4th story, The Carnival Wake by Delphi, Part 2

[valiha]

Title: The Carnival Wake
Fandom The Magnificent Seven
Author: Delphi at atdelphi
Artist: Sparrow at sparrowsverse
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters in this story are the property of their copyright holders. I am in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any previously copyrighted material. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made from this pursuit.
Pairing: Nathan Jackson/Josiah Sanchez/Ezra Standish
Rating: Adult
Warnings: Future Fic, past character death
Summary: Following a mutual loss, Nathan tracks down a missing Ezra to New Orleans. Against the backdrop of Mardi Gras revelry, the two men reflect on their histories with the city and on whether their relationship has a hope of surviving into the future.
Author's Notes: My deepest thanks to farad and lookfar for all their help.

Part II

Ezra had never been to the opera in his life, to his deep regret, but when he imagined the Paris of La Traviata or Carmen's Seville, it was New Orleans that set the stage. Its size, its opulence, its dirty grandeur-it never failed to dazzle him. Even here, in the midst of the mundane scene of a breakfast table, with scrambled eggs and bacon and grits that reminded him of nothing so much as his grandmother's kitchen, there were little cups of French coffee, and the graceful-legged china hutch, and the baroque clock ticking away on the mantel.

So it was that when Nathan finally came down to breakfast that morning, sleepless but clean-shaven, there was something almost tragically handsome in his tired expression and the stiffness of his gait. Ezra's heart lurched in his chest.

They sat opposite each other at the table, beside the other two boarding gentlemen, and they mutely shoveled down their eggs and drank their coffee. It was almost like old times, bleary-eyed after one gunfight or another, mindlessly eating their fill in the hotel dining room before stumbling off to bed. Neither of them spoke for several minutes, and then Nathan cleared his throat.

"There a telegraph office around here?"

Ezra blinked, swallowing down his mouthful of grits and dabbing at his mouth with his napkin before nodding. "A block west, on the corner."

"I'm going to have to wire Chris again," Nathan said, sounding put out. "And your mother too."

He nearly dropped his fork, and he stared in consternation. "You wired my mother?"

His outburst was loud enough to alert Madame Roy. He saw her just happen to glance through the doorway from the kitchen, her left eyebrow arching. The other gentlemen had the good grace to keep on plodding through their breakfasts. One of them turned the page of his newspaper.

Nathan gave him a look that clearly said, 'You took off in the middle of the night with nothing but the clothes on your back and your gun-what the hell do you think I did?' But all he said in mixed company, thankfully, was, "Of course I wired your mother. She's worried."

Ezra wasn't certain to what extent he believed that. Maybe she was. Her San Francisco mansion, however, was far away and sturdy enough to insulate the worst of the shocks, or so he hoped. He didn't need someone else to make amends to. He wondered if he should offer to pay for the telegrams, but he suspected that might rub Nathan the wrong way.

"I should go with you," he finally ventured. A brief hesitation near the end made it more of a question, and he firmed it up. "I'll apprise her of the situation."

That seemed to be a right enough answer, because Nathan nodded and got back to his eggs. Ezra had lost his appetite. He spread what was left around the plate to make it look as if more had been eaten, so as not to insult the landlords, and mused to himself that Nathan always ate more when he was upset. Ezra could hardly fathom the impulse, but then, he supposed, he had never really gone hungry before.

After Nathan had finished, they set out into town together, and Ezra took a deep breath of the thick morning air with some satisfaction. "It is a lovely day," he declared.

Nathan paused to give him a dark look.

Ezra raised his eyebrows. "Am I not even allowed to comment on the weather now?"

Nathan quickened his pace, long legs striding at full extension, leaving Ezra to do an ungainly little hop-step to keep up. "It's humid as a swamp and you know it, Ezra."

"It's lush," Ezra said, rather peevishly.

There was no response, and Ezra found himself looking yearningly at all the distractions of the city. The women and the men, and the shops, and the shuttered restaurant that practically screamed the presence of a gambling room in the back. "We should see when that bookshop opens. Or perhaps we might amble on to the Vieux Carré for the day. We could even take in a show this evening..."

Nathan halted in his tracks, once again leaving Ezra out of step. "Do you think this is a vacation?" he asked.

Ezra's mouth hung open for a moment as Nathan turned and loomed over him. "I-"

“Do you think it was a Sunday picnic getting here? Do you think I was riding in the first class car eating oysters while I was chasing after you?”

Ezra looked down the street in silence for several moments. They began walking again, past the bookshop, past a gay little café where a beautiful young woman in a red dress was setting out a pair of chairs. Then, abruptly, he said, “No.”

“What?”

Ezra took a deep breath. “No, I do not think it was a Sunday picnic,” he said crisply. In truth, it had not occurred to him. Of course he had seen the other cars disembarking when he had arrived in the city, but Nathan wasn't-Nathan was different, because-well. He shut his mouth and stuffed his hands rudely into his pockets until they reached the telegraph office.

Once there, he paid far too much for an overlong and breezy message to his mother. He glanced over Nathan's shoulder and read: ‘Found him. Heading back.’ He thought about the others then, for the first time since he had left. Chris solemnly holding his hat in his hands, and Vin curled over tiredly where he sat on the clinic steps. Buck’s hand unexpectedly coming to rest on his back, and JD making no pretense at hiding his tears.

He wondered if they expected him to come back at all, and he cleared his suddenly dry throat. "I was thinking..."

Nathan looked at him sideways, suspicious as always.

Ezra took a deep breath. "I was thinking we might stay until Mardi Gras."

Nathan's expression hardened, his hand over his mouth like he was trying to keep from saying something unfortunate. He looked around in disbelief as though Ezra had just suggested holding a music hall show in a church.

Ezra found himself looking away, dredging up that word that did not come easily when he was being sincere. His hands clenched around the edge of the counter, steadying him as his stomach twisted itself into anxious knots. "Please?"

There was only silence for several long moments as Nathan peered at him, squinting as if he could look through Ezra’s eyes and straight into his head. Finally, he sighed and scratched out the full stop, adding, ‘in a few days.’

"You're paying for the extra words," he said.

Ezra only nodded, swallowing hard over a lump in his throat, and then opened his wallet and obliged.

