Okay, so first of all, it can't be happily ever after yet because this is only the end of Season 3.
Also, this scene is actually out of order. This happened before the Population 25 stuff, but for my purposes, it worked better after.
And as always, thank you for reading and commenting and PMing. I always enjoy reading what you have to say, or just knowing you're reading even if you aren't saying anything.
Chapter 7
She's playing the morally superior deputy to Branch's loose cannon.
All night out there in the wilds she sacrifices her own comfort and hygiene to ensure no one else gets stuffed full of peyote and deposited in some wide-open space. Or at least that's the story she's going with.
In the morning, she wakes up in her musty sleeping bag on the bank of a creek under bright sunless sky. Her mouth is pasty and her neck is stiff, and she has to pee, which has been an ordeal.
Branch is crouched on the bank stirring something with a metal spoon in a metal dish. It's a sound in the same general category as nails on a chalkboard.
When he looks over his shoulder at her, he doesn't seem surprised to see her looking back.
"I made breakfast," he says. "Eggs."
"Sounds delicious. But I think I'll pass."
She stares up at the high clouds. Life would be less challenging, she realizes, if she didn't spend so much of it defending and deflecting and avoiding. At the very least, she wouldn't have stayed married so long. And she wouldn't be here.
She props herself up on her elbows.
"I mean that sounds totally disgusting," she says, and it comes off as more of an apology than she intends.
"I know what you meant," he says. "Again, if you want to head back, I'll understand."
"No, I'm good. I'll wait till Walt can get here."
She hasn't said his name for two days, and she tries to play it cool. Of course, Walt won't be getting here, mostly because as far as she knows, he has no clue where they are, and no interest in finding out.
"You think I can't be out here on my own," Branch says, squinting out across the water.
She sits all the way up and extricates herself from the bag. With her boots still on, it's not so easy.
"Someone has to act in the best interests of the good citizens of Absaroka," she says, out of breath from the exertion involved in standing up.
He scoffs.
The sight of the goop he's eating triggers a wave of nausea.
"No one got hurt," he says.
"So you don't deny it?"
He gives her that bitter, angry-eyed grin.
"Deny what?" he says.
She rolls her eyes and takes off down the bank. "I have to use the facilities."
"Sometimes you have to break a few rules," he calls after her, "to get the answers you need. Who do you think I learned that from?"
She stops and turns. "Don't compare yourself to Walt," she snaps at him.
She's not even sure where it comes from, but she knows before he responds that it's the chink in her armor.
"Right," he says, bruised red eyes glaring up at her. "I forgot. You and Walt have a special relationship."
There it is, back in her face where it probably belongs.
She watches him scrape the remnants of mushy eggs out of the metal dish and spoon them into his mouth.
Does he know? she wonders.
She starts walking again.
What are the chances that in addition to fixating 24-7 on the dead guy who tried to kill him, he's also put the pieces about her and Walt together? Or that, at this point, he'd even care if he did.
And what pieces? That's the real question. There aren't many.
In fact, if you were to go into the past with a scalpel and remove that twenty-four-hour period, replacing it with a fresh, untainted twenty-four-hour period, and sew it back up neatly, no one would ever know because that's really all there was to it. There was no prelude, and there was no spillage into the coming days. It was entirely contained in the span of time between the embrace in the hospital, and his departure for Denver the next night.
It started, it happened, it happened again, it happened a third time, then she went home. Then it happened once more before he took off, and now she hasn't seen him, at least not up close and alone, in well over a week.
She doesn't really believe Branch knows. She doesn't even think he's grasping at straws.
If she stops focusing on herself for a minute—her desire and her embarrassment and her current physical and emotional discomfort—and shifts at least some of her attention to him, she can see where it's coming from: He's not holding it up as leverage. He's telling her how alone he feels. While she's got what he perceives to be this "special" relationship, he's got everyone treating him like he's lost his mind.
Despite new evidence that maybe they should, nobody believes him. She's starting to, but right now, she can't even give him that.
Besides, special relationship her ass.
She stayed at the cabin that night and on late into the morning. Neither of them were expected at the station. They spent most of the time naked and wrapped around each other.
Strange though when she thought back on it was the fact that they'd said very little. He'd been sweet and attentive, and there was some of the usual in-the-moment chatter about here-and-now feelings, mostly physical, with maybe a little, I'm-so-glad-you're-here. But in the grand scheme, there was minimal communication.
He told her he loved her tits, and surprisingly, that's the word he used, but he didn't tell her how he felt about her. He admitted somewhat graphically that he'd thought about what he'd like to do to her, but he didn't expound on the evolution of his affection, if there even was one. When she left, he didn't promise to call her or tell her he wanted to do this again at some point, let alone every chance he got, which is what she would have said to him given almost any opening. But there wasn't one, and now she's glad she kept it to herself.
