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Title: Scars, Past and Future.
Writing Date: 2020.
Rating: Gen.
Warnings: Violence,spoilers.
Fandom: Red Dead Redemption II.
Characters: Micah Bell III, Micah Bell Jr., Dutch Van der Linde, Arthur Morgan, Charlotte Balfour, Amos Bell.
Pain burst across Micah's face, bleaching his vision to white for an instant.
He snarled, staggering back, unsteady on his feet. Reflexively he pressed his hand to the wound opened by Arthur's knife, teeth grit and breathing hard. His palm came away wet with blood.
"Oh, you got me pretty good, Black Lung," he bit out, sucking in a breath through his teeth, feeling the itch of wetness trickling down his face and into his whiskers. He tightened his grip on the knife. He could barely see. There were flames all around them, carriages and belongings burning alike. Micah could feel the heat on his face, hear the crackling and popping of wood succumbing to fire. He tried to blink blood from his eye to clear his vision, but it remained stubbornly dark.
Even with Arthur injured and succumbing to his sickness, he couldn't guarantee a victory if he couldn't see the bastard to stab him. Didn't matter. There were other ways to win. "Come on now," he barked, throwing himself forward. "Let's end this!"
He used his weight to knock Arthur off his feet. He went down hard on his back with a grunt and Micah pinned him, straddling him like a whore, and brought the knife down two-handed, not caring whether it went through his skull, his throat or his chest. Arthur, sick as he was, still fought back. Micah heard his feet scrabbling behind him, his heels trying for purchase on the rocky ground, and he tried to force the knife away, keeping the point of the blade from piercing his skin.
"You're going to die," Micah promised, low and measured in spite of the exertion. Whether by his hand or otherwise, Arthur Morgan was not walking out of Beaver Hollow.
"No doubt," Arthur agreed, keeping his hands back, his grip vice-like on his wrists.
He pushed as hard as Micah did. As intent as Micah was on stabbing the bastard to death, Arthur fought to keep him back. It was like a second wind, him finding the strength to keep him at bay, and Micah wished it would fucking blow out. With a great force of effort, he separated Micah's hands, pulling the one with the knife away and...
"Argh!" Micah cried out as he sank his teeth into his hand, biting into him. He reared back, pulling his arm back as he held it there, keeping him stuck, his teeth breaking the skin, and Arthur stopped only when he swung a punch at him, connecting with his cheekbone, knocking him off him and to the ground.
It hurt. Lights popped in front of his eyes as his knuckles hit the gash and he fell back, nearly prone. He saw stars.
"Stop this," a voice from behind them. It was plaintive. Micah had heard that tone a lot over the past few weeks. "Just... stop this. Both of you fools."
Dutch.
Micah scrambled to his feet as fast as he could get them under him. He wasn't going to end up on his back like a damned roach and he backed away from Arthur, feeling the heat of the fire around them, the snapping of the burning wood sounding loud in the ringing silence the fight's end left. He held his hand to his face, hoping to stop the pain and stem the bleeding. He could taste blood in his mouth.
Dutch looked at them, his face a mixture of disgust and pity.
He must have seen everything. Him atop Morgan, trying his damnedest to stab him and still failing to gain the upper hand. He'd worked too long for Arthur to play the victim and win Dutch back now. Too long, and too hard. All those plans, those nasty little words. All stitches that, once pulled, unraveled the entire thing.
This, here, now, this was the pile of thread that was left at the end of the gang and he was not going to let it go to waste, not now, not with him so close. His final push had been kicking the legs out from the pedestal the Van der Linde gang's prize workhorse had stood atop and here he was, lying in the dirt with little chance of seeing the dawn.
"He's turned, Dutch," Micah snarled, still gripping the knife in his hand. "I told you, he's turned! He came back here to rob you," he said, raising his voice over Arthur's protests.
Arthur tried to get up, pressing his hand to the stab wound in his back. He struggled, but failed to get to his feet. He addressed them from the ground, like a dog, his face twisted into a snarl, his sickly pallor turned orange by the firelight. "I didn't turn, Micah," he growled. His breath was audible, laboured. "You did. Tell Dutch what you said to Agent Milton-"
"You shut your mouth," Micah snapped, cutting him off. No. Not now. "You're talking nonsense."
"You're the rat, Micah," Arthur continued, breathy, weakening. "Not Molly, Dutch. Him. Him!"
Micah looked to Dutch and found his expression unchanged. There was no anger there, no lines of fury, not even sadness. Just a mask of calm. He'd be damned if he was going to let everything fall down around his ears now, not when he was this close!
"You're dyin', Black Lung," he raised his voice to talk over Arthur and the roar of the fires around them.
"And you're dead," Arthur retorted, weaker. "Inside you're dead."
To hell with him. Micah turned to Dutch, appealing to him instead of wasting his time and his breath on a dying man. He needed to get him away, not let Morgan's last words chip away at all he'd built up. "Come on, Dutch," he said. "Let's get the money and get outta here."
And then Dutch turned to him and Micah saw, quite plainly, that he'd lost. It was as if he was seeing him for the first time, seeing him for what he was, what he'd sought to do. Was he reliving all of those conversations with Hosea? Thinking back over every warning from Morgan? Wishing he could take back every word he'd wasted in defending him?
"Dutch..." Micah said, a nearly pleading edge to the word. "Let's go..."
Dutch backed away, eyes glazed, and turned to walk away. He didn't stop. He didn't run. He just ... walked. He walked like a man who was going through the motions. He'd not seen him like that since Hosea had died in Saint Denis.
"It's nonsense!" He called, uselessly. "Of course it is!"
But it was over. All that planning, all that work, every word, every lick of those fucking boots... and it came to this. Even in the end, with Arthur Morgan more than half dead on the dirty ground, he'd lost.
*
He staggered through the cave, pressing past the macabre leavings of the Murfree Brood they'd driven out. It still stank down there, even with the acrid smell of smoke in his nose, the fetid stench of blood, rank flesh and filth, all no doubt attributable to the suffering of their victims, cut through. There was a reason they had stayed on the outside of Beaver Hollow instead of moving in to the warren beneath.
The atmosphere there had been bad enough, heavy with resentment and suspicion, without the extra beating morale would have taken inside that wretched hellhole.
With most of the cave behind him, he slowed, his pulse thudding in his temples, the gash across his face twinging with every beat.
Micah stopped, unable to get his breath. His chest burned, both with the effort of breathing, and with the slashes he'd sustained in the fight. But that wasn't the worst of it; it felt like his eye was on fire.
He swung the sack of cash to the ground and turned abruptly, suddenly paranoid of a noise behind him.
Nothing.
He'd expected a shadowy figure, either Arthur somehow back on his feet, unkillable and sustained by spite, or a Pinkerton coming at him, barrel first, righteousness on his mind.
Just the echo... he laughed, the mad, breathy laugh of a man relieved, and the yawning darkness of the cave laughed back.
The ladder wasn't far. He'd left his horse, but he'd come to a whistle if he hadn't been cut down by bullets. If he had, there'd be hell to pay. Surely even Pinkertons wouldn't shoot a man's horse.
He sat down, back against the wall, needing rest before he got any further. His face still hurt, the sting and ache almost drowning out the rest of it. He definitely needed to get his eye looked at, but it could wait. He'd hardly bleed out. The fight had exhausted him and the adrenaline rapidly leaving his system left him with tremors in his arms and legs. So long as the inbred fucks who had this cave before them didn't seize upon this opportunity to return home, he'd be fine for a while.
The Pinkertons wouldn't check here. No sane man returns to where they were hunted. They flee, putting distance between them. Beaver Hollow, with its fire and chaos and bodies littering the ground outside, Pinkertons, Morgan, Miss Grimshaw, should be the last place they'd look.
Besides, he'd be safe, wouldn't he? Agent Milton had traded information for his safety, or so he'd said. Wouldn't it have just been poetic justice if he'd lied about his cooperation and information ensuring his release. But then, Morgan had mentioned Milton. He'd spoken to him. If Milton had walked away after that, especially after he kidnapped Abigail, Micah'd eat his hat. No, he'd be dead somewhere, food for the crows.
