Sweetwater, 1874

*****

The boss had made it very clear that he was engaged in very serious business with one of his oldest and most trusted friends, James Butler Hickok. He had left very strict instructions that he was absolutely not to be disturbed, under any circumstances apart from those that threatened the existence of the Bar M ranch or its inhabitants. In the last hour, exactly three such emergencies had occurred, such that the ranch would surely fall from the face of the earth if Kid did not attend to them straight away.

The latest interruption was brought to them by a skinny little ranch hand that Jimmy was sure was younger than he’d ever been in his life. Jimmy heard Kid mutter something under his breath that was very unbecoming of a gentleman rancher and made a note to tell Lou as much when she got back from town. Kid pressed his fingers to his eyelids and seemed to have a brief discussion with himself before giving Jimmy a look divided into equal parts annoyance and apology. And then he was gone to quell the newest rebellion.

Jimmy didn’t really mind so much. It was good to be back here, at the old Sweetwater station turned horse-ranch and to know he’d be staying awhile this time. He’d been too long away, he decided, from the only family he’d really ever known and the only people who’d really ever known him. He acknowledged that though his life was elsewhere, his heart was with them here, in this dusty ranch yard they’d thundered in and out of a thousand times or more.

He suspected that Kid had summoned him not as a partner, for he’d helped them start the ranch with some funds he had put away and they’d let him do so only if he took his share of the ranch, but as a friend. He sensed a loneliness and a restlessness about Kid that suggested that the man had grown a little stir-crazy with the quiet family life he was living and had need of rehashing old adventures and perhaps, of finding new ones.

That was fine with Jimmy, because he missed them. Fate had brought them all together and forced them to depend on one another for survival, and the love that had sprung between them was fast and fierce and had held steady through all the trials they’d driven it through. Though they all walked separate paths now, the bonds of fellowship and family where still strong and he’d felt the pull of those ties for a long while. It was time for him to return to them.

He had come home.

Jimmy shifted in his chair and gazed out the large window of the house Kid had built Lou, watching the comings and goings of light-hearted people who lived with plenty, under a sun that could be brutal or gentle depending on the way the wind blew, who worked for a dream that had been, oh, fifteen years in the making. Kid and Lou, even after the move of the express station to Rock Creek, had always had a hankering to come back here, had always thought of this place as their home. It took a lot of time, work, and the passing of a brutal war that the country still bowed under the memory of for them all to be able to come home. To stand on common ground again.

Thinking of those dark and bloody years, Jimmy was suddenly filled with a thrill of gratitude to be here, with Kid and Lou, in the place where their love for one another was found, and on several rather nerve-wracking and tense occasions for the rest of them, nearly lost. Jimmy had always known that they would eventually get it right.

Looking around, he had to acknowledge he’d rarely seen anything so right. The old bunkhouse was home to a whole new generation of misfits with nowhere else to go, and Lou tended to them as lovingly as Emma and scolded them as thoroughly and worried over them as much. Rachel lived in the old stationhouse, the one she’d come to looking for a place to stop running and the one she now proclaimed she’d never leave again. Teaspoon lived there with her, delightfully and in sin, and Jimmy thought it was only fitting that the man and woman he’d come to love as second parents finally slept in the same bed—even though it had caused quite a scandal in town. The old barn was mostly used for hay and storage now. The horses, horses as fine as any in the territory, were housed in the new stable nearby. Even now, he saw Buck sitting on the rail of the same corral they’d broken Indian ponies in, shouting encouragement to the gangly ranch hand flailing about on the back of a colt with a streak of wild still in him. For a minute, Jimmy tried to imagine it was Ike up there, like it had been way back when the world was a whole lot simpler.

Even the damned windmill leaned toward the western horizon like it had in the old days. They’d had to stand outside and tie it down in all manner of weather, and they had cursed the thing to hell and back again. But it was that windmill that had always risen over the horizon first on the run home, a beacon for the returning rider, drawing him (or her) into safe harbor. And it still stood at the outskirts of the ranch yard, looking as ready to fall over as ever.

