Chapter 22: lay me on the ground, fly me in the sky

He's a couple miles short of town when it hits him.

Hits isn't an adequate word. It slams into him. He's driving, watching the road, the sky, the last of the sun and the thunderheads ever nearer, thinking dimly about dinner and Merle and from what angle Merle might come at him and that sock full of cash and the apartment listings he wasn't at all looking at and the future he isn't at all thinking about, and always circling back around toward Sunday like one of those clichéd moths edging back toward one of those clichéd flames, and then the world cracks open, just splits right the fuck down the middle, and his foot slams down so hard on the brake that when the truck finally grinds to a halt he smells burning. Burning rubber. Possibly other burning things. Did lightning just strike something? Something nearby? The field? Him? He leans over the wheel and tries to get his breath, fails. His chest feels like two immense hands are curled around it and are attempting to squeeze his lungs out through his nose. He practically kicks open the door and stumbles out onto the asphalt, and when the world rocks sideways he manages to brace himself up against the hood.

The metal is hot enough that it should be hurting him. He doesn't notice. He stands there, head hanging between his shoulders, and breathes. Or he makes a valiant attempt.

There are a number of things you can supposedly make if you fake them long enough; maybe respiration is one of them.

He finally looks up. No lightning. More distant thunder-muttering, but though the sunset is deep crimson and sullen, there's no storm. Not yet. There should be, because he just got done kissing Beth Greene and it seems like there's a thing with that and storms, but the sky right over him is clear. Darkening. Lovely in a deeply weird kind of way. In perfect accordance with the rest of the universe. In perfect fucking harmony.

He straightens up and stands there, staring at the truck like it can explain some of this.

It has a cursed radio, and Beth fucking Greene has kissed him in it three times now, so is the idea that it might start talking really so unreasonable?

His grip on reasonable is the slightest bit shaky.

He turns and leans back against the truck and fumbles for his cigarettes. He's parked in the middle of the damn road, but if anyone comes along and wants to get past him they can just go the fuck around, and if they really want an explanation and they have an hour or so he might even try to give them one, just so - at the end - he can grab them by the front of the shirt and shake them and hiss SO DID THAT HAPPEN OR WHAT

He lights one up, leans his head back and stares up at that weird, lovely sky.

It's not even the kiss. The kiss was... Every kiss with her has been indescribable. Every kiss with her has been like the first kiss ever in the history of the whole practice. A revelation. Small ones and big ones - the first soft one that night in her drive and the harder one in the rain and now, just now, both kinds in very rapid succession - but each one world-altering.

His world. Different every time.

Okay, just by the way, if that's what kissing her is like, can you just imagine-

No. No, he really can't. Not right now, anyway. He has to drive home.

But it's not even about the kiss. Not any of them, them and everything contained within them, everything sweet and hot in her compressed to a single primary point of contact. Stars are that dense, and they make wells in space into which you fall. But it isn't those. It isn't the ones he already orbits.

She said meet me after church, and he doesn't think she would tell him to do that if she just wanted to give him another fun iteration of the Let's Just Be Friends talk. He's very new at this, but somehow he doesn't think telling the much older guy with whose mouth you keep colliding to meet you after church just so you can inform him you only want to be friends again is really a done thing.

He's guessing, but as guesses go he feels pretty okay about it.

It's not about those kisses. It's about how she wants him to meet her after church, and he's about as certain as he can be that she doesn't just want to be friends, so what it's about - what it's really about - is the kisses he's daring to suspect might be coming.

This isn't over. It doesn't feel over. He might be crazy, but he's not kidding himself. Not about this. It doesn't feel over because it's not.

So what the fuck is it?

You can't do this, some irritatingly rational part of him whispers. You can't. Whatever that was, you should have left it down there. Whatever you've got in your stupid fucking head now, let go of it, because that thing you're thinking absolutely cannot happen.

You want to know what's not a done thing?

Man, I don't even know where to start with you.

But it's not one thing. Not just. He breathes smoke at the darkening sky and almost laughs. It's not one thing at all. It's so many things, a universe full of them. More than he ever thought might be possible. He saw a picture once when he was a lot younger - doesn't remember how or where or even exactly what it was but he knows he saw it - which was supposedly a high magnification shot of space. He doesn't know what part of space and it doesn't matter; what matters is that - in that memory which is occasionally unreliable but which never lets go of the stuff it grabs onto - what he at first took for black space full of stars was, upon closer inspection, black space full of galaxies.

Hundreds of galaxies. Thousands of them. Millions.

It blew his fucking mind right out the back of his skull.

He has never told anyone about that picture, because he's never had the chance to tell anyone who would even vaguely get it, but for years he's carried it around with him, like he was saving it for something. For just the right thing. And now he thinks he might know what he was saving it for: To articulate to himself how it feels to know that Beth Greene might - of her own volition and free will and desire - kiss him again.

