She can't do much else but gasp and paw at the ground and the blood pours out of her. Bubbling at her lips, soaking down her throat, the quickly sodden scarf that he peels away to show the extent of the wound. Ripped ugly, sinew and flesh dripping from it like horrific garlands. Sasha bracing her head to keep her still as she gasps against the rushing feeling in her ears.
She keeps her good hand on him, grasping tightly to his shoulder, pulling at him to yank herself up to drink in a desperate sucked in breath that has her choking a moment later. Thick and dark against her mouth, can hear Sasha's half-formed question as she swims in and out of her vision. "What is that- "
She doesn't hear the rest of it as she swallows, one mouthful all that she needs. The sip thick and the only sustenance that floods with her, and the last bit of sense she has is to grasp Daryl's hand. Not for comfort, never for comfort, she does not how to take it nor ask.
But in the second that the flesh begins to knit itself back together, her back arches is an animal sound of pain that is smothered against his palm. Head rolling back, wet and splattering blood, life thick and ugly coursing through her body as she feels it flood through her. The red - to gray - to white place between life and death. Pulsing like agony and twice and bright in her eyes that she screws up tightly against it to keep it at bay.
Daryl doesn't have much to do but hold her hand through it. He tries weakly to pat her shoulder, hushing her quietly through the pain. He hates this helpless feeling, but it's helped an awful lot by the knowledge that she'll be alright. She won't die. She'll get through this. They all will.
Sasha seems to think otherwise. She's crying-- not in big wracking sobs, that's not her way. Sasha stares angrily down at the body, and tears silently slip down her face. She's once again struck in the face of death, helpless as everything dies around her.
It's never clean, living wasn't, and why should coming back from seeming death be any neater? She curls into Sasha's leg, jerking against Daryl's hand where it's on her shoulder. Spasms that are feverishly warm, sounds that are whimpers of distress in her effort of keeping quiet. Her eyes shut tightly and clinging so tightly to them both. Loose and jerking in turns, feels the warm splash of tears on her face that falls as gentle as rain and another time, perhaps, she'd offer consolation, kindness to ease them all through this. Vulnerable as it is.
Most of those times, however, those wounds aren't the difference between life and death. Aren't so messy. Most of the time, she isn't rendered so useless, the wounds that she can feel, muscles reforming around the bone, the veins spluttering like old pipelines into use, the tendons that hold it together, then the skin that centimetre by centimetre seals itself over the area. The sickening way a tooth is there, being pushed back up through her skin, where it had ripped out of the Walker's rotten gums in her flesh. It clatters as it falls, hitting the ground and rolling away. A wonder done in front of their eyes with but a sip. Her leg kicks out, grinding against the floor uselessly as the healing wracks through her. Sweat pouring off her for the effort, drenched in it.
Then all at once, she goes still, without breath, without movement, head rolling back into Sasha's leg, and the wound - is nothing but a strange white line at the back of her neck that seems no more than an old scar, and is gone - completely gone. Like nothing had ever touched her, the proof of her recklessness. Aged, but not in the way that matters.
Then she breaths again.
She's too exhausted to move, right now, and too tired to open her eyes. Wets her lips, forcing the words - because she thinks she can see it now, the frown on his face that is his concern, Sasha's grief.
Sasha will know now. That will be the end of it, she thinks. Rick and Daryl, they were reasonable to her only request, but Sasha? Maggie? Abraham?
They wouldn't.
She didn't even blame them.
"It's done, now." Doesn't move - she cannot under her own weight right now, and she's tired - Gods, she's so tired, and she is so old, and this body was so past any point it should have ever seen. She can feel it, she can feel is so achingly long in her limbs.
She just wants to sleep, she wants the long dark, she wants her son back and Devi when she smiled and a world she was born too but lost and lost again. Her husband's thoughtful words, Damodar's bubbling laugh. Sir Bors grey, old eyes and Sir Galahad's hand upon hers. "Daryl... I can't..." get up, keep doing this, any of it. Her fingers going lose on his, slipping - and with it, she sinks back, unconscious, but breathing.
Daryl Dixon watches her come back from the dead a second time. It always seems so painful, so unnecessarily cruel. Why come back, if it hurts so much? If it's such a journey from the living to the dead, and screaming and squirming, back again? If he could stand her loss, he'd suggest letting her go. It seems so painful, to come back again and again, always losing. It's Daryl's own personal horror, never being able to die when it's your time.
