Note: Just want to say again that I'm not a mental health professional and have no formal training in psychiatry or counseling, and everything I'm doing here is drawn from what I know from my own experience of treatment for various things. So it's very possible that I'm getting some stuff wrong. Please forgive if so. ❤️
Chapter 44: on heaven's stretch there'll be no more dying
I'm in the hallway again, I'm in the hallway. The radio's playing my favorite song. Leave the lights on. Keep talking. I'll keep walking toward the sound of your voice. - Richard Siken
They walk home together through the smoldering wreckage. In the center of the street they say goodbye without saying anything at all, and when she gently frames his face and leans up and kisses his mouth, it's soft and it's chaste and it doesn't linger. She doesn't need to linger, and he doesn't need her to.
This is not that kind of goodbye.
She turns, goes to her door and inside. He goes to his. Separated by a band of pavement, they both climb into cool showers - her stepping over dried streaks of blood that have no more power to trouble her - and lean against the tile until they're almost in a standing doze. They blink slowly as the spray runs off their lashes and the ends of their hair, sinking into the faint twinges as it runs over their cuts and burns, and they watch the water circling the drain make the transition from black-brown to cloudy gray to clear.
She pads silently down the hall, toweling off her hair. Her room is bright with mid-morning sun. Normally she would probably pull down the shade, but this time she leaves the towel in a careless heap on the floor and crawls naked and still damp into bed, and tugs the rumpled covers up over herself. His scent lingers like her kiss didn't, and perhaps beneath the surface there are rumbles of disquiet, but above them she's peaceful and it doesn't trouble her any more than his blood did. She wraps her arms around one of her pillows and pulls it firmly against her, closes her eyes into the sunlight and is asleep in minutes.
He doesn't sleep in his bed - his nest. It's not a bed, and he doesn't want it to be his. Not anymore. He stands there just as naked as her and looks at it, head slightly cocked like a thoughtful animal. Then he pulls on a shirt and a loose pair of pants and scoops up a blanket, one of the pillows, and walks out to the back yard. He curls up in the grass in his patch of shade and feels the breeze drying his hair and the droplets clinging to his skin.
The air is still thick with smoke, and now when the wind shifts the smoke is joined by the odor of burning flesh. But somehow it doesn't hit him as strongly as it did - maybe he's just used to it - and as far as noise goes, a kind of exhausted peace seems to have descended. It's quiet. There are voices, but they're low. He can hear Rick inside the house, saying something to Michonne. His family is close. He's not alone.
Shadowy things crawl around him, but they keep a wide berth. At least for now, they won't come near him. For now, he's safe from them. Like so many other things, that's enough.
He sleeps, and as he does the storms roll through and past and leave him be.
"I dunno how you do it."
He blinks at Denise. She rolls back from him in her chair, roll of gauze loose in her hands, still scanning him. Shaking her head very slightly, incredulous in a gentle way. His face feels tight and hot like a bad sunburn, more blisters are rising on his arms and the backs of his hands, and speaking of his arms and the backs of his hands, the hair there is almost completely gone. In a few places the cuts on the inside of his arms are burned as well, and they hurt like a motherfucker. His hair is even more ragged and uneven than before, and the sharp stinking of it on fire has stubbornly persisted despite the washing.
But she's cleaned him up, restitched, spread salve on the parts of him that need it. Wrapped and bandaged. She didn't ask about the bite on his neck, merely cleaned it and covered it, and he's more than content with that.
Afternoon of the day after the worst day of his life, and he actually feels…
He feels good. Or this might be what good feels like. It's not an entirely familiar sensation, so he might be partially guessing.
He shifts on the examining table. He's not uncomfortable there. Just restless. "Do what?"
"Uh, live?" She laughs softly. "You know you should be dead so many times over by now? You're like a fucking cat. Except I bet you're up to way more than nine."
"Indoor cat," he murmurs, flexes his hand to feel the pain - and not for the reasons he used to. There's something weirdly pleasant in the jab through his nerves.
Denise arches a brow. "Huh?"
Head-shake. Actually a tiny hint of a smile, though it hurts. "Nothin'."
He still doesn't know which he is. He wonders if it's possible to be both.
