It's the middle of the night when Ponyboy wakes up alone, grasping for nothing at the side of his nest.

Instantly, his heart sinks and his shoulders slump. Once again, Dallas is gone in the middle of the night, back to his pew. Ponyboy hates it, rolled over on his side to look at Dallas on his pew, the covers pulled up on his body. There's no way that he's as comfortable over there alone, when he could be in Ponyboy's nest with him, warm and comfortable.

He doesn't know why Dallas insists on leaving him like this. Every time they read together, every time that Dallas gets drowsy, Ponyboy never kicks him out, never demands he leaves. Every time, he keeps Dallas as close to him as possible, every time Dallas nods off, Ponyboy does his best to be close to him.

And somehow, Dallas always woke up, always wound his way back to his pew.

Ponyboy feels irritated, confused as he sits up in his nest. Weariness drags at his eyes, yawning in the cold night. He turns over, hunching up his shoulders. What about waking up with Pony was so bad? Why wouldn't Dallas just stay?

It picks at his brain. They've run off together, chosen each other. They'd been sharing everything, kissing, touching, even if they haven't gone past some fingering.

He chews at his lips and wishes Soda were here to talk to him. That's a wish that has been on his mind a lot for the past few months, yet hadn't been acted on in a long time. Once Sandy had gotten pregnant soon after their parents died, Soda's attention had been refocused on her. Going to him was hard, and then mostly impossible — both because of the pregnancy and because the effort to do it was so hard to muster up the energy.

And now, he really needed him. Wanted to go to his room, flop down on his bed and asked him what this all meant, about what he could do to get understand why Dallas did what he was doing.

Soda understood dynamics, relationships more than Pony ever did. For years, Ponyboy had mostly watched on the sidelines as Soda had talked with others about others, had seen girls and guys approach him — Steve Randle in particular — and if he were here, if they could talk, Ponyboy was confident that Soda could help.

He tries to imagine what he could say, what he might advise. Ponyboy scrunches up his nose, trying to conjure him up — and only comes up with how worried Soda might be right now. Where did Soda think he was, now? What did he think he was doing? Did he know about Johnny? What did he know about what had happened?

His teeth tear into his lip, and a bit of blood surges into his mouth.

Ponyboy shuts his eyes and tries to stop himself from thinking about that night too hard. Tries to keep it in.

Sleep. He needed to get back to sleep.

It's not easy, not with how much he wants to talk to Soda, with the way his eyes keep drifting back to Dallas' pew, wishing he'd just come over to Ponyboy, come back to him.

When his eyes finally droop, when sleep finally claims him, Ponyboy dreams about nothing, for once.

"I'm going to the river to wash our clothes," the scrape of the fork at the bottom of the skillet is loud, Dallas' voice steady as he does it. "You can take that gun, see if you can hunt something up by any kind of luck."

Yawning, Ponyboy rubs at his eyes, freshly washed from the pump, his shirt damp. "Sure. Might not get lucky, I gotta warn you. I can shoot and all, but no telling what might be around." The church has been organized almost like one of the shacks, with everything in it's right place according to Dallas more than Ponyboy.

From the various homes, they'd gathered a good amount of stock, arranged the best way they could. Against one side of the walls were an assortment of crates and trunks, all with specific things inside: the first one had all the cleaning supplies Dallas had found or stolen, the next to that one full of books and newspapers, and then a huge trunk they'd discovered in one of the many houses. It was the one Ponyboy was seeking, flanked on the other side by a slightly bigger trunk. That one was filled with various knicknacks, while this trunk was full of clean, neatly folded clothes. Ponyboy takes off his wet shirt, exchanging it for a heavy red flannel that's about two sizes too big for him.

He buttons it up as Dallas continues, "You never know. Be nice to eat something big enough that I don't have to go into town for more meat for awhile." He taps the skillet with his fork, "Beans and toast are done for you. I'm gonna get going."

"Wait, wait," Ponyboy sees him start to get up, hastily grabbing for his shirt. Dallas wipes his hands on his jeans, dressed in a black shirt and his brown jacket, looking so close to how he had at the drive in, his hair just a little longer, enough that the back is starting to kick out.

It's his hair that Ponyboy grasps for, pulling Dallas down for a kiss.

There's no hesitation to return it on Dallas' part, not at all: not with the way he grips Ponyboy's hair tightly back, with the clear eagerness on display with how quickly his tongue slips into Ponyboy's mouth and that shift in scent that always signaled his interest.

It makes the absence, the reluctance for Dallas to be in his bed that much more nagging when he pulls away, a grin on his face, his cheeks pink, saying, "I'll see you later too."

