Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

~*~

The thing nobody ever told him about aftermath was that it never really settled. It was all one big bone that just kept breaking and regrowing, breaking and regrowing, until the new shit got in the way of the old hurts and made it harder and harder to move. No more joints. Just Tim, and his life, and his slow ossification.

It felt like all the guys who came before him had been keeping that secret. Made him more than slightly bitter about it, such that he found himself scowling as the wrinkled shrink at the top floor of the student health building recommended he try experimental therapies.

Tim didn’t mean for it to amount to anything serious. All he’d done was make a joke about blowing his brains out if he didn’t pass his math requirement, because what sort of aspiring engineer couldn’t wrap his head around calculus?

It was still strange to think of himself as a student—nearly thirty in the body but at once older than sin and positively infantile in the head. The guy who’d helped Tim at the VA, the one with the dimple in his cheek and the pretty eyes, said there was a whole wide future waiting for him now. An honorable discharge opens a lot of doors, Mr. Gutterson; all you need to do now is choose the one that looks most enticing to you.

A lot of doors, sure. But more doors just meant more endings to Tim. Empty hallways had always spooked him, like maybe he’d known life ended with tunnel vision before he’d even teetered on its brink in Kabul.

He’d been good at school in the days before. So he picked school.

More fool him for thinking it could stave off anything worth a damn.

But anyways: experimental therapies. Worth a shot. Tim would try anything at this stage, loth as he was to admit it. That was the annoying part about integrity—he had it, and it made him want to stick around. 

Fucking inconvenient.

The building and office number the shrink had scrawled for him along with the appointment information on the back of a fucked-up Xerox page was on the far end of the U of K campus, the part that hadn’t yet gotten the facelift the rest of the place was in the middle of receiving. He took one look at the elevator doors that weren’t quite kissing in the middle and the analog dial above them, all six floors of it, and bet on the staircase instead—better the whiff of mildew than meeting death in the anticlimax of a rickety metal box. 

Two knocks on the door, R. GIVENS on the nameplate, wondering only briefly if it was Doctor or Mister or Ms before it swung open. 

Mister. Or Doctor. Tim found it only vaguely irritating that the first thought registering as he stuck out one hand for a greeting shake was that Doctor Mister R. Givens smelled of fine leather and clean linen. Fast on its heels was the sensation of his palm: warm and sturdy, smooth. Sure of itself.

Tim cleared his throat. “Afternoon. Tim Gutterson. I was recommended for your…study. Thing.”

Givens broke out in a sideways grin and stepped slightly aside in invitation over the threshold. He didn’t really look like a doctor-type, dressed in chambray and dark-wash jeans. Maybe Tim was expecting a lab coat. He peered around the spartan room, more of a suite really: a small foyer, a desk with a high-backed chair, and a cozy-looking nook just past it with a couch and a folded wool blanket flanked by an armchair in a buttery shaft of sun.

“Dr. Givens.” Boom. There it was. “Call me Raylan though, proper titles give me hives.”

He had the lilting whit of an accent native to these parts. An inkling for home shot quickly under Tim’s skin all at once. He missed Texas, for the first time in a long while.

Raylan gestured at the desk, a chair propped out across from it for the sitting. Tim made himself comfortable and eyed the shallow stack of paperwork ready to kick off his appointment. 

“Where you from, Mr. Gutterson?”

Tim glanced up as he peeled back the first sheet of paper— Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy for the Treatment of Post-Traumatic St —God. He quit reading and started scanning for the lines where he needed to sign. He didn’t have to give it a name. As long as it didn’t have a name, it was just a thing that happened sometimes. It wouldn't kill him if it didn’t have a name. 

“West Texas,” he said without looking up, chicken-scratching his signature onto the first line of many. “Middle of nowhere. Nobody knows it.”

Raylan was smiling as though remembering a fond dream when Tim glanced at him. “Try me.”

“Bell County.” Tim twiddled the pen briefly between his thumb and forefinger. “Salado.”

“I know Salado.”

“Yeah?”

“Made some bad choices in those parts,” Raylan said with that same private grin. Tim took extra stock of him for a moment: long and lax, all of him in the angular shape of a tin of leftover screws tipped over and spilled longways over the garage floor.

“Like psychedelics?” Tim asked, bent back to the task of signing away his organs, maybe; he wasn’t reading the fine print. 

Raylan barked a bristled laugh and said nothing either way.

Tim finished signing in silence. He checked the back of the packet to make sure he’d at least glanced at every page. Raylan held out a hand to take it and, in return, flipped through to add his co-sign to a few pages. “So,” he asked, trailing off a little for the multitasking, “in your own words…”

Raylan took a few moments with his brow benignly furrowed and his mouth barely pursed to round off the last few pages. He slipped the papers into his bottom desk drawer and kicked it shut with one foot before leaning back in his chair with a welcoming grin. “What brings you to this particular study?”

Well. Tim rubbed his palms gently along his knees and shifted in his seat. The office was deeply quiet, the sort of stillness that felt cut off from the rest of reality. He could already feel that Raylan’s attention had a certain weight to it, a pinprick focus like the concentration of sunshine through a magnifying glass.

“Uh.” He swallowed and shrugged halfway with one shoulder. “I have trouble…sleeping, I guess.”

“You’re a student?”

“Yessir.”

Raylan snapped and pointed his finger at Tim. “ There’s the Texas. Was wondering where you were hiding it.” He rested his chin on the same hand, his elbow propped on the edge of his desk. “Anything alongside the sleep issues?”

Tim wanted to squirm but kept himself still. He ran the tip of his tongue along the inside ridge of his lip and thought about it for a moment. “I mean.” He paused. Took a breath. Considered how much was warranted for the general wherewithal if a last resort.

The silence stretched for several beats longer than Tim intended. Raylan leaned back gently in his chair, still watching Tim. “Short temper, reliance on substances, anxiety, depression?” he rattled off, his expression open.

Tim raised an eyebrow. “All of the above?”

Raylan gave an appraising nod and drummed his fingertips lightly against the edge of his chin. Had Tim not been used to reading between the lines of other men’s habits, he wouldn’t have caught the briefest flash of real concern that shot quick as a loosed arrow behind Raylan’s eyes. But he was, so he did—and didn’t let on that he’d gotten the measure. 

At least it wasn’t pity. Tim could abide by plenty, but not pity. Never fucking pity. 

“I suppose I should tell you the risks,” Raylan said with an easy smile, and launched into a litany of eerie shit: not only the physical chance of heart attack with an increased in heart rate and blood pressure, but things like emotional suggestibility; mood destabilization; countertransference of feelings between therapist and subject. Raylan explained all of it with a slow, patient cadence in his worn-denim voice as Tim let the facts wash over him.

In a silence afterwards, letting it all sink in, Raylan tipped his head at Tim and watched him keenly. “Nothing personal, of course,” he threw in. Tim snorted. 

“Yeah,” he said, the aimless syllable of casting about. He wet his lips with a quick dart of his tongue and gave a nervy shrug. “I mean—yeah. Sure, right? I’m a fucking powder keg, this is my best and only option besides, what, an extended stay at motel de compression-socks? Be honest with me.”

Raylan’s eyes flashed. He didn’t move, but let a dry upturn of his lips twitch at one corner. “I prefer to call it the blue light special.”

They watched each other across the desk for a long moment. Tim’s pulse jangled quietly.

“I just want my head on right,” he said gently, a peek of real vulnerability that he shut as quickly as a box he shouldn’t have opened and didn’t like what he found inside. Raylan nodded once and stood without much fanfare, indicating the sofa at the end of the other room. 

“Then if you’d be so kind as to follow me, soldier, let’s get you settled.”

~*~

MDMA. Four letters, blue horse pill.

As Tim situated himself under a quilt stretched long-ways on the couch, feeling at the silk edge of a pink eye mask in his hands, Raylan peered at him through a pair of reading glasses and held up the capsule between his index finger and thumb.

“I could brew you a tea with it, but the kettle’s on the fritz. Can you swallow pills?”

Tim managed not to make a crass joke and simply nodded. Raylan smiled only with his mouth. 

“It’s not gonna be comfortable,” he said, not unkindly.

Tim peered at the pill and shifted under the quilt, kicking gently at the edges of it to couch it just so under his feet the way he liked. “I’ve swallowed pills before.”

“The trip. I’m giving you a very controlled dosage, measured out for your medical specifications, but I’m not gonna sugar-coat—you heard the warnings. This can wallop you. And if you seek this shit out on the street willy-nilly, it can kill you.”

“Keep your dealer in the chemistry department basement?” Tim asked, unable to not make just one shithead joke. He avoided Raylan’s gaze and reached for the headphones, connected to the turntable behind the couch on which Raylan had cued up a record of gentle nature sounds he could already hear piping through the cans.

Raylan did him the service of chuckling, but it was dry. He leaned to the edge of his seat and looked at Tim without blinking. “You’re gonna face things you might not realize you haven’t even processed yet. I’ll be here the whole time, just remember you aren’t alone, okay? You’ll be safe in there. Promise. It’s just your mind picking at its own jigsaw pieces.”

Raylan was looking at him with all the steely intensity of an interrogation, telling Tim he was safe —so yeah, maybe there was a bit of a stir below Tim’s belt; a prickly gripping at the base of his throat. He ignored it and burrowed more deeply into the blanket before bullying the pillow under his head into a more comfortable shape. “Thanks,” he said to the ceiling, and held out his hand for the dose without looking. 

He swallowed it down dry. Raylan looked amused in the last slice of sight Tim grabbed of him as he slid down the eye mask.

The fabric rasp as Raylan settled in his chair; the flutter of a paperback book rustling open. Tim pulled on the headphones and let himself focus on his breathing. The birds in the recording sang him onward.

And before he knew it, he was off.

~*~

The First Bardo - Birth

~*~

He has just shot a man. He knows this down to the whorls of his fingerprints and the blood in his veins.

It does not feel good—nor does it feel terrible. Mostly it’s just an absence, and probably that’s worse.

He’s in Kabul, he knows that much. Tim looks down and sees not his fatigues, but a worn set of chaps over dusty Levis; block-heeled boots made of reddish buckskin on his feet, a linen shirt sticking to him with his own sweat, and a hat with a slouching brim.

He blinks once; twice; feels a mild sunburn stinging at the corners of his eyes. Smells burning fuel somewhere in the distance. Tim looks down at his hands: the webbing between his right thumb and forefingers is lightly scarred with gunpowder.

So. A cowboy in Kabul. There are funnier jokes that start off worse.

Tim walks. He walks until he realizes there’s nobody else around for miles, and hardly any buildings besides. Only the old skeletons of support beams lie dormant in the sand like splintered teeth spat out and forgotten. It’s so hot Tim thinks he might melt, but he’s got plenty of energy to keep walking. And he does, for miles and miles alone with his thoughts.

He can’t remember the last time he wrote to his mother. He can’t remember where the rest of his platoon is, or how he even got separated from them. The pistol that matches the empty holster on his belt is gone, but there isn’t any fear in that realization—only a strange wash of relief, as cool as it is sudden.

“Deputy!”

When he looks up, there’s a pile of wreckage twisted up in the charred, black corpse of a downed helicopter. Whatever fire swallowed it up has long cooled. Beside it, the flat facade of a saloon waits like a mirage with a man standing tall beside the swinging doors. The tinny sound of a piano beckons from inside. Tim’s mouth waters with the promise of a drink. He raises his hand in reply, and the man waves him over.

“Raylan,” he calls out, because that’s who it is as he gets close enough to pick out his features: pepper-haired and keen-eyed, with a little bit of a laugh permanently hitched to the edge of his mouth that could be either derisive or warm depending on how Tim decided to take it. “Hell you doing all the way out here?”

Raylan shrugs. “Keeping an eye out for you.”

“Why?”

“Well, you’re late.”

Tim stops at the top step up the shallow porch. The shade is degrees cooler, meeting him like the cold slap of air conditioning that traced invisible walls between interior and exterior he can recall from faraway childhood summers. He pulls off his hat to run a hand through his hair and puts his hands on his hips. “Late for what?”

Raylan pushes open one side of the swinging doors. There’s a party inside: the music gets a little louder. The laughter of girls accompanies the raucous growl of men telling stories that constantly one-up the last in tall tales. Somewhere beneath it all, past it, like the fuzzy pinprick of perspective against the horizon, birdsong.

“Living,” Raylan says, and tugs Tim in behind him by the wrist.

~*~

It took a few dizzy stretches of waking and fading, waking and fading to return to himself cloudy in the come-down.

Tim looked at the clock as soon as his eyes started working again. Only two hours had passed.

“All there?”

Raylan slid a scrap of paper into the two-thirds mark of his book and shut it as he checked his wristwatch. He rose to help Tim with the headphones and the blanket, and stretched backward to grab and offer a full glass of water from the coffee table.

“Jesus,” Tim muttered. He drank down half in one go.

“Good Jesus,” Raylan hummed, watching him carefully, “or bad Jesus?”

“Are there multiple kinds?” Tim cleared his throat and tongued shallowly at the cottonmouth feeling sticking to his lips. He sipped again and hazarded a dry smile at Raylan. “All clear. Thanks.”

Raylan asked him a short battery of questions from a notepad that went in one of Tim’s ears and out the other. He could still very faintly smell the sour burn of fuel from outside the dry lumber of the saloon’s walls; hear the dull roar of faraway happiness.

