LittleMissDeadly

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[little-missdeadly]

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𝒫𝓁𝑒𝒶𝓈𝑒 𝒷𝑒 𝓇𝑒𝓈𝓅𝑒𝒸𝓉𝒻𝓊𝓁 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒹𝑜 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝓊𝓈𝑒 𝓂𝓎 𝓌𝑜𝓇𝓀𝓈 𝑜𝓇 𝓇𝑒-𝓊𝓅𝓁𝑜𝒶𝒹 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓂 𝑒𝓁𝓈𝑒𝓌𝒽𝑒𝓇𝑒 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽𝑜𝓊𝓉 𝓂𝓎 𝓅𝑒𝓇𝓂𝒾𝓈𝓈𝒾𝑜𝓃.

[little-missdeadly]

I maked this :p

[little-missdeadly]

Why the Coyotes Cry - Part 10

Hosea Matthews x OC

This one’s chaotic… emotional whiplash, minor character death (ig?), grief, suicidal tendencies, smut! MDNI

Links: AO3, Masterlist

@photo1030

Great Plains - 1895

Hosea came upon her careful as a wounded deer fixing to bolt. He tracked her gaze across to the horses where Caspian’s steps dragged lame and the old pride had fled him entire. Yet the beast raised that noble head, ears cocked toward her in dumb greeting. But he knew the look that lived behind the eyes.

“If there is a God,” Josie muttered, “I pray He grant me this one mercy and that his passing be swift and without pain.” Whether the words reached or no seemed a thing of no consequence. “I care nothing for my own suffering so long as his ends clean.”

She choked upon the words and he reached for her by blind instinct.

“Pray the Lord show mercy upon His creation,” Hosea said. “That his soul be called home as his time upon this earth is spent. Pray the Holy Ghost ride with him.”

Josie turned into his chest. No sob came at once, as though the withholding of it might yet hold the ground from swallowing her whole.

That day broke upon the Great Plains like a wound split open anew. The camp had shifted a short ways back into the lower country of West Elizabeth, hard by the forest’s ragged edge and nearer the trading post. The grass stood tall and rank and green and the wind moved soft against the coming heat of summer.

But mercy was no thing spoken in that country.

“It’s time, darlin,” Hosea said low. He did not draw near nor kneel nor lay hand upon her for fear she would shatter like sunbaked clay.

She made a choked sound, a protest that would not shape itself into words. Her pale cheeks were wet with tears, her lashes clumped dark, her chest heaving after air that would not fill her.

Hosea knelt then, a weathered hand resting light between her shoulders as she wept and clung to the blond mane tangled in her fingers.

“D’you want to pray?” he offered, and the silence that followed answered more than words.

His hand slipped from her shoulder to where hers lay twisted in the horse’s mane. Caspian still breathed in great labored gusts and made one sorrowful attempt to rise. The muscles in his ruined shoulder quivered with an effort the beast could no longer sustain and he sank back to the ground. Josie saw herself mirrored in the stallion’s wide and fearful brown eye and she curled forward until her brow rested against the warm golden hide. Hosea’s hand had not moved from hers.

“… if his time on earth is done, pray his passing be merciful, Lord… do not let him suffer for the sin of living,” she sobbed, and Hosea felt something crack open inside his chest.

Hosea let the silence settle heavy in the grove. Her words were taken by the dry air and swallowed whole. The heat clung brittle and merciless. Josie settled the stallion’s once-proud head across her lap and leaned down close. The words that followed did not carry to Hosea nor were they meant for him. Whatever she spoke was meant for the horse alone and for whatever deaf god might trouble itself to turn an eye toward them in that barren place.

“Josie, darlin,” the old man rasped. “There’s… lilies down near the creek. They’d do right nice I reckon.”

She drew a shaking breath and gripped the cream mane a moment longer. Then came the quiet slip of iron on leather from Hosea’s belt beside her, the cylinder turning, bullets falling soft into the grass, another taking their place. Such a small sound against the vastness of the plains and taiga, yet it rang louder in her ears than any thunder.

Josie looked sidelong at him for the space of two breaths. His weary eyes met hers beneath the brim of his hat and he gave a single gentle nod.

She rose with the stumbling grace of one already dead in the soul. She turned toward the creek. Seventeen paces. The lily-of-the-valley swayed there in the late light, small white bells glistening with dew like mourners in some forgotten glade. She did not kneel to gather them. She only watched their silent tolling, kin to the church bells of green hills where such flowers had once rung for the souls that never returned.

A single gunshot cracked across the hills, echoed among the trees, and fell with the finality of the last bell.

Death was not poetic. There was no romance in a thing that drew breath only moments before and was then stripped away without apology or witness. Death offered no warning worth heeding. Only in hindsight did it reveal itself as the cruel and hungry beast that swallows all which tries to flee it.

What had gnawed behind the breast in stale prisons now returned unbidden. It had come first in a single failed step upon uneven ground. Then it settled in when once became twice and twice became thrice and the strong proud thing grew small and withered and still beloved. Then into the silent pleas offered to deaf gods through nights of black uncertainty.

The soft jangle of spurs drew her back from the place she had fled into amid the dying echo of the shot. She did not turn.

She did not speak. No words in any tongue could carry weight enough. The man stepped forward and folded her into his arms whether it meant anything or nothing at all.

“He was a good horse,” Arthur said, resting his cheek against the crown of her head. He held her there because he knew the feeling of the ground vanishing beneath one’s feet and the body left to spin in nothing. Josie cried harder at the sound of his voice. “Never seen a horse wait for a goodbye b’fore.”

Arthur’s own voice broke as he spoke. He broke for her, for a grief he knew too well.

“He’d have waited forever for you, Josie.”

Whatever words tried to form in her throat died unborn. Josie shook with sounds that were not human. Arthur thought that if death had a voice it would sound like this—raw agony stripped of all civility or grace.

Hosea approached more slowly. The two men exchanged a glance heavy as spent lead. The older man came no closer.

As Arthur looked upon the old conman, he could not recall ever seeing him shed true tears. He was not sure he had ever seen any man in this outfit truly weep. He had seen weak and pitiful creatures crumble, yes. But something in watching Hosea stand there, the man who had not properly wept for Bessie now broken by the tears of this young Irish girl, told Arthur that nothing here was simple.

“It was peaceful,” the outlaw said at last. “Went quick. There was no pain. No more pain.”

At last he reached out, trembling fingers brushing her shoulder as though expecting her to recoil from his touch.

Arthur let go slowly, the girl collapsing with the conman. A scream broke from her sudden. It followed the echo that accompanied the single shot and with it rose the cries of coyotes. The woods became a choir of all the outcast and sorrowful things acknowledging death which would come for each thing when its time was due. When the sorrow would be silent and forgotten as all things eventually would be.

“I’m sorry,” Hosea said quiet, gathering her crumpled form to his chest. The words were small and frail against the vast indifferent country that had witnessed all and cared nothing.

Josie shook against the grief that rose in her throat but only a single tear escaped, cutting a pale track down her cheek.

“I prayed he would not suffer,” she said, the words quiet and fragile as thin frost upon the grass. “I will not rejoice that my prayer was answered.”

Hosea might have spoken some word of wisdom then but she had no need of it. There was no amount of drink that could numb the wound opened vast and festering inside her and he saw in her face something like his own grief only cleaner, stripped of all the mess and ruin he had made of his.

The year should have been one of joy with new life come among them. Women fawning over the newborn Jack Marston, the men clapping the father upon the back and speaking of prodigies. But John Marston had up and left. Abigail lay alone tending the child while healing from that wound only a woman can know.

Women gathered with her when chores allowed, Tilly taking little Jack while she and Mary-Beth sang low songs to the boy and Miss Grimshaw caring after Abigail the way a mother ought, the one her own had never been.

Josie would not watch from afar. She did not envy the reedy noise of an infant crying even as she felt for Abigail’s trouble. The trivial workings of camp and men were lost to her, barred away by the horse blanket still clinging to Caspian’s smell. She lingered at the edges, away from the horse pen which she avoided as if it had scorched her flesh to blister.

“You oughta eat somethin,” Hosea said gentle, his rough hand coming to rest lightly at her back. “Darlin, I’m worryin somethin fierce for you. You ain’t spoke in days. Won’t eat. Won’t take water.”

He searched her for a long while as the breeze moved across the silence between them.

“Please,” he said quiet, offering up his own canteen.

Her eyes flicked to the canteen and then made some small allowance, as if to drink. It satisfied him for the time.

“How about a ride out of camp,” he offered after a cicada buzzed and fell still, the edges of something hopeful on his words. “Just us. We can go anywhere you like. Let’s just get out of here.”

Josie made a face as though he had proposed her crucifixion. She shook her head and the tears came at once, flooding her eyes and cutting pale trails down her face.

“Josie—” he pleaded.

“Don’t!”

She retreated from him toward the lean-to but no ground would grant her relief. He caught her by the shoulders and stopped her there.

“Josephine,” he said, the name firm as judgment. “You will not be left to waste away in this grief.”

“No,” she argued, clutching the horse blanket like it was the last cord binding her to the earth.

Hosea did not hear it. He moved her toward the pen and she pulled against him, his strength against her small frame enough to keep them going though she dug her heels like one bound for the gallows.

“No!” she cried louder, and a few heads turned at the sound as he lifted her onto Gold Rush and climbed up after. She wept into the faded violet blanket, the scent the only mercy left to her in that barren world.

“We’re headed out!” Hosea called to whoever might turn an ear.

Then they were gone down the trail, two small figures swallowed by the indifferent horizon.

The country rose about them in black ranks of evergreen that broke at last into stone and meadow, merely an illusion of mercy.

Josie fought until she leapt off his horse, stumbling. He followed down after her.

“Josie!”

“Don’t touch me!” she screamed, retreating with the blanket clutched to her breast as though the air itself had turned to poison. Hosea did not flinch.

“Josie,” he called after her.

“No!” The word rang off the mountains that walled them in like the judgment of an absent god, silence falling thick as tar over the valley.

“I’d rather die than feel this anymore,” she cried, a broken sound as though death clutched at her without fully claiming.

