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.
Daryl frowns and wonders if he's just been called an idiot in Indian. He cocks his head to one side, then the other, wondering if he should ask. Once, he wouldn't have. But they know each other better now, especially after that scene at the mall.
"Ganesha - the God." She's happily letting the water run over her. Raking her fingers through it in long motions. "The Goddess Parvati, Goddess of love, fertility and devotion, wanted to bathe, but she could do not do so safely, as her husband, Lord Shiva, the God of creation and protection, was not there."
More splashing, and she goes to gather up her clothes. Scrubbing them briefly, easy enough that in that it hadn't settled into dry long. Talking as she cleans it. "Shiva had left on his many wanderings. So, to protect herself, she shaped herself a guard - her son, Ganesha. She made him brave and strong."
Gently, still sloshing about in the water, pulling it up and twists it between the two hands to ring the water out, watching it run red and red less each time. When it comes out clean that last time, she drops it back again. Watching his turned back. "But then when Shiva returned and found a strange man standing outside his wife's room, he cried out in rage. Who dared try to stare at his wife bathing?"
She creeps up behind him, not that quietly, mind you, clear that it's her and not and walker, the wet clothes in her hands. Dripping between her fingers, until she was close enough behind to him to lean the sodden clothes over his head. "And he attacked Ganesha, his own son, with all the fury and might he could muster, with his armies of demons, and cut off Ganesha's head." Her little story complete, she viciously squeezed the water out of the the clothes, splashing water over his hair.
Daryl leans back just slightly, squinting and hiding behind his forearm in a feeble attempt to shield himself. He doesn't seem to overly mind, but puts up the facade mostly for his own sense of pride or purpose.
"Sounds like an asshole," is his frank appraisement of ancient Indian spiritual tradition. "Away so much he didn't even know his own kid." Who would worship a deadbeat dad? Then again, their God wasn't much better, with what he let befall his son. It seems, in Daryl's opinion, a good idea not ever to be related to anyone all-powerful.
She's sodden as she peers over him, shirt wet and hair clinging, grinning wide and easy before she gasps - mocking and high. "Daryl? That's blasphemy." She scrunches up the material again and splashes more water on him. "Lord Shiva is the destroyer that allows new beginnings."
And she splashes more water on him. Watching his face uncovered from the blood and muck as it runs off of him.
Daryl scrubs at his face, ignorant of what she's doing. "Don't mean I'd want him judging my lineup," Daryl mutters, flicking a spare drop of watery mud off his brow.
"Your many crimes mount." More water, and she'll run out soon - eventually - but not yet. Endless supply where teasing him is apparently concerned. "Shiva saved his son. You will know Ganesha, his image was adopted by many. Even if they had no idea what it is. He has the head of an elephant, which was given to him in replacement for the one he lost."
She straightens, flicking out the fabric, all its creases, the blue striped linen that's finally starting to show its wear. Dark with being wet, the black ornamentation blending into it. "But judging has nothing to do with it. Your soul knows its own weight and you will contemplate it accordingly. Or so the priests say - " a grimace, brief " - said, at least."
Daryl finds he likes that idea. Not the one about an elephant's head-- that's just flourish, a side story to embellish the point, like being nailed to a tree so you can learn about forgiveness. "That how it work? Nobody can judge you but your own self?"
It is of course, more complicated than that. It's religion, it always is. "Self-enlightenment I always found is accomplished that way." This time, where she's standing, she doesn't splash the water on him. Her bare feet where her shoes are left by the river bed sink into the earth. No longer do the anklets chime like bells on her feet where she spoke her morning prayers, praising Mahalakshmi by her husband's side. "Each time you die, you contemplate, and as you lived your life and the lessons that you learned, you are born again into another body - human, animal, plant, anything that has life, they all have something to teach, and so you learn new lessons."
A memory, fond, careful, the water running up her arms as she twists the fabric round and round again. "When my husband passed, he said to me - in the next life, all would be righted. The next time, he would Queen - and I would be Raj." Hard to recall him now, her dying husband, a man she had known since childhood, who she had loved, born a child too, and then lost it all in but a few months.
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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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"What'd you call me?"
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More splashing, and she goes to gather up her clothes. Scrubbing them briefly, easy enough that in that it hadn't settled into dry long. Talking as she cleans it. "Shiva had left on his many wanderings. So, to protect herself, she shaped herself a guard - her son, Ganesha. She made him brave and strong."
Gently, still sloshing about in the water, pulling it up and twists it between the two hands to ring the water out, watching it run red and red less each time. When it comes out clean that last time, she drops it back again. Watching his turned back. "But then when Shiva returned and found a strange man standing outside his wife's room, he cried out in rage. Who dared try to stare at his wife bathing?"
She creeps up behind him, not that quietly, mind you, clear that it's her and not and walker, the wet clothes in her hands. Dripping between her fingers, until she was close enough behind to him to lean the sodden clothes over his head. "And he attacked Ganesha, his own son, with all the fury and might he could muster, with his armies of demons, and cut off Ganesha's head." Her little story complete, she viciously squeezed the water out of the the clothes, splashing water over his hair.
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"Sounds like an asshole," is his frank appraisement of ancient Indian spiritual tradition. "Away so much he didn't even know his own kid." Who would worship a deadbeat dad? Then again, their God wasn't much better, with what he let befall his son. It seems, in Daryl's opinion, a good idea not ever to be related to anyone all-powerful.
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And she splashes more water on him. Watching his face uncovered from the blood and muck as it runs off of him.
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She straightens, flicking out the fabric, all its creases, the blue striped linen that's finally starting to show its wear. Dark with being wet, the black ornamentation blending into it. "But judging has nothing to do with it. Your soul knows its own weight and you will contemplate it accordingly. Or so the priests say - " a grimace, brief " - said, at least."
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A memory, fond, careful, the water running up her arms as she twists the fabric round and round again. "When my husband passed, he said to me - in the next life, all would be righted. The next time, he would Queen - and I would be Raj." Hard to recall him now, her dying husband, a man she had known since childhood, who she had loved, born a child too, and then lost it all in but a few months.
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"What about you, huh? Holding the line up." He gives the flask around her neck a significant look.
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