Note: Like I said on Tumblr earlier, this is the last chapter I'll post until the rest of the thing is written. I don't know for sure how many more chapters we're talking about there, but I don't anticipate them taking more than another week or so to complete. I'm also not yet sure how I'll parcel them out, but as I said before, I'll try to minimize the cruelty.
While, y'know. Being cruel. Because I'm me.
Anyway, I'm happy to be able to post this. This is a chapter I've been wanting to get to for a long time. "Death Dream" by Frightened Rabbit is my mental soundtrack for the middle scene here (also the source for the chapter title), and ended up guiding a huge amount of how it was written. Blame grenye/stubbornmarrow for that. ❤️
Chapter 36: a still life is the last I will see of you
You said Tell me about your books, your visions made of flesh and light and I said This is the Moon. This is the Sun. Let me name the stars for you. Let me take you there. The splash of my tongue melting you like a sugar cube... We were in the gold room where everyone finally gets what they want, so I said What do you want, sweetheart? and you said Kiss me. Here I am leaving you clues. I am singing now while Rome burns. We are all just trying to be holy. My applejack, my silent night, just mash your lips against me. We are all going forward. None of us are going back. - Richard Siken
She doesn't need to see him in the light to know that getting to her took almost everything he has.
She opens the door and for half a second she thinks he's actually going to fall on her, swaying with one hand on the doorframe and the other hanging loosely at his side, his shoulders slumped, head down. He raises it as she steps forward, reaching for him, and the look on his face, in his hollow eyes - she knows it. She's seen it. The evening she went into his room and he was limp under the blankets, and moving even so much as his hand was nearly beyond his power. That hand lying softly curled on the floor - and that was something she had seen before as well.
And he told her he hated her. And he loved her. And begged her not to leave him alone.
Same look now. Same affect. Same everything. His eyes are blankly exhausted, and at first glance they look empty, but as she curls an arm around his waist and he leans on her and shuffles across the threshold, she catches the glint in them. The light.
He's still fighting. He realized what was happening to him and he got out - of that house, of that room. He crossed the street to get to her, and those yards must have felt like the crossing of an ocean. A journey that almost broke him. He was determined. Single-minded. He dragged himself onward with everything he had left and he washed ashore on the other coast.
He made it.
"C'mon." She slides her shoulder under his arm and bears him up, pressed against his side, the bars of his ribcage still so terribly near his skin. He walks another few feet and she reaches back to swing the door shut behind them, and then they're cloaked by the shadows.
She never bothered to turn a light on, either.
But she can make out his face, even so. Lowered to her - the outlines of his features. They look more defined than usual. Craggy and worn. As he did when he came to her that first night, he looks old.
She lifts her hands and sweeps his hair back. It's pointless, it immediately falls back into place over his eyes, but in that brief interim she sees him again, how unbelievably fucking tired he is, and her throat clenches in on itself, blocking her when she tries to swallow and knotting beneath her collarbones.
This isn't like when she came to his room. This is worse. She has no idea how he's even standing.
God, he's so fucking strong.
She presses her thumbs against his cracked lips and traces them to the corners of his mouth, and he whimpers softly, his eyes falling closed as he covers her wrists with shaking hands. She can't give up on him. She can't. Even if she wanted to, he comes to her like this and she knows she can't.
"What do you need?"
He shakes his head and she expects that. His mind is as exhausted as the rest of him. He probably has no idea what he needs, no idea how to help himself or what to ask for - except for it to stop. He almost certainly doesn't know how to make it do that, and almost certainly doesn't care how, so long as his current existence no longer consists of this.
This walking death.
Then he whispers You, and she sighs and tips her forehead against his chest, feeling the plodding thud of his heart against her brow.
"I don't wanna be alone." Still nothing more than that ragged whisper. He's throwing the words in front of an exhalation, the only way they'll ever make it out of him. His vocal cords are useless, numb bands of tissue in his throat, and she aches to hear what he's managing in their place. "They're gone. They went away. Can't see 'em anymore."