But he guesses he's selfish. He holds her through it, and she always comes back to him in the end.
He doesn't say a word, just hushes her quietly, cradling her gently. When she says she can't move, he picks her up, bridal carry, without hesitation. Anything for her. She'll survive.
Sasha is still standing before them with her knife. "What the hell was that?"
Consciousness is a slippery thing to hold onto. Doesn't have the strength to hold herself up to answer - figures Daryl won't, after all, he'd made his stance on the blackwater clear, and she was never forthcoming about it at the best of times. But hearing the words is deep in the corner of her mind, her head rolled back like a dead thing in his arms - throat exposed as she swallows, the arm tucked in between them grips to his shirt in searching way to keep him there as she tries to take a hold of the waking world where she's needed - even if all she wants is to sleep. Not that she worries he will drop her. Just that she doesn't know what else to do - isn't capable of anything else - has never stopped - just hanging on.
Eighty years in a forest. She had seen Galahad after a month without blackwater. She could have stopped, finally shown the age she felt. Withered away. Gone without it. Maybe she wouldn't have to remember this all too.
What the hell was that - it's a good question. She forces her head up, rolls it into his chest, takes a shaking breath against him. Hidden where she can be safe in her humanity. More preciously guarded than her hold that's splattered with her blood. "Have I not told you enough times? Perhaps you should have been listening." Warm, leather, dust, blood - something hundreds of years old. To men and women he'd loathe the comparison to, but familiar to her. "Leave me my rest. Ask me whatever you wish - later." It's tired, small, a desperate attempt at speaking and normally it's authoritatively cutting. But she just sounds - tired.
She blocks out Sasha's scathing response, the irritated demand that it's bullshit, that she'd been keeping that from them.
Sasha isn't talking to Rani, not really. Her eyes flicker over the body Daryl's carrying, but it's just a body. "She should be dead," Sasha says, teeth bared. "She was bitten."
That's how this works. Both of them know this. Daryl knows it. He felt like her once, watching Rani's throat knit back together in that cave.
He doesn't blame her. But Christ, he's not gonna let her touch Rani with that knife.
"She ain't gonna turn," Daryl says, and Sasha frowns.
It was always going to happen one day, wasn't it? The arguments, the fight, the idea that she has a cure but she doesn't, she doesn't have a way out, a way to make the world better. She's just got more blood and how could they ever understand that? They had their fill of it.
She falls quiet, doesn't answer, her eyes shut and her face turning into his chest she lets out a breath. A little while, she promises, a little while longer and she'll be able to stand again. The dizziness and the exhaustion will wear off after the blackwater is finished repairing all the blood that she had lost.
It's a long drive home. Sasha sits in sullen silence, half angry and half mournful while Rani takes up the entire backseat, breathing growing less shallow. She's like someone coming slowly from the deep ocean, drawing upon the beach in small uneven steps.
Sasha is more like a woman stewing in boiling oil.
They get back to the decrepit hotel they're camping out in without too much trouble. It's too indefensible, too few sight lines at the bottom of a shitty hill, to stay at indefinitely, but it's done fine for now. They take her to her rooms with care, and Daryl hovers over her, cleaning her wound and making sure food and water waits by her bedside.
It's so quiet - it's so quiet, in the depth of it all. The rock of the car that lulls, the sky she sees in flickers above her, and the world is so, so quiet. An exhaustion that is beyond just a wound, that makes it for once, knowing he's just there - easy to rest. To let it take her over, even if for awhile.
It may not be true death but - but it's something. For awhile, it's... something. A break, a holiday, a respite. Perhaps the only kind she would accept because it is the one she has little choice over. Not her nature to do anything else but fight, but it was taken out of her hand, and the inevitable unconsciousness is the weight of her father's hand on her shoulder, pushing her back into it.
