Chapter 8: wired and phoned to a heart of glass

It's Thursday and he still has no idea how he's going to keep them there.

Keep himself there, because that's really what it comes down to, and he's beginning to feel on a very basic level that he hasn't been honest with himself for a long time and it might be time to start.

On the drive back the day before, he didn't go the direct route. He took detours. Drove around for a while and watched the sun go down. The thing is, once he lets go of how he doesn't really like the town and he doesn't like the apartment or the job he's doing or even Merle a lot of the time - he learned a long time ago that there can be a pretty big difference between loving someone and liking them - he does like being out here. He likes the fields. He likes the trees. He likes the light on both - and the light on the gold of the meadow he drove past, birds exploding out of the grass in early evening flocks, breeze rippling everything, and he thought about her hair, how the wind and the light touches it, and for the moment he didn't think about how strange it was to fixate on such a small detail.

Small detail that doesn't feel small.

Still a warm evening, but there's already a softness in the air that foretells autumn. The hard edge of the summer heat is fading. They're falling into the last days of August, on the cusp of a transition, and he hasn't felt change so keenly before. He's been living year after year, almost forty of them, and it's been a long time since he experienced that time as a collection of periods with any delineation. It's all been one big blur.

All kind of one big nothing. A delineation would imply meaning and there just hasn't been a whole lot of that in general.

Being honest. Being honest here, he hasn't been happy for a long time, and in those ruins, sitting next to her in rustling silence, he thinks maybe he was close to that. Reaching for it. For that hour or so, he was free.

Watching the brown wooden posts of a fence blur past on the left until they almost looked like a single solid line, Semisonic drumming through the shitty speaker - were you ever so bright and sweet - he thought about an old monster movie, a shambling blockhead Frankenstein's Monster, little girl with flowers, unafraid, and a rough questioning mumble that was almost funny.

Friend?

He laughed then. He doesn't laugh very much. Wind grabbed him and tugged his hair back and laughing felt like the most natural thing in the world.

He doesn't do friends.

Got back to Merle, muttered an excuse, tried to not seem happy because he would have to explain why, dragged him out, found a biker bar about fifteen miles out of town, played some pool, got sort of drunk but not that drunk because he needed to drive and he needed to keep a handle on the situation, watched Merle try to cheat, watched Merle get into a fight, struggled to care. Felt like an asshole. This is his big brother.

This doesn't feel like his big brother anymore. This feels like a child he's trying to control and can't, and he never wanted to be a parent.

God, anything but that. That would be so horrible.

Home. Infomercials at four am. Passing out. He doesn't sleep anymore.

His last thought before he fell away from the world was that he was starting to slide too, he could feel it, feel himself desperately trying to hang on, looking at Merle and seeing himself, looking at both of them and seeing something so much worse and thank God neither of them has a kid, thank the good fucking Lord...

He's getting scared. He doesn't want this.

He wants out.

Then it's Thursday and he still has no idea how he's going to keep them there.

She shows up a couple of hours before he gets off work, and he's not surprised to see her. Not anymore. She didn't call him, she didn't text, and he wouldn't honestly expect her to. He's pretty sure by now that she shows up without warning him that she's coming because she doesn't want him to spook and run, even internally, and that girl is so worryingly perceptive. He should be scared about that too.

Instead she finds him toward the back, restocking birdseed, and she has two cups from the coffee shop and she holds one out.

"You like black, right?"

He looks at her for a moment, then nods and takes it. Because what else is he going to do?

She leans back against the shelf opposite and sips hers. He can smell the chocolate from where he is. He's always had a pretty good sense of smell - one of the reasons why tracking came easier to him than it did even to Merle, and when his father deigned to be complimentary he called Daryl a little goddamn wolf cub - but it's also pretty strong. Thick chocolate.

He sets the coffee down on the shelf next to him and goes back to the birdseed.

"I've hardly ever been in here. It smells."

"Yeah, 's the fertilizer."

"You ever get sick of it?"

He rolls a shoulder, hefts a bag. "After a while you don't notice."

"I think I'd keep noticing." She pauses. "It's different from the farm. Y'know? We use manure fresh from the source. Not just, but." Smile in her voice. "This smells like chemicals."

He wouldn't argue with that, so he doesn't. And now that she's pointed it out he's noticing it again.

"I had a really good time yesterday."

He glances back at her, sees her still smiling at him over the rim of her cup, and he feels something a little bit desperate clutch at his middle. Good thing. He's pretty sure there are parts of this he doesn't understand, but he doesn't need to understand them to understand that this is a good thing and it's reminding him what being happy feels like, and he doesn't want to leave it, and it's unfair to be made to feel like he has to. Like he has no choice.

"We didn't do nothin'."

"Yeah, we did," she says gently. "You know that, c'mon. You don't have to do somethin' big to do it. You can do somethin' just doin' nothin' much at all." She pauses again, and when she next speaks she sounds thoughtful. "I dunno if that makes a lot of sense."

He grunts. "Don't make no goddamn sense at all."

"You're in a mood."

He shoots her a look. Clutch. God, this is so unfair. "So what?"

