#✯ — [ ᶤ ᵃᵐ ᵗʰᵉ ᵒᶰˡʸ ˢᵒᶰ ] ⨯ pre-deadlock

[quick-drawn]

@colecassiidy asked: ↪ Quotes from things I’ve written “Don’t make me drag you out of bed, Colt.”

The other's voice hardly phases him, Colton refusing to look up from where he laid on his bed. Though, even if he did, Cole probably wouldn't be able to see him under the MASSIVE mound of blankets he'd rolled himself in. Much like a burrito. The fabric is pulled taut over his head, another tug snugging the fabric against his ears to help AID in further ignoring the other's threat.

It's been just a little over a week of this...since his mother passed...

Today was supposed to be a day of running errands. Or rather, three days ago it was supposed to be — Cole graciously letting him push the date back to make room for the GRIEF. Though time can't heal all, he learns, each passing day somehow proving worse than the last.

It's inevitable. He passes her door every day, clear view of her bed, all the machines that were once keeping her alive now lifeless and still. It's the absolute decimation of his routine — such an integral part being ripped from his day to day life, it's DIFFICULT for him to fill the void...feels wrong...

— it's why he still refuses to move, accepting his fate should it really come down to Cole dragging him to the front door by the ankles.

"Th'barn better be on FIRE, you doin' all that..."

[quick-drawn]

@colecassiidy ↪ you asked for this, don't start crying now —

He's dead.

It's a definitive thought that sits at the forefront of his mind, even despite the ruckus Lady and Maria were causing in the background, despite how he was now holding a barrel steady against the chest of one of the assailers —

despite how his own fate sat cold, ready behind him at the crook of his neck.

There's nothing but silence between the four of them until a thick swallow paves way for a throaty murmur from Colton, who's eyes have yet to leave the other currently slouched across the wooden tabletop where he'd left him earlier, "...Cole?" Not expecting an answer...but NEEDING one. Empty seconds tick by that feel like hours. Each one somehow filled with more silence than the last until his features are wrenching into some evenly mixed form of ANGER and sorrow. All he needed was some sort of movement — a lift of his head or twitch of his fingers...maybe a pained groan or just...something more than the NOTHING he's getting right now. Anything...

— but he's fucking dead.

He currently stood between the opposite ends of two different guns, both a trigger pull away from sealing the fate of two, but his mind was NOWHERE to be found. Mentally, he wasn't in the dire situation of standing at the barrel end of a gun — he was in the dire situation of losing someone he cared about, and the others knew it. But, trying to take that as an opportunity to get the upper hand is what would lead to peacekeeper firing first, discharging a single round point blank into the one man's chest.

But Colton will hit the ground before he does. Through the wispy smoke and gunpowder, he's falling heavily to his hands and knees, the aftereffect of a swift pistol whip to the back of his head. And it's a dizzying trip down, only worsened by the shove of a boot knocking him down to an elbow. "Fuck..." he grits through his teeth as his eyes are forced closed, trying to blink away the sudden onslaught of spots and stars taking over his vision.

Boots — he sees Cole's boots before his gaze is traveling back up to the table, managing to get his lungs full of air before he calls out again, "COLE!" like a cry for help — but it wasn't. There's no doubt he could use a hand from the other right about now, sure. But what he needed was reassurance. Affirmation that he didn't just get his brother killed...

But you did — he's fucking DEAD and it's all your goddamned fault.

He doesn't even register the PAIN of being wrestled into the ground, his arm being folded back enough to dislodge his shoulder or the heel that sat against his chin — just the sting of losing another one. He can't lose another one...

"WAKE UP, damnit! Please!" it burst from the top of his lungs, voice sodden with PANIC as he chewed on the dirt and gravel of the unpaved parking lot his jaw's ground into — one final plea for a clear conscience, one last cry for his brother.

[quick-drawn]

@colecassiidy:

↪ cont.