“Josie—” Hosea began, but the words had scarcely left him before she overrode him like a storm.

“Stop it! Every word you have ever spoken in my presence has been a lie. You are the reason Caspian is dead! Your own bullet tore the life from him! This godless land reached out and stole him from me and now I am nothing but a fool and a whore and whatever devilish thing this country has made me! There is no mercy here. No mercy that let him suffer, no mercy that tore him from me.“

She stopped only long enough for her chest to heave ragged and wet, her voice scraped raw as butchered meat. At last she tugged one of his revolvers from the saddle. He moved too slow to stop her, the heavy iron piece clutched in white knuckles.

“I want to die,” she whimpered, and the words were somehow the cruelest cut of all. “I want to go with him…“

Hosea stood frozen like his legs had suddenly been cast in lead. His hand reached uselessly for the gun as the hammer clicked twice under her thumb and the barrel sat against her temple.

Hosea stood in the gathering dark. “I met my daddy only three times in my whole life,” he said. “I conned my way from the hollows of Appalachia to Chicago to San Francisco and on to this slaughterhouse of a country. I have buried men good, bad, and worse. I tried to live honest and fell right back into what I always was, only to bury my wife of so many years and leave no legacy worth the spit of the world. I am no stranger to how cruel and wretched this place is.”

Only the sway of leaves disturbed them then. The water lapping slow at stony banks, a cold creek whispering among the pines as if it had seen such ruin a thousand times before and cared not at all.

“That bullet. It lives in me same as it lives in you. Every time I close my eyes I see the light go out of him. But the world don’t stop for our dead, Josie. It never has. It grinds on over their bones and leaves us to crawl behind it or lie down and die with them.”

She made no answer, metal warming to her skin. Somewhere in the pines a crow called once and was answered by nothing.

Hosea wouldn’t beg, he knew better. The expression she wore, he knew far too well. Nothing would convince a man more than begging.

“He lives in you, Josie. You still have a piece of him that he gave you, you best carry that for him,” Hosea said firmly, there was a determination in his weary eyes as he said it. “That horse wouldn’t have laid down and died without a fight, don’t you goddamn dare do it.”

He saw the hesitation rise and he moved, grabbing his gun from her hand and holstering it. He held her tight and quick against him as she cried.

“See the world for him, darlin’,” Hosea uttered. There was another soft click and she lowered the gun slowly, his fingers grabbing it away swiftly and drawing her close.

“He was so gentle...” she cried against him. “And now he’s ash on the wind and meat for the coyotes and I can’t even hate the right thing for it. I want to burn this whole country. I want God—if there ever was one—to answer for what He’s taken.”

Hosea stared into the black beyond. The scar in his lung pulled with every breath, a reminder of old violence that refused to kill him clean but he didn’t let her go.

“There ain’t no God here worth the name,” he said. “Only the land. And the land don’t answer. It takes. It takes your husband, your child, your name, your soul if you let it. And still it stands there tomorrow morning same as it ever did, green and gold and red with blood. That’s the only truth I ever found worth a damn.”

Josie turned her face toward him then, eyes red-rimmed and glittering like broken glass. For a moment he wondered if she would reach for the gun again. Instead, she curled her fingers into the breast of his coat.

“Then why do we keep riding?” she whispered, the words a curse and a plea both. “Why don’t we just lay down in this valley and let it finish what it started?”

Hosea’s arms came around her once more, heavy and scarred and unyielding as the mountains themselves. The fire hissed between them.

“Because something in us won’t let it,” he said. “Not while we got breath left to curse it.”

The creek kept talking to the stones, patient and eternal. The pines stood black against the blooming stars.

“If there is any mercy left in this godforsaken place you still believe in,” Hosea said into her hair, “tell me what it is I can do.”

“Don’t ever leave me,” she answered into his chest, the fur of his coat pressed soft against her cheek. It carried the reek of cigarettes and pine, undercut by the everlasting stink of horses and gunpowder that clung to every outlaw like a second skin.

“Okay,” he said, the word rough and rasping from the ruin in his lung. Even as he spoke it he knew she would outlive him by decades, that disease or bullet or the slow rot of this country would claim him long before her, yet the promise was the nearest thing to mercy he could offer in a land that had none.

She remained pressed against him a long time, the sun sinking low and the night closing over the basin like a shroud. The wind stirred the pines with a low and endless mourning. At length she drew back just enough to lift her face to his, eyes red and uncertain in the dying light.

“We should make camp,” Hosea said quiet like, calloused thumb brushing the smooth skin of her cheek then near her chin.

She nodded slowly, but neither moved.

“Kiss me again,” she uttered, fragile and tired. His brow twitched in brief questioning almost as if he had debated asking at all. His thumb brushed against her jaw quick but affectionate.

He leaned down, nose briefly touching hers before his mouth met hers lightly. Merely a brush of skin against her lips before returning with more weight behind it. Then, again longer than both times. His hands had delicately cupped her face and hers curled around his wrists and they remained there, brows touching and eyes closed.

“There’s a cabin a ways up the trail,” he muttered. “Let me take you. The sunrise is nice there. Quiet, just you n’ me.”

She nodded slow, letting him help her onto the horse and together they rode into the hills, making a fire on the worn down hearth of the sun-bleached cabin.

The quiet engulfed them but for the fire. Hosea lowered himself next to her on the old stained mattress remaining in that place. For a while neither spoke.

Josie still held the blanket in her lap, the threads worn from many rides and blond hairs still woven in. An owl screeched from outside, the lake lapping at the shore while other critters existed beneath the indifferent eyes of heaven.

“Don’t ever do that again, Josie,” Hosea finally said, letting out a deep sigh that pulled a cough from his lung. “If you are ever aiming a gun you aim it at someone tryin’ to kill you or someone else, don’t ever—“

She wove her fingers in his, the motion interrupting him.

“You got too much to live for,” he continued, shaking his heads as his words failed him. “A strong young buck who’ll go mad just to see you smile. Build you a house n’ be a man worthy to love you.”

“I don’t want someone better,” she said, watching the fingers of the fire. She turned toward him slightly, watching the shadows on the walls. “A better man would have buried me.”

Hosea closed his eyes at that. Her weight shifted closer and he felt her warmth bleed through his coat.

“You cold?” He asked, avoiding the heavier topic.

“A little.”

He shrugged off the coat and draped it around her shoulders. She pulled it close, the smell of it overtaking the damp wood and reek of something gone sour in the cabin.

“A better man wouldn’t have let you grab the gun,” he finished after a long silence.

“A better man wouldn’t have known what words would stop me from wanting to.”

“Josie—“

“Shut up,” she looked at him sidelong, eyes still red rimmed and glistening. “Just shut up, Hosea.”

He stared at her for a long moment but still debated speaking.

Josie moved slowly, with some caution as if waiting for him to push her away. When he didn’t and she rose herself enough to swing a leg across his legs and curl her arms around his neck and she stayed there until his hands settled shakily on her hips.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she admitted, some of the naivety slipping into her words.

“Well, you’re off to a fair start, darlin’,” Hosea rasped, restrained against a deeper want and forcing his eyes to stay on hers. “I ain’t young, Josie, I don’t want…”

“I know.”

She shifted upon him and the cloth of her skirt rode higher and the heat of her came against him through the fabric and his breath left him in a single ragged exhalation. His fingers flexed upon the narrow bones of her hips as though still in contention with some older judgment.

“I don’t want anyone else,” she muttered against his mouth.

He studied her face in the dim light. Whatever he found there broke the last of his resolve. His mouth covered hers and the kiss was slow and deep. She answered it with more hunger than art, her lips parting when his tongue sought entrance. One hand traveled the length of her spine, spanning the thin width of her back, while the other held her fast at the hip when she began to rock against him of her own accord.

The friction drew from her a soft and startled sound. He broke the kiss enough to speak against her mouth.

“Easy, girl,” Hosea muttered,

She flushed but did not withdraw. Instead she pressed closer still and hid her face against the side of his neck while her fingers worked at the buttons of his shirt with a clumsy determination. He watched the concentration in her features, the way her lower lip was caught between her teeth.

When the shirt hung open he guided her hands lower, to the belt and the fastenings of his trousers. Her movements still uncertain.

“You can stop whenever you want,” he said.

She shook her head once and freed him. He covered her hand with his own and showed her a slow stroke and then another. Her eyes remained fixed upon what they did, her lips parted.

“I… haven’t—“

“I know,” he said, and tipped her chin so that she must look at him. “We’ll go slow.”

He eased her back enough to work the underthings down her thighs. She helped him, lifting her hips in an awkward motion within the confined space of his lap. When the cloth was gone he held her inner thigh with a calloused hand, gentle so she would know not to startle. Eventually he slid two fingers carefully between her legs. He found the wet warmth of her, but she did not yield. So tight was she that even the press of a single fingertip made her inhale sharp and grip his shoulders.

He held still and gave her time. His thumb stroked slow circles higher while he waited for the tension in her thighs to ease. Only when her breathing evened did he push that lone finger deeper, working it gently until it was fully within her. Her forehead dropped to his shoulder. A small broken sound escaped her.

“You all right?” He asked softly, feeling her fingers curl against his shoulder.

“Yes,” she answered in a breath.

He kissed the side of her neck and the hinge of her jaw while her body took its time adjusting. When she began to ease into the motion of her own will he added a second finger. Her nails bit into his shoulders, the sensation burning and she made a soft, pained noise that caused him to slow further still.

“Breathe, darlin’.”

He kept at it until the worst of the resistance eased and her hips sought more rather than shrank from it. Only then did he withdraw and position himself against her. The blunt press of him had her tensed all over again.

“Look at me,” he asked, holding her securely.

She did, and careful and slow did he ease into her. Her breath snagged in her throat, her body tensing again, a deep, burning pressure that drew another pained sound. He stopped and waited, kissing her through it. Her brow remained against his neck, her flesh so unyielding it bordered upon pain for them both.

“Hosea—“

“I know,” his voice strained, waiting until she opened around him before pausing once fully seated. He stayed still, one hand stroked the length of her spine. The other remained firm upon her hip.