"Why?"

One minute she feels like she's somehow even older than he is, and the next she's asking questions like a pesky little kid and she won't quit. It's exasperating, but it should be more exasperating than it is. "Nothin'."

"Don't nothin' me. It's somethin'."

"You wanna let up, Greene?"

"No," she says simply, and there's a kind of forceful chipperness in the word, and he thinks again about how this is a Daddy's Girl who doesn't seem to be all that spoiled but who has learned that she doesn't have to take no for an answer, and she hasn't made a habit of doing so. "I brought you coffee, don't be a jerk."

"Didn't ask you to."

"You still shouldn't be a jerk. Cut it out." He feels her foot connect lightly with his calf. "Drink it, it's gonna get cold."

He almost tells her no, almost tells her to just fuck off, because he is in a mood, has been since she came in, and it's not because he wasn't happy to see her.

It's because he was.

He leans his hands against the shelf for a moment and just looks at her. She looks back, and she's wearing the expression of someone who does indeed possess full confidence in the prospect of getting exactly what they want if they just push enough.

So he sighs and takes the coffee and turns around to face her, leans back again. If Elmer makes a thing out of it he's on a break, and the truth is that he's beginning to get the feeling that Elmer is kind of afraid of him and wouldn't mind seeing the back of him.

Yet another reason he probably won't be here come Saturday.

"What're you doin' this weekend?"

Well. That's awkward. He shrugs. "Why?"

"No reason." And he's mildly pleased to discover - or maybe just to be reminded - that he can read her pretty well too, and he can tell now that she's just the slightest bit nervous about something and she's working up to it. "I mean... Well, you know that coffee shop."

"The one we was just in? One you just came from? No, I got no idea."

She wrinkles her nose at him. "You're bein' a jerk again."

He takes a sip of coffee at her.

"Anyway, they got this open mic night thing on Saturday, I do it sometimes. Thought maybe. Y'know. Maybe you wanna come. If you got nothin' else goin' on." She takes a breath and adds, "It's better than it sounds."

He remembers how she sang. He remembers that he asked her to and she did. He remembers that, and how it was unexpected and it made him feel strange but he didn't hate it. Yet another new thing. Listening to her sing, headlights and the rain, then the moon later. Smell of that tiny hint of her perfume.

He doesn't think it sounds bad at all.

He sighs and looks away. "I'm gonna be gone."

"Oh."

He must be mistaking the disappointment there. He must be. Why the fuck would she care enough to be disappointed? Clearly she doesn't dislike him, maybe she even thinks of him as kind of a weird sort of friend too, but why would she care?

She cocks her head. "How come?"

He's still only looking at her out of the periphery of his vision. He has to answer her, and he doesn't want to say my asshole brother is making me and I don't know how to stop him. So he just says, "Not gonna have this job after that."

"You ain't found nothin' else?"

Of course she isn't going to just let this go. He shrugs yet again.

"Alright." She's quiet for a minute, and when he looks back at her she's staring down at her cup, at her hands, her brow slightly furrowed. She's not looking at him, so he can really take her in without feeling so awkward. Her earrings are different. Tiny silver stars. This time she's wearing a leather wrist cuff in addition to a couple of beaded thongs, little blue glass, chipped here and there. She likes switching them up. Something about how she likes switching those specific things around catches his attention in a very odd way. Odd because it's not that unusual. He imagines. A girl would like switching up her jewelry.

But it still feels like something. He still notices it. Notes it. Files it away.

She lifts her head. "But if you were here, you'd come?"

He has no idea why that's relevant to anything, which means - he supposes - he has no reason not to answer, and do so honestly. "Guess so."

"Alright," she says again, and she pushes away from the shelf. Her brow is still a bit furrowed, and once more he senses that she's Up To Something. Which...

He would very much prefer to not feel anything about that at all.

"I'll be seein' you," she says, and then she's gone before he can think of a response. So he just stands there for a minute or two, watching the space she just occupied, and thinking about the precise phrasing of that.

I'll be seein' you.

It sounded like more than a goodbye. It sounded like a statement of fact.

It sounded, if he's still doing the honesty thing, more than a little like a prophecy.

I'll be seein' you.

He finishes the birdseed, then there's more shit that he mostly sleepwalks his way through, then he gets off work, there's the bar outside town, Merle once again trying to cheat at pool because he just doesn't know when to quit, a narrowly missed fight but hey, a missed one, and on the way home Merle talking in a vague kind of way about how he's looking forward to getting out of here, how they should take off right on Friday night, find someone headed out of town and thumb a lift, and actually now that they have some cash it might be worth seeing if Elmer will part with the piece of shit truck, and God he does miss that bike, fucking impound, that was a crying fucking shame is what it was.

And what the fuck is this on the radio, can Daryl fucking turn this shit off?

today is the greatest day I've ever known
can't live for tomorrow, tomorrow's much too long
I'll burn my eyes out before I get out

I wanted more than life could ever grant me

Daryl isn't overly fond of Billy Corgan's voice. But he cranks it up anyway. Way up.

I'll be seein' you.