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Pain. Thunder. Dirt.
His name, shouted over and over.
No. No. No!
A face looms above him, blurred at the edges, twisted and wet.
Don’t cry, he tries to say.
But his mouth fills with iron. His tongue is heavy. The words never make it past his teeth.
Pain. Thunder. Dirt.
Arms around him now. Strong. Desperate. Pulling him up from the cold ground. The world tilts. The sky fractures into pale light between gravestones.
It’s so cold, he thinks. Strange, to be cold in someone else’s arms. And it hurts.
Hands cradle his face, rough palms trembling against his cheeks.
“—with me! Don’t you—” A ragged breath. “Don’t do this to me.”
He tries to focus on the face above him. The hair falling forward. The blue of the eyes, darker now in the gray light.
“Don’t you— don’t you die on me. Paul. Look at me!”
He knows that voice. He knows it the way a body knows how to breathe. Even now. Even like this.
A forehead presses to his.
Then comes another sound. Ragged.
“I love you,” the voice says, fierce and terrified.
He wants to say it back.
He wants to say, I know.
But it hurts.
Daryl.
The name, too, does not reach his tongue.
The dirt smells sweet and wrong beneath him.
The warmth holding him begins to feel far away.
And the thunder swallows everything.
For a moment, there is only silence.
The world around him feels thin, a vellum sheet held up to a dying light, so fragile that a soft breeze might tear it. There is no pain now. The agony of the blade, the cold of the dirt, the slow beats of his own failing heart.
There is no ground, no sky. Only a wide and waiting nothingness.
He drifts through it, or maybe it drifts through him. It is difficult to tell where the "him" ends and the "nothing" begins. He is not certain he has a body anymore; there is no weight to his limbs, no air in his lungs, no pulse thrumming in the hollow of his throat.
And then, the flashes come.
The dead walking through empty streets. Clawing hands reaching through chain-link fences. The wet snarl of things that should be still. Rotting bodies carpeted across the earth.
And then, there is the fall.
He feels the sensation of descending, of the air rushing past him, but there is no earth to catch him. There is no solid thing to break the momentum. Instead of the ground rushing up to meet him like an old friend, there is only the phantom collision with a floor that isn't there. He simply continues to sink through the layers of his own ending.
The images stutter, skip, and blur. They feel like scenes from a movie he watched a lifetime ago. But other images come, too – things that carry a warmth the nothingness cannot swallow.
Warm limbs tangled with his, heat pressed along every line of his body. The fierce, startling blue of someone’s eyes, bright enough to act as a lantern even in the deepest dark. His name – his actual name – breathed softly against the sensitive skin behind his ear.
Memories, he realizes. These are his memories.
Promises murmured into his throat. Love. Devotion. Forever. Words spoken like a vow in a temple of their own making, and answered in kind.
He almost smiles at that one.
Almost.
The idea of smiling occurs to him, but there is no mouth to lift, no muscle to move.
Maybe none of it happened.
Maybe this is simply what the mind does when it dies. It builds a story. It stitches together something grand and tragic and unbearably romantic just to soften the long fall into the dark.
Maybe the dead never walked the earth. Maybe the world never ended at all. Maybe he never found a reason to stay in one place, never found a man who made the end of the world feel like a storm he no longer had to weather alone.
Maybe he never bled out on that cold cemetery ground.
If the apocalypse was a dream, then it was an elaborate, cruel thing. If loving him was a dream, then his brain possessed a sense of humor that bordered on sadistic.
Because to invent a man like that – stubborn and soft in equal measure, a man whose hands felt more like home than any roof or four walls ever could – to invent the other half of a soul he had once believed did not exist at all…
That would take a kind of talent bordering on divine.
Just how naive he had been, to think that whatever came after death would be merciful. He had expected to be allowed to forget.
Instead, the world returns.
He is standing where his body lies, though he does not remember the act of standing. He looks down, though he no longer remembers how eyes are meant to track the light. The mechanics of existence have become a foreign language.
He almost laughs at the irony of it.
Jesus, they used to call him.
Because he could forgive like a saint. Because he could find a reason to believe in humanity even when the world offered nothing but teeth and rot.
They looked at the long hair and the miracles he worked with his feet and his fists, and they built a myth out of a man. But the man had never been a believer. He never looked for the pearly gates, never feared the lake of fire, and certainly never expected to become the wandering, restless soul of the stories.
To him, death was supposed to be a simple extinguishing – clean, final, and blissfully empty. He didn't need a heaven when he had found one on earth, built of scavenged wood and shared meals.
Family.
The word slips through his fingers, translucent and weightless. Are they the ones standing there now, their shoulders bowed under the weight of the gray sky?
Their faces are carved open by a grief so raw it looks like a physical deformity. He knows they matter. He knows he would have laid down his life for them – and he did – but their names hover just out of reach, like something written in water, shimmering before they dissolve.
He cannot remember their names. But him.
Him, he knows in the marrow of his non-existent bones.
Him, who still cradles the empty house of his soul, even as the rain begins its descent.
Daryl.
The name comes to him like a tidal wave, settling on the mist that is his tongue.
Another figure steps forward, a blade held steady in her hand, mercy written in the hard lines of her face. He should know her name. He should remember the bond they shared, but none of it comes.
“No!” his other half cries.
The voice vibrates through him with a frequency that makes his spirit ache.
Daryl does not look at her. His hands, usually so steady on the crossbow, trembles with a violent tremor. “I’ll– I’ll do it.”
The knife presses to the temple of the body on the ground.
He watches as the steel bites into the skin. He waits for the sharp spike of agony, but there is only a strange, hollow pressure in a skull that is no longer his.
He feels the phantom warmth of the arms holding the corpse. He feels the desperate strength in them, the way the man bends over the limp body as if he could shield it from the world, from the blade, from the truth of what has already happened.
Paul does not know how much time has passed. Only that the figures who stood over him have dispersed into the fog.
There is only Daryl.
“Paul,” he mutters. Over and over.
I am here, Paul wants to say, but he has no voice to carry the weight of it. Daryl.
It hurts again.
Only the pain does not bloom in his lungs. It does not throb in a heart that has long since stopped its rhythm. It strikes, instead, in the space between the atoms of his soul. Whatever part of him remains capable of breaking, does.
Paul watches Daryl’s face – the blue eyes clouded with a storm of salt and grief.
Paul watches Daryl’s fingers – stained with dirt and the copper-tang of Paul’s own blood – fist into Paul's soaked shirt.
Paul watches the way Daryl’s head bows, the tangled mess of hair shielding a face that is collapsing into a deeper and deeper ruin of grief.
It is a specialized kind of torture. Paul is everywhere and nowhere at once, a witness to the exact moment the other half of his soul begins to wither.
Paul realizes the true nature of his sentence as he watches Daryl clutch the cold, slack body tighter, weeping into the neck of a man who is already a ghost.
So this is what remains, Paul thinks.
Only the agonizing half of a soul, watching the other half begin to bleed out from a wound no prayer can stitch.
Only love, still tethered to a world he can no longer touch.
So can we contend peacefully
Before my history ends?
Jesus I need you, be near me, come shield me
From fossils that fall on my head
There's only a shadow of me
In a matter of speaking, I'm dead
♪