Polyfacetious

Dadswap au!

I won’t be but silent back-up. Look, I heard your note, and, yes, you’re right, maybe real adventures would make better stories. And you, sir, smell chock-full of them. Amongst other things. I mean, what is that? Is that onion? It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, you smell of death and destiny. Heroics and heartbreak.

18. for one muse to wake the other by fingering them/giving a handjob

This is beyond stupid. This is dangerous. 

But Cobb has been a goddamn mess since they ran into his little brother on the beach. It was one thing to be out here when all you had to worry about was yourself. But knowing your baby brother was out there in the mud and the muck and surrounded on all sides by the enemy?

It would twist you up inside. 

(Later, they’ll find out that Raylan lied on his papers. That he used their mother’s last name, Vanth, to get around the rules.)

And Cobb was their Sargeant. He was the man in charge, and they needed him with a cool head. He was the one giving the orders when the captains were too busy to come check in. 

He’d kept their asses out of the fire more than once. 

So it’s just common decency for Frank to sleep in the dirt next to his sargeant, knees knocking against knees. And maybe he rolls closer in his sleep, nobody is going to care. It happened. 

And it’s just camaraderie to reach between them, when it’s that darkest part before dawn, and get his hand inside of the Sarge’s dungarees, and wrap his fingers around his dick. 

It’s got nothing to do with the way Cobb’s lashes sit fanned against his cheeks in sleep, or the way his lips are parted to let soft puffs of air through, slow and steady.

Or the way his own dick twitches when he feels Cobb start to lengthen and harden in his hand, hips moving before his brain even starts to wake up. Frank pulls his hand out and spits in his palm before he takes him back in hand, keeping his grip tight and his strokes long, just the way he likes it when he used to have time to do this to himself. 

Cobb stirs, dark lashes fluttering before bright, confused eyes are trying to find him in the darkness. The only reason Frank sees is because his eyes have long adjusted to it. 

“Shh.” It’s just a breath between them, Cobb going rigid for a second before he relaxes, and his hips stutter forward. 

“There you go. Like that.” He whispers the words in the scant space between their noses, his own breathing just as ragged as the sarge’s. 

“C’mon, Givens. It’s your turn to read.” Raylan looks from the paper balanced against his knee, to Sid’s big ridiculous puppy dog eyes. “You know I’d do it for you.”

And wasn’t that just a low blow. Because the kid was telling the truth. Secrets out here felt like an affront to your brothers. They shared cigarettes, they shared fear, they shared misery. They were supposed to share what little happiness they had, for the ones that didn’t have any at all. 

Raylan bites down on the corner of his lip. “It’s not to my wife.” There’s a few hoots and hollers, and someone says Givens has a mistress! and Raylan shrugs, because that’s as close to the truth as he can get out here. “So you’re gonna have to bear with me.” 

He can feel a particular pair of blue eyes on him. Raylan doesn’t look up from the paper, as he starts to read. 

“My dearest,

I hear gunshots in my sleep. Mortar fire, too. But the one thing I never expected to follow me into the dark is the sound of the dirt falling. It reminds me something awful of being back in the mines. The way the earth would shiver and dirt would rain down on your head like a warning from God himself to quit it. 

Who knew I’d miss the mines? 

I miss you, too. I miss running my fingers through your hair, where it sits against your neck. I miss the feel of your cheek beneath my lips. 

But most of all, when the dust settles around us and all that is left is ringing silence, I miss your voice. 

Home is not a building. It’s not a holler, or a town or a county line. 

Home is the soft valley of vowels in the mountains of your words. 

3. to shower with my muse

The room has become dreamlike, the steam from the shower rolling out across the floor and kissing the glass surfaces, mirror and shower door gone opaque with the heat of it. 

Rafael’s heat around him is more molten, constricting waves of pleasure that follow the slow rolls of his hips. 

Boyd doesn’t have Raylan’s natural gifts. He knows when it comes to his time in the bedroom, he’s got to put in the work to be remembered half as fondly. So he’s done plenty of reading on the subject. 

And he focuses entirely on Rafael, on the way he flutters and shivers and drops a wet, dark head back against the tile. (Boyd wonders for a moment, if his charcoals could capture that. The way Rafael’s dark hair looks against white tile. The way his mouth parts in ectasy.)

“There you go, baby.” Boyd’s voice is honey thick between them, a hand sliding down Rafael’s back and over the sweet curve of his behind to hitch his leg a little higher, so he can thrust a little deeper. 

12. for friends with benefits sex

Peter’s back hits the bed with a thump, and Raylan’s got his wrists pinned up over his head before their mouths collide again. He’s a little bit rougher with Peter than he’d be with most women, because he knows Peter doesn’t mind. 

