[Bandslash] The Ride
Title: The Ride
Fandom: Bandslash
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Hank Williams/Hank Williams III
Words: 5400
Originally written: June, 2006
Summary: Hank does something dumb.
The Ride
He would swear to his dying day that it had been a good idea at the time.
After all, it wasn't every day he got down South to see his relations. There was a lot of highway ahead of him, but it wasn't every day the road wound down past willows and rivers, past the Montgomery County line and into the city limits.
The last time he had been here, he'd taken a shotgun to the "Welcome to Montgomery" sign on the outskirts of town. Blown a hole clean through the center of the state seal, just to see if he could get away with it.
He was here again now, and the sign had been replaced.
It didn't surprise him.
You couldn't leave a permanent mark on anything in this world. Nothing but another person.
Hank had never been a philosophical man, but that sounded right to him. It had been years since he had considered himself a religious man, but that sounded like something he could believe.
He may have been an incurable cynic, self-destructive, aimless and lacking in motivation. He may have been a rebel, may have busted a few heads along the line because sometimes heads needed to get broke if anything was going to get done.
He may have been all those things, but he hadn't been raised by fucking wolves.
He knew how to treat family.
After the show, he had taken one of the bottles of whiskey from the bus. They always kept alcohol in stock when they traveled through the Deep South. It was damn near impossible to keep track of which counties were wet and which were drier than the back of his tongue after a two hour set.
He didn't remember if he had told anyone where he was going when he slipped out the back of the club, but it wasn't as though he was ever that hard to find.
It wasn't late yet, but most everything downtown was closed, and the most everyone was off the streets.
The night was chilly, and he sunk his hands into the pockets of his jeans to keep them warm.
Three miles to the cemetery. The gates were closed by now, and the whole place was locked down for the night, but he found a tree growing alongside the fence and used its low branches to boost himself over.
Breaking and entering, he thought.
Not a new sin, but a respectable one. You couldn't go wrong with the classics.
He landed hard on the other side of the fence, falling to his knees on the soft grass. A rock skated along the heel of his hand, drawing blood.
"Motherfucker…"
His voice was little more than a whisper, just a quiet hiss of escaping frustration, but it sounded loud in this place. In the dark and silence of an abandoned cemetery.
He lifted his hand to his mouth, and his tongue flicked out, lapping up the blood.
There were enough chemicals racing through his insides these days that he wouldn't be surprised if one day he started bleeding glowing toxic waste. But right now he tasted only salt and copper on his lips.
The same blood as anyone else.
Hank touched his chest with his fingertips, and felt the bottle of whiskey tucked into the inside pocket of his coat. A full and comforting weight against his heart.
He cut through the gravestones and white crosses that barely reached his knees. He stepped wide to keep from treading on any of the graves.
He didn't know where he was going, not exactly, but he knew he would know the place when he saw it. That monstrous monument, the white slab that jutted up from the ebb between two of the cemetery's rolling hills. Unless the moon came out, he thought, he wouldn't be able to read the name carved into the white marble. But you didn't need words to know that a man of some consideration was buried there.
A man of real importance.
A dull ache had settled into the crook between Hank's shoulder blades. It was a faint pain, but it never quite went away. Old whiplash, that had never quite healed right.
It hardly ever hurt enough to slow him down, but it lingered. Reminding him that he wasn't as young as he used to be.
Older now, after all, then his grandfather had ever been.
Of course, his grandfather couldn't really be blamed. He'd had aches of his own.
Hank reached back, pinching the back of his neck in a strong hand, digging his thumb into the nerve that traced the side of his throat.
But the pain didn't ease.
The thought of dying was pleasant to him only in the most aesthetic of senses. The contemplation of his own death hadn't comforted him in many years.
He had changed a lot. He could see it every time he glanced in the mirror and unfamiliar eyes looked back. He was neither better now than he had been, nor worse.
Only different.
“You going out There?” Joe Buck had asked, earlier that night, as he’d skulked toward the door of the bus, making little or no to-do about it.
But make no mistake; Joe noticed his coming and goings.
It wasn’t natural. Even so, Hank had little enough to say about it. Natural had never meant much to him, anyway. He knew it when he saw it, but it didn’t like his face much. And it rarely showed itself while he was around.
It probably liked Joe Buck’s face even less.
“Baked a cake,” drawled Joe, as if he had answered. “…for your loss.”
“Ain’t no loss,” said Hank, quietly.
He’d never met the man, after all.
“All the same,” said Joe, shrugging, noncommittal to a fine point.
He reached into the inner pocket of his Carhart coat and pulled out a plastic baggie, neatly wrapped and sealed around itself. Among the indistinguished contents, Hank could make out the telltale shape of a fat, white spliff.
“Party favors, for later. Guess you’ll be out. Might as well take ‘em.”
Hank caught the bag like a bad habit, one-handed, all reflex, and wondered where he'd come by skill like that. It was no holdover from playing catch with his Old Man on a sunny green lawn.
“What’re you up to?” asked Hank, after a moment. It was more of a civility than anything else.
“I reckon I’ll replace that string I broke in Macon,” Joe whistled, grinning broadly.
Hank knew he was fooling. If Joe ever did manage to bust a string on that upright of his, he’d probably come away from it short a couple of fingers, or at the very least with a couple of new scars to show for it.
Bass strings almost never needed changing, thick, unapologetic bastards that they were. Hell, flat-wounds like the ones Joe Buck was partial to needed it even rarer than that.
Guitar strings were another matter. Hank broke ‘em regular as clockwork, even the 12s. It was the nature of the beast, but Joe was always crowing about he never needed to change out, and how glad he was for that, because what a hassle it was anyway.
Bass player’s idea of a joke. It weren’t Hank’s, though.
He’d left without much more than a nod, and now he found himself here, in a marble orchard at midnight, with a pocket full of bad candy and a real temptation to devolve.
The moon was starting to rise, bright enough to cut shadows across the dew-damp grass, and the ground beneath the stone crosses and the weird, twisted trees was stained black as coffee or tar heroin.
He found a place beneath one of the marble angels. Her arched and triumphant wings hid him.
It wasn’t that he was afraid of being caught, not here. But sometimes he just liked a good shadow.
Hank slipped a hand into his pocket, pulled out the little plastic bag Joe had given him. That man had always been too good to him. Had always understood too much.
He broke the seal on the bag, dipped his hand in. Delicate tissue paper crumpled beneath his fingers, and he pulled out a long cigarette, wrapped in white and unmarked.
It smelled like pot, green and organic, but there was a faint chemical odor, too. A little something extra laced with the weed, to see him through a long, cold night. He couldn't place the smell right away, but it didn't really matter. He wasn't picky.
