Word Count: 1,736
Archive: DarkMagick.net, Apollymi’s Grimoire, and Archive of Our Own. Anyone else wanting it, please ask first. I’ll probably say yes, but ask first…[endsection]
Teasing Vasquez over the numbers they had each killed was easy. In fact, over the past few days, it had been a bit of engrained habit… which was damn good because Joshua wasn’t exactly the most involved in the ongoing conversation right now. At least, he wasn’t up to date with the one going on around him. No, his mind was back at the end of the street.
In his mind, he was back to back with Vas as they picked off Blackstones as they appeared on the street. He was putting bullets in any of the bastards who came too close to his brother. He was thinking all over again that his brother didn’t need to be involved in any of this mess.
More than that, he still didn’t think that Goodnight should have been stationed on the street. If you had a sharpshooter, especially one might be doing said shooting with a muzzleloader rifle, said sharpshooter should be in a place to do exactly that. Said sharpshooter should not be part of the show of force, such as it was, when you numbered only seven.
In his mind, he was standing over his brother, all but ordering him to take the damned shot. He was feeling the anger rip through him, hard and visceral, when Goodnight made the shot at last… and deliberately only wounded the Blackstone bastard. He was staring back at that horrible blankly pleasant look Goodnight often wore when he was cooly dealing with strangers, people he thought weren’t worth his time. He had hated that expression when they had been running together, and he hated it even more now, seeing it turned on him.
He flipped the tin star abandoned by Bogue’s purchased sheriff over and over again in his hands. The movement was something he could do without putting any damn thought into it, especially given how similar it was to playing with his own deck of cards. It left him too free to think about the blood covering his brother’s hand and dripping into the hard-packed dirt of the street… and the cold look Goodnight had been wearing as they’d settled on the porch of the hardware store… and the way he had been wiping blood off his arm as Miss Emma sent the good townsfolk off to examine their souls.
As the street cleared, Goodnight pushed himself to his feet. “Well, I don’t know ‘bout anyone else,” he declared, “but I could use a drink.”
Without waiting for an answer of any sort, he stalked right behind the post Joshua was leaning on next to Chisolm. Goodnight even suited his words to action by heading immediately into the saloon, Rocks trailing every step he took. Because of course Rocks was. Of course.
God damn but did a drink sound really good right now, he thought direly, shoving that star into his vest pocket. Goodnight wasn’t going to be too happy about him following along behind him like a puppy, like he hadn’t done in years, but he didn’t really want to give much of a damn about that at the moment.
In the meanwhile, though…
He whistled, one long and crisp long note, and only a few seconds later, he could hear the familiar sound of pounding hoofbeats. It look less than a minute for Jack to come tearing into town… because that horse only went at anything less than a full gallop if Joshua was on his back to slow him down. What actually was surprising was that he’d brought along a friend: that flea-bitten grey he’d heard Vasquez call ‘Diablo’. Whether that was the horse’s name or a comment on his personality, Joshua didn’t know. Wasn’t sure he wanted to know either.
And as always, Jack slowed down to a stop with only inches to spare before he would have barreled Joshua over. “You little shit,” he declared affectionately, scratching the horse beneath his forelock and around his bridle. “You do realize you ain’t actually a dog, right?” If Jack did realize it, the over-affectionate nuzzle that nearly knocked Joshua over did little to dispel the notion. “And I see you’re making friends. Diablo, right?”
“Si, güero.”
He didn’t exactly jump out of his skin at the sudden sound of Vasquez’s voice… but it wasn’t far from it either. Once he was fairly certain his voice might be something close to level, he shot back, “And has anyone ever told you anything about sneaking up on a heavily armed person, Vas?”
The Mexican shrugged nonchalantly. “Nothing I listen to.”
And yeah, he had to snicker a bit at that. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
Vasquez leaned against the hitching posts closest to his own horse and crossed his arms over his chest. “I might be wrong, güero, but I think this might be the first time everyone else is drinking and you’re not.”
And there was a point there, one he wasn’t even going to try to deny. “Probably so,” he agreed, moving around to take the saddlebags off Jack’s back. They would probably be safe enough there, but he made a policy of not trusting townsfolk if he could help it… or too many other people for that matter. Strange, though, that he couldn’t think of any reason not to do this in front of a known outlaw. “Reckon some of the folks in there drinking don’t particularly want my company.”
