fic: there's a devil waiting outside your door (raylan/boyd, rated MA)
title: there’s a devil waiting outside your door
author: someotherstorm
fandom: justified (set in season 3, late-ish, after the events of 3X04, “The Devil You Know” )
pairing: raylan/boyd
rating: MA
content advisory: gunplay (with a loaded gun), whipping
word count: ~7000
summary: Boyd shows up at Raylan's apartment, seeking absolution in Raylan's anger.
AN: thanks so much to norgbelulah for reading this over for me, and for the cheerleading and the help when i stumbled into a canon error and had to do a bit of re-working! any errors are most certainly my own <3 song title from loverman by Nick Cave.
there’s a devil waiting outside your door
There's a devil lying by your side
You might think he's asleep
but look at his eyes
Boyd Crowder shows up at his door at three-thirty in the morning, eyes bright and empty, hands raised in supplication. “I am unarmed, Raylan Givens,” he says, before Raylan can do the sensible thing and knock him one across the jaw. “And I am here to seek my penance.”
Letting Boyd speak is always mistake number one. If Raylan hadn’t been so recently asleep, he would have known to hit first and interrogate-in-a-prison-cell later.
“Huh?” Raylan responds like this is the first time he’s ever heard the English language. “What the hell are you doing here?” When in doubt, curse angrily and glare. Standard Raylan Givens operating procedure.
“Now, Raylan, I understand you might be vexed at me, showin’ up all unexpected-like, but if you want to look appropriately disapproving you are going to have to do something about your hair.”
“Why? Does it look as dumb as yours?” Raylan’s responses are gradually improving from half-wit moron to third-grader -- at least it’s a start. He rakes a hand through his hair, scowls when he realizes he’s inadvertently done what Boyd told him to, and slams a hand on the door jam.
Instead of making him feel better, it just hurts. “All right, don’t tell me why you’re here. Nice seeing you, Boyd.” Raylan goes to close the door. He’s starting to wake up a little more, and Boyd is fairly predictable.
“I told you, Raylan, I’m here to confess.”
Unfortunately, so is Raylan. That gets him to pause with the door halfway shut, hating himself even as he asks. “To what, exactly?”
Boyd steeples his fingers together and rests them against his chin. Raylan wonders if he practices these things, these offhand little gestures that are supposed to give the added touch of genuineness. “Now I am surely no expert, but I do believe it is customary to confess sins, Raylan.”
Boyd’s always had an odd habit of saying his name like that, repeatedly, like it means something else. Raylan narrows his eyes in warning. Boyd smiles beatifically in return.
Raylan tells himself it’s his duty to the law to see what Boyd Crowder may confess, but he’s not entirely sure that’s the obligation that has him stepping aside and letting Boyd into his apartment.
“This better be good,” Raylan says crankily, closing the door. “As in, I can put your ass in jail forever good, Boyd.”
Boyd is standing in the middle of the apartment, where the light from the bar sign falls around him like some kind of broken, demented halo. “It is an appropriate confession for the hour we find ourselves in, I promise.”
“That’d be, what?” Raylan checks the watch he’s not wearing. “Too-goddamn-early-o’clock?”
“The witching hour,” Boyd corrects.
“Thought that was midnight.” Raylan has half a mind to tell Boyd to forget it, to force him out -- there’s tension sparking in his veins, no one has ever riled him up so easy.
“Three-thirty. They say it’s the devil’s way of mocking the holy trinity.” Boyd holds his arms at his sides, palms turned out like a supplicant. “And here I am.”
“Here you are,” Raylan agrees, rolling his eyes. “But you’re more like a pest, so don’t flatter yourself into thinking you’re some kind of demon. Though I reckon you’re gonna tell me the devil sent you?”
Boyd starts laughing. It’s a strange sound, disjointed and fractured. “Maybe he did. I’ve been suffering these past few weeks from terrible dreams, Raylan. Maybe they were whispered in the dark and sent to find me.”
“You came here because you’re having bad dreams?” Raylan stares at him incredulously. “Then how about you go get yourself a nice glass of warm milk and read yourself a storybook, because I got my own nightmares, Boyd, and I sure as hell don’t need yours.”
Raylan turns away, intending the presentation of his back to be a firm indication their late-night chat is at an end -- but Boyd stops him, his voice hollow, flat, devoid of its usual lyrical cadence.
“In your nightmares, Raylan -- am I on my back, staring up at you through Harlan dirt and making noise like a wounded buck, asking you to make the pain stop?”
Raylan turns and crosses the room without answering. Boyd’s eyes are empty. Raylan knows that look all too well. “Who’d you bury?”
“I told him to close his eyes,” Boyd says, quiet. He doesn’t offer anything else, but it’s enough.
When it’s not personal, it doesn’t matter if they’re looking at you when the light dies. Raylan starts walking him backwards, until the back of Boyd’s legs have hit the edge of his bed.
In Raylan’s dreams, Boyd is lying dead on Ava’s floor with a bullet lodged in his heart -- but he’s always nineteen and covered in coal dust. The only way Raylan gets back to sleep after he wakes up is by remembering that it isn’t real.
He wonders what he’d do if it was. How he’d close his eyes and give in to the dark.
“Take off my belt,” Raylan says, and then kisses him.
* * *
Boyd is lying on Raylan’s bed, shirtless, wearing his jeans and boots. There’s mud ground into the soles, and it makes Raylan think about upturned, shallow-grave dirt. Raylan is beginning to wonder if there’s any other kind of soil in Harlan -- even the things that do manage to grow seem to lead right back to the grave. Even the mines are just another kind of tomb.
It’s pretty bad when even the fucking earth itself is out to get you.
Raylan moves to stand at the foot of the bed, thumb absently rubbing at the leather. His eyes trace the line of his spine, the tension in Boyd’s muscles. “You know, Boyd, you don’t have to personally see to it that nobody gets out of Harlan alive.” He smiles humorlessly. “It’s just a song.”
“Songs are just a way to make the truth sound pretty,” Boyd says, looking over his shoulder at him. “And I don’t imagine I ever will get out of Harlan alive.”
“Well I could send you to jail. Then you’d be out. And alive.” Raylan lifts the belt. “Put your head down. Hitting your face is already way too tempting.”
“I’ve been to war, and I’ve been to jail, and somehow I always end up right back where I started.” His words are muffled by the blanket, hastily thrown over rumpled sheets. Raylan intends to make him bleed, and he doesn’t want to get blood on the sheets.
Blood and dirt. That’s all there is in Harlan. “Not if you died there. In jail.”
“My, you are certainly a pleasure to visit this evening, Raylan.”
Raylan chases the smile out of his voice as best he can. “I didn’t exactly invite you.”
Boyd stretches, almost like a cat, arching slightly on the bed. It’s more restless than seductive, but it gets Raylan’s blood going all the same. “You burn with how much you want to hurt me. It’s not a hard beacon to follow in the dark, when your soul is sorrowful.”
Raylan closes his eyes. In his mind, he remembers being given the belt, how the fear and pain tasted, how it felt to try not to cry. After a while, he went right to anger without stopping by tears first, until the day he yanked the belt out of Arlo’s hand and turned on him.
You think you’re man enough to break me with that, son?
Gonna find out.
He didn’t, because his mother begged him to put the belt down. It was the same thing she always pleaded with Arlo about, when it was Raylan. And because he loved his mama, Raylan threw the belt on the floor and stormed out of the house, the sound of his father’s laughter chasing after him like a bullet seeking its target.
Knew you couldn’t do it.
That was the last time Raylan’s father raised a belt to him. Not that it mattered, he just found other ways to hurt Raylan, to strip away skin without leaving a mark. Raylan remembers going to bed that night, wishing in the dark secret places where he dreamed things he shouldn’t that his mother hadn’t come home that day.
He opens his eyes and looks down at Boyd on his bed, remembers the two of them being nineteen and drunk in the back of his truck -- his hands moving with rough urgency down the same skin he’s about to strike with his belt and his daddy’s rage. There’s a hunger there he’s never sated and it’s never gone away, just slumbered quietly until something stirred it back to life.
That something makes an impatient noise, jarring Raylan out of his thoughts. “You sure are taking your sweet time, Raylan,” Boyd says. “I appreciate a keen sense of dread as much as the next penitent, but it’s beginning to seem like you might not be up for delivering me from evil in a timely manner.”
Raylan makes a noise halfway between a growl and a sigh, a hint of a laugh at the edges. Boyd has always been good at that, taking Raylan out of dark places and into ones that might not be sunny, but are at the very least dimly-lit. “I’m so sorry my methods ain’t makin’ you feel better,” he snaps, and hits at Boyd with the leather belt, almost as a test.