He flicked his lighter, and touched the flame to the tip of his cigarette.
A bitter, rancid taste flooded his mouth on the first drag. By the second, his lungs burned from within and the skin around his mouth had begun to sting.
By the third, he was beginning to suspect that it wasn't just an innocent little pinch of angeldust laced into the cigarette.
Blow didn't make his skin crawl like this. It didn't make the backs of his eyes feel dry and prickly.
And he laughed, because the cemetery didn't seem so cold anymore, and that was funny for some reason. The moonbleached grass rippled, and the shadows danced before his eyes. The breeze was loud as a freight train.
There was a sharp pain in his right shoulder, like a bit of hot ash squirming around beneath the skin there. He scratched at it, nails clawing at the slick blue of his overshirt, raising ridges in the cloth.
But the more he scratched, the deeper the ache ran, diving into him like a needle lancing the skin.
"Fucker…" Hank muttered. "Get on outta there."
He tore off his jacket. Clawed at the front of his shirt, and the buttons gave easily, popping loose to become lost in the grass. Laughing, he shrugged the shirt off and tossed it aside. The white wifebeater he had on underneath didn't offer much protection against the cold, so he sucked hard on the cigarette clamped between his lips.
His head swam, and the chill in the air retreated.
That spot on his right shoulder was still bothering him, and he reached to scratch at it absently, digging his nails into the inked patch just under the spot where shoulder and bicep joined.
There was a tattoo of a raven there, angular and stylized. And beneath the bird, a name. Almost exactly the same as his, but with a whole fucking universe of different connotations.
But the nagging ache didn't ease, and red welts began to cut across his skin.
When he drew his hand back, there were flecks of fresh blood under his nails.
And, like a pan of water reaching boiling, the pain in his shoulder reached a point where the surface couldn't hold.
Something gave way. He felt the skin on his arm burst wide, felt a rush of wind against his face. A hail of black feathers drifted down to rest in his lap.
Hank whistled softly, impressed. In the flesh, the raven was the biggest damn thing he'd ever seen. Ugly and mangy, with strangely angular wings.
It looked up at him accusatively, and spread its massive wings. Beat them once, lazily and circled up to rest on the outstretched arm of the marble angel.
"Ain't that something…" he murmured. He sucked in a deep breath. Blue smoke filled his mouth, but he hardly noticed. The rest of the cigarette slipped, forgotten, from the corner of his lips.
He touched his right shoulder. The pain was gone, and where he had expected to feel blood, there was none.
The raven's beak was as long as Hank's index finger, and crooked like a broken bone. Its voice was like the sound of a diesel engine filtered through the walls of a cheap motel.
It made Hank's head feel light to hear it, and above him the stars blurred and spun.
"Shit…" Hank reached back, bracing his hands against the base of the statue. The stone felt cold and clammy, like feverish skin.
"Don't do that," he gasped. "You want me to yak up the last three meals I ate?"
The raven clicked its beak. Blue-black eyes glittered coldly in the moonlight.
Hank sighed. He let his head fall back, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, he thought, that bird would be gone. Back on his arm where it belonged.
But in the darkness behind his eyes, he could still see the ragged shape of the raven's wings, the definition of each tar colored feather.
Hank had had his share of hallucinations, but this looked real. This looked like flesh and blood and a whole hell of malicious intent.
He kept his eyes closed, and counted to ten, but he could still feel the raven's cold gaze on him.
So he counted to twenty. To fifty. And he was inching toward one hundred when the soft click of glass against stone made him jump.
"You sure do know how to scare a fella."
The stranger's voice was soft, dry as ashes. But it carried. It charged the air with electricity, like the faint tension after lightning strikes.
"You look just like a ghost."
Hank's lips parted slightly. His gaze strayed first to the stranger's face, hidden behind the shadow of a white cowboy hat. Then to his hand, wrapped around the neck of a whiskey bottle. He turned his wrist, tapped the bottle against the statue. It rang, like a chime.
"Hope you didn't bring this for a special occasion or nothin'."
He tipped the bottle in the direction of Hank's discarded coat. "I helped myself."
"That's for my granddaddy, you cocksucker. You better leave it be."
His tongue felt thick in his mouth. His voice slurred and rolled. Hank wasn't sure the stranger would be able to understand him at all. If he was even speaking anymore, or just imagining he was.
"For your granddaddy, huh?"
The stranger's accent was thick, one of the most liquid drawls Hank had ever heard. Dark and velvety.
"Well, I'm sure your granddaddy won't mind. It probably breaks his poor old heart to see good whiskey go undrunk."
He lifted his free hand, crooking his arm, perpendicular to his chest. The raven choked out a broken note, and beat its wings, gliding down to land on the stranger's wrist.
"I didn't know you brought company along," he said.
"Oh, shit." Hank's head fell back, cracking against the stone. "Can you see that thing?"
"'course I can see it. I ain't blind, boy."
"But that's mine. It came out of me."
"Well, I don't know nothin' about that." He lifted the bird up, and it hopped obediently onto his shoulder. "You don't look so good, boy. Why don't you have a drink? If that doesn't ease the pain away, only death ever will."
"Death ain't that good."
Clawing at the statue for support, Hank turned himself over onto his knees. He reached up, snatching the whiskey bottle away with a trembling hand.
He twisted the cap off with his teeth and spit it aside. Tipped the bottle, so his mouth was flooded with sweet liquid fire. He had to work his throat hard to choke it all down; the muscles along the sides of his neck twitched with the effort.
“Ain’t that a trick?” the stranger said. When he took back the bottle, it was four inches down. “Where’d you learn to drink like that?”
“It’s something I’ve been working on,” Hank said wryly.
“That so?” Even when the stranger leaned closer, Hank couldn’t make out his face. Only the vaguest hint of the slant of his nose, the sharp angle of his cheekbones.
But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew this man. That his name was familiar, and it would come to him, if he could only quiet the buzzing in his head long enough…
“Just who are you anyway?” Hank said. “Who the hell wanders around the cemetery after hours like this? You aren’t some kind of corpsefucker, are you? Cuz that ain’t right, man-"
“What’s your name?”
“My name?”
Hank scowled.
“It’s… Hank. You can call me Hank.”
“That what your friends call you?”
He shook his head. “No, it ain’t. But you aren’t my friend, are you?”
The stranger smiled faintly. “I guess not. But, you know, kid… there’s a problem. I know your name’s not Hank.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because, there’s a huge tombstone over yonder, and Hank’s the name written on that there grave. And I know for a fact that there can’t be two Hanks. Place just ain't big enough for that. So unless you’ve been dead fifty aught years now, then you ain’t Hank, now are you?”
