Work Text:
It isn’t unusual for anyone to get off the train. A few do, each day, now the iron horse has made it even here. But normally it’s the locals; folk from down the valley, or the farms further up, going back and forth to market. That day, in the cold morning light, it’s two women who arrive.
Two armed women.
One is middle-aged, with the sort of lines that smiling makes and frowning makes fierce. The other is younger, two, three decades, with her bonnet tied down far too tight. When asked, because someone is always foolish enough to ask, they claim they’ve come up to hunt; it is not quite past the birding season, that someone supposes, and so the outsiders go unquestioned.
For three days they stay in the tiny town hotel. They come in and out fleetingly, talking little and spending slightly too much. And then one night they go up to the hills.
To hunt, of course.
A man a millennium in the therebefore awakes to a knock at the door; it’s a woman, on the wrong side of her fourties, asking directions back down to the village. He buys her act long enough; to listen to her, to let her in (though she need not be invited), to be surprised when she draws cold steel.
He has heard of the weapon, of course. But he has never seen one. He does not fear it until it is too late.
The crash rolls down the mountain, and the younger woman waits. It is still birding, in a way; drive them up, shoot them down. And sure enough, a spot of darkness comes against the sky.
When she first held a gun, in the mud outside Sevastopol, it was powder and shot and she ran screaming at the blood. Now, though? It is the era of brass and repeater and nitro express, and silver-tipped bullets are not hard to find, and she has seen more blood than any should. So she does not run screaming when she draws her line, not when the gun in her hands speaks.
The man falls bleeding from the heavens, and two close in, a sharpened foot of ash between them.
And above, in the cabin, another woman watches, and feels sickened. At her own relief at the screams.