The Wanted (Revised Hurloane Fic) - Chapter 11
“They had nearly as many names as they had stories told about them. Ram. Raven. Red. Devil. Deputy. Outlaw. Short ‘n Long. Ghosts of the Rapids.”
Hurley’s a bounty hunter, the Raven is an outlaw, and the desert is a lonely place.
(The 50k+ Old West Hurloane AU Where Hurley Becomes A Thief Too that no one asked for. Edited and reposted from an old version of the story. T for non-graphic violence and discussions of death/injury/trauma.)
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Admittedly, it didn't take Hurley too long to fuck up.
They might have started to let their guard down, in hindsight. After awhile, the circumstances of this life with Sloane became, if not exactly routine, then at least rhythmic. There was a consistency to the spiking highs of their thefts followed by long periods of running and hiding and quiet. They came to know, for example, how long it would take after one of their big hits for the victimized town to send its bounty hunters coursing into the desert after them. The naps they took at midday when they were really on the run, so they could travel through the whole following night, and the paths through rocky land that they could take to slow down their pursuers--these things were never boring, but they did become familiar.
That may have been why, one day in the canyonlands, they got comfortable when they shouldn't have. Sloane, after all, seemed to know every possible path through the labyrinth of crevices. She, with her sharper ears, picked up the sound of distant hoofbeats before they did, too.
"Do you hear someone?" Hurley asked.
"Yeah. We need to pack up and get the horse ready. It'll take them awhile to find the right path to us, at least, if they ever do."
But whatever group was after them had knowledge of the land too, it seemed. It didn't take them long to navigate through. By the time the two of them were mounted and ready to run, Hurley could hear the pound of the horses too. The echoes confounded them, as they always had, but the sounds were undoubtedly getting closer.
And Hurley had to wonder.
"We have to go," Sloane said quickly. "We've got a couple minutes, maybe."
"Okay," they said, but they didn't get the horse moving just then. They felt how a frozen deer must feel, primed to spring at any moment but waiting, still, waiting wide-eyed until the last moment, because they needed to see their oncoming doom up close.
"Hurley?" Her voice was a warning as much as it was a question. Still they did nothing. They just needed a moment longer.
As the first flashes of paint horse came careening around the corner, as the hunters raised their voices and their pistols, as the thunder came rumbling toward them, all they could do was scan the angry faces. They looked for a familiar one, the visage of an older man with deep lines around his lips.
"Ram, move!"
They snapped back to themself just as bullets began to blow bits of rock off the canyon walls near them. The showers of dust hit them in the face as they began, desperately, to dodge and weave.
It took them longer than it would have otherwise to lose the bounty hunters, but they managed it. Once they got into the open, they didn't stop until the poor horse heaved and shook with exhaustion. White spit flew backward from its mouth.
Even this wasn't far enough, not even close. Just because they could no longer see their pursuers didn't mean those hunters weren't somewhere behind them. They would have to stop only for a short time before going on. There was a lot to do yet to shake the posse, now that they'd gotten within a hair of the two of them.
Hurley got off and tried to catch the breath that they hadn't been able to get back throughout the whole ride. Their heart beat so hard that it seemed to quiver.
"Hey," Sloane snapped at them before she even dismounted. Hurley braced themself. "Do you mind talking about what the fuck just happened back there?"
"Look, I'm sorry."
"No you're not," she muttered as she slid off the saddle. "You're never sorry for any of the fucking stunts you pull."
Hurley stopped mid-pace, then turned on her. "Excuse me, what's that supposed to mean?"
"Exactly what it sounds like. You're always trying to be some kind of damn hero. It's like you're playing a game."
This, they hadn't expected. She could be mad, sure, but to hit them with this out of the blue? "That's not true," they snapped back.
"Sure, Hurley."
"Well, if it's really what you think of me then why are you telling me now, huh? You've had months and months to let me know, if it's been such a worry for you!"
"Do you, like, get what we're doing here?" Hurley was starting to hate it when she got this way, when the spite and venom found its way back into her voice. It was the same voice they had heard what seemed like a lifetime ago, when they had come to her in the back of a barred wagon, trussed like a prize or like a dangerous thing. It was a voice that made an enemy of whomever she spoke to. "Don't know if you've noticed, but the bounty on our heads is only going up, and people are desperate for cash. They're going to look for any slip-up like that."
"You are not gonna talk to me like I'm a child," they growled.
"Then figure your shit out! Get it through your head that you only need to fuck up once for them to ruin both of our lives."
