Morse Code . Justified . Raylan/Boyd, Raylan/Ava, Boyd/Ava . R . One Shot .
Author: pprfaith
Title: Morse Code
Summary: There are stories that get told and stories that don’t. This is one of the one that don’t.
Words: 4k, straight up. Almost.
Warnings: Canon child abuse, spousal abuse, alcohol abuse and violence. Stream of consciousness writing and a teensy weensy bit of blood play connected to biting.
Rating: R
Pairings: Raylan/Boyd, with side dishes of Raylan/Ava and Boyd/Ava.
Disclaimer: Much as I wish I did, I do not own Justified.
A/N: There is a lovely person by the name of Bambie over on AO3 and we have been brainstorming Justified fic for the past three days. It was enormously fun and spawned this when I theorized that Raylan slept with Ava fully conscious of the consequences.
Unbetaed. And if you have suggestions on how to make the accent better, let me know. I’m flying blind here. Also, first time dipping my toes in the fandom. Concrit please!
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Morse Code
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There are stories that get told and there are stories that don’t.
Stories that don’t need to be told because they’re not made of words but of skin and bone and blood and a kiss full of teeth, a hand of a soft thigh, a finger twisted in a lock of hair.
There’s stories that no man alive is ever gonna whisper to another soul because even if he knows them, he also knows that they ain’t his to tell, so he won’t.
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This is 1990.
Later, twenty years and so many miles later, they claim to have met down in a dark mine shaft, where it’s hot and deadly and more like hell that you’d like to imagine. Later, they say ‘when we were nineteen’ like that’s all it was, one year and then the great exodus of Raylan Givens, prodigal son lost to the wilds of the civilized world.
There’s an oxymoron somewhere in that, but Boyd doesn’t much care and no, he ain’t explaining what an ‘oxymoron’ is to you either.
They say they worked together for a year and they smile real big while they do it, big and fake. It hides the smaller, truer smile and a truth that anyone born in this goddamn county should already know: Ain’t no not knowing anyone in Harlan.
They met when they were in diapers, their mothers placing them on a handmade quilt together and watching them drool on each other during a rare period of peace between Arlo and Bo. They met in primary school, learning their letters together and throwing each others’ lunch boxes in the ditch back by the music room. And they met in high school, fourteen and all gangly limbs, a Crowder and a Givens that should hate each other but somehow never managed, smiling at each other across a crowd of hillbilly idiots and rolling their eyes.
They know each other long before the mines and 1990, know each other well, the way you know someone you grew up with in a small town.
The mines just put the seal on it, stamp it into their skin. Boyd gets his first ink off his first paycheck (and doesn’t that make daddy mad) and Raylan still has that dark swath across his hip twenty years later where he fell and cut himself open on a rock and the coal dust never came out. Miner’s ink, he calls it a few times, but not often, because Raylan Givens ain’t a man who tells many stories.
The people he’d tell them to already know.
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But that’s then and this is now, this is them being nineteen and digging coal together, getting drunk every night and sleeping in the beds of their trucks cause there ain’t no way they wanna go home unless they have to.
Being a grown man don’t mean your daddy ain’t gonna beat you when he finds out you’ve been running around with that bastard’s son again.
They fuck in the dark, biting each other hard enough to leave marks and claiming it’s to stifle the sound. It’s bull, is what it is, but neither calls the other on his own lie, so they keep marking and pretending and holding on too tight in the dark.
They’re young, but they ain’t fools. They both know what this is and what it’s worth in the light of day.
They spend their time underground or out in the woods, spend their money on booze and food and stupid things they’ve never had before and it’s a heady feeling, almost like being in love.
Or maybe that’s exactly what it is but they’re not saying it, aren’t putting it into words.
Some stories don’t get told because a pair of faggot boys in rural Kentucky know better than to tell.
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It’s Sunday now and they’re off, both having gone home for lunch at their mommas’ tables, all cleaned up and proper like god really does love the wicked. They’re still in their shirt sleeves, Raylan with his rolled up the elbow, wearing that dumb hat he bought a few months back and looking stupidly good in it. Boyd keeps his shirt all buttoned up and his hair slicked down, arms folded across his chest.
They’re in the woods not far behind Arlo’s house (just out of earshot of drunken screaming), sitting against opposite trees, their legs almost touching.
Raylan’s got his eyes closed and his hat pulled real low and Boyd stares at him, all laser focus and intent, stares at him and wills him to come over here, to give him a kiss.
“You might, could just come over here, son,” Raylan drawls eventually, all twang and honey. He’s been trying to rid himself of the accent lately, of tucking away his ‘ain’ts’ and squaring his grammar, and Boyd don’t like it one bit. But today it’s all molasses and bad syntax again and Boyd feels loose enough to just give in, to crawl up Raylan’s long legs until he’s sitting smack on top of him, gnawing at his neck.
“Really?” he asks, one hand already down Raylan’s jeans, other divesting him of the hat.
Raylan smirks into a biting kiss, says, “You could try.”
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“Ain’t no way this is gonna end well, boy,” Aunt Helen tells Raylan one day, her furrowed face serious and her eyes kind.