He kept at it until the worst of the resistance eased and her hips sought more rather than shrank from it. Only then did he withdraw and position himself against her. The blunt press of him had her tensed all over again.

“Look at me,” he asked, holding her securely.

She did, and careful and slow did he ease into her. Her breath snagged in her throat, her body tensing again, a deep, burning pressure that drew another pained sound. He stopped and waited, kissing her through it. Her brow remained against his neck, her flesh so unyielding it bordered upon pain for them both.

“Hosea—“

“I know,” his voice strained, waiting until she opened around him before pausing once fully seated. He stayed still, one hand stroked the length of her spine. The other remained firm upon her hip.

“Okay?” He asked her, waiting until he felt her relax and nod against his shoulder.

Gradually, she started to chase the friction harder he let her set the pace, his hands steady upon her hips only to keep her steady. Her head rose from his shoulder, a soft noise greeting his ear with her breath and the warmth of her skin against his temple.

The climax took her by surprise, sharp and shivery, her body locking around him as she came for the first time.

He followed a handful of strokes later, burying himself deep and spilling with a low rough groan against her throat. He stayed there, breathing hard, arms wrapped about her while the thudding of his heart slowed.

She remained against him, arms still locked around his neck and quiet, the evidence of her inexperience still written in the careful way she shifted when he finally softened and slipped free. A faint smear of blood mixed with everything else between them. He noticed it and wiped it gently with a clean corner of his shirt and pressed a kiss to her temple.

“You all right?” He asked, feeling the slowing rise and fall of her ribs.

She answered by kissing him, pulling away to rest her brow against his.

“Yeah,” she breathed, still against him.

”Good.”

He held her a while longer in the quiet, the heat of their bodies cooling by degrees in the still air. Outside the thin walls the night moved on as it always had, indifferent, the distant call of some night bird the only mark upon it. His hand continued its slow path along her spine, the motion more for her settling than any further claim.

After a time he eased her gently back enough to look at her face. The flush still sat high on her cheeks. Her eyes were dark and a little wide, as if the world had shifted its weight and she had not yet found where to set her feet.

“You hurtin’ any?” he asked, voice low.

Josie considered it, the way a person might test a new bruise. She shook her head.

He nodded once. “Might ache come morning, just the way of things.”

With a care that belied the roughness of his hands he cleaned what remained between her thighs, the faint smear of blood and the rest of it, his touch light and matter-of-fact. She watched him do it, quiet, and did not look away.

When he was finished he drew the blanket up over her shoulders and then over his own, settling her against his chest once more. The old scar across his ribs pressed warm beneath her cheek. For a long stretch neither spoke. The rise and fall of his breathing was steady, though once or twice it caught, the remnant of the cough that had ridden him these last years.

“I ain’t a young man, Josie,” he said at last, the words measured, almost careful, then a laugh rasped from his lungs. “Sure have a way of makin’ me feel like one though.”

She felt safest next to him. Ever since she had come among these people and this hard country the mere fact of his presence had been enough to still the worst of the fear. Everything would have been fine. But illusions have a way of leaving those they enchant more broken than before.

Caspian was dead. She had been made to witness the degeneracy of men and the mean cruelty that rides always at the heels of envy. Yet something had settled beneath her ribs and she could not name it.

“I want to stay,” she said, and the words hung heavy in the silence between them. “I don’t want to find some decent town. I dont want to marry a man of large ambition and small luck. I don’t want the sitting room and the children and all that society would make of me. I don’t want what you think I deserve, Hosea.”

She looked at him in the faded amber of the dying fire and he saw the green of her eyes glitter in the dark.

“You asked me what I wanted. When snow was still falling slow and we traveled the road from Blackwater to camp, you asked what I wanted from this place,” she continued, and for the first time he heard a thread of certainty in her voice as she settled closer against him. “I want you to show me how to shoot a rifle. I want to learn to hunt and to skin a deer. I want to chase the wind and breathe the wild and I want to do these things with you.”

“I can do that,” Hosea said, and the sound was quiet and rough in his chest.

“I doubt I’ll ever recover from Caspian. But if Im to walk this sorry country without him then I want to walk it with you.”

“Reckon I can do that too,” Hosea said, and the words came rough from his chest as he kissed her hair and held her close and watched the logs shift and send their dying sparks up the chimney.

“What do you want, Hosea?” She asked him, and her voice was gentle as water against a far shore.

“I want to love you,” he answered. “I want to teach you to shoot and to hunt and to skin deer. I want to race you through the Heartlands and Roanoke Ridge and the high country of Ambarino. But I reckon whether either of us wills it or not I am going to love you all the while. I’ll fall for you like a man falls for the open sky and even then will I adore every moment of the falling.”

“Now you’re just talking nonsense,” she said.

“No darlin’. I’m just a romantic.”

She smiled against him and laughed a little in the dark. “Ah well,” she mused. “Carry on then.”

[little-missdeadly]

Been a while since I’ve posted any art so here’s this.

Josie in Colter

@photo1030

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⋆. 𐙚 ˚ tag game ⭑.ᐟ add 3 characters you identify yourself with .✦ ݁˖

hello! sorry i feel like a little weirdo joining without being tagged but i’m trying to get to know all my moots better. i adore barbara gordon and bonnie!’

emily (corpse bride), ororo munroe (x-men), piku (piku)

no pressure tags:

@thorst @thundermartini @morganscampfire @katdrew @honeycoyotes @revolvers-and-her-reveries @dolliecowboys + anyone else!

[revolvers-and-her-reveries]

Thank you for the tag!

^Corpse Bride is one of my all-time favorite movies <3

I identify with Alice Liddel (AMR), Eris Morn (Destiny 2) and Melinoë (Hades 2)

No pressure tags:

@mezzaninebeetle55 @photo1030 @raevennsge + anyone else who wants to !

[photo1030]

Thank you for the tag @revolvers-and-her-reveries I asked my husband what 3 characters HE think I most identify with. This is what he came up with:

Pretty accurate 😁

Tagging: @appalachiancowboy99 @little-missdeadly @alosertoremember @bonnieknowsbest @emerald-ranch @emmithar-blog @secondarysweets

[little-missdeadly]

Omg I love trends! Thank you @photo1030!

Christina Yang (Grey’s Anatomy), Beth Dutton (Yellowstone, Dutton Ranch), Mulan (Disney’s Mulan)

Tagging for funsies: @vulpine-spectacle @lutchdanverdinde @roamingtigress @taromello @gluechugger

[little-missdeadly]

THE FREAKING HERBALIST CHALLENGE IS THE WORST THING EVER

AND FOR WHAT? A COOL ASS BELT?

(I really want this belt)

[little-missdeadly]

Guys I’m gonna meet Arthur Morgan

[little-missdeadly]

GUYS I MET ARTHUR MORGAN

[little-missdeadly]

Guys I’m gonna meet Arthur Morgan

[little-missdeadly]

Why the Coyotes Cry - Part 9

Hosea Matthews x F!OC

MDNI, Angst, flirting, kissing, implied intimacy (ig?), fluff, alcoholism

Word Count: 3,755

H. Matthews — 1895

There are things a man carries that no amount of whiskey can sour nor distance outrun. Guilt is no idle thing. It does not rest. It moves with the patience of wolves and carries more weight than any grizzly that ever walked the high timber.

It is blood I cannot wash from my hands. Blood that has soaked into the grain of my soul and will not lift though I scour it with sand and prayer and years. No mercy lived in that loyal beast’s eye when the final shot rang through the trees and rolled away across the waste. Only a question that found no answer.

That sound returns in the dark. The echo of the report. The soft cry of the girl when she believes no one listens. The dullness that has come into her gaze, so that strangers now pass her in the street and see nothing of the light that once lived there. I have stolen that light. I have put it out with my own hand.

I am a man of many sins, well worthy of guilt and shame. I have conned, thieved, and killed for the promise of some freedom in a country far from these mesas. Yet none of it weighs upon me as this does. There is no damnation deep enough, no salvation wide enough, to balance the life I took from my wife. I pray the good Lord or whatever deaf thing sits above the vault of heaven will be kind to her. And in the same breath I know He will not.

Forgiveness is a word for children and fools. It fixes nothing. The country does not forgive. It only keeps the blood and moves on beneath the indifferent sun.

In the black year that remained of 1894, Hosea Matthews wandered a country of whiskey and dust, a man unmoored beneath a sky that pressed down like judgment. The bottle had become his only gospel, poured down his gullet in saloons where the lamps burned low and the air stank of piss and spoiled meat. He spoke little, his once-silver tongue thickened to slag, and the gang watched him from a distance as one might watch a dog gone rabid.

One night, deep in the bowels of some nameless border town where the wind carried the cries of coyotes like damned souls, he fell across a cot reeking of mildew and old blood. The rotgut had done its work. His eyes rolled white in the dark, and the dream—if dream it was—came upon him raw and unbidden.

She stood at the foot of the bed, Bessie, but not the Bessie of soft mornings and quiet promises. This thing wore her face like a poorly stretched hide. Her skin hung in pale strips where the grave had gnawed it, gray and mottled as spoiled venison. Worms moved slow beneath the remnants of her cheeks, patient as time itself. Her eyes, once warm as summer loam, were now sunken pits filled with a black fluid that leaked in steady rivulets down the ruin of her throat. She smelled of turned earth and formaldehyde, of the cheap pine box they’d lowered her into when the consumption or the sorrow or whatever devil had taken her finally claimed its due.

“Hosea,” she whispered, and the sound scraped like a rusted blade across bone. “You left me twice.”

He tried to rise but the air had turned to iron, pinning him to the soiled mattress. She drifted closer, her bare feet leaving wet prints that smoked faintly in the cold. The hem of her burial dress dragged behind her, heavy with grave mud and the small white bones of things that had burrowed in.

“You swore you’d walk the straight path for me,” she said. The words bubbled up through the ruin of her mouth, thick with grave liquor. “Yet here you are again, soaked in the devil’s own piss, running with Dutch and his fool children. Did my dying buy you nothing but this?”