It feels like he understands how big the world really is.

He stays there for the time it takes to smoke one cigarette and get another one about halfway down to the filter. During that time he doesn't do much thinking. He just lets himself process. By the time he gets back in the truck the last of the daylight is almost gone and he feels calmer. Steadier. Like he can go back to the world and be in it, and at least maintain the appearance of nothing much having changed.

But God, the world is so fucking huge.

How do you come back from that? How do you come back down and walk around and be normal? How the fuck did those guys go to the moon and come back and even function?

He almost wants to pull over just to laugh for a few more minutes.

No, he's not crazy. He's fine.

He drives back into town. It's a Saturday night and the storm - which now seems like it might actually miss them - has put a bit of a spark in the air. It's still warm and muggy but a wind is kicking up, and people are out on Main Street heading to one bar or the other, going to the restaurant, the cafe, and the coffee shop is - of course - doing its open mic night. He drives past crowds of kids grabbing at one last weekend of freedom before classes start up again, older couples walking hand in hand, small clots of what appear to be local farmworkers, and a few solitary people of all ages who don't look like they're going much of anywhere.

Open doors. Music. Talking, laughing. Lights, noise. More noise than usual. Or maybe he can just hear it better.

Beth was right. This is the cusp of something. At some point in the near future everything changes.

Is already changing.

She was scared. So is he. And they're completely different people from completely different worlds, so there's no reason to assume any of this will touch them the same way or change them the same way or that any of this means any more than that she wants to kiss him again and he's going to be sticking around for another few weeks, and at the end of it he'll say goodbye to her and leave and she'll graduate and do whatever she wants and have a great life and he'll never see her again.

Things are changing, sure, but nothing says her changes have much to do with his.

But he's not sure they don't. Because he looks back and he sees her fingerprints all over everything. Looks back and sees all the evidence she's left to mark the exact places she fucked with his life. He looks back and sees all of it starting to come unmoored, to drift. He sees orbits decaying and bodies spinning off into the void.

He looks back and he's not sure he sees much worth holding onto.

Merle is clearly already on his way out when Daryl walks in. Expected; not only has Merle been obviously avoiding conversation but he seems to be taking care to make sure their paths cross as little as possible. Daryl has been wondering exactly what's going on in Merle's head right now. At least some of the time. Maybe not as much as he would once have done.

Frankly - also unsurprisingly - it's starting to matter a bit less.

Merle is in the middle of pulling on a ratty t-shirt when Daryl comes into the bedroom and begins to strip off his. He keeps his back turned away from Merle as he does so. The scars there - the scars on both of them - are just sort of accepted between them as a given, recognized and understood and never spoken about. Daryl isn't even sure what either of them would say. You too, huh? Do you high-five over something like that? Even very ironically?

Almost enough to get a smile out of him, the first time he thought about it. A grim one, but still.

But that also doesn't feel like it matters as much. This is yet another thing which is now, in significant part, habit.

"You comin' out, brother? Was gonna get in a game of cards or two, get some winnin' on." Merle sounds almost cordial. Daryl can't tell if it's because he's nervous or actually in a good mood or what. But he's not overly fond of the feeling that he's the one being placated.

That doesn't raise any good associations.

He isn't. He tosses his shirt on the floor and shakes his head.

Merle turns and peers at him a bit. "Y'alright, man?"

So he must look like something happened to him. Can't be helped. And he doesn't think Merle is going to push him. Not right now.

"'m fine, bro."

"Right, whatever. Look, I'll bring you back a bottle of Jim Beam." Merle hesitates. "Gonna need the truck, though."

Daryl has no objection. He's finding he's distracted enough that it's difficult to summon up any objection to anything much. Maybe Merle isn't in a place to push him, but Daryl thinks he could actually be pushed to some effect. He supposes it's good, then, that things have aligned the way they have.

He's not a total fool, and he's getting worse and worse at lying to himself - losing a skill he thought he would never let slip. It's always been a survival skill and losing it might end up being a problem. At some point this is all going to come out and Merle is going to have himself a great big reaction.

Probably. Until then he can do some placating of his own. Distracting of his own. He's still good at that, anyway.

He digs into the pocket of his jeans and tosses over the car keys. Merle catches them one-handed, gives him a nod.

Daryl pushes past him and goes for the bathroom. "Just try not to come home dead or arrested or nothin'."

"Thanks, Dad."

But even that doesn't penetrate. Not really. It redirects around him like running water around a rock. A warm, soft cloud has gathered over him, the color of the night-glow outside, all that sound and life, and it smells like Beth's hair.

He already knows he's going to allow himself this. He's going to let himself do some more discovering.