Raylan looks down at his plate, pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, one hand fisting and unfisting convulsively on his thigh.
He looks down at his plate and pretends he didn’t hear. He praises her fried chicken and she lets him let it go.
He never tells Boyd.
And why would he? Ain’t nothing to tell both of them don’t already know.
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And then the summer’s over and they’re not nineteen anymore and something happens, in the dark, in the woods, something that is too close and too tight, something that should never have happened.
Something that should have never been said.
They’re not nineteen anymore and that means their time is up and their story over and Raylan Givens blows out of town like he’s got hell herself on his heels and Boyd Crowder follows only months later, the kings proverbial shilling in his pocket.
One earns himself a star and the other a gun and an even bigger taste for blowing shit up and that should be it.
But it ain’t.
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Here’s the thing about Harlan County. It don’t like to let its children go.
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They’re older, much older than nineteen, when Raylan sets foot back in his hometown and he feels, for a moment, like the earth should shake, but it never does.
He finds Ava the way he remembers her, a face like an angel and a soul that’s diamond and fire and steel.
He kisses her and it’s sweet and empty and then he asks her to help him find Boyd, which is the last thing he wants, which is the only thing he wants.
Twenty years he ran, and it all led back here.
Boyd fucking Crowder, there ain’t no escaping you.
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“Did you see your daddy’s face?” Boyd asks, in that church, spewing bullshit rhetoric and Raylan wants to say no.
Wants to say how he sees Boyd’s face, always, and he shoots it over and over and over, hoping it’ll go away but it never does because they were nineteen and they were stupid and in love even if they never said it and that night, that last night, something happened and it can never unhappen and here they are.
Twenty years older and not a bit smarter, only colder, deader, and faster at the draw.
A soldier and a lawman, where once two dumb boys stood, and Raylan routinely shoots men with Boyd’s face because he’s got to get that boy out of his head somehow, except it never works.
Twenty years and nothing’s changed.
“You aren’t gonna hurt Ava, are you?” he asks, careful to keep Harlan out of his vowels and Boyd scowls.
“I ain’t never hurt that girl,” he snarls and there’s a message there, about people hurting other people.
Raylan could read between the lines, but he chooses not to. Looks away.
Things were good once between them until they turned bad because he was scared and hungry and angry, until he ran and abandoned Boyd like trash. Things were good and now they ain’t and Raylan always knew he’d have to live with that, but he didn’t think he’d have to do it while looking Boyd in the eye.
Boyd, who is angry now, real angry, all teeth and fury. He’s more dangerous than he was at nineteen, and not in the way a gun and a star will solve. No, this kind of dangerous comes with fire and damnation, with exploding churches and men double tapped in the back of the head.
“I know you ain’t,” Raylan mollifies, soothing Boyd like a savage beast with a soft twang and the truth.
Boyd relaxes and Raylan smiles, the involuntary reflex of a baby, has a flash of Boyd sitting in the bed of his pickup, sounding ridiculous as he explains, in his best hillbilly words, that ‘involuntary’ means you don’t have a choice, means you must, always and forever.
“I fuck you involuntarily,” he said, all smooth and idiotic and Raylan remembers thinking, that ain’t how that goes.
It feels strange, to be gone for so long, and return to find that what matters most hasn’t changed at all.
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Twenty-four hours later they’re studying each other across Ava’s dining room table, Bowman’s blood still staining the carpet a faint pink behind Boyd’s chair.
Boyd is talking and talking and talking and all Raylan can think, all he can really focus on, is how Boyd got old.
There’s lines on his face, around his mouth and eyes and he squints a little and his hair. Raylan told Art Boyd hadn’t changed but he was lying and, Jesus, but they’ve gotten old.
Except he remembers his momma telling him age makes you wiser and here they are and they ain’t any smarter than twenty years ago, still talking shit and packing heat, still throwing punches just to get some attention.
There was this thing Boyd did, when they was nineteen, where he bit Raylan hard enough to draw blood and said it was an accident but it never was. Look at me, it said, look at me, punch me in the face if you have to, but fucking look at me!
And Raylan did, then and now, he always damn well did, looking at Boyd like he can’t look nowhere else.
So Boyd’s spouting his bullshit, gun in hand, across candles and flowers and Raylan knows this is all a game, just a way to force Raylan to pay attention to Boyd, but that don’t mean Boyd won’t shoot and that means Raylan is gonna have to and that -
Bang.
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“Stupid fucking sonuvabitch,” he whispers into Boyd’s ear later, at the hospital, before they stop giving Boyd the good stuff because he doesn’t think he could say it if Boyd were lucid.
“You fucking sonuvabitch, shoulda just bit me, like you used to.”
Boyd blinks at him sluggish and hurt and fever clear and says, “Under the circumstances, I thought more drastic measures were called for. You’ll forgive me for assuming, I am sure.”
He says it in his sloppiest accent and Raylan can’t help it. He laughs all the way out to his car.
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“Boyd used to come git me, sometimes, did ya know?” Ava asks, a jar of shine on the table between them, a new pink stain on the carpet that neither of them steps on or looks at.
