Note: Okay, I really need to warn for the stuff coming up, especially in this first bit. Things have been rough so far; this is bad, or at least I think so. I don't want to spoil, but this chapter contains a lot of violence, some sexual fucked-upness of a level above what we've seen so far, and contemplations of some utterly terrible things. There is nothing whatsoever hopeful or happy here. It's relentless misery. SO. :D I will say that this isn't the end. We have at least two more chapters to go.

Chapter 10: a slap back to the face for a sin he can't erase

Eyes open in the gray.

Not dawn yet. The liminal color-period between dark and what dawn eventually becomes. He lies there for a while and stares at the ceiling, feeling himself breathe, feeling the thrum of the blood between his ears, the steady thump of his own heart. He feels things; he doesn't hear them. There's nothing to hear. The house is silent - but it's more than just an ambient absence of sound. It's deeper than that.

There's no sound at all. None. And that gray is all-pervading. There's no color. Everything has been bled out of the world except what his skin can tell him.

Warmth next to him. But emptiness. Absence there too.

The place where she was.

He turns onto his side and looks at it for a while, the depression left by her body on the mattress and the pillow - perfect, complete, as if she didn't get up but was lifted bodily into the air.

It's early even for her. Early for her to be throwing her pretty things down, watching them destroyed.

He lays a hand in the center of the outline she left, feels the warmth soaked into the sheets. She was just here. She can't have been gone for more than a couple of minutes. But he didn't feel her get up. He's been a light sleeper longer than he hasn't, but he didn't feel her leaving him.

He sits up, leans over his bent knees, stares at the silent gray room. The wall of a window, the low, flat clouds outside. The edges of trees, distant ridges. Her bed, empty.

A long, black smear across the floor.

He looks at it, head slightly cocked. Looks at it for a while. It doesn't add up. It wasn't there before. It wasn't there last night when she tried to bleed herself out, when he stuck a needle in her, when he stripped her in front of the fire, when he touched her in a way he had no fucking business touching her no matter what he was intending to do, when he put her to bed and thought about what a piece of shit he is and about how deeply and profoundly he's fucked them both, about how hoping for anything at all right now feels like the worst kind of joke. But maybe it was there later, when she came to him, because it was so dark then and he barely even saw her inches away from him. She was only a faint blur when she fell into his lap and kissed him and begged him to fuck her - because she did. She did that. And he almost gave her what she was asking him for.

Maybe something happened before that. Or after.

He thinks about all of this with cool, blessed detachment. They're facts. There's no point in pretending they aren't. There's no fucking point in pretending anything at all anymore.

So that smear is there, beginning at the foot of his mattress and extending into the gray, swinging around the wall toward the stairs up to the second level, and also the foyer and the front door. It's a trail. Isn't it? Yes, it is.

Something was dragged.

You're a tracker. You can track.

Yes, he can.

He pushes to his feet, and it's easy. He should be sore from fighting with her, and he should be hungover from the wine, and he isn't either of those things. He feels utterly awake, perception a knife-edge, every shadow and every line starkly clear in spite of the desaturation of the world. Because of it, even. Animal-vision.

Predator.

He steps to the side of the smear and slowly - bizarrely slowly, as if he's walking through water rather than air - he begins to follow it.

It's blood. He knows this, and he knows it without having to bend and touch it, smell, taste. It's blood and it's very fresh, still wet and dully shining, and there's a lot of it. But not coming fast, whatever it was. No puddles or pools, no splatters. Just an easy, gradual bleed, little by little as it was pulled along. Pulled by something - or someone - struggling. The trail is uneven. It wobbles, stutters. There were pauses - weariness or pain or some combination of the two. Either the dragger was weak, or the draggee was heavy.

Or, again, both.

He's at the foot of the stairs. Soft clocking of something hard on wood. He pauses, turns; the dim bulbous shape of the hindquarters of a deer moving down the hall and out of sight. Its gait is uneven; so is its sound. It's limping.

