–GH–

Rafe gave his parting wave and left for the darkness around the front of the ranchhouse. 

Britt settled in his Adirondack. The last sips of his whiskey covered the bottom of the lowball glass still in his hand.

 Kato's glass glimmered similarly on the armrest that his leg wasn't occupying. He’d returned to his peacoat against the chill, the collar again flipped up under his ears. His chin and cheek were framed by a contemplative splay of fingers. 

Rafe's empty glass sat on the matching pedestal table to the chairs. This meeting about that drink Hank said he was keen on had been a mea culpa. Strangers on the ranch were just that. Strangers who claimed they could ranch… well, it was never anything personal, Rafe assured them; he just never trusted any stranger, least of all those who spouted they knew the work. Until he was satisfied.

They shook on his apology, thanking Britt and Kato for being the day's difference-makers. He then bowed to familial pressure and asked after Britt's interest in rodeo; the usual gang of Altaha competitors could definitely use him on their side. Flattering, even interesting, possibly tempting, in the right mood, but…had to decline. 

It also marked the first time on the day Britt heard a first-hand account of Kato’s save on John. Stories already circulated, tall tales budding an inch thick, actually, but none of the actual details shocked him, of course. He glanced a quick once-over of Kato's profile in the firelight. Britt’s gratitude… it went unspoken, but never unsaid. 

And as for that 3 o'clock wall, Kato was wrong…now and then. Casey, though, excused herself to bed before Rafe appeared at the door, whiskey and glasses in hand. They’d come over here for their fireside chat to avoid disturbing her. It turned into more than one drink and a few hours' worth of discussion at that. No wall; a low-hanging barrier, anyway. Adrenaline crashes and knotted thoughts, never linear nor predictable. 

The surroundings had more to do with it. He couldn't remember the last time they’d sat in nature just to plainly be…in nature. He set his glass to arm rest and his hands deep in his corduroy pockets. A shallow wince slipped in at his shoulder's brief gripe over the choice of movement. Kato’s bandaging replaced Honeywell’s, without a complaint up until now. He lay his head back and soaked up a panorama only rivaled by his boyhood summer nights. A grounded sense of place mimicked the silent night's sting and prickled his skin. Like with the morning’s reminder of the simpler ranch life, his muscle memory for the celestial in unencumbered indigo and violet castings unfurled.

The Solstice’s turn was the keynote. Any ambient firelight is a nearly comically inadequate pollution. The positioning of the chairs overlooked true North over the Sonoran Desert basin to Black Diamond. Due east, in his peripheral vision, as an inordinately large bright body, Jupiter with a 5-carat glitter. To his left, nearly requiring a turn in the seat to look to the west southwest, and hugging the horizon, Saturn was in far more modest form. The Solstice Moon, in this same quadrant, milked a translucent cream hue, watery in its three-quarter waxing gibbous illumination. In direct contrast to Jupiter’s ostentatiousness, Polaris hung as a single carat worth of beaconlight, gentle and dependable, and directly in line to their sitting. His eye for constellations began tracing. Polaris anchored a faint Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper. Across from Polaris but lower, towards the horizon, Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, which then pulled his gaze higher once more in this same quadrant for Cassiopeia, the W/M-shaped asterism for Ursa Major. Also circling Polaris, he spied Cepheus, the house-shaped constellation, and finally, faint but not too faint for his eyes, trained as they were for nighttime hunting, Draco, the winding serpentine constellation around the Little Dipper. He moved off the major celestial bodies and simply beset himself in the enormity of the nets of woven starfield spread from horizon to apex. 

Out here, night became more than simply the hours in which Britt Reid, multi-millionaire, had to take up his expected social mantles with a fixed smile and a well-cut tuxedo. Even more than the Green Hornet's cloak and dagger. It was remarkable how his life had taken on its own lunar cycles of sorts, all influenced by the tides of his journey and the people embarking on it with him, especially when he began making scalpel cuts to the past he could no longer reconcile with his present.

 That patchwork’s suturing healed its last inch in the summer. 