She held on to almost everything.
When it came down to it, maybe because she sensed the direction of the tide early on, she said even less than he did. She made no body comments whatsoever, nor did she mention, even lightly, how much she'd yearned for him for so long now.
Obviously, she didn't tell him she loved him.
She feels foolish.
Branch tries to get rid of her a few more times as they break camp. When she won't go, he kicks the pack towards her.
"You can carry that then," he says.
He shows her the intricate route he's drawn on the map before they take off downriver.
He claims to have gotten into Ridges' mind, seen the world through his eyes. Clearly, he's losing it, but maybe so is she. And maybe in some situations, losing it is appropriate, understandable even, if you're the understanding type.
It was around noon that day that she told Walt she had to go, had stuff to take care of. There wasn't any stuff, but she was becoming restless, feeling as though she couldn't breathe. Not physically exactly. It was more like her soul couldn't breathe, and it was cutting off the oxygen to her brain, so she couldn't think, either.
She just needed to get back to the mundane for a while, give herself some room to process.
When he called late that night with his warm bedroom voice, it was all the foreplay she needed. He said he'd be gone for a few days and he wanted to see her first. How could she have expected herself to say no to that? And why would she have?
She'd never known him to be gone for anything, and she might have benefited from giving more thought to that, but she was busy taking a shower and scrambling to find something hot to wear that didn't look like she was trying too hard.
After all that, though, it didn't matter what she wore. The second he crossed the threshold and the door was shut behind him, clothes were coming off. He stripped her of her yoga pants and led her by the hand with the pants still attached to one leg to his spot on the couch. She kicked them off while he unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his pants, and dropped them. It was literally the sexiest thing she'd ever witnessed. Without even bothering to take them all the way off, he pulled her onto his lap, onto him, and they were at it again.
He didn't stay long.
He was on his way to Denver, he said, driving through the night. Could be gone a few days. And he had something to tell her.
Maybe she should have been nervous, because after setting it up, he pulled his pants back on and tucked his shirt in and buckled his belt, and he even smoothed down his hair. So she followed suit and rounded up her pants and tank top and put them on.
He sat on the coffee table like she'd done that night to create some distance between them. She'd been so certain then that she'd never let this happen no matter how much she wanted him.
He looked sad, and she understood even then that it wasn't because he was going to miss her. On some level, she knew none of this had anything to do with her whatsoever, and it was best for her to think of it that way than to see it as the central plot and their interlude as comic relief.
"I'm getting close," he said.
She knew what he was talking about. They'd talked about it before all this, and she knew it was one of the reasons he hadn't been able to heal after Martha's death. But it wasn't the only reason. She knew that, too.
In his eyes, at that point, he was already gone.
He never did call, not that he'd said he would. He was gone four nights. Any updates about what he was doing and when he'd be back had come from Ruby, and those were vague.
When he got back there was a lot of low-talk behind closed doors, and Lucian coming in through the private entrance and not stopping in to ogle her, and Walt out of the office a lot. He didn't need her to ride with him.
Once, when he'd been home a couple of days, she went into his office and sat down. It took him a minute to look up, and when he did, he didn't even seem entirely sure who she was.
She asked him if he wanted to come over for dinner. He sort of froze, and he tried to smile, but it was fake. She doesn't even remember what he said. It plays in her memory as the sound of a jet engine revving up. He did say, "Thanks, Vic," the way he does, but before she even stood all the way up, he was off again in his mind.
She wanted to hurt him. Or to quit. But he was closing in on whoever it was now, and she couldn't leave him to wrap up the most important case of his life alone.
It's close to sunset when they come out of the hills. Branch takes the pack from her and throws it in the back of the truck with the other gear.
"Thanks for sticking with me, Vic," he says. "No one else has."
Five or six insulting remarks flip through her mind, but in the end, she just says, "You're welcome."
He removes his hat and gazes off in the direction they just came from.
"I wouldn't be him for anything right now," he says.
"Who?"
He looks at her like he thinks she's slow and pities her for it.
"Walt," he says.
"You wouldn't be him for anything ever," she says.
She knows what she's doing.
"He's pulled it all together. Any minute now he'll blow."
He keeps his eyes on her, the muscle in his jaw flexing and releasing.
"Ridges," she says.
"Has to be eating him up," he says.
"So that's what this is about? Being right?"
He turns his head, so he's looking away from her in that arrogant, dismissive way that makes her want to punch him in the throat.
"Why not?" he says with a shrug. "If he figures out who hired Ridges to snuff Martha, that's a bonus."
"You're such an asshole."
"People are more comfortable with me that way." He slaps the side of the truck and opens the driver's side door. "Let's go find Walt."
"You should probably do that on your own," she says.