“Shit, man. You’re hurtin’ my head. Don’t you have nothin’ better to do than bother me?”
“You don’t like good conversation with your whiskey?”
He passed the bottle back. Hank snatched it out of his hand and took another long draught.
“Hard to carry on a good conversation with half your teeth kicked out of your fuckin’ head, Mister. I’m just sayin’.”
A screeching birdcall split the silence, and the raven, which had been silent until now, so still that Hank had almost forgotten it was anything more than another shadow cast by the willow trees, spread its wings. It pistoned them once, took flight, and it was gone.
“Fuck,” Hank said. “That tattoo cost me a fortune…”
“It’s not like you ain’t got more,” the stranger said, tipping the bottle down, motioning vaguely to Hank’s forearms, where flame tattoos crept from wrist to elbow.
“It’s not the same,” Hank muttered.
“Well, I don’t know about that…” He leaned down, brushing his fingers along the underside of Hank’s wrist.
“Cut it out.”
Hank pulled his hand away. His skin itched, a low unpleasant buzz beneath the skin. He cupped his hand over the opposite wrist, rubbing at it absently.
The stranger gave a soft whistle. “Well, I must say, I ain’t never seen nothing like that.”
“Then you ain’t lookin’ hard enough.”
“I’m looking. I can’t look away.”
"Huh?" Hank's eyes strayed down, to where his hands lay limp across his thighs. His vision was still swimming a little, and the tattoos on his wrists seemed to ripple. To stutter, almost like real flames.
And as he watched, the lines flickered once, like an image on an old film reel, and when they returned, the first tongues of real fire appeared.
"Shit…" Hank muttered. The flames started near his wrist: a peak of orange fire, no bigger than the spark from a Bic lighter.
It spread upward, spiraling around his arm and up towards his elbow.
"Shit! Shit!"
He swatted at his arm with the opposite hand, but by now both wrists were engulfed. He could smell burning hair and charring meat.
"Fuck! I'm on fuckin' fire!"
Hank dug his heels into the dirt, trying to push himself to his feet. But the grass was slippery, and his boots went out from under him before he made it far.
Before he could try again, the weight of another body settled over him, pushing him down.
Hands closed around his wrists, cutting through the fire that swarmed around him.
He could feel that, Hank realized. The fingers curled against his skin. He could feel them, but he couldn't feel any pain.
"What the hell…?"
The stranger's grip was surprisingly strong. Hank didn't need to try to pull away to know that he wouldn't be able to. He was gentle, though. Tomorrow, there wouldn't be any bruises where his hands had been.
He lifted Hank's hands between them, so he could watch the flames, or perhaps so they both could.
"It just ain't your night, is it, boy?"
Even with the stranger's face only a few inches from his, even with the dancing flames throwing new patterns of light over him, Hank still couldn't make out his features. He was beginning to suspect that maybe he didn't want to. Maybe it would be better if he never found out what secrets were hidden beneath the brim of that immaculate, unstained white Stetson hat.
"Who…?" Hank murmured.
"Shh."
He pushed Hank's hands back until they touched the base of the marble statue. The flames glowed brighter for a moment, turned white hot beneath the stranger's touch.
"You ask too many questions," the stranger said. "Do you really need to know everything? Can't you let some things just happen because they can? Lots of things in this world, boy, don't have no satisfactory explanation."
Hank's lips parted, but before he could speak, the stranger leaned in - slowly, but without hesitation - and covered Hank's mouth with his own.
The kiss dragged on, long and lazy like an afternoon out on the front porch.
Hank whimpered quietly, low in his throat. He tried to pull away, but his body was reluctant to cooperate. It seemed content enough to stay, soaking up the affection.
The flames around his arms began to move again. Snaking from his fingertips, over the marble pedestal. They climbed the statue like ivy, draped over the stone angel like gun belts on a Mexican revolutionary.
Hank tried to pull away, but his arms were pinned. The flames held him fast, as if he had been bound in place with rope.
"Wouldn't want you to go runnin' off," the stranger said with a grin. "You look like the type who can't finish what he starts."
"I didn't start this."
"No? Well… maybe I just wanna thank you for the whiskey. Ain't easy to come by out here, you know."
He slid his hands under Hank's shirt, pressing them flat against his stomach. Sliding upward, and taking the shirt with them.
"Hey!" Hank said, squirming. "Don't be touchin' me there. Your hands are colder then a preacher's wife's cunt."
"I know," the stranger said quietly. "Ain't it a bitch?"
"I don't…" Hank said, but he didn't get to finish. His shirt was raked over his head, up to his elbows.
"You're skinny, boy. Ain't you been eatin' right?"
His breath was coming hard and fast now. Dry little gasps, torn from his lungs. "I… I dunno."
"You need to find a good woman to keep house for you. Put everything in order. That's what a good woman's for."
Hank laughed, thin and high. Edged with hysteria. "I don't know any of them."
The stranger's lips curled into a smile as he reached for Hank's belt, popping open the buckle and threading it out of the loops of his jeans. "You really need to calm down, boy."
He folded the belt over in his hand, slapped it across his palm with a crack. "What do you think I'm gonna do?"
"I'm sure you got a few things in mind," Hank said. "And I can tell you right now that I don't like where this is goin'…"
The stranger shook his head. "You kids these days, you're never satisfied." He tossed Hank's belt over his shoulder, and reached for the front of his jeans.
"Relax. Just relax."
"You're fucking crazy." Hank tensed, tugging at his trapped wrists. But the bonds were unyielding. Blunt, rather than cutting; more like chains than ropes.
"Hush, now."
Steady fingers unbuttoned his jeans, drawing the zipper down. Hands closed around his hips. The stranger's palms were rough, the kind of all-over roughness that comes from a lifetime of hard work. So hard that they had almost become soft again.
Hank swallowed. He really shouldn't have noticed the state of the stranger's hands, but it was stuck in his mind like a bone lodged in his throat.
Even after the touch was withdrawn, his skin stayed heated by it. Charged and tingling in anticipation.
"You know," the stranger said casually. "You seem real familiar somehow. Ain't that somethin'? I didn't think I had no friends left round these parts."
He eased Hank's jeans down over his hips. His head was lowered, intent on his work, and Hank could make out nothing of his expression.
"Yeah? I wonder why that might be. I mean, if you treat everybody this nice and all."
He gasped, as his jeans slid down his thighs.
"Oh, shit, that grass is freezin'!"
He squirmed, lifted himself on the heels of his worn boots. Until the stranger's hands came down on his thighs, pushing him back with that same surprising strength he had exhibited earlier.
