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Mercenary work took a man all sorts of places.
Of course, he was given the freedom to be choosy about those places. When a holodec displayed a job that would take him a stone’s throw away from Bellerae, Texas, he could have declined it. As a matter of fact, initially, he was quite stalwart that he would decline it. No interest in reopening old wounds. A hand gloved in scuffed and sun-faded leather initially went to dismiss the offered job until he hesitated.
Route 66 had once been a tourist attraction. Then the Omnic Crisis had all but flattened it and the Diamondbacks–fitting the name of their cold-blooded compatriots–had slithered into the cracks and made their nest there. And then, she had come and changed everything.
Just like she had come into that cell next to him in the Bellerae jail and changed everything. She had a way of that.
It was August. It was hot. But Route 66 had always had that little festival in August, and he’d be damned if he wouldn’t use the excuse to see how the place held up this many years removed. He knew that she had no disillusions that he was dead, she knew better. She was smarter. Frankie had probably pulled God knows how many records investigating the current whereabouts of their contumacious companion after he had vanished into the hands of the enemy forces. Enemy forces that became ally forces.
He remembered the first time he saw the Arbalest emblem stamped on a piece of steel in the hands of a terrorist. He remembered that time as he flicked ashes from his cigar and rose from the table he sat at. The job wasn’t particularly highfalutin or lucrative, but it would string him through to the next one. That’s what mercenary jobs did.
And it had enough of a window that he’d be able to attend the annual Bell County Heritage Festival that always was thrown in the hottest part of the year.
Maybe the stand that made those corn dogs was still in business. He really, really hoped so.
˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗
“You a regular sharpshooter, ain’t ya, mister?” All braces and acne the boy was, he couldn’t be more than fifteen years old, out here working for a paycheck to take some girl from the nearby Bellerae Academy on a date. Or something equally benign. What was it like, to be these normal people, living these perfectly prosaic lives? He’d been that, once. He’d been that awkward teen with a girl that made his chest feel all kinds of tight.
Shooting games were all the rage at the festival, the spillover from Bellerae and the Arbalest name still stamped heavy on their heritage. He hadn’t looked much into what had happened to the gunsmith line since he’d been busy working elsewhere. The last he’d thought of it was when he saw their stamp on the barrel weilded by a man who had done heinous things.
Entirely too large and entirely too unwieldy was the stuffed horse that was passed across to him. The little girl with her tight blonde pigtails and denim jumper skirt and missing front tooth had been staring at it for way more time than a kid her age usually had the attention span to. It was to her that the giant stuffed animal was handed off, resulting in a squeal as she ran off to show her parents. He just tipped his hat in their direction.
“Could say that.” The toy pistol had long been passed back across the waist-high wooden counter with a sloppily affixed sign. Not far away, the teenager was busy setting up the targets that he was half-surprised hadn’t been glued or otherwise rigged. A bullseye was a bullseye. “You take care, kid.”
Food stands had, over time, been replaced with food trucks. Few faces were familiar. He didn’t know if that was disheartening or comforting; undeniably uncanny. It was like walking through a childhood home after it had been redecorated by a new family. The same. The same, but everything was a little bit different; the photos on the mantle weren’t family anymore, and it wasn’t home. It wasn’t home in the way it had been. It was just a memory with a fresh coat of paint.
Time had faded the sign but it hung now on a mid-tier truck, the face behind it probably a daughter who happily served familiar fried fare. It tasted the same. The soda was still made with syrup and mixed with a long spoon as it was handed across, and bright eyes stared just a little bit too long at him as he tipped almost too generously on the holodec screen.
“Y’ act like a local, mister, but I know most folk what come through on the regular. Ya from another part a’ Bell County?”
“Well,” as the biodegradable straw was put into the top of the cup and the plate sporting two of the best corn dogs and smattering of crinkle-cut french fries was taken by his mechanical hand, “you could say that. Take care, miss.”
It was the same memory, but with a fresh coat of paint.
