Chapter 37: and the land is too changed to ever change

"And who the fuck is Beth?"

Daryl wants to laugh. Laugh through his split lip - the blood is clotting but the laughter would probably rip it open again, and that seems entirely appropriate.

He wants to laugh, but he can't. So he doesn't.

That question. Who is Beth?

Who indeed.

Daryl returns the paper towels to his mouth, speaks as clearly as he can. "Girl."

"No fuckin' kiddin'." Merle is now leaning his head back as far as it'll go, shirt still against his nose, and he actually sounds kind of amused, and for a few blessed seconds everything else - the shitty apartment, the crystal meth all over the floor, the girl who just walked away and the cold, hollow void-thing in the pit of his stomach - it's all gone, and this was just a stupid brawl, and they're sitting together in the equally stupid aftermath and all the tension will dissipate, and they'll laugh about it like they have a thousand times before. And everything will be all right.

Fantasy. But Daryl has learned all about the power of fantasies.

He closes his eyes and says nothing else. If no one speaks, he can hold onto that fantasy a little longer.

"Think you broke my fuckin' nose, man."

"You had it comin'."

Once more, that sense of nostalgia. He's so far away from real anger that he can't even remember what it felt like. This is his brother. He's a redneck asshole, a loser, not good for very much - perfect match for Daryl himself, if it comes to that - but he's Daryl's brother, and if that doesn't count for anything, what the hell does? "Was already crooked, just straightened it out for you."

"Fuck you."

Daryl lifts the paper towels away again, checks to see how much more blood there is, probes with his tongue. Tough to know just how bad with no mirror, but he doesn't think it's horrific. He doesn't feel any loose teeth. "Fuck you too, bro."

Silence for a while. It's really starting to get dark, and it's raining in through the door, but there's no wind now and nothing to see and anyway Daryl feels too exhausted to get up. Too exhausted to do much of anything.

He closes his eyes and he sees Beth's receding back. Her hair falling over one shoulder, shining in that glaring white light. Hard to look at. She was so hard to look at for so many reasons. She stared him down - this tiny blond girl, she is absolutely terrifying, and he has no idea what's going to happen now, because maybe he hurled words at her at the swimming hole, but he didn't back her up like that. He didn't loom. He didn't use his size and his strength as a weapon - even if it completely failed here. Both times.

Who is Beth?

Beth Greene is indescribable.

"No, I mean it." Merle still sounds very nasal, difficult now and then to understand him - a trip to the hospital might be a good idea, though it's not going to happen. "The fuck is she?"

This moment was coming. It was always coming, all of it; Daryl has fallen back into the sense of overwhelming inevitability that's marked this old story from beginning to now - a sense of falling in and of itself, dropping with ever-increasing speed and no handholds, and in fact he's going so fast now that if he tried to grab hold of anything it would yank his arm right out of its socket.

He could refuse to answer, but he's so tired and he hurts so much, and he just got done spewing bloody, toxic honesty everyfuckingwhere, so more of it doesn't seem like it would make things a whole lot worse.

Maybe he was always afraid of all the wrong things.

"Y'know that farmer I'm workin' for?"

"Yeah?"

"Daughter."

Merle laughs, muffled and pained, and what he says next is dripping with sardonic humor and clearly not really meant, but it's once it's out there it's out there, and it has to be dealt with.

"Why the hell was she here?" Another rough laugh into the balled-up shirt. "You fuckin' her or somethin'?"

He doesn't even have to lie at this point. He could address the first question and leave the second one alone, leave it for the jab it is; he could just talk about the money and it would be true and convincing and it wouldn't actually make this so much worse, regardless of whether or not that's even worth caring about now.

He could do that. It would be the smart move. But he's been inhumanly stupid this whole time, so why break a streak when he has one going?

"Not exactly."

He glances over at Merle, already knowing what he's going to see. It's getting on to evening and the room is crowded with shadows and lines of streaked rain on the window opposite the door, but he can see Merle's face well enough to know what's going on there, and it's all vague shock and slowly dawning realization.

"You're not."

Daryl says nothing.

"Holy shit, tell me you're not."

