Work Text:
He’s not sure, but there is probably a saying somewhere about relationships that start with blood.
-----
He’s twelve years old and too skinny for his limbs. His arms feel too long, like blades of tall grass, and his legs ache from stretching too thin too fast. His cousin’s belt is too big for his narrow hips, and he has it cinched so tight, the waistband of his jeans pucker. He wears one of his father’s t-shirts, a little too big for his shoulders, but it hides the way that he had pulled his jean past his navel in order for them to not drag underneath his sneakers as he walked all day.
Sitting in the principal's office, he tries to ignore the cold places on the bottom of his feet where there are holes in his hand-me-down Chuck Taylors and hopes no one notices the missing button from the plaid shirt he outgrew at least one summer ago.
“Henry,” the principal says, bored and resigned, like he expected no better from another Rez kid than to clock a nice, white boy on his first day there. “I want you to apologize to Walter.” Henry doesn’t say anything, or even look up, but he can see the old man wave his hand vaguely towards the door and sees the boy sit down in the chair next to him.
He’s too tall too, his limbs more proportional to his frame, and legs a little bowed. He’s heavier than Henry, and wider. His shoulders would probably fit in Henry’s over-sized shirts, and his boots probably would sit right on his feet and not trip him up all day.
“Henry.”
“I apologize,” Henry murmurs. He doesn’t look Walter in the eye. Instead, he stares at the dark brown spots splashed across Walter’s dirty denim shirt. He remembers how that blood had dripped down Walter’s chin unimpeded, Mr. Scroggins holding his hands behind his back to keep him from lunging back at Henry to finish the fight.
The principal looks at Walter expectantly, but Walter stays silent. He purses his lips, and Henry makes note that his face still had flecks of blood on his upper lip and in the corner of his mouth, wonders why no one offered to let him clean up, and waits. Walter nods.
They are dismissed as one. Walter follows Henry back to class, dogging his footsteps with clear intention, and Henry steels himself for another fight. He turns on the heel of one worn rubber sole and stares.
“I’m... sorry.” Walter sputters and stalls when he talks, and Henry sees a faint blush rising on Walter’s neck, as if he’s embarrassed. “I should have... spoken more clearly. Maybe then I wouldn’t have offended you.”
Henry remembers thinking that the excuse of germs was just that - an excuse. But Walter seems so contrite, Henry begins to believe that perhaps, this boy hadn’t had any ill will towards him.
Henry had wondered, back in that principal’s office, when it would start - the name calling, the braid pulling, the constant condescension that came from mixing the Rez primary school with the county’s junior high after keeping the two groups separate for almost twelve years. He was uniquely aware of the way his clothes fit and the color of his skin and the hundreds of years of history that sits between them and him.
“You have blood on your face, Walt.” Henry says instead of accepting the apology, but he supposes that from the way Walter smiles, it had the same effect.
“Ain’t nobody called me Walt before.”
-----
He would call it a running joke that the whole basis for their relationship lies in a moment of miscommunication between two teenage boys who were hot-blooded and raised to be tough. That is, if running jokes were their kind of thing.
-----
Walt’s got a couple of shirts with blood stains on them, Henry comes to learn. It’s always his blood, spilled because of another, and Henry doesn’t bother to make note of them anymore. He doesn’t always ask what happens, because there is a certain look in Walt’s eyes that answers any questions Henry might have.
Walt only ever asks for help once, and Henry uses the word “ask” with a grain of salt. It was more like Walt showed up on his front porch at two in the morning with a bleeding gash over his left eye and a broken nose. Henry sits his gentle giant of a friend on the edge of their ancient bathtub and rummages through the shoebox of supplies his mother keeps for moments like this, when Henry gets bucked by one of his horses and roughs up the palms of his hands. It gets cold in the flatlands after dark and Walt shivers as soon as he sits on the porcelain.
“Your father,” Henry says, rubbing iodine over the cut. The crusted, clotted blood comes off, but the wound bleeds a new and Henry grabs a little bit of toilet paper to press against the flow of blood.
“Let the fire go cold again.”
Henry had thought, once, when he and Walt had just began this tentative truce between themselves that Walt was quiet because he was slow. He thought that maybe Walt was one of those boys that came from too many years of living in the backwoods, learning to read from outdated primers that only went to the third grade. He knew he was wrong, though, when he heard his grandmother rolling her tongue over soft Cheyenne vowels and carefully listening to Walt repeat them back to her. Her eyes were dimmed by age, and her hands were stiff and arthritic, but she would cluck at his outsider friend and mutter darkly about white lips and pale eyes, before shaping Walt’s mouth to fit the culture of a whole nation of people.
