This was never supposed to be nothin' but a little somethin' to do

COLT

She's a runner, she's a lover, always stuck in her ways
Pull her closer, think you know her, now she's turning the page
She gave a warning if it's storming, she'll be gone with the rain

The campsite inevitably quiets as twilight turns dark and the stars wink on. Colt glances over at the rising smoke as the embers are doused, not having lingered for the fire or the conversation, her mind already a heaping dose of company. She considers just staying where she is the whole night, hat brim hiding the reminder glinting up above her, and how nice if that could be enough. The hillside would make a fine enough bed, she thinks, aside from the dew that'll collect—a problem for tomorrow her, today already full up. She sighs though, and where she leans over her knees in the meadows, she flicks the shredded bits of grass from her hands. This isn't her first attempt at quieting his presence, and while she hasn't found any solution, she knows it won't be sitting here and unraveling while the thread of him is close enough to pull at.

Getting to her feet with all the hurry of thaw in the dead of winter, Colt grabs something out of her saddlebags and then makes her way towards where she'd last seen Vesper. Her approach carries the wariness of someone reaching for a blade, having learned once already how cleanly this one could cut. "Vesper?" she tugs carefully on the dark with its name, peering through it in the search of motion. "Got a minute to talk?" Her voice is low and thin, and while it could be attributed to the day's work, it's been worn through by the scrub of salt that's attempted to scour him away.

Behind her, glass tinkles as it shifts in the hold of her hands, complaining of the tension she feeds into it. 

---

Set first night of the PQ

When she's in it, she's all in it, ain't no holding her back
When I'm with her, she's a river moving steady and fast
She's afraid of all the ways her heart is broke like glass

I need your hand but I don't want to burn it

Vesper knows she’s coming before the grass begins to whisper beneath her boots. Her mind reaches him first, familiar even through the discipline with which he’s spent the day refusing to look directly at it, and the cards in his hands go abruptly still, but only for a moment before his fingers resume their quick, complicated work, splitting and folding the deck through itself in patterns too precise to be called idle, as though nothing in him has changed at all.

He’d kept the herd between them whenever he could, found work on the opposite flank when he couldn’t, and made himself scarce once camp was raised. It had been easier beneath the sun, with orders to relay and unicorns to turn, than it is now with the dark drawn close around them and the memory of a desert still dry at the back of his throat. Her note has done nothing to soften it. If anything, those few spare words have sharpened the understanding he’d carried north only to find her gone.

Icewater surges through his veins at the sound of his name. His blue eyes flick up beneath the fall of pale hair, finding her through the darkness while the final card slips neatly into place. There are several answers waiting behind his teeth, all of them sharp enough to finish what he’d started between them, to puncture what he'd been letting go soft in the last few weeks until her note had made clear his foolishness. But Vesper has no interest in giving the camp a spectacle, especially not with Sunjata’s fucking hEars close enough to collect every brittle piece of it.

"Yeah," he answers at last, the word low and level despite the cold still moving through him. "Got one." He squares the cards against his palm and tucks them into his coat, then rises with the smooth, soundless ease of a shadow pulling itself loose from the ground. Rather than invite her closer, he gestures towards one of the moonlit meadows beyond the reach of the tents and the listening dark, already turning that way with the expectation that she’ll follow.

No I don't deserve it, I don't deserve it