"Why are you being like this? You're acting like I tried to get us caught!"
"You damn well could have."
"I wasn't!" She said nothing to that. Her jaw was locked and her lips in a line. Hurley hated how closed she looked. "Besides, you've had more than once chance."
"What are you talking about?" She sounded weary of them now.
"You've been caught more than once and managed to get out of it, right? Whatever you did to fuck up, it didn't ruin your whole life, did it?"
"Well, no shit. You were there for it."
"I meant before that. You got away from the first bounty hunters that caught you all on your own. Everyone knows that."
Sloane paused, for more than a beat. Then, seeming to recover the attitude that she had momentarily dropped, she turned to Hurley, hand on her hip, and talked to them like they were simple. "I'm not about to count," she started, "on every group of bounty hunters being as dumb and wet behind the ears as that pack of drunks."
It was too late, though. She probably thought that Hurley hadn't noticed the moment of hesitation, but they had. Any irritation that they may have felt up until that moment began to congeal into something colder inside them. It wasn't a thoughtful pause from her, nor was it mere surprise. It was a freeze. Her shoulders had hitched up with tension. It happened so quickly, they might not have been able to catch such a thing before, but they knew enough now to do so. They had seen her spooked enough times.
They tried not to let on that knew. "So," they started slowly, "that part of the story is true? That you got away on your own?"
"Yeah."
"That sounds like it was hard."
"It wasn't. They were idiots. And drunk for most of the time, like I said." She was busy taking off the horse's sweaty tack. When they didn't respond, she looked over at them, and they must have looked expectant, because she promptly groaned. "Look, it's not even one of my good stories. I was a kid, I was dumb, I didn't do what I would do now."
She was still fiddling with the saddle straps. She spoke like her words were meant to just skim past like a stone skipped on water. They sunk into Hurley anyway, slowly. "A kid?"
"Yeah."
"How...how old?"
"Gods above, why do you need to know?"
"I don't," they said hastily, although a part of them felt that it was, in fact, a need. "I was just asking."
"Ugh. I mean, I wasn't a kid, like, a little kid or anything. Like seventeen."
That was the first time they began to feel sick to their stomach.
She shrugged before she went on. "Walked into an ambush that I would've been able to see from a mile away these days." She shook her head and scoffed a little, seemingly at herself. "And I kept trying to fight the ropes after they tied me up, like I thought I could get out of them if I just pulled hard enough. I don't know. Think I thought it would make me seem tougher. Bad idea." She said no more about it, then.
And because she didn't specify further, they were free to fill in the gaps for themself. They imagined what it was like, when she fought because she could no longer take flight. Someone who, to begin with, was not a fighter, not that way at least. Behind their eyes, they saw, unbidden, a younger version of herself struggling like a mustang at the end of unyielding ropes, her skin chafing against them. Hurley had gotten glimpses of an almost animal fear in her before, the kind that widened her eyes; they imagined that kind of fear fully realized, that desperation that they had seen. Her straining
to get back to the open world that she knew, and being ripped from it still. Dragged forward through the heat, made to trudge with aching muscles behind her captors' horses once she had finally, inevitably worn herself out. Seventeen.
They could picture the hands of the hunters, so many hands on her at once to pull and push and pin her to the ground, hands heedless of whether they bruised her arms when they grabbed them to keep her still. Maybe hands that struck, if her trying to get away bothered them enough, or if their drunkenness inclined them. Maybe worse. Hurley wanted them off her, those ungentle hands. They would have beaten them all off if they could.
Sloane snorted to herself, then. The sound nearly startled them, it was so casual, so deeply at odds with how they felt. "Look, I'm embarrassed to even talk about it now, okay? All that fighting when I got caught. Big waste of sweat and energy. You know I'd never try that shit now. Stupid."
"It wasn't stupid." Hurley realized a moment later how forcefully they'd said it, enough to make Sloane's ears snap up. More quietly, they went on, "You were...you must have been so scared."
At that, they saw her practically jolt. Her first reaction, they could tell, was defensive. "I was just..." But then she trailed off, and whatever fire had flared up in her just then died off in an instant. She seemed to think a moment, then shook her head again. "But it was still stupid regardless, you know? I mean, no matter how you look at it, I should've saved my energy. Could've just saved it all until nightfall. They weren't too hard to get away from, in the end, like I said. A couple nights in, I undid the ropes with my teeth while they were sleeping. That's why my front teeth are still a little bit bent, see?" And she opened her mouth to show them off.
