Title: Crooked Star
Rating: M for language
Summary: There are only so many ways a man can grow. The life of Booker DeWitt. Connected drabbles and oneshots. Pre and post Infinite. Rated M for language.

Notes: Betaed by ocha-no-deathscythe.

Prompt: hands.

The sitting room at Mina's house smells like expensive ink and her grandmother's talcum powder, and he kind of hates it. The grandmother is bitchy, and the expensive ink is from her daddy's job, a clerk for the one lawyer in town, and every time he shows up at the back door he feels like a scuff on the floor from the way her mama looks at him. He shouldn't be here again, he thinks, and crosses his feet at the ankle. His boots are sitting outside, because of course, they're too damn dusty to be brought inside. Like the Schmidts are so damn fancy, with their rough wood floors and their homemade curtains just like the ones at North Star, but since Mina's mama came from Boston she thinks she has the right to put on airs out here in the territories.

'course, Mina's mama isn't here now. If she was she'd spit to see a dusty, bloodied-up DeWitt in her prim and prissy sitting room. His knuckles smart from where Cabe McAllister's teeth dug in, and his face has been throbbing something awful for ages. He's a stain in here, in this room with nice tables and lots of law books that Schmidt Sr. keeps all safe from dust and grime, like they actually mean something.

Mina whacks the bowl of water down on the table, and some sloshes over the edge. She doesn't notice. "Is there a damn reason you decided Cabe McAllister needed a whippin' today, or did you just get bored on your way back home?"

He scowls at her, and pulls his hand away when she goes for it. Mina glowers at him, a gimlet-eyed look, and then she reaches out again and takes his wrist in one hand. Her grip is surprisingly gentle, even though she looks about ready to rip his guts out through his nose right now. He doesn't resist. "Goddammit, Booker, you know Cabe's just a pig-headed son of a bitch who don't know his ass from his face."

"Your gramma'll smack you if she hears you talkin' like that," he says, and she swipes dirt out of the split skin on his knuckles, harder than she could've. It stings like a son of a bitch, but he keeps his mouth shut.

"Oma ain't here and I don't give a damn what she thinks of me anyway." Her nails dig into his wrist. "Dammit, Joel—"

His mouth tightens. "That ain't my name, Mina, and you know it."

"It's your name when you're being a stupid clot." Still, her hold softens. Mina drops her cloth back into the water, and then seizes the nearest empty chair, pulling it around the table so she can sit and keep working on his hands. Since they both left school she's spent more time inside than has been healthy for her, and all the freckles he remembers across her face have faded. They're still there, though, like stains on cloth, or constellations. She doesn't meet his eyes, just works on his hands. "What'd he say this time, Booker?"

"Nothin'."

"Something about your daddy?"

"No," he says, and he bites the inside of his cheek, ignoring the shock of pain. Cabe had managed to get off one good punch before Booker came down on him, and he's pretty sure it loosened a molar in the back of his jaw. He might have to spit it out later. "It don't matter anymore, anyway."

"Doesn't matter," she corrects, without thinking, and he can't help it. He snorts. Mina's been trying to fix his way of talking since they were both in the schoolhouse a mile from DeWitt land. It hasn't changed him a damn bit. It's just made her worse. "And it always matters, Booker. You know that."

He doesn't say anything. There's not anything for him to say. He's not repeating what Cabe McAllister said to him, not to anyone, and certainly not to Mina, even though she's probably heard worse and whacked McAllister herself a time or two, for all sorts of things. She blackmailed him into teaching her to punch a man's belly up through his teeth when he was twelve and she fourteen, and if he knows Mina at all, she's never forgotten it.

"How's your mama?" she says after a moment, and picks up his other hand, the one with the deep gash from the tooth. There are calluses on her palms, and inkstains on her sleeves. "She doin' all right?"

"Her husband's dead in a ridin' accident and left more problems behind than Satan, not much else she can be but wrecked," he snaps.

She looks up at him, sharpish, her eyebrows stuck together. Then her mouth tightens a little. "Sorry. Damn fool question."

Booker stares out the window. This is why Mina's the only person in this damn town who means a thing, because she knows. She's smart, way smarter than he is, but she doesn't make him feel stupid, if that made any sort of fool sense. She doesn't ask stupid questions—or if she does, she knows she's done it, and she won't push for an answer.

He looks down at his feet, realizes they're still bare, and fights the sudden urge to hide them under the chair. It's stupid he should feel vulnerable with no shoes, even in front of Mina—especially in front of Mina—but he does, and it bothers him. It bothers him because he's fifteen and she's seventeen. It bothers him because the whippet-thin twerp with ragged red hair tangled around her face is now a tall and slender woman-child with a tight bun at the back of her head, while he's just the way he's always been: gawky, snarly, stupid, and worth less than the dust in the back of her bookshelves.