He felt very sentimental, looking at this place that felt the same and yet was so much more than the home he’d known. Pride swelled very suddenly in Jimmy’s chest and his throat grew tight with it. He remembered the time when they’d all come to this same place without a penny to their names and without a soul in the world who would have known the difference if they just ceased to exist. Damn, he thought, life was a hell of a strange thing.

He had been lucky in his friends, he thought. Indeed.

Jimmy found that the smile that had spread upon his face was still in place when he felt a tapping upon his knee and looked downward. He was surprised to have been caught off guard. He was more wary these days than ever before—had to be. But he was not alarmed. This was the one place where he knew friends had his back.

He found himself looking down into the little moon face of Emma Louise, Kid and Lou’s youngest child. She was watching him with Lou’s big brown eyes, unblinking. She seemed to be on some errand of grave importance. Jimmy felt that such gravity deserved his solemn attention, so he tried very hard to flatten the widening grin crawling across his lips. He was hard pressed to chase the smile from his face with this child, for he had a special fondness for her. To those he considered friends, which were few outside the boundaries of this land, he often told tales of this little girl with the heart-shaped face and the dark, lively eyes.

"Howdy, Miss McCloud," he greeted her with a grin.

Emma bowed her head and dipped a knee in greeting and for the life of him, Jimmy couldn’t figure out where she’d seen that to learn to do it. Probably Cody, with his flair for the theatrical, he finally decided. "How do you do?" She asked him formally, and her voice had the same drawl as her mother’s.

"I reckon my day just got better, because I seemed to have found me some good company. It’s been a long time since we’ve met, Emma. Do you remember me? If you say you don’t, I think I’ll die of a broken heart."

Rather than answer this question directly, she reached up to grab the front of his shirt in both fists for leverage and climbed up upon his lap, elbowing and kicking until she was comfortably settled there on his knee, her legs dangling between his own.

Puffing now, she turned her gaze back into his eyes and said primly, "I remember you. I do not remember if I like you or not though."

Jimmy pressed his lips very tightly, determined he would not laugh at the child for he would then be in her bad graces. It was Lou’s lift of the chin, Lou’s narrowing of eyes as she studied him, measured him.

For a moment, Jimmy thought he might go blind with his envy of Kid. He managed to push it away most of the time because he’d accepted long ago that his particular kind of trouble didn’t leave him room for much of a family life. However, there were moments captured in his memory—watching Lou, her eyes bruised with exhaustion as she cradled her first born, named after him, just moments after bringing him into the world, seeing James run across the ranch yard on unsteady legs and catapult himself into his father’s arms when they’d come back from a horse sale, meeting Lou in the hallway on a dark and sleepless night, with her clad in a simple white night gown and little Emma Louise asleep on her shoulder from the pacing of the halls, one tiny hand fisted in Lou’s hair. There were moments like those, when the peace and the tenderness between Kid, Lou, and their son and daughter made him physically ache with longing and need to be a part of it, to have it for himself.

It wasn’t what his life was cut out for, though, so he supposed he’d better enjoy the moments of Kid and Lou’s life that he could. This, he thought, bringing his attention back to Emma, was one of them.

"So you don’t remember if you like me, huh? Well, I tell you what. I’ll do just about anything to win your heart, Princess. I will slay a dragon, take you for a ride on a white pony, sing you a song, buy you a pretty present. I’ll…"

"You have pretty hair, like Mama," she said, silencing all further pledges of fealty, reaching up to his shoulder to stroke the dark brown strands laying over it.

It was not quite the way he would have chosen to have her consider him, but she loved her Mama, so he guessed he could have done worse. And Lou was very pleasing to look upon.

"You may come with me. I want to play with your hair."

Jimmy’s eyebrows climbed very far up his forehead, nearly into the hair she wished to play with. Not exactly what he'd been expecting, but probably less complicated than, say, slaying a dragon. He made one attempt for dignity. "Well, I am waiting for your Daddy, little one. He and I were talking about very important things about the ranch. I’m one of his oldest friends you know. I help him make very important decisions."

The tilt of her head told him that she considered this highly unlikely.

