Chapter 49: the way we are tied in

The world is still coming at her only in fragments.

Broken mirror shards, scatters of fractured reflection. Not all of it in the proper order and none of it making very much sense. Someone - no, more than that, people - dropping to the ground beside her, hands on her again and rolling her to the side. Lifting her to sit, pulling her close. The zip ties are gone and her hands move loosely, drooping; she's aware of a burning sting at her wrists. Shadows moving into and out of the light. Voices, a confusion of them, interweaving and separating and weaving again. Someone saying something about a body. Someone saying something about an ambulance. Voice shaky. Every single voice is shaky, thick with tears.

Rick.

She doesn't know if there's a word for the sounds he's making. Not in English. And she can indeed identify words, as she blinks and he takes form, kneeling in the grass beside Lori and cradling something in his arms.

Forhwierfan min heorte i stan.

Make my heart a stone.

She tries to say it again - she's still breathing - everything in her skull muddy and confused. Was she hit? Struck in the head? She can't remember. Doesn't matter. Lori, they have to help Lori, she's alive right now but that could change any second, and she's wriggling in the circle of the strong arms that hold her, reaching for Lori, for Rick, but then she's being pulled to her feet, gentle but forceful, and she smells that familiar scent of smoke and leather and blood, and as Daryl leans in and speaks, her marrow turns to water in her bones.

She wants to fall against him and cry and cry and cry.

"We gotta go, Beth. We gotta go."

She manages to half turn, bewildered, attempting to catch his gaze. Beside them and in the periphery of her vision, she glimpses Michonne crouching in front of Carl, framing his face with her hands and stroking her thumbs across his cheeks. Carol is kneeling by Lori's head, brushing her hair back from her face. Shane is just standing, staring, hands hanging loose by his sides. Glenn is in the center of all of it, looking shellshocked, phone to his ear.

"The fuck are you talkin' about?" It comes out in a thin rasp and it hurts her throat; perhaps she's screamed it raw. "Why do we… Daryl, what the-"

He lays his hands on her shoulders, now speaking low and urgent. "The veil they put up is fallin' apart. Cops're comin', they'll be here soon. The more of us they find here, the tougher this is gonna be to explain, so we gotta get outta sight and we gotta do it now."

She shakes her head, eyes wide and her jaw working. This still makes no sense. None of this makes any sense. Or if it does, it's nightmare sense, consistent only with itself and wrong in every possible respect, and she can't wake up. She glances back at Rick and Carol, at Shane - who is changing swiftly back into fierd, hunching and rising, and bending to grasp Len under the arms, lifting his dead weight easily. And all at once she gets it.

They're going to hide the body.

Daryl releases her, and seconds later he's changing too, towering over her even though he's not even standing at his full height. He touches her arm with the point of a claw, careful. Insistent.

"The bigger Veil still protects us. If we stay out of sight, they'll avoid coming near us and they won't know why. But there's going to be a problem if we're standing here when they show up."

She drags in a breath and then another, staring down at the raw bands across her wrists where the ties abraded her skin. In the dimness, they look weirdly dark.

Maggie, pitiless: Get yourself together. You remember what Daddy always said.

We all got jobs to do.

She nods, biting down hard on her lip, and as she lays her hand in his huge one, his swallowing hers up, she follows him numbly into the shadows of the trees.


Shane follows a minute or two later, Len's body dangling unceremoniously from one paw. The bolt is still protruding from the center of Len's chest, and before the darkness hides his face, she catches his almost comical expression of surprise. Very possibly he died before he even realized what was happening.

Too bad. She wishes he could have had ample time for it to penetrate.

Shane dumps him into a pile of leaf litter and huffs a sound that manages to convey both cold rage and utter scorn. They're standing a little way into one of the small bands of woods that cut through the neighborhood, far enough in that Beth guesses they should indeed be mostly invisible if they don't move around more than necessary. Now that the initial shock has set in - not worn off but instead knitted itself so deeply into her bones that she can't imagine it ever leaving her - everything has flattened and receded, as if she's watching a two-dimensional playback of what's already happened, standing totally outside it. Her chest is aching dully, her lungs folded around her heart. She's still crying, but it's a slow, soundless trickle. She's cold all over but she's not shivering, and it's not so much the presence of cold as it is the absence of warmth.

