Chapter 44: squint your eyes and look closer

He doesn't wait when he gets home.

It's not that he intends to not wait. He doesn't really intend anything either way, and that might be why it happens. Merle said some stuff, some really fucking painful stuff, and the truth is that aside from some of the worst of it, which he's shoved away from him - what Beth really wants from this, what she thinks of him, what she means to do when she's tired of him, because of course she will be - he still believes it. Merle wasn't wrong. At least not completely.

If he was smart, if he was in his right mind, if he had an ounce of survival instinct, he would find a way to end this right now. End it if she can't, or if she refuses. He's not a creep and he doesn't ruin everything, but he doesn'thave anything to give her, and while she's very good for him, he doesn't think that in the long run he's good for her. Not because he's a bad person or something, because he's not. She doesn't think he is. She's told him, and he's running out of any options other than to suck it up and believe her.

You're a good man, Daryl Dixon.

There is another ending to this old story. And Merle knows it. Told him. Even if that was a worst-case kind of thing, even if it didn't end up that bad...

Beth Greene deserves better.

If he was smart about this he would still try to find a way to let go.

If.

Though he's dressed in a grimy tank and pants that might very well stand up on their own and even walk around a bit, Merle appears to have actually attempted some laundry when Daryl comes in. He's bent over the couch, sorting through the pile of tangled, rumpled clothes and muttering to himself. Merle has historically been confused and aggravated by the simplest kinds of housework. Daryl occasionally wonders what Merle did when he was out there on his own. It's not exactly like the guy was getting domestic in any sense, but there are some things he'd assume everyone picks up from somewhere.

Daryl makes his way over to the couch and peers down at the pile. His stomach is jumping a little. After talking to her like that, seeing her ride, of course it would pick now to do its jumping around. He wonders if it shows.

Merle turns a quick glare on him. "Why the fuck does shit disappear?"

Daryl shrugs. He has no idea. It just does. The world is full of mysteries.

"Whatever." Merle grunts irritably and returns to the task of pulling socks out of a tangle of pants and tossing them against the back of the couch. "What's up with you?"

Daryl takes a breath, and something about the quality of it - so he gathers, the way Merle freezes for a fraction of a second, head slightly turned, every joint and muscle locked into an attitude of keen attentiveness - is indicative. That jumping in his stomach is increasing in intensity, and while it's not unpleasant it makes him feel like he might have to do something, like tear back outside and run around the block a couple times to shed the excess energy.

Instead he stands, hands loose at his sides, and when Merle straightens up he doesn't look away. Keeps himself steady. He is steady, jumping aside. He's sure.

"Brother..."

"I can't."

Simple. Two words. Really they're all he needs to say, though he knows he'll say more. The room is dim and it's a little hard to get the full gist of what Merle is thinking from his features alone, but he gets enough. Knows that Merle gets enough. And Merle takes his own deep breath.

"Don't, brother." Merle shakes his head slowly. "Don't."

"I can't let go of her," Daryl says, soft. But he doesn't need to inject steel into it. Beneath it, foundational. It's already there. "I can't, bro. I won't."

Merle looks at him for a long, cold moment, stubbled jaw working slightly. Finally he shakes his head again, even slower, and turns away. This was expected. He didn't actually think Merle would argue. Not about this. Not now. Before, that hadn't been arguing either. It had been, he's certain, exactly what Merle said it was.

An attempt to help.

"You're fucked, baby brother. Completely. Just so you know."

"I know."

He grabs a relatively fresh shirt off the pile and heads toward the bathroom. "Wanna get fried chicken or somethin'?"

Merle does. They do.

About the serial killing thing: there are rare times when he considers the logistics of the way they've been sneaking around, especially when it comes to transportation, and he does see parallels. Not disturbing ones - he actually finds them kind of funny - but they're there. How he met her the first time. What they do now - making sure they minimize the chance that someone will see her getting into the truck, minimizing the chances of someone being able to report the last time and the last way in which she was seen if someone comes looking for her. Not that she's ever been gone long enough with him for that to be an issue, but still.