The naked, suspended bulbs came on around dusk. That was when he planned to leave. The best way to get around this part of the desert was still a hoverbike and there were plenty of places that rented them. Turns out, if you were willing to cough up the price of the bike as a deposit, they didn’t even make you put down a name. It was a dull, gunmetal grey. He’d picked one that was a dull, gunmetal grey on purpose. Perfectly nostalgic, like the carnival games and the good-natured workers that peered at him just a bit too long as he drank the old-fashioned carbonated drink and the taste of the corn dogs that had not changed their recipe in as long as he remembered, with the ketchup that was just a bit on the vinegary side of the spectrum.
He had every intention to return to the bike that was parked in the impromptu parking area denoted by white strings and reflective orange rectangles until he caught a glimpse of that dress.
It was white in the way sunlight was: tinged with gold and just a bit too bright. It sat off the slope of her shoulders with red stitching on the lace and a black, black choker. And a black, black hat. And black, black boots.
Red, red stitching. Like red, red lipstick.
He should leave. He knew he should get up from that picnic table as some of the folk around set to slinging some hay bales around the edge of a large square piece of wood, the dance floor for the evening. As they hauled out a jukebox that was likely upgraded to be fueled by powercells so it didn’t need to be plugged in. As someone talked about how they were so happy to thank everyone for coming out to the Bell County Heritage Festival. Maybe a mayor, or whatever city head there was. All he could think about was that dress that was white in the way that sunlight was white as she nursed a beer at a table on the other side of the area that would soon enough be turned into a dance floor.
That same acne-faced kid from the shooting booth hesitantly asked a girl who he could just tell had shot up a little too fast so her gingham dress was just at her knees when it used to be below them to dance. She acquiesced with a brace-faced grin. Kids allowed to be kids.
Imagine that.
She was laughing at some joke that he wasn’t in time to hear, that red, red lipstick and her hair snow white. Not the same white as the dress. Not a warm white that glowed like the edison bulbs that buzzed criss-crossed over the dance floor, but a cold, snowy white. Swiss snow. She’d never seen Swiss snow.
How strange to think: now he was more worldly than she was. The pretty canary was out of her cage but hadn’t flown much further than the front yard; this mangy, flea-bitten dog had been drug across every state and most of the countries to boot, the choke-collar leaving its pronged marks in his throat.
He could tell in carmine eyes she wanted to be mad. That the laughter died in her throat and she was on her feet fast enough that the skirt floated in a self-created wind. She cursed him. She cursed him and threatened him and made grand gestures that were enough to draw some eyes. But not enough that it was a ruckus. Not enough that it was going to disturb the joy around them. Give the people some peace. Let them dance beneath the hum of naked bulbs to a jukebox that their grandparents had probably danced to.
Let the kids be allowed to be kids.
“I’ll be outta town by sunrise.”
She would have beaten the tar out of him if they weren’t here. It hadn’t been on purpose. He had expected to see her about as much as she had expected to see him. Her balled fist merely placed pressure against the chest plate he wore beneath the draped serape, her eyes assessing the metal that now lay where his left hand was.
Her eyes asked what happened. His, crinkled and sun-kissed, didn’t give much of a reply.
“‘Course you ain’t stayin’,” was a knife to his gut. Hot, and then cold. Twisting. “You never stay.”
“I didn’t want to make trouble,” the mechanical hand curled around her elbow to cradle it, an action she rapidly recoiled from. His brows creased beneath the broad brim of his own hat, concealed by the shadow cast by humming bulbs. “Job brought me through. That’s all.”
“Then why’d you come up to me, like some sad-eyed, stray dog?” Grit teeth. Perfectly lined and perfectly white. Had the heiress ever endured a period where her crooked teeth were forced in place by the finest orthodontics money could buy? Her nails tapped on his chest plate. Accusing. “Coulda just tucked your tail and run off into the sunset and left me alone. After all you did, you think you can just – show your face ‘round here and…”
“I’ll be–”
“Gone by mornin’! You said that part already!” Indignation. She stamped her heeled boot on the friable sand at her feet. “Which is why I’m askin’ why you even bothered to come up to me and act like you got any right to…”
“Ask you to dance?”
She was slack jawed, all kohl-black eyeliner and pretty red lips and pretty red eyes. It wasn’t easy to render her speechless, but he had. A thousand emotions, likely one that the shrinks that he’d had to talk to for periodic exams back at the headquarters could lay out bare like a dissected frog. As for the gunslinger, he couldn’t name a one. They were a school of minnows flickering beneath a stream shielded by an overhanging deciduous folia. Silver things, moving at the same time at once and separate.
