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What she wants to know about are knots.
The thing is, he's been teaching her this entire time. For months. For well over a year now - getting on to two, truth be told, and when he actually sits down and thinks about that, the very few times he ever does, it’s almost more than he can think about. That they've been doing This - This with a capital T, because neither of them yet have an actual name for it, at least nothing either of them finds satisfactory - for this long, sure. Something that, to the extent he was ever directly aware of it before the world ended, he always gathered people were kind of into on a long term basis and did sometimes in compact blocks, but that was all. And of course they do that: They play and then they go back to how everything was before the playing, and for all intents and purposes it's normal. Or at least as normal as they’ve ever gotten, which is frankly leagues distant.
But it's also not like that. It never genuinely stops, their playing. Their game. It continues with no end in sight, and a long time ago he was waiting for the day when one of them - primarily her - would declare that okay, that's enough, it was fun, a hell of a lot of fun and she loved it, but now she’d like to stop.
He's not sure exactly at what point he stopped waiting for that, but he isn't waiting anymore,
If that day comes, it comes.
It's not like he's afraid of it. Even if he loses This - if they lose This, or give it up, or let it go - she isn't going anywhere.
And that's the other thing. The biggest thing. It's not about This at all, this game they never stop playing - this game in which he's suddenly found an exciting new role which fact doesn't really feel so new if he's honest. It's that he's with her, she's here, she's alive,and they're together and they're happy and they don't have to be afraid the way they were - though still afraid, yes, because the second you stop being afraid is the second you die - and they haven't yet had to run again.
That’ll change. Everything will change. That day, the day the game ends? They probably won't have a choice. Even if neither of them ever decides they want it to end, it will.
One way or the other, it will.
In the meantime - without consciously intending to - he's been teaching her things.
~
They didn't enter into This with any goal, not in the beginning. She wanted him to fuck her. She wanted him to stop fucking around being all careful and gentle - even when he was eager, even when he was so hungry he almost couldn't contain the fire scorching his blood - and fuck her. So she broke something open in him, opened a darkly ravenous Pandora’s Box in both of them that neither of them knew was there, and there was the belt and wood grit digging into her cheek as he pounded into her and afterward his hand on her throat and everything that sprang from that, sprouted and grew like a sapling and into a spreading tree. But at the heart of it, always and forever, has been how she feels, how he feels, looking at her new bruises and her old scars and her beautiful marks and knowing that she's strong.
How she feels, how he feels, looking at her new bruises and her old scars and her beautiful marks and knowing that he was strong enough to put so many of them there.
That's why. That's what it's for.
So that's what he's been teaching her. That's what they've been teaching each other. But that's not the entirety of what either of them has been learning, and while he's taught her about pain and about how he can give it to her and all the ways she can take it, there's a side of the equation he hasn't explicitly been delivering. He didn't need to. It wasn't about that. The most practical elements of how he does what he does… Those weren't things she needed to know.
But everything changes. And now she wants to know about knots.
~
She already knew some. When they were on the run together he showed her a couple of the basics. She knew a couple more simply by virtue of being a farm girl and doing all the stuff farm girls do. But since they began This, he's expanded his own knowledge far beyond what it initially consisted of, and he's learned how to bind her any number of ways for any number of reasons, how to do it for short periods and how to make it safe for her to be kept that way for a while. How to make it hurt but only just enough. He did it slowly, gradually, as unobtrusively as he could; on a couple of outside runs in the right places - or a couple of longer-haul trips with Aaron - he found a few books stuffed with useful tutorials and snuck them back. Studied, and far more than merely rope, but the rope earned a good deal of his special focus. He tried things out on her. Tried things out on himself. He's never been able to approximate the sheer elegant complexity of what he saw in one of those particular books, but that's okay. For him it's primarily about practical utility. It's not really about the aesthetics.
Or it is, but not like that.
Beth Greene is an aesthetic unto herself.
It's not solely about her comfort and her safety; he also cares about getting things right. It's never particularly counted what thing; if he cares at all, it's worth the extra care. This was and is worth everything.
So he learned.
Now he sits down with her on the porch steps of their little house, out there in the bright afternoon sun where anyone could walk by and see them - where a couple of people already have, two older kids back from work detail in the gardens who gave them a cheerful wave - and he holds a short length of the thick, soft rope he likes to use, and he begins to teach her.
