Topic: She's Back

Madison Rye

Date: 2011-02-08 17:13 EST
NOTE: The following string takes place January of the calendar year. Rhy'din Time.

It had never taken Madison very long to get her footing, back before she fell from grace and before her husband left on a gray sky day through the sheets of drying laundry on a line. Her life changed for the worse to change for the better and peace once ferociously claimed had become her trophy. Because of it, she never slept with a pistol under pillow and didn't keep blood under her nails or vile threats under her tongue. The only physical reminder she had of all the fire run through was a rib that never healed right and a disease for which there was no cure, no antidote, only acceptance. Her husband had come back from the kind of dead that see's you living the life of someone else. Hadn't she been doing the same thing for almost five years"

From widow to killer and vigilante to jezebel whose very name conjured things and had a county screaming for her demise.

Coming out the other end, cliff-free and walking steady, with her own kind of death at her heels and cinders in her breaths, she was somehow anointed, debt free, born anew. Saints are saints and sinners were dinners and she'd never claim the former, but she didn't feel as bad she thought she was. She was giving herself a chance. Elison and her had painted up their homestead, gotten a few horses for old times" sake, and lived quietly.

Then Michael called from the West and said he was coming back. Could he stay with them' It had been agreed over a bad telephone line in the early hours of a new year and ever since Madison couldn't sleep. Something was around the bend. The night had begun to hiss at her again. She was seeing signs in the wind and patterns in the grass. What was it' A few pebbles more fell down the cliff that was coming into few again, steeper and more perilous than ever.

Dawn of the 8th, Michael's company proved to be the answer.

Madison Rye

Date: 2011-02-08 20:22 EST
Vara Lace, no more than eighteen, colt-thin and shy-eyed, was not the likeliest of evils and the one least expected by all, especially Michael, to be Trouble. Madison opened the rain drenched porch door on the pair, Michael sullen as ever but with a new glimmer to his eyes, his hair chin length and stubble all over his cheeks, not the Michael that had left, and beside him, a frail, cloak-enamoured girl who Madison had never laid her eyes on, much like Rinn, had knowledge of through hearsay and wind-stripped letters.

"Mikey."

She embraced the boy to her close and hard and he the same. The girl stayed back, raising an olive hand to stroke away the hair clinging to her cheeks from the downpour. Over Michael's head Madison regarded the girl, none too easy about letting a progeny of the Thief, Sasha Cervenka, into the small sanctuary it had taken years for life to deliver. "Vara, I'm sorry." Her condolence, however, was sincere, after all, Vara was only a girl and one who no longer had her mother. "Rinn is in town, will you be visiting him?" Madison hoped that they would move onto Vara's father's and out of her loose hair. The forlorn daughter shook her head and pressed a searching look to Michael, who shrugged. "I thought you didn't mind if we stayed a while, Madi?"

There was no chance for expression nor a response from the 'slinger as Elison rose out of the dim behind and pressed his hands to his hips, giving the visitor and his quarry a tight smile and a lift of his brows. "Hope you didn't bring any cowsh*t with you." Michael gave an odd smirk and Vara looked away, pulling the cloak over her shoulders further. Madison shot Eli a look. "Well, you did just come from Lofton. Pardon my ill humorin' you." His humor a subtle tease, sensing the bitter chill growing that was no fault of the weather.

"Come in out of this bite" Madison urged, and giving a glance over the small field before the property in the cold, cold rain, they led the road worn lovers in, and with them, the invitation to a new war.

Madison Rye

Date: 2011-02-08 22:17 EST
"How was Hell?" Elison asked evenly while Madison put down a few rolls and meat onto the low-rise table in between two aged lounges. Michael sat beside Vara, a hand on her knee, while she kept her eyes pinned to the gunslinger the entire time.

"You ask like you are not there." Cervenka's child dead-locked her eyes on Madison and gestured flippantly about her, though the response was for the woman's husband. Elison crooked a brow and sat himself down, taking a roll up and breaking it apart in his hands. "There's worse n' hell." Vara refused the plate Madison offered and rolled her eyes.

"You think so."

"Vara, your mother tried to kill me. Your mother committed acts senselessly. She was a criminal", came Madison's slow-song voice, illuminating history with a sentence.

Vara rolled her shoulders and again placed her eyes on Madison frankly. "Mm. You are too."

"Okay." Elison took a chunk out of the bread in his hands and stood, walking around to stand behind Madison's chair, where she lounged straight out, one leg raised and the other dangling off the arm.

