, sheer fucking will.
My feet skidded in the soft dirt lining the barn's floor, and I swore, pressed my shoulder against the door, tears squeezing out, hot and sour, from my eyes as I pushed. Daryl was right next to me, his hand close to my shoulder, and he nodded once, and I couldn't be sure if it was a goodbye, or if it was pride, but it warmed me just the same. Rocketed through my veins and swooped low in my belly and I understood, I got it, I knew.
We ain't them. They wouldn't do this. They wouldn't fight and offer up their own skin for those they loved. They wouldn't tangle their limbs together and push and push against the inevitable, driven on the scantest possibility of success. They wouldn't.
We weren't dead.
As I slept, the storm became an ocean, and I sat at the bottom of it, in the sandy calm, my hair long again and flowing around me. I wasn't beautiful, because I was ruined. My legs were bare and rent with old, red scars; half of my face was on fire, and where my heart should have been, there was an empty space, the precise size of a child's fist, curled and tight and warm within me.
But the world was a jewel, a stormy one, and it glimmered and glistened around me, and a smile, a sad one, a broken one, creased my face and I looked up, up into the impenetrable blue. I reached out my hand toward the surface, fingers inching ever closer, but the moment I thought I would break the edge of the water, I found myself slipping, slipping backwards into the sand, and it rolled over me, a golden sheet, rippling atop my body until I was buried, buried and forgotten.
And in the morning, when I woke, I woke to the heady taste of companionable silence, the sweet aftermath left in the wake of a violent storm. My eyes drifted open, and met his. I smiled. Because I wasn't dead. Not yet. But just in case, just in case...
Rest in peace. Now get up and go to war, girl.
Thank you so much to those of you who take the time to provide reviews/feedback. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this chapter :)