afterword (there's no way I could ever leave)

Oh, hey. You made it.

There have been fics where I congratulated and thanked people for sticking with me to the end, but I think this might honestly be the first fic where I feel like some kind of prize should be awarded, because Jesus effing Christ.

This thing, like most of the things I write, got completely out of hand. In a good way, I think, and it's also accurate to say that I went into it pretty much expecting it to get out of hand - I do occasionally learn from experience - and made psychological room for it to do so. I said at the beginning that I wanted to do another Safe Up Here With You, and in many ways I have - I think this fic and that one would probably benefit from being read together as a matched pair - but in many ways this also ended up being quite different, and not just because it ended up being well over twice as long.

As happens very commonly with me, this whole preposterous mess had its inception in a song - "Right Where it Belongs" by Nine Inch Nails. What led up to it, as far as I can recall, was repeated listenings of the NIN album Still (I will never get over how it's called that) and noting that most of the songs on that album - and in fact a huge number of NIN songs in general - fit the angstier side of Beth and Daryl's relationship, and specifically the worst of Daryl's psyche. Despair, doubt, hopelessness, worthlessness, violence, rage, and desperate love - I had written about those things before, but I wanted to go for their throats in a way I hadn't. I wanted to really make an effort to write the darkest thing I reasonably could. I wanted to tread that edge I've talked about many times before, where I'm trying to hurt a reader but not so badly that they have to leave. I wanted to get people to the point the best horror films get you to: clutching a pillow and hiding behind it at intervals, almost unable to keep watching but completely incapable of looking away.

(Seems like at least with some of you, I've done that. I can't tell you how gratifying that is.)

I wanted, in other words, to be unapologetically brutal and cruel. But that "reasonable" requirement up there was important. I've referred to this multiple times as my "Dead Dove fic", and it sort of is in that I'm incorporating some really problematic tropes without interrogating them the way I ought to be, but it also isn't, because I didn't end up merely wallowing in trash. I ended up trying to do what I always do when I tackle things like this: tell a story about a journey into darkness in order to climb back into light. I always envisioned this as Daryl's (and Beth's) Inferno, but the Divine Comedy requires a Purgatorio and a Paradiso in order to be complete. We spent most of our time in Hell, but I didn't want to end it there.

Among other things, that's boring.

I'll make a confession: for the first few chapters I was legitimately uncertain regarding whether Daryl would come out of this alive, or whether Beth would make it either. When I said I couldn't promise a happy ending, I wasn't just jerking people around; I genuinely couldn't promise anything, because I wasn't sure. It didn't take long for me to narrow things down to a single ending, but when I went into this I didn't know, and that made things very interesting, as well as shaping the first few chapters in some important ways.

But it would have been too easy to end things in suicide or a mercy-killing or a combination of the two (or murder). It would have felt cheap to me, almost as cheap as an ending where everything is happy and fine and beautiful and nothing hurts. Something I say over and over is that I don't do hopeless endings. I think a mercy-killing/suicide ending isn't necessarily hopeless, and there was a period where I thought the climactic scene in the woods might end that way, but it wouldn't have felt right even then.

Healing is more difficult. And writing it happening after so much pain and horror, and making that writing work, was the challenge I wanted.

I loved how so few people saw that coming. It made me so pleased. (It also made me wonder at what point people are going to start trusting me.)

Another thing that kept it from being merely a Dead Dove fic was the fact that pretty early on, I realized that despite my making use of trauma and mental illness in a way that's incredibly uncomfortable and problematic, I also wanted to attempt to treat those things with some degree of respect, and tell a meaningful story about them.

I don't have a traumatic brain injury, but I am mentally ill, and specifically I deal with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder as well as depression and anxiety. I experience much milder versions of a huge number of the things Daryl does here, in particular compulsive self-harm and violent intrusive thoughts. I wanted to tell a horror story that disgusted and horrified me, which is why I incorporated those things (I also think there's some canon support for Daryl having a touch of dermatillomania; he often gnaws/chews/picks at his fingers, notably when he's tense). Especially the violent intrusive thoughts; one of the things that terrifies me most about those is the idea that I might someday act on them and hurt someone or myself. Very few people with those thoughts ever do, so objectively I know that I'm probably fine, but the idea of doing so is still horrible, and is in itself intrusive.

So in some ways this also became my catharsis. It seems like it became that for a lot of people.

I'm no longer sure where the idea of Daryl being the one to get shot at Grady came from. I think in part it was probably just because I hadn't ever heard of it being done before, and the idea presented some fantastic possibilities for dealing with Beth's character just as much as Daryl's. Beth in psychological pain has been written about plenty of times, but I don't think Beth in this kind of pain - Daryl's kind of pain - has really been done a whole lot. I tend to leap at the chance to do something different, or least something conventional in a different way, so here we are.