"Let's trim the fat and keep it lean here. My wife's actions were justified. Don't make it alright, but it makes it something to understand. You two are exhausted, let's wrap this thing up. "

Michael swallowed and put aside his plate, letting go his lover's knee. "I think we wait for morning."

Vara stood and threw her black hair over her shoulder dismissively. Her eyes held judgement the way Madison had witnessed it written on the faces of the Hexxmen, of Riley O"Rourke, and often, in the mirror. Madison didn't do a thing except look right back. Vara let out an exaggerated sigh and walked to the window, where the lashes of rain beat a tattoo.

Elison rubbed at his forehead, looking between the floor and the ice of the two women. "We're talking in the morning."

It was the most awkward any of them had ever felt, each of them subject to worse fates and escaping each. Madison drew herself out of her lounge and disappeared into their bedroom, while the other three shared glances and enmity.

"I set up a board in the room down from the bath. Get yourselves some good rest."

The fabled field King too disappeared.

Vara looked down the dark hall to their bedroom. "Who she think she is" Bitch."

"Hey, hey, you could have told me you felt this way before we came here. Want we get a coach to Rinn?" Michael grabbed her upper arms and manuevered her away from the couches and near the door, his voice dropping.

Vara turned her suddenly sly eyes up to Michael. "I want to see for me my mother's slayer. And now, I make her skin crawl." Her broken English was an endearing thing to the boy usually, but tonight, it sounded oddly bare and grotesque. Like there was some hollow, terrible place in his girlfriend that housed a spectral ugliness he'd not glimpsed before.

Michael looked down the dark hall and wished against himself that they had never come to the Donaldson residence. He could feel the terrible that would happen.

Madison Rye

Date: 2011-02-09 17:48 EST
The very next morning, when Michael awoke, it was to another rainy day and the sounds of activity. He propped himself up and spied through the back window of their small, wooden room, the gunslinger's preparing two horses. He turned to wake Vara but only the creases of the sheet she had lain upon remained. "Vara" Baby?"

He clambered to his feet in haste and rushed into the hall. He didn't know why he was running and why he was so worried, but his skin felt especially thin and his bones hurt with anxiousness. "Vara?" No sign of her in the kitchen, the lounge. He stepped back the bathroom " not there either. He drove the front door open yelling her name, rushing into the front field, when her small but powerful voice turned him around.

"I am here, Chaely. You were very tired." She motioned to caress the air as she might his brow, and he melted. She looked freshly awake, her hair was not brushed and her eyes were puffy from rest, but she was out of her night rail and dressed in a sweater and jeans. A long cigarette, one of those foreign ones that smelled strange, was burning to a black nub between her elegant fingertips. She smiled. Standing there staring at her something occured to him. The epiphany that comes on young men madly in love.

"You know, what you told me about your mother?"

"Which thing?" Vara lifted her shoulders and dropped them, flatly. There was so much she had told him.

"About how she set the world on fire, they'd say, just by being, well, you make everything shine."

She motioned again with a lovely smile and he obliged everything in him to her. He draped himself beside her on the chair beside and held her close. "I love you, Vara." Her eyes closed with cat-like glee and she tickled the back of his neck, looking satisfied and, thought Madison, smug, as she came around the side of the house with a big roan on rope.

"Morning", she sang with a smile to them. Vara grimaced and pushed Michael away, and with a petulant demeanor, got up and walked inside, slamming the door. Michael, with some shame on his face from his lover's actions, gave Madison a shrug. "Going to tell me why you're with her?" She asked, coming up to lean against the porch, patting the top of his shoe with a light laugh. "She's a clown, all those faces she pulls." Michael actually grinned at that but it was at odds with the shake of his head. "She's confused, and rightly angry. Would you want to be stuck with Rinn, too?"

"He's not so bad."

"He isn't father material. And he's a jerk. And he's selfish. There's nothing to like, except maybe his gun-handlin"."

Madison nodded and bit her lip, looking down and around to the field. "Come for a ride, Mikey."

A ride always meant a talk, and he knew he couldn't avoid this conversation any more than he could avoid getting wet without cover. He gestured for her to wait a moment while he went inside and grabbed his gun. He never left anywhere without it. Then he came back out and gave her the nod. "Which one's mine??

