Chapter 38: what makes the water holy she says is that that it's the closest thing to rain

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

Daryl has no fucking idea what a prayer is.

He thinks he's prayed. He knows he's prayed for deliverance: from pain, from terror, from his own childish understanding of evil - and don't children understand evil with a kind of purity that adults forget? - from loss and grief, from loneliness. He hasn't ever meant to pray those prayers, but he looks back and he can see that he did. Not to any specific God - he lost his faith in that a long time ago if he ever had it at all - but to anyone or anything who might be listening and might be in an answering mood.

There's one specific, intentional prayer he knows he made. One prayer for one half-formed thing, and the lack of articulation didn't matter, because he felt it to his marrow and he meant every word. The spoken ones and the ones he left unspoken.

He said a prayer and the answer was yes. It just hasn't worked out like he expected. Not that he ever expected anything.

This... He probably should have.

He told himself, after the last time, that he shouldn't come down here without her company, without her permission, because this is her place. When she brought him here that first time she was giving him a gift. Not carte blanche. He was probably overstepping in coming here that night when he prayed.

So now he's overstepping again.

The period of time between the flat wet of the wasteland and the road spinning out under him is a blur. This whole night is a series of clearer, sharper moments spaced out between the blurs through which he travels. He doesn't remember walking back to the parking lot, he doesn't remember getting into the truck. He doesn't remember driving out of town. He doesn't remember making this decision. He only knows, when the world snaps into focus, that these things have happened.

It's not the whiskey. He's pretty sure he was sober hours ago.

He parks at the edge of where the slope becomes treacherous, climbs out and starts to stumble downward. It's still raining, hitting the leaves over his head so hard they rattle, sullen thunder muttering constantly miles away. Lightning is nothing more than flickers on the horizon, barely any illumination at all - though with each flicker he can see the broken stone towers, the jagged walls, the exposed brick, nearer and nearer as he descends. This is her place but she's in bed, in that bed he shared with her for barely an hour, the bed in which he finally made her come, and she was kind enough to let him follow her. She's in bed, and he wonders how she's sleeping.

He could have checked. He could have climbed her trellis and tapped on the window, and she could have opened it and sent him crashing onto her lawn with a kick in the face, because who the fuck needs a bottom lip anyway?

He doesn't. He thinks he would be okay without one. It's amazing, the things you can learn to live without.

God, he's so fucking fucked up.

Creeping down this slope with her the first time had been like climbing down into a kind of fairyland - nothing facile and fluttery and stupid but something like what he once imagined real magic to be. Rules rewritten and suspended. A space closed off from everything else. A place that protects itself without any outside assistance - and isn't there no trash here? Isn't there no graffiti? Something is guarding these ruins. Sure, he felt that before, coming here that night he was certain he was going to have to leave town; he felt a kind of power flitting through the shadows and he thought about how maybe it wasn't just a kid reading ghosts into hanging sheets. He thought those things and maybe in the moment he even felt them, even believed them a little... but not like now. It's dark and the storm is still immense even if a lot of its power has bled away, and maybe he's not nearly as sober as he thought, but he still feels it, and it grips his spine with icy fingers. It's not vague. It's not dreamlike, even if everything else is. It's sharp and hard and real. Something is here, watching him.

He might not be welcome.

"Fuck you," he mutters as his boots slide on mud and loose rock. He fumbles for saplings, hanging shrubs, anything he can get his fingers around for purchase. "Fuck you, just-"

He's not even sure who the you is or what the fuck really refers to, but that Something might indeed be listening, because all at once the ground vanishes from under his feet - not slides but actually fucking vanishes, he'd swear to God or whatever - and he goes down on his ass, kicking and grabbing to try to stop his fall, mud working its way up the legs of his jeans and the small of his back, shards of wet rock scraping his palms open. He's yelling something - he has no idea what - rolling over once and then again, and he hits the grass on his side, except it's not grass anymore: it's a fucking waterfall of muddy runoff pouring into a creek swollen into a surging river. Lightning flicker: crumpled, bruised and bleeding and coughing dirty water, he sees brown foam swirling, bubbling into poor excuses for whitecaps and cascading away again.

