Here we go.

I'll try to post these reasonably quickly. That said, I want to make very careful editing passes, and I start teaching tomorrow, so we're not talking, like, within hours of each other. Expect the next chapter sometime tomorrow, probably not late. To steal from Lupe Fiasco, I know that irritates and you have my sympathies.

I'll be posting an afterword/post-mortem/sign-off with the final chapter and I'll have things to say to you there that I hope you will read, but here and now, as we prepare to go the last mile, let me just grab what I said from this post:

Thank you. Thank you thank you thank you, you made this such an incredible thing. You were inspiring. You helped keep me going. I don't think this would have been nearly as good without you. Thank you for having faith in me, thank you for caring enough to say things - regardless of what they were. Thank you.

And I'm not, like, demanding comments, but if you do read all the way to the end, please tell me what you thought. If this meant anything to you, please tell me so. You don't know how happy it makes me. It's not just I AM SO GREAT I AM SO GREAT EVERYBODY LOVES ME I AM SO GREAT; it's that I love this and it makes me so damn happy to share it with people. Like sharing anything you love, regardless of whether or not you had a hand in making it. Like why fandoms happen in the first place.

Finally, to those of you coming to this story after it's all done and posted: You may be tempted to skim to the end of the last chapter to see if the ending is happy. I can't stop you from doing that and you should read however you want. But let me request that you not do so. Let me request that you read this the way it was written - one word at a time, in order, until the final one.

Which means you have to take my hand and trust me, and trust in what kind of story this is. Whether or not you can do that is something only you can answer.

Thank you, again. So much.

Chapter 91: try to hit the brakes and you slide

It's been a while since he's been here to see her. But when he walks in it's like nothing has changed.

Different day, sure, and perhaps that might draw some different people - though that's probably unrealistic in a town where there's a pretty limited number of things to do on a Friday night - but in the low light it looks like the same crowd as the last time he was here, the same people and the same number, and aside from the winter coats all over the place and the boot-slush in front of the door, no time might have passed at all.

Except it's also very warm, warm in a way only external cold allows for, and the windows are fogging up. There are a lot of winter coats but no one is wearing any of them, and they're strewn all over, tossed on chairs and over the backs of the couple of sofas, making everything look lumpy and somehow formless.

He doesn't take his own coat off. Something about doing so feels like exposure. Maybe later if he really gets uncomfortable, but for now he makes his way to the barista - the one he knows, the Perceptive one - and she gives him a quick smile and puts through what he wants without him having to ask.

Black, absolutely scalding. Bitter and painful. Once that would have made him darkly amused. Now he just thinks it's straight-up funny. Still kind of dark, but he can look back on it with amusement and also a strange kind of affection for that person.

That person was doing the best he could.

Whenever he's come in here before he's hugged the back, kept to the more shadowy corners of the place - without, he thinks, being creepy about it. He's not actually lurking or anything. Which is good, because someone his age who looks like he does should under no circumstances lurk.

Especially not given what he's here for.

That big, pretty girl with the banjo and the pleasantly rough voice is up on the small stage. He hasn't seen her for a while either, and he likes her and he's glad she's here, though her presence really makes it feel like no time has passed, makes him feel like he's being flung back along a timeline that was already intensely weird when it was moving forward. By now he's almost used to this, to feeling like linear time isn't a reliable thing when it comes to this entire fucking place - this bizarre pocket of what he's always felt is an otherwise boring state - but he's still washed over by a slow wave of vertigo, not so much his inner ear as the inner rest-of-him. It's not dizziness. It's disorientation.

Disorientation literally means the loss of a direction. He's not sure how or why he knows that, but he does.

Well. Whatever. He's standing on his own two feet and the coffee is good, and he doesn't see her yet but she'll be here any minute and that's an even finer thing.

He's been waiting for Friday since she mentioned it. In truth he was waiting for it before that. He still measures his life in weeks; that's another thing that hasn't changed.

In some ways it's surprising how little really has.

He listens to the girl with the banjo, its pleasant, tuneful jangle and the equally pleasant grit of her voice. Though the song she's launching into is different from the last - there's something sharp about it, something jabbing, almost angry. The banjo no longer jangles; to him it sounds like tiny explosions of music bursting light brighter than the one hitting the stage.

she laid down in her party dress and never got up
needless to say she missed the party
she just got sad
then she got stuck
she was wincing like something brittle trying hard to bend
she was numb with the terror of losing her best friend
but we never see things change
we only see them end

and some vicious whispering voice
kept saying you have no choice
you have no choice

The door swings open and cold air puffs in. Heads turn - the ones near the door, nearer the back of the room where he's standing. People closest to it shiver and pull in on themselves; tonight is even colder than it's been, and the clouds are lower than ever. So for a moment it's like a bubble has been pierced - not burst - and the world it kept out slips in like the point of a pin.