Madison Rye

Date: 2011-02-10 20:30 EST
Strong winds and wicked rain had abated by the time the roan and sorrel had broken the foothills and weaved up through the pines. The promise of blue sky spun for miles on miles as clouds thinned and faded. The pair had rode in silence for most of the way, except for Madison pointing out marks of the landscape her modest, chapel-white house sat amongst.

"You are lookin" better", the son of the gun murmured as bridles were hitched and mares slowed and stopped. For a while, there was only the dry sound of horsetail flick. Valley cries. Branch crackles.

"I do' I feel it. But I can't say the same about you." Her face hadn't changed at all since he last saw her, which was going back almost a year, and he thought that strange as she gave him a glance - it wasn't a fond thought he tossed around his head while they dismounted. No lines, but the same clear, milk-pale complexion, bold blue eyes with a touch of lilac in them, and a mouth that curved like a dare.

"I barely made it here. "

"Bringing her along didn't help it. Nor the fact you shot—"

They both looked off as a gust came off the weed-dotted crag and knocked them in their chests, knocked the words from her mouth. Madison narrowed her eyes to a squint over the fields scattered below. "Sasha used to be a friend of ours, Elison and me. There were outposts all over the West, including Lofton. Elison knew her first, long before he and I became one." She rubbed her hands down over her thighs to her knees and held a breath, like the memories she had were suffocating. His horse stamped the earth. Dust puffed.

"I didn't know that." Michael felt the shock like a shrapnel clip to the gut. He lifted his eyes to the sky and thought back over what had transpired in the last eight months. Andy and Brenton were AWOL, with Brenton fallen into Angel Grease and whatever other drug gave him some temporary absolution, Andy taken off with Bunny who had since been pulled as Rinn's hostage and was in some sh*thole motel in Rhy"Din. And then there was the showdown between Sasha and Madison.

"Vara needed some closure, I think that's why she came."

A dark brow rose on the gunslinger's face. A smile that said she didn't believe it.

"What?"

"If she is her mother's daughter, well and true, then there is more to that Michael. You're more canny than that."

He nodded and shifted with all the unease, all the memory, all the weight of a worrisome future, like the sky somehow got lower, the pressure dropped and pinching his skin. "We'll get." He breathed in roughly and bowed his head, pulling his wide brim low over his eyes against the bright whiteness of the day and all its terrors. Madison turned the sorrel around and came up his side.

"You are still my boy, Mikey. I sent you to that babylon and you came back and I owe you for your troubles. When you need a place, and you alone, you've ours."

He clenched his jaw and nodded her way, then took off ahead to where the grasses became a depression and flattened out to the trail that led back home. Madison sat back in her saddle for a despairing moment, counted her breaths, and the beats of departing hooves that played a groove into her guilt. Deeper, deeper.

Madison Rye

Date: 2011-02-13 20:42 EST
Typher's rot made for a great excuse out of Rinn's mouth. "Horse can't drive these roads with the sh*t in its foot. Wait for tomorrow, Belle." He hung up. Madison was left with fury and a dial tone. "Bastard." Elison was left with a chuckle. "Hey, calm down. Another day isn't gonna kill us."

Madison clicked the phone into its cradle and turned around to her husband, who was still wearing the consequence of his laughter, a well-impressed grin and his boot to the doorframe. She couldn't help her own smile. He was given a tongue poke and off she waltzed into the living room where their visitors sat.

Michael had been helpful around the place for the past few days, helping to extend the yard line into the lower quarter of the hills where the pines were dense. This job required special concentration and a swiftness, with the clouds threatening and wire needing pull a total of three miles all the way around, not to mention lumbering. Elison and him had only made talk about the job when they did trade a look and the talk was sparse, about the countryside context, not the story back at the house. Meanwhile Madison had attempted some reconciliation with a rabid anger that was origamied neatly in a slim young Russian girl.

"Your Father isn't sending one of his prizes into this weather. It's another night unless you want to catch your death out there." The gunslinger nodded to the rains still beating a heavy racket over the roof and slats. The morning had been clear skies and clear conversation but as the day drew on the world and the relations got murkier. By every dinner Vara had worker herself silly into a hostility that held her appetite hostage but not her resentment. She would murmur insults over soup and break her bread with that broken English of hers. The few foreign terms she dropped in Madison had heard via the girl's mother on more than one occasion, and it had her put down her cutlery and tidy the table early.

Face to face in the kitchen, Elison had grabbed her wrist and told her, again, to calm. "She's a witch. I want her out."

