Chapter 63: all the dreams you never thought you'd lose got tossed along the way

They keep the glass very clean here.

For some reason that's what he keeps focusing on. That's what he keeps thinking, what he keeps thinking about. Not the chair he's sitting in, which is uncomfortable enough to qualify as a semi-effective torture device, and which he vaguely suspects might be designed that way so people don't stay long. Not the temperature, which they're keeping just barely too warm for him to see his breath. Not the decor - dirty, featureless cinderblock and nothing more, flat and soulless and vaguely hostile. Not the people around him - a range of ages and races, men and women, though no kids, and all of them sad-eyed, tired, a few of them openly angry. A few more of them - and this is worse - far more dead in the eyes than sad. Not numb but indifferent.

Used to this.

And he's not thinking about the lights, those awful garish fluorescents like needles straight into his optic nerves, lights that grab him by the brain and drag him back to the ER waiting room and his hands between his knees and helplessness like chains around his ankles, Annette silent beside him, knowing that Beth was all right and that meaning everything but also knowing how close he came to losing her, how close she came to not existing anymore, how close he came to a universe without her, and knowing - so deep inside himself, like the last remaining bullet fragment from an ancient gunshot wound - that she had only been there in the first place because of him.

Was coming to see you.

Those needles are stabbing into him now, and that shard of bullet is twisting in him, cutting into him, slicing open scar tissue and organs and barely healed veins. The antithesis of sunlight - not darkness but this.

This isn't the first time he's been here. Not here specifically, but… Here. In this place, at this point. This sick weariness, so close to genuine hopelessness. Except before, he managed to scrape together a few pieces of hope and hold onto them. Patchwork and piecemeal. He did it. Even then, so long ago, he did it.

He looks back and he understands that he always had faith. It was anemic, stunted, scarred worse than his body. But it was there. The best efforts of the world and its darker corners couldn't kill it.

But now here he is. And all he can think about is how they really do keep the glass here extremely clean. He can see through it clearly, no smudges or smears. No scratches. Right through to the other side, to the other half of the room, to the other chair, to the man sitting in it, to the man's bright orange jumpsuit, to the man's hands and hunched shoulders and face, tired and sad-eyed and fitting so well with everyone here, and isn't that nice for him, how he belongs, except Daryl can't work up the energy to be angry. Can't work up the energy to be sad. Can't feel any of what he thinks he probably should. He's so fucking tired, he feels like he's been driving for days because he has, he feels like he hasn't really slept in days because he hasn't, he feels like the rest of the world has crumbled through his hands and fallen into a fucking storm drain because that's exactly what it's done.

The glass. Maybe it's new.

Merle looks at him for a long moment. Daryl looks back. His jaw is working slightly. He has no idea what he wants to say. He's not even sure why he's here. He's not sure why he's doing anything.

Merle sighs and picks up the phone. Puts it to his ear. Daryl stares at him for a little longer, wheels spinning, letting them spin. He feels no particular need to hurry now, nothing really to hurry for - because everything is fucked and fucked well and truly beyond his ability to repair - but Merle keeps looking at him with those sad, tired eyes, and they're doing what the light can't.

Not needles. Waves. Crashing into the jagged cliff that is him. Wearing him down.

Merle has never looked at him that way.

He picks up the phone. He manages to not drop it. The glass. God. Looks like he could just reach through it. Reach through it and grab his brother by the neck, by the hair, slam his face into the table over and over and over until blood drips onto the floor.

Apparently he is angry. Okay.

So far he hasn't puked and he hasn't cried, and it would be good in a cold kind of way to maintain that streak.

Voice in his ear - he can see Merle's lips moving through that impossibly clear glass, but the voice is tinny and scratchy and distant, far more so than Beth's ever was on his shitty little cell phone. So far away. The glass is a lie. His brother might as well be on the other side of the fucking world.

"What're you doin' here?"

Daryl almost laughs. He almost breaks into peals of laughter, wild in all the wrong ways, wracked with the insanity that invariably comes with bad, senseless endings. It churns sickeningly in his chest but never actually emerges. Never becomes anything more than a soft, strangled noise deep beneath his breastbone, the creaking of continents, so quiet Merle almost certainly can't even hear.

Though the elderly woman next to him shoots him a look, which he ignores.

Merle pinches the bridge of his nose - his crooked nose, crooked and oh my God, it bled in a flood, what were they thinking, and Daryl would very much like to break it for him again. "Brother… You shouldn't even be here."

"I shouldn't," Daryl echoes softly. "I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't."