A maggot fell from her lip and landed on his chest, fat and glistening. It began to burrow.

Hosea’s throat worked but produced only a dry click. He saw the life they might have had flicker behind her ruined face— a small house, a garden, children that never came—shredded now like meat beneath a butcher’s cleaver. Her hand reached for him, fingers elongated and blackened at the tips, nails split and caked with dirt from her own digging.

“You’ll join me soon enough, my love,” she crooned, leaning down until her dripping eyes hovered inches above his. A cold drop of something foul landed on his cheek and burned like lye. “The world is ending for men like you. Just the long dark and me waiting, patient as the grave.”

He felt the maggot gnawing at the flesh, multiplying, consuming him just as the guilt did when looking upon her ruin. But as his eyes searched for the memory of her, it was not fear but sorrow. The maggots did not ease their consumption, his chest agape and weeping red where the bullet had bit him. Terror fled him, and he rose slow, his blood staining the bed and the floor and oozing steady and ceaseless. He lay unmoving under her gaze, eyes sorrowful and longing.

When the first gray light of dawn found him, he woke to the taste of blood and bile, clawing at his own chest where the imagined maggot had fed. The prints on the floorboards were gone. But the smell lingered—damp earth and corruption—and for the rest of that terrible year it followed him from bottle to bottle, a haunting more faithful than any wife had ever been.

The days bled one into the next like cheap ink on wet paper, a smear of heat and whiskey and the low drone of men waiting for the world to finish killing them. Hosea Matthews moved through them as a shade, his frame grown gaunt beneath the dust-caked coat, eyes sunk into sockets like wells gone dry. New Austin stretched before him in its merciless expanse, where the lake met the baked land in a flat mirror that promised ocean but delivered only alkali and the bones of drowned cattle half-buried in the silt. He stared into campfires until the flames danced with her face, then rode out alone, returning with nothing but more rotgut and the taste of failure thick on his tongue. Men came and went, some whole, most carved thinner by lead or regret. Celebrations flared brief and ugly, laughter like the cackle of hyenas over a fresh kill.

The visions did not cease, he had tried to drown them in more liquor, tried to bury her ghost that would not be contained by the physical earth. Still the sight of her tormented him. Most nights she was sat across the fire from him, just beyond true vision but always there. The scent of death pungent in his nose as he glared across the flames and took another deep swig.

The old man sat hunched by the fire like some ruin left by war, the bottle tilted to his mouth again and again as if it were the only sacrament left in a godless land.

“Ain’t seen a man drink that much,” Uncle grumbled. “And I’m a drunk.”

“Burns away the grief,” said Javier, eyes on the strings of his guitar.

Arthur spat into the fire. “Don’t reckon it’s burnin much. Man still looks like the dead are walkin round him.”

Bill wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “That young wife a his best get him to bed fore he’s howlin at the dark again.”

Arthur rose without answer. He crossed the broken ground toward the canvas where the firelight painted her shadow long and thin against the cloth. The night was full of its usual terrors and the river ran black beyond the cottonwoods.

“You all right?” he asked low.

Josephine startled, then settled. Her voice came small and hollow. “Feels like my fault somehow.”

“It ain’t,” Arthur said, glancing from her to the old man that had managed to drunkenly fool the sheriff of Blackwater by claiming she was his wife. “It ain’t your fault, Bessie was sick. She was sick for a long while but never let Hosea see it. Maybe he was too blind by loyalty to see it, but in the end that sickness took her.”

She said nothing. Just watched with pity as the bottle slipped from Hosea’s fingers only for him to pick it back up.

“He cries for her in the night,” she finally said, her gaze drifting up from Hosea’s shadowed form to beyond the flame, like she too saw the ghosts that haunted him. Maybe she did.

The camp whispered about glimpsing her wandering down to the river during the night. Tilly had followed once, said it was like she wasn’t really there and returned her to camp only for her not to recall anything about the venture come morning.

“Thank you for saving Caspian,” she muttered finally, pulling her green eyes from the fire and meeting his eyes briefly. “He means the world to me.”

Arthur chuckled, scratching his beard that had grown in. “Damn horse near bit my ear off. Ran Lenny out of the pen, kicked John when he went for his horse. Meanest sonofabitch I ever met, but…” he made an amused sound, “… that horse loves you. He wouldn’t die willing.”

Josie dried her eyes quickly, lip quivering with unshed emotion. She but it to keep still and shut her eyes for a long moment, then, returned to Hosea.

“Wish I could mend his grief same as I could his wound.”

“He’s sweet on you. Stood up for you like I never seen him stand for no one. Not even Bessie. Tells me he thinks the world of you.”

She folded her arms against the chill. “That’s kind of you, Arthur. But I have my doubts.”

“You’re right to have ‘em. But he needs you. Same as when the bullet was in him. Only this wound don’t close with stitches.”

She looked at the broken figure by the flames a long moment, then moved. She knelt beside Hosea without speaking. Words had no purchase here. She took the bottle from his shaking hand and sat with him while the fire spat and cracked like bones breaking.

“Do you see her?” he rasped at last, coughing wet and dark. Spittle ran down his chin. His eyes never left the dark across the fire.

“Who am I looking for?” she asked gently, her hand on his arm.

“She’s hauntin’ me,” he slurred. “Come to drag me down with her. Damn her. I buried her with these hands. Buried her deep.”

Josephine followed his gaze into the night. A shadow moved beyond the flames and was gone. She breathed in the cold river smell.

“Hosea,” she said, soft as speaking to her beloved horse. “Would you walk with me to the river?”

She moved a little closer, holding his hands with hers where his had grasped. “Arthur told me there’s bad men around here, warned me not to go alone.”

The old man nodded once, dull and heavy, and let her draw him up like a thing half-drowned.

Josie glanced back. Arthur gave a single nod from the firelight and fell in behind them, riding drag through the dark cottonwoods.

Hosea swung up onto Gold Rush and she steadied the old man’s boot in the stirrup while he hauled himself over, then slid the other foot home. She mounted behind the saddle. The horse needed no guiding. She knew the way, and the big dun waded hoof-deep into the river, black water slapping at her legs.

Upstream stood an abandoned shack, gaunt and warped, clothes still hanging from the line like the flayed skins of the dead. A single lamp burned inside with the last of its oil, guttering yellow against the night.

They dismounted. Arthur hitched Bodicea behind the shack and leaned against the rails, watching the dark horizons for shapes that might mean killing. He struck a match, lit a cigarette, and rested one hand near the cattleman at his hip.

“Do you see her now?” Josie asked. She pulled the coat from Hosea’s shoulders and dropped it into one of the baskets left with the laundry.

The old man turned his head, scanning the riverbank. The specter was not there. His shoulders loosened by a fraction and he removed the ruined hat, bleached and sweat-stained by the desert.

Josie acknowledged the small mercy. She loosened his neckerchief, worked the buttons of his vest and shirt until they too joined the coat. Then she drew her own dress over her head and stood in her thin chemise. She led him into the pool where the current ran slow and treacherous beyond.

They waded deeper. When the cold reached his thighs he cringed and hissed like a man touched with a branding iron. The shock cut through the whiskey enough to bring some ragged light back into his eyes.

She took the lye soap, dipped her hands into the black water, worked the bar between them until it foamed harsh and pale. She began at his shoulder, scrubbing down the length of his arm, top and underside, then his back, his neck, the other arm. At first he stood like a beast in the traces and let her work the dirt and the stink and the sorrow from his skin as if it could be scrubbed away like trail dust. But as the cold sank deeper into his bones he caught her wrists, holding them fast.

He did not look at her when he spoke. His voice was still thick with drink and his eyes remained dull as old lead.

“Reckon I can do the rest, darlin,” he muttered.

“Do you still see her?”

Only then did he look at her, his bloodshot eyes searching her face in the thin moonlight. Something flickered there in the ruin of the man, some last ember not yet drowned.

“I’ve made fool enough of myself,” he rasped, “without you bathin me like some dodderin old fool. You’ll catch your death in this river. Go see to that mare of yours if you’ve a mind to spoil somethin.”

She let the lye soap slip from her palms into his fingers but he did not take it, only waited to see what she would do.

“Who saved my horse from the river?”

The question lay between them heavy as the smell of silt and wet grass. Upstream the falls roared on, white water smashing over stone, indifferent and eternal.

“I had Arthur help me get him to camp,” he said after a time. He looked down. “Took a long while. Meaner than Satan, that horse. Near bit Arthur’s ear off.” A single dry laugh escaped him. “Too stubborn to die though. Stubborn bastard.”

She would not meet his eyes. She reached for the soap again but he caught her hand once more.

“I saw you when you thought he was dead,” he said, quieter now. “You’d have died too. Because you’re stubborn. And I… don’t want you to.”

She took the lye soap back, working it between her palms until the harsh foam rose again, and she looked at him through the river’s cold mist.

“I don’t want you to either,” she said.

For a moment they stood locked in that gaze, the black water moving around their legs like the slow blood of the earth, remembering the Blackwater hotel two years gone—when she had dragged him from death’s jaws and he had looked upon her as some pale vision sent from a heaven he no longer believed existed.

He leaned down, one rough hand rising to cup her cheek, the motion halting and grave as if the act itself might summon judgment.

His mouth found hers. Her cold hands came up against his bare chest, fingers pressing into the scarred flesh, then sliding around him as she drew closer. He held her there in the river’s grip, her arms circling his sides, two ruined souls clinging together while the falls roared on upstream like the voice of some indifferent god.

Unlike in the Blackwater hotel, she did not pull away. The kiss deepened, slow and grave as a wound that would not close. His hands did not wander with any young man’s hunger; they stayed where they were, only tightening, coiling about her like a man clutching at the last rope above the abyss, fearful she was but another phantasm sent to torment him before the dark reclaimed its due.

It was her left hand that moved, sliding from the scarred ruin of his ribs to cup his cheek, then threading through the wet silver strands of his hair. She had not recoiled. She had not pushed him from her. Instead she softened against him, yielding to the kiss as though she too had carried the longing in secret, too cowardly or too wise to hunt it down in the open.

