Archive of Our Own ^beta

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"Whe-where...?"

"Clinic... lie still,or I'll tie ya down."

"Wh-why..?"

"You got hit by a wall - I said, lie still."

"Whaat...?"

"You tell us. We're gonna have a little talk once Nate lets you outa here about your fondness for dynamite - you nearly got your fool self flattened."

"How...?"

"Long? Too long, three damned long days."

"Who..."

"Noone else was hurt, Ez. Nate's restin', 'Siah's prayin', JD's watchin' the jail and Buck's watchin' him. Vin'll take over here come nightfall. Now stop askin' questions... go ta sleep."

{sigh}

"Quiet... that's right.... good. You always did talk too much, Ez."

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Damn peacock ain't so dang'rous. Neither's that ladies' man.

Larabee, hell yeah, he looks right menacin' - him, Tanner and the mad priest. But that little dandy -? I could break Standish like kindlin'... well, iffen it weren't how dirty he fights. And the guns. Damn lot of guns.

And Wilmington? He's just a big easy-goin' dog of a man - yeah, a dog for the ladies and a dog in the easy, grinnin', stupid way he lopes 'round town.

Big dogs, though, they c'n bite. Bite hard.

Those two ain't dang'rous, not till the brawlin' starts. Then they're downright terrifyin'...

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Can't stand Maude, myself. She's a looker all right, but there's that meanness in her face, and no soul in her smile.

Hell, an' she can't stand me, either. She's real polite to my face, but I can see it in her eyes, hear it in her sugar-sweet voice.

But give us both our due, we hide it well. I'd burn in hell - and she'd burn all the money in Frisco - before we'd let him know it.

She's his ma. I'm as close to brother as makes no difference.

That makes us family, like it or not...

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"This... is Emma Dubonnet," Josiah said, big hands light and loving on the old daguerrotype picture.

Your pretty little lady... Nathan couldn't help smiling. The actress in town, who Josiah had acted the fool over, was aleady a fading shadow, and her younger, sweeter self would stay fresh and bright.

Good.

A strange thing, memory; his own spectres - overseers, whips, death - never quite went away. But now, in this wild little town, it was like the warmer, gentler, love-tinged memories, few as they were, were growing stronger than the bad.

Maybe because there were friends to hear them...

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You won't damn well let go, and I need a drink.

I don't know what to say, Ezra. You never wanted trust before, when I woulda given it ten times over. Given it where my life, our lives were at stake... as I would now, right now.

But this money... I saw your eyes, heard you talk. Felt your greed... so I can't give you the trust you ask, not in this.

If I give it to ya, we could damn well lose you.

If I don't... I could lose you.

So let it go, an' leave me... to drink.

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"Hey, Ez, y' okay?"

"But of course, Mister Wilmington... why would you assume there is something amiss?"

"Oh, I dunno. Mebbe the way you skooted 'cross that roof like a darn alley-cat on hot tin, where the varmints we're supposed to be - what's the word you called it?"

"Apprehending?"

"Nah..."

"Subjugating? Q-quelling? V-vanquishing? "

"Nope, none of -"

"Squash like the h-heinous insects they..."

"Yeah, that sounds 'bout right. Where they c'd see ya clear as day. An' mebbe the way y sorta jerked -"

"M-mister Wilmington, Ah might vellicate or flinch, or in an ill m-moment recoil, but Ah do not jerk, Ah have n-never -"

"Yeah, ya did, Ez. And..."

"And?"

"There's that big old bloody hole in your sleeve."

"What hole? I n-never noticed a-a..."

"Ez?"

"Oh ....................This h-h-hoooooole?"

"So ya don't look real okay to me... Ez, Ez, y'not gonna faint on me now? Ez!"

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Ezra again: and he looks okay and says he's 'unincapacitated', but Nathan has learned not to take chances, and f'sure not to after hearing what went down in the saloon tonight and seeing him carried in, half-senseless and babbling about 'another uncalled-for altercation'. Pupils, pulse, quick check of all limbs and if there's any blood...

Nathan breathes out his relief and starts composing the rant that will be expected and Ez deserves to be awake enough to listen to, about damn-fool cheatin' gamblers and keepin' of the way of maddened mugs and marks and is the few dollars made worth all this, and next time Nathan won't be so willing and ready to patch his fool sense up again...

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"Looks 's if you're right, Ez, 'nuthin wrong with you but a couple'a bruises, but y'gave me a right scare there. Sorry 'bout the yellin', and ruinin' y'pretty shirt tearin' it off like that, guess my huntin' knife weren't delicate 'nough to cut it dainty-like, but I needed to check y'all weren't hurt bad... quit the belly-achin', your pants are still in two, okay mebbe three pieces, okay mebbe shredded a bit but better them shredded than you.

"Hell no, I didn't panic too much, y'got other shirts but as the boy's all tell ya, we ain't got and we don' wanta need another Standish."

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"Easy, Ezra easy, stay still and hold on, it's gonna be okay..."

Though it sure don' look anything like okay right now. You're tryin' to hold him still, pressin' down with one hand on the hole in his blood-soaked side (please, please not anywhere fatal, you can't lose him, you can't lose any of them) while you try to gently - gently but that sound he makes - prod at what has to be a broken leg, broken in two places you think.

