Be advised: There's a fairly graphic description of self-harm in this one.

Chapter 65: there was no answer in the dust and I'm missing you so much

When she goes she takes everything he felt with her.

For a long time he just kneels there, staring at nothing. It's now well and truly dark outside, the sallow glow of the streetlight near the window pushing through the dirty glass, and it makes everything look twisted and bloodless and wrong. Endless nights he's laid awake in that light, sometimes the TV flickering, alone with only her voice on the other end of the phone or her face in his mind, her body, her hands, her mouth. But mostly her voice. Always her voice. Singing to him, singing him to sleep. Singing to him when he got there.

No sound now except the rain. Faint buzz of a car outside. A horn. Very far in the distance, sirens.

He would review his options if he could think of what they are.

Part of him is stepping aside from this scene, this pitiful tableau, and looking down at it with utter confusion. His options are simple - use the money the way they were planning or don't - and the correct one should be obvious, shining bright as a beacon. He knows all his reasons for constructing that plan and wanting what would come from it and half of them are still there. There are the reasons Merle wanted it, even if those reasons aren't what he thought they were. Merle made his wishes very clear.

Fuck Merle.

There's what Beth would want. He has to weigh that in. He has to incorporate that into the halting, semi-incoherent calculations stumbling through his head - once he was so good at keeping the books, so his inability to work through the numbers right in front of him is frankly pretty funny - and he has to use it to balance any decision he might make. He absolutely has to.

But he's having a lot of trouble thinking about her right now. He's having a lot of trouble even visualizing her face. And that's terrifying.

He isn't terrified. He isn't much of anything.

After a while his attention starts drifting from the pile of cash and gradually around the room. There's nothing specific it comes to rest on, nothing that seems more important than anything else. It's all supremely unimportant, every bit of it. Every scattered piece of trash - because Merle just couldn't ever be bothered to make the trip to the trash can. Every stick of broken furniture - because it's all broken in some way, every single piece, one leg about to come off the table the TV rests on and patched up with a bunch of duct tape, the shade on the lamp ragged and the whole thing unable to rest at any angle other than a crooked one, the TV itself which has a habit of turning off at random intervals, the recliner with its worn and ripped upholstery, which as it turns out also serves nicely as storage unit for drugs, and the couch, the fucking couch, just as ripped and worn and all its springs broken and always digging into his back, his legs - he has never once in all these weeks had a full night of unbroken sleep on this couch except when he was too fucking drunk to be conscious.

And he stopped calling that sleep a long time ago.

This is his room. This is his life. He made this room, settled into it, hated it but never expected to leave it, not really - getting back on the road, he'd carry it with him. It's not even a room. This is not about this particular room. It's his head, full of trash and broken things, but at least with Merle he didn't have to live in there alone.

Beth doesn't count as company. There is no fucking way Beth will ever keep him company in here. He told her about it, told her the truth, opened the door and showed it to her that night after they brought her home, but there is no fucking way he'll ever let her live in here with him.

His box of darkness.

He isn't giving that to her. Never. He doesn't have much to give her and he sure as fuck isn't starting there.

I mean, okay, we stick around, you get that fuckin' apartment, you keep workin' for her daddy... What then? What're you gonna do?

That is sort of the question at hand.

He slides sideways, back, sits and crosses his legs and drapes his hands over his knees and stares at the floor some more.

He can do whatever he wants.

It's very hard to understand.

He gets up. Goes to the door and closes it. Turns around and walks to the tiny, stubby hallway, walks into it, walks into the bathroom, turns on the light - sallow as the streetlight - and takes off his clothes. Considers what to do next. He appears to be at the point where he's approaching existence in small stages. Going at it all at once feels like a tall order.

He turns and peers into the water-spotted mirror. He didn't recognize his own body; now his own face looks unfamiliar. His eyes are shining dully out of dark pits, sunken. He's never great about facial hair maintenance because he doesn't give even a little bit of a fuck but now he's scruffy even by his own standards. His hair is lank, greasy. Might just be the awful light, but his cheeks look hollow.