That's strange.

But the smear is much more interesting, and it leads through the cavernous foyer and to the front door. So he has to go, of course. There's really nothing else he can do. What, go back to bed? Seriously? Go fix himself an early breakfast, go sit out on the deck and drink some more, go swallow a whole fucking handful of Xanax while he's taking care of that little job? Go stare at his own fucking face in the bathroom mirror and try to figure out if there's any remaining way in which he can even kind of justify his own existence?

Are any of those better options?

But he stops at the door, frowning at its heavy dark wood. It's partially open. Ajar. When is a door not a door?

All the fucking time because nothing is the way it's supposed to be.

Should he have his knife? His bow, the gun? Anything? Should he be at all concerned about this, about what might be on the other side of this door that could be responsible for the trail of blood he's been following? Because he's not, is the thing. He's not concerned in the least. He's merely curious in a dim, flat kind of way.

Behind him, the quietly uneven impact of the hooves of a lame deer swells, passes, fades into the ether.

He steps through the door.

Still gray outside, but brighter, and it's almost possible to make out red in the streaks of blood - a satisfying thing, even the hint of it, after all that grayscale. He feels good about it, purposefully smudging a line of it with his toe and drawing an outward spike - feels good about its clarity, about how easy it is to follow, about how he feels reasonably certain that he's nearing the end-

Then he lifts his head and his gaze together and all the goodness hisses away into nothing and the cold numbness returns, because his mind is trying to protect itself. He knows that. He's extremely cognizant of that fact. Again, no point in pretending.

At the end of the trail, she's there on the ground. Or he's pretty sure it's her. He can't see a whole lot of her, but he can catch glimpses of pale hair gone bone-white in the gray, spilling all around her and clotting in the blood pooling under her. Her arms are spread limp at her sides, her head lolling back, and she's twitching a little - or he thinks she is but it's hard to be positive with the way her body jerks in a rough, stuttering rhythm - in time with the form over her, obscuring her and bathing her in shadow, on top of her and between her spread legs and thrusting roughly into her. Rutting against her. Panting - a grating, inhuman sound, so loud. Billowing into the air like black smoke.

He can't see its face. Dark hair hanging, hiding it. He stands, watching, considering. Wondering. If he should do something. If there's anything he can do. What he would do, if he did.

The thing on her plunges its head down and in, and he shouldn't be able to see gleaming flashes of ruby-garnet teeth but he does, and he sees them sink into her throat and its head rip sideways - the flesh there already torn, already pumping blood in slow wells and in time with everything else. Chunk of skin and meat lengthening into a strip before tearing loose and dangling, swinging.

He finally sees her face as the thing fucking her and feeding on her raises its head and reveals her, her features twisted into a grimace that he can't mistake for anything but deep, pounding pleasure as more blood streams from her nose and mouth, but he only sees that for a second, because the thing turns to look at him, doesn't miss a beat, and of course it's his own face, and of course he's chewing. Of course he's spreading his mouth in a bloody smile.

He got what he wanted.

Eyes open in the gray.

He lies there and stares up at the ceiling, and takes some inventory.

He's not gasping. His heart isn't pounding and he's not shaking. He feels no trace of panic whatsoever. He feels no sense of overwhelming horror, though he knows he should. Any sane person would. But those rules don't apply up here. He left them down there. Maybe he left them in Atlanta, at the first moment this idea was conceived. Now he's seen what he saw and there's no unseeing it, and there's no escaping what he knows.

Warm, empty depression in bed beside him. She's gone. But it's lighter gray outside and in, the liminal morning period almost passed through and the dawn arrived, and he knows she's alive and she's out there on the deck, and when he sits up and sees no bloody smear on the floor he knows it on an even deeper level.

He knows a lot of things now.

He gets up. It's quiet but not silent, and very faintly he can hear the waking calls of birds and the hiss and whisper of trees. When he walks across the floor a couple of boards creak under his bare feet.

