Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The months go by, one by one, and Rust never fails to be a little taken with all the ways Marty still manages to surprise him. Fucking amazed, maybe, though he’s not one usually one to use that word.

He’ll think it, though, sometimes. Privately. At least in terms of all the things that mean Marty.

Rust can read the other man like a well-thumbed book, had made Marty Hart into a full-blown study something verging on twenty years ago, and has come to know every hitch and sigh in his breath like a worn guidepost, every set of his jaw and every angle of his hips, every shade of blue-tinged light that flashes through his eyes. Knows the fine-scrawled scripture written between his ribs, behind his knees, along the white gouge carved into his collarbone, once split and then seamed back together crooked, a nail pried free from a botched crucifixion.

Rust counts off the knobs of his spine like prayers on a rosary, absolutions for himself, for Marty, for the both of them. He whispers truths into Marty’s skin, and Marty doesn’t hear him most times, but Rust tells him anyways.

You’re an asshole.

You’re an idiot.

You’re beautiful.

You’re mine.

And maybe these days he knows Marty like the back of his own hand, one of the four destinations not found on a map that he’ll never forget, but there are times when Marty still manages to surprise him. Catch him off guard, stutter his breath up in his chest, pin down some of his own truths with throwing darts.

It starts like this.

Another day, one dawned and born for the both of them. Weak-tea sunlight filtering in through the blinds, not yet steeped in full daylight, slanting across the sheet tangled up around their legs in bed. A familiar mouth is trailing kisses up Rust’s bare back, pressing soft, chaste lips to his shoulder blades and along the pale curve of his side.

He knows who it is before he’s even awake, but that’s not the surprise.

Marty’s hands find him and pull them together, and it’s funny how they fit like this, two men, two corners cut from different quilts, two old and broken bodies run through the fucking mill and back. A square peg and a round hole, by all rights, but Rust doesn’t question it too much anymore, only turns and slides a foot between Marty’s calves, slides in close until they’re pressed together and the seam is pulled tight between them.

They’re both only half-awake but Marty’s cock is already starting to stir against his groin, pressing in hot and hard like a fired brand, and Rust ruts against him just a little, pulling a low and throaty moan loose with the warming friction.

Marty’s got other ideas for now, though, and gets one broad hand up around the back of Rust’s neck, holds him there while he kisses him long and deep, dragging his lips down to mouth soft and wet along his neck and the stubble-rough hinge of his jaw.

Another hand finds the curve of Rust’s ass and slides over the skin like satin, cupping him more easy than urgent while he still kisses slow and sweet, and when Marty gets like this Rust usually ends up on his back with his shaking legs wrapped around the other man’s hips, keeping them both tied to the ground while Marty holds him close, merges their lines and colors, tells Rust things without cumbersome words and gently, gently rocks him home.

But not yet, not so soon, because Marty’s mouth is still moving against his skin but now he’s pressing words there—against the corner of his mouth, the soft spot by his ear, into the little dip at the base of his throat, soft but unmistakable, single beads pulled off the rosary and left to scatter out across scarred and ink-stained terrain.

“You don’t know how beautiful,” Marty says, feeling softly startled laughter warm against the side of his face. “Wish you could see for yourself, Rust, just how fucking gorgeous, just how good.”

Marty kisses him again and Rust lets him, gives himself over to open hands—would give everything, maybe, if he was still whole enough to manage.

“What’s all this you’re sayin?” he murmurs, gasping a little when Marty’s fingers reach down further beneath the sheet to brush against the heat of him.

“Saying thank you,” Marty says, and he could be talking to Rust or God, either one, but then again, maybe there’s no real question left about what.

Chapter Text

It’s ten til midnight when Marty finally manages to coax Rust out of the house, drawing him onto the porch and pulling out two lawn chairs for them to slump down into. It’s pitch dark save for bursts of color flaring across the smoky sky as the neighbors pop off fireworks, and when Rust pulls out his own battered zippo it’s to light and suck down about half a cigarette in one long pull.

He adds another stream of smoke to the sky, and Marty sits back and watches red and green and blue flash along the glassy whites of his eyes.

"Neighbors are puttin’ on a good show this year," he says, and Rust settles back deeper in his chair, plastic and metal creaking like old bones underneath him.

"Yeah," he says, and Marty knows that’s about as good as he’s gonna get.

The man gets threadbare starting in the last week of December and starts unraveling around the edges until the first week in January comes and dies, and Marty’s known this for a long fucking time now, knows he can’t do nothing to help it but sit back and bide his time. But he counts the days off in a private little calendar he keeps in his head, and the third’s always the worst—always the one where Rust snaps and bristles and slams doors a little harder than usual, fucks off to the other end of the house and smokes like ten men facing the firing squad—, the one circled with a fat red marker, but they got two days yet and so he pushes his luck a little, sometimes. Just a little.

So tonight they’re watching the goddamn fireworks for ten fucking minutes, with a couple beers in hand while the TV inside blares the cheers of people crazy enough to freeze their asses off and watch the ball drop in New York, and it ain’t so bad. Not so bad, Marty figures, considering.

The sky starts in on a heady boil with two minutes left to go and it might as well be daylight, the flares are going up so fast and frequent now, and Rust is gripping his beer like it’s tethering him to something else but doesn’t flinch or look away inside the echoing bowl of thunder, and when the countdown starts up inside his eyes slip over to find Marty’s.

Marty grins like the devil and reaches out to find his free hand in the dark, counting quiet with the numbers ticking down up in Times Square, and Rust’s face doesn’t crack an inch as Marty leans in closer to bridge the space between them but he presses his thumb into Marty’s hand and holds on tighter.

"Three," Marty says low, laughing a little against Rust’s neck. "Two—oh shit, I’m about to spill this whole fuckin’ beer—"

Rust grabs Marty by the shirtfront and yanks him in close, presses their mouths together at the stroke of midnight and whispers, “One.”

The neighbors have burnt out all their grand finales and the TV’s already blaring Frank Sinatra when they break apart, and Marty’s gone a little breathless from it all, maybe, but Rust’s smiling now—something soft and quiet that reaches the light in his eyes, and that’s enough, Marty reckons. That’s all he needs.

"Happy New Year, babe," he says, popping Rust against the hip and leaning back in his chair to watch the last few straggling fireworks go up, not too worried about half his beer ending up on the patio floor. "Here’s to whatever the fuck it is we’ve been doing, and a whole ‘nother year of it to boot, because I figure I like keeping you around." He leans back in quick, then, and presses another kiss to the corner of Rust’s mouth. "Most of the time, anyways."

"Happy New Year, Marty," Rust says, quiet, when Marty stands and pulls him to his feet, letting the other man lead him by the hand into the newborn year.

Chapter Text

The stitches keep him held together good and tight and Rust is more or less back on the mend, still smoking and swearing and laying across Marty’s couch in sweats and a borrowed t-shirt that hangs too-big on his frame. Rustin Cohle, sure as the fucking world, though maybe without as much tightness around the corners of his eyes as Marty ever remembers.

Maybe it has something to do with the man being doped on painkillers and sewn up like a rag doll, maybe not, but Marty tries not to think too hard about the reasons because right now it’s a Tuesday—two weeks before their wild excursion back out to Lafayette General to get those black sutures clipped out of a pink crescent moon—and Rust is huddled up against his side like a sleepy-warm hound dog, watching the television but not really, head steadily sliding down further and further as Marty gently runs his fingers through the loose waves at the base of his neck.

“Softer than I’d have thought,” he says a little vaguely during a commercial, scritching his fingertips up further around the other man’s skull and evoking a peculiar little shiver that makes Rust vibrate against him. “Conditioner’s done you right. Better than whatever cheap dollar store shit you were probably using before.”

“Guess you’ve got me spoiled,” Rust mumbles, eyes at half-mast. He’s not even phased when Marty laughs low, making his head bob where it’s resting against one shoulder.

“Reckon somebody’s gotta do it,” Marty says, and when he shifts around Rust’s only response is to move with him.

* * * * *

Two days before the stitches come out and twenty-seven minutes into a Discovery special, the space between them on the couch dissolves and gives way until Marty opens his mouth and Rust is waiting there to meet it.

Things unwind like a summer ride down the lazy river until suddenly they don’t.

“Rust,” Marty says, prays, begs, and he’s ten miles past fucking wrecked, rasping like the name has become the real thing corroded in his throat. “I—I want to, I’ve gotta—”

“I know,” Rust says, all but breathing it back into his mouth. He finds Marty’s hand—pressed over the burning ridge cutting through his middle—and wraps his fingers around it, holding them both there while his heart flutters like the velvet beat of moth wings underneath. “Me too.”

The wildfire in Marty’s eyes softens and cools to dryer-spun blue and he heaves out a little sigh, frayed thin around the edges, letting his forehead fall to rest against Rust’s shoulder.

“You’re gonna fucking kill me,” he sighs, and tries not to smile too hard when Rust presses a kiss to the back of his neck, laughing like a softened old crow as he does it.

Chapter Text

Rust opens his eyes to the sound of water running steady, echoing through the bathroom in a lulling kind of trance. Marty’s side of the bed is empty next to him and he blinks in the rising daylight, still weak grey where it’s slanting in from between a crack in the curtains.

He sits up and swings his legs around until his toes touch carpet, letting them briefly curl into the softness there before he rises to his feet, walking naked from the bedroom onto the marble tile. The chill sends goosebumps skittering over his skin as he finds Marty perched on the edge of the deep garden tub, sitting with his legs trailing down into the rising water, bare back angled toward the door. He’s just as naked as Rust is, showing off the pair of dimples thumb-pressed into the small of his back.

Rust takes a quick piss and silently crosses the bathroom back to Marty, standing just behind him to watch the hot water throw rolling clouds of steam up into the air.

“Shame they don’t have any of that shit in the pink bottle you like so much,” he says, and Marty tips his head back over his shoulder, catching Rust’s eye and grinning sleepy.

“Gotta take advantage either way,” he says. “This thing’s the size of a goddamn Jacuzzi.”

“Hmm,” Rust says, watching as Marty stands and eases himself into the water, sinking down against the back of the tub and hissing faintly against the heat. “Hope you left enough hot water to start up the shower.”

“What do you need to go and take a shower for?” Marty says over the drizzle of the faucet, cutting through the surface of the water with his hand and spreading his knees. “Plenty of room for you right here.”

“Thinking you took a few too many hits off that tequila bottle last night,” Rust grunts, throwing his eyes against the wallpaper, done up in shades of pale ivory and muted gold. “I don't take baths.”

“No reason why you can’t start now,” Marty says, leaning forward to slow the tap. “Feels pretty damn nice, truth be told. Loosens your muscles right up.”

Rust drops his gaze back down, eyes trailing light over Marty’s bare skin, already flushed balmy pink from the heat. The chill from the tile is climbing steady up his ankles and calves, throbbing weak in his bones, and he can feel himself beginning to tip forward into the rising warmth, falling into it like the rare good dream.

“Just put your feet in for a second,” Marty says, flicking water droplets against Rust’s stomach. “Sit there real pretty and let me look at you.”

“Christ,” Rust sighs, though he steps up onto the ledge and eases his feet down into the other end of the tub anyways, sitting back on the towel Marty’s laid out there. His eyes slip shut as he listens to the running water churn, the sound alone making a tingling warmth climb up the column of his spine until it bursts soft and syrupy at the base of his skull. The lines of his body go lax and Marty must be watching him because he reaches forward to run his fingers down the back of Rust’s calf.

“C’mon,” he murmurs. “You’re not even all the way in and you already look like one of them babies on the mattress commercial. Making me fucking sleepy just looking at you.”

One of Rust’s eyes cracks open as he braces his hands behind him against the ledge, leaning back. “You better be glad I hate being cold,” he murmurs, pushing himself up to stand above Marty in the tub. “Where the fuck am I supposed to sit?”

Marty draws his knees up through the water and gestures in the wide spread between them, smiling soft but crooked at Rust. “Right here, cowboy. Turn the faucet off and take a seat.”

Rust shoots him a halfhearted look but cuts the tap off, turns his back and sinks down until he’s settled in the water, letting it lap hot up over his stomach and thighs. The soothing heat feels like it’s melting his bones down to butter and when Marty reaches forward to pull him back he goes without a word or fight, sinking back between the other man’s legs until he’s resting against him.

“Mmm, I told you,” Marty says, gently cupping water up over Rust’s stomach, watching as the tension in the muscles there slowly unfurls and gives way. “Feels good, don’t it?”

“Maybe,” Rust says without much effort, eyes already slipping back shut as steam curls in the air around them. Marty’s hand has come to rest against his lower stomach, thumb settled at the base of his navel, last two fingers just barely skimming the thatch of dark hair not far below.

“I might know something that feels even better,” Marty says, voice thrumming low against Rust’s back, and then his hand is dragging wet down over Rust’s stomach, palming around the soft line of his cock.

“You ain’t gonna get very far,” Rust says, though his voice is a little more pinched around the edges than it was before, pushing out past his teeth. “After last night I won’t be getting it up for a week.”

“Ye of little faith,” Marty murmurs, gently teasing his fingers down. He reaches further beneath the water and crooks his middle finger in just the right spot, biting soft into his lip as Rust shudders against him, body rippling like a mirage come to life. “Would you look at that,” he says, feeling Rust’s dick begin to press in a hard line against his wrist. “Like magic.”

“Nothing magic about that,” Rust breathes out, letting one of Marty’s legs shift down to brace along his side, water sloshing idly around them. Marty’s hand finally wraps firm around the solid length of him and Rust sags back further against his chest, hand sliding down the other man’s thigh to dig into the muscle above his knee.

Marty can feel every drawn breath, every tremor, every little hitch and sigh as they bleed straight from Rust into him, and he knows without a thought that he’s already throbbing hard against the small of Rust’s back, burning there like a fired brand. Their breathing has begun to spin out and fray in time, the only sound echoing quiet in the bathroom, and he starts working Rust steady, other hand drawing back up to splay wide over his stomach, spanning across the warped crescent cutting in a wide arc through the soft skin.

“Marty,” Rust rasps, head tipping back to fall against Marty’s shoulder, exposing the long line of his neck to the open air. He’s still got one hand anchored around Marty’s thigh but the other draws up to reach behind him, finding purchase around the back of his neck with fingers pressing firm into the top of his spine.

“Shhh,” Marty says, lips catching against the damp skin below Rust’s ear. He closes his eyes and feels every twist and dragging upstroke shudder between them, Rust’s cock heavy and too fucking familiar in his hand, and it’s like he can do this on instinct now, divined like a second nature so real he may as well be sitting here touching himself.

Tension is coiling up tight in Rust’s stomach beneath Marty’s hand and he presses the flat of his palm against it, trying to will Rust closer as he vibrates, gone off like something to spring up on the fucking Richter. He’s saying Marty’s name half-mindless now, both hands clenched like vices around his thighs, toes beginning to curl and cramp beneath the water.

It occurs to Marty that he needs his mouth on Rust and he goes hell-bent on any which way he can get, mouthing sloppy and crooked along the side of his neck, bowing over to graze his teeth along the ridge of a shoulder. “If you don’t hurry up I’m fixing to blow enough for the both of us,” he hisses, all but trying to wring those little keening noises out of Rust, feeling his own dick jump and ache almost painful. “Got me going like a wet dream—”

Rust comes apart right then with a strangled gasp, head thrown back against Marty’s shoulder so his breath bursts ragged in his ear, body snapping sharp like a bowstring as he shudders with each pulse. Marty works him through it until Rust’s hands loosen around his thighs, one of them drawing up to rest over the palm Marty’s still got spread wide over his stomach. He holds them both there while his breathing begins to deepen and slow, Marty’s hand pressed hot over the muscles, still hopping and twitching faintly beneath it.

Marty sinks down against the back of the tub with a sigh and Rust goes with him, twisting around until they’re pressed flush together, tangled up in a knot of arms and legs, shoulders and knees rising up from the water like a scattering chain of pink-flushed islands.

“I could drown right now and I wouldn’t even be mad,” Marty says, groaning as Rust’s mouth opens hot and wet against his jaw. “Not a care in the fucking world.”

“Be a shame to die with your dick rock hard,” Rust murmurs, reaching down between them to take Marty in his hand, and the contact alone is enough to make Marty want to cry. “Have to tape it down between your legs at the funeral after rigor mortis set in.”

“You and your ideas about dirty talk,” Marty groans, getting a tight handful of Rust’s ass. “It’s any wonder I get it up at all.”

Chapter Text

Thunder splits open the sky like a softened skull and Rust nearly jolts off the mattress, still swimming through the endless weed-choked jungle of a bad dream, soaked like heavy smog down into his bones and behind his eyes.

It’s pitch dark in the bedroom save for lightning streaking behind the blinds, but the air around him coats the back of his throat in a thick swill of all the many places things have ever gone wrong—coagulated in remnants of fresh-cut grass on a cracked asphalt road in Texas and dirty port water lapping against the docks on the gulf. Gunpowder burning hot in the Louisiana sunshine, split knuckles and a thousand-mile walk from station to truck, copper-bitter blood steeped in cold coming up from the dirt floor.

He coughs once, quiet and muffled behind his hand, trying to dispel it, trying to spit it back out into the air. Marty lies curled on his side a hand’s breadth away, softly snoring and draped over with darkness, and he’s always, always (always, Rust hears, in something like a heartbeat) there, but on nights like these he only believes it when he reaches out and feels familiar skin warm and soft and undeniably real.

The days where he might’ve been ashamed to do this are long since gone, packed up with old newspapers and left in water-stained boxes tucked into the corner of the garage, and he doesn’t think twice before he’s sliding in close up against Marty’s back, tucking an arm around his side to splay a warm hand against his naked stomach, feeling the rise and fall of soft breath against his chest and beneath his fingers in easy-rolling time.

Rust presses his nose and mouth into the fine hair at the base of Marty’s neck and breathes that down instead, all that instead of the grass and the water and the blood, and lays there listening to the rain slant against the roof and the thunder groan and howl out over the earth.

Chapter Text

Marty can’t remember the last time he saw Rust start to doze off somewhere in the middle of the day without help from a ten-inch gut wound and painkiller cocktail, back in the days when he’d take five steps and have to lean against the wall to catch his breath, fingers of one hand digging white-knuckled into his thigh while the other pressed against his stomach like he was trying to keep himself held together.

The picture in front of Marty now is a whole lot different. Two years later and Rust is as good as he’s gonna get and maybe even a little better than either of them would’ve thought, considering it all, but Marty isn’t one to question his good graces. He just blinks a little through the fog starting to slip into his own eyes, watching Rust’s lashes sink lower and lower until he’s tipping off to one side, leaning hard into Marty’s shoulder where they’re slumped back on the couch.

Their evening stakeout the night before had stretched into a midnight stakeout, and then a 2 AM stakeout, and it wasn’t until the shitheel they’d been tailing for a week had finally dragged ass out of his honey’s house at 3:44 in the fucking morning that Rust had shaken Marty awake and nodded to taillights disappearing around the corner at the end of the street.

“You awake all that time?” Marty’d mumbled while Rust cranked the car back up, and Rust had said something soft and low in return but damn if he can remember what it was, because they hadn’t gotten back home until ten past five and then had to be back in the office at o-ten hundred.

Now, his answer’s been spun out pretty clean in the wash.

“Hey,” Marty says, trying to snag himself out of a doze before it’s too late. He nudges Rust where he’s pressed up against his shoulder a little, words dropping soft onto the top of his head. “Rust. You’re gonna get a crick in your fucking neck, hunched over like that.”

“Ain’t asleep,” Rust says, snuffling out of wherever he’d been, but he sits up and gives Marty a look that seems more at-home in old memories of Audrey and Macie waking from afternoon naps with their hair tangled up in silk bird nests, squinty-eyed and puffy-faced where they’d been curled on the carpet with a stuffed pony or two.

“Well, you were headed there,” Marty says, reaching down to squeeze Rust’s knee. “C’mon.”

Funny thing is these days, when Rust finally gets tired enough to conk out he’ll bow under familiar hands and go willingly, turned pliant enough for Marty to pull up off the couch and guide down the hall, leaning back into the big warm palm keeping him steady until they can tip over onto the bed.

“Fuckin pants,” Rust mumbles to nobody in particular, jimmying his belt buckle halfheartedly, and when he gets them pulled over his hips Marty grabs the ankles and works them off until Rust’s stripped down to his briefs and wifebeater, already shifting back toward the headboard to collapse like a felled tree into his pillow.

Marty shrugs off his button-up and leaves his pants in a pile on the floor, slides in across the gold afternoon light pooling in the sheets and doesn’t waste any time in reaching for Rust, who turns into him like he’d been waiting for it, snuggling up to Marty until their legs are tangled together and he’s breathing warm and soft against the other man’s neck.

“Gonna regret this when we’re both up watching infomercials until six in the morning,” Rust slurs, words soft in the dip of Marty’s throat, and he shivers a little when they tickle there.

“Ain’t regretting it now,” Marty says, hooking an arm around Rust’s side to trace along his spine real soft for a second, and then he’s too tired to even do that, hand gone slack with sleep coming on fast.

Rust burns like a furnace in the summer and they won’t need a blanket, wrapped up in enough warmth together in the fading light of day. Marty hears Rust’s breath slow and even out and maybe indulges himself for a second, just a tiny little moment, where he presses his nose into the soft waves at the top of Rust’s head and breathes in deep, sucking down a lungful of whatever it is Rust smells like—clean and a touch sweeter than he’d ever admit, always with that familiar base note of smoke, even though lit cigarettes are fewer and further apart nowadays than they might’ve been before.