~*~

There was no moon that night, the first time they bedded down together. That was how he remembered it, at least. It was a Sunday, and it was cold-October, maybe, or November. He had never bothered to mark the date; that night and the next and a dozen nights after, it had seemed like the first and the last time, as though it had never really happened to start with and certainly could never happen again. He supposed he could look it up in an almanac, but there was a little voice in his head that niggled at him, worrying that he would open the book up and find that there hadn’t been any moonless Sundays that autumn after all.

In his memory, however, it was uncannily dark that night. The stars were chips of ice in the black sky, and he and Josiah and Nathan were nothing but shadows with eyes and teeth outside the smoky glow of the campfire. It had been an uneasy ride back from Jefferson Flats, for no reason that could be ascribed to a routine escort job. Josiah and Nathan had been exchanging small, tense looks all the two days out and one day back, looks that Ezra couldn’t quite interpret. He thought perhaps they had argued, but there didn’t seem to be bad feeling hanging in the air-only caution.

His palms were stinging around a cup of Nathan’s muddy tea. The stuff was foul, but it was hot, although that wasn’t quite enough to keep him from shivering as night settled cold and brittle over the camp. Josiah's coat suddenly thumped onto his shoulders, and he looked up sharply, startled. Josiah placidly took a sip of his tea, and Ezra picked at the dusty sleeve, frowning in disdain to cover his confusion.

"They say," Josiah intoned, "that there are three sure ways to warm a man up."

"Who's 'they'?" Ezra asked, a little embarrassed at how well and quickly the coat was doing the job. It was heavy, and it carried the warm whiskey and cigarillo scent of the man himself, which on a cold and quiet night like this was a mite too distracting.

"They," Josiah said. "You know 'they', don't you, Nathan?"

"I do know 'they', Josiah," Nathan said, right on the beat, and Ezra could hear the strange, crooked smile in his voice. Sometimes he thought the only thing they had in common was finding Josiah funnier than he deserved.

"All right," Ezra said, working his jaw in consideration as he humored them. "Three things."

"Well," Josiah said, "the first has to be a warm fire, wouldn't you say, Nathan?"

"Oldest one in the book, Josiah."

"Can't beat a good fire."

"Or a cup of tea. I'd say that's the second thing, wouldn't you?"

"A cup of tea," Josiah affirmed, nodding seriously. "Which you were kind enough to provide.”

"My pleasure."

There was a long, silent pause, and then Ezra couldn't resist any longer. "And the third?"

That was when Josiah's hand settled on his leg-on his thigh. It squeezed.

Ezra froze. The hand moved slowly higher. To his distant and ridiculous annoyance, the pair of them were right, and he flushed hot all the way through. He found himself looking not at Josiah, whom he knew would be grinning wildly, but at Nathan. This was a joke, certainly. And not a very funny one.

"Speechless is a good look on him, wouldn't you say, Nathan?"

Nathan chuckled then, a low, smug sound that made Ezra bite his lip. "Yeah, it is, actually."

Then there was another hand on him, slipping under the coat and resting at the small of his back. It wasn't Josiah's.

He opened his mouth, his thoughts spinning. He had been careful, as careful as a worldly man could be in this part of the country, but not quite as careful as Josiah, and certainly not as careful as Nathan if they had been...

"I-" he began to say, but then Josiah moved close, lips nearly touching his.

"'Speechless' was working here, Ezra," Nathan murmured.

He almost made a sharp retort at that, but the hand on his back started moving in slow circles. It had been nearly a year since anyone had touched him-not since Li Pong, unless getting beaten up counted-and it shook him thoroughly. He closed his eyes, and he shut his mouth, and he sat there, nearly trembling as the corners of his lips were kissed, as his suspenders were unsnapped and warm fingertips slipped under his shirt, as he was rubbed through his pants by a broad, knowing palm.

Getting horizontal was a slow descent: all of them leaning just a little, more and more, pausing only a moment for the guilty premeditation of dragging the bedrolls together. Then they were lying under the blankets, Ezra in the middle, all three of them untucked and half unbuttoned.

He kept his eyes shut through it all, as though it weren’t dark as pitch out. As though he couldn't tell exactly whom he was touching and who was touching him anyhow: Nathan's clean-shaven cheek and smooth skin that smelled of castile soap, and Josiah's callused hands and rough whiskers. Ezra's hands grasped desperately under the blankets, and his back arched at the soft touch that crept slowly down his spine. He did not want to be the one who did it, did not want to be the first, but he had already lost face enough that he suspected he would have to leave the territory by dawn, and he was burning up, so hot and hungry that he let his mouth move down past lips and cheeks, past the relatively egalitarian zones of neck and shoulders and chest.

He felt Nathan's stomach hollow in surprise as he shifted down under the blankets, mouth moving wet and messy along the way. His own breath came hard in nervous excitement as he fumbled with Nathan's pants. All he could hear was his own heart hammering and the sound of his own lips parting, and then Nathan's hand was curling gently around his throat and Josiah's fingers were playing with his hair. He heard a faint mumble above-maybe something like, "Jesus, Ezra"-but he did not beg pardon. The outside world was thoroughly muffled, and for the rest of the night, he gladly let it remain so.

~*~

The days that followed passed quietly and slowly, as if they were encased in a fog quite at odds with the sunshine outside. He and Nathan did not go to the café, or to a show, or to the bookshop, at least not together. Ezra spent most of his time in the rooming house, amusing little Clement with card tricks and wild, half-true tales about the west, or else listening to young Estelle describe in rapturous detail the dress she would be wearing to her first dance.

He and Nathan circled each other like shadows, watching each other warily from the corners of their eyes, but if Nathan had any secrets or rebukes on the tip of his tongue, he did not voice them, and Ezra's mouth was only full of ashes. He thought often of Four Corners and wondered if they would have anything to say to each other there; if they had ever really had enough in common to consider themselves intimates, or if it was only the web of mutual friends and the dizzy attraction of Josiah's personal orbit that had made them believe otherwise for a time. Maybe this exhausted silence was simply the way of things now.

On two subsequent afternoons, Ezra went out of the neighborhood and smoked through a full pack of cigarettes and sipped at one cup of strong coffee after another, watching the comforting comings and goings of strangers at the afternoon parades, each with their own joys and sorrows. Their faces blurred together until all the men were one and the women were too and Ezra himself was so anonymous as to be invisible. When he returned to the rooming house on the second occasion, Nathan was gone, and Ezra looked into his room three times to assure himself that his things were still there and he hadn't left entirely. He paced restlessly nonetheless until Nathan returned some time later with a small pile of books. Medicine and politics.

