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⟢　all down but nine

⠀⠀ 01. the grim reaper and god

Boothill needs to retrieve a bounty, and things go much easier when you’re with someone who can reach into people’s minds– especially when the payout for bringing the guy back alive is ten times higher than dead –so he drags his roommate along. Unfortunately, they crash land on a planet in the middle of nowhere full of dust and dirt and wide plains. Fortunately, their target had been spotted on the very same planet anyhow. A cyborg and a halovian walk into an old westward star system saloon… This must be the set-up for some kind of joke, right?

✦　read on ao3. |⠀i yap more in my a/n !!

✦　oc x canon　 |　7.9k words　|　junehill　|　divs.　⋆　boothill and june shenanigans in a western setting. my sister has been asking me to write the second chapter of this so im procrastinating by reformatting this first one instead T T

IT WAS ABOUT NOON at the time those two drifters had rolled in, the harsh, burning light of the day’s weather slanting across dry timber and drier sun-baked soil. Evening took a long time getting to Dirt, but when it came it was a comfort. For most of the hours of the day– and most of the months of the year –the sun had the town trapped deep in dust, far out in the chaparral flats, a heaven for snakes and horned toads, roadrunners and stinging lizards, but a hell for horses and civilians. There was not even a respectable shade tree within twenty or thirty miles; in fact, the actual location of the nearest decent shade was a matter of vigorous debate in the offices– if you wanted to call a roofless barn and a couple of patched-up corrals offices.

This was making the matter of the drifters more severe, in many a townsfolk’s opinion, as they did not have horses. If they had appeared from further west, that of which vaguely contained the trail towards a more respectable and much less sun-baked sort of settlement, it would have made some lick of sense, and yet the pair walked in on foot from the direction which pointed towards the desert out the back of town. Even putting aside all of that, the two made an odd couple of folk, and it made the children playing with sticks outside and poking at scorpion-holes uneasy enough to move their shenanigans into the nearest rickety wood buildings.

It was dead quiet save for the sizzle of heat that blurred the lines off of the horizon into unsteadily drawn wriggling mirages. The first drifter, the taller one, had large black boots that hit the earth with something so heavy you’d think you were hearing a sharp clang of falling metal. Each step he made– and most made bets that this one was a man from the wrong side of the tracks where they were watching at the saloon windows –kicked up a fine rusty powder at his feet, by virtue both of how long the road had gone without rain and how hard he was dragging himself across town, acting like a man half-dead from thirst already. No wonder, with the nonsensical place they were coming from.

The most striking thing about him was the head of hair on his shoulders. It shimmered in the bright heat beating down on his back, with the black hat on his head only being able to cast a sufficient shadow onto the topmost parts. Reaching almost down to his waist, the tips brushed in and out the shade of him with how he walked, and those of which were not darkened black glinted sharper– like polished silver when they caught the noonday glare. The rest of him was indecipherable; the man showed not an ounce of skin from the neck down, and besides his hair there was a muddy, deep red serape draped across his shoulders to his back.

The figure lagging behind him was a much more popular point of interest, as all the prying eyes could more clearly watch her face.

She did not look like the type of woman to be trudging around in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the clothes off of her back. Speaking of her clothes, they were much too fine for a trek through yonder desert. From the way her fabric hugged her arms it seemed that she was skinny as a young boy half her age, and the lightest breeze that could manage to breathe itself to life in the still, frying atmosphere looked fit to blow her over any second. Although her companion was dragging his feet, she was a few yards behind him at her unburned walking pace. The dust he was scuffing using his heels hung briefly still where they lingered, suspended in the air, and as such it was most likely a good thing they walked so far apart. Any closer and he would have caused road soil to cake into the fabric right above her ankles, onto the hem of her dress.

“I don’t like the look of em.” Mack clicks his tongue standing behind the bar.

“Suit yourself, I’m lovin’ the look of em– one of em, at least.” A rougher voice guffaws, leaning on his arm with his weight on the side of the shoddy, glassless saloon window. Someone had started a fight yesterday, so duly complying with the rule of no guns being allowed in the establishment, men resorted to their second best sources of entertainment, fists. During the midst of the whole bout, someone had thrown Sergeant Turley out of the now formerly-paned window, and with there not being any glassmakers in town they would have to wait for the next few traders to ship in before they even thought about getting it replaced. The man at the bar who’d clicked in disapproval clicks three more times, sharper with the sound, then picks up a glass to polish it with an old ragged cloth.

“You blind or somethin’? The girl’s probably been chasin’ that fella she’s with through the whole goddamn desert.”

“He looks like he’s got one foot in the grave far as I’m concerned.” The man grouses. He turns his palm into his pocket and fishes out a matchbox. It opens with a shuffle, and work-roughened hands pull out a single match to strike it on the windowsill. He lifts the pea-sized flame to the foot of his cigar, working his jaw to get the char even. The fire laves smoothly at the hemp.