It's a little remarkable, he thinks as he turns the shower on and finishes undressing, how when she kissed him he didn't think of all the things he's taken to spinning through his mind when he's alone. He thought about touching her, sure - but just her face. Her hair. Her neck and her shoulders. Her mouth, her lips and the slight roughness of her tongue - and there had been so much heat in that, huge pulses of it rolling up and down his spine - but his mind hadn't wandered any further south. Her mouth had been the center. It had been everything he wanted in those moments. More than enough.

He's kissed women before, of course he has, but those were hard things, clumsy in a way this wasn't, completely different. He had supposed they felt okay; now he's questioning that. His perspective has been flipped over, opened up. He gets kissing in a way he didn't. Or he's beginning to.

So there had really only been her mouth. With her pressed against him like that, bathed in sun, her strong hands on his arms and her cheeks warm against his palms, her tangled hair curling through his fingers, he thinks he might have just fucking collapsed if his decent imagination had drifted anywhere else. But given some removal, a little distance between what happened then and what's happening to him now...

Some things are different. Some things are more approachable, now that he feels like approaching them.

He steps under the spray and twists the tap from warm to hot, tilts his head back and feels the water pound. Thinks of rain. How rain fits into his life now. Rain has a specific place and it is a place, and he feels like she might always be waiting for him there.

She kissed him.

That's something. That's something worth some attention. Because in his mind, in that place he's carved out for the two of them - a poor echo of the way she manipulates time and space to make a place in which they can enclose themselves - she's always the one who has things done to her. She's not passive, and she certainly never resists - God, that would be absolutely horrifying - but she's not the one determining the course of events, the order in which stuff happens. She's not taking control. She's under him, arching and sighing, moaning his name, but she doesn't put her hands on him. She wants it, she whispers to him to keep going, don't stop, God, but that's all.

He pulls her against him and makes her feel him, how hard he is and what she's done to him, and he drags his lips down her throat, licks at her collarbones and the depression between them, tastes the salt on her skin. He circles her nipples with his tongue. He's gotten as far as completely stripping her and slipping a hand between her legs, grazing his fingers over her clit and making her jump and gasp, and that's wonderful, just so fucking great - but it's all him.

And now he understands how wrong that is. Not wrong in the sense of bad or wrong in the sense of holy shit you are really fucked up you creep, because he stopped thinking along those poisonous lines a while ago, but simply wrong in the sense of incorrect.

If - somehow, and he can barely even consider that as a real possibility regardless of what happened or didn't happen today - he ever got that far with her, he's pretty goddamn sure she wouldn't just have things done to her. Even eagerly. She wouldn't just take it.

He has some revising to do.

So he's going to get to work on that.

He leans back against the tile, hissing slightly at the cold, and slides his hand down his body. Of course he's already hard; he's been hard as fucking diamond since he got in here, and he curls his fingers around his cock and lets out a long, shuddering breath.

He's going to have this. Maybe he's not ready to introduce this to himself as more than a hypothetical situation outside this space he's built for himself, but in here he's going to entertain the idea all he wants. Play host. Fix it a drink. Make it comfortable, invite it to stick around for a while.

He usually does this quickly. He doesn't think he's going to do that this time. Because there are all those revisions to make, and he needs to make sure he gets it right.

So he just stands there, feels the weight of his cock, the thickness and the heat and the softness of his own skin - notices himself in a way he really hasn't before. Forever, his body has just been this thing. Meat. A conveyance. An object he rides around in and uses to do stuff. It had to be. It was dangerous to let it be anything more.

But if she touched him - if she touched him like this, and oh fucking God would she really - he's not so sure she would think of him that way.

He holds himself. Strokes once, slowly, and shivers, and thinks about her hand. Standing there in front of him, smooth cool fingers, running them up and down his length. Exploring him. Looking up at him with those wide doe eyes. Maybe smiling. That sweet little smile.

Jesus, the curve of her mouth.

He breathes her name and he strokes himself again.

This is okay. This isn't fucked up. Or if it is, he is so far past giving a shit.

In his mind she's careful with him. In his mind there's even a kind of innocence there, and that might be sort of fucked up, and also probably wrong because she's eighteen and she has to have done some things, maybe everything, but it's there anyway and it's his goddamn fantasy and he lets it be. She's uncertain about how to touch him. Maybe he takes her hand, maybe he gives her some direction. Maybe he shows her what to do.

His hips are already rolling slowly, head back, eyes closed. He can have this. He can give this to himself.

He deserves something nice.

