Her head snaps, where he shoots past her and there's an irritated noise for that too. Watching it fall, turning back to him with a scowl on her face. Skittish, skittish animal, waiting for the nearest thing to run from. "Because I have lost every group of people I have dared to call my own, dared to stand for. What makes you think yours will be better served than the ones I was married into, sworn to the gods to protect?"
It's spat out - nothing less than furious that he's gotten the words out. She doesn't care what's waiting for her, bitter and angry and the bile of regrets that is trying to heave out of her. So she ends the conversation the only way she knows how, she seeks out a fight. Easier to walk away from him, to march to that door and let all hell break loose than look at him. Got what he wanted, so now they could be done with it.
It's not what Daryl was expecting to hear, but it has the ring of truth he's been waiting for. She's afraid of leading and loosing again. It's... a kinder reason than he was expecting.
"Not asking you to do it alone, Rani." He keeps walking through the parking lot, in case she doesn't want to look him in the eye. "Nobody does anything alone no more. Nothing worth doing."
She marches on, without consideration to what he's saying. "Fall in, we're wasting daylight. Between today and tomorrow we can get three rooms clear, I don't want Judith sleeping outdoors again." Barks it over her shoulder, the conversation is over. She's at the door, hands on it and ready to pull it free. Takes nothing to tug at the door to get it free. "I'll draw them in, you can pick them off."
She waits for whatever response he's going to give, probably curse her for being pigheaded and stubborn.
Daryl rolls his eyes, and jogs a few paces to catch up with her. He's shaking his head the whole time. "This what you wanna do? Pick off walkers and keep your head down?"
It's such an abyssal waste, he can't even begin to describe it. He never thought he'd find himself critiquing someone else for a lack of ambition. "Some goddamn example you are."
One moment, she is all forward movement, ready to yank the door open and ignore whatever he might say.
But then he does, and she stops, utterly. The wary way she's always twitching, the hissing words, all of it. Rather what she says, hangs, full as summer air with its weight. The words hang and she doesn't move. Silent, silent, silent, empty, empty, empty.
The other side of the braced doors, the Walkers groan, they ache and claw and splatter and moan in their undeath, seeing her movement, seeing without seeing and in turn she watches them, their teeth scratching at the glass, their rotted flesh smearing lines. Just one more monster, just one more nightmare. Not afraid, not even horrified when she looks at them. What are they but lycans of another time? Once more Jhansi is in flames, once more the halfbreeds pour over the fields and devour everything in their path, the impoverished feasted upon and feasting as they turned.
Her farmhouse, and how he'd torn her from it, the cyclical home that is lost as she ties herself to it. Patterns that repeat themselves, no, no it's not him. Here is not here. He is Sir Bors de Ganis. Here is the walls of her fortress, Sir Bors is at her feet, there is blood tacky and thick in her hair and her fingers grip her blade so tightly, she doesn't know how she'll ever let it go. This morning is a night a hundred years ago where she's told she has a purpose that isn't just martyrdom. Where there are things at stake that are cannot be done by mortal means alone as the vial Sir Bors presses into her hands, is warm from the skin of a dying man who tells her what must be done. She'd accepted it then, terrified, but she had.
The words are quiet, missable even, as they come. "Fine - fine, you have your wish."
She's still not looking at him and - fine.
The only movement is steadying, setting herself both feet to the ground, her shoulders in a military straight line, pride stinging enough to make the words come out, where she isn't sure how to make them move otherwise. "But my condition is that you go, now. Leave me. I'll clear this out myself, bring the others the day after tomorrow. I'll work faster without another anyway. I just... need time to think."
Well, that's- that's stupid. And dangerous. Sets a precedent he doesn't like, either. You can't go off alone, that's not what being on the council is about. He should know.
He aims his crossbow ahead of him. He'd rather loose her on the council than let her get torn apart for the hell of it.
"Nah, Rani. Wouldn't be worth the council if I left you." There, he said it, that he'd accepted the damn fool call as well. That he has to. They can't go back to how they were. He trains his bow, and he goes forward, into the pit along with her.
He was a damned fool, an idiot, a drunken, moronic, stupid - and how dare he? How dare someone as evidently thick in the head not listen to her when she was giving him what he wanted. That was the point. He was looking to get himself killed, and it wouldn't be from a walker: it would be her. She would get fed up one day and she would put one of his own bolts through his eye if he insists on being like this with her. She didn't need him treating her like this. Like her company was so necessary, or like she was half so human as him, more than any of them put together. Everyone else was content to just touch her expecting marble, and she pretended she didn't see the disappointment when they found her a person.