"It's wet," Hank muttered. "You want me to catch my death?"
The stranger shook his head. "What do you think the whiskey was for?"
"Whiskey ain't never made nobody well again."
"Now that just plain ain't true."
The stranger slid his jeans the rest of the way off, tossed them aside to join his belt. Wherever that had landed.
"Hey!" Hank snapped. And then there were hands hooked beneath his knees, forcing his legs up and apart. He slid down so his weight rested on the small of his back, and the bonds around his wrists cut in hard enough to bruise.
"Hey! I said, cut that out!"
The stranger ignored him, ducking so he could rest Hank's legs on his shoulders. "You just ain't got no faith in medicine, boy. My momma used to say that a tablespoon of whiskey could cure most anything…"
He paused long enough to spit into his palm. His hand disappeared down between their bodies, and for a moment Hank lost track of it. Until he felt a rough, callused finger press against him, and then in.
"And if it was good enough for my momma, then it's good enough for you."
Hank gasped, tensing for a moment before he remembered that was the worst thing he could do. "Holy shit, man. Maybe it's real important to you that we do this for some reason. But could you at least do it without talking about your momma?"
"Sorry," the stranger said. "There ain't much else I remember these days. Well… 'sides the obvious, that is."
And he slid a second finger in to join the first.
"Ow," Hank muttered.
“Ain’t you done complaining yet?” the stranger said. He shifted his weight, forcing Hank’s legs back. His thighs twitched with the effort, and he felt the strain all the way to the small of his back.
He winced. “Hey, go easy. This ain’t no peeler bar; I can’t bend like that.”
“I guess not.” The stranger drew his fingers back, sharp enough to make Hank gasp. “It don’t really matter none, though.”
He shifted forward on his knees, and even though his pulse was throbbing like a kickdrum in his ears, Hank could hear the unmistakable sound of a zipper sliding down.
“You keep talkin’,” the stranger said. “I’m sure I’ll find some way to keep myself entertained.”
The first thrust was hard enough to drive him back against the base of the statue. Hank gasped as cold marble scraped his spine.
“Breathe,” the stranger said. “It’s all about knowin’ how to breathe.”
It wasn’t until he said something, that Hank realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out in a low sigh.
He tilted his head back against the stone, looked up at the sky. It was always hard to see the stars in a big city, and tonight he only counted four.
Four cold white stars swirled above him, but two cold, rough hands kept him anchored to the earth.
They raked down his chest, painting his skin with abstract designs. And they were steady, even after the stranger’s voice had grown rough, and his breath turned ragged around the edges.
“Relax,” he said. “Just relax.”
“Yeah, okay…”
Hank closed his eyes, but even then he could see those four pinpoints of pale light. As if they had been burned there. And in the frantic moments that came next, they blossomed into novas of blinding white light.
Galaxies, that expanded to fill his entire field of vision. Warming him from within like a shot of whiskey.
And then spiraling down into darkness.
* * *
“Hank. Hank. Hank. Hank. Hank!”
Each word was punctuated with a kick to the bottom of his boot, sharp and jarring. Hank turned over without opening his eyes, tucking his legs up under his body. He felt a twinge of soreness as he moved, like a pulled muscle in the back of one of his thighs.
“Lemme ‘lone,” he muttered. “Sleeping…”
“Oh, hell no! Hank, you better get your hungover redneck ass up offa the ground before I leave you here. Are you listenin’ to me?”
Hank opened his eyes, and his gaze strayed upward.
Joe Buck’s hands were crooked on his hips, one of his boots resting on the heel in mid-foot tap. He put on such a good show when he was annoyed about something; it always made Hank want to laugh.
He would have laughed now, if his mouth didn’t taste like shoe leather. If his head was throbbing fit to burst.
“Shit, man,” Hank rasped. “What the hell are you…?”
And then, all at once, he remembered, and he sat up so fast that his head swam and blue-gray lights flashed before his eyes.
His coat fell away, pooling in his lap. It had been pulled over him, he realized, like a blanket. His shirt had been folded beneath his head like a pillow, but other than that, all his clothes were in order, not a button out of place. He stretched his arm out, turning it so he could see the outside of the bicep.
A black bird was etched into the skin beneath his shoulder, just the same as it had been the night before.
“The hell, man…?” he breathed
“The hell, is right,” Joe Buck said.
An empty bottle of whiskey lay on its side in the grass. Joe nudged it with his toe. “Shit, maybe next time you oughta stick to bringing flowers.”
He laughed.
“That weren’t my fault.”
“Sure,” Joe said. “I bet it was just one of them damn zombies. Done… popped right out of the ground and stole your Number 7, am I right?”
“Shit, that’s not funny.”
“Nah? Well, neither is runnin’ all over this place trying to find your drunk ass.” He reached down, offering a hand. “So, why don’t you come on, before security gets wind of us?”
“Yeah…” Hank said. He shrugged his shirt on, and reached up to take Joe’s hand. “Yeah, sure.”
Joe leaned back on his heels, pulling him up. “You don’t look so good.”
“I don’t feel so good,” Hank said, reaching down to retrieve his jacket.
He shook the dirt off it.
“Party a little too hard? You stink like whiskey, you know. It’s all over you.”
“Really?” Hank wrapped an arm around his stomach, clutching at his ribs. There was an uneasy fluttering in his stomach. Like the way he remembered stagefright feeling, back when he used to get stagefright.
“Yeah, really. Don’t throw up.”
“I’m not gonna. I just…”
He sighed, looking up. “I had a hell of a dream last night, you know. What was that shit you gave me anyway?”
Joe shrugged. “Aw, I dunno. Something my buddy cooked up. He said it was dipped in embalming fluid, I think. Cool, huh? He said it’d make you fucking demented.”
“You could have warned me, you know.”
“Shit, man, I know you’re indestructible. You’re fuckin’ Iron Man. You tripped pretty hard though, huh? Saw through time and shit?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Joe laughed. “You don’t seem too happy about it. What was your scary bad dream about anyway?”
“It was…”
Hank paused, trailing off. It would have been all right, if not for the lingering soreness in the back of his legs, and the fading bruises around his wrists. If not for the strange ache below his left shoulder, like a fresh tattoo had been carved into the skin there.
Some stories were only good in the telling. Some were only good if you never told a soul.
He knew Joe would understand.
“What are you, my Psychic Friend or something? It was just a stupid dream. I don’t even remember what it was about.”
He pulled on his coat, and buttoned it up against the damp morning chill.
“Man, I’m fucking starving. Let’s get something to eat.”
*****
A/N: Title from the David Allan Coe song, which legitimately scared me the first time I listened to it.
