Work Text:
What he will remember is the way the lights from the bar make the pavement burn blue, and how it reminds him of fire, even as the rain leaks into his shoes and drenches his socks in a slow crawl, heel first, reaching for the toe. He will remember, too, that cigarette, hanging from his lips and then between his fingers, the heavy feeling in his lungs, and the smoke he breathes out, for the first time having nothing at all to do with the cold.
Inside the bar, there is music. Outside, just his fifteen year old fingers and his cigarette, and the blue-light fire on the ground. Inside, someone starts to sing. Outside, footsteps approach.
"Can I bum one?" says the owner of those feet, clad (dry, Tim thinks) in cowboy boots meant for keeping out the rain. Tim is too embarrassed to admit to having only one on him, so he takes one last drag, tries to cover the cough in a stumbling shuffle of his feet. He is unsure if this is more or less cool than the cough would have been, but there's no taking it back once it's been done. "Thanks," says the newcomer, his voice shades deeper than Tim's, his accent lighter, too, cleaner. "I'm Mark," Mark says through a cloud of smoke and a shit-eating grin. "You're new. Saw you in class."
Inside the bar, someone calls for the musician to get off the stage. Music City is, it turns out, as unfriendly to struggling old drunks as anywhere else Tim has lived. He knows already, staring through the fogged up windows at his daddy, who clambers drunkenly off stage, that they will not be here long.
He remembers, delayed, his manners, and makes a noncommittal sound that might be his name. As a consequence, for the first two weeks of their friendship, Mark calls him Jimmy.
~
Mark is born and bred Nashville, and Tim learns that he is much less cool than Tim had thought that first night. He's long limbed and fidgety with a smile like a nervous tic, but Tim can't shake the immediate--not affection, but reaction he'd had when Mark had blown a smoke ring at the windows of the bar and said, "don't know why they boo'd him off. I kinda like his sound."
Tim doesn't like his daddy, but it is nearly impossible to suppress that quiet swell of pride.
They become friends as boys do. It is a fast thing that evolves impossibly into a series of snapshots of youth: jumping over fences, a midnight swim in someone’s pool on the good side of town, naked when they’re caught, naked as they run through the streets screaming their youth and laughter. It’s not the kind of thing Tim’s ever had before, and when he presses Mark, still dripping and smelling of chlorine, against some rich family’s brick wall and kisses him until they’re both breathless, well, Tim’s never had that either. He’s a little frightened to admit he likes it.
On a Friday night in Nashville, Tim gets caught with his hands down Mark’s jeans. They laugh when they run, right up until they see the dead-end alley wall. Mark, who has seemed so cool to Tim after these last weeks, is shaking. Tim can feel it buzzing through the air between him. There is an irrational moment of blind fear of his own, where he almost grabs Mark’s hand. But Tim, he isn’t naive like Mark. Not stupid. He could run, but Mark’s breathing is frantic, and Tim isn’t sure he could run fast enough to get away. The boys between them and the exit are rich and bored and spitting at the ground to show how tough they are. They’ve got them cornered, and Tim doesn’t like being cornered.
Timmy, his mama said once. He couldn’t have been more than eight. She wasn’t in the picture for long, and he remembers her mostly as wafts of perfume, and a gauzy white fabric drifting in the wind, and yellow flowers. These are manufactured memories; the real ones are black eyes, a bleeding smile, and a laugh so light and airy he’d once thought he could float away on it. But this one conversation is real. My little boy will defend his lil self, she’d been bouncing him on her knee. Ain’t no big bully who likes a good shot. You be a good shot. She hadn’t taught him, of course, she’d not been around long enough to do any teachin’, but there are seven long years between eight and fifteen, and Tim’ s done a lot of learning.
Fifteen, his voice a shade too high to be threatening, Tim pulls a gun. "I'm gonna fire one warnin' shot," he calls. "Second one'll let me find out what brain matter looks like, up close and personal."
He fires. There's no magic involved, and probably no luck either. He knocks the baseball cap right off the asshole's head, but manages to leave the asshole underneath still breathing.
"I don't miss," he spits for the first time in his life.