Rim of the chilled bottle hangs from his lip a moment as he sat in thought, eyeing the open palm extended across rotting tabletop. For some reason he wasn't actually expecting an INVITATION to prove it — should've known better though, he would've demanded proof for such a claim too. But it wasn't just the unexpected bet unraveling on the table that had him a bit lost in thought, it was how STRANGE it was that they were even at this table in the first place...

— weird enough finding someone with the near exact likes of you, and even more so when that first meet is at gunpoint...but even besides all that, he'd never really found companionship like this before. Not after moving out here to TEXAS anyway. It was...nice, having company that wasn't his mother, that he could unapologetically be himself around, that was there to pick him up when he fell and laughed at almost all of his jokes — he almost forgot what it was like...almost didn't want him to leave...

"Well, I ain't ever been one t'back down from a CHALLENGE." he finally stammers out, sly grin returning to his features as the bottle is dropped next to the other, freeing up a hand to cradle into Cole's. There's an intimidating SQUEEZE as rickety chair is scooted just a tad bit closer, grin souring into a smug, presumptuous look.

"But, when I win, you gotta stay an' help wrangle th'cattle in tonight."

[quick-drawn]

starter. ↪ @colecassiidy

It's a one-hundred year old farm house — the floorboards bend and warp with the weather, branches from century-old oaks prod at shingles and scratch at siding with each gust of WIND, outdated copper pipe whines under the pressure of modern appliances — it's OLD. There's gonna be weird creaks and shadows in the middle of the night.

THIS, however, was not any of that. He was sure of it.

The unnatural clink of METAL clattering to the floor is what initially woke him from his sleep, Colton unable to ignore the odd domino-effect of clamor that followed. Something, or someone, had made it into the house — and he wasn't gonna wait around upstairs for them to find him first.

Peacekeeper is instinctively grabbed from his nightstand, held in clammy hands as he slowly made his way through the house. Each step down the two story staircase was a gamble whether or not it'd expose his approach with an ill timed SQUEAK. They hadn't been here long enough for him to learn such details of the old farm house — hardly long enough for them to even receive the first utility bill. Him and his mother, besides the house, they had nothing. He couldn't imagine what they were here looking for — what would be worth making so much of a ruckus over,

— worth risking your life over, his finger settling liberally over the trigger as he made it off the last step.

Drawers shuffled open and closed, still unpacked cardboard boxes slid across hardwood floors — though he grew closer to the intruder, the sound seemed to grow DISTANT, the pounding in his chest moving up to his ears until all he could hear was his own shallow, shaky breaths. He didn't want to do this — but he doesn't give himself enough time to back down.

Turning the corner with revolver leveled, the click of the hammer should be enough to get their attention, but he can't make out a face in the dark of the night. "Don't fuckin' move." said loud enough for the trespasser to hear, but hopefully quiet enough to not wake his mother upstairs. He'd rather resolve this PEACEFULLY — and without anymore blood to stain his hands...

" — 'fraid you've got th'wrong house." He takes one more step closer, just enough to see their hands over the counter — just enough to pull his stomach into an anxious knot...

"Whatever you're lookin' for AIN'T HERE. Stand up."

[quick-drawn]

Colton watches CAREFULLY as the figure moved for their pockets, remaining as observant as one could in the near pitch black of the torrid desert. Ensuring no sudden moves with the steady point of the barrel, he examines each item as it's tossed to the butcherblock. Nothing out of the ordinary. He's got half the mind to make a move for the wallet, check for identification — but the consideration is cut short at the delicate sound of SILVER pooling to the counter, eyes locking to the moonlight glimmered metal before he moves to snatch it up himself.

That's his mother's. And to think they'd almost gotten away with it...his features wrench in a sort of ANGER he can't even describe if he tried.

The grip around gunmetal tightens as familiar tenor echoes through the relatively empty house once more, his off hand fisting the bulk of the necklace as if to ensure safe keeping.

"Considerin' it, if it'll get you t' SHUT UP..." it's hissed through locked jaw with a rage induced flitter of the barrel, a reminder that it's there.