There’s lots of things that 14 year old Henry knows about Walt Longmire that twelve year old him did not. He is no longer the angry little boy who lashes out in anger first and asks questions second, and Walt is no longer this beacon of white privilege that Henry had thought him to be on that day in the water foundation line. And while Walt’s life in Absaroka County, Wyoming was made easier by the color of his skin, it did not save him from the trials of living under his father’s roof.
He knows the meaning behind every black eye Walt sports around school, long hair brushed over it in an insecure and delicate attempt to not draw attention to it. It doesn’t matter, because everyone in their tiny high school knows about the Longmires.
He knows why Walt’s mouth is always set in a firm line that wavers only to let out the fewest amount of words needed to convey a message. There’s a row of scars on Walt’s lip from the few times his father deemed he had spoken out of turn.
Henry also knows that, behind the bruises and the taciturn affect, Walt Longmire is the greatest man he’s ever known.
Walt’s eyes never leave the chipped, dirty tile of Henry’s family bathroom while his friend smoothes a coverlet over the wrinkles in his forehead. Henry’s feet are bare, and Walt’s are only covered in a pair of grimy, no-longer-white-but-grey socks.
“Did you walk here?” Henry asks.
Walt mumbles, “maybe,” and doesn’t flinch when Henry tips his chin up to look at his nose.
“I’m going to have to set this and it’s going to hurt.” Walt breathes out harshly, but nods. Henry takes his friend’s hands and sets them on his shoulders for support. He learned this trick from his grandmother’s sister, a great aunt who had passed now, and he uses all of his training to not panic as he feels the crunch of Walt’s bones under his fingers. Walt’s fingers curl into his shoulder, but he doesn’t yell out. He hisses between his teeth, and leaves red marks on Henry’s bare skin, but he doesn’t shout.
Henry doesn’t like Walt’s silences anymore than he likes the way he doesn’t have to ask to know that the cold fire was a lie.
-----
Walt gets drafted for the United States Army and he doesn’t tell Henry about it for weeks. It’s the longest fight in their friendship, because as soon as Henry hears the words - practically pried from inside Walt’s mouth - he joins up.
That was the second time Henry Standing Bear punched Walter Longmire across the jaw. Neither of them hoped it would be the last.
-----
The army barbers were not particularly careful with either of them, but Henry’s scalp looked much worse for wear when they emerged from Basic. There were dark scabs from where they had cut too deeply. He had gaps in his hair, which made the cuts stand out all the more.
Walt tends to stare at him a lot, fingers itching against the fabric of his army issued t-shirt, and Henry ignores what he knows Walt is thinking.
“It was just hair, Walter,” Henry sighs, standing on the bank of the Mekong river, dog tags cold against his bare chest.
Walt looks caught, very deer in the headlines, and Henry smiles.
“You going to tell me what happened to your hands?” Walt covers the abrasions with his palms as best as he can, hides the quirk of his lips by bowing his head. They were nineteen now, a far cry from the boys who had tussled in a long-forgotten school hallway. Walter had filled out his height, and Henry’s limbs all seemed to fit together and work in harmony. Where they had once been reeds blowing in the summer sun, they were sturdy oaks now, rooted in traditions that have been and will be longer than the two of them will walk together on this earth.
Walt was still the gentle giant who would nuzzle against Henry’s horses and could throw down with any man who looked sideways at him, if he was in the mood. Henry still the defensive Indian boy that shoots back with witty remarks now instead of the flats of his fists.
“Jagger called you chief again.”
Henry supposes that’s as good an answer as any, and lets Walter wear his scars. Henry can afford to be a man of peace when he’s got a man like Walter Longmire at his side.
-----
It’s not Walt that tells him how it happened. It’s an army nurse, her hair tucked underneath a jungle hat and her fatigues too big because of her latest bout with whatever bacteria lives in their water, who says, “You got shot, son. Your boy here got you out.” She looks about twenty-three, not much older than him, but she pats him on the cheek and smoothes a small, cold hand over the bristles of his hair like his mother used to when he got fevers in winter.
-----
He wakes up with an IV in his arm, the tubing bright red with bagged blood, and Walt sitting stoically in the little metal chair next to his cot. Henry raises an eyebrow, which takes about as much energy as he has to do, and waits.
“Wrong type,” Walt says, holding out his arm to show Henry the blossoming bruise on the smooth skin at the crook. The motion allows Henry to see the wet patches on Walt’s uniform and his friend shrugs uncomfortably. “I carried you out.”
