"A dream that is gettin' to turn to a nightmare, Tag." Her voice and her words come in a tempered way like her stroll across the yard towards him. Her eyes shift aside, beyond him, to blink back her tears and assert herself. The straightening of her shoulders, the arch of her spine. "This isn't... somethin' that's takin' place for one night, or week. Thing is, I need to work out in my mind what it is I'm feelin', what it is that I'm doin'. I never intended to... to leave you all to deal with this... this Leo fella. But... last night... and," she struggled, her words breaking like fog traveling low. "Can't be puttin' a month of raisin' on Marge. It ain't fair on her, nor the kids. I don't think you're hearin' the way I am feelin'. I'm not a dream, I can't ever live up someone's hope, like yours. I told you once, that gun was the problem. But it's not." She raked at her hair again. "It's me.?

"It is my dream. But I've loved you for what you are, not for anything you had to live up to." This was unshakeable, since the moment of clacking cups. Of lightning that struck. Tag knew how he felt and Madison could have told him it was poison, that he was dying, but she didn't know what it had been like before. No, the lightning striking wasn't poison to him. She may have doubted what she was to him, of the two halves at war, but Tag had been certain since he first moved to kiss her.

"Come, there are things that need to be said before you go," he motioned to her, his hand over his shoulder as he walked inside the house. It was, perhaps, the intensity of the conversation that made him grab a shirt out of the laundry basket and put it on. Steps took him into the kitchen.

Dark brows slope as she follows him inside with a breath in and a breath out. She's aware of lightning at the edges of her vision, the smell of tea... but it's gone cold and stale, the whisper of sheets that are tossed like driftwood on a bed that suddenly feels like that of a strangers, so very far away.

"You speak like that and you get to worryin' me." She unbuttons the shirt and in the growing heat of the building day and tension and tosses it over a chair at the table; the one she'd once sat at when he'd slid aside her braid and kissed her neck, asked her to his room... and then moved for the counter of the kitchen and leaned against it, drawing the daybreak of her sad eyes towards him as she reclined. "Talk to me." There?s a strain to her voice, there's a way she stands that is like a Madison that never really went away. The one that stood with smokes and stars on vagrant porches listening to the wind all alone. "Tell me what is in your mind."

"These things," he said when he looked at her and grabbed the open bottle of liquor Quinn had given him, "they don't happen overnight."

The last time he drank from the bottle it was with Glenn. Two shot glasses plunked on the counter and he poured them, putting one on the counter before her. There was a glance, a moment that said he saw her neck and that he wanted it. The bend of her neck said I remember you, too. He had never been great at hiding his intentions with her, not since he gave her his smile. But his breath drew in, he held the burn of it and looked down at the two shot glasses so that the pulse of her neck didn't remind him.

"They are like an infection, but it is not one sided. I've kept things from you." He lifted the shot glass and looked at her, waiting for her to toast with him, "You have kept things from me. I need to have it out with you because the qu-questions will rot my soul." She could toast him and purge with him all the little things that had dwelled in between. Glenn was not a sudden aneurysm, he had not occurred to her like a sudden blow to the head. The wind had always blown through her hair but he had loved the smell of the prairie on her, to the point he thought it was the dust of it that had seduced him. The first time they kissed he had thought she smelled like the mahogany of a gun handle and he had only pressed to have more, not less. Why had she always thought that part of her pushed him away?

"I didn't ever stop lovin' Douglas, Tag. I suppose, best way to be sayin' it to you, to myself, is that I put it on pause." She stiffened all over to gather her thoughts like broken leaves in her hands and let them fall away. She sees the look he gives her, the one he wore when he called her searing, told her that she burned like a prairie fire into his heart. Again, even the mere memory of that makes her think, now, not of the warmth of his desire and the flagrant way it had taken to them to the point a child had come from it, but of destruction. A fire can seal or shape but it can cause burns, it can kill, it can rage. Was that her, all those things? In the time they had been lovers, she had come to see the other side of her fire, of her nature, learned of what was there to be known and given, but when she spoke to Glenn, he reminded her of who she had been for so much longer. There would always be ash at their feet.

"We ended us, ultimately, because he died. And... there's much that is hauntin' me because of it. Not just... that, what he and I were to one another, but all the things we do not understand that took place."

But standing there, she remembers. She remembers trying to stop this from happening.

"You need to know and you need to know it every morning you wake up; that you did what you did to us. And that I love Tag with all the might of the strongest and most terrible winds and I ain't half afraid to blow you away with it if you come back to me in any way." One fist balled at her side. "I don't want us to come to that, that I needs to be puttin' my fist in your face. Do not give me a reason."