The room isn't empty. Over by the window, Tara is tending to a woman with burns about the same severity as his and an ugly gash along the left side of her brow. A man is lying in the bed upstairs with an arm missing just below the shoulder and an IV of whole blood beside him. Others in their houses, also - just as Rick said - hurt bad. He knows Denise has been all over all day, deputizing anyone she reasonably can, and he would be able to draw that conclusion even if she hadn't told him so and he hadn't waited to be seen until this point. Her face is drawn and pale and deep circles pit the spaces under her eyes. Tara doesn't look much better. Though she also seems to have escaped without significant injury.
Rick was right. It could have been so much worse. He's still doubtful regarding how much of that is due to him, but it's true.
Denise reaches up, uses surprisingly unhesitant fingertips against his chin to turn his head toward her, searching his face. Though perhaps it's not really so surprising. "How're you doing otherwise?"
He doesn't need to ask for clarification. It's more than what he did to his arms; he doesn't remember very much about his little episode of party crashing but he does remember that she saw him. Was badly rattled, nervous, but tried to calm him down.
He meets her gaze, shrugs. Wonders if she'll ask for more detail and hopes so much that she doesn't, because his head is hurting again, though not anywhere near unbearable, and articulating his state of mind involves more effort than he cares to expend on it.
She doesn't. Instead she nods down at the bandages on his arms. "You gonna do that again?"
He doesn't balk. Shakes his head. No. He's not. At least he doesn't anticipate it, though he honestly can't be sure. She'll know that, and understand.
"Have you tried other times? That I don't know about?"
A few seconds of reticence this time. Then he nods. There's no point in denying it. There's no reason to hide it from her. What, some twisted kind of pride? What the fuck is that worth? What has it ever been worth?
"Did you have a plan? Or did you just do it?"
"Just did it." His voice is low, rough, almost grating in his own ears. It's not as hard to tell her this as maybe it should be. Perhaps because he can't detect an iota of judgment in her quiet voice. She doesn't sound disappointed in him. She doesn't sound upset at all.
She merely wants to know what she's dealing with.
He lifts one arm, looks at the bandages. Feels a species of grim amusement. "I fuckin' suck at it anyway."
She smiles faintly. "Yeah. You really do." She pauses a beat, head tilted. He's reminded oddly of Rick. "Are you still thinking about it?"
He lowers his arm. Takes a breath. He's told her things. He's told her horrible things. He's told her horrible things as a form of aggression, trying to hit her with them. As if he was grabbing her by the hair and rubbing her nose in his shit, forcing her to look at everything ugly and wretched and horrific inside him. Forcing her to look at the monster he was so certain was all of him, punishing her for daring to care. He was never telling her about any of it with any expectation that it might make him feel better.
But looking back, he realizes that sometimes - a very few times to be sure but even so - it did.
"Yeah," he whispers, because he is. It's always in the back of his mind, rattling around like dry bones. Not even only killing himself, not always. But dying.
He's so close to it. All the time.
She nods, and she looks as if she expected this. "Thinking about it doesn't mean you have to do it. Doesn't mean you're going to." She covers his hand with hers, and it stings a little but he doesn't pull away. "They're just thoughts, Daryl. They can't hurt you. They can't hurt anyone else. I know it seems like it, I know they're scary as shit, but they can't do anything."
His gaze flits past her. In the corner of the room, a shadow moves jerkily. Black tendrils beginning to snake along the wall like infection spreading through a network of veins. Click of needle claws.
"The things you see can't hurt you either," she says, her voice even lower, and he squeezes his eyes shut. Ducks his head. Wants to believe her so bad, and believing is as scary as the things themselves. It sends beetles of terror crawling under his skin. Believing and then being wrong. Because hasn't he hurt people? Hasn't he hurt himself? Isn't that true? Can he afford to dismiss any of it? Can he afford to be wrong?
He curls inward, grips the sides of his head. Suddenly everything is much too loud. Not anything that was here before but the hissing coming from the corners. The cracking as holes open up in the walls and waves of ants begin to pour through.
I don't wanna be like this anymore.
He forces his eyes open, looks up at her. She's watching him closely, but keeping a distance - he knows for his safety, not for hers - and he's so fiercely grateful for that.
For a lot of things.
"That shit you was talkin' about before. Medication." He drags in another shuddering breath. Another. It's all beginning to fade. "Could that really help?"
"Honestly?" She sits back and crosses her arms, mouth tight at one side. "I dunno. It might."
"What about when we run out?"
