Chapter 2: this chapter will be long on the grass

He used to have nightmares like this, is another thing. Used to have them frequently, jumbled in with the others where his dad is a walker and pursuing him for miles and miles of trackless road, hair patchy as mange and face half sloughed off and tongue lolling through a broken jaw, and with the ones where he wakes up and Merle is lying next to him, reeking of blood and torn gut with his skull a churned, stabbed-in horror, and when he raises his head Merle grins at him and grates Finally found ol' Merle, didn't you, baby brother? Finally came after ol' Merle and finished the job for that asshole whose dick you been suckin' this whole time.

In those nightmares she was there and she didn't know him. Didn't know anything. She wasn't dead but she might as well have been a walker, plodding through the world with her head slightly cocked like a brain-damaged bird.

Brain-damaged. She is. He's not a doctor. This is such a mistake. Should have left her with Edwards, gone off by himself if he couldn't bear it. Not this.

He goes to his mattress and pulls off his boots, shirt, and he lies on his side for a long time and looks at her as the rise and fall of her body slows and deepens into sleep. He put her by the window because he thought the light might be good for her, and the moon is high and waxing and bright and it spills all over her. Her skin is far from perfect, scarred now in more than just the four places, but in that light she looks like marble. Like ivory. Something bloodless and carved.

She's alive and she's real, and she's sleeping, which means she'll get stronger. She'll be stronger tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow they'll try again.

He's not giving up on her. Not this time. He'll die first.

If he can't save her now, a significant part of him feels like that might be exactly what he deserves.

He put her by the light but she's not the only one getting it; the place has a southeastern exposure and the sun floods into the room as soon as it crests the horizon, drowning everything. It slams against his closed eyelids and wrenches them open, only to shove them closed again when screwdrivers stab into his retinas. He winces and rolls away and wishes he had either put the two of them elsewhere or invested in some kind of blinds.

Except no. Not here. Not this window. It's too big, it's too high, and when he does manage to open his eyes and peer groggily around him, sitting up with his legs tangled in the sheets and a hand raised to shade his face, he sees her there in front of it just like the previous afternoon, her palms flat against the glass, a little dark form against the brilliance.

The deck wraps around but here there's nothing but a sheer drop, and he has a sudden, horrifically vivid fantasy of her backing up and stancing like an Olympic sprinter, launching herself forward and arcing gracefully through the glass and out into the morning in a beautiful cloud of glittering shards.

He wouldn't be able to stop her. Not at this distance. He would never get to her in time.

Maybe he's making more mistakes. Maybe everything is a mistake. Maybe it's impossible to do anything here that isn't basically a huge mistake.

But she stands there with her hands against the glass and she doesn't back up, doesn't leap. She doesn't do anything. She's just there, dressed as he left her in a loose t-shirt and boxer shorts that don't entirely fit her and hang a bit off her hips, and she looks so small. So young. It's impossible that she's been through all of this, young as she is. Impossible to go through it and still be standing at all.

She's so strong.

"Beth," he calls softly, and she turns, and for a fraction of a second - but long enough that he's certain he saw it - a smile is pulling at the corners of her mouth. Barely there, but that slight curve. He's seen it before. It's her.

Then it's gone. Except not entirely. It left something behind. That spark in her, brighter. He can see its glow from all the way across the room.

He clears his throat, nudging hair out of his eyes. "You wanna eat?"

She nods, and he gets up and starts to pull breakfast together.

Once again she eats in that mindless, mechanical way, but once again she is eating, and she's doing it without arguing or fighting him, and she's doing it all by herself. He watches her but he tries to be less obtrusive about it, even though he's still pretty sure she wouldn't and doesn't care.

He has to talk to her. He sucks at talking, and that includes talking to her. With her it's easier than it is with most other people, or it was - though he was starting to be able to talk at least a bit to Aaron - but he still sucks at it, and now he has the strongly distinct impression that whatever brings her back in the end, communication is going to be a significant part of it, so he has to suck it up and try.

"Gonna head to town tomorrow. You think you can come with me?" It's dangerous to leave her here but he hadn't planned on taking her and he still doesn't, because everything is differing degrees of dangerous and all that's left to him is semi-effective risk management. But he figures it doesn't hurt to at least float the idea and see if she grabs it and holds on. And in fact she is looking up at him, that same expression of mild consternation, that same sense of something gnawing at her.

