Chapter 84: all the words that I've been reading have now started the act of bleeding

He has no idea what smell he's waking up to.

He knows that there is one, and he knows that it's familiar and he knows that he likes it. A lot. But the context makes it incomprehensible. He lies curled on his side and half into a warm depression that can only have been left by someone else's body, and he keeps his eyes closed against the insistent morning light even though opening them and looking around would probably provide some explanations.

He doesn't want to. Doesn't want to open his eyes, doesn't care particularly about the explanations doing so might get him. He's so comfortable and he feels so good - in spite of a faint burn on one side of his back - and he's full of the vague but very solid knowledge that something wonderful has happened and is still happening.

And it has something to do with that smell.

Then he hears the quiet clang of metal on metal coming from the direction of the kitchen, and he finally makes a concession to curiosity, opens his eyes a crack and peers.

Small blond girl, her long hair all in disarrayed tangles and wearing one of his older, softer button-down shirts with the sleeves torn off, her back to him as she does something with the stove.

So that explains the smell, and now he recognizes it as eggs. Eggs, cooking.

He watches her for a moment, unmoving and slightly incredulous, then pushes himself up and swipes a hand down his face, gives his still-protesting eyes a rub with the heel of his palm and stares at her again.

"Beth?"

She tosses a glance over her shoulder, a brilliant smile. "Oh. Hey." Back to the stove again, shifting a skillet around against the burner. "Be ready in a minute."

"Are you makin' breakfast?"

"Yep." She turns and moves to the side, reaching up and searching through cabinets. "You actually got plates, or do you just eat everything right outta what you cook it in?"

"You're assumin' I do any cookin' at all." He does. Not well and confined almost entirely to things that come dried in boxes, but he does. Someday he dimly hopes to graduate to mixing in fresh things and coming out with something edible. "One on the right there- Your other right, girl."

She shoots him a look, opens the correct cabinet and gets the plates, rummages in the drawer beneath for forks - apparently she does somehow know where he keeps those. "Would've made bacon too but you didn't have any, so it's just eggs and toast. I had to make the toast in the oven. You think maybe you might eventually get a toaster?"

He scratches absently at the back of his head, mouth twisting. Smiling. She's just moving right in. Somehow that isn't in the least surprising; she was respectful of his space and his claim on it the second she walked into it, but she's also never seemed anything but comfortable here, at least in the parts of it he occupies. "The fuck am I gonna toast?"

"Uh, bread? Bagels? Pop Tarts - you actually have those, do you just eat them cold?" She turns to him, plates piled with eggs. Scrambled. They look very fluffy. She wrinkles her nose, apparently still on the subject of Pop Tarts. "That's gross."

"You always gonna get all judgey on me five fuckin' minutes after I wake up? Is that gonna be a thing?"

Always. Like that might be a thing too.

She brings the plates over, drops to her knees and kisses the corner of his mouth - quick and firm - before she hands him his. "If you always smile like that when I do, then yeah, probably."

He takes the plate but he doesn't look away from her, and she holds his look, reaching up with her free hand and combing his hair back from his face. She smells like eggs, and she also smells faintly like yesterday's shampoo, like mint toothpaste, like sex, and he leans into the touch, eyes half closed.

God, if every fucking morning could be this way.

"You smile a lot more now," she says softly. "I like it."

"Maybe I just got more stuff to smile about."

"Yeah. Maybe." She looks at him a moment longer, her own smile dancing at the corners of her mouth and in her eyes and her fingertips tracing down his cheekbone, then settles herself on the bed next to him, her plate on her thigh. "Eat your eggs, they're gonna get cold."

He does as he's told.

The eggs are indeed fluffy. They're just about perfect. Eggs are one thing he can do that isn't out of a box that usually ends up pretty edible, but he can never get them like this. It might be some kind of dark magic. He wouldn't put it past her. She has powers, after all.

After a few moments of eating in comfortable silence he tries to ask how long can you stay but his mouth is full, so it comes out in a jumble of syllables. She laughs, kicks at him, tells him to mind his manners, and he swallows and tries again. And she cocks her head and smiles wider.

