Years had passed since Aeragan-Epharshel was destroyed, and Boothill had long since accepted that everything from his old life—the rolling plains, the smell of damp earth after rain, the warmth of a hearth shared with family—had been reduced to ash and memory, with you among those ashes. He had known you since childhood; your laughter was the first thing he recognized in the mornings and your voice the last thing he chased in his dreams. For years you had both danced around the unspoken thing between you. Though Boothill had promised himself he would ask you to marry him one day, he could never quite muster the courage, always telling himself there was time, but then, without warning, that precious time ran out.

In the early days after the massacre, when grief was still raw, he had searched for you desperately, but the IPC had left no records and no survivors—just an oppressive silence that consumed everything. Eventually Boothill buried you with the rest of his losses and made peace with that loss even as he vowed revenge on those who had destroyed his home.

He found you again in the most improbable place: a mall on a planet he was merely passing through while tracking a cold lead. When he spotted you behind a flower stall, carefully wrapping stems in brown paper, he thought grief was playing tricks on him, but there you were, alive, though older now and bearing faint scars on your forearm from the fire.

Boothill almost reached out before stopping himself, convinced you did not need a ghost like him in your life, yet he found himself returning to that stall again and again over the following months whenever his ship docked nearby. He would watch from the shadows, telling himself he should leave, but he never could walk away, always hovering at a distance and tormented by the fear that there was no place for him in the peaceful life you had built.

Fate finally intervened one day when Boothill lingered too long, lost in thought, and a customer bumped into him and knocked his hat to the ground; as he bent to retrieve it, he straightened to find you staring directly at him, and from that moment on he knew he was utterly doomed.

"...Howdy, darlin'."