And so Marty lets himself slip off into wherever Rust had already gone, and they lay pressed together like two puppies in a basket—or two old hound dogs stretched out together in the sun, maybe, but then again it’s all the same. Shadows slant further down the wall and damn if Marty knows in his bones that he’ll be wide awake and watching commercials for an onion chopper on the cusp of sunrise, but it’s okay these days, he reckons, when he’s got Rust there to brew good coffee and sit up to watch the day break with him.

Chapter Text

Three days into their impromptu hospital jailbreak inside this time that Marty has secretly come to call After, Rust nearly pops a stitch loose bright and early on a Sunday morning.

He sits half-naked and swearing a vivid blue streak on the closed toilet lid with his breath coming just a tiny bit faster than usual, barely anything that anybody but Marty might be so keen to notice these days. There’s toast burning in the kitchen but he can’t be bothered to tell Marty about that right now, hand cupped against his middle and trying to keep a tiny streak of blood from pooling between his legs while the other man fumbles a piece of sterile gauze out of its packaging.

“What the fuck were you doing in here, trying to touch your goddamn toes?” Marty asks, following the drop of bright red from Rust’s navel up to where it’s welling at the soft spot between his ribcage. “Maybe you need to keep the door open for a while, man, just in case somethi—”

“It’s my fucking hair,” Rust says, still jittery but suddenly a little less petulant under familiar hands, and when Marty looks up with the panic finally cleared out of his eyes he finds it half-combed on one side and hanging in clumps on the other, still dripping wet down Rust’s bare shoulders and back.

“What about it?” Marty asks, sighing when he pulls the gauze away to inspect the little skin split between stitches and finds that the bleeding has slowed and everything’s still intact. “Think you’re gonna live, this ain’t as bad as it looked—and thank God you finally washed it, I was going to hold you down and dunk your head in the sink later if you hadn’t.”

“I can’t hardly do nothing with it like this,” Rust says, looking down at his own stomach in quiet betrayal, hemmed back together in a jagged line of angry pink skin. “You got a half-decent pair of scissors around here? I’d assume just cut it off short, make it easier to manage in the meantime.”

“Why would you go and do a thing like that?” Marty asks, immediately cowed under how loud the question sounds here in the tiny bathroom around them. But Rust is looking at him, soft blue and unwavering, and doesn’t fight off the band-aid Marty unwraps and presses to his stomach with fingertips smoothing it down gentle on either side.

“Because I don’t want to be bothered with it,” he says. “Look what happened when I so much as tried to fucking comb it, Marty.”

“That don’t mean nothing,” Marty says, swallowing down the blush crawling slow up his neck . “I ain’t got much to mess with these days but it’s not like I don’t know my way around a goddamn hair brush. I can help you out just as well.”

It’s quiet between them for a moment and then Marty’s picking up the plastic comb where it’d clattered in the sink, reaching out without a word and running it through the ends of Rust’s hair to start working easy through any tangles.

“What, you gonna twist it up and braid it for me too?” Rust asks, though he doesn’t jerk away, eyes cast down somewhere toward his dirty clothes still piled in a corner on the floor.

“If you don’t shut up I just might,” Marty tells him, still careful not to pull too hard. “I’ll tell you one thing, though, I’m going out this afternoon and buying you some fucking conditioner.”


* * *

If Rust notices that he walks around the house smelling like sweet cream and strawberries after his showers these days, he doesn’t find much of a reason to complain.

Marty tells himself he’d done it because there was a sale running that day at the drugstore, and honest to fucking God, there had been. Buy one get one free advertised for a display full of brightly-bottled shampoos in a string of different scents, and he’d sat there with a crease drawn tight between his eyebrows, bypassing Springtime Irish Stream and Beachside Cotton until he’d finally plucked the matching pink bottles off the shelf and tossed them in his basket.

Wild strawberries and sweet cream, quietly placed in the shower that evening without any comment or fanfare, and the next morning Rust had simply emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam with a comb in his hand and sat on the edge of the bed while Marty ran it from root to tip just as easy as a dream.

“That conditioner’s already done you a fucking wonder,” he murmurs, gently squeezing the ends dry with a hand towel. “Doesn’t hurt that it don’t smell too bad, either.”

“One more thing I don’t feel like fucking around with,” Rust says, sleepy-lidded and loose-limbed despite the thread of annoyance in his voice. “Takes twice as long to get in and out of the shower now.“

Neither of them say anything about how Rust has been taking baths instead of showers ever since his accident, rinsing his hair with what Marty reckons is the big plastic souvenir cup he’d fished out of one of the kitchen cabinets and toted in there with him.

“Just you wait and see,” Marty says, giving Rust’s hair one last gentle ruffle with the towel before letting him go. “Gonna wish you’d have started doing it years ago.”

* * *

They sleep in the same bed these days.

It ain’t no big thing, Marty figures, because he’s only got one half-decent mattress here in the house and there’d been a time and place when it was a necessity, during those dark night hours in the first two—or three, or four—weeks after he’d brought Rust home.

These days the stark fear has started to fade into a quieter dull, the closer they get to the stitches coming out, but they still turn off the light and slip under the sheet one at a time most nights. It goes without saying that they each stick to their respective sides, though they both know there have been a few times sprung up in the middle of the night where one had reached out through the dark and the other had been there to answer.

It’s the nightmares, really. Just the nightmares. But then again who’s to say it’s the nightmares when they wake up in the mornings still pressed together and tangled up in a long seam, breathing soft against one another with the sun slanting in lazy over their sides.

And maybe one of those mornings Marty blinks awake early, flat on his back with Rust’s head tucked up under his chin, the other man’s black-feathered arm flung across his middle where it gently rises and falls with Marty’s every breath.

Rust is still sound asleep and maybe Marty’s hand comes up on a whim, smooths over the crown of his head and brushes easy over the loose waves fanned out there around their shoulders. The honey brown he remembers has lightened and gone greyer but it’s satin-soft to the touch, and maybe Marty turns his face to the side, just a little, to press his nose against the top of Rust’s head.

The last cigarette of the night had been lit before bath time and Rust had climbed right into bed after Marty’d finished combing and towel-drying his hair, knocked back his pain meds dry, curled up on his side and went out like a light. Now the smell of sweet strawberries still lingers heady and strong, not yet diluted by a mask of smoke, and Marty breathes it down deep with his fingers caught up in the ends of Rust’s hair.

“What’re you doin?” Rust slurs before he even opens his eyes, words pressed up against the side of Marty’s throat, and his legs shift under the sheets but he doesn’t make any other effort to move.

“Uh, nothing,” Marty says without thinking, frozen, and the words make a muffled landfall on the top of Rust’s head. “Just woke up.”

“Mmmhm,” Rust hums, and he’s still tucked up against Marty’s chest, one palm come up to brace warm over his collarbone. “Whatever you say.”

They lay there like that for a spell and Rust doesn’t seem like he’s got any quickfire notion to sit up and bolt, feels too soft and warm and easy here like this, and Marty tries not to think about it much when his hand comes back up to brace around his scalp, scritching easy through the loose waves with his fingertips.

Rust sighs and goes laxer against him, making a small noise like a happy old dog, and Marty smiles when the other man shifts around to let his hand travel further and even leans into it, little tendrils of long hair tickling against his skin.

“You gonna start purring here in a second?” Marty murmurs, working slow through the soft hair at the nape of Rust’s neck.

“You keep on,” Rust tells him, “and I just might.”

Chapter Text

Day one dark pinpricked with white-hot
specks of burning light and if they were
freckles on your face I would want to kiss
them for a taste, but we’re only soldiers
pulling one another from the
warring trench, only two wayward sons
walking barefoot atop a night-cooled
blacktop but that doesn’t mean
some things aren’t fated

You scream words I’ve never heard
before and they rise fast and well
on your tongue like blood, sound like
lost scripture in the dead of night
where we cling to one another without
ever saying we remember in the morning and
cigarette smoke is the kind of incense
you burn in this house, a sage against all seen
evils and if the curtains start to smell
like Camel Blue lights I say thank you god
for exorcising me from the clenched hand
of everything I didn’t have before, thank god
and thank god and
thank you
god

Sometimes I have dreams where you have
my grandmother’s old seam ripper in your hand
and I can’t do anything but watch and claw at my
closed throat while you snag and pull your stitches
loose one by one, open yourself back up to let the stars
and bitter velvet black run out and I try to catch
it in my hands but it pools too fast and that’s one
more fucking thing that I’ve gone and let slip
through my fingers, one more wasted life
to add to the first


There are moments that ask and moments that
answer and I still know how you take your
coffee after all these years, black on black without
a drop of white, still snap like a steel trap when
your stomach gnaws raw against your backbone and
those are the touchstones left like broken pavers
in memories let loose from behind ten
years’ worth of doors but your bare feet
on the kitchen floor are a blessing and your
hair gone loose around your shoulders
makes me wonder if I’m cursed and when
I find you standing out in the back yard at
three in the morning with your scars out
shining loud and proud you’ll say
look here, look at all these fucking stars
and I’ll be damned if I can see anything at all
but you

Chapter Text

The thing about Rust was that he didn’t really watch movies unless you corralled him into one, stoked it up big and made the whole thing a personal commitment. Never watched a TV until he was fuckin seventeen years old, as the story went, and that had bled out further in a life not wanting to be spent stationed in front of a screen when he had plenty of flicker-show visions plaguing him elsewhere.

Looking back, he can trace obscure shit like that in tree rings, with the good and bad years manifesting in thicker scar tissue than all the rest, just as readable as bisections of an oak spelling out seasons rife with drought and flood.

It goes for a lot of things. Movies just happen to be one of them.

Back when he and Claire had first met, back before work and Sophia and life had taken its toll, they’d park at the old drive-in down in Houston and swap spit taking sips off a cherry coke, so thick with sweet syrup that he’d taste it on her mouth when they piled up on an old blanket it the bed of the truck and exchanged the movie for a different kind of entertainment.

And that’s what Rust remembers about those movie nights, nearly thirty years out. Not titles and space expeditions and car chases ending in gunfire, but the way his fingers would align in the grooves between Claire’s ribs, how her dark hair fanned out like a wild halo behind her head and how she’d moan his name when he kissed the soft spot under her ear.

The movies he watched with Sophia in his lap were easier to remember, because most of the time she’d fall asleep fifteen minutes in and he wouldn’t have the heart to move, wouldn’t have anything to do for an hour but watch whatever she’d begged for him to put in the VCR before dropping right off into an afternoon nap.

He’d gone through a good portion of the Disney catalog that way, with his baby curled up and breathing soft against his chest. Classics, Claire had called them, but Rust doesn’t remember much about kissing dogs or lost boys or talking bears anymore. He remembers pushing honey-colored curls off Sophia’s forehead, the cold little drool spots she’d leave on his work shirts, the way she’d dance and jump around on the living room floor if she woke up in time for that one scene in The Jungle Book.

Crash had watched a film or two in his day, probably stretched out on some shitty motel bed while Ginger fucked a girl on the other side of the room. The bathroom light made everything look green and his eyes would vibrate in their sockets like static while he did up peachy with a syringe and a spoon stolen from the Piccadilly cafeteria, John Wayne’s voice following him like an oil slick all the way down the spiraling drain.

Needless to say, Rust doesn’t really remember those either.

But up in Louisiana, up in the swampy warmth and those first few tentative footsteps leading him back into being part of the Body, there’d been a night or two or three spent on the Harts’ under-stuffed loveseat, nursing the rim of a tall tea glass while Marty took long pulls off a beer and let the television settle on Rocky, Field of Dreams, Indiana Jones and maybe even Pretty Woman.

Maggie would always have dinner on the table before they ever got to the end of one, but Rust has an easier time remembering those, maybe, fifteen years and what feels like an entire lifetime later on down the line. Marty always rooting for the underdog, Marty throwing out some underhand comment about Rust needing a gal with tits like Julia Roberts, Marty groaning the one time he’d flipped to Schindler’s List and watched for a few minutes before quickly turning on the local rodeo channel, saying, “Oh hell man, sorry, we can’t watch that shit.”

“I’ve never seen it before,” Rust told him, catching a streak of blonde and blue through the window as Audrey skipped across the back yard with a spinning pinwheel clutched in one hand.

Marty sucked in a sharp little wisp of a breath and shook his head, eyes on the screen but full of something else. “Yeah, I don’t think you wanna.”

* * *

Dusk is just starting to settle in around the edges of day, slowly burning down to orange and pink-licked embers, spilling in through the sliding glass door like gold thrown across the carpet. The cat is stretched out on her side in front of the window and making the most of the dying light while she still can, whiskers faintly twitching every now and again. She’d flick the tip of her tail and pad over with a little trill if Marty said her name, but he can’t quite trust himself to speak right now.

I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel. A free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.

Rust’s been in the shower for the past quarter-hour and should be out any second, but the movie’s got more than five minutes left to run and Marty knows he isn’t going to make it. Knows because he never does, even though it’s been a few long years since he last sat through Brooks was here and so was Red, but here at the start of a good one maybe it’s hitting harder than he wants to remember.

I hope I can make it across the border.

Four years gone and he was sitting on this same couch, watching this same fucking movie with nothing but the crickets outside for company. No little cat curled up on the carpet, no sleepy-eyed man down the hall, and damn if he hadn’t sat here and cried.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.

If anybody ever had the nerve to ask, Marty wouldn’t admit to it.  He has a handful of honest memories hand-picked for an occasion that will never rise, to be doled out in chronological order, but none of them include the first week they’d brought Audrey home when he’d sat with her downstairs with the TV turned low, curled up so high on his chest that he could feel each tiny breath flutter against the pulse in his neck. None of them include halfway-collapsing in his childhood bedroom while his father lay dying down the hall, so eaten up with cancer that he may as well have already been rotting. None of them include that moment six months after the divorce was finalized where he woke up early on a Saturday morning to an empty apartment and sobbed outright until his chest felt like it was on fire.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams.

The shower cuts out and Rust never dallies getting dressed, dries off quick and steps right into his briefs without getting fussy about it, and as sure as the world it only takes a moment before the bathroom door’s creaking open and he’s padding down the hall into the kitchen, stepping past the margins of an older memory.

One long stretch of muscle, familiar scarred skin and fine bones, and Marty can’t look at him when he walks in but Rust catches him all the same, line between his eyes drawing fast and faint while he pulls a glass out of the dishwasher.

“What you been watching?” he asks gently, filling the glass up halfway with water from the tap before sucking it down in three long pulls.

“Nothin,” Marty sniffs, voice wavering at the tail-end, reaching up to scrub around his eyes.

“Looks like Shawshank to me,” Rust says, setting his empty glass down on the counter before stepping over to the couch, and the movie’s wound down to the last moment but when their thighs brush Marty feels the last little thread snap.

“Oh, shit,” he laughs out on the edges of a sob, covering his face with his hands as the heat wells up like an angry welt in the back of his throat.

Rust’s face crumples a little, edges of his eyes softened and downturned as he reaches for the remote and blackens the television screen before twisting around on the couch, drawing one knee up underneath him.

“Hey,” he says, one word soft enough to lie down on, getting a palm around the other man’s neck before leaning in close to press a kiss by his ear and across the knuckles of his right hand. “Don’t cry, Marty.”

Rust reaches up and takes Marty’s wrists, not with any threat to snap them this time, just pressing easy into the tendons with his thumbs until they finally lower and drop away. Marty’s eyes look scrubbed raw and he closes them quick, line of his throat still working fast while the light catches in tear tracks he hasn’t managed to wipe away yet.

Two fingertips touch the corner of his eye and Marty’s flushing something awful, so goddamn embarrassed he couldn’t see straight if he opened his eyes to look, but Rust doesn’t care, only takes the other man’s jaw between gentle fingers and pulls their faces close together.

“Don’t be crying for Red and Andy,” he says, nose skimming down Marty’s cheek until he leaves another kiss against the corner of his mouth. “They found one another in the end.”

And Marty still can’t talk but that’s okay, it’s alright because Rust is licking easy into his mouth and it’s probably like dipping his tongue into a pool of salted liquid sorrow but he does it anyway, easing Marty down until he’s pushed back flat on the couch, Rust’s body pressed in a long line against him.

“Rust,” Marty finally rasps, shivering when familiar fingers snake under the hem of his shirt, drawing it up over his stomach and chest. “You—you don’t gotta—”

“Want to,” Rust hums against Marty’s throat, pressing a kiss there while one hand gets caught between their chests, thrumming heavy with the steady beat of his pulse. He moves further north and curls the tip of his tongue around the lobe of Marty’s ear, laughing a little when the other man hisses and bucks up once against his thigh.

“You make one hell of a distraction,” Marty sighs, reaching around to get a handful of Rust’s ass through his briefs, breathing out sharp in the small space left between them when the other man bows over to suck and nip a welt high on his chest. “Well come on, then.”

Their eyes meet for a small moment and Rust finds himself looking into icy-bright blue rimmed with angry pink, a touch swollen around the edges, and Marty’s not crying now but his heart still feels something like a clenched fist at the sight.

“Wanna make you feel good,” he says, reaching down between them to slip his fingers under the elastic Marty’s boxers, mouthing the words crooked against his jaw. “Can’t hardly stand watching you cry.”

Rust eases back and scoots down the couch until he’s kneeling between Marty’s legs with a handful of boxers, and when he bends low he pulls the fabric down over his thighs in one jimmied movement, licking a hot stripe across the soft skin low along Marty’s stomach on his way back up.

His tongue skims across the dip of Marty’s navel and along the center line of his chest and God knows Marty would start begging now if he had to, knows Rust has got him right where they both want him to be. His legs feel like rubber and little flashes of blue and green are swimming across his vision but he goes willingly, letting Rust straddle his waist while he works his shirt over his head and drops it to the floor.

“Hope you left some of that shit in the side drawer,” Rust says a little breathless, leaning over Marty and the arm of the couch to dig around in the end table. An empty coaster hits the floor and then he’s coming back with a little plastic packet in his hand, ripping the corner off with his teeth.

“God bless free samples,” Marty says, and then groans long and loud when Rust pushes a slicked-up finger into him and starts working.

Rust taps hard into a fire-focused kind of intensity when he’s on top, doesn’t say much unless he’s saying it with his body or his hands, and Marty figures that’s okay, because when Rust is fucking him he’s usually got plenty enough to say for the both of them. But tonight he just lets it ride out slow and easy, takes everything as it comes, knows full well Rust can follow the dips in his breath and the tremors in his body just as well as words.

Three fingers later and Marty’s sweating with his boxers still tangled up around his knees, Rust’s breath coming faster while his cock presses hard against Marty’s thigh and he’s aching so deep for it now it’s almost painful.

“Get up here,” he rasps out, trying to pull Rust further up the couch. “No more of that—no more, c’mon.”

Rust pushes his briefs down his hips and then bows back over Marty, a damp curl of hair tickling against his skin while he mouths a wet line up the other man’s chest. He gets between Marty’s legs and his pupils are blown wider than before, half-hidden beneath heavy lashes when he rolls his hips and grinds against Marty’s thigh, mouths nearly brushing but not quite.

“Come on and take me,” Marty says, throaty and shameless, nothing mindless about it. “Can have it all, baby, you know that.”

And they both know, both know those words are only ever going to be for Rust, who swallows them down like a prayer when he finds Marty’s mouth with his, lines up with a twist of his slicked palm and pushes forward into him.

Marty whimpers outright into his mouth and lets Rust hitch one thigh up and hold it in place while he starts fucking into him, not going fast but not holding anything back, either. They fit and work together like clockwork these days and where one gives the other takes, trading back and forth in small touches and favors, and when Marty’s breath catches fast at the height of a thrust Rust braces himself on one forearm and drives deeper.

The throw pillow ends up on the floor and Marty’s nearly curled in on himself, shoving back against the armrest with every new jolt but Rust is beautiful above him, damp hair wreathed in orange fire bleeding in through the glass door. Marty reaches up and wraps both arms around him to hold on, digs one heel into the curve of his ass and gasps when Rust reaches between them and takes his cock in hand.

Their rhythm spins out into something messy but Rust keeps on, the cording in his arms and neck taut and straining as he jerks Marty as good as he can. He thumbs easy around the leaking slit and when he settles on his knees and pivots back in once, hard and straight and fast, Marty’s coming hard enough to arch over the back of the armrest, half-shouting something strangled and wordless with Rust’s mouth hot against his throat.

Rust works him through it and doesn’t take too long to follow, four or five more thrusts with the other man still tight around him and he’s gone, bent and shaking with one solid rush of breath bursting forth from his lungs, eyes clenched shut with his mouth dropped open wide.

“God damn,” Marty murmurs into the space between them with his lids drawn languid and heavy, chest gently heaving while his pulse beats in all the places where he and Rust touch, in his joints and hips and somewhere high in his throat. “Done forgot why the fuck we’re even on the couch.”

“Good,” Rust pants, still on his knees and slumped between Marty’s legs, one sticky hand resting low on the other man’s stomach. He draws up and presses a kiss to his lips, soft and warm. “That’d been the plan.”

Marty hums a little against his mouth, none too bashful anymore, reaching up to brush some of the hair off Rust’s forehead. “Since when you ever sat your ass down to watch Shawshank, huh? Wasn’t until last year I got you to sit the whole way through Titanic.”

“While back,” Rust says quietly, sliding a hand down Marty’s side. He pulls out easy as he can and fishes a piece of their clothing from the floor, wipes off cursory and then settles back against Marty, cheek flat against his chest with his eyes already dripping shut. “We need to get off the couch, man.”

“In a minute,” Marty says, gently massaging his fingers into the back of Rust’s neck as he watches the sun fall under the horizon through the sliding door.