Exhaustion came up on Micah like a pack of ravening wolves. The cool cave air, even with its stink of death and butchery, seemed to soothe the burning of his lungs and rob him of the energy he needed to get out the other side all at once. He could afford it. They'd be after Dutch, Arthur and John. Javier and that fool Bill had split off when things had gotten hairy back there, but that was a boon in disguise, splitting the Pinkerton numbers to chase down multiple targets. He wondered if they'd got away. Whether Dutch had, or if he'd given up. Whether they'd taken Morgan in. Dimly, he thought about the fates of Cleet and Joe.
Maybe he was the only one left, the sole survivor.
*
When he awoke everything ached.
His shoulders felt sore, as if he'd spent hours chopping firewood, as if he knew what that felt like. He hadn't volunteered to help with the camp chores, much. Some of the others were way more suited to it. On top of that, all of his muscles seemed stiff, like he'd worn them tired by shivering, like he had in Colter, in that draughty shack he'd had to share with Bill, Lenny, Javier and Charles.
He looked up, looking for the way out, and found his field of view half of what it was. Carefully, he touched his fingers to the gash left by Morgan's knife and found the blood dried, the track of the point encrusted with hardened blood. He was careful not to scowl, not to crack the new scab, and searched for the way out, where the ladder met the sky.
It was dark, it seemed. How long had he been asleep? It had felt like moments, a brief doze and then a jerk back to wakefulness, but the last he knew it was coming up on daybreak. He still felt tired, but he hauled himself to his feet, and the sack of takings back onto his aching shoulder, and started on the way up. The freaks who lived there before them had chosen to make the climb easier with planks and ladders, which was nice, but it wasn't exactly an easy flight of steps.
By the time he reached the bottom of the final ladder, he felt like he'd been put through the wringer. He wasn't athletic enough for that crap, scrambling up ledges and ladders, but there was one last ladder he needed to haul himself up, then he was home free, or as close as he was ever going to get.
Getting up there with the sack of money wasn't an easy task, but he managed, and he threw it out ahead of him and dragged himself up and out of there, into the fresh night air.
Fresh as it was going to get, anyway. He could hear the river gurgling off to the left, the piping bellow of one sort of deer or another in the distance and the wind shuffling the leaves of the trees as if they were playing cards. Everything still smelled of smoke and fire, an unpleasant thread of burnt wood weaving its way through the greener notes of Roanoke Ridge.
It almost seemed too quiet, like the entire woodland was holding its collective breath and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Micah didn't want to stick around for when that happened.
He whistled, and it felt like a lot more effort than he was used to.
He whistled again and had to take a moment to catch his breath.
The next time he did, he found himself slightly light-headed, his palms prickling with nervous sweat, but he stayed on his feet, listening out for the thudding hoof beats of his horse.
Or any horse. They'd all been particular about never riding the steed of another member of the gang, but they were all trained to respond to whistles and who knew how many of the gang were left to claim them. He didn't care if Boaz turned up, or Old Boy, or even the Count, he'd ride any of them out of there.
But it was Baylock who came.
Micah would never have admitted to the relief he felt at the sight of that bone-white face and those icy eyes, but it was there, a weight off his shoulders. He didn't look too worse for wear, but his black coat was mottled white around his saddle where the sweat of exertion had lathered and dried.
The sack of money attached easily to the saddle, but getting up into it wasn't the easy manoeuvre Micah was accustomed to. His muscles screamed out their displeasure as he hauled himself up and even Baylock nickered unhappily, though his patience was rewarded with a pat on the neck.
"Never let me down, do you boy?" Micah said, almost to himself. His throat felt dry and sore from breathing smoke. He put his heels to Baylock's flank and moved off, wanting to put some distance between himslf and Beaver Hollow.
With all the commotion they'd caused, the Murfree Brood, or at least whatever of them had survived Charles and Arthur, wouldn't waste time in reclaiming it. He didn't want to be there when they did.
He headed north, following the path by the river.
Micah didn't push Baylock hard, not knowing when he'd last rested and certainly not wanting to look like he was fleeing anything. No, he was just a lone man out on the trail. Nothing suspicious about that. Nothing at all. Even so, he urged Baylock off-trail, into the wood proper, away from the well-used paths. A black horse was hard to see at night, harder still in the shadows of the trees.
His head pounded. He needed to drink something, preferably water, but he recalled talk of the river being poisoned and couldn't remember how far up the taint began. Was it a little up from Butcher Creek? Or was it further north? He tried to recall, but his head seemed fogged, the thought moving out of his grasp the closer he got to it.
As he moved on, even the sounds of the forest seemed to fade out.
He'd heard stories about silence out in the wild signifying trouble. Some people said the cessation of birdsong signaled the arrival of the monsters of the Natives. Other, more rational folk told of it meaning that a predator was in the area, but surely even a cat or a pack of wolves couldn't scare the river to silence.
The only thing that broke through were whispers. A feminine voice, tremulous and nervous. Whispers? He looked about himself, suspicious of pursuers, but saw no one, nothing.
"What's that terrible noise..?"
Noise? There was no noise. All sounds seemed distant, far away. Baylock's ears searched for the source as he snorted, tossing his head, agitated. Micah spurred him into a canter, feeling like the rush of wind around him would clear his head. He couldn't remember Roanoke Ridge ever being so warm. It felt like the fire had followed him from the ruins of the camp.
Baylock slowed after a short while and Micah heard a buzzing in his ears, as if close to a bees nest. Abruptly, the sound of the river returned, at first loud, then dimmer, more distant... he heard the faraway high whinny of a horse and then, most unusually, a sensation of weightlessness and then he felt the ground meet him, hard.
The dark, damp smell of the forest filled his nose, getting stronger and stronger until he could think of nothing else and then ... nothing.
*
"So we were there, all guns blazing--"
"Micah!"
Micah sighed. He knew better than to ignore that, but he wanted to. The girl was hanging on his every word, large brown eyes rapt in his exaggeration of a story, thinking of the wild west she'd never see, stuck in this city.
"Micah!" The shout came again.
"If you'll excuse me," he said, touching his fingers to the brim of his hat. He stumped around the corner, one hand on his gunbelt, sullen and scowling. "What?"
His father stared him down, meeting Micah's insolence with a stony glare until it was enough to make him turn his head.
Micah Bell Jr. wasn't a man to be messed with. Both of his sons knew that, but the eldest carried his name, the third in the line to do so, and with that came expectations. He'd been given more than one back-hand across the face for talking back in his life, though they'd tailed off the older he'd got. At twenty three he'd mostly outgrown them, but he was still expected to answer to him, without question and without argument.
"We're going," his father said.
They looked alike, though the father was slightly taller, slightly broader and rather a lot meaner. A life of cruelty had hardened his features and his flinty eyes had no trace of warmth in them. He kept his blond hair short in contrast to his son, who wore it to his shoulders, and it was rather obvious that his nose had been broken more than once. Frequent consumption of beer and whiskey had given him a paunch that he'd never bothered trying to lose and there was a dark spot on the right side of his mouth where he'd lost two teeth in a fight he'd still won.
The son, on the other hand, still had all of his teeth and was the sort of skinny you only ever got when you were too active on not quite enough food.
"Now?" Micah scowled again, taking the reins thrust at him.
"Now."
He looked up at the assembled horses, three pretty nondescript beasts, all brown, nothing fancy, though the one his brother sat atop had three white socks to set it apart from the others and his father's, slightly bigger than the other two, was a gelding instead of a mare. Amos looked nervous, though that wasn't anything new.
"Let's go," he said, looking behind him.
He looked a lot like Micah, though that wasn't too surprising. He was just as blond and just as skinny, albeit without the scar on his chin. They were two years apart and shared a mother, full-blooded brothers. Amos had her eyes, Micah had his father's. She'd spent a lot more time with Amos than she had Micah. Their father thought him soft because of it, but Amos just insisted he was cautious, and would continue to do so even as he emptied a six gun into the face of a pursuing lawman and pulled out another to prove he wasn't yellow.
"What did you do this time?" Micah asked as he mounted his mare and she whickered as he settled into the saddle. One day he'd get a stallion, but she'd do for now.
Amos stayed quiet, though he visibly winced at the look their father shot him. Micah saw then that his skin was dark around one eye, like he'd been hit recently and the bruise hadn't yet formed.
"It doesn't matter," Micah Jr. said, the look he threw in Amos's direction getting no less withering. He mounted without fuss.
