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The night on Penacony lay under a veil of strange and suffocating quiet, the frantic, glittering pulse of the Dreamscape. Boothill walked without destination, a figure of polished fury and steel, aimless in the muted city. Each step was a deliberate, heavy punctuation in the silence, the clink-grind, clink-grind of his spurs a solemn rhythm for a man who had long since buried himself. All of it, every cut and weld and agonizing neural splice, was for a single purpose: to become the instrument capable of carving his vengeance across the throat of the galaxy. The only relic he had carried out of that long, self-inflicted slaughter was his face. It was still the original, weathered and worn, a map of laugh lines now frozen in a permanent grimace.
A spill of amber light, warm and defiant against the gloom, pooled from an open doorway ahead, and with it came a sound so alien it seemed to warp the air. The clean, resonant pluck of an acoustic guitar, its notes unhurried and modest, a melody built for porches and patience, for hands that knew soil and tenderness, not trigger guards and plasma burns. It was a sound from a dead world. Boothill halted, his systems running a silent, instantaneous threat analysis that returned only null data. No hostiles. No traps. Just sound. Yet the sound itself was the trap, bypassing every firewall and sensor array to hook directly into the raw, untouched nerves of his face, the last patch of ground where a memory could still take root.
He pushed the door open.
The bar was a pocket of subtle and aching stillness, a cave carved out of the city’s noise. A few lonely figures hunched over their drinks like penitents at a shrine. A bartender moved with a slow, ceremonial grace, polishing a glass to a painful clarity. And on a stage no larger than a coffin lid, a man with a guitar, his eyes closed. Boothill took the last stool at the bar’s far end, its legs groaning in protest beneath the terrible, concentrated weight of him. The cyborg did not order.
The player let the last vibration of a song fade into the silence, then spoke, his voice barely a whisper. “Sometimes,” he murmured to the strings, “a melody is the only key that still fits the lock.”
From the deepest well of shadow in a corner booth, a voice answered, a dry rustle like the last leaf clinging to a dead tree. He said, ‘Son, can you play me a memory? I’m not really sure how it goes.’ The old man paused, the effort of recollection a physical strain. “But it’s sad, and it’s sweet, and I knew it complete… when I wore a younger man’s clothes.”
The guitarist did not open his eyes. He only nodded, a slow, deep acknowledgment, as if receiving a sacred mission. His calloused fingers, which knew every ridge of the fretboard, found a chord, a simple, open, haunting arrangement of notes. And he began to play.
The first chord was not a memory. It was an annihilation.
Boothill did not remember. The bar, the stool, the cold, unfeeling blend of his prosthetics - they were vaporized in an instant of sensory riot. One moment, the pressure of the bar against his prosthetic leg. The next, the familiar, sun-warmed solidity of real wood under the palms of his hands, his real hands, the ones he could still feel in the ghost-limb of memory, with their scars and their strength and their capacity for tenderness. He felt it all: the rough, splintering surface of his own porch on his home planet, the pleasant, deep-seated burn in the muscles of his lower back after a day spent wrestling with the stubborn soil of the field. He felt the faded cotton of his work shirt, sweat-damp and clinging to the skin of his shoulders, a sensation so mundane and so exquisite it stole the breath he no longer needed. The air itself was thick with the scent of freshly turned earth and the sweet, evening-hour perfume of the flowers (Y/N) nurtured by the steps with a patience he’d always admired.
And then the laughter.
Oh, gods, the laughter.
Maya’s giggles were a high, bubbling fountain, a sound of pure, child-like joy that seemed to fracture the golden light of dusk into a thousand glittering pieces.
“You’re it, Papa! You’re the slowpoke grumpus monster!”
Boothill, was on his hands and knees in the red dust of the yard, play-snarling, his own laughter a rich, rolling thunder in his chest. His daughter, a sun-kissed joy of six years with grass stains on her knees and infinity in her eyes, danced just beyond his reach, her bare feet kicking up tiny constellations of dust that hung in the sunlight.
“Slowpoke?” his voice, his real voice, a warm baritone untouched by the synthesized modulation of the Ranger, was thick with mock outrage. “This ain’t slow, darlin’. This here’s advanced tactics. Lullin’ the wily outlaw into a fatal sense o’ security. Textbook Ranger maneuvering.”
“Is not!” she shrieked, spinning in a circle, her pigtails bouncing all over the place. “You’re just old!”
From the sanctuary of the porch, a laugh like clear water running over smooth stones, struck like a sweet melody. (Y/N). She leaned against the support post, her arms crossed, her entire being focused on the spectacle in the yard. The setting sun caught her from behind, setting her hair ablaze in a halo of molten gold, and her smile, oh that smile, was a thing of such devastating beauty and warmth it could have melted a frozen star. Boothill caught her eye, and (Y/N) winked, a slow, secret communication that held a universe of shared understanding. Boothill’s heart, the old, foolish muscle in his chest, did that ridiculous, swelling thing it used to do, a sensation so vividly recalled he felt its phantom ache in the hollow cavity of his artificial chest.
