InsaneJournal

Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	gunpowder and lead, yeah i can ship them what what

AI Fic: Gunpowder and Lead 22/22
TITLE: Gunpowder and Lead
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: R
RATING: Carly/Michael, David/Kim
SUMMARY: That’s what little girls are made of.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for dvbb, inspired by/loose interpretation of Bad Girls, which is an awesome movie that needs to have much more of a fandom, and why doesn’t it have more of a fandom?
DISCLAIMER: Somehow, I am not laboring under the impression that Carly, Syesha, Kim, or Brooke were ever outlaws in 1891. Nor am I under the delusion that I own any part of the copyright to Bad Girls. It’s a hard old world.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten
Part Eleven
Part Twelve
Part Thirteen
Part Fourteen
Part Fifteen
Part Sixteen
Part Seventeen
Part Eighteen
Part Nineteen
Part Twenty
Part Twenty-One



Part Twenty-Two

Kim had helped David with the feeding and care of the stock when his shoulder was still healing, every day, not bothering to pretend that she didn’t know what she was doing. He had been terribly amused by the sight, her with her hair pulled back and in long trousers rather than the pretty skirt that she had been wearing when he had met her, and had become even more amused when Kim had forked the hay over the fence to the cattle for the first time while hardly losing a blade.

“You are just all kinds of surprises, aren’t you?” he had asked her as he had leaned up against the fence himself, one leg cocked up onto the lowest rung in a manner that he needed to stop immediately if he expected her to continue being a lady, that sweet, curling smile lifting up one corner of his mouth.

“Maybe I can just wear many faces,” Kim had said tartly, pushing the hat that David had lent her back farther on her head. It was too big, and fell down into her eyes whenever she was not careful. David thus far had proven himself very fond of pushing it back for her.

Now, with his shoulder healed up and the sling gone, he still watched her throwing hay over the fence as if she had been doing it her whole life with that wryly arched brow, those eyes that always seemed to have something moving and working beyond them gleaming. “Many faces, huh?” David said, taking the pitchfork from her and throwing several loads of hay over the fence himself. The cattle lowed and jostled each other out of the way in order to reach the feed; it had been a dry summer, and the need for supplemental feeding was coming early. David had already expressed concerns about paying for the animals through the winter. He had rebuffed all of their attempts to pay him for all that he had done for them over the past few weeks, saying it was only something that he would have done all the same because it was right, and that what wasn’t right was for a man to get a reward for the basic decency that he ought to be performing all along. “Where does a lady like yourself get experience in feeding cattle, or is that a Mardi Gras mask that I’ve never heard of before?”

“Well.” Kim studied the way that the sunlight gleamed faintly off of the sleek, worn wood of the pitchfork. It kept her from looking at David’s face, which was more open and curious than she had ever before seen it, or at his shoulders, which were damp with enough sweat to make his shirt stick to him, and Kim to nearly forget that there were two people watching them from the porch. “Maybe it’s because I’m not actually from New Orleans, and I’m not actually any kind of lady.” David leaned the pitchfork against the fence and, ignoring the dissatisfied cattle for the moment, went very still, watching her. “Maybe I grew up on a little spread just like this, and lit out the minute that I turned sixteen to find adventure, romance, and a rich man to marry me.” She laughed; she hadn’t been that girl in nearly a decade, and it was hard to still remember her. “Didn’t get the first until recently, and the third used me up and left me in the middle of the French Quarter without a penny to my name.” Kim pressed her lips together, not certain that she wanted David to know what she had done to make those pennies after that. He was a good man, and good men with very rigid ideas of what that goodness meant didn’t often have a lot of kindness left over for women like her.

“A rancher’s daughter, huh?” David took the pitchfork back and began tracing patterns in the dirt with it rather than resuming the feeding. He was looking at his feet, Kim could not tell what his expression was. “Would you be mad at me if I told you that I was relieved?”

“Why ever would I be mad at you?” Kim blurted out, only to consider again a second later. “And why would you be relieved?”

David leaned the pitchfork up against the fence again, took both of Kim’s hands into his own. He was not wearing gloves, so Kim could feel every callus, see every stain and line of dirt etched into his knuckles. “How you can chew your nails when you have some of the filthiest hands that I’ve ever seen in my life, I don’t know,” she said before she could stop herself.

