[A/N: Contains some discussion of abortion. Also gratuitous porn.]
Before it all goes to hell, there are the few sweet weeks during which everything is right with the world.
The heat falters, stealing away the lush green of the leaves and leaving in its place arterial red and dying brown; cool, crisp nights where they huddle together on the bedrolls and breathe in the vegetable decay of the forest. It's time enough for the crackle of leaves and twigs beneath the horses' hooves, for tentative touches exchanged beneath the thick fur blankets, their soft cries turning to puffs of fog.
In someone else's life, it's the beginning of the cotton harvest. Django doesn't know what day he was born. On the plantation, he marked the passage of the years by the seasons; when the fields turned white, he'd know he'd grown older. Schultz declares that everyone ought to have a birthday, and comes back from town one afternoon with a good winter coat for him. It's a year since they met, a year that Django's been free, and that's enough like being born to count for something.
(The war creeps closer, a whisper in the saloons and plantations. Soon, the desolate farmland they ride through, abandoned to spoiled soil, will be drowned in blood.)
Django knows that this is only a strange fever dream; it won't last, and they'll face their own reckoning before the year turns. He'll pay for his transgressions. There is an order to the world, and he's broken it. Freedom, more money than he's seen in his entire life, and the wild, reckless love that makes him wake up in the dead of the night and pull Hildy and Schultz close to him to reassure himself that they're real: these are not things that a man like him is permitted to keep for long. It's a miracle that he's been allowed to experience them at all.
There are still borders he dare not cross. He speaks to no one but Hildy and Schultz; the only other souls he sees are the men he kills. They keep a stack of warrants with his name on them that seem to appear every time Schultz collects on a bounty, and these paper the walls of his prison. His is a small sort of freedom, but it'd big enough to contain his wife and his best friend and vast wilderness, and he tells himself, most nights, that it's all he needs.
When they catch up with Wylie Stockton it nearly goes bad. He leads them on a merry chase through an Arkansas bayou, so thick with cypress that neither Hildy nor Django can get a clear shot. She's up to her knees, slick mud cold as it sloshes inside her boots, when a large hand reaches out from between the moss-crusted tree trunks and slams her into the freezing muck.
He hauls her up, spluttering and choking on duckweed, and slams her into the thick trunk of a cypress. Stockton might have grown from the marsh himself, wet and bedraggled as he is. His teeth are the color of weak tea and his famous coat is waterlogged and tattered. His hands around her throat, thumbs digging in beneath her chin, she can well believe he's the monster the warrant made him out to be, savage enough to kill a lawman without compunction, let alone a black woman off by herself in the sodden depths of the swamp.
He twists her head to one side and, in stark contrast to the forceful grip he's got on her neck, traces one finger over the scar on her cheek as tenderly as a lover's caress.
"Pretty girl." His breath is sour against her face. "Where you run away from?"
She tries to get a shot off with the derringer, but it must be plugged with mud. He slaps her hand into the tree bark and pins it tight there.
"None of that." His gaze travels over her, assessing the rifle hanging by her side—useless at this range, even if she could get free from him, and probably stopped up just as bad as the derringer. Her pulse drums in her ears. "Where's a slave get a thing like that?"
"She ain't no slave," Hildy hears, just as a jet of blood erupts into her face. Django does like he's supposed to and checks for a pulse—not an easy thing, with the way his bullet ripped open Stockton's throat—before he's helping her to dry ground, running his hands over her to check for injuries.
"I'm fine," she says, pushing down the fluttering in her stomach. "Gun's stopped up is all. Get the body before the mud does."
It's no simple task to drag the corpse over tangled roots and frosting bog; it takes both of them tugging and occasionally digging a foot free where it's caught in the mud, and by the time they reach the wagon, her arms and back are aching and she can't feel her toes. Stockton's head dangles loose, nearly severed by the shot, and it thumps against her shoulder as they load him into the back of the wagon.
Schultz hobbles over to the campfire to start the teakettle boiling. Hildy and Django strip off their filthy clothes and wash up as much as they can in a stream barely cleaner than the swamp water before joining him. He hands her one of the mugs and she inhales the steam and almost forgives him his immaculate suit.
She runs over the chase in her head, trying to decide on when it had gone wrong, when she'd been too slow or too careless, but she keeps coming back to Stockton touching the side of her face, how he'd seen right through the rifle and the fringed suede jacket to the past when she'd cowered under Big John's whip, seen right through to the core of her.
"Ain't ever gonna escape it," she murmurs into her tea. She rubs the scar on her cheek, as if she could erase his fingers on the raised, branded skin. "Had me pegged right away. Like I weren't nothing."
Schultz and Django exchange glances. Django moves her hand away from her face, runs his thumb in slow circles over her palm, and Schultz curls around her back to let her lean into him, nuzzling her jaw.
