Chapter 37: the saints can't help me now, the ropes have been unbound

She's not sure when exactly it happens, but when she opens her eyes she's tucked against his side with her hand on his chest and her head on his shoulder, and he's breathing deep with an arm curled around her, face turned toward hers. Sleeping, it looks like. Though as she blinks at him and shifts her leg against his, fingers stroking upward and tracing his collarbone, she knows he's not.

Warm light, still early afternoon. She doesn't have to leave yet. Neither does he.

She ducks her head and kisses the knob of bone at the top of his shoulder, and he murmurs something, eyelids fluttering open. He gazes at her, blue and bright, and turns enough to allow himself to lift his other hand and tangle his fingers back into her hair.

He wants to say something. She can sense it beating against the inside of his throat, his head, trying to break loose like a trapped bird. But he can't. He shakes his head very slightly. And she doesn't have to ask why.

He doesn't like to say things unless he thinks they're right.

"I liked that," she breathes, closing her hand around his wrist. "Doin' that. I liked it a lot."

His smile is small and unrestrained and deeply awkward, and he flicks his eyes away, abruptly refusing to meet hers. He murmurs something, and she can only guess at the words.

Dreogan ic cweman thu?

She nuzzles him, presses in closer. "Mm?"

He swallows, clearly still unable to meet her gaze, and the words are barely more audible. But she hears them, and once again that warm brightness flares in her belly. It's nothing to do with fucking him. It's not that at all.

"Did I please you?"

"Oh." She sighs, cups his cheek and tips his forehead down to hers. Nods. She doesn't know what else to do. But somehow she doubts he needs more than that.

His needs really are very simple.

"Yeah. You did."

A shiver rolls through him - identical to that first one she truly noticed on the porch of the farmhouse under that Scead night sky. When she first realized that she had this power, to make him happy this way. She was scared then. Terrified, of what it meant. Like someone had just handed her a weapon with an uncertain trigger, something she might fire without meaning to.

She wasn't stupid. But she was wrong.

"I don't wanna leave," he whispers, and smiles again, shaky. "I don't wanna go anywhere. Fuck, I just wanna stay here."

"I wish we could." As if she would need to say it. She rolls even closer to him, pressed all along his side and slinging a leg high across his thigh, just about hooked over his hip. He's not hard, but she knows without having to give it a second's consideration - with a flush of wicked satisfaction - that if he was, she would be able to grind herself against him in a way basically guaranteed to drive him insane.

She ghosts her lips across his, and he moans softly and she grins and nips at him.

Grins, sure. But behind it, something darker and heavier is starting to weigh her down. She gropes at it, trying to get a grip on its shape, because there are any number of things it could be, but he solidifies it for her by extending his hand and, with exquisite care and a little nervousness in the tremble of his arm, takes hold of her left wrist and turns it, veins up.

She knows why. Just because he's essentially her slave - even her enthusiastically willing one - that doesn't mean he has no understanding of give-and-take. It doesn't mean he has no expectations.

She would probably do well to remember that.

She bathed him. Touched him, touched him in places that clearly drained him. He surrendered to her, and not because he had to do it. He was afraid, even if most of his fear had faded, but he wanted to. She hasn't missed the relief beneath the tension. Now he feels loose, boneless to his core, as if his body has been waiting for years to have this lifted from it.

Now he turns her wrist into the warm light and gazes at it, the delicate pale blue of her veins, the almost invisible wrinkles just beneath the heel of her palm, the bone curving the side… And the thin scar slashing across those branching rivers of blood.

He doesn't have to ask. He's about to, lips parting as his head ducks slightly and his eyes drop, but she doesn't give him a chance.

"I tried to kill myself."

No sense in mincing words. His eyes widen - but she's not sure she detects much in the way of real surprise. He's silent, lying there partway beneath her, cradling her wrist in his thick, powerful hand in a way that somehow manages to convey to her that he's being so careful, though he knows at the same time that she doesn't need it. Not from him. She's not fragile. He won't break her.

"A few months after the fire. No one fuckin' believed me. I was tryin' to tell people, they all said I was just traumatized, and after a while I couldn't take the way they looked at me. Bastards." No particular heat. Everything she feels here went cold a long damn time ago. "Kids at school. Doctors. My aunt and uncle. They were never gonna believe me. Never. And at night I just kept seein' it happen, over and over. So it just didn't…"

She shakes her head. "Finally didn't seem like it was worth it anymore. I was sick of it. I wanted to be done. So."

"But you didn't," he says, voice rough and low. Gentle.

