Work Text:
//
He’s in pressed trousers and an undershirt when he opens the door, toothbrush sticking out of his foam-flecked mouth pursed in a smirk like he’s won a bet against himself.
“‘On time’ my ass,” Tim enunciates around the plastic blue handle.
Raylan lets his eyes wander greedily across the edges of Tim’s chest not covered by the cotton’s college trying. “On your something, alright, you’re hardly even dressed. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Wish you weren’t.” Turning away, Tim starts up getting at his molars again with the swift screwing motion of one all too comfortable doing it without a reflection. He leaves the condo door hanging open.
Raylan steps over the threshold and shuts it behind him. “You’re a rotten liar, Gutterson.”
In the bathroom six paces from his door, Tim catches Raylan’s eye through the half-shut medicine cabinet and spits gainfully into the running faucet.
He’s been touchy.
Raylan had scowled at Art, his own brand of jumpy made by yesterday’s Wednesday stretching on longer than a day ought to be allowed to go, and pointed at the window. Sky’s still blue, too.
Drive him there tomorrow morning, would you?
To what, the hearing?
“Traffic was weird,” Raylan says. Over the trickling tap, Tim huffs bitter irony to himself—were the man anything else but himself, he’d be the pith of some miserable citrus.
“Great.”
This one rattled him bad. With his spectacles low on his nose, Art had looked even more dog-tired than usual. Dead kid was a vet, too.
. . . Aren’t most of ‘em? Statistically.
Sure, but I’d rather our department not buff those numbers. Keep an eye on him; it’s just Western District.
Just.
“We can still beat real rush hour,” Raylan calls up, eyeballing the shallow tower of DVDs waiting to be returned to the video store beside a shallow dish filled with empty chewing gum packs and Tim’s seraphic array of keys. He yawns so wide his jaw cracks.
“Always easier to get outta Lexington than into Louisville,” Tim says briskly, emerging from his bedroom with his dress jacket on, fastening a belt about his waist.
Raylan’s next thought goes to a stalling mist. He whistles low. “Look at you.”
“Don’t.” Tim, resplendent in midnight blue, switches a beret from one jittery hand to the other.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
He jangles faintly as he moves, his rows of medals and ribbon clearly unused to being worn; Tim’s posture flags to their gravity, if barely noticeably.
“It’s in everyone’s best interest that I’m liked by as many people as possible today,” he mutters dryly to a kitschy mirror fixed on the wall beside the coat closet—Raylan finds himself drawn up behind him, watching over Tim’s shoulder as he straightens one last invisible hair combed into severe, gel-parted order. He runs his thumb along the back of Tim’s starched collar.
“Oh, I think they’ll like you just fine.”
Tim turns, one broad-padded shoulder between them, and eyes Raylan’s tie flipped gently as he brushes past. “You want to steam that quick before we go?”
He can never quit from staring at Tim’s eyelashes from so close, these sweet rarities of time from which they snatch the opportunity for themselves without knowing it—“My C.O. wasn’t awake to check me off, sorry.”
“Yeah.” Tim grabs his Catherine-wheeling keyring. “It shows.”
//
They hit a midmorning patch of blessed nothing on the highway and drive in relative silence. Tim doesn’t complain about the bluegrass on the radio, which Raylan takes as a kindness—just sips his flat white from its paper cup and volleys gamely at Raylan’s attempts to tease him for ordering a drink that sounds more and rather like a slab of sheetrock.
Badge-flash at the courthouse, a few handshakes, and then Tim shepherded unceremoniously into his holding room with no space for a meal-mouthed Good luck or even a stumbling squeeze on the shoulder; no real reason to assume it’d be needed, anyways. All the poor son of a bitch has to do is relive it. Comes with the territory.
Raylan cools his own heels amid the teak and marble and solemn Latin truisms. He fixes himself an off-hour lunch of vending machine fare, daydreaming of nothing with all the old expertise of his adolescence bubbled up to fill the empty time.
He licks sodium dust from his fingers and eyes the low-hanging angle of the sun making the polished floor into a mirror. Footsteps ring dully through the vestibule. The light is golden and warm, and Raylan remembers when the sound of crickets at night was the loudest silence he knew could exist.