His face is whiter than that fancy frilled collar of his, and smeared with his own blood from your hand, but you can't be botherin' with that right now, there's so much more blood on your hands now as you press down with both, afraid he'll bleed out before Nate and the boys (where the hell are they, where the hell are they?) get here, and you can't pray, you haven't been able to pray for years, but if you though it'd help Ezra, you'd pray to every god in heaven and history... because please god, any god, you can't lose any of them.

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Ezra's mother left the next day, talking quickly and brightly about other places, other chances, other schemes, other scams. She didn't ask him to come with her, and he'd long ago learned - as a boy grown jaded and lonesome far too young - not to ask her to let him come. Being abandoned was what his boyhood was, after all.

But this time, watching Maude's delicate hand wave a dismissive farewell out of the stagecoach window, and listening to the rumble of wheels fading down the dirty main street of his ramshackle home, he didn't feel that old lonely sting: there were people still here, six of them, and somehow he knew they weren't about to leave him behind.

This time, and in a way that she would never understand, Maude had been the one left behind.

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"I was five," Ezra said quietly, gazing steadily into his half-empty whiskey glass.

The others, who'd been sharing childhood memories along with their drinks, all stopped and looked at him. There was something in his voice. Something odd.

"Maude started teaching me to cut cards early, and to pickpocket and... well gentlemen, you can probably surmise how it developed. I was by accounts a beguiling child, and like all beguiling children I sought to be good, to please my mother."

His friends were silent. Even JD, the youngest, felt the mood shift and chill like a darkening night. Ezra never let the cracks in his charming, ever-smiling armor show. This was a small level of trust, but for Ezra it could be everything.

They could not screw up, they would not screw up, not this time.

"And I was good, I assure you. Most proficient for such tender years. I was hardly ever discovered, and when I was, even at that age I was mostly able to finagle my way out of punishment. That was what childhood was, after all: Maude's was such, and she taught me as she was taught."

"Mostly." It was Chris who echoed the word, in a voice as soft as a desert wind. "Not always."

"Not always, Mister Larabee." Ezra threw back the last of the whiskey. "And no childhood lasts forever, after all."

"Didn't she protect you?"

"How could she?" And his own voice was dead, dust-dry. It hurt. "She was nevah there."

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It's gettin' dark, the seven of us are stuck in this godforsaken old excuse of an abandoned shack, and as usual Ezra is the one takin' up the only excuse for furniture here that ain't in pieces; he's sprawled all over the most ramshackle, moth-eaten excuse for a sofa this side of the Pecos, somethin' and the rest of us have to bunk on the floor.

I'm watching as Nathan hovers over him, checking that goddamn' bullet hole for what must be the tenth time; as Buck an' JD squabble in what they think are whispers over who makes beans an' bacon more temptin' for an invalid (neither of 'em do, but try tellin' them that); as Vin is too busy watchin' Standish to realize he's put twelve extra sugars in the coffee pot; as Josiah reads from some ratty and dead borin' book he found, in a deep voice designed to lull the invalid and everyone else; as Ez shifts, breath catching, mumbles somethin' about damn fool, bullet-not-proof heroes, and settles back to sleep.

They're all damn fool heroes, yeah. And I know now, as I watch them, they're one and all of them mine.

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Chris stared down at his injured seventh with his best 'figure you're dead if you're lyin' scowl. "Let me get this straight, Ez. You got y'self poisoned -"

"Not very badly, though," Nathan added thoughtfully.

"Shot -"

"Shot at -" Josiah corrected, "the bullets having missed our brother, for which we thank the Lord -"

"- An' killed Ma Conklin's potted as-aspo-aspidisteree thing instead," came from Buck. "That butt-ugly plant in her window."

"- Then bludgeoned by masked wannabe assassins -"

"They only bludgeoned his hat," Vin consoled. "Wannabe's all they was. Good thing too."

Chris glared around at his fellow lawmen, finishing with the patient who was lying in the clinic bed and looking as long-suffering as he knew how, and that was very long-suffering as they all knew. "All that, an' all you can think of is that mebbe just mebbe someone didn't like bein' cheated at poker?"

"Why Mister Larabee," Ezra contrived to looked even more wounded at the suggestion than by all the poison, shots and bludgeoning, "did I say anything about cheating? 'Bested' was the word I distinctly recall using."

"Yeah," JD said cheerfully, "but y'meant cheated."

Ezra looked round for sympathy, got none, and hid his head in the pillow with a doleful moan.

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Seven of us...

A gunslinger with too much grief and temper, a soft-spoken, unruffleable, damn lethal with a rifle tracker, an all too faulty preacher with an understanding god, a healer tempered into understanding by cruelty, a ladies' man who really loves the ladies and near everyone else, a kid trying too hard to grown up too soon, and a gambler who's proven way and away too sensitive under that thick skin he shows.

Seven of us, we don't fit all that well, but with a bit if pushin' and shovin' and yellin' and threatnin' and even sometimes fistfightin'... we make it work, because each other's all we got.