"All mornin'. Lotta the afternoon, if you want. I should get back before five, but if you wanna kick me out earlier-"

He reaches over and cups a hand against her knee, catches her gaze. Holds it. She was kidding, he's well aware of that, but even so. He needs her to know. "I don't wanna kick you out ever."

"Alright," she murmurs, covers his hand with hers and squeezes. And it hits him that he really means it. He really doesn't want her to leave. Ever. That's always been true, sort of, but now it's true in a violently insistent, almost aggressive way that catches him and grips, shakes him a bit.

If only every morning could be like this. If only that could happen.

They finish the eggs and the toast almost at the same time and put their plates aside on the floor according to an unspoken mutual decision, and she rolls onto her back and he leans over her, plucks the buttons of the shirt open and spreads it, palms her and kisses and sucks at her nipples, slides down and settles between her legs and stays for a while, stays until she's clutching at his hair and pleading with him, and he smiles against her and gives her what she wants with firm little flicks of his tongue. And he pushes himself up, turns her onto her side and lines himself up behind her, fumbles for a condom and fucks her long and slow and hard, fucks her until she's whining and trembling and clutching at him again. Begging him - harder. Please, oh God, fuck me harder.

Then after, drowsing, tangled. He holds her close and thinks about the rest of the day in a vague, unfocused way under his doze, and by the time they both begin to stir he knows what he wants to do next.

After a shower. Which is also very nice, and which also goes on for a while - careful and slow because of the tattoo, but not only.

It's not just that he's really and truly fucking someone now, and doing it semi-regularly. It's that he's doing it so much. And it's so good every time. Even when it's not explosive, even when it's something he guesses might not necessarily blow someone else's mind, to him it's so, so good. Because she is.

She's not a goddess. She's a girl. And she's not perfect. She's better.

"Still not tellin' me where we're goin'?"

He glances at her. She's leaning against the window, body angled toward him and one boot up on the seat, knee hugged to her chest, and she might be injecting some impatience into her voice but he can tell it's feigned. She's all curious amusement. This is something they do, he's finding: they concoct surprises for each other, and so far - aside from one particular exception - the results have been good almost without fail. She likes surprises. So, as it turn out, does he. At least when they're hers.

He's pretty sure she'll like this one.

He shakes his head and she snorts a quick laugh, pokes at his thigh with the toe of her boot.

They're heading out through the outskirts neighborhood full of smaller family homes - a clear late Saturday morning without too much of a bite in the air, so people are out and about and children of various ages are periodically running into and out of view, with and without toys, usually shrieking. Daryl has to swerve to avoid one - a pretty little girl with a collection of long, beaded braids and a battered scooter. It's not at all a close thing, but she turns and gives him the finger in an amiable kind of way.

He respects that.

"Sure you want kids?"

"My kids'll be perfect." And Beth's delivery is so utterly deadpan that for a fraction of a second he's not sure she's kidding.

The experience of finding the place - and then the place itself - had been so strange and borderline surreal that part of Daryl is honestly wondering if they'll find it again. If it'll even be there. If it was some kind of location caught between dimensions, winking into and out of existence only at specific intervals. If he'll arrive at the street where he's certain it was and there will only be an empty storefront, maybe some faded lettering on the window. And if then he'll ask a passing resident about it, and they'll give him a very significant look and, in a voice calculated for maximum ominousness, say Why, no one's been in that building for TWENTY YEARS.

It really doesn't feel impossible.

But when he hits the street in question, it's there.

He pulls over - in front of it this time - and cuts the engine. Beth sits forward and peers past him and out the window at it, brow slightly furrowed. But not because she doesn't like it. He can tell that immediately. She's even more curious now. Her attention is well and truly captured.

Like he figured it would be.

"So what is it?"

He shrugs, smiling a bit. "Says it on the window."

"That's not what I mean and you know it. You wouldn't bring me to just anywhere like this." She leans in, hand on his arm, and he can see in her eyes the same species of thing he saw the night before at the tattoo parlor. The same thing he saw when he took her out with the bow.

This is so important to her. Simply because it's something he thinks is important enough to share with her.

He reaches over and covers her hand with his, lifts it, presses his lips to her knuckles and says nothing at all. Because sometimes he gets the clearest, sharpest look at the workings of her wonderful mind, at how she throws herself into the world like every part of it might be worthy of her time, and he still can't handle it. It still fucks him up in the best possible way.

