Author's Notes at the end.
"You know, this book is fucking bullshit."
Henry looked at Vic – over his glasses, over the newspaper he held – and considered her profile against the window of the hospital room. The deputy sat slouched against the wall in the worst sort of chair owned by Durant Memorial – seamless citrus plastic and tube metal legs that shed chrome in flakes, unpadded, unbending, uncomfortable.
Vic had come back to the hospital an hour before, snow dusting her shoulders and clinging to her tactical boots. She had been offered a more comfortable chair – the one beside Walt's hospital bed. She had declined.
Henry had gone back to catching up on the available reading material, and had not pushed the issue.
Sometime over the last hour, Vic's boots had dried and she had shed her jacket. From one pocket she had produced a battered paperback and began leafing through it listlessly. Now she sat scowling at the book, her brows well knitted together, and her mobile face gone still.
When Vic did not go on, he turned back to his newspaper. Outside the window, snow still fell in tiny dusty flakes. It would stop in another hour. The monitors beside Walt's bed hummed quietly, and occasionally emitted a chirp, like a quail hen talking to her chicks.
Vic's stillness was disquieting. A scolding jay fallen silent in a snowdrift, or a biting fly caught in lodgepole amber. Vic's quiet hands were clean, and the shirt she wore was less rumpled than the rest of her. Beneath the rolled up sleeves of her uniform shirt, the pale ribbed hemi still showed splotches of rust and blackberry stains. The untidy end of her braid hung stiff and dark over one shoulder. She was, Henry noted, at least three weeks behind in re-dying her hair. The tan from her winter holiday had entirely faded from her skin.
She gave up on scowling at the cover in silence and said, "I hate this fucking book."
Henry spoke without looking up from the five-day old edition of the Durant Courant. "It is a classic record of heroism, friendship and human struggle with mortality." He turned the page, noting that the county Methodist Women's Guild had finally picked a date for the Absaroka Spring Fling. The conflict with the Powder River Theater Troupe had evidently been resolved. He would have to congratulate Ruby, later.
"It's propaganda about how women always fuck up men's lives! I always thought those gals harping about old white men authors were full of shit, but this mess is fucked up."
"I do not think the people of Sumer thought of themselves as white."
Vic opened the book again, "And the guys are dicks to the women. 'You are the door through which the cold gets in.'" She flipped the page and kept going. "'You are the fire that goes out. You are the pitch that sticks to the hands of the one who carries the bucket. You are the house that falls down.'" She turned her frown on Henry. "What the hell is that all about?"
Henry did not smile. "I think the phrase that the young people use, is that he is 'not that into her'."
"No fucking shit, red man." She pressed her fingers to her mouth. "Sorry."
Henry smiled at her with his lips closed. "None taken." It was the truth.
Vic folded her arms and returned to scowling at the closed book. The soft beep, beep of the bedside monitors continued. Down the hall, two nurses and the nightshift orderly managed some conflict over restocking bedlinens.
In the bed, Walt Longmire went on lying still and nonresponsive, his chest rising slowly, falling even slower.
Henry had nearly finished the Courant, and was weighing asking Vic for the Field & Stream on her other side, when her cellphone rang.
"Yeah." Henry watched the tension seep back into her shoulders and thighs. Her free hand came up and rubbed at her forehead, before dropping to slap one leg. "You're shitting me – wait, who called? Right. Yeah, fuckin' A." She listened, turning up her other hand to inspect her short-cut nails, before something said at the other end made her hand sink to her lap. "Yeah. On my way."
Vic shut off the cellphone and buried her face in her hands, her palm pressing the plastic case against her cheekbone and her fingernails digging into the disordered mop on her scalp.
"Fuck," she said, her voice muffled.
Vic's phone chirped again. Her knuckles blanched around the phone, but she did not move from where she sat hunched in her chair, elbows on her knees, face in her hands, and blood dried into the ends of her hair.
At the nurse's station, the squabble over bedlinens and mismatched towels faded away. The orderly's cart squeaked down the hall.
"Ferg says he found another set of tire tracks, skirting west around the wellhead. We –" Her voice cracked. "Fuck me. I must have missed it, the first time. Too busy getting –" She sat up, swallowing down the rest of her thought.
Henry could finish it for her. Too busy getting Walt stabilized, stripped of his sodden jacket, warmed, and back to Durant Memorial. Among the jumbled report that Ruby had passed on to Henry had been the distressing moment, halfway back to town, when Walt had warmed enough to bleed in earnest. Man and world had fought each other for the right to kill Longmire, and even now the decision had not been called.
"Five fucking hours. Too god damn long."
