Chapter 6: from the slippery hands to the line of your throat

All at once it's hot.

Not as hot as it's been. Not as hot as it could be, not as hot as so many of their days together before those days ended, when they slogged through the woods and across fields and alongside roads before they turned away again. He remembers the sweat was endless, the air was sweat - they swam through it and the only relief they got was rain and the occasional cooler night, and the times when they found a body of water large enough and clean enough to bathe in. Bathe being a very generous term for what they did. It was barely rinsing. Fast, very cursory, done as soon as they could. Taking turns taking watch. Moments of intense vulnerability that had to be as few in number as possible.

Never entirely naked. He never wanted her to see him. Tried to trust her to look away, tried to tell himself that she would, she wouldn't see the scars, she wouldn't think about them and wonder and maybe, some night when something broke in her, ask him about them.

She never did. And it doesn't matter now.

He never looked at her. His stomach twisted when - once, briefly - he thought about doing so. Not even that he wanted to, not that it was an urge, just... The possibility occurred to him. That he might. That she might not see him doing it. That he might get away with it.

He thought about it and it felt bad, wrong, so he didn't think about it again.

And now it's hot. He leads her out the front door and out toward the road, crossbow slung across his back - the space up here is small, far too small to accommodate any real game, only the house and the overgrown garden surrounding it, and a few hundred yards or so of trees before it all drops sharply away into a slope too steep and rocky for most things to climb. The road is the only way up or down that's at all practical, and further down the ground off the road will level out a bit, the slopes ease, and they'll be able to cover some of it. There might be deer. Rabbits. Squirrels could be anywhere, but he'd rather do better than squirrel if that's possible.

She follows him in silence, and again he thinks of that time.

It's almost comfortable.

About a quarter of a mile down, she's still trailing him, and he pauses and looks back and waits for her. It's not that he thinks she's going to wander off, not exactly, but if she's coming along he's for damn sure going to keep her in sight.

Knife at her belt. He can't stop looking at it.

They stayed there for a little while, no more than about ten minutes, and when she released him and he looked up at her she had gone blank again. Stared dully at him like she had said nothing, done nothing, like he had simply given her the knife and that had been that. Which the more realistic parts of him had expected. So he scrubbed his face with his hand and stood up, shook himself, put it all away.

But it was something, that moment with her. Another few minutes and it didn't even feel real, didn't feel like it happened at all. But it did, and it was something, and when he picked up the bow and she came to him dressed with her boots on, slid the knife smoothly onto her belt, that was something as well.

She has it. He doesn't have to carry it anymore. So regardless of the heat and the fact that he senses something in her has left him, he feels light.

"You gotta stick close," he says quietly when she reaches him, and she glances up at him. There's no clear sign of comprehension anywhere to be seen there, and he's wondering if she even registered the words, but then she nods - once, slowly, and he nods back and tries not to be too obviously relieved.

And if he's honest... It feels better having her with him. Maybe it's not safe, but the house isn't safe either, nothing is safe, and at least this way he knows. What she's doing. What's happening. He doesn't have any more control like this, but it feels like he does.

All these little somethings.

It's quiet for a while - quiet between them, and that's also familiar, and not just from the last few days. When they were together before there wasn't much talking. Even after things got better there wasn't a whole lot of it, and when there was she did most of it. But like this, her walking beside him and the endlessly varied calls of mockingbirds echoing through the trees and off exposed rock, the lower coos of the mourning doves, wind in the leaves and stirring the branches, he can almost take himself back there. Pretend nothing changed. Pretend they stayed together and she was never taken, and they never found the others, and it was just them. Just kept being that way.

That would have been just fine.

"How long were we out there?"

He jerks his head up, attention yanked back to her. Because she's said anything at all, because it came out of nowhere and cut through what was admittedly becoming an actual honest-to-God fantasy and a fairly vivid one, but mostly because once again it sounds like her, like the closest he's heard yet to the Beth he lost, and in fact it's so intense that for a few vertiginous seconds he thinks maybe everything else was the fantasy, that they really did stay together, that everything after that night... Nightmare, hallucination, alternate universe, whatever, not real. Never real.