Then the door falls closed and she's standing there alone with her guitar case in hand, pulling off her wool cap. She's bundled up in a thick coat, a scarf, but as she moves forward he can see her black boots - the ones she wore with that stupid bee costume - and her skirt clinging to her legs just above the knee, solid color beneath something gauzy and semi-translucent.

A deep, rich blue - almost the exact color of his sheets. Of the bed he made for them.

He's staring. She doesn't even have her coat off yet and he's staring. At her hair - very simple, almost the plain braid-augmented ponytail she always wears, but somehow smoother, swept back in a way that seats itself well within the territory of elegant, a few little tendrils falling around her face in a way that looks fetchingly artless and which he can tell is in fact very artful.

Tiny little stars twinkling in her earlobes. He's at such a distance, he shouldn't really even be able to spot them, but with her his awareness has always approached the preternatural, and if they aren't diamonds they sure look like they could be.

She sets the case down and shrugs off her coat, unwinds her scarf, and again there's the problem with the staring, and he really shouldn't do that, because as he is, he could be in here for any reason. Could be in here for the coffee, could be in here to see anyone. Could be in here to see her and it wouldn't be a huge problem; a fair number of people appear to come in to see her anyway.

But staring at her like he knows he must be? Little bit harder to excuse away.

Series of gold bangles on her wrist. Gold heart lying against her breastbone, gleaming when she turns. The dress is cap-sleeved, neckline falling in a deep scoop, patterned from the waist in a lacy texture the same shade as the skirt. The waist itself is accented with a silky ribbon pulled into a bow, the shade of early autumn moonlight, delicate and lovely between the soft flare at her hips and the tracery of the top. Hugging where he knows his hands fit so well.

He shouldn't stare. But he has an even bigger problem, which is that he's pretty sure his heart has literally stopped and he's not sure he can get it going again.

She looks around. Her eyes meet his and something flickers, something like a fragment of the blunt edge of the banjo's sound, and she looks away at the same instant he does. Like something was strained too far and snapped.

He kept his coat on and that was fine before but now he's far, far too warm, sweating against the lining and shirt sticking to his back, blood humming under his flushing skin, between his legs but also everywhere. It's nothing like it once was, nothing like that terrible, wonderful, helpless agony, but he is in pain, watching her pick her guitar up and head in the general direction of the front, smiling at a few people as she passes. She's moving easily, her strides even, but something about the sway of her hips matches the hard rhythm of the song in a way he can't entirely explain.

'cause when I look at you I squint
you are that beautiful
and my pussy is a tractor
and this is a tractor pull
I'm haunted by my illicit, explicit dreams
and I can't really wake up
so I just drift in between
thinking the glass is half empty
and thinking it's not quite full

The vertigo swells like the proverbial rising tide. He has to close his eyes against it. This is nothing like it once was, and nothing at all has changed.

The girl with the banjo is finishing up, the song tapering off into a breathy repeated chorus that falls silent a good few seconds before anyone applauds. The applause is enthusiastic but just a bit startled, and Daryl wonders if it's the first time she's done a song quite like that.

He dimly wonders, if so, what made her decide to do it tonight. What kicked her into that gear.

He doesn't know and he's not going to ask her. She's stepping down, unshouldering the strap of the banjo, and Beth is laying her things over the back of a nearby vacant chair and removing the guitar from its case, taking the single step up onto the stage.

What he recalls noticing about her, that first night he saw her step up there and begin her last-minute tuning, was how utterly at home she looked. He had also been freaking out in a new and very unwelcome way, looking at her and at Jimmy and at the door and wondering if it was possible to do an emergency ejection before this whole thing augered itself right into the fucking ground, but under that and under his panicky bewilderment he had simply been watching her, and he noticed how at ease she seemed. How she wasn't nervous, and it also didn't seem like she had anything to prove. She could have been standing in a full room or a nearly empty one and it would have made no difference to her.

She came to sing and be listened to, and that's what she's going to do. And she knows she'll do it well. She's comfortable in that fact, and she's not afraid.

He knows she would sing if no one was there at all.

She's not looking at him. She's not looking anywhere in his direction. That's good; he's cooling down on his own and he can focus on her without it being a problem all over again. But as she stops her tuning and fits her fingers to the strings, flashes everyone that wide, radiant smile, the pain returns. Or the vertigo tide washes out and leaves it exposed like broken rocks.

She said she could want him without it hurting so much. He said the same. And it doesn't hurt, not like that. But God, it does hurt. And it's not even about wanting her. That's not why. He looks at her now and he just... He hurts.

Because you can't look at something this beautiful without it hurting you, a little.

She speaks into the mic. He's still lost and he doesn't quite make it out. That's fine; he doesn't need to. It's not for him, and he didn't come to hear her talk - and he knows that she would sing if no one was here, and he knows she's here to sing to these people, but he also knows that when she opens her mouth to do it, whatever she sings will be for him.

