there's a single-stoplight town
Collection of comment fics written for the AMERICANA FICATHON.
asphalt fairgrounds and chrome silver cradles, Shadow Unit, Addy Villette, Chaz Villette, (William Villette), R
[tw: canonical rape/incest, canonical suicide]
"Hey, cowboy," says the mirror.
Jacknife upright, hands on a gun, fear sweat streaked across the sheets, heart racing (inexact term: racing, excess of 250 beats per minute, rate unsustainable), dream.
Dream.
--
"Hey, cowboy, just one, okay?"
Cheap popsicles just frozen sugar water and food dye. He sorts them into rainbow order, chooses a red one.
Addy shivers.
--
There's a red car in the dust, gravel drive caught in the tire treads. The door handle shines silver in the sun, baking in the heat, nothing you'd want to touch.
"Get in the damn car, Addy," says the shadow
He opens the door for her. It'll leave a burn.
--
"It's okay, cowboy, I've just had a little accident," and Addy doesn't move but there's a shadow under the door that slides across the floor and smells like cheap cigarettes and burning rubber and brush fires and a hundred and ten degrees in the shade.
Dream.
"You can do better than that, son," says the mirror.
--
I'll dig this hole, Boyd Crowder, Raylan Givens, Justified, PG
Boyd comes back from Myrtle Creek Mine in an explosion of coal dust and mud. Clean rings around his eyes and whiskey under his tongue and Raylan's fingerprints in the ash on his skin.
Boyd comes back from Desert Storm with explosives on his hands and a trigger in his head and an emptiness in his chest not even Harlan can fill.
Boyd comes back from Big Sandy Federal Penitentiary with poisonous tattoos on his knuckles and a bible under his belt and a hatred that almost, almost fills him up.
He comes back in a prison hospital with the light of God behind his eyes.
He comes back in a field of dead men with nothing to show for the last thirty-seven years of his life but a tenuous hold on a man he's bound to destroy, one way or another.
Boyd comes back, comes back, comes back.
--
Boyd believes in every Self that he reinvents.
Raylan has only ever believed in the outlaw Boyd Crowder.
One of them is wrong.
--
Boyd comes back in the rain, in the dust, in the cool dark of a coal mine. Boyd comes back to Harlan and nothing ever changes but him and maybe he's the one who's wrong. Raylan's star catches the sun and throws it back, one hand on his belt, near enough that it wouldn't matter, one way or the other.
The unending stasis of Harlan keeps Raylan from believing Boyd will change. Keeps Raylan from seeing maybe he could change. Maybe he should.
Unless Boyd is the one who's wrong.
Boyd comes back and comes back and comes around in circles.
Honest man, soldier, outlaw, priest. Honest man, outlaw, outlaw priest.
He'd pray for a sign, but at this point he's afraid he'd get one.
He's afraid of what he might do if all he got was silence.
--
made of shatterglass (cannot be broken), Thor, Loki/Sif(/Thor), R
She says it's the last time every single time and Loki laughs like a bell ringing. The way he laughs when his teeth bloody his lip at the behest of a fist. The way he laughs when Thor claims to love him.
This is the last time and he says, "Oh, darling. It always is."
--
If Thor is golden, Loki is dark, is silver, is cool green water, is gold when the light is just right.
Loki is teeth against her throat and long fingers on her thighs and Sif slips the leash of her friends, of the populated streets to meet him under bridges and behind department stores, inside vacant theaters and in the backroom of the taxidermy shop.
He smells like dust and blood and metal and things that move beneath animal skins. He rolls his hips up into her and she gasps, bites.
She never understood pain or need or how the two could be one, before Loki. She wants to scratch her name into the muscle and bone of him. She wants to carve him up and she wants him to devour her. She wants him to go away and never come back but she'd kill him if he tried to leave like he always says he's going to.
Thor would be heartbroken and frantic and Sif tips her head back staring into the glass eyes of some dead predator, a wolf from days long gone, slides her knee along Loki's side and says, "I'd go with him. I'd go with him to find you," and Loki's hips meet hers just this side of too rough and not nearly what she wants.