He lies there, wondering vaguely if anything is broken. When he's pretty sure nothing is, he rolls onto his back and stares up, mud soaking into his hair, his clothes, swirling around his boots. He closes his eyes and lets the rain bathe his face.

After a while he starts to shiver.

At some unknown point later he turns over and shoves himself to his knees and then to his feet, and that clinches it: nothing is broken. He's going to be in thirty two flavors of pain later, and his entire body is probably going to look like he got naked and rolled in purple and blue and green paint, but bones aren't sticking out of anywhere and he can move everything.

So this is all going really well.

He just stands there for a moment, palming water out of his eyes, and looking across the swamp the grass has become toward the arch she led him through.

He fell into this. Literally. Okay, he was headed down the slope anyway, but the last fifteen or twenty feet had been this place's doing, not him. This isn't his fault. He stares up at the stone and he might actually be saying as much. Waving his arms a bit. Belligerent. He's having a miserable enough night; what, does he have to pay an entrance fee here? Is he just being fucked with?

Yeah, maybe really not so sober at all.

Whatever.

This didn't even have to be complicated. It could have just been her. That was all I asked for. Why did any of that other shit have to happen? Just her, just being with her... Everything else could have been left out. Didn't need it. Not really.

If he hadn't gotten all those bonuses, would that mean he wouldn't have to pay as hard now? Would that mean he would get let off lighter?

He was ready to kick Merle's ass over owing people. Here he is, standing in front of a broken stone arch in the pouring rain in the small hours, and he's apparently become very sure that he owes a malevolent winged wolf god a favor. Or three hundred.

Except no, that's all beyond stupid. What happened is he got himself into a thing and it was good for a while but he can't help being what he is, so then what happened happened like it always happens and he ruined everything because that's what he does. There's no wolf god. There's no magic. Just some broken walls, no roof, and a redneck asshole soaked to the skin.

Soaked like she was. That first night.

He lets out a hollow groan and wanders through the doorway.

In the semi-enclosed space beyond, the rain is at once quieter and louder; there's some very small amount of shelter, but the sound of the drops echoes off stone after stone, amplifying itself, compounded by the roaring of the river. It's disorienting, difficult to sort any of it out, impossible to tell exactly where he is in relation to anything, and he stumbles and turns in place and blinks. He can orient himself by memory, and it seems like he can do it here in a way he couldn't out on that dead-end road. That wall right there, the one facing the river, higher than the rest - that's the one he found her leaning against the afternoon he came looking for her. So here, right here where he's standing - that's where he tugged her to her feet and she kissed him. Over there to the left, where the stones have chipped away around one big, smooth one - that's where he laid his hand when she first brought him here, and touching it made it real in a way nothing else had.

That's what touching things does.

So when she touched him, what did that do?

He turns until he finds another doorway that he's ninety percent sure isn't the one he came through and staggers back into the open.

This is a grotesque parody, he's realizing. Slogging along like this, in pain and feeling very sorry for himself and getting angrier all the time because of it - except for being wet, this is just a worse version of exactly what he did before. This is a broken mirror. He can turn here, look back, and see that all he's done is come full circle yet again. Like how he did with her in that first week, six days to fall in love with her like making the whole fucking universe and on the seventh day he kissed her and there was no longer any such thing as rest. This is just a bigger circle. Merle is the biggest - Merle, and then maybe even bigger is that girl and that shack and those two fucking kids. It's all circles. His entire life is circles.

Except circles just go around and around. This is heading downward.

You have nothing to give her.

And you honestly think Merle is the only one who could drag someone down with him?

Honestly?

As he sloshes across the grass he glances at the river again, at how it's sweeping up high over stones and leaning trees, and as he watches - stopping with his mouth slightly open - one of the smaller trees leans, shudders, and tears free from the ground, tumbling into the water with a crash and trailing roots like clutching fingers desperately trying to save itself.