He's better than he was. But he still wants so badly to be like her, and he still suspects he never quite will be.

"C'mon." He curls his fingers around hers and gives her a gentle tug, and when he gets out she follows him.

The next thing he's wondering is if it's open, given that it barely struck him as open before. But when he tries the door it swings in with that soft jingle, and as he holds it for Beth she steps inside, looking around and blinking.

She has every reason to blink. It's just as dim as he remembers, and in fact a little dimmer, because it appears to be even more crammed with stuff than before. Aaron expressed a desire to thin things out; instead it seems like he's made some new acquisitions, though it's less that Daryl spots anything specific and more a general feeling. A sense of increased compression.

Possibly Aaron didn't acquire anything. Possibly this much stuff in this small a space is able to reproduce in some fashion. Or maybe this is some kind of dimension-straddling building, and things keep spilling in from whatever the other dimension is.

Again, a lot of previously impossible things now seem distantly plausible.

Beth is slowly turning in place, hands in the pockets of her coat as she scans the shelves and the walls and the floors and the window and everything in and on and around all of it. She's chewing meditatively on her bottom lip, and he remains where he is for a few seconds, breath suspended, before he realizes that he's waiting to see what her reaction is and he's feeling the slightest undercurrent of anxiety as he does. Because he can see someone walking into this establishment and looking around, taking in the junk and the dust and the basement-cellar smell that lingers thick in the air, and walking right back out again.

But this is Beth. So naturally when she faces him she's smiling. A small smile, but clearly its size has very little to do with the sincerity of the feeling behind it.

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why'd you bring me here? You still haven't told me."

"You know the books? That shelf?" She nods. He goes on, though comprehension is already dawning on her face. "Got 'em here."

"Oh." Her smile widens just a touch and she looks around again. Before he can say anything else - not that he's sure what he would say - she's moving forward in the direction of one of the aisles, reaching up to run a hand along a shelf featuring a dusty selection of grotesque bobbleheads of American presidents. They all start jiggling as she passes. "There's so much... everythin'."

"Yeah. Pretty much." He follows her, watching her progress, and just as he had spotted the same expression she had been wearing when he took her to the woods, he's feeling almost the same. Not that this place is his in the way the trees and the sun-dappled paths and the clearings and glades had been, but it's somewhere he found. And if it comes to it, he does feel comfortable here. Though he couldn't say why.

"Is anyone else here?" She glances over her shoulder, effortlessly dodging a hanging rack of kitchen knives. They look very blunt, but it still strikes him as hazardous. He makes a mental note to mention it.

"Dunno. I mean, probably. Door's unlocked." He raises his voice. "Aaron?"

Nothing. The slightly muffled sound of his and Beth's footsteps over several layers of dust and a faint rustle in the distance that might be something opening, shifting, or falling onto the floor. He's about to call again when a voice - unfamiliar - comes to them from that same distance. It sounds tense.

"Just a sec!"

Beth glances at him again, eyebrow raised. He shrugs. He thinks he remembers something about a partner.

"Should we wait here?"

He shakes his head, touches her shoulder and nudges her on - deeper into what he supposes one could describe as the building's bowels, though that's not very attractive. "Might never find us if we do."

"Or we might get lost. Starve."

"Won't starve. There's mice." There basically have to be mice.

They hit the narrow end of the aisle and are forced down another one - this one featuring all furniture of various types and sizes, in various conditions. Some of it looks glossy and old and might be genuinely valuable. Some of it looks like several generations of children tried to refinish it with crayons. Some of it looks like absolutely nothing he's ever seen before. All of it is interesting, and Beth is bending close to some of it, back to trailing her curious fingers over rough and smooth and knobby alike, but she looks up when the voice that called to them starts to be audible again - muttering, still tense.

"What the hell did you- It's not here."

At an even further distance, and finally familiar, "Eric, I swear to God, I put it there."

"Swear to God, you didn't." Scuffling. A hard sigh. "Where is there?"

"By the three mannequins who look like Johnny Depp."

"I'm there, it isn't here." More scuffling, the sound of something small and soft thumping onto the floor, a quiet string of curses. "I thought you got rid of these, they're really goddamn creepy."