She watches his hands, eyes big - big and keen, big and sharp, sharp like they've only really been since she came back to him. Tracking every finely deliberate movement of his fingers. He watches her watching him and remembers putting the crossbow into her hands and watching her learn - more than half by instinct - to hold the thing. Technically too big for her, too heavy, not correctly balanced, but he could tell, looking at her within the first five minutes, that she could kill with it. Could get to the point where she did so reliably, without wasting bolts. She adjusts. She adapts.
Maybe better than anyone he's ever met.
He shows her a French Bowline, and there's something about it. About her eyes in that moment. A flare of something like a tiny blue flame. He falters - only slightly but she sees it, he knows she does - as the reality of what this is washes over him and into him. No; more over than into, like a hand pressing him down. Pinning him. Gentle and strong and deceptively delicate.
Closing over his throat.
He draws in a rough breath and pulls the knot loose in one smooth tug, and hands her the rope. She takes it from him slowly, carefully, her fingers tracing over its spiraling ridges, and she lifts her gaze his. Blue flame.
Pinning him.
She was a little girl when they began this new phase in earnest. She was his little girl - his Sweet Baby Girl - and he was her Daddy, and what they were doing together was so wrong and so bad and no one could know, but Christ, it was so, so good. He wouldn't lie then and he won't now. He doesn't love it in spite of how fucked up it is; he loves it because of that. That's how strong he knows he is. He looks at it and recognizes the joyful depravity in what they're pretending to do and to be, the deliciously twisted obscenity of this particular fantasy, and he's not afraid of it. It’s fucked up, but he isn't. She isn't. Not like that.
It's a game. Like everything else, it's a game.
And some ways maybe that was the last hurdle. He knew he could hurt her and it wouldn't ruin either of them. It wouldn't make her weak and it wouldn't make him a monster. He knew he could hurt her and it would transcend borders into ecstasy if he did it right. She could give herself up like that and he could take care of her. Then they fell into something that didn't have anything to do with pain at all, that was just about being so bad and wrong - and that wasn't wrong either. Not in essence. Not down to its foundation.
He's her Daddy and he loves her.
But right now he's not. And right now she's anything but a little girl. They're beyond that, at least for the moment. Back then she was doing what she knew. Now she knows more. She was taking the power she had; out here in the warm sunny open for anyone in this ruined world to witness, he takes some of what he has and he puts it in her hands.
And he offers her both his wrists.
She doesn't hesitate. She binds them slowly, just like he showed her - even distribution of pressure, not too much interference with bloodflow, no way for the knot to tighten or loosen. She binds his wrists together so their insides are flush, so he feels the rhythm of his pulse in one echoed and matched by the other. He closes his eyes, skin suddenly burning with blood in the cool air of mid-spring, and by the time she's finished his breathing is ragged and shallow and he's trembling. It kindles at the base of his spine and the base of his skull and it spreads like prairie fire, and his eyes are watering, mouth watering, his cock a diamond-hard rod straining against his fly. Aching and so pitiful how needy he is, and he doesn't give a fuck. Shame hasn't truly been part of this for a long time.
When he was her Daddy she found ways to prepare him for her.
But not like this.
“Beth,” he whispers, and as her name escapes him it's almost pained, but she presses her fingertips against his lips to silence him. Around them it's darker now, even if out on the street the sunlight beams on, oblivious to them. She’s somehow cloaked them both with that touch. Soft fingers, even after everything she's been through. Her hands aren't calloused like his, although they bear their share of scars.
He wants those hands on him. Everywhere, however she wants to use them.
“Show me again,” she says softly. The world is her voice all musical steel, swelling with it. Enclosing him. Caging him. And that's when he knows she's been teaching him too. Every second she's struggled in his grip and against his bonds, every second she's spent on her knees with his come in thick streaks across her mouth and cheeks and chin, every second she's begged and screamed, cried - she was teaching him how to be.
He knows exactly what to do.
She unties him and he shows her again. And again, until she's confident she has it, and she's winding the rope idly around her fingers and smiling out at the lengthening shadows, leaning against his side with his arm curled around her and his cheek resting against the crown of her head as if nothing whatsoever is out of the ordinary. She smells like soap and the ineffable scent of warm Beth, and very faintly of the poperie Mrs. Taylor uses, the latter lingering evidence of her morning work giving music lessons, and he closes his eyes again and breathes. Breathes her in.
She's all he needs to fill himself with.
“I'm on the wall tomorrow.” Conversational. Informative. He already knows. That's not why she's telling him. “I want you. When I get back.”
He nods. He's trembling again. He knows, knows without looking, that faint red bands encircle his wrists like reminders.
As if he needed any help remembering.
~
She takes his sight. That's the first thing.