"No. I didn't. I did part of one, and I decided I didn't wanna finish it right before my aunt came in the bathroom and found me." She grimaces. Still very cold. "So I went back in the hospital for a week or so. They got me a new doctor. Some great new drugs. Made me feel like a fuckin' zombie. But I took 'em. Least for a while. I wanted to live."

She stares at him - his narrow, crystalline blue eyes, wolf's face hiding behind the man, and the way he's holding her now…

It's like him. Like she was waiting for him to do that. Waiting to be able to let him.

"I wanted to live so I could hunt down the things that did it to us. I wanted to live so I could understand it. So I could kill 'em all."

He nods. But what flickers across his face is sad, and uncertainly so, and his jaw works as if he wants to say something and isn't sure he should. Isn't sure he can. But he pushes onward, and he does.

"Got part of that, anyway."

"What part?"

"You understand. You get why it happened."

"I guess I do." She tugs her wrist free, nothing forceful in the movement, and he releases her almost before she begins to do so. She gets some of it. She suspects there's a lot more that she'll never fully grasp, but at this point she's prepared to satisfy herself with what she has.

Especially since it seems they now have bigger problems.

She turns away from him and onto her side, facing the window with her arm crooked under her head and his body long and solid at her back. Her eyes unfocus until the room is a pale yellow blur, far more cheerful and more comfortable than it actually is. "I'm never gonna be able to kill 'em all."

He doesn't answer. She hears him moving behind her, feels his knees pressing into the backs of hers, one leg between her calves as his hand settles on her hip. Somehow, almost entirely without her noticing it, being in bed with him like this started feeling completely natural. She fits with him, finds comfortable places without needing to try. He responds to her own changes in position, accommodates her and himself. Maybe it's just Scyld. Maybe it's also Heala.

Maybe it's neither.

"We kill as many as we can," he says finally, breath warm at the nape of her neck. "You can help us."

Except for hunters. Except for towers and kings. Except for the end of the fucking world. "Ain't gonna be that simple now."

"No," he murmurs, and kisses her shoulder. "Never was."

"You're gonna have to mate with me," she says, very quiet. "Sooner or later. You're gonna have to."

Deeper silence.

Thicker. The traffic noise and occasional voices outside are abruptly muted, and the light seems to dim and lose some of its subtle color. Daryl's hand tightens on her hip as his body goes rigid, and she feels the points of claws lurking beneath the disguise of his blunt nails.

"Beth." Bloodless and hoarse, and nothing else.

"You're gonna have to." Finally she's saying it, and if he's fighting panic, it's only increasing her own calm. They've both been dodging this long enough. They can't anymore. Not after last night. Not after what almost happened, and what she found a way to give him. Give both of them. What she soothed won't stay soothed for long.

Maybe doing it really is that dangerous. Maybe it isn't. But she's certain that either way, it's not something that should just happen.

"It could-"

"Hurt me? Yeah, so could walkin' outside right now. So could bein' here with you." She rolls onto her back and his hand moves with her, settling on her lower belly just above the tightly curled line of her pubic hair. "Every fuckin' second now, I think we're riskin' our lives. Every time we try to go after whatever this is. Every time we try to learn more. The Scead. The Benescead. The Library. Before that, when you met me. It's all dangerous. Everythin'. Every goddamn breath."

She lowers her hand and covers his, small and warm cupped over his big scarred knuckles as she turns her head to look at him. Far from narrow, his eyes are wide, liquid, frightened and stricken - and hungry. Aching. More than any of those things. What's ultimately starving in him has nothing to do with fucking her and everything to do with what he said the thing itself is called.

Union of souls.

He's desperately incomplete. She's looking at someone in a state of partial existence. Waiting to be whole. For a few seconds she can't breathe.

"What're we fightin' for?"

"The world," he whispers, but she shakes her head.

"That's too easy. Any of you could be fightin' for the world. There's gotta be more. What's Rick fightin' for?"

"Us." Unhesitating, and utterly confident. "His wife. His kids."

"What about Carol?"

"She's got a kid too." His voice dips, traces the edge of faltering, and Beth wonders why. "Little girl."

"Does Michonne have a kid?"

He hesitates, and she knows she's not imagining the shadow falling across his face. She feels it, like the graze of a cool fingertip. "She… She did. Had a family. Gone now."

"Oh." Not exactly awkward, but she drops her own eyes from his and stares up at the white, water-spotted squares of the ceiling. There always has been something about Michonne, from the first time Beth met her. Something dark. Knotted like scar tissue. She was never able to define it.

But it doesn't disprove the point.