“Ain’t gonna be long.”

The lady appears to speed up and the man appears to slow down, as if they heard the conversation. For a brief second the tilt of her head angles slightly towards that same windowless saloon they were staring from, and the shadowy pupils of her narrowed eyes blink at something before she’s hurrying off towards the half-dead man. She had a pretty face indeed, but there was no denying its strangeness– everything about these newcomers were strange to the townsfolk anyhow –after they saw her eyes head on. The narrow squintlike quality of them didn’t look to be from the dust and the heat alone but from the natural make of her features. They were eyes nobody else in town had, shaped the same as almonds.

Foreigner’s eyes, from farther over across the sea. If it dissuaded the rest of the townsfolk it did not dissuade the watchers in the saloon, however, and if anything it only made them more intrigued on how their visiting would play out. He stops completely and she’s finally caught up, standing at his side looking away from them to talk beneath his hat.

She smooths out the front lap of her dress, the material coarser beneath the slender digits of her fingers. That was the last they would see of her face for now, and the last of her dark, pretty black pupils.

“Would you make yourself look presentable? Everyone’s staring at us!”

…The damn bird’s chirping is the first thing Boothill has to listen to after she leans in enough to catch the near nonexistent shade he’s casting. That’s what she was worried about, then? Lookin’ presentable? Ugh. He wipes a gloved hand across his sweating forehead, the precipitate tinted with oil. Shit.

It was so hot his temperature-balancing systems were releasing some of his goddamn fuel just for the evaporative cooling on his synthetic skin.

“Ain’t there any good samaritans in this shirthole?”

“Is that why you’ve been acting like you’re on the verge of passing out?” June continues grilling him, her palm pressing on the side of his covered arm. She’s looking at him like an angry wife, god forbid, and they were in the middle of town where they’d both be made fools out of if this conversation found itself raised any louder than an irate whisper. The last hub of civilization over– which June had very much preferred until a few detective-looking folks had started sniffing around –they were almost discovered sneaking away in the middle of night thanks to their propensity for argument with one another.

“Aw, hell, birdie. Gimme’ a break.”

She would not.

Boothill moves his hand to the back of his neck, a distinctly human-like gesture of his exasperation. It wasn’t a part of their performance act, though; he’d repeated the gesture a hundred times in a similar manner where June would be prattling off about something or the other, like not drinking oil from her favorite mug. Or something about washing his clothes to get the smell out whenever he came into the apartment after a long mission. Or telling him to stop tracking in mud as thick as tar all the way from the front door, into the living room, and onto the couch. He could hear it blurring together in his head, record scratches between words. While she kept chirp-chirp-chirping away into his ear Boothill was staring blankly into the distance. Or, offering the man some more generosity as to what he was doing, he was squinting observantly off at the horizon. No other town for miles, is what it looked like.

“You have any other bright suggestions?”

“What did you think? That you’d collapse on the road and someone would pick you up and take care of you? With how hea– huh?”

June blinks. Her eyebrows unfurrow and her blabbering grinds to a screeching halt on the rails. She’d abruptly cut herself off, lips parted like her brain was lagging behind. To be generous to her, too, it was hard to have a steady train of thought going under the hellish boil of this heat. Boothill’s grimace of exasperation slicks into a grin when he sees the gears visibly turning inside her head. Clearly this was a prime opportunity for revenge.

“Aww, gettin’ real quiet now? Bet you’re just cranky ‘cause you’re hungry. Ain’t really mad at me, are ya birdie? Or else you’d still be sayin’ some–”

June makes a face. “I am an adult woman.”

Really? ‘Cranky ‘cause you’re hungry’?

Boothill, meanwhile, was quite pleased with himself. He’d clamped a hand over his mouth with his fingers working his jaw and his shoulders shaking from repressed snickering while he drank in her deadpan expression. He’s hunched over, other hand on his knee so that at least some townsfolk would think he’s hurling yesterday’s lunch from heatstroke instead of laughing at nothing in the middle of the street like an idiot. June pinches the bridge of her nose. She sighs. Boothill makes a hissing sound like a rattlesnake from how hard he’s trying not to laugh, metal of his body creaking slightly. She knew she was partially at fault for it, but they felt like two bickering teenagers rather than two grown people sometimes. Or maybe it was a universal phenomenon in which all adults were truly just tall children with too much freedom in their hands. Shortly, she puts her hands on her hips with a labored exhale. Even her own breath felt hot on her lips as it left her mouth beneath this sun. June tilts her head with a resigned frown.

“...Let’s just go inside.”