She lifts her head and looks up at him, palms over the ridges of his cheekbones. He's standing so close to her, hasn't completely stopped leaning on her, but all at once she's alarmed by how little warmth he's radiating. His skin is cool. Not clammy like a man in the grip of a fever but instead very dry. She takes a breath, searching his face.
"Who's gone?"
But she already knows.
"The things." He's never had a name for them, not that he's ever used with her. "They never left before. Not like this." He shivers, sudden and violent, and once more she thinks he might fall, and if he does she doesn't have the first clue what she'll do. "I'm scared. Beth, I'm-"
He breaks off into deep silence, and she doesn't know how to fill it. He's never told her that. Never actually said it, not like that, even when she knew he was terrified. Panicked. Saying it now, his head in her hands, it's once again like it was before and the age melts away from him and he's a boy alone and hurting in the dark, lost in a nightmare he can't wake up from and with no one to guide him out.
She's not seeing an illusion, and it's not her imagination. This is yet another echo of yet another person he's been. Yet another person it's too late to save, and the knowledge is a needle at the base of her skull.
"You're not alone." She tugs his head down, so gentle, and kisses his brow. Kisses the scar and the place where he keeps picking it open, the roughness of the scab against her lips. "You're with me. I'm here."
This shouldn't feel sacramental. But she can't escape the uneasy conviction that every move she makes here might be the most important thing she'll ever do. She can't save this version of him, either. She's still sure of that. But she is here with him, perhaps the last of his demons, and that confers responsibilities upon her. There are things she can give him, whether or not he knows to ask for them.
She glances further down the hall, the dark rise of the staircase and the wide entrance to the kitchen, the living room, the smaller hallway that leads back to her bedroom. The house always looks bigger at night, and parts of it always feel less welcoming. Less safe. Whatever else happens now, it shouldn't happen here. The muscles of his legs are quivering. It won't be much longer before they give out and he does fall, and she already knows she won't be able to get him up again. And he's going to fall either way.
He should fall into something that can receive him.
"C'mon," she repeats, and maneuvers her shoulder back under his arm, pulls him forward. "C'mon and lie down with me."
He sinks down onto her bed without being prompted. The second she releases him and steps back he's going down in a controlled slide, the mattress bouncing slightly under his weight - very slight, under weight that remains slight as well. Too much so.
She didn't bother with the light in here, either, and she doesn't now. The moon is rising and spilling in through the window, pouring through the panes and seeping in where she has the sash half raised. As it always does, it drains the color from everything and makes it all look pristine, pure, and dark with an corresponding purity that equally comforts and unsettles her. Her hands and her bare legs when she glances down, the total absence of illumination in the corners. The sharp lines and extreme curves, nothing quite the size it should be. The effect is most extreme when it touches him; the window is at his back where he sits and yet again he's silhouetted - haloed in silver, his face a single fall of shadow.
He sits like he stood: hunched, slumped, seemingly on the verge of toppling, and she braces one knee on the bed beside him as she helps him turn himself and lie back. No boots, of course. No boots and old clothes hanging too loose on his frame. They make him look smaller than he is. She doesn't like it. Hasn't since she first saw it, which was his fourth or fifth day. It hasn't improved with time or its familiarity.
He rolls onto his side and faces her, back still to the window and his knees drawing up, arms tucked in close. Only the flicker of his eyes as he blinks marks their location with any reliability, and she hesitates, leaning over him, combing her fingers through his hair. He stares up at her, wordless.
What do you need?
You.
She climbs the rest of the way onto the bed and lowers herself to lie beside him.
She's not touching him anymore. He's not touching her. They're lying face to face, both half-fetal, the rise and fall of his shoulders almost imperceptible as he breathes. She follows it, tracks it with a kind of dull desperation that laces itself into her muscles, but suddenly it's as if he's receding and drifting away from her again. Smaller and smaller into the covers - but his eyes remain, black and enormous, fixed on her and fixing her in place.
She fights back a shudder. He shouldn't see it. He might misinterpret.
He might interpret perfectly.
