Chapter 43: there'll be no more going half the way
You can sleep now, you said. You can sleep now. You said that. I had a dream where you said that. Thanks for saying that. You weren't supposed to. - Richard Siken
The sun is rising over the roofs of the ruined houses beyond the wall when he finds her.
She's sitting on her platform, staring out at the world with her bloody knife in her hands. She's not facing inward, and somehow neither of these things comes as a surprise to him, though the platform is expansively stained red where that kid's body was before they got him down. Neither does it surprise him that she waited for him to come to her. Could be she was waiting for him to work up the courage, but he doubts it was exactly that. It's not that she thought he would be too afraid of her.
She called him a coward and she wasn't wrong, but not about this. Even though he probably should be one.
He did what he did. Fear is not what he feels.
He doesn't think there's a word for what he feels.
She gives him a glance when he tops the ladder, then scoots aside to make room for him. It's an invitation, clear enough, and he sits down beside her with his legs dangling over the edge alongside hers. It was difficult to get here. He limped the whole way, and the pain of everything - skin and bones and brain - twisted his breath around his ribs. But he had to, and he had to do it alone. And just as it's not about fear, it's not about punishing himself. He suspects she would say that he's done enough of that.
It's just something he has to do.
His head is pounding out a blood soaked drumbeat but it's bearable.
There's silence, and he lets the silence stretch out. There's noise behind them: groans, sobs, tense discussion, weary discussion, as weary as he feels. The collection of the dead is still going on, outside the walls the digging of a pit for the burning of the ones who weren't their own and soon, inside, the digging of graves for the ones who were. People did die tonight. They weren't able to save everyone. And the fires are still burning, though they're beginning to burn themselves out, and the spread has been astonishingly minimal.
Regardless, here everything is muted. Removed. It's like he said the first time he came to see her.
Nothing can touch her.
But finally he does speak. It's like the claws of a bird scraping down the back of his throat, but he does. Low and rough but loud in this little world she's created around herself.
"Beth. I. I can't-" And he turns his head and for the first time in good light he truly sees the bruises circling her throat and the blue-black bracelet of them around her wrist and he can't take it, wretched shame cannonballing into his breastbone, his nails digging into the meat of his palms. He didn't honestly expect that he would be able to do this. Needed to come up here, needed to try, but there's no apologizing for what he did to her. There's no excusing it, no running from it. Nothing he can possibly say can ever make it better.
Even if he knows - knows - that he'll never do it again. It doesn't change anything. He was capable of it. He is.
He now knows what he can do.
"Stop," she whispers hoarsely.
So he stops - though he's mostly stopped already. And it's quiet again, for a long time. There's breeze sweeping through the leaves all around them. There's a warbling series of notes from a mockingbird, a blackbird's trill. Below them, close to the wall, the sulky moan of a walker.
Neither of them has a gun anymore.
"You did it," she says at last - murmurs, voice still rough. He takes the three words as truth. Opens to them. "We can't go back."
"Yeah."
She releases a deep, shuddering breath. "It wasn't you."
"It was."
"No." She turns, looks at him, and the tears in her eyes don't surprise him either. He can try to imagine the ways in which he hurt her, but he knows there's a healthy amount of it that he won't ever grasp. He can't. It would be an insult to her to think he possibly could. "It wasn't. It was somethin' else."
"Beth. It was me." He stares down at his hands - as blackened as the rest of him, nasty blisters rising all along the back of his right one, blood crusted around his nails, and for once it's not only his. Though that used to be a lot more of a regular thing. "I wasn't fuckin' possessed or nothin'. I knew what I was doin'." He clenches his hands into fists and the skin on three of his knuckles cracks. Clear fluid seeps out. "I didn't wanna do it. But I knew."
"But you didn't want to." Her voice is quiet, even. She's not exactly arguing with him, even if she's denying what he's saying. It's more as if she's pointing things out, facts, parts of this and of him that he should bear in mind. "Everythin' went wrong. Wrong as it could've gone. It was like…" She tilts her head back and breathes, smiles tightly and rubs one-handed at her glistening eyes - spreading blood and grime around. "Everythin' fell apart. Yeah, it was your fault. But it wasn't."