He stared at Raylan’s hands, long fingers and sure palms. Tim swore the feeling of that hand around his was still there, a phantom ache.

“Now comes the important part,” Raylan said, tugging Tim back to attention.

“More important than the illicit substances?”

Raylan’s gaze sparked with humor. “Absolutely." He stood and crossed to his desk to shuffle through a few stacks of papers. "When you get home, you have one piece of homework.”

Tim sniffed and sipped down the last of the water. “Of course I do.”

“You gotta journal about it.”

Considering that, Tim chewed gently on the inside of his lip. He’d shared a drink with Raylan in the trip, Raylan-but-not-really, addled by the strange pitch of everything around them. It had been terrible liquor, home-brew, but perfectly serviceable for a fine time.

“You gonna read my diary?” Tim muttered. He held in a yawn.

Raylan raised his eyebrows. “Not if you don’t want me to. It can be anonymous. Just needs to be recorded for the study—primary source, all that.”

The yawn won out. Tim made an affirmative sound through the wide pull of his jaw and wagged his head shallowly on the tail of it. “Yeah. Okay.”

~*~

Tim drove home carefully, on an autopilot he didn’t quite trust but felt from a less-distant place than usual. He was aware of every turn of the wheel; flick of the turning signal; press of the pedal; but didn’t feel the need to do anything about it. It just was.

When he pulled into the driveway, an old reflex woke in him for the first time in years: thumping his left toe aimlessly into the footwell. The ‘72 Buick he used to drive had its parking brake on a pedal instead of a crank.

Huh.

Anyways, journaling—for that, he needed a journal. There was bound to be a notebook somewhere in the apartment. Tim used to keep lists with a near compulsion, as though simply organizing his life into manageable piles would keep it all in check and never let it get away from him; never let it fall apart.

His habits were predictable. Bottom draw of the desk that had turned into nothing but a surface to stack junk mail, a half-empty composition booklet. The marbled cover gave him the brief, shuddering sense of time moving backward through him like thread dragging through the eye of a needle. When Tim flipped through the first half of filled pages, his handwriting from before deployment met him in its tidy, unshattered rows. God. He used to have penmanship, didn’t he?

I will become an Army Ranger, he had written carefully, twelve times in a row as though casting a spell.

His stomach growled. He wanted a drink. He needed a long, hot shower. His limbs felt like they all weighed six tons.

Tim hunched down cross-legged in the middle of the rug, put his pen to the next empty page, and began to write.

I met a man today who told me I would be safe. I believed him. Stranger though, I believed my own instinct to trust him.

He wrote without an aim as Raylan had told him to, letting the wiles of his head fill ten pages with words as though kicking open a levee he didn’t know he’d built in his low straits. Tim wrote about his tours. He wrote about his only friend (deceased). He wrote about first grade, the last bit of school he could really remember before high school hurtled in like a smash-cut, and only stopped himself when he noticed the words were beginning to shape themselves around his mother.

He shut the cover without reading back over it and scrubbed both hands down his face, still tasting the dry desert air at the very back of his tongue. The refrigerator kicked up from the kitchen with its marble-clatter hum. Tim laid down and stared at the blank, black pearl of the television screen until he began to drowse—all of him weighted with foreign calm, settled low into his bones like river silt.

He slept for three hours.

When Tim woke to velveteen darkness, there was quiet between his ears for the first time he could ever recall.

Chapter Text

~*~

A week passed. The phone rang.

“I’ve got a scheduling conflict next Friday.”

Tim glanced at the paper calendar held to the fridge with a plastic letter T he couldn’t recall acquiring, but had owned since he lived in the barracks. So then Bimonthly appointments in this case meant two times a month, and not every two months. “Before I make an idiot of myself,” he said into the receiver, “this is Raylan, right?”

“Sorry. Dr. Givens calling, yes, hi. I’ve got a scheduling conflict next Friday.”

“You get this number from my file?” Tim asked. He leaned back against the counter and kept staring at the calendar, waiting for the hum under his fingernails to start up. He was out of control of a situation. This was going to be a long night.

Wasn’t it?

Tim held out his hand out flat in front of him. It wasn’t shaking. 

“That I did.” Raylan sounded a little sheepish. Tim chewed his lip and balanced the cradle between his ear and his shoulder. 

“Unfortunately week after next isn’t…great for me, if we have to reschedule,” Tim said, wincing to himself. Midterms. He hasn’t chewed his cuticles to blood yet, but it may still happen. He needs to be on top of his game.

Across the phone line, a barely-held sigh. “Shit—sorry. Damn. …Sorry.”

Tim frowned. “You okay, doc?”

“It’s a personal issue, bullshit, thing. Sorry.”

“No, it’s—fine. We can reschedule.”

“It’s better to keep it regular. I’m sorry.”

“Seriously, it’s fine.” Tim scratched at the edge of his free ear. He hated hearing people apologize to him.

The subtle skip of an Aha! chucked the signal and jogged Tim back into the present. He blinked. “Yeah?”

“I won’t be able to make it to campus in enough time, but would you be able to come here instead? Just the once.”

“Where’s here?”

“Home office. Dare I say the setup here is even a little nicer, but it’s entirely up to you. Bit of a muddy boundary, but—”

“Sure.”

Raylan paused briefly, the sound of his air stilling at the back of his mouth. He made a pleasantly surprised little huh.

“There’s that solved then. Same time?”

Tim shrugged and crossed his arms tightly around his middle, still balancing the phone against his shoulder. “Works for me. Only one class those mornings, so.”

“Ah, the smart man’s Friday loadout.”

“Allegedly.”

“Alright, well,” Raylan said, his voice attenuating with the evidence of a full-bodied stretch, “suppose you’ll need an address then.”

He recited a street name and a few simple directions there from campus that Tim scratched down on the back page of his journal, ever at hand at home.

“You’re on the edge of Tinseltown, aren’t you?” Tim hummed, tapping the edge of his pencil against the page. Raylan laughed.

“To the chagrin of several neighbors, yes. There is moderate tinsel. Don’t stare when you get here, it’s rude.”

Tim shut the notebook and peered at himself in the reflection of his window. “Much to stare at?”

“Just the six Rolls Royce’s, you know how it goes. Appreciate it, Tim.”

“Not a problem, doc,” Tim insisted, his voice a little tighter, his chest a little lighter to hear his name from someone else’s mouth. He’d always been that way; one predisposition the drugs probably wouldn’t be able to sandblast off of him.

The line died without a real goodbye from either of them. Of all the reasons Tim preferred the company of men, the uncomplicated simplicity of the way they held court with one another was probably the most enticing one. There was rarely if ever any guess work; most men were exactly what they said on the tin. 

Most men. Maybe he’d get there someday too.

Tim flopped the notebook back open and traced the shape of Raylan’s name in his own handwriting. His R’s were a little weird. Maybe nothing was permanent. 

~*~

Well, Friday went on and turned into a fucking disaster.

It started with sour milk Tim thought was still good ruining the last of his breakfast cereal after he poured without sniffing it first, turned into traffic he didn’t expect on a familiar stretch of road that only should have taken ten minutes to traverse instead of twenty, rounded off into an exam he’d forgotten about and arrived late to and definitely didn’t do well on, and when he got back home and tried stealing at least a brief nap before going to Raylan’s and only succeeded in staring at the ceiling for forty-five minutes, it culminated in a phone call he really could have gone without.

“If you’re calling to cancel, Raylan, just pretend you aren’t,” Tim snapped into the handset, “because today is not my fucking day.”

“Who the hell is Raylan?”

Tim froze. He stilled mid-stride across the kitchen to snatch his other shoe. He swallowed. “Hey.”

His daddy’s silence persisted in expectation of an answer. Tim cleared his throat and dragged a hand through his hair. “My, uh. He’s my therapist.”

“Therapist?”  

It crackled into Tim’s ear with such a jibe that Tim felt his mouth dry up and his tendons tighten with fight or flight before he even realized it. He said nothing. His daddy gave a bleak chuckle. 

“Therapist. What are you now, some kinda queer?”

Tim bit his tongue until he felt it sting. In an instant, he snapped himself back to rights—he reached for his second shoe and tugged it on. “Do you need anything,” he said, his voice carefully blank, “or did you just call me up to call me names?”

“Chrissake, Tim, take a fuckin’ joke. No love for your old man?”

Tim said nothing, set grimly to task of fumbling his laces tied. His daddy sighed.

“Fine. I need some money.”

“What else is new,” Tim snapped.

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. Make your own.”

“I just need an advance, Timmy. I’ll pay it back with interest, your pension—”

“MY pension,” Tim cut in, so fiercely that it stilled both of them for a moment. He collected himself in an instant: eyes shut, slow breath. “ My pension doesn’t exist to cover your shitass stupid betting debts. Make your own fucking money.”

He hung up with a clang and banged out of the apartment, hurtling down the steps to the ground floor, leaping into his car and gunning the engine to peel out of the lot with a raw-edged gusto that smacked equally of panic and victory. 

Tim had done well, held the line, not let himself buckle like he used to. His daddy didn’t know his address, just his phone number, and that was a small comfort in the face of the man’s volatility that had taught Tim from the day he drew breath that his happiness was contingent on managing a grown man’s bad habits ahead of his own emotions.

He hit the traffic again—Tim was so pissed off he didn’t even remember to go around it.

White-knuckling the wheel, his forehead bent to it in bumper-to-bumper, Tim opened his mouth and gave a long, full-lunged shout into the silence of the car.

~*~

He thumbed the doorbell with enough force to print the shallow impression of it briefly into his skin. Tim ground his back teeth and shut his eyes for a bid of calm; calm; he could be calm.

Approaching footsteps, the rattle of the latch—the door swung open on Raylan in a linen shirt and another pair of jeans. He wore an easy smile, which ground on Tim’s patience more than it probably should have. The foyer opening up past the jamb was huge.

“Hey,” Tim grunted, and side-stepped into Raylan’s invitation of an outstretched arm to come in. 

“Thanks for being flexible,” Raylan said as he shut the door. Tim glanced around and noticed without marking all the ways in which this house told of a bachelor making his home like a hermit crab in the shell of something that used to be—an empty wall with a light fixture where a painting maybe once had been; a sunroom meant for entertaining, which now only had a single chair and side table stacked high with old, butched-up pulp novels; a kitchen painted yellow, with four barstools at the breakfast bar yet only a small dining room table with two chairs that looked like an after-the-fact sort of purchase. 

Whatever. His doctor’s life wasn’t Tim’s to parse. He made an agreeable sound and followed after Raylan’s gesture to amble deeper into the house. “No problem.”

Raylan glanced at Tim over his shoulder with his brow shallowly furrowed. “You doin’ okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

It had a teasing note to it. Tim scowled and said with a little more pointedness behind it, “Yeah.”

Raylan’s expression barely twitched. He didn’t say anything else about it and led them into an office tucked into the far side of the house.

Here was where Raylan’s affects were then—a cozy space reminiscent of the university office with another couch, another record player, but with the deepened comfort of having been lived in a little more fully as one’s home instead of one’s place of work. There was a sweater hanging over the back of the desk chair. There were gaps in the shelves where Raylan had pulled out books here and there, perhaps to stack them in the sunroom.

“Well,” Raylan said, crossing the room to fiddle with the quilt that here looked handmade instead of the nondescript fleece he kept on campus. “You can thank my ex-wife’s stick-up-the-ass attorney for refusing to reschedule a meeting. Thanks for giving up your Friday night.”

He was trying to lighten the atmosphere. Tim was keen on when other people were trying to skirt the truth of their own discomforts. He gave a neutral grunt and simply sat down at the end of the couch, tugging the blanket over him and casting about for the eye mask. 

Raylan narrowed his gaze. “You sure you’re alright?”

“I’m fine,” Tim snapped. Raylan’s brows went up. 

“None of my business under normal circumstances, but seeing as I’m about to give you a mind-altering substance I think you’d better tell me if there’s something I should know about so I can make sure I’m not about to give you a real bad time.”

“You’re right,” Tim said, finding the little strip of cloth wedged between the couch cushions. He rolled it unconsciously around one thumb and didn’t look at Raylan. “It’s none of your business.”

“You go under in a bad mood, I can’t promise you’ll have a very fruitful session,” Raylan said. His voice was tight as a firm grip, verbally scruffing Tim just enough to keep him defiantly ruffled. Scowling, Tim glanced up at him.

“Well hell, isn’t that the whole reason I’m here in the first place? Because I can’t manage regular sunshine and fuckin’ rainbows?”

Raylan regarded him for a moment. “We can reschedule,” he hummed coolly. “Easy as that.”

“I’m already here,” Tim growled. He shoved on the eye mask and hunkered fussily under the blanket. “Next week won’t work for me. Let’s just get this shit over with.”

Raylan didn’t push it. Wordlessly, he hunted a pill from the wooden rasp of his desk drawer. He pressed it into Tim’s hand and passed him the headphones as it met Tim’s tongue. 

“Take it easy in there,” Raylan said with an air of warning. Tim said nothing, focused on the birds, and let himself fall away.

~*~

The Second Bardo - Dream

~*~

The smell hits him first. There’s a certain pitch to the tang of burning fuel that doesn’t leave the brain easy at all.

