Chapter Text
Bounty saw his bounty hunter on the first day of August, in the midst of dark and chaos.
On that day, Basque did not see him. On this first instance of their proximity, Basque, who had a reputation for killing, was busy killing someone else.
It happened like this:
Bounty had been dozing when the sound of a shout woke him. The desert air was brutally cold and dry, and there was dust in his eyes that scratched his skin when he rubbed them. He’d been curled tightly into himself before the shout, and now his muscles cramped.
Through the grit and blur or sleep, scattered packs and saddles that littered his party’s makeshift campsite were black heaps. A few revealed themselves to be people rather than baggage, stirring and rising and rubbing dirt from their faces.
Heads and eyes turned toward the shout. At the middle of the camp the central fire was still burning, and its flickering orange light highlighted the tableau.
The watch had kept it lit.
The watch was standing now, straining as he looked into the darkness, his rifle in his hand. This was what the watch was supposed to do. He had only been doing his job.
He was trying to tell them there was something out there.
Then there was a crack like the world breaking open. The watch fell back with a cry into the fire, scattering embers.
Next there was a squeal in the black, away from the fire. Bounty’s head whipped away from the orange light of the scattered fire to see the confusing shapes twisting away from the camp, their hooves thundering.
The horses, he realized with rising panic. Something had stampeded the horses.
Some of the others had risen, stumbling out of blankets and running toward the horses. The horses were their livelihood. What would they do without them? Now others were shouting, confused and afraid.
Bounty began to twist like he too was a stampeding packhorse, trying to free himself from his blanket.
He wasn’t really thinking, wasn’t really seeing. But then his wild eyes caught on the bounty hunter. He stood out among Bounty’s scrambling, confused party. He was so casual, and he was going the wrong way. He was not trying to catch horses. He had a different goal.
The strangeness of it made Bounty freeze.
The man was grinning, and his eyes were glittering, face was underlit crazily by the flickering red light of embers as he approached the fire. There was a pistol held loosely in his grip, and the light desert wind sent tendrils of his blond hair curling around his jaw as he swung his head from side to side, like he was scenting on the wind, searching.
Bounty felt ice flood his circulatory system.
He knew that man. Not personally, but through reputation. This was the big blonde wolf, the mastermind and the sharpshooter Basque of the Three Rivers. Basque the Bounty Hunter. It could be no one else..
What law existed in this godforsaken place depended on people like Basque. People whose very name was a threat. People who found those who did not want to be found.
Tonight, he was looking for Bounty.
Bounty was a banker. Lying in the dirt half tangled in a thin blanket in the middle of a smuggler’s caravan, he was wildly out of his element. But although he might be unpracticed in the ways of outlawship, he was not a stupid man.
He did not stand up.
He understood, under his disorientation, that the instinct to stand and run could kill him now. He needed to get out of here, his mind told him, but he needed to do it quiet like.
At the fire Basque turned. He had spotted something he didn’t like, and his blue eyes narrowed, fine lips pursed. He brought his pistol up so fast Bounty did not see the movement. But he heard the sharp crack of it, and realized it was the same noise he had heard before. Realized, belatedly, that Basque had shot the watch, and that he was dead, and now he was shooting someone else.
And Bounty sprung like a flushed rabbit, forgetting his determination to lay still, instinct driving his body without his mind having any say. Run run run his mind screamed at him, and he obeyed.
Someone was screaming in pain, off to his right. Bounty, now upright and vulnerable, froze again in indecision. He must flee. But which way?
Before him, the hunter held his pistol in one hand, high in the air, casual and relaxed, utterly unworried. At the centre of their little encampment he was like a man at the centre of a clock. His gun was the second hand, ticking inexorably around. Right now, his right shoulder pointed at Bounty, narrowed eyes searching the darkness. In moments he would see him.
Another pistol shot cracked in the black and Bounty’s breath caught as the Hunter flinched.
Out there in the darkness some fool was shooting back.
Bounty was close enough to see the slow smile spread even wider on a sharp mouth. That was no natural reaction.
The shooter had missed, and Basque was unharmed. And now he had a target, a direction. The wolf’s attention sharpened in the direction the shot had come from. The pistol rose.
Now. Bounty had to go. He had to run or die.
He turned and stumbled blindly into the dark, the echo of Basque’s returning fire ringing in his ears.
~*~
As often happens when one is stumbling through the dark, sure that death is close on your heels, Bounty’s thoughts turned to the people he loved.
When Bounty’s parents named him, they had invoked the gods of wealth.