She'd never understand why he treated her differently. After all, he'd seen her heal, he knew what she was capable of coming back from.
Dixon must mean stubborn as an ass, and no one had told her, laughing at the immortal queen that didn't know what a iphone was or whatever it was this time. Give her time, she'd work it out.
He's an idiot, an idiot and she's leaving him in the woods on the way back. She doesn't need to stay with him, she can make a point once and for all that she didn't need any of them, and maybe, he'd leave her be.
( That she craves, that she wonders at - she shoves deep, below the virulent curses of him and his name and his father before him and any children that she'd die for, that she promises to see to, after him. Because it shakes her - when he just goes running off, the way he fights beside her. She expects, even now, for them to fall back to just let her do it. What did they care if an immortal got shredded limb from limb? They could grow them back, after all.
It was how it worked for centuries. Why didn't he just fall in line like everyone else? )
None of which, things she's willing to accept and the calling him stupid at the back of his head, come out of her mouth. Rather, she rushes into that room with a comfort and an ease as she tackles the first walker, and lets it take a bite. If it's too busy tearing into her flesh, they don't see her blade come down for their head. The next one goes down with a kick to the head, the one after that has its arm torn off and a piece of glass shoved through its skull. It goes and goes and goes in a violence of its own art, its own brutality. That takes chunks out of her and she kills off the stab of pain that she finds so necessary.
( Because she never worries that he might shoot her in all this, she trusts him with her life as it might be, and that's what she'd never say, that she needs that kind of comfort. that she might need anything at all, she has stopped even considering. )
Daryl sees the rage light in her eyes, and he knows what he's done. She'll be livid, but that's what it is. She may be past fear of death, but that doesn't mean she deserves to die.
Daryl covers her, shooting walkers that come near her, staying carefully out of the way. She may be reckless, but he can't be. He sees her bitten, and something still screams deep in his bones at the sight. She's lost, isn't she? She's gone.
But she isn't, and they both know it. She keeps going. Daryl feels something scratch at his back, and in the fury of movement he tumbles, and before he knows it, they're on him, snapping in the air. One has him pinned to the ground, and the other, idiots that they are, pile on top, weighing him down. He's useless and mortal and going to die if things don't change quickly.
It's one second, where he isn't at the edge of her vision, where she's rushing one of them back into a wall to drive her blade deep into - a woman, pretty it looked like, had red hair that was blood and mud now, fallen out in clumps.
Then she does, then he's on the ground and she sees - red, but it's not quite that, the great upshoot of the blackwater that floods through her system. The clarity and the quiet that takes the place of fear or concern or anything but this, here and now - the words that come clear as anything: not him, not him, not him. She could lose it all but - not him.
She tears them off him, as they tear at it, blood that courses, down her - blood that fuels her, after he's safe - because he will be, he will, she'll make sure. She will always make sure. She won't lose anyone again, they were her people so much as it mattered anymore.
The first one's neck breaks, it's head ripped off by her bare hands. The one after has a knife through his stomach, one by one she rips them apart, she shreds, she tears and rends until there's nothing else, the splash of it on her clothes, her face, left but her alone in a scattering of corpses. Breathing hard and blade in hand. Terror only made her vicious, futility was nothing she had learned to handle well and he's fine - he will be, she will make sure of it. She alone can make sure of it.
Drops beside him, going to see if he's in one piece with shaking hands, because she doesn't trust her eyes in this dark. The hand going to his face as she gets her knees under her. Slick with blood and the gore as she pulls him to her, pushing his hair out of the way. Searching him over in fear that she does not know what else to do. Panic that is so carefully kept down, that weeps on the edge of her words. "Dixon. You're a fool. You are such a fool. I told you, I was giving you what you wanted. Why do you always insist on never listening to me?"
Goads him with a desperate attempt at surety. He'll respond, he always does. He always bite back and she relies on that too. Needs his petty insults and the things that keeps her human, keeps her here, she needs it and him and this and he can't, he can't -
Daryl is on the ground of the mall, so covered in gore he may as well be one of the rotting corpses on either side of him. It's hard to breathe through the stench, and his eyes burn with it. He gasps, horrible stuff, and he looks up at her, his savior.