So she does.

The first time he heard her do this, she crashed into it and it was like running out across a field in the sun, careless, happy in a way that knows it's fucked and is perfectly all right with it. I'd rather be the one who loves than to be loved and never even know. She made the guitar laugh. He never heard anyone do anything like that before. Didn't know it was possible. Didn't know she was possible.

It's not like that this time. She slides into the song, drifts - the first strum is soft and dreamy, and when her voice rises over it, it's dreamy too. Gentle. A little wistful, like she's remembering something far in the distant past, something she won't ever touch again. But the memory is a good one, and whatever is going on now is good too.

the last forty days have been rain
the sun is a prodigal one that seems bent upon
giving itself a bad name
and leaving us deep in the lurch as we walked down the lane
it's a long time, oh such a long time
and I hope for your sake I've changed
and I hope for my sake you managed to remain the same

is it raining for you, raining for you now
like it's raining for me, raining for me now

He's used to words resonating, sometimes eerily. It seems to be simply another natural law of whatever weird tangent universe he's stumbled into. But how she's singing, her eyes closed and her face slightly uplifted, it's for him just like he knew it would be, and he doesn't think this is some kind of accident. Nor does he think it's some kind of fate.

It's just her language.

you tied your old bike to a tree
came in from the weather though not yet together
I felt your hand light on my sleeve
as light as a bird that might offer a sinner reprieve
we don't know too much, I know we don't know too much
but love rains mysteriously
and behind every cloud is a purpose only now we can see

that it's raining for us, raining for us now
raining for us, raining for us now

The song dies away. Applause - very solid, very meant, but also very gentle, as gentle as the song, as if she's settled that feeling over them like a blanket and they're all reluctant to throw it off. She opens her eyes, smiles that smile and gives them a little bob of her head, and starts in on the next one.

If it was really the way it was then - that first time - he would run. He would surrender to the panic that churned in as a storm, when he realized the rest of the world was fading out like the song and all he could see was her. All he can see now is her, too, but he stands there, coffee cooling in his hands, and he surrenders to something very different.

He surrenders to her, and there are no conditions.

She sings three more songs, none of which he knows, all floating through that same dreamy gentleness. He drifts inside them, and when she stops for the last time it's jarring, like being abruptly woken out of a sound sleep - someone's hand on his shoulder, shaking him. She does another one of those head-bobs, deeper, and that's his cue. He moves toward the door, feeling as if he's edging into a kind of ghost territory where no one sees or hears him clearly, dropping the cup into the trash as he goes.

He doesn't look back at her. He doesn't need to. As he steps out into the cold, a gust of wind blasting into his face, he feels her small, warm hand clasped in his.

He heads down the quiet street to where the truck is parked. He has a few hours until he's supposed to meet her. He doesn't know what he'll do with them, but it doesn't much matter.

Her in that dress, coming to him out of the dark. Wearing that smile.

He would wait for the rest of forever for that end.

He drives home. He doesn't do so quickly. He has those hours to burn, and something is keeping him out here - driving up and down familiar streets and streets that still aren't so familiar, scanning everything around him and seeing some of it and sort of not seeing a lot of the rest. His mood has turned odd - not that it wasn't odd anyway. He watches the shifting pools of light from the streetlights as he passes beneath them, a hard yellow-orange against the snow. A lot of the latter has reached a point where it's gray and slushy; despite the lack of melting, a week of cars has done its work. Mostly clear roads lined with a dirty mess. It was always going to happen, it's not like he's going through some kind of bereavement over it, but there's always that nostalgia for when it was fresh and hardly anyone had even touched it.

It's remarkable enough that they even have it.

Lights of houses, of passing cars. Lots of light. He thinks about her in the light, bathed in it as she sang, sang like it was breathing. He still can't imagine what it's like to be that confident, that fearless. She always was; it was one of the first things he noticed about her. Pulling up beside her at two in the morning, a strange and disreputable-looking man clearly much older than her in a shitty pickup, offering her a ride and being more than a little persistent about it. Frankly very creepy. She had been wary of him, but she hadn't at any point displayed any fear.

If he had been horrible enough to try anything - something else he has difficulty imagining, though for very different reasons - he's completely certain she would have found a way to fuck him up, and she was confident in her ability to do that too.

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

It's strange to be thinking so deeply along these lines. Then again, given the context and what he'll be doing in a few hours, it might make a kind of sense.

He does eventually go home. Walking up toward the porch, he runs into Carol coming down the steps, tugging on gloves. She's bundled up and kind of shapeless but he can see that she's wearing makeup, earrings - small glass bead things, nothing big or ostentatious, and her makeup isn't much, but she's never done that in all the time he's known her.

Beth isn't the only one tonight who looks beautiful. In his opinion.