Raylan’s too far gone at this point to do more than grunt and Ava pats his head, says, “When Bowman got real mean, Boyd’d sometimes show up the next day and take me out, like a boy takin’ out his girl. He’d buy me lunch and take me to his place and he’d say real nice things to me, things Bowman weren’t ever gonna say to me.”
She gives Raylan a long, speculative look, like she thinks he might maybe try to steal her momma’s fine china if she looks away too long. “I always thought he was saving them nice things up for someone special, but they weren’t ever there, so he gave them to me, because he knew they’d make me feel better for myself.”
Blearily, Raylan glares at her and when she smiles at him, real soft like, he drops his head on the table and closes his eyes and pretends he’s anywhere Kentucky isn’t, anywhere where there’s no hollers filled with memory and no Crowders or Givens’, no shine or coal or familiar faces.
When that don’t work, he reaches for a shine again and understands how this county turns people into alcoholics.
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In jail, Boyd Crowder tells stories with a bible in his hand, secret stories about a god who forgives and the law that comes raining down like fire on a sinner’s head.
He tells the story of how god saved him for a purpose, how it guided the hand of law to miss his heart, and he tells it rubbing at the scar that centers on his chest, right where his soul sits.
It missed the heart, that bullet, but it hit something else instead, something far more important.
But he never tells that part, keeps it silent and trapped behind his teeth, keeps it where no-one can see because he speaks of god but late at night he ain’t so sure.
There’s the face of Raylan Givens above him in the swimming dark, whispering how fuckin’ dumb Boyd is, saying he’s sorry over and over. Telling him he shoulda just bit him like he used to, when they were nineteen and not a bit less dumb than they are at forty.
There’s Raylan saying Boyd should have found another way to make Raylan look at him, saying it like he would have listened to anything quieter than gunfire and his hand presses into the hole in Boyd’s chest, stemming the bloodflow, holding the wisps of his soul inside, and, and, and.
Boyd says god saved him, but he ain’t so sure that’s who it was.
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“I can’t,” Raylan tells Ava, getting drunk with her again, only this time on the hood of his car and not in her dining room, where Crowders just keep getting holes put in them by people who made promises to them, once upon a time.
Sounds like a fairy tale.
Ain’t.
“Why not?” she asks, a bit belligerent at being turned down yet again. Woman’s gonna start thinking there’s something wrong with her, he thinks.
Cause it’ll nix the case against Boyd, two of two witnesses suddenly sleeping together and shooting the man where his brother died only a few days before.
It’s nix the case and Boyd will walk free and -
Raylan stops. Thinks. And is glad for the Jim in his blood stream as he bends down to find Ava’s mouth and kisses her, real gentle, no teeth at all.
He tells her sweet things, too, that night and every night after that until it falls apart, sweet things he whispers into her skin and she smiles her Mona Lisa smile at him and keeps them for him, keeps them safe for now because she’s made of steel and love, Ava Crowder is, and she knows those things ain’t for her anymore than Boyd’s were.
Raylan thinks he loves her for that.
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“Do you have any fucking idea what you’ve done, son?” Art asks, pictures of Raylan and Ava, naked and compromised, scattered all over his desk.
Raylan tucks his hat low to hide his eyes and says sorry. Says he wasn’t thinking.
Lies on both accounts.
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“Someone took a shot at Ava,” Raylan says, five o’clock shadow on his face at noon, bruises at his collar and murder in his eyes.
He’s all fire and rage, way he was before, deep down in the mine, so spitting angry all the time, just wanting to beat on something the way his daddy beat on him whenever he could catch im.
Boyd blinks at it’s 1990 again and the shaft is burning behind them, dynamite and hellfire.
Blinks again and remembers that they ain’t ninteteen anymore, but neither are they smarter. Life, he is beginning to think, is an endless circle going round and round. God’s way of offering you a chance to fix your mistakes, perhaps.
“Listen to me,” he says, scooting forward in his seat, shackled hands flat on the table, laying it all out for Raylan, just the way it is, because he ain’t nineteen anymore but this is still Raylan Givens and that’s what it always boils down to.
Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder and it don’t matter if it’s bars or the law or Ava’s dining room table between them, or just a layer of skin they can’t quite shuck. This thing they are and were ain’t never gonna change, even when it does.
He tells Raylan about his momma and his daddy and how sometimes bad things make you blind and he can see Raylan itching to punch him in the mouth but he doesn’t because he listens.
Raylan listens and then he leaves and Boyd watches him go, looks down at his ever present bible, looks back at Raylan. Sighs.
They still trust each other, even now.
“Raylan,” he calls, almost too late. Raylan stops, turns, waits. “Don’t get shot, my friend.”
Raylan nods, tips an imaginary hat at Boyd and takes his leave.
There’ll be hell to pay for this later, Boyd knows.
But then, there always is.
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“Honey,” Ava says, later, earlier, what does it matter. “You know I ain’t dumb, don’t you?”
Raylan looks at her, long and hard and cold and she just shakes her head and reaches for her dress.
“Day you go to pick him up, I’m comin’.”
