Chapter 3: every clash brings out a warning

The next morning is the first time he finds her on the deck.

Nothing he can identify wakes him. He simply wakes up all at once, sitting up, eyes wide and focused, looking around. It's not the first time he's come awake like this; it's a cultivated skill, and he could do it long before the Turn. It's about survival, about self-defense; you're never safe, especially not when you sleep, when your old man staggers in at three in the am after a bender of epic proportions and he's looking to visit some hurt on whoever is available for visiting. You can't afford grogginess. It's a luxury. You wake up before you know why and you do what you have to do: you cower in a closet, under the bed, you lock yourself in the bathroom because it's the one door that has a lock on it - though it never works. All it does is buy you a few minutes. Maybe gives him a chance to calm down enough that he doesn't actually kill you this time.

Then, later, you wake up in the dark, in the thick of the night, because you know something is wrong even if you have no idea what it is. You know there's something out there. Something moved, crunched through branches, rustled some leaves, or there's an unnatural absence of birdsong - maybe not something most other people would hear but it was there. You're alert enough to run. Aim. Shoot. Kill. You can do this because if you can't the people you love die, and that's a very simple equation. It requires no thought whatsoever.

You wake up when something is wrong, and later you actually think about what it was.

He's sitting up in the gray dawn, sheets pooling around his waist, fully and vividly conscious, and Beth is gone.

His first job whenever this happens is to not panic. When you panic you might as well have stayed the fuck asleep for all the good you can do.

He shoves himself up off the mattress and throws on his boots without bothering with a shirt. Reaches for the bow but that's habit; he absolutely should not have the bow. This place is very remote but it's not completely secure, there are no walls but the cliff, and it's by no means impossible that a walker or two or even more could have staggered up this far. But he has his knife - couldn't put that away despite the danger, he can't be completely unarmed - and unless things are truly dire it'll be enough.

He somehow didn't think about her just... leaving. Why the fuck didn't he think of that? Why did he just assume she would stay put? The second she said she should be down with the other walkers in the town, warning bells should have clanged deafeningly in his head. If she got an idea like that, if she could focus enough to retain that logic...

Stop.

"Beth?"

Nothing. Not that she would necessarily answer. Not that she would even necessarily hear him or understand what she was hearing. He hurries up the few stairs while trying not to hurry, trying not to clomp like a fucking Clydesdale against the wood, and checks bedrooms one, two, and three. Both bathrooms. Closets. Back downstairs: half bath near the foyer. Pantry. More closets.

She isn't here. She's gone.

For the love of God, if you panic you're no good to her at all.

Back into the main room - and he sees it.

The whole far wall of the room is glass, but to the side is the deck and smaller panes of glass, and a sliding door leading out. The deck itself wasn't visible from where he slept. He never went close enough to her bed to see it. It never occurred to him to look.

The door is very slightly open. The gap is so narrow that he didn't feel the air - or he wasn't aware that he did. But maybe he did.

Maybe that was why.

Beth is on the deck, leaning against the railing - leaning over it. Looking down. Her big t-shirt is rippling against her body, and her hair is too short to stream behind her like once it would have but it rises around her head like a halo, glowing. Lighting her up as the sun touches her.

All he can do is stand there and look at her, and try to believe the sheer reality of her all over again.

She's leaning. Leaning over very far.

He pulls in a huge breath and goes to the door, slides it the rest of the way open, steps out onto the deck.

It's a nice deck, for a given value of nice, just like the rest of the place. It's big but not ridiculously so, and there's a rectangle of chairs and a loveseat and a firepit in the center. Far to his right there's a covered wooden box that he recognizes as an extremely elegantly designed hot tub. Before, he came out here only long enough to check that it was clear, and he didn't really notice what was over the railing. What was in front of him.

Both the deck and the windows in the main room look out over the cliff and down the whole mountain. The road they took up here is visible through the trees as a winding gray ribbon, and further down the roofs of the town lie nestled in more trees - a few places where it's clearer. McDonald's arches, last defiant stand of Americana. A gas station sign.

But the mountains. All in front of him, the Blue Ridge mountains, misty and purple-blue in the first edges of true sunlight, carpeted in thick green, rolling and rising and falling away again. Graceful in a way that bespeaks profound age. Only very old things are allowed to be beautiful like this.

They earn it.