"I'm broken," he says softly. He waits for the surge of self-hatred, and though there's shame, it doesn't come. Instead he's washed over and through with a kind of calm acceptance. This is not a cudgel to beat himself with. This is a recognition of how things are. Of who he is, and how he can't be who he was. He's not a monster, or a demon. He's broken, and it's not an excuse. It's just a context.
"You're sick."
He gives her his own thin little smile. "Yeah. That too."
"We're both broken." She lowers her head, her hair hanging in dirty strands around her face. They're both filthy and they smell awful, though characteristically he's far worse than she is. Both coated in blood, soot, and she's also burned here and there. Very likely no one made it through last night without being touched by fire.
But she's unfathomably beautiful, her skin and hair all bathed in sunlight. As always, she's bright enough to hurt him. And he won't, not unless he's certain she wants him to and maybe not even then, but he's filled and almost overwhelmed with the urge to touch her, simply to confirm to himself that she's real and she's here, and so is he. That whatever else has gone catastrophically wrong, they're here, together.
That they made it.
"I don't want it to ruin us," she says finally, and pulls in another breath, once again wipes at her eyes. "I wanna be stronger than that. I wanna be better. I still want an us. Whatever that means." She raises her face to him, and this time the smile she gives him through her tears is wider - so pained and sad and terribly hopeful. "Everythin' is shit and it's even worse now, everythin's been shit for so long, but you're here, and you're alive, and I want… I want that. I'm not sayin' you can, I'm not even sayin' we should, and what happened still… It happened… but I do."
He wants to say something to her, to that. He wants to say something very badly. But the words don't come and every muscle in the center of his chest sucks itself into a dense ball of pure agony that radiates outward, rippling through his bones and joining the storm in his head, and he trembles and leans forward and covers his face with his hands because it's the only thing he can do.
He covers his face with his hands and lets it all flow, and her hand is on his back, her head on his shoulder. Her lips - She kisses the side of his neck. It stings and he remembers why, and he trembles harder.
He doesn't know what to do with forgiveness.
Might be time to learn.
"I love you," she whispers, and he sobs, quiet, and this too is all right. And when he raises his head at last, everything still a watery blur, she takes his hand and presses it to her cheek, and without pausing to think about it, he swipes his thumb across the ashy track of her tears. Her scar.
"I love you." Shaky, but he gets it out, and he manages what comes after. "I want it."
She sags against him with her own shaky sound, and he can't believe he can do it and he can't believe she's letting him but he circles his arms around her and she fits, she fits like she basically always has - and he has no illusions about any of this. This is still fucked up. He's still fucked up. None of that is over. None of it is gone. He didn't walk into the fire and come out magically healed, the infected parts of him burned away and his mind cleansed. That hole, whether real or imaginary, is still in his skull. That bullet still carved its path through his brain, did what it did to him, and nothing that happened last night reversed its course and rewound it backward out of him and repaired what it destroyed. His head is killing him. Every inch of his internal terrain is run through with tremors, and what lurks beneath is terrible. Dark things are flitting around the corners of his vision like malevolent butterflies.
But maybe he can be all right.
After a while - no idea how long and it doesn't matter - he pulls back from her, gazes at her, shifts his focus down to his hands. Somehow, somewhere along the way, they began to represent everything. They've become the external thing by which he evaluates his interior. He looks at them and he perceives himself.
Torn and raw.
"I think I shouldn't see you for a while." He looks away, out over the treetops at a world in which he doesn't belong. Not that he belongs in the world behind him, either. "I gotta get my head right." He huffs a quick laugh, shakes his head. "Righter than this, anyhow."
He half expects her to protest. But she doesn't. She only nods, and she takes his torn, raw hand again in both of hers. She's so careful with him, but like every other touch now, it's painful - and he welcomes every part of it. Not least because yes, it might be some time before he feels it again. He might carry this pain as something precious, as a reminder. A promise to himself.
He's going to try.
He doesn't know if it's going to work. He doesn't know if he can get his broken head right. He doesn't know if he can get better. But he supposes that it wouldn't kill him to have a little faith. Faith is why he's here.
Faith is why he's alive.