He almost laughs again. Almost. Closer than before. Because how much bad shit has Merle done? What the fuck is scattered all over the damn floor, crunching uncomfortably under his ass when he shifts his position? But he appears to be at least mildly horrified by this, and whatever his reasons, Daryl doesn't feel like arguing. Merle's reaction might even be appropriate. Fair, under the circumstances. He's dimly aware of the fact that this is an old, nasty internal voice talking to him and he probably shouldn't listen, but there's still the thing about him doing everything stupid he possibly can.

So he just nods and pulls the paper towel away, checking it again; he's re-torn the lip and the darker, older blood is spotted with brighter red.

"The fuck old is she, man? Twelve?"

"She's eighteen."

"You sure? She don't look eighteen. Don't even look sixteen." Merle lets out a harsh, ugly guffaw. "And you're yellin' at me 'bout gettin' locked up."

"Told you, bro." No force at all behind the words. They're flat, lifeless. God, he's so tired. "She's eighteen."

"And you're fuckin' her."

He shakes his head. Third time he's wanted to laugh, and it's the worst by far, because what he's been doing with Beth... He hasn't had his cock inside her, no. And yet somehow that doesn't even seem to matter at this point. Maybe someone else might not consider it sex, maybe Merle might not consider it sex, but everything they've done together - from the first time she felt him pressing hard against her hip, to when she put his fingers on her clit, to when he pulled her into his lap and rutted between her thighs - has been more like fucking than any actual fucking he's ever done in his life.

This, too, is indescribable.

"She wants to wait."

"She wants to wait." Merle repeats the words slowly, as if he's trying very carefully to grasp the full sense in each one. Through all of this he hasn't stopped staring at Daryl, though Daryl can't bring himself to look directly at Merle. Periphery of his vision will do just fine for this. He's gazing at the TV - it's been knocked dangerously close to the edge of the crooked table they originally tossed it onto, and one more good knock and it probably would have toppled onto the floor and added real glass to the littered crystal - at its blank face, which is so much like an enormous staring eye. Him and Merle mirrored in it, sitting side by side, and except for the wreckage around them and the injuries they're sporting, the fight might as well not even have happened.

They've sat together like this so many times before.

"Yeah."

"She wants to wait."

"Yeah."

"Holy Jesus," Merle says softly - almost inaudibly. "Holy fuckin' Jesus. You're in love with her."

For a long moment Daryl says nothing at all. He doesn't move. He barely even thinks. The entirety of his consciousness is locked on those five words, spinning around the inside of his head and throwing themselves against the walls of his skull. They won't sit down and be quiet. They're yelling at him, screaming - her voice and her eyes and her hair, just sitting in the grass with her and listening to her talk, sing, her hand in his under the fucking table as he eats dinner with her family, weeping against her as she holds him under the stars, and how, since this all started, since he saw her on the side of the road and asked her to let him give her that fucking ride home, all he ever really wanted from her was to occupy roughly the same goddamn space.

All he wanted. Everything else, he could live without. But he doesn't know what he's going to do if he can't just be with her again.

You're in love with her.

He smiles and blood rushes into his mouth.

I get it now.

At some point he gets up, reaches down a hand, and after a moment of a little more staring at him Merle takes it and allows himself to be hauled groaningly to his feet. He pulls the shirt away from his face, and it's very dark outside now, but Daryl can see him through the last of the colorless daylight through the open door. He peers at Merle's nose, and the damage doesn't look catastrophic.

Anyway, it wouldn't exactly be the first time Merle's had his nose broken.

"You're a fuckin' asshole," Merle mutters, and Daryl doesn't see any reason to argue with that.

He crosses the room and turns on their one trash-fished-out-of lamp. Merle staggers to the door and closes it.

And they look at each other.

Daryl glances toward the kitchen. There's a mostly full bottle of Jack Daniels in there, of which they're both aware.

"Wanna get wasted?"

Merle grunts an affirmative. Daryl goes to get the bottle.

It doesn't take that long. It's also not intense, not sudden, and though they're still slumped on the floor with an unbelievable amount of crystal meth all around them, Merle isn't high. They're passing the bottle back and forth, and Merle's nose is about twice the size it should be and Daryl's lip feels like it's in pretty much the same condition. The whiskey stung it pretty bad at first, but Daryl's slipped back into that thing from earlier where he mostly doesn't give a fuck, and it's soothing in the most hollow possible way.

At some point Merle takes a huge swallow and then stares down at the bottle for a moment or two, picking at the edge of the label with his thumb.

