Chapter 8 - the world is heading ever southward

He can't take his eyes off her.

He couldn't take his eyes off her when he first found her, either. Because he couldn't believe it. Because a horrible, traitorous part of himself didn't want to. He stared at her and stared at her and hoped that she wouldn't notice, or if she did that she wouldn't care, and as far as he could tell she didn't do either. Didn't care that he was there at all, a lot of the time. So he could look. Look all he wanted.

Seems like that now, too. She comes back in with her ears and wrist and neck bare. All gone over the cliff. All made sacrifices. Leaning back against the counter, he watches her mechanically consume the canned sweet potatoes he's set out for her, and he studies her. Her face, her hands. The whole attitude of her body. She appears more than unconcerned; she appears to have slipped back into that distant flatness. But at least she's calm. There's no indication of instability in her at the moment, not that it means much.

No instability. Like nothing happened.

Because nothing did.

No blood streaked on her. None on him. He went to the bathroom, stripped, checked every inch of himself - it's stupid, crazy, it was just a bad dream, just one of the worst fucking nightmares he's ever had, but he checked anyway, and then he checked again. Examined under his fingernails. The inner creases of his thighs. Even between his goddamn toes. Everywhere.

Nothing.

Nothing happened. He's fucked up. There's no way he couldn't be fucked up. He's struggling, even if he's not struggling like her, and he has been for months. Now he's alone with her and he knows perfectly well that insanity can be contagious, and with nothing else up here, no one else to talk to and no one to help him, he can't possibly be surprised when his fucked up brain decides to fuck with him.

Doesn't mean he wants to... He doesn't want to do that to her. Doesn't.

Doesn't want to see her like that.

But today he's going to hunt for her, because he said he would, because he got them into this and he's not sure it'll actually hurt her any worse than she's already been hurt - the dangers of eating raw meat aside - and because he's frankly not sure what else to do.

If he gives her some of what she wants, he might get some of what he wants.

Not that.

But he can't help himself, what he does next. He has to.

He doesn't have much control over everything here. He doesn't entirely have control over himself, if it comes to that.

"Why'd you throw all that stuff away?"

Slowly, she lifts her head. She's still blank, but there's something flickering behind it. Something bright and conscious. "What stuff?"

"Stuff I got for you." He narrows his eyes, slightly but he knows she'll see it. And once again - and he hates it with astonishing viciousness - he doesn't feel like they're in this together. He feels like they're circling each other, looking for an opening, and he'll have to break her. "The necklace, the other stuff. You threw it over. Why?"

Her frown is very faint - puzzled. Puzzling. Then her face smoothed out and she shrugs. "It was pretty."

And that seems to be all he gets.

While she's dressing, he sits on his bed and stares down at his hand. The little red mark is still there in the center of his palm, stark as stigmata, but it looks smaller and fainter than it was. It might be his imagination - must be - but he'd swear it's fading as he watches.

An hour later he can barely see it anymore. Two hours and it's like it was never there at all.

His arm feels a bit better, and better still after he dry-swallows some more painkillers. She stripped off the dressing on her hand the day before and the bitten parts of her fingers look better too. He sits in the chair across from the couch and studies her some more, smoking, peering through the coiling wisps of it at her bent head and her curled body as her pen moves rapidly across the page of the journal.

She heals fast. Always has. He remembers her slashed wrist; took only a couple of days to shrink and start fading into pink skin. Before she began covering it with her beaded leather thongs and her cuffs.

He noticed even if he didn't mean to notice, even if he didn't realize it then. Noticed it. Noticed her.

He's been noticing her for a long fucking time.

Now he can't take his eyes off her, and he doesn't know quite why - there are a lot of reasons, he knows that much - and it's freaking him out.

He's aimlessly grateful that the dream is fading like the wound in his palm. There's a lot of it he doesn't remember. Just that it happened and it was bad.

"Whatcha writin'?"

She looks up, a little sharply - good, she cares enough to react that much. "You can't ask that about someone's journal."