Then he focuses on her face, on the scars slashed across it and on the little pale starburst in her brow, and he knows.

But she still spoke. She still asked him.

"Out where?" He knows that too, or he's fairly sure he does, but she's talking and he wants her to talk more.

"You know. After the prison. How long?"

He shakes his head. "Never knew."

"A week? Two?"

"Coulda been." It was all just days. Day after day after day, every single one the same, until something changed and none of them were the same anymore, and then... He just hadn't known. Could have been three weeks for all he recalls. Could have been a month. He was with her for a while. That's all he's ever been sure of when it comes down to time. A while.

"I don't remember." She sounds distant, but not because she's going away. She sounds distant in the way people do when they're trying to remember. "I just... It felt like a long time."

"Yeah, it did."

"I remember..." She tilts her head back and looks up at the sky - a hard steel blue - and he watches her, watches her face, this face he sometimes feels like he hardly knows and other times can't bear to look at because the sheer force of his knowing is like a fist in his gut. "There was this moment... I dunno if it was a moment. Maybe it took a while. But I sorta... It wasn't like I stopped wantin' to find the others. I mean, I thought we would find 'em. Eventually. Maggie and Glenn, and Rick and Carl and Judith. Michonne. Tyreese and Sasha. Bob. Everyone. I didn't worry about it. But I... I didn't worry about it. Y'know?"

She turns her gaze on him and it's almost too much. Because she's very close to smiling - faint and dreamy but so much her - and he never thought he would see that smile again.

"I was okay with how things were. It was alright. Just... Just bein' out there. With you."

He swallows, very hard, and manages a nod. But no words. God, no fucking words at all, how the fuck is he ever supposed to speak again. How is he supposed to walk now, to move. To breathe.

He can't just get her back. It can't be that easy.

"What happened to them?"

"I. They." Somehow. Somehow words. He ducks his head, looks down, looks away, looks at anything but her. She's asking, she cares enough to ask, but he has no idea how he's supposed to tell her. What he's supposed to say.

What she'll say when he does.

"Found 'em. We... We went north. DC, almost. Found a place." He shrugs. And here are the names of the dead. Here are the people you'll never see again, truly never see again, and it was all for nothing. "Safe. I guess." For a given value of safe.

She nods, once again slow. Thoughtful. And for a while she's quiet again and he's ready to let it lie, at least for the present - in significant part because he's not sure what else to ask her. Not sure what else to say. His throat is tight and his mouth is working slightly, everything tense and also so close to tumbling, falling apart, when she says the next thing and slashes the lungs out of him.

"How did you die?"

It takes him a long moment to figure out what she's just asked him. She doesn't fill that moment. She lets it be, waits for him to fill it himself. She still seems very calm and now a little distracted, watching two squirrels chase each other through the branches overhead, screeching and hissing, and he simply circles the question and gapes at it, as flatly bewildered as she's ever been since he brought her up here.

But then.

I knew you'd go to Hell, everything you've done.

At least you're with me.

"I didn't."

"Yes, you did. You're here."

"I didn't, Beth."

She shakes her head and shoots him a look that's more pitying than anything else. "Why're you lying to yourself like this? Why don't you just accept it?"

His jaw tightens even more. Hurts. "'cause it ain't true."

"Maybe we never made it out of the prison." She looks back at the road, brow furrowed. Again, merely thoughtful. "Maybe that was when it happened."

"We made it out."

"How are you so sure?"

"'cause I fuckin' am."

It takes him a few seconds to realize he's stopped, another to realize he's grabbed her by the wrist, yet another to realize he was very close to shouting at her. She's staring up at him with dim surprise. He blinks, wavers, sucks in air and stares down at her slim wrist in his hand, his hold so tight his knuckles have gone pale. He has to be hurting her. But she's just standing there.

His hand spasms open and he nearly recoils, as if she's burned him - and she has. His palm stings. Her wrist is pale where he was gripping it - pale in the prints of his fingers. Then, as he watches, the blood rushes back in and the outlines darken.

And he knows - without having to wait to see it - that he's bruised her.

He never did that before. Even at the shack, even what he did then... He didn't leave a mark on her. Not that she ever let him see.