The smell. Then the sounds—crackling fire, groaning steel and composite, a distant ringing; something animal and desperate, with a wet choking hitch to the end of each breath.

It’s breathing, isn’t it? That’s a body in his arms.

Tim wills himself to open his eyes and immediately wishes he hadn’t.

The worst of it started with a crash. Their bird went down just past noon sharp; the air hadn’t been as clear as they’d expected. Two men died on impact, and Tim was left with the only one in his platoon he could hazard to call a friend hanging to life by the rinds of their fingernails in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Then, it had been the two of them fighting against the light as Tim applied compression and shouted for aid down his fizzling comms without knowing coordinates, destination, anything clear enough to bring timely help—uninjured aside from some scratches, minor burns, Tim had only known enough to stave off death’s hand for a few extra minutes instead of sever its reach entirely.

Here, well. Here, it’s just…him.

Tim holds his hands firm around the wound in his own leg. It’s exactly the same as it was then, his arms still remembering exactly for how long they clung to Caddy’s body. It’s strange to be looking down at his own body in its place, seeing his face twisted with pain and going pale.

“Hang on,” Tim says through his teeth, as though reciting a script chipped into the cracked slab of the past. “I made the call, just—you hang on, okay?”

“Guttermouth.”

“You shut the fuck up and live. Hang on. You hear me?”

“Tim.” His dying double flails out and lands his grip messily on Tim’s elbow. He chokes messily around the next lungful of air. Beneath it all, son of a bitch, he smirks just a little. “Gotta go.”

His lips are barely moving. He’s bleeding from most places, a dark and deoxygenated ooze like distilled death. Tim shakes his head and keeps applying pressure. “Don’t gotta do shit but keep you here,” he grits out. “You hang on.”

The precarious pile of twisted wreckage shifts. The ground shifts with it. Tim nearly loses his grip on himself, but even as the sands heave he holds on tight.

Beneath one of the crippled, twisted blades, a hand paws up from under the dune. “Hey!” Tim calls out, desperate to hail anything that might listen. “Hey, MEDIC!”

The hand turns into an arm, turns into a helmeted head and torso and body hauling itself upward as though birthed from the ground. He’s badly burned but walking, shambling, and Tim holds fast to his dying body and paws sweat, blood, tears from his own eyes as the charred lieutenant stumbles over and grabs Tim by both shoulders.

“Gotta go,” the corpse repeats in a croak that cracks through his ruined throat. Tim tosses his head and throws himself forward, clinging to the failing body.

“Medic,” he wheezes, weeping, shaking his head. “I just—need a medic…!”

His lieutenant pulls him away with a shocking force that nearly knocks the wind backward out of Tim’s lungs. He flails as his grip peels up with the slippage of gore, and Tim scrabbles and kicks at the smokehouse-sweet black tar burning that invades his nostrils when the officer hauls him close and makes to drag him down as well. 

“No!” Tim gnashes and roars, kicks and tosses his head with all the wild fury he has ever stacked up and stored away in his body over the years—but none of it works. The lieutenant vises him close and starts back toward the hole he struggled up from, to sleep forever beneath the corpse of their downed bird, and it was never supposed to go like this; not this way, not alone, not—

“Deputy!”

Tim turns toward the voice and fights with the surge through his veins as mightily as he can against the headlock grip the corpse has on him. From the rise of a dune just beyond the greasy smear of the fire swallowing up around them, Raylan in anachronism peers down a scope trained even as the sun is hot on the creature that once was Tim’s lieutenant just over his shoulder.

The officer laughs. The sound of it tastes like smoldering glass. “You’re fuckin’ crazy,” he calls out at Raylan, with the voice of Tim’s father. “No way you can get me without hitting him too!”

He just keeps laughing, fighting the sound past the sticky wheezing of his ruined lungs. Raylan lines up, and Tim sees through his eyes and feels the tension of the shot as though he’s the one firing it.

For one gap between the moments, Tim feels and knows and is everything in this godforsaken place.

The sun winks against the scope. Raylan’s finger twitches.

~*~

He slammed into consciousness like soft fruit hitting a wall doing 80. 

Tim gasped around deep fistfuls of air and pawed at the headphones, the eye mask, the quilt, the cushions, until he fought his way to the floor and laid flat on his belly where he could comfortably collapse into wracking, full-bodied sobs.

No sand here. No sun. Just the vague, stiff smell of the carpet fibers, Tim’s own bitter panic, and the warm press of Raylan’s hand on his back.

Raylan.

“Breathe,” he was saying over and over again, slow and low-chested, so evenly and with such intention that Tim didn’t have a choice but to obey.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

In through his nose, out through his mouth. Tim had been to a grand total of two AA meetings since his discharge, and the only thing he’d taken away of any meaningful substance had been those fucking breathing techniques. 

Breathe.

Breathe.

“Fuck—!” he gasped, making weak fists by his side. His cheek was mashed sideways and he was staring at the edge of the floor, tracing the edge of the paint meeting the floor molding. Breathe.

“When you have some air back in those lungs,” Raylan murmured, “go ahead and tell me your name.”

Tim squeezed his eyes shut, fought the spiny pressure of another sob, and shuddered through his gritted teeth. “Tim—Timothy Gutterson. My name is Tim.”

“Good. Do you remember where you are?”

“Your house,” he gasped. Raylan’s hand was moving in careful, soothing circles along his upper back. With every second that passed, his terror ebbed further away. Shame was replacing the fear, but shame was easier to handle than fear. Shame didn’t make Tim feel like a dangerous thing.

“And do you know who I am, Tim?”

Tim reached up and pawed at his eyes with one hand, squeezing at the tears and the snot and wrestling with the collar of his t-shirt to mop his cheeks. “Dr. Raylan Givens,” he gasped.

“Good. How you feeling, Tim?”

Tim crammed a shuddering breath between his ribs with the same force he’d used to try and pack that hopeless, ragged wound. “Like shit,” he sobbed.

“That’s okay. Shit’s fine. Gotta feel like shit sometimes to feel better, huh?”

“I’m gonna be sick,” Tim wheezed, and Raylan moved immediately to help him stagger upward and steer toward the bathroom.

The tiny white subway-style floor tiles were cool under Tim’s knees. Standing at the sink afterwards, swishing cold water through his mouth and splashing it across his face, Tim tried his best to ignore the fact his eyes were still leaking. He leaned heavily with both hands on either side of the sink—Raylan stood in the doorway.

“Do not,” Tim rasped, stone-done and plumb exhausted, “tell me you told me so.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Raylan tetched. Tim snorted.

“Don’t believe you for a second.” He glanced up through the mirror and found Raylan watching him over his shoulder. “Can you just—I’d like to be alone, please.”

“Not unless you need to piss, in which case I’d still probably insist on hanging around because I just held your proverbial hair back anyways so what’s one measly piss gonna do to your pride—but I also don’t really think you should be alone right now.”

Tim glowered at him. “Seriously?”

“I’m not often a serious man, Mr. Gutterson,” Raylan said, his gaze hard and unflinching, “but when it comes to my patients doing stupid shit like electing to go under when they’re not on even keel, that tends to fuck with my pride and makes me want to do whatever I can to ensure shit doesn’t go even further south. So.”

“Don’t…” Tim shook his head and let it drop heavily to hang between the bracket of his shoulders. He gave a long sigh that ended in a miserable whine at its tail, and neither he nor Raylan did him the disservice of remarking on that. “Don’t call me that,” he said. “I’m just Tim, okay?”

When he looked up next, Raylan had softened by the smallest amount—but softened nonetheless. He nodded once. “Okay, Tim.”

The silence between them spooled with a widening fray along its edges. Tim broke it with a pitiful sigh colored very slightly by one last kick of his tears making him pule. He sniffled. “You got anything to drink?”

Raylan considered that with his mouth a firm line for a moment, and only held out against the full force of Tim’s eyes swimming in their own misery for a fraction of a second. He nodded backward toward the kitchen. “Here. Let’s go sit outside.”

Stumbling only a little, holding up one hand to demur Raylan’s offer of a shoulder to lean on, Tim sniffed again and managed to hold his shoulders back a little more stiffly; not melt too much more deeply into his ragged grief. He ran the side of one knuckle across his nose. “Maker’s Mark?”

“You have terrible taste,” Raylan deadpanned.

Tim gave a humorless scoff. “Fuck you.”

“Come on,” Raylan said tidily, taking him gently by the shoulder after all.

~*~

The pool was bigger than it needed to be; sized for a family. It cast an eerie upcast in soggy blue against Tim and Raylan kicked back in a pair of lounge chairs with the bottle between them.

Tim took his time examining the label under his thumb after his turn taking a pull straight from the neck. He turned to squint at Raylan. “Didn’t you say I had terrible taste?”

“Yep,” Raylan said, yawning freely.

“Hell does it say about you, you had this stocked?”

Raylan snorted and held his hand out for a sip. “Didn’t say I had good taste.”

They sat in silence for a long while. Raylan had done Tim the courtesy of letting himself return to the present in relative silence since they got settled out there—dragged the chairs up to the edge of the pool, cracked open the bottle, and settled back with their seats at two different reclining heights.

From nearly flat on his back, Raylan heaved a commiserative sigh. “Well, cheers,” he said, lifting the bottle a little higher in a mocked toast. “Survived your first bad trip.”

Tim drew his knees up to his chest and let out a pale groan. “Don’t tell me there could be more. I thought that was just—processing, shit.”

“Can’t promise that, legally.”

“What can you promise?”

Raylan held out the bottle without looking at Tim. “That you’re one brave son of a bitch.”

Tim stared at him for a brief, stunned moment. When he came back to himself, he nearly fumbled the bottle as he grabbed it.

More silence. Tim focused on the sharp cloy of the bourbon settling into his tongue, and suddenly he felt like talking about it.

“Somewhere along the way,” he said, and took a measured pause to consider the soup of honesty deep inside him. Tim shook his head to himself, chased down another mouthful, and figured it was already this far in. “I taught myself at some point to see everything that didn’t serve the version of events I thought was going to happen as—as, what’s a good word for it, an—an obstacle. ”

Tim pulled again from the bottle. He held it out to Raylan, making it slosh with the movement, but Raylan didn’t move to take it.

“I can’t abide by shit going wrong. You know? But if I’m at a distance, if I put myself far enough away that I can’t see things falling apart, or—or not even feel it, when it happens, it’s not…real. I dunno. Not unless I feel blood on my hands. Smell it. I’m always so far away.”

He pursed his mouth around a sharp clot of emotion along the sides of his neck. Staring at the water, the strange impermanent surface of it, Tim tipped another sip halfway up the bottle before deciding against it and setting it on the ground closer to Raylan. He burrowed backward into the uncozy surface of the plastic chair slats.

“They tell you you’re doing the right thing; good job, son. Good shot.” Tim tucked the lower half of his face in his knees for a moment, gazing into the wavering eye of one of the pool lights. “But what does it all matter? What did I ever really do but make those rich fucks in Washington richer, and smash my own future on the sidewalk like some raw fuckin’ egg in August?”

Raylan weighed that with a long, thoughtful silence. “If you name a ghost,” he finally said, “it can’t scare you so bad.”

Tim looked sideways at Raylan, resting one temple along the bracket of his forearms. “Which cereal box had that written on the back of it?”

The rumble of Raylan’s responding chuckle in his chest did more to convince Tim he was back on solid ground than anything else in the wake of coming to.

“Thank you for telling me that,” Raylan murmured. He wasn’t looking at Tim. “Seriously.”

Tim grunted and turned back to staring at the pool. “I’m just in my cups.”

“You ever realize your accent gets thicker when you drink, Tex?”

“Fuck you.”

“There, just like that: Fuck yew.”

Tim leaned over the space between them and wrestled the bottle back from Raylan. If he had a better handle of his wits, he may have been able to assign the warmth blooming in his chest to its true origin point rather than the drink.

But he was still a little scrambled—Tim looked up at the stars and mentally picked out all the constellations he ever taught himself as a kid; mostly just the cool ones that looked like they could have come from the battered copy of The Lord of the Rings he had checked out from the library back in town as often as they’d let him renew it.

“See, I feel all that shit,” Tim murmured as the idea came to him, “and then I wonder how my mother could have been so goddamn proud of me when I enlisted.”

Raylan sighed through his nose. “I’m sure she’s still plenty proud of you.”

“She’s dead.”

With an abashed warble arrested at the back of his throat, Raylan plucked at the edge of his sleeve. “Was.”

Tim watched him; the subtle dexterity down to the very ends of Raylan’s fingertips.

“I think I was always more comfortable sitting on the foot of the big bed watching her take off her earrings and roll down her stockings while she reorganized her perfumes than I ever was out with my daddy learning how to get a 10-pointer in one shot,” Tim murmured, allowing himself a brief sleep back into dreamy disconnect. He smiled fondly at nothing, the barest hint of a grin. “She had a different scent for every day of the week.”

Raylan’s eyes on him were as careful as Tim could guess the brushing of his fingers would be against his cheek.

“I’m sure she’d still be proud of you,” he said gently, so gently it probably wouldn’t have disturbed the surface of the pool.

Tim held in a shudder and heaved a baleful sigh instead. “Yeah, well. Guess I’ll never really know, huh?” He stood up and stretched, just to do something with his body besides sit in it, before pointing at the pool. “Is that heated?”

