— CHAPTER SIX —
the parting glass
[ 5667 words ]
Rot and death curdle into a grim mist, smelled more than seen, because it is dark. Too dark. A familiar dark, one who swallows and gobbles. Sylvie has spent so long trapped in the memory of this place, fleeing from its fog and blackness, and yet a great relief now settles in her dreaming mind.
Until someone cries.
On the opposite end of the train car, they thump the back of their head against metal. An endless assault. Tight curls slosh across their eyes, a sheet of rain. When they stomp, it is with sneakers whose canvas is torn and shedded.
"Why?" Wes weeps. "Why?"
Sylvie scrambles back. Every cry chokes her, a rope around her neck, unseen but tightening, tightening, tightening. Air is gone, as if it had never existed. Sylvie screws her eyes shut. Inhales nothing. Exhales nothing, lungs and eyes. Wes is stood in front of her.
His face is mangled and bloody, flesh and muscle drooping off. He looks as Gareth did, once she and Rick had finished with him. When he cries out again, she wonders how he manages it — he has no lips, no throat.
His voice drops to a whisper, as it did his last day in this train car, all those weeks ago. "Look at me."
The train car door flies open. Fire screeches and consumes. In the centre of it, Carl stands with his gun up. When she turns back to Wes, nothing is left of him but a pile of viscera splattered across his old converse. Sylvie catches her reflection in his blood. Faceless, a cavity of blood.
She stands on creaky legs and steps towards Carl.
He does not lower his gun. Fire swallows him, but he it untouched. A flame in his own right.
"I'm paying back my debt."
He squeezes the trigger. The bullet rips.
———
"Hey, hey, Sylvie," says a gentle voice.
There's an arm curled around her shoulders, a hand brushing stray curls out of her face. She's too frenzied and exhausted to bat either away, so she reluctantly lets them tend to her as she works up the strength to pry open her eyes. When she does, she sees it's Glenn and Maggie on either side of her with worry in the identical dip of their brows.
"You alright?" calls a stern voice from the front. Abraham's voice.
Wiping the sleep from her eyes, Sylvie blinks the world back into brightness. Everyone has turned to face her, each face coloured with varying shades of anxiety. Her cheeks warm in embarrassment; these strangers seeing her weak and trembling, thinking her vulnerable, maybe remembering she is just a kid. Even strict Abraham casts her a look of concern, gaze caught between her and the road ahead of them.
Sylvie untangles herself from Glenn and Maggie's web of care and resists the urge to make herself small. "'M fine," she mutters offhandedly, too tired to string together a firm and coherent response, but it seems to sate the trio nearest to the front of the bus who turn warily back to whatever it is they were doing before the disturbance.
"You don't have to be," says Maggie softly.
If she were more conscious, she might have something smart to say about that. But she best she can manage is a quiet but hopefully stern enough grumble, to which Glenn gives a quiet chuckle.
"I get nightmares too, you know," Tara shuffles to the edge of her seat and peeks half her head around it's low back. Set on ignoring her heart and honesty, Sylvie focuses on Tara's hands on, in, around her pistol — dissembling and inspecting the parts, then clicking them back together again. The mechanical rhythm of her actions proves a steady distraction. "Mostly about my family and the asshole who got them killed. Or about my new family, these guys, and what could've happened to them at Terminus." Sighing, she drops the gun on the seat beaide her. "I know what it's like," she finishes quietly.
"The ones I lost there weren't family," Sylvie spits, tone bordering on venomous. There you go again Sylvie, she scolds as Tara's face falls, messing everything up.
But Tara shakes off her words with a wan smile. "Who were they?"
Sylvie quiets. She's not staying with them. She's not, she reasons, even though they seem determined to make their way into her cold heart. Like Abraham and Rosita and Eugene, she has a mission — one they can't follow her on. So she's tried to stick to that with guarded coldness, and she's done an adequate job of it so far. She may as well throw them a bone.
"My brother and I met them on the road," she says, looking down and trying not to pay attention to the feeling of being watched — Glenn, Maggie, everyone. "We were going north; they were going north, so we stuck together. They weren't all good people."