His present now smelled like rain on lilacs. Entirely whole and much his own as he aimed the Hornet Sting at a problem only he could solve; Kato on his blindside…rich in the choices he made. He’d rather that any hour, any day, any month, any hardship, any which way the winds might blow, than accept the dictated terms last seen as a shell of their former selves in the federal penitentiary…

All that was missing was this. Out here. Whether here was Arizona or Texas. He could start a new quilt, couldn’t he. Distance, scale, scope, breezes of nothing, all left to the stars.

A soft, bodied ‘click’ followed by a weighty, whispered ‘shht’ of door bottom over track lifted Britt’s head from this half-lidded perusal through sky and thought. 

“Hello, fellas.” 

John’s whispered greeting from behind sat Britt forward. He craned his neck around the chair back. John shuffled from foot to foot just outside the patio doors, dressed for the night air, a packed brown bag in one hand and a thermos in his other, and grinning as if he’d just won something. 

Kato, too, leaned forward as he had with Rafe, to greet.  John took their attention as a gesture that it was all right to join in, and did, with his back to the warm fire. 

“What are you doing up?” Britt asked gently, looking him over closely, elbows propped on either armrest. He watched John’s gaze dart to the white strip of bandaging over his left eye, taking it in with a blink. 

At dinner, John mumbled a pardon after eating only enough mouthfuls to satisfy Jocali, and disappeared without a word to bed. Britt knew this somber switch was, at least, partially his doing… Casey wasn't the only one he’d outright frightened with his choices today.  Frittering away a snack to escape his thoughts out into a wide open ranch, it didn’t surprise Britt. John had the propensity and the skill. 

John’s winning grin twisted mischievously.  “What are you guys doing up?” He answered instead. 

Britt considered Kato, Kato considered Britt, two visual shrugs of agreement flexed their expressions, and all their smiles matched. 

“Couldn’t sleep,” Britt answered for both. 

“Me neither. I, uh, I was gonna go up on the roof.” John halfheartedly held up his brown-bag lunch and his thermos. 

 “The roof?” Britt repeated, skeptical. That was not his first inclination for sneaking–at all, so he forgave his little blunt push of curiosity. 

 Instantly jazzed at the chance to explain, John pointed to the covered portico over the patio table nook. “See that thing over there?” ‘That thing’ was one of Jocali’s flower trellises, used for providing natural shade, and quite sturdy, fabricated with welded steel and treated to stand up to the Arizona summers. It reached from the patio floor to the patio overhang. 

“Takes my weight, easy,” John explained. “I climb it all the time up to the roof to stargaze or just to look at the mountains, especially when I can't sleep. Wanna see?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He darted to the trellis, rolled the paper bag closed to carry it between his teeth, and pocketed the thermos. John had already hopped up two whole foot holds off the ground, going for four whole, before Britt could stand, or before Kato could get halfway out of his seat; amused, if the firelight hit his frown just right…

“Joh-,” the call of his name broke off in reflex as Britt rushed to his feet. “Wait a minute.” He held up a negating hand, keeping the voice light but the tone straight. Tonight was not the night for climbing trellises by firelight up to a rooftop, if any night at all could be. This kid… Britt’s eyebrows shot upward and inward, trying for a shot of (lightly shaken) good humor, “I believe you. Let’s not, though. Come on.” He motioned for him to come down. 

John’s arboreal imitation stuck another half a second like he’d hit fly paper. He cast a wide-eyed, silent ‘Why?’ over his shoulder, but dismantled his climb and stepped off, phewing the taste of the bag out of his mouth. 

He wandered back towards Britt’s outstretched gesture, “You sure? Jo doesn’t mind long as I don’t bother the flowers. Well,” he added after a thought. “ Actually. She doesn't know about it. I figure she wouldn’t long as the flowers are okay.”

Britt pressed his lips together in a bland expression of disquiet over at Kato, who shot back a similar expression before shaking his head and resuming his lounge. 

“Sit with me instead.” He retook his Adirondack, sitting against the rightmost portion of the seat, leaving open space on his left. He moved that arm out to make room for John to scoot under. “There’s room, c’mon.”

“Really? All right!” 

John plopped his brown bag and thermos on the pedestal table and climbed up under Britt's arm. John might be taller, but he is no less featherweight than he was five months ago. 

“This won't bother your shoulder, right?”

“No,” Britt replied, a token softer, well into his earlier sentiments that if John took the day’s events to heart, he was largely to blame and needed to mend it, “Not a bit.”