"I'm askin' anyway." He manages a smile, crooked and anemic. Or so it feels. "You gonna stop me?"

Her gaze is level. Cold. Clouds have blown in and the light has gone pale gray, and it's sucked the life-hue out of her skin. Yet another thing that's freaking him out just a touch, and he's trying to beat it back any way he can.

"Just not gonna answer you. Not if you're gonna be a jerk."

"Please tell me." Folding. Not that he doesn't want to fold. It's easier to fold right now, and he's not sure what he has to gain by trying to play it tough, trying to pretend she can't plunge her hand into his chest cavity and claw him to bloody chunks. She already knows she can. She's known that from the beginning. "Or don't. Whatever you want, Beth. You don't gotta tell me shit."

She's quiet for a while - feels like a long while. He's certain she won't, is ready to deal with it. He'll have tried and failed and that's not exactly a new experience for him.

But at last she looks back down and shifts on the cushion, squirms a little. "Stuff about dreams."

If her gaze was cold, maybe it infected him. He doesn't jump, doesn't gasp; he just quietly freezes all over again, biting down on the cigarette, hands clenched into fists and every muscle locked tight. Means nothing. She has dreams; with what happened to her it makes sense they'd be bad ones, at least a lot of them. She's been through shit. Her brain got blown to hell.

Even if she didn't say the dreams were bad ones.

"What kinda dreams?"

She looks up and past him, vaguely in the direction of the fireplace. Vaguely in the direction of her bed, the windows. The cold leeches into his marrow. "Red ones," she whispers. "Red and black."

He shouldn't keep asking. This isn't something he needs to know. They're just dreams, they're hers, ultimately they're her business. But as before, he can't stop it. As if something else is guiding him now, something perversely determined to root out every potentially awful thing it can find.

"What else?"

Still not looking at him. "Mm?"

"What else was in them? The dreams?"

She shakes her head. Once, twice. "Hands." She takes a breath, one that swells her up and collapses her like a balloon. "I don't remember."

He doesn't want to leave it alone now. Surely he can't. Surely he won't. But he does.

Completely without meaning to, without thinking about it, he taps the cigarette out on his tongue. The ash is gritty and bitter and the filtered smoke pluming into his sinuses reeks of stale tobacco that was never very good to begin with. But it doesn't hurt. Or if it does he doesn't care enough to perceive it.

She's still writing, not looking up anymore. And when he rises and tells her that he's going hunting, she gives him a quick disinterested nod. As if she forgot what it meant. That she'll be getting what she wants. As if she doesn't care anymore and she won't care about the outcome.

Maybe he doesn't have to go after all.

But ten minutes later he's shivering as he pulls on his boots, picks up the crossbow, heads out the door and into the slate-toned light and down the drive with the wind picking up all around him and shaking the treetops.

Storm.

He doesn't look at that long, rotten brown smear of blood in front of the door, between it and his bike. Doesn't look as he walks over it, doesn't look back. He doesn't need to see it. Does no good to him. Does fuck-all.

Her bloody hands, bloody lips. Bloody chin and throat. Blood in her hair, all over her chest and belly. Soaking her clothes. The blood on her teeth, all inset with garnets and rubies, and that smile.

He doesn't want to see her like that.

Stop.

He can't control it. Never could.

Not deer. Nothing large. God, he can't, because not only was it way too much and not only would that much fresh death probably attract walkers even if they've taken some minimal precautions, but it was so big, and lying there soaked in its own blood, it would have been easy enough to squint and blur away his vision and see something of a similar size but a different shape.

Something she would probably find even more satisfying.

As he turns off the road and begins to make his way onto the steep, wooded slopes, moving slow to keep his footing, it suddenly occurs to him that maybe it's not a bad idea to continue to keep her away from the rest of them after all. Maybe there is a legitimate reason that doesn't involve his own unbearable, uncontrollable selfishness.

She hasn't tried to feed on him. She believes - with her fractured, inconsistent logic - that he's dead too. He wouldn't make any kind of decent meal.

But he can't be so sure she'd believe that about the rest of them.