It was here. He knew it was here. He put her in front of it, in part because he wanted her to see it. But he didn't really see it himself until now.

She hasn't moved. Standing here in the wind with no shirt on, he's only dimly aware that he's shivering.

"Beth?"

And as he says her name, the wind brings him an answer in the form of the splintering crash of something shattering against the rocks below.

"Beth." He moves up beside her - slow. Nothing sudden. But she doesn't turn, doesn't look at him - she keeps her attention fixed firmly on what's beneath her, which is an almost sheer drop of at least two hundred feet. He's not afraid of heights, not especially - though neither is he overly fond of them - but he looks down at that plunge of stone and his stomach twists in on itself and the world spins.

So instead he looks at her. She has something in her hand, and before he can see what it is or stop her she extends her arm and releases it, and just before it spins out of his clear line of sight he sees that it's one of the glass sculptures from the bookshelf in the living room. Tumbling end over end, glittering black like obsidian, and smashing itself into a dust cloud of shards against a jut in the rock about twenty feet down.

He stares at this for a few seconds. At where it was. Then up at her.

Her hands are empty and she's smiling. And she raises her head, and she sees him. She sees him completely, and she's bright with recognition.

"Daryl. Hi."

He doesn't know what to make of this.

She's not herself. Not even close. He's not so stupid as to think that, to see that she's made a deeper foray into the world than he's yet gotten her to make on his own and think that everything is fine again. She still eats the breakfast he lays out for her with no indication that she tastes it at all, and now and then her eyes still slip out of focus. But she's here, she knows him, and when he asks her about the deck she doesn't hesitate before answering him.

"I woke up. Couldn't get back to sleep." She shrugs and forks canned peach into her mouth, swallows it almost without bothering to chew. "It's pretty out there."

"Yeah. It is." He watches her. Watches the movement of her hand, the tilt of her head, every minute twitch and shift of her facial muscles. Her. Her, looking for her. Any sign of her, beyond what he already has. "What were you doin' with the glass?"

"What glass?"

"The thing from the shelf." He's trying to sound like it's no big deal, like it's not a very extremely terrifyingly huge deal. Trying to sound conversational. Keeping it light. Oh, that's fine, people toss shit down mountains all the time. "The stuff you were droppin' over the edge. Why'd you do that?"

"Oh."

She pauses, and as he watches, her eyes shift out of focus again and she blanks. Goes away. Absence seizure, Edwards called it. They happen now. Her brain hiccuping. Not in themselves dangerous, provided they don't turn into anything else, but if they do? He's not a doctor and he's an idiot and he dragged her up a mountain.

And he's still not getting on the bike and taking her home.

She blinks and she's back. "I dunno. I like watchin' 'em fall. I like watchin' 'em break." She smiles again, and it's small and it should be sweet but there's something wrong with it. He doesn't know what or why but there is. "It's pretty too."

Don't do it no more, he almost says, and then he remembers the promise he made to himself and, though she didn't know it, to her. If she's not hurting herself, if she's not trying to hurt him, he won't stop her. She gets to follow her bizarre little whims to whatever bizarre little end they lead her.

"Yeah, well. Take it easy. We only got so much crap in here to throw off cliffs."

She shrugs and returns to her peaches.

So he decides he can risk it.

She's been in the back bedroom reading all morning. He goes to her with the bow over his shoulder, and when she hears his boots on the hardwood she turns.

The Secret Garden again. He recognizes it without having to see the title.

"I gotta go to town."

She cocks her head, brows slightly knitted, and that's when he knows he fucked up. Maybe not badly, but he underestimated her, or he overestimated the degree of her damage or at least the ways in which it operates, thought these different states into which she falls were different enough that she wouldn't remember between one and the next, and he fucked up and he has to deal with it now.

"You're not takin' me?"

He shrugs. You fucking idiot. "No need. Just goin' for a few things."

"You said you needed someone to watch your back." She shifts where she's sitting, facing him a little more directly. Her expression hasn't changed, nor has her even, light tone, but he looks at the hand gripping the book and it's shaking. Knuckles white. Fingers hooked. Ready to claw and scratch. "You said you'd feel better."

You. Fucking. Idiot. "Ain't that bad. I'll be alright."

She looks at him for a long moment. He can't read her at all, and he can't tell if it's because she's hiding from him or because there's nothing there to read. But her grip hasn't loosened. He wonders if she's breaking her fingernails.