She extends a hand. Not sure what for; to catch him, maybe. Secure him before he floats any further back out into that ocean he just crossed. Establish his true distance, prove to herself that he can be touched. That he's here. Her fingers trail down the ragged line of his jaw and it shifts as he pulls in a hard breath and somehow finds the will to send more words out with it.
"I dunno how much longer I can do this."
The pad of her thumb finds his lower lip again, presses. Traces. His mouth is trembling as if he's on the verge of tears, though she knows he's not. "Do what?"
She knows that too.
"Try." He's quiet for a moment, eyes closed, motionless beneath her hand. "I know what you said. I know what you see. But that's not all you see."
He's pushed her before, herded her - sometimes clumsily and sometimes not - in the direction of honesty. But even if he's technically been blunt, it's never felt like this. Not this kind of weary gentleness. No anger. No frustration or impatience. He's merely lying in her bed and making it abundantly plain that he's not going to accept anything less than the truth.
That if he's owed anything, it's that.
"I'm bad. There's somethin' bad in me." He's curling in tighter on himself and she has to chase him with her fingers, cupping his cheek as she leans her upper body closer to his. That, too, he's said as much. But this is a new thing. He angles his head up enough to meet her eyes, his own unfocused and faintly jittery. It's like the last remnants of his panic are seated there. Or the battle he's fighting simply to stay lucid. "I came back wrong. Beth… I never shoulda been here at all."
"That's not true."
"And that's bullshit." Something she might be willing to call a smile. An awful one, twisted and sad. "No matter how much I try, ain't gonna make no difference. No matter how good I do, ain't gonna last. It's gonna be fucked in the end. I'm gonna hurt someone." At last he lifts his hand and reaches for her, and her eyes flutter briefly closed and she can't hide her shudder this time as he ghosts his chewed fingertips from her temple down her cheek to her jaw. They were healing, and they don't look nearly as bad as they did, but he's still going at them. Fresh blood is crusted around his nail beds. Patches of his cuticles are raw and red.
Christ, she would give anything for him to keep touching her like this. No poisonous, hungry desire, not that she can sense. No mutilated hatred. No vicious rage. And every movement is slow, clearly requiring enormous effort, but he can move. He's emerging from the gray, even if only a little.
He's touching her like he would have, if she hadn't been taken from him and he hadn't stopped. If he had continued his tentative, innocent explorations of her body and the ways in which his could come into contact with it. If they had made it past Oh.
He's touching her like he loves her.
"I'm gonna hurt you."
"You're not." You stupid fucking Pollyanna bitch, you forget who you're in bed with?
"I don't want to. Fuck, you know I don't want to. But I will." Somehow without her noticing he shifted nearer, and now his lips are nearly brushing her brow. She can feel their movements stirring the air just above her skin, and his breath doing the same - and it's still not very warm. That alarming lack of heat persists. "I'm not gonna get better. I'm not gonna belong. Best I'm doin' right now is pretendin'. And I'm so tired." A breath heaves out of him. "I'm so fuckin' tired."
On his knees in front of her, gazing up at her. Pleading. No. No, he is not asking her for that. That's not what this is. She won't let it be. She wraps an arm around his shoulders and tugs him across the tiny remaining distance, meets him there, buries her face in his hair.
"You just gotta keep holdin' on."
He sighs and it ripples through him like a disturbance on the surface of dark water. "How much longer? When do I get to be done?" He shrugs her away enough to tip his head back and catch her eyes with his own, and they're shining with how profoundly himself he is, and she can't breathe at all. "When does it stop?"
When the words come to her, they escape on her own bloodless whisper. Echo of his. "Don't. Daryl… I love you, please… Please don't do this."
"Do what?"
You know. Her fingers clench in the thin fabric of his shirt, digging into the hard muscle it covers. As if she can keep him here by virtue of pure physical exertion. "Don't give up like this. I told you, I can't…" She practically lunges forward, burrowing into him, pressed chest to hip with one leg hooked over the back of his knee. Finally she can feel his heat, though it's faint, rising to her from a core trapped deep inside him, and it's something. "I can't lose you again, I can't do that."
"What if I can't do this?"
"You can."