"I guess we'd have to deal with that, then." She's silent a moment, then pushes forward. "Look, here's the bottom line. Your brain is exhausted. It's been dealing with all of this completely on its own for… God, for months. If nothing else, it could maybe give you a break. Give you a chance to get your breath. Then we could figure other things out."
Frown. This sounds complicated. "Like what?"
"Like strategies? Alternatives. For handling things when you don't have it anymore. Daryl…" She leans forward again, gaze unwavering behind her smudged glasses. "You're never gonna be like you were. What you're dealing with now, it probably won't ever go away. Not totally. But it could be… managed. You can learn to live with it." Another faint smile, and he can detect nothing false behind it. "I'm not saying it wouldn't be hard. Might be the hardest thing you've ever done. Harder than what got you here. But if you really want to… If you really want to, I think you can."
It's like he's drowning in what she's saying. Flailing, kicking, trying to keep his head above the surface. He could collapse onto the floor and lie there like a stranded fish, gasping. He can barely get enough air to speak. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." She touches him again, his hand. He stares down at it. She touches him so much, relatively speaking, and he doesn't actually want her to stop. "You can make it work."
And he finally does get a breath. A full breath. Thinks about what she said. Doing exactly that. How she's right, how he hasn't been able to breathe for months, how he doesn't remember what it's like to not be so tired he can barely move and moving anyway.
I wanna get better.
Very shaky, hardly audible: "Alright."
"Alright." She gives his hand a careful squeeze. Another smile. "When do you want to get started?"
He returns the smile. Doesn't know what it looks like to her, but it feels okay, and he doesn't have to try for it. It just comes.
"Ain't got no plans or nothin'." He sighs and looks toward the window, and the light stabs at his eyes but he does it anyway. He's going to take the pain like he never has, look at everything and not be the first one to blink. There are some things he's going to have to get used to. "For I guess… Forever."
Early that evening, Carol shows up at her door without being asked. She's carrying a bucket and some rags. Beth looks at these things, looks at her, and doesn't ask how she knew. She steps aside and lets her in without a word.
There aren't any words as she fills the bucket with water, adds soap. Tosses in the rags. Carol follows her to the bathroom, stands in the doorway for a moment and surveys the carnage. Beth hasn't yet put on any lights, and a shaft of the late sun turns Carol's hair from silver to a pale gilded gold.
Her face is difficult to read.
"Shit," she breathes at last, shakes her head. This shouldn't come as any surprise to her - Carol knows very well by now how much blood is in someone and how much they can lose and not die - but what Beth sees in her eyes is akin to surprise nevertheless. As if she knew it would be bad but didn't really understand the degree.
It's more blood than they saw in the hallway. Or it looks like more.
"Denise said he wasn't really tryin' to do it."
Carol shoots her a look, a tight smile. "Yeah, well, could've fooled me." Beth waits for her to continue but that appears to be the only comment she cares to offer at present. She nods at the bucket in Beth's hands. "Let's get to it."
Silence again as they lower themselves to their knees and start to wipe down the floor. Beth sees now - in a way she had been too overwhelmed with dreadful shock to catch - how right Denise was. He didn't hit an artery. There's no spray, no sign of any significant pressure at all. Except for a couple of exceptions, the cuts weren't deep. He flowed, and not heavily. He trickled, dripped. The dried puddles are much smaller now than they seemed before. His blood is everywhere, looks almost like he was intentionally spreading it around, but it's partially an optical illusion, its darkness against the pale tile.
Trying to try. But he was like her. He didn't actually want to. He never wanted to. He believes he's wanted to die, and maybe part of him has, but now she remembers what he said to her in his room that day when she was bandaging his hands. The fine distinction he made. He's always been impatient with the squirrely parsing of semantics. He doesn't make distinctions like that unless they truly mean something to him.
I don't wanna die. But I wanna be dead. All the time.
"He's doing better," Carol says - quiet, but it makes Beth start a little. Woolgathering, her father might have said. She looks up; Carol is looking back at her, unmoving with her wrung rag in her hand, and her expression…
One of the oddest mixes of relief and concern and wary caution that Beth has ever seen.
"Yeah?"
Carol inclines her head, sighs. "For now. Denise saw him." She jerks her chin at Beth. "You need to go see her too. You got banged up . And there's your head." Pointed tone, and Beth knows she knows. And more, worse. Because Carol's gaze drops slightly and comes to rest beneath Beth's chin.