“... Ain’t nobody asked me to dance in a long time.”
He held in his mouth: Not since I left? But he swallowed it, strangling it under the taste of vinegary ketchup and over-syruped soda. He wasn’t here to insult her. Hell, he wasn’t even here to remind her of what they’d lost. He wasn’t sure why he was here, other than the fact he wanted to dance.
The hand that was extended to her was cloaked by that sun-faded brown leather that had handled a toy pistol with the finesse he had wielded his revolver, both where she could see and where she could not. A hand that had ended lives and saved lives and a hand that had once, long ago, let fingers lazily lace with hers on a couch that had squeaked a little louder than they would have liked when they lost their virginity after months of flitting around the act. And they’d laughed.
It had not felt like that big of a deal then. Looking back, it still didn’t. It was an unconscious thing, like air in the lungs and a beating heart. Being with her had been as natural as breathing from the moment she was hauled into the cell next to him with mascara-streaked tears on her face and a torn school uniform. She’d been just as pretty to him then as she was in the white-like-the-sun dress and black cowboy boots before him now.
She wasn’t sure. She was visibly unsure until the old jukebox that had been upgraded at least three or four times–they could have gotten something new, something nicer, something that was more in line with the times but there was something about that old jukebox that just made it special–started the first few, sultry notes of “Tennessee Whiskey.”
He remembered it.
She remembered it.
Neither of them said anything about it, but the opening chords took them back to sitting on the edge of the cliff with the cherry red bike just a pace away. He’d found an old, bent, beat up guitar and remembered how to play. The song he had played was “Tennessee Whiskey.”
Her hand still fit in his just the same way that it always had. Her fingers were longer, slender, but calloused. The first time their hands had touched, they hadn’t been quite so calloused. They’d been soft from the life of a rich girl, but not completely soft. There was a roughness to them from the way she had held a rifle. How she had shot a dozen bottles and targets holding the Arbalest rifle that she probably shouldn’t have had. Like she shouldn’t have had that bike with the lev rims that she crashed. He remembered her telling that story, and he remember laughing almost until his stomach hurt.
A couple of heads turned as they walked to the dance floor, as he lifted her by the waist to place her on the other side of a hay bale instead of walking to where there was an opening. She rolled her eyes, and he smiled at her. Her umbrage melted away like snow under the hard-beating Texas sun. Swiss snow didn’t stand a chance in the desert.
“I can’t stand you,” she spoke, his mechanical hand falling onto the curve of her hip. It had been years. Years, years since he’d seen her. Since she’d seen him. Those bodies that had tangled awkwardly, gangly limbs not quite grown into, bodies not quite filled out fully into adulthood, had matured. The curve of her hips had set in properly and he couldn’t help but notice it. Not that he hadn’t changed. Gone was the lean and lank form that had helped found the gang. In its wake was the build of a soldier, a man whose body had been pushed to the limit, who had developed muscle and a million other things.
But that smile was still the same, and he knew it still had the same effect from the way her face colored just slightly. A little lopsided. Most of his expressions were.
“Y’look nice.”
“Don’t you sweet talk me.”
“Can’t a man just give a compliment?”
♪♫ You're as smooth as Tennessee whiskey,
You’re as sweet as strawberry wine.
You’re as warm as a glass of brandy… ♫♪
There were a million things to say. There were a million things to say but they were flecks of dust in the sunlight, appearing and disappearing. Instead, he thought about her. He thought about the warmth of her shoulder that he was able to feel, even through his gloved hand. What did she think about? He wanted to ask, but he didn’t. He just extended his arm with her hand in his, twirling her on the dance floor. A layer of lace-trimmed poplin sat under the skirt, barely visible, giving it shape and volume. The heels of her boots clicked against the wood, and she laughed. And she smiled.
And they were those awkward teenagers again, not sure what to do with how they felt. Too many late nights at Cutthroat Trout’s with liquor they weren’t old enough to drink–but nobody asked questions there anyway. (He wondered, for just a moment, if Cutthroat Trout’s was still open. He’d almost be surprised if it was, but more surprised if it wasn’t.) The first time he put a hand on her hip and pulled her against him. The first time that she blushed.