//
He slips in and stands in the cusp of the courtroom twenty-two minutes into the hearing. The ballistics expert goes on with a nasal drawl as Raylan watches the back of Tim’s neck, short hair nestled into his skull’s soft atlas just above his collar, unsequestered and bored.
He turns as if chasing an itch, or a soft scent—finds Raylan looking, their gazes glance hard like over-eager glasses tipping to slosh wrist to wrist—
“Your Honor, I call Deputy Marshal Timothy Gutterson to the stand.”
He turns, sharp blue wool and severe spine, and rises smoothly. His beret sits just so, placed without so much as a single fussing adjustment.
Raylan doesn’t lose him, per se, but he’s only seen this happen a handful of times and it’s still foreign enough to close in on the feeling—75th Regiment, all wall, no soul.
DEA needed a sharp eye on a scope. Tim’s leash got passed off. Stakeout went south, wrong bodies came out dead. The system at work in its cannibalizing: omelette, meet egg.
Happens not all the time, but feels like far more common than those occasions Raylan can count the individual hawthorn strands of Tim’s eyelashes.
He doesn’t so much as twitch a smile, yet still manages charm where another less-practiced distance might have come across troubled and stoney. Raylan finds his culprit as ever, there, a steely barrier in the unrelenting blue of those eyes—always and all-seeing, cataloging every inch of the courtroom in an instant, none of their own light let to show through.
//
A sudden exit peels off not five minutes onto I-64. Tim goes for the grab-bar, rising slightly in his seat, and shoots a flat look across the center console as the Lincoln slows to an idle on the frontage shoulder.
Raylan plugs at the hazard lights with two fingers. “You alright?”
The cadence makes it come out with the leveled candor of You Are Not Alright. Tim’s gaze flashes.
“Oh, I’m just peachy. Eager to get back home so I can go crosseyed and forget what I already did the slow work of burying, why? Car’s fucked?”
“You seem peckish.”
Tim’s knuckles tighten in their fist around the plastic handle. “I’m always peckish.”
Raylan throws on the blinker and cranes his neck to measure the next gap in traffic. “Then I suggest we find ourselves a lunch counter that’s still open, and a place to sleep it all off.” He spirals the wheel with the heel of one hand. Asphalt wheezes under the tires. “I’m not about to make a man who sat the stand drive a leg.”
“Can’t do the whole sprint on your own?” He hasn’t released the handle, but Tim sits back in his seat and peers vacantly at the rear-view reflection shrinking the world behind them to pinhole nothing.
“I also want to get a little drunker than I ought to, I think.”
The engine pitches. Tim sniffs, and shuts off the hazards. “Lead with that next time.”
//
They find a diner still serving breakfast as it buzzes Dolly from a dusty pair of Klipsch heads chained to the eaves above the bar. Raylan orders a short stack and an Irish coffee, while Tim fixes his best Thank-you-ma’am face as the waitress gushes about her nephew in the Coast Guard and nearly forgets to ask him if he wants hash or home fries on the side.
When the food comes, their continued silence settles in. Raylan’s down to his last flapjack and only two more scrapes of butter before Tim sets his fork aside and chews on the tip of his tongue, staring at laminate wood grain.
“You ever feel like you’re on permanent loan?”
Raylan watches Tim’s thumb rove along and along the fork handle, slow and light as though making sure it’s all still there. “How’s that?”
“All this.” Tim gestures vaguely at his badge; the medals; the cap on his knee under the table. “Like you don’t belong to yourself, nothing sticks. It’s not meant to.”
Furrowing his brow, Raylan puts his chin in his hand and tips his head; squints across the table. “Nobody really belongs to himself. Not if he’s serious about it.”
Tim dunks a speared pair of home fries into a shallow pool of mustard. “Don’t think too hard, now.”
He smiles to himself, a quiet conferment, but still braces a sullen and wrung-out weight. Raylan mulls on a pang of responsibility.
“You know how I prefer to remind myself the wheel’s still in my hand, end of the day?”
Tim peers at him and gnaws on his pickle spear. “Indulging in questionable pussy?”
Raylan digs one block heel into the mirror-shined toe of Tim’s oxfords.
“Come on, dude, these are fuckin’ calfskin.”
“Something like that. Hellcat.”
