Just want to make a note here: I'm primarily posting this over at ao3, where this was originally an exclusive. There are author's notes and such there that don't make it over here, for a variety of reasons. And for those of you wondering why this doesn't have more faves/reviews: that's why. This was already about 300k words long when I put it here. It has not been here from the beginning.

Six chapters to go after this one. I mean, I've been wrong before (see Safe Up Here With You) but I really think so.

Sigh.

Those of you who hate cliffhangers: there will be more cliffhangers after this. I'm sorry; that's just the shape of these chapters. I'll try to write fast enough that there's not too much time between them, but frankly I don't do this for a living (THAT WOULD BE VERY NICE) and I can't promise anything.

/3

Chapter 87: it's funny how you just break down waiting on some sign

Sunday is cold. Not icy, not gray; it's brilliantly clear, brilliantly sunny. Daryl says goodbye to Beth standing in a pool of it, still groggy and blinking - didn't sleep much, no, and not for the reasons he prefers - and after she leaves to take the relatively short hike back to the richer neighborhood where Becca's family makes their home he stands at the window and watches her go until he can't see her anymore, the light moving over her in waves and her moving through it like it's her most natural environment, and he wonders when this is going to stop blowing him the fuck away.

He can't see how it will.

He eats breakfast - cold pizza, always bizarrely great. He waits until the sun is higher, until it's getting on to ten and soaking the world, and he goes downstairs from the inside, softly calls Carol's name. Turns out she's in the kitchen again with a cup of coffee, and she looks up at him as he enters and gives him a very faint smile. The cut on her lip somehow looks worse than it did the night before and she has dark pits under her eyes, but otherwise she actually looks pretty okay. He gets himself coffee, sits down across from her, doesn't say anything. He suspects that it's enough for him to be here.

At some point he runs out, gets a tremendous quantity of donuts, brings them back, and they eat a bunch of them. And at some other additional point her smile is a bit less faint.

She really is okay. So, he's now certain, is he.

A little after noon he leaves her and, operating on whatever whims his subconscious digs out of itself and hurls at him, he goes back to Aaron and Eric's place and he buys some curtains. Plain ones - all the available patterns were vividly colored and very busy and they made him vaguely uncomfortable - but they're a light blue that looks as if it'll admit a fair amount of light even when drawn, and they're yet something else that feels right. He takes them home, puts them up.

Standing there, looking at them, for some reason it occurs to him that he still has no TV. No stereo. No computer. Still not even a fucking smartphone. Nothing whatsoever to provide him with an audiovisual connection to the outside world, aside from going the fuck outside. This doesn't seem to be a problem for him, at least not so far, and it also isn't something that gives him any special gratification; he's never been impressed with how self-impressed people become about turning off their fucking whatevers and really being in the moment. He doesn't think really being in a moment is the kind of thing you get self-impressed about.

But it's the case. He has no music but Beth, and the memory of Beth, and his own internal and external voices. Otherwise he lives in gentle quiet.

Looking back on it, his whole life has been noisy, and none of it was very pleasant noise. There's a lot of quiet to make up.

He goes out again and drives.

Nowhere in particular. No radio on. Somewhere in the back of his head remain two truths, and they hiss and whisper and won't leave him alone: that there's a world out there which, sooner or later, he has to figure out what to do with, and that he doesn't want to leave this one. He never planned to leave. He expected that he would have to, but he never planned for it. He isn't planning for it now; he has a home, he has a job, he has Beth, he has every reason to do whatever it takes to hold onto all three. Nevertheless, he can't stop his mind turning in circles around it, reinforcing itself endlessly.

He seems to be capable of being happy when Beth isn't around, but he's never as happy as he is when he's with her. That shouldn't need reinforcing. That fact is strong enough and big enough and loud enough to stand on its own and for itself.

But the world is out there, and it doesn't mean what it used to.

And it feels like everything is moving faster now.

There's considerably less than a week until Thanksgiving with the Greenes. He has no idea how one does Thanksgiving. If there's something specific he should wear. Something he should bring. Something unexpected that's going to be expected of him. Something that's going to hit him out of nowhere, completely blindside him.

He should probably be afraid. Nervous, at least. He isn't either of those things. He supposes that when the time comes, he'll figure it out.

Not that long until Christmas, either. About a month. Less.

He should start thinking about something to give her.

What does Beth Greene want for Christmas?

Something else he trusts he'll know. When the time comes.