He's not sure what to expect, and she hasn't given him much to go on. This isn't like before. This is nothing like before. There’s no seduction, no wicked little girl enticing and then all but coercing her own helpless father into the filthiest and most wonderful things. This is just him and it's just her, no masks and no game on top of a game. Only This.
He's sitting on the couch when she comes in, leaning forward with his elbows braced on his knees, and he jerks his head up when the door shuts behind her with a soft click.
It’s a warm day and she's a little flushed from the sun on the wall, shining sweat-damp at her hairline and the hollow between her collarbones, her shirt clinging to the lines of her waist, the small swells of her breasts. Her hair is secured in a plain ponytail, loose strands all around her face like a golden halo in the late afternoon sun coming through the blinds because she can never tame them no matter how hard she tries. He stares at her because he doesn't know what else to do; in different circumstances he might rise and go to her, force her to her knees before he lets her do anything else and use her mouth simply because he can.
Now he just waits.
So maybe she'll want him to go to the bedroom. Maybe she’ll want the couch. Maybe… Fuck, he has no idea; except for the rope he has no idea what's coming at him, and it's starting as a flutter in his belly and quivering upward into his lungs, pulsing down into his stiffening cock. Cramped and already straining for her hand. For anything she’ll give him.
One idea he does know is that he might have to beg for it. She seems to like that.
But for a long moment she simply stands there, rifle slung over her shoulder, and she looks at him. Pins him, like she did. Maybe she's thinking. Considering precisely what to do with him. Maybe she's trying to make him squirm.
Maybe it's getting difficult to breathe.
Not the bedroom, as it turns out. Not the living room. His hands have started actually shaking when she speaks, and when the words get through his ears to his brain he’s at a loss regarding the universe of new possibilities they open up in his very capable imagination.
“Kitchen,” she says softly.
There's a question here, unasked but terribly present, and he knows she knows.
What happens if he disobeys?
He doesn't want to find out right now. Right now he wants to be good for her. So he somehow levers himself onto his feet, somehow takes a step toward the kitchen, and another, and he can feel that blue-flame gaze singing his hair. His ears. The backs of his hands.
Fuck, he's already so hard.
The kitchen is a wide open space but for the island in the middle, airy and bright, polished granite and stainless steel, and as soon as his feet hit the tile floor he glances back, and that's when she gives him her first warning.
Which is just a narrowing of her eyes. Subtle. If he didn't know those eyes better than his own, he might have missed it.
She knew he wouldn't.
“Eyes front,” she says, still barely more than a murmur, softness as deceptive as her delicacy. Not that he's fooled, not that he's ever been fooled except perhaps at the very beginning - at the farm - and he swings his eyes forward toward the sink, the row of high windows above it, an empty coffee mug sitting on the granite countertop. A spoon next to it. The sunlight plays along the edge of the spoon and catches him with strange intensity.
From the second she walked in, none of this has felt quite real.
“Stop.”
He does. He's in the center of the floor, or as near as he's going to get between the sink and the small island. He notes these things as if they might be useful to him later, as if he might actually attempt some kind of escape, which is ludicrous.
But he notes them anyway. Maybe it's just what he does whenever he feels, on the deepest level possible, that he has no control.
And that's when it hits him, what’s really happening here, and it's not like when she was his baby girl because she's not, and it's not like when she rode him and clamped her hands around his throat because this is intentional, this is something she means to do, and maybe she won't hurt him, she hasn't given him any sign that she plans to and anyway he’s pretty sure she would warn him - no, she would ask - but all at once his throat clenches into a white-knuckled fist and he's shaking, shivering from the base of his skull to his tailbone, breath a tight hiss at the roof of his mouth.
He remembers when she said the word and she was shuddering in his arms and he was terrified. Because something he did shattered her that way, and only then did he fully understand. How powerful he was. Is.
What he does to her, he thinks about it, and he's so fucking hard and he wants this so bad, but his back exposed, all of him exposed and defenseless, and her with-
She-
Wanted to hurt her, accepted that, not broken for it. Not.
Wanting to hurt. Wanting it.
It’s not the same as it is with her. It can't be.
She has to sense it somehow - or it's fucking obvious, he's shaking, and suddenly she's there pressing solid against him and sliding her arms around his waist, head between his shoulderblades, holding him tight. Like she did that day. He broke open and she held him like this and it was all right.
He was safe. He was sobbing like he hadn't in front of anyone in decades, and it hurt so bad - gutted and bleeding out through his eyes and nose and all over her hands - and he had never felt that safe in his entire fucking life.
