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The tall grass between their families' homes always wound its way, brushing, past her knees as she ran through it. Flowing with the wind, dancing in it like her hair, the green and gilded plain (spring green and fall gold, ever changing with the seasons they thrived in) stretched into the expanse of freedom before her. The wind in her hair felt like solace; the boy who grinned at her from his perch thought she looked like divinity as the heavens blew their blessings into the crown of her head, a halo of her locks swaying with every bounding step she took.
Her grin mirrors his, wild in the weather and bright in the exertion of running down one hill and up another.
"Come on! Hurry up!"
Two youths running free in the grassy landscape tumble down in their excitement; they bound back up, undeterred and laughing all the while.
Graey snorts as his son loses his hat to the whirlwind girl from across the way, leaning on a wooden post and sipping his morning brew. When subtle footsteps approach him from behind, he does not startle, only leaning away from the post to lay his head on his Nick's shoulder.
"You seein' this, Nick?"
His mug is pilfered from his hand and Nick steals a sip, grimacing at the strength of whatever is inside before answering through a cough.
"Ack. Yeah, our boy's growin' up."
Taking his mug back, smirking in humor at the way Nick still sputters, he sips it carefully, humming in thought. A little wistful in the way that only age and parenthood can bring, he sighs.
"Boy's growin' up."
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"Pa!"
Graey jolts awake.
"Pa!"
Nick's thundering steps race by, towards their boy at the entry. The wind howls outside.
When Graey and Nick round the corner, finally coming face to face with their son, their hearts are still pounding. A fight? An injury? Who? Where? How?
The bundle the boy is cradling with his own scarf shrieks, a tiny fist emerging and catching him by the nose as he stares in wonder, startling him out of his urgent reverie.
Relief floods Nick's veins, knees going a bit weak as he leans over himself to breathe deep, and Graey huffs out a laugh, one hand reaching to lay reassuringly on Nick's back, before cackling when the little hand from the bundle manages to grab their son's long hair and pulls , earning a wince. Retribution, he thinks, for all the hair he must have lost as a young man when the boy was but a babe.
At the bewilderment in the young Loaded Gun's eyes, the two old men set into action, mirth in their own. They get her settled, the little thing cradled tenderly in their boy's arms. Bringing out blankets and tips and tricks leftover from their own hoard of wild children now mostly grown and scattered like dandelion seeds in the wind, Graey manages to help his son get the little baby girl to a sound sleep.
They watch with open fondness as the boy very very carefully, lightly and full of honest awe, brushes his fingers over the crown of the girl's head, wishing her pleasant dreams about wild horses and flowery plains.
Their boy has grown up.
Nick leans into Graey's space, close enough to feel his breath and murmurs in that tired, gruff voice of his.
"Does this make us grandparents?"
When their boy turns back to them and grins, eyes a little dangerous with a wicked, wild humor (about to heckle them about getting old, they know), Graey groans and curses under his breath.
"Son of a Gun ."
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"Ił'tee Káh Dił'tush!"
Her shout nearly echoes over the grassy plains he is roaming in, full name, so she means business. The wind picks up to carry her voice, as if the heavens themselves were already on her side and at her beck and call; in truth, so was he.
Not waiting for her to holler again, he scrambles up hill to get to the home he knows well from across the way. She waits for him at the top, hair wild in the weather, with his little girl on her hip. The little one reaches for him at the same time as he reaches for her (just like he used to do with his parents, he thinks) and he swoops her high into his arms, grinning with his teeth as she giggles and squeals when he spins.
"Careful!"
"I am, I am ."
Best friend she may be, but subtle she is not. The woman in front of him, all grown up from their days of tumbling through the wildflowers, only shakes her head, not quite believing him fully (she knows him too well for that, but trusts him with his own daughter enough to let it go unsaid). It takes a village to raise a child and, beyond Nick and Graey, she was the first person he thought to ask to keep an eye on his little one.
She had agreed wholeheartedly when the bundle he had carefully handed her blinked up from her arms, sleepy in the gentle morning breeze and fading moonlight of that precious day. He could not imagine doing this without her, and that thought scared him more than he would ever care to admit; his fathers gave him an appropriate amount of teasing because of it, not letting him forget.
"Are you listening, cowboy?"
"Huh?"
Tiny hands pull his hat over his eyes as he whips back around to face his friend, between the glare he can feel and the cooing of the kid in his arms, he feels a bit caught. When he hears a sigh, he knows he has been let off the hook.
Another hand gently tilts his hat back into place, and the eyes that meet his, closer than he expected, show nothing but fond exasperation. She invites him in for dinner, the little girl in too, claiming the babe had helped her stir the dough for this afternoon's dinner rolls. Enthusiastic baby babble follows suit, and he cannot help but believe every word, nodding and hmming and hawing where appropriate to the little girl in his arms' delight.
The sun wanes over a field turned gold, wind blustering through it in waves. If any of the dinner table's occupants thought to look out into the beyond, beyond the freedom promised in untamed weather and fall meadows, they might have seen the coming storm. They do not; the table is already set.
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He thinks he loves her, Loaded Gun and whirlwind girl as they ever were, but the words she speaks shoot like bullets through his heart and his own come spilling out in a gale. It takes a shrieking baby to break their standoff, boots clanking across the floor that signal her being picked up from the ruckus leave them be with only an unspoken warning. Graey's voice rumbles in the memories of his mind without him even having to speak, telling him of the strife that the heart can bring when concern is on the line.
