Archive of Our Own ^beta

It wasn't necessarily unusual for the old rancher to wander through town and find himself in someone's front yard, but it was always startling when it happened, especially when it was Eleanor's front yard and especially when he was peering in through the window at her lunch guests.  They didn't actually notice him until Eleanor's mother-in-law shrieked and knocked a tray of deviled eggs off the coffee table.  The outburst didn't deter him, and his eyes tracked over the guests for a good long moment before he moved away from the window.

"I'll go out there and make sure he doesn't hurt himself," said Helena, who'd rushed in from the kitchen at the noise of the platter clanging.

"I'll call the doctor," Tara said, jumping up from her seat on the couch.

Before she did anything else, Eleanor made sure that her mother-in-law was alright.  It had still just been two months since her wedding and despite the initial frostiness, she was slowly wearing the woman's defenses down.  After getting Rose settled back down with a little whisky in her teacup, Eleanor headed out to join Helena outside where she was attempting to keep the old rancher in Eleanor's yard.

He was dressed the way he always was and, apparently, the way he'd dressed ever since he'd first settled on Haven: work pants, collared work shirt, suspenders, and boots.  Despite his age and forced retirement, no one had ever found him wandering in his sleep clothes; he always explored the town like he was ready for anything.  Maybe once upon a time he had been.  Learning about his physical state had first sounded like a blessing to Eleanor—at least he was unusually mobile for his age and could enjoy a walk outside.  However, the day after she and Delun had come home from their honeymoon, she'd seen the rancher become so agitated and confused at ending up in the light industrial district that he'd taken off down the road at a full sprint, throwing bystanders into panic, and that had been terrifying.

Eleanor made her way down her front steps and into the garden to where Helena was talking loudly to the rancher about cattle and he was responding just as loudly.  That often worked to keep him occupied.  While he couldn't keep up with the actual state of the ranch, sometimes he talked about his herd as it had been twenty years earlier, and sometimes he talked about a herd that had never even existed on Haven at all—something from a long time ago. 

Everyone told her that he'd never been violent, at least not towards someone who couldn't handle themselves.  Sure, Eleanor had heard through the grapevine that he'd thrown a wild right hook at an Alliance-sent water decontamination plant inspector during a chance meeting at Somer's Pub, but there were far more lucid men on Haven who would do the same. 

"He's fine," Helena said quietly as Eleanor approached.  "I just don't want him to wander off before the doctor comes."

Part of moving to Haven only after getting married meant that Eleanor wasn't entirely sure who the doctor was in relation to the old rancher.  She wasn't quite sure if they were married or cousins or the doctor was a hired caretaker or something else entirely.  She was fairly sure they weren't brothers, given how often the rancher said your sister to the doctor when they were talking about the town secretary, unless there was some sort of bitterness over a lovechild in their family history.  All she knew was that whenever the rancher was out wandering, someone would call the doctor, who would then come and collect him with slow movements and gentle words and corral him back to the clinic or to the cottage they both lived in on the ranch property.  As far as Eleanor was aware, the two of them were allowed to stay there indefinitely, likely until they were both dead, courtesy of Miss Glidden who had bought the ranch once it became clear that Mr. Reynolds could no longer remember to feed himself, let alone manage his cattle.

Sometimes that was just what happened when someone grew old.  Eleanor may have only lived on Haven for a short while but she supposed that if there was any place in the 'Verse that was a good spot to grow old and go senile, it was Haven, and if there was a caretaker to have while it happened, it was Dr. Frye.

The presence of Dr. Frye on Haven was possibly the biggest reason Eleanor's mother had been comfortable with her moving there to marry Delun.  The look of pure relief on her mother's face would not fade from her memory for a long while, and neither would the following explanation to Eleanor's uncles about how Dr. Frye was the preeminent expert in brain disorder and damage treatment on the Rim if not in the entire 'Verse.  Eleanor had a sneaking suspicion that there was an underlying current of "you'd better make friends with that doctor in case someone in this family needs him."

Eleanor had brought up the name at her engagement party, and to her surprise, there was not a single mention of his amazing research on neurological treatment.  Instead, she'd been met by a cooing chorus of women of all ages who told her that he'd delivered all of their children with encouragement and enthusiasm and giddy groups of farming men who held up fingers or pointed to scars and eagerly told her about body parts they'd almost lost if it had not been for Dr. Frye.

"Easy on the eyes, too!"  Mrs. Kam had offered, after informing them all about the cesarean section he'd performed on her nearly fifty years earlier that had left her with a scar so unnoticeable that her own husband had forgotten about the surgery entirely and told their son the birth had gone through with zero complications.  "And he was back on that ship of theirs the very next morning and I was practically ready to go home."

"Ship of theirs?"  Eleanor had asked, and the little group had all suddenly hushed their voices like they thought a federal agent was in the room and told her that once upon a time the rancher had captained a transport ship that only stopped by occasionally until it had no longer been spaceworthy and the whole crew settled permanently on Haven. 

She never entirely figured out why everyone was whispering about it.