The thought briefly crossed his mind; not so much offing the offender for trespassing, or trying to steal his mother's things, but the slim chance that he'd have to fire in the name of self defense, like he'd done before — should they try anything smart with him, or prove to have ulterior motives. There's a slight tremble to his extremities at the thought — clear as day is the look of DISAPPOINTMENT his mother wore that dreadful night all those months ago. Along with relief, and a hint of GRATITUDE — but he doesn't remember any of those. Just the cry she'd let out at the scream of a bullet passing through the room, the way his body instantly flashed cold, stomach reeling as it is now — the disappointment in what her son had become, and the GRIEF that comes with witnessing the intellective death of her little boy...

It's BARS that insisted he did the right thing — never his mother. Must be why it stings the way it does, thinking back on it now. It's the reason they're in this predicament in the first place, having to move out to the desolate middle-of-nowhere. And Bars warned him, there was a chance that it wouldn't end here...but surely this wasn't it. Surely they hadn't found them so soon...SURELY —

— don't trust anyone.

The omnic's words echo through muddled thoughts to pull him back into the moment. Features visibly neutralize as he dares one last step closer to shove a fist into the other's shoulder, forcing the intruder to turn around towards the back door.

"We're gonna take a walk..."

he wants to spit and snarl out a try me. It scintillates on the tongue, sparking flash-fire and gun powder discharge. There's an irony in the juxtaposition between how the ghost holds his firearm with a locked wrist; anchored and assured where the rest of him is flitting fast eyes and fluttered breathing. Where was that, he wants to scream, where the fuck was that when god put you to your fucking knees? When you were nothing but a gun in your hands and the seared stinging in your lungs, buried in the blazing kindling of everything you once knew as home?

As the mirror image broaches a step closer, Cole's hands fists to the unreality of it. Leather gloves creak, nails digging into the interior. His eyes narrow to amber-glinting seething as the Other continues to punch out commands. His gaze snaps to the directed butcherblock.

A beat where he stares. No sudden movements.

He drags his hands down to his pockets. A pinky knuckle grazes against the protruding handle of a stolen revolver. Time doesn't stop, but it feels like it; a still frame staggered in a moving film, a lightning strike housing an impulse that could shatter everything. It's caught at the height of an inhale. There's no rounds in the chambers, and maybe this is Part of the Grand Trial, some arbitrary fucked up symbolism, aphorism, or what-have-you's, but who's to say ghost face was privy to know this little secret between himself and the last fucker caught choking blood in the alley. The Devil, they say, lives leisurely in the details. You can always bet youself on a bluff.

And, yet, the instinct to kill wells in the gut, floods it like a dog wrenching its jaws on bleached bones. The taste of iron and gunsmoke drenches his mouth heeding all the flavors of death. The way his body briefly laxes, expression bearing on something carefully focused-

He cuts into an exhalation abruptly, passing it over and digs through the denim instead of palming gunmetal. He yanks out an empty wallet that flaps uselessly onto the the surface. A folding knife clatters after it, followed by a lighter. The rest of his shit, he'd left back with Maria, still hitched to a shrub-shrouded fence post some ways back.

He pulls out, finally, a silver chain necklace. Hadn't thought much of it, but something light enough to pocket for even a chance of a penny seemed good enough for him. He lets it snake and pool besides his own litter, glinting and shining in the thread bare moonlight. His fingers slowly unfurl back up. He cants his head shoulder-bound and scoffs out a low-drawling sneer.

"Y'ain't got much to steal." His eyes dart over to a foot stool that'd skid around while he'd been gutting out the boxes. "Ain't much for missin' if y'come any closer." He breathes out, scathing, "You commitin' to the shot or what?"

[quick-drawn]

For such a young buck the revolver sits comfortably in his hands — not a shake or judder to it. Solely based off that, you wouldn't guess it was a KID behind that barrel.

But Colton...he was no kid — not in the mind, not anymore. He's seen too much, SUFFERED too greatly...put too many hours into insuring a steady hand and a level bullet for just anyone to be able to tell.

