Hold Onto Nothing as Fast as You Can

Jake's words ring in Isabella's ears like mournful church bells, signalling the untimely demise of someone she held near and dear to her heart.

I don't want to lose you, he'd pleaded with her. You're all I got left of her.

All he had left, like she was Sara's favorite dress, or some sort of trinket she had been particularly fond of while she was alive. Something to be stowed away, preserved, hidden from the world lest she meet the same grisly, violent end.

There had been a time when she would have done anything that Jake asked of her, bending to any request as if her obedience, her loyalty, might earn her the attention she desperately craved from him. Those days died with Sara, and now she was finally ready to put them to rest and bury them six feet under where they belonged.

She glances sidelong at her riding partner as their horses plod along the beaten path in Big Valley, a winding, serpentine trail that criss-crosses over Little Creek River. Leon isn't who she envisioned at her side when she finally took on the last dredges of Kilgrave's men, but she's grateful for the company, if not a little curious as to why he agreed to help her.

She watches him a beat longer than she should, long enough for him to notice that her eyes are on him and when he turns his head to meet her gaze, she reflexively looks away.

He swipes at his cheek with the back of his hand, chuckling quietly. "Somethin' on my face?" he jokes.

Isabella changes the subject. "We'll ride up on the ranch by sundown, and then we wait until night falls. We can expect eight men, give or take, one with a scar on his face..." She draws an invisible line from her forehead to her chin with her finger. "... but he's mine."

Leon wasn't entirely sure what he was doing out here either. None of this was any business of his, and things between Isabella and Jake seemed messy at best and traumatic at worst. He'd pieced together what he could of their story and it read like a tragedy. Was it something he really wanted to get involved in? It wasn't like he didn't have enough problems and tragedies of his own to deal with.

But he owed her this favor, at least. All trials and tribulations aside, in the few quiet moments they'd managed together since meeting they'd gotten along well. She was easy to talk to. He could tell there was a wildcat beneath the pretty eyes, but he'd never been too afraid of those.

Wincing at her description of the man with the scar, he feigns a shudder. "Wonder what the stupid bastard did to earn himself that?" He ponders. He'd seen more than his fair share of battle wounds, all things considered. But she didn't know that. Not yet.

None of them knew very much about him at all, and yet they let him stick around to stand guard over his little sister. Maybe this 'Family' weren't so bad.

Isabella answers his question with a scoff. "Who cares. It'll be the least of his worries in a few hours."

Nodding, Leon whistles quietly. It earns him a glance from the woman riding at his side.

"What?"

"Never met anyone quite so passionate about revenge before. That's all." He shrugs.

"Ever had someone brutally murder a person you care about?" She challenges, so sure of the answer about to come back at her.

Leon adjusts the reins in his hand and looks back to her mildly. He answers with a gentle and understanding smile. "Yes, actually."

Isabella blinks.

"Someone I knew killed a woman I was very fond of. Her boy too." He explains carefully, still keeping his past and his secrets close to his chest. "It.."

Trailing off, he flounders then shakes his head. "Not the same as a sister, I know. And we weren't a couple or anythin' like that. She just.. it shouldn't have happened. So I think I understand.. a little." He offers back to her.

It's been so long since Isabella has engaged in a conversation that didn't end in harsh words she didn't mean, without locking horns to defend her side of a disagreement, always on the end of a disapproving scowl or a litany of reasons why she was wrong. Her knee-jerk compulsion to Leon's admission is to defiantly square her jaw and argue that the loss of a friend isn't the same as losing family, but he does it for her.

It steals all the wind out of her sails, the look on his face so gentle and understanding that for a moment she isn't sure how to respond.

"Seems you're full of all sorts of surprises," she comments.

He smiles at her, lopsided. "I've been told that before."

Isabella's cheeks suddenly feel hot. She digs her spurs into Paloma's sides to inch the mare ahead a little faster, like she's trying to outrun the conversation.

Knowingly or not, Leon follows suit and catches up to her, nipping her escape route in the bud. "And you?"

"What about me?" she puzzles.

"I don't know. Tell me somethin' about you that'd surprise me."

She gapes at him, stupidly, like he asked her to recite a Shakespearean soliloquy from memory. "There's nothing to tell."

He snorts like it's the most absurd thing he's ever heard. "I don't buy that for one second. I found you alone in the woods, clutchin' a wound in your side and wipin' a man's blood off your knife. A woman like that's got a story to tell."

It's an oddly flattering sentiment, one that makes Isabella stumble uncharacteristically over her words. "I don't... I mean... you already know why I was out there."

He concedes with a nod of his head. "Sure. But who were you before all this?"

It's a vast question with a dozen different possible answers. Isabella had worn a lot of hats in her formative years in her attempts to live up to the standards of other people. Maybe a killer driven by revenge wasn't the wisest or most sustainable path to have chosen, but at least it was hers.

"If I had left my fate in the hands of my parents, I'd be a nun in Mexico right now," she reveals, eyeing him curiously for his reaction. "The things I've done since then... I expect I'd burst into flames if I set foot anywhere near a church now."