A memory in her mind, of what she had told Glenn. You did what you did to us. The strongest and most terrible winds. Do not give me a reason.

Except, she had taken a fist to his face and he had come back again, despite her protests. He continued to be a reminder of unfinished threads. Of unspoken conversations. Ones that lingered heavy and near.

"I don't... I don't be sudden in my love of him. It's not... it's..." her shoulders sank again and she broke away from the counter to stride over and take up a glass. "My feelin's have changed towards him. Not... not begun again, but? rather, come awake. And I don't be quite knowin' why, baby. I don't..." She placed a hand on the table and leaned into it with an exhaustion as she threw the shot back. The emptied glass placed back on the table. "I am always needin' to be honest with you. I always have been. And, my heart, it's been whole with you, for you, the babies. This... this house, this life. Our bar. All of it." Her voice dropped a note. "But I've needed to be honest with myself. And I haven't been. Not completely."

"What is it you keep from me?" She asked, after a time that felt the words could come to their beckon. She knew Tag accepted who she was and she also knew some secrets were best kept in the prison of one's ribs; the key thrown and gone. It wasn't about who she was pushing him away, as much as it was who she had not been, all he did not know, proving a danger if she not accept certain inevitabilities. If she did not move with the sun.

The dark man listened and was quiet, but he was not the same. Madison had put something on pause and at some point a button had been pressed. It hadn't felt like that to him. She had seemed ready for something else, something new. They had come to each other and the moment felt like lightning striking, finally at the kiss.

He threw back the shot, but set it down gently, carefully. His index and forefinger turned the glass as he thought, as he listened. Her heart was in two. Her heart was whole. The glass bottle rose and tipped to the side as he refilled their shots, "I want you with me honestly... and wholly. I don't want a paused you... I want the real you." His pause and then he spoke, slowly, "Glenn... I am not surprised. I remember the broken glass... " Sweeping it off the floor. The pain of it. The intense sensation of Glenn's presence on them both. How she just couldn't seem to become apathetic about him.

"I wanted you to decide how you felt... because it was for you to know. But I have resented you for tolerating that man and his presence. For how you knew he wanted to weasel in... and you'd let him work at the bar. You'd come across him, over and over, like there was some closure, some part of that life, that still needed to be said. I have hated you for that," Tag threw back the shot, his throat flashing with the swallow and then his eyes, dark pieces of a starless night, fixed on her face, "And I feel that by allowing that dishonorable weasel around someone I love that I allowed him the opportunity to... take things off of pause so that they just couldn't die." He had never wanted her selection of him to come from pressure, to come from disapproval. But Glenn had been like a weed, growing more and more. Tag had allowed it and the resentment for it, for himself, burned in his chest. He could feel the anger swell and grip his chest, crawl his broad shoulders like a sweat and grip him.

Her breaths come slower, harder, deeper when he says what she never thought she'd find on his lips. The way his eyes had gone away; still upon her, but not the same. Madison turns around and walks over to the sink to stare out the window. That spot... where she'd been in sleep shorts and a tee, and self-consciously running fingers through the knots in her hair before he turned to look at her.

"And..." she inhales, the breath shaking like that branch. "I decided that I knew that I loved you. More than bein' my goddamn friend." Her eyes shoot towards his but their chests are bullet ridden. It's hard to talk when you've got six words embedded in your chest like shrapnel. She looks down and sticks out her lower lip, working it side to side. "You've been hatin' me?" She grit her teeth and reached for the first thing she could see through the blur of tears as her dark head turned from him and she grabbed an upturned mug, drying on its rack, and hurled it across the room. It meets the wall and shatters. As a storm settles on the white house and lashes across the kitchen. "How dare you. How dare you ... say that you've been walkin' around with all this." She shook her head and placed her hands on her hips. "You hate me? Huh?"

"You... had Glenn on pause in your heart and you kept him around. I told you having him work at the bar was a bad idea. He's acted out like a child to keep your attention and it worked. I am your husband." His left hand moved to the wedding she gave him. Always. Forever.

There was a reach for the cabinet, arm stretching with a pop. A new shot glass drawn out and set atop the counter. He filled them both as he spoke, "I told you... there are things that need to be said. There is Penny, there is Ame and me and we love you. We are of you. We are like the four chambers of a heart... and you talk about leaving like it's for the best and can't see how that would stop our pulse? Goddamn it, Madi, let us in." He drank his shot and the turned, leaning back against the counter, his hands drawn behind him so that they curled around the edge of the counter, "Penny wants so much to be part of who you are that she asked you for the gun. I have loved you in between all the pauses, all..." his voice shakes, it drops and becomes soft and rocks along the floorboards,"... the beautiful versions of you that kept meeting me over the years."

