This short Lone Ranger interview has me feral, it gets unhinged about halfway through, and at the end the interviewer gets a goddamn hug 🙃*chewing through my restraints*
NOTES: So in my continuing tradition of craving the weirdest crossovers ever, I haven't been able to get a Lone Ranger/Last Unicorn verse-meld out of my head. I'm especially fixated on what would happen if Butch Cavendish encountered a (very unfortunate) Old-West-era Lady Amalthea. (Books-based Amalthea btw, though no shade to the movie!) What follows is my first attempt to play around with this idea.
He comes to her once the sun goes down. Creatures of night, brought to light—but the Carnival is far away, and no one announces him, save the clink of spurs in caliche. Nor does her fire's cast illuminate anything she hasn't already seen, by the unsparing noonday. More so even than the black of his coat, Butch Cavendish remains garbed in dust.
Grit rimes his skin, etches cryptic patterns over the pores of nose and cheek. Almost starker than the scar pulling up his lip like a burst seam. His eyes gleam meltwater-pale, incongruous in this parched land; the feather and snake's rattle tied at his temples should seem just as out-of-place. Not because they don't belong to this land, but because they are gross ornamentation. Torn from their rightful bearers, used to self-aggrandize what is still a man, however driven by dark forces.
Yet Amalthea looks at him, and she sees more. An image that is not only the onlooker's projection, as Mommy Fortuna's best spells always are. It would be easy to envision a crow, or any other carrion-feeder, with the black coat's tail swinging in time with his swagger. Instead she sees the specter of some devourer, older than the distant ancestors of those creatures whose parts he wears in his hair. Older even than what she was. A beast, neither strictly reptilian nor avian, with an appetite matched to primordial vastness. Scales under its eyes, quills bristling at its throat.
She shakes her head, and the image clears. But not the sense, or the smell. Unwashed flesh, rank meat. Heart's blood.
"Brought you a present," he says, kneeling beside her fire.
When he speaks the flames' glow winks back from his teeth, silver and yellow alike. She's been around humans enough, in these times, to know how they can mock each other for a crooked smile alone. For damaged incisors, for a broken or jutting bite, as the though only upstanding mortals have teeth set straight and white. The man in front of her may not be anything like upstanding. But she cannot imagine ridiculing his mouth. One does not laugh into the maw of a predator, who despite yellowing, aging, breaking, has managed to survive.
"But first, let's have you stretch a mite, hm?"
Butch unsheathes the Bowie knife strapped to his thigh. Holds out its length to her, cutting-edge up, and there is mocking in that rasp of a voice. Sparking through the air, like the reflection of light down the blade bared. She doesn't flinch, because it would be futile. There is no way for her to flee, nowhere to go. They've staked her bedroll in the middle of their camp, within a few strides of any one man. Bound her at wrists and ankles, the simple rope terribly adequate to the task, where once it—and they—could never have hoped to hold her.
She understands what he means for her to do. Yet she's tentative, lifting her wrists to the knife. It isn't fear that makes her move the rope's loops against the blade so slowly, though Butch must mistake it as such. He snorts his impatience, grabs her fingers to still them. (She does flinch at that, in face if not in body; but he's only looking at what he holds.) In two darting strokes he parts the fibers. Leaves her hands free, lets go with his own.
"Better be less delicate with this." Into her lap he tosses a square of hardtack, followed by a waterskin. It's advice she's ready to take, scrambling at the skin's cap. Tipping back the bag to drink deep, the lukewarm, half-stale liquid still a gift not to be squandered. Amalthea catches at any drops she spills, licks them from her fingers—which are numbed, and not just from disuse. Then she breaks a corner of the hardtack off between her teeth. Those are strong, even, and the kind of clean an ad in a lady's magazine would esteem. Not that it matters, to her. They are human teeth.
For the first few swallows, she doesn't care that Cavendish watches her. Doesn't think of him at all. It's only when her pinched stomach begins to ease, if just by a hair, that she wonders. Is he grinning, perhaps, amused at her desperation? But when she glances up at him, his stare is barren of even sardonic mirth. What it contains is—something else.
"Knew you weren't no boy. No girl-child, neither. That wizard's plumb daft as they say, if'n he thought putin' you in those clothes would hide a damned thing."
His eyes rake over her where she sits: the faded gingham worker's shirt, torn at the hem; the patched breeches rolled up at each knee. She remembers how he'd ripped off her hat, earlier this same day. How he hadn't hooted and hollered, seeing the long hair tumble down; though all around them his gang had been doing that, and worse. Freak, one of them had hissed, seeing the color of her hair, of her gaze. Send 'er back to that carnival in pieces— But Butch appeared to believe she was worth more, intact and unharmed. For now.
"You ain't so skinny as Skinny says. One glance, I knew exactly what you are."
Did you, Amalthea thinks, marveling, hoping—as strange as it would be, and as perilous—that maybe some part of this human body, he recognized, he knew for the true form beneath. Did you really?
He looks back into her face, a leer, a snarl at the ready. But whatever he glimpses there, it drains that readiness away. Replaces it with a straight frown—or as straight as it can be, with only one corner of his mouth properly turned down.
Butch returns his knife to its sheath. Leans back on his heels, still crouched less than an arm's length from her space.
"What I can't figure, though, s'why anybody'd keep a woman like you must'a been kept. Rich men's daughters don't got feet like those," jerking his chin at where hers rest in the dirt. Unblemished, save for this day's bruises and scrapes, but calloused on the soles. "Their legs don't got muscles for running neither, lean as you are. But those hands," and now the smirk surfaces, in his tone if not on his lips, "ain't no homesteader's. Eat my hat, if you've ever darned a sock or butchered a meal one day in your life."
"So who wants a woman that's high-class, but half-wild?" Almost musing, the way he asks. He is looking at the skin of her wrists, chafed from the ropes, streaked with grime—smooth where the water began to trickle down. She thinks he does not expect any reply, until the meltwater eyes flash upward. Seize at hers, turning sharp as the steel had in his hand.
"What would Haggard want, with a woman like that? They say he's colder'n a witch's tit, dead below the belt, and maybe above it too. Hasn't so much as sniffed after any kinda tail in years. Won't matter to him that you're clean, that you're virgin."
That last word, spit out, somehow more contemptuous than whore would've been. The way he pronounces it, like it's just a cheap diversion—something to amuse for an evening, perhaps. But not worthy of longer attention, much less lingering appeal.
The thing is, the whole camp falls quiet in its wake. Like they've all been listening, waiting, even more keenly than she knows they already were. And yet their baited breath, their collected interest, doesn't begin to frighten her so much as what she sees in him. Their leader, the man in front of her. Who pretends this is only one more detail to his scheme, an afterthought, really. When oh, she can see that it isn't.
"What's he mean to do with you, that he cares if I hand you over unspoiled?"