He shouldn't go. He shouldn't. But she seems... If he leaves her for an hour. If he leaves her for an hour and he comes back and instead of glass it's her body broken on the rocks, her bones splintered and skull shattered and her blood smears and spatters and pools of black paint across the cliff face.

It would make the rest of his life very simple. What little of it there would be.

If she's going to do it, she'll find a way.

Abruptly she smiles. It's not wide, but it's there, and he doesn't see any indication that it's forced or faked. Her hand has loosened. She is, if not his Beth, as close as he's probably going to get right now.

"Alright," she says, and turns her attention back to her book. "Be careful."

All right.

An hour. She can survive that long without him. They both can.

He's almost wrong.

They all got good at estimating the danger in any given place, and they did so quickly. Had to. It was that or die. It couldn't just be about the walkers you saw; it had to be about the ones you weren't seeing, because those were the ones that always killed you. By definition you didn't know for a fact that they were there, nor did you necessarily know where they were, but you could look at the space, the terrain, the layout, count the visible walkers and how they were dispersed, and draw conclusions from that. You could get a general idea of what you might be up against. You could very well be wrong, it could very well cost you, but it was and is better than blundering around praying you haven't lethally fucked up by being there at all.

They only passed through town on the way up, but he saw almost nothing that concerned him. Very little in terms of real destruction. Nothing burned out too badly - a few places down side streets where it looked like there had been fires, and while the McDonald's arches still stand the McDonald's itself is a blackened half-frame, but so much of the rest of it seemed intact. That meant there hadn't been many people to fuck it up when everything well and truly went to shit. Hadn't been many people to do the damage out of panic or stupid greed or rage or despair. Only a couple bodies on the sidewalks, desiccated and picked over by carrion hunters, and only a few bodies means there weren't many people to do the dying. Plenty of people die in their homes, he's seen that - mostly from opting out - but only a few slow, stupid walkers is another good sign.

This place is a goldmine. A treasure. Or it could be. There are so many things to hate about this situation he's plunged them into, but this is a bright spot and he's going to cling to it until he has no more reason to do so.

He hits a pharmacy - broken front windows but not looted too badly. These were people who had specific items in mind, found them and took them and took their leave. There's aspirin, vitamins, and the back is still fairly well-stocked with antibiotics. He takes everything he reasonably can. He can come back for more if he has to.

There's Xanax. Klonopin. He takes some of both and he despises that he's doing so, but really?

He's not sure Beth is the only one who might need them.

Antibacterial soap. Toothpaste. People are stupid about that last; they never realize that teeth will become a Thing after the apocalypse and they never think about it. They never think about abscesses. They never think about what it's like to die that way.

Simple lack of imagination has probably killed more people than walkers, in this world.

Out of the pharmacy and past Cute Antique and Gift Shoppes and toward the convenience-and-tiny grocery store he spotted on the way. Door unlocked and no broken windows - God, he can't believe this place actually exists twenty minutes away from where they're based. Someone went through here as well, scattered things around, but they didn't take too much, and he moves through the aisles, pack open, piling in jerky, tuna fish, beans, chili, powdered lemonade, more fruit and vegetables - peanut butter and jelly and a couple cans of soda, Jesus - and he skids to a halt in the candy aisle.

She told him. Once by the fire after the shack burned, when things started getting better, they were stupid and wistful and talked about the foods they missed most. He missed barbecue ribs slathered in sauce, as much grease as possible and bones to gnaw on like a dog. He missed corn on the cob. He missed chicken nuggets where the chicken was totally fake and he missed pie of all kinds. He missed gummy worms, a holdover from childhood. She missed cake, any kind of cake - she would be a Cake Person, there are two kinds of people in the world - and ice cream, and her mom's chicken salad, and bacon, and spaghetti and meatballs. Hershel made the meatballs himself and she and Maggie and Shawn all helped even though it wasn't necessary. She missed pie too. They talked about pie for a while - he favored cherry and she liked coconut cream and they argued the various merits of both.

She said she loved M&Ms. She loved the blue ones best. He told her she was crazy. She told him she didn't care what he thought and he fully believed she didn't, and he thought that was just fine.

There's a jumbo bag of M&Ms on the floor right in front of him.

He bends and scoops it up, packs it.

He goes out the rear, and that's his mistake.