Ezra's mouth twisted bitterly at the sight. The man came to New Orleans, bereaved, and still he didn't have feeling enough to read a novel. Ezra was prepared to make a comment to this effect when a sudden clamor downstairs seized his attention away from petty resentment. The front door had opened hastily, and he could hear the voices of several children as Monsieur Roy let out a startled "Mon dieu!"

He and Nathan both moved at once and reflexively took up lead and back-up positions as they hurried down the stairs to find Clement being borne in by his playmates. The boy had obviously taken a bad spill. His pants were torn, and his knees and palms and chin were scraped. His eyes were red, but he was manfully attempting not to cry in front of his friends.

Ezra halted once he saw the situation was not dire, but Nathan continued straight on into the fray with a soothing but authoritative order for everyone to calm down. The other children were soon dispersed, and poor Clement was sat down on the edge of the kitchen table for examination.

"All right," Nathan was saying softly when Ezra approached for a better view. "I'm going to see if you've broken anything while your Pa gets some clean water and rags. This might make your eyes sting a little."

The boy did indeed sniffle as he was prodded this way and that, but his wrists and ankles were declared sound, and soon the gravel was being gently cleaned from his wounds.

"You got any iodine, ma'am?" Nathan asked Madame Roy, and after a quick consultation with her husband, she sent Estelle next door to see if the neighbors did.

Ezra leaned against the wall, just outside of the kitchen, watching Nathan at work. He had often thought over the years that Nathan could have been an excellent card player if he had only put his mind to it. His hands were wonderfully competent and confident as he got the little boy's hurts cleaned and painted and bandaged up. Or perhaps, Ezra suddenly thought with an unpleasant turn, it was as a father where Nathan had missed his calling.

"He'll have to have a bath every night until those are healed up." Nathan patted Clement on the head at the boy's squawk of protest. "Just a quick one, morning or evening, then let the wounds dry before they're bandaged again."

The boy was soon being comforted with a piece of pie, holding a fork very delicately between thumb and fingers, and the tension in the air had eased enough that Madame Roy was muttering to herself over what he had gone and done to his new pants. Ezra, however, saw the way that Nathan's head bowed. As he watched, those graceful hands laced together tightly.

He followed Nathan's gaze to the bowl of dirty pink water and the bloody cloth, and he was suddenly back in the cool quiet of the clinic, listening to the terrible sound of Josiah's slow, ragged breathing. He remembered staring at the floor, at the ceiling, at the motes of dust floating in the sunbeam that cut across the room-anywhere but at the still, pale form on the bed. And he knew, looking at the curling hunch of Nathan's shoulders, that he was there too, with the rags and the water, the blood and the astringent stink of medicines.

Nathan touched the bloody cloth and then visibly flinched, and in that moment, for maybe the first time in his life, Ezra knew exactly what he was feeling. He remembered the third time he was shot; the first time that there was no diamond in his pocket, no wad of bills. The sound of the gun, and the jolt that knocked him backwards. The numbness that had lasted for seconds, then a full minute. It hadn't hurt, not one bit. It hadn't hurt until he had known it was real, and then...oh, and then...

He could hardly breathe, the pain in his chest so bad that he nearly had to sit down. He stared at Nathan, and for a moment he almost felt that familiar hand at his back-the one that had never failed to give him a well-timed shove. He wanted to step forward. He wanted to put his hand on Nathan's shoulder and squeeze it, but he could not make his feet move. He tried to imagine embracing Nathan, putting his arms around him the way he had never once done outside of a liaison, but he couldn't. So he only stood there, staring for a long time at the empty space around Nathan where someone was supposed to be standing, and then he turned around quietly and went to find some whiskey.

~*~

Ezra was six years old and still in short pants the first time he came to New Orleans. He arrived in the city clinging to his mother’s skirts, although it might be noted that for the purposes of their visit, she was not his mother. That period of custody marked the first time he was old enough to act along with a con beyond being dolled up like a girl or having a brace put on his leg, and he was to tell anyone he met that Maude was his governess.

The means and end of the job would be quick to fade from his memory, if he had ever fully been aware of them to start with. After nearly a year with Great-Aunt Elizabeth in the backwoods of Florida, New Orleans was like a confectionery, and he was sweet-drunk all their weeks there on the novelties, and the diversions, and the intoxicating privilege of his mother’s close company.

The two of them stayed in a beautiful hotel suite made up in the Spanish style-or so his mother importantly informed him-which was as large as all of Great-Aunt Elizabeth's house put together. There was a bathtub, and an indoor necessary down the hall, and a great big bed with curtains, in the shelter of which he slept on soft sheets in his mother's arms.

One day there was a wonderful parade, and he and his mother put on their best clothes and watched from the balcony of their room. Before Ezra's wide eyes, a painting came to life in the streets. There were men and ladies and perhaps even monsters in fancy dress singing and dancing and playing music, and there were great golden chariots being drawn behind tall horses that pranced down the wide avenue.

"That's only paint," his mother pointed out when he drew her attention to the glinting spectacle, and for the first time in his life, he nearly disbelieved her.

One of the ways Maude would go on to tell the story of his first Mardi Gras, Ezra was frightened and half-hidden behind her and would not be comforted for days after being spooked by a Pierrot. Other times, she would claim that he marched right in and joined the parade, carried away laughing on the shoulders of the devil himself.

The way he would later recall it, however, he begged her to let him go down to buy a bag of nuts from a vendor in the street, and she conceded. Once there, he found the other spectators taller than they had seemed from above and, unable to see through the crowd, he was swept away in the current of it. Helpless, he was bumped and jostled along, and finally he was knocked to his knees and let out a cry, whereupon a pair of large hands picked him up effortlessly and plunked him down on the back of one of the parade wagons.

Shocked and smarting, Ezra burst into tears. He held on tight to the edge of the wagon, afraid to jump down. He seemed to be traveling at a dizzying pace, although he would later come to realize it must not have been any faster than the speed of a walking horse. Slowly, however, a curious thing occurred to him: people were looking at him. All the spectators were looking at the golden wagon, and he was on it, and so they were looking at him. They smiled and clapped as he rode past, and when he tentatively waved up at them, they laughed and waved back.