The air is heavy between them. She just did something horrible, ripping bodies apart with her bear hands, and Daryl wonders if she can do that all the time. If it's hard, touching living people, not to rip them apart by accident. How it is that this thing can be so, so human when she does such inhuman things.
He can't find it within him to be afraid of this thing that others would surely call a monster. He sits up, guts sluicing off him. Stands, slipping on the blood.
She doesn't follow him up, on her knees in the viscera, watching him stand instead - it's like taking sobering breaths of air. Her mind numbed to all else, as she feels the blacksight dim from her vision. Blinking out a haze like she was drunk or dazed or both. The air full and festering, rot and damp that filled this place.
The only comfort, the only thing that made this - this thing that she was worth it, was watching his motions, and once she has that, her head bows. Exhaustion, perhaps, the aftershocks of her worry, thick as the blood. Letting it slip away from her. He was safe, he was fine, nothing had bitten him, he would not turn - ( whether she means lycan, vampire or walker, she cannot tell it apart, it is one horror that has bleed into another into another as the years have gone by ).
"Deserve has nothing to do with it." Her fingers sit on her legs, loosely curled up - doesn't know how to let go of her blades, her weapons. She knows nothing else, but this, not anymore. "What ... what makes you so sure I even can?"
He doesn't like this image of her kneeling, much less in front of him. It seems wrong somehow, so he gets back on the disgusting floor, and looks on her at eye level. Bloody and disgusting and exhausted, they make quite a pair.
Careful, cautious, not wanting to hurt her, he reaches out to touch her shoulder. "Everybody does, now days." He takes her hand, tries to help her up. They're going to get through this.
She leans into it, more than she usually does, - which is to say, she's always too aware, of being watched, every action, every murmur. Observed, weighed, deciding something she couldn't be aware of until it was done. Such was it was to be Queen, such was it was to spend a lifetime fighting in shadow. Memory better served in martyrdom than in living. That hadn't changed, because however he spoke to her, of her, they'd only see what she could mean. Proof of something that would go on, without concern of that weight. Better to let them think she did it with no regrets of herself.
Rather, she cannot lift it all under her own strength. Needs him for this, for her own humanity. For what it means to stare down these bits of herself. Needs the contact for what it is, a rock forward that feels like a stone working loose on a landslide, one thing tumbling after another. She pulls herself up as he tugs her. "They always did. Anything else was an illusion. That's why we... we were needed. To die and be removed from... from you all. It's easier to mourn an idea, because they were never real to start with."
The price, why wouldn't - she could never give the blackwater to another. No matter how they begged.
He helps her up, and they take plodding steps away from all the gore and horror they've created. They'll never come back to this place. The mall is a dead end, he'll tell Rick. What about that beaten down gym?
They can't come back here. The mall is dead, and it's worth the price of it, if Rani will stop looking out into the distance like the sun's stopped rising. He pats her shoulder, hushing her like he would a child.
"You ain't an idea," he says, moving her along. "hate to break it to you."
She shuffles the last of the steps. There's a thought there, in a moment, that she needs to get this off of her, off him, before they show themselves to another. Put her skin back her, her face, the things she must be for others. The heavy gold she will clean and clean again in the memories of why she wears it, the mark she paints no longer with vermillion, but red stained clay.
"Is that why you think I should stand to be voted upon?" Her hand stays on his shoulder, stumbling the steps, feet dragging through the clotted dust, staining her boots. "We were always... always just weapons. For someone else to use."
The sun outside is bright, clear. Light is so unforgiving, and she doesn't turn into it. She can't afford weakness, rather where her hand is set against his shoulder for support, she pulls him back, turning to face him, her slippery bloody fingers wandering as she turned to face him. Turned him back to her, where he makes such an easy shield. Whether it's to block light or the hissing joking words they exchange.
You don't deserve to die.
She swallows, trying to force it up, a gentle brush as she traces with worn fingertips to the line of his jaw. So, so very still, the blood that is red on her lips. "You... you are a relief to me." He doesn't look at her like that, he never has. "I never know what to do with it."
It's too much all at once, and Daryl doesn't rightly know what to say to any of it. He's not a person of words and he never will be. That he's somehow managed to unlock some place of meaning in Rani's heart is a goddamn astonishment to him. He helps her along, back to the shitty beat up car, and thinks it over.