What exactly would happen to her in the Zone? What would they do with a girl who kept trying to tear people apart with her nails and her teeth, who isn't large but who can be surprisingly strong and even more surprisingly quick and agile when she wants to be? Put her in restraints and just keep her there? Put her in a fucking cage? Drug her into oblivion?

Cast her out?

Rick wouldn't stand for that. None of them would. But Rick's position is still shaky. Same goes for all of them. At the moment what Rick has managed to accumulate has been collected primarily through the careful use of intimidation, and that only goes so far.

Just another reason why Daryl isn't in any particular hurry to get home. Why he's never in any particular hurry to get home anymore.

Home.

Up her with her... He blinks slowly, gaze sliding across the ground ahead and all around, watching for disturbed or crushed leaves and marked soil, dislodged pebbles. Scattered pine needles. The clouds have thickened and lowered and a lot of the forest floor has been swept into shadow, narrow pine trunks stark lines all around, but that never stopped him before and he won't allow it to do so now. Doesn't matter that his thoughts are moving back in some deeply uncomfortable directions - not that anything he thinks now is all that comfortable. This in itself - the track, the hunt - is still comforting. What he's thinking, he can approach with at least a little detachment. It's not clawing at him. There's no panic lurking inside it, no dread.

Might very well be better to keep her up here.

And maybe he still feels better up here than he would there.

You know that isn't true.

He doesn't know anything.

His hand twinges, sharp and sudden like a thorn piercing his palm, but when he jerks it up and examines it in the dimness there's nothing there.

He doesn't know anything.

He knows less and less every second.

In the end all he gets for her is squirrels.

It's mostly what he sees, it's easy - they're scampering all over, chasing each other around and chittering angrily, like something has them riled up, and he doesn't have to work at it for more than an hour or so before he has two. But it's also that they're small. Small, without much flesh on their bones and without much mess to be made. Because on his way back up the slope he sees the gray and black flash of a raccoon crawling through a thin cluster of undergrowth and the thing actually pauses and raises its wide head, fixes Daryl with glittering black eyes sitting deep in the twin hearts of its mask.

He could take it down, take it back to her. Christ, he could. It would probably make her happier than a couple of scrawny squirrels. Once again ignoring the very real damage he could be letting her do to herself by giving her the meat raw, ignoring all the rest of it and just looking at the sheer value - in her eyes - of what he could bring her.

Laying it down in front of her. Stepping back. Watching what happens next.

Rick told him, once. Clearly hadn't wanted to but clearly had needed to. It was long after it happened, and the fact is that he and Rick don't talk much anymore anyway, at least not like they used to. But this time they were, sitting out on the porch together, him with a cigarette and Rick with a can of lukewarm beer picked up on a run, and it had been a bad day. A bad week. Daryl is supposedly good at telling the difference between good people and bad people, but maybe he's not always so good at telling the difference between good people and bad people and crazy people, because someone he and Aaron brought back, who they thought was fine...

Mother and her two girls. Seven and five. Little blond stick figures, all skin and bone, with blue eyes that seemed to occupy fully half their dirty faces. They were starving, they were desperate, they were so happy to be there. And that afternoon the mother decided their first day in their new home was the perfect time and place to slit those two little throats open in the bathtub and follow up with her wrists.

Fuck knows why. Just one of those things.

So there was Rick, that night, sitting down next to him and talking. No intro. No preamble. Just this story about back when they were still living in the prison, when he found a woman in the woods, said she need help for her and her husband, said she would take Rick to him, and the husband was a severed walker head and Rick was supposed to be...

Some people are just too far gone. This? This wasn't your fault. It's not on you. You can't read minds, and there are people you're just not gonna be able to help.

But now there's that woman again, and what she did. Because she couldn't live without him. Even that much of him had been enough for her. Or she convinced herself of that. Because the alternative was worse.

She fed him. She fed him when she herself was starving. She would have killed to feed him, was ready to try. She fed that thing and she told herself it was him and he was there and it was enough. She hadn't lost him. He wasn't gone.

