No real notes this time. Except to say that yet again, this is something I'm feeling very melancholy about finishing. Though yeah, I think it can't continue that much longer anyway.

As usual, thanks for being here. ❤️

Chapter 35: I'm down to just one thing

I know you want me to say it, Henry, it's in the script, you want me to say Lie down on the bed, you're all I ever wanted and worth dying for too but I think I'd rather keep the bullet this time. It's mine, you can't have it, see, I'm not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that's as good as anything. - Richard Siken

She's never known what to do with her days off.

In truth, she doesn't have days off. Doesn't allow herself. She never really had them at the prison, either. Not even really at the farm. Sure, she had long lazy summers out of school and there was always Spring Break and a couple of times a trip to Florida - once to Disneyland when she was ten - and there was the winter holidays. Thanksgiving. But a farm never stops running. A farm doesn't take breaks. One way or another, she was always working. It felt good, to always be doing things. Maybe it put her in the minority of kids in her situation, but she always got the sense that Shawn and Maggie enjoyed it too. You sneak away to go to the swimming hole, parties, silly pointless aimless drives around the county with the windows down and music blaring, but in the end you always come home and you work, and the farm keeps running and living and the world keeps turning.

At the prison there was always something that needed doing. She found things. Took care of the littlest kids. Helped keep watch. Helped with food storage and inventory and prep. Worked the small fields, hoeing and weeding. She read, sometimes novels but often schoolbooks and other things that could count as educational. Organized a study group for the older kids, though it didn't really take. Did target practice. Wrote.

Thought about a lot of things. Thought all the time. Lying in bed in the dark, unable to stop thinking, her thoughts whirling around and around. She doesn't remember clearly what she was thinking about. Maybe everything. Maybe nothing. Just thinking. Getting herself off now and then when she felt the pressure building inside her but even that was slightly distracted. Unfocused despite the rapid motions of her fingers. She wasn't fully present in her own body.

Not thinking about Zach very much when she did that, truth be told. Thinking about some of the older guys. Bigger, stronger, more confident. One or two men she didn't know as well, but they had nice faces, nice hands. Were kind. She imagined they were good, probably. Might be rough but not too rough. Might be sweet with her. Slow.

Rick, more than once. Never told anyone about that. Never will.

And him.

Kid fantasies. Teenage girl, cliche - even at the end of the world. She thinks about them now and they're stupid, and she would rather not think about them at all.

So she doesn't know what people mean when they say day off. Maybe they don't mean anything. It's possible that they go through the exact same shit she does. Survival these days is a full time job.

But here, she has scheduled days off, and she has no idea what to do with them.

She reads. She cleans the house. She cleans her rifle. Sometimes she goes to the armory and she cleans all the rifles, sitting on the floor with a small dropcloth under her, oil on her hands as they move in those smooth, repetitive motions that she doesn't have to pay much attention to. And thinking.

None of it satisfies.

More and more, she catches herself staring into space. Losing time as she does it. She might do it for half an hour at a stretch. Maybe longer.

Sitting under a tree near the gardens and doing that now, alternately watching two kids on weeding duty and the light dancing through the shifting leaves above her. Drifting. There's a rustle in the grass at her side and Denise is lowering herself to sit. Not asking, but she must know that if Beth doesn't want her there, Beth will say as much.

Beth doesn't say as much. She meets Denise's gaze and gives her a single nod.

Silence for a while.

Then: "How're you doing?"

Beth sighs. "Alright." And it's not exactly a lie but it's not the whole truth either, and Denise will know that. Denise is perceptive, though not in the knife-edge way Daryl is. It's softer. But it's every bit as unyielding. "It's not really gettin' any easier. With him."

Denise nods, and when Beth glances at her there's no surprise in her expression. She expected this answer. Probably she already knew, because it's predictable. And she knows Daryl by now. "What about you, though?"

