Redemption was a relic.

It was not a house any longer and what ashes had remained the wind had long since taken. Like it took everything else.

Madison stood in the pre-dawn bundled up in her leather jacket and aviators back on her head. It was a ritual, being there on that land, as much as it was a nostalgic obsession. Something about Cadentia had always called to her sensibilities, maybe only to remind her of home or what home could have been. She still didn't know, though she had found glimpses of it in a bliss she never thought she might give another nor receive.

Somewhere in the sleeping world, Glenn Douglas slept beside Salome Martin and would rise and deliver the deed to the house to the bar. Madison had come to the land as if to steep in the feeling of it. As if to to reassure herself of what she was doing. For as much as could see, even with the world so dim, beyond the notice of light, it was the only way.

In these times, she wished for Charlie. He always had the words that soothed and realigned her purpose. But as she stood there she realised missing him would only injure her further. That missing him wasn't conducive. That the time for grieving had long been over and that many other things demanded her attention.

Back down roads a white house slept. Her children turned in their sleep. They didn't know the way she was. They didn't know who she had been and who she might still become. They knew her only as Mom. It was the only thing she had ever done right, besides being a good shot. Raising the kids and giving them the things that had been absent of her own youth, with strict, emotionally distant parents who had only grown more estranged from her as time went on and her choices had eventually given way to their disapproval and disappointment.

But it was a shadow she would not add to her own and never had.

She sat in the middle of the fallen wood and shaken earth and listened to the wind whisk around her. Whisper through the low shrubs and devil grass and candentia weed; with its thin, plum-dark cords and bright blue poisonous berries. She thought about how she had poisoned herself in various ways. About what she had done wrong, what she could have done better, about whether there was an antidote to what she knew she was becoming. More of herself but less of... what? Of whom? It seemed there was no obstacle to being who she once had but every chance of a new identity being abolished as earnest and stalwart as her attempts had been prior. Conviction blown like windows from an house gone inferno.

When the sun rose, it was over her curled, prone form sleeping in a ball in the ruination. She stirred awake in a bleary, dismal state of mind and walked over to the fence-line and tore off the sign that swung there, unscathed from the fire. Madison raked her eyes over the property name and then grunted as she arced an arm overhead and tossed it out ahead. It hit the dirt ground in a crack and bent and dented. She walked over and began stomping it into the earth until the letters were beyond comprehension.

When she was done, she slumped her shoulders and exhaled and rubbed at her eyes that burned with moisture. Then she walked over and slid into the car and stared out at the desert sky before assigning the key to the engine and driving herself back into town to Charlie's to meet with Glenn and begin again.

There had been long silences before. At times they had felt deeply nested in his chest, belonging there as if he embodied pauses in conversation and held it, suspended on the tongue. Sometimes the silent felt violent.

"Dad? Did you hear me?"

Tag turned from the pan that he had made pancakes in earlier. It was less than a year but Penny made a show of being too old for images in her pancakes, now. They were plain when he made them now, light brown coins simmering in a pan. The slate was wiped, clean, no mark of the story lingering on its surface. All he could do now was bookmark moments with her and hope he could remember them while she kept evolving. People said it all the time, it happened too fast. The cliche was common but he never thought how sharply it might strike him.

He remembered catching her in his arms when he'd gone to the warehouse for Madison. The two women would always make him think of something burning. He had thought she would be angry with him then, but she had smiled and asked that he just catch her.

"Hm?"

"Lunch money?" Penny was caught up in her own thoughts, in a different world and time than he was. She smiled for him, hoisting up Ame in her arms and making baby noises at him before she hugged him near. The glitter of her backpack was a strange and unnatural looking thing to him, but he found that he was starting to miss it. The glitter was on the endangered species list, along with pancakes that had hearts and trees burned in like old photographs.

Tag nodded and reached in his pocket, feeling the coins in it and then giving Penny a few bills, "Make sure to give some to Marjorie on your way to school."

"Sure. Tell Madi hi for me." She was in the dawn, she was the dawn. At times, like that one, her face and voice made her seem as if she was already a woman, shed of all the scales of glitter. When Penny stepped out, he found his hand still deep in his pocket, his thumbnail working along the ridges of he coin.

Comedy or Tragedy.

He went to the closet and retrieved an old story and opened it up. A six shooter and a wide brimmed hat that still smelled like a broken windmill, lightning and Journey. His hand slid over the metal of the gun, remembering just how strange it had been to him the first time. How the weight was unexpected, that it kicked back was a punch of pressure into his shoulder. Sweat from the plains embroidered into his hat.

