Chapter 67: life is more than who we are

He sits there for a long time.

A long time is an extremely subjective measure at the moment. It continues to be difficult to care about things like that. He sits with the book in his lap, staring down at the page - not turning forward or back. He's so tired, tired to the point of literally going limp, boneless, collapsing, but he feels bizarrely steady and his eyes are dry and his hands aren't shaking, and he can't look away.

This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them—I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees.

At last - and the sun has left him and moved a little way across the room, nearer the door - he puts the book down and picks up the crystal wolf. He closes his fingers gently around it, carefully; he remembers it from those years ago. He remembers that the crystal is good quality, thick and strong; it won't be broken simply by him holding it. He cradles it in his palm and lifts it so the light can catch it again, and he turns it, staring into it and at its smooth, graceful lines, the curve of its back, its tail, pricked ears, one paw raised from its frosted base. Alert, as if it heard something. Paying attention.

He stares at those translucent blue eyes.

He pushes himself to his knees and then to his feet, curling his hand around the wolf. He picks up the book in his other and turns back to where he left his pack and bow, and crosses to them. The pack isn't very full - in those final and coldly pragmatic moments he didn't feel like he needed much - but it's full enough. He curls two fingers under a shoulder strap and walks over to one of the patches of sun, closer to the place where the room transitions into the kitchen. He lays the pack down and then he lays himself down, the book and the wolf where he can see them, pack serving as a pillow - lumpy, and he can tell he'll have a motherfucker of a crick in his neck when he gets up, but as with almost everything else he's too exhausted to care.

He settles, curled, knees drawn up, sun warm on his shoulders and the side of his face, and he's asleep in seconds.

Really asleep. No dreams. Not that he can recall.

Nothing he needs to remember.

It's dusk when he opens his eyes. Other than that he has no idea what time it is. He lies there, drifting back into himself, only gradually aware of his body - aware that yes, he does have a motherfucker of a crick in his neck, and in fact it's not confined to his neck but seems to have spread to every part of him, ambient low-grade series of knots in his muscles like tiny painful beads strung through him. Even his fingers hurt.

The side of his left hand especially is throbbing and it takes him a minute or two to remember why.

He rolls onto his back and stares up at the ceiling.

Clean white. No water stain continents. Bizarrely, he thinks he might actually miss those. A bit.

He's hungry again - extremely - and he doesn't think his muscle pain situation is going to improve if he just keeps lying here. Gingerly, he rolls onto his side and lifts himself up to sit, raking a hand through his hair and blinking.

Everything should feel dreamlike. He should be disoriented, falling asleep like that and waking up like this on a bare floor in an empty room in a place that's still strange to him. But he doesn't. Everything here feels intensely, vividly real, and the floor under him is steady. He's grounded.

He feels like shit, but he doesn't think he's going to go spinning off into that void inside him. Not anymore.

A sudden soft hum; he jerks his head up, confused, but half a second later he realizes that it's just the fridge kicking on. Fridge. His stomach wrenches pitifully - oh my GOD would you PLEASE ADDRESS THIS PROBLEM IN A WAY THAT DOESN'T INVOLVE BAD PASTRIES - but he already knows that there isn't going to be any food in there. No painkillers in the bathroom. The place is completely empty - he can feel it, intuition so strong he knows he won't have to look.

There's the wolf and the book. Beside him, still. He glances over at them, reaches out a hand and lays a fingertip against the wolf's smooth, cool back.

He has to get up. So he gets up.

For a moment, though, he doesn't really do anything else. He stands there, hands opening and closing absently, and he tries to come up with some kind of plan, and he doesn't have one. He sure as hell didn't come here with one. He didn't come here with anything. Well, no: he did come here with a few things. He has some things, and he found some things.

Like someone thrown into a survival situation, he takes inventory. He has a couple of changes of clothes, and he has the clothes he's wearing. He has a wallet, such as it is. A truck and the keys to it. Cigarettes and a lighter. Bandanna. He has a phone and a crossbow and a fuck of a lot of money.

He has a book of poetry and a wolf.

This isn't a dream, but it is pretty goddamn surreal.

He sighs and wanders off into the bathroom, which he finds with no trouble even though the place is dim and getting darker all the time. In there he fumbles for the lightswitch, finds it and flicks it, and then has to just stand for another minute or two, reprocessing the sheer size of it. A lot of people probably wouldn't consider it anything much, but to him, after all this, it feels opulent. He's not sure what to even do with it. Besides the obvious.

He goes to the sink, turns the water on as hot as he can stand, and splashes a bunch of it onto his face and scrubs with his bare hands, drying off on his shirt because there isn't anything else - and that's something else he needs to take care of, unless he wants to just keep using clothes.

He glances into the mirror. He's still a wreck, but he thinks he looks a little more human.

His hand twinges. Right. The band-aid is coming off and he finishes the job, drops it in the sink. The burn is scabbing over, but it still looks ugly. It's going to leave a scar.

What the fuck is one more.

He closes his eyes. These things he has to do in order to live in this world.