He glances behind him and sees a line of bloody footprints. Then he blinks and they aren't there anymore. There is nothing surprising about that. He knows what he knows. He knows what he has to do.

They get warnings.

He goes to the window, goes to the side that faces the deck, and watches her for a little while - awake. No sign of the sedative he pumped her full of, that should still be laying her out until mid-morning at least. Like always, her hair is flying, her loose shirt is clinging tight to her when the wind pushes and tugs at it. He's not at all astonished to see that she's holding The Secret Garden in her hands, and when she lifts herself up on her toes to watch it fall and sends her journal after it, she's smiling. Tiny, but it's there, and it occurs to him that he would still do anything to keep seeing that smile, commit any number of sins, any number of horrific and unforgivable acts, that he's that far gone and he could slide further still. That looking at her now, he sees the graceful line of her throat and he thinks about closing his teeth on the softness at the juncture of it and her delicate shoulder.

He would be careful with her. He would.

He closes his eyes, hand pressed against the glass.

When he does what he has to do, he has no idea how she's going to respond. It doesn't matter. Yesterday he was still pretending, he was still trying to run away from it even as he did what he did to her, but he can't do that anymore. What's inside him. What he sees when he looks at her, what she sees when she looks at him, what they both want. What they might do. She's no longer so mysterious to him. He's gone down to meet her.

So close to her now. Just like he wanted.

He turns away from her and goes to start the day.

He waits until after she's eaten, after she's settled into herself a bit. Waits a couple of hours. Without comment and without either hiding it or making a big deal out of it, he's starting to accumulate things. Pull things together. Preparing. They might have to move fast, or he might have to; he has no way of being certain.

They get warnings. They don't get many. He knows things now, and one of the things he knows is that they're out of them. They're out of time. He gets her out of here, now, or something is going to happen and he won't be able to stop it. He won't be able to stop her. He won't be able to stop himself. She'll find a way.

So will he.

She's sitting on her bed and staring out the window. Outside, the clouds are thickening and lowering, and even looking at them is like smelling rain. It's going to storm and it's going to storm hard, and they're going to be traveling straight into it. Like the whole world is set on keeping them here, or at least making escape difficult.

That idea isn't nearly so ridiculous as once it would have been.

He walks over to her, stands behind her.

"We're leavin'."

She doesn't turn. But she stiffens. He sees it. A twitch and tense of her shoulders, her back, her neck. Her hands were relaxed in her lap; now they're fists. He's not worried, not afraid, but he's tightening too, lowering his center of gravity, ready for her to go at herself or to come at him, because he already knew there was a better than average chance that she would. Why? Fuck knows. Everything he does now apparently has a better than average chance of causing her to attempt to do harm to him or herself or both.

"When?"

Her tone is very even. Very calm. That might or might not be a good thing.

"Soon as I finish gettin' our shit together."

"Can I bring the book?"

"Book's gone. You threw it over the edge."

"Oh," she murmurs. "Right."

And nothing else. Gradually she loosens again.

So he turns away and goes back to packing.

Not much else to pack. Some food - they'll have to travel light but they can forage. He knows quick ways north, which roads are impassable and should be avoided. He can ride for hours upon hours without stopping, without sleep. He'll tie her onto the goddamn bike if he has to.

There's a wonderful degree of freedom in no longer giving a fuck.

But he does give a fuck when he's crouched over his bed, stuffing clothes into his pack, and hot agony explodes into his injured shoulder. Yes, he does care about that.

At first he has no idea what it is. He just knows the pain and he snarls like a hurt animal, starts to whirl, snarls into a yell when a second explosion goes off, bright at the edges of his vision, warm wetness streaming down his back. He throws his weight backward and collides with something that exhales sharply and disappears, and when he finally does turn, arm swinging, she's there and sprawled on the floor, her bloody knife in her hand and her face flushed and twisted with rage, and he can't tell if everything is going gray because he's bleeding too much or if it's just the light itself, all the color gone out of the world, back into his dreams. Everything his dreams. This was all one big fucking lie of a dream.

