you're too young & eager to love

Because it’s been over a year, and I still can’t fucking take it. Because Beth should not have died. Period.

Because Beth and Daryl have so many unanswered questions and possibilities.

Because ... Uuughhhh. My heart.

So, yeah, this is what coping looks like. Or completely raising a middle finger to the show.





He goes to bed with her the first night.

They don't plan it. It's not like they talk about it - of course not, he barely says two words to her that whole evening and he's lucky to get that much out past his trembling lips - or even look at each other and come to some kind of silent agreement. They get up, they start walking, and when they get to the bedroom door she's been told is hers, he just… doesn't leave.

She doesn't ask him to. She opens the door and takes his hand and leads him in. Closes it. Cuts off the light.

He's stiff, awkward. Clearly uncertain about whether he should be there. Clearly uncertain about what to do with his arms and legs, his hands. She's not certain either; she never slept with anyone like this. The mattress is a full, so it's not like they're crammed in together, but it's close enough quarters that they can't exactly stay on fully separated sides.

She doesn't want to.

She hasn't seen him in almost a year. He was sure he would never see her again. She's been through ten kinds of hell, getting here. She's been terrified and hurting and cold, starving and thirsty, and she's been lonely even in the midst of a group. Now he's here, this awkward, uncertain man lying so close to her in the dark and smelling of sweat and leather and cigarettes and that deeper Daryl-smell that she can identify anywhere and could never define, and she doesn't want him to stay on his side.

And she doesn't want him to leave.

It's okay, she whispers, and he stiffens and sighs, and she hears him turning. Feels him as he turns toward her. She repeats it and then clarifies - it's okay, I want you to stay - and gradually he relaxes. She leans up on one elbow and pulls the blanket up over them both, lies back down and tucks her hands against her chest. She has a habit of making herself small when she sleeps, and she suspects it's in part a mechanism of coping and in part one of defense, but right now it doesn't feel like either of those things. Right now it feels like a good thing to be small, because he's not.
He feels big and strong and safe, and she's not weaker for wanting those things right now, in a strange bed in a strange house where everything is so damn strange.

At some point his thick hand settles over her waist, curves to fit it. Her knee nestles between his. It still doesn't feel completely easy, but time and distance have proven themselves profoundly malleable, and right now neither of them means much.

He sleeps. Then so does she.


~


They wake up like that. They don't talk about it. There really isn't anything to talk about.
Going downstairs for breakfast, she gets the distinct sense that everyone knows and they’re not talking to her about it. Internally she rolls her eyes. Whatever. She doesn't have anything to explain. Nothing to defend. Yes, he’s almost twice her age, and yes, they slept together, but it’s Daryl and it’s not like that although she can’t really explain what it is like either.

He passes her, snags an apple from the bowl on the table, bumps her shoulder with it. Nothing more. She glances up and his back is already to her, heading for the door with his bow over his shoulder. He hasn't spoken to her since last night, but that's okay. He doesn't have to. And if he's walking away from her now, it's not because he doesn't want to be with her.

He needs time. She understands that. She saw his face when she walked out of the thick brush, rifle in her hands. For a moment that face was all she could see. His world was crumbling and he wasn't at all sorry to see it go. He was staring, awed, at the new one.

But he still needs some time.


~


Learning is a process. You can't do it all at once. She knows that - knows it better than she ever wanted to - but there's something about getting to know the Alexandria Safe Zone that she wishes she could fast-forward through. She understands the needs for its size, but she feels cramped. The normality is bizarre. It's like a Looking Glass version of the prison, where nothing is quite the correct size or shape and none of the lines go in the right directions. Where impossible things come flying at her before breakfast, in significantly greater numbers than six. Where it takes all the running she can do to stay in the same place.

The gardens. The walls. The infirmary. There's a school, of sorts. A library, of a kind. The church. She stands there for a time, Maggie silent behind her, and then then she walks down the central aisle to the altar and looks up at the cross.