"Want you to do it 'cause you'd be good at it," he says, honestly as he can. For some reason, it doesn't feel like the usual truth; it feels like being laid bare. "It's a thing for people. Dunno what to do with ideas."
He's not, he's saying, a particularly smart relief to anyone.
"Being honest, dunno what to do with you either half the time."
She watches him pull from the brush and she supposes that fear - she has never asked, but she has seen those scars on his back. Thought nothing of them, at the time, when she thought he had been military. What was that for a soldier?
Knew different now.
If he didn't want to know what to do with her, that seemed fair. Going the rest of the way back to the car with him, she leans herself gingerly into the car seat, her back stiff but only in a prickling sort of after awareness that fades and her head sinks back, fingers by her side on the chair. "Then we are even, and I would not ask for that to change."
A sigh, momentarily. "Take me to a river, I need to wash this off of me." Her head turns back from the tree whizzing by. "You too, you look like a Walker yourself. Not that I would blame them for making the mistake." Back to teasing, comfortable. A breath like she's trying to let some of the tension go.
Daryl doesn't know where the nearest river is. He hauls Rani into the car and heads off, looking for a dirt road or a line of trees somewhere. Neither of them should come back to camp with that much gore on them and no supplies. Daryl takes a frontage roads off to the side and stops, listening for any walkers that would have been scared up by the sound of a dying motor.
"Didn't think I'd ever be even with some queen."
Listening to the sound of the day dying around them, crooning birds and angry bugs, Daryl tries to hear the sound of a river.
"Y'know, once I got shot in the head." He taps the scar high on his brow, covered now by dark hair. "Thought I was a walker coming into camp."
It seizes hot until reasonably, obviously, it clearly hadn't done much. Twitches a curl at the corner of her mouth. "Well, I knew your head was thick, but I hadn't realised it would be that helpful."
She pulls herself out of the car, unwrapping her scarf around her neck as she goes, and laying it out on the bonnet of the car. Leaning over it, she undoes her hair again, raking it through with her fingers so she can unhooking the gold from her hair, from her ears, then from her nose piercing. Long looping chains that she snakes into a pile and bundles up into the scarf, following along behind him a moment later. Eyes up, as ever, on look out because that was staying alive.
Daryl grumbles and moves his head to the side, parting his hair on one side so she can see the long white scar through his hairline.
"She was just learning to shoot," he says. "Got lucky."
He follows her out of the car, walking slowly, watching her go. If his knowledge of Georgian backwoods is any indication... "Red Clay Creek should be near here."
She hisses sympathetically when she sees it. "Then I shall be glad of her inexperience."
She trusts his judgement about what is nearby, not just because this was his land, rather than her own. But because he was a hunter - a lifetime ago, he would have been her head of such matters, such was his knowledge, his eyes for it. He seemed to know where he was going no matter what.
There's the river, right on time. True to its name, the banks are red with clay. It's only waist deep. Daryl crouches down next to it, running his fingers through the gentle current. "There you go."
She nods the once, had - quite enough feelings for one day, easier to be quiet now. Nods to him the once and passes him the wrapped up jewellery. "Don't lose it." Because she trusts him - now more than ever.
But it's been far too long till she felt moderately clean, and she's eager in the way she wraps the scarf around her waist, peels off the coat that she'd hung onto half as close as the gold.
After they're off, she comes back to his side, an amused laughter, as she looks at him - how strange this, how reminiscent of something she had not done in years. Not that it stops her particularly until she's down to pants and the under-shirt someone gave her to replace the silk that had ripped beyond use in one attack or another. Had some name for it - or whatever, they'd given her a funny look when she'd said it, which was normal - and an insistence that 'women didn't have to dress like that anymore.'
She'd been good, and only grumbled slightly at the changes that had gone by without her noticing.
They're bundled up and she kneels to the water's edge and begins to rinse them. Letting the water wash off the blood, half dried. Letting them soak before she lowers herself, splashing water up over her face and shoulder, a relief from the sun, letting it splash over her and cool her, find her face and hair under her blood as she cups it in handfuls and splashes it up and over herself. Running damp hands up over across the back of her neck and across her shoulders, brushing over an ugly entrance wound that sits a white scar on her dark skin.
Daryl takes her things and sits quietly on the bank of the river, back turned to her so she can clean as much as she likes. He's got no interest in peeping on bathing women. It's a courtesy, one of the few he gives freely, without comment.
"Keep an eye out," he says. He can only play half the lookout. "Don't get distracted."