Maybe she could even bring him back.

Daryl drops the bow, braces a hand against the thick, rough trunk of an oak and lowers his head between his shoulders until he stops shaking.

It's not the same. He stares down at the rotting leaves, the thin carpet of gold-brown pine needles, a worm wriggling up through displaced earth. Wind circles him, chilly and smelling of rain and faint ozone. It's not the same. It's not at all the same. She's alive. She's not a walker. She's not dead. That's the whole point of being here.

Right?

This is just so she'll be happy. Just so she'll be easier to handle. Maybe easier to reach.

This is just so she'll be good.

Not the same. All the way back up to the road. Not the same, it's not. It's not. He still has limits. He has a whole fuck of a lot of things he won't do.

This used to be one of them.

Something else Rick said that night. One of the last things. Getting up to go back in, turning to look - not at Daryl but out at the dim, quiet street. So normal. So fucking normal that to Daryl it never stopped feeling hopelessly insane.

Something Rick said, and it didn't feel like it was directed at him.

They don't tell you, do they?

They don't tell you that never is just another word for until.

She's sleeping when he brings them in.

Curled on her mattress, knees drawn up to her chest, journal held beneath them in a tight hug. Her hair is half swept across her face, mostly obscuring her scarred cheek and her eye, and all he can see clearly is her full mouth - truly relaxed now, for once. No tension winding itself around her from the inside. No terror, or rage, or whatever the fuck the word is for what she feels most of the time these days.

She just looks like a little girl again.

He doesn't like it.

The rain has started, nothing more than a soft pattering on the windows, and not knowing what else to do, he shrugs off the bow and drops the squirrels on the kitchen counter. If he wakes her now they'll still be warm and she'll almost certainly like that better than if she has them later on, but he stands there, braced on the cold granite bar between him and the rest of the room, and looking at her, and he can't. He can't bear it. There might be things about how she looks now that he doesn't like and finds profoundly unsettling, but she's still Beth and her hands and mouth are clean, and he wants it all to stay that way. Just a little longer. He went out, he did this awful thing for her, surely he deserves that much.

She stirs, jerks her head up and down and flicks her hair back, and her brow furrows, twitches, smoothes out again. He watches her a moment longer, the streaks of rainshadow running down her cheek and hands and arms, her closed lids. Even at a distance of yards, somehow he can see her eyes darting rapidly back and forth beneath them.

He pushes away from the counter and goes to the pantry, grabs a bottle of wine at random, opens it with a soft pop and goes to the sofa, drops onto it, starts drinking.

He has no idea how long she sleeps. Time gets blurry, slides in and out like a slow tide. The light darkens, lightens, darkens again. The rain continues steady as it's been, but in the distance thunder begins to announce itself with gentle growling that he can tell - to the extent that he can tell anything - won't be nearly so gentle when it arrives. After about half of the bottle he can feel the house swaying in the gathering storm, rocking on its foundations. What kind of fucking idiot builds a house on a cliff? Who does that? Someone with a very extravagant death wish. Probably got it in the end, just not the way they planned. Now he and Beth are up here and it's just a matter of time before the whole thing goes over.

He should make a fire. Give her that extra red light, make her look even bloodier. In firelight, love looks black.

Blood. No. Blood does.

Her breast, that cold-peaked little nipple, tracing the pinched areola with his fingertip. Careful. Gentle as thunder. Feel her jerk and moan, clutch his hand, arch into it. Telling him not to stop. Her mouth all bloody, surging close and licking it onto his jaw, his lips, dark smears. Sweet copper. Raised on her knees in front of the fire, legs spread and glistening like ink, cunt raining black onto the flagstones. Pooling in their tiny indentations, their tiny imperfections.

Daryl, please, oh god that's so good it's so good please more god touch me touch me like that like that like that grappling with his other hand and dragging it to her cunt and nudging him between her dripping lips, throwing her head back and laughing and sobbing when he thrusts into her hot, slick mouth.

Clenching around him as the teeth inside her emerge, bite down, bite his fucking finger off.