He never got her back. Never even had the illusion of it. Not when it's all done.

Never will.

He lurches to his feet, looming over her and breathing hard, almost snorting like a bull. His arm is a bar of bright, singing agony, and he's having trouble lifting it, moving it at all; it took the brunt of her stabs and maybe she ripped something in it, probably she did, and she'll take out his other one if she can. He can see it in her wild, mad eyes. She'll take him out.

He knew this moment was coming. That's something else he knew. And he ran out of time, they didn't get out fast enough, so here it is.

"You're leavin' me," she breathes, shoving herself backward on her hands, knuckles white as she grips the knife's handle, lifts it. "You fucker, you're leavin' me. You said you wouldn't."

"Ain't. I ain't leavin'." Jaw clenched, blood hot on his back, feeling his one good hand hooking into claws, and as he advances on her he can see it, the back of her head exploding, and he tastes her blood on his lips. "You're comin' with me."

"I can't. We can't. We can't leave." She makes it to her feet, still backing up, but her eyes are cold blue fire and utterly devoid of fear. "This is the only place we can be."

Thunder. Rumble, then a crack that rips the air apart and light spikes out of the sky, and she lunges just as he does, blade like a shard of lightning as it slices through the air and toward him, and as he collides with her and hurls her back at the same time as he drags her against him, she slashes at his throat and he turns it aside and catches it in his shoulder again, his upper arm, grunts and feels the blade hit bone; she's cutting him to pieces, blood dripping from his fingers, spattering the couch and the glass top of the coffee table as he jerks them around and his arm whips loose through the air. He has her wrist, wrenching and feeling the bones grind, crunch, and her agonized howl means absolutely nothing to him as the knife tumbles from her fingers and clatters across the floor. She barely seems to notice; she's clawing at his cheeks, his eyes, screeching like a cat - that he's leaving her, that he always would, he always does, that she hates him, she'll kill him, and his mind hacks it all into a blur of awful fragments as he twists her arm and throws her what seems like halfway across the room.

He knew he would have to break her. In the end. He was just wrong about how. And why.

Fuck you, she's screaming, thrashing, rolling onto her hands and knees and trying to shove herself to her feet. Fuck you, you're leavin' me, you fuckin' bastard, you lying fuckin' bastard, you son of a bitch, you're leavin'. Hurtling toward the knife, ignoring a wrist that he very possibly just snapped, hand extended for it with her teeth gleaming in another lightning-strike, and he gets to it before she does and kicks it away, spinning it toward the fireplace and well out of her reach.

Blood everywhere. Her cunt was dripping it onto the stones, pumping it out of her when she fucked herself. He spilled it all over her belly and thighs and his hand when he came. She drank his and he drank hers when they fed on each other. It's all blood, always been blood, from the moment the bullet burst her head open and painted his lips with it to this moment now, when she's trying to bleed him dry and he'll take her apart to make her stop. He will. With certainty as dry and lifeless as the hardest desert, he knows he will.

But he can't. He can't give up. He can't, aching with it, hurting so much under his cold fury - he can't, he has to try, and he's reaching for her with his good hand as he comes for her, pleading.

"Beth, stop."

"Fuck you," she hisses again, launches herself past him and toward the kitchen.

And he knows why.

The last of the part of him that resisted the dead ice is swallowed in that moment. He hid it as well as he could, but she found it anyway. Of course. Of course. How long has she known about it? How long did she let him believe she didn't? How long did she leave it there, waiting for this? She's insane but she's crafty, cunning - more perhaps because of her madness - and he should have trusted her about as much as he would trust a snake. A viper. Something that will only strike and bite in the end, because it's simply their nature.