Leon smirks at that statement. It was one he could identify with wholeheartedly if he stepped back and took a look at his life until now. He hadn't really lived a life he was proud of. He was hoping to change that.. eventually.

"That makes two of us." He agrees with an amused nod of his head. It makes her smile, and that's good enough for him.

By the time they reach the ranch she had spoken about, it was nearing 1am and the place was alive with rowdy song and the clinking of beer bottles. A pig roasted on a spit over fire and filled the air with with it's smell.

Abandoning their horses, Leon leads Isabella through a thicket of trees and comes to a crouch hidden away in the shadows. Pulling binoculars from his satchel he surveys the homestead.

"How many?" She asks, and he hears her as she draws her rifle from her shoulder and checks it's loaded.

"I count seven, that I can see. Round a campfire.." he zooms in a little tighter, noting that even though they were in the throes of a celebration, they were still heavily armed. Shotguns, mostly. A drunken man wielding a shotgun was more dangerous than you'd give him credit for. It gives Leon pause.

"Good. All in one place, easy." Isabella grunts with a clink of metal.

Lowering his binoculars, he shakes his head. "I don't think so. Two of us, seven of them.. possibly more inside. They might be drunk, but they're armed to teeth. You better be damn sure you can pick off each one of them a single shot to the head else we're gonna have more than we can handle on our hands."

He meets her narrowed gaze. "I came here to kill them." She snaps, "what else do you suggest? Asking them nicely to come out?"

Leon chuckles slightly at her indignation. "No. But I do suggest we let them do half the job for us."

She puzzles.

"Give it a couple hours, most of em will be passed out in their own piss. By dawn, they'll all be asleep unless they're smart and they got a sober guard or two. They don't look that smart."

Isabella scowls, but looks thoughtful. "So strike when they're asleep?"

"Take em by surprise. They outnumber us four to one, we need all the advantage we can get. First shot'll wake em but they'll be disoriented, hungover. I like our odds much better." He shrugs.

It's not until now that Isabella considers how lucky she is to have walked away from so many fights with her life. Unrelenting in her pursuit to track that man to the outskirts of Valentine, unafraid to cloister herself away with another in a hotel room in Blackwater, her safety had never factored into the equation.

The odds had never mattered because she wasn't at the casino to win the jackpot. She was there to raze the entire damned building to the ground.

Leon speaks with such authority and insistence that they should bide their time that she can't summon the nerve to argue with him. Living through the night to see the sunrise in the morning is a luxury she could get used to.

"Fine," she agrees, slinging the strap of her rifle over her shoulder. "You take first watch."

She's awake and watching the ranch through her binoculars when the first traces of dawn creep above the horizon. There hasn't been any movement in hours, the last of the drunken outlaws having stumbled off to their bedrolls as soon as they drained their last bottle of whiskey. Movement behind her alerts her to Leon's presence, and she offers him a muttered 'good morning' over her shoulder as he readies his small arsenal of weapons.

"You ready?" he asks, sidling up beside her.

Tucking her binoculars away in her satchel, she shrugs her rifle off her shoulder and chambers a fresh round. "Let's finish this."

The first shot splits the silence like a crack of thunder, and within moments the ranch erupts into mayhem. Panicked shouts and slurred commands are hurled back and forth, drowned out by gunfire and the cacophony of overlapping voices.

The first man drops to the dirt just outside the cabin door, and the man behind him trips over his corpse in his haste to rush outside. A single round from Isabella's rifle opens up a window in his skull as he scrambles to his feet, and he joins his friend in the mud.

Leon hollers at her to move up, and together they vault the fence circling the property and take cover behind a rotting shed. Peering around the edge of the structure, they watch the outlaws clumsily paw around for their sidearms and haphazardly fire potshots in their direction.

He nods towards the cabin. "I'll flank around the back, take 'em by surprise," he suggests. "You lay down suppressive fire from here, and--"

"I don't think so, vato," Isabella interjects. "This is my fight. You stay here."

He opens his mouth to protest, but something hits the ground behind him and a sudden hiss among the intermittent pop of gunshots has him glancing over his shoulder for the source. The fuse from a stick of dynamite spits orange sparks from where it lays in the grass a few feet away, and Leon urges Isabella to her feet.

"Shit, run!"

They skirt around the opposite side of the shed and sprint towards the cabin. Grabbing Isabella by the shoulders, he presses her back against the wall and covers her body with his just as the dynamite explodes, obliterating the shed to a pile of rubble and dust. For a moment, neither of them move or even dare to breathe, like they're trying to gauge whether or not they had survived the blast.

After an eternity of minutes, Leon finally peels away from her and looks her over for injury. He finds nothing, but asks, anyway. "You okay?"

Isabella opens her mouth but struggles to locate her voice. Chest to chest, she can feel his body heat radiating off of him, can smell the leather of his vest and the hint of campfire clinging to his shirt. It's an intoxicating combination that goes straight to her head.

"Isabella?"

"I..." she croaks out, shaking her head to snap herself out of her daze. "Yeah, I'm fine. But you... you could have--"

She's cut short by more gunfire, and Leon nods towards the back of the cabin. "C'mon, then. We ain't finished yet."