He's not incautious. That's not the problem. It's just stupid, cruel luck. He steps out onto a stoop and into a fenced-in lot containing dumpsters and some wooden pallets and an ancient truck, and a pile of half-eaten bodies, and about thirty walkers. He's taking this in, bow up, his gut dropping toward his boots and adrenaline already pounding through him, but that practiced veneer of icy calm has descended over his mind, and he's about to thrust himself back through the door when one lunges at him from behind the dumpster beside him, hissing, and he swings instinctively aside and brains it with the limb of the bow.

And the door swings shut.

He fumbles behind him for the handle. It doesn't budge. It locked after him.

Okay. So. This is a thing now.

Something happened. He has no idea what and he has no time to figure it out, but something happened here, at some point in the probably-distant past someone did something to bring about this state of affairs, and as thirty walkers turn in his direction and start staggering eagerly toward him - oh HEY, oh my God, we were wondering if anyone would come, this is great - he curses their name and the names of their ancestors and the names of their descendents unto the third generation if the assholes have any.

Hanging strings of decay and sun gleaming dully off exposed bone and impossibly damp flesh, and rolling cloudy eyes and teeth, lots and lots of teeth, and the fence to his left - where the bodies are - is blocked by a solid wall of them and the fence to his right might be reachable but he can see the gate there secured by a chain almost the width of his wrist.

And directly ahead of him, the brick wall and gently slanted roof of the next building over, and another dumpster.

Might be enough. Might. It's all he has.

You fuck this up, she dies. You know that. If she doesn't starve first or opt out she will eventually wander down here, looking for her kin, and that's exactly what they'll make her into if they don't just rip her apart.

He smashes in the skulls of the two closest to him, kicks a third back and to the side, opens a gap and throws the bow onto his back, sprints.

He's carrying a bit of a load - which he should just drop, fuck it to hell - and he's not the fastest runner. He's always been more about distance; he can and has run for hours at a stretch. He knows this is basically suicide, no matter what happens or how hard he tries, and as he barrels through the dead crowd he feels hands groping for him, tearing at his shirt, the pack, a few grabbing onto and almost holding his hair. Teeth clicking what seems like centimeters from his head, ears full of groans, lungs full of air so foul he almost retches. He was used to the stench of them, still is, but this is worse somehow, so concentrated, and he's running through a wall of everything, running to her, for her, running to get back to her, and it feels like he has been running for hours and this time he's not giving up.

He's going to save her. They still get to save people. He's going to get it right.

One of them closes its bone-fingers on his shoulder - astonishingly strong for something that barely has muscles anymore - yanks him backward and he almost goes down. And he screams, wrenches, feels something in his arm wrench too and burst into fire, and his hands close on the edge of the dumpster and he vaults himself up, scrabbling at the brick, jumping and seizing the edge of the gutter and Jesus Christ you're too heavy you're too fucking heavy no way it holds you but his boots connect with the brick and he heaves himself up and his knees hit the roof and he's over. He crawls, clawing for air, rolling half onto his ass and staring behind him.

They can't jump. And he doesn't think any of them can reach that high. He might be okay. He might be.

His left arm is a series of sustained explosions. If he's scratched, that was all for nothing.

He doesn't check. He scrambles to the edge of the front of the building, tosses the pack over first, drops down, ignores the white stab of pain in his ankles and shins as he lands upright on the sidewalk. He can hear them, groaning and furiously disappointed and rattling the chainlink like angry prisoners in a riot, and he snatches the pack up again and hurls himself at the intersection where he left the bike.

The roar of it is a blanket wrapping itself around his mind.

Halfway up he stops dead, cuts the engine, gets off the bike, goes to the edge of the road and throws up.

It seems like it goes on for a while, though it can't be more than a few seconds, and by the time the heaving stops his nose is burning, eyes streaming with tears, and he staggers a couple of yards away, arm bursting into fresh yells, and crouches and swipes his hands over his face and thinks, simply, whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck

He's never reacted like this before. Never. He's stomped their skulls in, gutted them, hacked off arms and legs, took their heads off with a fucking chain. She said they used to be people and that was sweet and it stabbed him right in the ventricles, and she was right, but they aren't people and even if killing them isn't supposed to be fun he stopped being bothered by it a long time ago. And he got used to the looming prospect of his own death right around the same time.