"Nobody's good now," Maggie says. She bumps her shoulder in reassurance, and Sylvie realises how close they are, all three of them piled into the back like this. She wriggles a little for space.
"I know," she responds, having gained as much room as possible. "But some people try to be. They didn't."
"Did they hurt you?"
"No," she says. It's not a lie, but it doesn't mean it's entirely the truth. She remembers Vernon and the things he said, things which riled Wes' volatile temper — racist old asshole, Wes had called him. His son was no better. But they don't need to know the politics and intricacies. Truth is they don't need to know anything, but they want to. So for them she drops a trace of the truth, another, smaller bone. "Sometimes they wanted to."
Tara's face cracks open with surprise, but Sylvie looks to the side, the tight set of her lips a message of finality to te conversation. Understanding this, Glenn clears his throat and swerves the topic to the first time he learned to drive. An accessible anecdote, every joke and youthful mishap untangling the knots of dread Sylvie wove. In their amusement she busies herself with the window. The wind bursts through a small slit at the very top of the glass; she angles her head up to catch it and let in run through her hair. It's dank and thick when it hits her mouth, like the stink of a skin eater made digestible.
Her nightmare still crawls on her skin. Dreams are unguarded planes, filled with people and events beyond her control. They aren't places she tries to visit often. She has been lucky enough to sleep fitfully for the past few weeks; short, sporadic bursts of darkness and then light, nothing and then life. But she was so, so tired, and for once she felt some kind of safe, wedged between Glenn and Maggie, so she had let her guard down. In response she receieved too much memory and little sense.
Why had Wes worn the remainders of Gareth's face? Why had she worn them too? Why did Carl shoot? These are the questions she should be asking, but somehow she feels as if she knows all the answers. Maybe she should have let Carl crack her skull in with that hammer. It would have been justice.
"You know any road songs?"
It takes her a moment to realise Glenn is addressing her. His eyes crinkle with a smile, tone soft but not pitying, so she endures it. Road songs? Is that the kind of person they take her for? "No," she says, some of her usual terseness returning to her. Unless you'd count the trip she and Wes had taken down here at the start of everything, she has never been on any sort of road trip. And somehow she doesn't think the Fishbone he played typically classifies as road-trip friendly.
Her bluntness inspires tense silence, broken only by Tara's hesitant singing. "On the road again," she begins unsteadily. "Just can't wait—"
"Could you quieten down please? It is hard for me to concentrate on my mechanical endeavours when there's incessant noise pounding my earholes." Eugene maintains a level expression until Tara lightly slaps his arm. He winces, shielding whatever project he's fiddling with away from her reach. "This— This is a highly sensitive, fragile apparatus. Even the smallest of—"
"Don't be a dick, Eugene," warns Rosita. Just like yesterday evening, he shrinks under her scrutiny.
"My apologies," he issues, sounding entirely unapolagetic, before turning back to said apparatus.
"Beth used to sing," says Maggie, unprompted. There's a hollow texture to her voice, light, glassy. Beth? Sylvie has heard, in passing, of a Daryl and Carol, fled around the time Bob was taken. But not a Beth.
Glenn stretches his arm behind Sylvie's head to squeeze Maggie's shoulder. "Wherever she is now, I bet she's still singing, giving them life."
Sylvie still remembers how Maggie felt wrapped around her. Her warmth. The steady anchor of her voice. Now she knows why she had done it. And she can't be that for Maggie, but she can offer something, at least, however meagre and half-stammered. "I'm sorry," she says. It sounds clunky and wrong coming from her, and so she's not surprised when Glenn lets out a laugh.
"She's not dead." Oh. "Just somewhere else for now. But we'll find her." He glances to Maggie, whose hand — without Sylvie noticing — has snaked against hers, fingers interlocked. "We will."
The light, easy conviction in his voice makes hope sound like truth. Sylvie wants to believe him, but finding her means she's lost. In this world, lost is worse than dead. She doesn't retract her sorry.
"Did she know any road songs?" asks Tara.
Maggie is comforted enough, grinning now, without any of that ghostliness. "Yeah, different types. We put 'em in two categories: ones we could sing in front of daddy, and ones daddy'd smack us for if he heard 'em comin' out of our mouths."