She stares down at her wrist, her expression all vague puzzlement. She's not angry. She doesn't seem to be in any pain whatsoever. She just doesn't understand.

He almost stumbles back. Almost falls. He never said he was sorry, is the thing. Never said it. Tried to say it so many other ways, tried to show her every day, but I'm sorry never felt like enough, felt like it would be an insult, so he never did. He hoped - God, he believed, he did - that she knew he was.

And he told himself he would never do anything like that to her again. Never so much as raise his voice to her. He told himself that. Made himself swear, over and over. Made himself swear on all the names of the people he still believed were dead, because he knew there wasn't a god in Heaven and nothing else to swear by. Nothing else that meant anything.

He swore, and even as he's watching her now, he'd swear he can see the bruise forming.

"Beth..."

Rustling in the undergrowth behind him, and her head snaps up, everything about her sharpening into almost bestial alertness, razor edged. Daryl is already half-turning, the horror he's just committed briefly and mercifully forgotten, and he's about to draw the bow and investigate when she tears past him, moving with alarming speed, her strides long and graceful and her hair flying around her head, her knife unsheathed and winking in the sun. He opens his mouth to tell her to fucking stop, I told you- and then she's gone into the trees.

More rustling further in the distance. Could be small. Could be large. The sound is getting thrown around and it's difficult to tell.

Cursing lavishly, battling fear and despair and weariness so deep it almost overwhelms the first two, he swings the bow heavily into his hands and follows her.

He doesn't know how long they were out there together. What he did learn - and he learned it quickly - was that she's fast. Faster than you'd think to look at her. And one would probably assume a considerable degree of speed just looking at her legs. Their relative length. Their power. She runs, leaps and bounds through the shrubs and trees, dodging and almost dancing over roots and uneven patches of ground. The slopes have gentled but they're still slopes, and she's running parallel along the drop, little flashes of her through the trunks and dappled light, arms pumping. Chasing... He doesn't know what. Faster than a walker, anyway. Faster and, he's almost positive, larger than just about any walker would be.

He slings the bow back over his shoulder and keeps pace behind her, slightly higher up. She's swifter than he is, but she's a sprinter. She'll tire. He can just keep going. She's not making any effort to hide her trail. If he loses sight of her, it should be easy enough to track her.

He bruised her and now he's thinking about hunting her like an animal.

This is going great so far.

"Beth!" Probably does no good to call to her. Probably wouldn't even reach her; she wouldn't have run at all if she was fully with him. But he calls anyway, and the name rakes across his throat like he's already been running for miles.

She doesn't so much as glance in his direction.

But there's a flash of white in the distance, and he can see what she saw and what she's chasing: deer, white tailed, bounding along at a speed that should have been too much for her to match. But she is, and it takes him only another couple of seconds to see why: those bounds are uneven. The deer - a small doe - is injured already. Limping. Now and then it stops and wobbles, takes a few uncertain steps, runs again.

At this pace she might actually catch it before she exhausts herself.

"Beth, stop."

But should she? Should she stop? His brain is the same panting chaos as the rest of him, scrambling and unable to focus or process anything except what's right in front of him and what it might mean in the next few minutes, but some part of it is still removed and retaining enough higher-level reasoning to see her and think about what's happened and what it's been like and consider the possibility that this is exactly the kind of thing she needs.

Running. Sun, air, her body being used and used well. Being fully in herself, in the moment she occupies. Running like she could before - and even when the days were bad and they were running for all the wrong reasons, she was so beautiful when she ran.

She's so beautiful now.

So he stops calling her. He just pursues, watches her, watches the deer, feels his own body, the pump of his blood and the flex of his muscles - the pain in his arm nowhere near as bad as he had feared, though it's sure as hell not comfortable - how he's also here, sun on his face and arms, the cooler rush of air drying the sweat on his skin, the breath in his lungs. His heart.

He didn't die. He made it. She has to see. She has to see now.

Walkers don't run.

