Daryl had never wanted to die before. Never, during all of this—the walkers, the end of the damn world, finding Sophia—he’d never wanted to die, to give up.  But it felt…it felt like it would hurt less to die right now, hurt less than this jagged claw that seemed to be tearing at his heart.

Merle.  He couldn’t bear to look over at the body, stretched on the grass beside him, couldn’t bear to see the ravaged face, all the black blood.

The eyes. 

The eyes that had stared into him, bored through him like drills, as though driving home to him that Merle…Merle was gone.

And even then he’d tried. Just…push it away, like a child, like a damn child, trying to pretend it wasn’t real, it wasn’t Merle.

He couldn’t breathe, his chest was so tight, so he dropped back on the grass, gagging on air.

It was a perfect day, too, and that made it all the more wrong. Obscene, Dale woulda called it, though Daryl thought obscene just meant, like…titties and stuff.  But it suited. It fit. This was obscene, a kind of wrong nobody’d imagine. 

At least he couldn’t, and he’d grown up around badness.

The sun gleamed on the hilt of his knife, picking out the black spots of blood on it. In case he might forget.

Dang. He wished he could forget, and for a wild moment he had to fight the urge to take that knife and plunge it in his own eye, kill himself stone cold dead, just so he wouldn’t have to see, so he wouldn’t have to try to move under the weight of what he’d done.

You killed your own brother, Daryl.  What kind of monster does that? What kind of man does that?

No kind of man. Maybe Merle had been right: a real man, who had his own balls, wouldn’t lie here cryin’ like a damn baby.  He could almost hear Merle’s sneer. 

Christ. He’d give anything to hear that again: Merle’s voice, even them cold hard words. 

He rolled to his side, made himself face it. Look at it, Daryl, he thought, trying to summon Merle’s voice. Look at what you done. 

Daryl wanted to vomit. He wanted to run back home, maybe bury his face in Carol’s shoulder. Maybe just take watch and shoot every goddamn walker he could, because they was nothing. They was nobody and maybe killing enough would make this one killing hurt less. 

Or hurt more and he’d drown under all the gore.

He rightly didn’t care.

He remembered Merle and him, little kids, biking around the neighborhood. Just the one bike—they were too poor to afford two, so Daryl’d learned to sit on the handlebars, the air rushing past his ears, trusting Merle to steer and pedal. Always had.

No one steering him now, and the only sound in his ears was the rush thud of his own blood.

They busted into the house, for some cheap mix lemonade, sweating and gritty.  And Momma was there, on the phone, as always, her Lee Press On Nails tangling in the phone cord, a cigarette bobbling from her rouged lips as she spoke. 

“You go tell Sharon that’s a damn shame,” Momma had said. “And you tell her that I’ll go on down to First Baptist and light a candle for her.” A pause, the voice on the line saying something. “Come on, darlin’,” Momma said, barely noticing, as Merle shrugged, brushed past her on his way to the fridge, pulling down two plastic cups with beer logos on them. “Lightin’ a candle’s the least you can do when someone loses someone.”

Least you can do, Daryl thought, pushing himself up, barely, to his knees. Least you can do is light a candle.

Can’t even do that. No candles, and no church he'd seen that was free of walkers, as though God, if he ever existed, had left the world.

Elvis has left the building.

Merle's left the damn world, by his brother's hand, like some bad Cain and Abel story they'd wriggled through in Sunday School, when Momma had enough gumption to take 'em.

“Sorry, Merle,” he said, voice crackling, knowing the words were not enough, and that he wasn’t apologizing for stabbing him. Merle wasn’t Merle any more. And he knew Merle wouldn’t have wanted to live as a walker.

No one cared about them, even back then. Momma, always busy with her 'social circle', only using her boys when she needed them to run to the store to buy more cigarettes or beer.  They'd made a solemn pact, two little boys, dirty and poor, to take care of each other.

He had. As best he could.

And it didn't feel like enough, but it was the least he could do. The best he could do.