Music playing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlNM438__7Y&feature=related

11.30pm, Seaside Sam's

The crowd had thinned early for a Thursday leaving only a few old salts at the window seats and a couple of lovers and bohemian's in the back room with the tea lights, enamoured by candles and rich mahogany bookcases stuffed with eldritch editions and forgotten maps. The main entertainment of the night, as advertised on a hanging blackboard out front and upon colourful bills tacked to light posts, had already stepped down leaving the bar to the cheerful liveliness of gypsy music pouring from old speakers. Madison was a little remiss to see she'd arrived late. Part of her draw to Sam's was the live acts.

But that was only part of the reason for her quest from Ghost Town to the shoreline and the lighthouse-come-bar she'd not frequented since the first days of her stint. Hadn't her last visit been to gift her last gun to Salvador? As she slipped inside with a quiet smile towards the few tenders ragging down tables and sills, she remembered. That was before Lofton. She imagined, or tried to, what life would have been like had she never stepped foot into this town. Never met Charlie or Andy or Brentan. Nor Sal, Karras or Tavarius? She sat down in an alcove, where a small, two-seater booth lived. Shoulders shook her jacket off and hat followed. Another look around. A glance to the coast line, thoughtfully -- Lofton still would have caught up, no matter where she stood. And now she was a woman facing a sentence. No matter where she turned her hands were tied. Run, Madison. Get out of here. Leave tonight. Never come back.

The desire was thick in her mind, an enticing syrup quickly permeating her thoughts. Leave. Go. Run. Never come back.


Madison ordered a whiskey, sat back and enjoyed the music and the way the soft lighting danced amber in her drink, the way she felt like no one knew her here. A stranger. Leave. Go. Run. Run Madison, tonight.


Loner. Stranger. Misfit. Jezebel. Rain Dancer. Gunslinger. Dust Rose.

Trouble.

She was all of them.


An hour passed, her eyes got heavier.

"Another whiskey."

The tender arched a brow. "You sure 'bout that ma'am?"

"What do you think?" Dark maple and fireside soft.

Half-way through the second she laughed at herself. A rose is a rose is a rose.


So a jail it was going to be, huh?

The next time she glanced at the clock it was 1am. Only a few souls left to fill the hour with her. That's when Heil waltzed in.

"You're late."

"You're drunk."

They laughed. Then Heil's stoicism returned and he chased to the point.

"I can't do anything Madison", sitting before her, he took off his brown trilby giving a glance around as he relaxed his hat-flattened hair. "Unfortunately, even though Bishop could likely be remanded in custody for a longer stint with Assault, we can't try the persecuted without access to any further evidence .. and the fact he's... seemingly immortal. He's a case I like to call a black hole. There's many ways in but no way out."

"That analogy is the worst joke you've ever pulled." A slight smirk from her. "Not good enough."

"Mishin will head to Lofton, therefore you have some grace, but either way... "

A sip of her gold rush. She nodded.

"He's going to be staying with my parents while he gets what he can from the deputy's office there, I know that much. Tell me, do I have any room to bust? At all?"


"I'm afraid your pickings are slim. After your meeting with the Minister I did as you asked and observed your rights. But you are utterly restricted as Riley and Jin and I are, with code. For as far as I can see, you're plugged." It was difficult, knowing he had been defeated, that he only had straws. "I know... ", he leveled his eyes on the woman across from him, "I know you, Madi, and why you did what you did long before all this sh*t flared up. But if you see for yourself any future in this town, and we both know you do, then you have to do this."

"With a criminal record open here I can't open a home for the street kids."

"Madison.."

The 'slinger sighed.

"Are you ok--"

She raised her glass.

"I understand, Heil."

He looked at her there, eerily serene, with the best brave smile he'd ever witnessed. He supposed that by now she had become a professional at producing it. But nonetheless...

She almost looked pleased.

He didn't ask.

Because she was nodding for him to raise his glass.

"To what do we toast?"

"Tonight, Heil. Tonight."

"You're not going to run off, Belle?"

Her smile was worn like a bruise.

"No."


Her response hung in the air like cigar smoke, enough to make the eyes water and the throat tighten.


Her name alone conjured things.


"That scares me. You're up to something, aren't you?"

He shook his head, downed his brandy and covered his face with his hands, sighing. The woman was a handful. He wanted to help. Madison was going to be tearing him from his duty, his civic responsibility. But wasn't she too one of those citizens he was there to protect?