He swallowed back the way the air was torn, "Being honest with yourself... you'll find that truth and know it... with a man that openly says he will lie and deceive you?"

"I'm crying and bleeding... Madi, none of this is easy." What was easy was knowing what he felt in it, knowing the role he wanted to play and that it was one that was no longer passively allowing the world to work itself out. He was going to step in, to interfere, because that had been the point all along.

When she withdrew from him he did not try to close the distance. The way she recoiled at his blood made him look down at his chest, his free hand wiping away the droplets of red, smearing them into practically nothing except for the darker red spots lingering at the site of injury. Then she turned his face, his shoulder, and she did not have to shove or direct him with much force. His body turned like he was blindfolded and she guided him. He ended up with his back to her and two steps taken. The faded ink tattoos of Japanese lettering told an old story, of all the laws, all the rules and things that would have been, that he could never defy. The tattoos said that there was a tremendous, strict system ingrained on everyone... Then the ink was interrupted by all the scars of when he had defied it.

His voice comes from behind the ink and scars, "I met more than one of you. I met a young you at the bus stop... and the woman who went to Eli... and I met the woman who came back to open Charlie's bar. You have seen... other versions of me, too."

There was silence as he listened to her curl in to herself, to cry and try to feel safe in her own skin. He looked ahead, "I have always known that there was danger in your blood. It was me, Madi," he turned to look at her, "don't you remember, me? The one who... found the warehouse, where we left the fires? I am so damaged by the war... the nightmares. For weeks after being adopted... Penny had them, of her parents dying. She couldn't handle sleeping alone because she feared she'd lose me, too. We are a haunted, wonderful family. We know what it's like to have danger, to live it and we have a love we believe in." He moved, it seemed at first to her, but he lifted up his palms as a sign of surrender, pointing to the shot glasses and booze so that she would know he was not attempting to cancel out the space she had established.

He poured a new shot and looking down it, he said softly, "I lost Rona because I would not... speak with her, or connect to her. I didn't tell her she was important and I didn't stop her when she left. I never sought her out... I just never tried... It was how it was supposed to be. Over. That was years ago and the man I am now? The one you've seen me become?" He tossed back the shot and then sniffled, turning so that his body rolled away from her, leaning back against the counter, "when you're trapped on a sinking ship, I'll be there. I'll drown with you and... there's no other death I'd rather die. Facing this danger with you, seeing you more... and raw... I can think of nothing I would want more."

Wetting his lips, he had to clear his throat before speaking. Tag had never said so much and the sound of his voice had an increased gravel in it. It was a hardened song along a road which she had known the tune of, "I know that powerless feeling... and the feeling of being bad. I spent... a lot of time, feeling that way about myself. And there are times that the thoughts of it, the misery of what happened, wakes me from my sleep and all I can do is... " he sighed and looked out the window. It wasn't in their line of sight, but he was talking about upset carrots. She knew that about him, had always known. His eyebrows stitch together in concentration, "There are times I don't feel like I am... a good parent. I've disappointed Penny, and in some ways, she's had to grow up quickly and take care of herself more because of how I am. I'm hard on her and she gets mad and frustrated with me and... " there was a sigh. He shut his eyes, "I don't know how I could do any of it without you because you make it seem so easy."

He says words that are more than words because they are sentences built out of memory and smoke and the bricks that made them who they were today. These are the things, like the past she tries to ignore, are hard to refute. He had that way and always had, of turning the ordinary or the simple into something profound, something salient, something that spoke to her of lessons. He might deny his own effect on the family; on Penny, who Madison knew was not rebelling against him really, but trying to ascertain her own boundaries, her own needs, her own voice. As Tag had said, whatever she wanted to do, Tag and her would give Penny the structure to do it with.

"It's not easy, Tag. Just like it isn't walkin' around with all this... this stuff in my head. Glenn, Lofton, things forgotten... and the bar, a family... I worry that I ain't half handlin' anythin' like I could be. I used to worry and it was all for myself. But now there's people dependin' on me not to.... not fuck the hell up." She sighed and she, too, moved away from the fridge. The man of ink and scars and shadows, she watches him, watching the kanji float away, the way he falls back into himself, piecing himself together when she is certain, in that moment, that he feels he is crumbling. Telling the truth was not always a place for rubble, it was not always for destruction, but a place to build from. Is that not what he was saying, when he spoke of the fires and the danger in her blood?

Madison takes a moment standing there; a look towards the shattered mug, and then she steps over towards him. "You really don't think I'm bad?" She would start there. In that doubt.

