Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It's April, and Dodge does not feel any warmer.

The sun shreds the gossamer film of mist, damping the dirt to the road. Slick churns beneath the hooves of the plough horses, men drawing their wagons to town to buy the year's first supply of seed. Henry Wentworth, an elderly man with a proclivity for gardening, ladens his mule with a burden of what he hopes will bring corn in the harvest time.

"We've got sprigs of Easter lilies, marshal!" He pats his mule's neck. Matt helps him carry his bags of seed to his wagon. "Haven't had a frost for two weeks now. Summer's coming soon, and it's coming hot."

The warmth of a new season doesn't call for a sweat, but the breeze is comfortable. "It can't come soon enough." A soft thought, meant to be internal, loosed by a weary tongue.

"Hm?" Wentworth perks up with muted interest. "I suppose we earned a hot summer, what with the bitter winter." He's gentle but probing, the kind way an old man invites a younger one to talk about his troubles.

Matt doesn't take him up on it. "As long as there's no more snow."

In spite of the warming weather, the weeks since he found Chester and Doc on the hillside have scarcely felt less bitter. Today, the sun is high and bright, and the fresh sprouts no longer wilt with frost, and Matt is outside with his collar unbuttoned because it's warm enough to let the air on his throat. It's the sort of weather which once would have drawn Chester from his bed to watch the sunrise, how blue melts into gold. But now, dawn often stretches over a bag of bones in a cot, shuddering and whimpering, unsoothed by heaps of blankets and a stove fed fat with logs.

Wentworth asks, "How is Chester? We've not seen hide nor hair of him since him and Doc come back from the riverbend."

"He's alright."

"I'm glad to hear it."

The lies are exhausting, but the truth is unmanageable.

Wentworth wishes him well, and with a wave, he climbs onto his wagon to drive away.

It's nearly lunchtime. Matt buys two plates of chilies, tomatoes, and beans from Delmonico's. Doc tells him the best way to encourage Chester to eat is to eat with him, in company, so he might copy Matt and eat more.

With the current rate of success, Matt will be fat a long time before Chester is healthy.

He knocks twice on the office door. "Chester, I'm coming in." Announcing his presence, something he never did before. This is their home.

As he opens the door, Chester has both eyes covering his hands. Matt kicks the door shut behind him, blocking out the sun. With drawn curtains, only muted daylight intrudes in the office.

The sound of the latch closing into place leads Chester to peek between his fingers, and when he sees it's safe, he straightens himself up. He grins when he sees Matt, bracing himself on the frame of the cot to stand. "Mr. Dillon!"

The dust on the floor of the office bears long streaks in the shape of Chester's boot. As he hobbles to his feet, he limps to the table, hauling along his dropped foot so the toes skim the ground. They catch on the uneven boards, but he manages not to stumble. He flops unceremoniously into the chair.

Muffling a cough into his elbow, he snivels. "I been wondering where you got off to, leaving 'fore dawn."

Matt places the plate in front of him. "Ran out to Bowers' ranch. He's got some kind of animal taking out his cattle." He sits across from him.

"Yeah? You catch wind of it?"

"Not even a track. The way it's leaving carcasses, has to be something big."

Carcass. Chester stiffens at the word. His fork trembles in his hand. "You said we ain't got nothing that big out here."

Matt shrugs, careful to be nonchalant. "Any animal can get itself turned around." It was that blizzard. The weather drove up everything, all the starving predators expanding their range, too lost to find their way back home. But Matt can't tell him anything about winter that he doesn't already know. "Did Moss get around to feeding you this morning?"

"Yessir."

"How many dimes did you lose?"

"Aw, naw, we played checkers. Or I played checkers, rather, and he saw after me like a horse. All his fussing. I was ready for him to try to pick my hooves."

"That explains why your hair looks combed."

Chester gawps for a second, and then he smiles again, shaking his head. "You's funning me, Mr. Dillon." He takes the first bite of his lunch, and Matt stifles a sigh of relief.

The day he pulled Chester from the crevasse, he didn't look like a man. His overgrown beard and brittle hair, tall frame stooped over, frail skin stretched over a shrunken skeletal face, voice pinched hoarse by pneumonia and fever. Even his eyes, handsome dark eyes, clear and sweet like molasses, were fuzzy and bloodshot by weeks of staring into an empty, blinding white abyss. Matt (forgive him) recognized him first by his limp. And that, too, is different, complicated by a foot that droops as often as it holds straight.