But they weren’t teenagers anymore. They were adults, with baggage and trauma and history. He only wished that made it facile. It was almost easier when they were kids, like that acne-faced teenager and his dance partner with her dress she had outgrown. He spared them a glance.
To have been allowed to just be kids.
“Like that dress on you,” as they faced one another again, hand back on hip and shoulder. They fell in line, the steps of simple slow dances. It cinched in at her waist and fell mid-calf, fluttering with lace. “I never thought you were one for dresses.”
“Yeah, well, I never thought you were one to run off and work for the government,” she barbed, and he didn’t wince. He probably deserved it. Hell, he probably deserved it twice over, seeing as he had done just that. “... What happened to your hand?”
The prosthetic fingers tapped idly against the curve of her hip. “That’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you some time.”
“I thought you were leavin’ before sunrise. Got a feelin’ you won’t be telling me many long stories tonight, cowboy.”
♪♫ I've looked for love in all the same old places
Found the bottom of a bottle's always dry… ♫♪
“Frankie and Bez still together?” He tried not to look too hard at the way her red-painted lips sat on her face. Even in the blazing desert sun, she managed to keep her makeup impeccable. She always had. But he knew what she looked like without it, too. He’d woken up next to it a time or two, and she was just as pretty.
She moved closer to him. She moved closer to him, and closer to him, and her head almost rest on the linen of his serape edged in yellow designs. A lifetime ago, she had been prone to pilfering his clothing, more than once sitting and drinking coffee in little more than his shirt. They hadn’t been quite as oversized then as they would be now.
He let himself entertain how the light brown shirt he was in today would look draped over her filled-out form. He didn’t imagine anything else.
“They’re gettin’ hitched soon.” Her arms rest around his neck, fingers tracing the tips of his unkempt hair. He was due for a haircut. He’d get around to it eventually. “Don’t want to make a big deal out of it.”
“I remember a certain girl that didn’t want to make a big deal out of her eighteenth birthday,” he jested back, hand moving around her, from her hip to her lower back. There wasn’t much space left between them. He could smell her perfume. Cherry and leather. Unchanged, like the bright red of her lipstick and the way she tended to talk out of the side of her mouth.
At first, her only response was a scoff. After a moment, she spoke: “Yeah, well, if their weddin’ ends up with a manor on fire and someone kidnapped, I don’t think they’ll be very happy.”
“That’d be one way to make it a day nobody would forget.”
“Shut your mouth.” But it was spoken the way it so often was: with a smile behind it, even as her face tucked against him. A momentary pause before she added: “You’re wearing a new cologne.”
He had always cared about hygiene. Even when working in factories and on corporate farms, he had cared about being clean and smelling good. It was one of the things he had taken away from his upbringing: cleanliness as an almost spiritual practice. He took care of himself the best he could, even on missions. When cologne became available, he reveled in it. Smelling good mattered. It made him feel good.
But it had been over a decade. Of course he had changed the scents he wore.
His mouth had opened to speak before she beat him to it. “I like it.”
He liked her dress. She liked how he smelled. If they were any two other people in the expanse of the earth, it would sound like they were falling in love. Here, beneath the bright waning gibbous that crept towards zenith; here, beneath the low electric hum of strung lights; here, across from the crooning of an old love song about whiskey and wine; here, slow dancing on an impromptu dance floor framed with hay bales. Anyone else would fall in love. Anyone else wouldn’t have a choice.
He tried to convince himself he wasn’t. He wondered if she felt the same way.
“It’s good to see you doin’ well for yourself,” he managed, the song on the jukebox creeping near its end. Inevitably, the spell it cast would also be shattered. The kaleidoscopic memories that played out in his mind would be broken like a bottle at a bar fight and by the time the sun rose, he’d be on his way to his next job and she’d be cursing his name, like she always did.
Her grip tightened on the red linen fabric. “Could be better.” The feeling lingered there. She held in her mouth something, the same way he had held Not since I left? behind his stubbornly closed lips. He wanted to know what it was.