( 'Leave it to the Gods now, child. They will hold it for now.' Her father would smile, brushing against her brow. 'Leave it now.' )
She sleeps long, unmoving, death like perhaps, heavy in the bed. Through the night without so much of a hint of waking, nothing but a rise and fall of breath that is shallow to begin with. The odd babble in her sleep in a string of Hindi - then, in English, names that stopped having relevancy. Lord this and Sir that, calling for people that aren't there anymore - Damodar - when he is grown, he will be Raj, he will have the sword on which their honour was staked, but not before he ate his meal properly - for Devi - that she needs to keep her heels down and her eyes up when she's riding. Tesla, and she smiles, someone who is only ever Knight, that wracks her. Might seem important, except who here didn't call for someone they'd lost, from time to time? The only difference is that she has more to call for. A string of soldiers names, orders she always meant to give - for foot soldiers, of cavalry, of guerilla fighters, of tanks and trenches. A babble of time, that only she remembers - to them, now, for him, for Carl and Judith. Murmurs that mean nothing just to ask them something she can't quite say. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter she's going to watch them die too. Let her stop, let her stop, let this fever just burn her up.
Then, it stops, and the breaths become deep. Her dreams, have nothing else to give her. Settling again back into the silence. Deep heavy breaths that come instead - in the hours past dawn, the breaths of the living, not the half gone. Purging herself of the sickness of the Walkers, the fever of memories, she comes back, slowly but surely, the way she had long promised him, she would.
It's sometime past when the sky has crawled it's way up that the is drawn all the way back. She turns, curled her head into the pillow and breaths in and opens her eyes. For once she doesn't feel a need to dart awake, to begin moving almost as soon as she is able. The beds the most comfortable thing she's slept on in months, and someone's peeled her out of her bloody jacket and armour. Feels the bindings of her underclothes, and the blanket tucked around her. Says nothing, just staring at the blank wall that's paint has begun to peel with the damp.
He will be there, she knows he will, her voice croaks out in a whisper in the dim room. "Has she told them all?"
Daryl was sleeping dreamlessly, the kind of rest where you picture your own breathless body from afar. He hears Rani stir, and suddenly he's all movement, awake and aware without pause.
"Yeah," he says without pause, "Mostly don't believe her, though. Think Sasha's finally cracked." Poor goddamn Sasha, really. She don't deserve this.
She watches him, carefully, and, exhausted as she is, awake as she is, her hand shifts out from the blankets. Extending out to him in the offer for him to take it, to come closer.
"Yeah, we all deserve butlers'n four course meals," Daryl says with a little roll of his eyes. But it's not totally dismissive, not to her at least, the totality of her. She's too vast to ever be insulted by one thing. Rani is harder than most to pin down.
Daryl thinks it's because she keeps her pride in a safe place, hidden somewhere far away from her heart. Late at night, he imagines it's in that flask hanging from her throat, hidden sometimes by the scarves she collects. That's where the real Rani lives, the one who was a person before the blackness hit her veins and turned her blood. The secret part of her that laughs at his jokes, that talks about men and women hundreds of years dead, that tells the stories woven in the stars.
That's not how she is right now. Beckoning to him from her little throne of ratty blankets and pillows leaking stained foam stuffing, Rani is playing the ancient queen.
He takes her hand. "Hey," he says, and clasps his hand in hers.
"Only four? I was thinking six at least." No, no her pride is long since put so far away from herself, she does not bring it to the surface over much anymore - she laughs flat but earnest, most tired than unamused, so it rasps on her dry throat.
Some throne it is, and some queen she makes: laid up because of her own arrogance and insistence on taking as many blows as she could. But she smiles - only for him, this way. When there was no one else to see. Her 'Queen' face, Carl had called it, Maggie had laughed along with it. All stern and barely-there reactions until time had allowed them to read her.
Honesty, of herself, she has reasoned long, no one needs. No one needs these smiles, her quiet laughter, perhaps her stories about people undefeatable in their legend. But he seems to stay for them. He seems to let her express it - and for that, she is more grateful than she can say. Lets her fingers thread with his, hooking them together like bits of debris. All mangled and holding. "Hey." She pulls it closer, tucking it to herself. Warm, calloused, the things of living. "It seems my life was in your hands again."
It's one thing for her to go around saving others, that's her position, her duty - but him? He has no business doing that.
He stares at his hands caught in hers, and thinks over the meaning. No, it's not like that. The truth of Lakshmi is so much more mercifully simple, it's almost stupid. It's one of the many things about her that sets his mind at ease.
It's an effort to force herself up that little bit, a hiss of pain she keeps low and to herself. She has no business expressing pain when she is the one that cannot die. Her head hangs, the loose mess of hair falling over her face and it makes it easy to smile even so, tucked away. "Perhaps not my life, but my humanity certainly."