"Y'all fight for family. That's what the cyne is, isn't it? It's not just a pack. It's a family. Family is what comes next. Family is the world." She interweaves their fingers and squeezes, and realizes with a slow, flushed wave what his hand is really covering, and marvels at the fact that she's thinking along these lines at all. That she ever would.

She died. She got out of that fire, but she died. Something else stood up in her place. Here she is in bed with a werewolf, and she's thinking about the making of life.

"You told me you were all dyin' out 'cause you weren't havin' babies. Not… Not Hathsta ones. You can kill all you want, but if you can't do that…"

"Beth." Abruptly he lifts himself over her, disentangles his hand from hers and cups her face with his paw of a hand. Braced above her like this, he looks totally wild, totally inhuman, and once again it's as though she can see his form blurring at the edges, stretching and trembling as it threatens to come apart and reveal what's beneath. "The fuck're you sayin'?"

I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying. Suddenly she's afraid. Not of him - him nearly pinning her down this way is flooding her with calm, with the deep instinct that she's as safe as she can possibly be - but of everything beyond him. Where these words in her came from. Where they've been traveling together since she first saw him plunging out of the dark to do battle in her name like some kind of surreal knight errant.

"I lost my family," she breathes - and her breath is choked as tears well her eyes and trickle down to pool irritatingly in her ears. "I could fight for them, but they're dead. They're gone. I could kill a hundred thousand of those things and it wouldn't bring Daddy back, or Mama, or Maggie or Shawn. In the end it'd just be me."

"It wouldn't just be you." He leans down, brow against hers. "Wouldn't ever just be you."

"So I can fight for you."

"Lufiend," he whispers. "Agendfra. Eower heorte sy min guthfana."

She doesn't need him to tell her. She should. A few of the words she knows, but a couple she doesn't, and the context normally wouldn't be enough to make her confident. But he says them and they enter her head and unravel themselves - or bring her to them - and she understands.

Sweetheart. Mistress. Your heart is my battle-standard.

"Then sooner or later we can't fight this anymore." She combs her fingers into his hair, frames the sides of his head. Like she has before when he's been in fierd, his huge wolf's head and his muzzle, his tongue flicking against her mouth. "It doesn't have to be now, I know… I know there's so much shit we still gotta do, and I gotta go to work-" She laughs, sudden and incredulous and painful, gone as fast as it came. "But you know. You know." She gazes up at him, eyes searching his face. "Don't you?"

He doesn't move back from her, doesn't lift himself. Like he did when she was in his lap, he does it right there with her practically in his arms, the sharp cracks as his bones break one after the other beneath his deforming and reforming skin, and she watches, still with that same awe she felt the first time she asked him to do this for her and he did, as the wolf comes into being above her.

Not because he's running from anything. Not because he's trying to distract her, or him. He crouches over her with his fur glossy in the sun, forepaws at either side of her shoulders and his thick neck bent as he peers into her face.

This is because he needs to be himself.

"Ic oncnawan." He closes his eyes. There's resignation in his voice and his face - but that's not all it is.

Not nearly all.

"Aliefe hwilthrag," he says softly. "Hwon. Besece."

Again, somehow the words make their way into her - the vowels and the consonants, the forms, the feel and the sense she knows is there, and she meets that sense and cradles them in her hands, watching the light glint off them like the strands of his fur.

I know.

Give me time. A little. Please.

She reaches up and again she does what she's come to love doing and frames his face with her hands, her thumbs stroking the place where his head lengthens into his muzzle. A low rumble makes its way from his chest into his throat and she leans up to kiss the cool, wet end of his noise, the seam of his lips, the scruffier fur at his chin.

The truth is that he wouldn't have needed to ask for time. She doesn't want to do this now. She does, and she's wanted to do it since that first night with her fingers working in her pussy and her ass in the air, but every instinct she has - and apparently she has some she wasn't previously aware of - is telling her that it isn't time yet. Something isn't right.

Something is different now. It's about last night. He does understand. So does she.

So this isn't a thing to fear.

He's smiling when he raises his head, that slight curve of his lips that makes his face look so perfectly caught between human and animal, and glides the tips of his claws down her side. Like always, the scratch sends wonderful little sparks dancing through her nerves and she arches and breathes a laugh, her hands curving over the thick muscles of his forearms. She spreads her legs without a second's hesitation when he slides his knee between them and laughs again, rolls her hips up to chase the pressure he won't quite give her.

Naturally he wasn't done with her after the shower. No way. And it's not like she wants to fight him on it.

They've got time. She can give them both that much.

