Okay. So this is the first of the last five chapters (The Final Five, as I've come to think of them; thank you, Battlestar Galactica). The one after is written; I won't be posting it immediately but I will post it soon.

The final three chapters won't be posted in a single block, as I was intending, but they'll follow in very rapid succession, over a period of no more than three days.

I'm not sure what to say at this point except what I'll be saying again probably more than once, which is that this is a much more emotional thing than I was expecting, and a much more wrenching thing (there has been crying). I can't tell you how much I don't want to finish this. At the same time, I recognize that it has to end and what's coming is the right ending. This could never be a story that wandered or explored something long-term (and it has gone for so much longer than I expected). One way or another, this was always a road that had a final destination. A terminus, if you will.

Stories end.

I know a number of people are simply holding off until the whole thing is wrapped. I know - or I gather, from what's been said - that a number of other people are tremendously anxious about how this is all going to turn out. All I can tell you is what I've said before: you need to remember what kind of story this is.

At the same time, you can't fully know what kind of a story it is until it's finished. This is where faith comes in.

As usual I continue to be absolute crap about responding to comments, especially here, where I don't think I've responded to a single one (SORRY). But as has been true from the beginning: I can't tell you how much it means to me that you've come this far with me. Truly.

I hope you'll come with me just a little further.

Chapter 89: world, what lessons you prepare

"Read me somethin'."

Daryl turns, rolls onto his side and looks down both his body and hers at her lazy smile, her head propped on her hand, and as he watches her she lifts a foot and the soft shimmer of her pastel purple nail polish seizes his vision as she nudges his cheek with her big toe. He makes a face, grabs for and tweaks it, and she laughs and drops back into the embrace of the pillows, the late afternoon sun spilling all over her as generously as it always does.

Lazy Saturday, lazy as her smile - at least the latter part of it. Family visiting means family time, but she was able to get away for the evening, and she thinks she can wrangle it into a sleepover. Possibly not, but to the extent that she can do so without being suspicious, she'll try.

Things feel better. The contents of his chest and gut are sitting easier since Thursday night. But he hasn't talked to her about it, and she hasn't asked, and he's not sure whether it's because she can sense he's not totally comfortable with what happened or simply because she's waiting for him to decide how he wants to bring it up. Or both.

But he is sure that she knows it was a thing. A Thing. Proper noun. Unspecified and nevertheless quite specific.

Regardless.

She got here. Things happened - things which don't need to be proper nouns. Delightful things that went slowly and easily and ended with him kissing and biting gently at her neck as she came apart sitting in the cradle of his loosely folded legs, her own slung over his hips, arms around his neck and their bodies flush and her clit grinding against him. Never done it quite like that before. Will have to do it again.

There are still so many things he hasn't done.

Now they're sprawled all over the place, very decadent, and somehow his head ended up next to her feet, his own next to hers. For the last half hour he's been lying on his stomach and reading, one hand stroking up and down her smooth bare leg as she dozes in the winter sun.

Thursday and what he did and the whole bizarrely heavy thing has lifted away, and there's just her and the bed, and light. It's simple again. Always was, really.

Apparently now she's awake. Awake and grinning at him.

He looks at her, amused, marking his place with his thumb. "Why the fuck should I do that?"

"'cause I can kick you in the face?" She laughs and arches her back, the little curves of her breasts flowing gracefully up and down again into the bumps of her ribs, her nipples flushed a specific shade of pink that sets his fingertips tingling. "'cause you love me and you wanna give me what I want."

"That's what you think?"

"That's what I know." She pushes up on one elbow and fixes him with an abruptly serious gaze, her hair a golden tangled glory around her head. "C'mon. Read me somethin'. Anythin'."

He closes the book, lays it down and settles his hand over her knee, squeezes and lifts and begins trailing his fingertips up and down the inside of her thigh. She jerks, giggles, and everything inside him whirls ecstatically around itself. "What's in it for me?"

As if this wasn't about twenty times more than enough.

Again, she nudges his cheek with her toe - more of a caress this time. Despite her giggling, her expression has retained a solemn quality, and even though her legs are parting wider, he doesn't think what she's going to say is about what's waiting for him between them.

"What do you want?"

"You know what I want." His fingertips drift up to the jut of her hipbone before he can't go any further, then back down and just clear of the soft curls of her bush. "I'll do mine, you do yours."