He's safe now. And he has the word if he ever felt like he needed it, because the same rules apply. But he's safe. He’s so safe with her.
“We don't have to,” she whispers, and he almost breaks again right there, because he loves her so much he can't contain it.
“I know.” Softer whisper than hers. He not so much hears as feels the words on his tongue, passing his lips. But she hears, because she nods.
“I won't hurt you.”
So she says it. She knows, she knew. What he needs. All his knots loosen at once and it's entirely possible that he would crumple to the floor if she wasn't holding him up - again, like before. Because it's what she does. “I promise, Daryl. I won't hurt you till you say.”
He doesn't say anything. He just rests, breathes - getting his shit together doesn't exactly reflect what's going on in his head but it's not far off - and he gives her his own nod, and the light blurs away into a warm, comforting blankness. Something in which he could float. Where he knows she floats, when he does his job right. She floats into a bright, warm fog and he holds her, and he's with her when she comes back.
He wants to go there. So he’ll say.
Just not yet.
It's not verbal. It's not even necessarily something either of them mean to do. It happens like this sometimes - some kind of signal passes between them and they both know. But he's all right, breath deep and slow and his eyes half closed, and she releases him. And he doesn't fall.
“Strip,” she repeats, still very soft. “And wait for me.”
He thought she would be there. He thought she might want to see - this is something he likes to watch, likes it a lot, all that glorious bare skin coming into view at his command - but as he tugs his shirt over his head she's walking away, and going by the mutter-creak of the floor she's headed into the dining room.
Scrape of something as he unbuckles his belt and he knows it's a chair, and he begins to get it. A little. The shape of it. Part of it.
Christ.
He's not fully conscious of the rest as he removes it piece by piece and it aside. He's listening to her progress, lowering sun washing out his eyes, and all at once his bare feet are on the cool tile and she's there behind him, the edge of the chair nudging the backs of his knees.
“Sit.”
He sits, hissing as his ass touches the cool wood, the single word rolling through his head. All her commands so far are soft, slightly breathy, and very simple. He did it that way at first, still does sometimes - it's easy. When you're uncertain it's less frightening. But holy God, she has nothing to be afraid of.
Then again, neither did he. Ever.
Shuffling behind him, something being moved around. Her moving around. His head dips forward and he sucks in air and he's freshly aware of his own cock, how if he lost any of his erection in that brief moment of fear it's all come roaring back like the blood crashing like waves between his temples, how - when he opens his eyes and focuses - the head is already glistening with welling precome. Wouldn't take much now to get him pretty much dripping down his shaft and he moans-
-and moans again, a healthy percentage of it tense surprise, when something silky and completely unyielding stretches across his face, his eyes, and the world flicks off like a light.
“Hold still,” she murmurs, and she starts to tie him.
He tried things on himself, sure. To the extent that he could do so safely, anyway. He knows how rope feels against his skin. He knows how it feels when it tightens. But he didn't, is the thing, he had no fucking idea, because as she takes his arms and guides them to fold at the elbow behind the chair’s back, lays his wrists together and binds them to the chair’s horizontal middle slats, there simply aren't words to describe what's happening to him. His head had dropped; now it falls lower, hair hanging in his face and the world lost in total darkness, and everything is so heavy and every slide of rope and every graze of her fingertips pumps heat through him like magma. It feels like his cock is fucking twitching, jumping every time she winds another loop around him, as she secures his ankles to the chair’s legs, and when she breathes a laugh he wonders if it really is.
“Guessin’ you like this.” Gently amused. So she’ll talk to him, too. For some reason he likes that as well.
Like doesn't exactly cover the other thing.
“Pull,” she says, and she doesn't need to explain. He uses the word with her. Test what he's done. Try to get loose - a token effort only, but try. He does, twists and tugs, and there's warm friction and he's not going anywhere.
So then nothing happens. Just him and the air he's raggedly pulling into his lungs and the thudding of his heart filling every fucking one of his veins, and once again her movement. Familiar, actually, and if he could hear over his own fucking racket he could identify it. He's sure. He has no excuse for not knowing what this is.
Then smooth, bare skin glides across his, weight settling across his thighs and arms over his shoulders, and he smells her cunt and his cock is trapped against the trembling muscles of her belly and a long whimper wrings his lungs because how the fuck is he supposed to help it.
Small breasts against his chest, nipples tight and hard and like tiny fingertips as she moves, settles herself and rolls her hips once, horrifically slow. The heat of her breath against his throat and then her lips, the scrape of her teeth, again at his jaw, and when her name tears out of him in a jagged gasp she laughs.