Hosea allowed himself, in that cold river and under the indifferent roar of the falls, the small and terrible mercy of believing she loved him as he loved her.

They parted for air at last, yet neither drew fully away. Their faces remained close, eyes half-lidded against the river’s ceaseless gush about their legs, cold and black as the void between stars. It was Hosea who withdrew first. He looked upon her, thumbed the wet from her cheek, and tucked a single stray curl behind her ear with the care of a man handling something already lost.

“Go wait with Arthur and the horses, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ll be alright.”

He took the soap from her fingers. She stepped back, not far, only enough to grant the space he claimed. She climbed atop a boulder nearby and sat with knees drawn up, watching the night birds wheel against the star-scattered sky, her gaze grown distant while the old man finished what she had begun, shaking the water and harsh lye from his eyes.

Only then did she look at him. The silver hair lay slicked back from his skull. The fire of the lamp and moon carved hard shadows across the map of his face—years of roads and cons and robberies and pursuits etched there like the work of some blind god. A life she could not fathom save in glimpses: the law bearing down, her horse collapsing beneath her in the river, the stink of urine and degenerate men in the cells where they had thrown her.

Her eyes found first the great scar across his ribs, purple and stretched like an inkblot on spoiled parchment, then the others: thin pale lines, some long as knife strokes, some round as bullet holes, some burns left by scattershot. Each a monument to violence endured, stories older than her own brief years.

“There’s so many stories about what America is like,” she said, arms draped across her knee. “Come live the American Dream. New beginnings. A chance at a new life. An adventure. A fairytale.”

Hosea glanced at her, fingers working through the short silver at his crown. “There’s plenty of dreamin. Ain’t so many chances. Same as anywhere, I reckon. Get far enough gone and sometimes it seems the dreams might take.”

“Do you have a dream?”

“Used to.”

“What was it?”

“Same as any young fool. Strike it rich on dumb luck and live loud till I dropped dead old, surrounded by wealth and too many women.” He trailed off, leaning against the boulder beside her despite the river’s lingering cold. It felt good in the heat of New Austin. Felt cleaner than the reek of saloons and horseflesh.

“But it didn’t stay that way?”

“Never does.” He dried his hair with the towel and slung it over one shoulder. “That dream turned to outrunnin the law, headin west to some place we might be truly free. Me and Dutch and Arthur. Then John come along and it grew. Then I met Bessie. Whole world changed when I met her. Conned a man blind in Saint Denis and felt like the bastard I was. Dream of disappearin west became lyin low in the mountains on a homestead with a good woman. Livin honest. Prayin for redemption. But this sorry sonofabitch fell back into the life, and here we are again, chasin the west.”

She watched him. Saw how his eyes turned inward toward some country long behind him. In the moonlight he looked both ancient and stripped bare. She wondered what he had been in his youth—golden-haired scoundrel or lady’s charmer or both in the same breath. Now the moon rendered his skin pale, the shadows cruel along his cheekbones, the lines cut deep, the eyes tired beyond reckoning.

“What do you dream of now?”

He turned and looked at her, slow. The dullness had receded some.

“I’m findin a new one,” he said, and a faint smile touched his mouth. “Hopefully one that ain’t the bottom of a whiskey bottle. What do you dream about, Josie?”

Her eyes searched his face a long while. Then she looked to the river’s black current and the owl that passed silent overhead. Some other night creature cried out from the trees.

She spoke quietly, eyes on the black water.

“I had this dream my whole life,” she said. “That I would live the happy life God promised, the one my father preached in church. Rescue a few horses. Marry some good, promising young man who would build me a house and make an honest living.”

A small smile touched her mouth at the thought, then guttered out. She chewed her lip.

“I don’t think I ever really believed it. Not deep down. Then my father was killed and I had to go somewhere, so I came here. To the land of dreams. Came lookin for my cousin and the man of great promise and even bigger dreams that she had fallen for.”

She laughed, a sound that carried over the river with too much mirth for a place such as this. It drew a faint smile from him all the same.

“Now I’m… running after shadows,” she said. “Ghosts. Casting spells and curses, it would seem.” She met his eyes again. “I’m trying to find one too.”

They sat in silence for a time, the river gnawing at the rocks like a thing that would not rest. Josie spared a glance toward Arthur, still posted behind the shack, watching the dark for shapes that meant murder.

“You kissed me,” she said, and let the words fall between them like stones.

“I did,” Hosea answered. “Twice by my count.”

“Twice.”

Hosea drew a long breath and ran a hand down his chin, feeling the ragged beard that wanted shaving.

Arthur came forward to the river’s edge, keeping his distance yet near enough to be heard above the roaring falls.

“Everything all right?”

“Just fine,” Hosea said. He stepped from the water, riding trousers soaked black, and began rooting through his saddlebags.

Josie followed, handing him a fresh shirt she had packed and drawing out the trousers and coat he usually wore. He stared at them as if they belonged to another man, then looked at her who had gone through his things and chosen them with such knowing. Arthur watched too, but it was not the old man who held his eye. It was the girl.

When Hosea withdrew into the shack to change, Arthur came and stood before her. He glanced once toward the warped boards where the old man had gone, then offered her the dress. She took it and pulled it over her head, tying it into place with cold fingers.

“How is he?” Arthur asked. “I mean how is he really?”

“He’s fighting demons, Arthur. He’s losing, but he fights all the same.”

“Reckon he’ll come back?”

“He wants to.”

Arthur nodded and turned his gaze back to the horizons where the trails lay coiled like serpents in the moonlight.

“You… want to talk about anything else?” he asked, more cautious now.

She looked up at him and shook her head.

“Well, let’s get a move on,” Arthur said, going to fetch Bodicea.

Hosea stepped from the shack. Josie stood holding Gold Rush’s reins, waiting.

“You drive,” the old man said, a faint smile cracking his face. He helped her up into the saddle and reached to adjust the stirrups.

“I don’t need them,” she told him.

He studied her a moment, then nodded and mounted behind her. His hand settled light at her waist. Arthur rode ahead, leading them back through the dark.

“She’s a leg horse,” Hosea murmured, guiding her hand low on the mare’s mane. “Keep it quiet. Talk to her with the legs.”

She nodded and gave a gentle squeeze. The mare fell in behind Arthur’s mount and they moved down the trail. The ride back was calm and silent, the land holding its breath. When they reached camp the men had already withdrawn into their tents like beasts to their dens. Only the canvas and wagons remained, the horses stamping and snorting in the pen, and somewhere an owl cried out across the waste.

Arthur untacked Bodicea and turned her loose. He touched his hat to Josie as she rode in, then vanished into the dark.

Hosea slid down and eased her from the saddle, his hand lingering at her side a moment longer than needed. She stepped back, then returned.

“I want to stay with you,” she said suddenly.

Surprise showed plain on his face. Before he could answer she went on.

“I don’t sleep well. I… feel safer if—”

“Whatever you want, darlin’.”

He set his saddle on the rails and let Gold Rush graze. Josie went to Caspian, checked the wound, applied something from a small tin, and kissed the stallion’s nose. Then she followed Hosea to his lean-to.

“You got a blanket? Somethin’?”

She returned from the horse line with a blanket she had kept folded beneath Caspian’s saddle and shook it out. Hosea watched her, shaking his head with quiet amusement.

“What?”

“Nothin’,” he chuckled. “You’re sweet on that horse, that’s all.”

She gave a small smile and settled on the ground beside him. She turned her back to the old man, drawing the blanket tight around her until the world narrowed to the smell of wool and horse and the vast, indifferent breathing of the desert night.

Morning came grim and pale, the sky a dead ash stretched end to end, the wind cruel and without mercy. Josie was gone when Hosea woke, blanket and all, vanished like some succor granted only in the dark hours. As he rose he felt it—the terrors had fled him in the night. Bessie had not come with her grave clothes and accusing tongue. The guilt had been scoured from him as if the black river had taken its due and spared him the rest.

When he found her she stood alone against the red mesas and the steel-blue vault of heaven, a solitary figure cut from the waste. Her red hair had been cast loose and whipped about her head in the wind like a halo of living copper and fresh blood. Her eyes, green as frost upon bluegrass, caught the merciless light and burned with some hue borrowed from beyond this world, vivid and strange. For a moment he saw her not as she was but as she might have been in another life—among the green cliffs and soft rains of Ireland, far from this scorched and godless hell of broken legacies and old sins.

Here, in the dust and the glare, she seemed a fleeting mercy, already half-claimed by the country that devoured all things.

@photo1030

[little-missdeadly]

More OC inspo, hope y’all enjoy.

@photo1030

[gxthiqzz]

I posted this on my TikTok and I shall repost it on here!

Benjamin Byron Davis (Dutch’s actor) stated in an interview that Dutch is not a cannibal, and that alone should settle the “canon” debate. If people are assuming he is because of the bones found in his cave in Red Dead Redemption 1, that is a reach. Bones in a cave do not automatically mean cannibalism. Dutch is already established as a violent, unstable killer, so those remains could just as easily belong to people he murdered or even animals.

Yes, this may seem like it's not a big deal, but I’m deeply passionate when it comes to Dutch van der Linde. And to be clear: there is absolutely nothing wrong with headcanons. If you enjoy the idea of Dutch being a cannibal, go right ahead. Have fun with it. I am not here to police anyone’s imagination.

What irritates me is when people confidently claim, “It’s canon that he’s a cannibal,” when there is no confirmed evidence for that. Speculation is one thing. Canon is another. Those are two very different lanes.

So by all means, keep your headcanons if they bring you joy. :-) Just don’t present them as an official fact when they simply are not.

[little-missdeadly]

He’s definitely not Hannibal.

[little-missdeadly]

Breeds of Horses #13 - Caspian

Unlike the horses found in rdr2, Caspian is not a purebred or a recognized breed at the time.

@photo1030

Edit:

Thank you @johnmarstonrp for making it go away! First drawing since January.

[little-missdeadly]

I made this before the artist block of ‘26. Pray my desire to create returns.