It’s quiet for a few moments save for the sound of the air conditioner clicking on down the hall, and then Rust drums his fingers across Marty’s side. “You’re gonna get one hell of a hard-on now at the end of that movie,” he says, and Marty can’t see his face but he hears the thread of smile there all the same.

“Shit,” he laughs, sliding his hand down Rust’s back. “I hope.”

Chapter Text

“Now the Easter Bunny ain’t any kinda chump,” Marty says from where he’s down on one knee, finishing the buckle on Lilah’s left shoe. “So he let me in on a little secret, and says there’s a big ol’ golden egg out there with something real nice inside. Hid it special just for you.”

Lilah is all but bouncing on the spot, eyes already darting around the yard trying to pick out little flashes of neon color. She’s got one tiny hand wrapped around the handle of a white wicker basket and the other on Marty’s shoulder to help keep her balance, little sundress ruffling around two scraped-and-bandaged knees in the breeze.

“Poppy says bunnies only come out real early in the morning,” she says seriously, looking above Marty’s head to where Rust is drawing a sip of something out of a coffee mug, his eyebrows shooting up when he catches her looking. “So why’d we have to wait til after lunch?”

“Easter Bunny was running a little behind schedule today,” Rust tells her, gesturing vaguely with his mug as he squints off somewhere into the yard. “But he’s making up for it with that golden egg, I reckon.”

“You bet he is,” Marty laughs with a grunt, finally rising back up to his full height. He reaches out to gently tug on one of the French plaits thrown over Lilah’s shoulder and grins until the gap between his teeth is shining. “Ready? On three, now. One, two—go get ‘em!”

She skips out across the yard like a shot and Marty knows he’s grinning like a fool but can’t be bothered to wipe the smile off his face as he watches her go, squealing and hopping a little every time she finds a new egg to put in her basket.

There’s a pair of lawn chairs drawn up under the shade of the crepe myrtle and he nudges them closer with his foot before dropping down into one, leaning back and waiting for Rust to walk over and sit sprawl-legged in the other with his mug balanced on one knee.

“Imagine being that happy about some plastic eggs filled with jelly beans,” Marty says, blue eyes bright. “She’s having the time of her little life. That right there is nothing but pure wonder and innocence, plain and simple.”

“I’d say you’re just about as easy to please,” Rust says, mouth twitching up on one side when Marty kicks the leg of his lawn chair. “Minus the pure part, maybe.”

“Grampa!” Lilah calls out from near the clementine tree, turning to squint at them with her basket swinging heavy in the crook of an elbow. “Where’s the golden egg s’posed to be?”

“Gotta keep looking, baby,” Marty calls back. “He’s hidden it pretty good somewhere, but I know you’ll find it. I’ll tell you when you start getting warmer.”

Rust smiles against the rim of his mug, eyes following Lilah as she squats down low to peer in the azalea bushes and behind the rain gutter coming off the house. “Where’d you hide it?” he asks quietly.

“Under some grass clippings over by the clementine,” Marty says, catching the corner of Rust’s eye. “She’s done walked past it two times but I want her sleeping hard tonight, less Audrey whips our asses again for letting her stay up too late.”

“Whips your ass, you mean?” Rust says. “Wasn’t me who decided to let her have ice cream after nine o’clock at night.”

“You just keep on sitting high and mighty over there,” Marty snorts, pausing to holler warmer! when Lilah gets within a couple yards of the golden egg again. “I seem to recall somebody doling out no less than three different bedtime stories a couple weekends back.”

“That’s different,” Rust says, sniffing and kicking one boot out in the grass, lawn chair creaking faintly under his weight. “She was already in bed and couldn’t get settled down.”

“Uh-huh,” Marty tells him with a sliver of smile, tipping his head back into the sun filtering down through the crepe myrtle leaves. “Reckon you never did have any softness to you at all.”

“Not me,” Rust says, voice held even despite a smile tracking telltale in the crow’s feet around his eyes when Lilah squeals and runs toward them with the golden egg. “Leave all that mess up to you.”

* * *

Rust nudges the car door shut and holds out one hand, wrapping his fingers around five tiny ones when they press warm and sticky against his palm. Lilah’s got a little flower pocket sewn on the front of her dress that she’d decided to hide a handful of jellybeans in, popping them into her mouth one at a time all the way to the park.

“Gonna have to start frisking you before we leave the house,” Marty murmurs, taking Lilah’s other hand in his before they start walking through the gravel lot. “Better be careful, one of the goats might decide they wanna nibble off some sugar.”

Lilah peers down at the pocketful of jellybeans and then looks back up at Marty with wide blue eyes. “But I thought the sheep and bunnies ate flowers and grass,” she says, just above a whisper. “Peoples don’t taste good.”

“Sweet little thing like you just might,” Marty says, and then he and Rust pick Lilah up on cue and swing her between them in tandem, making small peals of giggling laughter cut soft through the afternoon air.

The grounds are done up festive with a few balloons and humidity-wilted streamers for the holiday weekend, awash with the smell of candied pecans and wisteria lingering heavy like old-timey perfume. A group of young boys stumble past one another toward the finish line in a makeshift gunnysack race and outside the occasional family or odd couple milling about the little fountain or garden trail, their walk across the park to the petting zoo goes over without a hiccup or hitch.

A low picket fence has been set up in the grassy lot next to the playground, penning a small herd of sleepy animals under the shade of three big oak trees. There’s a handful of goats and twin fleecy lambs following their ewe, one soft-eyed heifer calf and an open hutch where a fat pair of rabbits lay stretched out with their whiskers twitching. Hens and a brood of black and yellow chicks cluck around and scratch through the dirt, following in the wake of a pot-bellied pig who snuffles his way around looking for the wayward morsel to eat.

Marty goes to buy a small bag of livestock feed, leaving Lilah to slip through the gate alongside Rust, her tiny hand still tucked away in his. The goats immediately rush over with their ears pricked up in interest and the tallest of the bunch nearly reaches Lilah’s chin, already inching forward to sniff and nibble around the flower pocket on her dress.

“What you think, Miss Lilah?” Rust asks, cutting his eyes low to the top of her head, but she only steps back and presses herself close up against his thigh, one arm snaked up to hold onto the tail of his flannel shirt.

“I don’t,” she starts in, hiding her face behind his back so her voice is muffled there. “I don’t think—I like these goaties very much.”

“They’re just happy to meet you, is all,” Rust says, fingers lightly touching the back of her head. “They won’t hurt you. You know Grampa and I wouldn’t let them.”

“Uh oh,” Marty says as he walks up, already holding out a handful of feed for the goats to munch on. He squats down by Lilah’s side, grimacing a little from the dull ache in his bad knee. “I thought you were excited to come see the animals, babydoll. Look here—they eat right out of your hand.”

Lilah slowly disentangles herself from Rust and lets Marty drop a handful of feed into her cupped hands from a paper bag, stepping forward so he can hook a palm around her waist.

“Just hold them flat, there you go,” Marty says, uncurling Lilah’s fingers a little more and then letting his hand drop away. A speckled nanny goat leans in to nibble at the offering and Lilah wrinkles her nose and laughs, reaching up to gently finger one of the goat’s long ears when she’s done eating, floppy and soft as velvet.

The calf walks over and presses her nose right into Rust’s hand while Marty pats and feeds the stout little pig with Lilah, and he rubs at the patch of white on her forehead with the pad of his thumb, watching the sunlight catch in her long lashes until Lilah turns around and steps over, feet rustling soft through the grass.

“She’s so pretty,” she says in a small voice filled with awe, reaching out to touch a splash of white on the calf’s shoulder before peering back up at Rust. “Where’s her mommy?”

“Somewhere not too far, I’m sure,” Rust says, squatting down low on his heels. He beckons Lilah over and the calf noses down the soft inner side of her forearm before latching onto her fingers to try and nurse, and Lilah gives a little squeal but Rust only laughs, grunting out an oof when she jumps back and bumps into his chest.

“She doesn’t have any teeth,” he says, watching the bewildered look slowly slide off Lilah’s face. “You know how new babies suck on a pacifier? That’s all she’s doing.”

Rust turns when he hears a little click go off from behind them and Marty’s got the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth, winking as he slips his phone back into a shirt pocket. “Gotcha,” he says in a sage tone of voice, and then steps over to brush some oak pollen out of Rust’s hair.

“Be careful, they’ll suck the polish clean off your fingers,” he tells Lilah, holding out another handful of feed for the ewe when she walks over with the twin lambs. When Lilah’s freed her hand she takes the bag of feed from Marty and steps away from him and Rust, going to toss some down for the chickens to peck at.

“What you planning on doing with that picture?” Rust asks, watching Lilah move over to peer down into the rabbit hutch.

“Blackmailing you,” Marty says, cutting his eyes over. “Slap it up on billboards statewide.”

“Let me see it,” Rust says, and Marty pulls his phone out but won’t pass it over to Rust, holding it between them in his hand so the other man can squint at the photo.

“Send that one to me,” Rust says after a long moment, and Marty tries not to smile too hard when he does.

* * *

After a supper in town Lilah slips off and sleeps the whole ride home, still clutching the little paper crane Rust had folded for her out of a spare menu. She doesn’t stir when they pull into the driveway, only sighing sleepy when Marty reaches into the back seat to unbuckle her seatbelt and hoist her up against his shoulder.

“Get the door,” he whispers to Rust, passing off the keys, and then steps into the foyer and starts his way down the hall, the cat quietly padding along behind him.

Marty unbuckles one of Lilah’s sandals and only moves to the side when Rust steps in to start undoing the other, taking both little shoes and setting them by the foot of the bed. He pulls the blanket down and Marty pulls her dress over her head and then tucks her in without a word, gently pulling the paper crane from her hand and setting it on the dresser.

Dark has only just begun to settle in for the night and they follow one another back down the dim hall before Rust twists on the lamp in the living room, casting soft shadows across the walls while he drops into a chair to start unlacing his boots. Marty goes through the same small ritual in silence and then they both settle together on the couch, socked feet kicked up on the ottoman.

“Reckon we had a pretty good day,” Marty says after a spell, flipping through channels on the television. “Kid’s plumb tuckered, I’ll bet she sleeps past eight tomorrow morning.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, throwing his arm across the back of the couch behind Marty’s shoulders. “She was real sweet today.”

Marty snorts and settles down closer against Rust’s side. “Wonder who she gets that from?” he says, fishing a stray Easter egg off the side table and cracking a few jellybeans into his palm.

“Definitely not her Grampa,” Rust murmurs, plucking a jellybean out of Marty’s hand and popping it into his mouth. “Probably all Maggie.”

“Shit,” Marty laughs, throwing the remote down when he finds a movie for them to watch. “Better enjoy all these sweet years while we’ve got them, then.”

“Dunno about that,” Rust says after a spell, sleepy eyes on the television screen. “Seems like the kinda thing without any drawn expiration.”

Marty gives a little shake of his head but smiles, content enough in knowing there’s no rhyme or reason to argue, sitting there with Rust pressed warm and easy against his side.

Chapter Text

“Be still,” Rust says around the cigarette between his teeth, bumping the heel of one hand against Marty’s shoulder while the clippers buzz in the open air. “Fucking like trying to wrangle a toddler.”

“You’re fixing to snag my ear if you don’t put that goddamn cigarette down,” Marty snaps, though he goes still and sits up straighter on the stool they drug from the kitchen to the porch. “Christ, man.”

“I will if you don’t quit that squirming,” Rust says, blowing a stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth. He fixes the hand towel draped around Marty’s shoulders and then pushes the clippers through the hair around the curve above his ear, one clean swipe with a twist of his wrist.

It’s late in the day, somewhere in the balmy margin between afternoon and dusk, just dark enough for the crickets to start up their singing. There’s a sleepy green anole clinging to the outside of the patio screen and Marty watches it take two steps before hooking its toes back into the fine mesh, body silhouetted dark against the daylight slanting across the yard.

“You take much longer and I ain’t tippin,” he says without any real heat, feeling Rust rest one hand at the base of his neck as he goes about evening up his hairline.

“Take it out of my rent,” Rust murmurs before thumbing the clippers off and setting them down on the little porch table next to his ashtray.

“Finished?” Marty asks, and Rust’s answer is to pull the towel off his shoulders, a few warm fingers sliding under the neck of Marty’s shirt to brush and shake any loose hair away.

Marty stands from the stool and reaches up to run a hand over his head, nodding once when he’s satisfied. “Feels a whole lot better,” he says, plucking absently at the front of his t-shirt before cutting his eyes back to Rust. “You want me to try and do something with those sideburns?”

Rust stubs his cigarette out in the ashtray and blinks once before moving slow, slow to settle down on the vacant stool, hooking one bare foot up on the top rung. “Go ahead,” he says, and then hums when Marty tugs once at his ponytail before palming the clippers. “Don’t be getting any big ideas, now.”

“And have you cry like a schoolgirl for buzzing all that pretty hair off?” Marty snorts, leaning in close to get a better look at the side of Rust’s head. “Not a chance in hell.”

Chapter Text

“Warm that stuff up first,” Marty mumbles as he shifts a little closer to the headboard, cheek pressed flat against folded hands. “Trust you’d be the one to slap me with cold baby oil.”

Rust snaps the top back on the bottle and drops it down in the sheets, slicks the liquid satin between his palms and hums easy somewhere in the back of his throat. He draws up on his knees and then swings one around to straddle across the backs of Marty’s thighs, bare soles of his feet facing out.

“Fuck you,” he says, surprisingly soft, before pressing both thumbs at the base of Marty’s spine and dragging them up the smooth curve of his back. “I’m not a total masochist.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Marty says, though his breath hitches and unrolls in a telltale sigh when Rust’s hands span wide around the sides of his ribs.

Rust works in silence outside the lopsided pattern of their combined breathing, brow drawn up in the barest little thread of concentration. His hands glide over freckled shoulders and skim across familiar dimples thumb-pressed into the small of the other man’s back. There’s an old scar just behind Marty’s armpit on the right side, faded white and thick like a fattened crescent moon, and when he grazes it with the pad of one finger it’s like touching the shared memory of falling out of a tree house forty-something summers ago.

“Since when are you one to go easy on anything?” Marty grumbles, shifting half-restless between Rust’s thighs. “Dig the fuck in, man, I ain’t gonna be a sissy about it.”

It takes about two seconds before Rust finds the meanest knot and aims to flatten it out with the heel of his hand, big enough that he thinks of rolling a small orange across the pavement under his palm in a sharp burst of citrus oil, trying to loosen it up some before peeling.

“Fuck,” Marty hisses through clenched teeth, line of his back gone rigid under Rust’s hands. “Right–shit, shit, right the fuck–damn it Rust, oh–! Right there.”

“I got it,” Rust says, and there’s a welling sense of satisfaction as he presses his thumbs into the knot at the height of Marty’s shoulder, feeling the hard tension in the muscle gradually slacken and give way while he works and follows the dips and catches in the other man’s breath.

“Oh Lord,” Marty says after a while, sounding somewhere far-off and a little dazed even though he’s all but sunk down into the mattress. “Probably bruised me to kingdom come.”

Rust drops another dime of baby oil into his palm and starts back in easy, rubbing small circles into the small of Marty’s back, gently working up. “Probably deserve it, since you let it go this long without saying anything.“

“Well it’s a good thing you give back rubs like you work a damn case,” Marty mumbles, gone sleepy. “Call in Cohle for the assist every time.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, bowing over low so the words brush against the back of Marty’s neck. “Always get my man.”

Chapter Text

It’s a quarter past eleven in the morning when Rust walks into the kitchen with his boots already laced up, hair tied back neat with his cigarettes resting heavy in one shirt pocket. He loops a finger through his key ring and pulls them across the counter into the palm of his hand, making Marty look up from the morning paper spread open in his lap.

“Where you headed off to?” he asks, not bothering to pull his reading glasses off his face. “It’s Sunday.”

“World don’t quit spinning on Sunday,” Rust tosses back, pulling his new cell phone off the charger and slipping it into his pocket. He draws a mouthful of lukewarm coffee out of Marty’s mug still sitting on the counter, thumbs across his mustache and then heads for the door. “Need to pick up a few things. You want anything while I’m out?”

Marty is real careful to look down at the paper without rushing, doesn’t want to give himself away too easily. “Naw, I’m all set,” he says, turning to the sports section without rattling the pages too much. “Less you want something in particular for supper.”

Rust nods once and then steps out into the mid-morning sunshine, letting the birdsong drift in louder before closing the door against it again. His truck cranks over in the driveway with a rumble and a cough and Marty looks out the sliding glass door into the back yard, letting out a long, low sigh.

He reminds himself that the liquor stores in town are always closed on Sunday.

* * * * *


Rust comes back home forty-five minutes later with three plastic bags and a gallon of sweet tea, pulling in the smell of smoke and early autumn behind him. He drops one bag and the plastic jug off on the counter and then totes the other two with him down the hall, stows them away and pads back a few minutes later in his socked feet to root around the bag in the kitchen.

“What’d you get?” Marty asks, flipping through channels on the TV now. Rust rinses his hands in the sink and undoes his shirt buttons enough that his wifebeater is peeking through, cracks the the sweet tea open and wedges a box of lime popsicles in the freezer.

“Stuff to make roast beef sandwiches whenever you’re ready,” Rust says, pulling a clean glass out of the dishwasher before filling it halfway with tea, never any ice.

Marty feels the corners of his mouth pull up when he sees the popsicle box but he doesn’t say anything. Day two home from the hospital Rust’s stomach had been giving him trouble and Marty’d handed off one of the popsicles to help keep his sugar up, a strange thing passed between them but one that Rust accepted all the same. He bites into them with his teeth like an unholy terror but he went through the first box in three days flat and didn’t seem too keen on giving them up anytime soon.

It’s been a couple months now and the stitches are long since gone, but Marty’s glad to see that green box every time he opens the freezer. He doesn’t even eat the damn things himself anymore, but he figures that doesn’t matter. Just so long as somebody else will.


* * * * *


The days drag sometimes but maybe they drag easier than they used to, set up in two lawn chairs out back after the grass has been mowed and the bare planters picked and weeded. Marty swears he’s going to plant some flowers in the spring, says as much every time they’re fucking around in the yard and Rust humors him without fail, listing off some highfalutin botanical names in Latin before he looks sideways at Marty with a little pinch of something in his eye and gives the common names, too.

It’s verging on dusk and the crickets are out, song mingling heavy in the air with fresh-cut grass and warm earth. The two of them are sweaty and warm-licked by the evening sun and Rust can smell the heady scent of hard work between them, though it’s nothing bad. A little bitter with the tang of sweat and something like sweet hay, but his muscles feel warm and loose and Marty’s reaching over the arm of his chair to pluck a blade of grass from the ground, using a thumbnail to tear a little split in the middle before wedging it between two thumbs and bringing it up to his mouth.

He blows into the blade and it sings in return, a little squeaking whistle almost like a kazoo. Marty plays three clipped notes and then laughs softly, letting the grass twirl back down to the lawn. “Just wanted to see if I could still do it,” he says, not quite looking at Rust. “Tend to forget about shit like that when you get old.”

“You ain’t all that old,” Rust says, kicking one foot out in the grass. It’d been Marty’s weekend to push the mower so his jeans are cuffed around his ankles, bare feet not quite as pale as they used to be. He looks down at his hands and then squints toward the west, watching the edge of the sky light up violet and pink. “About ready to head inside?”

“Yeah,” Marty says, and Rust stands before holding out one hand. Marty takes it even though he doesn’t need to, rises to his feet and doesn’t let go until they’ve both taken three whispering steps toward the garage.


* * * * *


Marty’s showered and stationed in the recliner later when he hears the water cut out down the hall. It’d run a little longer than Rust’s usual ten-minute stints under the hot spray, but he figures what a man does in the shower is his own business and resolves not to let his mind wander too far.

It does anyhow, not that he’s too surprised. But then again, maybe a few moments inside the past several weeks haven’t left much for him to wonder about anymore.

He’s staring at the TV screen and not quite registering what’s on it when he feels a familiar hand slide onto his shoulder, two fingers skimming across the contour of his collarbone until they come to a rest at the soft dip of his throat. He doesn’t jump but stays very still, knowing Rust can feel the heartbeat jumping there under his fingertips.

“What took you so long?” he asks in a strange voice and then immediately regrets it, but Rust only draws his fingers up the line of Marty’s throat until he’s gently cupping his jaw, getting him to to tip his head back against the headrest of the recliner. There’s a flush burning light across his neck and his eyes are already dripped shut, and he feels Rust’s hair tickle across his face, loose and still hanging in damp waves around his shoulders.

The kiss is soft and dry when it’s pressed to his mouth, smooth and without the telltale bristle and tickle he won’t admit he’s long since gotten used to.

Marty’s eyes slip back open a fraction but he doesn’t start or move away, simply lets Rust nip a little along his bottom lip before he’s drawing himself back up, tucking his hair behind one ear but keeping the hand resting easy against Marty’s pulse. He steps around from behind the chair and then slides right into the other man’s lap, slumped low with his knobby knees hanging over the side of the armrest. Rust’s eyes are heavy and sleepy-bright but his face looks smoother when it’s clean shaven again, not so hard-worn and tired, the small bow of his mouth just as soft as Marty remembers.

“Look at you,” Marty says a little dazedly, one palm coming up to settle around Rust’s hip. “Don’t even hardly recognize you.” Rust is only dressed in briefs and his stomach rises and falls with every easy breath, long scar stretching some when he shifts to get an arm around Marty’s neck, pulling him down closer for another kiss.

