Chapter 5: and even on our worst days

She's not there.

But he knows where she is.

The sheets are still warm with her. He's still warm with her. He lies there for a few moments, curled around the space she occupied when she was with him. The space and the orientation of his body are all the evidence he needs: it happened. It did. It wasn't just another nightmare. It wasn't something less, or more. It was real, as real as anything is. She was lost in the horror of herself but she let him come to her. She let him touch her. Touched him. Let him stay.

Let him hold her.

He pulls in a breath. It goes on for a while.

Finally he levers himself up, groaning, turns away from the rising sun hammering against his eyes and skin and head, and takes stock of things.

He hurts. He hurts everywhere. It takes him a few more seconds to remember why - not just the sullen ache in his muscles but the sharper pain along his upper arm; when he looks at it he sees four short gouges crusted with blood. Echo of the hiss she made when she did it to him. Her eyes blazing almost as bright as the sun on his bare back.

Gorman.

He looks toward the sliding glass door, and she's out there on the deck, bent over the railing, her hair dancing pale gold in the breeze. He can't see what she's dropping this time, can't hear the sound of it shattering, but the memory of that sound surges up in him, boils its way into his forebrain, and he hears it anyway. Almost musical. A cloud of glass shards glittering in the sun. Her face, her eyes tracking its descent. Her expression. Not quite delight, but...

Something not too distant from that.

He watches her for a while. There's a long interval after the initial release where she doesn't appear to do much of anything. She merely stands there, head bent, staring down with her hands on the top of the rail. He knows how strong she is; he's had very detailed, very up close and personal demonstrations. It would be a simple matter for her to lift herself up and balance there like a carving on an Ancient Greek temple, a little marble nymph in a loose white t-shirt two sizes too big.

Poised in white, suspended over everything. In the cool arms of the wind.

Wind would never hold her up.

Neither will you.

For a second he almost shoves himself to his feet and charges for the door, throws it open, rushes her and seizes her and drags her - snarling and clawing at him like a wild thing - back into the house. He's vibrating with it, with wanting to do it. With the certainty that he will.

He does shove himself to his feet. But he doesn't rush her. If she was going to jump, somehow he thinks she already would have. At least today.

Tomorrow is always another story.

He's pouring syrupy fruit cocktail into a couple of bowls when it occurs to him that they can't keep eating out of cans. Not for much longer. He knew that anyway, was perfectly aware of it and had factored it into both his very specious reasons for coming here and his very general plans regarding what to do when they got here. But he's been distracted. He made that run yesterday and that was good, and he made it back and that was even better, but there are still things he's running the risk of neglecting. Still things he can't afford to let slip through the cracks.

They should have fresh meat, and if he can find fresh greens of any kind, even better.

This is yet another thing he can do, another thing on which he can exert some kind of control, and he won't have to think about how it doesn't make any difference at all.

Today. Today, maybe. If she seems stable enough. He stands in front of the counter and braces himself on it - cool granite, exquisitely polished, so smooth under his hands that it feels almost slick - and he closes his eyes and breathes. He can smell the syrup in the cocktail, awful saccharine with a cutting edge, and it makes his mouth hurt.

If she seems stable enough. That's hilarious. If she seems stable enough it won't mean anything, because yesterday she seemed pretty stable until she started trying to bite her own fingers off.

But it's what he has to go on. And it can't be nothing. It can't be. If he allows it to be nothing, he's already given up. He's already failed her.

He pushes himself away from that gleaming slippery granite and rummages through a drawer for a couple of spoons.

When she came in yesterday morning from her little ritual - so it seems to be - she seemed almost chipper, and the same is true now. She's moving lightly, easily, as if she's more present in her own body. Her lips are curved into something that could, with some work, become a genuine smile. She's almost - almost - completely focused.

Of the girl the night before, the girl writhing and screaming as if she was being electrocuted - and the girl after, the girl gone all cold and hard inside and begging him to lie to her and tell her she was safe - there's no sign.