The boys let their father take the lead, only spurring their horses to go faster once he'd kicked up dust ahead of them.
*
Pain shot across Micah's face enough to make his teeth clench. He thought he felt a crack, like caked blood splitting apart, warmth following in its wake. A coppery tang assaulted his nose, driving away the dark, earthy smell that had engulfed him. He forced his eyes, or at least an eye open, but the blur beyond meant nothing to him, just a mess of grey and black and brown and green.
He tried to push himself off the ground, fingers clawing in the dirt and leaves, but he found he lacked the strength.
There was a growl, low and deep, and the thundering bellow of a horse and then, against all reason, the percussive crack of a gun.
He thought he heard a voice in the ringing silence that followed.
The whispers again?
*
He wasn't sure what had possessed him to do it.
Maybe it was the same drive that pushed abandoned orphan children to try and find their parents even if they knew the reason they were alone was that they weren't wanted back when things were tough. Some were sold to workhouses in big cities, others into less savoury work, but it didn't stop a small number trying to find where they'd come from, to reunite with their own blood.
Maybe that's what Micah had wanted.
He knew he'd been drunk at the time, because he'd woken up the following day with the taste of whiskey on his lips and ink stains on his hands. When he drank, he sometimes found himself feeling maudlin, like all of his past mistakes and indiscretions were crowding about him, shadows at his shoulders.
He had a vague memory of writing a letter to his brother in a fit of madness, knowing only vaguely where he'd moved to, knowing it was San Francisco, a coastal city that had grown ridiculously in the past fifty years, with that bitch wife of his and their two gets.
The last time they'd spoke had been less than friendly, even if they'd run together both before and after their father's death. Amos had gotten married and Micah had attended out of a strange sense of duty. He wasn't sure why he'd gone, but seeing his little brother saying vows with that shrew, in front of a god he'd swore he hadn't believed in, had been really something.
He'd looked happy. He'd seen it in his eyes, brown, like their mother's. Not long after that, he'd washed his hands of him and moved out to the coast at his wife's behest, to leave behind the outlaw lifestyle and try to atone for what they'd done, leaving Micah alone, after all they'd done together.
He wouldn't admit it, but he'd felt betrayed. Their mother had died and they'd buried her together and later their father had been killed and they'd buried him together too. Neither had cried over him, but Micah hadn't felt his loss so sorely as when Amos left as well.
He'd almost forgotten about writing the letter until he received one in return.
Every word penned in his brother's untidy, ink-blotted script had hurt.
"Do not attempt to approach me. Do not attempt to visit me. Do not claim you know me."
He'd abandoned it, leaving it to the rain and paper-chewing insects, outside a small dwelling in the shadow of Shady Belle, within earshot of the snapping of alligators and crowing of long-legged wading birds.
*
Micah felt his face itching, his chest, his sides.
It was as though he was covered with crawling insects, their tiny feet irritating his skin with their erratic little paths. He wasn't conscious enough to realise it was sweat running down his skin, soaking the sheets beneath him.
He felt like he was burning, like the unseasonable heat he'd felt in the forest was coming from inside.
The pain in his face had dulled, but a throbbing had replaced it. He tried to open his eyes, but when he managed, he saw only blackness around him.
"Shhhh," the voice was soothing, not a whisper that time. "You're okay, you're okay..."
*
"What're you lookin' so damn pleased for?"
His father looked old. It was how he remembered him, nearing fifty, his grey beard bushy and shot with white, his hair longer than he'd ever kept it, but not thinning with age. More of his teeth were missing. His cheeks looked hollow, like there was a sickness in him, and his eyes were surrounded by bruised darkness that made them appear a brighter blue than they'd ever really looked in life. The last time Micah had seen him like that, he'd been cut down by a spray of bullets and his empty eyes had been staring up at the sky from the bottom of a shallow grave. It had been Amos who had closed them.
Micah Bell Jr. hadn't wanted to go out in the loop of a hangman's rope, spending his last moments dancing the jig of a lawman's ineptitude or dropping to a quick death with the snap of his neck. He'd wanted to die as he lived, on his feet or at a gallop, his guns in his hands, and he had. Lead from a lawman's gun had torn away the left side of his neck and he'd fallen from his saddle in a fountain of blood.
He was still covered in it now, his clothes stained with brown and red, and Micah only dimly noticed that his wound, seemed to be absent.
"I won," Micah said. "I got the money. From the trains, the coaches, Blackwater..." He was exulting, teeth bared in the humourless grin of a fox in a henhouse.
His father looked disappointed, though he always did in his memories, even though Micah had always done as he'd told him. He'd learned to fire a revolver better and faster than anybody else, he'd mastered horsemanship to the point where even the most headstrong stallion obeyed him. He'd robbed banks, killed lawmen, killed innocent people both at his father's word and of his own volition.
His father had never seemed impressed. It wasn't that he'd wanted the praise, he just wanted his respect. Him to acknowledge that he could do everything just as good as he could, just as good as his grandfather had taught him. If his father had lived to now, he'd have rubbed his face in what he'd achieved.
"I told you you would," he said, he said as if it was a foregone conclusion, merely an extension of his own work, a victory borne on the wings of his planning. "What now?"
Micah's grin froze and then died on his face, teeth still showing, but the corners of his mouth downturned. He felt the fury in him. "What else is there but the money?" He snapped. "I have enough there to keep me in bullets, whiskey and whores until I die."
"You're on your own," he said. "They'll hunt you 'til the ends of the earth, the lawmen and Dutch's gang."
"Dutch's gang are gone!" Micah spat.
"All of 'em?" His father asked. "They're all dead, are they?"
"Dead or scattered to the wind," Micah said, the set of his shoulders stiff with indignation. "Morgan's dead. Susan's dead. Hosea, Sean, Mac, Davey..." he counted them off on his fingers.
Not all of them, though. Javier and Williamson could still be alive. Sadie and Charles hadn't been there at the end, in Beaver Hollow. The women had fled and the weak, old men. They weren't worth thinking about. If they weren't dead, they'd abandoned their precious Dutch.
Dutch. He still lived. But he wanted him to. He wanted him to feel the loss he'd inflicted on him. The scars of his victory. If he hadn't wanted to go on with him, he'd have to go on alone.
"And you survived. You lived, they died. They was weak. I told you that's how it was. That you gotta use people to get where you want," his father told him. He'd heard it all his life. He'd taken it to heart, allowed nobody close to him. His father must have too, the coldhearted bastard.
"Of course they was weak," Micah said. "Weak and naive. Too trustin'," he added shortly. "I beat Dutch, brought him down. I won."
"It took you long enough to worm your way into his affection," there was a note of disgust in his voice. "Six months you licked his boots like a religious sycophant."
"I made him trust me," Micah hissed.
"You wanted him to respect you," his father said.
Micah snarled wordlessly, his lips twisting to show his teeth again. He still had all of his. He'd lost enough fights, but he'd never had his teeth knocked out of his head. He was better than his father there. "I made him trust me and then I tore everything down until there was nothing left of him. I took everything from him, his son, his woman, Hosea..."
Before falling in with Dutch, Micah had been transient in the wake of losing his father and his brother moving away. He'd gone from acquaintance to acquaintance, doing jobs with people he'd met before moving on. Cleet and Joe, Skinny... some jobs had gone well, others had been a disaster. He'd never stuck around. Dutch ... had been different. The rest of the Van der Lindes hadn't liked him, even if he'd tried to be civil in the beginning, so he'd stopped trying. He'd lingered on the fringe, never really participating. They'd never much wanted him around, so he'd stuck to the outside, like a coyote around a wolf kill. Maybe they'd known all along who he was, what he was, but it wasn't them he'd had to fool. It was Dutch.
He'd strived to pit Dutch against the rest of the them by planting seeds of doubt. He'd nurtured them lovingly, watering them with discord and feeding them on lies. He'd encouraged Dutch's more harebrained plans, gently pressed him to pursue revenge, embrace spite and make foolish decisions, ignoring his most trusted of advisors in favour of listening to him. It had only been easier once Hosea had fallen. Hosea had been the lynchpin. Even for all he'd done, all the ill-conceived plans and heists, Hosea had been the one keeping Dutch from going off the deep end. With him gone, Dutch had been more susceptible to his influence.