The rumble of a mule reached them a few minutes later as Helena was haggling the hypothetical price of beef per pound and Eleanor was relieved that Tara had opted to call her own husband rather than phoning the clinic.  Sometimes there was no one nearby available to drive the doctor, and Eleanor had recently watched her husband's aunt spend the better part of an hour spinning a tale that involved arguing over made up business deal negotiations just to keep the rancher from wandering further while the aging doctor made the walk.  A mule was far more efficient. 

Dr. Frye was in his usual outfit: smart corduroy pants and a cozy sweater over a button-up shirt.  He had his hands cupped around his reading glasses, apparently using them as makeshift dust goggles and took them off as he stepped off the mule.  Tara's husband killed the engine and hopped out of the driver's seat to offer a hand to Dr. Frye.  His cane had apparently been forgotten at the clinic in his rush so he wobbled a little on the step down and Eleanor reached out to help steady him.

"I'm afraid Mr. Reynolds has been out making trouble again," Eleanor said in what she hoped was a teasing tone.  To her relief, Dr. Frye cracked a bit of a smile.

"Not too much trouble, I hope."

"No, of course not," Eleanor assured him.  "He's never a bother."  She let the doctor hold onto her as they walked slowly from the road back into her front yard and towards Helena and Mr. Reynolds.  "We're just worried about him," she continued.  "He must be quite the constant responsibility."

"It's worth it," the doctor said immediately.  "He used to take care of us."

"I'm sure you were bringing in the bacon," she said placatingly.  "I've heard so much about your work, even off planet."

He flinched sharply and Eleanor's heart sank--she had not prepared herself for Dr. Frye being the sort of man who shied away from recognition, but he was the one to speak first.

"Not that.  I…when I was young, I did something very reckless that put me and my sister at risk, and he…he took us in.  Looked after us.  Taught us.  Toughened us up.  I wish you could have—" he cut himself off and Eleanor was startled to notice that he was near tears.

"Could have seen him in his prime," Eleanor finished for him.  "I wish I could have too.  It sounds like he did a lot for you."

"Yes, he—"

"Hey!"  Mr. Reynolds recognized the doctor, as he always did, and slipped past Helena to put one hand on the other man's shoulder.  "What are you doin' here?  Where's your sister?"

"I'm sorry—I lost track of time.  Let's go home.  She's fine."

"You got everything you need?"

"I—yes.  I'm ready to go.  River's back already.  I just got held up at the store."

"Let's head back then," Mr. Reynolds said definitively, turning on his heel and heading for the road with long strides.

"You have to slow down," Dr. Frye replied sharply, grasping onto his companion's sleeve.  "I can't walk as fast as you."

"We have to get in the air," Mr. Reynolds insisted. 

"Well, I can't move any faster than this, so we'll get there when we get there."

"Get in the air?"  Eleanor blurted out.  Dr. Frye shot her a look.

"He thinks we need to go on a trip soon.  He'll forget about it by the time we get to the clinic," he said under his breath.

"Doc, I can drive you two back to the clinic," Tara's husband offered from where he was leaning against the fence.

"Thank you, Lin Kui, but that's not necessary.  We'll walk.  A little bit of exercise is good for both of us."

"He'd get us back to the docks fast," Mr. Reynolds said, eyeing the mule.

"I just spent fifteen minutes with him," Dr. Frye said a little more quietly, but still loud enough for Reynolds to hear.  "He might recognize me if we stay with him."

Eleanor gave Lin Kui a startled look, but he just made a big show of staring at one of the neighboring houses like he hadn't heard anything.

"You might be right at that, doc," Mr. Reynolds admitted.  "Let's head out then."

The two men started off down the road, walking at Dr. Frye's pace, which meant it was slow going, especially without his cane.  No issue; the route back to the clinic was lined with houses and businesses so if they needed anything, someone was sure to notice them.

Eleanor gathered her confidence and turned to Lin Kui as they watched the two men slowly fade from sight.

"You might recognize him?"  She prompted.

"I think Dr. Frye might have been wanted at some point when he was young," Lin Kui said with a bit of a laugh. 

"Wanted…by the law?"

"Sounds crazy, don't it?  He uses that excuse sometimes if he needs to--it still gets Mr. Reynolds moving."

"You just have to adjust on the fly when you're talking to him," Helena cut in.  "Talk about cattle if he's got ranching on the brain, talk about cargo transport if he thinks he's still in that business.  One time he started talking to Kwai Hoon Clements at the clinic like she was a soldier under his command."

"Are the two of them married?"  Eleanor asked before she could stop herself.

"Them?"  Helena pointed down the road.

"Yeah."

"No…no, I don't think so."

"You don't think so?"

"They have different last names," Lin Kui pointed out.

"Plenty of people keep their names when they marry."

"The doctor was married," Helena said.  "I think he was, anyway.  He must be widowed now."

"But you don't know."

“He was,” Lin Kui confirmed.  “I remember her.”

“But listen, I'm not about to pry about a divorce or a dead spouse if the person in question doesn't bring it up, Eleanor,” Helena said.  “Am I just as curious as you?  Sure.  I wasn’t born on Haven either.  But look, plenty of people end up on Haven not wanting to think about their pasts or talk to others about it."