The rain throws itself obsessively against the window.

"You're outta your fuckin' mind. You know that."

Daryl ducks his head. That, yes, he knows. He's been perfectly cognizant of that from the beginning. Completely out of his mind and never finding his way back, and regardless of how much it hurts now and how much he'd give to be able to get a do-over with today, he still doesn't want to find his way back. He doesn't want to stop feeling this way.

He has to be in love, because he has no idea what else would make him sink into this level of determined masochism. He's never been in love, not that he's ever noticed, but he has at least a vague sense of what it does to people.

Among other things, it kicks them out of their minds. It evicts them from their sanity. In a sane world he wouldn't love this girl. But he's never lived in a sane world.

That possibility was taken from him at birth.

"Guessin' her dad don't know."

Daryl shakes his head.

"Jesus, little brother. Fuckin' hell." Another one of those thin blocked-nose laughs, and Merle hands over the bottle. It's at very low tide. "Fuckin' the farmer's daughter."

"Told you. I ain't." God, he really needs to cut that out, because that's a level of hair-splitting he should know better than to engage in. It's ridiculous. It's comical. He knows what her cunt tastes like, she knows what his come tastes like, he's made her cry his name, she's made him shout hers, they're fucking even if they're not.

Getting drunk isn't helping all that much. Not where that's concerned. He can taste her. He can still taste her. Sense memory strong enough to kick him in the face, split his lip all over again.

"Right, 'cause she wants to wait." Said with a healthy degree of mocking, which means Merle really must be feeling better, but there's not as much as there might be. "This why you've been findin' excuses for us to stick around? It is, ain't it?"

Daryl stares into the depths of the bottle and pushes at the inside of his lip with his tongue. The dull flare of pain is perversely comforting. He nods.

Merle takes the bottle. Tips it up, swallows, grunts and tilts his head back and gazes up at the ceiling. That mutant South America water stain. More of them now, probably. It's a wonder that water isn't running down the walls, soaking the rug. It's a wonder they aren't sitting in a puddle, in addition to a hailstorm of drugs.

"Man, I gotta ask." Merle rolls his head to the side so he can look at Daryl, and when Daryl looks back, this time he can see no real scorn in his brother's eyes. Only that constant weariness, and a faint outside edge of confusion. "Where the fuck you think this is even goin'?"

Daryl's eyes narrow. "Whaddaya mean?"

"I mean, okay, we stick around, you get that fuckin' apartment, you keep workin' for her daddy... What then? She's gotta be in high school. If she even is eighteen. What're you gonna do? You gonna marry this girl or somethin'?"

Daryl looks sharply away. This question... He had avoided it. Or at least he had avoided it directly, buried it under I don't know. Put it away, blocked it off, successfully ignored it in favor of how simply happy he had been. What was he going to do? Worry about that later. Thinking about the big scary future, sure, but he wasn't going to think about that.

About what he could have with her. About anything he could have with her.

He thought about her graduating, going off to college - okay, maybe not right after, but eventually - meeting a nice guy, getting married, getting a house, maybe having a kid or two. A dog; somehow he sees her with a dog. A normal life. A Nice life.

He doesn't fit into that, and he never will, and that's just the truth. He's...

He met her in the summer.

And this is a very old story.

It's like Merle can read his mind. "Maybe you got this thing for her, baby brother, but you really fool enough to think she got it for you? Man, you just this summer fling for her. Girl like that, good girl, for sure she's gonna be into bad boys, saw you and saw somethin' she could dip into and get out of when she's ready to start gettin' serious." Daryl opens his eyes in time to see Merle shaking his head, and there's still no scorn there. With the words, there should be, but there isn't.

It's like when Daryl first came back in. Merle looks tired. A little sad.

"You gotta get outta this, brother. She's gonna hurt you. When all's said and done you got nothin' to give her, and she knows it. Sooner you figure it out, better off you gonna be."

Every word is a slow, gentle punch to the gut. Every word. A blow relentless with truth. Because this is...

Because he has about a thousand dollars to his name. He has a truck which is, any minute, going to fall apart in the middle of the road like a goddamn cartoon. He never made it through as much as one full year of high school and he has no real marketable skills aside from fixing broken machines. He's sitting in the middle of a floor covered with crystal fucking meth, in probably the worst living space Beth has ever personally seen, and she walked in on him beating the shit out of his drunk addict parole-violating brother, and then he pretty much as good as threatened to hurt her.