Everyone laughs at that. She doesn't. The last dredges of her dream are ebbing away, but she still feels mangled inside, a twisting sickness. She tips her head back against the lip of her seat and looks past Glenn to watch Georgia flash by in a smear of pine and concrete. She wonders what Carl is doing. If he's thinking of her. All the things he said to her wail like bells at the back of her mind, reminding her she isn't entitled to think about him, and she snaps shut the lid on that box before she can dig any deeper.
"What about that song you sang at the prison?" Glenn pipes up.
"When?"
"The first night, outside, by the fire. Goodnight and joy—"
"Be with you all." It's Abraham who finishes the line. His singing is gruff and thick with accent as his talking, but warm, baritone. It reminds Sylvie of her dad's voice. Though he was never much of a singer, his voice had been deep.
"So fill to me," Maggie finishes, swaying in time with an unheard instrumental.
"The parting glass."
Glenn nudges her. Sylvie smiles wryly. Like her dad, she had never been a singer. Her voice is grating enough, quiet, tinged with a rasp. Maggie squeezes her hand, Glenn's chest is warm against her arm, rumbling with every breath and song.
Sylvie shakes her head no, and Glenn finishes. "Goodnight and joy be with you all."
———
The bus crashes ten minutes later.
Eugene's sputtering about a cure when it happens. Something bursts in the back of the bus, some kind of busted mechanic that Sylvie can't name or explain. Flame licks and rises behind her, almost nicking her if not for Glenn yanking her forward. But then the bus skews and hurls the both of them to the ground. She can't see outside save for the square of sky in the window, but she can feel it. They're sliding on the road, zig-zagging side to side. Abraham's cursing — "Son of a dick!" — and they're sliding.
"Hold the wheel firmer!" It's Rosita, panic in the high notes of her voice.
"Mother d— I am!"
"I am fearing for my life," Eugene mutters.
The bus lurches forward, stability regained for a split second, before the ground vibrates with flight. That feeling of gravity seeps into her bones. A weightless weight. Glenn tucks her into his side mid-air. They hit the ground and the whole bus jolts out of its frame before they're tipped onto the side. Glenn is thrown back against his seat and she flies against the metal door. Her head collides with metal.
———
She's drowning in fire. It's everywhere, everything. Beside her, Carl is untouched. The fire parts around him, encircling him, but never licking his skin. When he smiles, his teeth are flames.
———
Sylvie opens her eyes to black, and for a moment she thinks she is a crumb of ash in Carl's fire.
But she has a throat. She knows this because she feels her heart worm around in it: flutter, leap, ache. She can even taste its beat on her tongue. When it pulses faster, her throat burns and tears and she tries to use it — to scream — but no sound erupts. She flexes her fingers, which she also has, but they remain gnarled and stiff. She blinks: fabric itches the bridge of her nose, the flutter of her eyelashes, and she knows entirely that she is not ash, but only blindfolded. She has a body. She shuffles it and slides it around. The floor beneath her spine is hard, ridged with thin notches. Wood. Her head sinks into a lumpy pillow. Lint and dust scratch the exposed skin of her jaw.
To gauge the tightness of the blindfold, Sylvie scrunches her nose. It rides higher up her cheeks. Good. When she reaches her hand to pull it off, her wrist catches in place. Tension slithers up her back, sinks into the set of her shoulders.
She's been tied.
She bends her hand again and again to grasp at the bindings. But no matter how fervently she tugs, it won't unravel.
Ground yourself. She inhales dust and stale air, feeling the breath steel in her stomach, stiffen her chest, and loosen it all as she exhales through her mouth. Faraway snapshots of what happened before she woke here float back to her, dipped in a dreamy and unreliable haze. Singing. Fire. Flying. Her dream. There are only two logical conclusions to draw: everyone died and she was kidnapped, or everyone lived and she almost didn't.
A second could have fled by, or an hour, but at some point she feels the sensation of a hand above her head: a kind of parting of the air, a drench of cold. With her one free hand, she snatches for whatever she can, and ends up locking her fingers around a snaky limb — a wrist. She twists it, and somebody shrieks. Not somebody. Maggie.