"You may come," she repeated, a bit more firmly and he swore for a moment that Louise McCloud in her most glorious bull-headedness had leapt out of the five-year-old and faced him down. Emma jumped from his knee directly onto his toes, and took his hand.

"Your skin is very nice. Not rough like Daddy’s. It is like Mama's, soft like flower petals."

"Ah, well…" Jimmy stammered, just imagining the look of manly superiority on Kid's face should the child tell him this. Truth was, being a lawman was a hell of a lot easier on the hands and the body in general than working a ranch—provided you stayed alive. Kid would take no time in giving him grief over the evidence that Jimmy was living an easy life. He set out to prevent such an occurrence. "We should not say that to your Daddy. He might be sad that you think his hands are not so nice."

She ignored him. Though her tiny hand was completely hidden within his, it was very clear who was leading whom. He was forced to stoop a bit as he followed her. It was most ungraceful and awkward to be steered through the drawing room and into the hallway bent at the waist.

He glanced backwards at the room where he was supposed to be waiting for Kid, but then, who knew how long the fight in the bunkhouse would take to stop? For all he knew Kid might have met his death in the brawl. The ranch hand had seemed to think it was likely when he edged into the room, keeping the door between most of his body and the snapping eyes of his boss.

Emma did not seem to feel the need for conversation as she led him through the halls of the large main house, pausing to talk to no one, not him, nor anyone else she passed. Several of the hands’ wives worked in the house, cooking for the hands and keeping the house neat. The women who watched them go smiled and whispered to one another at the sweetness of the sight of Wild Bill tamed by the child. Emma managed the twists and turns of the house with one who has long ruled it, and she looked neither to the left nor the right as she brought him to the room that was hers to play in as she wished.

The room was bright and cheerful, with two large windows. There were paintings of horses and men that Jimmy himself had drawn there the winter before Lou gave birth to James. His heart gave over to tenderness as he looked at his labor of love, his gift to Kid and Lou alike, an acknowledgement of the love and happiness that had been so hard won for both of them.

He had painted them all, had given the children of Lou and Kid their history there in bright colors and sweeping murals. The mountains stretched across the walls, and in the shadows of the mountains ran their horses of yesterday; Katy, Sundance, Lightning, and so on. And atop them, the riders who had carried East to West and West to East. All of them as they’d been in the beginning, sure and strong and invincible, and endlessly thrilled to belong to something that mattered, to have someone else think that they mattered too. Ike, Noah, Buck, Cody, Kid, Lou, Jimmy, and even Teaspoon. They were all there, running across the wall and across history.

Jimmy’s mural had been a surprise for Kid and Lou. His skill with drawing was not something he’d ever bothered to share before. As a boy it had come to him—words he didn’t have command over, he couldn’t make sense of letters and sentences but he’d always known how to put lines together into a whole picture. There was such love etched in the walls by his own hands that it came back to him anew. He had always had a fine hand with a brush, and never had he put it to such use before, and never would he do so again. This was his masterpiece and he felt no need to top it. It was the best he could do, and it was enough for him because it had been a worthy gift.

He smiled as he remembered the long days he had shut himself into the room. Rachel had smuggled him food and drink for the better part of a week, for none save her had known Jimmy had arrived at the Bar M. It was a rainy week and the finishing touches were being put on the outside of the house, so that the weather held workers at bay. Lou and Kid were staying in the old main house with Rachel, preparing to move to their new home in just a few week’s time.

Jimmy had sent word when he was ready to show his labors to Kid and Lou. The memory of their faces was one of his fondest as they walked (or in Lou’s case waddled, her being fairly pregnant at the time) into the room and looked at him blankly in surprise. Lou had turned from him to the wall and then burst into sobs, and at first Jimmy had feared she was devastated by the ruin of her perfectly fine walls. But the wonder on her tear-soaked face as she walked to stand before each rider separately told him that she loved his gift even as much as he loved her. She'd paused for some time before the one of Ike and Noah, as he'd taken greatest care to do them justice, and her fingertips had reached out to hover above the ones they had lost too soon. New tears had welled upon her lashes as she looked at him, a bittersweet smile there in her lips and in her eyes.

