This is it, folks. The last chapter of The Blood Done Signed my Name. I have enjoyed writing this more than I would ever have guessed, and I appreciate that you would read what I've written more than I can say.

I've really grown to really love Merle. I've no doubt the show will go and break my heart when I inevitably get Jossed. I guess fanfic has its inherent risks... :)

I'd like to thank a couple fellow fans, and toss a rec your way. Designation, thank you so much for letting me talk through some of the end of this story with you. It was invaluable and your insights enriched the story immeasurably. Surplus Imagination has written a really amazing little one-shot called "Vengeance" I'd like to turn your attention towards. It deals with some very similar ideas in quite a different way. I really think you may enjoy the perspective provided there, so do go look it up.

I hate to say goodbye to you all, and goodbye to this story. But I already have an idea for my next move. A post season 2 fic, tentatively titled "Down in the Willow Garden." It is a murder mystery, set in the same universe as this fic. I'm hoping I'll get going on that in a month or so.

This has been such a true pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with me.

You and Me:

And then it was over.

Merle was gone, and Daryl was all alone.

When they told him what happened, Daryl looked for him, of course—he looked. But he'd come back with nothing but his severed hand.

His severed hand.

Then the dead came in the night, and there was no time to think. And there were piles of bodies to see to when the sun came up.

He did his part. Helped with everything as much as he could. It was simply what was necessary. They needed everyone hard at work to dispose of the remains and clear up camp. And they needed to make sure none of their own rose up to hurt anyone else.

So he worked for hours in the harsh sun—from the moment it rose it seared straight into his skin. He was drenched in sweat.

The hours went by. But when a moment presented itself, he slipped away from the crowd. Pulled the small, cloth bundle from his bag and took it into the woods.

He had a spade over his shoulder.

Much later on, as the sun set that day, Merle drove the stolen cube van up into the now-abandoned quarry. Mostly, he wanted to see if Daryl was waiting for him. But he also wanted to see what had happened after he'd set the walkers on the people there.

So he stepped out of the cab, and walked into the empty clearings that once held the camp.

There were a few collapsed tents. Some of them were torn and stained with blood. Just like at the FEMA shelter. The evening light floated over them, highlighting the long shadows.

And the mass of tents scattered there looked like collapsed, dying animals. The canvas remnants swelled against the wind like lungs laboring to breathe.

He watched the tents swell and gasp for a long time. The shadows grew longer.

And then he heard the first of the voices.

You did this.

He darted around. Expected someone behind him. But no one was there.

It was just him, imagining things.

But behind him there, right where he turned, there was blood on the ground. And there was more beyond it. Some of it in thick pools. That meant people had died, or were dying from the bites… were about to turn into walkers because of what he'd done.

Standing there, he began to feel a little nauseous.

He shook his head. Rebelled against it—protected himself. Pushed the thoughts away like they were trying to bite him. He'd had no choice. Merle knew it. This was the only possible way it could have gone.

But he'd never killed anyone before.

Now he had.

But he had to do it. This was just the sort of thing that happened in this new world of theirs. After all, Daryl shot that guy at the FEMA camp—the one who was trying to climb up with Merle onto the truck. Daryl killed someone. He'd done it because he had to do it.

And what Merle had done… it was so easy. He didn't realize how easy it would be. Rounding up the dead… they were stupider than chickens and it was nothing to herd them together and lead them along where you wanted them to go.

And so he slipped up the hills in the dark, letting them follow at his heels. When he got there, he evaded them easily, and let them keep on moving straight into the camp.

And as he slipped off into the night, a girlish scream rang out in the darkness.

He went back to his stolen truck and drove away—didn't bother to try to watch. When he was far enough out, he crawled into the back of the van to rest. To nurse his wounds.

He'd been absolutely exhausted, so he slept very well.

Daryl walked through the woods surrounding the camp. He chose a small clearing in a stand of trees, off in a quiet spot at the side of the quarry.

