Tonight the World Dies

I don’t remember my nightmare, but I know that it’s no coincidence that it’s returned. Daryl is leaning over me, his hands soft on my face as my fists swing blindly, when my eyes snap open and I am able to focus. My night shirt is drenched in sweat and my damp hair is plastered to my forehead.

“Yer okay, yer okay,” Daryl whispers repeatedly, brushing my hair away from my face. A whimper leaves my mouth and I focus on his eyes, which are wide with concern. Their blue depths pull me in, allowing me to rein in my erratic breathing until the panic subsides. His hand brushes across my forehead again and I lick my lips. “Yer okay.”

I reach up to grab his wrists and he shifts them so that I am holding his hands. I clasp them to my chest. My eyes close as my lip quivers again. Even though I don’t remember, I know what the nightmare was about. Daryl is patient with me, watching me as I compose myself and settle back into bed. He shifts and curls himself around me protectively, tugging me up against him so that my back is flush with his front. His hands are still clutched between mine, and he reaches out a thumb to brush comfortingly across the skin my shirt has bared. I settle back into the pillow, nuzzling my face into it, and close my eyes.

Daryl moves a hand to my bicep, rubbing slow circles with his thumb, as I try and get another hour or so of sleep. It is still dark outside our window—our.

“I’m sorry for waking you,” I mutter, keeping my eyes shut in a small bout of shame. His thumb stops.

“Ain’t nothin’ to be sorry for,” he replies slowly. Then he clears his throat quietly. “Ya can talk about it, ya know. If it helps.”

“I’m not sure it will. I was on my own after…everything…for a while so I learned how to forget it. But today, those men…it just made everything resurface. I don’t even remember my dream anyways,” I half-lie. The details are fuzzy, but the basic concept is always the same, and it always ends in blood.

“Just ‘cause ya buried it don’t mean ya forget.” His tone tells me everything his words don’t, tells me of his own dark experiences. “’N ya don’t have to keep it buried anymore if ya don’t want. It’ll help ya to move on.”

“Did talking help you?” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, and I keep my eyes closed as I feel every muscle tense in Daryl’s body. His grip on me loosens slightly and he shifts away. When I open my eyes and glance over my shoulder, he’s on his back and in the dark, I can just barely make out his eyes aimed at the ceiling. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that.”

“Nah, ya right. I never talked about it, but I didn’t need to. Had other shit goin’ on. I’ve never forgotten but I don’t let it weigh me down. Got people to look out fer. You, on the other hand, look like ya beatin’ yaself up over shit ya can’t change. No one’s judgin’ ya for doin’ what ya had to.”

“Really?” I ask meekly. God, I hate that I’ve been reduced to whimpers. Daryl turns his eyes to me, locking onto mine, and the intensity of them pull me in, keep me there in that spot.

“Really,” he says firmly, and I have no choice but to believe him. “We all done bad shit. We all move on diff’rently. But ya gotta move on. You’ll get yaself or someone else killed if ya keep hanging onto it.”

He’s right, of course he’s right. And his argument is so compelling that I don’t realize I’m speaking until my voice catches.

“That group…that group I was with, before I met you, before I met Gabriel, the bad ones…They found me. I was taking cover on the highway, staying in an abandoned RV with a flat tire. They were friendly, at first, offered me a place within them and let me keep my weapons. I was…naïve back then, so I went with them. They had a compound, an old office building or something, single-story, and there were about seventeen people in all. Women, children, as well as the men. A couple dogs. They shared their food with me, offered me a safe haven. This went on for a few weeks, until their leader, Xavier, came to me and said I’d had a debt to repay.” Daryl stiffens behind me, but I keep talking. “I ate their food, used their resources, and nothing was given for free. Xavier came to collect his debt, but I said no. I said I’d just leave, but he wouldn’t allow it. I knew then why I’d never heard the women laugh—only ever the men or the children, who were too innocent and naïve to know what was happening to their mothers or their guardians. Xavier locked me in a single office, kept me handcuffed to the desk with no food or water for a few days. Said he liked fight in his women, but not too much. I was much weaker the next time he came back, and he wasn’t alone. They…” I swallow but press on. Now or never. “They took turns. They kept me handcuffed to the desk, and I was so weak from lack of nutrition that I could just…lay there while they defiled my body. I fought a little bit, got a few good shots in, but I got tired fast and eventually just switched myself off. Humiliated doesn’t even come close…This went on until Xavier decided my debt had been repaid. I don’t know how long they had used me, how long I had been in that room. They fed me after that, gave me water, and I regained my strength, but I wasn’t going to stay there any longer. One night, I crept into Xavier’s room, the office where they’d…and I slit his throat in his sleep. Never woke up, just slipped away in his own blood. I did the same to two of his buddies before I got caught. They tried to hold me down, cut me, dislocated my shoulder and my knee, but somehow, I got away. I don’t remember how. I think I tuned everything out at that point, shut my brain off again. I took off, limping, into the forest near the compound, and I walked for a week before I stumbled, literally, upon Gabriel’s church. The rest you know.”

Daryl is eerily silent behind me, and a quick backwards glance at him shows me he’s glaring at the ceiling. In the dark, his blue eyes glimmer and I sit up in the bed, needing to put some distance between us. I cover my face with my hands as the silence stretches across the room.

“Please say something,” I say quietly, my voice muffled by my hands. I don’t realize that I am yearning for the sound of his voice, any sign of acknowledgment so that I don’t feel like complete and utter garbage—used up and broken. The bed moves, and Daryl’s footsteps pad across the room, and my stomach drops when I realize he’s leaving.

But then my hands are pulled from my face and I’m met with those stormy blues boring into me. I can’t look away and my bottom lip quivers when his hands come up to grasp my face.

“Ain’t nothin’ like that gonna happen again, ya hear?” he says, his fingers tightening around my face. My lip quivers again and then he kisses me firmly. I whimper into his mouth and grab at his wrists as he wipes at a single tear that has spilled out of my eye.

I break away, our lips parting with an audible smack, and ask, “You don’t…think anything different?”

He gives me a half-cocked smile. “God no. If anything changed, it’s that ya just became that much stronger to me.”

His words do something funny to my heart and I lean forward and kiss him again. Our mouths move together and he slowly pushes me back into the mattress. Our lips still attached, we scoot towards the headboard and I curl my hands into his shirt as my head hits the pillow. He doesn’t push any boundaries and keeps his hands propped on the mattress on either side of my head, keeping himself elevated. My body warms with the unfamiliarity of embracing someone this way and I move my hands from his shirt to the back of his neck, where I tangle his hair in my hands and pull, eliciting a quiet groan of approval from Daryl.

We lay like that, in the dark kissing, for a while, never venturing further. Despite the fire in my veins, the memories I’ve just revealed to him have left me feeling stripped and raw and unsure. Daryl breaks away first, looking down at me and chewing on his lip. In a gesture that is all tenderness despite his rough exterior, he brushes his knuckles over my cheek. My breathing is labored from our kissing, and as he watches me, my emotions run rampant. I haven’t felt like this since before the fall, a time period that seems eons away. I’d only ever felt love once, but watching Daryl watching me, I know it won’t be long before I feel it again. That thought scares me, though Daryl spills all his emotions into his actions, a man of few words, and in his eyes I can see the same emotions swimming. I reach up and tease my fingers in his beard, tugging on it lightly. He smirks down at me before leaning forward to kiss me once more and rolls off.

“Get some sleep,” he tells me quietly. I nestle into his side, feeling extremely light for the first time in a while, and close my eyes. When sleep finds me, it’s not nearly as frightening.