"Deal fell through. Hang on, I'm coming over."

"No, don't-" At that moment they hit the end of the aisle and turn again, and just to their left is a wiry man with reddish-blond hair crouching over a collection of small boxes, all of them open, two of them upended and spilling out cracked blank CD cases and motheaten teddy bears wearing garish bowties. He's looking up and toward what has to be the back of the building, mouth open in mid-yell, but Beth's toe nudges a stack of children's books and knocks one of them to the floor, sending up a little puff of dust. The man jerks his head around, clearly startled.

Standing over him are three mannequins that do indeed bear an uncanny resemblance to Johnny Depp. To Daryl's eyes, anyway. To the extent that he remembers off the top of his head - or cares - what Johnny Depp looks like. All of them are naked except for the purple sequined fedora tipped at a jaunty angle on the center one's head.

"Oh." The man - Eric, Daryl gathers - swallows and gives them both an awkward smile. "Hi."

"Hi." Beth steps forward, and the smile curving the corners of her own mouth is both amused and pleased. "Are you open?"

"Not technically, but..." Eric straightens up and slaps an enormous quantity of dust off the legs of his jeans. "I'm guessing Aaron left the door unlocked again-" This shot toward the back with a flash of a glare. "-so yeah, I suppose." He shifts his gaze from Beth to Daryl, still not completely at ease. "Is there something I can help you with?"

"Was here before." This man really doesn't seem much like Aaron, yet somehow after about ten seconds of being semi-formally acquainted he strikes Daryl as exactly the kind of guy who might fit him in some ways. "Met Aaron. He's-"

"Daryl?" About ten feet away - closer than Daryl would have guessed - Aaron's head pokes up, periscope-like, from behind a mound of clothes. He's smiling. He's also dusty, hair streaked with gray. "Hey! Wasn't sure I'd see you again. Eric." He shuffles up and forward, clambering over another stack of boxes and hopping down. "That's the guy I told you about."

"Oh," Eric says again, and this time he looks a bit less uncertain. "You bought the books. And the shelf. Right." He lets out a hard breath and wipes at his forehead, leaving a smear of dust. "I'd thank you for taking them off our hands, but I don't think it helped very much."

"He saved my life," Aaron says, reaching them and giving Daryl a quick, sunny grin. "Like I said."

Beth sends him a quizzical look in the midst of her smile, and again he shrugs at her. Great, back to this. Though it doesn't make him feel as weird as once it probably would have. "Stop."

"No, seriously. I would've been trapped. Might have never been found. I might've starved."

"You wouldn't have starved," Beth says dryly. "There's mice."

"Oh my God, are there mice." Aaron turns his beam of a smile on her, Eric after him. "And you're-"

"Beth." She offers him a hand. They both take it in turn. They get it dusty, and she doesn't seem to mind at all. She's still half looking around, her focus scattered everywhere like the light through the cracks and crannies of the shelving, her eyes wide. Enchanted. This is all about as odd as it was the previous time he was in here, but Daryl also can't think of many ways it could be better.

This is almost exactly what he was hoping for.

"Sorry about the mess," Aaron is saying to her, gesturing at the mess in question. "We're still going through all of it, and I swear to God, there's more of it than there was when we started. I kind of keep hoping someone might walk in and take the whole damn thing off our hands, but-"

"-but that's not going to happen, because I say."

And there's something in the look Aaron and Eric exchange then - an alchemically perfect combination of profound exasperation and warm fondness - that sheds a good bit of new light on the term partner.

Oh.

For the vast majority of his life Daryl has lived in surroundings and among people where and for whom this would be just about every kind of possible problem. For whom this would be at best violently uncomfortable, and at worst cause for actual violence. He's seen it. Once or twice he's seen some very ugly things done to people like he now gathers Aaron and Eric probably are. And now he is uncomfortable, a bit, suddenly unsure of where to put his eyes or what to do with his hands. But it feels like discomfort that has far more to do with him than with them.

He looks at them, both now talking earnestly to Beth about what they've been going through regarding nightmares of inventory and being half certain one of them will walk in here and never be seen again, Beth listening and still wearing that odd, pleased little smile, and they seem like good guys, and it feels like something he should maybe just get the fuck over.