He's maybe a little disappointed when they don't stick around to see if he's lying.
~
They leave Nashville after four months. Tim sees it coming. He waves to Mark when they pass him on the corner, but Mark doesn't see him. The glass on the car window is hot from the afternoon sun, and Tim presses his hands flat against it, splaying his fingers. They don't leave any imprint. That's just the way shit goes sometimes, Tim guesses.
~
"Yes sir," Tim says to the man behind the desk asking him if he wants to kill some motherfuckers. "I've always been good with a gun, sir."
He's still too young. He'll know that, eventually.
~
He will remember the second time he sees Mark for the real fire, and the complete and total absence of water, cold, or cigarettes.
The second time Tim sees Mark they are in a desert and he--Tim--is bleeding. Mark tells him to shut up, man, laughing that nervous laugh, his whole face twitching a little bit. Mark’s bleeding too--he’s gnawed his lip bloody, and he’d be bouncing his hands against his thighs, except they’re too busy trying to keep Tim from bleeding out through his shoulder.
“It’s just a flesh wound, Mark,” Tim keeps saying, “Calm the fuck down,” and this is all backwards, this comforting thing, and Tim hasn’t seen Mark’s body since they were both teenagers, and he thinks it’s unfair that he’s lying here shirtless, bloody, and half delusional and Mark is so buttoned up he might as well be in his dress uniform.
“Ok, ok, ok, ok, ok,” Mark is saying, and Tim laughs, spits up a little blood, Mark says “Oh shit,” and then he’s poking and prodding Tim’s torso, looking for a reason for blood to be flecking Tim’s lips. Overhead, a helicopter makes circles, searching for a place to land.
Tim doesn't have his gun, doesn't have his daddy, doesn't have a goddamn care in the world, and maybe he'd be dying out here in all this sand, except Mark is leaning over him, and he's keeping Tim alive with more determination than Tim knew he had.
~
It isn't just a flesh wound, but it's not bad enough to send him home, either. Tim returns to the sand and the dust and the blood. He has a gun. He has Mark. "Guess it didn't hurt your shootin'," Mark says with something like his old smile. "Welcome back, soldier." He hands Tim a cigarette, and if it weren't for all the sand, and the sun that's trying to bleach the life out of Tim's skin, he might think they're back in Nashville.
~
When Tim leaves Afghanistan, he leaves only bullets behind. He has a friend, still fighting the good fight, or whatever bullshit they call it these days, back in Kandahar, but mostly he tries not to remember.
"Welcome home," says the smiling woman behind the counter at the bus depot, but for a home Tim keeps a collection of images: different schools, different hallways, different front doors slamming in his face, different boys, and sometimes even different girls, and somewhere in America an overgrown graveyard with a drunk dead daddy six feet under. Welcome home she says, so he buys a ticket on the first bus leavin' and goes to try and find one.
Most days Tim wakes up in the morning and runs six miles before going to work. Some days it’s not so much that he wakes up in the morning, just that he’s awake and it’s morning, so getting out of bed is the only thing left to do. He has a banana, or sometimes an apple if there’s no other option, and he drinks the coffee he’d made first thing in the morning until it’s gone, even when it’s cold and the oil starts to shimmer on the surface.
Some days, the early days, he doesn’t much bother with the getting out of bed. As the days crawl on, though, he has less of a choice. He gets another job, chasing bad guys again, but at the end of the day he’s mostly going home to his bed and he’s staring at his ceiling, and that’s a good fucking start.
Art lays a hand on Tim’s shoulder, sometimes. He gets in too close, and it’s always when Tim is buzzing hottest, when his finger flicks to the trigger a second too soon, when he holds so still he might be dead already. Art lays a hand on Tim’s shoulder, and his fingers are looking old now, and he smells like coffee and pastries, but his grip is firm and warm and unshaken. Art’ll stand like that for as long as it takes, until Tim lowers his gun, until he lets his shoulders sink.