She did pray, all those miles. She prayed a lot. She survived, and she supposes that might as well be a miracle. She looks up at the deep brown of the cross, honey-colored light pouring in on it and the pews and the painted walls, and she mouths thank you.

Just in case.


~



He's leaning on the porch railing when she comes home with the last of the daylight, smoking. Gives her a nod like he sees her every day, and it's only because she can see his eyes through the unkempt mess of his hair that she knows it's not like that at all.

He's looking at her like he still can't believe it. He's nodding at her because it's all he can manage to do.

She doesn't go right in. She walks over to stand beside him, hands on the rail - white-pristine - and gazes out at the street.

“Does it ever stop feelin’ weird?”

He grunts. Taps ash. “Nah.”

“Bet you hated it.”

Hated. Not now. She can tell. She turns her head just as he does, and he looks at her for a few seconds that become a few more and a few more, and finally he gives her one of the smallest smiles she's ever seen.

Small and meant right down to his bones.

“Fuck you think?”

“I don't.” She returns the smile and it's not much bigger, and then she looks away. Up at the sky this time, all streaked red and gold. “Hate it. Not sure I like it, though.”

He grunts again. Rolls a shoulder. His bare arm is almost brushing hers and she can feel his warmth, and beneath that the vibration of a thousand emotions seething through his blood. He's not about to shatter. It's not like that. It's not like the moonshine and the shack. He's not desperate. He's not committing the world’s slowest kind of suicide, and he doesn't need to be saved from himself.

He's here with her and he needs some time.

“It's okay.” She lays a hand on his forearm and he drops his head, stares down at it and then at her, face for once unreadable. “C’mon. I'm hungry.”

He follows her inside.


~


It happens again.

Of course. It feels like there should be an of course. It was never going to go any other way. He doesn't pause and he doesn't seem uncertain; he's with her all the way to the door, and she opens it and they walk through together. Her in a long, loose tee and him stripped to his shorts and shirt, and together they lie down in the dark and she turns toward him at the same moment he turns toward her, and again his hand finds its place over the dip of her waist.

She doesn't have to tell him it's okay. Not this time.

But he's restless. Even if he's not moving much she can feel it: like a ripple under his skin, like waves, lapping and then slapping at his rocky shoals. Wearing at him. Foam churning with all the things he can't say.

He was trying to tell her that night, and he couldn't then either.

You don't have to. Daryl. Stop. I'm here.

It's quiet when he breaks - because yes, eventually he was going to. Not like the shack, the fire. It's not even breakage; he opens and he flows, and while that day forever ago he sobbed, he's silent as he trembles, as she gathers him into her arms and he clings to her, her throat and hair and shoulder soaked in his tears by the end.

She can tell: he's not afraid. He's not ashamed. This isn't hurting him in any way other in the way a limb hurts when it's been packed into a horribly tight space and it can finally stretch and take its share of blood.

It comes and then it goes and he's drained and calm against her, breathing deep. Slow. Maybe half asleep already. She strokes his hair until she's sure he's the rest of the way there, and only then does she allow herself to follow him down.


~


Again, there's nothing to talk about. It's a pleasure, that absence.

By now everyone who wasn't sure about where they both slept last night - and in whose company they did it - is totally certain, and they're discussing anything but It. Which is fine with her. She does some more private eye-rolling. When he passes her this time he still doesn't stop, but he lays a hand on her shoulder, and when she glances up he's looking at her, another hint of a hint of a smile there for her.

She takes it and gives him one of her own, and then he's gone.


~


That night she's tired - maybe the last dregs of the past two weeks catching up with her - and she goes to bed early. He's already there, on his side with his head propped on his hand, book open in front of him. He glances up when she comes in, and when she smiles at him he gives her a tiny nod and returns his gaze to the page.

Daryl is quiet more than he’s not, and Beth is okay with that. Since she got here, the people around her have hardly shut up for more than ten minutes at a stretch. And she gets it, she's not angry at them, but it's so much all at once, and the fact is that beneath layer after layer of toughened scar tissue, she's not nearly as together as she would like to be.

