AN: I'm terribly sorry for the extremely long hiatus. I do want to finish this though, and I honestly missed writing this. I'll try to finish it up soon. But if I do disappear again, I'll be back eventually. Thank you for the reviews and follows. They really do matter to me. 😊

Light

Somewhere in the distance, windchimes rustled slightly lulling Daryl back to the forefront of his consciousness. The first thing he noticed was that he no longer felt the familiar hardness of the table beneath him. Instead, he felt a softness beneath him that felt more like a bed. His eyes felt glued together and he fought to open them. Bright light rushed in to meet his sore eyes, lighting up a dull headache in the back of his skull. He wiggled his fingers and shifted his body weight in the bed. As he became accustomed to the blinding light, his vision focused and his surroundings dawned and fleshed themselves out. Daryl noted that he seemed to be lying in the makeshift bedroom that Beth had created. He found that he could move himself slightly, and he repositioned himself to a sitting position. His leg met his efforts with angry, sharp protests of pain but he thought idly that it seemed somewhat better than before.

As he sat up, Daryl noticed that he was not alone in the room. Sitting on a chair facing out toward the window of the room sat an unwelcome but familiar sight.

"Well, now. Look who's back. You've given us all quite a scare there, baby brother. Didn't know if we'd be seeing you again" Merle said with a smirk. He sat whittling something with a knife.

"I'm thirsty" Daryl managed.

Meryl stopped whittling and looked up to scan the room. He stood and walked over to stand at Daryl's bedside, handing him a jug of water from the nightstand. Daryl has long since stopped questioning the capabilities of his hallucinations. The fact that his ghost-brother handed him water was beyond Daryl's understanding. He just accepted it and drank greedily.

"Damn, you ain't lying. Can't say much though. Reckon I'd be about to thirst to death too if I slept half as much as you have lately" Meryl remarked.

When half the jug was gone and Daryl felt a slight pang of nausea, he stopped and recapped the jug. "Where's Beth?" he asked.

"Couldn't say. I don't really venture too far from you. Gotta look out for my kin and all that. She sure has put a lot of effort in you though, boy" Merle said. He turned and walked back over to his chair, reclaiming his post and taking his whittling back up.

"Shouldn't have. Should've moved on" Daryl said. His leg was fully awake now and throbbing constantly. His newfound clarity was foreign and alien to him, and he took the time to survey his own body. He noted that he had a bandage on his forearm from what he assumed was where Beth had been putting fluid into him. Pushing back the covers, he braced himself to survey the damage to his thigh. He couldn't see much; the area was thickly wrapped in gauze, but he did notice that the flesh seemed hard and warm. A brighter, more vivid jolt of pain leapt up at him as he pressed. Daryl winced and let out a sigh. His head hurt. His body felt like it like it was lined with lead. He noticed he needed to piss like a race horse. Grabbing the jug, he uncapped and finished the rest off before using the empty jug to relieve himself.

"Who gives a shit about the details. She did. You're here, and that's all I care about. Fuck knows, hopefully whatever that was knocked some damned sense in you. Running around out there half-starving with all your angst-ridden bullshit, you got real careless and came damned close to dying. And you'd have deserved it. The hell were you thinking, stomping around like a pissed off teenager?" Merle demanded.

Daryl smiled sickly and lolled his head, "I don't know, man. Maybe because I'm losing my fucking mind? What do you want me to say? I mean, I'm talking to my dead brother. I raped a girl. Drinking anything and everything I can get my hands on. Every time I close my eyes, I have vivid fucked-up dreams, some of which I don't even have any rhyme or reason for. I don't know, take your pick"

"You're thinking too damned much" Merle answered.

"Whatever you want to call it" Daryl resigned. He slunk back down in the bed, moving himself back to a laying position. The water had sunken itself heavily on Daryl's empty stomach. Despite being hungry, he found himself being lulled by a false sense of satiety.

Across the room, he noticed Merle stand and walk back towards him. "Yeah, that'll help. You go ahead and get yourself some more beauty sleep" he said sardonically. Daryl ignored him. He was tired. He couldn't be bothered to care.

Dark

As night gathered, Daryl stood on some nameless balcony in some nameless town. Absentmindedly, he lit a cigarette from a pack and studied the horizon around him. He couldn't place where he was. It seemed to be some city. Cars passed beneath him on a busy road, surrounded by other buildings of equal or greater height than the hotel he was in. None of the signage on the buildings made any sense, and the more he thought about it Daryl realized the writing he did see didn't seem to spell out any words at all. Given the level of detail he'd experienced recently, this newfound ambiguity seemed disconcerting.

"It's all breaking down, you know. It's in us and our blood, and you're not carrying just yours anymore" came a voice from behind him.

Daryl turned to look behind him, and noticed a petite girl opening the glass sliding door and pushing her way out to the balcony. She had long auburn hair and a gaunt frame. The girl shivered as she stepped out onto the balcony, partly due to the level of wind out on the high balcony and partly since she wore only a thin tank top and skimpy underwear.

"What did you say?" he asked, taking another long drag off his cigarette.

The unnamed girl took the cigarette from him and took a drag of her own. "I said, I'm coming down. It's for us both, you're not carrying just for you, doll"

Daryl weighed this in his mind and realized he felt rather achy and lethargic. He studied the girl more closely but still couldn't quite place her.

