Chapter 76: I'll do anything you ever dreamed to be complete

Saturday night is uneventful - which is good. Very. Daryl is better, Daryl is coming back - not done yet, he can feel it itching down deep somewhere like the ink in his skin, like the changing has nestled into his marrow and is snaking out roots - but uneventful is still best. He doesn't feel robust. There have been a lot of events.

He doesn't for a moment imagine that there won't be more.

He reads for a little - all stuff he knows, but with every pass he sees new things and new words jump out at him, and it's always worth it. Then around midnight he cuts out the light and rolls onto his back. The sky is clear and the moon is bright even if it's still only a crescent, and it tosses light into the room. Outside a wind is picking up, and he slings an arm across his forehead and thinks about that one good wind that'll put everything out, and thinks it's probably here. She was as prescient as she ever is. Knew they had to go today or not at all.

It's still hard to think about what's next. But he'll have to figure it out. It's not exactly like he has a choice.

He was locked into a circle, a spiral, no way out that he could see, endlessly inward and downward with no speedbumps, no road signs, no map - and no need for one, because what the fuck other way was there to go? Girl busted him out of it. Girl opened up a new road. But it's as trackless as the old one, and it's far more unknown. It's new, all new, and he's just trying not to look at his feet. Keep from tripping. Trust.

Not her and not himself. He's trying to trust something else, and he doesn't know what that something is.

Sometimes he's still sure that this entire thing is a dream. He'll mutter and stir and there'll be the squeak of broken springs, and he'll wake up on that fucking couch with his nose full of stale cigarettes and bad whiskey, knots in his back like clenched fists, and Merle will be snoring in the next room. And that'll be it. Nothing ahead but more shitty towns and shitty bars and bad deals with bad people, more walking, running, never stopping, the world gone flat and dead.

Can dreams change you? Can they really do anything?

Will this last? This tangent? Or will it collapse and toss him back into the world where everyone always gave him to understand he belonged?

The sheets still smell like her. No stale cigarettes, no bad whiskey. Soap and sweat and fucking her slow and hard. He shifts his legs with a soft rustle and it's like her sigh as she rolls against him. He made the bed for her and she's left a part of herself here, like a tether to pull her back. Or he believes it. It feels easy to believe.

Six impossible things before breakfast? Something like that. He remembers hearing something like that at some point in the hazy-distant past.

He falls asleep and he doesn't dream.

The wind picks up and picks up, and he wakes to it howling.

No rain. Not yet. But the light is threatening it, hard-edged and slate gray, and he stands in front of the window, scratching sleepily at his shoulder and trying very hard to not scratch the tattoo, watching the leaves sweeping down the empty, quiet street in whirlwinds. Tiny tornadoes, debris flying.

Sunday. Something about Sundays. Her in the rain and her pretty church dress, white like a virginal bride, laughing under a family umbrella. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago. It could have been last week. Could be now. He leans his forehead against the pitted wood of the frame and smiles as old warmth flushes through him, bringing with it a thin edge of heat. It's still early, he could pull some clothes on and stick a cigarette between his lips and go to see her coming out - wouldn't look all that suspicious, he could be there for any number of perfectly good reasons - but he can see her right now. See her and hear her, anytime he wants. He always could. It started out that way and it never went anywhere, whatever else happened.

She's deep in him. Deeper than he realized.

He didn't think he had songs in his bones. But yesterday she drew one out of him.

He wasn't born with them. But maybe she's putting them there.

All day the wind strengthens and works itself up into a frenzy, tears around and throws things like a big toddler with correspondingly big lungs and way too much energy. By mid-afternoon it's a gale, and by late afternoon the rain has arrived and it's a storm. A true storm, heavy like the ones that hit them in August and September and arguably started this whole thing rolling. Driven by the wind, the rain flings itself against the windowpanes, rattles as if the drops have gone solid and they're contending with hail instead of water. Daryl sits on the kitchen counter and works meditatively through a roughly thrown-together roast beef sandwich, watching the gray light darken and deepen even though it's no later than three. The rumbles of thunder are confining themselves to the distance, but they're coming. Already dim flashes of lightning are casting the swinging shadows of branches against the wall.

Winter can't sustain storms like this. This one is also probably the last one they're going to get. Makes sense it would want to go out big.