If he left bruises on a woman, Raylan would never forgive himself. But Peter wore the ones at neck and wrist like jewelry, like some kind of badge of honor. 

And he needs that right now. Raylan needs to be able to snap his hips forward and feel those fireworks go off under his skin and not have to worry about hating himself when it’s all said and done. 

This ain’t the kind of sex that lends itself to kissing, no matter how much Raylan might enjoy kissing Peter. So he holds himself on locked arms and watches Peter’s expression waver with every hard thrust, his own eyes wild with it. 

“Come on, Peter.” Raylan’s voice is low, accent muddy in the heat of the moment.

29. for sex on a table/counter/desk

Now, Raylan can’t be sure, but he’s almost certain he’s done something to piss Tim off. 

He hasn’t been to Harlan in awhile, he’s kept up with checking in like they agreed to when they’re working cases by themselves. Whatever the hell he did to piss Tim off, he’s got no idea. 

But when Tim strolls into the barbecue that they’re having at Boyd’s “friend” Rafael’s place, he does it with Raylan’s red plaid shirt open over a tanktop and a backwards Marshal’s ballcap on. 

And he walks right past Raylan without a word. 

Yeah, he’s being punished. 

Punished with an afternoon of spiked lemonade and good conversation and the laughter of his friends. And an erection that won’t go away, no matter how much he focuses on anything but Tim’s lips where they wrap around a beer bottle. 

Raylan, to his credit, lasts about two hours before he corners Tim in an upstairs bathroom to ask him what in the blue hell it was he did to make him mad. 

It’s only a blind few minutes later when he’s got Tim bent over the bathroom sink, using Rafael’s expensive, sweet smelling lotion for lube as he fucks into him that Raylan comes to the realization that he’s been played. 

“You son of a bitch.”

In another world, in another life, Raylan Givens wakes up in a room full of sunlight. He’s never been an early riser, never been a morning person. He blames growing up where he did for it, but it’s just not in his system. 

The room is clean, like the night before has been washed away. But no amount of tables turned right again can replace the broken plaster in the wall. Raylan stares at it until his eyes feel gritty and heavy. 

His dress greens are folded neatly over the back of the chair at the small table, his shoes shined up and sitting next to a coffee cup. By this time, even the cardboard sleeve and the styrofoam can’t keep it warm. 

That’s fine. Raylan hasn’t been warm since he got off the plane. 

He dresses on autopilot, refuses to stop in front of the mirror to fix his hair or his tie. He knows the others will get it for him if it’s bad. 

Frank is sitting on the rocking chair outside of the hotel room, on its “porch”. He runs a hand over short shorn hair and doesn’t say a word. Raylan’s glad for it. He’s all out of words, all out of thoughts. Everything in his head is just polaroid snapshots, stacked together and quick like a flipbook. 

It’s just the two of them here. 

The drive across town feels like the blink of an eye. Just the world spinning on past them. A blur of colors, just like Raylan’s thoughts. He doesn’t look at the sign outside of the building, refuses to let himself read the words. 

Inside, it’s quiet. There’s some kind of music in the background, unobtrusive and wordless. Raylan stops in the doorway to the room, counting each and every white wooden folding chair set up in neat rows. 

Forty five. They would only need five. Tim’s parents were dead. He had no siblings. No leftover friends from high school. No one but them. 

Frank is a shadow darkening the doorway but not moving. Raylan can’t bring himself to raise his eyes, so he brings his fingers to his lips again. He presses in hard against his split bottom lip and remembers Logan’s vicious, fathomless eyes. 

This is your fault! You did this!

Jacob took him to another hotel after that, Wade like a duckling in his wake. They were fractured now, not a cohesive unit. They never would be again. 

“Ray.” The first word he’s heard spoken today, Frank’s voice a gravelly balm against the waves of pain washing over him, but whatever was coming next is lost in the gunshot crack of the door slamming open and hitting the wall. 

Wade catches Logan by the elbow before he can throw himself at Raylan, dark eyes bloodshot. He must not have stopped drinking, Raylan can smell the Wild Turkey in the air around him, seeping out of his pores. 

Jacob is hot on Wade’s heels, but he’s not looking at Logan. He’s following Raylan up along the path of the runner of carpet, up to the side of a rich brown coffin, the satin inside making Tim’s skin look like alabaster. 

His brother’s grip on his shoulder is too tight. It’d break the skin if Raylan didn’t have so many starched layers on. 

“If you kill yourself, he’ll never forgive you.” Jacob has always seen right through him, has always known every vicious and miserable thought in Raylan’s head, called them clouds passing over the sun. 

There was no more sun now, just a yellow tornado sky turned black with the coming storm. All Raylan has heard in his ears since the shots stopped firing is the freight train wail of a tornado building inside of him. 

He didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. Life wasn’t a movie and Tim didn’t linger. He died with the same pragmaticism and perfunctory grace he did everything else. He was gone before Raylan ever put hands on him, shot right between the eyes. 

Raylan looks down at his hands, like he’s still expecting to see blood and bone there, like he’ll ever be able to wash away the spongey feeling of Tim’s brain seeping out of the hole in the back of his skull from his hands. 

“Then he can flip me the bird from Heaven while I roast in Hell.” Raylan’s voice sounds unfamiliar to his own ears, flat and raspy and useless. Jacob’s grip tightens somehow. 

“You tell me I have a life to live, that he’d want me to live it, I’ll shoot you in the fucking foot, Jacob.” Because maybe it was true. Maybe Tim was a better man than Raylan would ever be. 

Raylan wouldn’t wish this pain on anybody, but he can’t pretend he’d be magnanimous enough to wish Tim another love and another life after him. But Raylan has always been a selfish son of a bitch. 

“Fine.” His brother’s voice is choked. “Then do it for me. Live for me, because I can’t do this without you.”

That’s a low blow and it lands, just like Jacob knew it would. 

“He don’t look like he’s sleeping.” Raylan didn’t know why everybody fucking said that. Tim didn’t look like he was sleeping. 

No bad pornos here: (Accepting)

There’s blood everywhere. Splattered up on the walls in an easily identifiable pattern, because Raylan’s only been out of Glynco a couple of months, and even that’s not enough time to forget all the shit they taught him. 

It’s fanned out white against the stucco wall. The shooter was on the floor. Shot upwards. One right through the chin and out the top of his skull, painting the ceiling with bits of brain and bone. 

Raylan adjusts the knocked over chair on the floor, nudging it with the toe of his boot. Bumfucked Arkansas is not where Raylan pictured himself with a star on his hip, but he was riding the rap from taking Inspector Mullin’s daughter to bed. 

Not that it mattered now. What mattered now was making sure that his story lined up with all the evidence. He’s got a goose egg on the back of his head from the scuffle earlier, that’ll help. 

He lowers himself to the floor, digging the heel of his boot in so that it leaves a scuff. Raylan makes a gun with his fingers and shimmies his shoulders against the tile floor until it lines up with the spray. He makes the sound with his mouth. Pew. 

Outside, he can hear the sirens in the distance. West Memphis wasn’t a big town, and there wasn’t much the townies would be doing, especially in the middle of the afternoon. 

Raylan sits down on a felled log next to a kid who couldn’t be a day over seventeen, shoulders hunched up. “You drunk?” He doesn’t even know where the kid got the flask in his hands, but Raylan can smell it coming off of his skin. 

“I was headin’ that direction.” He’s all local, cotton mouthed vowels and the kind of combativeness that comes with years of being told you’ll never amount to anything. Raylan holds a hand out for the flask, and it’s handed over sullenly. He only takes a nip from it before he hands it back. 

“My daddy used to say that if you can’t fight ‘em drunk, don’t fight ‘em at all.” The bluest eyes Raylan has ever seen track up to the house. Where Timothy Gutterson Senior was cooling on the kitchen floor with a new exhaust port in the back of his head. 

“When they come to ask you questions, you tell them that your daddy knocked me down. That he pulled, and I fired.” Now those saucer sized blue eyes were back on him. Raylan’s shrug is all slow, rolling ease. “You got your whole life ahead of you, Tim. And I’ll get a slap on the wrist at most.”

Because Timothy Gutterson Senior was number eight on Arkansas’ most wanted list on account of forging prescriptions and writing hot checks. Raylan thinks maybe being a shitty father should be on that list too, but it’s always been a sore subject for him. 

Tim’s watching him like he’s something special, and all Raylan can think is that thirty years old is too damn young to feel this damn old. And that the setting Arkansas sun was looking like a halo straight from heaven where it sat behind Tim’s blonde head. 

“Listen-” Raylan pats his jacket pocket and finds the burner phone he’s been using since he got here, more amused that people still used flip phones than anything. He types a number in, and saves it. He holds the phone out to Tim on his upturned palm. 

“If you find yourself in trouble, any kind…You can call me. I’ll drop whatever I’m doing and I will come for you.”

Little Rock to West Memphis was just under two hours. In a tight spot, Raylan could do it closer to one. Tim takes the phone from him, hesitant like he thinks it’s gonna bite, and Raylan pats his knee before he stands.

No bad pornos here: (Accepting)

Tim isn’t talking to him. 

Technically, Tim is talking to the wall behind the vet bar, blonde head bowed and hands pressed flat against brick, red flannel near to falling off of a pale shoulder as he pushes back insistently. 

But even still, Tim isn’t talking to Raylan. He’s talking to the mocha skinned soldier who mans the door of the place, whose sweat is catching the streetlight like diamonds, and who is trying to nuzzle Tim’s neck and tell him easy, baby, we’ll get there. 

