zg_shadows | Mortals randomness

I have to write this otherwise I'll start acting weird and people will stare at me in the bookshop. I might just start acting weird anyway, god damn age old obsessions...

A pale figure staggered out of a quiet pub in an unremarkable London street. He wore a long, slim-fitted coat and an old style Stetson, both black. He was a little too haggard to be truly handsome and a little too thin to be well. A small pair of delicate smoked-glass spectacles hid his eyes. He paused at the door, his breathing ragged and laboured as one hand fumbled with the lid of a silver hip flask, the other held weakly to the wall for support.

God damn it - why now? He'd done nothing but sit quiet and play solitaire why did the devil have to claw in now?

Dimly through the pain and the longing for whiskey to burn it off he wondered how he'd get back to the hotel. He didn't have it in him. It had taken more than he had to get back up after that last whipping. He had no idea how he'd retrieved his hat or managed the stairs. He just knew that he refused to die down there, in that room, with the saw-bones watching and that pretty young thing he'd talked with and the two English gentlemen who claimed to know him by reputation...

Damned if he was gonna bleed his lungs out on the floor like that with them all watching.

Shaking now he lifted the hipflask to his lips, slugging the bourbon down his throat and trying not to retch on the alcohol as it cleaned the rotten blood from his mouth. His reprieve was short lived. The whiskey came right back up, accompanied by something sodden from his lungs.

He coughed, tried to spit and coughed again – a nasty wet and gravely sound like barbed wire being pulled through a drain. The hip flask slipped from his fingers as he strove to breathe; and then he was following it the floor, choking on the pavement as he tried to cough the devil out of his lungs.

But he had no strength to fight it.

His Stetson was knocked from his head as his cheek struck the pavement, but the smokey glasses stayed on, hiding his blue-grey eyes as they twitched and finally rolled back.

A clatter further along the pavement as two people approached.

"Oh – oh god – is he, like – dead?"

"I dunno... I'm not gonna touch him."

"Should we call an ambulance?"

"Yeah, but I'll bloody have his wallet and that silver thing first though..."

The universe shivered, and once where there had been only shadow, in the alcove of a doorway, there was suddenly something more.

There was the sound of a hammer being cocked on an old six-shooter and the rattle and click as the chamber rotated and the bullet slid in.

The two would-be thieves looked up, frozen in the act of their crime but unable to ignore that one clear sound.

A young woman with dark hair and darker eyes was standing not ten paces away. She wore a blood red corset and bustle skirt fringed in black lace. In one hand she held a velvet purse, in the other a derringer pistol.

"Lay one hand on him and I'll burn you down," she announced calmly, her voice low and strangely accented.

The two interlopers fled in a pounding of shoes, the woman’s gaze and pistol following their retreat until they had sprinted beyond sight. She calmly eased off the hammer and replaced the derringer in her purse before finally turning her attention to the man at her feet.

"Doc?"

She knelt beside him, retrieving his hat and flask, and removing his dark glasses so she could see his eyes. It was clear she didn’t like what she saw. She shook him gently. "Doc, come on, get up."

There was no response.

She leant over him placing one hand over his mouth, the fingers of the other pinching his nose closed. She counted the seconds, looking panicked when she reached four and there was still no change.

At six the man jack-knifed conscious, twisting onto his side to hack something up from his chest, spitting and heaving bloody mouthfuls into the gutter.

The dark-eyed woman caught him before he collapsed again, gathered him towards her, and supported him in her lap as he shook and tried to force the air into his ravaged lungs, one tiny sip at a time.

She stroked his face. "It's all right Doc, I've got you. I always got your back, don't I?"

His eyes slowly focused on his own personal angel. "D-damn you," he rasped. "Why... why couldn't you stay where I left you?"

She smiled, vixen-like and sharp. "You can't skip out of town without me knowing – I'll find you even when you high tail it to another country."

He muttered something which could have been 'Magyar witch'.

Her smile broadened and then faltered a little as she saw the expression on her lover's face.

"I told you... not to come... and I meant it."

"You don't mean it Doc," she told him. "You never mean it."

Tears of pain and frustration sparked his eyes into some semblance of life. "Damn you... to hell... Kate. Why – why can't you... let a man die in peace?"

There was a second of shocked silence.

"You're not dying!" she snarled back. "You're not dying – I'm here – I'll look after you and..."

"I'm tired, Kate." Doc Holliday's soft Southern voice cut across her anger. "So very tired."

Kate Elder blinked her dark eyes as if the wind stung them and managed a shaky smile. "A-all right. All right, Doc," she said, her voice suddenly strained. "I'll get you back to the hotel, how'd that be? And you can rest there, and you – you'll feel better tomorrow..."

The ghost of a smile twitched across his lips showing both sardonic amusement and sorrow. "That'll be just dandy," he whispered.