Chapter 27: I've burned everybody who had a hand to lend

Actually, no: there are several questions and they're all some species of big fucking hassle.

Merle. Merle is a pretty big question, and the question that is Merle brings a bunch of ill-tempered friends. Friends such as where the fuck is Daryl going and why does he need the fucking truck and what the fuck is so interesting at 10:30 on a Saturday night that he can't tell his big brother.

And it's not like Daryl has no excuse. He does. Some bullshit thing for Elmer in another county sent him out on the road on that fateful night when he first ran across the path of a certain capricious little goddess - the benefits of employing someone in an unofficial capacity being that you don't have to keep them in regular business hours - and he muttered something about that being the case this time. But it's not all that convincing for a whole lot of reasons, and he knows it, and maybe he's getting better at saying no to his big brother, but he's still shit at lying to him, and he knows that too.

They both do.

Merle knows something is up. Merle can smell it like a hunting dog, long time off the trail but senses not dulled by anything but time and distance.

So right up until Daryl walks out the door - change of clothes already in the truck, and he can think of a number of perfectly convincing excuses for that much at least - Merle is poking and prodding and being a characteristically outrageous pain in the ass.

Except he's not. He's making a show of it, but he's actually not. It's a front, and behind it...

Behind it, Daryl feels two keen eyes watching him - watching him very, very closely - and he tries to convince himself he's not scared by that.

And tonight is not his night for being convincing.

He is scared, is the thing. In the truck, rattling along under the wheeling constellations of early autumn, he feels it, curling a cold fist into his gut and twisting. He's going where she told him to go, when she told him to go there, and of course there was never anything else he could do, because any thought he had earlier about being able to stop this was a cruel fucking joke, and not least because he lost sight of the difference between can't and don't want to about three hundred miles back.

He's going but he's scared. Because of what he felt. Because of how she was looking at him. Because of how much he wanted her, wanted it, wants it right now with Pisces and Andromeda and Pegasus spinning overhead as witnesses. Because of what she told him to bring, and how now - as never before - he's aware of how possible, how likely it is that if this keeps going, she'll see him. She'll see all of him.

He doesn't know if he can handle that.

No one has ever seen him. Not really.

The radio is blaring something loud and hard and weirdly dreamlike all at once as he sees the tree coming up on the left, a towering spreading thing that seems ageless in the starlight. Starlight spilling everywhere, all the clouds blown away, and her standing under the tree with her pale arm raised, her hair loose around her shoulders.

meet me in outer space
we could spend the night, watch the earth come up

He's so fucking scared. Of her. She's terrifying. Little blond girl with those wide blue doe eyes and that smile like an inverted arch of sunshine, all her flower hues and her gold and silver, leather and beads, and that voice of hers sweet as warm honey right out of the hive, and she's the most frightening thing he's ever seen.

She's going to fuck him up.

He pulls over and she comes trotting to him, pack on her back, and she's already laughing when she hops into the cab and presses close, points into the dark ahead, tells him to drive.

"Where're we goin'?"

She has the window pulled all the way down, her hand making dolphin-arcs through the wind, and when he asks she shoots him an absolutely radiant smile. It's dark but he doesn't need a lot of light to see it. That glow seems almost literal. Stars and the truck's dash do just fine.

They've been driving for over five minutes and it took him that long to work up the courage to ask.

"It's a surprise."

Before they started driving again he lit a cigarette; now he blows smoke out into the breeze and under and over the fear he feels a thread of something a lot more like pure excitement. Which completely belies what he says next.

"Maybe I don't like surprises."

"You liked the last one."

He tosses a sharp look at her and he's met with that same smile, even broader. "The place by the creek," she says. Except he doesn't think that's what she means, or not all she means, and he's pretty sure she expects him to pick up on it.

He was raised on fists but also on mind games, on trying to guess what was the right thing to say or the wrong thing to say or how to get out of being hurt in a specific way if there was any way to do it at all. To this day few things set him off harder than feeling like his head is being fucked with, and this should be pushing all his buttons - but it's not. He's a little irritated, but more than anything he's just bemused by her, so fascinated in spite of and even maybe because of his fear, and it's true that every surprise she's given him so far - and there have been a number - has turned out to be a nice one.

Freaked him out a whole bunch, but other than that.

But it's more. There's something else going on.

He shrugs and takes a deep drag, tips her the smallest ghost of a smile. "Guess that was alright."

"This ain't the same. But I think it's nice. Me'n my friends come here a lot but no one's gonna be here now."

"How d'you know?"

"They're all at a party. One of the guys on the football team, it's his birthday. Or it was on Thursday, party's today."

"You ain't there?"

"No," she says, as if this should be massively obvious and she can't figure out why he would even feel the need to point that out - but there's still a smile lurking under it, equal parts teasing and warm. "I'm here with you." She reaches down and finds the volume dial, turns up the music. "I like this song."