“How’s your head.” John shifted close but not against, gingerly abstaining from committing his full weight against Britt's torso; that choice seemed all answer-dependent. 

“Also fine. Really.”  

John ‘oh'd’, a little expulsion of sound. He went quiet as he observed the fire. A beat later, he ventured, “That's good. I, erm, I was worried.”

There was the yearning tentativeness. A small-big admission, anyway. He wanted to ask how Britt was after the day’s doings, but instead he stuck to playing it off with casual questions. Britt recalled well this act of teasing apart and reading John’s verbal tea leaves. John confirmed as much once his weight ceased hedging about, afraid of somehow denting or disturbing, and sank all against him.  

Britt's arm came down to shelter his shoulders. He wasn’t going to let him go, and not this shy avoidance either, so he gave a bigger opening,  “I’m sorry about today, John. I didn’t mean to worry anyone, but I think I managed,” he calculated this matter-of-factly, “To worry just about everybody. That’s not right.”

John shrugged, a movement that moved Britt’s hug more into a cross-body bar. “Oh, I figured you'd be okay,” he said quickly, which wasn’t fooling anyone, “It just would have been really funny, your first full day and you’re trampl–”. John’s mouth snapped closed before the word ‘trampled’ slipped all the way. “I guess funny isn’t the right word, but anyway, you weren’t. Kato was there.” His adamant mention of that good fortune had Britt sensing he was missing an important puzzle piece that necessarily came before it. 

Until his nearly inaudible mumble, downright aching in tone, took Britt so off guard that the missing puzzle piece milled bewilderingly.  “The door stayed closed…” 

“What, John?”

The fire's mesmerising square dance, boxing in and curling out, distracted John's attention. The question didn’t even register. His delayed uptake eventually rolled a haphazard ‘no’ over Britt's ribs.

“Nuthin’.” Oh, there had been something alright… “Today… today just didn't go to plan.” As though that were a personal shortfall.  

Britt touched at his bandage, its edge crowding his eyebrow after John’s new favorite sport of trellis climbing must have loosened it; his own recollection of insisting it would be a good day put a rueful note in there,  “Well, I mean… it didn't go according to plan for anyone, John. Don't you worry about that.”

“No, I know,” John replied quickly, as if Britt had gotten too close to something like the true reason behind his strain of questions. He scrunched noticeably closer, muffling his voice by directing his words at his lap and not the firepit, “I'm okay. Not worried anymore.  I just, I wasn't hungry at dinner. That’s all.”

Britt regarded this prominent shift and the sum totals of his mumbled tangents and louder deflections with another creased furrowing. John’s ability to say only a bare minimum of what he actually wanted was as much of an old tendency to bottle and hold as his ability to disguise emotional truths. He’d been taught by circumstances that he had to. Once upon a time, Britt couldn't even get within an arm's length without him lashing out. Once upon a time, these tendencies turned deadly, and Britt had to race against steep odds to catch up in time.  

Despite tonight not showing much for it, they'd come a very long way, and much of that was because Britt, from the jump, didn't strictly treat John like a child.  An eye witness to his mother's murder and a slew of other unmentionables, more than most adults would ever experience in their lifetimes, all before his teens, to do so would be an insult. Even as an adult, Britt had to endure the vastitudes of the human experience whilst mid-performative empathy and sympathy after a catastrophic tragedy. The participants were all convinced they had done some great service and substance in his time of need. If he hated it, then, armed with the adult ability to walk away, he could never and would never subject John, who had no such privilege. 

Britt decided to change tactics and subject, and snagged the brown bag lunch from the pedestal table. He took a look inside, gave the contents a once-over of approval, “Not bad…”, and handed down a sandwich. “What kind?” 

John took a bite, a big bite. The introduction of food elicited a promising response. Through his mouthful, he answered, “Ham! Mmph,” he tried to chew faster, “Somebody traded a pig… for uh,” He took his first swallow,  “For some shoein’ one of the cousins did?  ‘N they brought over some of the meat. Have one.” 

“Oh no, I demolished my dinner,” Britt teased. “Somebody else didn't.”