Somewhere out there on the road, he got old.

He closes his eyes and leans over the sink, braced on the cracked, discolored porcelain.

Then he turns back to the tub, cuts on the shower, climbs under spray that he doesn't bother to heat beyond lukewarm, sits down on the floor of the tub and curls his arms around his knees. He remembers this too. After he got back from the hospital. So tired. Merle on the couch, busted nose, saying nothing to him. All Daryl wanted to do was sleep.

It occurs to him that he is incredibly sleep-deprived and that isn't likely to help anything. He doesn't care. He lays his forehead on the tops of his knees and closes his eyes but he doesn't doze. Not this time.

So that goes on for a bit.

He keeps waiting for that explosion and it keeps not happening.

Eventually he lifts his head, and via a combination of hauling and shoving he finds his feet. Makes a half-hearted attempt at washing himself and barely feels his own hands. This numbness is complex, many-layered, operating on multiple levels. It might be a kind of self-defense mechanism; it doesn't feel completely alien. But if this is time swung viciously back on itself, if this is some kind of broken mirror-world, that part is also new. He was numb before, but it was simple weariness. He knew he would feel again.

He probably will here, too, it's just.

It's hard to see past this.

He cuts off the water and gets out, finds a towel by sheer reflex, walks the few steps to the dim bedroom. Walks inside. Stands there. Tries to breathe.

Merle is everywhere.

Clothes all over the place. Tangled sheets on the bed. Skin mag on the floor. Beer cans and a couple of empty bottles, crumpled potato chip bag. Next to the bed on and by a wooden crate is a midden of everything, and on top of the crate is a meth pipe. A small baggie of stuff beside it - nothing big to move or sell but Merle's own personal stash.

He crosses the room, still naked, drops the towel on his way. He reaches the crate and picks up the little plastic bundle and turns it over in his hands. He's near enough to the window - broken blinds pulled two thirds of the way up - that the light from a passing car slides across the wrinkled plastic and makes it shine.

Crystal. X. Oxycontin. A fair amount of the last, almost as much as the first. Daryl wonders just how much Merle was taking by the end.

This, too, is technically an option.

He drops the baggie onto the bed and turns and begins to search through the wreckage for something to put on.

At some point he wanders back into the front room, meandering slightly like a confused river. He's slowly becoming aware that even more than exhausted, he's starving - he can't clearly remember the last thing he ate, vaguely recalls wolfing down something greasy at one of the places he stopped to look for Merle, but he has no idea when that was. Could have been day before yesterday. Could have been day before that. Sure as shit wasn't today.

The things he does to himself, it's remarkable that he can still function at all.

Whether or not he actually can remains the question at hand.

He should eat. Doesn't matter what. He should eat and then he should sleep, and tomorrow he should get his ass out of here and never look back.

Instead he looks at the money again. He stands there and he looks at it for a long time.

The texture of it is interesting, all piled in damp crumples, looking like a small collection of leaves. The way the light catches it, it looks sullen brownish-yellow - a dead color. Color of winter when snow isn't there to cover up the truth of it, blanket the wet rotting things with clean white.

He thinks he knows what Merle had to do to get that money. But the truth is that he doesn't. Not with any certainty. The truth is that he probably won't ever know.

The truth is that he really isn't sure he wants to.

The rain outside hasn't hardened and it hasn't softened. It's exactly the same - steady and even, a gentle hum like a car's engine. In an entirely different context it might be comforting. Not the pounding rain into which he ran the night the storm tore the world open, not the fury into which he hurled himself. He could make that place a home for his rage because it was rage in and of itself, everything seething and cracking through his head made physically manifest. So is this. This rain doesn't bring floods, and he doesn't think flooding is actually what he's going to do. He doesn't think any dams are going to break. This kind of rain just sends slow gray trickles into gutters, and that feels about right.