She parts her lips when he licks at her and licks back, nips at him, captures his tongue and sucks at it before he's tugging himself free and flicking a line down her throat to her collarbones. The air cools the wet trail he leaves behind and she feels herself unfurling under it, under him, the way he's pinning her down with his mouth alone. Where he's headed isn't exactly a puzzle, and a sigh that's close to another laugh rolls out of her as she strokes her fingers through the thicker fur of his shoulders.

Warm. Strong. Soft. Somehow it's the softness she keeps coming back to, and maybe it's because beneath the softness is the way she's never really felt afraid with him, not really - naked and laid out under a monster that could kill her with a casual flex of a muscle, and once more as safe as she can ever remember feeling.

And he's so beautiful like this. Shining mound of his back as he bends to travel lower, circling her nipples with rapid swirls of his tongue, the polished gleam of his teeth, curved claws at her hips. She pushes up on her elbows to watch him, her breath coming in hard pulls, and when he reaches her lower belly and the muscles there flutter, she moans and lolls her head back between her shoulders.

Sunlight glowing red against her closed eyelids. Gleeful scream of a kid outside, thump of bass as a car passes below. And his growl and her groan intertwining as he grips her by the hips and angles her body upward and licks in a hot, firm swipe from the crack of her ass to her clit.

On the beach he practically assaulted her. They were both desperate, and giddy and exhausted and half insane with the madness they'd been plunged into. Now he's unhurried, and he settles onto his belly and cups her ass with both paws, claws digging wonderfully into the small of her back. He gives her more of those long, slow licks, faster flicks over her clit only to slide back down into that slow, steady pace, and she gropes for his ears and the top of his head and keens at the ceiling. There's one thing she wants and he's very purposefully not giving it to her, and she could demand it. She did before, and he obeyed.

Not this time. This time he gets there on his own.

More noises are blending and blurring - the fragments of his name escaping her lips, more of that heady bass, creak of her bedframe and mattress as they bow under his weight, and then his name collapsing into please, God, Daryl, please do it, please, and his low, rough laugh and the slurp ringing off the walls as he enters her with his tongue.

She felt it, on the beach. But she didn't, not really. Again, she was too desperate, too frantic with wanting him in her any way she could get him, and now she goes loose, hands falling to her sides, and the sound that rises from her is one she's never heard from herself before. It's caught between a sigh and a broken wail, and he's filling her, flexing inside her, slipping back and pushing in again and somehow pressing into her from every side. Soft and slick and his breath searing her inner thighs, teeth digging into her mound and her belly, and in a brilliant burst she sees herself from the outside and it looks like he's eating her alive.

If - when, when - he mates with her, it'll be more than this. She's sure. But what remains of her brain can't even begin to imagine something better than this, can't begin to imagine feeling more full, more claimed.

Loved.

She's already riding so high that she barely notices when she starts to come. It's simply another level. It washes in and then drowns her, pummels her from the bones out and keeps going and going, and gazing up at the ceiling all she can see is a churning ocean of light. Something she could almost fall through. He could take her. They could go there together. Then she hears his muffled cry and the bedframe rattles like an earthquake and she knows they are.

Together.

Beautiful.

Too hot.

She's heavy and sticky, sweat coating her skin like it's the middle of summer, and she huffs a laugh as she rolls out of his furry arms and away, groping on the bedside table for the cell phone she realizes a split second later is gone forever.

Shit.

She has no idea what time it is anymore. No idea how much later. She knew they had time, but not all the time ever, and she shoves herself up and scrubs at her face, groaning when her legs and hips and everything aches. Her inner thighs are tacky with her own juices, more sweat making her itch, and she drags her hair over one shoulder and she turns at the waist to look back at him.

He's lying on his side, lazy and sprawled as much as the space will allow, eyes half closed and the fur on his belly matted with his own come, his tail slung over one hind leg. She hasn't paid much attention to it, she realizes, and it's sleek and luxuriant, and all she wants to do is fall into him and bury her face in it.

She has to get the fuck up.

He rumbles sleepily - protestingly - and makes a halfhearted grab for her, but she's already on her feet, arching her back and groaning again. "We gotta get outta here."

She's rooting in her dresser for a clean pair of jeans when she hears his own groan and the series of cracks that signal his change. "Quit your fuckin' job."

"And pay rent with what? My smile?" She drags her jeans up, hopping them over her hips. "My ass?"

"Move in with me."

"I like your place. I don't like it that much." And she does. She does like it, a lot. More than she might have expected. How its strangeness is far more welcoming to her now than it was, how being there is like entering a night totally apart from the rest of the city. How it feels to be in his den with him, how being in that room is somehow - very weirdly - a little like being in his arms. She likes it. But it's not hers.