He follows her, ripping his way through the air like the knife itself, trailing blood with more of it stinging in his eyes, feet pounding the floor like the thunder, and as he charges into the pantry she's on her knees, the pack open in front of her and the gun in her hands.

She's turning on him. She doesn't make it. A wine bottle has magically appeared in his grip and it hits the back of her head with a weirdly musical thud, and she drops like she did then. Before. Drops like a sack of bricks.

She falls, and he watches her blood pool beneath her slightly curled fingers.

He can't carry her. So he drags her back into the main room. And at some point he turns and looks behind them at the long, stuttering, gently curving red smear they've left, his blood and hers together, and all he feels is tired.

We get warnings.

We only get so many.

Neither of them is bleeding in a way that appears to be life-threatening. Both of them are bleeding a lot.

Her wrist doesn't seem to actually be broken, at least not badly. Fractured, possibly. Sprained, definitely. Fresh bruises. He checks the back of her head. Her skull seems intact. He notes this with only the most distant interest and drops her onto the sofa, and as she continues to bleed onto its pristine pale fabric in a sluggish ooze, he goes back to the kitchen, retrieves the pack and brings it to her, removes the rope.

It's easy to tie her wrists and ankles, even with one good hand and his teeth. She's like a rag doll.

She's like she was when he lifted her and carried her down five fucking flights of stairs.

He wipes his bloody face and wraps his arm up as best he can. He can move it a little. Just a little. The blood is slowing and he's only moderately dizzy. He sits down in the chair opposite the couch and spreads the remaining doses of sedative out on the coffee table. The pills. The Xanax and Klonopin he picked up in town.

He dry-swallows three Xanax and goes back to his dull staring. At his chemical arsenal. At her, her head lolled back and her mouth slightly open. Outside, the clouds churn and the wind slams against the house. The rain sounds like hail. Could be it is.

There's enough sedative here to kill her. That's an option. There's nothing overwrought about it, nothing melodramatic; it's very practical. It would probably be painless. She might never regain consciousness at all. He could administer that final dose, that honey-colored sleep, and then for himself there's the gun.

It takes him a few minutes of numb meditation to realize that in that scenario, she turns. She gets to. That's how she would see it now. She gets to turn.

Well, yeah. She gets what she wants.

And there's also just the gun. Just that. Very simple; simpler than the drugs and just as painless. He picks it up and studies it; take care of her and then himself, the work of seconds, and then comes the revelation that he's sitting here across from the girl he would have done anything, given anything to get back, and he's genuinely, calmly contemplating the various methods with which he could carry out an effective murder-suicide, and the fact doesn't hit him so much as wash smoothly over and through.

It follows. It just... It feels like he was always headed here.

It doesn't feel like murder-suicide. It doesn't feel that dramatic. It feels like putting a couple of hopelessly sick animals out of their misery. Intensely rational. Entirely merciful. Because he sure as fuck can't take her home now, and he sure as fuck can't go home without her. And he doesn't even know what home is anymore. He never did.

Once, he thought maybe home was her.

He gets up. Walks over to her. He watches himself with dim fascination as he lifts the gun and presses its muzzle against the starburst scar on her forehead. Stays like that for a few moments.

Lowers it and goes back and sits again, and sets the gun down on the coffee table with the rest of his options.

He could, of course, do nothing at all.

That's the one he goes with. It seems easiest. And he's so, so tired.

It's beginning to get dark when she finally stirs.

He watches her, blank. In fact he's not sure if the darkness is due to the time or to thicker cloud. The rain has definitely turned to hail, not large pieces but relentless, rattling against the roof and windows. Monotonously deafening but faded sufficiently into the background to mostly slip free from his attention.

She stirs. Groans, turns her head against the bloodstained back of the sofa. Flutters her eyelids. It could very well be that he's damaged her already damaged brain even further.

Well. Sooner or later he'll know.