Fandom: Bandslash
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Hank Williams/Hank Williams III
Words: 5400
Originally written: June, 2006
Summary: Hank does something dumb.
The Ride
He would swear to his dying day that it had been a good idea at the time.
After all, it wasn't every day he got down South to see his relations. There was a lot of highway ahead of him, but it wasn't every day the road wound down past willows and rivers, past the Montgomery County line and into the city limits.
The last time he had been here, he'd taken a shotgun to the "Welcome to Montgomery" sign on the outskirts of town. Blown a hole clean through the center of the state seal, just to see if he could get away with it.
He was here again now, and the sign had been replaced.
It didn't surprise him.
You couldn't leave a permanent mark on anything in this world. Nothing but another person.
Hank had never been a philosophical man, but that sounded right to him. It had been years since he had considered himself a religious man, but that sounded like something he could believe.
He may have been an incurable cynic, self-destructive, aimless and lacking in motivation. He may have been a rebel, may have busted a few heads along the line because sometimes heads needed to get broke if anything was going to get done.
He may have been all those things, but he hadn't been raised by fucking wolves.
He knew how to treat family.
After the show, he had taken one of the bottles of whiskey from the bus. They always kept alcohol in stock when they traveled through the Deep South. It was damn near impossible to keep track of which counties were wet and which were drier than the back of his tongue after a two hour set.
He didn't remember if he had told anyone where he was going when he slipped out the back of the club, but it wasn't as though he was ever that hard to find.
It wasn't late yet, but most everything downtown was closed, and the most everyone was off the streets.
The night was chilly, and he sunk his hands into the pockets of his jeans to keep them warm.
Three miles to the cemetery. The gates were closed by now, and the whole place was locked down for the night, but he found a tree growing alongside the fence and used its low branches to boost himself over.
Breaking and entering, he thought.
Not a new sin, but a respectable one. You couldn't go wrong with the classics.
He landed hard on the other side of the fence, falling to his knees on the soft grass. A rock skated along the heel of his hand, drawing blood.
"Motherfucker…"
His voice was little more than a whisper, just a quiet hiss of escaping frustration, but it sounded loud in this place. In the dark and silence of an abandoned cemetery.
He lifted his hand to his mouth, and his tongue flicked out, lapping up the blood.
There were enough chemicals racing through his insides these days that he wouldn't be surprised if one day he started bleeding glowing toxic waste. But right now he tasted only salt and copper on his lips.
The same blood as anyone else.
Hank touched his chest with his fingertips, and felt the bottle of whiskey tucked into the inside pocket of his coat. A full and comforting weight against his heart.
He cut through the gravestones and white crosses that barely reached his knees. He stepped wide to keep from treading on any of the graves.
He didn't know where he was going, not exactly, but he knew he would know the place when he saw it. That monstrous monument, the white slab that jutted up from the ebb between two of the cemetery's rolling hills. Unless the moon came out, he thought, he wouldn't be able to read the name carved into the white marble. But you didn't need words to know that a man of some consideration was buried there.
A man of real importance.
A dull ache had settled into the crook between Hank's shoulder blades. It was a faint pain, but it never quite went away. Old whiplash, that had never quite healed right.
It hardly ever hurt enough to slow him down, but it lingered. Reminding him that he wasn't as young as he used to be.
Older now, after all, then his grandfather had ever been.
Of course, his grandfather couldn't really be blamed. He'd had aches of his own.
Hank reached back, pinching the back of his neck in a strong hand, digging his thumb into the nerve that traced the side of his throat.
But the pain didn't ease.
The thought of dying was pleasant to him only in the most aesthetic of senses. The contemplation of his own death hadn't comforted him in many years.
He had changed a lot. He could see it every time he glanced in the mirror and unfamiliar eyes looked back. He was neither better now than he had been, nor worse.
Only different.
“You going out There?” Joe Buck had asked, earlier that night, as he’d skulked toward the door of the bus, making little or no to-do about it.
But make no mistake; Joe noticed his coming and goings.
It wasn’t natural. Even so, Hank had little enough to say about it. Natural had never meant much to him, anyway. He knew it when he saw it, but it didn’t like his face much. And it rarely showed itself while he was around.
It probably liked Joe Buck’s face even less.
“Baked a cake,” drawled Joe, as if he had answered. “…for your loss.”
“Ain’t no loss,” said Hank, quietly.
He’d never met the man, after all.
“All the same,” said Joe, shrugging, noncommittal to a fine point.
He reached into the inner pocket of his Carhart coat and pulled out a plastic baggie, neatly wrapped and sealed around itself. Among the indistinguished contents, Hank could make out the telltale shape of a fat, white spliff.
“Party favors, for later. Guess you’ll be out. Might as well take ‘em.”
Hank caught the bag like a bad habit, one-handed, all reflex, and wondered where he'd come by skill like that. It was no holdover from playing catch with his Old Man on a sunny green lawn.
“What’re you up to?” asked Hank, after a moment. It was more of a civility than anything else.
“I reckon I’ll replace that string I broke in Macon,” Joe whistled, grinning broadly.
Hank knew he was fooling. If Joe ever did manage to bust a string on that upright of his, he’d probably come away from it short a couple of fingers, or at the very least with a couple of new scars to show for it.
Bass strings almost never needed changing, thick, unapologetic bastards that they were. Hell, flat-wounds like the ones Joe Buck was partial to needed it even rarer than that.
Guitar strings were another matter. Hank broke ‘em regular as clockwork, even the 12s. It was the nature of the beast, but Joe was always crowing about he never needed to change out, and how glad he was for that, because what a hassle it was anyway.
Bass player’s idea of a joke. It weren’t Hank’s, though.
He’d left without much more than a nod, and now he found himself here, in a marble orchard at midnight, with a pocket full of bad candy and a real temptation to devolve.
The moon was starting to rise, bright enough to cut shadows across the dew-damp grass, and the ground beneath the stone crosses and the weird, twisted trees was stained black as coffee or tar heroin.
He found a place beneath one of the marble angels. Her arched and triumphant wings hid him.
It wasn’t that he was afraid of being caught, not here. But sometimes he just liked a good shadow.
Hank slipped a hand into his pocket, pulled out the little plastic bag Joe had given him. That man had always been too good to him. Had always understood too much.
He broke the seal on the bag, dipped his hand in. Delicate tissue paper crumpled beneath his fingers, and he pulled out a long cigarette, wrapped in white and unmarked.
It smelled like pot, green and organic, but there was a faint chemical odor, too. A little something extra laced with the weed, to see him through a long, cold night. He couldn't place the smell right away, but it didn't really matter. He wasn't picky.