“Gotta do something with my goddamn hair,” Rust says, pressing the words against the corner of Marty’s mouth.

“Mmmm,” Marty hums in his chest, fingers coming up to cradle the back of Rust’s head, parting easy through the long waves there. “Nobody said you had to do nothing.”

“You telling me you like it?” Rust asks, resting his forehead against Marty’s temple so a long tendril of hair tickles the other man’s neck.

“You kinda look like an old Skynyrd roadie, but I ain’t gonna complain too much,” Marty laughs, hissing soft when Rust’s mouth grazes around the curve of his ear.

Rust goes still for a moment but his hand snakes up under the hem of Marty t-shirt and rests warm against his stomach, thumb mindlessly tracing the soft skin there.

“I’ll probably end up cutting it,” he says, smiling a little when Marty goes to steal another kiss. “But I reckon it can wait til tomorrow.”

Chapter Text

A cloud of steam curls into the hall when Rust steps in the bathroom, slipping through the jungle-heavy warmth of the air without bothering to latch the door behind him. The mirror over the vanity is too fogged up to see anything, obscured with a film of water that would bead and well if he reached out to touch it. 

He’s already naked, has been since the moment he rolled out of bed, and parts through the sliver between curtain and tiled wall before stepping right into the shower. The ceramic is warm beneath his feet and Marty is facing away, wiping lathered soapsuds off his shoulders and arms under the water.

“You know it ain’t hardly big enough in here for the both of us,” Marty says, turning a little to catch the corner of Rust’s eye. “I’m just about finished.”

“You are?” Rust asks, humming low as he steps forward and trails a thumb down the line of Marty’s spine, fingers settling in the little dimples at the small of his back to gently rub there. “What if I needed help with something?”

Marty makes a tight noise in the back of his throat, something caught between a scoff and a stifled whimper. “You can wash your own damn hair,” he says, though he doesn’t try to knock Rust’s hands away. “And we–we got work this morning, Jesus.”

“We’ve got a little time yet,” Rust says, sliding in tight against Marty’s back and pressing a kiss against one shoulder, letting the warm water dampen and slick his hair flat. He drags his mouth over pink-flushed skin and then says the next few words behind Marty’s ear while his hand reaches down, cupping and squeezing the other man’s ass. “Besides, we own the fucking place.”

“Oh, hell,” Marty says, voice breaking when Rust traces and slides a finger somewhere lower, pushing himself back against his crotch. “There ain’t enough time for any of that, and I’ll be damned if I sit through three client meetings looking like I’ve got a cactus jammed up my a–”

He stops short when Rust swipes the pad of his middle finger in that sweet spot behind his balls and leans forward against the wall, letting the water beat down against his back. “Rust,” Marty rasps out, “if you’re gonna do it, you’d better do it quick. Fuck, fuck, c’mon.”

“Got another idea,” Rust says, erection already hot and hard against Marty’s lower back as he reaches for the bar of soap and lathers it up in one hand. He dips his slick palm between Marty’s thighs and gently soaps up the soft white skin there, shivering a little despite the warmth when he thinks about how he’s the only one allowed to do this, the way Marty would beg him for it, sweating and shaking and hissing Rust’s name.

Rust finishes with the soap and sets it aside, getting his hands back around Marty’s hips. “Hold your legs together for me,” he says, blinking through the water clinging to his lashes, and Marty does it without a word, forearms braced against the tile.

“Come on,” Marty says, dropping and bowing his head low, and Rust presses another kiss against his back before he pushes his cock into the warm wetness between Marty’s thighs, groaning as he slides in to the hilt. 

“Fuck, that’s real good, Marty,” he rasps, fucking back in and out a few more times on the long and slow stroke before he gets the presence of mind to reach around and take Marty’s cock in his hand. 

Marty’s muttering a string of low curses and makes a sound like he’s been shot when Rust starts working him steady, leaning forward to rest his forehead against his arm. “You don’t gotta,” he says, fingers lightly brushing the back of Rust’s hand. “I can–I can do it, just–”

“I got you,” Rust says, moving quicker now, the beat of water against the shower floor tangled up with the lewd slap of wet and soap-slick skin. Marty is all but vibrating against him and Rust can feel the fire building fast already, the rhythm of his hips spinning out messier and more urgent by the moment.

Two, three, four more sharp thrusts and he’s gone, bowed over and trembling with his mouth open against Marty’s neck. Warm stickiness has blossomed between Marty’s thighs now but he doesn’t pull away or bother with it yet, only keeps jerking the other man’s cock and the moment he thumbs over the head Marty’s done, coming with a little gasp and a mess against the tile wall.

They breathe hard under the spray together for a moment, water slowly starting to get cooler now, until Rust pulls back and turns Marty around to face him. He leans in and presses a panting kiss against his mouth, smiling a little as Marty weakly palms the dip in his side, eyes slipping shut.

“One day I’m gonna fall and break a hip, and what the fuck will you tell the first responder when they gotta roll up in here to wheel me out on a stretcher?”

“Tell them you’re too old to be fooling around in the shower anymore,” Rust says, picking the soap back up to wash between Marty’s thighs, cupping water in his hands to rinse them clean. 

“Shit,” Marty snorts, leaning into him. “You’d better clean up before the water heater gives out.”

He helps Rust wash his hair anyways.

Chapter Text

“When did you know?” Marty asks. “That you could do something like this. That you could—be with me, I guess.”

“I don’t think there was a singular defining moment of truth,” Rust says, squinting against the glare dazzling across the water. “Maybe it’d always been there beneath the surface, like we’d been skating along something predestined and finally fallen into the verity of it.”

He lets his fishing rod bounce a little in his hand, line of his throat working slight in a similar movement. “I just know that it felt right, when I came back into the full color of you after we walked out of that place. Like a relief I could taste.”

Marty hums to himself and reels in before throwing his line out again on impulse, thankful the pink-orange cast of dying day is enough to cover the warm flush climbing his throat. “What color do I taste like?” he blurts out before he can stop himself, brushing elbows with memories of Audrey and Macie, still knee-high and tugging on the tail of his shirt to ask things in the same tone of voice.

“C’mere,” Rust says after a moment, eyes soft, leaning into the tight space between their chairs. “I’ll tell you.”

He plants one on Marty, soft and chaste, and then the tip of his tongue swipes wet along Marty’s bottom lip, actually come in for a goddamn bonafide taste. Marty could fall right into that and not come back up for air ever again but then Rust seems satisfied with what he’s found, pulling back and tonguing his own lip, savoring the lingering flavor of it.

“Just the same as it’s always been, mostly,” Rust says. “Something heady and gold, like good bourbon or wildflower honey. A mouthful of bittersweet.”

Marty cuts his eyes sharp, a little bit blinded but not from the sun’s glare, mouth screwed up into a smile. “How’s it any different than it used to be?”

Rust looks back out across the water, butt of his pole wedged in the crease of his thigh when he tests the line, tugging once. “Dunno,” he says. “Could be a little sweeter, considering you’re not so much of a raging asshole anymore.”

Marty makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat and Rust laughs, low and husky, the sound of it almost new and surprising every time Marty gets to hear it.

“Besides that,” Rust says, “I guess you taste something like home.”

Chapter Text

Lilah is a month shy of her fifth birthday when she asks Marty to look at what she calls the picture memories, pointing out the two bound photo albums sitting on the top shelf in the living room.

He has to blow and wipe dust off the cover of the older one but pulls them down for her anyway, sits cross-legged on the carpet and cracks open the album Maggie had given him a few years before, filled with the doubles she had always found reason to buy when the girls were growing up. Two of every single photo from the time Audrey was still in diapers until the day she walked offstage at her high school graduation, and before things had ended the way they had, Marty’d used to tease Maggie about it, making up scenarios about flash floods and Alzheimer’s and Macie taking a lighter to the ones of her running stark naked through the back yard on her third birthday.

As it turned out, all those spare memories had been given to him.

Lilah settles down in Marty’s lap and lets him balance the album on her knees, watching as he turns the pages one at a time, spinning out stories and fragments of memory that land soft and warm in her hair. Her little fingers point out faces and zoo animals and even Mickey Mouse from a family vacation in Florida back in ’93, always careful not to touch the photos even though they’re covered in a plastic film.

It’s not until they’re looking at a photo from July 4th, 1996 does she look away from the golden sparklers a younger Marty is lighting off in the driveway and ask, “Why isn’t Poppy in any pictures?”

Marty clears his throat and weighs his options, decides the truth of things might be best left to discover on a different day. “He’s just camera shy, is all,” he says, turning the page. “Poppy didn’t used to like gettin’ his picture taken.”

But as sure as the spinning world there’s a picture of Rust when he turns the page. Mostly curved away from the camera and sitting on the deck next to a half-empty bowl of fruit salad, but Marty could clock those autumn-colored waves and the stiff set of his shoulders anywhere. Rust’s eyes are cut low to the cigarette in his hand, none too bright with the prospect of sitting through an hour’s worth of fireworks, and Marty can almost hear himself inside the walls of that memory, holding onto the neck of a sweating beer and calling out from somewhere near the grill after Maggie snapped the picture. Would it kill you to crack a smile, Rust?

“There he is!” Lilah says, leaning forward to get a closer look, and she stares at it for a moment before reaching up to touch the honey-brown curls gathered into pigtails on either side of her head.

“Poppy used to have hair just like me,” she says, smiling so the little gap between her two front teeth shines. “And I have the same blue eyes like you and mommy do.”

Marty laughs a little but presses a kiss to the crown of her head, not quite sure what to say. “Yeah, baby,” he says. “Just the same.”

Lilah keeps oddly still and quiet while they flip through the next few pages, and Marty doesn’t realize how hard the little gears in her mind had been cranking until she turns in his lap to look up at him, one tiny hand bracing gentle on his stomach.

“Grampa,” she says, in the same tone of voice Marty recalls her using to inform Penelope the stuffed pony that her back leg would need casting after an impromptu fall from the coffee table. “How did you and Poppy help Gigi make Mommy and Auntie Macie if it needs just a mommy and a daddy to make a new baby?”

“What?” Marty sputters, blinking back at her. “That’s not—that’s not how it works, sweetheart, Poppy didn’t help…I mean, Poppy had nothing to do with any of that. Just—just me and Gigi made your mommy and Macie.”

Lilah mulls that over for a moment, her little voice coming back in softer. “But you and Poppy love each other, and Mommy said that when two grown-ups love each other very much they can have a baby.”

“No, no, no,” Marty says, laughing a little breathless. He sets the photo album on the floor and turns Lilah around in his lap, vaguely wondering why the room feels so much hotter all a sudden. “See, me and Poppy…well. Poppy is like your Grandpa Ted, yeah? Me and Mag—uh, Gigi—were married a long time ago and had your mama and Aunt Macie together. Poppy and Grandpa Ted didn’t have anything to do with that, they—they aren’t really related to us the same way.”

“But Poppy,” Lilah says, suddenly babbling too fast for Marty to catch everything. “Poppy had the same hair like me, and he—he loves me, he tells me every time when I talk to him on the phone—”

Marty doesn’t realize his mistake until her eyes start filling with tears, welling up fast enough to brim and fall from the corners of her eyes. Her little bottom lip trembles and when she draws in another breath it hitches in a sob.

“Of course he loves you, baby,” he says, reaching up to wrap an arm around her and pull her in closer to his chest. “Just because he isn’t blood doesn’t mean he isn’t your Poppy, that doesn’t change a thing.”

The front door opens, then, and Rust walks in with a couple plastic grocery bags hanging from each hand. He turns and elbows the door shut behind him, then stands there blinking while he analyzes the scene on the living room floor.

“What happened?” he asks, locking eyes with Marty, and when Lilah climbs up and runs for him he doesn’t do anything but set the bags down on the floor and catch her.

“Uh,” Marty says, slapping his hands against his knees with a heavy sigh. “We were looking at old family pictures and she had some questions, and, well—” He makes a vague gesture with one of his hands, trying to coax the words free. “She knows that, uh, you—you aren’t related by blood now, I reckon. Oh hell.”

Rust hitches Lilah up around his waist and reaches to lightly touch the back of her head when she cries harder, slowly moving over to drop down on the couch behind Marty. “What’s wrong, Miss Lilah?” he asks, fixing the strap on her little overalls and running a hand down her back. “No reason to be crying, now.”

“I want us to be the same,” she hiccups, turning her face so hot tears burn wet in the crook of Rust’s neck. “I d-don’t want you to be different from me.”

“Well, everybody’s a little bit different,” Rust says, still rubbing circles on her back. He watches Marty stand up from the floor on creaking joints and then settle down next to them on the couch, throwing an arm behind Rust’s head. “Me and Grampa are plenty different too, but we’re still a family. I don’t love him any less for it.”

“But you’re my P-Poppy,” Lilah sniffles, tightening her grip on the flannel of his shirt. “We’re supposed to be the same.”

“What makes you think we aren’t?” Rust says, humming as he presses his lips to her hair. “We have the same love in our hearts, don’t we? A big kinda love, and nothing or nobody can ever take that away.”

Marty leans forward to pick the newer photo album up off the floor, flipping it open in his lap. He goes back to the beginning and then clears his throat, reaching over to gently tug on one of Lilah’s pigtails.

“Hey,” he says softly, waiting until she turns around to look at him, scrubbing a hand over her pink-rimmed eyes. “Look here.”

Marty points out a picture, one taken several years before that shows Rust stretched flat on the very couch they’re sitting on now, something tiny and pink curled up high on his chest while he watches the TV from under his lashes.

“That’s you,” Marty says, placing a finger on the baby in the photo and cutting his eyes over to Lilah. “When you were brand new and your mama brought you over here to visit. And before that, Poppy and I were there when you were born at the hospital. He held you right there when you were only an hour old.”

“Yeah,” Lilah says with a little hiccup, dropping her head back down against Rust’s shoulder, eyes starting to droop heavy.

“So he’s always been your Poppy,” Marty says, leaning in to kiss the tip of her nose with a smile.

“Always meant to be,” Rust says, quiet, words slightly muffled against her hair. “None of that other stuff matters, not a bit.”

He holds onto her for a while longer and watches Marty flip further ahead in the photo album, past photos of Lilah’s first Halloween costume, covered in cake frosting on her second birthday, playing in a little plastic pool in the back yard and sleeping with the cat in a wedge of sunlight coming in through the sliding door.

“She passed out?” Rust murmurs after a while, and when Marty looks up she’s fast asleep, breathing soft through parted lips.

“Yep,” Marty says, setting the pictures aside. “You want me to take her?”

“It’s alright,” Rust says, keeping his hands laced loosely around Lilah’s back. “But you might wanna go get the groceries off the floor.”

“Jesus,” Marty snorts, climbing to his feet. He brushes around the coffee table and leans down on the other side, bracing his hand on the back of the couch. “Once again, Poppy saves the damn day.”

“Naw,” Rust says, tipping his head back to let Marty plant one on him. “Wouldn’t have made it this far without you.”

Chapter Text

his body is the battlefield of a war
fifty years fought and there are a
thousand different landmarks
of a thousand different deaths but I only
know names for a handful of the
casualties buried beneath this sleeve
of broken skin, can only touch
the tombstones of ghosts he has
bled through enough for me to see

I trace shadows like ash fingertips
along his ribs and there are three
points singed into his side like
star points on a broken compass, the long
seam starting in the softness of his belly
a crooked needle pointing north when
that old black bird has always flown
south, and when I ask in the middle of
sunken night where we don’t pretend to
hide the broken pieces in our voices and
the wetness around our eyes
he will tell me that he took one bullet
for each of the loves in his life

whatever burns in his head catches
fire when it rains and he’ll watch
hidden flicker shows along the kitchen
walls, through the glass door at dusk
and behind his eyelids when the room
goes dark and solar flares from twenty
years gone still don’t seem to fade, struck
like sulfur matches that ignite colors
bright enough to burn entire
kingdoms down

he says his body is wick dying
down beneath a fast-moving flame
but he makes love like water and
makes it last, and when he does
all his breathing through the filter
of a blue light I have to ask how
a flesh and blood body can fail
a man when I have already
given him mine

Chapter Text

Saturday morning drapes over the room like an open sheet and Rust hears the purring before he sees the source, feeling the bed dip light as four paws pad up between him and Marty. He cracks one eye open and finds a gold and green pair staring back at him, and Ghost meows softly—a shy greeting, a question—while she waits for him to offer an open hand.

Rust shifts over onto his back and gently thumps two fingers against his collarbone. That’s all the cue she needs, and in a moment she’s stepping onto his chest and sliding up as close as she can get under his chin, tucking her tail in close and briefly pressing a cold nose to his skin while she settles. She’s full-grown but still a tiny little wisp of a thing with a tail Marty says looks like it belongs on a squirrel, and her purring is so deep and loud he can feel it humming in his throat.

It’s not yet full daylight and Rust closes his eyes against grey morning, listening to Marty breathe soft inside the quieter dips and lapses of Ghost’s purring. He reaches up and runs a thumb down the curve of her spine, and she chirps a little but doesn’t stir any more than that, gradually slipping off until she’s fallen into a quiet sleep.

Marty will wake up in a little while and scoff on principle while he stretches, tell Rust you spoil that cat rotten (even though they both know he doesn’t) and the day you start hacking up hairballs I ain’t even gonna be surprised (even though he would be). But he’ll reach over anyhow, follow the same path down the delicate line of her back that Rust had trailed over before and earn a little trill in response, two ears twitching and a sleepy-eyed blink cast his way.

“You ready to let him up for breakfast?” Marty murmurs, a small ritual they tend to go through on these mornings, and when he swings out of bed she stands and stretches out across Rust’s stomach, turning to watch him once she’s poised on the edge of the mattress.

“Go on,” Rust says as he kicks the sheet down, and then she daintily drops to the floor, trotting down the hall in Marty’s wake.

* * *

“Hold—hold her still, Marty, Jesus fucking Christ.”

“What do you think I’m trying to do? I don’t wanna fucking choke her out.”

“Get her by the scruff of her neck,” Rust mumbles over Ghost’s pitiful meowing, bracing his soapy hands to block her from struggling and leaping out of the laundry room sink. “It doesn’t hurt them, just grab hold of—okay, alright, there you go.”

Marty has on a pair of yellow kitchen gloves that stretch clear up to his elbows, now soapy-slick with pet shampoo they had to go out and buy special that morning. Ghost had slunk inside after breakfast reeking to high heaven and mussed with something nasty, and all signs had pointed straight to skunk.

“Can’t believe this shit,” Marty murmurs, holding her up by the scruff of her neck with his other hand supporting her from below. Rust is busy scrubbing suds into her fur and she looks about half her usual size soaking wet, all sad wide eyes and splayed toes. “Out for twenty minutes and gets doused in liquid festering hell first thing. It’s gonna smell like ass in here for two fucking weeks.”

“You’re the one who let her inside,” Rust says, grimacing when Ghost shakes a little and splashes water up into his face. “Said, and I quote: ‘Why does she look like she went through the ringer? Jesus Christ, what’s that fuckin smell’?”

“How the shit was I supposed to know?” Marty asks. “When the fuck you ever seen a skunk around here?”

Marty wrinkles his nose up and lowers Ghost back into the sink so she’s standing on all fours, idly stroking her shoulder while Rust shampoos her legs and the length of her tail. Her meowing has tapered off to the occasional frail-sounding yowl, and she keeps still this time when they start rinsing her off with warm water.

“Go ahead and get that towel ready,” Rust says, nodding toward the faded beach towel they brought in from somewhere in the garage. “You got the gloves, you’re playing catcher.”

“We ain’t got a fucking hair dryer,” Marty says, shaking the towel open and standing by Rust’s shoulder to peer at the cat with a small frown on his face. “She’s gonna be freezing her itty bitty ass off.”

“She’ll be alright,” Rust says, and with that picks Ghost up and drops her right into Marty’s open arms, not letting go until she’s been rubbed down and swaddled up in the towel. “I’ll clean up in here,” he says, already reaching to scrub tomato-paste shampoo out of the sink. “Take her out in the sun, maybe, so she can warm up some.”

Ten minutes, some heavy-duty cleaner and a heavy helping of air freshener later finds Rust stepping out onto the porch with a sigh, already bringing his lighter up to the end of a cigarette. “What’s all this?” he asks, pushing through the screen door to look down at Marty kicked back in a lawn chair with a small bundle still wrapped up in his lap.

Ghost blinks at him lazily through the sunlight, snuggled in her towel against the crook of Marty’s arm. “Oh, y’know,” Marty snorts, shading his eyes to watch Rust blow a stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth. “Just a couple bathing beauties.”

“You can let her out of the towel,” Rust says, walking over to stand behind Marty. “She’s probably gonna hide from us two weeks running.”

Marty holds both hands out and away, giving her more than ample room to jump up and scurry off. “No sir,” he says around a crooked grin before scratching a little around Ghost’s ears. “Reckon she’s pretty comfortable right where she is.”

“Hell,” Rust half-laughs on exhale. “It ain’t me who spoils that cat rotten.”

“Don’t be such a little shitbird,” Marty murmurs, closing his eyes and tipping his head back so it rests against Rust’s stomach. “I’ll have to take you to court for custody if you ever decide to up and leave.”

“Maybe I’d give you visitation rights,” Rust says when he reaches down to rest one hand on Marty’s shoulder, trying and failing to hide a smile behind his cigarette.

* * *

“You seen Ghost since I let her out this morning?” Rust asks after polishing off his glass of tea, sitting back at the kitchen table to watch Marty sort forks and spoons into the silverware drawer. “Been out all day.”

