Chapter 43: giving last amen to a migratory song

Next day is normal. Fairly. At any rate things have changed less than he expected them to in the sense of anything obvious.

The night before, he got home after Merle was asleep, and he left before Merle woke up. If he was in a mood to be honest with himself - which he sort of is - he would privately admit that there are things there that he's still avoiding. There's a conversation they probably should have, and he doesn't want to have it. It occurs to him, driving out to the farm in the brilliant morning sun with a cool breeze dancing its way into the truck's cab from all angles and combing through his hair, that for a long damn time his and Merle's relationship has been defined by what they don't say just as much as what they do. What he wanted to say before in the storm's aftermath and couldn't. Didn't have the words, but also sensed what Merle's reaction might be. Pulling back. Giving him a look like a slap in the face.

Get outta here, man.

He doesn't need that. He'll take a strange and unsteady peace. A ceasefire. At least for the time being.

And it's a beautiful morning, trees green and fields gold, and something is lingering in him from the night before, small and warm and bright like a stone left in the sun, and it's a peace just as strange but far less unsteady. It's there, where she touched him. Like it came from her head resting between his shoulderblades, sank through his ribcage and settled into his chest.

It's a weird image, but it feels true.

Radio on, moderate volume, but instead of pushing back the sound the wind seems to be catching, lifting it up, amplifying it because it can. Carrying it through the air and out and behind him like slipstream.

I want to be where I've never been before
I want to be there and then I'd understand

He's all right.

The farm is something else that hasn't changed, or how people treat him there. He doesn't know what Annette told Hershel and Shawn at the hospital, about what he did and the state he was in, but they left him alone then and he suspects it was because she told them to. No heartfelt expressions of gratitude. They didn't really say anything to him about it at all. They still didn't when he came to visit Beth; they mostly treated him as if it didn't happen. He supposed someone else might take deep offense at that, but it's exactly what he prefers, and he doesn't know how Annette knew that but he resolves that if he ever figures out how to thank her adequately he won't hesitate.

In truth he really just doesn't want to think about it. It was a nightmare. The whole thing was a fucking nightmare. There wasn't any heroism. He's not proud of anything. He was just terrified and confused and exhausted far beyond his ability to describe. And she was only there in the first place because she had been coming to see him, which he hasn't thought about any more than he can help. He'd rather forget about it.

He knows they're happy to have their daughter back. That's all he cares about.

He works. The odd jobs are getting less odd and more consistent; the real job, the harvesting and getting things set for the winter, is pretty much here. It's good to have the consistency and he finds himself looking forward to more of it, even if it won't last. Even if he still has no idea how long any of this will last.

Maybe she's not turning him away, maybe she still wants this, but he's still December.

He eats dinner with them - round roast and baked potatoes and he's content to sink into that small tasty heaven and not say very much - but after he leaves he doesn't go right home. He drives around a little in the setting sun, watching the side of the road for errant deer, and also watching for other things. When he finds them he gathers them up in a bunch, digs a length of twine out from under a seat, cuts off a section of it and binds them together.

In the last of the dusk he goes back to the ruins. Not into them, but he parks in the woods at the top of the slope and edges gingerly down over ground still slippery with mud that probably won't fully dry for another few rainless days, looking for the cigarette butt. He has to pick it up, take it out. He spoiled her place in a fit of bitterness and he can't let that bitterness remain.

But he doesn't find it.

He stands at the bottom of the slope and breathes deep: the smells of damp earth, wet, and growing things sent by rain into what might be one of their final spurts of life before winter shoves them down. The creek is still high but it's no longer a river. The stone towers stand quiet among the trees.

It doesn't matter that he was here and it doesn't matter what he did. This place is so much older and so much bigger than he'll ever be.

He waits until late, until after midnight. Then he parks and heads up her drive in the moonlight and climbs her trellis, silent as he can, the twine wrapped around the bundle held in his teeth. There are small rusted hooks just under the bottom of the windowframe - maybe once for a flowerbox or something similar - and he slips one of these under the twine, makes sure it's both secure and visible from inside the window, and climbs down again.

She'll see it in the morning: goldenrod and cardinal flower. He trusts she'll see it before anyone else does, and no one will ask her where it came from.

Wednesday turns out to be the last day she's staying home. Daryl comes earlier than usual - has been told he should, at least for a while - and she's in her pajamas on the porch steps in the post-dawn light with her knees drawn up and a mug full of what turns out to be tea resting on them. She's looking mostly okay except for the stitches across her cheek, and when Hershel offers him coffee Daryl figures there's no harm in sitting alone with her for a few minutes, not too close, and keeping the conversation minimal.