Henry reaches out, sees the pallor underneath his normally dark skin, and knows that there is probably a trail of his blood across a burnt jungle floor somewhere out there, and finds Walt’s fingers with his own. They are stained with more blood, crusted under the short fingernails, and he sees more evidence of his wound on Walt than on himself. He feels the twinge of pain near his hip that he assumes is where the bullet hit him and hopes he can still ride his horses when he gets home.
The hospital is something like a very large tent and there are rows and rows of cots spread out across the length of the room. In the bed next to him is a little boy with wild eyes and a sling on his arm. His face is burned on one side, but it’s a healed wound and not what has him sitting in that bed right now. It smells just like the rest of Vietnam - all jungle and wet foliage - but he can also smell the sweat of a hundred bodies and antiseptic.
He tries to speak, can barely get his mouth to work right, and he figures there must be a little morphine running around inside his veins with this stranger’s blood. He slurs out a little, though, before he loses the will to say anything more. He wants to make a joke about how, for once, he’s the silent one, but Walt just squeezes his fingers tighter and tells him to sleep.
-----
Henry always thought that Grandmother Standing Bear teaching Walt their language would help to give him more ways to express himself. Instead, it just gave Walt more beautiful and nuanced words to hoard like gold inside himself.
-----
It’s not their first kiss - that ship had sailed when they were sixteen and spent too many nights sharing heat under the stars - but it’s the first one Henry can remember that tastes of blood. Not even in Vietnam had Walt ever tasted like he does now, like fear. But they are home, have been back in Wyoming for over a year, and Walt tastes like pain and hot metal.
They are both wearing hand-me-down black wool suits bought from mail-order catalogues probably fifteen or twenty years ago. It was the heat of summer in the plains and Henry could feel like hair curling at the nape of his neck from the sweat. His eyes follow the tears on Walt’s cheeks and the trickle of sweat down his temples as his hand work hard to hold his friend up against the side of the funeral home.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” Henry says, but what he really means is “I’m sorry you got left behind.”
He remembers being seventeen when Grandmother Standing Bear died and Walt sitting next to him trying not to fall too deeply into his own feelings of loss and staying present for Henry as he mourned. Henry had had little contact with Mrs. Longmire - Walt’s father hated him, tended to sneer at him and call him names - so he didn’t have the same feelings towards Mrs. Longmire’s cancer diagnosis and death that Walter had towards Grandmother’s passing. But he could feel himself getting pulled underneath the weight of Walt’s grief, so he kisses him hard, uses the rough back wall of chapel to Walt from hitting the ground.
Back inside, Henry folds his hand demurely and stands beside Walt in the receiving line. Only a few people offer to shake his hand. It’s mostly the young men and women they knew from school, glancing over their shoulder to see if their parents see them, and give the two of them smiles like water that trickle away as soon as they move out of line. Walt’s father hadn’t bothered with coming. He didn’t believe in Heaven, or Hell, or any form of afterlife, and would have probably spent the majority of the service blatantly stealing sips from his hip flask. Henry cannot blame him for his beliefs, or non-beliefs, and he would not judge the man for wanting to mourn in his own way. He just wishes Walt had had a father who could put his hand on his shoulder as he threw a yellow daisy into his mother’s grave.
Walter had only Henry and today, he does not feel like enough.
-----
Henry always liked to say he was proficient at many languages, but fluent in only three: Cheyenne, the tongue of his mother; English, the hands with which he does his work; and Walter Longmire, the soft cadence he hears when he listen to his heart beat in the dead of the night.
-----
“He’s in the bathroom, the old bear,” Martha says by way of greeting. She had called him specifically, telling him Walt had come limping home twenty minutes ago and had locked the door behind him without saying a word to her.
Henry kisses her cheek and says, “old dogs must lick their wounds in peace.” He hears a muffled grunt from the back of the newly-wed Longmires’ home and knows he was heard. He knocks on the bathroom door and waits. He’s got a thousand years worth of patience for Walter, and a two second temper, so he knocks harder and waits some more. He hears the lock click eventually, though, and he slips through the barrier without letting Martha in behind him.
Walt has a narrow line of stitches across his ribs, uneven and done by his own hand, and Henry frowns. Walt must feel no compunction to cover the wound up because he merely ties a knot at the end and cuts the hanging thread away. “Guy pulled a knife on me.”
“And a trip to the hospital proved too arduous for you in your condition?” Henry pushes Walt by the shoulder to the toilet and forces him to sit. He sees Walt’s lighter on the sink ledge from where he had burned the needle black to sterilize it and the leftover thread stained red from Walt’s blood.
“I didn’t think this required a helicopter flight.”
