Chapter 18: to leave you there by yourself chained to fate

Things proceed pretty much as normal on Saturday. He comes back out reasonably early - he was moderate with the drinking the night before, beat Merle off him when Merle tried to push, and this time Merle was the one puking his guts up in the ditch - and he barely has a hangover. There are some clouds rolling in and for the latter half of the afternoon they hang around, obscure a lot of the sun, but they don't promise rain and Daryl is glad of the relief. It's getting warm again. Warm, and the air is taking on a thick quality. A storm is coming. Another one. Maybe not tomorrow or the next day, but soon. This late in August, this close to September, the last of the heavy summer storms roll through and through with relatively straightforward regularity. Easy to predict.

Daryl wonders if there's something about storms and Beth Greene. If he should just call in sick or something if it rolls in after Sunday. If it might be safer.

He doesn't stay for dinner. He goes home to an empty apartment - fuck knows where Merle is - and in the living room he stands for a moment, keys still in his hand, and looks at the crossbow in the corner.

He hasn't used it in a while.

He gets it, gets back in the truck, drives about ten miles outside of town and parks in a turnoff where it should be relatively obscured from the road. He takes the bow, takes a breath, heads into the woods.

Back when he was first learning how to do this - learning to hunt, learning to track, learning exactly how to placate his father and how to appease him and how to avoid pushing his buttons and how to dodge and protect his head and vital organs when the first three things failed - he could lose himself in it. In the hyperfocus, in the precision. Almost in a trance state. Almost self-hypnotism. He gets into the woods and feels the weight of the bow in his hand, feels the world, lets it fill his senses, and everything else goes away. What's left is a puzzle spread out all around him - what happened? How long ago? How many, what direction, where did they go and where did they come from? What were they doing? He can survey everything in front of him as a thing to be made sense of, where the stakes are nothing more than knowing what he's looking at.

Catching, killing - these things are ultimately incidental. What really matters is the knowing.

Now he stands just inside where the trees cluster more thickly together, where the remaining low light of the afternoon fades into deeper shadow. Just for a moment he closes his eyes and he pays attention to everything that isn't sight: the smell of decaying leaf litter and damp wood, torn moss, bruised vegetation and dry needles. Brown smells, green smells. Smells have a color and a texture; it took him a while to figure that out and sort it all into something that made sense, but they do. Blood isn't red but instead a sharp, thin orange-yellow, edged like a knife blade. Cut grass is a brilliant yellow just on the edge of green, soft and cool and just a little rough. The warm, musky scent of a live deer is like the hide of a fawn, mottled brown and gold and white. It's curved, round, dense and smooth.

And sounds. A blanket of them. Rustling leaves, in the trees and on the ground - and he knows how to tell the difference between breeze and insects and little animals and larger game. Birds, in all directions and at all distances. Sweet and complicated songs and rougher cries, territorial and otherwise communicative. The rush of cars in the distance. No burble of water but somewhere in here there has to be a stream. A creek. Something. Not the same as the one by Beth's ruins - he's the better part of twenty miles in the wrong direction for that, and he means to be. But there's one here.

And when he opens his eyes: disturbed leaves. Trodden ground. Depressions and places where the dirt has been kicked up.

Something large but moving lightly. Not slowly but not at any great speed. Taking its time. Out for an evening stroll - evening is the time for these creatures. He's chosen just the right when and where.

He starts to move through the trees with the bow a grounding weight in his hands, quiet as he can, eyes everywhere at once. Everything everywhere at once. That hyperfocus. In it, he's perfected. His mind takes on the narrow, sharp simplicity of a predator. It's not happiness, it's not about that... But in the times when he needs it, it's a kind of relief.

This was something he was good at, from early on. He doesn't know if he really has any natural talents, but if he does, he supposes this might be one of them, and he thinks he can take a degree of pleasure in that. In being truly skilled at something. In being able to do it almost effortlessly.

Like her. Like her music. Like the songs in her bones.

But he doesn't want to think about her right now. He came out here to get away from that. He came out here so he could stop.

He's not sure how long he tracks. The track itself is fresh - he guesses he's no more than half an hour behind the thing and in fact he might be a good bit less - and he follows it with no real difficulty. There's no focus on anything outside the present second. Everything that matters is contained within it.

The sun breaks through the clouds and lowers and lowers, long shadows through the trees, orange-red beams that make him think of that blood-scent. That's the only way he can mark the time. Soon he won't be able to see anything. But he can only do what he can do.

