A/N: Jack's death haunted me, toput it mildly. This piece is Ennis coming to terms with it, but I felt like I had to write it for the both of us.
Ennis would always associate Brokeback with smell. He remembered the first day, a dusty slice of Wyoming's never-ending inferno. He leaned against the rickety trailer, hat down, head down, wetting his cigarette between his lips, watching the yellow-brown grass sway in the hot breath of afternoon. The day smelled like scorched earth and nicotine; a sparse change from the train and even sparser from his brother's modest piece of land some fifty miles from the spot where he now stood. The smell of that trailer, that parking lot, was forever etched into his memory and would haunt him until his dying day.
The mountain itself existed like a reverie, an oasis in a desert of abandoned morals. It had secured a piece of something he stood for; and he liked to think that Jack had mulled over that piece until he knew it front to back – and that someone, somewhere, had understood Ennis Del Mar like the back of their hand.
Brokeback didn't have a specific smell – it consisted of everything and nothing; normal things, that had been monotonous until he had met Jack. The smell of burnt beans, the coals of an extinguished fire; wool, the sweat of horses; the bland, cold scent of freshly fallen snow; flannel blankets and mud-caked boots. At intervals, when the pain was unbearable, he would remove Jack's jacket from its resting place, press it to his face, inhale, and journey back.
He would remember mornings and nights. The crisp chill of evening after the embers of the fire shone burgundy on their faces. Jack would insist on playing a tune and Ennis would relent, for the privilege of a boyish grin, wondering later – as the wavering notes broke the serenity of the calm night – why he had let him pull out the goddamn harmonica in the first place. At nighttime, shrouded by darkness, it seemed to Ennis as if they hid from the world as much as they hid from themselves.
He imagined Jack. He felt Jack's slender fingers stroking the side of his face, tracing the outline of his jaw. He felt Jack kissing the nape of his neck, heard him groaning and sucking in breaths of mountain air. Felt him writhe and twist beneath him, saw his beautiful face contort, his eyes close and ask, in volumes louder than words, Shit, where d'we go from here?
He felt like he was forever filled to the brim with contradictions, full of parallel roads of different opportunity; because when Jack laughed, he was consumed with lightless and felt as heavy as an anchor.
In some fantastical world he had undoubtedly inherited from Jack he had remained faithful to Alma; he had provided his girls with a status symbol father figure; he had herded sheep in the summer of '63 and met Jack Twist, dreamer extraordinaire, lifelong friend and fishing partner. But he had not remained faithful, and although it never felt the same, never felt like a sin, he still feared the gaping mouth of hell. His father had imbedded that as deep as the lashes. But fire and brimstone was meaningless now; it fell like a cacophony on his ears and he cared no more for its message than he cared for run-on sentences.
He ached for something intangible, that kind of raw, biting hunger that scarred the lining of his heart and left him bleeding. He reached for something that was there, there, and he had let slip through his fingers like water. How it hurt now – and how terrible, that he had grieved for losses too early, and now there was nowhere to turn. How ironic the gift of hindsight.
Ennis used to think life was just hundreds of thousands of days strung together like popcorn on a Christmas tree. He used to believe life scoffed at want of detail.
He thought he felt Jack drape his arms around his neck, but it was just a breath of wind.
And that's all it would ever be.