Another thing that was an absolute joy and that I didn't at all see coming was the exploration of the relationship between characters that went outside Beth and Daryl's (and I got to explore a profoundly platonic side of that one as well as a romantic side, which I loved). Relationships that we don't actually see enough of on the show but which I think would have to be incredibly important in a situation like this. Especially the relationship between Carol and Beth - when I write those scenes I always feel like I'm giving a giant double middle finger to both the Carol people who hate Beth and the Beth people who hate Carol, which I enjoy - and the relationship between Beth and Rick, which fascinates me. Only gradually did I come to understand how painfully intimate - and just plain painful - that relationship would have to be, with Beth's guilt over the conviction that she was responsible for Daryl's death and Rick's guilt over the prospect of losing yet another brother, and their mutual love for this man who they lost and then recovered in just about the worst state possible.

Their love and anger brought something else to the fore, something I've written about before now - especially when it comes to Daryl and Merle - but haven't addressed in quite this way: the way it's possible to love someone and still feel profoundly negative emotions toward them. To love someone and also hate them. That's difficult because it's not how we ever write Daryl and Beth, but it's something else I've done before, specifically in Safe Up Here With You when Daryl unleashes all his rage over Beth's role in arguably causing her own death.

Which brings me to what's probably the single most difficult thing I did here, which was the single biggest factor in determining how the ending proceeded: Daryl's sexual assault of Beth.

This is yet another thing I did in Safe Up Here With You, in a much less violent way. There it was confined to fondling when Beth was in no position to give any kind of consent. Here I went a lot further, and a significant degree of why I did was that I wanted to see if I could, and this seemed like the ideal opportunity.

I've said on our fandom podcast that I regard Daryl sexually assaulting Beth as just about impossible to write in a way that works, and I still think that's true. It's true because of who Daryl is, how he regards predation of the vulnerable as the greatest crime someone can commit, how enraged we've seen him get over sexual violence, how fiercely he protects the people he cares for, and - probably most of all - his own sexuality, which we've never seen any evidence is aggressive (we have yet to see any evidence that he feels any real sexual desire for anyone at all). It's just not something he would ever ever ever do.

Unless.

The other thing I said about Daryl doing something like that was that I believed it might be possible to write it and have it be in-character if he was put in an unfathomably horrible position, where his context itself would push him in directions he would otherwise never go. So I did something very similar to what I did in Safe Up Here With You: I put him in close quarters with someone for whom he feels incredibly intense and deeply mixed emotions (and someone who isn't actually a whole lot more mentally functional than he is), and I wrote his sexuality as I imagine it might be, which is extremely immature and as powerful, when awakened by this person, as immature sexuality tends to be.

And it's awakening in such a fucked up way. It won't be healthy. It won't be safe. Daryl is possessive of Beth, to the point of behaving like a stalker. He has violent sexually-edged fantasies about her, and then violent fantasies that are explicitly sexual in nature (he has fantasies about literal necrophilia; I made those somewhat gauzy-lensed, in part because I felt like it actually increased the horror of them, but yeah).

So all of that led up to one of the most horrific things I've ever written. And I think - I hope you felt - that it worked.

But it made me realize something about the ending, which was responsible for making it about 10k words longer than I thought it would be: in order to keep it from being a mere plot point, I needed to show how Beth, and to a lesser degree Daryl, was coping with it and healing from it. I had to, because maybe this is kind of a Dead Dove fic and maybe I'm being problematic with my tropes, but I couldn't have respected myself or this story if I brushed off attempted rape. This meant that I had to continue past where I originally intended and depict at least some of the process of working through everything that had happened. It would have felt wrong to me to jump through all that to the epilogue. It would have felt like I was magic-wanding all of that pain and anger away.

So we dipped back into angst a little. But I didn't feel that it was regressive angst, or angst for the sake of angst. I meant for it to be a recognition that recovery is sometimes painful - mostly painful, in fact, depending on what you're recovering from - and that the steps forward are frequently slow, interspersed with some steps back. A journey up from a depth this low isn't going to be an easy one if it's going to be true.

But they made it.

And here we find ourselves at the end of the second longest thing (so far; I think Howl will surpass it by a good bit) that I've ever written in this fandom. It's become such a personal story for me, and one of which I'm so proud. It's not perfect, but no story ever is, and I'm emerging from it satisfied with how it was told.

I come to the end of a story with two interrelated goals in mind: to have done right by the story, and to have done right by everyone who accompanied me. I think I have to thank you especially much in this case, because holy lord it was not an easy ride, and because you trusted me and because you cared. Thank you so, so much. It means the world to me.

A few things before I say goodbye to you for now: As with I'll Be Yours For a Song and Safe Up Here With You, I'll be making a paperback version of this. I line edit all my stuff pretty carefully, so it probably won't be available for a while, but it'll happen. I'll also be releasing what I think of as the "soundtrack" for this, because as usual with me, music was the driving force for its writing as well as its inception.

And finally, I have a , and if you want to help support this kind of work and make it easier for me to keep doing it, please consider tossing a buck or two in my hat. I would do this stuff regardless, because I love it beyond belief, but it's still hugely appreciated.

Thank you again. I'll see you out there on the road, and I can't wait to find out what the next journey will bring.

12/10/15 - 7/7/16