afterword (may good hope walk with you through everything)
So.
The first thing I should tell you is that this story wasn't supposed to be nearly this long. When I first had the idea - directly drawn from Bjork's song "Hyperballad" - I thought it might be around 12k words, the length of a shortish novelette. Then I thought it might be around 20k words, the length of a shortish novella. Instead we have something the length of a shortish novel, and I suppose that, given my track record with I'll Be Yours For a Song, I really shouldn't be all that surprised when I vastly underestimate the length of my own stuff.
This got long because it needed to be long, because I wasn't very far in before I realized it had to be much longer than I originally envisioned if I was going to do justice to the subject matter - to the characters, to the themes, to what was actually going on. Because what was going on turned out to be rather complicated.
The story I initially wanted to tell - which in a lot of ways has remained the core and the foundation - was in significant part a response to a lot of the Daryl-helps-Beth-find-herself-again scenarios that have been flying around. There are elements of that idea that I like and there are elements of it that I'm not so fond of, but one of the issues I have with it was articulated only after I started writing, which is that an underlying assumption of a number of rough versions of it doesn't really account for the fact that Daryl is not okay.
Because Daryl is not okay. Finding Beth is probably not going to magically fix him. It shouldn't, anyway, if the story is going to be a true one. The idea that all he needs is her, that if she reappears he'll revert back into the Daryl we last saw in Alone - that's very romantic, it's very sweet, and I've written roughly that very thing more than once, but I don't think it's gonna happen.
I don't think it should happen.
So here Beth is discovered alive, and she's this level of damaged - so damaged that Daryl eventually wonders if she might not be better off dead after all. And Daryl is damaged. He's clinging to a vastly unrealistic idea of how things might happen - he's clinging to that exact scenario. That she's lost and he can guide her home.
And instead he gets lost in the darkness too.
I didn't want to trash that romantic scenario. I didn't want to dismiss it. But I did want to write a response, a kind of Yeah But What About This, that took something almost always conceived as bright and hopeful and joyful in the fandom - Beth's survival and return - and turned it on its head, inverted it, made it into something relentlessly horrible. Something as dark as reasonably possible, while still attempting to remain true to the story and the characters.
And the characters startled me a bit, in particular Daryl.
One thing that surprised me was how angry he was at Beth - which is something I don't think I've seen addressed very much. That he's grief-stricken, that he's devastated, that he's gutted, absolutely. That his world has been shattered, sure. But that he's absolutely furious with her? Not so much.
And you know, I kinda think he would be.
Because think about it. He lost her, and he lost her in the most senseless, stupid way, and there were so many things that went wrong in those thirty seconds, so many horrible decisions and mistakes, and yes, I do believe he would blame himself forever for failing to pull her back when she went for Dawn, but I think he would also blame her. He might hate that he's doing it, he might not even know that he's doing it, but I think he would. Because what she did - assuming nothing else was going on there - was stupid. Let's jettison our issues with the writing for a moment and treat it as something that really happened in canon - because it did - and it was so, so stupid and it made no sense at all. At least to him.
Just as one way to come at it: for those of us who have lost people we care about to suicide, I think that kind of anger is totally understandable. You're grieving for this person, you miss them so much, you have to face a world without them - and you're also so pissed off at them, because they left you. They did that. They made that decision. It doesn't matter how unfair it might be to feel that way - and hell, maybe it's completely fair. Regardless. You're angry.
Daryl is so fucking angry at Beth, and he doesn't even know it. Until he does.
I realized about halfway through writing that scene that he was almost speaking for the some members of the fandom there, and a number of you seem to have felt the same. "Catharsis" is the word I've seen flying around. It definitely felt that way for me.
And then there's the sex.
I imagined this would have an M rating - mostly for violence - and that sexual content would be kept at a minimum if it appeared at all. Then the masturbation scene slithered into my head, and it felt not only appropriate but necessary - a direction in which the story had to go if I was going to explore any of Daryl's deeper and more hidden feelings for Beth in that sense. It was twisted, horrific, surreal and vivid - like a nightmare so intense you're certain upon waking that it was true.
(And in fact if you were uncertain about whether or not it really happened, or how much of it actually did happen if any, you were meant to be. A lot of the more hallucinatory stuff that happens here is intended to be ambiguous. Did that happen? Don't ask me, man. I genuinely don't always know. And it may not matter.)
I almost always write Daryl as being so sexually inexperienced that he doesn't know how to interpret his own feelings, and may in fact not always recognize them as such. My headcanon is that he's not technically a virgin, but has absolutely no real understanding of his own sexuality. This shows up a lot in fic, obviously, in significant part because it's heavily supported by canon. Daryl discovering sex with Beth - in a loving, safe, and joyful way - is wonderful to write, and it's one of the things I most love about the ship. I mean, clearly; easily 70% of I'll Be Yours For a Song is devoted to that.