It was never too much before, is the thing. He was fine. More than fine; he thinks back to the last two years and he's beginning to understand that there were points at which he was absolutely fucking heroic. He did what had to be done when no one else was going to do it, increasingly he was the one who saw to it that they didn't freeze or starve or get arrested. He kept Merle from killing himself in about a hundred thousand different exciting ways. He held it together. He did. With no help to speak of. And he never thought about it.

Now he thinks about an empty apartment and he's paralyzed. He can't see it as anything other than an empty room. And that's just the one he slept in; there are others. Big ones. What the fuck is he supposed to put in those? Where the fuck does he put himself?

How do you do this? How does anyone do this?

He wasn't supposed to be doing it alone.

He goes back out into the front room. It's really and truly dark now, no light but the dull glow of the streetlights outside. He waits for his eyes to adjust, moves along the wall by the door looking for a switch, which he remembers seeing. It's there, right in front of him, and now he has light from a simple frosted glass overhead. So that's an addition to his inventory.

There's something else he can do now. Probably should have done it before. He fumbles in his pocket for his phone, dials.

It's a little after eight.

She'll be home.

It rings for longer than he's used to, and he's starting to wonder if she's not near her phone when he remembers: he didn't bother to keep the number he had. This will be an unfamiliar one. She might not pick up right away.

But then she does.

The soft not-click of a line opening. "Hello?"

Her voice is like the most welcome fist in the gut he can imagine, and for a few seconds he literally can't breathe. His chest is locked. He leans back against the wall, eyes closed against the overhead light, and soaks in the agonizingly wonderful sound of her. It's been a day, but he feels like he hasn't heard from her in years.

Which makes what he has to do now even worse.

"'s me."

"Oh." Soft breath, the word carried in something that isn't quite a gasp. When she speaks next her voice is lower and the cadence of her breathing has changed; possibly she's changing locations. Possibly she was with people. "Daryl, I... Okay, good."

"Toldja I would."

"Yeah, you did." She's smiling now. Good Christ, she's smiling, he doesn't even need to see it to feel like the sun has slammed back up and is flooding into the room. "This is the new number?"

"Yeah. I'll call your dad tomorrow, tell him."

"Where are you? Are you alright?"

"I'm fine. I'm in the new place." He opens his eyes and stares at the room. Part of him had almost expected it to not be there when he did. But it's here, bright and white and shadowless. He doesn't much care for the overhead; it hurts his eyes. He'll have to pick up something else - and hey, that's yet another thing on the terrifyingly vast to-do list he's throwing together in his head.

He can't do it all tonight. He can't do anything all at once. That's probably a useful fact to bear in mind, going forward.

"Is it nice?"

He could say yes. It wouldn't even be untrue; for what it is, right now, it's very nice - or at least he thinks so. But what he thinks isn't what he feels, and what he feels is that he still doesn't really belong here.

"Maybe it will be."

"Okay." Cautious now. Not very, but he's not doing a whole lot to keep his state of mind out of his voice, and he doesn't think she's gotten any less perceptive in twenty-hour hours' time. "When're you comin' back?"

So here it is. He closes his eyes again. How people do this, all of this - he strongly suspects - is that they just suck it up and hold their noses and jump.

"I dunno."

"Oh." Disappointment? Confusion? Yes, those things are there. She's no fool, far from it, and he's never seen much evidence that she's at all naive. He's probably been far more so than she has, in a number of tiny ways. But he understands now that she was hoping - though perhaps not entirely believing - that when he called her it would be a sign that everything was, if not okay, at least well on its way back to Okayness.

And it just isn't so.

"I mean... Sometime. Soon." I hope. "Just not right now. I gotta... I gotta do some stuff. I gotta deal with some shit."

A long pause. In the space her voice leaves he can hear other voices in the background, laughter, almost too faint to be heard at all, and he's certain that she was with her family, doing something, and he pulled her away from them and that feels terrible in a way he can't even begin to define.

"Are you sure you're alright?"

He takes a breath. Swipes a hand down his face and stops at his jaw. He needs to trim this fucking thing before he starts looking like an old biker and/or a goat. "No."

"Do you want me to come over?"

"I'll text you the address." Another breath, deep. You can't derive strength from air, not the kind of strength he needs right now, but it sure as fuck can't hurt. This... He does it himself or it doesn't happen at all.

And the only way this is going to work is if he starts doing the former, and doing it regularly.

"But I don't want you comin' over." Girl, I'm so sorry. "I can't have you here. I can't... I can't see you for a while."

"Daryl."

This time it's hardly a breath at all, and he knows what he's done. Or at least some of what he's done. Because she never uses his name over the phone if she can help it. Too risky. Sometimes when she's lost in the sounds that connect them, when she's lost in what she's doing or what he's doing to himself or just lost in general, she lets it slip. But this is not like those times. This is beyond disappointment or confusion.

He's surprised her. And she sounds like she might be scared. A little.

All this time, only feeling how much he needed her, how badly he wanted her, how hungry he was for her and every part of her, starving for her, dying when he wasn't with her and occupying roughly the same space...

