Chapter Text
—
The mud has a mind of its own.
For a while the sun shone and red seeped into the ground between blood-spattered dandelions and green grass that made your ankles itch. Yes, there were days of rain and wind but his horses never complained so neither did he. If the mood struck he might pluck one of those blood-spangled dandelions and pin it into his sash, reckons the boys might appreciate he fancies it a boutonniere. Give them something to poke fun at, even if it’s at his expense.
Maria liked tucking dandelions behind her ears, always said the yellow matched her hair, maybe that’s why he does it.
December comes, and one day the snow falls, the next day the sun’s back, and the day after the sky stinks of grey again and the snow falls harder, and then hours later the sun’s back, and that’s the cycle.
And the ground is sludge. Mud and sludge.
Topsoil? No, there’s none of that here. That melted snow fuses and mingles with the dirt and becomes mud and the mud puddles coalesce into mud pools and mud lakes and that’s how it goes. And they have to traverse it, they have to walk through it, elseways they die, but with the way their boots get buried half a foot deep with every step, the movement required to even pull this off could hardly be called walking. No, they trudge through, and on days they’re really unfortunate bastards, they wade through. The water rises from their feet, pools in their footprints, and really, it’s remarkable that one could dig his foot in the ground and in his wake kindle a water spring. That’s how so many of his men die, actually, now that he thinks about it. They sink into the mud, the ground swallows them whole.
The graves just dig themselves, don’t they?
If they die in summer, usually the boys will take some of those dandelions and place them next to a rock or a tree they’ve designated a resting place, something of a ritual, something elegiac, so they can pretend their names won’t be forgotten among thousands.
So far, he’s read the deaths of seven of his men; one died a deserter, one died getting trampled by a stagecoach, two were shot, and the rest were swallowed with the dandelions into the mud.
—
No dandelions in winter.
—
Her fur has never looked as void of pink as it ever has in her life.
The mud sticks and cakes into her pelt and she’s hasty to clean it off lest it dry up and pull patches of fur along with it and leave angry red blotches on her skin.
Her uniform is white, because of course it is; they want the girls to be easy on the eyes for the boys’ sake. Tonic for a tired soldier’s eyes.
It makes her feel like a fraud. She doesn’t feel modest, doesn’t feel seemly or ladylike or angelic like the white is meant to make her look because she’s pulled bullet fragments out of more patients than she can count with her elbows deep in their ribs and amputated limbs with no anaesthesia and her uniform isn’t even white anymore. The men, they beg, they beg: give him oil, give him snow, give him morph, give him mercy—
Sorry, boys. Best she can do is light you a smoke.
The chinchilla she’s tending to has a bullet lodged in his hip with no exit wound, but he’s mostly good as she works, groans into the belt he’s biting down on and jolts occasionally as she picks and prods, but don’t worry, darlin’, I’ve had it worse, he assures her and eventually she extracts the last of what she’s digging for.
She lets him hold her hand as he watches a snow leopardess, the head nurse, saw off his friend’s leg down to the bone as the other nurses hold him steady. The air inside the tent fills with the stench of blood that grows heady and the sound of screams that grow hoarse.
The longer he watches his friend, the paler he grows, he gets a little clammy, and she reaches underneath the cot to pull a pail out and hold it under his chin. He empties his stomach of whatever measly rations he’d eaten that day into it.
“Sorry,” the chinchilla murmurs to her, or at least she thinks he does; little difficult to hear him over the sound of an amputation happening six feet away from them.
She maintains that an ordinary person is entitled to be horrified at the sight of a mangled body, at the sight of his friend in the sort of pain he can’t do anything to relieve.
“Don’t be,” she replies, offering him a smile and a smoke.
—
“I don’t think yellow’s your colour,” and this time she doesn’t complain when he shakes the crown of dandelions she weaved into his quills off his head.
“Good. Maybe now you’ll stop trying to decorate me like one of your dolls,” he grumbles.
She giggles. “Next time I’ll use daisies, I think.”
Next time never comes because the illness takes her that same night, and the next morning after she’s put in the ground, he razes each and every last one of those dandelions from the ground up and burns them with the house.
The stories are one and the same: Shadow, they call him. Only loves his colts and his horses, that one.
But he had a sister once, that part of the story is often left unsaid.
—
They like to whisper myths, his men. It whiles away the time as you wait for the shot that kills you, and that’s actually how one of those myths goes.
You don’t hear the shot that kills you, they tell each other, and under any other circumstances, Shadow might scoff.
Just how would anyone alive know that?
But they put up with the stupid, annoying sound of him incessantly cracking open his sunflower seeds and spitting the shells into the dirt, so the least he can do is let them have their equally stupid storytime hootenannies.