"Walking around... with all these things in our heads..." It was only a few weeks ago that an old photo with a Mona Lisa smile came to the surface. The injustice, the mystery of who she was, stayed with him and left a hurt he wasn't sure how to reconcile. She hadn't told him that it would be okay or that he had to heal. She had taken his wounds, the guarded and outright ones, and waited for him to quit weeding in the garden when the weight became too much.

One hand lifted off the counter, resting on his hip, at the line of his abdominal muscle and side, catching in the gentle hook of flesh. His shoulders rolled forward, his left hand rubbing over the scratch of his face in thought. "I worry about... people depending on me." There was a lift of his eyes towards the doorway in the kitchen, in the direction of Penny's room, "About not...fucking the hell up," his gaze went to her, the meaning of who he may have let down, of where he did not want to fuck the hell up, moved from the direction of Penny's room to her face. Had he fucked the hell up? How had she helped him with that Mona Lisa smile while he had not seen Glenn, Lofton and all the things forgotten?

His dark eyes dropped to the floor as the feeling of guilt, of failure, began to manifest. It crawled into his shoulders, it crept into his posture and said that there was shame. His failure, that fuck up, it filled the room. Then, unexpectedly, her question crossed the room to him on small, forward steps. It was lifting an impossible weight to bring his gaze back up to her, "Not once." His gaze could stay on her as long as it took for him to answer before dropped back down.

"But Tag, when have you ever fucked the hell up?" The words are out her mouth in a tone that speaks of her frustration; at herself, at his own self-doubt, which as far as she was concerned, had no basis for it. When she had been resting before having Ame, during and after, he had put their house together, kept the house together, talked her down from assisting, insisted on her rest and even attended to shifts at the bar in her absence. He was the one who was doing the mending, just as he had that lifetime ago, when she was a broken doll on his lounge room floor, before she was a woman who was giving the weeds of his own hurts the attention.

He answers her, finally, as if the tide had drifted low and rolled out with a hint of never to return in its stretch. She finds, in a moment that at once pulls her apart and presses in too close, the way he used to make the night lean in closer, and she flounders at what to say. When she felt she hadn't given enough, and by the degrees he spoke it was not all a lie. She had hidden herself from him, ashamed at her history or confused by it and here he was attributing her very pains, her tortured, colourful, smoky mosaic of a past for being the very reason he loved her. It wasn't easy to love a woman with dust and blood beneath her nails.

She stares at her stoic, old, beaten boots and holds her gaze there as he moves towards him and clasps the sides of his face, with a light tension on her wrists which meant that she intended to lift his downcast, sable gaze to the country sky of her own. There's a glimmer of fear and hesitance when they lock eyes, but there's also always lightning. She seeks something in his eyes. Searches his face relentless for some clue as to how untie the knot. Her heart braced by worries and her mind rampant with all the potentials for further unrest. But he's tea-steam and ghost strings, stitches and shadows, old paths and new and rain, always rain. She'd never forgotten those things but perhaps what she had not done was indulged in them more readily; allowed what he was to impress her more readily, to wash that dust and blood from her hands, however stained she felt. "Tag, what do we do?"

"You don't feel... that I let you down with this?" He ventured. Had he ignored the little signs, or somehow been unapproachable to the point that the tension of all her thoughts had become an explosion that drove her to feeling she had to leave? That he would suffocate her ability to grasp the old things that haunted her instead of support her, as she had him? With Ame, it had been easy. Madison had done the impossible. She made a human being, crafted an entire person, and he could not fathom it. Another mind, a different world, passed through her body and took a breath. Taking a shift at a bar and attending to her felt relatively small compared to that.

The toes of her boots came into view. He saw them right before he felt the presence of her hands on his face lift his head up. It was there that he saw they were mirrors. Both projecting a sense that they had done or been faulty while the other just couldn't see it. She searched the night of his gaze, that place where all the stars were put out and reflected her image. The hand that he had resting on the side of his waist moved to be placed on her's.

"There's two things..." in terms of what they needed to do. ?There is a danger we need to kill because it threatens you, me.... this family. We're not letting that happen, or wait for it to happen. No one is taking Ame's mother from him the way mine was taken. No one is hurting the people we love... we won't allow it." Then, there was the other. Of unresolved things, or confusion, riddles and a lack of closure. Of what it all was and what it would make her, "The second is... I don't want you to... doubt yourself or any of this. I want to support you finding answers... the way you have me." His free hand made a motion. It indicated the house, the home around them. She had been rattled to the point that the porch with Penny's colored pencils on it would be left behind.