Marty picks up a pair of steak knives from the dishwasher and walks over to slide them into their block on the counter. “You got her on a curfew now?” he asks, though he leans back against the sink to briefly peer out the kitchen window, something he’d insist was nothing more than a reflexive glance if asked. “She always comes home before dark.”

Dusk is already slanting in watercolor shades of orange and violet through the windows and Rust waits a minute before he stands, palming his cigarettes off the counter to walk out through the garage. “I’ll be out front,” he says on his way to the laundry room, stepping barefoot onto the cool cement as he walks past Marty’s car and into the driveway.

The streetlights are already flickering to life and the crickets have just started to hum the beginnings of their nighttime song. Late summer rests heavy in the back of Rust’s throat, something warm and amber to the taste as he puts a cigarette between his lips and lights up behind a cupped hand, padding down the drive to drop the tailgate on his truck.

He sits back on the edge with one foot dangling off the ground, feeling the warm metal sink and give under his weight. A car turns around the corner onto the street and Rust watches it come and go before he brings two fingers up to his mouth and whistles harsh and loud, burning cigarette sending lazy curls of violet smoke into the air from his other hand.

It takes a few moments and two more long drags, but then he spots a dot of patchwork-splashed white slip out of the neighbor’s yard a few houses down. She scurries low to the ground, clearly on a mission, and it isn’t until she slows to look over her shoulder that he sees she isn’t alone.

Ghost waits for the new cat to catch up and then raises her tail in a lazy hook once she steps back into home territory, happily trilling in greeting as she trots through the grass alongside her companion wearing a jingling collar.

The door leading to the garage opens and closes and then Marty is shuffling up alongside the truck bed, blinking at the two critters sitting in his driveway. “Who the hell is this?” he asks, and when Rust looks up to shrug out an answer he finds Marty’s gaze locked on Ghost. “You out being the neighborhood hussy and bringing boys home?”

He sighs and leans back to sit on the tailgate next to Rust, palming the back of his neck like he’s not sure how to broach the subject. “Don’t tell me you been feeding strays,” he murmurs, hand slapping into his lap. “That’s just what we needed—another damn cat.”

“Already belongs to somebody,” Rust says, sticking his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and carefully sliding off the tailgate to crouch down on the driveway. “Clock that collar.” Ghost is up and winding around his knees in a flash, though the newcomer stands back a little bit further, a grey and brown tabby with soft yellow eyes that flash gold in the last flicker of sun.

Rust makes a soft clicking noise against the back of his teeth and holds out two fingers, and it takes a moment of coaxing and a look from Ghost but then the tabby is stepping over, gently pushing its head into the palm of his hand.

“What’s your name?” Rust murmurs after scratching around its ears for a few moments, reaching down to finger the tag hanging from the cat’s collar. He squints at the etching in the falling dark, just enough light left to make out four small letters.

“He got a number on there you can call?” Marty asks, sliding off the tailgate just as careful as Rust had before him. He stands with his fingers hitched on his hips for a moment and then sighs before crouching down, joints creaking a bit along the way.

“She,” Rust says, running his hand along the cat’s spine, watching her back rise and curl like a soft wave. “And naw, but I reckon she’ll make it home alright.”

Marty drums his fingers along Ghost’s back and slides them down the tip of her tail when she rubs her face against his knee, already purring up a storm. “Why you bringing your friends over this late, huh? Her folks are gonna be worried.”

The tabby slides out from under Rust’s hand and then goes straight to Marty, meowing a little until he relents and pets her. He scratches around her face and ears for a spell and then rises back up with a little grunt, watching the last sliver of sun sink below the violet-washed horizon.

“Alright Ghost Cat,” Marty says, leaning back over to hitch up the calico against his chest. “We’re callin’ it a night.”

Rust has already stubbed his cigarette out on the pavement but stays crouched down for a little longer, doling out a few more pats to their guest. “Goodnight, Miss Nana,” he says, thumbing over her forehead before rising to his full height alongside Marty. “Get on back home.”

The tabby watches them and flicks her tail, spinning once in place on light feet. She blinks and meows once in something like a farewell before turning round, making her merry way down the drive towards home, collar tinkling softly in the dark.

Chapter Text

Marty’s up to his elbows in white flour, fighting a mound of failing homemade biscuit dough to the bitter death when Mrs. Harriet Davis, former employee of the Lafayette Parish School Board, steps off her front porch and starts picking her way down the sidewalk toward the house.

It’s only just past nine in the morning and she steps lightly in her sandals around the puddles still pooled on the concrete, reaching up to straighten the hem of her cotton blouse as she comes. Marty watches from the kitchen window and makes three separate bets with himself in his head about whether she’ll notice the newspaper he hasn’t retrieved out of the driveway yet, and as sure as the slow-spinning world she crouches down in something like a curtsy to pick up the waterlogged plastic sleeve between two fingers before disappearing down the front walk.

“Hey Rust,” he calls, throwing the dough back down on the counter before turning so the words fall behind one shoulder. “You out of the shower?”

The answer doesn’t come until Rust is standing at the mouth of the hall, doing up the buttons on his shirt one at a time from the bottom up. “Yeah,” he says, just as three short knocks touch down on the front door, prim as posies.

“You mind getting that while I rinse my hands off,” Marty says, bumping the faucet on with his wrist. “Harriet Davis from next door, saw her coming.”

When Rust opens the door his eyes drop right to the newspaper where it’s been neatly tucked next to one of Marty’s planters by the front door, and when he looks up at the woman standing on the porch he can’t help but think of a blonde retrieving dog, waiting there with her sleek bob and eager-shining eyes.

“Morning, Miss Davis,” he says, stepping out onto the damp planking with bare feet, leaving the door cracked behind him. “Help you with anything?”

“Just Harriet, Rust, you know better than that,” she says with a wave of her hand, eyes flickering over the black bird on his arm before swiveling back up to his face. “Is Martin here too? I wanted to ask the both of you a question.”

“He’ll be out shortly,” Rust says, hitching his hands up on his hips when he finds he’s got nothing better to do with them. Harriet is standing over by the first step, peering down into the glistening flowerbeds lining the face of the porch. She turns and smiles at Rust but he doesn’t quite return the gesture, squinting in the wedge of sunlight slanting up from the beneath the awning.

“I was just admiring your flowers,” Harriet says, making a movement with her hand like she was throwing bird seed to them. “Beautiful bearded iris you’ve got here. Cal and I always see you and Marty out in the yard, tending to them in the evening.”

“Tryin’ to spruce this old place up for the grandbaby,” Marty’s voice comes as he steps out onto the porch, and this time Rust does smile, feeling Marty brush up against his left side. “Morning Harriet, what’ve I been missing?”

She smoothes her hands down the sides of her thighs and grins back at Marty, bouncing one time on the balls of her feet. “Well, I came to ask the two of you a favor. Cal and I are driving up to a wedding in Arkansas for the weekend and needed somebody to take care of Bo and Tilly. The Goldman kids next door are at summer camp and we’d rather not board the dogs when we could keep them at home, if you know what I mean.”

Marty’s eyebrows raise a fraction but he slants a look at Rust, letting a few unspoken words pass between them. Rust’s lashes dip in something like assent and Marty takes another step forward, hooking a thumb in his pocket. “If it’s just for the weekend, we’d be happy to,” he says. “Always love seeing Bo and Tilly out and about—wouldn’t be a problem at all.”

“Wonderful, I was hoping you’d say yes,” Harriet says, clasping her hands together with a brighter smile. “Know you have your cat, the little calico we see sometimes, so it’s good to know they’ll be with pet people.” She turns and gestures toward her own driveway, where Cal is busy loading a suitcase into the back of their SUV. “We’re leaving this afternoon and will be gone through Sunday evening, but I’ll leave their food and leashes out with a number in case you need to call.”

With that she pulls a single key from her pocket and passes it to Marty, a little LSU emblem hanging from the ring and catching in the light. “Make yourselves at home and thanks again for helping us out on short notice. Is there a good way to pay y’all for your time?”

Marty readies himself to say no when he thinks back a few months to the paper plate Harriet had brought over after her daughter’s baby shower, and then the look on Rust’s face as he’d savored each bite like a mouthful of gold and then sucked the tines of his fork clean.

“Maybe some of your famous hummingbird cake, since this one here loves it so much,” Marty says, letting his hip bump into Rust’s, real casual-like. “A few slices of that and it’s a done deal.”

* * *

Rose-tea dusk starts to fall across the yard after supper and Marty comes down the hall in drawstring shorts and a t-shirt, already laced into the pair of tennis shoes he’d had to buy for better goddamned arch support. He drops another pair of walking shoes down in front of Rust where he’s curled up on the sofa before tossing a ball of socks into his ledger-covered lap, the working page covered halfway with blue ink scrawled one neat line at a time.

“C’mon, slick,” Marty says, stepping behind the coffee table to pull one foot up behind him in a stretch. “We got a babysitting gig to follow through on and I imagine they’re gonna want to go for a walk.”

Rust sets his notebook aside and unfolds the socks, pulling them on one at a time. “You reckon I need to change clothes?” he asks, reaching down to loosen the laces on the tennis shoes, which are Marty’s old pair but fit well enough to do the trick all the same.

“Still been hot out in the evenings,” Marty says, twisting to stretch his side while he looks out the sliding glass door. “I know you don’t do shorts as a general rule but it might not hurt to lose the jeans.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, picking up the shoes before disappearing down the hall. Two minutes later he’s back in the kitchen wearing a pair of sweatpants and his white undershirt, sliding the Davis’s key off the kitchen counter into his hand. “Let’s go,” he says, walking through the garage door. “Don’t wanna keep them waiting.”

Bo and Tilly nearly bowl them over at the front door, tails flying a mile a minute while they dance around Rust and Marty’s feet.

“Take it easy, kids,” Marty says, trying to edge his way to the kitchen where the leashes are looped next to a notepad on the counter. “We’re gonna go, just hold your horses for a second.”

Rust trails after him with both dogs trotting hot on his heels. Bo is the larger of the two, jet-black with four white paws and a splash like a star on his chest, and immediately runs over to a wicker basket full of toys before bringing a stuffed duck back to nudge against Rust’s thigh.

“Y’all are a lot friendlier than the pups I’d meet back in my robbery days,” he murmurs, taking the toy and tossing it up in the air for Bo to catch. “So much for being a watchdog, hmm?”

“That’s on account of them already knowing you,” Marty says, bending over to hook the leash around Tilly’s collar. She’s a full head smaller than her brother with a thicker coat, spotted and mottled with different colors like something crossed with Australian cattle dog. Marty passes the other leash to Rust and smiles while Bo squeaks his duck toy. “Get big boy there hitched up on the harness. Guess he’s all yours, since you two are already thick as thieves.”

Out in the deepening twilight, they start off down the block with the crickets singing in the trees overhead, both dogs walking happy and easy on their leashes a few paces ahead. A light breeze rustles through the oak trees, bringing the promise of something that might be a nighttime shower in the air.

“Makes me want one or two of our own,” Marty halfway laments, stopping for a moment while Rust and Bo pause for the black dog to lift his leg on a crepe myrtle tree. “I tried the one time, but oh no—we came home with Little Miss Priss instead.”

“Well you got these two on loan all weekend, gotta live it up good while you can,” Rust says, stepping back in to match the other man’s stride. They pass under a streetlight and he catches the corner of Marty’s eye, come and gone in a short blink. “Don’t act like you ain’t buddies with that cat.”

Marty snorts and takes the corner, leading them around a turn in the block. “I didn’t say that, did I?” he asks. “Just saying it’d be nice, maybe, to do this with a couple good dogs more often.”

“Yeah,” Rust says after a moment, reaching down to hitch up his sweatpants on one side. “It would be.”

It’s full dark out when they make it back to the Davis house, both dogs panting heavy with their pink tongues lolling. Rust unhooks their leashes at the front door before letting them lead the way back inside, where Bo promptly sprawls out on his side across the kitchen tile while Tilly goes over to the water bowl, lapping up a drink.

“Hopefully y’all worked up an appetite,” Marty says, stooping over to pick up a pair of matching bowls off a little mat on the floor. He squints at the notepad on the counter and repeats the instructions to himself, turning to open the walk-in pantry. “Two scoops of dry, top off with half a packet of the wet food apiece in the evening.”

Rust peers through the blinds hanging in front of the rear sliding glass door and then reaches through them, pushing the lock down with a click. When Marty reemerges from the pantry he’s got a shiny gold foil packet in his hand, holding it out in front of him to decipher without his reading glasses.

“Filet mignon and bacon,” he snorts, tearing the top off. “Damn dogs eat better than we—Rust? Where’d you run off to?”

“Back here,” Rust’s voice floats in from the patio, the breeze tickling the hanging blinds where they’re still pulled shut. “Looking at the pool.”

Marty waits until both dogs are nose-down in their bowls and crunching away on kibble before he steps out in Rust’s wake to find the pool lit up with blue-green light. “Pretty fancy,” he says, walking over to the edge where Rust has knelt down to trail a hand through the water. “Cal says it’s a saltwater pool.”

Rust draws his hand up from the water and touches one fingertip to the tip of his tongue. “It is,” he says, slowly rising back to his feet. “Warm, too.”

“Maybe stick your feet in for a minute, cool off,” Marty says, turning to part through the blinds and check on the dogs. He flicks off the kitchen light while he’s inside and walks back out just as a splash sounds from the far end of the pool and Rust disappears beneath the surface.

“Real nice,” Marty says, bending to toe his shoes off. “You’re gonna have to cut through the yard now, because you sure as hell can’t drag your wet ass through Harriet’s clean kitc—”

He stops short when he catches sight of the pile of clothes folded on top of a pair of walking shoes in a nearby deck chair. “Oh hell, Rust,” Marty rasps, eyes cutting over to where Rust has his chin on his folded hands at the edge of the pool. “What if somebody sees you?”

“Then I hope they enjoy the show,” Rust says, pushing off the wall to glide backwards through the water, graceful as a river otter. “Come on in and take a dip, feels good.”

Marty walks barefoot over to the edge and looks down, watching Rust do slow laps from one end of the pool to the other. “I’m not so shameless that I’m going to go skinny dippin’ in my good Christian neighbor’s pool,” he says, dragging a few toes through the water. “When Harriet said to make ourselves at home, I don’t figure she meant like this.”

“Suit yourself,” Rust says, twisting again to swim towards the deep end, the smooth muscles in his shoulders working as his arms pull him forward through the azure-lit water. Marty watches him dive beneath the surface again and skim along the bottom, and he doesn’t stay under for long but when he comes back up again his hair is slicked back and dark, eyes reflecting the shimmering light.

“Fuck you,” Marty says without much heat and a low laugh, looking around the darkened yard before he pulls his t-shirt over his head and drops it next to Rust’s. “If we get caught we won’t ever hear the end of this.”

Rust slows to watch him, floating along on his back. “If this is the one thing we get busted for in our lives, I’d say we’re doing pretty damn good.”

“Yeah,” Marty snorts, stepping quickly out of his shorts and boxers. “Until the responding officer that shows up on the indecent exposure call rings it back to CID and my good name takes a swan dive down the shitter.”

Flush naked now, he walks around to the deep end of the pool and dives in without any more ado, gliding past Rust underwater until he comes up for air at the other side. Their eyes meet across the glowing surface and then Marty’s swimming for the other man, turning over on his back as he kicks by.

“Kinda freeing, ain’t it?” Rust says, letting one palm skim along Marty’s side as he passes. “Used to strip down like this during the summers in Alaska, go for a dip in the lake by our cabin. Never had any use for a bathing suit, least not out there.”

Marty pushes off the far wall and comes back, getting his footing up underneath him before gently pulling Rust toward the shallow end. He reaches down and gets his hand around the other man’s waist, broad hands spanning around the small of his back as he draws their hips closer together and leans in to press a salty kiss to the corner of Rust’s mouth.

“See now,” Rust says, wet lashes cast low, tipping his head back while Marty mouths along the line of his jaw. “You’re the one worried about gettin’ caught, and then you go and start shit.”

“What am I startin’?” Marty hums, nipping a little at Rust’s bottom lip. He grins and slides his hands down further, cupping his hands around Rust’s ass. “I can’t help it, you look like a goddamn vision in the water.”

Rust leans back in for another kiss when they hear four paws clicking fast on the patio floor and then a huge black blur is sailing through the open air and crashing into the water, doggie paddling for them with his head bobbing above the surface.

“Bo!” Marty says, laughing as Rust’s arms come up to cross around his shoulders. “Christ, we’re in for it now. Gonna have to dry his ass off before we can go back home.”

The dog does a small lap around them before swimming for the pool steps, hopping out and shaking the water from his coat. Tilly slips through the blinds and sets back on her haunches a safe distance away, watching all three boys with her ears perked forward.

“Good thing we’re not in any hurry,” Rust says, hooking an ankle around the back of Marty’s knee and laughing soft as they both fall back into the water.

Chapter Text

Marty can divide himself in half along the fissures of his life, between the woman who built him up and the man who tore him down. The two of them are the only souls he’s ever tucked away as foreign loves into a drawer where every other occupant was a delight of the flesh and not much more.

He started with Maggie and now he ends with Rust. A broken split of ten years sits somewhere in the middle of that lopsided lifeline but none of it mattered when Rust came home with him and stayed, and it was those pair of fine, strong-fingered hands that threaded the seam of Marty back together, stitching fine needlework into the larger quilt Maggie had been working on without much luck for twenty long years.

Making love to a man is different from making love to a woman, but for all his wick-dipping in secondhand honey pots over the years there have only ever been two that he’s seen laid open and bare for him, only ever two who had him for anything more than sideline fucking. Only two who looked into his eyes while they pulled him further into the rocking cradle of their hips, wordlessly begged for his kiss and his touch and his everything—and isn’t it a shame, maybe, how one had to beg for the other one to win it.

And for fifty-odd years Marty defines making love as something you only ever do with your wife and the mother of your children, with the woman who carries your name and new life in the growing swell of her stomach. Something done with gentle intention—reverently, tenderly, with a soft body the color of the moon, all supple curve and skin like satin ivory.

Maggie was never a soft woman but she’d give like water under Marty’s touch when he kissed behind her ear and raised up goosebumps on the insides of her thighs with his fingertips, tracing the delicate white threading of spider-webbed scars leftover from when she’d carried and nursed his daughters. And that was how it was, to be with the woman you loved.

He doesn’t count the others when he thinks back on a long line of regret. Only ever Maggie, and that was the way of things until the Later years when he’d finally found Rust.

Rust trembles and cries the first time Marty makes him come untouched, on a grey-lit morning six months past the throne room floor when they wake up before the sun to find one another in the waning dark. He clings to Marty like a salvation and chokes out a wet-sounding sob, body still racked with the fluttering shock of it, too far gone now to be ashamed of the wetness shining on his cheeks.

And at first Marty thinks he’s hurt him, kisses the corners of the other man’s eyes and tastes warm salt, trying and fumbling for the right thing to do or say.

“Did I hurt you?” he asks, confused by Rust’s hands soft as a resting bird’s wings on his shoulders but still holding on so tight, his heart hammering in a steady beat against the hollow side of Marty’s chest.

“No, Marty,” Rust tells him in a half-broken voice, looking away now but drawing a hand up to cup around the back of Marty’s neck, warm and light and familiar. “No.”

And when Marty only kisses under his eye and pulls their bodies closer, Rust doesn’t know if he can tell him—doesn’t know if he has the words or the voice to will the truth past his lips, sad and humble and full of beautiful ache as it is.

“You’re alright, then,” Marty breathes out through a small smile, pushing some of the damp hair away from Rust’s forehead with careful fingers. He doesn’t know what else to say and the next thing isn’t anything but sweet nothings but then it’s soft enough to lie down on if Rust wanted to pillow himself against it—his broken body and soul and his newfound heart.

“I’ve got you,” Marty whispers, because he does, and twines their legs back together. “Right here with me.”

And maybe that’s what Rust wants to tell him. That he does, that he’s the only one. That nothing but darkness had ever held Rust in its arms before, and now he’s here with Marty, letting unforeseen tenderness lick all his old wounds so sweet and gentle that it makes him cry.

“Yeah,” is what he says, pressing his face against the side of the other man’s throat, feeling the steady jump of life humming there. “You do.”

Chapter Text

Marty finds a piece of red string on his favorite navy sweater the night he shakes Rustin Cohle’s hand for the first time.

It’s about two inches long and pulls loose like it’d been woven right there into the other fibers, bright crimson red though damn if he’s ever seen it sticking out like a sore thumb before. The sweater isn’t new, something Maggie bought for him a few years back from a department store sale–but he rolls the thread between two fingers and drops it in the wastebasket.

Ten miles across town in a stark white apartment Rust is laying on his side, stretched out on a single mattress in his boxers and undershirt, staring at the wall while he smokes his way through half a pack.

He pulls a piece of red fiber from the beige carpet and holds it up against the single ceiling light, thinking of cherry cough syrup and burst blood vessels in his eyes, only vaguely wondering how it might’ve gotten there.

*

After Maggie kicks him out and he lands ass-first at Rust’s place for two weeks, it only takes a few days before the two of them settle into something anybody else might call a routine.

Coffee made in the mornings, two turkey and cheese sandwiches set out on the counter after work instead of one, one with extra mayonnaise and one without mustard. There’s another toothbrush visiting in the downstairs bathroom and once-divided piles of laundry turn into shared loads separated into darks and lights, and Marty only ever swears a little under his breath while he has to sort through Rust’s boxer briefs in the dryer to find his work socks.

When he finally finds the first twin in the pair it won’t pull free without a fight, and when he yanks it from the back of the dryer it comes loose with something else.