With few options left open to them they take the only advantage they have. The remaining outlaws knew exactly where they were and expected to have them pinned down, so they split swiftly. Leon breaks cover first with a deadly single shot to the brow of a man decked in brown and yellow. He slumps to the floor and Leon dives behind a crate, leaning out from it to take down another. Blood splatters up the wooden wall of the barn behind him, a macabre signature.

In the moment he has to breathe, he hears Isabella yell something at someone. It's full of fury and hatred. He can only assume she's found who she was looking for.

A glint at the corner of his eye catches his attention and he looks up to see the barrel of a silver rolling block peering through the slats in the upstairs barn. Leon's jaw tenses, it only takes him a moment to calculate his options before he surges forward and leaps up on to a stack of logs. Jumping again, he grasps the edge of the roof and prays to whoever is listening that he'd downed all of the bodies behind him.

He pulls and growls and hauls himself up over the lip of the roof, rolling to his side and back to his feet, he crouches. Moving swiftly. Well trained and on feather light feet he enters the upper deck of the barn and spots the sniper, attempting to line up a clean shot on Isabella as she unleashed on her victim.

"Oh no you don't." Leon growls at the guy as he moves up behind him.

The sniper has no chance to answer, as Leon grasps his chin and his forehead and snaps his neck with practiced ease.

The body slumps, and Leon gazes down over the bodies littering the floor, to Isabella.

It always the same, the moment when Isabella finally looks into the eyes of the men responsible for Sara's death. The world around her ceases to exist, conscious thought and reason abandon her, and in their place, all that remains is one very simple instruction:

Make them suffer.

Those words echo in her mind when she spots the man with the scar on his face, and hollers at him to let him know she's coming.

"¡No puedes esconderte de mí, cabrón!" she shouts, and lines him up in her sights when he turns to flee. She downs him with a well-aimed shot to the back of his thigh, and he collapses with a howl of agony.

By the time he rolls onto his back to clutch at his leg, Isabella has set her rifle aside and is looming over him, gripping the hilt of her knife so tightly that her knuckles run white. Oblivious to the sniper in the loft of the barn, she crouches down and presses the tip of the blade to the underside of the man's chin.

"Do you know who I am?"

She snarls the question like a rabid dog.

He shakes his head, digging his heel into the dirt in a flimsy attempt to scoot away from her.

She likes it when they say no; likes to envision them spending all eternity burning in Hell, and never understanding what they had done to deserve such a bloody, gruesome death.

"You knew someone very important to me," she adds, the only clarification she's willing to supply. He opens his mouth to defend himself but she silences him by digging the tip of her knife deeper into his skin. "You were just taking orders, I know. But the innocent suffer when people blindly take orders from bad men."

The blade bites into his flesh, a tendril of crimson trickling down his throat.

"But that's all the dead and innocent are to men like you, aren't they?" she postulates. "The sparks that fly from the metal as you grind the world down and try to remake it to suit your own whims. An inconsequential byproduct."

He sobs and begs for his mother. They always begged for their mothers.

With a flick of her wrist, she opens a horizontal maw in his throat, putting him out of his misery.

She doesn't notice Leon behind her until he gently lays a hand on her shoulder. "Is that him?"

She doesn't answer.

Above them, thunder rumbles and heralds an incoming storm, and Leon tries to coax her towards their horses hitched in the trees. "C'mon, before we're soaked to the bone."

The clouds part and pelt them with icy raindrops despite their best efforts to find refuge. Isabella doesn't utter a word as they navigate the beaten path slicing through the valley, and it isn't until Leon points out a small cabin in the woods that she even glances up from her hands gripping the horn of her saddle.

They hitch their horses to the railing and shuffle inside, teeth chattering and fingers numb. A desk along one wall and a mattress contained in a metal bed frame on the other occupy most of the floor space, and what remains is carpeted by scraps of paper and dead leaves.

Leon cups his hands around his mouth and breathes into them to warm them up. "Well, ain't no place to start a fire, but at least we got a roof over our heads."

Isabella peels her hat off her head and sets it down on the desk, and her vest follows suit. When her fingers being prying open the buttons on her blouse, Leon's jaw goes slack and he pivots on his heel to give her privacy.

"Sorry..." he apologizes. "Guess I should've expected you'd wanna change outta those wet clothes..."

Her fingers graze his forearm, and he takes it as a signal to turn around. Her blouse hangs open, a stripe of bare skin peeking through the gap.

Her lips are on his before he has a chance to comment, a kiss that lasts only briefly before he pulls away in shock. "What was that for?" he questions.

"Please..." she whispers.

Taking him by the hand, she guides him toward the bed and he follows obediently. Pressing on his shoulders to make him sit, she straddles his lap and brushes her nose against his.

"Isabella..." he croaks, fingers clenching and unclenching like he's struggling with what he wants versus what he thinks is right. "This isn't... I didn't agree to help you so that--"

Curling her fingers around his wrists, she guides his hands to her hips. "I know," she assures him, sliding her palms up the broad expanse of his chest. "Stop talking..."