I know I've felt like this before
but now I'm feeling it even more
because it came from you

Daryl has mixed feelings about the vocalist - she's just sort of strange - but he goes with it, because apparently Beth Greene gets what she wants.

And what he wants?

God, he just.

"Here. Down this way." She lays a hand on his forearm and directs him to the left - another turnoff, but not the ruins. They went past the turnoff for the ruins a few minutes back, and though this is another road unpaved by anything but gravel, it's wider and clearer, and obviously used a good bit more. Rather than running into the trees, it cuts straight through open, grassy land and over a small rise ahead until it dips out of sight. It looks almost silver in the starlight.

Okay.

He shoots her a quick glance. "You still ain't gonna tell me."

"Nope." She sits back again, elbow out the window, her head tilted ever so slightly to the side and her eyes closed. Like this he can see the way the cords of her neck and shoulder stand out a little as she extends them, the way her collarbone and her jawline are thrown into sharper relief. The way the breeze picks up strands of her hair and toys with them.

God, he's so scared, and God, he wants her so much, but he knows he could just have this, look at this and nothing more, and that would be fine. He knows it. Has since this all started. Anything she wanted to give him would have always been fine.

Because she's perfect, and even the smallest piece of perfection is still more than enough.

"Seriously, why ain't you there?"

"I told you." She doesn't open her eyes, doesn't lift her head. The smile on her face is almost dreamy. "I'm here with you. What about that's tough to get?"

He grunts at the night. Doesn't respond otherwise. A lot of things about it are almost impossible to get, but at least none of them are new.

"Why ain't you out drinkin' with your brother?"

He starts, snaps his head around, and she's looking calmly at him as if she just asked the most innocuous question in the world.

"I mean, you could be. You haven't told me anythin' about him, but seems like that would make sense for a Saturday night in a town like this, huh?"

He blinks, rolls a shoulder, and swings his attention back to the road cascading out ahead of them in the headlights' glow. Everything. She just said a huge fucking mouthful of everything, and she's well aware of it, and it's terrifying.

"Neither of us's where we probably should be, Mr. Dixon," she says softly, and before he can even begin to fumble for a response she points to the left bend in the fork they've come to.

The left bend falls down a short way toward a scatter of reflected starlight - water. The right bend continues on up a low ridge to a dim structure still pretty far distant, almost invisible except for its darker outline against a lighter sky and the couple of tiny lights in what he assumes are windows.

"He's a rancher. Lets kids use this part of his land, if we don't trash it up. Leave it like we found it. He's a good guy." She nods to the left again and bites at a knuckle. "Down there."

He already knows where they're going. Really he knew as soon as he read the text. It's just too small to be properly called a lake and just too large to be properly called a pond, rimmed on one end by nodding cattails in which frogs sing, surrounded by trees - thick-trunked and old, a few gnarled. A couple sweep their boughs over the water and someone has tied a rope swing to one of these; even in the dimness, when they climb out of the truck, Daryl can see that it's frayed, old. Been here for a while. How many kids have spent how many summers here? How many childhoods went into this water and came out again, dripping and laughing and just a little bit older and a little bit less pure, like baptism in reverse?

He stands there by the truck and looks at it, knows what it is and why she's brought him here, and two strong hands grab him like a wet towel and twist him in the middle.

He can't do this.

She moves past him, heading down to the water with her pack - full, he's sure, of towels and a change of clothes. She glances back and flashes him a smile-

And stops, that smile freezing, because he has always been shit at hiding what he feels and even with only starlight to be seen by, it must be absolutely clear.

"Daryl? What's wrong?"

What's wrong?

What's wrong is that he knows that if he went along with this, bit down on every part of himself and gritted every single tooth, she would pull off her shirt and there would be that flowery ruched bikini top. That top he thought, that evening, about tugging off her shoulders, about slowly removing and revealing the rest of her. The ruching between her breasts under which he wants to explore with his fingers, his mouth. She'll pull off her shirt and then everything else, and while he doesn't for a minute imagine that she's going to be naked or that she'll even necessarily want to do anything - though fuck, who knows at this point - all that skin will be bare. Visible to him. She might let him touch her, put his hands on her. Feel how warm she is, how smooth. How soft. She might like him to do that.

He knows all that might happen.

And he also knows that she's a fair-minded girl, tit for tat, and if she shows him hers...

She's going to want to see something too.

And he can't. He could maybe keep his shirt on, but... No, dead giveaway. Too weird. He can't. She'll see it, she'll see them, and she'll want to know about it because she's curious and because she likes him, and it isn't even that he thinks she wouldn't leave him alone if he made it clear he doesn't want to talk about it. That's not it at all.

Just... Her seeing him. That first question.

What happened to you?

He can't.

He backs up and shakes his head. He can't see Beth's face anymore, not well, but he can hear the questioning lilt in her voice when she speaks.