"In all the years I've known them, which is from the minute Dr. Frye pulled me out of my mama, I don't think anyone's ever even learned he was born," Lin Kui added.

"What about uh…Miss Frye?  The town secretary?  What do we know about her?"

"The doctor's sister was born vesselside.  She told me about that.  And she ain't a Frye, by the way. She's a Book."

"Widowed?"

"Nah.  I don't know how it figures precisely but my mama says she might have been adopted by the old pastor who died before I was born."

"And the doc wasn't?"

"I don’t really presume to know anything about any of Mr. Reynolds's old crew.  I just know they're good people and they're getting older now.  We have to look after them."  Helena's voice had taken on a bit of a hard edge and Eleanor was smart enough to back off.

She thought she would devote more time to thinking about Mr. Reynolds and Dr. Frye and where they might have come from and why people were so tightlipped about them, but it turned out that setting up her household and filing her interplanetary immigration paperwork and changing her name and meeting all Delun’s more distant friends ate up most of her energy.  Rose was still a little cold to her, but at one dinner they had a moment where they bonded over a shared love of hawthorn berry candies, which Delun apparently could not stand.  Delun protested appropriately and Rose rolled her eyes at Eleanor playfully and it felt like something had slotted into place for Eleanor on Haven.  She felt a little more confident chatting with people at the grocery store and going to miniature concerts in living rooms, and eventually she was invited to social events even if Delun couldn’t go because of work.

"I'm trying to find a job--I don't want to get something too intensive because I think we'll start our family pretty soon, but it would be good to bring in some cash and be out in the community a little," Eleanor told the guests at one such dinner potluck party.  Everyone nodded eagerly.

"I'd say you could come work at the dairy," said Harald.  "But if someplace needs someone who's good with organization and numbers, they ought to have you.  No use wasting that education."

"It's only half of a general studies degree," Eleanor reminded him.  He shrugged. 

"The dairy is always looking for folks.  But you should shop around."

"You could pick up some hours at the clinic," Kwai Hoon told her brightly.  "We always need someone to help out with answering calls or sorting files or calming patients."

"That might be best," said Harald's husband Omar.  "Hell, even after you have a little one you can bring them to the clinic."

Eleanor figured that everyone was right, and so on Monday she put on her comfiest shoes and one of her nicer dresses and walked to the clinic after breakfast and Delun’s kiss goodbye.  She hadn’t been there yet, but the old two-story house with the extensions built on and Dr. Simon Frye, MD stenciled in the window was hard to miss.  The waiting room looked more like a very large living room, with a few couches and dining tables with wooden chairs around them—maybe they held meetings there for the staff or maybe it was just the furniture that had been offered when they’d asked for help in furnishing the clinic.  There were a few folks sitting around and Eleanor waved to her neighbor Quentin as she made her way to the front desk.  No one was sitting there and there was no bell or buzzer, so she just stood beside it patiently.  Eventually a man with a badge that identified him as a nurse saw her standing there and darted behind the desk.

“Scheduling a checkup?”  The nurse asked.

“I’m actually here to talk to Kwai Hoon about working here, in some sort of secretarial role.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” he said with relief.  “She’s in an appointment right now but once she’s finished I’ll send her out to you.  Would you mind sitting down to wait?”

“No, not at all,” Eleanor assured him, and took a seat near the window.

After a few minutes of comfortable silence and a magazine on local arts of New Melbourne, Mr. Herby, the grocer, opened the clinic door and Quentin rushed over to hold it for him as they both persuaded Mr. Reynolds into the waiting room.  Eleanor stood because she felt like it was the right thing to do.

“He was by Opal Street,” Mr. Herby explained as he handed responsibility over to a perfectly agreeable Quentin.  “I think Mike gave him a cheese roll.”

“Mike makes a good cheese roll, don’t he, Mr. Reynolds?”

The rancher snapped his attention suddenly to Quentin and Mr. Herby slipped back out the door, no doubt hurrying back to the grocery store.

“Sure does, son.”

“Why don’t you take a load off, sir?  Sit down anywhere.  I could load something up on the vidscreen for you if you like.”

“Well, alright then.”  His eyes scanned the room before he let Quentin lead him to the armchair in the corner.  Quentin waved Eleanor off when she moved to help him get Mr. Reynolds settled, so she went back into her own chair to continue waiting.  It wasn’t long—Kwai Hoon appeared at one of the hallway doors, laughing with a patient and saying her goodbyes before she beckoned Eleanor over to the desk. 

“Thank you so much for coming here—I know there are jobs open in practically every single business you could ever walk into on Haven, and we can make do without someone dedicated to office work, but trust me, it’s going to make a world of difference.  Miss Book did it for a while, back when I was just starting out with my training.  She was real good at it, but she also used to tell all the pregnant women exactly what sex or eye color or hair color or complications they could expect with their babies and I think it creeped them out too much.”

“She was the ultrasound tech too?”

“No.”