A dig, how much he means to her is palpable, sometimes, something everyone else sees, certainly. "Or are you going to stubborn about my attempt to give you my thanks?"
It's not the kind of conversation he wants to get caught up in. Words turn to sand in his mouth, and he shrugs his rigid shoulders, back slightly stooped. "Nah," he says, because anything else would be too much and too little all at once.
"Then just say thanks. Don't gotta make it so flowery."
She watches him, careful, the loudest thing in the room, the quietest thing she knows. Always there, always at her back, in the way that is irritating as it is soothing. The one person that wouldn't want the attentions of a Queen when even now she feels people pandering to her out of the sheer impossibility of the things she is, the things she's seen. The only person she can ever say might be worthy of it.
Because in a hundred years, there is only ever been three people that would meet her in the worst of what she is, cut through it like the weapons she knew best. Hold her carefully not because she is a Queen, or because she drinks the blackwater, but he seems to see her what she is.
"Alright," she says and considers, alright and her hand slips up, a brush of her fingertips to his jaw. Curling gently against the two days of stubble, a careful relaxed motion that's nothing less than precise. A tilt up where she's propped up on the hand holding his to keep him there where she doesn't think she can afford to lose him. The one person in a century that it's true of and he is the only one who she can be sure won't take it from her body when she is too weak to defend herself. "I won't."
She kisses him, the corner of her mouth to his. The sleep and the exhaustion still in her movements. Light, barely that. As easy as a word and everything she could say in the manifold languages she speaks, made simple. A brush that means exactly nothing except that it means everything.
He doesn't move away, but he doesn't move closer either. There are things he could do or say, but it would all depend on feeling and thinking something other than the sudden dull thud of his stone heart against his ribs. He doesn't want this. He doesn't disdain it. He doesn't feel anything but the creeping feeling of his own rapidly approaching mistake.
He stays still, quiet and unmoving, until she's no longer touching him. "You're tired," he says, making her excuses for her. He stands. "Sleep."
"I am. But sleep won't fix it." She's slow to withdraw from it, but lets him, all the same. Want nor interest in trapping him. Said what she needs to say, and tired as she is - his suggestion is easy. Trailing across his jaw as he pulls from her, unwinds their fingers. It's not an excuse - she'd insist if she still weren't so exhausted, that it didn't change anything. She is tired and the sun rises and they are the words she gripped into his clothes as blood bubbled up her mouth.
But he wouldn't be him, she wouldn't have done it if he reacted any other way. Her fingers instead curling around the pillow again, drawing it into her. Tucking herself into it. Watching him underneath the blankets and forces the words up her lungs. "When it is my time, Daryl? You burn my body and you spill the blackwater to the ground."
She doesn't open her eyes, taking slow deep breaths against the pillow. "Have you never heard of letting people dream?" It's laughed out, rattling along her throat and shoulders. Like the sick are capable of. The slow way people die now. An adjustment of hours.
Perhaps she is just the same. If she were anyone else, she'd let it linger, feel the bite, feel the sickness, drag herself down to level of the living, hang there at the very edge, almost dead. "Besides, you know time has nothing to do with it."
He turns to her, slow and grim, like a door swinging stuck on its hinges. "You wanna die?"
His tone is judgmental. There's a right answer to this question. No flowery speech, no poetics. He'd prefer to cut through the shit, especially with Rani, who learned in fine palaces to hide in the spaces between words. If that ever worked on him, it doesn't anymore.
"It has nothing to do with that. I accept my death long before you drew breath, you cannot change that." It's snapped, direct - he wants her to be blunt with it. She will be, she supposes she owes him that much.
If he doesn't want to hear it - then that's that.
"It has nothing to do with my wants, do I wish to rest? Of course, I do. But do you not understand you are the only one I can trust?" Trust with her human parts, these soft weak things that live hunted under the skin like a wounded animal.
He looks down at her, sitting on the bed, warm and soft and alive. "Bullshit."
He knows her penchant for flowery words. Daryl dislikes them because of how easily they can hide the truth. Rani folds her true self up in pretty ideas and ancient stories and hides behind the past. Her age is her shield, and she uses it to lie to everyone and herself.
But she can't lie to him.
"You can trust all of us," he says. "You're afraid."
It occurs to him that he should be kinder. Maybe she wants comforting words? Maybe she wants comfort. That's probably what that kiss meant. But it's too late for that now.