She's felt like this before. She was kneeling in the grass like Rick is now, holding something in her arms as the world burned to the ground behind her.

Shane meets Daryl's eyes, his own glowing mirrors, but says nothing. She detects no anger, not toward them.

She detects nothing at all.

Sirens. In the distance, through the trees, lights flashing red and blue. She turns and looks back out at the yard, Daryl a solid pillar of warmth looming silently behind her. Carol is rising, changing, dropping onto all fours and padding toward them. She's walking slowly - almost limping, as if something heavy is pressing down on her powerful back. Of the rest of the cyne, only Michonne and Glenn remain behind.

With Rick and Carl in the wreckage.

"It's wrong," Beth whispers. "We should be with them."

Carol stops in front of her, gazing at her with tear-bright eyes. "We will be."

The sirens and lights are cutting through the dark, pulling up the drive, accompanied by approaching, agitated voices. Those neighbors Joe didn't want to disturb. The entire fucking world, flooding in to fill the empty spaces. Here, now, when it's far too late to do anything.

Except there's Lori.

Ambulance. Figures rushing toward where Rick is kneeling, bringing a stretcher with them. Carl lifting his head from Michonne's chest, scrubbing at his eyes; he looks so fucking young. Rick vanishes into what seems like a crowd of paramedics and Beth can't watch anymore. She totters, swings her face away, catches herself with a hand on Daryl's thickly-furred chest. Carol is beside him, paw on his shoulder, licking his muzzle and nuzzling at his jaw.

He's whimpering. Very soft, nearly inaudible, but he is.

She does what she now knows she can do and presses her face into his fur, lets the thunder of his heart pound into her head until she can haul ragged air into her lungs. All over again. It's happening all over again. She couldn't stop it before and she couldn't stop it this time either, and it's pounding into her head like Daryl's heartbeat, the pulsing bloody core of this nightmare: herself lying shot in the grass, Daryl on his knees beside her, and in his shaking arms…

Is it worth it?

It's worth it. It's the best thing that ever happened to me.

She wonders how Lori would answer that question now.


She doesn't watch the rest of it, but she listens. The voices of the paramedics, calm but run through with deep urgency. Rick's low moan, something like don't take her, and she doesn't want to think about what that means, about who he might be referring to, and she can't stop herself. One of the sirens receding; the ambulance leaving. More voices; she guesses the police. Rick is police. How will they handle this, because of that? They'll ask him fewer pointed questions, probably. They'll be more likely to implicitly believe whatever explanation he offers.

If he's able to think of anything. If he's able to speak at all in a way that makes sense to anyone else. She couldn't, she unwillingly remembers. Not coherently. When she wasn't fighting the paramedics and the nurses tooth and nail, she was trying to make them understand what happened, and it must have sounded like raving, hallucinatory, shit about monsters.

Rick might rave about monsters, and he wouldn't be wrong.

Judith. Christ. Judith.

She's never seen a child die. All the death she's been present for, and she's never seen that. And it is worse. Worse than any death she can imagine. It's like watching the fabric of the universe get ripped open, it's so utterly and fundamentally wrong.

At least it was quick, she thinks, and she wants to tear her hair out by the roots.

And then, one by one, a number of them leave, two police cruisers staying behind. A couple of the officers vanish into the house. A couple more start moving among the gathered neighbors, pushing them back.

No one is near them. No one is watching. For all intents and purposes, they're alone.

It feels like a very long time before anyone moves. Carol changes first, and as she shrinks into human form, her shoulders are still slumped, still weighted. Obeying an instinct she doesn't care to fight, Beth sags against her, and Carol holds her, rocking her slightly, trembling - and Beth understands that she's probably taking just as much comfort in it as Beth is. Poor comfort, but not nothing.

Daryl exhales. "I'll take care of the body."

"No." Shane shakes his head for emphasis. His glittering eyes are unreadable. "I'll take it. You go."

Daryl hesitates, and the unease in his hesitation fills the air around him like an aura. Beth can guess what's behind it, part of her continuing to observe everything with detached coolness: it's weird. Shane is Rick's second in command, or he seems to be. He and Lori are friends. He should want to be at the hospital more than any of them. Which is where she assumes they're going.