There isn’t a stitch of color outside black or navy in the load outside the red thread tethering Marty’s socks together, tied so neat and perfect that he nearly walks down the hall to ask Rust why the hell he knotted them together.

But he doesn’t say anything, only walks out into the kitchen in his boxers and picks up Rust’s sole pair of scissors before setting them back down again. In the end one clean cut could’ve saved him five minutes, but he only stands at the counter and slowly unwinds the knot until both socks come free, leaving the red string kinked but still whole.

Two days later he kills Reggie Ledoux.


* *


“You been taking up embroidery or somethin’?” Marty asks one spring morning in the car, hissing between his teeth when the sip of coffee he takes is too hot.

Rust looks down at the floorboard, in the cup holder full of loose change and straw papers, in the seat between his thighs. “What?”

“Keep finding string over there when you get out,” Marty says, and that’s when Rust notices the little ball of what looks like red yarn sitting in the console tray on a soft bed of grey cigarette ash.

“Don’t know what that is,” he says, reaching into his breast pocket to fish out another light. “Never made a habit of wearing much red.”

Marty stares at the ash tray for a long moment before he starts the car, jaw set into something thoughtful.

“Me either,” he says, listening to the clink and flare of Rust’s lighter.


* * *


The world is alive in shades of red and that’s all Marty sees while he makes the color bloom wet and shining on Rust’s face, his own split knuckles, in dark spots on his shirt that look like his partner’s namesake.

But not his partner anymore–not now.

Rust’s truck is gone and that was red, too, but Marty sits at his desk across from an empty one nursing a shiner and the headache of his fucking life, and when he sees the long scarlet thread hanging out of the drawer still holding his gun and wedding ring, all he does is yank it until it snaps in two.


* * * *


After a few years he starts wearing red when he never did before.

Maybe it was just an excuse to find it.


* * * * *


Why-don’t-you-buy-me-a-beer? leads them down a pothole-riddled highway into the first shitty bar come up on the roadside, and Marty holsters his gun and lets the engine start ticking before he decides to get out and follow Rust inside.

When he opens his car door, a piece of red shines in the jamb before slipping down onto the concrete. Marty doesn’t pick it up, but if he had he might’ve seen that it was nearly a foot long.

An inch for every year.


* * * * * *


In the dream afterward, or maybe it was real–he can’t tell anymore, everything in that place pulled free from the sieve of a waking nightmare whether he was in his own mind or not.

But there’d been a moment, in the dark, with his hand holding Rust’s life in his body–there’d been a moment, maybe, where he’d pulled his bloody palm back to look at the weeping wound and something had kept it there.

Marty doesn’t know if it was real, wouldn’t ever tell another soul if it was–but he knows what he saw before he finally gave in, knows what it was tethering him to Rust before the flare went up and the paramedics finally found them.

When he wakes up from surgery, the sleepy-eyed but smiling nurse is there at his bedside, scrubbing blood and dirt out from under his fingernails with a soft brush and pan of soapy water.

“You forget something?” she asks, trying to be conversational while he bites down the urge to break in half and sob.

Rust is still on the edge of death down the hall and when Marty looks at his left hand, he sees the red string knotted around his third finger in a perfectly lopsided bow.


* * * * * * *


When Rust decides to stay, he doesn’t tell Marty about the thin length of red he’d found marking a page in his ledger–the one, he privately knows, that holds a penciled portrait of a man sleeping close enough that he could detail the sparse fan of his eyelashes.

When Rust decides to stay, he moves his favorite books into the bedroom and throws their cardboard shelf in the trash. He hangs all five of his shirts in the empty side of the closet and then sits on the edge of the bed that Marty doesn’t use, the give of the soft mattress underneath him solid and welcome and real.

When Rust decides to say, he doesn’t have to think too hard on fate.


* * * * * * * *


They kiss and fuck and fool around when they want to, and that’s okay as far as either man is concerned–that’s just fine, and they don’t need to talk about it because maybe by the time it happened there wasn’t much left to discuss aloud. And on nights spent sprawled together on the couch with nothing to do or nowhere to go, Rust doesn’t need to hear the words behind Marty’s arm around his shoulders or the nose tucked in his hair to know what they really mean.

There’s a point, maybe–a time when the harsh collision and heated burn of their bodies turns into something else.

So when Marty eases him back onto the bed and kisses him until the room is blurred into a thousand shades of warm honey and amber, Rust lets him. He lets Marty kiss the jagged crescent cutting up through his middle, brush his hair away from his face and whisper soft things against the pulse jumping in his throat.

He lets Marty hold him close and take him there, the two of them pressed tight and flush enough that Rust thinks their lines and colors might not ever untangle after this—not that he wants them to, anymore.

And when he’s panting against Marty’s flushed skin and reveling in how their blood nearly beats in matched time, almost in tandem but not quite, he feels Marty’s hand still wrapped around his, fingers laced together tight enough that they’re cramped and dully aching. Even so, Rust doesn’t try to pull his hand free from Marty’s yet.

He knows he couldn’t if he tried, with the red string there in a web of delicate knots, binding their palms together tight.

Chapter Text

“Poppy,” a small voice says, somewhere close nearby. “Poppy.”

Rust can hear her before he even wakes up, his name coming from somewhere inside a garden with the high hedge that he’d need a ladder to look over. He’d been watching the robin pair build a nest from where he was sitting in the grass, and this is a far cry from the older dream in a wilder wood where he’d walked upon twin panthers treed by a pack of wolves.

“Poppy, wake up,” Lilah says again in a stage whisper, and this time she touches him, one little hand resting light on his collarbone. “Grampa says you gotta come in for suppertime soon.”

They’re in the back yard and Rust cracks his eyes open, shifting around some so the hammock he’s wrapped up in gently swings like a cradle in the air. Lilah is just tall enough now that he can see her face and little beansprout ponytail peeking over the edge, and it takes some maneuvering and a boost before she’s clambered up into the canvas cocoon and tucked in close next to his side.

“Now we’re both gonna get in trouble when Grampa comes lookin’,” Rust says around a stifled yawn. even though he doesn’t scold her or make any move to get up. “Didn’t mean to fall asleep out here.”

“That’s okay,” Lilah says, looking up above them at the oak tree shuddering and shifting in the quiet breeze, like the leaves might be whispering something to her that Rust can’t hear. “Sometimes I still take naps, too, even though I’m starting first grade soon.”

“Speaking of all that,” Rust says as he reaches over to brush some of the honey-colored hair out of Lilah’s face, “is that old Thunder Monster still giving you any trouble?”

She turns and looks at him with a serious look painted over her small face, startling for just a moment in how much it reminds him of Maggie. But then she turns her attention to Rust’s hands, picking up his left one in both of hers to play with the gold band on his third finger.

“No, Poppy,” Lilah sighs, like he really ought to know better. “He doesn’t like the star lights, remember?”

“Hmm, I guess you’re right,” Rust hums, content enough to let them slowly dither from side to side, listening to the wind chimes clink and tinkle from where they’re hanging on the back porch. He thinks of those glass stars and then the paper ones that glow gold in the guest bedroom, strung in a braid of fairy lights above Lilah’s head when she sleeps. “You think they’re still working after all this time?”

“Yeah,” Lilah says, pushing open Rust’s right hand this time so his palm is facing them both. “Grampa said you put magic in them so the Thunder Monster won’t ever come back.”

She presses her tiny hand into his, the tips of her fingers just barely reaching his knuckles, and Rust wraps his palm around hers before bringing it up to his mouth for a kiss.

“Course I did, baby,” he says, just as the glass door slides open on the porch. “You don’t ever have to be scared of the dark.”

The screen door creaks open and swings shut, and Lilah hunkers down closer to Rust’s side while they hear soft footfalls coming through the grass. “Shh,” she whispers. “Grampa’s coming to find us.”

As sure as the world, it only takes a moment before Marty’s peering over the side of the hammock at them and trying to keep a stern look plastered over his face. “Well well,” he pretends to growl, reaching in to squeeze Lilah’s leg so she laughs and squeals. “I was wondering where this stowaway had gotten off to. Are y’all gonna stay out here all night or what?”

“Wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Rust says, though he moves to sit up and take Lilah with him. “Especially if you’re makin’ that mushroom casserole again.”

Marty snorts and slaps the flat of his palm against the heaviest part of the hammock’s underside, narrowing his eyes when Rust doesn’t so much as flinch. “You’d better be glad I don’t let you go hungry.”

He lifts Lilah out and slings her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, waiting for Rust’s feet to touch the grass before starting back toward the porch. “Let’s go, Poppy,” he calls out. “You’re in luck tonight, we’re having tacos.”

Rust stands and stretches, pressing the soles of his feet against the warm earth. A lone bird sings somewhere from above and Rust thinks of the twin panthers for a moment, scared and snarling high in their tree, before the answering call of the bird’s mate rings across the yard in a sweeter tune than the first.

He lets their voices follow him as he traces the path Marty took back into the house.

Chapter Text

The month before Lilah’s second birthday, Marty steps out back into the summer heat and pulls up Audrey’s number on the phone. She answers on the fourth ring and doesn’t sound as surprised to hear his voice as she might’ve years ago.

“Hey Dad,” she says, and if he listens closely he can hear the sound of morning cartoons humming in the background. “How’re things going?”

“Good, darlin’, real good,” Marty says, sinking down into one of their old porch chairs so the metal creaks underneath him. “Just wanted to call and ask about the party if you got a minute to talk.”

“What about it?” Audrey asks, and the cartoons fade away as she passes into another quieter room. “It isn’t for another three weeks.”

The neighbor’s sprinkler is running and Marty watches it arc back and forth in a lazy rotation, sending a rainbow-shining mist of water through the air. He clears his throat and runs his teeth along his bottom lip, a little unsure of how to start. Rust is inside and across the house in the office, up to his elbows in oil paints, but he still feels a little sick at the thought of being found out.

“Dad,” Audrey says again, just on the edge of worry, and this time Marty relents.

“Well,” he says, laughing a bit under his breath before sobering up into something more serious. “I had to ask if y’all were planning on getting the baby a bike. A—a tricycle, guess it’d be at her age. You know.”

Audrey is quiet for a beating moment. “I mean, we’d thought about it,” she says with a sigh, like she’s relieved that’s all. “There was a little yellow one at the store last week that Orren won’t stop talking about, has daisies on the handlebars. If you and Rust want to get it for her, though, we can—”

“No,” Marty says a little too quickly, glancing over his shoulder through the glass door. “I mean—that’s what I called to talk about.” He draws in a deep breath as he turns back around, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Maybe you shouldn’t get her one yet, at this age. Give it another year or two until she’s a little bit older.”

The thread of suspicion is shining like piano wire in Audrey’s voice again, though she barks out a strange laugh into his ear. “What are you talking about, Dad? She’d be perfectly fine with a tricycle, even if she has to start with Fred Flintstone-ing it around. Some kids younger than her have already gotten their first bikes.”

Marty lets his hand slide down his face until it’s wrapped around one knee. He figures beating around the bush never did help him much in the past, especially with Maggie and two girls. That was long enough ago now that it might as well be an old war wound where he slugged himself in the foot.

“Listen,” he says, lowering his voice again. “You know about—Rust’s little girl. The one that passed.”

A cardinal calls out from somewhere in the treetops and Marty feels like he has to mine her name letter by letter from somewhere deep in his rib cage, it’s been so long since he said it. “Sophia.”

Audrey goes quiet again, no doubt biting into her lip in a habit inherited from her father. “Yeah,” she says at last. “He told us the night we met him. Me and Macie and Mom.”

Marty nods to himself, staring at his hand where it rests in his lap, remembering Maggie’s voice cutting into him after Rust had gone home that night. “I don’t reckon you know what happened–how it happened,” he says. “Shit, it took nearly twenty years before he even told me.”

A string of question pulls tight between them and Audrey nearly whispers when she asks, “How?”

“She got hit out in front of their house,” Marty says, clearing his throat. “Riding her tricycle near the street.”

Something rustles against the receiver, probably Audrey pushing her hair out of her face while that washes over her. “How old was she?” she asks, even though Marty knows she’s clever enough to have already found the answer.

“Just do me a favor, if you can,” he says, blowing out a sigh worn thin at the edges. “If you do wind up getting Lilah one for her birthday, that’s fine, I can’t hold nothing about it against y’all. God knows she’d probably love it. But while Rust—well, while we’re there for the party—”

“You don’t have to ask, Dad,” Audrey says, gently cutting in over him. “All you had to do was tell me.”

“Jesus,” Marty says, chuckling again and sagging back into the chair. His hand feels clammy around the phone despite the June heat and he bows his head inward, chin nearly against his chest. “Well good,” he says. “Thank you, sweetheart. You know it’d make all the difference in the world, for the both of us. With how—how he still deals with that and all.”

Audrey sniffs a bit, voice gone a tinge watery even though it still sounds strong. “I can’t even imagine,” she says, and he knows her eyes have probably swiveled back to find a little honey-blonde head in the TV room.

The bright red cardinal is singing again, this time out in the yard under the shade of the clementine tree, growing heavier with ripening fruit waiting to be eaten in November. He sings lone and proud for a moment before another shows up, duskier and more coppery in color. A handsome couple, all in all.

Marty watches them together in the sunlight, pecking around the base of the citrus tree. “Me either,” he says, quiet. “Me either.”

A tiny voice echoes on the other end of the phone, faint but unmistakable, and Audrey laughs bright and earnest this time. “I’ve got to go fix somebody lunch,” she says. “Talk to you later, alright?”

After she hangs up, Marty drops his phone between his knees but doesn’t move from his chair. The cardinal pair finishes their lunchtime browsing and flits off together, disappearing somewhere across the yard.

When the sliding door opens a little gust of AC blows out to tickle his neck, but the hand that braces on his shoulder is solid and warm. “You bird watchin’ again?”

“Uh-huh,” Marty says, tipping his head back to look at Rust, standing behind him in his white undershirt smeared with the odd dash of pink and violet. “Finished your masterpiece yet?”

“Just now, signed and sealed,” Rust says, stepping around Marty’s knees to slump down in the deck chair’s vacant twin. He squints out across the yard and crosses his ankles, bare heels propped against the cool concrete. “I think she’ll like it.”

Marty cracks a grin despite himself. “Luckiest two-year-old in the state,” he says. “Getting her own Rustin Cohle original.”

“Oh, I don’t know nothin’ about that,” Rust says, and he won’t look at Marty when he says it but there’s a smile humming through his voice as he does. “Didn’t sign it with my name anyhow.”

Marty snorts and glances over, eyes heavy on the side of the other man’s face. “Oh yeah?” he says. “I suspect art forgery, then.”

“Naw,” Rust says. “She’ll know who it’s from.”

It isn’t until they go back inside and down a couple glasses of lemonade that he wanders back into the office, footprints pressing into the faded sheet spread across the floor. The shower is running down the hall and Marty steps up to the canvas, bright and alive with splashes of color.

Down in the corner there’s only one word, scratched out in familiar slanting letters that Marty knows like the back of his hand. Poppy.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Marty opens the house up in late March, just a few short days after the vernal equinox pulls them into the arms of spring. He could’ve done it earlier in the year, what with the temperamental hemming and hawing of Louisiana’s warmer wintertime weather, but there seems to be something of an ingrained ritual in the act—like the groundhog waiting for his shadow to herald in brighter and greener days, Marty will wait for a breeze to pass them into some small yearly renewal.

Rust watches him move through each bedroom, dusting off neglected sills and pushing open all the windows and the patio door to let the wind and the light in. The little house seems to take a sighing breath when he does, exhaling out last year’s smells in favor of new ones. Freshly cut grass and cold well water, and the sweet smell of white blossoms unfurling on the clementine tree out back. The sound of familiar glass chimes move through the house, too, seeming to dart around corners and follow Rust’s footsteps as he walks down the hall and into the bedroom.

Midmorning light fills the room, slanting in across the carpet until it touches Rust’s feet. He watches Marty from the doorway, eyes following the other man as he strips the blankets and sheets off their bed and leaves them in a soft pile on the floor.

“Didn’t know you were this big on the spring cleaning,” he says, leaning his shoulder into the jamb and crossing his ankles. They’ve both showered and had their coffee and breakfast, though there’d been no real plans pulled together or laid out for the rest of the day.

“Just wanted to air things out a little bit,” Marty says while he bends to gather all the linens up in his arms. He makes a squinty smile at Rust and lets their shoulders brush while he moves into the hallway and toward the laundry room, bones creaking just a tad while he walks. “My mama used to do the same from time to time when I was growing up.”

What little Rust knows and remembers about Deidre Hart has been mostly passed along secondhand from Marty over the years, through memories and moments small enough to fit inside a store-bought greeting card. He’s seen where she’s buried and he’d met her only once, a long time ago now—on a holiday weekend in ’97 or ’98, walking down Marty’s driveway with her handbag and a dish of leftovers in her arms. Her hair had been set in white curls and she’d smelled of Yardley’s lavender, and Rust isn’t surprised to know she’d wash all her bed linens on the first yawning day of spring, but he smiles in knowing that Marty has saved and kept this small part of her for himself.

The washing machine runs through the morning, spinning and drumming along with the dancing wind chimes. Marty cleans the bathroom mirror and the one hanging behind the bedroom door with long wipes of a white cloth before he sits cross-legged on the living room floor to start peering through whatever’s been stacked up on the coffee table. Rust listens from where he’s sprawled on the sofa with a book balanced on his stomach, looking up from time to time to watch Marty over the cracked spine.

There are a few fishing magazines and a bright yellow flyer one of the neighborhood kids had tucked under the front mat advertising his lawn care services. A pile of opened mail, two manila case files, and a page ripped out of a coloring book with some crude but precious crayon scribbles doodled over an innocent pony’s face. Marty goes through it all and separates everything into two piles: the pony picture by a certain two-year-old stays and finds a home tucked away in his desk drawer, and a few of the magazines and the junk mail all go into the bin for recycling. He studies the yellow flyer for a little longer than needed, though it eventually winds up in the trash, too.

Marty still likes mowing his own lawn, at least most of the time.

The washer rings when its cycle is finished and Marty pushes himself up off the floor and pads away. Rust turns the page in his book but his eyes aren’t quite reading the words more than staring at them. He’s comfortable where he lays, warm enough and grateful for the breeze coming in off the patio, but when Marty comes back through the room carrying a laundry basket full of washing he takes that as his cue to stand up and leisurely follow him out into the yard.

Shoes seem like an afterthought on a day like this one, and Rust shivers a little when the soles of his feet touch cool grass, not yet baked hard by the unrelenting beat of summer. Marty is already standing beneath the oldest oak tree, lightly tugging and testing a heavy line he’d carefully strung out a few days before. Just something temporary, he’d told Rust with a sheepish kind of grin, like it somehow mattered where their clothes got dry. Rust felt something jump and tremble a little up behind his ribs at the sight, but he didn’t tell Marty that.

Don’t make any big difference to me is all he’d said, thinking all the while that he was damned lucky somebody cared enough to hang his old shirts out on a line at all.

Marty doesn’t bother with pinning anything this morning, though he calls back over his shoulder like he knew Rust would be standing there. “Come help me with these real quick,” he says, bending over to pull a damp sheet from the basket. He passes two corners of the pale blue cotton into Rust’s hands without another word and they shake it open together, stepping back to unravel the sheet between them like a heavy flag.

The scent of clean linen fills Rust’s nose, sharp but vaguely sweet when it sparks in the air. Most smells tend to accompany color-hued visions and memory for him, but the soapy smell of laundry detergent mostly makes him think of Marty. He remembers another time, a long while ago, when he’d go to the Hart household in another lifetime and Maggie’s kitchen would be filled with the perfumed scent of fabric softener. That was who she was back then, somehow—the coolness of fresh mint with her shades of lilac and dryer-spun denim. Marty used to come to work in the mornings and his shirts would still smell like starched lavender when he walked past Rust’s desk just right, leaving a mixed wave of floral and spiced cologne along behind him.

These days Marty doesn’t smell like lavender anymore, having been washing and drying his own clothes for a long time now. His soap is bright and blue, fresh and crisp but something shared only between the two of them. Rust never cared what his fucking clothes smelled like before, so long as they were clean, seeing how the stink of smoke and the booze would’ve choked it out anyhow—but those days are further gone now, too. He doesn’t smell much like an ashtray in a back country bar anymore, at least according to Marty’s nose.

That gradual change in itself was a little something like learning to breathe again, though Rust doesn’t say as much aloud.

When the bedsheets are hung along the line and swaying in the breeze, a tiny meow sounds from across the yard. Rust looks up from here he’s standing near Marty’s side, and the both of them silently watch as four little paws move through the grass toward where they wait for her. Ghost only momentarily pauses to look up at the drying linens before she ducks underneath and trills again in greeting.

“Where you been, miss thing?” Marty asks, bending over to pick the empty laundry basket back up. He looks down at the cat and tuts at her before tipping his head back to peer at the wide blue sky. Rust feels Ghost winding around his ankles but his gaze is caught on Marty, watching the shapes of clouds move across the glassy part of his eyes.

“What’re you thinking about,” Rust murmurs after a long moment. He doesn’t really know why he asks, but he does know that he can. Marty’s face cracks into a smile before he answers, a private kind of grin quirking up at the edges of his mouth.

“I dunno,” he says, shifting the basket around on his hip. He drops his eyes to glance at Rust before they return to watch the wind rustle through the white buds opening up on their clementine tree. Ghost mews again and Rust finally bends to pick her up this time, holding her up against his chest.

“You,” Marty says. “My mom. How fucking pretty it is out here. Whatever.”