Boothill throws off the last traces of his suppressed laughter with a firmer shake of his shoulders. Like a dog shaking off water.

“Where? The motel?” He leans in irritatingly, jabs his thumb backwards over his shoulder. June leans away with tension rebuilding at her temples as he continues to speak. “We’re dead broke.”

June shoots him another deadpan stare. “Rob someone.”

To her surprise, Boothill chuckles and flicks her on the forehead. “Don’t joke like that.”

“One day I’m gonna think you’re bein’ serious, and then you’ll be gettin’ all mad at me again after I pull my gun out on some poor sap.”

She’s blinking, flinching backwards at the contact, and her jaw drops into a small ‘o’ from the sheer audacity. He’d chuckled– and it was because he was sure the damn bird was never going to be serious about it. June was the kind of self-flagellating evangelical that would rather suffer and starve to death on the street than ask for a moldy spot of crumbling wheat bread, Boothill knew that trait of hers intimately. In fact, it was part of why they were at a complete loss of money. That, and there was the matter of them having had to buy new clothes to blend in. If June’s wings weren’t pinned to the back of her head underneath the mess of her hair and that pretty blue handkerchief they’d picked out, he was sure her feathers would have already flared into a fan like an agitated hen’s. Boothill stares at the empty space where they should’ve been, lips slanting with an absentminded lilt. He missed the fluttering things a little. This way, she almost looked as normal as any other gal back home. But it wasn’t the time for thinking about home now.

The whole while he’d been staring at her, June had been at a loss for words. That’s how quiet she’d been; enough for him to have the space to think. She ends up pinching the bridge of her nose again and closing her eyes while turning away from him, other hand on her elbow. The halovian shakes her head.

“...The saloon.”

Boothill decides it's still funny to continue acting like a jackass. “And what’re we gonna do, sit there twiddlin’ our thumbs?”

“Yes.” She opens her eyes, eyebrows arching upwards. She’s rebuking him too matter-of-factly, the jut of her chin far too confident– too assured for his liking from that lone word.

“It’s better than being out here.”

…Boothill hated it when she was right. His frown shows his teeth. Sitting in a building with a roof was an undeniably better state of being than standing aimlessly outside baking in the desert sun.

When he hesitates, uncharacteristically quiet, June adjusts her hands from where they were perched on her hips to instead fold over her chest.

What the hell was he frowning about?

Her eye twitches in annoyance. A bead of sweat rolls down the side of her temple. And another bead of sweat trickles down her arm, accompanied by another one beneath the fabric of her dress, and… God, it was so fucking hot outside. Her arms felt sticky where they were folded on top of one another. This planet was nothing but cacti and sand and dust and dead trees. It was in some middle of nowhere star system, in some middle of nowhere galaxy– and now, where they’d crash landed thanks to an exceptionally poor combination set of negotiation and navigational skills, they were in the middle of nowhere down here, too. June’s default, neutral-looking deadpan face twists into something fed-up and taunting with the way the corners of her lips jerk into a grin that was not the slightest bit happy.

“Mister Boothill? Not wanting to enter an establishment with alcohol in it?” She starts, getting snappy.

The halovian follows it up with an overly dramatic flourish of her hands, pressing her palms to the flat plane over her heart. “Tell me it isn’t true–”

“I’m going to faint!” June continues on and on again into his auditory processors. Boothill groans.

“Oh, I can’t believe it–” She’s almost singing. He runs a hand through the unkempt mop of white on his head, moving up the brim of his hat. She just keeps going. “Don’t make me hope for such a thing!”

“Have you really changed? You’ve well and truly given up the drink–?”

With a last ruffle of his oily, sweat-slick hair Boothill rolls his eyes so hard the crosshairs inside his pupils flicker, and he has to put a hand on the small of June’s back when he starts walking just to be sure that she wouldn’t be mocking him the whole way up to the steps and past the saloon doors. “Oh, enough.” He scoffs, patting the base of her spine for good measure so he’d walk beside her. “I get it, I get it.”

The amount of sarcasm she’d slathered every which way over her exaggerated bit stung in his ears. It ticked him off in a kind of manner he couldn’t answer to. Because then if he’d answered it would prove that she was right– a second time in a row, and he hated the first times already. After he resists the urge to grit his teeth, Boothill looks down at his side, where the serial offender had gone rather smugly silent.

“Tch. Look at the guardian angel on my shoulder over here.” He drawls with his own retorting dab of sarcasm. Boothill looks back in front of him because he couldn’t stand seeing her self-satisfied little face. Like she didn’t drink herself…

“I really am an angel, aren’t I? Where would you even be without me?”

And she was still laying it on thick.