His phone buzzes, and at the same instant the steady hissing moan outside becomes the flat of an immense hand striking the side of the house. Daryl doesn't jump, but he can tell his body was thinking about it pretty seriously for a quarter of a second there.

He hopes the roof is reasonably secure.

you ok?

He sets down the sandwich.

yeah why?

half a tree just came down
front yard
daddy's talking about boarding up windows, might be only half kidding

Half a tree. He wonders which one; he likes those trees. All together somehow they achieve a kind of pleasing tree-cluster harmony, shape and shade and how they've grown together, and he'll miss eating lunch under them now that it's getting too cold.

everythings fine here

So far. The wind smacks the house again and he tosses the ceiling another skeptical glance. He's not really worried. Not really. But he's seen what a fuck of a lot of rain can do, and he's also seen what a fuck of a lot of wind can do, and both of them now live in places surrounded by trees.

Him more than her, if it comes to that.

He hesitates, then adds stay away from creeks

Pause, buzz. In the interim, the lamp flickers gently. ha ha

Nothing else from her and he doesn't send anything either, but there's something about the lull that feels unfinished - a pause rather than a conclusion to a conversation. He finishes the sandwich, wanders over to the windows again and stares out.

Two plastic garbage cans are hurtling down the street, end over end. One of them narrowly misses the truck and collides with an elderly Impala, bounces off and continues on its way. Just outside, the branches of the old oak dip and rise and flail back and forth. They're bare and have been for a while, and in the weird, low light they look like the waving tentacles of some enormous sea monster.

A sea monster that somehow got lost and ended up in rural Georgia and is none too pleased about it.

Buzz.

whole tree just came down

Daryl looks down at his phone, biting at his lip for a second or two.

get away from windows maybe

Pause. Buzz.

yeah we all are
you too, you have those big ones

He does. He takes a few steps back, eyeing them with fresh unease.

It is, in fact, unease that he thinks might be out of proportion to the situation, gripping him far back in the gut and tweaking. Some of it is the memory of that derecho, the little girl who almost died, that great swath of destruction left behind - not that there were any huge losses, his neighborhood being what it was - and looking out his bedroom window and awed by that massive, profound, elemental rage. But a lot of it is simply that since late summer he's internalized the idea that here, in this town, storms roll through with what seems like a special determination to fuck his shit up. And he just got his shit settled.

And he's very vaguely haunted by the idea of her, once again, as a casualty.

There's no point in getting morbid. It's the light fucking with him, that strange light filling up his room, and all the other ingrained reasons he has to be jumpy. Which, even now… They haven't exactly disappeared.

He's still him.

Not much for a while. More wind. More rain. The roof doesn't fly off. But it occurs to Daryl at some point that he's essentially trapped in here, which is a new and unsettling thing. Minor, sure. Not even something most people would notice. It's like… This is why people fucking build houses, to have somewhere to go into when it gets like this. But he still can't go anywhere - taking the truck out on the road would be a questionable decision at best - and this is the first time when, at any point, he's felt like that here.

Whole day is just fucking unsettling. And he can't even pinpoint why.

Lying on his stomach on the bed, ignoring the increasingly-difficult-to-ignore itch on his back, he texts Beth again.

still alive?

Barely a couple seconds later: no

His mouth twists. Sort of a smile. dont fucking joke like that

I can joke how I want, I'm the one who almost died
miss you

miss you too

He aches. It rolls through him in a deeply familiar little wave. He closes his eyes against the last of the storm's light and thinks about how it would be to be trapped in here with her, about how it would be wonderful in the most complete way possible - and not even because he can think of a multitude of delightful ways in which they could entertain themselves with each other. It would just be nice to be with her. They could sit and talk, they could eat, they could just lie in bed, they could do all three things at once. They could do anything.

He hasn't ever applied the word cozy to anything he has ever done or anywhere he's ever been... But he thinks about her, about cold and dark and the essence of winter, and he sees how it can be applied and perfectly so. Needing her the way he did, needing her in a way he now senses was threatening to suck something out of him rather than flood something in, this just… It was never quite there. Bits, yes. But not the full thing. Friends with her, sure, but always it was something he was stealing. Always something he had to clutch for and snatch because it was forever almostout of his reach, and not really something he even deserved.

