Author's Notes: Just a drabble, a fantasy about the origins of Rooster Cogburn, our favorite drunken, grizzly bounty hunter.

Yes, little Sister.

He didn't remember much from his early days. Laughter, screaming, vibrating music, the air so thick with smoke and alcohol a body could barely breathe. For some forsaken reason he was always on the ground, always jerking his hands out of the way of sharp high heels and dirt covered boots as they stomped across the boarded floor. He remembered getting rusty nails and shards from broken glasses stuck in his knees and palms, leaving little red spots across the saloon floor.

He always got food off the floor, or the tables, or the icebox if he could find it. Never was hit or nothing, just never got noticed. He was like the strays, the mean looking dogs that liked to poke their muzzles in and stare hungrily at everything, drawing their teeth up in an unwelcoming snarl when folks dared to be kind to them. He sorta remembered staring back at them, wondering why their eyes were so familiar.

Things changed big time when he was about seven or eight…or six, he didn't remember very well. Most everything from those days was fuzzy, specially after he took to drinking.

But he can still see a big, ugly man blowing the brains out of a makeup painted, sharp-mouthed woman as she's screaming at him. Then the feller turned the barrell on his own face and pulled the trigger…that was even scarier than the first time. He remembered a short, small strip of a boy; ugly like the man and quick like the woman, sitting under the dusty, splintered table. His bony arms were white as flour where the thick layer of dirt didn't make him look tan as an Indian. He was wrapped all around the table leg like some rattler, his elbows poking sharply out of the tattered sleeves of a man's shirt that was big enough to be his nightie.

Folks came, of course. They found the corpses, dragged them outside and buried them in no particular place, probably inside the cemetary boundaries if they were lucky. It didn't matter much to him, except now he gets hit when he snatches food off the table or out of the icebox, and sometimes he gets a good kick in the rear if he's not out of the way fast enough. He's even more like those dogs outside then he was before; when he's noticed, he's not wanted. When he's not noticed, he's forgotten.

Maybe those two who kicked the bucket were his Ma and Pa…he didn't know, didn't care. Heck, he still doesn't care. They're nothing but an image of death in his mind, a burst of fire and smoke and blood that made life just a little bit harder than it was. They never gave him anything; they only took it away. No, he doesn't know if they were his folks. And he doesn't care.

He finally got thrown out, head over heels, only a few months later…or was it weeks? He doesn't remember. He walked through the streets, looking for food, snatching it from travellers…spent a lot of his time avoiding cartwheels. Saw a boy get killed by one once, saw his head get split open. It's not something he'd want to see again.

Things never got better; they just got worse. He'd always been skinny. Now he looked like a walking match that could burst into flames with one spark, eaten up and gone in an instant. He'd always been dirty; now he looked like a swarthy Choctaw boy, ducking under horse stalls and sleeping in the hard, dusty alleyways, where tin cans rolled by him, tossed by the high winds as he slept.

He must have been…oh, seven, eight…when they found him. Tall, black robed ladies who smelled like soap, hiding all their hair…if they had any; he'd always been suspicious about that…beneath big white veils. They shook him awake and invited him to their 'home for brats', as the men in the saloon sometimes said. Well, he didn't rightly care much for it until he heard the word, 'food'.

They talked real fancy, those nuns did. They insisted on him having a birthday, a saint, and a name. Of course the name was a fancy, tongue-twisting bit of nonsense, like Mattie girl or Le Boeuf would like to hear. Reuben Cogburn. Maybe that's why he let Edna name his boy, his only boy, an awful name like Horace.

The home was alright. The kids there were just like him, dirty, homeless, more like wild animals than human beings. The nuns set them up straight, cleaned them, taught them real English…not the garbled, half infant, half swearword language most street urchins spoke…and kept them well fed. His arms stopped poking through his clothes, and a real, healthy tan was able to cover his skin once the protective layer of dirt was scraped away.

His favorite nun was the one who held him down for his first bath and slapped him upside the head when he kept taking the Lord's name in vain. She understood that he'd heard it from infancy all right, and she was just as certain he could change, if he only wanted to. She fought him tooth and nail to get him to read and write, but he barely got beyond the alphabet. He just didn't see the need for it, and no one was gonna drive him like some sorry mule to waste his days learning something useless.