He could hear it inside his head, how she gloated over him the same as when they were arguing over something while sitting on her old, busted couch in their shared apartment (well, ‘shared’... more like Boothill invited himself in and wouldn’t leave). She’d have that exact self-satisfied, closed-lips smirk on her face with her eyelids drooping just so, and then she’d point at him, or laugh, or her wings would flutter up and down like a dumb fuckin’ canary, and then she’d say ‘haha, I win.’ Different star system, same annoying bird. His hand on her back tightens enough to crinkle fabric and he’s surprised she doesn’t slap it away– probably too lazy to lift another finger. As if to prove his point, June yawns and smacks her lips after they turn to walk up the creaky wooden steps of the town’s finest establishment.

Now, the amount of people didn’t unnerve Boothill.

There wasn’t much left in the world that could unnerve him as easily anymore; much less a bunch of no-name hicks with old whiskey on their breath and guns with bullets that would glance right off of his body even if they had the luck to fan the hammer and hit him square in the chest slinging all six shots. He wouldn’t use the term ‘unnerved’ for what he felt in a million years. He steps forward to nudge open the saloon doors and the sun on the floor changes where it had fallen over the dusty wooden planks in slats. Without thinking, he moves the side of his lips back, his upper lip quirks to expose his teeth– sharp, glaring as a butcher’s meathooks while he absentmindedly picks at what was probably leftovers of a bullet case between the gaps. June elbows him in the side and he remembers. He grunts. Not that he actually felt anything from the jab, but he’s frowning as he wipes his hand on his torn serape and regretfully closes his mouth.

No, what bothered Boothill was the eternal pretense they had to hide under. By grace and virtue of the humble town of Dirt being on a planet in a system that had never yet been touched by space-travel (save for washed up criminals who would go to the lengths of stranding themselves somewhere just to keep their blood debts from being collected), the locals had never seen visitors from beyond the sky. He could scarcely find any note of tech advanced enough to suggest that these people even had the ambition to dream of spaceships or the silver rail. At least it had seemed so in the little towns they’d had the displeasure of visiting so far. So it went without saying they had never seen a man of his likeness before in their whole lives– and if they’d seen his birdie tag-along without her wings pinned back, incorporeal shining halo above her head with her raven-dark feathers glimmering so black they were almost blue… He was sure they’d come running across lots to start praying to whichever God they believed in, dropping to the ground and begging on their knees. The thought made the muscles in his jaw tense– then they would get absolutely nothin’ done. Both their inbuilt proclivities lent themselves to naught but sand and muck in this kind of environment, when usually it would have helped them on the course of the Hunt. Miss Birdie’s abilities were still necessary, notwithstanding; though that was a matter to discuss in a different, less open locality.

His tongue picks at where his gloved finger had last tried. The bit from the damn casing wouldn’t come off. Boothill has to keep himself from making a rumbling sound like a growl low in his throat. Yeah, there it was– the word he’d been lookin’ for was aggravated.

This whole fucking affair was aggravating beyond belief.

“Hold on, son.”

Boothill raises an eyebrow, pausing mid-step.

An older looking man behind a wooden counter tilts his head towards a sign.

“House policy.”

In a thick, swirling, almost calligraphy-like lettering, the sign hung up on the wall said ‘Leave Your Guns at the Door.’

Before he could start something, June had already snaked her hand towards his side and pulled his revolver from the holster in all its pretty white-and-gold glory. It growls on the wood, sliding heavy over the countertop. For a town like this, it looked fancy– and not just fancy, it looked exorbitantly expensive, what with the beautiful embossing along the gleaming barrel and the silver ridges on the rear sight near the hammer. The crowning jewel, June would have said solemnly if the older man asked, was the fine metalwork of an eagle’s head on the grip. Not to mention how the trigger guard curved sleek all the way into the muzzle. Since he had not asked, she only stares at him with her eyes dark; there must be no stealing it. The man focuses on her eyes more than the gun when he stashes it somewhere under the counter. Boothill watches her open-mouthed in shock.

He takes a step up to her side and leans in closer to her ear. “Don’t forkin’ do that.” He’s scolding, voice like the hiss of a fresh stream over gravel. “Ya think I couldn’t hand it over myself?”

She’d fished his gun out so casually he didn’t know whether to be infuriated or impressed at the nerve of it. But June doesn’t even look at him. Or reply. June smiles thinly at the guy managing the counter, whose wizened white hairs were almost as shiny lustrous silver as Boothill’s. “Please keep it safe.” She chirps. As if he couldn’t feel any more offended, she’s turning and nudging him away towards the bar, smaller palm back on the bicep of his arm– or whatever the cybernetic equivalent of that group of muscles would be beneath all the secret-keeping fabric. He turns and walks anyway, but with how she was acting, treating him like that; it made him feel like a dog on a leash. That was mighty goddamn aggravating too. Things just kept getting more and more grating on his nerves. He hadn’t fuckin’ refueled yet, either.