She gets impatient. Tired. Frustrated. She wants to snap, now and then to snarl. She does all she can to bite it back and force it down. They thought she was dead, in the most complete way one can. She imagines what she would do if suddenly Daddy walked in the door with his head on his shoulders and his arms open for a hug, and her hands shake until she clenches them at her sides, nails leaving half-moons in her palms. She has to allow them this.

But not him. She can be quiet with him. So she changes into the first loose shirt she can grab, lines herself up along his broad back and is asleep in minutes.


~


Another night. Two. A week. She slides into something like a routine, and she learns his. They match pretty well; they usually fall asleep together, though now and then he or she comes in late, quiet, warm dip of the bed and a sigh accompanied by the comforting solidity of a body. Somewhere in there, his stuff started making a slow migration into the room - though it's not like he has a lot of stuff anyway. Some clothes. Couple books, of the kind she wouldn't have expected and yet somehow isn't surprised by. Hemingway. Joseph Conrad; she was assigned Heart of Darkness in school but never actually had to read it on account of the world ending. Mark Twain eventually makes an appearance - Huck Finn - and she's not surprised by that either.

She doesn't ask him about these. But she does steal whatever’s not in his hands. So they end up lying next to each other and reading, and then they end up kind of lying on each other and reading, and then one very rainy day they end up lying sprawled all over each other and reading, and she's not sure how they got there but she knows his thigh makes a good pillow and that feels like sufficient information.


~


She sings sometimes, in the dark.

She doesn't mean to, at least not the first time. It just happens. She's settled down with him for the night, late and peaceful, and he's lying on his back with his arm slung across his forehead, unfocused gaze on the ceiling. Thinking, she can guess - about the run he's making with Rick day after tomorrow, about food stores, about hunting and about game, about the group of worrisome looking men he and Aaron spotted about ten miles away a day or so back - but it doesn't feel like the anxious circular thinking into which he falls sometimes. It's idle and only half concerned. He's not winding himself up. He's just reviewing the day. Taking inventory.

She's half watching him, running a brush over and over through her hair. On her way up here, she almost hacked it all off. It would have been easier. But she kept catching sight of herself in car windows and rearview mirrors and actual mirrors, and for some reason thinking about going through with it made her gut knot up.

She's never cut it. Like Samson, like him, she let it grow.

She’s half watching him but not really watching him at all, because she's remembering when she used to do this before on the farm, before the Turn and even after: sitting on the edge of her bed and running the brush over and over through her hair and losing herself in the low light, the repetition of the motion, her eyes losing focus and her attention drifting into the strands and flowing down her shoulders.

Singing the songs Mama taught her. But also rougher stuff. Sadder stuff. Things and places she'd never seen. Barroom floors and lonely roads. Dirty alleyways. Empty places, lost, forsaken inside and out. Ruined love, and love that never should have happened and went so wrong but was worth it anyway.

She used to do that and then after the prison fell she didn't do it anymore, and it fell so far off her radar that she doesn't realize she's doing it now until she hears how silent he's gotten, and she stops.

It's not like he was making a racket before. He was near silent already. But all the barely audible sounds of his presence - his breathing and his heartbeat and the occasional rustle of the covers as he shifts on top of them, now and then a mutter as he says something to himself or to persons unseen - have utterly died away. As if he's dead, almost, and she feels a flutter of irrational panic as she turns to look at him directly.

He's simply looking back at her. And his face.

His face.

For a long time there's nothing. Just the two of them staring at each other, the lack of sound nearly deafening. As if the house has also fallen silent, as if the whole Zone has. To listen to her and then to listen to her absence.

“Couldn't take no music, after.”

So low it's difficult to hear him. So rough - grating, really - that it's difficult to understand the words. But she does, and she doesn't have to ask him what he means, and her heart cracks right down the middle.

Why don't you go on, play some more.

Keep singin’.

“I'm sorry,” she whispers.