It hadn't been easy. Dutch's gang had been loyal, some of them blindly, some with doubts, all of them foolishly. He'd had an easy in, at least. He'd not been inducted into the gang indebted to their noble leader, he'd saved him. Sure, so Dutch hadn't been kissing his feet in thanks, but he'd brought him into the fold with few questions about his motivations and while Micah had failed to fall in with the rest of them, Dutch had kept him around. He'd lent him his ear, taken his counsel and allowed him ample opportunity to stroke his ego and it was his ego that made his decisions for him. He didn't want input on his ideas, he wanted agreement, yes-men, backup. Micah had been generous there.
It had taken time. So much time. It hadn't all been smooth sailing, either. Especially on that boat in Blackwater. The money had been within his grasp, so close he could smell it, and then they'd been forced to leave it behind, along with some of the gang. The loyal had remained that way, even in light of Dutch's behaviour. They'd written it off as the stress of the situation, the potential for it being a setup, and waved it off as bad things happening in the heat of the moment, but it had driven a wedge between Morgan, Hosea and Dutch. That was its saving grace. The boat had sunk, but there was plunder in the wreckage. Micah had picked at that scab until the wound was raw, until their questioning and his venom had eroded enough of the camaraderie.
A lot of people had died because of him.
Blackwater had been the beginning of the end for the gang. The Callander Boys had fallen there and the girl, Jenny. She'd been sweet enough. Hadn't deserved her death, even if she'd never given him the time of day, even if he'd claim otherwise after the fact when she wasn't around to defend her own honour. Everything after that, directly or indirectly, had been his fault. If Blackwater hadn't gone down the way it had they might have all lived. They wouldn't have ended up in Rhodes, where Sean had died, or Saint Denis, which had claimed the lives of others.
He hadn't set the Blackwater job up to fail, no matter what everybody else said. It had been Dutch who had lit that spark and it had been there, with that girl's death and only a few words of encouragement from him, that he'd seen just how malleable Dutch could be, the madness that bubbled under the surface of the calm leader facade.
Picking that apart hadn't been hard.
He'd been more than a leader to many of the gang. To Arthur, John, and even Javier and Bill to an extent, he'd been like a father. That's what had rankled. That's what had made Micah want to move up the ranks. He'd wanted him to treat him like he trusted him, to prove he was better than those other sons and then take everything away from him in the end, to get one over on the glorious father-figure he'd set himself up to be.
"I won," he said again. "I beat him."
"Was it really him you wanted to beat?" His father asked.
*
Micah opened his eye and saw only darkness.
Even so, he wasn't afraid. He was comfortable and his head swam with confusion. Where was he? He could feel softness beneath him, something warm over him and he could sense somebody in the room with him, but it didn't strike him as wrong, or dangerous.
He couldn't smell the deep odour of soil, or the metallic tang of blood, nor could he smell the forest air or a breeze tainted by the scent of flowers, leaves or pine needles. There was something familiar about what he could detect, but he couldn't place what it was, only that it made him feel at ease.
He could move, he reckoned, but he wasn't sure he wanted to. As he thought about it, it felt like he was sinking down again, and a deeper darkness closed around him.
*
The sky was dark with leaden clouds. On the horizon, the only light was the distant, faint glow of a half moon, barely visible between the patchwork of greys. Wind gusted through the grass, carrying with it a spray of rain, bending stalks, sending ripples of movement through the meadow.
Atop a rock, curled up like a coil of rope in a dockyard, a rattlesnake lay. It raised its head, scales reflecting the roiling turmoil of the oncoming storm above, and hissed, the tip of its tail buzzing a warning...
*
Micah awoke to find himself looking up at a ceiling, the rattle from his dream ebbing away as consciousness moved in.
On the right of him he could see a door, unpainted, surrounded by stained, off-white wallpaper that otherwise depicted a repeating pattern of strange flowers, or were they leaves? On the left he could see a window, through which warm sunlight streamed, though that he found that the need to turn his head to see it was ... unexpected. He frowned, bringing a hand up to his face.
He traced the scratch down from his forehead to his nose. It hadn't healed, but it was on its way to doing so, and he could feel little knots holding some of the wound together. Stitches. His eye wouldn't open again, though. There was little chance of that. Further down his face he found that his whiskers were overgrown and untidy, but they were no longer stiff and encrusted with the dried blood of the knife fight.
He felt weak, but he pushed himself up to sitting and looked about himself.
The room he was in was untidy, but lived in. He suspected it had been set aside for storage, but the bed he lay in was nice enough, with an ornate brass bedframe and a comfortable mattress that was only slightly lumpy. There were few personal effects save a bowl, a lamp and an abandoned book. There was a folded piece of paper on the nightstand. He picked it up and opened it.
Dear sir,
I'm afraid you'll have to forgive me the lack of your name, for we haven't been formally introduced.
I expect you're wondering where you are and how you got here. Try not to worry, I mean you no harm. I found you in the forest not far from Brandywine Drop, in Roanoke Valley. You were almost taken by a cougar, though I managed to frighten it off.
I brought you back here, on account of your injuries and because you were burning up. I don't know if it was an animal that cut your face, but it became powerfully infected before I found you. I stayed with you until your fever broke, but I have need of supplies, so I have gone into the city now that you seem to be out of the woods, so to speak.
Your horse is tied up outside the house and your belongings are safely inside. Take anything you might need from the house should you seek to leave before I return. I have a small stock of food on the table if you need it and a selection of tonics you're welcome to, as I have gone to replenish those and will return with more.
I wish you good fortune.
- Charlotte Balfour.
Micah read it over twice before he folded it up and slipped it into his -- not his pocket. His shirt, clean, he noticed, hung over the back of a chair. He put it into the pocket of his trousers instead. He got himself to his feet and crossed the room to shrug on the shirt. It smelled pleasant, of soap and firesmoke. Not the acrid stench he remembered from outside Beaver Hollow, but that of a hearth, as if it had been hung to dry there.
He frowned, pushing the door open to let himself into the main room of the house.
Near the door, he saw his saddlebags, rig and, against all reason, the sack from the train robbery. He'd half expected that to be gone, squirreled away as payment for the care he'd received, but there it was, undisturbed. There was a red smear on one side. His blood, he assumed. He hadn't noticed it before. Through the glass of the window, he could see the bone white face of Baylock.
The fireplace was cold, the fire that had been lit there having long burned low, then out.
As promised, there was a selection of cans and bottles on the table which he did help himself to. He stopped to eat a can of beans and take a long drink of water from a bucket on the side, settling himself at the small table on account of standing being too much effort too soon. His stomach groaned first in protest of its enduring emptiness and then at the sudden sensation of being full. He stayed there a good while, the weakness of too much rest and not enough food draining him after only the few short steps from one room to the other.
When he felt up to it, he dragged himself back to his feet, stuffed his saddlebags with all he could carry, and put on his gunbelt. With a little effort he slung the saddlebags over his shoulder, grabbed the sack of money and pushed open the door with his foot, peering outside warily, his eye almost watering in the sun.
Baylock seemed pleased to see him and didn't complain as he got him ready for a ride. He looked clean and brushed and didn't nose or search him for food, having been apparently cared for as well as he had.
Micah swung himself up into the saddle, the effort seeming entirely too much for such a simple act, and turned the horse away from the house. As he rode away, he wondered if he should have left a note in return.
He pulled out the letter again and read it over for a third time, carefully.
He couldn't fathom why a complete stranger, a woman no less, would take a blood-stained vagrant into her home and nurse him back to health, when he not only had a pair of guns but also a bag of money that could only have been gained by illegitimate means. When he'd gotten his bearings, he saw that she was barely a stone's throw from the river. Her home was close enough to both Beaver Hollow and to where the shooting had taken place the night they'd been hunted to have heard every gunshot and nearly every shout as the Pinkertons had pursued them through the trees. She can't not have known of the trouble that had raced through that forest then, and if the wind had been right, she must have smelled the smoke of the burning camp on the wind.
It baffled him, why she'd tend to the injuries of an outlaw. Why she'd care so much about somebody she didn't know and had no obligation to. He'd couldn't have known what had made her so quick to help a stranger in such desperate need.