“You want this?” Another roll. He’d swear he can feel every individual curl of her bush as she moves, and no, she won't have to do much to get him pleading. “Mm? Feels like you do. Said I wasn't gonna hurt you.” Those hellfire lips graze his, every word a feather-light kiss. “I could make you feel so good, Daryl. Want me to?”
“Beth…”
She nips him and he winces, and it's not pain. “Say it.”
“I want you to.” Resistance is a tale told by an idiot. Maybe someday he will. Now he folds like paper. “Beth, please…”
“You're so hard for me,” she breathes, and her hand slides between them and he knows what's coming long before it does: her cruel little fingers curling around his cock and squeezing him, and even in the black interior of his skull lights flicker. “You want it in my pussy?” Stroke. “In my mouth?” Stroke, her thumb swiping up his underside, and he's shaking again and it's for the best reasons. “You know how good my pussy feels. Don't you?”
Teeth clenched so hard they hurt, and she just got started. “Yeah.”
“You want my pussy.” Another nip at his jaw - a perfectly gauged bite, and what rips out of him is close to a yelp. “Say it.”
He arches, hips jerking uselessly upward - not under his control, and he knows he won't get it back. His universe is all sensation and in so many ways that's worse than seeing - the ropes dragging his shoulders back when he struggles, her weight and her heat and the ripe little handfuls of her tits as she straddles him and the sharp smell of her cunt flooding his mouth with spit, his tongue drowning in it because it could be drowning in her, her fingers working his cock in smooth, firm strokes that she knows are just short of what he really wants, and her plump wet lips and her teeth and her tongue in his fucking ear Jesus Christ, and he sobs in pure delighted frustration and wrenches under her, gasping.
“I-I want-I want your pussy, Beth.” He twists again and she giggles happily and rocks backward as if she's about to ride him, gripping him tighter. “Shit, I want it so bad, please.”
He first discovered what a filthy mouth she can have when she started calling him Daddy. Turns out that skill can translate.
He's so fucked.
“Don't believe you,” she sing-songs, and she’s abruptly gone, hopping off him and - in his mind - dancing away to parts unknown. He sags and the moan that escapes him is so bereft, almost mournful, that he nearly laughs.
Another rustle, the clatter of silverware being pushed along the counter, and then a wet, sticky sound that he needs absolutely no help identifying.
He can't see her. He can't see her, and he can't decide if this is better or worse or what, and blood is packing itself into his cock with every capillary like a balloon.
“You remember that time you told me to get up here?” She says it with utter casualness, her tone even and relaxed over the quiet squelch as she fucks herself. Lazily, he thinks. She sounds lazy. She's in no hurry; she's not going anywhere, and neither is he. “Told me to make myself come? You remember that. You made me keep goin’. Wouldn't let me stop.”
She falls silent. Except no, she doesn't; her breath is the tiniest bit rough around the edges, and her fingers, how wet she is - she's drenched. He doesn't need to see it to know it; his mind is supplying the details. Slick and shining, milky semi-translucent around her finger - fingers - and trickling into the crack of her ass. Pooling on the granite - and if later she wants him to lick it up that might be just fine.
How wide she has her legs spread - might be only as wide as she needs or she might have both feet up on the counter, knees bent, spreading her lips with her other hand and displaying herself for the man who can't see her at all.
“Gonna make myself come now, Daryl. All by myself. And you can just listen.” Another laugh, happy but decidedly edged. She knows she's being cruel. She means to. She's looking at him - must be - and he's panting, practically drooling, cock jutting uselessly into the air, squirming against the ropes because he doesn't remember how to hold still, and this is his fault. Every second. It's all entirely his fault.
Listening to her breaths slip into moans, loose and deep, satisfied even if she hasn't come yet, and under it that thick squelch thicker and thicker as she finds her speed.
“You like it when I use both hands, right?” He does. He likes it a lot. One to finger herself with and one to attend to her clit - one of the fastest ways to get her to the edge and one of the best ways to keep her there. He doesn't need to do anything but watch. “Doin’ that now. It feels so good, Daryl, oh my God, it’s so… I'm so wet, can you hear that? I'm… ahh… it's-it’s-”
Rich, pleased roll of laughter. “It's on the floor. My pussy’s drippin’ on the floor, Daryl, it's so-oh, shit- Daryl-”
Almost. The edge in her voice - the gold wire that runs through its core - is tightening and tightening, he can hear it winding up, knows she's there, teetering, that just the right push would send her over. And how that looks-
No. Because he doesn't get to see it. He hears it, the approaching abandon, her groans bleeding into a singular crescendo that has more in common - as with so many of her sounds - with laughter. He hears the wet smack of her fingers in her cunt, the slide of her tongue across her lips as she lets out a ragged oh HELL yeah and then there's the clink of the spoon again as it's jerkily shoved - presumably - further along the counter, and something solid - her heel, maybe - is swinging against the lower cabinets, and these are his only clues as her climax slams into her.