She's fighting him. She doesn't know exactly when it happened, where the line was and when she crossed it, but she's a step away from shaking him, punching him, butting her forehead against his breastbone, her voice tense and fierce and strangled. She's fighting but he's not; he's circling his arms around her, cheek against the crown of her head, and absurdity upon absurdity: all at once he's the one comforting her. Frightened sobs are crawling their way up from her diaphragm and he's holding her so tight, a blur of silver and shadows in her broken field of vision, and the hideous and still half unbelievable thought comes to her that he might be asking for her permission.
Her permission to go. If not actually asking for her help.
I don't wanna be like this anymore.
I want it to stop.
There was a chance. Denise said. As long as he believed it was possible, he had a chance. Best chance he had. As long as he had faith.
Wouldn't have killed him to have a little of that.
"I love you, Beth." Whisper, a breath stretched into an agonized smile, and she pulls back enough to see that the smile is beautiful before she's falling into him again and sealing her mouth over his.
He gasps, stiffens, and for a few seconds he's frozen. She's frozen with him, gripping his shoulders, lips motionless against his own, and a tiny voice in the back of her mind - perhaps the one remaining sane part of her - is screaming no, no, oh my god don't don't fucking do it. Tiny but loud enough that she wonders if he can hear it.
He pulls back again. Wrenches free from her and stares at her, his candle-flicker eyes the only light in the dark angles of his face. Blinks. Licks his dry lips, sucks in a breath. For a surreal fraction of a second, she sees the war he's fighting inside himself. The war of attrition that he's been fighting for months. Maybe for a lot longer than that.
Maybe what he's been fighting his whole life.
What a sweet relief surrender might now seem to him. And what she might be able to give.
She's opening her mouth to say his name, and he swallows it as he grips her jaw and kisses her.
It's not like before. It's not like it was at first, gentle and soft and so hesitant, so apprehensive, and even later when he was more confident. It's not like the horror it was in bed in the clinic, when she felt just how much he wanted her and just what that wanting could make him do to her. It's like a perfect hybrid of both, ungraceful and desperate as he tongues her lips apart, and she moans and opens to him and licks into him as she tangles her fingers in his hair and drags him in.
Down.
Because he's lifting himself over her, running a shaking hand up her side and pulling up the hem of her camisole, ragged fingertips gliding across her bare skin, and heat flares and catches low in her belly and glows. She wasn't thinking before and she's even further from that now, even the screaming gone quiet, muffled by her panting and his deep groan as she spreads her legs and he settles between them, and she muffles a cry in the hollow of his neck when he rocks into her and she feels him big and hard against her pubic bone.
She can't do this. Not with how he is. Not with the wolf inside him, the invisible W on his brow, not with the skinless thing grinning its rusty razor blade smile as it strokes itself in anticipation of her. He's good now, yes. But something could break in him, he'll scent her blood, and he'll turn on her and sink his teeth into her carotid artery, thrust his serrated nails into her cunt and hook them into her walls and tear.
His mouth and hands streaked with her blood, painting it across her skin. Sucking it off her nipples. Licking it off her lips, before he bites.
And she's only getting wetter.
He's breathing her name against her jaw, her throat, slipping downward toward her collarbones as his fingers creep under her camisole - and he's hesitant, uncertain, lifting his head and staring down at her, and she fumbles for his wrist and drags his hand up to her tit. He jerks, forces a whine through his teeth, eyes squeezed shut. He's still terrified. Kneading her, circling her peaked nipple with his thumb and peaking it higher and making her gasp - it's clearly taking everything he has left in order to keep from running from this, but if anything now he's harder, bigger, and as she squirms a hand between them and cups her palm over his length he shudders and sobs her name, and joins it with affirmation.
Beth. Beth, fuck yeah, ohshitplease.
She kneads him like he's kneading her, cups her other hand over the back of his head, clenches her thighs against his hips and thrusts her tongue into his mouth. Thrusts all of herself up into him. Taking it.
The world fucking owes them this.