And he knows that.

She's hooking her bra and reaching for a shirt when he encircles her from behind, pulls her against him and nips at her ear. She squeaks, squirms, and relaxes when he presses his lips slowly to the edge of her cheekbone just beneath her temple.

Close to her scar.

"I wanna stay with you," he whispers. "I don't ever wanna leave."

He's not talking about the apartment.

She takes a slow breath and covers his hands with her own, closes her eyes. Now she's certain: at some point back there they fought past all the bullshit and all the barriers and reached a decision. Not now. Not yet. But this is unavoidable. This is going to happen.

So there's no sense in being afraid of it anymore.

"So don't." She leans into him, cranes her neck and nuzzles at his jaw. As always, washed through by how warm he is. How strong. That smell still lingering around him, one of the first things she noticed about him. Sweat and leather and blood. Smoke. Wolf. Wolf more than anything else, dark and wild. "I'm tellin' you."

She feels his smile widen. She's given him a command he wouldn't imagine wanting to disobey.

But they do have to leave.

He releases her and she finishes dressing, takes a few minutes to drag a brush through her hair and tie it back, and when she turns around he's dressed too and standing by the window, cigarette between his fingers as he stares out. His head is lowered and his focus is clearly on the street below.

Tight focus. His eyes are sharply narrowed, his teeth are slightly bared.

She feels the hair on her arms begin to rise as she joins him, glancing up at him and then following his gaze. "What?"

He jerks his chin downward. "Someone's there."

At first she thinks there's no way to be certain the man is there for her. He's near her door, sure, pacing the sidewalk and looking down at the phone in his hand, but he could be there for anything, and he's totally nondescript - open jacket against the breeze, worn loose jeans, Braves cap half shadowing his light brown face. He looks like a hundred people she sees every day.

But then he raises his head and looks directly up at her, and her breath catches in her throat as heat pulses into her hands.

"Who is he?"

Daryl shakes his head and steps away. "Dunno. Gonna see."

"I'm comin' with you."

He shoots her a frown over his shoulder, already halfway to the door. "No. You stay behind the wards."

"You're really gonna tell me what to do?" She snatches her jacket from the back of the couch, at his side in four long strides with one palm on the hilt of her knife. "Let's go."

He grits his teeth and she doesn't miss the barely audible growl deep in his chest - not at her but at the situation in general - but he allows her to step past him, and as she starts down the stairs she hears him shut the door behind them.

Kind of hard.

The sunlight stabs briefly at her eyes as she steps out into it, and she blinks, halts. The man is right in front of her, slipping his phone back into his pocket, and her hand is still hovering near her belt as Daryl looms behind her. She doesn't need to see him to know that he's hunching as if ready to charge, head lowered, nostrils flaring. The image is as vivid as if she had rearview mirrors in her eyes.

But the man merely looks her up and down, and she can't detect any malice. Any threat. His eyes flick to Daryl and back to her, and his brows draw together.

"Beth Greene?"

She lifts her head and pushes her shoulders back, stands erect. Strong. The hair on her arms hasn't lain down, but she's not afraid. Suddenly the street seems weirdly deserted and faded, almost receded, as if that other world she now half occupies has shifted and pulled her onto another level of itself, but she belongs here more than she ever knew, and accepting that is proving easier than she ever would have expected. This is her territory. He's on her turf.

He should be the one who's afraid.

"Why?"

"My name is Lawrence." His voice is low, smooth, very calm. "Lawrence Cole. I'm a private detective. Your aunt and uncle's attorney hired me to find you."

She blinks again, and not because of the light. This is unexpected. Actually unexpected, when she was thinking that might not be possible anymore. At her elbow, she feels Daryl stiffen in an echo of her surprise.

If this man is lying, he's an excellent liar.

"Why?" she repeats, and at least she manages to keep her voice steady. Edged, wary, but that isn't betraying the fact that he's just about knocked her on her ass.

She never wanted to see them again. She really thought they might leave her alone.

Cole's mouth thins and he releases a breath. He looks… regretful. And as with everything else so far, it seems genuine. "Miss Greene, I'm very sorry to have to tell you this, but-"

But she already knows what's coming. This is not surprising at all. It's not surprising because this is what happens to her, what's going to keep happening, and her core is sagging into the cradle of her hips, all the air flowing out of her as he says it. She didn't love them. It shouldn't matter to her. She doesn't want to feel this. She doesn't want to know. She wanted to be done.

She wanted to go.

"Miss Greene, your aunt and uncle are dead."