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“In light of recently acquired information, the prosecution has decided to drop most of the charges against you. The minor gun infraction still left will be accounted for as time served. As of tomorrow, Mr. Crowder, you are a free man.”
Boyd blinks at his slick city lawyer, sees the man’s well hidden disdain shining from watery blue eyes. He can guess how the man landed here, one of daddy’s connections left over from before, a favor owed, a life given.
So he smiles real big and says, “D’you think ya could maybe repeat tha’so I’s could understand it? You see, I ain’t very smart on accoun’a me growing up down in the hollers where there ain’t none o’ that ed-ju-cai-shn bullshit.”
The lawyer visibly cringes and the balding, elderly Marshall standing behind him looks like he wants to murder someone. Boyd smiles at him, too, and waits.
The lawyer opens his mouth, closes it, squirms with distaste and knows he can’t let it show, knowing, also, that he’s being shown up. In the end he settles for, “The Marshall who shot you has been screwing the only witness. Your case is compromised. You’re free to go.”
Raylan and Ava. Boyd can’t say he didn’t know, after Raylan’s private visit, but he didn’t expect their affair to yield such results for him.
Didn’t expect Raylan to make a mistake like that. Except… except the bald lawman don’t look very happy at all.
“Raylan, Raylan, Raylan,” Boyd drawls, slow and broad. Happy. “Never could keep it in his pants,” he tells the Marshall. “Even when we were boys together back in the mines, was always his dick, got him in trouble.”
He lets that hang there, watches the darkening of the older man’s eyes and thinks, involuntarily, of being seven and poking an injured snake with a stick to see what it would do.
Thinks also of all the ways Raylan’s dick got them both in trouble, back then, sneaking around in places they weren’t supposed to be, fucking on crates of dynamite after shift and trying to muffle their laughter all the way, before.
Before.
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There is a story of what happened between before and after, during that one night that ended with Raylan’s tail lights fading into after images in the dark and Boyd left behind, angry and hurt and lost.
There is a story there, but only two people alive who know it and they ain’t telling.
It’s their story, and they could, but sometimes even they know better than to pick at scabs.
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“I hear,” Boyd drawls, “That I owe you my gratitude for freeing me from prison, son.”
Raylan pushes off the white wall and falls into step next to him as the gates slam shut behind them.
“Error in judgment,” Raylan assures him with that curl to his lip that doesn’t mean he’s lying, except for when it does.
“Better not let Ava hear you call her that, my friend,” Boyd advises and follows automatically as Raylan starts leading the way to his towncar.
Ava’s sitting on the hood, cigarette in hand. She jumps to her feet when she sees them and waits for Boyd to come hug her so she can press a kiss to his lips and smile at him, all gorgeous, like a woman like her should.
She passes her cigarette on to him without asking and lights herself another one. Raylan leans next to her against the car, watches them both with the long suffering expression of a man that ain’t never figured out how to enjoy tarring his lungs.
Ava smokes in silence for a while, looking between them slowly. Eventually she drops her cherry, steps on it with a red heel and says, “I figure my bed is gonna get mighty cold now, what with both of you otherwise engaged.”
She smirks wickedly and then bounces around to the backseat, throwing herself into it.
Boyd just looks at Raylan, who looks back.
Says, “We ain’t nineteen anymore, Boyd.”
Boyd crushes his own cherry underfoot, straightens his jacket and shows Raylan his teeth.
“No, we ain’t.”
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“Ray,” Boyd says, in the darkness of a motel room that ain’t home and was never meant to be.
Raylan sets his jaw against a name he hasn’t heard from Boyd’s lips in twenty years.
“I don’t even know why I let you in here. You’re still an ex-con.”
“Absolved from all his wrong doings,” Boyd points out and then decides to cut this short, to stop the banter and the hurting just this once.
He takes a step forward, then another, trails calloused fingers across a hidden arc of grey on Raylan’s left hip. Miner’s ink, Raylan calls it, sometimes, but not often, because Boyd called it that first.
He takes a step forward, takes Raylan by the hip and pulls him in, pulls them together and lowers his face to Raylan’s neck, noses his t-shirt aside and sinks his teeth into the soft skin there, right above the collarbone.
Bites down.
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There are stories that get told and there are stories that don’t.
Some of those never told stories are made from skin and bones and lovers’ sighs and they get whispered into soft hollows and tender mouths in the dark.
This ain’t one of those.
This story is made of blood and guns and dynamite, of hurt and rage and dumb boys in a clearing down in a holler somewhere, throwing the word ‘love’ between them like a gauntlet and then running away, too scared to say goodbye, too scared to even breathe anymore.
This story is made of dumb boys that never learn and bite marks like morse code and it ain’t your story to tell, ain’t nobody’s but theirs.
So let them have it, nineteen and thirty-nine, forty and forty-five, in a mine and in the woods, in a motel and Ava’s guestroom, in the dark where no-one sees.
Let them have it.
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“Always were your face,” Raylan admits, with Harlan back in his mouth to stay these days, two fingers like a gun to Boyd’s temple.
“Always tryin’ to get rid of you.”
“Did it work?” Boyd asks, pushing up against his hand, eyes real keen.