She lowers herself with a quiet, happy hum, her own hand finding his thigh. "What d'you wanna hear?"

"Anythin'."

"So you'll do it?" She smiles at the ceiling, her eyes closed - brilliant. Her whole body glowing. Outside it's dropped below freezing, despite the sun, but in here it's all warm, a ghost of summer. In here they can lie in this bed he made for them and claim a tiny piece of everything for themselves, construct a world in which, for a little while, nothing else can touch them. That's what he wanted this place to be, that's what he's made it, and now she's here in it with him and really despite his teasing he would do anything for her. Give anything. Anything she wanted, as much as she wanted, for as long as she wanted, and afterward he would just look for more to give her. He doesn't have much to give her, but he'll give her whatever he has.

She knows it. She knows he's hers. He's his, at last and finally, his and his alone, and she knows that too, but the fact remains.

He's hers.

He lifts his head and kisses her ankle. "For a song."

"For a song," she echoes dreamily, her fingers drawing abstract designs on the side of his calf. "Yes."

He picks up the book again and thumbs through it.

He hasn't marked individual pages. He hasn't needed to. As he's learned this book, he's learned where his favorites are, and it's not uncommon for him to stumble on new ones; not unfamiliar ones, but lines and words he reads in a new way - unsurprising, given that he's a different man every time he reads them. So lately different ones have been moving forward in his mind, taking hold of him in ways they didn't before, and yes: there is one. There's a very specific one. He read it on Thursday night, read it with the wind howling its last outside, and as he finished it the wind died and everything went quiet, and when he turned off the light and tugged back the curtains and stared out the window the world was bright and soundless.

There is this one. The page whispers into place and her listening is like her hand in his, their fingers threaded.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

He falls silent. She doesn't speak. For a moment - a very strange moment - he wonders if he's upset her somehow. If this isn't what she wanted. If it hit her in some wrong way, or he's disturbed her with the subject matter. Which makes no sense, and in the moment after he knows that, but his diaphragm still clutches and he still opens his mouth to ask if she's all right, and raises his head.

And sees her gazing up into the light with tears shining in her eyes.

"Beth?"

"I'm okay." She wipes at her face and smiles, and he's seen that smile - not very often but he's seen it. When she smiles through her tears it's like the sun shining through rain, and he wants to push himself up and go to her, wrap himself around her, but he can't move. His muscles simply won't obey him. "I just... I dunno what to sing."

"You don't have to sing anything."

"I want to."

Finally the control of his limbs is returned to him, but he doesn't reorient himself. That's not what he's chosen. He sets the book aside and rolls in close to her, hand on her thigh, and presses his lips to her ankle again. "I'll make you sing."

He didn't think about this before and he doesn't think about it now. It's perfectly natural, like falling into water, into the grass, into bed. It takes none of his conscious effort. He just feels himself sinking into her, pulled and pulling, closing a hand over her ankle - where his lips were - and closing them around her toe, stroking her with the flat of his tongue, holding on when she twitches and releases another tight giggle which drops into a soft moan. Of course it feels good. Of course he could put his mouth here. He can put it anywhere he wants and he does, perfectly focused, licking and sucking his way over her feet, kissing along her fine bones to the knobs of her ankles as his hands glide across her skin. And he suddenly remembers one of those lovely, aching afternoons that came after he understood how much and in what way he wanted her - but before she did - and sitting with her in the grass and looking at her bare feet. Thinking about kissing her toes one by one and knowing it was impossible. It could never happen.

And now she's singing. Breathy and light, she's singing for him and it's beautiful. He smiles against her shin and keeps moving.

She must know where he's headed long before he gets there, because her legs are spreading wider and she's angling herself to be open to him, groping loosely at his hips and sighing his name. Dragging his mouth up the hot skin above her knee and biting carefully at her, smelling her, seeing her, the slick sheen on the insides of her thighs and her dark folds, and her sigh sharpens into a whimper as he kisses her there, the nub of her clit thrumming under his lips.

Sing, Beth. Sing for me.

She does. He doesn't have very much to give her but he gives her his mouth, his lips and his tongue, light scrapes of his teeth, and he gives them to her so deep and firm and slow until she's clutching at his hair and sending ragged moans down to him, half formed versions of his name, and he licks her juices in and laughs against her - and even if he didn't expect it, it's no surprise whatsoever when he feels her hand closing around the base of his cock and her warm, wet mouth taking him in, her tongue dancing over his head and down his shaft, and he pushes deeper into her at the same moment she rolls her cunt against his face.

