Western

Joel wakes to a cracked ceiling and the feeling of being submerged. He blinks and the feeling does not go away, but the ceiling comes into better focus and his peripheral vision sharpens somewhat. Slowly, he turns his head, temples throbbing all the way to his tongue as he does, but then he can see a chest of drawers and an open doorway and then he knows where is he is.

On the other side of the door Cassidy Green is standing at the rickety table of her homestead’s kitchen. She is wearing the tattered blue dress he first saw her in and is stirring something in a glass. Her black doctor bag is on the table in front of her; a bottle of this and that are catching the sunlight that comes through the east-facing window beside the front door. It’s morning, then, and Joel wonders if it’s the next morning or of he’s been unconscious for longer. The way he’s feeling, he won’t be surprised if it has been a week.

He closes his eyes for a minute. He simply can’t keep them open. When he opens them again he can tell that he’d sunk back into a stupor; the light coming through the window is much fainter, and Cassidy is nowhere to be seen. The homestead is quiet. There’s the sound of lowing cattle some distance away, but no other voices, animal or otherwise.

Her absence sparks a jolt of unease. Joel doesn’t think Gideon is bold enough to go after a woman the same way he went after Joel, but even with that reasoning in place, the memory of the night before (if it was the night before, and not many nights) and the savagery that Joel saw in his brother’s face is enough to make him want to keep her in sight.

Not that he would be able to do much to protect her, as it turns out. Trying to sit up, Joel discovers that his right arm has been splinted and wrapped tightly: broken, along with a few fingers. His left arm and hand are only bruised -- they’d dragged him off the left side of the horse, he remembers, and that side hit the ground first but was safe from their blows. His ribs ache: cracked. His gut burns and the muscles feel like limp, beaten leather. He’s shirtless, aside from bandages wrapped around the ribs, and he can make out the black-and-blue bootmarks on his skin.

Wherever he had gone those three years, Gideon had sure learned how to beat the hell out of a body, Joel thought wryly.

He forces his aching, equally-bruised legs over the side of the low, creaky bed, and levers himself to a sitting position using his good hand, ignores the wail his battered shoulder puts up. Then, he has to stop. His body hurts but his head is shuddering, his vision literally shaking as his brain pulses against the bones of his skull. His brainpan is packed with cotton and blood, hot. Joel tries to put a hand to his head to check for actual bleeding, bumps his broken fingers against his forehead, and barks out a curse. It only makes the headache worse, if that can be.

“Joel?”

He looks up, and Cassidy is there in front of him, a glass of water in her hand.

He opens his mouth and before he can speak she puts the glass to his lips. “Drink first,” she commands firmly. “You’ve been out a long time, and I could barely get you to swallow anything. Your throat’s got to be dry as dirt.”

She’s right -- he feels like he swallowed a desert wind, and slowly and gratefully he drains the glass. Cassidy patiently holds it before him, letting it drop when he needs to breathe. He is relieved to have her near again, relieved to feel her fingers under his as he uses his unbroken hand to guide the glass to and from his mouth. Between swallows he just looks at her, looks over her slightly dirty face and her worn dress and her neat brown hair. When last he’d seen her, he’d been sure it was the last time, so sure that he had painted her figure vivid enough in his mind to last him the years. Now she’s here, and though he’s grateful for the water, her presence is nearly as much as a physical balm as the liquid.

When he’s done, she steps back and just looks at him -- looks down at him. “It was your brother, wasn’t it?” she asks.


“Yeah,” Joel says, voice a rasp. “Yeah, him and a couple of his boys.”

He meets her eyes and there is a knowledge there -- confrontation, her eyes say, sooner or later. Joel frowns but says nothing.

Because Gideon is his brother. But when a brother attacks a brother, beats him bloody, leaves him for dead on a desert night--

There are lines, and once a man crosses certain lines he becomes a certain kind of man. And other kinds of men maintain those lines -- make them mean something.

Their father had been a man like that. And Cassidy wants him to be like that.

Joel feels a surge of rage: his father is dead, and Cassidy is nothing to him -- not mother, not sister, not wife. What right do any of them have to demand it of him?