Footsteps approach, a clatter of boots on screeching wood. A gun cocks against her temple.
"She turned?" barks Abraham, and the words are splintered over the ringing in her ears, but it's definitely Abraham: that military sternness could be nobody else. He prods the gun further into her head, pressing so hard she thinks she might pass out from the pressure. "Maggie you tell me now."
Sylvie finds her voice, though it's rough and scratched dry. "Point that somewhere else—" She coughs and it breaks the end of her threat, rendering it a weak plea instead.
After a few uneasy moments, a second hand descends on her and folds down the blindfold. The first thing she sees, once she blinks to balance all the light, is Rosita. She's smirking down at her, her two dark pigtails sweeping Sylvie's ears. "You put him in his place." She reaches behind Sylvie's head to unknot the fabric, and then to the bookcase to which her arm is tied. What happened? Why are they here? She itches to ask these questions, but she wasted her voice on a half-finished death threat, so she's forced to wallow in her curiosity for a little longer.
"I'll yield." Abrahamchuckles. She hears a telltale ruffle, clunk — the holstering of a gun. He ruffles her matted hair and she recoils in surprise. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Sylvie Chang."
Sylvie holds her throat. It's dry, but no worse than her throbbing head. When she manages to look at Abraham, a warm orange light flanks him. The intensity shoots a wave of pain straight to her eyes. She hisses and throws her newly-freed hand in front of her face.
"Migraine." Maggie kneels beside her, blocking out the offending light. "Figured as much."
Maggie dabs at her forehead with a wet piece of cotton. Sylvie lets her, because it is the only grounding thing: her presence, her touch. The spit of water streaming between her eyes, down the flat bridge of her nose, halving across her cupid's bow. When Sylvie looks up to watch Maggie work, she recognises the fabric as a part of Maggie's shirt, once red, now maroon with water. It's been torn off her sleeve; only an absent square of raw hem is left behind. Maggie notices her looking and sighs. "First aid kid was in the bus when it blew. We gotta make do with what we got."
Sylvie nods. A bus crash sounds right, but the exact images evade her, ducking and dodging from her memory. "Sorry," she settles on instead. "About your wrist."
Maggie only laughs and squelches the cotton, which oozes water. It drums to the floor. "I'm in better shape than you."
Footsteps recede and approach until Glenn is at her other side, not Abraham and not Rosita. He looms at her side, fuzzied by the darkness, and tips a fabric canteen to her lips. Sylvie almost turns her head away. If she were to accept, it'd prove she's the kid she'd not wanted them to see. Weak. Reliant. But her body is on fire. Reluctantly, she parts her lips and lets the water gush down her throat, swallows until the prickly feeling is quelled.
"How's your head?" Glenn asks, screwing the cap back on the canteen. It could be the darkness, or the concussion, or a disorienting concoction of both, but he hardly has form. A blip amongst staticky black: thick, sweeping hair, a flat plane of cheekbones, soft eyes — monolids, like hers. He speaks again, the movement of his lips splintering him as an object and throwing him back into personhood. "Sylvie?"
Maggie's still working on it, her fingers on her jaw, tilting her face to the side.
"Ouch," she says, the most succinct description she can grasp.
Glenn laughs. Maggie smooths her thumb across her jaw, restoring her head to its nornal angle — facing the ceiling. Maggie sits back on her heels and spreads her damp hands on her thighs. "You hit your head in the crash, passed out for hours. You might have a concussion. You ever had one of those?"
"No."
"Headaches, dizziness, memory loss, vomiting." Glenn lists the symptoms off with his fingers. Both Maggie and Sylvie raise a brow at his sudden medical expertise. "My sisters used to push me around when I was younger. Concussions were the least of it."
Maggie snorts and slides the back of her hands between the slope of Sylvie's forehead, the hollow of her temple.
"I don't have a concussion," she lies, and turns her head from Maggie's touch.
"Really?" Maggie challenges.
"Really." And then immediately a sick feeling crawls up her throat, surges in her mouth. She splutters and vomits into Glenn's lap.