"Daryl? C'mon, you-" She jerks her head at the water. "I got you a towel, don't worry."

He almost cracks up. Oh, good. A towel. That's everything solved. He can force-feed it to himself as punishment for letting himself get pulled into this when he knew exactly what it was and where it was going.

"Yeah, I don't think so."

"I told you, it's fi-" She cuts herself off with a confused little laugh and he can feel the pressure of her gaze on him, bearing down on him, like the weight of the light of an oncoming train. A completely oblivious and also perfect and totally worth dying for train. "Daryl, what the hell?"

"Stop." Trying to sound just annoyed, just sort of vaguely fed up, but what the hell is when she walks back to him, and stop is when the annoyance starts to slip and real anxiety takes its place. Tight and tense and unhappy. She has to be able to hear it, but she doesn't seem to yet grasp its severity, because instead she just laughs again.

"Don't tell me you're scared of swimmin'."

She lays a hand on the hem of his shirt - no more intimate than any other way she's touched him and in fact way less than most of those touches - and she's barely even tugging, but it shatters something in him and he wrenches himself away from her. The movement wasn't as intense as it felt, he'll think later when he takes some stock of things, but still not good. Still weird.

"Jesus, will you lay the fuck off, girl."

Somewhere in the trees an owl makes an announcement. Otherwise, except for the frogs, it's silent. He stares at her and she stares back at him, and she looks about as smacked as he feels, and it's awful. He feels awful.

Well.

"Daryl," she murmurs, and her voice isn't just confused now but hurt as well. He didn't want to hurt her, he really didn't, but he should have known he wasn't going to be able to avoid it. Because could be he was right before and she was wrong, and he's a piece of shit who ruins everything. Could very well be.

"Lay the fuck off," he snaps again, still standing back, and he thinks of an animal bristling and snarling because it's too stupid to understand what someone is trying to do for it. "Shoulda asked me. Shoulda asked me if I wanted to do this, this is bullshit."

Her face darkens, brows drawing together: hurt and confusion but a number of other things. Worry. A thin edge of her own anger.

"Don't gotta say it like that," she says. Her voice is quiet but there's hardness in it. "You're bein' a jerk, all you had to do was say you didn't wanna. What's the problem?"

"Ain't no problem."

"Yeah, I totally believe that."

"Know what, Greene? Ain't none'a your business anyway. Been pokin' at me from the beginnin', how about you back off in general? Just 'cause you kissed me a couple times, don't make you some kinda fuckin' therapist. That ain't what this is."

"So what is it?"

You said we didn't have to name it. All his stupid anger dissolves for a few terrible seconds and he just wants to release his own confusion, his own hurt - his fear. Wants to go to her, wants her to comfort him, because he's pretty sure she would even if he's been throwing verbal slaps at her for the last few minutes. If she saw that hurt she would reach out to it, even if she's still mad at him.

He thinks she would.

And that makes it worse, and it makes him angrier at himself, so he's angrier at her. Over such a small thing. He knows. Such a small thing, and it's not really small at all.

"Nothin'," he growls, and instantly he knows it was the exact wrong thing to say. The thing the furthest end of the spectrum from right. He didn't mean it the way it's coming off - just meant it as a brush-off, a deflection, meaningless in itself, but he knows how it sounds. His brain and his throat lock up, panicked. He doesn't know how to drag it back and explain.

"Nothin'," she echoes, so soft it's almost inaudible, and she turns on her heel and heads for the truck, not once looking over her shoulder. "Take me home."

He stares after her, the clenched fist in his throat too big and too tight for him to even swallow around it. Stares after her and his chest is that frayed rope swing, tangled into a tight mess and shoved into his ribcage, crowding out his organs.

I'm sorry.

In silence he drives her back to the tree, and in silence she climbs out of the cab, and she doesn't slam the door behind her. The lack of slamming feels extremely pointed. She starts off down the road, walking toward the farm, and she still doesn't look back.

He could still say it. She's still in earshot. She's there with the starlight bathing her, moving through the dark, and she's still beautiful - in her anger she's so beautiful. He could say he's sorry. Try to explain. Try to explain without explaining. It hurts so much.

He drives past her toward town.

Halfway there he stops and cuts the engine, slumps over the wheel. There's no way to say for sure how bad this is, how badly he's fucked up. It's entirely possible that he's fucked up everything. That the next time he sees her he won't get a smile, won't get anything at all, that she won't even look at him. That this was his one chance and he won't get another one.

That he's a piece of shit who ruins everything.

I think you should stick with her. Sounds like she's good for you.

She is. Of course he couldn't let her be that. Of course he wouldn't try.

He goes back to town and goes drinking with Merle, which appears to make Merle feel better.

At least one of them does.

Note: songs are "Stellar" by Incubus and "Dreams" by the Cranberries