#after jack is taken back and seen mac does the good ol lean against the wall and tip your head back in relief | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sofaradaysogood · 7 years

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Is fearr Gaeilge briste, ná Béarla clíste || Faraday

“Broken Irish is better than clever English” for @poorlikeness and @knivesnothingtoit

Just because he talks about his mother in the past tense, doesn’t mean she’s not somewhere.

By the time they reach town, they’re all on foot. Walking, leading their horses rather than riding them. It’s been a long day’s travel, and it’s nice to stretch their legs. It’s late in the afternoon; the heat has settled into a steady stillness, quiet and calm.

In all that tranquillity, Faraday’s unease is obvious. He’s tense and he’s jumpy, gaze darting from side to side and fingers clenching and unclenching at Jack’s reins without even realising. Jack’s content to follow the rest, and doesn’t seem to mind even when Faraday’s hands fall from the reins entirely.

It’s a small town, one of several scattered across the low, grassy plain. Each is no more than an hour’s ride from the next. An unlikely place to encounter any trouble. Mostly, they’re full of hard-working and god-fearing people, some even going so far as to avoid having a saloon.

Maybe that’s why they’re stopping here, of all places, for the night – nothing to get any of them in trouble. Just a real bed and some real, hot food, a break from sleeping under the stars as they make their way towards whatever mess it is that Sam’s leading them to.

It makes the first words they hear from one of its inhabitants all the more surprising.

“Joshua Faraday?”

Vasquez’s hand is on his gun before the last syllable falls. Faraday’s face is a picture of perfect panic. He has the look of a man prepared to sacrifice very dignity for the sake of escape – ready to simply turn tail and sprint.

Billy’s posture shifts, just a little. A brush of Goodnight’s fingers against his arm keeps him from advancing.

Sam turns a look on Faraday, its message clear.

Who’d you cheat in a backwater place like this?

When the owner of the voice emerges from the shade of a doorway, Sam’s expression turns a little more to disappointing than disbelieving. The man’s a preacher, sixty-five if he’s a day. Short and white-haired, but hearty and hale, face tanned and hands rough from real work.

Any other time, Faraday might have taken offence at the assumption that he’d cheated anyone at all, let alone a goddamn preacher. Right now, he’s too busy staring at the man, wide-eyed and frozen like a startled rabbit that can’t decide whether to bolt.

The man’s face isn’t painted with anger. In recognising the man before him, he seems to find only joy.

It’s a few short steps for him to be close enough to reach out, to grasp both of Faraday’s shoulders and to shake him a little, as if proving to himself that Faraday is real, not some ghost or spectre or mirage, rising up with the heat from the dust-track road.

“It really is you,” the man says, and then – without warning – he pulls Faraday into a tight embrace, mindless of the way that Faraday is still frozen under his touch, rooted to the spot and giving no sign of returning the greeting.

There’s a general air of bemusement from his fellows that scatters the moment the man pulls back and takes Faraday by the ear, like a child caught stealing apples. Faraday yelps, bending into the tight grip in a vain effort to escape some of the pain.

He’s got two inches, three guns and a good thirty years on the old man, but he seems powerless to break free. He stumbles on after him, boots scuffing against each other.

“Stop! Get off –”

His words have no discernible effect, and nor do his hands, scrabbling at the iron pinch of the preacher’s fingers. Vasquez has followed without question or hesitation, hand uncertainly hovering near his gun. The others, to some greater or lesser degree, follow. Some out of concern and some, no doubt, mere curiosity.

“Fháil amach dom!”

Vasquez pulls up short, a little surprised by the unfamiliar words that have torn themselves urgent from Faraday’s tongue. The preacher stops, too, drops his hand and turns back to face Faraday, whose hand comes up to clutch at his reddening ear.

“Ah? Anois labhraíonn tú do theanga féin?” the preacher demands, with a scoff. The general air of bewilderment amongst his companions grows. Faraday scowls at the accusation. Now you speak your own language? As a child, he’d refused. Sat in stubborn silence even when it had earned him a smack. He’d seen the way people were treated when they spoke Irish. The way his mother was treated, even when she spoke English, her accent obvious enough to earn her derision and abuse, to keep her from honest work.

Better to be silent than to be less than nothing.

“Where’re you taking me, anyway?” Faraday asks, irritably. In English. The Irish syllables, born out of desperation, had been clumsy on his tongue. You go long enough without speaking a language – even your own – and your tongue unlearns it.

“To let James Byrne have a word with you before I take you to see your poor mother.”

Faraday blanches, and finally seems to find his autonomy once more. He takes a step back, and then another, until he’s close enough to Vasquez to be reassured by his presence. He makes the mistake of glancing back at the man, and finding his eyes, wide and surprised and concerned, fixed solidly on him.

The reassurance fades a little.

“She doesn’t want to see me. So how ‘bout we skip both those things.”