Further down the slope and it's continuing to flatten out, but the ground is also becoming more treacherous - it's clear that this area is subject to considerably more erosion, and protruding rocks are scattered everywhere, lifted roots waiting to hook a foot and wrench or break an ankle. He has to slow, has to watch his footing, but so does Beth - and so does the deer, and he knows it's going to happen seconds before it does.

The deer attempts a leap across a jagged stone line, fails to get enough height, strikes its leg against the edge with a crack - bizarrely loud - and crumples with a rough honking cry, thrashing in the leaves. Beth is barely yards away, slowing, knife up and shining, little predator ready to make a kill.

And the walker staggers out from behind the tree.

Long strings of slimy brown hair, face half hanging off the skull and eyes rolling. Tongue lolling. It should go for the deer, it should go for the easier prey, God, it should, that's what's going to save her because he's struggling to get the bow into his hands and it's so much harder than it should be, his fingers abruptly thick and clumsy, he's too slow, he's too fucking slow but the deer, the deer will-

The walker wavers, hissing, turns and seems to consider something, and begins shambling toward Beth.

All of this happens in a fraction of a second. He still doesn't have the bow up. He's still running. He can't get good aim while running. Beth has skidded to a stop, staring, head slightly cocked and knife lowered, and the walker is less than three feet away from her.

Two.

He's going to watch her die all over again, and this time she isn't coming back.

He screams, and it's wordless and horrible, like it's him about to be ripped apart except if he was he knows he wouldn't scream at all, would just let go under it, and just as he's ready to stop and aim anyway and take down the thing that killed her, Beth snaps the knife up and buries it in the walker's eye and jerks it free.

The thing falls with a gurgle and lies still. And she merely stands, knife still raised, head cocked again, and he knows without being able to make out her expression that she's once more merely puzzled.

He does stop. Has to. Stops and drops the bow, bends over his knees, carves breaths out of the air. Nausea rocks him, grabs his head and feet and wrings him out - sheer terror, sheer and awful helplessness, because maybe he can't save her. Maybe he never could.

Maybe she has to save herself.

He gets her to help him carry the deer back.

It is, again, not a large deer, and it could be a much bigger ordeal, and it doesn't go quickly or easily but he's thankful at least that she's there. He went to her after, went to her and tried not to grab her by the arms, shake her, shout at her again, pull her against him and hold on so tight her bones ground together. Instead he put an arrow through the twitching deer's skull, turned to her, told her he needed her to help him.

Needed her.

She gazed silently up at him, and he could see she was sufficiently there to understand.

Together they lifted the carcass and began to haul it out of the woods.

He's doing a lot of thinking as they approach the road, none of it along pleasant lines. They're fairly far down from the house - a good couple of miles - and it was just the one; since they got here he's seen almost no walkers at all except the ones in town, and the vast majority of them appeared to be locked into the inexplicable pen behind the grocery store. Unless they finally pushed the fence down in their eagerness to get at him, they're still there.

He doesn't want to, but he should go down and verify, from as much of a distance as he can.

Just the one. And nearer the house the ground is almost impassable except for the road. The house isn't particularly secure in and of itself, but the location...

But. Even one. Even one.

He keeps being a fucking idiot. He's going to get both of them killed. There are any number of things that could do that, but at this rate it's going to be specifically him.

They're soaked with sweat and his arm is back to shrieking pain by the time they reach the house, and he calls a halt and drops the deer in the drive right in front of the door. Not ideal. Really, really not fucking ideal. But nothing is ideal, and he doesn't have time to get to dressing the thing now.

He has another job to do, and it can't wait.

He does take her by the shoulders - doesn't grab. Careful. Gentle as he can be, tired and hurting and freaked out as he is. He lays his hands on her, frames her, and she looks up at him with her wide, blue, calm gaze, and he wonders if she even knows what she did.

He tries very hard to not look at her wrist.

"I gotta go back to town. Alright? You understand what I'm saying?"

Her brows knit and he can already tell that yes, she does understand, and she's about to demand that he take her along, but he keeps going. Runs right over her. Because he thinks he understands a little of it now, what's driving her when it comes to this, and even if she threatened to open her veins over it, it doesn't originate in the place that's certain she's dead.

It comes from the place that wants to stay alive.

He can take it. Hold onto it. Manipulate it. Manipulate her.