Raylan gave him a look. “‘Course it’s heated, what do you think I am? A fuckin’ communist?”

Tugging off his shirt by the back of the collar, Tim peered at the edges of the yard disappearing into the dark. “Don’t got any peeping neighbors,” he asked, “do you?”

“I’ve never heard any complaints,” Raylan said, kicking back and closing his eyes.

Tim shucked everything but his undershorts and cannonballed into the deep end without giving it a second thought.

When he opened his eyes under the water, everything was blue and silent and he was alone.

He kicked himself to the surface and carved a few laps of high school backstroke down and back. Used to be his event; took him to districts the year he got real beanpole tall before everyone and could reach past them all. Too bad he quit growing pretty soon after then.

Tim slowed into the end of a skulling stroke and floated there in the middle of the pool, staring up at the sky with his ears pleasantly clouded by the water. He could see all the way up to infinity—the longer he stared at one patch of dark sky, the more places billions and billions of lightyears away made themselves known in the distance.

He had to believe in even just one reality somewhere out there in which Tim Gutterson from Bell County, Texas was truly happy.

He had to. Because if this was the only one, he’d better make it count—and that was a tall order he wasn’t sure he knew how to handle quite yet.

Chapter Text

~*~

The way Tim usually slept, curled up fetal on his side all balled-up tight, was more out of necessity than anything. He’d lived a life of small beds—the rickety twin mattress that took him through childhood into adolescence, the impersonal march of barracks slabs, stealing scraps of sleep out in the wastes trading shifts behind the scope, and now another narrow twin in his apartment he got on the cheap. Dug into his shoulder a little sideways with an errant spring or two, but it got the job done. 

He woke disoriented, spread out like a lizard on a rock under a thread count that felt patently sinful, and wondered for one addled moment if he’d gone and died in his sleep. 

Tim blinked, bleary-eyed, and peered around the room. The bed was definitely at least a queen. Across from him, past the edge of a nightstand with another three paperbacks stacked on it, the folding door of a mostly-empty closet stood open. A few collared shirts and garment bags hung in a row—either old overflow storage, or the evidence of a man making himself scarce by small degrees through the inevitable slip-slide of a life going to pieces in his hands. 

Scrubbing at his face, Tim swiped at the dried spit stuck to the corner of his mouth and took stock of himself: after hoisting back out of the pool, teeth chattering faintly in the dark, Raylan had offered Tim a towel and a place to sleep off his morbs. 

Got a guest room, he said, not quite looking as Tim scraggled the towel across his hair. Two of ‘em, technically. 

How’d you manage to keep the house? Tim had asked from the safety of the damp cowl left hanging over his face for a moment. When he pulled it away from his head again, Raylan was making a bitter little smile at nothing beyond the backyard fencing.

My indefatigable fuckin’ charm.

So Raylan whipped up a few plates of prepackaged frozen bullshit that might as well have been a Michelin-started feast for how hungry Tim was in the aftermath, eating right there at the counter with the towel wrapped around his waist. After insisting he help with cleanup, earn his keep on instinct, Tim took the guest room on the far end of the house. He showered, hung his undershorts over the shower curtain rod to dry, swilled a capful of burning mouthwash around to scour his teeth et al in lieu of a toothbrush—avoiding the craving to peep through Raylan’s medicine cabinet, just because—and proceeded to fall asleep so soundly the world could have ended outside without him knowing at all.

Still blinking in the pale light, just past seven in the morning if the analog clock on the nightstand was to be believed, Tim stared at his fist opening and closing carefully around the edge of the bedsheet and tried to ignore his morning wood. 

He was very nearly almost successful—and if that’s what he had to tell himself to stay sane about it, then that’s what he’d do.

Tim had never taken to shame like every pastor with a spot of ambition and a bone to pick with the very concept of youth itself tried to foist on him. Tim Gutterson’s shame was only ever self-taught, a taste he learned to stomach over the years of trying to measure up to a frame he would never be able to fit because it was built for someone who simply was not him.

He learned to touch himself by accident, with the discovery of things like friction and the fact that whenever he watched The Deer Hunter, the part where Steve and Michael hugged hello made the insides of his chest go all soupy. From there, it had just been a matter of figuring out where, how, and when the act served its ideal purpose.

Mostly, it was a tool to quiet his nerves. His head was an enigma all its own, but his body was blessedly less of a puzzle to sort out.

Tim turned onto his side and pet gently down his stomach, across the ridge of his hip, and sought the wakened flesh of his with careful drags of his fingertips. He stared at the slats of the drawn white venetian blinds grating the daylight into slim slats, and he breathed softly into the feeling of his gentle grip closing with the softest slide he could manage.

He was sharply aware that he was, technically, in Raylan’s bed. There were his books on the nightstand; his clothes stowed in the closet; the lightest reminder of his smell in the sheets, as though he’d lain here an odd night or two when the dark maybe stole into his bones like it sometimes stole into Tim’s and kept him awake—unable to seek sleep in a familiar place, perhaps Raylan also tucked himself away in secondary comforts.

Turning his face sideways into the pillow, Tim breathed a soft hint of a groan. He was never loud with it. One learned things like propriety and efficiency when packed in a tent like fucking sardines.

He allowed himself the luxury of reveling in the stillness, the empty-room comfort of a place that did not belong to him. Tim collected his bottom lip between his teeth and gazed at the tidy row of flannel shirts just visible on their hangers. His insides twisted, the hot coil in him speeding tighter with ropeburn urgency, and Tim bowed his forehead into his arm and clenched his free hand around the end of the pillow as he held in the weak breakage of his voice catching along his tongue’s root and spilled into one careful, catching palm.

Boneless, Tim listed for a while. The birds chattered outside. The world was none the wiser. He dozed a little, probably.

A knock startled Tim’s eyes back open eleven minutes later. His hand still resting between his legs had gone sticky.

“Yeah?” he croaked, curling up around his subtle mess.

“You awake?”

Tim yawned around the affirmative.

“Breakfast on the griddle,” Raylan said through the door. He rapped on the jamb again in farewell before his footsteps retreated back down the staircase through the narrow hallway.

Tim pushed off the covers and flipped onto his back. He swiped his hand across his belly, and then hissed a low oath to himself when he realized he was naked, compromised, and without any clothes.

He staggered to his feet and squeezed his eyes shut to steady himself against the pitch of a dizzy spell not unlike the hammerhead of a hangover. Balanced against the edge of the door, Tim stuck his head out.

“You got anything I can borrow to wear up here?” he called out.

“Whatevers up there is fair game,” Raylan shouted back up, his voice careening up along the walls—and as Tim moved to shut the door again, he caught the hurried Goddammit with a weighty hold between the d’s that told of Raylan accidentally burning himself on the skillet.

With his clean hand, Tim rooted through the dresser and pulled out a pair of sweatpants and a threadbare t-shirt made soft with wearing. He skulked into the attached bathroom, only glanced once at the disheveled blur of himself in the mirror, washed his hands, pissed, washed his hands again, and then pulled on the clothes made to fit a body much longer and narrower in the hips than his own. He had to cuff the sweats. The t-shirt sported a faded logo for a novelty restaurant somewhere on the Gulf coast and bunched up around his shoulders.

Tim slouched down into the kitchen. It only vaguely smelled of burnt cheese and overboiled grits. As he sat himself down in one of the breakfast bar stools, Raylan gestured at him with the business end of a spatula. “Nice hair.”

It had dried in a flattened half-mohawk thing with Tim falling asleep on it still wet. He ran his fingers uselessly through the thicket of it and held in another yawn.

“Your shampoo smells like a strawberry fucked a coconut,” he drawled. Raylan snorted.

“Most of the finer things in life do.”

~*~

After a breakfast better than it had any right being, Tim drove himself home with a cup of coffee for the road in a chipped mug Raylan promised he didn’t have to bother returning. Breakfast was better than it had any right being, but perhaps that was mostly because Tim’s brain felt like it had been yanked out through his ears, wrung dry, and crammed back in.

In a good way.

The apartment was a welcome, lonely sort of quiet when Tim shut the door behind him and leaned his head back against it. He took a moment there just to feel the habitation of his body; the subtle tingle flitting under his skin.

For once, it didn’t make Tim want to flay himself standing.

He was still wearing Raylan’s clothes.

There was a photo album under Tim’s bed that he could remember smelled like an old book, which he hadn’t so much as thought about since he first moved in and shoved it there into the dark so he didn’t have to do just that: think about it. He crossed the apartment, went down on his hands and knees, and peered at the forgotten clutter until he saw the edge of it. He batted it out, grimacing against the dust, and sat back against the edge of one bedpost to peel it open against his drawn-up knees.

A childhood in snapshots. He could hardly remember much of it, but each over-saturated-yet-blown-own photograph fed Tim his own past in frozen moments: there, a gap-toothed grin over a melting ice cream cone; here, his mother looking away mid-conversation with someone out of frame, her hair teased out big, Tim staring up at her in her lap like she hung the moon.

Where was that kid now? There was no way he was still living in the same vicinity of Tim’s spirit, so shelled-out and haunted with the phantom threats of pain, panic, and pressure.

Tim paged slowly through the photos, some of the plastic slip covers sticking to each other, and tried to reach for that boy in the places between his years. But he was either gone, or hiding—even when he turned to the last page, Tim felt no closer to his old self.

He still couldn’t recall what anything besides the Wednesday perfume smelled like, the last day he ever saw his mama, hugging him goodbye in the driveway while she pretended she wasn’t crying and Tim hated himself for not being able to stop his own pansy tears.

~*~

Tim arrived at the next session with his borrowed shirt and pants freshly laundered and unwrinkled in tidy rucksack rolls under one arm, and the washed mug in hand.

“Could have kept all that,” Raylan said as he shut the office door behind Tim, who made a doubtful sound as he set the souvenirs down on the end of Raylan’s desk.

“Then you’d have just ended up with a thank-you note,” he said, weighing the statement like a portent. Raylan smirked.

“You can take the kid out of Texas, huh?”

Tim smiled to himself and peered at Raylan for what may have been a touch too long, although neither of them commented on it. Raylan cleared his throat after a moment.

“Sorry for last time,” he blurted. Tim frowned.

“What, you’re sorry for me being stubborn?”

“No, the whole…making you haul out to my neck of the woods.”

Tim made a doubtful sound. “If that’s your definition of woods, ” he muttered, “do not go gentle into them thar hills.”

Raylan cast an amused look on him. “Seriously. I’m trying to be professional.”

“Sure, it just—doesn’t really warrant an apology.” Tim shrugged, and then crossed his arms with no other idea of what to do with them—and then un-crossed them, opting instead to rest his hands on his hips. He shrugged again. “I dunno. Kinda nice to see behind the curtain.”

“Oh yeah?” Raylan raised an eyebrow and looked him over with one quick flick of his eyes, which Tim felt lick through him like a shot of gin. “Not gonna wig out on me this time, are you?”

Tim bunched up his mouth around a smile that threatened a little too hard with the thrill of whatever was going on just north of his diaphragm. “Fuck yew,” he muttered, and led the way to the sofa as Raylan laughed.

~*~

The Third Bardo - Meditation

~*~

The sun isn’t half as virulent without a full set of fatigues on.

Tim stops walking for a moment and looks behind him—the endless thread of his footprints, made with that old pair of second-hand Keds he’d loved dearly and worn to shit, disappears into the horizon line.

Further down his body, he catalogs what he’s got on his person to weather this long trek: the blue polo with the banded sleeves, the jeans with the hole in the knee he patched all by himself in ‘82, and that’s about it.

Well. He’s done more with less.

Tim walks, and walks, and walks as the day grows long and sticky around him. He doesn’t sweat or feel the sun making a blistering home against the back of his neck, but he knows he’s been going for miles. He stops sometimes just to sit and listen to the empty hollows of his own head. It’s not…nice, per say, but it isn’t terrible.

It just is.

When he finds the sun growing low along the far end of the desert, he nearly sits down to wait for night to fall around him—but the unmistakable dull roar of a crowd cheering through a television rises from the distance, and Tim decides to follow it. 

He comes to a cave with a wide, dank mouth that breathes the promise of cool air up onto the sand. Tim picks his way carefully along the loose, red rocks that make up its edges and finds a path that goes down, down, down into the depths. The sound of the television persists—he remembers the sound of it: divisional playoffs, Minnesota versus Washington. He never gave a shit about football, but his daddy always had it on even though it never seemed like he paid the game any real attention either.

Tim scrambles carefully down the last bit of rock, near-damp with the way the earth hoards moisture deep in these parts, and speak of the devil: his daddy’s trailer with the ugly dent on one end glows like a lightning bug through its scuffed-up windows at the bottom of the cavern. 

He remembers to wipe his shoes off on the doormat after jostling it open—he’s sure to make the sound of it obvious so his daddy doesn’t get on his case, even though Tim isn’t the one who comes in from the rig and tracks crude oil across the floor after a particularly trying day.

Not that he’d ever say as much. Tim is a keen kid who learned early how to read a room, and put himself away in its periphery so as not to be bothered.

His daddy is on the sagging side of the couch, where he’s bent to the task of rolling an overfilled joint. “There he is,” he says, without looking up.