The gunmetal-make outlaw trudges along with a sigh. No use scolding her about it now. His hand moves up to come through his greasy hair yet another time, as if there was any remaining chance of fixing its unkemptness. In the middle of all this internal tirade and external fussing Boothill’s voice comes out as a groan so tired he almost lets the slight robotic, static buzz of his words processing through Synesthesia Beacon slip.

“God. I need a fudgin’ drink...”

“...That old man was gullible as hell.” June ignores him to whisper mostly to herself, blank-faced, with so much blunt disrespect it nearly makes him double-take. She only ever started talking ill of people this way when she was genuinely cross about something. In his head, although he’d never say it lest divine wrath strike him down where he stood, he was still sure it was because she was starving. “Didn’t even ask for your ammo.”

Well, that must’ve been why she’d done it.

If things came to the worst sorts, his body was still impervious to low caliber bullets, and now he’d gotten to keep his ammunition thanks to June batting her lashes at some old fool who’s forgotten to shake him down any further because of a little attention. He supposed he still had the transforming gun in his left arm as a perfunctory failsafe, but using it willy-nilly would tear up their honestly bought clothes and blow their cover straight to high heaven. And they couldn’t do that. Not when there was no sight of any other livable settlement on the horizon that his cybernetically-enhanced pupils could spot for hundreds of yards. The realization that June pulled that stint with his gun for a real purpose made him feel a mite less taken aback, especially after realizing it was a strategic move rather than a move to piss him off. With Miss Birdie it became exceptionally hard to tell, and often some particularly well-crafted plans of hers served to work as both.

They come closer to the tables after a moment or so of walking, someplace towards the middle of the building where it allowed for the people on the second floor to glance down at the pair of them with certain discerning looks, and a few ladies smirk from beneath their fans at the sight of the new cowpoke in town who– although he was travelling with a lady himself –seemed not to like her much in that way, and in that subtle suggestion implied inside their heads that they would have a chance to get to see his handsome face up closer come the sweet kiss of nighttime upon Dirt.

Unfortunately for the ladies, as handsome as he was, at any rate he was still dead broke; and aside from that, taking off his clothes would betray his entire purpose. They would not be seeing a lick of the tall silver-haired drink of water they were eyeing anytime soon.

Speaking of, Boothill turns his lips inwards and swipes his tongue over the drying synthetic skin. So realistic it could get dehydrated… one of the smaller pleasures in his life that made him feel a little normal. Subconsciously, his dryer throat swallows around nothing. A drink.

“Birdie…” He rumbles, grimacing. June opens her eyelids wider at him.

“What?”

“Can’t you just, I dunno… Talk some sense into folks? If you get what I mean?” His hand slips into his pocket and finds a singular sterling coin. The flat pads of his gloved fingers toy with their last bit of money, impatient.

“No.” She was too much of a self-flagellating evangelical, as he had previously assessed. The bird could have the whole place too mesmerized to remember their own names with a snap of her finger thanks to those mind tricks of hers. What was a few drinks on the house that the bartender would have only conveniently forgotten to charge them for?

Boothill ends up leaving the last coin in his pants well and alone. On a planet like Penacony, for example, they wouldn't have been so strapped for change while trying to flush their mark out of his hiding burrows. Big frontier joints that shuttled thousands of interstellar visitors day-in and day-out used credits. And credit was different from cold, hard cash, that to him was an established fact. There’s a terse silence between the two of them. It was either she had nothing else to say aside from her outright refusal or she was too ticked off to have the energy to explain herself. Within that middling gap of conversation (or lack thereof) Boothill wonders if he should fish the coin out and flip it to gamble on which option it was. The height from the tops of his boots to the joint of his hand, his palm, and the ceiling– on the topic of the ceiling, it occurs to him that this here ‘finest establishment in town’ would be considered much less fine out of town. Cobwebs stuck to the old rafters, no doubt hiding a lengthy food chain of spiders or some kind of similarly-evolved alien fauna he would rather not become acquainted with, and the waxen candlesticks propped up on the chandelier bobeche and arm were unlit but half-melted. Reused from the last night over, and only set to burn when it was absolutely necessary. Called him in for a moment of reminiscing about that dive bar Miss Birdie worked at…

All that to say if he wasn’t masquerading as a plain-old good for nothing to hide that he was a literal killing machine, he could’ve tested the strength of the hydraulics in his fingers against the shittiness of the roof through method of seeing if it was possible for him to blow a hole in it with a single silver dollar.

“Do you know what I heard when we were leaving town the last time?” June mumbles, tugging at his sleeve to snap him out of thought.