Except he’s holding it by the buckle, and swinging it makes him feel like Indiana Jones. Or like he’s ten years old and pretending to be Indiana Jones -- probably without the half-dressed man on his bed with a swastika tattoo, who Raylan is pretty sure he’s going to fuck after he whips him.
Indiana Jones fought the Nazis all the time, didn’t he? Maybe he fucked them off camera.
Raylan bites his lip to quiet the hysterical half-shout of laughter. “Boyd --”
He’s going to tell him to forget it, that he can’t do this, but the words fade into nothing the second he meets Boyd’s eyes. Boyd looks like Raylan remembers feeling all those years ago -- hungry, wanting, aching for things he didn’t know how to find. His eyes aren’t empty anymore, they’re almost pleading. “Raylan.”
“I don’t understand you,” Raylan says, the belt in one hand, his other tugging at his hair in quiet frustration. An old habit, one his superiors kept saying made him look unprofessional and easily rattled. One he solved fairly easily by wearing a hat.
The moment stretches between them, honest and raw. Raylan is waiting for Boyd to say something about beacons or demons or whatever the hell, one of those things drawn from his seemingly inexhaustible wellspring of hillbilly philosophy, but he doesn’t.
“Double the belt, it’ll work better,” is all he says, and looks away.
Raylan doubles the belt. He doesn’t let himself think about his father. He doesn’t think about anything at all as he raises the leather and brings it down hard on Boyd’s back. The sound of the belt striking skin is like touching a match to lit gasoline -- no matter how brief a touch, the whole thing still goes up in flames.
* * *
Raylan’s arm hurts, and his breathing is ragged and fucked up, there’s sweat dripping in his eyes but none of that matters -- all he’s concerned about is the way Boyd’s skin turns white and then red from the impact of the belt as he brings it down. Harder, and harder, and the hungry thing inside of him feels like it’s taking over, eating him alive.
He’s not being careful, if there even is such a thing; his blows are erratic, ill-timed, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. A few times the leather curls up over Boyd’s shoulder, licking at the edges of his tattoo. Raylan likes how that looks so much, he hits it a few more times on purpose. Like he can change it into some other shape, simply by the force of his disapproval.
As if that’s ever worked. Raylan isn’t thinking about how it felt, years ago, to wear Arlo’s disapproval mapped in bloody welts on his back. He’s not thinking of the hate that ran in his veins alongside his father’s blood, corrosive and eating away whatever affection might have been left.
Stupid you can’t do anything right what’s wrong with you why aren’t you strong why are you weak why are you my son why didn’t I have another one why aren’t you enough why why why
At some point he thinks about that night he took Arlo’s belt away. That was the first time he’d ever noticed the specks of blood that had seeped into the leather over the years. In the fire of his youthful fury, Raylan had been convinced that if he could do it to Arlo just once, all that blood would somehow disappear.
Each loud thwack of leather on Boyd’s skin makes him realize just how wrong he was about that. Once wouldn’t have sated the hunger. It would have just made it worse. He’s already thinking to himself how much is a human life worth, how many lashes, and hoping it’s more than he’s already delivered. He doesn’t want to stop.
Boyd’s body jerks and he’s grabbing tight at the edge of the mattress but he’s not telling him to quit.And that’s what makes Raylan stop, finally -- not because Boyd’s making too much noise, but because he isn’t making any.
Raylan stares at Boyd, at the faint smear of blood on his back and the hard, tight knots of his muscles. He used to do that, too -- fight the noises and the pain, refusing to give Arlo any satisfaction by trying to move away or begging him to stop. And now he realizes that never mattered -- all Arlo cared about was how good it felt to hurt someone. Scream or be silent, it’s all the same to the person holding the belt.
Like father, like son, eh? Arlo’s voice is a cracked-bell echo, filling his head along with the sound of leather-on-skin. Raylan wonders who his father saw beneath the belt, whose tyranny he was remembering while his son bled.
Somewhere, slumbering beneath the heart of a woman who once had his, there is a child with Raylan’s blood -- and his father’s blood, and Harlan blood -- coursing through its tiny veins. Raylan’s arm is in caught in mid-rise when he thinks this, about the things choked by Harlan soil that are never allowed to breathe.
Hate is a bitter, acrid taste in his mouth. “I can’t do this.” Raylan walks over to the bed, drops the belt. “I won’t.”
Boyd is breathing too fast and he’s hurt -- Raylan can tell that, even as caught up as he is in his own angst. Boyd makes a noise that sounds like he’s choking, and that gets momentary alarm out of him until he realizes Boyd’s trying to laugh.
More of the past starts to recede like clouds after a storm, clearing Raylan’s head. “Are you -- what’s so funny?” His voice sounds as raw as the skin of Boyd’s ravaged back. “You’re fucking kidding me, you are crazy, there ain’t no other explanation for you.”
“I thought you’d -- like it,” Boyd grits out, turning his head -- his eyes are so bright they’re almost inhuman, like he really is some demon sent to torment him. With the sweat and blood and lust swirling thick like smoke, it doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. Maybe that’s Boyd’s fault -- nothing ever seems crazy when it’s his idea.
Boyd’s still grabbing at the mattress, clinging like a sinner to the salvation he thinks he’s here to find. Raylan grabs one of his hands and presses it against the front of his jeans, sucking in an involuntary breath at the touch and providing clear evidence that yes, he did like it.
“Then why, Raylan, you contrary bastard -- why are you stopping?” Boyd does something with his hand that may not be intentional but it probably is, and it makes Raylan hiss and snap his hips forward, wanting more.
“Because,” Raylan bites out, staring hard at Boyd’s hell-lit eyes, willing him to understand.
“Oh. You think you’re like your daddy, ‘cause you liked that.” Boyd has always been good at understanding things that have to do with Arlo that Raylan doesn’t want to talk about. In fact, this entire thing is reminding Raylan uncomfortably of all the things Boyd was good at, before his roots were set too deep in Harlan. He wonders who Boyd might have been, if he’d gotten the fuck out when Raylan told him he should.
Probably the same. Look at me, I’m whipping a man until he bleeds and getting off on it. Maybe the goddamn song’s right, after all. We’ll never get out of Harlan alive, even if we leave and never go back. Some part of him would rest eternal beneath that headstone with his name on it, even if his body never touched the dirt.
It’s a depressing thought. But Boyd rubs his hand over the bulge in Raylan’s jeans one more time, pleasure chasing hot on the heels of adrenaline, and Raylan’s good and distracted from his moodiness. He notices how Boyd’s pushing his hips down against the mattress, that his restless motions aren’t entirely driven by pain.
Raylan scowls. He’s uncomfortable with how much he liked doing that, but for some reason he’s annoyed Boyd feels the same. “This is supposed to be punishment. Penance, remember? I think you read the wrong goddamn book in prison.” He grabs Boyd’s hair and pulls his head back, slaps him lightly on the side of the face. That feels good, so Raylan does it again.
And again. They both moan, the third time.
“I am sure I will suffer undue torment in my soul for liking how your hands feel on me in anger,” Boyd offers. He’s trying to get Raylan’s pants open.
Raylan rolls his eyes and pushes Boyd over so he’s lying on his back and then climbs on top of him without hesitation, despite knowing how bad that has to hurt. “If you end up having nightmares about it, don’t come back.”
Because you’ll just give in if he does. Raylan ignores his inner voice, which sounds uncannily like Tim Gutterson. He grins down at Boyd, narrow-eyed and sly, and feels much more like himself. “So...vengeful, angry god, right?”
Boyd snorts a laugh. “Oh, a god now, are we? Raylan, you’re awfully impressed with yourself for a man who couldn’t finish what he started with that belt.”
Raylan smacks him on the side of the head. “I started it, didn’t I? So when I stopped, it was finished. Jesus Christ, why are you like this?”
“I’m just saying that if it were left up to you, all those poor bastards in Sodom and Gomorrha would’ve ended up with is a little sunburn.”
“Don’t you think that particular story is a mite inappropriate, Boyd, considering...?” Raylan grinds down against him to make a point. Just to make a point. That’s all.
Boyd grins at him and pushes his hips up, grinds back. “And what story would you consider appropriate? Eve and the serpent?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m fresh out of apples.” Raylan leans down and kisses him like he did when he was nineteen, when it used to feel like he was drowning. There’s enough of whatever used to be between them that it still feels that way, a little.
“Am I forgiven, Deputy Marshal Givens?”
Raylan sits up slowly and shakes his head, reaching towards his bedside table. “No,” he says, straightening, a weight more familiar than a belt in his hand. “Not yet.”
Boyd sees what he’s holding and goes completely still beneath him, wary and no longer grinning. “Raylan --”
He presses the barrel of his service weapon against Boyd’s mouth, insistent. “Open your mouth.” Raylan strokes the tip of the barrel across Boyd’s jaw, up towards his temple and back down. “Come on, now, Boyd -- I know that ain’t a hard instruction for you to follow, given how many times I’ve tried to get you to do the opposite.”