“Hey,” Tim says. He pours himself a cloudy glass of water from the tap and drinks it steadily while watching his daddy through the corner of his eye. Tim has known every step of the process since before he could read: sprinkle, roll, lick, seal—apparently made the best rolls with those girl hands of his, but Tim never bothered to taste a mouthful of the stuff until he was seventeen despite handling it plenty in the years before.

“Any plans for the weekend?”

The fuzzy flick of a lighter comes five, six, seven times before it takes. His daddy glances over his shoulder at Tim tarrying by the sink. Tim shrugs and puts the glass on the shallow stack still waiting to be washed.

“I dunno,” he says. “Maybe practice shooting cans.”

“I’ve got more empties. You can take ‘em if you want.”

His daddy draws on a long mouthful and holds in a huffed cough as one of the players on the television fumbles the ball.

“I’m gonna go read,” Tim says.

“Don’t lock that door,” his daddy reminds him.

“Yessir.”

In Tim’s room, everything is the same—the bedspread the same color, the furniture in the same order, the photographs tacked up around the mirror on top of his dresser; but there are more photos now, hundreds of them, built up like the lip of a grotto around his foggy reflection.

Tim reaches up and plucks one from the top edge—his favorite photo of him and his mother, with her holding him on her hip and shooting a candid smile over her shoulder at whoever snapped it—definitely not his daddy; she never wore that smile around Tim’s daddy.

He folds it in half very gently and tucks it into his shirt pocket. Tim curls up on his side on the bed, tunes out the sound of the football game like always, and drifts off with the impossible sunset slicing low and golden through his porthole window.

~*~

Tim came back to himself in the middle of a yawn. He cracked his jaw and stretched from his seat. He put his chin in both hands and peered at Raylan for a moment, who was watching him with an amused angle of light behind his eyes over the edge of a particularly well-worn paperback.

“Does an esteemed scholar of science such as yourself have access to any other modes of metaphysical transportation?” Tim asked as another yawn built.

Raylan plonked a bookmark in between the pages and set the book aside. “Ask me again, without the bullshit.”

Tim leveled a look at him. “You got any weed?”

~*~

Raylan led them to the roof, up an old side staircase and through a door that never really latched properly. He produced a handroll even more tidily-made than Tim’s finest work and offered it to Tim first. 

The mouthful was nice, subtle and soft-edged. Tim passed it to Raylan and settled against the wall at their backs. In the distance, a storm was beginning to build in the rolling, slurried distance of the sky. It’d be a good one, if Tim had the audacity to be a betting man.

“How the hell did you fall into all this?” Tim asked. 

Raylan looked pensive and peered out over the sky. He held his mouth pretty when he smoked.

“I got started on a bad path,” he said as though scrying through the distance. “My mother left when I was ten, my father is a walking devil—or was, couldn’t care less if he’s still alive—and I could feel myself hurtling right down the exact same footsteps, and I hated it. But I didn’t know how to stop.”

He offered the next hit to Tim, who took it and traced the shape of Raylan’s profile against the heavy slate sky with a quick pass of his eyes.

“I was trying to make myself scarce one night just west of the Mississippi,” Raylan continued. “Accidentally took LSD, had a trip so bad I could swear I died, and woke up in the drunk tank Christ knows how many hours, days later. Decided right then and there in all my stale clothes that I was gonna get a PhD simply to spite the old fuck.”

He shot a winsome grin at Tim, dry and companionable.

“And here y’are,” Tim said, managing not to exhale. Raylan just looked at him for a moment; watched the smoke float from his mouth.

“And here I am.”

Tim considered the story for a moment. “Have you ever tripped again?”

“Nope,” Raylan said with a grin, biting his lips shut around the joint. "Just a sherpa."

They smoked it down together. The storm rolled in with a sticky, springtime slowness that tugged at the edges of their clothes and the ends of their hair on a building wind.

“I got some of my own paternal woes,” Tim hummed. He sniffed and pinched gently at his nose. “Kind of a thing for professor types, too.”

Raylan grinned with a knowing and humored subtlety pulling at his lips. “I can’t fuck you,” he murmured.

Tim raised his eyebrows at the floor between his feet. “I didn’t think that’s what I was asking for.”

“I can’t, Tim.”

Tim held up his hand for the smoke. Raylan gave it and regarded him curiously. Meditating on a shallow mouthful, Tim felt the charge in the air begin to settle in over his pores.

“Call me sport,” he said.

“…I’m not gonna call you sport.”

“Why not?”

“Why don’t you explore the significance of these feelings in your journal?”

Tim heaved a gale of a sigh and shut his eyes. Very carefully, Tim laid himself down onto his back and shut his eyes as the first few measly spews of rain began to patter down from the clouds. “It’s hitting,” he announced.

The gentle nudge of a boot toe prodded Tim’s left hip. “Lightweight.”

The sound of Raylan unfolding himself into a stand sketched against the concrete. When Tim squinted over at him, he wore a private-looking smile.

“Shall we?”

Tim’s stomach twisted with a sweet, lurching kick. “Shall we what?”

“Shall we participate in the great American pastime of getting stoned and finding the best burger in town?”

~*~

Raylan steered them wide into a Wendy’s parking lot after meandering around town singing along off-key by a regular quarter-step to a Marty Robbins cassette.

Tim narrowed his eyes through the windshield. “This is a Wendy’s, numbnuts.”

“Numbnuts?” Raylan all but fucking giggled.

The contagiousness of mild hilarity eased up under Tim’s skin like a warm blush, and he couldn’t help but laugh along. “You said we were finding the best burger in town!” he insisted emphatically, throwing an open hand at the chipper, red logo.

Raylan threw out both his hands, grinning like a fool. “Yeah, and I couldn’t find it, so now we’re at a fucking Wendy’s!”

They went slowly through the drive-thru and ordered too much food, which was the perfect amount for the occasion. Raylan flirted incandescently with the bored young woman on the other side of the order window and came away with a phone number in pink gel pen on his receipt for the trouble.

In silence scored only by more Marty Robbins and the steadily-increasing peals of thunder rolling in across the boiling sky, they ate to their hearts’ content. Halfway through Tim’s near-nirvana at the bottom of a sleeve of fries, the rain kicked up into another gear and began to come down in biblical torrents.

A rolling, Appalachian clap of thunder ripped through the sky. Tim licked the salt from the tips of his fingers.

Sitting back in silence to digest and swim away into the sound of the rain for a little while, Tim flicked the corner of the receipt Raylan had shoved in the coin cubby. “Weed used to make me horny,” he said dejectedly.

Raylan snorted. “Oh, to be twenty-four again.”

“I’m twenty-nine, asshole.”

“Seriously?” Raylan jogged his knee to tap against the outside edge of Tim’s thigh. “Look at you, with your dollface.”

Tim rolled his eyes and shifted slightly, twisting his hips gently as though to remind them they were not to betray his confidence here, goddammit.

He liked it; Dollface . Fucking sue him.

“Used to make me think I could paint,” Raylan said, scratching lazily at the underside of his chin. “But now I just kinda get…sad. Y’know? The good kind of sad.”

It was Tim’s turn to snort. On its heels, a righteous rumble of thunder rattled the frame of Raylan’s truck. “Only a brain doctor would say something like ‘the good kind of sad.’”

“There are a great many people who would be knocked flat by the insult of you calling me a brain doctor. And what fuck’s life worth if you can’t be a little sad about it sometimes?” Raylan flipped the lever on his seat and leaned back, staring at the roof; the sound of it like pelting gravel. “I was taught that the good lord’d look the other way if you gave the right money to the right people, and it took me forty years to realize the only god worth having is one who knows how to hold you when you don’t need nothin’ but a good hard cry.”

Tim stared at Raylan’s knee still leaned in across the console, barely touching him but so close Tim would swear he felt that warmth as though it was pressed straight up against him. He frowned with the effort of focus, zeroing in on the heat they barely, almost shared. “Weed used to make me able to cry, too,” he said blithely.

Raylan directed a feline smirk at him, settled on the long side of tender. “Pussy.”

~*~

They took the scenic route back to campus, mostly so Raylan could avoid the faster streets.

“You gotta try that new road,” Raylan said as they passed the construction zone that had fucked traffic earlier that month. “It’s a real hoot.”

Back in the parking lot, Tim pointed out his car so Raylan could pull up next to it and Tim wouldn’t have to get soaked to the bone walking over. Before he reached all the way for the door handle, Raylan stilled him with a point and a raised eyebrow. “You drive like a fucking saint, you hear me?”

Tim managed to keep his smile mostly to himself. “Yessir.”

He shuffled, hopped, and scooted into his own car, and when he gave a short wave through the rain-slick window, Raylan flashed his lights and steadily backed out to return home; gone into the sheets of rain.

It felt good to obey somebody’s request—Tim drove very carefully, both hands on the wheel, and checked his mirrors in a steady rhythm. Four miles from home, his body decided to remember what it used to do and set Tim’s careful mind alight with what it might have been like to climb over the console and ask Raylan to call him dollface again from a kneel in the footwell.

Those last four miles weren’t the most saintly driving, but he wasn’t gonna tell.

At home, he pawed his journal out from under his mattress and stared at the blank page. His cheeks were still at a high flush; his heart still heavy in his chest with a magnetic drag pulling toward something on the other side of his ribs he didn’t know how to reach for.

I’ve never let myself believe I could ask God to hold me instead of hate me, he wrote, carefully pushing and pulling his way through each letter.

Tim curled up on his side and looked for subtle, secret patterns in the wallpaper as he imagined all the ways Raylan could call him the sorts of things Tim didn’t trust he’d ever be able to hear from a man.

The rain drove onward from outside and washed the day away.

Chapter Text

~*~

The phone was rattling as Tim stepped from the shower. He reached out the door along the short wall along the outside of the bedroom and slapped around a little until he grabbed the receiver. 

Tim scrubbed at the right side of his head and knocked the water loose from his ear with a couple shakes before setting the handset to his face. “Hello?”

“We still on for next Friday?”

Raylan, sounding antsy. Tim frowned at his reflection and kept at the drying-off. “Yeah, unless you’ve got more lawyer shit come up?”

A stiff laugh crackled down the line. “No, all clear on this end. Just wanted to double-check.”

He wasn’t saying all of it, but nor was Tim about to pipe up and contribute to jogging his memory if he could help it— Kind of a thing for professor types, too. I can’t fuck you.

Dollface.

“I’ll bring you a bottle,” Tim blurted, on the off-chance his thoughts were loud enough to make their way down the line and he needed a way to cover them quick.

“Seriously?” Raylan sounded a little impressed, if not confused by the non sequitur.

“I drank you out of your bad taste, it’s only fair.”

It was true. They’d emptied the bottle together. Tim hadn’t paused to consider until now that Raylan hadn’t seemed any more hungover than him that next morning. Tit for tat.

“That really isn’t necessa—”

“See you Friday,” Tim cut in, and hung up before Raylan could do anything else off the cuff in that easy way of his to remind Tim he was a soft thing that could feel.

~*~

The Fourth Bardo - Dying

~*~

Tim knocked at Raylan’s office with his foot, and held out the bottle of Buffalo Tracer with the brown bag still wrapped around it when the door swung open. Raylan pulled an impressed face. Tim scoffed.

“What? Surprised someone who drinks Maker’s knows how to ask where this one’s shelved?”

“It’s not that much different,” Raylan said coolly, stepping back to allow Tim to cross the threshold.

“It’s very that much different.” Tim tipped his head and shook the bottle gently for emphasis. “Store clerk said a man needs real hair on his chest to drink Buffalo.”

Without ceremony, Raylan plucked the bottle from Tim’s hand and made a mild show of weighing it in his grip. “All for me then, huh?” he sallied.

Halfway through shrugging off his backpack, Tim kicked Raylan gently in the ankle. He glanced around the office and noticed a full teacup on the desk. “What’s that,” he asked, “fixing to turn teatime into a real party while I’m under?”

“Fixed the kettle!” Raylan crowed as he sauntered behind his desk and neatly deposited the bottle in its bottom drawer. “Figured we could try tea today instead of a pill, if you’re keen. Always worth a go trying multiple modes of ingestion, or at least that’s what my favorite crazy Swiss chemist posits.”

Tim narrows his eyes. “Should we be taking cues from crazy Swissmen?”

“If you ask me, they’re the only ones worth taking any cues from.” Raylan beamed at him. Tim held his ground and shrugged.

“Sure, yeah. Why not?”

Raylan indicated the cup, and Tim picked it up by the saucer. He sniffed it first—earthy, like tea was supposed to smell; unremarkable.

“Huh,” he said, peering at the ripples his breath made on the surface.

“What’d you expect,” Raylan teased gently, “green fairies ‘n’ shit dancing on the rim?”

“I expected something a little more involved than oolong.”

“Don’t cream your jeans, maestro, it’s no finer than what you’d get at a continental breakfast in Powderly.”

Tim shot Raylan a tart look before mocking a toast at him with the cup. “Bottoms up.”

It wasn’t that hot, so he sipped down most of it in one go without scalding himself. He still grimaced; didn’t taste like tea, really, more like the distillation of a mud potion a kid might make at a playground.

Raylan nodded at him with his chin. “Whole thing, hot-shot.”

Tim snorted. “Hot-shot?”