Because he's going to die out here. Sometime, someday. Every minute he remains alive is borrowed time. He knows that. Rick wasn't right, not the way he was talking, but he was right in a sense. That sense. They are walking dead. He just about accepted it. He would walk into a situation like that down there, deal with it, get out, let the adrenaline bleed out of him, move on. Not think about it anymore because you can't, because you have to put it away, or it kills you.

Here.

But he's shaking and he can't stop, because he almost didn't make it back. He didn't think to drop the pack until it didn't really matter. He wasn't careless, but he could have been more careful. He was so focused on fucking M&Ms. She did this to him.

She made him weak.

He can't afford that.

He shoves himself to his feet and goes back to the bike, pulls out the bottle of water he brought, rinses his mouth out. It doesn't help a whole lot - and he's spattered with rotting blood and brains and grime - but it's the best he can do. He lifts his arm, turns it, cranes his neck, bites his lips to keep back the wince even though there's no one to play stoic for. But he already knew it wasn't a scratch. He recognizes the deep, persistent burn of a damaged muscle.

Or something else. Damaged, anyway.

This whole thing is really not going very well.

Back on the bike. Deep breath. Deep breath, you fucking pussy. You stupid piece of shit, you breathe and you go the fuck back up there and you handle this.

He does.

First couple things, he does. Handling it is very much a work in progress and its future frankly remains questionable.

The house is quiet when he walks through the door, and he doesn't know yet whether or not to consider that a good thing. Probably there's no rule that applies there, nothing he can trust to hold consistent from situation to situation. There are any number of reasons why she wouldn't be making any noise.

In fact, given how she's been, it would be weird if she was.

Sighing, he moves through the foyer and into the main room, pack and crossbow combining to make a weight he honestly can't believe he's still carrying. The fire in his arm has died down to embers, but he's going to need painkillers. A fuck of a lot of painkillers. Best case, he strained something. Worst case, something is actually torn. Soft tissue injuries take forever to heal.

This is probably just his life now.

And he forgets it, because she's there.

Sitting crosslegged on her mattress, partially turned toward the window and bent over something - like she was with the book, and he thinks it might be the book, but as he slows, stops and looks at her, he sees that she's not holding her hands right to be reading.

She looks like she's writing.

"Beth?"

He forgets that he must look awful, must smell awful, walker and vomit, and sets down the pack and the bow and takes another step toward her. She doesn't look up, doesn't appear to be aware of him, but the way she's sitting - not those slumped shoulders, the subtle but fundamental lack of muscle tension that comes over her whenever she blanks out or slips away. She might not be aware of him, but she's very much aware of something, intent on it. Hand moving.

It clouded over about halfway back up, but she still glows.

"Beth. Hey." He takes another step and pauses, watching her. "I'm back."

I brought you presents.

She turns and looks up. She looks up, and like before, it's her, almost - awake and present and real. Thinking, even if her thoughts are broken and scattered and don't fit together anymore, a jumble of puzzle pieces from two or three different puzzles. Her eyes focus on him and she smiles - small but there, undeniable, and his lungs simultaneously try to expel all the air inside them and fill themselves as full as possible.

"Hi, Daryl."

She is writing. She's writing in a journal.

Or that's what it looks like. Blank pages, anyway, and lined. A journal, some kind of day planner; whatever, she found it somewhere, she understood what it was for, she probably remembered that she used to have her own, found a pen - looked for a pen - now she's... writing in it. Using it again.

She burned hers. She burned it for their fires. That always bothered him, so much, and he never told her. Never told her that part of him had wanted to tell her to stop.

He closes the rest of the distance between them and crouches. "You doin' alright? Anythin' happen?"

Like what?

"I'm fine." She sounds bemused, unsure of why he would ask. "You..." Something snaps into increasing sharpness in her gaze, her eyes widen a bit, and he realizes that when he came in she saw him well enough to know he was there and to recognize him, but now she really sees him, and she sees the state he's in. And she's concerned.

She's concerned. She's looking at him, she understands what she's seeing, and she's concerned about it. About him.

Okay.

"Are you alright?"

"I. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't..." He shrugs. He's covered in gut and blood and brain. Once that was just a normal day for them. "Ran into a little trouble, wasn't nothin'."

She wrinkles her nose. "You don't smell very good."