And it isn't, and he does. He does deserve it.

He always has.

Suddenly it isn't just about missing her. It's not about what he doesn't have, and it's not about what he wants right now. It's about what he might have, sometime. What he might have, how at least in some version of this tangent universe it might be possible, and while it doesn't involve any of the things he used to think of as Big Steps… It is one. It is one, in a way he doesn't entirely understand.

A tiny part of him stirs, looks around. Holy shit.

All of this happens in approximately the amount of time it takes for him to complete a round of inhale/exhale, and he's just wondering if and how to express any of this to her and how the fuck he would ever even attempt to do that via text message when lightning seems to shatter the very air, a flash so brilliant that he winces and flinches away, there's the unmistakable sound of an explosion in the distance that is most definitely not thunder, and the light doesn't flicker.

It just goes out.

He blinks in the dark for a second or two, purple and green spots still dancing around the room, then pushes himself up and peers out the window.

No lights anywhere that he can see. Not in any of the other visible houses, not the streetlights. It's not pitch dark - it wouldn't be, storms like this catch the light and bounce it around and provide their own illumination - but it's fucking dark all the same.

He has no candles. He didn't have any reason to buy any.

He's still holding the phone, and when it buzzes he almost drops it.

you lose power?

yeah just now
you?

yeah and just heard from a couple people
went out all over town seems like
even out this far

you ok?

fine
kinda fun if the house doesn't blow away
gonna play board games

He smiles faintly, settles back onto the bed. Of course they would.

And again, sudden and strange and vivid, the idea of that. Sometime. Him. Not excluded from that world. Not just a tourist, not just someone who wanders in and looks around and is awkward about it and leaves again. Really part of it. He could be. Might always be weird, might never be totally him, but... He could. It's not impossible.

If he tried.

Jesus.

He's once again trying to come up with something to say to her, even if it's completely innocuous, when something thumps hard just beneath him, and there's the dull and oddly musical sound of something else breaking. He sits up, listening, and when there's nothing else he shoves himself to his feet, phone in his pocket as he pulls on his boots. Not frantic, but.

As far as he knows, Carol is down there by herself. And there are worst-case scenarios in play here, and they're pretty goddamn bad.

The wind whips around him the second he steps out onto the stairs, rattles them against the side of the house, and they creak ominously as he heads down them as fast as he reasonably can. He did buy a coat and he's wearing it now, but it's not a thick one and it's not helping much, and it's not even remotely dealing with the water. Halfway to the ground he's drenched, and three steps from it he realizes that he could probably have just gone down the fucking interior stairs and dealt with any fallout and spared himself a soaking, but it's too late now.

The air seems like a solid wall of flying leaves and he's fighting a losing battle to keep his dripping hair out of his eyes as he sprints around the side of the house and up the porch steps, huddling under the cover of the roof and banging on the door. And it occurs to him that if something did happen, she might not be able to get there, and he's not sure at what point he switched from being generally calm to not being very calm at all, and he's scanning the door and wondering in a dim kind of way how much force it might take to kick it down, when it opens to reveal Carol, looking annoyed and in pain with her left hand wrapped in a bloody towel.

Otherwise she seems fine.

Her eyes widen and she reaches for him with her good hand, grabs him by the arm. "Good Lord, what the hell are you- Get in here now."

He does as he's told.

Inside it's warm, it's dry, and it's also not dark, and those are three reasons to be happy about being there. A fourth is that Carol really does seem okay, except for her hand, and he's only just opening his mouth to ask her about it before she stands him on the mat by the door and vanishes to - she calls over her shoulder - get more towels.

So he stands there, dripping and hugging himself and fighting off shivers, and looking around.

There isn't a whole lot in the way of light, but what he can see is coming through the entrance to the living room, and the warm, shifting quality of it tells him that it's a fire. Not candles, either - unless there's a fuck of a lot of candles - and there's also the soft crackling of something burning.

Right. Fireplace. Good idea.

Carol comes back, carrying a large bath towel in her non-bloody hand and shoving it at him. "Here. Get that coat off, you'll catch pneumonia."

He shrugs it off, mutters something about yeah, Mom, then glances down at it. It's heavy with water and it's doing most of the dripping. "What should I… Uh…"

"Oh, I don't-" Carol waves a hand at him. "Just drop it there. I'll deal with it later. Run it through the dryer for you or something."