Raylan snorts. “What do you think?”
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So?
Title: Morse Code
Summary: There are stories that get told and stories that don’t. This is one of the one that don’t.
Words: 4k, straight up. Almost.
Warnings: Canon child abuse, spousal abuse, alcohol abuse and violence. Stream of consciousness writing and a teensy weensy bit of blood play connected to biting.
Rating: R
Pairings: Raylan/Boyd, with side dishes of Raylan/Ava and Boyd/Ava.
Disclaimer: Much as I wish I did, I do not own Justified.
A/N: There is a lovely person by the name of Bambie over on AO3 and we have been brainstorming Justified fic for the past three days. It was enormously fun and spawned this when I theorized that Raylan slept with Ava fully conscious of the consequences.
Unbetaed. And if you have suggestions on how to make the accent better, let me know. I’m flying blind here. Also, first time dipping my toes in the fandom. Concrit please!
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Morse Code
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There are stories that get told and there are stories that don’t.
Stories that don’t need to be told because they’re not made of words but of skin and bone and blood and a kiss full of teeth, a hand of a soft thigh, a finger twisted in a lock of hair.
There’s stories that no man alive is ever gonna whisper to another soul because even if he knows them, he also knows that they ain’t his to tell, so he won’t.
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This is 1990.
Later, twenty years and so many miles later, they claim to have met down in a dark mine shaft, where it’s hot and deadly and more like hell that you’d like to imagine. Later, they say ‘when we were nineteen’ like that’s all it was, one year and then the great exodus of Raylan Givens, prodigal son lost to the wilds of the civilized world.
There’s an oxymoron somewhere in that, but Boyd doesn’t much care and no, he ain’t explaining what an ‘oxymoron’ is to you either.
They say they worked together for a year and they smile real big while they do it, big and fake. It hides the smaller, truer smile and a truth that anyone born in this goddamn county should already know: Ain’t no not knowing anyone in Harlan.
They met when they were in diapers, their mothers placing them on a handmade quilt together and watching them drool on each other during a rare period of peace between Arlo and Bo. They met in primary school, learning their letters together and throwing each others’ lunch boxes in the ditch back by the music room. And they met in high school, fourteen and all gangly limbs, a Crowder and a Givens that should hate each other but somehow never managed, smiling at each other across a crowd of hillbilly idiots and rolling their eyes.
They know each other long before the mines and 1990, know each other well, the way you know someone you grew up with in a small town.
The mines just put the seal on it, stamp it into their skin. Boyd gets his first ink off his first paycheck (and doesn’t that make daddy mad) and Raylan still has that dark swath across his hip twenty years later where he fell and cut himself open on a rock and the coal dust never came out. Miner’s ink, he calls it a few times, but not often, because Raylan Givens ain’t a man who tells many stories.
The people he’d tell them to already know.
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But that’s then and this is now, this is them being nineteen and digging coal together, getting drunk every night and sleeping in the beds of their trucks cause there ain’t no way they wanna go home unless they have to.
Being a grown man don’t mean your daddy ain’t gonna beat you when he finds out you’ve been running around with that bastard’s son again.
They fuck in the dark, biting each other hard enough to leave marks and claiming it’s to stifle the sound. It’s bull, is what it is, but neither calls the other on his own lie, so they keep marking and pretending and holding on too tight in the dark.
They’re young, but they ain’t fools. They both know what this is and what it’s worth in the light of day.
They spend their time underground or out in the woods, spend their money on booze and food and stupid things they’ve never had before and it’s a heady feeling, almost like being in love.
Or maybe that’s exactly what it is but they’re not saying it, aren’t putting it into words.
Some stories don’t get told because a pair of faggot boys in rural Kentucky know better than to tell.
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It’s Sunday now and they’re off, both having gone home for lunch at their mommas’ tables, all cleaned up and proper like god really does love the wicked. They’re still in their shirt sleeves, Raylan with his rolled up the elbow, wearing that dumb hat he bought a few months back and looking stupidly good in it. Boyd keeps his shirt all buttoned up and his hair slicked down, arms folded across his chest.
They’re in the woods not far behind Arlo’s house (just out of earshot of drunken screaming), sitting against opposite trees, their legs almost touching.
Raylan’s got his eyes closed and his hat pulled real low and Boyd stares at him, all laser focus and intent, stares at him and wills him to come over here, to give him a kiss.
“You might, could just come over here, son,” Raylan drawls eventually, all twang and honey. He’s been trying to rid himself of the accent lately, of tucking away his ‘ain’ts’ and squaring his grammar, and Boyd don’t like it one bit. But today it’s all molasses and bad syntax again and Boyd feels loose enough to just give in, to crawl up Raylan’s long legs until he’s sitting smack on top of him, gnawing at his neck.
“Really?” he asks, one hand already down Raylan’s jeans, other divesting him of the hat.
Raylan smirks into a biting kiss, says, “You could try.”
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“Ain’t no way this is gonna end well, boy,” Aunt Helen tells Raylan one day, her furrowed face serious and her eyes kind.
Raylan looks down at his plate, pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, one hand fisting and unfisting convulsively on his thigh.