It's a duet, he thinks somewhat whimsically as he moans with her, holding onto her and being held, swirling his tongue over her and feeling the same. They're doing this in harmony, drawing each other up higher and higher and moving deeper as they chase more of each other, catch, intertwine. How soaked she is, so sweet down his throat when he swallows her, knowing that she's lapping him up and loving it just as much. It should have always been like this; he should never have been afraid of taking something for himself. He should never have believed he couldn't give and take at the same time.

Only it's not even giving or taking. It's a single flow through both of them, rushing faster and heavier, an oncoming tide, a wave toward which they're running hand in hand, and it's so easy and so good, and he hears her muffled cry and feels her start to shudder and flood onto his eager tongue as he stiffens and wrenches and releases into her with a sob.

And then more laughing. Both of them. Holding each other so tight, licking at the taste and kissing every inch of skin they can reach as everything subsides back into that warm summer ghost, all so bright. Like stone towers glittering with flecks of mica, like the gleam of hidden marble. Like water under the moon. Like the grass into which they keep falling, in the sunlight and moonlight and starlight, keeping it for them until they can return. Like fresh snow.

She was always singing. She can't not. The songs are in her bones.

They're in his too. They always were.

The sun is sinking into the trees when they open his door and step out into a new world.

Not new to them, not now. It was new that night when he looked out his window at it: a blanket of snow that turned out to be a good three inches deep or so. The roads were all cleared fairly quickly, the ones that even needed much clearing, but it's been very cold since then and nothing has melted. There's been no wind since the storm ended; the last of the snow fell afterward and clung to branches and roofs, everywhere it could get purchase, and it's still there. Where no one has walked or driven or shoveled it away, it's pristine.

They aren't perfectly weather-equipped, walking down the stairs with only their coats as additional protection - taking particular care not to slip, he managed to get his hands on some salt but even so - but they don't care. Cold iron under their bare fingers, the ache of it - it makes her gasp and shake her hand, laughing again, and when she reaches the bottom she runs away from him across the lawn toward the street. He watches her go, her hair streaming out behind her, tossing a glance over her shoulder with that wild, incandescent smile, and his heart sobs with agony and joy and a hundred things he'll never be able to name.

She's so beautiful. And she's so young. For a while she made him feel almost that young again. Except there was no again.

He never felt young before her.

He follows her to the truck.

Five miles outside of town, the sun throwing itself across the snowy fields in a strange, gentle crimson, she rolls the window down. It's freezing but he doesn't ask her what the hell she's doing; she throws her head back and sings, her hand arcing through the air, red with cold. He doesn't remember turning the radio on but it's on all the same, a song he knows well by now. It keeps coming back.

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

And of course there are the lines that come after those. Do you want to get married, run away. But they no longer matter. He asked her that question. He didn't mean to, and he doesn't think she understood, and it wasn't exactly that, but he did.

He's not going to ask it again.

They take the road past the farm, hurtling down it; he checks the speedometer and they aren't going any faster than normal but he feels like they're flying - a little like how she drove him the night he finished the wing, him high on endorphins and arousal and on her, the night so big and the sky so huge. It's not night yet but night is coming, and they don't have a lot of time if they're going to get this started right.

They've been here in the night before, in the dark. But that was different.

He swings them into the turnoff and they slow as they bump and rattle over the gravel and then the rougher road, dirt and the knobs of roots, protruding stones. The field is a stretched white sheet to their right, streaks of it stained red, the shadows of naked tree branches extending across it like those cliched reaching fingers. But they aren't unfriendly, and neither is the deeper forest that swallows them when he bears left and starts down the slight and steepening incline.

This place knows them.

He stops at the top of the slope and they get out. She grabs the thick blanket he tossed in for this purpose, and when her back is turned he grabs something else - two things. The jar of moonshine, and a plastic bag wrapped around something small and oblong.

He bought it from Aaron with the curtains. He wasn't sure why at the time. He had no obvious reason for needing it. But something about it caught his attention and held it fast, and he couldn't just leave it there. He would find some use for it, he was sure, and now he has. Because he doesn't know what Beth Greene wants for Christmas, and he doesn't have much to give her, but this seems right.

