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Django had met many presumptuous, brutal, and ridiculous men in his life, but none of them were as ridiculous as the man to whom he owed his freedom.
For this was a ridiculously polite man with a German accent, a horse with manners and a grey suit, that always looked freshly taken out of the closet, even when its wearer had to ride through the desert for weeks and bathe in streams. This ridiculous German enjoyed boasting with big words in front of hillbilly, trigger-happy men and remained unfazed by any display of gun violence. Not even having a gun pointed directly at his nose seemed to disconcert him. Probably because it happened so often that by now the seriousness of the gesture simply passed him by.
This man was called King Schultz, and in the first twenty-four hours that Django made his acquaintance, he gave him clothes, bought him a beer, and made a deal with him as if they were nothing more than businessmen. At first, Django didn't quite know what to make of the dentist - Dr. King Schultz, German dentist in search of slave traders in the Texan desert - but he clearly was not to underestimated. After all, he had taken out the Speck Brothers without much trouble. And he did so with nothing more than his words, a gun, and his modest but arrogant confidence in being able to wriggle himself out of any situation. But when he paraded Django through Daughtrey on a horse, took him to a saloon blacks weren’t allowed in, and had the owner running out of the door, screaming for the sheriff, Django knew the dentist had to be crazy. Especially after he shot that sheriff wordlessly in the street, calmly sat back at his table, finished his beer and treated the infantry at the door, as if he were invincible.
But every time Django caught himself thinking that Dr. King Schultz was an arrogant fool who would find an early grave, he proved him wrong. After all, a madman could never have as many victories to show, as he did. For a whole winter, he showed Django what a bounty hunter he was, and what a bouncy hunter Django could become. He helped him hone his shooting skills, how to slip into various characters, and between sending telegrams to judges, gathering information about their next target, hours of horseback riding and the daily building and dismantling of the camp for the night, he still found time to teach Django how to read and write.
But before all that, the first thing he taught him was the legend of Django's wife.
On a cold desert night, they sat around a campfire with warm canned food in their hands, only in the company of their shadows on the rocks around them and their horses, and the Doctor told Django in a reverent voice of princesses and dragons. With his finger he drew circles in the air and his words drew circles of hellfire in Django's head, and as he spoke of how the hero Siegfried saved Princess Brunhilde, Django could feel the weight of his armor on his own shoulders.
King Schultz gave him stories, knowledge, clothes, food and a portion of his own salary, yet in his presence Django didn't feel like he did with other white men. He didn't feel beholden to him, nor did he feel as if the Doctor's gestures relegated him to a place in an invisible hierarchy - even if his choice of words all too often made it clear that they were from two different worlds. It took some time for Django to understand that they were equals. Maybe not in the eyes of the world, but when they rode through knee-deep snow or silently carried the heavy bodies of dead men behind them, it was always side by side, and that meant something.
King was a friend.
Someone who recognized Django's penchant for the dramatic - but who wasn't always aware of his own - who treated him well, and who would tease him without actually using hurtful or demeaning words. And when Django rolled his eyes at one of King’s fancy speeches, he never got angry with him. King made it easy for Django to accept his friendship and sometimes even forget what the world looked like outside of their time together. If only for brief moments, when the mountains on their route were particularly majestic or the stars were particularly bright, so that King would pause and get Django to admire the beauty of nature with him. Sometimes these strangely beautiful moments were thanks to festive delicacies, like apples with honey roasted over a fire, which the two would happily burn their tongues on, or even cake at a colleague's cabin.
But their time together wasn't just solitary togetherness under God's vast skies, the two of them had a job to do after all. A job that Django quickly came to like. King had once called him a natural, and what had initially been a comment at Django's lucky first kill, became truer and truer with each job. He was at least as fast and precise a marksman as King, and together they painted the winter of that year red. Django felt a tingling satisfaction in burying bullets in white skin, and King didn't scorn him for it. Occasionally even, when Django would listen to the last gurgling of a fat, cursing criminal before putting him down with a crooked smile, there was something like a proud glint in King's eyes. And when Django would wrap himself in his blankets that evening and let the smell and crackle of the campfire carry him away to sleep, he felt freer than any piece of paper ever could.
But the fire couldn't keep away all of the cold.
Some nights he could swear that the scars on his back complained of the cold, while the cruel sound of whips snapping haunted his dreams, and sometimes the memories of chains around his ankles and muzzles on his face found him in the most random and carefree moments. He didn’t tell King of the painful ghosts in his bones, or that although he liked King who had never done him any harm, Django sometimes felt bitterness at the sight of his bright face and impeccable suit. Some things just could not be said out loud, even between friends. Django felt no desire to say them out loud anyway, for once he was reunited with his wife, he hoped to bury all those heavy thoughts and memories and eventually forget them altogether.
He regretted that Broomhilda never really got to know King.
The man had not left Candyland with them, but although he had said he had no intention of dying in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, he had seemed oddly content at the moment of his death. It was as if he had finally turned the last page of a novel whose ending he had long known. Even so, Django mourned King and the risky sacrifice he had made for the freedom of his friends. A few German words in Candyland and the back of King's horse, Fritz, were all Broomhilda would ever share with the deceased, but every time Django made her smile by making Fritz bow his head for her, it felt as if it was King who made her smile. And though he knew he could never tell Broomhilda the story of her namesake as rivetingly as King had done back then, Django intended to try.