It's all he's ever been able to do.

And he's not far behind at all, because he comes on it very suddenly, standing on the crest of a little rise about thirty yards away from him.

He freezes. The wind is right; if it hasn't seen him and hasn't heard him it shouldn't bolt, though it's raising its head and flicking its ears, looking around. Young deer - young doe - still small with white flecks spotting her flanks and a shaft of sun lighting up the slope of her back. A little gawky, but there's clearly strength and speed there, and there's going to be more as she grows. Too young to mate, but she will. December, maybe. January. Before spring.

She will.

Because the bow is in his hands and he thinks she would be an easy kill but he's not going to shoot her. And not just because he's not sure he's set up to deal with a carcass and he hates leaving a kill behind.

So instead he just watches her. Watches her lower her head again, grazing a little at the ground, nosing through the leaf litter. There might be others nearby but he doesn't see them, doesn't hear them, and the track was only of one. Only her.

She's beautiful and he can't kill her. Merle would give him a barrelful of shit for it, his father would probably give him a hard cuff across the head, but they aren't here and he can't do it and he doesn't want to. It was enough to track her, find her, see her like this. See her living. See something in these woods that is, and living this way. Unconsciously. Simply. Not second-guessing, not worrying, not afraid in the way people are afraid. The way he's afraid, almost all the time. None of that. All instinct.

He watches her and he feels an ache deep in the core of him that he can't define. Like he's seeing something forever out of his reach.

He hisses, sharp and sudden. She jerks her head up, ears pricked, and he doesn't have to do it again. White flick of her tail and she's off, bounding through the trees, down the opposite side of the slope and gone.

He stands for a while longer, crossbow held loosely in his hands.

This may or may not have helped. He's not sure.

He goes back to the truck and drives home.

It does indeed rain on Sunday. There might be something about Sundays.

He doesn't go out until later in the afternoon. When he does, he doesn't go near the end of the street where the First Baptist Church is. She's almost certainly long gone, but it still doesn't seem like a good idea.

He goes to the coffee shop and sits for a while, coffee untouched in front of him, staring out the window. For a minute, standing at the counter, he almost ordered hot chocolate. Whipped cream. Little chocolate shavings on the cream.

Despite what Merle says, he isn't having very many good ideas these days.

Then again, he never really did.

Monday is normal. Beth is out with Jimmy and some friends. He doesn't see her at all.

Tuesday is when things get out of hand again.

It's back to being hot, bright, the air not yet heavy but clearly headed in that direction. They take it a little easier, stopping to rest more often, and Shawn talks to him a bit - something he hasn't really done much of before. Shawn seems to be warming to him. The conversation isn't long and it isn't deep, and Shawn does way more of the talking; like Beth is saying she might, he's taking a break, and going into his second year of gap between high school and college. He's not even sure he'll do college. That was for Maggie - she's been traveling but she'll be coming home soon for a week or so before the semester really starts up - and he assumes it'll be for Beth, but he's thinking about going into a trade. Maybe carpentry. Probably more solid money in it. And he likes that kind of work.

Daryl answers when it seems appropriate, makes noises to indicate that he's listening and paying attention, otherwise keeps himself to himself and thinks all over again about how this is all completely alien. This kind of planning. Thinking about the future. Recognizing any future at all beyond the next few days, the next week. How do you even fucking handle that? How do you deal with all that future coming at you? He has no idea. It frankly sounds scary.

Beth saying she wants to know why she's doing something.

That actually makes more sense to him than anything else.

Later in the afternoon. Things just beginning to cool off. Starting to wrap up, and that's when it happens. That's when everything basically goes to hell.

Around noon Beth went out with Jimmy and a couple of girlfriends from another nearby farm, bearing a cooler and some towels. He heard something vague about a swimming hole, didn't pay a whole lot of attention. Now Jimmy's vintage Tahoe pulls back up the drive, the doors open, everyone piles out laughing at something someone's just said-

And Beth slams her fist right into his stomach.

He's not standing that close but he can still see her with bizarre, dreamlike clarity. When she got in the car to head out, she was wearing a tight green tee and fairly short cutoffs, but to his credit he was distracted by something Hershel was saying to him and he barely noticed. Now, however.

