BOOTHILLLL - Blog Posts

I'M A COWBOY ON MY OWN TRIP

── ♡ BOOTHILL

❝ the road of a galaxy ranger is a lonely one. fortunately, boothill would never leave you be. ❞

Boothill is impossibly hard to get a hold of, and you consider that the next time he shows up for his maintenance, you’ll plant a GPS on him.

The unofficial Galaxy Ranger and ex-robotic scientist that you are, Boothill had become your personal project. His maintenance, upgrading his body and enhancing his current weaponry have been your turf, something you took keen delight in that you’ll never speak to the word, lest Boothill catches wind and stops paying mind to your complaints.

His entrance is always predictable. With a kick to your door, you will scoff, and he’ll stroll in with a damaged component or two that you’ll have to fix. When your door opens with a creak instead, you feel a chill run through your spine and you are already out of your desk chair by the time he stumbles in. Something heavy lodges in your throat when you catch your first sight of him, a mess of stray wires and missing metal, his prosthetics wrapped around his steel torso to try and keep his wiring and sensors from spilling out. His eyes are dull when he looks at you, missing his usual toothy grin. You run and grab him before he can collapse to the ground, ushering him to the medical bed you found in an abandoned hospital, treating it like an exam table.

“What happened to you?” You stress, and you gently move his arm out of the way to assess the damage. You examined the more critical damage first, where some cords were snapped clean. You believe Boothill to be extremely lucky that it wasn’t the one connecting him to his artificial heart. Metal was easy to replace, rewiring was not and if the component keeping him functioning stopped working, there was no way you could revive him again. Your teeth catch the bottom of your lip at the thought.

“Sorry, I got all banged up, Doc,” It’s the first time he’s ever apologised to you for coming to your workshop for fixing. It’s also the first time he’s ever been such a wreck, so you decide to ignore the semantics and shake your head.

“How did it happen?” You interrogate, lifting one of his legs that had a gaping hole in the middle. At your delicate touch, his ankle suddenly detached and you wince instinctively.

“They opened fire suddenly, fudging scum,” He spits out in hatred, and despite his visible exhaustion before, his eyes light up at the memory. “They were blasting away while there were kids there.”

You don’t inquire about the safety of the children. Boothill is one of the most skilled rangers you know, and even if an entire armed military began a shoot-out, he’d find a way to evade it. With the amount of bullet holes in his body, he definitely used himself as a human shield and the thought makes you purse your lips. From the long years since you’ve met him, you were quick to find out that Boothill had very few weaknesses, but one of them was definitely children. You aren’t sure why, and you don’t know if you’ll ever know. Hopes, dreams and history aren’t things discussed between rangers. Even your mutually beneficial relationship with him is a rarity amongst the group. Yet, there is a mutual understanding. Things that went unspoken and what made you guys so in sync in the first place. So, you break off his unrecoverable attachments and continue with what you have to do. Both of you speak nothing as you begin shifting through your cabinets of prosthetic parts, labelled under ‘Boothill’. Usually, he is all chatter when he stops by, either badgering you to finally fix his Synthessia Beacon he utterly despises (and you kept intact out of pettiness), or striking up a conversation about whatever he uncovered during his solo missions. You don’t blame his quiet solemness today, but it doesn’t make it any less unnerving, like the silence isn’t meant to be here. You were the first to break it.

“You’re lucky my shipment for spares arrived in time,” You state, walking over to him. By ‘shipment’ you meant whatever passing rangers happened to drop off at your doorstep after successful thefts at IPC warehouses. It’s laughable for you to think of IPC packages arriving at your doorstep in the middle of nowhere, a mailman ready for you to sign the papers.

“Lucky me,” He drawls out sarcastically, and you take a moment to flick his forehead. “What the fudge, Doc!”

You ignore his annoyed exclamation, hiding your growing smile behind hunched shoulders as you begin screwing on his replacement ankles.

“I can fix, some of the more critical parts,” You gesture vaguely to his legs. “But the rewiring is the real issue here. Luckily, I’ve sanitised the tubes already.”

He stiffens for a moment, his eyes unfocused as he looks up at you with furrowed eyebrows and a frown.

“You’re putting me to sleep?” He asks, void of his usual attitude and you hesitate. You knew Boothill hated being forcibly rebooted and put to sleep. You aren’t sure what he dreams of, but whenever it’s over he’ll keep his gaze away from you, and reels at your every attempt to approach him, even for a checkup. You sympathised with him, and you’ve grown to hate it as much as he did. Unfortunately, right now it’s necessary. With his mainstream wiring damaged beyond repair, you need to replace them and you can’t have him awake during the process and potentially damage the framework.

“I’m sorry,” You mean it but he looks as if he couldn’t hear you, his eyes now fixed on a random oil stain on the floor.

“Be fast with it, ‘kay?” He mumbles and you nod. You reach over and trace the synthetic skin of his neck, where the bumps of his skin reveal his power button. You’ve already memorised just about every inch of his body from all the times you’ve spent with him, working on him. Yet, you take the selfish moment to let your gloved fingers caress the spot, almost in a lover’s embrace. He’s looking at you the entire time and finally your eyes meet his. There is a moment’s breath of a pause before he flashes you a toothy smile and you swiftly press the button. The corners of his lips drop in an instant, his eyelids falling shut and his body going limp. He’ll never know how the sight of him like this made you want to throw up yourself. You aren’t sure what happened to you, ever since the damn bandit came into your life and the path you had planned for yourself suddenly became tainted with sporadic visits and bellied laughter from a scratchy voice. You used to be colder. It’s what being a calculating scientist made you. Yet, Boothill, his justice that he goes on about, they all muddled your senses to the point that the idea of him being taken from you in one irreversible swoop made bile rise to your throat. He’ll never know those, because you need him to maintain his image of you; a cool-headed robotician whose nerves he always manages to get on.

