A/N: This timeline is moved up so Henry is still actively working with the oil company.


Chapter 37 – March 1917 – I won't let you push me away

The explosion was deafening. Black smoke came up in a vertical cloud, towering high over the valley. Years removed, the instinct was the same:

Run.

ooo

The ground had come up underneath him, slamming into his back and thrashing him up again before finally putting him down. He was still coughing, one arm thrown over his face, when Bill appeared next to him, seizing the other in a commanding grip.

"Are you alright?" Bill shouted.

"The spark must have ignited the oil!" he yelled back. "Don't worry about me, get Mike and the others!"

Hickam was covered in ash but moving, clutching his head. Nathan had run up from behind him, helping Mike while Bill got Henry to his feet. Above them all the fire raged, the wind tossing it like a curtain over the side of the derrick.

"Henry, what do we do?"

Lucas was standing on the other side of him now, and he could hear more hoofbeats on their way. Henry glared at the oil rig, calculating in his head, then gave a firm nod.

"We need dynamite. A lot of it!"

Bill and Lucas ran back to where Jesse and Ned had just arrived. Before Henry had fully caught his breath, Ned and Jesse had disappeared into the storage building and the Mounties were riding back to the lumber mill in search of explosives. More men appeared from the town, instructions shouted at them as soon as they skidded to a stop.

The fire held Henry captive, its translucent flames billowing over the sky. But he could fix it this time. He knew he could. He threw off his suit coat and vest, itching for a fight.

Her voice came to him like a flashback. Behind the explosion still ringing in his ears, some broken piece of his mind heard her distantly screaming his name. He tried to shake it off, turning his face back up to the heat. But it wouldn't leave.

"Henry!" he heard it again.

He turned.

She was there. She was actually there. Past the haze of dirty air, she was running to him. And it wasn't a dream or a memory. She had never called his name last time. But the shouts on her lips were for him now.

"Henry!"

"Abigail, get out of here!" he yelled, his hand sharply waving her away.

"What is the dynamite for?" she shouted.

"I said stay back!"

Undeterred, she didn't stop until she was in front of him.

"Let me help!"

He was ready to pull his hair out with this woman, he had never been so terrified. "Goddammit, you're going to get hurt, just go!"

"No!"

"Yes!"

"No! I'm not losing you too!"

The siren sound in his ears grew louder. He could no more look away from her frightened, stubborn eyes than he could from the blaze behind him moments before. Are you really doing this now?, he wanted to laugh, his body rushing with adrenaline. But the rest of him just wanted to look at her, just wanted to hear it again. He wanted to tell her she wouldn't lose him, that she never could. Or that he wouldn't actually mind dying so much, if that was the last thing he got to hear. She wouldn't like that one probably. But he still didn't know how to make his voice say any of those things.

She was the one to break their standoff, flicking her gaze up to the rig. He followed the worried glance behind him. The wood was shaking, bucking and leaning, the flames eating their way through. A four-foot piece of the derrick dangled dangerously at the top, ready to slice into the air at the slightest provocation. Henry didn't wait. He crushed her hand into his and ran.

The still-burning board fell less than a foot from where they had stood. Shouts and cries rang out again, men jumping back and dropping the sticks of dynamite they'd carried. Henry and Abigail watched the scene unfold from the spot they had fled to several meters away, breaths heaving from the narrow escape.

"Stay here," he ordered.

But she squeezed his hand where she still held it, turning him towards her again.

"Henry, don't. Please."

The plea hung there, desperate, unanswered. They had been here before, a dozen times.

For as long as they had known each other, there had always been too much happening in the space between them. Whether fighting or forgiving, smiling or betraying, their unspoken hunger for each other consumed the very air. It was invisible, dangerous, always on the cusp of igniting. And every time, Henry had done nothing.

But he could fix it this time. He had to fix it this time.

His hand still in hers, he pulled her hard against him, knowing he would have to let go again much too soon. That he might never feel her in his arms like this again. He needed her to know. Even if it would only ever be this once. For eight years he had been holding his breath, and now it was hers.

She had kissed Henry a hundred times, in almost a hundred different ways. She knew the sturdy grasp of his hand behind her head. She knew the way his fingers tensed inside her palm, the way hers twined into his hair to keep him close. She knew the scratch of his stubble against her flushed skin, the warmth of his lips as they opened to her, and the fierceness of his embrace as he took her. She knew every inch of his body and where it fit against hers.