“Is that loaded?”
Raylan’s heart pounds faster with every breath -- he likes this too much, but it’s not making him feel nearly as guilty as the belt. Good to know his preferences for breaking every single rule of firearm safety is an across-the-board type thing.
Raylan caresses the side of his cheek with the gun. “Lawman school taught me to always keep my weapon loaded. And Harlan....” He draws the tip of the barrel lower, over the scar his bullet left in Boyd’s chest. “Taught me to always shoot to kill. Now open your mouth, Boyd.” Raylan cocks the hammer, the barrel pressed against the scar. “Don’t make me ask you again.”
Boyd opens his mouth, and Raylan traces the tip of the gun around it. “Close your eyes, son.” He says it like he imagines Boyd might have; soft, almost soothing. Like bringing death was some kind of gift.
Boyd jerks beneath him, eyes widening with a flash of sudden fear. It hits Raylan like an electric shock, makes him grind down harder and trap a moan behind his teeth, he wants this so badly he can taste it. Boyd closes his eyes, and Raylan can’t stop the noise he makes as he presses the gun inside his mouth.
Holy fuck, that’s hot.
He wants to say something, encouraging or threatening or both, but he can’t untangle his breath enough to form words so he doesn’t. He slides the gun in, out, watching the metal turn slick and wet, sees the smear of blood from where Boyd must have bitten his own lip while Raylan hit him.
Boyd is still as death as Raylan starts moving on top of him, the hard thrust of his hips timed with the slide of the gun into his mouth. Raylan can hear himself breathing, ragged and desperate, as if he were fucking Boyd’s mouth with something other than a gun.
“Suck on it.” Raylan barely recognizes his own voice, and his hand is shaking hard enough to make this even more dangerous and stupid than it already is but he doesn’t stop, he can’t.
Boyd’s eyes are moving beneath his closed lids, like he’s dreaming.
Raylan pushes the gun down too far, hears metal hit against teeth and Boyd starts to choke. His finger brushes against the trigger. “Was he scared? Is that why you told him to close his eyes, you don’t like seeing men die afraid? If I told you to open your eyes right now, is that how you’d look at me?”
Boyd opens his eyes, unfocused and blurry, pupils dilated so the irises are a thin edge, green swallowed by black. He doesn’t look afraid. Nothing good grows in Harlan. But the things that do aren’t easy to kill.
Raylan pulls the gun out of Boyd’s mouth, slowly. He gently releases the hammer, thumbs the safety on and sets the gun on the table. He’s careful to point the barrel away from the bed, as if that makes up for what he was just doing with it.
“I didn’t tell you to open your eyes,” Raylan says, voice shaking.
“You didn’t tell me not to,” Boyd counters. His own is just as unsteady.
“It was more of a hypothetical scenario. Didn’t you hear me say if?”
“There was a lot going on in that sentence. You’ll pardon my inability to parse your admittedly unclear grammar with your gun in my mouth.”
Raylan makes a face at him. “How much exactly do you need me to pardon tonight, Boyd? Because I’m pretty sure you’ve hit your withdrawal limit at the Raylan Givens Gives a Damn bank.”
Boyd’s mouth quirks.“Now, seems to me, I might have robbed that particular bank a time or two. Might be in your best interest to invest in some better security and stronger locks.”
Raylan glares down at him, irritated at how hard he has to work not to crack a smile at that. “It might be in your best interest to shut up,” he says pointedly. He was never as good with words.
“Might or is? I’m trying to be clear, here, Raylan -- you’re insisting on wishy-washy language, like maybe you don’t really know what you want.” Boyd’s voice sharpens, barbed and heavy with things Raylan doesn’t want to think about.
What he does think about, instead, is how Boyd looked with that gun in his mouth, Raylan’s finger resting against the trigger. Not like he was afraid of Raylan killing him, but like he trusted Raylan not to.
“Shut the fuck up,” Raylan growls, shoving Boyd down on the bed, uncaring of the welts on his back and how the blanket must be scratching at them. All they’ve ever done is open each other’s old wounds or leave new ones, so why stop now? “I know what I want.” He kisses him, fierce and hot, hands everywhere all at once.
Raylan’s always been angry and Boyd’s always been...Boyd, so this is how it’s been between them from the very first. Rough and hurried touches in the dark, tinged with a frantic desperation not because they were afraid of getting caught, but because they knew from experience things that felt good never lasted.
He gets his pants shoved down and straddles Boyd with his knees on either side of Boyd’s head, hands braced on the wall and fucking Boyd’s mouth -- as it turns out it’s better than the gun, but he’s glad he’s had both so that he can make an educated comparison.
It doesn’t matter how much or how rough Raylan is, Boyd always takes it. He stares up at Raylan with challenging, hot eyes, grabbing hard at his hips like he’s trying to pull Raylan closer, like he wants more. Like it’s a dare.
It’s so good he almost doesn’t want to stop, but Boyd moves from underneath him with a strong push against his hips, knocking Raylan off-balance. If he had the ability to appreciate the symbolism of that at the moment, he’d probably bang his head into a wall or get drunk. Instead, he fights the limitations of his current state of undress and the fact the fucking bed is way too small while he tries to orient himself.
Boyd starts laughing at him. Of course he does.
“Oh, you think this is fucking funny?”
“It is a bit, yes. I think you would be far more able to appreciate how ridiculous you look if you weren’t the one currently engaged in...looking ridiculous.”
Raylan grabs at his arm. “You could’a just said yes,” he grouses, kicking off the jeans that were tangled comically around his hips and pulling off Boyd’s with equal impatience. “Why do you do that, use eleven thousand words when one’ll do?”
“What answer do you want, here? The one I tell people who sound amazed I don’t talk like Larry the Cable Guy -- “
Raylan gives him a horrified look. “Why would anyone expect you to? Boyd, he’s from Iowa.”
“Yes, Raylan, I know that. Well, no, actually I didn’t and I am somewhat disappointed that you did. I expected more out of your sense of humor. But there’s that reason, and the one I tell other people, and the one I tell you. Which one do you want to hear?”
Raylan grabs Boyd’s arm and hauls him across the bed, the comforter twisting up beneath them in uncomfortable lumps. “I don’t know, how about the true one? I know that might shock and frighten you, try to move past it.”
Boyd casts his eyes upwards. “My association with you is rife with chances for personal growth, Raylan, it really is.”
Raylan stops trying to twist Boyd into the position he wants, because it’s clearly not working. Bartender, I’ll have another Maker’s neat to go with that symbolism I didn’t much want, thank you. “If that was a sex joke, it was awful. Well?”
“It wasn’t intended as such, no. And do you really care that much about the peculiarities of my vocabulary?”
“Yes, and it’s pissing me off that I do. So just answer the question.”
“If you expect me to talk like Larry the Cable Guy on account of my accent, you will be forced to admit your own stereotypes. It’s also a way to warn other people against underestimating me, that don’t involve Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson. And you, Raylan --” Boyd grins and rams his shoulder into Raylan’s chest. “Well now, I just like to annoy you.”
Ow. “I said I just wanted the truth, not for you to answer all three -- see, you did it again and Boyd, I am trying to fuck you, do you think you might cooperate so we can get on with it?” Raylan still has a hold of Boyd’s arm, so he twists it and throws a leg over Boyd’s hip, awkwardly positioned on top of him in a completely useless way.
“They’re all true, Raylan,” Boyd says, looking at him almost thoughtfully. “That’s your problem, you know. It always has been. You think if there’s one question, there can only be one answer.”
“Yeah, well, blame multiple choice tests.” Raylan’s immediately defensive because that actually might be kind of true. “And get where I’m tryin’ to put you, or I’m going to hit you.”
“I thought you had too many daddy issues for that.”
“Turns out, not a one if I use my bare hands.” Raylan gets a hand on Boyd’s shoulder and pushes down, and he sees the reddened skin around his tattoo, from where he’d hit him with the belt. “I don’t see how you can live with yourself every day, this goddamn thing on your arm.”
“It would be worse if I tried to live without it, don’t you think? I shouldn’t forget what I’ve done.”
Raylan sits back on his heels, not exactly letting Boyd up but close. He traces his fingers over the bullet scar on Boyd’s chest, remembers how he looked on the floor, soaked in blood and the life draining out of his eyes. The nightmares that have become infrequent but haven’t stopped. “I guess you shouldn’t.”
“Raylan --”
“Think I’ve had enough talkin’,” Raylan says gruffly, not meeting his eyes. “You want me to fuck you, turn the fuck over because I sure as hell ain’t as limber as I was when I was nineteen. If not, get dressed and get the fuck out of here. And take your...metaphors...with you.” Raylan isn’t sure what’s going to happen -- the heat is still there, simmering between them, but it might not be a bad idea to bank it completely and end this.