And it's not Christmas. But it's the last day of November. That has a meaning too.

The slope is very slippery and they move down it with extreme care, finding secure footholds before proceeding with the next step. Getting back up might be an adventure - getting up is always more difficult than people think it's going to be. But he feels ready for an adventure, and anyway they negotiate it just fine and only stumble a bit when they hit the level ground of the bank.

He looks around, looks toward the ruins. The creek is running far too fast to have frozen, but the calmer little pools made by collections of stones are crusted at the edges with ice. The snow seems to have clung even more heavily to the trees here, capped the stone towers and collected on the broken walls and tiny ledges formed by decades of slow erosion.

It's all white and clean and still, and bright even in the gathering dark.

But it's not pristine. There's a set of footprints from where they're standing leading through the archway and into the big room beyond, and she glances at him and gives him a single nod.

He was out here as soon as she told him what she wanted to do. She couldn't get away, so he came and prepared it for her. He thinks he did well.

He takes her cold hand in his and leads her through.

Beyond the arch in the center of the open space is a wide circle of stone surrounding a depression in the earth, and a pile of thick branches and kindling. It wasn't difficult and it didn't take him long; some of the wood he bought - and getting it down the slope was definitely an adventure - but most of it he was able to scavenge, and the ruins and the creek themselves gave him the stones. On Friday he worked through the better part of the afternoon, no gloves, hands stiff and raw. He could have worn some, should have, but he wanted to feel it. The chill. The roughness of the stones, the harsh wet of the snow melting on his fingers, the cracked and flaking bark. Dirt packed under his fingernails.

You touch things and you make them real.

They stop in front of the circle, her with the blanket over her arm and him with his jar and his plastic-wrapped package. It feels like a Moment, and he takes a breath, glances at her.

"Y'alright?"

He had worried, a tiny bit. Because of what this is, what she's doing. This is her place, and it's been untouched for so long. Now she apparently wants to scar it. Not permanently, because nothing is permanent, but for a while.

But he has scars. So does she. Not all of them are the kinds you can see.

The world is deep with scars.

She nods, steps forward and takes her own breath. "It's perfect." She looks back at him with a sweet little smile and he doesn't feel the cold at all. "Thank you."

He nods, looks down for the briefest of seconds. It feels good to be told thank you, to have such direct evidence that he's pleased her, but it's also retained its essential strangeness. The act of doing these things is pleasure in itself. She's thanking him for something in which he takes joy, regardless. Something for which he feels he might want to thank her.

"Know where I got the idea?"

He lifts his gaze to her, shakes his head. She's no longer looking at him. All her attention is on the pile of wood, and her head is uncovered, her hair pulled back and tumbling from its ponytail. Silver, like it was the first night she took him in. Straddled and rode him and they flew together.

The last of the sun is fading but the moon is rising, just a few days past its full. It streams through the trees, and like she always does, she soaks it into herself and keeps it, radiates it like it's her own.

Draws it down.

"Becca again. Or she started it. She got me curious, I looked some stuff up. There's something they do, in one of the celebrations they have. It was supposed to be in the fall, but... Well, I liked it."

She steps closer, her hands clasped in front of her, and he watches her because he can't see anything else anymore.

"They build this bonfire. Then they write down something they wanna get rid of, something in themselves they wanna let go of. They throw it into the fire, and that... It helps. Helps it happen. It's like starting over." She lifts her head. "I wanna do it. With you."

She turns back to him, so solemn and so beautiful he almost can't keep his feet. But he can move his hands and he sets the things he's carrying down in the snow, and he's reaching into his pocket for his lighter at the same moment she's reaching her own coat and pulling out pens and a couple of slips of paper. In unison. As if their bodies agreed something for which they didn't need words.

He holds out the lighter. "You wanna?"

She flashes him a grin that seems to come from her very core and takes it from him. "Hell yeah."

He picks up the moonshine and moves past her, unscrews the lid, upturns it and spills what's left over the kindling. Steps back, and she gives him one of the slips of paper.

He doesn't have to think. He thought he might, but it's not necessary. It's something he's been trying to let go of since this all began, maybe before, and he doesn't think paper and a fire is going to finish the job, but it might be something.

He writes against his palm - a little clumsy but it's not like it matters - folds it up and hands it to her. She takes it without a word, holds his and hers both between her fingers, flicks the lighter into flame and transfers it to what she's holding.