When John inhaled that sandwich, he snagged another, hiding a smile as he chewed. At least he was willing… Britt, now with a better understanding of Jocali after watching her undertake the role of head of the Altahas with gritty command, as the imprints of her nails on either side of his chin this afternoon attested, swallowed his guilt along with his food tonight while watching her watch John push his dinner around.

“What about this?” Britt kept this tactic going, hefting the thermos’s weight as the contents sloshed. 

John wiped his mouth on his jacket sleeve, “That's tea. Altaha family tea.” He added with a touch of exaggerated mystery. “Jo won't tell me what’s in it. But it’s pretty good, whatever it is. Honeywell,” Disdain practically jumped off the name, and that also did not surprise Britt in any way, shape, or form, in fact, it said a lot about his perception–still jade colored.  John was City, and if Honeywell made anything clear today, West Texas and City were on his pet snide short list, and John didn’t do snide from anyone, least of all an adult in supposed authority… “Calls it mud water. It's not, and I don't even like tea.”

Britt saw another opening, and this time, Kato, from his seat, made a high sign he wanted in. “Honeywell doesn't like it, huh.” He mused. “Good enough for me. Kato, get over here.” Britt twisted the cap off the container’s robust threads. 

“Way ahead of you.” Kato made the most effortless of efforts to unfold himself and stand. He snagged his lowball to drain the last sip as he went. He held it out for a pour, taking it halfway before saying when. 

John ogled their eagerness, his mouth half full and almost hanging open. He hastily swallowed, “You guys didn't like him either?”

Britt drained his glass, then poured his own tea chaser. His hummed grunt nearly made a growl out of his reply, “Not exactly.” 

“I thought it was just me!” John snickered, “Good. He calls me a gosling, do y'know that?” He took another big bite and a cap-turned-cupful of tea for himself from Britt. “I asked Dad what that was. He said a baby goose. A goose! So.” He swallowed this mouthful, downed his tea, and stabbed at the air with the half-eaten half of a half, “Next time he does it to my face, I'm gonna haul off and call him a jackass…!” 

Britt and Kato, already well into their drink, were wide open for it. They had to fight for their swallowing lives. Kato had to pivot in place, his torso tight with a neat torque towards the fire, the back of his glass hand pressed to his mouth as his shoulders visibly quaked with silent laughter. 

“I got other words, too. Four-letter ones. You don't want me to use those. So, I’m practically polite.”

Britt, alternating between clearing his throat and stifling an outright laugh, because he should really be discouraging such a thing, he should, could only agree, the levity in his voice roughed up to as warmed as the spitting sparks, "Practically.”

Kato, now somewhat recovered, earnestly tried to blank his expression as he cleared his throat, facing the two. “Good tea.”

“Great tea.” Britt levied back. 

They weren't talking about the tea. 

Kato mummed his lips, a grab to maintain composure. “Not mud water.”

Britt made an inquisitively innocent tilt of the head. “Acquired taste?”

“That.” Agreement raised his glass.

John giggled– his sarcasm skills may not be fully mature yet, but they were stronger than most kids his age, so he caught on almost immediately. He was so caught up that he automatically grabbed a third sandwich. 

Under this guise, Britt covertly gauged this next sandwich selection with gratification.  Got him laughing, got him eating. 

Kato had the better front view of John, like this, than Britt, and as he lowered his emptied glass, a shift in firelight as it broke around his stance highlighted a ribbon of silky black at John’s throat, just above the topmost snap on his denim jacket. 

He'd had it at the airport, Kato recalled, uncertain if Britt had, too,  as it had been largely obscured by his jacket. 

Kato pointed to it with his chin, “What is that ribbon you wear?”

John glanced down at himself, where Kato was looking, “Ribbon…? Oh!” Better than being asked about the roof!

 He scooted to the edge of the chair and bounced to his feet, all in on his conspicuous show of keeping his back to them while he fiddled around his neck and then around his face and finally behind his head.  Britt, questioning, leaned forward to watch. Kato rolled his bottom lip into his teeth, also questioning. 

John spun about and planted his feet in a strong shoulder-width base, accurately mimicking the Green Hornet's Partner's swagger.

“Not a ribbon!” 

His excited crocodile’s grin, also vintage Kato-inspired, flashed big and cocky and white… under a gleaming black silk mask.