And that bothers him, because there's nothing wrong with him, and never has been, and he's just being a goddamn fool for worrying about something so damn stupid.

She pinches the underside of his wrist hard enough to leave a bruise, and he snarls. "Shit, Mina!"

"You weren't listenin' to me," she says, and her eyes are fixed on his now, scary-blue. "Cabe McAllister deserved what happened, you ain't gonna find me arguin' that—"

"Aren't," he says, and smirks at her when the tips of her ears turn red.

"Ain't," she whips back, and then takes his jaw in one hand and starts to wipe the blood off his cheek. He tries to yank away, because if she keeps her fingers on his skin, he's going to get stupid, but she just looks at him again, and he lets her study the black eye, the split lip. She doesn't meet his gaze, just tends to the cuts, and finally she sighs and drops the dusty, dirty rag into the bowl on the table.

He should get up. Booker doesn't move. He hates this room, this house, but at least in here there's no one who snarls about Joel and Joel's debts and Joel's damn whores.

Mina looks down at his hands, bruised, cracked, dirt under the nails, and then sets her palms against his, light as a moth. She searches his face. "You all right?"

He shrugs a little. He doesn't return her grip; he doesn't dare. There are things he is, and things he's not, and something he's not is someone who'll ever be good enough to hold Wilhelmina Schmidt's hands. "It's shapin' up to be a dry year. All the harvests are goin' sour. Ours included."

She nods, and begins to tap the pulse in his wrist with her first two fingers on her left hand, in time with a heartbeat that isn't his. There are scars from horse teeth on her knuckles.

"Elijah left. Not like we've ever paid him, but he needs to eat."

"Ah," she says.

"The Hitchcock woman showed up," he says, suddenly, just because she didn't ask. "Yesterday. Says Joel managed to get her with child."

Mina's fingers still against his wrist. "You believe her?"

"Don't know. Don't care. Just 'cause it's Joel's brat doesn't mean it means a thing to me."

"The brat might be your brother or sister, Booker, you should give a damn."

"It's that damn whore's child and I don't want anythin' to do with it." Mina frowns at him, but he's not going to shut up this time. "Whole reason we're fallin' apart is because of him and his damn fool choices. Drunk as a skunk and up on a horse." His voice crackles. He's not upset. He's angry. He's been angry for the six months since the funeral, since he took a good look at the finances and realized that North Star was falling apart like a house of cards. God, he wants a cigarette. "I'm glad he's dead."

"No, you're not," she says. He stands, and pulls away from her, crosses to the window. When he peers through the curtains, he can see Cabe McAllister across the street, spitting blood as he checks out his reflection in a horse trough. The voice still hisses in his ear. Look at the dirty injun boy with those pretty eyes and pretty hands. Maybe your daddy's whores can teach you somethin' worthwhile, because you sure ain't gonna fix that ranch of yours up, boy.

His hands clench into fists. "Yes, I am."

"No, you ain't," she says again, and when she pulls him around to face her, he stares over the top of her head at one of the stupid ceramic figurines that Mina's oma brought all the way from Boston. "You wouldn't be so damn mad if you were glad he was dead, Booker, and I think you know that as well as me or the preacher."

"I don't talk to the preacher."

"Don't matter. Preacher talks to you." She doesn't hesitate. Mina straightens his shirt, and he can feel the heat of her palms through the cheap cloth, like coals. "You might've hated him, and I ain't sayin' you're wrong for that, but that don't mean you're glad he's dead. You're not that kind of man, Booker, I know you're not."

He scoffs. She reaches up, fixes the crook to his collar, and then lays her hands flat on his collarbones. The touch is like poison in his veins, slow and numbing and sweet, like nightshade on his lips. "You're not," she tells him, and the force of her belief is almost enough to convince him, too. "You're better than that. You know how I know?"

He shifts his gaze, to the window, to the sun, until spots burn against his eyes. Her fingers tighten against his shoulders, ever so slightly.

"Because you stayed, Booker DeWitt," she says. She strokes the wrinkles out, and then she steps back. The smell of her, dust and ink and horse, sticks with him. "You stayed, and that's how I know."

Booker laughs, almost under his breath. "Then you know me better than my own damn self, Mina Schmidt, 'cause I don't see how that matters."

She shrugs and doesn't explain it. Outside, there's a whicker of horse. One of the Schmidt brothers is back. Booker grits his teeth, and starts for the door. If a Schmidt boy finds him in here, there'll be hell to pay, on both sides. He's only halfway to the door when Mina reaches out, lays a hand on his arm.

"If you find yourself wantin' to run," she says, "come and talk to me a while."

He smiles at her, and ignores how his lip screams. "I find I always do."