He's been told a lot of lies about a lot of things. A lot of people, and not only himself. It's both relieving and disturbing how many new ones he keeps discovering.

"-so look around," Eric is saying. "I'm begging you. Anything you see you think you might want to carry out of here, I can't tell you what a favor you'd be doing us. I think some chaos is kind of cute, in a way, but."

Aaron glances over at the mannequins. "I don't suppose you'd like-"

"No." He and Beth say it in perfect unison, and Aaron looks caught between feeling crestfallen and cracking the fuck up. And Beth grabs for his hand, gives it a quick squeeze, releases it and leaves waves of soft warmth rolling up his arm.

He'll get over this. He'll get the fuck over himself. He doesn't even think it's going to be all that hard.

They bid Aaron and Eric a temporary farewell and leave them - squabbling affectionately - to wander the aisles. Beth is quiet, her attention still soaking in everything around her, gathering it in and spinning it around itself in a way that's almost literally visible. Daryl watches her far more than anything else; he's seen all of this he really cares to see, and now it's just her. Seeing everything through her. Not her eyes but her whole body, everything about her - her rapt, wide-eyed gaze, sure, but also her lips, parted and moving slightly as if in silent conversation with someone or something unseen, the way her hands keep rising to touch and trace and outline, delicate and entirely unhesitating. He doesn't know exactly when he started noticing this about her - how she moves through the world with all of her fully engaged in every part of it - but it must have been early, because it feels like it's something he's always known. Not just how she talks, how she feels. How she is.

The ruins? Was it that day, all sun-drenched stone and the rustle of trees, her practically dancing across the grass? Or was it the rain, the coffee shop, watching her out of the corner of his eye as he drove her into town?

Or was it even earlier than that?

He knows her so well now. But each time he sees something like this, it's the first time all over again. He wonders if he'll ever know her fully. And not because she hides anything from him.

Simply that there's so goddamn much to know.

"How did you find this place?"

He grunts, reaches up to re-situate a large glass soap dispenser - a weird green that seems to glow with its own internally sourced luminescence. "Just did."

"I dunno about that. I think maybe it was more."

"Think whatever you like, girl."

She halts, nudges herself backward and against his chest, and he catches her with his hands on her hips - automatic at first and then considerably less so. He leans down and presses his lips to the crown of her head, and she rolls her head back and sighs.

She still smells like them. Like him. It's so faint it might be only his imagination, but he knows it isn't. Their times together are persistent. They can't be washed off by a single shower. Whatever reality they have, it's more than what lingers on and in the skin.

"I think..."

"What d'you think?"

He touches her lips, feels her smile. "I think I wanna find somethin'."

"Like what?"

"I dunno." She pulls easily away and starts forward, going swift, tossing her hair over her shoulder. A thin beam of sun lances through the dusty air and catches her braid, lights it up like woven golden rope. "I'll know when I find it."

He does the only thing he could ever do, ever for the rest of his life, and follows her.

He loses track of the hour. The sun isn't absent but it's difficult to see clearly, bounced around in a way that makes it impossible to glean anything about time of day from it. And this place seems to have a way of eating temporal increments, a kind of time-dilation akin to but very different from anything she herself can do. They wander and they wander, mostly in silence, and she looks at the shelves and does so with meticulous care. Everything spotted and considered, even if only for a second or two.

Even the damn kayak on the wall. Though he thinks she's mostly just bemused by that.

But finally - near the front of the store, in brighter and more direct light - she stops, looking to her right at something eye-level, and there's a quality to her expression, a distinct kind of sharp-edged brightness, that makes him pretty sure she's found something.

He moves up behind her, hand on her shoulder. "What-?"

But then he sees.

It's another one of those shelves - a whole series of them, actually - covered in a bewilderingly eclectic assortment of things. Things is really the only word broad enough to capture the sheer variety; there are candleholders, snow globes, china figurines, plastic figurines, angels and fairies and unicorns and plain old run-of-the-mill horses, teacups that might be the only one of their kind in the universe for all they match any others there, jars, bottles, boxes, more jars, woodcarvings of animals and people and things that don't precisely exist, a metal tree dangling with what appears to be a hundred or so tiny prisms. He looks at these things - at her looking at them - and all at once he's back in her bedroom for the first time, awkward and hesitant in the warm glow of her lamp, turning his back on a beautiful girl wearing a huge pink Disney World tee and looking at her...

