Chapter 33: I'll try my best to make a go

It rains all day Monday, heavily. So there isn't a whole lot for him to do. Not at the farm, anyway, though there could be shit he could do there that doesn't involve getting soaked. Regardless, Hershel calls and tells him to stay home.

Given what happened the night before in Hershel's youngest daughter's bedroom, Daryl actually isn't all that upset about doing so. It would be weird. A buffer day is indicated.

Elmer - who is growing colder and colder with every passing week - has nothing for him either, and is starting to make extremely passive aggressive comments about getting the truck back. Which in truth he never used anyway; it just sat out back rusting until he slung it at Daryl, and Daryl has gotten more use out of it in the last few weeks than Elmer probably has in about ten years. But Daryl has a moment of intense disquiet before he realizes:

He can probably just buy the fucking truck.

So he does.

Elmer grudgingly refrains from trying to screw him over. Daryl has gotten pretty good at knowing when someone is trying to screw him over. And Elmer knows Daryl owns a crossbow and a pretty sizable knife.

Things happen sort of quickly after that.

Same day, later in the morning, he leaves a dozing Merle and drives his truck - his, what the fuck - to a tiny apartment building at the less well-to-do end of Main Street, toward where it stops being Main anything. It's pretty crappy - all chipped paint and faded brick and concrete walk with little weeds poking their way through the cracks - but it's better than where they are. He gets the sour-faced woman working in the leasing office to show him a two bedroom place on the top floor - cramped, the walls a dingy white that looks like it hasn't been repainted in at least a decade, but it's reasonably clean. Utilities included, but no furniture, and he's not sure about the rent. Might be a bit high. There are complications.

Can he do month to month? The woman's face gets even more sour, but she doesn't say no.

Anyway, it's a possibility. Maybe.

He doesn't look at anywhere else. It's not a big town. There aren't a huge number of options. But he goes to the coffee shop, gives his Perceptive Barista a tiny smile, and checks out the listings again over a cup of perfectly almost-scalding coffee.

Checks them out and turns his face to the window - rain hammering on it, swept under the awning by gusts of wind - and thinks, eyes closed, about his own bed. His own fucking bed.

Beth Greene in it.

He shakes his head. That... No. Merle. So probably never that.

But maybe.

There's a secondhand furniture store in town. It's tiny and it doesn't have a huge amount of stuff in stock, but it has some things. He looks at them, at the prices, does some mental calculations. Thinks about the barest essentials of what someone might need to make a place functional.

You don't actually need that much to make a place functional, at least not in the most fundamental sense of the word. You need four walls and a roof, and electricity and indoor plumbing are a nice bonus. He's spent extended periods of time living out of sleeping bags.

This isn't about making a place functional. It's not about that. He wants more than functional.

That's the point.

Later that afternoon he considers driving by the high school again. Just parking on the edge of the lot and sitting there for a little while. And he doesn't exactly feel like it's creepy, but he thinks about trying to explain it to anyone else, what happened and what's going on, and the whole thing falls apart. To literally everyone else he can imagine having this conversation with, he's utterly certain he would come off as a tremendous creep.

Not to her. That's really all that should matter to him.

But he still doesn't do it.

"Looked at this place today."

That night, pizza, shitty beer - the usual, but somehow it tastes better than normal, and Daryl ordered green peppers on his, which he never has before. Last Thursday Annette made this stir fry thing with green peppers - her first attempt at the recipe, and everyone was very congratulatory - and it really had been good. First time Daryl paid attention to something small like that. Something that used to not matter.

He's been eating better the last few weeks. A lot better. He feels stronger. He feels healthy.

He didn't know what that felt like. Had no reference for it. It took him a long time to figure out what was going on.

Merle made a face about the peppers, called him a fuckin' weirdo. Daryl couldn't care less.

So pizza, shitty beer. Lots of thinking. Daryl is still working on being committed to not dancing around this. He's going to be straight with his brother. He's going to just do it and see what happens.

He says it, sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, Swamp People on the TV, and behind him he's pretty sure he feels the temperature of Merle's mood slide down a few notches.

"Yeah?" Neutral. Neutral isn't necessarily good, but it's not necessarily bad, either. It's middle ground. "Where?"

"This place other side'a town." Daryl pauses. Swallow of beer to fill the pause. "Two bedrooms, ain't too bad."

Merle grunts, and again it sounds and feels neutral. Daryl tries to keep hope from sneaking in at his edges.

"Think we might be able to do it. I gotta see."

"You makin' your mind up after one place?"

Daryl swings his head sharply around before he can stop himself. There's really no playing this cool; Merle's tone is still neutral, even placid, and there's also something very placid in his enormous, messy bite of pizza, sauce all over his fingers and chin, but the question is anything but neutral.

If Merle really didn't care, if Merle didn't even think this was something worth spending a single serious thought on...

What the fuck.

"Ain't a lotta options," he says carefully. "I mean... I could, yeah."

Grunt. Nothing else. Daryl leans back, gaze locked on the TV again, people gleefully wrestling alligators, but he doesn't see it. He's not focusing. A puzzle has been dropped in front of him and he can't stop staring at it, circling it. Looking at it from various angles.

He didn't expect it to fall out of the sky at all.

All right. So he'll look. He was going to anyway, but... Yeah. He'll look.

