"What's 'stygian' mean?" Grace asked at random over supper. They'd found sign again. Daryl had a talent for certain, but they weren't coming up with what they needed to. They were tired. It was dark and gloaming outside. Shane had come in looking like a drunk; desperate, savage, impatient. That tang in the air was back around him again.
Herschel looked up. "How come?"
"It just crossed my mind."
"Um…" Andrea leaned back from the table and rolled the word her mouth with the piece of beef. "I think it has to do with the River Styx."
There was an equal mixture of 'Huh?'s and 'Oh's around the table, and between them, Grace and Andrea and (somehow not surprisingly) Glen spun the Greek mythos around the river of death and Persephone and Hades and the deal they'd cut. The rest sat back and listened. Sometime later, the guitar was tuned and Maggie and Grace sat on the porch listening as Daryl let a part of himself out of the box.
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Later that night, again, it was the two of them on the porch. Shane in a chair, her balanced on the railing in the moonlight. "That's a dark story to be telling, times like these."
"So?" she asked. "It's either tell it or lose it. It isn't like they're going to be printing books any time soon, and the odds of anybody having time to sit down and read one…."
He half nodded in agreement.
"You're kinda unhinged today, Shane."
He looked at her in astonishment. "Whaa?"
"Can't you feel it?"
"What in the HELL are you talking about, woman?"
"You were impatient when you came in. And the air goes sour around you."
"What the fuck?"
She sighed. "Never mind."
"Kinda flyin' loose, aren't ya?"
"I always do." She paused. "But you don't."
He leaned forward in the chair. "I don't understand."
"It's…..you do it when you think something should have happened different. Or when you think something shouldn't have happened at all."
"Smell sour?"
She half smiled at the ridiculousness. "Well…yeah."
"And you have room to talk?"
"I've learnt to TELL, Mr. Walsh, when I'm wobbly."
He leaned back in the chair and looked at her. "Like with the whole Styx River thing tonight?"
"River Styx," she said. "No. That was just…I see things. And that word's been bonking around in my head for a couple of days. Kinda like a song that gets stuck in your head, you know?"
"Yeah." They both paused.
"How long's it been since you had a song stuck in your head?" he asked.
She laughed. "I'm never without one. At least one."
He cocked his head sideways. "Do you sing?"
The smile was kind of shy. Completely sad. "Yes. When no one's listening." The sadness deepened. "Clara could sing. She had this little voice that was about pitch perfect. Those crazy high notes? Not a prob-a-lem."
"What about you?"
"People are always listening. So I don't sing. Do you?"
"I sound like a drownded hog."
She burst out laughing.
His broad mouth turned crooked and couldn't keep from dragging up at the corners. Singing. Music. The kind of things that were going to be lost and the kind of things that were going to happen to it now that it couldn't spread so far and wide… Shane almost lent thought to that for more than sixty seconds.
"Sing, Grace," he said. "There's nobody here."
Her mouth fell open in protest and she almost tipped off of the railing.
"We might lose it if you don't…."
She nodded slowly, and spoke after a while. "Sing what?"
"I don't care. I just want to hear."
A half smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and something completely changed about her. She started to pat a beat out on her thigh with an open hand. Shane recognized the rhythm right about the time she started to sing.
"Put a candle in the window, for I feel I've got to move….."
Bluesey. He would have pegged her for a soprano, but she was blues all the way down to her toes and deep and warm and if Shane had been standing he would have been left flatfooted.
"And though I'm goin', gone, you don't have to worry none, as long as I can see the light."
Shane shook his head and Grace turned it loose. Somebody else leaned up against the door frame down the porch –Daryl, he would guess— and he was afraid she would stop, but she didn't hear whoever it was and finished out the Creedence song without pause.
"I've got the chords for that…" Daryl said, and Grace DID almost fall off the railing then. She turned to look at him, looked at Shane almost betrayed, and the spell was broken. She turned, stood facing Daryl in her bare feet and you couldn't help but wonder if she was going to turn and run. And then the spell was back. "Go get it?"
"S'in the RV. Everybody's asleep…"
"Tomorrow night maybe then. After supper?"
"Sounds like an idea."
And all the sudden, when Dixon walked back up the steps and Grace took a breath into the night, Shane understood what she meant by sour.
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A/N: I have an idea for this. Swear I do. But it's just taking me a long time. And I like digging around in Shane Walsh's busted little brain. So do forgive me. Please?