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francixoxoxo · 3 months ago

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Oh my GOD EVERYONE READ THIS this is so genuinely heartbreaking to read, the way you write thoughtfulness and internal conflict is SO CAPTIVATING AND THE DIALOGUE IS SO FUNNY AND GOOD AND UGHHH I CAN JUST IMAGINE HIS DEAD SERIOUS VOICE AND THE LOOK ON HER FACE AS SHE SAYS "Oh, you're welcome," she says. "I am never letting you touch me in that way again." "I understand."

only one of two ways - billinea

you love me, but there's only one of two ways that this is gonna end -- someone dies, or someone gets hurt -- but if one of us dies, i hope i die first. cause i don't wanna live without you, i don't wanna ever learn how to fall asleep without you. tell me what's worse, losing you now or later? maybe i can break the curse and be in love forever, if i die first. (die first - nessa barrett) Billy tries to find a vestige of faith as Dulcinea struggles to give birth to their daughter. tw: childbirth, suicidal ideation

As he listens to Dulcinea scream, Billy tries to remember what it’s like to pray.

It’s been so long. Faith — in God, in most others — has never really served him well, at least not since his mother died. He’d wondered what sort of loving deity could look at a woman like her and think that it was just, that it was fair, to take her from this life before she was ready. To take her away from the son who needed her. Who would be alone without her.

Dulcinea screams again. He closes his eyes.

“God, please,” he whispers. If he speaks softly enough, maybe his voice won’t crack. He can’t blink, he can’t break, or he won’t be able to do this. “Please, don’t take them away from me.”

She had been nervous to tell him. He’d seen it in her eyes, the way her smile hesitantly flicked up at the corners before settling into an uncertain, wobbly line, as if she might cry. Her hands, folded at her waist, had reached for him with uncertainty, grasping at the folds of his shirt.

He’d taken her gently by the arms, drawing her closer to him. His heart had been beating a little faster, trying to push away the thought that she was going to leave him. She would be safer, then; she would be able to have the life she deserved, instead of the half life of danger and uncertainty that he had to bear. But the thought still makes him feel like he is drowning in sand.

“What’s wrong? Please, just tell me.”

Her eyebrows had twitched together, her eyes meeting his, and she smiled again.

“Billy…”

Inside the house, she screams again. He can hear her sobbing, each breath a wretched heave, and more than anything, he wants to go back in. But both the doctor and Manuela had nearly carried him out the door. The doctor’s wife, his nurse, put her hand on his arm.

She’d said, “You can’t do anything for her now.”

Maybe it had been intended as comfort, a way to assure him he could take a step away, but it sounded like a curse.

Dulcinea's voice had been shaking when she told him. He remembers saying, “Are you sure? Are you sure? ” Over and over again, until she was laughing, framing his face between her hands and saying, “Yes, yes, yes ” each time he asked. He’d wrapped his arms around her and held her so tight, a part of him had been afraid that he was going to squeeze her so flat that she could just slip through a crack in the floorboards at their feet.

“I know you hate me,” he says now, opening his eyes and tilting his head back to look at the stars. “And I understand why. Sinning to survive is still sinning, I get that. I do. But she hasn’t done anything wrong except love me.”

And the baby? If there was innocence in this world, surely it was this little life that had been created out of love, that hadn’t even opened its eyes to the world yet.

Her eyes.

Dulcinea has been insistent on that from the beginning, even before she started to show. “A mother’s intuition, ” she’d say, her expression almost smug, like she was in on a secret that he would never understand. He supposed she was right about that, at least.

True, he had felt the baby kick inside her, putting his hand against the curve of her belly with a gentleness bordering on reverence. It had shocked him each time, like a splash of cold water, and each time, he’d grinned giddily like a man in love for the first time. And wasn’t he, really? In love with his girl, and in love with this little life, so intensely that it felt like it might push everything else out and leave him full.