And there are her giggling little moans as it lowers her down, and his own desperate whimpering half-words. Pleasepleasepleasefuckplease.
Because he wants to beg. Because he knows she wants to hear it. Not for a second because he thinks he’ll receive one iota of mercy.
There's what he's sure is the sound of her fingers pulling free of her cunt and then her sucking at them, humming to herself, and just as he tumbles into total incoherence her feet hit the tile with a soft thud and he smells her again, overpowering this time, the scent pressing like fingertips onto his soft palate in violent sense-memory.
“Tell me what you want.”
“Beth-”
Her slick fingertip against his bottom lip, nudging, darting away from his seeking tongue. He licks at himself, which of course is what she meant for him to do, and those sense-fingers curl around his spine and shake him. “Say. It.”
“Lemme-” Not out of embarrassment or any kind of shame; simply that his vocabulary is shrinking by the minute. “Lemme taste you.”
“My pussy?” She sounds musing, and he can feel the pressure of her gaze as it rakes over him.
It comes in a trembling rush and somehow it's a relief to get it out. “Lemme taste your pussy. Fuck- Please.”
“I don't think so.” Smacking of her sucking the rest of her juices away, more of that pleasure-laced humming, and he can feel a wail beginning to weave itself together behind his ribs. More strands of want when she moves away from him again.
How long has this been going on? Ten minutes? Half an hour? The entire fucking evening?
She didn't even have to wind him up. He was already wound. He's been waiting for this.
Possibly from the beginning.
Cabinet opening. Something set on the counter - glass? Dense. Heavy. Jar? He strains to listen - and strains against the ropes, and against himself, his own roaring blood and his cock screaming through his nerves for any kind of release. Which she might very well not give him at all, because more than once he left her repeatedly at the boiling point and didn't touch her or let her touch herself for hours, sometimes days, and one way or another she’ll be looking to get her own back.
He can totally see her putting him through another hour of this and then leaving him where he is to think about what he's done.
All the many, many terrible things he's done.
A metallic whisper. A lid unscrewing. Yes, a jar. What the fuck do they have that's in a jar? Deb three blocks over makes preserves of various kinds and Beth loves strawberry. They have pasta sauce. Some kind of meat glaze that basically can't go bad. Nuts. A random thing of jelly beans.
None of those make any sense of even the vaguest kind, and he's about to give up and ask her and risk punishment for speaking when he hasn't been spoken to - yes, that's a rule he knows is already in place even if she never said it - when another scent eases its way into his nose, soft and slow and tinting his darkness a tawny gold.
“Open up.” And naturally she doesn't wait; her sticky fingers push past his lips, leaving smears of honey in their wake.
He doesn't usually care so much about sweet things - they're fine but he doesn't love them the way Beth does - but it's like a backhand slap to almost every sense he has: that scent and the lingering smell of her cunt under it, the thickness of it melting on his tongue, his own broken moan and her gentle breathy laugh, and the sweetness of it, sucking at it, trying to wrap his entire tongue around her two fingers - get everything, every molecule of it and anything of herself that she somehow missed, and it's so fucking sweet sweet, holy Jesus God it's so sweet.
“There you go,” she whispers. “You take it.”
Something about that drops the floor out from under him, and it perfectly follows when she pulls back and thrusts in and starts to fuck his mouth in an easy, relentless rhythm that he accepts with eager moans.
More sticky pressure. Third finger, honey-coated and stretching his lips, fucking into him with the others - and faster, deeper and rougher each time until she pokes the back of his throat and he gags and lurches in the chair, heaving. She withdraws and he's suddenly so empty, slumping forward with spit running down his chin and landing on the tile with a bizarrely loud pat-pat.
Her hand. Her other one, stroking up his cheek, combing into his hair and raising his head. Soothing. He presses into the curve of her palm and whines like a hopeful dog.
“You're okay.” Her lips again, but they're not tormenting him now, or they're not meant to; she ghosts them across his cheekbone, presses them to his temple like a blessing. “You're doin’ good, Daryl. You're doin’ so good for me.”