“You think I’m just going to walk away?” Boyd’s laugh is a well-aimed arrow. “I think maybe you forgot, Raylan. That’s more your specialty than mine.”
Boyd’s definitely trying to push Raylan’s buttons with that comment, and it works. Raylan tackles him and they fall off the bed in a tangle of limbs, and Raylan imagines all the fragile things in the bar below breaking into pieces.
The belt is on the floor where he dropped it. Raylan grabs it and wraps it around Boyd’s head, gets the leather strap in his mouth and pulls the buckle tight. “I think maybe you forgot how to be quiet. Here, let me help you remember. ”
Boyd bites at the leather and winks at him. It’s infuriating and attractive all at the same time, which Raylan figures is par for the goddamn course with Boyd Crowder.
Raylan fucks him right there on the floor. If it were anyone else, he’d worry about their comfort but it’s Boyd, and Raylan doesn’t have to do that with him. He’s never had to worry about being careful or losing his temper, about what might happen if all those knots he’s tied himself up into come loose.
There’s enough light that he can see the marks he left on Boyd’s back, the way they stretch and bleed as Raylan fucks him harder. Boyd’s making sounds beneath him, but the belt keeps them muffled and indistinct so he can’t tell if they’re moans of pleasure or gasps of pain. He doesn’t much care, and he doesn’t really know which he prefers, either.
Boyd is trying to keep himself up on his hands and knees, but the floor is slick with sweat and his palms slip, sending him forward on his elbows. It drives Raylan deeper inside of him and he moans, trying to keep himself balanced with one hand so he can grab tight at the end of the belt with the other.
It doesn’t work. Eventually the strain on his knees is too much and Raylan pitches forward, sending Boyd sprawling on his stomach on the floor. Raylan’s vision is a sweat-tinged haze and all he can hear is his blood pounding in his ears and the sound of their breathing, loud and erratic like some discordant symphony.
They might not make music together, but god, do they ever make noise.
Raylan puts the end of the belt in his mouth, and it’s mostly so he can use his hands for balance but maybe he wants to make sure he can’t say anything, either. His usual defenses have been breached and shattered, strewn around him like so much rubble, and he’s wary of what he might say without something there to trap the words.
Boyd is anything but passive underneath him; Raylan can feel him trying to get back up on his hands and knees, he knows how much Boyd hates feeling helpless. It’s not going to work unless Boyd pushes Raylan off him completely, and it’s obvious he doesn’t want to do that, either. The fact that he won’t just lay there and like it, that he keeps fighting, makes Raylan glad that neither of them can speak at the moment.
When he comes, he bites down so hard his teeth leave imprints in the leather -- just like his blood, all those years ago.
Raylan rises to his knees and pulls Boyd against his chest, yanks his head back with the end of the belt that’s wrapped now around his hand. He gets Boyd off with his hand and watches him while he does it, says things in a way that sounds vaguely threatening even though they’re not threats at all.
Come on, show me how much you liked that. My belt in your mouth, you beneath me and you couldn’t fucking move if you wanted to. But you didn’t want to, did you. You’re gonna go home and the only thing you’re gonna dream about is how you took it from me, you got that?
Raylan lets go of the belt so he can brace his forearm across Boyd’s collarbone, the back of Boyd’s head resting on his shoulder.
Raylan’s fingers tighten just a shade past comfortable and he slows down his hand on Boyd’s cock, for no other reason than he knows that’s how Boyd likes it. He can feel Boyd’s heart slamming against his chest, steady and strong. Raylan is suddenly glad his bullet missed its mark.
“Close your eyes,” he says, again, and shoves Boyd’s head forward so he can bite the back of his neck. Boyd comes over his hand but Raylan doesn’t stop biting until the skin breaks. Marks on Boyd’s neck and Raylan’s belt, in place of the words he shouldn’t say.
Raylan watches daylight crawl across the floor. It feels like he said them anyway.
* * *
There’s no point in going back to sleep, so Raylan pulls on his jeans and tries to ignore the belt coiled serpentine on the floor. It looks strange in the spill of light, like it somehow doesn’t belong.
Whatever is between them in the night fades with the dawn -- their history is written in shadow and blood and darkness, in coal mines and deep woods. Not sunlit apartments and open windows, city streets and neon bar lights.
“You want something for your back?” Raylan asks, gruffly, because it seems like he should.
“It’s all right.”
“You need something,” Raylan argues, though he has no idea what that something might be. Ice? Ground-up tylenol? That’s about all he’s got.
There’s a flash in his head of Boyd kneeling, his head bowed and his back bare, and Raylan’s standing behind him, working himself hard with his own hand and --
Guess it’s a good thing I’m not nineteen anymore, Raylan thinks. That wouldn’t do any good, anyway -- not for the bruises and welts on Boyd’s back, and certainly not for Raylan’s mental state.
It would be hot as fuck, though.
“Ava’ll do it.”
That makes Raylan’s eyebrows rise. “Will she.”
“Yes,” Boyd answers, shrugging on his shirt. He starts buttoning it, and he misses one but Raylan doesn’t tell him. Let him leave with a crooked shirt.
Pettiness is not as satisfying as other things, but it’s all he’s got at the moment.
“And what are you gonna tell her?”
“Maybe the reason you only ever think there’s one answer is that you only ask the one question. Over and over again.” Boyd shakes his head. “The truth.”
Raylan snorts. “Sure you are. And I’m late for all those bridge-selling appointments I got scheduled.”
“I’m not sure structural engineering is a profitable market these days, but you do what you like.” Boyd finishes his shirt, which is somehow not crooked even though Raylan would have sworn in a court of law that it should be.
A Concise Description of Boyd Crowder, by Raylan Givens.
“I’m supposed to believe you’re going to tell your girlfriend you came here, asked me -- asked me-- to whip you, shove a gun in your mouth, and fuck you?”
“Technically all I asked you for was penance, it ain’t my place to tell you how to administer it.”
“Those are words you will never say again, aren’t they?”
“What, asking you for penance?”
Raylan shakes his head. “That part where it ain’t your place to do something.”
Boyd grins slowly at him. Raylan doesn’t remember when the two of them ended up standing so close to each other, but they are. “Who’s idea you think it was for me to come here?”
There is no possible way that’s true. Is there? “She’s that desperate to get some sleep?”
“Well, she does prefer to get a solid eight hours, but she can sleep through just about anything -- surely you remember that.” There’s not a hint of recrimination in Boyd’s voice, and for some crazy reason, Raylan decides to believe it’s genuine. That Ava’s not jealous, that Boyd isn’t either.
He’s still not sure about Ava sending Boyd his way, but hell.
Boyd surprises him by getting a hand around the back of his neck and pulling his head down. His fingers are warm. Raylan thinks Boyd is going to kiss him, but all he does is press Raylan’s forehead to his own. “Thank you, Raylan.”
Raylan wants to punch him in the stomach. He wants to throw him on the bed and choke him, fuck him again, fall asleep like they used to in the back of his truck, back to back so they could watch each other’s. Before they were torn apart by tire tracks and tattoos and gunpowder.
“Who was it?” he asks, hands on Boyd’s shoulders.
“Who was...?”
“Don’t fucking play games with me, goddamn it.” Raylan can’t see anything in the space between them. Maybe that’s the reason why he left, all those years ago. “Who’s haunting your nightmares, Boyd? Who’d you kill?”
Boyd’s breath is warm on his mouth. “You, Raylan.”
Raylan has his hands up on the door, on either side of Boyd’s head. He’s pressed up against him, feeling more nineteen than’s reasonable for a man his age, running on no sleep and bad personal decisions. “But you didn’t kill me.”
“Funny thing about dreams, Raylan. People don’t always wear the same faces as when you’re awake.”
In your nightmares, Raylan -- am I on my back, staring up at you through Harlan dirt and making noise like a wounded buck, asking you to make the pain stop?
Raylan pulls back enough to look at him. “I don’t do it, do I. Close my eyes.” He thinks about his nightmare, Boyd’s sightless eyes staring up at him like cold, empty glass.
“No,” Boyd says quietly. He’s not looking at Raylan. “You don’t.”
Raylan opens his mouth to ask Boyd if he does it, in his dream, if he pulls the trigger -- but the fact Boyd won’t look him in the eyes is answer enough.
What poetic irony that Boyd’s nightmares are all about how he can’t kill Raylan, and Raylan’s are all about how he kills Boyd. It’s like a ballad -- the kind where everyone dies horribly and their ghosts wreak pointless bloody vengeance on the living, because they can’t hurt each other from the grave.
Raylan leans in and closes the distance between them, kisses him with enough heat to turn it all into ashes -- dreams, nightmares, the fact they’re both so afraid of how things will end. The only part of their history that isn’t written in darkness is the part that’s written in fire.