Rachel plies him in the morning with warm cups of coffee. She is soundless about it, the way she dumps the cold, oily black mess in his mug into a potted plant, out a window, into a trash can. Whatever’s closest, really. Then she hands him a hot, black new mug. Not one from home, but the kind that the Marshal’s service makes in patriotic colors. Always, their fingers brush then, and always, she meets his eyes and smiles.
Once, he’d reached for her, and she’d clamped a hand around his wrist so hard it hurt, but she’d smiled. When she let go, she patted his hand and went back to helping him fill out the report. She still brings him coffee the next day. With her lines drawn clear, she’s easy to talk to. The coffee is a little pavlovian; she gives it to him when he’s done something she likes, too. It takes Rachel six months to mold him into something she can work with, but it’s like being on a team again.
Raylan Givens shows up around then, but this time, Rachel’s directing Tim to get them both coffee. She winks at him, once, a smile, and then turns hard eyes on Raylan. They are slow to do it, but Rachel is steady about building their team.
~
Tim sees Mark for the third time about when he sees him for the last time, and it is unremarkable, except for the part where they continue to repeat old patterns. They pass each other cigarettes, Tim pulls a gun on a guy to save Mark's life.
Or he thinks he does. Or maybe he really does. Later, he will remind himself there are only so many times someone gets to be saved, and this is Mark like Tim has never really see him. This is that nervous, fidgeting energy broken in two and leaking through the cracks, washing out the bits of Mark that Tim still dreams about sometimes, and leaving someone else. Tim says goodbye this time, promises to call. It has been a long time since they were fifteen, and Tim's shoes are dry now. He puts off the call, and puts off the call, and puts off the call until there is no more call to make.
~
He says, “You shot my friend,” out loud in a tent. And there is a gunshot. And there is a body. Another body. Another bullet. Tim takes the sunglasses. He sits down.
~
Raylan finds Tim smoking a cigarette. Tim watches him. Raylan stands, mostly unseen, behind the corner, but he casts a shadow longer than a story, and Tim watches it and waits. Raylan wants to feel the spy, feel like he has the upper hand. Tim taps his cigarette, waits, and then taps it again. Still, Raylan’s shadow holds still. Tim leans back against the bricks and takes a long, slow drag. It’s a little on the obscene side, but Tim doesn’t get his kicks in much these days. He takes the victories where he can get them.
It doesn’t scare Raylan out from around the corner though, and Tim stands there for another long moment, listening to the way Raylan shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “You know,” Tim says finally, “If I were a bad guy, you’d be really fuckin’ dead right now.”
Raylan steps around the corner, all hips and a tip of his hat. He’s fucking shameless, there’s not a single sheepish thing about him, even though he’s been caught. “Tim,” Raylan says, short and clipped. It’s only one syllable long when he says it, and Tim just sighs and flicks his cigarette to the ground, lighting up another.
“Howdy,” Tim says, because it’s how he’s learned to greet Raylan.
“What’re you doing out here?” Raylan answers. It reminds Tim, vaguely, of being thirteen--he and Raylan can’t seem to stop playing this backwards game of call and response, where none of the calls and none of the responses make sense, but every time they leave having gleaned new information from the other.
Today, Raylan’s learned that Tim smokes when his hands shake. It’s not a fact Tim wanted getting out.
There’s a man dead, and I shot him is maybe where the story starts, the story that Raylan’s come all the way out to hear. It’s the reason they’re both standing in an alley behind a bar neither of them has ever been to, smoke clinging to Tim’s skin like Raylan’s clinging to his corner, still pretending he has the upper hand. There’s ten different ways I could kill you right now, without trying is also maybe where it starts, because it’s a fib, but just a little white one, and Tim works best between the black and the white. And then there’s the obvious I got a friend who died back in Kandahar, but even his newfound, pavlovian response to give Raylan the answer he seeks won’t let Tim say that out loud. It’s the truth, but it’s also a lie. Maybe he doesn’t work so well in the grey, after all.
“Tim?” Raylan says again, and his voice is louder, but he hasn’t moved closer. Tim’s pressed up against the wall, and if he were some sort of animal he might growl. He’s not convinced he isn’t some sort of animal. He’s learned to love the hunt. He takes another drag off his cigarette and blows the smoke at Raylan.