A few more seconds, then Daryl grunts what she guesses is a response in the affirmative, and she hears and feels him changing behind her, her face still pressed into the hollow of Carol's throat.

Touch on her upper arm. "C'mon, Beth."

She pulls back, searches Carol's face. What she sees there is a horrible tranquility, peace pulled over like a shroud. Necessity rather than anything natural. Hurried patchwork to keep the cracks from widening to the point of collapse.

We all got jobs to do.

"I'll be fine," Carol says, and strokes a hand over Beth's hair. "Go with him. I'll follow in the car with Shane."

There isn't much else she can do. She lets Daryl lead her back across the grass - trampled and flattened and bloodstained, and she doesn't look down the whole way - toward the driveway and the street where he's left his bike.

And this time the ride is no help to her.


It's only after she walks into the place and smells that hospital smell - sharp, aggressive antiseptic and lemon cleaner covering up other and decidedly more unpleasant smells - that Beth realizes she hasn't been in a hospital since she was discharged.

When that hits her, she has to stop a few feet from reception and focus on her breathing again.

It's more than the smell. It's the sounds, the flat echoes, the rattle of equipment, the muffled quack of the PA, the droning buzz of voices as if she's standing in a gigantic hive. It's the hard slick sheen of steel coupled with bland beige and pale green. It's the hard quality of everything, the way every surface is possessed of a kind of placid ruthlessness. Poreless and non-porous. Dead.

Lying in one of those fucking beds, staring blankly at the CNN news crawl on the TV in the corner of the ceiling, restraints around her wrists until they were sure she wouldn't try anything else. Until they were sure she wasn't a danger to herself.

Like she could be any greater danger to herself than they were.

It comes crashing in on her all at once, the sensory input hammering her from all sides, the memory of the grass and the light and the blood, screaming, sirens and lights, Rick's cries, and dark roses bloom at the edges of her vision and she wavers, her stomach lurching, her hands twitching and curling as she pulls rough, shaking breaths into her lungs. Hands on her shoulders, warm and strong, and her name, blunt with worry. She's being pushed backward and held up at the same time and she yields, allows her body to be guided, and when she's pressed downward she sinks and a thinly padded seat gives under her weight. She slumps at the waist and those steadying hands leave her shoulders and close tight around her own hands, and she's being told to breathe. Slow.

Just breathe, magden.

Daryl is telling her to breathe. Breathing with her. With her, flowing into her lungs like air. She draws him in and holds him there, leans in and feels him hold her, rests in him. Strength and soft fur. It doesn't matter that he's not in that form; it's there under his human skin, waiting, here with her even if she can't feel it.

She can breathe.

She focuses on him as he releases one of her hands and combs her hair back from her brow, and searches her eyes. "Beth, you- Fuck, Beth." He tugs her hair further back and tilts her head with gentle fingers on her jaw, examining something. She feels a sting and winces, and then remembers.

The pain when they found her in the closet, and the darkness after. They must have hit her. It slipped away, hadn't mattered. If there's blood on her face, it was probably easy to disregard. There was blood all over.

There might be a lot of things they would miss right about now.

"I'm alright," she mumbles, and his mouth tightens still more.

"Should get you checked out anyway."

"No." She snaps the rest of the way back, her mind and her voice both serrated, and he jumps very slightly, looking abashed. Mixed guilt and embarrassment twinge in her belly, but she wouldn't take it back if she could. She meant it. Everything about it.

"No," she repeats, lower. "I don't want them touchin' me."

He nods, though he's clearly not happy about it. "Alright."

Their names, faint from a distance, and she glances up to see Carol coming toward them from the doors, trailed by Shane. Daryl stands, his fingertips lingering on Beth's shoulder, and Carol pulls him into a half hug, cupping the back of his head as he sighs.

Shane stops beside them. Watches. Looks away, his expression difficult to read.

After a few seconds, Carol steps back, looking from Daryl to Beth and back again. "You find them?"

Daryl shakes his head. "We just got here."

Not entirely true, and she's grateful to him.