It occurs her in that all too paranoid way that the others cannot be far from this closed room and these walls are not so thick - that they will hear this argument when it piques. Neither of their tempers are their best traits. How well they suit, she thinks grimly, when they're growling like dogs with teeth in each other's throats. ( Refusing to let go, she wonders because they are too stubborn, or because neither of them knows how. )
"Of course I'm afraid." It's barked, snapped, pushing up on the bed, bedraggled still, dressed down to where she's got the blanket tucked under arm to keep herself covered. Maybe that's for the best. "But you are the one that doesn't want to hear so much as a word of truth, you're too busy in pretending that you feel nothing that you can't handle so much as a breath of my death."
Which would be -- sweet, if it wasn't irritating her, she can't afford to be precious, not about the black water.
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She keeps her good hand on him, grasping tightly to his shoulder, pulling at him to yank herself up to drink in a desperate sucked in breath that has her choking a moment later. Thick and dark against her mouth, can hear Sasha's half-formed question as she swims in and out of her vision. "What is that- "
She doesn't hear the rest of it as she swallows, one mouthful all that she needs. The sip thick and the only sustenance that floods with her, and the last bit of sense she has is to grasp Daryl's hand. Not for comfort, never for comfort, she does not how to take it nor ask.
But in the second that the flesh begins to knit itself back together, her back arches is an animal sound of pain that is smothered against his palm. Head rolling back, wet and splattering blood, life thick and ugly coursing through her body as she feels it flood through her. The red - to gray - to white place between life and death. Pulsing like agony and twice and bright in her eyes that she screws up tightly against it to keep it at bay.
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Sasha seems to think otherwise. She's crying-- not in big wracking sobs, that's not her way. Sasha stares angrily down at the body, and tears silently slip down her face. She's once again struck in the face of death, helpless as everything dies around her.
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Most of those times, however, those wounds aren't the difference between life and death. Aren't so messy. Most of the time, she isn't rendered so useless, the wounds that she can feel, muscles reforming around the bone, the veins spluttering like old pipelines into use, the tendons that hold it together, then the skin that centimetre by centimetre seals itself over the area. The sickening way a tooth is there, being pushed back up through her skin, where it had ripped out of the Walker's rotten gums in her flesh. It clatters as it falls, hitting the ground and rolling away. A wonder done in front of their eyes with but a sip. Her leg kicks out, grinding against the floor uselessly as the healing wracks through her. Sweat pouring off her for the effort, drenched in it.
Then all at once, she goes still, without breath, without movement, head rolling back into Sasha's leg, and the wound - is nothing but a strange white line at the back of her neck that seems no more than an old scar, and is gone - completely gone. Like nothing had ever touched her, the proof of her recklessness. Aged, but not in the way that matters.
Then she breaths again.
She's too exhausted to move, right now, and too tired to open her eyes. Wets her lips, forcing the words - because she thinks she can see it now, the frown on his face that is his concern, Sasha's grief.
Sasha will know now. That will be the end of it, she thinks. Rick and Daryl, they were reasonable to her only request, but Sasha? Maggie? Abraham?
They wouldn't.
She didn't even blame them.
"It's done, now." Doesn't move - she cannot under her own weight right now, and she's tired - Gods, she's so tired, and she is so old, and this body was so past any point it should have ever seen. She can feel it, she can feel is so achingly long in her limbs.
She just wants to sleep, she wants the long dark, she wants her son back and Devi when she smiled and a world she was born too but lost and lost again. Her husband's thoughtful words, Damodar's bubbling laugh. Sir Bors grey, old eyes and Sir Galahad's hand upon hers. "Daryl... I can't..." get up, keep doing this, any of it. Her fingers going lose on his, slipping - and with it, she sinks back, unconscious, but breathing.
She's alive, again.
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But he guesses he's selfish. He holds her through it, and she always comes back to him in the end.
He doesn't say a word, just hushes her quietly, cradling her gently. When she says she can't move, he picks her up, bridal carry, without hesitation. Anything for her. She'll survive.
Sasha is still standing before them with her knife. "What the hell was that?"
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Eighty years in a forest. She had seen Galahad after a month without blackwater. She could have stopped, finally shown the age she felt. Withered away. Gone without it. Maybe she wouldn't have to remember this all too.