A little while longer. Then she lifts her head, groaning again and squeezing her closed eyelids, features twisting with pain. There's something intelligent about that expression, something processing, and when at last she opens her eyes there's even sharper intelligence present in them. Clearer. She might be concussed, might have a plethora of other things very, very wrong with her, but she's still here. She's focused on him. She's focused on him like a bolt flying. He looks back at her, hunched, hands dangling between his knees-

And something in him is cracking open, seams appearing all over its surface and beginning to spread. Something reeking and rotten and awful is spilling out, pus-like. Infected and left to fester for a long, long time.

"Like I'm the one leavin' you," he whispers. "That's fuckin' hilarious. You know that?"

She blinks. Gives no other sign that she heard him at all. It doesn't matter. He doesn't care about a reaction. Doesn't give a fuck, not even remotely. He has no more of them left to give. He's just talking, low and sharp and harsh, syllables like bullets between his clenched teeth, and he's aware of a cold, swelling rage rising from somewhere in his gut, a place he had no idea was even there. Smeared with that pus, stinking, seething.

"You holdin' some kinda grudge? You punishin' me for somethin'? Is that what this is?" Jaw clenched tighter, his teeth grinding. "I tried. I fuckin' tried, don't you dare tell me I didn't fuckin' try. I ran all night for you. All night. Ain't my fault. It-"

She's blinking again. Slowly, owl-like, her face impassive, but those eyes... Just watching him, silent. Taking him in. He hates it, hates looking at it, her fucking face, how she doesn't even care, how she did this, and he hates her, and his lips peel back in something between a snarl and a sneer.

"Don't you fuckin' look at me like that."

Nothing. That hard, flat gaze. Like how for a while she was going away, blanking out - seems like years ago now - except she hasn't gone anywhere, and she understands everything he's saying to her. Every goddamn fucking thing, every spiteful, poisoned word.

He hauls himself to his feet, ignores the muffled shriek of his arm, stalks toward her. To the side. Back. Hectic pacing, glancing at her. One fist only.

"We had you. Y'know?" He releases a sound that isn't even close to a laugh. "We had you. You were right there, and we coulda walked out. Him? The kid? Wasn't worth it. You know what happened to him? Huh?" He stops, bends, inches from her face, and she tilts her head back and stares up at him as he hisses at her. "He didn't even fuckin' live, Beth. He was walker chow. His place all torn up, family dead, then he was dead, and you're gonna tell me you were worth his sorry ass? Kid wasn't good for nothin'."

Now it is a sneer, contempt roiling through the sick pit of his belly, and he doesn't even know who it's directed toward. Could be anyone. Anything. Everything. The whole fucking universe, which consists of this house and him and her, and the storm outside.

Another sharp, thin sound, the bones of laughter, because this is all so horrifically true and he's been waiting to say it for so fucking long. "Fuck, know what? You let him stay there, he'd probably still be alive right now."

He's trying to hurt her. He doesn't care if she's hurt, but he's also trying to hurt her, and he's back in the shack with her, her looking at him like that as he shouted every abusive thing he could think of at her, trying to make her cry, trying to hit her with his words if not with his fists, and she refused to be beaten back and it only threw him into new and hysterical heights of rage.

He shoves away from her, turns, walks a few steps, stops, and there's the needles and the drugs and the gun on the table, thrown into hard relief as lightning stabs into the shoulders of the world and makes it bleed rain.

He could do it. He could end this. He still can.

He whirls, snarling again, pain singing in his head and nausea shaking him, and he's so fucking angry, he could kill her, fucking kill her, because there was no point to any of this, none, it was all for nothing, and he should have crawled into that car with her and curled around her and stayed, and he should have put a knife through her skull just to make sure.

"I tried, and we had you. All you had to do was stay." All you had to do. All I had to do. Grab you, pull you back, and I didn't. I didn't. I knew it was wrong, it was all going wrong, and I could have stopped it, and I didn't. "What the fuck was that? Scissors? Are you fuckin' kiddin' me? What the fuck were you thinkin'? You lookin' to get yourself killed? Good job, right? Great fuckin' plan."

