I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays. So sorry for the delay – my muse is sporadic at best. As always, reviews are appreciated and adored. Enjoy!

"Welp, I reckon it's time for me to head home." Daisy stalled her mending at the doctor's casual words, the crackle of the fire the only sound in the dark room. In the bed across from her, Cap drew himself into a sitting position.

"Go?" the word was little more than a breath from Daisy's lungs. "You can't go – you can't leave us here alone." She dropped Cap's shirt from her lap as she stood to face the doctor, grabbing for his big, strange hands before she could think to stop herself, her eyes two startled emeralds in her head.

"Daisy," the doctor began, placing one of his own big paws over her pale skin. His brown eyes grew soft in the lamplight. "Whether you want to believe it or not, you're the one who's been nursin' him back to health for these past few weeks. I've only stood by and watched."

Daisy turned to look at Cap, the glow of life slowly returning to his features. He regarded the doctor warily, having never grown fully accustomed to the man's secretive ways. But he had learned to trust him, just as Daisy had learned to trust him, and that same faith bore down on her now. She knew the doctor was right, that he had become a bystander in his own makeshift home, relegated to the corners by an anxious Daisy who was reluctant to touch Cap but even more reluctant to have anyone else do so. After seeing Cap's eyes – those eyes that were so thoroughly and honestly his – staring back at her after long nights of waiting and wanting, she had wanted to pounce on him; to solder herself to his consciousness. But he wasn't the Cap from before: not the brash and playful Cap, the one who was so reassuring and confident. Now he was fragile, reduced to little more than his physical pain and the façade he adopted to hide it. Daisy saw the true toll of the Hatfield and McCoy feud in his weakness, and she realized that she understood very little of the big world outside her door.

"But I can't hunt," Daisy said, turning her attention back to the doctor. "And Cap is in no shape to…"

"Daisy," the doctor interrupted with a smile. "I know you been too preoccupied to notice, but I been storin' some food away for the two of you, enough at least to see you through a month or so. He should be healed by then." He watched the familiar apprehension in Daisy's eyes, the look he had seen on the face of many a concerned loved one.

"I wouldn't leave if I thought you still needed me," he continued when she didn't speak. "But you know how to clean his wound, how to change his dressings – how to care for him. I don't think anyone could take care of him the way you can. He's out of trouble now – the hard part is over." The doctor looked over Daisy's head at Cap watching him from the bed and the two men exchanged a nod of understanding. For all of the years of hardness that had grown in Cap's heart, it was the closest he could come to outward appreciation, although deep inside himself he felt that he could kiss the man's feet for saving his life and taking care of Daisy in the process.

"I don't…I don't know how to thank you," Daisy wrung her hands and looked anywhere but the doctor's eyes. She had grown accustomed to the comfort of his big frame standing watch over her like a guardian angel.

"There ain't a need to," he answered quietly. "Sometimes I think I come out here to get away from the world, but it seems the world always has a way of findin' me in the end, and tellin' me somethin' I should have known all along." The doctor waited for Daisy to look at him before he went on. "Life was tellin' me somethin' awfully important when he sent you two to me, and that there is thanks enough."

X X X

For many long minutes after the doctor left, Daisy stood staring at the door, waiting for him to come back, to guide her, to stand as a distraction between Cap and herself. She wanted to turn to Cap, to kiss him, to give herself to him, but the memory of his blood, of the pieces of his flesh coming away in the doctor's hands, still played in her vivid imagination. Some part of her felt responsible for it all.

"When you gonna stop this?" Daisy stilled at the quiet question, her back towards Cap.

"I don't know what you mean," she said without turning.

"You do know, Daisy," his voice was a low growl. She felt his eyes on her. "You been treatin' me like a newborn, like I'll fall apart if you touch me."

"I wasn't…"

"You know how many times I been shot?" she glanced at him over her shoulder. "Too many to count – first time when I was nine or so. Pa took Johnse and I out huntin' one day and damned if Johnse didn't skim me with a bullet. Burned like fire growin' through my skin. Nothin' like this one, of course, but it hurt just the same."

He waited for Daisy to respond, but she only studied the warped floorboards.

"My point is," he went on. "I survived before, and I'll survive now. I don't need you to be brave now – I've gone through this alone before. But I sure do want you to be brave enough to touch me, to treat me like you did…"

"If I'm so brave," she said softly into her chest before spinning on her heel to face him, "then why won't you tell me who those men were?" His jaw clenched and he looked away towards the window.

"You said I was brave…" she went on.

"You are brave…"

"…but not brave enough for this. Not brave enough for whatever you're not sayin'."

"I didn't keep it from you because of that," Cap started with a sigh. "I kept it from you because I couldn't keep you from killin' Thornton, because I couldn't keep you from that saloon and those men, because I couldn't keep you from all the evil things I've seen." The words spilled forward in a wave, his eyes hot in the firelight.

"I don't need your protection. You ain't my Pa."

"Damnit, Daisy," Cap paused and pulled a hand across his tired face. "It's not like I ain't been brought back from the grave or nothin'."

"Don't use that as an excuse," she said accusingly, coming closer to the bed. She couldn't understand where this anger had come from, but it was raging now. Why was Cap being so stern, and why was she answering him in kind? "You just said yourself you been shot before, so that ain't no reason for you to not have told me what's goin' on. We had so many hours together where you would just sit there and stare at me…"

"And what did you do?" his voice came out louder than intended. He leaned forward in the bed in a feeble attempt to assert some semblance of dominance. "You would barely look at me. We might as well have been strangers again, back in that clearin', back at that festival…back in that courthouse." The last phrase came out in a sort of whisper.

The fervor drained from Daisy at Cap's softening tone. His eyes grew distant and dewy, the glimmer of a primal passion roaming over her form. Almost simultaneously, the truth dawned on the two of them, the reason behind their frustrations coming to light. For everything they had been through, for everything they had experienced in such a short time. For the people they were and the people they had become. For Daisy to almost lose him, for Cap to scare her away…

"There is so little goodness in this world," Cap broke the silence. "I ain't never seen a goodness in anyone else the way I seen it in you. And I didn't want life to rob you of it all. I couldn't save you from Thornton, so I reckon I was tryin' to make up for it." A lump formed in Daisy's throat, her assumptions making her spin. She wanted to kick and kiss Cap at the same time.

"Why were they huntin' you?" she wondered aloud, coming to sit at the foot of the bed.

"Us," he answered, looking her straight in the eye. "They were huntin' us."

"Us?" she repeated, voice barely audible.

"Us," he said again with a nod. "Turns out someone saw somethin' at that barn, because there's a bounty on our heads for Thornton's life." The two sat quietly under the weight of the words. They had defended themselves against a vicious monster, and now they were being hunted like hogs for it.

"What will we do?" Daisy asked in a rush, tears pulling down her cheeks. "Where can we go? They'll kill us, they'll hang us or shoot us or Lord knows what…"

"Hey, hey," Cap pulled Daisy's head to his chest, his voice drumming against her ear. "Don't you see, darlin'? We don't have to go anywhere. No one knows where we are. Out here, we ain't a Hatfield and a McCoy."

Daisy drew herself up to look at Cap, her eyes glittering with wonder. She leaned into him until their foreheads met, their hot breaths mingling into a cloud.

"We're just you and me," she said softly, and Cap answered her with a kiss.