"I know. I'll deal with it." Running water means showers. They'll be freezing, but they do exist. For the moment he's just focused on fighting back his almost overwhelming joy. "Whatcha writin'?"

"I dunno. Just stuff."

"Can I see?"

He's expecting her to hesitate. To refuse, actually. He's not sure why, hasn't exactly thought the assumption through; he just assumed, so he's essentially unprepared for what she does do, which is immediately hold the journal out to him - open - without a word.

Or a discernible expression. She just now had one - a little vague, but it was there. First she was vaguely pleased to see him, then she was vaguely concerned for him, and now she's gone flat again. Not gone, but part of her has receded. Or, perhaps more accurately, her damage has swept back over her, like a tide subject to gravitational forces he hasn't yet identified.

He looks at her for a second or two, then down at the journal in his hands.

She always had very neat handwriting. Not fancy, not elegant - neat, plain, but also graceful in a way he was never able to define, and which seemed so much a part of her. It's not the kind of detail he recalls making a point of noticing. He probably never did make a point of it. That's just not how he is.

He remembers. He watched that neat, graceful writing go up in literal smoke.

What's on the pages he's looking at isn't neat. It isn't graceful. It's a scrawl, wandering and wobbling, paying no fealty to the lines, and written so hard that the pen has nearly ripped through the paper. It's the handwriting of a child only just beginning to learn how to form letters, just beginning to figure out how to make her hand and fingers perform this delicate task. And there's nothing about her thoughts, her feelings, what's happening, what she remembers happening - no element of internal narrative whatsoever. It's one very simple arrangement of letters, hurtling down the page like an avalanche.

BETHGREENEBETHGREENEBETHGREENEBETHGREENEBETHGREENEBETHGREENE

He bites down on the corner of his lip and he's quiet.

He's not a doctor, not a shrink, vastly out of his element, but he knows what this is. He doesn't think you have to be either of the former in order to see it and understand. Her brain hiccups, blanks out; here, it's grabbed onto something from before her world was blown apart and it's circling it wildly, almost hysterically, clutching onto this single bright fragment and trying to drag it out into the world where it's real.

He's cold all over. But she's writing. And she knows her name, and she knows that she knows it. Even though he's not sure she's aware of what she's been scratching across the pages.

Some part of her is trying to fix itself.

He looks up at her. She's sitting exactly as she was when he took his eyes off her, face impassive and gaze flat. But she's not gone. She's focused on him. She's there, and he thinks she still sees and hears. Might be able to process. Even if she doesn't show it. Even if he can't tell.

It's occurred to him - though he tries not to think about it too much - that a tiny, fully conscious part of her might be trapped behind her blank gaze, terrified, unable to reach or be reached, screaming for rescue.

He holds the journal out to her and she takes it back, holds it loosely in her lap. Good sign, probably.

"You remember your name, Beth?" Because this is something. She seems fixated on this, on some level, so maybe it can be a point of entry. "You whole name. You remember what it is?"

She cocks her head a little, frowning very slightly, and hope flutters across his diaphragm.

"Can you tell me? Your middle name?"

She told him. Another by-the-fire conversation, moving into weird little confessions, not any form of I Never but merely a We've-Been-Together-This-Long-And-I-Hardly-Know-You-So-Let's-Change-That kind of thing. Trading. Her full name for... Whatever he wanted to tell her. After I Never, she wasn't going to make any specific demands. Wasn't going to put him any more on the spot than he was comfortable with.

He was so grateful to her for that. So desperately grateful and he never found a way to say thank you.

He told her about the first time he smoked a cigarette. He was six, Merle shoved one at him while three of Merle's more goonish friends stood around and faked encouragement, and Daryl took one drag and careened into a coughing fit so bad he almost puked while everyone else laughed their asses off.

He told her this story with no shame and no trepidation. He was surprised by the absence of those things. Then he wasn't.

Her name. Full name. He thought it was pretty. He didn't tell her so.

"Beth, c'mon. I know you know." He's forgotten himself, forgotten how he looks and smells and what he's spattered with, what happened, forgotten everything but her - this girl all lit up and breathing and alive in front of him, looking at him, and he could swear she's trying. Could swear he sees it in her eyes. "You told me. Tell me again."

There's that odd snap in her again. Like the teeth of gears slotting into place. She opens her mouth and she's going to say it, he's going to have found that part of her, reached it, touched it for just a second. Made contact.

