As the season turns to cold, Vasquez starts to notice how empty and hollow everything feels. The joys he would have once taken with food and drink are gone and things taste like dust to his mouth. He declines any invitation to share meals with the pretty women in the town and even Emma starts to notice and ask why he's being such a rude son of a bitch.
How to explain that he's locked away his heart somewhere else, somewhere that he can't be, not if he wants to keep alive and sane, not if Faraday is going to get to have a life.
He grows his beard out, grows his hair until it's thick and curling, until the beard covers him enough that he probably could walk into a town and not be noticed as anything but some kind of hairy man thing. He loses some weight, too, because for all that his hunger and habits never changed, he doesn't sit down to eat the way he used to.
It just reminds him of being at these tables with Joshua, delighting in making him laugh. He can barely go near where he'd sat with him, healing, instead staying on the little farm of his, tending to some livestock and a small crop to keep him alive through the winter.
It's a small life. Maybe too small, but he still knows he's made the right decision because for all the hollow and sad emptiness of feeling like a part of him is missing, he never worries about someone coming to take his head.
The townsfolk of Rose Creek have his back.
Unfortunately, they also feel indebted to Faraday, which is why when a familiar horse and man come over the horizon, there's not one, but three people who give him up within the first thirty minutes, all without Vasquez realizing what's coming. They don't mean to be cruel because they don't know.
They just absently ask if Faraday's here to see his old friend, while Vasquez is none the wiser, in the midst of working with the cattle to coax milk out of them and chickens from the hens, preparing himself for the winter.
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How to explain that he's locked away his heart somewhere else, somewhere that he can't be, not if he wants to keep alive and sane, not if Faraday is going to get to have a life.
He grows his beard out, grows his hair until it's thick and curling, until the beard covers him enough that he probably could walk into a town and not be noticed as anything but some kind of hairy man thing. He loses some weight, too, because for all that his hunger and habits never changed, he doesn't sit down to eat the way he used to.
It just reminds him of being at these tables with Joshua, delighting in making him laugh. He can barely go near where he'd sat with him, healing, instead staying on the little farm of his, tending to some livestock and a small crop to keep him alive through the winter.
It's a small life. Maybe too small, but he still knows he's made the right decision because for all the hollow and sad emptiness of feeling like a part of him is missing, he never worries about someone coming to take his head.
The townsfolk of Rose Creek have his back.
Unfortunately, they also feel indebted to Faraday, which is why when a familiar horse and man come over the horizon, there's not one, but three people who give him up within the first thirty minutes, all without Vasquez realizing what's coming. They don't mean to be cruel because they don't know.
They just absently ask if Faraday's here to see his old friend, while Vasquez is none the wiser, in the midst of working with the cattle to coax milk out of them and chickens from the hens, preparing himself for the winter.