"We'd look everywhere for you," she gasps, growls and Loki slides his hand over her breast, her ribs, like he's not sure he's allowed. She never thought that would stop him. "We'd scour the fucking earth looking for you," she says in a voice like Loki's. He moans, strangled. His fingers brush her collarbone.
"I'd let him fuck me when wanting you got too bad," she whispers, half shocked at herself, at him, and his head comes up, his eyes like holes in the sky. "I'd let him fuck me but it wouldn't be the same," Loki's hand wraps around her throat as if of its own accord and she chokes out, "wouldn't be enough like you for either of us."
Loki's long, thin fingers like a trap around her neck and the dead watch them while they shatter and shudder and stop. (Never.)
--
"I suppose I'll have to stay, then," says Loki. Like it was his idea all along.
Sif shares a smile with the wolf.
--
chestnut_filly has done a podfic recording of this story here.
last night I dreamed about you (I dreamed that you were riding), Boyd/Raylan, Boyd/Ava, Justified, R
“I’ll be back in ten minutes, Johnny, try to hold things together until then,” Boyd is saying. He walks out of the hardware store and turns the corner and his truck is gone.
In its place is a big bay gelding tied up to the hitching post in front of the post office. The hitching post has always been there. The horse is new. (Old.)
The sky is pale and pitiless like a great blind eye and the only sound for miles is the call of birds and the steady clang of metal on metal. His boots are heavy-heeled and pinch at the toes.
Every step forward feels like a slow-motion fall and there’s a sound ringing in his head like thunder, heat lightning on a clear day and all of this is wrong but he knows that horse is his like he knows his name and the scars on his chest and his way home.
A car horn screeches at him and he’s standing in the street and the thunder is traffic and Johnny in his ear is calling his name with increasing vehemence.
“I’m alright,” Boyd says. “I’m alright.”
His truck is just where he left it.
--
He walks up to the door of the little wooden house and Ava says, “Boyd,” not like an invitation; just an acknowledgement of his presence. He comes in anyway, takes his hat off to her. “Mrs. Crowder.”
Boyd gave a speech at her trial about justice and forgiveness and the casting of stones. The townspeople voted not to hang her so she’s still here, in the house that Bowman built, wearing a faded blue dress and no jewelry, offering her dead husband’s brother tea, and then whiskey, wishing he’d just leave her alone.
“Ava, if I may,” he says, “there are a few ways in which you could improve your situation. I’d like to help you, if you’d let me.”
“If I may, Boyd,” she says back, sharp and sweet like only a southern woman can be, “I know precisely how you’d like to help and I’d sooner rot.”
Boyd sips warm whiskey, puts the cup back in its saucer. “Now, Ava,” he starts to say…
And Ava’s saying, “Boyd? Boyd? Honey, you alright?”
The ice in his glass rattles as he lets it go an inch from the table top.
“Yeah, baby,” he says. “I’m just fine.”
--
The tightness of his collar is familiar but the clerical tab in it is not. His hands are rough on the dusty black leather bible, on the Colt .45 at his hip.
His spurs chime when he walks, nothing like church bells.
--
Raylan keeps his left hand tucked through the bridle of the light dun stallion nosing at his shoulder. No one needs to look to see where his right hand is.
Boyd thinks, death on a pale horse, with only a mild sense of hysteria.
“Funny thing,” says Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens. “Four hundred head of cattle went missing over the drive to Lexington.” The star on his breast pocket and the buttons on his waistcoat throw sunlight fit to blind a man. Everything about Raylan Givens is a weapon.
“Is that a fact, Marshal,” says Boyd not like a question at all and largely for the benefit of the four men standing behind him with trail dust on their boots and sleeplessness in their eyes.
“Mmhm,” Raylan hums, not like he’s thinking because he already knows and Boyd feels a grin tug at the corners of his mouth, hides it by smoothing his mustache.
“Well, Marshal, if I hear anything that might be a help to you, be assured I will come calling.”
Raylan squints, resettles his hat, runs his thumb over the butt of his gun.
“You do that, Boyd,” he says. And he drums his hand on the roof of his Lincoln Towncar for emphasis.