Being the focus of attention was utterly new to him then. Up to that point, he had been under the impression that the whole of the universe centered around his mother, who was beautiful and clever and gay and everything worth paying attention to. People always smiled at his mother and crowded around her as if she were sunshine on a cold winter's day. Never before had the smiles and admiring looks been for him, and Ezra basked in them. Thus he stayed there on the wagon all the length of the parade, smiling and waving happily, until they drove past the crowds and finally came to a stop, at which point Ezra hopped carefully down, looked around him, and realized he was lost.

He began uncertainly to make his way back the way they had come. He was cold with worry at first, but being six years old, he was quickly distracted by the new sights. He looked into shop windows and got himself turned around as he wandered slowly up and down the street. He used the coin his mother had given him for nuts to buy a bag of caramels instead, and he traded one to a little girl in a blue dress for a piece of her lemon candy stick, and then gave one to a stray dog for the amusement of watching it chew. It was only when the light began to fade that Ezra began to worry again, and he found a lady in a great feathered hat whom he thought had waved to him on the wagon and found out how to get back to the hotel.

It was quite black out by the time he arrived, but the man downstairs recognized him and brought him up to where Maude was wringing her hands.

"Ezra! Oh, you beastly child-I was worried sick! Where have you been? And where is your hat?"

Ezra scratched his head. "I put it on a dog, but he ran away."

His mother made a sound of exasperated disbelief. "Oh, Ezra. Now I have to send someone looking for James-he's out looking for you, you silly thing."

The memory of who James was would not last out his childhood, muddled up with his mother's other marks and friends. He would, however, remember going to bed without supper-his mother having threatened to spank him, but not having had the heart to follow through-and lying alone in the big, soft bed, listening to warm chatter of people in the streets. When Maude went out to meet the man she had been spending time with, James perhaps, he fell asleep nonetheless and dreamed sweetly as the humid spring air embraced him. For the first time in his young life, he was not afraid to be without her.

~*~

When the clink and clatter of dinner plates and silverware finally finished that night and Ezra still had not gone back downstairs, Nathan came up to look for him. Ezra lay on his bed, feeling the sharp, no-nonsense knocking reverberate through his head. He considered putting the bottle of whiskey down, but didn't. He'd had too much, but he still realized he'd had too much, which meant he couldn't have had too much.

He opened his mouth and was about to tell Nathan to come in when the door swung open anyhow.

Nathan paused in the doorway, and when he got a look at Ezra, his lip curled in a familiar look of disgust. "Drinking your dinner? Oh, that's just fine. That's real nice, Ezra."

Ezra took another drink and then regarded the bottle critically, sloshing it to see how much was left. He wasn't going to be rude about it. "Do you want some?"

The door shut firmly. Ezra looked back to see which side Nathan was on and was mildly surprised to find it was this one. He was fixed with a hard look that he could not quite meet, and he fidgeted uncomfortably, plucking at the quilt.

"You think this is what he'd want?" Nathan finally asked.

It was a low blow, and Ezra covered his reaction by affecting not to understand him. "I beg your pardon?"

Nathan crossed his arms and shook his head. "Drinking yourself stupid. Smoking like a chimney. After what happened, you think he'd want you doing this to yourself?"

Two could play at that game. Ezra blew across the mouth of the bottle once, twice, thrice until it made a foghorn sound. "Say his name."

This time it was Nathan who pretended not to understand. "Huh?"

As it happened, he hadn't said it either since it happened, but Nathan had started this conversation. "Say his name."

Perhaps he expected Nathan to storm out spectacularly and leave him to his melancholy. Perhaps he expected him to take those two steps closer and give him the right hook he deserved. He had not, however, expected Nathan to look away miserably, his voice sinking into something like despair when he spoke.

"If you think I could have saved him, just come out and say it." Quiet. Almost...guilty.

Ezra looked up, his eyes widening. He stared in complete and utter bafflement. "I beg your pardon?"

Nathan was gazing down at the floor, nodding grimly to himself, his chin jutting out. "If you think I could have saved him-if you think some other doctor, some better doctor could have saved him-just say it to my face."

His mouth worked in dumb incomprehension. "I don't-" he said and then broke off. Josiah was...Josiah had been a hard-living man of 68. He had loved his cigars and handled his gin and whiskey like mother's milk and vitamin tonic. He had been shot once and stabbed twice in the time of their association, and God only knew where some of those other scars had come from. Both the notion itself and the concept of Nathan Jackson in doubt were equally implausible.

"Don't be ridiculous,” he finally said, uncomfortable but sincere. “I suspect he-that is to say, all of us, myself included-would have been dead long ago if it weren't for you."

Nathan looked up then, wary and weary. His voice was still very quiet. "What's this about, then, Ezra? What do you want me to do?"

Ezra did not reply and instead raised the bottle to take another drink, at which point Nathan stepped forward and yanked it out of his hands. Ezra let out a cry of surprise, and his fist clenched, and the thing that had been cutting up his insides finally made its last stab. "What did you have to tell him for?"

Nathan blinked and stepped back. His brow creased. "What are you talking about?"

He shook his head, trying to swallow it all back down, but it was too late. "You-you told him he was going to die."

Nathan stared at him for several long moments. Then, moving like a very old man, he sat down on the bed and took a long drink, draining the very last of the whiskey. When he had swallowed, he set the bottle down between his feet and peered into it as if he could read its last clinging drops like tea leaves.

As Ezra watched, Nathan's eyes welled up. He looked away, not able to bear seeing it.

"He wanted to know, Ezra."

"Fine," Ezra said shortly, and he shrugged, the motion angrier than he had meant it to be. “It doesn't matter.”

"He did. You know he did. He made his peace with God, and he said his goodbyes. He said goodbye to you. Do you even know how lucky..." Nathan's voice trailed off, low and rough.

Ezra's jaw tightened. He bit down on his lip until it was sore and probably bleeding. "I don't-" he finally said, swallowing hard. "Only. I would appreciate it. If you don't tell me when the time comes."

A breath of shaky laughter racked Nathan's shoulders. "You're going to outlive all of us, Ezra."

The tone of it was joking, but Ezra went suddenly cold all over nonetheless. His mouth ran dry, and his hands went bloodless. "Don't say that," he muttered urgently. "Don't you dare."

Nathan looked over slowly. Then he reached for him.

Ezra hesitated briefly, and then his hands rose, clumsy and chilled, to meet him halfway.