"Mrs. Lau!”  Dr. Frye appeared at the door leading to the surgical theater and grinned at her.  “I'm glad to see Kwai Hoon's recruitment efforts paid off.”

“I’m happy to be of use and get more involved around town,” Eleanor told him.

“Well, the records seem to take themselves out of order in the middle of the night, so that might be your biggest task.”

“I can do that,” Eleanor promised.

The nurse called Quentin up for his appointment, and Quentin took a detour to Dr. Frye before following the nurse back to the exam rooms.

“Mr. Roving-Around went out on a little adventure earlier.  Herby returned him and said something about a cheese roll.”

“Thank you, Quentin.”

“Of course.”

Dr. Frye glanced at the schedule that was open on the desk, checked his watch, and approached Mr. Reynolds where the older man was peering curiously at the vidscreen on the table in front of him.

“What are you watching?”

“Don’t know.  It has elephants in it.”

“I’ll get your forms out,” Kwai Hoon said, drawing Eleanor’s attention back to her.  She scanned Eleanor’s new ident card into the tablet’s reader and painstakingly copied down the info on the paper form, noting down hours and discussing days off with Eleanor as she came to the appropriate field in the form.

When they were happy with Eleanor’s proposed work schedule, Kwai Hoon focused on noting everything down and Eleanor glanced back at Dr. Frye and Mr. Reynolds and found that they were looking at her.

“I’ve seen her before,” Mr. Reynolds told the doctor, pointing at Eleanor.

“Yes, you’ve seen her around town.  She just moved here.”

He did not say you were in her front yard, scaring her lunch guests.

“You stitch her up?”

“She hasn’t required that yet,” Dr. Frye told him.  “She’s just a citizen.”

“Good,” Reynolds said with a nod.  Then to Eleanor: “You don’t go finding trouble, okay?”

“I won’t, sir,” she promised immediately.

“Good.”

“How about we don’t go looking for trouble today either,” Dr. Frye suggested, tapping on the vidscreen display.  “Here.  You like this one.”

“This one?”

“Just watch.  I have patients to see to.”

“Fine.  Just get through this as fast as you can so we can head out.”

Kwai Hoon finished with the forms and tentative scheduling as Mr. Reynolds stared half transfixed and half baffled by whatever was playing on the tablet in front of him.

Eleanor took her employment forms to city hall by hand, since it was just down the street.  Miss Book was at the front desk, twisting wire around a dowel.  She didn’t look up from her crafting for a second, not even when Eleanor was right in front of her.  However, she spoke right before Eleanor could clear her throat or say hello.

“Hello, sweetheart.  Eleanor Lau, right?  Delun’s wife?”

“That’s right.  I have—”

“Employment forms?”  Miss Book finally put her dowel down and grinned up at Eleanor, holding out a hand. 

“Yes.  Ah…here.”

Eleanor had only met Miss Book once before, and chalked up forgetting her name due to the fact that the visit had been to file her marriage certificate and she'd been so euphoric about the whole day that she was hard pressed to remember anything aside from Delun's equally overjoyed face.

She did remember the older woman's huge eyes and hair that must have been nearly knee length if it wasn't braided and pinned around her head in its usual crown.  She took the form from Eleanor and practically didn't even look at it.

"You'll be working with my brother," she said, her hands rummaging around in a drawer while her eyes stayed fixed on Eleanor.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Ma'am!"  Miss Book broke out into shockingly loud yet oddly melodic laughter.  "I know, Ellie, that I'm a ma'am, I know, I know, I know, but I'll tell you: you'll never get used to it.  Today you're a newlywed but tomorrow you'll open your eyes and you will be a woman with grown children risking their lives at the factories and sending you waves from universities in the core and young people here will call you ma'am and you'll be startled every single time it happens.  Let me promise you that."  She grinned.

Eleanor found that there was no obvious way to react to that, so she just waited for Miss Book to fill in some administrative blanks and tear off the carbon copy of the employment form that would be filed away in the clinic's office, then Eleanor thanked her when she handed it back, and hurried back to the office.

Eleanor learned the ins-and-outs of the clinic quickly.  There wasn't too much to figure out, at least, not for her specific job.  She answered the phone, she kept track of everyone’s files and schedules, and she talked to people when they walked in so that Mr. Asher, the nurse, didn’t have to dart out to the front desk while trying to administer vaccines.

She learned that Dr. Frye wanted detailed notes on everything, even if it was someone walking in with a headache and leaving with the advice to take a painkiller and lay down for an hour.  She learned that Miss Book not only maintained the city records but also ran the weather station and taught extra classes for local kids who had the goal of leaving the planet for university.  She learned that Kwai Hoon would have been a doctor; she'd been learning from Dr. Frye for almost fifteen years, but there wasn’t any money to send her off world for school.  Miss Book had apparently offered to hack entries in the cortex and brute force a certification, but Kwai Hoon had declined under the fear that she'd be caught.

"You should have seen the way that water inspector looked at all of us when he came through," Kwai Hoon said, grimacing.  "I just know they'd sniff it out if I started pretending I had a license."

"They wouldn't," Dr. Frye told them both with a chuckle.  "But it's your prerogative."