"I think she has a concussion."
———
Within five minutes, they manage to clean the vomit with Eugene's direction — "If I mix these two I can make a darn near perfect replica of bleach." — and wrap up Sylvie's head. Glenn and Maggie still sit at her side. Maggie trails her finger across Sylvie's eyeline. Sylvie is supposed to follow, but the pounding in her head makes it unbearable. So instead, they prop her up on a mountain of books softened by the dusty pillow, and Glenn begins his round of interrogation.
"If you're permenantly damaged we're gonna have to get a replacement," he says. He's gained some kind of shape, now, more man than hasty scraps of features. He flashes a quick smile. "Lets hope you're fine. Okay, uh, what's my name."
Sylvie narrows her eyes. She's drawn to the memory of days at home. She had been a curious child, always llearning the contours of the land beyond her garden. Scampering up sawtooth boulders. Hop-scotching through craggy foothills. Leaping over felled white pines. In the end she would always tumble on a root, or scrape herself on rock, or snag her hands in stinging nettles. Her mom would tell her, this is the punishment for wildness.
But her dad would lift her onto the kitchen side. She would trace the rhombic white tile beneath her thighs as he rummaged through a first-aid kit he only ever used on her. Even when the wounds were silent and invisible— an ache in the bones, tenderness beneath the skin, a transparent bruise — he smoothed a dinosaur plaster over her injury and sealed it with a kiss. So it won't peel off, even in the bath, even if you fall again, he would say. And she would believe him. Kids will believe anything if it makes them feel good.
Glenn is still looking at her when she's trying to shake the memory from her face, untwist her features to pretend she hadn't been yearning for anything at all. "Glenn," she says, and tells herself it's only to appease him. Concussions soften her, she thinks, make her more prone to nostalgia and pleasing people. It's disgusting.
"Okay, good. What's your name?" he prods, still going. Not satisfied.
"Sylvie," she answers, though it's half-scoff. The other half is decidedly not affection.
"You're great at this. Wow." It's all theatrically flat excitement, an attempt at humour. She rolls her eyes, stopping only halfway through when she finds that looking up makes her eyes burn. "How old are you?"
"Too old for this." She closes her eyes and sinks into her pillow, hoping to leave the flakes of that memory on there. It doesn't work.
"Glad to see our Sylvie's operating normally." Glenn brushes a dense curl from her eye, the sensation skittering across her skin like cold water dribbling, and just like on the bus — the memories of which have been returning to her in slow dredges — she hasn't the energy to fight him.
From five miles away or five breaths away, Maggie laughs. There's a flutter of sound in the same direction: fingertips rubbing on fabric. "You think you're ready for light? Everyone's at the fire."
"Yeah, sure," she says, tries to conjure up an image of fire. Even in her mind it aches. "This pillow stinks. I think its dust is stuck in my nose."
"Abraham found it for you," Glenn says. Abraham? Another debt on the list, she wants to think, but she's so tired of debts. She lets herself accept this one thing, just this once.
Shuffling closer now, Maggie hooks her under her arms and hefts her up, even as Sylvie protests that she can stand on her own. The two of them sling an arm across and under her shoulders to guide her to the fire. She startles at how easy they touch her, how little they shy, but then she's at the fire and the pulsing behind her eyes gives her something more pressing to worry about.
Rosita and Eugene are bickering; another memory floats back from a distant, cloudy part of her mind — shut up Eugene, her mind says in Rosita's voice. A shaky, silhouetted Eugene withers. Even as she, Glenn and Maggie alight at the fire, they continue to argue. With how often the three of them are in disagreement it's a wonder they didn't claw each other's throats out months ago. But the image is bloody and violent, too close to those unshakeable dreams, and Sylvie looks right at the aching fire to try to melt it all to ash in her mind.
Abraham sterns beside her, mouth in a tight line. If he thinks anything of the arguing pair to his left, he does not express it. For some reason, probably the same reason she thought of her dad and appeased Glenn, she finds herself saying, "Thanks for the pillow."
"No problem, kid. After that bus tumped over, all exploded to hell, we thought you were a goner."