David laughed long and loud, leaning back, and would have let go of Kim’s hands if she had not tightened her grip and refused to let him go. “You’re killing me here, Kim,” he said. Beneath the laughter, something in his voice made Kim abruptly go still. “What about the second?” he asked her. “How much luck have you had finding that?”

“Less than I’d like,” Kim said faintly.

“Don’t get mad at me for saying so, Kim, but you have no idea how glad I am to hear that,” David said. His face was turning slightly pink, and he had stopped blushing around her about the same time that he had been shot protecting her and hers. “And as much as you would make a fine New Orleans lady, I’m glad that you’re not one of those, either, because I can’t imagine that a lady from the city would ever be able to be happy out here, and I desperately want you to stay with me.”

“Oh.” Kim was too surprised to make any other sound. The idea of staying here, with David, and being the one to warm his bed and the one to make him laugh that special laugh was a long way from the most unappealing thing that she had ever heard. The longer that she let it settle into her mind, the better it became. But. What she had been, what she was. “David, I’ve done things for money.”

He understood immediately. Kim felt him lean back slightly, but he did not let go of her hands, and not just because she would not have let him go. “That doesn’t mean a damned thing.” He said it with enough ferocity to make Kim think that he was lying, a little, but would make it true through sheer force of will if that was what it took. “And I don’t want you here just to be my woman, Kim, I think that I should make that very clear. I want you here as something else.”

When he went down to one knee, Kim’s jaw fell open like a hinge, and it was long enough to make him visibly nervous before she was able to give her answer.

*
Brooke leaned up against the porch railing, Syesha beside her, and watched the silhouettes of Kim and David out by the corral, not nearly as hidden by the haystack as they were probably telling themselves. When David went down to one knee, Brooke sighed.

“Think we’ll get lucky?” Syesha asked. “Think she’ll say no?”

Brooke thought back to how she had felt when her own husband had proposed to her, how short a time she had had to think before giving the only possible answer that she could have given, and laid it against the expression that Kim had been swanning about the ranch with ever since they had been laid up here over the past few weeks.

“No,” Brooke said finally. “She’s not going to say no.”

“Goddamnit,” Syesha muttered, her tone dark and fierce. Brooke poked her in the side. “I know, I want her to be happy as much as you do, I just don’t want us to lose people.” She jerked her head back in the direction of the kitchen, where a faint argument could be heard coming through the open kitchen window. “Who the hell knows what’s going to happen with that, for that matter?”

“Three out of four’s not bad,” Brooke insisted. Syesha laid her head down upon Brooke’s shoulder; that about as close to agreement as Brooke figured that she was going to get.

*
It was good beyond words to see Michael with color in his cheeks again. It would have been better if he hadn’t been driving Carly absolutely fucking insane as a part of regaining his high humor, but it was still good. She shoved another log of wood into the stove, not quite to the point where she could picture it being his head, not after the close shave still only a few weeks back, but getting there. And Michael himself wasn’t helping his case.

“Has anyone ever told you,” Carly said as she slammed the coffee pot down on top of the stove so that it could boil. Water sloshed hot, hit the hot metal, hissed and disappeared again with seconds. Carly glared and imagined that it was running from her. “Has anyone ever told you that you are the single most obnoxious invalid that has ever walked this earth?”

Michael grinned at her. He had a good grin; Carly had not had an occasion to see enough of it, even now when it was all said and done and they had nothing in particular to do but get on with their lives and get the hell north before the law less than twenty miles away realized that David Cook was no longer entertaining only himself out here. It was taking him a little while to figure out what he was supposed to be doing with himself, now that Nigel was dead and revenge couldn’t be the only thing that defined him any longer. Carly was doing a little bit of that herself.

Of course, that didn’t stop the part where she meant every word she said, and Michael was the biggest pain in the ass that she had ever met in her life. He eased himself back a little further in the kitchen chair, putting his hand against his back and wincing. There were pink lines criss-crossing his shoulders and the line of his spine, Carly had seen them shortly after Lei had come back to take the stitches out of the gunshot wound, but it was the bullet hole that was taking the longest of all to heal. He hadn’t explained the meaning of the earlier bullet scar on his shoulder. Since Carly had a few scars of her own with backstories that she would rather keep to herself, she didn’t ask. Not yet.