“She’s got you running in circles, my love,” (YN) called, her voice a melody of amusement and adoration.
“She’s wearin’ out the last of my patience, is what she’s doin’,” He shot back, but the love in his tone was so potent, so undiluted, it seemed to sweeten the air between them.
With a theatrical groan, Boothill lunged. It was not the silent, lethal, hydraulic-piston strike of the cyborg he would later forge himself into, but a loud, graceless, wonderfully human lunge. He caught Maya around the middle, making a monstrous ROAR! that was mostly breath and affection. Maya screamed with sweet delight, a wild, wriggling bundle of limbs and laughter in the cage of his arms, her joy a visible, vibrating thing against his chest.
“Gotcha! Now, by the sacred law of this here homestead, the sentence for a captured outlaw is… the ticklin’ judgment!”
“No! No ticklin’! I surrender, Sheriff!” she gasped, breathless and giggling, as his big, work-roughened fingers found the vulnerable spots.
He relented, his resolve crumbling instantly before her joy. Instead, he hauled her up, lifting her as if she weighed nothing at all. Maya was light, a warm, breathing anchor in the strong crook of his arm. She pressed her dusty, sun-warmed cheek to his, her skin impossibly soft, and Boothill could feel the delicate flutter of her eyelashes against his temple like the beat of a bird’s wing.
“You’re a mighty dangerous bandit, you know,” He murmured, his voice dropping to a whisper meant for her ears alone. He carried her, his prize, back toward the sanctuary of the porch. “Gonna have to keep you under lock and key. Can’t have you terrorizin’ the local wildlife.”
“In the fort?” Maya asked, pulling back just enough to search his face, her eyes wide and solemn with the importance of the question.
“In the fort,” Boothill confirmed, his own voice growing thick with an emotion too large for words. “Guarded day and night by the fiercest, smartest deputy this side of the galactic rim. Your mama.”
He reached the worn wooden steps and sank down onto them with a grateful sigh, settling Maya into the cradle of his lap. (Y/N) sat down beside him, her shoulder finding its familiar place as a firm, warm line against his. He felt her heat seep into him, a soothing comfort.
Maya’s small hand, gritty with the honest dust of their home planet, came up and patted his cheek with tenderness. “You’re all scratchy, Papa.”
“That’s ‘cause I’m a tough old boot, darlin’,” Boothill said, leaning in to nuzzle her nose with his, a gesture that made her squeal with a laughter so pure it was music to his ears. “Seasoned by the wind and the work.”
“Nuh-uh,” she declared, her tiny fingers caressing with the ruthless accuracy of a child. “You’re all soft right here.” She found the spot, just below his ribs, and poked.
He flinched, a real, unguarded, belly-deep laugh bursting from him, a sound of such uncomplicated happiness it felt foreign even in the memory.
(Y/N) rested her head on Boone’s shoulder, and he could feel the curve of her smile against the side of his neck, a smile he could feel in his bones. “Give it up, cowboy. The verdict is in. You’re a certified, grade-A marshmallow.”
Boothill looked at his wife, at the love and laughter etched into every line of her face, then down at the miraculous creature sleeping now against his chest. The love that swelled within him was a physical force, a sweet, agonizing pressure behind his eyes, a tightness in his throat that promised tears of a kind he would never permit himself to shed again. The sun finally dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in a deep violet and warm orange before surrendering to the dark. The air grew cool, carrying the scent of night-blooming flowers. The first brave stars pricked through the darkness, and the crickets began their ancient song, stitching the evening together with sound.
In that still moment, Boothill was not a man who would one day take a torch to his own humanity and forge the remnant into a weapon. He was simply himself. A man with earth beneath his fingernails, a pleasant ache in his bones, and a universe that was small, and warm, and devastatingly complete, held within the circle of his arms on a simple porch step. It was everything. It was more than enough. It was a life he had chosen, and a life that had chosen him back.
“Love you, my little bandit,” He whispered, the words a vow breathed into the softness of Maya’s hair as he pressed his lips to the crown of her sun-warmed head.
“Love you more, Papa,” came the sleepy, muffled reply, a truth she stated as simply as naming the color of the sky.
“Love you both,” (Y/N) whispered into the space between them, her fingers finding his and lacing them tightly together, over the steady rise and fall of their daughter’s back.
The music in the bar twisted, faltered, then resolved into a single, dissonant chord that hung in the air like a question without an answer.
And the memory did not fade. It was executed.
Not with the sudden violence of spotlights and stun-blasts, but with the slow, suffocating silence that follows a world’s end. The silence of a home that would, within a year, be reduced to atoms and ash and memory. The silence left in the wake of the IPC’s “orderly asset reassignment,” a silence that grew only deeper after the quiet, unmourned graves were filled. The porch, the warmth, the perfect, living weight in Boothill’s lap… gone.
