I wrote this in response to a prompt that cemeterydreamer posted over on LJ. She asked for Daryl mourning Andrea's death, so I hope this satisfies that because I've written and rewritten this so many times that I don't even know if it's coherent anymore. I don't think I really care for it, but I hope that you guys do! Reviews are always most welcome.

"Be with me always-take any form-drive me mad!

Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!

Oh, God! it is unutterable!

I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"

-Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross once wrote that there are five stages in the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—

—and Daryl Dixon thinks she's full of shit.

For him, there is no stage but grief itself; raw, unbridled, all-consuming pain that burns from the inside out.

There's nothing that he can try to bargain for or try to deny or change. He'd watched the light leave the eyes of the one person he had ever really truly loved. He'd watched her suffer and waste away; watched her skin become sallow, her cheeks sunken, and her hair matted and sullied with sweat and grease. He'd held the gun to her temple and pulled the trigger. He'd washed her blood from his hands, scrubbing away the last essence of her left in world. He'd buried her in a poorly marked grave on the side of the road on the outskirts of a city consumed by death and rot and the ashes of a way of life long since gone.

He'd had time to prepare for it, of course. He'd known what was coming—they both had; they'd seen it enough times before with Amy and Jim and Sophia and all of the people that they'd encountered on the road.

They'd had just under two days from the time that Glenn, pale face and wide eyed, had returned to camp from a supply run carrying Andrea in his arms and they'd spent every moment together. Daryl had sat with her through every cough and every wheeze, had held her hair back when she'd leaned over the side of the bed to vomit, and had brought her wet wash cloth after wet wash cloth to mop the sweat of her face. As the hours had worn on, she'd made him pull a battered, dog eared book out from one of the pockets on one of her bags and read to her, and the book had been just as boring as Daryl remembered it being all those months ago when she'd brought it to his tent.

When she'd grown too weak and too tired to listen to anymore, he'd just talked to her. He'd told her about how he'd hoped that one day, they would have found a little house of their own to settle down in. One with blue or maybe green shutters, he'd said. Something to make them stand out. He'd told her something that he'd never told her before, and that was that he loved her, and that she was the only woman he had ever loved. He'd told her about what growing up in rural George was like and how he had never really felt that he had much of a chance at a real future, not until she'd come into his life. How relationships were never really his thing, and that most women couldn't understand him, not like she could. And then he'd about the family that they might have had one day; a little girl named Amy who'd wear her hair in pigtails and go hunting with her daddy. He would have been a good father, he'd promised her. A good husband. He would have given her all that she deserved.

And when Andrea finally died in the early hours of that Friday morning, she'd died with the smallest semblance of a smile on her face, as brave and courageous as ever.

There'd been no funeral, no ceremonials. The only flowers had been the lone little daisy that Daryl had tucked behind her ear, and she'd been buried in a simple yellow sundress that she'd found months before and had only had the chance to wear once. She'd had her same old worn out sneakers on her feet that night and she'd been embarrassed over the fact that her legs hadn't seen a razor in over half a year but Daryl couldn't remember a time where she'd ever looked prettier. He'd never forgotten that dress, and he hoped that she would have approved of his decision to lay her to rest in it.

Daryl would like to think that maybe she'd laugh at him for fretting over something like a burial dress or that maybe she would say "but my legs!" or that she'd just smile at him—and that's all he wants, really. He just wants to see her smile again. He'd loved her smile more than any other part of her; loved how it lit up her entire face, showed too much of her gums and crinkled the corners of her eyes.

When he closes his eyes, that's what he tries to imagine; Andrea laughing or smiling or yelling at him over something stupid that he'd done. He tries to forget about how still she'd looked when Rick helped him lower her into the ground or how her chest had rattled with the efforts of her last breath.

He tries to pretend that he never saw the bite on her forearm or the way her glassy, cold eyes had opened to the new life—no, the new existence that he'd had to take from her, because having to pull that trigger was like tearing a hole through his own heart.

His chest aches with hollow emptiness and it hurts him to think, to breathe. It hurts him to remember and it's agonizing to try to forget; everywhere he is, she's there. He sees her in Dale, in the strength of Carol's spirit and Lori's stubbornness, in Carl, in Shane's tenacity and Rick's gentle kindness. When he retires to his tent, he can still smell her on the blankets like she's still there, looking up from her book to smile at him and say goodnight. When he takes watch atop the RV, he can almost see her standing there; gun, eyebrow, and hip cocked.

They'd had eight months together, and that's it. Just a little under a year, and the time had seemed to pass far more quickly than it should have. It's so easy to think about it, all the things they'd never gotten to do; say I love you, find a house, settle down, get married (or something akin to it), have a child, have children, build a life, live their life, have a lawn to maintain, have floors to clean, have fights, makeup, read bed-time stories, have date nights, just be: together, apart, he, she, Daryl, Andrea, Daryl and Andrea, maybe mom and dad.

Andrea was it. She was everything. She was all that he never knew he wanted and now knew couldn't live without and it's so easy to think about how easy it would be to follow her, to pick up a gun or his knife or just cast all protection aside and lay down to wait and confront his fate; to just let the grief rise up like the tide and tow him under and swallow him down. It was the route his mother had chosen, he remembers, back when he was three and his father had gone one step too far; there'd been visible finger shaped bruises along her pretty, pale neck when the coroner arrived, and he'd tsked at them, and Daryl couldn't understand why they were there or why his mother wasn't moving or why she had her fingers locked around an empty orange bottle.

Like mother, like son. It could be that simple.

But then he thinks of Andrea, her laugh, her smile, and what she would say to him if she could know what he was thinking. She had always told him that he needed to stop running from things; from her, from feelings, from his past, from his future. "You can't close yourself off completely," she would say, head strong and persistent. And she was right. He couldn't.

Especially when it came to her.

It hurts, oh it hurts, but the grief is part of Andrea, and he won't allow himself to close up or to walk away from something that means that she was real and that she loved him. It's fleeting and temporary, like her scent on the blanket or the mental image he can recall of her standing atop the RV, and it reminds him that she once had been with him and really, that's all that matters. That she was there.

So he can suffer through for a little while because that's what she would have done, that's what she would have wanted him to do, that's how the memories of her will survive.

The new life span had to be short anyway.