The bruises at her throat. She actually forgot. For a short, blessed while. Not that the thing happened, but that it left any mark anyone could see and she wouldn't be able to merely explain it away. At least not now, and not with this woman.
If anyone would know exactly what they were looking at.
"I'm alright," she whispers. "'s not as bad as it looks."
Is that true? Internally, she shrugs.
Carol continues to look at her for a moment or so, gaze unyielding. But she says nothing, and eventually Beth realizes that she isn't going to. The Carol of a couple of years ago would have. She would have picked and pushed, far too hesitant to be genuinely nagging but unwilling to leave it alone. This Carol looks at her and at the evidence of what Daryl did to her, and without a doubt she's drawing her own conclusions and has her own feelings about them. But she's keeping them to herself.
What Beth chooses to do about it is something only Beth can decide. Right or wrong. And Beth owes her nothing.
It's been a long time since Carol was anyone's mother. Even his.
"He didn't," Beth says. Not a whisper. Low and solid. Not so difficult to say as she might have imagined. "He just bruised me. That's all."
Not saying it for her sake. There's nothing here about her that needs protecting. But across the street, presumably, Daryl is facing himself, and that'll mean that in his own way he's facing these bruises. Carol will finish up here, go back across the street and face him, and even if thinking about it ties her gut in knots, Beth is damned if she's going to send Carol into that house under the assumption that the man waiting inside might be a rapist.
Though he would likely maintain that the line between tried and did is very fine indeed.
Bottom line: Daryl needs Carol to be there with him. Fully. Maybe more than ever now.
Another couple beats of silence. Then Carol bends and soaks her cloth in the soapy water, shifting her gaze back to the floor. "Go see Denise, Beth. Don't make me tell you twice."
The floor is better. Ten more minutes and it's much better. Ten minutes after that and it's almost spotless, only a hint of a smear here and there in the grouting between the tile. The water in the bucket is a deeper pink, and Beth can't keep her eyes off it as she rises and carries it back down the hall. The sun is setting, and as Beth walks out onto the back porch it casts itself across the grass like a Midas spell, gold along the edges of the blades.
Always this way, gold.
She takes the steps one at a careful time and stands on the narrow square of pavement at the bottom, looking once more down at the bucket. Spots of white-pink foam standing out against the darker hue, almost a faded rose, and yet again she thinks about washing him off herself, crying as she watched him flowing away - and now she understands that not all of the crying was bad.
She never mourned him the way she should have. They were all denied what they and he should have had, the grave and the words and the chance to say goodbye, to feel like he was genuinely resting - peaceful, however horrible the event that put him in the ground. But she felt it worse than any of them, and even now she's not certain why.
She never mourned him. She never let go. She held onto whatever she could grasp. His blood. His knife. Her memories of him - not the good ones. Not the good in him, not what he gave her. She held onto those final nightmare seconds in that nightmare hallway, tortured herself with them over and over: the explosion of blood as his head snapped back and he fell, her part in it, her hopeless guilt, kneeling beside him and cradling his bleeding head in her lap and more of his blood bathing her hands.
And the trunk. The obscenity of that fucking trunk.
Maybe I could've done something.
She never mourned him. But she watched him soaking into the ground, the grass and clover and the asters' purple stain in the midst of the green, and it was awful, but also, just in those few seconds…
He watered the earth. His blood and everything of life in it. He watered what was growing there, and she doesn't need to return to that place to know in her bones that it all kept on growing.
She takes a trembling breath and squeezes her eyes closed - then opens them, relaxes, lets the tears flow as she walks into the grass and slowly empties the bucket over the white clover and the nodding heads of dandelions.
The soap probably won't do them any favors. But there isn't much of that. There's far more of him.
She stands there with the bucket held loose in her hand and watches him sink into the soil.
Maybe she could have done something. Maybe she could have not done something. Maybe she could have done nothing at all. Doesn't matter. What matters is that after, if she could have, she would have gotten this part right, and she would have done so even if all she had was his blood. There wouldn't just have been words, not from her, because words aren't what he asked her for. She would have given him the last thing he ever requested of her.
She doesn't know where she remembers the song from. But she does remember.
I know there is a land of beautiful flowers
where we'll meet again when life is over
where we'll while away the endless hours
on Heaven's bright eternal shore
I want to meet you by that beautiful river
on that eternal morning in the sky
where we'll live in peace through endless ages
where we'll never say goodbye
Very dimly, a part of her set very far back in her mind is aware of the back door opening and the quality of a silence in which someone is present - and watching her. Listening. And that's all right.