She opens her mouth and her hands fly to it, and with cold determination she begins to bite at her own fingers.

For a second he can't move. He's seen her do it but he hasn't seen her do it like this, not just her nails but her teeth, no sign that she feels any pain or intends to stop until her hands are bloody stumps. She's trying to fucking eat herself, and he lunges, seizes her wrists and drags them away from her face, blood already running down her chin and the flesh on the fore and middle fingers of her right hand churned and torn. She's fighting him but not with any anger. Not even any frustration. She's fighting him with no emotion at all, fighting him calmly. Fighting him like a machine whose basic function is being interrupted. Wrenching her forearms in his grip, twisting, bones grinding and popping, and fuck, she might actually break her fucking wrists trying to-

"Stop."

He's not yelling. Not barking, not growling. He's never heard himself sound like that. Solid, steel, quiet. There's no anger in it, because he feels none, but he does feel, and what he feels is relentless and terrible and pounding between his ears, and it makes him feel a thousand years old.

And she stops.

Or almost. She's not struggling anymore. She's trembling, still on the edge of violent, but he can't detect any more fight in it. She's just... She's not in control.

So he has to be.

Bit by bit he loosens his grip, and as her trembling eases, bit by bit he pulls her closer to him. She's still flat, but that doesn't mean she isn't scared. Somewhere. Just as scared as he is. If not more. Much, much more.

"Don't do that," he whispers. Loose now, stroking his thumbs slowly up and down the knobs of her wrists. He's staring into her eyes and she's staring back, and she does see him. She does. Her bloody mouth working, like she might still be about to speak, and somewhere behind those horrible dead eyes, he's positive he sees that spark again. "Please don't do that, girl. Please don't."

She pulls in a breath - huge. Her whole body seems to swell. Then it folds inward in a gust and she lowers her head and slumps. Not limp, but she's well and truly gone now. Which might be for the best.

He's numb. That's also for the best. Later, maybe, he can allow himself to react to this.

He waits until he's sure she's not moving anymore. Then he releases her and goes to get the first aid kit.

The bites in her fingers aren't actually as bad as he was afraid of. He had horrible visions of exposed bone; there isn't any. They bled a lot, as hand wounds tend to do. He cleans them and bandages them, and he gently tips her head back and wipes the blood off her face. Her eyes are open but glassy and completely unfocused, her pupils slightly dilated.

He lays his free hand against her cheek for a moment, cups it. He doesn't think she can see him or feel what he's doing, and he doesn't imagine she can hear him. But maybe she can. Who knows. Maybe she always can.

"Your name is Bethany Ann," he murmurs. "Bethany Ann Greene. Remember that. I'm gonna ask you again."

He waits for another few seconds, holding her, watching her breathe, watching her slow, slow blinking. Then he lays her down - carefully, arranging her as comfortably as he can - and watches her for a few minutes more. Watching every part of her. Her hands, her fingers. Looking for twitching. Watching the rise and fall of her chest, timing the intervals. Her mouth, her eyes, for any sign at all that she's coming back. Of which there's none.

She's still so bright.

At last he hauls himself to his feet, gives her one more look, and heads upstairs.

The shower is freezing. He stands under it until he can't feel anything anymore, watching the water circle the drain - brown to pink to clear. All white tile, all around him. White like a hospital. White like a morgue.

He can't do this.

He doesn't know what else to do.

When he comes back down - mostly dry and dressed in clothes he guesses count as almost sort of clean - she's sitting up and she's awake, and she seems to have at least partially re-entered herself, even if she doesn't intend to stay.

She looks up at him when he comes to her and crouches in front of her. Looks down at her bandaged fingers - held awkwardly in her lap - and up at him again. She's apparently cognizant enough to be confused about what she's seeing. More than confused, in fact; her eyes are wide and lips slightly parted the way they always are when she's nervous and she can't hide it.

Not because of him. Not made nervous by him. He's pretty sure.

"What happened?"

"You had an accident."

He's not going to tell her. He's not sure how to tell her. It now seems like she does remember some things from period to period, but he hasn't seen any indication - nor did Edwards say - that she's conscious of the things she does to herself when she's at her worst. Or if she's at all conscious of it, she doesn't know what it means. It holds no significance for her one way or the other.

She lifts her hand, cradles it against her chest. "It hurts."