"No."

"Man, that's. That's so fuckin' funny, you are so fuckin' funny, you are just fuckin' hilarious." Words all in a low rush, rocks carried along in a torrent, tumbling and cracking together and left far from their point of origin when the waters recede. "You wanna take that show on the road? Oh, wait, you did." He leans a little closer. He's gripping the phone so hard his fingers hurt, so hard he's sure he hears more than one knuckle crack. "Two fuckin' years of it, and now you fuck me right in the ass. One fuck of a final performance."

The woman next to him shoots him another look, much dirtier. Daryl sort of wants to break her face, once he's done breaking Merle's. Move on to everyone here, since everything is fucked anyway. Start with the glass. It doesn't even look that thick. Maybe he could punch right through it.

Maybe someone did. Maybe that's why it looks so new.

Merle sighs again. "Brother… I know… Can't you just walk outta here? Can't you just get up and go live your own fuckin' life for a change?"

"Can't I." He's back to echoing. Seems like that's his default when he can't think of anything of his own. So far it's working about as well as anything else has or could reasonably be expected to. "Well. See. That was kinda part of the whole thing where you fucked me in the ass." He leans closer, and while that numbness still overlays everything, the anger is burning brighter and hotter beneath. A lava dome, pressure building and ominous rumblings everywhere. Without meaning to he's bared his teeth. "Everythin' you said we was gonna do. You said you was gonna take care of it. Said you was gonna try."

"Daryl-"

His name. Not man or brother or any variation thereof but his name. It almost cuts through, almost reaches a hand into the flood and pulls him out and onto shore, but the water drags him on. He lifts a hand and he doesn't punch the glass, doesn't slam his palm into it; he lays it against that cool, smooth surface and lets the oil and sweat and dirt and grime on his fingers mar its eerie perfection.

No one has him. Beth was another world. Beth feels like a dream. There's only this.

No scream. No voice in it at all. A breath into the phone, every word thin and sharp as a knife.

"How could you fuckin' do this to me?"

Merle shakes his head, once, slow. "Man… You knew it was gonna happen sometime. You know you did. You know we couldn't keep runnin' forever without someone pickin' me up for somethin'." He leans in too, shoulders even more slumped than before, and if he looked old in the light of that waning moon, he looks ancient in the lights of this dead place. He looks dead himself, and Daryl's stomach rolls into his boots. "I made one mistake too many. Happens. That's just kinda how it-"

"Don't you fuckin' LIE TO ME."

It's not a shout. There's still no real voice in it at all; it's all hiss through clenched teeth, all breath. But behind it is all the force and rage of a scream, and Daryl knows in that dim way in which he's always at least subconsciously aware of his surroundings that more than one person in the room is looking at him now, including very possibly a guard or two.

Whatever.

Because now Merle is staring at him, and there's confusion in that stare, and that actually doesn't make very much sense when you come right down to it, but Daryl isn't right down to it - Daryl is off and running in another direction entirely, the numbness melted away like ice off the crown of a volcano, pouring down his sides, and he feels so sick he's not sure he can stand.

"Brother, what-"

"I talked to 'em before I came in here. Found out what happened. What you did."

Slow comprehension, dawning like the proverbial sun, and now Merle's tired, sad-eyed calm is slipping off him, his own melting snowcap, revealing something that faintly resembles dull horror.

Though the confusion remains.

"I didn't-"

"Found the roadhouse, you lying prick. You thought I wouldn't? You really thought-" For an endlessly terrible instant he falters, all that hard rage run through with cracks, and Merle's hand on his back and believing that things might be all right, believing that they could both try, and he's not going to puke but tears sting like acid in his eyes and he's not sure he can keep the other side of that streak running. "You thought I'd just give up? Thought I wouldn't keep lookin'? You really thought I'd just do that? You think that's me? Everything I did? For us? For you?"

"Look, man, just-"

"They didn't pick you up."

No more hissing. His voice has slipped into a whisper - soft. Bloodless. Abruptly the rage is gone, killed with those few words, smothered by everything he still remembers from that other world where things were good and getting better and he was going to have a place, a life, and a girl loved him and after so many years he finally found his brother, and they were going to live happily ever after - once upon a time in a faraway land there lived two brothers - and he was so stupid.

He was so fucking stupid.

"They didn't pick you up. You called 'em." He shakes his head, just as slow as Merle, and the world blurs away into that acid sting, that burn all through his eyes and throat and gut, veins, skin, and his voice breaks and almost bleeds into nothing. "You turned yourself in."