"Beth… Oh, sweetheart." Carol stops, bends, touches her head much like Daryl did, and Beth can guess what she's seen. "I didn't know it was that bad."

"It's not." She can't keep the weary impatience out of her voice, and she doesn't try. Her stomach is continuing to stagger like a drunk, even though the rest of it is fading and she doesn't think she's actually about to pass out. "I'm fine."

Carol looks doubtful, but appears ready to let it go. She turns her attention back to Daryl. "I'll go to the desk, see what they say."

She goes. Beth watches her, then drops her gaze and stares down at her boots. The toes aren't only scuffed anymore but spattered with blood - no way to be certain whose - and she wonders dully if she'll be able to get them clean. All of her must be a fucking mess. It's a marvel that a nurse hasn't assumed she's here for herself and missed the entrance to the ER, come over and steered her off to be tended to, given everything that's happened-

She stiffens, gropes at her belt as her breath stutters. In the meantime Daryl has taken a seat next to her, and now he grabs her again, trying to make her face him. "Beth?"

"It's gone," she whispers, and as she says it her fingers encounter the empty sheath, confirm that it is in fact empty, and her staggering stomach trips and plummets through the floor.

"What is?"

"My knife." She gazes helplessly at him. Maybe this shouldn't feel like as much of a catastrophe as it does. Or maybe this is precisely how much of a catastrophe it should feel like. "I think they took it."

His jaw works, eyes wide, and she knows he literally can't find anything to say. She's about to try for herself when Carol reappears beside them, looking sober and pale and inclining her head in the direction of the double doors on the far side of the big room.

"They're all in one of the waiting rooms. She wouldn't tell me anything else. Said they'd fill us in."

Daryl pushes to his feet and turns to Beth, reaches down a hand. His expression is asking a question he doesn't need to articulate.

Can you walk?

In answer, she takes his hand and rises, and she imagines her core as stone.

She hates this place. It's a mirror to an equally horrible place inside her, and she's being bombarded with a searing need to lie on the floor and curl into the fetal position until it's all over.

But she's damned if she's going to let it break her down.


When they get to the waiting room - a small space that isn't really so much a room as an alcove off a hallway with a water cooler, uncomfortable chairs, and old magazines scattered on a couple of tables - Glenn is leaning over his jittering knees with his hands clasped between them. He looks up, ashen-faced- and that's when Beth sees Rick.

Not sitting, and not with Glenn. He's standing by a large window, hugging himself and staring out at the light-speckled city darkness - darkness that's never truly dark. Beth catches his reflection in the glass, or the hint of it that's visible: a ghost of a man cast against the glowing sky.

Carl and Michonne are not in evidence.

Glenn takes a breath. "Carl's getting checked out. Michonne's with him. Lori… She's in surgery."

Carol takes a seat next to him. Moving mechanically, Beth follows Daryl into a couple of chairs opposite. Shane remains standing, leaning against the wall by the water cooler with his arms crossed over his chest and his face still that eerily impassive mask.

All around them, the hive-drone continues. It throbs gently and persistently between Beth's ears.

"What do they say?" Carol angles herself toward Glenn, leaning over her knees in unconscious mimicry. "If they said anything?"

Glenn opens his mouth, closes it, shakes his head and looks down at the floor. "They don't know. They don't…" He swipes a hand down his face. "She got shot in the fucking head. They don't know."

Carol is silent. For a moment, everyone is silent, and the silence is like a brick dropping through the air in slow motion. Then Daryl jerks his chin in Rick's direction.

"How's he doin'?"

"Bad." Glenn delivers the word flatly, like an echo of that brick. "He won't let me near him. He won't let anyone near him. He won't talk to anyone. Hasn't said anything since we got here." His voice drops as he tips his body closer to them. "I don't know what we're gonna do. We've been attacked, and if he can't-"

"Don't." Daryl isn't loud, not quite dangerous, but edged. Pointed. "We'll fuckin' figure it out."

"Yeah." Glenn glances at Carol. "Is Sophia safe?"

"She's still living with my sister. They're a good ways away. But I'll call her, let her know she might want to get them out of town for a while. Take a vacation."

"They already did what they wanted to do."