Maybe it’s time to let it burn.
author: someotherstorm
fandom: justified (set in season 3, late-ish, after the events of 3X04, “The Devil You Know” )
pairing: raylan/boyd
rating: MA
content advisory: gunplay (with a loaded gun), whipping
word count: ~7000
summary: Boyd shows up at Raylan's apartment, seeking absolution in Raylan's anger.
AN: thanks so much to norgbelulah for reading this over for me, and for the cheerleading and the help when i stumbled into a canon error and had to do a bit of re-working! any errors are most certainly my own <3 song title from loverman by Nick Cave.
there’s a devil waiting outside your door
There's a devil lying by your side
You might think he's asleep
but look at his eyes
Boyd Crowder shows up at his door at three-thirty in the morning, eyes bright and empty, hands raised in supplication. “I am unarmed, Raylan Givens,” he says, before Raylan can do the sensible thing and knock him one across the jaw. “And I am here to seek my penance.”
Letting Boyd speak is always mistake number one. If Raylan hadn’t been so recently asleep, he would have known to hit first and interrogate-in-a-prison-cell later.
“Huh?” Raylan responds like this is the first time he’s ever heard the English language. “What the hell are you doing here?” When in doubt, curse angrily and glare. Standard Raylan Givens operating procedure.
“Now, Raylan, I understand you might be vexed at me, showin’ up all unexpected-like, but if you want to look appropriately disapproving you are going to have to do something about your hair.”
“Why? Does it look as dumb as yours?” Raylan’s responses are gradually improving from half-wit moron to third-grader -- at least it’s a start. He rakes a hand through his hair, scowls when he realizes he’s inadvertently done what Boyd told him to, and slams a hand on the door jam.
Instead of making him feel better, it just hurts. “All right, don’t tell me why you’re here. Nice seeing you, Boyd.” Raylan goes to close the door. He’s starting to wake up a little more, and Boyd is fairly predictable.
“I told you, Raylan, I’m here to confess.”
Unfortunately, so is Raylan. That gets him to pause with the door halfway shut, hating himself even as he asks. “To what, exactly?”
Boyd steeples his fingers together and rests them against his chin. Raylan wonders if he practices these things, these offhand little gestures that are supposed to give the added touch of genuineness. “Now I am surely no expert, but I do believe it is customary to confess sins, Raylan.”
Boyd’s always had an odd habit of saying his name like that, repeatedly, like it means something else. Raylan narrows his eyes in warning. Boyd smiles beatifically in return.
Raylan tells himself it’s his duty to the law to see what Boyd Crowder may confess, but he’s not entirely sure that’s the obligation that has him stepping aside and letting Boyd into his apartment.
“This better be good,” Raylan says crankily, closing the door. “As in, I can put your ass in jail forever good, Boyd.”
Boyd is standing in the middle of the apartment, where the light from the bar sign falls around him like some kind of broken, demented halo. “It is an appropriate confession for the hour we find ourselves in, I promise.”
“That’d be, what?” Raylan checks the watch he’s not wearing. “Too-goddamn-early-o’clock?”
“The witching hour,” Boyd corrects.
“Thought that was midnight.” Raylan has half a mind to tell Boyd to forget it, to force him out -- there’s tension sparking in his veins, no one has ever riled him up so easy.
“Three-thirty. They say it’s the devil’s way of mocking the holy trinity.” Boyd holds his arms at his sides, palms turned out like a supplicant. “And here I am.”
“Here you are,” Raylan agrees, rolling his eyes. “But you’re more like a pest, so don’t flatter yourself into thinking you’re some kind of demon. Though I reckon you’re gonna tell me the devil sent you?”
Boyd starts laughing. It’s a strange sound, disjointed and fractured. “Maybe he did. I’ve been suffering these past few weeks from terrible dreams, Raylan. Maybe they were whispered in the dark and sent to find me.”
“You came here because you’re having bad dreams?” Raylan stares at him incredulously. “Then how about you go get yourself a nice glass of warm milk and read yourself a storybook, because I got my own nightmares, Boyd, and I sure as hell don’t need yours.”
Raylan turns away, intending the presentation of his back to be a firm indication their late-night chat is at an end -- but Boyd stops him, his voice hollow, flat, devoid of its usual lyrical cadence.
“In your nightmares, Raylan -- am I on my back, staring up at you through Harlan dirt and making noise like a wounded buck, asking you to make the pain stop?”
Raylan turns and crosses the room without answering. Boyd’s eyes are empty. Raylan knows that look all too well. “Who’d you bury?”
“I told him to close his eyes,” Boyd says, quiet. He doesn’t offer anything else, but it’s enough.
When it’s not personal, it doesn’t matter if they’re looking at you when the light dies. Raylan starts walking him backwards, until the back of Boyd’s legs have hit the edge of his bed.
In Raylan’s dreams, Boyd is lying dead on Ava’s floor with a bullet lodged in his heart -- but he’s always nineteen and covered in coal dust. The only way Raylan gets back to sleep after he wakes up is by remembering that it isn’t real.
He wonders what he’d do if it was. How he’d close his eyes and give in to the dark.
“Take off my belt,” Raylan says, and then kisses him.
* * *
Boyd is lying on Raylan’s bed, shirtless, wearing his jeans and boots. There’s mud ground into the soles, and it makes Raylan think about upturned, shallow-grave dirt. Raylan is beginning to wonder if there’s any other kind of soil in Harlan -- even the things that do manage to grow seem to lead right back to the grave. Even the mines are just another kind of tomb.
It’s pretty bad when even the fucking earth itself is out to get you.
Raylan moves to stand at the foot of the bed, thumb absently rubbing at the leather. His eyes trace the line of his spine, the tension in Boyd’s muscles. “You know, Boyd, you don’t have to personally see to it that nobody gets out of Harlan alive.” He smiles humorlessly. “It’s just a song.”
“Songs are just a way to make the truth sound pretty,” Boyd says, looking over his shoulder at him. “And I don’t imagine I ever will get out of Harlan alive.”
“Well I could send you to jail. Then you’d be out. And alive.” Raylan lifts the belt. “Put your head down. Hitting your face is already way too tempting.”
“I’ve been to war, and I’ve been to jail, and somehow I always end up right back where I started.” His words are muffled by the blanket, hastily thrown over rumpled sheets. Raylan intends to make him bleed, and he doesn’t want to get blood on the sheets.
Blood and dirt. That’s all there is in Harlan. “Not if you died there. In jail.”
“My, you are certainly a pleasure to visit this evening, Raylan.”
Raylan chases the smile out of his voice as best he can. “I didn’t exactly invite you.”
Boyd stretches, almost like a cat, arching slightly on the bed. It’s more restless than seductive, but it gets Raylan’s blood going all the same. “You burn with how much you want to hurt me. It’s not a hard beacon to follow in the dark, when your soul is sorrowful.”
Raylan closes his eyes. In his mind, he remembers being given the belt, how the fear and pain tasted, how it felt to try not to cry. After a while, he went right to anger without stopping by tears first, until the day he yanked the belt out of Arlo’s hand and turned on him.
You think you’re man enough to break me with that, son?
Gonna find out.
He didn’t, because his mother begged him to put the belt down. It was the same thing she always pleaded with Arlo about, when it was Raylan. And because he loved his mama, Raylan threw the belt on the floor and stormed out of the house, the sound of his father’s laughter chasing after him like a bullet seeking its target.
Knew you couldn’t do it.
That was the last time Raylan’s father raised a belt to him. Not that it mattered, he just found other ways to hurt Raylan, to strip away skin without leaving a mark. Raylan remembers going to bed that night, wishing in the dark secret places where he dreamed things he shouldn’t that his mother hadn’t come home that day.
He opens his eyes and looks down at Boyd on his bed, remembers the two of them being nineteen and drunk in the back of his truck -- his hands moving with rough urgency down the same skin he’s about to strike with his belt and his daddy’s rage. There’s a hunger there he’s never sated and it’s never gone away, just slumbered quietly until something stirred it back to life.
That something makes an impatient noise, jarring Raylan out of his thoughts. “You sure are taking your sweet time, Raylan,” Boyd says. “I appreciate a keen sense of dread as much as the next penitent, but it’s beginning to seem like you might not be up for delivering me from evil in a timely manner.”
Raylan makes a noise halfway between a growl and a sigh, a hint of a laugh at the edges. Boyd has always been good at that, taking Raylan out of dark places and into ones that might not be sunny, but are at the very least dimly-lit. “I’m so sorry my methods ain’t makin’ you feel better,” he snaps, and hits at Boyd with the leather belt, almost as a test.
Except he’s holding it by the buckle, and swinging it makes him feel like Indiana Jones. Or like he’s ten years old and pretending to be Indiana Jones -- probably without the half-dressed man on his bed with a swastika tattoo, who Raylan is pretty sure he’s going to fuck after he whips him.
