Chapter 15: and I keep me in a vacant lot in the ivy and forget-me-nots

Time is a weird thing.

He knows this. He's always known it. From his earliest memories, it's been fluid. Things bleed into other things, and he remembers stuff and it's out of order. It doesn't match up. Life can take on the most profound dreamlike qualities, and it can slow and it can speed up and it can stop entirely.

Pain helps this process. Pain fucks with time. Pain sticks you in a moment and keeps you there, plays with you. Pain is a cat and it takes you and makes you its little bitch of a mouse. Works you over until you're nice and soft and ready to eat, and if you live you come back with just a little more of you carved away. Aged. Dead and decayed. He knows that when you suffer, you become a walking dead thing. At least for a while.

Time is just so fucking weird.

And it turns out it's not just pain. Not just that at all. Because Beth's hands working through his hair and the taste of her, how she feels pressed so hard against him, her skin and the rain running over them both and still that smell on her, soap and something else so uniquely her, and he knows he's never felt pleasure like this. Never. This is deep pleasure, better than even the best of the few shitty fucks he's had, or the few times he's gotten drunk and actually enjoyed it, or his own goddamn hand - which, like fucking, always feels just a little bit like doing a job.

This is just... God, he feels so good. This feels so good.

This feel so right.

And it's not.

So time melts into the rain. More lightning, more thunder, but it's distant. She does have powers, after all, and she's made a little pocket in the world just for them, and she's keeping them here. He thinks he could stay here forever. No more eating or sleeping. Just this. Drink the rain, feed on her, sleep curled up inside her.

He's out of his mind. Completely. His mind is the puddle under his feet.

Well, that's not exactly news, is it?

But then there's a skip. A jump. He falls out of whatever it is, and she's still pressed against him but her hands have slipped out of his hair and she feels just a little bit tense and her mouth isn't on his anymore.

And she pulls back and it's all gone.

"I should go," she murmurs. She isn't quite looking at him, so he can't see her eyes, can't read her like he'd like to, but he's pretty sure she looks scared. A little. "They'll be..." She glances up at him, hugging herself again. Cold. He wishes he could run his hands over her arms, feel the goosebumps rising. Warm her until they're gone. "They'll be wondering where I got to."

Looking for her. Finding her here, with him. Knowing, just looking at the two of them, what they've been doing.

And then he would never see her again. He knows this too.

But he still thinks God, don't.

And of course she turns and walks away and he's still standing there like an idiot, because he is an idiot, he's probably the biggest idiot in the entire fucking history of the entire fucking world.

He watches her until she's gone around the corner. Church steeple in the rain, white against gray, just visible over the roof of buildings. He's not sure why he focuses on it for a moment, but he does. It's stabbing at the sky. Daring the lightning.

Billy fucking Corgan. I wanted more than life could ever grant me.

He turns around and walks into the wasteland and the weeds, the vines, runs his hands over them. Stops and tilts his head back and lets rain run into his mouth like he's trying to rinse it out, get rid of her before she poisons him.

But when he licks his lips he can still taste her. That same gentle sweetness.

Full circle. Maybe now he'll be able to get out of the loop.

But he really doesn't think so.

So time is fucked up again and the rest of the day is sort of a blur.

He goes back to the apartment. Once again Merle bitches at him about dripping on the floor. The woman is gone but he can still smell cheap wine and sex everywhere. He's fairly certain they were also smoking crystal. There's nothing he can do about that, it's already done - just like a number of things - so he dries himself off and collects the clothes he can carry in a torn trash bag and he heads out into the rain again, which makes the drying-off he did just so utterly pointless, and he goes to the town's one laundromat.

It's empty, which is just fine. He sits next to a pile of year old issues of Newsweek and People and Time and dozes to the sound of the thumping dryer.

Time is fucked up. He's been drifting through a week without much sense of any of it. It feels like it was a lot longer. Once he saw this movie about this kid who creates this other universe when something doesn't go the way it should - Merle thought it was boring and stupid but Daryl honestly kind of liked it even if he didn't get the entire thing - and it feels a little like that. Like the instant he stopped for Beth something split off and now he's lost.

Tangent, that's it. Tangent universe.

Who knows. Could be. Right now anything seems possible.

He takes care of the stuff he needs to do and ignores everything else. And the next day the rain has stopped and the sky is clear, the wind fresh, and because there's really nothing else to do he goes back to the Greene farm and tries in the span of half an hour of driving to get his shit together to the point where he thinks he can see her and not completely lose it again.

It already feels like it didn't really happen.

So maybe do it again and try to make it stick, some treacherous little part of himself whispers, and he clenches his teeth and tightens his hands so hard on the steering wheel that his knuckles stand out white as bone.

