DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by Buena Vista Pictures, Paramount Studios … no, wait, scratch that. This story is partially based on actual historical figures and events, and partially based on my own hours of twisted fantasies produced by seeing Tombstone and Gunfight at the OK Corral one too many times. No money is being made and no offense is intended.
Posted By: Elspethdixon
Ships: Kate/Doc Holliday, hints of Doc/Wyatt

Notes: The script for Gunfight at the OK Corral was written by a closet slasher, I swear.

 

… And in Health.

There were times when Kate wondered why she kept coming back. Why she kept wasting her time hanging around a hot-tempered, disease-ridden son of a bitch of a gambler who persisted in taking her affection, her attentions, her very presence, for granted. She was still young, well, relatively young, anyway, and not half bad looking. Surely she could find herself another man. A healthier man. A man who appreciated her, loved her, treated her as she deserved to be treated. Especially out here, where good women were hard to come by.

She had found herself others in the past, after a particularly vicious shouting match had denigrated into slaps and thrown objects, prompting her to leave again, full of hurt and resentment and the angry determination that this time, this time she was leaving him for good.

It never lasted, though. Eventually, the money would run out, or the liquor would run out, or she would tire of the other men, who were always coarser and dirtier, without the veneer of sophistication and the hoarse Georgia drawl she had grown used to, and she would find herself back here again. Back to lying awake at night beside him, listening to the congested rattle of his breathing in the darkness. Back to the endless rounds of card games in smoky saloons, drinking and laughing and watching him stack the deck and bilk the other players with the finesse of a master. Those thin, nicotine-stained fingers could slide a hidden card into a hand as cleverly as they could yank out a molar, dance over piano keys, or unlace her corset strings, and she loved to watch them work. No one's hands were quicker, with a deck or with a gun.

It always came down to guns, of course. Coming back to the card games and the companionship also meant coming back to the target practice, the duels and shoot-outs, the knife throwing—over and over again until the back of the hotel room door was splintered with holes—and Wyatt. Wyatt the paragon, Wyatt the lawman, Wyatt, the only true friend he'd ever had. He never fought with Wyatt, not for Wyatt the angry shouting matches he had with her, despite the fact that the two of them differed on so many points (such as, for example, how closely one should attempt to obey the law). Talking to Wyatt made him smile. Hell, thinking about Wyatt made him smile. Had Wyatt been a woman, Kate was sure the two of them would have been rolling about in bed together every night.

Had Wyatt been a woman, she would have found herself replaced before she could even think of walking out, and there would probably have been rings and vows soon after, the sort of vows she herself was never going to get.

Sometimes she hated Wyatt. Sometimes, when she was tired and hurt and angry and her latest indiscretion was being flung in her face, she hated him. And yet somehow, she always ended up coming back.

There were times when Kate wondered why she kept coming back. And there were times, like now, when she woke in the dead of night to the sound of desperate, racking coughs, holding his increasingly thinner body against her and brushing sweat-soaked hair out of his face while he hacked up blood on her shift, when she didn't need to wonder.

For better or worse, ran the vows she was never going to take. For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. If she didn't stick around and look after him, put up with him, who would?

 

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