Her shelf. Where she keeps her things. Where part of her started, maybe, and went from there. Some of it very like this other stuff - not unattractive but essentially useless and not seeming to possess any special significance for him or for anyone - but not all. In among her own souvenir snow globes and cheap little figurines there had been a carved wooden bear, and it had caught his eye over everything else. Because it was pretty in a real way that none of the other things possessed, and because something about its placement told him that she liked it more than almost anything else there.

Then, putting it back, the falling book. He caught it. She plucked it out of his hand. And she read.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention.

Now she's looking at the shelf right in front of her, where - sitting between a terrifying plaster clown and what looks like a toddler's Play-Doh art project, its head raised and ears pricked, neck sliding in a graceful gleaming slope down to an equally graceful and gleaming back - is a small crystal doe with eyes stained blue.

Because of course there is.

She picks it up. She does so carefully, more carefully than she's handled or even looked at anything else so far, and she lifts it into the light, turning it so every line and facet of it has its chance to catch the sun. The eyes glow brilliant, eerily so, and Daryl looks into them and thinks about shelves. About things. About how they wait on those shelves for just the right person at just the right time for just the right reason.

In literally any other context he would have considered this twee as all fuck. But here...

Not so much.

Could be nothing. Could just be the same manufacturer - probably tens of thousands of these animals were made in some factory somewhere, and probably he could walk into any junk shop anywhere in this part of the country and have a better than average chance of finding something at least sort of like this.

Could be. Or could be nothing of the kind. Or the two might not even be mutually exclusive.

Beth turns to him and breaks open the circles his thoughts are spinning in, holding the deer out so he can see. As if he needed any help in that regard. "It's like yours."

He clears his throat. "Yeah." It is.

She looks up and graces him with a thoughtful curve of her lips. "You didn't spot this last time you were in here?"

He shakes his head. He could probably come in twenty or thirty times and not see even half of what's here.

"Probably would've bought it if you had." She looks down at it again, cradling it in her palms. It's smaller than the wolf, but not by much. "It's just as pretty."

"You should have it."

She flicks her gaze back up to him, faint surprise in the tilt of her chin. "I was gonna say you should-"

"No. You."

He doesn't know why. He doesn't need to know why. It isn't even about the poetry of events or the rhythm and rhyme of chance. It isn't about some externally reinforcing idea of what's appropriate, and it sure as hell isn't about fate, whose existence he supposes he has to accept on some level by now but which he won't accept happily. He's aware that there's a thing people in love are supposed to do sometimes, where one of them has one half of a matched pair of things, and this isn't that; this is a deer, not a wolf, with the crystal and the blue eyes the only real similarity, and in fact they don't look all that much alike. The deer looks older, smoother. The wolf is more angular. Harsher in some very subtle ways.

It's not about any of that. It's about how she picked it up and it threw light onto her face, drew it out of her, and it's pretty and she clearly likes it.

And he can buy it for her.

He wants to do so with the kind of desperation he isn't sure one is supposed to feel in minor retail situations.

He doesn't really have anything to give her. Except he does. Now and then he does.

"Let me," he says, before she can say anything else, and he doesn't think he's allowing any of that sweetly fierce desperation he feels into his tone, but something about the look on her face makes him think she knows anyway.

She knows him.

She curls one hand around the deer and presses the other against his chest, lifts herself on her toes, and kisses him soft and slow - sighs into it when he takes her face in his hands and presses deeper. And when there's the gritty sound of a shoe in the dust behind him and an almost inaudible breath - Eric or Aaron, he can't tell and doesn't give a single particle of a fuck - he doesn't break it for a second.

In fact, he suspects he might be here with two of the people least likely to judge him for this in the entire world.

And they aren't.

Judging him, anyway. Judging either of them. Not that he can tell. The shoe in question turned out to belong to Aaron, who was somehow simultaneously looking at something on the wall and over his shoulder and very firmly at the floor when Daryl and Beth finally turned around. He had the look of someone who had just finished blushing and was relieved about the timing. But when he smiled at them, it was still utterly genuine.