Matt eats slowly, prolonging the time for Chester to take spoonful after spoonful. The first three bites are enthusiastic, a famished soldier eating his mother's pie for the first time after the war. But after that, he's full. He puts his spoon on his plate and rests his hands in his lap.

Doc has explained this: their stomachs shrunk from disuse. He, too, struggles to eat a meal, his scrawny hands picking over every sandwich and boiled egg Kitty puts in front of him.

"C'mon, have a little more," Matt says.

His dimples deepen. Sometimes, Matt thinks this is intentional: prolonging the event to keep his company a little longer. Chester's eyes flit to the window, and they narrow against the faint light blocked by the curtains. "It's getting brighter out there."

"Do you want to switch seats?" Matt's back is to the light.

"Naw, it ain't so bad." He squints, like he may discern a shape walking by the window. "I been hearing lots of traffic today."

"Folks coming in to get seed."

The calendar on the wall bears slashes through the days as they pass. Chester never did that before, didn't care for the date or one sunset fading into another. But the timeless adventure on the rocky hill left him longing to count every hour.

"I reckon it's warming up some."

"It is." He bumps Chester's foot with his own and nods back to the plate of food; he hasn't given up yet. Chester obediently takes another swallow. "You might spend some time getting some fresh air out front."

He ducks his head. "All that sun ain't too kind on my eyes. Hat just ain't shade enough."

"Wrap them up, then."

"Mr. Dillon, I look pathetic enough without you dragging me out and blindfolding me in front of God and everybody on Front Street."

"I don't think anybody much cares how you look, Chester."

"Might not. I care a bit, though." He picks at his food, not really eating, merely sorting the beans from the tomatoes, like playing with the spoon will satisfy Matt. "You sound halfway like Moss. He offered me a fly mask."

Matt snorts. "He was treating you like a horse, wasn't he?"

"Like I said. Just short of picking out my feet." With a clink of finality, he places his spoon on his plate.

When it's clear Chester can't stomach anything more, Matt leaves again. The office is dark and warm for Chester's comfort, but to Matt, it's stifling, shrinking the room too small. The atmosphere chokes him, an ever-present reminder of the months of Chester's absence.

He spent those days crowded over his desk with maps and pins, no longer seeing the passage of time, all sleepless nights with dawns of slipping boots and hooves on the endless sheet of ice.

It's a shame known to no one but God, that on the day Buck broke his leg in the hills, Matt wept into his mane.

But it doesn't do for men to tell things like that, and anyway, who would he tell? He doesn't deserve the sympathy of Chester or Doc.

Kitty knows on some level, the way a woman reads things off of a man without him telling about it. As he trudged back to town on foot in the wee hours of the morning, a defeated hypothermic man carrying a saddle on his shoulder, she ran from the Long Branch in her night gown and slippers. She ushered him into the saloon and poured liquor into him until he quieted. She warmed his frostbitten hands and combed the snowflakes from his hair, and then she took him upstairs, where he slept for fourteen hours.

Mostly, he remembers waking in a daze, the afternoon light dwindling into an early winter sunset, with Kitty pushing a mug of coffee into his hand. He staggered to his feet and spilled the coffee on her duvet. She asked him to stay. He told her he had to get back to work.

He regrets his callousness. But Kitty understood.

In the evening, Matt goes to the Long Branch, which feels emptier with only himself and Kitty at their table in the center of the saloon. He sips his beer, placing the mug back on the table with a clink. "No sign of Doc today?"

"Oh, I've seen him." She huffs, her thumbnail gliding beneath the shell of a boiled egg. "He got a wild hair up his ass about going down to the Millers for that baby to be born. He had us in that buggy before dawn. Course, he slept all the way out there, and they had lunch waiting on him. Me, I had another twenty miles back to Dodge before I saw the right side of a loaf of bread."

"They didn't offer you lunch?"

Her weight shifts in her chair, preoccupied with the egg. "Mrs. Miller and I have never seen eye to eye." She takes the first bite of the rubbery texture of the egg white.

"Right." Some prairie wives have their qualms against saloon girls, even those accompanying a doctor. Matt traces a seam in the glass with his thumb. "Doc's out there alone."

"He's not alone. He's got five people seeing after him. They won't let him miss a meal. They'll make him sick to his stomach, as much as they'll push down him."

Matt makes a face. Logically, he knows the Millers won't starve Doc or let him collapse. But he can't escape the gnawing in his gut, a tension, knowing Doc is out of reach. "I'd have rather one of us stayed with him, is all."

"You know how he gets when I hover. He's not an easy patient."