Tim spits a sharp little Ffft through his teeth pressed against his bottom lip, feline-mean, and bends to dust at his shoe with a fistful of paper napkins as Raylan swipes the last good bite from the edge of Tim’s plate.
//
It’s almost nice, the ass-end glow of Indiana; not every third someone knows his name, and Raylan finds a hotel trapped in the 1980s but clean enough to be considered quiet instead of fetid.
He phones Art from the off-white plastic wall-mount while Tim stands at the foot of the second twin bed and carefully strips to store his tie and shirt and jacket in a garment bag.
“Surprise surprise, it all ran behind time.” Raylan winds mindlessly at the handset cable around his elbow, leering at Tim’s shoulders left bare to his undershirt with his trousers still firm about his hips, only gently creased by the day’s sit-stand. “Done now, though. Finally. We’ll crash here, keep it cheap, roll in early tomorrow.”
“Gutterson’s off ‘til Monday.”
“Lucky him.”
“Bring a box from Spalding’s in before fishbowl and I won’t press you for a timesheet.”
“Deal.”
“Appreciate it, Raylan.”
“Sure.”
He hangs up without looking, stuck on the shape of Tim’s shoulders turning into his neck.
“Where you from then, soldier?”
Tim’s gaze collides with his, immediate and heavy.
“I’m not out this way so often,” Raylan purrs. He stands and does a slow walk-around in a shallow half-moon behind Tim, pacing, watching those particular hands straighten the innards of a tidy day-out duffel on the club-footed dresser. “You think you could show me around?”
“Careful, hoss.”
“Or what?”
“We gotta be out in public, hands where I can see ‘em.”
“You know somewhere?”
“Old girl at the front desk looked awful eager for a reason to talk to you, might as well make her day and ask.”
Raylan draws up close, corralling Tim against the bureau. He has the keeping smell of cedar about him from the jacket, all stuck on some other time; the faintest memory of the present clings only barely in evidence in the morning’s coffee left behind on his steady breathing.
“I could get you sweet,” Raylan murmurs, and gently runs his thumb feather-light along the fan-edge of Tim’s eyelashes; slowly one, two, three, four. “Take my time.”
Tim watches Raylan’s mouth. He lifts a hand between them and prods at the edge of Raylan’s lower lip to peer at the roots of his teeth therein. “Find us something better than this candyass minibar first.”
“Deal.”
//
Raylan flirts with the benign, blind confidence of one who can pretend he’s from anywhere, just how he used to swagger his way through Miami. The woman behind the desk with her blue mascara and a perm coiled just shy of too tightly gushes over a place down the road that almost certainly has poles bolted to the bar and mirrors on its ceiling.
On the sidewalk outside, night does them the kindness of turning relatively balmy instead of twinging bitter. Tim exchanges a crumpled ten for two cigarettes from one of the concierges milling by the doors, shares a convivial laugh with two of them about something too far off for Raylan to catch, and tucks the other behind his ear when Raylan demurs his offer, the first already lit and pinched between his lips.
“Five minute walk,” Tim says, nodding over his shoulder at his friends-in-passing. “Some place on the riverfront, cheap cocktails downstairs.”
“Music?”
“Upstairs.”
Raylan thinks. “Could probably hear it through the ceiling, from the right spot.”
“Harlan’s best shines ever-bright.”
“Your call, deputy.”
Tim starts walking.
He puts himself six broad strides apart before Raylan catches up fully. “Try something with me,” Tim asks without looking up when they stop at a crosswalk. A clammy fog gives up the last of its grip on the incoming summer night. “Would you?”
“Depends what it is.”
“Pick me up.”
“Beg pardon?”
Tim nips a quick inhale and barely glances at him, but threads him right through the needle accounting for every twitch of meridian arc Raylan could possibly throw at him—they’re too much the same cloth, for all the difference in their separate substrates. Raylan sets his jaw and angles his weight in his heels unconsciously, squaring for a fight or affection all the same to his gut processes.
“Pretend we’re strangers,” Tim murmurs. The light turns over, hand to pedestrian. “Follow me in somewhere. Pick me up.”
He steps down from the curb and crosses. Raylan watches the lowering dusk pet along his neck, the snake link against his skin catching neon and the last of the sunset with nothing to hide it. Crickets start up in uncommon grasses, just barely audible beneath the bustle of another town’s traffic.