He shook his head, trying to shake free the thoughts and questions, and urged Baylock through the river and beyond.
Writing Date: 2020.
Rating: Gen.
Warnings: Violence,spoilers.
Fandom: Red Dead Redemption II.
Characters: Micah Bell III, Micah Bell Jr., Dutch Van der Linde, Arthur Morgan, Charlotte Balfour, Amos Bell.
Pain burst across Micah's face, bleaching his vision to white for an instant.
He snarled, staggering back, unsteady on his feet. Reflexively he pressed his hand to the wound opened by Arthur's knife, teeth grit and breathing hard. His palm came away wet with blood.
"Oh, you got me pretty good, Black Lung," he bit out, sucking in a breath through his teeth, feeling the itch of wetness trickling down his face and into his whiskers. He tightened his grip on the knife. He could barely see. There were flames all around them, carriages and belongings burning alike. Micah could feel the heat on his face, hear the crackling and popping of wood succumbing to fire. He tried to blink blood from his eye to clear his vision, but it remained stubbornly dark.
Even with Arthur injured and succumbing to his sickness, he couldn't guarantee a victory if he couldn't see the bastard to stab him. Didn't matter. There were other ways to win. "Come on now," he barked, throwing himself forward. "Let's end this!"
He used his weight to knock Arthur off his feet. He went down hard on his back with a grunt and Micah pinned him, straddling him like a whore, and brought the knife down two-handed, not caring whether it went through his skull, his throat or his chest. Arthur, sick as he was, still fought back. Micah heard his feet scrabbling behind him, his heels trying for purchase on the rocky ground, and he tried to force the knife away, keeping the point of the blade from piercing his skin.
"You're going to die," Micah promised, low and measured in spite of the exertion. Whether by his hand or otherwise, Arthur Morgan was not walking out of Beaver Hollow.
"No doubt," Arthur agreed, keeping his hands back, his grip vice-like on his wrists.
He pushed as hard as Micah did. As intent as Micah was on stabbing the bastard to death, Arthur fought to keep him back. It was like a second wind, him finding the strength to keep him at bay, and Micah wished it would fucking blow out. With a great force of effort, he separated Micah's hands, pulling the one with the knife away and...
"Argh!" Micah cried out as he sank his teeth into his hand, biting into him. He reared back, pulling his arm back as he held it there, keeping him stuck, his teeth breaking the skin, and Arthur stopped only when he swung a punch at him, connecting with his cheekbone, knocking him off him and to the ground.
It hurt. Lights popped in front of his eyes as his knuckles hit the gash and he fell back, nearly prone. He saw stars.
"Stop this," a voice from behind them. It was plaintive. Micah had heard that tone a lot over the past few weeks. "Just... stop this. Both of you fools."
Dutch.
Micah scrambled to his feet as fast as he could get them under him. He wasn't going to end up on his back like a damned roach and he backed away from Arthur, feeling the heat of the fire around them, the snapping of the burning wood sounding loud in the ringing silence the fight's end left. He held his hand to his face, hoping to stop the pain and stem the bleeding. He could taste blood in his mouth.
Dutch looked at them, his face a mixture of disgust and pity.
He must have seen everything. Him atop Morgan, trying his damnedest to stab him and still failing to gain the upper hand. He'd worked too long for Arthur to play the victim and win Dutch back now. Too long, and too hard. All those plans, those nasty little words. All stitches that, once pulled, unraveled the entire thing.
This, here, now, this was the pile of thread that was left at the end of the gang and he was not going to let it go to waste, not now, not with him so close. His final push had been kicking the legs out from the pedestal the Van der Linde gang's prize workhorse had stood atop and here he was, lying in the dirt with little chance of seeing the dawn.
"He's turned, Dutch," Micah snarled, still gripping the knife in his hand. "I told you, he's turned! He came back here to rob you," he said, raising his voice over Arthur's protests.
Arthur tried to get up, pressing his hand to the stab wound in his back. He struggled, but failed to get to his feet. He addressed them from the ground, like a dog, his face twisted into a snarl, his sickly pallor turned orange by the firelight. "I didn't turn, Micah," he growled. His breath was audible, laboured. "You did. Tell Dutch what you said to Agent Milton-"
"You shut your mouth," Micah snapped, cutting him off. No. Not now. "You're talking nonsense."
"You're the rat, Micah," Arthur continued, breathy, weakening. "Not Molly, Dutch. Him. Him!"
Micah looked to Dutch and found his expression unchanged. There was no anger there, no lines of fury, not even sadness. Just a mask of calm. He'd be damned if he was going to let everything fall down around his ears now, not when he was this close!
"You're dyin', Black Lung," he raised his voice to talk over Arthur and the roar of the fires around them.
"And you're dead," Arthur retorted, weaker. "Inside you're dead."
To hell with him. Micah turned to Dutch, appealing to him instead of wasting his time and his breath on a dying man. He needed to get him away, not let Morgan's last words chip away at all he'd built up. "Come on, Dutch," he said. "Let's get the money and get outta here."
And then Dutch turned to him and Micah saw, quite plainly, that he'd lost. It was as if he was seeing him for the first time, seeing him for what he was, what he'd sought to do. Was he reliving all of those conversations with Hosea? Thinking back over every warning from Morgan? Wishing he could take back every word he'd wasted in defending him?
"Dutch..." Micah said, a nearly pleading edge to the word. "Let's go..."
Dutch backed away, eyes glazed, and turned to walk away. He didn't stop. He didn't run. He just ... walked. He walked like a man who was going through the motions. He'd not seen him like that since Hosea had died in Saint Denis.
"It's nonsense!" He called, uselessly. "Of course it is!"
But it was over. All that planning, all that work, every word, every lick of those fucking boots... and it came to this. Even in the end, with Arthur Morgan more than half dead on the dirty ground, he'd lost.
He staggered through the cave, pressing past the macabre leavings of the Murfree Brood they'd driven out. It still stank down there, even with the acrid smell of smoke in his nose, the fetid stench of blood, rank flesh and filth, all no doubt attributable to the suffering of their victims, cut through. There was a reason they had stayed on the outside of Beaver Hollow instead of moving in to the warren beneath.
The atmosphere there had been bad enough, heavy with resentment and suspicion, without the extra beating morale would have taken inside that wretched hellhole.
With most of the cave behind him, he slowed, his pulse thudding in his temples, the gash across his face twinging with every beat.
Micah stopped, unable to get his breath. His chest burned, both with the effort of breathing, and with the slashes he'd sustained in the fight. But that wasn't the worst of it; it felt like his eye was on fire.
He swung the sack of cash to the ground and turned abruptly, suddenly paranoid of a noise behind him.
Nothing.
He'd expected a shadowy figure, either Arthur somehow back on his feet, unkillable and sustained by spite, or a Pinkerton coming at him, barrel first, righteousness on his mind.
Just the echo... he laughed, the mad, breathy laugh of a man relieved, and the yawning darkness of the cave laughed back.
The ladder wasn't far. He'd left his horse, but he'd come to a whistle if he hadn't been cut down by bullets. If he had, there'd be hell to pay. Surely even Pinkertons wouldn't shoot a man's horse.
He sat down, back against the wall, needing rest before he got any further. His face still hurt, the sting and ache almost drowning out the rest of it. He definitely needed to get his eye looked at, but it could wait. He'd hardly bleed out. The fight had exhausted him and the adrenaline rapidly leaving his system left him with tremors in his arms and legs. So long as the inbred fucks who had this cave before them didn't seize upon this opportunity to return home, he'd be fine for a while.
The Pinkertons wouldn't check here. No sane man returns to where they were hunted. They flee, putting distance between them. Beaver Hollow, with its fire and chaos and bodies littering the ground outside, Pinkertons, Morgan, Miss Grimshaw, should be the last place they'd look.
Besides, he'd be safe, wouldn't he? Agent Milton had traded information for his safety, or so he'd said. Wouldn't it have just been poetic justice if he'd lied about his cooperation and information ensuring his release. But then, Morgan had mentioned Milton. He'd spoken to him. If Milton had walked away after that, especially after he kidnapped Abigail, Micah'd eat his hat. No, he'd be dead somewhere, food for the crows.