“You didn’t come back here because you were worried about me,” Tim says.
“No,” Raylan answers, tilting his head just a little. And that, Tim thinks, might be a fib too.
Tim flicks the cigarette to the ground again, then grinds it with the heel of his boot. When he meets Raylan’s gaze, Raylan doesn’t look away. “So,” Tim says, because there are more than a few beginnings to the story Raylan wants to hear, but none of them are rolling off Tim’s tongue any time soon.
“You need a ride somewhere?” Raylan asks, and Tim thinks, yeah, because he left his car somewhere and he doesn’t feeling like finding it.
“Ok,” Tim says out loud, and when he walks close, Raylan throws an arm around his shoulders. It’s a bold move, considering Tim’s been thinking of ways to kill him, but Raylan’s made of bold moves and swagger. Tim lets himself be lead, but his back is stiff enough, his shoulders straight enough, that neither of them are fooled into thinking Raylan is doing any real sort of guiding.
Raylan’s car is sun hot, and the seat presses warm and uncomfortable against the small of Tim’s back. Raylan moves to shut the door for him, and Tim just looks at him, and blinks. “Do I look like a goddamn child to you, Raylan?”
“What was that book you’re reading again?”
And Raylan’s tone is light, but Tim’s whole body goes tense, and he slams the door shut between them. He thinks, idly, about locking the car and waiting Raylan out. He’d either bake alive in here or win, and Tim thinks his heat tolerance is probably higher than Raylan expects it to be. Of course, this is what the quiet conversations in Art’s office have been about. Tim’s newfound self destructive tendencies. Art’s phrasing makes Tim smile, the curve of his mouth mean and bitter. Newfound? Yeah, that’s a fucking joke. Tim’s always been a bit self destructive, it’s why, he thinks, he was given a gun to point at people and set free in a desert.
I got a friend who died back in Kandahar, except he doesn’t, not anymore. That too, is gone, and he misses it like he’d not expected to. Like he’d missed the last grains of sand that had been caught up in the jacket of his book, the one he’d brought there and back again, just after he’d brushed them off the pages and into the trashcan. It’s a sudden thing, and it feels like being plunged in an ice cold ocean, because Tim’s shocked, and he’s flailing, and there is nothing tangible there anymore to prove anything ever was tangible to begin with.
The one time Mark had talked about it, he’d said he sometimes woke up sweating, thinking he was back there, thinking coming home had all been a dream.
Tim wakes up sweating, too, but it’s mostly because he worries about waking up, and never having been there, and being nothing at all.
And now, with all his thinking, he’s missed his chance, and Raylan is in the car next to him, staring. Tim hadn’t heard the question he knows that Raylan must have asked, but he knows the answer, “I want to go home,” he says, and then, when Raylan starts the car, “not my apartment.”
“Where?”
And on the tip of Tim’s tongue is something that he cannot say out loud, so he says, “Fuck if I know, Raylan. Just help me find my car.”
Raylan is skeptical, but they start driving. Tim doesn’t talk about how he sees, in Harlan’s dust every time they’re there, his own personal hellhole in the deep dark hills. He doesn’t talk about his daddy, or his mama, because this isn’t fucking Oprah, and they are two grown ass men with bigger problems. He doesn’t talk about why his hands were shaking, or how fucking stupid it is that two men are dead now, two men who could have died a thousand times a day over there, but didn’t, and now they’re dead here, where it should have been harder to die.
Tim’s hands were shaking because he was angry. They are still shaking, because he is still angry, and he’s angry that he can’t get them to stop, and he’s angry that Raylan had said ‘is anyone hurt’ and then nothing at all about the way Tim had pursed his lips and shaken his head. Raylan is always asking questions, just never the right ones. “Stop the goddamn car,” Tim snarls, and Raylan pulls over and Tim jumps out before the car has even pulled to a stop.
He has spent so much time feeling absolutely nothing on purpose, that the roiling in his stomach catches him off guard. Tim leans over and dry heaves into some bushes, but there’s nothing to expel, and so he drops down into the grass and stares up at the blue Kentucky sky, and wonders, as he has never been able to stop wondering, why he’s here.