He shakes his head. His forearm over his forehead, exactly like this in the coffin, turned to watch her. “Don't.”

“I am.”

“Don't matter now.” The exhale is a fist that grips him by the spine and tightens, squeezes him empty. “It don’t-”

“It does matter.”

It does matter. It does, it does, it does; all her time with him can be contained and expressed in those three words. It all matters. Whether or not it's over, it matters. Whether or not you can do anything to change it, it matters. Whether or not you had a choice, it always matters.

He doesn't say anything. The silence has washed over him again and he hasn't surfaced. He's gazing at her from the depths of it, eyes shining, and she sets the brush carefully down on the bedside table and swings her legs up onto the bed, slides close to him and lays her head on his chest.

“I can keep singin’,” she murmurs, and her hand settles splayed over his heart.

He doesn't answer her. But she feels him nod, so she keeps singing, and it's not lonely and it's not lost and it's not sad. And after a while his fingers begin to work through her brushed-out hair, until they slow and gradually stop, his hand cupping the back of her head and his breath smooth and deep.

She keeps singing.



~


She likes being the big spoon, when they sleep curled up together. He likes it too; if anything he appears to prefer it. But that's not always how it goes, and sometimes she curls herself backward into the hollow of his body and he hooks an arm around her waist, and all over again she feels his size - at least compared to her - and his strength, his solidity, the banked-down furnace of his heat. Like so many other things, it's comforting. To the extent that she ever feels safe anymore, even behind these walls, it's with him.

But now something that's not his arm has hooked her and drawn her up out of her dreamless darkness. She lies on her side with the steady rise and fall of his ribcage behind her, breath warm on the nape of her neck, and as she blinks into the faded rose light seeping into the sky, she feels him at the base of her spine. Pressing into her.

Hard.

Very. Rock-hard and twitching slightly as he stirs.

She doesn't tense up, doesn't pull away. She doesn't do much of anything. She merely stares at the window as a dam breaks in her head and the torrent floods over her. How it's been with him - yes, not like that. Never like that. Whatever the hell the rest of them think, they're wrong. Being with him like this - God, something like three weeks now - and thinking nothing of it, falling asleep in his arms, him in hers, all that awkward uncertainty melted away in how right it feels.

It came to her and she put it away. Didn't want it. She thought. What they had was good, she didn't need more.

Except now. Him. What if he.

The torrent has gathered in a pool in her gut and is swirling, surging, making the room seem to spin. Maybe she wants it. Maybe she doesn't. She doesn't know, she doesn't know, all the way back to that night in the candlelight and oh and everything that his silence contained and everything that might have been hidden far under the surface, and all at once it's hard to breathe and she jerks away from him, half turns and gropes for the covers as she realizes she probably just did exactly the wrong thing.

Because he's awake too. He wakes up fast and completely when startled, as catlike as his nocturnal roaming in the prison blocks, and he's pushing himself up, eyes wide and dark, mouth open almost certainly to ask her what's wrong-

And he gets it. She doesn't have to say a thing. She sits there with the blanket clutched in her hands and watches terrible comprehension breaking across his shadowed face.

For someone else, this would probably be no big deal. Probably laugh it off. Might be a little forced, kind of embarrassing, but she can see it going like that, and she would be willing to laugh too. But this isn't someone else. It's her and it’s him, and he's never once said a word about this in any context, and only now is she actually wondering why.

He swallows, his lips now a thin, sharp line. She thinks he might be about to say something else - is praying he does, because she's scrambling around for anything at all and coming up empty - but instead he turns away, completely, and when he shoves himself to his feet he moves so she can only see his back.

“Daryl.”

Only a breath. It's all she can do. This shouldn't be a big deal, for Christ’s sake, but it's plunging into a spiral, and as he starts to gather up his clothing and boots she can see by the set of his shoulders that he's trapped in the center of it.

“You don't have to-” She abandons the rest of it and watches helplessly as he yanks his clothes on, back still to her, laces up his boots with a soft grunt and grabs his bow from where he's leaned it against the wall and starts toward the door.