Exhaustion came up on Micah like a pack of ravening wolves. The cool cave air, even with its stink of death and butchery, seemed to soothe the burning of his lungs and rob him of the energy he needed to get out the other side all at once. He could afford it. They'd be after Dutch, Arthur and John. Javier and that fool Bill had split off when things had gotten hairy back there, but that was a boon in disguise, splitting the Pinkerton numbers to chase down multiple targets. He wondered if they'd got away. Whether Dutch had, or if he'd given up. Whether they'd taken Morgan in. Dimly, he thought about the fates of Cleet and Joe.
Maybe he was the only one left, the sole survivor.
When he awoke everything ached.
His shoulders felt sore, as if he'd spent hours chopping firewood, as if he knew what that felt like. He hadn't volunteered to help with the camp chores, much. Some of the others were way more suited to it. On top of that, all of his muscles seemed stiff, like he'd worn them tired by shivering, like he had in Colter, in that draughty shack he'd had to share with Bill, Lenny, Javier and Charles.
He looked up, looking for the way out, and found his field of view half of what it was. Carefully, he touched his fingers to the gash left by Morgan's knife and found the blood dried, the track of the point encrusted with hardened blood. He was careful not to scowl, not to crack the new scab, and searched for the way out, where the ladder met the sky.
It was dark, it seemed. How long had he been asleep? It had felt like moments, a brief doze and then a jerk back to wakefulness, but the last he knew it was coming up on daybreak. He still felt tired, but he hauled himself to his feet, and the sack of takings back onto his aching shoulder, and started on the way up. The freaks who lived there before them had chosen to make the climb easier with planks and ladders, which was nice, but it wasn't exactly an easy flight of steps.
By the time he reached the bottom of the final ladder, he felt like he'd been put through the wringer. He wasn't athletic enough for that crap, scrambling up ledges and ladders, but there was one last ladder he needed to haul himself up, then he was home free, or as close as he was ever going to get.
Getting up there with the sack of money wasn't an easy task, but he managed, and he threw it out ahead of him and dragged himself up and out of there, into the fresh night air.
Fresh as it was going to get, anyway. He could hear the river gurgling off to the left, the piping bellow of one sort of deer or another in the distance and the wind shuffling the leaves of the trees as if they were playing cards. Everything still smelled of smoke and fire, an unpleasant thread of burnt wood weaving its way through the greener notes of Roanoke Ridge.
It almost seemed too quiet, like the entire woodland was holding its collective breath and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Micah didn't want to stick around for when that happened.
He whistled, and it felt like a lot more effort than he was used to.
He whistled again and had to take a moment to catch his breath.
The next time he did, he found himself slightly light-headed, his palms prickling with nervous sweat, but he stayed on his feet, listening out for the thudding hoof beats of his horse.
Or any horse. They'd all been particular about never riding the steed of another member of the gang, but they were all trained to respond to whistles and who knew how many of the gang were left to claim them. He didn't care if Boaz turned up, or Old Boy, or even the Count, he'd ride any of them out of there.
But it was Baylock who came.
Micah would never have admitted to the relief he felt at the sight of that bone-white face and those icy eyes, but it was there, a weight off his shoulders. He didn't look too worse for wear, but his black coat was mottled white around his saddle where the sweat of exertion had lathered and dried.
The sack of money attached easily to the saddle, but getting up into it wasn't the easy manoeuvre Micah was accustomed to. His muscles screamed out their displeasure as he hauled himself up and even Baylock nickered unhappily, though his patience was rewarded with a pat on the neck.
"Never let me down, do you boy?" Micah said, almost to himself. His throat felt dry and sore from breathing smoke. He put his heels to Baylock's flank and moved off, wanting to put some distance between himslf and Beaver Hollow.
With all the commotion they'd caused, the Murfree Brood, or at least whatever of them had survived Charles and Arthur, wouldn't waste time in reclaiming it. He didn't want to be there when they did.
He headed north, following the path by the river.
Micah didn't push Baylock hard, not knowing when he'd last rested and certainly not wanting to look like he was fleeing anything. No, he was just a lone man out on the trail. Nothing suspicious about that. Nothing at all. Even so, he urged Baylock off-trail, into the wood proper, away from the well-used paths. A black horse was hard to see at night, harder still in the shadows of the trees.
His head pounded. He needed to drink something, preferably water, but he recalled talk of the river being poisoned and couldn't remember how far up the taint began. Was it a little up from Butcher Creek? Or was it further north? He tried to recall, but his head seemed fogged, the thought moving out of his grasp the closer he got to it.
As he moved on, even the sounds of the forest seemed to fade out.
He'd heard stories about silence out in the wild signifying trouble. Some people said the cessation of birdsong signaled the arrival of the monsters of the Natives. Other, more rational folk told of it meaning that a predator was in the area, but surely even a cat or a pack of wolves couldn't scare the river to silence.
The only thing that broke through were whispers. A feminine voice, tremulous and nervous. Whispers? He looked about himself, suspicious of pursuers, but saw no one, nothing.
"What's that terrible noise..?"
Noise? There was no noise. All sounds seemed distant, far away. Baylock's ears searched for the source as he snorted, tossing his head, agitated. Micah spurred him into a canter, feeling like the rush of wind around him would clear his head. He couldn't remember Roanoke Ridge ever being so warm. It felt like the fire had followed him from the ruins of the camp.
Baylock slowed after a short while and Micah heard a buzzing in his ears, as if close to a bees nest. Abruptly, the sound of the river returned, at first loud, then dimmer, more distant... he heard the faraway high whinny of a horse and then, most unusually, a sensation of weightlessness and then he felt the ground meet him, hard.
The dark, damp smell of the forest filled his nose, getting stronger and stronger until he could think of nothing else and then ... nothing.
"So we were there, all guns blazing--"
"Micah!"
Micah sighed. He knew better than to ignore that, but he wanted to. The girl was hanging on his every word, large brown eyes rapt in his exaggeration of a story, thinking of the wild west she'd never see, stuck in this city.
"Micah!" The shout came again.
"If you'll excuse me," he said, touching his fingers to the brim of his hat. He stumped around the corner, one hand on his gunbelt, sullen and scowling. "What?"
His father stared him down, meeting Micah's insolence with a stony glare until it was enough to make him turn his head.
Micah Bell Jr. wasn't a man to be messed with. Both of his sons knew that, but the eldest carried his name, the third in the line to do so, and with that came expectations. He'd been given more than one back-hand across the face for talking back in his life, though they'd tailed off the older he'd got. At twenty three he'd mostly outgrown them, but he was still expected to answer to him, without question and without argument.
"We're going," his father said.
They looked alike, though the father was slightly taller, slightly broader and rather a lot meaner. A life of cruelty had hardened his features and his flinty eyes had no trace of warmth in them. He kept his blond hair short in contrast to his son, who wore it to his shoulders, and it was rather obvious that his nose had been broken more than once. Frequent consumption of beer and whiskey had given him a paunch that he'd never bothered trying to lose and there was a dark spot on the right side of his mouth where he'd lost two teeth in a fight he'd still won.
The son, on the other hand, still had all of his teeth and was the sort of skinny you only ever got when you were too active on not quite enough food.
"Now?" Micah scowled again, taking the reins thrust at him.
"Now."
He looked up at the assembled horses, three pretty nondescript beasts, all brown, nothing fancy, though the one his brother sat atop had three white socks to set it apart from the others and his father's, slightly bigger than the other two, was a gelding instead of a mare. Amos looked nervous, though that wasn't anything new.
"Let's go," he said, looking behind him.
He looked a lot like Micah, though that wasn't too surprising. He was just as blond and just as skinny, albeit without the scar on his chin. They were two years apart and shared a mother, full-blooded brothers. Amos had her eyes, Micah had his father's. She'd spent a lot more time with Amos than she had Micah. Their father thought him soft because of it, but Amos just insisted he was cautious, and would continue to do so even as he emptied a six gun into the face of a pursuing lawman and pulled out another to prove he wasn't yellow.
"What did you do this time?" Micah asked as he mounted his mare and she whickered as he settled into the saddle. One day he'd get a stallion, but she'd do for now.
Amos stayed quiet, though he visibly winced at the look their father shot him. Micah saw then that his skin was dark around one eye, like he'd been hit recently and the bruise hadn't yet formed.
"It doesn't matter," Micah Jr. said, the look he threw in Amos's direction getting no less withering. He mounted without fuss.
