Chapter 41: and reruns all become our history

Merle is there when he comes in. Merle simply looks at him in silence and Daryl looks back - able, with the last of every kind of his strength, to focus on the room and its one other occupant - and gives him a single nod.

There is no crystal meth in evidence.

He might ask about it tomorrow. He might. It's not clear to him what tomorrow even is. Sunday? How long has he even been awake? What does awake even mean anymore? He's not sure how one really judges consciousness when one has been through what he's been through in the last however many hours.

What time is it? Maybe afternoon. Numbers are problematic. He stumbles into the bathroom and at some point he manages to pull off his boots and strip off his clothes, and after he makes some abortive attempts to make use of soap he sits on the floor of the tub under the warm spray and draws his knees up to his chest, wraps his arms around them, lowers his head and dozes.

Water isn't so bad. Though it snaps him back awake when it starts to get cold.

He climbs out. His legs aren't lead anymore; they're noodles. He gets himself mostly dry, and when he stumbles back out of the bathroom Merle is there. Merle gestures at the bedroom, still without comment.

Daryl doesn't ask for clarification, and he sure as fuck doesn't want to converse on the subject. He stumbles onward into the bedroom and drops the towel and collapses naked onto the bed, feels and sees nothing except for the thin light and the thinner mattress under him, stays awake long enough to curl up and drag the rumpled sheet over himself as he does, and about five seconds later he's tumbling down into the deepest, darkest sleep he's had in years.

Down there in the dark, he thinks he can feel fingers threaded with his.

He's almost sure.

When he wakes up it's dark through the broken blinds in the bedroom's single tiny window. He's still curled up, curled tight as a ball, like he's actively trying to make himself smaller. He uncurls and immediately it seems like a questionable decision; every muscle yells at once and he bites his lip to keep from yelling along with them. Once the pain subsides he manages to stretch everything out, roll onto his back and stare up at the shadowy ceiling, the grid of dark framing and white squares just barely visible.

From the next room he can hear the faint mutter of the TV, see a little light down the stub of a hallway.

So now he has to figure out what the rest of his life is going to consist of. Or at least the next few hours of it. Would help if he had any fucking idea at all what time it is. Or it might. Maybe not. He's not sure he's in a good position to make those kinds of evaluations.

Getting up isn't as awful as he thought it might be. His mouth is awful, desert-dry and tasting like it's been used as a burial ground for small animals. He sits on the edge of the bed for a moment or two, blinking at nothing, then levers himself up and fumbles around in the dimness for some pants to wear.

In the bathroom he brushes his teeth. It almost helps.

Merle is on the couch in his underwear, which is so fucking predictable it just makes Daryl tired all over again. But when Merle looks up he appears reasonably alert, though his nose is still a thing to behold. He doesn't look high. He doesn't even look all that drunk, though he does have a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels beside him, which he raises and offers without a word. Daryl shakes his head and makes his way to the tiny kitchen for a huge plastic cup of water.

Merle waits until he's seated on the couch and half the water is gone before he says anything. That might amount to kindness.

"Fuck happened to you?"

Daryl grunts. Talking now seems possible. "Fuck didn't?"

"You gone all that time?"

Another grunt. He doesn't think that's actually a question. Certainly not one Merle doesn't know the answer to.

"Coulda left the bottle."

Daryl shrugs. He supposes he could have. He could have done a lot of things. There are a lot of other things he has done which maybe he should have left alone.

Merle focuses his attention back on both the current bottle and the TV. On the latter, Kim Kardashian is being extremely angsty about the renovations on her new house. "Was this flood down here. You see that?"

A couple of enormous swallows of water give him some time to mull the question over. "Yeah. I saw."

"Sounds like it was really somethin'. Fuckin' kid fell in. Almost drowned."

"Girl, too," Daryl murmurs, and it's only after it's out there that he realizes a) how he said it, and b) that Merle isn't a complete idiot. And sure enough, Merle is giving him a Look, all sharpness and keen study, and Daryl squeezes his eyes shut and wonders in exactly what way he wronged the universe that it refuses to cut him a break.

Except it did. A few hours ago. Sort of a huge one.

For a long moment Merle says nothing. Then, very quietly and in a tone Daryl can't at all read, "She alright?"

Oh.

Daryl nods. He's not sure what the fuck else to do.

Merle looks at him a moment longer, then looks away, back at the TV. He might nod too. Daryl isn't sure. He desperately wants to just not care.