"They'd keep me home another day if I let 'em," she says quietly. She sips tea and tilts her face up to the bright soft-blue sky and smiles, little and sweet. Her hair is loose again and a little tangled, clearly not yet brushed and spilling over her shoulders, and something about the way the light touches her smoothes out her skin and features and makes her look both so young and completely ageless. Not entirely human. Even though she might be the most fully human person he's ever met.

"You wanna go back?"

She rolls a shoulder, glances at him. "Figure it's better if I get back to normal soon as possible. I feel pretty much fine. If I turn out to not be, 's not like I can't just come home again for a while."

He's on her left and his view of her stitches is clear, close - seeming nearer than he's actually sitting. He's got a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, but he wants nothing more than to set both down and touch that dark line like he didn't the night he came to her. Trace it with his fingertips. Maybe his lips. Feel the warmth of her against his face, under his hands. Bask in her.

He doesn't know why he should love that stitched line the way he does, and it's not just because he loves everything about her. It's more than that. It might be what it means - he saw her bloody, limp, was half sure she was dead, more than half, but she wasn't and she's not. She's alive and she's going to heal. The gash is going to heal.

But it's not going to leave her unmarked.

"'s gonna scar," he whispers, not meaning to say it out loud and slightly mortified when he realizes he has, but the look she gives him is faintly amused.

"Thanks for pointin' that out, Mr. Dixon." She pushes some loose strands of hair away from her face and takes another sip of tea. The fragrance of it drifts over to him: lemon and ginger. With honey, maybe. He can't tell for sure. "I know. I don't mind. Shawn says it's gonna make me look badass. You think I need to look badass?"

He grunts and taps ash carefully off the side of the steps. "Probably can't hurt."

"Can't hurt what?"

"Just good to not have people messin' with you."

"Yeah, I'll scare everyone away 'cause I got hit with a tree." She laughs softly, and he wishes so much she was closer - that it was safe to be closer - that it's like a knot in his chest. Close enough to put an arm around her, just sit with her in the morning, listen to the distant lowing of the cows in the barn and the cries of starlings as they rise out of the grass, turn and wheel and circle in dark shifting clouds, settle again. He already knows how well she fits against him, strength hidden in a deceptively small frame. One thing he can say is that he's never underestimated her. Not even at the beginning.

"You're already pretty scary, girl."

"Good. I try to be." She looks down into her mug, still smiling - to herself, looks like - and her teeth briefly catch her bottom lip. "When I was in ninth grade I was in this play - A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare, y'know?"

He doesn't know, but he nods.

"I didn't have this big part - I was just this fairy, didn't even really get to say anythin' - but there was this one line in it I always liked. Though she be but little, she is fierce." She lifts her head and looks at him, her eyes direct and cool and clear blue as the sky overhead, and she's got him locked there. He can't look away even though he almost wants to. Almost. In the meantime his coffee is getting cold and his cigarette is burning down to the filter. "I think I wanna be fierce, Daryl. When I grow up. That's what I wanna be."

Christ, you don't think you are now? But really, he thinks she does. Or some part of her does. In time, more of her will.

She's tough. She knows it. She is.

Finally he dislodges his eyes from her gaze, swings them down. Drops the cigarette into the coffee and listens to it fizzle. He didn't lose her - he didn't lose her in any of the ways he was afraid of. But that doesn't mean everything is easy now, and when she looks at him like this, he's pretty sure he'll always feel just a little like he's being pulled apart.

Wind sweeps up the drive, raising small puffs of dust and pushing gently at both of them like the ghost of a hand. It smells like dry grass. Crackling leaves. The day is going to be warm, but the air that wind carries is cool. The edge of a chill. The starlings cry and wheel. He knows a lot about animals and not just how to track and kill them, but he never understood how birds can move like that - like they all know at all times where each one of the others is and can alter their flight paths accordingly. Like schools of fish, and he doesn't get those either.

That song she sang. Hello blackbird, hello starling. Winter's over, be my darling.

"I should get goin'," he murmurs, sets down the mug and stands. He stretches and his spine pops in several places, and for the first time in a while he feels old. Maybe it should be more of a common thing, given his actual age, but when he's conscious of his age at all he usually feels too young. Young and awkward and like he doesn't understand very much. Doesn't understand near enough. Wandering through life with nary a clue.

