Chapter Text
“Mama?”
It was not a habit for Louis to interrupt his mother while cooking, or doing any other household task for that matter. It was the best way to end up with a new chore for himself. After all, If he had time enough to ask questions, he had time enough to work.
“What, child?” She snipped predictably, cocking her head towards him and away from her cutting board, with a ‘this better be good’ look in her eyes.
All according to plan… however half-baked it was.
“Sorry, ma’am. I just wanted to know if you thought I had time to go to the store, before supper. My classmates’ birthday is tomorrow, and I…”
“Hurry up and run, before I change my mind,” She scoffed, rolling her eyes back to her half-diced greens, before glancing back to Louis with a hard look.
“And take off that tutu, baby. People talk.”
Louis, though he had listened just fine to the words his mother had spoken, did not abide by any of them.
Well, aside one.
He did run.
The events of that school day’s recess were a fresh welt on his mind. And on his face, though it was more of a bruise, and split lip.
Both were easy to disguise, as he was prone to injury all on his own. He'd never been punched before.
Maybe it was silly, but he sort of thought that sort of thing never really happened. Maybe when you're older, when you get drunk, or when you say something very nasty. But Louis was only 13, and he was fairly sure he wasn't guilty on either remaining counts.
In fact, all he'd been guilty of in the first place was playing hopscotch with (or against, he couldn't really tell) little Madeline Carlisle, the youngest student in their class. And school, for that matter, but such would be a redundancy to mention.
“Hey. I got a question for ya. You think you a girl, or what?”
Louis looked up, finding that the snout-like, freckled nose of his classmate landed him a few inches shorter than himself.
He scoffed softly. Jesse had been picking on him for weeks, and Louis had just about had it with being the bigger person.
“Would you mind asking me that a few feet to the right? You're blocking my last square.”
He'd thought it a pretty clever retort, but he hadn't thought that for very long. Maddie started shrieking like a kettle the moment Louis had hit the ground.
“WYATT!! TEACHER!!” She took off in a sprint towards the doors, but after how hard she'd screamed her little head off, it was no wonder Louis could hear the approaching response before she could go in to fetch them.
“What the…!! Hey!! No fights’in on the schoolyard, you hooligans!”
Louis lifted himself onto his elbows, assuring himself he was in full capability to get back up. It was just tactical to preserve the scene of the crime.
A matter their class Deputy (as he'd taken to calling himself) took very seriously, however little anyone took him so in kind– with the exception of their teacher, Wyatt’s auntie, who encouraged his keen sense of justice by letting him enforce it around their schoolhouse.
He was, to put it very kindly... A stick-in-the-mud. Louis was quite sure he was the only student who hadn't been victimized by the boy’s snitching, even Maddie having been put to the corner for stealing out of another girl’s bag just the other day.
Louis had wondered, for some time, what it would be like to be friends with him.
He wondered that now too, as he replayed the events in his mind.
“No fightin’, officer,” Jesse had sneered, stepping back with his palms open in the air. “Ballerina here must’a tripped.”
Wyatt looked to Louis on the ground with those ox-y brown eyes and frowned, like he didn't know what to make of that answer.
“Yes, that's correct.” Louis gritted his teeth. “It wasn't a fight at all. If it had been, Jesse would have much fewer teeth.”
“You little cocksucker!! I'm gonna–!”
“Language!” Wyatt hollered, putting himself in a protective stance before Louis. Finally sure that he'd secured Wyatt as an ally, he'd pulled himself to his feet.
Despite knowing the gangly boy would fold like a card, it felt nice to have someone bigger than him stand up in front of him like that.
“Y’ain’t gonna so much as finish that sentence. ‘less you wanna get belted for recess tomorrow. Teach don't like fights.”
Jesse rolled his eyes, in a way that Louis could tell instantly was goading.
“Dang, Wy’. Guess they weren't wrong, what they said about you.”
“What?” Wyatt had furrowed his brow.
Louis brushed the blood off his chin, and stepped up behind him. He’d wanted to tell Wyatt not to listen, but in the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to lie and say it wasn’t true.
“When everyone said you were just a pansy, I mean.”
The bait had caught him before Louis could intervene at all.