Doc has recovered quicker than Chester in some respects. He knows what to do, and he tells them when they ask: What's next? What's most important? He says the key to regaining strength is to get moving, and he has from the very day he jumped out of the wagon and staggered up his stairs, clinging to Kitty and the rail. Each day, he insists on leaving the office, at least to sit on the boardwalk and people watch, even on the days the exhaustion is so heavy that he sleeps with his head on Kitty's shoulder sitting upright in the sun.

And those days are becoming fewer.

"Are you sure he's got it in him to take care of that by himself?"

"There's no talking him out of it. He tried to tack the horse by himself."

"How'd it go?"

"We're lucky he's got a quiet horse, is all."

The tip of his tongue trails the roof of his mouth, clicking on his front teeth. "Surprised he hasn't spent more time here." The first beer Doc had when they came home knocked him unconscious and left him fiercely ill the next day. Since then, he has only imbibed in soda water.

"Speaking of. When are you going to get Chester down here with the rest of us? We miss him."

"You know how to make a man feel loved, Kitty."

"Well, I went through three months without them. I didn't go three months without you. And the way you were turning up, I almost wish I had."

"Say it out, Kitty. You thought I was losing my head."

"You were."

Matt doesn't need Kitty to say, for he knows it himself: the fervency of desperation can drive any man past his breaking point. Each day saddling another horse, plotting another course, falling short every time. Ceaseless pacing which echoes in the jail if one listens closely, pallor graying in the mirror, the looming shadow of fate. Fate, the hollow whisper that every passing hour was another chance that Doc and Chester were dead, that even savvy men can only survive so long in the elements with no supplies, no shelter, no way out.

"I was," he admits.

Elbow resting on the table, Kitty leans in. Her long eyelashes flutter, the implicit flattery of a coy woman with a man in her sights. "Can I tell you a secret, cowboy?"

Indifferent, Matt reaches past her for the frosted mug again. "Sure."

"You're still losing your head."

"Is that so?"

She rolls her eyes, facade shattered. She leans away from him again, waving him off. "You know it, Matt. You're not yourself. Finding any excuse to stay in town."

"I went to the Bowers ranch this morning."

"After he spent a week hounding you. And reminded you that you killed two of his horses out there." He hides his grimace behind the rim of his mug. "You're not making your rounds. You've skipped some gunfights, even."

"How many gunfights have I missed?"

"You're ignoring my point, Matt." Kitty's sharp nature misses nothing, and she doesn't indulge him. "This mess has swallowed you up. You wake up and check on Chester. You wander around the office all day seeing after him. Then you go to bed and do it all over again."

He huffs. "It's not like he can care for himself."

She goes quiet, and the muffled hubbub of the saloon overwhelms them both, so the silence is less uncomfortable. She takes a nibble from the yoke of her egg. "He's not getting better, then."

Like a cave, her voice rings back at them. "He's doing alright."

After sunset, he returns to the office with supper, knocking twice and calling a warning before he enters.

Half of the floor is swept. On the other half of the floor, Chester is lying prone, fumbling with the broom in a weak attempt to pull himself up. One palm is pressed down, trying to push himself up. But he lacks the strength to bear his own weight. He curses at himself under his breath.

Matt closes the door, immersing the room in near-complete darkness. "I'm gonna light a lamp." Chester slings his arm over his eyes, groaning. Matt strikes a match, lighting the office with an orange glow. "How long have you been down there?"

"I dunno, Mr. Dillon," he mumbles into the crook of his arm.

Kneeling beside him, he touches between his shoulder blades. No muscle tone, bone on bone; there's more weight in Matt's hand than Chester's torso. "A couple minutes, or a couple hours?"

Slowly, Chester dares to loosen the tight pinch of his eyes, adjusting to the dim light. "What time is it?"

"Quarter til nine."

"Oh, I dunno. Didn't get started cleaning til it was darker outside. About seven, whereabouts."

He bites the tip of his tongue. "Roll over."

With a wince, Chester's dewy eyes find his, struggling through a fuzz to focus on his face. He hesitates to ask. "Would you give me a hand?" A flush of shame colors his hollow cheeks, sweat damping his hair to his forehead.

Matt places his hands Chester's shoulder and hip, lingering long enough to feel his thumb dip beneath the sharp protrusion of his pelvic bone, then gently flips him onto his back. A few wet coughs leave him trembling. With an arm around his shoulders, Matt tugs him to sit upright, legs stretched out before him. "You sound rough."

