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A/N: The Interlude is going to skip pretty quickly over the first six seasons of the show and then Part II will take off from the S6 finale / prologue. To refresh your memory, the S6 finale is where the letter was found that says Henry tried to warn the Company about the safety conditions in the mine. But please note this is NOT a fandom-blind story; there will be things I won't rehash or explain. For instance, it's assumed that you would know that Peter and Noah were acting strangely in Part I because they were bothered by the safety issues at the mine and that Peter was hiding his relationship with Clara, but also that Abigail didn't know any of this at the time, so she perceived it all differently. Similarly, I won't go into detail about everything that happened between Henry and Abigail in the show leading up to this point, though some of it will be explored through the narrative, and it's good to know the Christmas special between S3 and S4. Obviously with this reimagined backstory, some things from canon won't have happened quite the same way, but the rough arc of it can be assumed to have happened. (Except Henry acting sleazy with her in that one first-season episode, lol – I don't have a retcon for that.)

Also, brief mention of vomit in this chapter.

Thanks for reading!


Interlude – Dare to sit and watch what we'll become

Anyone in this town could tell you he'd been to prison. It was all right there, etched into the public record: Henry John Gowen, misuse of public funds, eight months served.

What they couldn't tell you is that he'd spent his whole life in one prison or another.

Childhood poverty wasn't unknown to the people of Hope Valley; he wasn't special in that regard. Some of them might even scoff or roll their eyes at him using it as some kind of excuse for all the terrible things he'd done. Maybe they were right – he could probably admit that to himself now. But it seemed to him they were content with their lot because they had each other, some kind of community. All he'd had was the dirt and the paddles, sisters who died because his parents couldn't afford to keep them alive, and parents who lived on because they couldn't afford to die. Acres of misery and monochrome that they couldn't even call their own. He had to get out. He could not die there, a destitute soul bound to a forsaken landscape.

But the city proved no better. He was every day a witness to all the wealth and opportunity a man could have, yet still like a little boy locked out in the snow, his hands pressed against the glass. Though on his own now, he could relish no real freedom. The coldness and ruthlessness needed to rip the stale bread from a dog's mouth or to pull a knife on someone before they could do it to you – these were not choices, they were necessities for survival. Scheming your way into a job, undercutting anyone who would take it away – these weren't questions of what to do, only how you would do it. Loyalty and conscience were sold to the highest bidder. Money was the only option, the only goal.

That's not to say he didn't come by anything honestly. He was smart, he did work hard, he did learn the mining business inside and out. Some part of him genuinely liked it, and liked knowing he was good at it. But the only difference between men whose aim is to get rich and men whose aim is to stay rich is the shine on their shoes. The fear of losing – the fear of simply not having – would never let him be free.

She was the only thing he had ever let go. She was the only thing he couldn't bear to ruin. Staying away from her was the only honorable thing he had ever done.

ooo

Everything happened at the same time, and then all at the same time it stopped.

The morning of the explosion existed now in the flashes of detail that had managed to take hold through the colorless haze of dread. She remembered the sound of feet on the ground. She remembered the crumbling faces of women who had flung open their doors at the blast, hoping desperately to find a different explanation on the other side of them. She remembered little Liam's bicycle, thrown down on its side in the grass. She remembered Florence pulling Carla's arm around her shoulders, her features set with determination and swallowed panic as she dragged the sobbing woman forward.

The mine was a blur of bodies and voices, clanging metal and shattered stone. An impossibly dark cloud had engulfed the morning's rainbow and every surrounding inch of blue. Several of the women who had run toward the sound seemed to freeze before some invisible line in the dirt, as though crossing it might provoke the earth to further rage. Others charged ahead, nothing left to risk. Martha Green had gotten halfway to the entrance before Franklin Palmer was shoving her back, fighting her until her legs gave out. She'd curled up into the ashy ground, still crying out for Tommy.

Abigail had rushed forward to fall beside her. She rocked the wailing woman in her arms as Peter's own name pulsed like a siren inside her head. More women were coming forward then, trying to push through the black billow of dust and the lines of men streaming down the road, shouting at them to stay back.