"I don't…" She trails off, her gaze back on the leaves above her, the bark rough against the crown of her head as it tilts upward. Her. It comes to her all at once that she hasn't truly thought of herself in isolation from him since he got here. She's irrevocably entangled with him, with his boundless darkness and the tiny flickering light struggling to keep shining at its heart. She's inside it with him. She was the second he fixed her with that burning, insane stare. He pulled her in and she doesn't honestly think he's capable of letting her go.

And it's not even that he doesn't want to.

"I'm fine."

"I think fine might be overstating it."

Shrug. She can't find it in herself to be irritated. "I'm good enough."

"You were having a rough time when you first got here," Denise says quietly. "I mean, you all were, but I think it was worse for you. I never got why. I think I do now."

"We were out there for a long time. We did the worst things." She swallows. This is evasion, but again, it's not untrue. "We did the worst kinds of things just to survive."

"But I said, it was worse for you. You and Rick. Bad in the same way, I thought at the time. I wasn't going to say anything, because…" She laughs thinly. "I thought you might stab me or something, you know? You guys were fucking scary. But I watched you. Everyone else adjusted pretty well. Glenn, Maggie, Abe, Rosita and Eugene and Noah, Father Gabriel… And Tara." Her voice softens even more. "Carol and Carl, not so much. They didn't settle. Still haven't. Or Michonne. And I think Sasha had a rough time at first, too. But you and Rick, it's different."

She pauses. Beth says nothing. She's waiting. The names came like blows and she bore them, because she knows they're not meant to be. She knows where this is going and it's not a place she wants to spend any time in, but with the same suddenness as her previous revelation, she knows it's inevitable.

All the dead are rising now, and she has to look each one of them in the face.

"What happened? With the three of you. When he got shot."

Beth looks down, cocks her head. Without meaning to she's begun worrying at the cuff wrapping her left wrist, fingering the worn edge of the leather. She's not sure there's a word for what her gut is doing. "He didn't tell you?"

"He didn't tell me any details. I don't think he can. He was fighting so hard to tell me what he did tell me. And like… His memory breaks off pretty hard. Of course." Another pause. Denise's features are fixed in an expression that can't properly be called nervous, though it's not all that far distant. But Beth doubts the nervousness is for herself.

She knows this could hurt. A lot.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't-"

"It was my fault."

She releases a huge breath, closes her eyes. People have told her it's not. They've told her more than once, or implied it if they haven't said it explicitly. They've been saying it for months. Daryl said it. But when it comes down to it, when she looks this decaying corpse in the face and wipes off its funeral makeup, she knows better. "I attacked someone. It was stupid. I was stupid. She had a gun, it was pointed straight at me. I would've gotten myself killed. Probably a lot of other people." Her teeth sink into her lip and gnaw. "He pushed me outta the way. Right at the wrong second. Gun went off, he took the bullet."

Nothing. Then, a breath from Denise: "Jesus."

"Thing is, she didn't even mean to. The woman I was goin' after. I don't think so. I got her in the shoulder with a pair of scissors, probably she just squeezed the trigger by accident. She was sayin' she didn't mean to, anyway, before Rick killed her."

She loosens her hands and they fall limp in the grass by her sides. She's not crying, which is strange. She would have thought the eyes of this body would make her cry. Force her tears out of her. Ruthless.

"I'd never seen him like that. He was shakin' so hard. He was…" The light, moving and moving. Stroking its bright fingertips across her face. "I don't even know how to say what he was."

"What happened then?"

"No one else died. We carried him out. Then a herd came. We had to run, and we… We couldn't just leave him there for them. He was…" Her mouth wrenches sideways so hard it hurts her, and she tastes a surge of bile. The memory of her vomit has somehow remained one of the most intense parts of the whole thing. "We didn't know he was alive but we thought he was fresh enough, they would've eaten him. We couldn't just let that happen. Y'know?"

Murmur: "Yeah. I know."

"There was a car. We put him in the trunk. We ran. I don't know if maybe we meant to go back for him. I don't think we did." She exhales again. It's smaller. She has less air to release. "I don't remember most of what happened right after that."