He calls her Monday night and asks her. Not about Christmas - he never really had a Christmas any more than he had a Thanksgiving - but about Thanksgiving itself and what it's going to be like. She doesn't give him a whole lot of detail, but he gets the sense that it's less to do with not telling him and more to do with there just not being much to tell. At least not by her estimation.

"It's just. Y'know. Thanksgiving." She laughs softly. "We eat turkey and stuffing, sweet potatoes, biscuits. Pie. Whole lotta everythin'. We talk about stuff. Maggie's gonna be home, she's bringin' this guy. Not sure Mama and Daddy know what to think about that yet," she adds thoughtfully.

"Yeah, but... What d'you do?" He's pacing the room, he realizes, and has been almost since the conversation started. Usually with her he's lying in bed, often on sleep's doorstep, her voice lulling him. Lulling him to other things. Now he can't seem to stop moving. It's not nervousness, he's still pretty sure, but it is a kind of nervous energy, an anticipation. Neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It's just kind of there. Something new, bearing down on him.

"I mean..." He can hear her thinking, searching for anything that might adequately answer his question. "Oh, Daddy goes 'round and asks everyone what they're thankful for. So I'd have an answer ready for that if I were you." Smile there. Teasing.

"Everyone?"

Okay, maybe a little nervous. A little. Because it sounds kind of like talking in front of people, not like any - very limited - dinner table conversation in which he's ever taken direct part. He doesn't do that. Talk in front of people. When he was in first grade - before things started getting truly awful - and not so good at just cutting out when he was being told to do something he didn't want to do, he dimly remembers being forced into a pathetic school play about magic animals or some shit and being so nervous he puked beforehand and almost during, and he didn't even have any fucking lines.

He thinks they made him be a bunny. He vaguely remembers something about floppy ears. As trauma goes it doesn't even sort of match the rest of the hell that followed, but even so.

Not that his father or his mother or Merle ever knew about it. He was very careful about that.

"It's not a big deal," she says gently. "Just one thing. Simple. Doesn't have to be some big production."

"Alright." Because he can't back out now, and anyway it shouldn't be a big deal. He's faced down worse. Plenty worse.

What is he thankful for?

How the fuck does he begin paring that list down?

"I'm real glad you're comin'." Still gentle. Tired, he can now hear. She yawns. "I think you'll be glad too. I know maybe it feels weird, but you will."

"I am." He is. When he said it to Annette he wasn't lying. Not about that, anyway.

"Good," she murmurs. And he's expecting them to start moving toward goodnight, but she's not done. "Oh, and we sing. We also do that."

Sing. That could be nice. Very nice.

"You and your mom? Maggie?"

"Everyone."

Oh.

The hundred different implications of this - actually there aren't anywhere near that many but they're all terrible - swing gleefully through his brain. He stops and blinks at the wall. "You don't mean-"

"No one's gonna make you do anythin'." Her voice is very soft. "But you should think about that too. I know you don't really... But you don't sound bad. Not at all. I promise, you don't. And I wouldn't just say that."

"What do you sing?" He's almost whispering. This is so strange.

"Whatever we feel like. Mama and Daddy sing hymns a lotta the time. Me and Maggie sing different stuff... More like what I sing now. Shawn doesn't usually do it alone, he's always with someone. The new guy, I don't know what he's gonna do. I mean, obviously." She pauses, and he knows exactly what her face is doing. That open, wide-eyed look, coaxing, firm but sweet. The look she has when she doesn't expect to hear no but only because she has very good reasons for getting a yes. "You can do whatever you want, Daryl."

Whatever he wants. Sure.

But he knows that there's something she's hoping for. She won't be upset if she doesn't get it. She won't be resentful and she won't hold it against him. But she's hoping.

"Alright." A promise of nothing. As noncommittal an affirmative response as he can manage. But after he says goodnight to her and hangs up, he's thinking about it. About how it might be.

He won't do it. Of course he won't. But he's thinking.

As always the body
wants to hide,
wants to flow toward it - strives
to balance while
fear shouts,
excitement shouts, back
and forth - each
bolt a burning river
tearing like escape through the dark
field of the other.

And he thinks of something else, on Tuesday night. The day before the day before. It's literally freezing outside, and through a kind of unspoken mutual agreement he ends up downstairs with Carol, sitting on the floor in front of the fire and smoking and picking spongy freeze-dried marshmallows out of his hot chocolate. Hot chocolate and peppermint schnapps. He doesn't like schnapps of really any kind, but turns out this is okay in hot chocolate, so there you go.