The boys let their father take the lead, only spurring their horses to go faster once he'd kicked up dust ahead of them.
Pain shot across Micah's face enough to make his teeth clench. He thought he felt a crack, like caked blood splitting apart, warmth following in its wake. A coppery tang assaulted his nose, driving away the dark, earthy smell that had engulfed him. He forced his eyes, or at least an eye open, but the blur beyond meant nothing to him, just a mess of grey and black and brown and green.
He tried to push himself off the ground, fingers clawing in the dirt and leaves, but he found he lacked the strength.
There was a growl, low and deep, and the thundering bellow of a horse and then, against all reason, the percussive crack of a gun.
He thought he heard a voice in the ringing silence that followed.
The whispers again?
He wasn't sure what had possessed him to do it.
Maybe it was the same drive that pushed abandoned orphan children to try and find their parents even if they knew the reason they were alone was that they weren't wanted back when things were tough. Some were sold to workhouses in big cities, others into less savoury work, but it didn't stop a small number trying to find where they'd come from, to reunite with their own blood.
Maybe that's what Micah had wanted.
He knew he'd been drunk at the time, because he'd woken up the following day with the taste of whiskey on his lips and ink stains on his hands. When he drank, he sometimes found himself feeling maudlin, like all of his past mistakes and indiscretions were crowding about him, shadows at his shoulders.
He had a vague memory of writing a letter to his brother in a fit of madness, knowing only vaguely where he'd moved to, knowing it was San Francisco, a coastal city that had grown ridiculously in the past fifty years, with that bitch wife of his and their two gets.
The last time they'd spoke had been less than friendly, even if they'd run together both before and after their father's death. Amos had gotten married and Micah had attended out of a strange sense of duty. He wasn't sure why he'd gone, but seeing his little brother saying vows with that shrew, in front of a god he'd swore he hadn't believed in, had been really something.
He'd looked happy. He'd seen it in his eyes, brown, like their mother's. Not long after that, he'd washed his hands of him and moved out to the coast at his wife's behest, to leave behind the outlaw lifestyle and try to atone for what they'd done, leaving Micah alone, after all they'd done together.
He wouldn't admit it, but he'd felt betrayed. Their mother had died and they'd buried her together and later their father had been killed and they'd buried him together too. Neither had cried over him, but Micah hadn't felt his loss so sorely as when Amos left as well.
He'd almost forgotten about writing the letter until he received one in return.
Every word penned in his brother's untidy, ink-blotted script had hurt.
"Do not attempt to approach me. Do not attempt to visit me. Do not claim you know me."
He'd abandoned it, leaving it to the rain and paper-chewing insects, outside a small dwelling in the shadow of Shady Belle, within earshot of the snapping of alligators and crowing of long-legged wading birds.
Micah felt his face itching, his chest, his sides.
It was as though he was covered with crawling insects, their tiny feet irritating his skin with their erratic little paths. He wasn't conscious enough to realise it was sweat running down his skin, soaking the sheets beneath him.
He felt like he was burning, like the unseasonable heat he'd felt in the forest was coming from inside.
The pain in his face had dulled, but a throbbing had replaced it. He tried to open his eyes, but when he managed, he saw only blackness around him.
"Shhhh," the voice was soothing, not a whisper that time. "You're okay, you're okay..."
"What're you lookin' so damn pleased for?"
His father looked old. It was how he remembered him, nearing fifty, his grey beard bushy and shot with white, his hair longer than he'd ever kept it, but not thinning with age. More of his teeth were missing. His cheeks looked hollow, like there was a sickness in him, and his eyes were surrounded by bruised darkness that made them appear a brighter blue than they'd ever really looked in life. The last time Micah had seen him like that, he'd been cut down by a spray of bullets and his empty eyes had been staring up at the sky from the bottom of a shallow grave. It had been Amos who had closed them.
Micah Bell Jr. hadn't wanted to go out in the loop of a hangman's rope, spending his last moments dancing the jig of a lawman's ineptitude or dropping to a quick death with the snap of his neck. He'd wanted to die as he lived, on his feet or at a gallop, his guns in his hands, and he had. Lead from a lawman's gun had torn away the left side of his neck and he'd fallen from his saddle in a fountain of blood.
He was still covered in it now, his clothes stained with brown and red, and Micah only dimly noticed that his wound, seemed to be absent.
"I won," Micah said. "I got the money. From the trains, the coaches, Blackwater..." He was exulting, teeth bared in the humourless grin of a fox in a henhouse.
His father looked disappointed, though he always did in his memories, even though Micah had always done as he'd told him. He'd learned to fire a revolver better and faster than anybody else, he'd mastered horsemanship to the point where even the most headstrong stallion obeyed him. He'd robbed banks, killed lawmen, killed innocent people both at his father's word and of his own volition.
His father had never seemed impressed. It wasn't that he'd wanted the praise, he just wanted his respect. Him to acknowledge that he could do everything just as good as he could, just as good as his grandfather had taught him. If his father had lived to now, he'd have rubbed his face in what he'd achieved.
"I told you you would," he said, he said as if it was a foregone conclusion, merely an extension of his own work, a victory borne on the wings of his planning. "What now?"
Micah's grin froze and then died on his face, teeth still showing, but the corners of his mouth downturned. He felt the fury in him. "What else is there but the money?" He snapped. "I have enough there to keep me in bullets, whiskey and whores until I die."
"You're on your own," he said. "They'll hunt you 'til the ends of the earth, the lawmen and Dutch's gang."
"Dutch's gang are gone!" Micah spat.
"All of 'em?" His father asked. "They're all dead, are they?"
"Dead or scattered to the wind," Micah said, the set of his shoulders stiff with indignation. "Morgan's dead. Susan's dead. Hosea, Sean, Mac, Davey..." he counted them off on his fingers.
Not all of them, though. Javier and Williamson could still be alive. Sadie and Charles hadn't been there at the end, in Beaver Hollow. The women had fled and the weak, old men. They weren't worth thinking about. If they weren't dead, they'd abandoned their precious Dutch.
Dutch. He still lived. But he wanted him to. He wanted him to feel the loss he'd inflicted on him. The scars of his victory. If he hadn't wanted to go on with him, he'd have to go on alone.
"And you survived. You lived, they died. They was weak. I told you that's how it was. That you gotta use people to get where you want," his father told him. He'd heard it all his life. He'd taken it to heart, allowed nobody close to him. His father must have too, the coldhearted bastard.
"Of course they was weak," Micah said. "Weak and naive. Too trustin'," he added shortly. "I beat Dutch, brought him down. I won."
"It took you long enough to worm your way into his affection," there was a note of disgust in his voice. "Six months you licked his boots like a religious sycophant."
"I made him trust me," Micah hissed.
"You wanted him to respect you," his father said.
Micah snarled wordlessly, his lips twisting to show his teeth again. He still had all of his. He'd lost enough fights, but he'd never had his teeth knocked out of his head. He was better than his father there. "I made him trust me and then I tore everything down until there was nothing left of him. I took everything from him, his son, his woman, Hosea..."
Before falling in with Dutch, Micah had been transient in the wake of losing his father and his brother moving away. He'd gone from acquaintance to acquaintance, doing jobs with people he'd met before moving on. Cleet and Joe, Skinny... some jobs had gone well, others had been a disaster. He'd never stuck around. Dutch ... had been different. The rest of the Van der Lindes hadn't liked him, even if he'd tried to be civil in the beginning, so he'd stopped trying. He'd lingered on the fringe, never really participating. They'd never much wanted him around, so he'd stuck to the outside, like a coyote around a wolf kill. Maybe they'd known all along who he was, what he was, but it wasn't them he'd had to fool. It was Dutch.
He'd strived to pit Dutch against the rest of the them by planting seeds of doubt. He'd nurtured them lovingly, watering them with discord and feeding them on lies. He'd encouraged Dutch's more harebrained plans, gently pressed him to pursue revenge, embrace spite and make foolish decisions, ignoring his most trusted of advisors in favour of listening to him. It had only been easier once Hosea had fallen. Hosea had been the lynchpin. Even for all he'd done, all the ill-conceived plans and heists, Hosea had been the one keeping Dutch from going off the deep end. With him gone, Dutch had been more susceptible to his influence.
