From the History of the Shirts II
Brokeback ficlet/vignette - another glimpse into the history of the two shirts.
500 words, movie canon, rated G. Warning for canon angst.
Disclaimer: They do not belong to me, but to Annie Proulx, Diana Ossana, Larry McMurtry and Focus Features. I make no profit of any kind except for the inspiration I find in thinking and writing of Jack and Ennis.
A/N: See previous entry.
When the kissing had to stop
Jack had never worried about what they’d do after. He lived for the here and now, and anyway - they had lots of time left on the mountain still. If he’d given it a thought at all, he’d a figured they’d continue like this, get a job somewhere together, stay close. Yeah, somehow they’d be together.
That brutal punch shattered every illusion and sent him crashing into Ennis’s reality. He saw the pain and rage of separation, felt it in his own battered face, his suddenly-bruised heart.
With a staggering jolt he realized that this could be their last day. They’d be free-falling down the mountain, diving headlong into despair, and then…?
Jack was at a loss.
Ennis was washing up at the creek. He’d pulled his other shirt out of the saddlebag, was kneeling over the water, hunching tensely, numbing his hand, numbing his nose, numbing his heart with angry splashes of icy-cold, the freezing wet of tears neither of them could let themselves shed.
The brightly sparkling snow-melt taunted both a them cruelly, beckoning and hurrying to get down off the mountain now it had made sure they had no choice but to follow.
Ennis’s bloodied shirt was lying up a ways from the bank, pulled off and cast aside in impotent rage.
Jack looked from the pale forbidding back at the creek, and over to the blood-stained shirt on the ground.
It was as if Ennis had violently shed his own skin, had ripped it off while it still clung to his sinews and bones, had deliberately torn away the soft layer that belonged here on Brokeback, and was painfully revealing the new one underneath.
Pale, hard and cold, skin like frozen snow. A shield against Jack and their time on the mountain.
No use arguing or reasoning with winter’s heart.
On an impulse Jack snatched the plaid shirt from off the ground. He crammed it against his chest, cradled it close, and bent his aching head over it in stunned silence.
The shirt he held in his hands seemed to him as strangely empty as a rattler’s discarded skin discovered in the desert dust. A skin still imprinted with the distinct shape of the body and life it recently housed, the memory of what used to be.
He turned to the horses. He’d have to wash up and change his own shirt, it was every bit as bloodied and dirty as Ennis’s.
He knew he couldn’t let them go. He needed to keep both their shirts by him.
Two tender skins, marked by the mountain, grass and dirt and sweat, torn from them prematurely as one, stained with fresh blood to prove it. Sweat and blood….but no tears. He didn’t have any.
The ache from the double punch to his feelings and his face seemed strangely distant and dull as he rolled up the two shirts and hid them in his pack.
He closed his dry eyes for a moment. No tears.
He felt too hollow, too empty for that.