 Its eyeholes lovingly, carefully measured and spaced, hand cut with a knife or razor blade. The band spanned three adult fingers wide, tightly sat and tied over the bridge of his nose, and covered his brows. 

Kato's bottom lip slipped from under his teeth. His glass lowered to his waist. A shuddering breath spread his shoulders to their widest, and set his tongue to probing a molar. He watched Britt’s reaction in his periphery.

 Britt sat completely motionless. Frozen by how the mask changed the whole of John’s face, the ferocity in his smile.  When he slowly straightened, the pull of his back pulled him right out of the lounger.  For the first time all evening, more of the night's chill than the fire, its crackling shadowplay undercutting, summoned this silent night's sting forward, convulsing his throat with a reflexive, unsteadying swallow. 

A slippery, banded pool of black silk. The simplistic mask. Lone Ranger in spirit, Green Hornet in set and eye cut. It could be innocent. On any other boy, in any other time and place and circumstance, it is innocent. A plaything. Toss it on and pretend.

 John didn’t have a child’s pretense for pretend. He'd seen what a mask can do in real life. It separates, it defines, it creates, and not always the kindest worlds. And he’d enjoyed that. 

 On John, it's why Britt gave him the Green Hornet secret. To separate the lure. To define the promise as something he knew and could trust. Create something that is kinder, not power, and not masked. Kill the boogeyman without making another. 

“I really wanted a mask like your two,” John was saying, a little bit of rambling kicking in, talking shop with the boys and all, “but I didn't know how to do that. Jocali has a bunch of stuff like this, so I picked out the biggest blackest ribbon and measured out the eye holes. It matches Kemo's tack!”

He touched it, running his fingers under the band, “It slides down sometimes when I’m riding–a lot of the times, really. It’s a hassle.” He wrinkled his nose to show its uneven slide, “Did you ever have that problem with yours where the eye holes were too low? First one I tried, I got a poke in the eye.” 

Neither one was saying anything, so he looked between the two, expectantly, “Well. Uh. Do you like it?” 

 Kato would only look as far as his partner's feet in the seconds after that question, then tilted a tightly hewed meaningful stare up the side of Britt’s stance.  

Britt felt this crawling gaze. This was his. He had to answer. He just didn’t… have any words to do it with. So he wouldn’t. He chose what spoke louder than anything he could think of in a moment, his grace and cool deserting for an unwelcome dole of indictment. He approached John, his body language open, and purposefully filled the boy's gaze. As Kato had done, he sank his fingers over the crown of John’s head, rifling his crop of brown hair, another gentling patted touch of reassurance and promise. An altogether more affectionate cuffing claimed his nape. He pulled him into an embrace. The boy happily sank into his hold, burying his own urgent squeeze about a rock-solid frame; plainly, this was the only thing he needed or wanted this entire time. Behind his head, to the mask’s tie, Britt pulled at its central knot. 

The mask’s ends fell apart. John stirred within their embrace. He made room for Britt to pull it off. 

Its corresponding slide tickled. John's nose itched, a sneeze brewing. He rubbed at it to stem the urge. His eyes unfogged, then, directly on Britt's, though they jutted more to the mask he held draped in his palm. Uncertainty and complete trust warred. 

Everything in Britt, every conviction, every iota of the moral and mortal decisions he made to ever give John the Hornet Secret, told him to take the mask. 

 You tried it one way. Now you have to do it this way. 

If he did that now, he’d kill every inch of confidence and trust. It would be telling him no because he can’t, and that’s all the explanation he’s owed. That didn’t work for Britt, and it was tried when the Green Hornet was only an idea, not yet fully realized.  It would never work for the kid who decided one night to confront his mother’s killer, either.  Until he could talk to him square…

Britt withdrew from the embrace and separated John from his midsection. He pooled the mask in the boy’s palm. 

“Keep that somewhere safe.” 

The advice, given from deep within Britt’s chest, pitched a serious coloring for rapt attention. For John, it represented an anointment, “I do.” 

The embers’ spit and snap filled in. Britt's jaw silently worked over what he should say next. Kato watched its flex and grit remake his features’ chiseled curves, a severity dipped darker in the firelight. He looked off into the desert beyond the backyard. Black Diamond watched. 