He flicked his lighter, and touched the flame to the tip of his cigarette.
A bitter, rancid taste flooded his mouth on the first drag. By the second, his lungs burned from within and the skin around his mouth had begun to sting.
By the third, he was beginning to suspect that it wasn't just an innocent little pinch of angeldust laced into the cigarette.
Blow didn't make his skin crawl like this. It didn't make the backs of his eyes feel dry and prickly.
And he laughed, because the cemetery didn't seem so cold anymore, and that was funny for some reason. The moonbleached grass rippled, and the shadows danced before his eyes. The breeze was loud as a freight train.
There was a sharp pain in his right shoulder, like a bit of hot ash squirming around beneath the skin there. He scratched at it, nails clawing at the slick blue of his overshirt, raising ridges in the cloth.
But the more he scratched, the deeper the ache ran, diving into him like a needle lancing the skin.
"Fucker…" Hank muttered. "Get on outta there."
He tore off his jacket. Clawed at the front of his shirt, and the buttons gave easily, popping loose to become lost in the grass. Laughing, he shrugged the shirt off and tossed it aside. The white wifebeater he had on underneath didn't offer much protection against the cold, so he sucked hard on the cigarette clamped between his lips.
His head swam, and the chill in the air retreated.
That spot on his right shoulder was still bothering him, and he reached to scratch at it absently, digging his nails into the inked patch just under the spot where shoulder and bicep joined.
There was a tattoo of a raven there, angular and stylized. And beneath the bird, a name. Almost exactly the same as his, but with a whole fucking universe of different connotations.
But the nagging ache didn't ease, and red welts began to cut across his skin.
When he drew his hand back, there were flecks of fresh blood under his nails.
And, like a pan of water reaching boiling, the pain in his shoulder reached a point where the surface couldn't hold.
Something gave way. He felt the skin on his arm burst wide, felt a rush of wind against his face. A hail of black feathers drifted down to rest in his lap.
Hank whistled softly, impressed. In the flesh, the raven was the biggest damn thing he'd ever seen. Ugly and mangy, with strangely angular wings.
It looked up at him accusatively, and spread its massive wings. Beat them once, lazily and circled up to rest on the outstretched arm of the marble angel.
"Ain't that something…" he murmured. He sucked in a deep breath. Blue smoke filled his mouth, but he hardly noticed. The rest of the cigarette slipped, forgotten, from the corner of his lips.
He touched his right shoulder. The pain was gone, and where he had expected to feel blood, there was none.
The raven's beak was as long as Hank's index finger, and crooked like a broken bone. Its voice was like the sound of a diesel engine filtered through the walls of a cheap motel.
It made Hank's head feel light to hear it, and above him the stars blurred and spun.
"Shit…" Hank reached back, bracing his hands against the base of the statue. The stone felt cold and clammy, like feverish skin.
"Don't do that," he gasped. "You want me to yak up the last three meals I ate?"
The raven clicked its beak. Blue-black eyes glittered coldly in the moonlight.
Hank sighed. He let his head fall back, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, he thought, that bird would be gone. Back on his arm where it belonged.
But in the darkness behind his eyes, he could still see the ragged shape of the raven's wings, the definition of each tar colored feather.
Hank had had his share of hallucinations, but this looked real. This looked like flesh and blood and a whole hell of malicious intent.
He kept his eyes closed, and counted to ten, but he could still feel the raven's cold gaze on him.
So he counted to twenty. To fifty. And he was inching toward one hundred when the soft click of glass against stone made him jump.
"You sure do know how to scare a fella."
The stranger's voice was soft, dry as ashes. But it carried. It charged the air with electricity, like the faint tension after lightning strikes.
"You look just like a ghost."
Hank's lips parted slightly. His gaze strayed first to the stranger's face, hidden behind the shadow of a white cowboy hat. Then to his hand, wrapped around the neck of a whiskey bottle. He turned his wrist, tapped the bottle against the statue. It rang, like a chime.
"Hope you didn't bring this for a special occasion or nothin'."
He tipped the bottle in the direction of Hank's discarded coat. "I helped myself."
"That's for my granddaddy, you cocksucker. You better leave it be."
His tongue felt thick in his mouth. His voice slurred and rolled. Hank wasn't sure the stranger would be able to understand him at all. If he was even speaking anymore, or just imagining he was.
"For your granddaddy, huh?"
The stranger's accent was thick, one of the most liquid drawls Hank had ever heard. Dark and velvety.
"Well, I'm sure your granddaddy won't mind. It probably breaks his poor old heart to see good whiskey go undrunk."
He lifted his free hand, crooking his arm, perpendicular to his chest. The raven choked out a broken note, and beat its wings, gliding down to land on the stranger's wrist.
"I didn't know you brought company along," he said.
"Oh, shit." Hank's head fell back, cracking against the stone. "Can you see that thing?"
"'course I can see it. I ain't blind, boy."
"But that's mine. It came out of me."
"Well, I don't know nothin' about that." He lifted the bird up, and it hopped obediently onto his shoulder. "You don't look so good, boy. Why don't you have a drink? If that doesn't ease the pain away, only death ever will."
"Death ain't that good."
Clawing at the statue for support, Hank turned himself over onto his knees. He reached up, snatching the whiskey bottle away with a trembling hand.
He twisted the cap off with his teeth and spit it aside. Tipped the bottle, so his mouth was flooded with sweet liquid fire. He had to work his throat hard to choke it all down; the muscles along the sides of his neck twitched with the effort.
“Ain’t that a trick?” the stranger said. When he took back the bottle, it was four inches down. “Where’d you learn to drink like that?”
“It’s something I’ve been working on,” Hank said wryly.
“That so?” Even when the stranger leaned closer, Hank couldn’t make out his face. Only the vaguest hint of the slant of his nose, the sharp angle of his cheekbones.
But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew this man. That his name was familiar, and it would come to him, if he could only quiet the buzzing in his head long enough…
“Just who are you anyway?” Hank said. “Who the hell wanders around the cemetery after hours like this? You aren’t some kind of corpsefucker, are you? Cuz that ain’t right, man-"
“What’s your name?”
“My name?”
Hank scowled.
“It’s… Hank. You can call me Hank.”
“That what your friends call you?”
He shook his head. “No, it ain’t. But you aren’t my friend, are you?”
The stranger smiled faintly. “I guess not. But, you know, kid… there’s a problem. I know your name’s not Hank.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because, there’s a huge tombstone over yonder, and Hank’s the name written on that there grave. And I know for a fact that there can’t be two Hanks. Place just ain't big enough for that. So unless you’ve been dead fifty aught years now, then you ain’t Hank, now are you?”
