[February 2] [Brokeback Mountain] Once Upon a Time - 2

[rhye.livejournal.com]

Title: Once Upon a Time - 2
Day/Theme: February 2nd/Three Seeds
Series: Brokeback Mountain
Character/Pairing: Jack Twist/Ennis del Mar
Rating: R

Chapter 2
Jack sent the first letter after he filed the paper. Ennis wrote back, nothing long, just saying he was waiting.

But three months passed and Jack was up over his head in paperwork, sleeping in the guest bedroom, fighting Lureen for every cent he could take. He knew he was the one dragging it out. He knew he could have cut his losses and run, but this waiting future with Ennis meant more than that, meant everything. Small ranches were folding left and right these days, and there was no way the bank was going to give money to a couple dreamers without a good-sized down-payment. The thought weighed Jack down during the day and kept him up at night. The desire he had to milk every dime he could from his own wife had opened a tense, canyon-sized, gaping rift between him and Lureen. When they did encounter each other in the house, she glowered at him, and he backed off in shame. He tried to keep to his room. He'd managed to avoid Randall for months, hoping Randall got the idea. Jack got a momentary thrill from the knowledge that it was a very Ennis-like thing to do. But at night his conscience plagued him with the way Bobby looked at him: wondering why his own father was trying to take from his own mother, wondering why all this was happening. Jack couldn't sleep. He hadn't slept well in the months this hell had been going on. Jack's lawyer insisted they could get more than what Lureen was offering, and Jack had told him to go all the way. Lureen would be fine, but Ennis...

Jack knew that this was his last chance. If their ranch folded, he and Ennis might part ways again, Ennis declaring this all a big mistake... His whole heart, his life, the very thing he shared with Ennis was at stake in this, and for that, Jack's conscience could learn to put up and shut up.

Daily, though, he could feel Ennis's hope fading like tail lights into the distance. Jack wondered if he would lose Ennis anyhow. He just needed this, he just needed their nest eggs, their ranch seeds, and he would be on his way, back to Ennis, back to home.

The lawyer, a broad-chested man with thatchy blond ringlets crowning his round head, was named Mike. Jack had laid it all out to him. Jack wasn't sure why, had been sure at the time it was a terrible idea, admitting to bringing his kind onto the holier-than-thou ground of Texas. But Mike understood, and when Jack's courage flagged, Mile smiled a smile that would have shone at the death of thousands it was so frightful, and yet somehow tender and caring. Mike leaned into Jack, and whispered, "For Ennis." And Jack knew he was sold. He'd venture into Eden itself waving a rainbow flag if it could bring this dream to fruition.

And so the struggle puttered on, his need to own and claim the sapling dreams driving him to desperate measures, unholy measures, at the bar of every civil court in the great, flat land of Texas.

Jack sent the second letter only after he'd won-- three hundred thousand dollars!

Ennis never wrote back.