Shane's voice is quiet, and as one they all turn to him. He looks back at them, and the corner of his mouth is twitching, as if it wants to twist out of that mask he's set it into. "They didn't need to kill him. They didn't need to kill any of us. Not yet, anyway. They took Rick outta commission, hobbled the whole fuckin' cyne without firin' a shot at us."

"Yeah," Beth murmurs. In the shock, she hadn't even considered the why of it, the deeper reason beyond the one Joe gave. But now it's glaringly obvious. Why fight the cyne at full strength if you don't have to? Murder two women and two children, then sit back and crack open a beer and watch it all burn down.

And really, murdering the one child was probably enough. The one child and, possibly, the one of the two women who would hurt Rick the most.

His mate. It comes to her the same way the fact of the hospital did, all at once and with an impact like a punch. His mate is horribly wounded. She might very well die. This bond that she's been told is deeper than human love, so deep it's woven into the wires of the brain. This bond that's changing her in ways she likely isn't even aware of yet. Souls.

What happens to one if the other dies?

She's not sure she wants to know.

"They haven't," Glenn says fiercely. "We're not that weak. He's not that weak."

Daryl cocks his head, eyes cold. "Oh really, little man? Second ago you was sayin' the exact opposite."

"Stop it," Carol hisses, sharp as a blade, and they do, looking at her and then at each other, and Beth can practically see their hackles risen, their ears folded back. "This is what we can't do. Okay? This, right here. Shane's right, this is what they want. If we're not that weak, then act like it."

Another few seconds, the tension humming through the air like a vibrating string. Beth doesn't pause to consider; she lays her hand on Daryl's forearm, and that's all it takes. She feels him backing down, pulling into himself, muscles loosening a bit.

Once more, she thinks of it like she has been. Down, boy.

For now.

Carol gestures at Rick. "Think I should try talking to him?"

Glenn shakes his head again. "I don't think it's gonna help. She's not even dead, and he's already…" He hesitates, fingers weaving and unweaving between each other. "Well. You know what it's like. And you hated the guy."

"Yeah," Carol says softly. "I know."

Glenn releases a heavy breath, drops his head. "So does Michonne. That's just… Shit, that's too damn many of us."

"I didn't lose a child. And like you said, I hated him. He was a hateful man." Carol pauses, then wipes at her eyes in jittery, nearly angry motions. "He's going to need Michonne now. Both of them are."

Daryl closes his eyes, rakes his fingers through his hair. "They're gonna need all of us."

"Se freamiht a se cyne sy se anhiwe freamiht," Glenn whispers, and the flowing words hang in the air.

The strength of the cyne is the only strength.

Daryl ducks his head. "Sothes."

Amen.


It's only after she wakes up that she realizes she's been sleeping. She simply opens her eyes into that same unpleasant overhead lighting, the darkness outside the window, her head in Daryl's lap. She blinks, shifts and scrubs at her face; she's curled up in that fetal position she wanted to adopt earlier, arms and legs pulled in so tightly that they're half asleep. They ache as soon as she moves, a sullen pain that seems to roll through her bones, and she groans.

Daryl's hand tightens a little on her upper arm. She turns to gaze up at him, his tired eyes and the strained lines of his face, glances at the others. No one appears to have moved, their own eyes hollow and red-rimmed. Nothing appears to have changed. She dimly remembers going to the bathroom to wash the worst of the blood off her face, but there's no indication of how long she's been out, and disorientation washes over her, almost nauseating.

She's pushing herself awkwardly upright, about to ask, when Carol and Glenn are seized by something in unison, Carol's eyes widening and Glenn getting unsteadily to his feet. Shane looks up.

Even Rick seems to twitch. It's possible that, ever so slightly, he turns his head.

She turns to follow their lines of attention and sees Michonne walking slowly down the hall toward them, appearing every bit as weary as Beth feels. Her gait is as strong as it's always been, but it wavers at the edges, as if her strength is a stubbornly maintained hard shell with something liquid and churning inside.

Beth can already hear it, regardless of the fact that Michonne wouldn't be delivering the news. She's gone.

And then she'll get to find out what happens when a mate dies. What becomes of the one left alone.

Glenn steps forward as Michonne reaches them. "What's going on? Where's Carl?"

