ran over here as fast as I could, may I request some guilty sadie/charles pre epilogue? Both of them at their lowest, the people they loved most dead, and taking out some of that anger/sorrow on each other?
no pressure obviously!
thank youu -vulture
(we went waaaay over 100 words but so is life)
Charles was heading back north to where he’d left the Wapiti, gravedirt fresh under his fingernails and a new wound carved in his heart, when he stopped at the saloon in a small town near the border.
He’d sworn on his mother’s unknown grave that he’d never drink his sorrow. But he needed to eat, and the inn wasn’t the kind of place that would take a man like him. The only other place that served food was the saloon, which tended to be more open to any kind of clientele that had dollars in their pocket.
And that’s where she’d found him. His partner in sorrow, his fellow blood-soaked sinner and odd-man out of the gang’s guns.
Mrs. Sadie Adler, widow. And possibly the only person alive whose company Charles could take.
They’d shared a drink for Arthur, once Charles told her of the cowboy’s fate. Then another, and another. In mourning, in celebration, because at least John and Abigail had made it out alive, if Charles had read the trail signs right.
Then the saloon closed, and it was just the two of them, two whiskey-drenched ghosts with nothing left to hold onto but each other’s shoulders as they stumbled to the town stable, hoping to spend the night in a hayloft instead of the street.
Sadie had made the first move, fitting her mouth to Charles’ own after pressing him against the rough wooden wall of Taima’s stall. The stable master wasn’t two minutes gone after settling for a fistful of crumpled dollars in exchange for a few haystacks and his discretion.
“Don’t know about you,” Sadie slurred, clever fingers fumbling open the buttons on Charles’ shirt, greedily stroking the skin of his bared chest. “But I ain’t much of a talker. Yes or no, Charles—you wanna feel somethin’ other than hurt tonight?”
It was, objectively, a terrible idea. Not just because laying with a white woman was the kind of thing a man like Charles could get hanged for, even this far north. But because Sadie was maybe his last friend on earth.
She was certainly the only one who knew what Arthur had been to him—who understood just how much Charles had lost.
That Charles has lost the love of his life, not just his best friend. Had lost warm strong arms that held him close in the quiet privacy of too-small tents, lips that kissed him secret and sweet in the shade of trees at the end of guard shifts. Hands that had held his own, tracing his scarred knuckles like they were something infinitely precious.
This was the kind of thing that ruined friendships. And then Charles really would be alone. Completely, finally.
He kissed her back.
(continued here on AO3. Rated E)