“Shit, man. You’re hurtin’ my head. Don’t you have nothin’ better to do than bother me?”
“You don’t like good conversation with your whiskey?”
He passed the bottle back. Hank snatched it out of his hand and took another long draught.
“Hard to carry on a good conversation with half your teeth kicked out of your fuckin’ head, Mister. I’m just sayin’.”
A screeching birdcall split the silence, and the raven, which had been silent until now, so still that Hank had almost forgotten it was anything more than another shadow cast by the willow trees, spread its wings. It pistoned them once, took flight, and it was gone.
“Fuck,” Hank said. “That tattoo cost me a fortune…”
“It’s not like you ain’t got more,” the stranger said, tipping the bottle down, motioning vaguely to Hank’s forearms, where flame tattoos crept from wrist to elbow.
“It’s not the same,” Hank muttered.
“Well, I don’t know about that…” He leaned down, brushing his fingers along the underside of Hank’s wrist.
“Cut it out.”
Hank pulled his hand away. His skin itched, a low unpleasant buzz beneath the skin. He cupped his hand over the opposite wrist, rubbing at it absently.
The stranger gave a soft whistle. “Well, I must say, I ain’t never seen nothing like that.”
“Then you ain’t lookin’ hard enough.”
“I’m looking. I can’t look away.”
"Huh?" Hank's eyes strayed down, to where his hands lay limp across his thighs. His vision was still swimming a little, and the tattoos on his wrists seemed to ripple. To stutter, almost like real flames.
And as he watched, the lines flickered once, like an image on an old film reel, and when they returned, the first tongues of real fire appeared.
"Shit…" Hank muttered. The flames started near his wrist: a peak of orange fire, no bigger than the spark from a Bic lighter.
It spread upward, spiraling around his arm and up towards his elbow.
"Shit! Shit!"
He swatted at his arm with the opposite hand, but by now both wrists were engulfed. He could smell burning hair and charring meat.
"Fuck! I'm on fuckin' fire!"
Hank dug his heels into the dirt, trying to push himself to his feet. But the grass was slippery, and his boots went out from under him before he made it far.
Before he could try again, the weight of another body settled over him, pushing him down.
Hands closed around his wrists, cutting through the fire that swarmed around him.
He could feel that, Hank realized. The fingers curled against his skin. He could feel them, but he couldn't feel any pain.
"What the hell…?"
The stranger's grip was surprisingly strong. Hank didn't need to try to pull away to know that he wouldn't be able to. He was gentle, though. Tomorrow, there wouldn't be any bruises where his hands had been.
He lifted Hank's hands between them, so he could watch the flames, or perhaps so they both could.
"It just ain't your night, is it, boy?"
Even with the stranger's face only a few inches from his, even with the dancing flames throwing new patterns of light over him, Hank still couldn't make out his features. He was beginning to suspect that maybe he didn't want to. Maybe it would be better if he never found out what secrets were hidden beneath the brim of that immaculate, unstained white Stetson hat.
"Who…?" Hank murmured.
"Shh."
He pushed Hank's hands back until they touched the base of the marble statue. The flames glowed brighter for a moment, turned white hot beneath the stranger's touch.
"You ask too many questions," the stranger said. "Do you really need to know everything? Can't you let some things just happen because they can? Lots of things in this world, boy, don't have no satisfactory explanation."
Hank's lips parted, but before he could speak, the stranger leaned in - slowly, but without hesitation - and covered Hank's mouth with his own.
The kiss dragged on, long and lazy like an afternoon out on the front porch.
Hank whimpered quietly, low in his throat. He tried to pull away, but his body was reluctant to cooperate. It seemed content enough to stay, soaking up the affection.
The flames around his arms began to move again. Snaking from his fingertips, over the marble pedestal. They climbed the statue like ivy, draped over the stone angel like gun belts on a Mexican revolutionary.
Hank tried to pull away, but his arms were pinned. The flames held him fast, as if he had been bound in place with rope.
"Wouldn't want you to go runnin' off," the stranger said with a grin. "You look like the type who can't finish what he starts."
"I didn't start this."
"No? Well… maybe I just wanna thank you for the whiskey. Ain't easy to come by out here, you know."
He slid his hands under Hank's shirt, pressing them flat against his stomach. Sliding upward, and taking the shirt with them.
"Hey!" Hank said, squirming. "Don't be touchin' me there. Your hands are colder then a preacher's wife's cunt."
"I know," the stranger said quietly. "Ain't it a bitch?"
"I don't…" Hank said, but he didn't get to finish. His shirt was raked over his head, up to his elbows.
"You're skinny, boy. Ain't you been eatin' right?"
His breath was coming hard and fast now. Dry little gasps, torn from his lungs. "I… I dunno."
"You need to find a good woman to keep house for you. Put everything in order. That's what a good woman's for."
Hank laughed, thin and high. Edged with hysteria. "I don't know any of them."
The stranger's lips curled into a smile as he reached for Hank's belt, popping open the buckle and threading it out of the loops of his jeans. "You really need to calm down, boy."
He folded the belt over in his hand, slapped it across his palm with a crack. "What do you think I'm gonna do?"
"I'm sure you got a few things in mind," Hank said. "And I can tell you right now that I don't like where this is goin'…"
The stranger shook his head. "You kids these days, you're never satisfied." He tossed Hank's belt over his shoulder, and reached for the front of his jeans.
"Relax. Just relax."
"You're fucking crazy." Hank tensed, tugging at his trapped wrists. But the bonds were unyielding. Blunt, rather than cutting; more like chains than ropes.
"Hush, now."
Steady fingers unbuttoned his jeans, drawing the zipper down. Hands closed around his hips. The stranger's palms were rough, the kind of all-over roughness that comes from a lifetime of hard work. So hard that they had almost become soft again.
Hank swallowed. He really shouldn't have noticed the state of the stranger's hands, but it was stuck in his mind like a bone lodged in his throat.
Even after the touch was withdrawn, his skin stayed heated by it. Charged and tingling in anticipation.
"You know," the stranger said casually. "You seem real familiar somehow. Ain't that somethin'? I didn't think I had no friends left round these parts."
He eased Hank's jeans down over his hips. His head was lowered, intent on his work, and Hank could make out nothing of his expression.
"Yeah? I wonder why that might be. I mean, if you treat everybody this nice and all."
He gasped, as his jeans slid down his thighs.
"Oh, shit, that grass is freezin'!"
He squirmed, lifted himself on the heels of his worn boots. Until the stranger's hands came down on his thighs, pushing him back with that same surprising strength he had exhibited earlier.