When he was done digging the hole, he sank to the ground on his knees. Unwrapped the cloth bundle, and took out his brother's hand. He held it in his own.

And he remembered when he'd held that hand in the shed—with the driving rain beating down everywhere around them. He'd held it while Merle clung to him and begged him not to leave.

And he'd held his daddy's hand, once. In the hospital. And Amy's hand, when the walkers came for them both.

He'd held that woman's hand, at the FEMA shelter—coated with that damning film of blood. He'd never learned her name.

And in this moment, he held this hand—Merle's severed hand. It was cold and grey and starting to rot. Didn't weigh very much. Seemed very light for something that had caused so much trouble over the years.

The skin was starting to feel dry and stiff to the touch, and there was already a faint smell. But Daryl held it without a moment's thought. Stared at it. Couldn't look away.

What that cop—Rick—what he and those others had done to Merle—good God. Imagining his brother chained up there, with nothing but that hacksaw… if Daryl thought too much about it, he'd probably throw up.

He never knew he could feel the kind of anger that was smoldering deep within his gut. It was a smoky, slow fire of pure rage that charred every word out of his mouth a deep black. It burned inside him, spreading wider—swelling red and furious as they all walked around like what happened to Merle didn't matter at all.

If he'd been there, Daryl would never, ever have strung any one of them up like that. Trussed and ready for the geeks to eat.

He was no coward.

After all, he'd gone after Amy. Didn't think twice. But then Andrea just left Merle there, knowing full well what Daryl had done before. He'd given her those few more weeks with her sister, and she didn't do a thing for Merle.

She didn't even care.

Daryl would have taken on anything before he did what those put together, educated, city people did. It was so unbelievably, inconceivably, inhumanly cruel.

It was like something Merle might do.

Merle walked around the remains of the camp as the sun lowered below the horizon.

A bit of torn canvas brushed his arm, fluttering in the wind. He made to reach out for it with his right hand. Checked himself, and used the left. There was blood on the nylon weave, brown and dry. It flaked against his fingers. And as he touched it, his daddy's voice rang out behind him.

Be a man, Merle.

He spun towards it. Nothing. But he was sure he'd felt a breath on his ear.

He was sure there'd been an acrid whiff of tobacco and halitosis and Colt 45 hanging in the air.

Daryl filled in the earth over Merle's hand. Buried it in the woods, silently and all alone.

Until now, there'd been no real time to really think about what happened.

When he went back for his brother with those others, they'd been attacked almost immediately—sent off on a completely different chase. Nearly lost that plucky little Asian kid, Glenn. Had to go through some pretty weirdass shit to get him back.

And when they got back to camp, the dead were on them out of nowhere, and everything was darkness and chaos.

And then the morning dawned, as it always does. He saw Amy lying dead on the ground.

Andrea wouldn't let them put her down—wouldn't let them keep her from rising up again.

He could see exactly what she was doing, sure. She just wanted to talk to her sister again. Wanted to see her moving around so she could pretend she was still alive. Wanted to unload whatever she needed to say—wanted to shrug off whatever misplaced guilt she was carrying on her shoulders.

It coated his anger with an acid tinge. He couldn't imagine anything more selfish.

He wanted to shout at her that Amy wouldn't hear shit. Amy was dead. Letting her get up like that… it was reckless. It was pointless. It was cruel.

He remembered Amy's voice.

What's it like in the woods before sunrise? Is it pretty?

That little girl. She'd had such an honest, open face.

And what the walkers were like… she shouldn't ever have to be that way.

He stood there that morning, and looked over at Andrea from a safe distance. Looked at her sitting with sister's body. And he remembered when Amy came up to talk to him, and how he'd driven her off.

Fuck off, Blondie—ain't no one wants you here.

He looked at her pale, dead body laid out flat on the dirt, and thought and thought about that time she walked away from him.

He was very glad he made her do it.

Past and present started blurring together. Merle was feeling very sick. Lightheaded. Yesterday and today and years and years ago all seemed like the same moment, then.