--
The sheets are cotton and the bed frame is iron and Raylan spreads Boyd out across the uneven mattress like he’s doing him a favor.
His tattoos are gone, Boyd notes.
The bullet scar on his chest is still there.
Raylan doesn’t ask about the cattle or the whiskey or the shipment of Winchester rifles because none of these are really questions. Not because he doesn’t want to know, but because he already does.
Boyd kisses him for it, all stubble and teeth and dark intent.
“Want to tell me about how we’re damned?” Raylan whispers low and rough into the skin just above Boyd’s ear.
Boyd draws breath to laugh, loses it in a groan as Raylan fits them together.
“Maybe later,” he says.
Ava tosses her hair back, rising above him like a wave made of flesh and light and Victoria’s Secret. “You still with me, baby?”
Boyd says, “Right here, darlin’. Where else would I be?”
--
she grew scarlet carsons in our window box, Buffy/Faith, BTVS, PG
Buffy Summers wears wide-skirted dresses in floral prints, cuban heel stockings and low bright pumps. She makes jello salads and coconut cakes for the church luncheons.
She orders a martini at the bar and sits with her legs crossed at the ankle.
The owner of the local Ford dealership watches her french manicured fingers on the stem of her glass, her teeth on an olive.
A woman swings herself onto the bar stool beside Buffy before he can make a move. She’s a woman of the other sort, dark haired and dark eyed, wearing wide leg trousers and oxfords, a stiff-collared shirt unbuttoned low. She’s spinning a fedora around one finger and she lays her free hand on Buffy’s thigh.
She catches the look on the car dealer’s face.
“Hey, mister,” says Faith, red mouth curving like a dare, “she’s my sister.”
-
Buffy sets her hair in pink plastic curlers, sits at her vanity in negligee and silky bathrobe, candy pink. She lights a cigarette. Faith lounges on the bed, naked and dangerous that way. Her hair wild and her mouth bitten full. Watches Buffy roll her stockings up her thighs.
“You gotta let loose, B,” Faith purrs.
Buffy drops ash into a tray shaped like a pink seashell, slants a look over her shoulder. “I thought I just did,” she says, smug, eyes on Faith’s mouth.
“Sure, but now you’re gonna go make macaroons for First Baptist.”
“You love my macaroons.”
Faith slides along the bed, tucks her chin over Buffy’s shoulder, snaps the elastic of her garter belt against her thighs. “Yeah,” she says, “but you’re only gonna let me have two. And you’re gonna give the rest to a bunch of people who’d burn us at the stake if they could.”
Buffy blows smoke at the lazy ceiling fan, turns her face against Faith’s, looks at them in the mirror, pink and gold and black and red. All woman.
“Let ‘em try,” she says, and she puts her mouth on Faith’s.
Blows out smoke, breathes in fire.
-
Buffy puts on boy’s jeans and a flannel shirt, ties her hair up in a kerchief. She washes the kitchen floor by hand, rakes the leaves off the lawn, dusts the furniture with lemon Pledge.
She prunes the roses with a hunting knife.
When Faith comes home, hair falling loose and shirt hanging looser, her hat cocked over one eye and her lipstick still flawless, Buffy’s wearing a green cotton dress and an apron. Her hair is smooth and shiny and she has two martinis waiting, both of them dirty.
Faith drinks hers down in one long swallow designed to make Buffy stare at her throat. She runs her hands under Faith’s suspenders, tugs her close.
“Hi, honey,” she whispers against her Chanel scented skin. “How was your day?”
Faith drops the martini glass and put her hands on Buffy’s waist.
“Now I’ll have to clean that up.”
“I’ll do it later,” Faith promises. She sounds like she always does, which is to say, completely insincere. Her mouth takes like wax and paint.
“No you won’t.” Buffy rolls her eyes but she giggles when Faith pinches her.
“I will. I’ll mow the lawn, too. And change the oil in the car. And clean out the rain gutters, just come with me.” She’s tipping Buffy down onto the (spotless) sofa as she says this.
“Anywhere. Always.”