Rust hums softly at that, letting it lie as it is. He leans over to drop the cat in Marty’s empty hamper and then taps the back of the other man’s ankle with his foot. “C’mon,” he says. “Got an idea.”

An old blanket is pulled down out of the hallway closet and Rust retrieves his forgotten book from where he’d left it on the coffee table. Marty trails back into the yard in Rust’s wake, eyes narrowed a little but following him all the same. He holds the patio door open for the cat and lets her back out too, watching as she darts across the lawn with her black tail fluffed up and held high.

They both settle on their backs in the cool grass, looking up at cottonmouth clouds moving between the branches of the swaying oak tree. The glass stars are still chiming on the porch and Marty closes his eyes and crosses his hands over his stomach while he listens to the day around them. Rust reads silently to himself and then a little out loud, offering up a small passage or two when Marty asks.

“Sometimes I’d open the windows up and lay out like this on the floor in the spring and summertime,” Rust says after a while, setting his book face down on the blanket to mark his place. “In that little house behind the bar, when it got warm enough.”

“It’s hard for me, even imagining you living back there,” Marty says. He keeps his eyes closed but a tiny furrow draws between his brows while his mind works something over.

“Wasn’t all too bad,” Rust says. He thinks of the rosy sunset glancing off the lake at dusk and the deafening song of frogs and crickets in the evening, how the wind would pass over him at midnight and feel like someone familiar breathing across his bare skin. Sometimes he’d smoke in the dark, and it seemed like the breaths he exhaled would make shapes and curl into signs and secrets untold. “You know I don’t need much.”

The neighborhood is quiet around them, nobody out mowing or chasing their kids around the yard at this time of day. Rust breathes in a deep lungful of air and can smell clean soap as the wind blows toward them, passing through the blue sheets like a sieve.

“If you’re asking me, you know what I think,” Marty says. He cracks open an eye to study the side of Rust’s face before looking toward the sky again. “You deserve a good bit more than just what you need.”

Rust smiles a little at that even though Marty isn’t looking at him. “Maybe I’d say the same thing about you,” he says.

“That’s funny,” Marty says with a little snort, slowly turning over onto his side to tuck an elbow up underneath his head. He’s facing Rust now, trying and failing to look mildly cross. “Because here I was thinkin’, maybe everything I need is exactly what I wanted anyhow.”

“You got lucky, then,” Rust says, watching Marty from beneath the spread of his lashes.

“Reckon I did,” Marty tells him, and then scoots a smidge closer until his nose is pressed into the soft shoulder of Rust’s shirt. “You smell good, at least.”

Rust props himself up on one elbow and peers down at Marty, all sleepy blue eyes and the wind carding through his hair. He doesn’t try to hide anything on his face while he searches across the open expression on Marty’s. “Must be your soap,” he says, leaning lower to narrow the small gap left between them.

“Must be,” Marty says, and reaches up to pull Rust the rest of the way down to meet him.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

It rains long and hard late in the summer, the kind of driving wind and water that knocks moss and limbs from the trees and chokes the house gutters until they verge on overflowing. The grass grows lush and thick but everything is sodden to the core and slimy to the touch, damp and steaming when the temperature cranks back up in the afternoon and heat rolls off the pavement in waves. Damn near stifling, and Marty vows to stay inside with the air conditioner running on full blast every spare moment he can muster.

It’s no big surprise, then, that Rust wants to take a day trip somewhere down south on a Friday morning while black storm clouds brew and boil to the east.

“In this weather?” Marty asks, pulling his reading glasses off his face and looking away from the newscaster droning on the television. “I can think of any number of shittier things I’d rather do than take 90 southbound in the driving rain.”

“We ain’t got nothing better to do,” Rust murmurs, picking up his sweating glass of water and staring at the vitamins left in a little dish for him on the counter, same as every other morning. “Unless you had big plans burning a hole in your pocket I hadn’t caught onto yet.”

Marty gestures at the TV screen where the weather radar is showing bands of angry orange and red flashing over most of the state of Louisiana. “Maybe I’d planned on sitting my ass at home and being content in the relative safety of the warm and inviting indoors,” he says, pausing while the weatherman warns for approaching lightning storms. “Keepin’ company with my loving and sensible partner, who I was hoping would settle down and read a good book or something.”

Rust works his jaw for a moment, mulling that over while the other man watches him from across the room. “I’ll drive,” he says, and Marty laughs aloud because he knows that’s all the concession he’ll get.

“Tell me,” he says, reaching up to rub against one of his temples, intrigued now. “Where it is you’re itching to go all of a sudden.”

“Erath,” Rust says simply.

“Erath,” Marty nearly shouts. “What in God’s name is down in Erath that you’d want to see on a day like this, when there’s hardly nothing but old cane fields and muddy road for miles.”

They watch each other for a long pause, Rust not telling and Marty mentally flipping through a thousand different possibilities until realization dawns on his face, making his features flicker with a shadow come and gone.

“Rust,” Marty says, careful and wary all at once. All of a sudden he’s got that old tightened look around his eyes that makes Rust’s stomach clench, the one where he’s trying to decide if Rust might break or bolt if he moves too fast.

“Don’t look at me like that, Marty,” Rust says, taking a deep breath. He looks down at his goddamn vitamins, still nestled in their little dish. “There ain’t nothing wrong.”

That seems to soften Marty’s expression somewhat, though it doesn’t wipe all the worry from his eyes. “Well, you can’t blame me for being surprised,” he says, then goes quieter for a second. “What’s got you thinking about the case?”

“I woke up thinking about it,” Rust says, not mentioning that he thinks about it nearly every other day still, probably will for the rest of his natural life or longer. “Not so much Dora as the place itself. Last time I was there—it was a day kinda like this, dark and wet. Everything was saturated, had that ozone smell hanging on it.”

Marty mouth presses into a thinner line, reaching up to scratch through the whiskers along his jaw. “I must’ve not been there with you.”

“You weren’t,” Rust says quietly. “I went alone. And I didn’t want to tell you straightaway this morning, but I figured if I went by myself and you caught wind of it you’d probably go off in a state fit to be tied.”

This time Marty smiles, shaking the last of the caution from his voice. “Damn straight I would,” he says, and then chuckles to himself a bit. “You’re starting to sound like me, talking like that.”

“Well,” Rust says, pushing his vitamins around on the counter now. His mind keeps trying to stray elsewhere, memories snared around a place he hasn’t been in over ten years. He can smell it if he closes his eyes—the dusty road, cigarette and fire smoke, the new-plastic static scent of his unworn windbreaker. Dora hadn’t been dead long enough to smell like anything other than cold earth and January morning. Even if she’d had, Marty’s cologne that day was strong enough to stick in his nose long after they’d left the car.

Marty worries along his bottom lip with his teeth, caught up in his own thoughts. “I mean, obviously you could go on if you wanted to,” he says. “I just wouldn’t want you to be—out there on your own, y’know.”

They both know that Rust is more than capable of taking care of himself and Marty to boot, but neither say it aloud. Rust knows what Marty means, what he’s really saying, and he’s thankful for it. Despite what he might’ve believed in another place and time, some things are just easier when they aren’t weathered alone.

On the television screen the news confirms the thunderstorms will only keep building as they pass through and persist into the night. Marty sighs and picks up the remote, presses the off button and slides his hands down his thighs where he sits.

“We’re gonna drive all the way down to Erath to see a tree?” he asks.

“A tree,” Rust agrees, though there’s something more to it than that.

“Alright then,” Marty says, then stands and presses a fist into the small of his back while he stretches. “Guess we’d better rustle up a goddamn raincoat or two.”

Thunder moans somewhere in the distance, deep and angry. Rust watches Marty shuffle down the hall to the guest room and disappear through the doorway, shortly followed by the creak and rattle of the closet doors being pulled open. He brings a thumbnail up to his mouth and tries not to bite it while he waits, though temptation wins out in the end.

“Shit, look here,” Marty’s voice calls out. He jostles around and Rust hears the faint but telltale sound of fingertips scratching down polyester and nylon. “I always forget about this thing.”

He steps back into the hall and holds up his old department-issue windbreaker, hangered and pressed flat by too many years spent book-ended between winter coats.

“Y’know, I think this is the original,” Marty says, shaking the sleeves out some with a dusty sniff. “Damn things weren’t ever replaced because we didn’t wear them enough to need another one.

Rust’s is long since gone, thrown out on the curb in a can with whatever else he couldn’t haul north in his truck across the border. Probably illegal to throw out police uniforms like that, come to think of it, but he hadn’t cared at the time. “Practically antique,” he tells Marty, trying to ease and settle back on his haunches some while he waits. “You gonna wear it for old time’s sake?”

“Hell no, smartass,” Marty snorts, quickly disappearing back into the spare room so his voice muffles again. “Probably wouldn’t fit anymore anyhow.”

He comes back a few moments later with a raincoat and a windbreaker with a hood, practically new, both of which they’ve probably only worn three or four times total in twice as many years. Rust is already dressed in full but Marty looks down at his own house shoes and sighs, longsuffering, not quite ready to trade soft fleece lining for his boots just yet.

“Give me a minute, babe,” he says, passing the coats off to Rust while a rumble of thunder shakes the sliding glass door. “I wasn’t exactly prepared to go on a safari into Erath just yet.”

“I’ll meet you in the truck,” Rust says, sliding his key ring off the counter into his hand, and then stills while he watches Marty turn and head back down the hall again. He’s struck with the urge to say something, anything, but isn’t completely sure what words are trying to crawl up his throat.

“Marty,” he calls after a few beats of quiet, wetting his bottom lip while he waits.

“Huh,” Marty answers, stepping through the bedroom doorway to finish putting his right leg into a pair of jeans. He drops his boots on the carpet with a thud and then threads his belt together, standing there in the dim daylight, the focal point of Rust’s tunnel vision. When he finishes with his pants he gets his shoes in hand and looks up and smiles, eyebrows high on his forehead even though the expression remains warm and familiar. “What, you got cold feet all a sudden?”

Then it crystallizes in Rust’s mind, perhaps for the thousandth or millionth time, that Marty has agreed to go with him simply because he loves Rust more than he hates anything else.

“Thank you,” is all he says. It almost comes out like a croak, but Marty hears him all the same.

“Better be glad I like you as much as I do,” he teases, unknowingly tapping into Rust’s vein of thought somehow, lightly thumping him in the side as he passes by and drops into the chair to start doing his laces. “Go ahead and get the truck cranked if you want, I’ll be out in just a second.”

Outside the air is full of humid promise, heavy with the smell of approaching rain. Rust stows their coats in the back seat and then spots the cat perched on a neighbor’s fencepost, watching him with her tail curled around her feet.

He whistles to her, snapping his fingers once and waiting to see if she’ll jump down and come home. Ghost blinks but doesn’t move, apparently the silent and unyielding Sphinx this morning.

“You’d better come on,” Rust says, watching her with a hand on his hip. The neighborhood seems empty this morning, still quiet with most of the tenants likely tucked into the soft rooms and corners of their houses. “Rain’s coming.”

The front door shuts and locks and then Marty’s there, squinting at her through the overcast light not yet choked out by storm clouds. “She’ll find her a place to hide,” he says. “Been wanting to stay out more than usual, anyway.”

“Wonder why,” Rust muses aloud, taking one last glance before opening the truck’s door and hauling himself up into the driver seat.

“I dunno,” Marty says, swinging up into the cab while Rust turns the engine over. He straps into his seatbelt and clears his throat, pointedly waiting until Rust finally relents and does the same, clicking the buckle into place. “Sure hope we hit the interstate before this shit boils over, though. You need me to pull up the map?”

“Naw,” Rust says. He can already see the map shining in his head, roads lit up like threads of neon-vibrant spider silk. “I still know the way.”

* * *

The truck merges off the highway just shy of an hour, leading them down an exit that’ll verge into the outer limits of Erath. Rain had finally broken through at a little past half-ten in the morning, though the worst of it seemed to be blowing west toward Texas. For the time being only a few stray drops gather and bead on the windshield, streaking down the windows as the truck rolls on.

The back roads out here run parallel to shallow ditches and farm runoffs, most of them filled with trash and debris blown off the interstate. Cane fields sprawl onward across the land as far as the eye can see, only interrupted by old wooden houses and barns bleached bone-white from nearly a century spent baking under the sun. There are trees aplenty, gnarled and ancient oaks with branches that nearly touch the ground in some places, but none of them are the one Rust is looking for.

“When you came back out here by yourself that time,” Marty says a little while later, pausing as they go over a dip in the road but not bothering to mute the radio. “When was that?”

Rust slides his hands around the steering wheel so they rest at the bottom, eyes still on the coming skyline. “Little bit before we parted ways back in ’02.”

“I’d figured as much,” Marty says, gone quiet again for a moment, and then laughs. “Even after Salter probably would’ve ground your ass into dust for even daring to think too much about it.”

“Fuck him,” Rust says plainly, making Marty snort again. “What Salter didn’t care to know is that the place was still active even then. He’d been back again, though by that time I wasn’t gonna be the one to put in a fuckin’ report on it, especially after they put me out on suspension.”

He’d been back again. Marty doesn’t need to ask who, though the thought alone makes the hair on the backs of his arms prickle and stand up straight. “How’d you know it was Childress? And better yet, why the hell didn’t you think to tell me something like that?”

Rust weighs that out, works his jaw a bit as he turns down a side road. “You didn’t exactly have your ears open to it at the time. Suppose I thought it best I took matters into my own hands on the periphery.”

“Good Lord,” Marty groans, almost pained. He drags a hand down his face and seems to slump lower in his seat. “Rust, I—”

“I forgave you for all that a long time ago, Marty,” Rust says, quiet. “You know I share some of the blame. Done is done, and it’s been done for more than a while now.”

Marty blows out a long sigh, resigned to the truth of it. “I know.”

“So you’re here with me now,” Rust says, eyes on something further ahead of them, and when Marty looks out the water-spotted windshield his stomach tightens a little at the sight. “That’s all that matters.”

The road that leads back through the growing sugarcane is still nothing but packed and leveled dirt, though the rain has left it sodden and craggy with flooded potholes. Rust slows the truck to a crawl as they navigate down the wider lane, passing two other oaks that don’t boast the same age or height as their third sister, leading up to the big tree like ladies in waiting. The turnoff is still marked by an old wooden electric pole, driven like some kind of makeshift cross into the ground.

Twenty years have passed, but it all looks the same give or take the cruder details of a crime scene.

“Think I’m gettin’ a headache,” Marty mumbles, reaching up to press two fingers into his eyes as they roll to a stop on the dirt road.

“Probably the weather,” Rust says, though he feels a pressure building behind his forehead, too. “We won’t stay long.”

They slide out of the truck into the roll of thunder, boots already caked in mud by the time they take two steps on the ground. Rust turns and looks down the road in either direction, squinting into flat-rolled nothingness save for a few scrubby swamp trees that look more like overgrown weeds sprung up along the horizon.

Marty zips his rain jacket up halfway, seeming to clutch it tighter against himself even though it’s the height of August. “That old chimney’s still standing,” he says quietly, nodding toward the remnants of brick structure resting atop a rusted hearth, worn down by years and weather but unmoved all the same. A monument by its own right, though Rust doesn’t let himself say it reminds him of a crumbling grave marker aloud.

“C’mon,” he tells Marty, though he moves closer to the other man, letting their hands brush in a small moment of reassurance.

They follow old tractor tracks up the little lane, past the high grass and an old car tire thrown out into the field. It’s sprinkling again though the drops turn heavier and ping like marbles against their jackets when they walk up beneath the canopy of the tree. Everything alive is verdant and green, covered with ferns and slick with rainwater, and Rust thinks back to old memories of deep jungle growing around the mouth of a labyrinth.

Neither man speaks, the two of them standing there shoulder-to-shoulder at the base of the broad trunk. Rust looks up at the higher branches and points out a coil of frayed rope still tied around one, rotted where it’d been broken or snapped in half some time ago. It sways gently in the wind while the treetop shimmers and groans in the coming storm, and anybody who didn’t know wouldn’t remember the net of tied sticks that once hung there.

“What would you have done,” Marty says, somber but with a gleam of nervous laughter in his voice, “if we’d rolled up here and one of them ugly stick sculptures was sitting out, just waiting for us.”

Rust sniffs at the air some, sucking in the sharpness of petrichor and ozone as he breaks away from Marty’s side to walk in a wider perimeter around the tree. “I dunno,” he says. “Burned it, probably.”

Just as the words leave his mouth, he stops where he stands and looks down at something settled among the old roots that Marty can’t see yet. “That’s new.”

It’s a small wooden cross, once painted white but now peeling and lopsided where it was jammed into the ground. Somebody had taken what looks like blue puff paint from the craft store and written out one name across the front, four letters worn but unmistakable, and then adorned each point of the cross with a painted star.

“Dora,” Marty reads, staring hard at the little cross. There’s no other decoration or writing on it, save for a string of pink Mardi Gras beads somebody had strung along the arms, too-bright and vulgar out here among nothing but dirt and plants and dead things. “Who d’you reckon put it out here?”

“No telling,” Rust says, squatting down on his heels to straighten the memorial. “I wouldn’t bet too high on Charlie.”

Marty’s mouth twists, cutting what was meant to be a withering look at the back of Rust’s head. “Her mama?”

“Nah,” Rust says, “too girlish and familiar for that. It was somebody who knew her, old friend maybe.”

He immediately thinks of floral cotton overalls and the sickly-sweet smell of cheap cotton candy perfume, chipped glitter nail polish and how Beth had asked if he’d be coming back by the ranch later once she’d handed Dora’s duffel and notebook over. Seems unlikely that she’d care, all these years later, but he wouldn’t be so surprised if she’d caught wind of the case in the news and driven out on some kind of soul-searching errand, just to tie up the edges of a loose memory.

Course, maybe he and Marty are here doing the same damn thing. Rust ponders that and then decides he won’t bring up Beth’s name unless Marty comes to the conclusion himself, standing back up to his full height while his knees creak beneath him. That ache is still throbbing behind his eyes, something like dull sinus pressure from the sheer weight of the atmosphere.

“You didn’t tell me what made you think he’d been back,” Marty says, eyes still on the cross. “I’m sure this wasn’t here at the time.”

“More sticks,” Rust says, making a circular motion in the open air with one hand. He pauses, waiting for another groan of thunder to rumble past. “Arranged like a mandala, almost. Open in the center and feathered out from there—some kind of symbol, I’m sure. Completeness or incompleteness depending on how you’d wanna look at it.”

Marty grunts at that, finally turning to look elsewhere across the landscape. “After all that, we shoulda called him the fuckin’ Arts and Crafts Killer.”

Rain is falling harder now, sliding off their coats and making the damp, oily smell of warm earth rise up from the ground in mimicry of a sauna. The tree sways like an arthritic dancer, groaning and creaking as if it’s come to animated life, and in some ways Rust thinks it has. He has questions he’d like to ask it, though those secrets are long since soaked and buried away for safekeeping.

“I don’t think he deserves a name,” Rust says, unflinching even when a heavy raindrop hits his neck and slides down his back beneath the coat. “Once we’re gone, he won’t have the privilege of being remembered.”

Marty reaches out and fixes the hood on Rust’s coat, making it so the rain can’t dampen his collar anymore. “When people let themselves forget about things, I think it makes them more apt to happen again.”

“Maybe on a personal level,” Rust says. “A human level.” He steps away and touches Marty’s elbow, leading the way back toward the waiting truck. “But in the broad scheme of shit that goes on in this world, evil having a name won’t stop it from happening again.”

They track through the mud, not caring enough to run but still hunched against the falling rain. A ramshackle pickup roars past on the road and slows but doesn’t stop, hurrying along once the driver has afforded themselves a glance at the pair of men walking down the dirt lane.

Back in the truck with the heat cranked on, Marty shrugs out of his coat and leaves it in the floorboard before taking Rust’s and doing the same. “Well,” he says, anticlimactic. “We came, we saw. You satisfied with the trip?”

“Reckon so,” Rust says, shifting into drive. He checks his mirror and then starts to pull back onto the road, the truck lurching some as it briefly sticks on the wet shoulder, and then stops when Marty quickly says, “Hey, hey—hold on a second.”

The engine idles where they sit and Rust looks over at Marty, waiting on an explanation.

“Don’t you laugh at me,” Marty says, fiddling with the edge of his seatbelt, “but I feel like I need to—say a fuckin’ prayer, or something. I don’t know.”

Rust blinks at that, and if Marty was expecting any dissent or sanctimonious speechmaking it never comes. “Alright.”

“You know I ain’t all that religious,” Marty prefaces again, a little more sure of himself this time. “I just think it’d be a cleansing sort of thing, y’know…to clear the air and all.”  

“Marty,” Rust says, almost softly. “After all this time, I can’t say I’d be willing to begrudge you much of anything at all, much less something that brought you peace of mind.”

Marty looks like something’s stuck in his craw, though he quickly reaches out and motions for Rust to give him his hand. “Okay,” he says, blowing out a deep breath. “Alright, bear with me here.”

He says his few words and Rust doesn’t bow his head but he closes his eyes, mostly focusing on Marty’s hand wrapped around his. He doesn’t think about the God he hasn’t ever really believed in, though his belief in what he feels for Marty might be close to the same thing.

Something to think about, maybe.

Marty doesn’t end with an amen, though he squeezes Rust’s hand and laughs a little bit as they finally get back on the road. “What we really need now is a couple aspirin and a good cup of coffee.”

“You wanna stop somewhere or head on home?” Rust asks.

“Home,” Marty answers, sitting back to get comfortable in his seat as the wipers clear the windshield facing north. “I think I’ve had enough adventuring for one damn day.”