It's in the rest of his body, below surface level, that ANXIETY tremored and tugged at nerves — weight shifting needlessly from one leg to the other, breaths uneven and desperate, eyes scanning the other's figure almost COMPULSIVELY, as if looking for a reason, even as the stranger complied to his demands. He just wanted this to be over with,

— preferably without having to find a soft spot for a bone orchard out back.

The trespasser's first muttered response sits heavily in the pit of his stomach — it's another kid. He's POSITIVE, because he knows that voice...it's the same as his. The eerily familiar tenor itches at the nape of his neck where hairs stand straight in unease.

Of course he'd probably know that already if the moon flooding in at weird angles wasn't the only light source throughout the house. It's entirely too dark for his liking, the intruder only defined by SHADOW even after they stand. Gaze flicks to the light switch, several arm lengths away, and he contemplates whether he should gamble with the temporary BLINDNESS it'd leave in it's wake or if he'd be better off not knowing who this was.

It's a tossup — a thought that takes too long to process, giving the other the opening they need to mouth off their smart remark.

The words immediately knot his brow and tense his grip, and suddenly, he's not in his kitchen anymore. Echoes of the past briefly glaze his vision and it's his FATHER he's standing before, words repeated back in that haunting tone of his. It's not the first time this has happened. It's consistent, ever since the cursed day itself — when he catches a glimpse of his mother's bedspread, or when the t-shirt he wore that night makes it's way through the wash...

It's been a year now, the situation replayed THOUSANDS of times in his head, yet it still shakes him to the bone. And you can hear it in his voice, when he finally scrapes together enough courage and air in his lungs to shoot off his own snarky remark. "Reckon I know a quick way for you t'find out."

He dares a step closer, crossing threshold in an attempt to get a better look at the other.

"Your pockets — EVERYTHING. On th' counter." he demands, barrel flicking towards butcherblock where he wanted the contents dropped. Not knowing what they were here for, he wanted to make sure he wasn't about to send them on their way with any of his or, more importantly, his mother's belongings.

Two whole days without food. It's a stupid run of bad luck that'd ruptured off a Sunday: rifle pocked empty of ammo days ago on the last meal he'd dressed and revolver rounds wasted on a shitty little scrap that he would've been better off leaving alone. His stomach suffers for it, shriveled and aching, but when the hell has it ever been anything else? (Before the war, maybe, but you've packed that shit behind you. Buried it in salt. This is not an answer that gets to be on a list of pre-selected choices.)

Everything here squeaks in the language of rusted metal and weary wood. the hinges creak and squeal as he peels open a kitchen cabinet. he knows how to be quieter than this, but hunger has left him hasty and careless to a game plan stripped clean of caution; everything hinges off the haphazard scaffoldings of grab-as-fast-as-you-can-and-get-the-hell-out. his breathing is too loud, welling a haunt in his ears as he picks through a sparse clutter of pots and pans like a turkey vulture cleaning a corpse. whoever lives here isn't exactly well-stocked and he stifles a grimace at the unspoken implications lying in the shades of that.

He's ducking out from the guts of the shelves when the shushing sound of something sliding loose begins to hiss into the air. A snap of the wrist and he snags a loose pan lid between a gloved forefinger and thumb, but the momentum's set alive to the thing that'd been beneath it; he watches in slow motion as a mason jar lid topples free from right under and clinks onto the floor. he sucks in a breath, wincing. His jaw squares, teeth gritting as he seethes an internal hiss. Fuck, fuck.

he sets them back and hastens through the rest. shucks out boxes half-filled with items that weren't worth their weight in trouble for a dollar's trade. frustration is getting to the better of him when the knockback of a hammer creaks through all his shuffling. He stills.

His hands flag up instinctively, fingers fanned out into an open, unarmed splay. The voice that shudders the silence speaks in whispered commands.