So she's more confident. She's pressing closer, handling him more roughly - maybe pushing him back, maybe almost pinning him. She's smart, she's sharp; if she didn't go into it already knowing everything she needs to know, she'd learn fast. His breath comes a little more strained, a little more shallow. Her lips against his jaw - he thinks she would probably slip her fingers into his hair and pull him down, kiss him again. That sweet gloss on her lips and the taste of her mouth. Maybe just a hint of her teeth. Naked - yes, she can be like that. Breasts against his chest. He can cup them, pass his thumbs over her nipples, feel them harden.

He can have this. It's all right. He can-

He stops, panting. The water isn't cold yet but it's headed there and he cuts it off, fumbling for a towel.

There could, if he wants, be more of this. Considerably more.

He dries himself. It's kind of a half-assed job. He drops the towel on the floor, moves in a bit of a daze into the living room and sinks down onto the couch, cock jutting up and head dark and glistening.

Okay, here's an even better thing: he can place them back in the ruins. Return there. He can do that anytime he wants - how the fuck did he not realize that before? He can put them back there and melt their clothes away, and what the fuck are clothes, anyway? Who had that ridiculous idea? He drops into the grass and she goes with him, on top of him, straddling him with her beautifully strong thighs. They're a fantastically bizarre Adam and Eve in the skeleton of an unidentified past, water and shifting light and the green swaying of trees. Taking hold of her hips, lifting her, but she's already moving how she wants to. Gripping him.

Head dropping back between her shoulders and mouth dropping open and her hair in free golden waves as she guides him into her.

He's aware that his hand is back on his cock, firm and fast, but everything is her and her delightful weight and the sun flowing across her skin as she leans over him, braces her hands on his chest and rolls her hips against him. If she did this he could arch under her, meet what she's doing to him, match it in rhythm and time. She'd ride him. She'd lean backward and prop herself up on his thighs and she'd throw her head back, her breasts standing out small and full and absolutely fucking perfect and begging for his palms.

If. If it happened like this. This is how it might happen.

He would ask her. She would want to be asked. He would ask her to go faster, harder, maybe even beg her; he could buck up against her, hissing impatience and need, and she could laugh and drop a hand between her legs and give herself what she wants, give it all to herself and just bring him along because she feels like it. Go as fast as she wants and as hard as she wants, moaning his name - please let her do that, that would be so amazing - fucking herself to a crescendo of everything and tearing open the world around her, squeezing him inside her and shaking, tensing and releasing and crying out and scaring doves out of the trees, exploding them into the sky in a torrent of wings, and he's coming hot and slick all over his hand and belly, sobbing and snapping his head back so hard he's sure he's pulled a muscle.

He sits there for a minute or two, half slumped, still gripping himself and staring at the ugly drop ceiling. Focusing on a waterstain that looks like a mutant South America. Trying to breathe.

She has a way of making very basic things extremely difficult for him. Especially oxygen. Oxygen appears to be antithetical to thinking about her in any direct way.

Well.

So if it happened - which it probably won't because even if she likes kissing him, the rest of it seems like a bit of a stretch - it might happen like that. Sort of. Maybe. He doesn't think it's totally outside the realm of possibility.

Melting clothes into nothing would be a neat trick.

He sighs and closes his eyes. He's not bad for wanting this. He's not fucked up.

But he's back to being pretty sure he's fucked.

He gets up. Cleans himself off, pulls on a pair of pants and wanders over to the one window in the room. Drags up the blinds and looks down. The glass itself is filthy but not so filthy that he can't see that world outside - so much bigger than he ever believed. Maybe he can't be in her specific corner of it - or he can't stay there, not forever - but this world contains him and her, together. That tether isn't his imagination. It exists. He thought it was just her; now he thinks maybe they wove it between them. She's powerful but he has to take at least some responsibility here.

He might be powerful too. A little. That also is remotely possible.

People passing on the street below. It's still not very late. He didn't lose all that much time in his own head. He feels like a voyeur, looking down at them as they drift through the early night. Like he's standing outside, like the glass is thicker than just glass. A membrane he can't penetrate.

But he could be closer than he was.

Everything is changing. He's changing. He needs to accept the fact that he just spent what he's pretty sure was the better part of fifteen minutes doing something that usually takes him less than five - that's part of those changes, because changes like this don't leave anything untouched.

And that's a rather appropriate turn of phrase.

He leans his head against the windowframe - pitted dark wood all blurry - and closes his eyes again.

He didn't know. He didn't go into this even slightly informed, or even vaguely equipped. If he could go back to the beginning and change it, he wouldn't. If anything he would just try to make it happen faster. Get there quicker. He would meet her at that goddamn party and save her a soaking, even if she was and is so beautiful when she's wet. Crank up the heater and beg her to sing for him. Drive her through the night and, if she was amenable, carry her past the farm and to wherever she felt like going.

Do anything for her. Anything.

Oh, girl.

It's not going to rain tomorrow. He's positive.

That's a change too.