Chester clings to one of Matt's hands, using all of his strength to hold himself straight. "All that dust on the floor." His breath rattles. A second shaky cough is muffled into his wrist. "'S why I was trying to get it swept up." His trunk trembles with the weight of supporting him, his core muscles atrophied into nothing.

A bit of snot beads at one nostril. He sniffs, but his nose keeps running, drawn on by incessant shivering, having lain without a blanket for so long. He can't let go of Matt's hand without collapsing.

It's effortless, holding up Chester's weight. He can do it with one arm. One of Matt's limbs contains more strength than Chester's whole body. Matt dabs the snot away with his thumb and smears it onto his trousers. "You've caught your breath?"

He shies from Matt's thumb on his face, but then he relaxes into the touch Licking his lips, he nods, squeezing Matt's hand with both of his. "Yessir."

"Grab onto me." Chester strings his arms around Matt's neck, and he scoops him up onto his feet. He sways into Matt's chest, knee buckling, before he finds his balance. He shuffles his feet. "You alright?"

"Mhm."

With a hand on the small of his back, Matt escorts him to the table. "Why didn't you yell for help?"

He sags into his chair, still breathless, space crackling in his lungs. "Mr. Dillon—" His mouth is dry, choking out his voice, and he laps at the roof of his mouth. Matt gives him a cup of water. He stares at it, but he doesn't pick it up. "I ain't got no interest in anybody seeing me this kinda way." The dust from the floor sticks to his clothes. He shivers, jaw clicking, goosebumps on his exposed skin. "Wasn't nothing hurting me down there." Matt drapes a blanket over his shoulders, and with downcast eyes, he murmurs a word of gratitude.

"Take a drink." These days, he only seems to remember when Matt tells him.

He takes a single swallow. His hand shakes, spent by the exertion of getting off of the floor. A man shouldn't be so frail.

Matt puts supper in front of him. It has gone cold. The gravy on the potatoes smells like beef.

"I ain't real hungry," Chester hedges. Matt pushes it nearer. "An hour wallowing around on the floor kinda knocked the appetite out of me."He hunches at the middle like an elderly man, head bowed forward.

"Chester…" Matt's thumb caresses the jut of his scapula. The thick flannel shirt and blanket over him don't warm him, shivers quaking through him. "You need to eat." You can't get stronger if you don't eat, he wants to say, but he bites his tongue on the extra impression.

Chester picks out a single scoop of potatoes untainted by the gravy and reluctantly laps it off of the spoon. His throat lurches into a repressed gag, withering in disgust. He attempts to gulp past it, and again, his throat tightens, lurching like he'll vomit.

"Don't. Don't force yourself."

He spits it back onto his plate. His eyes glisten as he wipes the potato grain off of his lower lip. "I'm awful sorry."

"You don't have anything to be sorry for." His jaw chatters. It's far from cold in the office, but Matt feeds another log into the stove, anyway. "Can I get you something else?"

The question is moot. They both know there isn't much Chester can keep on his stomach, and if there were, he wouldn't ask. "I'm alright, Mr. Dillon." He sags, tired. "If it ain't no matter to you, I—I think I'll go ahead and bed up for the night." He manages to stand.

He limps his way to bed. He doesn't undress himself, merely curling up in his cot in his baggy clothes, which pool around him. Everything fits him loosely, even the undersized clothes Matt purchased for him.

He expected Chester and Doc would come back thinner. He didn't expect them to come back looking worse-off than bad taxidermy.

Chester covers his head with his blanket to block out the light, and Matt places another quilt atop him. Within minutes, he rumbles with satisfied snores. Matt finishes sweeping. And then he sits at his desk.

A few weeks ago, maps littered his desk, techniques that hadn't worked, a dwindling list of things that could. He did his work after dusk. A burnt spot on the wood shows where he dozed off over his work, tipped over a candle, and lit his maps on fire. He extinguished the flames, and then he cursed himself for destroying something he needed.

He never considered he might have started a fire to ravage the whole block.

Now, his desk is bare except for a single book, a leather journal worn and patchy, with Chester's name scrawled inside the front cover. He brings the lamp beside him and sits to read, an arduous process, which sets his pulse thrumming through his wrists and tangles his tongue in the base of his throat. He has only managed to read a few dates. Each time he tries, he can't bear to go on.

He knows. He saw the mutilated corpse of Abner Reese, sliced with the neatness of a blade guided by a human hand. He saw the face untouched, the hands folded delicately on the chest, the careful plucking of rotten flesh away from intact. He saw the missing chunks of muscle and sinew, sawed like a butcher, the largest whole cuts taken away. He heard Chester's tale of a buzzard picking at the body of their friend, how he shot it and cooked it, which didn't change, no matter Matt's prodding questions.