"Yes, Ganesha." It's a teasing admonishment, tossed over her shoulder - glancing a look where he's all turned around. Like they'd all been living in the close quarters of a camp.
Which is as much warning as he gets before there's a loud splash. Happily sunk into the water and dipped herself backwards into. Washing the blood off of her hair, her face. Not deep enough to truly submerge herself but - enough when she leans back at the right angle to get her head under the water. Feel it all just run off and that's more than enough right now.
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It's spat out - nothing less than furious that he's gotten the words out. She doesn't care what's waiting for her, bitter and angry and the bile of regrets that is trying to heave out of her. So she ends the conversation the only way she knows how, she seeks out a fight. Easier to walk away from him, to march to that door and let all hell break loose than look at him. Got what he wanted, so now they could be done with it.
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"Not asking you to do it alone, Rani." He keeps walking through the parking lot, in case she doesn't want to look him in the eye. "Nobody does anything alone no more. Nothing worth doing."
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She waits for whatever response he's going to give, probably curse her for being pigheaded and stubborn.
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It's such an abyssal waste, he can't even begin to describe it. He never thought he'd find himself critiquing someone else for a lack of ambition. "Some goddamn example you are."
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But then he does, and she stops, utterly. The wary way she's always twitching, the hissing words, all of it. Rather what she says, hangs, full as summer air with its weight. The words hang and she doesn't move. Silent, silent, silent, empty, empty, empty.
The other side of the braced doors, the Walkers groan, they ache and claw and splatter and moan in their undeath, seeing her movement, seeing without seeing and in turn she watches them, their teeth scratching at the glass, their rotted flesh smearing lines. Just one more monster, just one more nightmare. Not afraid, not even horrified when she looks at them. What are they but lycans of another time? Once more Jhansi is in flames, once more the halfbreeds pour over the fields and devour everything in their path, the impoverished feasted upon and feasting as they turned.
Her farmhouse, and how he'd torn her from it, the cyclical home that is lost as she ties herself to it. Patterns that repeat themselves, no, no it's not him. Here is not here. He is Sir Bors de Ganis. Here is the walls of her fortress, Sir Bors is at her feet, there is blood tacky and thick in her hair and her fingers grip her blade so tightly, she doesn't know how she'll ever let it go. This morning is a night a hundred years ago where she's told she has a purpose that isn't just martyrdom. Where there are things at stake that are cannot be done by mortal means alone as the vial Sir Bors presses into her hands, is warm from the skin of a dying man who tells her what must be done. She'd accepted it then, terrified, but she had.
The words are quiet, missable even, as they come. "Fine - fine, you have your wish."
She's still not looking at him and - fine.
The only movement is steadying, setting herself both feet to the ground, her shoulders in a military straight line, pride stinging enough to make the words come out, where she isn't sure how to make them move otherwise. "But my condition is that you go, now. Leave me. I'll clear this out myself, bring the others the day after tomorrow. I'll work faster without another anyway. I just... need time to think."
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He aims his crossbow ahead of him. He'd rather loose her on the council than let her get torn apart for the hell of it.
"Nah, Rani. Wouldn't be worth the council if I left you." There, he said it, that he'd accepted the damn fool call as well. That he has to. They can't go back to how they were. He trains his bow, and he goes forward, into the pit along with her.
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She'd never understand why he treated her differently. After all, he'd seen her heal, he knew what she was capable of coming back from.
Dixon must mean stubborn as an ass, and no one had told her, laughing at the immortal queen that didn't know what a iphone was or whatever it was this time. Give her time, she'd work it out.
He's an idiot, an idiot and she's leaving him in the woods on the way back. She doesn't need to stay with him, she can make a point once and for all that she didn't need any of them, and maybe, he'd leave her be.
( That she craves, that she wonders at - she shoves deep, below the virulent curses of him and his name and his father before him and any children that she'd die for, that she promises to see to, after him. Because it shakes her - when he just goes running off, the way he fights beside her. She expects, even now, for them to fall back to just let her do it. What did they care if an immortal got shredded limb from limb? They could grow them back, after all.
It was how it worked for centuries. Why didn't he just fall in line like everyone else? )
None of which, things she's willing to accept and the calling him stupid at the back of his head, come out of her mouth. Rather, she rushes into that room with a comfort and an ease as she tackles the first walker, and lets it take a bite. If it's too busy tearing into her flesh, they don't see her blade come down for their head. The next one goes down with a kick to the head, the one after that has its arm torn off and a piece of glass shoved through its skull. It goes and goes and goes in a violence of its own art, its own brutality. That takes chunks out of her and she kills off the stab of pain that she finds so necessary.