It would be cliche to say Raylan sees red. But it would be the truth, also. He catches the soldier by the back of his shirt and yanks, tossing him back onto the concrete. By the time that indignant ‘what the hell’ hits the air, the soldier is staring down the barrel of Raylan’s firearm. 

He hears that quiet shit from Tim too, jeans still around his ankles and pale ass shining like the moon. “You. Get the hell out of here. I won’t ask twice. And you-” This one is aimed at Deputy Gutterson. “You stay right where you are.”

No bad pornos here: (Accepting)

There’s soot underneath his fingernails, despite washing his hands until his skin felt too tight. There’s whiskey in his veins too, but when you’ve been sneaking shine since you were thirteen years old, a glass or two of bottom shelf whiskey wasn’t enough to dull your senses. 

Boyd was here, standing in a puddle of porch light because he chose to be here. There was no spinning this story to be a wild act of impetuousness. It was a series of connected thoughts, each turned over in his mind like smooth stone from a creek, washed over again and again. 

He’d tried Austin, as instructed. But vapid, pretty college boys with their sharp smiles and their jaded outlook on life didn’t scratch Boyd’s particular itch. How could you go back to irony when you’d seen someone speak with passion and earnest joy?

You couldn’t. Boyd couldn’t.

And now he was watching Rafael through the honeycomb of his screen door, soft with the winding down of an evening, hair soft and glasses just a little askew. Beautiful. Painfully so. 

Boyd would never be a real artist, but he wanted it in that moment. To trade charcoals and sharp lines for warm caramels and golds. For browns like freshly tilled dirt. And heather greys, worn soft and gentled.

“I’ve tried to make more art. As an excuse to come see you again. I try and summon up some kind of feeling, something about being down in those tunnels. The way the walls shiver and it rains down dirt on your head. The claustrophobia. Anything at all.” 

Boyd looks down at his hands, at the creases of his knuckle, a shade or two darker than it should be. 

“But I don’t feel anything. I go down in the mine and I don’t feel anything. I look at my ceiling in the morning, and it’s the same. Even God’s clear blue sky doesn’t evoke a single emotion in me.”

It was the same kind of suffocation and claustrophobia he used to feel in the mines, when he was young and the world was still fresh. Boyd remembers Raylan at his shoulder, panting for breath and adrenaline heavy, the way his voice shook as he spoke. That place is going to eat us alive. 

Only it wasn’t the mine itself that was eating Boyd alive. It was the cavernous, empty space inside of his soul that was slowly growing. Nothing had filled it. Not guns, not the adoration of his peers, not the Lord. 

There was a vulnerability here, in handing over these last ragged pieces of himself. But what more could a man lose, when his rock bottom was underneath the earth?

Song of Achilles: (not accepting)

He listens to Gary give his speech on the porch in front of his hotel room, because the man deserves an ear after having the balls to walk up on him while he’s armed. 

And it’s bullshit, of course. Heavily practiced bullshit filled with mirror honed swagger. Gary talks about selling houses and ice cubes to eskimos and Raylan never takes his hand off of the doorknob. 

“She left you for me once, Raylan.” That’s parting shot, and Raylan has to admit it’s a pretty good one. Or at least it would be, if the mouthy blonde Gary expected to be on the other side of the door was the one actually there. 

But when Raylan steps into the poorly light hotel room, it’s not Winona who’s spotted with old sixty watt bulbs turned golden in the night’s growing darkness. 

It’s Tim. Shoes off an ankles crossed, eyes closed like he’s been sleeping. And maybe he was. But he’s been alert since the second Raylan turned the knob, though he lets him play at stretching and blinking awake all the same. 

You see the thing is, you cheat with somebody, and eventually it gets in your head. If they did it with you, they’ll do it to you. And Raylan, well, he’s been a little distracted here lately. And unwilling to open his door to Art or anybody else. 

But it’s not because he’s taking his ex-wife to bed. It’s because he’s taking his partner to bed. 

His hat takes up its spot on the table under the window, boots toed off and left beneath. Raylan sits on the edge of the bed and tries to figure out how the hell he’s supposed to operate under Tim’s gravity. Because some days, it feels strong enough to crush him whole underneath. 

“Winona and I talked about having kids.” He nudges Tim’s soft, dark shirt out of the way to lay callused fingers against a taut belly. “She told me that I wasn’t right for that. Too much anger in me.” Too much of his daddy. She wasn’t wrong, of course. But that doesn’t stop the ache that creeps up on him sometimes. 

“I always hated when she was right.” He breathes the word out, finally looking up into those Kentucky sky blue eyes. 

Winona, you may not have thought he was listening, but Raylan heard. 

I can’t handle the silence.