He's not running off to the ruins. There's no point. There's nothing there for him, and no sense in trying to run away from this. This hole in the world where the last fragments of his old life used to sit, this directionless absence.

He deals with it here or he doesn't deal with it at all.

He goes back to the bathroom and gropes through his dirty clothes for his lighter, cigarettes, returns and sits down with his back against the couch, knees bent up and drawn close to his chest and cash between his feet.

He sets the cigarettes down. Keeps the lighter.

He can feel hatred. He can feel that - oh, most definitely he can feel that. You can be numb and still hate. He's done it plenty of times. Sent himself away, froze off every sensation and every ache and throb of his heart and gut and head, done everything he could to protect himself from that monstrous man. But he still hated. All that energy that would have gone toward feeling other things, freed up for the singular job of hating. As feelings go, it's vast. Cold as black space. There was that picture he saw of the countless galaxies spinning through the void, but what if they were gone? What if only the void remained?

Something like that. That's what it is.

Moving suddenly, so abruptly that he startles himself, he bends between his knees and with one hand he scoops the cash together in a closer pile, and with the other he flicks the lighter open and into flame. It's so bright it hurts his eyes, so hot it sears his fingertips. Part of him is stumbling back and waving its hands - Christ, what are you, don't, don't you fucking DARE - but that part is small and difficult to hear over the rain-drone in his head, and easy to ignore.

He lowers the lighter. Holds it very close to one corner of a bill. Close enough to watch it begin to darken, begin to send up the tiniest silver thread of smoke.

Don't be stupid.

With a sharp clink he flicks it closed. Pinches the corner of the bill. The smoke disappears.

He leans his head back and stares blankly up at the ceiling, lighter held loose, a cool smooth weight in the cage of his fingers.

Not charging back like an idiot to try to get Merle out. Not the baggie. Not this.

So.

He gropes a cigarette out of his pack and lights it, breathes smoke at Mutant South America. The blankness isn't only in his vision. The hate is gone now and everything is back to feeling that way. That featureless flatness. And he remembers then that while he drove back from the prison in silence, on his way to the prison he had the radio on, and there was a song he didn't recognize at all. But the words drilled their way into him and he remembers.

so what happens when the heart just stops
stops caring for anyone
the hollow in your chest dries up
and you stop believing

so what happens when the heart gives up
but the body goes on living
the blood crawls to a slow and stops
and flows away

This is all very maudlin.

He plucks the cigarette from between his lips, lowers it. Looks at it. That tiny red coal eating away at it, the dusty cap of gray ash. The white is a little off-color. It's slightly bent. He's been carrying it around for a while.

He notes all these things with that same dim flatness, and he spreads his left hand and presses the tiny red coal against himself.

Turns it. Drills in the burn with the words - an intellectual burn more than a visceral one. The empirical fact of a burn. He can smell singed hair. Seared skin.

He lifts the cigarette away and looks at the ashy circle it left, raw flesh darker beneath the gray. He brushes the ash away and he sees that he made a crater in him, a ring of deep red and pale in the center, already beginning to seep clear fluid. Weeping.

It hurts, he guesses.

He stubs the cigarette out on the filthy rug and lets his head fall back again, closing his eyes. What exactly did you expect to get out of that?

He didn't expect anything. It was just something to do.

He's out of options.

After a bit he dozes.

He lifts his head in dawn light the color of the ash and blinks into it. He finds the rubber band and picks up all the cash, smooths it out the best he can, arranges it in a relatively neat stack, secures it. He lurches to his feet and goes to the bedroom, locates an ancient backpack pushed most of the way under the bed, stuffs some clothes into it. Goes back to the front room and gets his crossbow from the corner in which it's leaning and slings it over his shoulder.

At the door he turns around once and once only, and looks.

He doesn't close it behind him.

Note: song is "What Happens When the Heart Just Stops" by The Frames