"I'll have something, I hope," Ponyboy says, watching Dallas pull away with the shirt. He wants to say something, wants to say Why won't you stay?

But Dallas is gone and Ponyboy can feel his stomach growling by the time he leaves. So he goes to have breakfast alone, ruminating over what to do both as a hunter and as someone on the run with a person who he wanted who seemingly didn't want him.

Ponyboy doesn't eat, however, in the still darkened church. No, puts out the fire, takes his plate out and sits out in the back of the church. The plate, one of the ones they'd found in the houses that was white with a brown border, is balanced in his hand steadily as he takes a seat outside. The landscape around him is full of beauty from the trees that surround the valley in green turning to yellow, to the birds that sing around him to the vanishing form of Dallas on the horizon, heading to the river that flowed on the other side of the valley. Ponyboy watches him, eating the eggs and toast as the sun started to come up on the horizon.

There's no one to tell him to get back inside, no one to tell him that hanging out of the window and watching was silly as the sun rises. The tinges of orange, yellow, red blend in with the purple and blue, mist on the peaks around him a smoky white and gray. Birds call to each other, the wind picks up, and Ponyboy feels some of the cold leave him as he watches the sunlight touch the tips of the houses, sweep down the green mountainside, even touching on Dallas before he fully disappears towards the river.

Tulsa has always had beautiful sunsets and sunrises, always.

"Why d'you always have to sit out here to watch?"

He can hear Johnny's voice the way he always could — they'd been ten and twelve years old, and that day, Ponyboy had planted himself firmly inside of his father's study to get a good view, his face pressed against the glass. "Why not, Johnny? It's so pretty, all the time."

Johnny had come beside him, pressed his face against the glass and in silence, they watched as the sun sank on Tulsa through the window. They both should've been heading upstairs to wash up for dinner, yet Ponyboy had stuck to his ritual even with his friend spending the night.

At any point, Johnny could've said no. Instead he was here with him, watching in perfect silence as the sky streaked orange, as the sunk sank through that glass, until there was finally enough dark that Ponyboy had pulled away from the window, saying, "Wasn't it pretty?"

Johnny gave a shy, half shrug and smile. "Yeah. Wouldn't have ever thought about sunsets or sunrises before."

Ponyboy sighs and pushes away the memory. That Johnny Cade wasn't around anymore. Hadn't been for awhile.

It takes an hour to clean the gun, to check it and a little longer after that to get used to the weight of the gun, to count the ammo and see how much he had. Going to get more ammo was something that Ponyboy wasn't sure he wanted Dallas to do so soon, and wasting ammo was something his father never enjoyed.

More importantly, Ponyboy roots through the things they've found to see if they have hunting knives. He was pretty sure there were some — maybe not the best they could use, just good enough to use on an animal.

The gear he finds isn't bad; not too dull when he pulls it out, and Ponyboy takes a knife with him, just in case. A magazine goes with him too, an old battered copy of Weird Tales from 1932 that Dallas had found. It all goes into one of the old bags they'd found, made of leather and big enough to hold it all.

His father would've bought food and snacks, and Ponyboy grabs some of the crackers Dallas liked, a candybar, and fills one of the old tin cups they'd found with water.

"This is as good as it'll get," he mutters to himself, and makes his way out into the valley on his own.

Alone in the great sleeping-chamber with its high golden dome King Conan slumbered and dreamed. Through swirling gray mists he heard a curious call, faint and far, and though he did not understand it, it seemed not within his power to ignore it. Sword in hand he went through the gray mist, as a man might walk through clouds, and the voice grew more distinct as he proceeded until he understood the word it spoke—it was his own name that was being called across the gulfs of Space or Time.

His name — Conan. King Conan.

No. Ponyboy, his name is Ponyboy, and the gray mist of his dream is not something summoned by a sorcerer but the gray mist of a morning that his father always enjoyed on hunts. This hunting trip, Ponyboy is ten years old and his father is helping him steady a gun, showing him the sight.

"You have to be quiet. Keep focused," his father's voice rolls over him as the dream sharpens. It's a meadow, a full meadow where hardly anyone has ever touched. Ponyboy knows he should be focusing on a deer in the distance, one that was white tailed, finely made. It's so beautiful, not something meant to be slaughtered. It's a being that should be admired, something Ponyboy should be drawing or painting.

Instead his father breathes in his ear. "Go on. Pull the trigger, Pony."

Ponyboy squeezes. The recoil is fierce, and birds take off. The deer falls.

His father congratulates him, and walks him towards the slain deer. In the dream, time runs slow and Ponyboy feels sick. His father's voice is soothing, but there's a buzz in his head, interrupting his father's words. When they get down to the deer, though, it looks strange. It's in the form of a person, with a too neat bullet hole.

