History

(Trigger Warning: Disease, violence, pregnancy, sick infant, death, and death during childbirth.)

It was a night of ill omens when the child was born.

Storm clouds loomed on the horizon in all directions. A moon stained red as blood burned high in the sky, silhouetting the murder of crows as they sat silent in the branches of a dead, withered tree. They overlooked the ruins of a caravan, silent and watchful. Guardians awaiting their charge, or so it was told.

Wagons with broken wheels littered the trail. Horse carcasses and the corpses of a large family rotted in the dirt and the grass amongst them, some spilling out of the canvas coverings, others appeared to have crawled away a distance before they too succumbed.

Whether it was disease that took them, highwaymen, or something far more sinister depends on who is telling the tale.

That was how the wanderer found him, in a sea of death and crow feathers. A baby born to a pool of blood and a mother already cold and dead. A sickly little whelp, too small and weak to cry, and so pallid the wanderer expected the wretched thing to pass by morning light, but he took the infant anyway, and the crows followed.

The wanderer was no nurturer. Many times over the following years, he attempted to abandon the child with better carers. But there was something about the little uncanny creature that twisted his chest and soured his stomach whenever he got too far away. It might have been love for this child he nursed to health and raised for years, but he thought of it more like a curse, especially with all those crows hanging about, judging him for every step he took in the opposite direction. It didn't help that the child was sweet and doting. Somehow that just convinced the wanderer even more that there had to be something wrong with him. The world was ugly. Everything and everyone was killing each other, so why did that child keep smiling?

He grudgingly gave the child his name, because it was too inconvenient after four years with the creature to keep calling him 'boy', or 'you', or 'brat'.

Alasdair Ó Gadhra. That wretched small little thing, with eyes too big and a smile too sweet, the wanderer finally accepted as his.

It was in that moment when things began to change for the two of them. When the wanderer decided he might actually love the damned thing after all, and that dangerous moment drove him to do more dangerous things. Love and the desire to provide drove him to work harder, to steal more, to hunt better. He tried to join communities of good, honest folks, but he was too rough and his child too weird. The mormons tried to take the boy away from him. The christians tried to cure him of the devil. A sheriff or two just tried to cage and kill the wanderer outright with no regard for the child's future, as they are wont to do with horse thieves and cattle rustlers.

But the wanderer learned from his mistakes and his many close-calls with death. By the time the child reached puberty, the two of them were a well-oiled machine. They hit carriages on the road, stole cattle and horses. They robbed men panning for gold, and jumped hunters in the wild. They took just enough to survive on and kept moving constantly through the country, never staying in the same place for long.

It wasn't until they got cornered in a ghost town in California that things took a turn. Bounty hunters had them surrounded, and Alasdair, the sweet little thing that he was, at sixteen he looked twelve and girlish, with a sweet, soft voice to boot. He pretended to be a victim. He escaped to the bounty hunters, and when they tried to hasten him away, he turned on them. Took out two.

He was shot.

His wanderer went berserk. The following shoot-out was deadly. Word of it spread across California, where tales of the notorious Ó Gadhra father and son bandits were best known. The story told that they'd all been shot and succumbed to their injuries, in a sea of corpses and surrounded by crows, going out of this world the same way the young Alasdair came into it.

But they didn't die. Alasdair, bleeding from the hip and neck, dragged his wanderer, who'd been shot in the chest once and the leg twice, out of the ghost town. They found a place to lay low and heal, and limped their way to New Mexico where they found the town of Never. They claimed the name Keary and fell into a gang of train robbers. Though his injuries didn't quite heal right, the wanderer settled down for the first time, content to help the gang establish the gambling house and help run it while the younger, more agile ones handled the crimes out of town. It was better that way. Better that he and his boy weren't seen too often together where someone might see the resemblance to the legends and wanted posters.