And it makes him feel like a piece of shit.

"I need you to stay here. I know you don't wanna, and I don't wanna leave you, but I need that. I still need you, I gotta get in and out fast and I'll do that better if it's just me. When I get back, I'm gonna need your help, and we're gonna have to move fast then too. I can't do this without you." He gives her a little squeeze. "Alright?"

She hesitates, her face a frowning mask of displeasure. But at last she nods, and everything in him loosens the slightest bit.

Unless her mind collapses in the most utterly complete way possible, she'll still be here when he gets back, and all her blood will still be pumping through her veins.

"Alright." But he doesn't let go of her. Not right away. He just looks at her - her hair windblown around her face, her cheeks and neck still flushed with effort, her skin glistening and shirt sticking to her. Revealing the lines of her body, revealing how much thinner she is than when he last saw her - and she was thin then. And she's so strong and she's so fragile, and he releases her shoulders and cups her burning face in his hands.

Girl, I won't leave you. No matter what you do to me. Not ever. You could cut my fucking heart out and eat it in front of me and I would still never leave you.

She does nothing. Just looks at him. But her eyes aren't flat - all at once it's as if they spring from two dimensions to three, and it's so sudden it almost unbalances him, almost tosses his hands away. She always saw him like this, so clear. Before. He hated it and then he thought maybe he loved it and now he has no idea. He has no idea what she's seeing.

Maybe he shouldn't be doing this. Touching her now. Maybe this isn't right.

Because there's that line. He doesn't know what it is or why it's there but it's there and he's standing right in the edge of it, and a part of him he's barely cognizant of is whispering that if he steps across it there won't be any going back.

Ever.

She raises her hands and covers his. They're small, soft as they were on his face back in the house, in what feels like another lifetime, and against all sense they're cool. Cool and dry.

There are some things he could say. If he had any idea what the fuck they were.

"I'll be back in an hour." He takes a breath and slides his hands out from under hers. "Swear. An hour." He steps back, clenching, releasing, taking whatever just happened and shoving under the pile of rocks it feels like his bones have become. When he allowed himself to slip into this - something like this - down there, it almost got him killed. Almost got them both killed. Can't. Not again. Not now.

Later. Maybe.

He nods down at her knife - mostly clean and once more sheathed at her hip. "Stay at the house. Keep that on you. Anything shows up that ain't me, you put it down."

No hesitation this time. She nods.

It's still her.

Please be here. When I come back. Please be with me.

He turns and heads to the bike, kicks it into a roar, leaves her.

Not like last time. He's not exploring. One thing and one thing only, and thank Christ for that, because it's simple, and he has a couple of relatively simple backup plans. He needs to hit one place and one place only, and it's right off the central road they took through.

Town still quiet in the heat of late afternoon. Except faintly - and he's not sure how he missed this before - he can hear groans and hisses and the rattle of chainlink. Very possibly they had gone docile before he waltzed through that door and woke them up. Very possibly they'll go docile again if he gives them long enough. At least - as far as he can tell - they're still confined.

He doesn't go down that street. He moves on past it, past the pharmacy, toward the hardware store a few more blocks down. The big front window is smashed, glass everywhere, but inside the mess is minimal, not too many things missing, not too much scattered in the aisles and no sign of walkers, and along the wall at the back he finds exactly what he's looking for.

Loops of razor wire. Fifty feet. He grabs two. Back toward the front, two pairs of sufficiently thick gloves, extending most of the way up the forearm.

Back to the bike. And back up.

It's all a blur. He was aware of looking, finding, picking up. Now speed and the roar of the bike beneath him. He's the machine now, and his sole function is to keep them as safe as he can, even if that safe is a bad joke and means nothing in the end. Doesn't matter. He needs to do things. He can do this.

He can ask her to help him, and she will.

And that might be how he brings her back.

She's still there.

He pulls the bike to a halt in the drive, cuts the engine, but he doesn't climb off. Doesn't move. The world has settled into a hot, sleepy late afternoon, all cicada buzz and only the faintest breeze, the birds too sluggish to sing.