He heaves up, gasping his throat raw, head jerking wildly around. Not her, no, fucking hell, it's not. Didn't happen. She's not with him. She's there across the room. Her dim outline is rolling up and down, hips lifting and falling and her back straining upward, and he thinks oh fuck, no, no no no no not this, this is worse, please don't do this to me.

But he doesn't remember why.

Her hand isn't between her legs and she's not naked. She's gripping the sheets, tearing at them, her mouth pulled into a grimace that can't be anything but pain. As he stares, all the moisture hissing out of his mouth and running cracks through it like desert mud, she kicks violently, untangles her feet, tangles them even worse. Her teeth are bared, lips dragged into a snarl, and he's screaming at his body to move, Christ, move and fucking help her but his limbs are stupid useless things and he can't help anyone.

She wrenches her mouth open and screams, screams with no voice behind it, nothing but a breath that seems to rip her lungs apart on its way out.

Gorman.

Then he does move. But he never makes it.

He's halfway across the room when she goes abruptly still, and he goes abruptly still with her, skidding to a halt and gaping. She's on her back, splayed, but her face is relaxed, her entire body, just as much as it was before and like nothing even happened.

Then she stirs, flutters her eyelids and yawns, slowly pushes herself up sideways on one hand and turns her head and blinks sleepily at him.

"Daryl?"

"Yeah." Because what the fuck else is he going to say? "Yeah, I'm... I'm here."

"Mm." She stretches and he hears her spine cracking once, twice, and he flings his gaze away when she bends backward and drops her head between her shoulders, neck pulled into a lovely arch.

This is untenable. This can't continue. He doesn't know what happened, doesn't know why, but he can't. This has never happened before, never with anyone - he's never ever thought these things about anyone, and he's trying to take care of her and he looks at her and sees a child and it's so wrong and it's sick and he's sick and all at once he wants to fucking cry.

Stop.

When she looks at him again she's smiling, and it's small but warm. She's happy to see him. God fucking help him, she's happy. If she knew the shit that's chewing its way through his head. "You bring me anythin'?"

Like it's nothing. Like she's asking about anything she intends to consume in a conventional manner. Like she's not even asking about food; like she's a little girl whose father has just returned from a business trip and she's asking about presents from somewhere strange and exotic.

Jesus Christ, would you fucking STOP.

He swallows, and the force of it just about takes his tongue down with it. He manages to cobble together a nod.

"Yeah."

He makes her come into the kitchen, because of the tile. Easier to clean. She gives him an odd look but shrugs and comes willingly enough. Why wouldn't she? He brought her presents. She would probably do pretty much whatever he asked, provided it wasn't too unreasonable, in order to have them.

So he picks them up by their scruffy tails and when he turns around she's there with her knife in her hand, and what's on her face...

He looks away. He looks away when he gives them to her, and when his fingers brush her bitten ones in the transfer a shudder runs through him, so violent it nearly makes his teeth rattle.

But he looks at her when she drops to her knees on the clean white floor and cuts them open, carves away their hides, pulls out the gut with her bare hands and tosses it away into a sad, slick little pile, and sinks her teeth into muscle and fat and sinew, and tears it to shreds.

He watches her kneeling in a spreading pool of gore, flashes of pink flesh in her pink mouth as she eats and blood waterfalling down her chin, streaming past her wrists.

He knows about animals, he knows about anatomy and he knows how to take creatures apart, and he's intimately familiar with the process. But he's never seen squirrels that seem to contain this much blood. Furry bags of it. She burst them on her rocks.

He closes his eyes and the back of her head explodes, and he doesn't feel anything.

Thank God, thank the God who cannot possibly be there if things like this happen, he doesn't feel anything.

Note: Regarding the line: "Never is just another word for until" - I wish to God I could take credit for that but I cannot; it's from the absolutely stunning SGA fic Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose by Synecdochic, which is just... I'm not even in that fandom and never have been and a friend of mine who was sent it to me and I read it and JESUS.

Angry that I don't write that well.

Anyway, credit where credit is so massively due.