( Because she never worries that he might shoot her in all this, she trusts him with her life as it might be, and that's what she'd never say, that she needs that kind of comfort. that she might need anything at all, she has stopped even considering. )
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Daryl covers her, shooting walkers that come near her, staying carefully out of the way. She may be reckless, but he can't be. He sees her bitten, and something still screams deep in his bones at the sight. She's lost, isn't she? She's gone.
But she isn't, and they both know it. She keeps going. Daryl feels something scratch at his back, and in the fury of movement he tumbles, and before he knows it, they're on him, snapping in the air. One has him pinned to the ground, and the other, idiots that they are, pile on top, weighing him down. He's useless and mortal and going to die if things don't change quickly.
He struggles anyway.
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Then she does, then he's on the ground and she sees - red, but it's not quite that, the great upshoot of the blackwater that floods through her system. The clarity and the quiet that takes the place of fear or concern or anything but this, here and now - the words that come clear as anything: not him, not him, not him. She could lose it all but - not him.
She tears them off him, as they tear at it, blood that courses, down her - blood that fuels her, after he's safe - because he will be, he will, she'll make sure. She will always make sure. She won't lose anyone again, they were her people so much as it mattered anymore.
The first one's neck breaks, it's head ripped off by her bare hands. The one after has a knife through his stomach, one by one she rips them apart, she shreds, she tears and rends until there's nothing else, the splash of it on her clothes, her face, left but her alone in a scattering of corpses. Breathing hard and blade in hand. Terror only made her vicious, futility was nothing she had learned to handle well and he's fine - he will be, she will make sure of it. She alone can make sure of it.
Drops beside him, going to see if he's in one piece with shaking hands, because she doesn't trust her eyes in this dark. The hand going to his face as she gets her knees under her. Slick with blood and the gore as she pulls him to her, pushing his hair out of the way. Searching him over in fear that she does not know what else to do. Panic that is so carefully kept down, that weeps on the edge of her words. "Dixon. You're a fool. You are such a fool. I told you, I was giving you what you wanted. Why do you always insist on never listening to me?"
Goads him with a desperate attempt at surety. He'll respond, he always does. He always bite back and she relies on that too. Needs his petty insults and the things that keeps her human, keeps her here, she needs it and him and this and he can't, he can't -
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The air is heavy between them. She just did something horrible, ripping bodies apart with her bear hands, and Daryl wonders if she can do that all the time. If it's hard, touching living people, not to rip them apart by accident. How it is that this thing can be so, so human when she does such inhuman things.
He can't find it within him to be afraid of this thing that others would surely call a monster. He sits up, guts sluicing off him. Stands, slipping on the blood.
"You don't deserve to die."
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The only comfort, the only thing that made this - this thing that she was worth it, was watching his motions, and once she has that, her head bows. Exhaustion, perhaps, the aftershocks of her worry, thick as the blood. Letting it slip away from her. He was safe, he was fine, nothing had bitten him, he would not turn - ( whether she means lycan, vampire or walker, she cannot tell it apart, it is one horror that has bleed into another into another as the years have gone by ).
"Deserve has nothing to do with it." Her fingers sit on her legs, loosely curled up - doesn't know how to let go of her blades, her weapons. She knows nothing else, but this, not anymore. "What ... what makes you so sure I even can?"
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Careful, cautious, not wanting to hurt her, he reaches out to touch her shoulder. "Everybody does, now days." He takes her hand, tries to help her up. They're going to get through this.
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Rather, she cannot lift it all under her own strength. Needs him for this, for her own humanity. For what it means to stare down these bits of herself. Needs the contact for what it is, a rock forward that feels like a stone working loose on a landslide, one thing tumbling after another. She pulls herself up as he tugs her. "They always did. Anything else was an illusion. That's why we... we were needed. To die and be removed from... from you all. It's easier to mourn an idea, because they were never real to start with."
The price, why wouldn't - she could never give the blackwater to another. No matter how they begged.
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They can't come back here. The mall is dead, and it's worth the price of it, if Rani will stop looking out into the distance like the sun's stopped rising. He pats her shoulder, hushing her like he would a child.