He looks down at himself, his eyes wide, choking on his own blood. His father crouches down, grasping the hunting knife. "You know what to do, Dallas."

"I'm not Dallas," he says, crouching down. He looks downward and the body has changed again. It's no longer Ponyboy —- it's Johnny, gagging on his blood, his neck slashed. Ponyboy reaches over to take the knife from his father's hands. He grasps Johnny's hair with his free hand, and places the knife at the soft of Johnny's mutilated neck, pressing down, beginning to cut him.

That's what you do with game. That's what you're supposed to do.

Johnny's eyes turn glassy. The meadow gives way to pavement

and Ponyboy wakes up, gasping for air, his hands flying up to his throat. The magazine is where he left it, propped against his things, and he scrambles on his side, coughing, expecting to heave up breakfast.

Sweat coats his forehead, the scent of blood rapidly disappearing from his nostrils. He breathes in the cool air of the valley, clutching at himself, expecting for his father to be there, expecting to see Johnny's body.

None materialize. Ponyboy is just drawing cold breathe after cold breathe in the autumn air, with no animals around. Johnny's body isn't here, his father isn't asking him to treat him like a kill.

Ponyboy breathes, wipes at his face to push away the tears there. He glances around, his hands shaking. There's nothing out here, and the sun was shifting. He should leave before his imagination took over again.

He begins to put his things away, to get them back in the pack. Why he had dreamed that, he didn't know and he didn't want to be alone anymore. Not out here. Most everything gets packed away and it's only when Ponyboy is leaning down for the gun that he scents something on the wind —- not a human, an animal. Game.

All thoughts of leaving rush out. Ponyboy grips the gun, crouches down and follows his nose towards the other end of the grass filled valley to see an elk. It wasn't an old one, not fully matured yet it was still big enough that the moment Ponyboy sees it, he knows that if he does shoot it, it will be a hassle to get back to the church.

It also would be something he and Dallas could eat off for over a week. Maybe a lot longer.

His hands don't shake as he levels the gun up, as he aims his sight.

He breathes steadily, grips the gun and re-grips it.

The sound of two shots pierce the quiet of the valley. Over the sound of the river, Dallas lifts his head up, wondering just what Ponyboy has shot.

Beside him, the clothes flutter in the wind. Stringing up a clothesline along the trees, and waiting for a few hours was the smartest thing to do rather than to just show back up at at the church with wet clothes.

Dallas was down to just a pair of jeans and shoes, and the sound of the shots aren't far. He pushes his wet hair back, puts out the cigarette he has and makes his way towards the sound. It takes twenty minutes for him to pick his way closer to where Ponyboy had gone, and ten more to finally get to where he actually was, in the midst of what Dallas thought had been the old farm, where grass grew particularly well but old rotted posts still remained in places.

Of all things, he isn't expecting to see Ponyboy crouched in front of what looked like to be an elk. Dallas comes closer, seeing Ponyboy hunched over the elk with a knife in his hand, clearly trying to figure something out that Dallas couldn't understand himself.

The fact that he's smeared with blood in places, the scent mixing, draws Dallas closer. It makes a weird ache start up in his teeth when Ponyboy looks up at him, not startled for once that he's there. "I didn't think you were that close." He twists the knife in his fingers. "D'you think you could help?"

Stabbing Johnny Cade or holding someone up over some money was one thing. Ponyboy offering him to finish off an elk —- a huge one at that, with steam coming off of it's exposed insides, was another.

Dallas comes over carefully, not daring to look at the elk in the face, unsure what to think of the calm on Ponyboy's face. Something about it feels strange as if he's forcing himself to concentrate as he beckons Dallas over. "C'mere. My Dad taught me how to do this. Your hand can't shake," he offers the handle to Dallas, and Dallas grips the handle tightly. "We're gonna field dress it, take back as much as we can."

The elk's body twitches. Dallas scents blood, and he nods. "Sure, kid."

Ponyboy wraps a bloody hand around his and together, they begin to cut the elk.

The fire pops and crackles as Dallas finally takes a seat beside Ponyboy in the church hours later. Sweat coats his body, and the viscera from the elk Ponyboy had killed still remain in places despite the wash beneath the pump. The cold that was starting to really announce winter isn't as bad as it could be with the furnace now fully working, and Dallas takes the bottle of mountain whisky, as they'd been calling it, from Ponyboy to take a hard swig.

Ponyboy beams at him, having been the one to finish up first. "I told you it wasn't so hard once you get working on it. We'll be eating off that elk for awhile." Unlike earlier, where he'd been seemingly forcing himself to get through everything, he seems normal again.