So while he stood there in front of the mangled tents, his mind floated backwards. He was in the stolen van, just a few hours before. The memory was so vivid it was like it was happening all over again.

He passed out in that van after setting the walkers on the camp. And when he woke up in the back, the sun was just starting to lower in the sky. He'd slept the whole day through—for hours and hours, curled up in a limp heap. He'd opened his eyes to the dark, sheet metal ceiling. He remembered where he was, and what had happened.

I had to do it.

It had been his first conscious thought that day.

The bloody stump had soiled its wrappings with blood while he slept. So he'd had to rip the cloth away and start over—tearing at the clotted wound. It started bleeding again. Not in a terrifying rush like when it first happened—not like that, thank God. This was slow and seeping.

And when he went to stand up, he tried to push up on his hands and mashed his wound against the floor. Cried out through searing jolts of sharp, white pain. The sound of his voice echoed weirdly against the metal walls.

Standing in the camp by those tents, and remembering that pain, he clutched at the stump. Clutched at it above the makeshift bandages. Above where'd he'd burned the wound to seal it shut. He stared and stared at it. It didn't seem like his own body.

That just couldn't be his arm. The pain couldn't be his pain.

This had to be a mistake.

He walked past the tents, towards the treeline. Through empty campsites with their dead fires. His vision wobbled and swayed.

All of it seemed like some kind of fever dream. Did he have a fever? He was sweating hard. But it could just be the press of the humid air, trying to choke him as it cleaved all over his skin.

He saw another pool of blood on the ground—whose, he couldn't know. And he remembered his own blood gushing all over him—warm and wet—staining his clothes, smearing everywhere. Leaving a trail behind him.

And he stepped on a twig, and it sounded just like the gristling snap of the tendons when they burst away from his wrist. As he walked further along, he could hear the clattering of the handcuffs as clearly as if it was happening all over again. The metal rang against that pipe as he made it through the last of flesh and bone.

He could hear his hand landing on that roof with a muffled thud.

And when he'd finally cut through, the blood had gushed and gushed out from him as he staggered away, despite how tight he'd pulled his belt around his arm. It left him weak and dizzy and, strangely, deeply thirsty. He could hear his pulse ringing in his ears, and he had a headache that seemed like it would never lift.

He would never know how very close he'd come to bleeding out.

But even a day later, he knew how very weak he was. He felt strange… like he was wading through deep water. Everything was slow and hazy and dreamlike. It was hard to think clearly. He could only really feel.

When he'd fled that highrise, he'd let blind rage keep him upright. The stairwell full of walkers was spinning around him, and all he wanted to do was sleep.

But he had to fight—had to kill his way through what those city assholes had left in his path when they ran away. He attacked those crowds all alone, left-handed and weak and sick with terror. So he let himself hate them as much as he could. Let that hatred grow white hot. He clung to it. It was the only hope he had to survive.

And he did survive. All thanks to his own damn self.

When he got out, he slipped off to hide inside a building nearby—like a wounded animal. It used to be a bank. The blood had stopped trailing after him by then, and none of the dead saw him creep in. So he just collapsed there on the tight weave of the office carpet. Slumped in the corner to rest and recover. He wasn't sure how long he lay there, propped against the wall by the storefront windows.

Things faded in and out for a long time—the movement of the light. The sounds of the dead shuffling around outside.

And then he'd heard Daryl's voice.

Not clearly enough to make out the words. Just the tone and rhythm he'd recognize anywhere. The sound made him start awake.

At first, he thought it was part of a dream. But Daryl was there. Just outside. He could almost touch him if the window wasn't there between them.

Daryl was with that asshole cop and his asshole friends. And he was helping them. Helping them do what, precisely, Merle wasn't sure.

So he slipped out from his hiding place, and trailed after them, a good ways back. Always concealing himself carefully. Watching, completely unnoticed. No one expected him, here, and the crowds of dead made for a powerful distraction.

Daryl might be the best tracker Merle had ever known, but no one left a trace on asphalt.