The girl blinked at him and scratched at her neck. With more frustration, she said, "It'd be real nice if you'd come in and shoot me back up, Daryl. It's been a while and I'm coming down"

"Oh. Yeah, sure" he said blankly.

Without offering it back to him, the girl finished off the cigarette and tossed it over the side of the balcony. She clapped her hands together and pointed towards the balcony door. "Now, please. I need it babe"

Numbly, Daryl followed the girl back through the door and into a dark, nondescript hotel room. On the periphery of his awareness, he began to fill in the blanks of his comprehension. A messy king-sized bed sat before a television that droned quietly and filled the dismal little room with a faint light. Over in the corner of the room, scattered needles and vials sat. The girl led him over to the table and gestured before lying back on the bed. Using muscle memory Daryl went about preparing shots. After he finished, he sat on the edge of the bed.

The girl bounced up and craned her neck towards Daryl. "Me first," she insisted. In the faint, electric light of the room, Daryl noticed that the girl was not only gaunt, she was emaciated. Her arms were riddled with scars and blemishes. As he inspected her, he couldn't be sure if she was offering her neck for preference or for necessity. His bets were on the latter. After some maneuvering, Daryl found a decent vein and pressed down to isolate it. The girl seemed animated for the first time since getting him from the balcony. She buzzed with anticipation as he went about injecting her. Once he was done, the girl mewled as her eyes rolled. Curling her toes and sighing contentedly, she fell back to lie on the bed. Daryl then went about finding and shooting himself up.

As the drug coursed through him, Daryl felt the old familiar warmth spread throughout his body. Following the girl's example, he laid back on the bed next to her. The haze set in on his brain and Daryl stared blankly at the ceiling. Something sad and cold refused to warm up to the light traveling through him. Sighing, he recalled how often he shot up lately and how limiting his ecstasy seemed to be anymore. His thoughts spread out and dispersed themselves throughout the room. It didn't seem as though his pain dissipated like it used to; it seemed more like it just stretched out and moved a foot or two away from him, ducking under furniture and slipping into shadows. It felt like it a tranquilized snake, sitting within striking range and waiting to reemerge.

"I love you" the girl spoke softly next to him, her voice shrill and childlike. She giggled and rolled towards him. Daryl shifted slightly and allowed her to bury her face in his chest. He didn't know her name, couldn't say how long they'd been together in this suffocating hotel room.

"Mmhm" Daryl replied noncommittally. She didn't seem to notice, or care. He didn't feel like it mattered anyhow. She didn't love him and he didn't love her. Small flecks of memory meandered their way back to Daryl. Her name was Cloe. She was a cocktail waitress. Was or is, he didn't know or care. They'd met a few weeks back when he and Merle were running something along the border. The two brothers had temporarily separated while Merle settled some business in the next state over. Daryl had decided to lay low with the girl in the meantime, until his brother came back by and they moved on to whatever was next.

"Let's go out tonight, babe. I'm off work" Cloe said.

"Yeah, okay" Daryl answered.

The girl tossed her hair, rolled onto her stomach, and leaned up on her elbows, looking Daryl in the face. He watched as she playfully bounced her feet and chewed a piece of her hair. Something about how this fraught, fragile girl reveled in her synthetic happiness gnawed at Daryl's insides. He didn't think she'd used for long, the honeymoon wasn't over. He guessed Cloe had been at it long enough to burn up several of her more distal veins, but not long enough to be as burnt out as he was. Her glazed eyes and saccharine voice curdled his blood and gave him a distant feeling of nausea. Or maybe that was the heroin. Either way, he felt off.

"What are you thinking, Daryl?" she asked, busying herself with tracing the outlines of his tattoos.

I guess about how I'm ready to be dead. Or maybe how ten minutes ago I thought maybe I ought to jump from the balcony. Or it could be how your high makes me sick. Could even be how I guess I just don't care at all, Daryl mused.

"Just wondering how long Merle will be. Didn't give me a definite timeframe" Daryl said.

Her face dimmed a bit, but she recovered quickly. "I don't want you to go. Maybe I could go with you?"

Daryl had to restrain himself from smirking. Bless her heart, he thought. Still, he knew she'd probably forget his answer regardless. "We could see, yeah"

She kissed his chest and laid her head back down, nuzzling closer to him and sighing happily. Daryl wondered how much longer he could keep things up. He didn't get how things didn't seem to be as hard on Merle. He could run through drugs, put them down, walk away, come back to them, it didn't matter to him. Things felt thinned and heavy for Daryl. He knew he didn't want to continue living like he did, but didn't know how else to live.

"What do you think they see?" the girl asked him, her voice suddenly changed.

Daryl tensed some, startled by this change and pulled abruptly from his self-depreciating reverie. "What do you mean?" he asked.

Propping herself up on her elbows, Beth looked Daryl in the eye, "The walkers. Objectively, they seem to have vision. But what do you think it is they see when they look?"

"I don't think they think about it at all, honestly"

Beth smiled softly. "No, I don't think it's that simple. There's something there. Maybe it's only like a predator looking at its prey, but I think that there is thought there"

"Maybe. But why does that matter?" Daryl asked.

Beth leaned towards Daryl, moving her lips to beside his right ear. She whispered to him, her voice quiet and sad, "We've got the same blood, Daryl"