Chapter 9: no one put me in this hell, I lit a fire underneath myself

But by morning all his hope has dried up.

He watches Merle slip into unconsciousness around three. Around four, when he's pretty sure he's stone cold sober, he gets up off the couch and leaves the TV flickering and silent, walks down the rickety iron stairs on the side of the building - gripping to cracked and chipped brick and it shakes and every time he goes up or down it he half expects it to fall - and goes around the side, gets in the truck, pulls out onto Main Street and heads out of town.

The moon is still up, though it's sinking. It's cool, quiet, that kind of odd, almost supernatural stillness that comes only in the small hours. He drives up the long straight road and past the farm, and he doesn't slow. Doesn't at all. Doesn't look up the drive at the farmhouse, at the side where he knows her room is. Doesn't look for a light.

There certainly isn't a moment of total, wonderful madness where he imagines pulling over and getting out, walking up the long drive in the moonlight, up to the trellis, climbing up, tapping on her window. He definitely, definitely doesn't think about that for one single second.

So much for honesty.

He heads past and further up, to the place where the woods start to crowd in. He doesn't have to search for the service road turnoff. Take him somewhere once and he'll find his way back there every time. He bumps along over the dips and the gravel and the places where the gravel turns to dirt and then to mud - still mud, even now, because the ground was saturated and it'll take days of hard sun to fully dry it out - and he watches the moon-dapple through the trees, fluttering like moths across his face and his eyelids. The meadow he turns away from looks like white witch-hair. The trees darken and deepen, and finally he gets out and walks down the long, steep hill, sliding just a bit here and there.

The water is lower but still high. Its sound and its reflected, refracted light collect him and carry him down to the ruins.

He moves slowly through them, his eyes half closed, letting their shadows and half-perceived shapes and colorless stone drift over him. All their crumbles and fallings. By now he feels like he's dreaming, is half sure he is. Like that night was a dream, so unreal the next day. Like finding her like that, such a chance and so improbable, her voice and the feeling that she was giving him something, spinning it out of the air and herself. Her lips and her wet hair under his fingers, the way she smelled, the sweet taste of the lip gloss she left on his mouth.

He stops in the main room where he stopped before and touched the stone and she smiled at him, and he clenches his fists and he wants to scream, but something won't let him. This is a quiet place. A still place. This is her place. Maybe he shouldn't even be here without her.

Maybe he doesn't have permission.

He bites at his lower lip and keeps moving.

Out into the wide lawn, which the moon has turned into a grassy pool of light. Her standing in the center of it, swinging her arms, grinning at him and at everything. Isn't this great?

Yeah, it really is.

There isn't a single place in him that doesn't hurt, and in a way he doesn't understand and doesn't know what to do with.

The deer track is just as clear to him now as it was during the day and he follows it all the way down to the bank, to the little clearing, and he stands with his hands loose at his sides and stares at the marble. It had been pale and mostly clear in the daylight but now it positively glows, and in a way nothing else does. Again he thinks about it as a place of power, maybe something old far beyond anything else here. Magical. Stupid, so fucking stupid, he's not a kid, and even when he was he never believed in that shit, but he stands and looks at the snarling winged wolf, and he lets the belief wash over him.

Just for a moment. Because right now he doesn't have anything else.

It's not real. It's stupid. But he fixes his gaze on the wolf and he lets himself do it. Commit to whatever this is. Not like it matters. By tonight, if Merle has anything to do with it, this place and everything it is will be receding into the distance and gone.

So the great thing about it is that he has nothing left to lose. That's a kind of freedom.

Shitty kind, but still.

Please. Something. Just let something happen. I don't care what, just anything, because I'm not ready to do this.

I just got here, I just found it, it's not fair.

Merle, tired. Old. Merle, sober, knowing - Merle like he hardly ever is and like Daryl wishes he would be all of the time, because if he can't have the Merle of his vaguely realized pre-parole-breakage fantasies, this might be the next best realistic thing.

When the fuck was life ever fair, little brother?

Yeah.

He sits down on the bench beside the fountain, lays a hand on the wolf's head. Traces a finger over its wrinkled snout, its eyes, its savage teeth, its outspread wings.

Just you and me, bro.

He looks out at the running water, the rocks shining with wet. Moonset, almost. Dawn oncoming. He feels like a condemned man. That's beyond ridiculous. This is a girl he's actually known for barely a week, even if he saw her before then. This is a girl he still barely knows. She's eighteen at the oldest. He is literally old enough to be her father, and he doesn't understand her, and he doesn't understand what she's doing to him, what she's making him want, and it's not fair that she's making him want it when he has hours left to be in her general vicinity and then he'll probably never see her again. And even if he did.