So he could watch them from a distance—invisible and unseen. Like a crow on the power lines, or like a ghost.

He hid outside the tower as they checked the roof for him. But he saw most of what happened otherwise—right up until that stupid Asian kid got himself dragged off by those fucking gangbangers. And Daryl… he went right on after him. Stopped looking for Merle altogether.

Daryl chose that fucking chink bastard over him. Went off after that Glenn like he was his brother.

And Merle remembered Daryl at that FEMA camp, then. What he'd thought Merle had done there.

His wounds had just barely healed from that night. The bruises on his ribs had only just faded completely from where Daryl had beaten him.

And so he knew that whatever story those assholes told him about what went down, Daryl would believe it.

Merle tried to think through the haze in his brain. The heat on his skin. The pain stabbing through his arm and crushing against his temples. There was only one thing that this could all mean. It had finally happened.

Daryl had finally given up on him, like Merle always knew he would.

Daryl laid the hand down in the earth, and tried his best to accept that Merle had left him.

He had to know that Daryl would come for him—would never let them leave him there like that. But Merle had taken off, without leaving a single clue as to where to find him.

He was gone.

There must have been a reason—maybe walkers. Other survivors. Some imminent danger he had to escape, fast.

Merle wouldn't have just abandoned him for nothing.

He wondered where Merle had gone. Felt a dim foreboding. Wondered where this thing would take Merle without Daryl to keep an eye on him.

That made him almost desperate to go out searching, again. He almost stood up and headed to one of the cars.

But there was no way to find him. No shadow of a lead. No hope.

It was that fog of fucking uncertainty, again… the fog of war. Nothing they did was ever enough. Neither of them could ever plan for the brutal, horrible things that happened so suddenly in this world.

So Daryl had ended up alone. Merle had left him, for whatever reasons there had been.

For all the long decades they'd been together, Merle had known he would lose Daryl, someday. He'd been afraid of it ever since his brother was old enough to run away when he tried to hit him.

So he gripped hard. Hit harder. Pulled and fought and tore and bruised. Struggled hard to find new ways to force Daryl to stay close.

Sometimes it was all he could think about.

But he knew that Daryl would find a way to get free. He was better than their shitty little world on their shitty little dead-end road. It was obvious from almost the first. There was always something special about him—something greater and larger than the life fate had thrown at him.

He was too damned smart and he had too much inside him—Merle never really understood everything that was in there, completely. But he could sense it. And it made Merle feel as fake and insubstantial as the toy trucks and army men he played with as a kid. Small and cheap and cast in plastic. Scuffed up with some of the bits chipped off.

The shabby house on that shabby dead-end with the shabby people who lived inside it… that was where Merle was meant to be. He fit right on in, and made himself at home.

So he had to have Daryl with him—he had to have a part of that special, unnamable thing that had come into his agonizingly lonely life like some kind of miracle when Daryl was born.

The rest was nothingness. A blank void. And that was all he could see in his future, now that Daryl was gone. Gone without a trace.

Those people. Those fucking town people with their fucking civilized scruples that had turned out to be so fucking conditional. Beating down that fucking asshole T-Dog? That was unforgivable. It got you a gun to the head. But chaining a man up to be eaten? That was just fine.

They were just like that officious prick doctor who saw to his daddy when he was dying. The one he'd punched out. He'd almost gotten arrested over that, until Daryl talked them out of it. These assholes were just like that doctor. They were all so clean cut and smug and proud. They lorded over everything, like they were the fucking arbiters of fucking fate.

They'd taken his right hand—and they'd taken Daryl. And to Merle, it was like Daryl and the hand were really the same thing.

They'd taken it all. And that more than anything else showed him that what he'd done was right.

Daryl covered his brother's hand with loose soil. The crumbled bits of clay smelled damp and rich and good as he turned them over with the spade. And then the hand was buried. Swallowed up. Returned to the earth that made it. He looked down at where it lay.

No one really understood about Merle.

