Work Text:
Ennis drinks himself into oblivion most every night, and only manages to drag himself into work in the mornings by pure dumb luck and mean determination. He keeps his head down, focuses on the job like it’s a matter of life or death, and nobody says anything to him about the raw look of his skin or the anger in his bloodshot eyes, and that’s just fine with him. He works his hands to the bone, until they bleed hot and red, and when he binds them up he thinks about pouring salt over them instead, letting one pain shut out another.
He isn’t due to see Jack for near to two months. Two months of knowing what he knows, knowing it and not being able to do a damn thing besides grit his teeth and try to get by. Two fucking months of not knowing what’s going to happen to them, if they’ll make it through this like they’ve made it through everything else, or if this is going to be the one thing that’ll end them sure as a shotgun blast to the chest.
He thinks about Jack tangled up with that man and he gets a fire inside him, wants to jump in his truck, make that drive back down to Texas and thrash Jack to within an inch of his life, then haul him back to Wyoming and fuck him until neither one of them can walk, and never let Jack out of his sight ever again. He wants to take a can of gasoline and a handful of matches to that man’s house, watch it go up in flames that aren’t half as hot as the burning hatred roiling around inside his gut. He wants to do something—something, anything, anything at all. He wants it to be over and he wants it to never have started, and Ennis isn’t much of a praying man but he’d sit in church from now to never if it meant he could go back and cut this disease out where it started, turn away that bottle of whiskey and go freeze with the sheep.
He’s made up his mind a half-dozen times one way or the other, but nothing ever seems to stick. He’ll think he’s set, that he knows for good what he’s going to do, and then, quick as the hiss of a rattlesnake, the wind shifts, carries the smell of Texas on the air, and whatever he’s decided to do gets second-guessed. Soon enough he’s waking up on the floor, bone-cold and stiff through his shoulders and back, empty liquor bottle still in his hand, blinding headache settled between his eyes.
He’d tried, at first, to just not think about it. Kept himself busy, took the girls anywhere they needed to go, worked extra hours for next to no pay—anything to keep from being alone in that house, that house where, he thinks, it might have all started falling apart. They’d been falling for years, but it’d been together, always towards each other. After that day, after he followed that truck out on the road with guilty eyes and caught the flinch of steel behind Jack’s bruised expression, they’d only ever fallen apart.
Tried not to think about it, and managed to get through most of his days without putting his fist through a wall. But the nights were different, somehow longer, and Ennis couldn’t fill them with anything. He hadn’t dreamed in years, figured he’d given up dreams the day he turned his back on that truck and walked the other way, but he started dreaming again, things so bright they hurt his eyes, Technicolor nightmares of Jack and that man, that man whose name he couldn’t even bring himself to say. Jack, moaning deep and hot like some wild thing, those crazy, half-mad cries that always sent him spiraling into nothingness, Jack’s body stretched tight as a bow string, arched back like liquid fire, white and gold in the flame and moonlight, eyes blue as a punch to the gut, that fucked-out expression and his dick rising flushed and hot against his stomach. And that man who isn’t Ennis there to see it all.
It’s a tight race, but Ennis thinks he might hate that man a little bit more than he hates Jack. Ennis doesn’t know the first thing about that man, but he can see him in his head, knows how his skin must scream out to be against Jack, curled tight around Jack’s body, dick buried inside him deep as darkness, and fuck if Ennis can figure out how it could be any better than it is with them, what Jack could get from that man that he can’t find in Ennis. He’s tried so hard, so goddamn hard, to keep it out of his mind, but the truth is that he can’t rest, can’t get one single fucking second’s peace until he knows what that man’s got that he doesn’t.
He’s got to know so that he can get it, and then kill that man for having it first, and for making Jack want it so goddamn bad.
Last night it was Jim Beam, half the bottle before nine o’clock and the rest by midnight . Outside the window it’s raining hard, the sky like a dirty sheet, and Ennis is glad, because at least the light doesn’t hurt his eyes. The phone rings and he’s not surprised that it’s the boss, telling him to keep his lazy ass at home until these fucking rains stop, that the live-ins can handle the stock for a couple of days. He hangs up before Ennis can say anything.
The clock ticks loud and lonely in the silence of the room, and he’s halfway to the cupboard before he remembers that he’s out of liquor. Out of everything, almost, because he was going to stop by the store on the way in from work today.
He could sleep, or smoke, or take a knife to his wrists. He decides on a shower because he’s out of cigarettes and he’s bone-tired but he’ll never sleep. He strips off yesterday’s soured clothes and drops them outside the bathroom door, the reek of old whiskey like piss in his nostrils. The water in Ennis’s bathroom goes whole-hog either way, cold as melted glaciers or hot enough to peel skin, and today it’s leaning towards the former, turning his skin a shade of blue he only ever sees in his dreams, these days. Soaps his chest, his hair, rinses as quickly as he can, and jumps out, drying off with a towel he’s fairly certain hasn’t been wet with anything but water.
There’re hours ahead of him that he’ll have to fill.