@photo1030

[little-missdeadly]

Thinking about reviving some old fics I have in the drafts folder for other fandoms…

Ah nostalgia 🥰

[little-missdeadly]

Why the Coyotes Cry

Part 8

Hosea Matthews x fem!OC

MDNI, graphic descriptions of violence, suicidal thoughts, gore, descriptions of gore, flirting. If if you read the other parts you know what we’re about.

Enjoy!

@photo1030

The walls of the Blackwater hotel stood as indifferent as the very stones of creation, bearing neither memory nor future, only the thin record of moments already dying. They had witnessed every manner of sin and the slow dissolution of all things, watching with the same cold absence as God Himself, offering neither judgment nor mercy. For that brief span the world narrowed to the small room and the flickering gaslight, where all acts of men were hidden from heaven.

“How did you do it?” she asked, tying the front of her dress and sitting at the foot of the bed. She studied him as he drank deep from the whiskey bottle, more ghost than man now, a shadow of the one she had known before the country took her.

“Do what?” he asked, the words thick and slurred.

“Convince them we were married.”

“I’m a man of cons. Any man that acts confident enough is taken at his word,” he said flatly, pulling another swig of the amber liquor and hissing at the burn.

“You had papers,” she pressed, watching the whiskey dull his eyes. “I doubt you went to any true priest.”

“Not a straight one,” he answered. “Dutch took in a straggler, Reverend Swanson, you’ll get on well enough with him. He signed it. I put our names beside each other.”

He drew the crumpled document from his pocket and flicked it across to her. Josie’s eyes followed its fall. A heavy silence gathered after it struck the floor.

“Burn it, rip it up, do what you will,” he said.

Josie stared at the paper, then retrieved it and smoothed its creases upon the bed, studying the scrawled lies. “It holds no meaning for me.”

She looked up at him. He was still drinking, drifting into whatever country lay inside the bottle. She stood, crossed to him, and pulled the whiskey from his hand. He protested, reaching for it again until she held it beyond his grasp. They regarded each other across a long silence. As his eyes searched hers and softened at the corners in that sorrowful way of his, something in her eased as well.

“Bessie’s dead,” he whispered, as though he still could not believe the words. “How could God be so cruel?”

“I wish I had answers,” she replied, setting the bottle upon the mantel and glancing toward the window. Her own reflection stared back—hollow-eyed, ghoulish. She turned away from it.

“Then I go make a fool of myself, marryin’ a girl half my age…”

His fingers pressed hard against his eyelids until stars burst behind them and the tears retreated. He slammed a fist against his leg and glared at her where she stood.

“Why didn’t you go when you had the chance? None of this would have happened if you had simply gone! Ride off into the heavens on your gold horse and desert us like God!”

The words struck her. Josie stood and took the lashing as though it were justly earned. Yet they lay heavy against her ribs, as violating as the man in the cell across from hers who had spilled his filth onto the cracked floor between them. Her dark lashes lowered, casting shadows that could not hide the sorrow eating her hollow.

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Like hell you didn’t,” he heaved, throwing his hat onto the table and refusing to look at her again. “It was me and my wanderin’ eyes that sent her to the grave. Cheap bastard like me—you should’ve let me die. Why didn’t you just let me die?”

When he finally broke into tears she crossed to him slowly and rested a hand on his shoulder. She fought the tears rising in her own eyes and swallowed her sob, feeling the bleak kinship of their grief. Despite the cruelty of his words, his rough hand covered hers, leaning his weight against her thin arm as though she were the last tether holding him to this earth.

“What would you have me do?” she asked quietly, as lost as he.

“Don’t seek wisdom from a drunk,” he replied. She laughed once at the bitter irony, and he laughed too, holding her hand tight. In the face of his grief she kept her own walled behind her ribs. It still burned there, gnawing away pieces of her she could not see.

When the whiskey had ebbed from his flesh and the light had grown low, she pulled him from the chair where he slouched and led him to the untouched bed. With care she loosened his neckerchief, unbuttoned his collar, drew the boots from his feet, and let him lie there limp as a fresh corpse. She had taken three steps away when he roused.

“Josie,” he slurred, half whiskey and half sleep.

“Hosea,” she answered, standing near enough that he could make her out.

“Keep the reaper away from me a little while longer, would you?”

She studied his slumped form with something close to pity.

“I’ll see to what I can.”

Hosea was gone from the room when Josie rose the next dawn. Sleep had been evasive as the listening ear of heaven. She did not trouble with the thick curls of her hair but went straight to the window, fearful she would find herself adrift once more. She saw the flick of his horse’s tail and bolted from the room, down to the front door. With what strength remained in her small frame she threw the door open so it slammed against the wall and stood upon the clapboard walk before the saloon, making certain she had not dreamt it.

Hosea barely flinched. Gold Rush stood hip-shot, flicking an ear lazily. When he did regard her it was through the squinting haze of whiskey still burning off in his veins. A ragged cough escaped him as he tightened the cinch.

“When we get to camp you’ll have a place with the other girls,” he said, as though offering something precious. “There’s a few strays we picked up. Girl named Abigail Roberts came back. Got a baby comin’ sometime in January.”

“January?” she heard herself ask.

He regarded her carefully. “It’s April.”

“April…” she breathed, the word like all the wind swept from her lungs.

Hosea watched her a moment longer, tucking the last of the leather, until he saw the feeble step she attempted before her weight struck the post. It had been some time since he last ran, yet his feet were already moving. He reached her, steadied her with an arm beneath hers, hoisted her into the saddle, mounted behind her, and turned Gold Rush toward the road.

“It’s April,” he said again, almost annoyed. “It’s goddamn April.”

They rode steadily. Halfway up the trail Josie sagged back against him. The country turned north to south, and the fleeting snow gave way to red dust, arroyos, and mesa ridges that rose like the walls of some ancient colosseum. She barely saw it. Her eyes remained fixed on the blue vault overhead where a lone vulture circled, as though it already smelled the rot of her grief. She half-dreamed of being left behind somewhere, her flesh picked from her bones, if only it meant she might see her beloved Caspian in death.

How beautiful a thing was death when it remained so grotesquely out of reach. When the heart was left to bleed in the dirt while the flesh stayed whole and untarnished by the wound loss had carved.

She recalled the shot the man behind her had taken. An ugly, jagged thing that wept crimson, drunk by the earth as though it had never known water. She recalled the way living flesh felt solid as bone when it swelled against injury already sewn, the way blood smeared and oozed over her own pale skin, slick and drying into crust, while thick gelatinous clots strung between her fingers and continued to squelch through her hands in hot pulses. She recalled the sounds of a man dying, moaning half-formed words and looking past the faces of the living. She recalled how his exposed bone had brushed her wrist as he pulled desperately for air that forced out more clots.

Worst of all were his eyes when they had settled on her. How she had met them and looked into the eyes of a man who believed he was meeting God. She recalled how she had wept. How she had seen her father’s face burning in a pyre of false purity while he screamed. How the world had narrowed to her hands and the terrible weight of trying to save a man she scarcely knew, a wound that should have killed him.

The wound of man-flesh had slowly become a pelt of gold, yet no matter how she pressed, it bled until the color was forever branded into her memory.

She cursed the selfishness of men as the wounds of another became the wound of her own heart. She pictured that organ in her hands, fingers curled into its thick pulsing fibers until it stopped.

But she did not die. She sat atop the horse against the chest of the man she had saved while the sun beat down as the only spectator in that crimson colosseum, the blood of the forgotten coloring the very rocks themselves.

Tears could no longer be shed, for the earth had swallowed them just as it had claimed the tapestry of her life in the same way it claimed all the men around her.

The sun bled along the far horizon, the red stone running like fresh blood under a sky saturated with violet and rose, hues soft as dying grace. Hosea’s weathered hands eased her down from the saddle, steadying her until her feet found purchase on the hard earth. Then she moved among the tents and silent figures like one returned from the grave, half a specter in her own flesh.

A younger face turned.

“Josie!” the man shouted. He rose from an overturned crate and came rushing, his broad frame cutting shadow over her and a large, rough hand caught her before she could drift away among the canvas and vanish like smoke. He spoke of Caspian, but the name struck her like prophecy and she would not follow, too weak to bear the weight of hope.

Then the fence line appeared and the yellow horse stood grazing beyond it. She stopped as though the last of her mind had fled. His coat shone the color of pale gold, champagne washed in the last light, summer dapples breaking through like scales of some ancient beast shedding its old skin. The scar of the wound still marked his shoulder, livid and raised, a brand from the country’s own hand.

Air returned to her lungs. Tears came unbidden and she ran to the fence, stopping short as though the vision might dissolve before her eyes. The stallion lifted his head, looked across the divide, and gave a low, joyous sound. He came to her with careful steps, nostrils flaring at the scent of the girl he had known before death tried to claim him.

Her fingers touched the warm hide. She pressed her face into the golden mane and sobbed, hands tangling in the coarse strands as a drowning soul clings to the wood of the cross. Here was the lamb returned, the lost thing given back from the waste.

“How—?” she demanded, voice broken and ragged with weeping.

“He was shoulder-shot,” Arthur said. “A bad wound but clean. Javier and I cut the bullet out. Had some of the cure left from Boadicea’s snakebite. Figured the Lord might let it serve twice.”

Hosea stepped beside the younger man and laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Thank you, son,” he said quietly, eyes resting gentle on the girl and her horse. “Means the world to her, that animal.”

“I know it,” Arthur answered, scratching at his lengthening stubble. “If it had been Boadicea I’d have done the same. Same as she done for The Count, for John, for me… for your sorry hide too. I owed her this much.”

Hosea acknowledged the words with a single dip of his head.

“So it’s true then?” Arthur asked, shifting the subject with a long sigh. “You married her?”

“Forged documents,” Hosea corrected, too quickly. “Weighs the same as any counterfeit coin in this world.”

“And they believed it?”

Hosea did not answer. He needed not.

“Shit…” Arthur chuckled low.

“The world’s movin’ too fast,” Hosea said, cutting through the amusement. “The age of outlaws and gunslingers is ending, Arthur. Best we make ready for it.”