"He dead," Django says. "You ain't."
Schultz's hands rub up and down her freezing arms, and warmth blooms under his touch. He hesitates a moment, brushing up against the first button of her blouse. "May I?"
She chuckles, low and throaty; can't quite believe he's as reticent as he is after she and Django made it quite clear what they'd like from him. She helps him along, eager to get her mind on something other than the dead body in the back of the wagon. As she shrugs off her top, she feels his fingers hover above her back as if asking for permission.
"Go on," she says. Of course he's curious. Candie was right about that much; it's a wonder it's even taken him that long to ask.
But it's his lips that follow the gnarled scores that criss-cross her flesh, tracking a long, slow path over her skin, feather-light and reverent. She doesn't move, can't, wouldn't want to anyway, not until he's ended the journey at the small of her spine, his beard tickling her ribcage.
"Oh, Brunhilde," and there shouldn't be that pain in his voice, as if he were the one flayed by the overseers whip, "every mark on you, every scar, is a badge of strength." He lowers her onto the fur throw, changing places so that it's Django who holds her head in his lap while Schultz winds his way across her bared breasts, licks down her belly and works to unfasten her trousers. "You fought," another kiss, below her navel, and he slides her pants down. "You would not be caged. You resisted, and you outlasted them all."
His head disappears between her thighs, and at first she doesn't understand what he's doing until his tongue laps at her sex, prods and sucks at the secret places in her that send tremors through her body. She twists, knees buckling around him, moans upwards into Django's mouth. Her fingers fist at her sides, flex and grapple for his hairy forearms. She clutches at him and whimpers and shivers until he's wrung every last drop from her. Django drags him up and kisses him, and both their lips, when they find hers again, are wet with her taste.
She's limp and quaking, but she can tell neither of them are close to finished, both watching her expectantly. She'd jump on either of them if she could, but her legs won't quite obey her, and a wicked idea takes root.
"I want to watch," she says, and heat rises to her face. "I mean. Whatever it is you two do together."
Django looks down, almost bashful, which for some reason Schultz seems to find hilarious. "The lady wants a show," he says. "What do you say, my boy? Shall we give her one?"
"Both of you gone be the death of me," Django says without much conviction, and yanks his shirt up over his head. Hildy rolls herself up in one of the furs and watches the two men undress, laughs at how Schultz folds his clothes neatly in a pile and pushes them out of the way before looping his arms around Django's back and claiming his lower lip between his teeth. They're both kneeling in front of her, fingers mapping out planes of muscle and bone, of skin pale and dark, whole and broken and lit by flames. Django traces a finger over Schultz's side, and Hildy can see the thick, ropy scars there, uglier and deeper than her own. They must hurt him even now, much as he tries to hide it. "You sure you up to this?"
"I trust you," Schultz says, and sinks into the blanket, dragging Django down on top of him. Hildy watches her husband move over the older man, reaching between their legs to clasp their erections together. Schultz sighs, like he's needed this, and his hands travel the length of Django's back, over corded, rippling muscle, to cup his ass and press their bodies closer. He manages to hook one leg over Django's, his foot sliding down the length of Django's calf, hips bucking up underneath him despite Django's best efforts to be gentle.
"Shh," and it surprises Hildy; she'd thought two men—these two men in particular—together would be rough and ungainly, but Django touches him like he's made of glass. "Lay back. Let me do the work."
"Then do some work, son."
Django parts his legs and scoops melted tallow from the lantern by his head. Excruciatingly slowly, he works his finger into Schultz's body. It barely looks like anything from where Hildy's lying, but Schultz gasps. "Something like that?"
"Yes, yes. Exactly like that."
Django grins, and he does something with his fingers that makes Schultz rasp out incoherent little noises. The arm closest to Hildy flops out and she takes his hand, kisses the back of his knuckles. Django's deliberate, as confident with his hands as he is with his gun, and judging from the pitiful keen that escapes Schultz's lips, nearly as deadly.
"Please," Schultz whispers, and there's a throb between her own legs at watching him, so accustomed to being in control, suddenly vulnerable and wanton. Django doesn't need more encouragement than that. He angles himself onto Schultz, stroking his hair at his hiss of not-quite-pain, nips at his neck, rocks into him. He's all lithe, feral grace, ringed in flames, and Hildy's mesmerized by the play of fire light as his hips roll and thrust, by the smell of their arousal and the heat that radiates from them. Schultz is every bit as vocal as she'd imagined, mewls out more and harder and fuck me, and pardon the vulgarity, Fräulein, disintegrating into a rapid stream of German that, from what she is able to catch, is impressively filthy. The reminder that she's there, that they're showing off for her, has her dripping wet again.