Eleanor also learned that the old rancher could mostly be convinced to stay at the clinic all day, or at least corralled to a three block radius of it through a fairly casual system of everyone keeping an eye out for him.  Sure, it failed sometimes and resulted in him winding up in front yards, but everyone was quick to tell her it didn't happen near as often as it could and that if he wasn’t in the city streets or at the clinic, he was likely bothering Miss Book at city hall or Mr. Washburne at the post office and it was best to check there before searching residential streets.

"It's no trouble," said Miss Tulsey, who ran the drug store.  "He's just old now.  Needs a little help.  All of us would hope to make it to the age we need that sort of help."

"People wouldn't do that on Three Hills," Eleanor told her, thinking about her home planet.

"Well, Haven ain't Three Hills, now is it?"  Miss Tulsey pointed out.  “Mr. Reynolds may not be from here, but he’s lived on Haven for near on four decades and he’s done a hell of a lot for this community.  He protected us.  We take care of him.  Simple as.”

“He isn’t from here?”  Eleanor prompted, sensing her moment.  “Where’s he from?”

“Oh lord…I uh…I know it’s a rock that ain’t got no one on it anymore.  Destroyed in the war or by some terraforming disaster.  Don’t recall the name.  He’s been off that world since he was your age, though.  It don’t matter.  He’s here now.”

He sure was.  And so was Eleanor, and she knew that being on Haven meant that everyone looked out for each other, so she did.

The next Wednesday afternoon was the first time Eleanor was working at the same time as an Alliance flyover.  She’d grown up used to them—a quick checkup on quiet Rim planets who were more self-sufficient than not.  Just a few seconds to show off the loudest engine Alliance designers had cooked up in the past eight months to remind everyone that just because they were left alone for the most part through long debates and treaties, they were still within jurisdiction.  The rumble on Wednesday was unmistakable.  Eleanor wished she’d brought her earplugs to the office, but she could handle it for however many minutes they decided to circle.  In the waiting room, little Tilly Rama slammed her hands over her ears as her father tried to soothe her, but Mr. Reynolds sat there until the roar grew louder, at which point he leapt out of his chair and began closing the blinds and locked the clinic door.  He looked to the Ramas and silently pointed towards the doors that led to the rest of the clinic.  Mr. Rama picked Tilly up and glanced at Eleanor.

“He wants us to get back there,” he whispered.  “Is Dr. Frye…do you know—”

As though he’d heard his name through the door, Dr. Frye popped into the waiting room.

“Doc, with me.”

“Mal, get back here.  Come on.  I’ve found a spot to hide.”

“This family—”

“I’ve found a spot for them too,” Dr. Frye promised.  He held the door open and urgently corralled Mr. Reynolds back into one of the rooms in the long term care wing.  Mr. Rama sat back down with Tilly on his lap.

“Once when I was a kid, the flyover actually did bomb an old barn,” he told Eleanor.  “It was just to show us they could do it, but it was still terrifying.  So, I don’t blame him for being worried.”

Eleanor made an appropriately shocked noise and Mr. Rama told her the story in a little more detail as they waited for Tilly to stop squirming and for things in the clinic to settle back down.  The rumble stopped shortly and Dr. Frye reappeared at the clinic door.

“Mr. Rama, I’m so sorry about the—”

“Doctor, don’t apologize for flyovers.  And don’t apologize for Mr. Reynolds.  He’s just trying to protect us.”

“Thank you.  Well?  Miss Tilly?  Mr. Asher is ready to see you.”

Eleanor waited until the exam room hallway door was closed.

“Is he alright?”  She asked.

"He’s fine,” Dr. Frye assured her, noticing the closed blinds and locked door and crossing the room to take care of them.  “He uh…he led a very…dangerous life as a younger man.  Sometimes he goes back there, in his mind.  I can only be grateful he knew how to handle himself back then so he doesn’t really ever panic; he just starts problem solving for issues that aren’t real.  And you can imagine how all of the explosions and shootouts and hard living and head injuries took a toll on him."

"Is that um…did it affect his hearing?"

"You noticed that, did you?" Dr. Frye said drily.  "He used to hear everything--he'd hear me gossiping about him in another room and poke his head in just to scare me.  I'm sure he thinks that's still the case, which is why I get away with whispering about him when he's so close to me."

With that, he took his tablet and a few folders to one of the tables to get some work done and Eleanor was able to get the schedule for the next two weeks confirmed after a few calls to people who had asked to be added in when possible.  She was putting the electric kettle on for tea when the hallway door opened and Mr. Reynolds peered out.

“They’re gone,” he noted.

“They are,” Dr. Frye confirmed.  “And they didn’t stop for inspection or blow anything up this time.  We’re safe.”

“Nothing to say they won’t circle back,” Mr. Reynolds said, striding to the doctor and pulling him up by his elbow before heading for the door.  “We need to get going.”

"Mal—”

"That’s captain, doctor."

"Yes, sir," Dr. Frye replied smoothly, pulling his arm free and crossing back to Eleanor’s desk and one of the chests of drawers behind her.  "Captain, I don't think we'll be able to go anywhere anytime soon, with them likely watching the airspace.  Here."