He likes all kinds of things he never expected to.

But then, staring into the flames and scratching one of the Unimpressed Cats behind the ears, this thing occurs to him, and he turns. She's sitting in that same chair - a survivor of the attack - gaze locked forward and firelit. She seems only half aware of him, and when he touches her knee she jumps slightly.

"Sorry."

"It's fine." She resettles herself, gives him a faint smile. "Fine. Just thinking."

"Got a lot to think about."

"Mhmm." She cocks her head. "What is it?"

"You doin' anything for Thanksgiving?"

She's quiet for a few seconds, brows drawing together, before she answers. "I wasn't really going to do anything, I guess. Why?"

"You wanna do somethin'?"

She shoots him a quizzical look. "Like what?"

He takes a breath. He's aware that this is tremendously presumptuous, and from more than one angle. But Beth is presumptuous. When he first met her she was presumptuous in every possible way, taking him by the arm and maneuvering him into her world of light and Niceness - and deeper, bigger things he couldn't have imagined at the time - because she saw him and saw need he didn't know he had, and the songs in her bones reached out to the silence in his. She's a force of nature, and nature abhors a vacuum. She wanted to fill him. Wanted it with all the force and irresistibility of primal instinct.

He doesn't just love her with everything in him. He wants to be like her. As much as he can.

That involves a degree of presumptuousness.

"I'm, uh... I'm havin' dinner with the family I work for. On that farm." He pauses, realizes that this necessarily introduces a subject about which they haven't yet spoken. "Beth's family." He rolls an awkward shoulder. "They're good people. I think maybe... You think maybe you wanna come? I think they'd probably be fine with it."

And he has no reason to assume that. Except really, when he thinks about it, he does.

Carol gives him an odd smile. He can't quite pinpoint what's behind it - except pain. Some. A kind of pain that may have no specific source and defies any easy description. "They don't know me."

"They know me." Really? Do they? "They were... I wasn't even workin' there a whole day and I was already havin' dinner with 'em. 's just how they are."

Carol doesn't answer. He watches her for a moment or two, studying her, and when he doesn't get much solid info out of that he turns again and allows his eyes to unfocus into the deep light. So maybe it was a stupid idea. Could be. He feels a little awkward about it, but not as much as he might have expected. It was worth a try, anyway.

"The girl who reads you poetry," she says softly.

He stiffens. Just for a second. Because here it is. "Yeah." He pauses again, then huffs a quiet laugh. "Actually these days I'm readin' to her. But yeah, that's. That's her."

"They don't know you're seeing her, do they?"

Actually he's not surprised she's picked that up. Imagining him and Beth side by side, guards down, it probably doesn't take a lot of mental gymnastics to arrive at that conclusion. "No."

"She's pretty young."

No judgment. Not that he can hear. Just an observation. So while elsewhere he might have gotten defensive, here he just nods, still not looking at her. "Yeah. She is."

"Y'know, anyone else, I think I'd have some concerns," she says, tone casual - he can tell it's carefully so. "But not you. Somehow. She didn't strike me as the kind of girl who gets taken advantage of. Not easily, anyway."

He shakes his head, takes a drag and exhales. Not much to say to that. Not much to add. She isn't. He doesn't know what would happen to someone who tried to take advantage of Beth Greene, but he's not sure he would want to be on the other end of that little experiment.

But she says not you and low, pleased warmth wells up in him. No loud voices in him rush to argue or deny. She says she doesn't worry about him doing something like that, and, well, yeah. He wouldn't. He hasn't and he wouldn't and he's honestly not sure he could.

And there is something to add, actually.

"I love her."

"I know."

He glances back at her and she's smiling. It's small and it's warm too, matching what's inside him, amplifying it, and he's suddenly so glad that she's here and he's with her that his lungs clench and for a brief moment he can't get any air into them.

"Please come," he whispers.

Another short patch of silence. On the other end of it she nods, and somehow he knew she was going to. "Alright. I'd be fine on my own - really, I would... But you ask them, and if they say yes I'll come."

He ducks his head, looks back into the red depths of the fire. The cat flops onto her side and rolls, arches in a sensuously feline stretch and exposes her belly to the heat. The cigarette is burning down between his fingers and he flicks it into the flames. When he picks the mug up it's warm in his hands, warm as anything. It feels like nothing happened here. It feels like this place was never touched by anything bad. And in fact it wasn't. It came close, but he thinks maybe the House of Light mounts its own defenses, and that night they were there.

