Work Text:
Sadie stares at her hands, at all the little nick and cuts she’s accumulated throughout the years.
Jake, at every turn, had helped her with them. He’d bound her fingers in gauze, held her hands steady in the cold snow to stop the bleeding. He’d pressed a lingering kiss to every scrape and bruise she’d gotten while out hunting; every touch had been filled with unending warmth and love.
They used to dance in the evenings, sometimes to music, sometimes not; always swaying in each other’s arms, pressed together like two flowers between the pages of a book – molded into one another.
She takes the whiskey bottle by her side and stares at it instead, can’t bear to think of her Jakie. But he’s all she can think about. Even when she tries not to, his voice, his kind eyes, his warm hands, it all wells up in her mind until it spills over and hot tears gather in her eyes. In the whiskey, there’s a promise of delightful, heavy unconsciousness. A promise of temporary forgetfulness, an easing of pain only liquor can bring. She raises the bottle towards her lips.
And someone slaps it out of her hands.
“Hey!” Sadie glares at her intruder.
It’s the elderly man whose laugh is too loud standing in front of her with a deep frown. Hosea, she thinks she’s heard Abigail call him – others have called him Matthews. He’s holding a carbine repeater.
“Don’t start that,” Matthews says, matter-of-fact. “It’ll only make everything worse.”
He kicks the whiskey bottle, its contents spilling out over the lush, green grass. It reeks.
“How would you know?” Sadie grumbles, voice hoarse and tired.
Matthews shakes his head and sits down beside her, knees creaking at the effort, and coughs into his closed fist. “More than you know, Mrs. Adler.” His cough worsens, and he bends forwards, holding his chest in a way that looks painful. “More than you know,” he wheezes.
He looks the same he always does; stern and shifty – calculating in a way Sadie doesn’t really understand. He’s strange in that way because after watching him with the younger people in the group she’s gotten stuck with, Sadie’s come to find that he isn’t that stern when it comes to it. Shifty and mischievous, yes – by God, is he mischievous – but he’s also kinda soft. For an outlaw at least.
His coughing eases, but Sadie doesn’t. She’s not comfortable with him – isn’t with any of the men in the gang, to be frank. She trusts him about as far as she can throw him. Which, well, judging by his stature, she might be able to throw him at least a foot or two. Still, Abigail is the only one of these fools she even remotely trusts. She’s the only one who’s been honest with her so far.
She looks at the bottle, brown glass glinting in the sun.
Matthews must’ve followed her gaze because he sighs and clears his throat, resting his elbows on his knees. “You know, stuff like that – it might bring about a few blissful moments of utter blankness. Something near unconsciousness. But after that, it’s just more of those awful thoughts and feelings with no outlet… And you just keep drinking to make it all go away. And it just continues like that until you’ve reached a point where you’ve pushed away everyone who cared about you.” He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, something heavy behind his eyelids. “When you reach that point, you better pray you got someone good with you. Or at least someone honest, who can pull you out of that black hole. ‘Cause otherwise it’ll swallow you whole.”
Sadie doesn’t know what to say. There’s a lot of pain behind the words, experience she doesn’t want to dive into with a man she barely knows. She just sits there in silence, staring at her hands once again, trying to avoid the critical eyes she can feel on her – if Matthews expects some sort of response, he’s going to have to wait a long time.
“I thought I should let you know,” Hosea continues as if there hasn’t been an awkward stretch of silence, thick and soupy to a point where Sadie fears she might drown in. “Your husband’s been buried. If it brings you a little peace.”
Matthews’ voice is gentle, but firm and Sadie takes a sharp breath she feels like choking on.
She’d thought about it; going up into the mountains again to bury him. Steal a horse, ride all the way up to the ashes of what was once her home filled with warmth and love. She’d thought about digging a grave big enough for two.
She can’t do that anymore.
It brings a strange kind of comfort.
“I… Thank you, Mr. Matthews.”
Matthews shakes his head. “Don’t thank me. Thank Dutch. He’s the one who made me send someone up there.”
She’s not going to thank Van Der Linde, wouldn’t have thanked Matthews if he hadn’t brought it up with her. It’s their fault she’s even in this situation. If that bastard of a man, Micah, hadn’t burned down everything she knew, everything she owned, she would’ve had something to remember her Jake by.
As it is, all she has are her memories.
But memories fade.
She once heard someone say that the voice is the first thing you forget about a person, followed by their face.
She thinks of their wedding photo, the one that stood on the mantel just above their fireplace, how happy she’d been on that day, something ugly and sneering and burning twisting and sizzling within her – beneath her skin – when she remembers that photo is nothing but ashes now. Cold, grey ashes.
“Here.” Matthews dumps his repeater into her lap. Sadie startles, barely getting ahold of the weapon before it can clatter to the ground. It’s old and slightly worn, but, she thinks, it probably just needs some gun oil or something. “Make yourself useful, will ya?”
It’s heavy in her hands, but also… comforting in its familiarity.
“Thank you, Mr. Matthews,” she says, and this time it’s sincere.
He chuckles. “Hosea’s fine.”