Once she would have wanted this to be slow. In her first fantasies of him, those stupid cliche teenage girl fantasies, it was slow. He was firm and rough with her, because he was a rough man and of course he would be, but he was also good to her, careful in his way, and he took her slowly. In her imagination, when she lost her virginity to Daryl Dixon, she wasn't losing anything at all.
Those fantasies were bullshit but she still would have wanted slow. Sweet. Wanted time to be with him, lie with him and touch him and encourage him to touch her, show him how she liked it best, ask him to show her the same. Time to see him, every part of him, learn them and love them, display herself for him with a shy little smile, roll together in the sheets and stroke and kiss and lick and suck everywhere until they couldn't fucking stand it anymore, and he entered her and she welcomed him in.
Wouldn't have to be perfect. Wouldn't have to be smooth, something out of a damn romance novel. He could and probably would be awkward. She could make mistakes. It might not all be comfortable. Might feel weird in parts, might even hurt a tiny bit here and there. But it could be good all the same, they could be good, fucking the rest of the world away on a kitchen table or in a coffin or on the porch of a moonshine shack or under the trees and the shine of the moon, and nothing else would have to matter.
This is not perfect, and it's not smooth. It's not romantic. It's not gentle.
It's not slow.
She's frantic as she half shoves and half kicks him off her, yanking her camisole off and hissing a curse when a strap gets tangled in her hair. Her breasts are bare underneath it, and that first grab must have made him bold - or just even more desperate - because he's grabbing at her again with both hands, pinching at her nipples and sparking her nerves all the way up to her throat, making it difficult to shimmy her shorts down her hips, but she doesn't give a fuck. She kicks and arches, curses again, claws at his shirt until it's over his head and cast onto the floor, and then she's dragging him back down on top of her and kissing him so hard she hurts herself, kissing the breath out of him - because she needs to know it's there. He has breath to take.
His heart is thundering because it was beating in the first place.
Daryl. Jesus fucking Christ, DARYL. She might be moaning. Might be yelling. Doesn't matter. The empty house is all theirs. The rest of the Zone might as well be dead for all she cares - dead and burning all around them, lighting the room gold and orange and crimson. She's so wet and his hand is forcing its way between her legs and pressing her lips apart, and it's just like she imagined: raw finger pushing into her cunt, thick and as rough as the rest of him, and she throws her head back and grapples at his wrist and keens. He's shaking and she tastes his sweat as she humps herself upward and pushes him deeper, her nails scratching over the scars crisscrossing his chest and shoulders.
She would have learned them. All of them. Now she can barely see them, she wants him so fucking bad. She can barely see anything clearly in the firelight. Except that he's so big, looming over her, staring down at her with huge black eyes as he fucks his finger into her and heaves breath between his bared teeth.
Very sharp teeth.
Of course.
She fumbles with him at his belt, his fly, gets both of them open and worms her fingers into his pants as he shoves one-handed at his waistband, his finger still working in her. Maybe he's looming but when she gets his twitching cock in her hand - freezes again, just holding it, she can hardly fucking believe it - he raises his face into the moonlight and what she sees there makes her want to weep.
This is familiar too.
I just wanted to get you that damn dog.
"I love you." He says it and she bites her lip hard enough to draw blood, bites back her sobbing, because if she starts now she doesn't honestly know if she'll be able to stop. He's leaning over her, in her, cock thick and heavy in her hand and slick with precome, and every one of the three words is like a bullet fired point-blank through his chest from the inside. "I love you, Beth. Oh my God, I love you."
He barely has time to kick the rest of his clothes away before she's taking him, spread so wide and wet for him, and guiding him in.
His hoarse cry harmonizes with hers, and then she sees it.
It's not there, his Hell. The room is shadows and moonlight, quiet except for their gasping and their trembling moans as he rolls deeper into her and drops his forehead against hers. But it is there, all that fire, cackling darkness seething all around them, screams outside her shattered window and distorted shapes running and falling through the flames. The thing braced over her impales her, bottoms out, thrusts again, and it's so big it's tearing at her, and she doesn't give a fuck. Scrabbling at rotting skin that peels off under her nails, snarling at him in a voice she doesn't even vaguely recognize, fuck me, fuck me, stick your fat cock in my pussy and FUCK ME.