The people in the camp—T-Dog and Andrea and Lori and Rick—who was most to blame—they all thought Merle was a monster. He could read it in their faces. They were as sure of it as they could be sure of anything.

But they didn't know a single fucking thing about Merle—they couldn't really see him. They just saw what he looked like, and listened to him run his mouth.

So they only saw what they expected to see. What Merle showed them.

And the worst was what Lori said right in front of him.

Merle Dixon? He's not worth one of your lives, even with guns thrown in.

She said it right in front of Daryl like he wasn't standing there. And she cut his hair that time. She smiled at him. He'd seen straight through her and chose to keep her secrets. And still she'd say something like that to his face. And no one seemed to disagree with her.

His brother was just a worthless, ugly thing to them.

Some kind of monster.

Merle stood out where he and Daryl had kept their camp. Everything was completely cleared out.

Daryl was gone. Didn't wait for him. Left no note. Took the bike and all their things.

He'd found a note taped to a car out near the front—and he got hopeful, then. But the note wasn't for him. It wasn't for anyone he'd ever heard of. He'd crumpled it up and threw it in the bushes the moment he saw that it wasn't written in Daryl's hand.

He gave up, then. Went back to his stolen truck. Sank down against the front seat. Curled into himself, weak and sick.

Thoughts were picking at him. Swarms of memory. The baby birds were screeching at him from the foot of the white oak. Outside the rain-soaked shed, that family of walkers they'd killed were in a pile—surrounded by carrion birds that feasted on them, bit by bit.

And Merle… he felt like other parts of his body were being ripped off—torn away by hands and chewed apart by teeth. His skin itched and his bones ached.

He was full of holes, and they bled.

And then he was seven years old, and Daryl was just an infant, quietly asleep against one of their gran's large, freckled arms. She had her Bible out. And Merle was sitting on the floor, and she was leaning over him from her chair. She seemed so large and old and indomitable. She towered over him, staring with her stern eyes, and recited from the gospel of Matthew.

And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

And he sat in the truck at the quarry, listening to her voice. It echoed in the evening air, fading away into the heavy darkness.

And all the fight went out of him, then. He crumpled over on the steering wheel, shaken and drained. He buried his face against his single hand, breathing in hard gasps.

He just couldn't hold it in any longer. He'd been holding it in for years.

So he collapsed there, and wept like a child.

Daryl perched over the buried hand. Looked down at where it lay. It was almost time to go.

Daryl couldn't explain it to the others, but he knew that Merle was no monster.

He was no monster—he was Daryl's brother. He was important. He mattered.

But there were no words for it. There was just anger and fists and fighting—as if he could beat it into them and get them to understand that way.

All alone, in the woods, his anger was dull and low. It murmured in the background, quietly, like the voices of the people working out in the distance.

He laid his hand over the pile of loose earth. Rested his palm against that rich smelling soil and imagined what was buried down deep within it. The last part of his brother. The only thing he had left.

He thought about the buried hand, and then opened his mouth to speak to it, as if Merle would be able to hear what he said.

At the last moment, he stopped himself. Paused—held his breath. Looked around the little clearing, left and right. No one was anywhere nearby. He was all alone with the summer trees and gently nodding grass. The sunlight cut through the branches, harsh and bright and hot. It glared against the ground. The sound of the cicadas was thick in the air, and he could hear the people working in the distance—picking up what remained of the camp as best they could.

It was safe. He was alone.

So he breathed in hard, resting his hand over that spot of ground. Looked down at the loose earth, and spoke to what he'd buried there.

"I love you."

The sound of his voice hung in the air a moment, calm and quiet and steady. And he sat there, then, reflecting.

He'd never said it before—not to anyone. And saying it now didn't feel the way he thought it would.

It felt like saying goodbye.

He stood then, and turned. Pushed down the urge to look back, and went out through the underbrush to join the others.

There was silence in the clearing when he left. The sun fell over the grass and the insects floated noiselessly in the air.

Daryl walked out into an uncertain future. A new life.