What the hell was that - it's a good question. She forces her head up, rolls it into his chest, takes a shaking breath against him. Hidden where she can be safe in her humanity. More preciously guarded than her hold that's splattered with her blood. "Have I not told you enough times? Perhaps you should have been listening." Warm, leather, dust, blood - something hundreds of years old. To men and women he'd loathe the comparison to, but familiar to her. "Leave me my rest. Ask me whatever you wish - later." It's tired, small, a desperate attempt at speaking and normally it's authoritatively cutting. But she just sounds - tired.
She blocks out Sasha's scathing response, the irritated demand that it's bullshit, that she'd been keeping that from them.
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That's how this works. Both of them know this. Daryl knows it. He felt like her once, watching Rani's throat knit back together in that cave.
He doesn't blame her. But Christ, he's not gonna let her touch Rani with that knife.
"She ain't gonna turn," Daryl says, and Sasha frowns.
"So you've got a cure?"
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She falls quiet, doesn't answer, her eyes shut and her face turning into his chest she lets out a breath. A little while, she promises, a little while longer and she'll be able to stand again. The dizziness and the exhaustion will wear off after the blackwater is finished repairing all the blood that she had lost.
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Sasha is more like a woman stewing in boiling oil.
They get back to the decrepit hotel they're camping out in without too much trouble. It's too indefensible, too few sight lines at the bottom of a shitty hill, to stay at indefinitely, but it's done fine for now. They take her to her rooms with care, and Daryl hovers over her, cleaning her wound and making sure food and water waits by her bedside.
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It may not be true death but - but it's something. For awhile, it's... something. A break, a holiday, a respite. Perhaps the only kind she would accept because it is the one she has little choice over. Not her nature to do anything else but fight, but it was taken out of her hand, and the inevitable unconsciousness is the weight of her father's hand on her shoulder, pushing her back into it.
( 'Leave it to the Gods now, child. They will hold it for now.' Her father would smile, brushing against her brow. 'Leave it now.' )
She sleeps long, unmoving, death like perhaps, heavy in the bed. Through the night without so much of a hint of waking, nothing but a rise and fall of breath that is shallow to begin with. The odd babble in her sleep in a string of Hindi - then, in English, names that stopped having relevancy. Lord this and Sir that, calling for people that aren't there anymore - Damodar - when he is grown, he will be Raj, he will have the sword on which their honour was staked, but not before he ate his meal properly - for Devi - that she needs to keep her heels down and her eyes up when she's riding. Tesla, and she smiles, someone who is only ever Knight, that wracks her. Might seem important, except who here didn't call for someone they'd lost, from time to time? The only difference is that she has more to call for. A string of soldiers names, orders she always meant to give - for foot soldiers, of cavalry, of guerilla fighters, of tanks and trenches. A babble of time, that only she remembers - to them, now, for him, for Carl and Judith. Murmurs that mean nothing just to ask them something she can't quite say. It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter she's going to watch them die too. Let her stop, let her stop, let this fever just burn her up.
Then, it stops, and the breaths become deep. Her dreams, have nothing else to give her. Settling again back into the silence. Deep heavy breaths that come instead - in the hours past dawn, the breaths of the living, not the half gone. Purging herself of the sickness of the Walkers, the fever of memories, she comes back, slowly but surely, the way she had long promised him, she would.
It's sometime past when the sky has crawled it's way up that the is drawn all the way back. She turns, curled her head into the pillow and breaths in and opens her eyes. For once she doesn't feel a need to dart awake, to begin moving almost as soon as she is able. The beds the most comfortable thing she's slept on in months, and someone's peeled her out of her bloody jacket and armour. Feels the bindings of her underclothes, and the blanket tucked around her. Says nothing, just staring at the blank wall that's paint has begun to peel with the damp.
He will be there, she knows he will, her voice croaks out in a whisper in the dim room. "Has she told them all?"
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"Yeah," he says without pause, "Mostly don't believe her, though. Think Sasha's finally cracked." Poor goddamn Sasha, really. She don't deserve this.
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She watches him, carefully, and, exhausted as she is, awake as she is, her hand shifts out from the blankets. Extending out to him in the offer for him to take it, to come closer.
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Daryl thinks it's because she keeps her pride in a safe place, hidden somewhere far away from her heart. Late at night, he imagines it's in that flask hanging from her throat, hidden sometimes by the scarves she collects. That's where the real Rani lives, the one who was a person before the blackness hit her veins and turned her blood. The secret part of her that laughs at his jokes, that talks about men and women hundreds of years dead, that tells the stories woven in the stars.