“Wha–?! Who’s sayin’ that?? I ain't! Real men respect the law! And the school laws’re just as important!”
“So if we weren't at school, ya’d actually take a beating yourself, instead of tattling?”
The dread started creeping back over Louis just from the memory of Wyatt's deliberation.
“‘Course I would fight. Them's fair.”
“M'kay… fine. I believe you…” Jesse trailed off.
Louis winced at the way Wyatt's posture naively deflated in relief.
“If y’agree to fight me tonight.”
“Wh–” his straw-blonde hair bounced as he doubled back, “why??”
“You're pissin’ me off, that's why! What's wrong, your belly yellow after all?”
The silence was agonizingly thick. Where had their teacher been, when that was happening? Perhaps she was waiting on Wyatt's report back.
“...Okay,” Wyatt conceded, “fine. Since you're so doggone worked up about it. It just cain’t be at school.”
“end of Ebott road, then. By the mine. ‘fore the church bell rings.”
Louis remembered a moment of eye contact before Wyatt replied, and he remembered shaking his head as hard as he could.
“......Yeah. Whatever. I'll be there.”
Louis really hoped he'd been lying. Or more likely yet, knowing Wyatt's honest nature, that Jesse had been. But if he'd been crazy enough to punch Louis like that for no reason, there’s no way he wouldn’t take another chance.
Some boys couldn’t think with anything but their blood. Racing and molten and desperate to be spilled.
He was panting when he finally reached the edge of his neighbor’s property, placing his foot on the busted wooden fence and hoisting himself over. He tumbled when he landed, far from elegant, and lifted himself back onto his slippered feet with a grunt.
Ebott road had been the hard-lined, no-playing-past point for much of the town’s youth.
Operations had been at a dead stop since the war, though it wasn’t as if Louis had quite been alive, anyways. All his life, the mountain pass to the mines had been blocked off, forbidden from entry according to the mining company, or whoever still owned the plot.
It was reason enough in itself. Mines were dangerous, particularly abandoned ones, and no decent parent would want their beloved child running around up there.
Children his age were obviously not considerate enough of practical dangers, if such wild fables of monsters and ghouls needed to be invented to keep them out.
Louis didn't believe any of it. The world was only so big, and he'd traveled it a lot more than all his peers. There just wasn't any room in it for such tall tales.
The anxiety in his gut, surely, was from nothing more than the fight that was brewing.
He kicked a stone up the dirt path, only bouncing once before beginning to tumble back down towards Louis. The incline was growing steeper, and the path narrower as undisturbed foliage crowded it.
“You give that back!!”
Louis widened his eyes at the shrill sound of his classmate, letting his pace carry into a jog as he pushed past the ivy and brush.
Wyatt and Jesse were both in the dirt, rolling around for a few violent rotations before Jesse ended up on top, holding something thin and shiny in his hand.
“I knew it! I knew you was a pussy! Brought your papa’s gun to a fist fight and you won't even use it!”
Oh, so that's what it was.
Louis, after a moment's delay, felt a sudden surge of fear.
Jesse was holding a gun.
A revolver made of black metal with a wooden grip, and his fat little finger was coiled around the trigger. The slim barrel of the thing pointed towards Louis for a moment, and he felt his heart stop.
Louis had never seen a gun like that, just the shape of them through holsters. He didn't know much about them, either, and couldn't identify much about it by its design. He thought he at least knew what they sounded like.
It turned out it was a lot different at a distance.
Close as he was, when the boys kept wrassling and the trigger got squeezed, the noise was like a strike of thunder.
Louis screamed when it happened. The world rustled around them as rabbits went running, and as the echoes faded around them, Louis’s scream was subbed for another.
Jesse dropped the gun to the ground and scrambled to his feet, shaking like a leaf and babbling curses. ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ and ‘i didn’t mean’na’.
Blood was soaking up the sleeve of Wyatt’s flannel, fast. He was howling like a dog, and his face was drawn in a snarl.
There was a gap made suddenly for Louis as Jesse drew back, and so he seized it, bounding forward towards Wyatt.
The freckled assailant gave him a short, frightened look, before bolting away, down the road Louis had come from.
“Wyatt?”