Her words came out metered, slow. Compared to her earlier yapping she was giving off the impression of being hesitant to speak. It was a severe enough discomfort to make them pause in their aimless walking towards the bar (which they could not buy anything at anyways) and stand whispering near a large wooden post of scaffolding off to the side instead. Boothill leans his weight onto the wood.

“The rider that passed us that time in the trees. When we were camping, before the plains turned into the desert…” June explains.

Boothill’s lips quirk lopsidedly. This seemed a bit irrelevant. He huffs, drives his back farther up the scaffolding with a dismissive shrug. So?

“And what do I care about him?”

“You didn’t talk to him.” She got that right. He was busy keeping the fire they were sitting at from wheezing off into useless chunks of ash in a pit. That fella had looked like any other guy on the road that was leaving town, same as them. He’d found no reason to talk his ear off. Boothill figured June had only spoken to him to be polite. His expression crumples, then unfolds in a way that had both his eyebrows raised. She’d better get to the point soon.

“He said there’d been rumors going around, all the way back in Holiday.” One of the first places they’d been to after crashing themselves into uncharted territory.

“‘A man with long hair bleached white as the moon who could shoot six holes in your chest with his back turned.’”

The top and bottom rows of his teeth press tighter against one another.

“...And ‘a shorter lady with strange looking eyes that make you forget yourself.’”

June remembered it clear and cool in her mind as if it were a cloudless afternoon; that young man had laughed obliviously and went back on his merry way after thanking her for the chat, joking, ‘You and your buddy there look awfully like the two in that silly little rumor, ma’am. Have a nice night.’

“So why didn’t you make him ‘forget himself’, then?” Boothill grouses.

If word about the two of them spread too fast, or got too out of hand, their target might catch wind of what they were trying to achieve all the way out here. This was real bad. The poor bastard would go off running with his tail between his legs– and they’d have to start all over with tracking him down on some other distant planet that the Aeons didn’t care to glance over.

June looks at him like he’d just asked her why she didn’t hack the man into twenty even pieces with a hatchet.

“He didn’t even realize.” She says. Plus, he’d been kind, and it was altogether a pleasant conversation as one could have in the wilderness outside of town at night…

The outlaw scratches at the back of his ear, eyebrows pinching together. “You have too much faith in people.”

A loud thwack ripples through the air and bounces off the shoddy wooden floor to fall within earshot, and Boothill turns his head to the side over his right shoulder to see what the commotion is about. June, who is first of all clueless and second of all doesn’t care, only turns to look when she notices him looking, too; because how would she talk his ear off for scolding her about ‘faith’ when he wasn’t paying attention?

“I’m out.”

The man previously sitting at the poker table where the noise came from slaps his hand of cards back onto the wood, shoving the chair aside to make a swift exit.

Boothill grins, pushing off of the post and shooting June a look like he just can't stop himself.

…She would have liked to be the one to stop him instead, of course, but if it was poker, then there were bets. And wherever there were bets, there was cash.

“This is well timed.” Boothill slinks into the chair. There’s that smirk on his face that immediately tells June he’s about to cause trouble. He leans backwards on the rickety godforsaken thing like he was meant to occupy that specific space and time.

“You fellas don’t mind if I take his spot, do ya?”

With how Boothill was posturing it seemed that regardless of if they refused him, he’d keep sitting in the chair and being annoying until they had no other choice than to allow him to put a stake in. Not even his own stake, in this case– it was taking up the stake of the previous gentleman, who had abandoned his money from the sheer quickness which he had extricated himself from the game with. God knows Boothill’s pride wouldn’t have allowed for betting him and Miss Birdie’s last lonely coin.

On the other side of the table, the rest of the grizzled folks left playing share glances at each other when the newcomer reaches for the face-down cards, as they had only just met him and still were quickly becoming annoyed by the younger man’s overzealousness. One of them huffs. The second has his eye twitch.

“If’n you play his hand.”

By the time the words had left the old cowpoke’s mouth Boothill was already glancing at the faces where he turned them up with a bend of his fingers. Here is an exact identity of these cards as told by the later bystanders: The ace of spades with a heel mark on it; the ace of clubs; the two black eights, clubs and spades, and the queen of hearts.

Boothill whistles, folds them back face-down.

“I’d rather not.”

A sharp, buzzing, melting feeling drills into the side of his head. Boothill grits his teeth together beneath the tight line of his lips, feigning nonchalance. The feeling’s familiar voice pierces his ears with a sound that’s neither physically present or something from inside his own mind. What are you doing?

Junebug. He thinks. You’re a real nuisance.

The sensation pulsing behind his eyes thrums with energy, rolls around, then jerks to start throbbing at his temples as if she was offended. What’s wrong with the cards?

Boothill blinks once, hard. Get outta my head. Now.

“You seen ‘em. You play em.” Says the man with the twitchy eye.