Kid had not come fully into the room at the time, but Jimmy smiled now, standing in the doorway just where Kid had, as the impatient child tugged at him. The Kid had bowed his head for just a moment, and when he picked it up again, there had been tears of gratitude and amazement in his eyes.

"Damn it Jimmy," Kid said thickly, and walked to Jimmy to grasp his shoulder. "It’s a gift for a king."

"Do you know who painted these walls for you, little one?" Jimmy questioned Emma as she gave him an especially hard yank and he followed her the rest of the way into the nursery at last.

"Mama and Daddy’s most best friend, who loves me and Jamie very much," she answered automatically, as if she'd been well-versed in the tale. "Come and sit down."

Her casual relay of this old information cheered him beyond measure, for he imagined Kid or Lou laying their children down in this nursery during the night and telling them the tales he'd painted. Telling them of the love the one who had painted them bore for each child.

"Please, sit." She told, or ordered as it were, him and moved to the center of the room where a child’s size table and chairs stood. Emma was a gracious host and pulled a small chair out ceremoniously before crossing to take her own. Jimmy stared at the minute furniture and looked down the length of his body doubtfully. He eyed the tiny chair, not at all confident he could bend himself into it.

But Emma’s eyes were boring into his own expectantly, as piercing as any gunfighter’s gaze had ever been, so he cleared his throat and nodded for her to be seated first, as a gentleman would. When she was seated, he gingerly eased himself down, folding his legs at impossible angles so that his posterior region might meet the seat. The chair swayed a bit, and Jimmy did his best to keep his weight on his bunched legs, which stuck out to either side of him rather like a frog's.

"You are real big," Emma said at last, and looked altogether disapproving.

"Well, the table is real small," Jimmy pointed out, in defense of himself, stung by her displeasure.

"Yes it is," she said, and giggled as she looked at her companion.

They sat and watched each other for a few moments, and the blood stopped flowing altogether in Jimmy’s legs, so that he couldn't have removed himself from his twisted position had the house caught fire—which could have happened due to a problem in the kitchen that had been the occasion of an earlier interruption with Kid.

"You are very pretty, for a boy," Emma finally said, and though Jimmy hoped she might have forgotten her designs on his hair, he was forced to remind himself this was Kid's blood. She would likely never forget anything in her lifetime.

Within minutes, Jimmy sported several tiny braids, which he did not mind so much as the pink and lavender ribbons that she fastened them with. She was extraordinarily industrious and the whole of his head was adorned with knotted ribbons in no time at all.

At last, when all of his hair was hanging in braids of various thickness and length, she perched a lovely little crown on top of his head, and Jimmy had a suspicion it was Cody who had given it to her, probably about the time he taught her to curtsey like a queen. He thought Cody might also be responsible for the tiny jeweled earbobs and necklaces she decorated him with.

Once he was properly dressed, she saw fit to serve them both tea from her little tea-set. Jimmy was rather surprised to learn that tea parties with children actually contained no real tea—it was all pretend. He covered his novice as best he could and made appreciative noises as she poured air into his cup.

"Kind of you," he said and attempted not to crush the cup as he brought it to his mouth and actually sipped from it, not feeling nearly so foolish as he probably should have. "

"Lovely," she said, approving of him, and Jimmy thought that he had not endured such torture in vain.

Until a voice, trembling on the very edge of laughter that might never stop, wondered from the doorway, "wanna borrow one of Lou’s dresses for dinner there Jimmy?"

"Daddy!" Emma forgot Jimmy straightaway and ran from the folded man in the chair toward the doorway. Jimmy would not suffer himself to turn around and face Kid just yet. He felt blood rush into his face, hot and pink. Matching his ribbons. He wondered if he wished hard enough, if it were possible to disappear or to become invisible as the tea in the little cup he returned to the saucer.

"Hello, sweetheart," Jimmy heard Kid murmur and a shriek of delight followed from the child as he presumably swept her up into his arms and gave her several kisses. "What have you done to Uncle—or shall I say Aunt—Jimmy?"