He's happy. Sometimes that simple fact hits him and bowls him over, knocks him on his ass, because he had no idea what it really felt like before all this.

He's happy. Even a second of this is worth any pain it takes to get here.

On Wednesday morning he asks Hershel. Hershel seems a bit bemused, but he says yes. Yes, sure, his friend can come.

And there's something about the way Hershel says friend that makes it clear what the assumption there is, and wow, that's just really fucking awkward, but as he gives the man a small smile and hopes it doesn't look too tense and walks away into the path of a cold hard wind, he understands that there isn't much to do about it now.

Might even be good. Might be good if they think that. Might be additional cover, make them less likely to see certain things, and that is most certainly good. Because he's tired of lying, or he's starting to get there in a new and much bigger way, but the necessity of it is still there. If he wants this, and he does very much, the lie must remain in place.

At least for as long as possible.

There's still a lot he thinks he'd be willing to do in order to make sure it does.

There's still the matter of what the fuck he's going to wear.

He agonizes over this. Nearly every single item of clothing he has is second or third-hand and very worn. And that's never been something to which he had to give a second's anxious thought, because he's never done anything or been anywhere that required more than that. Dinners before now - coming off a day of hard work, he'll wash his hands, but of course he's not going to be all dolled up. But this feels different, because it is.

He puts it off until Wednesday evening. Drags his ass out to the much-despised Walmart and stomps around the aisles, glaring at things and sometimes at people. Yeah, he's generally happy a lot these days. With Beth he's deliriously so. Doesn't mean foul moods can't find him.

So it's the awful tinny music on the PA and the hard, slightly flickering lights poking a headache into his eyes, a bunch of kids running and shrieking toward the electronics department and something that smells like and may in fact be weeks-old spilled cheap perfume. But also, yeah, he's nervous. That thing from before about not being nervous was bullshit. He's nervous, and turns out he's not an asshole who ruins everything, but he is in over his head, more even than usual, and he doesn't want to fuck this up. Not in front of Beth. Not in front of Beth's family. Now not in front of Carol.

Oh God, what was he thinking there.

Well, as a family they don't strike him as overly formal. Coming out of church they've never been all that fancy. Okay, so. He has information to go on. He has intelligence on which to base strategy.

He is making this way, way too complicated.

He grits his teeth and in the end he settles for a pair of jeans, unusual for him in that they're new and unstained and have no thin spots or holes, and a dark gray button-down shirt with no discernible pattern, and boots that are intensely cheap and which he expects to fall apart in about a week but which also look fresh and new. Not fancy, but neat. He can be neat.

He tells himself over and over, in the ponderous checkout line, that he really doesn't have anything to prove to these people. They already think well of him. If he shows up sober and coherent and mostly not a mess, and he minds his manners like he already knows he can, he'll be fine.

Halfway home, the lights of surrounding traffic bleeding into bright, blurry obscurity, he thinks about Maggie's mysterious guy and bringing him home to meet the parents and what that must feel like from his end and what he must feel like he's up against, and he almost has to stop and put his head down on the wheel. Because he didn't mean for this part to happen, but it's happening, and he didn't know it would feel like this, and he frankly should have.

He knows these people. He does.

But they don't know him.

Lying in the dark, extremely awake and staring up at the ceiling and biting at his lips, whirling circles. Worrying and nosing like a freaked out dog. This is dangerous. Or it might be. He didn't realize just how much until now, until he's locked in. It's dangerous because he's out of his element, as he already knew, but that means part of him might break open if he flounders. He might slip. He might do something stupid. And not stupid in a way that embarrasses himself or Beth or Carol.

He might do something stupid.

Not because he's desperate. Not because he's starving for her and he's struggling to control himself because he can't bear it. Simply because he's moving through new territory all the time now, unfamiliar terrain, and even if he's very careful it doesn't take much to trip. Tripping when he's by himself? Not a big deal. Tripping in front of others, strangers? Apparently that can be managed.

Tripping in front of these people is potential disaster.

He's not a complete idiot, and he's not completely oblivious. Part of him knows: this can't go on forever, not as it is, if for no other reason than that nothing can. Nothing does. But not like this. Please God, the God who isn't there, please not like this.

He has to go, so he goes. Early Thursday afternoon he and Carol get into that damn truck, and he goes.

And yes, it's pretty much a quiet little disaster.

Just not exactly in the way he was afraid it might be.

Note: Poem snippet is "Lightning" by Mary Oliver.