So he stares down at the water for a short while. A little of the TV's light reflects on its surface. He thinks about moonlight, moonlight that shouldn't even be there. That wasn't there, maybe. He has no idea how much of what he saw last night was real. He has no idea if it matters. It felt real. It all felt real. The ruins. The rain. The moon. Real as the flood, real as her hand slipping out of his. Real as the weight of her in his arms. Aren't his palms scraped open? Isn't he a giant walking bruise?

For a couple of weeks there he actually thought he might have been getting a better grip on things. Isn't that funny?

There's really only one thing he's sure of anymore. And he doesn't think it helps all that much.

"You get rid of the crystal?"

It takes him a couple of seconds to realize that the question came from him. Merle shoots him a glance - unreadable again, Merle is playing his cards even closer to the chest than usual right now - and his already twisted mouth twists a bit more.

"Yeah. 's gone."

Daryl thinks about asking exactly how it's gone, which specific method of disposal Merle made use of, then decides that's the beginning of a much longer conversation that he's just not remotely prepared for. And which Merle would probably refuse to get into anyway. Merle is acting stupid a lot lately, but Merle isn't stupid, and while he hasn't felt like he could fully trust his big brother in a long, long, long time...

At some point he has to. At some point he's too tired to keep an eye on everything.

He could also ask about the money. He really should ask about the money. He's sure the money and the drugs are directly related, certain they are, but he doesn't totally understand why or how and he thinks he should. Out of all of this, this whole fucking fiasco, that feels like it might lie at the core. Like if he understands that, a lot of other things might become clearer.

But he can't. Not now. He doesn't feel like he's genuinely through what's happened, doesn't feel like he's come out on the other side of it yet. Could be because he's only slept a few hours and he needs a lot more before he'll be a functional human being capable of talking coherently and walking around without falling over, but regardless...

He needs to treat himself gently right now. Which he hardly ever does. Which he didn't even completely recognize as a real possibility until a few weeks ago. That he might deserve to be treated gently. That he might deserve to be something other than generally miserable.

He coughs, drinks more water. "What the hell time is it?"

"I dunno, man. After midnight." Merle tips back the bottle and keeps it there for a few seconds, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand when he lowers it again. "Should go back to bed. You still look like shit."

"Dunno if bed's gonna fix that."

"Yeah, you're a lost fuckin' cause there. Still." Merle nudges Daryl's thigh with the bottle. "Go on. Ain't got no reason to be up. Get your ass back in there."

Something deep in Daryl's chest shifts, tightens, aches. Suddenly he can't look at Merle at all, can't look at anything. He has no idea when this last happened. When any of this last happened. When he didn't feel like his big brother was finding a hundred tiny ways to make him feel small, make it clear what his place was, keep him in line. Keep him where he was meant to be. All of that is gone now, and it's just Merle again, and it wasn't ever supposed to be like this.

Day before yesterday he broke his brother's nose. Broke a bag of drugs open against his face. Screamed that he hated him - he knows he said that. He knows he did. Knows he meant it.

Looked him right in the eyes and cursed him. Cursed him with their own father. Wished that on him. The worst thing he could say.

In another world, one where everything is different and so many terrible things never happened, and children weren't simultaneously made old decades too early and kept children forever, he turns to his brother and says I'm sorry. That was wrong. What you did was wrong, but so was I. I was wrong. Forgive me, please, and let's start over.

That world is not this one.

Daryl goes back to bed.

He sleeps through into early Sunday afternoon and wakes up hurting and thirsty again and the light coming in through the window is so horrifically bright that he wonders if maybe he's been hit by an extremely delayed hangover. But he staggers to the bathroom and showers, drinks another gallon of water, and he feels mostly sentient. It's a start. Whatever he was in before, he has indeed come through it. He's on the other side.

Now he needs to decide what's next.

What's next is Merle comes home with coffee and donuts, and Daryl consumes both while sneaking surreptitious glances at him and trying to figure out what's wrong with him. He seems fine, but...

It's weird is all.

Anyway, the rest of the day is quiet and nondescript, and that's fine. Late in the evening Daryl wanders outside and down the street toward where the flood was. That end of the street is cordoned off and there's a police car. There's not much to see. The water is lower. Debris is everywhere, snagged on things, mud and sediment caking every surface it could cling to. The SUV is gone. It's inconclusive whether it was removed or simply carried away.

Doesn't matter, except to the degree that Daryl feels some odd, vague gratitude toward it.

He goes back to the apartment. Nothing much else happens.

Except that he gets a call from Annette.

Beth is coming home tomorrow.

No work on Monday, but Daryl goes to the farm. Not going is not an option.

He goes in the late afternoon, not too early; Beth was supposedly discharged around noon but he doesn't want to be there right as she arrives. Doesn't want to look too eager. Back to thinking he should tread very, very carefully here, not just with Beth - until he knows the details of what's up - but also with the entire family. Because he doesn't know how much he let slip at the hospital, how much anyone might have seen or what might have been said, or how they might have interpreted any of it, but...