But none of it had ever been real.

His chest was softer, his mouth hotter. The untouched parts of her body flared with a need even her imagination had not considered. The insistence with which he captured and recaptured her lips made her grip his arm in a way she never had to in her dreams. It was strange and familiar and terrifying and wonderful, and she wanted to keep it so badly that she was still shaking when he let her go, pushing their fused bodies apart to disappear back into the fray without another word or glance.

She watched helplessly as he left her, her mind trying to clear its haze. But in front of her the dark clouds still hung across the sky like a shroud. Flames licked over the rig, their heat reaching all the way back to the air around her. The men continued loading mountain after mountain of dynamite into barrels, Henry's determined figure now moving back and forth among them.

Henry came to stand at the front of a pushcart and terror churned up in her throat. He was separated from the dynamite and the fire by only a metal shield that barely reached above his height. At the back, dotted across the span of the long handle, Ned and Fiona called to him, looking uncertain. She couldn't hear the words he shouted back, but she knew without coming closer that he was clenching his jaw, his harsh clip cutting off their objections.

One strong leg stretched back into a runner's stance. In one final moment of preparation he hung his head, and if he were a praying man she would know that was what he was doing now. She covered her face with her hands, the anticipation too painful to watch. The helpers' bodies held tense at their positions, waiting for Henry's signal to puncture the suspense. Too soon and not soon enough, the sharp command came.

The line surged forward…

Too close. He was too close…

She shut her eyes…

Another explosion rocked the ground and then she was running, running again, running to the mine.

ooo

She kept going until the darkness of the abandoned tunnel swallowed her. Around her the imposing stone waited as she sucked in staggering breaths of damp chilled air. Her panic had brought her here, unbidden, to face the judgment of these walls. Years raced through her head as she stared at their blank craggy slates, thoughts and confusions and heartaches all jumbling together.

What happens to your children if they lose you? Who puts roofs over their heads then?

Peter, you know you don't have to…

Believe it or not, I cared about what happened to you after your husband passed.

It's going to be okay.

What you are, Mrs. Stanton, is my superintendent's wife.

Forgive me, Pa.

She did not have to wait long for the clamor of his footsteps to come behind her, as she had expected they would. Nonetheless fuming when she heard them echo against the rock wall, she pushed herself out from the shadows, her cries bounding across the space before he could even call her name.

"How could you do that?" she shouted as soon as he came into view. "How could you do that after all this time, in the middle of something dangerous like that when you know…"

"Because I'm tired of not doing it!" Henry's voice snapped back to her. He was covered in dirt, still stripped down to his rolled-up sleeves. "You showing up there, scared out of your wits, saying you couldn't lose me? That was the first time since the accident I actually felt like I had something to live for."

"No," she shook her head wildly, refusing to listen. "No, I can't do this. I have to go."

"How many times are you going to do this, Abigail? How many times are you going to try to bury yourself next to them?"

"Until it works!" she cried.

Her desperation reverberated over the rock, its force surrounding them.

"Do you want to know why I keep trying to stay in line? Why I keep acting what you so astutely called 'morally superior'?" she goaded him. "Because every time I try to tell people what I want, it's a mistake. Even you. Especially you. Every time I come to you, you leave!"

"I was spiteful and selfish and I'm sorry," he huffed out, his curtness belying any actual apology. "I was upset because you didn't come to me. I was upset because I thought you were the person who would stay. The person who would believe in me. But you didn't. Even the day of that stupid dance, when Bill found that letter. You acted like I was finally absolved, like I was finally worthy."

The accusation made her so angry she didn't even bother defending herself.

"Is that why you told me about Noah? To throw something in my face?"

He jabbed a finger across the air at her, mouth twisted in vindication.

"The fact that you can even ask me that? Tells me exactly what you think of me."

Her fists curled, nails digging into her skin as they shook violently in the air, a final tremor before she exploded.

"I'm tired of thinking of you!" she roared, the words bursting forward like a vicious animal. "Do you know how shameful I felt in those weeks after the accident? To have my thoughts drift from Noah to you and not be able to tell which loss hurt more? To have them be anything alike? How could I come to you, feeling that way? I needed to hate you, Henry, I didn't have a choice! Every time I saw you it would only remind me that I'd made a devil's bargain."