She still both looks and sounds annoyed - tone a bit sharp and syllables clipped - but as Daryl starts to make use of the towel and watches her head off in the direction of the kitchen, he decides that's probably way less to do with his intrusion into her evening and way more to do with whatever happened to her hand.

Which… It's remotely possible that she'll tell him.

He's not going to get dry. But he might work himself up to damp. He feels like - and suspects that he looks like - a wet dog, and when one of the perennially unimpressed cats drifts by, stops and looks him coldly up and down before drifting on out of sight, that seems like all the confirmation he needs. He's just wondering what to do about his waterlogged boots when Carol returns looking less irritated with her hand now wrapped in a gauze bandage, the firelight grabbing her lines and angles and twisting them into something that doesn't appear quite real.

She looks him over, and he stands there and lets himself be looked at.

"Why are you here?"

That's a good question. "I… heard somethin' break, I thought you might be-"

"Oh, that." Her mouth tightens and she glances down at her hand. "I dropped a mug in the kitchen, I couldn't see all that well, I reached down to pick up the pieces…" She shrugs. "I was stupid."

"You ain't stupid. It's dark." He looks a little more closely at her hand while trying to seem like he isn't. He knows Carol by now, is reasonably comfortable with Carol, likes that she's down here, but that night on the porch, drunk and sad and talking to her, her talking to him - they weren't best friends or anything after that and he doesn't imagine she thinks they were.

But then again, she probably wouldn't be too freaked out by him simply being concerned for her.

"Y'alright?"

She nods, raises it. "It wasn't deep. Right under the thumb, y'know? Just bled a lot." She sighs and glances back in the direction of the kitchen. "That was Cathy's favorite mug, too."

"She gonna be mad?"

"No. I mean… I don't think so. That's not like her. But she'd be upset, she's had it forever." She looks back at Daryl and gives him a tiny smile. There's a lot going on in that smile, and it's not all bad. "It had ducks on it. She loves ducks."

Daryl thinks of the ashtray they used when he came by to bring the first payment. Nods.

"Anyway." She shakes herself slightly and seems to refocus - on him, on everything. She gestures down at his boots. "Pull those off, go in the living room. The fire's warm." She turns away - once again toward the kitchen, and shoots him a quick glance. That smile is still there. "I was making hot chocolate. You want some?"

It hits him - sense memory, which is almost never gentle. Whipped cream. Little chocolate shavings on the cream. What grips him then is soft and bittersweet, and he doesn't entirely understand why. It's all quiet warm rain and the unique and indescribable smell of wet pavement, and the remains of raisins in a free bagel. The flash of little flower earrings and the bangles on her wrist. The Goo Goo Dolls on the radio.

put your arms around me, what you feel is what you are and what you are is beautiful

He takes a breath and starts to toe off his boots.

"Yeah. Yeah, thanks."

There's no whipped cream with the hot chocolate, nor are there any chocolate shavings. There are those little dehydrated marshmallow things floating in it, and somehow that's kind of perfect. He sits on the floor close to the plain, unadorned fireplace, crosslegged and slightly hunched as the water slowly evaporates out of his clothes and hair, and watches the flames leap and dance. Carol is sitting behind and to his right in a strange, angular, very modern-looking chair upholstered in a deep pink.

It doesn't look like it should be comfortable. But when he looks back at her, she looks comfortable. She also looks a bit distant, unfocused again, hands wrapped around her own mug.

He's not going to ask why. But he notices it. Notes it. Files it away. Adds it to the growing list of things he knows and can guess about her.

He's not feeling any need to break the silence - as seems to be usually true with her - but after a short time she does anyway.

"Always wanted a fireplace in my house."

He glances back at her again. "You get one?"

"Ed said they were pointless, couple houses we looked at that had them. Outside our price range. What he decided our price range was." Her bitterness is sudden and sharp, and it doesn't surprise him in the least. "Ed's a cheap bastard. Always was. With us, anyway. He never had any trouble spending on things he wanted." She looks away from the fire, at him, and doesn't quite offer him a smile. "Sorry, you don't-"

He shakes his head. "'s fine." And it is. He didn't mind it the first time she started telling him about it, and he doesn't mind it now. Can't imagine minding it.