Vic and the Ferg had met the ambulance twenty minutes out of Durant. From the tale the EMT had told Henry while Doc Bloomfield had scrubbed in, they had transferred Walt from the tailgate to the gurney in the middle of 237, with snow drifting in the back and barely enough time to slam the doors shut before Vic had flung herself back behind the wheel and led the ambulance back to Durant Memorial, lights and siren wailing all the way.
"She's a crazy woman behind the wheel," the EMT had said around her coffee. "Kyle could barely keep up with her. Didn't even slow down to a stop in the parking lot, just cut a u-ee and was gone again." The Ferg had called Henry on their way back out to the rail siding where Walt had been found, behind Ruby by half an hour.
Henry had not been able to reach Cady in Chicago. Walt's daughter was in the air again, the last leg of a long flight east to Philadelphia and a job interview.
Now Vic pushed herself to her feet, gathering up the jacket as she stood and catching the tattered paperback as it tumbled from her lap. Four steps brought her to Walt's side.
Henry folded away his glasses and the paper but remained seated, watching her. For a moment he thought she would speak, or touch Walt's arm where it lay curled over his chest. One hand, empty of jacket and book, reached out to the bedside table and touched the brown hat resting there. The hat, brim up to keep in the luck, rocked back and forth under the weight of her finger.
"I can accompany you, if you like." He would have thought Vic had not heard his offer, but the ends of her hair – the ones not stained with rust – quivered, as if she had begun to shake her head. The breath of her sigh was barely louder than the hum of the heater clicking on.
Still looking at Walt, Vic said, "Aren't – aren't you afraid, that he might not be here, when you came back?"
"No," Henry said. Because it was the truth.
Her hair quivered again, this time with a nod. The rest of her was motionless. "I have to go. The snow's stopping, we need to check the rail switches. And the Southford place. They called in a dark truck, no plates." Henry did not have to see her eye to know Vic stared at something very far away. She stood there a moment more – a stone on the edge of a cliff, a dewdrop on a blade of grass, an ember buried deep in sand.
"Do you want me to go with you?" Henry asked, carefully. No insistence, no reluctance, no pressure.
Vic shook her head, almost before he finished speaking. She turned on her heel like a fast cutting horse, a pheasant bursting from cover, a falcon stooping on a running mouse. Henry found himself rising to meet her.
"No, I've got it." She marched back across the hospital room and brushed past Henry on her way to the door. "You wait here, you can talk to Cady when she calls. I'll meet Ferg, we're going to get that fucking asshole." Almost at the doorway, Vic spun back again, quick as the rattlers she hated. "Here," she tossed the paperback underhand. "Tell him I didn't get it, he needs to fucking explain it to me i - when he wakes up."
Henry listened to her footsteps down the hall. When the sound of the slamming door had faded, he took the seat that Vic had refused, and settled down within arms-reach of the bed.
He considered Walt's battered profile and frost-bitten ear, and then returned his attention to the battered book Vic had thrown. The Epic of Gilgamesh, in the annotated Ferry translation. Dog-eared, creased, and now damp.
"Normally I would not question your taste in books," he said to Walt. "But I believe in this case you have misjudged either the woman or the book. She does not need to be taught boldness, nor to treasure life."
Walt said nothing.
The book fell open to the text for Tablet Five, marked by a greasy bicycle-backed playing card. Three of clubs. Henry turned the page.
You who have fought with lions and with wolves,
you know what danger is. Where is your courage?
If I should fall, my name will be secure.
Henry let the book fall shut. He remembered Vic's tight-jawed silence through the last hour, and how she had fled at the end.
"Still…" Aren't you afraid? Vic had said, with the terror thick in her voice. "Is that not what they have taught us of courage? To be unsure, unknowing, and to do one's duty regardless. She does not have the assurances that I do, and yet she goes on."
He had spoken the truth to Vic. He knew how this story went - he had no fear that Walt would die while Henry waited.
Gilgamesh sat beside Enkidu for seven days and seven nights, until a worm fell from his nose. Henry set the book aside and rose to find a blanket. He could sleep for an hour or two, and eventually Walt would wake. Eventually.
"You will have to explain it to her, I think. It would not come well from me."
It was not given otherwise, that Enkidu would have to live without his friend.
end
Characters/Pairing: Henry Standing Bear, Vic Moretti. Gen.
Setting/Warning: Book/series characterization meld. Something off-screen, in the winter after S2/A Death Without Company. No spoilers. Rated R, with a warning for Moretti mouth.
Author's Notes: I'm waiting for Gilgamesh to come up in the novels, except that I half expect Craig Johnson has it in mind, and that it cuts too close to the bone for Walt and Henry to actually talk about. Title and quotes from The Epic of Gilgamesh, Ferry translation. With thanks to the world's best beta (tm) who is also a Vic advocate extraordinaire.
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed the novels and the tv show as much as I did. Concrit of all sorts greatly appreciated.