Barely even Human
Yellowstone Queer Fic Excerpt
The Montana rain had been falling for three straight days, turning the boundary line between the Yellowstone Ranch and the Broken Rock Reservation into a viscous, treacherous trench of freezing black mud.
Jules was soaked to the bone, his oversized Carhartt jacket heavy with water and plastered to his shivering frame. Rip Wheeler had sent him out to ride the south fence line, a brutal, solitary punishment detail for mouthing off in the bunkhouse. But to a feral stray who had finally found a home, protecting the boundary wasn't just a job; it was a sacred, blood-sworn duty.
Through the driving, relentless sheets of rain, Jules saw him.
A massive, nameless figure was standing on the Yellowstone side of the barbed wire, shrouded in a heavy dark slicker. The stranger had a pair of heavy iron snips in his hands and was actively wrestling with the tension wire, pulling it taut against the wooden post.
To Jules, the equation was instantaneous and violent. Intruder. Sabotage. Threat.
He didn't yell a warning. He didn't unholster his radio to call for backup. He didn't even know if this was a Broken Rock local or a hired mercenary. It didn't matter. The brand burned into his chest flared with a blinding, territorial rage. Jules dropped from his saddle, hitting the slick earth at a dead sprint.
The sound of his boots sloshing through the muck was masked by the howling wind. Jules launched himself through the air with the sheer, suicidal ferocity of a cornered wolf, hitting the giant squarely between the shoulder blades.
The kinetic force of the tackle sent them both crashing violently into the liquefied earth.
The stranger hit the mud with a heavy, concussive thud, his heavy snips flying from his grip and disappearing into the freezing slop. For a split second, the man was entirely caught off guard.
Jules didn't give him a second to recover. He scrambled up, his hands covered in freezing mud, and threw a wild, desperate right hook that glanced sharply off the man's jaw.
"Get the fuck off our land!" Jules screamed, his voice cracking with a terrifying, raw hysteria, rain plastering his dark curls to his face.
The stranger's shock vanished, instantly replaced by the lethal, coiled reflexes of an apex predator. He didn't panic. He reached up, his massive, calloused hand easily catching Jules’s second punch mid-air. The man's grip was like an iron vise around Jules’s wrist.
Jules snarled, twisting his body violently to free himself, throwing his left elbow toward the intruder's throat.
They rolled in the muck, a chaotic, thrashing tangle of limbs, heavy canvas, and freezing water. The sheer disparity in their size was staggering, but Jules fought with the unhinged, merciless desperation of a street rat who had spent his entire life fighting for survival in alleyways. He bit, he scratched, he gouged, trying to use the slippery mud to his advantage to escape the crushing weight.
But the stranger was a mountain, and mountains did not yield to the storm.
The man absorbed a knee to his thigh and a desperate elbow to his collarbone, his jaw locking in grim determination. He surged upward, using his massive leverage to violently flip their positions.
With a breathless grunt of exertion, the giant drove Jules backward, slamming the teenager’s shoulders flat into the freezing mud. Before Jules could buck his hips to escape, the man dropped his heavy right knee directly onto the center of Jules’s chest.
The impact drove all the oxygen from Jules’s lungs in a sharp, agonizing whoosh.
Jules gasped violently, his vision spotting black as the crushing weight pinned him immovably to the earth.
"Enough," the stranger roared over the driving rain, his deep voice vibrating with absolute, undeniable authority.
But Jules wasn't done. The feral panic spiked. Operating on pure, blind instinct, Jules’s right hand whipped down to his belt. The fluid, practiced motion of a kid who had survived Seattle's underbelly took over. The silver blade of his buck knife snapped open with a sharp snick that cut through the sound of the storm.
He thrust the blade upward in a lethal, flashing arc.
But the stranger was faster.
As Jules’s arm came up, the man's left hand shot out, catching Jules’s wrist inches from his own neck. Simultaneously, the giant's right hand cleared his heavy leather sheath.
The chaotic thrashing abruptly stopped. The world seemed to freeze entirely, the only movement the heavy sheets of rain washing the black mud from their faces.
The heavy knee was still crushing Jules’s sternum. Jules’s wrist was locked in an immovable grip, the tip of Jules’s silver buck knife hovering exactly two inches from the stranger's jugular.
But resting flush against the pulse point of Jules’s own throat was the heavy, serrated, six-inch steel of a hunting knife.
The standoff was absolute. One flinch, one slip in the mud, and they would both bleed out in the dirt. They stared at each other, their chests heaving violently, their breaths rising in white, ragged plumes of steam against the freezing rain.
The man wasn't angry. He wasn't breathing heavily. The blood from his split lip dripped slowly down his chin, but his dark eyes were ancient, bottomless, and entirely calm. He was looking down at Jules not as a threat to be eliminated, but as a wild, terrified creature caught in a snare.
"You breathe like a dying bird, Yellowstone," he murmured. His voice was a low, resonant rumble, completely devoid of adrenaline or malice.
Jules gritted his teeth, his grip on his own knife shaking with the effort of trying to overpower the mans hold. "Get off me. I'll kill you. I swear to God, I'll kill you."
"No, you won't," the man replied softly. He didn't press his knife any deeper into Jules’s neck, but he didn't pull it away, either.
"Because if you wanted to kill me, you wouldn't be shaking. You're fighting a ghost, kid. And I'm not him."