“You don't.” She's forgotten how to form anything other than what she's already said. He's moving like he's angry and she's sure he is, and not one particle of that anger is directed at her.She knows without him saying a word that with this single moment he feels like he's betrayed something.

Betrayed her.

He's moving like he's angry but he's still quiet as he opens the door, steps into the hall and closes it behind him. Not a slam but it might as well be. There's an awful finality in it. As if he doesn't intend to open it again.

Well, his stuff is all here. What there is of it.

She stares for a while at the place where he's not. Downstairs, the front door opens and closes, and she knows that if she went to the window and looked out she would see him pacing the street like the cell block in his unhappier nights, tense shoulders hunched. Almost stalking.

She doesn't go to the window. She releases all the air in her lungs and sags down onto the mattress, curls into the warmth of the place he occupied and closes her eyes.

The bed is too big without him there. It's vast.

And it's getting colder by the second.


~


She doesn't see him all day. That in itself isn't unusual, but there's a pointedness in the way she's not seeing him, a distinct sense of intent. She had fully expected him to avoid her, and he is. The only question, she thinks wearily as she swings her legs off the platform on the wall with her rifle in her lap, is how long he’ll keep it up.

How deep his shame and his anger at himself runs.

Stupid.

With anyone else, she would be bewildered by this level of overreaction. It's Daryl, so she's not.
Around late afternoon, wandering aimlessly up and down the streets, her thoughts take a dark turn and she begins to wonder if this is really fucked. He’ll be haunted by a monstrous mutation of the truth and what they are and what she wants and he won't be able to break out of his own fucking head. Because Daryl Dixon is his own worst enemy, and that much hasn't changed since she was taken from him.

She fought her way back here, to her family, to him. She killed and she suffered, she went through hell after hell, she came out the other end with only three scars and most of the time she feels sane. Most of the time she feels all right. But it's not under any power of her own that she's been sleeping deeply every night. For the most part the nightmares leave her alone, and she wakes up feeling rested. Feeling well.

Losing that. Over something this stupid.

After an hour or so she realizes that she's searching for him. Runs across Aaron; Aaron doesn't know. Neither does Rick. This is not in itself strange. Sometimes Daryl vanishes for a while. He did before she came back and now and then he still does. She knows that.

It's the increasingly real prospect that he might not return to her at all - that while he’ll almost certainly come back, she might have to face the night alone for the first time since she walked through those goddamn gates - that sends her out after him.

Because she is going after him, and that means out. He's not behind the walls. She was sure of that long before she stopped searching. So much of him hasn't changed, no, and she knew him before, probably better than just about anyone else ever has. He appreciated fences but he was never completely at ease behind them, and he's sure as hell not at ease behind these walls. She's seen enough to know that even now he doesn't feel at home here, and her presence hasn't changed that.
She wouldn't want it to change. She imagines him domesticated and it's all possible kinds of wrong.
They don't argue with her when she tells them to let her out. She has her rifle and on her scarred face she’s wearing a look cultivated over miles of lethal danger that hardly ever fails to get results. Even with the scars she looks easily a few years younger than she actually is, and for a while she used that and her size as camouflage, as a way to encourage people to fatally underestimate her. Then she came to understand that those things - her small, slight build, her youth - could in themselves be dramatically intimidating. Little blond girl who survived a bullet to the head and is clearly and categorically prepared to fuck your shit up. So she can usually get what she wants with that look and she gets it now, and the shadows are long through the trees as she shifts her hand on the strap of her rifle and walks back out into the world.

He taught her to track. The basics, anyway. He taught her to track and then she taught herself, and it doesn't take her long to pick up his trail. He's not trying to obscure it, and he didn't come through that long ago - disturbed leaf litter and the occasional edge of a boot print as she moves deeper into the woods, ignoring the distant rasping growl of a walker or two.

He's walking heavily. Like he's carrying a weight.