//
Tim ducks into a dive with old vinyl booths and a low, private ceiling. Trailing from a block back, Raylan goes in after him.
He orders four double-shots of Buffalo Trace at the bar and finds Tim in a corner booth with his eyes as he crams a few bills into the tip jar. Raylan balances all four lowballs in two hands and marches them over to the table.
Tim fixes him with a lurid, sticky look Raylan can’t recall seeing in his face before. “To old friends,” Raylan says, still standing as he sets them down, and shoots back one glass for himself. He picks up another. “And to new.”
Tim doesn’t move, watching from a hard-cut shadow as Raylan downs his second shot. “I was waiting for a friend.”
“Oh yeah?” Raylan puts his hands on his hips. “You and your friend from around here?”
“Maybe.”
Raylan nods at the drinks untouched beside Tim’s Shirley Temple. “My treat. I like giving gifts.”
Tim puts his brows up. “You’d accept a drink from a strange man in a bar you’ve never been to, you stupid or something?”
“So it’s the first time for both of us.” Raylan smiles and sits down beside him on the close side of the booth. “Newcomers; passers-by. What are we, do you think?”
From across the bar, a fresh round of pool breaks. Tim stares at him. The small white buttons of his undershirt are open only to the very edge of his tattoo.
“I got furloughed.”
Raylan winces. “It’s a bitch, huh.”
Tim narrows his eyes. “And what do you think you know about it?”
He leans to flash his badge; Tim’s mouth twitches.
“Figures.” The light catches him as he turns, face angled away against the backdrop of frosted glass, and for an instant Tim is just an angry kid looking to act out, toeing at the extent of trouble he’ll get in for miscalculating an angle; any of them.
He looks directly at Raylan. The present hurtles back. They’re in a bar in Louisville. Raylan misses his bed.
Tim sniffs and shakes his head to himself. “. . . Least you had a choice.”
“How’s that?”
Tim leans in as he takes up the second shot allocated for him and examines the liquid against the sallow yellow light of an electric tea candle. “Bootlicker,” he whispers at Raylan’s neck.
“Oh, easy now, soldier, if I’m the kettle, you’re the pot.”
Their legs touch from hip to knee. Tim leans into him, not quite done baiting, and scoffs. “Soldier.” He glares warning like flint through his lashes, and Raylan realizes he’s alarmingly hard against his zipper. “Who said I liked it that way?”
It’s the smell of him, sweat and cologne and the back reaches of a closet—Raylan puts a hand behind Tim’s knee and holds him there. Tim’s leg twitches, making to kick, and Raylan squeezes; he stills.
Raylan looks him over in a slow crawl and glad-eyes Tim’s inseam, straining gently even under his belt. He tsk s gently and smooths his hand up from Tim’s knee to between his legs. Tim squeezes his thighs together, leaning forward, but Raylan keeps hold and pets him heavy. “C’mon now. You wanna be told, I can tell by looking: yes, sir; no, sir; I get it.”
With his free hand, Raylan reaches out and sips off the edge of Tim’s drink: oversweet, the same assaulting red in its taste as its color, and smacks his lips. He nods at Tim’s tags against a growing flush blooming along his collar bones and makes a sorry-you-feel-that-way face. “Only one of us is still getting paid for it.”
Tim’s cock twitches hard under his busy grip. Raylan fishes the cherry out from the ice in the glass, and Tim catches his wrist—he leans in, preemptive tongue out, and plucks the fruit from its stem with his teeth.
//
He shivers, fine hairs up as if chilled, despite the soft sheen of sweat painting the prone rise and valley of his body bowed against the sheets.
“Tim.”
Through his teeth bitten around his own dog tags, Tim makes a curious, warbling sound. His eyes flutter shut, his knees falling gently wider, as Raylan presses a hand flat to Tim’s lower back. He groans.
“What was that?”
“Please,” Tim tongues against his embossed selfhood—saliva drips along O NEG and CATHOLIC.
Raylan lulls him with a hush and works him even more slowly: lube collects between his fingers, another squeeze-packet from the fistful bought furtively at a gas station in the opposite direction of tomorrow’s return journey while Tim looked smug outside, smoking the second cigarette, almost certainly making up a few more jokes to himself about Raylan still carrying condoms in his wallet like it’s 1986.