There are still a lot of reasons to keep this under wraps. A lot. He's going to assume nothing there has changed.

He's so painfully uncool about this entire thing, but he still has to appear to be.

He comes by. They let him go up to her room - not unchaperoned. Annette is with him. Maybe that's not what it is, but he kind of thinks that might be what it is. Not that they suspect anything, but that...

Well.

Really, he has no idea. Probably bad to overthink it.

He has to behave as if he's never been in her room before - and in fact, here in the daylight, it does look different. Beth is in bed, propped up on some pillows, a mug of what looks like tea on the nightstand, and she's still a bit pale and clearly tired, and her cheek is still bandaged, but otherwise she mostly looks fine.

There's this distance they have to maintain. Pretend. It was almost easy before. Now he looks at her across it and he doesn't know what to do.

He pulls up a chair. Sits next to her bed, makes a few minutes of awkward, stilted conversation - how she feels, and yes, it was so lucky he happened to be there, honestly he was terrified, glad it wasn't so much worse. He wants to touch her hand. He has no idea what to do with his own. They feel - as they have before with her - big and clumsy. He looks at the afternoon light hitting her hair, looks at the subtle curve of her mouth when she smiles at him, and he would spend hours upon hours trying to explain how much he loves her even if he knows he would suck at it.

But he's just here with her, and she's all right.

So that's enough.

He drives back into town and goes to the coffee shop. His Perceptive Barista isn't there. The reedy kid who was singing that first open mic night is working the register. Daryl gets coffee and sits and stares into space, trying to sort through the internal wreckage the storm left behind and failing to make any sense of anything at all.

Around seven his phone buzzes. Not a text.

She's calling.

He's outside, wandering in the general direction of home, and he stops and stares at it, briefly uncomprehending. She doesn't call him. For whatever reason, that just isn't really a thing they've done. Which is fine; he doesn't care for phones, doesn't like having a voice with no face. But with her it wouldn't be a problem.

Regardless, it's yet another odd thing. He answers.

"Yeah?"

"Hi."

He stops, leans back against the brick of the wall behind him and watches cars roll by. "Hi."

"I'm glad you came out today." Pause. She sounds like she's working through something; not sure how he gets that, it might be something in the quality of her silence. "I know it was weird, but it was... It was good to see you."

"Yeah," he murmurs. He doesn't have a lot to say. He agrees. It was weird, and it was good to see her. All the other things he's thinking... There aren't words for them. At least not any words he knows.

Another pause. He closes his eyes and lets it sit there. Even just knowing she's on the other end of this, breathing, it's something he wants to hold onto.

"Listen... We should talk."

Great. "Uh huh."

"I mean... About a lot. A lot happened. I just... Daryl, I really need to. There's some stuff I wanna say."

His eyes are already shut; he squeezes them. Tight. This doesn't sound like a fun conversation. But fun got pulled off the menu a while ago. And if she wants to talk to him, he'll listen.

Hell, he might even come up with some stuff of his own to say. Wouldn't that be something.

"Alright. So let's talk."

"Not on the phone. I don't think that's a good idea. Can you... Can you come over?" Voice pitched low. Clearly trying to not be heard. She could have avoided that by not calling at all, he thinks, except maybe...

She has her reasons.

"When?"

"Tonight? Maybe around one?"

"Kinda late for a Monday, ain't it?"

He's teasing, or he's trying, trying really pretty hard, and he hears a very faint smile in her voice when she speaks again and it's like everything in him simultaneously coils up and loosens completely. "Yeah, school got canceled on account'a head injuries. You comin' over or not?"

"Yeah. I'll be there." God, he'll be so there. He'll be there more than he's ever been anywhere and he'll take whatever she feels like dishing out. Take it and then some.

"Okay. Good. I'll see you." Pause, and he thinks of her curled up under the blankets, pink t-shirt and pajama pants - which she hadn't been wearing before but it's so hard to think of her wearing anything else to bed now - and he has no idea how to name all the ways in which he wants her, very few of which actually have anything to do with fucking her.

"I'll see you," she says again, and then, very soft: "G'bye."

Silence, and on the screen her number blinks red. He stays where he is, phone loose in his hand, and stares up at the evening. It's still clear, and the days haven't shortened all that much yet, but there's a softer, pastel-ish quality to the sky that indicates the last of the fiery sunsets of summer.

Tuesday, he thinks again. Tomorrow. October.

Might not feel like it, not yet, but one way or the other, they're spinning on toward the dark.