Birds all around her. Everywhere. It's coming on to that part of the early evening when they gather and gossip, burst from tree to tree in raucous clouds. The mourning doves mourn their secret losses. The mockingbirds review their set lists for the night.

She stops and listens, head cocked. All that singing.

Throughout her grinding, agonizing journey north, she never stopped to listen. And she never sang.

“The hell you doin’ out here?”

She jerks and whirls, already bringing the rifle up even as she knows she doesn't need it. He doesn't raise his hands, doesn't take a step back; he simply stands there and looks at her, eyes hooded and face impassive but for the minute working of his jaw as he bites the insides of his lips.
He does that when he's upset. It gnaws at him, so he gnaws at himself.

“Lookin’ for you.”

He grunts, glances away. “Found me. Gettin’ dark, you should go on back.”

“Ain't goin’ back. Don't be an idiot.” She shoulders the rifle and crosses her arms. “You shouldn't run off like that if you don't wanna get chased.”

“What would you be chasin’ me for?” His voice is tight with exasperation, but beneath it the tension is present for a very different reason. She hears pleading at the edges. Can practically make out the words under the words, his desperateness for her to just leave him be.

“‘Cause I want you to come back with me.” Patient. “Daryl… Look, what happened-”

Every muscle on his face wrenches. He can't meet her eyes. “Don't. Wasn't nothin’.”

“No. It wasn't. That's the point.” She takes a step forward, takes a breath at the same time, and if he won't look at her she is going to look the hell at him. She's going to look at him until her eyes drop out of her head, just to make up for his end. “Daryl, I… We never talked about it, I know we didn't, but we… We've been sleepin’ together and I-”

“Jesus, girl, could you not?”

Finally he's looking at her, and he's stricken. Mortified, and suddenly she knows that it's because of the phrasing. Sleeping together. Literally, what they've been doing. But said out loud, it sounds…

“I like it,” she says quietly. She's merciless when she has to be. She wore him down once and that was before she challenged death to a wrestling match and won. “Bein’ with you like that. It's… It's nice. It feels good. I don't know what was gonna happen before, and I don't know all of what you're thinkin’ now, but if you want-”

“I don't.”

It's soft. But it's an explosion. Behind the dim flash of his eyes is a roiling chaos of fear and confusion - and relief. She blinks at him; she's not afraid, but the confusion is something she shares, because of everything she thought he might say…

“You don't,” she echoes.

He shakes his head, ducks it and stares down at his boots. “I don't want. That. With you. I don't.” He drags in a huge shuddering breath and raises his eyes to hers. “What happened… It just fuckin’ happened, I dunno, it happens. You know that. But that ain't what I want.”

She has no idea if this is a disastrous question or not, and it doesn't matter, because here it comes. “Why not?”

He shrugs, the picture of excruciating awkwardness. He now appears as if he would joyfully welcome the earth simply opening up and swallowing him whole, or a stray bolt of lightning picking the patch of ground he's standing on as a landing zone. She wonders if his lips are actually bleeding inside his mouth. “I don't. With anyone.” He pauses. “Never have. Dunno why. I just… It's not what I want.”

“Sex,” she says, as if some idiot part of her needs to be absolutely sure they're on the same page regarding the subject of this surreal conversation, and a huff of a breath escapes him and he gazes at her in total and utter despair.

Seriously?

“Okay,” she says quickly - softly. Gently. He's not going to be able to explain it. It's something else she knows implicitly. He might want to, he might make a desperate effort, but it's beyond him. She's been aware for a long time that his raw intelligence is formidable, that he might well be one of the smartest men she's ever met, but so much of him is a mystery to himself. Some of it because it has to be. Some of it simply because it is.

He doesn't want sex. At all. He won't be able to tell her why.

Why doesn't matter. And anyway…

She knew. She always knew. It was completely obvious.

“Daryl.”

He nearly whimpers. It vibrates in his throat, vaguely canine. She takes a careful step forward and reaches for him, and when her hand curls around his, he doesn't shy away. “Please come back with me,” she whispers. Then, because if she's not going to tell the whole truth now it doesn't matter when else she tells it: “Please come to bed with me.”