That's not how she is right now. Beckoning to him from her little throne of ratty blankets and pillows leaking stained foam stuffing, Rani is playing the ancient queen.
He takes her hand. "Hey," he says, and clasps his hand in hers.
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Some throne it is, and some queen she makes: laid up because of her own arrogance and insistence on taking as many blows as she could. But she smiles - only for him, this way. When there was no one else to see. Her 'Queen' face, Carl had called it, Maggie had laughed along with it. All stern and barely-there reactions until time had allowed them to read her.
Honesty, of herself, she has reasoned long, no one needs. No one needs these smiles, her quiet laughter, perhaps her stories about people undefeatable in their legend. But he seems to stay for them. He seems to let her express it - and for that, she is more grateful than she can say. Lets her fingers thread with his, hooking them together like bits of debris. All mangled and holding. "Hey." She pulls it closer, tucking it to herself. Warm, calloused, the things of living. "It seems my life was in your hands again."
It's one thing for her to go around saving others, that's her position, her duty - but him? He has no business doing that.
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"Nah," he says. "It never is."
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A dig, how much he means to her is palpable, sometimes, something everyone else sees, certainly. "Or are you going to stubborn about my attempt to give you my thanks?"
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"Then just say thanks. Don't gotta make it so flowery."
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Because in a hundred years, there is only ever been three people that would meet her in the worst of what she is, cut through it like the weapons she knew best. Hold her carefully not because she is a Queen, or because she drinks the blackwater, but he seems to see her what she is.
"Alright," she says and considers, alright and her hand slips up, a brush of her fingertips to his jaw. Curling gently against the two days of stubble, a careful relaxed motion that's nothing less than precise. A tilt up where she's propped up on the hand holding his to keep him there where she doesn't think she can afford to lose him. The one person in a century that it's true of and he is the only one who she can be sure won't take it from her body when she is too weak to defend herself. "I won't."
She kisses him, the corner of her mouth to his. The sleep and the exhaustion still in her movements. Light, barely that. As easy as a word and everything she could say in the manifold languages she speaks, made simple. A brush that means exactly nothing except that it means everything.
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He stays still, quiet and unmoving, until she's no longer touching him. "You're tired," he says, making her excuses for her. He stands. "Sleep."
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But he wouldn't be him, she wouldn't have done it if he reacted any other way. Her fingers instead curling around the pillow again, drawing it into her. Tucking herself into it. Watching him underneath the blankets and forces the words up her lungs. "When it is my time, Daryl? You burn my body and you spill the blackwater to the ground."
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"Ain't your time." Maybe it will never be.
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Perhaps she is just the same. If she were anyone else, she'd let it linger, feel the bite, feel the sickness, drag herself down to level of the living, hang there at the very edge, almost dead. "Besides, you know time has nothing to do with it."
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His tone is judgmental. There's a right answer to this question. No flowery speech, no poetics. He'd prefer to cut through the shit, especially with Rani, who learned in fine palaces to hide in the spaces between words. If that ever worked on him, it doesn't anymore.
"Gonna let this world beat you?"
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If he doesn't want to hear it - then that's that.
"It has nothing to do with my wants, do I wish to rest? Of course, I do. But do you not understand you are the only one I can trust?" Trust with her human parts, these soft weak things that live hunted under the skin like a wounded animal.
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He knows her penchant for flowery words. Daryl dislikes them because of how easily they can hide the truth. Rani folds her true self up in pretty ideas and ancient stories and hides behind the past. Her age is her shield, and she uses it to lie to everyone and herself.
But she can't lie to him.
"You can trust all of us," he says. "You're afraid."
It occurs to him that he should be kinder. Maybe she wants comforting words? Maybe she wants comfort. That's probably what that kiss meant. But it's too late for that now.
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"Of course I'm afraid." It's barked, snapped, pushing up on the bed, bedraggled still, dressed down to where she's got the blanket tucked under arm to keep herself covered. Maybe that's for the best. "But you are the one that doesn't want to hear so much as a word of truth, you're too busy in pretending that you feel nothing that you can't handle so much as a breath of my death."
Which would be -- sweet, if it wasn't irritating her, she can't afford to be precious, not about the black water.
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