Only two other people in his life have ever talked to him even remotely like this. And one of them he never saw again.

And all three of them since he came to this damn town.

She just gazes at him for a long moment, and he turns his body more toward her so he can see her without having to look over his shoulder. The light is still moving her face around, making it difficult to read her expression, but he thinks he might see…

Is she grateful?

"Y'know, you could have taken the inside stairs."

Yes, he does. Now. He rolls a shoulder, eyes flicking downward and away. "Cathy said-"

"I know what Cathy said. Cathy isn't here." She's still looking at him, level and direct. Wherever her thoughts were drifting, they're fully here again. "I trust you. If you need to come down here for something…" The wind, which had died down, abruptly rises and howls across the windowpanes and beats against the side of the house. The fire flattens as if it's trying to dodge, trying to avoid being lifted right up the chimney. "And it's awful out there."

He gives her a rueful little smile. "Yeah, I know."

Carol is quiet for another moment, staring down at the mug resting on her knee. Then she takes a breath, looks up at him again. "Tell you the truth, I'd… I'd feel better. Knowing you could just come down. If you needed to."

There's something in how she says it that pokes him, pinches something deep and instinctive, tugs. She doesn't sound scared exactly, but there's tension winding itself around her tone like a snake. Not strangling, but very much capable of doing so.

He tilts his head. "Everythin' alright?"

"Yeah. I just…" She sighs and swipes a hand down her face. "I'm looking for lawyers. I'm going to start… You know. Divorcing him. He's… He's not going to be happy."

Daryl would lay down just about all the money he has that not going to be happy is ridiculous levels of understatement, and the additional implications there are clear, and they work him into a single tight muscle. His jaw clenches. Not much, but it does. Once again he thinks of a dog, lips pulled back in a snarl.

Junkyard dog.

Yes, he would also feel better if he can just come right down. If he needed to.

"Good."

The corner of her mouth inches upward in faint but clear amusement. "Good that I'm divorcing him, or good that he's not going to be happy?"

"Both. Prick don't deserve to be happy."

"No, he doesn't."

She's staring back at the fire now, all trace of her smile gone. Her entire face has gone oddly flat, oddly expressionless, and Daryl remembers - like a gust of that wind outside slamming right into his face - that his mother once wore the exact same expression. More than once, actually, but he's remembering one specific instance, clear as footage in front of him. A neighbor came over to borrow a shovel for something long-forgotten - an older woman two houses down what everyone generously thought of as the street, all cracked blacktop and half gravel - and stood very close and said something. Something that made his mother look exactly like that.

He had been playing with a couple of broken Transformers in a patch of packed dirt in front of the house and hadn't been close enough to hear. But he looked up and saw his mother's face - her cheek swollen and dark with a bruise gone rich shades of purple and green - and hadn't been able to look away.

He didn't need to hear the words. He knew - roughly - what the woman was saying as she leaned on the rusty handle of the shovel. Only truly figured it out years later, but had been sure. Absolutely sure.

You need to get away from him. You and your boys. You need to get away or one of these days he'll kill you.

She beat Will Dixon to that, at least.

Sometimes, in very bad moments, he wonders just how accidental that accidental fire really was.

"You should do it," he says - low. Gentle. "You're doin' exactly what you should do." He thinks about touching her knee, her hand, but he doesn't. Can't. Not yet, if ever. And if he never can, that's all right. He doesn't need to fix her.

He couldn't do that anyway.

She shifts her attention from the fire to him, and while she's still difficult to read, the flatness in her affect is fading. "That's what you think?"

"That's what I know."

Another long moment of silence. He lets it flow in, the space left by the lack of sound filled only with the wind and the creak of branches and the fire snapping sparks upward in little dancing fragments of light.

"Yeah," she says finally, and nods. And she doesn't ask him how he knows, and while he's not certain about it, he thinks he might be thankful for that. It's not that he's ashamed of it. Not anymore. But there are some things he's not sure he's ready to talk about. Not to anyone but Beth. Not even to someone he has every reason to think would understand completely.

"You seem happy, though."