"Noah!" Abigail had shouted, calling out as loudly as she could above the fray. Her husband should be running. Her husband should be above ground. He would help. He would help them. "Noah!"

But it was Henry who found her. Henry who looked up from the top of the brick building where he had been clawing furiously at levers and gauges. Henry whose eyes on hers made reality finally come into focus. His suits had been shed and his face was dirty, but he was alive. Oh thank God, thank God he was alive. Relief shuddered through her, her heart resting for the smallest of seconds. Against all sense, she put her faith in him, silently begging for him to make this one thing right.

It was another thing he would never be able to give her. The hard terror that had sharpened his face sank slowly into an anguish that had already passed between them too many times. His lips parted and softened, his chest heaved, his eyes locked onto hers. Unable to scream, he curled his fingers, digging his hands into the controls.

Controls that Noah wasn't at.

No, no, noPlease, no.

When he dropped his head, she knew.

They weren't coming out. They weren't coming back. Everything she loved was gone.

In front of the ash-filled sky she had fallen forward, her hands clutching at the dirt, her tears offered in sacrifice to the earth. She begged God to take it back. She promised to be better, she promised to be faithful, she promised everything, if He would please please just take it back…

The echoes of her pleas mocked her in the silence of the empty house, goading her into remembering the terrible entreaties she had made just the night before. Racked with anger and self-loathing she grabbed up the firewood, letting it scratch at her as she threw it into the stove. When the flames grew high and fierce, she flung her notebook in too, unopened.

What I would be willing to give up for it. Vomit rose up in her throat at the memory of her words. She dropped, heaving on all fours, trying to purge what she couldn't burn. She crawled to the stairs, the acid left behind to eat at the floor. It didn't matter. In Peter's bed she cried out, wailing his name, praying that somehow the fire below would follow to consume her too. If she died, she would deserve it. She would welcome it.

But of course, she lived. She lived to bury her husband, and her son, and her friends' husbands, and her friends' sons. Forty-seven burials over ninety-five days, each growing quieter and quieter until there was nothing left to say.

Peter and Noah had been found within two days of each other, allowing her to bury them together. She was thankful for that much, not sure she could have gone through it twice. She hated even using the word: burial.

She'd clutched Molly's hand to keep herself from running forward to rip the top off Peter's coffin. It wasn't right, she wanted to scream. He needed air now. He needed to feel it on his face, suck it down into his lungs. Why were they making her put him back into this box, back into the ground? Why were they all standing over him with their shovels, packing him back inside a darkness that had finally let him go?

It was unbearable. Endlessly cruel. And through all of it – every drone of prayer, every thud of dirt – she had to abide Henry, watching her say goodbye.

He had been obliged to attend all the services, even as resentment and distrust of the company grew with each passing day. Flanked by two Pinkertons the company had brought on for security, he stepped up and offered her his condolences in the most solemn manner. And she hated it. She hated that she was trying to honor her husband with someone standing across from her who knew precisely how often she hadn't. She hated that she had felt even a moment's peace at seeing him alive that day. She hated that some part of her still sought the slightest bit of comfort from him.

And she hated that he never offered it.

ooo

How do you learn how to love when you've never been loved?

And if you've never been loved, how can you trust anyone to love you?

Abigail Stanton wanted to know him. Somehow he could tell that, even from the beginning – that she truly and without agenda wanted to know who he was. This frightened him with a fierceness it took him several years to understand, seizing him into a silence he often regretted but never overcame.

What would she say if she knew how much of that toy collection she found so charming had been stolen? What would she say if she knew to how many towns he'd traveled to pay off injured miners? What would she say if she knew Jane wasn't the only person he'd left behind in Hamilton?

He had abandoned his son, too, rather than let him down. Henry knew well his mistakes yet seemed cursed to repeat them. Another fault to add to the list.

But even though she may not have understood the ways he had tried… even if it hadn't been enough… he had given her more of himself than he had given anyone.