"They're keeping him overnight, he has a concussion. Otherwise he seems mostly okay. Physically." Her mouth tightens and her eyes shift to Rick.

"What about Lori? You hear anything?"

"She's out of surgery."

Not Michonne. A calm female voice from behind them. Michonne turns along with the rest of them, and there's a tall woman in a doctor's coat, her black hair pulled severely back from her light brown face.

She raises her voice, looking past them. "Mr. Grimes?"

Rick is motionless.

Michonne sighs. "You'd better tell us. He's…" She shrugs unhappily, and while the doctor arches a brow, she doesn't seem inclined to argue.

"Like I said, she made it through. She's in a coma, and for now we're going to keep her that way. In terms of where we go from here, it's just too early to say anything for sure."

Glenn swallows. "But she's gonna live?"

"That's one of the things I can't say for sure." She looks at Rick again, the corner of her mouth tightening. "I really should be telling her husband this."

"No," Michonne says, low. "Trust me, you shouldn't. Not right now."

"Can we see her?" Carol asks, and the doctor tilts her head, frowning.

"Look, are you family?"

"We're friends," Glenn says firmly. "We're really, really close friends." He nods at Rick. "He would say we're family."

"Friends," the doctor echoes, and it occurs to Beth that they must look like a fairly strange collection of people, not exactly what someone would picture when they hear the word friends. But the doctor gives her head a slight shake, as if to convey alright, whatever, and pushes on. "You can see her in a couple of hours. But some of you might want to consider going home and getting some sleep. It's almost four, and there probably won't be any news for a while."

"Might as well see the goddamn sunrise," Daryl grunts, and there's a flurry of nods.

The doctor rolls a shoulder. "I'll come back and let you know, then. If you're hungry, the cafeteria is open on the first floor." She smiles wanly. "The food is about as good as you'd expect, but it's edible. Usually."

She leaves, as swiftly as she came.

There's a lull in the space she left vacant, a sense of no one knowing quite what to do with a suddenly finite amount of wait time. Finally Glenn pushes past them and starts toward the elevators, looking back. "I'll go get some coffee. Or something."

"Or something," Michonne mutters, and falls into his abandoned chair in a controlled collapse, tipping her head back and closing her eyes, pressing the heels of her palms against them. "No fucking way I could sleep, anyway."

Carol huffs an utterly humorless laugh. It sounds closer to a sob. "No fucking way I can eat."

Shane says nothing.

But Beth is only peripherally aware of any of this. Yet again it's pounding into her, slamming into her chest and skull - this time the image of Lori in a hospital bed, covered in tape and run through with tubes, machines humming and beeping all around her as they keep her alive. Possibly her as she'll be for the rest of whatever life is left to her. Possibly how she'll spend her last moments. Possibly Rick's last memory of her. Possibly everyone's last memory of her.

Or she won't die, but she'll never wake up. She'll just be that way, for months, for years, for decades unless something happens or someone has the decency to let her go. Either way, this might be how her story ends.

It was horrible, it was the second most horrible thing she's ever seen in her life, but it's better to remember her fighting. To think she died that way.

Herself. Herself in that bed. Herself, a bullet to the brain, tape and tubes and machines. Herself, at last. Dead child. Daryl dying in every other way. Everything dying, everything dead, life and love burning in death's inferno. The universe crumbling like a collapsing tower. Falling like the withered petals of a rose.

"I can't," she breathes thickly, and Daryl touches her back.

"Huh?"

"I can't." Coward, she thinks, you coward, how can you, but she's turning, groping for Daryl's hand, the front of his shirt, pressing close as tears sting her eyes. "I can't stay here, Daryl, I'm sorry, I can't, I can't stay."

"Whoa. Hey." Hand in its place on her shoulder, his other cupping her face. "What's goin' on?"

"Just get me outta here." She shudders and leans her forehead against his chest, gasping for a few seconds before she pushes up to speak in his ear. There's no word for what she's feeling, just like there was no word for the sounds Rick was making. There are no words in any language for some things, for what happens when the fabric of the universe rips wide open, for when things fall apart.

In those moments, perhaps all you can do is find your way back to the beginning and stand there in the ruins, and try to understand.

"Take me to the farm."