"I'm going out." She says it in a calmly determined tone, like she's made a decision and she refuses to be shaken from it. She also sounds pleased with it. The determination has a bright edge.

She studies him. "You look happy."

He shrugs. He doesn't have a whole lot to say to that, given that he is. And she can probably make a good guess at the reason.

"Should bring some asshole home, get laid." He gives her something close to a grin, quick and gone again but he feels it and doesn't mistake it for anything else. "You got some stuff to pay me back for."

She snorts a laugh, but in the dim, monochrome light he can nevertheless see her cheeks flush in a way he doubts has anything to do with the cold. "Not sure I'm as loud as you." She moves past him, glances back over her shoulder with an arch smile. "Or her."

"Maybe someone give you a reason to be."

"Maybe." She pauses and looks back one more time, and now her smile is almost sly. "You know... I'm not sure about it anymore, but if there's a God I think He owes me at least one decent fuck after everything He's put me through."

He laughs. It's also very quick, but it feels good. Regarding the basics of it, he couldn't possibly agree more.

The time dilates. Expands. By ten-thirty he's back on the road again, negotiating light late Friday traffic out of town and into the bright-dark of snow cover. The clouds are lower and moving more rapidly than ever but there's nothing about more snow in the forecast so no one is entirely sure what's up with it. But again, people are also mostly unconcerned. This has been a weird few months for weather. Whatever.

He's among the unconcerned. As far as it goes, he figures they've been hit about as hard as they can be. They've come through. He never expected it would be an easy winter; patterns hold true over time. He was never that much of a fool. The primary thing, the thing standing out for him behind everything else, is that it's December and he's still here.

He made it. Summer fling survived the fall.

This is not that kind of story.

The radio is on, cranked, beating with the fence posts as they blur by on either side of him, dark on light - yet another song he recognizes but hasn't heard in a while. A good long while. Since he went out to the farm after that first night. Windows rolled down. Feeling good to be out. To be away. To be going back to her.

Not knowing why.

all last summer in case you don't recall
I was yours and you were mine, forget it all
is there a line that I could write
sad enough to make you cry
and all the lines you wrote to me were lies

He's burning up the speed limit, pushing this loyal, shitty thing as hard as he can. He doesn't care. He really doesn't think he's going to be caught. The clouds are the only things chasing him.

He has somewhere to be.

The party is indeed big. So is the house.

He parks down the road. Might not matter - she said they were vanishingly unlikely to be spotted in a way that would make people wonder, provided he didn't actually try to come in - but there's no reason to not play it safe, regardless of how reckless he's feeling. This doesn't seem to him like stupid reckless. Desperate reckless.

He's just happy.

He walks, hands stuffed into his pockets - still gloveless. He's aware of a stubbornness about it, rather than just not getting around to it, as if some deep-seated part of him wants as little as possible between the world and what he uses to be in it. And he's not cold, not really - and as the house comes into full view, he feels warmer just looking at it.

Damn thing looks like a fucking bonfire.

It's one of the huge McMansions for which he bears particular hatred, but rather than being part of a development it stands in splendid isolation, surrounded on all sides by open land rimmed with trees, but for a copse of young oaks closer in toward the rear of the thing. Cars are parked in the drive and on the side of the road and in a few places on the lawn, haphazard, clearly just left wherever anyone could find an accessible place to do so. The house itself is blazing with light, every big window seeming to pulse with it - the pulse in time with the bass hammering out through the walls, like the light itself is vibrating. Most of the windows are uncovered by shades or curtains, and occupants are visible, shapes moving past, some quickly, some slowly, and some in twitchy, uneven ways that indicate a kind of dancing.

This has all the hallmarks of a party a rich kid throws when their parents are out of town.

He watches this abomination as it begins to loom and idly considers how pleasant it would be to burn it to the ground. There are some resentments he's not and possibly never will be over.

He's not to try to go in. She's been here before; she gave him the basic layout and a place. There's no fence here and swings wide and off the road, making his way across the field, crunching through the frozen crust of the snow. The wind is gusting, falling down and surging back up again, now and then slapping him in the face - bracing more than painful. He feels very awake, very alert, every sense sparking at the edges and all of them blurring into each other the way they sometimes do when they're running at their full capacity. The bass has a texture, rolling bumps like moving hills, and the light tastes sharp and fairly bitter. The smell of the snow is like the edge of a piece of paper against his lips.

His form must stand out dark against the snow, but he's all but certain no one will be paying enough attention to see him, and the glow of that white isn't what it would be if the night was clear. He has darkness to move through, and only the vigilance of a bunch of drunk, stupid kids enjoying the last days in which they can be drunk and stupid before they go off to college to be drunk and stupid in a different and potentially more troublesome way.