"Could use someone to watch my back. It don't look too bad down there, but." He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. Crumbs, sticky, not all of the former confined to the plate because he will never be a tidy eater. Canned yams and crackers. The former aren't so terrible eaten cold. "You probably remember how to handle a gun. You're good with it. I'd feel better." He stops, searching her face. None of this is a lie. He doesn't think he can take her with him, but holy fucking Christ, he wants to. The two of them together. Like it was. He trusted her with his life. He wants to do that again.

And - very slowly - she nods.

He has no idea what to do. Part of him should have anticipated this, should at least have prepared a plan for it, because what the fuck is he supposed to do now? Tell her he changed his mind? Tell her he never meant it, never thought she would respond at all let alone say yes? Letting her, taking her, putting a gun in her hands - can he do that?

He absolutely can't.

"Beth," he whispers, but then she looks over toward the door and something happens to her face. Something he's seen before. A deeper flatness. A grayness. A fog settling around and enveloping her into its chilled, wet heart.

Her hands are hooking into claws. Trying to dig into the smooth, glossy wood of the tabletop.

"You should leave me down there," she says softly. "Why did you bring me here? I don't belong here. I have to be down there. With them. I have to eat."

He can barely speak. Girl, no. "You're eatin' right now."

"This?" She turns her attention back to the plate. She's still calm, still flat, but there's an edge of vague scorn in her tone. "This isn't food. This is... I dunno what this is. I don't know why none of you people believe me. Look at me." Now her attention shifts up to him, her eyes meeting his, wide glassy blue devouring her face like her oversized t-shirt is devouring her body. "I felt it. I'm not here. You don't see it 'cause you don't wanna see, but that doesn't make it less true."

"You're a walker?"

She nods. Somehow he's found a way, in the last few moments, to make himself cold. Cold and hard as the chrome that covers the entire kitchen. He'll have to do this. He'll have to do it a lot. He should get comfortable with it.

"You got shot in the fuckin' head, Beth." Keeping his voice level. Careful. He's not going to yell. "If you're a walker, and you got shot in the fuckin' head, why're you still around?"

She doesn't answer him. Her expression doesn't change. She doesn't budge her gaze. He doesn't budge his. It's a standoff. That's exactly what it is. He's staring her down and she's trying to do the same. Somehow he never really understood that he would be fighting her. Not just fighting for her, but her. He's probably not going to be able to do this peacefully. He's probably going to have to beat her down.

He's probably going to have to break her.

Finally she looks away again. Her nails are still digging into the wood, her knuckles bone-pale. Abruptly she thrusts the plate across the table and gets up with a sharp jerk, kicking her chair back and turning from him. Her back is expressing everything she needs to say and isn't.

She's angry. She's angry and that's so good, because she's not numb. There's fire.

"You're stupid," she says. "You're stupid and blind and you'll see."

She stalks away from him, heading across the expanse of floor toward the short flight of stairs that leads up to the other rooms. He doesn't take his eyes off her: her lifted head. Her purposeful gait. Her hands clenched at her sides. Her outside the shack, not backing down. Not budging. Not afraid of him. Solid in what she knew. She was burning bright then and she was so alive and she threw him into awe of her.

She held herself like this. Like she is now. Arguing that she's dead. It doesn't matter.

Inside he's rejoicing.

He follows her after a while.

Not hurrying. He refuses to hurry. He refuses to panic. He let her have some time. Maybe he shouldn't leave her alone, no, but maybe she also needs to be alone. She hasn't been alone for a single waking moment since she woke up that first terrible time. She's so far away from herself. He's not sure that being constantly in the company of other people is necessarily going to help her find her way back.

So he goes through the kitchen cabinets again, even though he's been through them already. There's a pantry - it's not very well stocked but there's stuff and a lot of it is non-perishable, and there's a wall of wine bottles. Floor-to-ceiling rack. He saw them the day before but he didn't take any time to really look at them, and he pulls a few of them down.

He knows nothing whatsoever about wine. He knows that it can make you drunk. He knows it's not his first choice in terms of methods of getting drunk. He knows that it - also - can be ridiculously expensive. Or it could, when expensive still meant shit.

He puts the bottles away. The last time they drank together, it didn't end so well. Probably best to not try it again.

He goes back into the kitchen and he stops for a few seconds, head cocked, listening. No sound at all from upstairs.

He turns to the block of knives on the counter and removes them all. He goes back into the pantry and pushes them under the wine rack, far back enough that they won't be visible unless someone really gets down there and looks. This feels like a pointless exercise - they're on a cliff for fuck's sake and it's really true that all she has to do is make a determined run for the window, and even if she doesn't do that there are probably any number of other ways to hurt herself in here, and Christ, he's seen for himself that all she needs are her own fingernails - but he does it anyway.

