"As the fish fleetly in flood swims,
as the finch freely in sky soars:
so hence I fly, floating away,
like the wind o'er the woods wafted afar…" Siegfried, Wagner

There are times in a man's life—like when he is, for example, buck-ass naked and hanging by his ankles, masked and gagged, waiting to be whipped or castrated or murdered or, more likely, all of the above in order—when the pain and panic retreat against all reason to a distant place, and he finds himself with a considerable amount of time to think.

Of course, he thinks mostly of how to escape, but the manacles are iron and the mask is tight over his face and it's all he can do to shift in place and listen to the rattle of the chains echo in the cold, empty space of the barn. Listen for footsteps. He can't see a fucking thing.

Naturally, he thinks of revenge, of the blood and hatred and desperate, terrible love that has kept him moving towards this particular moment in time, this particular end. He still hates, an orange-hot hate like the glowing tip of a brand. But it's not all-consuming. It's not all there is.

There is Hildy, somewhere, and he wonders what they're doing to her. Her eyes, wide in those last moments as the gun pushes against the side of her head and the last hope she has is snatched away. He wonders if she's dead. He wonders if they'll bring her in to watch him die.

And there is Schultz, crumpled in a bloody heap on the floor of Candie's study, and Django should hate him too because they could have all walked away. They could be miles from here if the man just knew how to lose.

He thinks of Candie, and the men around him, and he thinks that probably they never could have walked away. It would have always ended here, the chains lazily swinging him back and forth as he waits for death. In his short, miserable life, he's seen little resembling good luck, so what reason does he have to expect it now?

Mostly, though, as the boots stomp through the grass and the door creaks open to throw blinding light over the wooden floorboards, he has just enough time to wonder what the fuck Schultz was thinking.

Rewind. Stop. Pause at another moment, earlier, a point of divergence. The calm before the storm.

In 24 hours, a bullet will blast Lara Lee Candie-Fitzwilly in a completely improbable trajectory, but for now, no one is dead, fingers remain on triggers, bullets nestled sleeping in their chambers. It is still possible that everyone leaves well enough alone, unsatisfied but intact. But bullets are restless things, eager for freedom even if they do not yet know the path they'll take, the home they'll find.

Schultz pulls the trigger, and the flower on Candie's breast blooms in red. He apologizes almost inaudibly.

In the pause before the shotgun shell crashes into his side at yet another improbable trajectory and the world erupts into an inferno of thunder and blood, what Schultz is thinking is that it's still a better end than a man like himself might have hoped for and possibly more than he deserves. Someone screams, but it's far away and has nothing to do with him. The shooting doesn't stop, and that means that Candie's still dead and Django's still alive.

There will be a hundred, a thousand d'Artagnans, but the one he saw murdered is avenged, and no one else will die at Candie's hand. As the gunfire fades and the darkness washes over him, he thinks that this, at least, is worth dying for.

Back to Django.

He gets out because certain white motherfuckers don't seem to get that you can take revenge with a simple bullet to the head and no drawn-out monologues, not that he's complaining. Blows away every single son-of-a-bitch standing between him and Hildy, then crushes her to him and kisses her as though his life depended on it, as though they were the only two people left in all of creation. Then he tells her to get the horses outside saddled up. He has one or two things left to do.

He's not a man to do vengeance in half-measures. But nor is he a man entirely without a sense of practicality, and so after he rigs up the front of the big house with dynamite, he goes in search of the papers on which Hildy's freedom is indelibly transcribed.

Which means Candie's study, and Schultz, lying motionless in a pool of his own blood. Django can't quite bear to look at his face, but he kisses his hand, touches it to the dead man's lank grey hair, and whispers brokenly, "auf Wiedersehen." The corpse is warm, which doesn't make sense because a day must have passed, maybe more. And yet he's still startled when it moves.

He draws a breath in and holds it, his own pulse too loud in his ears to be positive. Touches the man's throat and feels something like a beat under his fingertips. Doesn't quite believe it until Schultz mumbles his name.

"Asshole," Django says, not without affection. It takes him several tries before he's able to lift Schultz to his feet. "You just had to have the last word, didn't you?"

He has to half-carry, half-drag his friend out to where Hildy's waiting with the horses, and his arms ache by the time, between the two of them, they manage to haul him up onto Fritz's back in front of her. There's a second where Django might have just swung up onto Tony, swallowed his pride, and been done with it. It wasn't bad, their original plan. Hildy, and now Schultz, are depending on him.

He pauses, looks down at the gun holstered at his belt.

Truth is, some motherfuckers are simply in need of killing.

And Hildy?

Hildy is awkwardly poised on the horse, the strange man who came to rescue her slumped in her arms as she presses a wad of cloth torn from her long skirts against his wound. The rags are already soaked through, her hand slick with sticky red. She's seen men die before, but never this close, his breath ragged as he fights for every gulp of air. It's all she can do to keep him from falling, to keep herself from falling as the horse's muscles shift beneath her thighs. In the shadow of the shed, she listens for the sound of hoof beats, gunshots, but all she can hear is the rasp of the wounded man's breathing, the rustling of the night wind through the leaves, and the distant song of cicadas.

Schultz clears his throat, and she flinches automatically. He notices; their bodies this close, he can't help but feel her tremble.

"My dear fraulein," his voice so weak she can barely hear it, "should you choose to do so, some day you might tell me what he did to you so that I might indulge in the fantasy of killing him twice."

She takes a few deep breaths. She can't not be afraid of him, even if she owes him her freedom, even if he's bleeding out in her arms and can't possibly be a threat. She freezes again when she sees a silver glint by his sleeve.

"Take it," he tells her, and she can see that he's holding out the derringer grip-first. The gun feels small but solid in her hand, its weight reassuring, and the grip slides into her palm like it was born to sit there. She shivers with an almost giddy sense of power before tucking it into the top of her skirt.

"What am I supposed to do with this?"

"Watch the house," he says, "If anyone comes out who isn't Django, shoot him. There are five shots left. If it looks hopeless, you can save the last one for me and ride as fast as you can away. Fritz is a good horse, he will—" Schultz coughs, and she steadies him.

"Save your strength," she says, feeling utterly lost. She doesn't trust him. Candie, too, was soft-spoken, gentlemanly, when the mood struck him. "Django will come back. He has to." Her voice falters at the last, and he squeezes her wrist. He doesn't try to comfort her—he's quiet for so long that she wonders if he's unconscious—but at least with him there she can pretend, for the first time in years, that she isn't entirely alone.

"Of course," Schultz says. "He has you." There's a strange tone in his voice, a wistfulness, that isn't just physical pain. She'd have thought it was envy if he hadn't been talking about another man. "The fires of hell would not hold him back. You are a lucky woman, Brünnhilde."

She doesn't trust him, she decides, but she might learn to like him a little.

Before she can contemplate the matter any further, a group of black-clad figures come riding through the gates, and minutes later, Django comes walking out alone and her prison of the past four months explodes into flame behind him.