One day, Shadow’s lieutenant, an orange red panda barely six months younger than him, receives a letter from his brother-in-law that his lady went into labour.
She didn’t survive it. Neither did his baby girl.
While the boys are asleep, the red panda folds the letter and tucks it into his jacket, like some kind of tragic little pocket-square to seem more dignified in what he's about to do, then walks out unto the setting sun and puts the barrel of his .45 in his mouth.
Well, myth busted. One can, in fact, hear the shot that kills him.
His boys stop telling stories after that.
—
Amy's quickly grown accustomed to the cigarette smoke, even more so to the blood; she breathes it more than she breathes air. It’s demanded of her, and that is her woe, that she is not allowed to feel sick or queasy.
The chinchilla offers her a drag from the cig she lights for him but she shakes her head, her vice is sugar. Yet another one of her woes, the lack of strawberry sweets for her to indulge in.
She’s a petite thing, and still, it’ll go straight to your hips, sweetheart, Mari-Ann had warned her all those years ago. She’d eaten the strawberry shortcake a little messier, then, if only to spite her cousin-in-law. Vanilla and Cream had laughed.
Springtime rolls around finally, and one day, a fennec fox no older than sixteen with a nasty fever stumbles into their tent and collapses right there at the tent door. He’s sweating, hardly breathing, and unconscious. Amy does everything there is to do, but ultimately, comfort is the only comfort she can give him now. And, yes, she’s aware he’s wearing the enemy’s colours, but her head nurse already did this song and dance with her before, knows Amy won’t brook any room for argument. He’s a child, he’s in their tent now, he’s in her care, and she will tend to him whether the leopardess complains in her ear that she’s using their medicinals on the enemy or not.
She wonders between her tears how someone his age had managed to land himself in the infantry, and she remembers the recruiter she’d socked in the nose a year ago. A teenager had walked into the office after she signed her own name, and the kid had told the recruiter he was fifteen.
The recruiter had only instructed the boy to walk out and then walk back inside and state his age as eighteen.
One broken nose and an earful later, she’d sent the boy back home to his folks with a frown and the recruiter to the infirmary with two twin wads of cotton up his nostrils.
She cries for him, the fennec she’s tending to now. Silently. He’s about Tails’ age but with maybe half the innocence and about six times the trauma.
The nurse matron, the snow leopardess, gives her a stern look, one she’d seen often when she’d treated her first two or three patients; the one that said not to mourn them, not like this, not while there was still work to be done.
She leaves the cold rag on the boy’s forehead and wipes her tears.
—
Shadow does indeed hear the shot.
It doesn’t quite kill him, though. It hits him in the shoulder.
Eight more men he’s lost in the last hour alone, so fifteen men total and counting. The Jackals’ assault was not unexpected, but it grates all the same when he hears them laughing, shouting numbers, tally keeping, who can pick off the most: three! Six! Eight—
They shoot down his fucking horse—
Kill the bastards one and all, until he sends whatever’s left of them running for the town. He’s the quickest draw there is and if they hadn’t known it then, they knew it now.
But the blood coming out of his shoulder seeps into his dandelion boutonniere—this limp, brown, dead thing that’s been pinned to his coat for months now—and it’s the last thing he sees before his boys pick him up off the ground and scream at each other to get him to the nurses’ tents.
Barely hears them, barely hears his name, the pleads—Cap?! Grab his legs! Shadow? Shadow?!—because he can only see the sky and the sun and he realizes for the first time—
Springtide.
—
A male hedgehog, perhaps two or three years older than her, but with the weariness of the war weighing down on him he looks like he could be more than that, is brought to them with the bloodied hands of his men pressed to his shoulder. One of them starts barking orders at her, and she takes satisfaction in the way his mouth clamps shut immediately when she glares at him, just about burns him with her hard gaze, singes his feathers, and points to a cot where they lay the hedgehog down.
She thinks she knows him, vaguely, or knows of him, at least. She hears the girls chattering sometimes when the tent is otherwise quiet; like a sewing circle, you hear everything there is to know about everyone there is: the tall hedgehog captain of a large company with fur black as night and red stripes to match his eyes, and a giggle or two usually accompanies the stories, followed by hushed murmurs of something lewd and the listener will then gasp, blush, you know how it goes.
Quickest draw there is. So. This is him?
The blood’s coming out of the other side of his shoulder as well. Makes her life easier that the shot went in and out. She shoos his boys away, before removing his coat and button up and pouring the tincture onto his shoulder. Shot’s too high to have broken or fractured anything, and the debris is easy enough to remove. Once more with the tincture and then she wraps his shoulder, loops the cotton around his torso—
Damn near wants to smooth out the tired lines under his sleeping eyes with the pads of her thumbs.
But she doesn’t.