She stops. Over in the vegetable garden, the girls are laughing at something. Light laughter, careless. Some joke about something entirely mundane. She can't even imagine what it might be. She doesn't know when she last laughed that way.

"I had his blood all over me," she whispers. "It was in my mouth. I didn't wash it off for a while." She glances down at her waist, her belt. What she hasn't stopped carrying there. "I had his knife. I don't remember how I got it. But I had it. I kept it."

She doesn't know what she's expecting now. For Denise to do what they always do, perhaps - tell her that it's not her fault, that there's nothing she could have done. That she didn't make him push her out of the way. That she didn't fire the gun. That they didn't know he was still alive. That it's actually better that they left him behind, because he almost certainly would have died if they tried to take him with them - a fact with which she's well acquainted.

But Denise says none of that. And after a few wordless minutes, Beth realizes that she isn't going to.

Instead she drops her hand into the grass, covers Beth's with it. It's warm and soft, and Beth can't keep back her shudder as the knot that's settled into her chest binds itself around her lungs.

What she wants right now is a total damn mystery to her.

"You're not fine." Denise gives her fingers a quick little squeeze. "That's okay. No one gets to be fine anymore."

"I didn't know why I was alive." She turns her head, gives Denise a smile. Very small, anemic. Painful. "I still don't."

"Maybe you don't need a reason."

Nod. She can allow how that's so. She told Rick that Daryl had no reason either. It could be that no one does. It could be that Daddy was full up with shit about that, and nothing happens for any reason at all. It merely happens, and you live with it or you don't.

She thinks it's likely.

Another thing she expects is for Denise to lift her hand away, clear her throat, and for things to be awkward. But she doesn't do that either, and it isn't, and Beth closes her eyes and after another moment or two the knot in her chest unwinds and she can breathe again.

"Are you coming to the party?"

Beth opens her eyes. Blinks. "Party?"

"Tomorrow afternoon. They just decided yesterday. It's been almost a month since the attack, Deanna thinks people could use something like that. Blow off some steam." Denise shrugs. "I don't think she's wrong. There's going to be a barbecue. Music. Mark got hold of some balloons that actually don't seem like they'll burst the second you blow into them."

Beth laughs. She can't help it. It might be the most absurd thing she's ever heard of. "Balloons?"

"Yeah. You know how people are." Denise's crooked smile suggests that she's well aware of the absurdity. That one must be indulgent about such things. "I know it's ridiculous, but you should come. You should all come. Even if you don't stay that long."

All. And a very large elephant stomps into a very small room.

"Daryl?"

"That's up to you. And him." She shoves herself to her feet, dusting off her jeans and grunting softly as she stretches. "Think about it. Okay?"

Beth nods. She supposes there's really nothing else to do.

She watches Denise start to walk away over the grass, heading back toward the clinic, and she's about to return her attention to the leaves and the light when Denise turns and looks back, an indefinable expression on her face and in her eyes.

"Beth?"

Beth simply looks at her.

"You're a good person."

Before Beth can even begin to construct a response, she's gone.

Again: Denise.

Not Aaron's. Not the living room. Out back, which has become something of a safe haven between his room - which stopped being safe a long time ago if it ever was - and just about everywhere else - which is alternately terrifying and loathsome. Except the garage, of course. But there are reasons why he doesn't want to talk there. Why he doesn't want her there.

Why he would prefer no one be there.

Mid-afternoon, out back, her coming out to meet him with a cup of horrible coffee in her hands and him with a cigarette sitting crosslegged in the grass. His smoke and her steam. He follows the course of both with his eyes. His gaze is unfocused and floating and as such can nearly anticipate the slow curling ascent of the vaporous twins.

He didn't dream last night. Or really, this morning. Not that he remembers.

It comes to the same.