Hurley turned away. "And then?"
"Ran into the mountains and ended up practically passed out in the hills. Think the only reason they stopped coming after me is because they figured I must've been dead up there already."
And Hurley imagined a child, run halfway into the hard, hot ground from exhaustion and thirst. Imagined Sloane's brown cheek pressed into rocks as she lay panting. Would she have thought, at that time, about having no one around to bury her? Being so alone, it's something they would have thought about, they're sure.
"Hey," she said, grousing, "don't give me that look. Do I look like I'm out here feeling bad for myself?"
"No, you weren't even going to talk about it," they murmured.
"Right. So don't you start feeling bad for me."
"Did they do this?" they asked, and they touched her upper back, where they knew that, under her coat, there were long white marks set into her flesh.
Instantly, they wished they hadn't. No one could have missed the sharp flinch that she gave this time, and they drew their hand away at once as though it had burned her. Too late. She breathed a little more quickly than before. Then, she seemed to realize that she had given up something without meaning to, and she cast her eyes to the ground and said nothing. Hurley felt no victory in what they had found out.
"I'm sorry," they said in a hush.
"Don't be." She sounded farther from them than before. For awhile, there was quiet.
"How'd you do it?" they murmured.
"What?"
"How'd you ever get up again?"
She furrowed her brow at the ground in a puzzling way. She looked like she was trying to reach back into some memory. "It rained," she said at last, and her voice was softer than it had been all day.
Hurley just looked at her and waited. They would have waited as long as it took her.
"I remember...I woke up in a cave up there, and it was thundering. I don't really know how I managed to stand, but I stumbled out there and sat on the ground, and it came pouring down. First water I'd had in days. And then I just kind of stayed there and stared up at the sky for awhile." She let out a humph suddenly and smiled slightly, in a fond sort of way. "You see why I've always liked it out here, right? This place has always been on my side."
She said it like it was a good thing. But Hurley, in spite of everything, had never been in a place in their life where the only things they had to rely on were the rough earth and the fickle, fragile clouds.
In almost a whisper, they said, "I'm on your side, you know."
She huffed, and they didn't miss the way she rolled her eyes a little. "I know." After another moment, she said, "Me too. About, you know, the being on your side thing."
"I know that. I do."
"Good."
"Did you..." They almost swallowed the question back down, unsure if they really wanted an answer. They decided that they needed one regardless. "Did you think about that when we...when my posse caught you?"
She raised an eyebrow at them. "Think about it?" Her hand went up to scratch the side of her scalp. "I mean, yeah, I guess I did. Kind of hard not to, right? Thought about not repeating the same mistakes as the first time, anyway," she finished with a forced laugh.
She had to have thought, too, that it could all happen again. Their posse had put that fear anew in her. Hurley had put that fear anew in her.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be."
They knew that they only had so much time before she stopped being receptive to this conversation entirely, so they took a deep breath. "Can I just say one thing?"
Her lip started to quirk up into a smirk as she looked their way. "I don't think I could stop you."
After a moment's hesitation, they put a hand lightly over hers. That was enough to pique, it seemed, as she faced them for the first time since they had started talking. They held her gaze as best they could. "I'm glad you got out of there alone. I'm so grateful you did. But you're not going to have to do that again, alright? I'm not going to let you, in fact." For her sake, then, they tried for a laugh themself. "And the next person who lays a hand on you is gonna get it broken, alright?"
She appreciated that, given the way that she giggled with them. Then, though, something that they hadn't seemed before touched her face and gave a new shape to her smile. It looked something like sadness, and it reached her eyes.
Stranger still, after a bit, she simply breathed out her nose in a small hum and said, "You're good to me, Red."
They would never have thought to be anything else to her.
----------------------------------------------------
Changes in the winds brought moisture from an ocean that was hundreds of miles and many worlds away from the solid, sunbaked earth underfoot. The two of them spent the violent summer near the Shickshaw Hills. Sometimes they came across towns tucked in crouching amongst the mountains and stayed for days, keeping a low profile, before moving on. Sometimes they wandered in the hills themselves, so that when the black clouds snuck up on them, they could duck into one of many caves and simply watch dirt roads far below them turning to muddy rivers, as the hardened ground spat back the water instead of absorbing it and let it run off in flash floods. A couple of times, they were not quite quick enough--the sky often went from blue to dark in minutes, and the first drop would scarcely hit the sand before all of the rain came down at once. It fell hard enough to sting. When that happened, Hurley would hear the slap of their waterlogged clothes as they ran for shelter and shivered in front of the lightning and thrilled at being at once so hot and so cold.