There are a lot of dimensions to this. Obviously by now a lot of them aren't innocent.

She's on the corner when and where she said she would be. It's a residential neighborhood obviously more wealthy than a lot of the rest of the town, the houses larger and more spread out than elsewhere, wide green lawns and well-trimmed hedges and low ornamental trees - dogwood and redbud and magnolia settling in for the end of the season. He knows why she chose this place and it's for those reasons: they're less likely to be seen. After school, people gone home, football practice going on but otherwise...

She hops in, smiling wide with her hair tugged back, braided but slightly messy today and the lace-patterned neckline of her shirt dipping low. His eyes wander there. He doesn't try to stop them. She leans in, smiles wider, kisses the corner of his mouth and lingers a little, and even though they're less likely to be seen here it strikes him as daring.

Which is nice.

As he heads down the street something appears to catch her eye and she glances back behind the seat, a mixture of confusion and interest sliding across her face. "Is that a crossbow?"

"Yeah."

She laughs softly and cocks her head. "What're you doin' with a crossbow?"

"What do people usually do with 'em?"

"Are you takin' me huntin'?" She doesn't sound exactly incredulous, nor does she sound unhappy about it, but as he pulls onto a larger road heading out of town he sees her looking down at her newer jeans, at her freshly lacquered fingernails - soft pink the color of the tee she wears to bed - and arching a brow at him. "Shoulda told me. I'm not exactly dressed for it."

"You'll be fine. We're not goin' huntin'. Not quite, anyway." He looks over at her again, smile tugging gently at the corner of his mouth. He wouldn't have wanted her to wear anything else. She's perfect. Someone else might think it would be out of place, given what he has planned, but they would be very wrong and he would tell them so.

"So you're gonna be all mysterious about it."

"Uh huh."

She shoves lightly at his arm, the brass beads around her wrist clicking. "You're bein' a jerk again."

"Yep." He goes ahead and smiles at her, because why the hell shouldn't he? "What've you been tellin' me 'bout surprises?"

She makes a little hmph noise, but he can tell she's pleased, and she turns up the radio and sits back in the seat, puts one boot up on the dash, looks half out at the fields rolling by and slips her hand out the window to sine wave in the breeze. Her pink nails flash in the sun.

"You ever been huntin'?"

She shakes her head, not looking at him - and then pauses. "Otis goes a lot. He takes Shawn sometimes, took me once when I asked. I was twelve. I was all excited, but." She shrugs, and suddenly the set of her jaw is a little less comfortable. "Otis got a deer. Buck. Took it down right away, he's a good shot and I guess it didn't suffer, but I saw it, the blood, and I..." She sighs. "I didn't like it. I mean, now I get it. I like venison, it's not like I got no idea where it comes from, and God, it's not like I never see stuff killed. I live on a farm. We slaughter things."

She's silent for a moment, gaze fixed out the window, and when she speaks again her voice is soft.

"It was just different. I dunno why. It didn't scare me or anythin', but it... It made me sad."

It's not what he expected. Yet somehow it is. It's exactly the answer that makes sense. He watches her out of the corner of his vision, studying her as best he can with his focus on the road. Other people he's known would be scornful about this, call her a baby, call her a stupid little girl, but they would be stupid themselves. Foolish. Uncomprehending. She's not a little girl. Not at all.

She says it's sad and he agrees. He does like hunting now, and he doesn't think it's even because it was beaten into him. He likes hunting because he likes it, and it really is that simple. He likes what it consists of. He likes what it takes, what he does. Tracking. Sighting prey. Even the stuff that's ultimately less important - a well-placed shot and a good kill.

But it's still sad, to see something beautiful and wild die. He never stopped feeling that, though he never had the words for it until this moment.