Behind the gun, in a wooden holder, were his swords. In the shadows of the closet it felt like seeing dim ghosts clear their throats. Why. Did. You? The glint of metal came from his wedding band.

Both of the weapons were left behind, put up carefully in the closet. These days there were more people to be careful about than just himself. Had he ever been careful with himself? Wasn't he meant to be thrown away, to be used up in a dramatic, fulfilling moment that never seemed... fulfilling when it came? War had been empty and he was certain when people spoke of its glory they spoke of movies and books and the want to romanticize something. It was easier if it was romantic, a person could stomach looking at a veteran when it was.

In the East he had fought for the idea of something he might have. In the West it would be fighting for something that was real. Life swung like a pendulum, asking him what he would do next.

Charlie's door was nudged open by his familiar hand, and he had only been there a moment when the deliveries had come. In those long hours where shadows stretched their furthest he was there, helping the pulse of Charlie's along with her as he had from the beginning. How did he make shadows so permanent? The brim of his hat put shade over his face as he read some of the slips and signed them with a slow, careful hand.

The sound behind him caused his head to turn, looking over his shoulder in Madison's direction as she appeared from the office. Beneath the brim of his hat, at the sight of Madison's arrival, she opened the box without meaning to. He smiled for the first time that day. It was a secret he only ever told her. The man making the delivery cleared his throat and his attention swung back to him where he finished signing for the cases to help replenish.

The dark man's help at the bar was not what it used to be. There had been days taken off from his other work to polish, replace and build at the birth of Charlie's. Now his presence was a handful of hours here and there unless a shift needed to be covered. There was o text or phonecall to announce him.

The line of his brow came together, knitting as the man spoke. Bring crap. Delivering crap. This was the place, with all the unnamed, unlabeled crates. SHURMAN crept into the back of his mind. The letters whispered softly. S.U.R.E.M.A.N. That there could have been anyone so certain and boastful that they were right as to coin the name. The delivery man was a Sureman, one that had worked too long and didn't want to be argued with.

The "toodles" made his lips part, he was on the verge of asking but when his eyes met Madison's, her realized that he wasn't experiencing the strangeness alone. His smile had another break, the hint of his teeth showing as his gaze ticked over, sizing up the boxes, "Fin never mentioned it to me."

She broke away to get the trolley in the back. The dark man moved, stepping around the crates, his fingers brushing over the fingerprint grain story of the wood. He was the morning, thoughts dawning over the boxes and his own thoughts. Paper splayed over one of the tables with Penny painting as the office upstairs found that its identity was blue. That there could be a break, a strike of cerulean even on days wet with grey.

Her question shook him from arches of blue paint. He reacted as if she'd known what he was thinking when she saw him again. A hint of being just a little coy, of sucking in a breath and looking away before his mind centered on the question. Penny.

"I used to be the hero," he said it, quietly. The sound of his voice revealed that it hurt more than he wanted to admit, that he was weighed with the same wishes that every parent had. She was growing up too fast and Tag was no longer that flawless hero who had all of the answers. Things were becoming his fault, more and more each day. Madison had been immune to that for a time, having been a novel visitor and then a fixture in their home, on the precipice of being mom, and not just Ame's mom. With the comfort of being around one another day to day, she had also gained hero status... and was losing it just as quickly. "She's not said much to me, either."

Madison's eyes moved over him, he felt it when he reached over, testing a board of one of the crates, his curiosity still nagging him. His chin pointed up, checking the brim of his hat and then looking back to her. His pause was thunder. It had been with the old things, a bookmark of his story that he couldn't seem to part with. A time when the ribbon on the dark man's wrist wasn't as faded as it was now, threatening to disintegrate, knowing its time was near an end. "I was..." to say he was surprised to find it was wrong. He knew he had kept it, but what had surprised him had been... "Remembering what it was like. That you had been in another room, once. It is strange to me to think of you as ever being far away."

The admission paused in the air, unsteady, as if she had been unaware of his affection. Madison had a way of being present even when she wasn't, of breaking clouds with her smile and hot-iron stomach pokes. A tumbleweed that had more than just a brushing impact. The world didn't get to know him as she did, to see the past and present rolled into one. Moments of a dark man at a bar, flipping a coin to her, asking her to call it. Rain and lightning strikes, bedroom rules and the cries of a child. His was a story written on her skin, caught on her lips in strange smiles and lion's marks on his chest. There was the sense she held something no one else knew about but caught glimpses of from time to time.