Henry methodically puts away the supplies, ignoring the way Walt sits at an angle, one hand just above the wound like he can hold his insides together with just that little bit of pressure. “When you became a deputy,” Henry begins, keeping his voice low and speaking in Cheyenne, “I warned you of just this.”
Walt harrumphs, coughs a little when the sound catches on his ribs, and leans more heavily against his knees. “We were on their land,” Walt replies.
Henry can tell from the creak of the floorboards outside that Martha is pacing worriedly outside. Henry supposes it is her right to worry; she had married the young deputy in full knowledge of the kind of work he would be doing. Sometimes, though, he wishes to be selfish and remind her that she did not have to lose sleep worrying about a boy in an abusive household, or a soldier in a field of battle. The sleepy job of being a deputy in Absaroka County is easy, comparatively. But Henry does not say these things, and he does not belittle her worry. She is his wife and he is just the bar-back at the local tavern. As far as Martha is concerned, he is merely Walt’s friend.
He clicks his tongue in a way that reminds him of his mother and turns the tap on for the shower. The water takes ages to heat up, always has, and Henry motions for Walt to work his undershirt off while he works on his boots. Walt doesn’t protest, not even silently, and accepts the hand Henry offers to help him keep his balance as he steps over the edge of the tub. The water swirls brown and thick around his feet, the drain always too slow to keep up, and Henry rolls up his sleeves to run his fingers through Walt’s hair.
Walt had made a vow to Martha to be faithful to be, and to love her, and Henry had stood next to him when he did. Because he had had no mother or father to impress, Martha had looked to Henry for approval. She wore her best dresses and her special occasion perfume whenever she would fix them both dinner, and judging from the way Walt never seemed to notice one way or another, he assumed it was a show for him. She would serve him first, like a good hostess, and play with the gold cross that hung from her neck as he spoke. Walt would smile beatifically from the other end of the table, pleased to know they were getting along so well.
They had meet her in town and she had taken a shine to the enigmatic and earnest Walt Longmire the same way he had as a boy. Walt suddenly found himself the center of a lot of attention and, in his typical way, he had shuffled and charmed his way through their interactions until she walked away, her phone number stuffed into the front pocket of his wranglers.
He had looked at Henry with a blank, slightly frightened face, and Henry had merely shrugged. "You should go for it, my brother."
The wedding had been a simple affair. She wore a pale yellow dress and her sister acted as the other witness with Henry. The Absaroka County Justice of the Peace didn't live in Absaroka county, so they had waited at her office for nearly an hour to sign the certificate. Walt had slicked his hair back and Henry had laughed at him the whole morning, standing outside the bathroom door while his friend fidgeted and fretted in peace behind it.
Henry feels the water trickle down his arms and soak the rolled sleeves of his long, flannel shirt. He rubs the soap together in his hands and works it gently through Walt's brown hair, hanging limply in his friend's eyes. As Walt rinses his hair clean, Henry smooths his hand across Walt's back and sides, taking care to not rip his stitches as he cleaned the leftover blood away from the wound. Walt reaches down to turn the tap off when the water finally runs clear at his feet and Henry grabs the only towel from the bar behind him to flop across Walt's shoulders.
After it was dried and bandaged, Henry knowing that at least one or two of the tighter stitches would pop tonight when Walt tossed and turned to get comfortable, he grabs the stuff bristle brush on the back of the toilet and works it through Walt's still damp hair.
"She's allowed to see you weak, Walt. She will not think less of you because you need her."
Walt did not seem impressed by the sentiment but Henry supposes it's not very impressive to the other person when you find their insecurities and poke at it with a stick. He reaches over and unlocks the door, one eyebrow raised in warning, and leaves him dripping onto the brand-new tile Martha had labored over for a week to install properly.
Martha grabs his arm as he leaves, doesn't ask why the fabric is soaked through, and kisses his cheek. "Thank you, Henry."
-----
The baby is still covered in its mother's blood when Henry bursts through the door. He had jumped into his cousin's car as soon as Walt had called him and sped half the way to the closest-by-one-hundred-miles hospital. There's a nurse wiping up a trail of blood from the floor with a white, rough towel underneath her shoe, while another nurse buffs the squealing baby clean and hands her to Martha.
"Cady," Walt says, grabbing Henry by the neck and pulling him in for a hug.
"I'm not letting you leave, Standing Bear, until you agree to be her godfather," Martha sobs, so happy, and Henry fights back the tears that prick and sting just behind his eyelids.
He gives her a name that means “Walks in the Light” and kisses her forehead when Walt shifts the feather-light bundle of baby and blankets into his arms.
-----
Henry supposes that what starts in blood will have to end in blood too. He also supposes he doesn't mind that, so long as it's for the sake of Walter Longmire that he bleeds.