When she tells him not to go, not to go snooping into those outsiders' business (the business that has been poisoning and pilfering and ravaging and- ), Ił'tee Káh Dił'tush, Loaded Gun, son of Nick and son of Graey, only grits his teeth one more time. Hat tipped over his eyes, downcast to the floor, he slowly tilts his gaze back to hers. An open window breeze makes the tears on her cheeks wobble in the wind, sensitive to the storm even now.
If he were a better man, he might have kissed her goodbye, just once, for all the things she has done for him, with him, unofficial yet official in all the ways that might matter. Instead, he leaves, slipping through the door like smoke in the wind, unable to be caught or contained.
A cruel twist of fate, then, that smoke is all he can see when he returns. Fire burns hot, like love, like blood, but in the end, even ash grows cold. His hands feel so cold; he cannot dig deep enough to find remnants of his home. The wind blows it all away.
If footsteps dance, a whirlwind dance, through a gilded field beyond his view, wild and free, he cannot see them; all he sees is red .
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Dan Heng is having trouble finding a match in the archives; the photo, the only seemingly identifying memento, of the semi-conscious woman Welt and Himeko had brought onboard is badly charred. The burns add up to an unpleasant picture, matching the scars that mar her arms (he had glimpsed them before PomPom brought in a thick blanket; the woman shivered like the leaves in the wind, cold even with the heat surrounding them).
"Any luck?"
"Not yet, but I might be close."
March pokes around the archives some more while she seemingly waits for a miracle, sifting through data pads as if to read them before pulling a face and sighing dramatically.
"Well, I'm off to get a snack. Do you want anything?"
About to remind her not to eat so many sweets, again, half-heartedly and with no malice, he is cut off by the announcement of a visitor.
Sharing a look, March and Dan Heng make their way to parlor car.
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"Fudge me sideways, you're finally here brother!"
Recognition strikes, swift like the wind, and Dan Heng ignores the visiting cowboy's enthusiasm in favor of curiosity.
"Boothill, do you recognize anything in this photograph?"
"Huh?"
Boots clanking across the parlor floor stride over as he reaches for the old-time slip of paper being held out to him. No one else in the car speaks, unsure in the face of Dan Heng's mysterious certainty, as little flakes of the charred remnants of a memory flicker onto mechanical fingertips; Boothill cannot feel them.
His hands shake anyway.
"Where'd you get this?"
Welt did not know that voice modulators could sound so humanly broken , but the tone that the Galaxy Ranger has taken tells him most everything he needs to know; he too, knows what it is like to be separated from someone you care about: friend or daughter (student or son; he cannot imagine a separation that would last an eternity, had quite literally crossed realities to avoid that fate).
He clears his throat to speak, sparing Dan Heng from explaining the day's events to the uncharacteristically solemn man in front of them. Telling him that the photo seemingly belongs to a woman that they've found, brought onboard after helping him and Himeko and getting herself quite injured in the process (tacking on, eventually, that she had not even introduced herself, friendly in the way of small-town folk who know everybody are), he hardly finishes gesturing in the direction of the car that they are letting her rest in before the cowboy takes off.
Sprinting through the doors and hallways, spurs rattling, creating his own wind behind him as he runs, Boothill bursts through the door like a flaming sunrise- sudden and bold, and with only a little desperation mixed in.
Mechanical knees hit the floor by her bedside, one metal hand knocking the hat from his head in reverance. Slowly, if he were still human he would be shaking (the Express crew watches from outside the door as a Galaxy Ranger's hands tremble; he does not notice), a fingertip that he knows does not deserve to be anywhere near her brushes gently across her forehead, tucking a stray strand of hair (wind tousled, no doubt) away.
Opening his mouth to say something, anything, to the whirlwind girl he had long thought gone (with the wind, ash blown into the gilded field lit by a burning sun), he stops. Her eyes blink open, bleary and tired.
"Tha' you, cowboy?"
He chokes, nodding anyway, just once. One hand disobeys him and lifts to grasp her own, warm from being under the covers of soft blankets, not that he can feel it; he thinks he can anyway.
She lolls her gaze up to the ceiling, staring directly into the round light fixture above (bad for her eyes, he thinks, but he does not have the fortitude to call her out on it yet). Huffing to herself, she mumbles.
"Son of a Gun ."
Now she is looking to him, eyes wider and more awake, the wildness he knows well still lit as she grins with her teeth.
"Well, how's it feel to be the one kept waiting, huh? Not so fun?"
Scoffing a laugh, Ił'tee Káh Dił'tush, Loaded Gun, son of Nick and son of Graey, nearly doubles over as he leans his forehead against their held hands, still laughing. Wild and free, a little crazed, they both cackle at each other as reality sets in.
"Thought I'd lost it all, sweetheart."
When she tilts her head at him from where she lay, the light crack of his voice breezing over her, he realizes that he needs to add more. The kiss he should have given her before is pressed to her forehead as he rises, giving her time to turn him away (she never would, how could she; twin breezes like a bullet in the wind meld their fates together).
"How'd the two of us wild things survive all that, huh?"
And she knows then, that she is still alive (the people in the doorway over his shoulder look vaguely familiar, a recent escapade coming to mind in bits and pieces as her memory returns). The tears she sheds now don't get picked up by the wind, no where to go but the shoulder her cowboy lets her cry on.
Her arms feel like solace; she thinks he looks like divinity as the light catches on his plating, glowing as if its blessings were being melded into the very being of him.
They are where they had once lost: home.