He spends a few seconds staring at the hole in the world where it was.

Then he moves on.

Once, years ago and lost in bottles and bottles of bottom shelf whiskey, he and Merle got into a protracted discussion - and before long a debate - about the nature of the end of the world.

For starters, what did the world mean? What qualified as the world? What were the exact terms under which they were operating? What about end? How do you really know something is over? What are the criteria by which you judge worlds and their endings?

Merle had been impatient with the semantics; he thought they were pointless and wanted to move on to the parts where everyone shot each other and hacked off each other's limbs and stole military-grade weaponry and blew everything up and burned everything down and descended into cannibalism. But Daryl was stuck on the conceptual side of things, and after Merle passed out snoring in the wide back seat of the old Impala they'd stolen, Daryl lay awake in the front seat and nursed the last of the whiskey and thought about worlds and their endings.

And what came to him, there in the dark, was the fact that when people talked about the end of the world, for the most part they weren't talking about an ending, and they certainly weren't talking about a world. In all of their bloody scenarios, things just...

Changed.

Changed a lot, sure, but everything was still recognizable in those end-of-the-world nightmares. People were people. They fought and hated and killed and died and destroyed just like always; they only did it with fewer constraints. They were just as ugly as they always had been. The ugliness was merely a lot more visible.

At the time, Daryl thought that might actually be preferable. At least at the so-called end of the so-called world people might be honest with you.

So, he mused - tasting whiskey and hearing Merle's thunderous snores and drifting into his own internal darkness - if really all they were talking about was change...

Maybe that was what endings were. Just more changes.

Maybe nothing ever really ends at all.

The rain peaks again just before he reaches the bench.

He can see it ahead of him, pale in that lightning flicker like a spirit flitting through the trees. If he's still going with the half-crazed idea of this place possessing some kind of real supernatural power, he can feel it thrumming through him - rainfall against the outer walls of his veins, his cell membranes. Every step he takes the rain comes down heavier and heavier, and to his right the river seems like it's rising higher every second, becoming truly dangerous. Rain like this, people die in it all the time. All kinds of ways, all sort of stupid reasons. Like lurching around half drunk in the woods way too close to a river running far too high.

No: If this place has power, he doesn't think that's going to happen to him. He doesn't think the place will let it. Though Christ, the entire sky is emptying itself onto him, and he grabs onto the slender trunk of a birch tree and feels it bend, and he splits his lip open all over again when he yells Jesus, could you give me some kinda fuckin' BREAK.

But it just rains harder, and it keeps going like that until he stumbles into the clearing where the bench sits, almost slips in the mud again and has to catch himself on yet another birch, and just when light cuts jagged across the sky and throws that snarling winged wolf's head into shadows as big as hallucinations, shadows that he would swear make those wings spread and spread-

It stops.

It doesn't lighten. It doesn't taper off. It just stops.

And it shouldn't be quiet, because there's the river behind him and rain dripping everywhere and running down to the roiling water, and the thunder can't just have completely died like that - but the silence is deafening.

So he just stands in it and he listens.

What happens next shouldn't happen either. It probably doesn't. It's probably not real. No way is it real. He's definitely still drunk, he's had a bad day like he hasn't had in maybe years, maybe since he was a kid, and everything he sees and hears and feels is just generally not all that reliable right now, so it's probably some fun little temporal trick his brain has cooked up to amuse itself.

Nevertheless: There's no moonlight. Then he blinks water out of his eyes and the sky is clear and the moon is pouring itself down on him, turning all the wet to silver and the marble of the bench to bone.

He stares at it, shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut. Rubs at them. Opens them and looks up at the sky and the moon is still there. Heavy, high, nearly full.

He did not sign on for this level of weird. Then again, he doesn't remember signing on for any of this.

But you did. Right here. You did.