Somehow it's the buzz of the cicadas that makes it as bad as it is. Like a cloud of distant flies. A plague. They fill his head as he stares at her, hands numb, lips numb, and the sound flows from his brain all the way down to his feet and numbs everything else. He's the remnants of a thing that used to move. He's been amputated from himself. He's a ghost limb.

She's there, kneeling in front of the deer carcass, bent over, arms smeared red up past the elbows and glistening in the sun. The front of her shirt is soaked in it, chunks of flesh here and there. It's dripped into her lap, spattered her jeans. It's everywhere. It's all over her.

He told her she should bathe. She has.

She lifts her head, pushes herself up. The ends of her hair have stuck together, congealed into brown spikes. Red all over her throat, her cheeks, her nose. Her lips.

She's chewing.

She swallows. Flashes him a quick smile with teeth like rubies. "Hi, Daryl." She gestures at the carcass, at the torn throat, the flank, hide slashed and peeled back and corded muscle and pale fat carved away. Bitten. Gnawed. "C'mon. There's plenty for you."

Later, he'll have no idea how he did it.

He'll have no idea how he did anything. Remembering it will be like watching himself from the outside, like watching someone else. Watching a movie. Getting off the bike. Going to her. Bending. Taking her hands in his, taking that blood onto his skin. Gentle. Keeping his voice low. Telling her she'd had enough, he had to get the thing under cover or it might be taken by something else. Someone else. Her nodding as if this made total sense, letting him tug her to her feet, direct her inside. Telling her to go into the bathroom and wait for him.

Her, docile again. Doing as he said. Not questioning him, not resisting. Not fighting. Blood all over the doorknob. Her back, her swinging crimson hands and forearms. Like she herself was skinned. Like she took that knife and took it all off, left it in a pile by the deer.

The fucking deer.

He drags it away. He drags it to the lower ground just beside and under the deck, where the drop is just as sheer, and he shoves it over and watches it fall. It hits one of the rocky juts, bounces. The crunch of bone is audible as its rib cage caves in. A hundred feet further down it hits the boulders that line the bottom of the cliff and bursts. Breaks open like a balloon of blood and gut, splatters over that pale, pristine rock.

That's what it would be like. That's what would happen. If it was him.

If it was her.

He doesn't vomit. He doesn't because he makes himself not do it, because he won't, because he signed on for this and he shouldn't be surprised. Shouldn't be shaken. Should just accept. She did this, it was always coming, and just thank a God who can't possibly be anywhere near this that it wasn't him lying there instead of the deer, throat ripped open and her feeding on him.

Except she would never do that, would she? Attack him, try to hurt him, try to kill him, sure. She might. But she wouldn't try to feed on him.

He's dead too.

They're both dead, together.

He goes in to her, and she's waiting in the bathroom just like he asked her to - he didn't specify but she went into the big bathroom off the master bedroom, which they've both been using. She's sitting there on the clean white tile, and it's not clean anymore; it's smeared far more than it should be just with the movements of her body, far more than that could account for, and the smears are loops and swirls that look intentional, and that's when he realizes she's been fingerpainting.

He crouches. He does this because he does it, because he will.

"Still need you to help me. Can you?"

She nods. Lifts a bloody hand and looks at it, turns it this way and that, moves her fingers through the air in graceful, waving patterns. She seems fascinated by herself. Entranced. Enthralled.

She was never a child to him. He looks at her now - under the blood, under what she's done to herself and the outward evidence of what she believes she is - and that's what he sees.

He uses one of the fluffy white towels taken from a cabinet at the far end of the room and water from the sink. He half-heartedly wipes off her face, her hands. Does what he can with her arms. There's nothing to be done about her shirt, her jeans. He won't even try.

It doesn't matter.

"Alright," he murmurs, drops the towel onto the horribly decorated floor and steps back. She's still a mess. He can't fix that. He can't fix anything. "C'mon. We gotta make it quick."

He leads her back out to the bike, hands her a roll of wire and a pair of gloves, takes one of each thing for himself, and walks her down the drive toward where the road narrows.

He doesn't look back at the long, curved streak in front of the house. If he could feel relief, he would be relieved that she doesn't either.