He reached into a drawer and to Eleanor's shock, he pulled out a pistol.  He quickly double checked it to ensure it wasn't loaded, grabbed a small box from the same drawer, and  placed them on the table and pulled out a chair.

“I think we ought to stay here for a while.  Besides; the others aren’t finished in town yet.”

Mr. Reynolds looked between the door and the gun on the table for a few moments before he acquiesced, sitting back down in front of the pistol and the box, which he opened to reveal some tools, a soft cloth, and several narrow brushes.  The old rancher fell to disassembling and cleaning immediately, like his hands were on auto-pilot.

"Dangerous life," Dr. Frye said softly, and Eleanor realized she'd been staring.  "I think it sticks with him more clearly than the ranching days."

“He’s always trying to go somewhere else.  Is that why?”

“I think so.  He wants to make sure he’s always on the move so he can get the job done or so the wrong people won’t catch up.”

“The wrong people meaning…?”

“Men who are either dead or don’t care about us anymore,” he said with a shrug.  “It’s been twenty years since a warrant reminder even came through the Cortex.  Sure, they’re still active, but I think anyone would only do something about it if we were still flying.  No one bothers with old men in a small town.”

Eleanor couldn’t stop thinking about that all day.  She got the impression early on that Mr. Reynolds had once been the sort of man willing to do anything to protect people close to him, but the image of him sitting calmly at the table cleaning a gun so fluidly stuck in her head. 

“Baby, what do you know about Mr. Reynolds?”  Eleanor asked that evening while Delun was washing the dishes.

“What do I know about Mr. Reynolds?  That’s an awfully open-ended question, Ellie.”

“I mean…did you know him before he…needed so much help?”

“Sort of.  He was already an old man when I was a kid.  Or, I mean, he always referred to himself as an old man back then, but he still had his wits about him.  When I was maybe six years old, there was a gang living in the abandoned Keck mineshaft that used to terrorize the dairy farmers and while the sheriff was having a town meeting to discuss the whole thing, Reynolds went and took care of it along with Miss Book.”

“Took care of it…like—?”

“Like killed them, yeah.  Came back with their holsters and gave ‘em to the dairy farmers as proof and told them it was better to take care of business up front like that.  That kind of man.  He didn’t start to forget things so much until right before I moved away for school.  I remember my aunt getting really upset about it, but when I asked her why, she wouldn’t say anything.  I guess he used to run supplies and medicine here before Haven made it onto the usual trade routes.”

“But he was a rancher?”

“Yeah, he was.  Had a knack for it.  Ran the operation very shrewdly and kept a lot of folks in good jobs.  Thank God Miss Glidden worked for him for years before she bought the place.”

“Anything else?”

“I want to know more too, sweetheart, but it just…it feels wrong to pry now, you know?  With him not really understanding anything anymore.  Almost like speaking ill of the dead before they’re dead, somehow.  So I haven’t asked anyone about his early days here.”

“That’s fair,” Eleanor said, taking the dripping pan out of his hands so she could dry it.  “I guess all we can do is make sure he’s safe and not too scared for the rest of his life.”

It didn’t turn out to be that difficult.  Mr. Reynolds still wandered off when no one was looking, but Eleanor was starting to think he was doing it so he could get cheese rolls.  He stayed in the waiting room more consistently now that Eleanor was working, the staff told her: another perk of having someone work the front desk.  Mr. Asher thought that it was because he didn’t want to get caught sneaking out, Kwai Hoon thought that it was because he wanted to be around people all the time, and Dr. Frye said it was probably because Mr. Reynolds had always had the instinct to make sure the young women around him were protected, and as his mind deteriorated he was more and more convinced that he was constantly in danger, so of course that meant Eleanor was too.

Whatever the case was, he was more often sitting and watching something on the vidscreen or reading a tattered old book from the selection in the waiting room.  Sometimes he’d stand up and pace around.  One afternoon, he watched her through narrowed eyes for nearly five minutes straight before getting up and walking to the desk.

“Mr. Reynolds, what can I do for you?”  She asked.  He squinted at her.

“You’ve got your work done, then?”

“No, I still have things to do.”

“You oughta get back to the ship and do ‘em then,” he told her sternly.  “Not be lollygagging around hoping the doc will have a minute free.”

“I can go get Doctor—”

“I don’t need him and you don’t need to be pestering him right now.  Come on; what’s the latest with the rewiring?”

Eleanor had not yet encountered him like this; convinced he was somewhere decades ago and talking to her like she was someone else entirely.  At least he seemed to understand Dr. Frye was somewhere in the building.

“I don’t….uhm…the doctor needs me here to take care of patient files.”

“He didn’t tell me about that.”

“It was…last minute.  There are so many people here who need his help.”

“That right?  Boy better not be running himself ragged.  Would hate to have a medic asleep on his feet when we need him.”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” Eleanor assured him as she rummaged around in the desk drawer and her hand closed around a deck of cards.  “Here,” she said, not sure exactly how she should address him (Captain sounded right, but he’d wanted to be called Sergeant that morning and then answered to a casual Mal during lunch) and so she chose to just hold the deck of cards out.  “It could be nice to take a break with some solitaire.  He won’t be but a few hours.”