Old blood flaking onto her cheeks. Cool wriggle of maggots at her scalp.
Moonlight and his torn hands framing her face, his breath coming in strained whimpers as he moves inside her, rolling his hips in a hard, stuttering, uneven rhythm. It hurts, what he's doing, but not in her cunt; it carves away at her heart, because when she combs his hair back from his face, his features are twisted in an expression she can only identify as agonized. He's fucking her and he needs it and it's hurting him so bad, his lips against her cheekbone, and she can't tell if he's saying I love you or I'm sorry.
Both.
She nods their mouths together, parts his quivering lips with hers, and feels the cutting edges of razor blades on her tongue.
Moon. Roaring flame. She blinks and she sees both, superimposed, wrapping her legs around his waist and bucking up to meet him, trying to urge him on. Hissing fuck me, Daryl, shit, please, I fucking want you, I love you, please. Shining eyes and eyes that are nothing more than voids in his skull, hands clamped over the sides of her thighs and spreading her even wider as he pounds into her, harsh grunts, growls, hisses, malformed things that might be her name, her hands seizing every part of him she can reach as she jerks her body in time with his, and she's gouging bloody channels in his flesh as he bites viciously at her throat, as he kisses her, gasps that he loves her, he hates her, she's everything he wants and needs and he would do anything for her, he would die for her again and again, she's a worthless slut and she's nothing to him except meat and a hole and she'll be exactly that for him after he murders her, and the flames devour them and the moon cascades down over them as she jams a hand between them and slaps at her clit, and as he howls and spasms and pulses burning into her she screams her ruined heart into him.
It's silent in the empty hallway, except for the gunshot. Her eyes are on his as the bullet slams through her skull and into his. She sees her blood spattering his lips. Tastes his on hers. It doesn't hurt. It's easy.
Got it right this time.
She's holding his hand, fingers weaved, as they go down together.
What she knows is that when she opens her eyes, there's no light at all. What she knows is that she's enclosed by him, his thin, powerful frame, his arms tight around her and his lips against her temple. What she knows is that he's still inside her, still wet between her legs, and she refuses to think about what that might mean. What she knows is that she's with him, and he's breathing and his heart is beating hard against hers, and he's alive. For another minute. Another ten. Half an hour. Maybe an hour. Maybe longer. As long as he can be.
What she knows is that they're both alive. They both made it. They're together. It's like it could have been. Like it was supposed to be.
That's all that ever mattered.
She has the gun.
There's no one else this time. There doesn't need to be. The others were only ever distractions. The important players in this drama were always only him and her, because in the end one of them dies so the other one can live, and the only meaningful questions are who.
How.
Why.
And of course by the time they come back here, even those questions are moot. Because he's so tired and he's in so much pain, and he asked her permission and she gave it. He asked her to help him and she will. He asked her to get it right and she'll do that too, and she's no doctor but she knows she can make him better. It's very simple. It always was.
She has the gun, here in this hallway where the light and the angles and the shapes and sounds and everything is Wrong, with the chance to do it over and make it right. She can. She's strong enough.
She loves him that much.
He's on his knees before her, filthy and bloody and so wounded, so weak it's a wonder he can stay upright at all. Ready to crumple even without what she's going to do to him. So she won't make him wait, she won't extend the cruelty; she levels the gun at him and presses the muzzle against his forehead, and this is where he smiles and thanks her, says he loves her.
In his own way, he says that goodbye both of them hate.
Except this is wrong too.
He's not smiling. He's cringing back from her, hands rising feebly in what's clearly a hopeless effort to shield himself, and his usually weary eyes are wide and terrified. He's shaking his head. He's whimpering.
No. No. Beth, don't, I- I changed my mind. I don't want to.
But he has to. Consternation wrinkles her features. Why doesn't he understand? He's in agony, he's sick far beyond the possibility of recovery - every breath, every beat of his heart, every second of life is torture for him. It's better this way. Better for him, better for everyone. He never should have made it. It was a mistake. She can correct it. She can free him. She can make it stop.