He turns in an arc, moving inward. The copse of oaks is close. Beyond it he can now see the house's enormous back deck, strung with Christmas lights. It might be freezing and windy but there seems to be a sizable contingent of kids who don't much care; the deck is crowded with people moving, dancing, weaving through each other holding plastic cups. Laughing. Pressed against the railing and sloppily making out.

He sinks into the shadows of the trees and leans against one, lights a cigarette. Watches.

He doesn't feel creepy, though he probably should. What he's doing is creepy. With her, he now only occasionally feels how much older he is in a way that bothers him; when he becomes aware of it it's with a kind of soft bittersweetness, in part for the time he lost and the time she still has ahead of her, the life she's going to live without the hell he had to go through to get to where he is now.

To get to her.

But here he is watching a bunch of children all living a comparatively rich, spoiled version of that hell, a parody of it where they play at being something they aren't, where they want to grow up too fast because they have no fucking clue, and he does feel it. He does feel older, and it's not with any particular softness. It's not unpleasant and he doesn't hate it; instead he regards it with a kind of bluntly detached acceptance. It's not bad that he feels this way, and he's not wrong to do so. These things are all truths.

He exhales smoke at this scene. Yes, he's being creepy. Guy pushing forty pretty goddamn hard, standing in the shadows and looking at something he'll never have. The fact that he doesn't want it makes little difference.

The creepiness also makes little difference. Because somewhere inside that great big slightly pathetic bonfire is her, and any minute now she'll be coming out to him.

Any minute like this minute. Here she is.

She slips out through the crowd on the deck just as the music shifts into something familiar, something pounding but musical in a way the last song wasn't. She moves through the crush of people like they aren't even there, her coat over her forearm, her upper arms bare and her neck and collarbones and the soft skin between her breasts revealed by the neckline all creamy pale in light that should turn her sallow. Cornsilk hair toyed with by wind that refuses to be any rougher with her than a breeze.

It's basically like something out of a stupid fucking movie, but whatever.

midnight
you come and pick me up, no headlights
long drive
could end in burning flames or paradise

And as soon as her boots touch the snow she starts dancing.

He's never seen her dance. He's seen her sing, seen how it possesses every part of her, flowing out of her marrow and through her skin. He's seen her run, seen the incredible picture she makes when she rides, seen her dive into still moonlit water, seen her dodge puddles with graceful skill like some kind of puddle-dodging expert, seen her grin when she hops into the passenger's seat of the truck. He's seen her drenched in rain and furious, he's seen her wet head tipped up for kiss, seen the same in the sun, in starlight, and he's seen her sunbathed and naked and falling into the grass, all wild and laughing, spreading her legs for him and spreading her whole self into the sheer ecstasy of being alive. He's seen her lying beneath him with every part of her loose and uncoiled with pleasure, and all silver and ivory as she straddles him with her head thrown back and her belly taut and waist long, her back arched and her breasts proud and perfect and her mouth wide in a cry, exploding into the air as she comes. He's seen all of these things, and he's seen a hundred others he can't name, and they fill him and overflow and he can't imagine ever wearying of any of it. He can't imagine ever having enough.

But he's never seen Beth Greene dancing.

She said she liked to, that night he picked her up. Said she liked to dance and sing and that's why she was at that stupid party where Jimmy got drunk and basically left her to fend for herself, and she didn't get to do any of what she wanted and left in a storm of frustration and impatience, and maybe he should be grateful to Jimmy for that because otherwise he's not sure how any of this would have found a way to happen. Though maybe it would have. Maybe there was never any way to stop it. So that night she got to sing after all, because he asked her to and she did. She granted him that blessing, and then bestowed upon him every other blessing he could have imagined and so many he never could.

But he's never seen Beth Greene dancing.

Until now.

He knew she was graceful - graceful in that slightly gawky way a young doe is, still learning how to be in her own skin, how to make her delicate, powerful limbs do what she wants them to do. But it wasn't like this, how she turns and her skirt spins with her, how she lifts her arms slightly, moves them with the whirl of her body, how her hair follows. Somehow it's like she's not even holding her coat anymore, like there's nothing in the way of anything she's doing, like gravity itself is reluctant to hold onto her. It's not like the dancing anyone else is doing, and he's sure most of them would say it's strange and not even necessarily good, but he watches it, watches her dance across the snow toward him, and he wants to fall to his knees and weep with how beautiful it is.

She's a woman. In truth she was never anything else to him. But she dances like a little girl, with utter abandon, like the whole world is hers to dance in, and it's so fucking beautiful.

so it goes
he can't keep his wild eyes on the road

No goddess could ever hope to approach this.

She's smiling when she reaches him and breathing hard, no longer pale but flushed and happy, and he falls on her like a starving man, seizes her by the hips, and she drops her coat as he pushes her back against a tree and cups her jaw with his fingers sliding into her hair and lifts her, takes her mouth, kisses a gasp out of her and then a long, sweet moan as she surges forward, her hands already slipping into his coat and under the back of his shirt and so cold against his skin - which might literally be about to burst into flames and make a true bonfire to put that thing out there to shame.