He looks down at his plate and pretends he didn’t hear. He praises her fried chicken and she lets him let it go.
He never tells Boyd.
And why would he? Ain’t nothing to tell both of them don’t already know.
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And then the summer’s over and they’re not nineteen anymore and something happens, in the dark, in the woods, something that is too close and too tight, something that should never have happened.
Something that should have never been said.
They’re not nineteen anymore and that means their time is up and their story over and Raylan Givens blows out of town like he’s got hell herself on his heels and Boyd Crowder follows only months later, the kings proverbial shilling in his pocket.
One earns himself a star and the other a gun and an even bigger taste for blowing shit up and that should be it.
But it ain’t.
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Here’s the thing about Harlan County. It don’t like to let its children go.
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They’re older, much older than nineteen, when Raylan sets foot back in his hometown and he feels, for a moment, like the earth should shake, but it never does.
He finds Ava the way he remembers her, a face like an angel and a soul that’s diamond and fire and steel.
He kisses her and it’s sweet and empty and then he asks her to help him find Boyd, which is the last thing he wants, which is the only thing he wants.
Twenty years he ran, and it all led back here.
Boyd fucking Crowder, there ain’t no escaping you.
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“Did you see your daddy’s face?” Boyd asks, in that church, spewing bullshit rhetoric and Raylan wants to say no.
Wants to say how he sees Boyd’s face, always, and he shoots it over and over and over, hoping it’ll go away but it never does because they were nineteen and they were stupid and in love even if they never said it and that night, that last night, something happened and it can never unhappen and here they are.
Twenty years older and not a bit smarter, only colder, deader, and faster at the draw.
A soldier and a lawman, where once two dumb boys stood, and Raylan routinely shoots men with Boyd’s face because he’s got to get that boy out of his head somehow, except it never works.
Twenty years and nothing’s changed.
“You aren’t gonna hurt Ava, are you?” he asks, careful to keep Harlan out of his vowels and Boyd scowls.
“I ain’t never hurt that girl,” he snarls and there’s a message there, about people hurting other people.
Raylan could read between the lines, but he chooses not to. Looks away.
Things were good once between them until they turned bad because he was scared and hungry and angry, until he ran and abandoned Boyd like trash. Things were good and now they ain’t and Raylan always knew he’d have to live with that, but he didn’t think he’d have to do it while looking Boyd in the eye.
Boyd, who is angry now, real angry, all teeth and fury. He’s more dangerous than he was at nineteen, and not in the way a gun and a star will solve. No, this kind of dangerous comes with fire and damnation, with exploding churches and men double tapped in the back of the head.
“I know you ain’t,” Raylan mollifies, soothing Boyd like a savage beast with a soft twang and the truth.
Boyd relaxes and Raylan smiles, the involuntary reflex of a baby, has a flash of Boyd sitting in the bed of his pickup, sounding ridiculous as he explains, in his best hillbilly words, that ‘involuntary’ means you don’t have a choice, means you must, always and forever.
“I fuck you involuntarily,” he said, all smooth and idiotic and Raylan remembers thinking, that ain’t how that goes.
It feels strange, to be gone for so long, and return to find that what matters most hasn’t changed at all.
+
Twenty-four hours later they’re studying each other across Ava’s dining room table, Bowman’s blood still staining the carpet a faint pink behind Boyd’s chair.
Boyd is talking and talking and talking and all Raylan can think, all he can really focus on, is how Boyd got old.
There’s lines on his face, around his mouth and eyes and he squints a little and his hair. Raylan told Art Boyd hadn’t changed but he was lying and, Jesus, but they’ve gotten old.
Except he remembers his momma telling him age makes you wiser and here they are and they ain’t any smarter than twenty years ago, still talking shit and packing heat, still throwing punches just to get some attention.
There was this thing Boyd did, when they was nineteen, where he bit Raylan hard enough to draw blood and said it was an accident but it never was. Look at me, it said, look at me, punch me in the face if you have to, but fucking look at me!
And Raylan did, then and now, he always damn well did, looking at Boyd like he can’t look nowhere else.
So Boyd’s spouting his bullshit, gun in hand, across candles and flowers and Raylan knows this is all a game, just a way to force Raylan to pay attention to Boyd, but that don’t mean Boyd won’t shoot and that means Raylan is gonna have to and that -
Bang.
+
“Stupid fucking sonuvabitch,” he whispers into Boyd’s ear later, at the hospital, before they stop giving Boyd the good stuff because he doesn’t think he could say it if Boyd were lucid.
“You fucking sonuvabitch, shoulda just bit me, like you used to.”
Boyd blinks at him sluggish and hurt and fever clear and says, “Under the circumstances, I thought more drastic measures were called for. You’ll forgive me for assuming, I am sure.”
He says it in his sloppiest accent and Raylan can’t help it. He laughs all the way out to his car.
+
“Boyd used to come git me, sometimes, did ya know?” Ava asks, a jar of shine on the table between them, a new pink stain on the carpet that neither of them steps on or looks at.