In an instant, he had wrapped an arm around Nathan and pulled him close. The heat of him was nearly scalding, and when Nathan pressed his face into the crook of his neck and Ezra felt hot tears dripping against his collar, his heartbeat made itself known for the first time in days. He held on to Nathan tightly then, so tightly that he distantly worried he'd hurt him, but Nathan was grasping him just as hard, squeezing the breath from him, and they sat clutching each other just like that for several long minutes, each pretending not to notice the other's hitching breath.

“I’ll kill you myself, Ezra,” Nathan finally mumbled against his shoulder. “When I’m on my deathbed and you try to run like a coward, I’ll shoot you in the back.”

Ezra closed his eyes tightly, and for the first time since Josiah had gone silent, he was comforted.

Part III

Nathan slept soundly that night, tangled up in his clothes and Ezra's greedy arms, and when he stirred on the morning of Fat Tuesday, it was to the sound of bells and singing. The bed frame creaked not long after, and Nathan fully broke the surface of sleep at the jostle of Ezra slowly easing out of bed. He opened one bleary eye and turned his head, immediately regretting it. Two men were not meant to share a mattress this small, and his neck and back were aching. They ought to have pushed the two beds together before falling asleep, but Nathan had hardly dared move all night in case Ezra bolted. It was mostly still dark out, and he squinted in the stuffy gloom as Ezra began to get dressed by the bedside.

"Breakfast won't be on yet," he said quietly, but Ezra, to his surprise, did not so much as guiltily blink.

"I have to run an errand," Ezra whispered, shaking his coat out and then combing his hair. Then, as though sensing Nathan's sleepy skepticism, he added, "I will be back."

Nathan looked at him silently for several seconds and then rolled over with a noncommittal hum. He stretched out, taking up the whole bed, and then promptly fell back asleep until the smell of hotcakes and sausages wafted up from the kitchen.

True to his word, Ezra returned to the rooming house before breakfast was finished. He piled his plate high and sat down across from Nathan, who was the lone occupant at the dining room table. One of the other boarders had packed up that morning, and the other was involved in a local club and had already set out for the occasion. The house was in a mild flurry. Clement scampered in, limping only a little, and snatched a pair of doughnuts off the table before darting out the back door. Mr. Roy was outside hanging decorations from the balconies, and Mrs. Roy and a few neighbor women were crowded into the kitchen with Estelle, fixing their hair.

"Upstairs," Ezra said when they had both cleaned their plates, and stood, dabbing powdered sugar from his lips with a napkin. His mood seemed to be picking up, as if he were invigorated by the holiday's mere presence, breathing in everyone else's excitement and turning it into something that half resembled happiness.

Nathan allowed himself to be herded up to Ezra's room and, once there, glanced around in suspicion. There were two sack coat suits laid out prominently on the bed: one in plum purple and the other a rusty red, and both of them looking far too expensive.

"No," he said, digging in his heels. "Uh-uh."

Ezra sighed heavily, leaning back against the wall and lacing his fingers patiently over his stomach. "Nathan,” he said, “I could have come back with a positively scandalous costume for you. I could have liberated a parade float. I could have gotten us on the guest list for the best Creole ball in town and dragged you along. Believe me, I had a very large bill in my pocket and my not-inconsiderable charm at hand, and it would not have been the first time that New Orleans didn't know what hit her. But I bought you a suit. Indulge me."

Nathan shook his head ruefully. One half of him was comforted to see Ezra in better spirits and the other half was annoyed with himself for it. This was how the whole business had started, really: indulgence. Indulging Josiah, and indulging Ezra, and all right, indulging himself too. Just a now-and-then arrangement. Something he and Ezra and Josiah got up to every couple of months when times were slow and privacy presented itself. Then it had snuck up on him and become a habit. And then, one day, he had woken up to realize it had been three years, and there was Ezra was lying in his bed beside him, softly snoring.

"All right," he said reluctantly. "But it's a waste of money. Where am I ever going to wear a get-up like this again?"

Something flickered in Ezra's eyes at that, and Nathan belatedly bit his tongue. He hadn't meant it harshly. Ezra knew how he felt about throwing money around, that was all. It seemed to have caught Ezra the wrong way nonetheless, however, and that smug smile didn't fade, but it did go false and glassy for a moment, and Nathan felt baffled and sorry enough that he picked up the suit he took to be his-it was longer, and even Ezra wouldn't put him in purple-and examined it. "All right," he said again. "All right."

He turned his back and took off his old suit, and then he put on the new one, which fit perfectly. He wasn't certain why that surprised him, but it did. He thought back, suddenly, to the first time it was ever just him and Ezra, and for all that they were nervously quiet in the room above the saloon, they'd had all the night ahead of them, and Ezra's fingertips had slowly walked over every inch of him, measuring and memorizing.

He turned around, still buttoning up, and Ezra plunked a new hat on his head and put a tie around his neck. Nathan held still and bore it, looking down and watching Ezra's hands as they deftly knotted the tie and then lingered, tugging gently at the lapels and collar and shoulder seams.

When Ezra's hands suddenly shook, Nathan reached up and caught them. He held them, even when Ezra shifted uncomfortably, more or less because he didn't know what else to do. They stood there silently until the scattershot exclamation of a drum in the street made them both step back and look to the window.

Nathan let go and picked up Ezra's suit. He examined it critically for a moment and then thrust it at him. Ezra always did look good in purple.

"Come on," he said, as he sat down on the bed and watched Ezra start to take his clothes off. "If I'm going to look like some fool dandy, I want company."

~*~

Nathan would later learn that the first Mardi Gras after the war was the celebration to end all celebrations, but at the time, all he knew was that the city had gone crazy. He sat at the window in his rented room, alone for once, gazing out at the party in the street. People had turned up dressed as all kinds of things: Africans and gypsies, tramps and aristocrats, and even food. He watched in bemusement as a full Sunday table and a bunch of grapes strolled down the street arm in arm.

After watching for a while, he took out the book he kept carefully tucked at the foot of his bedroll: Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical by Henry Gray. It had taken him months of saving and begging the bookshop owner to hold it before it was his, and now he was dutifully studying it page by page every day. He was still only up to the cells, having to pause now and then to go pay a visit to Mr. Trask at the general store to borrow his dictionary, but he was sticking with it, studying every chance he had for a little peace and quiet.

"WHOOO!"

Peace, maybe, but quiet wasn't in the cards. Nathan read the same page five times over before giving up. He put the book away and stood with a sigh, and then he got his coat and hat and left the room. The stairwell was crowded with a group of his neighbors drinking and playing dice, and he picked his way past them without comment, going out into the busy street.