* * *

The sky is dark even at midday, their little house cast over with grey and dreary shadow despite the streetlamps come on as if it were nearing dusk. Marty gets their wet coats out of the floorboard and jogs up to the porch, halfheartedly shaking the fabric out before draping it over the railing tucked up under their awning.

He waits while Rust locks the truck and takes his time walking through the rain and up the steps, little dark spots of water dotting his shoulders and shirtfront. He pushes a hand through his hair to get it off his forehead, the silver in it shining even beneath dull half-light, and then drops down in the wooden porch swing they’d hung the summer before.

“You don’t want to get outta those wet clothes?” Marty asks, taking Rust’s keys from his open palm to unlock the front door.

“Not right this second,” Rust says, using his heel to slowly push himself back and forth. “You go on in if you want.”

Marty does, though the porch lamp flickers on once he’s inside and he returns a few minutes later, unchanged save for the fact he’s brought two cups of coffee and a whole bottle of aspirin.

“I’ll let you self-medicate,” he says, passing one of the mugs and pills to Rust as he settles down next to him on the swing. “I know you didn’t say nothing but you got that look like you’re grinding nails between your molars.”

Rust murmurs his thanks and necks two aspirin dry before he starts sipping at his coffee. It’s hot and bitter-black and tastes even better than normal, maybe with a smooth bite of peppermint, though he suspects that’s because Marty made it and slipped something in there for the sake of clearing their heads out.

The swing in relative silence, listening to the rain fall against the shingles overhead, and only when the storm begins to fade does Rust catch the telltale sound of a little bell ringing from somewhere across the yard.

He waits and watches, and sure enough Ghost comes slinking around the house, high-stepping in the grass to keep her white paws from getting too wet. She stays tucked up beneath the eaves in the little dry strip of ground not damp with rain, though she stops to look back behind her as if she was waiting on something to follow.

Marty spots her now that he’s finished his coffee and tuts to himself, resting his empty mug on his knee. “Uh-huh, bet you got all wet,” he says. “Out here running amok in this weather like you’re too good to be a housecat.”

Ghost is still looking behind her, tip of her tail twitching while she waits, and by all means both men aren’t expecting it when a little orange and white blur darts around the corner of the house and nearly runs headlong into the calico. The two cats briefly tussle and chase each other up toward the porch, Ghost scrambling up the steps with her fluffed tail askew while the newcomer stops short to crouch behind a bush blooming with gardenia, intent on hiding now that it sees they aren’t alone.

“What on earth,” Marty says, leaning over Rust to try and get a better look at the tiny cat mostly hidden from view. Ghost is unconcerned now that she’s out of the rain, already gone about grooming herself where she sits beneath the awning.

“Must be a stray,” Rust says, though he doesn’t move to get up and look. “Probably feral.”

Marty sets his mug down and gets up with some ado, cutting Rust a crooked look. “What, and you’re just gonna let her sit out in the rain? I can tell you didn’t watch much Mr. Rogers as a kid.”

Rust makes some kind of noise low in his throat, slowly bringing his coffee up to his mouth. “What makes you think it’s a girl?”

“Well,” Marty says, going over to the edge of the porch to crouch down and look at the little creature tucked under their gardenias. “Just looked small, is all—petite, as they say.”

The cat meows pitifully, one solemn note that makes Ghost get up to go investigate her forgotten comrade’s whereabouts. She curls around Marty’s leg and rubs up against him, meowing back something that sounds vaguely encouraging.

“Aw, Rust,” Marty says in a plaintive voice, turning to look at the other man over his shoulder. “They’re buddies.”

“I seem to remember a conversation we had one time,” Rust drawls, “about projecting emotions and assumption onto evidence that isn’t considered proven fact.”

Marty laughs and swears under his breath, getting back up to head for the door. “You sit here and watch her,” he says. “I’m gonna try something.”

When Marty comes back a minute later he’s got a plastic tupperware dish full of cat kibble, shaking it around and making little kissy sounds as he settles down on the top porch step and sits the food on the sidewalk. “C’mere, little kitty,” he says. “Rust ain’t as mean as he looks, he’s just playing hard to get.”

The cat doesn’t move an inch, still only barely visible under the leaves. Ghost goes down the stairs to sit between it and Marty like a tiny Bastet, some kind of feline ambassador for this first new meeting.

“She ain’t gonna budge with you sitting that close,” Rust says, folding himself down onto the step to Marty’s far right without warning. “Scoot down here with me so she won’t feel crowded.”

Marty slides down and practically plasters himself against Rust’s side, squeezing his knee when a little apricot-colored face pokes out from underneath a dewy flower. Her nose sniffs the air, twitching while she takes a step further out onto the sidewalk, then another and another until she’s face-down in the plastic dish and crunching on cat food like she hasn't eaten a day in her life.

“Shhh,” Rust whispers, watching at ease. Marty’s looking at the tiny cat like he’s practically never seen one before, as if they’ve been living with Ghost as a roommate instead of a pet this whole time, her presence some kind of unique sovereignty that just so happens to need some dry food shaken out in a dish twice a day.

“She’s a pretty little thing, huh,” he says, barely inching to the left as he tries to get closer. “Like peaches over ice cream.”

“With fleas, I’m sure,” Rust says. “Couple ticks for good measure.”

“Aren’t you just a big ol' ray of sunshine today,” Marty mumbles, trying his best not to spook her. “I just want to see if she’s people-friendly.”

The little cat is still busy eating, though she glances up at Marty while she chews, keeping him in her line of sight. He eventually gets close enough to be about a foot away and after that she bolts, silently tearing off back around the house with her ears pinned low. Ghost gets up on her haunches in a rush and Marty scoops her up before she can take off, hoisting her against his chest despite a brief struggle.

“Not you, missy,” he says, almost browbeaten now that their guest is gone. The sky rumbles again as what little sun had broken through the cloud cover begins to withdraw and disappear. “Your friend must’ve had somewhere important to be.”

Rust pulls himself to his feet, going to collect their empty coffee cups off the porch railing. “You want her to come back, all you’ve gotta do is leave that food out here. Canned food probably do the trick even better.”

“Shit,” Marty snorts, thudding back up the steps with Ghost still in hand. “Be more likely to catch a raccoon or a possum. That’ll be the last thing I need to step on when I go out to get the fuckin’ paper before dawn.”

“Suit yourself,” Rust says lightly, holding the door open for Marty as they head back inside. “She might come around anyway now that she’s made a friend.”

“You know I still don’t like cats all that much,” Marty says as he breezes past into the foyer and deposits Ghost on the back of a chair. “But she needed help—y’know, in the interest of being a Good Samaritan and all.”

“Mmhmm,” Rust hums, locking the door as the August rain starts pouring overhead once more.

He doesn’t say anything about it when the food dish fills up on its own that night, or when an empty cool whip container full of fresh water appears next to it the morning after. An empty box lined with an old towel will come a week later, tucked up in a dry spot beneath the awning where the rain doesn’t hit it on the porch.

A couple of hot showers and fresh clothes do them a small wonder, and after lunch—and with a little sweetness and cajoling—Marty lures Rust down the hall and into the bedroom before all but tackling him on the half-made bed.

“Oh no,” Marty says in a put-on voice, sounding vaguely theatrical while he slides a hand up Rust’s side beneath the soft cotton of his t-shirt. “I think I’ve still got that headache after you dragged me out into hell’s boonies today to gawk at an old crime scene we had no business going to.”

Rust’s voice sounds like a smile when he answers, though he lets Marty keep kissing along the hinge under his jaw. “Guess you’d better lay down and rest, then.”

Marty laughs but then hums in agreement, pressing one last kiss by Rust’s ear before snuggling in and pushing their legs together. “We could surely use a nap.”

“You could use a nap, you mean.”

“Then what’d you follow me in here for, slick?” Marty asks, voice rumbling between them.

“Because I knew you’d ask,” Rust says, pressing one of his cold feet against Marty’s calf and then locking his knees together when Marty hisses and tries to pull away. “And maybe because I wanted to.”

“Well ain’t I lucky,” Marty snorts, though he reaches around and hooks an arm over Rust’s side to pull him just a little bit closer.

Rust is content enough to be held while the afternoon whittles away with summertime storms, warm and suddenly sleepy here with Marty wrapped around him. “Don’t know about that,” he says softly. “Luck’s got nothing to do with it.”

Chapter Text

Just like much of anything else he’s ever done, as it seems to Marty most days, Rust glides through the water with a practiced kind of ease. His strokes are strong and fluid, pulling him along the surface of the lake like some sleek cormorant. He dips below the surface on his return lap to the dock and disappears from view for a few long seconds, only rising above water again to wrap a cool hand around Marty’s calf.

“You’d better be glad I was watching you and not anything else,” Marty says, peering down at the other man bobbing a foot below him in the water. “Or I suspect you’d have a few less teeth right now.”

“There ain’t nothing out here that’s gonna get you,” Rust tells him, unfazed, not quite letting go in favor of letting his hand slip down to Marty’s ankle. “’Cept me, maybe.”

That sentiment lingers in the calm air between them for a few beats, and then Marty’s eyes cut sharp. “Don’t you do it,” he says, growling around what might be a hidden laugh. “I still got clothes on.”

“Then take ‘em off,” Rust drawls without pause. The evidence of his own conviction in that idea is folded up on the dock’s edge beside Marty—boots, jeans, boxer briefs and all. He’s as naked as a tadpole in the water, drops clinging to his temples and mingling with the freckles on his browning shoulders.

Marty’s glad there isn’t anybody else around for a few good miles.

* * * * *

Marty raises up on his knees for a moment and wavers just the littlest bit, faltering when he usually never does, and Rust could’ve seen the hesitation on his face even with both eyes closed.

He doesn’t push it. One of his hands rests against Marty’s thigh, more reassurance than anything urging. Just a suggestion, or maybe a reminder that they’re here, together, for good reason.

“You don’t have to,” Rust says gently, looking up at Marty from under his lashes. The other man has set back on his haunches even though he’s still straddling Rust’s pelvis like it’s a bronc about to buck him off. Tense from the top of his head to the tips of his fingers.

“Damn it, Rust,” Marty says, throat working some while he looks away. “I want to, but—”

“But what,” Rust says, skimming his fingers up to Marty’s waist so his thumb rests in the crease of one thigh.

Marty laughs, sounding a little shaken and hollowed-out. “I’m old,” he says, reaching up to wipe a hand across his face. “Too old to be doing things like this.”

Rust blinks at him slowly, lips turned up at the corners just a tad. “That your brain or your body talkin’?”

“Little bit of both,” Marty concedes with a long sigh. “Shit, you know I ain’t nothing special to look at. Feel dumb as fucking hell up here.”

Rust could tell him he’s been following the halo of light behind Marty’s head for the past five minutes, how it makes the room brighter and shines a little bit like the dust on a butterfly’s wings. He doesn’t say as much, though. Marty would cut and run like hell if there was one more tick against his masculinity chart, them already folded up in a delicate situation such as this.

“We’re both old, last I checked,” Rust says. “And you look pretty damn fuckable to me.”

That makes Marty flush crimson clear down to his chest but at least it teases a softer laugh out him. “You’re such a sweet talker.”

Rust isn't, not really, so he reaches up and tilts Marty's chin down for a kiss instead. The tension in the other man's body doesn't melt away entirely, but it shifts and seems to move its center of gravity. Rust thinks of electricity crackling down power lines in humming waves and thinks he can almost hear that sound thrumming between them.

"You ever let another fella do this?" Marty asks, gruff and mumbled with Rust's kiss still hanging around his mouth.

"No," Rust says honestly. "Can't say anybody else has made the offer."

Chapter Text

“You keep tracking sand in this place, we’re gonna be building sand castles in the kitchen,” Marty huffs when Rust walks into the rental carrying their beer cooler, eyeballing the offending mess on the floor. “Jesus, I need a broom.”

Rust breathes out steadily through his nose and sets the cooler down by the back door with ease, looking through the slider out at the rolling ocean for the first time. If he took another step onto the deck and threw a stone he could hit the water in one clean toss. Close enough to taste, like a fresh cut of seaweed.

“You know Bobby hires a cleaning lady between renters,” he says, eyes still caught somewhere in the bluish haze of horizon outside. “Wouldn’t be worryin’ myself about it. We’ll fix things up before we go.”

“Uh-huh,” Marty says, already busy stowing things in the plain white refrigerator, empty save for an open box of baking soda and a bottle of ketchup somebody left behind. They’ll be here less than a week, but still brought the fixings for a few meals and some snacks to tide them over on the afternoons they don’t feel like driving into town. Which may be more often than not, considering Marty’s already waging a building war against Florida’s coastal drivers.

“You thought street duty during Mardi Gras was bad, shit, you got another thing coming,” he’d said earlier that morning on the last leg of their drive. “Some old blue-hair out here will clean your clock with their Buick and leave you for dead in the goddamn crosswalk.”

The drive down from Lafayette hadn’t been a bad one, per se, but there’d been a few times where Rust quietly had to make some excuse to pull over and take a piss in a McDonald’s or some other ubiquitous highway mile marker, and then beat Marty back to the car so he could get behind the wheel for a few hours.

If Marty caught on quickly—and he did, after maybe the second or third time, “I’m no dummy, you old snake in the grass”—, he didn’t say much of anything about changing Rust’s mind, even if that old tilt to his mouth showed up while he studied traffic and fought the GPS tooth and nail.

But the car is parked and settling under the brick patio, and there’s a bona fide, actual, real-as-anything sea breeze licking up under Rust’s shirt when he opens the slider and steps out, only to immediately step back in and pull Marty back out with him.

“You haven’t even seen the view,” Rust murmurs, feeling some of the tightness bleed from Marty’s muscles under his hands. They stand there together on the deck overlooking sand so fine it could be powdered sugar, and Marty breathes out, then back in even deeper than before.

The sight and sound and smell of the ocean makes colors waver somewhere along the edges of Rust’s vision, like broken bits of kaleidoscope sea glass, but he keeps his sights held steady on Marty.

“We made it just fine,” he says, hitching two fingers through Marty’s belt loop. Sandpipers twitter down on the shore, long-legged and speckled. “Got the whole place to ourselves for the week.”

Marty’s eyes cut over at that, the blue there another piece of timeworn sea glass for Rust to hold under his tongue. The corner of his mouth twitches and then Marty’s face cracks into a grin, the gap between his teeth shining.

“You got any ideas on how we’re gonna spend a week, alone, cooped up in this pretty place?” he asks, leaning in to knock their hips together. “My feeble mind’s blanking out on me.”

“I got a few,” Rust hums, looking back over the water lapping against the shore in a ceaseless tide. The wind ruffles through the iron-colored waves on top of his head and then there’s Marty’s fingers carding through them, too, as he tips Rust’s face down for a kiss.

“Bet you do,” Marty says when he’s had his fill of Rust’s mouth, broad hand sliding away to smooth down his husband’s back. “You and that big brain of yours.”

Yeah, Rust thinks to himself, letting Marty lead him down off the deck steps so they can step out of their shoes and into the soft sand. They’ve got themselves a good long week ahead.

Chapter Text

It was still dark outside when Marty felt himself startle up out of a deep sleep. 

He squinted at the deep indigo through the crack in the curtains and then squeezed his eyes shut again, breathing out heavily through his nose into the pillow under his cheek. The incessant peeping from those goddamn birds was getting earlier every year—out there falling in love and shit in the crepe myrtles and bougainvillea he and Rust had painstakingly planted two summers ago, whatever the fuck birds do. Loud as hell, regardless. To think it wasn’t even five in damn morning. 

“Got half a mind to take my gun out there and shoot every one of them little shits out of the trees,” he said, voice still sandpaper-rough with sleep. Rust was still in bed but sitting there with his legs crossed in the dark like some Buddhist monk. Marty had lived with him long enough by now to not question it, other than, “How long have you been up?” 

“It ain’t the birds,” Rust replied, cryptic as usual, though there was a gentle warmth in his voice that Marty caught onto fast. “Listen.” 

“I’m hearing some kind of goddamn racket,” Marty grunted, bracing an elbow to lift his head and listen, “and what I’m concluding, if I’m not finally going deaf as a doornail, is that there must be a whole flock of them fuckers right on top of us—” 

“Go look at what the cat left in your dirty clothes pile,” Rust cut in over him, just a liquid shadow until he twisted to one side and turned on the bedside lamp.

Marty blinked in indignity under the abrupt wash of gold and huffed like a stuck bull. “What the hell is it?” he asked. “You’ve already been up to investigate?” 

Rust only hummed in some vaguely affirmative sound but didn’t otherwise move, except for his sleepy eyes slanting over to the cracked closet door. Tempting. Dangling the carrot out in front of Marty as per usual. 

Marty narrowed his own eyes and threw the covers back, somehow moody and straggling like a surly teenager despite his new titanium knee. “If I get up out of this bed and there’s a half-dead mockingbird in the closet I’m going to whip you.” 

“Alright,” Rust said, watching Marty’s back as he stood from the side of the bed. “Be easy so you don’t startle them.” 

“Startle what, you asshole,” Marty said, already easing the closet door open to gawp down at his clothes hamper, and then all he could do was let out a half-choked guffaw. “Peach! Jesus H. Jumping Jack Christ, where’d all these come from?” 

Upon closer inspection, it didn’t take a seasoned detective to figure out the source of the slightly bloody and damp mess nestled in his undershirts and underwear. Peach was there, sure as the world, with four little fuzzy peanut-looking things squirming against her soft belly. Mewing and wriggling as they all woke up and tried to find their assigned tit to suckle on. 

For her own part, Peach just looked up at Marty and mewled, contentedly blinking her big green eyes. 

“Since when did we support teenage pregnancy in this house?” Marty grunted, immediately going down on a knee to get a closer look without his glasses. “You little hussy, you’ve been hiding this the whole time, huh,” he said, endearing more than anything, and reached to scratch around the purring cat’s ears. “Planned it from the jump.”

“Guess we’re a couple of fools for not recognizing the signs,” Rust drawled from behind him, now standing at Marty’s shoulder. “Noticed she’d been eating more than the usual but just thought she was going through a growth spurt.” 

Marty bit into his lip a little anxiously, sizing up the four newborns. There were two pale-colored ones, lighter than the marmalade-over-ice cream complexion Peach sported herself, and then a spotty one like a koi fish and another that was gray with little white paws. 

“Look here,” he said, pointing out the dusty looking mini calico. “It’s like a tiny Ghost, just more faded out.” 

“Speaking of,” Rust said, letting his voice trail off softly. The queen of the house heralded her own entry with a greeting trill and her fluffy tail held high, immediately prancing over to the closet with another little meow. She and Peach briefly touched noses and neither seemed bothered by the other’s presence. Ghost simply sat graceful vigil next to the laundry basket and peered in at the babies, then up at Rust and Marty as if to say, Well boys, take a good hard look.

“My God, Rust,” Marty said in wonder. “What if they’re lesbians?” 

Rust snorted outright at that and gently thumped Marty’s ear. “Cats help raise each other’s kittens all the time. It’s colony behavior. She can’t have any of her own, but that don’t mean she can’t help babysit.” 

Marty sighed and sat down fully on the carpet, legs crossed, a weary hand passing over the bald top of his head. He looked in at Peach and the kittens again with a newfound worry replacing the sparkle in his eyes. “What are we gonna do with all these critters?” 

“Dunno, Peach seems to have it under control,” Rust said, settling down on the bed behind Marty. “We probably ought to get her some better food, with four hungry mouths to feed n’ all. But they look pretty healthy to me. Just let nature do as nature does for now, you know. Life always finds its way.”  

“In my laundry hamper, Jeff Goldblum?” Marty said, leaning back until he was in the spread between Rust’s knees. “Fuck’s sake. We should’ve known enough to kit her out with a little padded box or something more serviceable than my dirty drawers—two senior detectives with scrambled eggs for brains, for all the shining clues we’ve picked up on.” 

“Give it a day or two and we’ll fix her up with something better,” Rust told him, dropping a hand to the place between Marty’s neck and shoulder, fingertips grazing an old white scar. “They’ll be alright tucked up in there, trust me—it’s nice and quiet, safe. That's all they need right now.” That same warmth from before was back, that velvety gentleness Rust was capable of in this life they shared together. It felt good to hear the smile in his voice, and maybe that was all the reassurance Marty needed. 

“Well,” he said with a long sigh. “If I’m not mistaken, it looks like you and me are grandpas again.” 

“Yeah,” Rust answered, easy as anything. “Looks like it.”

Chapter Text

There’s the slow pull of something that feels like a ritual, alignment between the terrain of two bodies, Marty taking himself in hand and letting his body settle into the open cradle of Rust’s hips. The moment they finally fit together is almost like release in itself and Rust holds Marty still and close against him without moving, suspended in the spell of being filled again.

“I love you,” Marty says softly, a smile breaking through his voice, and Rust’s whole body thrums with the endless revelation of it—not love itself, he thinks, but finding this love with Marty.

But then his voice is gone and he can’t tell him, couldn’t say it back right now if he tried, because everything’s raising up like a hot welt in his throat and he squeezes his eyes shut, sucks in a shallow breath scraped raw around the edges and holds on to the thing that brought him this far. The thing he rises for at the break of every morning, the one thing he—against all odds, after everything—took into his hands as his own to keep and hold onto.

The room has bled and blurred into diluted smears of orange and golden shadow, a thousand different shades of the thing he loves, and Rust tries to breathe through the tightness in his chest but Marty still hears the rattle there, finds his face with eyes and gentle fingertips and goes still against him.