She still doesn't remember much of the crash. Before is starting to come together, a little wobbly and glossed over, stuttering and blank at times, but the picture is near enough there. But the few memories she has of the crash are probably fabricated, stitched together with the information Maggie had relayed to her. She wonders how they felt, when they saw her out cold, when they pressed their ears to her wrist or her neck, anywhere for a trace of aliveness.
"I was the one who suggested we, uh, tie you to the bookcase. I'm just glad you pulled through." To her surprise, there's raw softness on his face. Or maybe it's the orange glow of the fire, giving him the look of an open wound.
"I don't blame you. It was smart," she says.
His eyes widen with relief, like her approval rid him of a silent burden. "Well, I am mighty glad someone sees it that way. Glenn wasn't too happy about leavin' you like that. But you seemed snug as a bug in a rug, all tucked up with your pillow and all. I was sure you'd see it the same way." He laughs, for some reason, and now the bickering has withered, it's the loudest sound in this silent place.
Sylvie only nods and Abraham takes it as a conclusion, turning to Rosita, whose irritation is still stamped in the hard furrow of her brow. Just at this moment, Tara holds her fist out, stretching across Glenn and Maggie. "For staying alive, dude," she says, and it's then when Sylvie realises this is meant for her.
She shifts her uneasy gaze to Glenn, then to Maggie, searching for nothing tangible, but somehow necessary. Maggie smiles. Sated, Sylvie reciprocates the fist bump and Tara breaks into a grin. The image of Tara's hurt flares behind Sylvie's eyes as she blinks — a trace of a memory from the bus, unpinnable. The memory slips from her eyes and licks down her back. She suppresses the urge to squirm. By the time she opens her eyes, Tara is passing her something squarish and thick.
"Little Women," Maggie says, the words reverent, thick with disbelief. She traces the outline of a woman on the cover. Not a woman, just a head without a body, trapped inside a gilded frame. Somehow, she doesn't look sad about this: the dismemberment and the prison, both. Maggie turns to Sylvie, grinning. "Beth loves this book. Begged me to read it to her every night."
Tara smiles sheepishly at Sylvie. "We're in a bookstore. Might as well read, right?"
Sylvie studies the title like a picture. She wonders how Maggie came to form those sounds — Little Women. She opens the hard cover and flicks to the first page. More words, blurring as if fading in and out of existence. Heat creeps up her neck. Her stupid concussed mind conjures the image of her dad again. She and him tucked into the brass-legged dinner table, a book cracked open. She doesn't remember the name, only that it belonged to her neighbour: a little girl who was four years younger than her. It's an easy word to say, he'd said, trying for patience and inching away from it by the second, you just need to try. Do you want to be held back again? She shivers and suddenly she is struck by the childish notion that they all know what she is thinking.
Sylvie thrusts the book into Maggie's hands. She had been so stupid to think she had chipped away at her dreams, at those flashes of memory. It all comes back to her now, a violent wave of nausea. "Keep it," she says, the words tasting like sick in her mouth. Sour. Hot. Maggie goes to protest, but Sylvie near begs. "Please."
———
Sylvie is glad for when Abraham and Rosita leave the fire, and for half an hour later, when Tara and Eugene follow them. They've done too much for her today. Nursing her to health, finding her a pillow, gifting her a book. Debt upon debt upon debt, and to think she'd believed she'd escaped it all. She wonders what Wes would do, if he were here. Destroy things, probably, destroy himself trying to give back what they'd given. She should stick to her principles, do the same, but she feels spent enough under the weight of it all.
When Glenn knocks his knee against hers, tucked up to her chest, she ceases the thought and lets her eyes wander. Even in darkness, she can tell the bookstore is the type of place a family might have liked. Silvery streamers hang from the ceiling, remnants of some abandoned celebration. She could halfway see it: a mother and a toddler, picking over the dusty graveyard of toys in the corner; girls her age assembled in a circle, pouring over thrillers and mysteries, a fold-up table of cheap confectionery. She scratches at herringbone. It is unblemished, not yet a witness to the death and rot of outside. Not like the Church, whose hardwood is still stained by Termite blood. Is Gabriel still trying to scrub it off? Is everyone letting him?