He took the deck and settled down at the table with a grumble of may as well.

Eleanor watched as Mr. Reynolds shuffled the cards with a few flourishes that wouldn't have looked out of place in a gambling hall and instead of setting himself up a game of solitaire, began to deal cards to imaginary table mates.  The movement caught Dr. Frye’s eye as he left the exam hallway.

“Mr. Asher?”

“Yes, doctor?”

“Looks like a tall card game is on the schedule now.  Why don’t you wheel Miss Calhoune out here and see if Mr. Jurgenson is feeling up to leaving his bed.”

“Right away.”  Asher disappeared into the long term care extension.  Dr. Frye turned back to Eleanor.

“Do you play?”

“I mean, I can.  I’m not any good at it.”

“You don’t have to, but it would be nice to have four players.”

“Oh, sure.  I can sit in.”

“Thank you, Eleanor.  There’s a case of chips on top of the bookshelf in the corner.”

Eleanor lost all her chips rather quickly and left Miss Calhoune and Mr. Jurgenson to finish up the game with Reynolds.  She settled back into her chair behind the front desk and got back to checking the schedule for the upcoming week.  Dr. Frye’s last appointment of the day left moments later; it was a short day for the doctor.  He said goodbye and Eleanor entered in the date for the follow-up, and then Dr. Frye slid behind her to sort through the records he’d pulled earlier.  She listened to him flip through papers for a few minutes before the room was suddenly silent and she glanced over at him to see he was watching the tall card game with shining eyes.

“I like to see him doing some sort of activity that requires a level of mental energy,” he told her once he saw her looking at him.  “Sometimes he can manage it, sometimes he can’t.  I just…I should have…”  He heaved a sigh and Eleanor put a hand on his arm.

"I mean…even an expert can miss something.  You can't flagellate yourself over not seeing every single thing in his brain scan."

Dr. Frye didn't respond, choosing instead to tap the stack of papers on the desk and straighten them out.

"You did see something?"

"He never let me take a scan before he started to degrade rapidly," he said softly.  "He said he didn't want one and I couldn't exactly force him into the imager."

"Oh…Doctor, I didn't know--"

"Of course you didn’t," he told her gently.  "No one does.  He's one of the most stubborn men I've ever known; been like that since the day we met.  I brought it up a few times over the years, but he was steadfast.  I do what I can with the info I do have, but it's not as easy without information from before."

“There’s steps you can take now, right?”

“I’ve coaxed him into having scans done since,” he admitted.  “I don’t feel great about it, but I just…he deserves the best effort I can make.  There are experimental drugs; I’ve had a few cases that were similar but not exactly identical, and I’m reworking some of those prescriptions.  I wish you could have known him before.  He could talk his way out of any sticky situation.  He knew what everyone around him needed to hear at any given moment in order to get done what needed to be done, no matter how difficult it was.  He’d hire people who were holding him at gunpoint.  He’d front to police officers who were in the act of firing missiles at him.  Sometimes it felt like being hypnotized; he would tell you to do the most absurd, most dangerous things imaginable but you knew it would turn out okay in the end, somehow.”

He suddenly looked at the window to the street for a long moment, and Eleanor knew better than to say anything until he was ready.

"I know, it's no one's fault, but I still…I wish…well, it doesn't matter now."  There was another lull in the conversation until he suddenly looked at her with a sly smile.  "You know too much now, Eleanor.”

"Oh, uh, I—”

"I'm joking.  But he would have slugged me in the jaw for saying so much about either of us.  Anyway, speaking of—we’re getting a shipment of medications from Regina next week.  If I’m right, they should be good for him.  Would you see if you can get Lin Kui to take you to the docks to pick it up on his mule?”

“Sure, I’m seeing him and Tara tomorrow.”

“Wonderful; thank you.”

Lin Kui agreed to drive Eleanor to the docks before the entire question was even out of her mouth and she supposed that she shouldn’t have been surprised.  Haven wasn’t Three Hills, after all.

Dr. Frye was overjoyed about the shipment and for a few months, most of the energy he didn’t use to see his normal patients and the occasional specialty neurological patient from off world was taken up by crafting a drug regimen for Mr. Reynolds. 

Eleanor played in a few more tall card games—it was apparently a fairly popular activity at the clinic if held at the right time, with long term patients making their way out to the waiting room or women in the early stages of labor using focusing on the cards to distract themselves or staff popping in if there was nothing that needed immediate attention.  Eleanor felt that she was getting better at not losing immediately, but Kwai Hoon was a born bluffer. 

Eleanor’s own little house was feeling more like home every day.  She finally got around to putting her and Delun’s posters from school on the walls and Delun found a couch that wasn’t in such terrible shape that it couldn’t be fixed with a lot of little pillows on it.  She started working a little at the dairy on Saturdays, doing the same kind of file sorting and schedule wrangling that she did at the clinic.  She joined the secondary church choir, the one that was for people who were shy and would prefer not to perform so often.  She started babysitting Tara and Lin Kui’s two sons, partly to help them out and partly for practice.  She got into gardening and eventually Helena convinced her that she should start keeping chickens.