[little-missdeadly]

Why the Coyotes Cry

Part 7

Hosea Matthews x fem!oc

Yall know the drill, MDNI

Josephine A. Blackwood — 1894

There is a kind of torment that doesn’t scream.

It simply sits beside you, day after day, breathing the same thin air until you forget what breathing without it ever felt like.

I grieve a horse whose coat was pale and yellow as moonlight, whose last breath I could not ease. I grieve him the way some women grieve children they never got to hold.

And in the same silence I confess I have given my heart to the wrong man—Hosea, outlaw and scoundrel, and somehow the kindest soul I yet encountered in this place, though, a soul half-lost before I ever met him. I fell anyway. Quietly. Completely. The way a match falls into dry grass.

Everything conflicts now: the pull toward him and the terror of what he is, the memory of my home that no longer has place for me and the red dust that swallowed it. I’m scared for the girl I was and the woman this country is carving me into.

America does not break you all at once. It peels you, layer by layer, until you are raw and still standing, wondering why you ever crossed an ocean only to find a cruelty that wears a kinder name than the one back home.

But I feel that war inside my chest like two rivers meeting in flood—grief for what is gone, hunger for what I should not want, guilt for wanting it anyway.

This country is cruel in the way only beautiful things can be cruel. It shows you a horizon wide enough to hold every dream, then fills that horizon with graves and bars and men who take what they please.

I am tormented, yes. But torment has become the only honest thing left in me.

New Austin — 1894

“So we head further west,” Dutch said, scratching his chin and studying the map spread across the crate. Hosea sat hunched against the canvas wall, eyes clouded from the bottle. Arthur leaned broadshouldered and heavy against the tent pole, arms crossed like a man already weary of the words to come.

“And then what?” Arthur asks.

“Then we get gone. Head north towards Canada and disappear there.”

“How?” Hosea rasped. He rose slow and neared the table, boots scraping dirt form the floor. “There’s women and a child comin’, vulnerable folks. When law comes down we scatter like rats.“

“Have you lost all faith, old friend?” Dutch asked, hand on his hip and looking to the greying man.

“Most of it, yes,” Hosea spat. “John’s gone. Mac’s a drunk and starts fights everyplace he lights, same can be said about damn near every man here. And Josie’s gone too, only one worth a damn kept us all upright. Where’s she, Dutch?”

“We are a band of the unfortunate,” Dutch agreed. “But they are still decent enough people. As for Miss Blackwood I have heard no word.”

“Dutch!”

Molly burst through the flap, breathless, eyes wide and desperate. Dutch sighed low and disgruntled.

“Dutch, please, just a moment—“

“Molly, I’ve told you—“

“Josie’s in Blackwater,” the Irish woman said, breathless and eyes wide and desperate as she pleaded with the other two men. “Please, she’s my cousin, she don’t deserve the noose.”

Dutch’s jaw worked tightly and he glanced to the two men and then returned his attention to Molly.

“I said—“

“Blackwater?” Hosea cut in. “How long ago?”

“Just saw her with my own two eyes,”

Hosea asked no more. He looked at Arthur briefly, the drink burning off in the chill the desert clung to at evening. He waved Molly after him without word and they passed through the flap into the scatter of tents and wagons, the puttering of fires and low voices trailing behind like smoke. The tent flap fell shut and the map lay untouched on the crate, the lantern flame guttering faint against the coming dark.

“Tell me what you know,” he said, voice rough and low. “Was she well when you saw her?”

Molly shook her head once, the motion small and final. “I can’t say. Only glimpsed her brief, sat small against the wall through the bars.”

The prairie stretched flat and vast beneath the moonless sky when Hosea had turned away. Molly’s hand rose toward his arm hesitant and trembling then fell back to where she wrung them together, knuckles pale as bone.

“Will no one return for her?” The words broke soft against the wind as she spoke them. “After all she’s done, she’ll be left to the rope?”

Hosea drew a breath long and slow, tasting dust and smoke and the taste of old regret that never quite left his mouth. He looked back at her, eyes steady now though the lines around them had carved deeper, like fissures in parched earth.

“I’ll think of something, Miss O’Shea,” he said.

Molly held his gaze a long moment, searching for the lie the way a man searches a stranger’s palm for a hidden knife. Yet doubt hung thick between them, heavy as smoke curling from dying coals.

“Thank you, Mr. Matthews,” she returned quietly, the words small and measured and still uncertain whether the promise carried any more substance than the wind-scattered oaths Dutch flung like chaff across the camp.

She turned, shoulders narrow under her shall and she retreated into the blackness that swallowed their refuge.

Hosea reached for another bottle beside the guard’s dying fire. The embers threw red light across the ground in slow shifting pools and the wind stirred them so they recalled to him the color of Josie’s hair when the sun struck it full. He could scarce see her clear through the whiskey’s blur yet he saw her enough. He saw the small shape of her folded in a cell, arms locked over her knees, that auburn curtain fallen across her face to hide whatever the bars and the deputies had left of it. The vision pulled at him hard until he drank again to blunt the ache that bled him slow as a gut-shot deer left for the flies.

A figure moved across the coals. The new man Dutch had taken up in the flight from Cuhaney. A reverend or one dressed so. Hair wild and ginger shot through with grey at the temples, eyes dark as old bruises and hollowed deep. He carried his own bottle of amber and set the Bible beside it on the dirt like a witness that had seen too much already.

“Evenin’, Mr. Matthews,” the reverend said low.

“Reverend.”

“I hear tell that Miss O’Shea’s kin is held in Blackwater. No man here seems to know how to fetch her out.”

“No man does.”

Silence filled the gap between words and a log shifted in the heap, sending sparks and ash into the wind.

“She kept the reaper off me once, years back. Lung shot after a job. Should have bled out in the dust and been forgot. Instead, the Lord or whatever passes for Him sent an angel down. I thought her heaven-sent. Still do in a fashion,” Hosea continued. “If there’s a heaven she’d be the sole cause I’d credit it.”

The reverend lifted his eyes and nodded slow.

“I wanted to be a priest once,” Hosea said. Laughed once, dry and without mirth. “Could you picture it?”

A single coal cracked and spat in the silence that followed.

“Don’t recall ever missing another living soul the way I miss that girl,” Hosea lamented. “Been drinkin’ since my wife Bessie went cold. Josie’s the only thing made any of it seem worth the breath. Now it’s all waitin’ to die or the next fool notion Dutch dreams up.”

“Is that what gnaws at you?”

“What gnaws at me… terrifies me really, is the wantin’ for her. Not my wife, should be my wife, but it ain’t. It’s the resilient little Irish girl with her sorrowful green eyes,” Hosea explained, meeting the reverends eyes briefly before he slouched back and tipped his whiskey back. After a heavy moment he spoke again. “What gnaws me, Reverend, is how she made my entire life feel so utterly empty until she entered it… because that’s been some fifty years, years I’ve lived and robbed and… well, you know.”

The reverend took a pull from his bottle and set it down careful beside the Bible. The coals hissed once more and the wind moved through the sage beyond the wagons carrying the faint iron scent of coming frost. Neither man spoke again for a long time. The fire burned lower still and the red light dimmed on their faces until they sat like two old stones worn smooth by the same merciless water.

“Sounds like there’s more than that,” the Reverend said. Hosea looked up brief, eyes heavy with their unwitting grief and confessions still too heavy to speak.

“Ain’t there always.”

“I’m not such a good man myself,” Reverend said. “I’m a man of the cloth, but collapsed under temptations of flesh and substance alike. The only decent thing I’d done was save Mr. Van der Linde those weeks ago. Never loved a woman in the way it seems you describe. She feel the same?”

“I have my doubts, she’s young and lost, and if she did I might begin questioning her judgement.”

“Why would you question that which has been blessedly bestowed?”

“Because… I know she deserves more than a man like me, Reverend. That’s what eats me. The thought of dragging such a good soul down with me just because I dared to be near it.”

“If she’s in jail under those pretenses Miss O’Shea mentioned, doubt they’ll just let anyone get her out,” Reverend Swanson said, tipping his bottle back. “Usually a father or a husband can, claiming she’s an eccentric sort. I’ve had my share of vouching… there was a woman once, long time ago, got herself into trouble only for looking like someone the law was after. Her lover came to get her out, claimed he was her husband though they hadn’t planned the ceremony. I signed some papers, backdated them—done my share of that too. She went free the same day.”

“Don’t reckon you’re still in the habit?” Hosea asked, watching the Reverend.

“If someone wanted to pretend to be her husband I don’t see why not.”

They sat silently for a good time. Hosea turned his gaze to the black that may have been a horizon where a coyote cried into the night. The lone noise echoing off the mesas like an omen. Like a symphony of sorrow that may have been a cosmic reflection of where Josephine sat alone in a place that swallowed men.

Only in the silence between did the greying outlaw speak.

“There wouldn’t be much pretending,” he said, leaning back and bowing his head. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a pen.”

The sun beat down with a vengeance upon the snow-crusted earth. The court room of God remained as silent and indifferent as it had the day before, and the one before that.

Josephine sat on the bench with her knees still drawn to her chest, eyes dark and sunken while they watched the cell across from here where the broad man had spent himself on the floor and now exposed himself for further display and torment. He laughed in the back of his throat, licking his yellow teeth and staring at her the way a wolf might adore a fawn. She made no motion to acknowledge him, merely sat utterly still and staring blankly at the floor that glistened with degeneracy.

The door swung back slow on its hinges, the wood polished smooth by the years and the hands of violent men. The hand that moved it was pale and long-fingered, strange to these hard lands, untouched by rope or rein or the pitiless sun that bleaches all else to bone and horn.

He stood tall in the doorway, black top hat square upon his brow, the suit dark and unsoiled by the dust and blood of the country, his boots striking the boards with a sound that belonged to another world, an echo that had no rightful place amid iron and spit and reeking filth. His eyes were deep-set and weary, carrying a sorrow a man might pass over until he met them again and felt the full weight of what dwelled behind them.

The deputy did not look up. No one made spectacle of the visitor. He crossed the narrow floor without sound and stopped before the cell where Josephine sat huddled against the cold stone.