—
When Shadow comes to, he finds himself back at the encampment staring at the ceiling of a tent. He makes to sit up, but feels a pinch in his shoulder, then burning, and it draws a quiet growl out of him.
“Slow down, cowboy,” he hears. It’s a pink hedgehog with big, jade doe-eyes, and absolutely no business being as much a sight for sore eyes as she is, dressed in an angelic kind of white that’s stained with about as much blood and mud as him. “I just cleaned you up,” and she pushes her hand into his uninjured shoulder gently, urging him back into his cot.
He grunts and resists the press of her hand, and idly notes she’s got quite the arm on her. “I’m fine.”
“Sure about that? Your shootin’ arm’s looking a little limp,” she counters, nodding her head at the bandages.
He raises a brow at her. “Both my arms are my shootin’ arms.”
She smiles, not looking surprised in the slightest by his retort. He narrows his gaze, tilts his head like it might give him the angle he needs to see through her, to glean what she knows, what she’s heard about him.
Measuring up to his reputation, is he?
“Can’t convince you to stay until it’s healed?”
“Not unless you’ve got something for the pain,” he responds, bringing his hand to his face to rub at his eyes tiredly.
When he opens his eyes she’s holding a cigarette out for him.
Ah. Always prepared, then.
He observes her quietly, takes the cig from her and puts it between his lips. She lights it for him.
“You don’t strike me as a smoker,” he asks around the stick.
“I’m not,” she says, shrugging. “I keep them on me ‘cause you boys gnaw on them like candy.”
He hasn’t had a smoke in a while and he wonders how he went as long as he did on those coffee beans and sunflower seeds alone.
Something catches his eye, there’s a runt a few cots over, wearing enemy regimentals, can’t be older than sixteen. “He one of yours?” he asks, cocking his head in the fennec’s direction.
She turns her gaze to the boy, and suddenly she looks much less bubbly than she had a moment ago. “Yeah, he’s one of mine.”
“You see the garb, don’t you?”
She shoots him a brief glare, like she’d received several earfuls already. “Yes.”
“And you’re letting him lie in one of your beds?”
They ignore the head nurse’s distant grumbling—I keep telling her—and the pink hedgehog’s eyes narrow. “That a problem?”
“Recruiter didn’t warn you what happens to nurses that treat the enemy?”
“He’s a child,” she hisses, and while, yes, he’s a child, Shadow can’t imagine what merit she sees in tending to him, why she’s willing to risk putting a price over her own head.
He gets the impression she expects absolutely nothing out of it. Must be in her nature, he can tell, she’ll put the world on her shoulders and let it crush her if it means she doesn’t have to watch it burn. Most don’t make it far with that philosophy, so either she’s surviving on hopes and dreams or she’s got some grit to her.
It’s the latter; this, he can also tell, because she doesn’t shy away from scathing at him—
“He’s the enemy,” he growls back, quietly so as not to draw even more attention from the girls who think they’re being inconspicuous as they gawk at the hedgehogs arguing.
The fennec boy wakes, and her ears perk up as if attuned to it, to him. The kid’s one wrong breath away from the grave and she seems adamant that she tends to him to the best of her ability until it comes.
“Maybe yours,” she murmurs, and he almost doesn’t catch it, “but not mine,” and then she gets up to tend to the kid.
He catches her arm and she regards him with a questioning frown. “The price is fifteen thousand and a bullet,” he says.
Her lips curl in a snarl and she wrenches her arm out of his grip. “It’s twenty now, actually, and hemp fever,” she grits, and then leaves his cot and goes to the fennec.
—
His brothers fought in wars, the fennec boy tells her, his father, his uncles, his grandfathers, his great-grandfathers, the stories are one and the same. It’s why he’s here.
In and out of consciousness.
When the boy’s awake she opens some airtights and tries to get him to eat, he manages a bite or two before looking like he’s about to cough them right back up. Amy reckons he’s close.
He seems to know it, too, because he begins pouring his heart out to her. Tells her about his sister, about his family, his favourite hobbies. Tells her about the first time he fired a gun, about the proud smile on his Pops’ expression when he shot the penny square in the president’s face.
He cries as he tells her about his mother, of the fever that took her, the ballads she used to sing to him.
His favourite ballad happens to be one she’s mighty fond of as well.
He’s close now, and he knows it. Comfort is the only comfort she can provide him now.
So, she sings.
—
This woman, she doesn’t just mouth off, she sings, too, apparently.
Better than his men. Much better. He’s big enough to give her that. Even if ‘caterwauling’ is a more appropriate word for whatever the hell his men do.
It always has to be dinner and a show.
He’d listened to the fennec spill his guts to her for the last hour, recounting the last however many years of his life—likely knowing he was going to die in this tent, in that cot—as if hoping the pink hedgehog might deem him worthy enough a person to tell tales about around a fire. Worthy enough to remember.