Tuesday the rain continues, and if anything it's heavier than ever. Daryl leans against the windowsill, window half open, smoking and feeling the impacts of drops misting water onto his forearms, watching it run in rivers down the sides of the street and waterfall into the storm drains. Watching people run with umbrellas, newspapers over their heads, none of it doing much good. It's warm rain, still the kind of storm late summer brings. Late summer, hanging on. Refusing to let go.

He thinks about the catalogue of words he assembled for what rain does. Pounding. Soaking. Hammering. Sheeting when the wind grabs it and flings it sideways.

What was it doing when he picked her up by the side of the road? What was it doing when he saw her coming out of church? What about when he kissed her? What were the words for those times?

He should know. Maybe he should have been paying more attention.

Text late that night. He's almost falling asleep. It's just a single line but it says everything.

thinking about you

That could mean any number of things. But he's pretty sure it means one specific thing. One specific thing going on at exactly this moment. Or about to happen.

Thunder roars outside, lightning lances through the sky, and the whole world snaps into hard illumination. All the shadows on the walls make everything look huge. In the next room, Merle thumps over into another position - Merle never just stirs - and growls something in his sleep.

Daryl texts back.

me too

And he reaches into his shorts and curls a hand around his cock, already hard, and thinks about her.

Wednesday the rain lets up, though the sky still looks extremely threatening. It's a reprieve, but it's not over. The farm is all mud, all puddles. There are actually a few things in the house he can do - there are hinges on the cellar door that need replacing, there's some stuff down there that needs moving around. Small things that anyone could do, but he's here, so that means no one else has to do them, and he's content enough to take that work. It means he gets to be in the house, and he likes the house - bright even with the overcast sky, clean, all its decorations and furnishings clearly fine and worth a fair bit but somehow not in a way that makes him feel resentful.

He used to feel so out of place here. He still does, moving through these rooms - nothing about him in good repair, his hair hanging long around his face, and he hasn't done any form of shaving in a day or so. He doesn't belong. But no one particularly wants him to leave.

On the way out to the shed to get some tools he takes a detour through the living room because he can, because he hasn't really been in there much and he doesn't think anyone will chase him out by now, and he's curious. There's a cabinet in one corner, all glass and dark wood. The cabinet itself looks very old, and so does the crystal inside - ornate wine glasses, a decanter. Some of the glasses are colored, stemmed with what looks like silver. There's a statuette of a dolphin rising out of a sweeping frosted glass wave, caught in a kind of exaltation of motion.

Merle would look at this and think seriously about ways in which he could bust in here in the dead of night, or when people aren't home, and lift the whole collection. It all looks expensive. Extremely. If he could find a fence, which wouldn't be easy around here, but probably doable. Merle has an instinct for that kind of thing.

Daryl just looks at it for a while. How the light through the windows catches all of it, bounces around.

Then he goes out to the shed, comes back, fixes the hinges.

He's finishing up when Beth comes home. It's started raining again, and Annette is refusing to send him back out there without a hot meal - they aren't having anything fancy, just some beef stew she made the other day, bread she baked fresh. Daryl's sure there must be something about Annette that isn't perfect in a very low-key way, but he hasn't yet identified anything. He hangs out in the kitchen with her, mostly because he's not sure where else to go, and she talks to him, mostly about winter, how it was especially bad last year, how this one is projected to be a lot better but who knows. About how Hershel works himself too hard this time of year, and it's tougher since Maggie went off to college, how at least she's finishing up soon but if she does come home after, it probably it won't be for long.

About how it's nice to have Daryl around. How he helps.

The emotions that throw themselves briefly against the walls of Daryl's stomach are numerous and complicated.

After a little while he wanders out again and stands in front of the screen door for a moment - outer door open - listening to the rain drumming on the roof of the wraparound porch and watching it puddle on the boards. Listening to that until he hears the sound of a piano coming from the living room, soft, just under the steady rhythm.

He's heard it before, knows Beth plays - Annette plays too and very well, at least to his untrained ear - and it draws him in. Hershel and Shawn have gone into town on an errand. It's just her in the living room sitting at the old upright piano, her back to him, alone.

He leans in the doorway for a while, feeling himself loosen and open up and tighten all at the same time. Her voice, low and soft and agile, singing something he doesn't recognize.

you're so red in the eyes
either too low or too high
when I met you, you were sick
but you did not know why
I was a pretty poor cure
but my love for you was always sure
the bucket was broken
but the water was pure

tell me I got here at the right time
if I did it's probably the first time
no second guesses or secret signs
tell me I got here at the right time

She doesn't know he's there. He can tell. He doesn't want her to know; yet another thing that might seem creepy to someone else, but there's something so effortlessly lovely about her when she isn't aware of him. It's happened more than once. She never tries to be the way she is, even when he is looking. He remembers the first time he thought about it, when she bought him coffee and they sat in the shop together. He realized there was nothing artificial about her. Nothing fake or pretentious. There might be things she doesn't show, plenty of stuff she keeps to herself; she has her share of secrets, including from him. But she doesn't cover them up with lies.

Maybe she doesn't know what she plans to do with her life, doesn't yet have a plan at all, but she knows herself. Perhaps because she knows how she is, how she can be, when she's pushed to the brink of something overwhelmingly horrible.

He thinks about a world without her and everything in him shuts down, turns away.

After another little while he leaves her, silent.

Friday night.

want to see you. oak tree

He goes.

Note: song is "Here at the Right Time" by Josh Ritter