Don't fuckin' move. It punches out a gut-born impulse to do anything but. He staves it off, starves it beneath scraps of self-preservation, and teeths the inside of his cheeks as something else trickles uneasily against the nape of his neck. something insiduous. Something that piles rocks into the cavity of his stomach.

He knows that voice. Knows it housed in the pit of his own throat: that tenor, the way it hovers and trundles over those hushed vowels. A raspier version echoes out of his own voice box, a wary "easy, now," that gutters out between clenched teeth.

He wets his lips before firming them into a scowl, brows gnarling into an ugly knot as he complies to the other's demand to stand. His eyes flick between the bare furnishings; something, anything, that maybe he could throw-- the effort, however, aborts abruptly, gaze stuttering to a halt as it grazes over the figure holding him at gunpoint.

Cole might be back-lit by the moon cutting in from the window, but the kid that faces him isn't. Familiar features painted pale in evening light, he looks like a fucking ghost peering back at him behind the barrel of a revolver.

Must've died, he thinks, sometime Sunday. God sports a fucked up sense of humor, if this is the trial that sits for him on the precipice before hell.

He stares down the muzzle, into its deep, dark eye that colors the makings of the void. He wonders if this is how he'd looked, back then, half buried in the rubble.

A bully's humor wrenches out of him, delivered dry and haughty, bearing on the attack, tiding just above a primitive hate that he isn't fast enough to stomp on, "You even know how to use that thing?"

[quick-drawn]

His grip falters at Cole's initial demands, that ambitious grin slowly down turning into a weary look of defeat — as though he'd already LOST. Only made worse by the fact that he'd try to hide it behind a huff and another quick snap of a grin.

He was nervous not because the payoff was the best pillow he's got...

— but because it's the ONLY pillow he's got. If they were at the old house, back in New Mexico, sure. But here? They didn't exactly have the space to move the whole house. Just the essentials. Meaning: he's only got but the one, and like hell he'd take one from his mother...but, while Colton was a lot of things, a COWARD wasn't one of 'em.

He takes in a deciding breath, but before he could seal the deal, another offer is made. One a little more appealing than the last.

Peacekeeper wasn't exactly your everyday, run of the mill pocket pistol. Hell — wasn't even your average revolver. Ammo was scarce and handling it took a good deal of skill, but he couldn't deny the EXPERIENCE of it. Honestly, he could've just asked and Colton would've let him...but it'll be fun to see the other fight for it.

"DEAL." said through another tight squeeze, resetting his elbow against the table as that mischievous smirk returned.

"I'll even give you th' honors."

His brows cock up, impish and challenging. Anticipation jumps the tendons in his forearm into an eager ripple. He knows that this pause isn't reluctance or hesitation, and it's a strange kind of knowing; the sort that is hard-wired into stomach-seeded instincts and into the tingle of hair triggers. Assured, undoubting. He reckons that this is what his mother meant when she told him that she Knew Her Son. Though how much of this is knowing thyself versus having gotten to know Colton is a little beyond him. He reckons it doesn't matter. Split hairs just to have them split never suited him anyhow, but his grin broadens like an overripe fruit rupturing as Colton bears forward and clasps their palms. He's fiendish, sparking, swallowed in the sun of childish excitement, "Good - I ain't lookin' t'tell your ma that she's got a son to disown over some cowardice."

Cole answers Colton's squeeze with one of his own, elbow ruddying against the grind of welted wood grain. Their wrists deadlock to equal tensions.

He scoffs through a smirk, and it's an abrasive noise - all grit and no friction; "C'mon now, that's it?" -- Sure, it wasn't an easy chore, but he would've just done it anyway if the other asked. Still, Cole knows why it comes out like this. "How 'bout when you lose, y'let me take the most comfortable pillow y'got." He's been sleeping off of a stolen bed roll since he'd left the foster homes and orphanages; a feather-stuffed pillow would be nice to have as his own; A pause stumbles in. He hums, contemplative, and his gaze slides off to the side, "Or y'let me shoot a few rounds offa that fancy revolver of your's."