"Where's your reason' They're gonna find themselves pneumonia out there in them fields. Come now, Ay-co-nee. Come." He embraced her, rocking back and forth to the creaks of the floorboards.

Michael and Vara stared at one another across what felt more like years than a table. "You really want to go out in this, Vara?" He threw back his chair in his getting out of it so it wobbled but didn't fall and flailed his arm at the front door. "You wanna put us to our death?s like she said, out there?"

"I've had enough."

"We're not goin' "

Her silence deafened him with all its accusations. He hung his head. It was all he could do in the roar of her misgiving.

"It's only going to get worse out there", straight again thanks to love's fine aim, was Madison's soft-curled drawl from around the corner of the kitchen as she headed back to where dining met lounge. "I think we should give food a rest and talk. All of us."

Elison nodded to that behind her and wrapped a paw around her waist. Vara and Michael were held breaths and the shake of heads.

"We will then." Vara surprised them all.

For a heartbeat.

"Then I will kill you."

The Donaldson residence shook with the storm brewed within it's walls.

Madison Rye

Date: 2011-02-14 17:17 EST
Eight in the evening on Valentine's and Elison sat chewing the sweet end of a long strip of grass, in consternation over what had taken place. Out on the road was a coach that held Michael and the Russian. After the silent farewell, he attended to Madison with all the zeal four years apart can put into a man. Every day was a fresh blessing. He lived for her clearwater voice, for her summertime and cotton presence in his world. She was everything.

He had been waiting for a good hour for Madison to have a bath, which he'd made her have, to soak out the bad things, to relax that gorgeous head. He didn't go check on her, he didn't have to, he knew she was okay, even with..

The porch door opened and there she was. Her head craning around the screen ahead of the rest of her. She'd thrown on an old faithful, a button up cream blouse and a floral skirt that brushed the knees. She looked dead tired. But he sensed the peace on her, however dented it was, at least she had some again.

"Never underestimate the power of a soak."

He held out his hand to take hers. Hers filled it like it always had, like lyrics to a well-loved song, steps to a dance never out of fashion. Their palms together held a generous fortune. Lines touched. A saga, there.

"How's your neck?"

She rolled it easily in response as she settled on the porch edge with him, to set her eyes on the field, which at the hour was reduced to no more than spindly silhouettes. A few trees. Bushes. The fenceline.

"I never should have let her come in the door. I let you down, Madi."

"We were just doing what Sasha never would have. It's what we get for it."

At least there had been no blood. Lots of screams. Lots of shouts. And, for Madison, bruises, but nothing to set off her disease. Nothing to make things worse than they were. Michael still didn't know and Elison, sometimes, still wished he didn't.

"Do you need..."

Lethargic as Madison was, he figured he had to ask. He unbuttoned his shirt and began to peel away his collar. They had done this in the evenings a few times, when she hadn't been able to get to town or had a big ride.

But tonight she didn't oblige him but stopped his hand and inhaled of the night, of him, soap and straw and remembered sun. "Let's go to bed."

"You need it." He locked his eyes on her with all the solemnity of stone.

"Eli, I don't. What I need is sleep."

For as long as her condition had been, she had denied it. She didn't want to walk the mile she didn't have to, if she could help it — that wasn't always the fact, but if she surrendered to sleep, it could be.

"Madison, I don't mind."

"I don't.want.to."

"Don't want doesn't come into the equation. I'm not losin' you again."

When angry, the old accent bubbled up, tripped his words over into a drawl that cascaded. She shut her eyes with a wince.

"Let me help you."

"You don't have to do this just because Vara got her claws in. You don't have to feel guilty anymore." Her eyes pleaded as she peeked up at him.

It had been uneasy with his return. Her guilt for love affairs while thinking him deceased. His guilt for abandoning her in the name of the gun. Her illness. His horror at it. But overall was the clash of emotion. So much had changed.

Grief was a protean character. It could turn itself into regret, recklessness, shame, frustration. they both shared it. She squeezed his hand, pressed her luck to his in the grip. Maybe it had no resolution. Maybe, it just was.

"Time for bed."



They stood and moseyed on inside.

Madison Rye

Date: 2011-02-20 20:13 EST
Elison stroked back her hair.

"I heard tellin" that in one county you changed your name."

Madison laughed against his chest, working the belt loose from his striders. He began work on her blouse.

"Now, what wind ever told you that?" Her voice melted with amusement.