No reaction at all. He's a frozen pillar, his hand curled rigid. Everything. Every muscle, every joint. Like she's enchanted him into stone.

Then his eyes fall closed and all the tension bleeds out of him at once. It streams down his body and soaks into the ground and leaves him loose before her, softened, his fingers sliding weakly through hers. She holds his hand, and then she closes the last of the distance between them and wraps her arms around her waist, lays her head against his chest, and it's like the first time. The first time she really touched him.

He touched her back.

It's more than her elbow now. He's moving like he has to fight to do so, like he's so exhausted that lifting his hands is difficult, but he curls his arms around her shoulders and presses his cheek to the top of her head, and when he sighs and leans on her, she's strong enough to bear him up.

“I don’t care,” she breathes, and it’s all she can manage.

What she's saying. What she's not saying. Some of it is going unsaid because, just as there are things he doesn't know how to explain, there are things for which she can't find the words. What to call this, what it is and what it might become - it defies definition.

But maybe that was always true


~


On the porch, after dinner.

They made it back without running into a single walker except for one by the gate itself. They found the others at dinner, so they eat and it's like always, and he says essentially nothing beyond a few grunts in response to queries, but he's in a good mood, and everyone can tell.

So that's fine.

Then on the porch. He's there first, cigarette burning between his fingers; she comes a short while after and sits down beside him. She doesn't keep her distance. There's no reason to do that now. She settles against his side, leans on his shoulder, and after a long, sweet moment he turns and presses his lips to the crown of her head.

It's a warm night. Fireflies are starting to congregate in the bushes and the trees, crawling through the grass with slow green-gold pulses. More of them than she remembers seeing before. Maybe it's something about quality of the winter they had. Maybe something else. Yet another question she doesn't really need an answer for, because she's sitting with this man who in himself defies all definition, and she's watching all those tiny lights rise into the twilight to greet each other in midair, and when she closes her eyes she sees what he and she brought back from the woods, cradled in their joined hands and glowing in those same slow, rhythmic pulses, like a heartbeat.

“You sure this is alright?”

He couldn't not ask. She pushes her head against his jaw, somewhere between a butt and a nuzzle. “Yeah. I am.”

“It's weird.” He releases something near to a laugh. “I never…I don't-”

“Stop.” She closes her eyes, breathes. Feels him breathe with her. Like in the dark, matching him and slipping away into that rhythm. “I told you. You don't have to.”

“You’ll find someone else,” he murmurs, and she raises her head, frowning.

“What?”

“Someone.” He rolls a shoulder, takes a long drag and exhales. He doesn't look upset. His voice is rough, calm. Thoughtful. He's watching the fireflies. “Someone who wants that with you. You’ll find ‘em.”

“Maybe I will.” She gazes up at him, lip caught between her teeth. Suddenly she feels like crying, and it's not a bad feeling. This is not what she ever imagined for herself, but here now, this odd little light in her hands, she can't see herself with anything else, and there's nothing more she can conceive of wanting. “They can keep on walkin’.”

He looks down at her for a long moment. It's not an uncomfortable span of time. She eases into it, and so does he, and they rest there together. He's not arguing. She doesn't need to convince. He's said his piece, she's said hers, and now the talking can be done.

Damn romance novel.

Perhaps. Of a kind.

She extends a hand. After a few seconds a firefly lands on the tip of her index finger and stays, flexes its wings and pulses. She can feel the gentle pressure of his attention, and then the equally gentle pressure of his fingertip against hers as the firefly crawls from her to him. It remains there for another couple of seconds, crouched on his fingernail, before it blurs its wings into motion and lifts off into the dark.

“C’mon.” She leans up and grazes her lips against his cheekbone, pushes to her feet and reaches down a hand. He's smiling when he looks up, enormous behind the small fingers, already reaching for her - big and strong and safe.

Everything she wants, and she had it already. So did he.

“Let's go to bed.”