Indiana Jones fought the Nazis all the time, didn’t he? Maybe he fucked them off camera.
Raylan bites his lip to quiet the hysterical half-shout of laughter. “Boyd --”
He’s going to tell him to forget it, that he can’t do this, but the words fade into nothing the second he meets Boyd’s eyes. Boyd looks like Raylan remembers feeling all those years ago -- hungry, wanting, aching for things he didn’t know how to find. His eyes aren’t empty anymore, they’re almost pleading. “Raylan.”
“I don’t understand you,” Raylan says, the belt in one hand, his other tugging at his hair in quiet frustration. An old habit, one his superiors kept saying made him look unprofessional and easily rattled. One he solved fairly easily by wearing a hat.
The moment stretches between them, honest and raw. Raylan is waiting for Boyd to say something about beacons or demons or whatever the hell, one of those things drawn from his seemingly inexhaustible wellspring of hillbilly philosophy, but he doesn’t.
“Double the belt, it’ll work better,” is all he says, and looks away.
Raylan doubles the belt. He doesn’t let himself think about his father. He doesn’t think about anything at all as he raises the leather and brings it down hard on Boyd’s back. The sound of the belt striking skin is like touching a match to lit gasoline -- no matter how brief a touch, the whole thing still goes up in flames.
* * *
Raylan’s arm hurts, and his breathing is ragged and fucked up, there’s sweat dripping in his eyes but none of that matters -- all he’s concerned about is the way Boyd’s skin turns white and then red from the impact of the belt as he brings it down. Harder, and harder, and the hungry thing inside of him feels like it’s taking over, eating him alive.
He’s not being careful, if there even is such a thing; his blows are erratic, ill-timed, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. A few times the leather curls up over Boyd’s shoulder, licking at the edges of his tattoo. Raylan likes how that looks so much, he hits it a few more times on purpose. Like he can change it into some other shape, simply by the force of his disapproval.
As if that’s ever worked. Raylan isn’t thinking about how it felt, years ago, to wear Arlo’s disapproval mapped in bloody welts on his back. He’s not thinking of the hate that ran in his veins alongside his father’s blood, corrosive and eating away whatever affection might have been left.
Stupid you can’t do anything right what’s wrong with you why aren’t you strong why are you weak why are you my son why didn’t I have another one why aren’t you enough why why why
At some point he thinks about that night he took Arlo’s belt away. That was the first time he’d ever noticed the specks of blood that had seeped into the leather over the years. In the fire of his youthful fury, Raylan had been convinced that if he could do it to Arlo just once, all that blood would somehow disappear.
Each loud thwack of leather on Boyd’s skin makes him realize just how wrong he was about that. Once wouldn’t have sated the hunger. It would have just made it worse. He’s already thinking to himself how much is a human life worth, how many lashes, and hoping it’s more than he’s already delivered. He doesn’t want to stop.
Boyd’s body jerks and he’s grabbing tight at the edge of the mattress but he’s not telling him to quit.And that’s what makes Raylan stop, finally -- not because Boyd’s making too much noise, but because he isn’t making any.
Raylan stares at Boyd, at the faint smear of blood on his back and the hard, tight knots of his muscles. He used to do that, too -- fight the noises and the pain, refusing to give Arlo any satisfaction by trying to move away or begging him to stop. And now he realizes that never mattered -- all Arlo cared about was how good it felt to hurt someone. Scream or be silent, it’s all the same to the person holding the belt.
Like father, like son, eh? Arlo’s voice is a cracked-bell echo, filling his head along with the sound of leather-on-skin. Raylan wonders who his father saw beneath the belt, whose tyranny he was remembering while his son bled.
Somewhere, slumbering beneath the heart of a woman who once had his, there is a child with Raylan’s blood -- and his father’s blood, and Harlan blood -- coursing through its tiny veins. Raylan’s arm is in caught in mid-rise when he thinks this, about the things choked by Harlan soil that are never allowed to breathe.
Hate is a bitter, acrid taste in his mouth. “I can’t do this.” Raylan walks over to the bed, drops the belt. “I won’t.”
Boyd is breathing too fast and he’s hurt -- Raylan can tell that, even as caught up as he is in his own angst. Boyd makes a noise that sounds like he’s choking, and that gets momentary alarm out of him until he realizes Boyd’s trying to laugh.
More of the past starts to recede like clouds after a storm, clearing Raylan’s head. “Are you -- what’s so funny?” His voice sounds as raw as the skin of Boyd’s ravaged back. “You’re fucking kidding me, you are crazy, there ain’t no other explanation for you.”
“I thought you’d -- like it,” Boyd grits out, turning his head -- his eyes are so bright they’re almost inhuman, like he really is some demon sent to torment him. With the sweat and blood and lust swirling thick like smoke, it doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. Maybe that’s Boyd’s fault -- nothing ever seems crazy when it’s his idea.
Boyd’s still grabbing at the mattress, clinging like a sinner to the salvation he thinks he’s here to find. Raylan grabs one of his hands and presses it against the front of his jeans, sucking in an involuntary breath at the touch and providing clear evidence that yes, he did like it.
“Then why, Raylan, you contrary bastard -- why are you stopping?” Boyd does something with his hand that may not be intentional but it probably is, and it makes Raylan hiss and snap his hips forward, wanting more.
“Because,” Raylan bites out, staring hard at Boyd’s hell-lit eyes, willing him to understand.
“Oh. You think you’re like your daddy, ‘cause you liked that.” Boyd has always been good at understanding things that have to do with Arlo that Raylan doesn’t want to talk about. In fact, this entire thing is reminding Raylan uncomfortably of all the things Boyd was good at, before his roots were set too deep in Harlan. He wonders who Boyd might have been, if he’d gotten the fuck out when Raylan told him he should.
Probably the same. Look at me, I’m whipping a man until he bleeds and getting off on it. Maybe the goddamn song’s right, after all. We’ll never get out of Harlan alive, even if we leave and never go back. Some part of him would rest eternal beneath that headstone with his name on it, even if his body never touched the dirt.
It’s a depressing thought. But Boyd rubs his hand over the bulge in Raylan’s jeans one more time, pleasure chasing hot on the heels of adrenaline, and Raylan’s good and distracted from his moodiness. He notices how Boyd’s pushing his hips down against the mattress, that his restless motions aren’t entirely driven by pain.
Raylan scowls. He’s uncomfortable with how much he liked doing that, but for some reason he’s annoyed Boyd feels the same. “This is supposed to be punishment. Penance, remember? I think you read the wrong goddamn book in prison.” He grabs Boyd’s hair and pulls his head back, slaps him lightly on the side of the face. That feels good, so Raylan does it again.
And again. They both moan, the third time.
“I am sure I will suffer undue torment in my soul for liking how your hands feel on me in anger,” Boyd offers. He’s trying to get Raylan’s pants open.
Raylan rolls his eyes and pushes Boyd over so he’s lying on his back and then climbs on top of him without hesitation, despite knowing how bad that has to hurt. “If you end up having nightmares about it, don’t come back.”
Because you’ll just give in if he does. Raylan ignores his inner voice, which sounds uncannily like Tim Gutterson. He grins down at Boyd, narrow-eyed and sly, and feels much more like himself. “So...vengeful, angry god, right?”
Boyd snorts a laugh. “Oh, a god now, are we? Raylan, you’re awfully impressed with yourself for a man who couldn’t finish what he started with that belt.”
Raylan smacks him on the side of the head. “I started it, didn’t I? So when I stopped, it was finished. Jesus Christ, why are you like this?”
“I’m just saying that if it were left up to you, all those poor bastards in Sodom and Gomorrha would’ve ended up with is a little sunburn.”
“Don’t you think that particular story is a mite inappropriate, Boyd, considering...?” Raylan grinds down against him to make a point. Just to make a point. That’s all.
Boyd grins at him and pushes his hips up, grinds back. “And what story would you consider appropriate? Eve and the serpent?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m fresh out of apples.” Raylan leans down and kisses him like he did when he was nineteen, when it used to feel like he was drowning. There’s enough of whatever used to be between them that it still feels that way, a little.
“Am I forgiven, Deputy Marshal Givens?”
Raylan sits up slowly and shakes his head, reaching towards his bedside table. “No,” he says, straightening, a weight more familiar than a belt in his hand. “Not yet.”
Boyd sees what he’s holding and goes completely still beneath him, wary and no longer grinning. “Raylan --”
He presses the barrel of his service weapon against Boyd’s mouth, insistent. “Open your mouth.” Raylan strokes the tip of the barrel across Boyd’s jaw, up towards his temple and back down. “Come on, now, Boyd -- I know that ain’t a hard instruction for you to follow, given how many times I’ve tried to get you to do the opposite.”