Most damnably, he wanted to know how it would taste.
“Could be better?” he echoed, the word rolling. She’d had a beer, at least. Maybe two. He hadn’t tracked her, hadn’t seen when she appeared. He hadn’t, given that he would be driving. “You gonna tell me it’s lonely at the top?”
“It is.”
She was earnest with him in a way that he didn’t know she ever was with anyone else. Except maybe that butler, who was probably somewhere nearby. He hadn’t looked too hard. He hadn’t looked beyond the red trimmed lace on that off the shoulder dress before his mind was made up. She had enough people to mind her. He didn’t need to, too.
“... Well, I reckon it is.”
Just like that, the song ended. Slow-dancing couples on the floor shared kisses and made their way over or around the hay bales, and the expectation was there that they would, too. But he didn’t want to let her go. He held her in his arms for the first time in so long and nothing else ever really mattered. The worst part was that she seemed content to stay there, her head on his shoulder, smelling the notes of musk and cedar and honey.
“What am I supposed to do with you?” His grip around her waist loosened, slowly, as she stepped back. Her hands were planted on his shoulders and she looked at him with those red, red eyes lined with black kohl. They’d be putting another song on soon. Something would play, and then the moment would really, really end. “You just think you can walk in and tell me you’re leavin’ by sunrise and do all this…”
“All I did was ask ya t’ dance.”
Anger was not an accurate description of what was in her eyes, but it was a cousin to it. Near enough kin that it belonged in the family photo. Frustration, maybe. Grief. Bitterness. Anger was too narrow a term for it. This emotion wasn’t a ravine: it was a gorge, a canyon, wide and broad with strata that marked years of time.
He was left standing there while she moved away, onlookers presuming that just maybe they had quarreled and argued. When she hiked the dress up to her mid thigh and stepped over the bales and returned to the unfamiliar faces. Of course there would be new gang members.
Returning to this place was like returning to a childhood home after someone else lived there.
He called after her, moved to follow her. Onlookers saw a quarrel. Familiar faces would see way beyond that, a deep scar that had been thought healed peeling away in dehiscence that should have long been off the table. Maybe it had been a mistake.
He called after her again, one man with a yellow bandanna at his neck shouldering in to stop him like anyone in the world had the right to keep the two of them away from each other.
Excepting, of course, one another.
“Don’t you put a hand on him,” she said, beyond the unfamiliar faces. “Don’t none of you put a hand on him.”
“Boss, we just–”
“I didn’t ask.”
An impasse and a stalemate. Suddenly, they stood on opposite sides of a gorge. The flowing river through it had only dug and dug and dug deeper the room between the two of them, and maybe he had been fool enough to think they could pretend it wasn’t there.
Maybe he could, but he had been the one that had left. She had been the one that stayed. He was the one who had seen Swiss snow, and thought that it was just as white as her hair. She had been the one that stayed. He had been the one that had become the right hand of the commander of Blackwatch. She had been the one that stayed.
“I think it might be best if you went on your way.”
He wondered what the words she held in her mouth tasted like. Like cheap beer and fried festival food? Too much grease always upset her stomach. Maybe her butler had seen to it she ate before going out to the festival.
A hand moved away the gang member that wore the yellow bandanna. He wouldn’t realize until later that it was a slightly different version of the winged skull he knew so well. The establishment date had been stripped. The establishment date had been his idea. She’d made an effort, more than he knew. After all, he didn’t know about the torn photograph on that cherry red 1976 chopper. Some things were left a mystery. He didn’t know how she’d tried so hard to tear out the roots he’d planted.
Not inside of her.
Alongside of her own.
That only made it worse.
They stood now outside of the defined lines of the festival. The back of trucks and pop-up tents faced them, and none of the gang tailed them. While the sound of the jukebox playing something more upbeat than the song–their song–filled the air along with laughter and life, suddenly, everything felt cold. It felt cold as the steel that bit into his wrists in that interrogation room where he was given the offer. One prison or the other.
At least, that’s what it had felt like.
And now they stood here under the blue-black desert sky with stars that he swore were clearer than he’d seen them in years and he swore the white of her dress and hair shone brighter than all of them.
At least, in his eyes.
