Chapter Text
The sun is beating down across his back as he trips and stumbles, hands dusted with sand and blood.
“Tell them,” the man who once was Edward Sallow ordered him. “Tell them not to interfere, or there will be consequences.”
Edward Sallow has bright eyes and a smile that tells you that he had everything under control; there is no need to worry if you just do as he says, right down to the letter. Edward Sallow has big plans, and everything will fall into place if you do this one small thing for him, why don’t you?
He wonders if the man has sent spies to follow him, to make sure he will do his final duty.
(At night, he swears he can see eyes in the darkness, watching as he sits by his fire and thinks of what went wrong.)
“Do this for me. As an old friend. As a brother.”
In the Boneyard, children play on metal skeletons and pretend they can touch the sky. In the Boneyard, they run barefoot through the streets, all bruised bodies and bloodied knuckles.
(He cuts his hair before he leaves, and then Sallow’s. Those brown locks seem like snakes that touch the ground and seem to wriggle away before his very eyes.
“We are not children anymore,” he tells Sallow. “Do you understand?”
Bright eyes. A smile that lights fires. “I understand.”)
In the Boneyard, words like friend and brother carry more weight than an overloaded Brahmin.
He is a good friend. The tribes capture them, and all he can think of is how easy it will be to smother Sallow in his sleep and spare him this madness, to tell the missionary to help him hold his brother down, while he chokes the very life out of him.
He is a good brother. Sallow reads books and occasionally points out unfamiliar words to him, words which he explains, gently deconstructing concepts into understandable theories.
“You are my greatest mistake,” Sallow told him, as he ran into the desert, scraping his knees on the sand, like a rabbit being pursued by hounds. “But I will repay you. I will.”
Repay. How?
With a knife to the back? With a slit throat, a winking eye across his flesh? He doesn’t want to think about the consequences.
“Tell them for me, will you, my friend?”
Of course. For you, anything. Everything.
Except that one very important question.
(“Join me,” Sallow says, and his eyes flick between him and the silent missionary, those blue eyes seeming to mock him.
Make your choice. Make it. Make it here, loud, clear.
“Join me. One last time.”)
Bill Calhoun runs across the stretch of Arizona, thinking of bright eyes and a fire that’s barely getting started.