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Chapter Text

One spring, on a long trek eastwards, they came across an abandoned log cabin in the low foothills of the Rockies. There was a dug grave and a rough marker out back, but no sign of violence or distress - Goodnight imagined a sudden illness, the survivor heading back out from the failed frontier. Still, if the place held ghosts, they were quiet ones. A sweet stream ran down one corner of the plot, burbling over stones. There were split logs piled on the porch, not yet ruined by the winter. A stubborn garden plot had overrun its careful planting in defiance of the unforgiving mountain soils. Inside, the elements had not yet intruded.

Let's camp out here a while, he said to Billy, and they did, though not wholly out of choice: a late snowfall caught them unawares that first night and extended their stay. They were grateful then of the split logs. Billy climbed up on the roof to check the chimney so that they could light a fire by which he then had to be warmed from his exploits, a task which Goodnight took seriously.

They found a tin bath propped against one wall, and despite the effort involved it was a luxury that Goodnight could not resist and which Billy indulged him, as he did in all things eventually. Goodnight washed Billy's hair - about which, Goodnight noted, Billy did not complain. He let his head drop back into Goodnight's hands, closed his eyes when Goodnight raked blunt nails across his scalp. Spluttered a little when Goodnight doused him with clean warm water to sluice away the suds, to which Goodnight laughed and kissed the top of Billy's sleek wet head.

Clean as a whistle, he said, and settled for a spell with his cheek against Billy's, his arms draped over Billy's shoulders and trailing over his broad wet chest. He was getting damp all over the front of his shirt and his sleeves where they were rolled up over his forearms and he didn't much care. Later he would lay the shirt out before the fire and take Billy to bed. For now he kissed Billy's shoulder and the side of his neck and the vulnerable bit of skin behind Billy's ear, soaking the memory up like heat to be banked against future cold.

Years later Goodnight would remember this stay, especially when he was drunk. Remember the cabin? I wonder if it's still there. Sometimes he would go so far as to suggest a return trip out that way, although it never happened, and though Goodnight would not admit it he knew it was because he didn't really want to know if the cabin was still there or not - what it might mean if it was, whether he could bear it if it wasn't.

Chapter Text

The bridegroom drove across their path in a buggy as they rode into town.

"Bad timing," Billy said. The town would be full of jubilee and feeling close to its own people: not the atmosphere to be drumming up trade for their quick-draw competitions. "We ought to move on."

"Well, don't be too hasty," said Goodnight. "Five nights out in the wilderness makes a body ready for a night under a roof."

"You just like weddings," Billy said, and Goodnight grinned sideways at him and said, "I confess, I do."

The folk were disposed to be welcoming: the young bridegroom was well-liked, the young bride pretty and sweet, and Goodnight effusive enough in his praises of each to make up for Billy's disinclination to niceties. They took the last remaining room at the inn and installed themselves in the bar.

"Did I ever tell you that I was once engaged to be married?" Goodnight said. It was still early enough in their acquaintance that such revelations could be made, long enough in that Billy could still be surprised by them - though generally he tried not to show it, knowing that half the amusement for Goodnight lay in the attempt to shock him.

"No," Billy said. "You didn't."

"Well, I was," said Goodnight. "As a matter of fact I may still be, as I don't recall ever formally releasing the good lady from our engagement."

Now Billy was curious. "So why didn't you marry her?"

"Well, I never went home." Goodnight drained his glass and grinned. "Stayed out here and took up with you."

Billy refilled Goodnight's glass from the bottle, judging him to be in a bright enough mood for it.

"What was her name?" he asked, knowing that Goodnight wanted to tell him.

"Marie-Louise. She was the daughter of my father's business partner. Just acres of lace and frill, pretty as a porcelain doll. She gave me a lock of her hair in a handkerchief the day I left."

"What happened to it?"

"Well, somewhere between St Louis and the close of the war I reckon I had direr need of a handkerchief to staunch something than to wrap up a bit of pretty brown hair."

Billy looked at Goodnight, wondering what the story had been meant to accomplish. Possibly he had just been put in mind of it by the day, by the bridegroom and his pretty bride; perhaps Goody had seen an echo or a ghost of a life unlived in the boy's stunned face, like a man thunderstruck by his own capacity for joy.

Chapter Text

Goodnight rarely dreamed of Sharpsburg, which was the damndest thing, for in the ugly waking dreams that sometimes took him at an unexpected sound - of a gunshot or, hell, the scrape of a chair across a floorboard - his whole body would become rigid with the fixed conviction that it was back there in the heat and disaster. And that was strange too, because Goodnight did not remember ever being scared back then.

He had been a prodigious shot since childhood, and what he remembered of that time was the extraordinary clarity that it brought him: a clean focus, the winnowing of all his extraneous parts. His mother had been continually expressing shock that such a garrulous and troublesome child as he had been could muster the patience for it. But he could lie for hours in hides and blinds, hunting that distillation of self as much as bird or beast. When he was older he performed trick shots to small audiences around the county, which did not bring the same sense of satisfaction but compensated for this by a substitution of money and a little fame; thus he made a name for himself and the army laid its hand on Goodnight's shoulder and said, come along with us, son.

The first time Goodnight shot at a range the company sergeant removed his hat and sent for the colonel. Goodnight shot the course five more times while the colonel stood with his hands on his hips and directed a private to move the targets back and back across the open field. Goodnight made every one. The targets were straw dollies, man-height, some of them draped in stained jackets. At the end of the fifth go-around the colonel, who spoke the King James as a mother tongue, looked Goodnight up and down and said and the lord sent an angel, which cut off all the mighty men of valour, which gave Goodnight the heebie jeebies. So Goodnight became known as the Angel of Death before he had ever put lead into another human. But that came soon enough.

The first time Goodnight sighted a man and pulled the trigger, it did not feel like shooting at a target. It felt like -

Once, in boyhood, he had shot an owl and his nurse had whipped him nearly senseless for it. She held to a superstition that an owl was a bird intimate with death, and that to shoot one was to invite his notice. While the welts of her whipping stayed raised on his back he was plagued by nightmares of the owl, which perched in the trees of his dreams and looked at him like it could see right in to all the places in his soul where the light never shone, and knew them. The dreams passed, yet it was this that Goodnight thought of as he saw through the rifle’s sight the man fall like a cut-string marionette.

He found that he could not shoot men with clarity. It wasn't like shooting small wild things in the woods, and straw targets didn't crumple when they were hit. Maybe there were some that could do it but for Goodnight it required an access of emotion to kill men and keep on killing them, and for him it was anger. Once he'd discovered it he tended his anger with the care of a blacksmith tending his forge, until he could sight a perfect stranger down the scope of his rifle and hate him with such a clean and passionless white heat that he did indeed feel like god's own angel of destruction, and yet back at camp he could sit around with the men regaling them with tall tales and whooping them at cards. He felt untouched by it until the war was over, and found that what he'd been using for kindling was in fact some manner of interior scaffolding; that what he'd taken for a clean burn had left him as blackened and unsound as an old burnt-out barn.

Then he got drunk, and was fixing to stay drunk til someone did him the favour of a bullet in the head. He was making inroads to this end when he met Sam Chisolm.