She sits down on the next-to-bottom step and looks at him. Lights hits her glasses and reflects; he can't see her eyes. He doesn't like that. Shifts, tilts his head to try, but it doesn't work. He doesn't want to move more than he has. He looks away, fingers tearing at the grass - good, because if they're tearing at the grass they aren't tearing at each other. At him. Someone would think it was good, anyway. Maybe the same kind of person who would look at him and think he was trying. How nice for them. How flattering. He's pretty sure he's still doing well as far as pretending goes. Maybe better than well. He'd like to thank the Academy. He has so many people to thank. Should have made a list.

Stares down at the cigarette in his hand and wonders if it would hurt, adding another layer of scar tissue to the little circle he already has on his left hand. If he would feel anything at all.

She's asked him how he's doing. He didn't notice. This is the second time she's asking him; can tell by the volume and pitch of her voice, and she uses his name and sounds pointed with it. Patiently demanding his attention. Daryl. Looks up, squints. He's in the shade but it's a sunny day and the light is less than ideal. How is he doing?

Actively suicidal. Apparently. Just can't seem to commit. No better at it than she was.

Shrug.

He's doing okay. Guesses.

How's the bike?

Snaps his gaze back up to her. Jaw clenched. Teeth bare. Yeah, bitch knows that's a sore spot. Went right for it. He's getting a decent sense of how she operates. She lulls him, opens him up, makes him think he could be safe, but it's just to establish the location of all his weak points, and now that she has them she'll hit every one of them purely to amuse herself.

That's why she's asking, right? Why the hell else would she be asking?

Did she see something?

Flat. Not bothering to sound dangerous. No point. He's not going to kill her here, like this and they both know it. Not even going to go at her. Not going to carve himself across those few feet like a knife and rip her open, make the steps into a very messy and very unhygienic operating theater. The bike is the same unless Aaron did something to it. He hasn't been back there. Doesn't give a shit.

Sounds convincing.

Left it lying there on its side. Left her there with it. That time. Since then he's thought about it, about Aaron coming in and seeing it, glitter of broken headlamp glass scattered across the concrete, handlebars poking out from under the edge of the tarp like the hands of a murder victim covered by a sheet at a crime scene. He's imagined Aaron wondering what happened. He's thought about Aaron and about what Aaron might look like when he's sad, when he's disappointed, and he wanted to shatter his own fucking nose.

It doesn't matter.

Is he going to go back and work on it some more?

Fucking hell, she makes him so tired with these questions, and he was tired already. Tired, sullen throb in the back of his head that might mean impending disaster or might mean the usual general hellishness. Why does she give a shit? Why did she give a shit to begin with? Don't fuckin' say you like me, that's bullshit. What does she want from him?

She said. She wants to help him. Quiet. That's what she wants. That's what she's always wanted. That's why she did what she did and why she does what she does. She wants to help people.

Snort. So it's not personal after all, then. He's her fun little project, her fucking fixer-upper, with the therapy and the medication. At least she's finally being honest with him.

She sighs. If he wants to think of himself that way, she can't stop him.

What the fuck, dumb cow, she thinks of him that way, she just fucking said so.

How does he want her to think of him?

Silence. He stares at her, distressingly nonplussed. He's thrown, bitch threw him, and he's had enough of her doing that. Holding his balance is already just about impossible and she keeps knocking him off it. Kicking his legs out from under him with these carefully calculated jabs. It's unfair.

Not that fair is a thing, but it still is.

He lowers his gaze to his green-stained fingers and rubs their tips together. Smooth circles, over and over and over. Flecks and strings of green flesh, damp like drying blood.

He doesn't want her to think about him at all.

Is that true?

Is it true.

The grass whispers as the breeze combs over it, and in the field of his weary vision it turns a bloodless gray. Everything is gray. Everything is blurry, all at once glimpsed through a low fog. The sky is lost to him. The houses, he walls. Even she is growing indistinct. He's slipping away from her. The steps. The house.

He's slipping away from everything.