You needed a permit to keep farm animals on a street that close to the downtown area on Haven.

Eleanor handed over the permit application at city hall and Miss Book only glanced at it for a moment before scrawling something in the office-only box at the bottom, stamping it, and sliding it into one of the mailboxes in the wall behind her. 

"Looks like a good plan, Mrs. Lau.  Should be approved and permitted with no problems.  I loved raising chickens when I was younger."

"Thank you.  I'm excited," Eleanor said.  "Uh…how's Mr. Reynolds?  I just came from the clinic and he wasn’t there."

"He went out," Miss Book said, her eyes suddenly fixed on the window.

"Okay, well, he can only get so far," Eleanor assured her, trying to decide whether to call someone or start walking to see if she could catch up with him.  "Which way did he go?  We'll just—”

"On his own terms," Miss Book continued in an eerily thin voice.  "With his boots on."

Then she looked back down at the open file cabinet and went back to sorting.  Eleanor knew when a conversation was over, and dazedly left the building.

She only learned about the circumstances of Mr. Reynolds's death through whispers, because it was certainly not something she'd ever dare ask Dr. Frye about.  She heard it from Willa at her anniversary party that week, who had heard it from Richard at the farm supply store, who'd apparently heard it directly from Jacqueline Washburne when she'd been three gin and tonics deep into her Saturday evening.

She'd said that the painstaking research had paid off, that Dr. Frye wasn't considered a genius for no reason, that all those patients who came to Haven just to see him and went home post-surgeries with drug regimens and overjoyed loved ones were no fluke.  He'd developed a treatment plan that had done what he'd wanted: it had coaxed Mr. Reynolds back to bouts of lucidity and given him some of the sharpness that he'd had as a younger man.

And in one of these moments of clarity, Mr. Reynolds had waited until Dr. Frye had gone to the clinic, dressed himself in his old uniform, walked out to the rusted spaceship that lay grounded in one of the outer pastures of the ranch, sat down in the pilot's seat, and shot himself in the head.

Dr. Frye moved into the Washburnes' spare room the following Wednesday.

The whole town turned up to the funeral, which was perhaps the least surprising part of the whole ordeal.  There was no body or casket, just a little coffee can full of ashes.  Miss Book gleefully informed anyone who would listen to her that Mr. Reynolds had requested that urn specifically.

There were current and former farm hands who had worked under Reynolds and a long string of town officials who'd managed to get a handle on town security against outlaws with the help of strategies that Reynolds had organized.  Even older folks who had moved away came back, talking reverently about how they'd been saved as children from the anti-Reaver measures that Mr. Reynolds and his family had developed and Eleanor shuddered to think of a Rim childhood that hadn’t included the reinforced steel doors in church and school basements.  A few stooping old Browncoats arrived on planet too, ending up clustered around one little table in the ranch house during the potluck lunch after the service, laughing uproariously at stories with the old mayor, Mrs. Washburne.

They buried Mr. Reynolds in a corner of the cemetery that was shared with three other graves of honest, hardworking Haven folks, former members of his crew, most like, as well as a tiny and ornately engraved Buddhist memorial that had apparently been paid for by some actual real-life Companions from Sihnon.  No one was buried there, but the elegant little stone stood proudly in the Haven cemetery nevertheless.

Dr. Frye stood stock still during the entire service, staring blankly at the grave.  Eleanor didn't know how anyone was supposed to comfort him.  He'd definitely done all he could, and yet…hadn't that been what had led to this?  It was an awful thing to even think about.  All she did was keep her distance and let people who had known him longer than she had tell him that he ought to let someone take care of him for once, while Jacqueline Washburne nodded enthusiastically and told him she could now easily drive him to the clinic on her way to her own job at the docks.

Eventually Eleanor found herself listlessly staring at a mostly empty foil tray of siu mai as the post-wake gathering wound down.  Miss Book poked at the dumplings with one chopstick but made no move to pick one up and eat it.

"Are you…are you okay?"  Eleanor asked.  Miss Book shrugged.

"No.  But I will be."

"Is your brother going to be okay?"

"Eventually."

"Will you stay on Haven?"

"Of course we will.  Our home is here, out in the pasture.  We have to watch Patrick Cobb grow up.  Then once he's married, I think we'll lay down in the dirt together and die."

She said it like she was saying they were planning to have lunch downtown that weekend.

"Oh.  Ah.  Okay.”

“Don’t worry, Eleanor," Miss Book said firmly.  "My brother will be around to supervise your deliveries and we've both lived enough for five lifetimes."

"I'd love to hear about all that living one day," Eleanor said before she could talk herself out of it.  Miss Book's eyes flickered over to her brother, sitting hunched over in an armchair.

"You know, if you can get him going, he'll talk about everything without realizing it.  He could never keep himself from running his mouth.  I think folks here are just too polite to ask.  You ought to have him around for a lunch or three.  He would like that."