"A Westlin" one of course. You follow with it for a while and it whistles everythin" you wanna know. How I knew you weren't dead. You know what it told me?"

Her head fell back to look him in the eye with a brush of noses.

"You came close to death but you weren't quite done for."

Her smile was light. Her walk wasn't like sorrow anymore, her lips weren't painting funerals. It was a good thing. But the touch of what had been on the dark end of a street still left its marks.

"Did you change your name?"

"I did, for a year. Once the Hexx got onto the Sheriff, I had no choice. I carried it for more than one county."

"To?" He searched her face. He'd love her if her name was Abernathy, Gertrude, Theolonius. He grinned behind his soul.

"Cade."

"Now that there is a man's name. A handsome one, but a man's name nonetheless." He squinted at her in the lantern light thrown off of the bedside table. "You would've worned it well."

"It was the name of a pistol rabber I shot. He was one of the Milk gang. The ones that held up all the little milk shops across eight borders, the ones that went from that to murdering and ...." She couldn't muster that last word to her lips. It galloped down her spine. "I wanted to take more than his life." A kiss. "Got to me that one. They killed children..."

Elison rolled off her with a whiskers-nuzzle, pulled her astride him. "We got to talk about these things, Belle."

Astride, she rolled over his suggestion with more story, licking three fingers to snuff the candle..."When I was Cade, I got a lot more done."

The grin etched behind his soul again, he didn't know why, but he hugged her and spoke, breathed in the cotton and summer scent of her, his wildflower. "If they ever come again, I'll just call myself Nancy.?

They laughed loudly and crawled under the sheets, peeling off the rest of each other's clothes and concerns.

Madison Rye

Date: 2011-03-19 08:00 EST
"He was doing some — some trick."

Elison nodded for her to go on, while fixing the bread between his hands into her sandwich. He stuffed in some lettuce. He didn't look pleased but was taking his time to hear her out.

"And how did you go from watching a trick to being a part of it?"

Her eyes lowered to the plate he put before her. She took up the sandwich with every intention of a bite when she felt that feeling she'd felt so many times before begin its way through her. It always started in her lower back, an impression that was heavy like a sudden weight transposed from thin air, and finished in her jaw, tight and tense. "I offered him some money, I always liked magic, you know that. But he didn't take it. He asked me to sit and I — I sat. And it started ...then.."

He nodded, he nodded because he did well know how she like theatre, the stage, performers, it was so different from everything in the life they, she, had lived, but he frowned because this had seemingly been an Act that divided her life. "Why?"

"I don't know why, Eli. I have asked myself...", she breathed it all out, the cinders of her confession, the ones smouldering in her stomach. "I don't know. He appealed to something in me."

"And it still appeals, doesn't it?"

"No, I haven't seen him in ages."

"But you have, since I have been back, and what did he say' Have you slept with him' Tell me these things, Madi. Tell me how I get this man out of your system. Because he's in there."

He prodded a finger at her, his nostrils flared, his eyes bright with hurt.

"It isn't that easy, baby. It is that complex."

"Did you sleep with him?"

"No!"

"But you did things, I can see it. Why' Why?"

She put her head into her hands. "I don't know why."

"A'int good enough, Madi."

He strode out of the dining room and onto the porch to capture some something else than her in his sights. What she had allowed Karras to do has disgraced her more than her illness. It was not what she expected. What destroyed her the most, were the pangs she did still feel. That he could click his fingers and she would, quite literally, bend to his will.

"You know.."

Came Elison's voice from the porch, burred with discomfort, "I don't get it. I don't get what you have there at all."

She could hear him lighting up one of his roll-to's. Hear the wind. Shamefully, she gathered their plates and wandered to the doorframe and leant against it. Looked out at him alone in the night picking bones. "I don't love him."

"That makes it better?" His blonde pony-tail flickered as he turned to face her. "I don't care if maybe you did. I was gone. You thought me gone for good. But I don't like you seeing him now. Not after what you went through. Sooner you accept the wildness you had, easier it'll be and you won't want it. You fight yourself."

Madison sniffled back the tears and turned.

—

Later, face to face, his knee prying past her knees, her thighs, he tied her wrists to the bedposts with leather thongs from the shed. He took his time with it. Kissed her roughly. Rubbed her nipples until they were raw. Bit her abdomen. Her hip. Took her as he had not before. Afterwards, he untied her, and sudden, she wept. "Hey, hey, Acony...", but she was smiling.