[DRB]: Powerless
DATED: 9/3/1899 (2024)
Nothing had gone to plan. The carefully constructed tower of cards holding up their lives was all collapsing, one piece at a time. From the second Filly had woken up, it had been a mad dash finding out what had happened, regrouping, searching every sheriff's office, every town, every dock. Thinking about what had happened tightened her chest even now.
The image the lawmen on the ramparts of Fort Wallace.
The gun aimed down at all of them.
The deal they were presented with.
But what stuck with her, more than anything, what seeped into her very bones and filtered into her bloodstream with every beat of her heart--
Was powerlessness.
An immense, terrible, dreadfully pristine understanding
of powerlessness.
How hard they'd scrambled, how hard they'd ridden across county and back, how many people taken hostage, how many people held at the business end of a gun today, how many threats and telegrams, how hard they'd tried everything to get Oliver back...
How hard she'd searched the compound, sure that he had to be there-- that they had to be lying. Certain that he couldn't already be in Sisika, that he couldn't be in such immediate danger as to have the shadow of the hangman's noose falling on him. Certain that there had to be something they could do. It couldn't all be for nothing. It couldn't all be for nothing.
And yet, that's exactly what her searching eyes turned up: Nothing. He wasn't there. They had him where she and her people couldn't reach, one telegram away from death. Law had played them for fools, preyed on their need to protect their own.
Her mask had hidden her burning nose from the eyes of the lawmen, but not the crack in her voice as she called, painfully, that she hadn't found him. He wasn't there. They had no other option than to trust the law's word. Than to trust that if they did this, law would follow through on their end too. To do anything else would be to risk killing the very person they had done this all for.
Powerless.
Powerless.
Completely powerless.
Filly kept her composure as long as she could, but not forever. When she knew the others had made it to safety, she took her leave. Found a quiet place in the woods, where a river wound down the mountainside.
There, she sat, pulling up her mask for what threadbare comfort it could provide.
And cried.