“Is that loaded?”
Raylan’s heart pounds faster with every breath -- he likes this too much, but it’s not making him feel nearly as guilty as the belt. Good to know his preferences for breaking every single rule of firearm safety is an across-the-board type thing.
Raylan caresses the side of his cheek with the gun. “Lawman school taught me to always keep my weapon loaded. And Harlan....” He draws the tip of the barrel lower, over the scar his bullet left in Boyd’s chest. “Taught me to always shoot to kill. Now open your mouth, Boyd.” Raylan cocks the hammer, the barrel pressed against the scar. “Don’t make me ask you again.”
Boyd opens his mouth, and Raylan traces the tip of the gun around it. “Close your eyes, son.” He says it like he imagines Boyd might have; soft, almost soothing. Like bringing death was some kind of gift.
Boyd jerks beneath him, eyes widening with a flash of sudden fear. It hits Raylan like an electric shock, makes him grind down harder and trap a moan behind his teeth, he wants this so badly he can taste it. Boyd closes his eyes, and Raylan can’t stop the noise he makes as he presses the gun inside his mouth.
Holy fuck, that’s hot.
He wants to say something, encouraging or threatening or both, but he can’t untangle his breath enough to form words so he doesn’t. He slides the gun in, out, watching the metal turn slick and wet, sees the smear of blood from where Boyd must have bitten his own lip while Raylan hit him.
Boyd is still as death as Raylan starts moving on top of him, the hard thrust of his hips timed with the slide of the gun into his mouth. Raylan can hear himself breathing, ragged and desperate, as if he were fucking Boyd’s mouth with something other than a gun.
“Suck on it.” Raylan barely recognizes his own voice, and his hand is shaking hard enough to make this even more dangerous and stupid than it already is but he doesn’t stop, he can’t.
Boyd’s eyes are moving beneath his closed lids, like he’s dreaming.
Raylan pushes the gun down too far, hears metal hit against teeth and Boyd starts to choke. His finger brushes against the trigger. “Was he scared? Is that why you told him to close his eyes, you don’t like seeing men die afraid? If I told you to open your eyes right now, is that how you’d look at me?”
Boyd opens his eyes, unfocused and blurry, pupils dilated so the irises are a thin edge, green swallowed by black. He doesn’t look afraid. Nothing good grows in Harlan. But the things that do aren’t easy to kill.
Raylan pulls the gun out of Boyd’s mouth, slowly. He gently releases the hammer, thumbs the safety on and sets the gun on the table. He’s careful to point the barrel away from the bed, as if that makes up for what he was just doing with it.
“I didn’t tell you to open your eyes,” Raylan says, voice shaking.
“You didn’t tell me not to,” Boyd counters. His own is just as unsteady.
“It was more of a hypothetical scenario. Didn’t you hear me say if?”
“There was a lot going on in that sentence. You’ll pardon my inability to parse your admittedly unclear grammar with your gun in my mouth.”
Raylan makes a face at him. “How much exactly do you need me to pardon tonight, Boyd? Because I’m pretty sure you’ve hit your withdrawal limit at the Raylan Givens Gives a Damn bank.”
Boyd’s mouth quirks.“Now, seems to me, I might have robbed that particular bank a time or two. Might be in your best interest to invest in some better security and stronger locks.”
Raylan glares down at him, irritated at how hard he has to work not to crack a smile at that. “It might be in your best interest to shut up,” he says pointedly. He was never as good with words.
“Might or is? I’m trying to be clear, here, Raylan -- you’re insisting on wishy-washy language, like maybe you don’t really know what you want.” Boyd’s voice sharpens, barbed and heavy with things Raylan doesn’t want to think about.
What he does think about, instead, is how Boyd looked with that gun in his mouth, Raylan’s finger resting against the trigger. Not like he was afraid of Raylan killing him, but like he trusted Raylan not to.
“Shut the fuck up,” Raylan growls, shoving Boyd down on the bed, uncaring of the welts on his back and how the blanket must be scratching at them. All they’ve ever done is open each other’s old wounds or leave new ones, so why stop now? “I know what I want.” He kisses him, fierce and hot, hands everywhere all at once.
Raylan’s always been angry and Boyd’s always been...Boyd, so this is how it’s been between them from the very first. Rough and hurried touches in the dark, tinged with a frantic desperation not because they were afraid of getting caught, but because they knew from experience things that felt good never lasted.
He gets his pants shoved down and straddles Boyd with his knees on either side of Boyd’s head, hands braced on the wall and fucking Boyd’s mouth -- as it turns out it’s better than the gun, but he’s glad he’s had both so that he can make an educated comparison.
It doesn’t matter how much or how rough Raylan is, Boyd always takes it. He stares up at Raylan with challenging, hot eyes, grabbing hard at his hips like he’s trying to pull Raylan closer, like he wants more. Like it’s a dare.
It’s so good he almost doesn’t want to stop, but Boyd moves from underneath him with a strong push against his hips, knocking Raylan off-balance. If he had the ability to appreciate the symbolism of that at the moment, he’d probably bang his head into a wall or get drunk. Instead, he fights the limitations of his current state of undress and the fact the fucking bed is way too small while he tries to orient himself.
Boyd starts laughing at him. Of course he does.
“Oh, you think this is fucking funny?”
“It is a bit, yes. I think you would be far more able to appreciate how ridiculous you look if you weren’t the one currently engaged in...looking ridiculous.”
Raylan grabs at his arm. “You could’a just said yes,” he grouses, kicking off the jeans that were tangled comically around his hips and pulling off Boyd’s with equal impatience. “Why do you do that, use eleven thousand words when one’ll do?”
“What answer do you want, here? The one I tell people who sound amazed I don’t talk like Larry the Cable Guy -- “
Raylan gives him a horrified look. “Why would anyone expect you to? Boyd, he’s from Iowa.”
“Yes, Raylan, I know that. Well, no, actually I didn’t and I am somewhat disappointed that you did. I expected more out of your sense of humor. But there’s that reason, and the one I tell other people, and the one I tell you. Which one do you want to hear?”
Raylan grabs Boyd’s arm and hauls him across the bed, the comforter twisting up beneath them in uncomfortable lumps. “I don’t know, how about the true one? I know that might shock and frighten you, try to move past it.”
Boyd casts his eyes upwards. “My association with you is rife with chances for personal growth, Raylan, it really is.”
Raylan stops trying to twist Boyd into the position he wants, because it’s clearly not working. Bartender, I’ll have another Maker’s neat to go with that symbolism I didn’t much want, thank you. “If that was a sex joke, it was awful. Well?”
“It wasn’t intended as such, no. And do you really care that much about the peculiarities of my vocabulary?”
“Yes, and it’s pissing me off that I do. So just answer the question.”
“If you expect me to talk like Larry the Cable Guy on account of my accent, you will be forced to admit your own stereotypes. It’s also a way to warn other people against underestimating me, that don’t involve Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson. And you, Raylan --” Boyd grins and rams his shoulder into Raylan’s chest. “Well now, I just like to annoy you.”
Ow. “I said I just wanted the truth, not for you to answer all three -- see, you did it again and Boyd, I am trying to fuck you, do you think you might cooperate so we can get on with it?” Raylan still has a hold of Boyd’s arm, so he twists it and throws a leg over Boyd’s hip, awkwardly positioned on top of him in a completely useless way.
“They’re all true, Raylan,” Boyd says, looking at him almost thoughtfully. “That’s your problem, you know. It always has been. You think if there’s one question, there can only be one answer.”
“Yeah, well, blame multiple choice tests.” Raylan’s immediately defensive because that actually might be kind of true. “And get where I’m tryin’ to put you, or I’m going to hit you.”
“I thought you had too many daddy issues for that.”
“Turns out, not a one if I use my bare hands.” Raylan gets a hand on Boyd’s shoulder and pushes down, and he sees the reddened skin around his tattoo, from where he’d hit him with the belt. “I don’t see how you can live with yourself every day, this goddamn thing on your arm.”
“It would be worse if I tried to live without it, don’t you think? I shouldn’t forget what I’ve done.”
Raylan sits back on his heels, not exactly letting Boyd up but close. He traces his fingers over the bullet scar on Boyd’s chest, remembers how he looked on the floor, soaked in blood and the life draining out of his eyes. The nightmares that have become infrequent but haven’t stopped. “I guess you shouldn’t.”
“Raylan --”
“Think I’ve had enough talkin’,” Raylan says gruffly, not meeting his eyes. “You want me to fuck you, turn the fuck over because I sure as hell ain’t as limber as I was when I was nineteen. If not, get dressed and get the fuck out of here. And take your...metaphors...with you.” Raylan isn’t sure what’s going to happen -- the heat is still there, simmering between them, but it might not be a bad idea to bank it completely and end this.