But.
Take Daryl - sexually inexperienced, and not well-equipped to handle feelings and desires he doesn't fully understand. Throw in extreme levels of mental and emotional trauma centered around this girl, and months of profound depression following what he believed was her death. Throw in the additional trauma of finding her alive and in the state she is. Take him and her and isolate them completely, make him her caregiver and then intensify that into him taking on almost the role of a parent. Have him infantilize her to an alarming degree; he always saw her as an adult before but now he sees her as a child, a child he has to care for - and control. Then, after you've done all of those things, put him in situation after situation in which his latent sexual desire for her begins to bubble to the surface.
There is no. fucking. way that is going to go well. There is no way that's going to be healthy. This unexplored, extremely immature, extremely powerful part of his psyche is waking up, and from the word go it's poisoned and mutilated. And as he becomes more and more unstable, that part gets sicker and sicker and sicker.
Until he's dreaming about himself violating Beth's body in more than one way, and literally consuming her. Until he arguably sexually assaults her by fondling her when she's in no position to consent to anything and he knows it.
And that's when I realized I was almost writing a Yeah But What About This response to the ship itself.
I love Beth and Daryl as a romantic ship. I fucking love it. It's been years since a fictional canon relationship grabbed me this way. It makes me so happy, I adore writing it, and I clearly think the characterization of it by some as unhealthy and gross and predatory is total and utter bullshit. I'll defend the age difference to my last breath. I like the age difference. I won't pretend otherwise. I think it's interesting because of who these two people are, I think it's a fabulous wrinkle in their dynamic, and I like it.
But.
In here, I wrote their relationship in such a way that it almost became what those people say it is. It became deeply unhealthy. It became predatory. The age difference suddenly mattered, and not in a good way.
At one point I mentioned on my Tumblr that to amuse myself I had snuck a teensy weensy very obscure book reference into this thing. No one caught it - as far as I know - and I didn't expect anyone to. It was in chapter five, when Daryl notices that Beth appears to have skinned her knee at some point in the recent past, and it's a nod to Lolita.
This is why, at the end, no sexual relationship proceeds from that point. It can't. That part of him - and her - has become too toxic. As Daryl decides, it needs time to heal, and it might take a very long time. It might never fully heal at all. Regardless, they can't do it now. Not healthily. Not safely.
(Did they? Eventually? I think so. But that part isn't my story. My story is over.)
And that's the nature of the ending as a whole - open, uncertain, but hopeful. When I started this people wanted to know if it would end happily, and as usual I was an asshole and refused to say, even though I knew the ending would fall on a high note, or at least a much higher note than where it started.
One of the reasons why I both play very coy about endings and drop an obnoxious number of hints is that I get a lot of enjoyment out of watching readers try to guess what's going to happen. It's fascinating to get a look at how people are interpreting the flow and logic of the story, and a lot of that is because often those interpretations are different from mine, and I love that. I love seeing my own stuff from a different angle. Here, it was very, very interesting to see how many people predicted an ending that involved one or both characters dying. It was interesting, on this trip into Hell, to see how many people didn't interpret it as a journey down in order to come back up.
Because that's the thing - and if I ever write anything like this again you may take this as precedent for how I operate: I don't believe in hopeless endings. I don't believe in endings mired in despair. Not in my stories, anyway. I think there's a place for those, and in fact I enjoy many of them a lot; as I said, Lars von Trier's film Antichrist ended up influencing this thing incredibly much (right down to borrowing directly from it for the scene where Beth attacks Daryl and accuses him of leaving her) and that film ends on about the darkest note you can imagine. And right now a lot of my original writing is horror/dark fiction. I like writing the dark. I like writing about horrible things.
But I don't like writing cruelty purely for the sake of cruelty. And I don't like writing stories that end in total darkness.
I also don't like endings that tie everything up in a neat bow, where everything is perfect and everything works out and everyone is completely happy. For the most part, stories that end that way can't be true stories. But endings where things might be sort of all right, where there's a little bit of light even in the worst kind of darkness... Those are true endings, because I think most of the time that's how life is.
And I really do believe that at the final end of every story, of all of them, at The End of The Story, love wins.
More than once I've said that Safe Up Here With You is in many ways the dark mirror of I'll Be Yours For a Song. There's discovery, revelation, spiritual sickness, a long internal journey. And there's healing, and that healing happens first and foremost because of love.
It doesn't fix everything - love never does - but it does heal. And ultimately, after everything, this is the reunion of two people who love each other.
So there's that.
If you read this all the way to the end - the story and also this pretentious fucking essay of an afterword - thank you so much. It's always mildly surprising to me when people read anything I write, much less care about it, and I know this has been a particularly rough ride. I hope it ended in a place you're happy with. I hope I did my job and did this story justice. And I hope this isn't the last journey we take together.
-S
6/24/15 - 8/6/15