My muse has been after me to write a more canon-compliant Crucible fic, so here we are. I hope you like it. Please comment if you do. : )
Chapter One: Holes in the Story
Things were not supposed to be this way.
Ben Cartwright knew that from the start. It was an obvious truth, glaringly apparent from the moment he and Hoss received the fateful telegraph from Joe alerting them that Adam had gone missing, from the moment he and his middle son had finally joined his youngest to search, from the moment they had nearly given up on finding Adam at all. His eldest son had been robbed, stripped of his gun and horse, stranded in a savage landscape that seemed intent on swallowing and hiding him forever.
Ben was consumed by worry while he and his younger sons so fruitlessly searched. Over time, his worry gave rise to an unsettling fact: Adam was missing, and missing was much different than dead. It was a notion that was equal parts hopeful and horrifying, at least at first. Then as the days began to slip away, the minutes and hours steadily trickling around them like rain that was so needed by the surrounding dehydrated land, there was little hope to be found.
Ben's thoughts became macabre. Maybe this desert had no need for rain; maybe it quenched its thirst with blood instead. The thought was gone as soon as it had come. The grimness that had begun to settle into the pit of his stomach chased away by relief and joy.
They found Adam in that desert. Wandering aimlessly, he seemed to be half out of his body and completely out of his mind. He laughed and then, clinging to his father, he cried like a child, his breaths haggard and hard, expelled too quickly to allow him to do anything but sputter on to the next.
Holding his son close, Ben had rocked him, his weight shifting both their bodies back and forth. Failing to calm Adam with words, he had unconsciously begun to employ methods he hadn't used to soothe his first born in years. It didn't work. Nothing did, at least not that first day.
Arms wrapped around him, Adam held the material of his father's leather vest in tightly clenched fists and sobbed himself sick. It was then Ben knew what had taken place had been bad, because wandering the desert Adam hadn't been alone. He had been dragging a dead man.
Where the man had come from, how Adam had come upon him, or what had happened between them was anyone's guess. No one in Eastgate claimed to recognize the man, and the sheriff had never seen him before. "Drifter" is what the lawman called him, an entitlement that was given with little interest or thought before the man was buried in the inauspicious graveyard overlooking the desert town. No one, it seemed, cared much about this man. Adam, however, had cared enough to drag his body around.
Things were not supposed to be this way. Ben thought again and again as he and Adam remained at the boarding house in Eastgate, the hours and days beginning to feel stagnant around them as Adam struggled with exhaustion and heat stroke that manifested in an appallingly high fever. He didn't talk while captive to his sickness, which was not necessarily a worrisome thing. Some men became fountains of gushing secrets while suffering from high fever, the heat of their bodies impeding their ability to contain their every thought. Adam had never been one to do that. The sicker he was the less he talked. This occasion was no different—with the sole exception that his father wanted it to be.
There were just too many questions to be left unanswered. What had happened after Adam had been robbed? Who was the drifter the town had buried? What did he and Adam have to do with each other? Had fate brought them together, or had something else?
Both had appeared to be in rough shape. But Adam was the only one whose clothes were tattered and dirty, hanging off his body like rags. He was the only one with dark bruises and angry wounds scattered upon his skin. He was the only one who bore deep lacerations around his wrists and ankles; he was the only one who appeared to ever have been beaten or tied up.
When Ben sent his two youngest sons home, neither Hoss nor Joe had been happy about leaving Adam or their father behind in Eastgate. Adam was fine, or else he would be, and there was a ranch to take care of, serving as a perfect excuse for why his youngest sons needed to be excused from their sick brother's side. If Joe had been the one missing and then found hurt, Ben wouldn't have insisted upon such a thing. He wouldn't have been able to enforce it if he had. Pride was always such a volatile thing when it came to his oldest son. So used to looking after others, Adam had always struggled to allow others to do the same for him. Hoss knew that and that's why he was able to convince Joe to go, leaving Ben alone to hope he would be able to convince his oldest son of something else.