She can make him better.
But he's scrambling backward, one bloody hand upraised. Please. No, Beth. Beth, please, I won't be like that anymore. I can get better. I can try. I swear, I'll try.
No. Trying is part of the problem. She steps forward, gun aimed - not that she even needs her spectacular aim at this distance, but the business would be a whole lot faster and a whole lot easier if he would just hold still. If he would stop fighting. Stop trying. If he would accept that he doesn't belong here, that he doesn't belong anywhere. That he never will.
Beth. Dropping his hand, shivering. Looking up at her - tears glistening in his eyes. Overflowing. Falling like rain. I love you.
I can be all right.
No. He really can't.
As she squeezes the trigger and watches him collapse in a boneless splatter of blood and brain, she reflects musingly that this is the first gunshot she's ever heard that sounded like the shattering of glass.
Not that it matters.
She's awake for a while before she realizes that she is.
Lying on her side, sheet tangled around her bare legs. She's naked, skin and hair sweat-damp, something else sticky between her thighs, and she's sore. She's sore everywhere, but especially she's sore down there, her hamstrings feeling strained and pulled, muscles tight, and a strange and not altogether unpleasant burning ache in her vulva, her labia, deeper inside her.
Odd.
Another indeterminate length of time and she's on her back and gazing up into the darkness, feeling idly over her mound and the clumped curls there, and her other hand passes over the remains of the warm depression in the mattress next to her.
And her sluggish brain snaps to full alert, and she knows.
He was here. Now he's not.
There seems to be no transition between lying on her back and sitting upright. She's moved instantly from one state to the other, turning at the waist and groping mindlessly for the sheet - not even to cover herself. She has no idea what she would be covering herself for. There's no one in the house at all except him.
Because he is still here. She knows it with that terrible dream-certainty, and as she gets to her feet and feels the flat solidity of the floor under her, it occurs to her that this might actually be a dream, that her dreams have become so vivid and so intense that anything might be possible.
He was lost in his own nightmare. She met him there,
She can't be completely positive she made it out.
She calls his name as she moves slowly toward the door. Her voice is unnaturally loud and unnaturally immediate, as if she's yelling in her own ears even though her call was low, and she flinches, blinks into the darkness beyond her open doorway. The moon must have set, the lamps outside at their dimmest, and they're in the final few storied Darkest Hours Before the Dawn. A hollow laugh stirs in her chest but makes it no further than that as she steps out into the hall and stands for a few seconds, listening.
There is a distinct difference between the quality of empty silence and the quality of silence in which someone is present. The end of the world didn't teach it to her. She doesn't remember when she learned it. She suspects that it's not knowledge unique to her, though she's never encountered it articulated in any way, and wouldn't know how to begin to do so if asked. She simply knows the difference, and the silence that greets her is a silence full of him.
He's waiting for her in the dark.
Get your gun. Hissed voice inside her ear - not Maggie, not Rick, and not herself. It sounds eerily like him, coarsely urgent. Go back and get your damn gun. Get your knife. Fuckin' hell, get somethin', just don't you dare go out there unarmed.
You promised her.
Yes. But she lied.
She's already walking, the darkness encircling her like his arms.
There are only a very limited number of places it would make sense for him to be - the kitchen, maybe, or on one of the porches, front or back - but in all likelihood he's not making sense. Not to her, not to any other external observer, and least of all to himself. The basic logic according to which he operates might be familiar to her, but that doesn't mean his logic doesn't break down. It doesn't mean it can't vanish, and then who the fuck knows what might drive him, and where it might drive him to.
He could be anywhere.
She can see a slightly lighter darkness just ahead that must be the back end of the front hall, a darker set of lines that have to be the stairs. Immediately to her right is the entrance to the kitchen, and as she turns and peers into it with one hand on the wall, she thinks about the knifeblock on the counter, the gleam of all that chrome and steel, and she's a few steps in before he seizes her by the hair and jerks her head back, yanks her against him and bares his impossibly sharp teeth against her ear as he cuts her throat in a single neat slice and sprays all that shiny chrome with her blood.