By the time he looked up again, the outlaw was gone. A few bills lay folded beside her glass. He frowned and delicately replaced his hat. Then he stood and gave a cursory survey of the bar in case she'd only disappeared to the bar for another round or the bathrooms. Though he knew, he knew, he knew, that she had left. And that while she would not be Running Away, there was every bit the firestarting chance she would be Running Towards.

"Hellion", he muttered fondly, and stepped out inside into the suddenly brisk night.


Not a block away down by the sea, curled on the sand and artificially warmed, she wept. And her shadow wept with her.

"I'll tell you what I know."

She flipped the length of her braid back over a shoulder and settled into the rickety seat opposite Ella. Ella who sat there framed in echoed sunlight, bleached and thin that reverbed off the hotel wall. "I know that everything I thought I knew was wrong and that everything I come to know will likely be proven wrong once again."

"What you have done wasn't in vain."

"It was, Ella. I contrived something so meaningless." Like operating on a patient who didn't need it.

Ella squirmed in her seat, discomforted by her cousin's deprecation. But it felt salient. It felt like something she should pay heed to. Maybe Ada wasn't wrong or her Mother, Cordelia, sitting there twitching her yarn through sticks and gossiping.

"You didn't do anything that your father wouldn't have done, or Medley."

Madison's lips curved. Her smile was crude.

"I did everything they would not have done. Even Meddle."

The one with the dark eyes lowered them and scraped at her scalp thoughtfully, ending up with a handful of brunette and little else. "Why?"

"I've done as much bad as I've done good. The world didn't need a Cervenka but who am I to say someone didn't need her? That she didn't fit some space that maybe I've now ruined. Playing with wills isn't poker. I have myself a bad habit."

"They aren't locking you up. Maybe this is your second chance." She smiled and Madison smiled back.

"Maybe it is."


"You still want to disappear?"

"It'd be easier..."


"Not for me. Not for your parents. Not for your friends."

Madison looked to Ella as she rose from her own seat and shrugged, stucking thumbs down front pockets of bright blue denim jeans. "You'll do what you'll do. But think about what you just said, Cony. Wouldn't you be playing with some will if you let the magician steal you to the aether?"

By the time the 'slinger had mouthed an answer Ella was gone around the bend of the doorframe, red Chuck, laces undone, the last glimpse.

.....She trailed her fingers through meadow grasses while whistling at the wild blue yonder. Living was music. The sun sat at her apex, the brightest peach in a fruit bowl of hidden stars, the green and golds of the land rolling out around her with promise that had not gone. A walk that never ended. Some days she felt that unsung affinity with the land and the leaning trees and even their shadows more than others and those days, days had been so rare for so long, and they were returning to her. They embraced like old friends and said not yet to the twilight. Some era's did not twist away and burn and die.

It was the happiest she had ever been or could remember being since the simplicity of childhood and the early days of the Donaldson marriage in a white house in the middle of nowhere. She had peace again and it moved her and she strode with its momentum confidently, she ate drank slept awoke with peace and felt less like a dirty pearl and more like a diamond. Bad connotations were going to be her badge for years to come but who cared what the wind raved and what the papers said and what rumour whispered. She knew who she was. So did Elison, even if he didn't know it all, he knew what mattered. That she was still a woman and she still had love. Could still love. Did still love.


Her heart raged every single time they locked gazes over the dinner table. Every time she saw him some part of her that had been locked away came out again and dared to breathe. She felt lighter. She felt like it was okay to get swept away with the breeze. To believe in afternoon's when cotton was drying on the line and she saw his silhouette through the white fabric. He smelled of forever. The way the cedar bark smell recalled home. The taste of finest salt in the river. He was rich as the land. And his blood, its beat, it kept up the cadence of her inner song. She had not stopped singing since his return. Her walk was a hymn. Her step held a buzz. Her hair hid the places he had kissed and that cried out for that old touch long after he had let go her shoulders and his lipshad left her nape. The world slowed right down. Life was technicolour.


A saga lived between their held hands.

They collected the pieces of summer for their souls.

The one place she could return to were the meadows, the one place she could return and feel like Madison. Feel whole and wholesome. There was a loneliness that she could not describe that was not a sadness or tinged in sorrow, but a quiet, profound solitude. A conversation. A sense of being timeless and ageless in the country that did not judge and did not do except that which is was made to do and always would. It was some commune she had with the land. Where a branch shivered and seemed to say that way or a passing sparrow deemed it time to go home with a back-swirl of its wings into a southern gust. Where she could be known at her worst her best her essence.

And Madison listened. And Madison watched. And the breeze took her whistle off through the meadows. And the land echoed.