“Well,” finally dissevered the silence with the all the finesse of a dog with a bad leg, “I suppose you aren’t wrong.”
Still, no movement was made. Wind danced through the lace-trimmed poplin and the red linen as though it were staged to be painted, and neither of them made a move.
“... I didn’t come back t’ hurt ya,” he managed, finally. It was low and slow, and if she wasn’t paying attention, it was lost to the wind. And he meant it. He was genuine and earnest, like he had been when he bit back the dozen things he wanted to say in that barn on her birthday. It would complicate things. It would complicate things. “I didn’t even know I’d see ya here–”
“Horse shit.” It was the serrated edge of a knife slicing through something stubborn, but just dull enough it hurt more than it had to. “You know Deadlock keeps an eye on the folk ‘round here. You knew we’d be here.”
“Didn’t expect to see you in a pretty dress drinkin’ a beer. Reminded me of old times.”
“I’m afraid I ain’t feeling nostalgic anymore.” More than once in his tenure working on farms he’d seen snakes under hay bales or in holes, going from their lax state to coiled up to strike. He knew what he was looking at, so he held up his hands. “And I think you should go.”
The moonlight mixed with the reflection of lights from the festival still ongoing behind them. It glinted off his prosthetic. How poetic, in a way. The world going on around them while they were here, away from it all. He spoke: “That really what you want?”
Her eyes spoke, long before her bright red lips did. The slope of her bared shoulder and the bounce of that black choker as she swallowed. He kept his hands up, where she could see them, and he watched her erode like the silt being carried away by the Colorado River. Those rounded shoulders carried so much and she never was the type to put it down. Some things didn’t change.
Both of them had things they wanted to say. Neither of them seemed willing to say them.
How she shone in the mix of organic and electric light. How he thought if this was the last time he ever saw her, he’d be okay with this being his final memory of her.
“You ain’t gonna stay. So you might as well go.” She was right. He wasn’t going to stay.
He didn’t realize he’d been walking towards her until his arms found her waist. Until she leaned against him, their bodies following a familiar and natural path. Until she looked up at him with those eyes that didn’t match the venom from her mouth. The way she fit against him. The comfort and the warmth of her hands reaching up to his face.
“You’re never gonna stay.”
Then he kissed her. He kissed her, and she didn’t immediately shove him away. He kissed her and her hands curled into his hair at the base of his neck. She kissed him back, and the gasoline ignited with the tiniest of sparks. His hands–biological and mechanical alike–reached and groped, touched and held. It wasn’t graceful. They rarely were. It was messy, and basal: not what was portrayed in movies, but it was what people wrote songs about.
White poplin in his hand, drawn up. Fingers extended and racing towards skin as though he had never known the touch until–
Until he stopped. Until he drew away from her, though every synapse that lay behind his eyes furiously vociferated that he continue. She looked about as surprised as he was. He shook his head.
“I ain’t gonna do that to ya. It ain’t right.”
The silence was so all-encompassing that it felt like even the music back at the hay-framed dance floor adhered to it.
“... I’ll get on out.” Spoken. Unspoken, Like I should have in the first place.
Her sundress was wrinkled and unkempt. It sat uneven on her shoulder. Her hat askew, and she simply stared at him, and they both knew: yes. It was best if he left, because he wasn’t gonna stay.
“Y’ could stay. If you wanted to.”
He remembered the taste of the words in her mouth. Cheap beer and the cut of lipstick; lipstick that now stained his face, just a little. Something in her tasted like cherry. Maybe from a dessert at the festival grounds. He remembered the taste of: I want you to stay.
“I got a job t' do. I can… walk you back.”
“I’ll find my way. Without you.”
Just like she had for over a decade, he reminded himself, as she walked past. Just like she had for over a decade, he reminded himself, the flutter of her dress disappearing around a building.
He hadn’t grabbed cigars, so a cigarette had to do. It was placed between his lips and ignited, a low drag taken. And he looked at the moon. The moon and the stars that hadn’t shined quite as bright as her hair that was white as Swiss snow and her dress that was bright white in the way that the sun was.
“You idiot.” To no one, as he stayed on the outside of festival grounds, walking towards the gunmetal bike. “You damned idiot.”