He's not a shrink. He's never been to a shrink. He has no desire whatsoever to go to a shrink, if one were even available. But he recognizes this as a coping mechanism. An attempt to exert control over an environment and a situation where he really has almost no control at all.

He goes out to the bike and he gets the other pack. He considers it for a moment, standing in the echoing foyer, then takes it to the pantry and stuffs it at the far end of the wine rack from the door, in the gap between it and the back wall. It's not very accessible, and if he needs it in a hurry - which is kind of why he has it at all - it's going to be a problem, but he can't have it out there. He just can't. What it means. What it's for.

He can't.

So he finishes this, and then he goes back out to the main room and he pulls his bed into some kind of order, does the same for hers - for fuck's sweet sake, he's never made a bed in his life - and he goes to the stairs and after another few seconds of listening he goes up.

The bedrooms and the two bathrooms here make up the other half of the house, all spacious, all the same kind of cold and angular and distant. All high ceilings, big windows, very sparse decoration. She's not in the first bedroom he enters - naked boxspring, more hardwood, walk-in closet standing open with not much in it but a couple of plastic-sheathed suits that don't look like they've been touched since before the Turn and a bunch of unlabeled boxes he doesn't care to rifle through. The second one is almost identical except for a very large and deeply strange painting over the bedframe - a long streak of black on a white background, haloed in splatters. The center of it looks like a spilled pool of something. When he first saw it he looked at it long enough to be sure he hated it, and he hates it now, and he gets out of there as fast as he can.

She's in the third bedroom.

It's smaller. He didn't pull the mattress from it because it's at the very back of the house and he didn't want to make the trip that far down the hallway if there were two others closer by. Somehow, though the windows are also smaller, it seems brighter - perhaps because the light doesn't have to travel so far to hit the walls and bounce around. The bed is a full rather than a queen, there's another abstract painting that looks like it might be by the same artist, except it's white and green and he doesn't hate it nearly as much. There's another built-in bookcase with more hardbacks - though these are clearly far less about a display of oh-I-am-so-fucking-cultured-as-well-as-extremely-rich - and she's sitting on the floor in front of it, her legs folded to the side, bent over something in her lap.

He moves up behind her, quiet but not stealthy. He wants her to know he's there. If she can know. She doesn't turn or look up, but there's a subtle shift in the angle of her head and the set of her shoulders that tells him she's almost definitely aware of him.

He drops into a crouch and shifts a little beside her. "Whatcha got?"

Slowly, she swings her head around and focuses on him. The light catches her face and he sees - like the first time - the cruel scars slashed across her cheek and brow, and the tiny star-crater up by her hairline. And the healing scabs on her cheek where she clawed her skin open. Another scab at the corner of her bottom lip where she bit herself to taste the blood. Her eyes are so big and blue, and for the moment he knows they see him, and his chests twists into a hot bloody fist because she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen, because she's here.

He rips his gaze away from her and drops it down to what she's holding in her lap.

It's a book, clearly old - pages in good condition but gently yellowed and the cloth edges of the cover slightly frayed - and he can't make out the actual text, but he can see the title in the top left hand corner of the page.

The Secret Garden

"You ever read it before?"

He never has. He knows it exists but he knows nothing about it other than the fact that presumably there's a garden in it, and he's never so much as touched a copy.

She nods. Her attention is still fixed on him and he's pleading her silently and wildly to keep it there.

"When you were a kid?"

She nods.

"You like it?" He's flailing. He has to say something to her but he's a roiling bag of panic. He thought it used to be hard to say things to her when it felt like there was a lot at stake, that he couldn't fuck up again and hurt her somehow, but now he doubts anything he could say could really hurt her in that way, and yet talking to her is next to impossible.

She doesn't respond at all – not at first – and her eyes slide just a bit out of focus, and he's thinking he might have lost her again when she speaks.

"Daddy read it to me."

Okay. All right. Daddy. He can work with this. He lowers himself the rest of the way to the floor, sits next to her, angles himself so he's facing her. "How old were you?"

"I was..." She frowns. Her eyes are distant again but not because she's slipping out of the world. She's trying to remember. "I was eight. Seven or eight. Mama too, they... They took turns. They were takin' turns gettin' me to bed. But Daddy did the voices so I liked him best." And she punches him in the fucking jaw when she gives him a smile - small and warm and so sweet - and leans forward a bit, suddenly conspiratorial. "I never told anyone. Didn't want Mama... Didn't wanna hurt her feelings. I didn't have favorites. Didn't do that. But I did. With that." She looks down at the book again. "Daddy did the voices," she repeats, and it's so soft that he knows she's not talking to him anymore.