--
This entry was originally posted at http://ghostrunner.dreamwidth.org/5912.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
asphalt fairgrounds and chrome silver cradles, Shadow Unit, Addy Villette, Chaz Villette, (William Villette), R
[tw: canonical rape/incest, canonical suicide]
"Hey, cowboy," says the mirror.
Jacknife upright, hands on a gun, fear sweat streaked across the sheets, heart racing (inexact term: racing, excess of 250 beats per minute, rate unsustainable), dream.
Dream.
--
"Hey, cowboy, just one, okay?"
Cheap popsicles just frozen sugar water and food dye. He sorts them into rainbow order, chooses a red one.
Addy shivers.
--
There's a red car in the dust, gravel drive caught in the tire treads. The door handle shines silver in the sun, baking in the heat, nothing you'd want to touch.
"Get in the damn car, Addy," says the shadow
He opens the door for her. It'll leave a burn.
--
"It's okay, cowboy, I've just had a little accident," and Addy doesn't move but there's a shadow under the door that slides across the floor and smells like cheap cigarettes and burning rubber and brush fires and a hundred and ten degrees in the shade.
Dream.
"You can do better than that, son," says the mirror.
--
I'll dig this hole, Boyd Crowder, Raylan Givens, Justified, PG
Boyd comes back from Myrtle Creek Mine in an explosion of coal dust and mud. Clean rings around his eyes and whiskey under his tongue and Raylan's fingerprints in the ash on his skin.
Boyd comes back from Desert Storm with explosives on his hands and a trigger in his head and an emptiness in his chest not even Harlan can fill.
Boyd comes back from Big Sandy Federal Penitentiary with poisonous tattoos on his knuckles and a bible under his belt and a hatred that almost, almost fills him up.
He comes back in a prison hospital with the light of God behind his eyes.
He comes back in a field of dead men with nothing to show for the last thirty-seven years of his life but a tenuous hold on a man he's bound to destroy, one way or another.
Boyd comes back, comes back, comes back.
--
Boyd believes in every Self that he reinvents.
Raylan has only ever believed in the outlaw Boyd Crowder.
One of them is wrong.
--
Boyd comes back in the rain, in the dust, in the cool dark of a coal mine. Boyd comes back to Harlan and nothing ever changes but him and maybe he's the one who's wrong. Raylan's star catches the sun and throws it back, one hand on his belt, near enough that it wouldn't matter, one way or the other.
The unending stasis of Harlan keeps Raylan from believing Boyd will change. Keeps Raylan from seeing maybe he could change. Maybe he should.
Unless Boyd is the one who's wrong.
Boyd comes back and comes back and comes around in circles.
Honest man, soldier, outlaw, priest. Honest man, outlaw, outlaw priest.
He'd pray for a sign, but at this point he's afraid he'd get one.
He's afraid of what he might do if all he got was silence.
--
made of shatterglass (cannot be broken), Thor, Loki/Sif(/Thor), R
She says it's the last time every single time and Loki laughs like a bell ringing. The way he laughs when his teeth bloody his lip at the behest of a fist. The way he laughs when Thor claims to love him.
This is the last time and he says, "Oh, darling. It always is."
--
If Thor is golden, Loki is dark, is silver, is cool green water, is gold when the light is just right.
Loki is teeth against her throat and long fingers on her thighs and Sif slips the leash of her friends, of the populated streets to meet him under bridges and behind department stores, inside vacant theaters and in the backroom of the taxidermy shop.
He smells like dust and blood and metal and things that move beneath animal skins. He rolls his hips up into her and she gasps, bites.
She never understood pain or need or how the two could be one, before Loki. She wants to scratch her name into the muscle and bone of him. She wants to carve him up and she wants him to devour her. She wants him to go away and never come back but she'd kill him if he tried to leave like he always says he's going to.
Thor would be heartbroken and frantic and Sif tips her head back staring into the glass eyes of some dead predator, a wolf from days long gone, slides her knee along Loki's side and says, "I'd go with him. I'd go with him to find you," and Loki's hips meet hers just this side of too rough and not nearly what she wants.