"Fuck you, asshole," he growls, every aching muscle coiled up tight and vibrating with potential violence, and he stalks toward the bench. For a moment he thrusts every poisonous, agonized element of himself into that snarling maw, imbues it with himself, and he considers finding a rock and turning it into a pile of marble rubble.

But no. He cringes away from the very image, pushes it back. He couldn't even drop a cigarette butt here. He took it away with him, and he did it without even thinking.

This is her place. Hers. He can't do that. He just can't.

So instead he sinks down and leans his elbows on his knees, lets his head droop forward and his dripping hair fall into his eyes, and he wishes so much for a smoke.

And for a while there isn't much of anything else.

The inside of his head feels like all that loose meth, all rattling around - alternately dusky and glittering. Fragments that don't fit together. Bits of him are just sitting there in a cloud of merciful numbness, other bits are just in a lot of pain, but then there are the bits still able to make sense, and they're calm and they seem very rational, and those bits are telling him things.

Like how, okay, Merle's an asshole, everyone knows that, but there's a lot of merit in what Merle says. About how really, stepping back and looking at this objectively, it was probably all a huge mistake. About how he was happy and he had a nice thing, and he's always been very good at lying to himself, allowing himself to ignore certain ugly truths. About how he's been led around these last few weeks by his cock and his heart in equal measure, and he already knows he can't trust either of those things, so when they get together on something that's very bad news.

About how he doesn't have anything to give her... And actually, what does she have to give him, if it comes to that? Yes, she's sweet and beautiful and smart and fun, and her family is nice and he likes them a lot - but like he's been thinking this whole time, where does he fit into that? What place does he have there? What good is any of that, to a redneck asshole with an even bigger asshole for brother?

For the moment it's pleasant, sure. But what about a month from now? Two months? Three? What if he's still hanging around here in the spring, in the summer? When she graduates? Hanging around like a hopeful dog, eyes sad and tongue lolling, while she goes off to the rest of her Nice life?

Where did he think this was going?

So after he drags himself back up that hill and crawls home, it might be time to start thinking exit strategies. Get out before he gets in any deeper. Get out while he can. While they both can.

Even if it's entirely possible that after the way he treated her she's made the choice for him.

Those bits of himself are very reasonable. They're very persuasive. They're very good at gently pushing everything else aside in favor of their eminently reasonable persuasiveness, and after a while they're all he can hear. All he wants to hear. Because yeah, it's shitty and it hurts, but it's all familiar. It's all material he knows. He's an expert on it.

He's been studying it his entire life.

Sitting on this bench - on her bench, in her place - he looks at everything in this new, detached way, with the aching eyes of someone emerging sober and hungover from a night of the most amazing drunken debauchery imaginable, and that all feels like the dream. This is real. He's wet and cold, and he hurts, and this is just an old bench in the ruins of an old mill no one remembers, and he doesn't even know what any of it was for. He has no idea what the point was. He doesn't know what any of it meant.

She's not a goddess.

She's just a girl.

The moon is setting and the sky is just beginning to lighten at the edges when he finally shoves himself to his feet and makes his painful way back through the trees and across the sloshy grass toward the arch. The sky is still clear - incredibly clear, each star the head of a silver pin and not a cloud in evidence. And chilly. Almost cold. Tuesday is the first day of October. Summer officially took its leave almost a week ago.

Well.

He climbs back up the slope without falling again. Things are looking up.

At the truck he has to fumble in his pocket for his keys - has a bad moment where he can't find them and is sure he dropped them in the ruins and will have to go back down to look for them - but then he hears a cheerful jingle and his fingers close on cold metal and it's okay.

And there's something else. He pulls it out and holds it up, squinting, letting a shaft of low moonlight catch it.

It's the cigarette butt. The one he carried out with him.

Except no. He threw that one out the truck's window, halfway back to town. This has to be another one. They're all the fucking same, how could he be able to tell the difference between one and another in the cold moon-splashed dark after the day and the night he's had?