She read to him from the Bible. He never listened, always getting up and getting pulled back down, playing with his fingers, little twigs and rocks, staring out the window with an injured look of longing, as if he was some bird she'd cruelly caged. That face worked on the other nuns, but not this one. She was impossible to fool.

He still remembers the rare look of pleasure on her face when he actually listened to her for once, actually learned something. He didn't really remember what he'd learned, but he did learn it, or else he wouldn't be able to write down nothing. He can write…a little.

But that face is one of the sharpest, clearest memories from his past. When he's drunk in a whiskey haze, he can still see her smile. She wasn't pretty…she was actually almost as ugly as he was. He didn't ever care about that…he sorta liked her for it. She had hard hands, a sharp tongue, and the patience of a mountain. She had the presence of a mountain too, and he never forgot her. He forgot her name, but not her.

Cause he ran away when he was about…ten…maybe twelve. He ran away and jumped into the world, over his head, out of his league, whirled around by fate in a twisting mess of blood and pain and fear and death until the storm finally spit him out as he was now; missing an eye, overweight, alcoholic, and a mouth so foul he just knew that nun would slap him if she could see him now.

He wears a gun too, and uses it better than anyone he knows. He may be passing his prime, drawing closer and closer to the inevitable end. He's got it all settled. He's either gonna get shot, die from drinking, or pass away in some back room, alone and old. He doesn't care. Its not like life ever did really go right for him. He's seen nothing but death. It's the medium he works in, the visions that clog his dreams. After a while, the ghosts stopped haunting him. But he never forgets. He doesn't really remember how he started on the road to being a notorious killer.

They wonder why he drinks. They look at him with disgust. He drinks to forget. He drowned the faces of the Warton brothers and their old daddy and the old man and his wife, and his friend, Marshal Potter. They're all dead, and he watches as their faces swirl away in the whiskey, draining to the back of his mind where he doesn't have to look at them anymore, doesn't have to think about them.

Same thing at the dugout by the Carillon River, where he accidentally winged that fool LeBoeuf, and shot down Coke Hayes and Clement Parmalee. They were ugly, but they were men. Then he shot Quincy through the head and felt his wet, warm blood spatter on his face. It was done instinctively, all over with a bang. He had just stood there, powerless to turn around, knowing that the girl had seen it all. Then Moon, the thin, cowardly stripling, barely out of boyhood, awkward and ugly and afraid. He died begging for a proper burial. He comforted the boy, he promised he would, and he lied.

He left every single one sitting in a ghastly row outside the hut, lining them up to be torn apart and devoured by wolves, bears, and vultures. He wasn't content with killing them; he'd leave them out to be torn into itty-bitty blood shreds.

It's why he got drunk, and it's why he didn't sleep the entire night.

He's as dirty and foul mouthed and sinful as he was when he's a boy. It seems like nothing's changed, except he's a whole lot older and a whole lot less innocent. But he can't forget those nuns, can't forget that one nun in particular.

Which is why he likes this Mattie girl. She's sharp tongued and stubborn and too darn smart for her own good. But she's also got strength, a pure, clean and righteous strength, like those nuns. It's a strength Rueben Rooster Cogburn never had.

Which is why he hopes that, somehow, after all this is over, she'll think better of him. He has no idea how to show her, no idea how to tell her…and getting stone drunk and ranting about his failed marriages and bank robberies and murders isn't going to help. She's right. He wallows in filth and bemoans his station and spits and snores. That nun would say the same thing if she were there…except she'd also turn the bed out with him in it. Sometimes he wishes she would.

They're all right about him…and yet they're wrong.

He knows there's something good about him. He can't put it into words, can't figure it, himself. But he wants them all to know, wants that nun to know that all she did for him wasn't wasted.

It's why he's taking on a hopeless mission for a smart mouthed girl, teaming up with a Texas brushpopper and risking his own life out in the middle of a forsaken wilderness on a hopeless hunt for a measly fifty dollars. It's why he's putting up with her whiplike tongue and the bristling hostility from LeBoeuf. It's why he's trying; trying to be better than he ever has been before.

And it's why, when he talks to that wonderfully stubborn, strong Mattie girl, he calls her, "Sister".

FINIS