His brows pull together. Does he? He hadn't noticed - he might feel pretty good right now, but he had no sense of how obvious it might or might not be. He's self-aware enough to know that he's someone who doesn't hide strong emotion well, yet also someone who tends to have trouble showing anything at times.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." That half-formed, half-amused smile tugs once more at the corner of her mouth, and she sips her hot chocolate. "You had a friend over." Just over the rim of the mug, he sees her smile widen and he knows why.

Great.

"You… had a good time. Sounded like."

He drops his gaze and his head, and it might just be his proximity to the fire but he feels heat rushing into his face. Some part of him had known at the time that the house is old and probably not all that soundproof, and it's not like he was particularly focused on keeping the noise down.

Now he feels like a jerk. And he's wondering if Carol saw Beth, saw how young she is, is thinking about that too… But somehow he gets the clear sense that if she had, she would probably say something about it. Not so positive she would get all judgy, but… something.

"Yeah, uh… Sorry. 'bout that."

"It's all right." Her turn to be gentle, and she's still amused. "Was that the girl who reads you poetry?"

He nods, still not meeting her eyes. The heat in his cheeks is subsiding somewhat, but it's still there, and despite what she's saying he still feels like kind of a jerk.

But he had been happy. He had been so fucking happy. He was drowning in it, rising, floating on its surface until he was sucked back under.

"Beth." Because there's not much reason now to not tell her, as far as he's concerned. "She's… I hadn't seen her in a while, and she was-"

"I said it's all right." Carol breathes a quiet laugh. "Just don't be doing that every night is all."

"Yeah, well." He sets his mug down on the carpet and fiddles with his own fingers, capturing one set between his thumb and forefinger and twisting a little. "Don't think she's gonna be comin' 'round here that much."

"Is everything okay?"

He nods. Once again it's a bit hard to hold her gaze. "She's just…" She's in high school and I'm still pretty sure her father would murder me about five or six times if he found out even if he does like me.

Maybe because Hershel likes him. Trusts him. He's thought about that more recently in a very non-freaked out kind of way - because not thinking about it won't make it not true - and he wonders if that might not actually make it worse.

"She has a hard time gettin' away for a night."

"She works?"

"Could say that."

"Well. It's good that you have someone." Carol lifts her feet off the floor and shifts sideways in the chair, draws her knees up, curled. In another situation, another set of circumstances - with every single message her body and her movements still usually send - it might have looked defensive. But again, it simply looks comfortable. She's comfortable. She really is. Far more than when Daryl first met her, and that wasn't so very long ago.

There's something about this place.

He wonders, off-hand and idle, if Beth and Carol might like each other.

It's nice to think that they would.

"She sings too," he says softly. He's not sure what prompts it, not sure why it's something he feels the need to share, but he does. And it's pleasant to share it. "She likes singin', she's… She's real good."

"She sings to you?" Just as soft, and inquisitive in a way she hasn't yet been. As if the question is significant somehow, as if there's something at stake beneath it, and his answer might reveal something important.

Well, it's a pretty simple answer.

"Yeah."

Carol nods and seems content to let it lie where it is. He can tell she's not disinterested - far from it - but as she has since they first started having any form of actual conversation, she seems to know exactly how far to press and when to stop and let him continue things if he chooses to.

Like Beth.

He doesn't want to take this line of conversation any further. Not right now. But he doesn't mind that it's gone as far as it has.

One of the other cats pads silently out of the shadows and butts its dark head against his forearm, lifting its back in a sensual feline arch when he scratches it between the shoulderblades. Its purr is a deep, delightful rumble beneath his fingertips.

Carol clears her throat, a kind of introduction to what she says next. "Do you have anything else up there yet? Furniture or anything? I haven't really heard you moving anything around."

Maybe once this would have struck him as irritatingly nosy, but not anymore. It's not like she can somehow deafen herself to what's right over her. And she's clearly not indifferent to him. Not at all. He shrugs, shakes his head. Expressive enough for his purposes, and he doesn't anticipate having to justify himself. And she doesn't ask him to do so. He's not sure how he would, anyway.

Except.

"Not sure what to get."

She tilts her head to the side - oddly bird-like - and fixes him with a speculative gaze. "What do you have now?"