No. He has nothing to give her. He loves her so much he can't even remotely handle it, but he has nothing whatsoever to give her.

"Say she did run off with you," Merle says softly. He almost sounds back to his uninjured self now, except he doesn't. He never sounds like this. Never so sober, so old. "Say she married your redneck ass. Got a tumble-down shack in the middle of fuckin' nowhere. Pumped out a couple kids." He pauses, and it's horrible. "Say she did that."

You know what that looks like.

Daryl's throat locks up, his organs curl in on themselves, and he has to close his eyes, has to, because some things don't change, some things are reliable and consistent and solid as foundations, in some ways we never grow up and we never stop being children, and he is not going to cry in front of his big brother.

"You gotta let this go." Something smooth and cool nudging his hand; he thinks about Beth reaching for him under the table and it's the bottle. He takes it. "You gotta let this go, baby brother. You listen to me. I'm tryin' to help you. Let her go."

Daryl pulls in a long, shaking breath. It feels like claws raked down his throat, sandpaper, gravel spilling into his lungs. But he makes himself take another one, and another. Another. Beth is antithetical to oxygen. But he's going to make himself breathe.

She was so beautiful walking away.

"Think maybe that already happened."

"Yeah, well." Merle swings his unsteady gaze back to the ceiling. Daryl glances up and sure enough, wet patches are forming. One of them is beginning to look vaguely like Australia. "I said my piece. You just think about it, now."

The silence stretches out. Daryl holds the bottle loosely in his lap, doesn't raise it again. The rain continues - not heavy now but constant. Drumming fingers on the glass. As if the world itself is trying to get him to come outside.

"About before," he murmurs, and at first he's sure Merle has passed out, but he gets a very slight shake of the head.

"Don't."

So he doesn't.

After another little bit, Merle starts to snore.

Daryl listens to that, to the rain, to the thrum of his blood in his swollen lip - which does indeed seem strong enough to be literally audible. He thinks about passing out too, thinks it might be a good idea, might be the smart thing to do... So of course he doesn't. He swings to his feet and picks up the bottle and staggers to the door, jerks it open, and glances back a single time.

Like this, in the light and in the laxness of unconsciousness, Merle's features have smoothed out. The wrinkles don't look quite as deep - the damage time and alcohol and other substances have done to him. He almost looks young again.

The way he looked when he walked away.

Daryl slams the door behind him and carries himself and the whiskey out into the night.

It's not far to the short, dead-end road where he kissed Beth Greene in the rain. Took her and kissed her, and it was such a stupid fucking idea, and she kissed him and then tried to take it back later. Said they should be friends. But those few perfect seconds with her pressed against him, with her mouth...

It's not far and he reaches it in what seems like no time at all, the universe folding to erase the line between those two points. He's still lurching a little, but he's way more sober than he should be, and it might be the rain but he doesn't think so. He's drenched, wet beyond wet, his sodden clothes dragging at him - or he's dragging them - and he scrapes his boots over broken, weedy pavement toward the even weedier wasteland at the end.

It was right here, where it happened. This spot. Or was it? Maybe it was there - is that pothole familiar? That place where it almost appears to have buckled? Like something thrust itself up from underneath. Something trying to escape. Mutilating cracks patched with tar, melting them. Once he heard about a fire in a coal town up north, a fire burning underground for decades. Eating away at the anthracite. Bubbling up under the roads. Chasing everyone away. Devouring everything. Burning and burning and burning.

Changing it. So you can't go back.

It wasn't there, where he kissed her. Or there. He doesn't know where it was, that point of no return.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

He wanders into the weeds and there he stands for a few minutes, face tilted up to the wet night, letting the rain wash into his nose and into the corners of his eyes, into his damaged mouth, running down his cheeks and combing through his hair. Cool. Cold. This is the last of the summer, washing away.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do?

This is wasteland now, but once it was something else, and even under the weeds and the carpet of dirt there's pavement, hard surface, and when Daryl hurls the bottle at the ground the glass shatters and shards fly glittering into the dark like stars falling upward, and all that hardness echoes the sound back to him when he doubles over and screams his voice away.

With your one wild and precious life?