Hershel comes out to greet him, still with a cup of coffee, and tells him he's running a little behind this morning, and Daryl should give him about twenty minutes. Coffee? Coffee appears to be another thing, a kind of refrain. A running gag. He smiles and hopes it doesn't look too sickly. Sure, coffee sounds good. Not inside; he'll just have it on the porch, he wants a smoke before they get started. Hershel looks very slightly disapproving about the cigarette and Daryl remembers what Beth said in the truck the night he picked her up - Daddy doesn't drink. Daddy might think ill of more than once substance. Daryl makes a mental note not to smoke around him any more than he can help, and then realizes that it probably shouldn't make any difference.

He shouldn't have any attachment to these people. He shouldn't care too much what they think. Not anymore.

The coffee is good. Of course. He doesn't think these people produce anything that isn't. The mug in which they give it to him is a souvenir thing with a picture of the Blue Ridge Mountains and a quote from John Muir.

The mountains are calling and I must go.

Fuck you, John Muir. You don't know shit.

He sits and smokes. Drinks good coffee. Looks at the truck, the barn, the field beyond, all gold and green pressed against a naked blue sky.

He doesn't want to leave, and he realizes that there are actually a few different reasons for that. This place is pretty, and he hadn't noticed that until this week.

Maybe a lot of places he's been in have been pretty, and he just never noticed it at all.

Hershel comes out with Shawn. Otis will not be joining them today. They get to work, and the sun gets high but not all that hot. Daryl works until his back and arms ache, like if he does enough with his body he'll stop feeling the ghost of hers pressed against him. Like that field. Like that sky.

He doesn't see her. Maybe she's not even there. He hopes she isn't, because the thought that she might be hiding from him, purposefully staying away, makes him feel simultaneously relieved and sick.

He really wishes he could just decide how he feels. Pick a feeling and stick to it. Even if it sucks.

They work until five. Once again he turns down dinner. He's starving - he didn't eat much of the sandwich Mrs. Greene brought him - but he just doesn't think he can. Doesn't think it would be a good idea. Maybe Beth wouldn't be there, maybe it wouldn't be a total nightmare, but he thinks about holding her hand while Daddy addresses the good Lord and thanks him for everything there, and he feels like he would be telling some kind of lie. Just by being there at that blessed table, under that roof.

And freaking out. That would also be going on. He's really, really tired of freaking out. It takes energy, and he doesn't have a whole lot of that now.

God, the way her mouth tasted. Tastes. She still has that mouth. It's still there. It exists.

He's not equipped for any of this.

And of course she's waiting by the truck.

He doesn't stop walking. He just looks at her, and he wonders if he looks as haunted - as hunted - as he feels.

She was avoiding him. He has no way of knowing that but he does.

"Hi."

He nods at her. He's not sure what her face is doing. It looks like it might be doing three or four separate things simultaneously.

"Look, I..." She sighs and pushes her unbound hair back from her face. It's falling all around her shoulders in loose golden waves. The field and the naked sky. "I don't want this to be weird."

Well, it's a little fucking late for that now, girl. He just nods again.

"What happened..." She drops her voice. He doesn't want her to lean in closer to him but she does, head tipped back to look up at him, and he feels big and clumsy and like he might do something stupid and really unfortunate like tip over and fall on her.

"What happened, it can't..." She's having a lot of trouble finishing sentences. Then again, he's having no luck at all getting them started. "I have a boyfriend."

Who almost definitely would not die in a goddamn fire for you. "Yeah." Oh, look, a word. That's good. That's a good start.

"So I can't - we can't do that again. Okay? I don't wanna make you think- I still like you," she says, rushing a little. Like she's hurrying to patch something up. He realizes she's trying to not hurt his feelings too much and that's awful. "I like you a lot, I had fun with you. You think we can, y'know, stay friends?"

Oh my God, she's doing it, she's actually doing the Friend Thing. All of him curls up inside himself and whimpers. This is the worst thing. This is actually the worst thing that has ever happened to him.

It's not. That's not even funny. That's not even remotely true. But for a while she made all those worst things feel like maybe they didn't matter so much, like maybe they were actually in the past instead of riding around in his head all the time, and that was nice. That was a nice thing. He doesn't want to lose that.

And she doesn't owe him a goddamn thing. And if she wants to be friends he wants to be friends with her, because he wants that. He wants to feel that way. Even if it's awful. Even if it hurts. He thinks it would probably still hurt less than having nothing to do with her at all.

Maybe at some point it won't hurt so much.

"Alright," he says, very quietly, and she nods and gives him a tight, awkward little smile and leaves him there.

It's only after she's gone into the house and it's too late to call her back that he wishes he had told her he was sorry. Because he did it. He did it that second time, and she didn't ask him to, and he shouldn't have. It was a mistake. It was just a stupid mistake.

But God, it felt so good.

He gets in the truck, heads down the drive. Town is to the right. To the left, the woods. The creek.

He almost turns that way.

Then he doesn't.