He knows she loves him. But it somehow never occurred to him that she might feel even close to the same way.

He's such a fucking idiot.

"I need to do this by myself." He grits his teeth and closes his left hand into a fist so tight that he feels the scab over the burn crack open. "I'm sorry- Beth, I just need to."

"Why?

How to ever in a hundred million years explain that. For him. Someone else probably could. She probably could. But it feels like his mind is wheels spinning in mud, throwing up all these words and none of them work and all of them are flying and spattering into nowhere.

But he can try.

"'cause I never have."

She makes a noise that could - in some universe that isn't this one, that operates according to completely different rules - be a laugh. "I don't understand."

"Not sure I totally do either."

"So how long?"

"I dunno."

"Are you breakin' up with me, Mr. Dixon?"

The smile he can hear is weak. Watery. He imagines her sitting there - wherever she is - and scrubbing at her eyes and face with one hand. She's trying to tease him, trying to tease herself, trying to cast a ridiculous light over this - and it is ridiculous. But he knows it isn't helping.

He pushes away from the wall and walks slowly across the room to one of the windows, stands and lays his hand against the pane. Ghost hand. His reflection in the glass – surrounded by light, he's just a dark shape, his face lost in that darkness. Ghost man. Outside the shadows are heavy and thick.

What she's pretending to joke about is something he can't even imagine doing.

"No." He leans his forehead against the glass. It's cool. Soothing. "I love you, Beth."

A simple truth. He has those too, though not many, and if he cared to do so he could take an inventory of them as well.

"I love you too." He hears movement, shuffling, and now he's sure that she is scrubbing her face. "I wanna see you."

Not arguing. Just telling him. Jesus Christ.

"I wanna see you too." His face crumples and twists, everything twists, two hands gripping him and wringing him out like a dirty rag, and he feels the resulting wet running down his cheeks to the corners of his mouth. Salt. That twist feels like a terrible smile, and once more he thinks that time and space and the entire universe are one big Möbius strip and once again he's circled back around. "I'm just not ready."

"You tell me when you are?"

She could fight him. It wouldn't be completely outside what he's seen of her nature. She's wise far beyond her years but she's also a girl, a Daddy's Girl, and she's accustomed to having her way in the end, and she has her own ideas about how things should go and how things should be done. Him doing this alone, being alone... She hates it. Hates it. She doesn't have to tell him in order to make that abundantly clear.

He's not all that fond of it either. But there are a fuck of a lot of things about this situation that aren't ideal.

She could fight him. But she isn't. And she won't. And another thing he understands is that it has nothing to do with her not wanting to fight for him. She began this by taking him in hand, drawing her own conclusions about what he needed and making him, in her kind and gentle way, accept those things. And she was right about those things.

But that was the summer.

He needs to figure out what he needs. He needs to figure out how to live in this world.

"Yeah. Yeah, I swear I will. Swear to God, Beth."

"You don't believe in God." Still that watery smile. Not angry. Not at all. Part of him wishes she would be. He's not totally comfortable with feeling like he's not getting what he deserves.

He turns and looks back at the book. At the wolf. There, waiting for him, with no reason that he can see. "I believe in somethin'."

"Swear to that, then."

I swear to this weird fucking book of poetry that has no right to be here. I swear to this fucking crystal wolf I lost years back that shouldn't be here either. I swear to how I'm sure it's the same fucking one, and I swear to how I found the exact right words in that fucking book at the exact right time, and I swear to how I don't understand.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do?

I have no idea.

"Swear to my life, Beth," he whispers. "Swear to my fuckin' life."

Once more she's quiet. She's quiet for a long time.

But he isn't worried that it isn't enough for her.

At last she sighs, long and heavy. He thinks of wind through cracks. Winter. Which is fast oncoming, and nothing he could do can stop it, and nothing she could do can slow it down, whatever the extent of her time-fucking-with powers might be. "Alright."

"Ain't leavin' you." Still a whisper. "I'm not. Swear that too."

"I know." He can hear a smile again, and it's weak but it's no longer watery. And it's not even as weak as it was. He doesn't think. Sad, maybe. But it's there. "I'm gonna go."

"Alright."

"I love you so much, Daryl." Her voice cracks on his name. He would wrap her up in his arms if he could. Wrap her up and cradle her and rock her like he did when he pulled her out of the water, when she wasn't breathing and then suddenly she was.

Words will never be enough for what he was feeling then. Words will never be enough for any of what he feels all the time. He should resign himself to that fact, but he keeps looking for a way around it. Some way to reach and grasp what he really means.

But all he has are those three words.

"I love you, Beth."

Not-click of the line closing again. It feels like a shutting door.

He stands for a few more seconds, staring out the window, staring at the world through the ghost of himself, at the street and the other houses, the lights, the people living the life that still baffles and terrifies him, that he's still halfway certain isn't for him and never could be. And he stares at the old oak tree, nothing but a black shape now, so many of its limbs spindly and bare.

He's not ready.

He's not sure how he'll know when he is.