It had been a lot of work to get an animal that big cut open, to remove the parts of it they could and transport it to the church. The rest of the day had been swallowed by that task, of how to best store it, and taking a few chances with what they had. Then Dallas had to go back to get the clothes together, bring them back and he was feeling too exhausted for much else.

"Thank Christ," Dallas coughs as he feels the whisky beginning to warm him from the inside. "Was getting kinda close with all those thefts we've been doing." He leans back with a groan, not willing to get back up for anything major again. "You look at the papers I got two days ago?"

The crate is in a corner of the church, overflowing with books, magazines, newspapers. Ponyboy shakes his head, standing up to get it, bringing it over to Dallas. They both root through it, until he sees a photo he hasn't come across before, beneath a huge headline.

He'd just grabbed a stack of newspapers, half hidden in the back. There had been days worth of them and for the first time, he pulls one out to fully view it. There are three pictures on there splashed in color: to the very left was a photo of Johnny Cade dressed in a gaudy red suit, with his hair styled in that rich, weird way that most of the Soc boys had for a cotillion. It clearly was taken at one, given all the people surrounding him, dressed to the nines, beaming. Johnny looks small yet is clearly the wealthiest person in the entire group, balloons emerging from the top, halfway to falling in an array of blue, white, and red behind him. It's been taken at one of the big dance halls, right at the very end of the night if Dallas had to guess.

Between that is a mug shot Dallas taken a few months ago: his face bloodied from the fight he'd been in with Tim Shepard minutes before it had been taken, snarling at the camera, glaring at the cop who'd taken it.

Big deal. He must have fifty of those.

It's the third picture that really has him pausing: it's a photo of Ponyboy from probably a year or two ago with a significant more amount of baby fat on his face. His hair is neatly combed, and he's wearing a light pink shirt on him, posed for a school picture with a shy smile on his face. His cheeks look pinker, the freckles that have started to bloom on his skin in the weeks that they've been here are absent and he's clearly unpresented.

Dallas finds himself reading not the headline, but the article beneath: "In the twilight hours of September 25th, 1965, the body of Johnathan Cade Jr., the son of lauded industrialist and businessman Johnathan Cade Sr., was found in Crutchfield Park. The sixteen year old boy was said to have been found in a pool of his own blood, his head almost entirely severed from his neck." He doesn't see Ponyboy tense; doesn't have to, with the way that his scent flares up, shifts into clear distress. "Within hours, the Tulsa County police department then determined from various witnesses that his friend, Ponyboy Curtis, one of the remaining Curtis heirs, was missing. Despite a frantic seventy-two hour search, it has been concluded that more than likely, he has been kidnapped by the only person named consistently by witnesses to have stabbed Cade: Dallas Winston."

He puts the newspaper down. Ponyboy is pale beside him, his worry palpable, eyes on the newspaper in front of him. He reaches over to take it from Dallas, and reluctantly, Dallas hands it over.

He doesn't know what to say, doesn't know what to think for a moment as Ponyboy continues in a shaky voice: "Youth groups across Tulsa have been rocked with the information of their fallen and missing classmates. As of this article, few pieces of evidence have been found with regards to the murder — the most damning piece found thus far being the vehicle that was gifted to Cade earlier this year, a white Lincoln Continental. It was submerged in the Arkansas river, and retrieved in the early hours of Sunday morning. This- This was witnessed by various people as the vehicle was retrieved and remanded into police custody."

Ponyboy's voice breaks over the last word.

"You don't have to keep reading it," Dallas says, looking at the way Ponyboy's voice is pallid, drawn now. "We ain't going back there." He snaps out, "Never."

Ponyboy puts the paper down, his voice shaking, "I was thinking about —- about my family, Dallas. About what's happening, about what they're doing. Don't you — don't you wonder about them? About what's going on in Tulsa? Cherry, she was your friend. Don't you wonder? Don't you think she misses you?"

"Not the way you do," the admittance is frank from him. "Kid, I didn't have any of that. I had friends, I had my pack. I ain't saying I ain't gonna miss 'em, but I knew what I was doing. If I sit up here, if I worry about Cherry or Two-Bit, what's that gonna do for me or you?" Dallas knows that's not satisfying Ponyboy, can see it in his face. "Look, Cherry's tough, and Two-Bit ain't an idiot. They didn't have anything to do with any of this; and they both knew that I would probably just move on."

Ponyboy lowers his eyes, and puts the newspaper down. Dallas doesn't just leave it there. He takes it, tosses the newspaper into the fire.

It takes to the flames immediately, and he and Ponyboy don't talk again that night.

But, it still does linger in the back of his mind as he takes his normal place on the pew: just what was going on in Tulsa now?