Daryl isn't sure Aaron can fake a smile any better than he can.

Leaving Eric behind to root around in boxes and string together elaborate curses under his breath, Aaron led them back in the general direction of the front. Daryl could feel it coming - same as last time - and he was right; Aaron took the deer, took a look at it, and it was so clear that he was about to offer it to them for nothing that he might as well have said it. But Daryl snagged his eye, shut him up.

Aaron must be perceptive, for that to have worked.

I can pay. Let me pay.

Aaron let him pay. Twenty-five dollars, actually. Daryl suspects he was overcharged. As a favor. He was handing the deer to Beth and turning toward the door, when he cast a look back over his shoulder and caught the crooked hint of a smile on Aaron's face. Which he returned, remixed and sent back in compressed format. He doesn't think he really had to explain much of anything to Aaron.

He wonders how much Beth picked up. It's Beth, so probably just about everything.

He always sort of figured being in love with someone involved all kinds of weird little one-scene dramas, pretenses acted out and carefully maintained even when everyone involved knows exactly what they are. But he didn't know what kind.

Though he also suspects he and Beth might very possibly not be typical.

By the truck, she stopped and looked back, deer held in her hands, side and back glistening like ice. Now it's getting colder, the air sharpening - real ice possibly on the way tonight. But then, in the sun like she was, everything was warm, and gazing at her he could almost believe it was summer again.

"You should go back," she said softly, then turned her face to him, her expression as soft as her voice. Thank you. For taking her there. For taking her anywhere. For showing her anything. Everything. Moving through the world like this with her, intimate as being inside her. "When you. Y'know." She rolled a shoulder. "Need more stuff."

"Probably will." He will. He pulled the door open, nodded to her side. "C'mon."

Not a lot of time left. Not really. The sun, as it does, is moving, and it's on the upper end of its downward arc.

So now they're driving.

Not toward the farm. Out. Not toward Abby's place, either, or toward the forest and the clearing, or toward the ruins. Or toward what he's beginning to think of as The Road. This is a new direction, running roughly northwest - toward, Daryl imagines, where Alabama does as all right-minded entities should and gets tired of being Alabama, and instead becomes Tennessee. More mountains there, he thinks as the road unspools into a clean black ribbon cutting through a blanket of spreading gold. Beyond that... Kentucky. Illinois. Iowa. Lakes. Or he could cut harder west and hit Missouri and Kansas. Colorado and mountains beyond anything he's ever seen in his life.

God, he could. If he wanted. He really could. He could go anywhere. He doesn't want to; the wild, half-mad urge to do so from the night before hasn't returned to him, and he doesn't think it will. It feels like he's slipped over and past something.

But something else has broken open in him and he can't stop thinking like this.

"Where d'you wanna live?"

She looks sharply at him - surprise, not anger. She was toying with the deer, turning it over and over in the light, and now her fingers have gone completely still. He catches a glimpse of her face: eyes wide, clear, solemn. A little confused. "What?"

"When you move out. Get your own place. Where you want it to be? What kinda place?"

"I... I dunno. Told you, there's a lot I haven't figured out yet." He thinks that's all he's getting - is feeling sort of stupid, in fact, because she did tell him that and it's not even like he forgot, but the question burst out anyway - but she's looking thoughtful, and before he can foreclose on any of the rest of the potential conversation she continues it. "For a while I thought the city, Y'know, maybe Atlanta. Maggie's moved closer to it. But then... You remember I told you about the stars? About how there weren't any, about how it was like someone shuttin' off the sky?"

He nods. He does remember. That night in the field, where she told him she wasn't ready and they told each other they wanted it when she was. Moonshine or no moonshine, he remembers every goddamn second.

"I don't want that," she says quietly. "That's fine for visiting, but I don't wanna live like that. So somewhere in the country, I guess. Or maybe a small town. Like this one." She's wordless another brief moment, her hand on the subtle incline below where the door meets the window; it's far too cold to roll it down, and he notes that her fingers are twitching, like they itch to be making that graceful sine wave. "I know kids are supposed to wanna get outta things like that. Small towns. But I don't. I like it here."