“It’s not my fault that you can’t cook,” Michael answered coolly. There was still a burning smell in the air.

“And you can?” Carly snapped over her shoulder at him. Michael’s eyebrow went up. “That’s it, you’re done pulling this invalid shit, it’s time to start pulling your weight.”

Michael put his hands down flat against the top of the table and pushed himself to his feet. Still wasn’t quite as graceful as he had once been, making Carly feel a little guilty about the pulling his weight crack, but he was getting there. He proved it by how quickly and ably he took Carly by the arm and tugged her against him. Their mouths barely brushed before Carly pulled away, and Michael made a disappointed sound.

“You’re killing me here,” Michael said, seemed to realize the weight of his words a second later. One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Sorry.” Leaned in close again. “You said some things to me, right after I was shot.”

“I remember you saying a few things, too,” Carly answered him. Michael’s eyes first clouded and then widened; oh, he definitely remembered. “Yeah. All of those.” At the sound of two sets of footsteps tromping up the porch steps, Carly flashed him a smile that made her feel, oh, so much younger than she had ever thought to feel again and then went out. She felt Michael’s stare on the back of her neck as he followed.

David and Kim were coming up the porch steps and into the house, leaning up against each other and holding hands. Carly would have recognized Kim’s grin anywhere. Syesha and Brooke knew the look, too, it was obvious in their faces. They had been waiting for these two to take that final leap for the last two weeks, it was about damned time.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Carly said, and pulled Kim into the hardest hug that she could manage. Kim made an oofing noise as her ribs creaked and then hugged Carly back, laughing.

“And here I thought that I was going to be able to surprise you,” she said.

“Kim, the only people that you would be surprising at this point are the blind,” Carly answered. She let Kim go only so that she could hug David, too; he was startled by it and took a few seconds before he gripped her back. After that, Carly decided that he was a good hugger, and wished that she had more time to make friends with the man who was going to marry one of her closest friends. She had a feeling that they would have been good ones.

“I’m happy for you, Kim,” Syesha said as she hugged Kim next, though she sounded as if she was struggling not to cry at the same time. Didn’t make the joy any less real, or Brooke’s when she took her turn next. “Don’t guess that you’d be wanting to give it up and still go on the run with us with a wedding band on your finger, though?”

Kim made an unladylike snorting noise. “I’m amazed that I got this far.” Her face clouded. “Though convincing the sheriff not to arrest me the second that I have to go into town could take a little bit of fast talking.”

“Maybe there’s a way of dealing with that,” Carly said slowly. “Chris’s corpse is just rotting out there. Returning the money that he took from the bank and getting the reward for him, well, that ought to wipe the slate nice and clean and set you up all nice and pretty with a wedding present.”

David stirred. “I didn’t--” he started.

“That’s exactly why you deserve it,” Carly said gently. “It’s a gift, David. Not a payment.” Slowly, David started to smile at her; Carly could easily see how Kim had been charmed past coming back by that smile. “And Kim had better have a nice wedding, if the rest of us aren’t going to be here to see it.”

Kim’s face sobered before she pulled Carly into another hug. “Do you have to?” she whispered.

“Bounty hunters aren’t going to stop,” Carly whispered back. She looked over Kim’s shoulder at Brooke and Syesha. “They ain’t after you two, though.”

Brooke flipped her dandelion braid back over her shoulder. “Carly,” she started in what had to be the most aggressive tone that Carly had ever heard from her, making Carly pause and stare, “you are absolutely killing me if you think that Sy and I are going to be ordered off like good little girls after everything that we’ve been through.”

Carly guessed that she ought to have seen that one coming. “How do you feel about the Yukon, then?”

“Thanks for letting me weigh in on that plan, Carls,” Michael said dryly from behind her, and the nickname sent a shiver of pleasure of Carly’s spine that she barely managed to suppress.

“You kind of negated that when you promised,” Carly told him, feeling one corner of her mouth crooking up. It was a little nervous, maybe, because good men were something that she didn’t have just a hell of a lot of experience with, but Michael’s smile looked more than a little bit nervous in return.

“I guess I did.” He kissed her again, and this time it was no brush. “And just so you know, I’m a man of my word.”

End