You carry his unmoving figure over your shoulder and you don’t register your body’s complaints of his weight. There were things more painful than this, you think as you zip him into one of the prepared tubes. As preserving liquid fills the metal cylinder, you catch your image in the reflective glass. Have you always been this tired?

Another two months go by when you next see Boothill.

His last visit, which had been a critical one, had finished with little commotion. After reprogramming his hardware and forging the rest of his broken pieces, he was back in prime shape and left with nothing more than a “thanks”. His radio silence almost made you wonder if he resented you for his forced shutdown, and you try not to pay it much thought as you busy yourself with any unfinished project you could get your hands on.

That is, until an uneventful afternoon when your door is kicked open and you sit up with your first instinct to yell your complaints. Boothill strides in and your striking words dispel before they leave your lips.

“Oh,” You can only reply dumbly, and his grin somehow widens.

“Knew you’d be holed up in here, Doc,” He dares to sass, resting a hand on his hip as he surveys the packaged food on your desk, and the bags under your eyes. You click your teeth.

“Broke something again?” You wearily ask him, plopping yourself back into your spinning chair and giving him a quick scan.

“Do I gotta be broken to visit?” He poses it as a question but doesn’t listen to your answer as he drops himself onto your springy couch, feet kicked up like the ill-mannered guest he is.

“I don’t have time to waste on you,” You scoff, rolling your eyes as you turn back to the radio you had been taking apart.

“I got food.”

You asked him if he wanted something to drink.

For a man who couldn’t get drunk, Boothill adored his alcohol. You think he rides off the placebo effect of drinking, but choose not to comment since he’s finally decided to stop being so hot-and-cold with you and instead animatedly reciting his encounter with The Swarm.

“Most annoyin’ fudgin’ shirtbags I’ve had ta’ fight,” He snarls, before downing the rest of the bottle in his hand. It’s his third one. “Kept on multiplying no matter how many holes I put in ‘em.”

Despite your off-record status as a Galaxy Ranger, your areas of expertise stayed within the confines of machinery and weapons, with you never having even touched a gun in your life. From the stories, you couldn’t have been more grateful for the fact.

“How fast do you think they regenerate?” You question, resting your chin on the palm of your hand. He thinks.

“Around every few seconds,” He answers and raises a brow at you. “Why?”

“For next time,” You uncross your legs. “If I can increase the speed of your reloading, you can probably kill them before they have the chance to regenerate back.”

Usually, your new ideas for him would be met with enthusiasm, whereby he’d test his limits by suggesting his own upgrades which you’d either agree to or shut down. Much to your surprise, he tilts his head back and lets out a low groan.

“Seriously, all you got is work in that noggin’ of yours,” He comments, giving you a flat look and you splutter immediately in defence.

“But you are talking about work, too!” You retort and he laughs loudly, leaning on the backrest of the couch as if he knows something you don’t.

“I’m telling ya’ something about myself. Now you gotta too,” He explains and it gives you pause, turning your head to stare at him with incredulity.

“What is this, twenty questions?” You joke but he shrugs nonchalantly.

“Sure.”

“I think I’m a pretty open book,” Your gesture vaguely around your small and unkempt home shrouded in darkness with nothing but the straining blue light of your computer. “This is my whole life, right in front of you.”

“It ain’t,” He refutes immediately and you frown at him, not sure what’s going on with him tonight. “Unless you tellin’ me you’ve lived like this since you were born, then it ain’t your whole darn life.”

It’s the invitation you’ve always secretly prayed for. That someone will look at your dishevelled self and the mess you lie in, and say you were more than that. Boothill, of all people, is giving you the chance. Yet, your hands feel clammy as you press them together and suddenly the cyborg beside you is hard to look at.

“Why would it matter?” You ask him sincerely, missing your usual condescension. There is a brief silence before he continues.

“‘Cause I feel like it does,” He confesses, voice dropping lower as if he’s speaking into the world something only you and he should know of. “‘Cause I’ve been thinkin’ of how ya’ keep savin’ my behind, and how fudgin’ weird it is I don’t know anythin’ about ya’.”

You look at him, really look at him, and he meets you back with a defiant stare of your own. For a second, something crosses his eyes and you lose instantly, sucking in a sharp breath.

“You will think of me less.”

“Not possible,” He instantly hits back.

You fall back onto the uncomfortable scratchy fabric of your sofa, and your stare meets your dull, tilled ceiling. You reminisce about when grey was replaced with expensively painted beige, and the seat underneath you used to be a mahogany brown chair. In front of you had been a projection board, equations scribbled hastily across the screen. Your graded test paper sits in your book bag, perfect mark as usual. You think back to how far you’ve fallen from grace.

“Okay,” You say, “And you’ll tell me about yourself too. No enemies, no battles, just you.”

Something crosses his expression, but he agrees anyway. You will learn of his vendetta, of his anger and grief, of the daughter he never could have seen grow up. He will learn of you as Icarus, the one who reached too close to the sun and condemned themself to the ground. After the drinks have finished pouring, he will leave as if nothing had happened, announcing the next date for his visit. There is a silent agreement in the air that night.

You both were not good at living. And you have officially breached the line of co-workers.