This is something. This is a sacred moment. This is the opening of a door, wider and clearer than any since he first set eyes on her after Grady, and he has to walk up to it, and if he's very, very careful he might be allowed to walk through.

He reaches up and lays a hand on her shoulder - light as he can - and he feels the bones under her shirt, so delicate even if she was never fragile, and a minute shiver rolls through her but she doesn't flinch. She doesn't pull away.

"Can you read me somethin'?" He nods down at the pages. "Anythin' from that part. I never read it, just... read me a bit of it. Can you do that?"

Please.

"I..." She shakes her head, but he doesn't think she's actually refusing him. The way she's hunched herself, the way she's not quite meeting his eyes, it feels so much more like she's simply uncertain. Uncomfortable. And he hates making her uncomfortable.

He needs to get used to it, and he needs to do so immediately.

"Beth, can you?" Something in him tenses. Once again this feels strangely like tweaking some unseen and undefined line. "For me?"

She rolls her shoulder beneath his hand. Purses her lips. Reaches up and pushes a few strands of hair back from her face. And the movements are so quintessentially Beth that for a few seconds he can't breathe.

She reads.

One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands out and throws one's head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes one cry out and one's heart stands still at the strange unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun—which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so.

She pulls in a soft breath.

And one knows it sometimes when one stands by oneself in a wood at sunset and the mysterious deep gold stillness slanting through and under the branches seems to be saying slowly again and again something one cannot quite hear, however much one tries. Then sometimes the immense quiet of the dark blue at night with the millions of stars waiting and watching makes one sure; and sometimes a sound of far-off music makes it true; and sometimes a look in someone's eyes.

She falls silent and merely sits, motionless, staring down at the book. And he has no fucking idea now - and never will even if he really does live forever and ever and ever - what to possibly ever say.

And she looks up at him, puzzled. That same puzzlement. That same confusion.

"Where's Daddy?" Another punch in the jaw, this one he doesn't see coming and really should have because no one gets to have anything good, and inside he reels back and before he can recover she's pushing on. "Daddy should be here. Daddy's dead, the Governor..." Suddenly her lip trembles and her eyes are bright, too bright, and his entire body is numb from the neck down. "I should be with Daddy. He should be here. Did something happen? He always said he would be. We would all be together. In Heaven. Daryl, he did, he... And Mama and Shawn, where are they?"

TALK, you useless fucking piece of shit. Say ANYTHING.

"They ain't here." He's dropped his hand away from her shoulder but he touches her again, wanting to do more and not sure if he should or can or how he should touch her even if he did, and he can't. Can't do what he really wants to do and pull her close, pull her against him. When he tried before, she fought to get away from him, and he's not sure he can bear that now. "They're dead, Beth. You ain't dead."

"I am." The tears are running down her face but she's gentle now, like she's the one comforting him, and she reaches up and brushes his hair aside and lays her warm little hand against his cheek. Small and soft - a child's hand. She was a child, a girl, and that was torn away from her, burned out of her, blown to hell, and then he ruined what was left, because he does.

And she's too young for this monstrosity but she's not a child anymore. She hasn't been one for so long.

"I am," she repeats, that same terrible, relentless gentleness in her voice and her face and her eyes, and her hand. She strokes her thumb across his cheekbone. "So are you. We all are. We're all dead. We have been for a long time. Look around. You think this is livin'?"

She shakes her head. "We're all dead, Daryl. I know why Daddy and Mama and Shawn aren't here. We're all dead, and this is Hell."

She doesn't speak for the rest of the day. He leaves her alone. They eat dinner in total silence; he doesn't try to talk to her. He's not sure he can deal with whatever she might say. She seems perfectly calm now, perfectly content in her blank kind of way, and he'll take that as enough.

He doesn't make a fire. It's not as cold tonight and they should probably go easy on the stacked wood, and anyway he doesn't want to. Like she's a child he gets her to change and wash her face and brush her teeth, and like she's a child he puts her to bed again, tucks her in, sits with her for a few moments as her breathing slows. He doesn't touch her.

The moon is up again, and bright, and it bleeds all the color out of her. Motionless, she's a carving. She's stone.

We're all dead, and this is Hell.

Just now, he doesn't know that he would argue with that.

We'll try again tomorrow.