"Bed. Lamp." He hesitates. There isn't much else besides that aside from some stuff that doesn't, as far as he's concerned, count. He bought some more clothes. Dishes, towels. The most basic possible things, and he gave them very little thought. "I have… this book. And this…" He laughs softly, watching sparks fly. Actually saying this to anyone but Beth feels stranger than he might have imagined, had he been inclined to imagine it at all. "This wolf thing. Crystal, y'know? Figurine."

Carol responds only with a quiet mm, and for a minute or two he's all but certain that she has nothing more to say. Then, just as his mind is starting to drift away from it and into the blueish heart of the fire, she speaks again, her voice very low. Thoughtful.

"Why don't you get a shelf?"

He shoots her a look, bemused. "Why the hell a shelf?"

"Why not? To put things on." She smiles at him, and it's still quite small but it's the truest and warmest smile he's seen all evening, and it's a good thing to see. Warm as the room, as the fire - made even warmer by the continuing, steady force of the storm outside. "I've noticed- When you have something like that, a space or something… it fills itself. Somehow. You buy a shelf, you can put the book and the wolf on it, then you'll find other things, and maybe… Maybe you can go from there."

He doesn't answer her immediately. Now that he has the idea in place he can get a good look at it, investigate its logic. He has none of her experience with things. He's never made a practice of filling spaces, consciously or otherwise. He's just been in them. Living alone before, he didn't have much of anything. Didn't want much of anything. What would the point have been?

When had he ever been allowed to have anything nice?

But there is indeed a kind of logic in this, he thinks. Something he can get his fingers around the shape of. It definitely wouldn't be a bad move. There might not be very many of those available to him right now.

What matters, seems like, is just that he's moving.

And it sounds kind of like something Beth might say.

Slowly, he nods. "Alright. I guess… Guess it could be somethin'."

She's still smiling at him. But she doesn't say anything else. And they don't say anything else. And at some point there's more hot chocolate and also some semi-good chocolate chip cookies wrapped in a cellophane tube, and he throws another couple of logs on the fire, and he thinks about how this is also part of it. It's part of the light. The storm outside isn't letting up in the slightest, and he's still not sure he knows how to live in the world, but here he is anyway. And here she is.

They're sure as hell not best friends or anything, him and her. But friends…

Yeah, that might be something too.

He goes back upstairs around eleven - inside this time. The wind outside hasn't abated but it also hasn't strengthened, the rain a steady drum that's become more lulling than anything else, and he's feeling sleepy and very un-alarmed. If it was going to fuck his shit up, he thinks he would have noticed by now. It's just a storm. Or he's not actually sure there's any such thing as just a storm, at least not in this weird fucking town, but this one doesn't appear to be his blood enemy.

He sinks down on the bed and sends Beth another text. alright?

A moment. Then: yeah, you?

I'm good. He taps his fingers on the edge of the phone, briefly closing his eyes. The darkness is no longer threatening. It's wrapping him up in itself, as welcoming as the light. He was always safe here. power still out. going to bed

Beat. Buzz. think about me

He smiles faintly. Heat seems to pulse in a gentle wave from his heart and trickle through his veins, blood starting to simmer. She's playing coy but he knows exactly what she means.

you too

don't finish

His breath catches. This isn't unexpected, and they spent enough time together to this very end that she must know that he likes it. That he probably does it when he's alone. But she's never asked him to do it before. Never told him to.

She wasn't asking.

Not that it really makes a difference. She knows he wouldn't say no.

ok

The wind sings outside as he strips, relaxes into the night he made, takes his cock in his fist. He makes it slow, slow as he knows she would, long steady strokes from base to head, pad of his thumb tugging and pushing at his foreskin until a single warm line of precome is dripping down his knuckle to the back of his hand.

And yes, he's thinking about her and her wide eyes, wet mouth open for him and her small breasts heaving, her eagerly spread legs and her lips between them dark pink and glistening and ripe for his tongue - but he's also thinking about himself, about the calloused roughness of his own grip, about how good it feels to roll his hips and push into it. Without realizing it his other hand has started moving according to some agenda he wasn't even consciously aware of - dropping down to toy with his balls, passing in a lazy caress up the inside of his thigh, over his hip and the hard plane of his stomach. He captures his breath behind his ribs, holds it, feels. The firm rise and dip of his own muscles and how he can make them jump and twitch with light scratches of his nails, the ribs behind which he can feel that trapped breath fluttering, his chest. His thumb swipes across his nipple and as sharp heat surges through him and his back twists itself upward he makes a noise he's not sure he's ever gotten out of himself in his entire fucking life.