He honestly could have done it alone, but with her, like the deer, it goes faster. Together they put on the gloves and unspool the wire, and he marks trees on either side of the road around which they can wrap it. There's more than enough. Like before, she takes direction very well, and it begins to come to him that she might be so easy to handle now because she got what she wanted. What she thinks she needs. She hadn't been allowed to have it at all, not really since she woke up. The deer wasn't alive, wasn't thrashing and screaming, but it was fresh, warm inside, and it was close enough for her.

She got her meat. She got to feed. So now she's happy, content, and she'll probably do whatever he says.

He's still too numb to feel sick.

They end with two taut lines of razor wire stretching across the road, one at the level of his shins and one at the level of his chest. It's not impossible for a walker to go around, but one of the anchor trees is almost flush with an outcrop and the drop on the other side becomes very steep very fast, and he thinks it's unlikely. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than nothing, and the only real problem with it is that if he wants to go back down, doing so is now a bit more of a hassle.

If he wants to walk, he can just walk around. The bike is something else.

It is what it is.

When he beckons to her, she follows him back up to the house. She doesn't speak. He doesn't either.

He has nothing to say.

The sun is beginning to set when he builds up the fire.

He said they could do it this way and she agreed, so they will. Before, it was something he wanted her to do in the interest of connecting her to some scrap of what it once meant to be human. Now it's because she's still streaked and smeared with blood, drying brown on her hands and arms, her neck and face, caked under and around her fingernails. In her hair. She reeks with it. She gets close to him and his stomach turns.

Blood never used to bother him like this. It was just another feature of the days.

And he's never, in all the time he's known her, been disgusted by her.

He finds a bucket in a utility closet near the kitchen, fills it with water, sets it near the fire. She's sitting on the couch again, boots off and legs tucked under her, The Secret Garden open in her lap. She hasn't once looked at him since they came in together and he went to get wood. As far as he can tell she's ignoring him completely.

He's fine with that.

It's when he's left and returned with some towels and soap and is setting them down on the floor by the bucket that she speaks again. Not, as far as he can tell, to him. Not to anyone in particular. It's quiet, low, unprompted by anything he can see. But he freezes, bent, and listens because he can't not.

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries - as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live... surprising things can happen to anyone who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things cannot be in one place

Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow.

She's quiet again. He straightens up, and when he turns her head is still bent over the book, her eyes half closed, the fire catching them beneath her lids and making them glow. Like an animal's.

His hands are still bloody from when he took hers. When he tried to clean her. What made him try to do that? What was he actually hoping to get from it? What the fuck could she have gotten? What good did it do her? What good is any of this really doing her?

He thought he was getting her back.

"Take your bath," he says, and leaves her.

He spends some time in the very back bedroom, looking over the books on the shelf without registering any of the titles on the spines. None of it is interesting. None of it means anything. These are the stories of a dead world, and in the end they didn't mean anything either. They're like dead languages, where the tablets and the carvings and the scrolls remain but no one's left to speak the words. The alphabet and vocabulary and grammar can be deciphered and made sense of, and the words can be read, but no one remembers what any of it sounded like. They have no weight, no reality. No one uses those words to govern or teach or converse or buy or sell, to fix things and break them and go to war and beat peace into being. No one uses those words to sing to a baby. No one uses those words to say I love you.

They might as well burn.

But she won't let go of that fucking book.

He's not thinking, standing there, wandering aimlessly from room to room, tracking the passage of the last of the light but forgetting the time. He's not thinking when he walks back down the hall and the short flight of stairs, when he turns and there she is.

Then he can't think.

He never looked at her. He could have - could have glanced, peeked, and she wouldn't have known. She doesn't know now, not as far as he can tell. She's on her knees on one of the towels he set down for her, facing the fire with her back mostly to him, face unseen, naked and washing herself. She's doing it slowly, almost meditatively: rinsing the cloth in the bucket and wringing it out, passing it over her skin, returning it to the bucket and repeating the exercise. Her hair is damp, falling all around her face; she must have washed it too.