"We'd look everywhere for you," she gasps, growls and Loki slides his hand over her breast, her ribs, like he's not sure he's allowed. She never thought that would stop him. "We'd scour the fucking earth looking for you," she says in a voice like Loki's. He moans, strangled. His fingers brush her collarbone.
"I'd let him fuck me when wanting you got too bad," she whispers, half shocked at herself, at him, and his head comes up, his eyes like holes in the sky. "I'd let him fuck me but it wouldn't be the same," Loki's hand wraps around her throat as if of its own accord and she chokes out, "wouldn't be enough like you for either of us."
Loki's long, thin fingers like a trap around her neck and the dead watch them while they shatter and shudder and stop. (Never.)
--
"I suppose I'll have to stay, then," says Loki. Like it was his idea all along.
Sif shares a smile with the wolf.
--
chestnut_filly has done a podfic recording of this story here.
last night I dreamed about you (I dreamed that you were riding), Boyd/Raylan, Boyd/Ava, Justified, R
“I’ll be back in ten minutes, Johnny, try to hold things together until then,” Boyd is saying. He walks out of the hardware store and turns the corner and his truck is gone.
In its place is a big bay gelding tied up to the hitching post in front of the post office. The hitching post has always been there. The horse is new. (Old.)
The sky is pale and pitiless like a great blind eye and the only sound for miles is the call of birds and the steady clang of metal on metal. His boots are heavy-heeled and pinch at the toes.
Every step forward feels like a slow-motion fall and there’s a sound ringing in his head like thunder, heat lightning on a clear day and all of this is wrong but he knows that horse is his like he knows his name and the scars on his chest and his way home.
A car horn screeches at him and he’s standing in the street and the thunder is traffic and Johnny in his ear is calling his name with increasing vehemence.
“I’m alright,” Boyd says. “I’m alright.”
His truck is just where he left it.
--
He walks up to the door of the little wooden house and Ava says, “Boyd,” not like an invitation; just an acknowledgement of his presence. He comes in anyway, takes his hat off to her. “Mrs. Crowder.”
Boyd gave a speech at her trial about justice and forgiveness and the casting of stones. The townspeople voted not to hang her so she’s still here, in the house that Bowman built, wearing a faded blue dress and no jewelry, offering her dead husband’s brother tea, and then whiskey, wishing he’d just leave her alone.
“Ava, if I may,” he says, “there are a few ways in which you could improve your situation. I’d like to help you, if you’d let me.”
“If I may, Boyd,” she says back, sharp and sweet like only a southern woman can be, “I know precisely how you’d like to help and I’d sooner rot.”
Boyd sips warm whiskey, puts the cup back in its saucer. “Now, Ava,” he starts to say…
And Ava’s saying, “Boyd? Boyd? Honey, you alright?”
The ice in his glass rattles as he lets it go an inch from the table top.
“Yeah, baby,” he says. “I’m just fine.”
--
The tightness of his collar is familiar but the clerical tab in it is not. His hands are rough on the dusty black leather bible, on the Colt .45 at his hip.
His spurs chime when he walks, nothing like church bells.
--
Raylan keeps his left hand tucked through the bridle of the light dun stallion nosing at his shoulder. No one needs to look to see where his right hand is.
Boyd thinks, death on a pale horse, with only a mild sense of hysteria.
“Funny thing,” says Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens. “Four hundred head of cattle went missing over the drive to Lexington.” The star on his breast pocket and the buttons on his waistcoat throw sunlight fit to blind a man. Everything about Raylan Givens is a weapon.
“Is that a fact, Marshal,” says Boyd not like a question at all and largely for the benefit of the four men standing behind him with trail dust on their boots and sleeplessness in their eyes.
“Mmhm,” Raylan hums, not like he’s thinking because he already knows and Boyd feels a grin tug at the corners of his mouth, hides it by smoothing his mustache.
“Well, Marshal, if I hear anything that might be a help to you, be assured I will come calling.”
Raylan squints, resettles his hat, runs his thumb over the butt of his gun.
“You do that, Boyd,” he says. And he drums his hand on the roof of his Lincoln Towncar for emphasis.