Merle says nothing at all.

At some point his hand fell away from his face and now it's lying on the table alongside his other, limp - a dead man's hand. Useless. Daryl looks through that blurred acid veil at them and at him, and Merle looks back, and finally Daryl sets the phone down and buries his own face in his hands.

He's not crying. He's just floating. Drifting through the moonless, starless dark - nothing there to touch him, hurt him, betray him. Nothing to hope for or want. Nothing at all. The room isn't silent, but he can make all the sound go away. He can make everything go away.

It's been a long time since he had to, but he hasn't forgotten how.

Soft tap on the glass. He lifts his head, blinking in the hard, merciless brightness; Merle, hand outstretched, and what Daryl sees in him…

Daryl looks away. Rubs hard at his eyes with the tips of his fingers. Forces himself to look back at his brother, forces himself to pick the phone back up, forces himself to find his voice and join it to some words and shape it all into a pathetic parody of speech.

"Just tell me why."

And everything on Merle's face - every twisted, tangled, wrenching agonized thing - evaporates, leaving only bewilderment, and the purest yet. "What're you talkin' about?"

"What am I talkin' about?" Daryl gapes at him. "You… This. The money. You fuckin'... You just cut out, you fucked me, you didn't even-"

"You didn't see the note?"

Bewilderment is contagious. But as it hits him, forces its way into him and shoves aside everything else, he has to admit it makes for a nice vacation from abject misery.

"What… What note?"

"Left you a note," Merle says quietly - almost gently. Still confused, though. "On the couch. Right where you'd see it. You didn't see it?"

"I." I. He takes a breath, and isn't sure what he intends to do with it. "No. Didn't see no note. Didn't see nothin'."

But. On the couch.

Something is starting to pull at him. Gentle as Merle's voice, but hard. Insistent. Pay attention.

"I left it there," Merle says, still quiet. "Swear I did, man."

Daryl stares. Looks down at Merle's hands, at his own hands, at the glass. The smudge he left there, the perfect print of his hand. A ghost's hand, reaching through the center of the glass toward both of them. Reaching out.

"Go back'n look. Look real good. Maybe fell on the floor or somethin'." Merle hesitates, takes a breath. "Look under. Could be it got pushed there."

Nothing. No words. The last thing he had was anger, he now understands, and he doesn't think he even has that anymore, because it's not like he understood anything beforehand, but now he understands even less, and he doesn't have to close his eyes and take himself away in order to spin off into that void. He's there now, off-structure and free-floating, the black gaping to swallow him.

Go back and look.

He does have that.

He lifts his gaze to Merle's again, and Merle meets him in the glass, steady, unwavering, and the gentleness that was in his voice is now everywhere, all through him, somehow visible and permeating every cell. His brother, fully his brother, not some moonlit possibility of a man but the man himself, whole and real and alive and right there, and reaching up to press his fingertips to the ghost Daryl left there.

And gone. Nothing left but a shell. And that shell twists its mouth into a half-hearted sneer and shakes its head, pushes up from the table. "Get the fuck out. Don't come back here again. I don't wanna see you."

He turns, heads past other prisoners Daryl hadn't even seen, past guards he had barely seen, to a door he hadn't known was there, and through it into a world Daryl knows he'll never reach.

That's it.

That's all.

He sits there for another few seconds, staring at the glass, phone held loosely - precariously - and all he can focus on is those ghost fingers. That reaching hand. Two dimensional. Ethereal. Completely fucking useless.

Once upon a time in a faraway land there lived two brothers.

And then it ended. Because this is an old story. And stories always do.

He has no idea how long it took him to get out there. He genuinely has no idea how long it takes him to get back.

He just... drives. No direction. Technically he does have one, but it's floating out there somewhere in the void his brain has become, and it actually doesn't matter very much. The road is markless, trackless like he always thought it would be, except he never saw himself on this road without his brother. Always figured that - even if it was awful and dead and pointless and it sucked all the life out of them and left them shuffling shells - they would walk it together and they would walk it to the end.

To the extent that he could ever bear to imagine being alone, it was never him who got left. It was never Merle who left him.

This isn't how it was supposed to be.

No radio. He drives in silence except for the wind and the growl of the engine and the rattling of an almost total lack of shocks. The gray sky has sunk lower and grayed even further, thickened, and it's spitting water - not enough to properly be called rain, periodically collecting in sufficient quantity to turn the windshield to a dull haze.

Wipers. They squeal. It hurts his ears. He vastly prefers the silence.