He's done more than touch himself since she came crashing into his life. He's done more than jerk off. He's taken his time, and both with and without her guidance in his ear he's done what she would have if she was there. He's learned at least a little of how to enjoy himself. He's come to believe that he might be worth enjoying.

But not like this.

Maybe it's the storm - the growl of the thunder like he's locked in the purring throat of the world, the wind lashing rain against the house, and the hungry power thrumming through it all and waiting to spike toward the ground. But it might not be. It might simply be that he's finally ready to be with himself this way. It doesn't matter; what matters is that he's on his back with his legs spread and the sheets kicked down around his ankles and he's playing with himself, exploring like he's never touched any part of himself at all, and if he could he might be startled by it.

But really it's not that startling.

Tracing his fingers down the curves of his bicep and his forearm and feeling how they flex as he works his shaft in a fist slick with his own arousal. The tense bands of tendon in his throat, his collarbones, and back to his chest, finding his nipple and pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, gasping and releasing, circling it with the edge of his thumb and feeling it tighten into a little nub as hard as hers has ever been as the storm inside him sends spiderwebs of lightning from it straight down to the root of his cock.

There's the wind and the rain but over and above it there are the quiet sounds he's coaxing out of himself: breathy sighs, low groans, sobs that stutter and hitch and never quite escape him. He's nearly writhing under his own strong hands, thrusting up to chase his own touch, arching and panting and digging his nails into the smooth skin just above his collarbone. The frantic drum of the blood behind his closed eyes is keeping perfect time with the patter of the rain on the window, with the rise and fall of his body in the slow wave he's made of it. He's making himself feel so good, so fucking good, being so sweet, just as generous as she would be, tossing his head back and biting his lip and Christ, he's so close, he's getting himself so close, she told him to and he is, racing toward the edge with his cock burning in the circle of his fingers and making his whole body a prairie fire. Begging himself silently to let himself come, please, please, he can't fucking stand it, his fingers and his teeth, his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth, his cock thicker and heavier in his hand, the storm raging everywhere and he wants, he wants, Jesus fucking God, he wants it...

He freezes right on the fucking edge and trembles and rolls to the side, his face twisting, everything twisting, simply trying to breathe. Waiting to back down. His right hand is sticky; he disentangles it and lifts it, licks the salty-sweetness of his precome off his fingers. The desperate, throbbing ache between his legs feels like it should be making the walls quake, but in here everything is still.

The storm is confined outside again.

He pulls the sheets back up and clenches them in his fists, bearing up under waves of pained shuddering. At some point he finds his breath and what remains of his voice, and whispers her name to darkness that enfolds him like her arms.

It's not a prayer, no. But it's as close as he thinks he would ever want to get.

By dawn it's all blown through and left the sky scrubbed clean, and the quiet is so intense and so complete that it feels almost like deafness. The birds have apparently been stunned into taking a morning off. No one is on the street - not that a lot of people usually are, and especially not this early. Daryl stands on the landing outside his door, hands on cool iron still beaded with rain, and stares out at the world.

Branches litter the yard. Branches litter everything and everywhere. Across the street a particularly thick one has taken a tangle of line with it. Where leaves haven't gathered into piles they're carpeting the ground, the grass and the pavement nearly obscured. They're plastered to cars as if someone got way too enthusiastic with handbills. They didn't fall; they were ripped down, torn, and it's exactly as he thought it would be.

The trees are all completely bare. Skeletal. The wind left nothing, spared nothing. Took it all.

It might still be early November but autumn is over. The fire is out. He's standing on the front edge of winter, and it's going to be a cold one.

And he's still here. He was supposed to be gone three months ago and he's still here, and it's not just because she wants him here. Not anymore. He has no plan, no idea what's next; he's been kicked out of a very old and very ugly nest and fly or fall, he can't go back. Time isn't the shape it used to be, and maybe that really is her doing and maybe it isn't, but it's still moving. Still sweeping inexorably along like a river in flood.

He's always been a good swimmer. So is she. One flood already couldn't drag either of them down.

A month ago he wasn't afraid. He isn't afraid now.

He gets in the truck and goes to work.