He never looked at her. Never looked like this, never saw how the curve of her waist deepens when she's kneeling this way, how the fire casts her head and shoulders and upper arms in a kind of low sun-glow. He never caught a glimpse of her bare thighs folded against her calves and slightly spread, never saw the graceful dip of her spine, never saw her raise an arm to pass the cloth over her back and reveal her right breast - small and full, the soft hint of a curve rather than the curve itself, nipple tight and tiny with cold. She was marble; now she looks gilded. All her skin shadows and ruddy gold, shining wet in the firelight.

He never looked at her like this, so until now he never looked away, fists clenched stone with a tornado spinning in his chest. He never looked away, hands bloody and everything burning, acid eating into his throat.

She was never a child to him.

He looks at her now and that's not all he sees.

She dresses and in spite of her earlier meal she eats what he puts in front of her - fire-heated tomato soup and more crackers - as she always does, feeds herself like a machine with those even, regular rises and falls of her elbow, her arm, the slide of her spoon against the bowl coming every few seconds like a surrealist clock. He doesn't look at her as she eats, and he doesn't eat with her. He moves around in front of the fire - building it up against a night growing surprisingly cool given the heat of the day, gathering up the towels, picking up the bucket.

The towels are - like everything she touches, it seems - streaked pale red. The water in the bucket is pink.

She doesn't once glance up at him.

He empties the bucket outside. Stands for a moment and feels the slipping temperature, tilts his head back and stares up at the sky. It's clear. Expansive. It curves over him, cupping the world in a dark palm. The stars are almost too brilliant to look at.

The long smear of blood in the driveway looks black.

He brought her up here to save her. To try. But he knows that was wrong. He knows he was an idiot. Now he's trapped here with something he doesn't recognize, doesn't understand, isn't sure he wants to. He has no idea what happened. No idea what's going on.

No idea how this is going to end.

A while after, he sits in the last of the firelight and watches her sleep. Didn't put her to bed. Didn't cover her. Didn't stroke her hair - still a little damp. He's keeping a distance. He's not sure when he'll be able to stop.

It feels like today lasted a week. Maybe it did. His sense of time is definitely fraying at the edges. Getting slippery. Soaked in blood.

When he closes his eyes everything he sees is bloody. He looked at her, feeding on that deer, and now he thinks about how he first met Rick and how this whole fucking thing began, and years later, deer again, falling to his knees in the woods when everyone was dying in every meaningful way. Dead girl, walker girl. Even at her most - apparently - sane, that's still what she's making herself into. That's still what a significant part of her wants to be.

And she's there a few yards away from him, curled on her side with her arms tucked against her chest, looking so small, the scars on her face like deep rivers cut across a landscape seen from miles up, the imprint of his hand darkening around her wrist like a perverse replacement for the bracelets she lost. Motionless and breathing, face relaxed. Blood pulsing through her, warm. Soft. Last night he held her and tonight he thinks if he touched her again he would burst into flames and he would deserve it.

He fucked everything up. He's still fucking everything up, because he won't get away from her. Because he won't take her home. Because he refuses to let her have a home. Because he is, to a degree he only now sees and can only now admit, making this place a prison and making himself her jailer. Her warden.

Except he's also making himself something more than that, and something worse. Something worse, seeing her like a child and then seeing her that way, and it's wrong. It's very wrong. Since she dried herself and dressed he's been hit by wave after wave of subtle, almost imperceptible dizziness. Vertigo. The floor is unsteady. The wind pushes against the house and it feels like it's rocking very slightly, moving like a ship sailing through dark water. No map. No stars to steer by. No land in sight.

He'll sleep. They'll wake up and she'll throw her pretty things off the mountain and he'll feed her and they'll do whatever they do, and he'll tell himself they're safe, and he'll tell himself he's safe with her.

And he'll tell himself she's safe with him.

When he does sleep, when he does dream, it's of her teeth. Stretched out on the pavement, her hands on him, tipping his head back. When she clamps her jaws down on his throat and rips her head sideways, he thrusts his fingers into her hair and moans her name.

It doesn't hurt.

It's better now.

The dream is gone and she's staring at him from across the room. There's no light anymore but her eyes are glittering.

She smiles and her teeth are rubies. His mouth is full of blood.