What exactly did he think would happen if he stayed?

Where the fuck did he think this might be going?

How's that honesty thing working out for you?

"God fuckin' dammit," he whispers, and lets the breeze carry it away across the water to wherever.

And then, because he's out of options - at least options he has the balls to grab for - he goes home to the home that isn't a home and never was and never will be.

Goes home to wait.

He hasn't given notice. Hasn't wanted to. Maybe he was in some kind of denial. No maybe; he was in denial. Okay, we can be honest to that extent: he was in some major fucking denial. Like if he looked the other way and hummed loud enough, cranked up that stupid broken cursed radio, it wouldn't actually happen.

save tonight, and fight the break of dawn
come tomorrow, tomorrow I'll be gone

Hey, Eagle Eye Cherry? You can dive off a fucking bridge is what you can do.

But he's dragging himself downstairs - hasn't slept at all, feels like the shit Merle might scrape off his shoe after he's done scraping Merle off a bar floor - to inform Elmer that he and Merle are moving on and attempt to open negotiations about the truck, when his phone rings and it's another number he doesn't know. Not Merle.

Not Beth.

He's confused. But it's just as he's hitting the little green phone button that he realizes who it has to be, at least the rough outlines of what's going on, and who's probably behind it.

Girl.

She's fucking with his life. They have reached the point where she's reaching into his life like some kind of capricious little goddess, winding her fingers around it, and fucking with it because she can.

And that right there is a slightly awkward image.

He sits down on the third step from the bottom. "Yeah?"

"Mr. Dixon?" Soft voice but strong, real backbone to it, just the faintest hint of a quaver of age. He knows it by now. Daddy.

"Mr. Greene?" Be polite. Be polite to Daddy, because now you're probably in trouble, like you weren't before.

"Morning, son. Listen, I know you're employed elsewhere at the moment, but-"

Yep. Yep. Fucking hell, girl.

"-I have some work out here I could use your help with. You know the old silo to the side of the barn?"

"Yeah."

"Be honest with you, it's just about ready to come down. I don't need to completely rebuild the thing, but it's almost to that point, and Shawn and me, we're just not up to it by ourselves. We have a neighbor we can call in a favor from, but even then... We could use a extra hand. You seem like decent enough folk, at least so far." Just a little hint of a smile on the other end, small and wry, and he thinks he knows at least a little of where Beth gets it from. "You up for it?"

He closes his eyes and slides a hand into his hair. No. No, he is not. He's not up for it at all. Not any part of it, not in any way.

He was nearly done saying goodbye. This feels almost cruel.

"I dunno, I mean..."

"Give you twelve bucks an hour for your trouble." Another smile. "You're unskilled labor, Mr. Dixon, I wouldn't try negotiating me up from that."

He sits in silence for as long as he thinks he can get away with it. Thinking. Thinking desperately. Wondering why this is something he feels the need to think about at all. This should be a easy answer. This should be a no-brainer. It should not - in any way, shape, or form - be a brainer.

He's just not sure which answer should be the easy one.

Twelve an hour. He's making less than minimum wage here, and the one benefit is that the government isn't taking a cut.

Thinking desperately. Wheels turning so fast they're almost spinning. Stall Merle. Dangle the money in front of him. Talk about being in better shape when they leave town. Way better shape. Take the truck, maybe even something better than that. Still shit, because they'll still have next to nothing and it's not like this job can possibly take all that long, but something, anything, just any bargaining chip he has.

"Mr. Dixon?"

"Yeah. Uh. Yeah, I... How long you think this'd take?"

"All four of us, all working at full reasonable capacity? Five if you count Beth? A week, probably. Maybe two."

Two. Full capacity. Full days, at least for him, if he dumps Elmer. Full days at the farm.

At the farm with her.

"Yeah. I can do that." He pauses, takes a breath. "When you wanna start?"

"Come by later this afternoon and I'll give you a look at what needs doing. My daughter says you get off work at four?"

My daughter says.

GIRL.

"Yeah. Yeah, alright. I'll be there."

"Great. We'll look for you."

Call ends. Little red screen. He looks at the phone for a moment, then flicks it shut and looks at it again. Looks up at the mid-morning sun, clear blue sky - a day like there's never been rain in the entire history of the world. Soft buzz of a sleepy little town still in the process of rousing itself into a Friday slouch.

He thinks about the snarling winged wolf in the moonlight, the stupidity of a child's prayer to a magical world that doesn't and never did exist. There are no fairies, no gods, and there's no magic. He knows better. He knows better than a lot of people ever possibly could, or would want to, because he's prayed so many times to be saved and nothing has ever come through.

No fairies or gods or magic.

But - apparently - there's Beth Greene.