“You think I’m just going to walk away?” Boyd’s laugh is a well-aimed arrow. “I think maybe you forgot, Raylan. That’s more your specialty than mine.”
Boyd’s definitely trying to push Raylan’s buttons with that comment, and it works. Raylan tackles him and they fall off the bed in a tangle of limbs, and Raylan imagines all the fragile things in the bar below breaking into pieces.
The belt is on the floor where he dropped it. Raylan grabs it and wraps it around Boyd’s head, gets the leather strap in his mouth and pulls the buckle tight. “I think maybe you forgot how to be quiet. Here, let me help you remember. ”
Boyd bites at the leather and winks at him. It’s infuriating and attractive all at the same time, which Raylan figures is par for the goddamn course with Boyd Crowder.
Raylan fucks him right there on the floor. If it were anyone else, he’d worry about their comfort but it’s Boyd, and Raylan doesn’t have to do that with him. He’s never had to worry about being careful or losing his temper, about what might happen if all those knots he’s tied himself up into come loose.
There’s enough light that he can see the marks he left on Boyd’s back, the way they stretch and bleed as Raylan fucks him harder. Boyd’s making sounds beneath him, but the belt keeps them muffled and indistinct so he can’t tell if they’re moans of pleasure or gasps of pain. He doesn’t much care, and he doesn’t really know which he prefers, either.
Boyd is trying to keep himself up on his hands and knees, but the floor is slick with sweat and his palms slip, sending him forward on his elbows. It drives Raylan deeper inside of him and he moans, trying to keep himself balanced with one hand so he can grab tight at the end of the belt with the other.
It doesn’t work. Eventually the strain on his knees is too much and Raylan pitches forward, sending Boyd sprawling on his stomach on the floor. Raylan’s vision is a sweat-tinged haze and all he can hear is his blood pounding in his ears and the sound of their breathing, loud and erratic like some discordant symphony.
They might not make music together, but god, do they ever make noise.
Raylan puts the end of the belt in his mouth, and it’s mostly so he can use his hands for balance but maybe he wants to make sure he can’t say anything, either. His usual defenses have been breached and shattered, strewn around him like so much rubble, and he’s wary of what he might say without something there to trap the words.
Boyd is anything but passive underneath him; Raylan can feel him trying to get back up on his hands and knees, he knows how much Boyd hates feeling helpless. It’s not going to work unless Boyd pushes Raylan off him completely, and it’s obvious he doesn’t want to do that, either. The fact that he won’t just lay there and like it, that he keeps fighting, makes Raylan glad that neither of them can speak at the moment.
When he comes, he bites down so hard his teeth leave imprints in the leather -- just like his blood, all those years ago.
Raylan rises to his knees and pulls Boyd against his chest, yanks his head back with the end of the belt that’s wrapped now around his hand. He gets Boyd off with his hand and watches him while he does it, says things in a way that sounds vaguely threatening even though they’re not threats at all.
Come on, show me how much you liked that. My belt in your mouth, you beneath me and you couldn’t fucking move if you wanted to. But you didn’t want to, did you. You’re gonna go home and the only thing you’re gonna dream about is how you took it from me, you got that?
Raylan lets go of the belt so he can brace his forearm across Boyd’s collarbone, the back of Boyd’s head resting on his shoulder.
Raylan’s fingers tighten just a shade past comfortable and he slows down his hand on Boyd’s cock, for no other reason than he knows that’s how Boyd likes it. He can feel Boyd’s heart slamming against his chest, steady and strong. Raylan is suddenly glad his bullet missed its mark.
“Close your eyes,” he says, again, and shoves Boyd’s head forward so he can bite the back of his neck. Boyd comes over his hand but Raylan doesn’t stop biting until the skin breaks. Marks on Boyd’s neck and Raylan’s belt, in place of the words he shouldn’t say.
Raylan watches daylight crawl across the floor. It feels like he said them anyway.
* * *
There’s no point in going back to sleep, so Raylan pulls on his jeans and tries to ignore the belt coiled serpentine on the floor. It looks strange in the spill of light, like it somehow doesn’t belong.
Whatever is between them in the night fades with the dawn -- their history is written in shadow and blood and darkness, in coal mines and deep woods. Not sunlit apartments and open windows, city streets and neon bar lights.
“You want something for your back?” Raylan asks, gruffly, because it seems like he should.
“It’s all right.”
“You need something,” Raylan argues, though he has no idea what that something might be. Ice? Ground-up tylenol? That’s about all he’s got.
There’s a flash in his head of Boyd kneeling, his head bowed and his back bare, and Raylan’s standing behind him, working himself hard with his own hand and --
Guess it’s a good thing I’m not nineteen anymore, Raylan thinks. That wouldn’t do any good, anyway -- not for the bruises and welts on Boyd’s back, and certainly not for Raylan’s mental state.
It would be hot as fuck, though.
“Ava’ll do it.”
That makes Raylan’s eyebrows rise. “Will she.”
“Yes,” Boyd answers, shrugging on his shirt. He starts buttoning it, and he misses one but Raylan doesn’t tell him. Let him leave with a crooked shirt.
Pettiness is not as satisfying as other things, but it’s all he’s got at the moment.
“And what are you gonna tell her?”
“Maybe the reason you only ever think there’s one answer is that you only ask the one question. Over and over again.” Boyd shakes his head. “The truth.”
Raylan snorts. “Sure you are. And I’m late for all those bridge-selling appointments I got scheduled.”
“I’m not sure structural engineering is a profitable market these days, but you do what you like.” Boyd finishes his shirt, which is somehow not crooked even though Raylan would have sworn in a court of law that it should be.
A Concise Description of Boyd Crowder, by Raylan Givens.
“I’m supposed to believe you’re going to tell your girlfriend you came here, asked me -- asked me-- to whip you, shove a gun in your mouth, and fuck you?”
“Technically all I asked you for was penance, it ain’t my place to tell you how to administer it.”
“Those are words you will never say again, aren’t they?”
“What, asking you for penance?”
Raylan shakes his head. “That part where it ain’t your place to do something.”
Boyd grins slowly at him. Raylan doesn’t remember when the two of them ended up standing so close to each other, but they are. “Who’s idea you think it was for me to come here?”
There is no possible way that’s true. Is there? “She’s that desperate to get some sleep?”
“Well, she does prefer to get a solid eight hours, but she can sleep through just about anything -- surely you remember that.” There’s not a hint of recrimination in Boyd’s voice, and for some crazy reason, Raylan decides to believe it’s genuine. That Ava’s not jealous, that Boyd isn’t either.
He’s still not sure about Ava sending Boyd his way, but hell.
Boyd surprises him by getting a hand around the back of his neck and pulling his head down. His fingers are warm. Raylan thinks Boyd is going to kiss him, but all he does is press Raylan’s forehead to his own. “Thank you, Raylan.”
Raylan wants to punch him in the stomach. He wants to throw him on the bed and choke him, fuck him again, fall asleep like they used to in the back of his truck, back to back so they could watch each other’s. Before they were torn apart by tire tracks and tattoos and gunpowder.
“Who was it?” he asks, hands on Boyd’s shoulders.
“Who was...?”
“Don’t fucking play games with me, goddamn it.” Raylan can’t see anything in the space between them. Maybe that’s the reason why he left, all those years ago. “Who’s haunting your nightmares, Boyd? Who’d you kill?”
Boyd’s breath is warm on his mouth. “You, Raylan.”
Raylan has his hands up on the door, on either side of Boyd’s head. He’s pressed up against him, feeling more nineteen than’s reasonable for a man his age, running on no sleep and bad personal decisions. “But you didn’t kill me.”
“Funny thing about dreams, Raylan. People don’t always wear the same faces as when you’re awake.”
In your nightmares, Raylan -- am I on my back, staring up at you through Harlan dirt and making noise like a wounded buck, asking you to make the pain stop?
Raylan pulls back enough to look at him. “I don’t do it, do I. Close my eyes.” He thinks about his nightmare, Boyd’s sightless eyes staring up at him like cold, empty glass.
“No,” Boyd says quietly. He’s not looking at Raylan. “You don’t.”
Raylan opens his mouth to ask Boyd if he does it, in his dream, if he pulls the trigger -- but the fact Boyd won’t look him in the eyes is answer enough.
What poetic irony that Boyd’s nightmares are all about how he can’t kill Raylan, and Raylan’s are all about how he kills Boyd. It’s like a ballad -- the kind where everyone dies horribly and their ghosts wreak pointless bloody vengeance on the living, because they can’t hurt each other from the grave.
Raylan leans in and closes the distance between them, kisses him with enough heat to turn it all into ashes -- dreams, nightmares, the fact they’re both so afraid of how things will end. The only part of their history that isn’t written in darkness is the part that’s written in fire.
Maybe it’s time to let it burn.