Kicking a twitch of his finger at the cup before bending at the narrow waist to tidy a few papers on top of his desk, Raylan eyed him with what Tim hazarded to read as a lick of fondness. “Whole thing.”

It seemed Raylan was full of names that knew how to make Tim feel as though he’d been taken right around the middle and pressed flat, like the thumbprint in a peanut butter cookie.

He polished off the tea. Raylan accepted the empty dishware from Tim and set it to the side on his desk. “That’ll hit in a bit,” he said, still looking down at the papers, “go ahead and make yourself comfortable.”

Tim stood by for a moment and watched him. A moment turned into a few minutes—Raylan was distracted, paging through a thick sheaf of papers bristling with highlighter-colored tabs along its edges.

“You busy?” Tim hummed.

Raylan seemed to catch himself, stopped, and sagged a little through his shoulders. “No, I’m—sorry. I’m not busy. I’m all yours.”

He sent a wan smile to Tim, who continued to watch him. “Can I ask you a serious question?”

“Depends,” Raylan said, cutting his eyes.

“On what?”

“Whether or not it’s gonna upset you to ask it, because with that tea down your gullet you’re heading into the rabbit hole in a fast car without brakes.”

Tim’s brows twitched together. “How fast is fast?”

Squinting at his wall clock, Raylan tipped his head a little from side to side. “Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“It’s not gonna upset me,” Tim said. He let his face open a little when Raylan’s jaw twitched. “Promise.”

Raylan gave a slow, soundless sigh. Eventually, he gestured for Tim to carry on.

Tim chewed gently on the inside of his cheek. “How do I know if this is working?”

“What, the tea?”

“I mean…look. I like getting garnished with the good shit as much as the next guy, but is there ever a—a moment? Does it ever click?”

As Tim cast around for the right words, Raylan had sat down in the chair to regard him evenly across the clutter of his desk. He pushed the stack of paper aside and leaned forward on his elbows with his fingers loosely laced together. “Well, that could be a very far-reaching question.” he murmured, “couldn’t it?”

Tim just looked at him. “Try your best, sound it out.”

Distantly fascinated, Raylan leaned back in his chair. “You are a stony bastard, aren’t you?”

“Comes with the trauma,” Tim deadpanned.

“So that isn’t a dirty word to you after all!” Raylan said brightly.

A dry chuckle kicked its way from Tim’s chest, bucked out by Raylan’s blue streak of cutting straight to the quick. “‘ Scuse me?”

Raylan ground his jaw for a beat. He drew up his posture and pinned Tim with an intentional, flashing gaze. “All you macho go-army boys walk around with your acute emotional constipation— not,” Raylan interjected over himself standing halfway immediately with a hand out, “without reason.”

He finished rising the rest of the way very slowly, as though Tim might bite his hand off if he said the wrong thing. Tim pursed his mouth and squared his feet, curious to hear how Raylan planned to steer his foot out of his mouth.

“Like you said,” Raylan said in a low voice: “comes with the trauma. And I’m doing a terrible job of making sure I don’t upset you, so I’ll keep it short and sweet and say it doesn’t click, per say, but you’ll wake up one day and realize it doesn’t hurt so bad to be opening your eyes again with no reward for the effort but another fuckin’ day.”

Tim let the silence linger for a while, tasting it on the tip of his tongue. He let Raylan watch him a little uneasily for a few heartbeats, until Raylan gave a stark shrug. “There. Serious question gets a roundabout-serious answer.”

There.

Well, that didn’t sound too bad.

Was that it?

Tim wondered if he hadn’t maybe already gotten there.

The next time he blinked, the light coming in through the window behind Raylan’s chair sets the dust motes in the narrow shaft aglitter. It refracts in a brilliant spangle from one flick of Raylan’s eyelashes. Tim points at his own left cheekbone and glances down at his fingertip when his skin tingles gloriously with the touch; “Did you know you had a freckle there?”

Raylan’s mouth draws tightly into a flat line. “Shit. Okay. You processed that quick, you fuckin’ overachiever. Here—let’s get you to the couch.”

Tim lets Raylan take him easily by the shoulders and steer him toward the couch setup, but Tim puts up an arm to stop him when he sees a box on Raylan’s desk that was certainly not there before. “Wait.”

“Tim—”

Wriggling away from Raylan’s gentle guidance, Tim staggers to the desk and braces himself with the heels of his hands on either edge of the box. He looks up at Raylan, baffled and halfway accusatory. “This is my daddy’s gun case.”

Raylan has that careful, spooked-horse hand held out again. “Tim.”

“How did you get this?” Tim breathes. “You had it the whole time?”

“Come sit,” Raylan says, and he’s too beautiful to look at so Tim squeezes his eyes shut. “Tim. Let’s go get you situated. Not the best idea to be up and about right now.”

Tim still knows the lock combination—Tim’s birthday, off by a day because his daddy could never remember it right. He wrestles it open, peels back the lid, and stares. 

No pearl-handled revolver. Just the same photo of Tim and his mama, a little creased down the middle from being folded in his pocket. Tim’s pulse begins to race. 

“My daddy pawned it while I was—while I was away,” he stammers, still not looking at Raylan but casting about around the office as though it might be hiding somewhere else; he needs to put it back before his daddy gets home and sees he was meddling, his daddy can abide by much but not by meddling. Tim jams a fist into the root of his hair and shakes his head, struggling to calm his pulse. “He got rid of it, traded up, but I was gonna—I was—”

“Tim, it’s okay. It’s okay, come sit with me. Let’s focus.”

Tim can see Raylan shining like the inside of the sun from beside him. He averts his stare, shrugs off his careful touch, and there, right there in the doorway, his daddy is standing with the old six-shooter held lazily in his hand.

“Too late, Timmy,” he says, like he’s won something, and tucks it into the back of his waistband before turning to disappear down the hall outside. 

Tim makes to tear after him, but Raylan is stronger than he looks. He holds Tim back for a few panicked seconds that make Tim’s instincts kick on like a jet engine, and Tim manages to fight his way to the door; halfway over the threshold.

At the end of the corridor, the desert opens in a wide, sandy eternity warping with heat mirage. Tim’s daddy saunters away into it with his hands in his pockets and the pistol stuffed jauntily into his Wranglers as if waving goodbye.

“Daddy!” Tim shouts, still fighting against Raylan’s grip but unable to buck it completely. “Wait!”

He doesn’t wait. He just keeps walking. Above, past the water stains on the edges of the drop ceiling panels and the harsh fluorescent lights, a helicopter drones; screams, really. Sounds like it’s coming down. Tim tastes his heart in his mouth.

~*~

He woke to realize he was warm, but not uncomfortably so. The weight around him wasn’t wreckage or a collapsed dune or his own gear pressing him down into the earth. It was Raylan. 

Tim shifted slightly and found his back leaned back against the long solidity of a steadily-breathing chest. They were sitting on the floor, where Raylan had gently pinned Tim’s arms across his body to keep him from flailing and leaned back against the wall behind the desk. With his wrists free, Tim reached up and patted twice on Raylan’s arm as though tapping out.

“Hey,” he croaked.

Raylan started a little, like maybe he’d been dozing. “Hey. You back?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you do if someone’s chasing you through a parking garage?”

Tim blinked blearily but made no move to shuffle himself out of Raylan’s grip. “What?”

“What do you do,” Raylan repeated evenly, giving Tim’s hand a grounding squeeze, “if someone is chasing you through a parking garage?”

They were in the office. They were safe. Tentatively, Tim gave a firm squeeze back. “Uh. Look for the exit. Run toward the nearest source of light, an opening. Make a shitload of noise. Make myself a nuisance.”

“Good. Remind me what kind of car you drive, Tim?”

“Ford Bronco,” Tim said. Goddamn, it felt like he’d just gone six rounds with a sledgehammer. Had he been trying to wrestle Raylan?

His thought pattern careened to a halt at the feeling of Raylan petting a hand into Tim’s hair. “Ok, OJ,” he muttered companionably. 

“Hey, you’ve seen her,” Tim insisted, shifting as though making to turn around and shoot Raylan an accusatory look. “She’s cobalt blue.”

“ Cobalt blue, huh?” Raylan roved his fingers gently along Tim’s scalp, like this was just all part of the job; nothing to it. “That’s a good little car, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Her name’s Dolly.”

“As in the sheep, or the singer? Though I guess those are one in the same.”

 “Hey, can you—” Tim stopped himself and wagged his head out like he’d maybe heard some pocket change rattling around in there and made to shake it free. “The singer, obviously.”

“Sheep was named after the singer,” Raylan said, shifting gently before settling again behind Tim. “Cloned from a mammary cell, and all.”

“Let’s stop talking about sheep tits,” Tim rasped. “Could you just…hold me, for a little while longer? Please. I need a sec.”

Raylan sighed, the patient kind instead of a burdensome heave, and steered Tim around so his face could cradle down into Raylan’s shoulder. Slowly, as though he could hear his joints creaking as well as feel them, Tim wrapped his arms around Raylan’s back and held on tight. 

He matched his breathing to the low, steady pace of Raylan’s lungs; the steady path of Raylan’s hand drawing a comforting line down his spine from shoulder to waist, shoulder to waist. Their heartbeats synced up and slowed down. When Tim turned his face slightly to look at the desk, there was no gun case and Raylan’s collar smelled like summer once did before everything fell apart: heady and deep, full of potential.

~*~

Eager to use the kettle again, Raylan made Tim a cup of chamomile tea—swore on his boots there weren’t any mushrooms in it—and sat him down in the desk chair to help him come down the last bit of the way.

“That’s two bad trips out of four, doc,” Tim said weightily, offsetting the criticism with a tart look.

Raylan gave him a wry smile. “There are some who’d still bet those odds.”

“Yeah,” Tim scoffed, “my old man would be first in line.”

As he took another slow sip, the two of them watched each other with quick, darting glances.

“Sorry,” Raylan said, “for what it’s worth. Feels like that one was my fault.”

Tim made a demurring sound around the floral warmth in his mouth. “Consider us even,” he said when he swallowed. 

He watched Raylan for a little while—he was puttering around at the shelves, aimlessly organizing the spines of books and thick sheafs of paper clamped together with alligator clips. He looked good in his office; easy and sure of himself, like Tim was observing a rehabilitated animal making its home in a place it never expected to land.

“Well, from where I’m standing—”

“Sitting,” Raylan said smoothly without looking over his shoulder. Tim smiled. 

“From where I’m sitting, you aren’t very good at your job.”

Raylan chuckled as he turned to face Tim, with one hand on his hip and the other still braced against the bookshelf. “Wasn't exactly magna cum laude, but hell, I passed my defense. Fancy piece of paper says so.”

He pointed at the framed doctorate on the west-facing wall. Tim peered at it for a long while as he sipped from the fresh teacup, wondering faintly at all the men Raylan used to be and how he stumbled into settling on this one.

“Has this process been any kind of helpful?”

Tim looked up at Raylan’s question. He was still standing at the bookcase, watching Tim. “How d’you mean?”

“I mean you asked me if it’s gonna click, but it’s a process. Has this helped at all, with anything of yours? Truly.”

Tim mulled that thought for a moment. He took another slow sip. “Yeah,” he finally said. “I haven’t thought seriously about…hurting myself. Not since we started. So.”

He left the statement hanging. Raylan kept watching him.

“I need you to be bone-deep honest with me for a second,” Raylan said into the silence. 

“Okay.”

“Is there even the chance of the smallest reason I need to worry about you doing something stupid when this study is over?”

Tim frowned. “No.”

“None?”

“None at all.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Raylan grinned. “I don’t believe you.”

Tim blinked. “Okay?”

“I don’t believe you so thoroughly, that I’m gonna set down some insurance against that promise.”

Raylan paused, perhaps for dramatic emphasis. Tim nodded expectantly at him to continue and managed not to roll his eyes.

“We got one more session on the books,” Raylan said, ambling away from the shelves to lean on the long side of the desk. “If you stay on even keel for another two weeks thereafter, I’ll take you to dinner.”

“Is that Raylan-ese for another Wendy’s?” Tim asked into his cup, if only to keep himself from immediately blurting Yes, Christ, of course.

Raylan shot him a small, private smile. “I’ll make sure they have cloth napkins. Deal?”

Tim looked at Raylan outlined by the lowering sunlight, the fine hairs and frayed edges along his outline lit to a subtle brilliance like maybe Tim was still tripping a little.

Goddammit. He was falling in love.

“Deal.”

Chapter Text

~*~

Tim showed up to his final appointment feeling sheepish but trying to be macho about it, until he remembered Raylan’s comment about go-army boys and felt a little stupid for trying to draw his shoulders back like that. 

“My turn to apologize,” Tim announced through the jamb instead of knocking when he found the door ajar. Through the gap, Raylan looked up with a split second flash of what could only be classed as relief before schooling it away again.

“What for?” Raylan unfolded and gestured for Tim to come inside—Tim tarried a little over the threshold. Was that what always chased through Raylan’s demeanor when Tim arrived? Relief?

“For freaking out. You know.” He crossed onto the fluffy mauve-ish carpet and shut the door behind him, cramming his hands in his pockets. “The…hold me. Thing.”

Raylan looked amiably confused. “Thought we agreed that was my fault.”