"It's wet," Hank muttered. "You want me to catch my death?"
The stranger shook his head. "What do you think the whiskey was for?"
"Whiskey ain't never made nobody well again."
"Now that just plain ain't true."
The stranger slid his jeans the rest of the way off, tossed them aside to join his belt. Wherever that had landed.
"Hey!" Hank snapped. And then there were hands hooked beneath his knees, forcing his legs up and apart. He slid down so his weight rested on the small of his back, and the bonds around his wrists cut in hard enough to bruise.
"Hey! I said, cut that out!"
The stranger ignored him, ducking so he could rest Hank's legs on his shoulders. "You just ain't got no faith in medicine, boy. My momma used to say that a tablespoon of whiskey could cure most anything…"
He paused long enough to spit into his palm. His hand disappeared down between their bodies, and for a moment Hank lost track of it. Until he felt a rough, callused finger press against him, and then in.
"And if it was good enough for my momma, then it's good enough for you."
Hank gasped, tensing for a moment before he remembered that was the worst thing he could do. "Holy shit, man. Maybe it's real important to you that we do this for some reason. But could you at least do it without talking about your momma?"
"Sorry," the stranger said. "There ain't much else I remember these days. Well… 'sides the obvious, that is."
And he slid a second finger in to join the first.
"Ow," Hank muttered.
“Ain’t you done complaining yet?” the stranger said. He shifted his weight, forcing Hank’s legs back. His thighs twitched with the effort, and he felt the strain all the way to the small of his back.
He winced. “Hey, go easy. This ain’t no peeler bar; I can’t bend like that.”
“I guess not.” The stranger drew his fingers back, sharp enough to make Hank gasp. “It don’t really matter none, though.”
He shifted forward on his knees, and even though his pulse was throbbing like a kickdrum in his ears, Hank could hear the unmistakable sound of a zipper sliding down.
“You keep talkin’,” the stranger said. “I’m sure I’ll find some way to keep myself entertained.”
The first thrust was hard enough to drive him back against the base of the statue. Hank gasped as cold marble scraped his spine.
“Breathe,” the stranger said. “It’s all about knowin’ how to breathe.”
It wasn’t until he said something, that Hank realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out in a low sigh.
He tilted his head back against the stone, looked up at the sky. It was always hard to see the stars in a big city, and tonight he only counted four.
Four cold white stars swirled above him, but two cold, rough hands kept him anchored to the earth.
They raked down his chest, painting his skin with abstract designs. And they were steady, even after the stranger’s voice had grown rough, and his breath turned ragged around the edges.
“Relax,” he said. “Just relax.”
“Yeah, okay…”
Hank closed his eyes, but even then he could see those four pinpoints of pale light. As if they had been burned there. And in the frantic moments that came next, they blossomed into novas of blinding white light.
Galaxies, that expanded to fill his entire field of vision. Warming him from within like a shot of whiskey.
And then spiraling down into darkness.
* * *
“Hank. Hank. Hank. Hank. Hank!”
Each word was punctuated with a kick to the bottom of his boot, sharp and jarring. Hank turned over without opening his eyes, tucking his legs up under his body. He felt a twinge of soreness as he moved, like a pulled muscle in the back of one of his thighs.
“Lemme ‘lone,” he muttered. “Sleeping…”
“Oh, hell no! Hank, you better get your hungover redneck ass up offa the ground before I leave you here. Are you listenin’ to me?”
Hank opened his eyes, and his gaze strayed upward.
Joe Buck’s hands were crooked on his hips, one of his boots resting on the heel in mid-foot tap. He put on such a good show when he was annoyed about something; it always made Hank want to laugh.
He would have laughed now, if his mouth didn’t taste like shoe leather. If his head was throbbing fit to burst.
“Shit, man,” Hank rasped. “What the hell are you…?”
And then, all at once, he remembered, and he sat up so fast that his head swam and blue-gray lights flashed before his eyes.
His coat fell away, pooling in his lap. It had been pulled over him, he realized, like a blanket. His shirt had been folded beneath his head like a pillow, but other than that, all his clothes were in order, not a button out of place. He stretched his arm out, turning it so he could see the outside of the bicep.
A black bird was etched into the skin beneath his shoulder, just the same as it had been the night before.
“The hell, man…?” he breathed
“The hell, is right,” Joe Buck said.
An empty bottle of whiskey lay on its side in the grass. Joe nudged it with his toe. “Shit, maybe next time you oughta stick to bringing flowers.”
He laughed.
“That weren’t my fault.”
“Sure,” Joe said. “I bet it was just one of them damn zombies. Done… popped right out of the ground and stole your Number 7, am I right?”
“Shit, that’s not funny.”
“Nah? Well, neither is runnin’ all over this place trying to find your drunk ass.” He reached down, offering a hand. “So, why don’t you come on, before security gets wind of us?”
“Yeah…” Hank said. He shrugged his shirt on, and reached up to take Joe’s hand. “Yeah, sure.”
Joe leaned back on his heels, pulling him up. “You don’t look so good.”
“I don’t feel so good,” Hank said, reaching down to retrieve his jacket.
He shook the dirt off it.
“Party a little too hard? You stink like whiskey, you know. It’s all over you.”
“Really?” Hank wrapped an arm around his stomach, clutching at his ribs. There was an uneasy fluttering in his stomach. Like the way he remembered stagefright feeling, back when he used to get stagefright.
“Yeah, really. Don’t throw up.”
“I’m not gonna. I just…”
He sighed, looking up. “I had a hell of a dream last night, you know. What was that shit you gave me anyway?”
Joe shrugged. “Aw, I dunno. Something my buddy cooked up. He said it was dipped in embalming fluid, I think. Cool, huh? He said it’d make you fucking demented.”
“You could have warned me, you know.”
“Shit, man, I know you’re indestructible. You’re fuckin’ Iron Man. You tripped pretty hard though, huh? Saw through time and shit?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Joe laughed. “You don’t seem too happy about it. What was your scary bad dream about anyway?”
“It was…”
Hank paused, trailing off. It would have been all right, if not for the lingering soreness in the back of his legs, and the fading bruises around his wrists. If not for the strange ache below his left shoulder, like a fresh tattoo had been carved into the skin there.
Some stories were only good in the telling. Some were only good if you never told a soul.
He knew Joe would understand.
“What are you, my Psychic Friend or something? It was just a stupid dream. I don’t even remember what it was about.”
He pulled on his coat, and buttoned it up against the damp morning chill.
“Man, I’m fucking starving. Let’s get something to eat.”
*****
A/N: Title from the David Allan Coe song, which legitimately scared me the first time I listened to it.