Chapter Text
It becomes a half-formed thought only once Eli speaks of her face.
“Some men look at it,” Eli replies, answer drawn out only by her continued questioning.
There is a sudden stab of fear, that maybe Death resting in her bones has decided to wake up from his slumber and make himself known again in rotting sores and decomposing flesh. Is there a wound bound to fester on her face?
Cornelia almost lifts a hand to check. But the one mercy her life has shown her since that day is that her illness has not come back. So it is not that.
After the moment of surprise, in that heartbeat before Eli speaks again, Cornelia thinks maybe it is something to the timbre of his voice, a hint of sadness. The rules here are the same as in England – is that behind the look in his eyes? What would happen – has happened so far – if someone were to come upon them, a Pawnee and a white woman, as more than just traveling companions?
Cornelia has no more time for supposition. Eli gifts her the compass, kicks his heels into the horse’s flanks, turns his mount around masterfully, and is off in a cloud of Kansas dust.
-
Cornelia has no time to dwell on it further between everything that goes wrong after that, and in fact only remembers the conversation when they are deep into the prairie, where rolling waves of grass slowly give way to scrub and hills.
They have been riding all morning and her horse slows temporarily when Cornelia forgets to spur it onwards. She is loathe to admit it, Cornelia realizes as her horse comes to a stop without her to direct him, but she is exhausted.
With a nicker and the crunch of dirt under hooves, she realizes that Eli’s horse has stopped next to her. He extends his hand, and thoughtlessly she takes it.
In England it can be cold and dreary, but rarely is it hot. Out here, in two hours the land can go from frozen to aflame, with no shade or water in sight. She takes the weather as well as she can, but a hat can only help so much. The layers that protect her from the sun's rays weigh hot and heavy on her.
Cornelia registers the difference offhandedly, through exhaustion and thirst and hunger and a burning that keeps her going that has nothing to do with illness.
Though they hold her gently, Eli’s hands are rough, testament to a life lived outdoors and as a soldier. They are not, however, a man’s hands. Though she has never married, she has been helped down from enough carriages to know the difference between a man and a woman's hand.
A callused thumb slides to her wrist, breaks her introspection as Eli pronounces, “It’s warm.”
Cornelia hums a noncommittal answer, looks at him, sees him for the first time.
There is concern on Eli's face, which is alarming in someone so stoic. But the same bravery and handsomeness is still there, softened only by her own knowledge of the woman underneath.
What a life Eli must have lived.
“I’ve just overdone it,” Cornelia says softly as she draws back her hand. She takes the flask of water from her side, takes a sip that’ll keep her going until they find the next stream, and digs her heels into her horse’s sides.
-
It is in Wyoming that Cornelia confirms it.
They are close around the fire, raw from talk of homes no longer there when Eli speaks.
“I had a wife,” he says. But it lacks the finality of his way of speaking, and he looks for once as if he has something to say that does not come easily to him.
Cornelia admits she unfortunately knows little of value of the various cultures of the plains. She has only been informed of the ugly misconceptions the white Americans hold. Scalped and smashed babies, men stuck full of arrows like pincushions, white women taken as unwilling brides to red men. And women warriors, 'Amazons' dressed like men and able to kill like them, too – Cornelia had found it almost amusing that that was the most frightening thing to many of the homesteaders she’d encountered along the way. What would Doctor Freud have to say about that?
Eli’s dark eyes are watching her, and if there was another woman in Eli’s life, before her, then perhaps there is a chance.
Cornelia forgets – somehow, blessedly – and reaches out as any woman would to her beloved, meets Eli as he leans in to kiss her.
Eli’s touch is gentle, so gentle that it nearly breaks her heart.
After the first off-centre kiss, Eli’s lips find hers, and she understands now all those ridiculous passages in books about dashing heroes and rescued damels that she had read as a girl and a young woman before her life had changed irrevocably.
Cornelia reaches up, hand at the base of Eli’s head, tries to draw him closer, fingers ruffled through his spiked hair, fingertips touching the closely-shaved sides. And Eli too shoulders closer, a hand on her elbow now, and Cornelia leans into the caress, gives herself over willingly, eagerly to the strange and not unwanted ways her body moves, pressing against Eli, her own breath loud in her ears between kisses growing ragged.
It is only when Eli’s warm hand slips to her waist that she jerks away, though not for any of the reasons Eli thinks she must be doing so for.
He does not know. And even if he weren’t to care, she has not yet even bared her pitted hands before him – how can she bare her body?
“I can’t,” she says, the words tight in her throat as she scrabbles to her feet and away into the brush.
In the dark, Eli does not chase her.
-
Melmont is dead and now she can rest, Cornelia thinks dazedly from her place on the ground in Eli’s arms, as green and optimistic as the day she first stepped foot in this country.
Of course, there is no time for rest.
As soon as she is able, they are on horseback again. Eli must go one way and she must go another, Sheriff Marshall reasons, clear-headed.
If her long-dead heart could break one more time, she’s certain it is doing so now.
She has never been ashamed of her tears. What does Sherriff Marshal know, she wants to ask. Have they not just proved that anything is possible? That they must be somehow touched by magic? Eli, too, has not left yet, uncertainty plain in his lack of movement, his gaze towards her.
Cornelia blinks tears away, hot as her first fever as they fall from her lashes, dismounts and walks towards Eli through the wavering blur of them. There is the sound of Eli dismounting, too, the clinking of horse tack and the crunch of ground underfoot, and Sherriff Marshall haranguing them in the background.
She closes her eyes as she’s enveloped in Eli’s arms, shielded from the world and its injustices just briefly by his bright red blanket.
Eli breathes in deep, kisses the side of her head, says something in Pawnee.
“Get moving!” the sheriff hollers, but Eli does not move.
“Have to tell you something,” Eli says instead in English, ready now, and Cornelia buries her face deeper into the crook of Eli’s neck, breathes in and holds tighter, takes in the feel of Eli against her as his chin rests against the crown of her head.
“You don’t have to," Cornelia says, the same amount of love and acceptance there as when Eli spoke the same words to her. "I know it already.”