She closes her eyes and breathes deep. No. Not like that.
She's not totally certain he would make it that quick.
He's not in there anyway. She doesn't have to look in order to know. The silence there is empty. She turns away.
The porches. Living room. Dining room. Upstairs. There is, she thinks with a brief shudder, the basement. But there's also one other very obvious place, and maybe its obviousness is why she didn't think of it immediately. She pauses again, frowning and wondering at herself - because now something is wrong. She knows it. She's known it since before she was up, since before she was even fully awake. But it's slipping through her fingers, fluttering into the dark like a moth. Softer than an echo. The memory of a memory of something she heard in a dream.
Downstairs bathroom. Really the first place she should have checked. It wasn't carelessness. She's not careless like that anymore.
Something in her mind blocked it off.
She stumbles back against the wall, hands flying to her mouth, inhaling like the stab of a blade.
Like a fucking shard of glass.
Her feet thump against the hardwood as she runs. Sprints. How long ago was it? How long ago did she come out of that dream? How long has she been dozing alone in bed, lazy and stupid and useless, and by how much time will she be too late? Even broken, his mind devours details. His power of retention is considerable even on his worst days. She knows he remembers. He asked her. He fucking asked her, and he looked so sad and so afraid when he did, and he looked like a man who saw something coming, something horrible, and knew it couldn't possibly be avoided or evaded.
How did you know you didn't want to?
Now she's almost sure she's in a nightmare. Only in a nightmare could she be moving this slowly, each individual footfall like a thunderclap, her arms swinging, catching herself with one hand on the wall as she rounds the corner. In a nightmare you run like this, like running through tar, and you know it doesn't matter anyway, but you still run and you still torture yourself with the hope that you might be in time.
Though a small voice, the smallest yet, is murmuring Stop. Stop now. Go back to bed.
Leave him be.
She slams into the door with both hands, fumbles desperately at the knob. He'll have locked it. She locked it, she knew she only had a few minutes at best and they would be coming to stop her, and he'll have remembered that too, used her as a fucking model-
But the door swings easily open.
And the moon hasn't completely set after all.
The last thin stream of it is trickling through the frosted windowpanes and pooling on the tile, turning off-white to snow. It catches the broken shards of mirror and makes ice of them, ponds and lakes and rivers set in a vast flat tundra. It would be utterly pristine, if not for the streaks and puddles of black all over the floor, over the tile and the shattered glass and his naked legs folded in front of him where he leans back against the wall by the sink, his hands lying palm-up at his sides, the fingers of his right curled loosely around the long, thin makeshift blade he used to slash his arms.
His head is turned toward the window. His eyes are open. The moonlight sinks into them and is gone.
There was no transition between lying down and sitting up. There's no transition between standing in the doorway and on her knees in front of him. Dimly she feels glass cutting into her and she doesn't care. She can't possibly care about that, because it's happening again, it's happening again, she's kneeling on the floor with his blood on her, on her hands as she gropes for him, the sweet metallic stench of it filling her nose and mouth. She's reaching for him like she can do anything at all, and her own weeping is locked behind her heart, and all she can do is stare at him, at the long cruel cuts on his wrists and forearms, at all the fucking blood, and her shaking fingertips smear it down his cold cheeks to his mouth.
And he turns his head, very slowly, and blinks at her.
Nightmare, she's screaming silently at herself. NightmarenightmarenightmareWAKETHEFUCKUP because it has to be, because he hasn't turned, because he's looking at her with all that moonlight in his eyes, and this is somehow the worst one she's ever had.
The worst since it actually happened.
But then he raises his left hand and touches her, a single blood-black fingertip trailing down a single strand of her hair, and he mouths her name.
"You didn't." She doesn't have the first idea what she means. "You didn't, you-"
"You never wanted to," he whispers, and his hand drops back into his lap as his eyes slip closed. He releases a very long breath, and pulls another one in. "The way you cut. That's how it was. Before you even went in that fuckin' bathroom. You never… You never wanted to at all."
As she grabs frantically for towels and presses them against his arms, she glances up and sees that he's smiling.
It's a beautiful smile.