It was late morning when he got to Merle. He does know that. The grayness is slowly consuming any ability on his part to count time in disparate units, smearing everything into an endless nothing, but if he had to guess he'd say it's afternoon. Maybe. Sometime. Time does, he supposes, go on regardless of what you do or don't do.

He wonders in the most distant possible way how many times now Beth has tried to call him. How worried she is. Maybe how scared. He could stop. Find a payphone or something. Find someone and ask to use theirs.

He doesn't. He just keeps driving.

You don't realize how much you depend on basic assumptions regarding the nature of reality until suddenly they no longer apply.

Fields, gold. Browning. The outskirts of small towns, all looking the same. All utterly uninteresting. Farms. Woods, light and thick, more and more trees standing bare and skeletal. Lifeless. Flocks of starlings on the wheel, turning overhead in graceful clouds when the spitting lets up briefly. He can mark time by the oncoming dusk and the lights in the houses he passes. Old farmhouses. Ugly new developments. Gradually things begin to look familiar - certain fields, certain meadows. The fence they hopped, the grassy expanse where she played her guitar and he kissed her for such a long time and she said she wanted him. And then he looks to his left and sees the turnoff headed over the open land toward the rise, the little house just visible on the distant ridge, and his entire body knots up and tries to turn itself inside out, guts in tangles all over the passenger seat, heart and lungs draped over the steering wheel, skin a loose pile.

She's still there. She still loves him. Doesn't she? Why would that have changed? He hasn't lost her.

But he feels like he's lost everything.

He passes the turnoff for the ruins and it happens all over again. These places they had, places for them, gone now. Still there - they could go there and be in them - but let's not kid ourselves: they're gone. They can't lie down together, be together, be so close, be inside each other. Love that way. He was going to make a place for them. He was going to do that.

He passes the farm. Lights on. Keeps going. Prays to a God he sure as fuck doesn't believe in now that she isn't looking out the window. Prays she won't see him.

Town. Twilight. Those tiny, run-down outskirts houses and then the commercial buildings around the beginning of Main Street. Car dealership. Applebee's. Evening traffic.

It's Monday. He realizes it all at once. It's Monday the twenty-first.

Tomorrow is moving day.

He drifts through the time and the distance and ends up where he was always going. Feed-and-seed, locked up for the night and dark. Apartment up the shaky, rusting stairs. He climbs them one by one, every one a grinding protest. Steps up on the top and turns to the door, opens it. He didn't leave it locked. Didn't seem like it mattered.

The place is dark and stale. Worse than stale. The trash in the kitchen badly needs to go out. He stands in the doorway for a moment; outside, the thin, pathetic excuse for rain is starting to fall again, pattering on the windowpane across the room.

He doesn't bother closing the door. He crosses to the couch, turning the lamp on as he goes. Drops to his knees and reaches under, fumbling through crumpled cellophane and aluminum.

Note. What the fuck could possibly be in a fucking note that would be useful? What the fuck could adequately explain what Merle has done to him? To them? What could account for it? What could provide any kind of justification?

His fingers graze the edge of what feels like folded paper-

And something else.

He lets his fingertips rest against it while he processes what it is. What it must be. Rough fabric, wrapped around something that bulges. Bulky. So familiar.

He pulls out the folded paper, and with it he tugs out a dirty once-white sock wrapped into a bundle. Leaves the paper on the floor and picks up the sock, holds it in one hand, stares at it.

It doesn't. He isn't.

It's.

He straightens it and reaches in, and pulls out what he already knows is in it.

Or what he thinks he knows. Because yes, it's a roll of bills, but it's far, far bigger than anything he ever accumulated. It's held secure with a rubber band, and when he slides it off it snaps against his fingers, stings, and his hand jerks and the bills scatter across the floor. He's shaking his hand, hissing, and then he freezes and looks at what's in front of him.

Hundreds. Lots and lots of hundreds.

His hands are shaking as he gathers them up. Shaking almost too hard for him to grasp anything at all. The first few bills he fumbles for whisper through his fingers. He gropes for them, manages to hold them, manages to hold onto more. His breath is burning in his chest as he slowly begins to count them, and this makes no sense, none whatsoever - nonsense on top of nonsense, total lunacy, but it's here in front of him and solid enough for him to touch, to number, and he does and drops them and kneels there, rain tapping on the window as though it's trying to get his attention.

He could be wrong. Probably is. Has to be.

He picks them up again and grips them. Cradles them.

His brother. His fucking brother.

He's holding almost twenty thousand dollars in his hands.