Django shudders and cries out and collapses on top of Schultz's chest for a moment before easing out of him, stretches like a cat and then curls his fist around the other man's cock. Hildy can see how close Schultz is, his head thrown back and his eyes half-slit, panting for breath, and she curls in beside him, holds him tightly and murmurs in his ear while Django strokes him to completion.
None of them speak, after; words will only remind them that there's a clock ticking on their freedom and a dead body in the wagon. Instead, she lies in the sticky aftermath, her head buried against Schultz's shoulder and Django's arm wrapped around both of them, and thinks that the three of them together might violate every law of God and man but if so, she'd willingly go to hell to do it a few more times.
Later. The bayou is never silent; frogs call out the last steps in their dance before the winter, and the cries of owls echo through the cypress. Nothing is still; the forest stirs and rustles and never sleeps. "You awake, Doc?"
"I wasn't."
Django's turned around in his sleep, sprawled messily over the furs. Hildy untangles herself from his long limbs and wraps one of the blankets around her shoulders. She hears Schultz pad after her to the edge of the camp where the horses are tied. It's cold, but it's allowed now for her to squish close to him and rest her head on his chest.
There are no secrets between any of them, she thinks, except this one.
It's easier in German, both because the shapes of the words are already alien and ill-fitting and because even if Django wakes, he won't overhear their conversation. "I am going to have a child," she says.
He doesn't need to ask why there's so much sorrow and fear in her words, why she's telling him first and not Django. "Are you sure?"
"It's my time," she says. "And there's no blood."
"Is it—" but of course he doesn't need to finish, which is more or less the problem.
"It ain't yours. Couldn't be."
"That was not what I was asking."
"I know what you're asking."
He covers her hand with his. Her eyes grow hot, and there's no point in trying not to cry. "Fräulein, if you need, there are ways. Less dangerous than the ones you are thinking about. If that is what you want."
Hildy wants the open sky, her hands clutching the reins as D'Artagnan gallops over the hills, her hair streaming behind her in the wind. She wants the fingers and tongues and cocks of the men by her side, their ferocity and their kindness. She wants blood and fire and revenge. She wants the milky scent of an infant in her arms, born into freedom and somehow the child of each of them, and she can't see how she can have any of it, let alone all.
"That ain't what I want," Hildy says.
"It's not safe out here," Schultz says. "Not for a baby, or—if you change your mind about having one. I can collect the money in town and we can ride north. Tomorrow."
"Settle down."
"Not forever. That would be a waste of a good gunfighter. Talent such as yours should never be squandered."
Tears are streaking down her face, but that still makes her smile. "And if it ain't Django's?"
"It will at least be yours."
"All of ours," she corrects. "Prob'ly be a hell of a shot." She heaves one last sob. She feels wrung out, exhausted, but at least unburdened. "Tomorrow," she says, and it seems like enough of a promise.
The Pine Bluff sheriff is ripping down the poster of Wylie Stockton when Stone strides through his door, rubbing warmth back into his frozen hands. He's tracked over half the state, a strange sort of bounty hunter searching for handbills that aren't there.
"Caught your man?" he asks.
"Not me," the sheriff says. "One of your lot."
"How long ago?"
The sheriff looks confused, but he reaches for a pocket watch and, winding it, checks the time. "Couldn't be more'n a few hours."
"He in town?"
"Stockton? Out around back, but I don't see as you'll get much out of him. Fellow's near got his head blown clean off."
Stone wonders if the man is intentionally playing him, or whether he's just impossibly thick. "The other bounty hunter."
The sheriff shrugs. "Didn't seem like the sort to stick around. Prolly ain't got far, though."
He's come close before, all but stood in his quarry's shadow only to find that Schultz has blown out of town after collecting some ridiculous sum of cash, and without any indication that he's not travelling alone.
Today, though, luck is with him, and Pine Bluff is bustling, with sailors disembarking from the steamers and painted ladies blooming like flowers in their bright petticoats outside the swinging saloon doors, beckoning the strangers inside. It's an afternoon to slip in and out of town unnoticed, if one is attempting to duck the attention of anyone less eagle-eyed than Handsome Jack Stone.
His scar doesn't dissuade the whores; despite the mutilation, he's tall and lean and dressed like a man with money to spare, and he nearly regrets that instead of seeking out the feminine company that would happily have him, his concentration must be focused solely on a man of middling years and unsteady gait, limping up the steps into one of the saloons.
Stone might have had a wife by now, children, a house larger than the one-room shack he keeps down in Texas. He's nearly as old as Schultz and has been at the game much longer. But he's honest with himself—a necessity when one's own company is all one has—and he knows well enough that moment when he's cornered his prey, the thrill of recognition when a man knows he's done for, the cold, uncompromising justice of the gun, is a greater pleasure than any human companionship could ever bring him.
He strides into the saloon, triumphant.
