Part I: Burn all the blankets and dry all the tears (Henry Standing Bear, Walt Longmire)

Author's Notes at the End.

Henry woke to a light falling snow on the last day of the white man's year. He rolled over in his narrow bed, upstairs of the Red Pony's kitchen, and considered the grey light in the high window.

He had shut the bar early the night before, for lack of custom. His most regular bar-help had left for better pastures. It was too soon for work, too late to hunt, too dark for reading, too light for sleep.

There was no helping it. Henry got out of bed anyway.

Downstairs he stoked the stove in the corner opposite the fire place and sat next to it until he was certain the fire had caught, then made his way out into the wind.

The county plows had not run the roads since before midnight, but the fall had not been significant. He shuffled a few paces, then stepped off into a slow jog. Gravel crunched underfoot when he wandered off the road. Twice he hit potholes, soaking his sneakers. By the time he turned around, his fleece sweats were wet to the knee and he was sweating under his shirt.

Henry slowed to a walk in the bar's parking lot, breath still coming hard. The snow was tapering off – the evening would be clear, he decided. In the brighter light of day, everything pale was grey and all not grey was mud.

Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty oversnowed and bareness everywhere.

Or as his grandmother would have said, frost become cold, snow past prettiness, and all the pemmican thin and lean.

Henry sighed and went inside to dismantle Christmas.

Late in the morning, a familiar engine pulled up to the front wall and a pair of highbeams cut through the snow-frosted windows. A cream and red shape resolved itself with a slamming door. Henry wound a string of lights over his elbow and began untangling the next from the pronghorn mount.

"Hey," Walt said, from the doorway.

"Haa'ahe," Henry said, without looking around.

"Happy New Year," Walt said. "You gonna be open tonight?"

"It is tradition, if the weather is good." Henry flicked at the string of lights, flipping them off the spike blacktail. "How else will I make money, unless the bar is open?"

Walt's footsteps stopped halfway across the room. He stood there, still in the process of shedding his jacket, his eyes on Henry. "Gas fields are still hiring, last I checked." Slowly he peeled out of his coat and laid it over the back of a bar stool. "Or maybe you think you're too decrepit for that kind of work."

"Speak for yourself, old man. My knees do not creak every time I stand up."

"Course they don't, you don't have to stand up so far." Walt looked around at the empty bar. "Deena's not here to give you a hand?"

"Pool tournament, in St Pauls. She left yesterday." He tugged at the green wire as it hung up, recalcitrant, on an overbent-nail. "Damn." It had hung up there the year before, he recalled. And two years before. The third year, there had been a blizzard and the Red Pony had been closed for ten days.

"Taking it down by yourself, then?"

"It appears so." Henry flicked the cord, pulled again. "Everyone is very eager to put up Christmas decorations and throw a party, but clean-up appears to appeal to very few." He doubled the wire over his fist and jerked, hard, putting his weight into it.

"Watch it," Walt said, "It'll –"

Break, Walt probably meant to say, just as the frayed bit of wire came loose, and Henry came down, hard, on his ass.

Walt's hand was under his arm even before he came to his knees. "Leave be," Henry said, evenly. Quietly. Shrugging off Walt. Not snarling. Not shouting.

Walt stepped back and leaned on the bar, watching as Henry fetched a broom and swept up the shattered bulbs. "Don't think it'll anyone if the bar didn't open tonight."

"I have bills to pay."

Walt sighed, looked out the shrouded windows. "Seem to recall someone telling me once that money wasn't everything."

"We were twenty-seven, in Alaska, at Prudhoe Bay, at Christmas. Money was all we had, except booze. And we were swimming in booze." He bent again to push the dirt and glass into the dustpan. "Of course I thought it inconsequential and other concerns more pressing." Like his grandmother, who had not lived to see that next spring.

"Ah," Walt said. He shoved the barstool out, took a seat. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have talked you into staying."

Shaking his head, Henry leaned the broom against the pool table. "No, you were right. I had given my word in the year contract, and the money, while not everything, had a great deal of value." It had paid for the last hospitalization of Amelia Red Jay, for starters, and then for an in-home nurse from off the reservation, when the old woman had refused to go back into the sterile squared-off hospital in March. Had they not been snowed in at the oilfield, Henry would have gone home then, contract or no contract.

He realized he was staring at a fistful of light cords, and that Walt was still sitting at the bar, looking at Henry with those deep eyes that saw so far. Henry sighed and put the string of lights back in the box. "I am sorry. I am dwelling on sad times."

Walt nodded, looked down at his empty hands. "She was your grandmother." After another moment, he said, "If you'd rather not have company –"

"That is not what I said. Besides, it is your opportunity to put up with me. You have been a sullen mess for far too long. Let someone else have a turn."

Walt's head came up, sharply, and for a moment, Henry thought he had gone too far. Then Walt smiled, that quiet grin that reached all the way to his eyes. "Your grandmother would have whomped your butt for being a rude brat."

"Shut up and take the wreaths down off the speaker, white-eye." Henry crossed behind the bar for another empty box and pulled out a can of Rainer on the way. He popped the tab and handed it across the bar. Walt took it and nodded, sipped lightly at the drink.

"Only helping because I don't think the floor could handle you landing on it again, when you fall off the ladder."

Henry snorted. "That is it. You pay for the rest of your beer."