Stepping beside her, he bumped her shoulder with his, one hand wrapping on the trolley handle by her's. Seemed Tag was attempting a takeover, "Move aside, little lady, and let a man take care of this for you." It was his best, most horrible cowboy impression. His other hand went up to the brim, pinching it in a Western salute, followed by wink. It was terrifically bad. He was there, stray bits of humor, of old book ends and the incomplete song of a sky that she couldn't see the rain in, just clouds she broke with her smile. The rain would always come, building in clouds, rumbling through bones.

The rain always came, as did the fire.

His chin was lifted up in a soft show of being defiant to her, to challenge her when the little lady looked at him. The dry response ensnared him more than he thought it would. He wanted to shrug at it with a smile, but that wasn't what happened. It urged him to break his act, for her to crack a full grin. It was in that space where he would have slipped his hand over to her wrist and feel a bird flapping in her pulse before he kissed her. Mahogany and tea, wordless worlds getting swallowed up. Shows of suppressed affection moved in the language of their eyes. He took off his jacket and laid it over the back of one of the chairs.

Somewhere in the break of her lips, the grin that wanted to be and that she barely held back, was the lock of her eyes. Watching him as he turned away from her. The black t-shirt hid the story of his ink and scars from the eyes, but she knew where they were like he had become a favorite book. Her hands had traced those lines before, lip-reading a story she would fill in the blanks of. Promising him that the way he was hadn't been a problem, that he was okay. There was something new, though, a fresh mark on his skin the t-shirt didn't cover. From that elbow to his wrist was a long, blushing friction burn. It must have been from yesterday, from a job he was working.

In the back room he was unloading the boxes to a corner when he could pick out only bits and pieces of the conversation she had on the phone. Enough that he opted to just keep the crates piled up on the trolley. Maybe their lifespan here wouldn't be as long as they thought. The details of the phone conversation were muffled by the distance and the fact that he wasn't particularly interested in eavesdropping. His thoughts went on to his new job at work. Five stories up in a dry building called Unbroken Threads. It was a textile company that needed renovation. Areas in need of renewal had a way of calling to him.

That's what it's called when someone comes back. Somersault.

Shaking off his thoughts, he stepped out the back room to find an empty bar and the sound of shouting outside. He moved, clearing a path around the bar tables and chairs to the outside, arriving just as she was telling the guy it was a wrong delivery. The sun had climbed up brighter, causing everyone to squint to catch the details of one another. Under the shadow of his hat he frowned and then cut over to the guy, stopping in front of him so that his back was to the delivery truck and he was facing the irate delivery man. Tag had one hand lifted up, a flat press to the air in that universal sign of 'stop.'

"Whoa, whoa whoa, buddy," the driver said at Tag, taking one step back but brandishing a fist at him, anyway, "Don't you get started with me."

The Dark Man's hand stayed up. He was quiet, still, and the longer the moment stretched on the more unnerved the driver got. He could handle a confrontation, he could handle some yelling, but the waiting was just odd. Finally, shaking off the uncomfortable reverie of the moment, he repeated, "Look, pal, I don't care what you do with the crates but I got to go. Shit has to be delivered and it's not my problem that you have problems."

The man tried to step towards the driver's side of the truck again, but Tag mirrored him, remaining a wall between him and his path. The driver frowned, one hand balling up in a fist. The guy was thinking about it, thinking about where he'd punch him if this shit kept going on like it was.

The moment stretched. The dark man broke his silence. "Mistakes happen," it was stated calmly, his open palm motion of 'stop' turning to point back towards Charlie's, "And when they do... you fix them."

This was the shadow at the bar that didn't smile fully for anyone. This was the quiet reserve, the wall the whole world was unable to climb to get inside. He had a certainty in his voice, a confidence of knowing. It said that he knew the man would turn around, that he would gather up those crates and do as he was told. The only break or flicker in the dark man was the one that had always been there-- a flicker of his gaze to Madison.

The man spit on the ground, "Fine. But it's only cause you've been such a pain in the goddamn ass. See if your other deliveries don't end up late." His glower was palpable, but he went back towards the door of Charlie's, shooting Madison and especially dirty look, the sort of look that said he wanted to call her a bitch again, maybe even throw in a few more choice phrases.

It wasn't the sort of situation that was trustworthy. Tag became a shadow behind the man's stride, brushing past Madison on his way back into the Charlie's. The moment was brief, a small exchange where he gently squeezed her wrist to find the bird's flutter on his way inside, certain her vigil over Charlie's would remain relentless.