He didn't know where June was, whether she was standing behind him, sitting at a different table or in a corner farther off– but she was still traipsing around inside his thoughts. She doesn’t answer when he tells her to git. And you say I have no idea of personal space?

Shut it. What’s wrong with aces and eights?

She’d poked around enough to find that they were aces and eights. The next time Boothill speaks there’s an unintended gruffness to his pitch thanks to that needling psychic tune-in. His voice comes scratchy and low like a growl.

“I ain’t anted.”

The third man who had been silent for the most part pipes up. “The other fella anted.”

There her chirping voice was again. What’s an ante?

For someone who lived on a planet where the primary habitable area was a giant hotel which let you rent dreams you could gamble your life away in, June was exceptionally clueless. Boothill brings his palm up to his face and drags it down his synthetic skin. At least he wasn’t overheating so bad he was sweating oil now– but this was really testing his patience in a new, uniquely engineered kinda way.

His hand drags down enough to slip off of his chin and he shakes his head, arm dipping slightly behind him to push off of the backrest of the chair. The surly man with the twitchy eye repeats. “You seen ‘em. You play ‘em.”

Boothill stands. The chair makes a scraping sound with how he shoves it a little to the side to make space for his own swift exit. He sounds unbothered, self-assured. He pats dust off of the top of his thighs right below his belt.

“And if I don’t?”

There’s another grating-scraping noise when the man across from him rises to his feet.

“Play them cards, pretty boy.”

The surly, twitchy-eyed fella was holding a gun. The table– the entire establishment –falls silent.

Boothill.

He ignores her. A knife-toothed grin splits his face. The pulsing in his temples wasn’t Miss Birdie’s fault now– and the expression on his face was, being the second of its kind in the day, a grin that was not the least bit happy.

“Pretty boy?”

His hand flexes at his side, itching to click into place. The well-calibrated digits of his mechanical fingers concealed beneath the leather gloves feel as antsy as if they were flesh and blood. Boothill had it humming in his wiry veins. The revolver chamber in his left arm tingled, like he still had intact nerves rather than sensors.

“You that yellow-belly who skipped town far as Holiday, ain’t ya?”

The man pulls back the hammer with his thumb, slow.

“Long fuckin’ hair. Mouth with teeth like a coyote.”

The metal click fills the quiet of the whole saloon.

“Heard all you do is hang around with that lady o’yours.”

It makes his eyebrows knit together. The two moles at the corner of his left eye move with the crinkle of his muscles at the lateral commissure; June hopes none of the bystanders would catch how his pupils turn scarlet– how the tiny crosses at the dead center his eyes would shift to hone in with a particular focus. Boothill nearly spits in response. “Is that right?”

His assailant raises the muzzle to point square at the center of his chest.

“Heard all you did was buy fancy new clothes before ya got cold feet.” He adds.

His eye had stopped twitching, both narrowing into slits. He’d seen the way the gold glinted all the way from the countertop. “Fancy clothes and your fancy fuckin gun, huh? You runnin’ from something?”

“Ain’t gonna matter now.”

It was making June anxious. Whether she was consciously aware that she was still tuning or not, Boothill could feel the jackrabbit pulse of her heart in his own throat. She was doing as awful as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers. He was probably making it worse by staying so uncharacteristically silent. But apparently she trusted him enough to let him handle the situation on his own; if she was well and truly fearing for his life, she’d have done something to the poor guy’s head from all the way across the other side of the room.

The man chuckles. Boothill leans back.

“Hope your little lady can get you a pretty pine box to match.”

The next second the gunshot sounds there’s an accompanying clunk of a wood plank being stamped on– and the man’s pistol shoots straight upwards into the soft underbelly of his jaw, his brain splattering onto the cobwebbed ceiling.

He drops to the floor with a dusty thud, pistol still in hand.

Boothill tilted forwards where he’d put his feet up and dug his heel onto one of the loose wooden planks that made up the tabletop. The flat of his forearm rests on his knee, plank remaining diagonally pointed towards the ceiling where the contents of the formerly ill mannered poker player’s head had gone. His mouth was a thin, easy line. At his forehead his eyebrows nudged higher. Boothill watched that man drop dead like he was looking at roadkill.

“I ain’t ever been to Holiday. Some folks really gotta rein their drinkin’ problems in.”

He lifts his heel up and plants both feet back on the floor, patting the jut of his hip.

“...Now, what happened to the music?”

Frankly, June wanted to throw up.

There’d never been any music; she was just so disconcerted that she’d tuned out of his head, and now that the pulse of her mental symphony had left him, he’d mistaken it for the absence of music. The man at the piano to the side of the bar had been sleeping since they walked in.