Replaced by the unforgiving cold of the chair. The emptiness of the glass. The final, fading vibration of a guitar string.
Boothill sat utterly, terrifyingly still. Inside the cyborg’s armored chassis, a symphony of artificial life continued: coolant pumps whirred, servos engaged in tiny, meaningless adjustments, optics refocused on nothing. A masterpiece of machinery performing its functions with a sterile efficiency, maintaining the animate prison of a corpse.
Then, a shiver began. A sound was torn from him, not from his vocal synthesizer, but from some deeper, more ruined place, a sharp, choked gasp that strangled itself into a rasp, a machine’s pitiful attempt to mimic the shattering of a soul.
Boothill bent forward, folding in on himself as if the memory had become a physical blade, gutting him from the inside out. The cyborg’s forehead – the original, human forehead, with the lingering impression of a wife’s kiss – made contact with the polished wood of the bar. A low moan escaped Boothill, a sound of such ruin that it seemed to darken the very air around him, followed by another, and another, each one wetter, more broken than the last. Boothill’s shoulders began to shake. Not the controlled, rhythmic vibration of an engine, but the violent, helpless, shuddering tremor of something tearing itself apart at the seams.
Tears, hot and humiliating welled from Boothill’s human eyes, the only part of him that could still produce them. They swelled, overflowed, and spilled in a continuous, silent stream. The tears tracked through his face, carving canyons of grief through the dust, before dripping from the stark line of Boothill’s jaw onto the bar below. Each drop fell with a soft, definitive plink, a tiny, pathetic sound. Boothill wept silently, the cyborg’s frame wracked and trembled with the Herculean effort of containing a sorrow that had grown only more vast, more feral, more impossible to cage.
Boothill did not care who witnessed this destruction. The bartender had turned his back in respectful oblivion. The guitarist had stilled his hands, head bowed as if in prayer for the damned. Boothill was alone, utterly and catastrophically alone, in a room full of breathing things, drowning in the memory of a sun that had set for the last time and taken all the light in his universe with it.
The heavy convulsions slowly subsided, not into peace, but into exhaustion, the trembling downgrading to a constant vibration of suffering. Boothill did not lift his head. The cyborg remained there, forehead pressed to the wood, a weapon of mass destruction disarmed and discarded by the ghost of a man long murdered.
With a stiff, jerky motion, Boothill pushed a chaotic pile of credit chips across the bar, a small fortune, a meaningless transaction for a memory that was priceless. Boothill stood. The Ranger’s frame, usually a tower of looming, promised violence, seemed to diminish, as if the armor itself were trying to curl around the raw, weeping wound within.
Boothill did not look at anyone, his gaze fixed on some point in the distance that held nothing at all. The cyborg turned and walked, each step a mechanical echo of the last step. The door swung shut behind, sealing the silence back inside.
Outside, in the damp, reeking darkness of the alley where the glorious facade of Penacony crumbled into reality, Boothill stopped. The night breeze, smelling of decay and synthetic dreams, whistled a tuneless elegy through the alley, fluttering the stained hem of the Ranger’s poncho. Boothill leaned against the cold wall, the metal of his body emitting a dull clank against the brick.
And there, in the absolute solitude of the dark, Boothill slid down the wall. The descent was not controlled; it was a collapse, surrender in slow-motion. The cyborg came to rest sitting in the grime and the puddles. Boothill drew his knees up and wrapped his arms, the powerful prosthetics, tight around them. Then, Boothill buried his face into the dark cavity between his knees, into the only privacy left in the world.
The sobs came then, unleashed and unashamed. Great, shuddering waves that racked Boothill’s entire metal frame, making the armored plates grind and the servos hitch in distress. Boothill cried for the little girl who had called him ‘Papa’ with a voice like sweet honey. Boothill cried for the woman whose laughter had been his favourite song and whose head had fit perfectly in the hollow of his shoulder, as if carved by destiny to rest there. Boothill cried, most of all, for the man he used to be, the man he had systematically, willingly erased with every enhancement, the man who was soft in the secret, right places, whose joy was loud and unguarded, who had once known, with every fiber of his being, what it meant to be complete.
He was Boothill, the Galaxy Ranger. A cyborg by choice, a weapon forged in the fires of his own rage, a monument to vengeance walking on limbs bought with pieces of his soul. But here, in the still darkness, he was just a shell of the man he used to be. A ghost haunting the metal shell, a whisper of a man hugging his knees in a filthy alley, utterly broken by the memory of a love so devastatingly, perfectly sweet that its eternal, screaming absence was the only fuel potent enough to keep his cold reactor core burning.
The vengeance that fuelled him was no longer a hot, cleansing fire. It was something colder, heavier, and far more terrible. It was a glacier, slow and merciless, forged from tears that would never dry. And Boothill would carry its infinite, frozen weight, completely and forever alone, until the cyborg’s very last spark guttered out, leaving nothing in the dark but the echo of sweet laughter and the memory of a porch that no longer existed.