It hadn't been easy. Dutch's gang had been loyal, some of them blindly, some with doubts, all of them foolishly. He'd had an easy in, at least. He'd not been inducted into the gang indebted to their noble leader, he'd saved him. Sure, so Dutch hadn't been kissing his feet in thanks, but he'd brought him into the fold with few questions about his motivations and while Micah had failed to fall in with the rest of them, Dutch had kept him around. He'd lent him his ear, taken his counsel and allowed him ample opportunity to stroke his ego and it was his ego that made his decisions for him. He didn't want input on his ideas, he wanted agreement, yes-men, backup. Micah had been generous there.
It had taken time. So much time. It hadn't all been smooth sailing, either. Especially on that boat in Blackwater. The money had been within his grasp, so close he could smell it, and then they'd been forced to leave it behind, along with some of the gang. The loyal had remained that way, even in light of Dutch's behaviour. They'd written it off as the stress of the situation, the potential for it being a setup, and waved it off as bad things happening in the heat of the moment, but it had driven a wedge between Morgan, Hosea and Dutch. That was its saving grace. The boat had sunk, but there was plunder in the wreckage. Micah had picked at that scab until the wound was raw, until their questioning and his venom had eroded enough of the camaraderie.
A lot of people had died because of him.
Blackwater had been the beginning of the end for the gang. The Callander Boys had fallen there and the girl, Jenny. She'd been sweet enough. Hadn't deserved her death, even if she'd never given him the time of day, even if he'd claim otherwise after the fact when she wasn't around to defend her own honour. Everything after that, directly or indirectly, had been his fault. If Blackwater hadn't gone down the way it had they might have all lived. They wouldn't have ended up in Rhodes, where Sean had died, or Saint Denis, which had claimed the lives of others.
He hadn't set the Blackwater job up to fail, no matter what everybody else said. It had been Dutch who had lit that spark and it had been there, with that girl's death and only a few words of encouragement from him, that he'd seen just how malleable Dutch could be, the madness that bubbled under the surface of the calm leader facade.
Picking that apart hadn't been hard.
He'd been more than a leader to many of the gang. To Arthur, John, and even Javier and Bill to an extent, he'd been like a father. That's what had rankled. That's what had made Micah want to move up the ranks. He'd wanted him to treat him like he trusted him, to prove he was better than those other sons and then take everything away from him in the end, to get one over on the glorious father-figure he'd set himself up to be.
"I won," he said again. "I beat him."
"Was it really him you wanted to beat?" His father asked.
Micah opened his eye and saw only darkness.
Even so, he wasn't afraid. He was comfortable and his head swam with confusion. Where was he? He could feel softness beneath him, something warm over him and he could sense somebody in the room with him, but it didn't strike him as wrong, or dangerous.
He couldn't smell the deep odour of soil, or the metallic tang of blood, nor could he smell the forest air or a breeze tainted by the scent of flowers, leaves or pine needles. There was something familiar about what he could detect, but he couldn't place what it was, only that it made him feel at ease.
He could move, he reckoned, but he wasn't sure he wanted to. As he thought about it, it felt like he was sinking down again, and a deeper darkness closed around him.
The sky was dark with leaden clouds. On the horizon, the only light was the distant, faint glow of a half moon, barely visible between the patchwork of greys. Wind gusted through the grass, carrying with it a spray of rain, bending stalks, sending ripples of movement through the meadow.
Atop a rock, curled up like a coil of rope in a dockyard, a rattlesnake lay. It raised its head, scales reflecting the roiling turmoil of the oncoming storm above, and hissed, the tip of its tail buzzing a warning...
Micah awoke to find himself looking up at a ceiling, the rattle from his dream ebbing away as consciousness moved in.
On the right of him he could see a door, unpainted, surrounded by stained, off-white wallpaper that otherwise depicted a repeating pattern of strange flowers, or were they leaves? On the left he could see a window, through which warm sunlight streamed, though that he found that the need to turn his head to see it was ... unexpected. He frowned, bringing a hand up to his face.
He traced the scratch down from his forehead to his nose. It hadn't healed, but it was on its way to doing so, and he could feel little knots holding some of the wound together. Stitches. His eye wouldn't open again, though. There was little chance of that. Further down his face he found that his whiskers were overgrown and untidy, but they were no longer stiff and encrusted with the dried blood of the knife fight.
He felt weak, but he pushed himself up to sitting and looked about himself.
The room he was in was untidy, but lived in. He suspected it had been set aside for storage, but the bed he lay in was nice enough, with an ornate brass bedframe and a comfortable mattress that was only slightly lumpy. There were few personal effects save a bowl, a lamp and an abandoned book. There was a folded piece of paper on the nightstand. He picked it up and opened it.
I'm afraid you'll have to forgive me the lack of your name, for we haven't been formally introduced.
I expect you're wondering where you are and how you got here. Try not to worry, I mean you no harm. I found you in the forest not far from Brandywine Drop, in Roanoke Valley. You were almost taken by a cougar, though I managed to frighten it off.
I brought you back here, on account of your injuries and because you were burning up. I don't know if it was an animal that cut your face, but it became powerfully infected before I found you. I stayed with you until your fever broke, but I have need of supplies, so I have gone into the city now that you seem to be out of the woods, so to speak.
Your horse is tied up outside the house and your belongings are safely inside. Take anything you might need from the house should you seek to leave before I return. I have a small stock of food on the table if you need it and a selection of tonics you're welcome to, as I have gone to replenish those and will return with more.
I wish you good fortune.
- Charlotte Balfour.
Micah read it over twice before he folded it up and slipped it into his -- not his pocket. His shirt, clean, he noticed, hung over the back of a chair. He put it into the pocket of his trousers instead. He got himself to his feet and crossed the room to shrug on the shirt. It smelled pleasant, of soap and firesmoke. Not the acrid stench he remembered from outside Beaver Hollow, but that of a hearth, as if it had been hung to dry there.
He frowned, pushing the door open to let himself into the main room of the house.
Near the door, he saw his saddlebags, rig and, against all reason, the sack from the train robbery. He'd half expected that to be gone, squirreled away as payment for the care he'd received, but there it was, undisturbed. There was a red smear on one side. His blood, he assumed. He hadn't noticed it before. Through the glass of the window, he could see the bone white face of Baylock.
The fireplace was cold, the fire that had been lit there having long burned low, then out.
As promised, there was a selection of cans and bottles on the table which he did help himself to. He stopped to eat a can of beans and take a long drink of water from a bucket on the side, settling himself at the small table on account of standing being too much effort too soon. His stomach groaned first in protest of its enduring emptiness and then at the sudden sensation of being full. He stayed there a good while, the weakness of too much rest and not enough food draining him after only the few short steps from one room to the other.
When he felt up to it, he dragged himself back to his feet, stuffed his saddlebags with all he could carry, and put on his gunbelt. With a little effort he slung the saddlebags over his shoulder, grabbed the sack of money and pushed open the door with his foot, peering outside warily, his eye almost watering in the sun.
Baylock seemed pleased to see him and didn't complain as he got him ready for a ride. He looked clean and brushed and didn't nose or search him for food, having been apparently cared for as well as he had.
Micah swung himself up into the saddle, the effort seeming entirely too much for such a simple act, and turned the horse away from the house. As he rode away, he wondered if he should have left a note in return.
He pulled out the letter again and read it over for a third time, carefully.
He couldn't fathom why a complete stranger, a woman no less, would take a blood-stained vagrant into her home and nurse him back to health, when he not only had a pair of guns but also a bag of money that could only have been gained by illegitimate means. When he'd gotten his bearings, he saw that she was barely a stone's throw from the river. Her home was close enough to both Beaver Hollow and to where the shooting had taken place the night they'd been hunted to have heard every gunshot and nearly every shout as the Pinkertons had pursued them through the trees. She can't not have known of the trouble that had raced through that forest then, and if the wind had been right, she must have smelled the smoke of the burning camp on the wind.
It baffled him, why she'd tend to the injuries of an outlaw. Why she'd care so much about somebody she didn't know and had no obligation to. He'd couldn't have known what had made her so quick to help a stranger in such desperate need.
He shook his head, trying to shake free the thoughts and questions, and urged Baylock through the river and beyond.