The kid’s story goes much the same as everyone else’s.
He hears the fennec tell the nurse about some ballad or other his mother used to sing to him, and that’s how the pink hedgehog deafens the tent to everything but the sound of her voice. She’s really only singing barely above a whisper, but still, she quiets the world into a grave, sober silence in her grief for this boy she doesn’t know.
Oh, listen for a moment lads,
And hear me tell my tale.
Kid’s barely awake, but he’s fighting whatever it is pulling him under long enough to see the ballad through.
How o’er the sea from England’s shore,
I was condemned to sail.
Shadow doesn’t understand what she means to accomplish in the way she strokes the boy’s hand while his breaths grow weak and weaker. It’s an eerily familiar sight.
She’s breaking her own heart to mend his. Maria did much the same with him.
The jury said “He’s guilty, sir,”
And said the judge, said he:
Didn’t understand it with Maria, doesn’t understand it now.
“For life, Jim Jones, I sentence you
Across the stormy sea.”
The ballad, it sounds so out of place on her, and she, she looks so out of place with her big doe-eyes and her muddied, bloodied angel uniform.
“And take my tip before you ship
To join the iron gang,
That nurse’s veil on her, the drape of it around her shoulder blades, he wonders if she feels as undeserving of it as he does of the insignias pinned to his lapels—
Don’t be too gay at Botany Bay,
Elseways you’ll surely hang.”
—if she feels as dishonest dressed in the ivory white that’s stained with the blood of the men she couldn’t save as he does dressed in a colour he can’t even remember, stained with the blood of the men he sends to the grave.
“Elseways you’ll surely hang,” says he,
“And after that, Jim Jones,
This is what the boy mourns, then, that no one will ever march the thirteen steps up the gallows, look the hangman in the eyes, and sing about a young, rebellious fennec fox as a final curtain call.
Thing is, slugger, war changes both much and nothing at all. Usher in a new era, but the way the world works doesn’t change in the slightest. Usurper of a usurper of a tyrant, a guest on his own throne, complained of another coming for his dominion and of feeling ill. Usurper takes his pilfered crown, his cup, his sorrows, no notice of the pearly white walls crumbling down around him, no heed of his advisors’ advice, his leave, and then his life.
Poor guy. Regrets, condolences, all that.
Point is, you wouldn’t be the first to be laid to rest in an unmarked grave, and you certainly won’t be the last. And all the stories you never got to tell, all the ballads that will never be written in rhyme with your name, no one will hear them and no one will even bury you with them, either. All you take to the grave with you are your deeds.
Just ask the dandelions outside.
High up upon the gallows tree
The crows’ll pick your bones.”
The boy doesn’t see the ballad to its end.
Shadow didn’t hear the final breath he drew, but he did hear the way the pink hedgehog choked the last of those verses out between her tears. Part of him hoped she’d get to sing the song in full so perhaps she might for once feel like she sent at least one of these poor bastards off to return to the ground with something more than his colours and the mud in his boots.
The ballad probably doesn’t have the happiest of endings, though, so. Fitting, he supposes.
Shadow isn’t the only one watching her as she rises from her seat on the edge of the boy’s cot, as she takes his limp hand and lays it over his middle. When she turns around though, the only gaze that catches hers is his, and she only gives him the briefest of glances before the snow leopardess, in a rare act of motherliness, tugs her away from the boy with a hushed, gentle order to get herself fed.
He thinks he could smooth out the tired lines under her teary eyes with the pads of his thumbs if she let him.
—
“Rouge brought me a pearl bracelet!” she’d said in lieu of a greeting one day. “Oh, Shadow, look how pretty they are!”
Oh, good, there are two of them now. “Don’t get caught in public wearing them, the governess she probably swiped them from’ll think you stole them.”
Maria huffs. “You don’t know Rouge stole ‘em!”
He levels her with a flat look. She only giggles back. “Grump,” she chides, and he doesn’t object to that.
Just what he needs, a lawman coming for Rouge’s plundering neck only to find the goodies she nabbed on his sister’s wrist. “They won’t bury her with her jewels and pearls when they hang her.”
“They’d have to catch me first,” Rouge interjects, strutting into the salon spinning what is likely the governess’ husband’s gold watch around her finger and smirking. Perfect; the pearl bracelet has a beau to keep it company.
“All you take to the grave with you are your deeds, Sticky-Fingers. Remember that,” he snarks.
Maria laughs. “Plant a tree and watch your friends take shade under it, watch a flicky build its nest in it. It’ll remain long after you’re gone, Shadow. Not all of it just goes straight to the ground with you.”
—
“Your deeds can outlive you, Shadow.”
—