The door creaked, and in the dull silence, he half expected the scrape of Death’s scythe dragging over the wooden floor.
Instead, he heard a soft voice.
“Neddie?”
He took a deep breath to keep from crying and rubbed his face. “I— I’m h-here. Just gathering some things…” He pretended to look through the papers scattered under the counter, but only stained his hands with ink from a container the clerk must have knocked over in his final minutes.
Even the blue liquid smelled like blood.
Cole’s boots thudded against the floor as he made his way into the office and approached Ned, his gait heavy like Ned’s heartbeat.
Silence, and then, “What have they done?”
Ned gasped for air, unable to keep in a sob in the face of such questions. He covered his face, embarrassed by this moment of weakness. “It’s my fault,” he choked out.
Cole sank behind him and grabbed Ned with both arms, pulling him against his chest. “No. No, no, no, Neddie. It’s not. Don’t you ever say that,” Cole insisted in a whisper. “This is mad. They poisoned the whole town. With the wine, with food, they surely poisoned the wells too.”
Ned shook his head. He didn’t deserve the hug. “If I intervened when they attacked Scotch, none of this would have happened. I wanted an outlaw life, freedom, you, not… this.”
The scent of Cole’s body couldn’t bring Ned peace this time, but the arms surrounding him brought some relief. “You couldn't have foreseen this. I… I grew up here, and now everyone’s dead. Even that poor shopkeeper who used to give me extra raisins whenever my mother sent me to buy them. I can’t believe it’s come to this,” he whispered, pressing his face to Ned’s shoulder, his breaths coming in hurried gasps. He hugged Ned tighter when someone fired their gun out in the street.
When Ned closed his eyes, he couldn’t even find solace in darkness, because the emptiness under his eyelids instantly filled with memories of blue faces, bodies contorted in agony, blood on a girl’s shift, and the child stuck in a sandwich board as if it were a rat trap. He’d stabbed several lifeless bodies, but while they couldn’t feel pain or fear anymore, he’d never forget how his knife plunged into their defenseless necks. He held on to Cole’s arms as if they were the only thing still holding him on the surface in an endless sea of misery.
Cole inhaled against Ned’s skin, as if it helped him regain composure, and remained very quiet after that, listening to the shouts and cries coming from the town. But they could be safe for only so long in their little hideout.
“I don’t think I can stay after this. And I don’t think you can either,” Cole whispered.
“You heard Tom. He doesn’t let anyone leave.”
He’d wanted to let Ned go, and with lots of money at that, but what good would that have been if Ned couldn’t have Cole at his side? He would have failed his mission too, but at that point he’d forgotten all about that, as if his commitments to his dead parents and the Pinkertons had never been made. “Don’t worry about m-me. I just need a moment. I’ll be fine.” He’d closed his heart off to violence before, and he could survive this too.
“You said you joined for me. Well, I’m not staying,” Cole said with more force and pulled on Ned’s arm, trying to meet his gaze. “I’ve been through a lot with Tom and Zeb. But this? I won’t stand for this.”
Cole’s words were the light at the end of a tunnel filled with thorns, and even if the spirits of all those murdered here followed them farther west, at least they’d be together.
“You’d leave them behind?” Ned whispered, turning in Cole’s arms to face him.
Cole’s Adam’s apple bobbed, but he cupped Ned’s face and stroked it with his thumbs, so very gently. “Even if I still wanted to follow them, I would leave. Because you can’t stay. This is no life for you, and we both know that. Between Tom and you… well, that choice is clear,” he said, his mouth curving into a soft smile.
Ned had to wipe away another tear as he stared into the eyes of the man who understood him so well despite not knowing the dark secret he carried in his heart every day. He hadn’t realized how much he needed to know that Cole would choose him over Tom.
“And where would we go?”
Cole bit his lip and leaned in, resting his forehead against Ned’s, as if he needed closeness too. “California, of course. So you can have your stables, and we can live like upstanding citizens. I hear San Francisco is a city easy to get lost in.”
“And far away. By the ocean.” Ned’s heart woke to this fantasy despite the guilt and grief caused by what he’d participated in. He yearned to leave it all behind, and if Cole chose to do that for him, couldn’t Ned let go of his old life as well?