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res plot plans / general info / etc

Fletcher was found as a child wandering around a town called Silver Creek, where he still lives today. The old man who found him, Remy, ended up taking him in and formally adopting him after being cleared by the authorities when no one claimed the little boy. Because Remy needed vast amounts of help on his farm, Fletcher grew up with little emphasis on education and spent every moment he could learning how to work the farm, train horses, and rodeo. The old man taught him everything he could about life until he passed away recently from sickness. Since then, Fletcher has stopped taking in clients for boarding and training, he hasn't competed to bring in the necessary extra funds for the ranch, and hasn't made much of a move to do anything other than hemorrhage money.

res extra

“What can I do ya for, Fletch?”

The younger man studied the bar owner, who also happened to be the bartender almost every night. In a town like Silver Creek, it was ironically difficult to find an individual willing to tend a bar. Most of the individuals who needed employment only needed enough money to make it to the next rodeo, so it was difficult to find long-term help. The only other people willing to work were the teens in the town, who often didn’t have transportation and certainly weren’t old enough to be working at Lucky’s. Therefore, it was actually more odd for Fletcher to walk in and see someone other than Hank Donovan tending the bar, and it often caused him to walk right back out and drink at home.

From Fletcher’s perspective, Hank was one of the few tolerable people in the town other than his late father. Hank had been a childhood friend of Remy’s, and the pair shared a number of similarities that had made the young ranch owner cling to the older man in the difficult time he was currently going through. While many of the older ladies that knew Fletcher had tried to either do far too much for him, pry, or set him up with their daughters or granddaughters, Hank had done nothing but sit in silence with the young man and listen on the rare occasion that Fletcher felt like talking. It felt like Hank was the only person he could trust anymore.

“Mm, the usual,” the brunet grunted, steely eyes glazed over with a mix of grief, loneliness, and distance.

“You got it,” the old man quickly poured a brown liquid into a glass, sliding it across to his customer. Fletcher made no sudden movement toward obtaining nor consuming the contents of the glass, as was common. Though it had never been directly spoken by either of the two gentlemen, there was an unspoken knowledge between them that he wasn’t there for the alcohol. He lived on hundreds of acres of emptiness, and though he wasn’t very keen on the human race as a whole, he also knew that he was better off not completely left to his own devices. “How’re the horses doin’? That yearlin’ still givin’ you trouble?”

“More or less,” he replied, finally inhaling a small amount of the drink he’d been poured to buy himself a moment or two of silence. “I’m thinking of bringing her to Sunset Ridge next week and seeing how much I can get for her. Not sure yet.”

A brief look of concern washed over Hank’s face as he listened to the boy talk about the filly. This was the fifth horse he’d given up on this month, and he’d never given up on anything before his adoptive father’s death. In fact, he’d developed a bit of a reputation for being too stubborn and persistent, and refusing to give up on difficult horses. He’d taken in a lot of rescues and turned them into very successful mounts on the circuit, but he’d stopped buying horses after everything had happened. In fact, he was primarily selling them. Paired with the fact that he’d also stopped taking in clients, training, and boarding, Fletcher was going home to a nearly empty barn each night. “I see,” he replied, choosing not to challenge the boy’s thinking for fear of how he would react. Because he internalized everything, Hank often feared saying anything, and simply chose to respond in neutral phrases.

Before anything more could be said, the door swung open to reveal the most beautiful woman Hank had ever seen step foot in Silver Creek–and he’d seen each and every one of them over the last sixty or so years. A woman like the one that had just walked in his bar wouldn’t have come to a place like Silver Creek unless there was a mistake or an accident. Judging by the confidence in her stride, Hank assumed it was the latter.

As the woman strode up to the front of the bar, Fletcher turned to his right and took in the sight that had caused Hank’s mouth to gape open in bewilderment. There was a tall, elegant woman beside him who looked like she could have been a model or an actress. Not that Fletcher would know if she was someone famous, because he didn’t have a single television, computer, or phone in his house. There wasn’t any cell service on the ranch, and he hardly ever had time to do anything other than work the land anyway. Despite this, he had the distinct feeling that he should know her, even if it was only to find out what the hell she had done to end up in a place like this.

“What can I help you with, Miss?”

As the young woman responded to Hank’s inquiry with the answer that she was looking for a place called Fletcher Farms, the cowboy stiffened in his seat, willing Hank not to reveal his identity with his intense gaze. “What is it you want with the people at that place? They don’t take customers no more.”

“Well, they don’t typically take customers, but if you made some sort of arrangement with ol’ Remy way back when, I’m sure the new owner would honor that. I’m sure he could use the money since the farm isn’t bringin’ in what it used to make.” Hank didn’t conceal the meaning of his words in any way, if the look he gave the young man was any indication.

Glaring at Hank as he polished off the rest of the drink he’d been poured, Fletcher stood the glass back down on the bar and studied the girl’s expression. She seemed desperate, and her gaze lingered on his face for so long he began to feel concerned that there was something wrong with it. Of course, women sometimes called him handsome or tried to get him to buy them a drink, but no one had ever looked at him like that before. Letting it get to him just slightly beyond what he should have, he ran his hand over his face and then glanced down at his hand in the dim lighting to ensure that there hadn’t been anything unpleasant she’d been staring at, and it had all been out of desperation.

Despite his resentment toward Hank’s statement, Fletcher’s mind kept circling back to what Hank had said about the possibility that the woman had made some sort of arrangement with Remy. He thought about the fact that the man had been so quick to take him in when he’d needed someone, and that he was the kind of man who never let the farm go more than a day or two without filling it with visitors of some kind. He always had clients milling about, whether they had horses boarded at the ranch, were looking for a reining prospect of some kind, or were simply vacationers looking for a country getaway. He was so different than the old man, and he felt a pang of resentment at his reclusive nature when he realized that turning the girl away might upset the man who’d been a father to him.

“Is that true?” It was Fletcher’s turn now to study the girl with a lingering gaze. Of course she was pretty, there was no denying that. However, he didn’t really care. Fletcher was indifferent to beauty, to women, to people in general. He had never been easily influenced by his peers or by any sort of societal pressure to find someone beautiful to hang on his arm, and it had only grown more drastic as he’d lost the only person he felt a true emotional connection to.

Despite this, there was an instinctive curiosity to Fletcher’s personality that led him to keep reconsidering Hank’s sentiment about the girl’s relationship to Remy. By now, he’d been through every artifact, every voicemail, every email, and every trace that suggested that the old man had ever existed in an attempt to feel as though he was still connected to him somehow. If the girl had known him, even for a brief moment in time, even for a text message, he had enough curiosity to consider letting her into the hell he had created for himself back at the farm. There was a certain glow to his hazel gaze that softened at the edges, and not simply because of the dim lighting in the bar. He was searching her for the pieces of himself that he’d been missing since he’d lost his adoptive father, and he was searching her for the sincerity and confirmation that what the bartender had suggested was true. Even if it wasn’t, he likely would have accepted a lie if it held even a morsel of sincerity. He was desperate for something, anything at this point, when he felt he’d been left with nothing.