They had imagined for their perfect baby boy a future of abundance and plenty. They had pictured a good education, a stable career, and a loving wife.
A legacy.
They had given him everything he could possibly have required to accomplish this.
Until very recently, Bounty had lived up to his name and the expectations of his parents.
Although he had thrived, the stolid, old money of his father’s homeland had never compelled him. Bounty was talented and charming and wealthy – but he never felt as if he had earned the spoils of his efforts. His successes felt empty, his reputation unearned.
So when gold had been discovered in the wild mountains to the south, he had hardly hesitated before packing his bags and following the wild stories. Here was a place where a young man could make his mark, he’d realized. Here was an opportunity for self-determination from his father. The possibilities of such a place had thrummed in his blood.
At the end of a few day’s journey on a rocking, rolling ship, he learned that a port city had risen, a portal to the wilderness that lay beyond. It was called Devil’s Glen. Bounty wanted to be part of it.
You could go by road now. Most people did.
But the way was long and as much as Bounty valued self determination he was also a man who valued comfort. And so his father had paid his passage on the ships that flowed south every day, laden with food and cloth and timber and machinery and hope.
Bounty was no gold miner, and had no romantic notions about setting off up the black sand creeks following glittering trails. He was young, but he wasn’t stupid. He understood that his talents lay behind a mahogany desk in a well-appointed building, and that those talents would be bolstered by his connection to northern wealth.
As he had fallen asleep at night in his cramped but well-appointed ships quarters, he saw the bustling streets of the new metropolis in his dreams.
At first the real Devil’s Glen disappointed him.
It was dirty, and rough, and Bounty found that he had not appreciated the moderating power of a state government to subdue the most distasteful habits of humanity. There were prostitutes, gamblers, and drunks. The streets were dirty and the sheriff was breathtakingly corrupt.
But Bounty had found a room in the city’s best boarding house, put on his most expensive suit, and presented himself at Devil’s Glen’s central stock exchange. There he learned that Devil’s Glen was hungry for Bounty’s particular brand of reckless charm and doors opened for the pretty banker with his boarding school accent and his quick wit. They needed a man who was good with people and good with numbers, and Bounty found that he was both.
And then, within a year, he had money to bring his sister south, where she had better prospects. Her name was Hope, and she, like Bounty, chaffed against old wealth and aristocracy.
He set her up in the burgeoning silks trade - an apprenticeship with one of the city’s top traders, where she could put her talents to work.
He should have known she would bring him trouble. Hope always did.
~*~
On that first day of August, in the chaotic dark around a smugglers’ fire, Basque of Three Rivers never saw Bounty.
But he had seen him before. On the last week of July, on a hot day, he had seen Bounty’s face for the first time.
It had been gracing a wanted poster.
Given Basque’s chosen profession, this was not an unusual way for him to first see a man. But few wanted posters made him stop in the street the way Bounty had.
The man was…arresting.
In his picture, nailed unceremoniously to a telegraph pole, Bounty looked tidy and professional in his carefully pressed suit and jacket. He looked wealthy and straight as an arrow. He had high, sharp cheekbones and a pretty mouth and there was something about the eyes…
He was definitely out of place in the wanted poster genre, which tended towards shifty looking men covered in road dust and too much facial hair.
Basque tipped his head to the side, intrigued. Then he read Bounty’s name and laughed aloud, the sound echoing of the building facades in the hot dusty, empty street.
It was a joke so good he couldn’t have made it up.Just knowing that this was a reality in the world, in Basque’s world, made it seem a little brighter. It was deeply funny that a man named Bounty had a bounty on his head.
The smile slipped from his face abruptly at the sound of the jingle of horse harness and the thump of boots hitting the ground behind him. There was a horse’s snort and the man’s grunt and the sound of a pistol rattling meaningfully in its holster.
He didn’t have to turn around to know who he would see.
“Let me guess,” he drawled, before the pistol-rattling-person could say anything, “Mace wants to talk.”
A few minutes later he sat across from George Mace: Corrupt Sheriff of Devil’s Glen. An ugly man, inside and out by Basque’s reckoning. Big. Bullying. Overconfident. Ran this town, or at least, the parts of it under his Sheriff’s jurisdiction, with a slimy, oily, clenched fist.
The audacity of sending a constable chafed at him.
Basque was not the Sheriff’s pet.
But Basque’s irritation faded into curiosity as Bounty’s wanted poster was slid across the desk toward him.
Basque stared, hypnotized, at Bounty’s beautiful, well-fed face under the heavy ringed fingers of the corrupt sheriff of Devil’s Glen.