It's not even that he wants to fuck her. Not like that. When he kissed her in the rain he didn't want to fuck her then either. He just wanted her, needed her like air, needed her in every way it's possible to need anything, and now she's here under his hands and his mouth and he has her.

And he's hers.

And he's yanked backward, and the world slams into searing light that reels him and almost sends him tumbling into the snow.

He can tell that there's sound. He can't quite make it out. He can see blurry shapes in front of him, taste blood; he knows he should be in pain, and maybe that'll happen soon, but for now he's just locked into a stasis of pure shock, gaping at this world that's suddenly stopped making what little sense it was making before, totally uncomprehending.

He does understand one thing.

He doesn't have her anymore.

Beth. Beth is yelling something, shoving someone away from her. The world is slipping back into focus and sound is coming along with it, and he can tell she's as angry as she is surprised, her voice shaking, another voice answering her with just as much fury. Whirling back to him, and he recognizes clenched fists and then the face, bone-pale with rage and teeth bared into a snarl, as she yells the name that goes with it.

"SHAWN."

Well, then.

He's holding his jaw. He didn't know he was. It doesn't really matter, but it's something he notices and notes and files away, along with everything else. It's probably good to have as much information as he can.

You know. To the extent that he can do anything anymore.

Part of him is rearing up, claws fully extended, its own teeth bared and far sharper than Shawn's. Shawn isn't as big as him and Shawn isn't anywhere near as strong. He could fuck Shawn's shit up if he wanted to, and there isn't a tremendous amount Shawn could do about it.

But he's not going to do that.

"You. You sick motherfucker." Shawn's voice is trembling too, his whole body is, and for a jagged shard of a second Daryl is actually kind of sorry for him. Because this can't be fun. And he probably came out to have a good time.

Though Daryl is the one being attacked right now.

"Shawn-" But his words run right over her, and Daryl has time to see that her expression has lost most of its anger and is now horrified, stricken, before Shawn is eating up his entire field of vision, stalking a couple of steps forward.

"You keep your dirty fuckin' hands off her. How dare you, you piece of shit. How dare you."

Daryl has what he thinks is probably a very ill-advised urge to shrug. I'unno. It wasn't about daring, not in the end.

In the beginning, sure. Teenage daring. He gave her that.

She's trying again, almost pleading with Shawn even though there's still a hard edge in her, and it's horrible and he wishes she would stop. "Shawn, stop it, he wasn't-"

"Get in the car, Beth."

Her face goes stony. Not sullen, and not angry. Stone cold. "Don't you tell me what to do."

"Get. In. The car." Shawn hasn't taken his eyes off Daryl. That's reasonable and he's not to be blamed for it. Daryl sees no particular reason why he should. "We're goin' home. Now. And you." Another step. Daryl stands his ground. It's not about courage and it's not about defending something. He just doesn't want to move. "You touch her again, you come near her again, I swear to God-" He raises a fist, because of course. "You come near the farm, you step one toe on our land, I will fuckin' kill you. You got that? I will take you out. Don't think I won't. You're done with us."

"Shawn," Beth says quietly, and her voice is full of the same stone he sees on her face. That dancing little girl is gone. In her place is something frightening. Something Daryl isn't sure Shawn is recognizing, and for his own safety he possibly should be. "That ain't up to you."

Shawn shoots her a look, all scorn twisting into outright contempt, and that's when the thing in Daryl rears a second time, and this time it's tearing up through his forebrain and suddenly he's not terribly inclined to try to reign it in. Even if he has to. "You think Dad is gonna say any different? You think he's not gonna be worse? This prick wants to stay alive, he should probably clear outta the cou-"

"Beth."

Everything in him has gone still again. Still as a winter night. And it's bleeding out of him, filling the air around him, and he watches with strange impassivity as Shawn goes still as well. Beth turns her gaze on him, her glossy lips parted, and there's no way for him to tell her how sorry he is.

No possible way.

"Go with him, Beth."

She stares at him, hands loose at her sides. Shakes her head slowly. "Daryl, no, I-"

"Beth, please." Still low, but yes, now he's pleading. Not in her face about it, not overwrought, but he has no power to make her do anything and he needs her to do this for him. "Just go with him. I'll call you. Alright? Promise, I will."

"You will fuckin' not," Shawn hisses, but what Shawn doesn't seem to understand - among a great many other things - is that he might as well not even be here anymore. He's inconsequential. All Daryl sees is her. All that matters is her. Her and his ability to remove her from this moment, in which no one is going to win anything if they stay.

She doesn't say anything. Doesn't move. She swallows, and the tears in her eyes are like knives cutting into his.

