Chapter Text
Beth Dutton was a woman of exquisite faith, no matter how hard she tried, she knew her shitty luck would always screw her over. Emotional pain was something Beth was intimately familiar with, her inner turmoil had been a constant companion ever since her mother explained that she needed to be held to an impossibly high standard and while she tried her heart out, she could never match those high expectations.
The loss and sorrow that had been the hallmark of her teenage years, had inured her to tragedy and made adversity her closest bedfellow, or so she thought. But this physical pain was new and overwhelming as she lay in her hospital bed. A fucking bomb exploded in her office. Her assistant had popped like a red goo-filled water-balloon a mere stone's throw away from her. Miraculously despite many broken bones, burns and abrasions she was somehow still alive, even if it felt like more of a curse than a blessing. She understood it had been a close run thing, after all a mother-fucking building fell on top of her. She had been clinically dead for two minutes in the ambulance. She had been in a coma. Nothing hurt while she was in that comatose limbo, it was a blissful state of un-being. Now in her lucid moments the throbbing white hot pain was the only thing that occluded her raw emotions; her grief and crippling survivor’s guilt.
She had always been a connoisseur of misery, a lifetime of wallowing in the sadness of her past. But that had not prepared her for the present waves of crushing fresh pain that overwhelmed her whenever she managed to rise past the pharmacopeia of drugs keeping her dull and pliant. The nightmare of dead bodies haunted her waking thoughts, the only sleep she managed was tightly controlled by the tranquillisers that marked the transition of the hospital's day staff changing shift for the nighttime roster.
The war for the Dutton Ranch had spiralled out of control. An ever increasing bodycount weighed heavy on her mind, she felt the gut-wrenching guilt at narrowly escaping death on two occasions now and those people in her periphery who had not been so lucky. Her stomach twisted at how dismissive her father was when her assistant died during the Beck’s attack. In the back of her mind she knew in the zero-sum game her father was playing people like Jason were collateral damage. She wasn't sure anything could truly reach past the elder Dutton's atrophied heart. In a small way she felt this hard-heartedness was contagious, as she tried to recall the name of her most recent dead assistant, the name just hovering tantalisingly out of reach.
The traitorous part of her mind wished she had the same misanthropic streak as her father, if she could only work her tough facade into a concrete reality, she wouldn’t be haunted by the deaths of colleagues and acquaintances. With the exception of Kayce, she knew none of the Dutton’s were burdened by scruples. She knew she was at a metaphorical crisis point even before the bomb was mailed to her. Could she continue irrevocably down this path her father started, waring with the Indigenous tribes, Market Equities and the Beck Brothers or she could escape to a simpler life. The thoughts of running away with Rip, shedding the persona and baggage of Beth Dutton seemed like an impossible dream.
Could she convince Kayce and Monica that Tate would be safer removed from the toxic atmosphere of the Yellowstone Ranch, even if he was heir-apparent?
From her hospital bed, Beth struggled with the maelstrom of recriminations in her mind. She could torture herself endlessly with the what-ifs of choices made and the path not taken, but she understood fundamentally that she had been guilty of cowardice since Lee’s death. Her complicity in kowtowing to her father’s crazy and reckless plans, had repercussions for everyone in the Dutton family orbit. Even when she was kept out of the loop, she understood implicitly that her father played a game that took no prisoners and this inevitably would only ever leave victims in its wake. Although she was never very attentive in Church, she understood enough of the fire and brimstone dogma to know sins of omission were still sins in the eyes of organised religion.
She knew that Rip would follow her to the ends of the earth. It amazed and shamed her in equal measures that he had the space and understanding in his heart for her and all her flaws. She had trust that their relationship was stronger than the piteous scraps of attention her father tossed in Rip’s direction to keep him loyal and biddable. She stewed on the heart-to-heart she had with Monica after her shoplifting ordeal. She owed it to herself to bury her miserable past and live a full life with Rip, to respect the memory of those who died in the crosshairs of a cruel and pointless war. She would honour their sacrifice. She needed to honour the innate decency of Rip, to get him far away from the influence of her father, before he was twisted into the image of her father. It might be too late to save herself from damnation but she understood Rip was a simple and decent man
Could Beth Wheeler be better than Beth Dutton? She surely owed it to herself to find out.