"Me too," he whispers.

It's home. He doesn't want to leave it. Doesn't want to leave her.

But he could.

They climb up something that's a little more than a hill and a little less than a mountain, the harbinger of a larger collection of low tree-covered ridges looking back on rolling waves of farmland and forest. Toward the top there's an uninterrupted view from one side of the road and they park and get out, shivering in the wind that sweeps up the slopes - which must, Daryl thinks, be nearly constant. It's beautiful, all hard blue sky and fluffy clouds drifting between it and the ground, and he moves up behind her and wraps his arms around her waist, settles his chin on the top of her head. She sighs, and after a few seconds she covers his linked hands with hers.

It's so good.

"Got one more question," he murmurs, and in fact it's not the end of all of the questions, and she knows it. But it's the last one he wants to ask for now.

"Mm?"

"Why me?"

He can feel her nonplussed blink, as if it's intense enough to make use of all her muscles. "Why you what?"

Now truth. It doesn't hurt him anymore. It's just true. True things aren't always the options life goes with, but that doesn't make them less true, and this is something he's known since the beginning, even if he wound it up with angsty self-loathing, even if he used it as a cudgel to beat himself over the head and neck. And back.

"You could be with so many other people. Should be. I make no fuckin' sense at all. So why me?"

She turns in his arms, a bit jerky, and lays one hand against his chest, the other rising to cup his cheek. Half a smile is toying with the corner of her mouth, but she also appears equal parts incredulous and uncertain. "You kiddin' me, Daryl Dixon?"

"Not even remotely."

She merely stares at him for a long moment, and as before he's half certain that she doesn't intend to answer him. He wouldn't be upset, wouldn't blame her; it's a fuck of a question. But at last she strokes her thumb down the edge of his cheekbone, and he almost can't stand the way she looks at him. Shining, that gaze. Shining like stained blue crystal as the wind gently fingers strands of her hair loose from her ponytail and dances them around her face.

"'cause you're not like anyone else. 'cause the second I started talkin' to you I could tell you were listenin', and not like other people do. You really wanted to hear. You know how to pay attention." She smiles a little wider, and she's no longer uncertain at all. "I feel like I can show you things and you'll get it. You do get it, every time. You're kind. You're smart. You're strong, you're tough - I don't think you know it, but you are. You make me feel good, just bein' around you. You always have."

She takes a breath, and he thinks Stop, please stop, I can't, I literally can't take any more of this. He can hear that he's beautiful, and he can hear that she loves him, and he can believe both of those things, but all of this is something else, and she's saying each thing with utter genuine conviction, and it's slapping him in the face, twisting him up against her.

But he asked.

"You wanna try." She pushes up again, up on the toes of those worn old boots, and she kisses his mouth. "You do try. You try every day."

"Beth."

But he doesn't have to say anything else and she doesn't either, and she curls a hand around the nape of his neck and pulls him down and kisses him so long and deep, and as he frees her hair and tangles his fingers in it, his moan drowns out a wind he doesn't even feel anymore.

She's meeting her family in town. They're going out to dinner. He drops her off on an out-of-the-way corner not far from Main. She doesn't say a lengthy goodbye; he senses that she said it back on the hill, the overlook. There are all kinds of goodbyes, and he's been saying his share lately. One way or the other.

He doesn't watch her go. She said she doesn't know anyone in the neighborhood but he still shouldn't stick around. And anyway, his back is hurting again - burning in a way he can tell will linger for a while. He's tired. He should go home and rest.

He does. The sheets still smell like her - like her hair, her skin, her cunt. As usual it's more than enough for him to curl naked into them, pull up the blanket, breathe her in. All through his half sleep he's haunted by the memory of her fingers on his back, tracing every line. Her territory; she didn't choose the design and she didn't ink the thing into him, but she's claimed him all the same.

But she can't keep him here. He knows that now. She's powerful but her power doesn't extend that far. It's for him to choose. This is what he chooses.

This is what he plans to do.

At the back of the neck
the old skin splits.
The snake shivers
but does not hesitate.
He inches forward.
He begins to bleed through
like satin.

Note: Poem snippet is from "Rain" by Mary Oliver.