If I lose both of them, he thinks with a rather detached calm, the way he thinks when he’s planning a step in this never-ending war between him and Riley, him and Lincoln County, him and the rest of the fucking world —

If he loses both of them, he’ll just walk out into the desert. He will walk until he can’t anymore, and then when his legs give way beneath him, he won’t fight. He pictures himself laying there with his cheek against the ground, his eyes closed, waiting. He doesn’t know, even as he tries to commune with God, if he would be reunited with them — with all of them — in the hereafter.

Even if he’s not, at least this long struggle will be over.

“ I was afraid you would not be happy.”

She’d spoken so softly then that he almost hadn’t heard her. The two of them, leaning against an oak growing on the property. Her, wrapped in a blanket that he’d insisted on bringing despite the mild spring weather, leaning back against him. Him, with his arms around her, one hand splayed over her stomach.

Billy had felt almost insulted. A slap would have stung less. “Why wouldn’t I be happy?”

She hadn’t turned to face him, but he’d felt her shrug, her shoulders nudging against his chest. “Everything is so…tumultuous. I know you are worried all the time. I can see it in your face. This baby…”

She’d trailed off, and Billy put his lips against her temple. He breathed her in for a moment before he said, “This baby is ours. We made it together, you and me.”

Even though he’d been unable to see her face from this angle, he knew she was smiling. "T hat is typically how it works, from what I understand.”

“Hush.” But he was smiling, too. “I love you.” He nuzzled against her hair. “An’ I love—”

“Her,” she’d interrupted.

“Oh, her, huh? You’re sure?”

“Yes. Her. ”

She had expressed the desire to name a daughter after their mothers, and Billy finds it ironic now, as he listens to her labor to bring forth life and keep her own. He may lose a Kathleen all over again.

He closes his eyes again. A breeze comes down from the sky, as if the night is sighing for him, and he feels it brush against his cheek, comb through his curls. He swears, for a second, that he can almost catch a familiar scent on the air. Perfume dabbed delicately on her wrist with a fingertip, because there wasn’t much of it, but it made her feel like a lady.

“Ma?”

Dulcinea’s screams have faded to rhythmic, hushed sobs, like a terrible tide, and he can hear Manuela begging her to push, just once more. It’s fainter, but he thinks he can hear Dulcinea say, “No, I can’t, I can’t, I’m so tired…”

”Help her,” he begs. “Please, Ma. Please? I’m sorry. Don’t be mad at me for the things I’ve done. Or maybe — be mad at me, but help her, anyway. Help my baby. Please.”

Except he knows his mother wouldn’t be angry. Disappointed, maybe, but that’s worse. Frightened for him, which is even more awful. But more than anything, she would love him through it all, despite it all, the way Dulcinea does.

It’s like faith, that love, in its depth, in the way it can feed the soul if you let it. But it's unconditional, not blind, which is what separates the two. To have faith, you have to trust in absence, wring signs from silence, and see providence in the actions of men. But Dulcinea has always seen him exactly for who he is, even if she didn’t understand, even if she didn’t agree. She trusts him, and she believes in him, even when he cannot do those things for himself.

But it’s because he has shown her, time and time again — and he will continue to show her, if God or his mother or the intervention of medicine, whichever works; he does not care if it is one, or both, or a brew of all three — that he will do anything for her.

He wishes he could do this. If he could absorb every ounce of her pain, he would do it, right now. If he could trade his life for theirs, he would swallow a bullet like the finest whiskey.

Right now.

“I just want to be a better man,” he says, to his mother, to God, to anyone who might be listening. Anyone who can help. “I want to be the man you always thought I could be. But I need them to be that man. I can’t do it on my own. They’ll take my heart with them if they go.”

It hasn’t occurred to him what he’ll do if he loses one but not the other. What if he has to look into Dulcinea’s eyes and search them for blame? He is supposed to protect her, and he keeps failing. Everything she has suffered, it’s because of him. And now this.

Or what if he has to hold that baby in his arms, motherless like him, looking up at him as if he has what it takes to nurture anyone? He is poison. He must be.

Otherwise, why would this keep happening to him?