He doesn't want anyone to think about him. Everyone thinks about him all the fucking time and he's so sick of it. Everyone talks about him, about how to manage him. Maybe they don't do it in front of him, maybe they don't even do it aloud a lot of the time, but they're navigating him. His presence. His state of mind. Where he is, what he wants, doesn't want, what's likely to set him off. How to keep him from screaming at them. How to keep him from attacking them. Attacking himself. How to keep him calm. How to keep him from bleeding all over everything. Keep the damage to his hands and face under control. Keep him fed. Make sure the clothes he wears are at least kind of clean. Make sure he bathes semi-regularly. Brushes his damn teeth. They're about two steps from worrying about how well he wipes his fucking ass, and for all he knows they do worry about that.

No part of him is off limits from their earnestly concerned scrutiny. They won't leave him alone.

Do you want to be alone, Daryl?

And then something happens.

It's happened more than once, though not a lot. Almost exclusively with her. It disturbs him deeply when it comes over him, as powerful as his fits of hysterical rage, his seizures. His storms. It isn't like those; this is easy and swift and bizarrely gentle in how it overwhelms him, and the best way he could ever hope to describe it is that it's as if he's being filled. Something is flowing into him from somewhere else, into all his cracks and broken places. Covering his jagged coastline with softly lapping water.

Or it's welling up inside him, like a spring. Somewhere very far down, something he forgot about. Something he needed to forget. Wants to forget. Shit, it doesn't belong here. It doesn't belong in him. Wanting to claw at his face, beat at his own head - go the fuck AWAY.

Not like Merle. Merle chowing down on his turkey leg of a human arm, hideously amiable smile and teeth streaked with gore. No, it's not like that, the horror he feels.

He can't stop it. Can't stop anything. It happens and the air leaves him in a single rush, and he's made empty to pull it back in all fresh and new. His lungs open to receive it. The worms in his heart are still.

Once he would have done anything to not be alone.

Once. Her softness remains. Intensifies. Somehow she's closer, even if she hasn't moved. When?

Shrug. Long time ago. Before all this. Before he came here, before he died. All that time before, it meant everything to him that he wasn't alone. He had them. The world ended and he lost Merle, but he still had them. All of them. They didn't make him leave. They wanted him there, with them. He had a place. Earned a place. He worked hard to keep it. He was proud of it and of himself, maybe for the first time in his life he was genuinely proud of himself, and he wasn't alone and he wasn't afraid of being alone anymore.

Even when he lost it all, he still had her. So he wasn't alone. She wouldn't let him be alone. She didn't leave him, even when she probably should have. She stayed with him. He was with her. They were together and it was good. It could have been.

Something pulling at his mouth; it hurts like a strained muscle. At some point he realizes that it's a smile.

Lost her. After that he went with a bunch of murdering pricks, worse than murder, real psychos, but he didn't know what they could actually do until it was almost too late, and at least before that he wasn't alone. Then Rick killed them - or not all by himself but he did a lot of the killing - and he was back with them. And Rick said you're my brother and it pierced him, sharp and sweet, and he knew he wouldn't be alone anymore.

And he was certain that would find her and be with her and she would be safe, she would stay with him, and it would be like it was supposed to be. He had faith.

Instead he died. Then they left him behind. Then he woke up in a place that frightened him so badly and he was in so much pain all the time, so confused, so angry and he didn't know why and he hurt people because he couldn't make it stop, and after he left there and them he was alone again, and he's been alone ever since. For months he's been alone. Walked through the dark for hundreds of miles, alone. His ghosts and his demons were never real; he's perfectly aware of that. He invented them because without them the night was too vast and too unbearably empty, and he was all alone inside it. He killed the bad people he found, made himself alone again, and from his victims he created more demons to fill his loneliness.

He desperately believed that once he found her, it would be all right. It would be better. He would be better. He wouldn't be alone. All that agony and all that terror would no longer matter, because it would be like it was, like it was supposed to be, and he would never be alone again.