Then she nods, bends to gather up her coat and hat and scarf, and grips her brother's arm.

"Shawn. C'mon."

For a second or two Daryl actually thinks he might refuse. Then he snorts - rather like a bull - and turns away. "I mean it," he growls over his shoulder. "You come back around again, you're dead."

Beth doesn't look back at all.

So then they're gone.

He had her. He doesn't have her now.

All at once his body unlocks and he stumbles forward, wavers, catches himself against a tree. Leans, head down, spits blood into the snow and wonders if he's about to puke, decides he isn't, and just leans some more, focused entirely on his breathing.

He has no idea what he's feeling. He's pretty sure it's awful, but beyond that he can't put words to it. It's enormous and consuming and it hits him far harder and far deeper than Shawn's fist. He's intimately familiar with what happens when someone hits you hard enough: you simply can't process the pain so all you feel is the impact. The pain comes later, sometimes considerably much. In the meantime your body is left dazed, staggering, unable to make sense of any input. Barely able to function. You no longer feel like you're truly part of the world.

In many ways that's a mercy.

So there's that. For now. He lifts his head and peers blearily back toward the house. Everything appears exactly as it was. The festivities have continued without a pause - or if there was one he didn't see it, and no one is coming to investigate.

He should really go.

But he can't. Not yet. All he can do is lean there and breathe, and begin to feel the pain in his jaw even if he isn't feeling pain anywhere else, and wait for something else to go wrong.

And he does know one thing. It's a terrible thing, kind of, but it also isn't very surprising. Under the dull pain and the deeper dullness hiding the even deeper agony, he's aware of at least one thing he can put a word to.

Under it all, staring blankly at what happened and what's going on, is a perverse and selfish species of relief.

He doesn't have to lie anymore.

Somehow he makes it back to the truck. It's possible that a few things happen after that.

It's possible that he just drives. It's possible that he drives straight back to town and it's possible that he drives in the exact opposite direction and circles endlessly, unable to go anywhere at all. It's possible that he drives a little way and stops and gets out and screams into the dark, screams his throat raw, screams until his diaphragm and every muscle in his stomach is doing its own screaming and he doubles over and dissolves into a fit of coughing and once again comes treacherously close to vomiting all over his boots. It's possible that, having done that - or without doing that at all - he runs at the truck, hurls himself at it, punches his fists skinned and bloody, beats himself against its side until he leaves dents, because he does have a history of getting slightly melodramatic about things and it's accurate to say that pain can be its own kind of coping mechanism, and the pain in his body might be far more bearable than the other kind beginning to roar through his head.

It's possible that he simply stands and gazes up at the sky and wishes for stars in place of these low and rushing and increasingly apocalyptic clouds that have no obvious practical reason for even being there.

It's possible that he pulls out his phone and brings up her number, stares at it, almost hits send, doesn't. Stuffs it back into his pocket.

It's possible that he finds the crater-scar on his left hand and digs his fingernail into it until it opens up and bleeds.

It's possible that he leans his head against the wheel and cries in heaving, shuddering sobs hard enough crack his ribs, cries until his eyes are swollen and his face is blotchy and wet with tears and snot and he's a fucking mess in every sense of the word. It's also possible that he cries silently, cries like a smoothly flowing river, cries everything out of himself until he feels like he can allow the truck to drag his sick, sorry ass back to town.

All of these things are possible, and it's possible that all of them happened. It's possible that any number of them did, or only one. Afterward he's never sure. His knuckles are scraped, but not very badly and that could have been something else. He hurts but that could just be the pain in his jaw metastasizing. There's a scratch over the scar but it doesn't look very much like an injury from a fingernail and it could be from something else as well.

His throat is raw. That much he can't explain any other way. Though whether it was screaming or crying or a combination of the two, he has no idea.

He's never sure what happens after that.

What he does know is that eventually he goes home.

He knows he does because here he is in his room, in the dark, sitting on the bed and staring at his phone again.

He doesn't have the luxury of not knowing what to do.

Saying he would call her was stupid. It was a spur of the moment thing, and he really did believe it and intended to and he still wants to, God, he wants to so bad, but at present he can't imagine any scenario in which they allow her to talk to him, or him to talk to her, ever again.

Then again, she's eighteen. There are a number of things she could do now and a limited amount anyone could really do to stop her.

Please. Please, God, you're not real but please, please to anyone who's listening, who gives even a tiny little bit of a fuck, please just keep her there. Please don't let her do anything stupid. Please don't let her do anything to make this worse than it already is, if that's even possible, but let's face it, it actually could be a good bit worse, so let's operate under the assumption that there's at least a minuscule chance that this is all still salvageable and keep her there, and keep this at its current level of shit until we can figure out how to dig ourselves out of it.

Please.

He said he would call her. He's said that twice before, in situations vaguely like this one. One of those times he didn't keep his promise. The other one, he did.