Raylan’s too far gone at this point to do more than grunt and Ava pats his head, says, “When Bowman got real mean, Boyd’d sometimes show up the next day and take me out, like a boy takin’ out his girl. He’d buy me lunch and take me to his place and he’d say real nice things to me, things Bowman weren’t ever gonna say to me.”
She gives Raylan a long, speculative look, like she thinks he might maybe try to steal her momma’s fine china if she looks away too long. “I always thought he was saving them nice things up for someone special, but they weren’t ever there, so he gave them to me, because he knew they’d make me feel better for myself.”
Blearily, Raylan glares at her and when she smiles at him, real soft like, he drops his head on the table and closes his eyes and pretends he’s anywhere Kentucky isn’t, anywhere where there’s no hollers filled with memory and no Crowders or Givens’, no shine or coal or familiar faces.
When that don’t work, he reaches for a shine again and understands how this county turns people into alcoholics.
+
In jail, Boyd Crowder tells stories with a bible in his hand, secret stories about a god who forgives and the law that comes raining down like fire on a sinner’s head.
He tells the story of how god saved him for a purpose, how it guided the hand of law to miss his heart, and he tells it rubbing at the scar that centers on his chest, right where his soul sits.
It missed the heart, that bullet, but it hit something else instead, something far more important.
But he never tells that part, keeps it silent and trapped behind his teeth, keeps it where no-one can see because he speaks of god but late at night he ain’t so sure.
There’s the face of Raylan Givens above him in the swimming dark, whispering how fuckin’ dumb Boyd is, saying he’s sorry over and over. Telling him he shoulda just bit him like he used to, when they were nineteen and not a bit less dumb than they are at forty.
There’s Raylan saying Boyd should have found another way to make Raylan look at him, saying it like he would have listened to anything quieter than gunfire and his hand presses into the hole in Boyd’s chest, stemming the bloodflow, holding the wisps of his soul inside, and, and, and.
Boyd says god saved him, but he ain’t so sure that’s who it was.
+
“I can’t,” Raylan tells Ava, getting drunk with her again, only this time on the hood of his car and not in her dining room, where Crowders just keep getting holes put in them by people who made promises to them, once upon a time.
Sounds like a fairy tale.
Ain’t.
“Why not?” she asks, a bit belligerent at being turned down yet again. Woman’s gonna start thinking there’s something wrong with her, he thinks.
Cause it’ll nix the case against Boyd, two of two witnesses suddenly sleeping together and shooting the man where his brother died only a few days before.
It’s nix the case and Boyd will walk free and -
Raylan stops. Thinks. And is glad for the Jim in his blood stream as he bends down to find Ava’s mouth and kisses her, real gentle, no teeth at all.
He tells her sweet things, too, that night and every night after that until it falls apart, sweet things he whispers into her skin and she smiles her Mona Lisa smile at him and keeps them for him, keeps them safe for now because she’s made of steel and love, Ava Crowder is, and she knows those things ain’t for her anymore than Boyd’s were.
Raylan thinks he loves her for that.
+
“Do you have any fucking idea what you’ve done, son?” Art asks, pictures of Raylan and Ava, naked and compromised, scattered all over his desk.
Raylan tucks his hat low to hide his eyes and says sorry. Says he wasn’t thinking.
Lies on both accounts.
+
“Someone took a shot at Ava,” Raylan says, five o’clock shadow on his face at noon, bruises at his collar and murder in his eyes.
He’s all fire and rage, way he was before, deep down in the mine, so spitting angry all the time, just wanting to beat on something the way his daddy beat on him whenever he could catch im.
Boyd blinks at it’s 1990 again and the shaft is burning behind them, dynamite and hellfire.
Blinks again and remembers that they ain’t ninteteen anymore, but neither are they smarter. Life, he is beginning to think, is an endless circle going round and round. God’s way of offering you a chance to fix your mistakes, perhaps.
“Listen to me,” he says, scooting forward in his seat, shackled hands flat on the table, laying it all out for Raylan, just the way it is, because he ain’t nineteen anymore but this is still Raylan Givens and that’s what it always boils down to.
Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder and it don’t matter if it’s bars or the law or Ava’s dining room table between them, or just a layer of skin they can’t quite shuck. This thing they are and were ain’t never gonna change, even when it does.
He tells Raylan about his momma and his daddy and how sometimes bad things make you blind and he can see Raylan itching to punch him in the mouth but he doesn’t because he listens.
Raylan listens and then he leaves and Boyd watches him go, looks down at his ever present bible, looks back at Raylan. Sighs.
They still trust each other, even now.
“Raylan,” he calls, almost too late. Raylan stops, turns, waits. “Don’t get shot, my friend.”
Raylan nods, tips an imaginary hat at Boyd and takes his leave.
There’ll be hell to pay for this later, Boyd knows.
But then, there always is.
+
“Honey,” Ava says, later, earlier, what does it matter. “You know I ain’t dumb, don’t you?”
Raylan looks at her, long and hard and cold and she just shakes her head and reaches for her dress.
“Day you go to pick him up, I’m comin’.”
+
“In light of recently acquired information, the prosecution has decided to drop most of the charges against you. The minor gun infraction still left will be accounted for as time served. As of tomorrow, Mr. Crowder, you are a free man.”