Tim shrugged, or twitched his shoulders sort of, or what the hell ever. He didn’t know anymore. All he knew was that looking at Raylan put something in Tim’s amygdala on the fritz, like the hotplate of an old kettle that had no business working anymore except that it did, so one might as well use it.

Unbothered, Raylan glanced over his shoulder at the couch. He’d laid the quilt out already. “I’m just glad you’re okay. No more tea,” he tacked on with an earnest smile, “promise.”

Tim twitched his mouth in return and led the way to the sofa. As he settled down and slid off his shoes, Raylan watched him with the edges of his back teeth at work grinding gently around some faraway thought. 

“Meant what I said, you know,” he offered. Tim paused halfway through tugging the blanket over his legs.

“About what, the sheep being named after Dolly Parton’s boobs?”

“What? No.” Amused disbelief creased Raylan’s face, all the more handsome for the surprise of it—Tim looked away before his own eyes could go all dewy and stupid. “About the two weeks of good behavior.”

Tim ran the tip of his tongue along his bottom teeth, finding the one at the front that had started to slowly twist on its root somewhere north of fifteen years old and disrupted the tidy row of them. “Good,” he said simply, and laid back against the pillow. “Now strap me in, doc. I’m hankering for my enlightenment.”

It sounded cooler in his head. Raylan held in a smirk like he knew that, but he didn’t say anything sideways and held one last pill out to Tim instead of calling him something made affectionate with its subtle spines.

~*~

The Fifth Bardo - Reality

~*~

He’s finally found the end of the dunes, and they lead straight to his grandfather’s kitchen table. Tim has done leagues and leagues of homework here—spelling, arithmetic, book reports he never could manage to keep within the word limit because he just had too much to say about the stories.

Granny and Granddad were his mother’s parents; his daddy’s parents weren’t really the sort one took pains to visit, so mama filled the gap with her own folks twice as often. But after Granddad died, sick by cigarettes, it was like a chapter closed. Warmth gone, as though Granddad took it all with him and it wasn’t worth the drive anymore. Granny would come around sometimes to mama’s, what with her all sad from divorcing and needing some help here and there, but Tim secretly missed that kitchen table. And Granddad, mostly. He was a gentle man in a place that wasn’t often kind to gentleness, and Tim had been grateful for the proof he didn’t have to become a hardened thing if he didn’t want to.

Circumstance hardened him anyways, but that wasn’t Granddad’s fault.

Granddad had made Tim promise never to take up smoking from the privacy of his hospital bed the last time mama brought Tim to visit. She was down the hall getting more ice, and Granddad beckoned for Tim to listen closely and wheezed, Tobacco might make you feel butch, so softly Tim had to lean over the edge of the bed to hear, but it’ll kill you slow and unsorry. You’re too smart for that, I’d say.

And even through the grist of deployment pressing Tim from rough coal, to diamond, to a thing that killed much quicker than tar in the lungs, he managed to keep that promise.

But here, now: the table. There is a man in an immaculate set of dress blues sitting in one of two chairs with his back to Tim.

“Hello?” Tim calls out, and as it echoes strangely even though there aren’t any walls or floors or ceilings in this nothing-place, he realizes on the second syllable that he’s also in uniform: the sand-colored fatigues, as spotless as the day they were issued to him.

The man turns around, and Tim knows him immediately. 

“Well hello, Duckie,” he says with a smile, and scoots the second chair out for the taking with the toe of one mirror-shined shoe. 

“Hi,” Tim breathes, feeling all of a child again because it is him—younger, of course, probably right about thirty, and the very spit of Tim with just a little more of his mother about him. 

His grandfather smiles. He has a cigarette burning between two long fingers and sits pretty, somewhere between effete and well-postured. Tim can’t recall him ever looking like that before, but then again Tim can’t recall ever knowing him with a full head of hair either.

Tim sits. There are two small coffee cups in front of them, the little espressos Granddad had taken a shine to when he was stationed in Italy. Tim drops two sugar cubes into his and takes his time stirring it, feeling those sharp blue eyes taking stock of him.

“Do you remember your grandmother?” Granddad asks. Tim sips from his cup and furrows his brow.

“‘Course I do.”

She’d passed while Tim was deployed. Same accident that took his mama. He didn’t give it much space to dwell in regular memory.

His grandfather directed a wistful smile through the kitchen window, which hung impossibly in the air and gave a view of the flat Salado distance that made up the back end of the property that smelled of rich, sweet hay even though they didn’t keep any horses. “She was a real peach,” Granddad said. He sighed to himself through his nose and took a quick draw on his cigarette. “Patient as a saint. She didn’t have to marry me, you know.”

“What?” Tim screwed up his face at his grandfather, who was still looking at him with the edges of his mouth tipped up subtly like every movement of Tim’s face was familiar. “You adored each other.”

It almost comes out as another question, but he remembers himself and hides instead in the lip of his cup. His grandfather makes a neutral sound and sits back in his chair, sending another pensive look through the window.

“Well, I asked her to for mostly selfish reasons. She was sweet, and I was scared.”

Scared? Granddad wasn’t scared of shit. He’d lopped off the head of a rattlesnake with a shovel without so much as blinking when Tim came running in one day hollering about it coiled up in the tire swing on the big tree.

“Scared of what?” Tim asks. He abandons the coffee, still too bitter for his tastes anyways, and leans forward onto the table with his chin resting on his criss-crossed arms like he’s eight years old again. He’d kick his legs to and fro, if only they weren’t long enough by now to finally reach the floor.

His grandfather flicks softly at the end of his cigarette, kicking off a shallow rind of ash from its tip into an enamel bowl. “Sound it out,” he says softly, not quite meeting Tim’s eyes, “I think you know.”

Tim feels as though he’s missing the point of something significant, but can’t seem to grasp it fully. He stares at his grandfather, finding familiar pieces of himself in his face—the slope of his nose, the shape of his mouth, the riverbend of his hairline, the edges of his ears.

“What was it the handsome devil out there told you?” His grandfather hums after a protracted silence, still peering out the window. “Name your ghosts?”

Tim doesn’t say anything as recognition dawns in him, slow like the dissolution of blood threading into water. By the time it hits him fully, Tim can’t think of what the hell to say about it: I didn’t know sounds stupid, and probably isn’t even true because really, from here, Tim knows he knew. He always knew. Why didn’t you tell me is also a pale excuse, because Tim already knows the answer to that one as well. Same shit that keeps him claptrap from his own insides-out: a genetic predisposition to living in the margins as a means of survival.

He swallows the lump in his throat and stares at his knuckles for such a long time that his grandfather reaches across the table and wraps one delicate hand around his own.

“I wish I was different,” Tim settles for whispering.

“Oh, I did too, Duckie. I think all of us in that particular company do, but only for a little while if we’re lucky.”

“I’m just so… angry, ” Tim grits out. He wants to cry, but he won’t let that happen. Big boys don’t cry. “I’m angry all the fucking time.”

His grandfather runs his fingertips over the ridge of Tim’s wrist and casts a concerned look over him. “Anger is the easy feeling, but it’s hardly safest. It stops hurting so bad if you let yourself cry about it.”

He’s right, and Tim knows it. He used to hate when Granddad was right—made him feel dumb to have someone else be right instead of him. Tim has learned to avoid this feeling by simply being so fucking good at anything he takes up that nobody can ever tell him otherwise. It’s worked until now, mostly. Sort of.

Tim stews on that until he realizes he’s tired of standing up in front of the world he’s been given and expecting a fist instead of a handshake. And then it’s easy; his eyes welling up is just the next logical thing.

His grandfather clicks his tongue gently and pats Tim’s hand under his. “There you are,” he murmurs, and looks on with a strange touch of guilt as the tears begin to roll down Tim’s cheeks. “She never let you cry, did she?”

“I had to be strong for her,” Tim weeps.

“You were a child, Tim,” Granddad says, not chiding him but simply disappointed in the results of a past he might have had a greater hand in shaping but for the dying.

“I was her best boy,” Tim whispers, sheared to the bone, and dissolves into inarticulate misery.

His grandfather does him the greatest kindness Tim could ask for and simply stays there as Tim cries. Every now and then he drums the back of Tim’s hand with his fingers as though reminding him he’s still there, and he only interrupts Tim’s quiet collapse when he extinguishes the spent end of his cigarette and leans forward to angle for Tim’s gaze.

“I did my damn level best to love your mother enough,” he says evenly, as though he’s maybe been rehearsing the words in his head, “but I don’t think she and I ever spoke the same language. I’m sorry, Duckie.”

“She did okay,” Tim insists, swiping messily at his nose with the back of his hand. “She—she was okay.” His chin trembles before he can stop it. “Do you think she’d still love me? If she knew?”

His grandfather gives another lily-light sigh, his brow drawn, and comes down from his chair to kneel beside Tim’s and take him by both sides of the face. He dries Tim’s clammy tear tracks with his thumbs. “Look at you,” he murmurs instead of giving a direct answer, which is answer enough in and of itself; “pretty as a picture even when you’re crying. I knew you took after me.”

Tim expects the impact of that hard and bitter truth to hit him in a deeper place, but it doesn’t kill him. Not really. He gives a dry wince of a smirk and takes over drying his own face off, his breath still shuddering but his spirit still kicking. He nods his chin at the pack of cigarettes beside his grandfather’s cap on the table.

“I’d ask for one, but someone made me promise I wouldn’t,” he grumbles, and Granddad’s responding smile is sly and companionable.

“Good to know that integrity’s still intact.”

They sit back in their chairs in a spell of stillness, simply looking at one another as Tim revels in the feeling of returning to himself from very far away. He wonders if Granddad can see it too; all the parts of each other they share.

“I never learned how to trust that someone’s gonna be able to love me if they really know me,” Tim finally says. The words hang in the air around them like incense after they quit ringing, sticky with the weight of time around their origins.

“We all learn it differently,” his grandfather says, “at different times. Not knowing when or how is half the fun of living, really.”

Tim gives a dry sniff. “What, getting your heart broken is a good time?”

His grandfather crosses one leg over the other and leans his elbow against the table, a pose Tim realizes he’s made before the handful of times he tried to pick up a guy at a bar—although he was afraid to make it look too poofy, too gauche, and always pulled the punch of it a little. But when Granddad does it, Tim sees how easy it could be to live in one’s body like a home instead of a prison.

“They still taught you boys how to jump out of planes, right?” he asks, gesturing at Tim’s uniform. Tim nods—he fucking hated airborne. “The fun part isn’t the sorrow, Duckie. It’s the moment before you pull the cord, when the air is still rushing up at your face and you can’t tell whether you’re falling down or up; one with everything, terrified and ecstatic. It’s the what-if.”

Granddad leans back and sets to lighting another cigarette. “What if it goes wrong, sure,” he says as he taps at the box. “What if the parachute doesn’t open, what if the air blows wrong—but what if it goes right, and you get to feel what hundreds of generations of people before us could only look up at the sky and dream of trying? Flight. And hell, you’re already falling anyways. Scary part’s over. We’re all falling from the moment we’re born.”

Tim stares as his grandfather pulls a strike lighter from his breast pocket and draws on the flame from the edge of his lip. As he exhales, he nods to himself. “Our sort has to take terrifying risks, Tim, because if there’s the smallest chance it will make us happy for even a moment then by God, we have to try. Because what else is there? Even if it doesn’t stick, at least you tried. You lived. You have to reach for your own happiness. Nobody else can pull your chute for you.”

What else indeed. Tim thinks of his mama and her perfumes; of Caddy and his jokes about sand in uncouth places; of Raylan, and everything that falls into place with him.

Granddad gives the sideways grin Tim hasn’t realized he’s missed so dearly and pats Tim’s cheek with one soft, warm hand. “You’ll do alright, won’t you?” When Tim nods, the smile reaches his eyes. “There’s my good lad.”

~*~

Tim woke up slowly. It started with the sounds, canned birdsong dragging him back out of that silent place, and ended with his eyes opening wet behind the silk mask.

He pushed it away from his face and slid off the headphones at the same time Raylan started and rose from his chair to grab the usual glass of water. Tim rubbed at his eyes, a little mystified by the tears there, as Raylan knelt beside him and offered the cup.

“You okay, sport?” Raylan’s voice was achingly gentle, like he understood.

Tim drank a few gulps of the water with his vision unfocused, soft and sleepy and heavy on the middle-distance. He put the cup aside and slowly pulled a hand down his face—forehead-brows-eyes-nose-mouth-chin. All there.

He took a slow breath in, held it for a moment, and exhaled. Raylan was still knelt beside him.

It was the only thing that made any sense at all, next; Tim leaned over, rested that same hand on the curve of Raylan’s shoulder, and kissed him.

He could still remember what it was like to jump from a plane. Defying the laws of nature wasn’t something a body tended to forget. Feeling Raylan’s mouth open gently under his, the surprised puff of air escaping with hardly a sound but just enough of one for Tim to hear from so close, felt about as close as Tim could get to the sensation with both feet still on the ground.

It’s the what-if.

Tim tugged him gently backward, lowering them onto the couch, and the fact Raylan followed without letting him break the kiss stoked a burn in Tim’s chest that might have struck him dead had he not been ready to receive it. He took Raylan by the back of the neck, digging his blunt fingernails into his hair, and melted into the feeling of both Raylan’s hands clutched to either side of Tim’s waist as though he might find his way in if he pressed just right.