She sits down at the table at the same moment he puts the bowl in front of her, and before he's seated across from her she's already gone to work, feeding the machine, ingesting the calories that will keep her running with her eyes half closed and barely a pause to chew. It's fruit cocktail; it's a bowl of mushy things that used to be fruit floating around in sugar. She basically doesn't have to chew.

He's not that surprised to discover that it doesn't even really disturb him anymore, how she does it. If anything she's rubbing off on him. He doesn't want to taste what he's eating anyway, but even if he did he's not sure he'd be able to get much out of that particular realm of sensory input.

She's right. It's all just calories.

They've both been here. Maybe that's why it's easy.

He cleans up. He cleans the scratches on his arm. He looks at himself in the mirror for a long moment.

He considers asking her about Gorman.

He considers it for about ten seconds and dismisses it out of hand. It doesn't take genius-level reasoning to conclude that Gorman, whatever or whoever that is, isn't a place he wants her to go back to. Not if he wants to have a prayer of being able to handle her for the rest of the day, and he's still hoping she'll be steady enough for him to rationalize at least a couple hours of hunting.

He was gone for an hour yesterday and she was fine. She had even made some progress on her own, if what she scrawled across page after page of the journal was progress - and he's more than prepared to consider it that. Hell, maybe him leaving her alone for a while is a good thing.

But there are things he needs to take care of first. Things with her.

She's gone back to the sofa with The Secret Garden and is curled up at one end, legs drawn in close. Once again she seems to be shrinking into her t-shirt, and as he comes toward her his attention locks oddly on a scab on the top of her left knee. Nothing self-inflicted, as far as he can tell; it looks as if she took a fall, skinned it - hardly at all. Just the kind of minor thing that might happen for any number of perfectly innocuous reasons.

But there's something about it that makes him abruptly and profoundly uneasy. And he's fucked if he knows why.

He crouches in front of her, takes a chance and touches her knee - lays his hand over the scab, slightly rough against his palm. She lifts her gaze from the book and looks at him, eyes huge and dark and awful, surrounded by a pale, scarred face he's finding difficult to look at.

Sometimes he can deal with her scars and sometimes they break him open. And then there are the times that fall right in between.

He meets those soul-boring eyes and keeps his own steady. Somehow.

"You should get a shower."

She cocks her head. "Why?"

"'cause we been here almost four days and you ain't had one since we left." Four days. To remind her, give her some kind of context for this. To try to moor her in some way to the time through which she's moving.

To moor himself. Because if he's honest, he's starting to feel slightly unmoored.

She shifts her gaze away from him again - down to the page in front of her. He's being dismissed. "Doesn't matter."

"It does matter."

"It doesn't." She jerks her head up, teeth bared, and just for a sliver of a second he sees that girl again, the one with blazing eyes, the one who hissed and snarled and tore at his arm, and who might have torn out his throat if she wanted to. "You stupid fucking idiot, it doesn't matter, when are you going to get that?"

It's the word that throws him. Not her tone, not her expression, not the content of what she's saying. The word, that one word he says countless times a day, and can't think of a single time he's ever heard it pass her lips.

It shouldn't shake him. It does. It shakes him to his bones.

"'cause you're dead?" he says softly.

"You still don't believe me."

"I can see you breathin'.

"You're seeing what you wanna see."

"I can feel it, Beth." All at once he's frantic, and it's quiet, contained, a tight coil of desperation winding tighter and tighter around the clenched fist of his heart. He lifts his hand from her knee and reaches for her wrist, catches it, holds it, and she sucks in a hard breath and tugs but not as hard as she would if she was really intent on fighting him, and it knots his throat and he couldn't let go of her even if he tried.

He holds her wrist, turns it upward. He can see it. She can see it. Her left wrist, naked. She didn't bring any bracelets with her. She didn't bring any jewelry at all. It's all gone, left behind when they ran. All her pretty things, everything she held onto in the middle of so much ugliness, just gone.