"I'll get you some stuff for it." Not positive how effective what he has will be, but it'll be something. And he needs something. The cold water calmed a little of the angry red throbbing in his arm, but he can feel it starting back up, and it's going to be much worse tomorrow.

He's not sure yet how this is going to affect use of the bow. He hasn't checked. It could be a problem. Almost certainly will be. Right now he frankly doesn't want to know how much of one.

There's only so much he can take in such a compressed period of time.

But he's still cold, is the thing. Still. When he spoke to her like he did - Stop - some switch in him flipped off and another one flipped on, and now everything is at a distance. It's there, he can feel it, but it's removed from the dullness his core has become. It wasn't something he consciously intended to do. He just did it.

You have to let yourself feel it.

No I do fucking not. It serves no purpose. It doesn't help either of them.

He's doubtful he can maintain it for very long anyway.

She's staring down at the bandage again - lifting her hand, turning it, her expression now oddly wondering. "Why did you bother?"

He sighs and scrubs a hand down his face, hair hanging in his eyes. "'cause you was bleedin' everywhere."

"But it's pointless." She spreads her fingers and looks at him through them, one eye framed by the V of her middle and ring fingers. "I'm just gonna rot anyway. We're all gonna rot away to nothin'."

"We ain't."

"We are." She sighs and drops her hand, glances away and out at the low, gathering clouds. "I wish it would hurry up and happen. I want it to be done. I'm tired. I'm tired of walkin'." Her voice softens, fades, becomes little more than a breath slipping across clean white walls. "I want it all to be over."

He doesn't say anything. He watches her, studies her. What he can see of her face, the corner of her mouth, her slow-blinking eyes. He's still cold, still dull, but everything he's keeping at bay is already pressing in on him - sick, lurching exhaustion, heaviness, gravity increasing its hold on him tenfold. He's known since he began to understand some of the nature of her wounds that she was very possibly - very probably - suicidal, at least on some level, even if she never really made a concerted effort to go through with it. But that was an intellectual understanding. It was superficial. He knew but he didn't know. Now he's faced with it: what amounts to an explicit statement that she's looking forward to not existing anymore. Regardless of whether or not she believes she'll actually cease to exist.

"Beth," he says softly, and reaches for her. Because this is one of the few side benefits of running low on fucks to give: The list of things you have to try to keep yourself from doing shrinks significantly. And he touched her before, pulled her close even if he didn't hold her, and she let him. She was mostly gone by then, but she let him.

And he doesn't know that he's actually doing her any favors by not touching her.

And he fucking needs to.

She flinches, eyelids fluttering like she expects some kind of blow, but she doesn't pull away when he combs his fingers into her hair - God, so short, so much of it gone, how it might have tumbled over his hand, tangled around his knuckles - and when he cups the side of her head she actually…

She leans into it. Very, very slightly. She leans, pressure and warmth against his hand, and he forces air into and out of his lungs.

"You're not gonna rot. You ain't dead. You ain't. You're here. You're right here."

So try.

He waits for a few seconds, holding her, staring at her. She stares back, no longer flinching, no longer nervous, no longer with the same numb weariness that had seeped into her tone. She stares back, and she's there. Locked. Locked onto him. That spark, flaring for a fraction of a fraction of a second, he does see it, it is there-

And she's gone again. Blank. Her head droops slightly, her eyes sliding out of focus.

He watches her. He watches her for what seems like a good while, and the last of the color appears to seep out of everything. Eventually he withdraws his hand and gets up, and turns away from her.

Cold again. All over. At some point he'll feel it. He'll let himself, if it doesn't devour him first. But she's gone and he's cold, and once again he thinks that might actually be a best-case-scenario.

He goes to the pack and hauls it up onto his right shoulder, winces when the left one complains anyway, and he's almost to the kitchen when she speaks.

"Bethany Ann."

He was cold. Now he freezes, limbs locked, gut a pit of ice, veins frost. He doesn't turn. He can't. Because what if he just imagined it. What if he turns back and it was in his head, something between a desperate fantasy and an even more desperate hallucination, and she's sitting slumped like a broken puppet, eyes glazed and jaw loose and hands limp and useless and chewed on her thighs.

"Bethany Ann," she says again. Very soft. "You said you were gonna ask. You don't have to ask. Bethany Ann. Bethany Ann Greene."