Their legs tangled at the knees. Raylan’s tongue was a slow, exploratory wonder. The record player spun on with its birdsong and the gentle rush of the breeze through tree canopies in a tinny thread from the discarded headphones.

When Raylan’s thigh at just the right angle in just the right way made Tim flinch with a full-bodied shudder, skipping the hiccuped scrap of a whine past Raylan’s teeth, Raylan slowed real gentle and sat back slightly to give them space to breathe.

“You’re gonna wanna take your time coming down,” he panted, like he couldn’t tell which of them he was trying to talk to. Tim slid his arms closer around the bridge of Raylan’s shoulders and pulled him down enough to hold his ear to Raylan’s chest.

“I’m serious.” Raylan pet a hand down Tim’s hair again, just like the last session. His voice buzzed in his chest, low and gentle against Tim’s skull. He didn’t lean away or try to pull back. “You okay?”

“All clear,” Tim said into his shirt.

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh.”

The beat of Raylan’s heart kicked against his ribs, vital and urgent and there for the having, and he didn’t try to get up. He held on, crouched close like a shield, without Tim having to ask for it this time.

The clock above the door across the office whispered each second away with its unassuming brass hands. Tim stared through it at the long spread of his future, wide as the curving surface of the earth spread out beneath a jump—and for the first time, he swore he could feel the tug of a parachute unfurling from his back to let him ride the winds safely all the way down.

Chapter Text

~*~

The next two weeks passed with a frustrating evenness that made Tim take to daydreaming, which was all sorts of fucking ridiculous except for the fact it felt kinda nice.

Raylan didn’t call until the night before the second following Friday. Tim was eating a bowl of cereal in his boxer shorts watching the game show network with his notes for a disaster of a chemistry course open and ignored on the couch beside him. When the phone rang, he nearly upended Chex all over the carpet as he jumped to answer it like a goddamn teenager.

“What’s your address, hot-shot?”

Tim managed not to wind the cord around his finger, instead ducking to hold in a smile as though Raylan was able to see him through the receiver. “Hello to you too. What, wasn’t in my file?”

“Figured I’d try being a gentleman instead of a creep, for once.”

“Chivalry ain’t dead, huh?”

Raylan huffed a short laugh down the line. The studio audience on the television applauded someone winning a microwave as a consolation prize. A brief, comfortable silence settled in across the phone. 

At the same time Raylan piped up to say “I’m really looking forward to seeing you again,” Tim blurted, “I want you to fuck me so thoroughly I forget my name.”

A choked-off yelp that might be another chuckle crackled from Raylan’s end. “That could—be arranged?”

Tim grinned. “Yeah? That a rhetorical question?”

Raylan heaved a sigh, sounding half pained in a good way. “You are a dangerous little cottontail,” he murmured, his mouth close to the pickup.

Tim’s belly dove sharply and gave a sweet tug southward. He crowded himself up to the wall and leaned his forehead against the paneling. “Are you alone right now?”

“G’night, Tim,” Raylan said knowingly, like he was smiling too. 

“You could come over and help me figure out this chemistry shit.”

“Is that a euphemism?”

“Do you want it to be?”

“Goodnight,” Raylan said again, more clearly, “Tim.”

“Still need my address, though.”

“Goddammit.”

Tim recited the street number and name with a moony grin on his face. Raylan said goodnight for a third time with an expectant warmth laced into each syllable.

Later, in the dark of his room with the television still muttering on late-night nothing from beyond the door for the comfort of its noise, Tim stared at the ceiling and tried to quit running Raylan’s voice through his head for long enough that he might snag at least a tiny bit of sleep. 

See you tomorrow.

Hell. Why not. Maybe it was high time Tim gave the concept of tomorrow in general a fighting chance at being something worth looking forward to after all.

~*~

The restaurant had cloth napkins, and a very auspicious lack of condiment bottles on the table. 

Food was delicious, probably. Tim hardly registered the taste for the distraction of Raylan wearing a tie—they were both in jeans, it was still Kentucky and nobody was refuting that—and Tim hadn’t worn a jacket so Raylan kept getting sidetracked looking at his arms even though he tried to focus, and Tim couldn’t quit thinking about Raylan’s fingers doing up that tie in the mirror so maybe they both ate a little more quickly than they usually would have. Not on account of any nerves, per say, call it rather a charged excitement manifesting mostly in the way they couldn’t keep their feet from knocking together under the table or letting their gazes stick to one other a few sweet seconds longer than usual. 

Raylan insisted on paying. Tim made another joke about chivalry. They walked out to Raylan’s truck with a comfortable, companionable distance between them, just two guys grabbing a meal, holding the ruse all the way across the scrubby parking lot to where Raylan had pulled the truck into the dark beyond the greasy orange halo of the street lamp.

Tim had hoped the parking was calculated, and grinned into an urgent kiss that stood as proof when Raylan rounded on him—pressing him up against the wood paneling of the passenger door, Raylan slid a hand into one of Tim’s back pockets and held him fast for a giddy, breathless moment as he licked into Tim’s mouth as though he was still hungry after the dessert they’d just split. 

“What do you say, sport,” he breathed at Tim’s jaw, squeezing him gently, “should I make good on that request of yours?”

Tim caught the edge of Raylan’s lip in soft teeth to steal them into another brief, messy, fervent kiss. “Don’t set me off now,” he warned, “this is my good denim.”

“I’ll let you use my washing machine.” Raylan nosed at Tim’s neck and breathed him in a little. “Don’t even have to feed it quarters.”

“What did I just say?” Tim teased. He reached back and tugged the handle for the door, sidling backward into the passenger’s seat. Raylan peered down at him for a moment, braced on the frame of the cab’s roof—his face was sliced sideways by light and shadow, muddling his features into a sweet hecticism of wanting, and as Tim peered up through his lashes he felt a small piece of himself slot home. Here, it said to him from a low, old place; this is what you’ve been looking for.  

Raylan was a good driver, just the eager side of fast but always sure to use his blinkers. At a stoplight a few streets away from where the good neighborhood started, Tim lifted Raylan’s hand from the center console and brought it to his mouth. He looked Raylan straight in the eye, washed red in the glow of the signal bulb, and laved a slow, possessive kiss onto the knuckle of his thumb.

“What if this is my good denim?” Raylan all but growled, his eyes impossibly sharp in the dark. Tim grinned and skimmed his teeth over the edge of Raylan’s palm. The light switched to green.

“Drive,” Tim said, followed by his tongue finding the pulse between Raylan’s wrist bones, and laughed with his head thrown back when the gas pedal hit the floor with a thump.

~*~

The Sixth Bardo - Becoming

~*~

It’s a dream, which he knows. Doesn’t make it any less real.

Tim is slung low in a canvas chair, propped in front of a camper van parked in the high desert—he hasn’t been out west recently enough to tell just by looking at the sky, but something in his bones tells him it’s the Rio Grande Valley.

A handmade fire is burning low between him and a second empty chair. Tim sits and stares, and listens, and simply is for a moment. 

The camper door clatters open with a muttered oath and half a stumble—Raylan, catching himself sideways with a bottle and two glasses in hand as he comes back outside down the shallow steps. 

“Close one,” Tim needles fondly, without even really marking the fact the door slapping open didn’t make him jump.

“You’re the one who still threw rock paper scissors after I’d already told you I’m a couple sheets to the wind.”

Time shrugs and hunkers back into his seat, burrowing into the borrowed flannel shrugged over his shoulders. “You’re the one who threw rock,” he says, accepting the fresh pour from Raylan.

It isn’t a silence that needs much filling besides the both of them taking up one another’s space. 

“Oh, hey,” Raylan cuts in as though remembering, gesturing at Tim with his glass, “check your pocket. Forgot to tell you.”

Tim digs his fingers into the breast pocket of the flannel, and he pauses when he brushes against a flexible, plastic edge. He teases it out into the night and finds the photo of him and his mama.

He traces the fold in the image with the edge of his thumb, a slim line running between the two of them. Tim looks at himself peering directly into the camera, curious and frozen in time.

“Huh.” He flicks at the corners of it, turning it around between his fingers. “Forgot I was carrying that.”

On the back of it, his mama’s handwriting meets him in its delicate, faded loops: To my best boy—mama can always count on you.

“You gonna keep it?” Raylan asks, peering at TIm over the edge of his glass.

Tim considers it for a little while. It could be nice, but then again he’ll also keep finding it in every unchecked place he goes for the rest of his life if he does. He can’t keep everything.

Giving one last look to the picture, smiling a little at the boy who doesn’t know yet what sorts of colors he’ll grow up to see in the world in all its ugly beauty, Tim leans back in his chair and lobs it easily into the fire.

He watches the snapshot curl up, melt, turn to ashes. When it’s nothing but a smudge of what it once was, Tim raises a silent toast at the campfire and drinks deep.

From the edges of the chaparral hemmed in around their campsite, a rustling ushers the skinny figure of a coyote the color of dust into the edge of the firelight. Raylan mocks the tipping of an invisible hat at it.

“How’s that feel now?” the coyote asks Tim in Caddy’s voice. Tim considers that for a moment, shifting his shoulders as though testing the new weight of what he’s let himself carry now that the heaviest burden is gone.

“Lighter,” he says.

Satisfied, the coyote turns away and bounds down the hillside with its tail swishing in the dark. Raylan watches it go before reaching out to Tim with an open hand, the same hand he’d taken in the truck on the way back from the restaurant.

“Do it again,” he says with a smile.

Tim takes Raylan by the wrist, lifts his hand to his mouth, and kisses him where his thumb meets his palm.

“Drive,” he whispers against the soft blue pathways of Raylan’s veins beneath his skin.

~*~

There was a gauzy puddle of daylight coming in through Raylan’s curtains when Tim woke first.

Bare as his birthday and nested in a riot of kicked-up covers—Raylan was not the stillest sleeper, which was equal parts endearing and exhausting to discover in the small hours of the morning—Tim found himself draped across Raylan’s waist with his face mashed sideways into the mattress.

He lapsed between peering at Raylan in repose and stealing the dwindling scraps of sleep left in his head. When Raylan finally stirred, Tim was mostly awake and just putting off the inevitable of having to move.

“Morning,” Raylan muttered, swallowing a yawn, and only because he could and he wanted to, Tim leaned up and kissed him.

Raylan made an amused sound against Tim’s mouth, still cloudy with sleep. “Well hello,” he said between the steady press of Tim’s lips. “Good morning, Tim. Can I help you?”

Tim grunted as he propped himself up on his elbows. “Who’s Tim?” he murmured, and predicted right on the money that the joke would make Raylan smile a muzzy, unguarded smile. He tugged Tim in by the back of his head and led with his own kiss this time, smooth and unhurried. Tim let his eyes fall shut and his limbs melt heavy.

When Raylan let go of him, let him lean back a little, Tim didn’t go far. He settled down on Raylan’s chest and peered up at him—he didn’t want to look away. He wasn’t ready to look away.

“Did you seriously forget your name,” Raylan muttered, “or are you angling for something else here?”

Tim dug a knuckle benignly into his ribs. Raylan jackknifed just a little with a huffed laugh. “I’d probably be dead if not for you,” Tim said, easy as anything, like it didn’t really have to mean much if Raylan didn’t want it to.

Raylan stilled with his grip around the forearm of Tim’s offending hand, but only for a moment. He slid his touch up to Tim’s elbow, then shoulder, all the way up to the side of his face to draw him down into Raylan’s chest for several slow, waking heartbeats.

“I’m glad you’re here, Tim,” he said gently.

Tim smirked into Raylan’s sternum. “So is your hardon digging into my hip.”

“For Chrissake,” Raylan muttered, scruffing Tim lightly, “I’m trying to be all tender and you gotta remind me I’m just some uppity perv, huh?”

Batting his hand away, Tim rolled over and looked at him there across the sheets: Raylan’s hair was a mess. His morning stubble caught more silver than not in the sunlight. He looked at Tim like the world made a little more sense with him in it.

“I’m serious,” Tim said gently. Raylan didn’t blink.

“So am I.”

Tim drew a deep breath, held it, and exhaled all in one go. He shifted up onto his knees, pressed a kiss to Raylan’s forehead, smacked him flat-handed on the bare thigh, and vaulted from the bed when Raylan yelped and flinched and got his foot caught in the sheets.

“Coffee!” Tim announced as he stumbled into his boxers, and pelted for the kitchen before Raylan could get the pillow in his arm aimed for throwing.

Part of Raylan’s idea of working Tim up last night had been to describe in painstaking detail every step of preparing his very fancy Italian coffee machine as he took his sweet time helping Tim remove his clothes right there in the kitchen. Tim couldn’t tell which part was more embarrassing: that it really had worked him up, or that he remembered the directions.

The machine began to gurgle. Tim smiled at nothing and reveled in the feeling of another living day, fully awake and there for the taking just because he could.

He went up on his toes to grab two mugs from the cabinet above the sink and weighed the merits of them, wondering who should get the spotty diner mug that was most definitely stolen from somewhere off Route 77, versus the tin cup with an orange logo that had been peeled and misshapen in the dishwasher three eons ago.

Raylan’s bare footsteps loped around the corner. “Hey,” Tim called to him without looking up, deciding he wanted the diner mug. “You ever been to New Mexico?”