At least Boothill relocates where she’d been idling all the while– he snaps his head to the side to see June kicking the piano stool and the man wakes with a sharp jolt. An unusually sharp jolt that makes him sit immediately upright. Was she reachin’ for him?

Sure enough he’d started fingering at the keys with a grace and elegance a just-woken drunk couldn’t have possibly achieved on their own. She was rattling around in his skull, alright. Boothill shakes his head. He was strung up like a puppet playing like that. God rest the man’s soul. June would use her tuning for silly little things like annoying him when he was fixing for a game of poker or playing music for a saloon full of rakehells and bawds, but not on practical things like helping them scrape by with some spare change. And not even on other littler things he wouldn’t have been averse to…

Like getting him a drink for example.

Boothill wets his lips. He was never going to let her live that down.

The man she was puppeteering without as much effort as even a flick of her wrist hits the note right before the cue of her voice, and Boothill catches the music instantly. Something they’d played together once. Him on the guitar, her with her pretty singing, without the puppeteering or mind tricks or tuning shenanigans. Only playing around a campfire on a moonlit night. Crickets had chirped at the back of her somber, smooth birdsong, the words leaving her lips like cool clear water. He has to keep himself from swallowing instinctively at the thought. If he was still flesh and blood he’d feel the apple of his throat bobbing up and down, the press of his tongue at the roof of his hard palate. The absence of a feeling like that had long since become normal; as was the same with the absence of a number of many other feelings he’d forsaken and yet had come to miss when all was said and done.

　“I was five and he was six, we rode on horses made of sticks.”

　“He wore black and I wore white. He would always win the fight.”

Boothill readjusts his hat. His thumb and forefinger pinch at the thin, dark leather brim. They’d had to pawn that guitar weeks ago. A real shame. He’d liked the fella that had lent it to them.

　“Bang bang– he shot me down.”

Without blinking he’s walking to the side of the dead man, crouching over the corpse. The revolver remained in his hand. It looked like a gun he’d seen a hundred times before. A model that every planet with a similar make to this one seemed to develop at some point or other in their history. The more widely accepted term, the one he’d come to see in an interstellar museum that displayed arms from ‘uncivilized’ planets and left a bad taste in his mouth– it was the Colt Single Action Army. A six-round cylinder revolver with a four-inch barrel.

　“Bang bang, I hit the ground.”

Back home, the word for it was Peacemaker.

Boothill shifts where he’s crouching. He hesitates, hand pausing for a millisecond at his waist before he reaches for the man’s pockets. He sure was thinking about home an awful lot since they’d dropped in here.

With Miss Birdie’s song as a backing track to his illicit activities, it was easier for him to run along with another distraction that would dissuade him from daydreaming. She was annoying, sure, and if he had a wider array of choices she would be the last birdie in the world that he’d pick to go on trips like this with how mouthy and dramatic and demanding she could get– but she was the only bird that really tolerated him. Hell, she let him live in her house whenever they weren’t hunting some poor sap, as long as he’d bring her some food she liked. He could hear the words in his mind before she uttered them now, retracing the memory of that night in the plains. Voice like daffodils and warm milk and the last whisper of someone wishing you well before bed.

　Bang bang, “–that awful sound.”

Here, he’d learned that the word for it was Frontier.

He wondered if that was what it was truly called, or if his Synesthesia Beacon had just picked the nearest equivalent in a language he could understand and went with that. Boothill pries the gun from the man’s stiff, dead fingers. His pockets didn’t have anything of note inside. Nothing but a lighter and a pack of old tobacco and hemp cigars. He’d taken them. But it wouldn’t dig the two of them out of the financial hole that they’d ever-so-gracefully tumbled down into.

The rest of the saloon was so enamored with June’s singing that they don’t notice how he swipes the entire pot off of the poker table. Boothill slips the Peacemaker into his previously emptied holster as a temporary solution. He files the cigars and the lighter in one pocket. He puts the money in the other; now his one silver dollar had company.

He rises to his feet, watches his partner standing at the side of the piano. It was scary, a tad bit– though he would never admit that birdie of all people could be frightening, she was, sometimes, regardless. It was unsettling that as he listened to her sing her heart out for a bunch of no-name drifters and unfortunate souls he didn’t know when she had switched to her mind’s voice from the spoken word, or whether she had switched at all. Maybe she was singin’ in both.

Again he could almost touch that moment of the two of them sitting on fallen logs near a fire. Where he’d taught her the lyrics, played her the sound of the accompaniment. Boothill saw the words on her lips but felt them pressing slowly, softly– almost tender at the dips and holes of his skull.

The red circles behind the crosshairs of his eyes fade to a dull grey.

She looks back at him with those dark, pretty black pupils.

It wasn’t a bad feeling.

　Bang Bang,

　my baby shot me down.

　 ⠀

#Fics to read later