Her face, her beautiful scarred face, tipped up to his, and he lunges at her, centimeters away from her, body following directives of its own, all sourced from that infected wound and all just as mad as she is. He doesn't remember what it feels like to be sane, and now he never will.

"All you had to do was stay, just stay there and keep your fuckin' mouth shut, you stupid fuckin' BITCH."

The world slows. Stops. Grays out. Falls utterly silent. It's him and it's her, and he's towering over her, bent as if he's going to kiss her, teeth bared like he means to bite her lips off, fist pulled back and ready to smash into her face.

He can feel the crunch of her cheekbone shattering. For a split second of that endless frozen moment, he's sure he's done it.

But when everything winds back into motion she's just sitting there, and his fist is still raised, teeth still bared, lightning crashing outside and nearly constant, her skin brilliant and bone white and her eyes shining.

Shining. Overflowing, trickling down that cheek he meant to break.

He crumples. Steps back, almost falls, shakes his head, shakes everything. He feels a sting like a hundred needles in his scalp and realizes he's raked his hand into his hair and he's pulling at it, yanking, releasing it and stumbling again and whimpering before her, and she's still staring at him, crying silently, and he made her do it, made her cry, again, hurt her, and it's all he can do and all he ever does.

He was never going to save her. He can't save anyone.

We don't get to save people anymore.

I'm sorry, he almost whispers, but the words don't come. Nothing comes. He's standing there, left arm hanging useless and his other trembling so hard it might as well be, and it's taking all his last reserves of self control to keep from doubling over, retching, vomiting bile onto the floor.

I'm sorry, and he's useless, he's worthless, everything he touches turns to shit and falls to ruin and everything he tries to do goes down in flames, and I'm sorry, but the worst part is that he's not sure he is.

Not sure he wants to take any of it back.

He closes his eyes. He doesn't know how long. He closes his eyes and he breathes, and gradually the nausea eases, though it doesn't vanish. Gradually the room finds that stillness again, beneath the all-pervasive thrum of the hail, and he stops shaking. His blood cools, slows, begins to form the intricate crystals into which it cast itself hours ago. The rage is a distant wind. It's as useless as he is. There's no point in that either. No point in feeling it, no point in expending the energy.

Might as well let it all go.

He opens his eyes and she's still crying, tears dripping from her chin, her nose, wetting her lips, and her clear gaze is locked on him and it doesn't waver. Not once.

So he goes to her.

He crouches. He lifts his hand, frames the side of her face, pulls her in and tugs her down to meet him, and with exquisite care he wipes her tears away with his thumb, kisses the tracks they've made, kisses her mouth. Traces those scars, each one. Soft. He has to be soft now. He has to be gentle with her.

She's shivering. Hardly at all, but she is; the slightest vibration under her skin, in the core of her muscles. He cups her jaw with his palm and leans his forehead against hers, and he breathes.

She still smells like that soap. It's like water closing over his head.

No. Not the gun. Not the drugs. Not a knife. It could never be those things. It could only ever be one thing, and one thing alone. He carried her, in his first dream here. He carried her in his arms and even if he can't do that now, he still will, somehow; he'll lift her and hold her and carry her one last time.

"We come outta this together," he murmurs, "or I will take us both over the edge. I will. Don't fuckin' think I won't. I got nothin' left to lose."

His knife is on his belt. He draws it and raises it, presses the edge of the blade to her wrist, and cuts the ropes. Does the same to her ankles.

Gets up.

He drops the knife at her feet. She's looking at him again - not crying anymore. He has no idea what he's seeing on her face, in her eyes. It doesn't matter.

It really doesn't.

"You're right," he says softly. "I'm dead. I died when you left me."

He walks away from her. He doesn't look back.