Boyd blinks at his slick city lawyer, sees the man’s well hidden disdain shining from watery blue eyes. He can guess how the man landed here, one of daddy’s connections left over from before, a favor owed, a life given.
So he smiles real big and says, “D’you think ya could maybe repeat tha’so I’s could understand it? You see, I ain’t very smart on accoun’a me growing up down in the hollers where there ain’t none o’ that ed-ju-cai-shn bullshit.”
The lawyer visibly cringes and the balding, elderly Marshall standing behind him looks like he wants to murder someone. Boyd smiles at him, too, and waits.
The lawyer opens his mouth, closes it, squirms with distaste and knows he can’t let it show, knowing, also, that he’s being shown up. In the end he settles for, “The Marshall who shot you has been screwing the only witness. Your case is compromised. You’re free to go.”
Raylan and Ava. Boyd can’t say he didn’t know, after Raylan’s private visit, but he didn’t expect their affair to yield such results for him.
Didn’t expect Raylan to make a mistake like that. Except… except the bald lawman don’t look very happy at all.
“Raylan, Raylan, Raylan,” Boyd drawls, slow and broad. Happy. “Never could keep it in his pants,” he tells the Marshall. “Even when we were boys together back in the mines, was always his dick, got him in trouble.”
He lets that hang there, watches the darkening of the older man’s eyes and thinks, involuntarily, of being seven and poking an injured snake with a stick to see what it would do.
Thinks also of all the ways Raylan’s dick got them both in trouble, back then, sneaking around in places they weren’t supposed to be, fucking on crates of dynamite after shift and trying to muffle their laughter all the way, before.
Before.
+
There is a story of what happened between before and after, during that one night that ended with Raylan’s tail lights fading into after images in the dark and Boyd left behind, angry and hurt and lost.
There is a story there, but only two people alive who know it and they ain’t telling.
It’s their story, and they could, but sometimes even they know better than to pick at scabs.
+
“I hear,” Boyd drawls, “That I owe you my gratitude for freeing me from prison, son.”
Raylan pushes off the white wall and falls into step next to him as the gates slam shut behind them.
“Error in judgment,” Raylan assures him with that curl to his lip that doesn’t mean he’s lying, except for when it does.
“Better not let Ava hear you call her that, my friend,” Boyd advises and follows automatically as Raylan starts leading the way to his towncar.
Ava’s sitting on the hood, cigarette in hand. She jumps to her feet when she sees them and waits for Boyd to come hug her so she can press a kiss to his lips and smile at him, all gorgeous, like a woman like her should.
She passes her cigarette on to him without asking and lights herself another one. Raylan leans next to her against the car, watches them both with the long suffering expression of a man that ain’t never figured out how to enjoy tarring his lungs.
Ava smokes in silence for a while, looking between them slowly. Eventually she drops her cherry, steps on it with a red heel and says, “I figure my bed is gonna get mighty cold now, what with both of you otherwise engaged.”
She smirks wickedly and then bounces around to the backseat, throwing herself into it.
Boyd just looks at Raylan, who looks back.
Says, “We ain’t nineteen anymore, Boyd.”
Boyd crushes his own cherry underfoot, straightens his jacket and shows Raylan his teeth.
“No, we ain’t.”
+
“Ray,” Boyd says, in the darkness of a motel room that ain’t home and was never meant to be.
Raylan sets his jaw against a name he hasn’t heard from Boyd’s lips in twenty years.
“I don’t even know why I let you in here. You’re still an ex-con.”
“Absolved from all his wrong doings,” Boyd points out and then decides to cut this short, to stop the banter and the hurting just this once.
He takes a step forward, then another, trails calloused fingers across a hidden arc of grey on Raylan’s left hip. Miner’s ink, Raylan calls it, sometimes, but not often, because Boyd called it that first.
He takes a step forward, takes Raylan by the hip and pulls him in, pulls them together and lowers his face to Raylan’s neck, noses his t-shirt aside and sinks his teeth into the soft skin there, right above the collarbone.
Bites down.
+
There are stories that get told and there are stories that don’t.
Some of those never told stories are made from skin and bones and lovers’ sighs and they get whispered into soft hollows and tender mouths in the dark.
This ain’t one of those.
This story is made of blood and guns and dynamite, of hurt and rage and dumb boys in a clearing down in a holler somewhere, throwing the word ‘love’ between them like a gauntlet and then running away, too scared to say goodbye, too scared to even breathe anymore.
This story is made of dumb boys that never learn and bite marks like morse code and it ain’t your story to tell, ain’t nobody’s but theirs.
So let them have it, nineteen and thirty-nine, forty and forty-five, in a mine and in the woods, in a motel and Ava’s guestroom, in the dark where no-one sees.
Let them have it.
+
“Always were your face,” Raylan admits, with Harlan back in his mouth to stay these days, two fingers like a gun to Boyd’s temple.
“Always tryin’ to get rid of you.”
“Did it work?” Boyd asks, pushing up against his hand, eyes real keen.
Raylan snorts. “What do you think?”
+
+
+
So?