She's still wet - not dripping, but there's a moisture-sheen on her shoulders and collarbones and upper arms, probably from her loose, damp hair. Flash of gold heart on her breastbone. He doesn't think she was swimming in those shorts, but somehow now they look tighter. The tee is gone, and in its place is a bikini top, and he sees the blue and gold and green flower pattern and the slightly rough texture of the fabric and the way it's ruched between her breasts, her bare arms, the slim line of her waist and the way her belly is flat and firm with muscle, the way she's strong in a way he knew but never really saw until now.

The way there's basically nothing at all left to his imagination, and he has a decent imagination, and it's perfectly happy to take care of the rest of the job for him.

He can't really breathe.

And he's staring. Someone is going to see him staring. Shit. Look at something else, anything. At the house, the ground. The barn. Look at a tree. A crow is flying across the field to his right; good, look at that. There's always the old reliable standby for awkward people everywhere: pull out your phone and look at it like it's doing something.

He thought he was fucked. He didn't know what fucked was. He had no idea.

She sees him and waves. He waves back. He wonders how long one has to be deprived of oxygen to literally turn blue.

He says goodbye to Hershel and Shawn and drives home with the radio off. He feels mostly numb. He wasn't ready for that. Probably he should have known it would happen eventually, probably that supposedly decent imagination of his should have tipped him off, but he wasn't prepared at all, he wasn't equipped, and in fact this is the first time he can ever remember feeling like that about anyone.

She's nothing but a long, long beaded string of firsts.

And she's half his age.

Merle isn't there when he gets in. The place is dim and silent and stuffy. He opens all the windows and considers ordering a pizza and trying to get drunk; instead he heads to the bathroom and turns on the shower, strips and practically throws himself under the spray.

This is a Problem. This deserves to be a proper noun with a capital P and everything. Before it was a problem, but now it's a Problem. He closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the tile and lets the warm water stream down his back, and despite that warmth he's shivering slightly. Spent adrenaline. Maybe some other chemicals.

He already knows he still isn't going to fucking leave. He's going to leave even less now. There's every possibility that he'll stay here until someone physically removes him.

So.

It gets worse.

He's not even sure how or when it happens. He's not entirely aware. He's been drifting, trying to not think about anything. But that isn't working, because he's returning to the outline of her collarbones, her waist, the way her skin gleamed. He's thinking about that flowered ruching. And then he's thinking about what's under it, about the smooth skin there and the way he's sure without having to even see or touch that she'll have soft, downy blond hair, and that's when he realizes that his hand is between his legs, fingers wrapped around his cock, and he doesn't know when he was last this hard.

Oh no. Oh fucking no.

Oh, yes.

Because it feels good. It feels so good. Just thinking about that, her skin, what it might be like to touch it. Run his fingers over her. Not even necessarily do more than touch her, but just... Do that. Graze his lips against the side of her neck. She might arch under his mouth, just a little, and she might moan, and he remembers how she did moan when he was kissing her, when she was kissing him, when her mouth was working against his. Her tongue. Her body - there hadn't been anything between them then. Just fabric. Just cloth.

Easy to take that stuff off.

His hand is moving faster, grip tightening, heat streaming through him like the water over his back. He should let go. He should really, really cut it out. This isn't helping anything. But his mind is moving faster too and in his mind he's slipping that bikini top off her shoulders, tugging it down, baring her. Seeing her. In his mind she wants it and she's pressing into his hands - she's tipping her head back, her hair falling all around her shoulders, and she's moaning again. Moaning, sliding her fingers into his hair like she did in the rain.

Mouth drifting over her chest, that soft downy hair. The gold heart cool against his lips.

Hand braced on the tile, his breath coming fast and tight, and as it turns out, this is actually the worst thing that's ever happened to him. This, jerking off in the shower like this with every nerve in him a fluttering spark of pleasure and need, and gliding his tongue down the small curve of one of her breasts and closing his mouth over her nipple, sucking at it until it hardens, and then she-

He wrenches his head back and whines, jaw clenched until it hurts, shaking like someone's fucking tasing him, and he doesn't know if he's ever come like this. Coming like a punch to the jaw.

And it feels so good.

So he just stands there for a while - leaning one-handed against the wall, cock softening in his fist - as the water cools.

This is horrible. This is so, so, so horrible.

He knows he still isn't going to leave.

When he first picked her up he was pretty sure he was being a creep, or at least kind of looking like one, but he figured that was better than being a jerk, and anyway she didn't seem to think he was a creep at all in the end. She seemed pretty sure he wasn't.

Beth Greene might be smart. She might be observant. She might be perceptive to the point of discomfort. She might be thoughtful and even wise.

But Beth Greene is wrong.