"He is very pretty," Jimmy heard Kid tell her father, and in a moment he raised his eyes slowly to Kid’s as he strode around to the other side of the table with Emma perched upon his hip, her tiny arms wrapped hard around his neck. Her eyes were shining just like her Daddy’s, but the latter’s had a much more wicked light in them.

Jimmy would not suffer himself the indignity of trying to rise from the miniature chair with the Kid watching so smugly, so he sat as primly as one might when one looked like a toad.

"Why, you’re right. He is very pretty. And it is a stroke of good luck that he is dressed for company, for an old friend has just arrived to see him."

Against all odds, against all that was sacred and right and good with the world, Jimmy heard a cackling sort of laugh from the doorway behind him. He cursed himself for sitting with his back to the door, reminded himself never to leave himself open to the enemy in such a manner again.

"If I had known that you were envious of the crown, Hickok, I'd have stolen one from the prop box at the theater for you. And a few jewels too. No need to take the child’s." Cody walked around to stand by Kid, and together the three of them stood, all beaming down at him—Cody, Kid, and miniature Lou.

The child, because she had made him pretty. The men because they knew, as he knew, without a doubt, that this day would never be allowed to slip from recall.

Jimmy was certain, in that moment, that evil had been allowed to endure and that it lived in the hearts of the two men above him.

"And have you enjoyed yourself, Emma?" Kid asked his daughter. "Has Jimmy been good company for you?"

"Oh, yes. Daddy. He is so pretty, like Mama and Aunt Rachel. I’m gonna brush his hair every day and braid it. And then we can have our tea."

"Well, I might scold you for troubling your Uncle," Kid told her, "but he don’t seem to mind."

"Daddy, I think I will marry Uncle Jimmy." Emma announced this to her father, without preamble.

Though Kid smiled indulgently at her, his eyes were as arrows, and his smile like a blade when they fell upon Jimmy. In a pleasant enough tone, for his daughter was present, Kid said flatly to Jimmy, "when the hottest fires in all of hell turn to ice, Hickok."

Cody shrugged, "least ways by then he’ll be too old to be good for much of anything but having his hair braided."

Jimmy tried very hard to look as if he had no such intentions, which he did not, but was not willing to take many chances in the path of the protective father. He had been on the receiving end of Kid’s fists for lesser reasons than the protection of his only daughter.

Jimmy soon decided a diversionary tactic was in order and tried to look as threatening as possible, calling to mind the state he'd been in when facing down outlaws. He really had no concept of how ineffective it was, given that the ribbons tied above his forehead swayed down merrily before his eyes as he narrowed them into glittering slits.

Dividing a very dark look between his two friends he hissed, "there ain’t no need to talk about this, you know. I was just entertaining your daughter."

"You might have just played a game, or taken a walk," Cody suggested, eyebrow high.

"She didn’t want to take a walk. That’s no reason to fun me for this," Jimmy said and reached to remove the crown, but when the child issued a sharp gasp of protest, he was forced to leave it on it’s perch. This brought another round of snickering from Cody. Jimmy wondered if it would do permanent damage to the child if she saw her Uncle Cody get shot right in the middle of her tea party.

"What do you suppose the odds are of us never speaking of it again, Princess?" Kid asked, and though his daughter looked up in response, it was not to her that he spoke.

*

They spent time with Emma, and Jimmy had his revenge when he suggested that she invite Kid and Cody to have tea with them. Jimmy knew great satisfaction as he watched Kid bend his long, and less lithe, shape into the tiny furniture. Cody, who’d put on some weight in the last years due to what Teaspoon had years ago labeled his swinish habits, had crushed his chair right away, and Emma burst into sobs until Kid promised her that he would fix the chair before the night.

Finally, it was time for Emma to take a nap and they went back to Kid’s office to talk about a possible expansion of the ranch by buying up one hundred acres to the east, and Jimmy was finally able to remove his bows and braids. After some time, Cody and Kid stopped grinning and they actually tended to the pressing business of ranching.