"You ain't an idea," he says, moving her along. "hate to break it to you."
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"Is that why you think I should stand to be voted upon?" Her hand stays on his shoulder, stumbling the steps, feet dragging through the clotted dust, staining her boots. "We were always... always just weapons. For someone else to use."
The sun outside is bright, clear. Light is so unforgiving, and she doesn't turn into it. She can't afford weakness, rather where her hand is set against his shoulder for support, she pulls him back, turning to face him, her slippery bloody fingers wandering as she turned to face him. Turned him back to her, where he makes such an easy shield. Whether it's to block light or the hissing joking words they exchange.
You don't deserve to die.
She swallows, trying to force it up, a gentle brush as she traces with worn fingertips to the line of his jaw. So, so very still, the blood that is red on her lips. "You... you are a relief to me." He doesn't look at her like that, he never has. "I never know what to do with it."
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"Want you to do it 'cause you'd be good at it," he says, honestly as he can. For some reason, it doesn't feel like the usual truth; it feels like being laid bare. "It's a thing for people. Dunno what to do with ideas."
He's not, he's saying, a particularly smart relief to anyone.
"Being honest, dunno what to do with you either half the time."
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Knew different now.
If he didn't want to know what to do with her, that seemed fair. Going the rest of the way back to the car with him, she leans herself gingerly into the car seat, her back stiff but only in a prickling sort of after awareness that fades and her head sinks back, fingers by her side on the chair. "Then we are even, and I would not ask for that to change."
A sigh, momentarily. "Take me to a river, I need to wash this off of me." Her head turns back from the tree whizzing by. "You too, you look like a Walker yourself. Not that I would blame them for making the mistake." Back to teasing, comfortable. A breath like she's trying to let some of the tension go.
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"Didn't think I'd ever be even with some queen."
Listening to the sound of the day dying around them, crooning birds and angry bugs, Daryl tries to hear the sound of a river.
"Y'know, once I got shot in the head." He taps the scar high on his brow, covered now by dark hair. "Thought I was a walker coming into camp."
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She pulls herself out of the car, unwrapping her scarf around her neck as she goes, and laying it out on the bonnet of the car. Leaning over it, she undoes her hair again, raking it through with her fingers so she can unhooking the gold from her hair, from her ears, then from her nose piercing. Long looping chains that she snakes into a pile and bundles up into the scarf, following along behind him a moment later. Eyes up, as ever, on look out because that was staying alive.
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"She was just learning to shoot," he says. "Got lucky."
He follows her out of the car, walking slowly, watching her go. If his knowledge of Georgian backwoods is any indication... "Red Clay Creek should be near here."
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She trusts his judgement about what is nearby, not just because this was his land, rather than her own. But because he was a hunter - a lifetime ago, he would have been her head of such matters, such was his knowledge, his eyes for it. He seemed to know where he was going no matter what.
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There's the river, right on time. True to its name, the banks are red with clay. It's only waist deep. Daryl crouches down next to it, running his fingers through the gentle current. "There you go."
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But it's been far too long till she felt moderately clean, and she's eager in the way she wraps the scarf around her waist, peels off the coat that she'd hung onto half as close as the gold.
After they're off, she comes back to his side, an amused laughter, as she looks at him - how strange this, how reminiscent of something she had not done in years. Not that it stops her particularly until she's down to pants and the under-shirt someone gave her to replace the silk that had ripped beyond use in one attack or another. Had some name for it - or whatever, they'd given her a funny look when she'd said it, which was normal - and an insistence that 'women didn't have to dress like that anymore.'
She'd been good, and only grumbled slightly at the changes that had gone by without her noticing.
They're bundled up and she kneels to the water's edge and begins to rinse them. Letting the water wash off the blood, half dried. Letting them soak before she lowers herself, splashing water up over her face and shoulder, a relief from the sun, letting it splash over her and cool her, find her face and hair under her blood as she cups it in handfuls and splashes it up and over herself. Running damp hands up over across the back of her neck and across her shoulders, brushing over an ugly entrance wound that sits a white scar on her dark skin.
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"Keep an eye out," he says. He can only play half the lookout. "Don't get distracted."
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Which is as much warning as he gets before there's a loud splash. Happily sunk into the water and dipped herself backwards into. Washing the blood off of her hair, her face. Not deep enough to truly submerge herself but - enough when she leans back at the right angle to get her head under the water. Feel it all just run off and that's more than enough right now.
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