She raised her head. Met his eyes. Knew him the instant his boot touched the boards.

“I know you,” she said.

She rose slow, joints stiff from long confinement, and crossed to the bars on uncertain legs. He looked in upon her with that shadowed gaze, unblinking.

“Hello, Josephine,” he said. The voice was familiar, almost welcome in that place that had swallowed her whole and left nothing she recognized. Something like a smile might have moved beneath the sorrow, but she could not say. “I regret to see you cast so far to the ends of the earth, to be forgotten.”

“You’re not here to help me.”

It was not a question. Something shifted in the man’s face, subtle as a change in the wind across the waste.

“No,” he answered. He studied her a long moment, then stepped back. “But you won’t wait long.”

Josie’s gaze drifted to the guard bent over his papers. The man never once raised his head, never acknowledged the visitor standing not three feet from his desk.

“You’re not real…” she whispered, taking one step back from the bars and regarding him anew, as though seeing him for the first time.

“Not in any sense you would yet understand,” he replied.

“But you know things about me. You know my name. You know where to find me. What else do you know?”

The man smiled again, thin and sorrowful, and paced slowly down the narrow aisle between the cells, careful where he set his boots upon the blood-stained boards. He stopped directly before the deputy’s desk. The deputy kept writing. The visitor turned once more to meet her eyes.

“I know you,” he said. “And something will be asked of you. The answer is yes.”

“What is being asked?”

He gave a single, humming laugh, dry as dead grass.

“You want more than you have.”

He was gone before she could speak again, vanished between one breath and the next as though he had never stood there at all. Josie remained at the bars, forehead against the iron, listening to the slow drip of water somewhere in the walls and the indifferent scratch of the deputy’s pen across paper. The jail breathed on around her, heavy with the stink of old blood and unwashed men, and she wondered whether the visitor had been a mercy or merely another shape the country took when it wished to torment what little remained of her.

The evening had fallen by the time the door opened again, groaning long on its rusted hinges. Wearier footfalls crossed the floorboards, followed by the softer click of spurs like small iron teeth gnawing at the silence. Only then did Josie lift her eyes.

“Good day, gentlemen,” came the voice—raspy, worn thin by whiskey and sleepless nights, yet still carrying that old measured cadence.

She knew him without looking. She could see the scuffed boots, the old shearling coat hanging looser now than when she had left, the hat brim pulled low as though to hide from the merciless light of the world.

The deputy barely raised his head from the papers scattered across his desk.

“What can we do for you, mister?”

Hosea gave a small, dry chuckle that never reached his eyes.

“Well, that’s the question, ain’t it. I been ridin’ from Ambarino down through New Austin, askin’ after one particular soul.”

“Searchin’ for who, exactly?”

Hosea nodded once toward the cell. “That young woman yonder.”

The deputy snorted and leaned back in his chair. “Her? Wild thing, they say. Consorts with the devil. What business you got with her?”

Hosea paused. His eyes flicked to Josie for the briefest instant—something raw and wordless crossing his face—before returning to the lawman. He leaned one hand on the desk, steadying himself more than he would ever admit.

“She’s my wife, sir.”

The deputy barked a short laugh, sharp as a breaking bone. “Your wife? And I’m the Prince of Wales.”

“It’s God’s honest truth,” Hosea pressed, his voice dropping lower, thick with whiskey and something closer to desperation. “Married quiet-like a few years back. Fever took her whole family out near the Grizzlies. We drifted west after that, tryin’ to start over. A woman can lose her head when grief sets on her too heavy. Surely you’ve seen it before.”

The deputy folded his arms, unmoved, his eyes flat as river stones. “Heard tell she poisoned a woman not a month back. Ain’t said a damn word since we brought her in. Sits there still as a corpse. You’ll pardon me if I ain’t buyin’ the sob story.”

Hosea’s hand tightened on the edge of the desk until the knuckles showed white beneath the weathered hide. “I ain’t here to defend the company she’s kept. I’m here because I’ve looked high and low—through every saloon, every bounty poster, every whisper carried on the wind. Found her at last, and all I want is to take her home. Please, deputy… she’s all I got left in this godforsaken world.”

The plea lingered in the fetid air like a hanged man’s last breath, his voice cracking on the final word with a grief so artfully rendered it might have moved stones. Yet beneath it Josie heard the darker truth coursing, raw and spent and edged with something that tasted of fear. The deputy watched him a long while. The only sounds were the slow drip of water deep in the stone guts of the jail and the building itself settling into its dry bones with a low, rheumatic creak. Outside, the wind scoured the hardpan, indifferent as God.

The deputy rose at last and crossed to her cell. Josie sat on the rough plank bench, small and still. Their eyes met briefly.

“You know this feller?” the deputy asked.

Josie’s gaze slid to Hosea and held there, longer now, locked in some silent covenant.

“Yes, sir,” she answered, the words scarcely more than breath.

The deputy’s brows lifted a fraction as he looked between them, measuring the years that lay like miles between the old man’s weathered face and the girl’s youth.

“This man claims to be your husband,” he said, watching her close. “That so?”

Josie paused, a long and careful silence. She tore her eyes from Hosea and stared at the floor. The stranger’s words echoed in her skull like a sentence passed in the dark: something will be asked of you, and the answer is yes. She looked at Hosea again and saw in his eyes the ruin she had been delivered to, saw worry, saw pity, and beneath both something greener and older: the wet hills of Ireland and the home she had forsaken, even if he was no part of it.

“Yes,” she said at last, and did not look away.

Something flashed behind the old man’s eyes. The cell door protested its opening with a shriek like a tomb pried loose, and she was released into the world once more.

In the next instant his arms closed around her small frame. Hers rose more hesitantly, yet curled with a desperation that dragged a sob up out of her.

“Steady now, Josie-girl,” Hosea murmured against her hair. “You’ll be alright. I’ll get you home.” Then louder, for the deputy’s benefit: “Don’t you go runnin’ off again, you hear? Damn near put me in the ground. Much obliged, officer. Y’all have a pleasant evenin’.”

He led her out into the frozen air. For the first time since the cell had swallowed her, Josie drew a breath so deep it burned her lungs like fire. She collapsed into the snow, sobs racking her slight body. Hosea dropped beside her, wrapped his coat around her frail shoulders, then lifted her onto the horse’s back as though she weighed nothing at all.

“It’s alright,” he said, swinging up behind her. “It’s over now.”

The hotel was much as it had been a year earlier, only quieter, as though all the vice and clamor of travelers had been scourged from the place for this single night, leaving behind a stillness heavy as judgment.

Hosea helped with the frayed fastenings of the dress she wore, his fingers careful, stopping when it hung open enough for her to manage the rest. Then he stepped from the room, granting her the first true solitude she had known in weeks.

He kept vigil in the adjoining chamber, no great bulwark against the dark, yet better than the useless guard who had stood watch while whatever had happened in that cell unfolded. He had not been blind to it. He simply would not speak its name.

“Hosea?”

Her voice broke the quiet and he was on his feet at once, hand half-reaching for the pistol at his hip before he caught himself. He stopped just outside the door.

“Josie,” he answered, ear pressed to the wood.

“Sit with me,” she said, so fragile the words cut him. “Please.”

He hesitated only a moment longer, then slipped inside, careful to keep his eyes on the wall, and closed the door behind him.

“Everythin’ alright?” he asked the planks.

“I’m fine…” she said, shame coloring her voice. “I… I’m sorry. I just don’t like the quiet.”

Hosea gave a low, rough laugh.

“Ain’t that somethin’. Never known a woman who didn’t favor quiet. Bessie always used to.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“You didn’t.”

Silence then, broken only by the soft lap of water as she moved in the tub. He damned himself for the images that tried to form behind his eyes.

“You believe me?”

“I ain’t an idiot, girl. People die. You live long enough, they start droppin’ all around you like flies in winter. It’s the one thing binds us sorry sons of bitches together. One day we all go into the ground. Bessie… she turned bitter toward the end, I won’t lie. But I’d sooner remember her as she was before all that poison took root.”

“She was bitter on account of me,” Josie said quietly, taking up a burden that was never hers to carry.

Hosea chewed on words he would never loose, turning his face a fraction toward her without looking.

“Don’t matter,” he said at last, weary and strangely sober. “Some will believe what they will. I reckon it had nothin’ to do with you and everything to do with that sorry, piss-poor excuse of a husband she had.”

Josie laughed then, a bright, sudden sound that rang off the walls like something clean and unlikely in that place. He had never heard her laugh so in all the time he had known her. For a moment she seemed less a broken thing and more like some wild, fallen grace, red hair dark and wet at the ends, delicate hand covering her smile, green eyes alive with a humor that sent an unwelcome warmth flooding through the old man’s chest. His face burned. He snapped his gaze back to the wall.

When her laughter faded she spoke again, still amused.

“Look at us,” she said, water splashing as she gestured. “Rising to defend the other while we belittle ourselves.”

She exhaled, half-giggling.

“A conman and a witch. What a curious pair…”

Hosea laughed with her then, a low, wheezing sound.

“Hell,” he muttered, pulling off his weather-stained hat and dragging a hand through his grey hair. “Don’t be givin’ an old man ideas.”

“What ideas?”

“Of hopin’ I might still have a chance.”

He turned, leaning back against the doorframe, watching the gaslight flicker and gutter.

“You’re too good for an old bastard like me,” he said, his voice still carrying the shape of warmth though the blood had long since drained from it. “I said as much before. Said a good many things. The truths I spoke were dressed up in the clothes of a con.”

Josie drew her knees to her chest in the water, watching his face in that quiet, judgmentless way of hers, clinging to every word.

“That you’re my wife and…” He faltered, the silver tongue gone to lead.

“And that you love me so much you would ride from one coast to the other just to fetch me back,” she finished for him.

Their eyes met with a weight that seemed older than both of them.

He made a rough sound in his throat and looked at the floor, brow furrowed, holding the truth too close to the bone.

“That I’m fool enough to hope.”

[little-missdeadly]

I think my creative skills have dementia