"We're not goin' huntin'," he says again, just as soft. "I do, but we ain't doin' that."

He lets quiet creep in for a moment, under the radio.

I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty-two flavors and then some
and I'm beyond your peripheral vision
so you might want to turn your head

"So you still ain't gonna tell me?" The smile she gives him - just for a few seconds before she turns her head away - is small and sweet, and he gives in, because it's just them and the road is mostly empty this far out of town and he knows she'll let him, and he runs a fingertip down the line of her jaw. She hums and leans a little into the touch, and it's all he can do to keep from just pulling the truck the fuck over and dragging her in.

He could. But he doesn't.

"Ain't gonna tell you."

"Fine." She flips her hair back over her shoulder, a pretense at being huffy, but he can still see her smiling.

They don't say anything else until they reach their destination and he pulls partway into the turnoff - where he went that day weeks ago now, where he went into the woods and tracked the doe and decided to let her live. He climbs out, taking the bow with him, and she follows, looking quizzical again.

He jerks his head in the direction of the woods beyond the grassy roadside, green and still lush all around them. The sun is bright, though it's lowering, and light scatters and plays over the ground. Over her.

"You ever shot a crossbow before?"

She shakes her head, gaze shifting from it to him. He nods - had already been pretty sure of the answer - and slings it over his shoulder and against his back.

"I'm gonna teach you. C'mon."

He starts toward the treeline and he knows she'll follow, and she does, drawing up beside him with her strides long - longer than it looks like hers should be. She told him she was fast, that first day she took him to her ruins, and he doesn't doubt it. He has every reason not to.

He also knows she won't argue with this, won't reject it, won't even privately think it's stupid. She'll get it. She wanted to show him something of hers. He's shown her a lot, more than he's really ever shown anyone before, but it's all been things he wishes he didn't have. Things he would have preferred to not have the option of sharing. Nothing like the place she took him to.

He doesn't have anything to give her - or he doesn't have much - but he does have this. It's a piece of him. He knows without having to ask that he won't need to explain.

He knows without having to ask that she'll understand.

He leads her under the cool, shadowy cover of the trees.

The forest isn't all that dense, and he finds his way back to the track he followed with very little trouble. No fresh spoor there now, but he recognizes the place and starts to walk along it again, letting himself slip partway into that focused/unfocused state where he sees everything as a whole and only a few things in complete isolation. Smells and color, movement, shapes, the closest and most distant sounds - untangling them. Laying them out and admiring their elegance, their delicacy, what they can tell him. What he can learn.

"You go huntin' a lot?"

"Not so much now. Used to."

"You miss it?"

"Mmhm." He's distracted but it's a gentle kind of distraction, a spreading-out of his attention rather than a loss of it.

"What do you like about it?"

For a few moments he's at a loss regarding how to answer, not because he doesn't know but because - like always, because this is just how he is and probably always will be - he doesn't have the words. The reasons are myriad, so rich and so complex, and they exist in a context he has no idea how to explain either. So he works through it for a little while, padding quietly over the ground - she's doing her best to match both his pace and his relative stealth, which he notes and is pleased by - and finally he rolls a shoulder and tilts his head briefly back, watching the leaves as they flutter and listening to the soft creak of bending branches.

"Why d'you like that mill of yours?"

"Oh," she murmurs, and he can hear her smile without having to see her face.

Another short period of silence. He can feel her scrutinizing him, studying what he's doing and how he's doing it, and he waits for the questions. He won't have to go fishing for them. She's never shied away from presenting them for his consideration.

"So what're you doin', anyway?"

He gives her a quick glance. "You know trackin'?"

She starts to shake her head, then stops. "I mean... I know what it is. I don't know how to do it. Otis does it some, I guess, but he never talks about it. I guess maybe 'cause I never asked."

"Alright." He stops and lays a hand on her shoulder, gently halting her. "Just take a look around a second. Tell me what you see."