From inside, there is more urging, more begging, more sobbing. Another scream, and he swears he can feel the air itself swelling, the way it does before thunder breaks. He hears Manuela laughing and crying all at once, the doctor barking instructions like a general, and underneath it all, Dulcinea asking: “What’s wrong? What’s wrong with her?”

Her.

God, she’s quiet. Why isn’t she crying? He stands up, but then he’s frozen, waiting.

Praying.

Please, God — please, Ma — anyone, anyone, please…

A cry rips through the air, rips through him, a plaintive wail that expresses, quite clearly, a perplexed sort of indignity, as if to say, “And how the hell did I end up here?”

It’s a question he’s asked himself before, but it’s never made him sob like this, even as the stupidest grin makes his face hurt.

That’s his baby. His baby is crying.

“Billy?”

Manuela is standing in the doorway. One look at her face and he knows, but he still finds himself asking, “They’re okay?”

She beams at him, but there are tears glistening on her cheeks, too. “Yes,” she says. “They’re okay. You can come in now.”

He follows her inside, wondering how he is managing to walk when he’s fairly certain he has become divorced from his body. It’s like he’s a puppeteer managing a gangly marionette, all shaky knees and fumbling steps.

Until he sees them, framed in the doorway of their room, nestled in bed, and he comes crashing back down into himself with a roar of clarity so powerful that it feels like he has never seen anything before. Let alone anything as perfect as this.

Dulcinea smiles at him. He can see her exhaustion written on her face, painted in the sweat plastering her hair to her cheeks and her forehead, but — thank you — she is still here. Looking at him with gleaming eyes, cradling a mewling bundle in her arms.

“What are you standing there for?” She raises an eyebrow, still smiling. “Come in here.”

He is aware of the doctor and his wife still standing in the room, but they may as well be ghosts, ephemeral, for the impact they have on him. Billy carefully lowers himself onto the bed next to her, putting an arm around her and burying her face against the crown of her head.

The baby snuffles, huffs, as if asking him why he hasn’t even looked at her yet.

So he does.

“Oh,” he breathes out, awed.

Dulcinea laughs. “Oh,” she agrees.

Possibly, he’s biased, but there has never been a more perfect baby in the world than the one looking up at him right now. Dulcinea’s delicate features, including a tuft of raven hair, but those are his eyes. Round and blue, almost challenging, looking around at this new world and asking who is going to come take her on.

He reaches out carefully and touches the round peach of her cheek. He’s afraid she’s going to start crying right then, but she just sniffs daintily. The tiniest hand he has ever seen emerges from the blanket wrapped around her, and when he offers her a finger, she grasps it tightly.

“She’s perfect,” he says, leaning his cheek against Dulcinea’s head. “Thank you.”

Content now, wreathed in the sanctity and peace of new motherhood, Dulcinea leans into him. “Oh, you’re welcome,” she says. “I am never letting you touch me in that way again.”

”I understand.”

They are silent for a while, both of them just watching Kathleen exist. Breathing, eyes occasionally roving around the room before turning back to them, fingers flexing, little rosebud mouth parting. Billy thinks he could sit here forever. The world could burn to ash outside, and as long as the flames did not reach them here, he wouldn’t give a damn.

”Although…” Dulcinea starts, and he lifts his head to look down into her face.

”Mhm?”

”A little brother would not be so bad for her, I think.”

Billy smiles. He tilts hie head back against the headboard and closes his eyes. He cannot find it in himself to pray right now, not for lack of faith but because he can’t imagine asking for anything more than this.

Although…

”I think you’re right.”

#so so good #idk why this doesn’t have more attention #though my personal advice would be to add pictures to the headers on the fic as it is more eye catching #and more tags definitely help to get it out there more #that’s just my advice though I personally think this account is the BEST AND IT ONLY HAS TWO FICS EITH LIKE THREE NOTES EACH WHAT #billinea #billy x dulcinea #billy the kid #billy the kid 2022 #tom blyth #billy the kid fanfiction #billy the kid imagines #billy the kid imagine

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