The air was better out here even if the noise was worse, and Nathan went against the current of the celebration, making his way upstream like a stubborn salmon to where the street was a little quieter. He passed shops and houses with their doors flung open, and the smell of good food wafted all around him. He smiled when a pair of little girls raced by him, their hair in pigtail braids and their Sunday best grass-stained, and then he shifted uncomfortably when he came to the stretch of drinking and dancing halls. A group of ladies stood on their balcony, laughing and eating pastries. They were hardly dressed in more than their petticoats-shameless, a concept as foreign to Nathan as their French-and they laughed at him as he passed, blowing kisses and calling out invitations that he didn't need to translate to recognize.

There was an even more unsavory place a few buildings down. It was only a red door around the corner of the alley, and if Nathan didn't happen to pass it every day on his way to work just as it was closing up for the night, he probably wouldn't have ever noticed it. He had, though, and it hadn't taken much of a hard look to realize that it was only ever men in there; nor had it taken much of a listen to hear the rumors about what went on inside. It was a dancing hall full of hermaphrodites-bi-sexuals-fellows who were somehow part woman. Not like how it was in the army camps, where there wouldn't be any ladies around, so of course the men would dance with each other, and sometimes the smooth-cheeked ones got joshed into putting on a dress. This was something different, and the group of pale, soft-haired Creole boys who had gathered in the alley to share a cigarette turned to stare at him as he passed.

He hesitated only a moment. They were all of them fully dressed-in shirtsleeves and trousers, at least-but they seemed just as indecent as their neighbors with the way they stood, hips cocked to one side. With their lips, which were full and wet, and their eyes, which were rimmed in thick eyelashes.

"See something you like?" one of them asked. He was about Nathan's age, but built slightly, his voice high and lilting. His wavy hair was slicked back, and he wore a plum-colored waistcoat that drew Nathan's gaze reluctantly downward for an instant. The cigarette had stopped at him, and he licked his lips before taking a long drag of it. He blew the smoke out a moment later, his mouth forming a perfect 'o'.

Nathan frowned and backed up uncertainly, tripping over his own feet. Someone snickered, but the one who'd asked only smiled primly and passed the cigarette on to the next one in line.

His face warming furiously, Nathan pulled his hat down and hurried away. He had broken out in a sickly rash of sweat down his back and under his arms, and his head was swimming. He turned blindly down random streets and alleyways, through crowing crowds and dancing families and lovebirds getting up to all sorts of undignified things in public, until he finally found himself alone on a deserted warehouse street.

There he stopped, his feet hurting and his breath coming hard. He shivered at the sudden breeze off the water. He watched a pair of gulls chase each other in lazy circles across the sky, and he thought, dimly and dizzily, about freedom. This city was probably the freest place he had ever been, except maybe that first patch of land under his feet just over the Union line. Folks got up to all sorts of wonders here...and all sorts of wickedness, and for a moment Nathan felt like he was drowning in it all. Like he might not be able to find himself again if he let himself go under.

The days were short this time of year, and the sun was already starting to glare off the water. Where else could he go? Not back to Alabama, that much was certain. Up north? He found himself shaking his head mutely. Things weren't all that different up north, no matter how much people pretended otherwise. He had discovered that for himself the hard way.

He found himself squinting into the sunset, his clothes damp with sweat and the humidity, the town roaring behind him. He thought of what lay beyond the city limits, and what lay beyond that. Of what would happen if he picked up where he had left off, walking out of Alabama-if he just kept on going. He imagined dust, and dry heat, and solitude: the kind of place where every man save the Indian was just as new as his neighbor.

‘West,’ he thought. Maybe he would just keep on going west.

~*~

To his relief, Ezra didn't insist on going down and mingling. Instead, he carted two comfortable kitchen chairs up to his room and set them on the balcony, and there he sat in the mid-morning sunshine with Nathan, sharing a stack of Mrs. Roy's doughnuts and a pitcher of sweet iced tea and calling out greetings to everyone who passed by. Ezra spoke French about as well as he spoke Spanish: poorly, to Nathan's ear, but just earnestly enough to make those he addressed reply in kind.

Nathan closed his eyes, leaning back in his chair and listening as a marching band played something lively the next street over. He tapped his toe, and for the first time in a long while, the little smile that tugged at his lips wasn’t feigned.

“That young lady is looking at you,” Ezra murmured.

He opened his eyes and then narrowed them.

Ezra shrugged, looking innocent, and angled his chin down to where a beautiful girl in a green dress stood twirling a parasol and looking up at the house.

Nathan snorted. “I’m old enough to be her father. And she’s not looking at me.”

On cue, the door opened downstairs, and Estelle swept out to embrace her friend, looking every bit the young lady with her hair up and her skirts flouncing.

He looked at Ezra. “See?”

Ezra shrugged and refilled his glass from the pitcher. “She was looking. I would wager, sir, that there is no end to the eligible ladies in this city who would love to get their matrimonial hands on a doctor.”

He glanced at Ezra sideways, uncertain of this mood of his. “I’m no doctor,” he finally said.

Ezra hopped to his feet and gestured expansively at the cityscape before them. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the hubbub. “If I had a penny for every time you said that, I could pay your way through medical school-and as it happens, I do. So why not go? Carpe diem!”

Nathan only took a long drink and replied, mildly but firmly. “I’m almost fifty, Ezra.”

There was a brief pause. “So?”

He stared at Ezra for a moment and then set his drink down. He spread his hands helplessly. “So...so I’m not going to go off and start medical school, even if I could get into one. I’m not going to get married. I’m not going to have children. I’m as settled down as I’m getting.”

It didn’t hurt him to say it-he had thought about it enough over the last few years-but some part of him was surprised nonetheless that he had finally said it aloud. So was Ezra, it seemed, as he turned away, some strange expression playing over his face as he gripped the balcony railing and gazed down.

“Ezra?” Nathan asked after a moment.

Ezra shook his head, and his hands tightened white-knuckle around the railing before slowly easing. He sighed. “I was a young man the last time I was here.”

Nathan sat up a little straighter. Ezra was no fool, and they were only two short stories up, but something still made him want to grab Ezra by his shirt-tails and yank him back. “Yeah. Me too.”

“Seventeen,” Ezra said.

He cocked his head to one side.