A loose, weak smile seizes his mouth and curls it, and God, he means it. He means it so much. He says these things to her when the rhythm of what he's doing allows for it: strokes her and pets her and tells her how good she is, how amazing, and if he’s requiring something difficult of her he says he's so proud of her. She's so strong.
He never lets her forget.
But he didn't know it felt like this. Like sunshine pouring directly through his cracked breastbone and into his chest cavity. Like he's exactly where he should be. Like he's doing exactly what he should be doing.
“You're gonna do somethin’ harder now. Alright? I know you can.”
He nods. He’s emphatic about it. Whatever she wants. Anything. He can. It isn't even about coming. Not anymore.
It's just about her.
“You're gonna hold still and you're not gonna make any noise. Alright?” She kisses him again, feather-light, and the shiver that takes him rolls through him like thunder. “You do that for me, you get to come.”
He's nodding even as warning bells clang in his head, because what the fuck else is he supposed to do? She could tell him to do anything and he would at least try. He would want to. For her. To please her.
God, he's so fucking happy.
“Good,” she murmurs, and leaves him.
Sounds of movement. He can't decipher. Stickiness against his lips once more but it's not her fingertip; instinctively he opens to it and as the sweetness invades his mouth again so does the understanding of what he's tonguing, confirmed by her quivering sigh.
So he sucks the honey from her nipple and - because she doesn't withdraw - keeps on sucking, suckles with her hand cupping the back of his head. And the darkness somehow deepens. Smooths.
Every sweet thing comes from her. Every good thing. It's entirely appropriate, in the mud his mind has become, that he's doing this and everything that goes along with it - everything that he’ll meditate on later and wonder how deep this rabbit hole in him might go.
And they're already many meters down.
But then she's gone again, pulling free with a pop and his accompanying whimper of disappointment. “That one was just a warm-up,” she says, every word a grin, and before he has time to formulate the most basic concept of past and future and what's involved in either, her hands are on him again - warm melting-smooth fingers gliding down his neck and her mouth following, licking him clean of the tracks she's drawing. Dragging down to the base of his throat, sucking kisses that he dimly knows will be marks later. Scraping her teeth along the ridges of his collarbones, swirling and lapping honey in swooping patterns over his chest. He's sitting rigid, taut and vibrating, jaw painfully clenched with the effort of obeying her, when her fingers pass across his left nipple and he has enough time to bite down on the insides of his cheeks before she follows with her flicking tongue and then her teeth, working him carefully between them, almost breaking him when she tugs and red lightning spiderwebs into the dark.
He doesn't know if he moved. Maybe he did. Maybe it was too much.
Panic sinks cold fingers into his gut but it flows away when she moves again, lower, over his ribs and slowly down over his stomach, and by the rhythmic puff of her breath on his damp skin he can tell she's laughing.
But he can't hear anything anymore. His own pulse is drowning it out. If he did crumble, make a sound, he's not sure he would even know.
She's not stopping. Deep, shuddering sobs are beating against his ribcage like frightened birds. She's not stopping and she's sinking down between his spread legs, one hand burning a palmprint into the skin of his thigh, and he comes so close to breaking because he almost begs her to stop, because he can't, he can't be good for her if she does this to him, and it's all he wants, being good for her.
Ruthless little fingers start painting his shaft with honey and he almost screams.
He doesn't. Doesn't think so. His head is ringing with it, his breath coming in huge, ragged gasps, but she hasn't paused. Hasn't stuttered. Isn't hesitating one goddamn fragment of a second when she leans in and runs her tongue up the underside of his cock in a single rough sweep.
It doesn't matter anymore.
It does matter. It absolutely matters. But it might as well not. He's nearly writhing with the sheer effort of not moving at all, biting at himself until he tastes blood. She's eating him alive, a virtual mouth of Hell swallowing him up, and he's damned. Wants to be. Wants to fall apart under her, wants to give in and scream her name, anything to make this stop.
Anything to keep it going forever.
Sound has washed back into the world and he can hear the hiss as he claws air in through his teeth, and below it the softly hungry mm-mm noises she's releasing directly into him, striking the right tone from him like a bell. He feels it rising, clutches desperately at it, and it's no good: her name finally escapes him in a hopeless, agonized keening, and she vanishes like smoke.
No. No. God, no, no, he tried. He was trying. But his whole body is like one giant raw nerve, every blood-beat hot sweet agony. He doesn't know if he can make it worse, if maybe this is still salvageable, but he lifts his head as if he really could see her at the right angle, his tormented moans slipping free and into air now far too silent and far too still.
She's gone.