She does indeed take a second - longer than a second, when it would be easy to give her surroundings the most cursory of scans and wait for him to continue. She looks, really looks, takes in everything she can. Absorbs. He watches her; she already knows how to pay attention. Of course she does. It was one of the first things he learned about her, one of the first things that made him feel like she was different. She sees. Because she looks at the world and she perceives things very much worth seeing.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

"I see..." She takes a breath. "Trees. Of course. But they're thicker over there." She points ahead and to the left. "Beech. Most of the rest of these are oaks. That one, the fallen one..." She nods at it, a few yards distant. "It's not rotted too bad. Wood's still light. So it didn't fall all that long ago. I dunno why it fell, though. That one there… That hole down there at the base, somethin' might live in there. What we're followin'... We are followin' somethin'. Ain't really a path, but it's all thinner through here. Maybe it is a path? Not people. Deer, could be." She hesitates, then fingers the splintered branch of a sapling just beside her. "Somethin' broke some of these."

Something twinges in him, deep and bittersweet, and he folds himself around it. "Close your eyes. What d'you hear?"

Again she pauses and he can feel her listening, feel her breath slowing even though he's no longer touching her. "Wind," she murmurs. "No- not wind. It's just a breeze. Leaves. In the trees, but I think... on the ground too. Branches are creakin'. There's... Cars. Ways away. Birds, I know one's a dove, but the others..." She shakes her head.

"Tanager," he says softly. That twinge is twisting into an ache. He didn't expect it to be like this. Maybe he should have. "There's a whippoorwill couple hundred yards away. Couple'a catbirds right over you." He does touch her then, because he has no idea how he's supposed to keep from doing so; he lays his hands on her shoulders and feels himself loosen when she leans back. "What about what you smell?"

"Dirt," she says, smiling again. He can smell her hair like this, wants to bury his face in it and inhale. "Not, like, dirt. I guess you'd say soil. It's wet. Cool. It's been cooler under here all day. And... Leaves. Like they're broken. Somethin' crushed 'em. Maybe nothin' did, it's just strong. Water, I think. Like... Rotting leaves in water. Moss. It's like the creek. By the ruins. The mill."

"What d'you feel?"

"Sun. Shade. Breeze." She pauses, and when she speaks her voice is just the slightest bit lower. The slightest bit rougher. "You."

"Good girl."

He tugs her the rest of the way against him at the same time as she presses, back to chest, and he just holds her like that for a moment, arms slipping around her, and he closes his eyes and lays his cheek against the crown of her head and breathes. All the things she mentioned and also her, clean and sweet, and he thinks about the goldenrod and the cardinal flower, about asters and meadowsweet, fresh grass in the sun.

He's hard. She must be able to feel that too. But he doesn't rock his hips against her, and she doesn't press back any more than she is. It's more pleasant, at least right now, to keep the coals banked down.

"Trackin'?" she whispers, and he nods, touches her jaw and turns her head just a little and kisses the edge of her ear. A fine shiver runs through her and she sighs.

"It's just payin' attention. To everythin'. That's all it is. You learn to pay attention. You see." The corners of his mouth curve. "The signs are all there. You just gotta know how to read 'em."

"Alright," she says, tipping her head back against his shoulder. Her eyes are open and gazing up at the light in the trees, which passes through the leaves and makes them glow green and gold as if they possess their own illumination. "Alright."

He holds onto her for a few seconds longer, feels her breathe, her ribcage expanding in the circle of his arms, sure he can feel her heartbeat against his chest - he can. It is. It's there. She's not gone. She still exists. She's here with him and everything is alive, and everything he told her about, the box of darkness he gave her, it's in a box. He carries it around, but he doesn't have to live in there.

God, he wants to tell her. He wants to say it so much.

He steps away from her, touches her arm. Her elbow. Cups it in his palm.

"C'mon. There's more."

Note: song is "32 Flavors" by Ani Difranco