After the accident, he knew there would be no going back. Even before she targeted him and the company, he knew. Transgression and tragedy had driven their wedge between them, making any repair impossible.

And yet every time she didn't try in her stubborn way to overcome that wedge… every time she didn't come to him in her grief despite how raw he knew it was… every time she let herself be courted by some other man… it convinced him he was right. That once she had seen the worst of him, she had realized there was nothing to love.

That didn't mean he didn't still try to come between her and Bill, or try to run Frank Hogan out of her life once he discovered the preacher's past. He wasn't proud of that. He wasn't proud of most things he had done before his conviction, but for some reason he had still done them. He watched her move on in a way that he couldn't, tainted as he was in the aftermath of the mining trial, and he punished her for it. He kneaded the loss and the pain into his anger and let it harden.

Anyway, he told himself, it was better this way. Now she would never have to know the truth. Now it could never hurt her.

ooo

The fight made her feel alive. Despite his accusations about her self-righteousness, she couldn't help the jolt she got from just being there with him like this. She was leaning insistently across the table in the saloon, the two of them shouting with a long-denied familiarity. It was all emphasis and brazenness, coming so close to honesty. And then…

A while ago that might have meant something to me.

The sentence had sent her spiraling. Her mind came hurtling back to a turning point she had shoved far back into the shadows of her shame. That first moment when she had dared to hope.

Had he really invested in her business because he… cared about her? He had certainly had a strange way of showing it for the past several years. Trying to blame Noah for the explosion. Threatening her over the investigation and the café. And of course, the complete rejection of her and every minute they had spent together before the accident.

But he had also let them work for their homes, if she could count that. And he had sent for Nora so she would know the truth about Bill. He'd nearly started a town riot over the brick thrown through her window. And – she realized with a start, the imminent threat of it having long faded – he had still never told anyone what she had done that day in the church.

She didn't know what any of this meant, or what she even wanted it to mean. She had no idea of her feelings until she found herself in his house – a place that had taken up her imagination on that rainy night but where she hadn't dared go – asking if they could start over.

Things changed then. More time passed, his actions reflected through new eyes. She could hardly believe it when he came to the café after the commissary opened. Other than that fight over the mayorship, it was the closest they'd come to anything like intimacy since before the accident. Every new kindness they shared, every shy smile… it all made her believe they could go back. That he had actually cared for her. When he risked jail time to rescue Becky, it became nearly impossible to ignore.

But the ghosts were everywhere. She had foolishly overthought his behaviors before, and for all of her certainty the end result had been her being humiliated in his office and pulling away from her family in what turned out to be their final months together. To allow herself to hope or want again seemed just as devastating now as it had turned out to be then, and she'd resolved to learn her lesson this time. She reminded herself every time her resistance began to falter that he was still the person who had been in charge of the mine. That he was still at the heart of her most terrible sin.

Yet every time life showed her another path, it seemed she couldn't help but run off of it. Always, somehow, she would find the one that brought her back to Henry.

ooo

She wasn't supposed to forgive him. She wasn't supposed to come to his house and tell him that she needed him. She wasn't supposed to lean into him and kiss his cheek, lips marking him like a brand, the perfume of her skin resurfacing memories he had forced himself to shut away. She wasn't supposed to see him there in court, a disgraced criminal with nothing to offer, and still be able to say he was someone she loved.

She wasn't supposed to still want all of him. No one else ever had.

Optimism had gotten the best of him. That wasn't something he could often say about himself. But the possibility that they could connect with one another again, as this Henry and this Abigail… That they could even dream of creating something new that didn't ring with the echoes of the explosion or have the spectres of the Stanton men as its backdrop… That they could step out of the smoke and wreckage and find a new path forward… He felt more greed for that future than any fortune he'd ever pursued.

But as much as this Abigail thought she forgave this Henry, she didn't know the whole truth. She didn't know the whole truth about either of them.

Because what people in this town couldn't tell you is that there are other prisons a man can make for himself. They are built from love and a sense of honor. They are built from sacrifice and denial. They are built from falling rock.