If Carol wants to carry this back across the street as well, she's more than welcome to it.
He's not going to bed in this fucking room.
For the second time in a day, he stands there in it and looks around. He hates it. He hates everything it's making him feel and everything it is, all its bad shadows and its wrong angles, its corners where he sees darkness swirling like noxious clouds, the bare bulb on the bedside table, the bare mattress on the bedframe, the remains of his nest in the corner. The thin, anemic light of the rising moon through the curtains.
He understands that he's always hated this room. Only now is he also understanding that he doesn't have to stay here. This is not something he deserves. It's not his place anymore to decide what he does or doesn't deserve. He's very bad at that. He should leave it to someone else, at least for a while.
He doesn't have to stay here. If he wants to, he can walk out of here and never set foot in this room again. If he wants to, he can have this small measure of freedom from himself.
I want it.
Silently, he goes about the business of collecting the things he considers his.
There really is hardly anything. Mostly a few items of clothing and a toothbrush. He didn't care about things. He still doesn't. He already lost just about every thing he ever gave a shit about. He lost his bike. He lost his bandanna. He lost his vest, his wings. He lost his bow. It's just him now.
Well. Not exactly. There's what Beth gave him, and what goes with it, which Carol brought back with her from across the street earlier, and now he lays a hand on it: hilt of his knife where it rests in its sheath at his belt.
Last night he took that knife when she offered it to him and he fed it blood, and he doesn't feel bad about it. He doesn't regret it. He sees the necessity of it. But he took no pleasure in any of it. He lost track of how many people he killed, surging through the firelit darkness like a vengeful ghost, but he didn't enjoy the killing the way he would have expected. There was no release. It wasn't recreation in any sense of the word.
It was a job. It had to be done. He did it. Now it's over and he's washed the knife, washed himself, and life goes on and he goes on within it.
Can't go back.
He gathers what he has on the bed, takes a few more seconds to scan the space before returning his gaze to the little pile of his possessions. One thing he grabbed without stopping to consider, but he considers it now, bending and picking it up and turning it over in his hands.
His fingers. He's bitten them today, yes. Bitten and chewed and picked at the ragged ends. But it's better. And anyway he doesn't pay them any mind. He's focused entirely on what he's holding.
The Stranger
He thumbs it open, flips through. His attention stops at a passage he's read before, but somehow his brain latches onto a sequence of words and rips them free of their context, erases everything else around them and allows them to sit alone on a blank page.
For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.
He closes the book, drops it on the bed, and leaves it there.
Movement in the corner of his vision as he scoops the rest of it up and turns toward the door. He looks back - and freezes.
It's there. Crouched under the window, bathed in moonlight that turns it not pale white but instead a deep and malevolent red. Its scabby eyeless face, its bloody tongue lolling between an equally bloody set of razor-blade teeth, its needle-claws oozing poison and clicking as its long bony fingers twitch on the floor. Hanging flaps of decaying skin. Maggots wriggling in its open oozing sores. Flies.
You pathetic little moron. You stupid worthless piece of shit. You honestly think you can get away from this? From me?
From you?
He looks at it for a long time. He doesn't shudder or cringe, and he doesn't look away. He's not going to be the first one to blink. Eyes or no eyes.
He's also not going to lie to himself.
"No," he says softly, finally, and turns away.
He steps out into the empty hallway and shuts the door behind him with a soft click.
He could bed down any number of places. But he gently shrugs off Rick and Michonne and Carol and returns to the back yard, sets everything down in the grass. It's another clear night, though the stench of burning flesh lingers faintly in the air. He's smelled worse and it doesn't bother him.
All those nights on the road and beside the road and off the road, he never slept in the open. It wasn't just a matter of safety; open sky was a horror, even with the moon. Shadows were best. Under the cover of trees and outcroppings, bridges, abandoned buildings - though not cars. Never cars. Regardless, day or night, he found his own versions of caves to bed down in. He abhorred the sky.
Now he looks up at it, and his head hurts but it's not that bad. He can bear it. He thinks he can sleep without the pills. At any rate, he'll try.
Out here under the open sky is good for now.
Tomorrow he'll find out what comes next.
She's in the clinic, mid-morning, when Maggie and Glenn come back.