She tosses it onto the kindling and it ignites with a soft wompf and spreads, licking its way over and up the wood, drunk on the moonshine. Consuming.

Like that also was an offering.

He thinks about what's beyond this, waiting in the trees like it's been waiting for who knows how fucking long. Who the fuck knows how much longer it'll be there. He made offerings to that, too. Not meaning to, but he did all the same. His words, his rage and his desperation. Then, later, his pleasure. Hers. Letting her take his cock into her mouth, letting her love him that way. Loving her. Possibly what that damn thing always wanted most of all.

Beth shakes out the blanket and shifts nearer to him, and as she covers both their shoulders he feels her fingers brushing his. Curving against them, wrapping, threading. She squeezes, almost at the same moment he does, and they simply stand there, hand in hand like children, watching the fire burn.

"You don't have to tell me what you wrote," she murmurs, but he already has the words and he's already speaking, and he wants to. Something he's learned is that if he doesn't have his own words, that's all right. He can use someone else's if they do what he needs to do.

I want to be afraid of nothing, he whispers, as though I had wings.

He doesn't have to see her smile to know it's there. He can feel it like the fire.

"How did you know?"

Because I love you.

The flames seem to touch the moon. For all he knows, they do.

They stay as long as they can, together in the snow in silence, watching the fire die down and the moon rise. Then they have to leave, so they do.

They always have to leave.

But before they walk away, the blanket once more slung over her arm, he bends, and what he picks up isn't the moonshine jar. It's the little package, plastic crackling in the stillness, and he holds it out to her without a word.

She blinks at it, looks up at him. "What's that?"

He still doesn't speak. Proffers it, nodding. Clearly bemused, she takes it. Unwraps it. And stops, cradling it in her hands, gazing down at it as wordless as he was.

It's pale in the moonlight, but in the day it would be a tawny color, like the coat of a lion. A small sheath holding an equally small knife, all of it pleasantly worn, none of it new. When he picked it up he knew it was one of those things that has a story, and it felt almost as if it wasn't even from here. As if it began its story somewhere else, and has now entered theirs because it's time for it to do so.

He swallows. It's not that he's nervous. It's not that he's afraid she won't like it. He just thinks she might not know what to make of it.

She slides the knife free from the sheath and merely stares at it for a moment or two, then lifts her eyes again, and her smile...

Tiny. But it comes from somewhere so deep, and looking at her now, he knows she might understand even better than he does.

"It's beautiful."

He lets out a breath, closes his eyes for a second. "Call it an early Christmas present."

"Why?"

He shrugs. I'unno.

"Okay," she says softly, turning the knife so the moonlight gleams off the blade. In flashes it looks vaguely unreal - not so strange for this place, and not really so strange for this thing - and his focus is just as utterly locked onto it as hers is, nearly entranced.

Knives are supposed to be things that cut and injure and kill, dismantle. Destroy. Even usefully. But it doesn't feel like that to him. It feels like something else. Especially in her hands.

Then she slides it back into its sheath and the enclosed pocket of time is open and gone.

"Thank you," she says again, lays her hand against his cheek and pushes up on her toes, kisses him. Her lips are cool but the kiss itself is warm and gentle and sweet, somehow deep without being so, and too fleeting. Too soon she's pulling away from him, bending to slide the knife into her boot.

He has a quick flash of anxiety - they might wonder where she got it from - but there are probably a host of ways she could explain it. She buys things for herself. Why shouldn't she?

If he has to worry about something, it's not that.

He shakes himself, glances around. Touches her shoulder. "Time to go."

They kick snow over the low coals until the last of the glow fades into the night. They turn and pass back through the arch, and as they cross over the snow-covered stone walkway and begin to climb slowly back up the slope, neither of them looks back. The moon sends their shadows out ahead of them, dark on white. That down there was yet another goodbye, putting something else to sleep for the winter. Ahead is where they have to look now.

Much later, lying in the soft night he made for them and holding her tight in his arms, he sees those shadows again, painted on the inside of his eyelids.

Those were their last days as children. Now comes December and the winter, and these are the first days of something new.

Note: Poetry is Mary Oliver's "When Death Comes" and "Starlings in Winter" (what Daryl says at the fire); the song is of course "Slide" by the Goo Goo Dolls.