“This matters?”
He couldn’t help the laugh that was damn near startled out of him. “Not really, no. I’ve got things need dealing with before drinking though,” he answered with more cheer than he honestly usually felt these days. “Not to say I don’t trust our new colleagues with my money, but…”
For a long, long moment, Vasquez didn’t say a word, just stood there with one eyebrow raised in a silent question. And really, the question itself was obvious. There was no actual need to ask why he was trusting Vasquez when he wasn’t trusting any of the others. And it was a question he had asked himself just a couple of moments ago.
“Oh, shut up,” he retorted with another laugh, and this one he ended up sharing. And that was fine.
Personally speaking, Joshua was thinking he had called it: no one looked particularly pleased when he and Vasquez came downstairs at the hotel and joined the others around a large round table for the most uncomfortable dinner Joshua could remember attending in years. Hell, he couldn’t remember one half this awkward since before the War, before he left Louisiana in fact.
Of the ladies dishing out the food, he recognized Miss Emma. There was another girl, around the same age but apparently jumpier than their employer and a lot nervier, more apt to stare at the seven of them and run the minute she was caught at it; he thought he had heard Miss Emma calling her ‘Claire’ or ‘Clara’ or something of the like. Teddy was leaning against the bar, somewhere over near the kitchen, but at least his attention seemed to be limited to his own meal and not the seven men in front of him.
“Like being in one of them damn zoos,” Joshua grumbled.
He had claimed one of the bedrooms at the end of the leftmost hallway upstairs, and that was mostly thanks to the fact it was the one with a floorboard willing to come loose under his stomping, making for a good place to hide the money he’d had in his saddlebags. Vasquez had gotten a great deal of amusement out of that before taking the time to settle in the room next door. That left one room left in that section of the hotel, with one entire hallway of rooms on the right hand side remaining still to be picked from.
When they’d come downstairs, there had been two seats left at the table, between Rocks and Chisolm, and before he’d even had a chance to get annoyed, Vasquez had slid easily into the seat next to Rocks, leaving him exactly one place left if he wanted to join them… and oddly enough, he did. Maybe it was petty to want to be further from Goodnight and Rocks, but right now, he was hungry and he would take what he could get.
“Fame is a sarcophagus.”
Sometimes he wondered if Goodnight even thought about what he was saying before he actually said it. If that was the case, he’d honestly be surprised. All the same, though, that was damn maudlin, even for Goodnight, as their sister Colette would have said, and it was just automatic at this point in his life for him to chime back in with, “Do you get those out of a book, or do you make them up as you go along?”
Goodnight made this odd twitch, one that he honestly couldn’t remember ever seeing his brother do before and that he tried to cover by stuffing more food in his mouth. “I’ll try to use one syllable words from now on,” he shot back. Despite the tone—very obviously biting and curt—the words themselves could be…
No, Joshua was going to just going to assume that was meant teasingly, because apparently his mouth was going off on its own without consulting his brain… and apparently, it didn’t much care for his brother acting all grumpy and morbid. After all, completely without any input from his actual mind, he was already answering, “What’s a syllable?”
Goodnight made a sound that was reminiscent of a very grumpy child being told he had to sit still: something between a huff, a sigh, and a squawk. If anyone had asked him before tonight if such a noise was possible in a grown adult man, he probably would have denied it. Trust his brother to prove him wrong. And trust his brother to start turning that unattractive shade of puce he’d done once upon a time that had meant he was ridiculously embarrassed. If that was still the case, he couldn’t imagine what it was the older man could be self-conscious about.
But then Red Harvest was making some comment in his own language, shoving his plate of food away, and the back and forth between Jack Horne and Sam Chisolm distracted the conversation away, at least long enough for the color to leave Goodnight’s face. If there was going to be this kind of reaction every time the two of them spoke, the six days until Bogue came back to kill them all were going to be a real hoot.
[section=Footer Notes]18 February 2017I feel like I need to make apologies for how short this section is, which is weird to me, because it’s still a fairly good length. We’re closing in on halfway through what’s already written. There is still over 32,000 words written but not posted, and that’s not counting The Early Years, the letters and journals we’ve completely written out, and the “what-if”s we’ve played with.
~Adora[endsection]