He knelt over top of the boy, grasping his sleeve and beginning to rip it away from the wound. The fabric had been pierced in a shape almost like a flower.
Louis steeled himself, ignoring the whimpers of Wyatt's pain as he peeled the shreds off cloth away.
There was a quarter sized hole in his arm, also punctured in a nearly star-like pattern. The velocity of the bullet, close as it'd been, must have not only pierced him, but burst his flesh.
“LORD, IT HURTS!!!” He wailed, grasping onto Louis’s tutu with a trembling fist. He pinned his arm to the ground, gently, and unwound his fingers from the fibers.
“Wyatt, don't move this arm, just breathe.”
“What are you doin’?!” He finally turned his eyes to Louis, huge and wet and crazed, and sniffled. “I'm good as dead when my daddy finds ’bout all this.”
“Don't be so melodramatic,” Louis murmured, turning his eyes back down to the injury and deciding he wasn't allowed to look away until he'd fixed it.
He knew, theoretically, what a tourniquet was. Losing a few bits was commonplace as an enlisted man, and though the war had ended some time ago, its bloody marks remained. At least half the veterans of town had a stump to show for it, and stories by the boatful.
Louis tore the strip of Wyatt's sleeve with his teeth until it was in enough ribbons for him to tie around his shoulder.
“muhm- Mellow-druh-matic?” Wyatt asked through hard sniffles. Louis was glad he could give him some semblance of privacy by not looking at his face, because he could hear the snot he was dripping just fine.
“Don't feel sorry for yourself, we can fix this. Lots of…”
Louis choked down a wave of nausea, finally allowing himself a break to look at the green grass, the blue sky, and the brown earth.
There was just so much blood.
The red made Wyatt’s white flesh look so clammy and dead. Louis grasped his forearm gently, feeling the heat and the racing pulse beneath his fingers with an immediate relief.
“Lots of men get shot. I'm sure your father will see you've been punished enough.”
“I shouldn’a brought the darn thing,” he chastised tearfully.
“No, you shouldn't have,” Louis agreed. Wyatt gave a pitiful noise.
He wished he knew what to do now, other than hold the puncture closed. He could feel the blood continuing to want to gush from beneath his hand and Wyatt's shredded shirt.
What the fuck was he supposed to do? Get the bullet out?
He didn't have forceps, or a fire to sterilize them. Just his grubby fingers, and he was damn sure they wouldn't fit in the hole.
“You're going to be okay, though, Wyatt, I promise,” He found himself reassuring. He was speaking to himself, as well. Wyatt was going to be okay.
“We need to clean and bandage this better if we're gonna walk all the way home, though,” he decided, climbing to his feet. Despite his trembling and sobbing going on uninterrupted, Wyatt followed suit rather quickly.
“Mm'kay,” He shuttered. Louis wrapped his arm around Wyatt's waist, grasping his leather belt tight to keep him upright. Even in such a state of pain, he seemed almost shy to wrap his good arm around Louis’s shoulder in turn.
“I saw some ol’... ol’ crates an’ junk,” He hissed, resting his head on top of Louis’s, “an’... a, a well I think, too, inn'ere,”
Louis looked to where he was pointing, feeling an eerie twang go through him at the mouth of the cave. The sun touched around its mouth, but the inside was dark like night.
He nodded anyhow. What choice was there? Something needed to be done, and now.
They moved quickly enough, by Louis’s count. He could tell Wyatt had taken a slower pace as a result of his injury, but he'd always moved so fast with those long legs of his, and they were undoubtedly still holding strong in the face of immense suffering.
“You're quite sure you saw them in here…?” Louis asked gently, peering around with a long squint as they passed into the cave.
“Yeah, I got… real close, ‘fore Jesse showed up. They're all up’n by the big ‘ole.”
“...the big old what?” Louis asked, squinting through the cave’s echo.
The next step he took, he realized his mistake.
“LOU!!” Wyatt shrieked, dragged down by Louis’s grip on his belt, and his own around his neck.
Right.
The big hole.
What a funny way to die.
At least it felt nice, against the rushing, agonizing fear and vertigo, to reach and grab Wyatt with his other arm, and feel him hug back with a white knuckle grip.