But now there's this.

"It's right here." He lays his thumb over the fine blue tracery of her veins, over the thin white line that slashes across them. Beneath it a flutter, running and tumbling over itself - he thinks of a little bird in a cage far too small. "I can feel it. You can too. You gonna tell me that ain't real?"

"You didn't feel it before."

He can't breathe.

In his mind, he falls back before her. He cringes, crumples inward; there's no possible way his bones can continue to support him, hollow as they are. Those five words, she had to find them and use them, and he didn't even know she knew. Didn't know she had any idea. If Edwards told her. Or if she somehow remembers, and he can't even think about that. Oh my girl, please, no. No, no, no. Please don't. Please.

He knew she was violent. He knew she was dangerous. He didn't know she was cruel.

"Beth-"

"You left me." Chipped ice. Eyes, voice. She pulls her wrist free and he releases her with nerveless fingers, and somehow she manages to inject the full weight and force of all her contempt into a single tilt of her head. "I was dead, so you left me. So I'm dead now. So it doesn't matter." She looks down at the book again, arms wrapped around herself. "Get the fuck away from me."

He doesn't move. He's not disobeying her; he can't. He literally can't. He stares at her, and he would swear that yes, yes: his heart is no longer beating.

There was more. Why don't you remember the rest of it? They practically had to drag me away, almost dislocated my fucking arms, and I was screaming. I would have stayed with you. I would have. I didn't care, I would have stayed.

"I didn't want to," he whispers, and it has all the life of a drought wind.

"But you did."

She doesn't look up. She doesn't say anything else. At last he manages to find his feet, turns, walks away from her into light so bright it burns his eyes.

Except that's not really why they're burning.

He goes out on the deck and he leans over, looks down at that rough gray jut where he saw the glass explode. It's glittering now, and it wasn't before. Various parts of the cliff face directly below possess that kind of glitter, faint but unmistakable. Lingering glass dust from where the things pulverized themselves. He stares until the reason for the burning in his eyes transfers from what happened back in there to what he's seeing now, and the wind rushing up and drying him out.

She was happy when she came in after doing this. Happy, after her fashion: Happy in the only vague way she seems to be capable of now. It made her happy to watch these pretty things destroyed - and they are pretty, or they were; even if he doesn't like them, even if they make him uneasy, to someone they probably were pretty and he can see how someone would think so. Black and cold and shiny like beetles but graceful and swooping, clean lines, darkly elegant.

She breaks these things and she takes a great deal of satisfaction in it, and he doesn't understand why but he thinks about her cruelty, the cruelty he now knows is there, and he fights back a shiver.

Then he realizes there's no reason to do so and he goes ahead and shivers. Across the chasm, unseen and some immeasurable distance away, a bird screams. A raptor. Bird of prey. Something big.

Something lethal.

She didn't want to hurt him because he was some vague unnamed and faceless threat, or because he was in her way and he was of no consequence. She wanted to hurt him because he's him, and she knows him, and she knows exactly where all his softnesses are, his unprotected underbelly, and she knows exactly where and how to stab.

She has so much ammunition. He gave her so much. He spent days upon days giving her weapons she could use against him if she wanted to. He willingly put them in her hands. He disarmed. He did this because he trusted her more than he has ever trusted anyone and because he had to, because it was that or endless cold war - not with everyone else but with himself.

He gave her his arsenal because he believed without question that she would never turn the guns on him.

He's an idiot.

And if he had it to do over again, knowing what he does now, he wouldn't change a thing.

But all at once - no idea how much later, he gazed down at the rock until his eyes slipped out of focus and the wind massaged his skin into cool numbness - she's there behind him, touching his arm, and he jerks and has a sudden vision of her grabbing him with astonishing and yet not unexpected strength and shoving him over the railing to break on the rocks, her last thing destroyed.