“It’s late, John. You should get to bed.”

Contented, full after his sandwiches, and so much at ease, his bright sigh lazy and lax, “Mmm, yeah. I'll sleep now!”

He slipped his mask into his jacket pocket and collected his brown paper bag and thermos. His last, important act: to give Kato the same kind of hug, just as fiercely demanding in connection. Kato had only to look down as he encircled John’s shoulders to understand he'd also needed this, too. 

At the patio doors, his hand to handle, he looked back at the two men backlit in the fire’s sphere, “Hey, Kato?”

Kato’s silhouette raised its chin in answer. 

John’s smile hit big, wide, and cocky. “The thunder and the lightning’s too slow.”

 The sliding doors locked while the curtain swayed. 

 Kato resumed his firewatch. The back of his thumb rubbed at his mouth’s perturbed shape. Britt’s absently footed, quietly wandered, pacing took root behind the Adirondack, creaking the wood under his grip. He stared, for several excoriating minutes, into these same flames with the same intensity as Kato. 

“Are you really all that surprised?” Kato’s voice at last broke in with its lowest drone. The tone he used just before putting Britt through a teaching moment in the ring. “He idolizes you.”

The wood creaked again as Britt shifted his weight against the grain. “Us.”

Kato’s body language from behind signaled agreement. “Us.” He conceded. He had to. That parting hug and praise…

“No.” Britt said, confirming suspicions. “He loves the Green Hornet and his Partner, the fact of them, because it is us. I had to remove the faceless, the nameless,” He belabored these nouns. “I had to make it us. Not leave it to something like Rickert.”

A cloud of embers kicked up as the burn collapsed. Kato watched them sizzle. “He loves the mask just as well because it is you and it is me. Not for any violence for violence’s sake. The mask stands for something.” The morning’s conversation about choosing a fight spread its verdict into his words. “His views on right and wrong, they are definite.”

Britt’s fingers stridently knuckled fists into the wooden struts, “It worked too well.”

Kato’s silhouette changed shape as his arms came together in their typical jaunty angles, sharp and absolute in his hold on his biceps. The fit of his shoulders creased and strained the peacoat's lines.  This judgement welled a subdued repetition, “It worked too well.”

“All he has to do, Kato, is take those definite views on right and wrong while wearing that mask and choose one fight he can’t win–just one–.” 

Britt didn’t go on, but his agitation did. Its bristling command took the whole of the patio.

 A charged silence ensued, the fire no longer the focal point. Kato, with his low, assuaging drone, buffered those currents with his solemn confidence in what he’d known and learned better on today, “It wasn’t wrong to tell him, Britt.” He drew measure on his next words carefully, “Five months ago, I was uncertain. His recklessness gave me pause, but it's not Jack Rickert’s recklessness. I don’t see Rickert in him.” He half-pivoted in place and gently finished, “I see you.”

Britt’s gaze drew level; the fire’s orange haloed the vivid blues and greens therein. His astonishment tripped along the sides of his restiveness, eating away at it. 

A foothold. Kato fully vested his attention. He closed their gap with an easy stroll as he continued, “The you…that singlehandedly took on half his former football team, all men he’d known for years, with an uncontrolled right and a half-trained left…because they attacked the friend he had known only for a year.”

The gravitational pull to and density of their partnership was never so much or so well, and more startlingly, succinctly verbalized than when Kato brought up the event that tied it all together. Britt blinked as if the reminder of it brought him out of a deep sleep. Turbulence subsiding. He dropped his vice grip abuse on the chair, “Because they tried to kill the friend I had known only for a year, but who was already more of a brother to me than they ever tried to be.”

“Continue to agree to disagree on the kill part.” 

Kato’s mild, smart-ass droll broke Britt's grim reserve. His intent, no doubt. His impertinent grin flickered as Britt's grasp came to rest on his shoulder, a lesser form of the paddock's gripped exchange.

“It was still a no-win fight. You fought it anyway.” So he asked, with a note of discovery as simple and as straightforward as a question of tactic, “How do you tell that Britt Reid… he can’t?” 

Britt's outstretched reach pinioning him leadened with added muscled substance. Kato didn't blink at the transference. It was the weight of decision, always shared. 

“I don't. I explain it to him… as why he shouldn't.”