Mal listened carefully as she recounted the tragic events of the past year.  When she mentioned how she had found her husband, crumpled with his head and the rock he fell upon bloodied, the drifter's eyes darkened and a frown crept over his lips, partly veiled behind his mustache and beard.  He knew enough to know that with hired mercenaries breathing down her neck, there was a chance that her husband's passing was no accident.<br/><br/>This wasn't the moment to make such thoughts known.<br/><br/><i>And it happened immediately after they conceived a child</i>...<br/><br/>It had been a merciless winter of a year for Elody, Malcolm realized.  Each of those deaths would've sent any woman into a tailspin by themselves, but<i>together?  </i>His frown deepened and he shook his head as she brought up the selfish bastards that harassed her into selling what was left of her life and threatened what was left of her happiness.  Anger boiled underneath his concern and warming feelings towards her.  Slipping off his gloves, he barely heard her soft words about clothes as he slid his warm, strong hands around her waist and around her lower back, drawing her into his embrace, kissing her gently, brushing and pressing his lips softly against hers, and then more deeply, losing himself in the feel of her body, however surprised and unprepared she was, against his own.  The kiss endured for a long moment of silent intimacy before he pulled back.<br/><br/>Looking deep into Elody's bright sea-green eyes, his conveyed compassion and sympathy for her, but the taste and feeling of her lips remained.  "I'm not going to leave you here to face them alone," he said, sliding a warm hand over her cheek, his eyes never breaking contact with hers.<br/><br/>"But regardless of what they said, they'll be back tomorrow," he added, "unless the snow comes on strong."  He finally turned and gazed silently out into the bitter darkness, swallowing in memory at the past three nights he spent nearly freezing to death out there.<br/><br/>A week ago, Malcolm Blackwood didn't exist.<br/><br/>He had no birth certificate, no property, no record of service in the United States Army.  The sounds of gunfire, blood-curdling screams, the putrid stench of death and rotting limbs, the drumbeat and trumpets of war, calling men forward against each other in violent, bloody, senseless, savage death.<br/><br/>And for what.  So they could die for a cause that many of them had no real stake in?  So that they could dress themselves up in uniforms and try to survive the absurdity of real combat, where guns misfired, or shot wildly, inaccurately, men miserably wounded by bullets from god knows where, infected and then amputated, their faces and arms and legs destroyed—some of them killed right there on the festering fields, trampled down into mud and stabbed like beasts until they were unrecognizable to the women and children that waited for them back home, some who died just as horribly weeks later, with the flies laying maggots in their limbs, choking on their own blood and vomit, their lungs filled with pneumonia and their bowels shitting out their insides with typhoid and dysentery.<br/><br/>He had killed men, tended to men, delivered messages to send other men to their deaths at the doorsteps of their families, but no matter how many he killed or healed or enlisted, they were just meat for the relentless, bloody machinery of war that chewed up their lives and brought pain, misery, and death to their families, leaving mothers and children to fend for themselves in a country where a woman could not even vote, let alone take care of her family financially.<br/><br/>And now?  Now that the war was over, not even yesterday it seemed, already...<i>already</i>... they were looking for others to kill, others to destroy, sending their men and boys west to fight the native tribes of America.  Only this time?  It didn't stop with the field of battle, no.  The bloody massacres wouldn't end there.  They would go on to murder, rape, and pillage entire tribes of native Americans—the generals saw to that, "providing access" to women and children for the soldiers to do whatever they wanted to them.  For their unspeakable acts of violence and murder, the tribes would respond in kind, their hearts blackened with rage and vengeance.  And so it would go, back and forth, the cycle of killing and death drenching the Great Plains as the Army made its way west.<br/><br/>It was enough to make him sick.  He had to swallow the bile in his throat back down.  Malcolm couldn't take it anymore.  There was no end.  There would never be any end.  And Elody was one more woman, alone, being threatened, her life and land on the cusp of being taken from her by men in power.  He had deserted and decided to head west on his own, to get away from his past, to try to put his own sins behind him, but here he was again, in a situation all too familiar to him.  Clenching his jaw, his eyes burned with resentment and anger.<br/><br/>Then he turned back to Elody, her soft, warm face, her smile and eyes; she forced him, just by being herself, to suppress his rage.  To atone for his sins.  All of the horrors had passed like a silent film over his eyes in the moments he had looked out across the darkness.<br/><br/>Outside is where they would stay... for now.<br/><br/>Finally, he breathed in and did his best to force a smile, saying, "Well, this water'll get cold if we don't get it into the bath!"