Henry tried to respond, but she wasn't about to let him make excuses now that she had gotten started.

"You can be bitter all you want about how I turned on you after the accident, and you can tell me again that I'm running away, but you know what, Henry? You left me first." Her glare mirrored his now, all their old wounds bleeding across the earth between them. "And then the night of that stupid dance, after everything that had changed since, after I came back to you again? You still walked away. I broke the rules, Henry?" she scoffed. "Well, you broke my heart. The truth is I never would have written that letter if you hadn't tossed me out in the cold, if you hadn't treated me like I meant nothing."

"You think that's what I wanted?" he forced back, his body poised in attack.

"You've never told me what you wanted!"

"You're damn right I didn't! Because when you touched my hand that day in the church, I knew in my bones that I could not endure another borrowed moment. Pieces of you were never going to be enough for me." His voice turned savage, the growl of it making chills run up her spine. "I needed every second, every inch, every breath. I wanted to tear your husband apart with my bare hands any time he even looked at you. If I didn't give you up I would have destroyed everything to get what I wanted, just like I always do."

She backed away again, her body tight. "No. Don't say this now… You don't get to say this now. Not when you know how much I needed it then."

"What was I supposed to do?" he pleaded. "Confess everything with your husband standing on the other side of you? Go to work with them in the morning knowing I'd been with you the night before? I'm a lot of horrible things, Abigail, but that's not one of them."

"It didn't have to be that way, Henry. We could have done it differently, if you'd just – "

"If I'd what? If I'd said something? And then what?" He shook his head. "It was too risky, Abigail. For all I knew, I was just a diversion."

Her cold fury chilled the air again, the crisp indignation of her voice rising with every word. "And is that how little you think of me? That I would have offered to run away with you... that I would have risked my family… if you were just a diversion?!" she shouted.

"You didn't offer, remember?" he spat, advancing on her again. "You never gave me that letter! And we both know why," he said, eyes blazing. "Because it was a fantasy. Yes, it was the right thing, and yes, we were protecting Noah and Peter, but the rest of it? The truth? The truth is we were never going to do it. Not in a town like this."

In an instant, she knew he was right. Whatever armor had remained crumbled against the blunt blow, and suddenly all she could see was the endless mosaic of scars they had inflicted upon each other.

Defeated, they both laid down their swords. When Henry spoke again, it was the voice of the broken man to whom she had once promised mercy.

"We couldn't hide here, and we couldn't leave," he said. "And every time I remember that day, I have to remember that I hated this town because of it. I have to remember that I hated Noah, because I didn't hate him enough to betray him. And I have to remember that as soon as he showed me that letter, that I had every intention of betraying him anyway. No matter what warnings I gave to the company, no matter all the good I've tried to do since, I still have to live with what was in my heart when those men died."

His hand pressed hard against his chest, as though the hatred that had burned inside of him that day might rekindle and escape back into the mine. She could only wait in silence, her own exhausted heart having no reassurances to offer him.

"It's taken me a very long time and a lot of suffering to feel like I've served any of my rightful penance, and to feel like I have the right to say any of this to you. And I have never wished for you to go through anything like what I endured," he said, his voice thick. "But I told you the truth about that day because you needed to know it before I could tell you the rest. And if God had seen fit to take me from this world today, then I sure as hell wasn't going to leave before you heard me say the rest."

Thoroughly depleted, Abigail dropped weary hands to her sides. "What else is there?"

"I love you, Abigail. I have been in love with you from the first day we met and every day since. And I have gritted my teeth and told myself not to be, but I cannot keep sacrificing. Not for them… and not even for you." His eyes held her with a hardened resolve. "We can deny ourselves everything we want for the rest of our lives, trying to feel as much pain as they felt, but it is never going tomake us even. That's the lot that we have to live with. But dammit, Abigail, we are still allowed to live."

She hung her head, her humorless laugh a macabre echo inside their tomb. She could feel them all, underneath her feet, waiting for her response. Her tears watered their burial ground as she shook her head at the blurry figure waiting in front of her.

"You may have learned to live with it, Henry. But I haven't. I'm sorry."