“You were seventeen,” Ezra clarified.

Nathan nodded slowly. He vaguely remembered telling Ezra that one night-it must have been years back by now. The three of them in the church, lying on a pile of blankets on the floor, looking up at the dark ceiling and talking about the places they had been.

He looked out at the street, and his chest tightened when he glimpsed a tall, grey-haired man in a garish mask parting the crowd like the Red Sea. “You know,” he said, “I think Josiah came here once too, when he was in his twenties.”

He glanced at Ezra and realized that this wasn’t news to him. His thoughts followed that path around the corner to its eventual end. “Oh,” he said quietly. Of course Ezra had known that. He could have run off to anywhere, couldn't he, but he had come here.

Ezra said nothing, still looking blankly out at this place where all of them had been young and healthy once, where the world had been a carnival and all their lives had still been ahead of them.

He let out a long breath. “We’re almost fifty, Ezra,” he said. “And how many folks near fifty in this town do you figure have done even half of what we’ve done?”

“I'm sure I have no idea,” Ezra said, almost absently. Then he wet his lips. “Let me ask you a question.”

“All right.”

Ezra glanced back at him, just briefly. “What do you think happens to us after we die?”

There was nothing flip about his tone, which made Nathan hesitate. “I don’t know,” he eventually said, which was not how he would have replied a year ago, a month ago, maybe even a week ago. “I really don’t know Ezra. I guess I always figured...we go free. One way or another.”

Ezra only shook his head tiredly.

Frustrated, Nathan stood up and slammed his palm down on the railing-something that was not, in hindsight, a bright idea. He let out a curse as the impact rattled his bones, and Ezra spun around, his eyes so wide and startled that Nathan found himself shaking his head at the ridiculousness of them both, laughing softly and just a little crazily to himself until his own eyes stung.

“Goddammit, Ezra,” he finally managed to say. “Holding up the law...saving lives...getting to know some of the...“ His voice broke for a moment, the mad laughter faltering, and he scanned the crowd, searching for that man in the mask, but he was already gone. “Spending my life with some of the finest men I’ve ever met. I'm not sorry for one minute of it. Are you?”

He reached out and put his hand on Ezra’s back. No one was looking up at them. He felt Ezra give a brief shiver. His hand clenched powerlessly for a moment in the fabric of Ezra’s coat, and then it slipped up underneath until he could feel the heat of Ezra’s skin pouring through his shirt.

“You want to go inside?” Nathan murmured low. The house had emptied out, and the street was noisy, and a warm feeling was unfolding slowly inside him. He could smell the familiar tang of Ezra’s cologne, and he needed to touch someone, to touch Ezra, to bury his nose in his hair and hold him until his arms ached.

After what seemed like too long, Ezra nodded. He reached for his glass first, however, and raised it in a little salute. Nathan followed suit, clinking the glasses gently together, and while neither of them said a word, he knew exactly who they were toasting. And he figured that wherever Josiah was, he was probably a little sorry it was only iced tea.

~*~

“You like him,” Nathan said, sitting down next to Josiah in the saloon one night and watching him watch Ezra. The subject of their attention had commandeered the best table in the house to bilk a few well appointed travelers out of their appointments. The place was full up and rowdy, and no one paid their strange conversation any mind.

Josiah picked up his glass of gin and took a sip. His lips twitched up into a little smile under his mustache. He did not deny it, however, and he did not look away.

Nathan settled back in his chair. He did not really object to the looking, in and of itself. It wasn’t anything like that, what he and Josiah had going on between them. No cause for getting possessive. This was just Josiah’s nature anyhow. They had known each other for years now, and he knew the man was just plum in love with being in love. People or ideas, it didn’t matter which; Josiah lived for throwing himself headfirst into infatuation and, Nathan sometimes suspected, lived just as much for the pining when it all fell apart.

He followed Josiah’s gaze and watched Ezra lick his thumb before dealing out another round of cards. Ezra was all dandied up in that emerald green coat of his, lace cuffs peeking out and a tasteful tie pin glinting at his throat. Not a hair was out of place, and every little move was deliberate, like an actor’s. He could see the appeal, which bothered him a little. Ezra was an ignorant ass, of course. He was a peacock wrapped around a yellow dog wrapped around...well, there he had to pause, because Ezra managed to prove himself a real human being just about every time Nathan had him written off. Usually in so grand a fashion that the pair of them were knocked back to the beginning again.

“Be careful,” was what he eventually said, nudging Josiah with his elbow.

Josiah raised an eyebrow in query.

Nathan opened his mouth to clarify and then realized he wasn’t entirely sure what he had meant. Don’t go and upset the group, maybe. Don’t get caught. Don’t go and get yourself hanged. Don’t mess around with him. The last niggled at him, and he wondered who he was being more unfair to. Ezra was breezy, but he was no Buck, and he was no Josiah either. He didn’t think Ezra was the type to be in love with being in love. He seemed more the sort who wanted to be the apple of someone’s eye. The jealous kind, or at least the sulky kind. That never ended well.

He finally shrugged. “He bites.”

Josiah chuckled at that, seemingly unconcerned. “You scare him.”

Nathan narrowed his eyes, puzzled and a little annoyed. He refrained from pointing out that if anyone had cause to be scared here, it wasn’t Ezra. “And why’s that?”

Josiah took another drink and spoke as if it were obvious. “Because he knows you’re a good man. A better man than he is.”

Nathan snorted but didn’t immediately contradict him. He’d met plenty of white men without a name to them or a dollar in their pockets who hung on tight to the belief that they’d somehow earned the color of their skin if nothing else. “He’s not scared of you.”

Josiah shook his head and smiled that smile of his that was somehow sharp despite the slow, easy curve of it. “I haven’t been a good man in a long time.”

Nathan looked at him for several moments and then took his glass away from him. “Yeah, well,” he said, looking around at all the carousing. The place was full of smoke and drink. The poker game was getting hot, and a group in the corner was singing rowdily. Pretty much everyone was stoned and stupid and looked to be having a better time than he was. “Where does being good get you?”

“Heaven?” Josiah ventured, and then he slapped his hand down on the table and laughed out loud like he’d just made a howler of a joke.

Nathan rolled his eyes. He really disliked him sometimes.