But tonight has been a night of old stories and gods and unexpected light. It's been a night of rule-suspension. And he's sure - he's sure - it's the same damn cigarette butt. It's the same goddamn one.

He signed on for this, yeah. He did.

Time to sign off.

His mouth twists and he flicks it back down the slope, gets into the truck, and drives until dawn.

He doesn't hurry going back - takes a detour or two to give himself time to dry off with the ancient heater, and then drives around some more just because he can - and when he finally pulls back onto Main Street it's getting on to eight in the morning. And... Yeah, okay, it's Saturday and days and days of rain just blew clear, and the air is fresh and crisp and the sun is already warm and staggeringly bright, and it makes sense for everyone to be feeling lively, but as he rolls down the street and watches people rushing past him, notes the unusual amount of traffic, and everyone seems very intent on something, and all going in generally the same direction...

Something's happening. Or has already happened.

He drives - drives past the feed-and-seed, Merle momentarily forgotten - and the street becomes increasingly more congested with cars. Daryl drives until he can't anymore, until the traffic is bumper to bumper and motionless, and by now he can hear the noise - though he has no idea what it is.

Except it's familiar.

The world is taking on a whole new dreamlike quality. In a daze, he leaves the truck where it is and gets out and walks.

People keep running past him - a lot of kids, their faces lit up with a weird kind of excitement. An unsettling kind of excitement. Also familiar, in a way he can't place. He watches them, considers asking one of them what's up, and then he sees where everyone is going and he doesn't have to ask at all.

A little stream ran through the park at the other end of town. It was pretty. He and Beth walked next to it, walked the footbridge that arched over it. That was pretty too.

Not anymore, because the stream is gone.

So is half of the park.

He stands on the sidewalk and stares at the raging torrent barely yards away. For a moment - one of the most dreamlike yet - he's half certain that the rules have been suspended to the point where the river by the mill has been picked up and slammed down in the middle of town, left to scour itself a new bed. The same brownish foaming water, scatters of debris, twigs, leaves - and here, fragments of paper, plastic wrappers, garbage. It's carved a swath through the park and sliced away concrete, and half the road appears to have collapsed, the pavement and blacktop jagged and crumbling.

A Durango is sitting in the middle of the flood, submerged almost up to the windows. It's moving. Only ponderous little inches forward, water swirling around it, but definitely moving.

All up and down next to him on this new riverbank, a crowd. Staring, pointing, laughing. A lot of kids, but a fair number of adults as well, all excited. A carnival atmosphere. And all at once he knows where he's seen this before. It slams into his gut like a fist and he knows, and he smells smoke and hears sirens.

He squeezes his eyes shut and jams the point of his tongue against his lip. The smoke disappears into the dull stab of pain. The sirens don't. He glances back and sees, down the street beyond the clog of cars, the steady flash of police lights.

Well, that's probably good, because the adults here don't seem particularly invested in adulting and kids are fucking idiots, and someone is going to-

Scream.

He whips his head around. To his left - sharp, high-pitched, terrified. A kid - of course. He sees the kid topple, screaming, flailing behind for anything to stop the fall. Little boy, can't be more than nine, tangle of black hair and his eyes huge and dark, older girl who might be his sister trying to catch him as he tumbles off the pavement and into the foam. Daryl sees all of this in slow motion as he lunges forward, as he knows he's not going to get there in time. He's moving anyway, barreling through the few people between him and where he can still see the kid's head bobbing just above the water as he's swept down-

Someone else running toward the same place from the opposite angle - not barreling but sliding effortlessly through the crowd with a slightly gawky, awkward grace he knows as well by now as the movements of his own body. Knows because he's watched it, devoured it with his eyes, wanted to devour every inch with his hands. Taken those movements into himself, collected them and kept them like another in a long, terrible series of treasures.

The way she moves, impossibly lovely, like every step is dancing, and the morning sunlight turning her hair to streaks of gold fire as she hurls herself into the water and drags his heart with her, even if all he can do is stand there and watch her go.

Girl.

"Beth!"