He turns, breathing hard and trying not to - trying not to let her see it if he can't stop himself - and she's looking up at him with perfect, level placidity, her eyes wide and expression flat in a way he now recognizes as her normal baseline, the midpoint from which she moves up or down. The coldly vicious girl who sent him out here is gone.

Except she's not. She's in there. She's crouched, coiled, waiting for another chance to strike at him.

"The water's too cold."

He blinks at her, completely nonplussed. It seems like a total non sequitur, floating in midair unattached to anything she's said or will say. She looks back at him and appears to be waiting for something, nothing else to offer. She doesn't even seem that invested. The words are his to pick up or leave there.

But then he gets it. And his heart rockets into his throat, because it means she put the book down and got off that fucking couch and she at least tried for him. She didn't do it but she went up to the bathroom and she gave it a shot. And now that he looks at her, the edges of one side of her hair are the slightest bit dark. Damp. She leaned in to test the water and she didn't like it, so she stopped.

That's okay. That's absolutely fucking okay; for now he'll consider himself more than satisfied.

"Water heater ain't workin'."

"It's too cold," she repeats, shaking her head. "I can't."

As if she wants him to fix it, make it so she can.

He scrambles, flails around for an idea like he's backed into a corner and needs to come up with a way out or he'll be eaten alive. He can't just leave it there after all; he needs to do something about it, because every chance like this he gets is endlessly precious.

Heat. Yes.

"What about if you did it in front of the fire?"

She cocks her head - little brain-damaged bird - clearly confused.

"Tonight," he says gently. "I'll get a fire goin', get you a towel and some water, you can wash off in front of it. Where it's warmer. Better'n nothin'."

It sounds pathetic in his own ears. Wheedling. But she frowns slightly, looks thoughtful - and finally nods.

"Okay."

Okay.

He tears his eyes away from her, glances back at the world. The sun is high; it's just after noon. This is a chance, yes, maybe a good one. Take advantage. Miss it and you might not get another one for a while. Christ, he wants to believe she's getting better, and maybe she even is, but he can't let himself. Can't throw that much of himself into the certainty beyond hoping.

If he does he drops his guard even more than he already has.

"I'm gonna go huntin'. That alright?"

No hesitation. She nods again. But she's also not focused on him anymore, and as he watches she steps past him to the railing and lays her hands on the smooth dark wood. Like before, like the morning, the wind lifts her hair and the sun pours into it, bathes her face and neck and arms in a glow that seems to shimmer, and she's not a Greek nymph but an angel carved into a cathedral pillar, distant and unearthly and so beautiful that all at once he wants to drop to his knees.

"I thought I'd get wings," she murmurs. "After. I thought we'd all get wings and fly up to God. Isn't that stupid? But I did. All those pictures, all that bullshit in Sunday School. We'd all be together again. Jesus handin' out hugs like Santa Claus. Smug asshole."

It's her, her soft, sweet voice, but once again the words aren't her at all and they burn into him, sizzle through his eardrums. On their worst days together, starving and exhausted and sick to numbness with loss, she never talked like this. He did, when he talked at all, and she made him want to stop even if he couldn't.

Please don't. Girl, please.

"Thought I'd get wings," she says, echoing out over the sheer cut of stone and the trees falling away below. "You already had them and they didn't save you. You're here with me. Probably wouldn't have mattered." She closes her eyes. "I knew you'd go to Hell, everything you've done."

Striking. Striking like a viper, digging in her fangs and pumping her venom, and he stands there beside and behind her with his eyes and ears and skin on fire and he takes it. How she's softly, gently, sweetly tearing him apart, because she can.

"At least you're with me," she whispers, lids still delicately closed, her lashes long against the ridge of bone beneath her eye. "At least I'm not alone."

"You're not alone," he breathes, echoes with hers, and he has no idea how the fuck he says anything at all.