They were no longer the loud young men they had been in the oilfield and fell back on the comfortable silence that had grown up between them in the years since. Another hour, and they had all the red ribbons and green plastic wreaths peeled from the walls and rafters, and were missing no more than four of the gold tinsel bells from the original box of twenty-four. "That is close enough. We only put up twenty-one."

"You had twenty-three last year."

"No, that was the year before last."

"Thought it was last year."

"You did not help last year." Because Martha had died.

"Oh." Walt's eyes were staring at the cardboard box, but that was not what he saw. Then he straightened his shoulders. "Right. If I had helped last year, I wouldn't have let you put that string away with the frayed wire. Get me the electrical tape, and I'll fix."

Henry folded his arms. "Do you not have evil wrong-doers to pursue, lawman?"

Walt shrugged. "Ferg and Vic are on it."

"I thought Ferg was going on vacation. To Montana, and a date with an ice floe."

"Branch got delayed by the storm in Virginia, so Ferg's leaving tonight. I got time." When Henry remained unmoved, Walt said, "You can make me lunch."

So Henry made sandwiches – elk roast cut thick, with mustard and sweet onions - while Walt picked at the wire and applied black electrical tape, and then demanded a pair of needle nose pliers to pry the remains of the shattered bulbs from the seatings.

The can of beer sat all but untouched, so Henry made coffee.

"Deena say when she was coming back?"

"When she won, or when she lost, or when she got tired of playing. There is also a tournament in New Orleans in February, so she may be some time." Henry poured coffee in two mugs. "Did Branch warn you that he would be delayed?"

"He called Ruby, once when he thought he might be delayed, and then after he had to change flights. He's flying into Sheridan tonight. Weather happens." Walt looked up. Henry realized he was frowning. "What," Walt said, "You think I should dock his pay?"

Henry sighed. "No. Weather happens. And it is not my decision." He folded up the remains of lunch. "I am more concerned about the harmony of the rest of your deputies. Is the Ferg unhappy about delaying his departure?"

Walt swallowed down a laugh. "He didn't have to say anything. Vic was indignant enough on his account." He finished with the last light bulb and set the string aside. "She did want to know if there were any Cheyenne stories about frozen ice monsters. I told her I'd ask you."

Henry leaned on the bar, thinking. After a time, he said, "I do not remember any. There are the mehne, but in the winter they sleep in the deep water, or in the mud, like other snakes and the turtle people." He resumed wiping the bar. "Do you remember the tale of the man whose wife slept with a mehne?"

Walt took another sip of coffee and made an appreciative grunt. "Is that the one with the bad hunter who had two crippled boys, the wife meets the water-thing when she fetches water, the man finds out, and the man feeds the wife to their sons? The kids run away and the woman's head rolls after them across the prairie?"

"Roughly, yes."

"Then yes, I remember it, and yes, you really are in a bad mood."

Henry shook his head. "When I told that story to a white professor in Berkley, he told me that it was an allegory; that the mehne was the white man, the woman Mother Earth, and the children the twisted production of the corruption of the white man's so-called civilization."

"Really." Walt drank more coffee. "What was the hunter?"

"The Indian, of course, who had murdered our mother the earth in order to feed our own greed."

"Uh huh." Walt touched the brim of his hat, where it rest on the bar top, and made it spin on its crown. "What did your grandmother say about that?"

Henry smiled, remembering the long silence after he had told Amelia of the academic interpretation of the legend. "She said that the story was about what happened when a selfish and vain woman married a shiftless and incompetent man, and also that one should take care in where one goes into the water."

"I don't think I'll tell that story to Ferg."

"Vic may enjoy it."

Walt snorted. "She might." He opened his mouth as if to say something else, but shut it as the bar phone rang.

Henry cocked an eyebrow at Walt, let the phone ring twice, and then picked it up. "It is a beautiful day at the Red Pony Saloon – happy New Year to you as well, Ruby. Yes, he is right here."

Walt took the phone without comment. "Hey, Ruby." He pulled a pen from his jacket and motioned at Henry, who had already reached for a bar napkin. "How far off 287? Where's the ambulance coming from? Yeap. Leaving now." He handed the phone back to Henry and reached for his hat with the other hand.

"Will you be by tonight?"

"Maybe. Depends on, well." Walt shrugged. "You know how it goes."

"I do. Come by tomorrow for lunch."

"Cady wants to have breakfast."

"Which is why I offered lunch. You should not eat alone."

Already halfway to the door, Walt called back, "You make it sound like it's for my benefit."

Henry pitched his voice to carry. "Most things are."

The early noon light had finally cleared the windows, so that Henry could watch Walt raise a hand in farewell, even if the other man could not see Henry return it.

A lodge is made warm by the voice of a visitor. It was strange, Henry thought as he put more fuel into the fire, and lugged the boxes of decorations out the back door and through a foot of snow to the unheated shed, that the bar could be empty with no one there, and yet still so full.

/end part 1/

Author's Notes: T for language. Gen, smutless. Set around the start of S2. TV-verse, with some book characterization creep. Canon pairings. I am not sure how well I managed the happiness. Cheyenne legend of the Mehne and the adulterous wife adapted from the story recorded by George Bird Grinnell in 1903. Euro-descent poetry from Shakespeare's Sonnet 5. Titles from the Corb Lund song "The Rodeo's Over." Many thanks to the beta for encouragement and last minute indulgences.

This chapter is for gonergone's Yuletide 2015 request, who asked for Henry, fic that explores Henry's past…and all the good things to happen to him, and for him to be as happy as his current circumstances will allow. I am not sure how well I managed the happiness.