Raylan, to Tim’s surprise, follows him.
“Tim?”
“I will pay you all the money in the goddamn world to stop saying my name like it’s a whole conversation,” Tim says, but it’s not as vicious as it could have been.
“I’m going to take you home now,” Raylan announces, hauling Tim back to his feet, when all Tim wants to do is lie in the grass.
Raylan’s hands under his arms, hauling him to his feet, that is a tangible thing. Tim gazes at him, bitter and tired, and says “I got this friend who died back in--” and then stops himself.
Raylan doesn’t say I know or I’m sorry or I get it because he is--he does--none of those things. He looks at Tim and rubs the back of his neck and looks like he doesn’t really know what to do with himself, now. “Fuck,” Raylan says, and Tim nods his head.
“Yeah,” he says, and he’s not sure why it sounds like he’s answering a question. Tim’s standing there with his hands at his sides and a scratchy bush poking against the small of his back, and all of Harlan’s dust beneath his feet, and he just says “Yeah,” again, because what else is there to say? There are two men dead and neither one of them is Tim.
~
Raylan takes him home eventually. He’s insistent, pressing, and Tim lets him because the sound of Raylan’s voice begins to grate, because the feather light touches of Raylan’s fingertips on his shoulder begin to make Tim nauseous.
When they get to Raylan’s car, it is Tim who sits down in the driver’s seat. Raylan hands over his keys, reluctantly, the ghost of hesitation hiding in the way he eventually drops them into Tim’s palm, holding on to the last possible centimeter of them until they fall.
It is a long drive back to Tim’s fourth floor walk up. The conversation comes in spurts, like a dead car battery only Raylan is trying to coax back to life. Tim drives; the road is dark, and the trees make it darker, and it would be easy to lose control. He does not focus on the past, or on the way the setting sun above the black silhouettes of the trees leaves the sky a deep, dark blue like the pavement one night in Tennessee. He can no longer afford the grief that’s burrowed deep in his gut. He allows himself to name it--grief, and then pushes it to a far back corner on his mind. There is a turn ahead in the road; Tim takes the corner with the kind of precision his driving instructor in the rangers probably still has wet dreams about.
He pulls to a smooth stop alongside the curb. The street is quiet, no barking dogs or yowling cats to add atmosphere to the heaviness in Raylan’s car. Raylan is looking at him again, under the brim of his hat, but Tim studies the way his fingers curl around Raylan’s steering wheel. His knuckles are white. It takes him three deep breaths to relax his grip.
“Do you, uh,” Raylan says, waving his hand around in front of his face.
“I got booze,” Tim says.
There are two ways Raylan could have taken that statement, and the one he picks makes Tim think Raylan had never planned to leave him alone to his drinking tonight.
Raylan follows him up the stairs. Raylan thinks they’ll fuck. It’s obvious in the way he moves, and the way he feels comfortable enough standing close to Tim now. He’s less afraid than he should be, and Tim can appreciate they’ve had a few good fucks, but Raylan’s touch still makes him want to break every finger in Raylan’s hands, so Tim says not tonight, with the way he pulls away and presents Raylan with his back.
Raylan still touches him again, though, a palm pressed to the small of Tim’s back, an instant of lips against Tim’s ear. He leans back into it, just for a moment, just for a second, and then pulls away. “Not tonight,” he says out loud, turning and giving Raylan a glass.
“Should we toast, or somethin’?” Raylan asks finally, swirling his glass around and peering down into it like he’s a kid about to have his first drink.
Somewhere, in Tennessee maybe, there are two boys meeting. They are miles away from where Tim is now, but they will grow up, join the army, maybe fight a war or two. There are six boys meeting, or ten, or a hundred, and the story will happen again and again, and at the end of it, there will always be Tim and Raylan in his apartment, with real lives and real jobs, and good whiskey to try and uncurl the ugly thing in Tim’s stomach.
There will always be two men dead, and neither one of them will ever be Tim.
“No,” Tim says, and drains his whiskey in one gulp.
It echoes when he slams the glass on the table.