"No." She swings back to him, sudden and swift, eyes open and hooking cool blue barbs into his. "If you're goin' huntin', I'm goin' with you."

But. Inside his head he stumbles back, pressing against the rear wall of his cranium. No. Of course she would want that - he left her behind last time, and she accepted it and she didn't hurt herself, at least not while he was gone, but he could tell she wasn't happy about it. Probably for a whole multitude of hopelessly complex reasons that not even she fully understands.

He can't tell her no. But.

"You sure?" He shifts his feet, unable to keep back the unease. She would see it anyway, she could always see through him and he has every reason to know that's still the case. "I mean... You think you can-"

"I'm goin' with you or I'm cuttin' my wrists open," she says calmly. "And when you get back you'll have all that blood to clean up. Is that what you want?"

Not that she'll be dead. Of course she's not threatening that. In her mind, a dead girl's mind, she's merely threatening massive inconvenience. But it makes no fucking difference; she knew she would have him with that, pin him to the fucking wall like a bug, and she does and she has.

She's getting better, sure, maybe. Getting sharper, less helpless. He still looks at her and sees a child, hates it, wants to claw that vision out of himself because it's so wrong and it's so unworthy of her, but he can't just see a child, whatever else happens. Because if she's getting sharper, and that cruelty is in her, she'll know exactly how to hurt him instead of herself, and she won't need to do it with weapons or teeth or fingernails.

All she'll need to do is talk.

He thought he would be able to keep trying to save her even if she was trying to kill him. He actually thought that. He was actually that stupid. That unimaginative. And he was getting all grimly self-satisfied down there in the town about how many people have been killed by their own lack of imagination.

He thought he would be able to keep trying to save her and he fucking will.

Well.

He will not under any circumstances give her a gun. But in that pack, the one he's hidden, is something else, the one thing in there that he desperately hoped he would be able to pull out and use, because he never thought he would ever get the chance. Thought he would bear that burden until the world finally sent him to her.

He steps away from her and turns, nods toward the door - standing open. "Alright. But you're gonna need somethin'. C'mon."

Not how he wanted to do this. Not how he would ever, ever have wanted to do it. But he will and he'll drag whatever he can out of it, because she's here and alive and even if she doesn't believe she is, her pulse thrums strong and hot under his fingers when he touches her.

He can give this back to her, and he doesn't have to carry it any longer. And if she chooses to use it like he fears she will, it still won't matter, because if she's going to do it, if she's going to fucking do it, if she's really that determined...

She'll find a way.

He has her wait on the sofa while he goes to the pantry. This, one of his weird, semi-pointless fumblings at an attempt to keep some kind of bad joke of a handle on safety - not letting her see where he's hidden it. And really, he thinks as he bends and wedges his hand between the wine rack and the far wall, grabs the pack and pulls it free, it's not even about the gun. It's not about that at all. Not about any of what she might do with any of what's in there.

She's insane but she's not stupid. She'll see them - the drugs, the syringes, the restraints and the rope - and she'll know instantly why he has them. What they're for.

And if she trusts him at all now, she never will again.

None of that matters. He can lie to himself - he's so good at it - and tell himself that none of it will be necessary. He lays the pack down and kneels on the cold floor in front of it, unzips it.

It's right that he should kneel for this. For what he lifts out and holds in his hands. Cradles. Gently, lovingly.

Because for over half a year it was all he had of her.

He took it off after it became clear what he and Aaron were dealing with. It didn't seem like a good idea to keep wearing it, like it might set her off somehow in a way none of them would be able to control - or that was what he told himself. That was the more comfortable reason. The real one - he suspects - is that he took it off because he simply couldn't keep it on. Couldn't do it. Keep a dead girl's knife on his belt when she was right in front of him, breathing and warm and insisting that she was still dead.