Denise - looking like she hasn't slept more than a few hours since the attack, which is probably accurate - approached her without comment when she came in, ushered her over to a seat by the window and started examining her bruises and scrapes. Her throat, too, and when Denise touched her chin and lifted her head to get a better view, brief tension gripped her.
But Denise didn't ask. And sure, it could have been the Wolves. Any of her injuries could be chalked up to them.
No sense in thinking too much about it.
Beth murmured something about her head. Denise got a penlight, shone it into her eyes, made a bit of a face and shrugged. Asked her to try to walk a straight line. Started to ask her the date - then stopped and laughed a little. A question like that is pointless. No one knows the date anymore.
How does she feel? Beth returned the shrug. Tired. Beaten up. Her tailbone and ribs throbbed from where the Wolf knocked her down - not just the Wolf, but whatever. She felt numb, kind of, which she guessed was a species of shock. Probably doesn't matter how much shit you see and how used to it you think you are. You still have cracks. Sometimes those cracks actually get wider. She's walking around with a lot of scar tissue, and scar tissue isn't always tougher than before. Doesn't always protect so well. The attack hurt her, and it hurt her in more than one way.
Pause. Quiet.
Her gaze flicked from Denise's down to her wrist and back again. Denise has seen him, right?
Denise hesitated. Nodded. He's all right. He's very all right, actually.
"He wants to get better." Another little smile, soft. Weary but warm. "He wants to try medication. He wants to try actual therapy. He wants to try anything if it might help him. He just wants to get better."
So he believes it's possible.
The therapy… How does that work, exactly? She's talking to him?
Kind of. He talks to her. They talk together. The idea is that they look at problems, think about how to deal with them. It's about strategy. It's also about keeping the possibility in front of him like a beacon, keeping him focused on it: he can get better. Steps forward should be celebrated. Steps backward aren't the end of everything. What matters is that he keeps moving.
Beth lowered her head and looked at her hands. Focused on breathing. She doesn't bite her fingers bloody, doesn't strip off skin and scabs, but her hands are deeply calloused now, scarred on the knuckles and backs, tough in a way the farm never made them. He was trying to destroy what tied him to the world, what he was terrified might betray him in the worst possible fashion. She understands that it wasn't that planned or that intentional - that when he said it felt bad when he didn't, he was talking about something much more fundamentally physical in the new structure of his brain - but it was part of it. His fear of himself. His conviction of his own violent monstrosity. He was never truly as bad as he believed. But he was bad. Parts of him still have to be. He wasn't wrong. He isn't wrong.
She's not well either. She hasn't been well for a long time. There was losing him, there was getting him back, there's everything that happened since - the things he meant to do to her and the things he didn't - but it began for her even before that. It began even before the prison. And for better or worse, she's always made it her business to take care of other people.
Could be it's time for her to take care of herself.
She caught Denise's gaze again. Held it. Took another deep breath, and it was steady.
"Think I could do it too? Talk to you, I mean? Just… Just sometimes?"
This time Denise's smile wasn't tiny. And just then came the grating metallic sound of the gates opening and the rumble of an engine accompanied by voices, and Beth was up and across the room and pulling the door open before Denise could say anything else.
It's not like she really needed an answer. The smile was more than enough.
Maggie's face is pinched, worried, scanning everywhere as she stands by the car, hand frozen in the act of sweeping her dark hair back from her face. It unfreezes when she sees Beth coming toward her and she's opening her mouth to speak, but then Beth's arms are around her and squeezing her so tight she releases a surprised little oof. Second or two of that surprise lingering, but it doesn't go for longer than that; she's hugging Beth back, holding on, and the tender ache when she cups the back of Beth's head is easily ignored.
Beth did this at the prison, more than once, in the days before she stopped crying. People left on runs. People came back. Every time they did, it was a small miracle. It was worth clinging to them, if only for a moment, because the chance might not come again.
Somewhere along the way, she stopped believing in miracles. Things merely happened. There was no reason for it, and it didn't mean anything. But against every single odd he's alive, and people have died, but most of them made it. Most of them are still here. When Rick and Aaron led him through the gates, there was one more than there had been. Every day that's true is another small miracle, and it doesn't require a reason or some kind of externally bestowed meaning in order to be one.
It simply is.
"I'm alright," she murmurs, raises her head and sees Glenn and smiles shakily at him. "I'm alright."
We are.