Chester doesn't seem to remember what he did. Matt doesn't want him to.

He turns another page. In it, Abner is still alive, and Chester is digging roots out of the crags in the rock to feed him. The script is clear, not yet tortured by snow-blind eyes and feverish delirium.

Across the room, Chester stirs with a yelp. Matt turns back in his chair to peer at him. He snuffles, like maybe he'll fall asleep again, but then in a sleep-slurred voice, he croaks, "Mr. Dillon?" He peeks out from under his blanket. His teeth clack together.

Matt lifts his head. "Yeah?"

He blinks hard a few times. As his eyes fix on Matt's face, the wrinkle of anxiety between his brows abates. "Just seeing you're there, is all."

"I'm here." Chester eases. "You woke up thinking of me, huh?"

With a sleepy smile, his dimples deepen. "Always do." He covers his head again, satisfied. Beneath the blankets, he continues to shake, a false flash of cold drawn from his memory. Matt doesn't doubt he was dreaming of a lonely plateau of white.

Closing the journal, he puffs out the light and drags his cot nearer to Chester's, so the mattresses are flush together. "Here. Let's double up."

"You ain't cold, ain'tcha?"

"I'm cold." He's not. He undresses himself and slips beneath the blankets. Before he's lain down, Chester nestles into cleft between the mattresses, and when he feels the purchase of Matt's underwear, he croons a happy sound.

Chester's frigid hands stamp against his skin. It's uncomfortably hot, no open windows, wedged against another body under several heavy quilts. But Chester rests his head on his chest and dozes off again. Matt can't bear to disturb him.

He smooths a hand over his shoulders. When the memories in his dreams set him quivering, Matt nudges him, until he finds a safer place in his mind (Matt hears him mumble, Miss Kitty, followed by a laugh).

Matt is stuck on his back, sweating, bound up in limbs and layers. He twitches, trying to stir up enough draft on his skin. It's too hot to sleep. But Chester is content. Eventually, he surrenders, lying still in misery.

His hand cradles Chester's back. The crackles in his lungs abate. His breath flushes against his neck, real and alive. He stretches out, languid, burrowed into Matt like a baby at its mother's breast.

It doesn't feel like enough.

He kisses the crown of his head. The movement rouses Chester. "Mr. Dillon?" He lifts his chin.

"Sh. Go back to sleep."

His hand rubs Matt's flank. "Sweaty," he mumbles, only half-awake. Like a potato sprout pushing its way up through the earth, Chester roots out from under the quilts. With his good leg, he kicks the extra blanket off of the top of them, and scoots his weight off of Matt's body.

The air on his skin is a relief. "You're cold."

"'M alright now." Chester rolls onto his side with a huff of effort and a wince. His protruding bones, his hips and his coccyx and his pelvis, ache whenever they hold his weight too long.

Matt catches him at the waist. "Don't run off."

"You was all hot," he slurs into his pillow.

"I can be hot."

"You's mighty hard to get along with."

Sidling up behind him, his hand dips along Chester's belly, flat and concave from his ribs to his hips. The vacancy takes his breath away. No matter how many times he sees it, feels the feather-light girth of a strong man zapped by starvation, he can never wrap himself around it: This is Chester. This is all that's left of him.

"C'm'ere." He presses on Chester's belly, guiding his weight backward, until he wiggles against him, just barely touching. "Now I'll be fit to live with."

"You'll be sweating again long 'fore dawn." But Chester lies still, and quickly, he sleeps again.

Matt's palm rests just to the left of his solar plexus, where the thrumming of his heart rattles his ribs. It courses slow and steady tonight, endless with its rhythm. For that, Matt is beyond grateful.

At dawn, they lie on sheets damped by sweat. Chester is well-rested, bright-eyed. He squints against the pain of the muted blue glow through the window. "Tole you." Mirth crinkles the corners of his eyes. "All sweaty."

"You don't seem to be moving too fast."

Tears pool in his eyes, stabbed and agitated by the light. Matt closes them with his thumb and forefinger. The grin doesn't abate. "I ain't." He rests his head on the pillow, content. "Got everything I need right here." There's a dark bruise on his cheekbone from his fall.

Matt shuts his eyes. Maybe Chester knows something about the light that he doesn't. Maybe the stinging, burning, watering that blurs the shapes of the world is protecting him from everything he doesn't need to see.

When it all vanishes, for a split second, everything is whole again. "Me, too."

It's simply another lie he tells, wishing it were true.