So he kept it. Because he was going to give it back to her, when she was well. He was going to go to her and she would know him and she would know herself, and he would give it to her and not have to say anything - that he kept it for her, that he would have kept it forever and he's so, so glad he doesn't have to keep it anymore - and she would take it from him and look at him, understand everything he wasn't saying, smile at him. Touch his face with her smooth, cool fingers.

Thank you.

He closes his hands around the knife's soft, worn sheath and squeezes his eyes shut.

This is not how it was supposed to be.

But it is how it is.

He comes back to her, across the room, stops in front of her and looks down, the knife at his side. She looks up at him, blinking slowly. Docile again. Calm. Almost bovine.

He's not fooled for a fucking second. It might not be affected, what he's seeing. Might be genuine. He doesn't want to believe that she has enough guile and enough mad shrewdness to purposefully trick him like that. But that cruel girl, that viper - she's still down there. At some point between yesterday and this morning, that girl woke up, and he doesn't think she's going back to sleep. He senses that she intends to stick around.

This isn't what he's heard termed multiple personalities. At least, he doesn't think so. She's aware of what goes on, on some level, all the time. Every single one of these girls is Beth. But she's fragmented. She's been shattered. And he can't be sure of anything anymore.

All he can do is hold on.

He drops into a crouch in front of her and holds up the knife, handle and tip balanced on his fingers. He doesn't speak - doesn't and can't, gaze frozen on her face - and she stares at it, no sign of comprehension in those wide, glassy eyes.

Then she blinks again and something clicks back there, and she takes it in her hand, curls her fingers around it, unsheathes it. Turns it, her suddenly sharp attention moving up and down the blade.

"Mine," she whispers, and he gasps. Can't help it. Can't help anything. He clenches his hands into trembling fists, and there's no indication at all that she's even aware of him anymore.

She runs a fingertip up the edge and he's sure he's going to see blood well. But none does.

Her focus snaps back to him, still sharp. "For hunting?"

He nods. He can do that. He can nod and he can talk and he can adopt the pretense of being a functional human being capable of communicating with other human beings. He can do so very convincingly. He's had over a year of practice.

"You ain't goin' out there unarmed."

"I'll be safe."

"I'll be with you. I'll keep you safe."

"I don't need you to keep me safe." She's looking at the knife again, thoughtful, pressing the point lightly against the pad of her thumb. "I'm the thing everythin' else is afraid of."

He has nothing to say to that. He knows what she means and he doesn't want her to clarify, doesn't want to hear it again, but he also can't argue. He is afraid. He's terrified of her, of her and for her, so unbearably and monstrously afraid.

But he does have something to say. Because this isn't how it was supposed to be, none of this is how it was supposed to be, but she also wasn't supposed to be alive and whatever else is going on in the scatter of jagged glass shards that is her mind, she is alive and she's right here and last night she let him hold her. Reached for him and held on, and when he curled his arms around her she settled against him and slept. Warm. Breathing, heart beating.

She's not dead. She's alive. That's all that matters.

"I kept it for you," he whispers. "After. Carol gave it to me. I kept it. Beth, I..." And that's all he has.

He never expected to have to say anything at all.

She's looking at him. Still holding the knife - fingers now wrapped around the handle - but looking at him, clear and present and impossible to read. He meets that beautiful, terrible gaze as long as he can and then he drops his eyes away, face briefly twisting, knowing that she'll see and knowing that if she wants to strike at him he just rolled over and exposed his throat and belly, and he sharpened her fangs.

Touch on his face, his cheek. Smooth, cool. He shudders, sudden and hard, and jerks his eyes back up to her. And she's looking down at him, fingers stroking across the ridge of his cheekbone, and all he wants in this world or any fucking other is to lower his head into her lap and sob.

She knows. Oh God, she knows.

"Thank you," she says softly, lays the knife down and frames his face with her gentle, merciful hands, tilts his head up and leans in and presses her lips to his brow.

And when he gives up and lets the tears come, shaking in her hands, she carefully wipes them away.