How old were you then, were you even born yet to make that joke?
You really wanna go on a thought exercise about my childhood before you fuck my brains out?
Don’t say it like that.
Well what else is it?
“That’s right. There’s a good soldier.”
Tim rolls his hips to meet Raylan’s next move and nearly sobs when he isn’t denied the full press of friction. He chases it again and again, the elusive rhythm caught in two hands and pinned right down his scope—
Raylan pulls back. Tim twists, eyes red and chin wet and neck bent back like a wounded yearling still sporting velvet. Pity and desire chase together in a frantically erotic scramble to have .
“Shh.”
Tim groans again and twists his face away .
Petting with a slow knead at his right buttock, Raylan watches every minute twitch and tremble shuddering through the finely-tuned instrument laid bare beneath him. Raylan hasn’t so much as tugged the boots from his own feet.
“Be patient.”
He knows what he needed around this juncture of things: answers, a promise, no matter if it came up pale at the end of it. Some helpful stranger to convince him for a while that there wasn’t actually anything to worry about, or at least make too much noise in his body for a while for his head to do the worrying it wants.
Raylan slips his fingers back in and relents to letting Tim chase it again. He watches greedily, wishing new memories had all the same staying weight as old ones, and almost lets him get there; every sigh hitching, son of a bitch might start crying after all—
He’s ready for it this time when Tim rears instinctually at the absence, pushed past the point of hunger into pure desperation: Raylan nelsons him hard along the back of the neck, holding him heavy against the mattress, and lets Tim hear the rattle of his belt jangling open.
“Last I checked, be patient didn’t look like trying to break my nose after I’ve so kindly put my finger on your goddamn prostate.”
With careful teeth at the packet’s foil edge, Raylan takes his sweet time dressing. Tim stares out sideways, all of him aglow in maddened bliss, breath heaving, and Raylan grins when he follows the sightline to find the shape of them bent back in the old television’s dead, black eye.
He runs one slow hand up Tim’s thigh, to back, to shoulder, to hair, and scruffs slowly to make a loose reining fist. In the other, Raylan tips his cock down with his thumb and appraises the slick cleft beckoned open between Tim’s legs.
“You want your head put back on right, boy?”
“Yessir,” Tim says airily, arching up to meet him, and finally shuts his eyes.
//
They share a shitty continental breakfast when next the sun rises.
Tim wears one of Raylan’s chambrays hunted from the Lincoln’s back set in place of yesterday’s starched shirt. A family of five clearly mid-roadtrip at the next table over are enjoying the sleepy not-quite-there blessing of children attached to coloring books while their parents slug coffee amid the break in bickering.
Raylan watches Tim in quick bursts, over-aware of his propensity to hover in these delicate afterward hours. The first time they’d stumbled into this arrangement, the half-formed nothing of meeting up to chase each other around each his own track until clarity dawned with its milky thrust over all too soon, Tim hadn’t spoken to him for two solid days. But he comes around.
“Sorry I’m poor company.” Tim makes a flitty gesture at the side of his head.
Always does; Raylan gives him a dry smile. “You slept hard.”
Raylan drifted off last and woke up first, watching like a creep as the one-ply curtains let in the light from the highway after midnight and then again, after chop-water dreams easier to let go of than hold onto, later gray dawn; how heart-breakingly young a man like Tim looks when he’s gone for a while from the world bent on wielding him indiscriminately.
Tim frowns mildly to himself. “. . . I didn’t wake up, nothing?”
“Steady as stone. Found you right where I left you.”
Pausing once mid-sip before giving up on whatever he was maybe going to say, Tim sighs through his nose and nods distractedly. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Been a while, since I went a whole night through with no . . . nothing, or anything. That’s all.”
Syrupy, protective affection rises sullen in Raylan’s mouth. Tim stares out into the parking lot through the scuffed plate-glass windows painted with flaked specials from the year prior. The kind of painterly, soul-affirming sunrise sky that only shows up above Waffle Houses and fourth-rate hotels catches him just so to set a halo about his hair, all stuck up and still fresh with the smell of stale rosemary from the shampoo leftover in the en suite.
Raylan revels in the taste for as long as he can stand it. He knows the next mouthful of burnt instant coffee will chase it off, and today will have to start sometime, eventually, anyways.