I'm sorry. “I'm sorry,” he whispers - almost voiced. Almost sobbed. “Beth… I'm- I’m sorry, I couldn't- I tried…”
It's all he has. I tried.
“I know,” she murmurs, and when she shifts against the floor he suddenly and with a tsunami of relief realizes that she didn't go anywhere. She didn't leave him. She was there the whole time. “I know you did. It's okay.”
He doesn't understand.
It's okay.
“That was all I wanted.” All at once her sticky hands are framing his face, and when she ghosts her lips over his she leaves a trace of sweetness behind. Sweetness like the low music in the marrow of her voice. “You tried so hard for me. You're so good, Daryl.”
One of her hands disappears and returns to existence wrapped firmly around his cock, but he barely notices. He's lost in it. Those three words, light through which he's drifting. They're everything.
You're so good.
“You still wanna come?”
He doesn't nod. He's not sure what he's doing. Once again he's bleeding out, every tight muscle unlacing itself, every knot untangling in her hands, and she could be touching him anywhere, in any way. He simply lets out another shattered moan and shivers against her, shivers harder when she palms his head against her shoulder and turns his face into the hollow of her neck. She's stroking him, his hair and his cock, and dimly he thinks she might be singing to him. She can't be, that doesn't make any sense, but later that's what he remembers.
It doesn't build. Maybe there isn't anything to build. Maybe he's been on the edge this entire time. She strokes him and all at once it just comes, pouring out of him like a burst dam, and it feels like it keeps on going and going, wringing him dry. It's not a spasm. It's not a convulsion. He doesn't scream and buck into her fist. If anything the last of his muscle tension spills hot into her hand, and it's only her and the ropes holding him up. Holding him together.
Just holding him.
Her fingers are continuing their slow passage through his hair, but then they close, strands tangled around her knuckles, and she lifts his head.
“Open up.”
He does. And as she feeds him his own come, beneath the salt-bitter taste there's a world of honey sweetness.
~
She’s slow to untie him.
This is also something he does - not all the time, but often. The process of untying her can be part of what carries her back, and he sinks deeper and deeper into the light and then into the darkness as she works the knots loose and massages his wrists and ankles.
She doesn't ask him to get up, doesn't try to make him. She guides him down to the floor in a controlled slide, and when his knees find the blanket from the back of the couch instead of cold tile, the distant harbinger of a smile touches the corner of his mouth.
She's been learning this whole time. Learning every part. Everything she needs in order to take care of him now.
He's still in the dark when she lays his head in her lap, and she knows to leave him there. There's nothing he has to see. There's nothing he has to do at all except this, and he curls weakly against her as he gradually begins to gather his scattered pieces.
“I love you,” she breathes, and behind the darkness he feels tears prickling his eyes, and they're good ones. “I love you, Daryl. I love you so much.”
He can't answer. But he can search for her hand with his and he can find it and interweave their fingers, and that's good too.
They stay like that for a while. Then, when he's ready, she removes the blindfold with exquisite care and helps him up and leads him - a little unsteady and blinking owlishly in the kind light of early evening - to bed.
~
Lying in the dark with her in his arms. Waking at dawn and watching her sleep. Up an hour or so later and sitting on the porch with the cool breeze washing across his face and hands, mug of fiercely black coffee between his palms. He's staring at the lawn and her little garden and the empty street, the day still silent except for the distant groans of the small pack of walkers that’s been milling around the west end of the wall and being a nuisance to fully remove.
He's not truly seeing any of it. Not fully hearing. Every sense - all pleasantly weary - is turned inward as he meditates on life in general.
And specifically on this. On how she broke him. On how he wanted to be broken, and he wanted it so badly in the end. On how she didn't have to hurt him, even a tiny bit. She didn't have do anything particularly elaborate at all.
It was so easy.
The place she took him to - he strongly suspects she might be able to get him there with words alone. That it's easier to walk that path than he ever imagined, and so much of it is because he's so safe with her. Safer than he's ever been.
He still wants to keep the power he's gathered for himself. He still wants her crawling, sobbing, screaming for him to stop and please please stop, don’t, don't stop, I can't, please. He still wants to give her pain and everything sweet that goes with it.
But he's going to ask for that too. He's going to ask her to break him that way.
He's going to say.
It won't be like it was with her. He knows that too. It might be more difficult than anything else they've done. He's terrified.
That's why it has to happen.
Not yet. More of this first - seeing how far she can push him this way. The degree to which she can completely dismantle him. The depth. There are whole new worlds of things he has to learn, and the same is true of her.
But soon.