By the time they had caught their breath inside the cave and stripped their shirt off for it to dry beside the fire Sloane had built, often the storm would have already moved on and left the air outside sweet and cool. Hurley began to get used to the sight of her bare back. When she sat up straight, they saw the long, narrow dip between the muscles where her spine lay. They saw the few long scars on her shoulder blade but did not bring them up again.
Instead, they let their hair frizz as it air-dried and then slipped under the blanket that was already around Sloane's shoulders. The pair of them checked each other's recent scabs and sunburns to ensure that none of them were worsening. She ribbed them for how long it must've been since they had gotten some, with how long they'd been out in this lonely place, and they ribbed her back. They listened to her stories and heard her voice get slower and more sighing as she became sleepy, and again they thrilled at being at once so hot and so cold.
In the days after a big storm, seeds that had been waiting months or years for their chance erupted from the ground so quickly that you could nearly hear them growing. The two of them picked the desert wildflowers sometimes, to slip them into each other's hair or into their own; sometimes, they just let them be. Pink and red and orange, they burned with the colors of a sunset, were just as beautiful and just as quick to go. The leaves crisped under the sun, and the pollinating wasps and butterflies went elsewhere.
Nowadays, Hurley liked the night best. Sloane gathered them up against her, pressed their warmth into her as she always did. Her chin lowered down to rest on their shoulder, near the crook of their neck. They did their best to keep still and not to seem stiff. This was what always happened after she believed that Hurley had already fallen asleep, whether it was to keep them both warmer or simply because it was the same thing she always did, instinctually, when nestling into pillows. She buried herself away from the world.
These days, they seldom slept while she was still awake. They were simply too aware of each small movement she made. Their heart only ever began to slow when hers did. (Sometimes, in the night, they woke to her shifting and whimpering in her sleep. Sometimes, when they put a hand over her chest, she would slowly still without waking herself. They were developing an awareness of these signs in her, too.)
With practice, they had learned to keep their breathing steady when she gave them an accidental kick in the side as she tried to get comfortable. They were also pretty good at keeping up the ruse when wisps of hair tickled their forehead, when her nose brushed up and down their cheek in what, frankly, could only be described as nuzzling. This, too, was typical whenever she was snuggling in to sleep. Nothing out of the ordinary.
For their part, if they ever found themself restless, they would count their blessings, the way their mother had always said to do on sleepless nights. The cover provided by the hollows between the canyon walls, the wide desert sky heavy with stars. Both of them were alive and breathed the free air—every expansion of Sloane’s chest pressed against theirs was a reassurance of this.
What they did not expect was the way that, now, she slowed and then finally stopped nuzzling into them. When she came to a halt, her lips were on Hurley’s cheek. Closed. They felt more of a tingling than pressure, as though one of the night moths that fed on the cactus flowers had landed there, the touch was so light.
Sloane was not asleep. The breaths that left her nose and ghosted across Hurley’s skin were too quick and too irregular. She simply stayed still there.
Any second now, they were sure, she was going to realize that they were awake. They didn’t see how she could not have known, with the way their face, their everything, had begun to burn. They quashed the sudden urge to immediately kick off all the blankets, and her. They must have positively radiated heat. It was enough to prick them from the inside, and maybe to prick her, the paper-thin skin of the lips that they could not stop feeling no matter how much they tried to tune it out like a white noise. They were not sure whether they wanted to stop feeling anyway. Her mouth was still closed.
But she didn’t notice that they were awake, or at the very least didn’t acknowledge it. Instead, as she began to slowly pull away—for the briefest of moments, her lips seemed to stick to their skin just a little, from the saliva—she opened her mouth, only to let out a sigh that Hurley felt shudder through her whole body. Then there was a shift and her back was to them.
They lay there as she slipped into sleep and then for ages afterward, wide-eyed in the dark. They were too aware of themself to rest, too conscious of the sensations all around them, the scratch of the cotton blanket and the pebbles digging into their thighs and the other warm body fitted against the curve of theirs. All of it kept them up, all of it was all too much. It was like their skin itself called out for a touch, another touch. Probably, it was a bit like going mad, if to go mad was to experience the world too much and to see in it what no one else could.
That was not, in fact, a kiss. Not really, anyway. It was something nameless that had come at them out of the shadows, terrifying and full of possibility.
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