“Doesn’t want to see you?” The preacher barks a laugh, shakes his head and raises his hands, begging witness in God or anybody to this foolishness. “Mo Thiarna! What sort of mother wouldn’t want to see her own child? After so long?”

Something steely settles in the angle of Faraday’s jaw. No matter the look on Vasquez’s face, he wants to tuck himself closer still, to press back into the security of the man at his back who he knows will pull a gun when he does, because he trusts him.

Not that he’s planning on shooting anybody here.

“One who’s got me,” he says. “If you don’t mind, I got somewhere to be that’s not here, so --”

“Mac, grá sí leat.”

Faraday looks angry. He turns to Vasquez, and can’t quite meet his eye.

“I want to leave,” he says, as if it’s in Vasquez’s power to make the preacher disappear, to halt the words that none of the rest of them will understand. Vasquez looks from Faraday to the white-haired priest standing behind him, and nods, once.

He shifts to the side to let Faraday pass him, and then steps back again once he has, as though to shield him from this obviously unwelcome piece of his past. Head tipped just a little so he can see Faraday from the corner of his eye and watch the preacher at the same time, he rests a hand on his belt, not quite touching his gun.

“She doesn’t blame you,” calls the preacher, softly. “She never did, Joshua.”

“You sure you want to walk away from this?” Vasquez asks, softly. He’s not questioning Faraday’s decision. He’s just making damn sure this is what Faraday wants. Faraday stills, and his head drops, and Vasquez reaches out for his wrist. “Guerito?”

When Faraday takes a breath, it’s the breath of a man going out to meet his death.

“Just – don’t go far,” he mutters. Vasquez nods, and lets the fingers circling Faraday’s wrist drop. When he presses a hand to Faraday’s shoulder, it’s with a glance up and around at the surrounding buildings, the patiently watching preacher. He doesn’t trust it, any of it. Not if it makes Faraday this nervous.

When Faraday catches up Jack’s reins and leads him over, he only shakes his head, once, in answer to Vasquez’s inquiring look. He wants to know where they are, so he can slink back to them if needs be. He doesn’t want them to know where he is – doesn’t want them to follow, to see the disappointment he leaves in his wake.

Faraday makes his way over to the preacher, uncharacteristically cautious.

“If ol’ James Byrne thinks he can still put me over his knee,” Faraday warns, “he’s very much mistaken.”

Ol’ James Byrne is just that: old. He’d seemed old when Faraday was a child – now, he seems ancient, skin paper thin and limbs stick-like. And yet, here he is, next town over. Still doing the rounds with the good preacher, doctorin’ where folk need it.

He fixes Faraday with a look, and says ‘hmph’.

Faraday resists the urge to pull a face, the way he did at five years old when he got fixed with the same look for scraping his knees or his palms up.

“Well then,” Byrne says, like he saw Faraday this week just gone. “We’d better get riding.”

His mother doesn’t live where she used to.

She’s tucked up in Jack Byrne’s back room, too frail and too weak to look after herself anymore. She’s getting old and she’s getting ill and she’s dying by degrees. He doesn’t like the way guilt pools hot in his belly. She should be living comfortable. She shouldn’t be alone.

She shouldn’t have to see him again.

But he sinks into a chair by her bedside because Jack Byrne had looked him in the eye and told him that it’s God’s own luck he’d made it in time to see her still breathing. He doesn’t like the idea of her alone, now. Even if she deserves better company than this.

She stirs, and he leans forward. He’s hesitant to take her hand, but he does. Her fingers are cold and dry and too delicate in his rough hands. Her blue-tinged eyelids flutter. When her eyes open, they’re shockingly youthful in the sunken stretch of her face, mirrors of his own.

“Joshua?” she whispers, voice cracking and confusion evident.

"Dia duit, máthair,” he says. She begins to cry.

He rides back into town past midnight, so wrapped up in his own thoughts that Jack has steered himself most of the way, following the beaten track with the sort of patience he doesn’t usually exhibit.

He dismounts and unsaddles Jack without a thought, hands filling in for his brain. He even stays to brush Jack down, thorough and methodical, and blanket him after. And then, at a loss, his feet take him towards the hotel, the only place in this little nowhere that caters for strangers.

He finds Vasquez awake, sat on the wooden steps up to the door. Waiting.

Wordless, Faraday sinks down next to him, and surprises the Mexican by tucking himself against his side without a snide remark or even a grin. He just presses close, and shivers despite the warmth of the night.

“You saw your mother?” Vasquez asks, gentle. Faraday is still staring into the darkness as he replies.

“I saw her,” he confirms. “Go ndéana Dia trócaire air.” The sounds are a little clumsy in his mouth. He stumbles, toward the end, corrects himself.

Vasquez doesn’t understand, and isn’t there some irony in that, somewhere? Faraday pulls himself together, and turns a tired smile at Vasquez as he translates.

“God rest her soul.”

It’s the last time he’ll speak Irish in a long, long while. There’s nothing tethering him to it, now.

#;drabble: m #headcanon #send help

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