He can at least get two out of three.

He sits for another moment, then collapses back onto the bed in his coat and boots, phone clutched in his hand. He stares up at a ceiling lost in shadow. Carol's car wasn't there when he pulled up. The house is empty and silent - empty even with him in it.

One step at a time. Look at your feet and you'll trip. Always.

He lifts the phone and goes ahead and jumps.

It rings for a while without going to voicemail. He closes his eyes; yeah, okay, he's not surprised but he is disappointed in a numb kind of way. He did want to talk to her. Hear her voice. He's alone with this, completely, and he's used to that but just because he's used to it, that doesn't mean he likes it. Doesn't mean it's something he would choose.

And she's alone too. And she might not be used to it.

But yes, it was idiotic to think she would pick up, and he's about to cut the call when she does.

"Daryl?"

He releases an enormous breath, and that's when he realizes he's about to start fucking crying. Again, probably.

"Hi." Another breath. This is basic, he can do this. Breathing. He does it all the time. Then, "I-I didn't think you were gonna answer."

"Almost didn't. Daddy wanted to take my phone. Mama talked him down. Said that was ridiculous. Said I'm not a little kid, whatever else is goin' on. So." She sighs heavily. Wearily. There's a hitch, a tremble in the last of it, and he knows she's been crying too. Though now she sounds calm. "He's so angry. Shawn is so angry. I didn't even know he was gonna be there, he never said. Mama is..." She laughs. It sounds grim. "She sure as shit ain't happy."

He lays an arm across his eyes and watches the colors dance behind his lids. "They mad at just me? They mad at you?"

"Both, I think. Way more at you." She sighs again. "It's like I thought. Like I told you it would be. They think you made me. Or you... Not made, maybe, but they think you went after me and talked me into it. They think you seduced me." She sounds almost ready to laugh again at the word, and he finds himself in the same place. It's very funny. It's very sickly funny because it matches that old story in some ways, though in others it's extremely off the mark.

Really, this wasn't that kind of story at all. He was right about that. Maybe the basic framework was there, is there, but framework is just a skeleton. It's not organs and muscle and skin. This is something other.

"Yeah, well." He bites at his lip. Pain flares bright. "Wasn't ever gonna be nothin' else."

"They don't know you," she says softly. "I really... I thought maybe they did. They don't. They don't know you at all."

"No. They don't."

In so many ways, they don't. In so many ways, they were so wrong about him.

Silence. Silence for a long time. If it wasn't for the whisper of her breathing in his ear he might think she was gone. Taken away from him again. But then he hears her voice, still almost a whisper, and it's tight with fresh tears.

"Is it over?"

God. He bites his lip again but it doesn't help very much. "I dunno." He doesn't want to cry anymore. He's so tired. "I don't want it to be."

"Me neither. Daryl?"

"Yeah."

"What're we gonna do?"

"I dunno." He lifts his arm, swipes his hand roughly down his face. That doesn't help either. "I'm gonna... I'm gonna come out tomorrow. Talk to your dad. I got no idea if that's gonna do anything, but... I dunno, I'm gonna try. Meantime..."

"Meantime what?"

This feels so unfair, and it feels like he's responsible for the unfairness of it. And probably he is. Probably this has all kinds of less than admirable motivations behind it, but he's not going to unpack them right now, because again: tired. "Meantime, I guess just... Just leave it alone. Much as you can. I dunno if it's gonna help. I mean, you think you can do somethin'... They're your family, I just... I dunno. I'm sorry. I dunno."

"Okay."

More silence. He lets it roll out beneath them like a dark road. Maybe she's in the dark too. Maybe they have that in common. All those nights lying in the bed he made for them and talking to her, feeling like she was here. Right here, her warm, naked body slid in between the sheets. Like he could reach out and search for her hand and it would be there.

She feels very far away from him now.

"We were stupid," she whispers. She's crying. "Daryl, we were so fuckin' stupid."

"I know." And he can't stop it either. It's overflowing him, hot and trickling sideways over his cheeks. Burning his neck, his ears. He doesn't want to be doing this but his body never did listen to him and there's nothing else to do. "But it was good. Wasn't it?"

"Yeah. It was."

It was.

"You should go."

"I know." She heaves in a huge, shuddering breath and it aches in his chest like it's his own. "I don't want to."

"I don't want you to. You gotta."

"Yeah." Another pause, and he listens to her, and he doesn't want to be here and there's nowhere else he would rather be, because at least he can still hear her like this. At least he has that. Even if it's not for long. "I love you."

"I love you, girl."

"Goodbye."

He doesn't say it back. Later he'll wonder if he should have.

He'll decide it was better not to.

Note: Songs are "Slide" by Ani Difranco, "Rainslicker" by Josh Ritter, "Found Out About You" by the Gin Blossoms, and "Style" by Taylor Swift.