A low noise erupts from the back of the store, where Abraham and Rosita ventured. Then again, and again. It sounds like a grunt, a series of guttural, violent grunts. Sylvie pats her belt down, but her holster is empty. "The machete— the noise," she sputters out, brain floundering from fear to fear.
But where she expects panic and action, Glenn and Maggie lock eyes and laugh. Then they turn to her, eyes wide as if spooking a startled deer, or a child who thinks she has spotted a ghost. "It's okay. They're okay. You wanna find somewhere to sleep?" Glenn offers.
"What's going on?" She eyes them suspiciously.
She knows what it's like to have a secret kept from you. Wes and Faye were born too many years before her, one after the other in close succession; she had become used to being cut out of their jokes, anecdotes, memories, though never unkindly. That concealed smile. The conspiratorial laughter. They're hiding something.
"They're movin' the bookcases to set up their bed. I'm thinkin' we should do the same," Maggie says. Though her cheeks are still tinged red with laughter, her face is ironed straight. It could be convincing, if her siblings were nicer.
She relents, and they probably think she's bought it. They help her up again, to her chagrin, and move around five bookcases to form a makeshift room. By the time they're done, the groaning has fizzled out into a chorus of snores — gentle and throaty — and that's one concern smoothed over. She starts to heave apart one of the bookcases, but Glenn tugs her sleeve.
"Hey, where are you going?" This disappointment on his face is embarassingly vulnerable.
"Making my own room."
Behind him, oiled orange by the blinking light of the lantern, Maggie frowns.
"Stay with us for tonight," Glenn says. When she goes to refuse, seared instinct seizing the lead, he continues, "If something happens because of your concussion, we'll know. It's safer if you stay."
She rolls her eyes, though it burns once more, but steps back into their cocoon of bookcases. Debt, taunts a Wes-shaped voice in the back of her mind. There's a whiny sharpness to the word. She wants to stab him with it, so she's thankful when Maggie asks her, "Which colour?" because it scatters Wes' warning to the wind. Colour, she finds, refers to the three sleeping bags furled on the floor, puffy and pristine.
Sylvie thinks it's stupid. There are worst things to worry about than the shade of her sleeping bag. "Green," she says, anyway, for reasons she doesn't care to examine.
Maggie unfolds the green sleeping bag between hers and Glenn's, and though Sylvie wants to protest, they would probably argue back, and she's too exhausted to come up with good points.
Even as they all slip inside to sleep, Sylvie is restless. The ache between her eyes beats at any hint of slumber, and it's only amplified by her fear. Twice now she has had that dream. Fire. Gun. Blood. The library is black enough that she doesn't even have to close her eyes to picture it. If she remembers it, it's there, the fire bursting up from behind the bookcases, the barrel of the gun shoved between the cracks. After a few minutes of tossing and turning, picking absently at her own terror, Maggie inhales and begins to sing.
"Of all the money, that I ever had. I have spent it in good company."
Her voice is low, quiet, raspy: just as it had been on the bus, only smaller, packaged just for her and Glenn. If Sylvie stills and steadies, she can feel it vibrate the wood beneath her, the words tumbling down her spine. A shiver. This shiver feels like the lick of a tiny flame — not hot enough to scald, but warm enough to comfort. Nothing like the blaze that had overwhelmed her dreams. Sylvie finds herself sinking into this tiny flame, this voice. Sinking into sleep as her ache ebbs away.
"Goodnight and joy be with you all."
— AUTHOR'S NOTE —
firstly, tysm for 1k reads!!!! that's literally insane?? i'm so glad sm ppl are enjoying my fic, ily all <33
and sorry for such a late update!! i had major burnout and just couldn't get past editing. but i edited this whole chapter in a few hours and i feel much better. i tried to make something a little more lighthearted his chapter — if you can call a bus crash and a concussion lighthearted lol — and i hope that came across.
again, lmk what u think. also lmk what things are working and what isn't, etc., etc. tysm for reading!!!!!! the next chapter will be out MUCH sooner, i promise!