He believed. He had faith. Then he got here. Got to her. Found her.

Nothing was better. He's still alone.

Does she see? Does she see how completely hopeless this is? Raising his head to look at her, so full of this wretched thing, this shade, this man who died six hundred miles away and rotted to nothing in the trunk of a car. Never made it. Shouldn't be here. Yet here he is, taken over, and he won't stop fucking talking. Beaming through his eyes and respirating through his pores like the smoke from his forgotten and dying cigarette. He never wanted to be alone. Now he can't stop being alone. He no longer knows how to not be alone.

It doesn't matter what he wants. What matters is what is. If anything does. And he is alone. They think about him and talk about him and at him, and they press in close around him and hover and pester and coddle and pet and they try to help him, but they can't reach him. No one can.

He doesn't get to come back. He was out there too long. He doesn't belong here and he never will. He doesn't belong anywhere.

Except in the trunk of that fucking car.

She's simply looking at him. He still can't see her eyes. He doesn't know how much of it he actually said. He doesn't remember. It's possible that he said nothing at all. It's possible that he's been sitting here for five, maybe ten minutes and gazing at her in total silence while words spin in the mud of his brain and spatter it all over the walls of his skull.

She shakes her head. He's wrong. It does matter what he wants. It does.

No. Patient with her. She's not a dumb cow. She's not a bitch. She's a well-intentioned woman who wants to help him, but she doesn't understand. It doesn't matter. It never has.

Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come.

You're gonna die. Everyone in this place is gonna die. This place? It's gonna burn. Nothin' can stop that. Nothin' can change it. No one can save you. You don't belong here. You don't get to live. It's not your fault. It's just how it is. It's just how it's supposed to be. It never coulda gone any other way.

Everyone is gonna die. And I'll die alone. And no one will be left to remember I was ever here at all.

Her coffee is cold on the step beside her, her glasses are off and trembling in her hand. She's looking at him and she's crying, tears streaming down her face, and he feels a distant, dreamy kind of envy as he watches them fall. A vague desire for something he'll never have - so the desire is ultimately pointless. Just like everything else.

I'm sorry. Please go away.

Please leave me alone.

She's not asleep when the tap at her window comes.

She couldn't say why, but she's not surprised. She didn't see him, earlier. Rick told her he said he didn't want to see anyone. She respected that; she has to. Left, came home, ate and did nothing much until she felt she could justify going to bed. Empty house. Empty room even with her in it. She can't sleep, staring up at the shadows churning slowly across the ceiling, and now as she sits up and rises to her feet, she understands that she was waiting for him.

His mind remains largely unknown territory, its inhabitants adherents to rules and laws and customs she's unable to comprehend. Yet at the same time she does know him. His patterns and habits might not be familiar, but the shapes they take and the logic according to which they operate are still his. The skeleton of his structure. The frame. His morphology. He isn't a completely different animal.

There are things she can nearly predict.

It might be part of why she can't make herself give up on him.

She doesn't bother going to the window. She doesn't bother throwing something on over her shorts and camisole. She's moving calmly and easily as she heads down the hall to the front door and lays her palm over the cool handle. But she hesitates.

Only a few seconds. But something catches her, unseen and unfelt hands on her shoulders, holding her back. The last three times she's seen him, the last three days, he's been good. He's been sweet. He's been himself. Sad and hurting and struggling so hard it's clearly been making the pain much worse, but he's been there and he's been trying, whatever he may think about himself. A long stretch. Enough to make her hope.

Hope dangerously much. Because this can't last. She's playing the odds. He's strong but his strength can only extend so far. Sooner or later the darkness will drag him back down.

He loves her. He loves her with everything in him, and she believes it with everything in her. But the fact remains: inside the man she loves a wolf is prowling, a wolf who hates her and wants her and wants to destroy and devour her, and that man and that wolf are standing together outside her door.

Let me come in.

Which one of them will she see when she opens it?

There's only one way to know.

She opens the door, and she lets him in.