--
The sheets are cotton and the bed frame is iron and Raylan spreads Boyd out across the uneven mattress like he’s doing him a favor.
His tattoos are gone, Boyd notes.
The bullet scar on his chest is still there.
Raylan doesn’t ask about the cattle or the whiskey or the shipment of Winchester rifles because none of these are really questions. Not because he doesn’t want to know, but because he already does.
Boyd kisses him for it, all stubble and teeth and dark intent.
“Want to tell me about how we’re damned?” Raylan whispers low and rough into the skin just above Boyd’s ear.
Boyd draws breath to laugh, loses it in a groan as Raylan fits them together.
“Maybe later,” he says.
Ava tosses her hair back, rising above him like a wave made of flesh and light and Victoria’s Secret. “You still with me, baby?”
Boyd says, “Right here, darlin’. Where else would I be?”
--
she grew scarlet carsons in our window box, Buffy/Faith, BTVS, PG
Buffy Summers wears wide-skirted dresses in floral prints, cuban heel stockings and low bright pumps. She makes jello salads and coconut cakes for the church luncheons.
She orders a martini at the bar and sits with her legs crossed at the ankle.
The owner of the local Ford dealership watches her french manicured fingers on the stem of her glass, her teeth on an olive.
A woman swings herself onto the bar stool beside Buffy before he can make a move. She’s a woman of the other sort, dark haired and dark eyed, wearing wide leg trousers and oxfords, a stiff-collared shirt unbuttoned low. She’s spinning a fedora around one finger and she lays her free hand on Buffy’s thigh.
She catches the look on the car dealer’s face.
“Hey, mister,” says Faith, red mouth curving like a dare, “she’s my sister.”
-
Buffy sets her hair in pink plastic curlers, sits at her vanity in negligee and silky bathrobe, candy pink. She lights a cigarette. Faith lounges on the bed, naked and dangerous that way. Her hair wild and her mouth bitten full. Watches Buffy roll her stockings up her thighs.
“You gotta let loose, B,” Faith purrs.
Buffy drops ash into a tray shaped like a pink seashell, slants a look over her shoulder. “I thought I just did,” she says, smug, eyes on Faith’s mouth.
“Sure, but now you’re gonna go make macaroons for First Baptist.”
“You love my macaroons.”
Faith slides along the bed, tucks her chin over Buffy’s shoulder, snaps the elastic of her garter belt against her thighs. “Yeah,” she says, “but you’re only gonna let me have two. And you’re gonna give the rest to a bunch of people who’d burn us at the stake if they could.”
Buffy blows smoke at the lazy ceiling fan, turns her face against Faith’s, looks at them in the mirror, pink and gold and black and red. All woman.
“Let ‘em try,” she says, and she puts her mouth on Faith’s.
Blows out smoke, breathes in fire.
-
Buffy puts on boy’s jeans and a flannel shirt, ties her hair up in a kerchief. She washes the kitchen floor by hand, rakes the leaves off the lawn, dusts the furniture with lemon Pledge.
She prunes the roses with a hunting knife.
When Faith comes home, hair falling loose and shirt hanging looser, her hat cocked over one eye and her lipstick still flawless, Buffy’s wearing a green cotton dress and an apron. Her hair is smooth and shiny and she has two martinis waiting, both of them dirty.
Faith drinks hers down in one long swallow designed to make Buffy stare at her throat. She runs her hands under Faith’s suspenders, tugs her close.
“Hi, honey,” she whispers against her Chanel scented skin. “How was your day?”
Faith drops the martini glass and put her hands on Buffy’s waist.
“Now I’ll have to clean that up.”
“I’ll do it later,” Faith promises. She sounds like she always does, which is to say, completely insincere. Her mouth takes like wax and paint.
“No you won’t.” Buffy rolls her eyes but she giggles when Faith pinches her.
“I will. I’ll mow the lawn, too. And change the oil in the car. And clean out the rain gutters, just come with me.” She’s tipping Buffy down onto the (spotless) sofa as she says this.
“Anywhere. Always.”
--
This entry was originally posted at http://ghostrunner.dreamwidth.org/5912.html. Please comment there using OpenID.