The outburst had drawn Ezra’s attention, and when Nathan saw him looking back, he tilted his head cautiously, expecting to find his expression disgusted, maybe, or mocking. Ezra was not looking at Josiah, however. He was looking at Nathan, and not without a little sympathy. One corner of his mouth lifted in a little smile that was not at all like his usual bright flash of pearly white and gold. Nathan returned it hesitantly. Then Ezra shrugged and returned to his game at a word from one of his marks, the perfect picture of the grinning gambler back at work.

“You like him?” Josiah asked, plucking the glass of gin back out of Nathan’s hand and taking another drink.

“I don’t know,” Nathan said, deliberately interpreting that in the chastest way possible. “I don’t feel one way or the other.”

“He’s a good looking man,” Josiah said.

He nodded. “I suppose so.”

All right, he wasn’t going to be ornery enough to argue that. He didn’t care for all the trimmings, but he’d had cause to discover that Ezra was put together just fine under his clothes, and there was something about those eyes....

Well, there wasn’t anything unnatural in finding a handsome man handsome.

“Smart.”

“Smart-ass is more like it,” he said, but he agreed. He privately suspected Ezra did not have half the formal leaning he pretended at, but he thought upside down and sideways and around corners, and sometimes you had to admire a man like that. When he wasn’t putting it to bad use, of course.

“Charming,” Josiah said, and he grinned again, watching Ezra work the table.

“He is,” Nathan said at that, snorting. Yet he found himself watching Ezra with renewed interest, and upon seeing the tired little lines appear around his eyes as the night wore on, he wondered to himself if maybe he couldn’t learn to like him despite his charm.

~*~

Ezra's mouth was hot and sugar-sweet. The balcony was closed, and a chair was wedged under the door, and the room grew quickly humid as they tangled up on the bed together. He was careful with the tight buttons of Ezra's new shirt and awkward in the stiff folds of his own suit. That was what he told himself, at least-that he only hesitated for fear of tearing something that cost twice as much as it should have. And maybe it was true, because something tight inside him uncoiled all at once when Ezra pushed the jacket off his shoulders before starting in on the trousers.

He tried to remember the last time they had lain down together. It was months ago, before Josiah got sick. The hotel, maybe, and Ezra's big brass bed with its butter-soft sheets, the three of them quiet and careful as always, under the blanket of night. This narrow thing was harder to maneuver, but Ezra pushed him back and lay half on top of him, kissing him so hard it stung.

"Shh," Nathan hushed between kisses, wrapping his arms tightly around Ezra's back and beginning to stir when a solid thigh pressed between his own.

Some uncharacteristically reckless part of him wanted to take his time. He wanted to linger, to get his hands all over Ezra and not stop until the streets went quiet. The sun was spilling in through the curtains, and the room was nearly as bright as if they were out in the open, and half the world was just outside, making so much noise that no one would notice the creak of a bed or a voice crying out.

Ezra was already pressing against him in earnest, however, his hand snaking between them and stroking insistently. Nathan's breath stuttered, and he clutched Ezra even more tightly to him, kissing his mouth and his shoulders and his throat. He persisted at the last, just over the spot where Ezra's pulse was quickening, and let his teeth scrape dangerously against the soft flesh.

One of them shivered and didn't stop, and Nathan didn't know which of them it was. His heart began to hammer, and he tasted sweat as his tongue dipped into the curve of Ezra's collarbone. He closed his eyes and let himself lose track of which way was up. Ezra's naked skin almost burned against him, and the bedsheets were just as warm, and the thick air pressed heavily around him like an embrace.

It hadn't come upon him so hard since he was a much younger man, but his hands clutched greedily at Ezra as they moved together. He jerked when Ezra's kiss turned sharp, teeth closing around his lower lip, and his own hips pressed up as he pulled Ezra's down. His fingers dug in hard-hard enough that Ezra would usually complain, accusing him of trying to leave bruises, but now he only moaned softly in Nathan's ear, the short, hot little sounds coming over and over again.

"I-oh," Nathan gasped, feeling the hot spill against his thigh, and he crushed Ezra to him, pushing up and frotting, letting his own shot come.

They clung to each other, sweating and shaking. The celebrations in the street were muffled by his own racing heartbeat and the quick patter of Ezra's breathing in his ear. His fingers threaded through Ezra's hair, and a moment later he felt a hand curve around the back of his neck, a thumb brushing slowly back and forth until his breathing calmed.

Now they idled, kissing a time or two. Nathan sank down into the fuzzy comfort of sleep, lightly dozing until the room grew oppressively still and he became convinced that the smell of sex was going to get into the woodwork. He sat up, still heavy-headed, and then bent to begin gathering his clothes.

"No." Ezra said abruptly.

Nathan stopped, looking with a frown from his shirt to Ezra, who lay back shamelessly naked and messy on the bed, and then back again. "What?"

"No, I'm not so-" Ezra cut himself off with a yawn, and then he shook his head. "Never mind," he said, reaching out without opening his eyes. "My drawers?"

Nathan recovered them, and Ezra's pants too. Before he relinquished them, however, he paused to look Ezra over fondly from head to toe. His fingertips trailed slowly down Ezra's throat, over a nipple, down to his navel, and then around to a soft side, only to be batted away when Ezra sucked in his stomach with a ticklish gasp.

"I should probably see about train tickets home," Nathan said, getting his pants on and then lying back again. He reached for Ezra, who turned towards him and came precariously close to resting his head on his shoulder.

“Mm," Ezra murmured, his voice husky with sleep. "We could steal a couple of horses and take the long way back.”

He snorted. “I’m gonna pretend you said ‘hire’, Ezra. And are you crazy? That’s probably a month and a half on horseback.”

Ezra opened one eye and peered at him seriously. "So?"

Later, Nathan would reflect that on any other day, he would have dismissed the idea out of hand. It was, after all, ludicrous. But it wasn't any other day; it was Mardi Gras, and the sounds of the carnival drifted into the room, and Ezra's fingers were lacing with his own. He thought about the train ride here and considered the ride back, just as alone as he had come. Then he thought about riding hard and sleeping rough like he hadn't done for years. Even at forty, it had started to wear on his bones, and he couldn’t say he really missed it.

Then, of course, he thought on how Josiah would have voted if he were here. The tie-breaker, as always. Always up for one more ride-one more foolish adventure. It would be Lent come morning, and maybe he and Ezra could ride out the lean season on the road together.

"All right," he said, and for just an instant, Ezra's hand squeezed his. He squeezed back. "That sounds just fine."

[ part one][ part two]