She told him in the kitchen that he didn't act like he was thirty eight. He never got her to explain what she meant by that. He's starting to think maybe he gets it now.

"Daryl."

She stops him when his foot hits the dirt and he turns, looks back up at her. That strange young-old effect has fallen back over her with the light, and the wind has turned, sweeping her hair across her face. She tries to tuck it back but it escapes her. She looks very small, but she also looks like her body doesn't contain her, like she's spreading out into the air around her.

Maybe he's December. But he's not so sure she's May. He's not so sure it's that simple.

"Yeah?"

"The flowers were beautiful," she whispers, and it's like she's punched him in the heart.

He would bring her roadside wildflowers every night for the rest of his goddamn life if she would just keep looking at him like that.

He gives her a single quick nod and turns away and goes to work.

But he spends all day thinking, and after dinner and before he leaves he finds her again. She's in the paddock with the mare, riding in a slow walk around the edge of the fence. He leans on the wood, one boot up on the lowest rail, and watches her until she sees him. Not smoking this time. Just watching.

Even walking, it's incredible to see.

She dismounts and comes over to him, bringing the mare with her. "Hi."

"Hey." He can't stay. It would look weird. He knows this. Everything he wants to do would look weird if he went ahead and did it, and weird is actually more of a best-case scenario. Frankly it was a lot easier when he was the only one who knew about this whole thing. Everything was somehow much more innocent.

There wasn't this spark flicking around every time they look at each other.

"They didn't want me to ride, either. Here I am anyway." She gives him a smile that's more of a tiny quirk of her mouth than anything else. "Headin' home?"

"Ain't got nowhere else to go."

She gives him half a nod, stroking the mare's flank. "So I'll see you tomorrow?"

"Yeah."

He hesitates, then pushes ahead. He's not actually all that nervous about this, not about her answer or what she'll think of him for asking in the first place, but he still feels that he should be careful with the asking part. Because this is important. It's all important now. Not that he should play up the seriousness to an obsessive level or anything, but it is. "What're you doin' tomorrow? After school?"

"I..." She cocks her head, a quizzical little smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "I mean, I just come home, usually. Why you care?"

"Why you care if I care?" He's glad that's back. He liked it. He likes that they have a Thing and that the thing hasn't changed even if literally everything else seems to be doing so. "Is there anythin' you can say you're doin'? Say and they'd believe you? And not check?"

"I..." She adds an arched brow to the smile, all more quizzical. "Yeah, I could think of a couple things. Why?"

"Can I pick you up somewhere?"

"Daryl..." She breathes a soft little laugh and shakes her head. "What's this about?"

"I wanna show you somethin'." He'd thought he might feel at least a tiny bit of jitters at this part, even just at the prospect, but he doesn't. He's calm. "Can you do it?"

For a long moment she looks at him in thoughtful silence, chewing on her lip, and he lets her look. Has no problem with her looking. He's run out of things to hide from her.

Almost.

Finally she narrows her eyes. "This is where you serial kill me, isn't it."

Solemnly, he nods.

"I knew it. All this time, just workin' up to it." She sighs, bites back what's clearly a much wider smile. "I guess if you gotta do it, you gotta do it. Alright, Mr. Dixon."

"So where should I meet you?"

She thinks for a moment, still stroking the mare, hand moving over her dark, glossy neck. The mare noses at her hair and nickers. "When you go down the road with the football field on your right, make the left at the intersection there... Go three blocks. I'll be on the corner at three thirty."

"Alright."

He waits another few seconds, just gazing at her. This time he can feel her letting him look, and taking pleasure in knowing that he's looking. He can't be sure - the light makes it a little tough to see it clearly - but he thinks he might detect the slightest flush in her cheeks. That last night in her room, almost dozing with the soft, warm swell of her breast in his hand, he had been aware of nothing more than her smooth skin, how perfectly she fit in his palm, and the slow rhythm of her heart against his wrist and fingertips. He had wanted to stay with her but he hadn't wanted to fuck her. Somehow the idea had been distant. Not terribly important compared to what he was feeling then: the greatest part of the peace that's worked its way into him.

It's not distant now. That low heat in him is uncoiling as his attention drifts over her. It's like it's safe to want her again.

When she's ready.

"I'll see you," he murmurs finally, pushes away from the fence and turns, walking away without glancing back. But she's following him with her eyes. He can feel it.

He doesn't imagine he's the only one who's been waiting for it to feel safe. Safe to want something.

Safe to have it.

Note: song is "Two Points for Honesty" by Guster