He thought, this does not add up.
“Dead or alive,” growled the horrible Sheriff through his handlebar mustache.
Then, after a moment when Basque said nothing, he added: “Preferably dead.”
Basque studied Bounty and thought about what it meant that the Corrupt Sheriff of Devil’s Glen had solicited the services of Basque the Wolf to find him. Basque was difficult. Basque was expensive. Basque was quick to offence.
But Basque was also good.
Did Bounty require a difficult, expensive good man? Was he deserving of Basque’s attention?
It seemed to him that Bounty’s serious mouth, turned down slightly at one corner, was vaguely reproving. The clean-shaven face belonged to a gentleman, not a street thug.
It said I’m too good for you, I am too good for the Sheriff, I’m too good for this town.
It said, I am bored by this whole futile exercise.
It said I am completely comfortable in a starched white shirt. By the way, can I interest you in insurance on your loan?
What was a man like that doing on a wanted poster? What was a man like that doing with his photograph getting slid across the Sheriff’s desk?
After an uncomfortably long silence in which Basque considered all these points, he lifted his eyes to meet his Sheriff’s gaze across the photograph of the bounty named Bounty. He was careful to keep his expression neutral, to conceal the calculus he had done. Then he pitched his tone to be vaguely condescending and said:
“What did he do, turn you down for a mortgage?”
“Does it matter?” Mace growled in response, his doughy mouth turning down with displeasure, colour staining his cheeks under his rough beard. “I can offer you enough to render the issue moot.”
It was, Basque had to admit, a strong argument. Mace lifted a hand. A constable placed a pen in it. On the top of the poster, Mace wrote a number.
It was a large one.
Basque looked at the sum. His eyes narrowed.
“Well. Now I am just suspicious.”
Mace met Basque’s gaze evenly, his small watery eyes giving nothing away. He let the silence stretch.
Behind him, a constable shifted nervously. People did not normally question Mace. Usually questioning Mace got them killed.
But Basque was not afraid of Mace. He was not afraid of anyone.
“The price is high,” said Mace, his voice hard and crisp and broken glass, “because this is personal.”
Basque leaned back in his chair too, unintimidated, and quirked an eyebrow at the old Sheriff.
“Personal, huh?”
The sheriff fumbled for a cigarette. “Yes, personal.” He said, and sputtered a curse. “The boy is not some street thug needing to be put down. He has connections. They could come to his rescue, given time. But rest assured that for now, his allies have been neutralized.”
Basque made a show of examining his dirty fingernails as the Sheriff took a drag.
“And you tried to catch him, but he gave you the slip, that right?”
There was another tense silence, and then Mace breathed smoke into the room.
“In a manner of speaking,” Mace said tightly, after a few moments. It seemed like he wasn’t going to elaborate. “He can’t be trusted. Keep that in mind. He talks a pretty talk, but he’s rotten underneath. Evil to his core.”
Basque found this information unhelpful, and also deeply ironic coming from Mace.
Basque wasn’t in the habit of trusting his targets. Most of them were pretty evil, when it came down to it. Something about having a bounty on your head brought that out in a person.
After a time, he said “A bounty named Bounty, eh?” He was musing, half to himself. It was the elephant in the room.
Mace glowered, smoked, and said nothing. Apparently he didn’t find it as funny as Basque did.
Well, some people had no sense of humour at all.
“Ok,” Basque said eventually. “I’ll consider it.”
Business concluded, he stood up and turned to go. Abruptly, a large armored man stood in his way.
No one moved. All eyes slid to the Sheriff.
“What do you mean ‘consider,’ Hunter?” Mace asked, an edge on his voice. He stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray with violence, and his eyes had narrowed to slits.
Behind Mace, hired hands shifted almost imperceptibly toward hired guns. Basque’s gaze flickered contemptuously over the two muscled constables. They weren’t going to do anything to him. They needed him.
“I mean I’ll consider it.. You know I make no promises. I’ll keep an eye out. I’ll think about your price. If you’re lucky, I’ll bring him in. If not…” Basque shrugged, leaving the sentence unfinished. Mace glared up at Basque as his stood over the desk. Basqe tried to breathe shallowly. The smell of smoke was overwhelming.
“It would be better if you brought him, Hunter,” Mace said tightly.
Basque knew Mace thought that. He blinked once, slowly.
“Better for my finances, certainly,” he said, and then bared all his teeth in a wolfish grin. Mace did not smile back.
As if in afterthought, he reached down and picked up the photograph, wiggled his eyebrows at the Sheriff, and stuffed it in his breast pocket.