Adam had cried in the hours after being found. Deep and sorrow filled, these sobs would become the only he was destined to express. In the days which followed his emancipation from the desert, he was captive to sickness that rendered him unable—or unwilling—to utter a sound. And in the time that followed the blessed breaking of the fever that had raged through his body, he did not allow himself to emit so much as a thickened breath. He was painfully silent on all matters concerning the desert and the drifter. He refused to give the dead man a name. Maybe he had never known it, Ben found himself thinking. Or perhaps the knowledge had been lost, stripped away by the relentless and unforgiving landscape his son had been forced to wander for reasons that seemed destined to remain unknown to the rest of them.
Standing outside the Eastgate sheriff's office, Ben anxiously waited for Adam to complete his statement to the lawman regarding the dead drifter. It was a meeting he hadn't been invited to attend, though he had tried. It was Adam who had protested his father's presence. He said he wasn't a boy. He was a man, and, as such, he was quite capable of speaking to the sheriff about the drifter without his father looking after him. Ben hadn't had any other choice but to concede. Still, a part of him wondered why his son had been so adamant. Was it because Adam recalled what had happened in the desert, or because he didn't? What did it matter if his father listened in either way? Adam's meeting with the sheriff had been brief, more indicative of the latter suspicion than the former.
"What did you say?" Ben couldn't help asking as Adam reemerged from behind the building's closed door.
"Nothing," Adam said.
"Because he didn't ask you the right questions?"
"No." Adam's annoyance was immediate. "Because I don't know any of the answers. I already told you, I don't remember anything."
Although he had no real reason to, Ben suspected his son's claim was a lie. But he was anxious to take his son home, to remove him from the desolation of the desert in favor of a more forgiving landscape filled with soaring, green trees. He accepted the statement at its face value as he ushered his son toward their awaiting horses and then followed him away from the town.
Adam was quiet during the journey home. If he was experiencing any lingering distress or unease, he gave no indication. The rugged land which surrounded them did not seem to awaken within him any unfavorable memories of what he had endured. This led Ben to rethink his skepticism. Maybe his son really didn't remember. Maybe his lack of reaction to their surroundings was proof of that. If he hadn't known his son had been missing, if he hadn't sat vigil at his bedside after he was found, he wouldn't have thought anything out of place about Adam's behavior at all. Save for the scattered scrapes and bruises, the thin layer of bandages covering the deep wounds that had been etched in the skin of Adam's wrists, nothing about how he presented himself seemed glaring or out of place.
It wasn't until nightfall, when they were forced to stop and make camp, that the slightest evidence that Adam had endured something began to emerge. Carefully arranging his bedroll next to his father's, Adam slept closer to Ben than what would have been previously allowed. Closer than he had wanted to in years, in fact. They had separate blankets and their bodies weren't touching when they laid down, but they certainly could have.
Waking in the middle of the night, Ben found that slumber had prompted his son to inch closer. Hand snaking beneath his father's blanket, Adam slept calmly as he held the lapel of Ben's jacket in a tight fist. The action itself was telling, declaring within Adam a deep need to verify his father's steady presence.
Things were not supposed to be this way, Ben thought once again, moving his hand to cover his son's own. Considering how things could have been had Adam never been found, he would take them as they were. Besides, with how far away his son had felt, it was nice to be close.
They didn't talk about the sleeping arrangement when morning came. They didn't really speak about anything at all as the second day unfolded like the first, the next night demanding the same proximity as the one before. It took them two nights and three days to get home; the swiftness of such a long, taxing distance was rivaled by few other trips. Even Hoss was surprised by the quickness of it. Adam had only shrugged. He and Pa had been all business he had said. It was easy to span great distances quickly when you weren't trying to keep a herd of cattle in line. It was such a nonchalant answer, so freely given at that.
That night Adam retired to bed alone. Surrounded by the secure walls of his bedroom, he no longer needed to hold onto his father to make it through the night.
TBC