By dinner, no one had made mention of Jimmy in crown and ribbons for several hours, nor had Kid offered him one of Lou’s gowns before he took his leave to dress for dinner, and he dared to hope their mirth was spent. Buck, Teaspoon, and Rachel greeted him when he came down to the dining room for dinner. None of them had so much as given him a strange look, which was more than he would have hoped for.

He forgot his anxiety as Lou came down the stairs on Kid’s arm, glowing in a pale blue dress that was such a nice contrast to her dark skin and hair. Her smile was ready and stunning in warmth and it seemed that all else in the room dimmed around her. How was it that they’d ever taken her as a boy, he wondered, and not for the first time either.

She hurried to him, embracing him tightly, for she hadn’t yet seen their guest after spending the day in town. Jimmy knew from the tears of joy in her eyes that she loved him more dearly than any other save her husband and children. As they stood in one another's arms, their hearts beat together for a moment, Jimmy held hard to her before stepping back, hands upon her arms.

"You look good, Lou. Love and happiness suit you."

"The happiness is having you back here with us" She kissed him again, eyes alight with joy, and then turned away to greet Cody warmly.

Kid was smiling too, quietly, content to have old friends near. "It’s been too long since we were all at the same table together. Sit down, please."

Lou led them to a table loaded with a feast that not even Cody could have done justice to. The men waited for Lou and Rachel to be seated, their manners a far cry from what they’d once been when Lou might have been plowed under in their attempt to get the first serving.

Just as Jimmy was pulling out his chair at Kid’s elbow, Lou’s voice floated to him, silkily sweet, guileless though he knew better.

"Jimmy, I wish you wouldn’t sit by my husband. Just a while ago he made a comment of how pretty you were today. I am a little jealous, he hasn’t gone on about me like that in a long time."

They all roared with laughter, every last one of them, and he had little doubt that everyone at the ranch had by now long been aware of the events of the afternoon, and that Kid had no small part in that. At his expense, they were having themselves a very good laugh.

At his side, Buck reached over and tugged at a lock of his hair. When he drew his hand back, he held a pink ribbon, which he lay beside Jimmy’s plate.

"I suppose you couldn’t have brought yourself to tell me I had left one in all the time we spent together this afternoon?" Jimmy asked of Kid and Cody.

"It is not in my nature." Cody agreed and happily tore a piece of chicken from the bone with his teeth.

They were all still laughing, and self-consciously, Jimmy ran a hand through his hair, and thankfully encountered no more ribbons. As he did so, as they all laughed at him, he caught Kid’s eye, then Lou's, and thought that if he were not so smitten with this entire family, he just might have minded.

He considered, several times, trying to bring up the fact that both Kid and Cody had committed several omissions or slights of conduct in the drinking of the imaginary tea (not the least of which had been Cody’s flattening the chair), and that he had pleased his hostess more than the others. Unfortunately, he thought such a story couldn't really help his plight much at the moment.

It wasn't until the end of the meal, after dessert had been served that Lou wondered breezily. "Would anyone like some tea? Oh, but I forget. Kid and Cody have already taken theirs."

Cody reddened and Kid nearly choked on the last bite of his cake, looking at Jimmy in accusation. Jimmy shrugged and shook his head to let them know that he had not been the one to tell Lou about their invitation to the tea party.

Jimmy took great pleasure in seeing the look of suspicion come over Kid's face. Could see him wonder just how far Lou’s reach was in her home and who belonged to the network of spies she had placed throughout. Kid swallowed hard and looked at Lou, as if wondering what other things she had heard about his behavior that day.

In the end, Jimmy decided that he would rather wear ribbons down the streets of Sweetwater than be on the receiving end of the slow, knowing smile Lou gave Kid.

Feedback is always appreciated: gliterin2000@yahoo.com

 *This story is rather shamefully self-plagiarized from one I wrote a few years back for another fandom. I don’t know why I felt the need to adopt this plot to Jimmy—but it just seemed to fit him so well and I’d been missing writing him. And there’s always the DAB—dissertation avoidance behavior.